I used to work for a hulking great multinational company; let's call them CompanyName Limited. I was not in the IT department, I hasten to add, but was let in on the top-secret root/NT domain administrator/whatever you call it on that platform password.
You guessed it: CompanyName
After I wiped the tears from my eyes, and my sides stopped hurting, I let some other people in on the secret and it was hastily changed. It's amazing what you won't learn in the process of getting your MCSE.
I used to play this on a friend's Atari 400 (later he upgraded to an 800) in my pre-teen years, and was delighted and fascinated by it. He swore the game spoke German, but it sounded like white noise to me. ("SSCHHZZZSCCH" - "Hear that? They said 'Achtung!'")
Back then you could get somewhere in the game if you cunningly concealed your identity by stealing an SS uniform, but ever since Doom you have to blast your way through a wall of gore.
Don't get me wrong, I love the mad violence of Quake and the Quake-alikes as multi-player games, but Wolf 3D II sounds like a cheap rip-off of a somewhat less cheap rip-off. Unless there's some more compelling reason to play against bots other than they're wearing swasticas, and on better hardware than I've got you could see the sun gleaming off their belt-buckles, I'll give it a miss.
Sony are rank amateurs. Check out the news sometime. Generals covering their own wars, Henry Kissinger a "respected foreign affairs commentator". Who needs journalists,anyway?
Couldn't resist the chance to shamelessly promote it. Anybody in Sydney, check it out. It's going to be a major, major learning curve for me, so I need all the help I can get.
The various business councils, industry groups, associations, institues, thinktanks, lobby groups, "independant" public policy research bodies. Check with your employer. If your employer isn't a member or funder of at least half a dozen of these kinds of organisations, along with your company's major "competitors", I'd be very surprised.
My impression is that the employers are cutthroat competetive with one another.
That's the fairy story. It's probably true when you get down to the level of two corner shops a block apart from one another, but major corporations are so riddled with "strategic alliances", that the idea of consumer market competition is ridiculous.
Capital market competition is another story. A while ago there was a front page story in the Australian Financial Review screaming that regulators need to allow more of Australia's banks to merge, for the sake of competitiveness. On the face of it, that may seem absurd. Fewer competitors = more competition. However, when you realise that corporations aren't competing for customers, they are competing for owners, it makes perfect sense. (These same banks, by the way, have just been caught colluding on employment contracts.)
When you're top priority is increasing the value of you're company's stock, in order to secure investment capital, it makes perfect sense to screw your customers, your employees, the general community, and collude with your "competitors" as much as possible. In a consumer market your competitors are people in your industry; your customers will dump you and go to them. In capital markets, industries don't matter. Your owners can dump your stock, and buy oil companies, candy manufacturers, tulip growers, it doesn't matter. So you and your "competitors" have a common interest in keeping your industry attractive to investors that, given the balance of power in today's world economy, far outweighs any consumer or labour market pressures most of the time.
You're right about capital mobility. If you go on strike in the US, your employer is quite willing to move overseas. Or beat you up, intimidate your family, kill you, whatever - it's all happened many times before.
Well, okay then. What's the answer? If, for example, the workers involved and the general community recognise that GPLing your code leads to better software and more of it, how do you get companies to agree to this if it erodes their inefficient (from everybody's perspective but the shareholders') monopoly control of "their" code, and they'll move offshore rather than see that happen? Obviously you need a global union.
The Industrial Workers of the World has been around for nearly a century, and despite extraordinary persecution, is getting stronger year by year. Check it out. I don't think anything about this is unrealistic, and what we might expect of democratically-run industry is just mind-boggling. Helping free software, if that's you're thing (It's mine), is just the tip of the iceberg.
Disclaimer: I'm a delegate with the IWW in Australia, so I know what I'm talking about. Some people might consider that bias. (AC wobbly who posted the parent, please email me).
I'm sure anybody in the GNU project will tell you that the HURD became a low priority as soon as Linux came out. It's taken this long to become useable because there is already a GPL'd kernel available, so people are working on it because it's interesting, rather than urgently required.
If you take that into consideration, the "window of opportunity" shrinks somewhat, and we could well have been a year or so away from using GNU/HURD rather than GNU/Linux.
Maybe Macromedia Authorware? A few years ago, probably about the same vintage as YDKJ, I tried converting a training package done in Authorware to Shockwave to run over a company's intranet (Macromedia had some sort of package to do this, as I recall).
Bottom line was that even over a LAN performance was appalling, and for sales reps dialing in from laptops, it was out of the question. However if the client and server are the same machine, you may be able to get away with it.
I think the unjustifiable assumption in this argument is that there is a significant amount worthwhile content in the common ground of traditional media. Also that this common ground is not already being filtered. It is being filtered of course, but not by an online community of your peers.
"There will be no material that may give offense either directly or by inference to any commercial organization of any sort. There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless and lacking all sentimental or spiritual motivation....Members of the armed forces must not be cast as villains. If there is any attack on American customs, it must be rebutted completely on the same show." - Editorial guidelines insisted on by major advertiser Proctor & Gamble, quoted in Michael Parenti, Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment
Moreover, if media is not only filtered but propagated by one's peers, I think it's more likely that we'll have greater access to a wide variety of content. In effect, we may be "six degrees of separation" from virtually everything out there.
I agree that the concern over concentration over owned media is to some degree misdirected. What ought to be a concern is not that ownership of the major media is concentrated in a dozen, rather than a thousand hands, but that there should be some alternative to owned media at all.
