I'm no molecular biologist (or lawyer or mathematician, for that matter) but neither is the typical juror who's sole qualification (in the U.S., anyway) is being in the pool of those who have registered to vote and do not have some obvious prejudice against the matter at hand.
The assumptions you detail above and the intricacy of statistics is probably beyond analysis by the typical juror. This means that the jury is weighing not the technical or factual merit of the "experts" but some unknown subjective reason: the persuasiveness of the lawyers, how scary the defendant looks, how many days the case has gone on, or something else. In short, it is only a matter of time before the collection of assumption, error (possibly in procedure or in recording), and juror ignorance produced the result in this British case.
I hope that this acts as a wake-up call here in the U.S. but somehow I doubt it.
The experience on one platform transfers well to another and there is lots to like about FORTH, especially when dealing with an environment with exceedingly limited resources in comparison to a PC.
Probably. The Mall is private space (sorry, kids, you really can't hang out here!), the stores are tenants, and the terms of the lease usually give the landlord broad power to review and limit signs, advertising, window displays and such. It's not a free speech issue but one of an investment group (which in all likelyhood financed the construction of the mall) blundering as it tries to protect the revenue stream it generates from the rentals. If the mall is new, odds are good that the investment group is still years away from breaking even.
They may have their restriction upheld if it makes it court, but it isn't going to matter. They way people shop is changing. Connected consumers are better informed and visit the retail stores to touch and feel the product before buying it for less somewhere else. Actually, it's not remarkably different from the situation the large chain stores in the malls inflicted upon the local shopkeepers when they offered lower prices, greater selection, and more convenience than any small family business could offer. Reminds me of a proverb: When forests are cleared, splinters fly. It's unfortunate to be a splinter.
Thank you, but you should re-read what I wrote... _I_ would pay to use NDS commercially (I currently do so, and how) and _I_ would accept restriction upon the source in exchange for access to it (I currently do not have it). I'm only speaking for myself but I based my comment on the previous post, which in my reading suggested that Novell he would like it to be free, as in free beer.
I would welcome a move by Novell to turn NDS out as Open Source (tm?), both free as in speech and free as in beer, but I don't hold much hope. NDS is valuable to them and they've shown fairly little interest in the past in listen to their customers, let alone those who don't affect the bottom line.
Oh, yeah, another thing... I'll second that plug for Debian! It's the only distro I use.
Free, as in beer, isn't everything. Having used NDS for years, I believe there is enough value in it to make paying for it worthwhile. I'm not talking access to the NetWare server, the importance is that opening the source, even if it is restricted in some way, has the potential to spawn projects, some of which may be useful to me. Wouldn't it be great to have NDS authentication and management for Linux (and *BSD)? Maybe put all your workstations, servers, hubs, switches, and routers under one consistent administrative tool? I'd pay for that!
The single best source of information available to managers, the one least frequently used, the closest one to them, is their colleagues, coworkers and employees. Frequently, coworkers have knowledge broad, or deep, or both, on subjects outside their immediate job description. These people may have real-world experience having used the products under consideration or worked on a similar project but no one asked them about it. The problem is that artificial barriers such as competition, fear, ignorance, and elitism prevent the exchange of information.
I've harped on this before but it bears repeating: these organizations provide exactly the required service- making one an instant expert in time for the meeting- but nothing more. The wisdom and experience is acquired only by those who actually trudge across a mountain of documentation, suffer a test implementation, and sift through newgroup and listserv archives.
A few months after the project is underway which individual will have a better understanding of the subject? Without question, the latter will be able to explain their decision and the reasoning behind it. The former will fall back on an empty appeal to what amounts to a marketing report. It's good to see that some of the managers cited in the article demonstrate an understanding of the limits of the analysis. It's more worrisome that so many others, not mentioned, blithely accept it as gospel.
Aside, I'm a titled a Business/Systems Analyst but spend most of my time administering and supporting the projects we build rather than turning out white papers (something I'm required to do distressingly often). Am I biased? Yes, probably. Am I off target? Probably not.
