Money__ wrote Sheeeees LL thanks! . . . da hell is that . . yer thesis?!
No, just a curious wanderer on the information backlanes (it's rather interesting what you can pick up just rummaging around academic research papers).
One intriguing point that nobody has picked up is the rather interesting convergence between the Internet, wireless and global positioning system. If you think you can avoid sales tax by accessing an out-of-country server, you can forget about it. The companies are already three steps ahead of any scam any individual can dream up.
My speculation is that since governments will make GPS compulsary for mobile phones (and thus PDAs) on the pretext of ensuring emergency rescue, they can tax the physical point of purchase (all mobile phone tracking stations can identify the cell of origin) and since all IP addresses can be matched to physical devices, they can thus ultimately match to an identity whether individual or business tax number. It is also not well known but a certain Redmond company has invested heavily in an electronic financial clearing house. Taxes may be onerous but at least they are open to public scrutiny (e.g. the Gore FCC telecom charge to fund internet access for disadvantaged schools). On the other hand, who notices the nickle and dime software "tax" paid on every single transaction? Witness Adobe's bright idea of charging a fee for every secure PDF file that is copied. Not to mention that your purchasing patterns will be recorded by some computer somewhere for later... ummm.... analysis:-). As Sun's CEO noted, you can forget about any idea of privacy... you can't escape little brother unless you shift to a place like Serbia which has been bombed back into the Stone Age.
The price of a free society may be eternal vigilance but at least the consumers should be informed about any "hidden" costs.
thai wrote With the apparent inevitability of taxes on transactions over the web, what exactly will/should be defined as private transactions that are not to be taxed
This is not an easy answer as it squarely hits the contentious questions of sovereignty, juristiction, and individual beliefs of the role of governments. Firstly, some background. As a starting point, I'd recommend people have a gawk at understanding the relationship between taxes and economic activity. Basically as economies become more sophisticated, activities move from private endeavours (e.g. subsidence farming) to measureable activities (ie tracking the cashflow through the national accounting systems) to take advantage of the legal framework (contract law, safety standards, etc). This is one factor in a country's GNP, eliminating the inefficiencies in bartering by moving to a currency based transaction system with improved liquidity and retained value. To see the effect, just look at the economic collapse of Russia which has basically reverted to bartering goods between factories and inviduals. The original US constitution assumed an informed agreement between equal sovereign individuals (private property rights) which have been supplanted and augmented by federal commerce codes which support legal contracts for inter-state and international trade.
Now with the internet, there are already taxes on the seller (income tax, sales tax, incorporation, etc). What is worrying some groups is that the internet provides an alternative mechanism to minimise a consumer tax collected at point of physical sale. This is a particular concern with new taxes such as the forthcoming GST in Australia which wants to include the sale of secondhand goods within the tax base (previously excluded as it was too difficult to calculate an equivalent value in dollar terms). The issue is rather murky (OK downright opaque) as the internet is a half-way network caught between the concept of private intranets (original federation of AARNET servers) and a regulated public carriageway (telcos, radio, ISPs, etc). Hence there are multiple juristictions (not to mention different global standards) and inappropriate legal precedences with favor one party (usually the incumbents).
To answer your question, the Internet will be taxed when the overheads of regulation to curb the excesses (e.g. Spam, fraud, trust systems, etc) shifts the Laffer Curve such that there is a net increase in beneficial economic activity. The most appropriate mechanism is still yet to be determined, it may well be the governments insist that the credit card companies collect a compulsary levy which is refunded through a later rebate, it may be that governments insist that all transactions pass through a public key infrastructure which collects a small fee for each access, it may be that they charge the telcos a network volume fee leaving it up to companies to recover (ie pass on the costs) to the actual consumer. You actually might be surprised at how many "invisible" taxes and charges there are. I haven't seen any authoritive studies but some people speculate that 40-50% of the US GDP flows through the public sphere in some form or another (federal, state, municipal taxes/charges).
Governments naturally want to broaden their tax base to encompass as much economic activity as possible, efffectively to provide "consumer protection" in return for a slice of the action. When this becomes too onerous, you will see the rise of alternative "currencies" for local exchange, use of other intangible non-taxable entiries (frequent flyer points) and the favorite game of controlled multinational corporations for transfer pricing (ie shift high visible costs into tax heavy juristictions while assets are moved into tax havens). The internet has just opened up a huge bottle of worms as now similar practices are available to the individual with some savvy... can we say offshore gambling joints which have a secondary role as money laundary?.
In short, you can bet your bottom dollar that international governments will move to protect their interests. Currently there is a hands-off policy as, despite the hype, the internet only accounts for a tiny portion of world economic activity. This will change when it starts being at least 10% of all purchases. The only question is in what form it will take and whether the cost is worth the benefits. It is up to all the public interests groups/institutions to carefully scrutinise any proposals to ensure fairness and that any taxes are spent to support the appropriate activity.
jflynn wrote It might be worth looking into the certification standard they mentioned and see what's missing, if anything.
Heck, if you want to eyeball a public key certification system, take a look at OSCAR (Open Secure Certificate ARchitecture). While we all know that Silicon Valley is the centre of the IPO universe;-), some interesting work gets done outside California. Anyone knows whether it is legal to download and test this out within the US juristiction?
While it may be laudable that public institutions are shifting to a more transparent OS, would it result in any increase in real security (as defined by the reduction of risk of data corruption and unauthorised duplication)? Just like replacing cracked window-panes with bullet-proof glass may result in a ra-ra feeling of improved safety, there is no additional protection if people carelessly leave windows open. Security results from modifying dangerous habits, just like we automatically check to see whether the door locks behind us when we leave the house, we need to condition ourselves to automatically log out or follow other basic data integrity procedures (duplicate copies, permissions, etc). This is a process of on-going education, informing people why certain procedures have to be followed despite the initial perceived hassle. One can point to the German Enigma machine which, while technically secure, lost integrity through operators being careless in their transmissions (using same callsigns, repeating the first sign-on phrase, etc) which allowed the British cryptoanalysis an opening. I believe the Americans used a variation of the easily cracked Italian crypto-machine but retained security through more rigorous operational procedures.
Security is only as strong as the weakest point and IMHO, people are the most fallible link in the system, not computers (though bad design flaws/assumptions are tough to figure out too). So, will the political establishment spend the savings from using OpenSource and not licensing windows to reinvest in helping the users effectively use the systems? In my observation hardware might take up 15-30% of the cost, similar for software, but the rest (40-60%) is in the education of users for them to be productive (and don't get me started on the folly of buying Pentium IIIs for web-browsing).
Throwing money at a problem is no solution to thinking through the issues.
bright moments wrote That gives Sony some time to make changes to the PS2 specs. What they need to do is dump the firewire port. Get out of that dead-end technology and get on the USB2 bandwagon. Everybody's doing it, so why get left behind in the dust with proprietary gear, even if it is better. I mean, didn't Sony learn anything from betamax?
Have you got any evidence to back up your claims? My understanding is that IEE 1391 (aka firewire) is a peer-peer connection whereas USB is host-based. Sony is a very savvy consumer electronics company (one of the few Japanese companies to be truely international in scope) and if they've made the commercial decision to put iLink (their name for IEEE 1391 to avoid Apple's firewire branding tax), others are likely to follow. They would not have gone to the trouble of putting it into their digital TVs, camcorders, etc.... unless they expected they would benefit. While some PC-centered groups would be very happy for consumers to stick to their nice predictable upgrade path (RamBus, FutureIO, etc), I'm afraid the world doesn't work that way.
As for your claim that everyone is doing it, I would be very interested to learn your sample size of "everyone". Parroting popular press with their own ad-driven agendas is OK if you wish to follow the herd but then in my observation of nature, herds tend to be driven to the slaughter house. Consumer market where unit costs are critical, is completely different from the techical market where robustness, functionality and future development path credibility is much more highly valued. For example, betamax is widely used in the media production industry.
So, to return to the point, what evidence have you that firewire is a dead-end technology?
Well basically Cobalt sells standalone server appliances and rackmount systems, a niche area eminently suited for Linux due to hands-off maintenance and need for long-term stability. Rather intrigingly, they use MIPS-based chips (is similar to SGI) which, despite corporate x86 fixation, is a very cost-effective and efficient processor. If one ignores benchmark pissing contests, MIPS chips actually produce very good real-world application performance per dollar. Some generic reviews can be found by searching zdnet for their products. While I have no clue as to their success in the wider market, I note that several ISPs offer bulk CPU/storage/network based on amortised capital cost + (storage+bandwidth) operational charges. This may be a good choice for companies looking for a place to park their corporate data without worrying about the fine details.