The picture of the world you get from the corporate media now is probably little different to what you would have heard thirty years ago, although it's certainly broadened in some ways, narrowed in others. It's hardly true, however, to say that the range of content hasn't narrowed at all due to concentration of ownership. Robert McChesney's done a lot of good writing on this. A major problem is horizontal integration.
Say a movie studio can make either one of two movies. One of these is obviously suitable material for a soundrack album, novelisation, a range of toys, a spin-off TV series, etc. The other is just a movie. When the parent company of the film studio is the parent company of the record label, book publisher, toy manufacturer, TV network, etc., which one gets made? Obviously the one that "adds value" to as many subsidiaries as possible, regardless of the merit of the other, which may even be likely to do better at the box office.
Take a look at just about anything you see in the media, and you're likely to come across the same phenomenon. Children's content is a particularly egregious example. Twenty years ago, I was watching children's programming that was basically a couple of guys in a studio showing you how to do kitchen-sink science experiments. It was great. Can you imagine a McDonald's Happy Meal where you get a used toilet roll and a handful of pipe-cleaners? So that kind of programming fares not so well these days against stuff that has an associated video game, action figure, lunch box, glossy magazine, etc.
So what are the options for online media now that the banner ad ride seems to be over? As Kurt Gray from OSDN says here:
These web sites have grown way beyond the realm of affordable to operate by volunteers and donors. If OSDN and/or VA collapsed someday then the OSDN web sites would not be simply released back into the wild but rather be liquidated as assets to the highest bidder, and you can bet the new owners would gladly run these sites into the ground for every last penny they can quickly earn from them.
What we've had for the last few years is a three-tier Web of volunteer sites, sponsored (i.e. banner-ad) "community" sites, and the corporate media. If, as seems to be the case, advertising revenue is no longer viable to the extent that it once was on the web, it's not unreasonable to predict that we'll be seeing slashdot.cnet.com (or whatever) before it's re-branded as "CNET Geek Culture" and eventually left to die, with no audience left to mourn it's passing. We've all seen ad-revenue sites go this way before.
Slashdot's attitude in the past has been to accept corporate backing provided there's no editorial interference, which is perfectly reasonable. So what happens if slashdot ceases to support itself with the revenue from advertising? Well, it's going to have to add value to the activities of the other subsidiaries of it's owner in some way, by integrating itself into the standard network of cross-promotion. So it either changes it's attitude or goes under, as descibed above.
The bottom line is that, assuming banner ads are on the way out, Slashdot as it is today is not viable within the corporate media. This limitation on the kinds of media we can have is not a consequense of concentration of ownership. This is what will happen if you assume all media must be owned. There are other options, and they ought to be explored if we want to get something other than a diet of "news McNuggets".
I've read a fair bit from RMS, and I've yet to find any acknowledgement of a philosophical debt to Marx. If you want to go through Marx's writings to find connections between the philosophies of Marx and RMS, I'm sure you could find plenty, and a cure for insomnia at the same time. But you could play that game with any writer:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
--Thomas Jefferson
So why isn't RMS accused of being a raving Jeffersonian? Perhaps because there are plenty of people propagandised into believing that the limitless extension of property rights represents "the American way", and that the only conceivable criticism of the American way comes from state communism, therefore any criticism of any form of property rights must come from a communist.
I find it hard to read the comments where any story regarding RMS is concerned. I would be the last person to proclaim that "Slashdot sucks!" but there are definitely some topics that are guaranteed to produce little else but torrents of incoherent abuse.
As the author of this story on K5 said of his Slashdot experience:
"...it was picked up by Slashdot and my network connection and server were pretty much useless for 24 hours as over 200,000 hits logged up.... I had hoped that the Slashdot article might produce interesting ideas; instead, RMS' affiliation with goat.cx and the communist party were discussed."
I find all the venomous, mindless, jingoistic, capitalistic raving that accompanies the slightest mention of RMS really disturbing. I can't believe the amount of people who appear to spend the day poised in front of their computer, ready to defend the American way from the insidious attacks of creeping socialism. They never tire of their repetitiveness. They're not bothered by being incessantly off-topic. This is the land of the free, home of the brave, goddammit! There's no place for dissenting opinions here, so we gotta shout them down from a position of secure anonymity!
I can only hope it's the product of a very few unwell individuals who lack the courage to write their names on a toilet wall, and not representative of the attidude of a significant portion of the American public.
Re:As a television licence payer...
on
Hope For H2G2
·
· Score: 1
The BBC was corporatised in the 1980's, which changed it's character radically. AFAIK, there's practically nothing produced in-house now apart from news and sports coverage. Anything else is done by independant production companies, who rely on sales to mass markets elsewehere in the world to keep afloat.
The result is conservatism. You'll get plenty of critically accliamed detective thrillers, but little as inventive, brilliant, eccentric, etc., as [insert name of your favourite BBC series here].
As for DA, he's a very funny writer with one of the most distinctive 'voices' of the twentieth century. He's also notoriously lazy. I'm sure he'll get to work on a new book soon. Just as soon as he's finished this bath...
I see thing from a slightly different perspective than you. I do the occasional website for non-profits, community organistions, and so on. These people don't have the resources to have a developer spending days formulating "if browser=X" code and worrying about which subset of the standards are "browser-safe". In such a situation, especially now that users have the option of both downgrading and upgrading, you can't afford to take on the cost of your audience using broken browsers.
