As you are probably aware, if you think about it, you really don't want to claim that something is not patentable because it is merely a discovery rather than an invention. Why? Because there are many scientists and mathematicians who (to some degree) are Platonists -- i.e., the Mandelbrot (sp?) set is "out there" and was "discovered," not created.
Even if you want to argue that no mathematical discovery (or process to reach that discovery) should be patentable, do you want to claim the same for all manipulations and results of chemistry, as in the "discovery" of a new drug or antibacterial agent? And whether or not you want to, is it reasonable to assume someone would invest the huge sums of money, time, and human energy to come up with these if there could be no monetary benefit?
You don't want to put the legal system in charge of judging competing philosophies, do you? {-8
As one who is unfortunate enough to live in "Rude Rudy's" city, I must agree that this place fits the definition of a "police state." But fortunately, compulsive freaks like hizzoner can never be satisfied, so they always push harder, and now he's (finally) pushed so far past any acceptable level of oppression, he's doomed (policitically, anyway).
For those of you not following the issues:
He recently decided those who are in shelters, even if they have young children, must work. Those who won't work, will be removed from the shelters -- and therefore, he said (quite logically, really), their children would be removed from the family and placed in foster care. The courts have issued a (temporary) restraining order, of course.
He decided to criminalize being on the street (if you look poor, that is), just in time for Christmas. Rosie O'Donnell -- bless her -- took a strong stand against that on her national tv chat show. The mayor accuses her of taking a political stand in this, since she favors probable senatorial candidate Clinton over probable senatorial candidate Guiliani. This will destroy his political career (finally!), since even complete idiots have to now realize how completely mean-spirited and freaky this guy is.
I don't know how anyone can doubt this is a "police state" given that this country leads the world in numbers of persons incarcerated -- especially given that about 1/3 of all African-American males are under the thumb of the "criminal justice system" at any given time. (Yes, we have more prisoners than the USSR ever did!)
If you weren't aware of this, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I am an Englishwoman who's lived in the U.S. since my parents dragged me here. Ever since I was about 10 and visited England for a couple of months, I've thought it very odd that in England, with institutionalized censorship, there is very little actual censorship, and in the U.S., where "freedom of speech" is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, most people are afraid to speak out!
I think its related to the way American "authorities" treat Americans: The public is treated as children. (They therefore tend to act like children.) Cf. when the terrorists were bombing London, you could see notices asking the public to watch for dangerous packages and report them; you would never find such requests for help from the public here. Instead, they would pretend there was no danger and hire more and more police types, perhaps adding even more layers of police agencies to deal with such a threat.
If 99% of almost everyone's life is routine...
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...something is wrong in your local society! I believe that in the 50's, perhaps, many persons lived somewhat routine lives (got up and went to bed at the same time, worked the same hours in the same space doing the same thing M-F anyway, perhaps ate the same meals each week). They were recovering from the extremely high levels of uncertainty that gripped the world in the previous decade's war. But now?
My life is seldom the same from one day to the next, and that is probably true for many consultants (exception: I can usually be found asleep between about midnight and about 4:30am -- other than that, it varies). To a lesser extent, students live varied lives, and so do some children (those whose parents haven't scheduled every minute of their waking hours), especially during vacations from school.
As an artist, I believe humans have preferred levels of predictability or uncertainty, and seek to increase or decrease routine (or just their attention) in an effort to modify their degree of uncertainty. (Physiologically, social scientists can measure levels of arousal to get at this.) The level desired varies from one person to the next, of course, and over the course of the day (at night when we're ready to sleep we don't want any uncertainty in our environment, at hours of peak awareness, we want more).
Children are highly conservative and greatly value routine precisely because the world is constantly surprising them -- they haven't figured out the overall patterns yet. Retired adults stereotypically want to travel to new places and have new experiences.
Those of us who value a looser public space with plenty of room for eccentricity or personal choice will continue to evolve socially, relying on our new societal consciousness (the 'Net), and will no doubt continue to act in ways to increase the public disorder (or decrease the public order). Those who seek to control others will no doubt continue to use technology to identify and monitor the outliers, but eventually diversity in human society contributes higher survival value, and I believe it will prevail.
Optimal understanding of politics depends on assessing actions along the continuum between controlling others and empowering others.
I agree that the most valuable skill a manager or consultant needs is the ability to correctly estimate the amount of time which will be needed to complete a projected assignment.
