My wife has all but convinced me that Satan will be found dead of hypothermia before I can play golf on the moon or on Mars, so the next biggest thing is close-to-or-past supersonic flight. They've been dangling that carrot in front me for how long now, and now they're yanking it back!? *grumble*
My experience has been exactly the opposite, without exception. This morning I found 34 pieces of spam in my work inbox -- that's 34 since 4pm on Friday. Despite being listed in Whois and posting in USENET, I have gotten maybe 34 pieces of spam in six months at my personal email address.
I've complained about the spam situation more times than I can remember, mentioned how email addresses are being harvested off of our email servers, and described how much resource is probably being wasted processing and storing the spam, all to no avail. I mentioned anti-spam options, such as SpamAssassin, but nothing ever came of that, either. Perhaps I'm expecting too much from an IT department that's so heavily entrenched in Windows and Exchange...
Why is it so susceptible to attack, when the Internet as a whole is touted as being able to withstand nuclear Armageddon?
This whole nuclear attack thing is crap. From the perspective of network connectivity, what's the difference between a nuclear detonation and a few well-placed backhoe accidents? (Yes, yes, I know, they're totally incomparable because of the catastrophic effects of a nuclear detonation, but I'm talking about the effects on the network, not on people and buildings.) How many times in the last ten years have we seen major routing issues to a metropolitan city or even a geographic region arise after a backhoe cut something it shouldn't have? Admittedly, recovery from a nuclear detonation would take much longer than recovery from a backhoe accident... And if, God forbid, most of the metropolitan cities in the U.S, Europe, and Asia are destroyed in nuclear Armageddon, then the Internet's going to suffer big-time.
If the media hadn't reported on the root server DDoS, then 99.999(9?)% of the Internet community wouldn't have even known that anything had happened. DNS caching and the redundant servers helped things continue working despite the DDoS. On the other hand, if someone launched a DDoS against something like eBay or ETrade -- something the average person can see, feel, touch, and understand much more clearly than DNS -- then, one, the effects would've been much more apparent much more quickly and, two, the reactions from the average user of those services would've been much angrier.
Is DNS security an issue? Sure. But so is Internet security in general, but when major websites are inaccessible because of a worm or DDoS, who do we yell at aside from the site operator/owner? Not sure. As deplorable as ICANN's behavior is, they're also being made a scapegoat for bigger network issues, methinks, because there's no other actual organization to yell at.
When I do full backups, I do 'em twice. The first copy goes into our safe at home, and the second copy goes into our safe deposit box at the bank down the street. Incremental backups done during the week only go in the safe; I don't have time to go to the bank every day. I've seen other customers from time to time come into the bank with a box full of tapes -- either their business backups or just protecting their porn collection.:)
I get pissed off when produce I bought for $0.99 a pound goes bad in a few days. Imagine how postal I'd go if I bought a DVD for $9.99 to $14.99, only to have it go bad five days after opening it! Give me a break!
These things will fill up landfills faster than the AOL discs currently do. That is, if anyone's stupid enough to buy 'em. No, wait, sorry, I forgot. First the discs will be sold with no self-destruct warnings. Then there'll be a class-action lawsuit or two about it. Then labels will be put on the packages, and then sales will plummet.
Let me preface this comment by saying that I live in the Washington, DC metro area where -- for those who've been living under a rock for the last two weeks -- we've got some deranged asshole sniper running around, shooting people at random. So my apologies if this comment comes across as a bit jaded...
There are times when curtailing the press is a good idea. The press in Washington has been speculating so madly about this sniper incident that I'm convinced they've actually identified targets for the sniper. They commented one day that schoolchildren are safe because he hasn't come near a school. A day or so later, a kid gets shot outside a school. They commented that he hasn't shot anyone on weekends, and what happens? A couple of days later he shoots someone on a Saturday. The press routinely asks for information, both formally and behind the scenes, regarding the investigation into this lunatic and won't take answers like "giving out that info can compromise our investigation or tip off the sniper as to what we're doing" with any degree of seriousness. They're more concerned about their jobs, ratings, and careers than they are in public safety.
And there are numerous incidents here in Washington where the press has leaked highly classified information (e.g., national security matters) to the public. The Washington Times newspaper here is notorious for this.
So, I ask again, this ranking is a problem how exactly? I know some people are going to say that any restriction on the press is just the beginning of wider-reaching restrictions and is the foundation of a totalitarian state. And while that might be true, sometimes restrictions are necessary, especially when the media are less capable of behaving themselves than a four year-old kid.
In the late `80s and early `90s before the Internet was commercialized and the AUPs were tossed out with the weekly trash, services like AOL and CompuServe were actually somewhat useful because they had information that the ARPANEt/NSFnet did not have. For example, in my undergrad days I had to use news archives on AOL and CompuServe to get at newspaper articles that were not yet available in the microfiche archives in the college or public libraries or online anywhere on the Internet. But now that the Internet has been opened to commercial traffic for ten years, what exactly does AOL offer that the Internet doesn't offer? Aside from a fairly large tech support department (can't comment on its usefulness) and national dialup, I can't honestly say what they offer. They're nothing more now than a national ISP and Internet portal -- something any other ISP could accomplish, too, but without the gargantuan, annoying custom software, if they simply tried. AOL's TV ads always talk about how easy their service is to use, and, oh, gee, look at how pretty the screens are! Yeah, whatever. I've taught some of the most computer illiterate people to use Netscape for web browsing and email, and they all caught on very quickly and never had any trouble. And as for those AOL screens, I swear the stuff they show on TV is not only so Fisher-Pricey, but is usually more cluttered than any website I've ever seen.
So unless AOL can find a way to distinguish itself from other ISPs, like it used to be, then I say let it sink. (Innovation -- what a concept!) Somewhat less spam, fewer annoying people online.
"...home owner association..." -- that's the deal-breaker. There's no way in hell I'm buying a house in an HOA community and paying US $50 - 250 a month for an organization that, based on past experience, does nothing but tell me what I can't do with the house I just spent several hundred thousand dollars for. "Oh, you want to fly a flag? Nope, can't do that." "Oh, you want to put up an outdoor light that's brighter, clearly illuminates the house number, and turns on and off with the daylight? Nope, sorry." "Oh, you want to build a deck with railing that runs vertically or diagonally so that your children can't fall through? Nope, it must be horizontal. But we do offer bitchin' broadband!" No, thanks, it's not worth the cost or the aggravation. I could put those monthly HOA dues towards my own broadband that doesn't come with those gargantuan strings attached, or I'll get together with the neighbors in our non-HOA -- THANK GOD! -- neighborhood and roll our own wireless coop or something of that ilk.
