It's no accident that one of the subject headings on Slashdot, complete with its own graphic symbol, is "Enlightenment."
Another fine example of a thoroughly researched article by Katz, demonstrating his in depth understanding of his target audience and the technologies they use.
And probably stop using windows entirely. That's why I think this is probably total BS, fabricated in a desperate attempt to influence that show trial MS is in the process of losing.
ZD Net has been reporting on Linux as if it were the second coming this last few months. I hate to be cynical, but it is hard to believe Micros~1 isn't behind promotiong stories like these.
What do these people think they are going to accomplish, other than forcing someone to either reverse engineer their client, or write an entirely free CD database client and server. I can't imagine it's all that difficult.
I think Jon misses a fundamental driving force behind all this, behind the falling of the walls. This is simply the fact that the cost of processing and transporting information has become in many cases almost trivial.
Walls existed in the past because these costs were non-trivial, and often times required skills that the general public did not possess. Thus the middle man - the travel agent, the bricks and morter book and computer stores, the ticket adgent, etc... These walls did not exist just because huge evil corporations wanted to keep information away from people, they existed because these corporation found a place where they could provide services that the public wanted.
These walls were not barriers, they were outgrowth of the technological limitations of the time, a result of the high cost of moving and processing information.
In many cases technology now gives us the capabilities to do many of these things for ourselves, much more efficiently and cheaply - thus we no longer need the intermediary. Now the corporations are scrambling to protect the hegemony over information, but the genie is out of the bottle. Informations is free to flow around their old walls. The walls are an anachronism.
But more walls will be built. Walls are not inherently bad. Walls even exist on slashdot. There are still things that other people do more efficiently for me than I can do for myself or with the assistance of technology.
The difference between a good wall and a bad wall is this: A bad wall erects an articificial barrier to information, a barrier that is not inherent in the technology of the day. A good wall provides a value added service, it filters and simplifies, it offers me information I would have a hard time finding on my own. This is a definition based entirely on the technology of a given era. What is a good wall in one era can become a barrier as technology advances.
Jon tries to frame the battle between old and new as a more political conflict. Capatilism versus Communism, free vs. proprietary. It has nothing to do with politics, everything to do with technology. Cars will be free when and if it costs the manaufacturers next to nothing to make a car, or they can come up with a marketting plan that derives revenue from something other than the sale of the car. Technology may someday allow this. Who knows, but it will be technologically driven, not politically.
It seems that if Rob wants to get into the business of author/book publicist thats what he should do. If he wants to run one of the worlds most successful 'vertical portals' he should concentrate on that.
The fact that Amazon managed to sell several hundred copies of the book based on a slashdot article does not particularly impress me given the estimated readership of slashdot. I do not think this book is of particular interest to the slashdot following. If, as you claim Rob, you keep Katz on because you like his writing - have you read the book?
This indulgence of one particular author I think is going a bit overboard. Certainly keep him on as a columnist, but edit him, and keep him on topics that we might find interesting (we have heard what he has to say about the geek ethos and understand, we don't want to hear it anymore). But let his writing and his books stand on their own merit. Don't just give him 'front page' status because he happens to write for slashdot. You have a responsibility to your readers Rob.
Rob, if you read the book, really liked it and thought other slashdot readers would find it similarly interesting, then great. But I don't think that's what happened.
I propose a new statistic, the Katz factor. This is defined as the percentage of a Katz article (measured by word count) which is composed of the word 'geek'.
This article scores a 1.5%. The word 'a' makes up only 2.5% of the document, barely edging out 'geek'
On the other hand the word "Rushmore", of which film this is obstensibly a review, comprises only 0.7% of the document.
Why is this allowed to continue. This is not good writing. This is not interesting content.
From what I can tell from their web site, you boot a primary OS, NT or Linux are the only two they going to support so far - and then from that OS you launch virtual machines that should be able to run any OS.
I guess this is similar to how NT runs 16 bit windows apps.
