This is all covered in The Mythical Man-Month (Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-83595-9). It's this book that coined the phrase (page 25) 'Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.' It is much better to have a few junior programmers attending a good, senior programmer (generally speaking) than it is to have 4 junior programmers all hacking at a task they don't have the "tools" for. Put another way, if it takes one person 10 minutes to dig a post-hole, then it should take 100 people six seconds to dig the same hole. Wrong! (Add another ten people to manage the hundred, staff meetings, coordination overhead, etc....and I guarantee it'll take the whole day.)
Especially for the new dot-com's trying to make a living on the 'net, programmer experience is critical to ensuring stable, secure, bullet-proof code that can at least survive script-kiddie attacks. I can't tell you how many times I've seen blatant, well-published holes wind up in fresh code made by HTML jockeys that think they're programmers because they can create a complete <TABLE> by hand. Web programmers have a deservedly bad reputation for this very reason. The people I've seen put together ISPs and dot-com's often don't have a clue about security-- they simply put up a badly configured firewall that can do nothing about programmer errors leaving the barn door wide open.
Weinberg's Second Law applies: 'If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.' This law has been weakened somewhat is most areas of programmer endeavor, but the Internet is attracting wannabe programmers in droves. Not that I have anything against wannabe programmers; I just think that people should consider the ability and experience of their lead programmers before staking their futures on them.
Glass is not a liquid. It's a solid with the low molecular-level coherency of liquid (which is to say that it doesn't form crystalline structures at any scale larger than a few [dozen? hundred?] molecules across.) Now, if you've hung out in arcades as much as I did in my misspent youth, you've seen tempered pinball glass take horrendous abuse by the players, yet it doesn't shatter. [I've been told that if you drop one of these glass plates on edge, though, they make a horrible mess of tiny little fragments. I've never had the opportunity to verify this claim:-)] I think it's foolish to assume that IBM made hard drive platter glass using the same process as your bathroom mirror. Of course, the article doesn't list the process used. I'd suggest checking the patent archives:-)
People need to learn that the two simply don't equate. Stealing means that a victim does no longer have what was once theirs. Breaking into something means physically harming a device intended to prevent entry for the purpose of extracting data.
If you break into the place, photocopy a bunch of stuff (assume for sake of argument you brought your own paper), and exited with a bunch of stolen information, you still have stolen the information.
If they left the door unlocked, it is still considered "breaking and entering." Don't take "breaking" too literally.
I can't tell-- are you suggesting that if someone enters your business through an unlocked door or window and steals a bunch of sensitive information (customer lists, billing histories, patentable ideas that are still in the work-in-progress phase), it somehow shouldn't be a crime?
Just for clarification, Hopkins is a fairly large suburb of Minneapolis, in Hennepin County, which is the largest county in Minnesota by budget (iirc. May be second behind Ramsey.)
Perhaps I'm missing something... if the output signal is digital over firewire, and firewire technology is available for most newer computers, what's to prevent someone from intercepting the decoded audio between the player and the amp? In any case, any professional bad guy determined to copy the DVDs will be able to, given the right equipment. The only signficant result is that personal use copying (DVD to DVD or digital extraction) will be made very difficult in the near term. This use is legal and ethical, yet the recording industry is going to great lengths to try and stop it. It feels like a desperation tactic used by an industry that refuses to change with the times. In 5-15 years or less, when every PC has the capability to be a high-end (by today's standards) multitrack digital audio studio, distribution is a non-issue (Internet), and Internet radio replaces the Industry-controlled broadcast radio of today, I wonder what will happen to today's music industry?
What Mr. Metcalfe misses is the fact that it's not the platform that's new, it's the method. In the early days, substantial innovation in the field was done overnight (with gross excesses in caffeine.) Then, corporations and teams were formed to move the best programmers into management (c.f. "The Mythical Man-Month" or "The Dilbert Principle", your choice.) A revolutionary new method of software development is the concept being successfully proven here (the Bazaar,) a fact that seems to have escaped Mr. Metcalfe's attention. Analogies to farming have no relevance, since software is grown once and harvested without limit. Quality, not quantity, of software farmers is key. Analogies to Marxism and communism have little relevance to this meritocracy (another fairly new concept.) It appears that Mr. Metcalfe has been caught in the pundit trap on this one- he attempts to draw deep conclusions based on superficial or fundamentally flawed understanding. In this case he happened to be the proverbial blind man standing behind the elephant. "I'm not sure what it is, but I think it stinks!"