Sooner or later it's going to make no sense whatsoever to buy any new A/V electronics, music, or video because it'll be so functionally crippled and restricted that it won't be worth the cost or the hassle. We already have CDs that won't play on computers, DVD players, or gaming consoles and can break an Apple Macintosh (wonder who I could sue over that one?). What's next? VCRs and digital video recorders with no fast forward capability? A ban on TVs bigger than 5 inches and a total ban on speakers? You know, we wouldn't want other people, like our spouses or children, to be able to watch a TV show or listen to music alongside us without having previously paid a licensing fee or signed an NDA! And what'll happen then when revenue continues to plummet? Will they buy more legislation to outright ban computers, CD and DVD burners, traditional VCRs and digital video recorders, analog and digital camcorders, analog and digital tape recorders, MiniDisc recorders, MP3 players and recorders, pens, pencils, magic markers (ahem), sticks, hammers and chisels, knives, ink, graphite, paint, paper of all sorts and organic origins, thread and yarn, and anything else that might somehow, by someone somewhere or sometime in the future, be used to copy down a word, a musical note, or describe something they saw in a movie? Even the Amish are potentially in trouble!
I'm sure it hasn't occurred to those people that consumers might not be buying as many CDs and DVDs because we're more or less in, oh, I don't know, A RECESSION!? WITH THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE UNEMPLOYED NOW WHO HAD JOBS A YEAR AGO!? Nah, that couldn't be it. It must be the thieving citizenry. And it definitely couldn't be that recent music and video releases just flat-out suck. Nah, this is award-winning material coming out now, surpassing the quality of anything we've ever seen or heard before.
The more limitations legally placed on media and technology, the less likely people are going to be to buy things. What'll happen then? Will the MPAA and the RIAA buy a federal bailout akin to the one for the airlines?
I sincerely hope that their stupidity bankrupts them. Maybe the next generation of entertainment companies will realize that the average consumer isn't a criminal and won't appreciate being treated like one. I don't put up with local merchants treating me like an idiot or just another customer getting in the way of their laziness, so why should I put up with such offensive attitudes from the MPAA or RIAA? And I'm sure the RIAA will be happy to konw that, except for three, the only CDs I've purchased this year all came directly from the (little regional) bands themselves, whose music is far better than anything y'all've got going right now.
I had a domain up for renewal last July, and within two weeks of the actual expiration I received spam from numerous lesser-known registrars, reminding me of the upcoming renewal date and encouraging me to switch to them. While most made it clear where the message originated from, one was what I'd call actual spam. It mentioned a registrar by name, but the email headers showed the message being routed through a third-party open relay, and it wasn't clear that the message actually originated with that registrar.
The weeks prior to my renewal date were...disturbing...because of the increased level of spam and snail-mail junk mail.
Over my years in the business I've encountered the following means of measuring a programmer's productivity:
Number of lines of code written, highest score wins. In short, why write in 100 lines what you can write in 1,000?
Number of lines of code written, lowest score wins. You end up with your own obfuscated coding contest. You might also find people rewriting other people's work, redesigning APIs and other infrastructure components, for no reason other than to lower their own score. This can lead to total chaos, fights in the parking lot, etc.
Number of good lines of code written a month. What's the definition of "good," and how subjective is it? If it includes comments, then how is the usefulness of a comment determined? I've seen developers write more comments than code, and in the end the comments said nothing useful that would've helped a new developer maintain the code.
Number of bugs fixed in a month. The programmer who spent a month researching the sev 2 bug that was affecting system availability or data integrity for the last three months isn't recognized for his/her achievements, while the intern who fixed 100 bugs pertaining to typos on the website and in the documentation is rewarded.
Number of bugs created in a month, lowest score wins. Nice idea, punishing people for creating bugs, but people might get so paranoid about causing bugs that the turnaround time for code is obscenely high.
Code complexity metric, lowest score wins: All this proves is that the programmer's capable of writing non-complex code but says nothing about the documentation for the code, the overall design of the component or subsystem the programmer was working on, etc.
Number of tasks completed in a month. This screws the guy who's got a hefty task that cannot be divided any further or the programmer waiting on the sysadmin to install the necessary development tools so that he/she can actually get started.
Customer satisfaction. The customers are pissed because the website is unstable, but the rest of the back office system is running perfectly fine. In the end, everyone -- the back-office developers, the database guys -- is punished when only the website people should've been put on call center duty for a week.
Number of customer issues resolved. There's a great incentive here to solve issues with kludgy hacks which, in six months to a year, might leave the company with a very flaky, unmaintainable system.
360-degree input, or "Mutually Assurred Destruction". This was a system IBM used -- still uses? -- where your peers, some picked by you, some by your manager, would fill out a survey and offer opinions about you. The manager would then piece it all together and come up with a result. Like Dilbert called it, it's "mutually-assurred destruction," although I saw it work the exact opposite way many times.
There's so much more that goes into developing and delivering software than just writing lines of code. And the number of lines of code written isn't all that significant if the design sucks, if the documentation is unusable by the people who need it, if the call center people supporting the thing aren't trained properly, or if the systems supporting the website or the database are unstable. How do you put a score next to a name when many of the things contributing to that score are subjective or out of the control of the person being scored? We're not building CD players here!
The article mentioned that the criteria used in diagnosis of autism is quite subjective. My wife is a school teacher in an inner-city neighborhood in southeast Washington, D.C. Four of the students in her 22 student class have been classified as autistic, and it's complete hooey. The common thread amongst those four students is that they essentially don't have any parents and no parenting. They're either being raised by grandparents who already have one foot in the nursing home, parents who are hooked on crack or other drugs, or parents who are working multiple jobs each to make ends meet; regardless, the end result is the same -- no parents, no parenting. My wife, who is a fun but strict teacher whom the kids all love, has noticed that a strict classroom environment, with clearly defined and enforced behavioral boundaries but also positive reinforcement and praise, can really help these supposedly autistic kids. One of them who has been in my wife's class now for four months has essentially undergone a complete behavioral change: whereas he used to be very disruptive, shy, and mal-adjusted and hated school, he is now very outgoing, obedient, and loves school.
I've no doubt that some significant percentage of the new cases in California are legitimate. I do wonder, though, if a significant percentage of the remainder, though, are not autistic but are rather by-products of society's modern trend of blaming a child's behavioral or developmental problems on a psychological/mental disorder and doping him/her up on medication as a means of covering up our failures at being and unwillingness to be responsible parents.
Let's see, the things I've done with fellow developers:
Gone out to play pool during lunch and after work
Gone drinking after work and on weekends
Trashed bars together, including one place where we left a 50% tip and helped clean up the vomit, broken glass, spilled drinks, and toppled furniture (I'M NOT KIDDING!)
