The popup on the slashdot site reads "video surveillance everywhere! Makes your home safe and secure!" Irony of ironies. There is an iron law of beaurocracy: if it is technological feasible to demand data about something, they always will. Maybe someone will invent an intermediate device to cloak this data?
This idea about a master book database is fine, but what we REALLY need is a nonprofit entity that hosts and preserves reader comments.
Amazon now absolutely dominates the book industry because it got there first. Book critics (like me use amazon to publicly share our comments and criticism.
Amazon does a great service, but it resides in the commercial sphere. What if they decide that you need to pay a subscription to have access to the reviews? What if they decide that the author can't republish the reviews elsewhere? What if Amazon goes out of business? Eventually competitors will spring up, and amazon will no longer wield the influence it does. But we need a centralized solution to store these reviews.
I do agree that this would pose certain programming challenges, as well as legal challenges (i.e., how to moderate postings? how to limit space? how to protect against libel?).
Ideally this sort of database should exist for all the arts, but I suspect that there are advantages to separating them.
The thing I like about those poems is their subversiveness. How often have you just ignored advertising around you and then suddenly, one anti-advertisement catches your eye? When we surf or even search, we are skimming and go through a lot of things using our peripheral visions.
I once wrote a satirical piece that individuals would need to buy words before they could have the right to use them. So common words like pronouns and sex and friend and give would be too expensive for most people to afford, while words in other minor languages would be considerably cheaper.
Having an auction for words would be interesting and probably add variety to self-expression. Perhaps it is a far-fetched idea, but with Hollywood and content providers placing copyright lassos over so many things, will it be only a matter of time before corporations own the rights to certain words? Also, wouldn't it result in vast new vocabularies being created with every new day? I'm sick of using the word "sex." Why not use the word "glorb" instead?
Actually yahoo has a lot of my personal information when I signed up for yahoo banking and decided to pay 20$ for extra mail space. As it turns out, the $20 I paid doesn't even give me free pop access anymore. Oh, well, I'll be cancelling pretty soon.
I noticed that the article was written in Europe, so perhaps in America the legal climate is different. I worked for an IT industry that blocked access to adult sites and web-based email. Now I wouldn't dream of looking at porn or anything like that, but quite often a site would be blocked for incomprehensible reasons, and some sites providing email access also are blocked (hotmail, yahoo, etc). Unfortunately, they also blocked geocities and deja when it was around. Need I point out first that many email-based accounts automatically did virus scans before opening attachments, so the security argument was moot, especially because most of the viruses were spread via OUtlook and Windows Scripting Host.
Blocking instant message clients seem to be a logical move, although probably a company might allow company-installed chat clients only to be used. The problem is that for messaging to have any usefulness, you need to be able to speak with users of other IM clients. So it would be ultimately futile for a company to sanction a chat client that can't chat with most of the world.
Restricting access to web-based email essentially means that employers rely more and more on their company email system for personal mail. Employees therefore will receive more email in outlook (mailing lists, etc) and therefore more potential viruses.
Although the Courts have not caught up with technology, they will. As things currently stand, employers can monitor email, but there is also legal precedent preventing a person's personal phone calls during lunch breaks from being recorded and or listened to. The precedent involves a case where a company monitored off-hour calls from the company's telephone system and used the info to fire an employee. The court ruled that because the employee had no easily available alternative (i.e. no public telephones),the company did not have the right to monitor communication even on company equipment.
If employees use their company outlook for personal correspondence, then there is the potential to besmear the company through slanderous posts or abusive speech. Or simple the possibility of embarrassing the company publicly. If illegal or slanderous activity occurred on a company's email address, the company could be found liable. Also, if they wanted to fire an employee for making the libelous or abusive email, the employee could simply say the company did not provide an alternative for communicating.
So by limiting correspondence to company email addresses, the employer gets the worst of both worlds. They would ultimately be liable for employee emails, yet they wouldn't have firm grounds for firing employees for sending emails from the company email (especially if could be demonstrated that it was written during lunchtime or after hours).
This is all speculation of course, but it seems the logical direction for technology law to head toward. Perhaps a company may decide that the real risk of viruses may outweigh the theoretical risk of potential lawsuits arising from unauthorized email. But remember, one case is all it takes for legal departments all over the world to react.
I've noticed a kind of snobbery from experienced sys admins about the value of computer certifications.
I was talking to a head sys admin dealing with MS machines. She said that MSCE's are worthless and are no substitute for experience.
My response, "Duh!!!!" Of course experience is preferable to passing some test. Here are some arguments in favor of being certified:
1)it represents an attempt to learn an organized body of skills. What sys admins don't tell you is that they don't learn a skill until there's a major problem (and then they HAVE to learn about it). Certifications teach basic concepts and familiarizes you with commands and functions; it doesn't teach an algorithm for problem solving. That's where the experience comes in. The knowledge of a certified but clueless individual is a little about a lot of different areas. With a no certification sys admin, you're more likely to find someone who knows only about the problems he has fixed recently.
The second fallacy is that people with experience are more qualified than people with only a certification. Actually this statement is irrelevant. Ask yourself: if you had to choose between two candidates with identical experience, but only the first had a certification, which of the two candidates would you hire?
The problem with sys admin jobs is it's often next to impossible to get the experience in these fields without having hands on knowledge in the first place. For an unemployed individual, it is very difficult to know how to administer an Outlook server or Windows 2000 Server without having his or her own personal license. Certifications are a midway point towards demonstrating competence.
