..and Rick should know that. Heck, it's currently only getting a 1.25 out of a possible 3 by readers on the site. It's not looked on favorably.
I've communicated with Rick in the past and asked that he not publish inflammatory statements like this because they do not build up the Java community. In fact, it makes him and everyone he associates with sound like a bunch of complainers. He seems intent on beating the justice drum until everyone forgets what the heck they need to do now to solve the current issues facing Java developers. His diatribes don't help the legal case along in the least anyway; what is he hoping to accomplish?
FWIW - I feel that any Java developer would be spending their time much more wisely pursuing certification through Sun or IBM or working on an OS Java server solution like JBoss. I don't see how associating yourself with JavaLobby would help build up your career (unless you're just trolling for news).
It's too bad. He could actually lead the Java development community to an extent.
You make well reasoned points. If you look at your original post though, it did indeed seem bigoted. Obviously, we don't know you, so if you make comments like the one you did without some perspective about the comment then you should expect someone to call you on it. That's not just being PC or even in being in fear of PC; it's just normal people trying to be decent.
I would say that IDEs do not support outlining at all. My observation was just that code folding (such as that provided in Visual Studio.NET) would provide everything that most developers think they need. Of course, it's not the same as literate programming, but it does bear a superficial resemblence.
More importantly though and FWIW, I think we all owe you a big "Thanks". You've brought the literate programming discussion back to life for everyone and I'm sure we're all better off for it.
And a quick question: Do you think you'll ever put together a commercial version of Leo that functions within mainstream IDEs? I can see how Leo's features would be particularly useful within the context of products like VS.NET, Eclipse, etc.? I'm just curious on this count, but I know what a big effort this represents.
I agree to some extent. However, you're assuming that the developer will start with a good design. That may not be the case. Literate programming helps you get the design sorted out in an easily changed format, with or without code present. Think of it as re-factoring, but in the detailed design stage.
Now, one could argue that you really ought to have a design before you start coding. However, there seems to be no end to people who seem incapable of this and there seems to be no end to customers who are unable to articulate requirements well enough to make this possible.
I've tried Leo in the past, and while I support the author's ideas and the idea of literate programming in general, I do not believe that the practice will become significantly more common in the near future.
There are two reasons I believe this:
1. More and more modern IDEs support the idea of folding sections of code at multiple levels. Combine this with some well placed comments, and you achieve a very high degree of readability. This nullifies the primary benefit of Leo and ensures that most developers won't ever look at literate programming tools.
2. Changing over to literate programming is, at least superficially, a large change. It's a large change because it requires that developers switch their primary environment. That's a big deal. Even if developers had the tools for literate programming in their preferred programming language already in their hands, they probably wouldn't use it.
I do hope I'm wrong about the above though. I think a shift in the industry (even for a relatively short time) to literate programming would give us new ways of thinking about systems design, development, and would greatly ease long term maintenance.
You would think the major labels would take a lesson from this.
They will take a lesson from it. It just won't be the lesson you expect. Instead of saying something like "This restricted format stuff just doesn't work", they'll say something like "Piracy is killing us".
Just try it! I doubt that it's going to revolutionize the world of computing or anything, but it's a nice first step in anticipatory interfaces (anyone who reads Infoworld will regularly will know what I mean).
"But some people play this game only to build the best web server possible."
I suppose it's debatable, but I'll argue that market share has nothing to do with having the best product.
I believe that many people on/. look at the Apache numbers as some sort of "is Microsoft dead?" meter. They seem to think that if Apache can maintain a big enough market share for long enough, that it will either kill Microsoft or make Microsoft irrelevant. There's no doubt that it could hurt Microsoft's a teeny bit, but that's about it.
But don't worry too much. If you select web servers based on how many people make how much money off you, then you can still choose (what I presume to be) the leader by that criteria.
Exactly! And what I'm saying here is that Apache may or may not be a valuable part of many companies' mission critical applications. To me, that's valuable. Just knowing how many functioning instances of Apache are out there isn't too valuable for most businesses in my opinion.
..what this survey won't tell you is what products are being used for truly mission critical, complex, back-end processing (high, medium, or low volume). That's where companies will spend their money on licensing (not as important for OS obviously), support, training, etc.
So, yes, this is a victory for Apache, but it's a bit hollow. What's the point of having all the market share if very few people make not very much money on it?
One could say that I'm expecting too much of these numbers, and that might appear to be true. But let's not forget how many times the Netcraft numbers have appeared here and how often people will gloat about Apache's figures.
