Most of the discussion here has been about the merits of Notes as an end user product, but the real question at hand is whether there is any value in opening up the source code. I would personally be very dubious about that.
We are talking here about code that ranges up to 30 years old, which has been edited by hundreds, if not thousands, of Lotus/IBM employees. It has gone through not just multiple user interface changes, but even major changes in the nature of the user interface technology. Whatever conceptual integrity the code may have had when Ray Ozzie and his team created it is long gone.
I seriously doubt that there is anyone on the planet who understands the current Notes code. As we have seen in the recent Slashdot discussion about OpenOffice.org, it's very difficult for an outsider to come into such a project and be able to make any meaningful contributions.
When Sun decided to open up Solaris, it took them several years to do so. They had to clean up the code (and comments), then make sure that they actually owned all of the code. I'm quite sure that CA had to go through a similar lengthy process with Ingres.
If IBM were to open source Notes, they would have to follow a similar process. During that time, it would be difficult for the Notes engineering team to make any significant changes to the code base, such as new functionality. The end result would be an open source product that could probably still be understood, enhanced, and maintained only by the same IBM engineering team that is working on it now.
Even though I strongly encourages adoption and use of open source software, I am hard pressed to see the value in open sourcing this antiquated and complex piece of code. I find it difficult to imagine that open source developers would flock to work on this project when there are so many other more attractive options. I think that we should leave things as they stand as long as IBM is willing to pay people to support and maintain Notes.
Agreed, but my hope is that universal broadband and a stronger FCC will provide effective competition to the current duopoly. Where I live, I have several choices for DSL service in addition to the local cable monopoly, and I hope that the number of choices will grow. Most people have fewer choices. Almost everyone has much slower bandwidth than is routinely available in other advanced countries.
In addition, many people are falling for Comcast's Triple Play package offer, which locks them into a single provider for most of their communications. If Comcast dominates, then it's only a matter of time before they control more and more of the content. That gives me visions of Big Brother, Fahrenheit 451, and Brian Roberts as Our Leader, with his image dominating the large screen in my living room.
Tech policy is very important for the country, and we should make sure that these issues do not get overlooked as we address the multitude of other issues facing us.
Once upon a time, when AT&T (Ma Bell) provided all of the telephone service in the US, you had to rent your telephone from AT&T for about $1 a month, which is at least $5 today. At first, phones were all black. Colors were a major innovation, and the Princess phone (see one on Mad Men) was downright revolutionary. But all phones were made by AT&T's captive subsidiary (Western Electric). You couldn't get them anywhere else, and you couldn't buy them outright.
It wasn't until the 1968 Carterfone decision that AT&T was forced to give up this monopoly and allow other devices to be connected to the Public Switched Telephone Network. RJ-11 jacks followed, as did the flood of third parties making telephones. Today you can buy a phone very cheaply. You wouldn't be very happy if AT&T were charging $5/month for each phone and had the exclusive right to rent them.
Comcast is following the old AT&T monopoly model, the only difference being that the manufacturing of the boxes is outsourced. Cable boxes are available only from them. You can't buy them, and they arbitrarily decide on the monthly rental charge. (For simplicity, we'll let Comcast represent the entire cable industry here.)
Someday, perhaps soon, we will have a Federal Trade Commission that will use its enforcement powers to declare this arrangement to be illegal. Comcast will fight it in the courts, as did AT&T, but eventually they will lose, and will be forced to separate the cable box business from the television service. We consumers will then have the right to either continue renting our boxes or to buy it, with or without a service contract.
The bigger threat to Comcast, however, is the competition for delivery of content, where they don't have a complete monopoly. (They do own some of the cable channels, though.) Today, we can legally receive programs over-the-air, by cable, satellite, and Internet. As more and more of us go to the Web for our video entertainment, Comcast and the other cable companies may become increasingly irrelevant and lose more and more of their market share. The Obama Administration is talking about universal broadband service, which would be a big blow to cable TV. When that happens, I'm guessing that HBO and Showtime will decide to sell monthly subscriptions to their shows over the web (or through the iTunes music store). If they are successful, it's not long until Game Over for the cable companies.
Other replies in this discussion thread have noted that the new CSSE conference in Wuhan, China, is not an "important" conference.
As someone who has served on lots of program committees for research-oriented conferences, I thought that it might be useful to try to explain what makes a conference important. Here goes:
It has been around for a while - probably five years or more - and is reasonably selective in the paper selection process. For example, only about 10% of the papers submitted to the Int'l Conf. on Software Engineering are accepted for publication and presentation.
The community around the conference - conference and program chairs, attendees, etc. - includes the leading people (esp. researchers) in the field, who view the annual conference not only as a destination to learn about the latest advances, but also as a social event to meet and catch up with colleagues. The ACM Conference on Computers and Human Interaction is an excellent example of such a conference.
The invited and keynote speakers are well-known luminaries in the field, often affiliated with the most prestigious academic institutions.
The selection process is based on review of submitted papers, not on a pay-to-play approach found in some commercially-oriented conferences. The intent, not always achieved, is to find the most qualified people on the program committee for each paper. (Of course, the quality of the reviewing process often leaves a lot to be desired, but that's another issue.)
Tenure-track faculty in research universities get promoted not only on the number of publications, but also the perceived quality of where they are published. Since you don't get much credit for publishing in a new and obscure conference, there is little incentive to publish there. Furthermore, your work is less likely to be seen and cited by your peers. A faculty member only has the time and money to attend a few conferences each year, and only has the time to write a few papers.
