You are complaining that Microsoft does not allow you to distribute their software as open source?! What exactly gives you the idea that distributing closed-source software as open source software is legitimate?
You are mistaken. Read the text: they claim that "you shall not distribute the REDISTRIBUTABLE COMPONENT in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software." Note the phrase in conjunction with, as well as their definition of "Publicly Available Software". Contrary to your assertion, it is not the case that distributing any software defined by Microsoft as "Publicly Available" in conjunction with the (closed) REDISTRIBUTABLE COMPONENT will make the latter "open source." In particular, the PERL Artisitic License (named specifically in the EULA) clearly provides for such redistribution, and does not have the implication you assert.
Your confusion on this point is understandable (there are a lot of licenses out there, after all), but unfortunate nonetheless. It is precisely this sort of misunderstanding which aids Microsoft's PR war against Open Source.
Don't you think that there is room for the possibility of this condition being real? I'll bet there isn't much evidence or clinical data to back up these people's claims, but there's probably no evidence to refute it either.
Actually, there's plenty of evidence which, for all intents and purposes, refutes the claim of health problems from low-frequency EMF. This evidence takes the form of numerous studies which have sought the proposed effect, but have failed to find it, along with studies whose initial findings vanished as better measures of the variables in question were employed. (See Robert Park's Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud for a nontechnical summary.)
Of course, there are always those who will hold out hope that, somehow, there could be an effect...but if it's there, it's so small as to be far less important than the myriad other risks to which you are exposed on a daily basis. Frankly, this sounds like a good, old-fashioned panic to me....
[Not any better than the others here, but it's yet another example for those who are seeking one....]
I am writing to express my opposition to the proposed settlement in the Microsoft antitrust trial. As a scientist, I spend much of my time developing data analysis software for multiple platforms, including both UNIX and Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. My work is thus directly affected by the current proceedings, and I am concerned that a judgment be reached which is in the best interests of myself and other science and technology professionals.
I am particularly concerned that the Proposed Final Judgment does not adequately address the problem of Independent Software Vendors who ship Open Source applications. The Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1 SDK EULA, for instance, states in part that
"...you shall not distribute the REDISTRIBUTABLE COMPONENT in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software. "Publicly Available Software" means each of (i) any software that contains, or is derived in any manner (in whole or in part) from, any software that is distributed as free software, open source software (e.g. Linux) or similar licensing or distribution models... Publicly Available Software includes, without limitation, software licensed or distributed under any of the following licenses or distribution models, or licenses or distribution models similar to any of the following: GNU's General Public License (GPL) or Lesser/Library GPL (LGPL); The Artistic License (e.g., PERL); the Mozilla Public License; the Netscape Public License; the Sun Community Source License (SCSL);..."
This and other similar EULAs severely limit the potential for software makers to build Open Source software which is compatible with, or which makes legitimate use of, Microsoft tools. Since scientific software is often "Publicly Available" as per the above definition -- in keeping with the duty of scientists (especially those with public funding) to make their work available to American government, business, and academic institutions -- it follows that such behaviors on the part of Microsoft serve to impair the ability of the scientific community to meet its public responsibilities. Given the finding of fact that Microsoft holds a monopoly on Intel-compatible PC operating systems, it is espectially important to guarantee that Microsoft will not be able to use its monopoly power to control Independent Software Vendors. The Proposed Final Judgment does not succeed in accomplishing this.
The United States Department of Justice was in the right to take action against Microsoft initially, and -- as a taxpayer -- I certainly hope they will see that justice is served. The Proposed Final Judgment, however, is insufficiently strong to prevent the abuses which resulted in the initial action, much less the potentially actionable practices already proposed by Microsoft in the coming years. A strong judgment, possibly including the breakup of Microsoft, is the only viable means of restoring the benefits of free competition to the American software industry.