Re:Oh good!
on
Perl and XML
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
It's only 'Perl' if you like to pretend that the word isn't actually an acronym.
You see, if you remember that it's an acronym, you remember what the acronym means. If you do that, then you remember that the language had a specific purpose at one time and wasn't meant for every programming task under the sun. If you do that, then many people would have to re-examine the assumption that Perl/PERL/whatever should be used for exactly all programming tasks they attempt.
...go learn something else besides Java too. I mean, there's nothing wrong with Java, but if students leave school thinking "Java is it" and "nothing but Java", then I hope they can make a mean cappuccino; because there's no hope for them in the market.
The same goes for OO think. Why stop there? Why not learn stuctured programming, etc? Students will certainly encounter plenty of both in today's market. Some functional background will help a lot too. Granted, there's only so much you can do with an undergrad, but one has to learn what the market needs, and the market needs all of the above.
Anyone can be trained. Real education takes motivation. I can work with a motivated idiot; slacker geniuses are useless.
That *is* a key problem in open source. The project developers develop features around their own key interests first. One could fairly argue that you ought to just code the features in question that you feel are missing from the product, but that's hardly a possibility for most of us because of the time and skill needed to modify something as complex as a RDBMS like MySQL.
That said, you really don't need to sell your boss on what a given open source will be. You only need to concentrate on what's there right now and the ROI tradeoffs involved in procuring such a product over the traditionally favored commercial product (be it Oracle, SQL Server, whatever). At the end of the process, you may find yourself choosing the commercial product anyway. It happens.
As the article said, not everyone needs aircraft carriers. Most of us get by just fine with a frigate. Choose the right tools for your environment. Like it or not, those factors may include political factors which force you to steer clear of open source.
It's still going to hell. If anyone with a technical backbone actually bothered to read and comment upon the article I might think otherwise. But then again, I guess we vertebrates have something better to do.
July 25, 2002 Net Users Try to Elude the Google Grasp By JENNIFER 8. LEE
THE Internet has reminded Camberley Crick that there are disadvantages to having a distinctive name.
In June, Ms. Crick, 24, who works part time as a computer tutor, went to a Manhattan apartment to help a 40-something man learn Windows XP.
After their session, the man pulled out a half-inch stack of printouts of Web pages he said he had found by typing Ms. Crick's name into Google, the popular search engine.
"You've been a busy bee," she says he joked. Among the things he had found were her family Web site, a computer game she had designed for a freshman college class, a program from a concert she had performed in and a short story she wrote in elementary school called "Timmy the Turtle."
"He seemed to know an awful lot about me," Ms. Crick said, including the names of her siblings. "In the back of my mind, I was thinking I should leave soon."
When she got home, she immediately removed some information from the family Web site, including the turtle story, which her father had posted in 1995, "when the Web was more innocent," she said. But then she discovered that a copy of the story remains available through Google's database of archived Web pages. "You can't remove pieces of yourself from the Web," Ms. Crick said.
The gradual erosion of personal privacy is hardly a new trend. For years, privacy advocates have been spinning cautionary tales about the perils of living in the electronic age.
But it used to be that only government agencies and businesses had the resources and manpower to track personal information. Today, the combined power of the Internet, search engines and archival databases can enable almost anyone to find information about almost anyone else, possibly to satiate a passing curiosity.
As a result, people like Ms. Crick are trying to reduce their electronic presence -- and discovering that it is not as simple as it would seem. The Internet, which was supposed to usher in an era of limitless information, is leading some people to restrict the information that they make available about themselves.
"Now it's much more common to look up people's personal information on the Web," Ms. Crick said. "You have to think what you want people to know about you and not know about you."
These days, people are seeing their privacy punctured in intimate ways as their personal, professional and online identities become transparent to one another. Twenty-somethings are going to search engines to check out people they meet at parties. Neighbors are profiling neighbors. Amateur genealogists are researching distant family members. Workers are screening co-workers.
In other words, it is becoming more difficult to keep one's past hidden, or even to reinvent oneself in the American tradition. "The net result is going to be a return to the village, where everyone knew everyone else," said David Brin, author of a book called "The Transparent Society" (Perseus, 1998). "The anonymity of urban life will be seen as a temporary and rather weird thing."
Some believe that this loss of anonymity could be dangerous for those who prefer to remain hidden, like victims of domestic violence.
"If you are living in a new town trying to be hidden, it's pretty easy to find you now between Google and online government records," said Cindy Southworth, who develops technology education programs for victims of domestic violence. "Many public entities are putting everything on the Web without thinking through the ramifications of those actions."
