The recent controversy surrounding the presentation at the Black Hat Conference of security vulnerabilities in Cisco's Internetwork Operating System used in routers once again raises the question of whether the security of web sites, data, and networks are best served through the wide distribution of known security issues so that everyone is on an equal footing, or secrecy, until those vulnerabilities can be addressed by the responsible parties.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 08/03/20050 comments
Anyone in the software industry had to sit up and take notice when Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems made the recent announcement that the company was going to give away all of its software (
http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20050721/tc_infoworld/62811_1
, among others). Sun actually produces quite a bit of software, including Java Enterprise System middleware, Java Studio Creator, the StarOffice productivity suite, and various storage and network management products (Solaris had already been open sourced and inexpensive, at least for small-scale uses).
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 07/24/20050 comments
There are about three weeks in the summer when the heat and humidity in New England become stifling, making it impossible to breathe or to concentrate on doing any useful work. This happens to be one of those weeks. Lacking central air conditioning, by default I opt to do little or nothing.
Except that a couple of days ago I was traveling in the upper Midwest, visiting a customer to provide an insight into future product plans for our application platform. This customer, a large and privately-held retailer, prided itself on its cost-consciousness (some might even say they were frugal), and its lack of desire to be on the cutting edge of technology. In the Gartner taxonomy, it clearly rated as a Type C organization – a late adopter, one that moved after the technology had already been proven and adopted by most others. If you view technology adoption as the standard Gaussian curve, a Type C organization would be on the right side of the curve, well past its apex.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 06/26/20050 comments
While much of my formal education lies in the social sciences, my immersion in technology over the last 20 years has made me look at problems as technical rather than social. Usually this is the correct view, but it troubles me that I often solve the immediate problem without realizing the implications. I worked through the Internet bubble, for example, without profiting off the social transformation that became obvious in retrospect.
Perhaps it is only when I have a personal stake do I see the larger implications on interpersonal interactions and society. That is certainly the case with recent announcements that the Federal Aviation Administration is considering lifting the ban on in-flight cell phone use. Looking it as a technology problem, it seemed far-fetched that there could be interference with critical avionics, especially serious enough interference as to cause aircraft accidents. And there have certainly been circumstances where I would have like to call ahead with schedule changes or thoughts that couldn't wait.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 06/16/20050 comments
Prior to leaving on vacation, I penned the previous entry, in which I noted that the business of building software development tools beyond the fundamental editor, compiler, and debugger was in trouble. Part of the problem is that open source and free software tools tend to be very good, lowering the value of their commercially-developed equivalents. But the same is true of compilers (Gnu C) and debuggers (GDB), yet they still seem to remain commercially viable.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 06/04/20050 comments
Or perhaps it is just me that has changed over time. That part is certainly true. In addition to hair color trending gradually toward gray, I have just been fitted with my first pair of progressive eyeglasses.
But I've always been interested in the business of software, for at least three reasons:
- We, as an industry, build products that we know have defects and limitations, and sell them with a license claiming they have no value for anything.
- As we continue maturing the products through subsequent versions, they become increasingly fragile rather than increasingly stable.
- We have little understanding of the market in which the software is sold, and sell without understanding the customer's business of the problems we need to solve.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 05/19/20050 comments
Starting a technology company is a difficult and risky proposition. As we learned in the latter half of the 1990s, a professional-looking business plan, good contacts among potential investors, and a gift for selling were the primary prerequisites for getting initial funding. However, many of those business plans defined their exit strategy as getting acquired by another, usually more established company that wanted the technology for a specific business purpose.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 05/02/20050 comments
My journey on this topic began when I talked to Richard Heckel of Engineering Trends for my posting of a couple of weeks ago. His concluding remark, that an engineering degree may well be the current manifestation of the classical liberal arts degree, turned my thoughts as to just what it means to be a roundly-educated person in this day and age. Is it really an engineering degree?
Even as little as a hundred years ago, to be educated meant primarily to be read in the classics, and to converse on their grand meaning. That meant, of course, that only the leisure class could even have the chance of achieving this title.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 04/24/20050 comments
My
post of a week ago
brought a number of comments, in the feedback and via e-mail, both on outsourcing and on the relationship between outsourcing and the lack of young people interested in technology careers. I mentioned that the Wall Street Journal reported on the curious anecdote that the children of many successful and prominent technologists are shunning education and career in technology. One of the reasons given was that they were perhaps more cognizant than most young people of the phenomenon of outsourcing. In one case, the parent was a venture capitalist who advocated that start-up companies establish their development teams inIndia to reduce engineering costs.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 04/09/20050 comments
We've been reading for years about the inability of mathematics and the natural sciences to attractAmerica's youth into serious study and careers. The latest I saw was a March 31
st
Wall Street Journal article (
www.wsj.com
; the exact link requires a paid subscription) describing how even children of very successful technologists are shunning such careers. As a former educator in these fields, it pains me to hear such news. There is an elegance about much of these subject areas that should be experienced by many more than actually do.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 04/02/20050 comments
I used to be an unquestioning proponent of formal modeling and other techniques for developing software at high levels of abstraction. And it was easy to see how I came about that notion. While the assembly language programming I did as a college student was technically easy, it took an enormous amount of effort to perform the simplest tasks. I concluded that this activity wasn't the most productive use of my time.
As a graduate student, I was introduced to the concepts of formal modeling (in my case Petri nets, and later state charts), and became an immediate convert. The thought of diagramming my application and executing the diagram was appealing, because I didn't have to worry about housekeeping details such as type declaration and matching, memory allocations and deallocations, and pointer arithmetic. The semantics were all that mattered. The productivity gains from working at such a high level of abstraction had to overcome any inefficiencies in execution, especially with the ever-faster performance of processors.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 03/26/20050 comments
Tim O'Reilly of publisher O'Reilly and Associates (
http://tim.oreilly.com
) was one of the keynote speakers at EclipseCon last week, and in my mind one of the more compelling speakers I've heard. Tim spoke of patterns for business opportunity in an era of open source. He opened the talk by discussing several failed patterns, such as IBM's use of commodity components for the IBM PC and its outsourcing of its true value, namely the operating system.
More
Posted by Peter Varhol on 03/11/20050 comments