Certifications may not say much, but they at least mean the individual knows the terminology and basic concepts and has some familiarity with how things are supposed to work. That may not be much, but at least this person would be in a better position to pick up the more sophisticated skills more easily on the job.
This was a good piece, although shorter versions of it can be found at many places.
Content creators have it tough in this time. They are told to make money off their content, but the content sellers (time/warner, random house, etc) will help you do that only if you the content creator agree to the terms for selling content. The author has little flexibility in negotiating with the content provider if they want to make a profit.
In the early 1990's I felt that intellectual endeavors had zero economic value. I was not disparaging the pursuit of wealth or even making a cynical comment about the publishing market (I was an unpublished writer). I was merely stating what I felt to be an obvious point. The market cannot properly assess the value of artistic objects. My creative writing was (I felt) terrific, and yet no publisher would take a chance. And why would they? They had a bottom line to worry about, and I was not so naive to believe that any of my creative works would be a cash cow for a publishing company.
5 years later, the Internet was upon us, and suddenly, I no longer had to worry about getting published. Everybody and their 15 year old brother could publish a decent web page. It was a glorious time, but it threatened the livelihood of content creators (who probably weren't making a lot of dough off selling content anyway).
For me, nothing had changed. My goal was widespread distribution. Since I could accomplish that without begging a publisher to back me, I no longer needed publishers anymore. And nothing really had changed because I operated under the assumption that no economic value was to be gained from writing fiction to begin with.
Even though many artists/intellectuals are resigned to their output having no commercial value, most people still like the idea of buying the book at the bookstore or renting the video. Time Warner/Blockbuster/Random House are content facilitators. They provide easy access to art in a medium we prefer. In other words, TW/Blockbuster is offering a convenience service, not content. For that reason, content providers should not have the ability to restrict content in order to offer us the convenience of providing it for a price.
Of course, maybe what I say doesn't apply so much to the movie world, with lavish budgets and special effects. But then again, perhaps the big studio film came about only because of the aggregation of power of the Hollywood film industry. And remember, individuals now can produce special effects comparable to what studios coudl do 10 or 20 years ago.
Perhaps it is idealistic to believe that content creators should offer their content for free. After all, they have to buy their videocams, their PC's and their hosting service. And a lucky few find it immensely rewarding, so obviously they would want corporate backing. But at the moment, there are few advantages for content creators to hand over rights to a convenience/distribution service like Time/Warner/AOL. Profits are puny, and the restrictions on access are contrary to the artist's hope. One example concerns my friend's newspaper articles. His newspaper refuses him access to his own articles. And his articles remain in this database, totally inaccessible except for those willing to pay a fee to access it.
Free and commercial content have coexisted and will continue to do so. Even though we may complain about the strictness with which content providers guard the content they have bought, at least distribution companies are helping to make artistic works available (at a price) to the general public. There are thousands of music bands out there that nobody has ever heard of; MTV and Time/Warner have the power to provide the infrastructure and the publicity and distribution. Perhaps that is unnecessary, but without content providers like this, would we lose the common cultural heritage that makes us a culture?
Actually, a convincing case could be made if Microsoft threatened retaliation on OEM's who put alternate OS's (just one, not multiple) on a system. I don't think this has ever been alleged so far. I used to work for Dell (and am really disappointed that they dropped Linux for home users). But I don't think Dell did it in response to retaliation from Microsoft. The antitrust problems come when Dell can't preload programs that directly compete with Microsoft's own applications. (For example, loading no-cost openoffice or star office or a JRE on Dell machines would help the consumer. But Microsoft forbids it).
Dual boot machines would be absolutely lovely, and maybe this will be more of an issue when PC's have multiple hard drives and fast loading times. But honestly, except for hardcore developers, the majority of business users don't have a need for dual booting.
Well, I wish the litigator success, because it would definitely be a boon for PC's sold today to come equipped with more than one OS. However, nobody put a gun to the head of the OEM's who produced single system PC's. To win this case, you would need to demonstrate that the contracts between Microsoft and OEM's violated antitrust laws. Quite frankly, I doubt that this could be shown. Despite the finding of fact in the antitrust lawsuit, you would have to show that it was impossible or next to impossible for OEM's to sell PC's with alternate OS's.
But Dell has been able to sell Linux (which apparently they dropped, but don't worry, HP is now selling them). And other PC companies have been able to do the same (albeit in limited numbers).
To prove that it was impossible for OEM's to sell PC's with alternate OS's, you would need to demonstrate some sort of collusion between Microsoft and Intel, making it difficult for developers to produce alternate OS's on Intel CPU's. That clearly has not happened. The x86 Intel platform certainly didn't hinder kernel development, and Intel has been relatively open about publishing specs.
Good luck Be. Truly, I feel your pain.
Robert Nagle Idiotprogrammer Austin, Texas, idiotprogrammer, Technical writer
The question raised by this article is not whether China will ever become "free." The interesting question is : does government control business? or does business control government?
using the free time to retool?
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Man, some of these articles really hit close to home!
One of the problems is finding where the jobs are. In the economic boom, the recruiters helped everybody out. But although I consider myself a savvy job hunter, I'd had difficulty figuring out what companies are out there. National job boards are mostly useless because only a small percentage of companies need to advertise heavily to find a suitable candidate. Individuals need a good directory of company links in their local market.
