One thing you're neglecting is the cost of publishing on the Internet. A corporation can pay for a couple of T-3's, a bunch of expensive servers and the engineers and publishers who will put up their massive web sites.
A small publisher may be incredibly popular, but the costs would make it so that publishing would become increasingly difficult, there's a cap on how popular they can be. Too many people come to their site and their ISP will hit them with a bill they can't afford.
The central problem is the "cost" of publication falls more upon the publisher than the consumer. P2P publishing networks like MojoNation and Freenet change this trend. Resiliency is determined by consumer popularity, not how big the corporation publishing it's bankroll is. Usenet publishing is free, but ephemeral. Only a corporation could collectivize Usenet. Currently one has a monopoly on this collectivization, Google, and it does not archive binary posts.
The FastTrack network (Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster) is an authoritarian network. With version 1.3.3, network control was centralized by requiring authentication by company servers - all power in the network was concentrated in the hands of a few. Thus, since it is an authoritarian system, a more powerful authoritarian system, US entertainment corporations, can make the MPAA make the Dutch courts shut down the FastTrack network.
The Gnutella network on the other hand, is a more anarchic network. All power on the network is distributed equally among the users of the network. Thus, although it has been around longer than FastTrack, there is no central authority the MPAA can force to submit, so it is not as easy for the MPAA to shut it down as Napster and FastTrack are.
Beyond Gnutella there are publishing networks like Freenet and Mojonation. These networks would be even more difficult for some authority to attack than Gnutella. Publishing is free, and content is split up and distributed. Add to this encryption and reverse proxying, and it becomes difficult for people to know what data they store, and where data they request comes from. This type of network is even more resistant to authority's attempts to shut it down. The design of publishing networks is more complex and less utilitarian than that of Gnutella however. Thus design and usage of publishing networks is not up to the level of that of the Gnutella network yet.
"One huge win in my opinion that the Net has been a great influence on bringing the American ideas of freedom to the rest of the world. The greatest evil of the world, next to communism, is Socialism and I would like to see it finally die like it should have died last century as the failed experiment it was. The more socialism, the less freedom."
This opinion actually is related to those speculations Jon Katz made about how "the network will bring freedom". I recently read an essay by Bob Avakian which discussed whether or not "the truth would set you free". An example would be to go back 150 years ago - if a slave on a plantation, or an Indian about to be pushed off his land was incredibly enlightened about freedom and rationality and the like. Does this knowledge make him free? No, obviously not. Guns, whips and chains take away their freedom.
In a similar manner, the president of this country (Bush) and the richest man in this country (Gates) have something in common. They both were born with million dollar trust funds. They both had very wealthy, bourgeoisie parents and grandparents. Their place in society was fixed at the moment of birth.
1% of this country holds half the wealth and resources. They are bourgeoisie, which means they do not have to work in order to live, they can live off the interest of the money they have. Half of them got there the moment they were born. The vast majority of those in that 1% were born on the top of the income scale if not within the 1%. The rest of us have to work in order to live. Now why should it be that because of birth, some people do not have to work and get control of half of the resources, and the other 99% have to work to live, and have to split the remaining half of the resources? With even that half skewed upward so that the top 10% contains most of it?
If I had attained membership into that elite bourgeoisie class the way most of them entered it, by nature of birth, I might feel the way some do about socialism, communism, anarchism, whatever. Since I was not, I certainly do not care as much about property rights as much as that 1% who controls half the wealth must feel.
It should also be pointed out that capitalism is kept in place rather violently. Within the United States propaganda plays a big part, as well as keeping this the country with the highest percentage of it's population in prison and things like that. Worldwide the propaganda campaign has some importance, giving the idea that the US is one giant Baywatch set, but it is dealt with more violently. The US military has engaged communists directly when there is next to no local support against it, like in Vietnam, but mroe often it pays vast sums of money to the the military of foreign countries to do such a job. Colombia's military has received almost $2 billion in US aid over the past 2 years, hundreds of Colombian union organizers have been killed and Occidental is trying to expand it's pipeline in Colombia. These three things are not unrelated, on the contrary, they are very much inter-related.
Take a look at who is for what and it gives you a pretty good idea at who is going to benefit from it. Steve Forbes is for the flat tax, for the WTO and GATT and so-called "free trade" and the like. Which makes sense since his constituency are mostly millionares and billionares trying to expand their control of the world. Even right-wing people like Pat Buchanan who have a working class constituency actually go against GATT and the WTO and US military presence overseas except if there's an extreme necessity. Why? Because it hurts the working class constituency that supports Buchanan. Of course, the left wing is against these things as well. The Republican and Democratic parties is outside of their hands however.
This even reaches into our livelihoods. Look at how high unemployment for IT people and how salaries are frozen or slipping. Why is that? Why are corporations who are still making billions in profit per quarter laying us off and freezing/lowering our salaries? One thing that has helped them has been the ITAA's lobbying to allow 600,000 H1-B indentured servants into the country, repealing FLSA for computer operators, sticking section 1706 in the tax code with the NTSA and those sorts of things. People don't really care during go-go times like the late 1990's, but nowadays more engineers are paying attention to what the ITAA has been doing as they are getting laid off and their salaries frozen/cut and they ask, what happened?
Yes - Fasttrack (Kazaa/Morpheus) has centralized servers which require authentication, which means it's easy to shut down, like Napster was. Gnutella (Bearshare, Limewire) has no such centralization/authentication, which makes it near impossible to shut down. It's protocol is published, so anyone can write an open source or commerical application to access Gnutella. Gnutella server/clients (servents) are popular - Bearshare and Limewire are the 10th and 11th most popular downloads on Download.com, and both have been on the top 50 list for longer than Kazaa or Morpheus. Gnutella developers have been working together and seperately to solve problems such as automatically getting high-speed hosts into the center of the network, preventing too much freeloading, allowing multi-sourced downloading and so forth. They have already had success in all of these areas. The protocol is published, and there are many excellent Gnutella server/clients that are open sourced (Limewire, Gnucleus, gnut etc.)
I find publishing networks like Freenet and Mojo Nation interesting as well. They are not as functional as Gnutella or FastTrack networks currently, but they are very interesting. Freenet gets a lot of press, but in my opinion Mojo Nation is much more functional currently, and has had more development put into it. If you are interested in P2P networks, you should download Mojo Nation to see how much crazy stuff they have already put into it. Mojo Nation is the most functional publishing network I've seen thus far, and it's quite interesting. It's more for techies interested in the possibilities of P2P however, for functionality, stick with Gnutella.
This matter is dealt with in another Cringley article. I infer that the source code was published to make it more difficult to sell an IBM clone while having a legal leg to stand on. That's why Compaq had to spend $1 million to reverse engineer it in a completely legal manner.