I agree that redirecting people away from your content is not the best solution. A simple "This site is worst viewed using Nav4.x, IE 4.x, or IE3.x" message and a link to the WSP's site is appropriate, assuming your users are all grown-ups.
This would have been better presented as a "Don't Use Broken Browsers" campaign.
There is no problem using HTML 4 or CSS in Netscape 3, or even Mosaic as far as I'm aware, since the standards are designed in such a way that standards-compliant content "degrades gracefully" in older browsers. It may not look pretty, but it will be legible.
In other words, there is no problem with browsers that don't implement the latest and greatest standards, the problem is that (with respect to CSS at least) Nav4.x, IE 4.x and 3.x, implemented them brokenly. As I've said many times before, this is either due to such staggering incompetance that it's a wonder anybody at Microsoft or Netscape can tie their own shoelaces, or it's a result of a deliberate strategy on the part of both parties to hijack or at least derail the standards process, fully aware of the harm that would do to users and developers.
Now perhaps the WSP is just being diplomatic now that Netscape is doing the right thing (more or less), but saying "upgrade or else", is just going to elicit the sort of resposes seen here. The WSP ought to be as clear as it has been in the past in saying certain browsers are a menace, just don't use them.
Gee, thanks for warning me. You're right not to take the time listen to anybody with "political" views. You might have to think for yourself. It's easier to listen only to the "apolitical" people and accept everything they say at face value.
Thanks for saving me from manipulation by people with a sinister "agenda". I'm relieved to hear that the apolitical people have no agenda, beyond desiring only what's best for me.
"Granted, there's a point when government can stop funding research once it becomes profitable enough for business to carry it forward..."
This might be rephrased a little less charitably as "Once the public has paid the cost of developing the technology, business steps in to collect the profits." Standard practice in American high-tech industry.
As a system it is, as many here have pointed out, very efficient; an efficient mechanism for transferring money from taxpayers to the owners of large corporations. You pay for developing the technology, then pay a second time to be allowed to use it. It's a highly lucrative little scam, made possible by the system of intellectual property rights originally indended as an incentive to innovation, but now used principally as a licence to print money. A gift from the American people to their owners.
"...frankly if I got junk mail about obscure Who stuff, I'd be happy. Much better then credit cards, viagra, and stock tips. As long as its opt-in."
You've said this may times before, Rob. I agree it's a brilliant idea, and in fact you are in a perfect position to put such a scheme in place.
I don't think I've bought anything in the last year that didn't come from my local butcher, greengrocer, newsagent, or supermarket. Therefore, any advertising from anynywhere but these institutions is wasted. In fact, if it's truly a matter of "opt-in" I wouldn't want to see any advertising from these enterprises either.
Now there's a very simple way you could implement a scheme to help me out here. Get your banner ads from, say, ads.slashdot.org, rather than images.slashdot.org. That way, I can easily block advertising not relevant to me (ie. all of it) without losing all the great topic icons I've come to love so much.
Indeed, you could refine this very easily implemented system by introducing:
linux-ads.slashdot.org
website-ads.slashdot.org
hardware-ads.slashdot.org, and so on
Of course all these DNS entries point to the same server, so it costs you nothing in hardware, just a few minutes editing conf files.
Go on. Do it. Somebody has to be the first to implement your dream of opt-in advertising. Tell all your advertisers about it. I dare ya.
On the contrary, I use a small ISP (SneakerNet in Sydney, tell them I sent you), and have found it to be exactly the opposite of what you describe, much to my delight.
It's as cheap as any in my area - a damn sight cheaper than AOL or one of the telcos. The user-to-modem and modem-to-bandwidth ratios couldn't be better. Front-line tech support is the guy who owns the business, who has a day job, but can still be contacted if something goes wrong. The accounts department - I forget her name - is conveniently inattentive, which comes in handy during periods of cash-flow problems when I've been known to be half a year or more behind in my payments.
In short, it's the perfect service. Whether it's viable as a business is largely irrelevant, as I understand it's run as a hobby. Any profits end up going to upgrade hardware. In fact this would be a fantastic model for a bandwidth co-op. If you have a couple of dozen geeks in the same area code, set up a modem bank and a proxy server and split the bandwidth cost between you. Bound to be cheaper than a big ISP.
Problem is, of course, that your bandwidth provider probably provides end-user ISP services themselves, and wouldn't take kindly to the competition. In fact, I think it would be hard to find any these days that didn't explicity forbid such a thing in their terms of service.
I've heard stories from ex-small-ISP-proprietors that at the time the big telcos moved into the ISP business, the service from their bandwidth suppliers (the aforementioned big telcos) became suddenly very unreliable. Okay, that's something of an ubsubstantiated conspiracy theory, but I think there's grounds for believing that the dearth of small ISP's, run as business, hobby, co-op, or whatever, is nothing to do with unviability, more a consequence of the vertical integration of the few, now overwhelmingly dominant, players that can manipulate the market to suit themselves.
.NET isn't just a response to Java. Think back to the findings of fact in the anti-trust trial. The thing that scares Microsoft even more than free software is "the middleware threat".
Microsoft's core asset is it's ubiquity, and any cross-platform middleware layer is a threat to that. They've been beating out brushfires on that front since at least "the browser wars" (Browser war is hell, by the way. Pray you never have to send your sons off to serve on the front lines. I lost my best buddy to a stray MIME type. One minute he was standing right next to me, the next minute all the helper apps in the world couldn't save him.)
