This is slightly OT, but some more context on Bork might be of interest. In case anyone was wondering, Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court wasn't canned by the Democrats simply because he was a conservative --- there are plenty of conservatives on the Supreme Court, in case you hadn't noticed. He was "borked" in a long-awaited act of revenge.
During the Watergate scandal, Archibald Cox (the first ever independent prosecutor, a la Ken Starr) faced down the Whitehouse in an (ultimately succesful) effort to unearth damning evidence of criminal activity by both President Nixon and Veep Spiro Agnew.
Nixon wanted to fire Cox, but it wasn't in his power to do so. As an Independent Prosecutor, Cox was subordinate only to the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson. So Nixon demanded that Richardson fire Cox. This was an appalling abuse of power. Nixon essentially threw out the rule of law to satisfy his political ends. In an act of great courage, Richardson refused to comply. So Nixon fired him. Then he promoted the Deputy A.G. to acting A.G. and gave him the same order --- fire Cox. Again, a refusal; and again Nixon fired the guy. Next in line at the Justice Dept was the Solicitor General. At the time, this was none other than our friend Robert Bork. Nixon made him acting A.G. and ordered him to fire Cox. Bork consented and fired him. As an added bonus, he sent FBI agents over to the Prosecutor's office to seal it off, temporarily shutting down the investigation of the President.
This was the famous "Saturday Night Massacre" --- the most serious constitutional crisis ever faced by the United States, in fact. Bork's decision to cave in to Nixon's unconstitutional power grab forever marked him in the eyes of many Americans, and not just Democrats, either. When Reagan nominated him for the Supreme Court, the possibility of having someone who had helped Richard Nixon flaunt the rule of law sitting on the highest court in the land was just too much for many to bear. And so he was borked.
(1) Like most of us, Aunt Tilly has a job. She does not want to waste time compiling her own kernel any more than she wants to rebuild her own carburetor. Sure, it'd be fun and educational, but frankly she's too busy and needs to drive somewhere right now, not spend the weekend in the garage.
(2) Like most of us, Aunt Tilly has a brain. She is able to spot the difference between a real issue and a quasi-troll dreamt up by ESR. She knows, for example, that no-one wants only "the educated few" to be "able" to compile their own kernels. All the tools to do it are already there. But who should have to unless they want to? And why on earth should anyone forbid them if they so wish?
(3) Like some of us (though not me), Aunt Tilly has an iMac and thus already has a powerful Unix-based OS with a beautifully designed GUI and proper software management. She knows she can tweak it if she likes (see [2] above), but it works so well she doesn't need to think about it, which suits her fine (see [1] above).
Take a giant step backwards with ESR if you like. I hope for the day when Open-Source software is as well-designed and functional as it is well-motivated and worthwhile.
Yep. The beauty of Macs. I did the same thing with my Digital Camera (a Canon) and my girlfriend's TiBook. Just plugged the camera in to see what happened. It worked right away, downloaded all the pictures without even blinking. And here's me unable to get gphoto2 to compile on SuSE. Ack.
First, like every other sensible person here I think it's terrific that Carmack and ID have this strategy for releasing older code under the GPL. I've noticed that a lot of comments have argued that this is a strategy that many or all software firms should adopt with the GPL --- develop commercially and profit in the short run, release source to community when development cycle has moved two products down the road.
I wonder, though, whether ID find it much easier to pursue this strategy because they're in the game market? Games (and *especially* FPS/Multiplayer games) are a market segment where most buyers want the newest engine, best graphics, etc. Could a company that made Wordprocessors or Spreadsheets pursue this model as easily and still make profit like ID? I'm not saying it would be impossible, but it seems to me that many users would have a much higher tolerance for using a free, three-year-old version of their wordprocessor than using a pricely new version (assuming the company didn't do nasty things like change the.doc format, etc). This isn't true of games. So while I like this "Develop-Sell-Wait-GPL" approach, I'd bet that the "Wait" time of a company like ID is amongst the shortest of any software market segment.
I think the hair-trigger threshold that most people around here have for unleashing verbal abuse at innocuous sites whose opinion differs from theirs constitutes its own dataset about the desensitizing effects of violence on children.
Jeez --- a private site, simply listing toys that concerned parents might want to avoid this Christmas. That's all, folks!
Even worse is the crap quality of the negative responses. "If your children are jerks it's your fault, not the toys", "You should spend more time parenting and less time on this website." Unbelievable. Has it occurred to any of you that taking the time to choose toys for your children --- instead of buying whatever crap is marketed to them --- is actually evidence of being a good parent?
But, of course,/. hypocrites know no reason. It's techno-libertarian free internet for me, but get your site off my internet for thou. I'm sure if the story had been "Open Source Community Develops User-Driven Database of Toy Ratings" you'd all be creaming yourselves about the power of Open Source.
Jon Katz faults the fifteen-year-olds for their occasional lack of cultural depth and attention span. I wonder if he's relying on these flaws to make his own articles sound plausible.
