Read the article carefully. He isn't saying that "open source" can learn from capitalism. He's giving the usual speech from corporations that don't get it: we want you to stop being idealists and do things our way instead, because that will make us richer.
...Simon Phipps, said that open source had been focused for too long on sharing code instead of what he called "the enrichment of the commons"
He clearly means that it should be okay to not 'share' code as long as the commons is 'enriched'. This is an argument for proprietary software, thinly cloaked. My bet is that he's thinking of licenses that say "You can look at the source code and modify it to fix bugs for your use, and even distribute those bug fixes, but you may not use it to produce a product that competes with ours" - sure, it's better than what they used to offer, but it is just not good enough. It's not free software, it's slightly less painful proprietary software. It's Java - join their developer program and you can see the code, and submit bug fixes, but you can't share the code with anybody.
Expanding on his message, Phipps said that the message of open source was that "creating and maintaining a completely independent code base was ultimately self-defeating".
Instead, the future was in co-operation and in organisations preserving what was ultimately of value to them.
Here he's arguing that people shouldn't be reimplementing Java (as kaffe, sablevm, etc), but instead 'cooperating' with Sun and working on Sun's proprietary implementation of it. That's what this is probably all about. Sun don't want to release Java as free software, they just want the community to help them develop it.
The message here is: free software is bad, stop doing it because we don't want to play and that means competing implementations which is bad for everyone.
Even the anti-freedom 'pragmatists' would have to admit that it's not really a very convincing message. Creating and maintaining a completely independent code base is, all else aside, ensuring that there is always competition so Sun will continue having to work to stay ahead of them.
Inflation is another beast entirely, an effect of economics and technology as well as interest and growth.
That's like saying that gravity is an effect of math. Inflation is ultimately caused by an inflationary currency, which is the basis of usury. The principle is: the banks operate a currency for your use, and you pay for the use of it - either explicitly, via interest on loans, or implicitly, via inflation (the economics get complicated here, but decreasing the value of the currency you are holding is effectively increasing the wealth of the bank by an equivalent amount). The banks carefully control the rate of inflation by adjusting interest rates (interest on your savings is also inflationary), so that they get a good yield of milk from the cow without wearing it out.
Non-inflationary currency is entirely possible, it's just not what we use at present - primarily because the banks have a monopoly and aggressively defend it against anybody who might become a threat to their business model. There are multiple competing theories about whether it would work better or worse, and almost as many definitions for 'better' and 'worse'.
Capitalism is about competition, profit, and growth, and towards that end it has succeeded.
Capitalism is about getting people to act in a certain manner, motivated by greed. It works relatively well because humans are pretty greedy, on the whole. Competition and profit are just terms in the middle; growth is just the current state. The objective of the system is to see that things get done, the wheels keep turning, the cows get milked every day, etc. Growth, depression, and stability are all possible.
The problem is a lack of understanding. We've got millions of people who don't understand the basics of computers on a public, anonymous, worldwide network who are essentially network/server administrators, as far their home pc is concerned. To make it worse, most people not only don't understand, but don't want to understand.
The problem is that people are allowed to control a dangerous vehicle in public spaces without any form of training. Ineffective as they are, driving tests at least ensure that people know which side of the road you should be on. We shouldn't let the use computers on public networks without a similar level of testing.
Become rich and hire the mob to find these people and break some knees?
By and large, these people are the mob. Russian organised crime is into spam and phishing in a big way, and several of the other groups are getting in on the action. And it's no easier to shut them down today than it was a hundred years ago. They're using bribery, blackmail, pressure on the government from their semi-legitimate sides, and all the other usual tricks. When some of them finally do get arrested, they're always sacrificial pawns; another bunch of people is immediately set up to replace them.
There are a few people out there doing this stuff on their own, but to make money from phishing you need a way to convert a long list of credit card numbers into money - it's far better suited to organised crime than to rogue asshats.
What desire? AI in games hasn't really got any better in the past few years, and doesn't look likely to do so. All that has been improving is the level of simulation detail - the meat targets have learned how to crouch behind boxes and throw grenades around corners, but they haven't actually become more intelligent, they just have more actions available to them. Art quality, plot, and to a lesser extent gameplay, are the factors that sell games. Few people go out and buy a game because the AI is smart. So there's little interest in improving it beyond the minimum baseline needed to make the game playable.
Finally, the standard solution to the AI problem is to use humans for it. Game studios use multiplayer as a substitute for meaningful AI.
For what it's worth, it is my experience that the people on the team have by far the biggest impact on product quality, timeliness, and all those other goodness measures. I believe that the methodology is almost immaterial.
This may be true, but the software industry doesn't work that way. Managers want people to be interchangable parts, because that way they can easily replace them when they leave. So they focus on methodology.
Ironically there is one process that I believe is critical to every organization's success, and it probably the least-studied, least-optimized, least-formalized process every company has... and that process is the interview process.
This is probably directly related. The managers and HR droids apply their standard interview process, effectively hire people at random, and conclude that they can't reliably get good people - hence the above.
One of the big problems I see is that the interview process is normally optimised to hire the best salesdroid in the group (because they're best at "selling theirself") regardless of whether they are hiring for a sales role or not. Good engineers are cautious and precisionist in their speech, so they tend to "perform worse" at interviews by giving more precise, less optimistic answers.
