The long answer to "could a utility be held in the public domain?" is no.
What a load of crap. Lets talk real world examples here. Lets talk New Zealand.
In NZ, we used to have a 100% publically owned electricity system. The generation and transmission sides were run by central government, the local retail distribution by local government. It ran on a profit-making basis with most profits being ploughed back into expanding the infrastructure in a fairly environmentally-friendly manner, the rest paid to the central/local government as a social or community dividend. Ten years ago, it came out tops in an international survey as the most efficient, cost effective system in the world, not to mention virtually the cheapest as well. It worked well, it was sustainable, we had cheap power and everyone was happy.
Well, not everyone was happy. Big business wasn't happy, as they paid a higher rate than Joe Public. The economists weren't happy, as it didn't fit their model of competative maketplaces and made them look stupid. The international conglomerates weren't happy, as they didn't own the system and weren't making any money from it. Enter a right-wing, free-market market ideology government, and they set about solving these 'problems'.
First step, break up the central generator/transmission company into three parts, a transmission company and two competing generating companies, with one being privatised immediately, the other later down the track. This was supposed to reduce prices by introducing competition, but only drove up prices as you had 3 times the administrative overheads, and each company added an increased profit margin onto the cost.
Second step, force the local councils to privatise the local retail distribution companies, and allow local competition. Again, this was supposed to drive down prices, but instead sent them up through increased profit margins.
The consequences? Power prices have sky-rocketed for Joe Public. It also killed off the social and community dividend that went into funding public goods. The only winners are big business, who can negotiate bulk purchases for cheap prices, and the big American corporates who now own most of our power infrastructure, along with the rest of the country. The other supposed pay-off of increased investment in the infrastructure isn't eventuating either, as the rate of return on the investment isn't good enough.
But this was all predictable. After all, the first law of business is to maximise your profits, and all too often these days that means in the short term. Serving the public good by providing a cheap, sustainable utility or infrastructure just doesn't figure in the equation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not agaist open markets and competition (I loath M$ as much as the next guy), just don't set up the system in such a way that it destroys the public good in the process. That applies as much to water, roads, schools, the internet, etc as it does to power. Sometimes, the perfect market is not the answer. It's a narrow-minded, one-size-fits-all ideology that's every bit as wrong as the narrow-minded, one-size-fits-all communist ideology. Choose the solution that best fits the problem.
Agree with you on the pencil and paper bit, but if I was 17 years old and coding as fast as people twice my age (and many times the experience), I'd be wondering what I was missing...
...as long as everyone writes stuff that they personally can read.
I hope I never have to work with you. Illegible code is the bane of my life. I've worked on very large scale systems that have modules up to 35 years old. You try maintain 35 year old, undocumented, spagetti code and see how you like it.
I try to write stuff that anyone can read and understand, bcause you never know what idiot's going to be looking at it in 30 years time.
While the engineering tools we use and the environment we work in may change rapidly, I believe the underlying 'science' changes more slowly.
The architect or civil engineer also deals with fast changing building materials and fashions, but the core science remains, underpinning all they do.
For example, the internet is just another distributed environment with it's own toolset, that is slowly and painfully re-learning some lessons the big iron guys learned in the 70's. Or what about that infamous quote that Linux is 70's technolgy?
What my CS degree taught me was how to THINK about a problem BEFORE trying to fix it. The actual engineering tools side they taught was almost useless when I went looking for a job in the real world, but the 'science' gave me transportable skills that have enabled me to leap between environments with minimal pain.
That's got to be the stupidest piece of journalism I've seem for a while. There were so many errors and innacuracies, I had to check the by-line wasn't one of the Slasdot crew:-)
Re:It might be a helicopter
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 1
And thinking on the re-architecting part, and the reference to campuses, the post below about the Amsterdam bike scheme rings very true. The Metro would be a restricted community-owned version with a limited operating area, the Pro version would be self-owned and unlimited.
Need to get somewhere in a hurry, frustrated that there's no bus or taxi about? Just pop along to the local IT-park, grab one, and you're off.