On the other hand, I can't agree that salaries are good things, at least not in the U.S. As a consultant, I feel in control of my work, even under tight time pressure. If I need a certain kind of (software) tool, I acquire it; if I need assistance or expertise, I seek it out. As a salaried worker, one spends hours trying to work around ridiculous restrictions created by corporate budgets and political pressures.
Btw, I was taught decades ago how to estimate my time for any contract. This procedure has never failed for me yet, so I pass it on here:
Estimate how long you expect the job to take.
If necessary,
break it down into modules,
count the number of modules, N, and
multiply N by the most average-looking module, in terms of time projected to completion.
Multiply your estimate by 1.5 -- because things always go wrong.
This gives me a very accurate estimate -- except that if other people have to work with me on the project, I multiple my first result by 2.5 instead of 1.5!
Gotta agree with you -- a couple of times I've provided documentation for moving facilities or contingency planning, and I can tell you that when a commercial institution decides to move just one major software system from one clump of hardware to another, it takes almost a year of planning and thousands of man-hours to plan the move, test the changes, and actually accomplish the move. Such moves are always carried out over a weekend, usually a holiday (3-day) weekend, to allow for backup and recovery as necessary.
Y2K is equivalent to simultaneous facilities transfers for thousands of critical systems all over the world. To believe there will be no disaster is to have the faith of a small child. Even in the U.S., which is by far the most prepared nation, I expect at least one disaster (i.e., people will die) to ensue, probably in a large, old metropolitan area.
Seriously, folks... I come by my Y2K tremors honestly.. I've worked in the technological headquarters of rather a large number of brokerages and banks. With these eyes I have observed such stupidity and ignorance as would seem incredible to a trusting soul such as yourself.
Then again, you don't know me -- so, did you read the recent story about how NASA lost the probe orbiting Mars? Seems some bright coder failed to translate correctly from metric to feet in calculating the orbit, and it burned up because it entered the atmosphere (at about 60 miles instead of 150). Of course, you have to go to BBC for the horrendous details... the authorities and their media don't want you to realize how bone-headed even NASA's coders -- arguably brighter and more motivated than most -- can be.
If you're living in some cozy suburban home with a fireplace and you have plenty of water and fuel stockpiled, or you're down south where the temperature probably won't drop much below 45 degrees (F) the week after the New Year, you're probably safe enough. But those of us in NYC and other environments highly dependent on deeply interconnected technology have plenty of reason to fear. Just a couple of months ago, a sudden, completely unexpected rainstorm that fell only on Manhattan in the early morning knocked out the subways. So the buses and cabs were also effectively out of service since so many crowded onto them. If you were on your way to the hospital that morning, or desperately needed to get to the airport, you had a tiny taste of what COULD happen here the week of Jan. 1st.
When was the last time you heard of a predicted, expected power-outage??? They still happen in the greater NY metropolitan area -- even just last summer, blocks in uptown Manhattan were completely cut off for more than 24 hours, just because of high demand during a predicted heat wave!
The real danger is that relatively tiny technical failures can quickly cascade into life-threatening consequences in apparently unrelated systems. Remember the implications of complexity theory (one good reason to read the notes prefacing chapters of Jurassic Park, regardless of how you felt about the movie).
Okay, imagine you've just walked into a walk-in closet and closed the door. Bet you wish you had a light in that closet, right? Maybe you do -- maybe you have a really bright, 150-watt halogen lamp. Still see a lot of impenetrable shadows, do you? Suppose you put, oh, I don't know, a thick cloud of water vapour between your light source and the floor of the closet. Can you still distinguish your shoes down there?
Okay, now walk outside, on the cloudiest day of the year, and look around you. How many lights, placed where, and of what wattage, would you need to employ to achieve this level of illumination without your insignificant solar power???
Thousands of persons still use the sun to illuminate almost every significant activity, to dry their clothes, to warm themselves. Consider, too, the work accomplished by the sun in creating wind, harnessed by green plants to provide practically all our food, etc.
Solar power is far greater than your imagination can conceive -- it is merely our so-far limited ability to harness even a tiny fraction of this power which leaves us wanting more energy. It isn't the sun which "can't produce!"
HINT: It's really easy to create a program (within XyWrite's XPL language) to transform formatted text-as-is into a Web page (fitting particular templates) for the Web. Also, of course, it's a snap to create multiple (storable) macro-sets to generate custom HTML code for different clients. So it's still the best wp package around, as far as I can see. And just about infinitely hackable, too.