Part I drew mainly on Michael Lewis's recent book and (like Lewis) made a bunch provocative claims on the basis of very slim evidence indeed. "Are 15 year olds running the world?" "Is this a revolution?" The main problem with the article is that every time Katz makes one of these assertions, he provides no real evidence for it, backs away from its implications, or both.
This happens from sentence to sentence, eg: "The idea the anybody can become an instant expert in any context is pretty creepy... [But] expertise isn't power." It's all bait and no fish.
This installment waters down the "15 yr olds running the world" hook even more, to the point where the evil young geniuses of the first article now look like... well, like smart but disaffected and often self-absorbed teenagers with no real power, although a few of them might have the ability to cause people a lot of headaches. Is this really that insightful? Or new?
Beyond that, there are new contradictions in this episode. On the one hand, we're told that "The first generation of computer kids is now running the tech world, and they've been universally sobered by the realities of economics and politics." Fair enough. On the other hand, "the world has sometimes made [the 15 year old kids] technological orphans, abandoned them to sophisticated machinery that few adults bother to comprehend." Well, which is it? The first generation of computer kids ("now running the tech world") are in their '40s or even '50s! Many have teenage children! If there's been a revolution in information technology, then the first generation of computer kids (now heading for middle-age) presumably understand computers. If "few adults" understand computers, then where'd the first generation of computer kids go?
Sure, many parents don't know anything about computers and some 15 year olds are l337. But what follows? Very little, unless you want to rely on a lot of generational stereotypes and equivocation to make the argument go through.
Right, QED. Everyone loves stories like this --- little kid/granny/know-nothing/self-taught genius beats or fools the experts. While we should always be skeptical of experts' claims to unique knowledge, and not dismiss stories like this out of hand, they are very rarely as simple as they seem. If the story isn't simply flase (like the Beardstown ladies), it's usually exaggerated in some important way. Sometimes expert knowledge really is knowledge, and takes time and effort to learn. (I earned my Ph.D, man!) More often, though, we get articles like Katz's, which use cultural myths and anecdotal evidence like sledgehammers.
> U.S. and England, including the celebrated
> Jonathan Lebed of Cedar Grove, N.J., who rocked
> Wall Street and the SEC by turning himself into
> a master online stock manipulator in a few short
> months, though that's supposed to take years of
> high-intensity experience and training.
First, this kid "pumped and dumped" stocks. If you don't know what that means, you're more likely to think he was a genius. Second, Wall Street and London stock exchange companies have been recruiting "informally educated" kids (almost always men) to do trading-floor work for years. In London they're called "Barrow Boys" --- guys puffed up on testosterone and able to do math in their heads, because they have a background in bargaining in other kinds of street market. Third, Katz's sentence would be a lot truer if "a master stock manipulator in a few short months" read "a master stock manipulator FOR a few short months". It's always possible to beat the experts in the short-run (remember those little old ladies from Iowa or wherever?).
Note that "the myth of the genius" != "there's no such thing as genius". The former is a sociological phenomenon, a cultural archetype that people like Katz (and many geeks) like to latch on to. Of course there are plenty of smart 15-yr-olds. But they're not running the world.
What a troll! As has already been pointed out by numerous others, Google is claiming a non-exclusive license to your usenet posts. It doesn't own them. I'd only add that it's irritating in the extreme (a) to see this coming from/., which of all organizations should know a lot more about Licensing than this stupid story indicates; and (b) to see this crap slung at Google, the company which freely provides the best search engine on the web, and which is no doubt the first choice of basically everyone reading this story. Time for me to go back to K5.
This film is a travesty
on
Review: Blow
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· Score: 1
... So it's no surprise that Katz's review is, too. If you want to know what actually happened to George Jung, read Bruce Porter's book, which has the same title of the movie. If you want a good summary of just how many ways this shallow film rips the truth for the sake of its cheap, hero-making plot, then stay away from Katz and read a real movie reviewer, like
David Edelstein's piece on Slate.
Blow isn't a serious look at a particular time in U.S. culture because it pays no attention to the wider social and political context. Dressing everyone up in period costume and having Lynyrd Skynyrd on the soundtrack doesn't do it. (Watch The Ice Storm, say, and then tell me Blow really evokes its time well.) It isn't a good biopic, because it lies to high heaven about what really happened to its lead character, for the sake of cheap sentiment and moralizing. It isn't (as Katz seems to think) a "morality play" either, because all the characters are one-dimensional. It isn't even a good thiller, and --- with the exception of Depp --- isn't marked by any good performances, either.
Library: A place where information (esp scholarship) is stored, cataloged and crossreferenced by subject. Even the most comprehensive libraries makes choices about what to hold in their collections, what to specialize in and what to throw away. A heap of undifferentiated "content" (surely the most insidiously misleading word in the history of the internet) is not a library. A trash heap, even a searchable, interesting-to-rummage-through trashheap, isn't a library.
