I suppose I want a complete picture to completely eliminate any means of obscuring spending.
The problem is your definition of "complete". When you define it as every expenditure, no matter how small, you actually make it easier for them to slip pork and waste past you. Recall the expression about forests and trees.
Ever catch the British TV comedy "Yes Minister"? It's about a politician tasked to eliminate waste and bureaucracy in a government department and his fights with the bureaucrats who do everything they can to thwart him. When they want to hide something from him, they don't refuse him access to relevant documents, they snow him with a blizzard of information so the one fact he wants is well hidden.
I write technical documents for a living. One thing I learned early on is that communication is as much about abstraction as about detail. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues never figure that out!
Which justifies getting a reasonable breakdown of how they spend your money. But you want an accounting down to the individual dollar! So we're back to the paper clips.
In other words, every place you've worked has been plagued by the aforementioned laziness, stupidity, and bureaucratic ineptitude. For that matter, I've seen a lot of it too. Doesn't make it acceptable. And there are organization that manage to keep up. Well, most of the time.
Refusing to upgrade Microsoft Access for 10 years is particularly mind-boggling. How hard can it be? It's just a simple relational database. And I suspect that most people don't even use the relational features (which are pretty clumsy) and are basically using it as a flat-file editor.
And databases are crucial to a modern organization. Not keeping that part of your workflow up to date is asking for trouble.
Then why do you need to know how every dollar is spent? If a project costs, say, $10 Million and you think a lot of that was wasted, having access to small expenses won't help you make your case.
So, you're not interested in policies On priorities. You just want the ability to flame a civil servant every time they make a purchase you don't approve of, no matter how small. ("That brand of paper clips is too expensive!") Oh yeah, that's certainly going to make things more efficient.
What good would it do you? GWB was able to pretend that the Iraq war wasn't costing the U.S. anything. And he wasn't hiding the information, he was just leaving it out of the budget. Everybody was afraid to call him on it lest they look unpatriotic. Secrecy is not the problem.
The big disadvantage of being 64 bit is that Microsoft has dropped all 16 bit support in their 64 bit operating systems. For 99.5% of people, this is fine.
No, the big disadvantage of Win64 is astonishingly bad driver support. I've seen systems that couldn't handle USB mice!
And even at 0.5%, you're grossly overestimating the people who need to run 16-bit apps. Any Win16 app is at least a decade old and is no longer supported by the company that published it — assuming they still exist! If you have mission critical processes relying on such software, you're insane.
Of course, games don't count as "mission critical" — except on Slashdot, of course.
Trolls are a problem on Wikipedia, as they are with any site that lets anybody contribute content. But it's actually a smaller problem on Wikipedia than you'd expect. Wikpedia has a fair amount of crap, but the really obvious crap seems to get discovered and expunged pretty quickly. Thousands of eyeballs can be helpful.
Unfortunately, a lot of those eyeballs belong to people who mean well, but just don't understand their chosen subject matter as well as they think they do. Like the guy who "corrected" the article on Pluto because he didn't know that Pluto is sometimes closer to the Sun than Neptune!
That's pretty lame under any circumstances, but when a WP "editor" addss fourth-hand information about living people, it can cause a lot of grief. Which is why they're locking down this content first. It's not a sudden love of accuracy, it's fear of getting sued.
My favorite story in this context is from Brooke Gladstone, who's a big fan of the whole crowdsourcing concept in general and Wikipedia in particular. However, she was less enthusiastic about this edit, which she found intrusive, and was apparently made by a friend of her children.
In digging up this edit, I found an earlier version of her page that includes the name of a canary her husband used to own! That's my other big issue with Wikipedia: too much useless trivia.
And they'll say "but our records show" and they'll keep calling you over and over and over. Organizations with big call centers have infinite patience and do not understand the meaning of "fuck off".
Grade school idealism may be naive, but so is your high school cynicism. In the real word, "the people" are neither the collective source of our Jeffersonian wisdom nor Orwellian cattle. To grownups life is more nuanced than any simplistic extreme. Our government may not be as responsive as it should be, but pretending that it's totally out of our control is a glib copout.
If all you want is to shoot out text or postscript, then yeah, CUPS will work. There's more to printing than that.
