Consider the mean time between failures of a single component. Then work out the figure for n co-dependent components. A rough cut can be estimated in if you assume x% chance of failure of any n components in any period, then the chance of the whole system failing is 1-(1-x)^n. Plugging hypothetical numbers of x=0.1%% and n=64 then you get overall probability of failure as 6.4%. You can do more complex calculations based on Poisson processes and stochastic simulations but then you'd need a supercomputer to solve the optimisaton problems. You also have to keep in mind the greater engineering problems with heat dissipation, signal timing, cache coherance, and testing to make sure the same program runs on 1-n processors. On the otherhand disposable PCs are generally based on tried and true techniques (lower risk = lower profits = lower cost). Also the high-end systems tend to incorporate the latest and greatest which means they price according to market demand (the military tends to be a little inelastic about certain performance parameters). Knocking up a rackmount of boards may give you the same perceived aggregate *peak* performance but I will guarentee you that the actual performance will be quite dissimilar (unless the problem is so small it doesn't matter). Sometimes a 18-wheeler is more useful than a pack of motorcycle couriers. You get paid for knowing the difference.
It comes down to what you value more, whether you think the extra cost is worth not getting up at 4am to nursemaid the hardware or not.
The aim of "free" (as in beer) software is to limit the excessive prices charged by mainstream publishers. In a sense the free version is the minimum base level functionality (or quality check) that should be expected from a risk-free investment in software. Then you can compare the marginal improvement in the price of the commercial version and evaluate the prospective gains rationally (assuming a free and informed choice without excessive branded benchmarketing).
The biggest problem is that the "costs" of software is not reflected in the actual sale price. Quality control, amount of training, help-desk support, risk of inappropriate design/placement are the invisible costs that really determine whether a piece of software will be taken up enterprise-wide. It is too easy to shift the negative externalities onto other people (a case of privatising the profits, socialising the costs) and I suspect users will revolt one day and rethink their purchasing strategies if there were any real studies done of productivity gains.
The words "limit uses of copyright material" says it all about the mentality of the existing media groups. Basically they want to translate the Internet into a TV but with interaction (which maps to the ability to buy merchandise from them in their minds). Hello.... wakey wakeky guys. The ability for the user to *store* (or more correctly cache) and *transmit* data effectively decouples information in both a temporal and spatial dimension. Content distributors cannot assume that at 6pm, everyone will be settling down to evening news or that they can stagger the release of music titles to ensure word of mouth to control the build-up of hype. Hence their attempts to constrain the *use* of information through end-user licensing arrangements. By putting artificial restrictions (only home use, only link to original, etc) they hope to segment the market (much like aeroplane economy and business class) to sort out the people willing to *pay* for characteristics such as real-time (e.g. stock quotes), time sensitivity (last week's sports results are pretty valueless), or special services (e.g. customisation). However, the *big* assumption is that the consumer is passive and thus willing to have everything handed to them for the convenience (at a convenient markup). However, this IMHO is a serious misjudgement as what people (or at least the early adoptors) are seeking is the ability to combine/modify things to their liking. Star Trek would never have evolved the way it has if Paramount had forbidden the fans to write their own fiction or engage in unofficial conventions. The ability and freedom to mix your own tracks, design your own skin, or hack your own code modifications is viewed as a potential (lost) profit opportunity rather than a way of listening to what people really want. If a dispensing entity can restrict these rights, by fair means or foul, they then should be able to charge for the extra priviledges as per shareholder profit maximisation theory.
Unfortunately, the attempt to limit priviledges is not matched by a reduction in price. By attempting to license music rather than selling the rights to the contents they are effectively devaluing the resale and second-hand market. Some economists have noted that the secondary value of a good is often a more important determinant for marginal pricing, e.g. you can use a CD for the bits on it or as a drink coaster. Passing off a wasting asset as a durable good assumes that the consumers can't tell the difference or detect the reduction in value. Afterall, it's a standard trick when you can't raise the price, you reduce the portion size or dilute the intrinsic value.
One wonders what's worse, not having copyright and people borrowing your ideas, or having copyright protection and people *NOT* listening to you. So what can the Internet do? Well, you can take advantage of laws in other countries, compare and arbitrage prices across countries, or extend the reach of your opinions or new services. In other words, it forces individuals to think on a larger scale than previously.
... well, I suppose that is the branded niche they are going for, with enough bells and whistles to hold existing media/design customers while using commodity parts as much as possible. It seems such a shame that many of SGI's real innovations haven't spread, their use of Uniform Memory Addressing, high-end I/O bus (XIO) instead of existing PC arguments with FutureIO, use of replaceable CPU and power modules (on O2 and Octanes/Origins). IMHO, their real skill is in the I/O system, the fuel tank so to speak and not the CPU engine. Perhaps some brave third-party reseller might offer to substitute an Alpha board (a la T3E), a MIPS for backwards compatibility, or even AMD for rabid Intel haters? The brutual nature of low-end competition means razor thin margins which implies high volumes to get back adequate returns. Bodywork design only carries you so far as everything is dependent on the applications (business and entertainment) and internet services that users want.
I suspect the real competition is with Sony's Cr eativeStation which appears (according to the limited information released so far.. any updates?) to be both MIPS based (a variant of their Sony PlayStation) as well as Linux development. If someone ever tweaks key libraries to use the vector-based co-processors, things will really rip.
Sigh, why don't they sell the chassis, then let us buy the CPU's separately so we can upgrade at our leisure.
The value of life in highly developed countries is high. Have a look at the amount of warning labels, licensing conditions, legal disclaimers, etc you are expected to observe and sign. Safety and comfort seems to be quite a high priority, a lot of people wouldn't even consider visiting another country unless it had 5-star hotels and 24 hour conveniences. Admittedly lacking things like running water and toilet paper tend to be discomforting but then part of the exploration experience is to realise and appreciate the things we take for granted. You also find that unless conditions are extremely harsh, people are disinclined to shift out of their familiar comfort zone. Famines, poverty, political or religious prosecution have traditionally been the mechanisms for large-scale migration.
How much is a single human life worth? Should a 'western' life be considered a greater economic 'investment' and thus potential loss? Since your Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers noted that as the Third World had a deficit of pollution and it mades sense to export nuclear waste, it seems this attitude is all too common. Is one American solider worth killing hundreds of Sudanese civilians? Much better to sit back in an air-conditioned office and push that missile button? Why not pay to climb Mt. Everest? Or more exactly hire bearers to carry you up to be photographed.
Perhaps the problem is that we are running out of grand dreams, a challenge that can motivate us to reach new heights of potential. Most of the world is mapped. sports has been thoroughly commercialised, religion has fallen into background noise, and marketing wars don't exactly lead themselves to long-term passion. Star Trek aside, the energy cost of sending humans and their life-support supplies into space is still too high with out current technology level.
So, are we being suffocated by our own perceived sense of boredom? When more people watch "Who wants to be a Millionaire" rather than spend the time to build up skills to create new wealth (improved productivity of new goods and services). Who'd rather fantasise about Atlantis than fund archeology expeditions. Rather watch a VR flight simulation than take flying lessons? The on-line world sometimes is too seductive for our own good. I would hope that people realise that the only limit is your inner imagination and the passion to go out there and make a difference, if only to understand yourself better.
IMHO, this is just a specific case of business attempting to gain private benefits while socialising the negative externalities (ie public R&D). Basically R&D is high risk, as Paul Allen of Microsoft fame found out with his recently folded company. To help reduce the risk barrier, governments (supposedly representing the wider public interests) have traditionally funded broad fundamental science&technology, the well-spring from which the rest of consumer goodies spring from (computers from code-cracking, digital cameras from astronomy, etc). However, progress in this domain relies completely on a mindset devoted to honest introspection, intellectual integrity, and building on the work of others (idealistic shoulders of giants, etc). Hence the exemptions in copyright acts for review/reference, libraries, scholarly studies, etc otherwise the cost of research would just explode and we would probably have less of it.
Now, I think it is fair to say that if a person or private company spends their own hard-earned savings on R&D, they should be entitled to any and all benefits that accrue (provided there are no excessive negative social/environmental impacts). If something is funded publicly from compulsary taxes, (much like a public forum), then it should be made available to the any emember of the public. Attempting to move from one domain to the other without 'fair' compensation smacks of 'rent-seeking' behaviour (ie a public subsidy constrained by persistant below-market valuation) as all the benefits are expropriated by late stage technology developers/marketers and not the in-between debuggers/testers. If you think about it, this refers to the Intel 'point of technology inflexion' where the value/cost shifts sharply upwards. A case in point is the internet name domain registration bun-fight since once people realised the potential growth of the internet name-space, then by capturing critical nodes of the registration pathway, they are able to extract monopoly rents (ie disproportinate rewards to risks). One analogy you could use to describe this behaviour is a village letting a field lie fallow to build up its productive base only to wake up one day to find one person has fenced off the best parts and cut off the water supply. Another analogy is that people like GNU/Stallman/Postel building the basic roads (internet standards) but others coming along afterwards and embracing/extending them by errecting toll booths (you can guess who). This type of activity (while very profitable to the individual), hurts the system as a whole as it discourages people with the time/talent to play with new ideas if someone else gets all the kudos (ie OpenSource desire for 'reputation'). On the other hand, if you're a believer in private enterprise and capital accumulation, then you'd argue that it is more efficient so I suppose it does depends on whether you are a people-oriented person or capital person). Of course to shift things from the public to private sphere takes strong will and Machievallian talents, something not always appreciated by others, especially competitors.