The only thing is, I would have though that the x86 chip would have to be able to virtualize itself entirely, i.e. provide a virtual machine with all the same capabilities of the actual chip itself. From what I understand, the VM mode of the x86 chips is a limited subset of the features of the chip itself.
Also performance could be weird. It looks like each VM is just a process in the host OS, subject to the scheduling of the host OS. If you boot Linux from NT and NT decides to give a native process 90% of CPU, it doesn't look like there is much Linux, or the Virtual machine manager can do about it.
Ok, I don't get it. He asserts Linux and Open Source (oddly enmeshed and confused in his article) are doomed to marginality because they are not commercial software.
Ok, let's look at the success of other commercial Unix/Unix utility vendors. Well, guess what, compared to the installed based of Microsoft they are all marginal.
It's not the development model, or commercial vs. non-commercial, or the defect rate in Linux utilities vs HP/UX - its that every other player has to compete with the 2000 lb gorilla of Microsofts installed base.
Beyond that his article is riddle with factual flaws and bad logic, and a general statistical illiteracy. Linux doesn't support video cards? Hmmm... I must be imagining what I am seeing on my screen right now.
Linux will probably never rule the desktop - oh well. It will rise to a position of power in the Server OS market, a position based on its technical merit and performance - which is on par or surpassing that of most commercial Unixes.
Open Source will always be a valid development model, suffering from its inadequacies as does the commercial development model. Some OSS products will see commercial success, some will only continue to be used by the Linux hobbiest. Who cares. The OSS movement has produced some awesome software products - and I like to use many of them - I could care less what this guy recommends his Fortune 500 droids do.
These products will ultimately stand or fall on their own merit, not on the politics of their development model.
Recently saw a 60 minutes episode about personal privacy that really brought home the fact that personal privacy is not a technology issue. CPU ids won't effect the current state of affairs one iota.
The 60 min episode presented a family that had been 'checked up' on by an ex-wife. With the family's permission, 60 minutes tried to see what information they could get on the couple. It was amazing. Telephone calls, credit card purchases, credit reports, medical histories - and according to the sources of this info, not one server was hacked, not one security system breached.
All the information was gotten either via legitimate channels (scary what can be had legally) or by tricking people who have legitimate access to the information into giving it up over the phone.
Some of the people that track down this information actually give courses and seminars on how to cold call employers, banks, HMO, etc, and trick them into devulging personal information.
The reason this can happen is because we have very inneffectual laws. Employers don't think to admonish employees to never, under any circumstances give out any personal information over the phone, no matter how sweet the talker on the other end - because there are no consequences for doing so. There need to be very strict guidlines, and punishment needs to be swift and certain.
Another poster hit it right on the head when he said that yes, we have lost control of our personal information, it is out there, more and more people are tracking it, and more and more people have access to it, there is not much we can do about that - what we can do is make sure that those who do have the information are accountable for what they do with it. We need to make sure that they cannot use this information in such a way that it adversely effects our lives.
Scott's defeatist attitude is correct, in a technological perspective, we do need to get use to the fact that more and more people have access to our personal information - but we should never accept the negative consequences of illegal use of this information.
Realistically - Yes, human will eventually be replaced in most production environments. Totally automated factories are probably within reach in the next 20 years. The social challenge will be how to re-distribute the huge profits this brings to those that don't have the skills to get a job in a non-production environment.
Yes, computers will be blindingly fast in 20 years time. Capable of simulating insect-like intelligence at a level sufficient for automated carpet cleaners that run around at night without bumping into things, or driving our cars for us on the free-way (yes, a silicon insect intelligence can probably drive better than we do, it is always paying attention)
Human like intelligence in silico? Sure, when you have a computer that can accurately simulate the human brain - all the neurons, all the connections, and do it in real time. Even if moore's law continues until 2100 I don't think we will get there, as our computers are serial, and the brain is massively parallel. Can anyone who knows more about this than me estimate what kind of processing power it would take to simulate a neural network the size of our brain on a serial silicon chip? If we come up with a way of creating billions of artificial neurons and actually physically wiring them together, then we might have something.
