If someone makes a counterintuitive claim about IT outsourcing, it should not be scorned without thought.
There's a company in the Pacific northwest that claims the only way to make money in software is by keeping source code secret and restrictively licensing it and DRM-ing it up the wazoo. When you claim that Open Source is a viable business model you make a claim that seems just as counter-intuitive as that of those advocating IT outsourcing.
If you want the b-school types to seriously consider Linux, you should be open to seriously considering things as threatening to the working engineer as Open Source is to the monopolist.
I don't have a dog in the outsourcing fight. I think that if you're a world-class hack, it doesn't matter if you work in Borculo or Bombay.
excuse me, but I always thought a vigilante was someone who performed duties of the court (investigation, apprehension, judgement, and/or punishment) without court authorization. e.g. roundin' up a posse an' lynchin' ol' Black Bart for horse theivin'. That was back in the days before words were allowed to end in 'g' or 'd'
What does vigilantism mean in an online context? 1) spying out the home address of some spammer outside detroit and then publishing it? 2) white-hat breaking-and-entering of security systems? 3) publication of embarassing facts about the in-security of systems? Probably so.
All of these actions seem rude (if not illegal). However they do benefit the public. That doesn't make it right, but it does make it hard to publicly condemn. I think what we term "vigilantism" is a response to some social problem after the institutions that SHOULD have solved it prove ineffectual. The argument is whether this ad hoc cure is worse than the disease. It certainly constitutes a strong signal to duly authorized institutions to get off their dead butts and get their acts together.
There are other means besides vigilantism to respond to broken systems. If one mail system doesn't take my privacy concerns seriously enough, switch to another. That's why monopolies are bad (warning: mod this post down to troll b/c i'm to the right of Mao Tse Tung) denying us a choice to an alternate system. e.g. Black Bart steals too many horses, vote out Judge Ito for hangin' Judge Roy Bean.
I don't OWE it to any company to fix their problems or even provide feedback telling them they've got a problem. As a courtesy I may inform someone in charge, but I won't bother much about it. Because they're getting the info for free, they may ascribe just about that much value to it. If I embarass them with a vigilante stunt, yeah, that'll help my karma, win friends and influence people, sure.
I suppose the righteous response is to gently inform whoever's in charge. If that doesn't work, the rational response, when tempted to perform some vigilante act, is to look around for how to benefit from the institution's demonstrable incompetence. e.g. starting/backing a competitor.
you're reading. the claims that folks aren't reading any more are highly exaggerated. people may be reading different things than they did when there was nothing but novels, magazines, and newspapers. granted, Tivo and DVD makes it easier to watch TV (since there's usually something decent available to watch). But the big change IMO is the availability of online reading resources. I don't watch that much streaming video and I spend a lot of time online, and that time is primarily spent reading.
Novels are for sunday afternoons at the beach where the sand would otherwise get into my wifi-enabled gear. Newspapers? ((insert gratuitous slap at the NYT here))
A few months ago, two guys living in an old chevy terrorized suburban Washington DC, sniping at citizens seemingly at random. The police were looking for a Timothy McVeigh type in a white van, whereas it turned out one perp was named Mohammed and the other was an illegal alien and they drove an almost-black chevy Caprice.
I had an empty, helpless feeling every time I heard of another person getting shot. As you may recall, the perps were caught because one guy got guilty and confessed. Had these guys been a little more "professional" in their terrorism many more would have died.
The typical American reaction is to seek some technical solution: a way to locate the source of the shot in seconds. Turns out that there's a signal processing technique called "time reversal" that integrates the information from an array of sensors and irons out the reverberations to identify the source of the gunshot. A little while ago, I found this article that describes it. I dearly hope the next sniper who decides to terrorize a city does so where they have cameras and adequate microphones networked so as to enable this technique.
Whether it's evil or not to pepper public spaces with sensors depends upon what "public" means. It troubles me to see on the Discovery channel the videos from Britain where these cameras are commonplace, because these TV shows desensitize the public to surveillance cameras. On the other hand, part of me says, "what privacy can I reasonably expect in a town square?"
Given the prevalence of books on tape (or CD or MP3) and the time spent commuting, its easy to see why black marks on dead tree pulp are less frequently perused.
