The bureau has been entrusted to collect and analyze
information from the banking, land use, medicine and
telecommunications sectors, among others, and to share
it with prosecuting organs, courts and the police.
Share the information with police, who might actually come
after the people making the most complaints?
The cynic in me says that this is probably merely an
initiative by the government to see where the problems are,
rather than a true attempt to end corruption. A few
high profile cases will be dealt with, but the rest will
be window dressing. I wouldn't be surprised if a few
of the loudest complainers are quietly dealt with.
I think the Chinese authorities are realistic enough to
know that they face an impossible task. Witness the first
'death penalty for corruption' laws enacted, with great
fanfare, well over ten years ago. In spite of much PR and
many executions, corruption remains as widespread as ever.
The death penalty certainly doesn't seem to be a deterrent
against corruption.
One of biggest problems facing China's government is
ensuring its own long-term survival, and corruption is
a big danger to the government's survival. They should
know. The communist revolution itself was a reaction against
corruption.
I'm not sure how many people remember the wheeling and dealing
associated with the first major attempt, in Europe, to sell cable
TV. The basic plan was that various media companies attempted to
buy up all the Formula One and premier football (i.e. soccer)
broadcast rights and then only deliver the programs via cable TV.
This was to force people to buy cable TV and set top boxes. In
the end it didn't work too well. (Can anyone provide any links
to pages that describe this?)
Now we're having digital TV rammed down our throats. This time with
the help of the government. TV and electronic shops are jumping
for joy, and of course the cable companies are rubbing their
hands in glee. The poor consumer is having to buy lots of new
equipment and most likely a more expensive cable subscription too.
Here in Switzerland the switch over well under way. Terrestrial
(air) broadcast of analog signals has stopped, and the cable
companies are switching over too. The technique to 'encourage'
their customers to switch to digital is to silently remove more
and more of the non-major channels from the analog offering, while
offering balkanized digital 'packages' that end up a higher
monthly cost if you want to duplicate the same selection channels
you had before.
To the yuppies and the technically competent this is probably
a relatively small inconvenience. But I wonder about the poor
and older generation, who are essentially having a perfectly
acceptable analog service taken away from them.
Compare the introduction of digital TV with that of color TV.
Color TV was introduced in the early 60s and you could still use
and buy new black and white TVs well into 80s. While I'm not
asking for a backwards compatibility, I would appreciate it if
a similarly long switch over period would be given.
It is unsurprising that there is positive correlation between presence
of stenography software and criminals convicted of child pornography
and financial fraud. Given the penalties and the police/media
preoccupation with these activities, it is hardly surprising that
some criminals are using stenography to cover their tracks.
A point to note is that the criminals using stenography are probably
not using it to transfer large quantities of information, but merely
communicating small very private messages. This might include links
to web servers, credit card numbers or meeting/payment instructions.
It is unlikely to require more than a few hundred bytes of data.
While Schneier is correct that corporate theft is best accomplished
with USB drives or even your corporate laptop, the criminals using
stenographic software are probably not using it for their bulk
transfers of information, but rather pointers or encryption keys
to information transfered by other means.
Comparing the number of web pages against the number of child
pornographers who might be hiding stenographic in online images
makes Purdue's attempt to crawl the web in search for stenographic
data seem futile.
Data transfers by stenography have to be pre-arranged in advance by
some other communication method, otherwise how would sender and
receiver know how to encrypt/decrypt their messages? If your
interest is in stopping crime, then this is the weakest link and
should be the focus of your detective work.
Performance measurement of large capacity lines is a difficult problem, and
a subject of ongoing academic research. Performance is not constant over time
and any sensible guarantee or statement of performance implicitly includes
some kind of statistical averaging. Unfortunately, I can't offer you any tools
for instant measurements, but can give you some background on the problem,
as it applies to a commercial enterprise.
In the paper the authors argue that by dividing the average packet round trip
time (e.g. ping time) by the theoretical round trip time required by
an electromagnetic signal over the equivalent distance, results in a
dimensionless value that measures the quality of your connectivity to a
particular point in the Internet. Cleverly averaging these values for a large
number of points gives you a measure for how good your Internet connection
is.
Admittedly this is not your exact problem. You're more interested in
bandwidth measurements. That said, getting an absolute band measurement
for a particular instant in time is probably not going to completely
satisfy your
customers. And worse you probably want to word your client's contracts so that
you actually understand and can deliver on the performance guarantee that
you make.
