Bob’s Blog

Let’s face it: the internet is invading our lives. It’s become a part of almost every computing device and even some MP3 players. I get on the internet at least once every day, and many times on most days. It’s how many of us organize our calendars, keep in touch with others, find answers to questions, and pass our spare time. The internet is an amazing tool for all this and more, but it has dangers, too. The news is replete with stories of internet predators. The internet is also full of unwanted content, much of it maliciously trying to capture our attention or our private data. Because of this ‘internet invasion’ we all need to be aware of the dangers and the possible defenses available to us.

There are many available protections against internet invasion. The most important defense is self control. Don’t allow yourself to spend too much time on the net; don’t go surfing in chat rooms; don’t view malicious content if it does pop up on your screen. To help in this endeavor, there are also content filters and good practices, like keeping the family computer in a public room (instead of the bedroom). Rather than attempt to list all the available tools, let me direct you to a useful resource, the Internet Safety Podcast (and wiki). There you’ll find an introduction to internet safety topics and technologies, as well as ideas and instructions on how to make the most of them.

The term “open source” was invented by the Linux community in 1998, and was created to separate it from Richard Stallman’s “free software”. “Open source” means that the source code of a project is openly available and can be used with few restrictions. “Free software” follows a similar, yet subtilely different, ideology. Free software is essentially an activist movement against proprietary software. Stallman believes that all software should be free (as in “free speech”, not “free food”), and uses the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as a way to promote that ideal. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), however, understands the need and use for proprietary software, and even supports the use of open source projects and ideals in proprietary software.

The OSI has the much more defensible position. We live in a capitalist society. At some level, nothing will get done if there’s no money in it. There are many people who write software for the sake of writing software, but they are few in comparison to the market need for good software. That need is filled by capitalist corporations, who produce software to sell it to people. These companies can make good use of open source software, adding their own special value add to what is already available to make a viable product that they can sell. The FSF misunderstands the need for proprietary software. Without the ability to sell software, most software would never get made.

I’ve been reading an interesting book by Thomas Friedman called The World Is Flat. In his book, Friedman discusses the forces that have been and are flattening the world, and how to survive in an America where so many jobs are being outsourced. The flattening of the world began with the liberation of Eastern Europe from stifling soviet politics and economics. Other countries also entered the world economy, and many factory jobs moved offshore. Then came the PC, the internet, work flow software, and things just took off from there. Suddenly, jobs that could not be outsourced before (IT, HR, R&D, and other knowledge-based jobs) could be split up and sent to different parts of the globe. Some jobs can never be outsourced, because they have to be done in a certain location, but at times, it seems like no job is safe. Indeed many analysts say that the only way to protect American jobs is to impose tariffs and other taxes on internationally produced solutions. Friedman argues instead that the flattening of the world is good for Americans, but we’ll need to learn some new skills to thrive in the new world.

The most important skill we need is to be adaptable. Almost all of us, at one time or another, will find that our current job is being replaced by a computer or by somebody in Asia. When that happens, the only way to survive is to have developed new skills in a different (but perhaps often related) area. For example, when a tech support job is sent to India, the old American tech support guy had better have another way of making himself valuable. It could be that he’s learned enough from supporting a system to be able to maintain or improve it. Or perhaps he’s done some studying on the side and has developed the skills to write documentation and manuals. Whatever it is, it had better be something, because he’s no longer profitable as tech support.

To constantly be adapting her skill set to fill new jobs, the most important thing an American middle-class worker can do is constantly learn. She needs to develop a love of learning, a passion for what she does, and a curiosity about everything else. That way she will be constantly redefining herself, developing new specialties in fields that aren’t being outsourced. When the job she currently does gets automated or moved, she has something new to do.

This constant redefining may seem scary or difficult, but I think it’s exciting. I suppose it’s my love of learning new things that makes me excited to have to do it. I can never be satisfied with doing the same job the rest of my life. I’m glad that someday the job I’m doing will either become obsolete or be moved to somebody else. That leaves me free to expand, to improve myself, and to do just about whatever interests me. It keeps my life fresh and exciting. Globalization and the flattening of the world will bring (or rather, is bringing) amazing opportunities to Americans who are ready and willing to take full advantage of it.

Google is currently sponsoring a competition called Google Lunar X PRIZE, a race to the moon. Google will award $30 million the first team to safely land a remote-controlled robot, that can send images and data back to Earth, on the moon. Among the many competitors, Team FREDNET is unique: it is the only 100% open source competitor. What that means is that essentially anybody can join and/or contribute to the project. In an interview on NPR, Fred Bourgeois, one of the primary leaders, said that they have contributors from a dozen countries and of all ages, including a middle-schooler. This is an amazing achievement in global collaboration, and is strong evidence of how flat our world has become. 10 years ago, this team effort would have been impossible. Now it is impressive only because of its goal. The open source community has long since expanded to include the whole world. Developers from Asia to Africa contribute regularly to project such as GNU and Apache. But an open source approach to an international competition is a new idea. It’s a great step forward for globalization and will hopefully lead to increased international collaboration on other important projects.

We’re all familiar with Title IX. We see its effects in school sports programs. What we don’t often realize is how wide-ranging Title IX really is. Its scope includes all educational and government organizations. That includes mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, etc. While sports programs have come a long way towards equal numbers of male and female participants, engineering (especially computing) is still predominantly male. There are many people who see the vast disparity between the numbers of men and women graduating in computing and assume that means discrimination. What such people don’t realize is that there are other possible causes. I know very few females actually interested in computing. Now, don’t misunderstand: discrimination is a serious problem and needs to be stopped. But what we often call discrimination is simply a manifestation of the fact that different people have different interests. There isn’t much interest among women for playing football, for example. I’m sure there are women who enjoy the sport, but not nearly enough to create women’s football teams in our schools. Efforts at enforcing Title IX are misguided. Instead of assuming that ‘unequal numbers’ equals ‘discrimination’ we need to look fro the real causes of the inequality and seek to correct any causes that are caused by social or organizational discrimination, while understanding and accounting for the others.