The dark side of globalization
on
Defining Globalism
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Being against certain policies of the WTO, GATT, World Bank and so forth does not equate to being against global trade, or cultural cross-pollinization. For example, the globalization crowd is trying to push something called FastTrack through Congress. FastTrack is a law which says so-called free trade agreements can not be debated in our Congress any more. That's about as disconnected from democracy as you can get. They want FastTrack passed so corporations can hash out the agreements and not have to deal with what the American people think. Congress isn't the ideal place to have trade agreements fixed, but it's a hell of a lot better than just having a bunch of corporations write the whole thing.
Most of what GATT/WTO/World Bank wants is the same thing in other countries. They want to take the desire of the people, through their democratic governments, out of the globalization process.
Most people around the world aren't against global trade or cultural cross-pollinization, just certain aspects of them. For example, the US had GATT force Thailand to allow tobacco into their country. So we're forcing them to sell a deadly drug in Thailand, and they don't even have warning labels on the packs outside the U.S. We'd be better off forcing marijuana on them, at least marijuana isn't deadly. It's the same junk as a century ago when England and the US fought against China in the Opium Wars because the Chinese said opium and heroin were ruining their country.
That is what globalization is. Pushing deadly drugs without warning labels on kids in Thailand against the will of the Thai people. There are many examples like this but this is just one. Sweatshops in third world countries is another one. Yes, corporations can trade globally, but we also have to allow the democratic process in all countries to have a say. When you don't have that, people get upset, and sometimes react violently because of their resentment against the US.
I'm a Gnutella fan as well. It's just a matter of time before the RIAA closes down closed networks like the FastTrak (Kazaa/Morpheus) network now is with these new authentication schemes.
Right now Gnutella is the most popular open P2P network which has open source servents (like Gnucleus). It also has some brain-dead (which doesn't necessarily mean bad) servents like Bearshare and Limewire which are easy for the average person to figure out and use - possibly easier than Morpheus in any event.
Gnutella is just a really cool protocol and network, lots of fun for techies to play with, which inevitably means lots of new innovations. I love the ability to get most of the audio and video I want right away over the net, and I'm happy with their competition with the authoritarian music/movie business distribution model (Go to the store, sorry we don't have the band you like, just this NSYNC/Britney/Backstreet Boys CD we're pushing, that'll be $17).
I haven't heard of Xolox before, I'll look for it.
It's amazing how many American and European bourgeois here know what's best for the third world. Have you even ever visited a third world country, beyond the Club Med's if they had one? If not, I wouldn't have the chutzpah to open my mouth and pontificate on what they do or do not need. If you want to know, ask the democratic people's organizations in these places and they'll tell you.
One funny thing in reading all of the replies are the the people in the high-rated posts on this thread complaining that people in the third world are whiny for complaining about not getting bathroom breaks and that "if 'they' don't want third world debt, DON'T BORROW IT", plus many other posts derogatory of people who live in third world countries. So this is the attitude of the people who are _supporting_ globalization? The "fuck 'em, we're just going to globalize them"? Well, with that kind of attitude, and the provocative US army bases around the world (in Guantanemo Bay, Okinawa, Saudi Arabia, Vieques, Germany etc. etc.), you can't be surprised at the sometimes violent reaction people have to that kind of imperialism and colonialism.
Speaking of bathroom breaks and people talking about the "efficiency of the marketplace" ruling supreme, you are truly living in a fantasy world. The main problem is not bathroom breaks, the main problem is that people who advocate organizing unions in these countries are KILLED. Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, anywhere you see big corporations (Nike, Shell etc.) you'll see a lot of dead labor activists. So please include the caveat "efficient markets, which means killing labor leaders once in a while" in your analysis. If you want to read some stories, go to
and type something like "labor killed". You'll get lots of wonderful stories about corporate efficiency from around the world.
This is NOT democracy. Killing labor organizers is not democracy. It happened regularly in the US and Europe until about the 1930's when the NLRB was created to mediate corporate/labor disputes and other measures. Some of these so-called democracies have labor leaders killed regularly.
I can't explain the whole anti-globalization movement in a short post, so I'll get to the money borrowing. So "they" borrowed the money but "they" don't want to pay it back, huh? Are you sure the people who the money was lent to are the ones being asked to re-pay it? I'm not. How was the money given to them, was it divided up evenly among the population? Was it used to build and improve roads in rural areas? You've got to be kidding me. The money was handed over from the bourgeois of the US and Europe to the bourgeois of third world countries. Who knows what they did with it, they didn't spend it to improve the lot of the majority of the country, that's for sure. That's who's being asked to pay for it now though. The World Bank plan for repaying debt is simply to "globalize" the country. First, utilities like water, electricity, railroads etc. are privatized, another word for handing control of them to foreign corporations. Taxes are raised, social welfare is cut in order to repay the debt. Laws which allow labor unions and the like are ordered by the WTO to be revoked in order to allow a "flexible workplace".
I find it ironic that MSNBC was the news source submitted to get news about Microsoft's monopolistic practices. Corporate control of the means of production is consolidating and omni-present.
Hypocrisy from the bourgeoise
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Globalization
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· Score: 4, Informative
Katz's statements and many of the OBL discussing points are absurd. It sounds like all of you people are bourgeoise from the United States who get most of your news from US corporate-owned media. I know George W. Bush said in his first press conference that these attacks happened because "they hate freedom", but that's equally ridiculous as well. All of the posters who say "They will hate us no matter what" seem to know very little about who "they" are or why they feel as they do.
In Osama Bin Laden's message to the American people, which the White House asked newspapers and television to not show, he said the primary reason this happened is because the US military has been occupying his homeland, Saudi Arabia, for a decade. This is usually breezed over in American media, if mentioned at all, but it's what set him against the US to begin with. This is a quite rational, political reason, in fact he got kicked out of Saudi Arabia by the US-friendly monarch of Saudi Arabia for advocating American withdrawal. This makes a lot more sense than the loopy reasons being thrown about here and elsewhere. The people who talk like that have counterparts in the Muslim world, who say we're "evil crusaders bombing Afghanistan because we hate Islam, and no matter what anyone does, the US will always hate Islam and arabs".
Someone made a reply here in which they cynically said that OBL never mentioned the Palestinians before 9/11. They have a decent point, this may be so, and many leaders in Islamic countries have used the nexus of Israel and the Palestinians to try to rally broader support from the Muslim world.
Regarding Katz's statement - first, I'm set back by his arrogant view that America is the torch-bearer of cosmopolitan enlightenment, and the world is blessed by the spread of our enlightenment. This is the same kind of manifest destiny, imperialistic, colonial idea that America and the European powers held in centuries past - what results from this type of colonialism? South Africa. The Vietnam War. The antagonisms between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent that the British antagonized.
Katz's view on the benevolence of multi-national corporations, capitalism and technology are repulsive to me as a working class American, who knows what reaction a third world nation, who's corrupt bourgeoise politicians borrow from the US and Europeans in the name of the country, only to have the WTO turn around and demand that the country pay up for the money the corrupt bourgeoise of the country stole. What do you think the money borrowed by Pakistan and other countries went towards, building roads in poor, rural areas? Ha! Then the WTO comes in, and has the government privatize all the public utilities (which means that they all become owned by foreign corporations), do away with social welfare programs and so forth.
