SlashDot reports:

“The Senate mortgage bill proposed by Sen. Chris Dodd (who was the recipient of a sweetheart deal on his mortgage from Countrywide, one of the beneficiaries of the bill) includes an attempt to sneak into law a requirement that all electronic payment processors send detailed transaction data to the federal government. The proposed law contains an exception for businesses with fewer than 200 transactions or a total value less than $10,000. Quoting FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey (former House majority leader) from the article: ‘This is a provision with astonishing reach, and it was slipped into the bill just this week. Not only does it affect nearly every credit card transaction in America, such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express, but the bill specifically targets payment systems like eBay’s PayPal, Amazon, and Google Checkout that are used by many small online businesses. The privacy implications for America’s small businesses are breathtaking.’”

- StealthyRoid @ SlashDot: Link.

See Also

“Senate Housing Bill Requires eBay, Amazon, Google, and All Credit Card Companies to Report Transactions to the Government”
@ FreedomWorks: Link.

“This recession is going to be a bad one.”
- Gary North

Mises’ theory of the business cycle:

The central bank inflates. This creates a boom. This creates sectoral bubbles. Then the central bank ceases to inflate. The bubbles will pop. The economy will go into a recession.

… This recession is going to be a bad one …. I think your first line of self-defense is your job. If you lose your job, you are in big trouble. You will have to sell your assets in a fire sale economy.

You need to do whatever it takes to increase your value to your employer.


- Gary North @ LewRockwell.com: March 22, 2008: Link.

Thanks, EB.

“A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative.”
- Paul Graham

Paul Graham on the anthropology of big companies versus small companies:

What’s so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren’t meant to work in such large groups.

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I’ve read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they’re getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy.

Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet — for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature — a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.

Companies know groups that large wouldn’t work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together.

… Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree.

… A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers have more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other members of the tribe, but they don’t generally tell them what to do and when the way a boss can.

… The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you’ve written a piece of code you don’t need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you’re part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you’re going to face resistance when you do something new.

… Working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they’re transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they’ve grown several inches taller. Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I’d describe the way lions seem in the wild.

- Paul Graham, March 2008: Link.

Via NewsVine: Link.

“Local stations are wary of NPR’s embrace of podcasts and other new ways to deliver its news programs.”
- The Christian Science Monitor

Public radio stations make millions from pledge drives that intersperse the two hit news shows [”Fresh Air with Terri Gross” and “All Things Considered”], and NPR hasn’t wanted to undercut local stations’ fundraising by giving fans another way to hear the programs. But that could change, as NPR considers whether to fully embrace “new media” technology at the risk of bypassing some public-radio stations.

“The fear in its raw form is that NPR will market itself directly to consumers and … and completely eclipse their local stations,” says media consultant Michael Marcotte, a former San Diego public-radio news director.

The debate within NPR became public last week after the network’s board fired CEO Ken Stern. Mr. Stern, who’d been in charge for 18 months, had pushed NPR to offer its news through mediums other than terrestrial radio.

News reports blamed the firing on Stern’s embrace of technology initiatives, but NPR officials deny that. A larger factor, says Mr. Marcotte, may have been Stern’s inability to persuade member stations to trust his plans for delivering programming via technology other than old-fashioned radio.

- Randy Dotinga, The Christian Science Monitor: March 14, 2008: Link.

Disclosure: I work for Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) as a software guy. The events at NPR don’t directly affect me or MPR; but MPR is in a similar market niche, so I’ll be following this issue closely.

Free market economy? Level playing field? I don’t think so:

• The US Trade Representative makes trade concessions to the European Union, related to internet gambling.
• The deal is not subject to Congressional scrutiny or approval.
• A US Congressman requests that the USTR disclose the concessions.
• USTR rejects the request, “claiming the agreement was classified for national security reasons.”

Congressman Calls for U.S. Trade Representative to Provide Details of WTO Internet Gambling Settlement

Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has requested the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) disclose trade concessions made to foreign trading partners without Congressional approval. DeFazio’s inquiry raises the possibility of Congressional intervention to void new market access commitments granted by USTR to the European Union and other complainants as compensation for a United States trade violation regarding Internet gambling.

