Sarbanes Oxley takes all the joy out of being a programmer. It just sucks the life out of it. Coders like to code 32 hours a week-- not 32 hours per quarter. You can't even maintain your coding skills at those levels.
It's unfair to blame this on Sarbanes Oxley. Like any sort of process-oriented effort, you can do it a high-paperwork way or a low-paperwork way. I'm a big Agile proponent, and at one SOX company we made pretty minimal changes to what we were already doing. We numbered our story cards, added that number to every checkin comment, and also tracked who was pairing for each commit. Easy peasey. Everything else was covered by normal Extreme Programming practices.
The problem with SOX is the same thing you see with CMM or a bunch of other standards-related efforts: people like creating ceremony for its own sake, and mistake high-ceremony approaches for highly effective approaches. Find a process auditor who focuses on effective compliance to the spirit of the standard and you'll do fine.
Almost always? That I doubt. I see a chiropractor for acute back problems and it helps a lot. Never once has he tried to get me to see him more often than I want.
Generalization vs anecdote! Fight! Fight! Fight!
Who will win? I dunno, but the rest of us definitely lose.
Temperature and amount of sunlight during pregnancy and early infant months of a baby have no effect at all at his/her personality? [...]
If you actually got the astrologers to agree on a testable model like that, it would be fantastic. But what actual astrologers do varies so widely that you can't test "astrology" as a whole, you can only test particular astrologers.
The guy's right: astrology is not a model at all. It's a set of ink-blots that people stare and project their subconscious notions on.
His total: Thanks to poor critical thinking skills: 2451 people dead, 117,941 injured, and $138,693,382 lost. And that's just for the stuff he keeps track of.
with the liberalism in today's universities, many of them spent their time taking macrame or latin literature as part of their CS degree.
I agree that people should know the basics, and be able to kick ass with them.
On the other hand, I'm not just hiring a programmer to twiddle bits. If they are going to be professionals, they need to able to write, to speak, to listen, to think, and to understand a broad enough range of topics to apply lessons that come from other specialties. For example:
psychology - because the software we make is for people
sociology and anthropology - because we work in groups
american history - to understand the business and social context in which we work
world history - to not look like an idiot in front of international partners and clients
business - for obvious reasons
accounting - if you ever want to touch a system that handles money
law - at least enough to understand IP law and our regulatory environment
And I could go on from there. Mathematics, statistics, demography, marketing, advertising, visual design, information design, library science, physics, and experimental methods from some lab science: some knowledge of all of these fields can be helpful to pretty much any working professional programmer. And of course if you're looking to work in a particular field, like bioinformatics, you'll need special training.
Basically, what I'm saying is that if you want to be a professional, you need a liberal education (a term much older than the "liberal" stick the American right uses to beat the American left). Sure, you can still get a job, but if coding is all you can do, you'll end up the IT equivalent of a mediocre auto mechanic.
Maybe you're setting the bar too high? You might have to train the people you need.
This is a great solution for an established business that can afford the time it takes. But if you need productive people now rather than two years from now, it's not a great option.
It is also a risky approach in a hot market. A lot of good programmers like novelty and change jobs every couple of years, which reduces the incentive for training novices. Unless you're Google, of course, in which case you can swap people around between different projects while still getting the value of their training.
But once you grant that assertion, it follows - for all slashdot readers who are not self-employed - that your employer should be able to watch you.
The solution is to take it one step further. In any company that is publicly owned, has an employee stock ownership program, or gives employees options, employees are employers of the employers.
I don't care if my employers watch me as long as a) I can watch them, and b) I know when they're watching me. It's the same social dynamic in an open-plan office. Come on in! The water's fine.
If it has API it will rock as a secondary input system to mouse. You will be able to scroll through text/code just by looking, switch windows, copy paste - it has an enormous potential.
An enormous potential FOR EVIL, that is. The Escape Meta Alt Control Shift people are bad enough already. They'll go crazy with this, and I don't mean good-crazy-like-that-hot-barista-with-all-those-tattoos crazy. Running the compiler's going to be "control meta think_about_puppies think_about_hot_wings C" by the time they're done with it.