The interesting question for/.ers is should Cobalt be viewed as a company that supports the OpenSource philosophy? Despite porting Linux to use MIPS, as far as I'm aware, they have not contributed their port back into mainstream (correct me if I'm mistaken). Despite distribution hiccips and angst, RedHat have recognised the value of the Linux community by releasing a portion of its IPO shares to the hacker community but then their success is directly tied to the availability of high quality source. Cobalt is not exactly the same situation being more a vertical integrator rather than Linux distributor/support.
I suspose the point of all this musing is to think and explore the relationship between traditional businesses and the OpenSource "gift economy" as detailed by ESR. Would insisting on a gift (of shares) be considered boorish? A "gift" which is automatically expected suddenly shifts from a voluntary exchange of appreciation to a compulsary tithe on the future goodwill (ie thou must give away x servers or else!) which could shatter the easy-going nature of the OpenSource community. While individuals can be expected to keep social balances in their heads (e.g. cousin x gave y last Xmas so I'll give z in return where y~=z), corporations are run on tough balance sheets principles under recognised accounting rules with the sole objective aim of increasing "value" to "shareholders". This creates an unresolved issue in dicussing how corporations can both support and benefit from OpenSource without being seen as overly exploitive (which could potentially lead to loss of goodwill). What do people think?
It is not aways easy to determine the precise breakdown between in- and out-sourcing. Given the rapid mobility of the high-tech workforce, perhaps a better perspective would be what career structure can the company offer employees?
Thus to keep someone in-house, the project would have to be of reasonable duration and of core relevance to the business with on-going committement, perhaps targetted at a family man/worman looking for stable employment. The skills and knowledge/training involved would require a fairly high salary so you have to look carefully at whether the product would be long-term competitive (forget patents/copyrights, with software anything can be duplicated/replicated).
- Outsourcing for specialised skills that would not have the volume of involvement to keep an expert happy/interested. Also for once-off events like security audit, conformance testing, etc... The key factor is whether the company is located in an geographical area with enough diversity of skills.
- Sub-contracting/casual stuff for things that others can do better, suits part-timers who need/like variety and are young enough to travel. You're going to find it hard to keep footloose staff so its better not to tie the success of the project to upwardly mobile people who will up and move.
- really urgent stuff, well I can be cynical here and say to form a subcompany and offer mega-options to attract suckers to sweat 100 hour weeks before they burn out and crash or have an anuresyn (sp?) before 30 but then money is not important, right ?
I suggest that you view employment as being a sliding scale and be flexible in your hiring procudures. Given the choices out there temping, contract, equity partner, etc, you afford to be selective in your choice of personnel.
The Cunctator wrote As you can see from checking my user info, I'm at -8. Restarting is certainly one possibility; another would be to write such scintillatingly good posts that they get wildly up-moderated. The problem with that is that you have to write a scintillatingly good comment pretty quickly; posts written after the first hour or two of a/. posting, I think, are largely ignored.
Now this is an area where "tribal elders" come in useful. Often there are topics which have been heaviliy debated in a past thread and as a result, Rob may have modified (as in this case) the moderation process. But whenever new readers/users enter the community, they are unaware of this history and a similar process of education of/. processes reoccurs (the metaphorical smack around the head with a cluebat).
In corporations, this is called tacit knowledge and when enough natural migration or significant downsizing of the smartest people occur, can lead to a significant loss of "know-how" and resulting dysfunctional decline. For example, by reading previous threads on moderation, repeated posts that could occur periodically would be minimised (and thus avoid boring and eventually driving away the regulars).
Perhaps as a service, for the people who are new (ie in their grace period), if they attempt to submit a comment, as part of the preview process a couple of links to related threads (based on keywords?) could be supplied with a request to check and see whether they are actually adding anything new to the topic. Hopefully this would bring newcomers up to speed on the jargon and dynamics of/. as quickly as possible so they can begin to contribute useful posts and maintain the high editorial and reflective level (fervent hope here!).
The other thing that may help is that over time, some people would be recognised as designated specialists (in say RedHat or SGI) due to consistently high insights (algorithmically, perform a cluster analysis on topic components) and they get to maintain sub-FAQs/mini-whythis and perhaps the responsibility of contributing a historical context and wrapup session to each thread. Not to deprecate Rob's efforts but it would reduce his workload allowing him to concentrate on selecting the topics and working on the high level structure of/.
kovacsp wrote What does everybody think of an LDAP directory of all registered slashdot users ala the Netscape Directory? I, personally, think it'd be kinda useful, and neat!
Wouldn't this defeat the purpose of annonymous contributors by revealing their identities? Before people jump in with the suggestion of using their slashdot handle to redirect mail, I would note that many people value their privacy (ie have been overwhelmed by spam) and more email is often the last thing we need in busy lives (pause for mass amen). If authenticity is required, I would like to see at least one level of screen, if nothing else to control the information overload. Some suggestions
- Rob creates handles along the lines of name@slashdot.org for registered users
- a local private/public key is generated (optional) that on receipt and validation of the user's real PGP key (whatever that means), substitutes the slashdot key.
- a user controlled mechanism for carrying conversations beyond the normal termination of threads, ie default of ignore direct messages unless allowed (think 2 way matrix which if you look up a user's info, gives directions for further communications if on the allowed list)
The weakness is that/. security measures have to be adequate for people to have some degree of trust that their privacy/anonymity won't be compromised. Maintaining a balance between public exposure to ensure community credibility and a level of obscurity to respect personal opinions is a tricky act to implement. Perhaps I'm just dreaming, that in a global communications media with rapidly changing technology, there is no static solution. At the very least, we should be able to opt out of the system if it doesn't suit their needs (anyone notice it's funny how hotmail doesn't allow you to easily add but not delete accounts?).
This is EXACTLY what most GNU / Open source advocates are looking for. Here's a software standard that makes software easier to write. Who cares what OS / Hardware you're writing for? It's all a standard, just re-compile for the other platform.
Yes but who gets to define the standards?
My general observation of the computer industry suggests there are several variants of what are commonly called "standards" (oh and toss in the word open somewhere to really confuse matters).
- evolved standards, resulting from a bunch of people trying to solve a specific problem and iterating towards a solution (e.g. Gl->OpenGL->Web3D?)
- committee standards, a technical specification agreed ahead of time (e.g. Fortran, IETF, W3C sorta)
- defacto standard, an implementation that so completely fills a role/niche that it is universally adopted (e.g. NFS)
- imposed specifications, a base implementation released and through fortunate timing or market dominance, is defined as a standard for conformance
The problem is that it is extremely hard to create universal standards that work well the FIRST time. Usually at least two or more implementations hitting real-world bottlenecks are necessary to define a flexible standard that covers enough variances of the problem space for it to be widely adopted. Plus major issues in allowing it to evolve over time without any preconception of future technologies (witness Fortran 66, 77, 8x, 90, 95, etc). This learning curve puts a serious crimp on progress, especially as the hardware tech evolves faster than software development.
Anything that gives CHOICES is OK in my book...
I would qualify this by observing that it takes bloody-mindedness and sheer Machiavellian talent to get any largeish group with a multitude of self-interests to adopt a common code of practice (see legal conformance or tussels with metric/imperial measurements). Choice of standards that have no external force or non-biased referee insisting on interoperability leads to fragmentation and slower adoption. Combined with the pressures of commercialisation and the prospect of dominating a profitable market, good technical standards can often be distorted, subsumed or replaced by plurity of suboptimal choices.
As they say, standards are good, lets have lots of them.
This is EXACTLY what most GNU / Open source advocates are looking for. Here's a software standard that makes software easier to write. Who cares what OS / Hardware you're writing for? It's all a standard, just re-compile for the other platform.
Yes but who gets to define the standards?
My general observation of the computer industry suggests there are several variants of what are commonly called "standards" (oh and toss in the word open somewhere to really confuse matters).
- evolved standards, resulting from a bunch of people trying to solve a specific problem and iterating towards a solution (e.g. Gl->OpenGL->Web3D?)
- committee standards, a technical specification agreed ahead of time (e.g. Fortran, IETF, W3C sorta)
- defacto standard, an implementation that so completely fills a role/niche that it is universally adopted (e.g. NFS)
- imposed specifications, a base implementation released and through fortunate timing or market dominance, is defined as a standard for conformance
The problem is that it is extremely hard to create universal standards that work well the FIRST time. Usually at least two or more implementations hitting real-world bottlenecks are necessary to define a flexible standard that covers enough variances of the problem space for it to be widely adopted. Plus major issues in allowing it to evolve over time without any preconception of future technologies (witness Fortran 66, 77, 8x, 90, 95, etc). This learning curve puts a serious crimp on progress, especially as the hardware tech evolves faster than software development.
