...to set some money aside for legal fees. Why? Because as Brad Blumenthal told me about 15 years ago "Some bastard is going to sue you". It doesn't matter if they are right, or if you are right, it's just going to happen. Waving the white flag that says "I can't afford to fight" just makes the bastard stronger.
And let's face it, if you are pulling in $25K monthly on virtually no expense base, you can't turn around and bleat about not having the money to fight it.
None of the lessons learned and reported here are directly related to Project Management per se. They are all by and large implementation issues.
There is also nothing new here. This does not advance the state of the art. History does not advance by people relearning the same lessons again and again. Just because they have been reported here does not make this article special in any way. This article could have been written in any of the decades of 70s, 80s, 90s (substituting en vogue languages for C++/Java) and still make sense.
In order to truly advance the state of the art, we have to think in far more advanced ways about project management and software development. True Software Practice and Experience requires much more planning and critical thinking than evident here.
If Open Source is to provide a useful and stable platform on which to build, then we certainly need a better vision of how to build software. Otherwise, we will be doomed to repeat history by implementing old things in different ways and not really gaining any control over complexity.
In summary, we still have a software crisis; Open Source will not change that; and summaries of software development experience that just say "I made the same mistakes as other people did" are not very helpful.
...don't routers just refuse to send on data that comes from a spoofed address? If on the backbone, you see a destination IP that is reserved, just dump the packets.
This can be solved by using an authenticating SMTP server or some other way of routing the email through the mail server responsible.
The problem you mention is more political rather than technical. Or to quote the end of section 10.2 of the draft (emphasis added by me):
But as I saw from the comments on the first version of this draft, people religiously insist on sending e-mail with their domain from any computer with any IP address in the world, e.g. when visiting a friend using her computer. It appears to be impossible to convince people that stopping mail forgery requires every one of them to give up forging.
Or maybe to recognize that this in fact a legitimate use. The e-mail address adhere to the individual. Why should they not be able to use that as an identifier regardless of where they are? It should be a purely technical issue arranged between the mail servers which messages they agree to carry or not.
In other words, the example given is not forgery since the person is not pretending to be someone else.
I rigged up a spam-processing kit last year which incorporated some of the features discussed in the Reverse MX protocol. Damn, I should have written a technical report about it after all...
To help assist counterfitters, the Australian Governmebt has equipped this page with pictures of all their currency with a printer friendly version
Nice to see the government goes that extra step to help out the cheaters and counterfitters.
You didn't really get the bit about the plastic see-thru bits in the notes, did you?
The author's of the paper against defending against physical attacks go to some lengths to develop reverse Turing Tests to ensure that a human is involved in the loop.
A simpler protocol to ensure the same end is a non-identification based biometric check. This ensures that a real live human was present at the location and time the check was made (yes, I know this can be faked).
A non-dentification based check means that the individual is not explicitly _identified_ merely that their identity can be _verified_. Hence this is a less intrusive procedure.
This form of biometric authentication is quite often found in supermarket checkout lines for example, where an operator must periodically (or prior to significant activity such as withdrawing cash from a register) pass a biometric check to verify that a) they are present and b) they are the same individual that passed the previous check (or a new operator has taken over) and c) they are authorised to carry out various tasks.
Hmmm. You don't understand Shannon or bandwidth very well, or 56K technology.
Bandwidth on a pure analogue line is about 3kHz (typically 3400Hz); you have to consider the signal-to-noise ratio as well before you can give the theoretical limit. A typical S/N will be around 30dB, so you plug that in to Shannon's equation: Channel capacity = 2 * 3400 * log2(1+ 30) = 33688 bits per second.
56K technology is different; the upstream limit is still the theoretical 33.6Kbps as above. The downstream limit is 56K as the bitstream is digital and modulated in a different way so as to remove the analogue/digital conversion which is where the bandwidth limit restricts channel capacity.
The FCC limits the downstream rate to 53.3 to minimize crosstalk issues.
A manager at one of our strategy meetings made the comment that there were "Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians..." (indicating that there were too many Team Leaders and not enough people to be led.
Someone at Sun Human Resources might have misunderstood this and started a recruiting drive...
