Re:Incredible Film...There is no Santa Claus...
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Review: A.I.
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· Score: 1
I agree. I just saw it this weekend. I cried for most of the film, but they were tough, manly tears, I'll have you know. Actually, the whole existential, ironic mess of self, identity, and consciousness is staked out in a very bright, hot sun with this movie. That's why I cried. I cried for us! I cried because there is no Santa Claus--of any kind, anywhere, for anyone, ever! Super ouch! The fact that the white trash/Luddites actually rioted to save David is a double-whammy, triple reverse psychology mind-blower, even though the preacher/bounty hunter dude is undoubtedly right. The scene where David sits for 2,000 years begging a statue is straight out of all the village churches of the RC world where people pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary all their lives, ferchrissakes! These ideas have been dealt with by many before, but AI puts a mighty summation sign in front of the whole topic. (I'm about to cry now....)
When I worked at MS ('94-'95) I was told in a bathroom in a whisper not to drink the free house coffee. Otherwise I'd wind up like Steve Ballmer: a babbling, brain damaged moron! Nasty stuff!!
Nietzsche once said that the human was a bridge between God and animal. That would explain our schizoid reality to a T. In "Also Sprach Zarathustra", Nietzsche created the myth of the "superman", but never really described him in detail. Somehow we humans would slave away at life until we reached some threshold, then magically, some border would be crossed by some individual to The Next Great Thing. This is what I read into the film after reading Kubrick interviews. Dave Bowman was that superman who finally crossed into the next state of being, the first human to get off that damned bridge to the other side. The confusing ending was symbolic of this Unknown. Rock Hudson supposedly left the film disgusted saying, "will somebody please tell me what that film is about!? Rock, just like you showing your dog your wedding pictures, Kubrick is "showing" us this Great Beyond. IMHO, Clarke screws everything up with his absolutist/literalist overcooking and overexplaining. The hotel scene at the end of the film is ruined by Clarke in his book version. To me the scene is a genial symbolistic dreamscape. The human mind, when given information beyond its comprehension does exactly what a computer does when it mis-calculates some math problem: vaguely recognizable, but totally unreliable stuff comes out. Koans, baby, do your koans! The Nietzsche-man asked Big Questions, probably the biggest ever asked. Seeing a film based on some of the N-man's biggest issues has made me a better person....
Have you ever apologized and found out that's exactly what your opponent LEAST expected? Once caught off-guard, a love fest ensues whereby the red-faced apology demander falls all over himself apologizing for the apology demand.
MS will fail mainly because they're on the treadmill of greater and greater profits. I think today's "downturn", "recession" (whatever) is an example of the insanely great profits chase finally hitting the wall. MS will dodge and weave around, looking for new profit sources, but the days of insane, accelerating profits are over. Meanwhile, the Open Source movement will keep on plugging away, impervious to bean counters, or nay-sayers, or downturns, and eventually plow all before it. Great software will result and reasons to buy only marginally better commercial software will disappear. MS has not locked up the server market--Linux will move strongly into all levels of serving--which leaves them very vulnerable. What else makes them money?
Hey, I think I know this guy. He was the singer/comedian at my little brother's Barmitzvah. Sort of a gonzo Andy Kaufmann type of humor. Lots of the older geezers there didn't get, though.
I've got Postgres, which comes with a fine ODBC driver, talking to Access just great. Access is good on an MS platform for admin stuff. I have scraps of data here and there that cut and paste easily into ODBC-linked Postgres tables through Access. But I would never use Access as a client front-end--unless your user base knows how to use QBE or SQL and absolutely needs to cook up their own queries on a daily basis. Otherwise, if you have a set group of canned queries, why lug Access along? Better to use Java, VB, VC++, or a Web for the (much much thinner) client. Access is a good enough client development tool, but why drag along the whole Access executable (and shell out for all the Access licenses) unless your users absolutely need all the other stuff Access has? The vast majority of VB out there is employed for just this reason: you don't need Access unless your users need both canned queries and the ability to write their own.
History is written by the winners. That's why Nazism is so evil and bad, while Euro-christianity is so holy and great. Imagine the Nazis had won WWII and it's 300 years later. Young, idealistic "modern" Nazis would be doing missionary work in some devastated 3rd world country. And if anyone brought up Hitler and all the genocide, these idealists would quickly disown "those silly old Nazis". Sound familiar? There is probably nothing more shameful that we as humans do than the writing our own history.