Now what policy tools can be used to limit extreme anti-competitive behaviours (like the Geneva convention on war, you do need some *basic* guidelines to mark the playing field, uneven as it may be)? Traditional forms (or even definitions) of markets have not really evolved to handle pure intellectual goods. Part of the problem is that the US, as one of the more advanced ecnomies, has imposed its patent system (with all the systematic flaws and structured deficiencies intended to foster its early industrial economy) on the rest of the world (WTO, etc). For example, automation of business practices is a rather obvious result of computerisation, yet you have individuals attempting to gain a monopoly on entire sectors because they claim to be the first to codify it in VisualBasic or whatever (can you say Priceline?) even though the practice may already been implemented in parts/with variations/different combinations in other businesses but it wasn't worth patenting as it is something commonly done (there are only so many ways of pricing an auction). Patenting something just because it is nonobvious to the clueless is not a definition of innovation IMHO and the biggest stumbling block is sorting out the merely novel, as compared with the truely innovative is a major difficulty.
The big problem comes in that most cutting areas of science nowadays are capital-intensive (think electron microscope, think supercomputer, think synchrotron), and this is a big big problem as governments are not particularly good at allocating capital (think bureacratic infighting over budgets instead of raising bonds/selling equity). Hence you need serious funding which governments are relunctant to do when there is no "obvious" political or socio-economic payoff (e.g. perceived supercollider boondoggle, etc). Hence their encouragement of "industry involvement" and the contaiminent of research ideals (for the good of humanity etc). This can be seen in other sectors such as medicine as privatised hospitals tend to discourage (or even abandon) their teaching role as profits (as traditionally defined) is dependent on patient throughput (easy to automate/accelerate) and not quality of care (very hard to measure).
What is the solution? A lot of people would like to know. I suspect part of the problem is that our accounting system (which defines profit/loss) doesn't really measure the value of human capital properly. How does one measure the social value of a public university? More that just passing on learning (which can be obtained by reading a book), but the meeting of minds, moulding of motives, and mixing of memes? And more importantly, how do you provide technological solutions to problems which are inherently social in nature (e.g. fencing off intellectual commons due to entrepreneurial zeal without realising the unwritten rules of conduct).
People forget the whole point of economics (and thus commerce) is to satisfy individual desires with limited resources (time, energy, tech, etc). Science fiction (and fantasy to a lesser extent) expands the range of possibilities (think of it as advanced speculative marketing) and if enough people are willing (usually measured by their pocket-book), their dreams are fufilled. For those fixated on OSS terminology, think of it as scratching new itches on a mass scale. If enough people think a trip to the moon is worthwhile (after calculating the energy expenditure from tossing a few hundred kilograms up a gravity well), then you can bet some crazy outfit will come up with a marketing and branding plan the next day before outsourcing the technical details to the Russians (well, you can't get much lower cost than a bunch of bankrupt space engineers:-)). It may seem unfair but the people who do tend to accumulate things in the past (kings, tycoons, entrepreneurs, etc) usually had enough power, wealth or accumum to indulge in individual fancies (think Hearst, think Carnegie, etc), leaving the rest of us legacies like crown jewels or art collections or possibly even a future space tourist industry. It takes a rare individual/situation to motivate an entire group to accomplish complex missions (e.g. US tax-payer funded space race). If they can get a leg up by trying to crystal-gaze popular sci-fi lit, then I hope they have luck in bringing a little more excitement into the world. However, it should be noted that often we are constrained by our own limited viewpoints as much as any pundit. I recall an analysis of what people expected the future shape of their city to look like back in last century and people could forsee the electric lights and better transport system, but they still expected low-rise buildings and missed completely the sky-scrapers skyline (the elevator is a rare invention that enabled large collection of humans to really be put in close proximity with each other). Who can accurately tell what new social forces and desires will arise?
Aside... it does make you wonder about the human race though when more people believe in astrology (and pay for it) than they do in investing in funding astronomy.
... in the comment that HP is betting solely on EPIC and MIPS has stopped processor development altogether. Given the slippage in Intel's original roadmap for Merced, HP were smart to keep a hand in the PA-RISC and while MIPS may not be revving their processors like the others, they earn a very tidy income from licensing their IP and creating variants of their processors for the embedded market while continuing to source high-end designs from SGI (who still have a 5 year roadmap for their R14K, R16K).
From a personal perspective, it is rather disturbing from an architecture point of view that so much attention is focused on the branding and MHz rating. If we use the analogy of cars, the peak revolutions per minute has got nothing to do with the actual real-world engine performance. A lot of factors depend on the I/O subsystem (gas tank + injection system), cache design (suspension), and more recently stlying (bodywork). Just because it runs hot, doesn't mean that it runs well, in fact from a thermodynamic perspective excess heat is an indication of inefficiency. Just as in real-life, there is a distinction between buses (good ol' shared memory Suns), industrial trucks (IBM workhorses), SUVs (SGI drool-designs) or motorcycle packs (Beowulfs). Pretending a souped up scooter with over-granished rusty frame can do the job of everything is a serious indication of cluelessness or delusion.
Just as in real life, the limitation is the overall transport system (network) which is still an information back-lane despite the heavy hype. Sure a speed-demon Porsche (Alpha) can outrun anything in a speed race but most people settle for a Ford (Intel) or Chevvy (AMD) to commute to work. Some may prefer a flashier Saab (Apple) or stick with the boring but solid Volvo (IBM) or even go upmarket with a BMW (SGI) but they all serve a basic purpose (mobility) and dominate specific niches. You get paid for maintaining a professional non-bias and correctly matching your company's needs to the available choices.
The quasi-technical mainstream press really has to get their act together if reading the IT section in any general newspaper is any indication... more like unpaid advertising sometimes. I suspect that past 1 GHz, the CPU performance is of only marginal benefit (outside niche areas) as the speed limit is the bandwidth limitations anyway.
You mean you haven't heard of PH(i)Bspeak?:-) (pronounced fibspeak to accompany those hallow words of benchcrafting).
world-class - we rushed this rather marginal prototype out to gain what meagre first-mover advantage we can
enterprise level - we wasted so much time on development and marketing hype we desparately need to find some clueless CTO's to buy enough of these suckers to avoid going under
empowering decision making - only if you're signing the cheque, then we'll empower you with all the 5-star meals you can gorge yourself on
object oriented - the only object is to orient you to forking out the dough (upfront of course) for this unmaintainable heap of junk
ultimate in flexibility - there are so many bugs we have to make a daily release
No reflection on QNX which I understand is a fine product in its category but I'm sure there are many other examples of PH(i)Bspeak people can come up with.:-). Perhaps we can judge the pain to gain ratio of a software company by measuring the number of salesdroids/lawyers vs engineers/scientists they employ. If we make it compulsary for product safety (and sanity) perhaps the quality of software will get a noticable lift? Oh well, we can all dream on.
Universities have an interesting pedigree, originating from the monastaries that taught reading/writing (not surprisingly intended to keep records of the church assets:-)) to libraries of learning (a major drawcard of the golden age of Arabian culture), to the Renaisance liberal college (Oxford, Royal Society of London, etc) and currently industrial scientific powerhouses driving the internet transformation (MIT, Stanford, etc).
Given that you see failings in the current system (as indicated by your desire to set up a private course), can you speculate on how you see the tertiary sector evolving. Perhaps you have some views on how private institutes or providers might foster the quarternary education sector (which can be broadly defined as post-post-graduate, professional life-long-learning, university of the third age, or adult free-thinking depending on the buzzword-du-jour or mental biases). Proto-examples I'm aware of vaguely heading this direction are University of Phoenix (US), Open University (UK/Europe), and Universitas21 (Austrasia).
In short, what do you believe the future holds for the next organised stage of research-intensive learning/teaching?
Correct me if my impression is wrong but the megacorps seem to entering a cultural shark-feeding frenzie in trying to stake out a market stomping ground. It seems that the "best" tactic for "owning" a loyal cult following (whether game or movie show) is take a scorched earth approach to similiar genres. It's equivalent to Doyle claiming all rights to detective stories just because his Sherlock Holmes pioneered the style. Or Disney claiming all cat and mouse stories just because it would clash with their beloved Mickey. Now claiming a cultural franchise with guarenteed audience to sell do-dackies and merchandising to may be profitable in the short-term but how clued is the fan-base to stand for it? One wonders whether creative gaming souls will then become another version of street musicians being squeezed by the music distributors? Afterall, you learn by imitating your peers and predecessors and it would be nice to eat while doing so. Curtailing this outlet for younger souls to practice and demonstrate their talents seems a short sighted goal, if not outright illegal under anti-competitive practices. A company is entitled to protect their stuff developed over the years but attempting to fence in a culture commons will only hurt the public in the long term by depriving them of alternatives.
IMHO, mental monopolies are just as damaging as physical monopolies. Someone needs to get out a cluebat for the MBAs running the show.
... chock-a-block full of TLA (three letter acronyms) makes my head swim. I'm left wondering how scalable would this system be? I can see it working in a tight-dense human network where there are enough closely coordinating and communicating entities to determine access levels and policies, apply classification of information into categories, and a regulatory/punishment system for violations. Does this translate well into the rather hap-hazardous nature of the Internet? Just like military style firms (where do you think chief executive *officer* comes from) are a hangover from the industrial age, perhaps we need to rethink the whole idea?
Perhaps the underlying model has some fundamental constraints on growth? I'm reminded of the genetic case where bacteria which have complex regulatory gene expressions (think a switched network of proteins activating different stages) have a size limitation of 10 megabase pairs. Beyond that the conflicting signals seem to inhibit any higher level functions. The example that I can think of is that person A can look at kernel code, but not the part with patent X, unless they sign an NDA with company K, which is waived if they are no longer competing with company L, etc....
