Outsourcing has been moving "up the food chain".
From call centers selling products to help desk
support. And from help desk support to software
development, chip design, paralegal work and
any other job that can be done on a computer.
One of the scary things about offshore outsourcing
is that it appears to be eating into more and
more high paying jobs. These are the jobs that
were supposed to belong to first world "knowledge
workers". After hollowing out our manufacturing
and losing high paying manufacturing jobs,
then losing "knowledge worker" jobs, the fear
is that all that will be left are "service sector" jobs
that pay poorly and have few benifits.
These fears should not be dismissed and they are
certainly echoed in the slashdot community. But
the issue is more complex than the
pay differential between India and Silicon Valley.
People in the US are notoriously insular. We
don't travel to foreign countries as much as people in Europe since the United States is
huge. We tend to assume that people everywhere
are either just like us or want to be just like
us (just listen to they way G.W. Bush talks about
Iraq).
When we look at India from afar we see
a democracy. India has a British derived
legal system, just like we do. Many Indians
have excellent english language skills. Many
of us have gone to school and worked with
people from India. So
there should be no problem moving jobs from the
US to India where the job can be done for much
less cost.
India is a huge country. Maximum City is
about just one part of India, Bombay. I have
no idea who different Bangalore is. The
picture that Mehta paints of India is of a
country whose legal system is broken on every
level.
A broken legal system has a number of implications.
One implication is that without a civil tort system,
where a lawsuit can be successfully brought, there
is nothing to stop someone from stealing your
intellectual property. If you pay someone to
develop software there is nothing to stop them
from selling it to someone else. If you
partner with someone there is nothing to stop
them from appropriating shared intellectual
property or the money that you put into the
partnership.
The legal system is broken on a criminal level
as well. Extortion exists more or less without
check. Wealthy people must be careful to avoid
displays of wealth, lest they be targeted for
extortion. Wealthy Indians who do not pay are
killed or their family members are kidnapped.
There is no reason to assume that a foreigner
in India will be immune.
The police in India practice torture and have
squads that take part in extra-judicial killings.
One chapter in Maximum City starts out
with an account of a muslim baker being burned
alive during one of the Hindu anti-muslim riots.
This is not Kansas, Dorothy.
Cost in the western world are much higher. But
the legal system in the western world works
well in comparison to the legal system in
India or China. While there is corruption in
the police and civil service in the United States
it is not a way of life as it is in India or
China.
The book Mr. China by Tim Clissold tells
a story of how the investment group that Clissold
worked for lost $400 million (US) on a number
of Chinese joint ventures. After three years
of struggle, Clissold, who spoke Mandarin Chinese
fluently, was totally burned out.
China is changing
at a dizzying rate. The conditions of a few
years ago that Clissold described may no longer
be the same.
But even in China the "rule of law" is in the
process of evolving. China is still the land
of the "Red Princes" and those who go against
the oligarchy can
Why is the much respected tech writer leaving what he described as 'greatest gig in the world' for the perilous journey of developing an entrepreneurial idea in citizen-journalism?
Like many Bay Area Sprawl denizens, I've subscribed to
the Mercury News (where Dan Gilmore publishes)
for many years. I used to really like Gilmore's
writing. I have not gone back and read the
archives (assuming they are available without fee),
but I remember Gilmore as being someone on the
side of engineers and innovation. Maybe I just
don't remember Gilmore correctly. But I do
recall reading Gilmore columns and thinking
to myself Yeah!.
The Dan Gilmore I've read in the last two years
seems like a different person. I've read few
editorials by Gilmore for sometime that
left me with that Yeah! feeling.
Gilmore used to write a lot about the culture
and working environment of Silicon Valley.
But recent events seem to have passed him by.
He does not seem
to have grasped what has happened to engineering
and the job market. He's been in the camp that
claims that what we are seeing around is just
another setback to Silicon Valley (that great
hot bead of innovation). The Next Big Thing
will come along and life will at least return
to the relatively better times of 1995, if not
the rockin times of 1999.
Recently in discussing the hostile takeover of
PeopleSoft by Oracle all Gilmore could write
was that PeopleSoft was irresponsible to resist
the Borg at Oracle for so long. He only tangentially
mentioned the thousands of employees who would
lose their jobs in one of the worst technology
job markets in memory. Nor did Gilmore comment
on the fact that the corporate culture of
PeopleSoft is radically different from that of
Oracle. Those who survive the layoffs that result
from the hostile merger will find themselves
at a very different company, if Oracle is any
indication. Oracle is a company that has a
reputation for cutthroat internal competition.
The fact that a hostile takeover might even work
in the software industry is something that
Gilmore missed as well. Why might it work now
when a decade ago a hostile takeover was considered
impractical? Well one reason is that a decade
ago the engineering staff, middle managers,
sale and marketing people could all "jump ship"
and go to another company. It's a different
world now, since jobs are much harder to come by.
When it comes to stock options, all Gilmore
could do was parrot the line put forth by
Silicon Valley executives. He never acknowleged
that stock options are a major part of the
bloat executive compensation that we've seen
in the last couple of decades. He just
claimed that it would hurt innovation in
Silicon Valley. Gilmore never offered any
hard numbers to back this up. Just the
corporate line.
Gilmore seems to be burned out. Perhaps
bored. So I'm glad to see him gone on to something
else. Perhaps the Mercury News will actually
hire someone who is paying attention to what
is going on.
One final example, as far as I'm concered, of
Gilmore's meltdown, an example I'm sure that
some slashdotters will object to: in reviewing
the difference between Bush II and Kerry,
Gilmore could come up with only the most tepid
criticism of the worst president in the modern
century. As far as I'm concerned this simply
means that Gilmore was just not paying attention
to events on a national and world level. He
just blathered on about which president would
be better for Silicon Valley, as if somehow
we are divorced from the rest of the nation.