I agree that highlighting features such as utilities and games within an OS makes it appear more attractive to users, but almost no end users actually buy an OS any more. Most are purchased by [presumed] technically competent manufacturers of hardware... a few others are free, downloaded by [actually] technically competent individuals.
Also, advertising features (even when they don't work at ALL!) is more effective in sales than simply offering them (see practically any Microsoft product for examples). (-8
I beg all you young men (and I'm sure that's what 90%+ of you are) to heed this message: While you are a young male (especially English-speaking and white), any projection of technical competence will get you a job, in today's market (in the U.S.). You will be desirable because of your very basic coding skills or networking skills -- the specific technical training you can easily display in your conversation or previous job experience. As you age, PLEASE NOTE that employers will automatically assume you no longer have these cutting edge LOW-LEVEL technical skills (i.e., coding, hubs-'n' -routers, etc.). Of course, if you're female, you have an uphill battle from the start and will assume to age (for "age" read "become obsolescent") at about 5 times the male rate.
Once you are somewhat older -- in your early 30's, say -- you will probably face a period of diminished demand for your services as a coder. This happens in part because of stereotyping, but also because of changing work patterns (there's so much job-hopping most managers are no longer promoted from within in technical departments).
I always stress to young coders that they MUST make the jump from lower-level, highly technical, quickly obsolescent skills to higher-level skills (analysis, "management" -- which I agree is mostly nonsense and no distinct set of knowledge, or hi-level accounting... something!) in order to remain employable. My dear readers, consider the demographics and make up your mind to identify your own path out of low-level coding-type expertise to higher-level jobs as soon as you get your first jobs. College can be one such path, partly because of "networking" (the soft, making-contacts kind). Oftener than you think, instructors place outstanding students into corporations with which they have previously had contact.
Certain courses really ought to be free -- others usually cannot. Here's why:
I want to encourage writers to meet together, share their work, get constructive feedback. So I offer a free "course" in a space, open to all comers. I facilitate, primarily to set the tone of the group (also because I'm very good at this and sometimes writers request my feedback specifically). This course can be free only if it doesn't cost me anything to use the space -- it could conceptually be free online, even (although there are practical difficulties about protecting material -- work in progress -- distributed electronically to who-knows-where-and-who).
I offer a course called "Basic Technical Writing," which provides already-competent writers with some basic principles distilled from my 20+ years of technical documentation consulting experience. These principles are not obvious, cross many disciplinary boundaries, and are (in today's job market) very valuable knowledge. If I make the course available online, some jerk will publish my material as his/her book. In addition, I am teaching intelligent but non-technical persons (writers) about technical matters, and cannot predict how much each student will understand. To put it another way, I restrict my class size to 6 persons, have prerequisites (not only competency in writing, but in at least one wp package), but still expect to have to tailor the material quite heavily for the specific students in each session.
Finally, I would like to point out that it is a Generally Good Thing to have an academy, and tuition-paid courses are basically essential support for an academy. I agree fully that today's American colleges and universities are NOT such academies, being more like diploma mills where money is exchanged for a paper job interview opportunity... But f2f interaction in an academy is still the ideal for a REAL education -- not just training-to-do-a-job.
Plato, in the _Republic_, also specified that an elite, enlightened class would control the goings-on in his ideal society. Despite the unpopularity of "elitism," I think in any hierarchical society (i.e., in any groups of more than 50 persons since at least 20,000B.C.!) this is a natural and even defensible arrangement.
Although not many realize it, the real effect of the 'Net will be to make hierarchical structure unnecessary, though it may take a couple more decades. I'm also fond of saying that, in years to come, certain econometricians (who currently use a rather small subset of mathematics to model what they conceive of as "the economy") will finally realize that the economic function of the 'Net was to introduce the concept of limits into economic practise.
Yes, this integration is exactly why a "philosophy of technology" is such a fuzzy/meaningless concept. Apart from our language, absolutely everything else humans have or use is the result of "technology" (material application of knowledge). So how can it be heuristic to regard it as a separate issue for a unique philosophy?
A philosophy of science does make sense, and I understand its subject matter and its issues, but a philosophy of technology just makes no particular sense. I could see having a philosophy of using/reviewing new technological innovations, but consider this part of political science, really.
