Re:I have searched this entire thread...
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1
You are excluding a greenhouse-gas-less technology that works NOW. Externalities, including waste management, amount to about a tenth of cost. Essentially, externalities have been to seen to be mostly paid for in advance through the elaborate safety systems in non-Soviet plants.
It isn't just that MS Outlook is specially vulnerable. It's that it's hard to think how one could even invent a better execution environment for viruses. None of this nasty assembly language stuff - it amounts to a high-level, rich scripting environment.
And MS does not make it easy to turn off sensibly. You couldn't turn it off in 95. Dunno about 2000 or XP, but in ME you can disable scripts, but at the price of Explorer putting up a dialog telling you that the page is rendered wrong and asking if you want to re-enable them. Ahem.
Does it really matter what happens to ICANN? It already has zero cred. It already has failed to do the positive things that were hoped for from it. It is also deeply questionable whether, if
ICANN issued a controversial order on a subject, whether Verisign or anybody else would pay much attention. E.g., it's questionable how much harm they could do.
I guess we did see ICANN's opinion seem to matter just yesterday. But that is because they have chosen to do nothing, and because the.za Namespace guy has built his own credibility in the local community.
So, does any of this actually matter?
As far as independence from the US gov't, I think that is a dead issue, too (yet another reason nobody trusts them). ICANN is increasingly a
creature of K Street.
From that POV, maybe legislation can't make things worse. I think Burns is probably trying to be helpful, but since it requires a serious inet-weenie to understand what a vital ICANN could do, one has to have low expectations here.
Consolidation is OK so long as individual users mostly have choices on an individual basis. Despite media consolidations, there is more real media choice today than ever.
Not long ago, I saw a talk on broadband connectivity here in Texas, especially with reference to rural communities; there are alot of mighty small and isolated communities here in this state. Surprisingly many had access to broadband. Communities of any size at all had access to actual choices - two of cable, DSL, or wireless. Communities which only had one of those did so only because of widespread satisfaction with the 'monopoly' provider. It seems reasonable to believe that competition will spring up if satisfaction thins with that provider.
And, of course, everybody has access to satellite, but it doesn't seem to be needed in surprisingly many places.
Here in Austin, we have monopoly cable companies, and we have DSL mostly provided by a single cable company. Two near-monopolies in terms of individual technologies, but they do compete. Their prices are competitive; they don't dare let their service departments go too far south; they are always running TV ads blasting each other.
And if it doesn't work out, we can always reregulate. No matter what people say about money and politics, democracy will not be suspended as a result of this decision.
I remember reading one of the CMM-related books, and thinking that following that model would leave me with about 5% of my time for simple programming and debugging activities. No studies had been done on which of the vast numbers of records kept was actually effective, now on how much time each such activity took, so there was no efficiency discipline at all.
Those of you using CMM, is that 5% estimate atall accurate?
The question that naturally sprung to my mind, then, was, if you have a problem needing 200 people to solve, wouldn't you be better off just hiring 10 programmers, breaking them into four small teams, and using a simpler software engineering model? (well, OK, 15 programmers; in small companies I spend about 2/3 of my time coding)
Has anybody watching this space been involved in both styles of project, and care to comment on contrasting experiences? Times spent, quality of resulting code, whatever?
Granted, there probably are project sizes for which the latter approach would not work. But one other interesting question: in those cases, is 1000:1 parallelism really achievable even in CMM-land? Or are you just making things worse by adding programmers ala Mythical Man-Month? Is there any project done by masses of programmers that wouldn't have been done better by less than a hundred?
Arguing the case on Windows, over the years, would the various Windowses have done better with under 100 programmers? Yes, Windows has vast functionality, but a tighter team would have meant less replication, and thus less work to go to Win 2k and XP.
You know, although many of the things Daisey says about Bezos are true, it's worth keeping the following thing in mind:
Jeff Bezos dreamed of the ultimate bookstore made available to us all, with effectively infinite stock, available to anybody anywhere in
the world with access to the Internet and to American dollars.
He made that dream really happen.
And hundreds of thousands? millions? of customers take advantage of it every year, many in places where the newsstand is otherwise it as far as access to books goes. Now that ultimate bookstore is in Lubbock, Texas, and Moscow and Liberia too.
Did people have to work and have suckyish jobs to make that happen? Yes, but probably fewer than would have had to spend Clerks-like shifts in zillions of bookstores to let people buy that many books pre-Web. Indeed, Daisey is disappointed because the hope left. What percentage of people answering phone banks are hopeful about their
current job even when they start? Maybe the job had a positive angle or two.
Was Bezos business plan cracked? Yes, no question. But the company is still in business, survived the crash unlike the truly questionable
companies.
Was Amazon the tulip of the 90s? No question. I'm sure it was not easy for those in the company to be the focus of such, er, irrational exuberance.