In short: authorities were concerned about Microsoft dominance in the web-browser market. And they have been worried about Mcirosoft dominance in the media-playback market. Yet they are not concerned about DirectX and the dominance it gives to Microsoft? How come?
Because antitrust is fundamentally a reactive set of laws, not pre-emptive ones. Authorities weren't "concerned about Microsoft dominance", they were concerned that an actual business (Netscape) had been destroyed by Microsoft. It's not a crime unless big business gets hurt. Microsoft abusing their monopoly position isn't enough. Undesireable effects on the consumer are not enough.
When Microsoft has used their monopoly position to shove Sony and Nintendo out of the gaming market, then they can start thinking about putting together an antitrust case. Of course, that won't do you much good.
Almost all of them have a clause in there that says you agree, at your expense, to let the software maker or their appointed agent come in at any time and audit you for license compliance.
Clauses like this in contracts of adhesion (meaning a contract where you did not get a chance to negotiate terms with the other party) are typically invalid and regularly struck down in courts. Basically, if a clause would not have been accepted by a hypothetical 'reasonable person' who had a chance to negotiate, in the opinion of the court, then it is void. Letting a third party come into your company and poke through all your computer systems with sensitive data on them is not something that the courts often regard as reasonable. Here's a key phrase from the US case law, lifted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_of_adhesion:
absence of meaningful choice on the part of one party due to one-sided contract provisions, together with terms which are so oppressive that no reasonable person would make them and no fair and honest person would accept them.
Remember that, by the BSA's rules, merely having all the original media, license certificates and product keys for every single copy you've got installed is not sufficient.
Ah, the BSA. This is a little scam they run. Here's how it works: They come along to you with a bunch of impressive-looking lawyers and make all these demands. You're probably a fairly small company. You don't have legal staff in-house. You don't realise that the law is actually on your side at this point; you think that they're telling the truth, and you have to let them audit you. So you let them.
At this point you have just granted them permission to do this stuff, so you can't later claim (when your lawyer explains things to you) that their investigation was unlawful. The whole scheme is based around conning you into granting them permission without realising it.
What you should have done was:
(1) instruct them to get off your property (2) give them the name of your lawyers, and instruct them to refer all further correspondance there (3) if they are still here, call the police and tell them you need some trespassers removing
Then you can have a nice leisurely discussion with your lawyers and figure out what, if anything, you actually need to do. Most likely they will tell you that you don't need to do anything unless the BSA has actual evidence of infringement.
Under no circumstances should you ever allow anybody to search your premesis unless they are holding a warrant and they are an officer of the law. The BSA themselves will never, ever have the right to do this because they are not the police.
As for those 'rules' they have about having to show the invoices? They made those up. They have no legal standing. The BSA has to prove that you are breaking the law, not the other way around. Then you merely have to show anything that proves them wrong. "Innocent until proven guilty" applies.
But don't take my word for it. If you are in a managerial role in a company and you are not absolutely sure about this stuff, go and talk to your lawyers and ask them for precise written instructions about what you should do if this stuff happens. Then distribute those instructions to all your management staff.
The BSA is like a mail worm infestation: it's far better to block them at the firewall than to try and clean up the mess once you let them get onto your network.
I can't see how anyone expecting to make a living in the IT industry can pirate with a clear conscious.
Easy: the principle of fair trades. The IT industry routinely screws over we-the-customers with its anti-freedom tactics, its poor management of projects, its preference for style over substance, its inability to deliver the products that we actually want, and above all its sheer stupidity.
It's no surprise that people who are aware of all this feel little moral concern over screwing the IT industry back just a little bit.
Maybe your ethics don't work that way, but a lot of people do operate on a tit-for-tat scheme, and the IT industry is definitely earning itself a whole load of tits. It's quite likely that a lot of your users would not only be happy to pirate your software, they would also like to come over to your house and kick you in the crotch a few times. It may not be your fault personally, but I don't even need to know where you work to be able to say that they've probably acted against the best interests of your users on multiple occasions. And they are not happy about it.
I'm not talking about the ones who like your software and tell you that. I'm not talking about the ones who go out to the store and buy it. I'm talking about the ones who have to use it because your marketdroids sold it to their managers based on a pack of lies, and now they're stuck with having to deal with the same crap every day. They have no hope of ever getting the problems solved because your company has evolved a "technical support" department whose job is to make sure that customer complaints never reach the developers, so that the developers can work undistracted on the next piece of marketable junk.
These people are probably the largest number of actual users of your product. Not *sales* of the product, but people who have to suffer it.
These people are angry.
And you expect them to care about your welfare? Just because some of them work in the same industry?
Fix the busted industry, so that computers cease being a source of frustration and stress for millions every day. Then you'll maybe have a chance of getting some sympathy. Until then, forget it.
This could make life difficult for those small distros that are being maintained by one or two people in their spare time due to the high amount of work it creates.
And who would be affected if these distros stopped being maintained?
If the creator cannot manage the VERY SIMPLE things required to comply with the GPL, then it's a safe bet that they aren't actually managing to maintain the thing either. But I don't believe either of these is the case here.
Really, this article is a whole load of whinging about nothing. These MEPIS guys can manage to put together a distribution that is sold directly through their own web store, and yet they cannot manage to copy the source code to a single public server? Pull the other one, it has got bells on. They must have the source code; they merely need to place it on a web server and/or offer to burn it to a DVD for anybody who asks. Anybody who is reading this comment should be fully capable of doing these things with minimal effort.
