There are, in fact, two models of business. In one model, a company generates profits to execute business. In the other, the company executes business to generate profits. The owners of the company choose which model they follow.
For example, many of the best book publishers from the first half of the last century made money to execute business. Victor Gollancz published the Lord Peter Wimsey books to make the money with which he underwrote his Left Book Club. In this country, Random House and Scribners were publishers that used the profits from their bestsellers to underwrite books that they wanted to published - some of which have become the classics of our literature. Nowadays, of course, those once-superb houses have all been gobbled up by corporations, and it's all astrology, diets, and self-help.
Obviously, it's easier for a privately held company to re-invest its profits in doing work that the owners feel should be done; but it's not impossible for a corporation to have a conscience - or a sliver of a conscience, in any case. The much-maligned automakers, I think, do have a commitment to building high-quality vehicles, however, bad they are at it; if they didn't, they would get out of the business altogether. And there are others as well. Perhaps fewer now than there once were; but they're there.
As for Microsoft, I find it hard to believe that its management gives a rat's ass about software; if they did, they wouldn't ship the crap that they do. But I'm not a billionaire, so what the hell do I know?
I've been working in the industry for more than 20 years - first as a documentor/tech writer, then as a coder. I have five kids, three grown and gone, one teenager, and a six-year-old (one of the sins of my old age). I've worked in not-for-profits, for the government, for service providers, and software companies. Two pieces of advice:
- Try and work for someone who has kids himself. He or she will understand when emergencies arise, as they will.
- Set aside a time every day that you spend with the kids. It can be breakfast, or dinner, or the 11-o'clock-news. But set it, and make it happen.
- And one more: Extreme programming, among its many other virtues, helps programmers to Have A Life. Look for a place that at least pays lip service to it.
That child that is in your wife's belly now will leaving for college in the blink of an eye. When that day comes, you'll wish you had been around more. And if the singles in your company complain about your occasional absenses, remind them that the kid your rearing will be paying them their Social Security benefits.
Philip Jose Farmer's novel "Jesus on Mars", in addition to having one of the coolest titles I've ever seen, is based on just that premise: What if an alien race were converted to Christianity? Only in Farmer's novel, they've converted to a Christianity that doesn't exist today - that is, Christianity as it would have been had it remained a sect of Judaism. Well worth reading.
Br. Consolmagno didn't say we can't communicate with dolphins; he said we can't talk with them. Clearly, we can communicate with them, as anyone who's seen a dolphin show can testify. What we can't do is talk - that is, move the communication beyond the "do this and I'll feed you" stage. God knows, it's hard enough for tribes of humans to talk, for lack of a common frame of reference; it's possible that evolution in an alien environment will think in ways that we will find impossible to fathom - and vice versa.
Somewhat off topic, Br. Guy's book, "Turn Left at Orion" is the best primer on observing the sky that I've read. I'll be giving a copy to my niece for her graduation from grammar school.
Fine. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't. Big deal. The fact is that that's how he built MS-DOS. All of us who had to struggle with extended and expanded memory - not to mention those bloody memory models (tiny, small, compact, medium, large, huge) that MS-DOS's 16-bit architecture kept alive for ten long years after Intel released its 32-bit processor - we paid the price for Gates' short-sightedness.
But that's how it is with a monopoly: one man screws up, and everybody suffers.
And the helpless customers have to fork over the $$$ for each release, just to get fixes for the bugs that should never have been there in the first place.
The notion that the public is somehow unaware of Microsoft's failings is nonsense. They are aware of it every time they see the BSD. They're aware of it every time they pay for overpriced, bloated software. They're aware of it when their screen is flooded with pop-up ads that they can't block. They're aware of it when their mailboxes are flooded with virus-generated mail. They know it everytime their desktop is hacked or corrupted due to yet another security hole in Windows. Don't kid yourselves: the great mass of users out there know they're being screwed.
The reason they stick with Microsoft is that they have no choice. That's the power of a monopoly. They have no choice because the software they need in their work doesn't run on anything else. They have no choice because their employers have mandated that they use Microsoft software. Their employers have no choice because there is very little in the information industry that doesn't in some way involve Microsoft - and once MS software gets a foothold in a business, it metastasizes into every part of the company.