Where I work, there are a lot of very fancy Xerox printers. You can access them through Solaris LPR (not CUPS, but the same kind of old-fashioned spooling) or you can access them directly via the Windows-only Xerox driver. With LPR, you get a printout. If you really know what you're doing, you can make the printout double-sided.
With the Xerox print driver, you can print out multiple copies, collated and stapled. You can send and receive faxes, and scan in documents. There are other features (like n-up printing) that you could do on LPR, but only if you're really good with Postscript filters; on Windows, you just have to find the right GUI screen.
Mind you, I'm not happy that Xerox doesn't provide a Linux version of this driver. But the fact remains that it's the only way to use this fancy, expensive piece of hardware to its full potential.
You speak of "marketing" as if it were something you can buy at 7-11. Real marketing is complicated and expensive, and takes organization and contacts. Without it, you haven't much hope of reaching an audience of any size. Getting 10% of the revenue from a book that sells well is a lot more money than 100% of a book that nobody knows about.
Yes, I know, some people have made a success of online books, using viral marketing. But I think you'll find that in every case, the goal is to demonstrate to a "real" publisher that there's a market for the book. And once that happens, they soon make a lot more money from royalties than they ever made from distributing the book themselves, even with the 90% "rip off".
Uh, people who need their services? Where I live, DSL maxs out at maybe 1.5 MB, regardless of provider. If I want more than that, Comcast is my only option.
All the crews and their families live at the station - imagine that as a way of life.
I can't imagine doing anything these guys do. Those of us who've never lived or worked on the sea can only imagine the risks and hardships of people working on it, never mind people like this who only go out when it's really nasty.
On the other hand, the station strikes me as a pretty good place to raise kids. No urban distractions or hazards, lots of chances to learn stuff and to just be a kid, and a community small enough to ensure that they all get personal attention.
Dude, you have serious reading issues. I'd have that looked into.
How you can think onthemedia.org is a blog is just beyond me. It's a web site for a radio news/interview show. The page I linked is a transcript of an interview with this guy, who's something of an expert on the issue.
Further reading issues: none of the sources you link says anything like "fake studies... targeted to make doctors think they are real and therefore describe pills that kill their patients, or at least make them suffer". It's as I said: real information, but cherry-picked.
I'd say the exact point of this, is to make doctors prescribe drugs, with the only reason being profit. Which was exactly my point.:)
You're entitled to admit a mistake (we all make them) but not to spin that admission as an what-I-really-meant. When you accuse people of publishing "fake studies" that "kill" you're spouting bullshit.
Well, at least it's original bullshit. I apologize for accusing you of spreading somebody else's bullshit.
What's really ironic is your little jab a Wikipedia. At least they admit they have a problem with people posting fourth-hand information and are trying to do something about it. You, on the other hand, do the exact same thing and refuse to admit what you're doing. That makes you as dishonest as any drug company flack.
They publish fake magazines, with fake studies in them, especially targeted to make doctors think they are real and therefore describe pills that kill their patients, or at least make them suffer while going broke, just so the pharma industry can make money.
Citation needed. The version I heard was that the studies we're all legit, but cherry-picked to help sell products. And note the past tense: they got caught, and stopped doing it.
Dishonest? Certainly. But not the evil murderous thugs in your version. Which, frankly, sounds like the usual fourth-hand blog bullshit. Use your brain before repeating such crap.
Gee, what an interesting idea. Too bad a couple million people had it before you. For any given subject matter, there are already a lot of people writing about it on the web. Some of them are pretty good. No newcomer is going to rise to top of the search engine results unless their work is really good and they do a lot of viral marketing.
Speaking of marketing, you have a pretty simplistic notion of what publishers do. They don't just print up the books and list them on their web site, they market, advertise, and provide editorial support. That last one is kind of important, assuming that you don't want to look like an illiterate clown.
Another thing: very few technical books earn a significant amount of money. So really, the only reason to do all that work is the prestige of being a published author. Looks really good on your resume, and your mother will want a copy, even if she doesn't understand a word. Actually having your name on a book that's sitting on a shelf over at Barnes and Noble gives you a lot more prestige than just having a PDF on your web site.