This is just somebody who was caught being ignorant about the GPL and feels the need to blame the system for their own mistake. The GPL is not 'causing them problems'. This is not news, let alone for nerds, and it's not stuff that matters.
I'm afraid it will probably be 'lost'. No really, the EU has notoriously bad accounting and huge amounts (millions of euros) of money go missing every year. Nobody's sure whether it's embezzeled or wasted or just sitting somewhere that nobody can find, but there are gaping holes in their accounts. Unfortunately the EU is not under the jurisdiction of any country, and since it has no direct taxpayers it doesn't have useful accounting laws - this would be totally illegal if it was done by the government of any member country. If a corporation did it, their directors would be immediately arrested for fraud while the relevant organisation conducted an autopsy of their accounts. But the EU is apparently unaccountable.
do you honestly think the "right to bear arms" could have any effect on fighting the tyranny of the US government?
Well, yes. That is, after all, the reason why that clause exists. It's not stated very well though; it was supposed to be more along the lines of "the right to form a militia", not "the right to self defence with deadly weapons".
Recent governments have encouraged it being pushed it more in the direction of 'self defence' and have taken to labelling all other forms as terrorism and coming down hard on them. The right to bear arms is now effectively dead. If you had it, it could have an effect on fighting the tyranny of the US government, but for all practical purposes you don't. The right to keep a gun in a locked box in your house is not useful, and you no longer have the right to get together with a bunch of like-minded people and cast off your oppressors.
It's probably obsolete. People like being oppressed these days.
Don't get me wrong, I like what they've done so far, but is it possible for a company to expand beyond a certain critical mass and still stick to the operating principle "Don't Be Evil"?
There's two things you need to realise. The first is that "Don't be evil" was coined as a short way to sum up stuff like "don't fuck the interns" and "don't file fraudulent accounts", it doesn't mean "work in the best interest of the customer". You can find a commentary on how it came to exist here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Be_Evil.
The second is that it stopped being anything more than a marketing label at the point when they made the IPO.
It has never meant "don't do something that is bad for the customer because it makes more money". Google sometimes will and sometimes won't do this; they tend to take a longer-term view and not explicitly screw the customer in a way that will piss them off, but they are not above causing you inconvinience if it would be costly for them to do otherwise (hence the continuing click fraud issues).
In short, nothing in their code of conduct says that they cannot obtain a monopoly position and use it to squeeze the market for money. They just can't do it by shooting puppies. "Don't be evil" doesn't mean "be good".
Marginally. If the university is paying the student to attend in a standard scholarship arrangement, they can withdraw that scholarship at any time for no reason (although normally they cannot recover any money already paid). This can be used as a threat to coerce the behaviour of students. They can also revoke 'privileges' like being allowed to play on the university-run sports team. So this isn't exactly a ban, just a threat. If you're thinking about going to a university, it'd be a good idea to check out how often they threaten their students like this, but otherwise who cares?
If the student doesn't have a scholarship or care about privileges, the university can't really do anything about it, unless that specific student is posting actual libellous or otherwise illegal material. If you're posting true material that isn't covered by any of the draconian intellectual slav^Wproperty laws over there, you should be safe.
In high school science classes we should teach theories that could be wrong (in particulars or wholly!) but are our best guesses - like evolution, general relativity, etc. We should not teach it if it's not even a science (like ID).
We should teach them as good approximations that make useful predictions. There's no point teaching ID because it doesn't even try to make any predictions so it can't ever be useful; I don't think it's worth worrying about whether or not something is true if it's of no practical value (unless you're studying philosophy).
If on the other hand you insist that only actual falsification makes something a science, then only theories we no longer believe can count as scientific!
That's actually a reasonable and sound position. It's more or less impossible to prove something correct in science - we've discovered many times that if a theory looks right on one level, when you go deeper it's just a good approximation. So you can never really be sure whether you've found the right answer, or just something close to it. And from our experience of science the odds are in favour of the 'good approximation' side.
On the other hand, when you've proven something wrong, you're pretty damned sure that it's wrong. It's then a scientific fact. You can't do that for something that appears right - it's more like a scientific guess.
It's important to keep this in mind - remember that something you believe to be correct is almost certainly not correct in every particlar. And follow up on those "Hmm, that's odd" moments, because those are how progress is made.
It doesn't even get any money from the government.
the Academy shall, whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art, the actual expense of such investigations, examinations, experiments, and reports to be paid from appropriations which may be made for the purpose
(From the government legislation that created the NAS, in 1863)
Funded by the government. That means controlled by them for all practical purposes, at least when working on government-funded projects. The government just can't bribe them explicitly - and hey, you can't bribe a congresscritter explicitly either, but that doesn't stop anyone.
it is probably the single most respected organization of scientists in the entire world
Is that like the World Series?
To say that "this is not a peer-reviewed paper" is particularly stupid, because the report in question is itself a peer review
That does not mean that the paper has been through the peer review process. Just because it's commenting on something that other people wrote doesn't mean anything. Nor is it a peer review. A peer review is an analysis of one particular paper, specifically focussing on the validity of the paper. This is just an opinion piece that talks about some papers.
