All parties agree to accept a given digital gesture as a valid signature;
The entire text of the agreement that was digitally executed be preserved in verifiable original form; and
The original executed document can be reproduced on any signer's request in a reasonable amount of time.
In practice, the form of the signature is the least onerous requirement. A simple "I AGREE" button is as legally valid with or without a sophisticated PKI signature, e.g., from VeriSign or Thawte. Entities that want to offer legally binding digital agreements spend much more time focusing on the storage and retrieval requirements.
Gibson's digital pickup technology is interesting, and perhaps even promising given that electromagnetic pickup technology hasn't really changed in fifty years.
Damn people, be creative...for people who are really pushing the envelope,...this has the potential to be huge.
OK, but since when have creative geniuses been in danger of getting caught sitting on their hands waiting for technology to arrive so they could make art for the rest of us? One of the hallmarks of great players is that they "push the envelope" by transcending the available technology in pursuit of the music in their minds' ears. Hendrix didn't learn about the whammy bar in the Fender booth at the NAMM show. Santana didn't begin using distortion when he got his first Mesa Boogie.
I used to play guitar for a living, and for a while was a national clinician for Ovation, performing on their acoustic/electrics with integrated hexaphonic pickups, MIDI controllers, and synthesizers--a decade ago. I also used computer sequencers extensively to write music, score videos, etc. My experience with digital controllers, synthesizers and computers in composition and performance is that these tools are powerful, fun to use, but extremely difficult to transcend for serious creative work. The proliferation of these technologies has brought popular music to a state where much of it sounds the same, a natural result of musicians tending to use the same samples, synth patches, sequencing and editing systems, pitch quantizers, and amplifier simulators.
As a guitarist, you make a conscious choice as to how much of your "sound" you wish to be dependent upon your rig. You may be a wonderful player, but if you're using a digital delay, amp simulator and a PA system, probably almost any guitarist will sound a lot like you if he picks up your axe on the bandstand. I now play (almost exclusively) a nylon-string classical acoustic guitar, usually unamplified. The sound it makes when I play is completely mine, the result of twenty-five years playing the instrument, not available in a box. Other people playing my guitar sound like they are playing a different guitar.
The number of guitarists I know who have hours out of the day to learn the nuances of digital audio so they can set up separate effects and EQ for each string is nonzero, but very, very small. Most of us would spend our time better by learning good right hand (pick and fingerstyle) technique, studying chord voicings, and transcribing McLaughlin's and Scofield's guitar solos.
IANAL, but by licensing a product that includes development tools, the use of which would cause the licensee to infringe a third party's patent, MS may have committed fraud in the inducement. Damages claimed for this type of fraud would not be constrained by limitation of liability provisions in the EULA, and beyond patent license costs could include business interruption damages, unamortized development costs, etc. In any event, with the tens of thousands of SQL Server licensees, eventually a court is going to find MS responsible for an end user's patent license expense to Timeline, and the window will open for the rest of the MS customers (pun intended). MS is going to end up holding a very large bag for this.
One can't help but note that this was a company that built the foundations for its empire on acquiring rights to the QDOS IP for a song and relicensing them to IBM. Poetic justice.
...the plain simple truth is: terrorism most likely will not affect you!
This is the type of comment that, given appropriate airtime, could really help George Bush, John Ashcroft, Don Rumsfeld, and Tom Ridge plan a beautiful future for this country. In fact, I bet they have a team out looking for examples of ridiculous statements like this one made against counterterrorism efforts, as material to use in debates when rational people challenge the equally polarized and ridiculous statements the Administration makes in support of its counterterrorism agenda.
The people affected by the 9/11 attack were much more diverse than those of us who worked in lower Manhattan and had our lives turned upside down for a few months afterward. If one counts those people who were affected by the U.S. equity markets being shut down for four days, airline travel interruptions that lasted for weeks, and telecommunications in and out of the northeast being disrupted for months, the circle is much, much larger. And this was one incident, of which there will certainly be more. Contrary to what misterhaan thinks, if you are an American citizen, terrorism will most likely affect you, eventually if it hasn't already.