That's to say nothing of the laundry list of things multinational corporations have done in third world countries, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Perhaps Dow Chemical Union Carbide's gas spill in Bhopal, India which killed thousands and injured hundreds of thousands. I can't educate people as to what the US media has not been educating it's citizens of US involvement around the world in in a short post. You'll have to check out the role of Shell in Nigeria, Nike in Indonesia, Phillip Morris in Thailand (making the US use GATT to sell it's deadly tobacco drugs - and without warning labels, and too children, just like it did decades ago in the US). It's a laugh that the US is sending $1 billion to Colombia to fight drugs - how come we're not spending $1 billion on other drug-producing countries? Hell, the head of the US army "anti-drug" force was caught red-hand trafficking drugs into the US. The US began by stealing the Panama canal a century ago, funded the Colombian military for prior decades because it was "fighting Soviet communist proxies". The Soviet Union folds, but the same money and military support keeps flowing, but now the US military's PR department has changed the reason to "fighting drugs". I could go on and on forever.
It's funny how the US is going to rid the world of fundamentalism when polls show that the US is the most religously fundamentalized country in the industrial world. If the federal government lifted church/state restrictions, the South and the West would put back creationist science, prayer in school and so forth quicker than you'd believe.
A Christian nation like the US should know the bible verse Matthew 7:1-5
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
Chess is not a pure strategy game - a player with great tactical skill and fair strategical skill will consistently beat a player with fair tactical skill and great strategical skill. Chess strategy is building long-term advantages like a well-placed knight, but if you can not see a pin or skewer 1, 2 or 3 moves out, such long-term strategical advantages are pointless. A lot of people tell me the Asian board game Go is a strategical game, while chess is a combination of tactics and strategy.
Age of Empires was heralded as a great RTS game, and I have been playing it since it came out (AOE -> ROR -> AOK -> AOK:TC ). Ensemble/Microsoft is constantly trying to tune the game so as the game doesn't just crumble into "rushing" (in AOK, with Teutons; in AOE, with Assyrians) via patches and new versions. I do get tired of clickfests to see who can get built up to a level of strength the fastest, where I'm dead if I don't get to Castle age within 13 minutes.
A lot of the strategizing takes place between games when people try to figure out which tribe has an unstopabble advantage. Another form of strategizing is working together in the game. To me this is the ultimate strategizing, it seems nothing is more difficult than organizing a plan with your teammates. A clan that has it's members working together as one unit is unstoppable. I've always thought of that as real strategy.
Yes, OpenBSD is 4 years without a remote hole in the default install. They have a very good code peer review which fixes problems before they become problems. Microsoft trying to lay the blame for this on sysadmins is insane. Yes, I do expect to get an OS out of the box with no major security problems. This just shows you how far removed from reality Microsoft still is. They don't "get it". This is why they have had trouble penetrating into the Fortune 500 high-end market. Engineering does not want to here "you're having this problem because you're tardy". What they're saying in essence is "we expect you to work on our timetable". ie. when some 15-year-old exposes how crappy the security of W2K out-of-box is and they patch it, every client worldwide is expected to immediately upgrade or it's the customers fault because they're tardy. This is not what customer's like to here. Thankfully I only have to deal with Solaris (and Linux) most of the time, and NT/W2K only on occasion. I've had the misfortune of always having some small NT responsibility since NT 3.51 came out. Anyone remember what a piece of crap that was? Windows 3.11 GUI even after Windows 95 came out with it's Mac ripped off interface, constant blue screens of death, weird license restrictions on how many people could connect at once, constant need to edit the registry to do anything but editting the registry would invalidate any support. Blah - it hasn't gotten much better since. I've been sysadminning a while, and most NT admins will admit that UNIX is superior to NT.
Since this mentions RSI, I'd like to give a public service announcement I wish I got 10 years ago: If you are a teenager or in your early 20's and are the typical marathon computer sessions geek - realize if you don't take small precautions, you *will* get RSI. It's just like smoking - you're OK for 10-20 years and then you start coughing.
Like many of my friends, I started getting RSI a few years ago, and it got worse and worse. I found out what to do though. You can reduce the RSI (like carpal tunnel syndrome) you're getting by some very simple procedures. The R in RSI stands for repetitive and that's what you get it from - having your hand on the mouse for hours and clicking it. I have a ball mouse at home and a Microsoft one at work so I use different muscles at home and work. I also switch-hit, switching the mouse from left hand to right every half hour. This way, you can stay at the computer like normal, except you're not hurting yourself as much. Switch-hitting every half hour gives your hand half an hour of rest while you keep working. Of course, resting, hand exercises and other things are good too.
Programming guru Jamie Zawinski, the guy who wrote the original Netscape for UNIX has a great page on RSI. Check it out, and other pages on RSI. I really think there should be OSHA regulations at least *informing* young guys that prolonged use of mice and keyboards can damage their wrists and leave them so they can't type.
Absolutely. People always talk about the copyright issue, but a deeper threat is how an open distribution threaten's the music industry oligopoly. When artists can reach consumers directly, the power of the handful of companies that control the music business goes away.
I believe this changes not only the music business, but changes music itself. The safest, most profitable thing for record companies to push is fluff, non-threatening pop like N'Sync and Britney Spears. Music and music videos that express the anger that is in the ghettoes, or that glorify marijuana, or which don't conform to certain people's ideas of language or sexuality that other's should be allowed to express - all this is attacked by Tipper Gore's PMRC, protests against Time Warner due to their rap music, MTV's banning of the marijuana leaf symbol, radio's bleeping of words and so forth. A more free marketplace avoids censorship, or the restrictions of even the threat of censorship change music with.
Personally, I've always thought nobody else should have any business telling me what I should listen to, read, or watch. I hope these free, distributed, open source networks remain in place and remain vital. This will only happen if we continue to write code for them, and support their right to existence against the RIAA, MPAA and so forth.
To me, Verizon (and SBC) is the Microsoft of the telecommunications business. I spent a few months this year dealing with a DSL fiasco. I'm not one of those people who gets upset about little things, but when they shut off my normal phone service and so forth, I began getting really pissed off.
Verizon (and SBC) have a government-granted monopoly on local phone service. The government says they're the only ones who are allowed to string telephone wire over and under our public streets. A condition of this monopoly which the government has granted, Verizon has to let DSL providers like Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms access to the central office and so forth. Verizon has been breaking the law and not meeting this obligation. In 1999 Covad filed an anti-trust suit against Verizon.