The trouble with Banks or any other "brilliant" economist is they mix pure, logistical supply and demand of a marketplace with the accounting systems used to marshall and control it. If you use a currency, you are forced into a growth-only, virus-like, mad charge off a cliff. My perfect economy would have roughly half of its activity involved in some form of recycling. Suppliers would be able to supply to only those who have maximized usage of said resource. If "most-for-the-least" was a two-way street, recycling would automatically be built into the system. As it is now, recycling can never compete with artificially cheap resources. And its only when a resource nears total annialation that recycling and "alternatives" can begin to get off the floor. Cancers and diseases work this way too: they only know mindless exponential growth. If the "market" as described by today's economists can't be taught to live within some form of real reality (as opposed to economic reality), then nature has no choice but to eventually collapse it. And I'm not really interested in any of Jullian Simon's red herrings about how the "market" adapts and consumes less and gets more productive and efficient. Sure it does, but it also grows, cancelling out any of these benefits: 5 people consuming X is the same as 10 people consuming 1/2X. There's no future in capitalism, i.e., a supply and demand system based on currencies other than a cliff and a steep drop some day soon....
I never plan on reading any "economics" textbook, because then I'd start believing that the naked emperor was indeed clothed in the "finest silks". Like you, I'd begin confusing supply and demand with this or that supply and demand accounting methodologies (so far we've only seen bullshit communism and full-of-shit capitalism). Nobody seems to be able to separate supply and demand from capitalism. Capitalism uses money to proxy value, to "account", whereas a pure supply and demand system would not. Capitalism is a crock of shit because it believes the convenience of a currency outweighs all the bad side effects. Like I said, when supply and demand is measured by profit only, a whole raft of bad things comes along like vibration in a poorly designed machine. Because we use money, we assign prices. Because everything has a price, you are forced to use profit as your only measurement of commercial success. Again, look at oil: we cannot function without cheap oil. If the price began to rise (reflecting its dwindling supply), inflation would travel up the value-adding stack and eventually destroy it, since no one could make their profits! This means without eternally cheap oil (and other base resources), the capitalist system collapses! This is not rocket science. And if you think about it, you can see that it's only because we use money that this happens. Economics textbooks don't talk reality like this, that's why I don't read them!
Why not use networks to measure the success of supply and demand directly? Profit is a very stupid way to measure success. Sure it works a little bit, enough to beat communism. But who ever said communism wasn't also a crock? Capitalism is better than communism like an old man with lung cancer is better than an old woman with breast cancer. Try to imagine fabulous supply and demand--better than even "free market" supply and demand--BUT WITHOUT USING STUPID MONEY!!! Pull your heads out of the "economics" textbooks, and just start thinking about how things are, and how absurd inflation, debt, and profit really are. They only exist because we use currencies. They have nothing to do with economic health or diversity.
You hit the nail on the head. Capitalism is a joke of a system. It's a joke because it uses money/currency. Why's that? When you use a currency you are forced to set prices on goods and services and that means success is measured by profit only. In reality capitalism is zero-sum, a pyramid scheme (albeit huge and global), no matter what "they" say about "expanding markets". Hey, why can't we do suppy-and-demand better? We've got massive computer networks already. Let's just figure out how an electronic barter system would work, ferchrissake! You don't believe me? Here's an example: If a crucial base resource dwindles over time in supply, the "free market" would demand that its price rise, right? All right then, what about crude oil? If you adjust for inflation, crude oil has FALLEN in price over the last century. (If we really measured supply and not just availability, oil would cost $1000's per barrel.) This is the prime reason capitalism is a lie: it cannot survive without seriously (perpetually) undervalued base resources, both material and human. Without an ultra-cheap base, there can be no value-added stack, no "Economy" built, no pyramid of profits, since any increases in base resource prices would be passed up the value-adding chain, thus setting off shockwaves of destructive inflation. At some point the value-adders can't make their price points and the system collapses. Hence, we're forced to pull every trick in the book to keep base resources cheap and plentiful--at any cost!! Hello! Anybody home?!! That kind of bs can't go on forever! Sorry Friedman, Simon, there is no comeback to my argument. (BTW, how come I'm the only one who's figured this out?)
When I do data management tasks with MS COM, I'm painfully aware of how crippled the Windows environment is. For example, I would like to run an AS/400 5250 terminal automatically to grab data instead of clicking the mouse and hand typing in stuff. Sure, the terminal (I'm using WRQ) is a COM server that lets me do all sorts of neat stuff from COM clients. But I still am forced to deal with an app that was primarily built to be GUI, not remotely leveraged by other code or apps. Work that would be a short, little process running behind the scenes in Unixland turns into a dance of windows popping up and disappearing (I actually have to tell the stupid thing to go away when it's finished). That's why I like the author's idea of dual CLI/GUI utils. However, the Uxinae still can't touch COM for slickness, modularity, and flexibility. GNOME is beginning to address this gap with Bonobo(sp?). I think some cross-fertilization would be good for both camps....
