tr.im was BY FAR the flakiest URL shortener out there. It seemed to me like it was down or overloaded as often as it was up. The biggest reason not to use tr.im isn't bogeyman partnerships between Twitter and bit.ly, but this:
I read this with interest as I have been involved in large scale IT development projects for various corporations for the better part of 15 years. This memo makes it appear as if the problems in the project were execution related: bad management, poor quality control, bad architecture, performance problems, etc.
In my experience, it is actually not that common for an experienced team to fail largely on execution problems. Rather, as I like to say (call it Renn's Law if you'd like): "Most failed corporate software projects failed before the kickoff meeting". Usually the signs of failure were there all along, before the project even officially got started.
Here are some of the key things I've seen lead to problems, most of which are not directly related to the core development (design, build, and test) of the project:
- Lack of an identified executive sponsor - Failure to identify a limited subset of people who are empowered and responsible for articulating the business requirements of the system - Lack of clarity as to the actual goals to be achieved or the underlying problem to be solved. - No shared vision of what a successful outcome would look like among the various stakeholders - Project positioned as an IT-centric solution to a business-centric problem without a corresponding business strategy, process, and change management plan in place. - Insufficient resources (time, money, people) allocated to the project - Lack of qualified staff in key roles (data architect, functional lead, etc) - Poor governance and scope control
I've been using one of the release candidates that got installed by default when I updated ubuntu. It isn't doing much for me, frankly. The only thing they've fixed that I consider a big win is the memory leak issue from FF2. What's so exciting about this new release?
ChaCha is based in Indianapolis and is backed by Scott Jones, a local tech entrepreneur who made his fortune as one of the co-inventors of voice mail. Given the relatively small number of tech companies in Indiana and the desire of the state to diversify its economy away from manufacturing, it doesn't seem too unreasonable that the state government and a leading university would back a home grown company.
This is the old self-sufficiency argument. There's no economic reason for self-sufficiency. It has to be justified on the basis of some external factor like national security. In that respect, nations do typically like to be self-sufficient in military matters. This is far more important for the United States than Europe, given the size and scope of the US military and the fact that, rightly or wrongly, the US military is frequently used.
The reverse argument does not apply in the case of Galileo since that system is not for military use.
I'm pleased to see, however, that the US military is starting to open up its procurement in non-strategic areas. For example, the US Army just signed a huge deal with Eurocopter and the new Marine One (the President's helicopter) will be Italian. The Eurocopter design is clearly the best on the market and I'm glad we're buying it. Similarly, I'm glad to see the Air Force refueling tanker bid being opened to Airbus. Given the disputes over subsidies on the commerical side, and the treatment of Pratt & Whitney during the A400M tender, I don't see Congress really allowing Airbus to win. That's a shame, but at least competition will keep the taxpayer's cost lower, and it is worth it to Airbus too to invest in the bid just to dry up some profits for Boeing. I sure hope that the US opens its defense market more and more to global bidders.
1. Any differences in functionality between GPS and Galileo are really a post-hoc project justification. Do you honestly believe that the rationale behind Galileo was to improve reception in certain countries and to improve accuracy? I strongly doubt it. The statements of the European politicians who launched the project would not indicate that. Of course they will tout the advantage of their system. It's almost the nature of a me-too product to claim at least some functional or technical superiority. But that's not why Europe is building it. At the end of the day, the US had one, so Europe wanted one too.
2. I will grant that the A380 is a much larger plane. The parallel here is that the decision to build the plane appeared to be based, like Galileo, largely on matters of pride and prestige, not marketplace demand. While I think the plane ultimately will do better than the current problems and sales levels would indicate, I don't think at the end of the day this will prove to be an economically wise investment versus alternatives.
3. It's easier to get a faster percentage growth on a smaller base.
I must confess I've never seen the logic of the Galileo system. This is so clearly about nothing but Euro-prestige, and it makes you wonder if the Europeans understand fundamental economics. Everything Galileo will do is done by GPS (which, btw, is not a generic name, though I'm sure the Euros would love it to be to confuse the marketplace) or will be done when planned upgrades are in place. Bogeyman scenarios of the US cutting off GPS are ridiculous as I'm not aware that the US military has ever shut off access even in Iraq - and the US military would jam Galileo if they wanted to in any case.
The Europeans could have had a free ride at the US taxpayers expense. Instead, they decide to spend billions to build a competitor system. So how to recoup that? It's obvious that the EU will force all mobile phones, cars, planes, etc. sold in Europe to use Galileo. The free market would never adopt a new alternative that is not technically or functionally superior, is going against an entrenched competitor with a huge install base, and costs money where the alternative is free. So you can bet it will be regulated into existence and the huge fees everyone is forced to pay for this (hidden inside the price you pay for these devices, of course, just like VAT) will be touted as how "successful" the system is - as if adding a multi-billion tax on your citizens while everyone else pays nothing is a benefit of the system. Look for rules requiring Galileo on any aircraft which uses EU airspace, necessitating costly refits to the worldwide fleet of planes that already have GPS installed and other costly items that will actually be an economic drag.