Are there other ways of looking at the problem? Kerberos has a ticketing system which is essentially a time-to-live mechanism. Perhaps a commercial implementation at file level could be based on the half-life of information? How long is it before a piece of information becomes commercially irrelevant? And then check thresholds (refreshed periodically) across a range of keys to see the probability that such access violates a critical temporal mass (ie if viewing too many sensitive documents at once, could be indication of someone faking a download).
Perhaps then it would shift the paradigm of information control away from fine-grained permissions (human intensive) towards detection of unusual patterns of activitiy (AI intensive).
1900 - my gun is bigger than your gun 2000 - my nuke is nastier than your nuke 2100 - my AI is smarter than your AI
:-)
Actually, I'm not totally convinced that having more "free" software is in the same category as having more "free" beer/money. Firstly, by default all IP whether patent or copyright passes into public domain after 20 or 90 years. So in essense all ideas/thoughts are already "free" (if you take the view that copyleft is merely a time-shift into the future but looking back), just that some people want to create a little (OK, a big) profit opportunity in the short-term. Also ideas breed and mutate on themselves and thus having a pool of software that people can tinker with creates new opportunities (see GIMP and online photo lab). There is no extra cost in having 1 or a million extra people play around with ideas or information. On the other hand, anything to do with atoms is a wasting asset (depreciating, opportunity costs, dead-weight loss, etc). Having an extra 1 million people means that it ties up a lot of resources. In that sense, money is a claim on future resources and the changes in value of various classes of goods, an indication of what the larger population wants, ie signals to suppliers to invest more in certain lines of production. Creating false and/or distorting signals through funny money tinkering of the ol printing press (inflation) is thus a really bad idea (ps someone tell Greenspan to rein in the loose monetary policies). In this sense, OpenSource software is a luxury good, it can only be produced by highly skilled/education people (ie spare cash + food to put themselves through uni or self-taught) with leisure time on their hands. While it may appear rather chaotic to corporations with top-down control, perhaps it is just as efficient (or equally inefficient) as trying to charge everyone for the priviledge of access (ie supply driven rather than demand driven).
Human nature is funny sometimes, especially when people confuse price with value. Cows won't eat mouldy hay but if you put a fence around it, they are tricked into thinking it is forbidden and therefore must be "good". Thus we have a stupidity tax (not knowing where to get hold of free sources) plus an ego-tax (trusting the overhyped brand) which in the long-term, will only benefit the smart hackers. It's regretful that corporations have seized upon these little idiosyncracies of human nature (not to mention doing their damn best to reinforce it) and are making excess profits but then that is the nature of market evolution. Eventually the next generation wises up and the rules change yet again. Having AIs may tilt the balance somewhat in favor of the consumer (imagine having a guardian angel that informed you if something was a good choice or not, e.g. calories in a cake) but then the companies would come up with the devil's advocate to just be daring and try that scrumptious chocolate cake. A never ending arms race, even with AI.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Whether MS is broken up or not, the point should be to identify behaviour that inhibits open competition and try and figure out a systematic way of adding degrees of freedom to allow some diversity into the system.
1) Vertical integration - much like the big media companies are trying to dominate content, distribution, marketing, and venture capital stakes, I think some thought has to be given to whether a company should have control at every single stage. If you look at Red Hat vs Mandrake, they offer the same product through different channels and are branded differently. Improper tying of products from OS to applications to network services with no point of opportunity to switch/substitute creates a complex exclusionary network.
2) Eat the Young - the point about young startups taking the risk to create real innovative products is eliminated if big companies can cherry-pick one solution, then wipe out the value of its peers by bundling practices. Having the choice between a trade sale at fire prices or having the value of your market evaporated does not give much incentive to develope new ideas (not to mention being venture capitalists to constrain share growth upside). The financial firms have developed Chinese walls to solve this problem, perhaps something similar should be in place for large IP aggregators.
3) Truth in Advertising - probably a pipe dream in the land that invented hype and spin-doctoring but wouldn't it be consumer-friendly if there were basic product qualifiers such as expected time to failure, cost to repair/replace, man-hours to install, rate of learning curve, etc? We have engineering standards for cars to toys so why not set the minimum bar for software as well? If software is going to be treated as a disposable good, then people should at least understand how much they are going to pay in that time period.
Part of the problem is not the software creator, but just educating the public consumer as to what are the qualities of good software. Until people can see and appreciate the difference, they won't be able to separate flash from functionality.
I'm a little bemused by the extreme concern of DoD in computer security. Granted that they have many secrets to hide and their war-potential to protect. However, I would note that most security breaches are caused by human factors, whether deliberate or accidental. One can point to the example of an ex-CIA director who left incriminating files on a laptop. Also draw the analogy that engineers have concluded that more car safety technology is reaching points of diminishing returns as only 10% of accidents is attributed to mechanical failure and the rest mostly to the idiot behind the wheel (alcohol, road rage, sleepiness, whatever). In the same way I fear that network paranoia (while important and a hard target) is blown out of proportion to the more obvious risks of human failability. I would like to be comforted that the military has on-going *HUMAN* processes to keep improving the quality of their people rather than hoping the next Y2K bug doesn't accidently triggers the nukes. Invest in brains, not silicon bullets.
In a broader view, what is it about technology that foster the simplistic magic pill approach? In any complex situation, after you eliminate the obvious weaknesses, there will be many vulnerable points of attack and more exotic technology in lieu of awareness training could create a false sense of security. Blind faith, whether religion, technology or dogma seems to be a point of hubris.
Why are people so upset? Because fundamentally the music distributors are accelerating the depreciation rate of the owners' music collections. In effect what people assumed they were purchasing (a life-time property right to listen to said song) is being subverted as the industry is trying to pull a fast one by claiming that it is (really cross out hearts and hope to die) a disposable time-limited license. This is the difference between a hard-bound book and a fillout scrapbook. Naturally it is more profitable for the companies to resell the same piece of junk... err... music in a newer flashier (not to mention more restrictive) format (think vinyl, tape, CD, and now DVD). After all, you can only sell one encyclopedia once but instead can generate a nice little lifetime cashflow through monthly newsletters and regular updates. People are not stupid, though they might not realise the economics of the technology shift, they can tell when they are getting a worse deal than before (relative to outright purchase). So although the industry might decry it as "piracy", most people who have already purchased CDs, probably have cause for self-justification in RIPing the tracks. On the other hand, the industry does have a point is that when they sold people the music, they did not include the rights to redistribute duplicate copies. So there will be some natural resistance though I suspect the industry giants will get away with it wherever consumer laws are weak and/or they can bully the local government (not too difficult when most MNCs outgross the GDP of many third world nations). Hopefull the Senate/Congress are not too stupid to fall for these kind of tactics (though the software licensing case makes you wonder). If the companies are really serious about offering disposable (ie not resellable) music, then they should price them accordingly (probably cents to a few dollars) instead of wasting time trying to dilute the value of their customer's holdings.
Ummm... any legitimate firm will usually already be a company (with registered business number) and be subject to the securities and investment laws of the jurisdiction of incorporation (e.g. Delaware). It is the fly-by-nighters, the obscure off-shore locales and generally too-good-to-be-true places you should be wary of. Just like when you visit a new city, you take common-sense precautions (e.g. don't walk down certain Washington streets at night) and do some checking (e.g. by law, all invoices have to include the business registration number). Remember, despite all the hoop-la about internet taxes, many taxes do go to pay things like consumer protection authorities, fair trading groups and commercial courts. As for selection of jurisdiction, playing fast and loose with international law can easily get you into complications so unless there are compelling reasons to shift off-shore, it is better to spend your energies creating a business and worry about hiring the lawyers at a later stage. Of course countries which "get it" will have a slight advantage but then as it is an open field at this stage, nobody can bet what are the "best" laws (e.g. does privacy == bad for companies?). Three Rules for Thumb for success in e-business 1-don't invest in anything you don't understand 2-don't give money to people you can't trust 3-if you lose your shirt, stop whinging, take your lumps and learn from it LL
Surprisingly, there are collaborating groups around the world (e.g. Australia) that are in the process of designing building working prototypes of some of these weird and wonderful machines. The problem is that we still don't really have a good grasp of what commercially useful domain will drive the need for mass demand. I suppose it was the same electronically in that early boards were more toys until people mastered the assembly of megagates into useful building blocks. Peole like Pen rose have speculated on physiological process underlying a given thought that may initially involve a number of superposed quantum states. I hope there are some really smart guys out there who can take some of the ideas through to the next stage. Now if someone could come up with decent quantum algorithms for massive parallel search and comparisons of multiple genetic strands databases, they'd make a killing. LL
... and there is a smaller conceptual jump between Linux and AIX, Solaris or IRIX than with NT. He who has the most applications in your desired market segment wins and if learning a dev environment through OpenSource hacking gives you a leg up on the competition, companies are not going to overlook a gift horse, especially if it can deny programmer talent (and mindshare) to the opposition. Hardware is a commodity, OS are becoming a commodity, the fight over the next few years is to commoditise web standards through XML as quickly as possible to dominate a profitable (ie persistant income) service niche. After that it's anyone's guess as the concept of market forces will be different (perhaps more driven by fads trying to gain footholds in the teeth of entrenched lifestyle thematic branded companies).
The only thing you can be sure of is to expect more Tux memorabilia.