And don't even get me started on the difference between social power and information. Suffice to say that the Library of Congress is not the most powerful branch of government, even if it's the most knowledgeable.
The Cultural Contradictions of Geekdom
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 2
> the Internet's collective response to one
> well-nigh apocalyptic decision after another
> has unfortunately been the same as the
> Internet's collective response to just about
> everything: posts, lots and lots of posts.
Hehe. And here we go again. (See below, passim.) Saying "Lawyers rule the world" could be interpreted in a number of different ways. Most productively, it's saying something about the realities of political and legal institutions and organizations. The Geek world is very good at a particular kind of organization --- the distributed, decentralized network. Geeks often think that the robust, flexible qualities of this kind of organization make it practically and morally superior to all the alternatives. This article shows in part why this is wrong: the distributed network of geeks spends most of its time whingeing to itself, while well-organized competitors kick it in the ass legally.
I think the key contradiction in geek culture is that even though they routinely rail against corporate greed, etc, they espouse an absurd kind of libertarian / ayn randian ideal of freedom, where one's ultimate desire is to be left the hell alone, typically in order to become a very rich person. The enormously high tolerance of personal abuse in online groups (like this one) shows that geeks generally haven't the first idea about civic engagement or political organization, and gives the lie to the idea that there really is a well-developed community out there in any meaningful sense. Real communities have some solidarity, can form hierarchical organizations to defend their interests when needed, and don't tolerate too much static in the public sphere. By contrast, it seems thet Geeks just want a bigger cubicle, a steady supply of snacks, and a new computer. In the near future, watch and be amazed as the hardline efforts of people like RMS to generate real legal innovations get written off as the ravings of ideologues, interested groups write the laws they want, and geeks get bought out by the corporations they're supposed to despise, no doubt whining every step of the way.
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. - Max Weber.
Companies have a strong interest in creating a pool of workers with very little bargaining power, and nothing is better than a bunch of people who can be deported at a moment's notice by the INS. It's not even a question of collective bargaining --- unionisation, etc --- but also individual labor market mobility. My brother and I are both on H1-Bs, and he had a lot of trouble changing jobs recently, as he had to go through the whole recertification process with the INS. They delayed processing his application, and he had to return home for 8 weeks, without an income, before things got sorted out.
Even though US firms can't legally pay less than the going market rate for H1-B workers like my brother and I, our vastly restricted labor market power is very appealing to employers.
What's happening in the IT sector is that many occupations are being downgraded and deskilled. Time was when being a "computer programmer" was a job that needed serious training. But in a society where many, many people get some kind of post-highschool training and computers are ubiquitous, it's not such a big deal to learn Java or XML anymore. A lot of people in the IT sector, dazzled by the world of stock-options and IPOs, are missing the broader trend: many programming-type jobs are rapidly becoming *relatively* low-skilled occupations. The analogy is to 19th and early 20th century clerks, who used to be the backbone of the financial and accounting sectors --- these were "black-coated workers," that is, socially respectable and basically white-collar workers, who were nevertheless low-paid, to the point where some blue-collar occupations had a much higher take-home than them. The key to this process was the way in which the position of the clerk could be rationalized, monitored and relatively "automated," in the sense that there was little craft-type skill necessary for the job. A more recent example comes from occupations that do their work over the phone: new technologies for monitoring productivity and performance make it easier for employers to rationalize the work-process and de-skill the job, to the point where wages get driven down.
The fact that companies prefer H1-Bs over American workers (who won't work the long hours given the money, benefits and job security on offer) is a strong sign that this shift is happening in the IT sector too. This is perhaps a hard fact to swallow for young IT workers who think that their all night cubicle coding marathons mean that they are programming geniuses in the dynamic new economy, instead of just replaceable wage slaves working insane hours to no purpose.:)
"I manage a small business and am well aware of how bizarre the EEOC and others can get when it comes to sexual harassment, racial quotas, etc."
The EEOC does not and cannot mandate or enforce anything resembling "racial quotas." Like many aspects of American Law, equal employment opportunity laws state a general principle but are (a) very vague about what constitutes compliance, (b) weak on enforcement mechanisms, and (c) usually allow professional organizations (consultants, personnel departments) to determine what compliance means. Throwing around phrases like "racial quotas" is plain wrong and very misleading.
George Lucas is a gearhead disguised as a screenwriter/director. His choice of gear = computer animation/digital cinema techniques. His ideal ratio of eye candy to actors is 1:0, as is his ideal ratio of eye candy: plot/ characterization/ etc. As long as he can say "We used the latest technology to do this --- nothing like this was available when I did Star Wars" then he's happy. Case in point: digitally mapping the expressions of Liam Neeson onto the stunt guy's face for the light saber duels. I saw Lucas interviewed about this, and he basically loved it that he could shut the actor out of the picture completely, and let the computer take care of the challenge of directing the film. Never mind that the result was a terribly edited fight scene (in the immediate context) and a lot of unmotivated actors playing cardboard characters (in the film as a whole). Sad, really.
