Until we have programming languages and APIs and and OSes and interfaces that stay stable for decades there will be no way to get stable certification.
Kid, it ain't about languages and APIs and whatnot. Algorithms are algorithms, you can implement anything you want in any Turing-complete language. Once you're halfway competent, you can pick up any programming language easily, it's just a notation for the algorithms and data structures, that's all. Read some Knuth, you'll see that the fundamentals are already well-understood and don't change much. The many disasters in IT projects are caused by people who fixate on what programming language, OS, middleware, etc to use, and don't approach the problem as a real systems analyst would. Jump straight in and start coding and you're bound to run into problems.
This is one reason why discriminatory pricing is such a bad thing. It is a sign that the supplier has managed to segment the market and it is not a true free market where customers can onsell between them to level prices.
Consider the implications. Should a pharma company be obligated to sell its products at the same prices in wealthy US and EU countries as in impoverished African countries?
Re:Other IT Myths
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
What we need to do is to get organized and support independent regulation authorities which will prevent companies from doing anything they think its cheaper.
There is an organization in the UK, the Institute of Analyst Programmers, that bills itself as a professional organization for programmers. I am a member and every now and again I badger them about getting a royal whatever so members could qualify as Chartered Engineers (or whatever title), like the IEEE, the IMechE and so on.
Their reply? Pursuing that is not in their members best interest, as most of 'em would fail to qualify and quit, leaving the IAP without any members and hence funding. There is a rival organization, the BCS, but their chartered status is like an MCSE, no-one bothers to get it, no employer ever demands it.
Ultimately, it needs to be demonstrated to both programmers and employers that some sort of accreditation actually adds value, 'til then, it won't ever be accecpted. Face it, if a bridge collapses that matters, if the database is the wrong shade of mauve your PHB might get upset but really, who cares?
Of course embedded is different, but that's often done by EEs who can get chartered.
Re:No, that's a different myth.
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 4, Funny
How about "fluorescent beige is a great colour scheme"?
... his idea about being a suspect because you get searched at an airport is pure idiocy. There are two choices:
Search people randomly, and people will complain that they're being treated like "suspects"
Search likely suspects, and civil liberties types (like Gilmore himself) will complain that you're racially profiling people
. Not only that, but "innocent until proven guilty" - what's proof of guilt, a SUCCESSFUL hijacking?? Hey Sherlock, too late once it's proven, what you gonna do, call 911 at 30,000 feet?
Being searched doesn't mean your a suspect, it just means you were there when the number came up. Gilmore's badge-wearing is just plain attention-seeking. Terrorism IS real, it IS a threat, and any inconvenience is the fault of the terrorists, not the check-in staff!
The whole idea of trying to take your customers for everything you can sounds so much colder when you look at it from their side.
You aren't taking them for everything you can. You're selling at a price, and it's up to them whether they want to pay it or not. Charge them what they are willing to pay, not more. Some people will complain, but as the author says, some people will always complain.
There's nothing unethical about making money. Making money in a free market is the best proof you could ask for that you are giving people what they want at a price they can afford. Making people happy, is that ethical enough for you?
It's senseless to do so. When copies start being really cheap to make, you need to find some other means of compensation than giving the creators a way to tax making copies of their creation.
You say that, but other than "rely on donations" you've yet to offer a mechanism by which expensive IP can be created.
Make localized versions with custom niceties like this patched onto the software
But Kurds and Turks both live in Turkey. Selling a Kurdish edition (for example, mentioning Kurdistan, which is what Kurds call the bit of land they want the Turks to give them) in Turkey would offend Turks. Selling a Turkish edition (not acknowledging Kurdistan) in Turkey would offend Kurds living there. There's no way to keep both parties happy.
That these two groups are squabbling is not Microsoft's fault. I can't see how they can be blamed, even in the slightest, for insensitivity.
The results of their map reading have lead them into several political situations that there was little possibility of them being aware of.
Exactly. The article even makes the point, Microsoft was forced to choose between offending Kurds and offending Turks. There was literally no way to satisfy both groups. So MS simply made the call, we have more Turkish customers than Kurdish, so we'll make the change the way they want it. Democracy in action.
In the age of the internet dividing rights up based on geographical regions makes little sense (if any).