So now it's a cheap, self-balancing, clean-powered, community-operated, communal urban personal trasportation device.
Re:It might be a helicopter
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
From Bob's column, there's a link to a story and video of the iBot at http://www.msnbc.com/news/285231.asp , but only in WMA I'm afraid.
So, from the clues given in the main story, it's a form of transport, agreed? Add in iBot, Kamen's complaint that its main drawback is expensive batteries, the post further down about his research into cheap, clean mini engines, and we must be getting close. A cheap, self-balancing, clean-powered, personal trasportation device. Now it's just a question of form factor.
How about a self-balancing, powered unicycle, although lateral balance would be a tough nut to crack:-) I could picture myself dodging traffic on one of those.
.....Bruce Eckel at http://www.bruceeckel.com . All his books are free on the net. I downloaded "Thinking in Java 2" and started printing it out at work a chapter at a time, 2-up, double-sided on A4 and storing it in a ring-binder. After about 3 chapters, I was sick of the inconvenience, so went out and brought the book (a very worthwhile investment, I might add).
I suspect a LOT of people have done the same thing, and Bruce seems to be doing OK as a result. He makes some very good comments about it halfway down the page at http://www.bruceeckel.com/notes.html , worth reading.
I really don't see e-books taking off until we get those high resolution, paperback-sized flexible e-paper things. The reason books have lasted so long in their present form factor is convenience, which e-books currently don't have.
So, can anyone point to a good source of enlightenment for those of us throughly confused by now about CODECs, formats, compression, QT, Sorenson, etc? A nice web-site explaing the different bits, how it all fits together, a bit of history, how to do it yourself, etc.
I'll grant you that Rugby is a cool sport, but it's one best left to the Australians.
Australians! Now I KNOW you're talking sh!te. Since when have they been the high-water mark for rugby. Anyone with half a brain knows the All Blacks are the greatest team to ever walk this planet;-)
Here's my idea for a voting system, as inspired by my frequent visits to the airport: use boarding passes!
Use a touch-screen kiosk, with a screen for each election (president, senate, etc), with the candidates clearly laid out for the voter to touch, and a confirm vote screen. Once a voter has been through each election choice, the kiosk prints out the ballot. On the front is clearly printed the candidates the person has voted for. On the back is the encoded magnetic strip with the vote details. They then drop it in the ballot box themselves.
Advantages?
1) No over or under voting thanks to on-screen selections
2) Printed human readable names allows voter to confirm for themselves they picked the right people, makes for easy manual recounts (no arguments over pregnent chads here!), and guarantees against a fraudulent magnetic strip encoding.
3) Magnetic strip makes electronic counting quick and easy. No chads, no OCR screw-ups. If the strip fails, you still have the printed vote.
4) The vote isn't final until they place the ballot in the box, so the old dears have until the last second to realise they've screwed up and go back for another go. Also allows for multiple attempts to print if the machine chews your ballot or doesn't print properly.
5) Uses existing wide-spread, proven, reliable cheap technology.
And of course, the software is written as Open Source and runs on Linux...
Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer having bits of paper to look at to confirm a vote. There's just too many power-hungry dishonest politicians and lobbyists out there willing to do anything to win to guarantee free and fair e-lections.
How's this. Government choses a contractor to build a system. Contractor delivers code to government, government releases code as open source. Government then can choose from any interested parties to manage the code base for them, do one-off mods to the system, etc. The key here is that the code is open for all to see, so you can hold competitive bidding for all work on the system. Company X wants to get a slice of the governments money? Download the code, assign a few programmers, and start bidding. The work is still done by reputable firms, to exacting standards, and carefully reviewed before being checked in, but the government isn't locked into a single vendor.
Think of it like building a house. Just because Builder Bob did the kitchen, doesn't mean he gets to do any re-modelling work in 5 years time. I choose who I think will do the job best, and that probably won't be DIY Joe from next-door.
OK, so it's not pure Open Source as we know it, and I'm sure people will pick holes, but it's a high-level concept, and it sure beats the current way of doing things.