Try some (or all) of the following- 1. #!/usr/bin/perl -w 2. learn the funky stuff- it exists for a reason. 3. use strict; 4. don't hire dummies, demand examples of their code. 5. #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; 6. always define your needs up front and work out your algorithms on paper before coding. 7. #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use diagnostics;
I'm surprised to see this here but I suppose I shouldn't. I'll add my two cents though- I met my wife despite my interest in computers. I was tooling around on a motorcycle and completing graduate study in the Humanities. She has no interest in computers beyond MS Office, WWW, email and Freecell and thinks the way I latch onto things- computers, history, math, literature, sports, politics- with such intense zeal is "cute". The point is that I was a pretty much whole individual with wide interests and comfortable with myself. She noticed.
Lonely geeks need to get out and do something other than computers. They need to cultivate more facets; to be a person that someone would want to have around, maybe invite to a party or take out somewhere.
Sidestepping the matter of ComputerWorld putting its own spin on the report, what is the credibility of Gartner, Giga, etc. in the IT industry? The second question is who is their target audience?
These analysis groups have a deservedly bad reputation among IS/IT staff for the same reason that the national news reports lack accuracy when one is personally familiar with the event: the author is too far from the subject matter to do it justice and the readership doesn't demand more. Ask anyone who does the "heavy lifting" in an IT shop about one of these reports. If they are more than vaguely knowledgeable about the subject they can pick the report apart. Now try the same thing with upper management. Funny how the response is different.
These groups make their living producing, despite their claims, shallow analysis for a readership that needs information quickly so that they can become "instant experts" before the next meeting. Depth is not necessary, technical accuracy obfuscates, just get the gist and make it readable. The topic of the week is always on the horizon and this must be put into the readership's hands fast. Odds are good that the information will be lost or forgotten (for a chuckle, go back and read last year's reports and predictions).
I know I've said it before, but these companies have a track record for post-prediction and a habit of ignoring their misses that makes psychics look good. Worse, I personally know a few people who work for these companies and I can only say that I was glad to see such people leave.
Are you referring to the same browser I've used for nearly the past two years? There's no arguing the multiple window/single window line because it is much more a matter of personal preference than it is a technical one or one of standards (whatever that means). Now that 3.6 has worked out the bugs in the proxy and plugin support, I use nothing else at work.
Opera is exactly what I expect from a browser. It is small, fast, configurable, W3C-recommendation compliant (more so than either IE5 or Netscape 4.6), and reliable. The ease of use, a nebulous term at best, is excellent. Others in my office have downloaded the shareware edition after witnessing my use and some of them have continued to use it.
I was, and continue to be, willing to pay for this in the face of free alternatives for the simple reason that the free browsers do not meet my criteria. If Mozilla matches up, I'll use it. If it doesn't, I'll drop it. When the Linux edition of Opera is released I will test it and if it's as polished as the Windows edition, I will fork over my money and be glad that someone wrote a browser with someone like me in mind.
The author lumps Cyberterror with CBRN and fails to distinguish military from civillian.The author further mistakes the cost of civillian cyberterror. A hospital I am aware of runs its entire building management system on what is essentially an unsecured network with remote access. What is the cost to hack such a network? Quite low, made lower by the fact that technically unsophisticated users (maintenance staff) use it. What is the potential payoff to a terrorist who gains control? Very high. Consider the psychological effect of a major hospital suddenly having all it's fire alarms and sprinklers go off, the heat rocket to over 100 degrees F. in all the common areas, while the magnetic fire doors slam shut and the card readers stop working. Scary, and entirely possible.
What should be explicitly said in Clive Thompson's article is that while software is not like other products, except, perhaps, commercial art or illustration, it must be managed like it was just another engineering project. In that regard, the failure of software to deliver is plainly a failure of management.
