The most obvious reason this will not happen is because it is trivially to circumvent - disposable pre-paid mobile phones allow criminals to communicate in a way that is almost impossible to track - there is no way to tie the conversation to individuals.
Off-shore email accounts and strong encryption allow communications that are almost impossible to monitor; any serious criminal organisation should be able to ensure total privacy of communication.
Walking with dinosaurs, a program on the bbc, had this story as well; they based it on a computer model showing the unnatural bending required for some dinosaur necks to achieve the classic cartoon stance.
I still believe it is about the folks who brought us DCMA using their muscle to get more cheap labour, with which they can produce more software, for which we can pay more money, with which they can spend more money lobbying, to import more foreign cheap labour - aaargh. My brain just exploded.
Yeah, I would love to work in the states too. Just don't let me get old, or forget to learn (insert cool new technology here) in time to get my next gig.
Imagine the scene - a board room, the tension rises, everyone knows the numbers are looking bad, and suddenly a marketing exec speaks up : "Differential pricing ! It's the solution ! We can do what the (fill in industry as already mentioned in other posts) do ! Charge different people different amounts !".
The room goes quiet. One group thinks it is the perfect way to milk their more affluent customers and get some profit going for a change; others think "wow ! we can really beat the comparison shopping engines with this !". Another gang reckons it's a great way to snare new customers and then gradually raise prices on their subsequent visits....
Guess what ? It won't work. I don't believe that this can work in a way that won't repel as many people as it attracts, and those who have been repelled will never come back. It's too hard. How can some software know that CmdTaco's price threshold for an anime DVD is $20 ? That he'll go elsewhere the moment he realizes he is being screwed ?
OF course, I bet it looks real sweet in the briefings to the wall street crowd - "Amazon pioneers differential pricing model on the internet; applies for patent to protect their IP in this area..."..
Now, if I were these guys, I would not be too worried if some geekoid types reverse engineered my scanner interface. Heck, I would not have used XOR as my encryption routine, but that's another story.
I would worry if someone worked out a way of using that knowledge, and the scanners I had given away for free to launch a rival service. Posting this code for them must seem like the first step down that road. And of course, now that business models can be patented, there is a good chance they have gone and done that (of course, I don't know whether they have, and I'm too lazy to check).
So maybe the precious IP they are defending is not XOR, but their business model. And while business model patents are plainly ludicrous, maybe they could only persuade someone to lend them money to give away the scanners free by relying on such a patent ? Who knows.
They definitely need help in the PR department....
2600 will probably loose - they have been painted as evil hackers in court, the copyright-owners are on a bit of a roll right now, and it's an election year.
What strikes me is that these huge organisations - both the "content creators" like Disney, and the software shops like Microsoft, seem to forget where their ideas come from. Never read a good book, watched a good film, heard a good song, used a good program created by a faceless organisation - to survive, these Intelectual Property-based organisations need one thing more than anything else, and it is TALENT.
The DMCA, the DeCSS and Napster cases - they all serve to turn those talented folks who could be making them rich into sworn enemies. Which self-respecting geek would go to work on a new form of encryption for DVD players ? Which teenage band who have been chucked of Napster is going to sign with a major label ? (well, maybe if the money was right...)
Somewhere in Hollywood, there is high-priced consultant scaring the studios, saying "look at Napster ! In 3 years time, everyone will have broadband access to the net, and the same will happen to your DVD content ! You will have to give up all that you hold dear !". The knee-jerk reaction is instantaneous.
Someone, somewhere is going to figure out a way to get rich from content in the new digital age, where information can not be protected by encryption and still be publicly available and run on cheap hardware.
I bet it won't be the existing powers.
Won't be me either, if I keep wasting my time posting to Slashdot....
I got a vaio some months back, and it is not quite as cool as it looks - it's slow, the screen has got the dreaded "always-on" pixel (and Sony refuse to do something about it unless at least 4 pixels are broken !), using external monitor/tv out requires a reboot - in short, I preferred my old dell. Maybe Sony should stick to TV's, diskmen and Aibos !
Wanna bet the Transmeta device will look totally droolworthy, but prove to be a toy for marketers rather than geeks ?
