In an age where publications are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their power to drive revenue, it is more important than ever that editors take a stand for the paramount importance of high-quality, thorough, accurate reporting and editorials, untainted by financial interests or the pursuit of personal gain. InfoWorld stumbled by continuing to support Randall C. Kennedy when it should have, at the very least, questioned his judgment. It can and must do better.
I suspect you are the editor of a publication in competition to InfoWorld. Your arguments are carefully thought out, your written English is impeccable, your paragraph construction is correct, you are careful with names and you're posting Anonymous Coward.
Nothing wrong with all that (or anything wrong with your post) but it's a shame I can't add you to my friends list. I would have, for that post.
People like to draw the comparison with civil engineering, where an engineer may be liable (even criminally) if, say, a bridge collapsed. But this isn't really the same thing. We're not talking about software that simply fails and causes damage. We're talking about software that fails when people deliberately attack it. This would be like holding a civil engineer responsible when a terrorist blows up a bridge -- he should have planned for a bomb being placed in just such-and-such location and made the bridge more resistant to attack.
Yes - you can only predict nature, not politics or the sweeping winds of change. Bridges have been built before terrorism was a concern. The military has always known how to destroy things that civil engineers build. It's the nature of life. You can't re-write history that's writ in things that were built, you can only build anew with the new concerns in mind.
But engineers have tried. The World Trade Towers were designed to survive an impact of a fully-laden Boeing 707, I heard. 747's were far off in the future.
In times long past I was guilty of writing software with absolutely no concern for security at all. Why should I have? It was a quick and dirty piece in Vax Fortran/TDMS/RMS and written before the frigging Internet existed. And I found out that twenty years later, the program - a months work designed to be thrown away when new software would come in to replace it - was still in use. Hey, it worked, and it survived bit decay far better than I expected.
But like you, I refuse - utterly - to be responsible for its security in a world that didn't exist when it was written. I've moved on.
It took me 15 years to reach a senior programmer position- now they're telling me next year, at age 40, it's time to quit the industry altogether and do something else?
I was a senior programmer twenty years ago. Now I work in marketing. Please, someone! (sob) Let me out!
Ok, get past teh lulz and I have to admit it's kind of nice writing about computer stuff without having to chase the bugs. I'm too old to work 70 hour weeks for the sheer fascination of building code. And to tell the truth, I'm not as fascinated about it as I used to be. I prefer bigger building blocks now.
The real truth is, most of my work is isolated from people by the imposition of two TFT screens between us, and they have no clue about my age unless I drop one. When they ask about me privately, I tell them in real life I'm a mix of Staffordshire Terrier and Border Collie.
It has to be an Easter Egg. But what is it? I, for one, would be quite happy to discover during the course of examining my work email files that there was a new way do something constructive with my day, perhaps a World of Warcraft ICC rep run. And as far as bugs go, I could always use a few more stacks of Nerubian Chitin.
It not about agreeing, censorship is bad no matter what.
Using ISP's to check traffic is kind of like stopping people on the road and checking their identification papers, to ensure they're citizens or have the legal right to be on the roads. It may be effective compliance technique, but it's egregiously inappropriate behaviour on the part of any government. People do not like to be searched, however innocent they be.
So stay out of my briefcase. There's nothing illegal in there. I have nothing to hide, but those papers are mine and mind your own business!
Government and industrial institutions, once they reach a certain size, are notoriously risk-adverse. If there's a change in the weather, they'd prefer someone else to be the weathervane. Things that happen in Norway can have a disproportionate amount of influence across the world.
It's not a phenomenon limited to the office software industry, either; in the electricity distribution industry, for example, many very large organisations are watching what's happening in Portugal and Spain and have stated they want to incorporate that experience before they launch their own programmes of change.
Why? Simply because they're doing it first. I guess it's because they're smaller and a bit more agile, I don't know. But it's much cheaper to watch someone else make mistakes and follow blind alleys rather than take the risk on yourself. Risk is expensive.
So, the electricity world watches Iberia. The bureaucracies of the world will be watching Norway, make no mistake.
Nobody remembers HP? They charged 70% margins for HP-9000. The ended up givingthe PA-RISC design to Intel, along with the employees who made it, for no cash and what I think ended up being useless options.
Ahh, Superdome. Consistent battler at top of TPC-C ratings.
But you could go back further, and say - Nobody remembers Digital? I do,rather. I wish I could recover the memory I have permanently committed to DCL lexical functions.
