Some liked Dragon's Lair, some liked Space Ace. My game of choice in this genre was "Cliff Hanger".
The only problem is that it being much, much less popular, it disappeared before I could complete it. I never made it past the Ninja attack (somewhere around story sequence 5).
Egad. An MBA that incorporates econometrics? Where, pray tell, did you get this?
My biggest problem with an MBA is that I fear it's not going to quantitative enough. My undergrad is Math. I added the Math Ed option for the heck of it and found the glittering generalities that pass for curriculum in teacher training to be either self evident or suspect. I'm worried that MBA curriculum would be much the same way. Bu combine a serious examination of financial markets and hard quantitative analysis and I could get interested.:)
What I'd be curious is to know how valuable it would be compared to an MA/MS in Econ. Yes, I know they're not the same thing... just curious if anyone has any ancetdotal or actual info about salaries, employability...
Or what about something closer to running a business, like Operations Research?
--
Re:America: the country without a past...
on
American Gods
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· Score: 2
So the question is: does the culture of the united states cause this sense of little history, or does the lack of history cause the restless culture?
I tend to think that it's a bit of both of course, but lately I've been thinking about how cultural values actually reinforce the lack of history. Our culture doesn't encourage people to cultivate a sense of home or of belonging to a place much. The archetype is that you have to leave home to grow up.
(That shouldn't be too surprising considering that we consist of a nation of immigrants... to some degree, that has to exist.)
Still, there are pockets of culture in the US that encourage settling, and it would seem that in some of those communities, there IS a sense of history established. Reading Wendell Berry is one way to start thinking about this closely... he's interested in this sort of thing and documents where he's seen it (and also, somewhat antagonistically, where he doesn't).
You know, other than NSA Linux, I can't think of a single open source project funded by the governement. And I don't know that NSA Linux really counts: after all, it seems to me they just found something useful and are modifying it to fit their needs.
So I'm curious to know what the government is funding....
(And, theoretically, if the NSA didn't distribute it at all, they wouldn't even have to make their changes available, right?)
I take issue with several sophisms that Steve Ballmer attempted to promulgate during his interview with the Sun-Times, printed on June 1st.
Ballmer claims that "Open Source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." This is an out-and-out mistatement of what open source licenses do. In order to keep Sun-Times readers well-informed, perhaps an examination of the essentials of the two most popular open source licenses would be in order.
The BSD license, originally created to cover software released by UC Berkeley, essentially requires only that you retain a notice attributing the original source of the software. Thus software under the BSD license is very close to the public domain -- all you have to do to use it in any way you wish is to appropriately credit the original author. You don't even have to post this credit in a prominent place (like the about box or documentation of a program). It only has to go in the code, and users might even remain unaware that a program uses BSD licensed software.
One good example of this can be found in Microsoft's own Windows NT and Windows 2000. The IP stack -- an essential portion of the networking code -- is actually taken from code released under the BSD license. Microsoft has thus taken open source software and succesfully incorporated it into one of their flagship products -- all without resulting in any loss of intellectual property on Microsoft's part.
The GNU Public license, originally created at the Free Software Foundation, is stricter in its requirements than the BSD license, but nowhere near as restrictive as Ballmer suggests. It is true that if you take code from
a piece of GPL'd software and release a derivitave work based on that code, then you must release that derivitave work, with source code, under the GPL.
The GPL makes this requirement in order to ensure people will always be able to freely use, inspect, and modify software released under the GPL. Software released under the GPL cannot be made proprietary.
However, there is NO provision in the GPL that states you must release ALL your software under the GPL. Non-derivative works may be released under any license the copyright owner please. Thus, a company such as Corel can distribute their own version of the popular GPL'd operating system Linux and simultaneously sell their Word Perfect Office Suite in the traditional proprietary manner. They are not required to open source all of their products -- not even their version of Word Perfect that runs on Linux -- because these products are not derived from GPL'd software. This example neatly refutes Ballmer's assertion that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." The GPL applies to and affects only software that is derived from other GPL'd software, allowing companies handle the distribution and licensing of their proprietary software in any way they see fit.
It's worth noting that Corel and Microsoft itself are only two of many corporations and small businesses who are succesfully incorporating open source software into their operations. AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun have long used similar strategies. AOL, EBay, Red Hat, VA Linux, and others are among the growing powerhouses that have learned to harness and profit from the increasing popularity of open source. Far from being a cancer that is unfit for business use, open source has proved to be a boon for those who understand it.
The verity of these points is obvious to anyone who has spent suffecient time familiarizing themselves with the essential facts about various types of open source software. Either Ballmer is simply uninformed about his competitors, or he is taking advantage of his opportunities in public forums such as the Sun-Times to intentionally mislead people about software which is competing (quite effectively) with Microsoft's own products. Given Microsoft's history, which do you beleive?
Sincerely,
--
-1, Redundant (or, why UI is not the problem)
on
The Humane Interface
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· Score: 4
I've said this before, but I'm not sure it sticks yet. I think that Raskin has a good point about consistency across system interface. However, I've come to beleive that UI is not the bugaboo of human-computer interaction. The real problem is system configuration/administration.
My parents, for example, are competent using any number of applications (all with varying purposes and slightly different UIs). But ask them to change any system setting, and they will either give you a blank look or freak out. They don't have the faintest idea of how to start. They're even wary of navigating control panels until they find the right tab/checkbox.