Pity e-books haven't taken off. They probably need the OLED displays. Given a decent text-to-speech software and a high end PDA and the Gutenberg project, and Baen's library, a guy could read until needed his eyes for driving and then listen in his car.
good point. trouble is that it was a member of the vast right conspiracy complaining about the Clinton Chronicles that recalled its bogocity to mind.
any group of more than one person will have elements that disagree with one another. just as Mr. Kerry and Mr. Nader disagree, so do various folks on the right disagree with one another. if you think the individuals you named never disagree with one another, you haven't listened to them long enough. proving a negative is a labor-intensive business.
does anybody know if anybody's got "The Clinton Chronicles" available for download. You know the documentary about how Bill & Hill murdered Vince Foster, that Bill ran drugs out of Mena airport, that kind of stuff. How 50 of Bill's friends were murdered or committed suicide within a year of him taking office.
Not that I believe any of that, but hey, if someone likes F911, maybe they'd like the Clinton Chronicles, too.
Don't mod me down, i'm not just trolling for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, i'm giving Mr. Moore buzz.
Yaknow, instead of using compressed air, maybe you could achieve the same effect using a non-black-powder fuel-air mix?
My potato cannons are probably too crude. But imagine a simple fuel injector that atomizes a measured amount of a volatile fluid (alchohol, propane, ether, gasoline) in a combustion chamber with a spark (bbq grill igniter or spark plug). After each firing, flush the combustion chamber with fresh air and you are ready to shoot again. I imagine there are a number of handy components that could be repurposed for a DIY mortar capable of lofting fireworks.
Black powder puts out a lot of smoke, but I've never seen anything but fire and water vapor coming out of my alchohol/air potato gun barrels. (oh, and potatos, too.)
The Disney approach probably works quite nicely, the pumpkin-chucking guys all use compressed air, so there's probably good reason to go the Disney way. I imagine that a fuel/air propulsion system would be lighter and more portable.
I think the military is considering liquid-fuel/air in their next generation of artillery.
Though most folks recall Jonathan Edwards once preaching of spiders dangling over the maw of hell, his most significant writing was philosophical particularly on the topic of Free Will.
Jonathan Edwards said that Free Will consists of the mind choosing that which it finds most pleasing or agreeable based on what it knows at that moment. I think considerations like this drove Soren Kierkegaard mad choosing to make himself miserable because it pleased him to exercize his will so.
It would be interesting to know what this continent's most thoughtful Calvinist would think about these experiments. I think he'd be pleased, but he might differ on the interpretations of the findings.
i recently read that McCain-Feingold's restrictions on political advertisements prior to an election could be interpreted as applying to this movie. Once someone starts restricting political speech one steps on a slippery slope. if a 3rd-party corporation buys advertising unflattering to a political candidate it should not matter whether that corporation is the NRA or Lion's Gate (mr. moore's film distributor).
what's to prevent the Vast Right Wing conspiracy from putting together films that says 'Kerry sucks' then blanketing the airwaves with ads for these "movies?" Coming soon to a TV near you: ads for "Kerry Hates Guns" by the NRA, "Kerry hates babies" by Right To Life, "Kerry hates mustard" by the Republican Catsup Attack Machine.
has George Soros purchased slashdot while I wasn't looking?
My wife scoffs at my many-hundred dollar several-year-old 1 (count 'em 1) megapixel camera with lousy color balance. And she blythely uses her disposable Fuji camera for all her snaps.
I think the idea of using a kit to do some aerial photos sounds like a fun hack. I have donated $10 to the lad in this story because I've done stupid stuff, too.
And I think my donation should cover the purchase of a replacement DISPOSABLE film camera for him to loft in subsequent experiments. Maybe replace the bubble-wrap with light-tight gaffer's tape. Think appropriate technology.
I met an engineer from Jaguar when I worked for a company building CAD software. He was suitably pleased with the cool things we did, but admitted that sometimes the most appropriate thing when you wanted to know how a few bits would work together was to mock up something with stiff paper and tacks: Cardboard-Aided Design.
Don't forget that many think tanks exist to provide sinecures for defeated politicians and party loyalists who can't hold down real jobs.
