You can get jobs working for people you never meet, and who don't even live in the same country as you.
I realize that this is possible, however, it is a very tiny exception to a very prevalent practice.
I have neither a high school nor college degree and I haven't had any problem.
Good for you. I suspect you got an early break in being able to demonstrate your competance without being "properly" credentialed, and after that employers looked at your experience instead of your (lack of) academics? I know a number of people who have gotten started in computers this way.
But, there are still a large number of employers (rightly or wrongly) who care about high school and college credentials. Enough to make this a real barrier.
Where I live (St. Louis), the inner city public schools spend more money per pupil... [blame inner city school failure on students]
Reasons for why inner-city schools are awful, in spite of huge sums of money sunk into them, are more than I have time to write (and no doubt vary from city to city somewhat). But "blame the students, they get the education they deserve" is simplistic, to say the least.
As far as the attrition rate of blacks in technical colleges, do you think it is a possibility that this may be in part to the fact that blacks who were not academically prepared were admitted into these programs in the name of diversity? We'll find out, in many places (California for example), students are being admitted to programs solely on the basis of academic merit. I would suspect that the attrition rate of blacks under these circumstances would be much lower.
Again, this is "blame the student," and again, I think that to make this the answer is to miss what's going on.
The IEEE has actually done some studies on this issue. If I remember correctly, their studies show that the dropout of black engineering students did not correlate with test scores or "affirmative action" admissions. Which would invalidate the theory that black attrition at the college level is due to admission policy. If you actually care about this, you might want to look into that research. If you just want to use it as an excuse to bash admission policies that try to take into account the atrociousness of the previously-mentioned schools, then don't let me confuse you with facts.
Where I go to school the race distribution in programming courses is often 50% asian. Don't know how this qualifies as a white thing.
I know that, and you know that (this is a weakness with the Katz article and the cited work, it does not deal with large non-white, non-black IT worker population). But would you have known this before you went to your school? I wouldn't have. With the possible exception of Charles Wang, when was the last time you saw a computer person in the media who wasn't some white guy?
There is, unfortunately, a perception that some blacks hold, that education is a "white thing", leading to peer pressure against academic excellance. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to wonder if this (incorrect) perception extends to computing.
This debate is simply not limited to technology. At its core its the heart of the liberal/conservative debate. (I rule out all the truely rabit bozo's on both sides.)
While you are quite right that this is about more than technology, there are more options than the "liberal/conservative" dichotomy (and duopoly).
I suggest plugging "Distributism" into Altavista, following some links, and then doing some research into what a sane economy might look like.
If the infrastructure is in place to allow people reasonable access to learning (e.g. schools) the government has done is job. If you choose to not take full advantage of public education and the current set of programs that are offered by society, the end result should not continue to be someone elses responcibility to continually give you further options.
This would ring less hollow if we didn't live in a society that deliberately maintains a certain unemployment rate "to avoid inflation" through monetary policy.
Acheiving fame and fortune isnt a right.
No, it isn't. But being able to put food on the table and clothes on your kids is. Or ought to be, in any civilization worthy of the name.
Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. -- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World
For an (allegedly, and in my experience, practically) "color-blind" profession and environment, there is a dearth of black American computer folks. Why?
I'm sure that, for a complex situation such as this, it's foolish to point to a single cause and say "this is it." Still, here are a few likely problem spots --
Racism in hiring: Yes, it's still out there. It's practically impossible to get hired without a fact-to-face interview. Today, it's more likely to be expressed as "we're looking for somebody to fit in with the team" rather than "we don't hire Negroes".
Economic class: If you're in the underclass, it's harder to break into technical and professional fields. Blacks are disproportionatly underclass. You do the math.
Education: The decay of urban schools is well known. Once that gauntlet is run, it is also well documented that the attrition rate of black students in technical programs at college exceeds that of whites and other groups by large percentage points, with the gaps growing greater at higer levels of education.
Self-selection: If computing and the internet is seen as a "white" thing, perhaps blacks are simply choosing to opt out? Or assuming that they are not welcome?
And, the one that SlashDot readers won't like to entertain...
The technology itself: It may be that the internet is a technology that, contrary to claims made on its behalf, stratifies rather than levels the economic playing field. In which case, the black community probably is the "canary in a coal mine." They have been so before on other issues -- for instance, if you look at the statistics on illegitimacy for blacks vs. whites, you find that the curves are practially the same. It's just that the black curve is shifted 20 years in front of the white curve.
There is probably not a "silver bullet" answer to this. But a good first step is to actually think about the problem, instead of just assuming that the sunny claims about how the Internet is going to solve all our problems will come true.
To people living with a government so controlling that would REQUIRE such an implant (which would give them all sorts of fun ways of locating you, checking what you're doing, verifying that you conform), I should think the end of the world would be more of a release than something to fear.
Well, yes. Revelations is a book that is meant to encourage, not frighten, the faithful.
On the other hand, Christians (at least here in the USA today) have it veeeery comfortable compared to, say, the Roman persecutions that were going on when Revelations was sent around to encourage everyone to hang in there until Jesus comes back in glory. So the idea that yes, this release of the ages is coming, but first you're going to experiece this merciless, totalitarian persecution may not be taken as encouraging to those who have a good deal going today.
Besides, if you take the Bible literally enough to believe direct interpretation of the Book of Revelations, this stuff is going to happen, no matter what you do or say, so railing against it or trying to delay it is as pointless as screaming at the wind.
Not necessarily. Death is inevitable, too, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to take medicine and try to live longer.
Use of nanocomputers for "branding" and tracking citizens may or may not be "the mark of the Beast." (Personally, I tend now toward an amillenialist interpretation these days, which does *not* require the Mark to be something specific to the last generation. YMMV.) But that doesn't matter. If this becomes a potential application of nanocomputers, it should be opposed because it's an evil and totalitarian thing, not because it might be the "Mark."
"Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks." -- G. K. Chesterton
Well, as a certifiable Katz-basher on some other topics, fairness demands that I speak up when he turns out some good work. I felt that I got a good sense of what this book was about, and why I might care, and why it is important. The Celebration Chronicles is now going onto my "must read this someday" list.
Notice that the review did not mention "Columbine", "porn", or "geek" once.:^)
Anyone who thinks JWZ is onto something here owes it to themselves to read Juliet Schor's The Overworked American : The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. Schor documents this vague feeling that we're really not working any less (in fact, we work more) than our pre-computer ancestors. The only reason we think we work less today is that we do compared to the labor mills of the 1800's. But compared to the agrarian/craft culture before that, we have piddly amounts of leisure. Lots more to buy, if you're among the lucky to to employed. But not as much time to spend with your family and neighbors.
If you really want to question those assumptions, follow that with Gene Logsdon's The Contrary Farmer. Logsdon claims that, intelligently run, a 20-30 acre farm (such as the one he farms in Ohio) can provide a base for economic self-sufficiency with only an average of 2-4 hours of work per day. Leaving plenty of time to bring in some cash by writing books, and to enjoy the sunsets and catch some fish.
"But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced." -- G. K. Chesterton
Why steal the concept of making steel 20 times faster than before from software that handles the process, when I can get the information on the process from the patent filing itself?!?!?!
Exactly! This is why industrial processes are often covered by trade secret, not by patent. The whole point of patents is to encourage the making public of innovations, with the time-limited monopoly on the idea granted as the reward for making public something which a person (or corp) could have kept secret as long as feasible. (Whether the current US patent system actually serves that purpose today is a different question...)
