It turns out that the best way to reduce pollution is to turn "pollution" (i.e. waste) into product.
Or to use raw materials more efficiently, and thereby save money in the process.
That was the experience of Silicon Valley: they reduced output of contaminated solvents
by learning to use less solvent in the first place.
Oftentimes a product that the company didn't make before. The point is pollution is waste, the less you waste the more money you make.
Yeah, at least sometimes. Which is one reason you might do better with "socially responsible investing".
Though on the other hand, pollution is often an "externality" that the manufacturer can inflict on the outside
world without paying for it... until people get pissed off enough about it to take legal action, in which
case the company that's already figured out to reduce pollution could be in a very good position.
(Though I wouldn't be surprised if "tradeable emissions caps" undermine that to a large extent.
It might make more sense to pollute as much as you can so that you can plead for a higher "cap",
and then you can make a killing selling your pollution rights.)
People trying to do good things can make money too, why not invest in them?
Because it's vanishingly difficult, and Gates basically says it's a fool's errand, to figure out who the "good" companies are.
It is no more difficult than figuring out what actions a non-profit should take in order to accomplish the good.
If you believe that it makes any sense at all to have a non-profit to do anything at all, you need to believer
that it's possible to do this.
Would it make any sense to make money selling nerve gas to Nazis so that you could use the money to help war
refugees?
People like the idea of keeping morality separate from economic reasoning because it makes things so much
simpler, but I'm afraid the logic really doesn't hold up. Yeah, it's hard to know where your money is
going when you buy a pair of sneakers, but it's not that hard.
But never fear: there is a certain amount of convergence between investing for long-term profit and investing in "good" companies. Firms that don't play well with others tend to attract negative attention, limiting their yield. I'm not saying the good guys always win, but then my definition of "good" would probably not match yours anyway. I'm just saying that you don't have to obsess over whether you've invested in "good" companies, as the really bad ones will be easy enough to spot.
Well, which is it? Can we rely on the free market to zap the bad guys because bad guys always lose or not?
I haven't checked recently (post-dot bomb), but at least for awhile there "socially responsible investment funds" were performing pretty well. Maybe you should turn your advice around? If you look for ethical behavior, you might
be able to use it to predict long-term economic performance...
First of all, the connection between income inequality and crime rates is interesting, and dramatic, but it doesn't strike me as being the biggest problem.
The main trouble with "income inequality" is that it's incompatible with democracy: money can buy elections, bribe officials, undermine the very legal system and so on.
That's pretty obvious, and if it doesn't strike you as a problem, I would guess it's because you've got the idea that rich people are smart and wise and can do a better job of controling the political system than poor people (poor people, after all, are lazy and stupid and just want government handouts so they can watch TV and drink beer all the time. Right?).
This is an idea that was considered by the founding fathers, and explicitly rejected.
You're not supposed to get any political edge by owning wealth.
Everyone gets one vote, everyone can run for office, bribery is illegal, etc.
Further, I might point out that places that have tried a tight association between rulers
and the wealthy are not exactly shining examples -- the polite term for this sort of
thing is "crony capitalism", or "fascism" if you're not afraid of over-worked political
rhetoric.
Myself, I used to be a hard core advocate of free markets. Back around 1980,
if a lefty tried a line on me like "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer",
I would point out that historically what really seems to happen is "the rich get richer
and the poor get richer". I used to sneer at their complaints about increasing income
inequality as (a) a statistical blip and (b) politics of envy.
But here we are 20 years later, and that statistical blip still hasn't gone away, and
the United States is starting to look like a strange country that I barely recognize...
Anyway, my advice to conservatives: stop fighting the cold war, and pay attention to what's really happening... "Markets" are legally defined entities, and there's room to wonder if definition we're using is the right one. And my advice to liberals, I suppose, is to think about other ways of fixing problems like this than just raising taxes.
I don't support DRM, but I do support Apple. Why? Because they made it easy - even trivial - to not go the DRM route.
I know other people who've gone that route, and I think it's short-sighted. If you buy an iPod because you figure you'll just put regular mp3s on it, you still end up supporting the marketing of a device that embraces DRM. The Clueless User looks at you, the Computer Expert, and sees that even you are using an
iPod.