GPS is like an open source project or classic economic "public good". Galileo is a like a gratuitous fork. It's also the attempt to turn a public good into a private one by the use of new technologies like encryption/DRM.
Building Galileo also ignores the law of comparative advantage. Why not focus at where you have the greatest comparative advantage over other people instead of fighting to replicate everything everyone could ever do? No one questions that the Europeans have the technical expertise and financial resources to build this project. The question is whether Galileo is the best use of those resources. Better to put them towards something that would be game changing, not a "me too". Why not use that to figure out how to make hydrogen fuel cells really work? Or build a space probe to do something no one has every done before. There are a million potential projects that Europe could do that would benefit humanity and turn them into an unquestioned economic or scientific leaders in varios area. Unfortunately, the EU seems to consistently want to do these type of me-too project instead, whether that be Galileo, the A380 or A400M, Jacques Chirac's new French search engine, etc. The playbook seems to be cloning someone else's ideas, making them slightly bigger and better, then touting them as the best thing since sliced bread. All of these can be successful in a nominal sense, but I question whether they were the best economic use of the resources.
Europe has vast treasures of intellectual talent, largely top notch infrastructure (London transport excepted, thank you), awesome culture, high productivity, a mostly-common currency and open borders, and a history of great economic success. I've got to believe the ingrediants are there for a great boom - particularly with the influx of new Eastern European members - if the EU governments would just put the right policies in place to make it happen.
Meanwhile, the US economy has grown by 20% since 2003 - adding $2.2 trillion in GDP. In other words, we just added an entire China to our economy in the last three years while also adding millions of new jobs. Considering the doom and gloom generally reported in the media, that's something to think about.
Government is the Ultimate Mulitnational Corp.
on
TSA Violated Privacy Act
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Private security as more poorly performing or as more personally invasive? Sure, pre-9/11 private security at airports was a joke; but so was our government intelligence, for example.
Look at the world today. There are at least as many examples of public sector failures as private (our public schools being a great example). Many of the most polluted sites on our country were made that way by government agencies such as the US military. And of course let's not forget such shameful items as the Tuskegee Experiment.
The fact is, government is almost exactly like a large corporation in every respect - only on a larger scale. As I've often argued, government is the ultimate multi-national corporation. Both corporations and goverment are nominally controlled by their owners (the shareholders or voters) but the reality is that entrenched management really runs the show most of the time. Both are characterized by a bureaucratic mindset.
One big difference is that if a corporation does something wrong, it is much easier to hold accountable. You can sue a corporation who hurts you - governments can only be sued if they decided they want to let you (sovereign immunity). Governments have regulatory oversight of corporations, but there is little oversight of the government itself. Corporate officials who screw up can be sued personally for damaged (e.g., the Enron board). Public officials are immune from lawsuits related to their jobs by law. Also, corporations can rarely force you to do business with them (with some notable exceptions), but the government is generally your supplier of its services whether you want it or not.
Overall, I think we'd be better served with most serviced provided by a competitive private sector market, with vigorous public oversight to hold the providers accountable.
It doesn't surprise me that the TSA has demonstrated contempt for the law here. As a regular traveler, I can tell you that they already (with some notable exceptions whose names I wish I had so I could cite them as positive examples) have contempt for the actual public they are charged with protecting. They have gone the way of all elites who profess to act in the name of the people, but actually do things that are in interally focused institutional interest.
I can certainly understand that law enforcement wants to "get the bad guys". Unfortunately, so much of today's law enforcement activity has little or nothing to do with actual criminals and spends most of its time operating against ordinary citizens. If you think this is limited to terrorism, think again. The Illinois State Police where I am routinely set up "seat belt enforcement zones" where people are pulled over and forced to prove that they aren't law breakers. It's similar to more and more "checkpoints" that are set up for all sorts of things and a presumption on the part of the police that they have the right to search you just to find out if you are doing anything wrong. That puts the 4th amendment on its head, and unfortunately our courts have gone along with it. Unless you are actually in your home, you can probably assume you can be investigated, searched, questeioned, etc. by the cops for any reason or for no reason at all.
So I don't see the TSA as some unique manifestation of anti-terror laws or a rogue agency. I see them as very symptomatic of what has been going on in law enforcement for a long time. This is just the next chapter.
It's interesting that the article both slams MSFT for cutting back on employee benefits while blaming its flat stock price on poor execution. Letting expenses get out of line is a big part of execution. As MSFT's stock has been flat, I think you will indeed begin to see them focus much more on operational efficiencies to reduce costs and drive profits. Some employees may in fact benefit from this as they are large stock holders (if the stock goes up, it may outweigh the loss in benefits). Others (especially any laid off) could certainly end up worse off.
