As a learned poster pointed out, it's cheaper to offer beanbag chairs and free soft drinks than it is to compensate people well, but it seems compensation is also rising somewhat. The real issue here is that quality minds detest the narrow appearance-based logic of corporate culture, and they're always cutting out toward the frontier. The same thing is true of writers, of space pioneers, and inventors as it is of computer geeks. When too many people get into the room, the job at hand becomes a secondary function to how it appears to others.
If geeks are smart, they'll channel FOSS ideology into corporate culture as a right and a demand. We want:
Comfortable dress requirements
Reasonable comfort food
Sensible workweeks
Some of what we do to be open IP, or FOSS-styled learning for the good of humanity
Right now, the corporates are hoping to buy us off with a bolt of fabric and a foosball table. Who's going to step up and articulate what all creative minds really want, which is a chance to work on interesting projects for the good of humanity, with all the fear, uncertainty, doubt and boring ties left behind?
It was never a sane business model. The value of most CDs is their novelty and hype potential, not the music inside, which is mostly pointless goop for easily-distracted people. They're not going to make a killing any longer, since the means of distribution have now surpassed the means of production. Universal and Apple fighting over a miniscule advantage in a collapsing industry is a sure sign that the entertainment industry has no clue where to go now that its product is no longer scarce by the nature of its distribution.
It's no longer possible to make money selling software alone to corporations. The support contracts and maintenance are part of the package and are in fact the biggest money maker. These were once add-ons, when the price of software itself was high relative to costs, but as complexity has expanded, so has the cost of production and with it, the tendency toward bugs and incompatibilities.
As a result, corporations aren't going to buy any software that does not come with support, because those gotchas can delay vital money-producing work. Software companies have quite sensibly as a result been drifting closer to a license/service model, where software is "sold" but that purchase is really an entry point to the purchase of yearly support contracts and licenses that entitle them to updates.
Microsoft is not concerned about Linux because Microsoft makes money from selling its support contracts. Their goal at this point is not to slander Linux, but to leave it as a free option with no clear support path, because Linux is divided into thousands of distros with no clear market leader.
This can benefit OSS/FOSS in that where Microsoft tackles the broadest, unspecialized market, Linux distros can shine in specialized areas, for example music production, and offer unofficial support to those who are smaller companies or individuals wanting to forge their own path and not be dependent on expensive support contracts.
What OSS/FOSS should do at this point is to cease any emulation of Microsoft or Google as market leaders, and look closer to the Apple model, which is selling a specialized service to a number of specialized needs. So goes my experience, and whatever "wisdom" has been imparted to me by it.
First the North Pole, then Canada, then Michigan and finally all of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Can't you see they've come to take our precious bodily fluids?
For environmental reasons, Microsoft should continue development and support of Windows 2000 and XP. Older machines will keep running longer and so stay out of landfills, and they could eventually give these operating systems away free to benefit the penniless basement-dwellers of the world who keep typing "F1R5T P05T" at the start of every thread.
Make it an ideology
on
GPLv3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"The educational aspect of GPLv3 has, in my opinion, been the greatest success," he says.
I agree. The open source movement has always wanted a focal point, a figure like Mao or Roosevelt, who can champion its ideal and point out its obvious implications. It's slightly anarchistic. It's anti-ownership. It's Darwinistic (let the best code win). All that is now clear, and many people agree.
The real question to me, as an observer of "current history," is whether people will take this to logical conclusions outside the world of the net. Will the Wal-Marts burn, and Paris Hilton be forced to do her own laundry? Will the morons of the world be forced to dwell in antartica? Or will this be a pithy statement like those of forgotten rock stars, "changing the world" inside a few minds separated by vast spaces of time, distance, economic instability and doubt?
Somehow, every "new search technology" comes to back to the same idea, which is tagging objects with categories outside description of their traits in the online world (keyword, address, memory location). This guy is no exception, except that he's put a psychotic business model on top of it, instead of finding a way to evangelize RDF to the web at large (in my view, a good idea).
Branding is about consumer trust. If they trust your company to do something consistently well, they will place a good deal of faith in that (hopefully without becoming fanboys). As a result, whenever a product buying decision comes up, they are more likely to select the branded product.
Branding can also work for open source. When people come to trust a "product," or piece of software like FireFox, they will keep using it until given a reason to do otherwise.
