No more than could go wrong when being owned by Sun.
Seriously, I have not seen a single technology come out of Sun's research labs that hasn't been screwed up by Sun's attempts to turn it into a product. Java, SPARC, Solaris, NetBeans, all have suffered from Sun's management and marketing incompetence. From chip design right up through applications, Sun has screwed up every technology its ever got its hands on. Oracle, at least, can make and market a decent database.
There's a difference between that and organ donation. If you take my TV, you've taken something that I could and would have used in the future. If I'm dead, well, I'm not going to be using this body again. You may as well turn it into scrap and spare parts. Hell, if you look at it that way, salvaging whatever spare parts you can get is a hell of a better use of time and resources than burning me or sticking me in a box and burying me.
They're not going into the factories because they can no longer support themselves by farming. They're going into the factories because farming was never a viable strategy for them. If their parents would have had the opportunity of a factory job, they would have taken it too.
The anti-globalization crowd thinks that the majority of peasants out there want to be stuck with subsistence farming. They do not. They want to be prosperous bourgeoisie just like the people of the first world. I think its awfully culturally imperialistic of us to say, "No, sorry, you can't have a first world lifestyle because you're a hundred years late to the party."
There's a qualitative difference between the new forms of DRM and their older counterparts. The new DRM does not store the encoded material and the decryption key for that material in the same place. Instead, the decryption key is stored on a remote server, and the key is passed down to your machine every time you start the game.
Is it breakable? Sure. You can try to sniff the key as it crosses the network from their servers to yours. Doing so, however, is much more difficult than teasing out a static key that comes along with your game. Even if you get the key, you often have to have the overhead of emulating a key server in order to simply start the game.
Generally, if I have a physical copy of the game, I can expect to still run it 20 years later, long after their authentication servers have bit the dust.
That may have been true in the past, but these days, games purchased on physical media are just as DRM encumbered as their digital download brethren. It doesn't matter if you purchase Assassin's Creed 2 on a physical disk or as a digital download. It'll still communicate with its DRM servers as you play. These days, all you're paying for is a license key. The physical copy of the game is just a convenience, as you can generally install more quickly from a physical disk rather than a network connection.
India is not really a country with fair wages either.
So how exactly would you define a fair wage? $40,000 a year isn't a lot in the US, but in India, one can buy a house, two cars, pay for private school, and hire a maid for that sum. $20,000 a year is barely above the poverty line in America, but it still gets you a solidly middle class lifestyle in India.
ensure that the general population suffers no ill effects of the war to the point that it doesn't affect more than the occasional purchase of a "Support our troops!" magnetic ribbon.
That is utterly and absolutely false. Sure the wages paid to Chinese factory workers are low by our standard. However, the wages a Chinese peasant earns in an electronics factory are far higher than the wages he or she would have earned in any of the other occupations open to him or her. If it were not the case, there would not be such a large labor force for these factories. China, despite all its other authoritarian policies, does not frog march workers into these plants. They come of their own free will.
That's what makes me despair about a lot of the anti-globalization/fair trade protesters. They don't understand that workers are not being driven into the factories. Rather the factories are a more attractive form of employment than subsistence farming or herding. Are these factories places where you or I would want to work? Absolutely not. That, however, does not give us the right to take that factory job away from someone whose other opportunities are even worse.
At the same time, you have to recognize that the major historical reason to use IE is that one needed it in order to navigate necessary sites. The more that pressure that large companies can bring to bear on vendors to make their sites work across multiple browsers, the better off we all are.
Notice that IBM is not going with Chrome, though it is a faster and better browser for the moment.
Well, there's also the fact that Chrome is only a year or so old. Firefox, in all its iterations, has been around for almost six years. Which one do you trust more?
You can only establish a theory on the back of careful testing, falsification, etc. When the proposed result of a theory cannot be shown... there can be no theory.