Cynicism aside, most of us have experienced the project manager or, worse, the project management team, without a clue as to what the programmers are doing. Not that the manager isn't coming from a technical background but that they simply don't have personal experience with the tools and technologies their programmers are using and without it they are unable to distinguish between honest underestimations and outright bullshit for project milestones. They got their specs from the business people, probably didn't understand them, tossed them to the senior developers who (if they bothered to work with the DBAs and Sysadmins) passed back a project model or at least a logical diagram of the data and of the system. This draft suddenly gets set in stone and approved, often after the team has begun work. Maybe the project model wasn't even done by the developers. It might be done by the project manager themself or a dedicated functionary who just scribes these things all day.
This is compounded by programmers- and I've been here myself- dazzled with their own innate superiority who blithely assume that they can "get up to speed" with a new tool, technology, platform, co-worker, team, boss, project, whatever in less time than it takes to cook an egg. These programmers probably want to cloister themselves until the job is done. Version management? Source control? Approved methodology? Review? Hey, did anyone check if it works? Nothing is more frightening than leaving the average developer alone in a cube for six weeks. It takes discipline to do these things and most people, myself included, don't take to it unless were forced to do so.
The third ingredient in this recipie is the tools themselves. If there is a method for choosing development tools, what criteria are used? As often as not, the tools are bought and paid for before the development team is assembled. Are these the best tools for the job? Maybe. Or maybe the box was just the nicest color, or the sales rep. made the best pitch or took the manager to the nicest restaurant, or- and this is usually the case- a competitor or colleague used the tool successfully for a project that bears little resemblance to the one at hand.
What should be dawning on you if you've read this screed is that no blame goes on the customer. All they did was ask for something, it was the entire development process that was supposed to field that request, sift through it, prioritize the goals and result in a software product. If it didn't, it sure sounds like a management problem to me. I've got it, let's shuffle the cubes around.
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I'm no molecular biologist (or lawyer or mathematician, for that matter) but neither is the typical juror who's sole qualification (in the U.S., anyway) is being in the pool of those who have registered to vote and do not have some obvious prejudice against the matter at hand.
The assumptions you detail above and the intricacy of statistics is probably beyond analysis by the typical juror. This means that the jury is weighing not the technical or factual merit of the "experts" but some unknown subjective reason: the persuasiveness of the lawyers, how scary the defendant looks, how many days the case has gone on, or something else. In short, it is only a matter of time before the collection of assumption, error (possibly in procedure or in recording), and juror ignorance produced the result in this British case.
I hope that this acts as a wake-up call here in the U.S. but somehow I doubt it.
I'm getting off topic, I suppose, but Legos aren't the only platform where FORTH is available and you are not going to waste your time learning it.
Versions, free and commercial, exist for any Unix with GCC, DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, Windows, the Palm Pilot, and dozens of microcontrollers. Did you know that FORTH is part of the Open Firmware provided in the Sun and the PowerMac boot proms? (Note IEEE requires a subscription, so check out Sun's OpenFirmware page)
The experience on one platform transfers well to another and there is lots to like about FORTH, especially when dealing with an environment with exceedingly limited resources in comparison to a PC.
This list of FORTH implementations by platform is a little dated but should point in the right direction.
Probably. The Mall is private space (sorry, kids, you really can't hang out here!), the stores are tenants, and the terms of the lease usually give the landlord broad power to review and limit signs, advertising, window displays and such. It's not a free speech issue but one of an investment group (which in all likelyhood financed the construction of the mall) blundering as it tries to protect the revenue stream it generates from the rentals. If the mall is new, odds are good that the investment group is still years away from breaking even.
They may have their restriction upheld if it makes it court, but it isn't going to matter. They way people shop is changing. Connected consumers are better informed and visit the retail stores to touch and feel the product before buying it for less somewhere else. Actually, it's not remarkably different from the situation the large chain stores in the malls inflicted upon the local shopkeepers when they offered lower prices, greater selection, and more convenience than any small family business could offer. Reminds me of a proverb: When forests are cleared, splinters fly. It's unfortunate to be a splinter.
Welcome to the new paradigm, shoppers.