And you think you're qualified to be software engineer without having an understanding of the halting problem??/boggle. People like you make rockets blow up (Ariane V).
Ariane 5 failure was largely the result of a software reuse problem and hence in the domain of Software Engineering.
However, you could argue pedantically that putting a large number into fewer bits was a representation problem and hence in the realm of Computer Science...
Um, he didn't say war was a dumb idea, but he did express reservations. Here. I'm not too surprised this wasn't widely reported in American media, even though the address took place at a US University.
My word list contains: GOOGLE, GOOLED, GOOGLES, GOOGLING
A GOOGLY is an English cricketing term. So to be GOOGLED is to be bowled out by a weird delivery. So it's already a verb. They probably shouldn't have been allowed to trademark what was already in common usage.
Interesting to see a legal challenge to stop language development. "Cease and Desist" letters should better be labelled "barratry". Too many scum-sucking lawyers on this planet for my liking.
In particular, this posting, which is eerily prescient.
In other news, Iraqis welcomed the news as God's vengeance". (Link via Drudge Report). I think Reuters should know better than to report this kind of thing as news.
When I wrote "...will become restimulated", my intended meaning was "will (have) to become restimulated (by some agency)".
In other words, my feeling is that corporations have found that they can exploit the US market by maintaining prices and reducing costs. This is not a new idea - Tom Peters was putting this idea forward in the 80s.
However, there will come a point where the mechanism by which they are reducing costs - outsourcing jobs - becomes a negative factor that will reduce their ability to exploit the market.
My suggestion is that at that point, the corporations will have to find an alternative means to retimulate the economy that enables the market into which they sell their products. The alternative is as you suggest - that a corporation that finds itself in that position could be sold and this is entirely possible.
I think that some long-term planners are at work behind the scenes now and that people in positions of power are thinking in abstract terms about very important things such as clean water, energy and food supplies. And I mean thinking in terms of how these can be exploited in radically new ways. Access to clean water and access to cheap energy will become unbelievably critical inthe next 10-15 years and I do believe that some long-term planners have realized this and are putting the machinery in place now to be able to exploit particular circumstances some time down the track.
We don't actually make anything of any value anymore. We are a nation of lawyers and marketing types. All we need now is an army of telephone sanitizers and we'll be all set.
Be of good cheer. You still have the largest military-industrial complex on the planet, and the largest number of private military corporations. If the outsourcing strategy doesn't work, then you can just take it all back by force.
That may or may not be someone's strategic plan...
When the US passed the law in the late 1800s or early 1900s giving corporations the same rights as a natural person, they made corporations extraordinarily powerful.
This is another example. Such trends are not really globalization as such - they are simply a means by large corporations to reduce cost and eliminate tax liabilities in the US.
By employing cheaper labour in foreign countries, they can reduce costs and hence increase profit by maintaining the current pricing levels. Have you ever noticed that the cost of manufactured goods almost never significantly drops in price? How do those 50% off sales work? Well, the company still makes a profit since their markup is 70% or 100%.
Do the workers in foreign countries benefit? Yes, to an extent. There are certainly jobs available that would not otherwise have been there. Does the corporation have any loyalty to those people? Not really - they can easily shut down and move a factory as economic changes happen.
This is not dissimilar to US electronic investment in Europe in the late70s and 80s. European governments were falling over themselves to subsidise huge US plants to stimulate their own economies and keep their workforce employed.
Reverse process is also happening in the US. Chep migrant labour (often illegal) at minimum wage employed on production lines to assemble goods at low cost. Little job security or even basic health/safety standards since the workers are desperate for any income.
Is it something for the US to worry about? Not really. Your corporations are pursuing short-term gain according to economic opportunity. When demand for their manufactured goods or services drops off in the lucrative market of the US because consumers cannot afford them because they have insufficient income or no jobs, then that economy will become restimulated. Whetever the corporations might do, they will not commit suicide by eliminating or disenfranchising their primary market.
Welcome to the 21st century (and the 20th) where humans exploit other humans for profit.
Bill Hamilton invented the jetboat back in the 1950s. It uses an impeller (not a propellor) to provide thrust.