Which is not to say that putting your stuff online is a waste of time. It's a good way to get attention, and it's your obvious last resort if you can't get a "real" publisher interested in your work. Actually, my next book will be online before I even finish writing it (assuming I ever start writing it). This will allow me to get feedback as I'm writing, and also allow me to experiment with various modes of authoring and delivery. (Crucial buzzwords: DITA, EPUB, XSL.) But that's all just a means to an end. If my online version never results in a "real" book, I won't be heartbroken — but neither will I consider the online version an adequate substitute.
Hey, here's a really radical idea. Why don't we deal with an Ask Slashdot by actually trying to answer the question?
Gee, I dunno, what did you get? Did you work on the source code as a hobby? Then you got whatever people get for their hobbies (pleasure mostly). But I'm dubious that enough software hobby hours to sustain all the big Open Source projects out there. To get a steady stream of work from people, you usually have to pay them for their time.
I knew a guy who made a hobby of XEmacs. He didn't get paid for his work — until he landed a job with the development tools group at Sun. At the time XEmacs was part of the tools bundle Sun provided, and they paid him a full time salary to work on nothing but XEmacs. Amongst other contributions, he was the Beta Release Manager for XEmacs. (Not for the Sun version, for the whole thing.) As such he had prime responsibility for code integration; he used to complain to me about people who'd save up all their changes and submit them in one big blob, which made integration a lot harder.
Then he got tired of working on nothing but XEmacs and went on to other stuff, but he still uses XEmacs a lot, hacks it a lot, and contributes his work. And he doesn't do it on his own time, so in effect his employer is still subsidizing the XEmacs project.
I suspect that most contributions to OS projects are of that form: people working on them on company time. Possibly some such companies don't realize the extent they're subsidizing OS this way, but many more do know and consider it a necessary expense.
So, you have lots of people getting paid to work on OS code. Maybe not a majority on every project, but in every case I think you'll find that there are crucial roles, such as project management and QA, that are filled by people who are paid to do it. Certainly OS projects that can't find commercial backing seem to wither and die pretty fast.
I judge the free software movement by the rantings of its founder. I think it's safe to assume that his views are more representative than yours.
My definition of a schoolyard radical is somebody who loves elaborate social theories, but has no ability to apply them outside academia. RMS is a classic case: his GNU OS (the original "free" software project) has been under development for 27 years, with no end in sight. Yes, big chunks of it are incorporated in Linux, but the fact remains that RMS doesn't know how to see a big software project to completion. Like all schoolyard radicals, he never has to acknowledge his failure because he lives in the academic world, away from economic reality.
RMS's theories appeal to the same mindset that bought into the "fuck you I'll do what I want" brand of libertarianism that became alll the rage during the 80s. That mindset has just recently shown its intellectual and moral bankruptcy. RMS had one good idea: that voluntary cooperation was a better model for shared projects than the traditional committee approach. Others have taken this idea and done great things with it. RMS deserves some credit for that, but from his point of view it's almost an accidental outcome.
This isn't about some indistinct philosophy or religious point.
Maybe not an indistinct one, but the issue is pretty religious.
As you say, the Free/Open distinction is real enough. But it seems to me that it's the "software wants to be free" zealots who don't get this. They assume that everybody who uses FOSS is behind their entire program. That's why they insist that GPL is the only license anybody needs -- their program only advances if everybody uses it.
What they don't get is that the big backers of Open Source are not schoolyard radicals like RMS. They're big technology companies whose business goals are furthered by the existence of code bases that are accesible to everybody. So they subsidize FOOS projects by giving them money, hardware, programmer time, even management resources. This is what keeps the FOSS movement going.
The zealots see the FOSS movements success as a vindication of their silly theories. In reality, it's just a new business model. Their inability to grasp this is what causes the disconnect over licensing.
It's not an article it's a blog posting. As it's source, it gives another blog posting. What's the source for that one? Yet another blog posting, this time with no source at all.
This is where I should insert the usual rant about Slashdot editors not just blindly posting whatever crap people happen to send in. But we've all done that 100 times, and they've never paid attention.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose I want a complete picture to completely eliminate any means of obscuring spending.
The problem is your definition of "complete". When you define it as every expenditure, no matter how small, you actually make it easier for them to slip pork and waste past you. Recall the expression about forests and trees.