IT people are used to thinking of themselves as belonging to an exclusively IT company. In actuality, a lot of non-IT companies need help managing their network. Not as glamorous maybe, but at least it's a job.
The real problem with IT unemployment is that people are reluctant to accept non IT positions. Why? You stop gaining new skills and quickly lose touch with what skills are in demand.
I'm a technical worker out of work for 9 months, partly by choice. I used some of the time to update my skills. If only I had a crystal ball that allowed me to see what skill will be necessary for my next job, that would simplify things. As such, I'm busy learning about everything. A job interview revealed my ignorance about Win Active Directories, so I check out a book on the subject. Another job interview asks about XWindows, and so I pick up another book. Learning about this stuff is not very painful, but it's frustrating not having a clue what skill will land you the job. It's also frustrating trying to balance the time you spend job searching with the time to update skills.
Is anyone spooked by all the defense jobs out there? As it turns out, I can't qualify for security clearance because I'm seeking dual citizenship. But if you looked at the postings, you'd swear that a good 50% of job opportunities are related to defense contractors.
I had a good job with Dell; they treated me very well and there were lots of perks. In a day I'm going to a job fair for contract Dell tech support jobs, probably without benefits or job security. Hey, if it pays the bills, I'll be happy. (Just cancel that trip to Mexico for this year).
large % of pages =invisible to search engines!
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 1
Google is a good search engine, but I have had a lot of frustration getting my domain and personal web pages listed there. The number one search result of my name "robert nagle" is a listing of all the amazon reviews I've posted. My web pages remain invisible to the world most of the time. Even when I submit url's by hand, they are ignored for various reasons, some of which I understand, some of which I don't.
Google is notoriously bad about showing home pages put on the servers of a person's ISP as well as pages that were created by simple HTML editors. Once this content is moved out of the ISP's server, the pages are invisible again, and the individual has to endure the arduous wait of the search bot to find his site again. Corporations have more stables url's and automated ways of generating search-optimized pages, which is certainly beyond Joe HTML trying to put up pictures of his cat Fluffy.
Now, perhaps one could rationalize the predominance of corporation-generated pages by saying that corporations have an awful lot of content to offer. Amazon, for example, has captured a lot of literary and film criticism in its user comments.
Even if that is true, it doesn't weaken my point: google doesn't really show the Internet for what it is. I read somewhere that a large percentage of web pages was invisible to the major search engines or other. (I'm seem to remember the number was 70%; not sure). Google often produces helpful results out of what its bots are able to capture. But don't for a moment think that it captures the majority of the interesting stuff out there.
I tend to agree that these music service ideas are futile, especially because they place strict limits on the quantity of downloads and what you can do with them after subscribing. I would not pay for that at all.
But there's one thing I might pay for: commercial-free user-created music channels (or "radio stations"). www.live365.com is a great example, even though the commercials are awful. Users are allowed to create their own radio stations for $30-50 a year, and they do this by uploading mp3's to a central server. There are provisions for DRM, but apparently live365 bought blanket licenses to songs protected under ASCAP. The breadth of these radio stations is just incredible; I have one trance station from Holland, Albanian folk music, Asian underground, old Egyptian music by Om Kulthoum, etc. These stations repeat the same songs every three hours or so, so it's as good as owning. Also, the live365 player displays the playlist of current and recent songs.
The subject of discussion here is misplaced. Obtaining an mp3 of a song is a trivial task; the hard part (and the value that a company can provide) is calling attention to interesting songs and helping users to find the new and different. And for that, the p2p players do practically nothing. From www.live365.com I have learned about so many great singers. This is accomplished by users adding their own custom playlists.
The revenue model for live365 seems to be based on advertising, but I would certainly pay $5 a month for access to hundreds, if not thousands of streaming playlists. (Of course, I'm talking broadband users.
What would Kafka's weblog look like?
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 1
What's so cool about dialogue and discussion anyway? We've gone from one extreme to the other. Kafka and Dostoevsky were able to keep journals without seeking audience reactions, and look where such delusions of grandeur brought them. And what's wrong with being a blowhard anyway? It's kind of fun knowing everything.
(On another note, can you just imagine what Kafka's web diary would look like? )
The big problem is whether the Linux desktop is intuitive and usable enough for mainstream consumers.
AOL probably wants to go into the PC business or to collaborate with a PC maker catering to the home market. They could simplify the interface and the setup and say that for $200 you could get a good PC/appliance and an office suite and an email client, and AOL ready to go and an instant messager. (Of course, all of these are pretty much ready to go already and free for AOL, so all they need to do is tidy up the interface and installation). I wouldn't be surprised if they hide a command prompt from users.
It's possible they might be able to give the PC for free in exchange for a 2 year commitment with AOL.
If I were AOL hatching this plan, I would hide the fact it was in fact linux. Why do the consumers really need to know?
People have been discussing IE v. netscape as far as xhtml and css support. What about plugins? I think netscape/mozilla's support of plug ins is lousy.
I lived in Ukraine for a year and have visited there several times, including recently.
Yes, I've bought a lot of cheap CD's, but believe it or not very few American CD's. The Russian/Ukrainian CD's come with license stickers, so I suspect they are legit.
