Stupidity is a genetic condition. We'll either solve the stupidity problem by taking control of our genetic future, or continue to live with it for the rest of human existence.
I'm the father of a little girl with Down syndrome--she has an IQ of 58. I'm sure you'll understand that I become terrified when people speak of "taking control of our genetic future." Given the options, I'll choose to put up with stupid people for the rest of human existence.
Let's look at another thing "powering" the US post office by way of compairison. Jeeps. You see them all over, as they won bids on an open market. The Post Office Jeeps were stripped of all insignia and were only recognizable by their form. No cardboard cut outs recomending the purchase of Jeeps ever kept the sun from shining through a USPO window. No "test drives" were ever offered. Instead, Jeep was happy to be making the sale and the use was recomendation enough. The USPO had no intentions of recomending one automobile maker over another.
Except, well, that the USPS doesn't buy them from Jeep. (Jeep, BTW, isn't a company. Jeep is a brand of DaimlerChrysler.) The USPS buys vehicles from a variety of vendors, under contract. Here, for instance, is an article (with photo) about the USPS buying electric-powered mail vehicles from Ford.
If you browse the New Business Ideas page of the USPS web site, you'll find that the Post Office is looking for new ways to generate revenue. That's why there are Federal Express drop boxes outside post offices these days--and why Federal Express is hauling Express Mail for the USPS. If they can get Microsoft to pay them money to distribute advertising in the post office, how is that different from AOL paying them to carpet-bomb America with sign-up CDs? The more ways the USPS finds to produce revenue, the lower postage costs will be. Is that a bad thing?
Back in the days of the Cold War there was a joke that went like this:
Q: Mr. President, the Russians have just deported the Moscow reporters for the Associated Press and the New York Times. How do you intend to respond?
A: We're aware of the situation, and in accordance with standard protocols we will be deporting the Washington reporters for the AP and New York Times as well....
In a very real sense, the Internet will come to be viewed as the ultimate secret weapon. Information is very hard to control, and free access to information is a serious threat to the despot. The Chinese and the Saudis both fear free access to information--they're sufficiently connected to the rest of the world to know that they can't simply disconnect their people from the Internet, but they're trying very hard to prevent access to "bad information." The Chinese, in particular, are cracking down on Internet cafes (here's an article from the official People's Daily, a slightly different perspective from the Digital Freedom Network).
An effective way to attack injustice is publicity--and an effective retort is to say, "oh, but [name other country] is doing it too--we agree completely." In this case, the Chinese and the Saudis can loudly and publicly proclaim their agreement with "the Americans" and continue tightening the screws on their citizens access to information.
One of the great strengths of America is that any clown can run for elective office. One of the great weaknesses of America is that so many clowns manage to get elected.
I'll disagree with you about whether Morgantown was PRT or not--that was, after all, the project that coined the term. But that's beside the point. What is the point, and is the big limitation with any kind of PRT system, regardless of the car size, is that PRT requires a dedicated, exclusive right-of-way. And that is fatal.
A dedicated right-of-way essentially limits people to traveling up and down the line. Larger systems might include intersections with other lines--extremely large systems might build lines for the express purpose of facilitating connections (such as JR's Yamanote line around Tokyo). But dedicated rights of way force people to live, work, and shop along those rights of way.
The original idea for PRT was to address that very problem: develop a system that did not require the rider to change lines, but instead would permit you to go from your originating station to your destination without changing trains. (The design firm that pushed this concept was headquartered in suburban Chicago. You only have to change trains on the CTA elevated once in February to understand the appeal of this concept.) The system proponents (and their associates at UMTA) envisioned creating something like PRT on the scale of the Chicago transit system--but, once you were in a car, you could go anywhere in the system nonstop, without changing lines.
A great idea. But even with that version of the idea, on a scale of that magnitude, you'd still fail. Because work patterns change; life patterns change. If you have an auto you no longer have to pay the higher rent for an apartment that is near to a busy train station; you don't have to pay inflated prices at a small grocery store near that station; and if you want to take your daughter for dance lessons in the next town over, you can. No standing on a transit platform, no exposure to crime, substantially less hassle.
Where transit, particularly fixed right-of-way transit, is successful is where there are obstacles to cars. Particularly artificial obstacles that are easy to manipulate, like bridges. One of the most financially viable transit systems in the U.S. is a small line run by the Delaware River Port Authority, connecting Lindenwold, NJ with downtown Philadelphia. Why is this line successful? Because the DRPA also runs the four bridges across the Delaware River that connect South Jersey to Pennsylvania. They set the tolls on the bridge and the fares on the transit system to a) cover costs, and b) balance traffic load. In effect, they use bridge tolls to encourage (read "force") riders onto transit. Absent something like that, fixed right-of-way transit doesn't work.
How was the cost of building the roads factored in? Not fair to compare the cost of a new railbed to just stuffing more traffic into existing roads....
Actually, in Morgantown it was entirely fair. Ridership was sufficiently low that it would have been completely absurd to bother building any additional road capacity. While my dad got a big laugh (and made a good point) about buying every student and staff member at West Virginia University a new car every two years, that wasn't a serious proposal. (After all, if you added 10,000 new cars to the streets of Morgantown, WV you would need more road capacity.) It was merely a simple metric to get people to understand just how much money was being squandered on this thing.
Part of the reason the project failed was because of how the project got funded. An extremely powerful member of the U.S. Senate, Senator Robert Byrd, represents the state of West Virginia. He views his role in Washington as requiring him to do his utmost for the people of his state--and he views that to mean that he should bring as much federal funding (federal jobs, federal facilities) to West Virginia as possible. He controlled the federal appropriations process, and approved the UMTA PRT project with the proviso that it be built in West Virginia. However--any form of mass transit requires population density and/or significant geographic obstacles to walking or driving. The most successful transit systems in the world (Japan, hands down) combine incredible population density with extremes of geography (mostly geologically unstable soil, which limits building highways). Morgantown has very low population density--so it was a bad choice for a transit system. Had they tried it in a more densely-populated setting, particularly with geographic barriers to cars, they might have achieved more success.
I disagree with your supposition that a PRT car would be less expensive to build than an auto. You correctly point out the problem of scale--transit cars are essentially custom-made. Even if an effort was made to produce a uniform design (such as the President's Conference Committee, which developed the PCC designs used by American and Canadian streetcars in the mid- to late-20th century), you'd still only produce a few thousand per year. Even if you produced 20,000 a year you wouldn't come close: remember that a personal auto is typically driven less than 2 hours per day. (U.S. auto warranties assume that a typical car is driven 1000 miles per month. At 40 mph that's an hour of driving per day.) If we only had a 4% utilization rate (which is what that means) of our PRT cars, the system would be a failure. If we had a 20-25% utilization rate, the system would still be an economic failure, and cars built to personal auto standards would be destroyed in a short period of time. (Consider the abuse that taxis take, for instance.)
This is called Personal Rapid Transit, and the first PRT system in use was a "demonstration project" in Morgantown, West Virginia, funded by the U.S. Dept of Transportation. (Morgantown is the home of West Virginia University, and the system linked the WVU campus and downtown Morgantown.) It was built in the early 1970s, but I believe it is no longer operating. Subsequent to the development of the Morgantown project a similar system was developed at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport. All of the "ultramodern" features described for the system in Cardiff were used there: variable destinations, multiple route paths, standby cars to "flex" demand, etc.
The submitter of this article makes a slight mistake in his summary: PRT, including the Cardiff system, does not envision users being able to take vehicles off the tracks. There have been rail- and rubber tire-based PRT systems proposed, but even the rubber tire-based systems are designed for a dedicated, exclusive right of way. (Several mass transit systems, notably Toronto's, use rubber tires instead of rail.)
PRT suffers from a relatively simple problem: massive capital costs. I believe what finally killed the Morgantown project was a moment of clarity at the Urban Mass Transit Administration (UMTA, the U.S. D.O.T. agency that oversaw the project). A consultant pointed out that while the PRT system had been fun, it would have been substantially cheaper to simply buy every student and staff member of WVU a new car every two years. (My stepfather was the smart-aleck consultant.)
The Cardiff project? Three words: Big Government Boondoggle. The fundamental problem of PRT is the fundamental problem of Light Rail and Monorails too: they are dedicated right-of-way solutions that run along an extremely expensive path. (Even if the cost of construction is trivial, the cost of land acquisition is enormous. If the cost of land acquisition is NOT enormous then there isn't sufficient population density to support a fixed right-of-way system.) It is dramatically cheaper to buy buses. It is dramatically more efficient to run buses. Buses can change routes instantly--so buses that "prowl" the city center Monday through Friday can run on suburban loop routes among shopping malls on Saturday and Sunday. And a bus-based transit system only requires a marginal additional cost for right-of-way (bus stop marking, signs, shelters, etc.).
But buses don't have the sex appeal of big transit projects, so people still throw money at thirty-year-old concepts and call them "ultramodern technology."
How 'bout if we haul out the big networking technology of the time, and proclaim ARCNET as "ultramodern" networking?
By way of introduction, let me mention up front that I've been an elected public official, an elected party official, and I've run several political campaigns in municipal, county, and state senate races.
Let me offer some advice.
Don't pitch Open Source
You're attempting two impossible things at one time: you're raising an issue that you simply cannot get across in the limited bandwidth of a campaign; and you're staking your campaign on the city's website and it's present outsourced contractor. Picking on a city vendor is generally a bad campaign strategy, unless the vendor is already on the front page of the newspaper or the current mayor's brother-in-law. Otherwise you are perceived as "rocking the boat" and a nuisance--and you will guarantee yourself absolutely zero cooperation from municipal employees on issues like poster permits, etc. You also instantly create an opponent: the city official responsible for selecting the incumbent (Windows-based) web hosting firm. Who will, undoubtedly, be quoted in the newspaper as saying, "if this guy wants to be the city I.T. director, he should come down to City Hall and fill out a job application. Picking the software for the website isn't City Council's job...."
I'm not kidding. I have seen this happen before.
Back in the late 1980s I recruited a candidate to run for the local school board. This guy was perfect. He had a clue about schools and education, he had kids in the district schools, he was an assistant coach in the local township rec. league, and he had a terrific grasp of financial issues. Except....
The guy was going to TQM (Total Quality Management) training classes, and embracing the TQM religion. And he got religion--he started talking about implementing TQM in the schools, and he wouldn't get off the subject. He talked about it when he was campaigning, he talked about it when he talked to voters at home, he talked about it in his brochures, and he handed out a white paper on TQM at the League of Women Voters meeting. It was, um, a bit over the top. It's been maybe 10-15 years, and I still get grief from local leaders about the guy--where did I dig him up?
What you should do
Understand that you have a very limited amount of bandwidth to talk to the voter. And you have a very limited number of voters to talk to. And 95% of those voters are interested in races that they view as more significant than yours. All of which means that you simply cannot even begin to sell something as complex as Open Source, or as instantly controversial as "replacing the city's Internet consulting firm" (which is how the newspaper will report your campaign platform).
Instead, do these steps:
Go to the county registrar's office, and get data on voter registration and election attendance for the past 4 years. This data is a matter of public record, and it should be available--I'm 99% sure Virginia makes it available for each county, but I might be mistaken.
Load the data into a database. You'll have a table of voters, and data reporting which of the elections in the past 4 years that voter has voted in.
Run a script or write a program that assigns points to each voter. Award:
1 point for voting in the 2000 General election.
2 points for voting in the 1998 General election, or the 2000 primary election
3 points for voting in the 1997 and 1999 General elections
4 points for voting in the 1998 primary election
5 points for voting in the 1997 or 1999 primary elections.
As you can quickly see, voters can score from 0 to 25 points. You will also see that there is a relatively small number of voters who score 20 points or higher. You will find that practically any voter scoring more than 15 points will score 25--and will get downright hostile if you suggest that perhaps they might have ever missed a single opportunity to vote. In politics we call them "Super Voters." They are the key to winning elections.
