I thought that the general consensus among mainstream economists is that the stock market IS being irrationally exhubrent and is threatening the long term sustainability of the current expansion.
Translation: they're cheering Greenspan on. "Come on, Al! make it a 50 this time!"
Research theories from academics don't typically represent the day in and day out reality that applied economists deal with. [Applied economists are typically financiers, finance politicians, clued-in managers, consultants, and the odd techie who happens to have an economics degree..:) ]
Most of the industrialized nations of the world have had service-driven economies for the past 50 years. The U.S. is special because it has succeeded in exporting more services more than any other country. Canada, for instance, is comparable to the U.S. in that over 70% of its GDP is in services, yet over 50% of Canadian exports are manufactured goods (especially cars). Other countries have a long way to go to compete with U.S. service exports.
My point is that services are driving the economy, and economic growth is providing lots of the good things currently happening throughout the industrialized world.
What I find ironic, however, is how the concept of how "goods become services". Hasn't it been a mantra of the OSS community to promote software as a "service" and "not a good", such that it eliminates property rights. Be careful what you wish for...
Services are effectively a knowledge-based industry: from the hairdresser to the corporate consultant. Services are *not*, in my opinion, a game that will be dominated by large faceless corporations, they will be dominated by individuals with specialized knowledge, who often just happen to work for large organizations for logistical and strategic reasons. (See www.cluetrain.org).
NDAs are not a licence on knowledge. They are a licence on intellectual property. There *is* a difference. One can write a software framework at one employer, and then re-write it a similar one at another employer, and *nothing illegal* has taken place so long as the source code and original design documents have not been copied. Knowledge is what is in-between your ears, and an employer cannot prevent you from using ideas.
" The little girl that made my ram? " Could you be any more unrealistic?
Actually, I wasn't referring to the U.S. I was referring to the industrialized world (i.e. the G-7 + the asian tigers + mexico) Skill & talent in general is becoming rare.
Yes, by many countries' standards, the U.S. is rich. However, economic development in many countries (including Taiwan, Mexico, Korea, Hong Kong, etc.) has boosted wages and standards of living tremendously. These countries are getting better, not worse. And, (ahem), I would attribute a lot of that success to the investment of multi-national corporations in those countries. You know, benefits from trade + comparative advantage, and all that jazz.
There is still, of course, the 3rd world, which includes much of Africa, that requires tremendous work.
This seems to ignore the role of deficits in making the budgets, and also ignores that corporate profitability is actually taking a relative downturn over the last 30 years..
In particular, if, as is increasingly the case, the workers who produce a good are not the same people who buy it (frequently these days they don't even live in the same country), there is no reason whatsoever for the corporation to protect the interests of the workers
You've never managed a company before, have you.
Actually, here's another thought: It turns out there's a real shortage of skill & talent out there in pretty much EVERY industry, since we're nearing full employment, and uh, that means they're treating us employees pretty damn good.
The people whom you claim are served so slavishly by corps must be rich people. How else do they have the money to "vote with their dollars"?
Oh jeezus. "Vote with your dollars" is Economics 101: the cumulative actions of all consumers will create an emergent pattern in the macro economy, thereby influencing which companies succeed and fail. The bulk of income is in the middle class of this country. The market is primarily influenced by the middle class, not the rich.
In corporatism, the needs of the individual are subordinated to the needs of the corporation. Via the argument you've presented, people claim that corporations represent the people so totally that the interests of corporations are equated with those of the people. Sounds kinda like communism to me.
The needs of the individual are the whole purpose corporations exist in the first place: to create and serve a customer. You can't get around that. Unless you, (ahem) think that "only rich people buy stuff".
Organizations are wonderful entities that can get tremendous feats accomplished. You forget that corporations are organizations: they are made BY people, for people. We entrust our economic resources to them precicely because they ARE ONLY an economic institution, and will use these scarce resources in the most productive way possible to please the market.
I think YOU are crazy for even equating individual ambition with those things.
So what is the ultimate symbol of excellence at ambition? Influence? Philanthropy? Happiness? Economic power? I would say that all of them play a part.
I know quite a few professional musicians and not one of them makes enough money to support themselves... How is MP3 sharing going to make this worse?
By effectively forcing a "if I can't make money at this, no one can" policy into effect. This assumes that some entrepreneur doesn't come up with the technology to ensure proper remuneration with sharing.
Rubbish. How do you measure "success"? In terms of the amount of money a vanishingly small number of individuals and corporations have made?
Vanishingly small? Indie labels are thriving. Many of the big labels' sales are up, but they still struggle to find new and innovative acts that fit the mainstream's tastes.
Profit is a part of success. Music marketing, recording, and distribution is a BUSINESS, and profit is an objective, not evil, part of business.
Profit is not and can never be the same as culture (unless you want a culture that views money above all else, but surely most people would value love, security and happiness above money... right?).
Of course. Profit is not the goal, the goal is to make and distribute music. Profit is just a requirement of being in business: it's not about greed, it's about covering the costs of future investment.
It seems to me that all the commercialisation of "culture" has done is made it more and more difficult to listen and see anything that is even slightly outside the tastes of Main Street USA. There must be a million great unsigned bands in the world but we won't get to hear any of them because if a record company releases too many tracks at once it's profits will be diluted. How the hell is that "successful"??
This is a very peculiar argument.
- The music industry is OVER LOADED with thousands of artists that are mainstream, alternative, and experimental. I'm shocked that you seem to think that the local record store only has rows and rows of the latest Britney Spears or Metallica CD's. When I walk into a Virgin Megastore, HMV, or Borders, I see rows of world music, new age, jazz, classical, metal, alternative, electronica (with over 10 sub-genres in that big umbrella term alone), rock, pop, rap, trip hop, hip hop, r&b, soul, etc. Amazon.com and CDnow.com have THOUSANDS of artists, and you can buy almost every obscure artist imaginable on tape or vinyl off of an indie label's website or mailing address.
- If there are a million unsigned bands now, how does MP3 sharing change this? These bands can be putting out MP3's right now, freely sharing them. They will suffer from the same problem: There's not enough time to take in everything.