Fair enough, right? The big realization came when I realized that I'm afraid of system administration too. Especially when it comes to unix systems. Even with all those neat-o little configuration tools that come with Linux now, it can be a nightmare to setup X or networking if things aren't just how you found them.
Compared to these sorts of trials, learning to type the right commands or navigate a heirarchy of menus is easy. Most humans are born with the ability to pick up language, so typing commands isn't too much of a stretch. Pointing and clicking isn't hard either. What we're not equiped to do is manage a lot of detail, or absorb a lot of underlying principles quickly. Until someone manages to address those concerns, UI may be great but human-computer interaction will not move far forward.
One more time, since I've already posted some replies to other posts containing this observation, but I want to make sure this gets through to everybody:
The problem is that Katz is preaching to the choir. To a fair bit of the Slashdot audience, who already understand the ideas that Katz presents, the news is banal and the writing seems to be mere repackaging.
The reason things really heat up, though, is because a large portion of the slashdot audience is proud. They can't stand being told something already know. And their reaction to it is to belittle the person who tells them. Which they will do by:
1) proclaiming that it old news, that they already knew it and so did anyone who really knows what's up
2) arguing with them, especially over more trivial points
How many well-writen, cogent, and erudite rebuttals do you find to a Katz article? Maybe 2. How many
in category #1 and #2 do you find? Start counting.....
If Katz published these stories in the Reader's Digest, this wouldn't happen.
The problem with this and many of Katz's other editorials is that while they profess "insight" they usually offer nothing more than spun spin that lacks...
Wrong. The problem is that Katz is preaching to the choir. You already know half the ideas he discusses, so to you it seems a bit banal. And you're a proud geek, so you can't stand being told something you already know. And your reaction to that is to belittle the person who tells you by proclaiming that it's old news, that you already knew it, that anyone who really knows what's up already knew it, and that also, the person telling you missed several important details.
This is a perfect example. The *rise* of steganography? Come on. Just because it's new to Katz doesn't mean that it's *new*.
There may be someone in the audience who didn't know the term or understand the underlying concepts.
I've been reading amateur cryptography books since 1980. I didn't run into the term steganography until 1994. Like everyone else, I understood the concept -- one of the hidden-message strategies that was used in my grade school was using the nth letter of every word in an aribitrary message to get the real message.I just didn't know the term, and didn't quite understand the implications. I doubt a lot of people did. I doubt a lot of people do. I do know that the number of slashdotters that "get it" is probably higher than most, but I'll be there's a few readers who still don't really get steganography. And I'll bet there's even more who didn't ever think it was something that big business might get upset over. I'd even be willing to bet you're one of those people. Because rather than writing a reasoned response (indicating thought) stating why you don't think businesses/people/governments will react negatively to it, you just posted a knee-jerk criticism of the author and loudly declared that you knew about steganography all along.
Steganography is a fundamental part of encryption. There's neither nothing "new" about it nor anything that indicates -- BANG! out of nowhere! -- that it's on the "rise."
Its use is on the rise because there's more data to hide things in and more data that people want to hide.
Moreover, most of Katz's essays feel like they're the result of getting a "review copy" in the mail. Katz gets a free book -- maybe reads the whole thing, skims it, or just reads the last few chapters -- and then writes an essay.
Katz publishes articles about social implications of technical things. Not detailed expositions of the technical things. In one sense, you are correct -- Katz probably doesn't deeply grok technical things and therefore often doesn't see the right implications.
For Katz, everything is new, earth-shattering, revolutionary, and dangerous. We're always all living at the beginning of a revolution.
The web revolution, The computer revolution, The napster revolution, The corporate revolution, The democratic revolution.
You don't think these are part of something revolutionary?
I could go on, but you get the point. Katz's vision often lacks coherence from one essay to another. In essay #1 the web is revolutionary. In essay #2 napster is revolutionary.
The coherence is there, if you look. It's all about the conflict between the fact that technology is eliminating some scarcities that used to create lucrative markets. And at the same time, the popular ideology in american business and policy is that economics take prioriy over individual rights and innovation. Those are most of Katz's threads. Well, there are some about hostility of the majority to minorities, but that about covers it.
The final point is Katz's arrogance. He will not respond to posts. Period. Katz's uses Slashdot as a mouthpiece but doesn't join in the chorus of voices. It's an arrogance that I find quite stunning -- and something that I'm surprised more people don't find offensive.
He doesn't respond to *your* posts, I bet... what's the point? But he has responded to a few of mine. And I've seen others as well.
Maybe you'll have to try reason instead of largely unfounded criticism. I find that helps to draw a response.
Good gracious, there are so many potentially spurious and actually spurious ideas lurking in your post I don't know where to start.
Excellent perspective - if more slashdotters would read and try to understand rather than flaming posts like this, they might come to understand why the JonKatz's of the world rarely make it out of the academic world (who else would have them, since they produce nothing of value).
I don't think Jon counts as an academic. He's been a professional writer for a while. He actually has a writing life outside of slashdot, too.
Furthermore, there well may be a number of worthless academics, but the fact is, academia produces some fantastic stuff. You're using the invention of an academic named Tim Berners-Lee right now. Thank him while you're thinking of the number of useless people in business -- PHBs and incompetent plebes alike.