All that being said, I don't believe stocking up on duct tape, developing comprehensive data surveillance systems, or banning model rockets are appropriate responses to the problem. But I support better airline and customs security, better immigration systems, and the Patriot Act, among other things, as necessary steps to avoid the type of lifestyle currently enjoyed in places like Israel and Afghanistan.
There seem to be two fundamental questions at the base of this discussion:
Is it appropriate for one IP application be regulated separate from others?
Should voice communications, regardless of their medium of transmission, be regulated similarly?
These are both interesting questions that could be the subject of learned/.'s, but I'm not sure that the discussion has practical significance, as this is one of many areas where regulation trails practice.
Telecom regulation is intended to protect customer pricing and access to service. However, competition among carriers has brought service offerings so far above the tariff standard that almost no one pays tariff rates (around $0.25/min for long distance) for service anymore.
VoIP is another force which will ultimately drive down the cost of service. And like it was with DSL, there are some new players who have managed to get out in front with offerings, but at the end of the day, it will mostly likely be the established carriers who will benefit from VoIP. There is just a tremendous advantage to owning the infrastructure (and customer base) which, over time, is very difficult for a competitive carrier to beat.
I'd have to believe that every large carrier has a long-term strategy of increasing the percentage of packet-switched traffic on its network relative to circuit-switched. The idea of exploding the applications for their existing cable and infrastructure is just too compelling to do otherwise. This migration is a megatrend, and IMO it's not likely that regulation is going to significantly speed it or slow it.
I am not familiar with that particular Covey book, but I agree wholeheartedly with the premise. The UI designer is considered a luxury on almost any development team except the largest or best-funded. Without a UI designer, the job of interface design usually goes to the developers themselves, and without specific direction or guidelines, they have a propensity to produce random and arbitrary interfaces that often are just thought through enough to show the code behind them works. Sometimes the client sees the results in beta, freaks out, and starts giving UI direction to QA, which makes matters much, much worse.
(BTW, I do not consider the people who work in ad agencies or web design shops by and large to be UI designers. Usually these people are graphic designers who have no background in software usability, but instead delight in creating pretty image buttons, rollover links and the like. Having one or more of these folks on the team has no correlation to producing usuable products.)
How can we improve our UIs if we can't afford to hire UI designers on the project team?
Educate the analysts, architects, developers and QAers on design for usability. There are two resources, classics in the field, that make great starting points. Although neither directly addresses software development, both books present a theory and logic system that can be readily applied to UI design. The first is Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things, which mostly addresses designing products that are manipulated with controls (of one kind or another). The second book is Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which covers designing information displays for maximum clarity. Tufte also gives seminars around the country where he gives an intro to his philosophy of design.
Establish UI standards in a document that can be referenced by your developers when creating interfaces. There are references by Apple and Microsoft which are good starting points, but your UI manual should cover material specific to the domain your team is working in. For instance, if you're a securities firm, you should standardize on how you represent security names, prices, and labeling of market data points (e.g., "52Hi" vs. "AH" vs. "YrHi", etc.).
Many development projects also neglect to spend sufficient time observing how the target users do their work. Even though there are lots of users whose work requires too much keyboard dexterity and accuracy to use a mouse, developers don't often account for keyboard shortcuts, hot keys, etc. I've seen a trader pick up a monitor and throw it because he couldn't use the program running on his computer fast enough to do his job. Not a good way to discover a hole in your requirements process.
The sets, costumes and especially music in this show are spot-on. They recreate the ambiance of the original series beautifully. I actually got a thrill when the teaser opened up. It's amazing all this could be accomplished in an indie production, seven years or no. It's in part a testament to the level of enablement provided by digital video technology.
However, IMO what Starship Exeter proves is that the true genius of the original Star Trek was in the writing. As great as the visuals and audio cues are in Exeter, the plot and dialog are dreadful. (Garrovick VO: "...the repairs to the damage caused by the Klingon attack is almost complete.") No amount of time or technology can invest the producers of a Star Trek knock-off with the creativity of a Heinlein or Ellison or Gerrold.
