I recall that The Economist (amoung others) made the interesting point that the best estimates for the cost of the Chinese space program is pretty much the same as the amount of direct foreign aid given to China by other nations.
One small point, your comments about bandwidth and service are limited to your local area (U.S. maybe?). The broadband situation varies significantly around the world and generalizing from local conditions is problematic.
In my case (Toronto, Canada), things just keep getting better and better. My DSL ISP just dropped the price on their 3000/800 service by 30% (to CAD$30).
Basically, this broadband nirvana was achieved by the govt regulator coming down hard on the near-monopoly telephone company and forcing them to sell local loop access fairly to any ISP. So I do have a bit of faith that, if you firmly separate the provision of the last-mile infrastructure from the service providers, it can work.
Well, to turn your question around, why should the OS community chase MS by using.NET as the basis for anything?
If the primarily goal of the OS.NET projects isn't to allow all software produced for.NET (MS or OS frameworks) to run, then why are they using.NET as a starting point. Why not create a new language/framework? (One which avoids the flaws that exist in.NET because of it's inherent windows bias.) Or why not enhance an existing project like perl or python or any number of other projects to achieve the ends Miguel has claimed are his goals?
No, because one of the primary purposes of Office is to support the Windows near-monopoly. Simply selling Office regardless of the impact on Windows sales is not in MS's best interests. If it was, they would have ported Office over to all the unix operating systems by now.
Well, if selling Office licenses were MS's priority, they would have ported it over to Linux (and Solaris and HP-UX, etc, etc). Heck, even the Mac OS Office version is continually on thin ice. Clearly, selling Office licenses isn't MS's priority. It only matters to them so far as it supports Windows' market position. So, I don't expect MS to produce either a.NET framework or an Office version that might undercut Windows' market position.
To my mind, it all comes down to the Office.NET test. That is, at some point in the future (if MS sticks with.NET), Microsoft will release Office.NET (the Office suite rewritten for.NET). The test is: will Office.NET run, off the shelf and without any major crashes or missing functionality, on a non-MS.NET framework.
If it will, then I'll be happy to declare.NET as the greatest cross platform programming environment in the universe and hold the developers of the non-MS.NET frameworks up as champions of the open source world.
But if it doesn't, then I judge the whole effort to produce non-MS.NET frameworks as a waste of the open source community's time. And while, of course, programmers are free to waste their time if they want, don't expect me to be interested and contribute.
Now,.NET apologists might claim that the Office.NET test is unfair. That there are many useful things that can be done with a partial implementation of.NET. To that I say, you're deluding yourself. If the best that we can hope for is a two.NET world (MS.NET and the open source.NET ghetto) then, as a professional programmer, it's not something I'm going to use. My time is important enough that I'm not going to waste it trying to remember what bits of.NET I can and can't use when I use Mono or dotGNU.
Now, as you can probably tell from the tone of my post, I've more-or-less concluded that there is basically no chance that MS will ever allow Office.NET to run on any non-MS.NET framework. They'll keep back just enough to insure that their Office cash cow continues.
When people talk about moving the ICANN functions to the UN, they're not talking about the general assembly (GA) or the security council (SC). They're talking about the specialized agencies.
The specialized agencies are almost completely autonomous organizations that the GA and SC have no direct control over. Some examples are the world health organization (WHO), the international telecommunications union (ITU), and world meteorological organization (WMO). See UN System of Organizations for details (in particular check out the "UN System Chart").
The specialized agencies have a pretty good (but by no means perfect) record of handling systems that require some international co-operation.
So, to repeat, complaints about the way the security council or the general assembly work really have no relevance to the "should the UN control the internet" argument.
To paraphrase the quote about the golden age of science fiction: the golden age of Doctor Who is whatever Doctor you were watching when you were thirteen.
I think that all we're missing is that if the matter goes to court, then anything could happen. Well, I don't mean literally anything; but even though it looks to us (/. readers) like SCO doesn't have much in the way of facts on their side, they could still win their case. The legal system can get very complicated, very quickly and cases will often hinge on small bits of legal minutia that baffle even skilled lawyers, let alone IANAL outsiders. Every time you enter a court room you're taking a big risk.