A number of prominent EMACS users already have permanent wrist damage from all those modifier keys. If they release an API for this thing, there'll be a whole new generation of people with repetitive mind stress injuries.
Junk mail subsidizes regular mail and helps keep costs down.
Wrong!
On a very narrow analysis, sure. The post office fixed costs get divided by more pieces of mail. Ergo, when you send one piece of personal mail, the junk mail it travels with helps pay part of the cost.
But who do you think pays for all of that junk mail? You do. That shit doesn't get sent out for the fun of it; it gets sent because on average, each piece makes more money than it costs. When you add it all up, you get a small discount on the postage Aunt Sally's birthday card, and a big ol' charge on your purchases. On average, naturally.
You read it, you think you have a handle on this idea of "mind", then find yourself floundering when you sit down to write an AI program based on the ideas in the book.
That's a totally reasonable answer, and I can see why you're frustrated. But I feel like we're decades away from being ready to publish "Society of Mind: The Coding Workbook".
Again, I'm a professional developer, so I know a lot about making software go, and almost zero about what AI has been up to since I gave up on it in the early 90's. But when I look around for the biggest real-world success, I see the Roomba. That seems to validate Brooks's assertion that the way to get to good AI is to start with bodies and give them something to do. And those things seem to be roughly as smart as a mosquito, which isn't a mind that needs a lot of designing.
I wouldn't expect "Society of Mind" to be useful in a practical sense until you're more in the range of mice than bugs. So that it isn't practically useful yet doesn't strike me as a big strike against it. As you said, he's not an implementation guy, and isn't recommending it as an implementation book. Until we've built a few dog-class minds, we won't be in a good position to judge his theories.
I disagree. The customers WANT shoddy, buggy software, because it costs less.
But it doesn't. Crappy software costs a little less in the short term, and much more in the long term.
If you don't offer it to them as an option, they'll find someone who will.
Some will. Some won't. The smart ones eventually learn.
Take a look at Google, for example. They make rock-solid stuff, they are very focused on cost efficiency, and they devote so much effort to testing that the have an internal testing conference and a guerilla campaign to promote testing. They know that quality pays off heavily in the long run.
They may pay lip service to it, but they won't pay for it.
I think we have done a terrible job of selling it. These days, I just tell the clients I'll use "best practices", and I don't even offer them the option of doing dumb stuff. Instead, when they want to make things come out faster, I show them how to be radical about cutting scope. Train them properly in that, and they'll forget about the (false) choice of adding bugs.
If this were a story about someone calling up AOL to cancel, and AOL making it very clear that there's a lot of hassle and runaround involved, you'd probably be arguing the other way.
Yes. Here, the power differential runs the other way. People tend to support the underdog, partly based on the intuition that the just outcome shouldn't depend on how much money you have.
Bank Julius Baer has approximately infinite money, and a strong financial incentive to harass anybody who makes them look dodgy, even (and perhaps especially) when they are being dodgy. Wikileaks, on the other hand, has no money, is making no profit, and is providing a public service. It's not surprising that the public would side with people working for the public good.
A normal response would be "Send it to world headquarters[...]"
I look forward to the day they have a world headquarters. Would you care to fund it?
Until then, what they have is a bunch of volunteers scattered around the world. Saying that you need to know which lawyer will handle the case seems like a pretty reasonable request. I understand that the court system is mainly adapted to corporations and pre-internet notions of how things happen. Given the vast variety of people that have gotten involved in the case, this looks like a fine opportunity for a little institutional learning.
They tried to serve Wikileaks with a notice [...] pulling the DNS was about all they had available to them.
That's bullshit. Over the years, I've been on the receiving end of a variety of notices, requests, and demands from lawyers, cops, and federal agents. Wikileaks was mildly jerky, but the lawyers were even more so. If they had a problem with particular documents and intended to sue in the US, they could have just said which documents and where they were planning to sue.
This isn't censorship, as the government isn't doing it. Nor ir it prior restraint on publication.
You did notice that it was shut down by a court, right? I know some think that courts are naturally occurring mineral formations, but I swear, this one is part of the federal government.
What's the big deal? Do the haters think people have the right to publish anything on the 'net, no matter how false or scurrilous, without any repercussions whatsoever??