The big problem is not with entertainment CD. Yes, there are pirated videos everywhere, but the dubbing is usually terrible. While a lot of foreign CD's are probably pirated, again, they are not a lot of sales, if you look at it from an international perspective.
The real problem is with software piracy, which is a big problem. Many legit businesses use pirated copies of Windows and other expensive applications, but there is widespread acknowledgement that there is a problem. Also, there is a pervasive fear among businessmen of "inspectors" coming and finding unlicensed software. Mention the word "inspector" to businesses or schools, and you will strike the fear of God in people. Perhaps the enforcement of software licenses is lackadaisical at best, but the medium to large firms are probably unwilling to risk being caught with unlicensed software.
Yes, it's probably true that a lot of offices for small companies have illegal copies of Office and Windows, but the bigger companies have more incentive to comply.
I should mention also that the "culture of piracy" persists in America almost as much as in Ukraine. It's a little disingenuous of the US government to single Ukraine out for such treatment.
Ouch. today I had a telephone interview with a defense contractor. They were planning to fly me up but I had to pass a preliminary security checklist. When asked about whether I had dual citizenship, I replied that no I hadn't, but I was in the process of seeking Irish citizenship for sentimental reasons.
The security officer said that was enough to disqualify me. Although I was disappointed, the interviewer was even more so.
The job concerned pretty secret stuff, but it's hard to imagine what kind of security risk I posed. It's not as if Ireland lacks extradition treaties with the US!
On another note, I should mention that in the tech writing field, a good 50% of the openings are government jobs requiring security clearance.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer , Idiotprogrammer, Austin, Texas, Technical Writer
I read a study about that matter a year or two ago. The study found that the ticket prices had little to do with production costs, but varied according to the popular demand each singer recives. In other words, Britney Spears tickets costs 110$ because the promoters think they can get away with it.
This "predatory pricing" (if you want to call it that) is in response to ticket scalpers who sell the tickets for their "true" market value. Concert promoters thought, if we sell the ticket for 30 and a scalper resells it for 100, then we are missing 70$ profit. They responded by jacking up the prices to scalper levels, even it if means the possibility of unsold tickets.
So the answer is that tickets are so high because too many jackasses are willing to pay. IN other words, Top 40 singers cost a lot, while other singers with less promotion and big label support have to take smaller venues and charge less. One may be indignant at the unfairness, but ultimately this is better for the discriminating consumers. Isn't it?
I'm having trouble getting to the slashdotted article. But let me say how nice it would be to have the audio connections in a convenient place up front. It bugs the hell out of me to have to reach behind my PC, which is a mess of wires.
If a smaller form factor is to succeed, it would need to rely on wireless peripherals. The big problem is the tangled mess of wires in the back. For all the shortcomings of laptaps, at least everything is built into the design rather than relying on peripherals to do everything.
Perhaps this answer is flippant, but the answer in the documentation industry is to use whatever tool you already have. (I know, I'm a tech writer). Word is probably the most widely used doc tool pretty much because it's on every Windows' user's desktop. It's very difficult to ask management to use tools because of the learning curve and the additional expense.
Very often I would try to devise a custom documentation solution or use an open source tool. And often I would find little or no support from management who are asking me why I just don't it in html or Word.
Online help/integrated documentation often doesn't require any tool at all, but is simply incorporated into the business logic (hint: that is a very bad idea!!). I had to write documentation for a major manufacturing tool at a very long hardware company. In their foresight, the programmers had a technical writer create help notes for each screen and on the same server/database, so I had to wait before the next release for the opportunity to update the documentation.
Programmers are really cool people, and actually a lot do a decent job on documentation. It just never occurs to them to organize the information or to anticipate typical user problems.
While the rhetoric of the emails is outrageous, the point raised here is very interesting.
A person seems to have looked for email addresses of computer companies in order to send solicitations to do work. The recipient of one such solicitation didn't like it and called it spam. His reasoning went like this: because we have an HR department, therefore any job solicitation sent to any other email is spam.
That is curious reasoning. Many online applications simply dump online resume submissions into a database where they are never read. The job seeker is encouraged to contact a real person, not an online tool, and Mr. Shifman seems to have adopted that strategy.
I think this exchange reflects badly not only for Mr. Shifman, but Mr. Schwartzman, who seems to take umbrage at a simple, direct resume submission. Shifman's anger aside, it seems that it would be a great injustice for an ISP to treat Mr. Shifman as a spammeister.
I frequently sent out things to acquaintances and friends (url's, essays, and yes, even jokes once in a while), and it would be frightening if one of my acquaintances treated it like spam!
The best thing about the whole episode is that I learned what the word "barratry" means.
I've enjoyed kazaa for the last few weeks, but lately the performance has been very slow. Just yesterday, it said it had errors and shut down. Perhaps the problem is local to my machine, but I wouldn't be surprised if some central network has been shut down in response to the lawsuit. The performance in the last week has been horrible.
I've really enjoyed those Hindi mp3's! But if you download any adult stuff, that is 9 times out of 10 what others will be borrowing from you.
Slashdot Mirror
The popup on the slashdot site reads "video surveillance everywhere! Makes your home safe and secure!" Irony of ironies. There is an iron law of beaurocracy: if it is technological feasible to demand data about something, they always will. Maybe someone will invent an intermediate device to cloak this data?