Then there is the problem of programming this brain...
Oh no! Genes that cause organisms not to reproduce are going to cross-populate into unintended species and do what? Cause them to die off without re-producing. End of story.
It's not like this gene is going to run rampant and kill everything on the planet. A gene that causes organisms to die without reproducing does not spread very far.
A company named Cruise Technologies (now defunct) has been making a wireless Citrix client for several years now. A friend of mine put these to work in a cardiologist's practice. Very cool.
If they can get this stuff down to the profile of a letter sized notebook, get the screen dpi somewhere aproaching the even half the dpi of lasterjet output, and make it all seemlessly integrate with the network it would revolutionize the way we use computers.
Wouldn't do much for me at home, other than allow me to browse easily on the couch. But imagine the corporate application. Bring your wireless PC to the meeting with you. All your notes are in the PC. Someone wants to see your presentation? Zap it to their wireless PC. No more printing. Hurrah!
When was this golden age that the present day keeps getting compared to?
As far as I know there was only about a generation after WWII that enjoyed life-long employment and insanely bloated benefits.
Yes, compared to this generation our workplace is dishearteningly cutt-throat. But that generation rode an unsustainable bubble. Compared to the rest of recorded history we today are much better off in our working lives.
The pendulum will swing the other way. There are inneficiencies and inequities in the current workplace. These provide opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Start a company Jon. Hire all those perfectly good, displaced, middle aged workers, and if they are as good as you say they are, you'll be eating those dirty old capitalist's lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
It's no accident that one of the subject headings on Slashdot, complete with its own graphic symbol, is "Enlightenment."
Another fine example of a thoroughly researched article by Katz, demonstrating his in depth understanding of his target audience and the technologies they use.
-josh
And probably stop using windows entirely. That's why I think this is probably total BS, fabricated in a desperate attempt to influence that show trial MS is in the process of losing.
ZD Net has been reporting on Linux as if it were the second coming this last few months. I hate to be cynical, but it is hard to believe Micros~1 isn't behind promotiong stories like these.
-josh
What do these people think they are going to accomplish, other than forcing someone to either reverse engineer their client, or write an entirely free CD database client and server. I can't imagine it's all that difficult.
-josh
Only it was a batch file that spawned a new command interpreter, to run the same batch file.
Could not click the close buttons fast enough.
Control-Alt-Delete, then selecting shutdown killed them all - eventually.
-josh
What's so bad about walls?
I think Jon misses a fundamental driving force behind all this, behind the falling of the walls. This is simply the fact that the cost of processing and transporting information has become in many cases almost trivial.
Walls existed in the past because these costs were non-trivial, and often times required skills that the general public did not possess. Thus the middle man - the travel agent, the bricks and morter book and computer stores, the ticket adgent, etc... These walls did not exist just because huge evil corporations wanted to keep information away from people, they existed because these corporation found a place where they could provide services that the public wanted.
These walls were not barriers, they were outgrowth of the technological limitations of the time, a result of the high cost of moving and processing information.
In many cases technology now gives us the capabilities to do many of these things for ourselves, much more efficiently and cheaply - thus we no longer need the intermediary. Now the corporations are scrambling to protect the hegemony over information, but the genie is out of the bottle. Informations is free to flow around their old walls. The walls are an anachronism.
But more walls will be built. Walls are not inherently bad. Walls even exist on slashdot. There are still things that other people do more efficiently for me than I can do for myself or with the assistance of technology.
The difference between a good wall and a bad wall is this: A bad wall erects an articificial barrier to information, a barrier that is not inherent in the technology of the day. A good wall provides a value added service, it filters and simplifies, it offers me information I would have a hard time finding on my own. This is a definition based entirely on the technology of a given era. What is a good wall in one era can become a barrier as technology advances.
Jon tries to frame the battle between old and new as a more political conflict. Capatilism versus Communism, free vs. proprietary. It has nothing to do with politics, everything to do with technology. Cars will be free when and if it costs the manaufacturers next to nothing to make a car, or they can come up with a marketting plan that derives revenue from something other than the sale of the car. Technology may someday allow this. Who knows, but it will be technologically driven, not politically.