It's a shame that a nice film has turned into the equivalent of the Nike Swoosh --- just a brand name to sell crap. The increasingly feverish protests of the Star Wars cultists just get more and more embarrassing. Yoda might be able to peddle his "There is no Try" routine on screen, but it's clear that Lucas stopped trying years ago and as a result there's nothing doing with the new films.
I think this is an excellent editorial. Here's a mild paradox about Slashdot readers that's always struck me as odd: On the one hand, they're the people who are most aware of the power of complex, decentralized, un-coordinated modes of social organization, and are usually vociferous in their advocacy of them as models for everything from software development to social organization. On the other hand, they're pathologically prone to seeing conspiracies everywhere, run by evil individuals with vast powers who are out to dominate the world. Why is this so?
I think there are two reasons. The first is specific to tha hacker community. The image of themselves as a loose goup of outsiders who fight the power is just part of their collective identity. As the internet has developed, this has really become a difficult identity to sustain. As linux has taken off, and many fomer penniless grad students have become billionaires, the community has been forced to believe in ever more evil threats --- Bill Gates becomes like some sort of comic book character who is impossibly evil and powerful.
The second reason is more general: the alternative to a conspiracy theory is a structural explanation of some kind. Structural explanations are inherently more boring than conspiracy theories, and they are certainly less media friendly. Better to blame Bill Gates -- or an evil conspiracy of Hackers, depending on your point of view! --- for our troubles, than analyze the complex structure of a developing economy and society.
None of this is to deny that powerful people can have bad motives and do evil things. But the bigger the conspiracy, the more people have to be involved, and the more it starts to look like a structural phenomenon. Having a conspiracy answer as a knee-jerk explanation for everything just isn't going to cut it anymore. As an explanation for events, blaming Bill (or whoever) is exactly what the media do to hackers when they demonize some 13 year old and say he could destroy the internet. Let's have more analysis and less paranoia.
When they started to run out of 1-800 numbers ten years or so ago, someone had the idea of adding the universe of 1-877 numbers (or some equivalent) to the toll free list. Because the numbers were distributed by auction, the owners of 1-800-CARWASH had a strong incentive to buy 1-877-CARWASH as well, to pre-empt consumer confusion. The net result was that the number of genuinely new toll-free numbers that became available was a great deal smaller than it might have been.
If ICANN plan to let somecompany.com get first call on somecompany.shop, the number of new domain names will not increase significantly. The same thing will happen if they auction the site names. In fact, the only way to properly and significantly diversify the universe of top-level domains is to get rid of the.com domain, abolish it altogether and replace it with.shop,.banc, etc, instead of merely *supplementing* it with those new TLDs.
Of course, this is unlikely (because the pressure will be on to have some sort of bidding process, in the mistaken belief that this will efficiently allocate domain names). But if it doesn't happen, there'll be a much smaller increase in the number of available domains than we'd like.
I recently bought an ultralight from TuxTops, a small company out of California that sells a range of laptops running RedHat (and soon other distros, apparently). It works great out of the box, including the modem. (It uses the lucent linmodem.) Funnily enough, I've also had trouble with the power adapter making contact when you plug it in --- the plug is one of those teeny tiny ones and can be a little iffy.
Anyway, if you're in the market for a very good linux laptop and (a) you want it next week and not in Q3 or whenever IBM ships, and (b) you have a life and can't waste your time configuring one yourself from scratch, then definitely check out these guys. They have a good product and are very friendly.
I've found that other laptop users in coffeeshops will try to casually peek at your screen to see why your windows desktop looks so weird.:-)
... Doom III is going to be a wholly new sort of game, right? Maybe a synthesis of Civilization, The Sims and Eric's Ultimate Solitaire?
I don't think so. Perhaps the reason that there was a huge fight inside ID about this (and we've only heard one side of it, remember) is that the company's owners know what the phrase "One Trick Pony" means.
I remember playing Doom for the first time as vividly as anyone. But what all the Doom-nostalgics out there don't seem to realise is that it is impossible for you to re-live the experience you had when when you first played Doom. You can't pretend you've never played a game like it before. You can't roll the clock back. Read Proust and see for yourself. That's what being nostalgic means, and why nostalgia is related to melancholy. You're want to relive a past experience but you can't.
The only thing that's going to produce a similar experience --- that "Oh my God I'm completely absorbed by this amazing new thing" feeling --- is a wholly new kind of game, and sadly Doom III ain't going to be it, by definition. By embarking on this project, Id are starting to look like the Microsoft of gaming: Doom, Doom 95, Doom 2000... and I bet that's why Kevin and Adrian made such a fuss over the project.