Umm, do you know who pays for the BBC? The British taxpayer, that's who. Nothing it ever free, someone always pays somewhere. Why do you think that the overtaxed Brits should pay for your media?
This has all died out now, with CISC (read: Intel) coming out as a winner.
The end of CISC vs RISC was that they converged. A modern x86 is a hardware instruction decoder surrounding a RISC-ish core. The RISC processors like SPARC and MIPS added more complex instructions, again around a RISC core. The debate died out because BOTH sides won.
Well, yes, OF COURSE he does. That's the POINT. The character of Han Solo goes from ruthless mercenary, caring only about himself and his profit, to actually believing in and fighting for a cause. If Han Solo is basically a nice guy to start with, then his character instantly loses a lot of depth. That's why people are upset about the change, because it dumbs down the movie for an audience who can't handle ambiguous characters with complex motivations.
So, do you propose a system in which we go from house to house every year demanding to get a detailed inventory of all the intellectual 'property' everybody is making use of to make sure they've paid for it all?
No, I propose the continued existance of the system we have now, you want a CD, a movie, a piece of software, whatever, you BUY it. I'd like to see one change, tho', which would be to split the cost of the media from the cost of the content on it. So if I scratch a CD, say, I should be able to get a new one for the cost of the media alone, since I've already bought the contents.
Creating new ideas is expensive. After that, they cost absolutely nothing.
Creating new ideas is CHEAP. Turning ideas into real products is hard, and expensive.
I spend a bunch of money and effort making sure that Folding@HOME is running on all the computers I control.
Well, that sort of pure science is interesting, but it's not a product. You can't "cure AIDS @ home" because there is no software to do that, it takes expensive people and expensive equipment to work on it. You might kid yourself that you're helping real problems, but you are only doing so in the more indirect way.
Ah, there you have it: as far as IP goes, we do have nearly unlimited production capacity. Economists had to come up with the idea of augmenting returns; it's so damned cheap to copy bits that marginal costs keep decreasing.
You are missing the point. Say you invest a lot of money creating a piece of IP: a drug formula, a music CD, a piece of software, whatever. You figure out how many instances of this IP you expect to sell, and price it to recoup your costs and make some profit too (after all, you gotta eat, you gotta repay the mutual funds that invested in you, etc).
You sell each copy with the caveat "you may use this personally, but you may not redistribute it". You ONLY sell to people who accept this condition (called a "license"). Some people, however, agree to your terms to your face, then turn around and break your terms when they think you're not looking.
Now, reproducing bits is very very cheap, but creating bits is not. How, in your world where cost of producing IP is considered the same as the cost of replicating it, does expensive IP get created?
But once intelectual property is created, it is no longer scarce (except through artificial control of the supply).
You are missing the point that the act of creation has to be paid for somehow. If you want a new drug, you need labs, you need plenty of smart people, you need even more people to run and participate in trials, you need people to submit the thousands and thousands of pages of clinical studies to the FDA, etc etc. The way this cost is recouped traditionally is that every purchaser of the end product pays a little towards the initial cost. Sure drugs can be produced cheaply as generics, but that isn't creating new intellectual property.
Incidentally, free software is expensive too. When Microsoft or Sun or Oracle wants to create something, they sit hundreds of people down in front of computers in an air conditioned office and tell them to work on it 'til its done, it's obvious where the money goes. But when writing free software, you still need a PC, you still need books and a network connection, you still need somewhere to put all this stuff, even if the office is part of your house. Just because the money is spent in very many tiny transactions by many people and not a few large transactions by a single entity doesn't mean that the money isn't spent! I bet if it were possible to add up the real cost of developing Linux, it would be comparable to the cost of developing any commercial Unix.
So, how do you propose that expensive IP is created if there is no mechanism for the cost to be shared by the eventual end users?
Are lawyers doing pro bono work destroying the market for lawyers? Are doctors who work in a clinic as volunteers destroying the demand for medical services?
Your analogy does not hold. A lawyer doing pro bono work does it for an organization or individual who could not otherwise have legal representation. A doctor who does volunteer work does so for people who could not otherwise have medical treatment.
Whereas if you look at open source, its express intention is to REPLACE commercial software. RMS believes that his mission is to provide a free alternative to every major piece of software, and eventually to make commercial software development unviable.