That's precisely the argument I make when someone tries to cast macroeconomics as a scientific discipline. There is no experimentation in macro - only post-hoc ergo propter hoc argumentation. In micro-economics (especially behavioral econ.) you can do experiments with participants to see how humans behave. For macro? Forget it - there's no way to effectively experiment on the global economy.
Actually, climatology is more of a science than economics. At least with climatology, the basic principles governing the system (e.g. fluid dynamics and thermodynamics) are known. Economics doesn't even know the basic principles concerning human decision making. Their assumption of humans as rational value-maximizing actors would be laughed out of the room in any serious psychology (or even sociology) journal.
We used to have an institution that would do that for you, present all sides, including sections that are fact only, plus separate editorial pieces, all in once convenient package. I think they used to call it "the press".
That institution has never and will never exist, except as an ideal espoused by J-school professors.
In other non-TV media there is a balance for both sides, but of course most Americans only watch TV News.
Really? Care to provide a source for that? In my experience, at least, as many (if not more) people subscribe to right-leaning news sources (e.g. Fox News, Wall St. Journal, talk radio) as left leaning news sources (e.g. MSNBC, New York Times, HuffingtonPost). Media bias exists - one only has to look at the examples I used above to see that its so. The problem is in generalizing the bias exhibited by a single organization into an indictment of all media.
Besides, with the Internet, it is easier than ever to go and track down primary sources yourself. If you don't think the media is giving you an accurate picture, its quite easy to see the facts of the matter for yourself.
I for one think that there's a real opportunity for unionization to help out (with union contracts being not so much about pay as working conditions), but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
The problem is, there isn't any way to divorce pay from working conditions. In essence, the way the software industry works right now is that developers are paid for only about 75%-80% of the time worked. Their pay assumes an eight hour day, while their deadlines assume ten or twelve hour days. So any push towards having more reasonable deadlines would probably end up with management reducing pay in response.
The other issue is the sheer diversity of the field. With other professions (especially the "blue collar" ones) we can find characteristics of safe working environments and try to enshrine them in contracts or regulations. Such a thing is nigh impossible in a field like programming. Even in blue-collar work, emulating a pleasant and efficient work environment can be difficult. Just ask GM how long it took for them to get their assembly lines up to the quality standards set by Honda, et. al.
Well, the problem with those laws is that they might run afoul of the 5th Amendment here in the US. The Supreme Court has already ruled that suspects cannot be forced into giving up passwords; that a password is "knowledge", not a "possession." Thus, forcing someone to give up a password would violate their rights under the 5th Amendment even if the police have rights under the 4th Amendment to seize the encrypted data.
The reason for such a right is to ensure that people are treated as innocent until proven guilty. The Fifth Amendement (right against self incrimination) works alongside the Fourth Amendment (right against unreasonable search and seizure) in order to allow this.
mmunity means "Immunity against prosecution." So this is not the sort of thing they can use against someone. They can't say "You are immune from prosecution, now testify about your crimes. Ok, you testified, now we are going to charge you with those crimes." The person was given immunity from prosecution, can't prosecute them for those crimes.
That only works if the only evidence of the crime is from the person's testimony and the crime is the only one that the person can be charged with. As soon as you have multiple witnesses and multiple charges its not so simple anymore.
For example, consider the following scenario. There are two people, persons 1 and 2, each charged with two crimes, A and B. Now, what the prosecution can do is give person 2 immunity from charge A, so that person 1 gets convicted. Person 1, likewise can be given immunity from charge B, so that person 2 can be convicted. Voilá, both people are convicted, despite having "immunity."
Do you think that "boys clubs" are more prevalent in the tech industry than other industries? The problems that you cite probably exist in most companies to one degree or another.
I totally agree. In fact, the parent's comment probably describes the world of high finance even more than it does the world of information technology. Anyone who has read The Bonfire of the Vanities or FIASCO will see that all these characteristics are present to a much greater degree in finance types than they are in programmers. After all, programmers, in the end, still care about making something that works. Finance types only care about racking up the highest score^W^W biggest final balance, regardless of what happens in the long run.