And it sure sounds like how Linus runs the kernal...
Having stood on both sides of the out-source relationship, I can state that maintenance costs are seldom if ever cheaper if you out-source:-) That is, IF you already have an IT shop that is competently run.
It is certainly cheaper if you include the cost of lost opportunity in your given market. The key factor for the bank I worked at in deciding to pull our systems back in-house was the huge time delays we faced in getting changes made to our out-sourced systems. The delays seriously affected our ability to respond to changes in a volitile marketplace and was costing us market share. Now, the only things they out-source are the commodity parts of the systems, the parts that never change. Anything else stays firmly in-house where people who know what they are doing look after them.
There are two areas where out-sourcing does make economic sense. (1) If your system rarely changes, and all you need is a box to run it on and day to day support staff, out-sourcing is un-beatable. (2) If you don't have an IT shop, building a good one costs a lot of money and time, and needs a lot of experience. Getting an out-sourcer to build and run it for you for you makes sense until you are mature enough to take things over.
That's what happens out in the commercial world. When we outsource, and the code is bespoke, then we, the customer, own the code and retain the right to get a different company to maintain it if the original company screws up.
If the outsourced code is a package, we demand the code be escrowed. If the company fails to deliver on it's contractual obligations, the code gets released to us to use to continue our business, but not for any other purposes.
If you're big enough, some vendors even give you the code to play with (e.g. IBM), for an extra fee, and under restricted license conditions.
If the bidder refuses to play by our rules, they don't get to play. After all, we hold the dollars:-)
It's not really an open source versus closed source argument, it's really about a very poorly negotiated contract, sadly a far too common occurrence when it comes to governments around the world.
It's a lifestyle thing. I live in an apartment where pets are banned. Even if pets were allowed, I work bad hours (as most IT people do) and wouldn't be able to care for a cat or dog properly (I have a hard enough time remembering to feed my fish). And I love gadgets. How many others are there out there like me? More than enough potential customers to make it worth Sony's while.
Now, if only it could fetch a beer from the fridge, I'd be in like a shot...
Ah, but if you have your AIBO hooked into your wirless network hooked to your always-on DSL internet connection, what's to stop AIBO checking-in with his real master, whether that's Sony, the CIA or whoever gave you AIBO as a present?
Ah, but if you stick a wireless LAN card in the PC slot, you have remote control AIBO. Make AIBO walk. Make AIBO play. Make AIBO take photos in places he shouldn't...
Um, didn't Amiga patent the right-click menu? I seem to recall that was one of their key pieces of IP that kept people sniffing around Commodores corpse...
Recently, the United States government has struck down things such as student-led prayers at school. It has struck down attempts to censor the Internet (remember the Communications Decency Act?
I thought it was the government who made the laws like the CDA and the courts that struck them down?
Um, remind me again who was it who invented the web? Some limey with a posh sounding double-barrelled surname wasn't it?? And while yodeling from the top of some Swiss mountain with Heidi and the von Trapps...
"it's obvious that Word just throws odd formatting codes where ever it pleases, and never bothers to clean them up"
That's almost just what it does do:-) I remembr reading an article in a mag a while back where an anonymous MS code slave explained the basics of how.DOCS are created. This is vastly simplified and from an failing memory, so no flames please where I screw up:-)
From memory, he said that.doc is sort-of a diff file. You start with an (almost) empty file, into which Word inserts your text and formatting as you type and click. So far, so good, but when you go back to change things, it doesn't do the obvious thing and change it in the file, it actually appends your changes onto the end of the file.
When you reload the file, it sort-of starts from the beginning again, and applies your changes in the order they occurred. That's why you find the format commands all over the place: the file holds location details for the target and the action to be applied. This is also why old, frequently edited documents get so large (and so slow to load).
Try it. Create a document. Do lots of editing, make lots of changes. Save it. See how big it gets. Now use 'Save As'. Watch it shrink as Word goes through and trys to clean up the mess it's made.