Yes, I have to agree. The parent post had
some interesting things to say. It's too bad
that the author did not use paragraphs or,
perhaps, understand how to use HTML to get
paragraphs.
I know that that what impresses me in addition to
course work is someone interested in computer
science. People who learn on their own and do
things on their own. People who have contributed
to open source projects or published some of their
own software.
Also, internship experience. This allows you to
talk about accomplishments in something like
a real world setting.
And on the topic of internships... Let me give
a plug for the internship programs at the
National Labs and in particular at my employer,
the Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL).
LLNL has excellent internships in a variety of
areas, including physics, materials science and
computer science. A friend's daughter did an
internship here last summer and was given access
to the microfabrication (silicon) fabrication
facility. Another student did some work to
add the Reiser FS to a distributed computing
system. Some of the departments have seminar
programs for summer interns which are interesting
as well.
If you are interested in applying see the LLNL
web pages (don't send me email, I can't help).
You should apply NOW, since some of the programs
stop accepting applications by the end of
December (some allow applications through
January and Feburary). In many cases you will
need letters from professors, so get those
letters now before winter break.
I work at a National Lab in my day job.
I write software "on the side". It is not
a business yet, but I hope that it will become
one someday. The software is targeted at
a narrow application area: finance and electronic
market trading (e.g., stocks).
The fact that Eric Drexler was one of the first
(after Feinman) to write about the dream of
nanotechnology is widely recognized. But as
the parent post notes, Drexler ignores chemistry.
His critics are all experimental chemists. Not
exactly a group to be ignored.
All accomplishment starts with a dream. But the
path from dream to reality requires something more
than dreaming. Here Drexler falls down.
I'm sorry, I don't recall the reference, but I
recently saw an article on corporate CEOs getting
involved in politics. Apparently Gates, who has
either been apolitical or leaning toward moderate
Republican is now a Bush II supporter. I have
assumed that this is because the Justice Dept.
under Bush II has gone pretty easy on Microsoft.
Assuming that Gates even notices, I'd be surprised
if he's a big supporter of Bush II's other policies
(e.g., the war in Iraq, big government deficits
etc...) But apparently Republican/Bush II
business policy is enough to balance all of this.
Gates has said, on a number of occasions, that
he felt that the government was being unfair
to Microsoft. From Gates point of view here
is poor Microsoft, innovating away, for the
customer, and they get punished for doing good.
So finally there is a Justice Dept. that is
willing to let Microsoft be Microsoft. Oh
the joys of free enterprise (especially when
an enterprise works to make things less free).
Cost issues aside, I think that perception of
ClearCase is effected by whether you have to set
ClearCase up yourself or not.
The first time I used ClearCase I had to set up
the ClearCase environment. I did not like the
ClearCase documentation much. Rather that just
telling you what you need to know to get the
system set up they provide their grand vision
of the world. I could care less about their
grand vision, I want to get the source
control system working. After this experience
I was not a big fan of ClearCase.
I used ClearCase again in an environment where
the release engineering group managed ClearCase,
along with the releases. They would "freeze"
the branches for release (and let you in when
you had a bug fix). They would also create
new development branches and they managed the
main line branch. In this environment ClearCase
was really nice. I liked it a lot and prefer
it over CVS.
In summary I'd say that ClearCase is a higher
cost source control system. You not only have to pay for
the software license for ClearCase but part of
someone's time to manage it as well. For small projects
and software development groups this does not
make sense. But once a group reaches a certain
size, the cost can be justified and ClearCase
is nice.
I am currently working on a project where there
there is a core set of software that is used by
three different groups, each of which will
probably want their own changes. In this
environment I think that a release engineering
group and ClearCase would be justified (of course
that does not mean that we're going to get
a relase engineering group and ClearCase).
A fair criticism. However, the sad truth as far
as I can tell is that Relax NG will be an also
ran. XML Schemas seem to have become the standard
and I have not seen any formal defintion for how
a schema defines an XML document. That is, does
a schema define an LL(1), and LR(1) or a backtracking
tree match (which seems to be the case).
So, yes, not everyone is clueless. But what
seems to be the accepted standard does appear
to have been developed by the clueless.
In in the last stages of a project that implemented
a graph based query language for a graph that is
implemented by an Oracle database. Our query language eventually
results in some large SQL statements and on
occasion the Oracle optimizer does pretty poorly
at executing these queries. My colleague, who
is an Oracle expert, has added a large number of
"hints" to get the optimizer to do "the right thing". These "hints" can result in a factor
of ten reduction in query time.
Lots of work undoubtedly has gone into the
Oracle optimizer, but it is not obvious that
a language that translates better into the
relational model might not do better than
SQL does currently.
A stronger argument for why REL will probably
go nowhere is that lots of people (like my
colleague) have spent a lot of time mastering
SQL. And SQL is relatively portable (as long
as one avoids extensions as much as possible).
Re:There's nothing there, yet we need help
on
Fabian Pascal Reacts
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The XML community seems to be largely devoid
of any knowledge of history or computer science
depth. I have yet to find a description of
XML schema processing in terms of grammars and
parsers. The brain damaged SAX parser has become
popular, while few know about the XmlPullParser.
Since many of those who use XML parsers don't
seem to have ever parsed anything else, they
do not seem to find it odd that
the scanner should call the parser, rather than
the other way around.
Perhaps this lack of computer science depth
is due to the fact that XML grew out of the
dot-com bubble, when people felt they had no
time to design or think about much. Just get
it out the door. It was also during this time
that the field was flooded with people who
had not necessarily studied computer science.