Ever catch the British TV comedy "Yes Minister"? It's about a politician tasked to eliminate waste and bureaucracy in a government department and his fights with the bureaucrats who do everything they can to thwart him. When they want to hide something from him, they don't refuse him access to relevant documents, they snow him with a blizzard of information so the one fact he wants is well hidden.
I write technical documents for a living. One thing I learned early on is that communication is as much about abstraction as about detail. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues never figure that out!
Which justifies getting a reasonable breakdown of how they spend your money. But you want an accounting down to the individual dollar! So we're back to the paper clips.
Now you're being childish. Of course I grasp that. What I can't get you to explain is what you'd do with the information once you had it.
In other words, every place you've worked has been plagued by the aforementioned laziness, stupidity, and bureaucratic ineptitude. For that matter, I've seen a lot of it too. Doesn't make it acceptable. And there are organization that manage to keep up. Well, most of the time.
Refusing to upgrade Microsoft Access for 10 years is particularly mind-boggling. How hard can it be? It's just a simple relational database. And I suspect that most people don't even use the relational features (which are pretty clumsy) and are basically using it as a flat-file editor.
And databases are crucial to a modern organization. Not keeping that part of your workflow up to date is asking for trouble.
Then why do you need to know how every dollar is spent? If a project costs, say, $10 Million and you think a lot of that was wasted, having access to small expenses won't help you make your case.
And yet that same mouse worked fine with the HID driver on Win32.
So, you're not interested in policies On priorities. You just want the ability to flame a civil servant every time they make a purchase you don't approve of, no matter how small. ("That brand of paper clips is too expensive!") Oh yeah, that's certainly going to make things more efficient.
What good would it do you? GWB was able to pretend that the Iraq war wasn't costing the U.S. anything. And he wasn't hiding the information, he was just leaving it out of the budget. Everybody was afraid to call him on it lest they look unpatriotic. Secrecy is not the problem.
The big disadvantage of being 64 bit is that Microsoft has dropped all 16 bit support in their 64 bit operating systems. For 99.5% of people, this is fine.
No, the big disadvantage of Win64 is astonishingly bad driver support. I've seen systems that couldn't handle USB mice!
And even at 0.5%, you're grossly overestimating the people who need to run 16-bit apps. Any Win16 app is at least a decade old and is no longer supported by the company that published it — assuming they still exist! If you have mission critical processes relying on such software, you're insane.
Of course, games don't count as "mission critical" — except on Slashdot, of course.
Trolls are a problem on Wikipedia, as they are with any site that lets anybody contribute content. But it's actually a smaller problem on Wikipedia than you'd expect. Wikpedia has a fair amount of crap, but the really obvious crap seems to get discovered and expunged pretty quickly. Thousands of eyeballs can be helpful.
Unfortunately, a lot of those eyeballs belong to people who mean well, but just don't understand their chosen subject matter as well as they think they do. Like the guy who "corrected" the article on Pluto because he didn't know that Pluto is sometimes closer to the Sun than Neptune!
That's pretty lame under any circumstances, but when a WP "editor" addss fourth-hand information about living people, it can cause a lot of grief. Which is why they're locking down this content first. It's not a sudden love of accuracy, it's fear of getting sued.
My favorite story in this context is from Brooke Gladstone, who's a big fan of the whole crowdsourcing concept in general and Wikipedia in particular. However, she was less enthusiastic about this edit, which she found intrusive, and was apparently made by a friend of her children.
In digging up this edit, I found an earlier version of her page that includes the name of a canary her husband used to own! That's my other big issue with Wikipedia: too much useless trivia.
Seems like now that O'Reilly's publishing a LISP book, the Age of Parenthesus has come
I, for one, welcome our new parenthetical overlords.
And they'll say "but our records show" and they'll keep calling you over and over and over. Organizations with big call centers have infinite patience and do not understand the meaning of "fuck off".
Grade school idealism may be naive, but so is your high school cynicism. In the real word, "the people" are neither the collective source of our Jeffersonian wisdom nor Orwellian cattle. To grownups life is more nuanced than any simplistic extreme. Our government may not be as responsive as it should be, but pretending that it's totally out of our control is a glib copout.
