Month: September 2003

John Cleese as court jester

InfoWorld TechWatch: John Cleese’s day in the Sun

“Remember this: It’s practically impossible after a really good idea emerges to recall exactly what the process was that gave birth to it.”

“As far as creativity is concerned, there’s actually no such thing as a mistake.”

“A man who is afraid to make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.”

“Even the attempt to minimize risk can only result in the that greatest risk of all – rigidity.”

Students of medieval history will recall that the jester was the only person permitted to tell the truth without fear of reprisal . . . .

four kinds of lies? (lies, damned lies, statistics, and film ratings)

Suitable for kids? That’s just a G-up – www.smh.com.au

The other day I took a preschool child to see the first 20 minutes of Nemo, which was as much as she could bear before I had to remove her from the cinema, shaking with terror and begging to get away. As I carried her up the stairs I could see the rest of the audience.

Everybody over the age of maybe seven or eight was enjoying it hugely. However, almost every child under that age, about a quarter of the audience, was more or less paralysed with fear. They knew something was up when Nemo’s mother and siblings were eaten in the opening minutes, but the chase through the sunken submarine by a giant, murderous shark in a feeding frenzy sealed the deal.

Fortunately, I heard about nightmare potential before it got popular, so I have been able to avoid dealing the aftermath. Still, it would useful if the ratings really reflected the content of the movie.

a big lie: market share as haxor bait

David Pogue’s column uncovers the Big Lie about why UNIX-based systems are less attractive to mischief-makers. Hint: it has nothing to do with marketshare and everything to do with “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

Evidently, I’m not the only columnist to have fallen for this old myth; read another writer’s more technical apology. But the conclusion is clear: Linux and Mac OS X aren’t just more secure because fewer people use them. They’re also much harder to crack right out of the box.

sunspot.net – plugged in

“Many orders of magnitude more people look over the source code for OS X and the related BSDs than have access to Windows source code,” said John Klos, a developer of NetBSD, a flavor of Unix closely related to OS X.

Thus, many of the obvious holes in OS X were closed years ago. That, some suggested, actually makes OS X a more attractive target.

“If I were a fame-driven cracker with solid technical skills, cracking a BSD-based system would be the fastest way to show off my capabilities,” said Rich Morin, a programmer and consultant based in San Bruno, Calif.

“My suspicion, therefore, is that many crackers have tried this challenge and failed,” Morin added. Still, he cautioned “nobody has any way to know for sure.”

It is hard to understand how no one has exploited anything in a massively disruptive way, like the various Outlook worms, given that any buffer overflows or other potential exploits are openly available, until you stop to think how many people how been in the source code and how likely they are to practice defensive programming as a matter of course.

I heard what you meant, not just what you said

a short meeting with one of my alleged superiors today that illustrated just how profound the miscommunication between us is. One of the goals for 2004 is to get my position as a classified employee (a clerical employee under the university’s collective bargaining agreement) converted to professional staff, usually reserved for people with demonstrable skills. I officially called an end to that charade today, to a surprised reaction. But my reasoning is quite simple, I think.

I asked for a raise a week ago, having successfully cleared the 6 month probationary hurdle. The response was a lengthy epistle about how the university’s bureaucracy was so difficult to work with, that it would be like moving heaven and earth, etc.

I pondered that for awhile, and realized that if it was that difficult to get a small salary increase within the classified staff pay scale, what chance anyone will find the intestinal fortitude to reclassify the position?

So that settles that. Expectation management on full strength from here on out . . . .

deja vu all over again

Art Watch – September 7, 2003 – MP3s Are Not the Devil – The Ornery American

Orson Scott Card explains how owning a record label is a better way to get rich than actually playing music . . . .

The irony is that we’ve played out this whole scenario before, more than once. When radio first started broadcasting records instead of live performances, the music publishing industry became livid. This was going to hurt sales!
[ . . . ]
Same thing with TV and movies. Yes, TV wiped out the B-movie market segment and it killed newsreels — but it opened up a lucrative aftermarket that kept movies alive long after they would have stopped earning money.
[ . . . . ]
The internet is similar, but not identical, to these situations.

First, most of the people who are getting those free MP3s would not be buying the CDs anyway. They’re doing this in order to get far more music than they can actually afford. That means that if they weren’t sharing MP3s online, they would simply have less music — or share CDs hand to hand. It does not mean that they would have bought CDs to get the tunes they’re downloading from Napster-like sharing schemes.