Membership is so highly regarded that universities brag about how many NAS members they have, and are proud if they are able to claim even one.
People do that with MCSEs too. People like to brag about anything they can.
Indeed, the NAS review was requested by a Congressional critic of global warming in response to questions that had been raised about the validity of its methodology.
That doesn't mean he was pulling the strings that determined what the result was. Given the result, it means he probably lost the string-pulling match.
You seriously need to wake up and stop trusting your government. They've been manipulating the output of 'impartial' scientists and other bodies for longer than I can remember, why on earth do you think this one is any different? We usually find out about these things a few weeks or months later, when the media can ignore it because it's no longer news.
As any profit minded company, they should not care what it runs behind the scenes as long as TCO is low on the long run.
Excuse me? Microsoft is not a profit-minded company. They're notorious for it. They have two divisions that make a profit (Windows and Office) and everything else runs at a loss. Their xbox gaming division managed to be wildly popular and still make a four billion dollar loss. If Microsoft was a profit-minded company, they would axe all these useless exercises and focus on their core business - Windows and Office. Xboxes certainly aren't selling copies of Windows or Office.
The reality is that Microsoft is a power-minded company. It's not about making money, it's about control over how people use computers. Their goal is to arrange the world so that you use only Microsoft products. Whatever it costs.
Of course if the roles were reversed you'd be saying how silly it was that American landline users have to pay extra to call someone who chooses to use a cellphone.
This is unrelated; it's because in the UK, there is one network responsible for landlines and not cellphones, so every call between a landline and a cellphone is a 'trunk' call (like you have between different carriers in the US). Long-distance calls on landlines here are always within BTs network, so those don't cost as much as calls to cellphones. You get exactly the same thing in the US, it's just that there, you have carriers that do both cellphone and landline networks, and you have multiple landline networks, so it looks different.
Out of curiosity, do you get charged double air time if you call another mobile from your own?
No. Calls between cellphones on the same network (or on some other networks, depending on your contract) are often cheaper than landlines. All calls between networks cost roughly the same (except that some of the cell networks have made special deals to reduce the costs between them, but BT are not allowed to do that because they're a monopoly).
According to the article "Global Warming Skeptics," there are only 12 scientists who disagree with global warming. From the discussion here, clearly there must be more disagreement.
(even ulcers were figured out eventually)
No, you don't get it.
Scientists don't just randomly shout disagreement with things they think are wrong. They don't. Most scientists are careful to make no strong statements about anything until they can prove it. This is because they are scared of the effect on their reputation if they say something which is later proven false - a few speak out anyway, but the vast majority do not. They do have a strong incentive to disprove the consensus (like the ulcer thing), but the keyword is disprove. Merely speaking against the consensus without proof is something that they do not do.
Most scientists don't have any proof about global warming and so they keep quiet about it. It's not that they agree with the 'consensus' or disagree with it. They are perplexed by the puzzle and trying to find out. There is not a rule that says they have to form an opinion one way or the other - most scientsists don't form strong opinions before doing research.
The current 'consensus' goes something like: planet getting hotter? Probably. Significantly hotter? Maybe, ask again in 50 years. Will it continue to do so? No idea. Why is it happening? Well, we have some guesses but that's about it. None of the guesses can correctly explain all of the data we have so far. What can we do about it? See previous answer. The scientists are busy working on this list from the beginning, but politicians persist in jumping ahead and making up stuff about the later ones.
The 'report' in this article is an unreviewed publication from an organisation controlled by the government for the purposes of telling them what they want to hear. As such it has no more validity than any other political statement on the matter. This is not a peer-reviewed paper, so it's not 'real' science. And incidentally, they seem to have collected a reasonable amount of the evidence for the planet getting hotter, and then blamed humans for it without any evidence at all.
Anyone who takes thier data seriously would never think of doing such a thing. You have no idea what happens when your files get copied to some third party network.
I can't really say that I care what happens to my heavily encrypted data while it's on some third party network. If they can't give it back to me in identical form, they don't get paid any more, and they aren't the only place where I store it.
I wish I could be a rat, they can cure paralysis, aids, being overweight, being underweight, many types of cancer, mood disorders, aggression, lots of diseases and I even think baldness.
You were joking, but actually this is an important point. There's two reasons why they experiment on small rodents for these things. One, it's easy to obtain a large number of genetically uninteresting rodents. Two, rodents are very *simple* creatures which makes them much easier to work on.
The thing is that they're small and they don't live very long, so their biology is much less sophisticated than that of a human. Getting those 80-year lifespans that people enjoy requires far more wetware. This is important because it means that while they can do all these things to rats, it is much much harder (or sometimes impossible, or just nonsensical) to get them to work on humans.
The cancer cures are a big one. The experiments are useful and advance our understanding of biology, but most of them aren't going to lead to cancer cures that work on humans. Why not? Because a lot of them are either manually implementing anti-cancer mechanisms that are already built into humans, but are missing from rodents, or else would be effectively defeated by another part of the human body's far more powerful mechanisms for fighting diseases. So while the scientists learn a lot about how stuff like cancer works from the experiments, you shouldn't expect them to be able to create the same effects in people.
Many small animals can regrow lost limbs. Humans can't; instead they live ten times as long. There are tradeoffs involved here.
The best thing that Microsoft could do for itself is spin-out their products into separate spin off companies.