I'm not sure if you're trolling here or just clueless, but I'll run with the latter. If the documents were actually false, then BJB should just say, "yet more Internet" and ignore them. Obviously, the problem is that the documents are actually valid but put them in a bad light.
We grant limited legal protection to information for reasons like "advancing the sciences and the useful arts" or running a legal business. Although it's a little amazing given our congressmen, those valid reasons to not include malfeasance, corruption, and skulduggery. In fact, just the opposite: whistleblowing is frequently protected by law because it helps us nab people up to things not in the public interest. Like, it appears, Bank Julius Baer and some of their clients.
Upon reading the article summary, I thought the guy must be nuts.
After reading the article, however, and carefully thinking about his ideas, I've concluded that he is instead an idiot.
Has this man never heard of Metcalfe's Law? His second, registration-only internet will be about as popular as BITNET and Telenet are these days. (Yes, Virginia there were globe-spanning networks before the Internet. It's true!)
While he's at it, he might as well call for a second telephone system, one that only allows people to say nice things.
Believe it or not, I have been in a situation where I had a removed front passenger seat and a soaked footwell. [...] I removed the seat so I could get my head in there to look closely. But then I ran out of time, so I just left it like that till next weekend. That's surely plausible. But the notion that Reiser then threw out the seat? No way. Every geek I know has a giant collection of old parts that they will use "someday". A real geek would have kept the seat. Even if there was something wrong with it, there were plenty of good parts on that sucker.
Christ, I've still got a 100 MB SCSI hard drive in my parts bin that I haven't thrown away yet. Yeah, megabytes, that's right.
Here in the USA at least, it's only possible to check good references. Nobody dares give bad references anymore, for fear of being sued.
I don't think this matters at all. Honestly, I'm not sure anybody ever gave bad references. Why would somebody put down a reference if he knew it would be bad? And unless somebody was a colossal ass, why would you dish dirt on them to a stranger? Most people are nice, and will say nice things.
So given that all references always say good things, what good are they? Well, the trick is in the questions you ask. You don't just ask what they thought of Joe. You ask for Joe's strong points. You ask what kind of support Joe will need to be most effective. You ask them to tell a story about some project they worked on with Joe. You ask about Joe's work habits. You ask them what they think the perfect job for Joe would be.
With questions like that, you can tell the people being polite (or the ones afraid of lawyers) from the people who really mean it.
As for the article... it suggests CIOs who change company too often might be bad. That's not an indicator of anything. That's not even a good heuristic.
I disagree. It's at the very least an indicator of changing companies frequently.
In some positions, you can live with turnover. Others really benefit from continuity. In my mind, that includes a lot of technical and accounting positions, the C*O level included. In those positions, the more history you know, the more effective you are.
Especially with software development and IT infrastructure, there are a lot of ways to get the job done, and each person has their strengths. Change key people too often, and you'll pay a lot to switch approaches over and over, without seeing any real payoff.
Funny, that didn't seem to stop them from creating an 'advisory body' to regulate speech for them. If you believe in free speech, you should be dead set against the FCC.
Not necessarily.
As I understand it, the spirit of the right to free speech is to maximize the free flow of ideas and information among citizens, democracy's lifeblood. But with a mere handful of channels of broadcast media auctioned off to people pledged only to make money, there's little reason to believe that does much for the public good. Placing some restrictions on the use of the public commons of the airwaves is not unreasonable.
Of course, many of the actual content restrictions they are placing are ridiculous. Allowing the death of TV news while getting their panties in a twist over nipple slips and naughty words is idiocy. Especially while they let media ownership concentration increase so drastically, reducing diversity of opinion and concentrating control of content in the hands of executives ever more insulated from the people they nominally serve. Still, if we're going to have broadcast, we need some content regulation.
Thus I say: screw broadcast.
Turn the public airwaves over to Internet service, and run it as a content-neutral public utility. The electric company doesn't care whether I plug in a Jesus statue or a double-ended vibrator, and neither should the regulator of the airwaves. Take a portion of the revenues and train citizens in media production and internet publishing. Create a new national public commons, a peer-to-peer modern equivalent of the old town square. That's the real way to end content regulation on the airwaves.
