Victor Rozek
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As I See It: The Man Who Would Be Kim
February 25, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreHe was born in West Germany, the product of a German-Finish union, and for most of his life he bore the surname of Schmitz. From an early age he proved to be a poor model of German conformity, contemptuous of rules and indifferent to authority. But by the time he entered his teenage years, he had found a profession and a place of refuge from the pangs of conventionality: his refuge was the Internet; his profession, hacking.
Although he never got beyond junior high school, Kim managed to engineer a thriving career breaking and entering into other people’s phone systems.
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As I See It: The Next Big (Destructive) Thing
February 11, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIf you’re an unemployed software engineer, I have good news and bad news for you. There are people hiring, but they go by the name of Al Qaeda. Welcome to the worm-eat-worm world of Cyber Warfare. It is the Next Big Military Thing, and everybody is gearing up to smite their godless foes without firing a shot. According to Jeffrey Carr, head of the digital security firm Taia Global, and author of Inside Cyber Warfare, Al Qaeda released a video last year in which they recruited hackers to better attack critical infrastructure. You have to wonder what inducements they
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As I See It: Gadfly
January 28, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreA young man died recently, by his own hand. He had the tussled good looks that women like and men envy, and an exceptional mind capable of contributing to the general welfare. He was, in the estimation of admirers, a digital Robin Hood, robbing the establishment of its data and sharing it without condition or hope of profit; dispensing the King’s venison to hungry men. The King, however, was not pleased, and although the young man did not pose an actual danger to anyone, he was, by all accounts, becoming a royal nuisance. In the end, though, what may have
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As I See It: Success, The Career Killer
January 14, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read more“I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.” Better yet to be a success at something you love and to remain lucid and funny past your hundredth birthday. But Naftaly Birnbaum was an anomaly. He knew what he wanted to do by age seven. Talent and singular focus propelled a career that spanned vaudeville, radio, television, and film. By the time of his death, he was a national icon best known by his adopted stage name, George Burns.
Characterizing career success can be as elusive
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As I See It: Still Buoyant After All These Years
December 10, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIT is a buoyant profession. It stays afloat in turbulent economic waters. Just in the last four years, it has weathered recession, high unemployment, offshoring, outsourcing, looming austerity, and two rounds of quantitative easing courtesy of Ben Bernanke. (Quantitative easing is a banker’s euphemism for printing tons of money with little benefit to anyone but the bankers.) Nonetheless, it appears the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery.
If so, IT remains the one indispensable asset across all sectors and enterprises. Consider that during the ravages of Sandy, not every business was able to save its inventory, but you
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As I See It: How IT Decided The Election
December 3, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIn retrospect, analyzing wars to determine the exact tipping point for the victorious side is tricky business. There are multiple battles and often multiple fronts. Strategic decision making, tactical challenges, advantages in weaponry, motivation of the fighting force, and a hundred other factors all play a part. As, sometimes, does chance. Just deciding if divine favoritism played a part would be a subject of testy debate, although that advantage is usually claimed by the winner.
The aftermath of elections loosely resembles the aftermath of wars, at least in the extensive postmortem analysis. Where victory and defeat are concerned, both sides
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As I See It: The Many Faces Of Creativity
November 12, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreOne of the challenges of writing a bi-monthly column is continually coming up with interesting ideas. In the Internet age, it is humbling to discover that hundreds of writers have already explored a particular topic I believed was original. For that matter, just finding a fresh take on a subject like computing–which returns 375 million Google hits–is about as tricky as electing a third-party candidate. Which is why, I suppose, there is a truism among writers: “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.”
Software development is a lot like writing, only it often requires mastery of multiple languages. And given the
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As I See It: Born Again Computers
October 29, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreSmall business start-ups have a notoriously short half-life. And non-profits are even less likely to thrive. With the ascendency of Wall Street-style greed, doing good fell out of fashion, and packing a conscience became regarded as more hindrance than help. But in an era when those most blessed by fortune have backed away from communal responsibility, it is still possible for empathy to bind with hard work and create an enterprise that is both successful and honorable.
One such enterprise not only provides a valuable service but, within its sphere of influence, is also addressing stubborn social challenges and a
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As I See It: Sub-Atomic Dreams
October 22, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreTheoretical physicist Brian Greene once observed: “No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you’re going to fail.” God knows I’ve tried, but my cat is just not interested in relativity. That’s so yesterday. She wants to learn quantum mechanics. But the thing about quantum mechanics is that only a handful of people on the planet can truly claim to understand it. And that’s probably an exaggeration. Even Einstein called it “spooky.”
Not only is the math beyond the capabilities of the average smartphone, but concepts like “superposition,” “entanglement,” and “decoherence” have about as much in
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As I See It: Chasing The Impulse
October 15, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreWhat if there was a simple experiment that could predict the trajectory of a 4-year-old’s life. Seems improbable. After all, toddlers are no more fully formed than Greek economic policy. But such an instrument exists and it involves marshmallows.
The experiment was the brainchild of psychologist Walter Mischel and it dates back to the 1960s when experimentation of any sort usually involved drugs. It was conducted at a preschool on the Stanford University campus with the children of faculty members and graduate students, which suggests that the little dauphins were strangers to privation. The test was simplicity itself, and the