Sit down with friends and a stack of phone books. Your voter registration data will not include phone numbers. You have to match a phone number to each Super Voter in your party.
When you have phone numbers for each Super Voter, sit down in front of a contact manager (like Act!) and start at the top of your list. Call each and every Super Voter. Tell them your name, and tell them you will be sending them information about yourself. Describe to them why you are running for city council. Ask them to read your material, and think of any questions they might have for you--you'll be calling them back in a week or two.
Then mail your information to each SV you contact.
Then call back.
In the words of CmdrTaco, "lather, rinse, repeat." Your aim should be to talk to each of your SV's at least three times before the primary. (N.B. Talk to, not leave message for. Chatting with the answering machine does not count.)
In your conversations you want to emphasize three things:
Your name (name recognition is the single most important issue in municipal elections)
Why you are running (brief, to-the-point, no-jargon: what you will bring to Charlottesville City Council to make life better
Your willingness--your eagerness--to hear what issues that voter has on his or her mind. "If you were on City Council, what are the three things you would do?"
Do not waste your time on paid advertising (spend a buck or two on signs and poll cards--do not spend a dime on newspaper ads or (worse) radio or TV. Don't even think about billboards. And don't waste your time calling anybody but voters with a proven track record of voting in even-year primaries, at least. Call the SVs first, and then--only if you have time--call the highest-point voters who have voted in at least 2 primaries.
Why just the SVs? They will vote. They will vote if it is snowing, they will vote if it is raining, they will vote under any circumstances. (Example: Mario Andretti and his family were constituents of mine--they all voted absentee from Indianapolis in a completely uncontested municipal primary. The entire family are SVs.) Second, they influence other people's votes. People will ask Uncle Donald who to vote for--Uncle Donald will be sure to mention that you have made a point to call him for his views and opinions. Uncle Donald's personal recommendation is worth more to you than any billboard, anywhere.
If you do all of this, you run an extremely good chance of getting elected. If you have been honest in stating why you are running, and sincere in wanting to hear what your constituents have to say, you will deserve to be elected.
And if you are genuinely worthy, on the day after the election, you will start calling your voters all over again--to say Thanks, and to ask for guidance in how you function in office on City Council.
And hey--if you do get elected, drop me a note. My oldest daughter is going off to college in Lynchburg next fall, and I know she'll be traveling to C'ville for riding lessons. It might be handy to have a contact to call in an emergency.
Your question is similar to one that I have been researching for some time, in my role as an adjunct professor of E-Commerce. What is the impact of the Internet on governments?
There is a rich history of how governments have confronted new technologies in the past. It's the sort of history that I wish high schools would teach: some of the laws passed in response to new technologies are extremely funny. The introduction of steam engines, canals, railroads, the telegraph, repeating arms, the automobile--even the safety razor--emboldened legions of pompous politicians eager to satiate their constituents' desire to Put A Stop To This. And Put A Stop To This they did--until they realized that the next town over was benefiting from all the jobs building the railroad line, or manufacturers were locating plants across the state line to avoid their jurisdiction, or (the worst possible fate for a pol) people were just laughing at them and ignoring the law. (Through 1976, at least, it was illegal for a man in the State of Illinois to shave himself unless he was a licensed barber.)
There typically has been a pattern to how governments (the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the judiciary) come to grips with a new technology. The initial response typically is "Put A Stop To This". The next response is "Regulate It!"--generally meaning "slow it down," as the original cast of pompous pols is replaced by wannabe-graybeards urging "caution" and "restraint." As bureaucrats and politicians see wider acceptance of the technology the next step is natural: "How Can We Tax It?" The rules and requirements tend to get relaxed as the bureaucrats, etc., become comfortable with the technology, in a phase I call "Hey! This Could Be Useful." Ultimately, for extremely disruptive technologies, there is a phase we might call "We'd Better Get On The Bandwagon."
Railroads are a perfect example: in the 1830s and 1840s every politician was in the Put A Stop To This camp; by the later 1840s and early 1850s there was grudging acceptance, but still "restraint" and "caution". (There were, for instance, repeated debates about whether it was safe for the Post Office should use trains to move mail.) By the 1850s railroads were confronting a bevy of tax proposals: taxes on rights-of-way, taxes on locomotives, taxes on rail cars, and taxes on revenue. When the U.S. Army used railroads to bring fresh troops to Gettysburg--and won the battle--the utility of railroads was made manifest. Suddenly every politician was a closet railfan, and the pols fell over one another in their rush to champion, sponsor, or even subsidize the building of Yet Another Railway Line. By the late 1860s, up until the economic collapse of 1873, and then again in the later 1870s, the We'd Better Get On The Bandwagon phase was at its peak: rather than regulating or taxing railroads, politicians were working fiendishly to ensure that the railroad didn't pass them by. Towns with railroads lived, towns without railroads died.
The technology has changed--politicians have not. What has also changed--and what makes this process seem so much more contentious--is that the Internet has appeared in the public consciousness, and in your living room, at an extremely rapid pace. And the pace of change is only increasing. Meanwhile, the pace at which politicians (and bureaucrats and judges) move through the Put A Stop To This/Regulate It To Death/How Can We Tax It/Hey This Could Be Useful framework hasn't changed much.
Which phase are we in?
I think we're definitely in the Put A Stop To This phase, and we're going to stay there for a long time--partly because the pace of change means that there is always something new to put a stop to, but also because the growing reach of the Internet means that there is always a fresh crop of less-than-clueful politicians just a router hop away. When the Internet finally got to Afghanistan, the Taliban...Put A Stop To It.
The Next Phases
As some officials begin to comprehend the impact of the Internet, we begin to see the phase of "caution" and "restraint." In the U.S., for instance, we have federal programs to wire every school and public library for Internet access--but politicians still fuss and fume about "Net Nanny" programs and how to write laws that meticulously prevent librarians from just using a little common sense. State tax officials are hard at work trying to harmonize state sales tax laws in order to implement sales taxes on e-commerce purchases. In some places--a very few places--politicians and bureaucrats are even talking (NB: talking, not acting) about using community development funds to wire downtowns with fiber optic. These few--these very few--understand that this is the railroad question all over again: if you have cheap bandwidth, you will prosper; if you have little or no bandwidth, your town will die.
That Said, Let's Make Some Distinctions
Several people posting on this topic have brought up the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as an example of draconian law similar to the examples you mentioned. There are certainly aspects of the DMCA that fall into the Put A Stop To This phase--particularly issues like rules on defeating encryption, whereby "decrypting" something protected by ROT13 becomes a federal crime. (The best response to that, as with safety razors in Illinois, is publicity and ridicule.) But one of the major challenges facing governments--the bureaus, the courts, and the representatives--is the development of intangible property. Note that I'm explicitly not using the term "intellectual property"--the issue is broader, and different, than intellectual property laws. The Internet enables the instantaneous transfer of valuable merchandise across borders--municipal borders, state borders, and national borders. If I buy a copy of Opera 6.0 for example, I am "importing" software from Norway. Except--I actually import nothing. If I go to a website and pay $16 for MP3 files of eight of my favorite songs, I get something valuable (Econ 1A--it's valuable because I'm willing to pay for it). But I do not have even one more molecule than I owned before I started that download. That presents all kinds of problems: a huge portion of tax receipts depend upon various forms of excise taxes, and excise taxes depending upon physical property crossing physical boundaries. (Quiz: if I buy $34,000 worth of map data from a provider in Europe and retrieve the data by FTP, does the transaction get included in balance of payment statistics reported by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce? Nope.) As more and more commerce consists of file transfers and other forms of distributing intangible property, oodles of legal, financial, and tax issues appear. The DMCA has some dumb aspects--but it is at least a first attempt to come to grips with some of this issues.
Moving forward
As the world and the Internet community forge ahead, there will be ample opportunities to learn from other people's mistakes. When a judge in, say, Ohio prepares to issue a decision banning "hate speech" there may be an assistant who will point out that the speech in question is a fatwa issued in Iran, and the ruling might make the judge look as silly as that bozo judge in France.
There is another dimension
Regardless of whether, when, or how politicians around the world finally come to grips with the Internet, there will always be someone, somewhere, who wants to prevent it. With good reason: there are lots of cultures around the world that feel threatened by American movies, American music, American literature, and American attitudes about all sorts of things. And they--rightly--see the Internet as a conduit for all things American, and fear the consequences for their cultures. And that's an entirely legitimate fear--even with millions of users from other countries, the Internet culture is a mirror image of the American "frontier experience" in its wildest and wooliest. I think that's a good thing--but I'm an American. The Saudis, the Chinese, the Taliban, and a fool of a judge in Paris all disagree. There's an irony in the fact that a tool developed by the U.S. Defense Department will become the ultimate weapon of American cultural hegemony. And eventually the bureaucrats, courts, and politicians will have to come to grips with that.
In sum...
When pundits or pols in Austria, Australia, or Austin are fussing and fulminating about this Internet-based Crisis! or that, remember: this is just a phase. Pat them on the head, and tell that someday they will grow out of it.
I personally think you have a chip on your shoulders by your suggestion Jiang should be prohibited from having business ties while Bush and company can.
I think that, perhaps, you misunderstand my point. I was describing business practices in Asia, particularly China, and how often it is that winning bids with the government include close relatives of senior government officials. No better example existed than Indonesia under Suharto, but since Suharto left office there has been nobody who does official graft with such elan as the Chinese.
You seem intent on bringing up Messrs Bush and Cheney, rather than responding to my point. Okay--let's deep-drill your idea. Mr. Cheney, while an advisor to Bush's presidential campaign, retained his post as CEO of Halliburton, a major oil services company. (What do they do? They provide oil drilling equipment, they build pipelines, they maintain pumping equipment--they provide all the services that keep oil fields working.) And, once he was on the Republican ticket, he took quite a while to divest himself of his Halliburton stock and options. And the Halliburton board gave him a whopping severance package. So--he has close ties to the oil companies.
But that's not all. Do you remember the Kursk? The Russian submarine that sank in the Baltic? Do you remember that it was raised by a team of Norwegian divers? Did you--perchance--explore the website of the firm that raised the Kursk, and discover who they were? A joint venture with Halliburton. Which is to say, Vice President Dick Cheney has, at least in some sense, business ties with the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy.
And (and here's the point) the American response is, "so what? It's just business." In American social terms one can engage in business relationships with all sorts of people, without agreeing with their politics or policies. Elsewhere in the world, on the other hand, people rarely divorce their opinions from their wallets with such ease.
Which brings us back to Jiang and Red Flag:
And you know this how?
I've been doing business in Asia for almost ten years. My family has been involved in Asia even longer (working for various government agencies directly, as well as for the World Bank). While I don't presently maintain an apartment in Tokyo (which I did for a couple of years) I work very hard to stay in touch. I have a pretty good handle on how business is done in Asia.
Sorry to disappoint you, but Bush and Cheney are know to have ties to many, if not all, of the major oil companies in the US. I'm not even going to touch on the subject of stock ownership.
So what?
Trotting out the aging bromide about "Bush and Cheney are know [sic] to have ties to many, if not all, major oil companies in the US" is a) silly and b) beside the point. The finances of federal politicians, including Bush and Cheney are a matter of public disclosure and public record. (For example, here's a link to George W. Bush's disclosure statements for tax years 1998 and 1999.)
What is more to the point is what Dubya did before he got into politics: he was the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers--a post he held despite being one of the smaller investors in the group that bought the team. Why give Dubya the job? Well--perhaps the fact that his father was president of the United States at the time might have been some influence....
In this circumstance, the presence of Jiang in the bidding process was absolutely, positively of influence. Jiang's company entered the bidding, Jiang's company won the bidding. The relative merits of Linux, Windows, Open Source, or green tea were immaterial. That's how business is done in China.
The second-to-last sentence in the ChipCenter article explains a lot:
Jiang Mianhang, the very own son of China's president, is one of Red Flag's chief backers.