In a letter circulated to all members of Congress last week, DeFazio encouraged his colleagues to join him in calling for the USTR to provide a copy of the concession agreement between the United States and the European Union. The USTR had recently rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for the same document, claiming the agreement was classified for national security reasons. “There is a concern that the USTR may have been ambitious in its use of a ‘national security’ classification to avoid any publicity of which new business sectors are to be subject to the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) treaty,” said DeFazio’s March 6 letter.

… The DeFazio request comes following a contentious trade dispute over Internet gambling, in which the Caribbean nation of Antigua successfully challenged the regulation of Internet gambling in the United States. The European Union announced earlier this week that it will open an investigation into a possible international trade violation by the US on this issue. The investigation is the result of a Trade Barriers Regulation complaint filed by the Remote Gambling Association (RGA), which represents the largest remote gambling companies in Europe. The RGA claims the US is in violation of international trade law by threatening and pursuing criminal prosecutions, forfeitures and other enforcement actions against foreign Internet gaming operators, while allowing domestic U.S. online gaming operators, primarily horse betting, to flourish.

- @ Eye on Gambling: Link.

Office of the United States Trade Representative @ Wikipedia: Link.

“Google will join with five other companies to invest in a 10,000 km trans-Pacific submarine cable to carry data to and from Asia.”

Google said it would join with five other telecom companies — Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel — to invest $300 million in the construction of a 10,000 km submarine cable.

The high-speed fiber optic trans-Pacific cable, called Unity, will have a capacity of up to 7.68 Tbps and will run between the United States and Japan, about 6,200 miles. It is planned to accommodate demand for trans-Pacific bandwidth, which has grown at a rate of 63.7% annually between 2002 and 2007 and is expected to double biannually from 2008 through 2013, according to TeleGeography, a telecommunications consultancy.

… What Google gets is bandwidth at cost, said Stephan Beckert, director of research for TeleGeography, in an e-mail. Google, along with Comcast, is one of the few companies that have opted to purchase and light long-haul dark fiber, he said. It is the first non-telecom company to take an active role in submarine cable ownership.

- Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek: Link.

More details from SingTel

Using state-of-the-art Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, it will support up to 960 Gbits per second per fibre-optic pair with a maximum of eight fibre pairs. By having a higher fibre count, it is able to offer more capacity at lower unit costs. Unity will have a potential design capacity of 7.68 Tbits per second, making it one of the highest capacity cables of its kind. This data rate is equivalent to more than seven million Internet users simultaneously having real-time access to a 1 Mb file.

NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications have been jointly awarded the contract to implement this project.

- SingTel press release: Link.

“I wondered if he saw me for what I feared I had become — a drug rep with an M.D. I began to think that the money was affecting my critical judgement.”
- Dr. Daniel Carlat

How many doctors speak for drug companies? We don’t know for sure, but one recent study indicates that at least 25 percent of all doctors in the United States receive drug money for lecturing to physicians or for helping to market drugs in other ways. This meant that I was about to join some 200,000 American physicians who are being paid by companies to promote their drugs.

… I found myself astonished at the level of detail that drug companies were able to acquire about doctors’ prescribing habits. I asked my reps about it; they told me that they received printouts tracking local doctors’ prescriptions every week. The process is called “prescription data-mining,” in which specialized pharmacy-information companies (like IMS Health and Verispan) buy prescription data from local pharmacies, repackage it, then sell it to pharmaceutical companies. This information is then passed on to the drug reps, who use it to tailor their drug-detailing strategies.

- Dr. Daniel Carlat @ The New York Times: link.

“A capsule toy that contains a self-assembly model of a capsule toy machine, complete with tiny capsule toys ready to vend.”

