The funny thing was, Statistics Canada cancelled a schedule released of a panel dataset because of security reason. One of my classmates has been waiting for a year for the security check passed through such that he can use that dataset to complete his empirical studies. I just don't understand how many people in the world can trace the information of a particular person if the dataset is without names, addresss, telephone numbers or any direct identification information.
Not my problem though, coz' they would not let me pass the security check anyway as I am not a Canadian at the moment.
Is growing inequality a problem? Seems everybody assume that some group of people controlling more resources than others is a bad bad thing. Is it?
Even we would like the world to be more equal, sometimes you give the poor country the right to access informations does not neccessary help. Without a well established legal, political, economical system, only those with more resources can really benefitted from information. I don't see, without proper property right definition under legal system, how can a farmer in a poor Africa country benefitted by having the information of the most advanced biotechnology Americans? It isn't feasible for them to apply the information, and there's no way they can sell the information.
No matter how you hate the western society, we take it for granted for the invisible infrastructure we are living in.
The languages we are using are typically in the spirit of "Open Source". Put it in this way, how many of you are speaking English with those "Thy" "Thou" word? And there are new vocabulary coming out everyday. Nobody control the one language, and they are ever changing, change according to the need of the society, and change from every individual. (Mostly TV characters nowadays).
So unless you can find a better open source mechanism to design an internationally accepted internet-based language, if we all use one single language, it will be the mixed of English with many different language, as if you've seen in the ICQ world.
I heard this story when I was a little boy. There was a starvation in ancient China. One day, the king went out of the palace to take a look, and he met farmers who are so thin and pale. He asked the following government officers, "Why are these people so unhealthy?" One officer told him, because they don't have rice to eat. The king didn't understand and ask, "why don't they eat meat instead?"
Yes, freedom of speech is important. Yes, have to right to get information is important. But before we can improve most people's living standard in the third world, concerning whether they have or what they have on internet access is simply asking what kind of 16oz steak they are eating.
Unless you can show me how internet access can improve their living standard significantly, I won't bother. We better to change their governments, not giving them cheap and good internet access while most people don't even have calculators.
What I see the problem rest on, is there's no cost for you to use up more bandwidth than others. Using those bandwidth hungry software at the same time is typically a rent seeking behaviour: there's bandwidth left over from normal usage, people are hurry to take that over for their own good coz' they don't have to pay a cent for it.
3 years ago when my school implemented a 40 hour limit on dialup access, I objected the idea. People won't limit their use at peak hour. A more practical way to redirect bandwidth usage to non-peak hour is to "charge" differently on different hours. For the normal users, they don't care their office bandwidth being taken over for Napster usage at 3:00am or 4:00am, so, let's put a high price on daytime usage and low price at 3:00am.
Unfortunately, when I talked to the sys admin, they just think it's too trouble to implement and forget about it. Maybe it's because sys admin are too lazy these days to write some decend code for doing such easy job.
Is there any competition in the market of education? I think the competition is minimal, compare to any other industry. If you have kids, how many schools are there can you really choose from without moving your home? Is there any way to change schools with only minor cost (including the lost time of catching up and adoptation)?
Is it really neccessary to have students lock to one school? School administrators, teachers will tell you "yes" such that to promote xxx and yyy. They didn't say, without this stablity, there're other ways to promote the same xxx and yyy.
Underfund? Take a look on poor countries and see, some schools are producing better quality education than in wealthy US/Canada/UK/...
The point is, without the competition, without the free choice from the customers, we lost the guidance of proper use of funding. If students can choose any school and change school easily, the market pressure will guide the funding to the best use. Bad teachers? No problem. Students can vote with their feet (going to other schools) if the school don't fire them. Too much job for the teachers? No problem, if they can't perform well, students will go to somewhere else, and so the school has to find way to help out teachers. Want your kids to learn more facts? Choose a school that's specialised in this area. Want your kids to learn how to learn? Choose a school that's good at that.
I believe many teachers decided to be good teachers at the first day. Just like there're good people who want to be good government officials. However, the whole mechanism does not encourage them to do their best.
Take a look on the successful case of deregulation of monopolies. Education system is basically a monopolists' market. A coupon system is the first step to achieve efficiency.
I didn't read all the comments on this thread, but it seems that our economists didn't state their ideas.
I'm not into the field of law and economics, but I know that one principle we may consider is, the responsibility is assigned in the way that the outcome is efficient.
Say, it's extremely easy for the manufacturer to implement measures to prevent bad use, but it's costful to monitor users' usage, the natural conclusion is the manufacturer has the responsibility.
On the other hand, it's difficult to have the manufacturer to implement preventive measures, maybe technologically impossible, then it's the users' responsibility.