Gone to concerts, movies, etc.
Helped each other move
Been part of each other's weddings and gone to each other's bachelor parties
Watched each others' pets
Helped out with home improvements
Watched football, basketball, or hockey on TV, sometimes with spouses and girlfriends in attendance, and gotten smashed
Had BBQs with everyone, their spouses, girlfriends, kids, even parents.
Can't say I've bailed one out of jail, although one called me when he was released from the county jail after a one-night visit... Our spouses and significant others get along fine and often times talk about us behind our backs and gang up to tease us incessantly.
I don't think the difference between how IT people and fire/rescue people socialize has anything to do with the presence or absence of danger. I think it has to do more with the fact that a lot of our computing work is done in isolation. There might be people around us -- in the next cube or office, walking by, etc. -- but we can nevertheless go for hours or even days without every actually talking to anyone. So much communication in my workplace is done by email, not in person. I know people who spend hours (ab)using instant messaging, irc, and other chat means, meeting maybe 1% of the people they talk with online -- and let's face it, socializing online is very different than doing it in person. Many of us became obsessed with computers as kids while other kids became obsessed with sports, music, drama, whatever. So while they were socializing with people in the weight room or on the field, in rehearsals and such, we were in a room, alone in front of a computer. They learned socialization, we didn't -- unless we made the conscientious decision to walk away from the computer and do something with other people. A lot of kids didn't do that and really missed out on life; some felt they were too different and couldn't, while others felt that everyone else was too beneath them and actively chose not to. I did walk away, and while I might not know as much about computers as some others do, developing those social skills to experience rich friendsips, relationships, and now marriage made it all worthwhile.
Can't hold my liquor as well as some of these construction or fire/rescue types, though. Oh well.
I trudged through the list, saw some familiar names. But what's missing -- and what'll probably be next to impossible to find -- are the old standalone BBS's from the early- to mid-`80s, running on Apple II's, 8-bit Atari's with a rack of floppy drives and a 300 or 1200 baud modem, or 16-bit Atari ST's with a 20 or 40 MB hard drive and a 2400 baud modem. Some of the best ones I saw back then weren't networked with any other BBS or Internet node with fidonet, UUCP, or any of those goofy protocols that never took off. They didn't have the latest "k00l warez." But they did have message boards that were egregiously active and had more of a sense of a community than anything I've seen on the Internet in the 13 years I've been using it.
This plan will most likely succeed for a variety of reasons. First, if it does, in fact, turn out to be cheaper than paying several hundred US dollars every three years or so for a new upgrade, then home and small business users will flock after it for the reduced price, if nothing else. Second, Office is essentially the de facto standard for office suites these days, so folks working at home, taking work home, or sharing documents with other clients or customers are basically required to have/use MS Office. So they'll stick with MS Office, no matter what creative pricing plans or such Microsoft comes up with, because they've no other choice.
And let's face it, there really aren't many realistic alternatives available. Alternatives, in order to have any real chance of taking off, need to fully -- not partially, not almost, but completely -- support MS Office's current file formats for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Project, at the very least. I've seen users attempt to use embedded and standalone file format converters, get mad when something like formatting gets corrupted and just switch to the real thing. Alternatives must run on the systems folks are currently using, namely Windows and, to a lesser extent, Mac OS. I know this'll probably upset the average Linux user and open-source advocate, but the average user or the average IT manager is not going to switch to a new operating system -- something as complex as Linux or even something as simplistic as Mac OS -- just for a new office suite. The average home user doesn't understand and is ignorant of computers and operating systems; they might know that alternatives to Windows exist but see no real reason to consider them given their lack of popularity, publicity, etc. The average company is not going to undertake an OS transition because of the disruption it'd cause, because of the investment in current systems, standards, contracts they have.
In the end, Microsoft wins again because folks will upgrade, because of cheaper costs, because office standards force an upgrade, or because there just isn't any other real choice available. And the same will hold true if Microsoft does away with the pay-once model later on. And just think of the privacy concerns and DMCA enforcement opportunities available to Microsoft if they do, in fact, do away with the pay-once model! Yippee...
My employer, quite unfortunately, uses Outlook. The fundamental reason it was chosen was because it was supposed to "improve communications" by forcing us on to one system and help us to better organize meetings through its online calendaring. Communications have not been improved whatsoever; if anything, more email is flying around, and folks are ignoring it due to sheer volume and constant interruption. The online calendaring thing doesn't realy offer much because folks don't necessarily pay attention to when someone's available and when they're not. I've lost count of the number of times I've put into the calendar the fact that I would be away on vacation or out of the office for some reason, only to return to find a meeting notice during that blocked-out time and a nastygram afterwards demanding to know why I wasn't there. We've seen countless cases where someone schedules a meeting, but no one receives the notification. We've seen countless examples where someone blocks off time on their calendar, but that information is never propagated to the Exchange servers for no reason we can find. It has utterly failed in its original purpose.
What it has forced upon the company, though, is an increased IT budget. We have software engineers, especially, who now have Windows machines on their desk whose sole purpose is to read email. Nothing else! A fair number of these folks don't have Windows machines at home; they have Macintoshes, Linux machines, FreeBSD, or some other UNIX variant. So the only way for these folks to read email when they're working at home is to carry a laptop home with them. A bit ridiculous and expensive -- not just in procurement costs, but also in maintenance costs -- to have an entire desktop or laptop computer whose sole purpose is email. But that's what you get when you go with a proprietary system instead of one based on open standards.
To be fair, there is an HTTP interface into Exchange that we have here. It gets the job done, but it's annoying, and I've had it wipe out my entire inbox before. Also, you can supposedly get at your email on an Exchange server with POP3 and/or IMAP, but you're still excluded to some degree from the calendaring (mis)features.
I haven't used this, but I've heard HP OpenMail quoted as an alternative to Exchange that runs on practically everything. Don't know how true that is, though.
First, let me say that I could care less at this point who wins the election because, regardless of who wins, we're doomed. They'll keep finding newer, more creative ways to shaft us with more gems like UCITA and DMCA, among the usual obfuscated tax policy, useless education reform, etc, etc, etc.