As to the investors that are buying based on the chance element of the legal system, as others have pointed out, it's basically a bet. They might loose all their money, but if they win, they win big.
Given the alternatives (mp3 on Kazaa, aac on the iPod) already out there, who is really going to choose to buy their music in.wma format??
Well, non-/. people generally simply don't care about the format. All they care about is: does it play on my stuff (computer and portable) and is the DRM not too restrictive (and is the price right, of course). Really, they *just don't care* about the format.
So Windows users will use a WMA encoded service over the copyright infringing P2P services if they value their time (ie. not having to filter through all the bad/incorrect encodings to find the good one) and don't mind spending money.
And Windows users will use a WMA encoded service over iTMS if they don't use an iPod as their portable device (because very little else supports AAC and the average user doesn't want to do the burn to CD and re-encode as mp3 trick).
There's a bit of confusion here about the UN. Now I'm not an expert, but my impression is that the UN is a whole bunch of agencies that have only vague connections between each other. In fact, they call them the UN System of Organizations. For example, the Security Council doesn't give orders to UNICEF.
So all the arguments on this thread citing problems with the Security Council or the General Assembly or the Secretariat as reasons not to put internet governance under the UN aren't particularly relevant. For example: "UN shouldn't govern the internet because China has a veto on the Security Council", doesn't make much sense.
What's being suggested is to create a new Special Agency (see the org chart on the site UN System of Organizations I gave above) or to assign internet goverance to an existing Special Agency (the ITU). And the Special Agencies are the most autonomous parts of the UN.
The standard operating procedure for Hollywood is that, when you have a successful movie, all the other studios rush off a copy-cat movie (or several or a TV show) to try to ride the wave of success. But this doesn't seem to have happened in this case (or maybe I'm forgetting some movies, all I can think of is the upcoming Illiad adaptation).
I think that the problem is that the more concrete parts of what she's saying, like the quote of her's that you singled out, are motherhood and apple pie. That is, it's not something that anyone would disagree with and it's something that everyone of HP's competitors says that they also do with their enterprise system.
Do you want your IT systems to allow you to swiftly and automatically or semi-automatically react to changes in your business? Of course you do. Everybody does.
The problem is that she doesn't in any way explain how HP's products do that. Or even how they do it better than products by Sun or IBM or EDS or Microsoft or...
I think that that's what Cooper was trying to get at by asking essentially the same question over and over again. Not that she wasn't able to articulate what businesses want from IT, but that she wasn't able to explain how HP products achieve that.
In regards to car reviews in CR, my understanding was that they review the way they do because they only have one review category, the family car. That's not to say that they deny that there are other ways to categorize cars, just that they're targeting a niche, the everyman car buyer. And because, realistically, 90%+ of non-commercial vehicles sold in the developed world are going to be used as general purpose family cars, the family car is the criteria they use to judge.
And this is the reason that they blithely review dissimilar vehicles together. They've made a concious decision to simply not use the categories that the auto industry does. So a Toyota Echo, Mercedes E-class and a Ford F-150 are all reviewed using the same criteria.
So, basically, if you're not planning to use the car you're buying as a general purpose family car, then you should ignore their reviews because they're not using the criteria you want.
I actually lived in London in some of the years after the train system privatization (1998-2001) and I think that you're misrepresenting the situation there, particularly in regards to my previous message about competition, monopolies and how to run these things.
First, Railtrack (the track owning company, the "transmission" part of the equation, now Network Rail, it seems) was initially created as a completely private company with a government granted monopoly. You'll note in my original post that I say that this is the worst possible case and should be avoided at all costs. If it's not possible to have competition (which is probably the case for rail tracks), then the government should run it. They never should have privatized Railtrack. They did bring it back into the public sector (around '99 or '00), but only after the damage had been done.