This post was not intended to bait or upset anyone. It's an analysis of a successful business tactic and one, were I Microsoft, I'd apply.
On one of the mailing lists I'm on, there was chatter today about business actions that don't increase profits but might make the company's position healthier. I can't prove that giving away software makes more money by getting people familiar with it, but I know that all the kids growing up using Apple//s looked more favorably on Apple than others.
This is ridiculous. People are becoming such neurotic queens (no relation to sexual orientation, thx) that they can't be offended, are afraid of conflict, and won't stick their necks out because someone might disagree. As a result, we can't make decisions, and we get weak.
"Saigon, shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm going to
wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour,
it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing...
I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce.
When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I
could think of was getting back into the jungle.
I've been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting
softer. Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute
Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger."
Get the equipment into schools, then sell the software, and watch kids graduate expecting Apple gear. If I were Microsoft, I'd put ISOs of all their hardware and OSs on the main site for this reason.
The researcher confuses signal and cause. The good-feeling is a response to altruism, but that is what drives us toward altruism, not some inherent desire to do good. If altruism produces a feelgood feeling like drugs do, we must recognize that this is the motivator and not altruism itself. We are reacting to the effect, not finding a cause within ourselves to take the action. Otherwise, heroin addicts are taking drugs simply to keep the drugs from getting lonely.
Altruism triggers pleasure centers like a drug or sex, which means that we do altruistic acts for ourselves, not for others. So don't expect the OLPC folks to cry out over this one. The original OLPC group wanted to construe themselves as philanthropists, and now Intel and others are moving in to scoop up this "new market." There are no gifts without strings.
Looks to me like the Federal Trade Commission is enforcing some lack of regulation in the name of economic competition. This may have influenced the fear shown in the Bush guy's rant. They may be right, economically-speaking, but from an information perspective it's a terrible loss if net neutrality goes.
Back in the 1980s, what distinguished the Amiga (and later Steve Job's excellent NeXT) was the ability to split data among multiple co-processors and pipe it quickly around the motherboard, eliminating bottleneck and liberating the processor. Now in the PC world we're finally seeing this architecture recognized as new Intel chips tout their front-side bus and cache more than sheer increase in speed.
This SUN machine is a bigger-scale example of the same. It uses AMD Barcelona chips, and derives its power from internally routing data more efficiently than (most of) its competitors. It seems that in the Moore's-law endgame, what makes the chip a star performer is the surrounding components and their engineering for efficiency.
This will be better for geeks, as it makes the skill of efficient design come back into play after years of "bigger is better." Now if it just extends to software as well, we'll all benefit...
I agree that it's difficult, however the reality is that the market has defined the standard, and there is a way of making it happen. Yes, it will be difficult, but life's challenges are what make it fun, don't you think?
This will fundamentally change the wiki model, which grew rapidly because it did not require its writers to be accountable to existing standards. That made it popular, but also error-prone.
Academia and government are going to take over wikipedia from within, by this model, and while this violates the fundamental ideal of wikipedia, it will improve the content vastly. Maybe there's something to learn here about the wisdom of accountability and peer-review standards that, while imperfect, evolved over time for a reason.
It's a very generous move by the Germans, and one I hope others follow.
I read all of your posts that I can find, and I respect your opinion. I hope the following different one can be taken in that spirit. (Argumentation should be fun, like all things in life we can make fun.)
I am not arguing from a purist position, or even an ideological one. I am speaking of practical solutions to many of the issues we are likely to face in the desktop world. I run Linux, BSD and Windows and see each as a balance of strengths and weaknesses.
Why I say Linux should run Windows applications: this would create a single stream of development where now we have several and much duplicated work. It does not make sense to maintain a false adversity here. Linux running Windows apps would not only make Linux more easily adoptable, but would force Windows to respond to some real competition. (I don't consider the Mac to be competition; its actual user base is tiny, and are seen by most people as effete zealots. It will go the way of the Amiga and Atari ST.)
Ultimately, win32 is going to be replaced by the Vista-series APIs and not a moment too soon, because it's archaic and as you noted, riddled with labyrinthine rules and countless exceptions. Yuk! No fun to develop for, unless you've been doing it for so long you can navigate around it.
I know that what I suggest is not easy, but look at all that Open Source has done so far that is considered non-trivial. Sometimes, you have to do what guarantees success even if it's a lot of work. I'd put colonizing Mars into that same category, and yes, I'm for that too.