If all you want is to shoot out text or postscript, then yeah, CUPS will work. There's more to printing than that.
Where I work, there are a lot of very fancy Xerox printers. You can access them through Solaris LPR (not CUPS, but the same kind of old-fashioned spooling) or you can access them directly via the Windows-only Xerox driver. With LPR, you get a printout. If you really know what you're doing, you can make the printout double-sided.
With the Xerox print driver, you can print out multiple copies, collated and stapled. You can send and receive faxes, and scan in documents. There are other features (like n-up printing) that you could do on LPR, but only if you're really good with Postscript filters; on Windows, you just have to find the right GUI screen.
Mind you, I'm not happy that Xerox doesn't provide a Linux version of this driver. But the fact remains that it's the only way to use this fancy, expensive piece of hardware to its full potential.
You speak of "marketing" as if it were something you can buy at 7-11. Real marketing is complicated and expensive, and takes organization and contacts. Without it, you haven't much hope of reaching an audience of any size. Getting 10% of the revenue from a book that sells well is a lot more money than 100% of a book that nobody knows about.
Yes, I know, some people have made a success of online books, using viral marketing. But I think you'll find that in every case, the goal is to demonstrate to a "real" publisher that there's a market for the book. And once that happens, they soon make a lot more money from royalties than they ever made from distributing the book themselves, even with the 90% "rip off".
Uh, people who need their services? Where I live, DSL maxs out at maybe 1.5 MB, regardless of provider. If I want more than that, Comcast is my only option.
All the crews and their families live at the station - imagine that as a way of life.
I can't imagine doing anything these guys do. Those of us who've never lived or worked on the sea can only imagine the risks and hardships of people working on it, never mind people like this who only go out when it's really nasty.
On the other hand, the station strikes me as a pretty good place to raise kids. No urban distractions or hazards, lots of chances to learn stuff and to just be a kid, and a community small enough to ensure that they all get personal attention.
Dude, you have serious reading issues. I'd have that looked into.
How you can think onthemedia.org is a blog is just beyond me. It's a web site for a radio news/interview show. The page I linked is a transcript of an interview with this guy, who's something of an expert on the issue.
Further reading issues: none of the sources you link says anything like "fake studies ... targeted to make doctors think they are real and therefore describe pills that kill their patients, or at least make them suffer". It's as I said: real information, but cherry-picked.
I'd say the exact point of this, is to make doctors prescribe drugs, with the only reason being profit. Which was exactly my point. :)
You're entitled to admit a mistake (we all make them) but not to spin that admission as an what-I-really-meant. When you accuse people of publishing "fake studies" that "kill" you're spouting bullshit.
Well, at least it's original bullshit. I apologize for accusing you of spreading somebody else's bullshit.
What's really ironic is your little jab a Wikipedia. At least they admit they have a problem with people posting fourth-hand information and are trying to do something about it. You, on the other hand, do the exact same thing and refuse to admit what you're doing. That makes you as dishonest as any drug company flack.
They publish fake magazines, with fake studies in them, especially targeted to make doctors think they are real and therefore describe pills that kill their patients, or at least make them suffer while going broke, just so the pharma industry can make money.
Citation needed. The version I heard was that the studies we're all legit, but cherry-picked to help sell products. And note the past tense: they got caught, and stopped doing it.
Dishonest? Certainly. But not the evil murderous thugs in your version. Which, frankly, sounds like the usual fourth-hand blog bullshit. Use your brain before repeating such crap.
Gee, what an interesting idea. Too bad a couple million people had it before you. For any given subject matter, there are already a lot of people writing about it on the web. Some of them are pretty good. No newcomer is going to rise to top of the search engine results unless their work is really good and they do a lot of viral marketing.
Speaking of marketing, you have a pretty simplistic notion of what publishers do. They don't just print up the books and list them on their web site, they market, advertise, and provide editorial support. That last one is kind of important, assuming that you don't want to look like an illiterate clown.
Another thing: very few technical books earn a significant amount of money. So really, the only reason to do all that work is the prestige of being a published author. Looks really good on your resume, and your mother will want a copy, even if she doesn't understand a word. Actually having your name on a book that's sitting on a shelf over at Barnes and Noble gives you a lot more prestige than just having a PDF on your web site.