What's curious to me is that the story takes itself so seriously. It would have been easy to make a few small changes and have a very clever satire. Instead, their treatment leads one to conclude that they believe their screenplay, like the sets, costumes and music, is true to the nature of the original. It's sad that their fine attention to the series' other creative elements didn't apply to the writing.
Apple is a company with a history of taking some pretty lousy marketing and PR positions, going all the way back to the 1984 ad (and its follow-on campaigns) which represented corporate IT management as an evil empire that needed to be overthrown. A great way to appeal to the very people you expect to sign your orders.
Their decision not to participate in Macworld Boston can not be justified IMO by any of the reasons I've read in the threads here. I can't imagine many folks here in NYC getting bent out of shape about Apple joining Macworld in Boston, but if any of them are Mac users, they'd surely be more disappointed at having Apple staying away from the show. Maybe--only maybe--Apple would get less press in Boston than in New York, but not less than the zero press they'll get as a no-show in Boston. As to costs, certainly having a pavillion at the show isn't free for them, but for God's sake, a third-party organization is financing and managing a major trade exposition to stimulate interest in Apple's products. How much money would they have to spend to generate an equivalent level of buzz on their own?
As to whether they'd be better off concentrating their marketing on newbies who are switching from PCs, someone should remind Apple that they are in business today because of the loyal base of customers that stuck with them through the dark days of the mid-1990s. These are the same people who are going to ensure Apple will be in business five years from now. It's classic Apple hubris to pretend that they and their trade show don't matter.
Years ago, I used to be an IT director at a company with a Macintosh infrastructure. Macintosh zealots used to have a saying that "Apple is bad, Macintosh is good." Some things aparently don't change. I have a lot of respect for their products (even though I don't use them much anymore), but I'll never own Apple's stock again.
I am a former CIO for a US brokerage company. I doubt the firms cited in the CNET article intend to promote a single standard to make it easier for their security folks to block. I don't know aobut Canada, but here in the US, the technology guys don't get to overrule the business guys when the firm's revenue is on the line. At my previous company, the traders on the desk discovered IM long before the technologists had a strategy for it. By the time we figured out what was going on, sales traders were taking not-held orders by IM from their sell-side customers. Even though there was no immediate was to monitor it (this was before Communicator) and hence comply with SEC rule 17, there was also no way we could block it without losing business. The representatives of Merrill et al. that were cited in the article are in the same position. Standards will help them comply with SEC and NASD requirements for electronic communications review and retention, which also protect the firm in case a dispute arises over communications between a customer and a rep that happen over IM.
Lame is what it is, particularly since the target decision-maker for buying LivePerson can hardly be expected to be a SlashDot reader.
As someone who bought LivePerson for a retail financial services call center, my personal perspective is that LP (or any Internet customer service chat) has less to do reintroducing one-on-one communications between CSRs and customers than providing even greater operating economies between reps and customers than phone-based call centers.
In a phone-based call center, one rep talks to one customer at a time. In a LivePerson call center, one rep can talk to two or three or four customers at a time. That means it can take at least two or three or four times as long to get the same questions answered (before factoring in the lag time associated with typing the responses on a keyboard, etc.). The reason you add LP to your call center is because your marketing people want to advertise it, not because it will bring your customers closer to you or provide them better service. By the numbers, it won't.
There are Internet technologies that improve customer service. VoIP and screen sharing have the potential to revolutionize service by providing a richer customer/rep experience. But chat is a gimmick in most applications. Unless they have only one phone line, most Internet customers are better off calling for service rather than using chat.