Japan is clearly a nation that worships shopping, a nation that has taken the retail experience to its bosom and raised in its honour a frenzy of poured concrete and burnished chrome, a hypermarket for saints. You can wander into a Japanese department store and lose an entire day, without even scraping the surface of the mall it’s embedded in. My personal nemesis is Yodabashi Camera: a department store that has a clothing and houseware department embedded in it where most such shops would feature an electronics boutique department. Half of the sixth floor of its Yokohama branch is given over to capsule toy vending machines, where for 200 yen (about 80 pence) you can turn the knob and acquire a tennis ball sized bundle of mysterious plasticky goodness with a model kit of some complexity within. My favourite … is a capsule toy that contains a self-assembly model of a capsule toy machine, complete with tiny capsule toys ready to vend. Even the toys teach recursion …

- Charles Stross: link.

Via Boing Boing.

Here’s one for the software developer in all of us:

“It’s absolutely critical … to not think of these layers as persistence, business, and presentation. Database, processing, and user interface are much more appropriate terms.”

[I]t’s completely infeasible to encapsulate an application’s business logic into a single layer. It’s also logically impossible.

By the time a developer creates the perfect persistence layer — something that takes in any type of data, tucks it away somewhere, and provides an easy mechanism to retrieve it — he has created a separate infrastructure application. Recreated, actually. The operating system’s file system already does exactly that.

By the time a developer creates the perfect presentation layer — something that takes in any type of data and displays it in a flexible manner — he too has recreated an infrastructure application. ASP/PHP/etc with HTML already does a fantastic job of implementing that goal.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a multi-layered application. In many cases, anything but that would be a bad design. It’s absolutely critical, however, to not think of these layers as persistence, business, and presentation. Database, processing, and user interface are much more appropriate terms.

- Alex Papadimoulis @ Worse Than Failure: Link.

Big Ball of Mud

“Complete rubbish” sums it up nicely.

There’s a pattern for this recommendation, and it’s very common — The Big Ball of Mud.

- Comment @ WTF: Link.

Business Logic: the Junk Drawer

The business layer is not mythical, it’s simply done poorly in most instances because most development departments have no definition of what is business logic and what is presentation logic or database logic.

When I separate, I ask myself what I am doing in a class. If my class exists only to enable display, then it’s view logic. Sure there’s page-flow which is defined by the customer, but it’s still the way the interface works, not the way the application processes data.

What about when the class does both, enables a view and implements business logic? The answer to that is pretty simple … your class is doing too much.

Persistence logic should pretty simple. There should be a way to find, create, update, and delete. Anything more than that is business logic.

I have a fourth class, that is utilities. All code that does something that has nothing to do with the application like xml parsing or string utilities(yes I know there are a ton of them them available to download, but this is an example) goes in the utilities.

Everything else is business logic. In my mind, if you correctly define the other three, business logic is like the junk drawer because it’s such a broad category.

- Comment @ WTF: Link.

Understanding the Problem Domain

As programmers we try to scrape by learning the least we have to about the problem domain, and instead lean heavily on people qualified to properly understand it.

Unfortunately, this means we cannot look ahead and we make some pretty stupid design decisions. A lot of the needless complexity and “over engineering” comes from a poor grasp of the actual problem. Meanwhile, we understand the technical issues very well, and so we quite properly manage to slot them into time-tested patterns.

- Comment @ WTF: Link.

“Sears has launched a virtual closet, called e-Me, for the promotion of its back-to-school season …”

Sears has launched a virtual closet, called e-Me, for the promotion of its back-to-school season, partnering with Meez and Virtual Model, which powers Meez.

The site basically operates as a Sears-branded Meez. All the clothes to choose from are those that are being pushed for the back-to-school shopping season, such as The Cheetah Girls line and Canyon River Blue. Real photos are used for the items you can select for your Meez, though a digital representation is used for your actual avatar. All the other functions for Meez is included for the Sears-branded version, including backgrounds, pets, hairstyles, etc. There’s also a gallery for users of e-Me, where you can check out other users’ creations and rate them. Sears has indicated that it will be adding games and other user interaction in the future. Items can be saved to a closet and printed out for an in-store discount on clothes.

[Mashable: Link]

“Meez is a website that allows users to create their own animated avatars, or “3D I.D.” graphics, for the Web.” Wikipedia.

Further evidence that there’s money t0 be made in cyberspace … or that there’s money to be made selling cyberspace to Sears et. al.