So the goal is to get your work published in the best journals and conferences. You send your best work to the "A" conferences, recognizing that there are "B" and "C" conferences every week of the year (with the exception of this week and next). If a lower quality conference is being held in a location that you very much want to visit, then you dash off a paper of lesser quality, knowing that even a software-generated paper is likely to be accepted. You don't even have to put it on your CV, and it's a pretty safe bet that your colleagues won't see it.
When I was a vendor back in the Dark Ages of the 20th century, I had very mixed feelings about trade shows. It took a lot of people, time, and money to prepare for a show and then be present for the duration. Most of the people who came by our booth were tire-kickers at best, and we developed the theory that anyone who took our giveaway (candy, etc.) first wasn't really a prospect. On the plus side, we came away from almost every show with enough good leads to justify our expenses. Our marketing and sales guys would screen the leads and follow up with the best prospects. A few of our bigger customers would never have found us had we not shown up at these shows.
With so much information available online, and with the ability to purchase things with just a few mouse clicks, why would I go to such a trade show today? For me, that's easy.
It's a great way to discover new companies and products, often hiding in the corner of the show floor or as an adjunct to a larger vendor.
It's often valuable to get your hands on a product to see if it is well made and usable. I recently went through a lot of hassle with Dell when I bought and subsequently returned the Inspiron Mini 9 (Ubuntu version) because of the tiny and unusable keyboard.
If you expect that the product you are seeking will be critical to your business over time, it's valuable to build a relationship with the vendor. A major trade show is often the best chance to meet their senior people and decide if you want to invite them to make a sales call.
So I will once again show up at Macworld SF and will hope that IDC will find it profitable to continue running the show. That gives companies the chance to show their stuff rather than struggling to get their product stocked and displayed by the Apple retail store or other merchants (who show only a tiny percentage of what's available out there). I'm likely to show up at future Macworlds, too, since my purpose for attending isn't to see Apple's products, but to see everything else.
The less time that your child spends in front of a screen at this age, the better. There's no computing equivalent of putting a golf club in the hands of 2-year-old Tiger Woods. Yes, your child could use something like "My ABCs" on the computer, but you would do better to go together to the public library, explore some choices, and bring home a picture book to "read" together.
As a parent, I also know that you probably aren't going to listen to much from Slashdotters, and that you definitely want to have a machine as a holiday gift. In that case, you should get an XO Laptop from the One Laptop per Child project. For $399, you get a nearly indestructible machine for yourself, and you send one to a needy child in a developing country. In a couple of years, you and your child will be able to use this together. In the meantime, you can know that you are supporting a good cause and helping another child.
The Obama Administration will need additional expertise and leadership in many different areas of technology, ranging from biotechnology to telecommunications, and from cybersecurity to information systems. While there are individuals who might be pretty good in a couple of these technical areas, it's hard to imagine a single person who could contribute knowledgeably in all of them. Even if we confine the discussion to computing, there's a long list of issues calling for different types of expertise.
System procurement is pretty much a disaster across the board. The FBI and the FAA have sunk many years and many millions into new systems without very much to show for their efforts. The DOD puts out billions of dollars in contracts, but systems show up flawed, late, and way over budget (if they show up at all).
Obama has promised to lower the cost of health care delivery through improvements in IT. The systems at the VA hospitals work, but are largely built on a version of MUMPS, a language designed almost 40 years ago. Getting medical professionals to agree on computerized medical records and systems for processing those records is an extremely tall order.
National security depends on our ability to protect against cyber-attacks, and demands expertise in cryptography, network security, and other issues of authorization and authentication.
We also want to make efficient use of the systems currently in use, as well as employ effective software development processes for maintaining those systems and building new ones. Government-supported systems will last for many years, so they should be built with modern, proven technology. Of course, open source software plays an important role there, preventing the government from becoming more dependent on vendors of proprietary software and systems.
To me, a state CIO might be very good at preparing RFPs and doing competitive review of the bids for large acquisitions. However, that capability would only cover a small percentage of
what is needed for the CTO position.
I'd like to see President Obama appoint a CTO with broad technology and policy experience. This person should have worked with industry and with government, and should have good contacts in the research community. The chosen person should be able to sit around the table with Cabinet members and command respect for his or her knowledge and experience. Without that, it becomes more difficult for the CTO to effect change in the different executive departments.
The CTO would probably need to establish an Office of the CTO and hire people with suitable knowledge of the various key scientific and technical fields. We're coming off a period where the public holds scientific and technical knowledge in low regard, so it's essential that the CTO help to restore the reputation and status of the scientific community.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. In my experience, government often serves to set the agenda for R&D in several ways. First, they support "basic" research through grants to universities from organizations such as the NIH and the NSF. Some of those research projects end up with commercially viable results. Sometimes a professor or student will start a company to achieve such commercialization (such as Sun Microsystems and Genentech) and other times a university will license the results to anyone willing to pay the license fees or royalties (such as Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and Vitamin D).
The government also sponsors applied research, often through DoD and NASA. Our major aerospace companies (Lockheed, Raytheon, etc.) receive many millions of dollars in federal research (IR&D) funds each year to work on various projects, most of which are "pre-commercial". That means that the company itself wouldn't make such an investment with its own funds, since it might have a negative hit on its bottom line and therefore affect the stock price. However, we've seen that those research dollars often lead to huge business opportunities for established companies and startups as the results of that work become commercially attractive. One great example of this is the Internet, which comes directly from DoD ARPA funding.