Re:Ten Reasons Why TeX/LaTeX is Better than Word
on
Writing Documentation
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· Score: 1
For whatever it's worth, I'll add my name to the pro-LaTeX chorus, at least as far as formalized writing goes. I was an avid Word user for years -- and have prepared fairly complex, book-length documents using it -- but my Master's thesis finally pushed me over the edge. Since switching to LaTeX, I have found that my papers are easier to prepare, better looking, less subject to being scrambled (which was actually a major problem for me under Word...different Word versions tended to have issues with the various embedded objects in the text), are more easily modified for different journals' requirements (a task which used to be very difficult under Word), and take up less space. Formatting my Doctoral thesis was almost laughably easy, and there's no risk that the size of the document will cause the interpreter to explode (unlike Word).
Of course, there are still a few caveats. The first is that most of my writing these days is professional....thus, the automagic typesetting features of LaTeX are working for me, not against me. The second is that there has been something of a learning curve involved. I don't know about other users, but it took me a week or so to get up to speed with the basics, and I'm still (two to three years later) picking up tricks. (Note that I've been figuring things out as I go...if I'd had someone to show me how to get started, this would have taken only a fraction of the time.)
Anyway, having used both Word and LaTeX intensively for large, complex documents, I can unequivocally recommend the latter for serious projects. LaTeX has greatly increased my own productivity, and any urge I might have had to switch back has been stifled by watching my peers struggle continually with Word-based problems.:-)
Researcher One: "I thought this was supposed to be a random poll."
Researcher Two: "It is, our methodolgy is perfect."
Researcher One: "Then why am I getting the same result?"
Answer: Evidently the data generation process is non-ergodic.:-)
"What, those are great random numbers! They worked fine the last five hundred times...."
At this point, linux is a downgrade for end users. You lose features. You may say you don't like the features, you don't need the features or don't want the features but the bottom line is you lose them.
Oddly, I am not aware of any such "features" (other than the built-in spyware, which I can do without). I have heard this line often from Windows users, but so far don't see any functionality which I personally would gain by switching from Linux to Windows (which I no longer use). Given that such a move would cost massive quantities of cash (not to mention any ideological issues), it sounds like all cost and no gain from my point of view....
In any event, you're going to need a vastly more persuasive argument than that to persuade some of us. I don't make any claims for the typicality/atypicality of my experience, but my computing experience -- and productivity -- has improved significantly as the result of my move away from MS products.
In my experience, posting anything negative about Linux will get you modded down. Posting positive things about Microsoft can also get you modded down, but not as often. The chances of getting modded down for this decreases for posts over about 2k and for posts that begin with "I know I'm going to get modded down for this...", but I've found that if you state an opinion that is contrary to Slashdot groupthink, you need to post anonymously.
This seems to be a very common perception, but I must confess some skepticism on the matter. While I hear a lot of people asserting that posts which do not conform to some hypothetical "groupthink" line are inevitably modded down, I also note that many (not all, but many) of these same posts are themselves modded up.
The problem, I think, is that it is actually very hard to tell precisely which posts are being modded up/down for what reasons, without conducting a more extensive analysis. If one were able to collect data on a large, random sample of posts, blind-code those posts for content, and add codes for additional factors (like discussion context), one would then be in a position to determine whether there is actually a major problem of "Slashdot Censorship" here. This would be a nontrivial undertaking (well, the coding would be nontrivial, anyway -- the actual analysis would be fairly easy), and I do not expect that anyone here will volunteer for the job. (Don't look at me -- I've got a thesis to revise!:-)) Without such a procedure, however, it is impossible to determine whether the alleged phenomenon is real, or whether it is simply the conjunction of selection and recall biases.
In any event, I would recommend against trusting your intuition on this one. People aren't very good at this sort of judgment task.
As an artist you don't need money. You're doing this for the love of music. All the kids who dream of being rich rock stars aren't real musicians. Real musicians starve.
Actually, my understanding is that real musicians play for a living. Despite the hyped dream of being able to "record once, get paid forever," the musicians that I have known (including my former teachers and their colleagues) made their livings by playing live on a regular basis. A glamorous lifestyle? No, but they weren't starving, either. Of course, to do this you have to be A) competent, B) versatile, and C) the sort of person who really loves to perform....but the career is there, for those who have the right stuff.