If you're not going to use the iStore, don't buy an iPod. There are other alternatives out there.
Yes, I was wondering if anyone else was going to make that point...
before the AT&T breakup (circa 1980) you couldn't just go out and
buy telephones, you were supposed to go through Ma Bell if you wanted a
second phone installed in your house, and so on. Their claim was that
they couldn't trust third party manufacturers to build reasonable
equipment that wouldn't fry the network or some such.
It's things like that that give monopolies a bad name.
And yeah, Apple is once again, not exactly on the side of the angels
here... that's a big surprise, eh? Who would've thought that Steve
Jobs could be such a control freak?
The problem with the GPL is that it's prone to proprietary dual-licensing schemes.
A point perhaps -- and this may be a bug in the GPL -- but it's somewhat muted
in the case of distributed ownership of copyright, as is the case of the Linux
kernel. The copyright owners can't play games with you, because it's nearly
impossible to even find all of them.
To contribute to a large GPLed project, it's required that you agree to legal documents whereupon you promise to give away your copyright to the project.
The FSF does things that way, it is true, but (1) I'm not worried about FSF corruption scenarios any time soon
and (2) unlike nearly every other group out there, the FSF actually employs lawyers, so I'm inclined to cut them some slack if they tell me they need this for legal reasons.
If the Linux guys are demanding this now, that's a new one on me.
They then can dual-license it, or sell per-seat licenses, get rich, while you sit in a corner and suck your thumb,
living in your mother's basement, coding for free.
And how is this case any different from the BSD case? In the GPL case, if you don't like what the copyright holder
is doing you can fork it and maintain a GPL version...
At least with the BSD license, the code is yours, wherever and whenever you want it, be it in a community situation or a corporate setting. Hence, "freedom for coders."
I disagree. What this really does do is encourage people to indulge in dreams of avarice,
forking off the BSD version, adding some bells and whistles, and selling their proprietary
version for a gazillion dollars. This is (a) largely a pipe dream, these days (b) likely to
be a screw-the-coder scenario. The original authors don't often get a cut of the pie...
unless they start pushing their own proprietary versions...
Your motivation to contribute to a code base should not be a "moral imperative", but a technical decision.
My motivation should be whatever I want it to be.
I'll leave morality to religious zealots or for fans of personality cults that choose their leader's definition of "freedom."
Note to self: don't take anyone seriously who uses the word "zealot".
They can't see past the end of their nose.
The difference between GPL and BSD licenses:
1. GPL = code freedom
2. BSD = coders freedom
I care about people more than source code. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
Oh, knock it off. The trouble with the BSD is that it's prone toward proprietary
forks, which splits the community and bleeds off energy from the projects. Take
a look at the Unix wars of the 80s. For that matter, take a look at Mac OS X.
Eventually the folks working on web forums will realize that they are just recreating NNTP and move on to something else.
Hey, I've got an idea: let's try to implement a weblog with a distributed P2P backend that can't be slashdotted!
Doesn't that sound cool?
(And maybe we can work out some way of quoting the text you're replying to that doesn't involve
typing BLOCKQUOTE tags all the time... let's see, how might that work?)
anyone know of a good "schema cookbook"
on
SQL Hacks
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Something I've been wondering about off and on:
is there anything like a "schema cookbook" out there?
The other day I was once again implementing yet another
set of tables to represent mailing addresses, phone numbers,
user names and so on; and it once again struck me as being
completely ridiculous that we all don't just use the same
standard schemas to do common tasks like this.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
belmolis wrote:
As someone who has been a touch typist for 38 years and a 25=year Unix person, I too find it extremely difficult to accept the claim that the keyboard is necessarily slower than the mouse. That just contradicts my experience. I remember the first time I tried to use a graphical editor - Bravo - the Xerox predecessor to MS Word. It was unbearable. Obviously you didn't need to learn anything by way of commands to do simple editing - just move the mouse and type something to insert, backspace or whatever it was to delete - but I found positioning the mouse precisely to be extremely painful.
Yes, I agree completly. That was my first experience on using a mouse (first generation Macintosh).