Here's a smart article on Slate by Rob Walker that might give some posters around here something to think about. In particular, it points out who the Napsteroids might be getting into bed with. Worthy crusades against rip-off music conglomerates do not justify ripping off other people's intellectual or artistic work. Which is why OSS works within the framework of property rights and copyright law, and not outside it.
Stallman's answer to this question Q: Are there any good case studies of large corporations opening up proprietary in-house source code? deserves to be read carefully. If what he says is roughly right, we're watching a very interesting change right now. What's happening is that a movement based on particular principled ends (of the kind that Stallman advocates) is getting repackaged and sold to companies as a new and effective means, ie a better way to turn a profit. It's interesting that RMS is now typically criticized for being past his time, etc. There's a predictable pattern to many social movements of this sort: they begin with prophetic characters like Stallman who have a radical agenda, and then gradually become co-opted and assimilated to existing institutions like corporations and the market. A key moment in this shift is when people stop arguing for an innovation like Open Software on principle and start arguing for it in terms of self-interest. Like Gresham's law, the bad arguments drive out the good, and pretty soon what seemed like an additional benefit of a principled idea becomes the main reason for supporting it. It'll be interesting to see in 15-20 years whether anyone argues for Open Software from a principled position, as Stallman does. My money says it'll become integrated into how corporations and markets work, and justified as a more effective way to make money. I get the feeling that many Open Source advocates (like Eric Raymond) aren't aware that this is happening.
I'm a grad student at Princeton (though not in engineering). I can tell you that PEAR is a long-standing embarrassment to the engineering department and the administration, and a long-running (though increasingly little known) joke amongst the University community. Because Jahn had tenure, the University couldn't fire him (I'm all for academic freedom), but they ousted him as chair and exiled him to his lab.
PEAR sometimes makes the news, and there are usually some engineers around to say what's wrong with the experiments, so I'll leave that to them. I think the main problem is that their work is almost by definition not reproducible.
I know this is just an argument from authority, and PEAR supporters will say "But every major scientific advance has been laughed at when first discovered." True enough. Unfortunately, for every one of those, millions and millions of stupid or false ideasn have been laughed at too, and with good reason. So take it with a small salt mine.
Slashdot Mirror
During the Watergate scandal, Archibald Cox (the first ever independent prosecutor, a la Ken Starr) faced down the Whitehouse in an (ultimately succesful) effort to unearth damning evidence of criminal activity by both President Nixon and Veep Spiro Agnew.
Nixon wanted to fire Cox, but it wasn't in his power to do so. As an Independent Prosecutor, Cox was subordinate only to the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson. So Nixon demanded that Richardson fire Cox. This was an appalling abuse of power. Nixon essentially threw out the rule of law to satisfy his political ends. In an act of great courage, Richardson refused to comply. So Nixon fired him. Then he promoted the Deputy A.G. to acting A.G. and gave him the same order --- fire Cox. Again, a refusal; and again Nixon fired the guy. Next in line at the Justice Dept was the Solicitor General. At the time, this was none other than our friend Robert Bork. Nixon made him acting A.G. and ordered him to fire Cox. Bork consented and fired him. As an added bonus, he sent FBI agents over to the Prosecutor's office to seal it off, temporarily shutting down the investigation of the President.
This was the famous "Saturday Night Massacre" --- the most serious constitutional crisis ever faced by the United States, in fact. Bork's decision to cave in to Nixon's unconstitutional power grab forever marked him in the eyes of many Americans, and not just Democrats, either. When Reagan nominated him for the Supreme Court, the possibility of having someone who had helped Richard Nixon flaunt the rule of law sitting on the highest court in the land was just too much for many to bear. And so he was borked.
1. A most excellent business magnate in charge of enforcing the Americans with Disabilities act.
2. A old, twisted central-Asian warlord concerned with copyright law.
3. A combination of (1) and (2). Possibly resembling Jack Valenti.
(2) Like most of us, Aunt Tilly has a brain. She is able to spot the difference between a real issue and a quasi-troll dreamt up by ESR. She knows, for example, that no-one wants only "the educated few" to be "able" to compile their own kernels. All the tools to do it are already there. But who should have to unless they want to? And why on earth should anyone forbid them if they so wish?
(3) Like some of us (though not me), Aunt Tilly has an iMac and thus already has a powerful Unix-based OS with a beautifully designed GUI and proper software management. She knows she can tweak it if she likes (see [2] above), but it works so well she doesn't need to think about it, which suits her fine (see [1] above).
Take a giant step backwards with ESR if you like. I hope for the day when Open-Source software is as well-designed and functional as it is well-motivated and worthwhile.
Yep. The beauty of Macs. I did the same thing with my Digital Camera (a Canon) and my girlfriend's TiBook. Just plugged the camera in to see what happened. It worked right away, downloaded all the pictures without even blinking. And here's me unable to get gphoto2 to compile on SuSE. Ack.