I had Covad as my DSL provider, Verizon is my local Baby Bell Local Exchange Carrier. For people who have ever had to deal with a T-1 which is down, you know how it is maddening as Verizon and Digex (or UUnet, or Sprint, or MCI) just point fingers at each other and say it's not their fault. I am somewhat familiar with central offices and the like so I was able to discern who was at fault in my case - and it was always Verizon's. When I called Verizon to complain that my phone line was dead or at other times that my DSL line was dead they had the gall to ask me why I wasn't using Verizon DSL. Covad kept making appointments to get into my CO but the Verizon people were always no-shows. Hell, they're a monopoly, why should they care.
Verizon is also one of the biggest political contributors in New York state politics, and one of the biggest contributors to national campaigns. This is how they get the government-granted right to be the only ones allowed to string telephone wire over and under our public streets. Once Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms are out of business, they can hike DSL rates up real high.
There is a GLUT of unused bandwidth out there, and even in this economy a demand for DSL. But government-granted mononopolies like Verizon/SBC prevent us the user/consumer from getting to that bandwidth. I keep getting advertisements in my phone bill for Verizon DSL, but I will never use them. I became so mad at Verizon, I did some political work on the campaign to keep them from doing long distance in Massachusetts.
Open up our phone lines to free competition. Get rid of the Verizon/SBC monopoly over phone lines over and under our public streets, which is granted by corrupt politicians who are paid off to maintain that license.
When are attorney generals going to start going after the Baby Bells (Verizon, SBC - I guess any day now all the Bell companies will recombine again) who have been preventing DSL companies from their legal access to central offices? There is a glut of backbone bandwidth out there, high demand for high-speed home access for it, yet the Bells spend more time trying to drive Covad out of business than providing service to their customer's.
If this was a free market, that would be one thing - but the government grants a monopoly to the Bell companies. That's the real problem.
Most ISP's wouldn't do something that would lose them business like this, why can SBC be so cavalier? Because they have a government-enforced monopoly, and know they can get away with anything (this goes for Verizon as well). Since the government gives the local loop to these companies, legally they have to allow companies like Covad access to their facilities. However, they have done everything they can to throw up roadblocks to competition. If they were competitive in a free market I wouldn't care, but they have a government enforced monopoly allowing them and them only to string telephone lines over and under public streets. And they are killing DSL competition, which means higher DSL prices which means less people using DSL and the Internet.
I have to say that I've had the totally opposite experience. FreeBSD had a very easy root/boot floppy disk procedure and network install (ie. install over the Internet), whereas slackware, had a much more complicated procedure, with many, many floppy disks needed.
A few months ago I wanted to install Red Hat on a CD-less machine I have at home, over a 56K modem. I was going to download the files to my Sun box and then NFS mount them locally. Red Hat doesn't go out of their way to advertise that they have a network install of Red Hat but a friend of mine pointed it out to me. Harkening back to the good old days, my NE-2000 compatible card didn't have the proper drivers (for RH Linux, there was no problem when it had Windows 95), and enabling/disabling Plug-and-Play, changing the IRQ and all that jazz didn't help. I hadn't done an install of FreeBSD for a while but at wit's end I did that. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was able to install over the Internet via a modem!
Frankly, it's my opinion that FreeBSD has always been one step ahead of Linux in ease of installation for the past 5 years. I am speaking of the most popular Linux distributions, since I almost always install what the most popular dist is (although I have used Debian and so forth). The only thing Linux ever sometimes surpassed FreeBSD on was NIC cards - sometimes Linux would work with a cheap NIC card that FreeBSD wouldn't. And frankly, Windows always killed both of them in working with virtually every network card.
In terms of being memetic, ease of installation is more important than even ease of use. If you get totally stuck on installation, who cares who user-friendly GNOME is?
3.10 If my secret key ring is stolen, can my messages be read?
No, not unless they have also stolen your secret pass phrase, or if your pass phrase is susceptible to a brute-force attack. Neither part is useful without the other. You should, however, revoke that key and generate a fresh key pair using a different pass phrase. Before revoking your old key, you might want to add another user ID that states what your new key id is so that others can know of your new address.
Most of the research for these drugs are done by the government and universities, and then are just handed over, free of charge, to the drug companies. This "it will stop R&D" is BS, the majority of the R&D work is publically funded, although the profit on it is capitalized among a select few.
> Also, the US has never overthrown Australia. I'd suggest laying off the crack.
What do you need, the CIA to place ads in newspapers spelling out their role in the Whitlam/Kerr affair?
...locked down by paranoid "systems engineers" (who, by the way, are as much engineers as my brother is with his Lego Castle set)
The amount of time I spend as a systems engineer fixing crappy programmer's programs is awesome. Can you say "memory leak"? I think I have taught dozens of programmer's that there are memory calls aside from malloc(), like, ones that actually reclaim memory! Then of course there are the programmer's who have to put time calls in so the program can know exactly what time it is 10000 times every second - hey, did you know that that uses CPU cycles and will slow your, and every other program on the system down? Of course, the developer usually says that calls can be taken out because it is unneeded! Sometimes I don't believe the output I get from truss - these people are paid to be program all day, how come I know how to program better than most of them? One of the largest production processes we have to run has a memory leak that the developer's can't fix, so the solution is to keep rebooting the machine before it runs out of memory. I think I'm going to go play with my Lego Castle set, since the programming geniuses seem to have a handle on everything.
Reflecting on this, I think this goes into the "cult of competence" that i often see in IT. In organizations, especially large ones, all the IT people are jockying to be known as the "genius", the whiz kid who knows everything. Where I work, I rarely post to the public mailing lists because it takes so much time to post - I write out my post, then I review it to make sure everything is correct and done in the best way possible, then I send it out. Everyone is always trying to show up everyone else. Maybe the fact that there is a large bonus, and most of it will only go to 10% of the people contributes to this, but I think there is more to it. I used to work constantly, often sleeping at my desk, and I spent so much time working I could answer almost any technical question lobbed at me instantly. So in a way, I was like these people I see. Eventually I realized spending all this time wasn't enriching me that much, and I spent time hanging out with my friends and girlfriends. However, because of these prima donnas who spend all their time working, plus the H1-Bs, I am lower in the pecking order however. Oh well. One thing that pisses me off is I've had 4 different managers within a year and it's almost as if each one you're supposed to prove how competent and hard-working you are to them. Maybe I should be asking why I have manager's rotated every 3 months instead. I don't see it talked about much, but there's a very self-destructive streak within IT workers, almost a competition to see who can spend more time at work and less time having a social life. Usually these people have little self-confidence, except in their technical ability. I guess for me this is what defines primadonna.