Doesn't this all get back to the anti-graphics/GUI, command line-ueber-alles attitude that open source inherited from the lost Unix continent? And this isn't the only hit we'll take because we don't like/do GUI. I read Miguel de Gnome's manifesto on "...Unix Sucks" and he describes a very tight ship over at Microsoft vis-a-vis GUI. Let's face it, Microsoft's IE has us beat bad, and exactly because GUI is such a persona nongrata in the os world that things like this happen. Sure, this discussion is supposed to be about proprietary tags, but, hey, why did someone decide to play proprietary politics in the first place? Probably because non-IE browsers suck, and it's probably not worth their time and effort to porting a hot page design over to the GUI-cretin browsers.
Microsoft is rightly trying to turn the browser into a catch-all client, and not just for traditional HTML pages. It's inevitable that some form of a universal, generic client come forth, and--odd as it may be--the browser looks like it. Hence, getting more out of a browser than simple HTML display is an inevitable pursuit. That means Microsoft will sooner or later leave behind the HTML-only bias of HTML standards purists. Eventually, Web pages will be the plug-in, or simply one use among many others. I'm praying for Bill to take pity on us and port IE over to Linux, etc. That's our only hope of ever having a decent browser.
Re:Big League badge of honor
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CS vs CIS
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· Score: 1
Right on! Especially in America, management has become the new royalty, i.e., parasites. Sure, a Scoutmaster or Den Mother is sometimes necessary. But I've worked in some Dilbert shops before that could only have been improved by a nuclear strike--so fouled up they were by the bad vibe the "overlords" had propogated. With a more modular, networked economy I'm hoping the parasites simply get lost in the (re-)shuffle. As far as the 10%, I also agree. When I skim the news, I always head for the science and technology, simply because it's the only area where the human crap shoot is actually making any certifiable progress. All the rest (except for some of the arts) is just so much leaky-brained redundancy.
Big League badge of honor
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CS vs CIS
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· Score: 1
I wouldn't waste my time on CIS. There is no real way to teach the management of IT: you're either a manager or you're not. "Sort of" learning computers just makes you a dangerous manager. CS is a science, which means butt-busting work. Usually, the professors try to kill the students. But whoever crawls out alive at the end of the semester is usually pleasantly surprised. So, surviving the "psych-out" is half the battle. In general, a CS curriculum is designed to put you in the ballpark of big-league programming. It might not set you up specifically for any one project or brand or paradigm, but you'll be hired on the basis that a CS degree proves you can handle big league IT issues.
No matter how refined computers become, no matter how many orders of magnitude of AI we pile on top of each other, no matter how elegant and compact and all-encompassing thing become, there will always be a need for someone who understands the underlying components. Somebody will have to know what is inside of the black box. There will always be McGiver situations where a more elemental understanding of the technology is necessary.
Obviously, components are the first step, more Lego-ing and less handcrafting of software. But I disagree with anyone who thinks hardware is way out in front of software. If hardware speed were indeed so far out in front, then games would be written in VB or Java or Python or Smalltalk or Modula-2. As it stands today, we're still facing a large performance gradient. Make the gradient go away, i.e., make it so that bulky, overhead-intensive-but-elegant languages fly just as well as tight, super-optimized C or Assembly, relatively speaking, and then you can talk about hardware's arrival.
I believe GNU/Linux is successful mainly due to politics, but partly due to "technological honesty". Sure, the overall user/developer experience of the Unixae is more primitive than, say, Microsoft Windowses, but what sort of progress has MS really brought? Phony, glitzy bells and whistles is not necessarily progress. Besides COM, MS really hasn't much to offer in terms of elegance.
Another aspect of the open source/free revolt is that this is the first time true freedom in the computer world has appeared. Back in the late '70's at my university, if you weren't a 3.5 math major, you didn't get into the CS emphasis, and, hence, you never got your hands on a computer; you were just a peasant. Microsoft Windows changed that with Peztold's tome on Windows 3.1 programming, and now, finally, GNU/Linux has broken the field wide open. We really haven't had much time to flex our muscles yet. The world simply hasn't hit its software development stride yet.
All in all, a few more years of open/free software and true universal hardware speed will turn things around.