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You are excluding a greenhouse-gas-less technology that works NOW. Externalities, including waste management, amount to about a tenth of cost. Essentially, externalities have been to seen to be mostly paid for in advance through the elaborate safety systems in non-Soviet plants.
See
the huge ExternE study, (more here).
It isn't just that MS Outlook is specially vulnerable. It's that it's
hard to think how one could even invent a better execution environment
for viruses. None of this nasty assembly language stuff - it amounts
to a high-level, rich scripting environment.
And MS does not make it easy to turn off sensibly. You couldn't turn
it off in 95. Dunno about 2000 or XP, but in ME you can disable
scripts, but at the price of Explorer putting up a dialog telling you
that the page is rendered wrong and asking if you want to re-enable them.
Ahem.
Does it really matter what happens to ICANN? It already has zero cred. It already has failed to do the positive things that were hoped for from it. It is also deeply questionable whether, if ICANN issued a controversial order on a subject, whether Verisign or anybody else would pay much attention. E.g., it's questionable how much harm they could do.
I guess we did see ICANN's opinion seem to matter just yesterday. But that is because they have chosen to do nothing, and because the .za Namespace guy has built his own credibility in the local community.
So, does any of this actually matter?
As far as independence from the US gov't, I think that is a dead issue, too (yet another reason nobody trusts them). ICANN is increasingly a creature of K Street.
From that POV, maybe legislation can't make things worse. I think Burns is probably trying to be helpful, but since it requires a serious inet-weenie to understand what a vital ICANN could do, one has to have low expectations here.
Consolidation is OK so long as individual users mostly have choices on an individual basis. Despite media consolidations, there is more real
media choice today than ever.
Not long ago, I saw a talk on broadband connectivity here in Texas, especially with reference to rural communities; there are alot
of mighty small and isolated communities here in this state. Surprisingly many had access to broadband. Communities of any size at all had access to actual choices - two of cable, DSL, or wireless. Communities which only had one of those did so only because of widespread satisfaction with the 'monopoly' provider. It seems reasonable to believe that competition will spring up if satisfaction thins with that provider.
And, of course, everybody has access to satellite, but it doesn't seem to be needed in surprisingly many places.
Here in Austin, we have monopoly cable companies, and we have DSL mostly provided by a single cable company. Two near-monopolies in terms of individual technologies, but they do compete. Their prices are competitive; they don't dare let their service departments go too far south; they are always running TV ads blasting each other.
And if it doesn't work out, we can always reregulate. No matter what people say about money and politics, democracy will not be suspended
as a result of this decision.
I remember reading one of the CMM-related books, and thinking that following that model would leave me with about 5% of my time for simple programming and debugging activities. No studies had been done on which of the vast numbers of records kept was actually effective, now on how much time each such activity took, so there was no efficiency discipline at all.
Those of you using CMM, is that 5% estimate atall accurate?
The question that naturally sprung to my mind, then, was, if you have a problem needing 200 people to solve, wouldn't you be better off just hiring 10 programmers, breaking them into four small teams, and using a simpler software engineering model? (well, OK, 15 programmers; in small companies I spend about 2/3 of my time coding)
Has anybody watching this space been involved in both styles of project, and care to comment on contrasting experiences? Times spent, quality of resulting code, whatever?
Granted, there probably are project sizes for which the latter approach would not work. But one other interesting question: in those cases, is 1000:1 parallelism really achievable even in CMM-land? Or are you just making things worse by adding programmers ala Mythical Man-Month? Is there any project done by masses of programmers that wouldn't have been done better by less than a hundred?
Arguing the case on Windows, over the years, would the various Windowses have done better with under 100 programmers? Yes, Windows has vast functionality, but a tighter team would have meant less replication, and thus less work to go to Win 2k and XP.
You know, although many of the things Daisey says about Bezos are true, it's worth keeping the following thing in mind:
Jeff Bezos dreamed of the ultimate bookstore made available to us all, with effectively infinite stock, available to anybody anywhere in the world with access to the Internet and to American dollars. He made that dream really happen. And hundreds of thousands? millions? of customers take advantage of it every year, many in places where the newsstand is otherwise it as far as access to books goes. Now that ultimate bookstore is in Lubbock, Texas, and Moscow and Liberia too.
Did people have to work and have suckyish jobs to make that happen? Yes, but probably fewer than would have had to spend Clerks-like shifts in zillions of bookstores to let people buy that many books pre-Web. Indeed, Daisey is disappointed because the hope left. What percentage of people answering phone banks are hopeful about their current job even when they start? Maybe the job had a positive angle or two.
Was Bezos business plan cracked? Yes, no question. But the company is still in business, survived the crash unlike the truly questionable companies.
Was Amazon the tulip of the 90s? No question. I'm sure it was not easy for those in the company to be the focus of such, er, irrational exuberance.