The pop-up appearing from the slashdot site reads:
This idea about a master book database is fine, but what we REALLY need is a nonprofit entity that hosts and preserves reader comments.
Amazon now absolutely dominates the book industry because it got there first. Book critics (like
me use amazon to publicly share our comments and criticism.
Amazon does a great service, but it resides in the commercial sphere. What if they decide that you need to pay a subscription to have access to the reviews? What if they decide that the author can't republish the reviews elsewhere? What if Amazon goes out of business? Eventually competitors will spring up, and amazon will no longer wield the influence it does. But we need a centralized solution to store these reviews.
I do agree that this would pose certain programming challenges, as well as legal challenges (i.e., how to moderate postings? how to limit space? how to protect against libel?).
Ideally this sort of database should exist for all the arts, but I suspect that there are advantages to separating them.
The thing I like about those poems is their subversiveness. How often have you just ignored advertising around you and then suddenly, one anti-advertisement catches your eye? When we surf or even search, we are skimming and go through a lot of things using our peripheral visions.
I once wrote a satirical piece that individuals would need to buy words before they could have the right to use them. So common words like pronouns and sex and friend and give would be too expensive for most people to afford, while words in other minor languages would be considerably cheaper.
Having an auction for words would be interesting and probably add variety to self-expression. Perhaps it is a far-fetched idea, but with Hollywood and content providers placing copyright lassos over so many things, will it be only a matter of time before corporations own the rights to certain words? Also, wouldn't it result in vast new vocabularies being created with every new day? I'm sick of using the word "sex." Why not use the word "glorb" instead?
By the way, if you want an absurdist meditation on words, buying, selling, etc, read The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster .
Robert Nagle
Actually yahoo has a lot of my personal information when I signed up for yahoo banking and decided to pay 20$ for extra mail space. As it turns out, the $20 I paid doesn't even give me free pop access anymore. Oh, well, I'll be cancelling pretty soon.
Robert Nagle, Austin, Texas Idiotprogrammer
I noticed that the article was written in Europe, so perhaps in America the legal climate is different. I worked for an IT industry that blocked access to adult sites and web-based email. Now I wouldn't dream of looking at porn or anything like that, but quite often a site would be blocked for incomprehensible reasons, and some sites providing email access also are blocked (hotmail, yahoo, etc). Unfortunately, they also blocked geocities and deja when it was around. Need I point out first that many email-based accounts automatically did virus scans before opening attachments, so the security argument was moot, especially because most of the viruses were spread via OUtlook and Windows Scripting Host.
Blocking instant message clients seem to be a logical move, although probably a company might allow company-installed chat clients only to be used. The problem is that for messaging to have any usefulness, you need to be able to speak with users of other IM clients. So it would be ultimately futile for a company to sanction a chat client that can't chat with most of the world.
Restricting access to web-based email essentially means that employers rely more and more on their company email system for personal mail. Employees therefore will receive more email in outlook (mailing lists, etc) and therefore more potential viruses.
Although the Courts have not caught up with technology, they will. As things currently stand, employers can monitor email, but there is also legal precedent preventing a person's personal phone calls during lunch breaks from being recorded and or listened to. The precedent involves a case where a company monitored off-hour calls from the company's telephone system and used the info to fire an employee. The court ruled that because the employee had no easily available alternative (i.e. no public telephones),the company did not have the right to monitor communication even on company equipment.
If employees use their company outlook for personal correspondence, then there is the potential to besmear the company through slanderous posts or abusive speech. Or simple the possibility of embarrassing the company publicly. If illegal or slanderous activity occurred on a company's email address, the company could be found liable. Also, if they wanted to fire an employee for making the libelous or abusive email, the employee could simply say the company did not provide an alternative for communicating.
So by limiting correspondence to company email addresses, the employer gets the worst of both worlds. They would ultimately be liable for employee emails, yet they wouldn't have firm grounds for firing employees for sending emails from the company email (especially if could be demonstrated that it was written during lunchtime or after hours).
This is all speculation of course, but it seems the logical direction for technology law to head toward. Perhaps a company may decide that the real risk of viruses may outweigh the theoretical risk of potential lawsuits arising from unauthorized email. But remember, one case is all it takes for legal departments all over the world to react.
I've noticed a kind of snobbery from experienced sys admins about the value of computer certifications.
I was talking to a head sys admin dealing with MS machines. She said that MSCE's are worthless and are no substitute for experience.
My response, "Duh!!!!" Of course experience is preferable to passing some test. Here are some arguments in favor of being certified:
1)it represents an attempt to learn an organized body of skills. What sys admins don't tell you is that they don't learn a skill until there's a major problem (and then they HAVE to learn about it). Certifications teach basic concepts and familiarizes you with commands and functions; it doesn't teach an algorithm for problem solving. That's where the experience comes in. The knowledge of a certified but clueless individual is a little about a lot of different areas. With a no certification sys admin, you're more likely to find someone who knows only about the problems he has fixed recently.
The second fallacy is that people with experience are more qualified than people with only a certification. Actually this statement is irrelevant. Ask yourself: if you had to choose between two candidates with identical experience, but only the first had a certification, which of the two candidates would you hire?
The problem with sys admin jobs is it's often next to impossible to get the experience in these fields without having hands on knowledge in the first place. For an unemployed individual, it is very difficult to know how to administer an Outlook server or Windows 2000 Server without having his or her own personal license. Certifications are a midway point towards demonstrating competence.