One of the many things that distinguish Americans from the rest of the world--and particularly from Asians--is the American social construct of "just business." I hope you understand, the tycoon says to his beloved, I had to destroy your father's empire and bankrupt all your siblings--but it was 'just business.' This is central to the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie, "You've Got Mail"--Hanks's character is a big-block bookstore tycoon who wipes the small businesswoman (Ryan) off the map--but she falls in love with him anyway. It is practically impossible to explain to most Americans how oddly this strikes practically anybody in the rest of the world. Particularly in Asia.
Nothing, in China, is "just business." You cannot trash-talk a country for their laxity in intellectual property rights and then expect to sell them software licenses. But you also cannot even begin to think that the son of the Chinese President is to be treated as just another vendor. The presence of Red Flag in the bidding guaranteed that Red Flag would win the bidding. That's how business is done in China.
What's instructive in this, however, is that six other vendors also "won" in the bidding--it might be very interesting to see what they offered (such as what OS and what word processors). It might not be particularly surprising to discover that one or more is a Microsoft reseller. One can spank a disrespectful suitor (Microsoft) by pointedly excluding them from the vendor list--but offer Microsoft an opportunity to regain favor by including a reseller (or perhaps more than one) on the list.
Microsoft got stiffed; the president's son won the biggest chunk of the business. Anybody in China could have told you that would happen. The real story is whether there are any Microsoft-OS suppliers on this vendor list, or if the Beijing government has embraced Linux exclusively.
...it seems like there are a few people/communities who have overcome things that you and you collaboraters were not able to hack.
I've looked through most of the higher-mod'd posts--paying particular attention to been-there/done-that posts. Let me suggest that the stories fall into three categories:
We set up a Linux box! One or two volunteers set up a Linux box as a web server, proxy server, mail server (or all three).
We set up three Linux boxes! A squad of volunteers set up several Linux boxes as network file storage. Great idea--but once again we come back to the scalability problem. One box functioning as a NAS server sounds great--but how do you back it up? And if you have 3, or 5, or 8 boxes with different hardware configurations, scattered across the district, how do you back them up? Remember--school districts have lots of buildings across big geographical areas. Sending somebody around with a stack of DLT tapes is not a good solution. A standardized NAS box (with a standardized tape drive, or a centralized backup method) is a lot more maintainable solution.
I scrounged up 5|10|25 386sx|386|486 boxes for my classroom, and installed Linux! I have tremendous respect for teachers willing to do this--but the consequence is inevitably the circumstance that I described in my original post: the fact that somebody can cobble together two dozen cast-offs encourages the school board to cut funding for new hardware or IT support staff.
It's easy to applaud that heroic teacher with 25 386 computers in his classroom at a high school in New Orleans. But that guy is almost part of the problem, not the solution. Because the school board is doubtless saying, "see--we have computers in our schools." They're computers most Third World educators would be ashamed of, but they have computers in the schools, by golly.
Think about the end result:
At the end of the student's school career he or she will go off to college, or go into the work force. If the student gets a job, he or she will be confronted with systems that are radically faster, more capable, and substantially more complex. The student will be substantially behind the curve. His peer that went to college will be worse off: competing against students from districts that invested in technology and offered things like AP courses in programming (C++). The kids in a New Orleans classroom with 25 386sx and 386 boxes are dead meat on a stick when they have to compete against kids from a district that assigned PowerPoint slide projects as homework for 7th graders. (Not that PowerPoint is good--I think PP numbs the brain. But kids who are familiar with the tools at that age have a HUGE advantage in college and in the workplace.)
Bottom line: shipping scrap to the local schools may give you a tax write-off, but it ends up doing nothing (or worse) for the kids.
We faced the same problems you addressed but we did something about it and it's working.;-)
I beg to differ.
I applaud the success that you have had--but I note that on your demo site you take pains to point out the specific motherboard, video, and network adapters that you used, based on your prior knowledge of their reliability. Which, um, sounds like precisely what I was saying. If the local mill walked into one of your managed classrooms and dropped off a stack of IBM Micro-Channel PS/2 boxes, what would you do?
And more to the point, what would you do if you had to support not that one classroom, but scores of classrooms across a large geographical area? And support all the other aspects of the district's technology program at the same time? (The telephones, cable TV, building security systems--even the headsets for the football and soccer coaches.)
I note, particularly, that your organization focuses on 4th to 8th graders. It would be very informative to hear why you do not provide services for pre-K through 3rd grade. Is it, perhaps, because of the massive amounts of curriculum software available (not to even mention the "third-party" game software teachers always use) all of it depends upon DOS and/or Windows? And getting any two packages to work together simultaneously on most video cards is a cast-iron b*tch? (Lurkers: if you're not familiar with the problem, trust me: the hardest classrooms to provide computers to are the K-3 classes. The video driver problems would curl your hair.)
A working solution in a single classroom is not, by a long stretch, the same thing as providing IT services across the entire school district.
Please forgive me if I sound a little petulant. But I take umbrage at the toss-off line at the bottom of your post to the effect that "...we did something about it." I resent that--we busted buns to develop a district-wide IT plan. We measured user ability, satisfaction, and use before we implemented the plan; we measured ability, satisfaction, and use after we implemented the plan. We deliver "100% school time up time", while computer usage in the district has soared, and machine outages have dropped to essentially zero. The IT plan has done so well that the IT staff has effectively slit their own throats: the school board almost eliminated one of the (3.5) positions last year because things were going so well.
Thanks for taking the time to write. However, I'm not sure we're communicating. You have described a splendid concept for a computer-oriented program for older students. You suggest that you could have done all of what you propose at age 10 (start from fdisked machines, a stack of CDs, and a pile of printed README documents). You seem to suggest that since you could have done this, anybody could have done this. And you seem to think that spending an entire year doing this would be beneficial.
Alas, the Pennsylvania Department of Education would probably disagree. They would vastly prefer if the district's 10-year-olds were engaged in other pedagogical pursuits: reading, writing, 'rithmetic, sex education, drug-awareness education, enviro/political behavior modification, etc.
Please forgive the sarcasm, but please also understand that the focus of computers in classrooms is not to make computer techs out of the 6th graders. The point is to use the computers to learn academic subjects. We don't want students, or teachers, to ever have to think about partitioning a hard drive or re-compiling the OS kernel. We want them to think about using e-mail to collaborate with an "email pal" across the world; or to use NetMeeting or Groove to collaborate with students in other district buildings. The computer is not the raison d'etre--it is the tool.
The scene: "Public Comment" time at a school board meeting. The previous speaker, a senior citizen, has spoken at length about the burden of school taxes on the elderly in the community. He has particularly emphasized his opposition to the blatantly gold-plated technology proposals in the school budget (including the 4--count 'em, 4! PDAs for the district IT staff). Then the school board's self-designated Taxpayer Advocate clears his throat, and says, "Y'know, I was talking to our IT director at work the other day, and we're getting rid of a bunch of computers. Some are 486s, but a lot are Pentiums--we could provide a lot of those machines to the district at little or no cost....
...And another dumb IT decision is in the offing. Lots of people want to donate their downstreamed equipment to the schools. Sometimes they genuinely think they're doing good: most of the time they're trying to claim a tax credit for the contribution, and will "suggest" valuations for each machine that they drop off. All too often those donations cost the district actual cash--because you have to pay a HazMat hauler to take the monitors these days.
Linux and other free (as in beer) software may well have a place in education. There is a very powerful argument, for instance, for creating an Office-type suite with extensive classroom management tools. Given that school environments can be extraordinarily hostile (think of the kinds of behavior that occurs in a middle school classroom if the teacher steps out into the hall) there is a persuasive argument to be made for a robust platform like (ahem) FreeBSD.
But. Please please please do not even think of saddling the poor, overworked techs at your local school district with your worn-out, leftover, good-for-nothing junk. You are doing them no favors, you are doing no good to the district, and you are probably preventing adoption of a well-thought-through technology plan by "donating" your scrap equipment.
Computers in schools
I'm on the Technology Committee of the Nazareth (Pa.) Area School District. We've played out that scenario at the top of this post several times. We have had several area companies offer to donate their scrap to us. We have had several board members get positively indignant that we have spurned those offers. We did spurn those offers, and if I have any say in the matter we will continue to spurn those offers--here's why.
This is a hostile environment
Suppose your employer decides to install a new computer system. And suppose a computer-phobic customer service rep decides that he doesn't want to use the new system. Your employer has a simple remedy: fire the CSR. Doesn't work that way in American schools: if you want the teacher to use a computer, you have to persuade her/him.
This is a hostile environment #2
Teachers (no surprise, right?) don't want to look stupid in front of their students. But the kids are substantially more adept with computers than the teachers--so the teachers have a built-in ambivalence (at best) about computers.
So we have to persuade teachers to use a device that potentially can humiliate them in front of their students. How?
From hard-won experience, the district IT staff has to offer absolutely bullet-proof reliability. They have to be able to guarantee--and deliver on that guarantee--that the computers will be there, working flawlessly, whenever the teacher wants. No reboots, no network hassles, no video driver conflicts (elementary teachers probably use more video games than CmdrTaco), no need to get an MSCE in order to teach 3rd grade. In other words, the district IT staff has to provide Service Level Agreement-style functionality.
But...
do you think this means that anybody is willing to pay for a district IT staff? Funny boy--the school board will fund an extra assistant to the wrestling program in a heartbeat, but they won't spend a dime for a part-time LAN geek unless you do some major politicking. So what IT staff you have (4100 students, 450 employees, 7 buildings over 80 square miles, 3.5 IT staff) have to make do with what they have.
Which means...
They have to standardize, standardize, standardize. Every elementary classroom has to have the same video cards; every machine has to have the same network adapter; every machine in the high school has to have the same monitor. They have to develop a formalized bug-tracking system to identify recurring problems, and they have to take a systemic view of the entire IT picture in order to maintain 100% uptime. Because if they provide less than 100% uptime the teachers will stop using the system, and the parents will start calling the school board. And so forth....
So please...
Don't "do the kids a favor" and ship them junk. If you want to make a meaningful donation, call the school district and ask if you can give them the money to buy another one of their reference desktops. If they're running Windows, hold your nose and buy Windows. If they're running a bunch of out-of-date kiddie games, hold your nose and buy the out-of-date kiddie games. Do not make their lives miserable by sending them leftovers, or by going out to Circuit City and buying a $399 special. (God save the IT staff from the enthusiasm of the PTA.)
If you want to champion Open Source in the schools
Don't go preaching Linux as religion. Get involved, go to meetings, be prepared to make a reasonable case, and be prepared to argue for a complete replacement of the entire district IT infrastructure. And be prepared for war from the elementary teachers and the PTA: elementary school software runs on Windows, period. If you want to replace it, you'd best have a bunch of kids games tested and ready to go.
Bottom line:
Computers are crucial to education in the 21st century. I teach in a graduate program, and I'm constantly amazed at the number of MBA students with only the faintest glimmer of understanding about computers and technology. But the route to learning about computers and technology is not with leftover junk--it is with a carefully-developed, meticulously-managed, (and yes, sometimes rigidly enforced) IT plan that promises a "100% school time up time" service level, and delivers it. If the users can trust that the computers will be there, they will learn. If they can't trust the computers, they will learn to hate them.
A key reason behind Toshiba's decision to exit commodity DRAM production is a long slide in DRAM prices that began in the summer of 2000, which has pushed prices to below-cost levels leaving Toshiba, and almost all DRAM makers, losing money on every chip they sell. [Emphasis mine]
In other words, there is a price war going on. And, if ITWorld's sources are correct, there is at least one producer who is making money manufacturing DRAM at these prices. Given that Micron is buying the DRAM plant (and running TV ads selling DRAM via Crucial), it seems clear that Micron a) thinks they can make money in the DRAM business, and b) thinks that they can use that plant in Virginia to make DRAM more competitively than Toshiba did.