Frankly, my sympathy here is somewhat limited: the rest of us get paid for the work we continue to perform on a daily basis, as do most professional musicians. I can fully see the allure of getting paid many times over for a single recording -- and I understand that even this does not lead to riches for most -- but my empathy for the desire does not translate into an endorsement of the system which brings it about. Just because someone wants to have a monopoly on information dissemination does not mean that the rest of us should give it to them (no matter how strong the emotional appeal).
Desktop computing? Don't they know? The war is over. Microsoft has won.
Well, yes, but it's far more sudden than the author makes out. I think a lot of us believed that the Linux desktop could compete after Microsoft was broken up or destroyed for the monopoly that it is.
Well, no, actually, Microsoft has not won the desktop war....at least, not on my desktop.
And, in some sense, my little desktop matters more than one might think, because as long as there is a moderately large (in absolute, not relative terms) number of Linux desktop users, there will continue to be an incentive for Linux developers to keep churning software. As has been pointed out by other posters, MS is much more vulnerable to competition than is Linux; the latter can survive in a very small niche, since its development is not tied to the support of a massive corporate infrastructure. Of course, I (like many others) would love to see Linux adopted more broadly, but so long as the software works for me, I'm going to use it. Right now, Linux meets all of my desktop needs, and no "OS war" is going to make me switch back to MS.
Of course, legislation making Free Software difficult or impossible to make/distribute could pose a bigger problem, but that's another matter....
think that this will actually help the economy, even if not a lot. The last time the USA was in a recession and went into war, it came out as the strongest power on the world. Hopefully this will unify the nations and bring everybody's economy back up again.
Unlikely. In the former occasion, the US had a largely industrial economy; hence, the diversion of production to wartime needs was not as painful as it might have been, and the subsequent investment in production facilities was at least partially recoverable afterwards. We now have a service economy....disruptions in production/consumption patterns experienced during WWII would (I would imagine) be quite catastrophic to today's ecology of firms. Mess with the metaphorical trophic system badly enough (e.g., by making large classes of service/leisure goods difficult to supply or consume) and you're going to see a lot of firm mortality. If nothing else, that's going to create a lot of lost social capital, not to mention pretty serious shocks to the labor market....
And that doesn't even begin to get into the deadweight losses associated with interventions like price fixing, rationing, etc. which accompanied the WWII wartime economy in the US.
I'm not an economist, so you should check with someone who has studied the problem in more detail. I would be very suspicious, however, of any claims for the economic "benefits" of full-on war which do not factor in the production mix of the society in question.
Heh. I still remember the incredible deal I got on my first modem...an internal US Robotics model (1200baud) for the low, low price of $120.:-) I had to save for months to afford it, but it was worth every penny.
I didn't discover the BBS scene until '87 or thereabouts; a friend showed me his dad's new modem, and I was instantly hooked. That connect tone was like some magic gateway to a faraway land where your identity was based on what you said, rather than how old you were or what you looked like....and for a junior high deviant, that was pretty damn appealing. I stayed with the local scene (which wasn't too big -- I was in Durham, NC, and my parents wouldn't let me call long distance:-)) until '92, when I went to college and discovered the Net.
I still do miss the sense of "place", though. The BBS was like a hangout, a bar or cafe, each with its own ambience. Then again, in the early '90s, the whole Net was a little like that. Then the corps got interested, the Eternal September hit, and before long the Mundane Hordes were talking about Net legislation....
But I digress. I owe my youth (misspent or otherwise) to those "cheap" modems, and the sysops who made a lively BBS scene possible in a mid-sized southern town. Wherever they may be (perhaps still at the Biscuit Kitchen:-)), may their data lines be free of EMF!
-Carter
(Once known as The Eagle, in younger and possibly more foolish days....)
I choose not to believe the US government is essentially evil. I choose to believe the US government has improved its stance on human rights in general, effectively and steadily over the last 200 years.