It was smart for Mark Cuban to choose to hedge
in this case, but the brains behind setting
up the hedge resided at an investment bank.
Hedges of this type are set up by investment banks
like Goldman or UBS.
They have people who sell these kind of services
to executives. I imagine that someone like this
connected with Cuban. For a substantial fee they
set up the hedge. The goal of the investment
bank is to lay off the risk, by selling options,
or a moving set of dynamically hedged options
so that they keep the fee and have no risk.
As noted in the parent, the hedge limits the
"down side" loss, while also limiting the
"upside" gain. This would not have been such
a good move for Google insiders, but it was a
very good move for Yahoo insiders.
What ever social/moral issues exist (e.g., artist,
like software engineers, need to get paid for
their work), peer-to-peer networks
have many interesting computer science issues
associated with them. For example, Hector Garcia-Molina database group at Standford
is also involved in peer-to-peer network research. A peer-to-peer network
that provided privacy to those who supplied files
would not only avoid RIAA suits, but it would
protect people who publish material that
governments and corporations wished to suppress
(e.g., it would be a way to guarantee free
free speech).
I have not worked this through, but on the face
of it, I would think that it should be possible
to create a peer-to-peer network where it would
be difficult to tell which system supplied a
file. The idea (half-baked, perhaps) is that
a request would go out for a file, or perhaps
a string which could be matched by a responder
("Barry Manilow"+hits). The response would
be routed through intermediate systems and
might not follow the same path through the
life of the transaction (e.g., the file fetch).
Neither the requester or the responder would
know that path to the other. They would just
send packets out to their neighbors.
While in theory it would be possible to trace
these transactions, it would be difficult.
And doing so might be similar to wiretapping
the internet, which might be illegal without
a court order (at least in the US).
So there are a few questions:
Is there p2p software that obscures the source
of files? Certainly what I've proposed is not
terribly original, so perhaps it already exists.
Avoiding getting sued by the RIAA seems like
a pretty good incentive to use this software.
Is there some problem with this concept? Would
a peer-to-peer network that emulates a routing
network be easier to track than I think?
Thanks for posting and for the clear explaination.
I'm guilty of fuzzy thinking here. I was thinking
that these are iterative algorithms, similar to
random number generators. And that a larger input
stream would result in better distribution. But
there is no reason to think this on reflection.
Basicly you're saying that if SHA-1 alone is not
good enough then use some combination of cryptographic
hash functions and that will be better.
Well, OK. But it does not address the reason that
so many people hope that the attack on MD5 and SHA-1
are not solid. These algorithms have a number of
attractive characteristics. They are not hugely
expensive to compute (the algorithm above is).
They can be used to calculate a (supposedly)
unique signature for an input. And the
signature does not consume a large number of bits
(another problem with the algorithm proposed
above).
On a related note: I wonder if the attack
on these algorithms has something to do with the
number of bits used as input. Intuitively it
seems that the larger the number of bits in the
input stream, the more unique (widely distributed)
the hash should be. So if you used small inputs
then collision might be more likely.
I went back and read my post. Perhaps I did not
make point clearly.
I love computer science. I've done a lot in my
career that I'm proud of (see my resume). I am fortunate to have
a job at a government lab that will never be moved
overseas. If you really love computer science
then you should go into this field. And, as I noted, at least the CS geeks are not as gross
as the Wall Street traders.
But the profession is not what it was
five years ago. So go into it with your eyes
open. This is the same advice that I'd give
anyone, regardless of gender.
One thing that has changed in the last twenty
years is that there are many more women in
science and technology. I already mentioned
Ingrid Daubechies, an applied mathematican who
was responsible for developing advanced
signal processing algorithms (the Daubechies
Wavelets).
I recently went
to a talk by a woman who is a lab head at MIT.
She is working on processes to get biological
viruses to create inorganic nanotubes. She
has won a variety of scientific awards and is
clearly on the fast track to being a major
contributer in her field.
In high school it may be difficult to see that
there are women like these out there. When
you get to a University it will be different.
So by
all means, go for it. You can be one of these
women.
If you love computer science and applied math,
this is a great field. But you will start your
career in a very different world than I did.
For most of my career there has been a shortage
of software engineers. I have been able to
go from company to company looking for the next
cool project. These days are gone and they
may never return.
Given the current state of computer science
employment, I'm not sure that I'd encourage anyone,
regardless of gender to go into this field.
Given the instability in employment and flat job
market, the only reason to go into computer
science is because you love it.
I went to a talk by a woman professor at the UC
Berkeley engineering department. She pointed out
that women act a bit like canaries in a coal mine.
When they start to disappear, the field is getting
toxic. I think that in may ways we have a toxic
profession. Some of the best jobs are now with
the government. This is a bad sign. It
is a sign of an unhealthy job market and profession.
In addition to the current job market we have
a profession that is infamous for its age
discrimination (look at empolyment statistics
for engineers over 40). I doubt that it is an
easy field for women to work in. I suspect that
there is gender discrimination as well. This is
why you see women gravitate to large companies
like IBM and HP, or to government jobs. These
organizations at least attempt to actively
work against gender discrimination.
So it should not be a surprise that while there
are now notable women in mathematics (like
Ingrid Daubechies), we are not seeing as many
women in CS. I suppose that at least we can
pat ourselves on the back that our field is
better than Wall Street, where humans in general
and women specifically are treated badly.
I assume that here you are referring to Lynn
Conway of Conway and Mead, who wrote one of the
early pioneering books on (what we would now
consider) low level VLSI design.