Anything that gives CHOICES is OK in my book... I would qualify this by observing that it takes bloody-mindedness and sheer Machiavellian talent to get any largeish group with a multitude of self-interests to adopt a common code of practice (see legal conformance or tussels with metric/imperial measurements). Choice of standards that have no external force or non-biased referee insisting on interoperability leads to fragmentation and slower adoption. Combined with the pressures of commercialisation and the prospect of dominating a profitable market, good technical standards can often be distorted, subsumed or replaced by plurity of suboptimal choices.
As they say, standards are good, lets have lots of them.
David Gould wrote That brings up an interesting question: I'll admit that I'm pretty interested in my "karma", and want to gain as much as possible, insofar as it's a measure of "acceptance" within the community, or some such warm fuzzy feeling. But is it good for people to become obsessed with this?
Depends on how much emotional attachment you have on external peer pressure. I have heard of reports (but seen no formal studies) that females apply a greater value on the social relationships/status with others whereas guys put greater emphasis on the accomplishments they have achieved. Karma (if you ignore the hip connotations) is just a metric that provides feedback on what are the qualities that the/. audience is looking for. Personally I think it is a good idea as IMHO it encourages more critical reflecting thinking which is in a serious shortage in this day and age of impulse thinking/buying. Others may seek "karma" for the perceived kudos assocaited with it but unless/. becomes a global phenomena, has zero value outside the community. Think of it as a localised social currency:-).
Seriously, it's amazing how fast the stories go by these days. I guess it's an inevitable result of Slashdot becoming so big, but it makes it a lot harder to participate in the discussions. If all the stories have over 300 comments by the time you get to them, all you can really do is read. If you take the time to write a really thoughtful comment, chances are hardly anyone will still be reading the story by the time you post it. This is often my problem. I'm not sure how your idea would help with this problem, but I think it's an important one.
Again, I think you have to look carefully at the effect that Rob is trying to achieve (at least fgrom my observations). The goal is to gain a representative and comprehensive sample of the opinion-space of/. readers, encouraging greater marginal participation and attempting to float to the top good ideas/commentary. Think of the general problem as a genetic search across a global semi-professional audience, attempting to find the centroid (median consensus view) plus boundaries (interesting perspectives/angles) under a self-optimising strategy (moderation). (Aside... if the politicians ever get ahold of this, they'll kill to get their ratings up... maybe Rob should release it only for non-profit use). Thus you want to encourage comments to fill missing holes (if someone has already said something, just agree), discourage repetition and irrelevant gunk, damp down inaccurate information, and dynamically redefine the objective goal to achieve greater illumination and agreement/action.
The size of the submissions and the short time span of posts may be a problem if/. expands as you point out. Some possible solutions include splitting levels -1 to 1 into separate geographical and/or time zones, but merging higher level comments (a la multigrid iteration). It would be an interesting research project to find how such communications patterns can scale to thousands or even millions of comments/people and the resulting time/energy efficiency for disseminating problems and creating solutions.
IQ wrote Recently - in the last 12 months - this has been overrun with the paid trolls from M$. That is a problem. Moderation is an attempt to rid this site of those (futile) trolls. And I am willing to assist in that worthwhile task.
Foruntately (or unfortunately as you see it), SlashDot has the policy of being completely open to all comers, regardless of inherent bias. If this was purely a non-profit community then there would be no problems but unforuntately OpenSource and the internet are very business sensitive where branding and marketing hype can outweigh technical merits.
The way polticians handle it is that lobbyists are required to declare any financial interests. Similar rules apply to journalists and truth-in-advertising (an oxymoron if ever I heard one). Perhaps a compromise is that people can still remain anonymous but if they declare a financial interest, create a special AC name for them (e.g. Corporate FUDer or GNU Advocate) to make it clear that their writings are not personal opinions. Thus their opinions and thoughts are still accepted but people would adjust (as appropriate) for the spin that is being directed from the source. The other measure of self-protection is that people cite the user info when refering to a previous post so that others can check the reputation and/or karma to get a feel for the level of weight of that opinion.
Otherwise things could get a little nasty in the future as was the case down under in Australia when a popular radio talkback presenter was found to be accepting "commissions" from bank consortium on commenting (or more accurately not commenting) on financial deregulation (I believe 5 separate reviews were initially launched). Nothing wrong with have a diversity of views but it is worthwhile to NOT surpress potentially diversive but valid criticisms/feedback, as well as to expose hidden agendas to the harsh light of public truth and scrutiny.
Rob wrote Finally is an interesting idea that has been proposed a few times that I just wanted to throw out for discussion. As it stands, you only see the moderator controls when you have moderator points to use. What if the moderator controls were always visible, but when you submitted the form, they were only counted if you had moderator points. Oh, and you wouldn't know if you had points.
Actually a slight variant of this idea might be worthwhile. Instead of moderating every post, the reader gets to moderate a random subset. This gives
- a baseline reference so that a score of 2 would be of roughly equal quality which can be confirmed by looking at other posts
- subset reduces the amount of hard thinking required and given enough samples, should be an accurate reflection of the total population (any statisticians out there that can confirm?)
- equality and there is greater opportunities for moderation so even those who don't reply, get a chance to shape the conversational flow (a problem with teaching is encouraging the passive listeners who do think deeply but take time and thus miss the discussion window)
- encourage a larger segment of readers to moderate would slow down the early posters and thus spread the discussion time-span out a bit more, thus (hopefully) avoiding quick off-the-cuff bursts and evening out load on the server
The only negative feature I can see is that some thought has to b e given to how the "random" subset needs to be selected as you want adequate coverage of all the posts to give later entries or the marginal AC's a better chance for good ideas to float to the top.
witten makes some very good points As slashdot's popularity grew, the small community-based discussions turned into a frothing troll-ridden free-for-all. And he saw moderation as his only choice in trying to combat the trolls. However, in the long run, moderation is a losing proposition. Try to squelch the trolls, and they'll be that much more determined to screw with the system.
Given its positive connotations (more==good), I suspect that the karma system will only exacerbate the troll problem as more people post to gain enough feedback (funny or otherwise) to achieve extra height on their/. soapbox. While advertisers would be estactic at the extra traffic, it makes it harder for the time-limited reader to pick out the above average comments. As economists have noted, this leads to cogestion effects (everyone talks a little louder ultimately making the whole room too noisy) while imposing a negative externality cost on other people (increasing time taken to moderate, then moderate the moderators, then....).
Solving problems like this are difficult (think trying to balance a real community). As noted in an earlier post, you have to look very carefully at the social dynamics and add appropriate dampers or incentive structures. One rather simple solution is to given posters a chance to self-moderate and then reward those who moderators concur (ie negative karma if someone thought their post was funny but everyone else thought it was a troll). Then hopefully a reputation system like E-Bay would be encouraged through peer pressure to conform and improve the quality of posts which is (so far) definitely above the average newsgroup.
The other thing that may be of some use is to encourage very high karma posters to write wrap-up reviews so that late attendees can get the whole picture without wading through all 200+ messages. Ultimately I think being more creative in the the choice of categories and a descriptive filtering language (as other have suggested) will control the complexity but given the wide variety of suggestions Rob has so far, it might be worthwhile setting up some careful double-blind experiments, say selecting random threads to compare 2 moderation techniques then looking at the distribution of scores to make quantitative measurements of effectiveness. You know, that thingy we call the scientific method:-). As we say here, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
Much as geeks like to think otherwise, companies like Apple cannot afford to develop computer for the 10-15% of the population that are power-users. For many people good enough at reasonable cost would be adequate for their needs. Afterall, how many word processors need 1 Gflop performance?
The hardware is just the canvas, what are the killer applications that will drive the next generation of products? I suspect the consumers would be a lot happier for people to come up with good tools to make their life a little easier. I think we can accept that Apple has recognised this trend by reducing the range of choices into 4 product lines with perhaps the personal mobile device the only missing gap. Perhaps its time that geeks (and I mean it in the nicest way) get their grubby hands off the technology and allow normal people to define what they want. Smart salespeople don't sell products, they help the customer achieve their desires.