I'm also puzzled by the article citing Merck as a great company because of its committment to principles. Once the world's largest pharmaceutical company, Merck now a mid-tier play and slipping. With the removal of Vioxx from the market, the pending patent expiration on Zocor, and a comparatively weak pipeline, a number of analysts are questioning the company's ability to survive as an independent. I certainly applaud Merck's forthright recall of Vioxx and comittment to patient safety. But their policies have not kept them at the top of the pharmaceutical heap.
Google is also praised, despite the fact that it appears to be cooperating with the Chinese government in censoring the Internet and has set up a two tier owernship structure that gives the founders complete control despite a much lower ownership percentage (Google recently got very poor marks overall for corporate governance). (Having said that, I love Google!)
I'm sorry, but if traditional telecom is subject to regulation, VOIP ought to be as well. The current regulatory scheme is set up, to some extent, to use local line charges to subsidize other services, in returns for some profit skimming. If we allow VOIP to bypass the local loop for high margin service (e.g. eliminating access charges for LD calls), then we need to rethink regulation.
When your significant other (or you for that matter) has a heart attack, you want to pick up that phone and call 911 and expect someone to pick you up, not to hear that, sorry, there is network congestion or a DDOS attack on the local router. Somebody has to subsidize telecom services for the poor. Etc.
It is certainly not fair to saddle traditional telecom with burdensome rules while exempting new players. At a minimum, the old players ought to have their regulations lifted. Of course, the slashdot crowd doesn't want that either. That would mean they would be exploiting their monopolies.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but I think Ballmer has a point that the free software community really hasn't done a lot of truly innovative work. Apple, there's innovation. But free software? I don't know.
A lot of this comes from the fact that we started with zero and had to build a free software base. So we did indeed have to re-invent the wheel to produce a totally free operating system. But today, when we should be at the point where we are really leading, we really aren't doing as much as we should.
Gnome & KDE are really Windows / Mac knockoffs of a GUI environment.
Gimp is a clone of Photoshop & co.
Samba is a free implementation of Windows file sharing.
etc. etc. etc.
Did the free software community invent peer to peer file sharing, instant messaging, EAI, ERP, or Java? No. And every time a proprietary technology like that comes along, the free software community has to devote large amounts of resources to implementing a compatible version.
Where's the "killer app" for free software? Where is the project that makes free software drive the market instead of the other way around? There are possibly a few things out there (Beowulf?), but not nearly enough. The ones that are really driving it are just using free software as a base (e.g., TiVO).
There are many off the shelf products to do this. Among them:
o Tier 3 storage platforms from vendors like NetApp and others. You can use a NetApp R100 as near line storeage for backup.
o Techniques such as BCV or snapshot for backup. You can leave the 3rd mirror broken all day and use it for fast restore that day if necessary (or for remounting as a reporting database or for copying production data to test, or, or, or)
I certainly wouldn't roll my own. Tapes aren't going away. There will always be a need for archival and secure off site backups. But doing short term backups to disk (or staging backups to disk) is become a fairly common solution to dealing with today's larger data volumes and smaller backup windows.
Your credit actually seems to have a lot to do with a lot of things. Poor credit is correllated with a lot of things. For example, those with poor credit are more likely to have auto accidents and file claims. In fact, one insurance company I know had studies indicating that credit history was the most important predictor of future auto claims - even moreso that prior auto claims. Amazing.
This makes a certain amount of sense. While many people do end up in credit trouble through no fault of their own (catastrophic medical bills, job loss, etc), very often people who end up with poor credit do so because they are unable to properly manage their fiances. Perhaps this indicates they are also irresponsible in other areas of their life.
The US did not degrade the GPS signal during the Afghanistan conflict. With emergency services such as cellular E-911 relying on accurate GPS, I think it's unlikely the US would likely degrade the signal. (Now watch them turn it down 30 seconds after I post this....) Keep in mind, even with Galileo, the US military would doubtless jam the signal if they felt their battlefield superiority was threatened.
As I've long argued, there's no real justification for Galileo. It's about the EU (esp. France) wanting to avoid looking weak next to the US. It is about industrial policy and euro-prestige. There is no reason not to rely on the US GPS system, which already has billions in upgrades planned, including fully separate civilian only signals. The US also has local jamming capabilities that does not require the military to globally degrade signals.
At any rate, there's a lot of good Galileo information on the web. Here are some links:
Gimme a break. The Galileo system was conceived and designed as a "euro-prestige" project. Even if the US military decides to degrade GPS today (which nobody from the US military has said that they are going to do - at least not that I've heard), they are launching many more satellites with civilian only circuits which in the future will provide a separate signal from the military one. Galileo is transparently designed to as a duplicate to the US system to demonstrate EU technical competence and as a prop to their space industry. Loyloa de Palacio, EU Transport Commissioner, said, "Europe wishes to be present on the international scene... in all aspects of cutting-edge technologies." This is hardly the only project in which the euro-govt's are spending big to try to duplicate already existing US tech. The A400M military transport is another example.