Of course, a lot of personal information that can be found on the Internet is already in the open, having been printed in newspapers, school newsletters, yearbooks and the like. In addition, the government records that are moving online -- tax assessments, court documents, voter registration -- are already public.
But much of that kind of information used to be protected by "practical obscurity": barriers arising from the time and inconvenience involved in collecting the information. Now those barriers are falling as old online-discussion postings, wedding registries and photos from school performances are becoming centralized in a searchable form on the Internet.
"Google and its siblings are creating a whole that is much greater than the sum of the parts," said Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "Many people assume they are a needle in a haystack, simply a face in the crowd. But the minute someone takes an interest in you, the search tool is what allows the rest of the crowd to dissolve."
As a result, people are considering how to live their lives knowing that the details might be captured by a big magnifying glass in the sky.
"Anonymity used to give us a cushion against small mistakes," Mr. Brin said. "Now we'll have to live our lives as if any one thing might appear on page 27 in two years' time."
Waqaas Fahmawi, 25, used to sign petitions freely when he was in college. "In the past you would physically sign a petition and could confidently know that it would disappear into oblivion," said Mr. Fahmawi, a Palestinian-American who works as an economist for the Commerce Department.
But after he discovered that his signatures from his college years had been archived on the Internet, he became reluctant to sign petitions for fear that potential employers would hold his political views again him.
He feels stifled in his political expression. "The fact I have to think about this," he said, "really does show we live in a system of thought control."
David Holtzman, editor in chief of GlobalPOV, a privacy Web site, said that the notion of privacy was "undergoing a generational shift." Those in their late 20's and 30's are going to feel the brunt of the transition, he said, because they grew up with more traditional concepts of privacy even as the details of their lives were being captured electronically.
"It almost gives you a good reason to name your kid something bland," Mr. Holtzman said. "You are doing them a good favor by doing that."
Indeed, a generic name is what Beth Roberts, 29, was seeking when she changed back from her married name, Werbick, after a divorce. A Google search on "Beth Werbick" returns results only about her. But a search for "Beth Roberts" returns thousands upon thousands of Web pages. "I would have plausible deniability if someone wanted to attribute something to me," said Ms. Roberts, who lives in Austin, Tex.
Mr. Fahmawi, the economist, said he envied the ability to be a name in the crowd. "If I had a more generic name, I'd sign petitions with impunity," he said.
But those who have become more conscious of their Internet presence can find that it is almost impossible to assert control over the medium -- something that copyright holders discovered long ago.
The debate over privacy is particularly fervent in the field of online genealogy, where databases and family trees are copied freely, with or without the consent of the living individuals.
Jerome Smith, who runs a genealogical Web site, recently removed some names at the request of a man who did not want his children's information on the Web. But Mr. Smith noted the information itself had been copied from a larger public database. "Once you put it out there, it's out there," said Mr. Smith, who lives in Lake Junaluska, N.C.
Google says its search engine reflects whatever is on the Internet. To remove information about themselves, people have to contact Web site administrators.
A disadvantage of instant Internet profiling is that there is no quality control -- and little protection against misinterpretation. The fragments of people's lives that emerge on the Internet are somewhat haphazard. They can be incomplete, out of context, misleading or simply wrong.
John Doffing, the chief executive of an Internet talent agency called StartUpAgent, is surprised by how many job applicants ask him what it is like to be a gay chief executive in Silicon Valley. He says that even though he is heterosexual, some people assume he is gay because his name turns up on the Internet in association with his philanthropic work relating to AIDS and an online gallery devoted to gay and lesbian art.
While this has been more amusing than troubling, he says, such information could be misused. "What happens if I were a job seeker and someone decides not to give me a job because of the same assumption?" he asked.
There are also cases of mistaken Google-identity. Sam Waltz Jr., a business consultant in Wilmington, Del., met a woman through an online dating service. Before they met in person, she sent him an e-mail message saying that she did not think they were compatible. She had found his name on a Web site called SincereLust.com, which appeared to her to be run by a Delaware-based transvestite group.
"I'm sitting here, reading her e-mail and thinking, `What is this?' " Mr. Waltz said.
He discovered that the site was a drama group dedicated to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." His son, Sam Waltz III, had been a member while he was at the University of Delaware.
Mr. Waltz quickly explained the situation to the woman, and they have been dating for 18 months. "Now I periodically do a self-Google to make sure there is nothing else that needs to be challenged or checked," Mr. Waltz said.