I think the difficulty is that the mouse requires a tighther feedback loop: with a mouse you have to
stare at the screen to have a hope of positioning it correctly, but with a keyboard interface you
typically watch the screen to catch mistakes, not to execute every single task correctly. It's much
closer to being an open loop.
Mac users like to talk about how the Mac interface is better than Windows because "the edge of the screen
is infinitely deep", which is to say that you know you won't overshoot the top of the screen with the
mouse cursor, i.e. it eliminates some of that feedback loop management you need to do when handling a mouse.
So then, how deep is your keyboard?
(emacs user since version 18... and before that I was a Wordstar fan.)
I haven't looked into it, but I would guess that the Reiser projects
would simply refuse any patches from someone who is unwilling to
assign copyright over to NameSys, just as the FSF projects do
(though for slightly different
reasons: the FSF feels the need to hold copyright in order to have
legal standing to go after GPL violations).
And myself, I definitely disapprove of the practice of proprietary cross-licensing of GPL'd code,
but there's no way to prohibit the practice, and at least Hans Reiser is quite up front
about what he's doing.
The trouble with the practice is that it's something of a violation of the spirit
of the GPL, which is directed toward creating an open community centered around
the software. A software project that is advertised as being under the GPL has an implicit
promise that it will remain a free and open project -- it is poor form (though not
legally prohibited, as far as I know) for the developers to suddenly announce that
all future versions of a project will no longer be released under the GPL. Even users
that don't contribute code still effectively contribute to the project:
they provide bug reports, useability feedback, acts as an unpaid advertising
force. They're members of a community that may have no legal say in how the project
is run, but myself, I think there's something of an ethical burden on the developers
to avoid jerking them around.
But clearly Hans Reiser has a different opinion about the details of his obligations,
and he's the guy who started these projects... and I hope the projects continue some way
or another. I'm a fan of ReiserFS 3 (I find I'm now addicted to directory filesizes that
actually reflect the size of their contents), and I've been looking forward to playing
with Reiser 4 plug-ins sometime....
er, couldn't you just fork it and rename it whatever you want for free?
Provided you licensed it under the GPL, yes, you could do that.
The copyright holder has additional options, however -- Hans Reiser says that he
actually makes some money selling the right to use his file system without
telling anyone else that they're using it.
(Yes I know, but the corporate world is weird.)
Also, if you RTFM, you'll see that they mention proprietary add-on products, such
as a file compressor
In other words, you guys know my stance. I'll not fight the combined
opinion of other kernel developers, but I sure as hell won't be the first
to merge this, and I sure as hell won't have _my_ tree be the one that
causes this to happen.
So go get it merged in the Ubuntu, (Open)SuSE and RHEL and Fedora trees
first. This is not something where we use my tree as a way to get it to
other trees. This is something where the push had better come from the
other direction.
Yes, thanks much for the pointer to Taibbi reveiw... truly excellent:
And boy, does it take off. Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end--and I'm not joking here--we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce. Moreover, Friedman's book is the first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a calculator to figure the value of the author's metaphors.
God strike me dead if I'm joking about this. Judge for yourself.
My, what a festering pit of idiocy we have here today. (No wonder I hang around here.)
I skimmed many a screenful of incoherent ranting before it even dawned on me that the people here
might not have heard of Thomas Friedman... don't you guys ever read anything but slashdot discussions?
Everyone loves to complain about Thomas Friedman (his latest work pro-globalization cheer-leading being
"The World is Flat"). In the circles I hand out in, the fact that he regularly has op-ed articles in the New York Times is one of the things people point to show the paper's pro-corporate bias (if Paul Krugman hadn't waited until after he was hired before he veered left, there's no way they would've ever published him...).
Any way, Sterling's a great writer, but this is a fairly lame article, as is typical for slashdot (no wonder I, etc.): they front page pointers to some of his worst work. I must admit that I don't know that Sterling has been in very good form of late... you might take a look at some of his Viridian Notes, though the last one is a pretty crazed, over the top rant about the board of Exxon being put on trial when people realize how much bullshit they've been spewing.
I gather that he wants out of the column business to get back to fiction writing. And the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction has a pretty decent story from him: "Kiosk".
I've always wondered where the "Microsoft of Linux" thing came from. They don't seem to be at all like Microsoft to me, so the comparison makes no sense to me.
