Re:Some interesting thoughts from the book.
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Cybernauts Awake!
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"Technology has the power to change relationships between people. It is not neutral."
So, if it's not neutral, is it good or evil? Inquiring Slashdotters want to know!
Besides I don't see the causal relationship: "Gravity has the power to pull people to the ground. It is not neutral".
"If a standard is 'owned' by one company... then the company ends up with something very like a monopoly."
Duh!
"People 'in' cyberspace and deeply experienced with it tend to overrate it."
Compared to whom? What's the reference group? If it is Joe Random Luser, then there are a lot of things he believes to be overrated;)
"Money has always been somewhat virtual..."
At the time of, say, ancient Greeks -- no (obviously). Basically, the advent of banks made money somewhat virtual (your money was a line in the account ledger) and that was, I believe, somewhere around the XIV century.
First, the question whether 30-something percent of Americans are diagnosable with a mental disorder is pretty meaningless. Because it all depends on your definition of a mental disorder.
In reality, there is a whole spectrum of conditions from one extreme (let's keep it one-dimensional for simplicity, although it's not) of Maslow's super-people who are wise, strong, sensitive, can take it, etc. etc. to the other extreme of heavy-duty clinical disorders when people cannot survive on their own. People at extremes are fairly rare and it's obvious whether they are mentally ill or healthy. The situation is more complicated for the mess in the middle. Basically, you can pick any line and call people to the left of it "mentally sick" and people to the right of it "mentally healthy". Depending on your definitions (where you draw the line) you can have from 10 to 90% of the population either sick or healthy -- you choose!
The second issue is of treating mental disorders with drugs. Again, it's fairly obvious that heavy-duty disorders need to be treated with drugs, because that the only thing that (sometimes) works -- at least the only thing we know of. The interesting question again concerns the mess in the middle, and the question is: do we all want to be well-adjusted? In each society there is sort of a picture of a "mentally healthy" individual and those that deviate from this picture are supposed to work on getting closer to it. But is it a Good Thing? I think it can be shown that most of the world's greatest literature and poetry, and to a lesser degree music, was created by severely maladjusted people. It is likely that have they been treated to become "normal", no masterpieces would have been created.
The question of "do you want to be more normal?" is actually a very deep one and has to do with the person's identity. If I have periodic situational depressions, is it part of me? If I make them go away, does it make "me" less of me? There are two extremes, neither of which seems to work: one is "when severely depressed, take walks in the woods", and the other is "if you wake up in bad mood, take the yellow pill and it will pass". Where the right middle is, I am not sure.
Yes, but which god?? There is YHWH, and the Christian Trinity, and Allah, and Vishnu (together with Shiva, etc. etc. etc.), and Odin, and.... Also there are not-quite-Gods-but-really-nice-fellows like Buddha and others. So, pray tell me, oh Wise One Who Knows All The Answers, which god?
Besides, it's not like anybody doesn't know that the answer is 42.
But when you start depending on technology for survival,
News for you: we already are. Let's say all electric power irrevocably dies. In this case most of humanity will die out from hunger fairly quickly (within one year). The human species will not die out, but maybe ~80% of population will.
For example, what is someone made a mistake in developing this technology, causing every genetically engineered human being on the planet to suffer from a degenerative disease
Since it's fairly clear we are not going to change over to genetically engineering everybody within one generation, the answer is that the first few "guinea pigs" will die from that disease and the rest will wait until the technology gets fixed.
But I laugh when I think of the idea of abstracting sex from the process of making children
Good, because it has been abstracted. The Pill, latex condoms, etc. have broken this connection.
I shudder to think about screwing the gene pool up so much that we come to depend on genetic engineering for the survival and well-being of our species
Why would we depend on it for survival?? You are jumping waay too much ahead...
we are embarking on something this huge without more support from our leaders?
And who are your leaders? I sincerely hope that it's not the US Congress.
[making kids cheerful and pliant] but i harbour no illusions that the majority of the world feels, or would act, this way
The majority of the world already acts this way. Upbringing is probably at least as important as genes in forming a personality. Besides, this is a free choice issue -- why should you force or prohibit a pair of individuals from making a choice about their child?
[re human cloning] what if some wacko dictator says it's illegal for new babies have red hair?
All your examples are genetic engineering issues and have nothing to to do specifically with human cloning (unless non-cloned humans are made illegal, a situation I do not expect to see in the foreseeable future).
it doesn't seem beyond belief to me that given the ability to control our children we would, as a culture/species, remove our own bio-diversity to the point where our ability to surive some catastrophic event would be impaired.
First of all biodiversity is a characteristic of an ecosystem and reflects the number and variety of organisms sustained by that ecosystem. What you are concerned about is the diversity of genes in the human gene pool. That could be an issue, but given the rates at which generations follow one another, this doesn not seem to be an important concern. If you want to worry about damage to human gene pool, worry about modern medicine allowing people with fatal-if-untreated genetic defects to survive and breed. In a normal population such genetic defects are washed out naturally, since individuals that exibit them die before they can breed. That is no longer true for humans and it is an already real threat to human gene pool.
[re having no disabled people] what about people like stephen hawking?
What about him? He still would be born, only not paralyzed. Maybe he wouldn't be as brilliant because his mind/energy will spread itself over more stuff, but he'll certainly be happier.
who are we to steal someone elses suffering.
If you want to suffer, nobody is going to prevent you from suffering. The issue is preventing you from having to suffer and not having a choice in the matter. If you need to self-flagellate for spiritual fulfilment, be my guest.
i wouldn't wish some nasty, genitically avoidable disease/malfunction on anyone. but don't these things enrich the world around us?
Somebody's else suffering enriches your world? Er... it doesn't sound like a particularly nice (or defensible) position to take.
but i do object to your labelling someones attempt to think about things as stupid and anti-progress.
I do not object to people trying to think. However, both Katz and you seem to believe that arranging some words in your mind or on paper qualifies as thinking. Permit me to disabuse you of this notion. Good thinking is hard. It requires concentration, mental discipline, logic, and ability to hold complicated structures of concepts in your head. Relatively few people (among those I met, at least) can think well.
Katz's article and your post, sorry to say, do not qualify as good thinking. They are a messy soup of ramblings, buzzwords, fears, half-baked ideas, and whatever else came into your head when you were writing this. I do not claim that I always do good thinking when I post to Slashdot, but at least I try to be coherent. Unfortunately, Katz is free from that limitation of mine.
Katz's article is stupid (insofar as it has any content, which I am not sure about) and is anti-progress, because it is, basically, fear-mongering -- it tries to raise dark, vague, primal fears about technological progress.
Think about the "just guess" generation. They see a function call like socketpair(Child_Side, Parent_Side, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC) and they start typing random things trying to guess what happens when you diddle those arguments. It boggles the mind.
But it's a GOOD thing!! Provided that the whole thing happens in a sandbox, that's how learning occurs, and that is as true for submitting random arguments to socketpair, as it is for the games you mentioned like perl and nethack (sorry about vi, can't make myself put it in there).
To put it into high-falutin' words, trying the guess the output of random input is a trial-and-error process of mental map construction. As such, it is not the fastest one, but probably the most useful, both for brain exercise, and for the insights you get while trying weird stuff. Yes, reading a book (man page, pod file, etc) will give you a correct mental map much faster, but you'll understand it less and will forget it faster.
I agree that mucking around in stuff you have absolutely no clue about isn't productive and is not a good way of problem-solving. However it can be incredibly fun (you get to discover on your own so many new things), very intellectually challenging (how must it work to react to X by Y, and to Z by A?), and good gymnastics for the mind.