No, Cringley is right: all we can do is hunker down and way for Microsoft to make a fatal error. It won't be for some years - I think Cringley is far too optimistic in saying that it will come within a decade. In the meantime, we who believe in software freedom will have to build our virtual monasteries and wait for dark times to pass. (Yeah, maybe I'm being too apocolyptic, but it's been that kind of day.)
In my humble experience, music is an excellent way to give a gifted kid a really difficult challenge, and to get him/her involved socially. It takes determination and hard work to learn to play well; and playing in band or ensemble will teach teamwork and helping others to excel so that the group thrives. And playing or singing in ensemble is one of life's great pleasures.
Of course, if the kid hates music or has a tin ear, there's always karate.
I'm 51, probably a lot older than most/. readers. I've worked as a calligrapher, mailman, gravedigger, copy editor, technical writer, stock boy, lifeguard, mechanic. I've worked with the federal government, the Illinois State government, and the government of Cook County. I've cleaned toilets in women's rest rooms and been a clerk/typist at Cook County Juvenile Court (one circle of Hell I hope never to revisit). I've been a research assistant in an ophthalmologic research center, and written audiovisual scripts for drug companies, and operated a mag-card machine in a typing pool. And no, I am not making any of this up.
I got into IT 20 years ago, back when a guy with some smarts and some good work habits could pick up K&R, learn it, and get a job. Having sampled something of the broader working work, I must say that I love IT. I'm with a small company where I get to code nearly all day long, there's minimal political bullshit, and the pay and bennies are excellent. Writing good code is so much more challenging and fun than cleaning toilets or digging graves, you have no idea!
In my best of all possible worlds, I would make my living as a musician. But that is not to be: lack of opportunity, and (to be truthful) lack of talent stand in the way. But for me, IT is a damn good second best. Take it from me, that greener grass you see out there probably is astroturf.
I'm 51, but unlike Derrith, I had the good fortune to have teachers in grammar school who taught us the intricasies of English grammar. One in particular, Mother Mary Henry (R.I.P) was a gifted teacher who actually made grammar enjoyable. So when I later studied Latin and German, I already had the blueprint in my head - for Indo-European languages, at any rate.
It is a shame that this knowledge is denied to our young people. Standard English is as close to a universal language as the world has ever known; if one can use it within its rules, one can be understood by people around the world. Pace Steven Pinker, but learning "the rules" can be liberating, not oppressive.
Like many posting here, I would dance around the flames if Microsoft were to crash and burn. That being said, the money that Gates has contributed to research for a malaria vaccine - probably the world's most pressing health problem, and one that is shamefully underfunded by our government - could potentially save the lives of millions. And the money he's donated to charter schools across the country (including the one at which my brother teaches) is offering real educational opportunity to many poor kids who otherwise would be stuck in shitty public schools.
No, if a withered narcissist like Mick Jagger can be knighted, Gates certainly deserves the honor. It's a shame, though, that the British are honoring him when, frankly, he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It galls me to write this, but it's the truth.
Some U.S. citizens have already been knighted without anyone complaining. The most recently citizen to be knighted, to my knowledge, was Rudy Giuliani.
Any technology that promises 90 miles to the gallon (if I'm doing my conversion from klicks to miles correctly) is worth pursuing. Regardless of how the hydrocarbons are disposed of, such a huge increase in mileage will lower the total amount of greenhouse gasses pumped into the atmosphere.
Another advantage is that it works off of less refined fuels, like jet fuel (i.e., kerosene) and diesel, instead of high-octane gasoline; these fuels are cheaper than gas, more abundant, and a lot safer to handle.
And yes, lowering the amount of oil that we have to import from troubled regions like the Middle East is definitely for the good.
Your list of upcoming missions left out the most exciting of all: The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. It will be entering Saturnian orbit in 165 days; next year, it will be dropping the Huygens probe into the atmosphere of Titan. This is very cool stuff coming up this July. Here's the home page for details: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
As long as we're talking about mothers, Grace Murray Hopper was born on December 9. The centenary of her birth will be in three years: mark your calendars.
My first machine was a Kaypro II: 2MHz Z-80, 64 KBytes of RAM, two single-sided, double-density floppy drives holding a total of nearly two thirds of a megabyte of data, serial and parallel ports - and, most important, bundled software. I made a lot of money with that thing, as a technical writer. Call me crazy, but I liked Perfect Writer!