Which is not to say that putting your stuff online is a waste of time. It's a good way to get attention, and it's your obvious last resort if you can't get a "real" publisher interested in your work. Actually, my next book will be online before I even finish writing it (assuming I ever start writing it). This will allow me to get feedback as I'm writing, and also allow me to experiment with various modes of authoring and delivery. (Crucial buzzwords: DITA, EPUB, XSL.) But that's all just a means to an end. If my online version never results in a "real" book, I won't be heartbroken — but neither will I consider the online version an adequate substitute.
Hey, here's a really radical idea. Why don't we deal with an Ask Slashdot by actually trying to answer the question?
What do you do when zombies attack?
Most people buy popcorn.
Gee, I dunno, what did you get? Did you work on the source code as a hobby? Then you got whatever people get for their hobbies (pleasure mostly). But I'm dubious that enough software hobby hours to sustain all the big Open Source projects out there. To get a steady stream of work from people, you usually have to pay them for their time.
I knew a guy who made a hobby of XEmacs. He didn't get paid for his work — until he landed a job with the development tools group at Sun. At the time XEmacs was part of the tools bundle Sun provided, and they paid him a full time salary to work on nothing but XEmacs. Amongst other contributions, he was the Beta Release Manager for XEmacs. (Not for the Sun version, for the whole thing.) As such he had prime responsibility for code integration; he used to complain to me about people who'd save up all their changes and submit them in one big blob, which made integration a lot harder.
Then he got tired of working on nothing but XEmacs and went on to other stuff, but he still uses XEmacs a lot, hacks it a lot, and contributes his work. And he doesn't do it on his own time, so in effect his employer is still subsidizing the XEmacs project.
I suspect that most contributions to OS projects are of that form: people working on them on company time. Possibly some such companies don't realize the extent they're subsidizing OS this way, but many more do know and consider it a necessary expense.
So, you have lots of people getting paid to work on OS code. Maybe not a majority on every project, but in every case I think you'll find that there are crucial roles, such as project management and QA, that are filled by people who are paid to do it. Certainly OS projects that can't find commercial backing seem to wither and die pretty fast.
I judge the free software movement by the rantings of its founder. I think it's safe to assume that his views are more representative than yours.
My definition of a schoolyard radical is somebody who loves elaborate social theories, but has no ability to apply them outside academia. RMS is a classic case: his GNU OS (the original "free" software project) has been under development for 27 years, with no end in sight. Yes, big chunks of it are incorporated in Linux, but the fact remains that RMS doesn't know how to see a big software project to completion. Like all schoolyard radicals, he never has to acknowledge his failure because he lives in the academic world, away from economic reality.
RMS's theories appeal to the same mindset that bought into the "fuck you I'll do what I want" brand of libertarianism that became alll the rage during the 80s. That mindset has just recently shown its intellectual and moral bankruptcy. RMS had one good idea: that voluntary cooperation was a better model for shared projects than the traditional committee approach. Others have taken this idea and done great things with it. RMS deserves some credit for that, but from his point of view it's almost an accidental outcome.
This isn't about some indistinct philosophy or religious point.
Maybe not an indistinct one, but the issue is pretty religious.
As you say, the Free/Open distinction is real enough. But it seems to me that it's the "software wants to be free" zealots who don't get this. They assume that everybody who uses FOSS is behind their entire program. That's why they insist that GPL is the only license anybody needs -- their program only advances if everybody uses it.
What they don't get is that the big backers of Open Source are not schoolyard radicals like RMS. They're big technology companies whose business goals are furthered by the existence of code bases that are accesible to everybody. So they subsidize FOOS projects by giving them money, hardware, programmer time, even management resources. This is what keeps the FOSS movement going.
The zealots see the FOSS movements success as a vindication of their silly theories. In reality, it's just a new business model. Their inability to grasp this is what causes the disconnect over licensing.
It's not an article it's a blog posting. As it's source, it gives another blog posting. What's the source for that one? Yet another blog posting, this time with no source at all.
This is where I should insert the usual rant about Slashdot editors not just blindly posting whatever crap people happen to send in. But we've all done that 100 times, and they've never paid attention.