What some people call technology inflation (or the instability of proprietary standards) has been studied previously and described as the time it takes for half of what you've learn to become irrelevant. From this point of view, the comparisons between OpenSource and ShrinkWrap becomes rather obvious. If the user population is small and adaptable, then it is OK to have rapid release cycles. However, once a product becomes "mainstream" (e.g. email=sendmail, web=apache) people prefer some stability as it reduces the transitional and training costs. One can compare it with a high frequency wave, expanding and broadening out so that others can ride on the envelop. Trying to force high frequency upgrades and changes at the mature stage translates to chop/friction which merely dissipates energy.
So where does this lead companies? As ESR pointed out, the erroneous assumption is that software is a service pretending to be a manufacturing industry. This suggests that companies after a while are going to just treat hackers as high-powered consultants (a la surgical team) to come in, identify an information infrastructure problem, and provide a solution. Trying to capture "broad-based knowledge" and hoarding it will be difficult once your employees realise you are depressing their marketability for the next job (inless it is such a specialised high-demand area you can work anywhere).
Companies have tried before to corner talent, witness certain entertainment megacorps demands to sign away all creative rights for hired animators. It may be highly paid renumeration, but it is still economic slavery in a different form of gilded cage. Perhaps the OpenSource and hacker philosophy is just an unconcious collective movement that realises the inherent dangers of lack of choice which leads to stagnation. There must be some degrees of freedom for knowledge to grow, diversify, cross-pollinate and evolve. Restricting it in a permanent vice may be profitable in the short-term, but the long-run effects may not be that great.
So what can people do to reduce the inevitable decay of their knowledge? Continuous learning, upgrading of skills, and picking software interfaces with long-run stability, and even then be prepared to abandon whole sectors when new technology comes along (e.g. why have a word processor when voice-transcribers mature?). Above all, keep publishing your ideas so that they can join the richer mix and survive for a little longer. IF knowledge keeps on spreading, then the concept of an information monopoly will be harder to sustain without heavy-handed distortions of governments. Unlike labour (which can be easily substituted), knowledge is either you've mastered it or you haven't and fortunately nobody has come up with a mind-transfer machine as yet. Perhaps companies will then be more careful of nurturing scarce human capital instead of playing the diktator (and if anyone hasn't seen the darwinian thinking of MBAs to maximise external capital growth has got a few surprises ahead of them). And least anyone gets too confident about being irreplaceable talent, you should read up on classics like Daedalus.
LL
What are you testing for?
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 1
It still comes down to what are the traits you are attempting to evaluate. The concept of rote learning is simply impossible with today's explosion of information. Traditional time-limited exams were designed to evaluate a student's ability under stress and breadth of competency in a core curriculum in a reasonably standardised framework (same resources of time/materials available to everyone). If you make the step that competency includes the ability to investigate, integrate and index new information, then making a notebook available is not such a huge conceptual leap (think of it as unlimited openbook). There are a couple of drawbacks that I can see, one is that the best prepared students will win out (ie a blackmarket for bookmarks and prepared solutions engines) and secondly, educators will have to redesign their exams to be more problem oriented without compromising what they want to test for (e.g. issue of how do you control excessive collaboration when you're trying to evaluate individual mastery). The supply of laptops is a short-term issue, much like the provision of standardised calculators at high-school. People will come up with a solution such that portable Crays don't give too much of an advantage (it's not the size that counts but how you use it:-) ). Perhaps a basic CD so that everyone has the same basic data will also solve data access problems.
The rather more interesting follow-on is what does this imply for educational entrance barriers? I can forsee a day when to enter into a top-notch Linux training college, you have to prove you can hack your way past the network security protocols with each level of access revealing enough basic information to crack the next layer. Taken to its extreme, you might even say that the test becomes the teacher, and almost game-like in its challenge.
Unforunately much of education has still yet to evolve out of medieval ritual of perch on lecturn and dictate to the masses. Admittedly it costs a small fortune to design courses using modern instructional technology with a corresponding short life-span, yet if movie production studios can make a living, then there is no reason why education can't adopt some of the practices.
Life will certainly be interesting as the explosion of home-learning material and instructional multi-media is showing.
You wrote <I>Private property is essential to creating a functioning system for economic relationships that -- theoretically, at least -- benefit everyone. No one has come up with a better or more efficient system. </I>
While this may be applicable to Western economic theory which evolved out of the relatively rich European heartlands and plains of Americas, I would respectfully suggest that it is only applicable in cases where the ratio of capital to labor is comparatively high. If you look at indigenous cultures where sharing among an extended family, it is a different economic system. It is a mark of media success in conditioning the Western psyche that mere mention of the word communism condems these societies to the fringes. Also when economics gets to the stage of being a near religion as practiced by the Chicago School of rational capitalism and IMF, then I think its time to start worrying.
It is an accepted truism that the winners write the history books. Have you ever thought about how the evolution of empires influenced policy and development? When the British started colonising Africa, they hit head-on the rather aggressive natives (Zulus, etc) and the view of hostile indigenous natives was reinforced by the US native americans. The rather predictable outcomes of policies dervied from early days had disasterous impact on Australian aborigines (forced resettlement, baby adoption, socially destructive welfare) which had adapted to a much dryer, fragile landscape. It may be decades before any of that mess gets fixed up (if not degraded further by inept political handling).
I'm starting to ramble but the relevance is that roughly 10 years ago the courts overturned the legal precept of "Terra Nullius" (look up references to Mabo case). Thus the assumption underpinning land rights that the continent was empty before white colonialisation has been overturned. This sent shockwaves (metaphorically speaking) through the society and people are still coming to grips with it (or ignoring it in the vain hopes it will go away). However, some indications from reviewing recent legislation indicates a slight but subtle shift, towards what I suppose can be called "Terra Pluribus" from the philosophical view that existance can have more than one set of principles. This can be seen in the shift in policy framework in accepting that the environment is an entity in its own right whose interest (due to extreme diminished capacity to ennunicate her needs) requires custodianship by state statutory body. This means that there are certain <B>rights that need to be preserved, independent and outside of human economic activity</B>.
This is also the issue with non-tangible goods. Who owns a culture? If there are no fans, then there is no commercial franchise. If a Japanse firm copied a sacred symbol from a religious group (another case to look up) or borrows from medicinal verbal folklore without compensation, is it infringing or desecrating its meaning (c.f. muslim countries refusing to let words from Koran use for advertising). Would people object if Tux was subbranded by a distributor who refused to ship fully GPL source? Can you protect a philosophy (e.g. OpenSource) from contamination? These are tough questions that existing property rights do not cover.
Perhaps one day, cultural lore will be put on equal footing with common law and commercial lures (and if you don't understand the difference then you might as well kiss your credit limit goodbye). Economics has never been a science in the sense that it really attempts to put econometrics rules on inherently sociological activities. Nevertheless, big firms/cults have tried to tilt the economic landscape their way by writing the rules/laws/scriptures and providing an encompassing environmental (can we say factory shop on a global scale). What's the difference between Disney the company and Scientology the cult in promoting a certain world view?
All I can say is that I hope people travel, keep their eyes and minds open, and try to understand what it is they value (apart from the obligatory hot water and clean toilets:-)). Perhaps then you'd appreciate there are benefits beyond just economics and monoculturism (no matter how gung-ho its proponents think it is).
I'm not quite sure how broadly or narrow you need to interpret the word "state". I know that contorting the URI to do wierd things is not unusual. In a PhD a long time ago I used a combination of techniques to effectively pass commands encoded within the URI to an interactive state engine embedded within a simple web server (experiments in doing simulation on demand on a multiprocessor). The use of altering the DNS has a couple of tradeoffs though, it involves a layer outside the HTTP server-server level but it is faster as one step in the parsing is removed. Thus some portability is sacrificed for performance which in the overall scheme of things I'm not sure is superior because a lot of the lower level network will get hardwired (eventually) into network boxes which is permanent infrastructure whereas you want to have flexibility in modifying the interactions. Sorta the difference between ripping out a wall and repainting the wallpaper.
The internet pace does have a disadvantage in that it is impossible to weed out *bad* or useless ideas out of the volume generated every day. How many inventions actually become a commercial success? Building a better mousetrap does not always equate to getting rid of more mice.
... is an American salary, an Australian lifestyle, and Asian taxes (15% in HK!)
Guess what hell would be:-). Least the yanks feel too superior, the Brisbanites (where ol' McArthur McArthur had his Pacific headquarters during WW2 which coincidentally I hear has been refurnished and is planning a reopening) had this rather wry observation about the Americans.... "overpaid, oversexed, and over here":-).
Actually, does anyone notice how Linux is slowly turning into a real profession like medical doctors with salaries and conventions in exotic locations to match. Maybe one day we'll have over-heart virtual surgery on the kernel:-).
All the restrictions in the world cannot alter the intent of another nation. If you treat someone (or a nation) with suspicion, interpret their every move as hostile, and generally bully their citizens, is it surprising that negative attitudes form? Now that the Cold War is over, perhaps a more enlightened foreign policy could be forged based on a more consistent set of principles?
In my mind, the export of "munitions" like Beowulf pales in comparison with past doctrine now being slowly exposed such as military training given to the Indonesian special forces which rebounded badly in the Timor Separation. Certain Latin American countries have no particular appreciation of the US "aid" that they received in the past either (Panama, Niguargua, Columbio, Haitii, etc).