It's like a "military attache" in an embassy. What exactly does he do? Nothing. So that he can have the time to do the spook work that's his Real Job.
Same with think tanks. Guys get paid by rich patrons to write books that the rich patrons want written. That takes what? a couple hours. (We have an existence proof that AdTI didn't spend much time delving into insightful research. And they jobbed out the technical business of actually looking at source.) The rest of the day is available to spend smoozing with buddies from your party who are either politicians or some politician's staff.
Note to monopolists: be sure to buy an equal number of Republican and Democrat camp followers. You never know who might win the next election. And if you have to screw over one party this election, and they lose, you'll have guys in position in the new administration.
In so doing, Microsoft buys the lunchtime buzz that the politicians and those around them hear and that informs their thinking.
if my oncologist is right, I won't be needing posthumous data storage, since he says the CAT scan didn't find any cancer this time. a summer without chemo! woo hoo!
Once upon a time, some ambulance-chasers shook down Apple. Rather than prove Apple keyboards did not hurt wrists, Apple settled and thereby minimized their expected expense of litigation. (An expected loss, as any MBA can tell you is the probability of an event, times the cost of that eventuality. If I sue you with a one-in-a-million chance of winning for a billion dollars, then your expected loss is one thousand dollars plus legal expenses.)
Thereafter some bright tort lawyers got the idea that if Apple provided a nice payday, then IBM would provide richer pickings. They sued IBM, but IBM did not settle. Instead, IBM fought and won in court.
But IBM did not stop there. Big Blue turned around and sued the law firms who had brought these nuisance law suits.
If, as us tin-hat wearers have suggested, Microsoft has financed barratry, maintenance and champerty against the Open Source community (of which IBM is a member) through SCO, Canopy and/or BayStar, then Microsoft should be held responsible. These subpoenas may indicate IBM's inclination to explore this kind of litigation.
Though we may agree about what the First Amendment means, neither of us wear the black robes of the Supremes. And the sad fact is that the words of the Constition mean exactly what the Supremes want them to mean. This situation is exactly the same as Alice in Wonderland and Humpty Dumpty when he said, "When I use a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing more, nothing less."
Some decades ago, a right was found hiding in the penumbra of the emanations of the Constitution. By this means, an unelected elite subverted democratic process and a lot of laws were overturned and the political argument continues to this day.
We don't want corporate types to define "free speech" to mean exactly what they want it to mean. Any tinkering with "free speech" will have to meet with Disney's approval (and all the other publishing and broadcasting megacorporations) because they own enough free speech to apply tremendous political pressure.
The big showdown IS the equivalent (metaphorical (of closing brackets)).
Or {parentheses, as the case may be}.
You didn't see the last chapter of Cryptonomicon in the right light. To me, it looked like a friggin' LISP program with several hundred pages worth of loose ends tied up as best Stephenson could manage.
(My fave (LISP) idiom was the square brace (that told the interpreter, "dammit, *you* count the parentheses (I'm done here]
yaknow, i'm thinking i could: - take some of my best short stories, - get my wife who worked in radio to record them, - post the MP3s, - encourage editors to listen on the subway ride.
OK, suppose you've got a large gang of geeks who are torqued at M$ for some bit of encrypted software and they put together one of these mob-super-clusters. Someone gets a wild hare idea to factor the crypto key and proposes it to the mob, who bereft of common sense and lawful reflection decide to break the crypto before Responsible Parties can shut them down.
We have long known that mobs can give rise to emergent phenomena which can't be predicted. It'd be amusing to consider what such a mob's clustered cpu power could give rise to. e.g. the Borg collective might have been a bunch of geeks trying to figure out howto score with Jeri Ryan
Slashdot Mirror
If someone makes a counterintuitive claim about IT outsourcing, it should not be scorned without thought.
There's a company in the Pacific northwest that claims the only way to make money in software is by keeping source code secret and restrictively licensing it and DRM-ing it up the wazoo. When you claim that Open Source is a viable business model you make a claim that seems just as counter-intuitive as that of those advocating IT outsourcing.
If you want the b-school types to seriously consider Linux, you should be open to seriously considering things as threatening to the working engineer as Open Source is to the monopolist.