In any case, a person who tries to, say, configure a mail server, types in a few random things into config files, sees that they don't work, and drops the whole thing saying "I guess this isn't for me" is RIGHT. This isn't for him. But such people shouldn't be allowed near config files anyway. On the other hand a clueful person (if he has the time, the inclination, and the backups) could play around with the configs, testing out different ideas of his, and RTFMing on the as-needed basis. This person would know mail servers much better than somebody who picked up "Mail Servers for Dummies", skimmed through it, and more or less blindly made the "recommended" changes to his config files.
But as a rant against clueless lusers, I agree completely with you. The crucial difference is whether somebody is playing in a sandbox and/or has the capability to fix back all he broke, or he is randomly poking fingers at buttons on an important machine hoping that it would magically do what he wants (if he knows what he wants, that is).
I have this book and have skimmed through it. This is basically computer science algorithms (zillion of different sorts, graph representation, etc.) implemented in Perl. The problem is that this book has limited relevance to real life. "Perl Cookbook" is much, much more useful in this regard.
So, if you are collecting all Perl book, or are really interested in how to implement red-black trees in Perl, do buy it. On the other hand, if you are looking for snippets of code to solve small-to-medium-sized problems you meet all the time, "Perl Cookbook" is a much better choice.
We have set out on a project whose goal is to alter the nature of human existence, without the interest of a single national political leader or a single Congressional debate
And Katz speaks of this as if it were a BAD thing! Really, what could the interest of a politician, or of a whole bunch of congresscritters add to the debate except fuck it up?
In effect, children may be given genotypes
Er... genotype is an existing word. Look up its meaning in a dictionary (hint: you are using it incorrectly).
Why have an idiosyncratic or rebellious offspring when you can choose a cheerful and pliant one?
For a whole variety of reasons. I, for example, definitely don't want my kids to be cheerful and pliant consumer-drones. In my book being "strange" is good.
[human cloning] Too many people will want to use it, too much money can be made off of it.
So, what's bad about human cloning? You've spent paragaphs hinting darkly about unspeakable horrors, but what are they? What is all that awful and horrible about human cloning? After all when it happens naturally and twins are born, nobody seems to be all that excited about it...
Are we comfortable living in a world in which whose categories of humanity - the retarded, the blind, the disabled - will disappear from our part of the earth?
Well, I don't know about Katz but I would be perfectly comfortable living in the world where there are no disabled people. I would also like to ask -- is Katz comfortable living in the world where nobody is sick with bubonic plague? How could he stay in the US where it is so hard to find cholera sufferers? And, to think, for example, about the artificialness of prostheses -- why, in the good old days if you lost a leg, you just lived without a leg, not tried to put on these awful metal-and-plastic contraptions -- right, Katz?
What about developing and Third-World nations, where few will have access to Perfect Baby technologies?
You mean if everybody can't have it, nobody should have it? I thought that this was a basic idea of Russian communism in the 20s, but it kinda went out of fashion since then.
A generation ago, who could have imagined that one company would have its software in more than 90 per cent of the personal computers in the world?
A generation ago who could have imagined personal computers? Besides, a generation (maybe 1.5 generations) ago one company had a presence in every American home and controlled the communications of the entire nation. Yes, I'm talking about Ma Bell. And, pray tell, what horrible things came out of this?
Nonetheless, somebody got this insanely fucked up idea that if it's got a mouse interface, it's easy to use for a novice
I believe it were the PARC people, mostly from Alan Kay's Smalltalk project, that were the first to get this idea. It also seems to me that the idea wasn't "if there is a mouse, it got to be easy to use", but rather "here is this new visual interface, and the mouse is a natural way to operate it".
And even if it were so, optimizing for a novice instead of a long-time user is nutty.
Yes, but. There is also such a thing as a casual user. People generally don't spend their whole life with a single program that they get to know like the back of their hand. There are exceptions and they mostly tend to involve programmers and text editors (e.g you, Tom, and vi). Other, "normal" people spend a lot of time moving from one program to another, or, say, using a program once a week or once a month. In such cases having to remember keyboard commands is a pain in the neck. More, if the commands are different across applications, your fingers become confused and lose that their automatic knowledge of what to hit when with all the well-known consequences. So I would say that mouse-based GUIs are definitely a good thing.
That was the 'but' part. There is also the 'yes' part in that once you do become an expert in some application, keyboard shortcuts are faster and more convenient. That is exactly why good user interface design allows for multiple ways to do the same thing, some of them mouse-based, and some keyboard-based (if the design is really good, you can also write scripts).
They forget that the experienced user is more important than the novice, because his annoyance will be compounded across the time interval.
Not necessarily. If the learning curve is sufficiently steep, people will just not spend the effort to learn the interface and thus will never achieve the necessary proficiency. First of all, many people will try out a program and if they cannot make sense of it in the first few minutes, they'll chuck it. Second, I, for example, use a lot of programs, say, once a week. So once a week I again become a novice user and would much prefer to click around then to try to remember the keyboard commands.
Kaa
And the point of this being...?
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V2 OS
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Really.This looks like an exercise in OS design and x86 assembler coding. I hope these guys had a lot of fun writing it, because that's all the utility that's going to come out of it. Do we need a mini-OS for desktop machines? Nope. Do we need one for palmtops? Yes, but palmtops don't run x86 processors, oops. Do we need one for embedded processors? Also yes, but x86 processors are quite rare there, plus there are already a couple of OSes around and even at least one (AFAIK) open-sourced.
So I'm standing here, wondering: what's the point?
It does, however, beat "Campus Jihad for Alah." I say that from a non-Muslim perspective so maybe they have the same connotation for Crusade as I do for Jihad.
You are.... CORRECT!
First, the Muslims (at least the Middle Eastern ones) really dislike crusades (historical, that is). Saladdin who defeated some of them is a huge hero.
Second, the word "jihad" in Arabic means nothing but "earnest and hard work towards some goal". The correct translation would probably be "campaign". Historically this word is was used to denote the holy wars to spread Islam and so is associated (in the European/Western mind) with sable-wielding barbarians coming from behind the dunes on their camels, and lately, with Muslim terrorists.
If consumerism is so natural, then why do corporations spend something like $450 BILLION a year to keep it going? And start marketing products in the US to children at age 2?
Because you might buy the product not from them, but from their competitors.
Look at cars. If all car advertising were banned, do you think Americans will drive less? They may buy new cars less often, but they will still buy them.
On the other hand, a democratically elected government with an active citizenry is accountable to those citizens.
Somewhat. First, active citizenry is (unfortunately) becoming harder and harder to find, and second the accountability is very crude: it's a one-bit control, you either accept or reject something, but you cannot fine-tune it.
A corporation is only accountable to its shareholders.
That's not true. A corporation is accountable to the laws of the country where it operates, and thus to this country's government, and thus, [giggles] to the people.
(Or perhaps I would at least ask Kaa to clarify.) I have no more "freedom to ignore intellectual property" than I have freedom to ignore the locks on my neighbors doors. These are not "freedoms."
Clarification: Yes, you currently you do have the freedom to ignore intellectual property. For example, a couple of days ago I downloaded Napster and committed some MP3-related copyright violations. I did this fully knowing that the chance of somebody prosecuting me for these violations is infestimaly small. Thus I am free of restrictions that are not being enforced.
VHS won, not because it was better technology, but because it was supported by multiple vendors. And yet I don't see any incompatibilities with my VCR because multiple companies manufacture them.