I know this feeling, and the best thing for me is to go for a long walk at lunchtime, go visit a museum, book shop, concert, anything that is intellectually stimulating but bears NO resemblance to computing. This usually gets at least some energy back. After that, I like to get stuck into a couple of books that are about programming, but NOT about the current problem - stuff like Bentley's "Programming Pearls", "Out of their minds", "The soul of a new machine", that kind a thing. Seeing how people solved problems before really helps to start seeing new approaches to whatever is bugging me. If that hasn't done the job, I usually start tinkering with a fun piece of code, a game or a 3d screensaver - anything to get me back into the flow. This has always worked so far - usually I lose a couple of days, and come back to another few months of productive life. When it stops working, I guess I'll move into marketing.
There is an urgent shortage of beer. Even though my local supermarket has a lot of beer on the shelves, it is not the right kind of beer. Specifically, it is too expensive. In addition, I think you will agree that the beer you can buy cheaply stinks - it doesn't taste right, it doesn't get you drunk, and people insist on calling it "water".
I guess there are a number of issues...
1. You can never get enough of what you want. Good IT folk are hard to find - just like good plumbers, artists, football players.
2. It takes a while to sort the good ones from the bad ones - you wouldn't hire john elway based on a couple of interviews, you'd want to see him play.
3. The ones you can find tend to be expensive, hard to retain, and prone to poaching
4. Many companies see their staff as a resource to exploit; they are often unwilling to invest in training. Good IT folk don't grow on trees - they need to be trained, developed, coached, whatever.
5. Many employees see their employers as a short term gig, seek to extract the maximum value before leaving for a better job.
6. 4 and 5 become a recursive process with no exit clause.
7. it is probably difficult for geeks to move out of their chosen technical area of expertise, because being a geek implies a certain obsession with something - hardware, software, whatever. However, as you get older, have a higher salary expectation etc., you have to be able to offer your employer significant additional value to compete with a 21 year old fresh from college. If you can't keep your technical skills up to date, you can expect some pretty bad stuff to happen as you get older.
Lets own up first, I was one of those consultants....
I believe every serious development shop needs processes; how rigid they are depends on the product. You'd hope the folks building air traffic control systems are very methodical about their QA, at all stages of the development lifecycle. On the other hand, an e-commerce development project is not much use to anyone if the processes mean it takes 3 years to build a simple shopfront.
In my experience, process improvements are nearly always possible - though not always justified. Solid, proven methodologies can help (and have done in many organisations).
But :
- if the change is imposed top-down, it is unlikely to succeed - programmers are by nature not likely to respond to pressure from above, and will at best comply reluctantly, at worst leave or sabotage.
- the need for change needs to be identified and championed by someone who is credible with those most affected - ideally someone with hands-on project responsibilities, a user or customer
- the process needs to fit the project and the people
- incremental change is far more likely to succeed than a revolution.
The only way I know of improving the software process is to start with the development team (including the business analysts, testers, support folk etc.) and representatives from the rest of the business, identify the concerns, bottlenecks, common failures etc., and agree on a broad framework for improvements. That framework may have a fancypants name, or may just be made up on the spot. We then agree a set of monthly improvement targets - and it is nearly always about basic stuff, like code reviews, version control, "who-does-what-when", change control, and hand-over points.
Of course, I gotta eat, so I will most likely convince the person who signs the checque that the development organisation is reaching Maturity level 32 on the Institute of Made-up Professionals IT maturity model, and that they are leapfrogging the competition yadeyadeyade.
Anybody picked up on the Serial port stuff ?
on
E-commerce and Linux
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· Score: 1
Okay, Access is the spawn of satan; NT is buggy; SQL Server is a poor relation of Oracle - yeah yeah, or no no - this is a great argument but I thought that one of the main reasons for the problem could be the link using the serial port. This must be slow, and probably uses some home-spun protocol, which may contain some hidden bugs. Worth investigating replacing that with a simple network link instead ?