Certifications may not say much, but they at least mean the individual knows the terminology and basic concepts and has some familiarity with how things are supposed to work. That may not be much, but at least this person would be in a better position to pick up the more sophisticated skills more easily on the job.
publicrelations@xybernaut.coma ut.com
techsupport@xybern
This was a good piece, although shorter versions of it can be found at many places.
Content creators have it tough in this time. They are told to make money off their content, but the content sellers (time/warner, random house, etc) will help you do that only if you the content creator agree to the terms for selling content. The author has little flexibility in negotiating with the content provider if they want to make a profit.
In the early 1990's I felt that intellectual endeavors had zero economic value. I was not disparaging the pursuit of wealth or even making a cynical comment about the publishing market (I was an unpublished writer). I was merely stating what I felt to be an obvious point. The market cannot properly assess the value of artistic objects. My creative writing was (I felt) terrific, and yet no publisher would take a chance. And why would they? They had a bottom line to worry about, and I was not so naive to believe that any of my creative works would be a cash cow for a publishing company.
5 years later, the Internet was upon us, and suddenly, I no longer had to worry about getting published. Everybody and their 15 year old brother could publish a decent web page. It was a glorious time, but it threatened the livelihood of content creators (who probably weren't making a lot of dough off selling content anyway).
For me, nothing had changed. My goal was widespread distribution. Since I could accomplish that without begging a publisher to back me, I no longer needed publishers anymore. And nothing really had changed because I operated under the assumption that no economic value was to be gained from writing fiction to begin with.
Even though many artists/intellectuals are resigned to their output having no commercial value, most people still like the idea of buying the book at the bookstore or renting the video. Time Warner/Blockbuster/Random House are content facilitators. They provide easy access to art in a medium we prefer. In other words, TW/Blockbuster is offering a convenience service, not content. For that reason, content providers should not have the ability to restrict content in order to offer us the convenience of providing it for a price.
Of course, maybe what I say doesn't apply so much to the movie world, with lavish budgets and special effects. But then again, perhaps the big studio film came about only because of the aggregation of power of the Hollywood film industry. And remember, individuals now can produce special effects comparable to what studios coudl do 10 or 20 years ago.
Perhaps it is idealistic to believe that content creators should offer their content for free. After all, they have to buy their videocams, their PC's and their hosting service. And a lucky few find it immensely rewarding, so obviously they would want corporate backing. But at the moment, there are few advantages for content creators to hand over rights to a convenience/distribution service like Time/Warner/AOL. Profits are puny, and the restrictions on access are contrary to the artist's hope. One example concerns my friend's newspaper articles. His newspaper refuses him access to his own articles. And his articles remain in this database, totally inaccessible except for those willing to pay a fee to access it.
Free and commercial content have coexisted and will continue to do so. Even though we may complain about the strictness with which content providers guard the content they have bought, at least distribution companies are helping to make artistic works available (at a price) to the general public. There are thousands of music bands out there that nobody has ever heard of; MTV and Time/Warner have the power to provide the infrastructure and the publicity and distribution. Perhaps that is unnecessary, but without content providers like this, would we lose the common cultural heritage that makes us a culture?
Robert Nagle, idiotprogrammer Austin TX
Actually, a convincing case could be made if Microsoft threatened retaliation on OEM's who put alternate OS's (just one, not multiple) on a system. I don't think this has ever been alleged so far. I used to work for Dell (and am really disappointed that they dropped Linux for home users). But I don't think Dell did it in response to retaliation from Microsoft. The antitrust problems come when Dell can't preload programs that directly compete with Microsoft's own applications. (For example, loading no-cost openoffice or star office or a JRE on Dell machines would help the consumer. But Microsoft forbids it).
Dual boot machines would be absolutely lovely, and maybe this will be more of an issue when PC's have multiple hard drives and fast loading times. But honestly, except for hardcore developers, the majority of business users don't have a need for dual booting.
Robert Nagle
Well, I wish the litigator success, because it would definitely be a boon for PC's sold today to come equipped with more than one OS. However, nobody put a gun to the head of the OEM's who produced single system PC's. To win this case, you would need to demonstrate that the contracts between Microsoft and OEM's violated antitrust laws. Quite frankly, I doubt that this could be shown. Despite the finding of fact in the antitrust lawsuit, you would have to show that it was impossible or next to impossible for OEM's to sell PC's with alternate OS's.
But Dell has been able to sell Linux (which apparently they dropped, but don't worry, HP is now selling them). And other PC companies have been able to do the same (albeit in limited numbers).
To prove that it was impossible for OEM's to sell PC's with alternate OS's, you would need to demonstrate some sort of collusion between Microsoft and Intel, making it difficult for developers to produce alternate OS's on Intel CPU's. That clearly has not happened. The x86 Intel platform certainly didn't hinder kernel development, and Intel has been relatively open about publishing specs.
Good luck Be. Truly, I feel your pain.
Robert Nagle Idiotprogrammer
Austin, Texas, idiotprogrammer, Technical writer
The question raised by this article is not whether China will ever
become "free." The interesting question is : does government control
business? or does business control government?
Man, some of these articles really hit close to home!
One of the problems is finding where the jobs are. In the economic boom, the recruiters helped everybody out. But although I consider myself a savvy job hunter, I'd had difficulty figuring out what companies are out there. National job boards are mostly useless because only a small percentage of companies need to advertise heavily to find a suitable candidate. Individuals need a good directory of company links in their local market.