Some say that the phenomenon of instant unchecked background searches could be manipulated to sabotage others' reputations.
Jeanne Achille, the chief executive of a public relations firm called the Devon Group, was horrified that someone had used her name and e-mail address to post racist slurs in a French online discussion group. She has repeatedly had to explain the situation to potential clients who have asked her about the posting.
"Whoever did this had to put some thought into it," Ms. Achille said. "Is it perhaps one of our competitors? Is it someone who felt we did something to them and wanted to get back at us? Is it a personal thing? Is it a disgruntled former employee?"
The posting has been impossible to remove. "There is no cyberpatrol that you can go to and make all of this go away," Ms. Achille said. "You just have to live with it."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
#1 - If you don't want information about yourself to be public, then don't make it public. No I'm not trolling. How difficult can this be? It can't be a violation of your 'privacy' if you don't post the material in question in the first place.
#2 - Google (and others I'm sure) do all of us a great service by caching the last known good copy of a site. Then when we/. (this is the only punctuation-only phrase I would ever use as a verb by the way) the site, we can (usually) still see it. Please consider the value of this service for your sake, and posterity's before you rant about of all the precious privacy we've lost.
#3 - What's in a name anyway? It's just an identifier. We could all just as well be numbered for all the real value that a name contains. What are you without your name? Still you, right? So why do you need a name, other than for identification purposes which is directly tied to our seeming need for ownership of resources? Don't forget, you are not your identifiers, or circumstances. You will always be you no matter the circumstances. At least, that's true until you die... then you are still what you will be. But before you get stressed out by that, I urge you to consider what you were before you were born. Remember that? Me neither. No point in stressing out about it then, eh?
#4 - Do not post to/. after imbibing respectable amounts of alcoholic beverages. Just trust me on that.
There is no shortage of materials, free and commercial, that you could use to bring yourself up to speed. What are you really looking for here? A job offer?!
If you really want to be a developer, then learn how to learn how, dig in, and get busy. Those of us who are serious know this for what it is: a plea for attention.
If there were no good materials from which to learn, I would be more sympathetic. As it is, you're just wasting time.
I will concede that Macs have their good points, but how is using a Mac ethically equivalent to using Linux? If you're using Linux, you're either doing it because it does something better than the rest or you're using it because you believe in the ideals of Open Source software.
Why do people use Macs? Because they like them. Why do people use Windows? Because they like it or don't care enough to look elsewhere. Using a Mac is no better than using Windows from an ethical standpoint because they're both offered by companies that would/have monopolize/d the market given the chance.
Aside from that, you disregard the fact that the author did not (to our knowledge) have a Mac around that could run OS X. Why should he go buy all new hardware just to run OS X? Does that make any sense?
...I don't care how well constructed the report is when it's premise is fundamentally flawed to begin with. What are they trying to accomplish by pointing out how much defective software costs us? Why *didn't* they point out the opportunity cost of not having the software in the first place? Why is no one able to state how much *benefit* there is in having that software, defective or not?
If you could weigh the benefits of the software against the costs of defects, development, etc. you might actually have something useful. For all I know, that may be what NIST intends, but somehow I doubt it.
Armchair philosophers are a researcher's best friend in finding out the questions that matter. NIST should have consulted a few before embarking upon a study which is essentially worthless to the industry or the general populace. (Note that such a report is good stuff for consultants who want to place QA resources. Hmmmm...)
I am sick to death of alarmist stories on/. that assume that the average/.er will believe in anything but Microsoft no matter what the story.
Hopefully, this is a sea change for/. and it's front page stories. Stories that are about so-and-so feeling screwed and wronged by Microsoft aren't automatically worthy of our attention. To me, that why the story of RealNames on/. is worthy of mention; because of/., not RealNames.
This goes double for application developers. If you get a solid education first, you will have NO problem picking up any technology out there. I do interviews for my consulting firm, and guess what? The guys who stay current the most tend to be the ones who finished a higher education degree. We're not prejudiced against the ones who have experience only and no degree. But it just happens to be that the ones we most often hire are the ones who finished their degrees. If you finish the degree, you're typically made of sterner stuff than the guy who went for the $$$ right away. Most every employer I've dealt with sees it that way too.
Slashdot Mirror
..and Rick should know that. Heck, it's currently only getting a 1.25 out of a possible 3 by readers on the site. It's not looked on favorably.
I've communicated with Rick in the past and asked that he not publish inflammatory statements like this because they do not build up the Java community. In fact, it makes him and everyone he associates with sound like a bunch of complainers. He seems intent on beating the justice drum until everyone forgets what the heck they need to do now to solve the current issues facing Java developers. His diatribes don't help the legal case along in the least anyway; what is he hoping to accomplish?