MS has decided it can't afford to go after each new entrant into this territory, so it's going to have to colonise it. So we'll get a binary-only stripped-down windows emulator that runs on only those platforms MS feels it needs to support. My guess is this will be exactly the same platforms they've ported IE to, with promises to port to others once certain technical issues (related to the OS - FUD) have been addressed.
As for Microsoft's claims that.NET will be standards-based: anybody using ECMAScript? Isn't it great? Now nobody needs to be scared to use JavaScript anymore. Both Microsoft and Netscape worked on the spec, so obviously all browsers from them since have stuck to it, right? And doesn't CSS work like a dream in all the browsers that trumpet their support of this open standard? Microsoft (and Netscape, and Sun, and...) have been playing this game of "Kick the ball, Charlie Brown" with us for years. That's one reason why you should stick to free software.
MS can't leverage their monopoly if anybody can get their hands on the lever. If they are counting on the death of the desktop, and essentially giving their next platform away for free, you can be certain they've got a strategy for turning their dominance into a revenue stream. Whatever the strategy is, it's going to be bad news. Learn the lesson. Microsoft don't play nice, so don't play with them.
You're right. This is about the third article I've read in as many days telling me how lucky I am to work in this industry. Actually I burned out of this industry (not real programming to be honest - web stuff) a couple of years ago and haven't been able to face it since.
It's particularly ironic that this comes from someone who's been put out to pasture at Microsoft, where they specialise in competantly flogging the dead horses of genres developed years ago (probably by the same people they've poached and have set up in front of their production line).
Who's going to pay you? Ninety-nine percent of the time it's someone who's only concern is the bottom line, and who is only willing to place safe bets on adequate reworkings of ideas that have gone before. This applies to any work, not just games, not just IT. So you get your consolation from the technical challenges, which if you're able to ignore the big picture will probably save your sanity whether you're a games programmer, coding financial crap, or a burger flipper.
The only people I've seen who are happy with wage slavery are the ones who approach it like a crossword puzzle, and aren't in the least bit perturbed that what they are doing is at best pointless, if not wasteful and destructive. It pays not to be a big picture person.
If you're concerned about working in freedom, check out these people. I happen to be one of them. Work with others to liberate yourself.
I like the solution that Abbie Hoffman proposed for junk mail: When you get something with a reply-paid envelope in it, tape the envelope to a house brick and pop it in the post. The spammer has to pay for the weight.
Insufficient investment incentives:
This is really ironic in the light of recent "welfare reforms" to move us towards a US-style "tough love" society. Incentive for workers is "work for us or starve, or go to prison"; incentive for multinational corporations is "here's pots of money - go crazy!"
Inadequate infrastructure and bandwith:
Bandwidth for what? A one-way pipeline from advertiser to you. I can see the point of getting the equivalent of a T1 to every home in the country if I could run a server from home, but every cable modem service I've seen prohibits running servers in the Terms of Service. I want the Internet, not MSN on steroids. Who's asking to be the target of "datacasting" or "media convergence"? I've already got a TV, and it's been sitting idle since I found the net.
Insufficient support for information economy R&D:
The fact that R&D tax concessions exist at all is outrageous, so it may be some consolation that Miscrosoft considers them inadequate. How on earth can you argue that research directed by private power must be paid for by the public?
Failure to create local centres of excellence:
"Australia could stand to benefit if it were able to increase the competitiveness of its institutions of higher education..." Now correct me if I'm wrong , but isn't the purpose of an institution of higher education to educate people? The reason why I've never gone to university is that they already serve as publicly-subsidised skilled worker farms, competing to meet the needs of the private sector.
Failure to protect against piracy:
Heven't these people heard of RMS? It's not "piracy", it's "sharing". It's academic anyway, since it's getting to the point where there's enough good free software around that nobody needs to share Microsoft software anyway. This is good news for Microsoft; if nobody uses their software, nobody's "pirating" it.
A skills shortage:
Garbage. We've probably got more MSCEs and VBScript kiddies per capita than any country on earth, thanks to Microsoft's effective marketing of their powerful and innovative technologies. I mean in my book, that consitutes a skills shortage, but surely to Microsoft it's a cornucopia.
Lack of access to capital:
No, when "investment" is a byword for "plunder", the problem is too much access to capital. I recommend reading economist Frank Stillwell's "Changing Track" for a good summary of the effects of "opening up the economy", also Jane Kelsey has written comprehensively of the New Zealand experience. Basically, the consequense of "investment incentives", and the privatisation of public assets in Australia and New Zealand has been that most of the wealth generated by economic activity in these countries leaves them, never to return.
(b) An obvious rip-off, compared to free ("speech" or "beer") software.
Therefore nobody in their right minds will buy into it; not developers, and not users. The problem is, there's a third customer here: businesses.
Why are people using Windows and MS Office at home? Because it's stable, based on open standards ("interoperable"), inexpensive, and easy to use? Or because that's what everybody uses at work?
Why are there a hundred VBScript kiddies for every genuine hacker? Because the timeless allure of BASIC is so irresistable? Or because that's about the ratio of Visual-Active-whatever developer jobs to jobs for programmers.
Some people are asking who in their right mind would pay over and over again for the same software, and be at the mercy of one company for service delivery. Show me a company that doesn't. Large corporations don't have in-house IT departments any more; smaller corporations never had them. They sign "just make it work, ok?" contracts with outsource companies, and pay through the nose to not worry about how technically efficient, interoperable, and so on, their software is. A business is going to look at.NET and ask "why are we operating a server farm with an army of contractors when all we need is a firewall and we can suck all this stuff down the wire from Microsoft?".