You might want to contact
Roberto Percacci
who is one of experts in the field. He started Europe's first (or at least
one of the first) bandwidth exchanges and was instrumental in improving
the transparency of bandwidth measurements and performance guarantees. I believe
he does consulting in the field and if not, he can at least point you in the right
direction. (In fairness, I must admit I'm a friend of his, we met in the mid-80s
at MIT when he was doing his post-doc there.)
BTW: Googling on 'percacci internet performance' brings up a number of
references to papers that cite Percacci's original paper. You might want to
read some of them too.
I would welcome the return of dumb terminals, provided they have the traditional black background with green or orange foreground. The (default) bright white settings of most PCs hurt my eyes.
..and I'd also like the 'gold' key to come back too.
Yeah, I can see it now. Chinese email users can expect messages
like the following:
Dear Comrade,
Your attempt to send email has been blocked due to violations
of one or more of the following email filter rules:
Your email:
contained unsolicited information.
promoted products and services critical of the state.
contained inappropriate sexual or religious matter.
is detrimental to national security.
Note that this list is subject to change or amendment without
prior notification or warning. Additional stricter criteria may
be applied order to prevent inappropriate email from being
distributed.
This violation has been logged by the People's Central Committee
and will be carefully investigated. Your presence and full
cooperation is required during the investigation, and a
full confession will be considered in your favor when your
sentence is determined.
As there are severe penalties, including life imprisonment or
execution, for sending inappropriate email, your cooperation
with the investigating committee is essential.
Re:Whats specific about Taiwan? -- Outsourcing!
on
Spam from Taiwan
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So, what is so specific about Taiwan that causes this?
Availability of relatively cheaper computing power with good bandwidth?
Some legal stuff?
Availability of some skill set?
All of the above, and more. Taiwan is a great place to outsource technology intensive
operations. Perhaps spammers have discovered this. In a nutshell, spamming is just
another technology driven business.
Maybe it's so great that even China outsources their spam generation there too. Hence their low
spam generation figures.
My experience with Model Driven Architecture left me with a bad
feeling about it. While the theory and goals are admirable, I
worry that practical implementations don't meet expectations.
Basically, I think that MDA is presented as a silver bullet,
and the type of companies likely to by 'targeted' by MDA (e.g.
those that must 'fix' their development methodology) are the
least likely to benefit from it. I am willing to accept that
highly skilled and well managed project teams will experience
massive productivity gains using MDA, but such project teams
(unfortunately rare in our industry) would probably succeed
using pretty much any methodology.
I worked one summer on a Java based project whose goal was to
develop a system for managing health insurance policies. The
company and project were flawed for a number of reasons, not
directly related to MDA, but the choice of MDA made the situation
much worse. The end of this story is that the company went out
of business because it was unable to deliver the software it
had promised.
Near the start of the project, the company had hired an MDA
guru, who designed the MDA and, I belive implemented most of
its core. Over time the MDA core portion expended in into
a massive code generator that took hours to run and required
tons and tons of memory.
The state of the project when I arrived (which was to implement
optimizations to one of XML based parts of the code generator)
was:
The application required many many hours to generate/compile.
The resulting code was so large and complex that any meaningful
analysis of it was virtually impossible.
It was also impossible to try out quick changes or do any
kind of rapid prototyping.
The architecture and tools were so complex that new staff
required long training periods in order to be productive,
I think the worst result of MDA, was that the nature of the MDA
process caused a large divide to develop between the 'system'
programmers, maintaining the underlying MDA library, and the
'application' developers.
The system people, generally well qualified programmers, had
little or no interest in the end application. The were fascinated
by the tools and viewed the production of a functioning application
as 'an exercise for the application programmers'.
The application programmers, on the other hand, had absolutely
no understanding (though through necessity they had interest) of the
underlying architecture and no ability to predict the performance
implications of their design choices.
The result was a massive resource hog. The two system programmers,
truly interested in ensuring the that MDA system could actually
be used create an salable application had to work overtime to
try to hold everything together. Unfortunately, they failed,
though not for want of trying.
The main technical problem, beyond the complexity of the tools,
was their attempt to map the MDA's OO data model to a relational
database. (I'm not sure if this is a core principal of MDA,
so I welcome your feedback). While OO data modeling might be
good for user interfaces. I don't feel it's that suitable for
modeling typical business data, like insurance policies. And
the OO modeling concepts seemed to confuse the business domain
experts, who tended to think in relational model terms.
It may well have been that this particular implementation of
MDA was badly flawed. That said, the nature of MDA, that of hoping
to implement your application by 'drawing pictures', and then
filling in snippets of code to complete the it, seems naive.