My favorite quote from the MSloth: "Word docs are mostly space". Sort of sums M$ up nicely, don't you think?
Of course, I could be wrong, it's a frequent occurence...
Slashdot Mirror
The long answer to "could a utility be held in the public domain?" is no.
What a load of crap. Lets talk real world examples here. Lets talk New Zealand.
In NZ, we used to have a 100% publically owned electricity system. The generation and transmission sides were run by central government, the local retail distribution by local government. It ran on a profit-making basis with most profits being ploughed back into expanding the infrastructure in a fairly environmentally-friendly manner, the rest paid to the central/local government as a social or community dividend. Ten years ago, it came out tops in an international survey as the most efficient, cost effective system in the world, not to mention virtually the cheapest as well. It worked well, it was sustainable, we had cheap power and everyone was happy.
Well, not everyone was happy. Big business wasn't happy, as they paid a higher rate than Joe Public. The economists weren't happy, as it didn't fit their model of competative maketplaces and made them look stupid. The international conglomerates weren't happy, as they didn't own the system and weren't making any money from it. Enter a right-wing, free-market market ideology government, and they set about solving these 'problems'.
First step, break up the central generator/transmission company into three parts, a transmission company and two competing generating companies, with one being privatised immediately, the other later down the track. This was supposed to reduce prices by introducing competition, but only drove up prices as you had 3 times the administrative overheads, and each company added an increased profit margin onto the cost.
Second step, force the local councils to privatise the local retail distribution companies, and allow local competition. Again, this was supposed to drive down prices, but instead sent them up through increased profit margins.
The consequences? Power prices have sky-rocketed for Joe Public. It also killed off the social and community dividend that went into funding public goods. The only winners are big business, who can negotiate bulk purchases for cheap prices, and the big American corporates who now own most of our power infrastructure, along with the rest of the country. The other supposed pay-off of increased investment in the infrastructure isn't eventuating either, as the rate of return on the investment isn't good enough.
But this was all predictable. After all, the first law of business is to maximise your profits, and all too often these days that means in the short term. Serving the public good by providing a cheap, sustainable utility or infrastructure just doesn't figure in the equation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not agaist open markets and competition (I loath M$ as much as the next guy), just don't set up the system in such a way that it destroys the public good in the process. That applies as much to water, roads, schools, the internet, etc as it does to power. Sometimes, the perfect market is not the answer. It's a narrow-minded, one-size-fits-all ideology that's every bit as wrong as the narrow-minded, one-size-fits-all communist ideology. Choose the solution that best fits the problem.
Agree with you on the pencil and paper bit, but if I was 17 years old and coding as fast as people twice my age (and many times the experience), I'd be wondering what I was missing...
I hope I never have to work with you. Illegible code is the bane of my life. I've worked on very large scale systems that have modules up to 35 years old. You try maintain 35 year old, undocumented, spagetti code and see how you like it.
I try to write stuff that anyone can read and understand, bcause you never know what idiot's going to be looking at it in 30 years time.
While the engineering tools we use and the environment we work in may change rapidly, I believe the underlying 'science' changes more slowly.
The architect or civil engineer also deals with fast changing building materials and fashions, but the core science remains, underpinning all they do.
For example, the internet is just another distributed environment with it's own toolset, that is slowly and painfully re-learning some lessons the big iron guys learned in the 70's. Or what about that infamous quote that Linux is 70's technolgy?
What my CS degree taught me was how to THINK about a problem BEFORE trying to fix it. The actual engineering tools side they taught was almost useless when I went looking for a job in the real world, but the 'science' gave me transportable skills that have enabled me to leap between environments with minimal pain.
That's got to be the stupidest piece of journalism I've seem for a while. There were so many errors and innacuracies, I had to check the by-line wasn't one of the Slasdot crew :-)
And thinking on the re-architecting part, and the reference to campuses, the post below about the Amsterdam bike scheme rings very true. The Metro would be a restricted community-owned version with a limited operating area, the Pro version would be self-owned and unlimited.