I don't have a dog in the outsourcing fight. I think that if you're a world-class hack, it doesn't matter if you work in Borculo or Bombay.
I believe the term should be spelled Total Cost of 0wnzeredship.
Kudos on a delicious bit of satire!
excuse me, but I always thought a vigilante was someone who performed duties of the court (investigation, apprehension, judgement, and/or punishment) without court authorization. e.g. roundin' up a posse an' lynchin' ol' Black Bart for horse theivin'. That was back in the days before words were allowed to end in 'g' or 'd'
What does vigilantism mean in an online context? 1) spying out the home address of some spammer outside detroit and then publishing it? 2) white-hat breaking-and-entering of security systems? 3) publication of embarassing facts about the in-security of systems? Probably so.
All of these actions seem rude (if not illegal). However they do benefit the public. That doesn't make it right, but it does make it hard to publicly condemn. I think what we term "vigilantism" is a response to some social problem after the institutions that SHOULD have solved it prove ineffectual. The argument is whether this ad hoc cure is worse than the disease. It certainly constitutes a strong signal to duly authorized institutions to get off their dead butts and get their acts together.
There are other means besides vigilantism to respond to broken systems. If one mail system doesn't take my privacy concerns seriously enough, switch to another. That's why monopolies are bad (warning: mod this post down to troll b/c i'm to the right of Mao Tse Tung) denying us a choice to an alternate system. e.g. Black Bart steals too many horses, vote out Judge Ito for hangin' Judge Roy Bean.
I don't OWE it to any company to fix their problems or even provide feedback telling them they've got a problem. As a courtesy I may inform someone in charge, but I won't bother much about it. Because they're getting the info for free, they may ascribe just about that much value to it. If I embarass them with a vigilante stunt, yeah, that'll help my karma, win friends and influence people, sure.
I suppose the righteous response is to gently inform whoever's in charge. If that doesn't work, the rational response, when tempted to perform some vigilante act, is to look around for how to benefit from the institution's demonstrable incompetence. e.g. starting/backing a competitor.
you're reading. the claims that folks aren't reading any more are highly exaggerated. people may be reading different things than they did when there was nothing but novels, magazines, and newspapers. granted, Tivo and DVD makes it easier to watch TV (since there's usually something decent available to watch). But the big change IMO is the availability of online reading resources. I don't watch that much streaming video and I spend a lot of time online, and that time is primarily spent reading.
Novels are for sunday afternoons at the beach where the sand would otherwise get into my wifi-enabled gear. Newspapers? ((insert gratuitous slap at the NYT here))
A few months ago, two guys living in an old chevy terrorized suburban Washington DC, sniping at citizens seemingly at random. The police were looking for a Timothy McVeigh type in a white van, whereas it turned out one perp was named Mohammed and the other was an illegal alien and they drove an almost-black chevy Caprice.
I had an empty, helpless feeling every time I heard of another person getting shot. As you may recall, the perps were caught because one guy got guilty and confessed. Had these guys been a little more "professional" in their terrorism many more would have died.
The typical American reaction is to seek some technical solution: a way to locate the source of the shot in seconds. Turns out that there's a signal processing technique called "time reversal" that integrates the information from an array of sensors and irons out the reverberations to identify the source of the gunshot. A little while ago, I found this article that describes it. I dearly hope the next sniper who decides to terrorize a city does so where they have cameras and adequate microphones networked so as to enable this technique.
Whether it's evil or not to pepper public spaces with sensors depends upon what "public" means. It troubles me to see on the Discovery channel the videos from Britain where these cameras are commonplace, because these TV shows desensitize the public to surveillance cameras. On the other hand, part of me says, "what privacy can I reasonably expect in a town square?"
Heaven forfend that you should dis the Democrat vice-presidential candidate's profession.
(Have you ever noticed that anything to the right of Mao Tse Tung gets moderated "troll" on Slashdot?)
Given the prevalence of books on tape (or CD or MP3) and the time spent commuting, its easy to see why black marks on dead tree pulp are less frequently perused.