I also have a Kaypro 10, which was given to me by a friend. The thing still works (as does the Kaypro II), and I have it in my office at work, where I use it to help teach the kids about the history of our profession.
More than 20 years ago, AT&T sued Mark Williams Co., the publisher of the Coherent operating system (a commercial clone of UNIX) for copyright infringement. The suit was dropped when MWC showed (and Dennis Ritchie himself verified) that although Coherent replicated the functionality of UNIX as described in the System 7 documentation, it had an independent code base. This was proved both by examination of the source code, and by the fact that the Coherent kernel did not replicate several undocumented UNIX bugs (and, of course, had a number of bugs of its own that UNIX did not have).
The Coherent episode suggests one approach to disproving the SCO case: if undocumented SCO/UNIX bugs (or features) are missing from Linux, that strongly suggests that the Linux code was not copied from UNIX. Documenting subtle differences in behavior between the two kernels could put the final nail into SCO's coffin.
If SCO thinks that it somehow has a copyright on the intellectual content of the code (e.g., that only it can publish a macro called "isdigit()"), well, AT&T long ago chose not to assert that claim.
The Narnia books have some wonderful writing in them, but the allegory is pretty heavy-handed. Also, Lewis's jumbled mythology - fawns and satyrs alongside Father Christmas and Norse frost giants - just doesn't work; and the children are weak protagonists. Also, the scriptwriters will have their hands full with the children's dialogue: either they can be true to the originals' pre-WWI public-school slang and confuse many of the American viewers; or they can update it and risk the wrath the books' fans. Not an easy problem.
I would much rather see Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet adapted to film. Weda could do marvelous work imagining the space voyage and the inhabitants of Lewis's Mars. The hero, Dr. Ransom, who was modelled after Tolkien himself, is much more interesting than anyone in the Narnia books, including Aslan. It would be another great role for Ian McKellan; or if you think McKellan is too old, perhaps Alan Rickman. Just my $0.02 worth.
Sposky writes, "Raymond all too frequently falls into the trap of disparaging the values of other cultures without considering where they came from. It's rather rare to find such bigotry among Windows programmers, who are, on the whole, olution-oriented and non-ideological."
Au contraire, Mr. Sposky, most Windows people I deal with are ignorant of anything that doesn't come from Redmond, and not willing to learn. God knows I've meant plenty of UNIX bigots, but at least they know something about Windows - they have to, there's no avoiding it. The same is not true about Windows bigots: they combine their parochialism with a triumphalism that is as infuriating as it is unmerited.
One other aspect of the two cultures that Mr. Sposky doesn't discuss but is worth bringing up: UNIX bigots are not trying to shoulder Windows out of the marketplace - we couldn't, even if we tried. The Windows culture, however - or its corporate sponsor - is in fact trying actively to extinguish all competition. This is open-mindedness? Give me a break.
Don't forget that VoIP has a huge price advantage over "plain old telephone service": it's immune to local excise taxes. Take a look at your phone bill some time and you'll see how much of it goes to your local municipality: those are dollars that can be split between the customer and the carrier.
I'm curious to see what alliances will be formed: local governments and the phone company on the same side for once, against cable providers and possibly the FCC. It could be a real dog fight.
So, Gates has gotten religion, and decided to open up his proprietary file formats because... why? Beats me, but somehow I don't think it's going to add up to anything good for the non-Microsoft portion of our industry. Call me paranoid if you like: but there's a hook in that bait somewhere, and I for one am in no hurry to bite!
Since it hasn't been mentioned before, Clifford Stoll's paper "Stalking the Wily Hacker" (CACM 1988:31:484-497) is a classic that should be included in any list of influential papers.
That being said, here's a question: has anyone published an anthology of classic CS papers? I'd love to have in one volume examples of the classic work by Von Neumann, Turing, Ritchie, and the rest of the gang. Has such an anthology been published? If so, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
I live in Chicago, which has been a one party state for the Democrats since the 1930s. For many years, we used mechanical voting machines, which tallied votes using an analog tallying system. The voting machines had no paper trail either - which made it mighty easy for the presidential election of 1960 to be "nudged" in the direction that Mr. Vidal no doubt favored. And even with paper, there's plenty of hanky panky that a clever precinct captain can perform on a ballot: you'd be amazed how quickly an election can be turned by a guy who knows how to use a sharpened bicycle spoke to "edit" a handful of punch ballots.