I have suspected as much: while I sympathize with people’s gripes about $18.99 CDs (it sure doesn’t encourage me to buy any), I have assumed a lot of file-sharing activity was just a way of listening to music without paying for it.

getting behind instead of getting ahead

The Two-Income Trap is thick with irony. Middle-class mothers went into the workforce in a calculated effort to give their families an economic edge. Instead, millions of them are now in the workplace just so their families can break even. At a time when women are getting college diplomas and entering the workforce in record numbers, their families are in more financial trouble than ever. Partly these women were the victims of bad timing: Despite general economic prosperity, the risks facing their families jumped considerably. Partly they were the victims of optimistic myopia: They saw the rewards a working mother could bring, without seeing the risks associated with that newfound income. And partly they were the victims of one another. As millions of mothers poured into the workplace, it became increasingly difficult to put together a middle-class life on a single income. The combination has taken these women out of the home and away from their children and simultaneously made family life less, not more, financially secure. Today’s middle-class mother is trapped: She can’t afford to work, and she can’t afford to quit.

This is why I want a part-time job: we need the time someone can spend at home more than the income. Insurance being the way it is, quitting entirely is out of the question, but half-time would be fine.

quote of the day

Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground

Some experts wonder if the industry’s efforts will create more trouble for it than ever. “The R.I.A.A. is breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” said Clay Shirky, a software developer who teaches new media at New York University.

[ . . . ]

Another file-sharing model is for business users who want to collaborate while protecting secrets from competitors. “The needs of businesses and the needs of file traders are the same,” Mr. Shirky said. “I want a secure way to send you a three megabyte PowerPoint file with no way for anyone else to see it. That is not different from an MP3 file.”

Zoë’s all grown up

zoë

I am trying Zoë one more time: I gave up on it for no compelling reason about a year ago, and found myself this past week or so backed into a corner with email overload. I decided to give it another look and I’m very impressed. I had some initial problems with the fact secure IMAP wasn’t supported, but another user on the Zoë mailing list was able to work out the problem and lo, a patch was released.

The version number now is 0.4.8, and where I left off was 0.2.2 or thereabouts. A lot of features have been added, but more importantly, the component parts that Zoë is based on have almost improved. Java is at 1.4.1 for most platforms (I’ve run it Zoë on OS X and FreeBSD with no problems), the various engines — javamail, lucene, jrendezvous, jdbm, jtidy, xpp, simple, jbyte — are also improved.

This is the kind of innovation we should see from established companies with resources and a broad view of the market. Instead we see it come from some bright spark with a Vision of a Better Way. I’m just glad to see it at all . . . .

But they told us XP was all new?!

The Scobleizer Weblog

Believe me, it ain’t fun to work at Microsoft when we continually have bugs found in our products. It’s the discussion at every lunch and every meeting I’ve been in lately.

Are we working on answers? Yes (with more to come).

50 million lines of code, some of which was written more than a decade ago. I remember using 386’s about a decade ago in Fawcette’s first offices. They were never attached to the Internet. We didn’t have email. No Web. I’m sure that guys who were writing code back then had no idea their code would be permanently connected to everyone else’s computers and that criminals would try to break into their computers.

Interesting that MSFT never expected any box running Windows (or DOS) would be networked, but the Mac shipped with networking built-in. Anyone ever wonder how companies like Novell came into being? By supplying the networking that the grand visionaries in Redmond didn’t understand.

And now we have Scoble (admittedly not a tech guy) saying that some of the 50 million lines of code in the current MSFT offerings dates back to the pre-internet era. Funny, we had dog and pony shows about how XP was all new, all good, and nothing to do with that old Windows95 dreck.

Bah. When I consider that Apple has introduced the PowerPC line with very little, if any, code dating back to the 68K days in 1993 and then switching to OS X with yet another completely different code base, Linux has emerged from the fruitful mind of a university student, the various *BSDs have all evolved in their divergent directions, and the Leading Brand gives us what?

<snicker> spent some time with the tech staff at my workplace today and one of the fired up and XP machine, to which another asked (about the default background), “did you get that from TeleTubbies?”

smoldering resentment?

DenverPost.com – ENTERTAINMENT

People listen to the average CD many more times than they watch a DVD. Yet CDs are languishing in stores and DVDs are flying off the shelves. How to see this other than sheer music industry incompetence?

[ . . . . ]

Record label missteps are legion. But solutions are at hand: Let go of whole-disc sales and create a dollar-per-song online service as good as Apple iTunes. Make it universally available, with all the independents signed up.