I know of at least one instance of a patentable industrial process that was held as trade secret instead. The reasoning? To patent it would allow my competitors to use this idea. They could violate the patent and I would never know. I don't intend to sell this idea, I just plan to use it to make my real product more efficiently. Therefore, there is no benefit and probable harm to my business by pursuing a patent.
This same company, however, seems to be aggressive about obtaining patents on improvents to their manufactured end product themselves. In that case, if they incorporate an innovation into their product without securing patent protection, all their competitors would have to do is to duplicate the innovation without incurring the research costs and risks themselves. So patents make sense in those cases.
is here. Interestingly, he's a Microbiology, Zoology, and Crop & Soil Sciences professor, and not in the EE or Computer Science departments.
Apparantly, Michigan State has formed a Computational Biology Group since I was a student there. The group looks heavily weighted towards natural science types, with only two computer professors, Dr. Pramanik and Dr. Punch on board. I learned both classical AI and GAs at MSU from one of Dr. Punch's classes -- he's a very good professor, intelligent, a good teacher, and an all-around nice guy.
Sun missed the obvious slam -- the one so graciously provided by Microsoftie VinodV:
When describing this problem to JimAll, he provided the perfect analogy of "chasing tail lights". The easiest way to get coordinated behavior from a large, semi-organized mob is to point them at a known target. Having the taillights provides concreteness to a fuzzy vision. In such situations, having a taillight to follow is a proxy for having strong central leadership.
There you have it, straight from the source! Microsoft isn't plagiarizing, they're simply chasing Sun's tail lights!:^)
Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - Only be sure always to call it please 'research'. -- Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky
News Flash! Katz determines TV brings success!
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Quack!
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This caught my eye...
Also on the increase is the number of underclass children with no access to computers or the Net, kids who may therefore be forced into low-paying dead end jobs when they grow up.
While Katz is correct that there is a growing underclass in the USA, and that this is a serious problem, the "therefore" seems more than a little misplaced to me.
First of all, the AAP report was about television, not computers and internet access. Now, the underclass in America may be lacking many things, but TV is not among them. And I've never noticed any causal relationship between hours spent in front of the television and the ability to avoid McJob. If anything, the relationship seems inverse. But that's just my anecdotal experience; perhaps Katz can cite some studies which show television fostering creative intelligence in the viewer, or even some testimonials from engineers or CEOs who credit their watching Superfriends or Scooby Doo or The Flintstones with their later career success.
As for internet access being essential for burger-flipping avoidance in the future, don't count on it. The entire generation of us who grew up before the internet exploded onto the scene are an existance proof that it's not necessary to have a mouse in your hand at age 3 to prosper in the Internet Age(tm). What is important is the ability to read, to apply creative intelligence, and to work well with other people. If you have those things, you can learn to drive a web browser or a spreadsheet. If you don't have those things, no amount of videogames and "edutainment" software will give them to you.
But far be it from me to inject a little reality into Katz's quest to defend the inalienable rights of two-year-olds to have television sets in their rooms, or of teenagers to access unlimited porn. After all, not getting enough of Barney and www.hotxxxsluts.com at the right developmental stages will cripple them for life, right? Sheesh.
Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.
-- G. K. Chesterton
What exactly would be the advantage of having a plug-in LAN on a die? Why would you want to network with yourself?
It's already being done. The example I know about is Motorola's QUICC core, which they combine on the same die as a CPU. The 68360 is essentially a 68040 (except they use the CPU32 architecture, which has a slightly stripped-down instruction set from the full 68040) plus the QUICC core. There are also the PowerPC 860 variants, which are a PowerPC 60x (not sure of the exact model) plus QUICC on the same die. These are fairly popular chips to design embedded communications systems around.
I do embedded software, not board designs, so I don't know all the tradeoffs of having this type of CPU core. I assume that keeping the chip count down is one of the major advantages. The QUICC is an incredibly flexible unit -- it can handle framing for most any protocol. Ethernet, ATM, T1, SONET, LAPB/D, etc. So, it eliminates the need for specialty framing logic, perhaps even an ASIC, as long as you get the firmware set up right.
There are some pretty interesting notes about the QUICC (more than I'm going to read!) on the Motorola Semiconductor web site. Just enter "QUICC" in the "Search" box.
(Disclaimer: I don't work for Motorola, I've just had to program on a number of these chips and have been impressed by what gets stuck on the same die with the CPU.)
I don't think the situation WRT Linux and mainstream users is as hopeless as you make it out to be. Here's why:
Most end users when they get their PC don't want to have to have to learn commands, figure out short cuts. Then want to take it out of the box, plug it in and have it run.
True, to a point. However, I think you've bought excessively into the myth of Positive Windows(tm) OOBE (Out-Of-Box-Experience). Linux installation is not that much harder than Windows installation -- it's just that 99.44% of computer users get Windows pre-installed. A pre-installed (or friend-installed) Linux would avoid that same pain. And have you actually watched somebody with no computing experience (or even no WIMP-GUI experience) sit down in front of a Windows computer for the first time? People have to actually (gasp!) read the "Getting Started" documentation, or else have personal handholding, or it just doesn't make sense the first time staring at the Start button.
Also, in my experience, after initial familiarity is gained, many people start to graduate into the "power user" category. At which point, they end up delving into topics such as the Windows Registry, DLL incompatibilities, and the various "power user" tips and tricks of Windows. All of which constitute a formidible body of arcana, which is not made magically easier by the fact that it comes from Redmond, WA. Yet normal end-users tackle it anyway.
You just point, click, and the application runs, you don't have to compile applications and then compile it.
Funny, I just point, click, and the application runs, once it's been installed, under Linux as well. Just like in Windows. Except without the BSOD. :^) Surely you're familiar with the existance of GNOME, KDE, AfterStep, Window Maker, CDE, etc.?
As for compiling, end users don't have to do that with Linux either. That's the whole point of Caldera, Red Hat, the Debian project, etc. Of course, if you want to, you can, but it's hardly required, unless you want to live at the bleeding edge of progress.
"One smaller motivation which, in part, stems from altruism is Microsoft-bashing." -- Vinod Valloppillil (Microsoft), Halloween Document I
Follow the link to the "Privacy Practices". After squinting for a while, I finally just did View -> Page source, and found the following tags --
-- liberally scattered throughout.
They also claim that "Personally identifiable information may include name, title, company, address, phone number, etc. We do not require this information to obtain access to any part of our public sites," yet accessing the MCG Linux Forum requires registration (Full Name and Email) in order to access.
Jerry Mander analyzed this effect of television (among other) over twenty years ago, in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. It's still very relevant today; I would urge anyone who's concerned about the negative effects of media to read this book.
To paraphrase Mander, he argues that television is a noisy channel (in the information-theoretic sense) with certain bandpass characteristics. (Mander doesn't phrase it that way, he's a former advertising executive, not an engineer.) Crap passes through relatively unperturbed by the channel, while quality suffers an impedance mismatch and suffers enough noise and/or attenuation that it doesn't stand much of a chance.
"We have become a country of restless, shallow people accustomed to being entertained every moment of each day." ---Michael Medved, Film Critic
Does anyone have a more exact reference to the 1996 law that is going to require states to use SSNs starting in 1999? I'd be very interested in this.