What you put out therefore has to be either clearly mainstream so it is marketable, or clearly "innovative" with mainstream sensibility so that word of mouth will carry it.
This is not a fault of the current system, this is a problem that just exists: people can't pay attention to everything, and this problem will just get worse as the internet increases our information overload.
Listen, you seem to be extremely pissed at anyone who makes a profit, but the fact is that if you take away profit, you don't just take away the "profit motive", you take away the fundamental engine of investment available to our society. It rewards those who cater to the market by allowing them to GROW.... Profit is but a small price to pay for continued economic prosperity... it is a VERY small sliver of the U.S.'s total GDP, of which wages take up the vast majority...
Re:yes, rights are important
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Pay Lars
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Hmm. Let's see:
First: Nope. Society is simply a bunch of people trying to avoid killing each other. It has no power, and certainly it does not "grant" anything to individuals.
Then: For the most part, there's a trade-off. If nobody cooperated, then there'd be a perpetual state of violence among people. In order to avoid that, we surrender some of our rights.
So, in other words, the society has no power over us, but this is a paradox because if it didn't we'd devolve into a state of anarchy, which is unacceptable. (Robert Nozick pretty much formulated this theory).
Your rights are yours. They are not given to you; but you can give them away. Most people give them away -- they let the government pry into their lives and take their money; they let people tell them what to do; etc.
For the most part, there's a trade-off. If nobody cooperated, then there'd be a perpetual state of violence among people. In order to avoid that, we surrender some of our rights.
Yes, but a right is a statement of entitlement, hence it is defined by human beings. If you say "I have a right to all of the ice cream in the world", then there is little one can say to refute that unless you have other rights that conflict with it.
Rights will only be in conflict with each other if certain rights are "negative". Your rights end where another person's begin. This is the principle of rights in the western countries.
Basically what I'm saying is that you can say you have a right all you want, but a government is effectively a means of drafting and enforcing what are basically philosophical positions that have evolved dialectically over the last 300 years in the western world.
The argument is that the right of intellectual property is a philosophical position. It is a right granted to authors for the benefit of society. You can disagree with it, you can argue against it, but history will decide the victor.
You, however, have been blinded. You've been led to believe that the government is the source of power and that they deign to permit you to breathe so that they can tax you and occasionally make you kill people for them.
It's really convenient to paint me as a mindless, brainwashed drone, isn't it? Do you normally feel that people with differing views from you are blind, or do you ever think that maybe, just maybe, you could learn something from an exchange with them?
This is the attitude I've taken with this discussion. I'm here to learn. Please argue the position, not the person.
You've got the whole thing backwards.
Uh huh.
Governments have no right to exist unless we say so.
Ideally, government exists because we say so, but as mentioned above, it is almost a natural state of affairs that any society without government devolves into anarchy. Hence, even if we say "we don't need no stinkin' government", whoops, another one would pop up eventually.
People created the concept of intellectual property hundreds of years ago and made laws to define it. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. And up until about 30 years ago, it probably was a good idea.
But times have changed. The rights that we surrendered when we created intellectual property are becoming more important than the alleged benefits of intellectual property.
Sorry, I don't buy it. This is basically saying "I'm entitled to all of the art in the world for free!". Whoops, sorry, see, we granted those things called "negative rights" to the creators of those works.
In other words, YOU do not determine the rights that government chooses for society. The collective actions of YOU and the rest of society chooses them through the course of history. Majorities are the short-term way of accomplishing this change, but philosophical & historical trends are the long-term way of accomplishing it.
But there's a kink behind this whole issue of social change: The whole notion of intellectual property is based upon an extended version of the economic law of scarcity: that there ain't no free lunch in a world where few people are talented and skillful. We have intellectual property to ensure money & investment flows to those who please the market, otherwise we would not have enough GOOD, quality material proliferating.
Skill and talent, the two prerequisites for musicians, will ALWAYS be scarce. Hence, the need for property to ensure that those WITH talent get the resources to use it.
The key is not to destroy the system, but to let the burgeoning indie labels and entrepreneurs to come up with better models that defeat the big labels. They really can do this by offering QUALITY, innovative music & distribution technology that the big labels have a hard time finding. Napster is sort of like the black sheep here: they're innovative, for sure, but they're also offering a forum for thousands of people to break the law.
Now, a side note: I can see intellectual property becoming less of an issue when we have technology to ensure remuneration for free copying of intellectual works, (and I don't mean per copy, I mean just SOME form of guaranteed remuneration). Chances are this will happen before any of the above social changes, so this argument may have been moot, but it was enjoyable at times, nevertheless...
You're creating a bunch of assumptions that are very incorrect.
#1) Slashdot community member = Free software advocate. Wrong. Slashdot is a news for nerds site with lots of differing opinions. Lots of people like Linux. That doesn't mean they use it for religous reasons. The "open source" movement is about PRAGMATICS, not religon or philosophy.
#2) People who support a system of intellectual property are supporting the greedy and rich. Wrong. The greedy and rich are not the benefactors of a strong property system: SOCIETY as a whole is benefitted by it because it provides economic incentive to perform productive work.
Some say "art should not be paid for". This argument is so shallow, it's surprising that people still use it. Without compensation, art wouldn't proliferate, would it? Not because of lack of love, but because of a lack of time & commitment. Perhaps, one would think, that if a particularily good artist comes along with something in his/her spare time, people would throw money at them to produce more? Oh, but now, we're back at square one: paying money for art, if the market wants it. And that's the kicker: clearly, the market wants it, because, uh, they're still paying for the books, CD's, and movies that people create today.
The laws of private property and contract, whether tangible or intellectual, have historically been the most successful economic policies to stimulate a free market. The socialist "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" creed is a wonderful moral fantasy, but cannot coincide with economic reality. There is no free lunch, even with intellectual works.
Unlimited free copying is justifiable IF AND ONLY IF there can be guarantee of remuneration to the original creator of that work if so desired. Only then can a "sharing" community exist while the market continues to foster the determinants of economic success: productivity and innovation.
Laws change. Economic laws don't. If you can come up with a good way of promoting free copying while preserving remuneration to the artist, become an entrepreneur, not an activist...