Everything but the Windows and Office companies would immediately liquidate, because every single one of their other products makes a net loss. None of those other things are going concerns in the market, they're paid for from the Windows and Office profits.
The whole point of the Microsoft empire is monolithic control over every aspect of the user experience. Their goal is to ensure that users do not encounter any non-Microsoft products during a normal day. It wouldn't make any sense for them to split up.
Slashdot Mirror
He clearly means that it should be okay to not 'share' code as long as the commons is 'enriched'. This is an argument for proprietary software, thinly cloaked. My bet is that he's thinking of licenses that say "You can look at the source code and modify it to fix bugs for your use, and even distribute those bug fixes, but you may not use it to produce a product that competes with ours" - sure, it's better than what they used to offer, but it is just not good enough. It's not free software, it's slightly less painful proprietary software. It's Java - join their developer program and you can see the code, and submit bug fixes, but you can't share the code with anybody.
Here he's arguing that people shouldn't be reimplementing Java (as kaffe, sablevm, etc), but instead 'cooperating' with Sun and working on Sun's proprietary implementation of it. That's what this is probably all about. Sun don't want to release Java as free software, they just want the community to help them develop it.
The message here is: free software is bad, stop doing it because we don't want to play and that means competing implementations which is bad for everyone.
Even the anti-freedom 'pragmatists' would have to admit that it's not really a very convincing message. Creating and maintaining a completely independent code base is, all else aside, ensuring that there is always competition so Sun will continue having to work to stay ahead of them.
Inflation is another beast entirely, an effect of economics and technology as well as interest and growth.
That's like saying that gravity is an effect of math. Inflation is ultimately caused by an inflationary currency, which is the basis of usury. The principle is: the banks operate a currency for your use, and you pay for the use of it - either explicitly, via interest on loans, or implicitly, via inflation (the economics get complicated here, but decreasing the value of the currency you are holding is effectively increasing the wealth of the bank by an equivalent amount). The banks carefully control the rate of inflation by adjusting interest rates (interest on your savings is also inflationary), so that they get a good yield of milk from the cow without wearing it out.
Non-inflationary currency is entirely possible, it's just not what we use at present - primarily because the banks have a monopoly and aggressively defend it against anybody who might become a threat to their business model. There are multiple competing theories about whether it would work better or worse, and almost as many definitions for 'better' and 'worse'.
Capitalism is about competition, profit, and growth, and towards that end it has succeeded.
Capitalism is about getting people to act in a certain manner, motivated by greed. It works relatively well because humans are pretty greedy, on the whole. Competition and profit are just terms in the middle; growth is just the current state. The objective of the system is to see that things get done, the wheels keep turning, the cows get milked every day, etc. Growth, depression, and stability are all possible.
The problem is a lack of understanding. We've got millions of people who don't understand the basics of computers on a public, anonymous, worldwide network who are essentially network/server administrators, as far their home pc is concerned. To make it worse, most people not only don't understand, but don't want to understand.
The problem is that people are allowed to control a dangerous vehicle in public spaces without any form of training. Ineffective as they are, driving tests at least ensure that people know which side of the road you should be on. We shouldn't let the use computers on public networks without a similar level of testing.
Become rich and hire the mob to find these people and break some knees?
By and large, these people are the mob. Russian organised crime is into spam and phishing in a big way, and several of the other groups are getting in on the action. And it's no easier to shut them down today than it was a hundred years ago. They're using bribery, blackmail, pressure on the government from their semi-legitimate sides, and all the other usual tricks. When some of them finally do get arrested, they're always sacrificial pawns; another bunch of people is immediately set up to replace them.
There are a few people out there doing this stuff on their own, but to make money from phishing you need a way to convert a long list of credit card numbers into money - it's far better suited to organised crime than to rogue asshats.
driving mostly by desire for better AI in games
What desire? AI in games hasn't really got any better in the past few years, and doesn't look likely to do so. All that has been improving is the level of simulation detail - the meat targets have learned how to crouch behind boxes and throw grenades around corners, but they haven't actually become more intelligent, they just have more actions available to them. Art quality, plot, and to a lesser extent gameplay, are the factors that sell games. Few people go out and buy a game because the AI is smart. So there's little interest in improving it beyond the minimum baseline needed to make the game playable.
Finally, the standard solution to the AI problem is to use humans for it. Game studios use multiplayer as a substitute for meaningful AI.
For what it's worth, it is my experience that the people on the team have by far the biggest impact on product quality, timeliness, and all those other goodness measures. I believe that the methodology is almost immaterial.
... and that process is the interview process.
This may be true, but the software industry doesn't work that way. Managers want people to be interchangable parts, because that way they can easily replace them when they leave. So they focus on methodology.
Ironically there is one process that I believe is critical to every organization's success, and it probably the least-studied, least-optimized, least-formalized process every company has
This is probably directly related. The managers and HR droids apply their standard interview process, effectively hire people at random, and conclude that they can't reliably get good people - hence the above.
One of the big problems I see is that the interview process is normally optimised to hire the best salesdroid in the group (because they're best at "selling theirself") regardless of whether they are hiring for a sales role or not. Good engineers are cautious and precisionist in their speech, so they tend to "perform worse" at interviews by giving more precise, less optimistic answers.
In short: authorities were concerned about Microsoft dominance in the web-browser market. And they have been worried about Mcirosoft dominance in the media-playback market. Yet they are not concerned about DirectX and the dominance it gives to Microsoft? How come?