FWIW - I feel that any Java developer would be spending their time much more wisely pursuing certification through Sun or IBM or working on an OS Java server solution like JBoss. I don't see how associating yourself with JavaLobby would help build up your career (unless you're just trolling for news).
It's too bad. He could actually lead the Java development community to an extent.
You make well reasoned points. If you look at your original post though, it did indeed seem bigoted. Obviously, we don't know you, so if you make comments like the one you did without some perspective about the comment then you should expect someone to call you on it. That's not just being PC or even in being in fear of PC; it's just normal people trying to be decent.
I would say that IDEs do not support outlining at all. My observation was just that code folding (such as that provided in Visual Studio.NET) would provide everything that most developers think they need. Of course, it's not the same as literate programming, but it does bear a superficial resemblence.
More importantly though and FWIW, I think we all owe you a big "Thanks". You've brought the literate programming discussion back to life for everyone and I'm sure we're all better off for it.
And a quick question: Do you think you'll ever put together a commercial version of Leo that functions within mainstream IDEs? I can see how Leo's features would be particularly useful within the context of products like VS.NET, Eclipse, etc.? I'm just curious on this count, but I know what a big effort this represents.
I agree to some extent. However, you're assuming that the developer will start with a good design. That may not be the case. Literate programming helps you get the design sorted out in an easily changed format, with or without code present. Think of it as re-factoring, but in the detailed design stage.
Now, one could argue that you really ought to have a design before you start coding. However, there seems to be no end to people who seem incapable of this and there seems to be no end to customers who are unable to articulate requirements well enough to make this possible.
I've tried Leo in the past, and while I support the author's ideas and the idea of literate programming in general, I do not believe that the practice will become significantly more common in the near future.
There are two reasons I believe this:
1. More and more modern IDEs support the idea of folding sections of code at multiple levels. Combine this with some well placed comments, and you achieve a very high degree of readability. This nullifies the primary benefit of Leo and ensures that most developers won't ever look at literate programming tools.
2. Changing over to literate programming is, at least superficially, a large change. It's a large change because it requires that developers switch their primary environment. That's a big deal. Even if developers had the tools for literate programming in their preferred programming language already in their hands, they probably wouldn't use it.
I do hope I'm wrong about the above though. I think a shift in the industry (even for a relatively short time) to literate programming would give us new ways of thinking about systems design, development, and would greatly ease long term maintenance.
You would think the major labels would take a lesson from this.
They will take a lesson from it. It just won't be the lesson you expect. Instead of saying something like "This restricted format stuff just doesn't work", they'll say something like "Piracy is killing us".
Just try it! I doubt that it's going to revolutionize the world of computing or anything, but it's a nice first step in anticipatory interfaces (anyone who reads Infoworld will regularly will know what I mean).
Good stuff.
"But some people play this game only to build the best web server possible."
/. look at the Apache numbers as some sort of "is Microsoft dead?" meter. They seem to think that if Apache can maintain a big enough market share for long enough, that it will either kill Microsoft or make Microsoft irrelevant. There's no doubt that it could hurt Microsoft's a teeny bit, but that's about it.
I suppose it's debatable, but I'll argue that market share has nothing to do with having the best product.
I believe that many people on
But don't worry too much. If you select web servers based on how many people make how much money off you, then you can still choose (what I presume to be) the leader by that criteria.
Exactly! And what I'm saying here is that Apache may or may not be a valuable part of many companies' mission critical applications. To me, that's valuable. Just knowing how many functioning instances of Apache are out there isn't too valuable for most businesses in my opinion.
..what this survey won't tell you is what products are being used for truly mission critical, complex, back-end processing (high, medium, or low volume). That's where companies will spend their money on licensing (not as important for OS obviously), support, training, etc.
So, yes, this is a victory for Apache, but it's a bit hollow. What's the point of having all the market share if very few people make not very much money on it?
One could say that I'm expecting too much of these numbers, and that might appear to be true. But let's not forget how many times the Netcraft numbers have appeared here and how often people will gloat about Apache's figures.
It's only 'Perl' if you like to pretend that the word isn't actually an acronym.
You see, if you remember that it's an acronym, you remember what the acronym means. If you do that, then you remember that the language had a specific purpose at one time and wasn't meant for every programming task under the sun. If you do that, then many people would have to re-examine the assumption that Perl/PERL/whatever should be used for exactly all programming tasks they attempt.