I wonder, though, whether ID find it much easier to pursue this strategy because they're in the game market? Games (and *especially* FPS/Multiplayer games) are a market segment where most buyers want the newest engine, best graphics, etc. Could a company that made Wordprocessors or Spreadsheets pursue this model as easily and still make profit like ID? I'm not saying it would be impossible, but it seems to me that many users would have a much higher tolerance for using a free, three-year-old version of their wordprocessor than using a pricely new version (assuming the company didn't do nasty things like change the .doc format, etc). This isn't true of games. So while I like this "Develop-Sell-Wait-GPL" approach, I'd bet that the "Wait" time of a company like ID is amongst the shortest of any software market segment.
Should read, "The answer my friend, is --- win blows."
Jeez --- a private site, simply listing toys that concerned parents might want to avoid this Christmas. That's all, folks!
Even worse is the crap quality of the negative responses. "If your children are jerks it's your fault, not the toys", "You should spend more time parenting and less time on this website." Unbelievable. Has it occurred to any of you that taking the time to choose toys for your children --- instead of buying whatever crap is marketed to them --- is actually evidence of being a good parent?
But, of course, /. hypocrites know no reason. It's techno-libertarian free internet for me, but get your site off my internet for thou. I'm sure if the story had been "Open Source Community Develops User-Driven Database of Toy Ratings" you'd all be creaming yourselves about the power of Open Source.
> relative novices to build highly destructive
> (malicious software)," he wrote in the essay.
...I wasn't paying attention -- is he talking about the crackers or Microsoft here?
;-)
Part I drew mainly on Michael Lewis's recent book and (like Lewis) made a bunch provocative claims on the basis of very slim evidence indeed. "Are 15 year olds running the world?" "Is this a revolution?" The main problem with the article is that every time Katz makes one of these assertions, he provides no real evidence for it, backs away from its implications, or both. This happens from sentence to sentence, eg: "The idea the anybody can become an instant expert in any context is pretty creepy... [But] expertise isn't power." It's all bait and no fish.
This installment waters down the "15 yr olds running the world" hook even more, to the point where the evil young geniuses of the first article now look like... well, like smart but disaffected and often self-absorbed teenagers with no real power, although a few of them might have the ability to cause people a lot of headaches. Is this really that insightful? Or new?
Beyond that, there are new contradictions in this episode. On the one hand, we're told that "The first generation of computer kids is now running the tech world, and they've been universally sobered by the realities of economics and politics." Fair enough. On the other hand, "the world has sometimes made [the 15 year old kids] technological orphans, abandoned them to sophisticated machinery that few adults bother to comprehend." Well, which is it? The first generation of computer kids ("now running the tech world") are in their '40s or even '50s! Many have teenage children! If there's been a revolution in information technology, then the first generation of computer kids (now heading for middle-age) presumably understand computers. If "few adults" understand computers, then where'd the first generation of computer kids go?
Sure, many parents don't know anything about computers and some 15 year olds are l337. But what follows? Very little, unless you want to rely on a lot of generational stereotypes and equivocation to make the argument go through.
Right, QED. Everyone loves stories like this --- little kid/granny/know-nothing/self-taught genius beats or fools the experts. While we should always be skeptical of experts' claims to unique knowledge, and not dismiss stories like this out of hand, they are very rarely as simple as they seem. If the story isn't simply flase (like the Beardstown ladies), it's usually exaggerated in some important way. Sometimes expert knowledge really is knowledge, and takes time and effort to learn. (I earned my Ph.D, man!) More often, though, we get articles like Katz's, which use cultural myths and anecdotal evidence like sledgehammers.
> U.S. and England, including the celebrated
> Jonathan Lebed of Cedar Grove, N.J., who rocked
> Wall Street and the SEC by turning himself into
> a master online stock manipulator in a few short
> months, though that's supposed to take years of
> high-intensity experience and training.
First, this kid "pumped and dumped" stocks. If you don't know what that means, you're more likely to think he was a genius. Second, Wall Street and London stock exchange companies have been recruiting "informally educated" kids (almost always men) to do trading-floor work for years. In London they're called "Barrow Boys" --- guys puffed up on testosterone and able to do math in their heads, because they have a background in bargaining in other kinds of street market. Third, Katz's sentence would be a lot truer if "a master stock manipulator in a few short months" read "a master stock manipulator FOR a few short months". It's always possible to beat the experts in the short-run (remember those little old ladies from Iowa or wherever?).
Note that "the myth of the genius" != "there's no such thing as genius". The former is a sociological phenomenon, a cultural archetype that people like Katz (and many geeks) like to latch on to. Of course there are plenty of smart 15-yr-olds. But they're not running the world.
What a troll! As has already been pointed out by numerous others, Google is claiming a non-exclusive license to your usenet posts. It doesn't own them. I'd only add that it's irritating in the extreme (a) to see this coming from /., which of all organizations should know a lot more about Licensing than this stupid story indicates; and (b) to see this crap slung at Google, the company which freely provides the best search engine on the web, and which is no doubt the first choice of basically everyone reading this story. Time for me to go back to K5.