PHP3 is highly specialized to do Web pages. Perl is generically well suited for doing many things, including Web pages. Therefore, Perl is a more useful language than PHP3, in general. The fact that "database-driven Web sites" is an emerging technology leads us to believe that there is no date of obsolescence; however, I believe we just don't see it yet. To quote from the article:
We've already seen the deaths of many over-specialized organisms in computing: Lisp machines, Ada chips and many so-called fourth generation languages. Any program ever written in assembly language for an obsolete architecture is now obsolete. Likewise, any program that ties its fortunes to a single operating system is likely to go down with the ship.
Personally, I'm a big fan of ColdFusion (similar to PHP3), and currently make my living writing ColdFusion-based intra/extranets for organizations that still use NT, but I believe (as Larry seems to) that anything that can't or doesn't adapt will become obsolete (hence my Linux/PHP play-box at home.) Before getting too religious about any software or platform, remember: this rule of obsolescence applies to people as well as software.
Perl/TK would be perfect for the PalmPilot, but that may require a bit more RAM than they typically hold. OTOH, if 3COM wanted the PalmPilot to have thousands of craven freeware programmers writing to their platform, then that is exactly what they'd do. Hmmm....
Astronomers should know about it. RSA is typically performed using 512 bit prime numbers. There are approximately 3.778e151 such prime numbers. Using the advanced storage technology available to the NSA, it should be possible to store a 512 bit number in a single hydrogen atom. A typical universe (e.g. ours) contains approximately 1e90 hydrogen atoms. If the NSA has hidden 3.778e61 universes in an inconspicious little building in Maryland, astronomers should notice some deviations in the gravity field in the area.
I guarantee you that nothing will be accomplished from all this, once the smoke clears and the hype fades.
Heh... I think very little lasting change will come from this. I hope that the little change that does come from this is positive change, but the prison code of high school, and the unwillingness of people to use mirrors in the search for cause, makes that unlikely. I'm trying to figure out what I might be able to do to make some difference, but my life as an on-the-road consultant makes that problematic. Apathy is not the problem (IMHO); figuring out what to do to help, is an issue to discuss. Which is a question Katz does not seem to have addressed. Is this one of the sources of your hostility toward him?
I think I understand the context of your objection, now. However, I don't see where/. is a forum for the events of Indonesia, Aceh, or East Timor. Most of/. readers are very personally affected by the Littleton tragedy, which makes this a perfect forum for venting our thoughts and feelings. So, don't be surprised that this is a hot topic here. The national press went a bit overboard, and certanly has lowered my opinion of their ability to understand the issues they are "reporting," but it's a shocking event that happened in someone's backyard-- and everyone wants to know how to keep it out of their own. As a parent, I have a deep worry for my preschool kids' future, and the Littleton shootings have every parent with teenagers on the edge of their seats. It's a flaw in human nature that we are most concerned with what affects us directly, but to say that there should be no venting forum anywhere because the world has deeper tragedies is silly. (Isn't that easily inferred from what you're saying?) Without a forum for intelligent discussion of this issue, it is doomed to repetition. How many high school kids have to die before it's worthy of your attention? Which forum is better for our discussion of this issue?
Katz is showing the problems that led to this tragedy from a perspective overlooked or unnoticed by most media, and I feel that he has done me a personal service for publishing the work that I've seen (though I'm unfamiliar with his earlier work.)
Why is the plight of East Timorians more topical than Geek persecution in this forum? Why shouldn't those of use deeply affected talk about it? Sure, "deeply" is relative for those of us so shallow as to think the Littleton shooting was newsworthy, but that shoe fits me, so I'll wear it.
Perhaps there is a different forum somewhere for you to talk about the plight of the inhabitants of Aceh (Acehians?) and still be on-topic but I'm pretty sure this thread isn't it.
What is violence to you? Is driving someone to suicide violent to you? How many countless social outcasts have been driven to that point? When I was there [high school], only the hope that things would be different as an adult kept me alive. (I'm glad I made it.) Seems like the difference here is that these kids took a few of their persecutors with them. I feel bad for the parents, and for the kids who were just in the wrong place at a very wrong time. I honestly don't care about Katz' motivations-- his articles (and the many other/. topics) have helped me realize that the anger I thought I had supressed all these years was never far away, and this realization may help me truly put that period of my history behind me.
Perhaps you think I'm just some screwed up fuck who desperately needs some kind of counseling. I'm thinking you may be right. I wouldn't have thought so a month ago, but the scab is off-- seems the wound never healed-- and a community discussion is underway. And every community has its leaders.
Someone needs to be the advocate, the messenger, a leader. Why not him? Who else? You? Bah.
If they're being unfairly treated by authority figures, they have legal recourse
That's the difference between "real life" and "high school." In "real life," there's legal recourse. In high school, there's a prison-movie-esque code of silence. If you "rat out" someone who is picking on you, be it a peer or a faculty member, expect things to get much worse, not any better.