Two points:
This suggests strongly that we won't see a DRAM price rise anytime soon. Several posts on this topic have pointed out that when you see market players exiting, supply tightens up and prices rise--but in this case supply isn't going to decrease, only the brand names will change.
This is also extremely interesting to those of us who heard of the "vaunted Japanese electronics industry" throughout the '80s and '90s. The dominance of the DRAM market by Toshiba and NEC was so overwhelming that Peters and Waterman bent over backwards to chronicle the contrarian investments of an Idaho potato farmer named J.R. Simplot. Simplot, who more-or-less invented the frozen french fry, was watching TI and Motorola bail from the commodity DRAM market, and plowing his millions into a plucky upstart...by the name of Micron. 12 or 13 years after In Search of Excellence featured Micron in a clearly David-vs-Goliath-and-we're-not-betting-on-David tone, it would seem that an American company has beaten the Japanese electronics industry at their own game, driving them from the marketplace. That is an interesting story.
(hint : moving like a sleek penguin under arctic ice).
[quibble]Any penguin under arctic ice is seriously lost. Antarctic ice, certainly. The Falklands, and other land masses of the high southern latitudes, certainly. But not in the Arctic.[/quibble]
You may well have seen a grocery store chain experiment with prices--that's a practice that's been going on for decades. (Grocery stores routinely change different prices in different neighborhoods--a few cents more in rich neighborhoods (where consumers will pay more for convenience) and a few cents less in poor neighborhoods (where consumers may be more price-sensitive). The "frequent shopper" card systems won't really impact that--grocery stores can map price/demand (elasticity) curves already.
What the frequent shopper programs do is help the stores manage what products get displayed, how they get displayed, and how they are priced. They do this by identifying the "core customers"--both of the chain, and of that particular store.
Most consumers purchase most of their groceries at one particular store. They might shop at a different store (it's adjacent to your child's school, so you can stop in on your way to work) occasionally, but that big hundred-bucks-a-week trip usually happens the same place. By offering lower prices on selected items, the stores entice the frequent shopper to sign up for the card, and permit his shopping habits to be tracked. While this offers the theoretical possibility of monitoring the customer (we get our prescription drugs at the grocery store--if I start getting scrips filled for AZT, does that mean I have AIDS?), it offers the immediate opportunity of selling coupons to advertisers. (To wit: I buy dog food--even when I am not buying dog food in that particular trip, I almost always get a dog food coupon at the register.)
The real advantage of a frequent shopping card, though, is identifying the buying habits--in the aggregate--of the store's core buyers. It helps enormously in making "plan-o-gram" decisions: how much of what to stock where. Example: last week the deli ran out of salmon four days running. Should we increase our daily order of salmon? Well--if our data shows that most of that salmon was bought by frequent shoppers, the answer is obviously yes--these are customers who will likely be back for more seafood. On the other hand, if very few of our frequent shoppers bought that salmon, it might be wise to wait--we may have had a statistical cluster of salmon-swallowing tourists in the neighborhood. In a similar way, we can identify whether our core customers buy more of our store brands or the name brands for particular products. We may find differences between this behavior in different stores: in stores where our brands do better, we give those brands more space; where our core customers prefer the name brands, we give the name brands more shelf space. In any case, we tailor the shelf space in each store to focus on the product mix favored by the frequent shoppers in that store--that may mean more salmon in some stores, and more produce in others. (Real live example: there is a chain grocery store in Morrisville, Vermont--a tiny town thirty miles from the Canadian border--that has five different varieties of fresh mushrooms in the produce section on any given day. Why? Because their core customers like mushrooms. [Real Vermonters might suggest that this store caters to quiche-eating flatlanders, and offer this as proof, but I digress....)
In the example that you cite:
...Next thing you know, my 79 cent loaf costs $1.39 and I'm supposed to feel lucky when they sometimes offer a special membership price of $1.10. Uh huh.
The store might test different prices to determine your resistance to a price increase (this is called "elasticity" by economists--elasticity is to Econ majors as pointers are to CS majors: if you don't get the concept, you tend to go find another major). If you're going to buy French bread, and you're willing to pay $1.39, that's the price. The frequent shopper cards may help in letting the store measure price resistance among the core shoppers (that is, if 80% of the store's french bread is sold to frequent shopper cardholders, and they demonstrate a near-horizontal elasticity curve [change the price, they don't care] then the store can safely hike the price of french bread). But stores have measured elasticity like this, as I wrote above, for decades--all the frequent shopper cards do is let them measure price resistance more accurately.
IMHO, anybody who
installs database software without setting the password (Heck, installs any software that has passwords without changing the default) and
exposes their corporate database to the web
is too incompetent to keep their job. I seriously believe that infections like this should start becoming yardsticks that system administrators are hired and fired against.
I so agree with you. But you'll find unsecured SQL Server databases exposed to the public Internet all the time. I've seen it particularly with Small Business Server (package of Microsoft Back Office products, including SQL Server). A small company buys a package deal from a local vendor--they start hosting their own web pages, using SQL Server, and never even wondering about anything like security.
There is plenty of fault to go around here: the small business bears some responsibility--they're buying a tool without providing the resources to use the tool appropriately. But there are lots of small vendors out there that fancy themselves as Microsoft OEMs and ISVs, assembling kit computers, doing the basic install with zero configuration (or security updates) and plugging the box into the client's network. This is precisely the market for Microsoft's Small Business Server--a low budget tool, and frequently completely unprotected.
And sometimes it's the client
Sometimes the client absolutely insists on shooting himself in the foot. I have a proposal outstanding to a warehousing firm--they're dragging their feet, and part of the reason is that they don't want to pay for two servers. (One is publicly accessible, the other [which has the SQL Server installed] is not.) Why can't we use the same box as the web server and the SQL Server? Well, gosh--because then anybody with SQL Enterprise Manager can connect on port 1433, and keep retrying passwords as long as he wants--the login dialog never times out.
You heard it here first: this worm will affect a lot more companies that you'd think.
The book industry has business rules that date (literally) back to the time of Gutenberg. Among those business rules are a standard trade practice of permitting bookstores to return books for full credit up to a year after the date the bookstore bought the book from a publisher or wholesaler.
For most publishers returns are a colossal pain in the neck. You have to inspect the books to determine if they are damaged, you have to restock the book into the warehouse location, you have to handle a bunch of accounting grief--the list goes on and on. For most "trade" publishers return rates average from 5% to 15% of books shipped.
For mass-market publishers the business rules are a bit different. Mass-market publishers use substantially cheaper materials, and print in substantially larger volumes--they will release lists of titles each month, and will only anticipate a selling season of one to three months. When the bookstore pulls the book from the shelves it does not return the entire book (there's no point: the publisher has declared the book out of print). Instead the bookstore rips the front cover off of the book and just returns the cover for credit. The bookstore is then supposed to dump the body of the book in the trash.
However, if you browse the sidewalk stands in midtown Manhattan you will notice hundreds if not thousands of paperback books that are missing their front covers. What happens is that a bookstore (or clerk) sells the stripped bodies out the back door to the sidewalk merchant. It might be for a few cents per copy; it might even just be to avoid the cost of paying a trash hauler to take the books away. But that stripped book has been declared to the publisher as having been discarded, and the author does not receive any royalties for the sale.
Years ago I was the business manager of a small publishing house (where I installed Netware 86 in 1983). My little company still does software development for publishers and warehousing companies.
And since I just noticed that you're at Lehigh, I should mention that I'm in Wind Gap, twenty miles north of you.
Is Critical Thinking Just Not Popular Anymore?
on
Brian West Update
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeesh!
There are a ton of breathless posts up on this subject, all saying "Gosh! He plead to the Fed charges--that means he's a crook!" And, as is all too usual for/. commentators, everybody seems to have stopped reading the prosecutor's press release right there.
Let's stop right there for a moment: this is not a news article. It is a press release, issued by the Federal prosecutor. Press releases, on their face, are designed to promote a person, product, or cause--they make no pretense at all of being comprehensive or factual. They are more than 'spin'--they are a carefully-structured form of shaping the truth. In other words, when your government lies to you, it usually uses a press release to do so. "We'll protect your civil liberties while monitoring your email and listening to your phone calls?" Press release. The many public benefits of Echelon? Press release. The pressing need for a national ID card? Soon to be a press release.
So let's put on our critical thinking hats, kiddies, and re-read this press release with a little more critical attitude. Let's start with the simple facts: Brian West was cruising a news site; he found a security flaw; he downloaded a couple of PERL scripts; he called the editor of the paper the next day and told the editor he'd found a flaw. The newspaper editor flipped out, called the FBI, the FBI showed up at Brian West's office, Brian West (really stupidly) blithely gives the FBI permission to search his hard drive and copy all of his files, and gets charged with hacking. Right?
Now let's think of the context: hackers are Evil. They get long jail terms--they do hard time. Nailing a hacker has all kinds of sex appeal for a prosecutor--computer crime is very juicy stuff for the media. (The best example is right here on SlashDot--look at how many people have read this bit of fluff and leapt to post comments about how wicked this West fellow was, and how much we should apologize for all those nasty things we said about the cops.) So just how "nailed" was West?
You'll have to go all the way down to the bottom of the press release: the maximum penalty for this misdemeanor (speeding is a misdemeanor) is a year in jail. But the prosecutor's press release says explicitly that West will probably get probation. And (read a little higher up) West has been released without bail--solely on his promise to appear--pending sentencing.
Now--why would the prosecutor's self-issued press release admit that this heinous computer crook has received a complete pass? That he won't do a day in prison, won't pay a penny in fines, and has been released without bond pending sentencing? Remember: this is the prosecutor's press release, so this is the most positive spin the prosecutor can put on this.
Because the prosecutor didn't have a case--but West had probably run out of money. Note that West had two lawyers to pay (not that legal fees in Edmond, OK or Cleveland, TX are gargantuan, but presumably West wasn't exactly rich either). There are lots of times in the American legal system where justice is lost in the rush to expediency. "Criminals" plead guilty to misdemeanors with no penalties because they can't afford the cost of a trial. Prosecutors demand guilty pleas--even if there is effectively no sentence--in order to chalk the case up as a "win". This, I'd bet, is precisely one of those cases.
Ask yourself this question: if the Justice Department had issued this kind of press release for Dmitry Skylarov, would you regard it as a rousing vindication of the Feds--or a moral victory for the defendant?
So...you want to block all network traffic whatsoever?
Or are we just blocking stupid people from cheating?
Actually, I just made a comment on SlashDot explaining what the Babson software project really addresses. In my classes (e-commerce concentration classes for our MBA program) I routinely do have students use the Internet during class. E.g. compare/contrast different websites for the customer experience; compare/contrast different news sites for ease of access to information; walk through use of different Internet-based research tools; and so forth. Internet connectivity in the classroom can be a good thing.
On the other hand, some people have discovered that you can use the Internet to cheat. In my original post I mentioned a half-dozen kids who were caught (at the local high school, not at DeSales) using AIM to swap answers in a quiz. The word here is "cheating"--but one set of parents got extremely upset at the notion that little Jimmy was accused of cheating. He was using the Internet! Passing the answers on a printed sheet of paper, why that would be cheating--but doing it with an AIM client, why that's technology!
Unbelievably, the school caved. Warned the kids, changed the school cheating policy, and said, "tut tut, don't let us catch you doing that again." The kids no doubt learned a lesson: nothing is wrong until you get caught.
IANAL-BIAAP (I Am Not A Lawyer But I Am A Professor). The AP article and the sources the writer quotes at Babson are being, um, polite.
All of you have probably heard of "research services" on the web where students can download papers. This, as you might imagine, scares the wits out of professors--is this brilliant, trenchant insight into the financial impact of the introduction of telegraphy into the American West in the 1870s the product of your dilligent research and extraordinary writing skills? Or am I reading a paper you grabbed off the night this morning for twenty bucks? (Yes--fraternities had and have libraries of course material, but that's much easier to detect.)