... So it's no surprise that Katz's review is, too. If you want to know what actually happened to George Jung, read Bruce Porter's book, which has the same title of the movie. If you want a good summary of just how many ways this shallow film rips the truth for the sake of its cheap, hero-making plot, then stay away from Katz and read a real movie reviewer, like David Edelstein's piece on Slate. Blow isn't a serious look at a particular time in U.S. culture because it pays no attention to the wider social and political context. Dressing everyone up in period costume and having Lynyrd Skynyrd on the soundtrack doesn't do it. (Watch The Ice Storm, say, and then tell me Blow really evokes its time well.) It isn't a good biopic, because it lies to high heaven about what really happened to its lead character, for the sake of cheap sentiment and moralizing. It isn't (as Katz seems to think) a "morality play" either, because all the characters are one-dimensional. It isn't even a good thiller, and --- with the exception of Depp --- isn't marked by any good performances, either.
And don't even get me started on the difference between social power and information. Suffice to say that the Library of Congress is not the most powerful branch of government, even if it's the most knowledgeable.
> well-nigh apocalyptic decision after another
> has unfortunately been the same as the
> Internet's collective response to just about
> everything: posts, lots and lots of posts.
Hehe. And here we go again. (See below, passim.) Saying "Lawyers rule the world" could be interpreted in a number of different ways. Most productively, it's saying something about the realities of political and legal institutions and organizations. The Geek world is very good at a particular kind of organization --- the distributed, decentralized network. Geeks often think that the robust, flexible qualities of this kind of organization make it practically and morally superior to all the alternatives. This article shows in part why this is wrong: the distributed network of geeks spends most of its time whingeing to itself, while well-organized competitors kick it in the ass legally.
I think the key contradiction in geek culture is that even though they routinely rail against corporate greed, etc, they espouse an absurd kind of libertarian / ayn randian ideal of freedom, where one's ultimate desire is to be left the hell alone, typically in order to become a very rich person. The enormously high tolerance of personal abuse in online groups (like this one) shows that geeks generally haven't the first idea about civic engagement or political organization, and gives the lie to the idea that there really is a well-developed community out there in any meaningful sense. Real communities have some solidarity, can form hierarchical organizations to defend their interests when needed, and don't tolerate too much static in the public sphere. By contrast, it seems thet Geeks just want a bigger cubicle, a steady supply of snacks, and a new computer. In the near future, watch and be amazed as the hardline efforts of people like RMS to generate real legal innovations get written off as the ravings of ideologues, interested groups write the laws they want, and geeks get bought out by the corporations they're supposed to despise, no doubt whining every step of the way.
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. - Max Weber.
What's happening in the IT sector is that many occupations are being downgraded and deskilled. Time was when being a "computer programmer" was a job that needed serious training. But in a society where many, many people get some kind of post-highschool training and computers are ubiquitous, it's not such a big deal to learn Java or XML anymore. A lot of people in the IT sector, dazzled by the world of stock-options and IPOs, are missing the broader trend: many programming-type jobs are rapidly becoming *relatively* low-skilled occupations. The analogy is to 19th and early 20th century clerks, who used to be the backbone of the financial and accounting sectors --- these were "black-coated workers," that is, socially respectable and basically white-collar workers, who were nevertheless low-paid, to the point where some blue-collar occupations had a much higher take-home than them. The key to this process was the way in which the position of the clerk could be rationalized, monitored and relatively "automated," in the sense that there was little craft-type skill necessary for the job. A more recent example comes from occupations that do their work over the phone: new technologies for monitoring productivity and performance make it easier for employers to rationalize the work-process and de-skill the job, to the point where wages get driven down.
The fact that companies prefer H1-Bs over American workers (who won't work the long hours given the money, benefits and job security on offer) is a strong sign that this shift is happening in the IT sector too. This is perhaps a hard fact to swallow for young IT workers who think that their all night cubicle coding marathons mean that they are programming geniuses in the dynamic new economy, instead of just replaceable wage slaves working insane hours to no purpose. :)
"I manage a small business and am well aware of how bizarre the EEOC and others can get when it comes to sexual harassment, racial quotas, etc." The EEOC does not and cannot mandate or enforce anything resembling "racial quotas." Like many aspects of American Law, equal employment opportunity laws state a general principle but are (a) very vague about what constitutes compliance, (b) weak on enforcement mechanisms, and (c) usually allow professional organizations (consultants, personnel departments) to determine what compliance means. Throwing around phrases like "racial quotas" is plain wrong and very misleading.
It's a shame that a nice film has turned into the equivalent of the Nike Swoosh --- just a brand name to sell crap. The increasingly feverish protests of the Star Wars cultists just get more and more embarrassing. Yoda might be able to peddle his "There is no Try" routine on screen, but it's clear that Lucas stopped trying years ago and as a result there's nothing doing with the new films.