Today, I am the proud posessor of an Ohio driver's license without my SSN. The SSN is optional in Ohio. Also, Michigan uses driver licence numbers that are independant of the SSN. At least for now.
My wife gets a little frustrated with me, because I'm one of those cranks who, from time to time, will make a sticking point about the SSN. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple refusal to give the number, and you discover that it was optional all allong. Sometimes it's tougher than that.
During last year's move to Ohio, we had to sign up for electric service via Toledo Edison, which insisted upon a SSN for activation of service. Their phone people absolutely would not budge on this. Actual conversation transcript:
Me: "So, what you're saying is that my only options are to give you this number, or to sit in the dark and freeze."
Them: (pause)... "Well, yes, those are your options."
I realize that at this point, this would be where most people cave in to the power of convenience. I decided that it was time to not just get mad, but to get even. So, I looked up the address of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission on the web, called their complaint line, and (wonder of wonders) found that they were incredibly helpful. I explained my situation, was told that "they can't do that to you", and they gave me a number of a manager at Toledo Edison to call, with instructions to call them back if TE gave me any more trouble.
Lo and behold, when I called this office at Toledo Edison, the person on the other end of the line cheerfuly explained that, in fact, they didhave a procedure that allowed one to sign up for electric power without using a SSN, it simply involved showing up in person at a Toledo Edison office. So I did that.
Further dark side, though -- while this person at Edison headquarters was clueful and helpful, she asked at the end of the call if there was anything more I wanted, or if I wanted to speak to any management about this. Fool that I am, I said "sure, I'd love to give a piece of my mind to your management, thanks for asking."
I explained very nicely to this man what had happened up to this point, and suggested that they obviously had a training problem with the operators if they would insist that a procedure doesn't exist when a call to the state PUC proved that it did. Mr. Pointy-Hair decides that the issue isn't the fact that they are operating in violation of their state regulatory agency, but the fact that I would want to do something so inconceivable as to not give my SSN over the phone. At this point I've over my stupid quota for the day, so I remind him that
I'm the customer here
Therefore, I'm right
It is supremely stupid to argue with your customers and to tell them that it's their problem if you're not giving them good service
Toledo Edision is in violation of the law here
He owes me a thank you rather than abuse for taking my own time to explain to him the bug in their system
And it's time to hang up on this bozo, because I doubt it's in my power to give him a clue
Moral: If you're serious about SSN privacy, prepare for some inconvenience, and watch that high blood pressure, it's bad for the health.
You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company. -- Colonel "Bat" Guano, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
You are absolutely right that, for any saavy internet user, the US export restrictions are a joke -- just surf over to a non-US site and grab any crypto you want.
What the US restrictions are effective in doing, however, is to cripple the development of cheap, commercial, embedded crypto. No US company want to develop a domestic-only product, that will qualify as munitions per export regulations. So they don't bother.
So, are the export restrictions effectiving in preventing all use of crypto? No. Are they effectiving in keeping the Bad Guys from using crpto? No. But, they are highly effective in preventing the widespread use of crypto. They are highly effective in preventing the use of strong crypto in part of the underlying communications infractructure.
I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine for themselves if we have this situation because the spooks at the NSA are so darn clever, or because the politicians in Congress are so darn stupid.
Having to compete in a market is sufficient to serve the public interest. The only way a company can fail to serve the public interest and still make money is when the company has [been given] a monopoly.
Your faith in "free" market competition to serve the public interest is touching, but it's not one I share. Last time I checked, companies exist to serve the private interest of the owners/shareholders. One hopes that companies can do well by doing good, but it's simply a happy side effect when that private interest and the public interest coincide.
p.s. I'm sure you're quoting Chesterton out of context. He was as anti-government as the next liberal.
Per the American Chesterton Society quotes page, this is from G.K.'s Weekly, 10-April-1926. I confess to not having read the context of that particular essay. However, I have recently read all of What's Wrong with the World and The Outline of Sanity, in which Chesterton makes an extended case that Capitalism and Socialism are, rather than opposites and mortal enemies, nearly twins. So I rather doubt that I'm taking him out of context.
(TOoS is Chesterton's tract on Distributism, the political philosophy he advanced with Hillare Belloc against both Capitalism and Socialism. It advocates the widespread distribution of property into many independant enterprises, such as family farms, local stores, and cottage industries, as a bulwark against the encroaching power of both State (Socialism) and Corporation (Captialism).)
"It may be very difficult for modern people to imagine a world in which men are not generally admired for coveteousness and crushing their neighbors; but I assure them that such strange patches of an earthly paradise do really remain on earth." -- G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity
"From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy." -- G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity
"Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." -- G. K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity
And nobody's going to risk dollar one in trying to compete, with your kind of attitude.
That's funny -- I didn't realize I was entered in any "competition" where I needed an "attitude" to "win." Did somebody sign me up for a 10K race or as an investor in an IP-over-cable deal while I wasn't looking?
Who, in their right mind, who invest the kind of dollars needed to do facilities-based competition if they know they can just steal access from the cable company?
Oh, please. If cable companies are made to open access like ILECs have, you can count on them charging an arm and a leg for those co-location privileges (like the ILECs do). That's hardly "stealing."
The only way you're going to get competition is if you let the cable companies make a ton of money, AND it's clear the secure property rights will reign. Who would put up any kind of investment if they think the government is going to waltz in and nationalize it??
Boo hoo hoo. The cable companies are the ones who submitted to "nationalization" in the first place, by accepting monopoly status, and getting government help for rights of way. Part of the deal of being a de jure monopoly is that you get government oversight and some obligation to serve the public interest.
Well, now the definition of what constitutes public interest has changed to involve competition at the service level. That's hardly "nationalization", just a change in the business environment. No one has proposed making cable or telco a state-owned enterprise.
"Steal," "nationalize,"... let's be careful throwing those loaded words aroud...
"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business." -- G. K. Chesterton
There are a few points that I hope slashdot posters will keep in mind (as I see that the cable company apologists are already out in force):
Cable has been built as a monopoly.
While today there is beginning to be some miniscule amount of competition between cable providers, the overwhelming majority of cable has been installed and run as a de jure monopoly (just as the telephony and electrical infrastructure was built).
The current cable plant will not support a large internet rollout without massive investment.
The classic architecture for a cable system (coax-based) is lousy for providing IP services. Basically, it's non-trivial to take something that was built for 100% push, all users getting the same content, and change that to a system that gives good upstream bandwitdth. Cable companies with older cable plants are basically screwed, and will need to spend $$$ to be able to offer broadband internet that scales beyond the first few early adopters. Companies that deploy their plant now have a huge advantage, because they can make their initial investment in hybrid fiber-coax (HFC), which does work better to provide both classic CATV and broadband internet.
Competitive infrastructure is not being built.
AFAIK, there are no serious plans by anybody to set up competing cables to the curb. Those lucky companies that are building cable plant with new HFC are those that are wiring up areas that are newly built or just never had a cable rollout yet.
Other opened monopolies are not duplicating the physical plant to create "competition".
In the two other major monopolies (telephony and electrical power) that have been opened to competition, there is no rollout of new distribution infrastructure. In the telco case, access at the central office has been mandated (leaving a single physical plant for the last mile). Also, the power companies are not planning on building competing grids, but will compete on delivering power over the existing grid. So, for telephony, the ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) have to open up physical space and wiring in the CO, plus have interoperability for the number databases, and the incumbent power companies will need to figure out how to do something similar with shipping power around the grid.