It reminds me of the early 90s when 'strong CASE' was the rage
and the CASE proponents said all application design would be
done using diagramming tools and then filling in the bodies of
the subroutines.
I suspect that over the years, MDA will generate a minor following,
like strong CASE did, but then a new fashion will emerge and
interest in MD
There have been numerous attempts at producing 'better' keyboards.
Here are two that I am familiar with:
Microwriter
I remember seeing advertisements in the back of Byte magazine in
the late 80s for a device called the Microwriter.
It was a one-handed keyboard with only five keys and you 'played'
chords in order to enter the desired character.
It's no longer manufactured, but
here are some
pictures and an image of the chords for the characters a to z.
A successor to the Microwriter exists and is called the
CYKEY.
The web site claims compatibility with some PDAs.
DataHand
The DataHand consisted of two banks of multi-switches (for want of
a better word) one for each hand. The multi-switches were essentially
little cups in which you rested
your fingers. Each multi-switch could be activated in five directions:
down, north, south, east, west. Down was a 'normal' key press, and the
compass directions involved pressing a switch to the side of your
finger tip. Basically your fingers remained still and you merely
moved you finger tips. I believe you could also get pedals to act
as shift keys.
I friend of mine actually had one of these, he was a translator and
had to do massive amounts of typing. He claimed it was 'somewhat' more
efficient but rather difficult to get used to. I think he gave it
up in the end.
Mizuho sold short 610,000 shares of J-Com, which means they
have to deliver 610,000 buyers to buyers.
There are only 15,000 shares of J-Com. Which means J-Com
has to buy, deliver the shares, and then buy them back again.
Everyone in the Tokyo market knows this and it's driving up
J-Com's share price. Mizuho will therefore have to buy back
shares on an ongoing basis, in the face of a rising share
price, until it can completely cover the short
position.
Mizuho does have assets sufficient to buy back the shares,
which means they can't declare bankruptcy in order to
back out of the deal (which would have meant that all
the other exchange members would have had to pony up for the
shortfall).
Given the mistake, must buyers will be slow to sell,
hoping for the price rise caused by the 'short squeeze'.
For this reason most counter-parties will also be unwilling
to reverse the trade.
It will be difficult for the exchange to unwind everything
back to the original starting point, given all the trading
activity that has happened in the meantime.
What ever happens it's going to cost Mizuho a bundle.
Typos in order entry screens happen all the time and there should
be systems in place to catch them. Obviously there was a bigger
error than that made by the clerk.
In other words, the guy responsible will not be getting fired
alone. The entire group responsible for reality checking all
transactions in gone, including especially the department head,
who probably won't ever be allowed to work in a bank again.
Dealing with robot revolts is actually pretty easy. The following
is from a secret cold war surveillance intercept, which gives away
the secret to stopping a wild robot:
Robot: Danger! Danger! Will Robinson, alien life forms detected.
Dr. Smith: That robot is so tedious.
Will Robinson: He might be right, maybe we should listen to him, Dr. Smith.
Dr Smith: No, my dear Will, he's only a stupid machine and he's confused.
Robot: (Waving arms wildly) Danger! Danger!
Will Robinson: But there might be aliens!
Dr. Smith: (Removing the robots battery pack): No, we're absolutely safe.
Given the perceived popularity of MySQL, Oracle obviously
feels it needs to react in order to prevent a slide in its
market share. This is interesting, given that Oracle is one
of the world's largest software companies and makes most of
its money selling top-end systems to large enterprises,
which isn't (yet) MySQL's playing field.
MySQL is good enough for many smaller software projects
and is therefore capturing mind share in the developer world.
Oracle obviously realizes this leads to a trickle up
effect as software developers with MySQL experience will probably
start to recommend it for other, larger, projects.
Oracle is trying counteract this by attempting to capture
developer's mind share, rather than battling directly for market
share. This is a long-term strategy and its success will depend
on how well Oracle interacts and reacts with the Open Source
developer community.
From the few comments posted here, mainly those stating how big
and complex the Oracle system is, I wonder if Oracle actually
gets it. If the learning (and administering) curve is
really that steep, Oracle may be better off if it releases a
light (in size and complexity) version that is easy to
get up and running on small projects. A second recommendation
would be to make sure Oracle 10 is included by default on most
popular Linux distributions (which will be difficult, given it's
size and complexity).