Would you prefer not paying for culture, hence driving all culture works to the fringes of unemployed people working through government grants and donations?
Turning culture into a business has been very successful; let's not destroy that. Instead, let's find business & technology models that allow the free market and human desires for free proliferation of cultural works...
Hmm. Last I checked, profits were a lot more than "extra money". They cover the costs of raising capital in the first place and provide capital for tomorrow. Being highly profitable is actually quite socially responsible, in contrast to the money-losing dot-coms that are bleeding money away from other innovative or productive companies...
Re:yes, rights are important
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Pay Lars
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Jesus christ, you want to be pedantic about this? Copyright in the US isn't meant to protect authors IN THEIR CAPACITY AS AUTHORS. Happy? You obviously knew what I meant. Just trying this bullshit so you don't have to answer the actual point?
No, I'm saying that a "right" is something that society grants an individual. The reasoning behind copyright is different from its execution: which is granting a right to authors to protect their works.
I'm not being pedantic, I'm challenging your notion of you seem to think is "right". >:)
That's what you say now. What you said BEFORE was that there is a "right" to prevent people from using information. It is your original statement with which I take issue.
Our definitions of right are different. I'm just saying a "right" is something that society grants you, i.e. what congress grants authors through IP law.
It doesn't matter WHY they do it, it's the fact that the execution of the law effectively grants rights.
Actually, I would say his argument was more hard-core libertarian than communist.
Re:yes, rights are important
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Pay Lars
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So, what do you suggest? That Metallica should have to survive on its own on the free market? Lemme give you a clue; free market and copyright are incompatible.
Sez you.
Copyright is a restriction of the free market, MEANT TO ENHANCE THE LIVES, NOT OF THE AUTHOR, BUT OF SOCIETY.
In an absolute sense, yes it is a restriction of the free market. In a comparative sense, it is not; copyright allows the proliferation of works that arguably would not exist without granting monopoly power to their creators as incentive.
The government decides to give Metallica copyright monopoly AS A CHARITY, in order for them not to have to survive through free market competition and thus have more time to help society.
Free market competition requires rules of the game. I am postulating that some form of intellectual property is required to ensure the game runs smoothly. Eliminating copyright allows many people to sell Metallica's works: at lower prices, yes, but at the expense of destroying Metallica's incentive to innovate since anyone can appropriate and profit off of their sunk costs.
Copyright is based upon solid economic principle. It is a necessary and sufficient restriction to the market in order to foster innovation. This assumes that the greatest benefit to society is not lowered prices, it is innovation in content.
The counter-argument to the above is that copyright destroys innovation because competitors can't take other people's works and change them in ways that are marketable. The answer to this is that not all forms of innovation are equal; minor tweaks to an intellectual work drive down the price of this work yet add little value to it.
Please, go learn some US IP law before you start to talk about "rights that Congress grant[s]". The right granted by Congress is TO SOCIETY, not to any author.
WHAT IS an author but a member of society? The purpose of IP law is to benefit society, through granting monopoly rights to authors. We can go twisting around semantics of words all day, but I think this particular point is somewhat irrelevant.
Society gets stuff, authors get monopoly. Monopolistic competition ensues.
Currently the most logical perspective is the current one by the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization: Ideas are free (gratis and libre). A particular manifestation of them are under the control of the creator.
That's absurd. For all we know, all the ideas -- even specific ones ("particular manifestation[s]"), have been invented in the past by some previous society of aliens from some other galaxy. Do they have a "right" to prevent us to use those ideas, because they thought of them first (and because they are specific)? I'd really like to hear the logic behind that.
I think we're on different wavelengths here, as I don't follow your logic at all. Let's bear through this...
First of all, I said "ideas are free". I think your retort ignored this. If a green man from mars thought of an idea first, he can't legally stop us from using it.
Secondly, a "particular manifestation" is the context upon which these ideas are included: a book, a recording, etc. If Mr. Worf wrote "My Life in the Federation as a Warrior", you'd be free to use the ideas contained in the book, but not take the book and re-sell it as your own work, or to liberally copy the contents of the work verbatim in your own work [plagarism].
Such restrictions as these does place limits on what the free market can do with this commodity (Lars hasn't read a dictionary lately), but it ensures a smoothly operating market by providing incentive to innovate.
Copyright as it stands is not a perfect law, nor do I say it "shouldn't change". What I do say is that there needs to be some level of IP law in existence to properly facilitate a high level of innovation in intellectual works.
yes, rights are important
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Pay Lars
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Who gets to decide "what metallica needs" to pay for its work and life? Certainly not you, nor should the government.
Furthermore, it is extremely presumptuous to say that the rights that congress grants U.S. residents aren't really rights. What "really" is a right? Is it something self-evident? Is it the U.N. declaration of rights? Who decides?
Currently the most logical perspective is the current one by the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization: Ideas are free (gratis and libre). A particular manifestation of them are under the control of the creator.
Some day, they may be libre, but I doubt they'll ever be gratis.
While IP may be built on the shoulders of past ideas, it typically isn't built on prior copyrighted work (unless, of course, it is GPL).
So, yes, people DO have the right to call a piece of IP their own property if they so choose. Any particular manifestation of IP represents innovation, however small or trivial, and hence should be protected by copyright.
RMS' essays on copyright form a position that would have us eliminate the copyright system so everything is "free". I disagree with that.
That's a very libertarian view of business ethics.. I was just taking a course on this recently, and there definitely is also a prevalent view of business ethics that is markedly socialist - meaning that social responsibility comes above and beyond profits.
The answer, of course, is probably in the middle: capitalism works, but we need to keep an eye on it. Socialism doesn't work on its own, but sometimes has a good idea to help capitalism on its way (the welfare state, for instance, even though it doesn't quite work as well as we'd hope). Oh, and businesses DO have a social responsibility, it just so happens that their first responsibility is to be profitable: a bankrupt corporation does no one any good.
Re:Java won't ever replace C++ for me until
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The MS analysis does not give very good technical reasons for the delegate. There are also numerous inconsistencies between the points they make, which are typically done to skew the reader's perception in favour of delegates.