Of course, government agencies don't always make the right call about what ideas are worthy of investment and who should get the money. In some cases, the proposals are poorly developed or the reviewers give them low ratings. It's also possible for political considerations to affect the decisions of who and what gets funded, particularly if the science advisors don't have strong science credentials. But it often works out pretty well: polio vaccines, man on the moon, jet airplanes, and so on.
I didn't have the H1-B debate in mind in my comment about talented immigrants. Let me explain what I meant. Suppose that a top engineering graduate of Indian Institute of Technology (or some other outstanding foreign institution) wants to work for a Ph.D. in computer science or engineering at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, or some other top US school. First of all, the US has become much less attractive to foreign students as we have made it more difficult for them to get visas; Canada, the UK, and Australia are attracting many more such students than they did five years ago. Second, it used to be much easier for the Ph.D.s to stay in the US after they finished their degrees. When you look at the top management of Silicon Valley companies, you can see that many of the founders and executives were not born in the US. (Sergey Brin and Andy Grove are just two examples out of thousands.)
I think that keeping these talented people and their entrepreneurial energy in the US is a good thing. I doubt if they take jobs from Americans; indeed, the opposite is true: they create companies that employ thousands of people and generate wealth. The current policy, though, requires most of these people with advanced degrees to return to their home country soon after they have completed their studies. Not only do we lose them to our own economy, but we set them up to compete against us. When we buy Acer and Lenovo computers, we are sending money to Taiwan and China. As long as the US isn't doing a very good job of attracting our own students to careers in math and science, we have to import that talent in much the same way that US sports teams now scour the world for the best talent.
Apologies for the long message, but there's a lot to be said on these issues, and they are all strongly connected to science policy.
Both the Obama and McCain campaigns have responded with answers to 14 questions related to science and science policy. ScienceDebate 2008 is sponsored by the National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the Council on Competitiveness and a long list of non-partisan professional and scientific groups. These questions go far beyond the simple issue of network neutrality.
Based on the record, it's pretty clear that Obama and the Democrats are bigger supporters of government funding of scientific research than are the Republicans, who believe in leaving it to the "market". That market-oriented view, of course, has a negative impact on such things as funding the development of drugs for rare diseases where it would be impossible for a private company to make a profit on their investment in the needed R&D and clinical trials.
Personally, I think that we should also reverse the policy that now forces top foreign science and engineering students who come to the US for their Ph.D. and M.D. studies to return to their home countries. Making that change is at odds with the Republican platform stance of tightening the borders.
Without wanting to seem elitist about all of this, McCain and Palin probably aren't smarter than 5th graders when it comes to science. McCain graduated 894th out of 899 in his class at the Naval Academy and Palin's undergraduate degree in journalism was earned at 5 different universities.
While I commend Vint Cerf for his public endorsement of Obama (and strongly share his preference), the US is faced with a slew of critical geopolitical and economic issues. Whoever wins, scientific research isn't likely to be a top priority in the new Administration. All we can do is hope that it has strong supporters in the White House.
From following the second link and looking at all of the legal filings, it appears that Jacobsen, as plaintiff, easily incurred more than $100K in legal fees in trying to assert ownership of his own work. Did those funds come out of his own pocket? If so, how many of us could afford to take on a similar fight to protect our own work?
In a timely coincidence, the film Flash of Genius is opening today. It tells the story of how Ford stole the invention of the intermittent windshield wiper from Dr. Robert Kearns, and how Kearns fought back (at considerable personal expense).
We also know that RCA and David Sarnoff stole the basic invention of television from Philo Farnsworth. It took more than 10 years for Farnsworth to win the right to royalties for his invention. Aaron Sorkin wrote a play, "The Farnsworth Invention", based on this story.
I'll be a senior well before many other Slashdotters, and expect that I'll continue to take public transportation when possible, avoid driving at night or on the freeways, and even bike around town as long as I am healthy enough to do so.
In the meantime, though, I'm concerned about surviving my hellish commutes on the freeways. Apart from those who [illegally] text or talk on their mobile phones while driving, there are all too many drivers who seem personally offended that I am in front of them, even at 75-80 mph. They'll drive right up on my tail, pass me, and then switch lanes every few hundred yards in the hope that they can get to their destination a few seconds faster. It's too bad that the Highway Patrol doesn't crack down on them.
These cars routinely zip past the older drivers, who stay close to the speed limit, usually in the right hand lane. I worry more about single drivers in Escalades, Excursions, Tahoes, and other large vehicles that completely block my view of the road ahead.
For now, I just hope to live long enough to become an older driver!
I've recently heard that Microsoft is looking for a Senior Director in the Product Marketing area around their web application development strategy and tools. One of the requirements for this position is a solid understanding of the LAMP stack and development approaches for web applications built on open source software. Presumably the successful candidate will have the task of marketing Microsoft's.Net story against the open source LAMP stack. Microsoft's participation at OSCON and similar events gives them both the opportunity to become part of the open source community, and a better understanding of how they can compete against it.
"I'm not the one you're looking for." -- Obi-Wan Kenobi
Privacy and freedom: get over it. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights: bad prognosis, but trying to survive in hiding until January 20, 2009.
If you want to understand how leaders like Stalin and Hitler got so many millions of people to follow them and built up such powerful "security" forces, you don't have to look outside the borders of the US. Just picture Dick Cheney in an SS uniform.