While I am impressed by Oracle's move, I'll be surprised if it
gets them the gains they are hoping for. I don't think they
realize the commitment this move will require in the Open Source
world in order to be successful. Open Source is one of the
few playing fields where actions still count more than PR.
This makes me wonder if another major software company will
follow with a drastic reaction when the Linux desktop
and the Open Office suite are truly ready for prime time.
The music industry is grasping at straws because it
fears it is dying. It is another example of the inappropriate
behavior of an industry that is unable to offer something
that customers are willing to pay for.
Laughing aside the argument that giving away something
provides a justification(1) for stealing, lawyers could
argue the following:
So, is this like when Microsoft first gave away Internet
Explorer, in an attempt to shut down Netscape, which
ultimately succeeded. What happened to them? Well, the
Justice department decided that Microsoft was a monopoly
and was unfairly using its monopoly powers. In the end,
in spite of being found guilty, no punishment was enacted
and the give away of Internet Explorer continues to this
day.
This argues that BBC should be allowed to give away
music.
Your opponent might then argue that BBC is a
government entity and that private music producers have
to compete against an entity giving away product
subsidized by taxpayers money.
You could then counter and compare it against the
situation where a government
gives away medicine in an attempt to wipe out a
disease affecting its citizens. Correct me if I'm
wrong, but I don't know of any cases where giving
away medicine in such circumstances has been prohibited.
There are even case of patent violations where countries
have copied drugs (I seem to remember this has occured
in South Africa and Brazil) in order to reduce the cost.
In this case you might argue that the drug is music
and the disease is modern culture.. but let's not start
up that old argument.
In any case, this also argues that BBC should be
allowed to give away music.
-----
(1) Think about the free product samples you see in
stores occasionally. Do you think that this makes people
believe that they can take home large packages of
the same product being offered for sale without
paying?
In 1996 Sokal wrote what was essentially a parody of a scientific journal
article, filled with meaningless technical and philosophical jargon.
His goal was to demonstrate that academic publishing had fallen victim
to the emperor's new clothes syndrome.
Sokal was able to get his paper past the peer review of
Social Text, a serious academic journal, who published the paper and
subsequently suffered great embarrassment when Sokal revealed what he had done.
Sokal followed up by writing
Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword, which explained
why he had done it.
The
Social Text
Affair
caused great controversy in the scientific publishing world.
Another mumbo-jump king, who, this time, appears to be serious is
Francis Fukuyama
, who wrote The End of History. Disturbingly, he is an advisor to
the American president.
In the business world, no one's that interested in exposing the hoax
of buzzword-speak. I suspect the reason is because impressive sounding,
but meaningless, text generally helps you get ahead in business. Hence we
end up with mission statements and Dilbert, all of which ultimately, aims
to profit from all this silly-ness.
The
USGS
runs a good
site
that lists all earthquakes, worldwide, with magnitude greater than 2.5. I
monitored the list after the tsunami of last December, and it was interesting
to see the aftershocks in the following weeks.
In this case the same thing is happening. You'll note in the list that
there have already been a number of aftershocks over the past few hours.
They also have a RSS feed, so presumably you could create your own
tsunami warning system.
Before you get too excited, think a minute and consider the
following:
The actual judgment makes reference to the recent Google
case where the Academy Française was able to stop non-French
content from getting high rankings. In this case, involving
the American film Mulholland Drive, UFC-Que Choisir was apparently
able to argue that DVDs with non-French content was essentially
encrypted to the common French citizen and therefore illegal.
The logical next step is to ban all foreign films in France.
This would be a bad thing.
Disclaimer:
Ask yourself: Does what I just read even make sense? Could this guy
even be serious?
No, we don't need better band-aids, we need cures. It starts with
the credit bureaus and ends with them moving to a better system
of identifying people that doesn't make identity theft so fucking
easy.
I'm not sure what you mean by better systems for identifying
people. If you mean that not all database systems need a global
identifier like a social security number, then I agree. That said,
database systems that are global in scope, like credit bureaus, need
to be able to associate you with your data. This means that
some kind of global key value is necessary and will always
be a target of identity thieves.
A federal law on accidential data disclosure is a start.
Unfortunately, it may be the best you'll get, given the lobbying power
of the industry groups that would campaign against the real cure.
The real cure is to create an economic incentive for the data
holders, e.g. the public institutions, banks, credit bureaus, etc., that
imposes costs associated with improper disclosure. Once there is an
economic incentive, better procedures will be developed and enforced by
the data holders themselves.
BTW: This should also include an incentive to encourage data holders to
fix incorrect data.