On the matter of the train operating companies (the "generation" side of the system, if you will). There was never any real competition here either. Because every train company was granted a regional monopoly. If you wanted to go from London to Manchester, you had no choice about what company you used. This was, and is, extremely stupid. Again, if you can't create a real, competative market, then don't privatize because it won't work.
What they should have done, if they followed my prescription, was to keep the track and stations as publicly owned and operated and auction "slots" to train companies for relatively short periods of time. Sort of like airports do for flights to airlines. So if you wanted to go from London to Manchester you could pick Company A leaving at 08:00, but if you didn't like that company, you could pick Company B at 09:00.
So to summarize:
- If you can introduce a real, competative market, do so. (But keep government as a regulator.)
- If you can't introduce a real market, keep the resource in government hands.
- Whatever you do, don't grant monopolies to private companies. This is stupid.
I think that an important point it that transmission and generation need to be treated differently (and separately). I'm all in favour of a free market in generation (with government regulation). But I think that governments should continue to run the transmission.
The reasoning is simple: competition is good, monopolies are bad; if you can introduce competition, then do so; if you can't, then a government run monopoly is preferable to a private monopoly.
Power generation can clearly be run as a competative free market. Not free from government regulation, mind you; but there's no need for governments to run power plants. And the regulation has to work both ways, including fighting against the NIMBY instincts of land owners.
But for power transmission, on the other hand, it's very hard to have real competition. The barriers to entry (the start up capital of running lots of wires) are too high (generally. there are a few exceptions). So in that case, the government should run the distribution network (whether it's paid for out of general taxation or a user fee is another issue).
The worst thing you can do is have the government contract out a monopoly to the private sector. This produces the worst of both worlds and allows people to negatively caricature free markets, even though it isn't a free market, just a private company operating a monopoly.
There, problem solved. We've got free markets and we've got public ownership. Everyone's happy. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.
The real outcome of this is that the direct marketing industry will realize that they don't spend nearly enough money on Washington lobbyists and campaign contributions (like the tech industry realized after they started getting beaten up by the hill).
Expect a significant increase in spending by the direct marketing industry on lobbyists and campaign contributions. Then, a few years from now, expect several new bills expanding the list of exemptions to the do-not-call list.
Article Doesn't Really Support Headline
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't think that the article really supports the headline (yeah, I know, this is/., I shouldn't be surprised about that).
First, choosing an unrepresentative sample of 400 people out of about 300 million can't possibly tell you anything useful about the broad trends of a society ("...Rich Get Richer").
Second, of the 400 richest people in the US, only a small fraction of them have their wealth based on a technical source (even broadly defined). So the "Tech" part of the headline is suspect as well.
I like the little icons that they use to categorize the jobs in the story. I think that we should adopt a standard of using those icons on our resume job listings. Then the interviewer can see at a glance that your last job involved futility and psychological torture.
But please note that in the Franklin quote he says "essential liberty" and "temporary safety". Not "any liberty" and "any safety". Franklin would probably be just fine with trading unessential liberties for permanent safety.
I'm not trying to defend the US governments abuses of anti-terrorism law; they've clearly crossed over the line. It's just one of my pet peeves when people haul out the Franklin quote to back up opposition to any changes in the balance between liberty and security.
This is also a practical problem, in terms of making it hard to contact domain owners.
I have several domains and I use a separate email address for my whois records (separate from my home and business addresses). But I don't monitor emails to that address because it has become completely filled with spam. I just delete all mail to that address.
But that, of course, means that any legitimate attempts to contact the domain owner are lost as well. I could try and filter it (either manually or with software) but the ratio of legitimate email to spam on domain registry emails is thousands to one, so it's really not worth my time.
So, aside from any privacy concerns, the public availability of email addresses on whois records in effect renders them useless as contact information.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall that The Economist (amoung others) made the interesting point that the best estimates for the cost of the Chinese space program is pretty much the same as the amount of direct foreign aid given to China by other nations.
One small point, your comments about bandwidth and service are limited to your local area (U.S. maybe?). The broadband situation varies significantly around the world and generalizing from local conditions is problematic.