As you can probably guess, my sympathy is not exactly with the cable companies. I have yet to see a good argument why they ought to get to keep a service monopoly on their plant while folks like the RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) and electric utilities don't. Just like Ma Bell and the public utilities, they managed to grow huge as a legally protected monopoly. Now, that "competition will make it all better!" has become the new fad, they would like to protect their little fiefdom. Of course they would.
"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business." -- G. K. Chesterton
You seriously undermine your case by lumping together "families" and "communities". Families have certain natural prerogatives in raising children to the point where they are capable of independent judgment. Communities have no such prerogatives -- I am an unreconstructed unmutual when it comes to Hillary's Village.
Well, I lumped family and community together because I didn't want to take the time to make the two cases separately.
As you say, the family right to screen is part of the natural perogative of the parent in attempting to raise children to the point that they have a healthy and independant judgement. You seem to think I'm arguing that local communities have the same right in loco parentis. This is not what I meant, and if I seemed to say that, I apologize for the confusion.
It seems to me that the right of a community to set community standards is simply part of community self-determination. In a free and democratic society, this should be liberating, not oppressive. As I noted, the right to set a community standard regarding obscenity is a right that has been held by the Supreme Court to not be in violation of free speech rights (if you know of a Court case that contradicts this, please let me know). It is this right that Katz's essay disparages.
Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. -- G. K. Chesterton, "What's Wrong With The World"
Now that I've gotten your attention with the subject line...:^)
The issue of access and class/race stratification is an important one, and I'm glad that Jon Katz chose to highlight it for/. However, while he makes a good start at outlining the issues, he then muddies the water by using equitable internet access as a springboard for some unrelated rants about pornography on the internet and blocking software.
Here are some issues where Katz is clearly missing the point or just doesn't get it:
Sex on the Internet is a legitimate issue
Blocker software is about empowerment, not censorship
Sex on the Internet is a legitimate issue. Please remember that the First-Amendment, free speech rights are not absolutes. You can't shout "fire!" in a crowded theater, you can't slander or libel without being liable, and you can't distribute obscene materials. Obscenity laws have, in general, been upheld by Supreme Court review (IIRC, particular obscenity laws have been struck down for various reasons, but the concept itself has been upheld as Constitutional). The test is normally "community standards" and "redeeming social value."
The only difficulty that the internet brings to this situation is that the definition of obscenity (and enforcement of obscenity statutes) varies from place to place. When dealing with distribution of physical media, this isn't that much of a problem. You simply end up with results such as Playboy being sold in city A while not being available on shelves in city B. But with the internet, by making something available on the web (or via FTP download), you've managed to "publish" simultaneously in cities A and B (and even countries X, Y, and Z). Which leads directly to the next point...
Blocker software is about empowerment, not censorship . People like to talk about how "decentralizing" the internet is, but in reality it centralizes in some very key ways. By saying "open the floodgates" to pornography, with no ability to do blocking, you have circumvented the ability of communities and of families to make and enforce their own decisions about what constititues community and family standards. That doesn't look like empowerment to me. If the only possible standard I can apply is the lowest common denominator of the entire world, and everyone needs to apply that standard everywhere, it looks pretty centralized to me.
There are other problems with Katz's essay, such as the relative importance of internet access among problems facing teenagers today, and the lack of mention of how free software can make a difference in providing internet access (such as Mexico's decision to use GNOME rather than some proprietary company's software for their schools, so that they could actually afford to get computers into the classroom. But I don't have time for that today, hopefully someone else will pick up the slack.
Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else. -- G. K. Chesterton
Anti-trust law and delusions of persecution
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Caldera Trial Update
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Antitrust law is retroactive, which means that even if something was perfectly legal when you actually did it, if it is subsequently declared illegal you are still liable.
I don't know how antitrust law works in the UK, but in the US this is simply wrong. See my other post for more details.
This means that there is no way to tell if you are breaking the law when you do something, because the law doesn't exist yet! Microsoft's phalanx of corporate lawyers would never have broken existing laws, Bill is too smart for that.
IANAL. As I understand US antitrust law, while there are certainly areas of interpretation where it may not be clear what constitutes antitrust behavior, in general it's possible to know if you are breaking the law or not.
It is not, in itself, a violation of US anti-trust law to gain a dominant market share constituting a de facto monopoly. (I'm going to ignore de jure monopolies like the public utilities.) What it is illegal to do is to use that dominant market position to
Deny competitors access to that market by attempting to shut them out of distribution channels.
Sell at below cost in order to drive comptetors out of a market (using greater bank reserves to outlast a smaller competitor, with hopes of making up the difference by having a more profitable monopoly later). This is commonly known as "dumping".
Leverage a monopoly (or near-monopoly) position in one market to gain unfair advantage in a separate market.
As for the "Bill and his phalanx of lawyers would never willingly break the law" argument --- ROTFLMAO! Sure they would! And they certainly would (and have) push the boundaries of the law as much as they deemed profitable. Anti-trust enforcement in the US has a history of being "too little, too late". So it makes good corporate sense (in a bottom-line, worshipping the almighty dollar and stock valuation way) to do precisely the amount of anti-trust violation that you think you can get away with.
Now, whether Bill and Co. have managed to walk that line (of attempting world domination without being so egregiously in violation of the law that they suffer a serious setback at the hands of the DOJ) successfully or unsuccessfully is still an open question (since we don't know the results of the trial yet). Given that previous actions by the Federal Government against MSFT for anti-trust violations have amounted practically to little more than a slap on the wrist, we shall see. Maybe Bill was too smart to obey the law, if MSFT gets off too easily...
But please, let's not have any of these conservative/libertarian/Randist fantasies about how Microsoft is being persecuted for simply being successful. Microsoft is being prosecuted for violating the law. A law that they freely chose to ignore, or at least dance right up to the line and stick a couple of toes over, believing they wouldn't get those toes stepped on hard enough to matter.
I thought no law was allowed to be retroactive (the Constitution says that here in Norway, at least), but with the American legal system, you never know:-)
The American Constitution says the same thing:
No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
This is from Section 9. As this is part of the original, unammended Constitition, it would seem that the founders put a higher priority on forbidding retroactive laws than on such minor issues as freedom of speech, press, and religion (which had to be added in a bug-fix, er, I mean ammendment, later).
Given that, I see a couple of possibilities --
U.S. anti-trust laws don't really contain ex post facto regulations, and sql*kitten is spewing FUD
U.S. anti-trust laws do contain ex post facto regulations, and in the 70+ years of anti-trust law, no lawyer has been clever enough to think of getting the laws thrown out on Constitutional grounds
I know which explaination makes more sense to me...
... and I mean this in the best possible way. Hasn't anyone else read ESR's interview at linux.com where he talks about calibrating for media interest? The media are pathetically poor at reporting subtle (or even not-so-subtle) philosophical nuances. The media are great at reporting conflict and personality clashes -- it's their bread and butter. So, if RMS and ESR let their subtle (though not necessarily unimportant) clash over strategy and tactics into the media, they sustain interest in both "free" and "open source" software, and more folks end up actually reading the GNU Manifesto and the Open Source Definition.