Bruce Schneier has
written extensively on the subject. A good quote taken from
this article is:
The only way to fix this problem is for vendors to fix their
software, and they won't do it until it's in their financial
best interests to do so.
Another part of the real cure is to have authentication associated
with the use of personal records about you. A key part of this is
proper vetting of entities changing your data, which should, in
some cases, include your direct authorization.
Is it just me, or is this like the third story
of personal information being stolen from
California universities recently? WTF is going
on over there?
Nope, it's not just you. The same thing is going on everywhere
else. It's just that in California they have a
law
that requires disclosure when data gets out.
(article describing law)
The reason you keep hearing about data leaking from Californian
universities is because they actually follow the law,
unlike some
federal agencies.
A better question to ask is: 'What about all the
privacy violations that you don't get to hear about?
The Brazilian government may actually have the
staying power to just say no to Microsoft.
Consider what Brazil has done in the recent past:
Photo-ed and fingerprinted incoming American citizens in
response to America's change in visa policies.
Charged fairly hefty import tariffs for PCs to promote
local industry.
Promotes Brazilian music, and indirectly, interest in
Brazilian culture and tourism, via the encouragement of
free music downloads [I read this in a magazine, but
can't anything online confirming it. Can anyone help?]
I'm not saying that these are necessarily all good things. I
just want to say that Brazil tends to do it their way, in
spite external pressure.
It's nice to see a country actually withstand to pressure
from the multi-nationals and try to implement a policy
for the benefit of all its citizens, rather than the usual
vested interests. Let's just hope it doesn't become corrupted.
Also, recognize that Brazil is interested making their
population computer literate. This includes the longer term
goal of developing a viable computer software industry. Open
Source is an inexpensive and suitable platform for giving
everyone a software development environment. Why only a
few may actually use it, I'm sure it will create a lot
of talented programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
-
The bureau has been entrusted to collect and analyze
information from the banking, land use, medicine and
telecommunications sectors, among others, and to share
it with prosecuting organs, courts and the police.
Share the information with police, who might actually come after the people making the most complaints?The cynic in me says that this is probably merely an initiative by the government to see where the problems are, rather than a true attempt to end corruption. A few high profile cases will be dealt with, but the rest will be window dressing. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the loudest complainers are quietly dealt with.
I think the Chinese authorities are realistic enough to know that they face an impossible task. Witness the first 'death penalty for corruption' laws enacted, with great fanfare, well over ten years ago. In spite of much PR and many executions, corruption remains as widespread as ever. The death penalty certainly doesn't seem to be a deterrent against corruption.
One of biggest problems facing China's government is ensuring its own long-term survival, and corruption is a big danger to the government's survival. They should know. The communist revolution itself was a reaction against corruption.
As they say: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Now we're having digital TV rammed down our throats. This time with the help of the government. TV and electronic shops are jumping for joy, and of course the cable companies are rubbing their hands in glee. The poor consumer is having to buy lots of new equipment and most likely a more expensive cable subscription too.
Here in Switzerland the switch over well under way. Terrestrial (air) broadcast of analog signals has stopped, and the cable companies are switching over too. The technique to 'encourage' their customers to switch to digital is to silently remove more and more of the non-major channels from the analog offering, while offering balkanized digital 'packages' that end up a higher monthly cost if you want to duplicate the same selection channels you had before.
To the yuppies and the technically competent this is probably a relatively small inconvenience. But I wonder about the poor and older generation, who are essentially having a perfectly acceptable analog service taken away from them.
Compare the introduction of digital TV with that of color TV. Color TV was introduced in the early 60s and you could still use and buy new black and white TVs well into 80s. While I'm not asking for a backwards compatibility, I would appreciate it if a similarly long switch over period would be given.
A point to note is that the criminals using stenography are probably not using it to transfer large quantities of information, but merely communicating small very private messages. This might include links to web servers, credit card numbers or meeting/payment instructions. It is unlikely to require more than a few hundred bytes of data.
While Schneier is correct that corporate theft is best accomplished with USB drives or even your corporate laptop, the criminals using stenographic software are probably not using it for their bulk transfers of information, but rather pointers or encryption keys to information transfered by other means.
Comparing the number of web pages against the number of child pornographers who might be hiding stenographic in online images makes Purdue's attempt to crawl the web in search for stenographic data seem futile.
Data transfers by stenography have to be pre-arranged in advance by some other communication method, otherwise how would sender and receiver know how to encrypt/decrypt their messages? If your interest is in stopping crime, then this is the weakest link and should be the focus of your detective work.