In my case (Toronto, Canada), things just keep getting better and better. My DSL ISP just dropped the price on their 3000/800 service by 30% (to CAD$30).
Basically, this broadband nirvana was achieved by the govt regulator coming down hard on the near-monopoly telephone company and forcing them to sell local loop access fairly to any ISP. So I do have a bit of faith that, if you firmly separate the provision of the last-mile infrastructure from the service providers, it can work.
Well, to turn your question around, why should the OS community chase MS by using
If the primarily goal of the OS
No, because one of the primary purposes of Office is to support the Windows near-monopoly. Simply selling Office regardless of the impact on Windows sales is not in MS's best interests. If it was, they would have ported Office over to all the unix operating systems by now.
Well, if selling Office licenses were MS's priority, they would have ported it over to Linux (and Solaris and HP-UX, etc, etc). Heck, even the Mac OS Office version is continually on thin ice. Clearly, selling Office licenses isn't MS's priority. It only matters to them so far as it supports Windows' market position. So, I don't expect MS to produce either a .NET framework or an Office version that might undercut Windows' market position.
To my mind, it all comes down to the Office.NET test. That is, at some point in the future (if MS sticks with .NET), Microsoft will release Office.NET (the Office suite rewritten for .NET). The test is: will Office.NET run, off the shelf and without any major crashes or missing functionality, on a non-MS .NET framework.
.NET as the greatest cross platform programming environment in the universe and hold the developers of the non-MS .NET frameworks up as champions of the open source world.
.NET frameworks as a waste of the open source community's time. And while, of course, programmers are free to waste their time if they want, don't expect me to be interested and contribute.
.NET apologists might claim that the Office.NET test is unfair. That there are many useful things that can be done with a partial implementation of .NET. To that I say, you're deluding yourself. If the best that we can hope for is a two .NET world (MS .NET and the open source .NET ghetto) then, as a professional programmer, it's not something I'm going to use. My time is important enough that I'm not going to waste it trying to remember what bits of .NET I can and can't use when I use Mono or dotGNU.
.NET framework. They'll keep back just enough to insure that their Office cash cow continues.
If it will, then I'll be happy to declare
But if it doesn't, then I judge the whole effort to produce non-MS
Now,
Now, as you can probably tell from the tone of my post, I've more-or-less concluded that there is basically no chance that MS will ever allow Office.NET to run on any non-MS
But if we turn the production on our cities completely over to building space ship modules, we won't complete the SETI program wonder in time.
When people talk about moving the ICANN functions to the UN, they're not talking about the general assembly (GA) or the security council (SC). They're talking about the specialized agencies.
The specialized agencies are almost completely autonomous organizations that the GA and SC have no direct control over. Some examples are the world health organization (WHO), the international telecommunications union (ITU), and world meteorological organization (WMO). See UN System of Organizations for details (in particular check out the "UN System Chart").
The specialized agencies have a pretty good (but by no means perfect) record of handling systems that require some international co-operation.
So, to repeat, complaints about the way the security council or the general assembly work really have no relevance to the "should the UN control the internet" argument.
To paraphrase the quote about the golden age of science fiction: the golden age of Doctor Who is whatever Doctor you were watching when you were thirteen.
I think that all we're missing is that if the matter goes to court, then anything could happen. Well, I don't mean literally anything; but even though it looks to us (/. readers) like SCO doesn't have much in the way of facts on their side, they could still win their case. The legal system can get very complicated, very quickly and cases will often hinge on small bits of legal minutia that baffle even skilled lawyers, let alone IANAL outsiders. Every time you enter a court room you're taking a big risk.
As to the investors that are buying based on the chance element of the legal system, as others have pointed out, it's basically a bet. They might loose all their money, but if they win, they win big.
Given the alternatives (mp3 on Kazaa, aac on the iPod) already out there, who is really going to choose to buy their music in .wma format??