Look, VHS is the equivalent in computer world, of, say, IDE interface. It is well-defined and multiple manufacturers both produce it and write code for it. Since it is simple enough and changes little, there are few if any compatibility problems. An OS is something that is orders of magnitude more complicated, plus for reasons of efficiency people often bypass the APIs and depend on the internals working in a particular way. An operating system is not a printer and not a VCR, and this difference is relevant.
Certainly there will be a dominant OS, but there's nothing to prevent that OS from being developed, marketed and sold by more then one company.
A single OS developed by multiple competing companies?? Can you send me some of that stuff you are smoking?
if it's "standard" then it shouldn't matter how many developer's implement it.
It should not, but in the real world it does. See again the video cards example.
The number of different names Windows is sold under
The *names* under which Windows is sold is irrelevant. You are not talking about setting up a system of car dealers, are you? There is Bob's Autos, there is Jim's Vehicles and there is John's Limousines -- and they all sell the same Ford Taurus assembled at the Ford plant. If all Windows are the same, nothing changes -- you may get better customer support, but that's all. I thought the idea was to have flavors of Windows that were actually different -- otherwise what's the point?
You would die a horrible death to is you had a product, but were prevented by your competitor from selling it.
Sorry, but you should phrase it correctly. It's not like you were prevented from selling your product, it's just that your competitor was giving away its version for free. Sure looked bad from Netscape's point of view, but I see no God-given right of Netscape to have the public buy its product. And yes, I know why MS did this and what it hopes the ultimate consequence will be.
And I don't know what you mean by the browser thing being irrelevant. Do you only want to web to be accessiable from Windows machines??
The DoJ suit was about the incorporation of browsers into operating systems. This issue is completely moot now.
As to which browser is better, currently IE is noticeably better than Netscape. When Mozilla comes out we'll see. IE, by the way, runs on Solaris, for example.
It was an anti-trust violation.
I don't think it was. People disagree on this issue and that's why there was a court case.
However, it is good to hear that you don't think browser bundling is an issue anymore. That should mean I won't have a problem buying a Gateway PC with Netscape 5 preloaded, right?
It's not an issue not in way you think. Right now it is perfectly acceptable to supply the browser as part of the operating system (yes, MS won). You don't ask for a PC with Partition Magic preloaded, do you? If you want it you buy it, but in the meantime you can partition your drives using fdisk (or whatever Windows supplies). Most desktop environments come with calculators bundled. You want a better calculator -- go buy it and install it. You don't need a better one -- fine, use the one that came with the OS.
Remember the DOS days? There were plenty little companies that were selling all kinds of small OS tools for PC because DOS sucked so much. Eventually the DOS started to suck less and include all these little tools. The companies went out of business to great wailing and gnashing of teeth, but to me it was a good thing. I don't want to buy a zillion utilities from different companies to get my computer in decent shape. I actually prefer my OS to come with a disk partitioning utility, with a backup utility, with a calculator, etc. etc. If I want something more I'll go buy it, but I want the basics to be there. Well, the browser is now one of the basics. If I decide IE sucks, I'll go and install Opera (Netscape currently really, really sucks). If I am satisfied, I'll stay with IE. What's the problem?
OK let's say I'm one of the artists at etoy.com... [snip]... my friends and i accept the stock, sell it, buy ourselves some kick ass SGI boxes and some killer software and keep doing what we do at another domain name.
PS: I can't get over the way people on slashdot make it seem like a domain name is some necessity of life like food, air, water or shelter. We were not born with them and they'll be gone before we die. So what's the fscking point of all this ruckus.
In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up becaues I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up becaue I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me - and by that time no one was left to speak up.
The government looks out for its people. They need to plan ahead, to ensure future generations survive
Sorry, we have a big difference of opinion right here at the start. I think that the main goal of government is to self-perpetuate on the one hand, and to increase its own power, on the other hand. Sometimes this coincides with the society's interests, sometimes not (Pol Pot comes to mind).
As to the time horizon, the time horizon of most politicians extends exactly to the next election and as such is much shorter than the time horizon of some corporations (especially Japanese).
[Cell phone example]
This is actually a case where the market forces will work perfectly well: "Buy our new SuperWizzo cell phone! Unlike the competition, it will NOT give you brain cancer!" Besides, I have strong doubts about cell phone -> brain tumors link. It reminds me too much of the silicone implant debacle (in case you missed the end, the consensus was that there is *no* link, but the class-action lawyers were quite skillful).
Here's a story: I want to form a company that develops the next killer-app, the next hottest thing. Here are some issues I'll face:
- evil corporations: Can Microsoft wield power or what? And with a few blows it takes out Netscape. So what makes you think I'm not on their death list.
Welcome to the real world. Your start-up will be on the death list of all its competitors, whether you think of them as "evil" or not. Microsoft is considered to be evil because (1) it's big and (2) it's particularly crass and vulgar about it. Would it make you feel any better if a faceless Midwestern corporation did it to you instead of the "evil" MS?
a new trend in the economy, one where everybody becomes an expert.
[re incompatibilities] This of all the different printer models, and they all work the same to the user under Windows
Bad example. Printers are end-use devices of low complexity. Nobody makes system calls to printers. Think of a car, instead. The user interface is the same for all of them. They gas tank opening is quite standardized. But if you want to change the oil, the oil filter can be in any of many different places, and the wrench you would need can be one of many different types. Let's say you want to install, say, an alarm. You have a box and a bunch of wires -- and where these wires have to go is highly car-specific.
Incompatibilities are really only a problem if companies cover up/hide the interfaces need to interact. [snip] If there are incompatibilities, it's not the fault of multiple products, but lack of proper communication.
Maybe that should be true in some Platonic world. It's definitely not true in the real world. Example: video cards under DirectX. The interface is there and is quite well known. Yet look at any support page for a newly released game -- there would be a list of video cards with card-specific problems listed (and, hopefully with a kludge to fix some of them). My point is that even if the interface exists, the complexity of efficiently interacting with something so complicated as an OS (or even a video card driver/hardware) is such that you really, really want a single standard base.
I stand by my point that creating strawberry/cherry/chocolate Windows will be a compatibility nightmare.
And only the strong live. So no incompatibilities.
Agreed. That's why for any given consumer market there will always be one dominating OS. Look at e.g. Beta vs. VHS wars -- only one could live.
But if the OS company doesn't have the browser, then they can't force OEM's to not bundle Netscape and others.
Oh, come on. Netscape died a horrible death (I don't know of a fate much worse than being bought by AOL) and the whole browser thing is irrelevant by now. It was basically a pretext for the DoJ to go after Microsoft. Browser bundling is not an issue any more.
OEM's testified under oath that this [unbundling OS from hardware improves usability] was so.
And you believed them? OEMs have their own agenda and most of it is concerned with building brand loyalty. OEMs would *love*, for example, to brand-customize the OS so that on boot-up instead of a stupid Windows picture you get a stupid "Bozo Computers makes the best computers in the world! Unless you press Ctr-Alt-Shift-SysRq in two seconds you will be transported to our website www.bozo.com!" Since that would dilute MS's brand awareness, MS didn't cooperate and OEMs hated it for that. Don't be too naive about the motivations of corporations (even other than MS).
when MS forced a certain OEM to bundle IE instead of Netscape, their support calls went up considerably
And what does this have to do with breaking up Windows into competing flavors?
Companies who communicate will find their products more viable then those who refuse too.
By "communicate" I presume that you mean "publish interfaces and APIs". That can be true, but not necessarily so. In the computer world (both hardware and software) the game is most often won not by those who are most compatible with most everybody. The game is won by people who got there first and by being first locked the segment into their own standards. If they succeed in that (and this is the holy grail of most tech companies) compatibility actually becomes their enemy, not their friends. Companies which proclaim compatibility are usually trying to play catch-up. Witness, for example, the funny MS-vs-AOL game that they played over the InstantMessenger. Maybe that's not how it is supposed to be, but that's the way it works in the real world.