Microsoft doesn't have to convince developers or users to adopt.NET, just corporate managers. Promise the world, throw in enough buzzwords and acronyms, let the technical problems work themselves out once the sale's been made. Get to the people who run the world, and the world will follow.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work for a hulking great multinational company; let's call them CompanyName Limited. I was not in the IT department, I hasten to add, but was let in on the top-secret root/NT domain administrator/whatever you call it on that platform password.
You guessed it: CompanyName
After I wiped the tears from my eyes, and my sides stopped hurting, I let some other people in on the secret and it was hastily changed. It's amazing what you won't learn in the process of getting your MCSE.
This sounds great, but has anybody explored the possibility of serving X apps from a Beowulf cluster of similarly pre-loved equipment?
Call me perverse, but running 486/Pentium terminals off a virtual Athlon which is actually a cluster of 486/Pentiums appeals greatly to me.
I used to play this on a friend's Atari 400 (later he upgraded to an 800) in my pre-teen years, and was delighted and fascinated by it. He swore the game spoke German, but it sounded like white noise to me. ("SSCHHZZZSCCH" - "Hear that? They said 'Achtung!'")
Back then you could get somewhere in the game if you cunningly concealed your identity by stealing an SS uniform, but ever since Doom you have to blast your way through a wall of gore.
Don't get me wrong, I love the mad violence of Quake and the Quake-alikes as multi-player games, but Wolf 3D II sounds like a cheap rip-off of a somewhat less cheap rip-off. Unless there's some more compelling reason to play against bots other than they're wearing swasticas, and on better hardware than I've got you could see the sun gleaming off their belt-buckles, I'll give it a miss.
Sony are rank amateurs. Check out the news sometime. Generals covering their own wars, Henry Kissinger a "respected foreign affairs commentator". Who needs journalists,anyway?
Indeed it would. I'm working on a community project in Sydney, Australia to do (among other things), just that using recycled hardware.
Couldn't resist the chance to shamelessly promote it. Anybody in Sydney, check it out. It's going to be a major, major learning curve for me, so I need all the help I can get.
The various business councils, industry groups, associations, institues, thinktanks, lobby groups, "independant" public policy research bodies. Check with your employer. If your employer isn't a member or funder of at least half a dozen of these kinds of organisations, along with your company's major "competitors", I'd be very surprised.
That's the fairy story. It's probably true when you get down to the level of two corner shops a block apart from one another, but major corporations are so riddled with "strategic alliances", that the idea of consumer market competition is ridiculous.
Capital market competition is another story. A while ago there was a front page story in the Australian Financial Review screaming that regulators need to allow more of Australia's banks to merge, for the sake of competitiveness. On the face of it, that may seem absurd. Fewer competitors = more competition. However, when you realise that corporations aren't competing for customers, they are competing for owners, it makes perfect sense. (These same banks, by the way, have just been caught colluding on employment contracts.)
When you're top priority is increasing the value of you're company's stock, in order to secure investment capital, it makes perfect sense to screw your customers, your employees, the general community, and collude with your "competitors" as much as possible. In a consumer market your competitors are people in your industry; your customers will dump you and go to them. In capital markets, industries don't matter. Your owners can dump your stock, and buy oil companies, candy manufacturers, tulip growers, it doesn't matter. So you and your "competitors" have a common interest in keeping your industry attractive to investors that, given the balance of power in today's world economy, far outweighs any consumer or labour market pressures most of the time.
You're right about capital mobility. If you go on strike in the US, your employer is quite willing to move overseas. Or beat you up, intimidate your family, kill you, whatever - it's all happened many times before.
Well, okay then. What's the answer? If, for example, the workers involved and the general community recognise that GPLing your code leads to better software and more of it, how do you get companies to agree to this if it erodes their inefficient (from everybody's perspective but the shareholders') monopoly control of "their" code, and they'll move offshore rather than see that happen? Obviously you need a global union.
The Industrial Workers of the World has been around for nearly a century, and despite extraordinary persecution, is getting stronger year by year. Check it out. I don't think anything about this is unrealistic, and what we might expect of democratically-run industry is just mind-boggling. Helping free software, if that's you're thing (It's mine), is just the tip of the iceberg.
Disclaimer: I'm a delegate with the IWW in Australia, so I know what I'm talking about. Some people might consider that bias. (AC wobbly who posted the parent, please email me).
I'm sure anybody in the GNU project will tell you that the HURD became a low priority as soon as Linux came out. It's taken this long to become useable because there is already a GPL'd kernel available, so people are working on it because it's interesting, rather than urgently required.
If you take that into consideration, the "window of opportunity" shrinks somewhat, and we could well have been a year or so away from using GNU/HURD rather than GNU/Linux.
Maybe Macromedia Authorware? A few years ago, probably about the same vintage as YDKJ, I tried converting a training package done in Authorware to Shockwave to run over a company's intranet (Macromedia had some sort of package to do this, as I recall).
Bottom line was that even over a LAN performance was appalling, and for sales reps dialing in from laptops, it was out of the question. However if the client and server are the same machine, you may be able to get away with it.
I think the unjustifiable assumption in this argument is that there is a significant amount worthwhile content in the common ground of traditional media. Also that this common ground is not already being filtered. It is being filtered of course, but not by an online community of your peers.