I would also like to note that part of the "clash" between RMS and ESR probably relates to the fact that RMS is an ethicist and a philosopher, and ESR is an aikidoka. RMS is concerned that the ethical imperitive and philosophical underpinnings of free software are not lost in the new emphasis on "open source" as a marketing strategy. ESR is a student of Aikido. In Aikido, you don't confront your opponent with force-vs-force, but you redirect your opponent's engergy in a less destructive way. Also, it is believed that simply doing Aikido is the primary way to absorb and begin to practice the philosophy of peaceableness, rather than beginning by studying the writings of O-Sensei.
So, RMS is trying intellectual and moral persuasion in order to promote free software. ESR is trying to get more corporations to do free software, and trusting that the philosophy will follow. Both approaches are complementary, not contradictory. I'm glad we have both RMS and ESR.
First of all, there's more than a single embedded systems market. There are truly low-end systems (think toaster thermocontrols) where a Unix-like OS is certainly overkill. On t he other hand, there's a very large market segment where a Unix-like OS is not overkill. Telecom switching equipment and industrial control panels fit into this category. In these segments, it's not unusual at all for your "small" computer to be a m68k, PPC, SPARC, or Pentium running at a respectable speed and having 4, 8, or even 32+ Mb of memory. This is the market space currently occupied by VxWorks ( Wind River Systems), pSOS ( ISI), LynxOS ( Lynx Real-Time Systems), VRTX ( Mentor Graphics), Chorus ( Sun), QNX ( QNX Software Systems), OS-9 ( Microware), and a whole bunch of others that I can't think of off the top of my head. Oh, yeah, and Windows CE.
I even know of folks who are using Solaris or AIX in this type of application. Not to mention the poor fools who are stuck with Windows NT for control and monitoring applications (don't laugh, it happens!).
Now, the majority of these real-time operating systems (RTOS) are POSIX-compliant, at least to some degree. Usually, this means that they implement the POSIX.1 APIs. So, except for the tasking and memory models, they look a heck of a lot like Unix/Linux. Some of them (LynxOS, QNX) are downright Unix clones (like Linux). All of them have TCP/IP networking available, all of them either already have Java support or have promised it Real Soon Now, lots of them even use gcc/gdb as their toolchain.
Given that, why not Linux? Margins tend to be sensitive here, so you'd really like to eliminate those per-cpu royalties that the commercial (I should say "proprietary", since MontaVista is obviously commerical) vendors charge. And (contrary to what some/.'ers have posted) uptime is critical in many of these applications. Long-term supportability and credibility is also critical, as many of these systems may have production lifetimes of years, and field lifetimes of decades. Customers already recognize the value of having access to the source code in these circumstances, and they tend to demand it from their software vendors (it is usually provided under NDA or escrowed).
Now, check out the founders of MontaVista. Jim Ready helped put together VRTX, one of the first commerically-successful RTOS's. Jerry Kirk founded Microtec, which is the dominant vendor of compilers and debuggers for embedded systems (the XRAY debugger is the most-used debugger in the embedded world). So I would guess these two ought to have a good understanding of how to put together a OS + development enviroment that would appeal to the RTOS market.
It looks to me like, between this and eCos, we're about to see The Cathedral and the Bazaar dynamic in yet another OS market.
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it needs to be. -- Linus Torvalds
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that this is possible, however, it is a very tiny exception to a very prevalent practice.
Good for you. I suspect you got an early break in being able to demonstrate your competance without being "properly" credentialed, and after that employers looked at your experience instead of your (lack of) academics? I know a number of people who have gotten started in computers this way.
But, there are still a large number of employers (rightly or wrongly) who care about high school and college credentials. Enough to make this a real barrier.
Reasons for why inner-city schools are awful, in spite of huge sums of money sunk into them, are more than I have time to write (and no doubt vary from city to city somewhat). But "blame the students, they get the education they deserve" is simplistic, to say the least.
Again, this is "blame the student," and again, I think that to make this the answer is to miss what's going on.
The IEEE has actually done some studies on this issue. If I remember correctly, their studies show that the dropout of black engineering students did not correlate with test scores or "affirmative action" admissions. Which would invalidate the theory that black attrition at the college level is due to admission policy. If you actually care about this, you might want to look into that research. If you just want to use it as an excuse to bash admission policies that try to take into account the atrociousness of the previously-mentioned schools, then don't let me confuse you with facts.
I know that, and you know that (this is a weakness with the Katz article and the cited work, it does not deal with large non-white, non-black IT worker population). But would you have known this before you went to your school? I wouldn't have. With the possible exception of Charles Wang, when was the last time you saw a computer person in the media who wasn't some white guy?
There is, unfortunately, a perception that some blacks hold, that education is a "white thing", leading to peer pressure against academic excellance. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to wonder if this (incorrect) perception extends to computing.
While you are quite right that this is about more than technology, there are more options than the "liberal/conservative" dichotomy (and duopoly).
I suggest plugging "Distributism" into Altavista, following some links, and then doing some research into what a sane economy might look like.
This would ring less hollow if we didn't live in a society that deliberately maintains a certain unemployment rate "to avoid inflation" through monetary policy.
No, it isn't. But being able to put food on the table and clothes on your kids is. Or ought to be, in any civilization worthy of the name.
Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad.
-- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World
For an (allegedly, and in my experience, practically) "color-blind" profession and environment, there is a dearth of black American computer folks. Why?
I'm sure that, for a complex situation such as this, it's foolish to point to a single cause and say "this is it." Still, here are a few likely problem spots --
And, the one that SlashDot readers won't like to entertain ...
There is probably not a "silver bullet" answer to this. But a good first step is to actually think about the problem, instead of just assuming that the sunny claims about how the Internet is going to solve all our problems will come true.
Well, yes. Revelations is a book that is meant to encourage, not frighten, the faithful.
On the other hand, Christians (at least here in the USA today) have it veeeery comfortable compared to, say, the Roman persecutions that were going on when Revelations was sent around to encourage everyone to hang in there until Jesus comes back in glory. So the idea that yes, this release of the ages is coming, but first you're going to experiece this merciless, totalitarian persecution may not be taken as encouraging to those who have a good deal going today.
Not necessarily. Death is inevitable, too, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to take medicine and try to live longer.
Use of nanocomputers for "branding" and tracking citizens may or may not be "the mark of the Beast." (Personally, I tend now toward an amillenialist interpretation these days, which does *not* require the Mark to be something specific to the last generation. YMMV.) But that doesn't matter. If this becomes a potential application of nanocomputers, it should be opposed because it's an evil and totalitarian thing, not because it might be the "Mark."
"Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks."
-- G. K. Chesterton
Well, as a certifiable Katz-basher on some other topics, fairness demands that I speak up when he turns out some good work. I felt that I got a good sense of what this book was about, and why I might care, and why it is important. The Celebration Chronicles is now going onto my "must read this someday" list.
Notice that the review did not mention "Columbine", "porn", or "geek" once. :^)
Thank you, Jon.
Anyone who thinks JWZ is onto something here owes it to themselves to read Juliet Schor's The Overworked American : The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. Schor documents this vague feeling that we're really not working any less (in fact, we work more) than our pre-computer ancestors. The only reason we think we work less today is that we do compared to the labor mills of the 1800's. But compared to the agrarian/craft culture before that, we have piddly amounts of leisure. Lots more to buy, if you're among the lucky to to employed. But not as much time to spend with your family and neighbors.
If you really want to question those assumptions, follow that with Gene Logsdon's The Contrary Farmer. Logsdon claims that, intelligently run, a 20-30 acre farm (such as the one he farms in Ohio) can provide a base for economic self-sufficiency with only an average of 2-4 hours of work per day. Leaving plenty of time to bring in some cash by writing books, and to enjoy the sunsets and catch some fish.