Bummer eh?
...go learn something else besides Java too. I mean, there's nothing wrong with Java, but if students leave school thinking "Java is it" and "nothing but Java", then I hope they can make a mean cappuccino; because there's no hope for them in the market.
The same goes for OO think. Why stop there? Why not learn stuctured programming, etc? Students will certainly encounter plenty of both in today's market. Some functional background will help a lot too. Granted, there's only so much you can do with an undergrad, but one has to learn what the market needs, and the market needs all of the above.
Anyone can be trained. Real education takes motivation. I can work with a motivated idiot; slacker geniuses are useless.
That *is* a key problem in open source. The project developers develop features around their own key interests first. One could fairly argue that you ought to just code the features in question that you feel are missing from the product, but that's hardly a possibility for most of us because of the time and skill needed to modify something as complex as a RDBMS like MySQL.
That said, you really don't need to sell your boss on what a given open source will be. You only need to concentrate on what's there right now and the ROI tradeoffs involved in procuring such a product over the traditionally favored commercial product (be it Oracle, SQL Server, whatever). At the end of the process, you may find yourself choosing the commercial product anyway. It happens.
As the article said, not everyone needs aircraft carriers. Most of us get by just fine with a frigate. Choose the right tools for your environment. Like it or not, those factors may include political factors which force you to steer clear of open source.
It's still going to hell. If anyone with a technical backbone actually bothered to read and comment upon the article I might think otherwise. But then again, I guess we vertebrates have something better to do.
In reference to your sig:
Have you ever surfed the web through a ssh connection using Lynx? It is pretty interesting...
Why is that particularly interesting? I've used Lynx, but I haven't done the above. ???
July 25, 2002
Net Users Try to Elude the Google Grasp
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
THE Internet has reminded Camberley Crick that there are disadvantages to having a distinctive name.
In June, Ms. Crick, 24, who works part time as a computer tutor, went to a Manhattan apartment to help a 40-something man learn Windows XP.
After their session, the man pulled out a half-inch stack of printouts of Web pages he said he had found by typing Ms. Crick's name into Google, the popular search engine.
"You've been a busy bee," she says he joked. Among the things he had found were her family Web site, a computer game she had designed for a freshman college class, a program from a concert she had performed in and a short story she wrote in elementary school called "Timmy the Turtle."
"He seemed to know an awful lot about me," Ms. Crick said, including the names of her siblings. "In the back of my mind, I was thinking I should leave soon."
When she got home, she immediately removed some information from the family Web site, including the turtle story, which her father had posted in 1995, "when the Web was more innocent," she said. But then she discovered that a copy of the story remains available through Google's database of archived Web pages. "You can't remove pieces of yourself from the Web," Ms. Crick said.
The gradual erosion of personal privacy is hardly a new trend. For years, privacy advocates have been spinning cautionary tales about the perils of living in the electronic age.
But it used to be that only government agencies and businesses had the resources and manpower to track personal information. Today, the combined power of the Internet, search engines and archival databases can enable almost anyone to find information about almost anyone else, possibly to satiate a passing curiosity.
As a result, people like Ms. Crick are trying to reduce their electronic presence -- and discovering that it is not as simple as it would seem. The Internet, which was supposed to usher in an era of limitless information, is leading some people to restrict the information that they make available about themselves.
"Now it's much more common to look up people's personal information on the Web," Ms. Crick said. "You have to think what you want people to know about you and not know about you."
These days, people are seeing their privacy punctured in intimate ways as their personal, professional and online identities become transparent to one another. Twenty-somethings are going to search engines to check out people they meet at parties. Neighbors are profiling neighbors. Amateur genealogists are researching distant family members. Workers are screening co-workers.
In other words, it is becoming more difficult to keep one's past hidden, or even to reinvent oneself in the American tradition. "The net result is going to be a return to the village, where everyone knew everyone else," said David Brin, author of a book called "The Transparent Society" (Perseus, 1998). "The anonymity of urban life will be seen as a temporary and rather weird thing."
Some believe that this loss of anonymity could be dangerous for those who prefer to remain hidden, like victims of domestic violence.
"If you are living in a new town trying to be hidden, it's pretty easy to find you now between Google and online government records," said Cindy Southworth, who develops technology education programs for victims of domestic violence. "Many public entities are putting everything on the Web without thinking through the ramifications of those actions."
Of course, a lot of personal information that can be found on the Internet is already in the open, having been printed in newspapers, school newsletters, yearbooks and the like. In addition, the government records that are moving online -- tax assessments, court documents, voter registration -- are already public.