What Babson is trying to deal with is a variant of the same problem: if I ask a question in class, I don't want students looking up the answer on Google. If I give a quiz in class, I particularly don't want students using Instant Messaging clients to share answers. (I haven't seen this happen in my class--but I'm on the Technology Committee of the local school district, and a half-dozen high school kids were caught doing precisely this.)
This isn't a free speech issue: this is a matter of preventing people from cheating.
but I've read some articles in the Register and elsewhere that indicate that MS has a pricing policy that makes XP cheaper if it is purchased before a specific cut-off date that is looming rapidly. If you upgrade to XP later, subsequent Agreements will be more expensive.
You are absolutely correct. The drop-dead date for signing up for their Open License program (which is effectively an annual subscription for software) is either October 1 or October 10. And my largest customer, number 2xx on the Fortune 500, is so far content to say, "drop dead." They're not moving.
I find it interesting that these companies even care. Windows XP offers a few bells and whistles--but it doesn't offer a lot more than Windows 2000. Sure--it offers support for joysticks and heavy-duty gaming. But that doesn't strike me as a compelling new feature causing a corporation to upgrade ("And, uh, this slide shows how we'll be able to use this new version to install Dirk Blasto Space Invader joysticks in all of our CSR workstations to handle irate callers...").
It seems to me that Microsoft isn't just trying to shift the business model from a "purchase" to a "pay-for-use" model, as many have suggested. I think they're also trying to--or will end up being forced into--a business model similar to Intel's. When the next round of microprocessors appears the chips are sold at a premium price--and the product clears the market at that price. As Intel rachets up production it can profitably lower the price, clearing the market of demand at that lower level. The cycle keeps repeating--Intel (and other semiconductor manufacturers) have this down pat.
Microsoft has done similar things in the past. Their Visual Studio 6.0 toolset is, by now, quite long in the tooth. They sold tons in the early days of the product, but sales are considerably lower--so Microsoft offers bundled books and tools, and offers lower prices to resellers, to sell product. In effect they're lowering the price to entice buyers into the market who aren't willing to pay the higher price.
I think we're going to see the same thing with XP. Corporations are simply going to stand pat: why upgrade? All XP gives you is some easily-ignored bells and whistles, and the ability to use joysticks. In order to get corporations to upgrade Microsoft is going to have to make it worth the corporations while--which will almost certainly mean price decreases and less draconian license restrictions.
My largest customer is number 2xx on the Fortune 500. They're just now rolling out Windows 2000 to desktops around the world--and they have shelved plans for even piloting XP. Microsoft wants them to upgrade--but can't make a compelling case for a whopping upgrade expense (plus the cost of actually installing the OS, labor, etc.) in a time of tightly-trimmed budgets and some layoffs. "Hey," said a friend and senior manager, "we just announced we're whacking 200 people. If we spend three million bucks installing XP we're going to have to whack another 40. Is the ability to use a joystick worth those peoples' jobs?"
Last week I attended a seminar that included an impromptu lecture by a highly-regarded economist. One of the key changes in the economy over the past 20 years, as he sees it, is that manufacturers by and large have lost control of their pricing. You don't ship shirts to a department store and tell them what to charge--instead you get a purchase order from Wal-Mart telling you what they're willing to pay. And you deal. The major exception that this economist mentioned was pharmaceutical companies, because they're protected by patents on their products. If your doctor prescribes ButaGlutaMax, you can only get it from one place. An exception he did not mention was software--and I think Microsoft is about to learn this lesson. In a booming economy with a bazillion dot-coms buying PCs, Microsoft sold a lot of OSs. The boom is over, budgets are drying up all over the world, and Microsoft is trying to force through a price increase. I don't think they're going to be able to control their prices this time around.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi!
I'm the father of a little girl with Down syndrome--she has an IQ of 58. I'm sure you'll understand that I become terrified when people speak of "taking control of our genetic future." Given the options, I'll choose to put up with stupid people for the rest of human existence.
Except, well, that the USPS doesn't buy them from Jeep. (Jeep, BTW, isn't a company. Jeep is a brand of DaimlerChrysler.) The USPS buys vehicles from a variety of vendors, under contract. Here, for instance, is an article (with photo) about the USPS buying electric-powered mail vehicles from Ford.
If you browse the New Business Ideas page of the USPS web site, you'll find that the Post Office is looking for new ways to generate revenue. That's why there are Federal Express drop boxes outside post offices these days--and why Federal Express is hauling Express Mail for the USPS. If they can get Microsoft to pay them money to distribute advertising in the post office, how is that different from AOL paying them to carpet-bomb America with sign-up CDs? The more ways the USPS finds to produce revenue, the lower postage costs will be. Is that a bad thing?
Back in the days of the Cold War there was a joke that went like this:
In a very real sense, the Internet will come to be viewed as the ultimate secret weapon. Information is very hard to control, and free access to information is a serious threat to the despot. The Chinese and the Saudis both fear free access to information--they're sufficiently connected to the rest of the world to know that they can't simply disconnect their people from the Internet, but they're trying very hard to prevent access to "bad information." The Chinese, in particular, are cracking down on Internet cafes (here's an article from the official People's Daily, a slightly different perspective from the Digital Freedom Network).
An effective way to attack injustice is publicity--and an effective retort is to say, "oh, but [name other country] is doing it too--we agree completely." In this case, the Chinese and the Saudis can loudly and publicly proclaim their agreement with "the Americans" and continue tightening the screws on their citizens access to information.
One of the great strengths of America is that any clown can run for elective office. One of the great weaknesses of America is that so many clowns manage to get elected.
I'll disagree with you about whether Morgantown was PRT or not--that was, after all, the project that coined the term. But that's beside the point. What is the point, and is the big limitation with any kind of PRT system, regardless of the car size, is that PRT requires a dedicated, exclusive right-of-way. And that is fatal.
A dedicated right-of-way essentially limits people to traveling up and down the line. Larger systems might include intersections with other lines--extremely large systems might build lines for the express purpose of facilitating connections (such as JR's Yamanote line around Tokyo). But dedicated rights of way force people to live, work, and shop along those rights of way.
The original idea for PRT was to address that very problem: develop a system that did not require the rider to change lines, but instead would permit you to go from your originating station to your destination without changing trains. (The design firm that pushed this concept was headquartered in suburban Chicago. You only have to change trains on the CTA elevated once in February to understand the appeal of this concept.) The system proponents (and their associates at UMTA) envisioned creating something like PRT on the scale of the Chicago transit system--but, once you were in a car, you could go anywhere in the system nonstop, without changing lines.
A great idea. But even with that version of the idea, on a scale of that magnitude, you'd still fail. Because work patterns change; life patterns change. If you have an auto you no longer have to pay the higher rent for an apartment that is near to a busy train station; you don't have to pay inflated prices at a small grocery store near that station; and if you want to take your daughter for dance lessons in the next town over, you can. No standing on a transit platform, no exposure to crime, substantially less hassle.
Where transit, particularly fixed right-of-way transit, is successful is where there are obstacles to cars. Particularly artificial obstacles that are easy to manipulate, like bridges. One of the most financially viable transit systems in the U.S. is a small line run by the Delaware River Port Authority, connecting Lindenwold, NJ with downtown Philadelphia. Why is this line successful? Because the DRPA also runs the four bridges across the Delaware River that connect South Jersey to Pennsylvania. They set the tolls on the bridge and the fares on the transit system to a) cover costs, and b) balance traffic load. In effect, they use bridge tolls to encourage (read "force") riders onto transit. Absent something like that, fixed right-of-way transit doesn't work.
Actually, in Morgantown it was entirely fair. Ridership was sufficiently low that it would have been completely absurd to bother building any additional road capacity. While my dad got a big laugh (and made a good point) about buying every student and staff member at West Virginia University a new car every two years, that wasn't a serious proposal. (After all, if you added 10,000 new cars to the streets of Morgantown, WV you would need more road capacity.) It was merely a simple metric to get people to understand just how much money was being squandered on this thing.
Part of the reason the project failed was because of how the project got funded. An extremely powerful member of the U.S. Senate, Senator Robert Byrd, represents the state of West Virginia. He views his role in Washington as requiring him to do his utmost for the people of his state--and he views that to mean that he should bring as much federal funding (federal jobs, federal facilities) to West Virginia as possible. He controlled the federal appropriations process, and approved the UMTA PRT project with the proviso that it be built in West Virginia. However--any form of mass transit requires population density and/or significant geographic obstacles to walking or driving. The most successful transit systems in the world (Japan, hands down) combine incredible population density with extremes of geography (mostly geologically unstable soil, which limits building highways). Morgantown has very low population density--so it was a bad choice for a transit system. Had they tried it in a more densely-populated setting, particularly with geographic barriers to cars, they might have achieved more success.
I disagree with your supposition that a PRT car would be less expensive to build than an auto. You correctly point out the problem of scale--transit cars are essentially custom-made. Even if an effort was made to produce a uniform design (such as the President's Conference Committee, which developed the PCC designs used by American and Canadian streetcars in the mid- to late-20th century), you'd still only produce a few thousand per year. Even if you produced 20,000 a year you wouldn't come close: remember that a personal auto is typically driven less than 2 hours per day. (U.S. auto warranties assume that a typical car is driven 1000 miles per month. At 40 mph that's an hour of driving per day.) If we only had a 4% utilization rate (which is what that means) of our PRT cars, the system would be a failure. If we had a 20-25% utilization rate, the system would still be an economic failure, and cars built to personal auto standards would be destroyed in a short period of time. (Consider the abuse that taxis take, for instance.)
This is called Personal Rapid Transit, and the first PRT system in use was a "demonstration project" in Morgantown, West Virginia, funded by the U.S. Dept of Transportation. (Morgantown is the home of West Virginia University, and the system linked the WVU campus and downtown Morgantown.) It was built in the early 1970s, but I believe it is no longer operating. Subsequent to the development of the Morgantown project a similar system was developed at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport. All of the "ultramodern" features described for the system in Cardiff were used there: variable destinations, multiple route paths, standby cars to "flex" demand, etc.
The submitter of this article makes a slight mistake in his summary: PRT, including the Cardiff system, does not envision users being able to take vehicles off the tracks. There have been rail- and rubber tire-based PRT systems proposed, but even the rubber tire-based systems are designed for a dedicated, exclusive right of way. (Several mass transit systems, notably Toronto's, use rubber tires instead of rail.)
PRT suffers from a relatively simple problem: massive capital costs. I believe what finally killed the Morgantown project was a moment of clarity at the Urban Mass Transit Administration (UMTA, the U.S. D.O.T. agency that oversaw the project). A consultant pointed out that while the PRT system had been fun, it would have been substantially cheaper to simply buy every student and staff member of WVU a new car every two years. (My stepfather was the smart-aleck consultant.)
The Cardiff project? Three words: Big Government Boondoggle. The fundamental problem of PRT is the fundamental problem of Light Rail and Monorails too: they are dedicated right-of-way solutions that run along an extremely expensive path. (Even if the cost of construction is trivial, the cost of land acquisition is enormous. If the cost of land acquisition is NOT enormous then there isn't sufficient population density to support a fixed right-of-way system.) It is dramatically cheaper to buy buses. It is dramatically more efficient to run buses. Buses can change routes instantly--so buses that "prowl" the city center Monday through Friday can run on suburban loop routes among shopping malls on Saturday and Sunday. And a bus-based transit system only requires a marginal additional cost for right-of-way (bus stop marking, signs, shelters, etc.).
But buses don't have the sex appeal of big transit projects, so people still throw money at thirty-year-old concepts and call them "ultramodern technology."
How 'bout if we haul out the big networking technology of the time, and proclaim ARCNET as "ultramodern" networking?
Hi!
By way of introduction, let me mention up front that I've been an elected public official, an elected party official, and I've run several political campaigns in municipal, county, and state senate races.
Let me offer some advice.