My personal take is CNN have crossed the line and Chez should take them to task for infringing his constitutional right to "free speech" (does anyone actually respect free speech anymore).
The constitutional right you refer to doesn't exist. The whole text of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Note the first part: Congress shall make no law. That doesn't say anything about what private citizens may do; it just restricts the government. CNN is not compelled to keep paying this guy if they think it's no longer in their best interests to employ him. Whether that's a good idea or not is a different question, but one of the fundamental American rights is the right to be an idiot.
Software Engineers must become a chartered only profession, so that people who are not chartered are not allowed to practice.
This is a reasonable theory, but I think it's wrong in practice for a few reasons:
Most software is not life-critical. much engineering is.
Scale matters. You don't need to be licensed to build a doghouse or install cabinets. Only some software development is of the scale where quality practices matter.
Practice is quickly changing. For example, agile methods appeared circa ten years ago, and are just now becoming popular. A rigid professional standards process wouldn't allow necessary change.
For now, because the costs of bad software are generally more direct and turn up more quickly, I think licensing isn't necessary yet. A failing bridge kills the people on it, but a failing bank software project only harms the bank's profit margins. They'll learn. Eventually.
So I agree with Feynman's comments in relationship to engineering and the further comments to software development. But I don't find them to be a fault in the nature of engineering, just a fault in our ethics. What does capitalism and competitiveness drive us to do? Cut corners, often.
Any approach to engineering that only works with uber-humans, rather than the regular ones we have to work with, strikes me as painfully naive. Much of engineering is about understanding and accepting the nature of the materials used. Surely we can do that not just with compounds and chips, but also with people?
If we know people will want to cut corners, we as engineers and developers need to make sure they cut the right corners. That's one of the things I love about short-cycle agile methods:
If I complete some new feature every week in priority order, when we run out of time, what is left over is the lowest-priority features.
If I start from day one with automated tests for everything, then I don't have to choose between quality and quantity: keeping quality up gives me the ability to produce greater quantities.
If I do my work in such a way that they can change direction every week, then they can respond to and even outpace their competitors without compromising anything.
More importantly, I think we must learn to talk the language of managers, and to build strong relationships with them. When we see a problem that has serious implications, we need to be able to put it in business terms. Rather than saying that X is suboptimal or wrong, we should be able to say that it will result in lost sales or confused users.
And most importantly, we should stop offering people the option to build bug-ridden pieces of crap. That is frequently what people want in the short term, but never what they want in the long term. It's unprofessional, it harms relationships, and wrecks the image of our profession. That's not to say we should insist on gold-plating everything, pursuing technical perfection that has dubious real-world merits. But in the same way a licensed engineer would not see building a shoddy bridge as an option, we should stop treating buggy, low-quality software as the norm.
So now that everyone's realized their mistake and ISPs are trying to crack down on the users and the government is calling it a terrorist tool, where's your worldview now?
I'm not saying that people with money don't act in ways that get them more money. Many rich people are indeed greedy.
What I'm saying is that there is no vast conspiracy to keep our noble citizenry down. And that's precisely because rich people are greedy. They aren't very good at cooperating at the best of times, because that would mean sharing rather than being greedy. Occasionally they do try to collude, which is why we have anti-trust laws.
Of course, a lot of you people aren't helping. The reason the telecom and cable companies have a lot of power over the internet is that people keep giving them money. Anybody who frets about corporate control of the Internet while subscribing to AT&T or Comcast needs to sack up and get an independent ISP. While there are still some left.
Well, you get up to 21 pounds of CO2 from a pound of crude oil - a 21:1 increase in "stuff". This sponge apparently can do a 1:83 reverse, so the whole system appears to be a 21:83 savings in space underground. Why not pump it right back into the ground?
That is so wrong that I am forced to suspend your Slashdot license.
First, that page page doesn't say "pound of crude oil"; it says "gallon". That's like 7.5 pounds of oil. So that's a 3x increase in stuff. (Which some would call "mass".) Then these crystals do 1:83 in volume, but more like 10:11 in mass. So to get rid of your pound of crude oil, you'd need about 30 pounds of these crystals.
Please go study Dimensional Analysis (aka the unit-factor method or the factor-label method). Once you have mastered that, you will be permitted to post on science-y topics again.