Say, why we don't blame the knife manufacturer if someone kill someone else using a knife? There's simply no cheap technologically possible measure to prevent this usage. In many countries outside US, gun is forbidded because this is the cheapest (including the opportunity cost of not using them) way to prevent bad use. Maybe American don't think their lives are valuable to forbid guns or maybe they think their normal uses are very valuable.
I have to say, I'm a prof wannabe. so maybe I'm somehow bias on this issue.
As someone has point out, the prof/instructors have edit the materials to present. Although the prof/instructors seem to "pirate" others copyrighted materials, the copyright laws generally have exception clauses on the use of materials for education purpose in schools or institutions. A student copying down what have presented is included in this exception. And indeed, the prof/instructors can claim copyrights on this materials as they have edited. It's derived work.
If student sell it to others without the permission of the original copyright holders and it's not under the same exceptional clause of copyright law, that's already a violation of copyright.
Of course, you can argue whether it's appropriate to extend the copyright interpretation of derived work to this case, that's something we shouldn't overlook.
And... of course I would say, only stupid students would pay to get a copy of notes for elementary courses. You always learn more by direct interacting with professors/instructor for advanced topics that the notes do not cover normally.
Go to the other side of the world, Multi-system TV are the mainstream in Hongkong, (so as Multi-system VCR) coz' people like to watch video from US (NTSC), Japan (PAL)...
there's not even 1 in 1000 predictions that hit the reality. besides applauding JK's effort in providing some interesting predictions, what do we really care?
Indeed, even we have a 1 million times more powerful supercomputer nowadays, we wouldn't be able to solve most of the problems we would like to solve. It's not simply about the power of the computing device. Do we really understand how our world works? If we don't, even the most complex simulation can't approach the reality.
And, even the device is fast enough, do we have the resources to provide the huge reality data feed to the computing model? Without that, even the most complex models won't work.
It's a dangerous thing to have the supercomputer help the cleverest to predict everythings and implement policies... we do need some stupid politicians to represent the average Joe to balance the power. Luckily, our world are far too complex and so, right now the usefulness of stupid politicians is low.
Yes, everybody says how good it will be to have cert./regulations/insurance so and so, but should we ask ourselves why don't we have that already? Why we still need to put big money on Y2K now? Why don't somebody compensate that? Why do you suddenly get a blue screen after reading this line without M$ apologises to you?
regulations may work partially, but since rules can't change frequently, it's definitely will be a failure when regulatiors can't catch up the technology appeared. Also, be careful for those big companies like M$ that can put money in politics to kill off competition from small company by regulations.
the best way seems to be like the UL mentioned somewhere above. Insurance companies have the incentive to avoid paying claims by avoid having the software clash. So, most properly insurance companies would like to investigate the software under the insurance throughoutly and if they say, yes, we do the business, that piece of software shouldn't be too bad and a set of environment for normal operations are also discovered.
however, why we don't have that good working mechanism now? I would bet, when a system clash happen, it's infeasible to determine which piece of software is the reason. Sometimes, it's the hardware. So, in that case, insurance company have too many way to escape from the compensation, and so insurance can't reduce the risk enough for consumer willing to pay for it.
on the other hand, if even insurance company have the difficulty to determine which software is clash-proof, the market simply cannot exist.
take a look, as there's no case indicate M$ has to compensate for their customers when blue screens appear, and M$ knows that whenever they don't provide the source codes, no insurance company could have adequate risk evaluation, so no business could be done seriously. Other than M$, the market is simply too small for even one insurance company to get in the market (cannot share the risk).
Sure you can have a law that put insurance to every piece of software, but it never work well in that case. The auto-insurance doesn't make the road safer. Indeed, I would believe people drive more aggressively since insurance would cover all damage. Software companies would make worse software if insurance always cover it.
Yes, CE-based palm-top computer with a mobile phone can pretty much do the "advanced" idea many slashdotters have, but this device is a total failure in my opinion.
I once saw a guy next to me on a flight typing on a Toshiba libretto, it's really funny to find that his fingertips are much larger than the keys.
Indeed, if you want those powerful function, get a slim notebook computer will do. What's special is if there's a device with a remote-control size, or mobile phone size, that can do the job of providing instant informations (by email/www/internet radio or video/voice over IP) and simple communication with other devices thru Infra-red and provide simple entertainments when it's idle. CE-based device could do this kind of thing, but it's simply too complex (trying to put a PC on that size is stupid). Just like I don't why we need to put a Pentium processor in a rice cooker, I don't see why we need a condensed computer functions in such a device? Of course, if in the future, when the user-interface can be integrated seamlessly with us, I may want this small device that can dictate a business presentation documents just like I talk to my sec. Now, I just need a mobile phone with some practical function.
the idea of CE is just as bloat as all other M$ products.