Don't pitch Open Source
You're attempting two impossible things at one time: you're raising an issue that you simply cannot get across in the limited bandwidth of a campaign; and you're staking your campaign on the city's website and it's present outsourced contractor. Picking on a city vendor is generally a bad campaign strategy, unless the vendor is already on the front page of the newspaper or the current mayor's brother-in-law. Otherwise you are perceived as "rocking the boat" and a nuisance--and you will guarantee yourself absolutely zero cooperation from municipal employees on issues like poster permits, etc. You also instantly create an opponent: the city official responsible for selecting the incumbent (Windows-based) web hosting firm. Who will, undoubtedly, be quoted in the newspaper as saying, "if this guy wants to be the city I.T. director, he should come down to City Hall and fill out a job application. Picking the software for the website isn't City Council's job...."
I'm not kidding. I have seen this happen before.
Back in the late 1980s I recruited a candidate to run for the local school board. This guy was perfect. He had a clue about schools and education, he had kids in the district schools, he was an assistant coach in the local township rec. league, and he had a terrific grasp of financial issues. Except....
The guy was going to TQM (Total Quality Management) training classes, and embracing the TQM religion. And he got religion--he started talking about implementing TQM in the schools, and he wouldn't get off the subject. He talked about it when he was campaigning, he talked about it when he talked to voters at home, he talked about it in his brochures, and he handed out a white paper on TQM at the League of Women Voters meeting. It was, um, a bit over the top. It's been maybe 10-15 years, and I still get grief from local leaders about the guy--where did I dig him up?
What you should do
Understand that you have a very limited amount of bandwidth to talk to the voter. And you have a very limited number of voters to talk to. And 95% of those voters are interested in races that they view as more significant than yours. All of which means that you simply cannot even begin to sell something as complex as Open Source, or as instantly controversial as "replacing the city's Internet consulting firm" (which is how the newspaper will report your campaign platform).
Instead, do these steps:
And hey--if you do get elected, drop me a note. My oldest daughter is going off to college in Lynchburg next fall, and I know she'll be traveling to C'ville for riding lessons. It might be handy to have a contact to call in an emergency.
Your question is similar to one that I have been researching for some time, in my role as an adjunct professor of E-Commerce. What is the impact of the Internet on governments?
There is a rich history of how governments have confronted new technologies in the past. It's the sort of history that I wish high schools would teach: some of the laws passed in response to new technologies are extremely funny. The introduction of steam engines, canals, railroads, the telegraph, repeating arms, the automobile--even the safety razor--emboldened legions of pompous politicians eager to satiate their constituents' desire to Put A Stop To This. And Put A Stop To This they did--until they realized that the next town over was benefiting from all the jobs building the railroad line, or manufacturers were locating plants across the state line to avoid their jurisdiction, or (the worst possible fate for a pol) people were just laughing at them and ignoring the law. (Through 1976, at least, it was illegal for a man in the State of Illinois to shave himself unless he was a licensed barber.)
There typically has been a pattern to how governments (the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the judiciary) come to grips with a new technology. The initial response typically is "Put A Stop To This". The next response is "Regulate It!"--generally meaning "slow it down," as the original cast of pompous pols is replaced by wannabe-graybeards urging "caution" and "restraint." As bureaucrats and politicians see wider acceptance of the technology the next step is natural: "How Can We Tax It?" The rules and requirements tend to get relaxed as the bureaucrats, etc., become comfortable with the technology, in a phase I call "Hey! This Could Be Useful." Ultimately, for extremely disruptive technologies, there is a phase we might call "We'd Better Get On The Bandwagon."
Railroads are a perfect example: in the 1830s and 1840s every politician was in the Put A Stop To This camp; by the later 1840s and early 1850s there was grudging acceptance, but still "restraint" and "caution". (There were, for instance, repeated debates about whether it was safe for the Post Office should use trains to move mail.) By the 1850s railroads were confronting a bevy of tax proposals: taxes on rights-of-way, taxes on locomotives, taxes on rail cars, and taxes on revenue. When the U.S. Army used railroads to bring fresh troops to Gettysburg--and won the battle--the utility of railroads was made manifest. Suddenly every politician was a closet railfan, and the pols fell over one another in their rush to champion, sponsor, or even subsidize the building of Yet Another Railway Line. By the late 1860s, up until the economic collapse of 1873, and then again in the later 1870s, the We'd Better Get On The Bandwagon phase was at its peak: rather than regulating or taxing railroads, politicians were working fiendishly to ensure that the railroad didn't pass them by. Towns with railroads lived, towns without railroads died.
The technology has changed--politicians have not. What has also changed--and what makes this process seem so much more contentious--is that the Internet has appeared in the public consciousness, and in your living room, at an extremely rapid pace. And the pace of change is only increasing. Meanwhile, the pace at which politicians (and bureaucrats and judges) move through the Put A Stop To This/Regulate It To Death/How Can We Tax It/Hey This Could Be Useful framework hasn't changed much.
Which phase are we in?
I think we're definitely in the Put A Stop To This phase, and we're going to stay there for a long time--partly because the pace of change means that there is always something new to put a stop to, but also because the growing reach of the Internet means that there is always a fresh crop of less-than-clueful politicians just a router hop away. When the Internet finally got to Afghanistan, the Taliban...Put A Stop To It.
The Next Phases
As some officials begin to comprehend the impact of the Internet, we begin to see the phase of "caution" and "restraint." In the U.S., for instance, we have federal programs to wire every school and public library for Internet access--but politicians still fuss and fume about "Net Nanny" programs and how to write laws that meticulously prevent librarians from just using a little common sense. State tax officials are hard at work trying to harmonize state sales tax laws in order to implement sales taxes on e-commerce purchases. In some places--a very few places--politicians and bureaucrats are even talking (NB: talking, not acting) about using community development funds to wire downtowns with fiber optic. These few--these very few--understand that this is the railroad question all over again: if you have cheap bandwidth, you will prosper; if you have little or no bandwidth, your town will die.
That Said, Let's Make Some Distinctions
Several people posting on this topic have brought up the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as an example of draconian law similar to the examples you mentioned. There are certainly aspects of the DMCA that fall into the Put A Stop To This phase--particularly issues like rules on defeating encryption, whereby "decrypting" something protected by ROT13 becomes a federal crime. (The best response to that, as with safety razors in Illinois, is publicity and ridicule.) But one of the major challenges facing governments--the bureaus, the courts, and the representatives--is the development of intangible property. Note that I'm explicitly not using the term "intellectual property"--the issue is broader, and different, than intellectual property laws. The Internet enables the instantaneous transfer of valuable merchandise across borders--municipal borders, state borders, and national borders. If I buy a copy of Opera 6.0 for example, I am "importing" software from Norway. Except--I actually import nothing. If I go to a website and pay $16 for MP3 files of eight of my favorite songs, I get something valuable (Econ 1A--it's valuable because I'm willing to pay for it). But I do not have even one more molecule than I owned before I started that download. That presents all kinds of problems: a huge portion of tax receipts depend upon various forms of excise taxes, and excise taxes depending upon physical property crossing physical boundaries. (Quiz: if I buy $34,000 worth of map data from a provider in Europe and retrieve the data by FTP, does the transaction get included in balance of payment statistics reported by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce? Nope.) As more and more commerce consists of file transfers and other forms of distributing intangible property, oodles of legal, financial, and tax issues appear. The DMCA has some dumb aspects--but it is at least a first attempt to come to grips with some of this issues.
Moving forward
As the world and the Internet community forge ahead, there will be ample opportunities to learn from other people's mistakes. When a judge in, say, Ohio prepares to issue a decision banning "hate speech" there may be an assistant who will point out that the speech in question is a fatwa issued in Iran, and the ruling might make the judge look as silly as that bozo judge in France.
There is another dimension
Regardless of whether, when, or how politicians around the world finally come to grips with the Internet, there will always be someone, somewhere, who wants to prevent it. With good reason: there are lots of cultures around the world that feel threatened by American movies, American music, American literature, and American attitudes about all sorts of things. And they--rightly--see the Internet as a conduit for all things American, and fear the consequences for their cultures. And that's an entirely legitimate fear--even with millions of users from other countries, the Internet culture is a mirror image of the American "frontier experience" in its wildest and wooliest. I think that's a good thing--but I'm an American. The Saudis, the Chinese, the Taliban, and a fool of a judge in Paris all disagree. There's an irony in the fact that a tool developed by the U.S. Defense Department will become the ultimate weapon of American cultural hegemony. And eventually the bureaucrats, courts, and politicians will have to come to grips with that.
In sum...
When pundits or pols in Austria, Australia, or Austin are fussing and fulminating about this Internet-based Crisis! or that, remember: this is just a phase. Pat them on the head, and tell that someday they will grow out of it.
I think that, perhaps, you misunderstand my point. I was describing business practices in Asia, particularly China, and how often it is that winning bids with the government include close relatives of senior government officials. No better example existed than Indonesia under Suharto, but since Suharto left office there has been nobody who does official graft with such elan as the Chinese.
You seem intent on bringing up Messrs Bush and Cheney, rather than responding to my point. Okay--let's deep-drill your idea. Mr. Cheney, while an advisor to Bush's presidential campaign, retained his post as CEO of Halliburton, a major oil services company. (What do they do? They provide oil drilling equipment, they build pipelines, they maintain pumping equipment--they provide all the services that keep oil fields working.) And, once he was on the Republican ticket, he took quite a while to divest himself of his Halliburton stock and options. And the Halliburton board gave him a whopping severance package. So--he has close ties to the oil companies.
But that's not all. Do you remember the Kursk? The Russian submarine that sank in the Baltic? Do you remember that it was raised by a team of Norwegian divers? Did you--perchance--explore the website of the firm that raised the Kursk, and discover who they were? A joint venture with Halliburton. Which is to say, Vice President Dick Cheney has, at least in some sense, business ties with the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy.
And (and here's the point) the American response is, "so what? It's just business." In American social terms one can engage in business relationships with all sorts of people, without agreeing with their politics or policies. Elsewhere in the world, on the other hand, people rarely divorce their opinions from their wallets with such ease.
Which brings us back to Jiang and Red Flag:
I've been doing business in Asia for almost ten years. My family has been involved in Asia even longer (working for various government agencies directly, as well as for the World Bank). While I don't presently maintain an apartment in Tokyo (which I did for a couple of years) I work very hard to stay in touch. I have a pretty good handle on how business is done in Asia.
So what?
Trotting out the aging bromide about "Bush and Cheney are know [sic] to have ties to many, if not all, major oil companies in the US" is a) silly and b) beside the point. The finances of federal politicians, including Bush and Cheney are a matter of public disclosure and public record. (For example, here's a link to George W. Bush's disclosure statements for tax years 1998 and 1999.)
What is more to the point is what Dubya did before he got into politics: he was the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers--a post he held despite being one of the smaller investors in the group that bought the team. Why give Dubya the job? Well--perhaps the fact that his father was president of the United States at the time might have been some influence....
In this circumstance, the presence of Jiang in the bidding process was absolutely, positively of influence. Jiang's company entered the bidding, Jiang's company won the bidding. The relative merits of Linux, Windows, Open Source, or green tea were immaterial. That's how business is done in China.
The second-to-last sentence in the ChipCenter article explains a lot:
One of the many things that distinguish Americans from the rest of the world--and particularly from Asians--is the American social construct of "just business." I hope you understand, the tycoon says to his beloved, I had to destroy your father's empire and bankrupt all your siblings--but it was 'just business.' This is central to the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie, "You've Got Mail"--Hanks's character is a big-block bookstore tycoon who wipes the small businesswoman (Ryan) off the map--but she falls in love with him anyway. It is practically impossible to explain to most Americans how oddly this strikes practically anybody in the rest of the world. Particularly in Asia.
Nothing, in China, is "just business." You cannot trash-talk a country for their laxity in intellectual property rights and then expect to sell them software licenses. But you also cannot even begin to think that the son of the Chinese President is to be treated as just another vendor. The presence of Red Flag in the bidding guaranteed that Red Flag would win the bidding. That's how business is done in China.