That aside, I sincerely believe that the voters complaining about the unintuitive ballot have only themselves to blame. Voting is a right and a responsibility, one that many Americans take for granted or take too lightly. It's the voter's responsibilty to read the entire ballot, to carefully make their choices, to review their choices before submitting the ballot, to ask for help if they can't read the ballot or don't understand it, and to ask for a new ballot if they make a mistake (irrelevant in those precincts that use electronic voting). Those polling place workers are there to help and, being legally blind (worse than 20/200), I've asked for help before and have had no trouble. And I saw that ballot on websites, in newspapers, and on TV and I'm sorry, but that ballot is not that unintuitive. The voters there had their chance. They could've asked for help or a new ballot, but they didn't and instead waited until much later before complaining to anyone. They blew it. Let them live with it.
On a slightly related matter, anyone thought about the impact of TV stations and websites announcing election results before polling places were closed? For example, results were being announced for the East coast while polls throughout the rest of the country were still open. They were also announcing results for my state even though the polls in the state were still open. I know this came up in the `80s as well, but with the Internet as ubiquitous as it is now, I have to wonder if such instantaneous coverage might discourage some folks and send them home vote-less.
Just because a product was developed with formal design and test specifications doesn't mean the product's trustworthy. I've no doubt that companies like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Apple, Netscape, etc. use formal specifications and processes for everything, yet they've all made a science of deploying flawed, untrusthworthy products. I'm personally of the opinion that the people directly or indirectly involved with the implementation of a product play a much larger role in its eventual trustworthiness than the presence or absence of formal design and testing specifications. If developers aren't meticulous with their coding -- e.g., making sure the code's readable, maintainable, consistent, etc. -- and diligent with unit testing (and, in C and C++, memory analysis with something like Insure++ or Purify), then there's a greater chance that the result will be unreliable dribble. Likewise, managers of these products can easily override recommendations from testers and decide to release the product, flaws and all, just so release dates can be met; after all, there seems be the mindset in the commercial world that being first to market with a flawed product is much better than being second to market with a solid product.
You can have reckless or disciplined developers in both the open- and closed-source worlds. You can have and not have formal design and test specifications in both the open- and closed-source worlds. You can have rigorous reviews in both the open- and closed-source worlds. It just all depends on the mindset and discipline of the people actually doing the work. Let's not forget the space shuttle developers.
I, personally, don't think closed-source software, by definition, is more trustworthy than open-source software -- and vice-versa. But it's a lot easier to ascertain the trustworthiness, security, reliability, etc. of open-source software than it is of closed-source software because, in the open-source world, you've got the code, giving you the option and ability to do your own reviews, free of spin control from the developer(s) or prosecution via stupid laws like UCITA, and to fix any defects you find. That is what makes open-source code so powerful, in my opinion.
Virginia has a Consumer Use Tax that either predates or came into existence about the same time as online ordering; I saw it in early 1994 when filing my first Virginia tax return (for tax year 1993). This tax is targeted at purchases for which no sales tax was paid. It was originally targeted at mail order purchases, plus some other less memorable situations, but now covers Internet purchases as well. The tax is computed by adding up all your non-taxed purchases, sans shipping and handling charges, and multiplying that by the Virginia sales tax rate, currently 4.5%. Tihs total is then deducted from your refund or added to your debt. It's clearly described in the Virginia state tax return instruction booklet.
Having been married recently and hearing my wife say repeatedly, "Government sure makes it hard for me to be an honest citizen," I can definitely appreciate and understand the appeal of moving a lot of the government-citizen interaction online -- e.g., no more snotty bureaucrats, long lines, horrendously inconvenient hours, etc. But, on the other hand, I've seen how OLTP systems are designed and implemented; for many, it's a playground, Kindergarten mentality. I've seen how and why functionality, reliability, scalability, security, privacy, fault tolerance, availability, integrity, etc. get butchered or even completely sacrificed, and I've seen the results -- corrupted data and systems unavailability being examples. I've seen how the absence of plans and processes to recover from faults and disasters can leave an OLTP system dead in the water, totally useless for hours -- occasionally even more. I've experienced how useless call center people can be -- e.g., because they're not trained well enough in processes and policies, they don't have access to information, their computers don't work, etc. I've also seen how flaky Internet connectivity, for whatever reason, can be. We all have. And this is all coming from either start-ups, who are supposedly on the bleeding edge of technology and innovation, or historic, reputable companies, who are putting their reputation on the line (and sometimes damaging it) to play catch-up who know better.
I've also seen and read more than enough about how totally inept (U.S.) local, state, and federal government agencies, officials, and lawmakers can be. They're barely capable of handling basic government functions -- e.g., education, transportation, defense, finances, and the mish-mash of social programs -- in an intelligible manner.
If goverment agencies, software companies, and consultants are brought together, do you honestly think they'll understand what it means to build and be able to actually build systems that are highly available (99.9% is a good start), fault-tolerant, and reliable; that guarantee data integrity; that safeguard citizens' information and privacy; that are secure from the webservers back to the database(s); that are scalable? Will they be able to design, implement, and rehearse disaster recovery plans? How will they handle issues such as citizen authentication (e.g., see PFIR Statement on Electronic Signatures and Documents for an explanation of the risks surrounding recent U.S. legistation to make electronic signatures legally binding) and information disputes/inaccuracies? Are they ready to staff call centers with enough trained employees with adequate computers and tools to help citizens in a timely manner (e.g., so that they're not on hold for 15 - 30 minutes). Are they ready to adapt current government processes, regulations, and procedures so that online transactions are efficient? For example, how do you translate the real-world requirement for original documentation into the online world without making the turn-around time for transaction processing measurable in weeks? And what about those who can't use online transactions? Over time when transaction processing becomes much more common, will they be forced to pay a surcharge to visit a government office for their business, just as some banks do in today's ATM/mail/online-banking world when someone tries to talk with a teller, even for something that can't be done via ATM, mail, or online banking? Will they be open to independent, surprise audits?
A lot of unanswered questions, and, let's face it, previous efforts by private and public sector groups to modernize public-sector agencies haven't gone as smoothly as they should've.
Instead of spending millions upon millions of dollars on technologies and paradigms that government agencies and officials have proven complete arrogance of in the past and making software companies and consultants obscenely rich, wouldn't it be better to spend some money in the short term to streamline the current processes and practices? And then do enough research to phase in a solid OLTP system over time, rather than a rushed, flaky one with flaky processes behind it?
As others have stated, Virginia has done an excellent job of making visits to their Department of Motor Vehicles offices significantly less painful and lengthy. My wife was able to get a new driver's license, register and title her car, and get new license plates in all of 30 minutes or so on a Saturday morning at a busy DMV office. And the folks were very friendly and helpful, patiently answering questions and such. Her interest in their online system all but died after that -- she doesn't see the need, doesn't want the nerves (e.g., where's my registration, is something wrong, did they get it, did they lose it?), and doesn't want to deal with the risks.