I agree with this. From experience I've seen busting your ass at a mid/large sized company doesn't get you that much more money, in the end you're just another administrator or code monkey. When I say busting your ass I mean working a lot of hours. It's almost impossible to compete with the H1-B's, who seem to all work 60 hours a week minimum. I work the least amount of hours I can get away with, unless I'm working on something I find interesting, which is rare. Of course, this being IT, the least I can get away with averages 53 hours a week. You're better off investing that time on your own life and side projects. You only learn this over time. Maybe that's why there are so many young, "prima donna" programmers. I don't mind the people mentioned in the article, but I find 21-year-olds who try to make like you're an idiot because you can't write a Linux kernel module from memory. Usually the reality of the workplace smacks them in the face soon enough and they quiet down.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing you're neglecting is the cost of publishing on the Internet. A corporation can pay for a couple of T-3's, a bunch of expensive servers and the engineers and publishers who will put up their massive web sites.
A small publisher may be incredibly popular, but the costs would make it so that publishing would become increasingly difficult, there's a cap on how popular they can be. Too many people come to their site and their ISP will hit them with a bill they can't afford.
The central problem is the "cost" of publication falls more upon the publisher than the consumer. P2P publishing networks like MojoNation and Freenet change this trend. Resiliency is determined by consumer popularity, not how big the corporation publishing it's bankroll is. Usenet publishing is free, but ephemeral. Only a corporation could collectivize Usenet. Currently one has a monopoly on this collectivization, Google, and it does not archive binary posts.
The FastTrack network (Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster) is an authoritarian network. With version 1.3.3, network control was centralized by requiring authentication by company servers - all power in the network was concentrated in the hands of a few. Thus, since it is an authoritarian system, a more powerful authoritarian system, US entertainment corporations, can make the MPAA make the Dutch courts shut down the FastTrack network.
The Gnutella network on the other hand, is a more anarchic network. All power on the network is distributed equally among the users of the network. Thus, although it has been around longer than FastTrack, there is no central authority the MPAA can force to submit, so it is not as easy for the MPAA to shut it down as Napster and FastTrack are.
Beyond Gnutella there are publishing networks like Freenet and Mojonation. These networks would be even more difficult for some authority to attack than Gnutella. Publishing is free, and content is split up and distributed. Add to this encryption and reverse proxying, and it becomes difficult for people to know what data they store, and where data they request comes from. This type of network is even more resistant to authority's attempts to shut it down. The design of publishing networks is more complex and less utilitarian than that of Gnutella however. Thus design and usage of publishing networks is not up to the level of that of the Gnutella network yet.
"One huge win in my opinion that the Net has been a great influence on bringing the American ideas of freedom to the rest of the world. The greatest evil of the world, next to communism, is Socialism and I would like to see it finally die like it should have died last century as the failed experiment it was. The more socialism, the less freedom."
This opinion actually is related to those speculations Jon Katz made about how "the network will bring freedom". I recently read an essay by Bob Avakian which discussed whether or not "the truth would set you free". An example would be to go back 150 years ago - if a slave on a plantation, or an Indian about to be pushed off his land was incredibly enlightened about freedom and rationality and the like. Does this knowledge make him free? No, obviously not. Guns, whips and chains take away their freedom.
In a similar manner, the president of this country (Bush) and the richest man in this country (Gates) have something in common. They both were born with million dollar trust funds. They both had very wealthy, bourgeoisie parents and grandparents. Their place in society was fixed at the moment of birth.
1% of this country holds half the wealth and resources. They are bourgeoisie, which means they do not have to work in order to live, they can live off the interest of the money they have. Half of them got there the moment they were born. The vast majority of those in that 1% were born on the top of the income scale if not within the 1%. The rest of us have to work in order to live. Now why should it be that because of birth, some people do not have to work and get control of half of the resources, and the other 99% have to work to live, and have to split the remaining half of the resources? With even that half skewed upward so that the top 10% contains most of it?
If I had attained membership into that elite bourgeoisie class the way most of them entered it, by nature of birth, I might feel the way some do about socialism, communism, anarchism, whatever. Since I was not, I certainly do not care as much about property rights as much as that 1% who controls half the wealth must feel.
It should also be pointed out that capitalism is kept in place rather violently. Within the United States propaganda plays a big part, as well as keeping this the country with the highest percentage of it's population in prison and things like that. Worldwide the propaganda campaign has some importance, giving the idea that the US is one giant Baywatch set, but it is dealt with more violently. The US military has engaged communists directly when there is next to no local support against it, like in Vietnam, but mroe often it pays vast sums of money to the the military of foreign countries to do such a job. Colombia's military has received almost $2 billion in US aid over the past 2 years, hundreds of Colombian union organizers have been killed and Occidental is trying to expand it's pipeline in Colombia. These three things are not unrelated, on the contrary, they are very much inter-related.
Take a look at who is for what and it gives you a pretty good idea at who is going to benefit from it. Steve Forbes is for the flat tax, for the WTO and GATT and so-called "free trade" and the like. Which makes sense since his constituency are mostly millionares and billionares trying to expand their control of the world. Even right-wing people like Pat Buchanan who have a working class constituency actually go against GATT and the WTO and US military presence overseas except if there's an extreme necessity. Why? Because it hurts the working class constituency that supports Buchanan. Of course, the left wing is against these things as well. The Republican and Democratic parties is outside of their hands however.
This even reaches into our livelihoods. Look at how high unemployment for IT people and how salaries are frozen or slipping. Why is that? Why are corporations who are still making billions in profit per quarter laying us off and freezing/lowering our salaries? One thing that has helped them has been the ITAA's lobbying to allow 600,000 H1-B indentured servants into the country, repealing FLSA for computer operators, sticking section 1706 in the tax code with the NTSA and those sorts of things. People don't really care during go-go times like the late 1990's, but nowadays more engineers are paying attention to what the ITAA has been doing as they are getting laid off and their salaries frozen/cut and they ask, what happened?
Yes - Fasttrack (Kazaa/Morpheus) has centralized servers which require authentication, which means it's easy to shut down, like Napster was. Gnutella (Bearshare, Limewire) has no such centralization/authentication, which makes it near impossible to shut down. It's protocol is published, so anyone can write an open source or commerical application to access Gnutella. Gnutella server/clients (servents) are popular - Bearshare and Limewire are the 10th and 11th most popular downloads on Download.com, and both have been on the top 50 list for longer than Kazaa or Morpheus. Gnutella developers have been working together and seperately to solve problems such as automatically getting high-speed hosts into the center of the network, preventing too much freeloading, allowing multi-sourced downloading and so forth. They have already had success in all of these areas. The protocol is published, and there are many excellent Gnutella server/clients that are open sourced (Limewire, Gnucleus, gnut etc.)
I find publishing networks like Freenet and Mojo Nation interesting as well. They are not as functional as Gnutella or FastTrack networks currently, but they are very interesting. Freenet gets a lot of press, but in my opinion Mojo Nation is much more functional currently, and has had more development put into it. If you are interested in P2P networks, you should download Mojo Nation to see how much crazy stuff they have already put into it. Mojo Nation is the most functional publishing network I've seen thus far, and it's quite interesting. It's more for techies interested in the possibilities of P2P however, for functionality, stick with Gnutella.