Pity e-books haven't taken off. They probably need the OLED displays. Given a decent text-to-speech software and a high end PDA and the Gutenberg project, and Baen's library, a guy could read until needed his eyes for driving and then listen in his car.
good point. trouble is that it was a member of the vast right conspiracy complaining about the Clinton Chronicles that recalled its bogocity to mind.
any group of more than one person will have elements that disagree with one another. just as Mr. Kerry and Mr. Nader disagree, so do various folks on the right disagree with one another. if you think the individuals you named never disagree with one another, you haven't listened to them long enough. proving a negative is a labor-intensive business.
does anybody know if anybody's got "The Clinton Chronicles" available for download. You know the documentary about how Bill & Hill murdered Vince Foster, that Bill ran drugs out of Mena airport, that kind of stuff. How 50 of Bill's friends were murdered or committed suicide within a year of him taking office.
Not that I believe any of that, but hey, if someone likes F911, maybe they'd like the Clinton Chronicles, too.
Don't mod me down, i'm not just trolling for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, i'm giving Mr. Moore buzz.
Yaknow, instead of using compressed air, maybe you could achieve the same effect using a non-black-powder fuel-air mix?
My potato cannons are probably too crude. But imagine a simple fuel injector that atomizes a measured amount of a volatile fluid (alchohol, propane, ether, gasoline) in a combustion chamber with a spark (bbq grill igniter or spark plug). After each firing, flush the combustion chamber with fresh air and you are ready to shoot again. I imagine there are a number of handy components that could be repurposed for a DIY mortar capable of lofting fireworks.
Black powder puts out a lot of smoke, but I've never seen anything but fire and water vapor coming out of my alchohol/air potato gun barrels. (oh, and potatos, too.)
The Disney approach probably works quite nicely, the pumpkin-chucking guys all use compressed air, so there's probably good reason to go the Disney way. I imagine that a fuel/air propulsion system would be lighter and more portable.
I think the military is considering liquid-fuel/air in their next generation of artillery.
Though most folks recall Jonathan Edwards once preaching of spiders dangling over the maw of hell, his most significant writing was philosophical particularly on the topic of Free Will.
Jonathan Edwards said that Free Will consists of the mind choosing that which it finds most pleasing or agreeable based on what it knows at that moment. I think considerations like this drove Soren Kierkegaard mad choosing to make himself miserable because it pleased him to exercize his will so.
It would be interesting to know what this continent's most thoughtful Calvinist would think about these experiments. I think he'd be pleased, but he might differ on the interpretations of the findings.
i recently read that McCain-Feingold's restrictions on political advertisements prior to an election could be interpreted as applying to this movie. Once someone starts restricting political speech one steps on a slippery slope. if a 3rd-party corporation buys advertising unflattering to a political candidate it should not matter whether that corporation is the NRA or Lion's Gate (mr. moore's film distributor).
what's to prevent the Vast Right Wing conspiracy from putting together films that says 'Kerry sucks' then blanketing the airwaves with ads for these "movies?" Coming soon to a TV near you: ads for "Kerry Hates Guns" by the NRA, "Kerry hates babies" by Right To Life, "Kerry hates mustard" by the Republican Catsup Attack Machine.
has George Soros purchased slashdot while I wasn't looking?
My wife scoffs at my many-hundred dollar several-year-old 1 (count 'em 1) megapixel camera with lousy color balance. And she blythely uses her disposable Fuji camera for all her snaps.
I think the idea of using a kit to do some aerial photos sounds like a fun hack. I have donated $10 to the lad in this story because I've done stupid stuff, too.
And I think my donation should cover the purchase of a replacement DISPOSABLE film camera for him to loft in subsequent experiments. Maybe replace the bubble-wrap with light-tight gaffer's tape. Think appropriate technology.
I met an engineer from Jaguar when I worked for a company building CAD software. He was suitably pleased with the cool things we did, but admitted that sometimes the most appropriate thing when you wanted to know how a few bits would work together was to mock up something with stiff paper and tacks: Cardboard-Aided Design.
Don't forget that many think tanks exist to provide sinecures for defeated politicians and party loyalists who can't hold down real jobs.
It's like a "military attache" in an embassy. What exactly does he do? Nothing. So that he can have the time to do the spook work that's his Real Job.