-josh
It seems that if Rob wants to get into the business of author/book publicist thats what he should do. If he wants to run one of the worlds most successful 'vertical portals' he should concentrate on that.
The fact that Amazon managed to sell several hundred copies of the book based on a slashdot article does not particularly impress me given the estimated readership of slashdot. I do not think this book is of particular interest to the slashdot following. If, as you claim Rob, you keep Katz on because you like his writing - have you read the book?
This indulgence of one particular author I think is going a bit overboard. Certainly keep him on as a columnist, but edit him, and keep him on topics that we might find interesting (we have heard what he has to say about the geek ethos and understand, we don't want to hear it anymore). But let his writing and his books stand on their own merit. Don't just give him 'front page' status because he happens to write for slashdot. You have a responsibility to your readers Rob.
Rob, if you read the book, really liked it and thought other slashdot readers would find it similarly interesting, then great. But I don't think that's what happened.
-josh
I propose a new statistic, the Katz factor. This is defined as the percentage of a Katz article (measured by word count) which is composed of the word 'geek'.
This article scores a 1.5%. The word 'a' makes up only 2.5% of the document, barely edging out 'geek'
On the other hand the word "Rushmore", of which film this is obstensibly a review, comprises only 0.7% of the document.
Why is this allowed to continue. This is not good writing. This is not interesting content.
Please, someone, make it stop.
-josh
This looks like the Real Thing(tm).
From what I can tell from their web site, you boot a primary OS, NT or Linux are the only two they going to support so far - and then from that OS you launch virtual machines that should be able to run any OS.
I guess this is similar to how NT runs 16 bit windows apps.
The only thing is, I would have though that the x86 chip would have to be able to virtualize itself entirely, i.e. provide a virtual machine with all the same capabilities of the actual chip itself. From what I understand, the VM mode of the x86 chips is a limited subset of the features of the chip itself.
Also performance could be weird. It looks like each VM is just a process in the host OS, subject to the scheduling of the host OS. If you boot Linux from NT and NT decides to give a native process 90% of CPU, it doesn't look like there is much Linux, or the Virtual machine manager can do about it.
-josh
Ok, I don't get it. He asserts Linux and Open Source (oddly enmeshed and confused in his article) are doomed to marginality because they are not commercial software.
Ok, let's look at the success of other commercial Unix/Unix utility vendors. Well, guess what, compared to the installed based of Microsoft they are all marginal.
It's not the development model, or commercial vs. non-commercial, or the defect rate in Linux utilities vs HP/UX - its that every other player has to compete with the 2000 lb gorilla of Microsofts installed base.
Beyond that his article is riddle with factual flaws and bad logic, and a general statistical illiteracy. Linux doesn't support video cards? Hmmm... I must be imagining what I am seeing on my screen right now.
Linux will probably never rule the desktop - oh well. It will rise to a position of power in the Server OS market, a position based on its technical merit and performance - which is on par or surpassing that of most commercial Unixes.
Open Source will always be a valid development model, suffering from its inadequacies as does the commercial development model. Some OSS products will see commercial success, some will only continue to be used by the Linux hobbiest. Who cares. The OSS movement has produced some awesome software products - and I like to use many of them - I could care less what this guy recommends his Fortune 500 droids do.
These products will ultimately stand or fall on their own merit, not on the politics of their development model.
-josh
When I grow tired of the idiocy in our own legislature, I only have to read a story about European government to remind me how good we have it.
-josh
Recently saw a 60 minutes episode about personal privacy that really brought home the fact that personal privacy is not a technology issue. CPU ids won't effect the current state of affairs one iota.
The 60 min episode presented a family that had been 'checked up' on by an ex-wife. With the family's permission, 60 minutes tried to see what information they could get on the couple. It was amazing. Telephone calls, credit card purchases, credit reports, medical histories - and according to the sources of this info, not one server was hacked, not one security system breached.