How about PDA+Mobile Phone+MP3 Player?
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PDA+MP3 Player
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· Score: 5
Seems to me, even the technology nowadays allow us to have a real PDA instead of those toys we have now. Why don't we have it now?
How about a PDA that can 1. Organising informational documents 2. Internet communications (email + www of course, and more... audio/video stream... a portable Radio and TV...) 3. Phone service (voice over IP, please, not the other way) 4. MP3 Music on tiny storage device (how about those micro-hard-drive from IBM?) Don't have to bring that bunch CDs with me on the road. 5. Infra-red communication (that control your garage doors, your cars, your VCR, etc.)
Of course, as small as the mobile phone nowadays. No stupid keyboard like those CE-based thing, but a little bit more buttons for easier programmed controls over things that I would like if Palm had it.
I wonder would this happen: music industry become an industry like academics, that sharing knowledge and idea (here the music) freely with recognition of the author (the musician).
So, the new industry have recording companies, whose role is just like the academic journals in academics, publish music for musicians. Of course, there're cost for music lovers to search for the good music, and so the recording labels basically provide some information on the music. If you love certain kind of music, like R&B, maybe you would like to subscribe to a R&B labels by small annual fees, and you get the music downloaded. You can distribute it freely as long as you're not making money on it.
I guess, this would kill most of the current industry and force them to do very specialised kind of music for small number of audience.
Similar to academics, many musicians won't be happy with this new industry... shouldn't we subsidised musicians like we subsidised universities to promote creativities?
Re:which infinity are we talking about?
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Infinite Space
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I guess as a non-mathematician, I would concern about the infinity from numerical analysis. We use it because it suits our problem.
Now when there's resource constraint on expanding web space, which establish the upper bound, and growing number of occupancy in web space, something you may think "infinite" now would not be infinite later if the growing of resource is slower than the growing of users. "infinite" now doesn't affect us. But then when it becomes "finite" to many of us, that's something we care.
So, infinite web space worth nothing to discuss.
"Of course, I enjoy learning some new math."
Property is Always Virtual, so as Money .....
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Infinite Space
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When new things get into mainstream, the mainstream make them into great deals. Indeed, we human think something is important when we don't understand it. Unluckily, mainstream tend to have more misconception on things than others.
Property is always something virtual. I mean, seperate the rights you own something and the entity itself. So if you own something, you can do a lot of different things on it because you have the rights to do it. WHen you can't do something on it, it's either because you don't have the right to do it, or the physical properties of the thing itself make you too costful to do it. When we own something, we actually refer to the rights, although it's related to the phsical presence. To an extreme, if I say I can let you have love by paying me, as long as you think you have love from that even I do particularly nothing, that you still think you own the love, and I respect it. So many others would respect it too.
So UO character is virtual property, so as you real house, so as the diamond, and so as the water. As long as you derive happiness from owning this thing, there's a value for you. Does the physical properties of this things affect a lot on the value? I would give up nothing for an UO character, but somebody would give up thousands dollars. Yes, they may not be able to sell it out later, but they don't care, so that thousands dollars are the opportunity cost they are willing to give up. I respect people's preference. I'm willing to give up $100 dollars for wearing a diamond for a year, so if that diamond's price now is $10,000, I would buy it only if I expect I could sell it out at least $9,900 next year. If the price now is $99, I would buy it without considering the next year's price. Did I get any usable value from that diamond? I bet I would enjoy watching it only. So you think.
On the other hand, money is always virtual. People always tend to think that money should tie up to phsyically useful or scared things, like gold. Indeed, money's value is the value we believe it has. That's why ancient people can use stones as money, that's why prisoners' use cigarettes money, that's why we use paper notes as money. Money is just units to reflect the relative value of commodities.
So the web/net space is finite physically, but as long as the scarcity has not kick in, the price is zero, the value is in our mind, and looks like infinite, which again many people believe something is free of charge means it's infinite. Check a textbook on math to see the concept of infinity. Something with infinite supply and limited demand have zero scarcity, but not the vice versa.
Identification of the problem itself is important.
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Why Kids Kill
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Look, the problem of the media Katz criticised is making conclusion or opinion too easy. I would say he's correct not to make yet-another-explanation to this situation.
My opinion is: bad-gun-control + bad parenting + bad education philosophy.
In the mind of some M$ only so-called "system administrator", introducing something they could never understand is equilvalently to get rid of them from the game. That's why "but we don't have anyone here who has the time to learn how to do that, and we can't hire anyone new."
If a prediction is going to happen for sure, that's already a fact. Most predictions are not going to happen anyway. So as this one.