As a start, read this paper:
The Spectrum of Internet Performance
http://en.scientificcommons.org/574473
In the paper the authors argue that by dividing the average packet round trip time (e.g. ping time) by the theoretical round trip time required by an electromagnetic signal over the equivalent distance, results in a dimensionless value that measures the quality of your connectivity to a particular point in the Internet. Cleverly averaging these values for a large number of points gives you a measure for how good your Internet connection is.
Admittedly this is not your exact problem. You're more interested in bandwidth measurements. That said, getting an absolute band measurement for a particular instant in time is probably not going to completely satisfy your customers. And worse you probably want to word your client's contracts so that you actually understand and can deliver on the performance guarantee that you make.
You might want to contact Roberto Percacci who is one of experts in the field. He started Europe's first (or at least one of the first) bandwidth exchanges and was instrumental in improving the transparency of bandwidth measurements and performance guarantees. I believe he does consulting in the field and if not, he can at least point you in the right direction. (In fairness, I must admit I'm a friend of his, we met in the mid-80s at MIT when he was doing his post-doc there.)
BTW: Googling on 'percacci internet performance' brings up a number of references to papers that cite Percacci's original paper. You might want to read some of them too.
Good luck!
FTFS: Sticking a needle with a flaming plasma tip into your mouth
Sounds like it's time for a new hi-tech remake of the Marathon Man (1977).
Dear Comrade,
Your attempt to send email has been blocked due to violations of one or more of the following email filter rules:
Your email:
- contained unsolicited information.
- promoted products and services critical of the state.
- contained inappropriate sexual or religious matter.
- is detrimental to national security.
Note that this list is subject to change or amendment without prior notification or warning. Additional stricter criteria may be applied order to prevent inappropriate email from being distributed.This violation has been logged by the People's Central Committee and will be carefully investigated. Your presence and full cooperation is required during the investigation, and a full confession will be considered in your favor when your sentence is determined.
As there are severe penalties, including life imprisonment or execution, for sending inappropriate email, your cooperation with the investigating committee is essential.
Availability of relatively cheaper computing power with good bandwidth?
Some legal stuff?
Availability of some skill set?
All of the above, and more. Taiwan is a great place to outsource technology intensive operations. Perhaps spammers have discovered this. In a nutshell, spamming is just another technology driven business.
Maybe it's so great that even China outsources their spam generation there too. Hence their low spam generation figures.
- The Design of the UNIX Operating System, by Maurice Bach
- The UNIX Programming Environment, by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike
Have done that, the you should be prepared to figure out the rest by yourself. It's not that difficult, but it might take a while.My experience with Model Driven Architecture left me with a bad feeling about it. While the theory and goals are admirable, I worry that practical implementations don't meet expectations. Basically, I think that MDA is presented as a silver bullet, and the type of companies likely to by 'targeted' by MDA (e.g. those that must 'fix' their development methodology) are the least likely to benefit from it. I am willing to accept that highly skilled and well managed project teams will experience massive productivity gains using MDA, but such project teams (unfortunately rare in our industry) would probably succeed using pretty much any methodology.
I worked one summer on a Java based project whose goal was to develop a system for managing health insurance policies. The company and project were flawed for a number of reasons, not directly related to MDA, but the choice of MDA made the situation much worse. The end of this story is that the company went out of business because it was unable to deliver the software it had promised.
Near the start of the project, the company had hired an MDA guru, who designed the MDA and, I belive implemented most of its core. Over time the MDA core portion expended in into a massive code generator that took hours to run and required tons and tons of memory.
The state of the project when I arrived (which was to implement optimizations to one of XML based parts of the code generator) was:
I think the worst result of MDA, was that the nature of the MDA process caused a large divide to develop between the 'system' programmers, maintaining the underlying MDA library, and the 'application' developers.
The system people, generally well qualified programmers, had little or no interest in the end application. The were fascinated by the tools and viewed the production of a functioning application as 'an exercise for the application programmers'.
The application programmers, on the other hand, had absolutely no understanding (though through necessity they had interest) of the underlying architecture and no ability to predict the performance implications of their design choices.
The result was a massive resource hog. The two system programmers, truly interested in ensuring the that MDA system could actually be used create an salable application had to work overtime to try to hold everything together. Unfortunately, they failed, though not for want of trying.