This matter is dealt with in another Cringley article. I infer that the source code was published to make it more difficult to sell an IBM clone while having a legal leg to stand on. That's why Compaq had to spend $1 million to reverse engineer it in a completely legal manner.
Being against certain policies of the WTO, GATT, World Bank and so forth does not equate to being against global trade, or cultural cross-pollinization. For example, the globalization crowd is trying to push something called FastTrack through Congress. FastTrack is a law which says so-called free trade agreements can not be debated in our Congress any more. That's about as disconnected from democracy as you can get. They want FastTrack passed so corporations can hash out the agreements and not have to deal with what the American people think. Congress isn't the ideal place to have trade agreements fixed, but it's a hell of a lot better than just having a bunch of corporations write the whole thing.
Most of what GATT/WTO/World Bank wants is the same thing in other countries. They want to take the desire of the people, through their democratic governments, out of the globalization process.
Most people around the world aren't against global trade or cultural cross-pollinization, just certain aspects of them. For example, the US had GATT force Thailand to allow tobacco into their country. So we're forcing them to sell a deadly drug in Thailand, and they don't even have warning labels on the packs outside the U.S. We'd be better off forcing marijuana on them, at least marijuana isn't deadly. It's the same junk as a century ago when England and the US fought against China in the Opium Wars because the Chinese said opium and heroin were ruining their country.
That is what globalization is. Pushing deadly drugs without warning labels on kids in Thailand against the will of the Thai people. There are many examples like this but this is just one. Sweatshops in third world countries is another one. Yes, corporations can trade globally, but we also have to allow the democratic process in all countries to have a say. When you don't have that, people get upset, and sometimes react violently because of their resentment against the US.
I'm a Gnutella fan as well. It's just a matter of time before the RIAA closes down closed networks like the FastTrak (Kazaa/Morpheus) network now is with these new authentication schemes.
Right now Gnutella is the most popular open P2P network which has open source servents (like Gnucleus). It also has some brain-dead (which doesn't necessarily mean bad) servents like Bearshare and Limewire which are easy for the average person to figure out and use - possibly easier than Morpheus in any event.
Gnutella is just a really cool protocol and network, lots of fun for techies to play with, which inevitably means lots of new innovations. I love the ability to get most of the audio and video I want right away over the net, and I'm happy with their competition with the authoritarian music/movie business distribution model (Go to the store, sorry we don't have the band you like, just this NSYNC/Britney/Backstreet Boys CD we're pushing, that'll be $17).
I haven't heard of Xolox before, I'll look for it.
It's amazing how many American and European bourgeois here know what's best for the third world. Have you even ever visited a third world country, beyond the Club Med's if they had one? If not, I wouldn't have the chutzpah to open my mouth and pontificate on what they do or do not need. If you want to know, ask the democratic people's organizations in these places and they'll tell you.
c .a ctivism.progressive
One funny thing in reading all of the replies are the the people in the high-rated posts on this thread complaining that people in the third world are whiny for complaining about not getting bathroom breaks and that "if 'they' don't want third world debt, DON'T BORROW IT", plus many other posts derogatory of people who live in third world countries. So this is the attitude of the people who are _supporting_ globalization? The "fuck 'em, we're just going to globalize them"? Well, with that kind of attitude, and the provocative US army bases around the world (in Guantanemo Bay, Okinawa, Saudi Arabia, Vieques, Germany etc. etc.), you can't be surprised at the sometimes violent reaction people have to that kind of imperialism and colonialism.
Speaking of bathroom breaks and people talking about the "efficiency of the marketplace" ruling supreme, you are truly living in a fantasy world. The main problem is not bathroom breaks, the main problem is that people who advocate organizing unions in these countries are KILLED. Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, anywhere you see big corporations (Nike, Shell etc.) you'll see a lot of dead labor activists. So please include the caveat "efficient markets, which means killing labor leaders once in a while" in your analysis. If you want to read some stories, go to
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&group=mis
and type something like "labor killed". You'll get lots of wonderful stories about corporate efficiency from around the world.
This is NOT democracy. Killing labor organizers is not democracy. It happened regularly in the US and Europe until about the 1930's when the NLRB was created to mediate corporate/labor disputes and other measures. Some of these so-called democracies have labor leaders killed regularly.
I can't explain the whole anti-globalization movement in a short post, so I'll get to the money borrowing. So "they" borrowed the money but "they" don't want to pay it back, huh? Are you sure the people who the money was lent to are the ones being asked to re-pay it? I'm not. How was the money given to them, was it divided up evenly among the population? Was it used to build and improve roads in rural areas? You've got to be kidding me. The money was handed over from the bourgeois of the US and Europe to the bourgeois of third world countries. Who knows what they did with it, they didn't spend it to improve the lot of the majority of the country, that's for sure. That's who's being asked to pay for it now though. The World Bank plan for repaying debt is simply to "globalize" the country. First, utilities like water, electricity, railroads etc. are privatized, another word for handing control of them to foreign corporations. Taxes are raised, social welfare is cut in order to repay the debt. Laws which allow labor unions and the like are ordered by the WTO to be revoked in order to allow a "flexible workplace".
I find it ironic that MSNBC was the news source submitted to get news about Microsoft's monopolistic practices. Corporate control of the means of production is consolidating and omni-present.
In Osama Bin Laden's message to the American people, which the White House asked newspapers and television to not show, he said the primary reason this happened is because the US military has been occupying his homeland, Saudi Arabia, for a decade. This is usually breezed over in American media, if mentioned at all, but it's what set him against the US to begin with. This is a quite rational, political reason, in fact he got kicked out of Saudi Arabia by the US-friendly monarch of Saudi Arabia for advocating American withdrawal. This makes a lot more sense than the loopy reasons being thrown about here and elsewhere. The people who talk like that have counterparts in the Muslim world, who say we're "evil crusaders bombing Afghanistan because we hate Islam, and no matter what anyone does, the US will always hate Islam and arabs". Someone made a reply here in which they cynically said that OBL never mentioned the Palestinians before 9/11. They have a decent point, this may be so, and many leaders in Islamic countries have used the nexus of Israel and the Palestinians to try to rally broader support from the Muslim world.
Regarding Katz's statement - first, I'm set back by his arrogant view that America is the torch-bearer of cosmopolitan enlightenment, and the world is blessed by the spread of our enlightenment. This is the same kind of manifest destiny, imperialistic, colonial idea that America and the European powers held in centuries past - what results from this type of colonialism? South Africa. The Vietnam War. The antagonisms between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent that the British antagonized.
Katz's view on the benevolence of multi-national corporations, capitalism and technology are repulsive to me as a working class American, who knows what reaction a third world nation, who's corrupt bourgeoise politicians borrow from the US and Europeans in the name of the country, only to have the WTO turn around and demand that the country pay up for the money the corrupt bourgeoise of the country stole. What do you think the money borrowed by Pakistan and other countries went towards, building roads in poor, rural areas? Ha! Then the WTO comes in, and has the government privatize all the public utilities (which means that they all become owned by foreign corporations), do away with social welfare programs and so forth.