And many of the Seattle protesters are enthusiastic free-marketeers. What they're opposed to is out-of-control business with no morality - the motto of our times.
And, pray tell me, which morality are you talking about? There are plenty of moralities around, a lot of them are incompatible. Is it the suburban-US morality (or it has been corrupted by the big bad corporations?) -- or is it Christian morality (oops, plenty of non-Christians around) -- or is it Buddhist, or Confucian, or which?
This is very western-centric.
Oppressive corporatism - foreseen and warned about by great writers from Orwell to Huxley
It was my impression that these writers didn't worry too much about corporations. What they worried about was government, and I personally am still much more distrustful of a government than of a corporation.
Corporatism has, in fact, damaged the environment by creating incalculable amounts of products that pollute and trash the earth.
And guess why? Because the people wanted them, because the people buy them, and because the people will continue to buy them. That is called "satisfying demand". Would you rather commute to work in a horse-driven carriage?
Younger workers are forced into dead-end and poorly paid positions with little chance of advancement or meaningful work
You are telling this to the Slashdot crowd, remember?
...the notion that companies are behaving immorally: [snip]... Microsoft, which has been accused of monopolizing software and information markets for years
Since when monopolization of a market is a sin?? You can argue that this is economically inefficient and thus the society should step in, but this is all about economic efficiency. What has morality do with it?
Other issues cited by the protestors:
Ah, here we come to the interesting parts
individual liberty,
Meaning what? And what does it have to do with corporations?
economic dignity,
I take it this means "I want to be paid regardless of whether the work I do is useful, or even regardless of whether I work at all".
patent control,
Meaning what? Besides, I doubt this issue worries much your average person.
the freedom of intellectual property,
Err.. does this mean the freedom to own intellectual property, or the freedom to ignore intellectual property? Both are freedoms, you know.
higher wages, job security, labor rights,
I see. The meeting of of our union Local 2072 is now brought to order. Those fat cats have been underpaying us all our lives, and I want more money, dammit! This is my moral claim!
environmental protection,
That's like apple pie and motherhood, isn't it?
and some check on the rise of corporate power and influence.
Power vacuum gets filled quickly. So, tell me, if you don't want the corporations to have power, who is to have it? Government? No, thank you very much. A brief look at history, even only of the XX century is a pretty convincing argument to give government as little power as possible. "The people"? There ain't no such thing. What you would call "the people" I would probably call a mass and a mess of tribes, groups and subcultures with different agendas, different views of the workd, and different ideas about how to go about pretty much everything. The individual? Yeah, I'm all for it, but I have this tiny little nagging suspicion that any power taken away from corporation is not going to end up in the hands of an individual anyway. IMHO it is the governments who are mostly afraid of the growth of the competition to their power, so they try to keep their monopoly on power for as long as possible.
Katz is trying to make the Seattle protesters much nicer and more sophisticated than they are. As far as it seems to me, they are mostly a mix of the same union and Greenpeace types with a bunch of luddites thrown in. Calling them techno-idealists is a very big stretch.
Okay, wise guy. I'm waiting to hear. Why wouldn't it [breaking up of MS] be a good for the average consumer?
Although I'm not the original poster, I'll bite.
First, there are two possible kinds of breaking up. The first kind will essentially split all of MS's businesses into chunks so that there would be, for example, two or three companies selling the Windows OS. The second kind will split MS by businesses, that is, into an OS company (Windows in its many flavors), an applications company (Office, etc.) and an Internet company.
Let's look at the first kind where we would have, say, stawberry Windows, cherry Windows, and chocolate Windows instead of plain-vanilla Windows which we have now. Is it good? Well, it would definitely lead to lower prices which is a good thing, and may (not at all certain) eventually lead to a better product. However, there is a big problem with this scenario and that is the compatibility issue. Right now users and developers (in the Windows world) have to contend mostly with hardware diversity issues. Do you really advocate layering whole another bunch of compatibility problems on top of that? "Ah, yes, sir, our product runs fine on cherry and strawberry, however we are having some problems with chocolate when there are more than 2 SCSI devices connected to the bus, and there is also that strange side-effect of a system call in cherry that we cannot really get a handle on...". Having a standard base is a Good Thing.
The second kind of breakup wouldn't help much, too. Windows would still be force-bundled, and still be dominant. Sure, those Office developers might lose some of their priviledged insights into system internals, but make no mistake -- the world uses MS Office not because it is tightly integrated with the underlying OS, but because it is the best office suite available.
To look at your points:
There will be no more forced bundling on OEMs
Only in scenario #1, plus the OEMs still need an operating system. I'll give you a hint -- for quite a while it's not going to be Linux.
which will result in better usuability, and less support problems for consumers
You make no sense. Unbundling the OS from the hardware will result in better usability? Having multiple Windows flavors will result in less support problems?
Lower prices for consumers.
Granted. For low-end machines the price of Windows becomes a significant percentage of the machine's cost.
Better compatibility. Just like cars have a lot of intercompatibility, if Microsoft were broken up, that would, in part force the companies to have compatibility with other products.
Dream on. The compatibility will become a major headache for everybody involved. Note that it's the cars' user interface that's "intercompatible" -- that is, the same -- but just try to install some part from Ford's engine into your Honda! And market forces do not enforce compatability, but rather push everybody towards some compatible base on which everybody can standardize. And an OS is a base for building applications, not the goal in itself.
Right now, if I need to send a document to someone I need to find out what word processor they have, and then try to get it in that format.
Well, actually right now you can send the document in the MS Word format and be pretty sure everybody will be able to read it. It is in your scenario that you'll have to find out what your counterparty is using.
As I said, it's my opinion -- I, personally, disliked it. It is slow and a memory hog, could not do some stuff I needed to do (I don't remember what exactly by now) and had many minor inconveniences. I don't remember details, but I remember a lot of frustration and some disgust.
Or wasn't there a study that said any two random sites are 19 clicks apart? Now we're down to four? In a matter of two months since I saw the story? I don't buy it, yet.
I don't buy it either. Remember, the same story said that an average site has 15 outgoing links. That means that you can get (on the average) to 15 sites in one click, to 15^2=225 sites in two clicks, to 15^3=3375 sites in three clicks, and to 15^4=50625 sites in four clicks. Only lousy 50,000 sites??? That's a far cry from the whole web.
The author claims, for example, that Office 97 is barely runnable on a Pentium-II 266
That is FUD and bullshit. I run Office 97 on my Pentium (not Pro) 200 with 64Mb of RAM and it's very much usable (after you disable the paperclip, of course).
I've worked with Applixware under Solaris. It sucks (IMHO and YMMV, of course). For a while it was the only game in town, but even then I found out that I'd rather ftp data files to my PC and then work on them in Excel rather than fire up Applix and try to do stuff under it. I haven't tried Sun's Office yet, but I have a feeling that unless Applix gets really better really fast it is going the way of SCO UNIX.
Slashdot Mirror
"Technology has the power to change relationships between people. It is not neutral."
;)
So, if it's not neutral, is it good or evil? Inquiring Slashdotters want to know!
Besides I don't see the causal relationship: "Gravity has the power to pull people to the ground. It is not neutral".
"If a standard is 'owned' by one company... then the company ends up with something very like a monopoly."
Duh!
"People 'in' cyberspace and deeply experienced with it tend to overrate it."