You can't flame Moody because the ABC site has absolutely no way to e-mail them!! I know because I've been reading that Bozo for a while now and he's notoriously pro-MS and anti-Free/OS. Once, a long while ago he followed up a super-flamed article with a piece grumbling about how much flame he received--but that was back when the ABC site had at least a "webmaster" email address. Now there's no way possible to flame our fellow "cyberteer".
This may be from the Out-on-a-limb department, but I believe the atrocious browser and/or fonts situation must be solved for Linux to move forward. Grizzled old hackers from the Unix tradition see all of this a just superfluous eye-candy, but that huge block to the left of us on the chart don't warm up to computers with bad/mismatched/funky/tiny/ugly fonts. It's just a fact. And unfortunately, Linux has to compete on the desktop to really challenge MS.
Gelernter has good, interesting points. Obviously, data as the brain does it and as your PC does it is radically different. But the brain is a classic product of evolution, and evolution doesn't pro-actively create, it simply rolls the dice and goes with the winner. "Going with the winner" has changed radically, however. I just returned to a town in Illinois where I spent a few years of my early childhood. What I had in my memories and what I saw these 35 years later more or less coincided, but I was occassionally shocked at how poor my memory had stored the information. The point is, I really appreciate the exactness of photography, printed paper, digital storage, etc. We may eventually understand the human brain, but what if its "inexactness" is inextricably woven into to mix? Could the human brain be a loser, an evolutionary dead-end? Gelernter's "swarming data" is probably accurate, but Danny Hillis' analogy to everyone having a powerful computer being like everyone having a noisy power generator running in their backyard is my gold standard. Whatever happens, I don't think I need more than a smart dumb terminal.
I don't think we here in Wichita knew anything about this thing. I know the ACLUG (Wichita-based LUG) would have promoted it and caravan-ed on over there....Maybe better advertising would help....Hey, KC is pretty big IT-wise....
Programming in the MS Windows environment is geared towards producing nice, pretty Windows apps, full stop. Everything else is much more difficult for all the stated reasons. I've used Visual Studio and Visual Cafe on Windows and in both cases there was no advantage to using those environments unless you were building a standard, user interface Windows app. However, in today's world so much of programming is either "systems" or Web. Sure, Microsoft has long stood for the "Cadillac" ride, while Unix/Linux is more like a Landrover, but you can go more places in a Landrover. That's why I think the "Where do you want to go today?" is so specious: Whatever your answer is it better fit into a Windows app on a Windows box. And I have to emphasize the Open Source mentality again. I've worked in MS environments where needed bugfixes or lacking functionality simply stopped the show--with no recourse to solving the problem other than to wait for MS to maybe fix it or expand it. When you have to back an entire development team out of Visual Basic 6 because VB6 suddenly can't handle your VB 5-written app, you'll stop complaining about the canvas seats and the hard suspension of that Landrover. Sure, the learning curve is steeper in the Linux/Unix environment, but there is no limit to what you can do--once you master the gnarly tools--whereas Windows programming always seems to have a stone wall just lurking around the corner.
This may sound alarmist, but Linux on the mass desktop depends on Mozilla. In today's general consumer office/home computer world, the browser is almost as (maybe more) important as (than) the the office suite. The Gateway/AOL/Transmeta deal will be an incredible flop if Mozilla can't deliver the goods--regardless of the hardware/OS. That would be a very high profile failure for the Linux world. I'm not really effected as I'm in a university setting where we play with esoterica all day. But the Joe Homebod, who's just heard of Linux last week, will turn is dull eyes back to M$ if Linux can't deliver with at least a decent browser. Call me paranoid, but without the office/home masses, Microsoft will have even more opportunity to genetically tinker with the Internet. BTW, we could use some decent font rendering, too.
The pathetic GUI environment of Linux is a turn-on to some Linux/Unix folks who think command line prowess is a sign of manhood. But wait, this whole GUI question is relevant to the computer as an end-user machine, not systems admin or developer equipment. That's why your Mac boosting sort of makes sense but doesn't. IT professionals don't need a pretty GUI, end-users do, though. The basis of your argument underlines today's schizophrenia of whether a box, G4 or Pentium, should be a server, a workstation, or a friendly end-user desktop machine--or all three at once. If X is supposed to be a server, what does a pretty GUI get you? NT became a hit mainly because it was a (funtionally) stable Windows environment which gave management the impression that their smartest secretary could be made systems administrator, so deceptively easy was the clickity-click of the mouse. Now, try to add 300 new users at once. You won't find any secretary writing Win32 code to do that. I'm sure X will be a hit on Intel machines, simply because GUI sells. Linux will hopefully climb out of the hideous font, sucky browser hole they're presently in, but the battle over what a fast G4 or Pentium is really supposed to be will go on.