Btw, given the action of linguistic principles, shortening "Internet" to "'Net" is inevitable -- but I like to use the initial apostrophe! Also, please remind folks to capitalize Web (the World Wide Web is a proper noun, for all that Tim B-L didn't make it a corporate logo-name!).
Thanks! Btw, I recall Sturgeon's Law as "90% of everything is... crap," which seems to fit better with empirical observation that only 10% of the people are ever effectively involved in change!
You don't appear to understand what "open source code" actually means. It means that, unlike code "owned" and tightly controlled by a secretive bunch of corporate money/legal freaks, anyone (okay -- anyone who's qualified!) can look at it, test it, propose (or even implement) changes and improvements. Try proposing a change in Windows and see how far you get.
It took years for Billy G. even to respond to users' many, repeated requests just to add a comma to the last ("free space") line of a response to the DIR command! (Perhaps this xplains all those thumbprints we used to see on user's screens: they were trying to count the zeroes (-8.)
or very poorly documented, which comes to the same thing.... One of the major charges at an earlier time against MS was their refusal to document (or properly document) their OS in time. So, their own in-house-designed applications could be written to be released for a new release of DOS (or, later, Windows), but no-one else could start work until the new release was actually out there... (Then the programmers had to first examine the OS to make sure what they wanted to do would match what MS had done!)
Well before Microsoft showed up (i.e., once Billy G. saw serious profit-potential by riding IBM's coattails), there were some really neat OS's for non-IBM personal computers. One of them was so well-designed (for the Z80, Radio Shack Model I) it actually read AND wrote to diskettes formatted in any of the other OS's for that machine! And, if you asked for a particular file that wasn't on the diskette drive you were logged to -- well, it actually searched for that filename on successive drives until it found it, or reported the file was not available.
I remember when a friend first told me about DOS for the IBM machine, how horrified we were at its primitive abilities. *Sigh*
In the long-ago days when I used to code (or at least, code a lot more than I do now) we had this odd practise of testing our programs to make sure they worked. Nowadays, of course, they call this function "quality assurance" and apparently you have to have a certain kind of education to do it (or at least, to have the title and salary that goes with doing it).
I would be amused by the incompetence of currently active coders (esp. those at Microsoft) and documenters (my theory is, at MS they give them the specs, but don't let them use the product when they're writing the manual!) -- if it didn't negatively affect my work. Not to mention my cost to my clients.
And I don't want to even think about how many hours I've put in exhaustively determining that, indeed, the feature promised and even illustrated in the manual doesn't actually work, no matter how many ways you try to trick the software into working.
If only that were their only "trick." Here are two reasons I learned to hate Microsoft several years ago:
I bought a Toshiba 1000 when they first came out -- seems primitive now, but it was great then... except for one non-working feature of their custom utilities. When I called about the bug (i.e., undocumented feature!), a Toshiba engineer explained they knew about it, and had asked Microsoft to fix it (they had supplied the code, it turned out) -- and MS declined to fix it!
I was amazed that they were arrogant enough to assume they could get away with this.
My favorite wp package is XyWrite, and I've been using it since the mid-80's. During the years upgrades to the version "3+" were coming out, one feature (auto spell-check and optional/customizable auto-fix) suddenly disappeared from a minor upgrade. I asked at a users' group meeting why this had happened, and was told that MS had decided to add this feature to Word, and threatened to sue XyWrite if they didn't drop it!!!!
That is, they were prepared to use their essentially infinite (compared to other companies') assets to cause legal problems for companies that had features they intended, brazenly, to steal for their own inferior product. Tell me this is competitive, non-monopolistic behavior, not chilling to innovation!
First, noone can "get a job as" a sci-fi writer. You write, or you don't write, sci-fi -- if you do, you ARE and if you don't, you are NOT.
Second, you don't appear to have read Mr. Katz's proposal -- perhaps you scanned it... In no way is he calling Disney "Orwellian." (Or perhaps you haven't read Orwell either, and just think you know what the word means?)
I do agree that a "philosophy of technology" is a very fuzzy concept, however. Wouldn't that be like seeking a philosophy of whether or not one ought to act like an engineer (i.e., apply knowledge to solve problems)? Hmmm. So, would its scope include issues like:
whether or not one ought to use wheeled vehicles when seeking to transport materials too heavy to carry easily, or
whether or not to transport such materials (is it against God's will???), or
whether we ought to try continually to come up with the best possible way to perform such transportation?