There is still an annual CBBS get together in Chicago every year. A number of the folks from those days still drop in on newsgroups like chi.general and chi.internet.
Randy is still around. He runs a CBBS successor called Chinet www.chinet.com.
The bottom line is that if you take someone's money - the government's, a corporation's, a foundation's, etc - you are implicitly or explicitly agreeing to the strings attached. Seldom is there a "free lunch". If there is money being offered, there is usually a reason why. I'm not entitled to have free money come raining down on me. Why should a wealthy institution like MIT? They know the game.
If I offer the FSF a $20,000 grant to develop a "Foo" software package for me, provided they design it how I want, the FSF is certainly free to turn that money down and do their own thing (or do without a Foo package). But that doesn't make me an evil man for asking the FSF to write a program that meets my needs if I give them a donation to do so. Similarly for the government.
Microsoft is not the only one working on a filesystem that does (if I read the article right) what Yukon does. Vendors like Oracle are already doing something similar today. They realize that most content today exists as "unstructured" data (ie., not columns in relational database tables). They are enhancing their software to more easily handle unstructured data through the database. I actually think this can be a good thing: databases already can manage very huge amounts of data across multiple physical stores. This extends the concept to unstructure files. You can run SQL like operations against it, use enhanced indexing and search techniques, export the content easily using the built-in database access tools (WebDAV views and the like), etc. You get robust role based security, excellent logging/monitoring (which some people might think is a bad thing).
I'll use Oracle as an example because I'm more familiar with it. When you store things like PowerPoints and the like into Oracle, through their products like InterMedia you can automatically do things like search for content insides of these "opaque" files (not just look for file names in a filesystem directory), automate metadata generation (e.g., width/heigh/color depth, etc for images), transcode from one format to another, etc. At this point, most of the capabilities I've seen are "toolkit" oriented. That is, they enable developers to build apps that take advantage of them but aren't necessarily suitable for use directly by end users. I believe all of oracle.com is managed in this way, so check it out.
If Yukon is basically doing a similar thing in extending SQL Server to support unstructured content well, this could very much be a good thing in terms of functionality.
Also, don't be so quick to dismiss MS's security talk as just another way to take over the world. Obviously, these guys are very focused on market success and very focused on competition with GNU/Linux and free software. But they understand that in general security flaws have been a huge achilles heel for their products and they are doing a number of things top to bottom throughout their development process to really wring out security bugs and make more robust software. I can't reveal what most of this is due to non-disclosure, but from what I've seen MS are treating security very seriously and are focusing on the "security gap" in the same way they've focused on competitor functionality in the past.
It has been known for years that methane hydrates on the ocean floor might provide more energy than conventional fossil fuels. There's an interesting article on them from the US Geological Survey here
The fact is that the earth contains virtually unlimited supplies of energy that can be tapped into by man. And that is apart from the truly huge reservoir of nuclear power we can tap into. There is no energy shortage - not even an oil shortage - on this planet.
I've seen calculations that indicate it would have been feasible to use water to cool the metal to the point where it would not have plasticized. Evaporation of water is enormously efficient as a cooling system. Among other reasons - as the NYT article points out - most of the highly combustible jet fuel was consumed very rapidly and we would be dealing with ordinary fires. Obviously the current sprinkler designs were not adequate to the task. With the narrowly spaced supporting columns on the exterior of the building, however, it should have been feasible to have large numbers of stand pipes parallelling the beams that would continue to be available for water supply in the event of an impact. Obviously at the time no one would have reasonalbly thought that would have been necessary. In the future, who knows? Asbestos fireproofing certainly would have helped as well.
The purpose of the sprinkler system in this case would not be to put out the fire, but to eliminate heat. The heat channeled into heating the water and converting it into steam would not have been availble to heat the steal beams. It's a matter of water as a cooling system, not a fire suppressant.
Here is an overview of the various flavors of content management:
1. Content Management. A generic term for managing various types of content. It includes a system for managing digital content files (and perhaps offline content as well) along with metadata that describes the content. Usually workflow and security are included.
2. Document Management. Content management focused on text documents, office automation documents, and scanned images. These tend to be very workflow oriented.
3. Web Content Management. Obviously web focused content management that is oriented towards the web publishing process. Includes some workflow and usually publishing templates and perhaps a mechanism for actually publishing the content to the web server.
4. Digital Asset Management. Focused on being an archive or digital library that other systems such as web content management can draw on. The focus is on re-purposing of content. Often these system are rich media focused and include facilities for transcoding content from one format to another dynamically.