Businesses ignore the laws of economics at their peril. Linux, due to its open-source nature, has several unique factors going for it
- long-term staying power, unlike companies who only produce software for the latest and greatest (due to inelastic demand, thus higher margins), open source can migrate with the platform and thus reduce transistional and maintenance costs
- diversity of hardware, because it is ported to a wide range of platforms, the code is more robust and resiliant to disruptions, a critical factor in stability
- efficiency of execution, because it was designed for lower-performance hardware, more thought has gone into the architecture which means that less money has to be spent on hardware
- due to the stability factor, the combined hardware+software service turns into a durable good and can thus be amortised over a longer time period, rather than a consumable item requiring regular upgrading and replacement
- rapid developmental feedback ensures greater responsitivity to the market as effectively the developers are also the consumers. Rather than bringing out a potential marketing lemon, the product evolves to completely fill an application niche and creating an absolute advantage (witness sendmail, bind, etc)
- wider pool of talent, because of its low-cost nature, any person can pick it up and extend. While not everyone may have the talent to be a hard core kernel hacker, the exposure will create a deeper pool of ideas to draw upon. Thus the marginal utility is higher than for a priced product
Note that not everything is roses, there are some structural problems with the OpenSource model, in particular the lack of pricing signals to indicate the software of greatest potential value. Thus it has the appearance of following commercial trends or personal pet projects (witness the significant freshmeat interest in 3D games against more mission critical functions such as support for wireless). This is not knocking the OpenSource model but just an observation where the commercial market is superior. Thus Linux will have a role in business just as closed applications have a different focus.
Before people start running enthusiastically towards the cliff dropoff, I'd suggest some thought about what are the desired objectives (besides the obvious troll of "I deserves x karma because my writing is so scintillating")
Some personal observations
Fact - you get moderation points the more you post Positive feedback loop - more people naturally post Negative Feedback - threads get rather lengthy
Fact - more messages mean less time spent scanning through low-scores Negative feedback loop - interesting messages can get ignored in the noise Positive feedback - people set higher quality barriers
Fact - moderation is applied equally to all posts Negative feedback loop - early posts are more likely to be well read/received and later ones ignored (think Fibonnacci series and integrate the total number of moderated posts)
I think we should congratulate Rob on trying to satisfy the largest common subset of/.ers. I would like to offer a few minor variations to the ideas he has suggested:
- self moderation - give people the chance to nominate their posts as funny/troll/comment etc. This will (hopefully) reduce the load on the moderators
- give other readers more control over their filter, have the initial coarse numbering scheme, then finer control like (ignore trolls 2, add +1 to person X, add it 50% people consider it funny)
- 15 minute of fame - one random (or semi-random) post per thread to be given score of 5. This is like random breath testing, if you know that your post could be eyeballed by a sizeable fragment of/. readers, would you be encouraged to be more careful in your average writing? Debateable...
- karma seekers - the problem with mass communications is that mediocracy tends to dominate, e.g. newsgroups find inital experts are driven out by the noise. It would be nice if I could permanently donate my karma to the rare gurus that do wander past so that they could be encouraged to post more enlightening information rather than fighting through the history ranks
As noted in a thread, long long ago, SlashDot is more like a cocktail party than newspaper so if Rob can find good mechanisms for finding and amplifying interesting thoughts, we should all applaud him.
The issue comes down to who gets to control the standards for interfacing to your future digital TV (I beleive analog transmission is due to be phased out by 2004?) and thus eye-ball time (if stories of teenage 40 hour/week watching TV is true). By aggressively pushing the brand awareness, alternative choices don't even get a look-in, especially if you can default to your content site. Selling hardware is not profitable, but claiming a slice of the on-going revenue stream for services is. By defining and thus controling the OS standards, they can get advanced notice of future applications and thus breathing space to put a foot into high growth areas before others catch on. Time to market is a killer advantage which is worth a fortune if you can establish leadership in a game category (witness Quake, C&C, etc).
Now the technical question (considering this is SlashDot) is should the x86 family really suitable as a media processor compared with alternatives such as Sony Emotion Engine or SH4? Would the component count be low and cheap enough to support broadband, ASDL or even wireless? And would the Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers be taking this lying down?
To put things on a more cynical note, isn't one cause of the public apathy towards voting that many of the "issues" are already more efficiently resolved by special interest groups and lobbyists?
One has to think carefully about what a political system really provides. In its broadest sense, you can describe it as a mechanism for the population to ennunciate what it wants. While conquering a few continents may have worked in imperial times, modern states are much more complex, especially in a multi-connected world. However, there should be some basic principles
- every adult should be able to participate - a system that encourages selection of executive/operational people from the largest pool of talent - self corrective mechanisms to provide constant feedback
One can then speculate how the internet would change or facilitate the process. I would speculate 2 new elements, a better "memory" of past events (and promises/performances) as web sites record opinions, improved connectivity leading to faster dissemination of "good/bad" policies and thus (hopefully) greater diversity of views being debated.
Note that a simple vote is not always an obvious signal except for strong public issues. More sophisticated techniques exist such as multicriteria objective optimisation which balances tradeoffs between many different desires. Personally I would vote for simplification of the legal system just so that ordinary people don't need law degrees just to understand how goverance works.
Throwing together 128 boards is not the same as delivering a decent SMP, especially when you look at the economic angle. Hard engineering and economic realities
- each CPU throws off the thermal equivalent of a warm brick. Unless you've got decent cooling design, expect to waste a lot of floor space and/or exterior cooling
- handling hardware failure, you need diagnostics and graceful recovery, and with the complexity increasing non-linearly with the number of component combinations, expect some serious downtime
- balanced systems... putting together the I/O subsystems + associated maintenance is going to cost an arm and a leg. Remember that raw hardware is only 15-30% of the total cost of any large-scale installation.
- the cost is in the hardware but the value is in the applications. Unless there are compelling applications or a decent software base, it will be difficult to shift enough applications in time to beat Moore's Law.
You know, it's interesting that the most intriguing hardware comes from closed or partially closed systems. We hear more "cools" and "awesome" when we talk about vendors of closed systems like Apple or SGI. When's the last time we featured an article like "HP comes out with new Pavilion line of PCs"?
The answer is rather simple. Every product must pay for itself otherwise the company goes kaput and there are no products at all. It then stands to reason that in a low volume market (ie exotic hardware, specialised features) they can't afford to let anyone else copy it otherwise they will be completely undercut. Hence the use of patents and obfustation to hide trade secrets.
On the other hand, in a commodity driven market which the wider PC is, volume and market share is key to enforcing the desired price/time curve and maximising total revenue. In this situation you want your products to be used as widely as possible and therefore, open specifications are necessary. The trick (as the top players have found) is to define the specifications ahead of time then release them after your products are on the shelf. Oh, and play games with upstream/downstream suppliers (if necessary, fob off market regulators by calling it quality control so you can eyeball profitable areas of expansion) to make yourself indispensible in your place on the value chain.
One of these days, someone should write a book on PC pricing strategams. It would make very interesting reading to see how the consumer has been milked.
Every profession, once it reaches a point of maturity (I'll leave it up to the pundits as to whether IT has hit that sweet spot yet) establishes a set of customs or cultural norms that, if nothing else, help protect themselves from excessese and self destruction and help define their purpose for existance. The doctors have their Hippocratic Oath, lawyers their client-attorny priviledge, and the largest corporations a distinctive mindset. In fact this is a phenomenum that ESR has detailed quite nicely in his writings about the hacker community and open source development.
The question is that if the computing industry is to move from being seen as the province of self-absorbed geeks and nerds, to the level of expertise and professional found in top-notch surgical teams (and I believe the level at the top of technical mastery of details is on a par), I would have to argue that a code of conduct be ennunciated so at least we can define a standard for members to be identified with.
What would such a code for hackers be? Ultimately any moral, cultural or ethical code can only be self-directed, motivated by the social conventions of peers. One may note that many of the ideals in media (Star Trek, Star Wars, Asimov's Laws of Robotics, etc) have passed into popular language (e.g. Prime Directive) so there is some scope of encouraging people to be more like say Linus rather than XXXX (name your favorite peeve). As for some suggestions to get people thinking, I'd toss in the following
1) Understand the hacker's code and why it exists 2) Remember the history of the source before you 3) Try not to delete or corrupt data, you never know when it might come in handy 4) Avoid perverting code beyond the purpose for which it was designed 5) Give attribution to hacks you borrows 6).... ???
Cleverness for its own sake may be satisfying for the ego but ultimately, what defines a hacker and his/her purpose in life?
OK, let's get down to the basics - what portion of time is spent actively learning as compared with other recreational/consumerism activities?
If you gave a teenager the choice between reading a book or playing video games, what would be their response?
Would your kids rather watch Discovery Channel or go out on a field trip in the rain?
Is the role of schools to include social and vocational aspects? If not, then what is the role of teachers as compared with parent?
Would kids prefer to emulate Einstein or Michaal Jordan? Do they know the difference between fame and celebrity?
Given the many leisure activities available to people, what motivating force would encourage them to tackle the hard subjects?
And by the way, these problems are not unique. Even Japan are finding their educational system is starting to creak. It is easy to handle outrages like high school shootings but slow erosion of standards and educational values are much more difficult to solve.