No, it doesn't make any sense, unless Microsoft has started releasing all the code they write under the GPL.
I gave up on Red Hat because (a) I got tired of being burned by weak technical decisions and an apparent absence of any QA (circa RH 5-8) -- and my brief look at FC3 didn't impress me much, either; (b) I wasn't impressed with them suddenly dropping support for their server distro, announcing "linux isn't ready for the desktop" (too bad no one told SUSE that, eh?).
The pods are just sticking with RedHat because they've heard about them in the funny pages -- I mean, business pages. With an IPO that big it's got to be good.
(And if your IT staff is good enough, it doesn't matter what distro you start with -- a good sysadmin can create a Debian work-alike with any distro.)
That's an interesting assertion. A company can be "closed" in a number of different ways, and I think being somewhat secretive about product development plans is not at all unusual. Apple just gets a lot more attention in this area.
Apple also has a tendency to release "closed" un-hackable hardware without room for third-party extensions, it is also "closed" in that it does
not license it's software to run on other hardware... and I haven't been following the story,
but are they releasing any patches upstream to BSD developers, and so on?
As you point out, companies can be "closed" in a number of ways, and Apple manages to hit
most of them.
Why would linux kernel maintainers have used a proprietary SCMS all these years, if it wasn't simply the best suited tool for that purpose? (bitkeeper)
Hypothetically, because the developer was a friend of Torvald's, and he talked him into it.
Jobs just don't last long enough to use them to make detailed decisions about where to live.
It's a problem, but there are ways to deal... my strategy has always been to live some place
in the middle of areas where there's a lot of potential jobs. This is, of course, one of the
advantages of cities, but it's also true of the relatively sprawling Silicon Valley area --
where notably it is not that tough to get around by public transit (provided you haven't been
suckered into spending a lot of money on a house with a view but without transit).
And I appreciate your level-headed reply (because I can certainly be a tad obnoxious on occasion).
but I think you missed the main point of my post. Most people in the U.S. (and yes including myself) are not willing to suddenly give up driving, especially because the government suddenly raised the taxes.
I realize that this is what people say but I actually don't believe that it's true. Faced with rising gas prices people really will adjust their behavior over time and do things differently: the claim that spending on gas is completely "inelastic" even in the short term is almost certainly not the case:
one of the reasons I made up a hypothetical scenario of gas prices "tripling", is to get that across. A price shock like that would send everyone scrambling for carpools, demanding public transit, looking for ways to rearrange the many-and-various discretionary trips that they take.
Whether this is "bad for the economy" is a different issue -- I was just talking about demand "elasticity",
and I wasn't specifying where the price shock would come from -- for purposes of that discussion political
instability in the Mideast works just as well.
But if you're asking me if I think it's a good idea to jack gas prices via a tax, I suppose I would
say yes, though how fast would be adviseable would certainly be a good question, and my preference would
certainly be for something like the scheme that I think Gore proposed, which is to raise "carbon taxes",
but to drop other taxes proportionally -- what we need is a shift in incentives, not an increased burden.
Taxes are never, repeat NEVER good for the economy.
Now now... don't you think that our fine-elected leaders are capable of
wisely managing economic stimulus? Why I'm sure they'll do at least as
good a job as they did with your zoning regulations.
Not to mention that I, like millions of other people in the country drive a good distance to work where there is no public transportation.
Yeah, I know. Why do you guys put up with that? If the local politicians where I were living couldn't do any better than that,
I'd be looking to kick their ass.
I'm sorry that you don't like it, but we have built our economy, infrastructure and lives around cars. If you can get by without using a car, great. Most of us don't want to.
Many, many, people are convinced that surburbia is just the natural order of things, but really it's a pretty new way of living, and if you look at it closely a very artificial way of living: a creation of some odd public policy decisions about zoning
regulations and highway funding. Fifty years ago people changed the way they were living. A change like that could happen again.
Slashdot Mirror
Or to use raw materials more efficiently, and thereby save money in the process. That was the experience of Silicon Valley: they reduced output of contaminated solvents by learning to use less solvent in the first place.
Yeah, at least sometimes. Which is one reason you might do better with "socially responsible investing".