But as least we know, it seldom happens that nearly the everybody wants the exact same stuff. So even there're different information appliances, some of us may still want personal computers to do the jobs. Even sardines come in different brand names. In that era, no single manufacturer earns huge economic profits. That's a good thing.
In other words, as long as a company that can identify certain customers' wants, they can survive. This editorial writer just doesn't feel good when Apple's customers are not large enough to dominate the part they are good at, and this writer is scared that Apple will again leave the path of satifying the customers' needs. As long as Apple moves in pace of the market, that would be fine. And it seems that Apple is not doing too bad now.
What a beautiful scene! However, could our society that simple?
Let's face the truth. If OSS is ONLY based on the idea of give and share thru' network, OSS is DEAD already. Network lower the costs of sharing, and the costs of stealing knowledge. Which force win the race depends on the arrangement. If there's no punishment on participants to take without giving, sooner or later nobody is willing to give anymore. It simply doesn't survive.
It reminded me the Prisoner's Dilemma game. When two suspects are trial separately for once and for all crime, both of them have to incentive to confess such to reduce their own sentence. The outcome, a Nash Equilibrium, is simply inferior than the cooperative outcome by both denying. That's the dilemma. However, they can commit crime repeatly for infinite times, adopting a tit-for-tat strategy can make them settle at the cooperative outcome for self-interested.
For OSS to survive, we do need some kind of tit-for-tat strategies, rather than a religion of the goodness of OSS. Network is just a tool. GPL/LGPL may do the job (or does it?)
As Steeldrivin has pointed out, volunteering is not single direction. If you're interested, you could check an interesting article, "Toilet Cleaning and Department Chairing: Volunteering a Public Service" by Marc Bilodeau and Al Slivinski, Journal of Public Economics, Feb 1996.
I would suggest to drop the emphasis on scarcity. True, without scarcity, we can satisfied our wants as much as we can based on the economic theories we have nowadays. But is scarcity the starting point of every economic analysis? No. Every economic theory ought to specify how we have scarcity. The way that scarcity arised will affect the "rule of the game", and thus the equilibrium.
Moreover, I do want to know, as time is limited for everybody, how come contribution of codes or update or as simple as bug report is not using up resouces? If it takes up resources, any kind of exchange in Open Source model is not exchange based on something other than scarcity. I would bet, if there were equilvalently effective mechanism to obtain the advantage of Open Source development model, while the source could be kept closed without high transaction cost, our evil M$ would have adopted it already.
The basic flaw that I would say from Mr Levin's original article is: assume that what economics has are those models from undergraduate textbooks. Therefore, so as long as those models doesn't match the observations in Open Source development, it must be the trouble from the assumption: Scarcity. However, Mr Levin hasn't considered that each model must have more than one assumed restriction, and these all restrictions could be also wrong while the basic assumption of scarcity is okay.
In economics, in most of the time we assumed that: agents are self-interested and know what we are doing, period. (technically, rationality, although there's such thing as bounded rationality in economics too) Nothing else must appear in every model, although we always say that resources are limited to some extent. (Even more creative idea is to applied evoluntionary game theory to explain why are we self-interested.) An economist's job to such "new" kind of Open Source development model is to first applied the knowledge we have today to explain. As we have seen in many other areas, we still can explain the so call un-selfish behaviour and organisation based on the self-interested assumed economics. If we have tried all the existing modelling techniques in the mainstream economics and still can't find the proper explanation, then check assumptions. The suggestions of something like "Algamics" based on the inability of perfectly explaination of the observations by some subset of economic theories is not new to social sciences. That appeared even before Adam Smith (from many psychologists at that time). What we see is more and more social scientists found that the idea from economics are so powerful in their own area and adopt it, while economists, especially those from U of Chicago, are trying to use economic theories to explain more and more area that used to be in other social sciences. Even psychologists and sociologists nowadays would hesitate to attack the insufficiency of rationality and scarcity. (Related to the methodology of economics, interested could check the Positive Economics by Milton Friedman.)
If Mr Levin's idea appeares before Ronald Coase, it's revoluntionary in economics. However, the rise of Industrial Organisation theories in the last 30 years have laid down the framework to explain many industrial structures, which would include the open source development model. (Ronald Coase published not many articles, but each one is very very important. His theories are the foundation of works on organisations, firms or even society.)
Sum it up. Economics is not just for market behaviour.
The only good point as a real economist I can find from Mr Levin's article is: economists have not done any serious study on the Open Source Movement. Other than that, it's full of flaws and misunderstanding of economic concepts.
Basically, we can model the situation by the similar models of volunteering (we do have models about volunteering!). I bet it's because the dropping of hardware cost enable us to have Open Source Softwares. And the dropping of hardware cost is nothing new to economics.