Lynn Conway is a transgender person. She used to
be a he, if I recall correctly. Whether we can
count Ms. Conway as an example of women succeeding
in science and engineering is a more complex
question.
But stepping back for a moment - there is no
question that Conway, regardless of gender -
has made significant contributions.
If you go to the Analytical Graphics Inc. web site
"careers" web page and search under "Information
Technology" you get...
Sorry, there are currently no job positions available in Information Technology. Please check back later.
As many have noted in previous posts, there is
still not that much hiring going on.
On the positive side, it speaks well of the
company that they offer the perks, even when
there are not openings and they would probably
not have a hard time hiring new people.
Since you know Evan I am certainly willing to
take your word for his skills. The only thing that
I will note is that there is a certain amount of
experience that is useful in creating a decompiler.
For example, an understanding of control flow/
dataflow graph construction (from which one
can rebuild source). But this is really a side
issue. I'll assume that Evan has the skill
and experience.
What I don't understand from looking over
Evan's web page is
whether Evan actually created the software.
And if not, all we're dealing with is an idea
and a not terribly unique idea at that. There
is also another name for an unimplemented
idea: a dream.
If all this litigation and, I would assume,
pain on Evan's part, is simply over
an idea then I think that my original
comment is on the mark:
This appears to be
the result of a corporation and Evan becoming
embroiled in litigation over something that is
not worth suing over. A decompiler is simply
not patentable (assuming that someone was willing
to challenge the patent). It is an idea that
is obvious to anyone "skilled in the art".
Now techniques for decompiling might be patentable,
but if I understand this correctly, this is not
about existing software or algorithmic techniques.
Even if one tried to patent algorithmic techniques
in this case, there is over thirty years of prior compiler
"art" on algorithms. Yes one could claim that
these algorithms were applied in a new way
(decompiling), but it would still be an uphill
battle. Finally, as far as I can tell, there is
not much of a market for decompilers.
If this reading of the situation is correct,
this appears to be an example of stupid
management and a stubborn Texan. The stupid
management thought that they owned an idea,
which is more or less worthless (but being
stupid/ignorant, they did not know it). The stubborn
Texan insisted that he owned his ideas. The
end result may be Mr. Brown being forced
into bankrupcy if Alcatel ever enforces the
legal fee judgement. Even if this is not
the case, Mr. Brown will never get back all the
time he spent on this. From my point of view,
life is too short.
Darl:
One announcement that we are making at the show is called the SCO Marketplace, and that's a marketplace exchange whereby we are going to allow developers to come and bid on work-for-hire projects that we have, to fill in the gaps where we're going with our development plan.
Given that software developers in low cost
countries like India and Eastern Europe can
develop software far cheaper than developers
in the US, does this mean that SCO is outsourcing
their software development? I can see it now:
SCO will fire their engineering staff (what little
is left) and announce that they are a "virtual
company" consisting of lawyers, suing IBM, and outsourced
software projects. SCO will consist of Darl
and a few hench-weasels to manage the lawyers
and Indian software engineers.
From a quick read of Evan Brown's web site
it appears that the "unique idea" he claims is
a decompiler. That is, a program that will take
compiled binary code and convert it into some
kind of source code. As an idea this does not
seem to be terribly unique or profound. What is
difficult is implementing this idea in working
software.
Evan Brown claims that the company he has
been in litigation with offered him $2 million
for the rights to his "idea". Apparently he
turned them down. According to the web site
they then sued Mr. Brown claiming to own the
idea anyway.
What I find ironic is that as an "idea" a decompiler
is certainly not worth much. An actual
implementation, that can be easily retargeted,
might be worth $2 million, but it is not clear
that this is what Mr. Brown had, or that he was
capable of creating this kind of software. The
guy was working as tester and debugger, not a compiler developer. His skills seem to have been
hacking an existing software base, not creating
new, complex software.
While I am sympathetic with Mr. Brown's David
vs. Goliath fight, it does seem that his
difficulties lie in being difficult. It seems
like there must have been a way out of this
other than years of litigation.
The case also seems to turn on Texas law. While
I am tempted to make nasty comments about the
state that elected G.W. Bush governor, I'll
resist. After all he might be "elected"
president and I would not want an all expense
paid trip to the US resort in Cuba.
I will note that at least in California
work that you do on your own time that is not
related to your employers work belongs to you.
And given the history of startup companies here, it also
appears that in many cases you can use related
work as long as you quit first.
Oh, and by the way, I have a compiler development
background. I'd be happy to deliver a decompiler
for $2 million...
Re:What do corporations want from education?
on
Feed
·
· Score: 1
Yet another example of Toffler(s) being wrong.
They were writing at a time when there actually
was a labor shortage in the Western world.
We can only hope that we will see those times
again. We have "future shock", but not of the
kind they invision.
Our world is struggling with a shortage of jobs,
not workers. Corporations have more than enough
workers. Feed gets some of these themes
right. As productivity increases, more and
more stuff is produced by fewer and fewer workers.
Who will consume all the stuff that is the
fruit of all this productivity? Corporations will
be increasingly interested in a consumer class,
since they will have more than enough workers.
And workers will compete ever more fiercely
for the few real jobs that are available.
We are starting to see the footprints of what
may be a post capitalist world. Unfortunately
I'm not convinced that it will be much of
a utopia. At least not in my lifetime. I'm not
sure what form the emerging market system will take. But it seems clear that
a world where people work, in the sense that they
have throughout human history, for the means
of survival is less and less functional. The
claim that service jobs will make up for all
of the jobs lost to automation and globalization
is simply a statement of faith ("I believe in
the unseen...").