Though on the other hand, pollution is often an "externality" that the manufacturer can inflict on the outside world without paying for it... until people get pissed off enough about it to take legal action, in which case the company that's already figured out to reduce pollution could be in a very good position.
(Though I wouldn't be surprised if "tradeable emissions caps" undermine that to a large extent. It might make more sense to pollute as much as you can so that you can plead for a higher "cap", and then you can make a killing selling your pollution rights.)
RealProgrammer wrote:
It is no more difficult than figuring out what actions a non-profit should take in order to accomplish the good. If you believe that it makes any sense at all to have a non-profit to do anything at all, you need to believer that it's possible to do this.
Would it make any sense to make money selling nerve gas to Nazis so that you could use the money to help war refugees?
People like the idea of keeping morality separate from economic reasoning because it makes things so much simpler, but I'm afraid the logic really doesn't hold up. Yeah, it's hard to know where your money is going when you buy a pair of sneakers, but it's not that hard.
Well, which is it? Can we rely on the free market to zap the bad guys because bad guys always lose or not?
I haven't checked recently (post-dot bomb), but at least for awhile there "socially responsible investment funds" were performing pretty well. Maybe you should turn your advice around? If you look for ethical behavior, you might be able to use it to predict long-term economic performance...
First of all, the connection between income inequality and crime rates is interesting, and dramatic, but it doesn't strike me as being the biggest problem.
The main trouble with "income inequality" is that it's incompatible with democracy: money can buy elections, bribe officials, undermine the very legal system and so on.
That's pretty obvious, and if it doesn't strike you as a problem, I would guess it's because you've got the idea that rich people are smart and wise and can do a better job of controling the political system than poor people (poor people, after all, are lazy and stupid and just want government handouts so they can watch TV and drink beer all the time. Right?).
This is an idea that was considered by the founding fathers, and explicitly rejected. You're not supposed to get any political edge by owning wealth. Everyone gets one vote, everyone can run for office, bribery is illegal, etc.
Further, I might point out that places that have tried a tight association between rulers and the wealthy are not exactly shining examples -- the polite term for this sort of thing is "crony capitalism", or "fascism" if you're not afraid of over-worked political rhetoric.
Myself, I used to be a hard core advocate of free markets. Back around 1980, if a lefty tried a line on me like "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer", I would point out that historically what really seems to happen is "the rich get richer and the poor get richer". I used to sneer at their complaints about increasing income inequality as (a) a statistical blip and (b) politics of envy.
But here we are 20 years later, and that statistical blip still hasn't gone away, and the United States is starting to look like a strange country that I barely recognize...
Anyway, my advice to conservatives: stop fighting the cold war, and pay attention to what's really happening... "Markets" are legally defined entities, and there's room to wonder if definition we're using is the right one. And my advice to liberals, I suppose, is to think about other ways of fixing problems like this than just raising taxes.
And speaking of not being afraid of over-worked rhetoric... allow me to recommend: Paul Krugman on the New Class War in America
fyngyrz wrote:
I know other people who've gone that route, and I think it's short-sighted. If you buy an iPod because you figure you'll just put regular mp3s on it, you still end up supporting the marketing of a device that embraces DRM. The Clueless User looks at you, the Computer Expert, and sees that even you are using an iPod.
If you're not going to use the iStore, don't buy an iPod. There are other alternatives out there.
Yes, I was wondering if anyone else was going to make that point... before the AT&T breakup (circa 1980) you couldn't just go out and buy telephones, you were supposed to go through Ma Bell if you wanted a second phone installed in your house, and so on. Their claim was that they couldn't trust third party manufacturers to build reasonable equipment that wouldn't fry the network or some such.
It's things like that that give monopolies a bad name.
And yeah, Apple is once again, not exactly on the side of the angels here... that's a big surprise, eh? Who would've thought that Steve Jobs could be such a control freak?
A point perhaps -- and this may be a bug in the GPL -- but it's somewhat muted in the case of distributed ownership of copyright, as is the case of the Linux kernel. The copyright owners can't play games with you, because it's nearly impossible to even find all of them.
The FSF does things that way, it is true, but (1) I'm not worried about FSF corruption scenarios any time soon and (2) unlike nearly every other group out there, the FSF actually employs lawyers, so I'm inclined to cut them some slack if they tell me they need this for legal reasons.