While SGI may have no peers in certain specialised market niches, I would humbly suggest that it come to the realities of the marketplace in pricing third party peripherals and knic-knac add-ons. Doing head-head comparisons of features, I would quite happily pay a premium for SGI functions that are truely unique and truely add productive value to work. However, as a budget concious customer, I would be royally pissed off at the massive markups on bundled 3rd party goods (admittedly it has gotten better in recent years) with limited choice (try getting Irix drivers for exotic hardware). As hardware and software becomes a commodity, the power of choice shifts to the buyer. People who purchase SGI goods are not idiots, but how long will loyalty last when they find out that adding the SGI name to a rebadged product adds significantly to the cost (and this goes to any branded vs white box hardware)? SGI does have a lot of technical brilliance in its favor and it could become a rebound story a la Apple with its adoption of Linux. However, they really need to have some clarity of thought as to the value they are offering compared with their competition and provide efficient execution in an era of faster business cycles. Promises are nice but delivery is what counts.
Slashdot Mirror
Sheeeees LL thanks! . . . da hell is that . . yer thesis?!
No, just a curious wanderer on the information backlanes (it's rather interesting what you can pick up just rummaging around academic research papers).
One intriguing point that nobody has picked up is the rather interesting convergence between the Internet, wireless and global positioning system. If you think you can avoid sales tax by accessing an out-of-country server, you can forget about it. The companies are already three steps ahead of any scam any individual can dream up.
My speculation is that since governments will make GPS compulsary for mobile phones (and thus PDAs) on the pretext of ensuring emergency rescue, they can tax the physical point of purchase (all mobile phone tracking stations can identify the cell of origin) and since all IP addresses can be matched to physical devices, they can thus ultimately match to an identity whether individual or business tax number. It is also not well known but a certain Redmond company has invested heavily in an electronic financial clearing house. Taxes may be onerous but at least they are open to public scrutiny (e.g. the Gore FCC telecom charge to fund internet access for disadvantaged schools). On the other hand, who notices the nickle and dime software "tax" paid on every single transaction? Witness Adobe's bright idea of charging a fee for every secure PDF file that is copied. Not to mention that your purchasing patterns will be recorded by some computer somewhere for later
The price of a free society may be eternal vigilance but at least the consumers should be informed about any "hidden" costs.
LL
With the apparent inevitability of taxes on transactions over the web, what exactly will/should be defined as private transactions that are not to be taxed
This is not an easy answer as it squarely hits the contentious questions of sovereignty, juristiction, and individual beliefs of the role of governments. Firstly, some background. As a starting point, I'd recommend people have a gawk at understanding the relationship between taxes and economic activity. Basically as economies become more sophisticated, activities move from private endeavours (e.g. subsidence farming) to measureable activities (ie tracking the cashflow through the national accounting systems) to take advantage of the legal framework (contract law, safety standards, etc). This is one factor in a country's GNP, eliminating the inefficiencies in bartering by moving to a currency based transaction system with improved liquidity and retained value. To see the effect, just look at the economic collapse of Russia which has basically reverted to bartering goods between factories and inviduals. The original US constitution assumed an informed agreement between equal sovereign individuals (private property rights) which have been supplanted and augmented by federal commerce codes which support legal contracts for inter-state and international trade.
Now with the internet, there are already taxes on the seller (income tax, sales tax, incorporation, etc). What is worrying some groups is that the internet provides an alternative mechanism to minimise a consumer tax collected at point of physical sale. This is a particular concern with new taxes such as the forthcoming GST in Australia which wants to include the sale of secondhand goods within the tax base (previously excluded as it was too difficult to calculate an equivalent value in dollar terms). The issue is rather murky (OK downright opaque) as the internet is a half-way network caught between the concept of private intranets (original federation of AARNET servers) and a regulated public carriageway (telcos, radio, ISPs, etc). Hence there are multiple juristictions (not to mention different global standards) and inappropriate legal precedences with favor one party (usually the incumbents).
To answer your question, the Internet will be taxed when the overheads of regulation to curb the excesses (e.g. Spam, fraud, trust systems, etc) shifts the Laffer Curve such that there is a net increase in beneficial economic activity. The most appropriate mechanism is still yet to be determined, it may well be the governments insist that the credit card companies collect a compulsary levy which is refunded through a later rebate, it may be that governments insist that all transactions pass through a public key infrastructure which collects a small fee for each access, it may be that they charge the telcos a network volume fee leaving it up to companies to recover (ie pass on the costs) to the actual consumer. You actually might be surprised at how many "invisible" taxes and charges there are. I haven't seen any authoritive studies but some people speculate that 40-50% of the US GDP flows through the public sphere in some form or another (federal, state, municipal taxes/charges).
Governments naturally want to broaden their tax base to encompass as much economic activity as possible, efffectively to provide "consumer protection" in return for a slice of the action. When this becomes too onerous, you will see the rise of alternative "currencies" for local exchange, use of other intangible non-taxable entiries (frequent flyer points) and the favorite game of controlled multinational corporations for transfer pricing (ie shift high visible costs into tax heavy juristictions while assets are moved into tax havens). The internet has just opened up a huge bottle of worms as now similar practices are available to the individual with some savvy
In short, you can bet your bottom dollar that international governments will move to protect their interests. Currently there is a hands-off policy as, despite the hype, the internet only accounts for a tiny portion of world economic activity. This will change when it starts being at least 10% of all purchases. The only question is in what form it will take and whether the cost is worth the benefits. It is up to all the public interests groups/institutions to carefully scrutinise any proposals to ensure fairness and that any taxes are spent to support the appropriate activity.
LL
jflynn wrote
;-), some interesting work gets done outside California. Anyone knows whether it is legal to download and test this out within the US juristiction?
It might be worth looking into the certification standard they mentioned and see what's missing, if anything.
Heck, if you want to eyeball a public key certification system, take a look at OSCAR (Open Secure Certificate ARchitecture). While we all know that Silicon Valley is the centre of the IPO universe
LL
While it may be laudable that public institutions are shifting to a more transparent OS, would it result in any increase in real security (as defined by the reduction of risk of data corruption and unauthorised duplication)? Just like replacing cracked window-panes with bullet-proof glass may result in a ra-ra feeling of improved safety, there is no additional protection if people carelessly leave windows open. Security results from modifying dangerous habits, just like we automatically check to see whether the door locks behind us when we leave the house, we need to condition ourselves to automatically log out or follow other basic data integrity procedures (duplicate copies, permissions, etc). This is a process of on-going education, informing people why certain procedures have to be followed despite the initial perceived hassle. One can point to the German Enigma machine which, while technically secure, lost integrity through operators being careless in their transmissions (using same callsigns, repeating the first sign-on phrase, etc) which allowed the British cryptoanalysis an opening. I believe the Americans used a variation of the easily cracked Italian crypto-machine but retained security through more rigorous operational procedures.
Security is only as strong as the weakest point and IMHO, people are the most fallible link in the system, not computers (though bad design flaws/assumptions are tough to figure out too). So, will the political establishment spend the savings from using OpenSource and not licensing windows to reinvest in helping the users effectively use the systems? In my observation hardware might take up 15-30% of the cost, similar for software, but the rest (40-60%) is in the education of users for them to be productive (and don't get me started on the folly of buying Pentium IIIs for web-browsing).
Throwing money at a problem is no solution to thinking through the issues.
LL
bright moments wrote
.... unless they expected they would benefit. While some PC-centered groups would be very happy for consumers to stick to their nice predictable upgrade path (RamBus, FutureIO, etc), I'm afraid the world doesn't work that way.
That gives Sony some time to make changes to the PS2 specs. What they need to do is dump the firewire port. Get out of that dead-end technology and get on the USB2 bandwagon. Everybody's doing it, so why get left behind in the dust with proprietary gear, even if it is better. I mean, didn't Sony learn anything from betamax?
Have you got any evidence to back up your claims? My understanding is that IEE 1391 (aka firewire) is a peer-peer connection whereas USB is host-based. Sony is a very savvy consumer electronics company (one of the few Japanese companies to be truely international in scope) and if they've made the commercial decision to put iLink (their name for IEEE 1391 to avoid Apple's firewire branding tax), others are likely to follow. They would not have gone to the trouble of putting it into their digital TVs, camcorders, etc
As for your claim that everyone is doing it, I would be very interested to learn your sample size of "everyone". Parroting popular press with their own ad-driven agendas is OK if you wish to follow the herd but then in my observation of nature, herds tend to be driven to the slaughter house. Consumer market where unit costs are critical, is completely different from the techical market where robustness, functionality and future development path credibility is much more highly valued. For example, betamax is widely used in the media production industry.
So, to return to the point, what evidence have you that firewire is a dead-end technology?