Moreover, if media is not only filtered but propagated by one's peers, I think it's more likely that we'll have greater access to a wide variety of content. In effect, we may be "six degrees of separation" from virtually everything out there.
I agree that the concern over concentration over owned media is to some degree misdirected. What ought to be a concern is not that ownership of the major media is concentrated in a dozen, rather than a thousand hands, but that there should be some alternative to owned media at all.
The picture of the world you get from the corporate media now is probably little different to what you would have heard thirty years ago, although it's certainly broadened in some ways, narrowed in others. It's hardly true, however, to say that the range of content hasn't narrowed at all due to concentration of ownership. Robert McChesney's done a lot of good writing on this. A major problem is horizontal integration.
Say a movie studio can make either one of two movies. One of these is obviously suitable material for a soundrack album, novelisation, a range of toys, a spin-off TV series, etc. The other is just a movie. When the parent company of the film studio is the parent company of the record label, book publisher, toy manufacturer, TV network, etc., which one gets made? Obviously the one that "adds value" to as many subsidiaries as possible, regardless of the merit of the other, which may even be likely to do better at the box office.
Take a look at just about anything you see in the media, and you're likely to come across the same phenomenon. Children's content is a particularly egregious example. Twenty years ago, I was watching children's programming that was basically a couple of guys in a studio showing you how to do kitchen-sink science experiments. It was great. Can you imagine a McDonald's Happy Meal where you get a used toilet roll and a handful of pipe-cleaners? So that kind of programming fares not so well these days against stuff that has an associated video game, action figure, lunch box, glossy magazine, etc.
So what are the options for online media now that the banner ad ride seems to be over? As Kurt Gray from OSDN says here:
What we've had for the last few years is a three-tier Web of volunteer sites, sponsored (i.e. banner-ad) "community" sites, and the corporate media. If, as seems to be the case, advertising revenue is no longer viable to the extent that it once was on the web, it's not unreasonable to predict that we'll be seeing slashdot.cnet.com (or whatever) before it's re-branded as "CNET Geek Culture" and eventually left to die, with no audience left to mourn it's passing. We've all seen ad-revenue sites go this way before.
Slashdot's attitude in the past has been to accept corporate backing provided there's no editorial interference, which is perfectly reasonable. So what happens if slashdot ceases to support itself with the revenue from advertising? Well, it's going to have to add value to the activities of the other subsidiaries of it's owner in some way, by integrating itself into the standard network of cross-promotion. So it either changes it's attitude or goes under, as descibed above.
The bottom line is that, assuming banner ads are on the way out, Slashdot as it is today is not viable within the corporate media. This limitation on the kinds of media we can have is not a consequense of concentration of ownership. This is what will happen if you assume all media must be owned. There are other options, and they ought to be explored if we want to get something other than a diet of "news McNuggets".
I've read a fair bit from RMS, and I've yet to find any acknowledgement of a philosophical debt to Marx. If you want to go through Marx's writings to find connections between the philosophies of Marx and RMS, I'm sure you could find plenty, and a cure for insomnia at the same time. But you could play that game with any writer:
So why isn't RMS accused of being a raving Jeffersonian? Perhaps because there are plenty of people propagandised into believing that the limitless extension of property rights represents "the American way", and that the only conceivable criticism of the American way comes from state communism, therefore any criticism of any form of property rights must come from a communist.
I find it hard to read the comments where any story regarding RMS is concerned. I would be the last person to proclaim that "Slashdot sucks!" but there are definitely some topics that are guaranteed to produce little else but torrents of incoherent abuse.
As the author of this story on K5 said of his Slashdot experience:
I find all the venomous, mindless, jingoistic, capitalistic raving that accompanies the slightest mention of RMS really disturbing. I can't believe the amount of people who appear to spend the day poised in front of their computer, ready to defend the American way from the insidious attacks of creeping socialism. They never tire of their repetitiveness. They're not bothered by being incessantly off-topic. This is the land of the free, home of the brave, goddammit! There's no place for dissenting opinions here, so we gotta shout them down from a position of secure anonymity!
I can only hope it's the product of a very few unwell individuals who lack the courage to write their names on a toilet wall, and not representative of the attidude of a significant portion of the American public.
The BBC was corporatised in the 1980's, which changed it's character radically. AFAIK, there's practically nothing produced in-house now apart from news and sports coverage. Anything else is done by independant production companies, who rely on sales to mass markets elsewehere in the world to keep afloat.
The result is conservatism. You'll get plenty of critically accliamed detective thrillers, but little as inventive, brilliant, eccentric, etc., as [insert name of your favourite BBC series here].
As for DA, he's a very funny writer with one of the most distinctive 'voices' of the twentieth century. He's also notoriously lazy. I'm sure he'll get to work on a new book soon. Just as soon as he's finished this bath...
I see thing from a slightly different perspective than you. I do the occasional website for non-profits, community organistions, and so on. These people don't have the resources to have a developer spending days formulating "if browser=X" code and worrying about which subset of the standards are "browser-safe". In such a situation, especially now that users have the option of both downgrading and upgrading, you can't afford to take on the cost of your audience using broken browsers.
I agree that redirecting people away from your content is not the best solution. A simple "This site is worst viewed using Nav4.x, IE 4.x, or IE3.x" message and a link to the WSP's site is appropriate, assuming your users are all grown-ups.
This would have been better presented as a "Don't Use Broken Browsers" campaign.