Theoretically, it seems that there's nothing new. We do need some empirical studies.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing was, Statistics Canada cancelled a schedule released of a panel dataset because of security reason. One of my classmates has been waiting for a year for the security check passed through such that he can use that dataset to complete his empirical studies. I just don't understand how many people in the world can trace the information of a particular person if the dataset is without names, addresss, telephone numbers or any direct identification information.
Not my problem though, coz' they would not let me pass the security check anyway as I am not a Canadian at the moment.
Is growing inequality a problem? Seems everybody assume that some group of people controlling more resources than others is a bad bad thing. Is it?
Even we would like the world to be more equal, sometimes you give the poor country the right to access informations does not neccessary help. Without a well established legal, political, economical system, only those with more resources can really benefitted from information. I don't see, without proper property right definition under legal system, how can a farmer in a poor Africa country benefitted by having the information of the most advanced biotechnology Americans? It isn't feasible for them to apply the information, and there's no way they can sell the information.
No matter how you hate the western society, we take it for granted for the invisible infrastructure we are living in.
The languages we are using are typically in the spirit of "Open Source". Put it in this way, how many of you are speaking English with those "Thy" "Thou" word? And there are new vocabulary coming out everyday. Nobody control the one language, and they are ever changing, change according to the need of the society, and change from every individual. (Mostly TV characters nowadays).
So unless you can find a better open source mechanism to design an internationally accepted internet-based language, if we all use one single language, it will be the mixed of English with many different language, as if you've seen in the ICQ world.
I heard this story when I was a little boy. There was a starvation in ancient China. One day, the king went out of the palace to take a look, and he met farmers who are so thin and pale. He asked the following government officers, "Why are these people so unhealthy?" One officer told him, because they don't have rice to eat. The king didn't understand and ask, "why don't they eat meat instead?"
Yes, freedom of speech is important. Yes, have to right to get information is important. But before we can improve most people's living standard in the third world, concerning whether they have or what they have on internet access is simply asking what kind of 16oz steak they are eating.
Unless you can show me how internet access can improve their living standard significantly, I won't bother. We better to change their governments, not giving them cheap and good internet access while most people don't even have calculators.
What I see the problem rest on, is there's no cost for you to use up more bandwidth than others. Using those bandwidth hungry software at the same time is typically a rent seeking behaviour: there's bandwidth left over from normal usage, people are hurry to take that over for their own good coz' they don't have to pay a cent for it.
3 years ago when my school implemented a 40 hour limit on dialup access, I objected the idea. People won't limit their use at peak hour. A more practical way to redirect bandwidth usage to non-peak hour is to "charge" differently on different hours. For the normal users, they don't care their office bandwidth being taken over for Napster usage at 3:00am or 4:00am, so, let's put a high price on daytime usage and low price at 3:00am.
Unfortunately, when I talked to the sys admin, they just think it's too trouble to implement and forget about it. Maybe it's because sys admin are too lazy these days to write some decend code for doing such easy job.
Is there any competition in the market of education? I think the competition is minimal, compare to any other industry. If you have kids, how many schools are there can you really choose from without moving your home? Is there any way to change schools with only minor cost (including the lost time of catching up and adoptation)?
Is it really neccessary to have students lock to one school? School administrators, teachers will tell you "yes" such that to promote xxx and yyy. They didn't say, without this stablity, there're other ways to promote the same xxx and yyy.
Underfund? Take a look on poor countries and see, some schools are producing better quality education than in wealthy US/Canada/UK/...
The point is, without the competition, without the free choice from the customers, we lost the guidance of proper use of funding. If students can choose any school and change school easily, the market pressure will guide the funding to the best use. Bad teachers? No problem. Students can vote with their feet (going to other schools) if the school don't fire them. Too much job for the teachers? No problem, if they can't perform well, students will go to somewhere else, and so the school has to find way to help out teachers. Want your kids to learn more facts? Choose a school that's specialised in this area. Want your kids to learn how to learn? Choose a school that's good at that.
I believe many teachers decided to be good teachers at the first day. Just like there're good people who want to be good government officials. However, the whole mechanism does not encourage them to do their best.
Take a look on the successful case of deregulation of monopolies. Education system is basically a monopolists' market. A coupon system is the first step to achieve efficiency.
I didn't read all the comments on this thread, but it seems that our economists didn't state their ideas.
I'm not into the field of law and economics, but I know that one principle we may consider is, the responsibility is assigned in the way that the outcome is efficient.
Say, it's extremely easy for the manufacturer to implement measures to prevent bad use, but it's costful to monitor users' usage, the natural conclusion is the manufacturer has the responsibility.
On the other hand, it's difficult to have the manufacturer to implement preventive measures, maybe technologically impossible, then it's the users' responsibility.