All the information was gotten either via legitimate channels (scary what can be had legally) or by tricking people who have legitimate access to the information into giving it up over the phone.
Some of the people that track down this information actually give courses and seminars on how to cold call employers, banks, HMO, etc, and trick them into devulging personal information.
The reason this can happen is because we have very inneffectual laws. Employers don't think to admonish employees to never, under any circumstances give out any personal information over the phone, no matter how sweet the talker on the other end - because there are no consequences for doing so. There need to be very strict guidlines, and punishment needs to be swift and certain.
Another poster hit it right on the head when he said that yes, we have lost control of our personal information, it is out there, more and more people are tracking it, and more and more people have access to it, there is not much we can do about that - what we can do is make sure that those who do have the information are accountable for what they do with it. We need to make sure that they cannot use this information in such a way that it adversely effects our lives.
Scott's defeatist attitude is correct, in a technological perspective, we do need to get use to the fact that more and more people have access to our personal information - but we should never accept the negative consequences of illegal use of this information.
-josh
Downloading the human brain? Come on.
Realistically - Yes, human will eventually be replaced in most production environments. Totally automated factories are probably within reach in the next 20 years. The social challenge will be how to re-distribute the huge profits this brings to those that don't have the skills to get a job in a non-production environment.
Yes, computers will be blindingly fast in 20 years time. Capable of simulating insect-like intelligence at a level sufficient for automated carpet cleaners that run around at night without bumping into things, or driving our cars for us on the free-way (yes, a silicon insect intelligence can probably drive better than we do, it is always paying attention)
Human like intelligence in silico? Sure, when you have a computer that can accurately simulate the human brain - all the neurons, all the connections, and do it in real time. Even if moore's law continues until 2100 I don't think we will get there, as our computers are serial, and the brain is massively parallel. Can anyone who knows more about this than me estimate what kind of processing power it would take to simulate a neural network the size of our brain on a serial silicon chip? If we come up with a way of creating billions of artificial neurons and actually physically wiring them together, then we might have something.
Then there is the problem of programming this brain...
-josh
You can telnet into the darned thing, no root
password.
Wow, I am glad that all these groups at least take themselves seriously.
'Hactivism'?
Calling for the 'power of hacking' to not be abused?
Hilarious.
-josh
Oh no! Genes that cause organisms not to reproduce are going to cross-populate into unintended species and do what? Cause them to die off without re-producing. End of story.
It's not like this gene is going to run rampant and kill everything on the planet. A gene that causes organisms to die without reproducing does not spread very far.
-josh
A company named Cruise Technologies (now defunct) has been making a wireless Citrix client for several years now. A friend of mine put these to work in a cardiologist's practice. Very cool.
If they can get this stuff down to the profile of a letter sized notebook, get the screen dpi somewhere aproaching the even half the dpi of lasterjet output, and make it all seemlessly integrate with the network it would revolutionize the way we use computers.
Wouldn't do much for me at home, other than allow me to browse easily on the couch. But imagine the corporate application. Bring your wireless PC to the meeting with you. All your notes are in the PC. Someone wants to see your presentation? Zap it to their wireless PC. No more printing. Hurrah!
-josh
When was this golden age that the present day keeps getting compared to?
As far as I know there was only about a generation after WWII that enjoyed life-long employment and insanely bloated benefits.
Yes, compared to this generation our workplace is dishearteningly cutt-throat. But that generation rode an unsustainable bubble. Compared to the rest of recorded history we today are much better off in our working lives.
The pendulum will swing the other way. There are inneficiencies and inequities in the current workplace. These provide opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Start a company Jon. Hire all those perfectly good, displaced, middle aged workers, and if they are as good as you say they are, you'll be eating those dirty old capitalist's lunch.
-josh
But it least it's the NY Times.
So Linux rhymes with 'cynics' eh...
If they get as much traffic as their current page claims, one would think they could support the site on ad revenue alone.
Sounds like they need to do a better job of promoting themselves.