Slashdot Mirror
tr.im was BY FAR the flakiest URL shortener out there. It seemed to me like it was down or overloaded as often as it was up. The biggest reason not to use tr.im isn't bogeyman partnerships between Twitter and bit.ly, but this:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3565/3796342926_a4365424b1_o.png
I read this with interest as I have been involved in large scale IT development projects for various corporations for the better part of 15 years. This memo makes it appear as if the problems in the project were execution related: bad management, poor quality control, bad architecture, performance problems, etc.
In my experience, it is actually not that common for an experienced team to fail largely on execution problems. Rather, as I like to say (call it Renn's Law if you'd like): "Most failed corporate software projects failed before the kickoff meeting". Usually the signs of failure were there all along, before the project even officially got started.
Here are some of the key things I've seen lead to problems, most of which are not directly related to the core development (design, build, and test) of the project:
- Lack of an identified executive sponsor
- Failure to identify a limited subset of people who are empowered and responsible for articulating the business requirements of the system
- Lack of clarity as to the actual goals to be achieved or the underlying problem to be solved.
- No shared vision of what a successful outcome would look like among the various stakeholders
- Project positioned as an IT-centric solution to a business-centric problem without a corresponding business strategy, process, and change management plan in place.
- Insufficient resources (time, money, people) allocated to the project
- Lack of qualified staff in key roles (data architect, functional lead, etc)
- Poor governance and scope control
I've been using one of the release candidates that got installed by default when I updated ubuntu. It isn't doing much for me, frankly. The only thing they've fixed that I consider a big win is the memory leak issue from FF2. What's so exciting about this new release?
I see that I am registered use 539. I was surfing the site before registration was required. I must be getting old if this site is a decade old
ChaCha is based in Indianapolis and is backed by Scott Jones, a local tech entrepreneur who made his fortune as one of the co-inventors of voice mail. Given the relatively small number of tech companies in Indiana and the desire of the state to diversify its economy away from manufacturing, it doesn't seem too unreasonable that the state government and a leading university would back a home grown company.
This is the old self-sufficiency argument. There's no economic reason for self-sufficiency. It has to be justified on the basis of some external factor like national security. In that respect, nations do typically like to be self-sufficient in military matters. This is far more important for the United States than Europe, given the size and scope of the US military and the fact that, rightly or wrongly, the US military is frequently used.
The reverse argument does not apply in the case of Galileo since that system is not for military use.
I'm pleased to see, however, that the US military is starting to open up its procurement in non-strategic areas. For example, the US Army just signed a huge deal with Eurocopter and the new Marine One (the President's helicopter) will be Italian. The Eurocopter design is clearly the best on the market and I'm glad we're buying it. Similarly, I'm glad to see the Air Force refueling tanker bid being opened to Airbus. Given the disputes over subsidies on the commerical side, and the treatment of Pratt & Whitney during the A400M tender, I don't see Congress really allowing Airbus to win. That's a shame, but at least competition will keep the taxpayer's cost lower, and it is worth it to Airbus too to invest in the bid just to dry up some profits for Boeing. I sure hope that the US opens its defense market more and more to global bidders.
1. Any differences in functionality between GPS and Galileo are really a post-hoc project justification. Do you honestly believe that the rationale behind Galileo was to improve reception in certain countries and to improve accuracy? I strongly doubt it. The statements of the European politicians who launched the project would not indicate that. Of course they will tout the advantage of their system. It's almost the nature of a me-too product to claim at least some functional or technical superiority. But that's not why Europe is building it. At the end of the day, the US had one, so Europe wanted one too.
2. I will grant that the A380 is a much larger plane. The parallel here is that the decision to build the plane appeared to be based, like Galileo, largely on matters of pride and prestige, not marketplace demand. While I think the plane ultimately will do better than the current problems and sales levels would indicate, I don't think at the end of the day this will prove to be an economically wise investment versus alternatives.
3. It's easier to get a faster percentage growth on a smaller base.
I must confess I've never seen the logic of the Galileo system. This is so clearly about nothing but Euro-prestige, and it makes you wonder if the Europeans understand fundamental economics. Everything Galileo will do is done by GPS (which, btw, is not a generic name, though I'm sure the Euros would love it to be to confuse the marketplace) or will be done when planned upgrades are in place. Bogeyman scenarios of the US cutting off GPS are ridiculous as I'm not aware that the US military has ever shut off access even in Iraq - and the US military would jam Galileo if they wanted to in any case.
