Jim's Coredump

The April 8, 2017 edition of the Economist had two articles whose juxtaposition amused me. The first was an excellent story “ Computers security is broken from top to bottom ” and the second “ How hospitals could be rebuilt, better than before ” described the virtues of increased computer usage in hospitals. I sent the Economist the following letter: F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. I must commend the Economist for publishing “How hospitals could be rebuilt, better than before” and “Computer security is broken from top to bottom” in the same newspaper. More computers in healthcare; what could go wrong? (see article 2) More seriously, several crucial segments of the world economy — finance, communication, and transportation — can no longer function without computers. In a few years, other important industries aut...

Many – but not all –   software developers would probably rather learn COBOL than capture and analyze in a research-type paper  the systems they have constructed . But, contrary to popular belief, research papers are one of the best way to capture the important aspects of a system in a concise and usable form. All developers should write (or be made to write) a paper when they do something that is worth sharing with others. [A paper does not need to be an academic research paper. It could be a detailed blog post like Joe Duffy's Blog , which contains the equivalent information in a less formal format.] It cannot be a system architecture description – hundreds of pages of detailed, hierarchical description that no one can (or does) read. Let me tell you a cautionary tale how Microsoft threw away $100 million, with little or no return, because developers said, “writing papers is not part of my job”. In Microsoft Research, Galen Hunt and I ran the Singularity project to w...