I ordered SDSL service last September from DigitalSelect (now PrimusDSL). They partner with Covad who have to deal/suffer with Bell Atlantic. The installation process itself went quickly, but there were serious stability problems afterwards; the link would stay up for anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days, but no longer than that. DigitalSelect camped on Covad pretty hard to get the problem fixed and kept me informed all the way through, even going so far as to conference me in on the calls to Covad's support people. After looking over everything from the CO back to the house, Covad found that someone (my money's on Bell Atlantic -- see below) had broken a card in the phone network interface box on the back of the house. Covad fixed that immediately, and SDSL's been solid ever since.
Maybe others have had problems with Covad, but I place the blame on Bell Atlantic given the problems I've had with them for regular phone service. I'd ordered a second analog line recently; the work was to have been completed on a Thursday but wasn't done until late that following Monday. Why? They couldn't find the phone network interface box. Even when armed with detailed instructions from me about the box's location -- go behind house, open back yard gate, go through gate, walk to back of house, look for grey box with Bell logo on it immediately below huge power utility meter box, both by large firewood pile -- they couldn't find the damned thing. Three technicians came and failed. The fourth came out, found the box with no directions, did the work, and made the comment that his co-workers are stupid. Oh, and during this whole process they crossed my primary voice line with a neighbor's. Then, two days after the second line was installed, both the primary and new lines dropped out completely. I had to call their repair department on my cellphone, and the only explanation I got from them about why the lines were down -- and why it took five seconds to fix it -- was that they messed up. No details, just that they messed up.
I don't trust these people for regular voice service, and I've heard nothing about horror stories about bellatlantic.net. I'd go without xDSL before ordering it from them directly.
I started looking at the cable modem v. xDSL offerings earlier this summer when my current-but-soon-to-be-former ISP, Verio (they bought my original ISP), REALLY started to frustrate me. News outages, dialup problems, network problems, Netapp crashes, etc. I already had 2-channel ISDN and wasn't going to downgrade to 56K access, especially given the limited choices of good-quality ISPs here. I could've bought mediocre cable modem service from my cable company; waited for them to replace their entire infrastructure and reinvent everything; waited for StarPower and others to lay cable in my neighborhood and start offering services, or; look at xDSL. Cable modems simply weren't an option, and, according to friends and co-workers who have cable modems through assorted cable companies out here, they're a mixed blessing, either because the bandwidth is so unpredictable or the ISP is so incompetent.
So I looked at xDSL. The ADSL offerings out here were too dumbed down -- no domain hosting, either no static IPs or hefty charges for an IP or two, etc, etc, etc. After some research I eventually chose SDSL, and after some false starts (improperly wired DSL jack, defective router) it's now up and running nicely, running everything I need. And the ISP seems to be on the ball, too.
Oh, and using Bell Atlantic as a test case is not advisable...
Five years from now, I'll probably be using something else. That's just how it goes...
Not that I trust journalists -- technical and especially mainstream -- to accurately report on technical matters...
The article implies that a local/intranet registry will have to be maintained describing the mappings between human friendly names and URLs. So instead of remembering URLs, users will have to remember how the thing's registered in the local registry, quite possibly in a way that's not intuitive to them. A user might want the 1998 budget report and look for "1998 Budget Report," but the finance people might've registered the document in the local registry with a title that's only intuitive to them (e.g., "1998 Expenditures"?) and others in their field. A title that's intuitive to person A in discipline A might not be all that intuitive to person B in another discipline. Sounds like we'd be back at square one rather quickly.
There's a point at which we have to stop dumbing down computers and standards and start insisting on smarter users and smarter website maintainers (i.e., put a little thought into how documents and pages are organized). Perhaps we're reaching that point...
...but I'd rather hire a programmer, sysadmin, datbase admin, etc. with some battle scars than someone fresh out of college. Maybe the universities in this area REALLY suck, or maybe our HR department really sucks, but the bulk of the young kids that've come through here in the last couple of years have been undisciplined (can't write efficient code in any language, are very susceptible to hype, etc.), can't read other developers' code, and don't really know, either through experience or at least classroom time, what it takes to build solid systems. So we end up having senior engineers mentor and supervise them closely, and while that might help the young engineers mature, it also takes valuable time away from the senior engineer's other responsibilities. In an organization in which the senior engineers are already overtasked, that can be even more costly. We've had some young kids come in who were mostly self-taught, and they've turned out to be speculator engineers. But they've been rare.
And as for the hyped 60, 70, or 80 hour workweeks... I used to do that, but one day (literally) I realized that it just wasn't worth it anymore. I was salaried -- no overtime -- and underpaid, and I was severely neglecting my personal life and interests. So I changed jobs, cut back to working between 40 and 50 hours a week, and made a real effort to spend more time with others, catch up on neglected interests, etc. And I think it made a real difference, both in my physical health and in my emotional well-being. Being able to step away from work for a while also helps to rejuvenate me; I seem to do some of my best brainstorming on the train home. Nowadays I try to encourage those who work for me to not put in the insane hours unless it's really necessary because friends, family, and health are hard to replace. I'm sure that 60, 70, or 80 hour work weeks will come back to haunt some folks in increased health problems later on. I'm now seeing some younger engineers who're working 60 - 80 hours a week burning out.
We have a lot of mid- to late-20's employees here, but we also have a healthy mixture of folks in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and the older ones, even if their skills are a bit out of date, still have a lot to offer from their own experiences.
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My wife has all but convinced me that Satan will be found dead of hypothermia before I can play golf on the moon or on Mars, so the next biggest thing is close-to-or-past supersonic flight. They've been dangling that carrot in front me for how long now, and now they're yanking it back!? *grumble*
I've complained about the spam situation more times than I can remember, mentioned how email addresses are being harvested off of our email servers, and described how much resource is probably being wasted processing and storing the spam, all to no avail. I mentioned anti-spam options, such as SpamAssassin, but nothing ever came of that, either. Perhaps I'm expecting too much from an IT department that's so heavily entrenched in Windows and Exchange...
This whole nuclear attack thing is crap. From the perspective of network connectivity, what's the difference between a nuclear detonation and a few well-placed backhoe accidents? (Yes, yes, I know, they're totally incomparable because of the catastrophic effects of a nuclear detonation, but I'm talking about the effects on the network, not on people and buildings.) How many times in the last ten years have we seen major routing issues to a metropolitan city or even a geographic region arise after a backhoe cut something it shouldn't have? Admittedly, recovery from a nuclear detonation would take much longer than recovery from a backhoe accident... And if, God forbid, most of the metropolitan cities in the U.S, Europe, and Asia are destroyed in nuclear Armageddon, then the Internet's going to suffer big-time.