The Europeans could have had a free ride at the US taxpayers expense. Instead, they decide to spend billions to build a competitor system. So how to recoup that? It's obvious that the EU will force all mobile phones, cars, planes, etc. sold in Europe to use Galileo. The free market would never adopt a new alternative that is not technically or functionally superior, is going against an entrenched competitor with a huge install base, and costs money where the alternative is free. So you can bet it will be regulated into existence and the huge fees everyone is forced to pay for this (hidden inside the price you pay for these devices, of course, just like VAT) will be touted as how "successful" the system is - as if adding a multi-billion tax on your citizens while everyone else pays nothing is a benefit of the system. Look for rules requiring Galileo on any aircraft which uses EU airspace, necessitating costly refits to the worldwide fleet of planes that already have GPS installed and other costly items that will actually be an economic drag.
GPS is like an open source project or classic economic "public good". Galileo is a like a gratuitous fork. It's also the attempt to turn a public good into a private one by the use of new technologies like encryption/DRM.
Building Galileo also ignores the law of comparative advantage. Why not focus at where you have the greatest comparative advantage over other people instead of fighting to replicate everything everyone could ever do? No one questions that the Europeans have the technical expertise and financial resources to build this project. The question is whether Galileo is the best use of those resources. Better to put them towards something that would be game changing, not a "me too". Why not use that to figure out how to make hydrogen fuel cells really work? Or build a space probe to do something no one has every done before. There are a million potential projects that Europe could do that would benefit humanity and turn them into an unquestioned economic or scientific leaders in varios area. Unfortunately, the EU seems to consistently want to do these type of me-too project instead, whether that be Galileo, the A380 or A400M, Jacques Chirac's new French search engine, etc. The playbook seems to be cloning someone else's ideas, making them slightly bigger and better, then touting them as the best thing since sliced bread. All of these can be successful in a nominal sense, but I question whether they were the best economic use of the resources.
Europe has vast treasures of intellectual talent, largely top notch infrastructure (London transport excepted, thank you), awesome culture, high productivity, a mostly-common currency and open borders, and a history of great economic success. I've got to believe the ingrediants are there for a great boom - particularly with the influx of new Eastern European members - if the EU governments would just put the right policies in place to make it happen.
Meanwhile, the US economy has grown by 20% since 2003 - adding $2.2 trillion in GDP. In other words, we just added an entire China to our economy in the last three years while also adding millions of new jobs. Considering the doom and gloom generally reported in the media, that's something to think about.
Private security as more poorly performing or as more personally invasive? Sure, pre-9/11 private security at airports was a joke; but so was our government intelligence, for example.
Look at the world today. There are at least as many examples of public sector failures as private (our public schools being a great example). Many of the most polluted sites on our country were made that way by government agencies such as the US military. And of course let's not forget such shameful items as the Tuskegee Experiment.
The fact is, government is almost exactly like a large corporation in every respect - only on a larger scale. As I've often argued, government is the ultimate multi-national corporation. Both corporations and goverment are nominally controlled by their owners (the shareholders or voters) but the reality is that entrenched management really runs the show most of the time. Both are characterized by a bureaucratic mindset.
One big difference is that if a corporation does something wrong, it is much easier to hold accountable. You can sue a corporation who hurts you - governments can only be sued if they decided they want to let you (sovereign immunity). Governments have regulatory oversight of corporations, but there is little oversight of the government itself. Corporate officials who screw up can be sued personally for damaged (e.g., the Enron board). Public officials are immune from lawsuits related to their jobs by law. Also, corporations can rarely force you to do business with them (with some notable exceptions), but the government is generally your supplier of its services whether you want it or not.
Overall, I think we'd be better served with most serviced provided by a competitive private sector market, with vigorous public oversight to hold the providers accountable.
It doesn't surprise me that the TSA has demonstrated contempt for the law here. As a regular traveler, I can tell you that they already (with some notable exceptions whose names I wish I had so I could cite them as positive examples) have contempt for the actual public they are charged with protecting. They have gone the way of all elites who profess to act in the name of the people, but actually do things that are in interally focused institutional interest.
I can certainly understand that law enforcement wants to "get the bad guys". Unfortunately, so much of today's law enforcement activity has little or nothing to do with actual criminals and spends most of its time operating against ordinary citizens. If you think this is limited to terrorism, think again. The Illinois State Police where I am routinely set up "seat belt enforcement zones" where people are pulled over and forced to prove that they aren't law breakers. It's similar to more and more "checkpoints" that are set up for all sorts of things and a presumption on the part of the police that they have the right to search you just to find out if you are doing anything wrong. That puts the 4th amendment on its head, and unfortunately our courts have gone along with it. Unless you are actually in your home, you can probably assume you can be investigated, searched, questeioned, etc. by the cops for any reason or for no reason at all.
So I don't see the TSA as some unique manifestation of anti-terror laws or a rogue agency. I see them as very symptomatic of what has been going on in law enforcement for a long time. This is just the next chapter.