Now waiting for the inevitable follow-ons "...remember Compaq?" and "...remember Packard-Bell?"
HP's dual-trace oscilloscopes were nice. Personally I think they would have been happier staying with test instrumentation and mil-spec stuff than the incessant race to the bottom that x86 components have become.
Beige boxes with tiny margins ate Sun's lunch, once they could run any reasonable operating system, or even an unreasonable one. Remember when so many people thought the future would be Windows and that Unix was dying? That was so depressing that we had to fix it by ourselves. But the beige boxes would have taken over either way.
I'm pretty sure - well, it's obvious really - that a change in direction would have changed their fortunes, but it would have had to have happened a fair way upstream.
Sun was focused on two things - product and services. For product they had SunOS and the E-series high performance servers. SunOS was indeed punished by Linux (it's very difficult to compete with "free") and the E-series were something of a dead end. Yes, they were putting money into refining it but they were basically acquired Cray derivatives, weren't they? Short-term thinking indeed.
So, they had (a) an operating system that cost money competing with a work-alike that was free, (b) a line of hardware that they didn't have the research infrastructure to re-invent, and (c) services. And as we all know, "moving toward a services-based model" is industry code for "our gear is obsolete and we can't sell it any more". And how much of it can be done more cheaply offshore? Like it or not, that's the competition.
Oh, and Java. Can't forget Java. Sun owned the test suite for Java. License costs for Java? Umm..
It's almost like the judge(s) in this case bothered to learn about how the technology actually works! So who or what do we credit this minor miracle to?
Us folk here in Horse Trailer. We're all like that, thank you for noticing.
On a more serious note, it might be worth mentioning that we take education very, very seriously, and anyone with professional qualifications here will have had to study very hard to get them in an extremely competitive environment. We don't just hand diplomas out of a packet of crisps, or because your uncle had one.
There's a culture of "learning how to learn" on top of the impartment of knowledge, and people are brought up to understand and believe that what they make of their life depends entirely on how clever they are - and not just how clever they are to get the degree, so they study and study hard.
I'm not surprised at all at the common sense I see in the legal profession here. From what I've seen, there's relatively little idiocy to be found in it here at all.
sigh... right you are. I suppose that given Australia's history with copyright law I really expected something sinister somewhere.
Shouldn't bag us across the board, mate. Sure we have the odd obvious cretin (you listening, Conroy?) but it's also illegal here to sell a DVD player that is region-locked (ACCC got that one right, I believe). Swings and roundabouts, I suspect, but I've noticed a relatively low CQ (Cretin Quotient) in our government and administration. Well, administration anyway - Parliament certainly has its share. But the folks in the offices mostly get it right, not a huge lot of sinister in any of them.
And no, I do not work for the government in any capacity.
As an Optus customer for about eleven years (basically since they first took the field against Telstra) I have to say that I'm quite satisfied with my current ISP.
On the other hand, I feel this rather insistent urge to start looking over iiNet's web page, see what they offer. Just out of curiosity, y'know. Don't use the Optus POP3 email address much any more, anyway. Hmm...
In the past, you could tell artificial diamonds from natural ones because of imperfections, but with today's technology, you can't tell even with a microscope.
You still can, according to my father - a gemologist and certified diamond rater - natural diamonds tend to have minor imperfections, artificially created ones do not.
Haven't disk manufacturers been doing this forever, using faster memories to cache disk?
Digital's ESE series disks. RAM backed by disk with (iirc) write-behind caching. Expensive (memory was, after all) but in production in the 1980's. Welcome to the future.
I agree that a lot of really competent folks no longer even bother to call in to "customer service" lines. But that's not so much because they inherently believe it best to skip that step. It's conditioned behavior, based on years and years of trying it and having miserable results!
There was a lovely Dilbert cartoon long ago that covered that - something about replacing the on-hold music with the sound of someone rubbing a balloon to get the call rate down.
Come to think of it, that's not much worse than elevator music punctuated with occasional "Your call is important to us" messages.
Slashdot Mirror
In an age where publications are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their power to drive revenue, it is more important than ever that editors take a stand for the paramount importance of high-quality, thorough, accurate reporting and editorials, untainted by financial interests or the pursuit of personal gain. InfoWorld stumbled by continuing to support Randall C. Kennedy when it should have, at the very least, questioned his judgment. It can and must do better.
I suspect you are the editor of a publication in competition to InfoWorld. Your arguments are carefully thought out, your written English is impeccable, your paragraph construction is correct, you are careful with names and you're posting Anonymous Coward.