Same with think tanks. Guys get paid by rich patrons to write books that the rich patrons want written. That takes what? a couple hours. (We have an existence proof that AdTI didn't spend much time delving into insightful research. And they jobbed out the technical business of actually looking at source.) The rest of the day is available to spend smoozing with buddies from your party who are either politicians or some politician's staff.
Note to monopolists: be sure to buy an equal number of Republican and Democrat camp followers. You never know who might win the next election. And if you have to screw over one party this election, and they lose, you'll have guys in position in the new administration.
In so doing, Microsoft buys the lunchtime buzz that the politicians and those around them hear and that informs their thinking.
Yaknow, when William Gibson writes a story about someone posting video on the net, figuring out what's going on supports a whole novel.
BUT when someone does so in real life, everybody kvetches about the acting.
My wife spoiled Star Trek when she pointed out that Star Trek was misnamed.
DS9 = Star Trek Melrose Space
Voyager = Star Trek Gilligan's Island
I thought a Big Bang involved things going out, but Convergence involved things going in? Ergo, shouldn't this article be entitled the Big Crunch...
for blackening the name of the one Frenchman who doesn't suck
if my oncologist is right, I won't be needing posthumous data storage, since he says the CAT scan didn't find any cancer this time. a summer without chemo! woo hoo!
Once upon a time, some ambulance-chasers shook down Apple. Rather than prove Apple keyboards did not hurt wrists, Apple settled and thereby minimized their expected expense of litigation. (An expected loss, as any MBA can tell you is the probability of an event, times the cost of that eventuality. If I sue you with a one-in-a-million chance of winning for a billion dollars, then your expected loss is one thousand dollars plus legal expenses.)
Thereafter some bright tort lawyers got the idea that if Apple provided a nice payday, then IBM would provide richer pickings. They sued IBM, but IBM did not settle. Instead, IBM fought and won in court.
But IBM did not stop there. Big Blue turned around and sued the law firms who had brought these nuisance law suits.
If, as us tin-hat wearers have suggested, Microsoft has financed barratry, maintenance and champerty against the Open Source community (of which IBM is a member) through SCO, Canopy and/or BayStar, then Microsoft should be held responsible. These subpoenas may indicate IBM's inclination to explore this kind of litigation.
Though we may agree about what the First Amendment means, neither of us wear the black robes of the Supremes. And the sad fact is that the words of the Constition mean exactly what the Supremes want them to mean. This situation is exactly the same as Alice in Wonderland and Humpty Dumpty when he said, "When I use a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing more, nothing less."
Some decades ago, a right was found hiding in the penumbra of the emanations of the Constitution. By this means, an unelected elite subverted democratic process and a lot of laws were overturned and the political argument continues to this day.
We don't want corporate types to define "free speech" to mean exactly what they want it to mean. Any tinkering with "free speech" will have to meet with Disney's approval (and all the other publishing and broadcasting megacorporations) because they own enough free speech to apply tremendous political pressure.
The big showdown IS the equivalent (metaphorical (of closing brackets)).
Or {parentheses, as the case may be}.
You didn't see the last chapter of Cryptonomicon in the right light. To me, it looked like a friggin' LISP program with several hundred pages worth of loose ends tied up as best Stephenson could manage.
(My fave (LISP) idiom was the square brace (that told the interpreter, "dammit, *you* count the parentheses (I'm done here]
yaknow, i'm thinking i could:
- take some of my best short stories,
- get my wife who worked in radio to record them,
- post the MP3s,
- encourage editors to listen on the subway ride.
Maybe that way i could get a book deal.
Note to self: If ever pirate Russian gas pipeline control software, look for the "paybacksAreHell" subroutine.
OK, suppose you've got a large gang of geeks who are torqued at M$ for some bit of encrypted software and they put together one of these mob-super-clusters. Someone gets a wild hare idea to factor the crypto key and proposes it to the mob, who bereft of common sense and lawful reflection decide to break the crypto before Responsible Parties can shut them down.
We have long known that mobs can give rise to emergent phenomena which can't be predicted. It'd be amusing to consider what such a mob's clustered cpu power could give rise to. e.g. the Borg collective might have been a bunch of geeks trying to figure out howto score with Jeri Ryan