In many respects, Katz is an aspiring Monk Toohey. In fact, the behavior is so consistent that you'd have to believe he's using the reference as his formula (hard as it is to believe, but there are many on the fringe left that aspire to the anti-hero mythology, such as Kaczynski, McVeigh, etc).
Ellsworth Monkton Toohey, if you are refering to the character from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead as your link seems to suggest, is the correct name of the character. There's got to be a serious amount of hubris involved in the assumption that you can read Katz motives as well as Toohey's are marked up by Rand (then again, Rand fans may tend to mistake hubris for her doctrine of ego/integrity). I find it highly unlikely that Katz is a collectivist. True, he's not laisez-faire, but in just about every other respect, he seems to defend the rights and glory of the individual as opposed to the groups. So why didn't you compare him to Austin Heller? And get Toohey's name wrong? Have you READ the Fountainhead?
- he subjectively declares numerous items to be of extreme classification - e.g. "revolutionary", "crisis," etc. (what katz declares as reality/is/ reality)
You don't think that there is anything revolutionary about the internet?
You don't think that there aren't a few potential crises in the growing view of some policy makers and
most corps that place economics over individual freedoms?
Katz may exaggerate, and wax a bit too prosaically flowery at times, but he's not that far off.
- he posts tirades that are thousands of words, but can't find the time to engage in a dialog (only katz's reality is of interest and should be studied and absorbed by the masses; katz already knows reality as he has declared it, and doesn't need to waste time discussing it with others).
You're dead wrong. I've seen Katz jump into discussions spawned by his own articles. I've seen him acknowledge points that others made -- including some of my own comments.
- he opposes concepts consistent with predominant slashdot philosophy (free speech & free press ala areopagetica, free software, individual achievement overcoming conspiracy of the masses e.g. microsoft, etc.) and yet presents himself as the self-declared spokesperson for the slashdot community (much through the failure to engage in dialog - e.g. "my thoughts/are/ the view of slashdot and require no further introspection from me").
Ahh... you're smoking crack. He seems pretty pro free speech, free press, free, uh (don't know what areopagetica means), free software, and individualist. AND: he does NOT present himself as the spokesman for the community. He repeatedly says that he is NOT a geek himself... just interested in things tech/geek and how they affect society at large.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Jon Katz is merely unpopular around here because he's preaching to the choir, and if there's one thing that offends a geek, it's being told something they already know.
People like you should not be allowed within 50 yards of a soapbox.
My. We're not advocating censorship, are we?
Arrogant, moralistic, self-righteous bastard. I
wish people like you would leave the rest of us the hell alone. If I want to buy porn and other people want to be paid for making it and starring in it, then who the hell are you to say that we lack integrity?!
I didn't mean to imply that you or even anyone else who views porn lacks integrity. I simply meant that if the people who our top level poster called the "hypocratic [sic] republic" had integrity, they probably never would have noticed the porn banners. And thus weren't hypocrites at all. See my other post for further such clarifications.
I could say you lack intelligence for believing in a bunch of religious tripe.
I could say that you assumed you knew my background and what I had to say before you read carefully and therefore missed my actual point and got incensed about nothing at all. I would probably be more correct in that assertion than you are in yours by several orders of magnitude.
But do I go around doing that? No.
Um, well, actually, you just did "that."
I leave you the hell alone and would appreciate it if you would do the same.
Your post consists of exactly the same level of invasiveness into my life that mine did to yours. I think we're both OK.
Here's the crux of the debate: what does the invisible hand do well, and what doesn't it do well?
That's the policy question we really should be asking. Do we know if the invisible hand uses the radio spectrum better than the FCC -- or average citizen -- would? Nope.
Here's my plan for an experiement: let's take the existing spectrum, and carve it up into 3 areas. One portion of the spectrum is administered by the FCC as it is now. One portion is leased to commerical entities for a period of something like 10-20 years. They can trade those leases as they like. One last portion is given out to the public to do whatever they please with. All three groups (anyone using or leasing a portion of the spectrum) are required to report what they've done with it -- both in terms of services provided and gross/net returns.
Then we review each method for results on best services....
I posted this question on Phil's site, but I'd be interested to see what the response is here...
Assuming our heros lose their shareholder suit, doesn't the fact that their product is open source give them a hedge? That is, can anyone think of a reason they can't just grab the willing talent from ArsDigita, take their product, domain knowledge, and contacts, and create ArsDigita2, sans VCs?
In other news, scientists were shocked to discover that some Burlington employees, when tested, possesed DNA composed of a fifth, previously unknown protein, now known as Inine.
"We thought Cytosine, Tyrosine, Anonymine, and Guava were the basic DNA blocks," said John Ersatz, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. "With this new protein, the art of DNA acrostics is going to improve by 25%!"
"We could even rename that film 'Gattica'!" said and excited Slashdot poster.
--
Either Eazel has it wrong or the article does
on
Eazel On The Ropes
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· Score: 2
If they think that refering to "wav" and "mp3" files as songs is what's really going to enhance the quality of the user experience, they're a little loopy.
For a few first time users, I think that could be useful.