Thank you, but you should re-read what I wrote... _I_ would pay to use NDS commercially (I currently do so, and how) and _I_ would accept restriction upon the source in exchange for access to it (I currently do not have it). I'm only speaking for myself but I based my comment on the previous post, which in my reading suggested that Novell he would like it to be free, as in free beer.
I would welcome a move by Novell to turn NDS out as Open Source (tm?), both free as in speech and free as in beer, but I don't hold much hope. NDS is valuable to them and they've shown fairly little interest in the past in listen to their customers, let alone those who don't affect the bottom line.
Oh, yeah, another thing... I'll second that plug for Debian! It's the only distro I use.
Free, as in beer, isn't everything. Having used NDS for years, I believe there is enough value in it to make paying for it worthwhile. I'm not talking access to the NetWare server, the importance is that opening the source, even if it is restricted in some way, has the potential to spawn projects, some of which may be useful to me. Wouldn't it be great to have NDS authentication and management for Linux (and *BSD)? Maybe put all your workstations, servers, hubs, switches, and routers under one consistent administrative tool? I'd pay for that!
I've been using the beta scp from the author of PuTTY, a very good free SSH1 client for Win32.
Can anyone say 'prior art'?
The single best source of information available to managers, the one least frequently used, the closest one to them, is their colleagues, coworkers and employees. Frequently, coworkers have knowledge broad, or deep, or both, on subjects outside their immediate job description. These people may have real-world experience having used the products under consideration or worked on a similar project but no one asked them about it. The problem is that artificial barriers such as competition, fear, ignorance, and elitism prevent the exchange of information.
I've harped on this before but it bears repeating: these organizations provide exactly the required service- making one an instant expert in time for the meeting- but nothing more. The wisdom and experience is acquired only by those who actually trudge across a mountain of documentation, suffer a test implementation, and sift through newgroup and listserv archives.
A few months after the project is underway which individual will have a better understanding of the subject? Without question, the latter will be able to explain their decision and the reasoning behind it. The former will fall back on an empty appeal to what amounts to a marketing report. It's good to see that some of the managers cited in the article demonstrate an understanding of the limits of the analysis. It's more worrisome that so many others, not mentioned, blithely accept it as gospel.
Aside, I'm a titled a Business/Systems Analyst but spend most of my time administering and supporting the projects we build rather than turning out white papers (something I'm required to do distressingly often). Am I biased? Yes, probably. Am I off target? Probably not.
Try some (or all) of the following-
1. #!/usr/bin/perl -w
2. learn the funky stuff- it exists for a reason.
3. use strict;
4. don't hire dummies, demand examples of their code.
5. #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
6. always define your needs up front and work out your algorithms on paper before coding.
7. #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use diagnostics;
I'm surprised to see this here but I suppose I shouldn't. I'll add my two cents though- I met my wife despite my interest in computers. I was tooling around on a motorcycle and completing graduate study in the Humanities. She has no interest in computers beyond MS Office, WWW, email and Freecell and thinks the way I latch onto things- computers, history, math, literature, sports, politics- with such intense zeal is "cute". The point is that I was a pretty much whole individual with wide interests and comfortable with myself. She noticed.
Lonely geeks need to get out and do something other than computers. They need to cultivate more facets; to be a person that someone would want to have around, maybe invite to a party or take out somewhere.
In other words, get a life.
Sidestepping the matter of ComputerWorld putting its own spin on the report, what is the credibility of Gartner, Giga, etc. in the IT industry? The second question is who is their target audience?
These analysis groups have a deservedly bad reputation among IS/IT staff for the same reason that the national news reports lack accuracy when one is personally familiar with the event: the author is too far from the subject matter to do it justice and the readership doesn't demand more. Ask anyone who does the "heavy lifting" in an IT shop about one of these reports. If they are more than vaguely knowledgeable about the subject they can pick the report apart. Now try the same thing with upper management. Funny how the response is different.
These groups make their living producing, despite their claims, shallow analysis for a readership that needs information quickly so that they can become "instant experts" before the next meeting. Depth is not necessary, technical accuracy obfuscates, just get the gist and make it readable. The topic of the week is always on the horizon and this must be put into the readership's hands fast. Odds are good that the information will be lost or forgotten (for a chuckle, go back and read last year's reports and predictions).