The steadiest water stream can erode the strongest rock. A consistent message of rule by law, respect for human and property rights, and civil society will do more in the long-term in altering societial values than bombing the living daylights out of people whenever they step over a dimly perceived line. By watching TV, the Chinese have gained respect for western police reading people's rights when arrested (not a common occurance for a society slowly emerging from fuedal warlord times). By consistently demonstrating the virtues of a open society, with the free exchange of ideas, even when that could put us in a perceived position of vulnerability (with a decent armored cluebat hidden out of sight just in case), moral authority can be maintained. Even though many people do not share RMS views, they do respect his passion for sticking to his principles. Leadership, especially in the global setting, should be more setting an example, not trying to blugeon or bully people into following your lead blindly. When a giant, walk softly and bend down to listen sounds like a good analogy to get along with normals.
The Beowulf example is like trying to stick a finger in a dam when the whole ediface is changing, about as useless as patenting the click when everyone is moving on beyond the mouse. Similar technology exists in Isreal and could be duplicated given enough time. Given the basics of enough food (a recent Nobel winner proved that most starvation resulted from bad distribution systems, rather than absolute lack of food) and some decent shelter, the average citizen from other countries are much more interested in sitting down and knocking back a few beers than in the posturing antics of self-opinioned leaders on a media crusade. And ultimately it is the average citizen that benefits from openess when they can vote with their feet.
If they can afford to build a Beowulf then ship them the CDs and invite them to join the GNU revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are paying for is peace of mind.
Consider the mean time between failures of a single component. Then work out the figure for n co-dependent components. A rough cut can be estimated in if you assume x% chance of failure of any n components in any period, then the chance of the whole system failing is 1-(1-x)^n. Plugging hypothetical numbers of x=0.1%% and n=64 then you get overall probability of failure as 6.4%. You can do more complex calculations based on Poisson processes and stochastic simulations but then you'd need a supercomputer to solve the optimisaton problems. You also have to keep in mind the greater engineering problems with heat dissipation, signal timing, cache coherance, and testing to make sure the same program runs on 1-n processors. On the otherhand disposable PCs are generally based on tried and true techniques (lower risk = lower profits = lower cost). Also the high-end systems tend to incorporate the latest and greatest which means they price according to market demand (the military tends to be a little inelastic about certain performance parameters). Knocking up a rackmount of boards may give you the same perceived aggregate *peak* performance but I will guarentee you that the actual performance will be quite dissimilar (unless the problem is so small it doesn't matter). Sometimes a 18-wheeler is more useful than a pack of motorcycle couriers. You get paid for knowing the difference.
It comes down to what you value more, whether you think the extra cost is worth not getting up at 4am to nursemaid the hardware or not.
LL
I think people are missing the point.
The aim of "free" (as in beer) software is to limit the excessive prices charged by mainstream publishers. In a sense the free version is the minimum base level functionality (or quality check) that should be expected from a risk-free investment in software. Then you can compare the marginal improvement in the price of the commercial version and evaluate the prospective gains rationally (assuming a free and informed choice without excessive branded benchmarketing).
The biggest problem is that the "costs" of software is not reflected in the actual sale price. Quality control, amount of training, help-desk support, risk of inappropriate design/placement are the invisible costs that really determine whether a piece of software will be taken up enterprise-wide. It is too easy to shift the negative externalities onto other people (a case of privatising the profits, socialising the costs) and I suspect users will revolt one day and rethink their purchasing strategies if there were any real studies done of productivity gains.
LL
The words "limit uses of copyright material" says it all about the mentality of the existing media groups. Basically they want to translate the Internet into a TV but with interaction (which maps to the ability to buy merchandise from them in their minds). Hello .... wakey wakeky guys. The ability for the user to *store* (or more correctly cache) and *transmit* data effectively decouples information in both a temporal and spatial dimension. Content distributors cannot assume that at 6pm, everyone will be settling down to evening news or that they can stagger the release of music titles to ensure word of mouth to control the build-up of hype. Hence their attempts to constrain the *use* of information through end-user licensing arrangements. By putting artificial restrictions (only home use, only link to original, etc) they hope to segment the market (much like aeroplane economy and business class) to sort out the people willing to *pay* for characteristics such as real-time (e.g. stock quotes), time sensitivity (last week's sports results are pretty valueless), or special services (e.g. customisation). However, the *big* assumption is that the consumer is passive and thus willing to have everything handed to them for the convenience (at a convenient markup). However, this IMHO is a serious misjudgement as what people (or at least the early adoptors) are seeking is the ability to combine/modify things to their liking. Star Trek would never have evolved the way it has if Paramount had forbidden the fans to write their own fiction or engage in unofficial conventions. The ability and freedom to mix your own tracks, design your own skin, or hack your own code modifications is viewed as a potential (lost) profit opportunity rather than a way of listening to what people really want. If a dispensing entity can restrict these rights, by fair means or foul, they then should be able to charge for the extra priviledges as per shareholder profit maximisation theory.
Unfortunately, the attempt to limit priviledges is not matched by a reduction in price. By attempting to license music rather than selling the rights to the contents they are effectively devaluing the resale and second-hand market. Some economists have noted that the secondary value of a good is often a more important determinant for marginal pricing, e.g. you can use a CD for the bits on it or as a drink coaster. Passing off a wasting asset as a durable good assumes that the consumers can't tell the difference or detect the reduction in value. Afterall, it's a standard trick when you can't raise the price, you reduce the portion size or dilute the intrinsic value.
One wonders what's worse, not having copyright and people borrowing your ideas, or having copyright protection and people *NOT* listening to you. So what can the Internet do? Well, you can take advantage of laws in other countries, compare and arbitrage prices across countries, or extend the reach of your opinions or new services. In other words, it forces individuals to think on a larger scale than previously.
LL
I suspect the real competition is with Sony's Cr eativeStation which appears (according to the limited information released so far .. any updates?) to be both MIPS based (a variant of their Sony PlayStation) as well as Linux development. If someone ever tweaks key libraries to use the vector-based co-processors, things will really rip.
Sigh, why don't they sell the chassis, then let us buy the CPU's separately so we can upgrade at our leisure.
LL
It's called duty of care.
The value of life in highly developed countries is high. Have a look at the amount of warning labels, licensing conditions, legal disclaimers, etc you are expected to observe and sign. Safety and comfort seems to be quite a high priority, a lot of people wouldn't even consider visiting another country unless it had 5-star hotels and 24 hour conveniences. Admittedly lacking things like running water and toilet paper tend to be discomforting but then part of the exploration experience is to realise and appreciate the things we take for granted. You also find that unless conditions are extremely harsh, people are disinclined to shift out of their familiar comfort zone. Famines, poverty, political or religious prosecution have traditionally been the mechanisms for large-scale migration.
How much is a single human life worth? Should a 'western' life be considered a greater economic 'investment' and thus potential loss? Since your Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers noted that as the Third World had a deficit of pollution and it mades sense to export nuclear waste, it seems this attitude is all too common. Is one American solider worth killing hundreds of Sudanese civilians? Much better to sit back in an air-conditioned office and push that missile button? Why not pay to climb Mt. Everest? Or more exactly hire bearers to carry you up to be photographed.
Perhaps the problem is that we are running out of grand dreams, a challenge that can motivate us to reach new heights of potential. Most of the world is mapped. sports has been thoroughly commercialised, religion has fallen into background noise, and marketing wars don't exactly lead themselves to long-term passion. Star Trek aside, the energy cost of sending humans and their life-support supplies into space is still too high with out current technology level.
So, are we being suffocated by our own perceived sense of boredom? When more people watch "Who wants to be a Millionaire" rather than spend the time to build up skills to create new wealth (improved productivity of new goods and services). Who'd rather fantasise about Atlantis than fund archeology expeditions. Rather watch a VR flight simulation than take flying lessons? The on-line world sometimes is too seductive for our own good. I would hope that people realise that the only limit is your inner imagination and the passion to go out there and make a difference, if only to understand yourself better.
LL
IMHO, this is just a specific case of business attempting to gain private benefits while socialising the negative externalities (ie public R&D). Basically R&D is high risk, as Paul Allen of Microsoft fame found out with his recently folded company. To help reduce the risk barrier, governments (supposedly representing the wider public interests) have traditionally funded broad fundamental science&technology, the well-spring from which the rest of consumer goodies spring from (computers from code-cracking, digital cameras from astronomy, etc). However, progress in this domain relies completely on a mindset devoted to honest introspection, intellectual integrity, and building on the work of others (idealistic shoulders of giants, etc). Hence the exemptions in copyright acts for review/reference, libraries, scholarly studies, etc otherwise the cost of research would just explode and we would probably have less of it.
Now, I think it is fair to say that if a person or private company spends their own hard-earned savings on R&D, they should be entitled to any and all benefits that accrue (provided there are no excessive negative social/environmental impacts). If something is funded publicly from compulsary taxes, (much like a public forum), then it should be made available to the any emember of the public. Attempting to move from one domain to the other without 'fair' compensation smacks of 'rent-seeking' behaviour (ie a public subsidy constrained by persistant below-market valuation) as all the benefits are expropriated by late stage technology developers/marketers and not the in-between debuggers/testers. If you think about it, this refers to the Intel 'point of technology inflexion' where the value/cost shifts sharply upwards. A case in point is the internet name domain registration bun-fight since once people realised the potential growth of the internet name-space, then by capturing critical nodes of the registration pathway, they are able to extract monopoly rents (ie disproportinate rewards to risks). One analogy you could use to describe this behaviour is a village letting a field lie fallow to build up its productive base only to wake up one day to find one person has fenced off the best parts and cut off the water supply. Another analogy is that people like GNU/Stallman/Postel building the basic roads (internet standards) but others coming along afterwards and embracing/extending them by errecting toll booths (you can guess who). This type of activity (while very profitable to the individual), hurts the system as a whole as it discourages people with the time/talent to play with new ideas if someone else gets all the kudos (ie OpenSource desire for 'reputation'). On the other hand, if you're a believer in private enterprise and capital accumulation, then you'd argue that it is more efficient so I suppose it does depends on whether you are a people-oriented person or capital person). Of course to shift things from the public to private sphere takes strong will and Machievallian talents, something not always appreciated by others, especially competitors.