That's why you'll find more men doing jobs that are really unpleasant but well-paid (relative to their education level), such as mining, logging, or firefighting [snip]
I agree with your sentiment, but I disagree with your examples. Mining, logging, firefighting are all very satisfying careers. Sure, the work is hard, but the amount of political bullshit involved is fairly low. You know what your job is, you come in, work your shift, and then you leave. And with firefighting, you know that you're performing a vital service. I mean, that's one of the few professions that will have a non-trivial number of people calling you a hero.
For a much more comparable example, try finance or law. Same high pressure and pay. Same low level of satisfaction. And, unlike with mining, logging, firefighting, or even IT, a significant fraction of society considers you to be a net negative - a leech that makes his living off the labors of others.
Now, what's interesting is that a career in IT ought to fall into the low-risk personally-rewarding camp (the physical risks are minimal, and there's a lot of joy in building things), but instead falls into the higher-pay less-reward camp due to the way IT employees are treated.
The reason IT employees are treated the way they are is because the vast majority of companies do not make computers or software. For them, IT is a cost - something that must be maintained at a certain level in order to prevent the company from falling behind. So what happens is that IT resources are cut to the bone - and employees are placed under ever increasing pressure to be productive. Moreover, because IT work doesn't generally involve life threatening environments or machinery, there is no government regulation forcing the employer to slow down and maintain a modicum of standards regarding deadlines and work environments. IT work has the same standards as mining and logging and manufacturing did at the turn of the century, and consequently IT workers are as unhappy as miners, loggers, and assembly line workers of that era. However, the lack of physical danger in IT work (your fingers can't get sliced off from typing, for example) means that the chances of IT work being regulated anytime in the foreseeable future are slim to none.
It depends on what you're measuring the success of. If you're looking at the Saturn V booster, then Apollo 13 was a success. There was nothing the booster could have done to prevent or exacerbate the later problems caused by the oxygen tank explosion in the command module.
The Shuttle has great performance, to be sure. But, then again, so does a Ferrari. It doesn't mean that either is a cost-effective means of transportation. The one big problem I have with the Space Shuttle design is that it combines cargo hauling with crew transport. Cargo can handle much more stress and people have a much greater tolerance for failure for cargo launches. Combining cargo and crew transport means that you have to have the same tolerances for launching cargo as you do for launching human crews. Obviously, this means that your cargo launches are unnecessarily expensive.
Had NASA separated its cargo and crew launchers (as their original plan would have had them do) the STS program would have been able to launch more tonnage, more quickly than it was able to.
The only exception to that rule-- so far-- has been the vehicles NASA developed.
Not so. In the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, NASA had a number of well publicized launch failures that caused much hand wringing. Heck, even today, NASA rockets blow up. Even in the realm of manned spaceflight, NASA had the Apollo 1 disaster, where a brand new human-carrying vehicle failed on the launch pad, resulting in the deaths of three astronauts.
The only reason that NASA has the track record that it does today is because it has the benefit (and institutional memory) of its previous failures.
From what I read, it seemed like it was Ormandy who proposed the 60-day window. Given that, it was disingenuous for Ormandy to publish after only 5 days. He could have sat on the bug for another 55 days, and then if Microsoft hadn't provided a fix, he could have come out and said, "I have informed Microsoft repeatedly over the past 60 days. They've done nothing, and therefore I'm publishing." That position would have earned him a lot more support in the security community.
The issue is that the bad guys reverse engineer the patches as they come and then they target the unpatched systems immediately.
But how does that protect anyone? I mean, you've still got all the patches out there for the malicious hackers to look over. How does it matter if you release twenty patches on Patch Tuesday, or one patch at a time over the course of a month or so?
Even given all that, it still doesn't justify Ormandy publishing the bug (and, more importantly, the proof of concept code) after only 5 days. If Microsoft was refusing to commit to a 60-day timetable, Ormandy should have published the bug, the code, and all his correspondence with Microsoft on d+61, not d+5.
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No more than could go wrong when being owned by Sun.