Compared to whom? What's the reference group? If it is Joe Random Luser, then there are a lot of things he believes to be overrated
"Money has always been somewhat virtual..."
At the time of, say, ancient Greeks -- no (obviously). Basically, the advent of banks made money somewhat virtual (your money was a line in the account ledger) and that was, I believe, somewhere around the XIV century.
Kaa
Two observations.
First, the question whether 30-something percent of Americans are diagnosable with a mental disorder is pretty meaningless. Because it all depends on your definition of a mental disorder.
In reality, there is a whole spectrum of conditions from one extreme (let's keep it one-dimensional for simplicity, although it's not) of Maslow's super-people who are wise, strong, sensitive, can take it, etc. etc. to the other extreme of heavy-duty clinical disorders when people cannot survive on their own. People at extremes are fairly rare and it's obvious whether they are mentally ill or healthy. The situation is more complicated for the mess in the middle. Basically, you can pick any line and call people to the left of it "mentally sick" and people to the right of it "mentally healthy". Depending on your definitions (where you draw the line) you can have from 10 to 90% of the population either sick or healthy -- you choose!
The second issue is of treating mental disorders with drugs. Again, it's fairly obvious that heavy-duty disorders need to be treated with drugs, because that the only thing that (sometimes) works -- at least the only thing we know of. The interesting question again concerns the mess in the middle, and the question is: do we all want to be well-adjusted? In each society there is sort of a picture of a "mentally healthy" individual and those that deviate from this picture are supposed to work on getting closer to it. But is it a Good Thing? I think it can be shown that most of the world's greatest literature and poetry, and to a lesser degree music, was created by severely maladjusted people. It is likely that have they been treated to become "normal", no masterpieces would have been created.
The question of "do you want to be more normal?" is actually a very deep one and has to do with the person's identity. If I have periodic situational depressions, is it part of me? If I make them go away, does it make "me" less of me? There are two extremes, neither of which seems to work: one is "when severely depressed, take walks in the woods", and the other is "if you wake up in bad mood, take the yellow pill and it will pass". Where the right middle is, I am not sure.
Yours in craziness
Kaa
Yes, first poster, in fact, God is the answer!
.... Also there are not-quite-Gods-but-really-nice-fellows like Buddha and others. So, pray tell me, oh Wise One Who Knows All The Answers, which god?
Yes, but which god?? There is YHWH, and the Christian Trinity, and Allah, and Vishnu (together with Shiva, etc. etc. etc.), and Odin, and
Besides, it's not like anybody doesn't know that the answer is 42.
Kaa
But when you start depending on technology for survival,
News for you: we already are. Let's say all electric power irrevocably dies. In this case most of humanity will die out from hunger fairly quickly (within one year). The human species will not die out, but maybe ~80% of population will.
For example, what is someone made a mistake in developing this technology, causing every genetically engineered human being on the planet to suffer from a degenerative disease
Since it's fairly clear we are not going to change over to genetically engineering everybody within one generation, the answer is that the first few "guinea pigs" will die from that disease and the rest will wait until the technology gets fixed.
But I laugh when I think of the idea of abstracting sex from the process of making children
Good, because it has been abstracted. The Pill, latex condoms, etc. have broken this connection.
I shudder to think about screwing the gene pool up so much that we come to depend on genetic engineering for the survival and well-being of our species
Why would we depend on it for survival?? You are jumping waay too much ahead...
Kaa
we are embarking on something this huge without more support from our leaders?
And who are your leaders? I sincerely hope that it's not the US Congress.
[making kids cheerful and pliant] but i harbour no illusions that the majority of the world feels, or would act, this way
The majority of the world already acts this way. Upbringing is probably at least as important as genes in forming a personality. Besides, this is a free choice issue -- why should you force or prohibit a pair of individuals from making a choice about their child?
[re human cloning] what if some wacko dictator says it's illegal for new babies have red hair?
All your examples are genetic engineering issues and have nothing to to do specifically with human cloning (unless non-cloned humans are made illegal, a situation I do not expect to see in the foreseeable future).
it doesn't seem beyond belief to me that given the ability to control our children we would, as a culture/species, remove our own bio-diversity to the point where our ability to surive some catastrophic event would be impaired.
First of all biodiversity is a characteristic of an ecosystem and reflects the number and variety of organisms sustained by that ecosystem. What you are concerned about is the diversity of genes in the human gene pool. That could be an issue, but given the rates at which generations follow one another, this doesn not seem to be an important concern. If you want to worry about damage to human gene pool, worry about modern medicine allowing people with fatal-if-untreated genetic defects to survive and breed. In a normal population such genetic defects are washed out naturally, since individuals that exibit them die before they can breed. That is no longer true for humans and it is an already real threat to human gene pool.
[re having no disabled people] what about people like stephen hawking?
What about him? He still would be born, only not paralyzed. Maybe he wouldn't be as brilliant because his mind/energy will spread itself over more stuff, but he'll certainly be happier.
who are we to steal someone elses suffering.
If you want to suffer, nobody is going to prevent you from suffering. The issue is preventing you from having to suffer and not having a choice in the matter. If you need to self-flagellate for spiritual fulfilment, be my guest.
i wouldn't wish some nasty, genitically avoidable disease/malfunction on anyone. but don't these things enrich the world around us?
Somebody's else suffering enriches your world? Er... it doesn't sound like a particularly nice (or defensible) position to take.
but i do object to your labelling someones attempt to think about things as stupid and anti-progress.
I do not object to people trying to think. However, both Katz and you seem to believe that arranging some words in your mind or on paper qualifies as thinking. Permit me to disabuse you of this notion. Good thinking is hard. It requires concentration, mental discipline, logic, and ability to hold complicated structures of concepts in your head. Relatively few people (among those I met, at least) can think well.
Katz's article and your post, sorry to say, do not qualify as good thinking. They are a messy soup of ramblings, buzzwords, fears, half-baked ideas, and whatever else came into your head when you were writing this. I do not claim that I always do good thinking when I post to Slashdot, but at least I try to be coherent. Unfortunately, Katz is free from that limitation of mine.
Katz's article is stupid (insofar as it has any content, which I am not sure about) and is anti-progress, because it is, basically, fear-mongering -- it tries to raise dark, vague, primal fears about technological progress.
Kaa
HAH! coming from a person who, obviously, is not a parent
My two kids, eight and twelve years old, will be very surprised to learn that I am obviously not a parent.
Kaa
Think about the "just guess" generation. They see a function call like socketpair(Child_Side, Parent_Side, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC) and they start typing random things trying to guess what happens when you diddle those arguments. It boggles the mind.
But it's a GOOD thing!! Provided that the whole thing happens in a sandbox, that's how learning occurs, and that is as true for submitting random arguments to socketpair, as it is for the games you mentioned like perl and nethack (sorry about vi, can't make myself put it in there).
To put it into high-falutin' words, trying the guess the output of random input is a trial-and-error process of mental map construction. As such, it is not the fastest one, but probably the most useful, both for brain exercise, and for the insights you get while trying weird stuff. Yes, reading a book (man page, pod file, etc) will give you a correct mental map much faster, but you'll understand it less and will forget it faster.
I agree that mucking around in stuff you have absolutely no clue about isn't productive and is not a good way of problem-solving. However it can be incredibly fun (you get to discover on your own so many new things), very intellectually challenging (how must it work to react to X by Y, and to Z by A?), and good gymnastics for the mind.