Now what policy tools can be used to limit extreme anti-competitive behaviours (like the Geneva convention on war, you do need some *basic* guidelines to mark the playing field, uneven as it may be)? Traditional forms (or even definitions) of markets have not really evolved to handle pure intellectual goods. Part of the problem is that the US, as one of the more advanced ecnomies, has imposed its patent system (with all the systematic flaws and structured deficiencies intended to foster its early industrial economy) on the rest of the world (WTO, etc). For example, automation of business practices is a rather obvious result of computerisation, yet you have individuals attempting to gain a monopoly on entire sectors because they claim to be the first to codify it in VisualBasic or whatever (can you say Priceline?) even though the practice may already been implemented in parts/with variations/different combinations in other businesses but it wasn't worth patenting as it is something commonly done (there are only so many ways of pricing an auction). Patenting something just because it is nonobvious to the clueless is not a definition of innovation IMHO and the biggest stumbling block is sorting out the merely novel, as compared with the truely innovative is a major difficulty.
The big problem comes in that most cutting areas of science nowadays are capital-intensive (think electron microscope, think supercomputer, think synchrotron), and this is a big big problem as governments are not particularly good at allocating capital (think bureacratic infighting over budgets instead of raising bonds/selling equity). Hence you need serious funding which governments are relunctant to do when there is no "obvious" political or socio-economic payoff (e.g. perceived supercollider boondoggle, etc). Hence their encouragement of "industry involvement" and the contaiminent of research ideals (for the good of humanity etc). This can be seen in other sectors such as medicine as privatised hospitals tend to discourage (or even abandon) their teaching role as profits (as traditionally defined) is dependent on patient throughput (easy to automate/accelerate) and not quality of care (very hard to measure).
What is the solution? A lot of people would like to know. I suspect part of the problem is that our accounting system (which defines profit/loss) doesn't really measure the value of human capital properly. How does one measure the social value of a public university? More that just passing on learning (which can be obtained by reading a book), but the meeting of minds, moulding of motives, and mixing of memes? And more importantly, how do you provide technological solutions to problems which are inherently social in nature (e.g. fencing off intellectual commons due to entrepreneurial zeal without realising the unwritten rules of conduct).
LL
People forget the whole point of economics (and thus commerce) is to satisfy individual desires with limited resources (time, energy, tech, etc). Science fiction (and fantasy to a lesser extent) expands the range of possibilities (think of it as advanced speculative marketing) and if enough people are willing (usually measured by their pocket-book), their dreams are fufilled. For those fixated on OSS terminology, think of it as scratching new itches on a mass scale. If enough people think a trip to the moon is worthwhile (after calculating the energy expenditure from tossing a few hundred kilograms up a gravity well), then you can bet some crazy outfit will come up with a marketing and branding plan the next day before outsourcing the technical details to the Russians (well, you can't get much lower cost than a bunch of bankrupt space engineers :-)). It may seem unfair but the people who do tend to accumulate things in the past (kings, tycoons, entrepreneurs, etc) usually had enough power, wealth or accumum to indulge in individual fancies (think Hearst, think Carnegie, etc), leaving the rest of us legacies like crown jewels or art collections or possibly even a future space tourist industry. It takes a rare individual/situation to motivate an entire group to accomplish complex missions (e.g. US tax-payer funded space race). If they can get a leg up by trying to crystal-gaze popular sci-fi lit, then I hope they have luck in bringing a little more excitement into the world. However, it should be noted that often we are constrained by our own limited viewpoints as much as any pundit. I recall an analysis of what people expected the future shape of their city to look like back in last century and people could forsee the electric lights and better transport system, but they still expected low-rise buildings and missed completely the sky-scrapers skyline (the elevator is a rare invention that enabled large collection of humans to really be put in close proximity with each other). Who can accurately tell what new social forces and desires will arise?
... it does make you wonder about the human race though when more people believe in astrology (and pay for it) than they do in investing in funding astronomy.
Aside
LL
... in the comment that HP is betting solely on EPIC and MIPS has stopped processor development altogether. Given the slippage in Intel's original roadmap for Merced, HP were smart to keep a hand in the PA-RISC and while MIPS may not be revving their processors like the others, they earn a very tidy income from licensing their IP and creating variants of their processors for the embedded market while continuing to source high-end designs from SGI (who still have a 5 year roadmap for their R14K, R16K).
... more like unpaid advertising sometimes. I suspect that past 1 GHz, the CPU performance is of only marginal benefit (outside niche areas) as the speed limit is the bandwidth limitations anyway.
From a personal perspective, it is rather disturbing from an architecture point of view that so much attention is focused on the branding and MHz rating. If we use the analogy of cars, the peak revolutions per minute has got nothing to do with the actual real-world engine performance. A lot of factors depend on the I/O subsystem (gas tank + injection system), cache design (suspension), and more recently stlying (bodywork). Just because it runs hot, doesn't mean that it runs well, in fact from a thermodynamic perspective excess heat is an indication of inefficiency. Just as in real-life, there is a distinction between buses (good ol' shared memory Suns), industrial trucks (IBM workhorses), SUVs (SGI drool-designs) or motorcycle packs (Beowulfs). Pretending a souped up scooter with over-granished rusty frame can do the job of everything is a serious indication of cluelessness or delusion.
Just as in real life, the limitation is the overall transport system (network) which is still an information back-lane despite the heavy hype. Sure a speed-demon Porsche (Alpha) can outrun anything in a speed race but most people settle for a Ford (Intel) or Chevvy (AMD) to commute to work. Some may prefer a flashier Saab (Apple) or stick with the boring but solid Volvo (IBM) or even go upmarket with a BMW (SGI) but they all serve a basic purpose (mobility) and dominate specific niches. You get paid for maintaining a professional non-bias and correctly matching your company's needs to the available choices.
The quasi-technical mainstream press really has to
get their act together if reading the IT section in any general newspaper is any indication
LL
world-class - we rushed this rather marginal prototype out to gain what meagre first-mover advantage we can
enterprise level - we wasted so much time on development and marketing hype we desparately need to find some clueless CTO's to buy enough of these suckers to avoid going under
empowering decision making - only if you're signing the cheque, then we'll empower you with all the 5-star meals you can gorge yourself on
object oriented - the only object is to orient you to forking out the dough (upfront of course) for this unmaintainable heap of junk
ultimate in flexibility - there are so many bugs we have to make a daily release
No reflection on QNX which I understand is a fine product in its category but I'm sure there are many other examples of PH(i)Bspeak people can come up with. :-). Perhaps we can judge the pain to gain ratio of a software company by measuring the number of salesdroids/lawyers vs engineers/scientists they employ. If we make it compulsary for product safety (and sanity) perhaps the quality of software will get a noticable lift? Oh well, we can all dream on.
LL
Given that you see failings in the current system (as indicated by your desire to set up a private course), can you speculate on how you see the tertiary sector evolving. Perhaps you have some views on how private institutes or providers might foster the quarternary education sector (which can be broadly defined as post-post-graduate, professional life-long-learning, university of the third age, or adult free-thinking depending on the buzzword-du-jour or mental biases). Proto-examples I'm aware of vaguely heading this direction are University of Phoenix (US), Open University (UK/Europe), and Universitas21 (Austrasia).
In short, what do you believe the future holds for the next organised stage of research-intensive learning/teaching?
LL
Correct me if my impression is wrong but the megacorps seem to entering a cultural shark-feeding frenzie in trying to stake out a market stomping ground. It seems that the "best" tactic for "owning" a loyal cult following (whether game or movie show) is take a scorched earth approach to similiar genres. It's equivalent to Doyle claiming all rights to detective stories just because his Sherlock Holmes pioneered the style. Or Disney claiming all cat and mouse stories just because it would clash with their beloved Mickey. Now claiming a cultural franchise with guarenteed audience to sell do-dackies and merchandising to may be profitable in the short-term but how clued is the fan-base to stand for it? One wonders whether creative gaming souls will then become another version of street musicians being squeezed by the music distributors? Afterall, you learn by imitating your peers and predecessors and it would be nice to eat while doing so. Curtailing this outlet for younger souls to practice and demonstrate their talents seems a short sighted goal, if not outright illegal under anti-competitive practices. A company is entitled to protect their stuff developed over the years but attempting to fence in a culture commons will only hurt the public in the long term by depriving them of alternatives.
IMHO, mental monopolies are just as damaging as physical monopolies. Someone needs to get out a cluebat for the MBAs running the show.
LL
... chock-a-block full of TLA (three letter acronyms) makes my head swim. I'm left wondering how scalable would this system be? I can see it working in a tight-dense human network where there are enough closely coordinating and communicating entities to determine access levels and policies, apply classification of information into categories, and a regulatory/punishment system for violations. Does this translate well into the rather hap-hazardous nature of the Internet? Just like military style firms (where do you think chief executive *officer* comes from) are a hangover from the industrial age, perhaps we need to rethink the whole idea?
....