Seriously, I have not seen a single technology come out of Sun's research labs that hasn't been screwed up by Sun's attempts to turn it into a product. Java, SPARC, Solaris, NetBeans, all have suffered from Sun's management and marketing incompetence. From chip design right up through applications, Sun has screwed up every technology its ever got its hands on. Oracle, at least, can make and market a decent database.
There's a difference between that and organ donation. If you take my TV, you've taken something that I could and would have used in the future. If I'm dead, well, I'm not going to be using this body again. You may as well turn it into scrap and spare parts. Hell, if you look at it that way, salvaging whatever spare parts you can get is a hell of a better use of time and resources than burning me or sticking me in a box and burying me.
They're not going into the factories because they can no longer support themselves by farming. They're going into the factories because farming was never a viable strategy for them. If their parents would have had the opportunity of a factory job, they would have taken it too.
The anti-globalization crowd thinks that the majority of peasants out there want to be stuck with subsistence farming. They do not. They want to be prosperous bourgeoisie just like the people of the first world. I think its awfully culturally imperialistic of us to say, "No, sorry, you can't have a first world lifestyle because you're a hundred years late to the party."
There's a qualitative difference between the new forms of DRM and their older counterparts. The new DRM does not store the encoded material and the decryption key for that material in the same place. Instead, the decryption key is stored on a remote server, and the key is passed down to your machine every time you start the game.
Is it breakable? Sure. You can try to sniff the key as it crosses the network from their servers to yours. Doing so, however, is much more difficult than teasing out a static key that comes along with your game. Even if you get the key, you often have to have the overhead of emulating a key server in order to simply start the game.
Generally, if I have a physical copy of the game, I can expect to still run it 20 years later, long after their authentication servers have bit the dust.
That may have been true in the past, but these days, games purchased on physical media are just as DRM encumbered as their digital download brethren. It doesn't matter if you purchase Assassin's Creed 2 on a physical disk or as a digital download. It'll still communicate with its DRM servers as you play. These days, all you're paying for is a license key. The physical copy of the game is just a convenience, as you can generally install more quickly from a physical disk rather than a network connection.
India is not really a country with fair wages either.
So how exactly would you define a fair wage? $40,000 a year isn't a lot in the US, but in India, one can buy a house, two cars, pay for private school, and hire a maid for that sum. $20,000 a year is barely above the poverty line in America, but it still gets you a solidly middle class lifestyle in India.
ensure that the general population suffers no ill effects of the war to the point that it doesn't affect more than the occasional purchase of a "Support our troops!" magnetic ribbon.
A ribbon made in China, no less.
in practice ends up driving down wages everywhere
That is utterly and absolutely false. Sure the wages paid to Chinese factory workers are low by our standard. However, the wages a Chinese peasant earns in an electronics factory are far higher than the wages he or she would have earned in any of the other occupations open to him or her. If it were not the case, there would not be such a large labor force for these factories. China, despite all its other authoritarian policies, does not frog march workers into these plants. They come of their own free will.
That's what makes me despair about a lot of the anti-globalization/fair trade protesters. They don't understand that workers are not being driven into the factories. Rather the factories are a more attractive form of employment than subsistence farming or herding. Are these factories places where you or I would want to work? Absolutely not. That, however, does not give us the right to take that factory job away from someone whose other opportunities are even worse.
At the same time, you have to recognize that the major historical reason to use IE is that one needed it in order to navigate necessary sites. The more that pressure that large companies can bring to bear on vendors to make their sites work across multiple browsers, the better off we all are.
Notice that IBM is not going with Chrome, though it is a faster and better browser for the moment.
Well, there's also the fact that Chrome is only a year or so old. Firefox, in all its iterations, has been around for almost six years. Which one do you trust more?
You can only establish a theory on the back of careful testing, falsification, etc. When the proposed result of a theory cannot be shown... there can be no theory.