It'd be great if lawyers gave black and white answers to questions like this, like you'd expect from to hear from a developer if you asked him what the memory requirements of his objects will be. Instead, in my experience, lawyers tend to think in terms of probabilities and downside, and give relative advice. In this case, the relevant dimensions are probably "Who is going to get sued?" and "What's on the line if he loses?" There is a big difference between the developer personally being sued, and your company being sued by the developer's former employer. In either case, however, the former employer will have to show some damage to his business. You and your developer can probably determine whether such damage would occur, and if you think it would, you'd want to steer clear. For instance, if your company is developing a streaming audio player and the developer's last job was with Real Networks, be careful. A suit could delay your product launch and cost your company plenty. If OTOH your company is developing a patient records system, and your developer used to work for a brokerage firm, you may not have much to worry about, since it's unlikely the former employer would spend money to sue without a business justification. If they did, your maximum downside would probably be to fire the developer.
One last point: Some firms have their developers sign paperwork when they are hired that states all work product created by the developer will be original in its nature, will not infringe patents or copyrights of any third party, and will be wholly owned by the employer. Although it won't prevent a suit from a former employer, having this type of agreement on file can demonstrate the new employer acted in good faith if he has to go to court.
Slashdot Mirror
- All parties agree to accept a given digital gesture as a valid signature;
- The entire text of the agreement that was digitally executed be preserved in verifiable original form; and
- The original executed document can be reproduced on any signer's request in a reasonable amount of time.
In practice, the form of the signature is the least onerous requirement. A simple "I AGREE" button is as legally valid with or without a sophisticated PKI signature, e.g., from VeriSign or Thawte. Entities that want to offer legally binding digital agreements spend much more time focusing on the storage and retrieval requirements.Damn people, be creative...for people who are really pushing the envelope,...this has the potential to be huge.
OK, but since when have creative geniuses been in danger of getting caught sitting on their hands waiting for technology to arrive so they could make art for the rest of us? One of the hallmarks of great players is that they "push the envelope" by transcending the available technology in pursuit of the music in their minds' ears. Hendrix didn't learn about the whammy bar in the Fender booth at the NAMM show. Santana didn't begin using distortion when he got his first Mesa Boogie.
I used to play guitar for a living, and for a while was a national clinician for Ovation, performing on their acoustic/electrics with integrated hexaphonic pickups, MIDI controllers, and synthesizers--a decade ago. I also used computer sequencers extensively to write music, score videos, etc. My experience with digital controllers, synthesizers and computers in composition and performance is that these tools are powerful, fun to use, but extremely difficult to transcend for serious creative work. The proliferation of these technologies has brought popular music to a state where much of it sounds the same, a natural result of musicians tending to use the same samples, synth patches, sequencing and editing systems, pitch quantizers, and amplifier simulators.
As a guitarist, you make a conscious choice as to how much of your "sound" you wish to be dependent upon your rig. You may be a wonderful player, but if you're using a digital delay, amp simulator and a PA system, probably almost any guitarist will sound a lot like you if he picks up your axe on the bandstand. I now play (almost exclusively) a nylon-string classical acoustic guitar, usually unamplified. The sound it makes when I play is completely mine, the result of twenty-five years playing the instrument, not available in a box. Other people playing my guitar sound like they are playing a different guitar.
The number of guitarists I know who have hours out of the day to learn the nuances of digital audio so they can set up separate effects and EQ for each string is nonzero, but very, very small. Most of us would spend our time better by learning good right hand (pick and fingerstyle) technique, studying chord voicings, and transcribing McLaughlin's and Scofield's guitar solos.
One can't help but note that this was a company that built the foundations for its empire on acquiring rights to the QDOS IP for a song and relicensing them to IBM. Poetic justice.
This is the type of comment that, given appropriate airtime, could really help George Bush, John Ashcroft, Don Rumsfeld, and Tom Ridge plan a beautiful future for this country. In fact, I bet they have a team out looking for examples of ridiculous statements like this one made against counterterrorism efforts, as material to use in debates when rational people challenge the equally polarized and ridiculous statements the Administration makes in support of its counterterrorism agenda.