I'd agree that what you call the tri-partite constituencies (dev., admin., user) explained a lot of OS marketplace dynamics -- prior to MicroSoft! Marketplace hype seems to be a driving force in their bloated implementation of OS's.
I believe an operating system ought not to be defined as including utilities (NOT "applications!") such as Edit (in DOS). In exactly the same way that current MS W'9x users have to know to tell the system to show/not show file extensions, hidden and system files, etc., different persons (roles?) need different utilities. Having one bloated super-utility and trying to make it configurable for all users is sort of like what IBM used to do with operating systems: They made it so complicated -- because of all the optional parameters provided to customize for different machines -- client companies had to have special techies just to deal with the operating system!
In my own case, I rejected the Mac OS solely because no developers offered utilities equivalent to early Norton's packages available for the PC. Sure, it's a "better" operating system, but when things went wrong (as they always did for those Mac people begging me to help them!) there were never tools available that I could use to help them. That doesn't mean every OS should come bundled with utilities like disk wiping, defragging, and file management -- it just means these capabilities should be available to those who need them.
Thanks for providing good, solid information in your response! Americans seem to have this schizoid "take" on telephone wiretapping -- many of us know that government already monitors all international calls, calls from major-hotel rooms, etc. on a strictly illegal and continuing basis. At the same time, most of us ignore this fact. Those of us who know and say organized government is the greatest threat to individual liberty (like the framers of the U.S. Constitution!) are being defined as "right-wing" terrorist types. Simply applying this label ("terrorist") makes it legal to post surveillance on us.
The most dangerous laws (previous to these issues) are the anti-racketeering statues, supposedly created only to fight organized crime. Once such ill-advised laws exist, however, they are "cleverly" applied by self-righteous prosecutors eager for new and more powerful weapons to terrify those they presume are criminals.
The real danger we need to fight is the propaganda that redefines intelligence, technical competence, and love of individual liberty into "bad" traits. If most citizens were better educated about what the government ALREADY does, they might be less willing to retract the Bill of Rights: further restrict freedom of speech, and the right to associate or meet in public (cyber)spaces.
Could we not consider that the answer to the question in part rests on tapping into human nature, not just technology? After all, in one sense the solution is easy: Given access to the Web by our magic plastic box, we simply log in to some forum, perhaps upload a picture of the starving child, or (satellite) coordinates of our farm, and broadcast an appeal for immediate assistance (i.e., delivery of food).
This would, of course, work perfectly if the humans receiving the posted message were responsive. Now take it one step forward: Somewhere in this world, there are humans ready and able to be responsive. So, someone somewhere (who sees this as the most important work they can do, which is related to the issue of individual vocation) conceives of a Web site where immediate attention can be brought to bear on urgent, life-threatening, low-cost-to-solve problems like this. Now the farmer can actually post the emergency request to an existing site, with a more realistic hope of salvation.
If this seems unrealistic, remember that some of us already do something similar offline: Letters to Santa Claus from needy children are put in bins at Post Offices, and individuals come and pick them up and fulfil individual requests. I think most of us would give a lot more if we didn't suspect most "charitable contributions" never reached actual recipients.
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Even if you want to argue that no mathematical discovery (or process to reach that discovery) should be patentable, do you want to claim the same for all manipulations and results of chemistry, as in the "discovery" of a new drug or antibacterial agent? And whether or not you want to, is it reasonable to assume someone would invest the huge sums of money, time, and human energy to come up with these if there could be no monetary benefit?
You don't want to put the legal system in charge of judging competing philosophies, do you? {-8
- For those of you not following the issues:
- He recently decided those who are in shelters, even if they have young children, must work. Those who won't work, will be removed from the shelters -- and therefore, he said (quite logically, really), their children would be removed from the family and placed in foster care. The courts have issued a (temporary) restraining order, of course.
- He decided to criminalize being on the street (if you look poor, that is), just in time for Christmas. Rosie O'Donnell -- bless her -- took a strong stand against that on her national tv chat show. The mayor accuses her of taking a political stand in this, since she favors probable senatorial candidate Clinton over probable senatorial candidate Guiliani. This will destroy his political career (finally!), since even complete idiots have to now realize how completely mean-spirited and freaky this guy is.
I don't know how anyone can doubt this is a "police state" given that this country leads the world in numbers of persons incarcerated -- especially given that about 1/3 of all African-American males are under the thumb of the "criminal justice system" at any given time. (Yes, we have more prisoners than the USSR ever did!)If you weren't aware of this, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I am an Englishwoman who's lived in the U.S. since my parents dragged me here. Ever since I was about 10 and visited England for a couple of months, I've thought it very odd that in England, with institutionalized censorship, there is very little actual censorship, and in the U.S., where "freedom of speech" is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, most people are afraid to speak out!