In any case, a person who tries to, say, configure a mail server, types in a few random things into config files, sees that they don't work, and drops the whole thing saying "I guess this isn't for me" is RIGHT. This isn't for him. But such people shouldn't be allowed near config files anyway. On the other hand a clueful person (if he has the time, the inclination, and the backups) could play around with the configs, testing out different ideas of his, and RTFMing on the as-needed basis. This person would know mail servers much better than somebody who picked up "Mail Servers for Dummies", skimmed through it, and more or less blindly made the "recommended" changes to his config files.
But as a rant against clueless lusers, I agree completely with you. The crucial difference is whether somebody is playing in a sandbox and/or has the capability to fix back all he broke, or he is randomly poking fingers at buttons on an important machine hoping that it would magically do what he wants (if he knows what he wants, that is).
Kaa
I have this book and have skimmed through it. This is basically computer science algorithms (zillion of different sorts, graph representation, etc.) implemented in Perl. The problem is that this book has limited relevance to real life. "Perl Cookbook" is much, much more useful in this regard.
So, if you are collecting all Perl book, or are really interested in how to implement red-black trees in Perl, do buy it. On the other hand, if you are looking for snippets of code to solve small-to-medium-sized problems you meet all the time, "Perl Cookbook" is a much better choice.
Kaa
We have set out on a project whose goal is to alter the nature of human existence, without the interest of a single national political leader or a single Congressional debate
And Katz speaks of this as if it were a BAD thing! Really, what could the interest of a politician, or of a whole bunch of congresscritters add to the debate except fuck it up?
In effect, children may be given genotypes
Er... genotype is an existing word. Look up its meaning in a dictionary (hint: you are using it incorrectly).
Why have an idiosyncratic or rebellious offspring when you can choose a cheerful and pliant one?
For a whole variety of reasons. I, for example, definitely don't want my kids to be cheerful and pliant consumer-drones. In my book being "strange" is good.
[human cloning] Too many people will want to use it, too much money can be made off of it.
So, what's bad about human cloning? You've spent paragaphs hinting darkly about unspeakable horrors, but what are they? What is all that awful and horrible about human cloning? After all when it happens naturally and twins are born, nobody seems to be all that excited about it...
Are we comfortable living in a world in which whose categories of humanity - the retarded, the blind, the disabled - will disappear from our part of the earth?
Well, I don't know about Katz but I would be perfectly comfortable living in the world where there are no disabled people. I would also like to ask -- is Katz comfortable living in the world where nobody is sick with bubonic plague? How could he stay in the US where it is so hard to find cholera sufferers? And, to think, for example, about the artificialness of prostheses -- why, in the good old days if you lost a leg, you just lived without a leg, not tried to put on these awful metal-and-plastic contraptions -- right, Katz?
What about developing and Third-World nations, where few will have access to Perfect Baby technologies?
You mean if everybody can't have it, nobody should have it? I thought that this was a basic idea of Russian communism in the 20s, but it kinda went out of fashion since then.
A generation ago, who could have imagined that one company would have its software in more than 90 per cent of the personal computers in the world?
A generation ago who could have imagined personal computers? Besides, a generation (maybe 1.5 generations) ago one company had a presence in every American home and controlled the communications of the entire nation. Yes, I'm talking about Ma Bell. And, pray tell, what horrible things came out of this?
All in all, this is another content-free rant.
Kaa
Nonetheless, somebody got this insanely fucked up idea that if it's got a mouse interface, it's easy to use for a novice
I believe it were the PARC people, mostly from Alan Kay's Smalltalk project, that were the first to get this idea. It also seems to me that the idea wasn't "if there is a mouse, it got to be easy to use", but rather "here is this new visual interface, and the mouse is a natural way to operate it".
And even if it were so, optimizing for a novice instead of a long-time user is nutty.
Yes, but. There is also such a thing as a casual user. People generally don't spend their whole life with a single program that they get to know like the back of their hand. There are exceptions and they mostly tend to involve programmers and text editors (e.g you, Tom, and vi). Other, "normal" people spend a lot of time moving from one program to another, or, say, using a program once a week or once a month. In such cases having to remember keyboard commands is a pain in the neck. More, if the commands are different across applications, your fingers become confused and lose that their automatic knowledge of what to hit when with all the well-known consequences. So I would say that mouse-based GUIs are definitely a good thing.
That was the 'but' part. There is also the 'yes' part in that once you do become an expert in some application, keyboard shortcuts are faster and more convenient. That is exactly why good user interface design allows for multiple ways to do the same thing, some of them mouse-based, and some keyboard-based (if the design is really good, you can also write scripts).
They forget that the experienced user is more important than the novice, because his annoyance will be compounded across the time interval.
Not necessarily. If the learning curve is sufficiently steep, people will just not spend the effort to learn the interface and thus will never achieve the necessary proficiency. First of all, many people will try out a program and if they cannot make sense of it in the first few minutes, they'll chuck it. Second, I, for example, use a lot of programs, say, once a week. So once a week I again become a novice user and would much prefer to click around then to try to remember the keyboard commands.
Kaa
Really.This looks like an exercise in OS design and x86 assembler coding. I hope these guys had a lot of fun writing it, because that's all the utility that's going to come out of it. Do we need a mini-OS for desktop machines? Nope. Do we need one for palmtops? Yes, but palmtops don't run x86 processors, oops. Do we need one for embedded processors? Also yes, but x86 processors are quite rare there, plus there are already a couple of OSes around and even at least one (AFAIK) open-sourced.
So I'm standing here, wondering: what's the point?
Kaa
It does, however, beat "Campus Jihad for Alah." I say that from a non-Muslim perspective so maybe they have the same connotation for Crusade as I do for Jihad.
You are.... CORRECT!
First, the Muslims (at least the Middle Eastern ones) really dislike crusades (historical, that is). Saladdin who defeated some of them is a huge hero.
Second, the word "jihad" in Arabic means nothing but "earnest and hard work towards some goal". The correct translation would probably be "campaign". Historically this word is was used to denote the holy wars to spread Islam and so is associated (in the European/Western mind) with sable-wielding barbarians coming from behind the dunes on their camels, and lately, with Muslim terrorists.
Kaa
If consumerism is so natural, then why do corporations spend something like $450 BILLION a year to keep it going? And start marketing products in the US to children at age 2?
Because you might buy the product not from them, but from their competitors.
Look at cars. If all car advertising were banned, do you think Americans will drive less? They may buy new cars less often, but they will still buy them.
On the other hand, a democratically elected government with an active citizenry is accountable to those citizens.
Somewhat. First, active citizenry is (unfortunately) becoming harder and harder to find, and second the accountability is very crude: it's a one-bit control, you either accept or reject something, but you cannot fine-tune it.
A corporation is only accountable to its shareholders.
That's not true. A corporation is accountable to the laws of the country where it operates, and thus to this country's government, and thus, [giggles] to the people.
Kaa
(Or perhaps I would at least ask Kaa to clarify.) I have no more "freedom to ignore intellectual property" than I have freedom to ignore the locks on my neighbors doors. These are not "freedoms."
Clarification: Yes, you currently you do have the freedom to ignore intellectual property. For example, a couple of days ago I downloaded Napster and committed some MP3-related copyright violations. I did this fully knowing that the chance of somebody prosecuting me for these violations is infestimaly small. Thus I am free of restrictions that are not being enforced.
Kaa
VHS won, not because it was better technology, but because it was supported by multiple vendors. And yet I don't see any incompatibilities with my VCR because multiple companies manufacture them.
Look, VHS is the equivalent in computer world, of, say, IDE interface. It is well-defined and multiple manufacturers both produce it and write code for it. Since it is simple enough and changes little, there are few if any compatibility problems. An OS is something that is orders of magnitude more complicated, plus for reasons of efficiency people often bypass the APIs and depend on the internals working in a particular way. An operating system is not a printer and not a VCR, and this difference is relevant.