Can you imagine a lawyer doing a corporate merger for free? Or a doctor doing cosmetic surgery for free? Because that's what's required for your analogy to work.
Or whether it's logical for them to insist that that their labor is worth nothing but that it's an outrage to replace them with someone earning half as much.
Exactly. That is one of the perpetually most entertaining things about Slashdot, how people (sometimes on the same day!) can simultaneously believe that
Linux competing with Microsoft on price is GOOD
Indian programmers competing with American programmers on price is BAD
Now I realize that Slashdot is not a group mind, but these two positions are the ones most advocated here, and there does appear to be an overlap between those holding each one. There are others too
The State should regulate Microsoft/the DSL providers/whoever
The State should refuse to uphold intellectual property
Well do you want government regulation or not, I ask them?
because USSR wasn't communist at all? it was a socialism, it says so in the name "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". There has never been a communist state, only socialism.
The terms Communism and Socialism were used interchangeably by both Marx and Engels. The idea of Socialism as a transitional stage to Communism was coined by Stalin; you see it was necessary, he told the people, that during the transitional stage certain classes should continue to be more richly rewarded just as they were under Capitalism, in order to bring about a Communist future. Unsurprisingly, equality was never achieved and the country continued to be divided between the Party and the Proletariat.
I have no problem doing work for 5 people with my job since I love what I do.
In a Communist state, if the Party decides it needs more farmers, then off to the fields you go, labouring with hand tools. Many present-day Communists assume that in a Communist state they would live as they presently do, but wouldn't have to worry about "inequality". Well, such people should study the Khmer Rouge to see what happens to intellectuals and artists in a Communist state.
Maybe you do love what you do enough to do it for only the minimum pay, but would you enjoy it so much if you couldn't buy bread or the electricity cut out every day or if you complained about the government the secret police would knock on your door? That's life in a Communist country.
Do traits of human nature (especially of those inclined to seek power) make such ideals unachievable.
Yes, Communism is impossible. It appears that property rights are causal. Joe Farmer will work harder on his land if he gets to profit from the sale of his produce, and as a result there will be plenty of food. If Joe Farmer knew that whatever he produced would immediately be "redistributed", that no matter how hard he worked his family would still go without, why would he bother to go the extra mile? That's why capitalist countries have food surpluses, and the old Soviet Empire, and present day China and North Korea have perpetual food crises.
Consider Joe Autoworker. There's no way for him to progress in his career through working harder or smarter than his peers. The trade union has ensured the promotion and raises are based on seniority (i.e. time served) alone. So why would he bother to go the extra mile? That same union has also arranged for it to be very difficult to fire anyone. Joe Autoworker, and all his colleagues, are therefore incentivized to do no more than the absolute minimum not to be fired, and wait around for his automatic raise and promotion as time passes. That's why American and British auto industries are hollow shells of their former selves.
The idea that how/what you do should be correlated with your reward appears to be fairly fundamentally hard-wired into human nature. Capitalism seeks to harness that natural urge and turn it towards the good of society as a whole. When your farmers make a profit, no-one starves. Communism seeks to reverse that natural urge, to decouple work from reward, and it will always fail because humans simply don't function like that.
As for those seeking power for its own sake, the Communist system is better suited to them. The power held by an inner party member (the "nomenklatura" the Soviets called them) in a Communist country dwarfs the power of any capitalist, in local terms anyway. Can your manager literally exile you to a slave labour camp in the frozen wastelands? People who love power love Communism.
The Beeb is not paid for by the taxpayer, its paid for by anybody who watches BBC TV. If you can prove you can only get Sky TV, for example, you do not need to pay the license fee.
You are mistaken. The tax is paid for *ownership* of a TV.
Or, in other words, (1)-type people don't realize a computer CAN multitask
This isn't a Windows thing. At college I often saw people sitting at powerful Unix workstations with one xterm open, using the machine exactly as they'd use a dumb terminal. Sometimes they'd be logged into two adjacent machines, using them both, with one window open on each.
Slashdot Mirror
Until we have programming languages and APIs and and OSes and interfaces that stay stable for decades there will be no way to get stable certification.