Right now the economic system seems to be
unstable. The global workforce is becoming
integrated. Those of us in software
engineering are now discovering what the steel
workers found out: we are competing with large
labor pools in India, China, Russia and Eastern
Europe. Salaries are stagnating in the
Western world as wages start
to be averaged out on a global scale. As people
have less disposable income who will buy all
the stuff? There will be some increased demand
in rising economies, but population pressure
and automation will keep their salaries down.
So their ability to pick up the consumer slack
is equally limited.
This suggests that corporations might actually
move to create a consumer class, as Feed
speculates. How else to feed the cycle of
income and consumption when most people don't
have what we would recognize today as jobs?
Slashdot Mirror
Outsourcing has been moving "up the food chain". From call centers selling products to help desk support. And from help desk support to software development, chip design, paralegal work and any other job that can be done on a computer.
One of the scary things about offshore outsourcing is that it appears to be eating into more and more high paying jobs. These are the jobs that were supposed to belong to first world "knowledge workers". After hollowing out our manufacturing and losing high paying manufacturing jobs, then losing "knowledge worker" jobs, the fear is that all that will be left are "service sector" jobs that pay poorly and have few benifits.
These fears should not be dismissed and they are certainly echoed in the slashdot community. But the issue is more complex than the pay differential between India and Silicon Valley.
People in the US are notoriously insular. We don't travel to foreign countries as much as people in Europe since the United States is huge. We tend to assume that people everywhere are either just like us or want to be just like us (just listen to they way G.W. Bush talks about Iraq).
When we look at India from afar we see a democracy. India has a British derived legal system, just like we do. Many Indians have excellent english language skills. Many of us have gone to school and worked with people from India. So there should be no problem moving jobs from the US to India where the job can be done for much less cost.
How simplistic this view is was brought home to me recently when I read Suketu Mehta's book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
India is a huge country. Maximum City is about just one part of India, Bombay. I have no idea who different Bangalore is. The picture that Mehta paints of India is of a country whose legal system is broken on every level.
A broken legal system has a number of implications. One implication is that without a civil tort system, where a lawsuit can be successfully brought, there is nothing to stop someone from stealing your intellectual property. If you pay someone to develop software there is nothing to stop them from selling it to someone else. If you partner with someone there is nothing to stop them from appropriating shared intellectual property or the money that you put into the partnership.
The legal system is broken on a criminal level as well. Extortion exists more or less without check. Wealthy people must be careful to avoid displays of wealth, lest they be targeted for extortion. Wealthy Indians who do not pay are killed or their family members are kidnapped. There is no reason to assume that a foreigner in India will be immune.
The police in India practice torture and have squads that take part in extra-judicial killings. One chapter in Maximum City starts out with an account of a muslim baker being burned alive during one of the Hindu anti-muslim riots.
This is not Kansas, Dorothy.
Cost in the western world are much higher. But the legal system in the western world works well in comparison to the legal system in India or China. While there is corruption in the police and civil service in the United States it is not a way of life as it is in India or China.
The book Mr. China by Tim Clissold tells a story of how the investment group that Clissold worked for lost $400 million (US) on a number of Chinese joint ventures. After three years of struggle, Clissold, who spoke Mandarin Chinese fluently, was totally burned out.
China is changing at a dizzying rate. The conditions of a few years ago that Clissold described may no longer be the same. But even in China the "rule of law" is in the process of evolving. China is still the land of the "Red Princes" and those who go against the oligarchy can
I'm glad to see this, since I have not wish to put a dime of my money in the pocket of a National Review right wing fanatic.
Why is the much respected tech writer leaving what he described as 'greatest gig in the world' for the perilous journey of developing an entrepreneurial idea in citizen-journalism?
Like many Bay Area Sprawl denizens, I've subscribed to the Mercury News (where Dan Gilmore publishes) for many years. I used to really like Gilmore's writing. I have not gone back and read the archives (assuming they are available without fee), but I remember Gilmore as being someone on the side of engineers and innovation. Maybe I just don't remember Gilmore correctly. But I do recall reading Gilmore columns and thinking to myself Yeah!.
The Dan Gilmore I've read in the last two years seems like a different person. I've read few editorials by Gilmore for sometime that left me with that Yeah! feeling.
Gilmore used to write a lot about the culture and working environment of Silicon Valley. But recent events seem to have passed him by. He does not seem to have grasped what has happened to engineering and the job market. He's been in the camp that claims that what we are seeing around is just another setback to Silicon Valley (that great hot bead of innovation). The Next Big Thing will come along and life will at least return to the relatively better times of 1995, if not the rockin times of 1999.
Recently in discussing the hostile takeover of PeopleSoft by Oracle all Gilmore could write was that PeopleSoft was irresponsible to resist the Borg at Oracle for so long. He only tangentially mentioned the thousands of employees who would lose their jobs in one of the worst technology job markets in memory. Nor did Gilmore comment on the fact that the corporate culture of PeopleSoft is radically different from that of Oracle. Those who survive the layoffs that result from the hostile merger will find themselves at a very different company, if Oracle is any indication. Oracle is a company that has a reputation for cutthroat internal competition.
The fact that a hostile takeover might even work in the software industry is something that Gilmore missed as well. Why might it work now when a decade ago a hostile takeover was considered impractical? Well one reason is that a decade ago the engineering staff, middle managers, sale and marketing people could all "jump ship" and go to another company. It's a different world now, since jobs are much harder to come by.
When it comes to stock options, all Gilmore could do was parrot the line put forth by Silicon Valley executives. He never acknowleged that stock options are a major part of the bloat executive compensation that we've seen in the last couple of decades. He just claimed that it would hurt innovation in Silicon Valley. Gilmore never offered any hard numbers to back this up. Just the corporate line.