However, Eazel's real selling point could be: simplifying system administration, which is really the hard part of computers. If you can do that with Unix -- or any system -- the world will beat a path to your door. Well, 10% of the market anyway, looking at things empirically....
What does it say about slashdot moderators that this comment -- straight from the mouth of a member of the team working on the project, and the guy who actually got the cease and desist -- is moderated to a "3" and random rants against what a stupid decision apple made are up at "5"?
Granted, it's a stupid decision by Apple. But how much obsessing about it do we need? Especially more than this?
Do you feel the same way about sweatshop-shoestore boycotts?
One-click patent boycotts?
Any boycott?
These people thought something was wrong, they voiced their opinion and their plans. That's what a boycott is Yahoo responded. Nothing wrong here any more than boycotting Amazon or Nike. The problem seems to be that you don't agree with their idea of wrong. So call up Yahoo and let them know they messed up and you want to see porn back on the site, and what harm did it ever do anyone anyway. But don't expect other people to stop expressing their views, and don't expect Yahoo to have to agree with yours.
Anne Marie's post, btw, was obviously a troll, so I don't blame you for getting riled up.
BTW, The federal government is perfectly within its rights to offer/deny any funding it has based on conditions it sets. Whether or not they have the right to COLLECT the money from us is what I'm more concerned about. Especially this time of year.:)
If you can create your own themes, isn't this the opposite of trademark infringement? After all, this means you're replaceing the Apple trademarked graphics with something else. Something else you or someone else homebrewed.
There's only two reasons I can think Apple be upset about this.
1) Fear of having their interface diluted. They don't want the MacOS associated with joe phearsum's 1337-7h3m3. Or maybe even joe graphic designer's luscious theme. It's worse if they throw in apple graphics.
2) They feel like they're legally bound to defend trademarks.
Of course, given the fact that most of their customers are fairly loyal, asking people nicely not to use apple graphics in their own themes would probably work....
What alternatives are you actually suggesting? The only way to change the situation in question that I can think of:
1) require that people cannot express their views to Yahoo
2) require Yahoo to carry porn, regardless of how they feel about it ethically, or as a business move, or from an image standpoint
If you can think of anything else, great, but I can't see how doing EITHER 1 or 2 wouldn't be a greater travesty of justice than missing out on some porn.
"When you're hungry, do you go and stare at a picture of a steak?" -- Bill Cosby
Maybe "homogeneity of attitude" might have been a better phrase. What I meant by integrity is "wholeness"... probably a little closer to its literal meaning than its general meaning. Thus, the yahoo users/customers who complained about porn present on yahoo were but not links or banner ads were not hypocrites. They simply didn't know the ads/links existed precisely because they were consistent enough in their attitude towards porn they never stumbled upon them. "Consistent throughout", "integrity", "homogenous". Rather unlike hypocrisy, in fact.
BTW, what is a "Hypocratic public"? Perhaps one commited to universal health care? You'd best look in Canada or Europe for some such thing.
Among the senior members of the 2600 group in Washington who have found themselves in this
situation are Guy Montag, 39, an information systems analyst who works for a government
contracting company;
I thought Guy Montag was a "fireman" who used to burn books for the government but then began to be discontented with his distopian society and one day picked a book up and began to read and read and eventually (quite, um, dramatically) left society when caught...
Is Farenheit 451 old enough that a 39 year old's parents may have named a kid after a character in the book?
--
Re:Where does ruby sparkle? (languages are languag
on
Programming Ruby
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· Score: 3
PHP (perl for people to stupid to perl)
While I tend to find some things about PHP annoying in comparison to perl -- PHP is, in most things, just a little less convenient, and I'm used to perl -- I think that comment is just way off. Much better, I think, is Mark Jason-Dominus' view.
"In my world, PHP can be a good solution, and Perl can be a good solution, because maybe a problem can have more than one good solution. In my world you use what works, and using PHP can't possibly reflect badly on Perl."
as Objective C does to C++
Now I know you're smoking crack. For years, a small group of people called NeXT programmers wrote serious software with ease and speed the rest of the world -- especially the C++ world -- only dreamed of. Yes, back when (and perhaps before) perl was still in version 4.
And the functional and logical paradigms are VERY useful in the right problem domains (and/or with the right mindset). Which can be said of just about every language. Yes, perl is cool, and multiparadigmatic, and it is the swiss army chainsaw it's touted as, but that doesn't mean that other languages are all useless. There's more than one way to do it.
The only freedom that was excercised here was the freedom of a vocal minority to bully a company into arresting themselves and their law abiding consumers
You mean, the freedom of someone to say "I think porn is bad" and the freedom of someone to say "We value your patronage. We won't sell porn" should be curtailed?
Perhaps I shouldn't be able to express my ideas about pornography?
Perhaps yahoo should be REQUIRED to carry porn?
Some people expressed their viewpoint -- legally and probably ethically. Yahoo responded as they saw fit -- legally and probably ethically. You're welcome to express your viewpoint to Yahoo, too.
because of some all-too-deeply entrenched american belief that the human body is a disgrace, and that human sexuality is even worse.
Not everyone who thinks that porn may be a negative thing thinks that the body or sexuality are bad. There's room for a viewpoints other than that stereotype/strawman.
Slashdot Mirror
Some liked Dragon's Lair, some liked Space Ace. My game of choice in this genre was "Cliff Hanger".