Well, non-/. people generally simply don't care about the format. All they care about is: does it play on my stuff (computer and portable) and is the DRM not too restrictive (and is the price right, of course). Really, they *just don't care* about the format.
So Windows users will use a WMA encoded service over the copyright infringing P2P services if they value their time (ie. not having to filter through all the bad/incorrect encodings to find the good one) and don't mind spending money.
And Windows users will use a WMA encoded service over iTMS if they don't use an iPod as their portable device (because very little else supports AAC and the average user doesn't want to do the burn to CD and re-encode as mp3 trick).
There's a bit of confusion here about the UN. Now I'm not an expert, but my impression is that the UN is a whole bunch of agencies that have only vague connections between each other. In fact, they call them the UN System of Organizations. For example, the Security Council doesn't give orders to UNICEF.
So all the arguments on this thread citing problems with the Security Council or the General Assembly or the Secretariat as reasons not to put internet governance under the UN aren't particularly relevant. For example: "UN shouldn't govern the internet because China has a veto on the Security Council", doesn't make much sense.
What's being suggested is to create a new Special Agency (see the org chart on the site UN System of Organizations I gave above) or to assign internet goverance to an existing Special Agency (the ITU). And the Special Agencies are the most autonomous parts of the UN.
The standard operating procedure for Hollywood is that, when you have a successful movie, all the other studios rush off a copy-cat movie (or several or a TV show) to try to ride the wave of success. But this doesn't seem to have happened in this case (or maybe I'm forgetting some movies, all I can think of is the upcoming Illiad adaptation).
I think that the problem is that the more concrete parts of what she's saying, like the quote of her's that you singled out, are motherhood and apple pie. That is, it's not something that anyone would disagree with and it's something that everyone of HP's competitors says that they also do with their enterprise system.
Do you want your IT systems to allow you to swiftly and automatically or semi-automatically react to changes in your business? Of course you do. Everybody does.
The problem is that she doesn't in any way explain how HP's products do that. Or even how they do it better than products by Sun or IBM or EDS or Microsoft or...
I think that that's what Cooper was trying to get at by asking essentially the same question over and over again. Not that she wasn't able to articulate what businesses want from IT, but that she wasn't able to explain how HP products achieve that.
As long as the best chess playing computers are still made by humans, I'll feel confident in the superiority of our species.
It's when the best human-made chess playing computers are routinely beaten by the best computer-made chess playing computers that I'll be worried.
In regards to car reviews in CR, my understanding was that they review the way they do because they only have one review category, the family car. That's not to say that they deny that there are other ways to categorize cars, just that they're targeting a niche, the everyman car buyer. And because, realistically, 90%+ of non-commercial vehicles sold in the developed world are going to be used as general purpose family cars, the family car is the criteria they use to judge.
And this is the reason that they blithely review dissimilar vehicles together. They've made a concious decision to simply not use the categories that the auto industry does. So a Toyota Echo, Mercedes E-class and a Ford F-150 are all reviewed using the same criteria.
So, basically, if you're not planning to use the car you're buying as a general purpose family car, then you should ignore their reviews because they're not using the criteria you want.
I think that this might be the rotating work pod that you were thinking of: Aura
I actually lived in London in some of the years after the train system privatization (1998-2001) and I think that you're misrepresenting the situation there, particularly in regards to my previous message about competition, monopolies and how to run these things.
First, Railtrack (the track owning company, the "transmission" part of the equation, now Network Rail, it seems) was initially created as a completely private company with a government granted monopoly. You'll note in my original post that I say that this is the worst possible case and should be avoided at all costs. If it's not possible to have competition (which is probably the case for rail tracks), then the government should run it. They never should have privatized Railtrack. They did bring it back into the public sector (around '99 or '00), but only after the damage had been done.
On the matter of the train operating companies (the "generation" side of the system, if you will). There was never any real competition here either. Because every train company was granted a regional monopoly. If you wanted to go from London to Manchester, you had no choice about what company you used. This was, and is, extremely stupid. Again, if you can't create a real, competative market, then don't privatize because it won't work.