Gilmore seems to be burned out. Perhaps bored. So I'm glad to see him gone on to something else. Perhaps the Mercury News will actually hire someone who is paying attention to what is going on.
One final example, as far as I'm concered, of Gilmore's meltdown, an example I'm sure that some slashdotters will object to: in reviewing the difference between Bush II and Kerry, Gilmore could come up with only the most tepid criticism of the worst president in the modern century. As far as I'm concerned this simply means that Gilmore was just not paying attention to events on a national and world level. He just blathered on about which president would be better for Silicon Valley, as if somehow we are divorced from the rest of the nation.
Yes, I have to agree. The parent post had some interesting things to say. It's too bad that the author did not use paragraphs or, perhaps, understand how to use HTML to get paragraphs.
I know that that what impresses me in addition to course work is someone interested in computer science. People who learn on their own and do things on their own. People who have contributed to open source projects or published some of their own software.
Also, internship experience. This allows you to talk about accomplishments in something like a real world setting.
And on the topic of internships... Let me give a plug for the internship programs at the National Labs and in particular at my employer, the Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL).
LLNL has excellent internships in a variety of areas, including physics, materials science and computer science. A friend's daughter did an internship here last summer and was given access to the microfabrication (silicon) fabrication facility. Another student did some work to add the Reiser FS to a distributed computing system. Some of the departments have seminar programs for summer interns which are interesting as well.
If you are interested in applying see the LLNL web pages (don't send me email, I can't help). You should apply NOW, since some of the programs stop accepting applications by the end of December (some allow applications through January and Feburary). In many cases you will need letters from professors, so get those letters now before winter break.
I work at a National Lab in my day job. I write software "on the side". It is not a business yet, but I hope that it will become one someday. The software is targeted at a narrow application area: finance and electronic market trading (e.g., stocks).
The fact that Eric Drexler was one of the first (after Feinman) to write about the dream of nanotechnology is widely recognized. But as the parent post notes, Drexler ignores chemistry. His critics are all experimental chemists. Not exactly a group to be ignored.
All accomplishment starts with a dream. But the path from dream to reality requires something more than dreaming. Here Drexler falls down.
I'm sorry, I don't recall the reference, but I recently saw an article on corporate CEOs getting involved in politics. Apparently Gates, who has either been apolitical or leaning toward moderate Republican is now a Bush II supporter. I have assumed that this is because the Justice Dept. under Bush II has gone pretty easy on Microsoft.
Assuming that Gates even notices, I'd be surprised if he's a big supporter of Bush II's other policies (e.g., the war in Iraq, big government deficits etc...) But apparently Republican/Bush II business policy is enough to balance all of this.
Gates has said, on a number of occasions, that he felt that the government was being unfair to Microsoft. From Gates point of view here is poor Microsoft, innovating away, for the customer, and they get punished for doing good. So finally there is a Justice Dept. that is willing to let Microsoft be Microsoft. Oh the joys of free enterprise (especially when an enterprise works to make things less free).
Gee, thanks for your useful addition to the discussion. I did not know that english and spelling pedants actually used computers.
Cost issues aside, I think that perception of ClearCase is effected by whether you have to set ClearCase up yourself or not.
The first time I used ClearCase I had to set up the ClearCase environment. I did not like the ClearCase documentation much. Rather that just telling you what you need to know to get the system set up they provide their grand vision of the world. I could care less about their grand vision, I want to get the source control system working. After this experience I was not a big fan of ClearCase.
I used ClearCase again in an environment where the release engineering group managed ClearCase, along with the releases. They would "freeze" the branches for release (and let you in when you had a bug fix). They would also create new development branches and they managed the main line branch. In this environment ClearCase was really nice. I liked it a lot and prefer it over CVS.
In summary I'd say that ClearCase is a higher cost source control system. You not only have to pay for the software license for ClearCase but part of someone's time to manage it as well. For small projects and software development groups this does not make sense. But once a group reaches a certain size, the cost can be justified and ClearCase is nice.
I am currently working on a project where there there is a core set of software that is used by three different groups, each of which will probably want their own changes. In this environment I think that a release engineering group and ClearCase would be justified (of course that does not mean that we're going to get a relase engineering group and ClearCase).
A fair criticism. However, the sad truth as far as I can tell is that Relax NG will be an also ran. XML Schemas seem to have become the standard and I have not seen any formal defintion for how a schema defines an XML document. That is, does a schema define an LL(1), and LR(1) or a backtracking tree match (which seems to be the case).
So, yes, not everyone is clueless. But what seems to be the accepted standard does appear to have been developed by the clueless.
In in the last stages of a project that implemented a graph based query language for a graph that is implemented by an Oracle database. Our query language eventually results in some large SQL statements and on occasion the Oracle optimizer does pretty poorly at executing these queries. My colleague, who is an Oracle expert, has added a large number of "hints" to get the optimizer to do "the right thing". These "hints" can result in a factor of ten reduction in query time.
Lots of work undoubtedly has gone into the Oracle optimizer, but it is not obvious that a language that translates better into the relational model might not do better than SQL does currently.
A stronger argument for why REL will probably go nowhere is that lots of people (like my colleague) have spent a lot of time mastering SQL. And SQL is relatively portable (as long as one avoids extensions as much as possible).
The XML community seems to be largely devoid of any knowledge of history or computer science depth. I have yet to find a description of XML schema processing in terms of grammars and parsers. The brain damaged SAX parser has become popular, while few know about the XmlPullParser. Since many of those who use XML parsers don't seem to have ever parsed anything else, they do not seem to find it odd that the scanner should call the parser, rather than the other way around.