There is no problem using HTML 4 or CSS in Netscape 3, or even Mosaic as far as I'm aware, since the standards are designed in such a way that standards-compliant content "degrades gracefully" in older browsers. It may not look pretty, but it will be legible.
In other words, there is no problem with browsers that don't implement the latest and greatest standards, the problem is that (with respect to CSS at least) Nav4.x, IE 4.x and 3.x, implemented them brokenly. As I've said many times before, this is either due to such staggering incompetance that it's a wonder anybody at Microsoft or Netscape can tie their own shoelaces, or it's a result of a deliberate strategy on the part of both parties to hijack or at least derail the standards process, fully aware of the harm that would do to users and developers.
Now perhaps the WSP is just being diplomatic now that Netscape is doing the right thing (more or less), but saying "upgrade or else", is just going to elicit the sort of resposes seen here. The WSP ought to be as clear as it has been in the past in saying certain browsers are a menace, just don't use them.
Gee, thanks for warning me. You're right not to take the time listen to anybody with "political" views. You might have to think for yourself. It's easier to listen only to the "apolitical" people and accept everything they say at face value.
Thanks for saving me from manipulation by people with a sinister "agenda". I'm relieved to hear that the apolitical people have no agenda, beyond desiring only what's best for me.
This might be rephrased a little less charitably as "Once the public has paid the cost of developing the technology, business steps in to collect the profits." Standard practice in American high-tech industry.
As a system it is, as many here have pointed out, very efficient; an efficient mechanism for transferring money from taxpayers to the owners of large corporations. You pay for developing the technology, then pay a second time to be allowed to use it. It's a highly lucrative little scam, made possible by the system of intellectual property rights originally indended as an incentive to innovation, but now used principally as a licence to print money. A gift from the American people to their owners.
You've said this may times before, Rob. I agree it's a brilliant idea, and in fact you are in a perfect position to put such a scheme in place.
I don't think I've bought anything in the last year that didn't come from my local butcher, greengrocer, newsagent, or supermarket. Therefore, any advertising from anynywhere but these institutions is wasted. In fact, if it's truly a matter of "opt-in" I wouldn't want to see any advertising from these enterprises either.
Now there's a very simple way you could implement a scheme to help me out here. Get your banner ads from, say, ads.slashdot.org, rather than images.slashdot.org. That way, I can easily block advertising not relevant to me (ie. all of it) without losing all the great topic icons I've come to love so much.
Indeed, you could refine this very easily implemented system by introducing:
Of course all these DNS entries point to the same server, so it costs you nothing in hardware, just a few minutes editing conf files.
Go on. Do it. Somebody has to be the first to implement your dream of opt-in advertising. Tell all your advertisers about it. I dare ya.
On the contrary, I use a small ISP (SneakerNet in Sydney, tell them I sent you), and have found it to be exactly the opposite of what you describe, much to my delight.
It's as cheap as any in my area - a damn sight cheaper than AOL or one of the telcos. The user-to-modem and modem-to-bandwidth ratios couldn't be better. Front-line tech support is the guy who owns the business, who has a day job, but can still be contacted if something goes wrong. The accounts department - I forget her name - is conveniently inattentive, which comes in handy during periods of cash-flow problems when I've been known to be half a year or more behind in my payments.
In short, it's the perfect service. Whether it's viable as a business is largely irrelevant, as I understand it's run as a hobby. Any profits end up going to upgrade hardware. In fact this would be a fantastic model for a bandwidth co-op. If you have a couple of dozen geeks in the same area code, set up a modem bank and a proxy server and split the bandwidth cost between you. Bound to be cheaper than a big ISP.
Problem is, of course, that your bandwidth provider probably provides end-user ISP services themselves, and wouldn't take kindly to the competition. In fact, I think it would be hard to find any these days that didn't explicity forbid such a thing in their terms of service.
I've heard stories from ex-small-ISP-proprietors that at the time the big telcos moved into the ISP business, the service from their bandwidth suppliers (the aforementioned big telcos) became suddenly very unreliable. Okay, that's something of an ubsubstantiated conspiracy theory, but I think there's grounds for believing that the dearth of small ISP's, run as business, hobby, co-op, or whatever, is nothing to do with unviability, more a consequence of the vertical integration of the few, now overwhelmingly dominant, players that can manipulate the market to suit themselves.
.NET isn't just a response to Java. Think back to the findings of fact in the anti-trust trial. The thing that scares Microsoft even more than free software is "the middleware threat".
Microsoft's core asset is it's ubiquity, and any cross-platform middleware layer is a threat to that. They've been beating out brushfires on that front since at least "the browser wars" (Browser war is hell, by the way. Pray you never have to send your sons off to serve on the front lines. I lost my best buddy to a stray MIME type. One minute he was standing right next to me, the next minute all the helper apps in the world couldn't save him.)
MS has decided it can't afford to go after each new entrant into this territory, so it's going to have to colonise it. So we'll get a binary-only stripped-down windows emulator that runs on only those platforms MS feels it needs to support. My guess is this will be exactly the same platforms they've ported IE to, with promises to port to others once certain technical issues (related to the OS - FUD) have been addressed.
As for Microsoft's claims that .NET will be standards-based: anybody using ECMAScript? Isn't it great? Now nobody needs to be scared to use JavaScript anymore. Both Microsoft and Netscape worked on the spec, so obviously all browsers from them since have stuck to it, right? And doesn't CSS work like a dream in all the browsers that trumpet their support of this open standard? Microsoft (and Netscape, and Sun, and...) have been playing this game of "Kick the ball, Charlie Brown" with us for years. That's one reason why you should stick to free software.