I think there are two reasons. The first is specific to tha hacker community. The image of themselves as a loose goup of outsiders who fight the power is just part of their collective identity. As the internet has developed, this has really become a difficult identity to sustain. As linux has taken off, and many fomer penniless grad students have become billionaires, the community has been forced to believe in ever more evil threats --- Bill Gates becomes like some sort of comic book character who is impossibly evil and powerful.
The second reason is more general: the alternative to a conspiracy theory is a structural explanation of some kind. Structural explanations are inherently more boring than conspiracy theories, and they are certainly less media friendly. Better to blame Bill Gates -- or an evil conspiracy of Hackers, depending on your point of view! --- for our troubles, than analyze the complex structure of a developing economy and society.
None of this is to deny that powerful people can have bad motives and do evil things. But the bigger the conspiracy, the more people have to be involved, and the more it starts to look like a structural phenomenon. Having a conspiracy answer as a knee-jerk explanation for everything just isn't going to cut it anymore. As an explanation for events, blaming Bill (or whoever) is exactly what the media do to hackers when they demonize some 13 year old and say he could destroy the internet. Let's have more analysis and less paranoia.
If ICANN plan to let somecompany.com get first call on somecompany.shop, the number of new domain names will not increase significantly. The same thing will happen if they auction the site names. In fact, the only way to properly and significantly diversify the universe of top-level domains is to get rid of the .com domain, abolish it altogether and replace it with .shop, .banc, etc, instead of merely *supplementing* it with those new TLDs.
Of course, this is unlikely (because the pressure will be on to have some sort of bidding process, in the mistaken belief that this will efficiently allocate domain names). But if it doesn't happen, there'll be a much smaller increase in the number of available domains than we'd like.
Anyway, if you're in the market for a very good linux laptop and (a) you want it next week and not in Q3 or whenever IBM ships, and (b) you have a life and can't waste your time configuring one yourself from scratch, then definitely check out these guys. They have a good product and are very friendly.
I've found that other laptop users in coffeeshops will try to casually peek at your screen to see why your windows desktop looks so weird. :-)
I don't think so. Perhaps the reason that there was a huge fight inside ID about this (and we've only heard one side of it, remember) is that the company's owners know what the phrase "One Trick Pony" means.
I remember playing Doom for the first time as vividly as anyone. But what all the Doom-nostalgics out there don't seem to realise is that it is impossible for you to re-live the experience you had when when you first played Doom. You can't pretend you've never played a game like it before. You can't roll the clock back. Read Proust and see for yourself. That's what being nostalgic means, and why nostalgia is related to melancholy. You're want to relive a past experience but you can't.
The only thing that's going to produce a similar experience --- that "Oh my God I'm completely absorbed by this amazing new thing" feeling --- is a wholly new kind of game, and sadly Doom III ain't going to be it, by definition. By embarking on this project, Id are starting to look like the Microsoft of gaming: Doom, Doom 95, Doom 2000... and I bet that's why Kevin and Adrian made such a fuss over the project.
Here's a smart article on Slate by Rob Walker that might give some posters around here something to think about. In particular, it points out who the Napsteroids might be getting into bed with. Worthy crusades against rip-off music conglomerates do not justify ripping off other people's intellectual or artistic work. Which is why OSS works within the framework of property rights and copyright law, and not outside it.
Stallman's answer to this question Q: Are there any good case studies of large corporations opening up proprietary in-house source code? deserves to be read carefully. If what he says is roughly right, we're watching a very interesting change right now. What's happening is that a movement based on particular principled ends (of the kind that Stallman advocates) is getting repackaged and sold to companies as a new and effective means, ie a better way to turn a profit. It's interesting that RMS is now typically criticized for being past his time, etc. There's a predictable pattern to many social movements of this sort: they begin with prophetic characters like Stallman who have a radical agenda, and then gradually become co-opted and assimilated to existing institutions like corporations and the market. A key moment in this shift is when people stop arguing for an innovation like Open Software on principle and start arguing for it in terms of self-interest. Like Gresham's law, the bad arguments drive out the good, and pretty soon what seemed like an additional benefit of a principled idea becomes the main reason for supporting it. It'll be interesting to see in 15-20 years whether anyone argues for Open Software from a principled position, as Stallman does. My money says it'll become integrated into how corporations and markets work, and justified as a more effective way to make money. I get the feeling that many Open Source advocates (like Eric Raymond) aren't aware that this is happening.
PEAR sometimes makes the news, and there are usually some engineers around to say what's wrong with the experiments, so I'll leave that to them. I think the main problem is that their work is almost by definition not reproducible.
I know this is just an argument from authority, and PEAR supporters will say "But every major scientific advance has been laughed at when first discovered." True enough. Unfortunately, for every one of those, millions and millions of stupid or false ideasn have been laughed at too, and with good reason. So take it with a small salt mine.