The people affected by the 9/11 attack were much more diverse than those of us who worked in lower Manhattan and had our lives turned upside down for a few months afterward. If one counts those people who were affected by the U.S. equity markets being shut down for four days, airline travel interruptions that lasted for weeks, and telecommunications in and out of the northeast being disrupted for months, the circle is much, much larger. And this was one incident, of which there will certainly be more. Contrary to what misterhaan thinks, if you are an American citizen, terrorism will most likely affect you, eventually if it hasn't already.
All that being said, I don't believe stocking up on duct tape, developing comprehensive data surveillance systems, or banning model rockets are appropriate responses to the problem. But I support better airline and customs security, better immigration systems, and the Patriot Act, among other things, as necessary steps to avoid the type of lifestyle currently enjoyed in places like Israel and Afghanistan.
- Is it appropriate for one IP application be regulated separate from others?
- Should voice communications, regardless of their medium of transmission, be regulated similarly?
These are both interesting questions that could be the subject of learnedTelecom regulation is intended to protect customer pricing and access to service. However, competition among carriers has brought service offerings so far above the tariff standard that almost no one pays tariff rates (around $0.25/min for long distance) for service anymore.
VoIP is another force which will ultimately drive down the cost of service. And like it was with DSL, there are some new players who have managed to get out in front with offerings, but at the end of the day, it will mostly likely be the established carriers who will benefit from VoIP. There is just a tremendous advantage to owning the infrastructure (and customer base) which, over time, is very difficult for a competitive carrier to beat.
I'd have to believe that every large carrier has a long-term strategy of increasing the percentage of packet-switched traffic on its network relative to circuit-switched. The idea of exploding the applications for their existing cable and infrastructure is just too compelling to do otherwise. This migration is a megatrend, and IMO it's not likely that regulation is going to significantly speed it or slow it.
(BTW, I do not consider the people who work in ad agencies or web design shops by and large to be UI designers. Usually these people are graphic designers who have no background in software usability, but instead delight in creating pretty image buttons, rollover links and the like. Having one or more of these folks on the team has no correlation to producing usuable products.)
How can we improve our UIs if we can't afford to hire UI designers on the project team?
- Educate the analysts, architects, developers and QAers on design for usability. There are two resources, classics in the field, that make great starting points. Although neither directly addresses software development, both books present a theory and logic system that can be readily applied to UI design. The first is Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things, which mostly addresses designing products that are manipulated with controls (of one kind or another). The second book is Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which covers designing information displays for maximum clarity. Tufte also gives seminars around the country where he gives an intro to his philosophy of design.
- Establish UI standards in a document that can be referenced by your developers when creating interfaces. There are references by Apple and Microsoft which are good starting points, but your UI manual should cover material specific to the domain your team is working in. For instance, if you're a securities firm, you should standardize on how you represent security names, prices, and labeling of market data points (e.g., "52Hi" vs. "AH" vs. "YrHi", etc.).
Many development projects also neglect to spend sufficient time observing how the target users do their work. Even though there are lots of users whose work requires too much keyboard dexterity and accuracy to use a mouse, developers don't often account for keyboard shortcuts, hot keys, etc. I've seen a trader pick up a monitor and throw it because he couldn't use the program running on his computer fast enough to do his job. Not a good way to discover a hole in your requirements process.However, IMO what Starship Exeter proves is that the true genius of the original Star Trek was in the writing. As great as the visuals and audio cues are in Exeter, the plot and dialog are dreadful. (Garrovick VO: "...the repairs to the damage caused by the Klingon attack is almost complete.") No amount of time or technology can invest the producers of a Star Trek knock-off with the creativity of a Heinlein or Ellison or Gerrold.
What's curious to me is that the story takes itself so seriously. It would have been easy to make a few small changes and have a very clever satire. Instead, their treatment leads one to conclude that they believe their screenplay, like the sets, costumes and music, is true to the nature of the original. It's sad that their fine attention to the series' other creative elements didn't apply to the writing.
Today's Times has a story to the effect that Microsoft has apologized and is going to begin removing the decals.