If the media hadn't reported on the root server DDoS, then 99.999(9?)% of the Internet community wouldn't have even known that anything had happened. DNS caching and the redundant servers helped things continue working despite the DDoS. On the other hand, if someone launched a DDoS against something like eBay or ETrade -- something the average person can see, feel, touch, and understand much more clearly than DNS -- then, one, the effects would've been much more apparent much more quickly and, two, the reactions from the average user of those services would've been much angrier.
Is DNS security an issue? Sure. But so is Internet security in general, but when major websites are inaccessible because of a worm or DDoS, who do we yell at aside from the site operator/owner? Not sure. As deplorable as ICANN's behavior is, they're also being made a scapegoat for bigger network issues, methinks, because there's no other actual organization to yell at.
When I do full backups, I do 'em twice. The first copy goes into our safe at home, and the second copy goes into our safe deposit box at the bank down the street. Incremental backups done during the week only go in the safe; I don't have time to go to the bank every day. I've seen other customers from time to time come into the bank with a box full of tapes -- either their business backups or just protecting their porn collection. :)
These things will fill up landfills faster than the AOL discs currently do. That is, if anyone's stupid enough to buy 'em. No, wait, sorry, I forgot. First the discs will be sold with no self-destruct warnings. Then there'll be a class-action lawsuit or two about it. Then labels will be put on the packages, and then sales will plummet.
There are times when curtailing the press is a good idea. The press in Washington has been speculating so madly about this sniper incident that I'm convinced they've actually identified targets for the sniper. They commented one day that schoolchildren are safe because he hasn't come near a school. A day or so later, a kid gets shot outside a school. They commented that he hasn't shot anyone on weekends, and what happens? A couple of days later he shoots someone on a Saturday. The press routinely asks for information, both formally and behind the scenes, regarding the investigation into this lunatic and won't take answers like "giving out that info can compromise our investigation or tip off the sniper as to what we're doing" with any degree of seriousness. They're more concerned about their jobs, ratings, and careers than they are in public safety.
And there are numerous incidents here in Washington where the press has leaked highly classified information (e.g., national security matters) to the public. The Washington Times newspaper here is notorious for this.
So, I ask again, this ranking is a problem how exactly? I know some people are going to say that any restriction on the press is just the beginning of wider-reaching restrictions and is the foundation of a totalitarian state. And while that might be true, sometimes restrictions are necessary, especially when the media are less capable of behaving themselves than a four year-old kid.
So unless AOL can find a way to distinguish itself from other ISPs, like it used to be, then I say let it sink. (Innovation -- what a concept!) Somewhat less spam, fewer annoying people online.
"...home owner association..." -- that's the deal-breaker. There's no way in hell I'm buying a house in an HOA community and paying US $50 - 250 a month for an organization that, based on past experience, does nothing but tell me what I can't do with the house I just spent several hundred thousand dollars for. "Oh, you want to fly a flag? Nope, can't do that." "Oh, you want to put up an outdoor light that's brighter, clearly illuminates the house number, and turns on and off with the daylight? Nope, sorry." "Oh, you want to build a deck with railing that runs vertically or diagonally so that your children can't fall through? Nope, it must be horizontal. But we do offer bitchin' broadband!" No, thanks, it's not worth the cost or the aggravation. I could put those monthly HOA dues towards my own broadband that doesn't come with those gargantuan strings attached, or I'll get together with the neighbors in our non-HOA -- THANK GOD! -- neighborhood and roll our own wireless coop or something of that ilk.
I'm sure it hasn't occurred to those people that consumers might not be buying as many CDs and DVDs because we're more or less in, oh, I don't know, A RECESSION!? WITH THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE UNEMPLOYED NOW WHO HAD JOBS A YEAR AGO!? Nah, that couldn't be it. It must be the thieving citizenry. And it definitely couldn't be that recent music and video releases just flat-out suck. Nah, this is award-winning material coming out now, surpassing the quality of anything we've ever seen or heard before.
The more limitations legally placed on media and technology, the less likely people are going to be to buy things. What'll happen then? Will the MPAA and the RIAA buy a federal bailout akin to the one for the airlines?
I sincerely hope that their stupidity bankrupts them. Maybe the next generation of entertainment companies will realize that the average consumer isn't a criminal and won't appreciate being treated like one. I don't put up with local merchants treating me like an idiot or just another customer getting in the way of their laziness, so why should I put up with such offensive attitudes from the MPAA or RIAA? And I'm sure the RIAA will be happy to konw that, except for three, the only CDs I've purchased this year all came directly from the (little regional) bands themselves, whose music is far better than anything y'all've got going right now.
The weeks prior to my renewal date were...disturbing...because of the increased level of spam and snail-mail junk mail.
Number of lines of code written, highest score wins. In short, why write in 100 lines what you can write in 1,000?
Number of lines of code written, lowest score wins. You end up with your own obfuscated coding contest. You might also find people rewriting other people's work, redesigning APIs and other infrastructure components, for no reason other than to lower their own score. This can lead to total chaos, fights in the parking lot, etc.
Number of good lines of code written a month. What's the definition of "good," and how subjective is it? If it includes comments, then how is the usefulness of a comment determined? I've seen developers write more comments than code, and in the end the comments said nothing useful that would've helped a new developer maintain the code.
Number of bugs fixed in a month. The programmer who spent a month researching the sev 2 bug that was affecting system availability or data integrity for the last three months isn't recognized for his/her achievements, while the intern who fixed 100 bugs pertaining to typos on the website and in the documentation is rewarded.
Number of bugs created in a month, lowest score wins. Nice idea, punishing people for creating bugs, but people might get so paranoid about causing bugs that the turnaround time for code is obscenely high.
Code complexity metric, lowest score wins: All this proves is that the programmer's capable of writing non-complex code but says nothing about the documentation for the code, the overall design of the component or subsystem the programmer was working on, etc.
Number of tasks completed in a month. This screws the guy who's got a hefty task that cannot be divided any further or the programmer waiting on the sysadmin to install the necessary development tools so that he/she can actually get started.
Customer satisfaction. The customers are pissed because the website is unstable, but the rest of the back office system is running perfectly fine. In the end, everyone -- the back-office developers, the database guys -- is punished when only the website people should've been put on call center duty for a week.
Number of customer issues resolved. There's a great incentive here to solve issues with kludgy hacks which, in six months to a year, might leave the company with a very flaky, unmaintainable system.
360-degree input, or "Mutually Assurred Destruction". This was a system IBM used -- still uses? -- where your peers, some picked by you, some by your manager, would fill out a survey and offer opinions about you. The manager would then piece it all together and come up with a result. Like Dilbert called it, it's "mutually-assurred destruction," although I saw it work the exact opposite way many times.