Say, why we don't blame the knife manufacturer if someone kill someone else using a knife? There's simply no cheap technologically possible measure to prevent this usage. In many countries outside US, gun is forbidded because this is the cheapest (including the opportunity cost of not using them) way to prevent bad use. Maybe American don't think their lives are valuable to forbid guns or maybe they think their normal uses are very valuable.
What's wrong with ./ers?
I have to say, I'm a prof wannabe. so maybe I'm somehow bias on this issue.
As someone has point out, the prof/instructors have edit the materials to present. Although the prof/instructors seem to "pirate" others copyrighted materials, the copyright laws generally have exception clauses on the use of materials for education purpose in schools or institutions. A student copying down what have presented is included in this exception. And indeed, the prof/instructors can claim copyrights on this materials as they have edited. It's derived work.
If student sell it to others without the permission of the original copyright holders and it's not under the same exceptional clause of copyright law, that's already a violation of copyright.
Of course, you can argue whether it's appropriate to extend the copyright interpretation of derived work to this case, that's something we shouldn't overlook.
And... of course I would say, only stupid students would pay to get a copy of notes for elementary courses. You always learn more by direct interacting with professors/instructor for advanced topics that the notes do not cover normally.
Go to the other side of the world, Multi-system TV are the mainstream in Hongkong, (so as Multi-system VCR) coz' people like to watch video from US (NTSC), Japan (PAL) ...
±×ÂI
what do we care?
there's not even 1 in 1000 predictions that hit the reality. besides applauding JK's effort in providing some interesting predictions, what do we really care?
Indeed, even we have a 1 million times more powerful supercomputer nowadays, we wouldn't be able to solve most of the problems we would like to solve. It's not simply about the power of the computing device. Do we really understand how our world works? If we don't, even the most complex simulation can't approach the reality.
And, even the device is fast enough, do we have the resources to provide the huge reality data feed to the computing model? Without that, even the most complex models won't work.
It's a dangerous thing to have the supercomputer help the cleverest to predict everythings and implement policies... we do need some stupid politicians to represent the average Joe to balance the power. Luckily, our world are far too complex and so, right now the usefulness of stupid politicians is low.
Yes, everybody says how good it will be to have cert./regulations/insurance so and so, but should we ask ourselves why don't we have that already? Why we still need to put big money on Y2K now? Why don't somebody compensate that? Why do you suddenly get a blue screen after reading this line without M$ apologises to you?
regulations may work partially, but since rules can't change frequently, it's definitely will be a failure when regulatiors can't catch up the technology appeared. Also, be careful for those big companies like M$ that can put money in politics to kill off competition from small company by regulations.
the best way seems to be like the UL mentioned somewhere above. Insurance companies have the incentive to avoid paying claims by avoid having the software clash. So, most properly insurance companies would like to investigate the software under the insurance throughoutly and if they say, yes, we do the business, that piece of software shouldn't be too bad and a set of environment for normal operations are also discovered.
however, why we don't have that good working mechanism now? I would bet, when a system clash happen, it's infeasible to determine which piece of software is the reason. Sometimes, it's the hardware. So, in that case, insurance company have too many way to escape from the compensation, and so insurance can't reduce the risk enough for consumer willing to pay for it.
on the other hand, if even insurance company have the difficulty to determine which software is clash-proof, the market simply cannot exist.
take a look, as there's no case indicate M$ has to compensate for their customers when blue screens appear, and M$ knows that whenever they don't provide the source codes, no insurance company could have adequate risk evaluation, so no business could be done seriously. Other than M$, the market is simply too small for even one insurance company to get in the market (cannot share the risk).
Sure you can have a law that put insurance to every piece of software, but it never work well in that case. The auto-insurance doesn't make the road safer. Indeed, I would believe people drive more aggressively since insurance would cover all damage. Software companies would make worse software if insurance always cover it.
Yes, CE-based palm-top computer with a mobile phone can pretty much do the "advanced" idea many slashdotters have, but this device is a total failure in my opinion.
I once saw a guy next to me on a flight typing on a Toshiba libretto, it's really funny to find that his fingertips are much larger than the keys.
Indeed, if you want those powerful function, get a slim notebook computer will do. What's special is if there's a device with a remote-control size, or mobile phone size, that can do the job of providing instant informations (by email/www/internet radio or video/voice over IP) and simple communication with other devices thru Infra-red and provide simple entertainments when it's idle. CE-based device could do this kind of thing, but it's simply too complex (trying to put a PC on that size is stupid). Just like I don't why we need to put a Pentium processor in a rice cooker, I don't see why we need a condensed computer functions in such a device? Of course, if in the future, when the user-interface can be integrated seamlessly with us, I may want this small device that can dictate a business presentation documents just like I talk to my sec. Now, I just need a mobile phone with some practical function.
the idea of CE is just as bloat as all other M$ products.
