Prarie Blake dot com

TaxBreaks, March 2010 (10-01) (author unknown)

TaxBreaks, March 2010 (10-01) (author unknown)

Seriously, why is everyone in such a rush?

Thousands of bodies are already cryonically frozen, waiting for faster computers and medical advances that will undo their cause of death

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that's where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel - Europe, Middle East and Africa

Biggies like Microsoft and Google are fine with it, but not US government.Michael Geist

1 mm thick sensor could be used in medical and building applications.

Our first Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the second alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

The most notable change for developers is moving $form['#field'] to $form_state. This makes field forms more resilient to form_alters and debugging became a lot less tedious. Comment body became a field and new fields can be added to comments through the field UI module. And congratulations to the docs team and associated helpers for their outstanding work in enhancing and correcting lots of API documentation this release.

We've also fixed a number of issues since the previous alpha, most importantly one that caused all files to be deleted after six hours. Oops. :P This is a great time to reiterate...

It is important to note that this alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be at least one more alpha version followed by a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

read more

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Enterprise Systems, I mean. And not just a little bit, either. Orders of magnitude wrong. Billions and billions of dollars worth of wrong. Hang-our-heads-in-shame wrong. It’s time to stop the madness.

These last five years at Sun, I’ve been lucky: I live in the Open-Source and “Web 2.0” communities, and at the same time I’ve been given significant quality time with senior IT people among our Enterprise customers.

What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.

This is unacceptable. The Fortune 1,000 are bleeding money and missing huge opportunities to excel and compete. I’m not going to say that these are low-hanging fruit, because if it were easy to bridge this gap, it’d have been bridged. But the gap is so big, the rewards are so huge, that it’s time for some serious bridge-building investment. I don’t know what my future is right now, but this seems by far the most important thing for my profession to be working on.

The Web These Days

It’s like this: The time between having an idea and its public launch is measured in days not months, weeks not years. Same for each subsequent release cycle. Teams are small. Progress is iterative. No oceans are boiled, no monster requirements documents written.

And what do you get? Facebook. Google. Twitter. Ravelry. Basecamp. TripIt. GitHub. And on and on and on.

Obviously, the technology matters. This isn’t the place for details, but apparently the winning mix includes dynamic languages and Web frameworks and TDD and REST and Open Source and NoSQL at varying levels of relative importance.

More important is the culture: iterative development, continuous refactoring, ubiquitous unit testing, starting small, gathering user experience before it seems reasonable. All of which, to be fair, I suppose had its roots in last decade’s Extreme and Agile movements. I don’t hear a lot of talk these days from anyone claiming to “do Extreme” or “be Agile”. But then, in Web-land for damn sure I never hear any talk about large fixed-in-advance specifications, or doing the UML first, or development cycles longer than a single-digit number of weeks.

In The Enterprise

I’m not going to recite the statistics about the proportions of big projects that fail to work out, or flog moribund horses like the failed FBI system or Britain’s monumentally-troubled (to the tune of billions) NHS National Programme for IT. For one thing, the litany of disasters in the private sector is just as big in the aggregate and the batting average isn’t much better; it’s just that businesses can sweep the ashes under the carpet.

If you enjoy this sort of stuff, I recommend Michael Krigsman’s IT Project Failures column over at ZDNet. Also, Bruce Webster is very good. And for some more gloomy numbers, check out The CHAOS Report 2009 on IT Project Failure.

Amusingly, all the IT types who write about this agree that the problem is “excessive complexity”, whatever that means. Predictably, many of them follow the trail-of-tears story with a pitch for their own methodology, which they say will fix the problem. And even if we therefore suspect them of cranking up the gloom-&-doom knob a bit, the figures remain distressing.

So, what is to be done?

Plan A: Don’t Build Systems

The best thing, of course, is to simply not build your own systems. As many in our industry have pointed out, perhaps most eloquently Nicholas Carr, everything would be better if we could do IT the way we do electricity; hook up to the grid, let the IT utility run it all, and get billed per unit of usage.

This is where all the people now running around shouting “Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!” are trying to go. And it’s where Salesforce.com, for example, already is.

If you must run systems in-house, don’t engineer them, get ’em pre-cooked from Oracle or SAP or whoever. I can’t imagine any nonspecialist organization for whom it would make sense to build an HR or accounting application from scratch at this point in history.

Of course, we’re not in the Promised Land yet. I’m actually surprised that Salesforce isn’t a lot bigger than it is; a variety of things are holding back the migration to the utility model. Also, you hear tales of failed implementations at the SAP and Oracle app-levels too, especially CRM. And Oracle is well-known to be ferociously hard at work on a wholesale revision of the app stack with the Fusion Applications. But still, even if things aren’t perfect, nobody is predicting a return to hand-crafted Purchasing or Travel-Expense systems. Thank goodness.

But Sometimes You Have To

I don’t believe we’ll ever go to a pure-utility model for IT. Every world-class business has some sort of core competence, and there are good arguments that sometimes, you should implement your own systems around yours. My favorite example, of the ones I’ve seen over the past few years, is the NASDAQ trading system, which handles a ridiculous number of transactions in 6½ hours every trading day and pushes certain well-known technologies to places that I’d have flatly sworn were impossible if I hadn’t seen it.

Here’s a negative example: One of the world’s most ferocious competitive landscapes is telecoms, which these days means mobile telecoms. One way a telecom might like to compete would be to provide a better customer experience: billing, support, and so on. But to some degree they can’t, because many of them have outsourced much of that stuff to Amdocs.

Given all the colossal high-visibility failures like the ones I mentioned earlier, what responsible telecom executive would authorize going ahead with building an in-house alternative? But at some level that’s insane; if your business is customer service, how can you bypass an opportunity to compete by offering better customer service? The telecom networks around where I live seem to put most of their strategic investments into marketing, which is a bit sad.

Plan B: Do It Better

Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose you asked one of the blue-suit solution providers to quote you on building Ravelry or Twitter or Basecamp. What would the costs be like? And how much confidence would you have in a good result? Consider the same questions for a new mobile-network billing system.

The point is that that kind of thing simply cannot be built if you start with large formal specifications and fixed-price contracts and change-control procedures and so on. So if your enterprise wants the sort of outcomes we’re seeing on the Web (and a lot more should), you’re going to have to adopt some of the cultures and technologies that got them built.

It’s not going to be easy; Enterprise IT has spent decades growing a defensive culture based on the premise that you only get noticed when you screw up, so that must be avoided at all costs.

I’m not the only one thinking about how we can get Enterprise Systems unjammed and make them once again part of the solution, not part of the problem. It’s a good thing to be thinking about.