But much of that kind of information used to be protected by "practical obscurity": barriers arising from the time and inconvenience involved in collecting the information. Now those barriers are falling as old online-discussion postings, wedding registries and photos from school performances are becoming centralized in a searchable form on the Internet.
"Google and its siblings are creating a whole that is much greater than the sum of the parts," said Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "Many people assume they are a needle in a haystack, simply a face in the crowd. But the minute someone takes an interest in you, the search tool is what allows the rest of the crowd to dissolve."
As a result, people are considering how to live their lives knowing that the details might be captured by a big magnifying glass in the sky.
"Anonymity used to give us a cushion against small mistakes," Mr. Brin said. "Now we'll have to live our lives as if any one thing might appear on page 27 in two years' time."
Waqaas Fahmawi, 25, used to sign petitions freely when he was in college. "In the past you would physically sign a petition and could confidently know that it would disappear into oblivion," said Mr. Fahmawi, a Palestinian-American who works as an economist for the Commerce Department.
But after he discovered that his signatures from his college years had been archived on the Internet, he became reluctant to sign petitions for fear that potential employers would hold his political views again him.
He feels stifled in his political expression. "The fact I have to think about this," he said, "really does show we live in a system of thought control."
David Holtzman, editor in chief of GlobalPOV, a privacy Web site, said that the notion of privacy was "undergoing a generational shift." Those in their late 20's and 30's are going to feel the brunt of the transition, he said, because they grew up with more traditional concepts of privacy even as the details of their lives were being captured electronically.
"It almost gives you a good reason to name your kid something bland," Mr. Holtzman said. "You are doing them a good favor by doing that."
Indeed, a generic name is what Beth Roberts, 29, was seeking when she changed back from her married name, Werbick, after a divorce. A Google search on "Beth Werbick" returns results only about her. But a search for "Beth Roberts" returns thousands upon thousands of Web pages. "I would have plausible deniability if someone wanted to attribute something to me," said Ms. Roberts, who lives in Austin, Tex.
Mr. Fahmawi, the economist, said he envied the ability to be a name in the crowd. "If I had a more generic name, I'd sign petitions with impunity," he said.
But those who have become more conscious of their Internet presence can find that it is almost impossible to assert control over the medium -- something that copyright holders discovered long ago.
The debate over privacy is particularly fervent in the field of online genealogy, where databases and family trees are copied freely, with or without the consent of the living individuals.
Jerome Smith, who runs a genealogical Web site, recently removed some names at the request of a man who did not want his children's information on the Web. But Mr. Smith noted the information itself had been copied from a larger public database. "Once you put it out there, it's out there," said Mr. Smith, who lives in Lake Junaluska, N.C.
Google says its search engine reflects whatever is on the Internet. To remove information about themselves, people have to contact Web site administrators.
A disadvantage of instant Internet profiling is that there is no quality control -- and little protection against misinterpretation. The fragments of people's lives that emerge on the Internet are somewhat haphazard. They can be incomplete, out of context, misleading or simply wrong.
John Doffing, the chief executive of an Internet talent agency called StartUpAgent, is surprised by how many job applicants ask him what it is like to be a gay chief executive in Silicon Valley. He says that even though he is heterosexual, some people assume he is gay because his name turns up on the Internet in association with his philanthropic work relating to AIDS and an online gallery devoted to gay and lesbian art.
While this has been more amusing than troubling, he says, such information could be misused. "What happens if I were a job seeker and someone decides not to give me a job because of the same assumption?" he asked.
There are also cases of mistaken Google-identity. Sam Waltz Jr., a business consultant in Wilmington, Del., met a woman through an online dating service. Before they met in person, she sent him an e-mail message saying that she did not think they were compatible. She had found his name on a Web site called SincereLust.com, which appeared to her to be run by a Delaware-based transvestite group.
"I'm sitting here, reading her e-mail and thinking, `What is this?' " Mr. Waltz said.
He discovered that the site was a drama group dedicated to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." His son, Sam Waltz III, had been a member while he was at the University of Delaware.
Mr. Waltz quickly explained the situation to the woman, and they have been dating for 18 months. "Now I periodically do a self-Google to make sure there is nothing else that needs to be challenged or checked," Mr. Waltz said.
Some say that the phenomenon of instant unchecked background searches could be manipulated to sabotage others' reputations.