What's instructive in this, however, is that six other vendors also "won" in the bidding--it might be very interesting to see what they offered (such as what OS and what word processors). It might not be particularly surprising to discover that one or more is a Microsoft reseller. One can spank a disrespectful suitor (Microsoft) by pointedly excluding them from the vendor list--but offer Microsoft an opportunity to regain favor by including a reseller (or perhaps more than one) on the list.
Microsoft got stiffed; the president's son won the biggest chunk of the business. Anybody in China could have told you that would happen. The real story is whether there are any Microsoft-OS suppliers on this vendor list, or if the Beijing government has embraced Linux exclusively.
I've looked through most of the higher-mod'd posts--paying particular attention to been-there/done-that posts. Let me suggest that the stories fall into three categories:
It's easy to applaud that heroic teacher with 25 386 computers in his classroom at a high school in New Orleans. But that guy is almost part of the problem, not the solution. Because the school board is doubtless saying, "see--we have computers in our schools." They're computers most Third World educators would be ashamed of, but they have computers in the schools, by golly.
Think about the end result:
At the end of the student's school career he or she will go off to college, or go into the work force. If the student gets a job, he or she will be confronted with systems that are radically faster, more capable, and substantially more complex. The student will be substantially behind the curve. His peer that went to college will be worse off: competing against students from districts that invested in technology and offered things like AP courses in programming (C++). The kids in a New Orleans classroom with 25 386sx and 386 boxes are dead meat on a stick when they have to compete against kids from a district that assigned PowerPoint slide projects as homework for 7th graders. (Not that PowerPoint is good--I think PP numbs the brain. But kids who are familiar with the tools at that age have a HUGE advantage in college and in the workplace.)
Bottom line: shipping scrap to the local schools may give you a tax write-off, but it ends up doing nothing (or worse) for the kids.
I beg to differ.
I applaud the success that you have had--but I note that on your demo site you take pains to point out the specific motherboard, video, and network adapters that you used, based on your prior knowledge of their reliability. Which, um, sounds like precisely what I was saying. If the local mill walked into one of your managed classrooms and dropped off a stack of IBM Micro-Channel PS/2 boxes, what would you do?
And more to the point, what would you do if you had to support not that one classroom, but scores of classrooms across a large geographical area? And support all the other aspects of the district's technology program at the same time? (The telephones, cable TV, building security systems--even the headsets for the football and soccer coaches.)
I note, particularly, that your organization focuses on 4th to 8th graders. It would be very informative to hear why you do not provide services for pre-K through 3rd grade. Is it, perhaps, because of the massive amounts of curriculum software available (not to even mention the "third-party" game software teachers always use) all of it depends upon DOS and/or Windows? And getting any two packages to work together simultaneously on most video cards is a cast-iron b*tch? (Lurkers: if you're not familiar with the problem, trust me: the hardest classrooms to provide computers to are the K-3 classes. The video driver problems would curl your hair.)
A working solution in a single classroom is not, by a long stretch, the same thing as providing IT services across the entire school district.
Please forgive me if I sound a little petulant. But I take umbrage at the toss-off line at the bottom of your post to the effect that "...we did something about it." I resent that--we busted buns to develop a district-wide IT plan. We measured user ability, satisfaction, and use before we implemented the plan; we measured ability, satisfaction, and use after we implemented the plan. We deliver "100% school time up time", while computer usage in the district has soared, and machine outages have dropped to essentially zero. The IT plan has done so well that the IT staff has effectively slit their own throats: the school board almost eliminated one of the (3.5) positions last year because things were going so well.
Hi!
Thanks for taking the time to write. However, I'm not sure we're communicating. You have described a splendid concept for a computer-oriented program for older students. You suggest that you could have done all of what you propose at age 10 (start from fdisked machines, a stack of CDs, and a pile of printed README documents). You seem to suggest that since you could have done this, anybody could have done this. And you seem to think that spending an entire year doing this would be beneficial.
Alas, the Pennsylvania Department of Education would probably disagree. They would vastly prefer if the district's 10-year-olds were engaged in other pedagogical pursuits: reading, writing, 'rithmetic, sex education, drug-awareness education, enviro/political behavior modification, etc.
Please forgive the sarcasm, but please also understand that the focus of computers in classrooms is not to make computer techs out of the 6th graders. The point is to use the computers to learn academic subjects. We don't want students, or teachers, to ever have to think about partitioning a hard drive or re-compiling the OS kernel. We want them to think about using e-mail to collaborate with an "email pal" across the world; or to use NetMeeting or Groove to collaborate with students in other district buildings. The computer is not the raison d'etre--it is the tool.
Hi!
The scene: "Public Comment" time at a school board meeting. The previous speaker, a senior citizen, has spoken at length about the burden of school taxes on the elderly in the community. He has particularly emphasized his opposition to the blatantly gold-plated technology proposals in the school budget (including the 4--count 'em, 4! PDAs for the district IT staff). Then the school board's self-designated Taxpayer Advocate clears his throat, and says, "Y'know, I was talking to our IT director at work the other day, and we're getting rid of a bunch of computers. Some are 486s, but a lot are Pentiums--we could provide a lot of those machines to the district at little or no cost....
...And another dumb IT decision is in the offing. Lots of people want to donate their downstreamed equipment to the schools. Sometimes they genuinely think they're doing good: most of the time they're trying to claim a tax credit for the contribution, and will "suggest" valuations for each machine that they drop off. All too often those donations cost the district actual cash--because you have to pay a HazMat hauler to take the monitors these days.
Linux and other free (as in beer) software may well have a place in education. There is a very powerful argument, for instance, for creating an Office-type suite with extensive classroom management tools. Given that school environments can be extraordinarily hostile (think of the kinds of behavior that occurs in a middle school classroom if the teacher steps out into the hall) there is a persuasive argument to be made for a robust platform like (ahem) FreeBSD.
But. Please please please do not even think of saddling the poor, overworked techs at your local school district with your worn-out, leftover, good-for-nothing junk. You are doing them no favors, you are doing no good to the district, and you are probably preventing adoption of a well-thought-through technology plan by "donating" your scrap equipment.
Computers in schools
I'm on the Technology Committee of the Nazareth (Pa.) Area School District. We've played out that scenario at the top of this post several times. We have had several area companies offer to donate their scrap to us. We have had several board members get positively indignant that we have spurned those offers. We did spurn those offers, and if I have any say in the matter we will continue to spurn those offers--here's why.
This is a hostile environment
Suppose your employer decides to install a new computer system. And suppose a computer-phobic customer service rep decides that he doesn't want to use the new system. Your employer has a simple remedy: fire the CSR. Doesn't work that way in American schools: if you want the teacher to use a computer, you have to persuade her/him.
This is a hostile environment #2
Teachers (no surprise, right?) don't want to look stupid in front of their students. But the kids are substantially more adept with computers than the teachers--so the teachers have a built-in ambivalence (at best) about computers.
So we have to persuade teachers to use a device that potentially can humiliate them in front of their students. How?
From hard-won experience, the district IT staff has to offer absolutely bullet-proof reliability. They have to be able to guarantee--and deliver on that guarantee--that the computers will be there, working flawlessly, whenever the teacher wants. No reboots, no network hassles, no video driver conflicts (elementary teachers probably use more video games than CmdrTaco), no need to get an MSCE in order to teach 3rd grade. In other words, the district IT staff has to provide Service Level Agreement-style functionality.
But...
do you think this means that anybody is willing to pay for a district IT staff? Funny boy--the school board will fund an extra assistant to the wrestling program in a heartbeat, but they won't spend a dime for a part-time LAN geek unless you do some major politicking. So what IT staff you have (4100 students, 450 employees, 7 buildings over 80 square miles, 3.5 IT staff) have to make do with what they have.
Which means...
They have to standardize, standardize, standardize. Every elementary classroom has to have the same video cards; every machine has to have the same network adapter; every machine in the high school has to have the same monitor. They have to develop a formalized bug-tracking system to identify recurring problems, and they have to take a systemic view of the entire IT picture in order to maintain 100% uptime. Because if they provide less than 100% uptime the teachers will stop using the system, and the parents will start calling the school board. And so forth....
So please...
Don't "do the kids a favor" and ship them junk. If you want to make a meaningful donation, call the school district and ask if you can give them the money to buy another one of their reference desktops. If they're running Windows, hold your nose and buy Windows. If they're running a bunch of out-of-date kiddie games, hold your nose and buy the out-of-date kiddie games. Do not make their lives miserable by sending them leftovers, or by going out to Circuit City and buying a $399 special. (God save the IT staff from the enthusiasm of the PTA.)
If you want to champion Open Source in the schools
Don't go preaching Linux as religion. Get involved, go to meetings, be prepared to make a reasonable case, and be prepared to argue for a complete replacement of the entire district IT infrastructure. And be prepared for war from the elementary teachers and the PTA: elementary school software runs on Windows, period. If you want to replace it, you'd best have a bunch of kids games tested and ready to go.
Bottom line:
Computers are crucial to education in the 21st century. I teach in a graduate program, and I'm constantly amazed at the number of MBA students with only the faintest glimmer of understanding about computers and technology. But the route to learning about computers and technology is not with leftover junk--it is with a carefully-developed, meticulously-managed, (and yes, sometimes rigidly enforced) IT plan that promises a "100% school time up time" service level, and delivers it. If the users can trust that the computers will be there, they will learn. If they can't trust the computers, they will learn to hate them.
Hi!
In other words, there is a price war going on. And, if ITWorld's sources are correct, there is at least one producer who is making money manufacturing DRAM at these prices. Given that Micron is buying the DRAM plant (and running TV ads selling DRAM via Crucial), it seems clear that Micron a) thinks they can make money in the DRAM business, and b) thinks that they can use that plant in Virginia to make DRAM more competitively than Toshiba did.
Two points:
[quibble]Any penguin under arctic ice is seriously lost. Antarctic ice, certainly. The Falklands, and other land masses of the high southern latitudes, certainly. But not in the Arctic.[/quibble]
Hi!
You may well have seen a grocery store chain experiment with prices--that's a practice that's been going on for decades. (Grocery stores routinely change different prices in different neighborhoods--a few cents more in rich neighborhoods (where consumers will pay more for convenience) and a few cents less in poor neighborhoods (where consumers may be more price-sensitive). The "frequent shopper" card systems won't really impact that--grocery stores can map price/demand (elasticity) curves already.
What the frequent shopper programs do is help the stores manage what products get displayed, how they get displayed, and how they are priced. They do this by identifying the "core customers"--both of the chain, and of that particular store.
Most consumers purchase most of their groceries at one particular store. They might shop at a different store (it's adjacent to your child's school, so you can stop in on your way to work) occasionally, but that big hundred-bucks-a-week trip usually happens the same place. By offering lower prices on selected items, the stores entice the frequent shopper to sign up for the card, and permit his shopping habits to be tracked. While this offers the theoretical possibility of monitoring the customer (we get our prescription drugs at the grocery store--if I start getting scrips filled for AZT, does that mean I have AIDS?), it offers the immediate opportunity of selling coupons to advertisers. (To wit: I buy dog food--even when I am not buying dog food in that particular trip, I almost always get a dog food coupon at the register.)
The real advantage of a frequent shopping card, though, is identifying the buying habits--in the aggregate--of the store's core buyers. It helps enormously in making "plan-o-gram" decisions: how much of what to stock where. Example: last week the deli ran out of salmon four days running. Should we increase our daily order of salmon? Well--if our data shows that most of that salmon was bought by frequent shoppers, the answer is obviously yes--these are customers who will likely be back for more seafood. On the other hand, if very few of our frequent shoppers bought that salmon, it might be wise to wait--we may have had a statistical cluster of salmon-swallowing tourists in the neighborhood. In a similar way, we can identify whether our core customers buy more of our store brands or the name brands for particular products. We may find differences between this behavior in different stores: in stores where our brands do better, we give those brands more space; where our core customers prefer the name brands, we give the name brands more shelf space. In any case, we tailor the shelf space in each store to focus on the product mix favored by the frequent shoppers in that store--that may mean more salmon in some stores, and more produce in others. (Real live example: there is a chain grocery store in Morrisville, Vermont--a tiny town thirty miles from the Canadian border--that has five different varieties of fresh mushrooms in the produce section on any given day. Why? Because their core customers like mushrooms. [Real Vermonters might suggest that this store caters to quiche-eating flatlanders, and offer this as proof, but I digress....)