LL
Well basically Cobalt sells standalone server appliances and rackmount systems, a niche area eminently suited for Linux due to hands-off maintenance and need for long-term stability. Rather intrigingly, they use MIPS-based chips (is similar to SGI) which, despite corporate x86 fixation, is a very cost-effective and efficient processor. If one ignores benchmark pissing contests, MIPS chips actually produce very good real-world application performance per dollar. Some generic reviews can be found by searching zdnet for their products. While I have no clue as to their success in the wider market, I note that several ISPs offer bulk CPU/storage/network based on amortised capital cost + (storage+bandwidth) operational charges. This may be a good choice for companies looking for a place to park their corporate data without worrying about the fine details.
/.ers is should Cobalt be viewed as a company that supports the OpenSource philosophy? Despite porting Linux to use MIPS, as far as I'm aware, they have not contributed their port back into mainstream (correct me if I'm mistaken). Despite distribution hiccips and angst, RedHat have recognised the value of the Linux community by releasing a portion of its IPO shares to the hacker community but then their success is directly tied to the availability of high quality source. Cobalt is not exactly the same situation being more a vertical integrator rather than Linux distributor/support.
The interesting question for
I suspose the point of all this musing is to think and explore the relationship between traditional businesses and the OpenSource "gift economy" as detailed by ESR. Would insisting on a gift (of shares) be considered boorish? A "gift" which is automatically expected suddenly shifts from a voluntary exchange of appreciation to a compulsary tithe on the future goodwill (ie thou must give away x servers or else!) which could shatter the easy-going nature of the OpenSource community. While individuals can be expected to keep social balances in their heads (e.g. cousin x gave y last Xmas so I'll give z in return where y~=z), corporations are run on tough balance sheets principles under recognised accounting rules with the sole objective aim of increasing "value" to "shareholders". This creates an unresolved issue in dicussing how corporations can both support and benefit from OpenSource without being seen as overly exploitive (which could potentially lead to loss of goodwill). What do people think?
LL
It is not aways easy to determine the precise breakdown between in- and out-sourcing. Given the rapid mobility of the high-tech workforce, perhaps a better perspective would be what career structure can the company offer employees?
... The key factor is whether the company is located in an geographical area with enough diversity of skills.
Thus to keep someone in-house, the project would have to be of reasonable duration and of core relevance to the business with on-going committement, perhaps targetted at a family man/worman looking for stable employment. The skills and knowledge/training involved would require a fairly high salary so you have to look carefully at whether the product would be long-term competitive (forget patents/copyrights, with software anything can be duplicated/replicated).
- Outsourcing for specialised skills that would not have the volume of involvement to keep an expert happy/interested. Also for once-off events like security audit, conformance testing, etc
- Sub-contracting/casual stuff for things that others can do better, suits part-timers who need/like variety and are young enough to travel. You're going to find it hard to keep footloose staff so its better not to tie the success of the project to upwardly mobile people who will up and move.
- really urgent stuff, well I can be cynical here and say to form a subcompany and offer mega-options to attract suckers to sweat 100 hour weeks before they burn out and crash or have an anuresyn (sp?) before 30 but then money is not important, right ?
I suggest that you view employment as being a sliding scale and be flexible in your hiring procudures. Given the choices out there temping, contract, equity partner, etc, you afford to be selective in your choice of personnel.
LL
The Cunctator wrote /. posting, I think, are largely ignored.
/. processes reoccurs (the metaphorical smack around the head with a cluebat).
/. as quickly as possible so they can begin to contribute useful posts and maintain the high editorial and reflective level (fervent hope here!).
/.
As you can see from checking my user info, I'm at -8. Restarting is certainly one possibility; another would be to write such scintillatingly good posts that they get wildly up-moderated. The problem with that is that you have to write a scintillatingly good comment pretty quickly; posts written after the first hour or two of a
Now this is an area where "tribal elders" come in useful. Often there are topics which have been heaviliy debated in a past thread and as a result, Rob may have modified (as in this case) the moderation process. But whenever new readers/users enter the community, they are unaware of this history and a similar process of education of
In corporations, this is called tacit knowledge and when enough natural migration or significant downsizing of the smartest people occur, can lead to a significant loss of "know-how" and resulting dysfunctional decline. For example, by reading previous threads on moderation, repeated posts that could occur periodically would be minimised (and thus avoid boring and eventually driving away the regulars).
Perhaps as a service, for the people who are new (ie in their grace period), if they attempt to submit a comment, as part of the preview process a couple of links to related threads (based on keywords?) could be supplied with a request to check and see whether they are actually adding anything new to the topic. Hopefully this would bring newcomers up to speed on the jargon and dynamics of
The other thing that may help is that over time, some people would be recognised as designated specialists (in say RedHat or SGI) due to consistently high insights (algorithmically, perform a cluster analysis on topic components) and they get to maintain sub-FAQs/mini-whythis and perhaps the responsibility of contributing a historical context and wrapup session to each thread. Not to deprecate Rob's efforts but it would reduce his workload allowing him to concentrate on selecting the topics and working on the high level structure of
LL
kovacsp wrote
/. security measures have to be adequate for people to have some degree of trust that their privacy/anonymity won't be compromised. Maintaining a balance between public exposure to ensure community credibility and a level of obscurity to respect personal opinions is a tricky act to implement. Perhaps I'm just dreaming, that in a global communications media with rapidly changing technology, there is no static solution. At the very least, we should be able to opt out of the system if it doesn't suit their needs (anyone notice it's funny how hotmail doesn't allow you to easily add but not delete accounts?).
What does everybody think of an LDAP directory of all registered slashdot users ala the Netscape Directory? I, personally, think it'd be kinda useful, and neat!
Wouldn't this defeat the purpose of annonymous contributors by revealing their identities? Before people jump in with the suggestion of using their slashdot handle to redirect mail, I would note that many people value their privacy (ie have been overwhelmed by spam) and more email is often the last thing we need in busy lives (pause for mass amen). If authenticity is required, I would like to see at least one level of screen, if nothing else to control the information overload. Some suggestions
- Rob creates handles along the lines of name@slashdot.org for registered users
- a local private/public key is generated (optional) that on receipt and validation of the user's real PGP key (whatever that means), substitutes the slashdot key.
- a user controlled mechanism for carrying conversations beyond the normal termination of threads, ie default of ignore direct messages unless allowed (think 2 way matrix which if you look up a user's info, gives directions for further communications if on the allowed list)
The weakness is that
LL
This is EXACTLY what most GNU / Open source advocates are looking for. Here's a software standard that makes software easier to write. Who cares what OS / Hardware you're writing for? It's all a standard, just re-compile for the other platform.
Yes but who gets to define the standards?
My general observation of the computer industry suggests there are several variants of what are commonly called "standards" (oh and toss in the word open somewhere to really confuse matters).
- evolved standards, resulting from a bunch of people trying to solve a specific problem and iterating towards a solution (e.g. Gl->OpenGL->Web3D?)
- committee standards, a technical specification agreed ahead of time (e.g. Fortran, IETF, W3C sorta)
- defacto standard, an implementation that so completely fills a role/niche that it is universally adopted (e.g. NFS)
- imposed specifications, a base implementation released and through fortunate timing or market dominance, is defined as a standard for conformance
The problem is that it is extremely hard to create universal standards that work well the FIRST time. Usually at least two or more implementations hitting real-world bottlenecks are necessary to define a flexible standard that covers enough variances of the problem space for it to be widely adopted. Plus major issues in allowing it to evolve over time without any preconception of future technologies (witness Fortran 66, 77, 8x, 90, 95, etc). This learning curve puts a serious crimp on progress, especially as the hardware tech evolves faster than software development.
Anything that gives CHOICES is OK in my book ...
I would qualify this by observing that it takes bloody-mindedness and sheer Machiavellian talent to get any largeish group with a multitude of self-interests to adopt a common code of practice (see legal conformance or tussels with metric/imperial measurements). Choice of standards that have no external force or non-biased referee insisting on interoperability leads to fragmentation and slower adoption. Combined with the pressures of commercialisation and the prospect of dominating a profitable market, good technical standards can often be distorted, subsumed or replaced by plurity of suboptimal choices.
As they say, standards are good, lets have lots of them.
LL
This is EXACTLY what most GNU / Open source advocates are looking for. Here's a software standard that makes software easier to write. Who cares what OS / Hardware you're writing for? It's all a standard, just re-compile for the other platform.
Yes but who gets to define the standards?
My general observation of the computer industry suggests there are several variants of what are commonly called "standards" (oh and toss in the word open somewhere to really confuse matters).
- evolved standards, resulting from a bunch of people trying to solve a specific problem and iterating towards a solution (e.g. Gl->OpenGL->Web3D?)