As a parent, I frequently have to deal with this question : do I do what is best for my children, or do I do what is best for wider society ? In the UK, many people feel that a private education is superior to the one provided by the state; if this is so, do I send my kids to a private school, thus weakening the state school system, or do I send them to the allegedly inferior state school ? The same is to an extent true with genetic engineering of kids - I believe it is not a good thing in the long term, except in certain rare medical situations; I believe society is served by having individuals who are not "perfect" - a world of Pamela Anderson/Harrison Ford clones would be dreadful. Would I choose a genetic improvement to my childrens' intelligence ? Well, maybe, if I could ever work out what intelligence really means. Was Picasso more or less "intelligent" than Einstein ? Would the world be served by a population made up entirely of succesful intellects - 6 billion Bill Gateses - aargh. Scary. No answers, only questions; however, the really important thing is that we need to keep the science going forward, not run away saying "No, we don't understand this, we should not be researching this subject".
I agree that most design documents end up badly out of date, inconsistent with the final product, and occasionally misleading through incompleteness. However, I still insist on creating them - because they help me think before writing code. I happen to need all the help I can get when coding, and writing down what I intend to build before building it works best for me (peer reviews being a close second). If you and your team are all capable of working without these crutches - good for you ! But most of the code I have seen over the years would clearly have benefited from a bit of thought up-front - and I would assert that it is easier to deal with poor quality code than with a poor quality conceptual design if you are the poor sod who is trying to fix a bug long after the original developer left... The purpose of design is not to keep management happy - most managers wouldn't know a good design from a hole in the ground, and the others haven't got time to read and understand a useful design document. The purpose is to make the developers think before they code. Oh, and Steve McConnell has said all this far more clearly than I could...
Well, look at the big players - all have had a pretty rough time on Wall Street recently. And everybody knows they have run out of places to go - the companies who can afford million dollar implementations are just running out. Peoplesoft ( the company I know best ) is responding partly by creating "partnerships" all over the shop - but is that enough ? Their software is pretty smart, and a lot easier to work with than SAP, but it makes me furious most of the time - so much hard coding, so few common functions, etc. So, perhaps this software is not really worth quite so much - perhaps it is the membership to club that matters ? And how is that different from the "membership" to the linux club ? Oh, except for cost, of course...both require a substantial dedication, a leap of faith, a commitment to stick with the product...
Here is a random, and flame-provoking thought : In some ways,you could view the ERP market as a weird version of the open source thing - The ERP vendor (SAP, Peoplesoft, Baan) ships source code to the client (this is the way these things work). The client either leaves it alone and uses it out of the box, hacks it themselves to do what they want, or employs "partners" to do it for them - essentially a service company making money out of understanding the source code better than the client. The fact that money changes hands does not really matter, but that the licensing is often restrictive clearly scuppers a direct analogy. However, I am pretty sure that for many implementations, the cost of the software is only a part of the cost - a SAP consultant often runs at around $1000-2000 per day. A lot of companies, both big and small, are making money out of implementing SAP and other ERP packages. Compare : Linux is open source, and companies like RH or S.u.S.e make money by understanding the source better than their clients, or making it simply more convenient to use/install/configure. So, who wants to bet on SAP reinventing themselves as a service company, supplying the software for a minimal amount, and concentrating on charging for implementation/customization ?
Boring suit type stuff, but the ERP market is running out of space to grow into. Most of the companies who can afford to spend the kinds of money required for SAP, Baan, Peoplesoft or what have you, have already done so. So, these guys have to move down the food chain to the smaller companies, who can't afford $2000 a day for an "Implementation Partner" - these firms want to buy something off the shelf and have it working without any hassle. Now, if I were SAP, I would look at the NT server license, the MS client licenses, the fact that NT (and the other MS software) shifts shape with Service Packs etc. every other day, and the trouble MS is having releasing Win2K, and a bet on linux becomes a lot more attractive - you could literally put Linux, a database and app server pre-configured with "Small business SAP" on a $10K Intel box, ship it, and have a small firm up and running with minimal effort. Course, this is just hypothesis, and I know more about Peoplesoft than SAP, but these guys are getting squeezed for space to grow, and their shareholders are still expecting nice big revenue figures.
And what's more, in Amsterdam there are the dreaded "Automatiek", kinda fast food from hole in wall joints, where you can get a burger, sandwich, and various deep-fried meatie and veggie things - all without human contact ! Oh, and beer of course...