Kid, it ain't about languages and APIs and whatnot. Algorithms are algorithms, you can implement anything you want in any Turing-complete language. Once you're halfway competent, you can pick up any programming language easily, it's just a notation for the algorithms and data structures, that's all. Read some Knuth, you'll see that the fundamentals are already well-understood and don't change much. The many disasters in IT projects are caused by people who fixate on what programming language, OS, middleware, etc to use, and don't approach the problem as a real systems analyst would. Jump straight in and start coding and you're bound to run into problems.
This is one reason why discriminatory pricing is such a bad thing. It is a sign that the supplier has managed to segment the market and it is not a true free market where customers can onsell between them to level prices.
Consider the implications. Should a pharma company be obligated to sell its products at the same prices in wealthy US and EU countries as in impoverished African countries?
What we need to do is to get organized and support independent regulation authorities which will prevent companies from doing anything they think its cheaper.
There is an organization in the UK, the Institute of Analyst Programmers, that bills itself as a professional organization for programmers. I am a member and every now and again I badger them about getting a royal whatever so members could qualify as Chartered Engineers (or whatever title), like the IEEE, the IMechE and so on.
Their reply? Pursuing that is not in their members best interest, as most of 'em would fail to qualify and quit, leaving the IAP without any members and hence funding. There is a rival organization, the BCS, but their chartered status is like an MCSE, no-one bothers to get it, no employer ever demands it.
Ultimately, it needs to be demonstrated to both programmers and employers that some sort of accreditation actually adds value, 'til then, it won't ever be accecpted. Face it, if a bridge collapses that matters, if the database is the wrong shade of mauve your PHB might get upset but really, who cares?
Of course embedded is different, but that's often done by EEs who can get chartered.
How about "fluorescent beige is a great colour scheme"?
- Search people randomly, and people will complain that they're being treated like "suspects"
- Search likely suspects, and civil liberties types (like Gilmore himself) will complain that you're racially profiling people
. Not only that, but "innocent until proven guilty" - what's proof of guilt, a SUCCESSFUL hijacking?? Hey Sherlock, too late once it's proven, what you gonna do, call 911 at 30,000 feet?Being searched doesn't mean your a suspect, it just means you were there when the number came up. Gilmore's badge-wearing is just plain attention-seeking. Terrorism IS real, it IS a threat, and any inconvenience is the fault of the terrorists, not the check-in staff!
The whole idea of trying to take your customers for everything you can sounds so much colder when you look at it from their side.
You aren't taking them for everything you can. You're selling at a price, and it's up to them whether they want to pay it or not. Charge them what they are willing to pay, not more. Some people will complain, but as the author says, some people will always complain.
There's nothing unethical about making money. Making money in a free market is the best proof you could ask for that you are giving people what they want at a price they can afford. Making people happy, is that ethical enough for you?
I don't think it's a bad idea to ignore Cringley.
Aye, I fully agree. If he knows so much about search engines, why isn't he running one himself?
Or is it one of those things that "it's world famous in Korea...and Korea is the center of the universe" kind of thing?
Like the way David Hasselhoff is very popular in Germany...
Movement of the stock price post-IPO gets Google nothing
Unless they plan to use their stock as an acquisition currency.
It's senseless to do so. When copies start being really cheap to make, you need to find some other means of compensation than giving the creators a way to tax making copies of their creation.
You say that, but other than "rely on donations" you've yet to offer a mechanism by which expensive IP can be created.
Make localized versions with custom niceties like this patched onto the software
But Kurds and Turks both live in Turkey. Selling a Kurdish edition (for example, mentioning Kurdistan, which is what Kurds call the bit of land they want the Turks to give them) in Turkey would offend Turks. Selling a Turkish edition (not acknowledging Kurdistan) in Turkey would offend Kurds living there. There's no way to keep both parties happy.
That these two groups are squabbling is not Microsoft's fault. I can't see how they can be blamed, even in the slightest, for insensitivity.
The results of their map reading have lead them into several political situations that there was little possibility of them being aware of.
Exactly. The article even makes the point, Microsoft was forced to choose between offending Kurds and offending Turks. There was literally no way to satisfy both groups. So MS simply made the call, we have more Turkish customers than Kurdish, so we'll make the change the way they want it. Democracy in action.