If I want to watch a high-def network program that is available over-the-air, I find that the quality of the OTA HD broadcast is almost always superior to the same program transmitted in HD (at an extra monthly charge) by our local cable monopoly. They deliver more channels, but they are in "highish-def", compressed to maximize the number of channels that they can support. (Thank you, Mr. Roberts.) So if you have a modern HDTV with a built-in tuner, go out and buy an inexpensive HD antenna (rabbit ears with at least a 45db gain), and watch over-the-air when you can.
Ajax Patterns [http://ajaxpatterns.org/wiki/index.php?title=AJAXFrameworks] and eDevil [http://edevil.wordpress.com/2005/11/14/javascript-libraries-roundup/] compiled a list of more than 100 Ajax toolkits, covering a wide variety of underlying language technologies. While many of these get very little use, there are at least six [Yahoo UIL, Tibco (General Interface), Google GWT, OpenLaszlo, Microsoft.Net, and Dojo (or the commercial WaveMaker based on Dojo)] with a significant developer base.
When people are looking for an Ajax toolkit, the Google name often gets it onto the selection "short list", but that doesn't automatically assure that it will be the final choice. Many corporate IT organizations insist upon commercial support for any software that goes into their business-critical applications. Of course, Google does not provide such support. In those situations, GTK will be ruled out for business reasons, independent of its technical merits. The net result is that there are numerous sites built on GTK, but the large variety of choices means that no single framework or toolkit has yet emerged as a favorite.
There's a new Open Source Census project that lets you identify the open source programs that you are running on your machine. Go to the project at http://ossdiscovery.org/ to download the OSS Discovery client (a Ruby program) to see what open source programs and components are on your machine. If you are the author of a distributed open source component, you can add a "fingerprint" to the discovery database so that your project can also be found.
I bought a new Toshiba HD DVD player in early November, when they were closing out the A2 model. It was DOA. It took until January 8th for them to get a replacement to me. During that time, it took them 3 tries to get the mailing label right, a week to verify that the machine was, in fact, dead, and then four weeks to ship a replacement machine. Their customer service people are very good at apologizing, but completely unwilling to take responsibility for the problems or to do anything that would make amends. What am I offered for a new in-the-box Toshiba HD-A2, along with the coupon and receipt for 5 new HD-DVDs?
When the OLPC project started looking for customers, they approached national governments, with the idea of getting the leadership of a country to commit to buying large numbers (a million or more) of the XO laptops for their countries. Part of the idea was that such large orders would drive down the average cost. As we now know, that strategy proved impractical for several reasons, including the unwillingness of countries to lay out the money for an unproven approach, the political and economic competition within countries for use of that money, the competition that arose from other companies wanting to produce and sell low-cost computers to schools. The OLPC leadership has changed its strategy, focusing on smaller deployments and pilot projects, such as those now underway in Uruguay and Peru.
In the US, the federal government has relatively little involvement in such decisions, which are handled at the state and local level. With the change in strategy, the OLPC effort can address individual states and cities. Of course, there are underprivileged students in every state, but here, too, the OLPC sales effort must deal with the same kinds of issues that they found in Thailand, Nigeria, and elsewhere. If you were the Superintendent of Schools for Detroit's school district or the State Secretary of Education in Mississippi, would you spend the taxpayers' money on XO laptops, on teachers to help schools comply with the No Child Left Behind mandate, or on something else?
I bought an XO laptop during the Give One, Get One promotion, and admire all of the effort that went into its design. It's fun to use, even if it is a bit underpowered and the keyboard is tough for continuous typing. I wish the OLPC team the best of success with their program, but it's also likely to be a tough sale here in the US, patriotism notwithstanding.
We're beginning to get a little bit off-topic here, but I wanted to clarify my point about testing and releases. In my experience, every vendor releases software with bugs in it -- it's the nature of software. Before everyone could use FTP or a browser to download a new version of a program, you were pretty much stuck waiting for a vendor to produce a new version of their product and ship it to you. They didn't do that very often, maybe one major and one minor release each year, since there was a significant cost associated with creating the distribution media and shipping it to customers. (If there was a "showstopper" problem, then they might create a patch and ship it to those who requested it.) As a result, vendors did a fair amount of testing to try to avoid shipping software with serious bugs, sometimes delaying ship dates to identify and fix Severity 1 and 2 bugs.
As soon as it was possible for vendors to avoid the cost of manufacturing and shipping, then vendors changed their development processes. Microsoft, for example, now sets a date for their product releases well in advance and almost always adheres to that date, independent of its quality, since they have tied numerous sales and marketing activities to that date. It's rare for them to push back release dates, though they did that for Office 2008 for the Mac.
Netscape certainly didn't introduce the idea of shipping buggy software, but they were the first to recognize that they didn't have to do very careful testing of their releases, since they could quickly post a "better" version on their website and let their users download it.
Netscape made at least 15 different releases of Netscape 4.x (not counting 5 preview releases) in roughly a year and a half between mid-1997 and late 1998. No vendor, including Microsoft, ever did anything like that before.
To come back to the subject at hand, the 1997-8 period coincided with the publication of Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and the beginning of rapid growth of the open source movement. In early 1998, Netscape announced their intent to open source Netscape Communicator, though it took four years before the first result of the Mozilla project became available. In those four years, Internet Exploder basically wiped all of the other browsers off the map, and it wasn't until early 2005 that Mozilla Firefox began to take share from IE.
