Jeremyopolis » school

Have you tried a little love?

Jeremy — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:32:43 +0000

Ethics are a funny thing. We spend hours making them up and then try and find ways around these self-imposed moral rules. The best solution to an ethical problem is love. If everyone loved their boss, everyone would always give an honest day of work. If everyone loved their customers, we wouldn’t need the Better Business Bureau to protect consumers. If love was the motivating factor for all we did, we wouldn’t need ethics anymore because everyone would do what is best for the other person; we would all have adequate care. All of this begs the question: have you tried a little love?

IP – ’tis Broken

Jeremy — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:57:09 +0000

Few May Start, But Many Will Succeed

Jeremy — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:57:49 +0000

Wikipedia was started by a handful of people; Linux was started by one person. Both of these projects have become mainstream. They are well accepted by the general populace and everyone knows about them. They succeeded because after a smart founding, a large group of many people supported and helped the project to progress. The same is happening with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A decade ago, the Church began to have a strong online presence. That presence was brought about by a small group of people. Today, many, many members of the Church are spreading that online presence and helping the project that few started to succeed through the help of many.

Externalities Are Amazing

Jeremy — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:20:55 +0000

The Internet motivates people with externalities. Ask any economist and he or she will tell you that externalities do not motivate people. Yet, the Internet illustrates that externalities do motivate people; Wikipedia and open-source software being the two best examples. These projects show that externalities motivate because the people who write Wikipedia articles do not benefit directly from writing articles. They receive no remuneration; yet, there are consistently people editing articles. Who knows why they do work for free, with a few shakes of externalities thrown in on the side, but thank goodness there are people that will do the work so all Internet users can benefit.

Software Outsourcing – Two Options and They Both Stink

Jeremy — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:39:57 +0000

There are two kinds of software outsourcing: some or all. Outsourcing the whole project is not smart. Typically, when outsourcing a complete project, the outsourcing company acts as a consultant. This means they write the software, get paid more than they bid for the job, and then leave, never looking at the software again. Because they leave, they don’t care how well the software is engineered; they don’t care that fixing a bug will take eons and hoards of cash. You, who just paid a pile of green for the poorly coded software, are now stuck with the cost of maintenance and no software gurus on your team that know how the software works.

The second option is to outsource some of the software. The problem with outsourcing some of the software is that the software needs to be embarrassingly parallelizable. This means that there needs to be discrete parts of the software that do a complete function on their own without relying on any other piece of your software. When a program can be divided this way, some of these distinct parts can be outsourced, while others will stay within the company. Most software does not have the property of being embarrassingly parallelizable or else software engineers would simply create the specific parts once and plug them together. Then no one would need to program any more. Clearly, there are more programmers today than there were last year.

Both of these software outsourcing options stink. Pay more money now and less later; choose the third option: no outsourcing.

Crowd Source Patents

Jeremy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:39:45 +0000

Disclaimer: I know quite a bit about patents. However, I don’t know everything. If there is already an easy way for people to comment on patents, regard this article as a highlight of my ignorance.

People file for crazy patents all the time. Even a simple patent search turns up patents for things like linked lists or other very common, everyday items that have been around longer than the life of a patent. What is even crazier is that the patent office grants them, despite the angry mobs of bloggers who fill their blogs with enraged posts about the shortcomings of said patents. Crowd sourcing patents is a capable solution to this patent problem. Give this mad mob of bloggers and all people an easy to use web site where they can gather evidence for or against a patent. Crowd sourcing patents would solve the problem of the patent office having to employ experts in every field. The power, and responsibility, would be back in the hands of that wrathful mob who could invalidate the crazy patents before they are even granted.

A New Dinosaur

Jeremy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:34:33 +0000

Brigham Young University recently found a new long-necked dinosaur in a quarry in Utah. There is a large problem with new dinosaur discoveries: no one really knows if they are correct or not. Scientists have supposedly found “120 known species of sauropods [but], there have been only eight instances in which scientists have been able to recover intact skulls.” How do the scientists even know if there are 120 different sauropods if they have only ever found 8 skulls? Maybe every sauropod had a different shaped head because they used them to bash coconuts open so they could enjoy sweet coconut milk. The real point is, these dinosaur scientists don’t really know anything about the dinosaurs because they didn’t live during the Age of the Dinosaurs. The amount of fossil evidence that has been found is tiny, as evidenced by the quote above. This leads me to wonder why we keep inventing new types of dinosaurs when we find a new leg bone here or a new skull there. For all we know, they could be from the very same dinosaur.

75 cents – Would it be enough today?

Jeremy — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:26:51 +0000

In The Cuckoo’s Egg, a novice computer administrator enters into a ten month battle with a foreign hacker because of a 75 cent accounting error. The administrator had to verify that the 75 cent discrepancy wasn’t from a software error, but was caused because of the activities of the hacker. The state of software during this ten month battle was very simple in comparison with the state of software today. The simple nature of the software made tracking down the real source of the error easy. Because of the simplicity of the software and the ease of confirming the error, the administrator was positive that there was an outside problem and that the missing 75 cents was not a result of his buggy software.

Proving that the small discrepancy was not an internal problem would be much more difficult today because software has become too complicated. The software of today is, at a minimum, several orders of magnitude more complicated than the software that was used in The Cuckoo’s Egg. Windows now has over 100 million lines of code and Linux has over 12 million lines of code. On top of the operating system’s millions of lines of code, today we add all the web servers, dns servers, firewalls, virus scanners and every other program that is run on a computer of today. When you have so many different programs that are each much more complicated than all of software combined in The Cuckoo’s Egg, assuring yourself that a 75 cent error was not because of some other program on your computer becomes impossible. How can we ever know that somone has been inside our computers if we can’t even track down a 75 cent error?

New Random Number Generator! – Who cares?

Jeremy — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:36:05 +0000

An exciting new development has taken place in the computer world: a new random number generator was created. Most people will never notice or even realize that a new kind of random number generator was conceived of and implemented, yet this random number generator could have a great impact on their lives. If this new random number generator proves to be more random than the current random number generators, every single person who uses the Internet will be affected. Take, for example, buying something on Amazon.com. A random number generator actually plays a key role in keeping your credit card number secure. Without good random numbers, a malicious individual can easily access your credit card number and all of the personal information you send when you buy something online. That is why a new random number generator should actually matter to everyone who uses the Internet.

Collaboration vs Confidentiality

Jeremy — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:31:44 +0000

In the new age of social networking, we, the users, must closely watch the balance we strike between collaboration and confidentiality. Genealogy has progressed wildly since people have started to place their pedigrees on their personal websites. Collaboration has made the increase in genealogical research possible. Yet, many people fail to realize that being able to find your mother’s maiden name on your personal family history website is a problem. This doesn’t seem like a big problem until we think about the last time we registered for a site like Facebook. The seemingly innocuous question about your mother’s maiden name now becomes much more important; that name can be used to reset your password and gain control of your Facebook account. We need to always be on guard and check our desires for collaboration with our need for confidentiality.