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I agree. I just saw it this weekend. I cried for most of the film, but they were tough, manly tears, I'll have you know. Actually, the whole existential, ironic mess of self, identity, and consciousness is staked out in a very bright, hot sun with this movie. That's why I cried. I cried for us! I cried because there is no Santa Claus--of any kind, anywhere, for anyone, ever! Super ouch! The fact that the white trash/Luddites actually rioted to save David is a double-whammy, triple reverse psychology mind-blower, even though the preacher/bounty hunter dude is undoubtedly right. The scene where David sits for 2,000 years begging a statue is straight out of all the village churches of the RC world where people pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary all their lives, ferchrissakes! These ideas have been dealt with by many before, but AI puts a mighty summation sign in front of the whole topic. (I'm about to cry now....)
When I worked at MS ('94-'95) I was told in a bathroom in a whisper not to drink the free house coffee. Otherwise I'd wind up like Steve Ballmer: a babbling, brain damaged moron! Nasty stuff!!
Nietzsche once said that the human was a bridge between God and animal. That would explain our schizoid reality to a T. In "Also Sprach Zarathustra", Nietzsche created the myth of the "superman", but never really described him in detail. Somehow we humans would slave away at life until we reached some threshold, then magically, some border would be crossed by some individual to The Next Great Thing. This is what I read into the film after reading Kubrick interviews. Dave Bowman was that superman who finally crossed into the next state of being, the first human to get off that damned bridge to the other side. The confusing ending was symbolic of this Unknown. Rock Hudson supposedly left the film disgusted saying, "will somebody please tell me what that film is about!? Rock, just like you showing your dog your wedding pictures, Kubrick is "showing" us this Great Beyond. IMHO, Clarke screws everything up with his absolutist/literalist overcooking and overexplaining. The hotel scene at the end of the film is ruined by Clarke in his book version. To me the scene is a genial symbolistic dreamscape. The human mind, when given information beyond its comprehension does exactly what a computer does when it mis-calculates some math problem: vaguely recognizable, but totally unreliable stuff comes out. Koans, baby, do your koans! The Nietzsche-man asked Big Questions, probably the biggest ever asked. Seeing a film based on some of the N-man's biggest issues has made me a better person....
Have you ever apologized and found out that's exactly what your opponent LEAST expected? Once caught off-guard, a love fest ensues whereby the red-faced apology demander falls all over himself apologizing for the apology demand.
MS will fail mainly because they're on the treadmill of greater and greater profits. I think today's "downturn", "recession" (whatever) is an example of the insanely great profits chase finally hitting the wall. MS will dodge and weave around, looking for new profit sources, but the days of insane, accelerating profits are over. Meanwhile, the Open Source movement will keep on plugging away, impervious to bean counters, or nay-sayers, or downturns, and eventually plow all before it. Great software will result and reasons to buy only marginally better commercial software will disappear. MS has not locked up the server market--Linux will move strongly into all levels of serving--which leaves them very vulnerable. What else makes them money?
Hey, I think I know this guy. He was the singer/comedian at my little brother's Barmitzvah. Sort of a gonzo Andy Kaufmann type of humor. Lots of the older geezers there didn't get, though.
Well, that certainly serves me right for following a blind link!
I've got Postgres, which comes with a fine ODBC driver, talking to Access just great. Access is good on an MS platform for admin stuff. I have scraps of data here and there that cut and paste easily into ODBC-linked Postgres tables through Access. But I would never use Access as a client front-end--unless your user base knows how to use QBE or SQL and absolutely needs to cook up their own queries on a daily basis. Otherwise, if you have a set group of canned queries, why lug Access along? Better to use Java, VB, VC++, or a Web for the (much much thinner) client. Access is a good enough client development tool, but why drag along the whole Access executable (and shell out for all the Access licenses) unless your users absolutely need all the other stuff Access has? The vast majority of VB out there is employed for just this reason: you don't need Access unless your users need both canned queries and the ability to write their own.
History is written by the winners. That's why Nazism is so evil and bad, while Euro-christianity is so holy and great. Imagine the Nazis had won WWII and it's 300 years later. Young, idealistic "modern" Nazis would be doing missionary work in some devastated 3rd world country. And if anyone brought up Hitler and all the genocide, these idealists would quickly disown "those silly old Nazis". Sound familiar? There is probably nothing more shameful that we as humans do than the writing our own history.