- committee standards, a technical specification agreed ahead of time (e.g. Fortran, IETF, W3C sorta)
- defacto standard, an implementation that so completely fills a role/niche that it is universally adopted (e.g. NFS)
- imposed specifications, a base implementation released and through fortunate timing or market dominance, is defined as a standard for conformance
The problem is that it is extremely hard to create universal standards that work well the FIRST time. Usually at least two or more implementations hitting real-world bottlenecks are necessary to define a flexible standard that covers enough variances of the problem space for it to be widely adopted. Plus major issues in allowing it to evolve over time without any preconception of future technologies (witness Fortran 66, 77, 8x, 90, 95, etc). This learning curve puts a serious crimp on progress, especially as the hardware tech evolves faster than software development.
Anything that gives CHOICES is OK in my book ...
I would qualify this by observing that it takes bloody-mindedness and sheer Machiavellian talent to get any largeish group with a multitude of self-interests to adopt a common code of practice (see legal conformance or tussels with metric/imperial measurements). Choice of standards that have no external force or non-biased referee insisting on interoperability leads to fragmentation and slower adoption. Combined with the pressures of commercialisation and the prospect of dominating a profitable market, good technical standards can often be distorted, subsumed or replaced by plurity of suboptimal choices.
As they say, standards are good, lets have lots of them.
LL
That brings up an interesting question: I'll admit that I'm pretty interested in my "karma", and want to gain as much as possible, insofar as it's a measure of "acceptance" within the community, or some such warm fuzzy feeling. But is it good for people to become obsessed with this?
Depends on how much emotional attachment you have on external peer pressure. I have heard of reports (but seen no formal studies) that females apply a greater value on the social relationships/status with others whereas guys put greater emphasis on the accomplishments they have achieved. Karma (if you ignore the hip connotations) is just a metric that provides feedback on what are the qualities that the
Seriously, it's amazing how fast the stories go by these days. I guess it's an inevitable result of Slashdot becoming so big, but it makes it a lot harder to participate in the discussions. If all the stories have over 300 comments by the time you get to them, all you can really do is read. If you take the time to write a really thoughtful comment, chances are hardly anyone will still be reading the story by the time you post it. This
is often my problem. I'm not sure how your idea would help with this problem, but I think it's an important one.
Again, I think you have to look carefully at the effect that Rob is trying to achieve (at least fgrom my observations). The goal is to gain a representative and comprehensive sample of the opinion-space of
The size of the submissions and the short time span of posts may be a problem if
LL
Recently - in the last 12 months - this has been overrun with the paid trolls from M$. That is a problem. Moderation is an attempt to rid this site of those (futile) trolls. And I am willing to assist in that worthwhile task.
Foruntately (or unfortunately as you see it), SlashDot has the policy of being completely open to all comers, regardless of inherent bias. If this was purely a non-profit community then there would be no problems but unforuntately OpenSource and the internet are very business sensitive where branding and marketing hype can outweigh technical merits.
The way polticians handle it is that lobbyists are required to declare any financial interests. Similar rules apply to journalists and truth-in-advertising (an oxymoron if ever I heard one). Perhaps a compromise is that people can still remain anonymous but if they declare a financial interest, create a special AC name for them (e.g. Corporate FUDer or GNU Advocate) to make it clear that their writings are not personal opinions. Thus their opinions and thoughts are still accepted but people would adjust (as appropriate) for the spin that is being directed from the source. The other measure of self-protection is that people cite the user info when refering to a previous post so that others can check the reputation and/or karma to get a feel for the level of weight of that opinion.
Otherwise things could get a little nasty in the future as was the case down under in Australia when a popular radio talkback presenter was found to be accepting "commissions" from bank consortium on commenting (or more accurately not commenting) on financial deregulation (I believe 5 separate reviews were initially launched). Nothing wrong with have a diversity of views but it is worthwhile to NOT surpress potentially diversive but valid criticisms/feedback, as well as to expose hidden agendas to the harsh light of public truth and scrutiny.
LL
Rob wrote
Finally is an interesting idea that has been proposed a few times that I just wanted to throw out for discussion. As it stands, you only see the
moderator controls when you have moderator points to use. What if the moderator controls were always
visible, but when you submitted the form, they were only counted if you had moderator points. Oh, and you wouldn't know if you had points.
Actually a slight variant of this idea might be worthwhile. Instead of moderating every post, the reader gets to moderate a random subset. This gives
- a baseline reference so that a score of 2 would be of roughly equal quality which can be confirmed by looking at other posts
- subset reduces the amount of hard thinking required and given enough samples, should be an accurate reflection of the total population (any statisticians out there that can confirm?)
- equality and there is greater opportunities for moderation so even those who don't reply, get a chance to shape the conversational flow (a problem with teaching is encouraging the passive listeners who do think deeply but take time and thus miss the discussion window)
- encourage a larger segment of readers to moderate would slow down the early posters and thus spread the discussion time-span out a bit more, thus (hopefully) avoiding quick off-the-cuff bursts and evening out load on the server
The only negative feature I can see is that some thought has to b e given to how the "random" subset needs to be selected as you want adequate coverage of all the posts to give later entries or the marginal AC's a better chance for good ideas to float to the top.
LL
As slashdot's popularity grew, the small community-based discussions turned into a frothing troll-ridden free-for-all. And he saw moderation as his only choice in trying to combat the trolls. However, in the long run, moderation is a losing proposition. Try to squelch the trolls, and they'll be that much more determined to screw with the system.
Given its positive connotations (more==good), I suspect that the karma system will only exacerbate the troll problem as more people post to gain enough feedback (funny or otherwise) to achieve extra height on their
Solving problems like this are difficult (think trying to balance a real community). As noted in an earlier post, you have to look very carefully at the social dynamics and add appropriate dampers or incentive structures. One rather simple solution is to given posters a chance to self-moderate and then reward those who moderators concur (ie negative karma if someone thought their post was funny but everyone else thought it was a troll). Then hopefully a reputation system like E-Bay would be encouraged through peer pressure to conform and improve the quality of posts which is (so far) definitely above the average newsgroup.
The other thing that may be of some use is to encourage very high karma posters to write wrap-up reviews so that late attendees can get the whole picture without wading through all 200+ messages. Ultimately I think being more creative in the the choice of categories and a descriptive filtering language (as other have suggested) will control the complexity but given the wide variety of suggestions Rob has so far, it might be worthwhile setting up some careful double-blind experiments, say selecting random threads to compare 2 moderation techniques then looking at the distribution of scores to make quantitative measurements of effectiveness. You know, that thingy we call the scientific method
LL
Much as geeks like to think otherwise, companies like Apple cannot afford to develop computer for the 10-15% of the population that are power-users. For many people good enough at reasonable cost would be adequate for their needs. Afterall, how many word processors need 1 Gflop performance?
The hardware is just the canvas, what are the killer applications that will drive the next generation of products? I suspect the consumers would be a lot happier for people to come up with good tools to make their life a little easier. I think we can accept that Apple has recognised this trend by reducing the range of choices into 4 product lines with perhaps the personal mobile device the only missing gap. Perhaps its time that geeks (and I mean it in the nicest way) get their grubby hands off the technology and allow normal people to define what they want. Smart salespeople don't sell products, they help the customer achieve their desires.
LL
Businesses ignore the laws of economics at their peril. Linux, due to its open-source nature, has several unique factors going for it
- long-term staying power, unlike companies who only produce software for the latest and greatest (due to inelastic demand, thus higher margins), open source can migrate with the platform and thus reduce transistional and maintenance costs
- diversity of hardware, because it is ported to a wide range of platforms, the code is more robust and resiliant to disruptions, a critical factor in stability
- efficiency of execution, because it was designed for lower-performance hardware, more thought has gone into the architecture which means that less money has to be spent on hardware
- due to the stability factor, the combined hardware+software service turns into a durable good and can thus be amortised over a longer time period, rather than a consumable item requiring regular upgrading and replacement
- rapid developmental feedback ensures greater responsitivity to the market as effectively the developers are also the consumers. Rather than bringing out a potential marketing lemon, the product evolves to completely fill an application niche and creating an absolute advantage (witness sendmail, bind, etc)
- wider pool of talent, because of its low-cost nature, any person can pick it up and extend. While not everyone may have the talent to be a hard core kernel hacker, the exposure will create a deeper pool of ideas to draw upon. Thus the marginal utility is higher than for a priced product
Note that not everything is roses, there are some structural problems with the OpenSource model, in particular the lack of pricing signals to indicate the software of greatest potential value. Thus it has the appearance of following commercial trends or personal pet projects (witness the significant freshmeat interest in 3D games against more mission critical functions such as support for wireless). This is not knocking the OpenSource model but just an observation where the commercial market is superior. Thus Linux will have a role in business just as closed applications have a different focus.