I think its related to the way American "authorities" treat Americans: The public is treated as children. (They therefore tend to act like children.) Cf. when the terrorists were bombing London, you could see notices asking the public to watch for dangerous packages and report them; you would never find such requests for help from the public here. Instead, they would pretend there was no danger and hire more and more police types, perhaps adding even more layers of police agencies to deal with such a threat.
My life is seldom the same from one day to the next, and that is probably true for many consultants (exception: I can usually be found asleep between about midnight and about 4:30am -- other than that, it varies). To a lesser extent, students live varied lives, and so do some children (those whose parents haven't scheduled every minute of their waking hours), especially during vacations from school.
As an artist, I believe humans have preferred levels of predictability or uncertainty, and seek to increase or decrease routine (or just their attention) in an effort to modify their degree of uncertainty. (Physiologically, social scientists can measure levels of arousal to get at this.) The level desired varies from one person to the next, of course, and over the course of the day (at night when we're ready to sleep we don't want any uncertainty in our environment, at hours of peak awareness, we want more).
Children are highly conservative and greatly value routine precisely because the world is constantly surprising them -- they haven't figured out the overall patterns yet. Retired adults stereotypically want to travel to new places and have new experiences.
Those of us who value a looser public space with plenty of room for eccentricity or personal choice will continue to evolve socially, relying on our new societal consciousness (the 'Net), and will no doubt continue to act in ways to increase the public disorder (or decrease the public order). Those who seek to control others will no doubt continue to use technology to identify and monitor the outliers, but eventually diversity in human society contributes higher survival value, and I believe it will prevail.
Optimal understanding of politics depends on assessing actions along the continuum between controlling others and empowering others.
On the other hand, I can't agree that salaries are good things, at least not in the U.S. As a consultant, I feel in control of my work, even under tight time pressure. If I need a certain kind of (software) tool, I acquire it; if I need assistance or expertise, I seek it out. As a salaried worker, one spends hours trying to work around ridiculous restrictions created by corporate budgets and political pressures.
Btw, I was taught decades ago how to estimate my time for any contract. This procedure has never failed for me yet, so I pass it on here:
- Estimate how long you expect the job to take.
- If necessary,
- break it down into modules,
- count the number of modules, N, and
- multiply N by the most average-looking module, in terms of time projected to completion.
- Multiply your estimate by 1.5 -- because things always go wrong.
This gives me a very accurate estimate -- except that if other people have to work with me on the project, I multiple my first result by 2.5 instead of 1.5!Y2K is equivalent to simultaneous facilities transfers for thousands of critical systems all over the world. To believe there will be no disaster is to have the faith of a small child. Even in the U.S., which is by far the most prepared nation, I expect at least one disaster (i.e., people will die) to ensue, probably in a large, old metropolitan area.
Seriously, folks... I come by my Y2K tremors honestly.. I've worked in the technological headquarters of rather a large number of brokerages and banks. With these eyes I have observed such stupidity and ignorance as would seem incredible to a trusting soul such as yourself.
Then again, you don't know me -- so, did you read the recent story about how NASA lost the probe orbiting Mars? Seems some bright coder failed to translate correctly from metric to feet in calculating the orbit, and it burned up because it entered the atmosphere (at about 60 miles instead of 150). Of course, you have to go to BBC for the horrendous details... the authorities and their media don't want you to realize how bone-headed even NASA's coders -- arguably brighter and more motivated than most -- can be.
If you're living in some cozy suburban home with a fireplace and you have plenty of water and fuel stockpiled, or you're down south where the temperature probably won't drop much below 45 degrees (F) the week after the New Year, you're probably safe enough. But those of us in NYC and other environments highly dependent on deeply interconnected technology have plenty of reason to fear. Just a couple of months ago, a sudden, completely unexpected rainstorm that fell only on Manhattan in the early morning knocked out the subways. So the buses and cabs were also effectively out of service since so many crowded onto them. If you were on your way to the hospital that morning, or desperately needed to get to the airport, you had a tiny taste of what COULD happen here the week of Jan. 1st.