There's so much more that goes into developing and delivering software than just writing lines of code. And the number of lines of code written isn't all that significant if the design sucks, if the documentation is unusable by the people who need it, if the call center people supporting the thing aren't trained properly, or if the systems supporting the website or the database are unstable. How do you put a score next to a name when many of the things contributing to that score are subjective or out of the control of the person being scored? We're not building CD players here!
I've no doubt that some significant percentage of the new cases in California are legitimate. I do wonder, though, if a significant percentage of the remainder, though, are not autistic but are rather by-products of society's modern trend of blaming a child's behavioral or developmental problems on a psychological/mental disorder and doping him/her up on medication as a means of covering up our failures at being and unwillingness to be responsible parents.
Gone out to play pool during lunch and after work
Gone drinking after work and on weekends
Trashed bars together, including one place where we left a 50% tip and helped clean up the vomit, broken glass, spilled drinks, and toppled furniture (I'M NOT KIDDING!)
Gone to concerts, movies, etc.
Helped each other move
Been part of each other's weddings and gone to each other's bachelor parties
Watched each others' pets
Helped out with home improvements
Watched football, basketball, or hockey on TV, sometimes with spouses and girlfriends in attendance, and gotten smashed
Had BBQs with everyone, their spouses, girlfriends, kids, even parents.
Can't say I've bailed one out of jail, although one called me when he was released from the county jail after a one-night visit... Our spouses and significant others get along fine and often times talk about us behind our backs and gang up to tease us incessantly.
I don't think the difference between how IT people and fire/rescue people socialize has anything to do with the presence or absence of danger. I think it has to do more with the fact that a lot of our computing work is done in isolation. There might be people around us -- in the next cube or office, walking by, etc. -- but we can nevertheless go for hours or even days without every actually talking to anyone. So much communication in my workplace is done by email, not in person. I know people who spend hours (ab)using instant messaging, irc, and other chat means, meeting maybe 1% of the people they talk with online -- and let's face it, socializing online is very different than doing it in person. Many of us became obsessed with computers as kids while other kids became obsessed with sports, music, drama, whatever. So while they were socializing with people in the weight room or on the field, in rehearsals and such, we were in a room, alone in front of a computer. They learned socialization, we didn't -- unless we made the conscientious decision to walk away from the computer and do something with other people. A lot of kids didn't do that and really missed out on life; some felt they were too different and couldn't, while others felt that everyone else was too beneath them and actively chose not to. I did walk away, and while I might not know as much about computers as some others do, developing those social skills to experience rich friendsips, relationships, and now marriage made it all worthwhile.
Can't hold my liquor as well as some of these construction or fire/rescue types, though. Oh well.
I trudged through the list, saw some familiar names. But what's missing -- and what'll probably be next to impossible to find -- are the old standalone BBS's from the early- to mid-`80s, running on Apple II's, 8-bit Atari's with a rack of floppy drives and a 300 or 1200 baud modem, or 16-bit Atari ST's with a 20 or 40 MB hard drive and a 2400 baud modem. Some of the best ones I saw back then weren't networked with any other BBS or Internet node with fidonet, UUCP, or any of those goofy protocols that never took off. They didn't have the latest "k00l warez." But they did have message boards that were egregiously active and had more of a sense of a community than anything I've seen on the Internet in the 13 years I've been using it.
And let's face it, there really aren't many realistic alternatives available. Alternatives, in order to have any real chance of taking off, need to fully -- not partially, not almost, but completely -- support MS Office's current file formats for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Project, at the very least. I've seen users attempt to use embedded and standalone file format converters, get mad when something like formatting gets corrupted and just switch to the real thing. Alternatives must run on the systems folks are currently using, namely Windows and, to a lesser extent, Mac OS. I know this'll probably upset the average Linux user and open-source advocate, but the average user or the average IT manager is not going to switch to a new operating system -- something as complex as Linux or even something as simplistic as Mac OS -- just for a new office suite. The average home user doesn't understand and is ignorant of computers and operating systems; they might know that alternatives to Windows exist but see no real reason to consider them given their lack of popularity, publicity, etc. The average company is not going to undertake an OS transition because of the disruption it'd cause, because of the investment in current systems, standards, contracts they have.
In the end, Microsoft wins again because folks will upgrade, because of cheaper costs, because office standards force an upgrade, or because there just isn't any other real choice available. And the same will hold true if Microsoft does away with the pay-once model later on. And just think of the privacy concerns and DMCA enforcement opportunities available to Microsoft if they do, in fact, do away with the pay-once model! Yippee...
What it has forced upon the company, though, is an increased IT budget. We have software engineers, especially, who now have Windows machines on their desk whose sole purpose is to read email. Nothing else! A fair number of these folks don't have Windows machines at home; they have Macintoshes, Linux machines, FreeBSD, or some other UNIX variant. So the only way for these folks to read email when they're working at home is to carry a laptop home with them. A bit ridiculous and expensive -- not just in procurement costs, but also in maintenance costs -- to have an entire desktop or laptop computer whose sole purpose is email. But that's what you get when you go with a proprietary system instead of one based on open standards.
To be fair, there is an HTTP interface into Exchange that we have here. It gets the job done, but it's annoying, and I've had it wipe out my entire inbox before. Also, you can supposedly get at your email on an Exchange server with POP3 and/or IMAP, but you're still excluded to some degree from the calendaring (mis)features.
I haven't used this, but I've heard HP OpenMail quoted as an alternative to Exchange that runs on practically everything. Don't know how true that is, though.
That aside, I sincerely believe that the voters complaining about the unintuitive ballot have only themselves to blame. Voting is a right and a responsibility, one that many Americans take for granted or take too lightly. It's the voter's responsibilty to read the entire ballot, to carefully make their choices, to review their choices before submitting the ballot, to ask for help if they can't read the ballot or don't understand it, and to ask for a new ballot if they make a mistake (irrelevant in those precincts that use electronic voting). Those polling place workers are there to help and, being legally blind (worse than 20/200), I've asked for help before and have had no trouble. And I saw that ballot on websites, in newspapers, and on TV and I'm sorry, but that ballot is not that unintuitive. The voters there had their chance. They could've asked for help or a new ballot, but they didn't and instead waited until much later before complaining to anyone. They blew it. Let them live with it.
On a slightly related matter, anyone thought about the impact of TV stations and websites announcing election results before polling places were closed? For example, results were being announced for the East coast while polls throughout the rest of the country were still open. They were also announcing results for my state even though the polls in the state were still open. I know this came up in the `80s as well, but with the Internet as ubiquitous as it is now, I have to wonder if such instantaneous coverage might discourage some folks and send them home vote-less.