I know I've said it before, but these companies have a track record for post-prediction and a habit of ignoring their misses that makes psychics look good. Worse, I personally know a few people who work for these companies and I can only say that I was glad to see such people leave.
Are you referring to the same browser I've used for nearly the past two years? There's no arguing the multiple window/single window line because it is much more a matter of personal preference than it is a technical one or one of standards (whatever that means). Now that 3.6 has worked out the bugs in the proxy and plugin support, I use nothing else at work.
Opera is exactly what I expect from a browser. It is small, fast, configurable, W3C-recommendation compliant (more so than either IE5 or Netscape 4.6), and reliable. The ease of use, a nebulous term at best, is excellent. Others in my office have downloaded the shareware edition after witnessing my use and some of them have continued to use it.
I was, and continue to be, willing to pay for this in the face of free alternatives for the simple reason that the free browsers do not meet my criteria. If Mozilla matches up, I'll use it. If it doesn't, I'll drop it. When the Linux edition of Opera is released I will test it and if it's as polished as the Windows edition, I will fork over my money and be glad that someone wrote a browser with someone like me in mind.
The author lumps Cyberterror with CBRN and fails to distinguish military from civillian.The author further mistakes the cost of civillian cyberterror. A hospital I am aware of runs its entire building management system on what is essentially an unsecured network with remote access. What is the cost to hack such a network? Quite low, made lower by the fact that technically unsophisticated users (maintenance staff) use it. What is the potential payoff to a terrorist who gains control? Very high. Consider the psychological effect of a major hospital suddenly having all it's fire alarms and sprinklers go off, the heat rocket to over 100 degrees F. in all the common areas, while the magnetic fire doors slam shut and the card readers stop working. Scary, and entirely possible.
What should be explicitly said in Clive Thompson's article is that while
software is not like other products, except, perhaps, commercial art or
illustration, it must be managed like it was just another engineering
project. In that regard, the failure of software to deliver is plainly a
failure of management.
Cynicism aside, most of us have experienced the project manager or,
worse, the project management team, without a clue as to what the
programmers are doing. Not that the manager isn't coming from a
technical background but that they simply don't have personal experience
with the tools and technologies their programmers are using and without
it they are unable to distinguish between honest underestimations and
outright bullshit for project milestones. They got their specs from
the business people, probably didn't understand them, tossed them to
the senior developers who (if they bothered to work with the DBAs and
Sysadmins) passed back a project model or at least a logical diagram of
the data and of the system. This draft suddenly gets set in stone and
approved, often after the team has begun work. Maybe the project model
wasn't even done by the developers. It might be done by the project
manager themself or a dedicated functionary who just scribes these
things all day.
This is compounded by programmers- and I've been here myself- dazzled
with their own innate superiority who blithely assume that they can "get
up to speed" with a new tool, technology, platform, co-worker, team,
boss, project, whatever in less time than it takes to cook an egg.
These programmers probably want to cloister themselves until the job is
done. Version management? Source control? Approved methodology? Review?
Hey, did anyone check if it works? Nothing is more frightening than
leaving the average developer alone in a cube for six weeks. It takes
discipline to do these things and most people, myself included, don't
take to it unless were forced to do so.
The third ingredient in this recipie is the tools themselves. If there
is a method for choosing development tools, what criteria are used? As
often as not, the tools are bought and paid for before the development
team is assembled. Are these the best tools for the job? Maybe. Or maybe
the box was just the nicest color, or the sales rep. made the best pitch
or took the manager to the nicest restaurant, or- and this is usually
the case- a competitor or colleague used the tool successfully for a
project that bears little resemblance to the one at hand.
What should be dawning on you if you've read this screed is that no
blame goes on the customer. All they did was ask for something, it was
the entire development process that was supposed to field that request,
sift through it, prioritize the goals and result in a software product.
If it didn't, it sure sounds like a management problem to me. I've got
it, let's shuffle the cubes around.