IT people are used to thinking of themselves as belonging to an exclusively IT company. In actuality, a lot of non-IT companies need help managing their network. Not as glamorous maybe, but at least it's a job.
The real problem with IT unemployment is that people are reluctant to accept non IT positions. Why? You stop gaining new skills and quickly lose touch with what skills are in demand.
I'm a technical worker out of work for 9 months, partly by choice. I used some of the time to update my skills. If only I had a crystal ball that allowed me to see what skill will be necessary for my next job, that would simplify things. As such, I'm busy learning about everything. A job interview revealed my ignorance about Win Active Directories, so I check out a book on the subject. Another job interview asks about XWindows, and so I pick up another book. Learning about this stuff is not very painful, but it's frustrating not having a clue what skill will land you the job. It's also frustrating trying to balance the time you spend job searching with the time to update skills.
Is anyone spooked by all the defense jobs out there? As it turns out, I can't qualify for security clearance because I'm seeking dual citizenship. But if you looked at the postings, you'd swear that a good 50% of job opportunities are related to defense contractors.
I had a good job with Dell; they treated me very well and there were lots of perks. In a day I'm going to a job fair for contract Dell tech support jobs, probably without benefits or job security. Hey, if it pays the bills, I'll be happy. (Just cancel that trip to Mexico for this year).
Google is a good search engine, but I have had a lot of frustration getting my domain and personal web pages listed there. The number one search result of my name "robert nagle" is a listing of all the amazon reviews I've posted. My web pages remain invisible to the world most of the time. Even when I submit url's by hand, they are ignored for various reasons, some of which I understand, some of which I don't.
Google is notoriously bad about showing home pages put on the servers of a person's ISP as well as pages that were created by simple HTML editors. Once this content is moved out of the ISP's server, the pages are invisible again, and the individual has to endure the arduous wait of the search bot to find his site again. Corporations have more stables url's and automated ways of generating search-optimized pages, which is certainly beyond Joe HTML trying to put up pictures of his cat Fluffy.
Now, perhaps one could rationalize the predominance of corporation-generated pages by saying that corporations have an awful lot of content to offer. Amazon, for example, has captured a lot of literary and film criticism in its user comments.
Even if that is true, it doesn't weaken my point: google doesn't really show the Internet for what it is. I read somewhere that a large percentage of web pages was invisible to the major search engines or other. (I'm seem to remember the number was 70%; not sure). Google often produces helpful results out of what its bots are able to capture. But don't for a moment think that it captures the majority of the interesting stuff out there.
I tend to agree that these music service ideas are futile, especially because they place strict limits on the quantity of downloads and what you can do with them after subscribing. I would not pay for that at all.
But there's one thing I might pay for: commercial-free user-created music channels (or "radio stations"). www.live365.com is a great example, even though the commercials are awful. Users are allowed to create their own radio stations for $30-50 a year, and they do this by uploading mp3's to a central server. There are provisions for DRM, but apparently live365 bought blanket licenses to songs protected under ASCAP. The breadth of these radio stations is just incredible; I have one trance station from Holland, Albanian folk music, Asian underground, old Egyptian music by Om Kulthoum, etc. These stations repeat the same songs every three hours or so, so it's as good as owning. Also, the live365 player displays the playlist of current and recent songs.
The subject of discussion here is misplaced. Obtaining an mp3 of a song is a trivial task; the hard part (and the value that a company can provide) is calling attention to interesting songs and helping users to find the new and different. And for that, the p2p players do practically nothing. From www.live365.com I have learned about so many great singers. This is accomplished by users adding their own custom playlists.
The revenue model for live365 seems to be based on advertising, but I would certainly pay $5 a month for access to hundreds, if not thousands of streaming playlists. (Of course, I'm talking broadband users.
What's so cool about dialogue and discussion anyway? We've gone from one extreme to the other. Kafka and Dostoevsky were able to keep journals without seeking audience reactions, and look where such delusions of grandeur brought them. And what's wrong with being a blowhard anyway? It's kind of fun knowing everything.
(On another note, can you just imagine what Kafka's web diary would look like? )
The big problem is whether the Linux desktop is intuitive and usable enough for mainstream consumers.
AOL probably wants to go into the PC business or to collaborate with a PC maker catering to the home market. They could simplify the interface and the setup and say that for $200 you could get a good PC/appliance and an office suite and an email client, and AOL ready to go and an instant messager. (Of course, all of these are pretty much ready to go already and free for AOL, so all they need to do is tidy up the interface and installation). I wouldn't be surprised if they hide a command prompt from users.
It's possible they might be able to give the PC for free in exchange for a 2 year commitment with AOL.
If I were AOL hatching this plan, I would hide the fact it was in fact linux. Why do the consumers really need to know?
People have been discussing IE v. netscape as far as xhtml and css support. What about plugins? I think netscape/mozilla's support of plug ins is lousy.
I lived in Ukraine for a year and have visited there several times, including recently.
Yes, I've bought a lot of cheap CD's, but believe it or not very few American CD's. The Russian/Ukrainian CD's come with license stickers, so I suspect they are legit.