LL
Before people start running enthusiastically towards the cliff dropoff, I'd suggest some thought about what are the desired objectives (besides the obvious troll of "I deserves x karma because my writing is so scintillating")
/.ers. I would like to offer a few minor variations to the ideas he has suggested:
/. readers, would you be encouraged to be more careful in your average writing? Debateable ...
Some personal observations
Fact - you get moderation points the more you post
Positive feedback loop - more people naturally post
Negative Feedback - threads get rather lengthy
Fact - more messages mean less time spent scanning through low-scores
Negative feedback loop - interesting messages can get ignored in the noise
Positive feedback - people set higher quality barriers
Fact - moderation is applied equally to all posts
Negative feedback loop - early posts are more likely to be well read/received and later ones ignored (think Fibonnacci series and integrate the total number of moderated posts)
I think we should congratulate Rob on trying to satisfy the largest common subset of
- self moderation - give people the chance to nominate their posts as funny/troll/comment etc. This will (hopefully) reduce the load on the moderators
- give other readers more control over their filter, have the initial coarse numbering scheme, then finer control like (ignore trolls 2, add +1 to person X, add it 50% people consider it funny)
- 15 minute of fame - one random (or semi-random) post per thread to be given score of 5. This is like random breath testing, if you know that your post could be eyeballed by a sizeable fragment of
- karma seekers - the problem with mass communications is that mediocracy tends to dominate, e.g. newsgroups find inital experts are driven out by the noise. It would be nice if I could permanently donate my karma to the rare gurus that do wander past so that they could be encouraged to post more enlightening information rather than fighting through the history ranks
As noted in a thread, long long ago, SlashDot is more like a cocktail party than newspaper so if Rob can find good mechanisms for finding and amplifying interesting thoughts, we should all applaud him.
Regards,
LL
The issue comes down to who gets to control the standards for interfacing to your future digital TV (I beleive analog transmission is due to be phased out by 2004?) and thus eye-ball time (if stories of teenage 40 hour/week watching TV is true). By aggressively pushing the brand awareness, alternative choices don't even get a look-in, especially if you can default to your content site. Selling hardware is not profitable, but claiming a slice of the on-going revenue stream for services is. By defining and thus controling the OS standards, they can get advanced notice of future applications and thus breathing space to put a foot into high growth areas before others catch on. Time to market is a killer advantage which is worth a fortune if you can establish leadership in a game category (witness Quake, C&C, etc).
Now the technical question (considering this is SlashDot) is should the x86 family really suitable as a media processor compared with alternatives such as Sony Emotion Engine or SH4? Would the component count be low and cheap enough to support broadband, ASDL or even wireless? And would the Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers be taking this lying down?
LL
To put things on a more cynical note, isn't one cause of the public apathy towards voting that many of the "issues" are already more efficiently resolved by special interest groups and lobbyists?
One has to think carefully about what a political system really provides. In its broadest sense, you can describe it as a mechanism for the population to ennunciate what it wants. While conquering a few continents may have worked in imperial times, modern states are much more complex, especially in a multi-connected world. However, there should be some basic principles
- every adult should be able to participate
- a system that encourages selection of executive/operational people from the largest pool of talent
- self corrective mechanisms to provide constant feedback
One can then speculate how the internet would change or facilitate the process. I would speculate 2 new elements, a better "memory" of past events (and promises/performances) as web sites record opinions, improved connectivity leading to faster dissemination of "good/bad" policies and thus (hopefully) greater diversity of views being debated.
Note that a simple vote is not always an obvious signal except for strong public issues. More sophisticated techniques exist such as multicriteria objective optimisation which balances tradeoffs between many different desires. Personally I would vote for simplification of the legal system just so that ordinary people don't need law degrees just to understand how goverance works.
LL
Throwing together 128 boards is not the same as delivering a decent SMP, especially when you look at the economic angle. Hard engineering and economic realities
... putting together the I/O subsystems + associated maintenance is going to cost an arm and a leg. Remember that raw hardware is only 15-30% of the total cost of any large-scale installation.
- each CPU throws off the thermal equivalent of a warm brick. Unless you've got decent cooling design, expect to waste a lot of floor space and/or exterior cooling
- handling hardware failure, you need diagnostics and graceful recovery, and with the complexity increasing non-linearly with the number of component combinations, expect some serious downtime
- balanced systems
- the cost is in the hardware but the value is in the applications. Unless there are compelling applications or a decent software base, it will be difficult to shift enough applications in time to beat Moore's Law.
LL
The answer is rather simple. Every product must pay for itself otherwise the company goes kaput and there are no products at all. It then stands to reason that in a low volume market (ie exotic hardware, specialised features) they can't afford to let anyone else copy it otherwise they will be completely undercut. Hence the use of patents and obfustation to hide trade secrets.
On the other hand, in a commodity driven market which the wider PC is, volume and market share is key to enforcing the desired price/time curve and maximising total revenue. In this situation you want your products to be used as widely as possible and therefore, open specifications are necessary. The trick (as the top players have found) is to define the specifications ahead of time then release them after your products are on the shelf. Oh, and play games with upstream/downstream suppliers (if necessary, fob off market regulators by calling it quality control so you can eyeball profitable areas of expansion) to make yourself indispensible in your place on the value chain.
One of these days, someone should write a book on PC pricing strategams. It would make very interesting reading to see how the consumer has been milked.
LL
Every profession, once it reaches a point of maturity (I'll leave it up to the pundits as to whether IT has hit that sweet spot yet) establishes a set of customs or cultural norms that, if nothing else, help protect themselves from excessese and self destruction and help define their purpose for existance. The doctors have their Hippocratic Oath, lawyers their client-attorny priviledge, and the largest corporations a distinctive mindset. In fact this is a phenomenum that ESR has detailed quite nicely in his writings about the hacker community and open source development.
.... ???
The question is that if the computing industry is to move from being seen as the province of self-absorbed geeks and nerds, to the level of expertise and professional found in top-notch surgical teams (and I believe the level at the top of technical mastery of details is on a par), I would have to argue that a code of conduct be ennunciated so at least we can define a standard for members to be identified with.
What would such a code for hackers be? Ultimately any moral, cultural or ethical code can only be self-directed, motivated by the social conventions of peers. One may note that many of the ideals in media (Star Trek, Star Wars, Asimov's Laws of Robotics, etc) have passed into popular language (e.g. Prime Directive) so there is some scope of encouraging people to be more like say Linus rather than XXXX (name your favorite peeve). As for some suggestions to get people thinking, I'd toss in the following
1) Understand the hacker's code and why it exists
2) Remember the history of the source before you
3) Try not to delete or corrupt data, you never know when it might come in handy
4) Avoid perverting code beyond the purpose for which it was designed
5) Give attribution to hacks you borrows
6)
Cleverness for its own sake may be satisfying for the ego but ultimately, what defines a hacker and his/her purpose in life?
LL
OK, let's get down to the basics - what portion of time is spent actively learning as compared with other recreational/consumerism activities?
If you gave a teenager the choice between reading a book or playing video games, what would be their response?
Would your kids rather watch Discovery Channel or go out on a field trip in the rain?
Is the role of schools to include social and vocational aspects? If not, then what is the role of teachers as compared with parent?
Would kids prefer to emulate Einstein or Michaal Jordan? Do they know the difference between fame and celebrity?
Given the many leisure activities available to people, what motivating force would encourage them to tackle the hard subjects?
And by the way, these problems are not unique. Even Japan are finding their educational system is starting to creak. It is easy to handle outrages like high school shootings but slow erosion of standards and educational values are much more difficult to solve.
LL
While SGI may have no peers in certain specialised market niches, I would humbly suggest that it come to the realities of the marketplace in pricing third party peripherals and knic-knac add-ons. Doing head-head comparisons of features, I would quite happily pay a premium for SGI functions that are truely unique and truely add productive value to work. However, as a budget concious customer, I would be royally pissed off at the massive markups on bundled 3rd party goods (admittedly it has gotten better in recent years) with limited choice (try getting Irix drivers for exotic hardware). As hardware and software becomes a commodity, the power of choice shifts to the buyer. People who purchase SGI goods are not idiots, but how long will loyalty last when they find out that adding the SGI name to a rebadged product adds significantly to the cost (and this goes to any branded vs white box hardware)? SGI does have a lot of technical brilliance in its favor and it could become a rebound story a la Apple with its adoption of Linux. However, they really need to have some clarity of thought as to the value they are offering compared with their competition and provide efficient execution in an era of faster business cycles. Promises are nice but delivery is what counts.
LL