Need to get somewhere in a hurry, frustrated that there's no bus or taxi about? Just pop along to the local IT-park, grab one, and you're off.
So now it's a cheap, self-balancing, clean-powered, community-operated, communal urban personal trasportation device.
From Bob's column, there's a link to a story and video of the iBot at http://www.msnbc.com/news/285231.asp , but only in WMA I'm afraid.
So, from the clues given in the main story, it's a form of transport, agreed? Add in iBot, Kamen's complaint that its main drawback is expensive batteries, the post further down about his research into cheap, clean mini engines, and we must be getting close. A cheap, self-balancing, clean-powered, personal trasportation device. Now it's just a question of form factor.
How about a self-balancing, powered unicycle, although lateral balance would be a tough nut to crack :-) I could picture myself dodging traffic on one of those.
.....Bruce Eckel at http://www.bruceeckel.com . All his books are free on the net. I downloaded "Thinking in Java 2" and started printing it out at work a chapter at a time, 2-up, double-sided on A4 and storing it in a ring-binder. After about 3 chapters, I was sick of the inconvenience, so went out and brought the book (a very worthwhile investment, I might add).
I suspect a LOT of people have done the same thing, and Bruce seems to be doing OK as a result. He makes some very good comments about it halfway down the page at http://www.bruceeckel.com/notes.html , worth reading.
I really don't see e-books taking off until we get those high resolution, paperback-sized flexible e-paper things. The reason books have lasted so long in their present form factor is convenience, which e-books currently don't have.
So, can anyone point to a good source of enlightenment for those of us throughly confused by now about CODECs, formats, compression, QT, Sorenson, etc? A nice web-site explaing the different bits, how it all fits together, a bit of history, how to do it yourself, etc.
Australians! Now I KNOW you're talking sh!te. Since when have they been the high-water mark for rugby. Anyone with half a brain knows the All Blacks are the greatest team to ever walk this planet ;-)
Here's my idea for a voting system, as inspired by my frequent visits to the airport: use boarding passes!
Use a touch-screen kiosk, with a screen for each election (president, senate, etc), with the candidates clearly laid out for the voter to touch, and a confirm vote screen. Once a voter has been through each election choice, the kiosk prints out the ballot. On the front is clearly printed the candidates the person has voted for. On the back is the encoded magnetic strip with the vote details. They then drop it in the ballot box themselves.
Advantages?
1) No over or under voting thanks to on-screen selections
2) Printed human readable names allows voter to confirm for themselves they picked the right people, makes for easy manual recounts (no arguments over pregnent chads here!), and guarantees against a fraudulent magnetic strip encoding.
3) Magnetic strip makes electronic counting quick and easy. No chads, no OCR screw-ups. If the strip fails, you still have the printed vote.
4) The vote isn't final until they place the ballot in the box, so the old dears have until the last second to realise they've screwed up and go back for another go. Also allows for multiple attempts to print if the machine chews your ballot or doesn't print properly.
5) Uses existing wide-spread, proven, reliable cheap technology.
And of course, the software is written as Open Source and runs on Linux...
Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer having bits of paper to look at to confirm a vote. There's just too many power-hungry dishonest politicians and lobbyists out there willing to do anything to win to guarantee free and fair e-lections.
Reckon I could get a patent on this???
How's this. Government choses a contractor to build a system. Contractor delivers code to government, government releases code as open source. Government then can choose from any interested parties to manage the code base for them, do one-off mods to the system, etc. The key here is that the code is open for all to see, so you can hold competitive bidding for all work on the system. Company X wants to get a slice of the governments money? Download the code, assign a few programmers, and start bidding. The work is still done by reputable firms, to exacting standards, and carefully reviewed before being checked in, but the government isn't locked into a single vendor.
Think of it like building a house. Just because Builder Bob did the kitchen, doesn't mean he gets to do any re-modelling work in 5 years time. I choose who I think will do the job best, and that probably won't be DIY Joe from next-door.
OK, so it's not pure Open Source as we know it, and I'm sure people will pick holes, but it's a high-level concept, and it sure beats the current way of doing things.