Firefox relies on extensive user testing and reporting, and Microsoft has done the same, the difference being that Firefox is open and IE remains closed. Firefox development has advanced much more quickly than has IE, and the Microsofties should have learned something about the power of open source from that.
Of course, my comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. Netscape was the first company to understand that it was more effective to release buggy software early than to spend time getting it right. As with many other things, the Internet changed everything. Before the Internet, it cost vendors money to ship out new disks, tapes, etc., with new versions of software. Now, vendors can shift the burden to you, posting the updated (fixed) version of the software and leaving it up to you to download it. More and more, vendors are including "call home" routines in their software to check for such updates. The whole concept of "agile development" is built around "release early, release often".
In community open source projects, testing is left to the community after the developers do the best job they can to find and fix problems. Microsoft has apparently adopted this model, releasing early versions of their products so that users can find and report problems. They have extended that model to paid versions of the official releases, too, resulting in frequent Patch Tuesdays and massive Service Packs. Why pay for internal testers when you can get your customers to do it for you?
I was founder and CEO of Interactive Development Environments, Inc. (ide.com), which was the 78th dotcom on the "first 100" list. IDE developed the Software through Pictures multi-user graphical modeling environment that ran on a heterogeneous network of Unix workstations. We released our product in late 1984, got VC funding in May, 1988, and lasted until November, 1996, when we were merged into Aonix, which still exists today.
Although we were 78th on that list, I believe that we were among the very first to place an ad that used an email address as a contact point. I was able to find an ad from the August, 1987, issue of Unix World, where we gave our email address as ucbvax!sun!ide!sales, using the UUCP format. Our customers were developers and early adopters, mostly on Sun workstations, so we actually got some email and some sales leads in this way. Of course, we switched to the "@ide.com" format as soon as we were able to do so. (Please post a reply if you are aware of an earlier use of an email address in a published ad.)
Let's all agree that the US is part of the Third World when it comes to mobile phone service (and broadband, too). Anyone who has spent time in Scandinavia, Korea, Japan, or other advanced countries knows that we usually pay more and get less for our money. The carriers have no real incentive to improve service.
So the issue is how to get out of the current muddle and to cut ties with these carriers. Of course, we can use Skype or various IM and video conferencing tools to talk to people without making a traditional landline or mobile call. The coming deployment of WiMAX networks will increase our ability to use IP-based devices for calling.
The forthcoming FCC auction of the 700MHz spectrum, now scheduled for January, will introduce more openness into the bidding process, and should enable a company such as Google to develop a competing service. Assuming that happens, there will be an alternative our dependence on the incumbent carriers, which will have its ups (price, flexibility) and possible downs (advertising, privacy concerns).
There are also numerous efforts underway to create devices based on open source software. The Nokia N800/N810 http://www.nseries.com/ is a Linux-based device with a useful developer site http://www.maemo.org/. The OpenMoko project http://www.openmoko.org/ is aimed at developing an open source phone. These devices are, of course, unlocked. When OpenMoko has advanced a little further, you should be able to take anyone's SIM chip, put it in your OpenMoko phone, and make a call. For now, though, the best you can do is to have an unlocked phone. (I have about 8 SIM chips from different countries, and switch them when I travel, thereby avoiding the extortionate international roaming charges of the mobile carriers. You can easily buy "pay-as-you-go" service almost everywhere, including in the US.)
So we can already take various steps to loosen our ties to the cellphone carriers. With some luck, many of us will be able to extricate ourselves completely. It's only then that the cellphone carriers will feel the need to improve their products and services to attract and retain customers.
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We are talking here about code that ranges up to 30 years old, which has been edited by hundreds, if not thousands, of Lotus/IBM employees. It has gone through not just multiple user interface changes, but even major changes in the nature of the user interface technology. Whatever conceptual integrity the code may have had when Ray Ozzie and his team created it is long gone.
I seriously doubt that there is anyone on the planet who understands the current Notes code. As we have seen in the recent Slashdot discussion about OpenOffice.org, it's very difficult for an outsider to come into such a project and be able to make any meaningful contributions.
When Sun decided to open up Solaris, it took them several years to do so. They had to clean up the code (and comments), then make sure that they actually owned all of the code. I'm quite sure that CA had to go through a similar lengthy process with Ingres.
If IBM were to open source Notes, they would have to follow a similar process. During that time, it would be difficult for the Notes engineering team to make any significant changes to the code base, such as new functionality. The end result would be an open source product that could probably still be understood, enhanced, and maintained only by the same IBM engineering team that is working on it now.
Even though I strongly encourages adoption and use of open source software, I am hard pressed to see the value in open sourcing this antiquated and complex piece of code. I find it difficult to imagine that open source developers would flock to work on this project when there are so many other more attractive options. I think that we should leave things as they stand as long as IBM is willing to pay people to support and maintain Notes.
In addition, many people are falling for Comcast's Triple Play package offer, which locks them into a single provider for most of their communications. If Comcast dominates, then it's only a matter of time before they control more and more of the content. That gives me visions of Big Brother, Fahrenheit 451, and Brian Roberts as Our Leader, with his image dominating the large screen in my living room.
Tech policy is very important for the country, and we should make sure that these issues do not get overlooked as we address the multitude of other issues facing us.
No one has yet mentioned University of Technology, Sydney, which has a reasonably good computer science department.