But then we wouldn't need this fascist control, where companies and governments are in bed together keeping the power strucuture alive and the resources always in short supply.
Totally. Why, I hear that those bastards have suppressed some sort of globe-spanning communication network that would have allowed the populace access to vast amounts of information about every subject under the sun. Billions of pages, all at your fingertips, from a simple device in your home. Obviously, it would have made it much harder for them to control us. So those fascist parasites killed it.
Oh, wait. No, actually, the government funded the initial development of the Internet, and corporations funded a lot of the subsequent development and most of the rollout. Hmmm. I wonder if your world-view could do with a little expansion.
Slashdot Mirror
Sarbanes Oxley takes all the joy out of being a programmer. It just sucks the life out of it. Coders like to code 32 hours a week-- not 32 hours per quarter. You can't even maintain your coding skills at those levels.
It's unfair to blame this on Sarbanes Oxley. Like any sort of process-oriented effort, you can do it a high-paperwork way or a low-paperwork way. I'm a big Agile proponent, and at one SOX company we made pretty minimal changes to what we were already doing. We numbered our story cards, added that number to every checkin comment, and also tracked who was pairing for each commit. Easy peasey. Everything else was covered by normal Extreme Programming practices.
The problem with SOX is the same thing you see with CMM or a bunch of other standards-related efforts: people like creating ceremony for its own sake, and mistake high-ceremony approaches for highly effective approaches. Find a process auditor who focuses on effective compliance to the spirit of the standard and you'll do fine.
Almost always? That I doubt. I see a chiropractor for acute back problems and it helps a lot. Never once has he tried to get me to see him more often than I want.
Generalization vs anecdote! Fight! Fight! Fight!
Who will win? I dunno, but the rest of us definitely lose.
Temperature and amount of sunlight during pregnancy and early infant months of a baby have no effect at all at his/her personality? [...]
If you actually got the astrologers to agree on a testable model like that, it would be fantastic. But what actual astrologers do varies so widely that you can't test "astrology" as a whole, you can only test particular astrologers.
The guy's right: astrology is not a model at all. It's a set of ink-blots that people stare and project their subconscious notions on.
It's harmless stuff
Not according to this guy: http://whatstheharm.net/index.html
His total: Thanks to poor critical thinking skills: 2451 people dead, 117,941 injured, and $138,693,382 lost. And that's just for the stuff he keeps track of.
I agree that people should know the basics, and be able to kick ass with them.
On the other hand, I'm not just hiring a programmer to twiddle bits. If they are going to be professionals, they need to able to write, to speak, to listen, to think, and to understand a broad enough range of topics to apply lessons that come from other specialties. For example:
- psychology - because the software we make is for people
- sociology and anthropology - because we work in groups
- american history - to understand the business and social context in which we work
- world history - to not look like an idiot in front of international partners and clients
- business - for obvious reasons
- accounting - if you ever want to touch a system that handles money
- law - at least enough to understand IP law and our regulatory environment
And I could go on from there. Mathematics, statistics, demography, marketing, advertising, visual design, information design, library science, physics, and experimental methods from some lab science: some knowledge of all of these fields can be helpful to pretty much any working professional programmer. And of course if you're looking to work in a particular field, like bioinformatics, you'll need special training.Basically, what I'm saying is that if you want to be a professional, you need a liberal education (a term much older than the "liberal" stick the American right uses to beat the American left). Sure, you can still get a job, but if coding is all you can do, you'll end up the IT equivalent of a mediocre auto mechanic.
Maybe you're setting the bar too high? You might have to train the people you need.
This is a great solution for an established business that can afford the time it takes. But if you need productive people now rather than two years from now, it's not a great option.
It is also a risky approach in a hot market. A lot of good programmers like novelty and change jobs every couple of years, which reduces the incentive for training novices. Unless you're Google, of course, in which case you can swap people around between different projects while still getting the value of their training.
But once you grant that assertion, it follows - for all slashdot readers who are not self-employed - that your employer should be able to watch you.
The solution is to take it one step further. In any company that is publicly owned, has an employee stock ownership program, or gives employees options, employees are employers of the employers.