When was the last time you heard of a predicted, expected power-outage??? They still happen in the greater NY metropolitan area -- even just last summer, blocks in uptown Manhattan were completely cut off for more than 24 hours, just because of high demand during a predicted heat wave!
The real danger is that relatively tiny technical failures can quickly cascade into life-threatening consequences in apparently unrelated systems. Remember the implications of complexity theory (one good reason to read the notes prefacing chapters of Jurassic Park, regardless of how you felt about the movie).
Okay, now walk outside, on the cloudiest day of the year, and look around you. How many lights, placed where, and of what wattage, would you need to employ to achieve this level of illumination without your insignificant solar power???
Thousands of persons still use the sun to illuminate almost every significant activity, to dry their clothes, to warm themselves. Consider, too, the work accomplished by the sun in creating wind, harnessed by green plants to provide practically all our food, etc.
Solar power is far greater than your imagination can conceive -- it is merely our so-far limited ability to harness even a tiny fraction of this power which leaves us wanting more energy. It isn't the sun which "can't produce!"
HINT: It's really easy to create a program (within XyWrite's XPL language) to transform formatted text-as-is into a Web page (fitting particular templates) for the Web. Also, of course, it's a snap to create multiple (storable) macro-sets to generate custom HTML code for different clients. So it's still the best wp package around, as far as I can see. And just about infinitely hackable, too.
Also, advertising features (even when they don't work at ALL!) is more effective in sales than simply offering them (see practically any Microsoft product for examples). (-8
Once you are somewhat older -- in your early 30's, say -- you will probably face a period of diminished demand for your services as a coder. This happens in part because of stereotyping, but also because of changing work patterns (there's so much job-hopping most managers are no longer promoted from within in technical departments).
I always stress to young coders that they MUST make the jump from lower-level, highly technical, quickly obsolescent skills to higher-level skills (analysis, "management" -- which I agree is mostly nonsense and no distinct set of knowledge, or hi-level accounting... something!) in order to remain employable. My dear readers, consider the demographics and make up your mind to identify your own path out of low-level coding-type expertise to higher-level jobs as soon as you get your first jobs. College can be one such path, partly because of "networking" (the soft, making-contacts kind). Oftener than you think, instructors place outstanding students into corporations with which they have previously had contact.
- I want to encourage writers to meet together, share their work, get constructive feedback. So I offer a free "course" in a space, open to all comers. I facilitate, primarily to set the tone of the group (also because I'm very good at this and sometimes writers request my feedback specifically). This course can be free only if it doesn't cost me anything to use the space -- it could conceptually be free online, even (although there are practical difficulties about protecting material -- work in progress -- distributed electronically to who-knows-where-and-who).
- I offer a course called "Basic Technical Writing," which provides already-competent writers with some basic principles distilled from my 20+ years of technical documentation consulting experience. These principles are not obvious, cross many disciplinary boundaries, and are (in today's job market) very valuable knowledge. If I make the course available online, some jerk will publish my material as his/her book. In addition, I am teaching intelligent but non-technical persons (writers) about technical matters, and cannot predict how much each student will understand. To put it another way, I restrict my class size to 6 persons, have prerequisites (not only competency in writing, but in at least one wp package), but still expect to have to tailor the material quite heavily for the specific students in each session.
Finally, I would like to point out that it is a Generally Good Thing to have an academy, and tuition-paid courses are basically essential support for an academy. I agree fully that today's American colleges and universities are NOT such academies, being more like diploma mills where money is exchanged for a paper job interview opportunity... But f2f interaction in an academy is still the ideal for a REAL education -- not just training-to-do-a-job.Although not many realize it, the real effect of the 'Net will be to make hierarchical structure unnecessary, though it may take a couple more decades. I'm also fond of saying that, in years to come, certain econometricians (who currently use a rather small subset of mathematics to model what they conceive of as "the economy") will finally realize that the economic function of the 'Net was to introduce the concept of limits into economic practise.
A philosophy of science does make sense, and I understand its subject matter and its issues, but a philosophy of technology just makes no particular sense. I could see having a philosophy of using/reviewing new technological innovations, but consider this part of political science, really.
Btw, given the action of linguistic principles, shortening "Internet" to "'Net" is inevitable -- but I like to use the initial apostrophe! Also, please remind folks to capitalize Web (the World Wide Web is a proper noun, for all that Tim B-L didn't make it a corporate logo-name!).
Thanks! Btw, I recall Sturgeon's Law as "90% of everything is ... crap," which seems to fit better with empirical observation that only 10% of the people are ever effectively involved in change!