Perhaps the underlying model has some fundamental constraints on growth? I'm reminded of the genetic case where bacteria which have complex regulatory gene expressions (think a switched network of proteins activating different stages) have a size limitation of 10 megabase pairs. Beyond that the conflicting signals seem to inhibit any higher level functions. The example that I can think of is that person A can look at kernel code, but not the part with patent X, unless they sign an NDA with company K, which is waived if they are no longer competing with company L, etc
Are there other ways of looking at the problem? Kerberos has a ticketing system which is essentially a time-to-live mechanism. Perhaps a commercial implementation at file level could be based on the half-life of information? How long is it before a piece of information becomes commercially irrelevant? And then check thresholds (refreshed periodically) across a range of keys to see the probability that such access violates a critical temporal mass (ie if viewing too many sensitive documents at once, could be indication of someone faking a download).
Perhaps then it would shift the paradigm of information control away from fine-grained permissions (human intensive) towards detection of unusual patterns of activitiy (AI intensive).
LL
1900 - my gun is bigger than your gun
2000 - my nuke is nastier than your nuke
2100 - my AI is smarter than your AI
:-)
Actually, I'm not totally convinced that having more "free" software is in the same category as having more "free" beer/money. Firstly, by default all IP whether patent or copyright passes into public domain after 20 or 90 years. So in essense all ideas/thoughts are already "free" (if you take the view that copyleft is merely a time-shift into the future but looking back), just that some people want to create a little (OK, a big) profit opportunity in the short-term. Also ideas breed and mutate on themselves and thus having a pool of software that people can tinker with creates new opportunities (see GIMP and online photo lab). There is no extra cost in having 1 or a million extra people play around with ideas or information. On the other hand, anything to do with atoms is a wasting asset (depreciating, opportunity costs, dead-weight loss, etc). Having an extra 1 million people means that it ties up a lot of resources. In that sense, money is a claim on future resources and the changes in value of various classes of goods, an indication of what the larger population wants, ie signals to suppliers to invest more in certain lines of production. Creating false and/or distorting signals through funny money tinkering of the ol printing press (inflation) is thus a really bad idea (ps someone tell Greenspan to rein in the loose monetary policies). In this sense, OpenSource software is a luxury good, it can only be produced by highly skilled/education people (ie spare cash + food to put themselves through uni or self-taught) with leisure time on their hands. While it may appear rather chaotic to corporations with top-down control, perhaps it is just as efficient (or equally inefficient) as trying to charge everyone for the priviledge of access (ie supply driven rather than demand driven).
Human nature is funny sometimes, especially when people confuse price with value. Cows won't eat mouldy hay but if you put a fence around it, they are tricked into thinking it is forbidden and therefore must be "good". Thus we have a stupidity tax (not knowing where to get hold of free sources) plus an ego-tax (trusting the overhyped brand) which in the long-term, will only benefit the smart hackers. It's regretful that corporations have seized upon these little idiosyncracies of human nature (not to mention doing their damn best to reinforce it) and are making excess profits but then that is the nature of market evolution. Eventually the next generation wises up and the rules change yet again. Having AIs may tilt the balance somewhat in favor of the consumer (imagine having a guardian angel that informed you if something was a good choice or not, e.g. calories in a cake) but then the companies would come up with the devil's advocate to just be daring and try that scrumptious chocolate cake. A never ending arms race, even with AI.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
LL
Whether MS is broken up or not, the point should be to identify behaviour that inhibits open competition and try and figure out a systematic way of adding degrees of freedom to allow some diversity into the system.
1) Vertical integration - much like the big media companies are trying to dominate content, distribution, marketing, and venture capital stakes, I think some thought has to be given to whether a company should have control at every single stage. If you look at Red Hat vs Mandrake, they offer the same product through different channels and are branded differently. Improper tying of products from OS to applications to network services with no point of opportunity to switch/substitute creates a complex exclusionary network.
2) Eat the Young - the point about young startups taking the risk to create real innovative products is eliminated if big companies can cherry-pick one solution, then wipe out the value of its peers by bundling practices. Having the choice between a trade sale at fire prices or having the value of your market evaporated does not give much incentive to develope new ideas (not to mention being venture capitalists to constrain share growth upside). The financial firms have developed Chinese walls to solve this problem, perhaps something similar should be in place for large IP aggregators.
3) Truth in Advertising - probably a pipe dream in the land that invented hype and spin-doctoring but wouldn't it be consumer-friendly if there were basic product qualifiers such as expected time to failure, cost to repair/replace, man-hours to install, rate of learning curve, etc? We have engineering standards for cars to toys so why not set the minimum bar for software as well? If software is going to be treated as a disposable good, then people should at least understand how much they are going to pay in that time period.
Part of the problem is not the software creator, but just educating the public consumer as to what are the qualities of good software. Until people can see and appreciate the difference, they won't be able to separate flash from functionality.
LL
I'm a little bemused by the extreme concern of DoD in computer security. Granted that they have many secrets to hide and their war-potential to protect. However, I would note that most security breaches are caused by human factors, whether deliberate or accidental. One can point to the example of an ex-CIA director who left incriminating files on a laptop. Also draw the analogy that engineers have concluded that more car safety technology is reaching points of diminishing returns as only 10% of accidents is attributed to mechanical failure and the rest mostly to the idiot behind the wheel (alcohol, road rage, sleepiness, whatever). In the same way I fear that network paranoia (while important and a hard target) is blown out of proportion to the more obvious risks of human failability. I would like to be comforted that the military has on-going *HUMAN* processes to keep improving the quality of their people rather than hoping the next Y2K bug doesn't accidently triggers the nukes. Invest in brains, not silicon bullets.
In a broader view, what is it about technology that foster the simplistic magic pill approach? In any complex situation, after you eliminate the obvious weaknesses, there will be many vulnerable points of attack and more exotic technology in lieu of awareness training could create a false sense of security. Blind faith, whether religion, technology or dogma seems to be a point of hubris.
LL
LL
Ummm ... any legitimate firm will usually already be a company (with registered business number) and be subject to the securities and investment laws of the jurisdiction of incorporation (e.g. Delaware). It is the fly-by-nighters, the obscure off-shore locales and generally too-good-to-be-true places you should be wary of. Just like when you visit a new city, you take common-sense precautions (e.g. don't walk down certain Washington streets at night) and do some checking (e.g. by law, all invoices have to include the business registration number). Remember, despite all the hoop-la about internet taxes, many taxes do go to pay things like consumer protection authorities, fair trading groups and commercial courts. As for selection of jurisdiction, playing fast and loose with international law can easily get you into complications so unless there are compelling reasons to shift off-shore, it is better to spend your energies creating a business and worry about hiring the lawyers at a later stage. Of course countries which "get it" will have a slight advantage but then as it is an open field at this stage, nobody can bet what are the "best" laws (e.g. does privacy == bad for companies?). Three Rules for Thumb for success in e-business 1-don't invest in anything you don't understand 2-don't give money to people you can't trust 3-if you lose your shirt, stop whinging, take your lumps and learn from it LL
Surprisingly, there are collaborating groups around the world (e.g. Australia) that are in the process of designing building working prototypes of some of these weird and wonderful machines. The problem is that we still don't really have a good grasp of what commercially useful domain will drive the need for mass demand. I suppose it was the same electronically in that early boards were more toys until people mastered the assembly of megagates into useful building blocks. Peole like Pen rose have speculated on physiological process underlying a given thought that may initially involve a number of superposed quantum states. I hope there are some really smart guys out there who can take some of the ideas through to the next stage. Now if someone could come up with decent quantum algorithms for massive parallel search and comparisons of multiple genetic strands databases, they'd make a killing. LL
... and there is a smaller conceptual jump between Linux and AIX, Solaris or IRIX than with NT. He who has the most applications in your desired market segment wins and if learning a dev environment through OpenSource hacking gives you a leg up on the competition, companies are not going to overlook a gift horse, especially if it can deny programmer talent (and mindshare) to the opposition. Hardware is a commodity, OS are becoming a commodity, the fight over the next few years is to commoditise web standards through XML as quickly as possible to dominate a profitable (ie persistant income) service niche. After that it's anyone's guess as the concept of market forces will be different (perhaps more driven by fads trying to gain footholds in the teeth of entrenched lifestyle thematic branded companies).
The only thing you can be sure of is to expect more Tux memorabilia.
LL
What some people call technology inflation (or the instability of proprietary standards) has been studied previously and described as the time it takes for half of what you've learn to become irrelevant. From this point of view, the comparisons between OpenSource and ShrinkWrap becomes rather obvious. If the user population is small and adaptable, then it is OK to have rapid release cycles. However, once a product becomes "mainstream" (e.g. email=sendmail, web=apache) people prefer some stability as it reduces the transitional and training costs. One can compare it with a high frequency wave, expanding and broadening out so that others can ride on the envelop. Trying to force high frequency upgrades and changes at the mature stage translates to chop/friction which merely dissipates energy.
So where does this lead companies? As ESR pointed out, the erroneous assumption is that software is a service pretending to be a manufacturing industry. This suggests that companies after a while are going to just treat hackers as high-powered consultants (a la surgical team) to come in, identify an information infrastructure problem, and provide a solution. Trying to capture "broad-based knowledge" and hoarding it will be difficult once your employees realise you are depressing their marketability for the next job (inless it is such a specialised high-demand area you can work anywhere).
Companies have tried before to corner talent, witness certain entertainment megacorps demands to sign away all creative rights for hired animators. It may be highly paid renumeration, but it is still economic slavery in a different form of gilded cage. Perhaps the OpenSource and hacker philosophy is just an unconcious collective movement that realises the inherent dangers of lack of choice which leads to stagnation. There must be some degrees of freedom for knowledge to grow, diversify, cross-pollinate and evolve. Restricting it in a permanent vice may be profitable in the short-term, but the long-run effects may not be that great.
