Like everybody else on the Internet, I’ve been following the dispute between GoldieBlox and The Beastie Boys, or to put it more as I see it, the fight that GoldieBlox picked with The Beastie Boys in order to generate publicity. For a really excellent rundown of the questions of law, check out Andy Baio’s fairhanded take. For the argument that questions of law aside, GoldieBlox doesn’t really deserve the strong outpouring of support they’ve gotten from the rabble, read Felix Salmon.
John Gruber writes about a leaked email from Yahoo executives beseeching employees to switch from Outlook to Yahoo’s own mail product. It’s kind of sad, and as Gruber points out, wrongheaded:
If your employees are only using your own products or services because they have to, or feel obligated to out of some sort of loyalty, you’re losing.
At work, my team builds internal tools. I have no interest in imposing those tools on anyone. It’s our job to build tools that people want to use, or prefer to use over the other available alternatives. I welcome the competition, because participating in the marketplace of ideas sharpens our work and keeps us honest. When I see people doing their own analysis work rather than using something we built to make that work easier, it’s clear that we’re failing to build the right things or to communicate about them effectively.
Duplicated effort can be a waste, but it’s not as wasteful as demand that people use tools that make them less productive and happy. These sorts of mandates are what gave us generations of internal tools that are profoundly worse in terms of usability than widely available consumer software. I like it when people user our software, and more importantly, I like it when people choose to use our software. This kind of internal protectionism at companies weakens the teams involved, it doesn’t protect them.
I’ve recently read two books about computing history, and I intend to write about them both. The first is Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. Kidder was invited by Tom West of Data General to document the creation of a new computer–a 32 bit supermini designed to compete with the formidable VAX 11/780 from DEC.
The book covers the era when building a new computer meant building a new computer from the ground up. The idea of building a computer from off-the-shelf components had not yet arrived, companies built everything from scratch, and wrote all of the code for the new system, all the way down to the metal. Even for highly integrated, brand new systems like the iPhone, many more components sourced from third parties were used than companies like Data General, DEC, and IBM used back then. The original iPhone was built using an existing CPU, and an existing operating system. All of the hardware and nearly all of the software for the Data General system was produced specifically for that system. It is likely that no engineers work completely original systems any more, the costs are too high. It’s hard to read about that kind of work and not feel both nostalgic and intimidated.
At the same time, the mechanics of how projects are run feel familiar, especially if you’ve ever worked on a big project that started with an unrealistic deadline. In many ways, the book documents the computer industry at its worst, even as it cements the mythology of heroic engineering feats that seem romantic from a distance but are usually awful in the moment.
Kidder talks about two phenomena that really resonated with me. The first is the idea of the managers getting people to “sign up” – for the project and for specific tasks. The idea is that “signing up” meant showing a willingness to sacrifice whatever was necessary to complete the task, and to work impossibly hard on the project in general. The managers gauged job candidates on their likelihood of signing up, and turned down those they didn’t believe would. Having had a relatively long career in the computer industry, I’ve seen signing up from both sides. On one hand, as an engineer, you crave a project worthy of signing up for. Signing up only happens when you feel like you’re doing work of significance, that you’re experiencing an opportunity that surpasses any you thought you’d ever be offered.
By the same token, as a manager, you want to work on projects that you would be willing to ask people to sign up for, and you want to hire people who you feel like you can motivate to sign up. Managers must also know that intentionally exploiting people’s willingness to overcommit is almost certainly evil. One of the key attributes of a good manager is a commitment to do what’s in the best interests of the members of the team, whether they want you to or not.
Kidder also lays out the nominal and actual rewards of engineering work. The members of the Eagle team (that was the code name for the computer they were building) were ostensibly motivated by the pinball rule – if they won, their reward was getting to play again. The members of the team toiled in anonymity, even within Data General, and weren’t going to get big bonuses no matter how well the project did. In theory, they did what they did in hopes of getting the opportunity to work on even bigger and better projects in the future. In reality, they did it because they were a team, and because they were committed to their craft. This is a set of values deeply understood by anyone who takes pleasure in building things. The building of new things is both the job and the reward. If you do well, you may get to build bigger things. More importantly, though, at the end, you brought forth order from chaos. What else does a person need?
All great books on history both illuminate the past and highlight the universal, and Kidder’s book meets that standard. I found it to be an incredible page turner. I don’t want to spoil the story, so I’ll say no more. As soon as I finished the book, I wanted to get out my computer and start writing some code.
The other book I just finished is Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma, about which I have so many thoughts that I’m finding them difficult to organize. I’ll write more about it later.
I didn’t really pay much attention when Adobe’s massive data breach was first reported, but now that all of the details have emerged, we know that the scope of the breach is truly spectacular. The Naked Security blog has the details. This episode is particularly sad because the best practices around password storage are well understood. Even though practices like using slow hashing algorithms are pretty new, and I wouldn’t have expected Adobe to have adopted them, the basic approach of storing a salted hash has been in wide use for quite some time.