Examples: They compare the number of "classes" used in the AIC vs. delegates case. (22 vs. 1) Yet they ignore to mention that delegates are actually classes under the covers (therefore, the answer is 22 vs. 22).
That AIC's need to be compiled in advance is rather irrelevant unless you are concerned about a 2-3% development footprint hit.
They also ignore that with some simple reflection, the number of AIC required for event handling can fall dramatically.
The source code differences are 9279 bytes vs. 10842. That's a difference of 1600 bytes, mainly from AIC syntactic-junk.
MS claims that delegates can be portable. That's nice, but that also means the onus is on MS to submit it to the Sun community process.
The multicast arguments are equally skewed. So because some events may be multi-castable, that justifies the usage of a non-standard construct that works just as well as AIC's, is just as fast, and has a slight flexibility advantage?
And based on my experiences on a 6-month WFC project, delegates are decent, but I see no real benefit of them over AIC's other than the class footprints (which again can be alieviated through judicious use of reflection).
Yes, I see what you're getting at: it doesn't matter if Taylor was good or evil, it's the reality that counts.
Well I have one major problem with that: Taylor's work is fundamental to understanding how we got to where we are today. If the majority just rejects it as "inhumane", we're not helping ourselves understand how we can increase today's productivity.
There seems to be a general aversion to work analysis in the 1990's. A lot of work is skilled work, or professional work. But even so, a large portion of that work is _repetitive_. Proper work analysis can isolate or automate that repetitive work so skilled people can go onto the "real" things people are good at: creativity, problem solving, and innovation.
To me this is what the cluetrain is about indirectly - putting people to work in environments that are best suited to LIFE.. and to do that, we have to try to eliminate the mundane, the repetitive, the stuff that machines do well and human beings don't.
[actually I think expert systems one day will automate a lot of the trivial & mundane -- they're not going to be as inflexible as they were in the 80's, as you mention in Chapter 1...]
If you want to read an excellent essay about Taylor and related productivity stuff, check out "The New Productivity Challenge" by Peter Drucker, in his book "Managing for the Future".
Yes, this is an excellent point. I think Deming sits next to Taylor as the most important contributor to understanding how to make work productive.
And this reminds me of one part of Chapter 1 of the cluetrain: I think Chris Locke misrepresents Fredrick Taylor (understandably, since many people do out of fashion).
I'd argue that the misapplication of Taylor's techniques were inhumane, not Taylor's work itself. Taylor's contribution to management was in "work analysis" i.e. what's the most efficient way to perform a task? Often the inhumane part was "job analysis", i.e. in a production process, how should you organize the division of labor? Taylor had little to do with the latter... unfortunately managers took the liberty of designing jobs along the lines of the work.
Taylor made it clear in his writings & testimony that he cared deeply about treating workers as "humans", to be paid well and treated well. Managers, under his system, were the servants of workers. That he didn't know post-Freudian psychology is akin to blaming IssacNewton for not knowing about quantum mechanics.
Deming essentially updates Taylor for the late 20th century...
Perhaps I'm just a little guilty of being too confident in market & competitive forces, my opinion is that a lot of what the cluetrain prophesizes is going to happen with or without the shouting.
I guess it's good to at least TRY to warn the complacent companies, but it would be so delightful to see some big-boys fall out of ignorance...
- Most business books are tripe. Not all business books are. Read Drucker, Senge, Hock, or Tom Peters. They're all quite good (most of the time). There seems to be almost a smug ignorance of business in the Slashdot community, as if this makes one intellectually superior or something... isn't it ironic how much we chide business people for not knowing anything about technology?
- There seems to be a profound ignorance of history, economics and business in the second review. Were people really just mindless TV zombies for the past 50 years? Not exactly. TV has a big influence, but it isn't the only influence. Nor is it an evil influence.
Was the industrial revoltion an evil conspiracy that homogenized work and workers into meanlingless jobs? In some ways, yes, though some companies were better than others. In other ways, no: it dramatically increased productivity, and hence the standards of living for capitalist Europe and North America to levels never before known in the general populace.
Did craftsmanship create better quality products and happier consumers than mass production? Okay, would someone prefer a crafted refridgerator, or a massed produced on? "Oh, but that's different." Is it, really? Yes, technology has changed to a point where we (consumers) now want & deserve "mass customization". But at the beginning of mass consumer production, after just coming off of a war-time economy, we were just happy to get our hands on stuff, period.
About the book:
- Very thoughtful, but also very repetetive. Chris Locke is a great writer, and I liked his pieces best.
- Contrary to popular belief, this book does not say "down with marketing". It actually says "up with marketing", just in more dynamic forms.
- I like the idea that an organization should more be a "society of individuals" than a "hive mind like the borg". Ironic how just 8 years ago many of us were wearing our Star Trek uniforms discussing over cheesy poofs how perfect a society like the Borg really was.
- There seems to be this overall disinterest in economics. What's interesting is that many economists have been saying exactly this message for the last few years: The Internet gives power to the consumers, hence pushing competition up to never-seen-before levels.
- "Profit margins are YOUR problem. We don't care if you are a company." Well, that's fine actually from a consumer perspective. They should have all the power that this manifesto is predicting will come to them. But being a book catered to businesses, they're placing the hard work in the hands of the readers - how do you adopt these ideas into a viable business model? Perhaps, one would hope, that these ideas are naturally leaning towards easy to find business models.
On a side node, this position also unfortunately leads some with particular political biases (ahem), to believe that it's a call to eliminate intellectual property laws because "I'm a consumer dammit, and I don't care if you're a business that wants to make money off of your IP. I want to copy it freely and not pay for it."
Sure, you one day will probably be able to copy it freely and distribute it far & wide to whomever you please. It doesn't mean, however, that you shouldn't have to pay for it, and some day, there'll be technology that does this non-invasively. "It's about freedom, not money." Sure - and If you believe that, more power to you. I just think there's too many people on the bandwagon for free beer.
The keywords "new" and "delete" could just as simply draw you a slice of memory in a completely different way on different computing platforms. You're tying syntax to implementation.