My point is that the absence of a paper trail is not a new problem. The real problem with electronic balloting is the fact that the ballots can be hacked remotely - a fact that we will realize only when wake up one day and find that a 14-year-old punk hacker nobody ever heard of has just been elected president.
Word and Excel files are a medium of information interchange. People upgrade to the latest version of Office not for Microsoft's dancing-paperclip technology, but so they can read files written by the latest version of Office.
Consider: You're in Mega Corporation and you're running Office 97. One day, the guys running XP with the latest Office pre-installed start sending you Word and Excel files. It doesn't matter that these documents use none of the new Office features, and may even use the same file format: your Office 97 doesn't recognize them, and you can't do your work any more. So, you shell out for the newest Office. And then, of course, everyone you send your documents to has to upgrade as well.
God, what a racket! Why anyone in his right mind does business with MS is beyond me: you wind up so screwed.
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For example, many of the best book publishers from the first half of the last century made money to execute business. Victor Gollancz published the Lord Peter Wimsey books to make the money with which he underwrote his Left Book Club. In this country, Random House and Scribners were publishers that used the profits from their bestsellers to underwrite books that they wanted to published - some of which have become the classics of our literature. Nowadays, of course, those once-superb houses have all been gobbled up by corporations, and it's all astrology, diets, and self-help.
Obviously, it's easier for a privately held company to re-invest its profits in doing work that the owners feel should be done; but it's not impossible for a corporation to have a conscience - or a sliver of a conscience, in any case. The much-maligned automakers, I think, do have a commitment to building high-quality vehicles, however, bad they are at it; if they didn't, they would get out of the business altogether. And there are others as well. Perhaps fewer now than there once were; but they're there.
As for Microsoft, I find it hard to believe that its management gives a rat's ass about software; if they did, they wouldn't ship the crap that they do. But I'm not a billionaire, so what the hell do I know?
- Try and work for someone who has kids himself. He or she will understand when emergencies arise, as they will.
- Set aside a time every day that you spend with the kids. It can be breakfast, or dinner, or the 11-o'clock-news. But set it, and make it happen.
- And one more: Extreme programming, among its many other virtues, helps programmers to Have A Life. Look for a place that at least pays lip service to it.
That child that is in your wife's belly now will leaving for college in the blink of an eye. When that day comes, you'll wish you had been around more. And if the singles in your company complain about your occasional absenses, remind them that the kid your rearing will be paying them their Social Security benefits.
Philip Jose Farmer's novel "Jesus on Mars", in addition to having one of the coolest titles I've ever seen, is based on just that premise: What if an alien race were converted to Christianity? Only in Farmer's novel, they've converted to a Christianity that doesn't exist today - that is, Christianity as it would have been had it remained a sect of Judaism. Well worth reading.
Somewhat off topic, Br. Guy's book, "Turn Left at Orion" is the best primer on observing the sky that I've read. I'll be giving a copy to my niece for her graduation from grammar school.
But that's how it is with a monopoly: one man screws up, and everybody suffers.
God, I love Microsoft!
The reason they stick with Microsoft is that they have no choice. That's the power of a monopoly. They have no choice because the software they need in their work doesn't run on anything else. They have no choice because their employers have mandated that they use Microsoft software. Their employers have no choice because there is very little in the information industry that doesn't in some way involve Microsoft - and once MS software gets a foothold in a business, it metastasizes into every part of the company.
No, Cringley is right: all we can do is hunker down and way for Microsoft to make a fatal error. It won't be for some years - I think Cringley is far too optimistic in saying that it will come within a decade. In the meantime, we who believe in software freedom will have to build our virtual monasteries and wait for dark times to pass. (Yeah, maybe I'm being too apocolyptic, but it's been that kind of day.)
Here in Cook County, Illinois, it happens all the time - if by "voters" one means only the living.
Of course, if the kid hates music or has a tin ear, there's always karate.
I got into IT 20 years ago, back when a guy with some smarts and some good work habits could pick up K&R, learn it, and get a job. Having sampled something of the broader working work, I must say that I love IT. I'm with a small company where I get to code nearly all day long, there's minimal political bullshit, and the pay and bennies are excellent. Writing good code is so much more challenging and fun than cleaning toilets or digging graves, you have no idea!
In my best of all possible worlds, I would make my living as a musician. But that is not to be: lack of opportunity, and (to be truthful) lack of talent stand in the way. But for me, IT is a damn good second best. Take it from me, that greener grass you see out there probably is astroturf.