You can have reckless or disciplined developers in both the open- and closed-source worlds. You can have and not have formal design and test specifications in both the open- and closed-source worlds. You can have rigorous reviews in both the open- and closed-source worlds. It just all depends on the mindset and discipline of the people actually doing the work. Let's not forget the space shuttle developers.
I, personally, don't think closed-source software, by definition, is more trustworthy than open-source software -- and vice-versa. But it's a lot easier to ascertain the trustworthiness, security, reliability, etc. of open-source software than it is of closed-source software because, in the open-source world, you've got the code, giving you the option and ability to do your own reviews, free of spin control from the developer(s) or prosecution via stupid laws like UCITA, and to fix any defects you find. That is what makes open-source code so powerful, in my opinion.
So what's the big deal, exactly?
I've also seen and read more than enough about how totally inept (U.S.) local, state, and federal government agencies, officials, and lawmakers can be. They're barely capable of handling basic government functions -- e.g., education, transportation, defense, finances, and the mish-mash of social programs -- in an intelligible manner.
If goverment agencies, software companies, and consultants are brought together, do you honestly think they'll understand what it means to build and be able to actually build systems that are highly available (99.9% is a good start), fault-tolerant, and reliable; that guarantee data integrity; that safeguard citizens' information and privacy; that are secure from the webservers back to the database(s); that are scalable? Will they be able to design, implement, and rehearse disaster recovery plans? How will they handle issues such as citizen authentication (e.g., see PFIR Statement on Electronic Signatures and Documents for an explanation of the risks surrounding recent U.S. legistation to make electronic signatures legally binding) and information disputes/inaccuracies? Are they ready to staff call centers with enough trained employees with adequate computers and tools to help citizens in a timely manner (e.g., so that they're not on hold for 15 - 30 minutes). Are they ready to adapt current government processes, regulations, and procedures so that online transactions are efficient? For example, how do you translate the real-world requirement for original documentation into the online world without making the turn-around time for transaction processing measurable in weeks? And what about those who can't use online transactions? Over time when transaction processing becomes much more common, will they be forced to pay a surcharge to visit a government office for their business, just as some banks do in today's ATM/mail/online-banking world when someone tries to talk with a teller, even for something that can't be done via ATM, mail, or online banking? Will they be open to independent, surprise audits?
A lot of unanswered questions, and, let's face it, previous efforts by private and public sector groups to modernize public-sector agencies haven't gone as smoothly as they should've.
Instead of spending millions upon millions of dollars on technologies and paradigms that government agencies and officials have proven complete arrogance of in the past and making software companies and consultants obscenely rich, wouldn't it be better to spend some money in the short term to streamline the current processes and practices? And then do enough research to phase in a solid OLTP system over time, rather than a rushed, flaky one with flaky processes behind it?
As others have stated, Virginia has done an excellent job of making visits to their Department of Motor Vehicles offices significantly less painful and lengthy. My wife was able to get a new driver's license, register and title her car, and get new license plates in all of 30 minutes or so on a Saturday morning at a busy DMV office. And the folks were very friendly and helpful, patiently answering questions and such. Her interest in their online system all but died after that -- she doesn't see the need, doesn't want the nerves (e.g., where's my registration, is something wrong, did they get it, did they lose it?), and doesn't want to deal with the risks.
Maybe others have had problems with Covad, but I place the blame on Bell Atlantic given the problems I've had with them for regular phone service. I'd ordered a second analog line recently; the work was to have been completed on a Thursday but wasn't done until late that following Monday. Why? They couldn't find the phone network interface box. Even when armed with detailed instructions from me about the box's location -- go behind house, open back yard gate, go through gate, walk to back of house, look for grey box with Bell logo on it immediately below huge power utility meter box, both by large firewood pile -- they couldn't find the damned thing. Three technicians came and failed. The fourth came out, found the box with no directions, did the work, and made the comment that his co-workers are stupid. Oh, and during this whole process they crossed my primary voice line with a neighbor's. Then, two days after the second line was installed, both the primary and new lines dropped out completely. I had to call their repair department on my cellphone, and the only explanation I got from them about why the lines were down -- and why it took five seconds to fix it -- was that they messed up. No details, just that they messed up.
I don't trust these people for regular voice service, and I've heard nothing about horror stories about bellatlantic.net. I'd go without xDSL before ordering it from them directly.
So I looked at xDSL. The ADSL offerings out here were too dumbed down -- no domain hosting, either no static IPs or hefty charges for an IP or two, etc, etc, etc. After some research I eventually chose SDSL, and after some false starts (improperly wired DSL jack, defective router) it's now up and running nicely, running everything I need. And the ISP seems to be on the ball, too.
Oh, and using Bell Atlantic as a test case is not advisable...
Five years from now, I'll probably be using something else. That's just how it goes...
The article implies that a local/intranet registry will have to be maintained describing the mappings between human friendly names and URLs. So instead of remembering URLs, users will have to remember how the thing's registered in the local registry, quite possibly in a way that's not intuitive to them. A user might want the 1998 budget report and look for "1998 Budget Report," but the finance people might've registered the document in the local registry with a title that's only intuitive to them (e.g., "1998 Expenditures"?) and others in their field. A title that's intuitive to person A in discipline A might not be all that intuitive to person B in another discipline. Sounds like we'd be back at square one rather quickly.
There's a point at which we have to stop dumbing down computers and standards and start insisting on smarter users and smarter website maintainers (i.e., put a little thought into how documents and pages are organized). Perhaps we're reaching that point...
And as for the hyped 60, 70, or 80 hour workweeks... I used to do that, but one day (literally) I realized that it just wasn't worth it anymore. I was salaried -- no overtime -- and underpaid, and I was severely neglecting my personal life and interests. So I changed jobs, cut back to working between 40 and 50 hours a week, and made a real effort to spend more time with others, catch up on neglected interests, etc. And I think it made a real difference, both in my physical health and in my emotional well-being. Being able to step away from work for a while also helps to rejuvenate me; I seem to do some of my best brainstorming on the train home. Nowadays I try to encourage those who work for me to not put in the insane hours unless it's really necessary because friends, family, and health are hard to replace. I'm sure that 60, 70, or 80 hour work weeks will come back to haunt some folks in increased health problems later on. I'm now seeing some younger engineers who're working 60 - 80 hours a week burning out.
We have a lot of mid- to late-20's employees here, but we also have a healthy mixture of folks in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and the older ones, even if their skills are a bit out of date, still have a lot to offer from their own experiences.