Boats driven by jets are useful since they have better water clearance and can be used in shallow waters. Edmund Hillary (of Everest fame) took a fantastic boat trip up the Ganges river, as far up the headwaters as they could go, which turned out to be pretty far...
Such technology would be fantastically useful in the Florida Everglades for example, where conventional outboard motors wreak havoc with marine life, particularly the dugong.
If anyone ever gets to New Zealand on vacation, make sure to go on the Shotover Jet boats. They do a full 360 at high speed; can't do that with a conventional craft.
There seems to be an interesting recurring theme in human history - we constantly strive to build libraries but we have never yet built one that is quite "good enough".
The Great Library in Alexandria was a wonder of the ancient world until it got burned down as part of a domestic dispute between Mark Anthony and Cleopatra. I was amused to note that the local University recently received funding approval to rebuild it - grants committees move slowly.
In mediaeval times, monks were the guardians of knowledge and the various monasteries dotted around Europe were oases of learning and knowledge in those times. Knowledge was restricted to the few.
The original Gutenberg made it possible to create huge volumes (literally) of knowledge and disseminate it on a wide scale. Ever since, people in power have sought to control this technology - either through censorship, copyright, or even education (you have to be able to read before a book is of greatest use to you.)
In Victorian England, the mark of a scholarly gentleman was in the breadth of works he maintained in his private library.
Perhaps a new initiative might be Gutenberg@Home whereby any reader made an electronic copy of physical works by some convenient, nondestructive means. By keeping such a personal library private, one would not have to worry about copyright laws, even as currently framed.
How much of what is holding us back from building the perfect library simply our insistence on monetary-related restrictions? How long will it take us to realize that lengthy (in time) and complex or intensive (in resources consumed) PHYSICAL processes are the only ones to which we need to attach a value. Whatever happens inthe electronic world should be free and that the collation, assembly, verification, dissemination and application of the sum of human knowledge is one of the most important things that we could achieve?
Who helps us? Who sent rescue workers to the WTC, or OKC? Who sends crews to us when WE have catastrophic earthquakes or storms, or floods?
New Zealand sent most of its bush firefighters to assist with the wildfires in California last year.
Your comments are idealistic and misguided. I was most amused on my last visit to the US when the local guide told me how wonderful life in America ws and then warned me not to walk anywhere...
Slashdot Mirror
...to set some money aside for legal fees. Why? Because as Brad Blumenthal told me about 15 years ago "Some bastard is going to sue you". It doesn't matter if they are right, or if you are right, it's just going to happen. Waving the white flag that says "I can't afford to fight" just makes the bastard stronger.
And let's face it, if you are pulling in $25K monthly on virtually no expense base, you can't turn around and bleat about not having the money to fight it.
1. Do not deal with academics of any description 2. Do not deal with geeks/nerds of any description 3. ??? 4. Profit
None of the lessons learned and reported here are directly related to Project Management per se. They are all by and large implementation issues.
There is also nothing new here. This does not advance the state of the art. History does not advance by people relearning the same lessons again and again. Just because they have been reported here does not make this article special in any way. This article could have been written in any of the decades of 70s, 80s, 90s (substituting en vogue languages for C++/Java) and still make sense.
In order to truly advance the state of the art, we have to think in far more advanced ways about project management and software development. True Software Practice and Experience requires much more planning and critical thinking than evident here.
If Open Source is to provide a useful and stable platform on which to build, then we certainly need a better vision of how to build software. Otherwise, we will be doomed to repeat history by implementing old things in different ways and not really gaining any control over complexity.
In summary, we still have a software crisis; Open Source will not change that; and summaries of software development experience that just say "I made the same mistakes as other people did" are not very helpful.
...don't routers just refuse to send on data that comes from a spoofed address? If on the backbone, you see a destination IP that is reserved, just dump the packets.
Or maybe to recognize that this in fact a legitimate use. The e-mail address adhere to the individual. Why should they not be able to use that as an identifier regardless of where they are? It should be a purely technical issue arranged between the mail servers which messages they agree to carry or not.
In other words, the example given is not forgery since the person is not pretending to be someone else.
I rigged up a spam-processing kit last year which incorporated some of the features discussed in the Reverse MX protocol. Damn, I should have written a technical report about it after all...