You can "choose to believe" anything you wish, but reality is not obligated to agree with you. While it is certainly true that the US government has substantially improved its stance (from a libertarian point of view) on domestic human rights for women, racial minorities, and laborers in the workplace over the past 200 years, you seem to be unware of the fact that these gains were the result (at least in part) of persistent struggle by those who faced oppression. It is simply not the case that things just "got better" on their own, as anyone who participated in the fight for civil rights would tell you. Furthermore, the US has continued to commit acts of political repression right up to the present day; I've cited it here before, but It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America by Bud and Ruth Schultz is an excellent (and chilling) reference on the subject. I would suggest doing some reading from this or other relevant history texts before holding forth on the US human rights record.
In any event, if the present trend towards the expansion of government surveillance, unaccountability in law enforcement (e.g., secret evidence, detention without charge or trial, etc.), and military/law enforcement collaboration continues, the historical record strongly suggests that we will see substantial abuse of this power by government officials (corrupt or otherwise). I am aware of no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion that things will be different this time around.
I believe the majority of you online rights complainers are spoiled pampered brats that have never had to sacrifice the least little thing in your lives, and don't understand that we have to help find solutions to the problems caused by unintended side-effect our electronic age has brought us.
In the past, it has been precisely this sort of "rights complaining" which has kept authoritarian interests in check. Perhaps, when you or a loved one is hauled off due to having spoken out against state policy, having angered an official, having been the victim of a beauracratic mistake, or simply having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, you will reconsider your assessment of us. It has happened before, and -- if you have your way -- it will happen again.
Of course, by then it will be too late. Let's just hope that there are enough "spoiled brats" out there to keep this from happening.
You falsely assume that "you have nothing to worry about if you don't break the law." When draconian laws like this are on the books, it takes very little for corrupt enforcers to trump up charges against those they don't like. Add to that the usual pile of simple mistakes, systematic attacks on dissidents, etc., and you've got the makings of a brand new prison population.
But I'm sure they'll never come for you, or anyone you care about. After all, you don't break the law, do you? And justice always prevails, does it not?
Never make the mistake of thinking that because you are law-abiding, you are safe.
Hmm. So, would this not imply that I would be forbidden from holding a conversation with a second party in a sufficiently obscure natural (or artificial but non-machine) language? If so, how can that not violate my First Amendment rights? And if not, then how can it be that it is permissible for me to speak to another party in an obscure language involving sounds, but not in an obscure language involving numbers?
Either the very idea of prohibiting cryptography is trivially unconstitutional, or else the US is permitted to decide what languages can and cannot be spoken within its borders. IANAL, but I have difficulty in seeing how the latter could hold up. Not that logic has any importance in such matters, mind you.....
Mr. Katz is mistaken: this is not a "new reality," but rather the age-old struggle between authoritarianism and freedom. In every free society, periodic inhumane acts or other tragedies spark calls for the strong hand of the State to save the people from whatever threat has emerged. The maintenance of freedom requires that these calls be resisted, no matter how seductive the siren song of security may seem at the time.
If we surrender a "little" freedom on issues like cryptography, fourth and second amendment rights, and the all-important right to free speech, there most certainly will be long-term consequences. American history is littered with examples of the abuse of State power to suppress dissenters, a fact which is all too quickly forgotten by the American people. (I would suggest books such as Lies My Teacher Told Me or It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Oppression in America for those who are unfamiliar with these events; such reading is not for the faint of heart, I warn you.) Make no mistake: any abridgments of our freedoms which we permit now will be used when the next wave of political repression hits.
I don't know who that wave will target. In the 1920s, it was anarchists and labor unionists who suffered. In the 1940s, they locked up, seized the property of, and generally harrassed persons of Japanese and German descent. In the 1950s, homosexuals and suspected "communists" were targeted. In the 1960s, they went after civil rights and peace activists.
as a musician i resent the idea of anyone else touching my work that isn't in my band. especially since it still would have my name attached to it. Plus i cant' imagine the hell you'd have with multiple bands playing "forked" versions of the same song.