That's precisely the argument I make when someone tries to cast macroeconomics as a scientific discipline. There is no experimentation in macro - only post-hoc ergo propter hoc argumentation. In micro-economics (especially behavioral econ.) you can do experiments with participants to see how humans behave. For macro? Forget it - there's no way to effectively experiment on the global economy.
Actually, climatology is more of a science than economics. At least with climatology, the basic principles governing the system (e.g. fluid dynamics and thermodynamics) are known. Economics doesn't even know the basic principles concerning human decision making. Their assumption of humans as rational value-maximizing actors would be laughed out of the room in any serious psychology (or even sociology) journal.
We used to have an institution that would do that for you, present all sides, including sections that are fact only, plus separate editorial pieces, all in once convenient package. I think they used to call it "the press".
That institution has never and will never exist, except as an ideal espoused by J-school professors.
In other non-TV media there is a balance for both sides, but of course most Americans only watch TV News.
Really? Care to provide a source for that? In my experience, at least, as many (if not more) people subscribe to right-leaning news sources (e.g. Fox News, Wall St. Journal, talk radio) as left leaning news sources (e.g. MSNBC, New York Times, HuffingtonPost). Media bias exists - one only has to look at the examples I used above to see that its so. The problem is in generalizing the bias exhibited by a single organization into an indictment of all media.
Besides, with the Internet, it is easier than ever to go and track down primary sources yourself. If you don't think the media is giving you an accurate picture, its quite easy to see the facts of the matter for yourself.
I for one think that there's a real opportunity for unionization to help out (with union contracts being not so much about pay as working conditions), but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
The problem is, there isn't any way to divorce pay from working conditions. In essence, the way the software industry works right now is that developers are paid for only about 75%-80% of the time worked. Their pay assumes an eight hour day, while their deadlines assume ten or twelve hour days. So any push towards having more reasonable deadlines would probably end up with management reducing pay in response.
The other issue is the sheer diversity of the field. With other professions (especially the "blue collar" ones) we can find characteristics of safe working environments and try to enshrine them in contracts or regulations. Such a thing is nigh impossible in a field like programming. Even in blue-collar work, emulating a pleasant and efficient work environment can be difficult. Just ask GM how long it took for them to get their assembly lines up to the quality standards set by Honda, et. al.
Well, the problem with those laws is that they might run afoul of the 5th Amendment here in the US. The Supreme Court has already ruled that suspects cannot be forced into giving up passwords; that a password is "knowledge", not a "possession." Thus, forcing someone to give up a password would violate their rights under the 5th Amendment even if the police have rights under the 4th Amendment to seize the encrypted data.
The reason for such a right is to ensure that people are treated as innocent until proven guilty. The Fifth Amendement (right against self incrimination) works alongside the Fourth Amendment (right against unreasonable search and seizure) in order to allow this.
mmunity means "Immunity against prosecution." So this is not the sort of thing they can use against someone. They can't say "You are immune from prosecution, now testify about your crimes. Ok, you testified, now we are going to charge you with those crimes." The person was given immunity from prosecution, can't prosecute them for those crimes.
That only works if the only evidence of the crime is from the person's testimony and the crime is the only one that the person can be charged with. As soon as you have multiple witnesses and multiple charges its not so simple anymore.
For example, consider the following scenario. There are two people, persons 1 and 2, each charged with two crimes, A and B. Now, what the prosecution can do is give person 2 immunity from charge A, so that person 1 gets convicted. Person 1, likewise can be given immunity from charge B, so that person 2 can be convicted. Voilá, both people are convicted, despite having "immunity."
Do you think that "boys clubs" are more prevalent in the tech industry than other industries? The problems that you cite probably exist in most companies to one degree or another.
I totally agree. In fact, the parent's comment probably describes the world of high finance even more than it does the world of information technology. Anyone who has read The Bonfire of the Vanities or FIASCO will see that all these characteristics are present to a much greater degree in finance types than they are in programmers. After all, programmers, in the end, still care about making something that works. Finance types only care about racking up the highest score^W^W biggest final balance, regardless of what happens in the long run.