Because antitrust is fundamentally a reactive set of laws, not pre-emptive ones. Authorities weren't "concerned about Microsoft dominance", they were concerned that an actual business (Netscape) had been destroyed by Microsoft. It's not a crime unless big business gets hurt. Microsoft abusing their monopoly position isn't enough. Undesireable effects on the consumer are not enough.
When Microsoft has used their monopoly position to shove Sony and Nintendo out of the gaming market, then they can start thinking about putting together an antitrust case. Of course, that won't do you much good.
Clauses like this in contracts of adhesion (meaning a contract where you did not get a chance to negotiate terms with the other party) are typically invalid and regularly struck down in courts. Basically, if a clause would not have been accepted by a hypothetical 'reasonable person' who had a chance to negotiate, in the opinion of the court, then it is void. Letting a third party come into your company and poke through all your computer systems with sensitive data on them is not something that the courts often regard as reasonable. Here's a key phrase from the US case law, lifted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_of_adhesion
Remember that, by the BSA's rules, merely having all the original media, license certificates and product keys for every single copy you've got installed is not sufficient.
Ah, the BSA. This is a little scam they run. Here's how it works: They come along to you with a bunch of impressive-looking lawyers and make all these demands. You're probably a fairly small company. You don't have legal staff in-house. You don't realise that the law is actually on your side at this point; you think that they're telling the truth, and you have to let them audit you. So you let them.
At this point you have just granted them permission to do this stuff, so you can't later claim (when your lawyer explains things to you) that their investigation was unlawful. The whole scheme is based around conning you into granting them permission without realising it.
What you should have done was:
(1) instruct them to get off your property
(2) give them the name of your lawyers, and instruct them to refer all further correspondance there
(3) if they are still here, call the police and tell them you need some trespassers removing
Then you can have a nice leisurely discussion with your lawyers and figure out what, if anything, you actually need to do. Most likely they will tell you that you don't need to do anything unless the BSA has actual evidence of infringement.
Under no circumstances should you ever allow anybody to search your premesis unless they are holding a warrant and they are an officer of the law. The BSA themselves will never, ever have the right to do this because they are not the police.
As for those 'rules' they have about having to show the invoices? They made those up. They have no legal standing. The BSA has to prove that you are breaking the law, not the other way around. Then you merely have to show anything that proves them wrong. "Innocent until proven guilty" applies.
But don't take my word for it. If you are in a managerial role in a company and you are not absolutely sure about this stuff, go and talk to your lawyers and ask them for precise written instructions about what you should do if this stuff happens. Then distribute those instructions to all your management staff.
The BSA is like a mail worm infestation: it's far better to block them at the firewall than to try and clean up the mess once you let them get onto your network.
I can't see how anyone expecting to make a living in the IT industry can pirate with a clear conscious.
Easy: the principle of fair trades. The IT industry routinely screws over we-the-customers with its anti-freedom tactics, its poor management of projects, its preference for style over substance, its inability to deliver the products that we actually want, and above all its sheer stupidity.
It's no surprise that people who are aware of all this feel little moral concern over screwing the IT industry back just a little bit.
Maybe your ethics don't work that way, but a lot of people do operate on a tit-for-tat scheme, and the IT industry is definitely earning itself a whole load of tits. It's quite likely that a lot of your users would not only be happy to pirate your software, they would also like to come over to your house and kick you in the crotch a few times. It may not be your fault personally, but I don't even need to know where you work to be able to say that they've probably acted against the best interests of your users on multiple occasions. And they are not happy about it.
I'm not talking about the ones who like your software and tell you that. I'm not talking about the ones who go out to the store and buy it. I'm talking about the ones who have to use it because your marketdroids sold it to their managers based on a pack of lies, and now they're stuck with having to deal with the same crap every day. They have no hope of ever getting the problems solved because your company has evolved a "technical support" department whose job is to make sure that customer complaints never reach the developers, so that the developers can work undistracted on the next piece of marketable junk.
These people are probably the largest number of actual users of your product. Not *sales* of the product, but people who have to suffer it.
These people are angry.
And you expect them to care about your welfare? Just because some of them work in the same industry?
Fix the busted industry, so that computers cease being a source of frustration and stress for millions every day. Then you'll maybe have a chance of getting some sympathy. Until then, forget it.
If the creator cannot manage the VERY SIMPLE things required to comply with the GPL, then it's a safe bet that they aren't actually managing to maintain the thing either. But I don't believe either of these is the case here.
Really, this article is a whole load of whinging about nothing. These MEPIS guys can manage to put together a distribution that is sold directly through their own web store, and yet they cannot manage to copy the source code to a single public server? Pull the other one, it has got bells on. They must have the source code; they merely need to place it on a web server and/or offer to burn it to a DVD for anybody who asks. Anybody who is reading this comment should be fully capable of doing these things with minimal effort.
This is just somebody who was caught being ignorant about the GPL and feels the need to blame the system for their own mistake. The GPL is not 'causing them problems'. This is not news, let alone for nerds, and it's not stuff that matters.
what are they going to do with the cash?