You didn't really get the bit about the plastic see-thru bits in the notes, did you?
The author's of the paper against defending against physical attacks go to some lengths to develop reverse Turing Tests to ensure that a human is involved in the loop.
A simpler protocol to ensure the same end is a non-identification based biometric check. This ensures that a real live human was present at the location and time the check was made (yes, I know this can be faked).
A non-dentification based check means that the individual is not explicitly _identified_ merely that their identity can be _verified_. Hence this is a less intrusive procedure.
This form of biometric authentication is quite often found in supermarket checkout lines for example, where an operator must periodically (or prior to significant activity such as withdrawing cash from a register) pass a biometric check to verify that a) they are present and b) they are the same individual that passed the previous check (or a new operator has taken over) and c) they are authorised to carry out various tasks.
STF
Hmmm. You don't understand Shannon or bandwidth very well, or 56K technology.
Bandwidth on a pure analogue line is about 3kHz (typically 3400Hz); you have to consider the signal-to-noise ratio as well before you can give the theoretical limit. A typical S/N will be around 30dB, so you plug that in to Shannon's equation: Channel capacity = 2 * 3400 * log2(1+ 30) = 33688 bits per second.
56K technology is different; the upstream limit is still the theoretical 33.6Kbps as above. The downstream limit is 56K as the bitstream is digital and modulated in a different way so as to remove the analogue/digital conversion which is where the bandwidth limit restricts channel capacity.
The FCC limits the downstream rate to 53.3 to minimize crosstalk issues.
STF
A manager at one of our strategy meetings made the comment that there were "Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians..." (indicating that there were too many Team Leaders and not enough people to be led.
Someone at Sun Human Resources might have misunderstood this and started a recruiting drive...
Ariane 5 failure was largely the result of a software reuse problem and hence in the domain of Software Engineering.
However, you could argue pedantically that putting a large number into fewer bits was a representation problem and hence in the realm of Computer Science...
STF
If recall is just as good in fast-forward mode, advertisers should wonder why they need to pay for 30-second slots :-)
Um, he didn't say war was a dumb idea, but he did express reservations. Here. I'm not too surprised this wasn't widely reported in American media, even though the address took place at a US University.
STFMy word list contains: GOOGLE, GOOLED, GOOGLES, GOOGLING
A GOOGLY is an English cricketing term. So to be GOOGLED is to be bowled out by a weird delivery. So it's already a verb. They probably shouldn't have been allowed to trademark what was already in common usage.
Interesting to see a legal challenge to stop language development. "Cease and Desist" letters should better be labelled "barratry". Too many scum-sucking lawyers on this planet for my liking.
STF
No shit!
I'd like to draw your attention to this Google news thread (link via Robot Wisdom)
In particular, this posting, which is eerily prescient.
In other news, Iraqis welcomed the news as God's vengeance". (Link via Drudge Report). I think Reuters should know better than to report this kind of thing as news.
STF
When I wrote "...will become restimulated", my intended meaning was "will (have) to become restimulated (by some agency)".
In other words, my feeling is that corporations have found that they can exploit the US market by maintaining prices and reducing costs. This is not a new idea - Tom Peters was putting this idea forward in the 80s.
However, there will come a point where the mechanism by which they are reducing costs - outsourcing jobs - becomes a negative factor that will reduce their ability to exploit the market.
My suggestion is that at that point, the corporations will have to find an alternative means to retimulate the economy that enables the market into which they sell their products. The alternative is as you suggest - that a corporation that finds itself in that position could be sold and this is entirely possible.
I think that some long-term planners are at work behind the scenes now and that people in positions of power are thinking in abstract terms about very important things such as clean water, energy and food supplies. And I mean thinking in terms of how these can be exploited in radically new ways. Access to clean water and access to cheap energy will become unbelievably critical inthe next 10-15 years and I do believe that some long-term planners have realized this and are putting the machinery in place now to be able to exploit particular circumstances some time down the track.
STF
Be of good cheer. You still have the largest military-industrial complex on the planet, and the largest number of private military corporations. If the outsourcing strategy doesn't work, then you can just take it all back by force.