That's to say nothing of the laundry list of things multinational corporations have done in third world countries, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Perhaps Dow Chemical Union Carbide's gas spill in Bhopal, India which killed thousands and injured hundreds of thousands. I can't educate people as to what the US media has not been educating it's citizens of US involvement around the world in in a short post. You'll have to check out the role of Shell in Nigeria, Nike in Indonesia, Phillip Morris in Thailand (making the US use GATT to sell it's deadly tobacco drugs - and without warning labels, and too children, just like it did decades ago in the US). It's a laugh that the US is sending $1 billion to Colombia to fight drugs - how come we're not spending $1 billion on other drug-producing countries? Hell, the head of the US army "anti-drug" force was caught red-hand trafficking drugs into the US. The US began by stealing the Panama canal a century ago, funded the Colombian military for prior decades because it was "fighting Soviet communist proxies". The Soviet Union folds, but the same money and military support keeps flowing, but now the US military's PR department has changed the reason to "fighting drugs". I could go on and on forever.
It's funny how the US is going to rid the world of fundamentalism when polls show that the US is the most religously fundamentalized country in the industrial world. If the federal government lifted church/state restrictions, the South and the West would put back creationist science, prayer in school and so forth quicker than you'd believe.
A Christian nation like the US should know the bible verse Matthew 7:1-5
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
Chess is not a pure strategy game - a player with great tactical skill and fair strategical skill will consistently beat a player with fair tactical skill and great strategical skill. Chess strategy is building long-term advantages like a well-placed knight, but if you can not see a pin or skewer 1, 2 or 3 moves out, such long-term strategical advantages are pointless. A lot of people tell me the Asian board game Go is a strategical game, while chess is a combination of tactics and strategy.
Age of Empires was heralded as a great RTS game, and I have been playing it since it came out (AOE -> ROR -> AOK -> AOK:TC ). Ensemble/Microsoft is constantly trying to tune the game so as the game doesn't just crumble into "rushing" (in AOK, with Teutons; in AOE, with Assyrians) via patches and new versions. I do get tired of clickfests to see who can get built up to a level of strength the fastest, where I'm dead if I don't get to Castle age within 13 minutes.
A lot of the strategizing takes place between games when people try to figure out which tribe has an unstopabble advantage. Another form of strategizing is working together in the game. To me this is the ultimate strategizing, it seems nothing is more difficult than organizing a plan with your teammates. A clan that has it's members working together as one unit is unstoppable. I've always thought of that as real strategy.
Yes, OpenBSD is 4 years without a remote hole in the default install. They have a very good code peer review which fixes problems before they become problems. Microsoft trying to lay the blame for this on sysadmins is insane. Yes, I do expect to get an OS out of the box with no major security problems. This just shows you how far removed from reality Microsoft still is. They don't "get it". This is why they have had trouble penetrating into the Fortune 500 high-end market. Engineering does not want to here "you're having this problem because you're tardy". What they're saying in essence is "we expect you to work on our timetable". ie. when some 15-year-old exposes how crappy the security of W2K out-of-box is and they patch it, every client worldwide is expected to immediately upgrade or it's the customers fault because they're tardy. This is not what customer's like to here. Thankfully I only have to deal with Solaris (and Linux) most of the time, and NT/W2K only on occasion. I've had the misfortune of always having some small NT responsibility since NT 3.51 came out. Anyone remember what a piece of crap that was? Windows 3.11 GUI even after Windows 95 came out with it's Mac ripped off interface, constant blue screens of death, weird license restrictions on how many people could connect at once, constant need to edit the registry to do anything but editting the registry would invalidate any support. Blah - it hasn't gotten much better since. I've been sysadminning a while, and most NT admins will admit that UNIX is superior to NT.
Like many of my friends, I started getting RSI a few years ago, and it got worse and worse. I found out what to do though. You can reduce the RSI (like carpal tunnel syndrome) you're getting by some very simple procedures. The R in RSI stands for repetitive and that's what you get it from - having your hand on the mouse for hours and clicking it. I have a ball mouse at home and a Microsoft one at work so I use different muscles at home and work. I also switch-hit, switching the mouse from left hand to right every half hour. This way, you can stay at the computer like normal, except you're not hurting yourself as much. Switch-hitting every half hour gives your hand half an hour of rest while you keep working. Of course, resting, hand exercises and other things are good too.
Programming guru Jamie Zawinski, the guy who wrote the original Netscape for UNIX has a great page on RSI. Check it out, and other pages on RSI. I really think there should be OSHA regulations at least *informing* young guys that prolonged use of mice and keyboards can damage their wrists and leave them so they can't type.
JWZ's RSI page is:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/wrists.html
Absolutely. People always talk about the copyright issue, but a deeper threat is how an open distribution threaten's the music industry oligopoly. When artists can reach consumers directly, the power of the handful of companies that control the music business goes away.
I believe this changes not only the music business, but changes music itself. The safest, most profitable thing for record companies to push is fluff, non-threatening pop like N'Sync and Britney Spears. Music and music videos that express the anger that is in the ghettoes, or that glorify marijuana, or which don't conform to certain people's ideas of language or sexuality that other's should be allowed to express - all this is attacked by Tipper Gore's PMRC, protests against Time Warner due to their rap music, MTV's banning of the marijuana leaf symbol, radio's bleeping of words and so forth. A more free marketplace avoids censorship, or the restrictions of even the threat of censorship change music with.
Personally, I've always thought nobody else should have any business telling me what I should listen to, read, or watch. I hope these free, distributed, open source networks remain in place and remain vital. This will only happen if we continue to write code for them, and support their right to existence against the RIAA, MPAA and so forth.
To me, Verizon (and SBC) is the Microsoft of the telecommunications business. I spent a few months this year dealing with a DSL fiasco. I'm not one of those people who gets upset about little things, but when they shut off my normal phone service and so forth, I began getting really pissed off.
Verizon (and SBC) have a government-granted monopoly on local phone service. The government says they're the only ones who are allowed to string telephone wire over and under our public streets. A condition of this monopoly which the government has granted, Verizon has to let DSL providers like Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms access to the central office and so forth. Verizon has been breaking the law and not meeting this obligation. In 1999 Covad filed an anti-trust suit against Verizon.
I had Covad as my DSL provider, Verizon is my local Baby Bell Local Exchange Carrier. For people who have ever had to deal with a T-1 which is down, you know how it is maddening as Verizon and Digex (or UUnet, or Sprint, or MCI) just point fingers at each other and say it's not their fault. I am somewhat familiar with central offices and the like so I was able to discern who was at fault in my case - and it was always Verizon's. When I called Verizon to complain that my phone line was dead or at other times that my DSL line was dead they had the gall to ask me why I wasn't using Verizon DSL. Covad kept making appointments to get into my CO but the Verizon people were always no-shows. Hell, they're a monopoly, why should they care.