It is a cliche' of human history to fear what you don't understand, and it is a very small step from fear to hatred.
You couldn't pay me enough to relive high school. The media backlash against geeks and video game players has recently haunted me with my old feelings of persecution, which I thought I had put behind me over ten years ago.
Small wonder an unrestrained jock clique drove these kids to violence. It only amazes me that it doesn't happen more often. How sad that it had to come to this before anyone noticed.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... i need to pour this beer on my monitor so it doesn't combust from displaying this thread!
Nothing like a good flame war...
This is all covered in The Mythical Man-Month (Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-83595-9). It's this book that coined the phrase (page 25) 'Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.' It is much better to have a few junior programmers attending a good, senior programmer (generally speaking) than it is to have 4 junior programmers all hacking at a task they don't have the "tools" for. Put another way, if it takes one person 10 minutes to dig a post-hole, then it should take 100 people six seconds to dig the same hole. Wrong! (Add another ten people to manage the hundred, staff meetings, coordination overhead, etc. ...and I guarantee it'll take the whole day.)
Especially for the new dot-com's trying to make a living on the 'net, programmer experience is critical to ensuring stable, secure, bullet-proof code that can at least survive script-kiddie attacks. I can't tell you how many times I've seen blatant, well-published holes wind up in fresh code made by HTML jockeys that think they're programmers because they can create a complete <TABLE> by hand. Web programmers have a deservedly bad reputation for this very reason. The people I've seen put together ISPs and dot-com's often don't have a clue about security-- they simply put up a badly configured firewall that can do nothing about programmer errors leaving the barn door wide open.
Weinberg's Second Law applies: 'If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.' This law has been weakened somewhat is most areas of programmer endeavor, but the Internet is attracting wannabe programmers in droves. Not that I have anything against wannabe programmers; I just think that people should consider the ability and experience of their lead programmers before staking their futures on them.
Glass is not a liquid. It's a solid with the low molecular-level coherency of liquid (which is to say that it doesn't form crystalline structures at any scale larger than a few [dozen? hundred?] molecules across.) Now, if you've hung out in arcades as much as I did in my misspent youth, you've seen tempered pinball glass take horrendous abuse by the players, yet it doesn't shatter. [I've been told that if you drop one of these glass plates on edge, though, they make a horrible mess of tiny little fragments. I've never had the opportunity to verify this claim :-)] I think it's foolish to assume that IBM made hard drive platter glass using the same process as your bathroom mirror. Of course, the article doesn't list the process used. I'd suggest checking the patent archives :-)
Actually, you'd have to wait until 3-14-16 by that logic; 3.14159... rounds to 3/14/16.
Of course, the perfect Pi day would have been 3/14/1593, unless you want to wait a lonnng time and celebrate on 3/14/15926..! (ad nauseaum)
Wheeee....
People need to learn that the two simply don't equate. Stealing means that a victim does no longer have what was once theirs. Breaking into something means physically harming a device intended to prevent entry for the purpose of extracting data.
If you break into the place, photocopy a bunch of stuff (assume for sake of argument you brought your own paper), and exited with a bunch of stolen information, you still have stolen the information.
If they left the door unlocked, it is still considered "breaking and entering." Don't take "breaking" too literally.
I can't tell-- are you suggesting that if someone enters your business through an unlocked door or window and steals a bunch of sensitive information (customer lists, billing histories, patentable ideas that are still in the work-in-progress phase), it somehow shouldn't be a crime?
Just for clarification, Hopkins is a fairly large suburb of Minneapolis, in Hennepin County, which is the largest county in Minnesota by budget (iirc. May be second behind Ramsey.)
Perhaps I'm missing something... if the output signal is digital over firewire, and firewire technology is available for most newer computers, what's to prevent someone from intercepting the decoded audio between the player and the amp? In any case, any professional bad guy determined to copy the DVDs will be able to, given the right equipment. The only signficant result is that personal use copying (DVD to DVD or digital extraction) will be made very difficult in the near term. This use is legal and ethical, yet the recording industry is going to great lengths to try and stop it. It feels like a desperation tactic used by an industry that refuses to change with the times. In 5-15 years or less, when every PC has the capability to be a high-end (by today's standards) multitrack digital audio studio, distribution is a non-issue (Internet), and Internet radio replaces the Industry-controlled broadcast radio of today, I wonder what will happen to today's music industry?