The main technical problem, beyond the complexity of the tools, was their attempt to map the MDA's OO data model to a relational database. (I'm not sure if this is a core principal of MDA, so I welcome your feedback). While OO data modeling might be good for user interfaces. I don't feel it's that suitable for modeling typical business data, like insurance policies. And the OO modeling concepts seemed to confuse the business domain experts, who tended to think in relational model terms.
It may well have been that this particular implementation of MDA was badly flawed. That said, the nature of MDA, that of hoping to implement your application by 'drawing pictures', and then filling in snippets of code to complete the it, seems naive. It reminds me of the early 90s when 'strong CASE' was the rage and the CASE proponents said all application design would be done using diagramming tools and then filling in the bodies of the subroutines.
I suspect that over the years, MDA will generate a minor following, like strong CASE did, but then a new fashion will emerge and interest in MD
Here are two that I am familiar with:
Microwriter
I remember seeing advertisements in the back of Byte magazine in the late 80s for a device called the Microwriter. It was a one-handed keyboard with only five keys and you 'played' chords in order to enter the desired character.
It's no longer manufactured, but here are some pictures and an image of the chords for the characters a to z.
A successor to the Microwriter exists and is called the CYKEY. The web site claims compatibility with some PDAs.
DataHand
The DataHand consisted of two banks of multi-switches (for want of a better word) one for each hand. The multi-switches were essentially little cups in which you rested your fingers. Each multi-switch could be activated in five directions: down, north, south, east, west. Down was a 'normal' key press, and the compass directions involved pressing a switch to the side of your finger tip. Basically your fingers remained still and you merely moved you finger tips. I believe you could also get pedals to act as shift keys.
Have a look here to learn more about it.
I friend of mine actually had one of these, he was a translator and had to do massive amounts of typing. He claimed it was 'somewhat' more efficient but rather difficult to get used to. I think he gave it up in the end.
51N5 1T HAZ L355 K33Z 1 KAN AL50 T1P3 FA5T3R + M0R3 AKURAT3LY.
1T5 35P3C1ALLY G00D F0R WR1T1NG 5PAM MA1L, WH1CH H3LP5 M3 B3 M0R3 3FF1C13NT AT W0RK.
Note the following:
What ever happens it's going to cost Mizuho a bundle.
Typos in order entry screens happen all the time and there should be systems in place to catch them. Obviously there was a bigger error than that made by the clerk.
In other words, the guy responsible will not be getting fired alone. The entire group responsible for reality checking all transactions in gone, including especially the department head, who probably won't ever be allowed to work in a bank again.
..Beatings will continue until morale improves.
There you have it: Just remove their battery pack.
MySQL is good enough for many smaller software projects and is therefore capturing mind share in the developer world. Oracle obviously realizes this leads to a trickle up effect as software developers with MySQL experience will probably start to recommend it for other, larger, projects.
Oracle is trying counteract this by attempting to capture developer's mind share, rather than battling directly for market share. This is a long-term strategy and its success will depend on how well Oracle interacts and reacts with the Open Source developer community.
From the few comments posted here, mainly those stating how big and complex the Oracle system is, I wonder if Oracle actually gets it. If the learning (and administering) curve is really that steep, Oracle may be better off if it releases a light (in size and complexity) version that is easy to get up and running on small projects. A second recommendation would be to make sure Oracle 10 is included by default on most popular Linux distributions (which will be difficult, given it's size and complexity).
While I am impressed by Oracle's move, I'll be surprised if it gets them the gains they are hoping for. I don't think they realize the commitment this move will require in the Open Source world in order to be successful. Open Source is one of the few playing fields where actions still count more than PR.
This makes me wonder if another major software company will follow with a drastic reaction when the Linux desktop and the Open Office suite are truly ready for prime time.
We live in interesting times!
- Hollywood acts like a large organization. For the individuals
making investment decisions, big money and careers
are at stake.
- They tend to stick to previously successful formulas.
- Which leads to a risk adverse climate.
- Which leads to a winner take all environment (large
stars and budgets dominate)
- Which stifles innovation and restricts access to
market for smaller and
experimental films.
- Which results in bad movies.
QED.1. First they ignore you.
2. Then they laugh at you.
3. Then they fight you.
4. Then you win.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Now we're at stage three.
Laughing aside the argument that giving away something provides a justification(1) for stealing, lawyers could argue the following:
So, is this like when Microsoft first gave away Internet Explorer, in an attempt to shut down Netscape, which ultimately succeeded. What happened to them? Well, the Justice department decided that Microsoft was a monopoly and was unfairly using its monopoly powers. In the end, in spite of being found guilty, no punishment was enacted and the give away of Internet Explorer continues to this day.