MS can't leverage their monopoly if anybody can get their hands on the lever. If they are counting on the death of the desktop, and essentially giving their next platform away for free, you can be certain they've got a strategy for turning their dominance into a revenue stream. Whatever the strategy is, it's going to be bad news. Learn the lesson. Microsoft don't play nice, so don't play with them.
No, it's "I Won't Work", or "I Want Whiskey". Honestly, you had a better class of blockhead in days gone by...
BTW, you're in a forced labour camp already, you just don't know it.
You're right. This is about the third article I've read in as many days telling me how lucky I am to work in this industry. Actually I burned out of this industry (not real programming to be honest - web stuff) a couple of years ago and haven't been able to face it since.
It's particularly ironic that this comes from someone who's been put out to pasture at Microsoft, where they specialise in competantly flogging the dead horses of genres developed years ago (probably by the same people they've poached and have set up in front of their production line).
Who's going to pay you? Ninety-nine percent of the time it's someone who's only concern is the bottom line, and who is only willing to place safe bets on adequate reworkings of ideas that have gone before. This applies to any work, not just games, not just IT. So you get your consolation from the technical challenges, which if you're able to ignore the big picture will probably save your sanity whether you're a games programmer, coding financial crap, or a burger flipper.
The only people I've seen who are happy with wage slavery are the ones who approach it like a crossword puzzle, and aren't in the least bit perturbed that what they are doing is at best pointless, if not wasteful and destructive. It pays not to be a big picture person.
If you're concerned about working in freedom, check out these people. I happen to be one of them. Work with others to liberate yourself.
I like the solution that Abbie Hoffman proposed for junk mail: When you get something with a reply-paid envelope in it, tape the envelope to a house brick and pop it in the post. The spammer has to pay for the weight.
Insufficient investment incentives:
This is really ironic in the light of recent "welfare reforms" to move us towards a US-style "tough love" society. Incentive for workers is "work for us or starve, or go to prison"; incentive for multinational corporations is "here's pots of money - go crazy!"
Inadequate infrastructure and bandwith:
Bandwidth for what? A one-way pipeline from advertiser to you. I can see the point of getting the equivalent of a T1 to every home in the country if I could run a server from home, but every cable modem service I've seen prohibits running servers in the Terms of Service. I want the Internet, not MSN on steroids. Who's asking to be the target of "datacasting" or "media convergence"? I've already got a TV, and it's been sitting idle since I found the net.
Insufficient support for information economy R&D:
The fact that R&D tax concessions exist at all is outrageous, so it may be some consolation that Miscrosoft considers them inadequate. How on earth can you argue that research directed by private power must be paid for by the public?
Failure to create local centres of excellence:
"Australia could stand to benefit if it were able to increase the competitiveness of its institutions of higher education..." Now correct me if I'm wrong , but isn't the purpose of an institution of higher education to educate people? The reason why I've never gone to university is that they already serve as publicly-subsidised skilled worker farms, competing to meet the needs of the private sector.
Failure to protect against piracy:
Heven't these people heard of RMS? It's not "piracy", it's "sharing". It's academic anyway, since it's getting to the point where there's enough good free software around that nobody needs to share Microsoft software anyway. This is good news for Microsoft; if nobody uses their software, nobody's "pirating" it.
A skills shortage:
Garbage. We've probably got more MSCEs and VBScript kiddies per capita than any country on earth, thanks to Microsoft's effective marketing of their powerful and innovative technologies. I mean in my book, that consitutes a skills shortage, but surely to Microsoft it's a cornucopia.
Technology security:
Read intellectual property protection mechanisms.
Lack of access to capital:
No, when "investment" is a byword for "plunder", the problem is too much access to capital. I recommend reading economist Frank Stillwell's "Changing Track" for a good summary of the effects of "opening up the economy", also Jane Kelsey has written comprehensively of the New Zealand experience. Basically, the consequense of "investment incentives", and the privatisation of public assets in Australia and New Zealand has been that most of the wealth generated by economic activity in these countries leaves them, never to return.
The majority of posts here have dismissed .NET as:
(a) Technically ugly and unreliable, and
(b) An obvious rip-off, compared to free ("speech" or "beer") software.
Therefore nobody in their right minds will buy into it; not developers, and not users. The problem is, there's a third customer here: businesses.
Why are people using Windows and MS Office at home? Because it's stable, based on open standards ("interoperable"), inexpensive, and easy to use? Or because that's what everybody uses at work?
Why are there a hundred VBScript kiddies for every genuine hacker? Because the timeless allure of BASIC is so irresistable? Or because that's about the ratio of Visual-Active-whatever developer jobs to jobs for programmers.
Some people are asking who in their right mind would pay over and over again for the same software, and be at the mercy of one company for service delivery. Show me a company that doesn't. Large corporations don't have in-house IT departments any more; smaller corporations never had them. They sign "just make it work, ok?" contracts with outsource companies, and pay through the nose to not worry about how technically efficient, interoperable, and so on, their software is. A business is going to look at .NET and ask "why are we operating a server farm with an army of contractors when all we need is a firewall and we can suck all this stuff down the wire from Microsoft?".
Microsoft doesn't have to convince developers or users to adopt .NET, just corporate managers. Promise the world, throw in enough buzzwords and acronyms, let the technical problems work themselves out once the sale's been made. Get to the people who run the world, and the world will follow.