Verizon is also one of the biggest political contributors in New York state politics, and one of the biggest contributors to national campaigns. This is how they get the government-granted right to be the only ones allowed to string telephone wire over and under our public streets. Once Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms are out of business, they can hike DSL rates up real high.
There is a GLUT of unused bandwidth out there, and even in this economy a demand for DSL. But government-granted mononopolies like Verizon/SBC prevent us the user/consumer from getting to that bandwidth. I keep getting advertisements in my phone bill for Verizon DSL, but I will never use them. I became so mad at Verizon, I did some political work on the campaign to keep them from doing long distance in Massachusetts.
Open up our phone lines to free competition. Get rid of the Verizon/SBC monopoly over phone lines over and under our public streets, which is granted by corrupt politicians who are paid off to maintain that license.
When are attorney generals going to start going after the Baby Bells (Verizon, SBC - I guess any day now all the Bell companies will recombine again) who have been preventing DSL companies from their legal access to central offices? There is a glut of backbone bandwidth out there, high demand for high-speed home access for it, yet the Bells spend more time trying to drive Covad out of business than providing service to their customer's.
If this was a free market, that would be one thing - but the government grants a monopoly to the Bell companies. That's the real problem.
Most ISP's wouldn't do something that would lose them business like this, why can SBC be so cavalier? Because they have a government-enforced monopoly, and know they can get away with anything (this goes for Verizon as well). Since the government gives the local loop to these companies, legally they have to allow companies like Covad access to their facilities. However, they have done everything they can to throw up roadblocks to competition. If they were competitive in a free market I wouldn't care, but they have a government enforced monopoly allowing them and them only to string telephone lines over and under public streets. And they are killing DSL competition, which means higher DSL prices which means less people using DSL and the Internet.
I have to say that I've had the totally opposite experience. FreeBSD had a very easy root/boot floppy disk procedure and network install (ie. install over the Internet), whereas slackware, had a much more complicated procedure, with many, many floppy disks needed.
A few months ago I wanted to install Red Hat on a CD-less machine I have at home, over a 56K modem. I was going to download the files to my Sun box and then NFS mount them locally. Red Hat doesn't go out of their way to advertise that they have a network install of Red Hat but a friend of mine pointed it out to me. Harkening back to the good old days, my NE-2000 compatible card didn't have the proper drivers (for RH Linux, there was no problem when it had Windows 95), and enabling/disabling Plug-and-Play, changing the IRQ and all that jazz didn't help. I hadn't done an install of FreeBSD for a while but at wit's end I did that. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was able to install over the Internet via a modem!
Frankly, it's my opinion that FreeBSD has always been one step ahead of Linux in ease of installation for the past 5 years. I am speaking of the most popular Linux distributions, since I almost always install what the most popular dist is (although I have used Debian and so forth). The only thing Linux ever sometimes surpassed FreeBSD on was NIC cards - sometimes Linux would work with a cheap NIC card that FreeBSD wouldn't. And frankly, Windows always killed both of them in working with virtually every network card.
In terms of being memetic, ease of installation is more important than even ease of use. If you get totally stuck on installation, who cares who user-friendly GNOME is?
Your secret key being lost does not make the encryption readable. From the PGP FAQ:
l #3 .10
http://www.uk.pgp.net/pgpnet/pgp-faq/faq-03.htm
3.10 If my secret key ring is stolen, can my messages be read?
No, not unless they have also stolen your secret pass phrase, or if your pass phrase is susceptible to a brute-force attack. Neither part is useful without the other. You should, however, revoke that key and generate a fresh key pair using a different pass phrase. Before revoking your old key, you might want to add another user ID that states what your new key id is so that others can know of your new address.
Getting your secret key is not a compromise of the encryption.
Most of the research for these drugs are done by the government and universities, and then are just handed over, free of charge, to the drug companies. This "it will stop R&D" is BS, the majority of the R&D work is publically funded, although the profit on it is capitalized among a select few.
> Also, the US has never overthrown Australia. I'd suggest laying off the crack. What do you need, the CIA to place ads in newspapers spelling out their role in the Whitlam/Kerr affair?
The amount of time I spend as a systems engineer fixing crappy programmer's programs is awesome. Can you say "memory leak"? I think I have taught dozens of programmer's that there are memory calls aside from malloc(), like, ones that actually reclaim memory! Then of course there are the programmer's who have to put time calls in so the program can know exactly what time it is 10000 times every second - hey, did you know that that uses CPU cycles and will slow your, and every other program on the system down? Of course, the developer usually says that calls can be taken out because it is unneeded! Sometimes I don't believe the output I get from truss - these people are paid to be program all day, how come I know how to program better than most of them? One of the largest production processes we have to run has a memory leak that the developer's can't fix, so the solution is to keep rebooting the machine before it runs out of memory. I think I'm going to go play with my Lego Castle set, since the programming geniuses seem to have a handle on everything.
Reflecting on this, I think this goes into the "cult of competence" that i often see in IT. In organizations, especially large ones, all the IT people are jockying to be known as the "genius", the whiz kid who knows everything. Where I work, I rarely post to the public mailing lists because it takes so much time to post - I write out my post, then I review it to make sure everything is correct and done in the best way possible, then I send it out. Everyone is always trying to show up everyone else. Maybe the fact that there is a large bonus, and most of it will only go to 10% of the people contributes to this, but I think there is more to it. I used to work constantly, often sleeping at my desk, and I spent so much time working I could answer almost any technical question lobbed at me instantly. So in a way, I was like these people I see. Eventually I realized spending all this time wasn't enriching me that much, and I spent time hanging out with my friends and girlfriends. However, because of these prima donnas who spend all their time working, plus the H1-Bs, I am lower in the pecking order however. Oh well. One thing that pisses me off is I've had 4 different managers within a year and it's almost as if each one you're supposed to prove how competent and hard-working you are to them. Maybe I should be asking why I have manager's rotated every 3 months instead. I don't see it talked about much, but there's a very self-destructive streak within IT workers, almost a competition to see who can spend more time at work and less time having a social life. Usually these people have little self-confidence, except in their technical ability. I guess for me this is what defines primadonna.
I agree with this. From experience I've seen busting your ass at a mid/large sized company doesn't get you that much more money, in the end you're just another administrator or code monkey. When I say busting your ass I mean working a lot of hours. It's almost impossible to compete with the H1-B's, who seem to all work 60 hours a week minimum. I work the least amount of hours I can get away with, unless I'm working on something I find interesting, which is rare. Of course, this being IT, the least I can get away with averages 53 hours a week. You're better off investing that time on your own life and side projects. You only learn this over time. Maybe that's why there are so many young, "prima donna" programmers. I don't mind the people mentioned in the article, but I find 21-year-olds who try to make like you're an idiot because you can't write a Linux kernel module from memory. Usually the reality of the workplace smacks them in the face soon enough and they quiet down.