"But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced."
-- G. K. Chesterton
Exactly! This is why industrial processes are often covered by trade secret, not by patent. The whole point of patents is to encourage the making public of innovations, with the time-limited monopoly on the idea granted as the reward for making public something which a person (or corp) could have kept secret as long as feasible. (Whether the current US patent system actually serves that purpose today is a different question ...)
I know of at least one instance of a patentable industrial process that was held as trade secret instead. The reasoning? To patent it would allow my competitors to use this idea. They could violate the patent and I would never know. I don't intend to sell this idea, I just plan to use it to make my real product more efficiently. Therefore, there is no benefit and probable harm to my business by pursuing a patent.
This same company, however, seems to be aggressive about obtaining patents on improvents to their manufactured end product themselves. In that case, if they incorporate an innovation into their product without securing patent protection, all their competitors would have to do is to duplicate the innovation without incurring the research costs and risks themselves. So patents make sense in those cases.
is here. Interestingly, he's a Microbiology, Zoology, and Crop & Soil Sciences professor, and not in the EE or Computer Science departments.
Apparantly, Michigan State has formed a Computational Biology Group since I was a student there. The group looks heavily weighted towards natural science types, with only two computer professors, Dr. Pramanik and Dr. Punch on board. I learned both classical AI and GAs at MSU from one of Dr. Punch's classes -- he's a very good professor, intelligent, a good teacher, and an all-around nice guy.
Sun missed the obvious slam -- the one so graciously provided by Microsoftie VinodV:
There you have it, straight from the source! Microsoft isn't plagiarizing, they're simply chasing Sun's tail lights! :^)
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
-- Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky
This caught my eye ...
While Katz is correct that there is a growing underclass in the USA, and that this is a serious problem, the "therefore" seems more than a little misplaced to me.
First of all, the AAP report was about television, not computers and internet access. Now, the underclass in America may be lacking many things, but TV is not among them. And I've never noticed any causal relationship between hours spent in front of the television and the ability to avoid McJob. If anything, the relationship seems inverse. But that's just my anecdotal experience; perhaps Katz can cite some studies which show television fostering creative intelligence in the viewer, or even some testimonials from engineers or CEOs who credit their watching Superfriends or Scooby Doo or The Flintstones with their later career success.
As for internet access being essential for burger-flipping avoidance in the future, don't count on it. The entire generation of us who grew up before the internet exploded onto the scene are an existance proof that it's not necessary to have a mouse in your hand at age 3 to prosper in the Internet Age(tm). What is important is the ability to read, to apply creative intelligence, and to work well with other people. If you have those things, you can learn to drive a web browser or a spreadsheet. If you don't have those things, no amount of videogames and "edutainment" software will give them to you.
But far be it from me to inject a little reality into Katz's quest to defend the inalienable rights of two-year-olds to have television sets in their rooms, or of teenagers to access unlimited porn. After all, not getting enough of Barney and www.hotxxxsluts.com at the right developmental stages will cripple them for life, right? Sheesh.
It's already being done. The example I know about is Motorola's QUICC core, which they combine on the same die as a CPU. The 68360 is essentially a 68040 (except they use the CPU32 architecture, which has a slightly stripped-down instruction set from the full 68040) plus the QUICC core. There are also the PowerPC 860 variants, which are a PowerPC 60x (not sure of the exact model) plus QUICC on the same die. These are fairly popular chips to design embedded communications systems around.
I do embedded software, not board designs, so I don't know all the tradeoffs of having this type of CPU core. I assume that keeping the chip count down is one of the major advantages. The QUICC is an incredibly flexible unit -- it can handle framing for most any protocol. Ethernet, ATM, T1, SONET, LAPB/D, etc. So, it eliminates the need for specialty framing logic, perhaps even an ASIC, as long as you get the firmware set up right.
There are some pretty interesting notes about the QUICC (more than I'm going to read!) on the Motorola Semiconductor web site. Just enter "QUICC" in the "Search" box.
(Disclaimer: I don't work for Motorola, I've just had to program on a number of these chips and have been impressed by what gets stuck on the same die with the CPU.)
I don't think the situation WRT Linux and mainstream users is as hopeless as you make it out to be. Here's why:
True, to a point. However, I think you've bought excessively into the myth of Positive Windows(tm) OOBE (Out-Of-Box-Experience). Linux installation is not that much harder than Windows installation -- it's just that 99.44% of computer users get Windows pre-installed. A pre-installed (or friend-installed) Linux would avoid that same pain. And have you actually watched somebody with no computing experience (or even no WIMP-GUI experience) sit down in front of a Windows computer for the first time? People have to actually (gasp!) read the "Getting Started" documentation, or else have personal handholding, or it just doesn't make sense the first time staring at the Start button.
Also, in my experience, after initial familiarity is gained, many people start to graduate into the "power user" category. At which point, they end up delving into topics such as the Windows Registry, DLL incompatibilities, and the various "power user" tips and tricks of Windows. All of which constitute a formidible body of arcana, which is not made magically easier by the fact that it comes from Redmond, WA. Yet normal end-users tackle it anyway.
Funny, I just point, click, and the application runs, once it's been installed, under Linux as well. Just like in Windows. Except without the BSOD. :^) Surely you're familiar with the existance of GNOME, KDE, AfterStep, Window Maker, CDE, etc.?
As for compiling, end users don't have to do that with Linux either. That's the whole point of Caldera, Red Hat, the Debian project, etc. Of course, if you want to, you can, but it's hardly required, unless you want to live at the bleeding edge of progress.
"One smaller motivation which, in part, stems from altruism is Microsoft-bashing." -- Vinod Valloppillil (Microsoft), Halloween Document I
Follow the link to the "Privacy Practices". After squinting for a while, I finally just did View -> Page source, and found the following tags --
-- liberally scattered throughout.
They also claim that "Personally identifiable information may include name, title, company,
address, phone number, etc. We do not require this information to obtain access to any
part of our public sites," yet accessing the MCG Linux Forum requires registration (Full Name and Email) in order to access.
Jerry Mander analyzed this effect of television (among other) over twenty years ago, in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television . It's still very relevant today; I would urge anyone who's concerned about the negative effects of media to read this book.
To paraphrase Mander, he argues that television is a noisy channel (in the information-theoretic sense) with certain bandpass characteristics. (Mander doesn't phrase it that way, he's a former advertising executive, not an engineer.) Crap passes through relatively unperturbed by the channel, while quality suffers an impedance mismatch and suffers enough noise and/or attenuation that it doesn't stand much of a chance.
"We have become a country of restless, shallow people accustomed to being entertained every moment of each day." ---Michael Medved, Film Critic
Does anyone have a more exact reference to the 1996 law that is going to require states to use SSNs starting in 1999? I'd be very interested in this.
Today, I am the proud posessor of an Ohio driver's license without my SSN. The SSN is optional in Ohio. Also, Michigan uses driver licence numbers that are independant of the SSN. At least for now.
My wife gets a little frustrated with me, because I'm one of those cranks who, from time to time, will make a sticking point about the SSN. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple refusal to give the number, and you discover that it was optional all allong. Sometimes it's tougher than that.