It's interesting that the article both slams MSFT for cutting back on employee benefits while blaming its flat stock price on poor execution. Letting expenses get out of line is a big part of execution. As MSFT's stock has been flat, I think you will indeed begin to see them focus much more on operational efficiencies to reduce costs and drive profits. Some employees may in fact benefit from this as they are large stock holders (if the stock goes up, it may outweigh the loss in benefits). Others (especially any laid off) could certainly end up worse off.
I'm also puzzled by the article citing Merck as a great company because of its committment to principles. Once the world's largest pharmaceutical company, Merck now a mid-tier play and slipping. With the removal of Vioxx from the market, the pending patent expiration on Zocor, and a comparatively weak pipeline, a number of analysts are questioning the company's ability to survive as an independent. I certainly applaud Merck's forthright recall of Vioxx and comittment to patient safety. But their policies have not kept them at the top of the pharmaceutical heap.
Google is also praised, despite the fact that it appears to be cooperating with the Chinese government in censoring the Internet and has set up a two tier owernship structure that gives the founders complete control despite a much lower ownership percentage (Google recently got very poor marks overall for corporate governance). (Having said that, I love Google!)
I'm sorry, but if traditional telecom is subject to regulation, VOIP ought to be as well. The current regulatory scheme is set up, to some extent, to use local line charges to subsidize other services, in returns for some profit skimming. If we allow VOIP to bypass the local loop for high margin service (e.g. eliminating access charges for LD calls), then we need to rethink regulation.
When your significant other (or you for that matter) has a heart attack, you want to pick up that phone and call 911 and expect someone to pick you up, not to hear that, sorry, there is network congestion or a DDOS attack on the local router. Somebody has to subsidize telecom services for the poor. Etc.
It is certainly not fair to saddle traditional telecom with burdensome rules while exempting new players. At a minimum, the old players ought to have their regulations lifted. Of course, the slashdot crowd doesn't want that either. That would mean they would be exploiting their monopolies.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but I think Ballmer has a point that the free software community really hasn't done a lot of truly innovative work. Apple, there's innovation. But free software? I don't know.
A lot of this comes from the fact that we started with zero and had to build a free software base. So we did indeed have to re-invent the wheel to produce a totally free operating system. But today, when we should be at the point where we are really leading, we really aren't doing as much as we should.
Gnome & KDE are really Windows / Mac knockoffs of a GUI environment.
Gimp is a clone of Photoshop & co.
Samba is a free implementation of Windows file sharing.
etc. etc. etc.
Did the free software community invent peer to peer file sharing, instant messaging, EAI, ERP, or Java? No. And every time a proprietary technology like that comes along, the free software community has to devote large amounts of resources to implementing a compatible version.
Where's the "killer app" for free software? Where is the project that makes free software drive the market instead of the other way around? There are possibly a few things out there (Beowulf?), but not nearly enough. The ones that are really driving it are just using free software as a base (e.g., TiVO).
There are many off the shelf products to do this. Among them:
o Tier 3 storage platforms from vendors like NetApp and others. You can use a NetApp R100 as near line storeage for backup.
o Techniques such as BCV or snapshot for backup. You can leave the 3rd mirror broken all day and use it for fast restore that day if necessary (or for remounting as a reporting database or for copying production data to test, or, or, or)
I certainly wouldn't roll my own. Tapes aren't going away. There will always be a need for archival and secure off site backups. But doing short term backups to disk (or staging backups to disk) is become a fairly common solution to dealing with today's larger data volumes and smaller backup windows.
Your credit actually seems to have a lot to do with a lot of things. Poor credit is correllated with a lot of things. For example, those with poor credit are more likely to have auto accidents and file claims. In fact, one insurance company I know had studies indicating that credit history was the most important predictor of future auto claims - even moreso that prior auto claims. Amazing.
This makes a certain amount of sense. While many people do end up in credit trouble through no fault of their own (catastrophic medical bills, job loss, etc), very often people who end up with poor credit do so because they are unable to properly manage their fiances. Perhaps this indicates they are also irresponsible in other areas of their life.
The US did not degrade the GPS signal during the Afghanistan conflict. With emergency services such as cellular E-911 relying on accurate GPS, I think it's unlikely the US would likely degrade the signal. (Now watch them turn it down 30 seconds after I post this....) Keep in mind, even with Galileo, the US military would doubtless jam the signal if they felt their battlefield superiority was threatened.
At any rate, there's a lot of good Galileo information on the web. Here are some links:
These links are from a file I have of info on Galileo. Hopefully no link rot.
Gimme a break. The Galileo system was conceived and designed as a "euro-prestige" project. Even if the US military decides to degrade GPS today (which nobody from the US military has said that they are going to do - at least not that I've heard), they are launching many more satellites with civilian only circuits which in the future will provide a separate signal from the military one. Galileo is transparently designed to as a duplicate to the US system to demonstrate EU technical competence and as a prop to their space industry. Loyloa de Palacio, EU Transport Commissioner, said, "Europe wishes to be present on the international scene ... in all aspects of cutting-edge technologies." This is hardly the only project in which the euro-govt's are spending big to try to duplicate already existing US tech. The A400M military transport is another example.