“A ‘master of all trades’ is a threat to any large organization as you can not replace them easily.”

Big companies want cogs. You hire interchangeable people who do very simple well defined tasks. If one leaves you hire someone else give them the ISO9000 job description and have the replacement up and working in a week. (after the 6 month hiring process)

A “master of all trades” is a threat to any large organization as you can not replace them easily. I had this issue at past jobs luckily I had a boss who knew how to balence the process vs my skills and I was essentially made into a one man prototype lab.

If you have one guy set up firewalls, wire the network, configure the server, write the application, and leave you have no one else who knows all the steps and at best you have to hire several people to replace the person who left.

It may seem silly but large companies/organizations want consistency over brilliance.

[Worse Than Failure]

Bo Lipari reports: “Over the last two months Microsoft and a cadre of high paid lobbyists have been working a full-court press in Albany in an attempt to bring about a serious weakening of New York State election law.”

On Thursday, June 14, I recieved a copy of proposed changes to New York State Election Law [Link to PDF] drafted by Microsoft attorneys that has been circulating among the Legislature. These changes would gut the source code escrow and review provisions provided in our current law, which were fought for and won by election integrity activists around the state and adopted by the Legislature in June 2005. In an earlier blog I wrote about Microsoft’s unwillingness to comply with New York State’s escrow and review requirements. Now the software giant has gone a step further, not just saying “we won’t comply with your law” but actively trying to change state law to serve their corporate interests. Microsoft’s attorneys drafted an amendment which would add a paragraph to Section 1-104 of NYS Election Law defining “election-dedicated voting system technology”. Microsoft’s proposed change to state law would effectively render our current requirements for escrow and the ability for independent review of source code in the event of disputes completely meaningless - and with it the protections the public fought so hard for.

[Bo Lipari: Link]

Via SlashDot, which observes that “Microsoft is siding with the makers of voting machines that run on Windows — the company doesn’t want its code inspected by outsiders.”

“Apple picks a fight it can’t win: Why Safari for Windows will leave Apple bruised and bloodied”

The insular Apple universe is a relatively gentle place, an Athenian utopia where Apple’s occasional missteps are forgiven, all partake of the many blessings of citizenship, and everyone feels like they’re part of an Apple-created golden age of lofty ideas and superior design.

But the Windows world isn’t like that. It’s a cold, unforgiving place where nothing is sacred, users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken. Especially the Windows browser market.

This is no Athens.

This is Sparta.

[Mike Elgan: ComputerWorld]

Via SlashDot.

Which reminds me of this classic essay:

Umberto Eco on Mac versus DOS [circa 1994]:
“I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant.”

Excerpts from an English translation of Umberto Eco’s back-page column, La bustina di Minerva, in the Italian news weekly Espresso, September 30, 1994.

Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It’s an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.

Naturally, the Catholicism and Protestantism of the two systems have nothing to do with the cultural and religious positions of their users. One may wonder whether, as time goes by, the use of one system rather than another leads to profound inner changes. Can you use DOS and be a Vande supporter? And more: Would Celine have written using Word, WordPerfect, or Wordstar? Would Descartes have programmed in Pascal?

And machine code, which lies beneath and decides the destiny of both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that belongs to the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic.

[Umberto Eco: The Modern Word]

See kbuenovintage.com:

Antonio Pineda 970 Earrings

1/2 x 1-1/4″ 970 silver sheet formed earrings signed with Antonio’s crown mark as well as the Cooperativa Castillo mark and eagle assay #58. Screw backs. Were $225.

Iraqis use Google Earth as military intelligence asset

Google Earth … is being used to help people survive sectarian violence in Baghdad ….

… Some Iraqis have set up advice websites to help others avoid the death squads … people to draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth’s detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can work out escape routes and routes to block.

… For some time now, vigilante-style guard forces have been operating in many neighbourhoods, especially in Sunni areas targeted by Shia militias.

… Many Sunnis see the Shia-dominated police forces as just as much of a threat, because of evidence of their involvement in kidnappings.

… It’s thought that insurgents have also used the map site, examining the detailed images to pick out potential targets.

[BBC]

Via Boing Boing.