In a way I am, and yes you're right here. I think the point I'm making is that OO systems change memory allocation into "allocating objects".
A procedural language such as C has no such model. It's a "blob of malloc'ed memory".
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that the general consensus among mainstream economists is that the stock market IS being irrationally exhubrent and is threatening the long term sustainability of the current expansion.
:) ]
Translation: they're cheering Greenspan on. "Come on, Al! make it a 50 this time!"
Research theories from academics don't typically represent the day in and day out reality that applied economists deal with. [Applied economists are typically financiers, finance politicians, clued-in managers, consultants, and the odd techie who happens to have an economics degree..
Most of the industrialized nations of the world have had service-driven economies for the past 50 years. The U.S. is special because it has succeeded in exporting more services more than any other country. Canada, for instance, is comparable to the U.S. in that over 70% of its GDP is in services, yet over 50% of Canadian exports are manufactured goods (especially cars). Other countries have a long way to go to compete with U.S. service exports.
My point is that services are driving the economy, and economic growth is providing lots of the good things currently happening throughout the industrialized world.
What I find ironic, however, is how the concept of how "goods become services". Hasn't it been a mantra of the OSS community to promote software as a "service" and "not a good", such that it eliminates property rights. Be careful what you wish for...
Services are effectively a knowledge-based industry: from the hairdresser to the corporate consultant. Services are *not*, in my opinion, a game that will be dominated by large faceless corporations, they will be dominated by individuals with specialized knowledge, who often just happen to work for large organizations for logistical and strategic reasons. (See www.cluetrain.org).
NDAs are not a licence on knowledge. They are a licence on intellectual property. There *is* a difference. One can write a software framework at one employer, and then re-write it a similar one at another employer, and *nothing illegal* has taken place so long as the source code and original design documents have not been copied. Knowledge is what is in-between your ears, and an employer cannot prevent you from using ideas.
" The little girl that made my ram? " Could you be any more unrealistic?
Actually, I wasn't referring to the U.S. I was referring to the industrialized world (i.e. the G-7 + the asian tigers + mexico) Skill & talent in general is becoming rare.
Yes, by many countries' standards, the U.S. is rich. However, economic development in many countries (including Taiwan, Mexico, Korea, Hong Kong, etc.) has boosted wages and standards of living tremendously. These countries are getting better, not worse. And, (ahem), I would attribute a lot of that success to the investment of multi-national corporations in those countries. You know, benefits from trade + comparative advantage, and all that jazz.
There is still, of course, the 3rd world, which includes much of Africa, that requires tremendous work.
This seems to ignore the role of deficits in making the budgets, and also ignores that corporate profitability is actually taking a relative downturn over the last 30 years..
In particular, if, as is increasingly the case, the workers who produce a good are not the same people who buy it (frequently these days they don't even live in the same country), there is no reason whatsoever for the corporation to protect the interests of the workers
You've never managed a company before, have you.
Actually, here's another thought: It turns out there's a real shortage of skill & talent out there in pretty much EVERY industry, since we're nearing full employment, and uh, that means they're treating us employees pretty damn good.
The people whom you claim are served so slavishly by corps must be rich people. How else do they have the money to "vote with their dollars"?
Oh jeezus. "Vote with your dollars" is Economics 101: the cumulative actions of all consumers will create an emergent pattern in the macro economy, thereby influencing which companies succeed and fail. The bulk of income is in the middle class of this country. The market is primarily influenced by the middle class, not the rich.
In corporatism, the needs of the individual are subordinated to the needs of the corporation. Via the argument you've presented, people claim that corporations represent the people so totally that the interests of corporations are equated with those of the people. Sounds kinda like communism to me.
The needs of the individual are the whole purpose corporations exist in the first place: to create and serve a customer. You can't get around that. Unless you, (ahem) think that "only rich people buy stuff".
Organizations are wonderful entities that can get tremendous feats accomplished. You forget that corporations are organizations: they are made BY people, for people. We entrust our economic resources to them precicely because they ARE ONLY an economic institution, and will use these scarce resources in the most productive way possible to please the market.
What the fsck are you talking about?
I think YOU are crazy for even equating individual ambition with those things.
So what is the ultimate symbol of excellence at ambition? Influence? Philanthropy? Happiness? Economic power? I would say that all of them play a part.
I know quite a few professional musicians and not one of them makes enough money to support themselves... How is MP3 sharing going to make this worse?
... it is a VERY small sliver of the U.S.'s total GDP, of which wages take up the vast majority...
By effectively forcing a "if I can't make money at this, no one can" policy into effect. This assumes that some entrepreneur doesn't come up with the technology to ensure proper remuneration with sharing.
Rubbish. How do you measure "success"? In terms of the amount of money a vanishingly small number of individuals and corporations have made?
Vanishingly small? Indie labels are thriving. Many of the big labels' sales are up, but they still struggle to find new and innovative acts that fit the mainstream's tastes.
Profit is a part of success. Music marketing, recording, and distribution is a BUSINESS, and profit is an objective, not evil, part of business.
Profit is not and can never be the same as culture (unless you want a culture that views money above all else, but surely most people would value love, security and happiness above money... right?).
Of course. Profit is not the goal, the goal is to make and distribute music. Profit is just a requirement of being in business: it's not about greed, it's about covering the costs of future investment.
It seems to me that all the commercialisation of "culture" has done is made it more and more difficult to listen and see anything that is even slightly outside the tastes of Main Street USA. There must be a million great unsigned bands in the world but we won't get to hear any of them because if a record company releases too many tracks at once it's profits will be diluted. How the hell is that "successful"??
This is a very peculiar argument.
- The music industry is OVER LOADED with thousands of artists that are mainstream, alternative, and experimental. I'm shocked that you seem to think that the local record store only has rows and rows of the latest Britney Spears or Metallica CD's. When I walk into a Virgin Megastore, HMV, or Borders, I see rows of world music, new age, jazz, classical, metal, alternative, electronica (with over 10 sub-genres in that big umbrella term alone), rock, pop, rap, trip hop, hip hop, r&b, soul, etc. Amazon.com and CDnow.com have THOUSANDS of artists, and you can buy almost every obscure artist imaginable on tape or vinyl off of an indie label's website or mailing address.