You're clearly not a jazz musician, then. The entire genre is based on "forked" music, played -- and modified -- by different artists. It is an oddity of modern rock music that bands are considered to have an exclusive connection to the songs they happened to write, and that the "covering" of older songs is considered to be a mark of immaturity. Genres predating the current era of copyright madness generally admit forking, and indeed many are based on it....
"Open music" has existed for aeons. "Closed music" is a thoroughly modern idea, and a pretty sad one at that.
Despite your mod down to Troll status, you're quite right. The idea of needing to read a 50-page manual before using a piece of software has been obsolete since 1984. Most of the computer-using world knows that it's obsolete, but/. is a haven for command-line nostalgics. Apparently there are people who prefer to spend their time memorizing commands rather than using software to get something done, just as there are people who would rather tinker under their car's hoods than actually drive anywhere. I have nothing against this taste, but what seems to be missing on/. is an understanding that this inclination is and always will be in the minority.
Spoken like someone with a very short memory. As someone who had to migrate his user base to Windows in the first place, I can tell you that Windows was not intuitive nor easy for many end users. To those who were trained in the command-line and text-menu environments which preceded it, the iconographic conventions of Windows were often very confusing. Hell, even the mouse took getting used to for some folx! Over and over again, we'd get complaints that Windows was "too hard" or "too confusing" from people who had no trouble with WordPerfect 5.1....
The point of this, of course, is that no interface is truly "intuitive"; the approachability of a new interface is rather a factor of the extent to which it mirrors those with which you are already familiar. For those who were raised on Windows, it is "obvious" that Windows is the more "intuitive" OS. For someone raised in DOS, Linux, CP/M, TOPS 20, or what-the-hell-ever, it would be equally "obvious" that theirs was the "intuitive" one.
Don't confuse your implicit training with an inherent feature of the OS.
I think this is lost by most slashdotters. If you're doing nothing wrong, why do you care!
Actually, what seems to be "lost" on many Slashdotters is the fact that the Enforcers of Law (TM) themselves are neither infallible nor even necessarily law abiding. Sure, you may be doing nothing "wrong" (though, with the Christian Coalition and friends in power, this is an increasingly large category of activities), but that doesn't mean you won't get falsely accused because:
You happen to have accidentally matched someone in the database;
Someone doesn't like your opinions/manner of dress/color of skin and wants you punished;
Local business owners (or other interests) think that people like you are Undersirables, and are exerting influence to have you harassed (possibly illegally);
Some corrupt agent of the state has decided that you look like a good mark for harrassment (e.g., for lucrative property forfeiture, blackmail, etc.);
You have accidentally violated some ancient law which is still on the books (of which there are hundreds), and today someone just happened to decide to start enforcing it;
etc.
The history of the United States (not to mention other nations) is filled with examples of people who had "done nothing wrong," but who were mercilessly hounded by the state. (I recommend books such as It Did Happen Here
or Lies My Teacher Told Me for the uninitiated.) If you install a system such as this, in which people's identities are continuously "searched" by law enforcement authorities, then -- mark my words -- you have created a situation in which substantial abuse is
all but inevitable. By a combination of technical
error, maliciousness, bigotry, corruption, and
good, old-fashioned incompetence, you're going to
get a large number of substantively innocent
people who will be harassed, charged, and jailed (or worse) because of this kind of omnipresent enforcement system.
Those who consider such concerns to be "paranoia" are in dire need of a history lesson. Alas, I fear that they will suffer precisely the society that they deserve....
-Carter
So-called "anarchists"
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 1
I find it particularly saddening to see this action
ascribed to a group of "anarchists," as this will
doubtless continue to feed the widespread (and
false) belief that anarchism is synonymous with
violence and destruction. Such beliefs are
dangerous not only because they smear philosophical
anarchists, but also because they serve to attract
fans of senseless destruction to the anarchist
movement.