In the age of the internet dividing rights up based on geographical regions makes little sense (if any).
Umm, do you know who pays for the BBC? The British taxpayer, that's who. Nothing it ever free, someone always pays somewhere. Why do you think that the overtaxed Brits should pay for your media?
This has all died out now, with CISC (read: Intel) coming out as a winner.
The end of CISC vs RISC was that they converged. A modern x86 is a hardware instruction decoder surrounding a RISC-ish core. The RISC processors like SPARC and MIPS added more complex instructions, again around a RISC core. The debate died out because BOTH sides won.
Han murders Greedo
Well, yes, OF COURSE he does. That's the POINT. The character of Han Solo goes from ruthless mercenary, caring only about himself and his profit, to actually believing in and fighting for a cause. If Han Solo is basically a nice guy to start with, then his character instantly loses a lot of depth. That's why people are upset about the change, because it dumbs down the movie for an audience who can't handle ambiguous characters with complex motivations.
So, do you propose a system in which we go from house to house every year demanding to get a detailed inventory of all the intellectual 'property' everybody is making use of to make sure they've paid for it all?
No, I propose the continued existance of the system we have now, you want a CD, a movie, a piece of software, whatever, you BUY it. I'd like to see one change, tho', which would be to split the cost of the media from the cost of the content on it. So if I scratch a CD, say, I should be able to get a new one for the cost of the media alone, since I've already bought the contents.
Creating new ideas is expensive. After that, they cost absolutely nothing.
Creating new ideas is CHEAP. Turning ideas into real products is hard, and expensive.
I spend a bunch of money and effort making sure that Folding@HOME is running on all the computers I control.
Well, that sort of pure science is interesting, but it's not a product. You can't "cure AIDS @ home" because there is no software to do that, it takes expensive people and expensive equipment to work on it. You might kid yourself that you're helping real problems, but you are only doing so in the more indirect way.
Ah, there you have it: as far as IP goes, we do have nearly unlimited production capacity. Economists had to come up with the idea of augmenting returns; it's so damned cheap to copy bits that marginal costs keep decreasing.
You are missing the point. Say you invest a lot of money creating a piece of IP: a drug formula, a music CD, a piece of software, whatever. You figure out how many instances of this IP you expect to sell, and price it to recoup your costs and make some profit too (after all, you gotta eat, you gotta repay the mutual funds that invested in you, etc).
You sell each copy with the caveat "you may use this personally, but you may not redistribute it". You ONLY sell to people who accept this condition (called a "license"). Some people, however, agree to your terms to your face, then turn around and break your terms when they think you're not looking.
Now, reproducing bits is very very cheap, but creating bits is not. How, in your world where cost of producing IP is considered the same as the cost of replicating it, does expensive IP get created?
But once intelectual property is created, it is no longer scarce (except through artificial control of the supply).
You are missing the point that the act of creation has to be paid for somehow. If you want a new drug, you need labs, you need plenty of smart people, you need even more people to run and participate in trials, you need people to submit the thousands and thousands of pages of clinical studies to the FDA, etc etc. The way this cost is recouped traditionally is that every purchaser of the end product pays a little towards the initial cost. Sure drugs can be produced cheaply as generics, but that isn't creating new intellectual property.
Incidentally, free software is expensive too. When Microsoft or Sun or Oracle wants to create something, they sit hundreds of people down in front of computers in an air conditioned office and tell them to work on it 'til its done, it's obvious where the money goes. But when writing free software, you still need a PC, you still need books and a network connection, you still need somewhere to put all this stuff, even if the office is part of your house. Just because the money is spent in very many tiny transactions by many people and not a few large transactions by a single entity doesn't mean that the money isn't spent! I bet if it were possible to add up the real cost of developing Linux, it would be comparable to the cost of developing any commercial Unix.
So, how do you propose that expensive IP is created if there is no mechanism for the cost to be shared by the eventual end users?
Are lawyers doing pro bono work destroying the market for lawyers? Are doctors who work in a clinic as volunteers destroying the demand for medical services?
Your analogy does not hold. A lawyer doing pro bono work does it for an organization or individual who could not otherwise have legal representation. A doctor who does volunteer work does so for people who could not otherwise have medical treatment.