It wasn't until the 1968 Carterfone decision that AT&T was forced to give up this monopoly and allow other devices to be connected to the Public Switched Telephone Network. RJ-11 jacks followed, as did the flood of third parties making telephones. Today you can buy a phone very cheaply. You wouldn't be very happy if AT&T were charging $5/month for each phone and had the exclusive right to rent them.
Comcast is following the old AT&T monopoly model, the only difference being that the manufacturing of the boxes is outsourced. Cable boxes are available only from them. You can't buy them, and they arbitrarily decide on the monthly rental charge. (For simplicity, we'll let Comcast represent the entire cable industry here.)
Someday, perhaps soon, we will have a Federal Trade Commission that will use its enforcement powers to declare this arrangement to be illegal. Comcast will fight it in the courts, as did AT&T, but eventually they will lose, and will be forced to separate the cable box business from the television service. We consumers will then have the right to either continue renting our boxes or to buy it, with or without a service contract.
The bigger threat to Comcast, however, is the competition for delivery of content, where they don't have a complete monopoly. (They do own some of the cable channels, though.) Today, we can legally receive programs over-the-air, by cable, satellite, and Internet. As more and more of us go to the Web for our video entertainment, Comcast and the other cable companies may become increasingly irrelevant and lose more and more of their market share. The Obama Administration is talking about universal broadband service, which would be a big blow to cable TV. When that happens, I'm guessing that HBO and Showtime will decide to sell monthly subscriptions to their shows over the web (or through the iTunes music store). If they are successful, it's not long until Game Over for the cable companies.
As someone who has served on lots of program committees for research-oriented conferences, I thought that it might be useful to try to explain what makes a conference important. Here goes:
So the goal is to get your work published in the best journals and conferences. You send your best work to the "A" conferences, recognizing that there are "B" and "C" conferences every week of the year (with the exception of this week and next). If a lower quality conference is being held in a location that you very much want to visit, then you dash off a paper of lesser quality, knowing that even a software-generated paper is likely to be accepted. You don't even have to put it on your CV, and it's a pretty safe bet that your colleagues won't see it.
With so much information available online, and with the ability to purchase things with just a few mouse clicks, why would I go to such a trade show today? For me, that's easy.
So I will once again show up at Macworld SF and will hope that IDC will find it profitable to continue running the show. That gives companies the chance to show their stuff rather than struggling to get their product stocked and displayed by the Apple retail store or other merchants (who show only a tiny percentage of what's available out there). I'm likely to show up at future Macworlds, too, since my purpose for attending isn't to see Apple's products, but to see everything else.
As a parent, I also know that you probably aren't going to listen to much from Slashdotters, and that you definitely want to have a machine as a holiday gift. In that case, you should get an XO Laptop from the One Laptop per Child project. For $399, you get a nearly indestructible machine for yourself, and you send one to a needy child in a developing country. In a couple of years, you and your child will be able to use this together. In the meantime, you can know that you are supporting a good cause and helping another child.
System procurement is pretty much a disaster across the board. The FBI and the FAA have sunk many years and many millions into new systems without very much to show for their efforts. The DOD puts out billions of dollars in contracts, but systems show up flawed, late, and way over budget (if they show up at all).
Obama has promised to lower the cost of health care delivery through improvements in IT. The systems at the VA hospitals work, but are largely built on a version of MUMPS, a language designed almost 40 years ago. Getting medical professionals to agree on computerized medical records and systems for processing those records is an extremely tall order.
National security depends on our ability to protect against cyber-attacks, and demands expertise in cryptography, network security, and other issues of authorization and authentication.
We also want to make efficient use of the systems currently in use, as well as employ effective software development processes for maintaining those systems and building new ones. Government-supported systems will last for many years, so they should be built with modern, proven technology. Of course, open source software plays an important role there, preventing the government from becoming more dependent on vendors of proprietary software and systems.
To me, a state CIO might be very good at preparing RFPs and doing competitive review of the bids for large acquisitions. However, that capability would only cover a small percentage of what is needed for the CTO position.
I'd like to see President Obama appoint a CTO with broad technology and policy experience. This person should have worked with industry and with government, and should have good contacts in the research community. The chosen person should be able to sit around the table with Cabinet members and command respect for his or her knowledge and experience. Without that, it becomes more difficult for the CTO to effect change in the different executive departments.
The CTO would probably need to establish an Office of the CTO and hire people with suitable knowledge of the various key scientific and technical fields. We're coming off a period where the public holds scientific and technical knowledge in low regard, so it's essential that the CTO help to restore the reputation and status of the scientific community.
The government also sponsors applied research, often through DoD and NASA. Our major aerospace companies (Lockheed, Raytheon, etc.) receive many millions of dollars in federal research (IR&D) funds each year to work on various projects, most of which are "pre-commercial". That means that the company itself wouldn't make such an investment with its own funds, since it might have a negative hit on its bottom line and therefore affect the stock price. However, we've seen that those research dollars often lead to huge business opportunities for established companies and startups as the results of that work become commercially attractive. One great example of this is the Internet, which comes directly from DoD ARPA funding.
Of course, government agencies don't always make the right call about what ideas are worthy of investment and who should get the money. In some cases, the proposals are poorly developed or the reviewers give them low ratings. It's also possible for political considerations to affect the decisions of who and what gets funded, particularly if the science advisors don't have strong science credentials. But it often works out pretty well: polio vaccines, man on the moon, jet airplanes, and so on.