I don't care if my employers watch me as long as a) I can watch them, and b) I know when they're watching me. It's the same social dynamic in an open-plan office. Come on in! The water's fine.
The answer to "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" is to make it a circle, not a hierarchy.
If it has API it will rock as a secondary input system to mouse. You will be able to scroll through text/code just by looking, switch windows, copy paste - it has an enormous potential.
An enormous potential FOR EVIL, that is. The Escape Meta Alt Control Shift people are bad enough already. They'll go crazy with this, and I don't mean good-crazy-like-that-hot-barista-with-all-those-tattoos crazy. Running the compiler's going to be "control meta think_about_puppies think_about_hot_wings C" by the time they're done with it.
A number of prominent EMACS users already have permanent wrist damage from all those modifier keys. If they release an API for this thing, there'll be a whole new generation of people with repetitive mind stress injuries.
You heard it hear first.
Junk mail subsidizes regular mail and helps keep costs down.
Wrong!
On a very narrow analysis, sure. The post office fixed costs get divided by more pieces of mail. Ergo, when you send one piece of personal mail, the junk mail it travels with helps pay part of the cost.
But who do you think pays for all of that junk mail? You do. That shit doesn't get sent out for the fun of it; it gets sent because on average, each piece makes more money than it costs. When you add it all up, you get a small discount on the postage Aunt Sally's birthday card, and a big ol' charge on your purchases. On average, naturally.
You read it, you think you have a handle on this idea of "mind", then find yourself floundering when you sit down to write an AI program based on the ideas in the book.
That's a totally reasonable answer, and I can see why you're frustrated. But I feel like we're decades away from being ready to publish "Society of Mind: The Coding Workbook".
Again, I'm a professional developer, so I know a lot about making software go, and almost zero about what AI has been up to since I gave up on it in the early 90's. But when I look around for the biggest real-world success, I see the Roomba. That seems to validate Brooks's assertion that the way to get to good AI is to start with bodies and give them something to do. And those things seem to be roughly as smart as a mosquito, which isn't a mind that needs a lot of designing.
I wouldn't expect "Society of Mind" to be useful in a practical sense until you're more in the range of mice than bugs. So that it isn't practically useful yet doesn't strike me as a big strike against it. As you said, he's not an implementation guy, and isn't recommending it as an implementation book. Until we've built a few dog-class minds, we won't be in a good position to judge his theories.
I disagree. The customers WANT shoddy, buggy software, because it costs less.
But it doesn't. Crappy software costs a little less in the short term, and much more in the long term.
If you don't offer it to them as an option, they'll find someone who will.
Some will. Some won't. The smart ones eventually learn.
Take a look at Google, for example. They make rock-solid stuff, they are very focused on cost efficiency, and they devote so much effort to testing that the have an internal testing conference and a guerilla campaign to promote testing. They know that quality pays off heavily in the long run.
They may pay lip service to it, but they won't pay for it.
I think we have done a terrible job of selling it. These days, I just tell the clients I'll use "best practices", and I don't even offer them the option of doing dumb stuff. Instead, when they want to make things come out faster, I show them how to be radical about cutting scope. Train them properly in that, and they'll forget about the (false) choice of adding bugs.
If this were a story about someone calling up AOL to cancel, and AOL making it very clear that there's a lot of hassle and runaround involved, you'd probably be arguing the other way.
Yes. Here, the power differential runs the other way. People tend to support the underdog, partly based on the intuition that the just outcome shouldn't depend on how much money you have.
Bank Julius Baer has approximately infinite money, and a strong financial incentive to harass anybody who makes them look dodgy, even (and perhaps especially) when they are being dodgy. Wikileaks, on the other hand, has no money, is making no profit, and is providing a public service. It's not surprising that the public would side with people working for the public good.
A normal response would be "Send it to world headquarters[...]"
I look forward to the day they have a world headquarters. Would you care to fund it?
Until then, what they have is a bunch of volunteers scattered around the world. Saying that you need to know which lawyer will handle the case seems like a pretty reasonable request. I understand that the court system is mainly adapted to corporations and pre-internet notions of how things happen. Given the vast variety of people that have gotten involved in the case, this looks like a fine opportunity for a little institutional learning.
