April 20th, 2006
I’ve received hundreds of impassioned letters (well, okay, so it was only one e-mail from my colleague, Tom DeMarco) about my recent posting discussing Money magazine’s survey indicating that software engineering is the best job in America. After five years of dot-com collapse, layoffs, outsourcing, and stagnant salaries, it’s no wonder that some people would […]
April 19th, 2006
I’ve been intrigued with the concept of the “long tail” ever since I saw an article by Chris Anderson in the October 2004 issue of Wired. If you haven’t heard the phrase, you should definitely read Anderson’s entire article; but in a nutshell, he explores the consequences of an industrial distribution system that focuses a […]
April 18th, 2006
An update to yesterday’s posting, in which I complained that I couldn’t find any interesting use for all of my idle CPU cycles. I’m still not excited about searching for extra-terrestial life in the universe, and I’m not as excited as I should be about long-term medical research. But it turns out that there’s a […]
April 17th, 2006
In an earlier posting, I cited a source claiming that there were roughly 772 million PC’s worldwide as of 2004; for all I know, the number may be closer to a billion today. But what I do know is that most of those PC’s are idle roughly 99 percent of the time. They sit in […]
April 16th, 2006
A recent Wired article reports that Phil Zimmerman now has a beta version of a program that will encrypt Internet-based VoIP phone calls, thus thwarting the NSA’s ability to carry out the U.S. government’s extra-judicial eavesdropping campaign. Zimmerman, in case you’re not familiar with the name, is the man who gave us PGP back in […]
April 15th, 2006
According to a recent article in Money magazine, software engineers have the best job in America. Actually, the software industry has two entries in the top-ten list, because “computer IT analysts” supposedly have the seventh-best job. The complete list of top-10 jobs consists of the following:
Software engineer
College professor
Financial adviser
Human Resources Manager
Physician assistant
Market research analyst
Computer IT […]
April 14th, 2006
For the last couple of years, I’ve been following the progress of Nicholas Negroponte’s efforts to provide citizens — especially children — of developing nations with a low-cost $100 computer to help eliminate the “digital divide” that exists today. It’s an important part of a megatrend that I hope will occur during my lifetime: ubiquitous […]
April 13th, 2006
Everything old is new again: some thoughts on the renewed interest in structured analysis and modeling, and a recommendation to take a look at dynamic models
April 12th, 2006
Internet security firms are paying bounties of anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for information about security bugs and vulnerabilities. There are a few comparable web sites for reporting non-security problems and feedback with software products, but we could use some more robust and detailed services in this area