Glad you explained this so I needn't (-8 !
It took years for Billy G. even to respond to users' many, repeated requests just to add a comma to the last ("free space") line of a response to the DIR command! (Perhaps this xplains all those thumbprints we used to see on user's screens: they were trying to count the zeroes (-8 .)
or very poorly documented, which comes to the same thing.... One of the major charges at an earlier time against MS was their refusal to document (or properly document) their OS in time. So, their own in-house-designed applications could be written to be released for a new release of DOS (or, later, Windows), but no-one else could start work until the new release was actually out there... (Then the programmers had to first examine the OS to make sure what they wanted to do would match what MS had done!)
I remember when a friend first told me about DOS for the IBM machine, how horrified we were at its primitive abilities. *Sigh*
I would be amused by the incompetence of currently active coders (esp. those at Microsoft) and documenters (my theory is, at MS they give them the specs, but don't let them use the product when they're writing the manual!) -- if it didn't negatively affect my work. Not to mention my cost to my clients.
And I don't want to even think about how many hours I've put in exhaustively determining that, indeed, the feature promised and even illustrated in the manual doesn't actually work, no matter how many ways you try to trick the software into working.
I love this -- you put it in quotation marks, but I never heard it before. Can you tell me the source, please?
I was amazed that they were arrogant enough to assume they could get away with this.
That is, they were prepared to use their essentially infinite (compared to other companies') assets to cause legal problems for companies that had features they intended, brazenly, to steal for their own inferior product. Tell me this is competitive, non-monopolistic behavior, not chilling to innovation!
Second, you don't appear to have read Mr. Katz's proposal -- perhaps you scanned it... In no way is he calling Disney "Orwellian." (Or perhaps you haven't read Orwell either, and just think you know what the word means?)
I do agree that a "philosophy of technology" is a very fuzzy concept, however. Wouldn't that be like seeking a philosophy of whether or not one ought to act like an engineer (i.e., apply knowledge to solve problems)? Hmmm. So, would its scope include issues like:
- whether or not one ought to use wheeled vehicles when seeking to transport materials too heavy to carry easily, or
- whether or not to transport such materials (is it against God's will???), or
- whether we ought to try continually to come up with the best possible way to perform such transportation?
(-8I believe an operating system ought not to be defined as including utilities (NOT "applications!") such as Edit (in DOS). In exactly the same way that current MS W'9x users have to know to tell the system to show/not show file extensions, hidden and system files, etc., different persons (roles?) need different utilities. Having one bloated super-utility and trying to make it configurable for all users is sort of like what IBM used to do with operating systems: They made it so complicated -- because of all the optional parameters provided to customize for different machines -- client companies had to have special techies just to deal with the operating system!
In my own case, I rejected the Mac OS solely because no developers offered utilities equivalent to early Norton's packages available for the PC. Sure, it's a "better" operating system, but when things went wrong (as they always did for those Mac people begging me to help them!) there were never tools available that I could use to help them. That doesn't mean every OS should come bundled with utilities like disk wiping, defragging, and file management -- it just means these capabilities should be available to those who need them.
The most dangerous laws (previous to these issues) are the anti-racketeering statues, supposedly created only to fight organized crime. Once such ill-advised laws exist, however, they are "cleverly" applied by self-righteous prosecutors eager for new and more powerful weapons to terrify those they presume are criminals.
The real danger we need to fight is the propaganda that redefines intelligence, technical competence, and love of individual liberty into "bad" traits. If most citizens were better educated about what the government ALREADY does, they might be less willing to retract the Bill of Rights: further restrict freedom of speech, and the right to associate or meet in public (cyber)spaces.
This would, of course, work perfectly if the humans receiving the posted message were responsive. Now take it one step forward: Somewhere in this world, there are humans ready and able to be responsive. So, someone somewhere (who sees this as the most important work they can do, which is related to the issue of individual vocation) conceives of a Web site where immediate attention can be brought to bear on urgent, life-threatening, low-cost-to-solve problems like this. Now the farmer can actually post the emergency request to an existing site, with a more realistic hope of salvation.
If this seems unrealistic, remember that some of us already do something similar offline: Letters to Santa Claus from needy children are put in bins at Post Offices, and individuals come and pick them up and fulfil individual requests. I think most of us would give a lot more if we didn't suspect most "charitable contributions" never reached actual recipients.