Perhaps this lack of computer science depth is due to the fact that XML grew out of the dot-com bubble, when people felt they had no time to design or think about much. Just get it out the door. It was also during this time that the field was flooded with people who had not necessarily studied computer science.
It was smart for Mark Cuban to choose to hedge in this case, but the brains behind setting up the hedge resided at an investment bank.
Hedges of this type are set up by investment banks like Goldman or UBS. They have people who sell these kind of services to executives. I imagine that someone like this connected with Cuban. For a substantial fee they set up the hedge. The goal of the investment bank is to lay off the risk, by selling options, or a moving set of dynamically hedged options so that they keep the fee and have no risk.
As noted in the parent, the hedge limits the "down side" loss, while also limiting the "upside" gain. This would not have been such a good move for Google insiders, but it was a very good move for Yahoo insiders.
What ever social/moral issues exist (e.g., artist, like software engineers, need to get paid for their work), peer-to-peer networks have many interesting computer science issues associated with them. For example, Hector Garcia-Molina database group at Standford is also involved in peer-to-peer network research. A peer-to-peer network that provided privacy to those who supplied files would not only avoid RIAA suits, but it would protect people who publish material that governments and corporations wished to suppress (e.g., it would be a way to guarantee free free speech).
I have not worked this through, but on the face of it, I would think that it should be possible to create a peer-to-peer network where it would be difficult to tell which system supplied a file. The idea (half-baked, perhaps) is that a request would go out for a file, or perhaps a string which could be matched by a responder ("Barry Manilow"+hits). The response would be routed through intermediate systems and might not follow the same path through the life of the transaction (e.g., the file fetch). Neither the requester or the responder would know that path to the other. They would just send packets out to their neighbors.
While in theory it would be possible to trace these transactions, it would be difficult. And doing so might be similar to wiretapping the internet, which might be illegal without a court order (at least in the US).
So there are a few questions:
Is there p2p software that obscures the source of files? Certainly what I've proposed is not terribly original, so perhaps it already exists. Avoiding getting sued by the RIAA seems like a pretty good incentive to use this software.
Is there some problem with this concept? Would a peer-to-peer network that emulates a routing network be easier to track than I think?
Thanks for posting and for the clear explaination.
I'm guilty of fuzzy thinking here. I was thinking that these are iterative algorithms, similar to random number generators. And that a larger input stream would result in better distribution. But there is no reason to think this on reflection.
Basicly you're saying that if SHA-1 alone is not good enough then use some combination of cryptographic hash functions and that will be better.
Well, OK. But it does not address the reason that so many people hope that the attack on MD5 and SHA-1 are not solid. These algorithms have a number of attractive characteristics. They are not hugely expensive to compute (the algorithm above is). They can be used to calculate a (supposedly) unique signature for an input. And the signature does not consume a large number of bits (another problem with the algorithm proposed above).
On a related note: I wonder if the attack on these algorithms has something to do with the number of bits used as input. Intuitively it seems that the larger the number of bits in the input stream, the more unique (widely distributed) the hash should be. So if you used small inputs then collision might be more likely.
I went back and read my post. Perhaps I did not make point clearly.
I love computer science. I've done a lot in my career that I'm proud of (see my resume). I am fortunate to have a job at a government lab that will never be moved overseas. If you really love computer science then you should go into this field. And, as I noted, at least the CS geeks are not as gross as the Wall Street traders.
But the profession is not what it was five years ago. So go into it with your eyes open. This is the same advice that I'd give anyone, regardless of gender.
One thing that has changed in the last twenty years is that there are many more women in science and technology. I already mentioned Ingrid Daubechies, an applied mathematican who was responsible for developing advanced signal processing algorithms (the Daubechies Wavelets).
I recently went to a talk by a woman who is a lab head at MIT. She is working on processes to get biological viruses to create inorganic nanotubes. She has won a variety of scientific awards and is clearly on the fast track to being a major contributer in her field.
In high school it may be difficult to see that there are women like these out there. When you get to a University it will be different. So by all means, go for it. You can be one of these women. If you love computer science and applied math, this is a great field. But you will start your career in a very different world than I did. For most of my career there has been a shortage of software engineers. I have been able to go from company to company looking for the next cool project. These days are gone and they may never return.
Given the current state of computer science employment, I'm not sure that I'd encourage anyone, regardless of gender to go into this field. Given the instability in employment and flat job market, the only reason to go into computer science is because you love it.
I went to a talk by a woman professor at the UC Berkeley engineering department. She pointed out that women act a bit like canaries in a coal mine. When they start to disappear, the field is getting toxic. I think that in may ways we have a toxic profession. Some of the best jobs are now with the government. This is a bad sign. It is a sign of an unhealthy job market and profession.
In addition to the current job market we have a profession that is infamous for its age discrimination (look at empolyment statistics for engineers over 40). I doubt that it is an easy field for women to work in. I suspect that there is gender discrimination as well. This is why you see women gravitate to large companies like IBM and HP, or to government jobs. These organizations at least attempt to actively work against gender discrimination.
So it should not be a surprise that while there are now notable women in mathematics (like Ingrid Daubechies), we are not seeing as many women in CS. I suppose that at least we can pat ourselves on the back that our field is better than Wall Street, where humans in general and women specifically are treated badly.
I assume that here you are referring to Lynn Conway of Conway and Mead, who wrote one of the early pioneering books on (what we would now consider) low level VLSI design.
Lynn Conway is a transgender person. She used to be a he, if I recall correctly. Whether we can count Ms. Conway as an example of women succeeding in science and engineering is a more complex question.