And it sure sounds like how Linus runs the kernal...
Having stood on both sides of the out-source relationship, I can state that maintenance costs are seldom if ever cheaper if you out-source :-) That is, IF you already have an IT shop that is competently run.
It is certainly cheaper if you include the cost of lost opportunity in your given market. The key factor for the bank I worked at in deciding to pull our systems back in-house was the huge time delays we faced in getting changes made to our out-sourced systems. The delays seriously affected our ability to respond to changes in a volitile marketplace and was costing us market share. Now, the only things they out-source are the commodity parts of the systems, the parts that never change. Anything else stays firmly in-house where people who know what they are doing look after them.
There are two areas where out-sourcing does make economic sense. (1) If your system rarely changes, and all you need is a box to run it on and day to day support staff, out-sourcing is un-beatable. (2) If you don't have an IT shop, building a good one costs a lot of money and time, and needs a lot of experience. Getting an out-sourcer to build and run it for you for you makes sense until you are mature enough to take things over.
That's what happens out in the commercial world. When we outsource, and the code is bespoke, then we, the customer, own the code and retain the right to get a different company to maintain it if the original company screws up.
If the outsourced code is a package, we demand the code be escrowed. If the company fails to deliver on it's contractual obligations, the code gets released to us to use to continue our business, but not for any other purposes.
If you're big enough, some vendors even give you the code to play with (e.g. IBM), for an extra fee, and under restricted license conditions.
If the bidder refuses to play by our rules, they don't get to play. After all, we hold the dollars :-)
It's not really an open source versus closed source argument, it's really about a very poorly negotiated contract, sadly a far too common occurrence when it comes to governments around the world.
It's a lifestyle thing. I live in an apartment where pets are banned. Even if pets were allowed, I work bad hours (as most IT people do) and wouldn't be able to care for a cat or dog properly (I have a hard enough time remembering to feed my fish). And I love gadgets. How many others are there out there like me? More than enough potential customers to make it worth Sony's while.
Now, if only it could fetch a beer from the fridge, I'd be in like a shot...
Ah, but if you have your AIBO hooked into your wirless network hooked to your always-on DSL internet connection, what's to stop AIBO checking-in with his real master, whether that's Sony, the CIA or whoever gave you AIBO as a present?
Ah, but if you stick a wireless LAN card in the PC slot, you have remote control AIBO. Make AIBO walk. Make AIBO play. Make AIBO take photos in places he shouldn't...
Um, didn't Amiga patent the right-click menu? I seem to recall that was one of their key pieces of IP that kept people sniffing around Commodores corpse...
I thought it was the government who made the laws like the CDA and the courts that struck them down?
Um, remind me again who was it who invented the web? Some limey with a posh sounding double-barrelled surname wasn't it?? And while yodeling from the top of some Swiss mountain with Heidi and the von Trapps...
"it's obvious that Word just throws odd formatting codes where ever it pleases, and never bothers to clean them up"
:-) I remembr reading an article in a mag a while back where an anonymous MS code slave explained the basics of how .DOCS are created. This is vastly simplified and from an failing memory, so no flames please where I screw up :-)
.doc is sort-of a diff file. You start with an (almost) empty file, into which Word inserts your text and formatting as you type and click. So far, so good, but when you go back to change things, it doesn't do the obvious thing and change it in the file, it actually appends your changes onto the end of the file.
That's almost just what it does do
From memory, he said that
When you reload the file, it sort-of starts from the beginning again, and applies your changes in the order they occurred. That's why you find the format commands all over the place: the file holds location details for the target and the action to be applied. This is also why old, frequently edited documents get so large (and so slow to load).
Try it. Create a document. Do lots of editing, make lots of changes. Save it. See how big it gets. Now use 'Save As'. Watch it shrink as Word goes through and trys to clean up the mess it's made.
My favorite quote from the MSloth: "Word docs are mostly space". Sort of sums M$ up nicely, don't you think?
Of course, I could be wrong, it's a frequent occurence...
John.