Alas, given a few more years of this, I fear that
the folk misconception will have become true. It's hard to communicate to people that
you're in favor of peaceful cooperation when
the self-proclaimed "anarchist"
next door is randomly breaking stuff....
Maybe we ought to trademark Anarchism (TM). Then
we could get government enforcement for correct
usage of the term.;-)
The author, for all of his literary pretensions,
seems rather ignorant of the history of the
literature about which he writes. Even if we
dismiss the classical fantasy literature (losing
Beowulf, El Cid, and the Arthurian
legends in the process (among others)), what
fantasy buff could forget the likes of writers
such as Lord Dunsany? LOTR has its place,
but for my money I'd take The Charwoman's
Shadow or The King of Elfland's Daughter any day.
Sigh. As others have said, the author just doesn't get it. (I wasn't impressed by his
"Rape in Cyberspace," either.) But I suppose
every parlour has its pigs....
-Carter
PS. I thought his style to be a bit pompous, too. Not that I should talk.;-)
The Siren Song of the Web
on
The Social Web
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· Score: 2
This is an interesting piece, although it seems to exhibit at least two major flaws upon first reading. Based on my admittedly quick reading of the piece (caveat emptor), these would be two obvious criticisms which I would make of the paper (were I reviewing it):
First, the authors are not studying friendship networks as the term is usually deployed in the network literature. They are studying citations on homepages, which is not the same thing. While they may be justified in arguing that these citations are in some way a proxy for the actual friendship network, the paper does not present any data to support this claim (or, more importantly, to assess the degree of measurement error inherent in the use of citations as proxy data). In showing, therefore, that there are associations between web page content or mutual citations and direct citations, the authors are merely using web pages to predict web pages. This would be expected to inflate the strength of the observed relationship (since there may be mechanisms encouraging (for instance) transitivity of web page citations which are not present between web page citations and friendship), and would lead me to question the validity of the research findings. At the very least, I find the title and abstract misleading and believe that the authors should be much more upfront about what it is that they are actually studying.
As a second concern, I was a bit irked by the fact that the authors continued to perpetuate the myth that degree (number of ties) for actors in most social networks is power law distributed. While it is true that some social networks exhibit this property, it is most emphatically not the case that all do. For instance, degree distributions resulting from the GSS network module are not even vaguely power-law distributed, and neither are most of the standard data sets distributed with UCINET (the bulk of them seem to be approximately normal based on my tests, which is exactly what you'd expect from a sum of random variables). The fact that web pages seem to exhibit power-law distributions in degree suggests that their networks are actually quite different from face to face networks, a finding which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Alas, since citations are being used here as a proxy for friendship relations, this does not exactly inspire confidence in the data.
All in all, this is an interesting paper; unfortunately, I think it suffers greatly from the "siren song of the web." As the authors note, it is very easy to collect large quantities of data from web pages...alas, methinks it might be a bit too easy. I am aware of no extant data to support the proposition that hypertext citation networks taken from the W3 can be used as a reasonable proxy for more general interpersonal relations, but I fear that the lure of trivial data collection may seduce many researchers to look the other way when opportunities like this arise. Maybe it will turn out that web-based citation networks can be used in this way, but I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, I'll stick to my fogeyesque position that real progress vis a vis the study of interpersonal relations depends on more traditional observation and elicitation schemes.
-Carter
Re:To what purpose, I wonder
on
The Social Web
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· Score: 1
I'm not advocating being a luddite or anything, but more and more often these days we see online social interaction not adding to but
replacing more traditional forms of human contact.
To a great extent, it isn't: a lot of the work on interaction via electronic media suggests that people in fact tend to use electronic communications to maintain ties formed through conventional means. This may seem counterintuitive, but then the correlations between self-report and actual behavior for both net use and interaction are pretty poor in the studies I've seen; people may think that their ties are formed differently now, but when you look at actual logs the data tells a different story.
Of course, things are still in flux, and these earlier findings could get washed away with time. We'll see....
Surveys are inherently flawed as a scientific method of producing data.