Their decision not to participate in Macworld Boston can not be justified IMO by any of the reasons I've read in the threads here. I can't imagine many folks here in NYC getting bent out of shape about Apple joining Macworld in Boston, but if any of them are Mac users, they'd surely be more disappointed at having Apple staying away from the show. Maybe--only maybe--Apple would get less press in Boston than in New York, but not less than the zero press they'll get as a no-show in Boston. As to costs, certainly having a pavillion at the show isn't free for them, but for God's sake, a third-party organization is financing and managing a major trade exposition to stimulate interest in Apple's products. How much money would they have to spend to generate an equivalent level of buzz on their own?
As to whether they'd be better off concentrating their marketing on newbies who are switching from PCs, someone should remind Apple that they are in business today because of the loyal base of customers that stuck with them through the dark days of the mid-1990s. These are the same people who are going to ensure Apple will be in business five years from now. It's classic Apple hubris to pretend that they and their trade show don't matter.
Years ago, I used to be an IT director at a company with a Macintosh infrastructure. Macintosh zealots used to have a saying that "Apple is bad, Macintosh is good." Some things aparently don't change. I have a lot of respect for their products (even though I don't use them much anymore), but I'll never own Apple's stock again.
I am a former CIO for a US brokerage company. I doubt the firms cited in the CNET article intend to promote a single standard to make it easier for their security folks to block. I don't know aobut Canada, but here in the US, the technology guys don't get to overrule the business guys when the firm's revenue is on the line. At my previous company, the traders on the desk discovered IM long before the technologists had a strategy for it. By the time we figured out what was going on, sales traders were taking not-held orders by IM from their sell-side customers. Even though there was no immediate was to monitor it (this was before Communicator) and hence comply with SEC rule 17, there was also no way we could block it without losing business. The representatives of Merrill et al. that were cited in the article are in the same position. Standards will help them comply with SEC and NASD requirements for electronic communications review and retention, which also protect the firm in case a dispute arises over communications between a customer and a rep that happen over IM.
As someone who bought LivePerson for a retail financial services call center, my personal perspective is that LP (or any Internet customer service chat) has less to do reintroducing one-on-one communications between CSRs and customers than providing even greater operating economies between reps and customers than phone-based call centers.
In a phone-based call center, one rep talks to one customer at a time. In a LivePerson call center, one rep can talk to two or three or four customers at a time. That means it can take at least two or three or four times as long to get the same questions answered (before factoring in the lag time associated with typing the responses on a keyboard, etc.). The reason you add LP to your call center is because your marketing people want to advertise it, not because it will bring your customers closer to you or provide them better service. By the numbers, it won't.
There are Internet technologies that improve customer service. VoIP and screen sharing have the potential to revolutionize service by providing a richer customer/rep experience. But chat is a gimmick in most applications. Unless they have only one phone line, most Internet customers are better off calling for service rather than using chat.
It'd be great if lawyers gave black and white answers to questions like this, like you'd expect from to hear from a developer if you asked him what the memory requirements of his objects will be. Instead, in my experience, lawyers tend to think in terms of probabilities and downside, and give relative advice. In this case, the relevant dimensions are probably "Who is going to get sued?" and "What's on the line if he loses?" There is a big difference between the developer personally being sued, and your company being sued by the developer's former employer. In either case, however, the former employer will have to show some damage to his business. You and your developer can probably determine whether such damage would occur, and if you think it would, you'd want to steer clear. For instance, if your company is developing a streaming audio player and the developer's last job was with Real Networks, be careful. A suit could delay your product launch and cost your company plenty. If OTOH your company is developing a patient records system, and your developer used to work for a brokerage firm, you may not have much to worry about, since it's unlikely the former employer would spend money to sue without a business justification. If they did, your maximum downside would probably be to fire the developer.
One last point: Some firms have their developers sign paperwork when they are hired that states all work product created by the developer will be original in its nature, will not infringe patents or copyrights of any third party, and will be wholly owned by the employer. Although it won't prevent a suit from a former employer, having this type of agreement on file can demonstrate the new employer acted in good faith if he has to go to court.