I didn't have the H1-B debate in mind in my comment about talented immigrants. Let me explain what I meant. Suppose that a top engineering graduate of Indian Institute of Technology (or some other outstanding foreign institution) wants to work for a Ph.D. in computer science or engineering at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, or some other top US school. First of all, the US has become much less attractive to foreign students as we have made it more difficult for them to get visas; Canada, the UK, and Australia are attracting many more such students than they did five years ago. Second, it used to be much easier for the Ph.D.s to stay in the US after they finished their degrees. When you look at the top management of Silicon Valley companies, you can see that many of the founders and executives were not born in the US. (Sergey Brin and Andy Grove are just two examples out of thousands.)
I think that keeping these talented people and their entrepreneurial energy in the US is a good thing. I doubt if they take jobs from Americans; indeed, the opposite is true: they create companies that employ thousands of people and generate wealth. The current policy, though, requires most of these people with advanced degrees to return to their home country soon after they have completed their studies. Not only do we lose them to our own economy, but we set them up to compete against us. When we buy Acer and Lenovo computers, we are sending money to Taiwan and China. As long as the US isn't doing a very good job of attracting our own students to careers in math and science, we have to import that talent in much the same way that US sports teams now scour the world for the best talent.
Apologies for the long message, but there's a lot to be said on these issues, and they are all strongly connected to science policy.
Based on the record, it's pretty clear that Obama and the Democrats are bigger supporters of government funding of scientific research than are the Republicans, who believe in leaving it to the "market". That market-oriented view, of course, has a negative impact on such things as funding the development of drugs for rare diseases where it would be impossible for a private company to make a profit on their investment in the needed R&D and clinical trials.
Personally, I think that we should also reverse the policy that now forces top foreign science and engineering students who come to the US for their Ph.D. and M.D. studies to return to their home countries. Making that change is at odds with the Republican platform stance of tightening the borders.
Without wanting to seem elitist about all of this, McCain and Palin probably aren't smarter than 5th graders when it comes to science. McCain graduated 894th out of 899 in his class at the Naval Academy and Palin's undergraduate degree in journalism was earned at 5 different universities.
While I commend Vint Cerf for his public endorsement of Obama (and strongly share his preference), the US is faced with a slew of critical geopolitical and economic issues. Whoever wins, scientific research isn't likely to be a top priority in the new Administration. All we can do is hope that it has strong supporters in the White House.
In a timely coincidence, the film Flash of Genius is opening today. It tells the story of how Ford stole the invention of the intermittent windshield wiper from Dr. Robert Kearns, and how Kearns fought back (at considerable personal expense).
We also know that RCA and David Sarnoff stole the basic invention of television from Philo Farnsworth. It took more than 10 years for Farnsworth to win the right to royalties for his invention. Aaron Sorkin wrote a play, "The Farnsworth Invention", based on this story.
In the meantime, though, I'm concerned about surviving my hellish commutes on the freeways. Apart from those who [illegally] text or talk on their mobile phones while driving, there are all too many drivers who seem personally offended that I am in front of them, even at 75-80 mph. They'll drive right up on my tail, pass me, and then switch lanes every few hundred yards in the hope that they can get to their destination a few seconds faster. It's too bad that the Highway Patrol doesn't crack down on them.
These cars routinely zip past the older drivers, who stay close to the speed limit, usually in the right hand lane. I worry more about single drivers in Escalades, Excursions, Tahoes, and other large vehicles that completely block my view of the road ahead.
For now, I just hope to live long enough to become an older driver!
I've recently heard that Microsoft is looking for a Senior Director in the Product Marketing area around their web application development strategy and tools. One of the requirements for this position is a solid understanding of the LAMP stack and development approaches for web applications built on open source software. Presumably the successful candidate will have the task of marketing Microsoft's .Net story against the open source LAMP stack. Microsoft's participation at OSCON and similar events gives them both the opportunity to become part of the open source community, and a better understanding of how they can compete against it.
Privacy and freedom: get over it. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights: bad prognosis, but trying to survive in hiding until January 20, 2009.
If you want to understand how leaders like Stalin and Hitler got so many millions of people to follow them and built up such powerful "security" forces, you don't have to look outside the borders of the US. Just picture Dick Cheney in an SS uniform.
If I want to watch a high-def network program that is available over-the-air, I find that the quality of the OTA HD broadcast is almost always superior to the same program transmitted in HD (at an extra monthly charge) by our local cable monopoly. They deliver more channels, but they are in "highish-def", compressed to maximize the number of channels that they can support. (Thank you, Mr. Roberts.) So if you have a modern HDTV with a built-in tuner, go out and buy an inexpensive HD antenna (rabbit ears with at least a 45db gain), and watch over-the-air when you can.
Yes, posted late at night. Not fully tracking at that hour. Of course, it should be GWT. My bad. Sorry for the error.
When people are looking for an Ajax toolkit, the Google name often gets it onto the selection "short list", but that doesn't automatically assure that it will be the final choice. Many corporate IT organizations insist upon commercial support for any software that goes into their business-critical applications. Of course, Google does not provide such support. In those situations, GTK will be ruled out for business reasons, independent of its technical merits. The net result is that there are numerous sites built on GTK, but the large variety of choices means that no single framework or toolkit has yet emerged as a favorite.
There's a new Open Source Census project that lets you identify the open source programs that you are running on your machine. Go to the project at http://ossdiscovery.org/ to download the OSS Discovery client (a Ruby program) to see what open source programs and components are on your machine. If you are the author of a distributed open source component, you can add a "fingerprint" to the discovery database so that your project can also be found.