Seems to me, even the technology nowadays allow us to have a real PDA instead of those toys we have now. Why don't we have it now?
How about a PDA that can
1. Organising informational documents
2. Internet communications (email + www of course, and more... audio/video stream... a portable Radio and TV...)
3. Phone service (voice over IP, please, not the other way)
4. MP3 Music on tiny storage device (how about those micro-hard-drive from IBM?) Don't have to bring that bunch CDs with me on the road.
5. Infra-red communication (that control your garage doors, your cars, your VCR, etc.)
Of course, as small as the mobile phone nowadays. No stupid keyboard like those CE-based thing, but a little bit more buttons for easier programmed controls over things that I would like if Palm had it.
I wonder would this happen: music industry become an industry like academics, that sharing knowledge and idea (here the music) freely with recognition of the author (the musician).
So, the new industry have recording companies, whose role is just like the academic journals in academics, publish music for musicians. Of course, there're cost for music lovers to search for the good music, and so the recording labels basically provide some information on the music. If you love certain kind of music, like R&B, maybe you would like to subscribe to a R&B labels by small annual fees, and you get the music downloaded. You can distribute it freely as long as you're not making money on it.
I guess, this would kill most of the current industry and force them to do very specialised kind of music for small number of audience.
Similar to academics, many musicians won't be happy with this new industry... shouldn't we subsidised musicians like we subsidised universities to promote creativities?
I guess as a non-mathematician, I would concern about the infinity from numerical analysis. We use it because it suits our problem.
Now when there's resource constraint on expanding web space, which establish the upper bound, and growing number of occupancy in web space, something you may think "infinite" now would not be infinite later if the growing of resource is slower than the growing of users. "infinite" now doesn't affect us. But then when it becomes "finite" to many of us, that's something we care.
So, infinite web space worth nothing to discuss.
"Of course, I enjoy learning some new math."
When new things get into mainstream, the mainstream make them into great deals. Indeed, we human think something is important when we don't understand it. Unluckily, mainstream tend to have more misconception on things than others.
Property is always something virtual. I mean, seperate the rights you own something and the entity itself. So if you own something, you can do a lot of different things on it because you have the rights to do it. WHen you can't do something on it, it's either because you don't have the right to do it, or the physical properties of the thing itself make you too costful to do it. When we own something, we actually refer to the rights, although it's related to the phsical presence. To an extreme, if I say I can let you have love by paying me, as long as you think you have love from that even I do particularly nothing, that you still think you own the love, and I respect it. So many others would respect it too.
So UO character is virtual property, so as you real house, so as the diamond, and so as the water. As long as you derive happiness from owning this thing, there's a value for you. Does the physical properties of this things affect a lot on the value? I would give up nothing for an UO character, but somebody would give up thousands dollars. Yes, they may not be able to sell it out later, but they don't care, so that thousands dollars are the opportunity cost they are willing to give up. I respect people's preference. I'm willing to give up $100 dollars for wearing a diamond for a year, so if that diamond's price now is $10,000, I would buy it only if I expect I could sell it out at least $9,900 next year. If the price now is $99, I would buy it without considering the next year's price. Did I get any usable value from that diamond? I bet I would enjoy watching it only. So you think.
On the other hand, money is always virtual. People always tend to think that money should tie up to phsyically useful or scared things, like gold. Indeed, money's value is the value we believe it has. That's why ancient people can use stones as money, that's why prisoners' use cigarettes money, that's why we use paper notes as money. Money is just units to reflect the relative value of commodities.
So the web/net space is finite physically, but as long as the scarcity has not kick in, the price is zero, the value is in our mind, and looks like infinite, which again many people believe something is free of charge means it's infinite. Check a textbook on math to see the concept of infinity. Something with infinite supply and limited demand have zero scarcity, but not the vice versa.
Look, the problem of the media Katz criticised is making conclusion or opinion too easy. I would say he's correct not to make yet-another-explanation to this situation.
My opinion is: bad-gun-control + bad parenting + bad education philosophy.
WHat's yours?
In the mind of some M$ only so-called "system administrator", introducing something they could never understand is equilvalently to get rid of them from the game. That's why "but we don't have anyone here who has the time to learn how to do that, and we can't hire anyone new."
On their documentation page , they claim that except the Libdes they adopted used different license, everything else is LGPLed.
If a prediction is going to happen for sure, that's already a fact. Most predictions are not going to happen anyway. So as this one.
