Spam

Spam is totally out of hand. Through the summer I was amazed at the number of mortgages that I had apparently applied for. Filtering makes the spammers job harder, so now the spam is mostly incomprehensible. For example I recently got an email offering:

Xe.ni_cal, Vi,ox`x, vi_cod'_in, Ce_leb~rex, Ul'tr.am, Me'~rid-ia,
R`educ^'til, V^al,_ium, Ci.al_is, Le`vitr,a, Via-gra

To enter into a commercial relationship, you need trust on both sides, especially on something as untrustworthy as the Internet. How could I possibly trust a vendor who is unwilling to spell out what they are offering? This email and other like it is a completely pointless waste of time. Spam could quite easily kill email in the same way as it killed the Usenet. Fight Spam.

BI is Back!

I glad to say that once again it is OK to use the term Business Intelligence (BI). For the last year or so, there has been a big push to talk about Business Performance Management as the next big thing, and along with that comes the suggestion that BI is no longer au courant. The problem is that Business Performance Management shares an acronym with Business Process management, another important emerging category in the Business Software market. So when the thought leaders say "BI is dead, long live BPM!" they leave us scratching our heads with puzzlement. By BMP, do they mean BPM or BPM?

My view is quite simple. BI has not gone away and Performance Management is just a new aspect of BI. As every one can see, BI is a TLA (Two Letter Acronym) whereas BPM is a TLA (Three Letter Acronym), and we all know that a TLA trumps a TLA any day.

"no such thing as"?

One response to free software is to "just shut up and pay the man"! I may have even said this myself, although with humorous intent. The interesting thing is that when I looked for "no such thing as free software", I found several sites advocating that free software costs more money than software that you have to pay for, so you were better off paying the man.

Are these really free opinions or just examples of "speak up and be paid by the man?"

There is no Such Thing as Free Software

Yesterday at lunch the conversation came around to free software and I had to say it: "There is no such thing as free software". Provided that we are talking about free software and not "Free Software", I stand by my statement. Well, even if we are talking about "Free Software", I stand by my statement.

The problem with "Free Software" is that it is written by geeks for themselves. Most Free Software is not a program for doing something, it is a toolkit for building a program for doing something, because that is how the true geek likes to do it. After you have downloaded the software, you have to devote time to understanding the toolkit and to building the tool that you need. As you do not have unlimited time, it is not free.

It is as if you went to the hardware store and instead of buying a saw they gave you a kit for making a saw with a sheet of cut metal, a gidget for setting the teeth, a file for sharpens the teeth and a multi-page book of instructions. Sure you can set the saw teeth to be a rip saw or a cross-cut saw, but it is going to take hours of careful setup before you can cut any wood.

Worse, when you upgrade your system, as you have to every few years, you find that you have to download a new version of the free software because that is the version that is compatible with your new system. The new version of the software does not work with your old configuration, so you have to spend time understanding and configuring your setup again.

The people who create Free Software do it to please themselves. It is much more important for them to have the software "do the right thing" than to make the software compatible with the previous version. Thus every version seems to have a number of arbitrary incompatible changes from the previous version.

Note that I am not saying that software that you pay for is necessarily better than Free Software. Very often with paid software you find that the new version is arbitrarily different from the previous versions in annoying ways and yet you have to suffer the indignity of paying for it as well.

At least with Free Software you know what you are getting into and why. Free software (no caps.) poses a whole set of extra problems and issues that we will discuss at another time.

Big Blackouts are Inevitable

A couple of days ago, I complained about electrical power reliability and that the government should be doing something about it. Today, in IEEE Spectrum there is an interesting article on the problem. If anyone should know about electrical power, it is the IEEE, and their prognosis is not good.

There are a number of competing theories, but the bottom line is that large blackouts will continue to happen, and that is that. The section of the article on Chaos theory (remember the Jeff Goldblum character in Jurassic Park), almost seemed to suggest the idea in Asimov's Foundation that some day we will predict the future by writing mathematical equations.

Anyway, even if large blackouts are going to occur every 35 years or so, that is no reason to let the politicians off the hook. After all the reason we elect them is to look after our interests so lets make them do it!

(Update 11/22/2008 fix link to article)

Search Alone

George Chitouras of Inxight Software gave a talk to the Emerging Technology SIG of the SDForum on "Search Alone is Not Enough". I had seen it before, but it is always fun to see the combination of natural language analysis, search and user interface that Inxight has pulled together. This time he also showed us the Time Wall which is another neat visualization tool. Someone in the audience was so bowled over by the display of search features that he asked whether Inxight would mean the end of Google. Apparently he was going to discuss Google with his broker the following morning.