I hope Adobe conducts a productive investigation of the incident and shares the systemic failures that led to the breach — not just the user database being stolen, but also the decision not to migrate to a more secure method of password storage over time. My guess is that Adobe not only has many Web properties, but also native applications that need to authenticate, and that they probably weren’t abstracted cleanly from the database used to store the encrypted passwords, so migrating to a new system was always deemed to be too low priority to be worth the extensive effort required.
Today I saw a number of tweets pointing to HelpUsHelpMolly. It’s a campaign to raise money to help Molly Holzschlag pay for medical treatments and health insurance premiums as she fights a debilitating liver disorder. She was forced to leave her job due to her illness, and her COBRA coverage ended on November 1. Given that she is not able to work, she needs financial support, and she will have to fund her own medical treatment while she is uninsured.
Molly is the author of a number of the seminal early books on Web publishing. To put it simply, pretty much everyone who works on the Web learned from Molly or from someone who learned from Molly. She has also been a persistent, longtime advocate for the open Web. If everyone whose career on the Web was launched in part due to her work donated a small portion of what they’d earned to her medical fund, she wouldn’t have any financial problems to worry about.
I strongly encourage everyone to make a contribution.
Before I go, though, I want to make a political point. The big story of the week was the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Edie Littlefield Sundby, who is losing her (seemingly very generous) health insurance because United Healthcare is dropping out of the individual insurance market in California. That decision is based at least in part on changes in the insurance market caused by the Affordable Care Act, and of course the op-ed blames ObamaCare for her predicament. She can’t find a replacement policy on the exchanges which will enable her to see the same doctors that she’s seeing now, and given that she’s undergoing very aggressive cancer treatment, that’s awful news. I understand why she’s angry, and why she’s angry about ObamaCare.
On the other side we have people like Molly Holzschlag, who’s in the middle of a fight with a horrible disease herself, and who is uninsurable at the present time. She was on an expensive COBRA plan, and when that ended, she was forced to go without insurance at all. As of January 1, she’ll be able to get insurance again, thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Edie Littlefield Sundby may not be able to get the same insurance, but she will be able to obtain health insurance in 2014, and so will Molly.
I wrote about something similar in 2010, about Hamid Mohajer, a restaurant owner who faced a cancer diagnosis. His wife took a second job in order to obtain insurance, and still wound up facing ruinous medical debt when the plan’s lifetime maximum contribution was exhausted. Hamid passed away just a few weeks after my post.
Edie’s story is unusual enough to find its way to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, while stories like Molly’s and Hamid’s are sadly common. I’ve seen too many fund raisers for people whose health problems have forced them into severe financial duress over the years. With the Affordable Care Act in place, hopefully we’ll decouple severe health problems from destitution due to medical bills.
Right now Molly Holzschlag needs the help of the community she helped to create. Please be generous.
News about NSA spying programs has been breaking at a dizzying pace since the initial stories based on Edward Snowden’s leaks were published by Glenn Greenwald. The big news last week was that there are NSA efforts to tap the network connections used to route internal traffic for huge online companies like Google and Yahoo. The Washington Post has the gory details today, including slides leaked by Snowden that show what looks like traffic captured from Google’s internal network.
It’s also interesting that the NSA operates much like multinational companies that set up shell companies all over the world to minimize their tax bill. They set up their network taps in specific geographic areas in order to minimize the amount of oversight they face. It’s illegal for the NSA to vacuum up all of Google’s network traffic if they tap network connections inside the United States, but it’s perfectly legal if they do it overseas. Google happily sends data belonging to Americans all over the world for perfectly valid reasons, and the fact that the NSA is spying on Americans in this way is irrelevant in the eyes of the law. (I should add that this is not a new practice, this is how ECHELON was used as well.)
Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
In 2011, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony (basically everyone not in the Android camp in the mobile handset business) teamed up to buy Nortel’s patent portfolio. Today they filed a suit to recoup some of that investment, suing Google and six Android handset makers for patent infringement. Interestingly, they’re not suing them for violating a telecommunications patent, but rather for patents related to search advertising. I hope Google fights this one to the bitter end and wins.
(And yes, I know that Google has been on the offensive side in patent lawsuits as well. My stance is simple. I’m for the utter collapse of the patent system, and failing that for the defendant in every case.)
© 2024 rc3.org
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
The latest batch of insider details on Healthcare.gov
Here’s a paragraph from the New York Times’ latest insider account of the efforts to fix the Healthcare.gov Web site (and deal with the political fallout of the problems with the rollout):
I’d like to read a whole article about this paragraph, and not some worthless outpouring of moral outrage either. How’s it supposed to work, and what’s missing right now?
Update: From the comments, a story on the data loss issue.