What Mr. Metcalfe misses is the fact that it's not the platform that's new, it's the method. In the early days, substantial innovation in the field was done overnight (with gross excesses in caffeine.) Then, corporations and teams were formed to move the best programmers into management (c.f. "The Mythical Man-Month" or "The Dilbert Principle", your choice.) A revolutionary new method of software development is the concept being successfully proven here (the Bazaar,) a fact that seems to have escaped Mr. Metcalfe's attention. Analogies to farming have no relevance, since software is grown once and harvested without limit. Quality, not quantity, of software farmers is key. Analogies to Marxism and communism have little relevance to this meritocracy (another fairly new concept.) It appears that Mr. Metcalfe has been caught in the pundit trap on this one- he attempts to draw deep conclusions based on superficial or fundamentally flawed understanding. In this case he happened to be the proverbial blind man standing behind the elephant. "I'm not sure what it is, but I think it stinks!"
Perl/TK would be perfect for the PalmPilot, but that may require a bit more RAM than they typically hold. OTOH, if 3COM wanted the PalmPilot to have thousands of craven freeware programmers writing to their platform, then that is exactly what they'd do. Hmmm....
See The Onion article...
I guarantee you that nothing will be accomplished from all this, once the smoke clears and the hype fades.
Heh... I think very little lasting change will come from this. I hope that the little change that does come from this is positive change, but the prison code of high school, and the unwillingness of people to use mirrors in the search for cause, makes that unlikely. I'm trying to figure out what I might be able to do to make some difference, but my life as an on-the-road consultant makes that problematic. Apathy is not the problem (IMHO); figuring out what to do to help, is an issue to discuss. Which is a question Katz does not seem to have addressed. Is this one of the sources of your hostility toward him?
I think I understand the context of your objection, now. However, I don't see where /. is a forum for the events of Indonesia, Aceh, or East Timor. Most of /. readers are very personally affected by the Littleton tragedy, which makes this a perfect forum for venting our thoughts and feelings. So, don't be surprised that this is a hot topic here. The national press went a bit overboard, and certanly has lowered my opinion of their ability to understand the issues they are "reporting," but it's a shocking event that happened in someone's backyard-- and everyone wants to know how to keep it out of their own. As a parent, I have a deep worry for my preschool kids' future, and the Littleton shootings have every parent with teenagers on the edge of their seats. It's a flaw in human nature that we are most concerned with what affects us directly, but to say that there should be no venting forum anywhere because the world has deeper tragedies is silly. (Isn't that easily inferred from what you're saying?) Without a forum for intelligent discussion of this issue, it is doomed to repetition. How many high school kids have to die before it's worthy of your attention? Which forum is better for our discussion of this issue?
Katz is showing the problems that led to this tragedy from a perspective overlooked or unnoticed by most media, and I feel that he has done me a personal service for publishing the work that I've seen (though I'm unfamiliar with his earlier work.)
Why is the plight of East Timorians more topical than Geek persecution in this forum? Why shouldn't those of use deeply affected talk about it? Sure, "deeply" is relative for those of us so shallow as to think the Littleton shooting was newsworthy, but that shoe fits me, so I'll wear it.
Perhaps there is a different forum somewhere for you to talk about the plight of the inhabitants of Aceh (Acehians?) and still be on-topic but I'm pretty sure this thread isn't it.
What is violence to you? Is driving someone to suicide violent to you? How many countless social outcasts have been driven to that point? When I was there [high school], only the hope that things would be different as an adult kept me alive. (I'm glad I made it.) Seems like the difference here is that these kids took a few of their persecutors with them. I feel bad for the parents, and for the kids who were just in the wrong place at a very wrong time. I honestly don't care about Katz' motivations-- his articles (and the many other /. topics) have helped me realize that the anger I thought I had supressed all these years was never far away, and this realization may help me truly put that period of my history behind me.
Perhaps you think I'm just some screwed up fuck who desperately needs some kind of counseling. I'm thinking you may be right. I wouldn't have thought so a month ago, but the scab is off-- seems the wound never healed-- and a community discussion is underway. And every community has its leaders.
Someone needs to be the advocate, the messenger, a leader. Why not him? Who else? You? Bah.
If they're being unfairly treated by authority figures, they have legal recourse
That's the difference between "real life" and "high school." In "real life," there's legal recourse. In high school, there's a prison-movie-esque code of silence. If you "rat out" someone who is picking on you, be it a peer or a faculty member, expect things to get much worse, not any better.
It is a cliche' of human history to fear what you don't understand, and it is a very small step from fear to hatred.
You couldn't pay me enough to relive high school. The media backlash against geeks and video game players has recently haunted me with my old feelings of persecution, which I thought I had put behind me over ten years ago.
Small wonder an unrestrained jock clique drove these kids to violence. It only amazes me that it doesn't happen more often. How sad that it had to come to this before anyone noticed.