Whereas if you look at open source, its express intention is to REPLACE commercial software. RMS believes that his mission is to provide a free alternative to every major piece of software, and eventually to make commercial software development unviable.
Can you imagine a lawyer doing a corporate merger for free? Or a doctor doing cosmetic surgery for free? Because that's what's required for your analogy to work.
Exactly. That is one of the perpetually most entertaining things about Slashdot, how people (sometimes on the same day!) can simultaneously believe that
- Linux competing with Microsoft on price is GOOD
- Indian programmers competing with American programmers on price is BAD
Now I realize that Slashdot is not a group mind, but these two positions are the ones most advocated here, and there does appear to be an overlap between those holding each one. There are others too- The State should regulate Microsoft/the DSL providers/whoever
- The State should refuse to uphold intellectual property
Well do you want government regulation or not, I ask them?because USSR wasn't communist at all? it was a socialism, it says so in the name "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". There has never been a communist state, only socialism.
The terms Communism and Socialism were used interchangeably by both Marx and Engels. The idea of Socialism as a transitional stage to Communism was coined by Stalin; you see it was necessary, he told the people, that during the transitional stage certain classes should continue to be more richly rewarded just as they were under Capitalism, in order to bring about a Communist future. Unsurprisingly, equality was never achieved and the country continued to be divided between the Party and the Proletariat.
I have no problem doing work for 5 people with my job since I love what I do.
In a Communist state, if the Party decides it needs more farmers, then off to the fields you go, labouring with hand tools. Many present-day Communists assume that in a Communist state they would live as they presently do, but wouldn't have to worry about "inequality". Well, such people should study the Khmer Rouge to see what happens to intellectuals and artists in a Communist state.
Maybe you do love what you do enough to do it for only the minimum pay, but would you enjoy it so much if you couldn't buy bread or the electricity cut out every day or if you complained about the government the secret police would knock on your door? That's life in a Communist country.
Do traits of human nature (especially of those inclined to seek power) make such ideals unachievable.
Yes, Communism is impossible. It appears that property rights are causal. Joe Farmer will work harder on his land if he gets to profit from the sale of his produce, and as a result there will be plenty of food. If Joe Farmer knew that whatever he produced would immediately be "redistributed", that no matter how hard he worked his family would still go without, why would he bother to go the extra mile? That's why capitalist countries have food surpluses, and the old Soviet Empire, and present day China and North Korea have perpetual food crises.
Consider Joe Autoworker. There's no way for him to progress in his career through working harder or smarter than his peers. The trade union has ensured the promotion and raises are based on seniority (i.e. time served) alone. So why would he bother to go the extra mile? That same union has also arranged for it to be very difficult to fire anyone. Joe Autoworker, and all his colleagues, are therefore incentivized to do no more than the absolute minimum not to be fired, and wait around for his automatic raise and promotion as time passes. That's why American and British auto industries are hollow shells of their former selves.
The idea that how/what you do should be correlated with your reward appears to be fairly fundamentally hard-wired into human nature. Capitalism seeks to harness that natural urge and turn it towards the good of society as a whole. When your farmers make a profit, no-one starves. Communism seeks to reverse that natural urge, to decouple work from reward, and it will always fail because humans simply don't function like that.
As for those seeking power for its own sake, the Communist system is better suited to them. The power held by an inner party member (the "nomenklatura" the Soviets called them) in a Communist country dwarfs the power of any capitalist, in local terms anyway. Can your manager literally exile you to a slave labour camp in the frozen wastelands? People who love power love Communism.
The Beeb is not paid for by the taxpayer, its paid for by anybody who watches BBC TV. If you can prove you can only get Sky TV, for example, you do not need to pay the license fee.
You are mistaken. The tax is paid for *ownership* of a TV.
yet their productivity per capita is actually higher than in the USA.
Well, yes, but they have double-digit unemployment too. You can have all the holiday you want if you don't have a job!
Or, in other words, (1)-type people don't realize a computer CAN multitask
This isn't a Windows thing. At college I often saw people sitting at powerful Unix workstations with one xterm open, using the machine exactly as they'd use a dumb terminal. Sometimes they'd be logged into two adjacent machines, using them both, with one window open on each.