They tried to serve Wikileaks with a notice [...] pulling the DNS was about all they had available to them.
That's bullshit. Over the years, I've been on the receiving end of a variety of notices, requests, and demands from lawyers, cops, and federal agents. Wikileaks was mildly jerky, but the lawyers were even more so. If they had a problem with particular documents and intended to sue in the US, they could have just said which documents and where they were planning to sue.
This isn't censorship, as the government isn't doing it. Nor ir it prior restraint on publication.
You did notice that it was shut down by a court, right? I know some think that courts are naturally occurring mineral formations, but I swear, this one is part of the federal government.
What's the big deal? Do the haters think people have the right to publish anything on the 'net, no matter how false or scurrilous, without any repercussions whatsoever??
I'm not sure if you're trolling here or just clueless, but I'll run with the latter. If the documents were actually false, then BJB should just say, "yet more Internet" and ignore them. Obviously, the problem is that the documents are actually valid but put them in a bad light.
We grant limited legal protection to information for reasons like "advancing the sciences and the useful arts" or running a legal business. Although it's a little amazing given our congressmen, those valid reasons to not include malfeasance, corruption, and skulduggery. In fact, just the opposite: whistleblowing is frequently protected by law because it helps us nab people up to things not in the public interest. Like, it appears, Bank Julius Baer and some of their clients.
Upon reading the article summary, I thought the guy must be nuts.
After reading the article, however, and carefully thinking about his ideas, I've concluded that he is instead an idiot.
Has this man never heard of Metcalfe's Law? His second, registration-only internet will be about as popular as BITNET and Telenet are these days. (Yes, Virginia there were globe-spanning networks before the Internet. It's true!)
While he's at it, he might as well call for a second telephone system, one that only allows people to say nice things.
Just so everybody knows, the technical term for the zoom out gesture is "pinch", and the term for zoom in is "goatse".
Christ, I've still got a 100 MB SCSI hard drive in my parts bin that I haven't thrown away yet. Yeah, megabytes, that's right.
Here in the USA at least, it's only possible to check good references. Nobody dares give bad references anymore, for fear of being sued.
I don't think this matters at all. Honestly, I'm not sure anybody ever gave bad references. Why would somebody put down a reference if he knew it would be bad? And unless somebody was a colossal ass, why would you dish dirt on them to a stranger? Most people are nice, and will say nice things.
So given that all references always say good things, what good are they? Well, the trick is in the questions you ask. You don't just ask what they thought of Joe. You ask for Joe's strong points. You ask what kind of support Joe will need to be most effective. You ask them to tell a story about some project they worked on with Joe. You ask about Joe's work habits. You ask them what they think the perfect job for Joe would be.
With questions like that, you can tell the people being polite (or the ones afraid of lawyers) from the people who really mean it.
As for the article... it suggests CIOs who change company too often might be bad. That's not an indicator of anything. That's not even a good heuristic.
I disagree. It's at the very least an indicator of changing companies frequently.
In some positions, you can live with turnover. Others really benefit from continuity. In my mind, that includes a lot of technical and accounting positions, the C*O level included. In those positions, the more history you know, the more effective you are.
Especially with software development and IT infrastructure, there are a lot of ways to get the job done, and each person has their strengths. Change key people too often, and you'll pay a lot to switch approaches over and over, without seeing any real payoff.
Funny, that didn't seem to stop them from creating an 'advisory body' to regulate speech for them. If you believe in free speech, you should be dead set against the FCC.
Not necessarily.
As I understand it, the spirit of the right to free speech is to maximize the free flow of ideas and information among citizens, democracy's lifeblood. But with a mere handful of channels of broadcast media auctioned off to people pledged only to make money, there's little reason to believe that does much for the public good. Placing some restrictions on the use of the public commons of the airwaves is not unreasonable.
Of course, many of the actual content restrictions they are placing are ridiculous. Allowing the death of TV news while getting their panties in a twist over nipple slips and naughty words is idiocy. Especially while they let media ownership concentration increase so drastically, reducing diversity of opinion and concentrating control of content in the hands of executives ever more insulated from the people they nominally serve. Still, if we're going to have broadcast, we need some content regulation.
Thus I say: screw broadcast.