During last year's move to Ohio, we had to sign up for electric service via Toledo Edison, which insisted upon a SSN for activation of service. Their phone people absolutely would not budge on this. Actual conversation transcript:
I realize that at this point, this would be where most people cave in to the power of convenience. I decided that it was time to not just get mad, but to get even. So, I looked up the address of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission on the web, called their complaint line, and (wonder of wonders) found that they were incredibly helpful. I explained my situation, was told that "they can't do that to you", and they gave me a number of a manager at Toledo Edison to call, with instructions to call them back if TE gave me any more trouble.
Lo and behold, when I called this office at Toledo Edison, the person on the other end of the line cheerfuly explained that, in fact, they didhave a procedure that allowed one to sign up for electric power without using a SSN, it simply involved showing up in person at a Toledo Edison office. So I did that.
Further dark side, though -- while this person at Edison headquarters was clueful and helpful, she asked at the end of the call if there was anything more I wanted, or if I wanted to speak to any management about this. Fool that I am, I said "sure, I'd love to give a piece of my mind to your management, thanks for asking."
I explained very nicely to this man what had happened up to this point, and suggested that they obviously had a training problem with the operators if they would insist that a procedure doesn't exist when a call to the state PUC proved that it did. Mr. Pointy-Hair decides that the issue isn't the fact that they are operating in violation of their state regulatory agency, but the fact that I would want to do something so inconceivable as to not give my SSN over the phone. At this point I've over my stupid quota for the day, so I remind him that
Moral: If you're serious about SSN privacy, prepare for some inconvenience, and watch that high blood pressure, it's bad for the health.
You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company. -- Colonel "Bat" Guano, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
You are absolutely right that, for any saavy internet user, the US export restrictions are a joke -- just surf over to a non-US site and grab any crypto you want.
What the US restrictions are effective in doing, however, is to cripple the development of cheap, commercial, embedded crypto. No US company want to develop a domestic-only product, that will qualify as munitions per export regulations. So they don't bother.
So, are the export restrictions effectiving in preventing all use of crypto? No. Are they effectiving in keeping the Bad Guys from using crpto? No. But, they are highly effective in preventing the widespread use of crypto. They are highly effective in preventing the use of strong crypto in part of the underlying communications infractructure.
I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine for themselves if we have this situation because the spooks at the NSA are so darn clever, or because the politicians in Congress are so darn stupid.
Your faith in "free" market competition to serve the public interest is touching, but it's not one I share. Last time I checked, companies exist to serve the private interest of the owners/shareholders. One hopes that companies can do well by doing good, but it's simply a happy side effect when that private interest and the public interest coincide.
Per the American Chesterton Society quotes page, this is from G.K.'s Weekly, 10-April-1926. I confess to not having read the context of that particular essay. However, I have recently read all of What's Wrong with the World and The Outline of Sanity, in which Chesterton makes an extended case that Capitalism and Socialism are, rather than opposites and mortal enemies, nearly twins. So I rather doubt that I'm taking him out of context.
(TOoS is Chesterton's tract on Distributism, the political philosophy he advanced with Hillare Belloc against both Capitalism and Socialism. It advocates the widespread distribution of property into many independant enterprises, such as family farms, local stores, and cottage industries, as a bulwark against the encroaching power of both State (Socialism) and Corporation (Captialism).)
"It may be very difficult for modern people to imagine a world in which men are not generally admired for coveteousness and crushing their neighbors; but I assure them that such strange patches of an earthly paradise do really remain on earth." -- G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity
"From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy." -- G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity
"Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." -- G. K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity
That's funny -- I didn't realize I was entered in any "competition" where I needed an "attitude" to "win." Did somebody sign me up for a 10K race or as an investor in an IP-over-cable deal while I wasn't looking?
Oh, please. If cable companies are made to open access like ILECs have, you can count on them charging an arm and a leg for those co-location privileges (like the ILECs do). That's hardly "stealing."
Boo hoo hoo. The cable companies are the ones who submitted to "nationalization" in the first place, by accepting monopoly status, and getting government help for rights of way. Part of the deal of being a de jure monopoly is that you get government oversight and some obligation to serve the public interest.
Well, now the definition of what constitutes public interest has changed to involve competition at the service level. That's hardly "nationalization", just a change in the business environment. No one has proposed making cable or telco a state-owned enterprise.
"Steal," "nationalize," ... let's be careful throwing those loaded words aroud ...
"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business." -- G. K. Chesterton
An excellent and informative essay.
There are a few points that I hope slashdot posters will keep in mind (as I see that the cable company apologists are already out in force):
While today there is beginning to be some miniscule amount of competition between cable providers, the overwhelming majority of cable has been installed and run as a de jure monopoly (just as the telephony and electrical infrastructure was built).
The classic architecture for a cable system (coax-based) is lousy for providing IP services. Basically, it's non-trivial to take something that was built for 100% push, all users getting the same content, and change that to a system that gives good upstream bandwitdth. Cable companies with older cable plants are basically screwed, and will need to spend $$$ to be able to offer broadband internet that scales beyond the first few early adopters. Companies that deploy their plant now have a huge advantage, because they can make their initial investment in hybrid fiber-coax (HFC), which does work better to provide both classic CATV and broadband internet.
AFAIK, there are no serious plans by anybody to set up competing cables to the curb. Those lucky companies that are building cable plant with new HFC are those that are wiring up areas that are newly built or just never had a cable rollout yet.
In the two other major monopolies (telephony and electrical power) that have been opened to competition, there is no rollout of new distribution infrastructure. In the telco case, access at the central office has been mandated (leaving a single physical plant for the last mile). Also, the power companies are not planning on building competing grids, but will compete on delivering power over the existing grid. So, for telephony, the ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) have to open up physical space and wiring in the CO, plus have interoperability for the number databases, and the incumbent power companies will need to figure out how to do something similar with shipping power around the grid.
As you can probably guess, my sympathy is not exactly with the cable companies. I have yet to see a good argument why they ought to get to keep a service monopoly on their plant while folks like the RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) and electric utilities don't. Just like Ma Bell and the public utilities, they managed to grow huge as a legally protected monopoly. Now, that "competition will make it all better!" has become the new fad, they would like to protect their little fiefdom. Of course they would.
"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business." -- G. K. Chesterton
Well, I lumped family and community together because I didn't want to take the time to make the two cases separately.
As you say, the family right to screen is part of the natural perogative of the parent in attempting to raise children to the point that they have a healthy and independant judgement. You seem to think I'm arguing that local communities have the same right in loco parentis. This is not what I meant, and if I seemed to say that, I apologize for the confusion.
It seems to me that the right of a community to set community standards is simply part of community self-determination. In a free and democratic society, this should be liberating, not oppressive. As I noted, the right to set a community standard regarding obscenity is a right that has been held by the Supreme Court to not be in violation of free speech rights (if you know of a Court case that contradicts this, please let me know). It is this right that Katz's essay disparages.
Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. -- G. K. Chesterton, "What's Wrong With The World"
Now that I've gotten your attention with the subject line ... :^)
The issue of access and class/race stratification is an important one, and I'm glad that Jon Katz chose to highlight it for /. However, while he makes a good start at outlining the issues, he then muddies the water by using equitable internet access as a springboard for some unrelated rants about pornography on the internet and blocking software.