In the example that you cite:
The store might test different prices to determine your resistance to a price increase (this is called "elasticity" by economists--elasticity is to Econ majors as pointers are to CS majors: if you don't get the concept, you tend to go find another major). If you're going to buy French bread, and you're willing to pay $1.39, that's the price. The frequent shopper cards may help in letting the store measure price resistance among the core shoppers (that is, if 80% of the store's french bread is sold to frequent shopper cardholders, and they demonstrate a near-horizontal elasticity curve [change the price, they don't care] then the store can safely hike the price of french bread). But stores have measured elasticity like this, as I wrote above, for decades--all the frequent shopper cards do is let them measure price resistance more accurately.
John Murdoch
I so agree with you. But you'll find unsecured SQL Server databases exposed to the public Internet all the time. I've seen it particularly with Small Business Server (package of Microsoft Back Office products, including SQL Server). A small company buys a package deal from a local vendor--they start hosting their own web pages, using SQL Server, and never even wondering about anything like security.
There is plenty of fault to go around here: the small business bears some responsibility--they're buying a tool without providing the resources to use the tool appropriately. But there are lots of small vendors out there that fancy themselves as Microsoft OEMs and ISVs, assembling kit computers, doing the basic install with zero configuration (or security updates) and plugging the box into the client's network. This is precisely the market for Microsoft's Small Business Server--a low budget tool, and frequently completely unprotected.
And sometimes it's the client
Sometimes the client absolutely insists on shooting himself in the foot. I have a proposal outstanding to a warehousing firm--they're dragging their feet, and part of the reason is that they don't want to pay for two servers. (One is publicly accessible, the other [which has the SQL Server installed] is not.) Why can't we use the same box as the web server and the SQL Server? Well, gosh--because then anybody with SQL Enterprise Manager can connect on port 1433, and keep retrying passwords as long as he wants--the login dialog never times out.
You heard it here first: this worm will affect a lot more companies that you'd think.
Hi!
Yup--it's off-topic. But it's a good question.
The book industry has business rules that date (literally) back to the time of Gutenberg. Among those business rules are a standard trade practice of permitting bookstores to return books for full credit up to a year after the date the bookstore bought the book from a publisher or wholesaler.
For most publishers returns are a colossal pain in the neck. You have to inspect the books to determine if they are damaged, you have to restock the book into the warehouse location, you have to handle a bunch of accounting grief--the list goes on and on. For most "trade" publishers return rates average from 5% to 15% of books shipped.
For mass-market publishers the business rules are a bit different. Mass-market publishers use substantially cheaper materials, and print in substantially larger volumes--they will release lists of titles each month, and will only anticipate a selling season of one to three months. When the bookstore pulls the book from the shelves it does not return the entire book (there's no point: the publisher has declared the book out of print). Instead the bookstore rips the front cover off of the book and just returns the cover for credit. The bookstore is then supposed to dump the body of the book in the trash.
However, if you browse the sidewalk stands in midtown Manhattan you will notice hundreds if not thousands of paperback books that are missing their front covers. What happens is that a bookstore (or clerk) sells the stripped bodies out the back door to the sidewalk merchant. It might be for a few cents per copy; it might even just be to avoid the cost of paying a trash hauler to take the books away. But that stripped book has been declared to the publisher as having been discarded, and the author does not receive any royalties for the sale.
Years ago I was the business manager of a small publishing house (where I installed Netware 86 in 1983). My little company still does software development for publishers and warehousing companies.
And since I just noticed that you're at Lehigh, I should mention that I'm in Wind Gap, twenty miles north of you.
Yeesh!
There are a ton of breathless posts up on this subject, all saying "Gosh! He plead to the Fed charges--that means he's a crook!" And, as is all too usual for /. commentators, everybody seems to have stopped reading the prosecutor's press release right there.
Let's stop right there for a moment: this is not a news article. It is a press release, issued by the Federal prosecutor. Press releases, on their face, are designed to promote a person, product, or cause--they make no pretense at all of being comprehensive or factual. They are more than 'spin'--they are a carefully-structured form of shaping the truth. In other words, when your government lies to you, it usually uses a press release to do so. "We'll protect your civil liberties while monitoring your email and listening to your phone calls?" Press release. The many public benefits of Echelon? Press release. The pressing need for a national ID card? Soon to be a press release.
So let's put on our critical thinking hats, kiddies, and re-read this press release with a little more critical attitude. Let's start with the simple facts: Brian West was cruising a news site; he found a security flaw; he downloaded a couple of PERL scripts; he called the editor of the paper the next day and told the editor he'd found a flaw. The newspaper editor flipped out, called the FBI, the FBI showed up at Brian West's office, Brian West (really stupidly) blithely gives the FBI permission to search his hard drive and copy all of his files, and gets charged with hacking. Right?
Now let's think of the context: hackers are Evil. They get long jail terms--they do hard time. Nailing a hacker has all kinds of sex appeal for a prosecutor--computer crime is very juicy stuff for the media. (The best example is right here on SlashDot--look at how many people have read this bit of fluff and leapt to post comments about how wicked this West fellow was, and how much we should apologize for all those nasty things we said about the cops.) So just how "nailed" was West?
You'll have to go all the way down to the bottom of the press release: the maximum penalty for this misdemeanor (speeding is a misdemeanor) is a year in jail. But the prosecutor's press release says explicitly that West will probably get probation. And (read a little higher up) West has been released without bail--solely on his promise to appear--pending sentencing.
Now--why would the prosecutor's self-issued press release admit that this heinous computer crook has received a complete pass? That he won't do a day in prison, won't pay a penny in fines, and has been released without bond pending sentencing? Remember: this is the prosecutor's press release, so this is the most positive spin the prosecutor can put on this.
Because the prosecutor didn't have a case--but West had probably run out of money. Note that West had two lawyers to pay (not that legal fees in Edmond, OK or Cleveland, TX are gargantuan, but presumably West wasn't exactly rich either). There are lots of times in the American legal system where justice is lost in the rush to expediency. "Criminals" plead guilty to misdemeanors with no penalties because they can't afford the cost of a trial. Prosecutors demand guilty pleas--even if there is effectively no sentence--in order to chalk the case up as a "win". This, I'd bet, is precisely one of those cases.
Ask yourself this question: if the Justice Department had issued this kind of press release for Dmitry Skylarov, would you regard it as a rousing vindication of the Feds--or a moral victory for the defendant?
Actually, I just made a comment on SlashDot explaining what the Babson software project really addresses. In my classes (e-commerce concentration classes for our MBA program) I routinely do have students use the Internet during class. E.g. compare/contrast different websites for the customer experience; compare/contrast different news sites for ease of access to information; walk through use of different Internet-based research tools; and so forth. Internet connectivity in the classroom can be a good thing.
On the other hand, some people have discovered that you can use the Internet to cheat. In my original post I mentioned a half-dozen kids who were caught (at the local high school, not at DeSales) using AIM to swap answers in a quiz. The word here is "cheating"--but one set of parents got extremely upset at the notion that little Jimmy was accused of cheating. He was using the Internet! Passing the answers on a printed sheet of paper, why that would be cheating--but doing it with an AIM client, why that's technology!
Unbelievably, the school caved. Warned the kids, changed the school cheating policy, and said, "tut tut, don't let us catch you doing that again." The kids no doubt learned a lesson: nothing is wrong until you get caught.
Hi!
IANAL-BIAAP (I Am Not A Lawyer But I Am A Professor). The AP article and the sources the writer quotes at Babson are being, um, polite.
All of you have probably heard of "research services" on the web where students can download papers. This, as you might imagine, scares the wits out of professors--is this brilliant, trenchant insight into the financial impact of the introduction of telegraphy into the American West in the 1870s the product of your dilligent research and extraordinary writing skills? Or am I reading a paper you grabbed off the night this morning for twenty bucks? (Yes--fraternities had and have libraries of course material, but that's much easier to detect.)
What Babson is trying to deal with is a variant of the same problem: if I ask a question in class, I don't want students looking up the answer on Google. If I give a quiz in class, I particularly don't want students using Instant Messaging clients to share answers. (I haven't seen this happen in my class--but I'm on the Technology Committee of the local school district, and a half-dozen high school kids were caught doing precisely this.)
This isn't a free speech issue: this is a matter of preventing people from cheating.
John Murdoch
Adjunct Lecturer, DeSales University
You are absolutely correct. The drop-dead date for signing up for their Open License program (which is effectively an annual subscription for software) is either October 1 or October 10. And my largest customer, number 2xx on the Fortune 500, is so far content to say, "drop dead." They're not moving.
I find it interesting that these companies even care. Windows XP offers a few bells and whistles--but it doesn't offer a lot more than Windows 2000. Sure--it offers support for joysticks and heavy-duty gaming. But that doesn't strike me as a compelling new feature causing a corporation to upgrade ("And, uh, this slide shows how we'll be able to use this new version to install Dirk Blasto Space Invader joysticks in all of our CSR workstations to handle irate callers...").
It seems to me that Microsoft isn't just trying to shift the business model from a "purchase" to a "pay-for-use" model, as many have suggested. I think they're also trying to--or will end up being forced into--a business model similar to Intel's. When the next round of microprocessors appears the chips are sold at a premium price--and the product clears the market at that price. As Intel rachets up production it can profitably lower the price, clearing the market of demand at that lower level. The cycle keeps repeating--Intel (and other semiconductor manufacturers) have this down pat.
Microsoft has done similar things in the past. Their Visual Studio 6.0 toolset is, by now, quite long in the tooth. They sold tons in the early days of the product, but sales are considerably lower--so Microsoft offers bundled books and tools, and offers lower prices to resellers, to sell product. In effect they're lowering the price to entice buyers into the market who aren't willing to pay the higher price.
I think we're going to see the same thing with XP. Corporations are simply going to stand pat: why upgrade? All XP gives you is some easily-ignored bells and whistles, and the ability to use joysticks. In order to get corporations to upgrade Microsoft is going to have to make it worth the corporations while--which will almost certainly mean price decreases and less draconian license restrictions.
My largest customer is number 2xx on the Fortune 500. They're just now rolling out Windows 2000 to desktops around the world--and they have shelved plans for even piloting XP. Microsoft wants them to upgrade--but can't make a compelling case for a whopping upgrade expense (plus the cost of actually installing the OS, labor, etc.) in a time of tightly-trimmed budgets and some layoffs. "Hey," said a friend and senior manager, "we just announced we're whacking 200 people. If we spend three million bucks installing XP we're going to have to whack another 40. Is the ability to use a joystick worth those peoples' jobs?"
Last week I attended a seminar that included an impromptu lecture by a highly-regarded economist. One of the key changes in the economy over the past 20 years, as he sees it, is that manufacturers by and large have lost control of their pricing. You don't ship shirts to a department store and tell them what to charge--instead you get a purchase order from Wal-Mart telling you what they're willing to pay. And you deal. The major exception that this economist mentioned was pharmaceutical companies, because they're protected by patents on their products. If your doctor prescribes ButaGlutaMax, you can only get it from one place. An exception he did not mention was software--and I think Microsoft is about to learn this lesson. In a booming economy with a bazillion dot-coms buying PCs, Microsoft sold a lot of OSs. The boom is over, budgets are drying up all over the world, and Microsoft is trying to force through a price increase. I don't think they're going to be able to control their prices this time around.