The only problem is that it being much, much less popular, it disappeared before I could complete it. I never made it past the Ninja attack (somewhere around story sequence 5).
I did see someone complete it once....
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Egad. An MBA that incorporates econometrics? Where,
:)
pray tell, did you get this?
My biggest problem with an MBA is that I fear it's
not going to quantitative enough. My undergrad is Math.
I added the Math Ed option for the heck of it and found
the glittering generalities that pass for curriculum
in teacher training to be either self evident or suspect. I'm worried that
MBA curriculum would be much the same way.
Bu combine a serious examination of financial markets and hard quantitative analysis and I could get interested.
--
What I'd be curious is to know how valuable it would
be compared to an MA/MS in Econ. Yes, I know they're not
the same thing... just curious if anyone has any
ancetdotal or actual info about salaries, employability...
Or what about something closer to running a business,
like Operations Research?
--
So the question is: does the culture of the united states cause this sense of little history, or does the lack of history cause the restless culture?
I tend to think that it's a bit of both of course, but lately I've been thinking about how cultural values actually reinforce the lack of history. Our culture doesn't encourage people to cultivate a sense of home or of belonging to a place much. The archetype is that you have to leave home to grow up.
(That shouldn't be too surprising considering that we consist of a nation of immigrants... to some degree, that has to exist.)
Still, there are pockets of culture in the US that encourage settling, and it would seem that in some of those communities, there IS a sense of history established. Reading Wendell Berry is one way to start thinking about this closely... he's interested in this sort of thing and documents where he's seen it (and also, somewhat antagonistically, where he doesn't).
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You know, other than NSA Linux, I can't think of a single open source project funded by the governement. And I don't know that NSA Linux really counts: after all, it seems to me they just found something useful and are modifying it to fit their needs.
So I'm curious to know what the government is funding....
(And, theoretically, if the NSA didn't distribute it at all, they wouldn't even have to make their changes available, right?)
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I take issue with several sophisms that Steve Ballmer attempted to promulgate during his interview with the Sun-Times, printed on June 1st.
Ballmer claims that "Open Source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." This is an out-and-out mistatement of what open source licenses do. In order to keep Sun-Times readers well-informed, perhaps an examination of the essentials of the two most popular open source licenses would be in order.
The BSD license, originally created to cover software released by UC Berkeley, essentially requires only that you retain a notice attributing the original source of the software. Thus software under the BSD license is very close to the public domain -- all you have to do to use it in any way you wish is to appropriately credit the original author. You don't even have to post this credit in a prominent place (like the about box or documentation of a program). It only has to go in the code, and users might even remain unaware that a program uses BSD licensed software.
One good example of this can be found in Microsoft's own Windows NT and Windows 2000. The IP stack -- an essential portion of the networking code -- is actually taken from code released under the BSD license. Microsoft has thus taken open source software and succesfully incorporated it into one of their flagship products -- all without resulting in any loss of intellectual property on Microsoft's part.
The GNU Public license, originally created at the Free Software Foundation, is stricter in its requirements than the BSD license, but nowhere near as restrictive as Ballmer suggests. It is true that if you take code from
a piece of GPL'd software and release a derivitave work based on that code, then you must release that derivitave work, with source code, under the GPL.
The GPL makes this requirement in order to ensure people will always be able to freely use, inspect, and modify software released under the GPL. Software released under the GPL cannot be made proprietary.
However, there is NO provision in the GPL that states you must release ALL your software under the GPL. Non-derivative works may be released under any license the copyright owner please. Thus, a company such as Corel can distribute their own version of the popular GPL'd operating system Linux and simultaneously sell their Word Perfect Office Suite in the traditional proprietary manner. They are not required to open source all of their products -- not even their version of Word Perfect that runs on Linux -- because these products are not derived from GPL'd software. This example neatly refutes Ballmer's assertion that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." The GPL applies to and affects only software that is derived from other GPL'd software, allowing companies handle the distribution and licensing of their proprietary software in any way they see fit.
It's worth noting that Corel and Microsoft itself are only two of many corporations and small businesses who are succesfully incorporating open source software into their operations. AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun have long used similar strategies. AOL, EBay, Red Hat, VA Linux, and others are among the growing powerhouses that have learned to harness and profit from the increasing popularity of open source. Far from being a cancer that is unfit for business use, open source has proved to be a boon for those who understand it.
The verity of these points is obvious to anyone who has spent suffecient time familiarizing themselves with the essential facts about various types of open source software. Either Ballmer is simply uninformed about his competitors, or he is taking advantage of his opportunities in public forums such as the Sun-Times to intentionally mislead people about software which is competing (quite effectively) with Microsoft's own products. Given Microsoft's history, which do you beleive?
Sincerely,
--
I've said this before, but I'm not sure it sticks yet. I think that Raskin has a good point about consistency across system interface. However, I've come to beleive that UI is not the bugaboo of human-computer interaction. The real problem is system configuration/administration.
My parents, for example, are competent using any number of applications (all with varying purposes and slightly different UIs). But ask them to change any system setting, and they will either give you a blank look or freak out. They don't have the faintest idea of how to start. They're even wary of navigating control panels until they find the right tab/checkbox.