The trouble with Banks or any other "brilliant" economist is they mix pure, logistical supply and demand of a marketplace with the accounting systems used to marshall and control it. If you use a currency, you are forced into a growth-only, virus-like, mad charge off a cliff. My perfect economy would have roughly half of its activity involved in some form of recycling. Suppliers would be able to supply to only those who have maximized usage of said resource. If "most-for-the-least" was a two-way street, recycling would automatically be built into the system. As it is now, recycling can never compete with artificially cheap resources. And its only when a resource nears total annialation that recycling and "alternatives" can begin to get off the floor. Cancers and diseases work this way too: they only know mindless exponential growth. If the "market" as described by today's economists can't be taught to live within some form of real reality (as opposed to economic reality), then nature has no choice but to eventually collapse it. And I'm not really interested in any of Jullian Simon's red herrings about how the "market" adapts and consumes less and gets more productive and efficient. Sure it does, but it also grows, cancelling out any of these benefits: 5 people consuming X is the same as 10 people consuming 1/2X. There's no future in capitalism, i.e., a supply and demand system based on currencies other than a cliff and a steep drop some day soon....
I never plan on reading any "economics" textbook, because then I'd start believing that the naked emperor was indeed clothed in the "finest silks". Like you, I'd begin confusing supply and demand with this or that supply and demand accounting methodologies (so far we've only seen bullshit communism and full-of-shit capitalism). Nobody seems to be able to separate supply and demand from capitalism. Capitalism uses money to proxy value, to "account", whereas a pure supply and demand system would not. Capitalism is a crock of shit because it believes the convenience of a currency outweighs all the bad side effects. Like I said, when supply and demand is measured by profit only, a whole raft of bad things comes along like vibration in a poorly designed machine. Because we use money, we assign prices. Because everything has a price, you are forced to use profit as your only measurement of commercial success. Again, look at oil: we cannot function without cheap oil. If the price began to rise (reflecting its dwindling supply), inflation would travel up the value-adding stack and eventually destroy it, since no one could make their profits! This means without eternally cheap oil (and other base resources), the capitalist system collapses! This is not rocket science. And if you think about it, you can see that it's only because we use money that this happens. Economics textbooks don't talk reality like this, that's why I don't read them! Why not use networks to measure the success of supply and demand directly? Profit is a very stupid way to measure success. Sure it works a little bit, enough to beat communism. But who ever said communism wasn't also a crock? Capitalism is better than communism like an old man with lung cancer is better than an old woman with breast cancer. Try to imagine fabulous supply and demand--better than even "free market" supply and demand--BUT WITHOUT USING STUPID MONEY!!! Pull your heads out of the "economics" textbooks, and just start thinking about how things are, and how absurd inflation, debt, and profit really are. They only exist because we use currencies. They have nothing to do with economic health or diversity.
You hit the nail on the head. Capitalism is a joke of a system. It's a joke because it uses money/currency. Why's that? When you use a currency you are forced to set prices on goods and services and that means success is measured by profit only. In reality capitalism is zero-sum, a pyramid scheme (albeit huge and global), no matter what "they" say about "expanding markets". Hey, why can't we do suppy-and-demand better? We've got massive computer networks already. Let's just figure out how an electronic barter system would work, ferchrissake! You don't believe me? Here's an example: If a crucial base resource dwindles over time in supply, the "free market" would demand that its price rise, right? All right then, what about crude oil? If you adjust for inflation, crude oil has FALLEN in price over the last century. (If we really measured supply and not just availability, oil would cost $1000's per barrel.) This is the prime reason capitalism is a lie: it cannot survive without seriously (perpetually) undervalued base resources, both material and human. Without an ultra-cheap base, there can be no value-added stack, no "Economy" built, no pyramid of profits, since any increases in base resource prices would be passed up the value-adding chain, thus setting off shockwaves of destructive inflation. At some point the value-adders can't make their price points and the system collapses. Hence, we're forced to pull every trick in the book to keep base resources cheap and plentiful--at any cost!! Hello! Anybody home?!! That kind of bs can't go on forever! Sorry Friedman, Simon, there is no comeback to my argument. (BTW, how come I'm the only one who's figured this out?)
When I do data management tasks with MS COM, I'm painfully aware of how crippled the Windows environment is. For example, I would like to run an AS/400 5250 terminal automatically to grab data instead of clicking the mouse and hand typing in stuff. Sure, the terminal (I'm using WRQ) is a COM server that lets me do all sorts of neat stuff from COM clients. But I still am forced to deal with an app that was primarily built to be GUI, not remotely leveraged by other code or apps. Work that would be a short, little process running behind the scenes in Unixland turns into a dance of windows popping up and disappearing (I actually have to tell the stupid thing to go away when it's finished). That's why I like the author's idea of dual CLI/GUI utils. However, the Uxinae still can't touch COM for slickness, modularity, and flexibility. GNOME is beginning to address this gap with Bonobo(sp?). I think some cross-fertilization would be good for both camps....