- If there are a million unsigned bands now, how does MP3 sharing change this? These bands can be putting out MP3's right now, freely sharing them. They will suffer from the same problem: There's not enough time to take in everything.
What you put out therefore has to be either clearly mainstream so it is marketable, or clearly "innovative" with mainstream sensibility so that word of mouth will carry it.
This is not a fault of the current system, this is a problem that just exists: people can't pay attention to everything, and this problem will just get worse as the internet increases our information overload.
Listen, you seem to be extremely pissed at anyone who makes a profit, but the fact is that if you take away profit, you don't just take away the "profit motive", you take away the fundamental engine of investment available to our society. It rewards those who cater to the market by allowing them to GROW.... Profit is but a small price to pay for continued economic prosperity
Hmm. Let's see:
First:
Nope. Society is simply a bunch of people trying to avoid killing each other. It has no power, and certainly it does not "grant" anything to individuals.
Then:
For the most part, there's a trade-off. If nobody cooperated, then there'd be a perpetual state of violence among people. In order to avoid that, we surrender some of our rights.
So, in other words, the society has no power over us, but this is a paradox because if it didn't we'd devolve into a state of anarchy, which is unacceptable. (Robert Nozick pretty much formulated this theory).
Your rights are yours. They are not given to you; but you can give them away. Most people give them away -- they let the government pry into their lives and take their money; they let people tell them what to do; etc.
For the most part, there's a trade-off. If nobody cooperated, then there'd be a perpetual state of violence among people. In order to avoid that, we surrender some of our rights.
Yes, but a right is a statement of entitlement, hence it is defined by human beings. If you say "I have a right to all of the ice cream in the world", then there is little one can say to refute that unless you have other rights that conflict with it.
Rights will only be in conflict with each other if certain rights are "negative". Your rights end where another person's begin. This is the principle of rights in the western countries.
Basically what I'm saying is that you can say you have a right all you want, but a government is effectively a means of drafting and enforcing what are basically philosophical positions that have evolved dialectically over the last 300 years in the western world.
The argument is that the right of intellectual property is a philosophical position. It is a right granted to authors for the benefit of society. You can disagree with it, you can argue against it, but history will decide the victor.
You, however, have been blinded. You've been led to believe that the government is the source of power and that they deign to permit you to breathe so that they can tax you and occasionally make you kill people for them.
It's really convenient to paint me as a mindless, brainwashed drone, isn't it? Do you normally feel that people with differing views from you are blind, or do you ever think that maybe, just maybe, you could learn something from an exchange with them?
This is the attitude I've taken with this discussion. I'm here to learn. Please argue the position, not the person.
You've got the whole thing backwards.
Uh huh.
Governments have no right to exist unless we say so.
Ideally, government exists because we say so, but as mentioned above, it is almost a natural state of affairs that any society without government devolves into anarchy. Hence, even if we say "we don't need no stinkin' government", whoops, another one would pop up eventually.
People created the concept of intellectual property hundreds of years ago and made laws to define it. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. And up until about 30 years ago, it probably was a good idea.
But times have changed. The rights that we surrendered when we created intellectual property are becoming more important than the alleged benefits of intellectual property.
Sorry, I don't buy it. This is basically saying "I'm entitled to all of the art in the world for free!". Whoops, sorry, see, we granted those things called "negative rights" to the creators of those works.
In other words, YOU do not determine the rights that government chooses for society. The collective actions of YOU and the rest of society chooses them through the course of history. Majorities are the short-term way of accomplishing this change, but philosophical & historical trends are the long-term way of accomplishing it.
But there's a kink behind this whole issue of social change: The whole notion of intellectual property is based upon an extended version of the economic law of scarcity: that there ain't no free lunch in a world where few people are talented and skillful. We have intellectual property to ensure money & investment flows to those who please the market, otherwise we would not have enough GOOD, quality material proliferating.
Skill and talent, the two prerequisites for musicians, will ALWAYS be scarce. Hence, the need for property to ensure that those WITH talent get the resources to use it.
The key is not to destroy the system, but to let the burgeoning indie labels and entrepreneurs to come up with better models that defeat the big labels. They really can do this by offering QUALITY, innovative music & distribution technology that the big labels have a hard time finding. Napster is sort of like the black sheep here: they're innovative, for sure, but they're also offering a forum for thousands of people to break the law.
Now, a side note: I can see intellectual property becoming less of an issue when we have technology to ensure remuneration for free copying of intellectual works, (and I don't mean per copy, I mean just SOME form of guaranteed remuneration). Chances are this will happen before any of the above social changes, so this argument may have been moot, but it was enjoyable at times, nevertheless...
You're creating a bunch of assumptions that are very incorrect.
#1) Slashdot community member = Free software advocate. Wrong. Slashdot is a news for nerds site with lots of differing opinions. Lots of people like Linux. That doesn't mean they use it for religous reasons. The "open source" movement is about PRAGMATICS, not religon or philosophy.
#2) People who support a system of intellectual property are supporting the greedy and rich. Wrong. The greedy and rich are not the benefactors of a strong property system: SOCIETY as a whole is benefitted by it because it provides economic incentive to perform productive work.
Some say "art should not be paid for". This argument is so shallow, it's surprising that people still use it. Without compensation, art wouldn't proliferate, would it? Not because of lack of love, but because of a lack of time & commitment. Perhaps, one would think, that if a particularily good artist comes along with something in his/her spare time, people would throw money at them to produce more? Oh, but now, we're back at square one: paying money for art, if the market wants it. And that's the kicker: clearly, the market wants it, because, uh, they're still paying for the books, CD's, and movies that people create today.
The laws of private property and contract, whether tangible or intellectual, have historically been the most successful economic policies to stimulate a free market. The socialist "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" creed is a wonderful moral fantasy, but cannot coincide with economic reality. There is no free lunch, even with intellectual works.
Unlimited free copying is justifiable IF AND ONLY IF there can be guarantee of remuneration to the original creator of that work if so desired. Only then can a "sharing" community exist while the market continues to foster the determinants of economic success: productivity and innovation.