It is a shame that this knowledge is denied to our young people. Standard English is as close to a universal language as the world has ever known; if one can use it within its rules, one can be understood by people around the world. Pace Steven Pinker, but learning "the rules" can be liberating, not oppressive.
No, if a withered narcissist like Mick Jagger can be knighted, Gates certainly deserves the honor. It's a shame, though, that the British are honoring him when, frankly, he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It galls me to write this, but it's the truth.
Some U.S. citizens have already been knighted without anyone complaining. The most recently citizen to be knighted, to my knowledge, was Rudy Giuliani.
Another advantage is that it works off of less refined fuels, like jet fuel (i.e., kerosene) and diesel, instead of high-octane gasoline; these fuels are cheaper than gas, more abundant, and a lot safer to handle.
And yes, lowering the amount of oil that we have to import from troubled regions like the Middle East is definitely for the good.
Your list of upcoming missions left out the most exciting of all: The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. It will be entering Saturnian orbit in 165 days; next year, it will be dropping the Huygens probe into the atmosphere of Titan. This is very cool stuff coming up this July. Here's the home page for details: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
As long as we're talking about mothers, Grace Murray Hopper was born on December 9. The centenary of her birth will be in three years: mark your calendars.
I also have a Kaypro 10, which was given to me by a friend. The thing still works (as does the Kaypro II), and I have it in my office at work, where I use it to help teach the kids about the history of our profession.
The Coherent episode suggests one approach to disproving the SCO case: if undocumented SCO/UNIX bugs (or features) are missing from Linux, that strongly suggests that the Linux code was not copied from UNIX. Documenting subtle differences in behavior between the two kernels could put the final nail into SCO's coffin.
If SCO thinks that it somehow has a copyright on the intellectual content of the code (e.g., that only it can publish a macro called "isdigit()"), well, AT&T long ago chose not to assert that claim.
I would much rather see Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet adapted to film. Weda could do marvelous work imagining the space voyage and the inhabitants of Lewis's Mars. The hero, Dr. Ransom, who was modelled after Tolkien himself, is much more interesting than anyone in the Narnia books, including Aslan. It would be another great role for Ian McKellan; or if you think McKellan is too old, perhaps Alan Rickman. Just my $0.02 worth.
Au contraire, Mr. Sposky, most Windows people I deal with are ignorant of anything that doesn't come from Redmond, and not willing to learn. God knows I've meant plenty of UNIX bigots, but at least they know something about Windows - they have to, there's no avoiding it. The same is not true about Windows bigots: they combine their parochialism with a triumphalism that is as infuriating as it is unmerited.
One other aspect of the two cultures that Mr. Sposky doesn't discuss but is worth bringing up: UNIX bigots are not trying to shoulder Windows out of the marketplace - we couldn't, even if we tried. The Windows culture, however - or its corporate sponsor - is in fact trying actively to extinguish all competition. This is open-mindedness? Give me a break.
I'm curious to see what alliances will be formed: local governments and the phone company on the same side for once, against cable providers and possibly the FCC. It could be a real dog fight.
So, Gates has gotten religion, and decided to open up his proprietary file formats because ... why? Beats me, but somehow I don't think it's going to add up to anything good for the non-Microsoft portion of our industry. Call me paranoid if you like: but there's a hook in that bait somewhere, and I for one am in no hurry to bite!
That being said, here's a question: has anyone published an anthology of classic CS papers? I'd love to have in one volume examples of the classic work by Von Neumann, Turing, Ritchie, and the rest of the gang. Has such an anthology been published? If so, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
My point is that the absence of a paper trail is not a new problem. The real problem with electronic balloting is the fact that the ballots can be hacked remotely - a fact that we will realize only when wake up one day and find that a 14-year-old punk hacker nobody ever heard of has just been elected president.
Consider: You're in Mega Corporation and you're running Office 97. One day, the guys running XP with the latest Office pre-installed start sending you Word and Excel files. It doesn't matter that these documents use none of the new Office features, and may even use the same file format: your Office 97 doesn't recognize them, and you can't do your work any more. So, you shell out for the newest Office. And then, of course, everyone you send your documents to has to upgrade as well.
God, what a racket! Why anyone in his right mind does business with MS is beyond me: you wind up so screwed.