Fair enough, right? The big realization came when I realized that I'm afraid of system administration too. Especially when it comes to unix systems. Even with all those neat-o little configuration tools that come with Linux now, it can be a nightmare to setup X or networking if things aren't just how you found them.
Compared to these sorts of trials, learning to type the right commands or navigate a heirarchy of menus is easy. Most humans are born with the ability to pick up language, so typing commands isn't too much of a stretch. Pointing and clicking isn't hard either. What we're not equiped to do is manage a lot of detail, or absorb a lot of underlying principles quickly. Until someone manages to address those concerns, UI may be great but human-computer interaction will not move far forward.
--
I used to live in stormy waters, just dying of fright,
but now I've found a special hobby
and I'm doin' all right
Line from the song Suction Cup 6.1 by Sofina on mp3.com. Great tune.
(Nope, I'm not in the band, but they're local to my area and they're pretty darn good).
--
One more time, since I've already posted some replies to other posts containing this observation, but I want to make sure this gets through to everybody:
The problem is that Katz is preaching to the choir. To a fair bit of the Slashdot audience, who already understand the ideas that Katz presents, the news is banal and the writing seems to be mere repackaging.
The reason things really heat up, though, is because a large portion of the slashdot audience is proud. They can't stand being told something already know. And their reaction to it is to belittle the person who tells them. Which they will do by:
1) proclaiming that it old news, that they already knew it and so did anyone who really knows what's up
2) arguing with them, especially over more trivial points
How many well-writen, cogent, and erudite rebuttals do you find to a Katz article? Maybe 2. How many
in category #1 and #2 do you find? Start counting.....
If Katz published these stories in the Reader's Digest, this wouldn't happen.
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The problem with this and many of Katz's other editorials is that while they profess "insight" they usually offer nothing more than spun spin that lacks...
Wrong. The problem is that Katz is preaching to the choir. You already know half the ideas he discusses, so to you it seems a bit banal. And you're a proud geek, so you can't stand being told something you already know. And your reaction to that is to belittle the person who tells you by proclaiming that it's old news, that you already knew it, that anyone who really knows what's up already knew it, and that also, the person telling you missed several important details.
This is a perfect example. The *rise* of steganography? Come on. Just because it's new to Katz doesn't mean that it's *new*.
There may be someone in the audience who didn't know the term or understand the underlying concepts.
I've been reading amateur cryptography books since 1980. I didn't run into the term steganography until 1994. Like everyone else, I understood the concept -- one of the hidden-message strategies that was used in my grade school was using the nth letter of every word in an aribitrary message to get the real message.I just didn't know the term, and didn't quite understand the implications. I doubt a lot of people did. I doubt a lot of people do. I do know that the number of slashdotters that "get it" is probably higher than most, but I'll be there's a few readers who still don't really get steganography. And I'll bet there's even more who didn't ever think it was something that big business might get upset over. I'd even be willing to bet you're one of those people. Because rather than writing a reasoned response (indicating thought) stating why you don't think businesses/people/governments will react negatively to it, you just posted a knee-jerk criticism of the author and loudly declared that you knew about steganography all along.
Steganography is a fundamental part of encryption. There's neither nothing "new" about it nor anything that indicates -- BANG! out of nowhere! -- that it's on the "rise."
Its use is on the rise because there's more data to hide things in and more data that people want to hide.
Moreover, most of Katz's essays feel like they're the result of getting a "review copy" in the mail. Katz gets a free book -- maybe reads the whole thing, skims it, or just reads the last few chapters -- and then writes an essay.
Katz publishes articles about social implications of technical things. Not detailed expositions of the technical things. In one sense, you are correct -- Katz probably doesn't deeply grok technical things and therefore often doesn't see the right implications.
For Katz, everything is new, earth-shattering, revolutionary, and dangerous. We're always all living at the beginning of a revolution.
The web revolution, The computer revolution, The napster revolution, The corporate revolution, The democratic revolution.
You don't think these are part of something revolutionary?
I could go on, but you get the point. Katz's vision often lacks coherence from one essay to another. In essay #1 the web is revolutionary. In essay #2 napster is revolutionary.
The coherence is there, if you look. It's all about the conflict between the fact that technology is eliminating some scarcities that used to create lucrative markets. And at the same time, the popular ideology in american business and policy is that economics take prioriy over individual rights and innovation. Those are most of Katz's threads. Well, there are some about hostility of the majority to minorities, but that about covers it.
The final point is Katz's arrogance. He will not respond to posts. Period. Katz's uses Slashdot as a mouthpiece but doesn't join in the chorus of voices. It's an arrogance that I find quite stunning -- and something that I'm surprised more people don't find offensive.
He doesn't respond to *your* posts, I bet... what's the point? But he has responded to a few of mine. And I've seen others as well.
Maybe you'll have to try reason instead of largely unfounded criticism. I find that helps to draw a response.
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Good gracious, there are so many potentially spurious and actually spurious ideas lurking in your post I don't know where to start.
/is/ reality)
/are/ the view of slashdot and require no further introspection from me").
Excellent perspective - if more slashdotters would read and try to understand rather than flaming posts like this, they might come to understand why the JonKatz's of the world rarely make it out of the academic world (who else would have them, since they produce nothing of value).
I don't think Jon counts as an academic. He's been a professional writer for a while. He actually has a writing life outside of slashdot, too.