Slashdot Mirror
The most obvious reason this will not happen is because it is trivially to circumvent - disposable pre-paid mobile phones allow criminals to communicate in a way that is almost impossible to track - there is no way to tie the conversation to individuals.
Off-shore email accounts and strong encryption allow communications that are almost impossible to monitor; any serious criminal organisation should be able to ensure total privacy of communication.
Walking with dinosaurs, a program on the bbc, had this story as well; they based it on a computer model showing the unnatural bending required for some dinosaur necks to achieve the classic cartoon stance.
Slashdot hosted a similar debate in March.
I still believe it is about the folks who brought us DCMA using their muscle to get more cheap labour, with which they can produce more software, for which we can pay more money, with which they can spend more money lobbying, to import more foreign cheap labour - aaargh. My brain just exploded.
Yeah, I would love to work in the states too. Just don't let me get old, or forget to learn (insert cool new technology here) in time to get my next gig.
Imagine the scene - a board room, the tension rises, everyone knows the numbers are looking bad, and suddenly a marketing exec speaks up : "Differential pricing ! It's the solution ! We can do what the (fill in industry as already mentioned in other posts) do ! Charge different people different amounts !".
The room goes quiet. One group thinks it is the perfect way to milk their more affluent customers and get some profit going for a change; others think "wow ! we can really beat the comparison shopping engines with this !". Another gang reckons it's a great way to snare new customers and then gradually raise prices on their subsequent visits....
Guess what ? It won't work. I don't believe that this can work in a way that won't repel as many people as it attracts, and those who have been repelled will never come back. It's too hard. How can some software know that CmdTaco's price threshold for an anime DVD is $20 ? That he'll go elsewhere the moment he realizes he is being screwed ?
OF course, I bet it looks real sweet in the briefings to the wall street crowd - "Amazon pioneers differential pricing model on the internet; applies for patent to protect their IP in this area..."..
Now, if I were these guys, I would not be too worried if some geekoid types reverse engineered my scanner interface. Heck, I would not have used XOR as my encryption routine, but that's another story.
I would worry if someone worked out a way of using that knowledge, and the scanners I had given away for free to launch a rival service. Posting this code for them must seem like the first step down that road. And of course, now that business models can be patented, there is a good chance they have gone and done that (of course, I don't know whether they have, and I'm too lazy to check).
So maybe the precious IP they are defending is not XOR, but their business model. And while business model patents are plainly ludicrous, maybe they could only persuade someone to lend them money to give away the scanners free by relying on such a patent ? Who knows.
They definitely need help in the PR department....
Pingle
So, here's my take.
2600 will probably loose - they have been painted as evil hackers in court, the copyright-owners are on a bit of a roll right now, and it's an election year.
What strikes me is that these huge organisations - both the "content creators" like Disney, and the software shops like Microsoft, seem to forget where their ideas come from. Never read a good book, watched a good film, heard a good song, used a good program created by a faceless organisation - to survive, these Intelectual Property-based organisations need one thing more than anything else, and it is TALENT.
The DMCA, the DeCSS and Napster cases - they all serve to turn those talented folks who could be making them rich into sworn enemies. Which self-respecting geek would go to work on a new form of encryption for DVD players ? Which teenage band who have been chucked of Napster is going to sign with a major label ? (well, maybe if the money was right...)
Somewhere in Hollywood, there is high-priced consultant scaring the studios, saying "look at Napster ! In 3 years time, everyone will have broadband access to the net, and the same will happen to your DVD content ! You will have to give up all that you hold dear !". The knee-jerk reaction is instantaneous.
Someone, somewhere is going to figure out a way to get rich from content in the new digital age, where information can not be protected by encryption and still be publicly available and run on cheap hardware.
I bet it won't be the existing powers.
Won't be me either, if I keep wasting my time posting to Slashdot....
I got a vaio some months back, and it is not quite as cool as it looks - it's slow, the screen has got the dreaded "always-on" pixel (and Sony refuse to do something about it unless at least 4 pixels are broken !), using external monitor/tv out requires a reboot - in short, I preferred my old dell. Maybe Sony should stick to TV's, diskmen and Aibos !
Wanna bet the Transmeta device will look totally droolworthy, but prove to be a toy for marketers rather than geeks ?