You might have to write me off as a moronic optimist at this point:) and I won't blame you, but looking at the long-term results and needs, the wisdom of these points might be ascertainable.
Run windows apps on Linux -- eventually, we're going to need to take this step. A standard, unified API to develop for makes it easier on companies that are already afraid that DRM violations will erode their bottom line. If Linux starts running Windows apps, I think more people will switch over, because they run Windows for the easy installation (now nearly conquered by Ubuntu) and the vast library of software guaranteed to run on it.
(a) too much like an existing product. Ran a 6500-series chip like the Apple//, used the same peripherals, had roughly the same capabilities. (b) not enough like an existing product. Was incompatible with Apple// software, had no new support base, was more expensive without adding much.
Vista, as originally designed, was a technical marvel. I would like Microsoft to keep pushing toward that, which is what Microsoft engineers want. The MBAs and marketing team think differently. Vista's strength right now is that it replaces the archaic workarounds in the win32 API, and supplants the 1980s-style graphic display model with something better. So as I see it, it will eventually be a better system to use.
The entire Vista situation is poetic to me. The struggle of the human species to overcome its own limitations, get a better design out on the table, and do it while dodging the pitfalls of politics and the markets... human, so human!
As far as I can tell, two things control content. First, what the advertisers think, because they're paying for it. Second, whether it will offend anyone who is not socially recognized as marginalized. It would be a great hubris-laden error for us to assume we don't labor under a different set of the same rules that Chinese must follow.
This is a dumb idea for America, because whichever nation has a Mars base has an escape valve from Mutually Assured Destruction in instance of nuclear war. "Yeah, you got Washington, all right, but our 6,000-person Mars base is going to last a lot longer than your radioactive, rubble-strewn ass..."
100mb "images" including RAR/ZIP files? This site is designed to push back against the YouTube, Gmail, Megaupload sites and give people a public data cache they can rely on for more than video. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the first shot in a canny business strategy to make the next web 2.0 supersite, with Pirate Bay's essential idea being that of the remote public file cache as a precursor to the remote, public/private desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
As a learned poster pointed out, it's cheaper to offer beanbag chairs and free soft drinks than it is to compensate people well, but it seems compensation is also rising somewhat. The real issue here is that quality minds detest the narrow appearance-based logic of corporate culture, and they're always cutting out toward the frontier. The same thing is true of writers, of space pioneers, and inventors as it is of computer geeks. When too many people get into the room, the job at hand becomes a secondary function to how it appears to others.
If geeks are smart, they'll channel FOSS ideology into corporate culture as a right and a demand. We want:
Right now, the corporates are hoping to buy us off with a bolt of fabric and a foosball table. Who's going to step up and articulate what all creative minds really want, which is a chance to work on interesting projects for the good of humanity, with all the fear, uncertainty, doubt and boring ties left behind?
It was never a sane business model. The value of most CDs is their novelty and hype potential, not the music inside, which is mostly pointless goop for easily-distracted people. They're not going to make a killing any longer, since the means of distribution have now surpassed the means of production. Universal and Apple fighting over a miniscule advantage in a collapsing industry is a sure sign that the entertainment industry has no clue where to go now that its product is no longer scarce by the nature of its distribution.
It's no longer possible to make money selling software alone to corporations. The support contracts and maintenance are part of the package and are in fact the biggest money maker. These were once add-ons, when the price of software itself was high relative to costs, but as complexity has expanded, so has the cost of production and with it, the tendency toward bugs and incompatibilities.
As a result, corporations aren't going to buy any software that does not come with support, because those gotchas can delay vital money-producing work. Software companies have quite sensibly as a result been drifting closer to a license/service model, where software is "sold" but that purchase is really an entry point to the purchase of yearly support contracts and licenses that entitle them to updates.
Microsoft is not concerned about Linux because Microsoft makes money from selling its support contracts. Their goal at this point is not to slander Linux, but to leave it as a free option with no clear support path, because Linux is divided into thousands of distros with no clear market leader.
This can benefit OSS/FOSS in that where Microsoft tackles the broadest, unspecialized market, Linux distros can shine in specialized areas, for example music production, and offer unofficial support to those who are smaller companies or individuals wanting to forge their own path and not be dependent on expensive support contracts.