Furthermore, there well may be a number of worthless academics, but the fact is, academia produces some fantastic stuff. You're using the invention of an academic named Tim Berners-Lee right now. Thank him while you're thinking of the number of useless people in business -- PHBs and incompetent plebes alike.
In many respects, Katz is an aspiring Monk Toohey. In fact, the behavior is so consistent that you'd have to believe he's using the reference as his formula (hard as it is to believe, but there are many on the fringe left that aspire to the anti-hero mythology, such as Kaczynski, McVeigh, etc).
Ellsworth Monkton Toohey, if you are refering to the character from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead as your link seems to suggest, is the correct name of the character. There's got to be a serious amount of hubris involved in the assumption that you can read Katz motives as well as Toohey's are marked up by Rand (then again, Rand fans may tend to mistake hubris for her doctrine of ego/integrity). I find it highly unlikely that Katz is a collectivist. True, he's not laisez-faire, but in just about every other respect, he seems to defend the rights and glory of the individual as opposed to the groups. So why didn't you compare him to Austin Heller? And get Toohey's name wrong? Have you READ the Fountainhead?
- he subjectively declares numerous items to be of extreme classification - e.g. "revolutionary", "crisis," etc. (what katz declares as reality
You don't think that there is anything revolutionary about the internet?
You don't think that there aren't a few potential crises in the growing view of some policy makers and
most corps that place economics over individual freedoms?
Katz may exaggerate, and wax a bit too prosaically flowery at times, but he's not that far off.
- he posts tirades that are thousands of words, but can't find the time to engage in a dialog (only katz's reality is of interest and should be studied and absorbed by the masses; katz already knows reality as he has declared it, and doesn't need to waste time discussing it with others).
You're dead wrong. I've seen Katz jump into discussions spawned by his own articles. I've seen him acknowledge points that others made -- including some of my own comments.
- he opposes concepts consistent with predominant slashdot philosophy (free speech & free press ala areopagetica, free software, individual achievement overcoming conspiracy of the masses e.g. microsoft, etc.) and yet presents himself as the self-declared spokesperson for the slashdot community (much through the failure to engage in dialog - e.g. "my thoughts
Ahh... you're smoking crack. He seems pretty pro free speech, free press, free, uh (don't know what areopagetica means), free software, and individualist. AND: he does NOT present himself as the spokesman for the community. He repeatedly says that he is NOT a geek himself... just interested in things tech/geek and how they affect society at large.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Jon Katz is merely unpopular around here because he's preaching to the choir, and if there's one thing that offends a geek, it's being told something they already know.
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People like you should not be allowed within 50 yards of a soapbox.
My. We're not advocating censorship, are we?
Arrogant, moralistic, self-righteous bastard. I
wish people like you would leave the rest of us the hell alone. If I want to buy porn and other people want to be paid for making it and starring in it, then who the hell are you to say that we lack integrity?!
I didn't mean to imply that you or even anyone else who views porn lacks integrity. I simply meant that if the people who our top level poster called the "hypocratic [sic] republic" had integrity, they probably never would have noticed the porn banners. And thus weren't hypocrites at all. See my other post for further such clarifications.
I could say you lack intelligence for believing in a bunch of religious tripe.
I could say that you assumed you knew my background and what I had to say before you read carefully and therefore missed my actual point and got incensed about nothing at all. I would probably be more correct in that assertion than you are in yours by several orders of magnitude.
But do I go around doing that? No.
Um, well, actually, you just did "that."
I leave you the hell alone and would appreciate it if you would do the same.
Your post consists of exactly the same level of invasiveness into my life that mine did to yours. I think we're both OK.
Unless I've been trolled....
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Here's the crux of the debate: what does the invisible hand do well, and what doesn't it do well?
That's the policy question we really should be asking. Do we know if the invisible hand uses the radio spectrum better than the FCC -- or average citizen -- would? Nope.
Here's my plan for an experiement: let's take the existing spectrum, and carve it up into 3 areas. One portion of the spectrum is administered by the FCC as it is now. One portion is leased to commerical entities for a period of something like 10-20 years. They can trade those leases as they like. One last portion is given out to the public to do whatever they please with. All three groups (anyone using or leasing a portion of the spectrum) are required to report what they've done with it -- both in terms of services provided and gross/net returns.
Then we review each method for results on best services....
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What is "unstructured" data?
Just wondering....
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I posted this question on Phil's site, but I'd be interested to see what the response is here...
Assuming our heros lose their shareholder suit, doesn't the fact that their product is open source give them a hedge? That is, can anyone think of a reason they can't just grab the willing talent from ArsDigita, take their product, domain knowledge, and contacts, and create ArsDigita2, sans VCs?
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In other news, scientists were shocked to discover that some Burlington employees, when tested, possesed DNA composed of a fifth, previously unknown protein, now known as Inine.
"We thought Cytosine, Tyrosine, Anonymine, and Guava were the basic DNA blocks," said John Ersatz, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. "With this new protein, the art of DNA acrostics is going to improve by 25%!"
"We could even rename that film 'Gattica'!" said and excited Slashdot poster.
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If they think that refering to "wav" and "mp3" files as songs is what's really going to enhance the quality of the user experience, they're a little loopy.
For a few first time users, I think that could be useful.