If the Linux guys are demanding this now, that's a new one on me.
And how is this case any different from the BSD case? In the GPL case, if you don't like what the copyright holder is doing you can fork it and maintain a GPL version...
At least with the BSD license, the code is yours, wherever and whenever you want it, be it in a community situation or a corporate setting. Hence, "freedom for coders."
I disagree. What this really does do is encourage people to indulge in dreams of avarice, forking off the BSD version, adding some bells and whistles, and selling their proprietary version for a gazillion dollars. This is (a) largely a pipe dream, these days (b) likely to be a screw-the-coder scenario. The original authors don't often get a cut of the pie... unless they start pushing their own proprietary versions...
My motivation should be whatever I want it to be.
Note to self: don't take anyone seriously who uses the word "zealot". They can't see past the end of their nose.
Oh, knock it off. The trouble with the BSD is that it's prone toward proprietary forks, which splits the community and bleeds off energy from the projects. Take a look at the Unix wars of the 80s. For that matter, take a look at Mac OS X.
Because they realize that I might shoot them.
(Have you ever heard of television? Why don't you go away and watch it for awhile...)
Hey, I've got an idea: let's try to implement a weblog with a distributed P2P backend that can't be slashdotted! Doesn't that sound cool?
(And maybe we can work out some way of quoting the text you're replying to that doesn't involve typing BLOCKQUOTE tags all the time... let's see, how might that work?)
The other day I was once again implementing yet another set of tables to represent mailing addresses, phone numbers, user names and so on; and it once again struck me as being completely ridiculous that we all don't just use the same standard schemas to do common tasks like this.
Yes, I agree completly. That was my first experience on using a mouse (first generation Macintosh). I think the difficulty is that the mouse requires a tighther feedback loop: with a mouse you have to stare at the screen to have a hope of positioning it correctly, but with a keyboard interface you typically watch the screen to catch mistakes, not to execute every single task correctly. It's much closer to being an open loop.
Mac users like to talk about how the Mac interface is better than Windows because "the edge of the screen is infinitely deep", which is to say that you know you won't overshoot the top of the screen with the mouse cursor, i.e. it eliminates some of that feedback loop management you need to do when handling a mouse.
So then, how deep is your keyboard?
(emacs user since version 18... and before that I was a Wordstar fan.)
I haven't looked into it, but I would guess that the Reiser projects would simply refuse any patches from someone who is unwilling to assign copyright over to NameSys, just as the FSF projects do (though for slightly different reasons: the FSF feels the need to hold copyright in order to have legal standing to go after GPL violations).
And myself, I definitely disapprove of the practice of proprietary cross-licensing of GPL'd code, but there's no way to prohibit the practice, and at least Hans Reiser is quite up front about what he's doing.
The trouble with the practice is that it's something of a violation of the spirit of the GPL, which is directed toward creating an open community centered around the software. A software project that is advertised as being under the GPL has an implicit promise that it will remain a free and open project -- it is poor form (though not legally prohibited, as far as I know) for the developers to suddenly announce that all future versions of a project will no longer be released under the GPL. Even users that don't contribute code still effectively contribute to the project: they provide bug reports, useability feedback, acts as an unpaid advertising force. They're members of a community that may have no legal say in how the project is run, but myself, I think there's something of an ethical burden on the developers to avoid jerking them around.
But clearly Hans Reiser has a different opinion about the details of his obligations, and he's the guy who started these projects... and I hope the projects continue some way or another. I'm a fan of ReiserFS 3 (I find I'm now addicted to directory filesizes that actually reflect the size of their contents), and I've been looking forward to playing with Reiser 4 plug-ins sometime....
Provided you licensed it under the GPL, yes, you could do that.
The copyright holder has additional options, however -- Hans Reiser says that he actually makes some money selling the right to use his file system without telling anyone else that they're using it.
(Yes I know, but the corporate world is weird.)
Also, if you RTFM, you'll see that they mention proprietary add-on products, such as a file compressor
To quote Torvalds himself on the subject:
Possibly, the fork should be called "GNU/Linux".