Certainly there will be a dominant OS, but there's nothing to prevent that OS from being developed, marketed and sold by more then one company.
A single OS developed by multiple competing companies?? Can you send me some of that stuff you are smoking?
if it's "standard" then it shouldn't matter how many developer's implement it.
It should not, but in the real world it does. See again the video cards example.
The number of different names Windows is sold under
The *names* under which Windows is sold is irrelevant. You are not talking about setting up a system of car dealers, are you? There is Bob's Autos, there is Jim's Vehicles and there is John's Limousines -- and they all sell the same Ford Taurus assembled at the Ford plant. If all Windows are the same, nothing changes -- you may get better customer support, but that's all. I thought the idea was to have flavors of Windows that were actually different -- otherwise what's the point?
You would die a horrible death to is you had a product, but were prevented by your competitor from selling it.
Sorry, but you should phrase it correctly. It's not like you were prevented from selling your product, it's just that your competitor was giving away its version for free. Sure looked bad from Netscape's point of view, but I see no God-given right of Netscape to have the public buy its product. And yes, I know why MS did this and what it hopes the ultimate consequence will be.
And I don't know what you mean by the browser thing being irrelevant. Do you only want to web to be accessiable from Windows machines??
The DoJ suit was about the incorporation of browsers into operating systems. This issue is completely moot now.
As to which browser is better, currently IE is noticeably better than Netscape. When Mozilla comes out we'll see. IE, by the way, runs on Solaris, for example.
It was an anti-trust violation.
I don't think it was. People disagree on this issue and that's why there was a court case.
However, it is good to hear that you don't think browser bundling is an issue anymore. That should mean I won't have a problem buying a Gateway PC with Netscape 5 preloaded, right?
It's not an issue not in way you think. Right now it is perfectly acceptable to supply the browser as part of the operating system (yes, MS won). You don't ask for a PC with Partition Magic preloaded, do you? If you want it you buy it, but in the meantime you can partition your drives using fdisk (or whatever Windows supplies). Most desktop environments come with calculators bundled. You want a better calculator -- go buy it and install it. You don't need a better one -- fine, use the one that came with the OS.
Remember the DOS days? There were plenty little companies that were selling all kinds of small OS tools for PC because DOS sucked so much. Eventually the DOS started to suck less and include all these little tools. The companies went out of business to great wailing and gnashing of teeth, but to me it was a good thing. I don't want to buy a zillion utilities from different companies to get my computer in decent shape. I actually prefer my OS to come with a disk partitioning utility, with a backup utility, with a calculator, etc. etc. If I want something more I'll go buy it, but I want the basics to be there. Well, the browser is now one of the basics. If I decide IE sucks, I'll go and install Opera (Netscape currently really, really sucks). If I am satisfied, I'll stay with IE. What's the problem?
Kaa
OK let's say I'm one of the artists at etoy.com... [snip] ... my friends and i accept the stock, sell it, buy ourselves some kick ass SGI boxes and some killer software and keep doing what we do at another domain name.
PS: I can't get over the way people on slashdot make it seem like a domain name is some necessity of life like food, air, water or shelter. We were not born with them and they'll be gone before we die. So what's the fscking point of all this ruckus.
In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up becaues I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up becaue I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me - and by that time no one was left to speak up.
-- Pastor Martin Niemoller
Kaa
The government looks out for its people. They need to plan ahead, to ensure future generations survive
Sorry, we have a big difference of opinion right here at the start. I think that the main goal of government is to self-perpetuate on the one hand, and to increase its own power, on the other hand. Sometimes this coincides with the society's interests, sometimes not (Pol Pot comes to mind).
As to the time horizon, the time horizon of most politicians extends exactly to the next election and as such is much shorter than the time horizon of some corporations (especially Japanese).
[Cell phone example]
This is actually a case where the market forces will work perfectly well: "Buy our new SuperWizzo cell phone! Unlike the competition, it will NOT give you brain cancer!" Besides, I have strong doubts about cell phone -> brain tumors link. It reminds me too much of the silicone implant debacle (in case you missed the end, the consensus was that there is *no* link, but the class-action lawyers were quite skillful).
Here's a story: I want to form a company that develops the next killer-app, the next hottest thing. Here are some issues I'll face:
- evil corporations: Can Microsoft wield power or what? And with a few blows it takes out Netscape. So what makes you think I'm not on their death list.
Welcome to the real world. Your start-up will be on the death list of all its competitors, whether you think of them as "evil" or not. Microsoft is considered to be evil because (1) it's big and (2) it's particularly crass and vulgar about it. Would it make you feel any better if a faceless Midwestern corporation did it to you instead of the "evil" MS?
a new trend in the economy, one where everybody becomes an expert.
[laughs long and hard]. See Kaa's law.
Kaa
[re incompatibilities] This of all the different printer models, and they all work the same to the user under Windows
Bad example. Printers are end-use devices of low complexity. Nobody makes system calls to printers. Think of a car, instead. The user interface is the same for all of them. They gas tank opening is quite standardized. But if you want to change the oil, the oil filter can be in any of many different places, and the wrench you would need can be one of many different types. Let's say you want to install, say, an alarm. You have a box and a bunch of wires -- and where these wires have to go is highly car-specific.
Incompatibilities are really only a problem if companies cover up/hide the interfaces need to interact. [snip] If there are incompatibilities, it's not the fault of multiple products, but lack of proper communication.
Maybe that should be true in some Platonic world. It's definitely not true in the real world. Example: video cards under DirectX. The interface is there and is quite well known. Yet look at any support page for a newly released game -- there would be a list of video cards with card-specific problems listed (and, hopefully with a kludge to fix some of them). My point is that even if the interface exists, the complexity of efficiently interacting with something so complicated as an OS (or even a video card driver/hardware) is such that you really, really want a single standard base.
I stand by my point that creating strawberry/cherry/chocolate Windows will be a compatibility nightmare.
And only the strong live. So no incompatibilities.
Agreed. That's why for any given consumer market there will always be one dominating OS. Look at e.g. Beta vs. VHS wars -- only one could live.
But if the OS company doesn't have the browser, then they can't force OEM's to not bundle Netscape and others.
Oh, come on. Netscape died a horrible death (I don't know of a fate much worse than being bought by AOL) and the whole browser thing is irrelevant by now. It was basically a pretext for the DoJ to go after Microsoft. Browser bundling is not an issue any more.
OEM's testified under oath that this [unbundling OS from hardware improves usability] was so.
And you believed them? OEMs have their own agenda and most of it is concerned with building brand loyalty. OEMs would *love*, for example, to brand-customize the OS so that on boot-up instead of a stupid Windows picture you get a stupid "Bozo Computers makes the best computers in the world! Unless you press Ctr-Alt-Shift-SysRq in two seconds you will be transported to our website www.bozo.com!" Since that would dilute MS's brand awareness, MS didn't cooperate and OEMs hated it for that. Don't be too naive about the motivations of corporations (even other than MS).
when MS forced a certain OEM to bundle IE instead of Netscape, their support calls went up considerably
And what does this have to do with breaking up Windows into competing flavors?
Companies who communicate will find their products more viable then those who refuse too.
By "communicate" I presume that you mean "publish interfaces and APIs". That can be true, but not necessarily so. In the computer world (both hardware and software) the game is most often won not by those who are most compatible with most everybody. The game is won by people who got there first and by being first locked the segment into their own standards. If they succeed in that (and this is the holy grail of most tech companies) compatibility actually becomes their enemy, not their friends. Companies which proclaim compatibility are usually trying to play catch-up. Witness, for example, the funny MS-vs-AOL game that they played over the InstantMessenger. Maybe that's not how it is supposed to be, but that's the way it works in the real world.