What OSS/FOSS should do at this point is to cease any emulation of Microsoft or Google as market leaders, and look closer to the Apple model, which is selling a specialized service to a number of specialized needs. So goes my experience, and whatever "wisdom" has been imparted to me by it.
First the North Pole, then Canada, then Michigan and finally all of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Can't you see they've come to take our precious bodily fluids?
For environmental reasons, Microsoft should continue development and support of Windows 2000 and XP. Older machines will keep running longer and so stay out of landfills, and they could eventually give these operating systems away free to benefit the penniless basement-dwellers of the world who keep typing "F1R5T P05T" at the start of every thread.
"The educational aspect of GPLv3 has, in my opinion, been the greatest success," he says.
I agree. The open source movement has always wanted a focal point, a figure like Mao or Roosevelt, who can champion its ideal and point out its obvious implications. It's slightly anarchistic. It's anti-ownership. It's Darwinistic (let the best code win). All that is now clear, and many people agree.
The real question to me, as an observer of "current history," is whether people will take this to logical conclusions outside the world of the net. Will the Wal-Marts burn, and Paris Hilton be forced to do her own laundry? Will the morons of the world be forced to dwell in antartica? Or will this be a pithy statement like those of forgotten rock stars, "changing the world" inside a few minds separated by vast spaces of time, distance, economic instability and doubt?
Somehow, every "new search technology" comes to back to the same idea, which is tagging objects with categories outside description of their traits in the online world (keyword, address, memory location). This guy is no exception, except that he's put a psychotic business model on top of it, instead of finding a way to evangelize RDF to the web at large (in my view, a good idea).
Branding is about consumer trust. If they trust your company to do something consistently well, they will place a good deal of faith in that (hopefully without becoming fanboys). As a result, whenever a product buying decision comes up, they are more likely to select the branded product.
A short introduction to branding
Branding can also work for open source. When people come to trust a "product," or piece of software like FireFox, they will keep using it until given a reason to do otherwise.
This post was not intended to bait or upset anyone. It's an analysis of a successful business tactic and one, were I Microsoft, I'd apply.
//s looked more favorably on Apple than others.
On one of the mailing lists I'm on, there was chatter today about business actions that don't increase profits but might make the company's position healthier. I can't prove that giving away software makes more money by getting people familiar with it, but I know that all the kids growing up using Apple
This is ridiculous. People are becoming such neurotic queens (no relation to sexual orientation, thx) that they can't be offended, are afraid of conflict, and won't stick their necks out because someone might disagree. As a result, we can't make decisions, and we get weak.
"Saigon, shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm going to wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing... I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I've been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger."
Transcript
Get the equipment into schools, then sell the software, and watch kids graduate expecting Apple gear. If I were Microsoft, I'd put ISOs of all their hardware and OSs on the main site for this reason.
The researcher confuses signal and cause. The good-feeling is a response to altruism, but that is what drives us toward altruism, not some inherent desire to do good. If altruism produces a feelgood feeling like drugs do, we must recognize that this is the motivator and not altruism itself. We are reacting to the effect, not finding a cause within ourselves to take the action. Otherwise, heroin addicts are taking drugs simply to keep the drugs from getting lonely.
CSRF explained, albeit clumsily. The examples made the article. Solution: use POST requests for user actions, and add unique tokens to each form.
Altruism triggers pleasure centers like a drug or sex, which means that we do altruistic acts for ourselves, not for others. So don't expect the OLPC folks to cry out over this one. The original OLPC group wanted to construe themselves as philanthropists, and now Intel and others are moving in to scoop up this "new market." There are no gifts without strings.
The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday recommended against additional regulation of high-speed Internet traffic.
n ternet_neutrality_ftc
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070628/ap_on_hi_te/i
Looks to me like the Federal Trade Commission is enforcing some lack of regulation in the name of economic competition. This may have influenced the fear shown in the Bush guy's rant. They may be right, economically-speaking, but from an information perspective it's a terrible loss if net neutrality goes.
Gotta update my tattoo, Which was the GPL-2, But from the looks of v3, Should be hours of agony!
Back in the 1980s, what distinguished the Amiga (and later Steve Job's excellent NeXT) was the ability to split data among multiple co-processors and pipe it quickly around the motherboard, eliminating bottleneck and liberating the processor. Now in the PC world we're finally seeing this architecture recognized as new Intel chips tout their front-side bus and cache more than sheer increase in speed.