So what can people do to reduce the inevitable decay of their knowledge? Continuous learning, upgrading of skills, and picking software interfaces with long-run stability, and even then be prepared to abandon whole sectors when new technology comes along (e.g. why have a word processor when voice-transcribers mature?). Above all, keep publishing your ideas so that they can join the richer mix and survive for a little longer. IF knowledge keeps on spreading, then the concept of an information monopoly will be harder to sustain without heavy-handed distortions of governments. Unlike labour (which can be easily substituted), knowledge is either you've mastered it or you haven't and fortunately nobody has come up with a mind-transfer machine as yet. Perhaps companies will then be more careful of nurturing scarce human capital instead of playing the diktator (and if anyone hasn't seen the darwinian thinking of MBAs to maximise external capital growth has got a few surprises ahead of them). And least anyone gets too confident about being irreplaceable talent, you should read up on classics like Daedalus.
LL
It still comes down to what are the traits you are attempting to evaluate. The concept of rote learning is simply impossible with today's explosion of information. Traditional time-limited exams were designed to evaluate a student's ability under stress and breadth of competency in a core curriculum in a reasonably standardised framework (same resources of time/materials available to everyone). If you make the step that competency includes the ability to investigate, integrate and index new information, then making a notebook available is not such a huge conceptual leap (think of it as unlimited openbook). There are a couple of drawbacks that I can see, one is that the best prepared students will win out (ie a blackmarket for bookmarks and prepared solutions engines) and secondly, educators will have to redesign their exams to be more problem oriented without compromising what they want to test for (e.g. issue of how do you control excessive collaboration when you're trying to evaluate individual mastery). The supply of laptops is a short-term issue, much like the provision of standardised calculators at high-school. People will come up with a solution such that portable Crays don't give too much of an advantage (it's not the size that counts but how you use it :-) ). Perhaps a basic CD so that everyone has the same basic data will also solve data access problems.
The rather more interesting follow-on is what does this imply for educational entrance barriers? I can forsee a day when to enter into a top-notch Linux training college, you have to prove you can hack your way past the network security protocols with each level of access revealing enough basic information to crack the next layer. Taken to its extreme, you might even say that the test becomes the teacher, and almost game-like in its challenge.
Unforunately much of education has still yet to evolve out of medieval ritual of perch on lecturn and dictate to the masses. Admittedly it costs a small fortune to design courses using modern instructional technology with a corresponding short life-span, yet if movie production studios can make a living, then there is no reason why education can't adopt some of the practices.
Life will certainly be interesting as the explosion of home-learning material and instructional multi-media is showing.
LL
You wrote
:-)). Perhaps then you'd appreciate there are benefits beyond just economics and monoculturism (no matter how gung-ho its proponents think it is).
<I>Private property is essential to creating a functioning system for economic relationships that -- theoretically, at least -- benefit everyone. No one has come up with a better or more efficient system. </I>
While this may be applicable to Western economic theory which evolved out of the relatively rich European heartlands and plains of Americas, I would respectfully suggest that it is only applicable in cases where the ratio of capital to labor is comparatively high. If you look at indigenous cultures where sharing among an extended family, it is a different economic system. It is a mark of media success in conditioning the Western psyche that mere mention of the word communism condems these societies to the fringes. Also when economics gets to the stage of being a near religion as practiced by the Chicago School of rational capitalism and IMF, then I think its time to start worrying.
It is an accepted truism that the winners write the history books. Have you ever thought about how the evolution of empires influenced policy and development? When the British started colonising Africa, they hit head-on the rather aggressive natives (Zulus, etc) and the view of hostile indigenous natives was reinforced by the US native americans. The rather predictable outcomes of policies dervied from early days had disasterous impact on Australian aborigines (forced resettlement, baby adoption, socially destructive welfare) which had adapted to a much dryer, fragile landscape. It may be decades before any of that mess gets fixed up (if not degraded further by inept political handling).
I'm starting to ramble but the relevance is that roughly 10 years ago the courts overturned the legal precept of "Terra Nullius" (look up references to Mabo case). Thus the assumption underpinning land rights that the continent was empty before white colonialisation has been overturned. This sent shockwaves (metaphorically speaking) through the society and people are still coming to grips with it (or ignoring it in the vain hopes it will go away). However, some indications from reviewing recent legislation indicates a slight but subtle shift, towards what I suppose can be called "Terra Pluribus" from the philosophical view that existance can have more than one set of principles. This can be seen in the shift in policy framework in accepting that the environment is an entity in its own right whose interest (due to extreme diminished capacity to ennunicate her needs) requires custodianship by state statutory body. This means that there are certain <B>rights that need to be preserved, independent and outside of human economic activity</B>.
This is also the issue with non-tangible goods. Who owns a culture? If there are no fans, then there is no commercial franchise. If a Japanse firm copied a sacred symbol from a religious group (another case to look up) or borrows from medicinal verbal folklore without compensation, is it infringing or desecrating its meaning (c.f. muslim countries refusing to let words from Koran use for advertising). Would people object if Tux was subbranded by a distributor who refused to ship fully GPL source? Can you protect a philosophy (e.g. OpenSource) from contamination? These are tough questions that existing property rights do not cover.
Perhaps one day, cultural lore will be put on equal footing with common law and commercial lures (and if you don't understand the difference then you might as well kiss your credit limit goodbye). Economics has never been a science in the sense that it really attempts to put econometrics rules on inherently sociological activities. Nevertheless, big firms/cults have tried to tilt the economic landscape their way by writing the rules/laws/scriptures and providing an encompassing environmental (can we say factory shop on a global scale). What's the difference between Disney the company and Scientology the cult in promoting a certain world view?
All I can say is that I hope people travel, keep their eyes and minds open, and try to understand what it is they value (apart from the obligatory hot water and clean toilets
LL
I'm not quite sure how broadly or narrow you need to interpret the word "state". I know that contorting the URI to do wierd things is not unusual. In a PhD a long time ago I used a combination of techniques to effectively pass commands encoded within the URI to an interactive state engine embedded within a simple web server (experiments in doing simulation on demand on a multiprocessor). The use of altering the DNS has a couple of tradeoffs though, it involves a layer outside the HTTP server-server level but it is faster as one step in the parsing is removed. Thus some portability is sacrificed for performance which in the overall scheme of things I'm not sure is superior because a lot of the lower level network will get hardwired (eventually) into network boxes which is permanent infrastructure whereas you want to have flexibility in modifying the interactions. Sorta the difference between ripping out a wall and repainting the wallpaper.
The internet pace does have a disadvantage in that it is impossible to weed out *bad* or useless ideas out of the volume generated every day. How many inventions actually become a commercial success? Building a better mousetrap does not always equate to getting rid of more mice.
LL
... is an American salary, an Australian lifestyle, and Asian taxes (15% in HK!)
:-). Least the yanks feel too superior, the Brisbanites (where ol' McArthur McArthur had his Pacific headquarters during WW2 which coincidentally I hear has been refurnished and is planning a reopening) had this rather wry observation about the Americans .... "overpaid, oversexed, and over here" :-).
:-).
Guess what hell would be
Actually, does anyone notice how Linux is slowly turning into a real profession like medical doctors with salaries and conventions in exotic locations to match. Maybe one day we'll have over-heart virtual surgery on the kernel
LL
All the restrictions in the world cannot alter the intent of another nation. If you treat someone (or a nation) with suspicion, interpret their every move as hostile, and generally bully their citizens, is it surprising that negative attitudes form? Now that the Cold War is over, perhaps a more enlightened foreign policy could be forged based on a more consistent set of principles?
In my mind, the export of "munitions" like Beowulf pales in comparison with past doctrine now being slowly exposed such as military training given to the Indonesian special forces which rebounded badly in the Timor Separation. Certain Latin American countries have no particular appreciation of the US "aid" that they received in the past either (Panama, Niguargua, Columbio, Haitii, etc).
The steadiest water stream can erode the strongest rock. A consistent message of rule by law, respect for human and property rights, and civil society will do more in the long-term in altering societial values than bombing the living daylights out of people whenever they step over a dimly perceived line. By watching TV, the Chinese have gained respect for western police reading people's rights when arrested (not a common occurance for a society slowly emerging from fuedal warlord times). By consistently demonstrating the virtues of a open society, with the free exchange of ideas, even when that could put us in a perceived position of vulnerability (with a decent armored cluebat hidden out of sight just in case), moral authority can be maintained. Even though many people do not share RMS views, they do respect his passion for sticking to his principles. Leadership, especially in the global setting, should be more setting an example, not trying to blugeon or bully people into following your lead blindly. When a giant, walk softly and bend down to listen sounds like a good analogy to get along with normals.
The Beowulf example is like trying to stick a finger in a dam when the whole ediface is changing, about as useless as patenting the click when everyone is moving on beyond the mouse. Similar technology exists in Isreal and could be duplicated given enough time. Given the basics of enough food (a recent Nobel winner proved that most starvation resulted from bad distribution systems, rather than absolute lack of food) and some decent shelter, the average citizen from other countries are much more interested in sitting down and knocking back a few beers than in the posturing antics of self-opinioned leaders on a media crusade. And ultimately it is the average citizen that benefits from openess when they can vote with their feet.
If they can afford to build a Beowulf then ship them the CDs and invite them to join the GNU revolution.
LL