February 20, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:This is why non-computer literate
This is why non-computer literate reporters shouldn't be allowed to write stories on things they don't understand.
Kevin Maney listened to the very interesting David Gelernter (yes, the Unabomber victim) waxing lyrical about his new concept for an operating system and fell harder than I did for Tommy Meehan when I played my first game of spin the bottle.
First of all, software engineers, like everyone else, get overenthusiastic about the prospects for whatever they're currently working on. Second of all, this guy's starting a company. He's selling, okay? And third of all, would it hurt to do a little checking before you write things down?
The reporter describes a system that uses time, rather than files, to organize things, and describes that as a more "natural" way to do it. First of all, the brain has all sorts of "natural" storage mechanisms, only one of which is chronological -- if it's natural you want, why not organize our files by smell, the most powerful of the brain's associational tools? Second of all, good file systems set up by a competent administrator do organize things chronologically. You may recall that "sort by date" function in Windows Explorer. . . Third of all, merely organizing things chronologically is a terrible way to deal with things more than a few days old. Quick -- did you write the Henderson memo before or after you ordered the tickets for your last vacation? Of course, Gelernter isn't proposing that; he's proposing something that organizes all the files relating to a given topic chronologically. Well, many or most files relate to more than one topic, so you'd end up setting up various associations for each file, so that you could view it in its proper timestream. We already have software that does this quite well. It's called a relational database, and Larry Ellison, among others, has gotten quite rich off them. Of course, David Gelernter wouldn't sound quite so sexy if he were setting up another DB company.
Then the reporter goes over the top. He tells us that this software would have prevented Enron. Why? See for yourself:
So Windows did it. Bad guys could get away with bad things at Enron because Windows stored the relevant information in thousands of metaphorical burping plastic tubs. If good guys had been able to see the story of Enron's transactions, they would've spotted trouble and stopped it.Hey, people in technology blame Microsoft for all their other ills. Why not this?
Umm. . . because it's totally idiotic? Forget the fact that the system described, a cross between a database and a search engine, would be, on existing hardware, impossibly slow. Forget the fact that, as far as I can tell, a mention of the CEO in a memo would dump it forever after into the "timestream" for the CEO, rendering such searches near-useless. Forget trying to imagine the number of documents reading "the story of Enron" would entail, or asking who exactly would have the time or energy do this.
Let's think instead about a basic issue of which the reporter is apparently unaware: security. If you're on a network, and the network is any good, you will note that you can't see much except the stuff you're supposed to work on; personal and workgroup files, that is. Even in a poorly run network, however, confidential financial data are generally sealed up like the casino vault in Ocean's Eleven. The good guys wouldn't have been able to see the story of Enron's transactions, because the story wouldn't have been there to see. The data were locked away in the networks of other companies, or accessible only to those at the top of the food chain. No, Virginia, you can't blame Enron on Microsoft, the Freemasons, or evil Republicans. Sometimes, a badly run company is just a badly run company. It's not a symbol of anything.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 20, 2002 3:20 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links