The big problem is not with entertainment CD. Yes, there are pirated videos everywhere, but the dubbing is usually terrible. While a lot of foreign CD's are probably pirated, again, they are not a lot of sales, if you look at it from an international perspective.
The real problem is with software piracy, which is a big problem. Many legit businesses use pirated copies of Windows and other expensive applications, but there is widespread acknowledgement that there is a problem. Also, there is a pervasive fear among businessmen of "inspectors" coming and finding unlicensed software. Mention the word "inspector" to businesses or schools, and you will strike the fear of God in people. Perhaps the enforcement of software licenses is lackadaisical at best, but the medium to large firms are probably unwilling to risk being caught with unlicensed software.
Yes, it's probably true that a lot of offices for small companies have illegal copies of Office and Windows, but the bigger companies have more incentive to comply.
I should mention also that the "culture of piracy" persists in America almost as much as in Ukraine. It's a little disingenuous of the US government to single Ukraine out for such treatment.
Robert Nagle, idiotprogrammer, Austin, Texas
idiotprogrammer
Ouch. today I had a telephone interview with a defense contractor. They were planning to fly me up but I had to pass a preliminary security checklist. When asked about whether I had dual citizenship, I replied that no I hadn't, but I was in the process of seeking Irish citizenship for sentimental reasons.
The security officer said that was enough to disqualify me. Although I was disappointed, the interviewer was even more so.
The job concerned pretty secret stuff, but it's hard to imagine what kind of security risk I posed. It's not as if Ireland lacks extradition treaties with the US!
On another note, I should mention that in the tech writing field, a good 50% of the openings are government jobs requiring security clearance.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer , Idiotprogrammer, Austin, Texas, Technical Writer
I read a study about that matter a year or two ago. The study found that the ticket prices had little to do with production costs, but varied according to the popular demand each singer recives. In other words, Britney Spears tickets costs 110$ because the promoters think they can get away with it.
This "predatory pricing" (if you want to call it that) is in response to ticket scalpers who sell the tickets for their "true" market value. Concert promoters thought, if we sell the ticket for 30 and a scalper resells it for 100, then we are missing 70$ profit. They responded by jacking up the prices to scalper levels, even it if means the possibility of unsold tickets.
So the answer is that tickets are so high because too many jackasses are willing to pay. IN other words, Top 40 singers cost a lot, while other singers with less promotion and big label support have to take smaller venues and charge less. One may be indignant at the unfairness, but ultimately this is better for the discriminating consumers. Isn't it?
I'm having trouble getting to the slashdotted article. But let me say how nice it would be to have the audio connections in a convenient place up front. It bugs the hell out of me to have to reach behind my PC, which is a mess of wires.
If a smaller form factor is to succeed, it would need to rely on wireless peripherals. The big problem is the tangled mess of wires in the back. For all the shortcomings of laptaps, at least everything is built into the design rather than relying on peripherals to do everything.
Perhaps this answer is flippant, but the answer in the documentation industry is to use whatever tool you already have. (I know, I'm a tech writer). Word is probably the most widely used doc tool pretty much because it's on every Windows' user's desktop. It's very difficult to ask management to use tools because of the learning curve and the additional expense.
Very often I would try to devise a custom documentation solution or use an open source tool. And often I would find little or no support from management who are asking me why I just don't it in html or Word.
Online help/integrated documentation often doesn't require any tool at all, but is simply incorporated into the business logic (hint: that is a very bad idea!!). I had to write documentation for a major manufacturing tool at a very long hardware company. In their foresight, the programmers had a technical writer create help notes for each screen and on the same server/database, so I had to wait before the next release for the opportunity to update the documentation.
Programmers are really cool people, and actually a lot do a decent job on documentation. It just never occurs to them to organize the information or to anticipate typical user problems.
While the rhetoric of the emails is outrageous, the point raised here is very interesting.
A person seems to have looked for email addresses of computer companies in order to send solicitations to do work. The recipient of one such solicitation didn't like it and called it spam. His reasoning went like this: because we have an HR department, therefore any job solicitation sent to any other email is spam.
That is curious reasoning. Many online applications simply dump online resume submissions into a database where they are never read. The job seeker is encouraged to contact a real person, not an online tool, and Mr. Shifman seems to have adopted that strategy.
I think this exchange reflects badly not only for Mr. Shifman, but Mr. Schwartzman, who seems to take umbrage at a simple, direct resume submission. Shifman's anger aside, it seems that it would be a great injustice for an ISP to treat Mr. Shifman as a spammeister.
I frequently sent out things to acquaintances and friends (url's, essays, and yes, even jokes once in a while), and it would be frightening if one of my acquaintances treated it like spam!
The best thing about the whole episode is that I learned what the word "barratry" means.
Hi, I'm interested in downloading ogg format music, but I can't seem to find a good peer to peer application that lets you specify ogg.
I use kazaa,limewire, winmx, and it's next to impossible to locate ogg files.
Perhaps I can just hope they randomly show up, but does anyone use a p2p program that can filter out everything but ogg?
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Austin
I've enjoyed kazaa for the last few weeks, but lately the performance has been very slow. Just yesterday, it said it had errors and shut down. Perhaps the problem is local to my machine, but I wouldn't be surprised if some central network has been shut down in response to the lawsuit. The performance in the last week has been horrible.
I've really enjoyed those Hindi mp3's! But if you download any adult stuff, that is 9 times out of 10 what others will be borrowing from you.