I know this feeling, and the best thing for me is to go for a long walk at lunchtime, go visit a museum, book shop, concert, anything that is intellectually stimulating but bears NO resemblance to computing. This usually gets at least some energy back.
After that, I like to get stuck into a couple of books that are about programming, but NOT about the current problem - stuff like Bentley's "Programming Pearls", "Out of their minds", "The soul of a new machine", that kind a thing. Seeing how people solved problems before really helps to start seeing new approaches to whatever is bugging me.
If that hasn't done the job, I usually start tinkering with a fun piece of code, a game or a 3d screensaver - anything to get me back into the flow.
This has always worked so far - usually I lose a couple of days, and come back to another few months of productive life. When it stops working, I guess I'll move into marketing.
There is an urgent shortage of beer. Even though my local supermarket has a lot of beer on the shelves, it is not the right kind of beer. Specifically, it is too expensive. In addition, I think you will agree that the beer you can buy cheaply stinks - it doesn't taste right, it doesn't get you drunk, and people insist on calling it "water".
I guess there are a number of issues...
1. You can never get enough of what you want. Good IT folk are hard to find - just like good plumbers, artists, football players.
2. It takes a while to sort the good ones from the bad ones - you wouldn't hire john elway based on a couple of interviews, you'd want to see him play.
3. The ones you can find tend to be expensive, hard to retain, and prone to poaching
4. Many companies see their staff as a resource to exploit; they are often unwilling to invest in training. Good IT folk don't grow on trees - they need to be trained, developed, coached, whatever.
5. Many employees see their employers as a short term gig, seek to extract the maximum value before leaving for a better job.
6. 4 and 5 become a recursive process with no exit clause.
7. it is probably difficult for geeks to move out of their chosen technical area of expertise, because being a geek implies a certain obsession with something - hardware, software, whatever. However, as you get older, have a higher salary expectation etc., you have to be able to offer your employer significant additional value to compete with a 21 year old fresh from college. If you can't keep your technical skills up to date, you can expect some pretty bad stuff to happen as you get older.
Lets own up first, I was one of those consultants....
I believe every serious development shop needs processes; how rigid they are depends on the product. You'd hope the folks building air traffic control systems are very methodical about their QA, at all stages of the development lifecycle. On the other hand, an e-commerce development project is not much use to anyone if the processes mean it takes 3 years to build a simple shopfront.
In my experience, process improvements are nearly always possible - though not always justified. Solid, proven methodologies can help (and have done in many organisations).
But :
- if the change is imposed top-down, it is unlikely to succeed - programmers are by nature not likely to respond to pressure from above, and will at best comply reluctantly, at worst leave or sabotage.
- the need for change needs to be identified and championed by someone who is credible with those most affected - ideally someone with hands-on project responsibilities, a user or customer
- the process needs to fit the project and the people
- incremental change is far more likely to succeed than a revolution.
The only way I know of improving the software process is to start with the development team (including the business analysts, testers, support folk etc.) and representatives from the rest of the business, identify the concerns, bottlenecks, common failures etc., and agree on a broad framework for improvements. That framework may have a fancypants name, or may just be made up on the spot. We then agree a set of monthly improvement targets - and it is nearly always about basic stuff, like code reviews, version control, "who-does-what-when", change control, and hand-over points.
Of course, I gotta eat, so I will most likely convince the person who signs the checque that the development organisation is reaching Maturity level 32 on the Institute of Made-up Professionals IT maturity model, and that they are leapfrogging the competition yadeyadeyade.
Okay, Access is the spawn of satan; NT is buggy; SQL Server is a poor relation of Oracle - yeah yeah, or no no - this is a great argument but I thought that one of the main reasons for the problem could be the link using the serial port. This must be slow, and probably uses some home-spun protocol, which may contain some hidden bugs.
Worth investigating replacing that with a simple network link instead ?
Well, it is the Monty Python aniversary...
As a parent, I frequently have to deal with this question :
do I do what is best for my children, or do I do what is best for wider society ? In the UK, many people feel that a private education is superior to the one provided by the state; if this is so, do I send my kids to a private school, thus weakening the state school system, or do I send them to the allegedly inferior state school ?