Kaa
Wow, Katz is worse than usual...
...the notion that companies are behaving immorally: [snip] ... Microsoft, which has been accused of monopolizing software and information markets for years
And many of the Seattle protesters are enthusiastic free-marketeers. What they're opposed to is out-of-control business with no morality - the motto of our times.
And, pray tell me, which morality are you talking about? There are plenty of moralities around, a lot of them are incompatible. Is it the suburban-US morality (or it has been corrupted by the big bad corporations?) -- or is it Christian morality (oops, plenty of non-Christians around) -- or is it Buddhist, or Confucian, or which?
This is very western-centric.
Oppressive corporatism - foreseen and warned about by great writers from Orwell to Huxley
It was my impression that these writers didn't worry too much about corporations. What they worried about was government, and I personally am still much more distrustful of a government than of a corporation.
Corporatism has, in fact, damaged the environment by creating incalculable amounts of products that pollute and trash the earth.
And guess why? Because the people wanted them, because the people buy them, and because the people will continue to buy them. That is called "satisfying demand". Would you rather commute to work in a horse-driven carriage?
Younger workers are forced into dead-end and poorly paid positions with little chance of advancement or meaningful work
You are telling this to the Slashdot crowd, remember?
Since when monopolization of a market is a sin?? You can argue that this is economically inefficient and thus the society should step in, but this is all about economic efficiency. What has morality do with it?
Other issues cited by the protestors:
Ah, here we come to the interesting parts
individual liberty,
Meaning what? And what does it have to do with corporations?
economic dignity,
I take it this means "I want to be paid regardless of whether the work I do is useful, or even regardless of whether I work at all".
patent control,
Meaning what? Besides, I doubt this issue worries much your average person.
the freedom of intellectual property,
Err.. does this mean the freedom to own intellectual property, or the freedom to ignore intellectual property? Both are freedoms, you know.
higher wages, job security, labor rights,
I see. The meeting of of our union Local 2072 is now brought to order. Those fat cats have been underpaying us all our lives, and I want more money, dammit! This is my moral claim!
environmental protection,
That's like apple pie and motherhood, isn't it?
and some check on the rise of corporate power and influence.
Power vacuum gets filled quickly. So, tell me, if you don't want the corporations to have power, who is to have it? Government? No, thank you very much. A brief look at history, even only of the XX century is a pretty convincing argument to give government as little power as possible. "The people"? There ain't no such thing. What you would call "the people" I would probably call a mass and a mess of tribes, groups and subcultures with different agendas, different views of the workd, and different ideas about how to go about pretty much everything. The individual? Yeah, I'm all for it, but I have this tiny little nagging suspicion that any power taken away from corporation is not going to end up in the hands of an individual anyway. IMHO it is the governments who are mostly afraid of the growth of the competition to their power, so they try to keep their monopoly on power for as long as possible.
Katz is trying to make the Seattle protesters much nicer and more sophisticated than they are. As far as it seems to me, they are mostly a mix of the same union and Greenpeace types with a bunch of luddites thrown in. Calling them techno-idealists is a very big stretch.
Kaa
Okay, wise guy. I'm waiting to hear. Why wouldn't it [breaking up of MS] be a good for the average consumer?
Although I'm not the original poster, I'll bite.
First, there are two possible kinds of breaking up. The first kind will essentially split all of MS's businesses into chunks so that there would be, for example, two or three companies selling the Windows OS. The second kind will split MS by businesses, that is, into an OS company (Windows in its many flavors), an applications company (Office, etc.) and an Internet company.
Let's look at the first kind where we would have, say, stawberry Windows, cherry Windows, and chocolate Windows instead of plain-vanilla Windows which we have now. Is it good? Well, it would definitely lead to lower prices which is a good thing, and may (not at all certain) eventually lead to a better product. However, there is a big problem with this scenario and that is the compatibility issue. Right now users and developers (in the Windows world) have to contend mostly with hardware diversity issues. Do you really advocate layering whole another bunch of compatibility problems on top of that? "Ah, yes, sir, our product runs fine on cherry and strawberry, however we are having some problems with chocolate when there are more than 2 SCSI devices connected to the bus, and there is also that strange side-effect of a system call in cherry that we cannot really get a handle on...".
Having a standard base is a Good Thing.
The second kind of breakup wouldn't help much, too. Windows would still be force-bundled, and still be dominant. Sure, those Office developers might lose some of their priviledged insights into system internals, but make no mistake -- the world uses MS Office not because it is tightly integrated with the underlying OS, but because it is the best office suite available.
To look at your points:
There will be no more forced bundling on OEMs
Only in scenario #1, plus the OEMs still need an operating system. I'll give you a hint -- for quite a while it's not going to be Linux.
which will result in better usuability, and less support problems for consumers
You make no sense. Unbundling the OS from the hardware will result in better usability? Having multiple Windows flavors will result in less support problems?
Lower prices for consumers.
Granted. For low-end machines the price of Windows becomes a significant percentage of the machine's cost.
Better compatibility. Just like cars have a lot of intercompatibility, if Microsoft were broken up, that would, in part force the companies to have compatibility with other products.
Dream on. The compatibility will become a major headache for everybody involved. Note that it's the cars' user interface that's "intercompatible" -- that is, the same -- but just try to install some part from Ford's engine into your Honda! And market forces do not enforce compatability, but rather push everybody towards some compatible base on which everybody can standardize. And an OS is a base for building applications, not the goal in itself.
Right now, if I need to send a document to someone I need to find out what word processor they have, and then try to get it in that format.
Well, actually right now you can send the document in the MS Word format and be pretty sure everybody will be able to read it. It is in your scenario that you'll have to find out what your counterparty is using.
You get the idea.
No, I still don't.
Kaa
As I said, it's my opinion -- I, personally, disliked it. It is slow and a memory hog, could not do some stuff I needed to do (I don't remember what exactly by now) and had many minor inconveniences. I don't remember details, but I remember a lot of frustration and some disgust.
Kaa
Or wasn't there a study that said any two random sites are 19 clicks apart? Now we're down to four? In a matter of two months since I saw the story? I don't buy it, yet.
I don't buy it either. Remember, the same story said that an average site has 15 outgoing links. That means that you can get (on the average) to 15 sites in one click, to 15^2=225 sites in two clicks, to 15^3=3375 sites in three clicks, and to 15^4=50625 sites in four clicks. Only lousy 50,000 sites??? That's a far cry from the whole web.
Kaa
The author claims, for example, that Office 97 is barely runnable on a Pentium-II 266
That is FUD and bullshit. I run Office 97 on my Pentium (not Pro) 200 with 64Mb of RAM and it's very much usable (after you disable the paperclip, of course).
Kaa
I've worked with Applixware under Solaris. It sucks (IMHO and YMMV, of course). For a while it was the only game in town, but even then I found out that I'd rather ftp data files to my PC and then work on them in Excel rather than fire up Applix and try to do stuff under it. I haven't tried Sun's Office yet, but I have a feeling that unless Applix gets really better really fast it is going the way of SCO UNIX.
Kaa
If people are "producing more than they consume", then someone is stealing some of the product of their labour.
Bzzzzt. Such things as savings + investment on the one hand, and waste + disasters on the other hand have clearly never entered your mind.
As Karl Marx pointed out.
Hasn't Karl Marx been proven wrong so many times it's not even funny?
Kaa