This argues that BBC should be allowed to give away music.
Your opponent might then argue that BBC is a government entity and that private music producers have to compete against an entity giving away product subsidized by taxpayers money.
You could then counter and compare it against the situation where a government gives away medicine in an attempt to wipe out a disease affecting its citizens. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know of any cases where giving away medicine in such circumstances has been prohibited. There are even case of patent violations where countries have copied drugs (I seem to remember this has occured in South Africa and Brazil) in order to reduce the cost.
In this case you might argue that the drug is music and the disease is modern culture.. but let's not start up that old argument.
In any case, this also argues that BBC should be allowed to give away music.
-----
(1) Think about the free product samples you see in stores occasionally. Do you think that this makes people believe that they can take home large packages of the same product being offered for sale without paying?
In 1996 Sokal wrote what was essentially a parody of a scientific journal article, filled with meaningless technical and philosophical jargon. His goal was to demonstrate that academic publishing had fallen victim to the emperor's new clothes syndrome. Sokal was able to get his paper past the peer review of Social Text, a serious academic journal, who published the paper and subsequently suffered great embarrassment when Sokal revealed what he had done. Sokal followed up by writing Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword, which explained why he had done it.
The Social Text Affair caused great controversy in the scientific publishing world.
Another mumbo-jump king, who, this time, appears to be serious is Francis Fukuyama , who wrote The End of History. Disturbingly, he is an advisor to the American president.
In the business world, no one's that interested in exposing the hoax of buzzword-speak. I suspect the reason is because impressive sounding, but meaningless, text generally helps you get ahead in business. Hence we end up with mission statements and Dilbert, all of which ultimately, aims to profit from all this silly-ness.
In this case the same thing is happening. You'll note in the list that there have already been a number of aftershocks over the past few hours.
They also have a RSS feed, so presumably you could create your own tsunami warning system.
Disclaimer: Ask yourself: Does what I just read even make sense? Could this guy even be serious?
- No, we don't need better band-aids, we need cures. It starts with
the credit bureaus and ends with them moving to a better system
of identifying people that doesn't make identity theft so fucking
easy.
I'm not sure what you mean by better systems for identifying people. If you mean that not all database systems need a global identifier like a social security number, then I agree. That said, database systems that are global in scope, like credit bureaus, need to be able to associate you with your data. This means that some kind of global key value is necessary and will always be a target of identity thieves.A federal law on accidential data disclosure is a start. Unfortunately, it may be the best you'll get, given the lobbying power of the industry groups that would campaign against the real cure.
The real cure is to create an economic incentive for the data holders, e.g. the public institutions, banks, credit bureaus, etc., that imposes costs associated with improper disclosure. Once there is an economic incentive, better procedures will be developed and enforced by the data holders themselves. BTW: This should also include an incentive to encourage data holders to fix incorrect data.
Bruce Schneier has written extensively on the subject. A good quote taken from this article is:
Another part of the real cure is to have authentication associated with the use of personal records about you. A key part of this is proper vetting of entities changing your data, which should, in some cases, include your direct authorization.
- Is it just me, or is this like the third story
of personal information being stolen from
California universities recently? WTF is going
on over there?
Nope, it's not just you. The same thing is going on everywhere else. It's just that in California they have a law that requires disclosure when data gets out. (article describing law)The reason you keep hearing about data leaking from Californian universities is because they actually follow the law, unlike some federal agencies.
A better question to ask is: 'What about all the privacy violations that you don't get to hear about?
You need this law at the federal level.
Consider what Brazil has done in the recent past:
- Photo-ed and fingerprinted incoming American citizens in
response to America's change in visa policies.
- Charged fairly hefty import tariffs for PCs to promote
local industry.
- Promotes Brazilian music, and indirectly, interest in
Brazilian culture and tourism, via the encouragement of
free music downloads [I read this in a magazine, but
can't anything online confirming it. Can anyone help?]
I'm not saying that these are necessarily all good things. I just want to say that Brazil tends to do it their way, in spite external pressure.It's nice to see a country actually withstand to pressure from the multi-nationals and try to implement a policy for the benefit of all its citizens, rather than the usual vested interests. Let's just hope it doesn't become corrupted.
Also, recognize that Brazil is interested making their population computer literate. This includes the longer term goal of developing a viable computer software industry. Open Source is an inexpensive and suitable platform for giving everyone a software development environment. Why only a few may actually use it, I'm sure it will create a lot of talented programmers.