I bought a new Toshiba HD DVD player in early November, when they were closing out the A2 model. It was DOA. It took until January 8th for them to get a replacement to me. During that time, it took them 3 tries to get the mailing label right, a week to verify that the machine was, in fact, dead, and then four weeks to ship a replacement machine. Their customer service people are very good at apologizing, but completely unwilling to take responsibility for the problems or to do anything that would make amends. What am I offered for a new in-the-box Toshiba HD-A2, along with the coupon and receipt for 5 new HD-DVDs?
In the US, the federal government has relatively little involvement in such decisions, which are handled at the state and local level. With the change in strategy, the OLPC effort can address individual states and cities. Of course, there are underprivileged students in every state, but here, too, the OLPC sales effort must deal with the same kinds of issues that they found in Thailand, Nigeria, and elsewhere. If you were the Superintendent of Schools for Detroit's school district or the State Secretary of Education in Mississippi, would you spend the taxpayers' money on XO laptops, on teachers to help schools comply with the No Child Left Behind mandate, or on something else?
I bought an XO laptop during the Give One, Get One promotion, and admire all of the effort that went into its design. It's fun to use, even if it is a bit underpowered and the keyboard is tough for continuous typing. I wish the OLPC team the best of success with their program, but it's also likely to be a tough sale here in the US, patriotism notwithstanding.
As soon as it was possible for vendors to avoid the cost of manufacturing and shipping, then vendors changed their development processes. Microsoft, for example, now sets a date for their product releases well in advance and almost always adheres to that date, independent of its quality, since they have tied numerous sales and marketing activities to that date. It's rare for them to push back release dates, though they did that for Office 2008 for the Mac.
Netscape certainly didn't introduce the idea of shipping buggy software, but they were the first to recognize that they didn't have to do very careful testing of their releases, since they could quickly post a "better" version on their website and let their users download it. Netscape made at least 15 different releases of Netscape 4.x (not counting 5 preview releases) in roughly a year and a half between mid-1997 and late 1998. No vendor, including Microsoft, ever did anything like that before.
To come back to the subject at hand, the 1997-8 period coincided with the publication of Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and the beginning of rapid growth of the open source movement. In early 1998, Netscape announced their intent to open source Netscape Communicator, though it took four years before the first result of the Mozilla project became available. In those four years, Internet Exploder basically wiped all of the other browsers off the map, and it wasn't until early 2005 that Mozilla Firefox began to take share from IE.
Firefox relies on extensive user testing and reporting, and Microsoft has done the same, the difference being that Firefox is open and IE remains closed. Firefox development has advanced much more quickly than has IE, and the Microsofties should have learned something about the power of open source from that.
Of course, my comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. Netscape was the first company to understand that it was more effective to release buggy software early than to spend time getting it right. As with many other things, the Internet changed everything. Before the Internet, it cost vendors money to ship out new disks, tapes, etc., with new versions of software. Now, vendors can shift the burden to you, posting the updated (fixed) version of the software and leaving it up to you to download it. More and more, vendors are including "call home" routines in their software to check for such updates. The whole concept of "agile development" is built around "release early, release often".
In community open source projects, testing is left to the community after the developers do the best job they can to find and fix problems. Microsoft has apparently adopted this model, releasing early versions of their products so that users can find and report problems. They have extended that model to paid versions of the official releases, too, resulting in frequent Patch Tuesdays and massive Service Packs. Why pay for internal testers when you can get your customers to do it for you?
Although we were 78th on that list, I believe that we were among the very first to place an ad that used an email address as a contact point. I was able to find an ad from the August, 1987, issue of Unix World, where we gave our email address as ucbvax!sun!ide!sales, using the UUCP format. Our customers were developers and early adopters, mostly on Sun workstations, so we actually got some email and some sales leads in this way. Of course, we switched to the "@ide.com" format as soon as we were able to do so. (Please post a reply if you are aware of an earlier use of an email address in a published ad.)
Fun times....
So the issue is how to get out of the current muddle and to cut ties with these carriers. Of course, we can use Skype or various IM and video conferencing tools to talk to people without making a traditional landline or mobile call. The coming deployment of WiMAX networks will increase our ability to use IP-based devices for calling.
The forthcoming FCC auction of the 700MHz spectrum, now scheduled for January, will introduce more openness into the bidding process, and should enable a company such as Google to develop a competing service. Assuming that happens, there will be an alternative our dependence on the incumbent carriers, which will have its ups (price, flexibility) and possible downs (advertising, privacy concerns).
There are also numerous efforts underway to create devices based on open source software. The Nokia N800/N810 http://www.nseries.com/ is a Linux-based device with a useful developer site http://www.maemo.org/. The OpenMoko project http://www.openmoko.org/ is aimed at developing an open source phone. These devices are, of course, unlocked. When OpenMoko has advanced a little further, you should be able to take anyone's SIM chip, put it in your OpenMoko phone, and make a call. For now, though, the best you can do is to have an unlocked phone. (I have about 8 SIM chips from different countries, and switch them when I travel, thereby avoiding the extortionate international roaming charges of the mobile carriers. You can easily buy "pay-as-you-go" service almost everywhere, including in the US.)
So we can already take various steps to loosen our ties to the cellphone carriers. With some luck, many of us will be able to extricate ourselves completely. It's only then that the cellphone carriers will feel the need to improve their products and services to attract and retain customers.