However, Eazel's real selling point could be: simplifying system administration, which is really the hard part of computers. If you can do that with Unix -- or any system -- the world will beat a path to your door. Well, 10% of the market anyway, looking at things empirically....
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What does it say about slashdot moderators that this comment -- straight from the mouth of a member of the team working on the project, and the guy who actually got the cease and desist -- is moderated to a "3" and random rants against what a stupid decision apple made are up at "5"?
Granted, it's a stupid decision by Apple. But how much obsessing about it do we need? Especially more than this?
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Do you feel the same way about sweatshop-shoestore boycotts?
:)
One-click patent boycotts?
Any boycott?
These people thought something was wrong, they voiced their opinion and their plans. That's what a boycott is Yahoo responded. Nothing wrong here any more than boycotting Amazon or Nike. The problem seems to be that you don't agree with their idea of wrong. So call up Yahoo and let them know they messed up and you want to see porn back on the site, and what harm did it ever do anyone anyway. But don't expect other people to stop expressing their views, and don't expect Yahoo to have to agree with yours.
Anne Marie's post, btw, was obviously a troll, so I don't blame you for getting riled up.
BTW, The federal government is perfectly within its rights to offer/deny any funding it has based on conditions it sets. Whether or not they have the right to COLLECT the money from us is what I'm more concerned about. Especially this time of year.
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If you can create your own themes, isn't this the opposite of trademark infringement? After all, this means you're replaceing the Apple trademarked graphics with something else. Something else you or someone else homebrewed.
There's only two reasons I can think Apple be upset about this.
1) Fear of having their interface diluted. They don't want the MacOS associated with joe phearsum's 1337-7h3m3. Or maybe even joe graphic designer's luscious theme. It's worse if they throw in apple graphics.
2) They feel like they're legally bound to defend trademarks.
Of course, given the fact that most of their customers are fairly loyal, asking people nicely not to use apple graphics in their own themes would probably work....
'course, now that they've lost goodwill....
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Not a bad meta-logical troll. :)
But just in case you're serious....
What alternatives are you actually suggesting? The only way to change the situation in question that I can think of:
1) require that people cannot express their views to Yahoo
2) require Yahoo to carry porn, regardless of how they feel about it ethically, or as a business move, or from an image standpoint
If you can think of anything else, great, but I can't see how doing EITHER 1 or 2 wouldn't be a greater travesty of justice than missing out on some porn.
"When you're hungry, do you go and stare at a picture of a steak?" -- Bill Cosby
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Maybe "homogeneity of attitude" might have been a better phrase. What I meant by integrity is "wholeness" ... probably a little closer to its literal meaning than its general meaning. Thus, the yahoo users/customers who complained about porn present on yahoo were but not links or banner ads were not hypocrites. They simply didn't know the ads/links existed precisely because they were consistent enough in their attitude towards porn they never stumbled upon them. "Consistent throughout", "integrity", "homogenous". Rather unlike hypocrisy, in fact.
BTW, what is a "Hypocratic public"? Perhaps one commited to universal health care? You'd best look in Canada or Europe for some such thing.
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Among the senior members of the 2600 group in Washington who have found themselves in this
situation are Guy Montag, 39, an information systems analyst who works for a government
contracting company;
I thought Guy Montag was a "fireman" who used to burn books for the government but then began to be discontented with his distopian society and one day picked a book up and began to read and read and eventually (quite, um, dramatically) left society when caught...
Is Farenheit 451 old enough that a 39 year old's parents may have named a kid after a character in the book?
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PHP (perl for people to stupid to perl)
While I tend to find some things about PHP annoying in comparison to perl -- PHP is, in most things, just a little less convenient, and I'm used to perl -- I think that comment is just way off. Much better, I think, is Mark Jason-Dominus' view.
"In my world, PHP can be a good solution, and Perl can be a good solution, because maybe a problem can have more than one good solution. In my world you use what works, and using PHP can't possibly reflect badly on Perl."
as Objective C does to C++
Now I know you're smoking crack. For years, a small group of people called NeXT programmers wrote serious software with ease and speed the rest of the world -- especially the C++ world -- only dreamed of. Yes, back when (and perhaps before) perl was still in version 4.
And the functional and logical paradigms are VERY useful in the right problem domains (and/or with the right mindset). Which can be said of just about every language. Yes, perl is cool, and multiparadigmatic, and it is the swiss army chainsaw it's touted as, but that doesn't mean that other languages are all useless. There's more than one way to do it.
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The only freedom that was excercised here was the freedom of a vocal minority to bully a company into arresting themselves and their law abiding consumers
You mean, the freedom of someone to say "I think porn is bad" and the freedom of someone to say "We value your patronage. We won't sell porn" should be curtailed?
Perhaps I shouldn't be able to express my ideas about pornography?
Perhaps yahoo should be REQUIRED to carry porn?
Some people expressed their viewpoint -- legally and probably ethically. Yahoo responded as they saw fit -- legally and probably ethically. You're welcome to express your viewpoint to Yahoo, too.
because of some all-too-deeply entrenched american belief that the human body is a disgrace, and that human sexuality is even worse.
Not everyone who thinks that porn may be a negative thing thinks that the body or sexuality are bad. There's room for a viewpoints other than that stereotype/strawman.
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