Doesn't this all get back to the anti-graphics/GUI, command line-ueber-alles attitude that open source inherited from the lost Unix continent? And this isn't the only hit we'll take because we don't like/do GUI. I read Miguel de Gnome's manifesto on "...Unix Sucks" and he describes a very tight ship over at Microsoft vis-a-vis GUI. Let's face it, Microsoft's IE has us beat bad, and exactly because GUI is such a persona nongrata in the os world that things like this happen. Sure, this discussion is supposed to be about proprietary tags, but, hey, why did someone decide to play proprietary politics in the first place? Probably because non-IE browsers suck, and it's probably not worth their time and effort to porting a hot page design over to the GUI-cretin browsers. Microsoft is rightly trying to turn the browser into a catch-all client, and not just for traditional HTML pages. It's inevitable that some form of a universal, generic client come forth, and--odd as it may be--the browser looks like it. Hence, getting more out of a browser than simple HTML display is an inevitable pursuit. That means Microsoft will sooner or later leave behind the HTML-only bias of HTML standards purists. Eventually, Web pages will be the plug-in, or simply one use among many others. I'm praying for Bill to take pity on us and port IE over to Linux, etc. That's our only hope of ever having a decent browser.
Right on! Especially in America, management has become the new royalty, i.e., parasites. Sure, a Scoutmaster or Den Mother is sometimes necessary. But I've worked in some Dilbert shops before that could only have been improved by a nuclear strike--so fouled up they were by the bad vibe the "overlords" had propogated. With a more modular, networked economy I'm hoping the parasites simply get lost in the (re-)shuffle. As far as the 10%, I also agree. When I skim the news, I always head for the science and technology, simply because it's the only area where the human crap shoot is actually making any certifiable progress. All the rest (except for some of the arts) is just so much leaky-brained redundancy.
I wouldn't waste my time on CIS. There is no real way to teach the management of IT: you're either a manager or you're not. "Sort of" learning computers just makes you a dangerous manager. CS is a science, which means butt-busting work. Usually, the professors try to kill the students. But whoever crawls out alive at the end of the semester is usually pleasantly surprised. So, surviving the "psych-out" is half the battle. In general, a CS curriculum is designed to put you in the ballpark of big-league programming. It might not set you up specifically for any one project or brand or paradigm, but you'll be hired on the basis that a CS degree proves you can handle big league IT issues.
No matter how refined computers become, no matter how many orders of magnitude of AI we pile on top of each other, no matter how elegant and compact and all-encompassing thing become, there will always be a need for someone who understands the underlying components. Somebody will have to know what is inside of the black box. There will always be McGiver situations where a more elemental understanding of the technology is necessary.
Obviously, components are the first step, more Lego-ing and less handcrafting of software. But I disagree with anyone who thinks hardware is way out in front of software. If hardware speed were indeed so far out in front, then games would be written in VB or Java or Python or Smalltalk or Modula-2. As it stands today, we're still facing a large performance gradient. Make the gradient go away, i.e., make it so that bulky, overhead-intensive-but-elegant languages fly just as well as tight, super-optimized C or Assembly, relatively speaking, and then you can talk about hardware's arrival.
I believe GNU/Linux is successful mainly due to politics, but partly due to "technological honesty". Sure, the overall user/developer experience of the Unixae is more primitive than, say, Microsoft Windowses, but what sort of progress has MS really brought? Phony, glitzy bells and whistles is not necessarily progress. Besides COM, MS really hasn't much to offer in terms of elegance.
Another aspect of the open source/free revolt is that this is the first time true freedom in the computer world has appeared. Back in the late '70's at my university, if you weren't a 3.5 math major, you didn't get into the CS emphasis, and, hence, you never got your hands on a computer; you were just a peasant. Microsoft Windows changed that with Peztold's tome on Windows 3.1 programming, and now, finally, GNU/Linux has broken the field wide open. We really haven't had much time to flex our muscles yet. The world simply hasn't hit its software development stride yet.
All in all, a few more years of open/free software and true universal hardware speed will turn things around.
You can't flame Moody because the ABC site has absolutely no way to e-mail them!! I know because I've been reading that Bozo for a while now and he's notoriously pro-MS and anti-Free/OS. Once, a long while ago he followed up a super-flamed article with a piece grumbling about how much flame he received--but that was back when the ABC site had at least a "webmaster" email address. Now there's no way possible to flame our fellow "cyberteer".