But as least we know, it seldom happens that nearly the everybody wants the exact same stuff. So even there're different information appliances, some of us may still want personal computers to do the jobs. Even sardines come in different brand names. In that era, no single manufacturer earns huge economic profits. That's a good thing.
In other words, as long as a company that can identify certain customers' wants, they can survive. This editorial writer just doesn't feel good when Apple's customers are not large enough to dominate the part they are good at, and this writer is scared that Apple will again leave the path of satifying the customers' needs. As long as Apple moves in pace of the market, that would be fine. And it seems that Apple is not doing too bad now.
What a beautiful scene! However, could our society that simple?
Let's face the truth. If OSS is ONLY based on the idea of give and share thru' network, OSS is DEAD already. Network lower the costs of sharing, and the costs of stealing knowledge. Which force win the race depends on the arrangement. If there's no punishment on participants to take without giving, sooner or later nobody is willing to give anymore. It simply doesn't survive.
It reminded me the Prisoner's Dilemma game. When two suspects are trial separately for once and for all crime, both of them have to incentive to confess such to reduce their own sentence. The outcome, a Nash Equilibrium, is simply inferior than the cooperative outcome by both denying. That's the dilemma. However, they can commit crime repeatly for infinite times, adopting a tit-for-tat strategy can make them settle at the cooperative outcome for self-interested.
For OSS to survive, we do need some kind of tit-for-tat strategies, rather than a religion of the goodness of OSS. Network is just a tool. GPL/LGPL may do the job (or does it?)
As Steeldrivin has pointed out, volunteering is not single direction. If you're interested, you could check an interesting article, "Toilet Cleaning and Department Chairing: Volunteering a Public Service" by Marc Bilodeau and Al Slivinski, Journal of Public Economics, Feb 1996.
I would suggest to drop the emphasis on scarcity. True, without scarcity, we can satisfied our wants as much as we can based on the economic theories we have nowadays. But is scarcity the starting point of every economic analysis? No. Every economic theory ought to specify how we have scarcity. The way that scarcity arised will affect the "rule of the game", and thus the equilibrium.
Moreover, I do want to know, as time is limited for everybody, how come contribution of codes or update or as simple as bug report is not using up resouces? If it takes up resources, any kind of exchange in Open Source model is not exchange based on something other than scarcity. I would bet, if there were equilvalently effective mechanism to obtain the advantage of Open Source development model, while the source could be kept closed without high transaction cost, our evil M$ would have adopted it already.
The basic flaw that I would say from Mr Levin's original article is: assume that what economics has are those models from undergraduate textbooks. Therefore, so as long as those models doesn't match the observations in Open Source development, it must be the trouble from the assumption: Scarcity. However, Mr Levin hasn't considered that each model must have more than one assumed restriction, and these all restrictions could be also wrong while the basic assumption of scarcity is okay.
In economics, in most of the time we assumed that: agents are self-interested and know what we are doing, period. (technically, rationality, although there's such thing as bounded rationality in economics too) Nothing else must appear in every model, although we always say that resources are limited to some extent. (Even more creative idea is to applied evoluntionary game theory to explain why are we self-interested.) An economist's job to such "new" kind of Open Source development model is to first applied the knowledge we have today to explain. As we have seen in many other areas, we still can explain the so call un-selfish behaviour and organisation based on the self-interested assumed economics. If we have tried all the existing modelling techniques in the mainstream economics and still can't find the proper explanation, then check assumptions. The suggestions of something like "Algamics" based on the inability of perfectly explaination of the observations by some subset of economic theories is not new to social sciences. That appeared even before Adam Smith (from many psychologists at that time). What we see is more and more social scientists found that the idea from economics are so powerful in their own area and adopt it, while economists, especially those from U of Chicago, are trying to use economic theories to explain more and more area that used to be in other social sciences. Even psychologists and sociologists nowadays would hesitate to attack the insufficiency of rationality and scarcity. (Related to the methodology of economics, interested could check the Positive Economics by Milton Friedman.)
If Mr Levin's idea appeares before Ronald Coase, it's revoluntionary in economics. However, the rise of Industrial Organisation theories in the last 30 years have laid down the framework to explain many industrial structures, which would include the open source development model. (Ronald Coase published not many articles, but each one is very very important. His theories are the foundation of works on organisations, firms or even society.)
Sum it up. Economics is not just for market behaviour.
The only good point as a real economist I can find from Mr Levin's article is: economists have not done any serious study on the Open Source Movement. Other than that, it's full of flaws and misunderstanding of economic concepts.
Basically, we can model the situation by the similar models of volunteering (we do have models about volunteering!). I bet it's because the dropping of hardware cost enable us to have Open Source Softwares. And the dropping of hardware cost is nothing new to economics.
Theoretically, it seems that there's nothing new. We do need some empirical studies.