Here are some issues where Katz is clearly missing the point or just doesn't get it:
Sex on the Internet is a legitimate issue . Please remember that the First-Amendment, free speech rights are not absolutes. You can't shout "fire!" in a crowded theater, you can't slander or libel without being liable, and you can't distribute obscene materials. Obscenity laws have, in general, been upheld by Supreme Court review (IIRC, particular obscenity laws have been struck down for various reasons, but the concept itself has been upheld as Constitutional). The test is normally "community standards" and "redeeming social value."
The only difficulty that the internet brings to this situation is that the definition of obscenity (and enforcement of obscenity statutes) varies from place to place. When dealing with distribution of physical media, this isn't that much of a problem. You simply end up with results such as Playboy being sold in city A while not being available on shelves in city B. But with the internet, by making something available on the web (or via FTP download), you've managed to "publish" simultaneously in cities A and B (and even countries X, Y, and Z). Which leads directly to the next point ...
Blocker software is about empowerment, not censorship . People like to talk about how "decentralizing" the internet is, but in reality it centralizes in some very key ways. By saying "open the floodgates" to pornography, with no ability to do blocking, you have circumvented the ability of communities and of families to make and enforce their own decisions about what constititues community and family standards. That doesn't look like empowerment to me. If the only possible standard I can apply is the lowest common denominator of the entire world, and everyone needs to apply that standard everywhere, it looks pretty centralized to me.
There are other problems with Katz's essay, such as the relative importance of internet access among problems facing teenagers today, and the lack of mention of how free software can make a difference in providing internet access (such as Mexico's decision to use GNOME rather than some proprietary company's software for their schools, so that they could actually afford to get computers into the classroom. But I don't have time for that today, hopefully someone else will pick up the slack.
Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else. -- G. K. Chesterton
I don't know how antitrust law works in the UK, but in the US this is simply wrong. See my other post for more details.
IANAL. As I understand US antitrust law, while there are certainly areas of interpretation where it may not be clear what constitutes antitrust behavior, in general it's possible to know if you are breaking the law or not.
It is not, in itself, a violation of US anti-trust law to gain a dominant market share constituting a de facto monopoly. (I'm going to ignore de jure monopolies like the public utilities.) What it is illegal to do is to use that dominant market position to
As for the "Bill and his phalanx of lawyers would never willingly break the law" argument --- ROTFLMAO! Sure they would! And they certainly would (and have) push the boundaries of the law as much as they deemed profitable. Anti-trust enforcement in the US has a history of being "too little, too late". So it makes good corporate sense (in a bottom-line, worshipping the almighty dollar and stock valuation way) to do precisely the amount of anti-trust violation that you think you can get away with.
Now, whether Bill and Co. have managed to walk that line (of attempting world domination without being so egregiously in violation of the law that they suffer a serious setback at the hands of the DOJ) successfully or unsuccessfully is still an open question (since we don't know the results of the trial yet). Given that previous actions by the Federal Government against MSFT for anti-trust violations have amounted practically to little more than a slap on the wrist, we shall see. Maybe Bill was too smart to obey the law, if MSFT gets off too easily ...
But please, let's not have any of these conservative/libertarian/Randist fantasies about how Microsoft is being persecuted for simply being successful. Microsoft is being prosecuted for violating the law. A law that they freely chose to ignore, or at least dance right up to the line and stick a couple of toes over, believing they wouldn't get those toes stepped on hard enough to matter.
The American Constitution says the same thing:
This is from Section 9. As this is part of the original, unammended Constitition, it would seem that the founders put a higher priority on forbidding retroactive laws than on such minor issues as freedom of speech, press, and religion (which had to be added in a bug-fix, er, I mean ammendment, later).Given that, I see a couple of possibilities --
I know which explaination makes more sense to me ...
(Full text of the U.S. Constitution plus many other resources are available at http://www.usconstitution.net/.)
... and I mean this in the best possible way. Hasn't anyone else read ESR's interview at linux.com where he talks about calibrating for media interest? The media are pathetically poor at reporting subtle (or even not-so-subtle) philosophical nuances. The media are great at reporting conflict and personality clashes -- it's their bread and butter. So, if RMS and ESR let their subtle (though not necessarily unimportant) clash over strategy and tactics into the media, they sustain interest in both "free" and "open source" software, and more folks end up actually reading the GNU Manifesto and the Open Source Definition.
I would also like to note that part of the "clash" between RMS and ESR probably relates to the fact that RMS is an ethicist and a philosopher, and ESR is an aikidoka. RMS is concerned that the ethical imperitive and philosophical underpinnings of free software are not lost in the new emphasis on "open source" as a marketing strategy. ESR is a student of Aikido. In Aikido, you don't confront your opponent with force-vs-force, but you redirect your opponent's engergy in a less destructive way. Also, it is believed that simply doing Aikido is the primary way to absorb and begin to practice the philosophy of peaceableness, rather than beginning by studying the writings of O-Sensei.
So, RMS is trying intellectual and moral persuasion in order to promote free software. ESR is trying to get more corporations to do free software, and trusting that the philosophy will follow. Both approaches are complementary, not contradictory. I'm glad we have both RMS and ESR.
First of all, there's more than a single embedded systems market. There are truly low-end systems (think toaster thermocontrols) where a Unix-like OS is certainly overkill. On t he other hand, there's a very large market segment where a Unix-like OS is not overkill. Telecom switching equipment and industrial control panels fit into this category. In these segments, it's not unusual at all for your "small" computer to be a m68k, PPC, SPARC, or Pentium running at a respectable speed and having 4, 8, or even 32+ Mb of memory. This is the market space currently occupied by VxWorks ( Wind River Systems), pSOS ( ISI), LynxOS ( Lynx Real-Time Systems), VRTX ( Mentor Graphics), Chorus ( Sun), QNX ( QNX Software Systems), OS-9 ( Microware), and a whole bunch of others that I can't think of off the top of my head. Oh, yeah, and Windows CE.
I even know of folks who are using Solaris or AIX in this type of application. Not to mention the poor fools who are stuck with Windows NT for control and monitoring applications (don't laugh, it happens!).
Now, the majority of these real-time operating systems (RTOS) are POSIX-compliant, at least to some degree. Usually, this means that they implement the POSIX.1 APIs. So, except for the tasking and memory models, they look a heck of a lot like Unix/Linux. Some of them (LynxOS, QNX) are downright Unix clones (like Linux). All of them have TCP/IP networking available, all of them either already have Java support or have promised it Real Soon Now, lots of them even use gcc/gdb as their toolchain.
Given that, why not Linux? Margins tend to be sensitive here, so you'd really like to eliminate those per-cpu royalties that the commercial (I should say "proprietary", since MontaVista is obviously commerical) vendors charge. And (contrary to what some /.'ers have posted) uptime is critical in many of these applications. Long-term supportability and credibility is also critical, as many of these systems may have production lifetimes of years, and field lifetimes of decades. Customers already recognize the value of having access to the source code in these circumstances, and they tend to demand it from their software vendors (it is usually provided under NDA or escrowed).
Now, check out the founders of MontaVista. Jim Ready helped put together VRTX, one of the first commerically-successful RTOS's. Jerry Kirk founded Microtec, which is the dominant vendor of compilers and debuggers for embedded systems (the XRAY debugger is the most-used debugger in the embedded world). So I would guess these two ought to have a good understanding of how to put together a OS + development enviroment that would appeal to the RTOS market.
It looks to me like, between this and eCos, we're about to see The Cathedral and the Bazaar dynamic in yet another OS market.
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it needs to be. -- Linus Torvalds