Inxight does not compete with Google, they sell search software products to corporate and government users. George made the good point that search for them is different than search on the internet. Most importantly there is much less cross reference between documents, so it is difficult to establish reasonable page rankings. Instead, Inxight proposes semantic analysis of documents and placing them in a user defined taxonomy which is easy to access through their StarTree. The TimeWall allows easy graphical search of documents arranged by time. Other semantic information extracted from the documents can be displayed along with the search results to help with further refinements of the search.

I want a version of their system on my PC to help me manage email and other documents. Unfortunately, Inxight is not going in that direction, however there are other projects that while they may not be so capable, are more affordable.

As predicted by an audience member there were heated discussion after the talk on various topics raised. I partook in a discussion on whether a taxonomy had to be a directed tree or whether it should be a graph. Although I argued both sides at the time, I think on reflection that a taxonomy is easier to use and less confusing when it is a tree., and that this is worth more than the generality of a graph taxonomy.

Reliable Electical Power?

This morning I was online reading a news item on electricity reliability when a power blip caused my PC to reboot. Such irony. When I tried to to back to the news item, it required a subscription, and I had to scrabble around to find another version of the story.

Electricity reliability is exactly the kind of thing that the government should be able to sort out. How hard can it be? If your elected representative cannot get something simple like this right, it is time to be thinking about change.

Easy Touch Screen Voting?

My bank recently changed the local ATM from one made by NCR to one made Diebold. Diebold is the notorious maker of touch screen voting machines whose results cannot be verified. The ATM is also a touch screen. When it went to get money the other day, I touched what I thought was the "Get Cash" icon on the screen, but the ATM thought I touched the nearby "Quick $40" icon instead, and I was immediately served $40 and handed back my card without an opportunity to correct the mistake. I hope that the Diebold touch screen voting machines are not as difficult to use as their ATMs.

IT Does Matter

Nicholas Carr caused a storm last year when he wrote an article called "IT Doesn't Matter" for the Harvard Business Review. Recently he published a book on the same subject. For the article to generate the response that it did, it has to contain more than a grain of truth. In the long run, he may be right. At some point in the future, for the vast majority of companies, IT will not matter in the same way that accounting does not matter. Accounting is a function that needs to be done, and it needs to be done correctly, but it is not something that can give a company a decisive competitive advantage or a superior business model.

The problem is that we are not yet at the point where IT does not matter. Technology continues to advance, and we are always building new systems to take advantage of the new technology. What's more, it takes time to develop the understanding and standardization of an IT application to the point where it runs smoothly enough to be taken for granted, or outsourced.

I think that it takes a minimum of 25 years to get a application or technology properly under control. For example, payroll was a white hot application in the 60's with companies hiring talented programmers to write their payroll applications. By the 90's, payroll had gotten to the point where it was almost entirely outsourced.

Payroll is a relatively simple application. How long is it going to take to get the PC or the Internet under control to the point where they can be taken for granted? Then there are much more complex applications like ERP or CRM that have been around for a few years but certainly not long enough to be satisfactorily stable. Finally there are still emerging categories such as content management and business process management and new technologies such as RFID and sensor networks.

Unfortunately, Carr's writing distracts us from a much more important and corrosive problem, that of the IT divide. At a recent conference, the IT divide emerged as the dominant topic during the wrap up panel. I will have more to say about it later.

More Thoughts on Internet Explorer Security

Maybe my last post was too severe. Windows Internet Explorer has a lot of security problems, and it will continue to have problems. The people who created it may prove to be misguided, however they are in the experimental phase of a new technology, and with anything new, "mistakes are made". In fact, we have not properly explored the design space unless mistakes are made.

A major source of security problem in Internet Explorer is the worldview that underlies its architecture. Just as pet owners come to resemble their pets, software reflects the organization that creates it. Microsoft is a large company that expects to dominate any field that it enters. Internet Explorer security is based on the concept that a small number of large media companies will dominate the internet and provide content for the masses. These companies need to install helper applications to web enable their content. ActiveX and other mechanisms are there to make this process work seamlessly without bothering the user. Also, because the applications are platform specific, they help cement the domination of Windows.

In practice the internet is more like the Wild West, with lawless thugs riding roughshod over whatever they can. Mechanisms to seamlessly deliver helper applications are exploited by the bad guys to seamlessly deliver unwanted programs of all sorts. Butler Lampson (now at Microsoft Research) recently published an excellent paper on security in IEEE Computer. He talks about trusted computing bases and sandboxing applications to prevent them from doing things that they should not. Now all we need is for the right people to listen to what he has to say.