Nothing wrong with all that (or anything wrong with your post) but it's a shame I can't add you to my friends list. I would have, for that post.
I'm not sure, but Craig Barth is an anagram for Hair Grab Ct, which is obviously the location of the next clue.
It's also an anagram for Rig bar chat. Anything to stir controversy, then...
Size of the disk IO queue? Even small integer values are bad.
People like to draw the comparison with civil engineering, where an engineer may be liable (even criminally) if, say, a bridge collapsed. But this isn't really the same thing. We're not talking about software that simply fails and causes damage. We're talking about software that fails when people deliberately attack it. This would be like holding a civil engineer responsible when a terrorist blows up a bridge -- he should have planned for a bomb being placed in just such-and-such location and made the bridge more resistant to attack.
Yes - you can only predict nature, not politics or the sweeping winds of change. Bridges have been built before terrorism was a concern. The military has always known how to destroy things that civil engineers build. It's the nature of life. You can't re-write history that's writ in things that were built, you can only build anew with the new concerns in mind.
But engineers have tried. The World Trade Towers were designed to survive an impact of a fully-laden Boeing 707, I heard. 747's were far off in the future.
In times long past I was guilty of writing software with absolutely no concern for security at all. Why should I have? It was a quick and dirty piece in Vax Fortran/TDMS/RMS and written before the frigging Internet existed. And I found out that twenty years later, the program - a months work designed to be thrown away when new software would come in to replace it - was still in use. Hey, it worked, and it survived bit decay far better than I expected.
But like you, I refuse - utterly - to be responsible for its security in a world that didn't exist when it was written. I've moved on.
It took me 15 years to reach a senior programmer position- now they're telling me next year, at age 40, it's time to quit the industry altogether and do something else?
I was a senior programmer twenty years ago. Now I work in marketing. Please, someone! (sob) Let me out!
Ok, get past teh lulz and I have to admit it's kind of nice writing about computer stuff without having to chase the bugs. I'm too old to work 70 hour weeks for the sheer fascination of building code. And to tell the truth, I'm not as fascinated about it as I used to be. I prefer bigger building blocks now.
The real truth is, most of my work is isolated from people by the imposition of two TFT screens between us, and they have no clue about my age unless I drop one. When they ask about me privately, I tell them in real life I'm a mix of Staffordshire Terrier and Border Collie.
On the Internet, nobody really knows.
It has to be an Easter Egg. But what is it? I, for one, would be quite happy to discover during the course of examining my work email files that there was a new way do something constructive with my day, perhaps a World of Warcraft ICC rep run. And as far as bugs go, I could always use a few more stacks of Nerubian Chitin.
One day robots will use humans to dispose of memes...won't be so funny then...
There, fixed that for you.
Oh, wait...
Just call me uh, Clem.
Close B close mode on Deputy Dan.
Circletimesquare, your eye has a funny cast about it. Is that your cat?
"Hi, I just received a postcard from blizzard-rewards.com with a realm on it. Is it safe to load?"
Whoa, seriously profound point there. Really, everything on the internet is a walled garden.
You're right, of course. But there are natural operators that come into play to level the field.
"Anyone that tries to chop it [the Web] into two will find that their piece looks very boring."
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Republicans and creationists are human too you know.
Provably?
You can't build an omelette without crushing a few eggs...
People aren't eggs.
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. Space is what keeps it all from happening to you.
It not about agreeing, censorship is bad no matter what.
Using ISP's to check traffic is kind of like stopping people on the road and checking their identification papers, to ensure they're citizens or have the legal right to be on the roads. It may be effective compliance technique, but it's egregiously inappropriate behaviour on the part of any government. People do not like to be searched, however innocent they be.
So stay out of my briefcase. There's nothing illegal in there. I have nothing to hide, but those papers are mine and mind your own business!
It's not a phenomenon limited to the office software industry, either; in the electricity distribution industry, for example, many very large organisations are watching what's happening in Portugal and Spain and have stated they want to incorporate that experience before they launch their own programmes of change.
Why? Simply because they're doing it first. I guess it's because they're smaller and a bit more agile, I don't know. But it's much cheaper to watch someone else make mistakes and follow blind alleys rather than take the risk on yourself. Risk is expensive.
So, the electricity world watches Iberia. The bureaucracies of the world will be watching Norway, make no mistake.