I'm afraid it will probably be 'lost'. No really, the EU has notoriously bad accounting and huge amounts (millions of euros) of money go missing every year. Nobody's sure whether it's embezzeled or wasted or just sitting somewhere that nobody can find, but there are gaping holes in their accounts. Unfortunately the EU is not under the jurisdiction of any country, and since it has no direct taxpayers it doesn't have useful accounting laws - this would be totally illegal if it was done by the government of any member country. If a corporation did it, their directors would be immediately arrested for fraud while the relevant organisation conducted an autopsy of their accounts. But the EU is apparently unaccountable.
do you honestly think the "right to bear arms" could have any effect on fighting the tyranny of the US government?
Well, yes. That is, after all, the reason why that clause exists. It's not stated very well though; it was supposed to be more along the lines of "the right to form a militia", not "the right to self defence with deadly weapons".
Recent governments have encouraged it being pushed it more in the direction of 'self defence' and have taken to labelling all other forms as terrorism and coming down hard on them. The right to bear arms is now effectively dead. If you had it, it could have an effect on fighting the tyranny of the US government, but for all practical purposes you don't. The right to keep a gun in a locked box in your house is not useful, and you no longer have the right to get together with a bunch of like-minded people and cast off your oppressors.
It's probably obsolete. People like being oppressed these days.
Don't get me wrong, I like what they've done so far, but is it possible for a company to expand beyond a certain critical mass and still stick to the operating principle "Don't Be Evil"?
There's two things you need to realise. The first is that "Don't be evil" was coined as a short way to sum up stuff like "don't fuck the interns" and "don't file fraudulent accounts", it doesn't mean "work in the best interest of the customer". You can find a commentary on how it came to exist here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Be_Evil.
The second is that it stopped being anything more than a marketing label at the point when they made the IPO.
It has never meant "don't do something that is bad for the customer because it makes more money". Google sometimes will and sometimes won't do this; they tend to take a longer-term view and not explicitly screw the customer in a way that will piss them off, but they are not above causing you inconvinience if it would be costly for them to do otherwise (hence the continuing click fraud issues).
In short, nothing in their code of conduct says that they cannot obtain a monopoly position and use it to squeeze the market for money. They just can't do it by shooting puppies. "Don't be evil" doesn't mean "be good".
is this even legal?
Marginally. If the university is paying the student to attend in a standard scholarship arrangement, they can withdraw that scholarship at any time for no reason (although normally they cannot recover any money already paid). This can be used as a threat to coerce the behaviour of students. They can also revoke 'privileges' like being allowed to play on the university-run sports team. So this isn't exactly a ban, just a threat. If you're thinking about going to a university, it'd be a good idea to check out how often they threaten their students like this, but otherwise who cares?
If the student doesn't have a scholarship or care about privileges, the university can't really do anything about it, unless that specific student is posting actual libellous or otherwise illegal material. If you're posting true material that isn't covered by any of the draconian intellectual slav^Wproperty laws over there, you should be safe.
In high school science classes we should teach theories that could be wrong (in particulars or wholly!) but are our best guesses - like evolution, general relativity, etc. We should not teach it if it's not even a science (like ID).
We should teach them as good approximations that make useful predictions. There's no point teaching ID because it doesn't even try to make any predictions so it can't ever be useful; I don't think it's worth worrying about whether or not something is true if it's of no practical value (unless you're studying philosophy).
If on the other hand you insist that only actual falsification makes something a science, then only theories we no longer believe can count as scientific!
That's actually a reasonable and sound position. It's more or less impossible to prove something correct in science - we've discovered many times that if a theory looks right on one level, when you go deeper it's just a good approximation. So you can never really be sure whether you've found the right answer, or just something close to it. And from our experience of science the odds are in favour of the 'good approximation' side.
On the other hand, when you've proven something wrong, you're pretty damned sure that it's wrong. It's then a scientific fact. You can't do that for something that appears right - it's more like a scientific guess.
It's important to keep this in mind - remember that something you believe to be correct is almost certainly not correct in every particlar. And follow up on those "Hmm, that's odd" moments, because those are how progress is made.
(From the government legislation that created the NAS, in 1863)
Funded by the government. That means controlled by them for all practical purposes, at least when working on government-funded projects. The government just can't bribe them explicitly - and hey, you can't bribe a congresscritter explicitly either, but that doesn't stop anyone.
it is probably the single most respected organization of scientists in the entire world
Is that like the World Series?
To say that "this is not a peer-reviewed paper" is particularly stupid, because the report in question is itself a peer review
That does not mean that the paper has been through the peer review process. Just because it's commenting on something that other people wrote doesn't mean anything. Nor is it a peer review. A peer review is an analysis of one particular paper, specifically focussing on the validity of the paper. This is just an opinion piece that talks about some papers.
Membership is so highly regarded that universities brag about how many NAS members they have, and are proud if they are able to claim even one.
People do that with MCSEs too. People like to brag about anything they can.
Indeed, the NAS review was requested by a Congressional critic of global warming in response to questions that had been raised about the validity of its methodology.
That doesn't mean he was pulling the strings that determined what the result was. Given the result, it means he probably lost the string-pulling match.
You seriously need to wake up and stop trusting your government. They've been manipulating the output of 'impartial' scientists and other bodies for longer than I can remember, why on earth do you think this one is any different? We usually find out about these things a few weeks or months later, when the media can ignore it because it's no longer news.
As any profit minded company, they should not care what it runs behind the scenes as long as TCO is low on the long run.