Jeanne Achille, the chief executive of a public relations firm called the Devon Group, was horrified that someone had used her name and e-mail address to post racist slurs in a French online discussion group. She has repeatedly had to explain the situation to potential clients who have asked her about the posting.
"Whoever did this had to put some thought into it," Ms. Achille said. "Is it perhaps one of our competitors? Is it someone who felt we did something to them and wanted to get back at us? Is it a personal thing? Is it a disgruntled former employee?"
The posting has been impossible to remove. "There is no cyberpatrol that you can go to and make all of this go away," Ms. Achille said. "You just have to live with it."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
#1 - If you don't want information about yourself to be public, then don't make it public. No I'm not trolling. How difficult can this be? It can't be a violation of your 'privacy' if you don't post the material in question in the first place.
/. (this is the only punctuation-only phrase I would ever use as a verb by the way) the site, we can (usually) still see it. Please consider the value of this service for your sake, and posterity's before you rant about of all the precious privacy we've lost.
/. after imbibing respectable amounts of alcoholic beverages. Just trust me on that.
#2 - Google (and others I'm sure) do all of us a great service by caching the last known good copy of a site. Then when we
#3 - What's in a name anyway? It's just an identifier. We could all just as well be numbered for all the real value that a name contains. What are you without your name? Still you, right? So why do you need a name, other than for identification purposes which is directly tied to our seeming need for ownership of resources? Don't forget, you are not your identifiers, or circumstances. You will always be you no matter the circumstances. At least, that's true until you die... then you are still what you will be. But before you get stressed out by that, I urge you to consider what you were before you were born. Remember that? Me neither. No point in stressing out about it then, eh?
#4 - Do not post to
There is no shortage of materials, free and commercial, that you could use to bring yourself up to speed. What are you really looking for here? A job offer?!
If you really want to be a developer, then learn how to learn how, dig in, and get busy. Those of us who are serious know this for what it is: a plea for attention.
If there were no good materials from which to learn, I would be more sympathetic. As it is, you're just wasting time.
You don't need a brain to karma whore you "small step for a whore".
I will concede that Macs have their good points, but how is using a Mac ethically equivalent to using Linux? If you're using Linux, you're either doing it because it does something better than the rest or you're using it because you believe in the ideals of Open Source software.
Why do people use Macs? Because they like them. Why do people use Windows? Because they like it or don't care enough to look elsewhere. Using a Mac is no better than using Windows from an ethical standpoint because they're both offered by companies that would/have monopolize/d the market given the chance.
Aside from that, you disregard the fact that the author did not (to our knowledge) have a Mac around that could run OS X. Why should he go buy all new hardware just to run OS X? Does that make any sense?
...I don't care how well constructed the report is when it's premise is fundamentally flawed to begin with. What are they trying to accomplish by pointing out how much defective software costs us? Why *didn't* they point out the opportunity cost of not having the software in the first place? Why is no one able to state how much *benefit* there is in having that software, defective or not?
If you could weigh the benefits of the software against the costs of defects, development, etc. you might actually have something useful. For all I know, that may be what NIST intends, but somehow I doubt it.
Armchair philosophers are a researcher's best friend in finding out the questions that matter. NIST should have consulted a few before embarking upon a study which is essentially worthless to the industry or the general populace. (Note that such a report is good stuff for consultants who want to place QA resources. Hmmmm...)
I'm playing it right now on this laptop that runs XP. Everything seems to work fine. It's not as if it's doing anything really tricky after all.
*shrug*
Considering that I once doubted that I would ever even own my own computer, that's not too bad!
Give it 20 years when you're getting your mandatory "Common Sense Implant". PC? You ain't seen nothing yet.
when i make a copy i have not deprived you of anything
Well, actually you have. Does the word 'revenue' mean anything to you?
I am sick to death of alarmist stories on /. that assume that the average /.er will believe in anything but Microsoft no matter what the story.
/. and it's front page stories. Stories that are about so-and-so feeling screwed and wronged by Microsoft aren't automatically worthy of our attention. To me, that why the story of RealNames on /. is worthy of mention; because of /., not RealNames.
Hopefully, this is a sea change for
Thanks again....
This goes double for application developers. If you get a solid education first, you will have NO problem picking up any technology out there. I do interviews for my consulting firm, and guess what? The guys who stay current the most tend to be the ones who finished a higher education degree. We're not prejudiced against the ones who have experience only and no degree. But it just happens to be that the ones we most often hire are the ones who finished their degrees. If you finish the degree, you're typically made of sterner stuff than the guy who went for the $$$ right away. Most every employer I've dealt with sees it that way too.
Good luck...