But stepping back for a moment - there is no question that Conway, regardless of gender - has made significant contributions.
If you go to the Analytical Graphics Inc. web site "careers" web page and search under "Information Technology" you get...
Sorry, there are currently no job positions available in Information Technology. Please check back later.
As many have noted in previous posts, there is still not that much hiring going on.
On the positive side, it speaks well of the company that they offer the perks, even when there are not openings and they would probably not have a hard time hiring new people.
Since you know Evan I am certainly willing to take your word for his skills. The only thing that I will note is that there is a certain amount of experience that is useful in creating a decompiler. For example, an understanding of control flow/ dataflow graph construction (from which one can rebuild source). But this is really a side issue. I'll assume that Evan has the skill and experience.
What I don't understand from looking over Evan's web page is whether Evan actually created the software. And if not, all we're dealing with is an idea and a not terribly unique idea at that. There is also another name for an unimplemented idea: a dream.
If all this litigation and, I would assume, pain on Evan's part, is simply over an idea then I think that my original comment is on the mark: This appears to be the result of a corporation and Evan becoming embroiled in litigation over something that is not worth suing over. A decompiler is simply not patentable (assuming that someone was willing to challenge the patent). It is an idea that is obvious to anyone "skilled in the art".
Now techniques for decompiling might be patentable, but if I understand this correctly, this is not about existing software or algorithmic techniques. Even if one tried to patent algorithmic techniques in this case, there is over thirty years of prior compiler "art" on algorithms. Yes one could claim that these algorithms were applied in a new way (decompiling), but it would still be an uphill battle. Finally, as far as I can tell, there is not much of a market for decompilers.
If this reading of the situation is correct, this appears to be an example of stupid management and a stubborn Texan. The stupid management thought that they owned an idea, which is more or less worthless (but being stupid/ignorant, they did not know it). The stubborn Texan insisted that he owned his ideas. The end result may be Mr. Brown being forced into bankrupcy if Alcatel ever enforces the legal fee judgement. Even if this is not the case, Mr. Brown will never get back all the time he spent on this. From my point of view, life is too short.
Darl: One announcement that we are making at the show is called the SCO Marketplace, and that's a marketplace exchange whereby we are going to allow developers to come and bid on work-for-hire projects that we have, to fill in the gaps where we're going with our development plan.
Given that software developers in low cost countries like India and Eastern Europe can develop software far cheaper than developers in the US, does this mean that SCO is outsourcing their software development? I can see it now: SCO will fire their engineering staff (what little is left) and announce that they are a "virtual company" consisting of lawyers, suing IBM, and outsourced software projects. SCO will consist of Darl and a few hench-weasels to manage the lawyers and Indian software engineers.
From a quick read of Evan Brown's web site it appears that the "unique idea" he claims is a decompiler. That is, a program that will take compiled binary code and convert it into some kind of source code. As an idea this does not seem to be terribly unique or profound. What is difficult is implementing this idea in working software.
Evan Brown claims that the company he has been in litigation with offered him $2 million for the rights to his "idea". Apparently he turned them down. According to the web site they then sued Mr. Brown claiming to own the idea anyway.
What I find ironic is that as an "idea" a decompiler is certainly not worth much. An actual implementation, that can be easily retargeted, might be worth $2 million, but it is not clear that this is what Mr. Brown had, or that he was capable of creating this kind of software. The guy was working as tester and debugger, not a compiler developer. His skills seem to have been hacking an existing software base, not creating new, complex software.
While I am sympathetic with Mr. Brown's David vs. Goliath fight, it does seem that his difficulties lie in being difficult. It seems like there must have been a way out of this other than years of litigation.
The case also seems to turn on Texas law. While I am tempted to make nasty comments about the state that elected G.W. Bush governor, I'll resist. After all he might be "elected" president and I would not want an all expense paid trip to the US resort in Cuba.
I will note that at least in California work that you do on your own time that is not related to your employers work belongs to you. And given the history of startup companies here, it also appears that in many cases you can use related work as long as you quit first.
Oh, and by the way, I have a compiler development background. I'd be happy to deliver a decompiler for $2 million...
Yet another example of Toffler(s) being wrong. They were writing at a time when there actually was a labor shortage in the Western world. We can only hope that we will see those times again. We have "future shock", but not of the kind they invision.
Our world is struggling with a shortage of jobs, not workers. Corporations have more than enough workers. Feed gets some of these themes right. As productivity increases, more and more stuff is produced by fewer and fewer workers. Who will consume all the stuff that is the fruit of all this productivity? Corporations will be increasingly interested in a consumer class, since they will have more than enough workers. And workers will compete ever more fiercely for the few real jobs that are available.
We are starting to see the footprints of what may be a post capitalist world. Unfortunately I'm not convinced that it will be much of a utopia. At least not in my lifetime. I'm not sure what form the emerging market system will take. But it seems clear that a world where people work, in the sense that they have throughout human history, for the means of survival is less and less functional. The claim that service jobs will make up for all of the jobs lost to automation and globalization is simply a statement of faith ("I believe in the unseen...").
Right now the economic system seems to be unstable. The global workforce is becoming integrated. Those of us in software engineering are now discovering what the steel workers found out: we are competing with large labor pools in India, China, Russia and Eastern Europe. Salaries are stagnating in the Western world as wages start to be averaged out on a global scale. As people have less disposable income who will buy all the stuff? There will be some increased demand in rising economies, but population pressure and automation will keep their salaries down. So their ability to pick up the consumer slack is equally limited.
This suggests that corporations might actually move to create a consumer class, as Feed speculates. How else to feed the cycle of income and consumption when most people don't have what we would recognize today as jobs?