There is still an annual CBBS get together in Chicago every year. A number of the folks from those days still drop in on newsgroups like chi.general and chi.internet.
Randy is still around. He runs a CBBS successor called Chinet www.chinet.com.
BTW: Ward is also the fellow who invented XMODEM
The bottom line is that if you take someone's money - the government's, a corporation's, a foundation's, etc - you are implicitly or explicitly agreeing to the strings attached. Seldom is there a "free lunch". If there is money being offered, there is usually a reason why. I'm not entitled to have free money come raining down on me. Why should a wealthy institution like MIT? They know the game.
If I offer the FSF a $20,000 grant to develop a "Foo" software package for me, provided they design it how I want, the FSF is certainly free to turn that money down and do their own thing (or do without a Foo package). But that doesn't make me an evil man for asking the FSF to write a program that meets my needs if I give them a donation to do so. Similarly for the government.
Microsoft is not the only one working on a filesystem that does (if I read the article right) what Yukon does. Vendors like Oracle are already doing something similar today. They realize that most content today exists as "unstructured" data (ie., not columns in relational database tables). They are enhancing their software to more easily handle unstructured data through the database. I actually think this can be a good thing: databases already can manage very huge amounts of data across multiple physical stores. This extends the concept to unstructure files. You can run SQL like operations against it, use enhanced indexing and search techniques, export the content easily using the built-in database access tools (WebDAV views and the like), etc. You get robust role based security, excellent logging/monitoring (which some people might think is a bad thing).
I'll use Oracle as an example because I'm more familiar with it. When you store things like PowerPoints and the like into Oracle, through their products like InterMedia you can automatically do things like search for content insides of these "opaque" files (not just look for file names in a filesystem directory), automate metadata generation (e.g., width/heigh/color depth, etc for images), transcode from one format to another, etc. At this point, most of the capabilities I've seen are "toolkit" oriented. That is, they enable developers to build apps that take advantage of them but aren't necessarily suitable for use directly by end users. I believe all of oracle.com is managed in this way, so check it out.
If Yukon is basically doing a similar thing in extending SQL Server to support unstructured content well, this could very much be a good thing in terms of functionality.
Also, don't be so quick to dismiss MS's security talk as just another way to take over the world. Obviously, these guys are very focused on market success and very focused on competition with GNU/Linux and free software. But they understand that in general security flaws have been a huge achilles heel for their products and they are doing a number of things top to bottom throughout their development process to really wring out security bugs and make more robust software. I can't reveal what most of this is due to non-disclosure, but from what I've seen MS are treating security very seriously and are focusing on the "security gap" in the same way they've focused on competitor functionality in the past.
It has been known for years that methane hydrates on the ocean floor might provide more energy than conventional fossil fuels. There's an interesting article on them from the US Geological Survey here
The fact is that the earth contains virtually unlimited supplies of energy that can be tapped into by man. And that is apart from the truly huge reservoir of nuclear power we can tap into. There is no energy shortage - not even an oil shortage - on this planet.
I've seen calculations that indicate it would have been feasible to use water to cool the metal to the point where it would not have plasticized. Evaporation of water is enormously efficient as a cooling system. Among other reasons - as the NYT article points out - most of the highly combustible jet fuel was consumed very rapidly and we would be dealing with ordinary fires. Obviously the current sprinkler designs were not adequate to the task. With the narrowly spaced supporting columns on the exterior of the building, however, it should have been feasible to have large numbers of stand pipes parallelling the beams that would continue to be available for water supply in the event of an impact. Obviously at the time no one would have reasonalbly thought that would have been necessary. In the future, who knows? Asbestos fireproofing certainly would have helped as well.
The purpose of the sprinkler system in this case would not be to put out the fire, but to eliminate heat. The heat channeled into heating the water and converting it into steam would not have been availble to heat the steal beams. It's a matter of water as a cooling system, not a fire suppressant.
Here is an overview of the various flavors of content management:
1. Content Management. A generic term for managing various types of content. It includes a system for managing digital content files (and perhaps offline content as well) along with metadata that describes the content. Usually workflow and security are included.
2. Document Management. Content management focused on text documents, office automation documents, and scanned images. These tend to be very workflow oriented.
3. Web Content Management. Obviously web focused content management that is oriented towards the web publishing process. Includes some workflow and usually publishing templates and perhaps a mechanism for actually publishing the content to the web server.
4. Digital Asset Management. Focused on being an archive or digital library that other systems such as web content management can draw on. The focus is on re-purposing of content. Often these system are rich media focused and include facilities for transcoding content from one format to another dynamically.
Hope this helps.