This may be from the Out-on-a-limb department, but I believe the atrocious browser and/or fonts situation must be solved for Linux to move forward. Grizzled old hackers from the Unix tradition see all of this a just superfluous eye-candy, but that huge block to the left of us on the chart don't warm up to computers with bad/mismatched/funky/tiny/ugly fonts. It's just a fact. And unfortunately, Linux has to compete on the desktop to really challenge MS.
Gelernter has good, interesting points. Obviously, data as the brain does it and as your PC does it is radically different. But the brain is a classic product of evolution, and evolution doesn't pro-actively create, it simply rolls the dice and goes with the winner. "Going with the winner" has changed radically, however. I just returned to a town in Illinois where I spent a few years of my early childhood. What I had in my memories and what I saw these 35 years later more or less coincided, but I was occassionally shocked at how poor my memory had stored the information. The point is, I really appreciate the exactness of photography, printed paper, digital storage, etc. We may eventually understand the human brain, but what if its "inexactness" is inextricably woven into to mix? Could the human brain be a loser, an evolutionary dead-end? Gelernter's "swarming data" is probably accurate, but Danny Hillis' analogy to everyone having a powerful computer being like everyone having a noisy power generator running in their backyard is my gold standard. Whatever happens, I don't think I need more than a smart dumb terminal.
Wonderfully put. Right on!
I don't think we here in Wichita knew anything about this thing. I know the ACLUG (Wichita-based LUG) would have promoted it and caravan-ed on over there....Maybe better advertising would help....Hey, KC is pretty big IT-wise....
Programming in the MS Windows environment is geared towards producing nice, pretty Windows apps, full stop. Everything else is much more difficult for all the stated reasons. I've used Visual Studio and Visual Cafe on Windows and in both cases there was no advantage to using those environments unless you were building a standard, user interface Windows app. However, in today's world so much of programming is either "systems" or Web. Sure, Microsoft has long stood for the "Cadillac" ride, while Unix/Linux is more like a Landrover, but you can go more places in a Landrover. That's why I think the "Where do you want to go today?" is so specious: Whatever your answer is it better fit into a Windows app on a Windows box. And I have to emphasize the Open Source mentality again. I've worked in MS environments where needed bugfixes or lacking functionality simply stopped the show--with no recourse to solving the problem other than to wait for MS to maybe fix it or expand it. When you have to back an entire development team out of Visual Basic 6 because VB6 suddenly can't handle your VB 5-written app, you'll stop complaining about the canvas seats and the hard suspension of that Landrover. Sure, the learning curve is steeper in the Linux/Unix environment, but there is no limit to what you can do--once you master the gnarly tools--whereas Windows programming always seems to have a stone wall just lurking around the corner.
This may sound alarmist, but Linux on the mass desktop depends on Mozilla. In today's general consumer office/home computer world, the browser is almost as (maybe more) important as (than) the the office suite. The Gateway/AOL/Transmeta deal will be an incredible flop if Mozilla can't deliver the goods--regardless of the hardware/OS. That would be a very high profile failure for the Linux world. I'm not really effected as I'm in a university setting where we play with esoterica all day. But the Joe Homebod, who's just heard of Linux last week, will turn is dull eyes back to M$ if Linux can't deliver with at least a decent browser. Call me paranoid, but without the office/home masses, Microsoft will have even more opportunity to genetically tinker with the Internet. BTW, we could use some decent font rendering, too.
The pathetic GUI environment of Linux is a turn-on to some Linux/Unix folks who think command line prowess is a sign of manhood. But wait, this whole GUI question is relevant to the computer as an end-user machine, not systems admin or developer equipment. That's why your Mac boosting sort of makes sense but doesn't. IT professionals don't need a pretty GUI, end-users do, though. The basis of your argument underlines today's schizophrenia of whether a box, G4 or Pentium, should be a server, a workstation, or a friendly end-user desktop machine--or all three at once. If X is supposed to be a server, what does a pretty GUI get you? NT became a hit mainly because it was a (funtionally) stable Windows environment which gave management the impression that their smartest secretary could be made systems administrator, so deceptively easy was the clickity-click of the mouse. Now, try to add 300 new users at once. You won't find any secretary writing Win32 code to do that. I'm sure X will be a hit on Intel machines, simply because GUI sells. Linux will hopefully climb out of the hideous font, sucky browser hole they're presently in, but the battle over what a fast G4 or Pentium is really supposed to be will go on.