What they should have done, if they followed my prescription, was to keep the track and stations as publicly owned and operated and auction "slots" to train companies for relatively short periods of time. Sort of like airports do for flights to airlines. So if you wanted to go from London to Manchester you could pick Company A leaving at 08:00, but if you didn't like that company, you could pick Company B at 09:00.
So to summarize:
- If you can introduce a real, competative market, do so. (But keep government as a regulator.)
- If you can't introduce a real market, keep the resource in government hands.
- Whatever you do, don't grant monopolies to private companies. This is stupid.
I think that an important point it that transmission and generation need to be treated differently (and separately). I'm all in favour of a free market in generation (with government regulation). But I think that governments should continue to run the transmission.
The reasoning is simple: competition is good, monopolies are bad; if you can introduce competition, then do so; if you can't, then a government run monopoly is preferable to a private monopoly.
Power generation can clearly be run as a competative free market. Not free from government regulation, mind you; but there's no need for governments to run power plants. And the regulation has to work both ways, including fighting against the NIMBY instincts of land owners.
But for power transmission, on the other hand, it's very hard to have real competition. The barriers to entry (the start up capital of running lots of wires) are too high (generally. there are a few exceptions). So in that case, the government should run the distribution network (whether it's paid for out of general taxation or a user fee is another issue).
The worst thing you can do is have the government contract out a monopoly to the private sector. This produces the worst of both worlds and allows people to negatively caricature free markets, even though it isn't a free market, just a private company operating a monopoly.
There, problem solved. We've got free markets and we've got public ownership. Everyone's happy. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.
The real outcome of this is that the direct marketing industry will realize that they don't spend nearly enough money on Washington lobbyists and campaign contributions (like the tech industry realized after they started getting beaten up by the hill).
Expect a significant increase in spending by the direct marketing industry on lobbyists and campaign contributions. Then, a few years from now, expect several new bills expanding the list of exemptions to the do-not-call list.
I don't think that the article really supports the headline (yeah, I know, this is /., I shouldn't be surprised about that).
First, choosing an unrepresentative sample of 400 people out of about 300 million can't possibly tell you anything useful about the broad trends of a society ("...Rich Get Richer").
Second, of the 400 richest people in the US, only a small fraction of them have their wealth based on a technical source (even broadly defined). So the "Tech" part of the headline is suspect as well.
But hey, I'm all for the mob, let's eat the rich!
I like the little icons that they use to categorize the jobs in the story. I think that we should adopt a standard of using those icons on our resume job listings. Then the interviewer can see at a glance that your last job involved futility and psychological torture.
To my mind, the whole debate about the open source .NET projects will come down to what I call the Office.NET test, which goes like this...
.NET framework.
.NET frameworks?
.NET is the real deal, a cross platform programming environment.
.NET isn't a cross programming environment, regardless of what the Mono and dotGnu forces say.
At some point in the not too distant future, Microsoft will release Office.NET. That is, their office suite re-written to run under the
The test is, will Office.NET run, out of the box with no significant crashes or non-functioning features, on non-Microsoft
If yes, then
If no, then
But please note that in the Franklin quote he says "essential liberty" and "temporary safety". Not "any liberty" and "any safety". Franklin would probably be just fine with trading unessential liberties for permanent safety.
I'm not trying to defend the US governments abuses of anti-terrorism law; they've clearly crossed over the line. It's just one of my pet peeves when people haul out the Franklin quote to back up opposition to any changes in the balance between liberty and security.
This is also a practical problem, in terms of making it hard to contact domain owners.
I have several domains and I use a separate email address for my whois records (separate from my home and business addresses). But I don't monitor emails to that address because it has become completely filled with spam. I just delete all mail to that address.
But that, of course, means that any legitimate attempts to contact the domain owner are lost as well. I could try and filter it (either manually or with software) but the ratio of legitimate email to spam on domain registry emails is thousands to one, so it's really not worth my time.
So, aside from any privacy concerns, the public availability of email addresses on whois records in effect renders them useless as contact information.