Laws change. Economic laws don't. If you can come up with a good way of promoting free copying while preserving remuneration to the artist, become an entrepreneur, not an activist...
Would you prefer not paying for culture, hence driving all culture works to the fringes of unemployed people working through government grants and donations?
Turning culture into a business has been very successful; let's not destroy that. Instead, let's find business & technology models that allow the free market and human desires for free proliferation of cultural works...
Hmm. Last I checked, profits were a lot more than "extra money". They cover the costs of raising capital in the first place and provide capital for tomorrow. Being highly profitable is actually quite socially responsible, in contrast to the money-losing dot-coms that are bleeding money away from other innovative or productive companies...
Jesus christ, you want to be pedantic about this? Copyright in the US isn't meant to protect authors IN THEIR CAPACITY AS AUTHORS. Happy? You obviously knew what I meant. Just trying this bullshit so you don't have to answer the actual point?
No, I'm saying that a "right" is something that society grants an individual. The reasoning behind copyright is different from its execution: which is granting a right to authors to protect their works.
I'm not being pedantic, I'm challenging your notion of you seem to think is "right". >:)
That's what you say now. What you said BEFORE was that there is a "right" to prevent people from using information. It is your original statement with which I take issue.
Our definitions of right are different. I'm just saying a "right" is something that society grants you, i.e. what congress grants authors through IP law.
It doesn't matter WHY they do it, it's the fact that the execution of the law effectively grants rights.
Actually, I would say his argument was more hard-core libertarian than communist.
Sez you.
In an absolute sense, yes it is a restriction of the free market. In a comparative sense, it is not; copyright allows the proliferation of works that arguably would not exist without granting monopoly power to their creators as incentive.
Free market competition requires rules of the game. I am postulating that some form of intellectual property is required to ensure the game runs smoothly. Eliminating copyright allows many people to sell Metallica's works: at lower prices, yes, but at the expense of destroying Metallica's incentive to innovate since anyone can appropriate and profit off of their sunk costs.
Copyright is based upon solid economic principle. It is a necessary and sufficient restriction to the market in order to foster innovation. This assumes that the greatest benefit to society is not lowered prices, it is innovation in content.
The counter-argument to the above is that copyright destroys innovation because competitors can't take other people's works and change them in ways that are marketable. The answer to this is that not all forms of innovation are equal; minor tweaks to an intellectual work drive down the price of this work yet add little value to it.
WHAT IS an author but a member of society? The purpose of IP law is to benefit society, through granting monopoly rights to authors. We can go twisting around semantics of words all day, but I think this particular point is somewhat irrelevant.
Society gets stuff, authors get monopoly. Monopolistic competition ensues.
That's absurd. For all we know, all the ideas -- even specific ones ("particular manifestation[s]"), have been invented in the past by some previous society of aliens from some other galaxy. Do they have a "right" to prevent us to use those ideas, because they thought of them first (and because they are specific)? I'd really like to hear the logic behind that.
I think we're on different wavelengths here, as I don't follow your logic at all. Let's bear through this...
First of all, I said "ideas are free". I think your retort ignored this. If a green man from mars thought of an idea first, he can't legally stop us from using it.
Secondly, a "particular manifestation" is the context upon which these ideas are included: a book, a recording, etc. If Mr. Worf wrote "My Life in the Federation as a Warrior", you'd be free to use the ideas contained in the book, but not take the book and re-sell it as your own work, or to liberally copy the contents of the work verbatim in your own work [plagarism].
Such restrictions as these does place limits on what the free market can do with this commodity (Lars hasn't read a dictionary lately), but it ensures a smoothly operating market by providing incentive to innovate.
Copyright as it stands is not a perfect law, nor do I say it "shouldn't change". What I do say is that there needs to be some level of IP law in existence to properly facilitate a high level of innovation in intellectual works.
Who gets to decide "what metallica needs" to pay for its work and life? Certainly not you, nor should the government.
Furthermore, it is extremely presumptuous to say that the rights that congress grants U.S. residents aren't really rights. What "really" is a right? Is it something self-evident? Is it the U.N. declaration of rights? Who decides?
Currently the most logical perspective is the current one by the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization: Ideas are free (gratis and libre). A particular manifestation of them are under the control of the creator.
Some day, they may be libre, but I doubt they'll ever be gratis.
Ideas, are free. Manifestations of them are not.
While IP may be built on the shoulders of past ideas, it typically isn't built on prior copyrighted work (unless, of course, it is GPL).
So, yes, people DO have the right to call a piece of IP their own property if they so choose. Any particular manifestation of IP represents innovation, however small or trivial, and hence should be protected by copyright.
RMS' essays on copyright form a position that would have us eliminate the copyright system so everything is "free". I disagree with that.
Over 70% of the U.S. economy is already in services. Copyright still works. Sorry.
That's a very libertarian view of business ethics.. I was just taking a course on this recently, and there definitely is also a prevalent view of business ethics that is markedly socialist - meaning that social responsibility comes above and beyond profits.
The answer, of course, is probably in the middle: capitalism works, but we need to keep an eye on it. Socialism doesn't work on its own, but sometimes has a good idea to help capitalism on its way (the welfare state, for instance, even though it doesn't quite work as well as we'd hope). Oh, and businesses DO have a social responsibility, it just so happens that their first responsibility is to be profitable: a bankrupt corporation does no one any good.
The MS analysis does not give very good technical reasons for the delegate. There are also numerous inconsistencies between the points they make, which are typically done to skew the reader's perception in favour of delegates.
Examples: They compare the number of "classes" used in the AIC vs. delegates case. (22 vs. 1) Yet they ignore to mention that delegates are actually classes under the covers (therefore, the answer is 22 vs. 22).
That AIC's need to be compiled in advance is rather irrelevant unless you are concerned about a 2-3% development footprint hit.
They also ignore that with some simple reflection, the number of AIC required for event handling can fall dramatically.
The source code differences are 9279 bytes vs. 10842. That's a difference of 1600 bytes, mainly from AIC syntactic-junk.