That may or may not be someone's strategic plan...
STF
When the US passed the law in the late 1800s or early 1900s giving corporations the same rights as a natural person, they made corporations extraordinarily powerful.
This is another example. Such trends are not really globalization as such - they are simply a means by large corporations to reduce cost and eliminate tax liabilities in the US.
By employing cheaper labour in foreign countries, they can reduce costs and hence increase profit by maintaining the current pricing levels. Have you ever noticed that the cost of manufactured goods almost never significantly drops in price? How do those 50% off sales work? Well, the company still makes a profit since their markup is 70% or 100%.
Do the workers in foreign countries benefit? Yes, to an extent. There are certainly jobs available that would not otherwise have been there. Does the corporation have any loyalty to those people? Not really - they can easily shut down and move a factory as economic changes happen.
This is not dissimilar to US electronic investment in Europe in the late70s and 80s. European governments were falling over themselves to subsidise huge US plants to stimulate their own economies and keep their workforce employed.
Reverse process is also happening in the US. Chep migrant labour (often illegal) at minimum wage employed on production lines to assemble goods at low cost. Little job security or even basic health/safety standards since the workers are desperate for any income.
Is it something for the US to worry about? Not really. Your corporations are pursuing short-term gain according to economic opportunity. When demand for their manufactured goods or services drops off in the lucrative market of the US because consumers cannot afford them because they have insufficient income or no jobs, then that economy will become restimulated. Whetever the corporations might do, they will not commit suicide by eliminating or disenfranchising their primary market.
Welcome to the 21st century (and the 20th) where humans exploit other humans for profit.
STF
Bill Hamilton invented the jetboat back in the 1950s. It uses an impeller (not a propellor) to provide thrust.
Boats driven by jets are useful since they have better water clearance and can be used in shallow waters. Edmund Hillary (of Everest fame) took a fantastic boat trip up the Ganges river, as far up the headwaters as they could go, which turned out to be pretty far...
Such technology would be fantastically useful in the Florida Everglades for example, where conventional outboard motors wreak havoc with marine life, particularly the dugong.
If anyone ever gets to New Zealand on vacation, make sure to go on the Shotover Jet boats. They do a full 360 at high speed; can't do that with a conventional craft.
STF
Payola is one of the factors that made record companies the giants that they are today.
This is old news anyway. Read this article written in 1956.
STF
There seems to be an interesting recurring theme in human history - we constantly strive to build libraries but we have never yet built one that is quite "good enough".
The Great Library in Alexandria was a wonder of the ancient world until it got burned down as part of a domestic dispute between Mark Anthony and Cleopatra. I was amused to note that the local University recently received funding approval to rebuild it - grants committees move slowly.
In mediaeval times, monks were the guardians of knowledge and the various monasteries dotted around Europe were oases of learning and knowledge in those times. Knowledge was restricted to the few.
The original Gutenberg made it possible to create huge volumes (literally) of knowledge and disseminate it on a wide scale. Ever since, people in power have sought to control this technology - either through censorship, copyright, or even education (you have to be able to read before a book is of greatest use to you.)
In Victorian England, the mark of a scholarly gentleman was in the breadth of works he maintained in his private library.
Perhaps a new initiative might be Gutenberg@Home whereby any reader made an electronic copy of physical works by some convenient, nondestructive means. By keeping such a personal library private, one would not have to worry about copyright laws, even as currently framed.
How much of what is holding us back from building the perfect library simply our insistence on monetary-related restrictions? How long will it take us to realize that lengthy (in time) and complex or intensive (in resources consumed) PHYSICAL processes are the only ones to which we need to attach a value. Whatever happens inthe electronic world should be free and that the collation, assembly, verification, dissemination and application of the sum of human knowledge is one of the most important things that we could achieve?
STF
New Zealand sent most of its bush firefighters to assist with the wildfires in California last year.
Your comments are idealistic and misguided. I was most amused on my last visit to the US when the local guide told me how wonderful life in America ws and then warned me not to walk anywhere...
STF
The files were IN the computer?
OK, to be more precise: he never originated the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute"
Just make sure they spell your name right.
STF
PT Barnum didn't say "there's a sucker born every minute". STF