Turn the public airwaves over to Internet service, and run it as a content-neutral public utility. The electric company doesn't care whether I plug in a Jesus statue or a double-ended vibrator, and neither should the regulator of the airwaves. Take a portion of the revenues and train citizens in media production and internet publishing. Create a new national public commons, a peer-to-peer modern equivalent of the old town square. That's the real way to end content regulation on the airwaves.
The constitutional right you refer to doesn't exist. The whole text of the First Amendment: (from The Bill of Rights)
Note the first part: Congress shall make no law. That doesn't say anything about what private citizens may do; it just restricts the government. CNN is not compelled to keep paying this guy if they think it's no longer in their best interests to employ him. Whether that's a good idea or not is a different question, but one of the fundamental American rights is the right to be an idiot.
This is a reasonable theory, but I think it's wrong in practice for a few reasons:
For now, because the costs of bad software are generally more direct and turn up more quickly, I think licensing isn't necessary yet. A failing bridge kills the people on it, but a failing bank software project only harms the bank's profit margins. They'll learn. Eventually.
Any approach to engineering that only works with uber-humans, rather than the regular ones we have to work with, strikes me as painfully naive. Much of engineering is about understanding and accepting the nature of the materials used. Surely we can do that not just with compounds and chips, but also with people?
If we know people will want to cut corners, we as engineers and developers need to make sure they cut the right corners. That's one of the things I love about short-cycle agile methods:
More importantly, I think we must learn to talk the language of managers, and to build strong relationships with them. When we see a problem that has serious implications, we need to be able to put it in business terms. Rather than saying that X is suboptimal or wrong, we should be able to say that it will result in lost sales or confused users.
And most importantly, we should stop offering people the option to build bug-ridden pieces of crap. That is frequently what people want in the short term, but never what they want in the long term. It's unprofessional, it harms relationships, and wrecks the image of our profession. That's not to say we should insist on gold-plating everything, pursuing technical perfection that has dubious real-world merits. But in the same way a licensed engineer would not see building a shoddy bridge as an option, we should stop treating buggy, low-quality software as the norm.
So now that everyone's realized their mistake and ISPs are trying to crack down on the users and the government is calling it a terrorist tool, where's your worldview now?
I'm not saying that people with money don't act in ways that get them more money. Many rich people are indeed greedy.
What I'm saying is that there is no vast conspiracy to keep our noble citizenry down. And that's precisely because rich people are greedy. They aren't very good at cooperating at the best of times, because that would mean sharing rather than being greedy. Occasionally they do try to collude, which is why we have anti-trust laws.
Of course, a lot of you people aren't helping. The reason the telecom and cable companies have a lot of power over the internet is that people keep giving them money. Anybody who frets about corporate control of the Internet while subscribing to AT&T or Comcast needs to sack up and get an independent ISP. While there are still some left.
Well, you get up to 21 pounds of CO2 from a pound of crude oil - a 21:1 increase in "stuff". This sponge apparently can do a 1:83 reverse, so the whole system appears to be a 21:83 savings in space underground. Why not pump it right back into the ground?
That is so wrong that I am forced to suspend your Slashdot license.
First, that page page doesn't say "pound of crude oil"; it says "gallon". That's like 7.5 pounds of oil. So that's a 3x increase in stuff. (Which some would call "mass".) Then these crystals do 1:83 in volume, but more like 10:11 in mass. So to get rid of your pound of crude oil, you'd need about 30 pounds of these crystals.
Please go study Dimensional Analysis (aka the unit-factor method or the factor-label method). Once you have mastered that, you will be permitted to post on science-y topics again.
But then we wouldn't need this fascist control, where companies and governments are in bed together keeping the power strucuture alive and the resources always in short supply.
Totally. Why, I hear that those bastards have suppressed some sort of globe-spanning communication network that would have allowed the populace access to vast amounts of information about every subject under the sun. Billions of pages, all at your fingertips, from a simple device in your home. Obviously, it would have made it much harder for them to control us. So those fascist parasites killed it.
Oh, wait. No, actually, the government funded the initial development of the Internet, and corporations funded a lot of the subsequent development and most of the rollout. Hmmm. I wonder if your world-view could do with a little expansion.