I would say those guys are looking at the other way to solve problems...
There are two kind of aproaches to a problem:
The analytical approach - divide the problem into it's component parts and then solve each part separatly
The synthetical approach - look at the context of the problem as a way to gather information to solve de problem, and even in some cases just avoid the problem altogether
The analytical approach by itself is not the most efficient way to solve problems - plenty of times you find out that you either solved the wrong problem, took the hardest path or created a new problem.
A good example of how the analytical approach to problem solving doesn't allways work is ( taken from a book whose title i unfortunatly don't remember ) is the following:
If to find out why the cars in Great Britain have the steering-wheel on the right and in the rest of europe have it on the left you apply the analythical approach, you will divide the cars in it's component parts, but as much try you will not find out why it is so. If you apply the synthetical approach you will look at the context in which the cars are and... voilá.
Most programmers ( i know ) seem to be very much into the first approach - they just keep happily (or not) programming the solution to one or other problem, paying little atention to the world around them, when suddenly some unexpected event hits them, and they don't know where it came from (like for instance seeing all your work thrown away because someone didn't really understand what the problem was and told you to solve the wrong thing).
It's time that you guys see that Sometimes to achieve your objectives you have to Hack The World
Forget about phoning the school with bomb threats. Forget about stinky bombs.
There's a new game in town: Snitch on the school buly
Basically, after the Pinkerton guys get some 10 or 20 anonymous calls about a guy ( the school buly ) having antisocial behaviour, they will see a patern emerge - the guy will be called, and will have to answer some really nice questions about his family, his gamming habits,...
This might turn out to be an anti-bully tool instead of an anti-geek tool!!!
Set up a website, with a password protected area containing the MP3 ( for local artists for instance )
People can subscribe to this "mp3 club" 0for a monthly fee and get a username password
The system tracks what you download and stores it in a database
At the end of the month you get a list of the artists/musics you got. You classify each artist from 1 to 5 ( or whatever )
The monthly fee gets distributed to artist depending on their classification for that month
The web site is maintained based on advertising - the whole monthly fee goes directly to artists
The basic idea here is to have a viable business model ( for the owners/maintainers of the web site ) while at the same time rewarding the artists in proportion to the "quality" of their music, and making the consumer only pay for what he likes.
Spying is natural. I would assume that every goverment spies. It's a question of information - Information is power. If i spy on my neighbour, i'm getting power over him, while at the same time removing him of some of his power ( by finding out what he knows about me ). If some people do it to other people, why wouldn't goverments ( which are much more attached to power ) do it ??!
Now the next question - is the spying done on commercial subjects?
Of course it is. Let's put thing this way:
Spying agencies are usually shadowy things, by nature secretive, and as so, it's very dificult to know everything about them, even for very high placed officials. Their basic principle is "What you don't know you can't compromise". So, if some people inside those organisations would pass some of the collected information to external entities ( read companies ), either by misguided patriotism or simply for "monetary incentives", that would be dificult to control, even if there was a higher will to contain such "leaks".
The power you get from spying is just potencial power, it is uselles on itself. Plus, information loses it's potential value over time - it's much more important to know about an event before it's happened or just after it, than it is to know it 50 or 100 years later. Returning to the "spying on your neighbour" story - for instance: you know that your neighbour, every day, leaves his house at a certain hour, and return's at another hour, leaving the house empty in between. That in itself is not very usefull, but if you want to rob his house...
Nowadays, with the end of the Cold War, military power has lost some of it's strength. By association, inteligence gatering of military information has also been on the decay. The real power of today is Money. Naturaly, the inteligence comunity will turn into gatering economical information, as a way of preserving their countries power ( read money ).
My position as an european?
Two things:
In this area european goverments are a shame. Instead of adopting a proactive stance in terms of national defense of information ( for instance with criptography ), only now are they awakening to the dim reality that some have put out there a network to trace every comunication in Europe - up to now, concrete measures are few and weak. Let's admit it - Europe has been out-smarted. ( And don't start me we the French proibition on cryptography - i'm sorry all you french guys out there, but in this matter your goverment c'est une merde ).
Great Britain - either you are european, or you are not - Great Britain is part of the EC, and yet they keep on trying to block changes, and keep supporting spying stations for other powers ( Echelon - please read the Interception 2000 report ). If you don't like the rest of Europe, GET OUT!!!
The values mentioned for the cost of making CDs seem vastly exagerated. I know that there are some Spanish companies that will make you CDs, minimum 1000 units, at 40 pesetas ( about 25 cents ) each. This value is for CD-ROMs, but i assume that it applies to any kind of CD. Think of it this way: It's cheaper to make the CDs in Spain ( or whatever ) and shipping them to the US than it is paying US$7 a piece. I would advice anyone who want's to distribute his music, or his software, or his own Linux distro, to look for the same companies that make CDs that are distributed with magazines ( i hope you don't think that magazines are paying US$7 for each CD they bundle ). Information is power.
I live ( and work ) in Portugal - That's in the westernmost part of Europe - and work in the IT business. In here things are like this: - You officialy work 40 hours per week - In practice, in most companies you work around 50 hours or more. - Sometimes you have to work during weekends and holidays. Of corse all those extra hours are done because you want to do them. So things are not very different from the US, except that here you earn half of what you get in central europe, one-third of what you get in the UK and one-fourth of what you get in the US. Just a view from a different place!