That's why you'll find more men doing jobs that are really unpleasant but well-paid (relative to their education level), such as mining, logging, or firefighting [snip]
I agree with your sentiment, but I disagree with your examples. Mining, logging, firefighting are all very satisfying careers. Sure, the work is hard, but the amount of political bullshit involved is fairly low. You know what your job is, you come in, work your shift, and then you leave. And with firefighting, you know that you're performing a vital service. I mean, that's one of the few professions that will have a non-trivial number of people calling you a hero.
For a much more comparable example, try finance or law. Same high pressure and pay. Same low level of satisfaction. And, unlike with mining, logging, firefighting, or even IT, a significant fraction of society considers you to be a net negative - a leech that makes his living off the labors of others.
Now, what's interesting is that a career in IT ought to fall into the low-risk personally-rewarding camp (the physical risks are minimal, and there's a lot of joy in building things), but instead falls into the higher-pay less-reward camp due to the way IT employees are treated.
The reason IT employees are treated the way they are is because the vast majority of companies do not make computers or software. For them, IT is a cost - something that must be maintained at a certain level in order to prevent the company from falling behind. So what happens is that IT resources are cut to the bone - and employees are placed under ever increasing pressure to be productive. Moreover, because IT work doesn't generally involve life threatening environments or machinery, there is no government regulation forcing the employer to slow down and maintain a modicum of standards regarding deadlines and work environments. IT work has the same standards as mining and logging and manufacturing did at the turn of the century, and consequently IT workers are as unhappy as miners, loggers, and assembly line workers of that era. However, the lack of physical danger in IT work (your fingers can't get sliced off from typing, for example) means that the chances of IT work being regulated anytime in the foreseeable future are slim to none.
It depends on what you're measuring the success of. If you're looking at the Saturn V booster, then Apollo 13 was a success. There was nothing the booster could have done to prevent or exacerbate the later problems caused by the oxygen tank explosion in the command module.
The Shuttle has great performance, to be sure. But, then again, so does a Ferrari. It doesn't mean that either is a cost-effective means of transportation. The one big problem I have with the Space Shuttle design is that it combines cargo hauling with crew transport. Cargo can handle much more stress and people have a much greater tolerance for failure for cargo launches. Combining cargo and crew transport means that you have to have the same tolerances for launching cargo as you do for launching human crews. Obviously, this means that your cargo launches are unnecessarily expensive.
Had NASA separated its cargo and crew launchers (as their original plan would have had them do) the STS program would have been able to launch more tonnage, more quickly than it was able to.
The only exception to that rule-- so far-- has been the vehicles NASA developed.
Not so. In the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, NASA had a number of well publicized launch failures that caused much hand wringing. Heck, even today, NASA rockets blow up. Even in the realm of manned spaceflight, NASA had the Apollo 1 disaster, where a brand new human-carrying vehicle failed on the launch pad, resulting in the deaths of three astronauts.
The only reason that NASA has the track record that it does today is because it has the benefit (and institutional memory) of its previous failures.
From what I read, it seemed like it was Ormandy who proposed the 60-day window. Given that, it was disingenuous for Ormandy to publish after only 5 days. He could have sat on the bug for another 55 days, and then if Microsoft hadn't provided a fix, he could have come out and said, "I have informed Microsoft repeatedly over the past 60 days. They've done nothing, and therefore I'm publishing." That position would have earned him a lot more support in the security community.
The issue is that the bad guys reverse engineer the patches as they come and then they target the unpatched systems immediately.
But how does that protect anyone? I mean, you've still got all the patches out there for the malicious hackers to look over. How does it matter if you release twenty patches on Patch Tuesday, or one patch at a time over the course of a month or so?
Even given all that, it still doesn't justify Ormandy publishing the bug (and, more importantly, the proof of concept code) after only 5 days. If Microsoft was refusing to commit to a 60-day timetable, Ormandy should have published the bug, the code, and all his correspondence with Microsoft on d+61, not d+5.