This SUN machine is a bigger-scale example of the same. It uses AMD Barcelona chips, and derives its power from internally routing data more efficiently than (most of) its competitors. It seems that in the Moore's-law endgame, what makes the chip a star performer is the surrounding components and their engineering for efficiency.
This will be better for geeks, as it makes the skill of efficient design come back into play after years of "bigger is better." Now if it just extends to software as well, we'll all benefit...
I agree that it's difficult, however the reality is that the market has defined the standard, and there is a way of making it happen. Yes, it will be difficult, but life's challenges are what make it fun, don't you think?
This will fundamentally change the wiki model, which grew rapidly because it did not require its writers to be accountable to existing standards. That made it popular, but also error-prone. Academia and government are going to take over wikipedia from within, by this model, and while this violates the fundamental ideal of wikipedia, it will improve the content vastly. Maybe there's something to learn here about the wisdom of accountability and peer-review standards that, while imperfect, evolved over time for a reason. It's a very generous move by the Germans, and one I hope others follow.
Hi,
:) and I won't blame you, but looking at the long-term results and needs, the wisdom of these points might be ascertainable.
I read all of your posts that I can find, and I respect your opinion. I hope the following different one can be taken in that spirit. (Argumentation should be fun, like all things in life we can make fun.)
I am not arguing from a purist position, or even an ideological one. I am speaking of practical solutions to many of the issues we are likely to face in the desktop world. I run Linux, BSD and Windows and see each as a balance of strengths and weaknesses.
Why I say Linux should run Windows applications: this would create a single stream of development where now we have several and much duplicated work. It does not make sense to maintain a false adversity here. Linux running Windows apps would not only make Linux more easily adoptable, but would force Windows to respond to some real competition. (I don't consider the Mac to be competition; its actual user base is tiny, and are seen by most people as effete zealots. It will go the way of the Amiga and Atari ST.)
Ultimately, win32 is going to be replaced by the Vista-series APIs and not a moment too soon, because it's archaic and as you noted, riddled with labyrinthine rules and countless exceptions. Yuk! No fun to develop for, unless you've been doing it for so long you can navigate around it.
I know that what I suggest is not easy, but look at all that Open Source has done so far that is considered non-trivial. Sometimes, you have to do what guarantees success even if it's a lot of work. I'd put colonizing Mars into that same category, and yes, I'm for that too.
You might have to write me off as a moronic optimist at this point
Run windows apps on Linux -- eventually, we're going to need to take this step. A standard, unified API to develop for makes it easier on companies that are already afraid that DRM violations will erode their bottom line. If Linux starts running Windows apps, I think more people will switch over, because they run Windows for the easy installation (now nearly conquered by Ubuntu) and the vast library of software guaranteed to run on it.
The Apple /// failed because it was:
//, used the same peripherals, had roughly the same capabilities. // software, had no new support base, was more expensive without adding much.
(a) too much like an existing product. Ran a 6500-series chip like the Apple
(b) not enough like an existing product. Was incompatible with Apple
Vista, as originally designed, was a technical marvel. I would like Microsoft to keep pushing toward that, which is what Microsoft engineers want. The MBAs and marketing team think differently. Vista's strength right now is that it replaces the archaic workarounds in the win32 API, and supplants the 1980s-style graphic display model with something better. So as I see it, it will eventually be a better system to use.
The entire Vista situation is poetic to me. The struggle of the human species to overcome its own limitations, get a better design out on the table, and do it while dodging the pitfalls of politics and the markets... human, so human!
As far as I can tell, two things control content. First, what the advertisers think, because they're paying for it. Second, whether it will offend anyone who is not socially recognized as marginalized. It would be a great hubris-laden error for us to assume we don't labor under a different set of the same rules that Chinese must follow.
This is a dumb idea for America, because whichever nation has a Mars base has an escape valve from Mutually Assured Destruction in instance of nuclear war. "Yeah, you got Washington, all right, but our 6,000-person Mars base is going to last a lot longer than your radioactive, rubble-strewn ass..."
100mb "images" including RAR/ZIP files? This site is designed to push back against the YouTube, Gmail, Megaupload sites and give people a public data cache they can rely on for more than video. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the first shot in a canny business strategy to make the next web 2.0 supersite, with Pirate Bay's essential idea being that of the remote public file cache as a precursor to the remote, public/private desktop.