I skimmed many a screenful of incoherent ranting before it even dawned on me that the people here might not have heard of Thomas Friedman... don't you guys ever read anything but slashdot discussions? Everyone loves to complain about Thomas Friedman (his latest work pro-globalization cheer-leading being "The World is Flat"). In the circles I hand out in, the fact that he regularly has op-ed articles in the New York Times is one of the things people point to show the paper's pro-corporate bias (if Paul Krugman hadn't waited until after he was hired before he veered left, there's no way they would've ever published him...).
Any way, Sterling's a great writer, but this is a fairly lame article, as is typical for slashdot (no wonder I, etc.): they front page pointers to some of his worst work. I must admit that I don't know that Sterling has been in very good form of late... you might take a look at some of his Viridian Notes, though the last one is a pretty crazed, over the top rant about the board of Exxon being put on trial when people realize how much bullshit they've been spewing.
I gather that he wants out of the column business to get back to fiction writing. And the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction has a pretty decent story from him: "Kiosk".
No, it doesn't make any sense, unless Microsoft has started releasing all the code they write under the GPL.
I gave up on Red Hat because (a) I got tired of being burned by weak technical decisions and an apparent absence of any QA (circa RH 5-8) -- and my brief look at FC3 didn't impress me much, either; (b) I wasn't impressed with them suddenly dropping support for their server distro, announcing "linux isn't ready for the desktop" (too bad no one told SUSE that, eh?).
The pods are just sticking with RedHat because they've heard about them in the funny pages -- I mean, business pages. With an IPO that big it's got to be good.
(And if your IT staff is good enough, it doesn't matter what distro you start with -- a good sysadmin can create a Debian work-alike with any distro.)
Apple also has a tendency to release "closed" un-hackable hardware without room for third-party extensions, it is also "closed" in that it does not license it's software to run on other hardware... and I haven't been following the story, but are they releasing any patches upstream to BSD developers, and so on?
As you point out, companies can be "closed" in a number of ways, and Apple manages to hit most of them.
Really? When someone recommends a new technology to me, the first thing I do is use google to look for "X sucks" articles.
If you can't find any, then you know it's an immature technology.
And I'm not particularly down on Modern art myself... maybe I should name a project "Rauschenberg" (except that he's not dead yet).
Hypothetically, because the developer was a friend of Torvald's, and he talked him into it.
It's a problem, but there are ways to deal... my strategy has always been to live some place in the middle of areas where there's a lot of potential jobs. This is, of course, one of the advantages of cities, but it's also true of the relatively sprawling Silicon Valley area -- where notably it is not that tough to get around by public transit (provided you haven't been suckered into spending a lot of money on a house with a view but without transit).
And I appreciate your level-headed reply (because I can certainly be a tad obnoxious on occasion).
I realize that this is what people say but I actually don't believe that it's true. Faced with rising gas prices people really will adjust their behavior over time and do things differently: the claim that spending on gas is completely "inelastic" even in the short term is almost certainly not the case: one of the reasons I made up a hypothetical scenario of gas prices "tripling", is to get that across. A price shock like that would send everyone scrambling for carpools, demanding public transit, looking for ways to rearrange the many-and-various discretionary trips that they take.
Whether this is "bad for the economy" is a different issue -- I was just talking about demand "elasticity", and I wasn't specifying where the price shock would come from -- for purposes of that discussion political instability in the Mideast works just as well.
But if you're asking me if I think it's a good idea to jack gas prices via a tax, I suppose I would say yes, though how fast would be adviseable would certainly be a good question, and my preference would certainly be for something like the scheme that I think Gore proposed, which is to raise "carbon taxes", but to drop other taxes proportionally -- what we need is a shift in incentives, not an increased burden.
Now now... don't you think that our fine-elected leaders are capable of wisely managing economic stimulus? Why I'm sure they'll do at least as good a job as they did with your zoning regulations.
Yeah, I know. Why do you guys put up with that? If the local politicians where I were living couldn't do any better than that, I'd be looking to kick their ass.
Many, many, people are convinced that surburbia is just the natural order of things, but really it's a pretty new way of living, and if you look at it closely a very artificial way of living: a creation of some odd public policy decisions about zoning regulations and highway funding. Fifty years ago people changed the way they were living. A change like that could happen again.