Excuse me? Microsoft is not a profit-minded company. They're notorious for it. They have two divisions that make a profit (Windows and Office) and everything else runs at a loss. Their xbox gaming division managed to be wildly popular and still make a four billion dollar loss. If Microsoft was a profit-minded company, they would axe all these useless exercises and focus on their core business - Windows and Office. Xboxes certainly aren't selling copies of Windows or Office.
The reality is that Microsoft is a power-minded company. It's not about making money, it's about control over how people use computers. Their goal is to arrange the world so that you use only Microsoft products. Whatever it costs.
Is it true that Europeans don't pay for text messages
No. However, the rates are low, and you don't pay for receiving SMS. You can get contracts where you pay a fixed rate per month for them, too.
Of course if the roles were reversed you'd be saying how silly it was that American landline users have to pay extra to call someone who chooses to use a cellphone.
This is unrelated; it's because in the UK, there is one network responsible for landlines and not cellphones, so every call between a landline and a cellphone is a 'trunk' call (like you have between different carriers in the US). Long-distance calls on landlines here are always within BTs network, so those don't cost as much as calls to cellphones. You get exactly the same thing in the US, it's just that there, you have carriers that do both cellphone and landline networks, and you have multiple landline networks, so it looks different.
Out of curiosity, do you get charged double air time if you call another mobile from your own?
No. Calls between cellphones on the same network (or on some other networks, depending on your contract) are often cheaper than landlines. All calls between networks cost roughly the same (except that some of the cell networks have made special deals to reduce the costs between them, but BT are not allowed to do that because they're a monopoly).
According to the article "Global Warming Skeptics," there are only 12 scientists who disagree with global warming. From the discussion here, clearly there must be more disagreement.
(even ulcers were figured out eventually)
No, you don't get it.
Scientists don't just randomly shout disagreement with things they think are wrong. They don't. Most scientists are careful to make no strong statements about anything until they can prove it. This is because they are scared of the effect on their reputation if they say something which is later proven false - a few speak out anyway, but the vast majority do not. They do have a strong incentive to disprove the consensus (like the ulcer thing), but the keyword is disprove. Merely speaking against the consensus without proof is something that they do not do.
Most scientists don't have any proof about global warming and so they keep quiet about it. It's not that they agree with the 'consensus' or disagree with it. They are perplexed by the puzzle and trying to find out. There is not a rule that says they have to form an opinion one way or the other - most scientsists don't form strong opinions before doing research.
The current 'consensus' goes something like: planet getting hotter? Probably. Significantly hotter? Maybe, ask again in 50 years. Will it continue to do so? No idea. Why is it happening? Well, we have some guesses but that's about it. None of the guesses can correctly explain all of the data we have so far. What can we do about it? See previous answer. The scientists are busy working on this list from the beginning, but politicians persist in jumping ahead and making up stuff about the later ones.
The 'report' in this article is an unreviewed publication from an organisation controlled by the government for the purposes of telling them what they want to hear. As such it has no more validity than any other political statement on the matter. This is not a peer-reviewed paper, so it's not 'real' science. And incidentally, they seem to have collected a reasonable amount of the evidence for the planet getting hotter, and then blamed humans for it without any evidence at all.
Anyone who takes thier data seriously would never think of doing such a thing. You have no idea what happens when your files get copied to some third party network.
I can't really say that I care what happens to my heavily encrypted data while it's on some third party network. If they can't give it back to me in identical form, they don't get paid any more, and they aren't the only place where I store it.
Not seeing your point.
I wish I could be a rat, they can cure paralysis, aids, being overweight, being underweight, many types of cancer, mood disorders, aggression, lots of diseases and I even think baldness.
You were joking, but actually this is an important point. There's two reasons why they experiment on small rodents for these things. One, it's easy to obtain a large number of genetically uninteresting rodents. Two, rodents are very *simple* creatures which makes them much easier to work on.
The thing is that they're small and they don't live very long, so their biology is much less sophisticated than that of a human. Getting those 80-year lifespans that people enjoy requires far more wetware. This is important because it means that while they can do all these things to rats, it is much much harder (or sometimes impossible, or just nonsensical) to get them to work on humans.
The cancer cures are a big one. The experiments are useful and advance our understanding of biology, but most of them aren't going to lead to cancer cures that work on humans. Why not? Because a lot of them are either manually implementing anti-cancer mechanisms that are already built into humans, but are missing from rodents, or else would be effectively defeated by another part of the human body's far more powerful mechanisms for fighting diseases. So while the scientists learn a lot about how stuff like cancer works from the experiments, you shouldn't expect them to be able to create the same effects in people.
Many small animals can regrow lost limbs. Humans can't; instead they live ten times as long. There are tradeoffs involved here.
The best thing that Microsoft could do for itself is spin-out their products into separate spin off companies.
Everything but the Windows and Office companies would immediately liquidate, because every single one of their other products makes a net loss. None of those other things are going concerns in the market, they're paid for from the Windows and Office profits.
The whole point of the Microsoft empire is monolithic control over every aspect of the user experience. Their goal is to ensure that users do not encounter any non-Microsoft products during a normal day. It wouldn't make any sense for them to split up.
Whats the point?
This is a sport. I do not believe it needs a point. Blame slashdot if you thought it was anything other than a fun game of engineering challenges.