Nobody remembers HP? They charged 70% margins for HP-9000. The ended up givingthe PA-RISC design to Intel, along with the employees who made it, for no cash and what I think ended up being useless options.
Ahh, Superdome. Consistent battler at top of TPC-C ratings.
But you could go back further, and say - Nobody remembers Digital? I do,rather. I wish I could recover the memory I have permanently committed to DCL lexical functions.
Now waiting for the inevitable follow-ons "...remember Compaq?" and "...remember Packard-Bell?"
HP's dual-trace oscilloscopes were nice. Personally I think they would have been happier staying with test instrumentation and mil-spec stuff than the incessant race to the bottom that x86 components have become.
Beige boxes with tiny margins ate Sun's lunch, once they could run any reasonable operating system, or even an unreasonable one. Remember when so many people thought the future would be Windows and that Unix was dying? That was so depressing that we had to fix it by ourselves. But the beige boxes would have taken over either way.
I'm pretty sure - well, it's obvious really - that a change in direction would have changed their fortunes, but it would have had to have happened a fair way upstream.
Sun was focused on two things - product and services. For product they had SunOS and the E-series high performance servers. SunOS was indeed punished by Linux (it's very difficult to compete with "free") and the E-series were something of a dead end. Yes, they were putting money into refining it but they were basically acquired Cray derivatives, weren't they? Short-term thinking indeed.
So, they had (a) an operating system that cost money competing with a work-alike that was free, (b) a line of hardware that they didn't have the research infrastructure to re-invent, and (c) services. And as we all know, "moving toward a services-based model" is industry code for "our gear is obsolete and we can't sell it any more". And how much of it can be done more cheaply offshore? Like it or not, that's the competition.
Oh, and Java. Can't forget Java. Sun owned the test suite for Java. License costs for Java? Umm..
So, what was their business model again?
We are all slaves to the vote.
It's almost like the judge(s) in this case bothered to learn about how the technology actually works! So who or what do we credit this minor miracle to?
Us folk here in Horse Trailer. We're all like that, thank you for noticing.
On a more serious note, it might be worth mentioning that we take education very, very seriously, and anyone with professional qualifications here will have had to study very hard to get them in an extremely competitive environment. We don't just hand diplomas out of a packet of crisps, or because your uncle had one.
There's a culture of "learning how to learn" on top of the impartment of knowledge, and people are brought up to understand and believe that what they make of their life depends entirely on how clever they are - and not just how clever they are to get the degree, so they study and study hard.
I'm not surprised at all at the common sense I see in the legal profession here. From what I've seen, there's relatively little idiocy to be found in it here at all.
sigh... right you are. I suppose that given Australia's history with copyright law I really expected something sinister somewhere.
Shouldn't bag us across the board, mate. Sure we have the odd obvious cretin (you listening, Conroy?) but it's also illegal here to sell a DVD player that is region-locked (ACCC got that one right, I believe). Swings and roundabouts, I suspect, but I've noticed a relatively low CQ (Cretin Quotient) in our government and administration. Well, administration anyway - Parliament certainly has its share. But the folks in the offices mostly get it right, not a huge lot of sinister in any of them.
And no, I do not work for the government in any capacity.
As an Optus customer for about eleven years (basically since they first took the field against Telstra) I have to say that I'm quite satisfied with my current ISP.
On the other hand, I feel this rather insistent urge to start looking over iiNet's web page, see what they offer. Just out of curiosity, y'know. Don't use the Optus POP3 email address much any more, anyway. Hmm...
In the past, you could tell artificial diamonds from natural ones because of imperfections, but with today's technology, you can't tell even with a microscope.
You still can, according to my father - a gemologist and certified diamond rater - natural diamonds tend to have minor imperfections, artificially created ones do not.
Yup, man-made stuff can be better.
Haven't disk manufacturers been doing this forever, using faster memories to cache disk?
Digital's ESE series disks. RAM backed by disk with (iirc) write-behind caching. Expensive (memory was, after all) but in production in the 1980's. Welcome to the future.
I agree that a lot of really competent folks no longer even bother to call in to "customer service" lines. But that's not so much because they inherently believe it best to skip that step. It's conditioned behavior, based on years and years of trying it and having miserable results!
There was a lovely Dilbert cartoon long ago that covered that - something about replacing the on-hold music with the sound of someone rubbing a balloon to get the call rate down.
Come to think of it, that's not much worse than elevator music punctuated with occasional "Your call is important to us" messages.