The same is to an extent true with genetic engineering of kids - I believe it is not a good thing in the long term, except in certain rare medical situations; I believe society is served by having individuals who are not "perfect" - a world of Pamela Anderson/Harrison Ford clones would be dreadful. Would I choose a genetic improvement to my childrens' intelligence ? Well, maybe, if I could ever work out what intelligence really means. Was Picasso more or less "intelligent" than Einstein ? Would the world be served by a population made up entirely of succesful intellects - 6 billion Bill Gateses - aargh.
Scary. No answers, only questions; however, the really important thing is that we need to keep the science going forward, not run away saying "No, we don't understand this, we should not be researching this subject".
I agree that most design documents end up badly out of date, inconsistent with the final product, and occasionally misleading through incompleteness.
However, I still insist on creating them - because they help me think before writing code. I happen to need all the help I can get when coding, and writing down what I intend to build before building it works best for me (peer reviews being a close second). If you and your team are all capable of working without these crutches - good for you ! But most of the code I have seen over the years would clearly have benefited from a bit of thought up-front - and I would assert that it is easier to deal with poor quality code than with a poor quality conceptual design if you are the poor sod who is trying to fix a bug long after the original developer left...
The purpose of design is not to keep management happy - most managers wouldn't know a good design from a hole in the ground, and the others haven't got time to read and understand a useful design document. The purpose is to make the developers think before they code.
Oh, and Steve McConnell has said all this far more clearly than I could...
Well, look at the big players - all have had a pretty rough time on Wall Street recently. And everybody knows they have run out of places to go - the companies who can afford million dollar implementations are just running out.
Peoplesoft ( the company I know best ) is responding partly by creating "partnerships" all over the shop - but is that enough ? Their software is pretty smart, and a lot easier to work with than SAP, but it makes me furious most of the time - so much hard coding, so few common functions, etc. So, perhaps this software is not really worth quite so much - perhaps it is the membership to club that matters ? And how is that different from the "membership" to the linux club ? Oh, except for cost, of course...both require a substantial dedication, a leap of faith, a commitment to stick with the product...
Here is a random, and flame-provoking thought :
In some ways,you could view the ERP market as a weird version of the open source thing -
The ERP vendor (SAP, Peoplesoft, Baan) ships source code to the client (this is the way these things work).
The client either leaves it alone and uses it out of the box, hacks it themselves to do what they want, or employs "partners" to do it for them - essentially a service company making money out of understanding the source code better than the client.
The fact that money changes hands does not really matter, but that the licensing is often restrictive clearly scuppers a direct analogy. However, I am pretty sure that for many implementations, the cost of the software is only a part of the cost - a SAP consultant often runs at around $1000-2000 per day. A lot of companies, both big and small, are making money out of implementing SAP and other ERP packages.
Compare : Linux is open source, and companies like RH or S.u.S.e make money by understanding the source better than their clients, or making it simply more convenient to use/install/configure.
So, who wants to bet on SAP reinventing themselves as a service company, supplying the software for a minimal amount, and concentrating on charging for implementation/customization ?
time to return to the real world.
Boring suit type stuff, but the ERP market is running out of space to grow into. Most of the companies who can afford to spend the kinds of money required for SAP, Baan, Peoplesoft or what have you, have already done so.
So, these guys have to move down the food chain to the smaller companies, who can't afford $2000 a day for an "Implementation Partner" - these firms want to buy something off the shelf and have it working without any hassle.
Now, if I were SAP, I would look at the NT server license, the MS client licenses, the fact that NT (and the other MS software) shifts shape with Service Packs etc. every other day, and the trouble MS is having releasing Win2K, and a bet on linux becomes a lot more attractive - you could literally put Linux, a database and app server pre-configured with "Small business SAP" on a $10K Intel box, ship it, and have a small firm up and running with minimal effort.
Course, this is just hypothesis, and I know more about Peoplesoft than SAP, but these guys are getting squeezed for space to grow, and their shareholders are still expecting nice big revenue figures.
And what's more, in Amsterdam there are the dreaded "Automatiek", kinda fast food from hole in wall joints, where you can get a burger, sandwich, and various deep-fried meatie and veggie things - all without human contact ! Oh, and beer of course...
Of course, the license terms for SQL server state that you may not publish benchmark results without MS permission...wonder why ?