I've been folowing Katz's posts and the replies to them for the following 3 days, and altough it's been an interesting reading, i've noticed one thing:
I've never seen a reply from Katz in any of his threads
Please correct me if i'm wrong
The only kind of reply i've seen are new articles, but no comments from Katz himself.
To me, and comming from someone who so dramaticaly defends the Net as a new media this seems to be a behaviour in the old journalistic tradition:
The journalist is the producer of articles and we are simply consumers - there's no interaction
Katz, from his allmighty position as an originator of articles, throws at us, mere mortals, pieces of his unbounded wisdom.
He is not participating in the discussions - one could almost say that everything that is said by the ones that post the comments is mere gravel in which he walks
Does any one out there also thinks that this is not the way to BE on the Net???
Actualy the problem seems very much to be a lack of appropriate measurements and objectives for low/middle management.
If you are a middle manager, you success might be measured in a plain costs vs revenues scale. This method, however, lacks any strategic depth - for such a manager, specialy given the current job mobility, it makes more sense to generate short-term sucesses by sacrificing long-term sucess (for example, by burning out your best programmers to finish some project in an impossible deadline).
Also any type of investment that will hit the bottom line but only yield results on the medium/long-term will not be made.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two kind of aproaches to a problem:
- The analytical approach - divide the problem into it's component parts and then solve each part separatly
- The synthetical approach - look at the context of the problem as a way to gather information to solve de problem, and even in some cases just avoid the problem altogether
The analytical approach by itself is not the most efficient way to solve problems - plenty of times you find out that you either solved the wrong problem, took the hardest path or created a new problem.A good example of how the analytical approach to problem solving doesn't allways work is ( taken from a book whose title i unfortunatly don't remember ) is the following:
If to find out why the cars in Great Britain have the steering-wheel on the right and in the rest of europe have it on the left you apply the analythical approach, you will divide the cars in it's component parts, but as much try you will not find out why it is so. If you apply the synthetical approach you will look at the context in which the cars are and ... voilá.
Most programmers ( i know ) seem to be very much into the first approach - they just keep happily (or not) programming the solution to one or other problem, paying little atention to the world around them, when suddenly some unexpected event hits them, and they don't know where it came from (like for instance seeing all your work thrown away because someone didn't really understand what the problem was and told you to solve the wrong thing).
It's time that you guys see that Sometimes to achieve your objectives you have to Hack The World
Forget about phoning the school with bomb threats.
Forget about stinky bombs.
There's a new game in town:
Snitch on the school buly
Basically, after the Pinkerton guys get some 10 or 20 anonymous calls about a guy ( the school buly ) having antisocial behaviour, they will see a patern emerge - the guy will be called, and will have to answer some really nice questions about his family, his gamming habits, ...
This might turn out to be an anti-bully tool instead of an anti-geek tool!!!
The basic idea here is to have a viable business model ( for the owners/maintainers of the web site ) while at the same time rewarding the artists in proportion to the "quality" of their music, and making the consumer only pay for what he likes.
How about it?
--- This idea is free of charge ---
Now that i've branded myself let's carry on.
Spying is natural. I would assume that every goverment spies.
It's a question of information - Information is power. If i spy on my neighbour, i'm getting power over him, while at the same time removing him of some of his power ( by finding out what he knows about me ). If some people do it to other people, why wouldn't goverments ( which are much more attached to power ) do it ??!
Now the next question - is the spying done on commercial subjects?
Of course it is. Let's put thing this way:
My position as an european?
Two things:
The values mentioned for the cost of making CDs seem vastly exagerated. I know that there are some Spanish companies that will make you CDs, minimum 1000 units, at 40 pesetas ( about 25 cents ) each. This value is for CD-ROMs, but i assume that it applies to any kind of CD. Think of it this way: It's cheaper to make the CDs in Spain ( or whatever ) and shipping them to the US than it is paying US$7 a piece. I would advice anyone who want's to distribute his music, or his software, or his own Linux distro, to look for the same companies that make CDs that are distributed with magazines ( i hope you don't think that magazines are paying US$7 for each CD they bundle ). Information is power.
I live ( and work ) in Portugal - That's in the westernmost part of Europe - and work in the IT business. In here things are like this: - You officialy work 40 hours per week - In practice, in most companies you work around 50 hours or more. - Sometimes you have to work during weekends and holidays. Of corse all those extra hours are done because you want to do them. So things are not very different from the US, except that here you earn half of what you get in central europe, one-third of what you get in the UK and one-fourth of what you get in the US. Just a view from a different place!
- I've never seen a reply from Katz in any of his threads
Please correct me if i'm wrongThe only kind of reply i've seen are new articles, but no comments from Katz himself.
To me, and comming from someone who so dramaticaly defends the Net as a new media this seems to be a behaviour in the old journalistic tradition:
Katz, from his allmighty position as an originator of articles, throws at us, mere mortals, pieces of his unbounded wisdom.
He is not participating in the discussions - one could almost say that everything that is said by the ones that post the comments is mere gravel in which he walks
Does any one out there also thinks that this is not the way to BE on the Net???
If you are a middle manager, you success might be measured in a plain costs vs revenues scale. This method, however, lacks any strategic depth - for such a manager, specialy given the current job mobility, it makes more sense to generate short-term sucesses by sacrificing long-term sucess (for example, by burning out your best programmers to finish some project in an impossible deadline).
Also any type of investment that will hit the bottom line but only yield results on the medium/long-term will not be made.
Oops - time's up - gotta go!!!