MS claims that delegates can be portable. That's nice, but that also means the onus is on MS to submit it to the Sun community process.
The multicast arguments are equally skewed. So because some events may be multi-castable, that justifies the usage of a non-standard construct that works just as well as AIC's, is just as fast, and has a slight flexibility advantage?
And based on my experiences on a 6-month WFC project, delegates are decent, but I see no real benefit of them over AIC's other than the class footprints (which again can be alieviated through judicious use of reflection).
Yes, I see what you're getting at: it doesn't matter if Taylor was good or evil, it's the reality that counts.
...]
Well I have one major problem with that: Taylor's work is fundamental to understanding how we got to where we are today. If the majority just rejects it as "inhumane", we're not helping ourselves understand how we can increase today's productivity.
There seems to be a general aversion to work analysis in the 1990's. A lot of work is skilled work, or professional work. But even so, a large portion of that work is _repetitive_. Proper work analysis can isolate or automate that repetitive work so skilled people can go onto the "real" things people are good at: creativity, problem solving, and innovation.
To me this is what the cluetrain is about indirectly - putting people to work in environments that are best suited to LIFE.. and to do that, we have to try to eliminate the mundane, the repetitive, the stuff that machines do well and human beings don't.
[actually I think expert systems one day will automate a lot of the trivial & mundane -- they're not going to be as inflexible as they were in the 80's, as you mention in Chapter 1
If you want to read an excellent essay about Taylor and related productivity stuff, check out "The New Productivity Challenge" by Peter Drucker, in his book "Managing for the Future".
Magel Barrett was a vocal B5 supporter, was a guest star, and went to B5 conferences.
She also has been heard saying "Gene would have loved it". (See the Lurker's guide @ http://midwinter.com/lurk to find links to conference reports.)
[Though you're obviously being a troll, since every episode of B5 wasn't about war....]
Yes, this is an excellent point. I think Deming sits next to Taylor as the most important contributor to understanding how to make work productive.
And this reminds me of one part of Chapter 1 of the cluetrain: I think Chris Locke misrepresents Fredrick Taylor (understandably, since many people do out of fashion).
I'd argue that the misapplication of Taylor's techniques were inhumane, not Taylor's work itself. Taylor's contribution to management was in "work analysis" i.e. what's the most efficient way to perform a task? Often the inhumane part was "job analysis", i.e. in a production process, how should you organize the division of labor? Taylor had little to do with the latter... unfortunately managers took the liberty of designing jobs along the lines of the work.
Taylor made it clear in his writings & testimony that he cared deeply about treating workers as "humans", to be paid well and treated well. Managers, under his system, were the servants of workers. That he didn't know post-Freudian psychology is akin to blaming IssacNewton for not knowing about quantum mechanics.
Deming essentially updates Taylor for the late 20th century...
Cool. Thanks for the reply, Chris.
Perhaps I'm just a little guilty of being too confident in market & competitive forces, my opinion is that a lot of what the cluetrain prophesizes is going to happen with or without the shouting.
I guess it's good to at least TRY to warn the complacent companies, but it would be so delightful to see some big-boys fall out of ignorance...
Comments on the reviews:
- Most business books are tripe. Not all business books are. Read Drucker, Senge, Hock, or Tom Peters. They're all quite good (most of the time). There seems to be almost a smug ignorance of business in the Slashdot community, as if this makes one intellectually superior or something... isn't it ironic how much we chide business people for not knowing anything about technology?
- There seems to be a profound ignorance of history, economics and business in the second review. Were people really just mindless TV zombies for the past 50 years? Not exactly. TV has a big influence, but it isn't the only influence. Nor is it an evil influence.
Was the industrial revoltion an evil conspiracy that homogenized work and workers into meanlingless jobs? In some ways, yes, though some companies were better than others. In other ways, no: it dramatically increased productivity, and hence the standards of living for capitalist Europe and North America to levels never before known in the general populace.
Did craftsmanship create better quality products and happier consumers than mass production? Okay, would someone prefer a crafted refridgerator, or a massed produced on? "Oh, but that's different." Is it, really? Yes, technology has changed to a point where we (consumers) now want & deserve "mass customization". But at the beginning of mass consumer production, after just coming off of a war-time economy, we were just happy to get our hands on stuff, period.
About the book:
- Very thoughtful, but also very repetetive. Chris Locke is a great writer, and I liked his pieces best.
- Contrary to popular belief, this book does not say "down with marketing". It actually says "up with marketing", just in more dynamic forms.
- I like the idea that an organization should more be a "society of individuals" than a "hive mind like the borg". Ironic how just 8 years ago many of us were wearing our Star Trek uniforms discussing over cheesy poofs how perfect a society like the Borg really was.
- There seems to be this overall disinterest in economics. What's interesting is that many economists have been saying exactly this message for the last few years: The Internet gives power to the consumers, hence pushing competition up to never-seen-before levels.
- "Profit margins are YOUR problem. We don't care if you are a company." Well, that's fine actually from a consumer perspective. They should have all the power that this manifesto is predicting will come to them. But being a book catered to businesses, they're placing the hard work in the hands of the readers - how do you adopt these ideas into a viable business model? Perhaps, one would hope, that these ideas are naturally leaning towards easy to find business models.
On a side node, this position also unfortunately leads some with particular political biases (ahem), to believe that it's a call to eliminate intellectual property laws because "I'm a consumer dammit, and I don't care if you're a business that wants to make money off of your IP. I want to copy it freely and not pay for it."
Sure, you one day will probably be able to copy it freely and distribute it far & wide to whomever you please. It doesn't mean, however, that you shouldn't have to pay for it, and some day, there'll be technology that does this non-invasively. "It's about freedom, not money." Sure - and If you believe that, more power to you. I just think there's too many people on the bandwagon for free beer.
The keywords "new" and "delete" could just as simply draw you a slice of memory in a completely different
way on different computing platforms. You're tying syntax to implementation.
In a way I am, and yes you're right here. I think the point I'm making is that OO systems change memory allocation into "allocating objects".
A procedural language such as C has no such model. It's a "blob of malloc'ed memory".