This is simply untrue. While it is true that there are certainly important limitations on the sorts of research questions one can address via survey methods, a properly constructed and administered survey instrument is a perfectly valid means of gathering data. The survey instrument is a stimulus, like any other; provided that the researcher has done his or her homework in ensuring that said stimulus will result in the appropriate response pattern, there is no inherent problem with using it. In fact, there are some circumstances (e.g., when one is interested in studying a problem which requires that a fairly simple stimulus be administered uniformly to a very large population) in which surveys are probably better than the alternatives. One can often (though not always) get better samples of large populations using survey methods than with interview or laboratory recruitment, and the uniformity of the survey instrument can eliminate certain kinds of idiosyncratic bias which can surface in, for instance, face-to-face interview settings.
Surveys can use misleading questions, slightly unusual definitions, and a host of other methods to twist the results even before they are collated.
This is correct. As with any other method of data collection, the unscrupulous can (and sometimes will) manipulate the data collection procedure so as to ensure that the results come out "their way." In general, one should be very careful in interpreting survey results; knowing both the exact question wording and the context of the question (i.e., what other questions were being asked) is key (as is knowing the details of the sample, in many cases, but I digress).
(Of course, a positive feature of the survey instrument is that one often can make sense of the results, given the above information. With experiments, you really can't interpret the results without knowing the procedure...and don't get me started on how hard it is to verify the necessary details of unstructured interviews or ethnographies....)
Even if you have NO agenda, and just honestly want to know the answer to a question, results obtained from surveys are highly suspect, and must be taken with a huge grain of salt.
All results are suspect, and all results which run contrary to prior information should be taken with a grain of salt. (Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and all that.) Surveys are not unique in this regard.
I have some (small) experience in this area, as I used to do work for a group that wanted information that could only be obtained by
asking our patrons questions. After working for months to design a survey with overlapping, interlocking questions so that we could run cross checks on the results, carefully picking wordings, working long into the night to tailor the questions to specifically address the issue we wanted data for, and then administering and analyzing over 3000 responses, we discovered that: what we thought we were very clear in asking was not at all what some of the patrons thought we were asking; that nearly 30% of the survey responses were internally inconsistent as far as we could tell (ask the same factual question two different ways, and obtain two different responses); that even when the data was unambiguous, it was very difficult to understand (interpret) what the answers meant; and many other problems.
Sounds like you didn't run an adequate pilot study, and/or your measures hadn't been properly validated elsewhere. In general, if you want to get useful data from a survey instrument, you usually have to either validate it on a pilot population using supplemental data (for behavioral reports) or assess its psychometric properties (for attitudinal items). Simply coming up with questions which seem "very clear" often won't do it: what seems clear to the researcher may not be clear to the subject.
BTW, I should point out that if you were trying to use self-reports as proxies for behavioral data, then validation would have been crucial. Subjects usually don't know with whom they had lunch last week, much less the exact number of alchoholic drinks they have had over the past year (a commonly used item, frighteningly enough). In this sense, your trepidation with respect to surveys is sensible...but I am aware of no evidence to suggest that interviews or other elicitation procedures are any better. (Use infallible unobtrusive measures if you can; otherwise, diary/pager studies are about as good as you're likely to get.)
Surveys to answer the question "Does napster encourage or suppress music sales?" will never produce a valid, reliable answer.
Well, certainly not by asking people "Does Napster cause you to buy more or less music?". Using a survey instrument to assess CD purchasing behavior might get reasonable data (though I would need to see information on the reliability/validity of self-reports of CD purchases and Napster use, which I do not have), however, so "never" is probably too strong a statement.
There are just too many variables. The only way to answer that question for sure is to take a representative cross section of
Napster, non-Napster, and former-Napster users, and analyze their music buying behavior before and after the introduction of the Napster service, and correct the results for economic growth, socio-economic status, locale, and many other factors.
...don't forget selection effects!
And then you MIGHT be able to say something statistically valid. MIGHT.
Indeed. But the issue here is less about surveys per se than it is about research design. I will completely agree that the Napster survey described here appears abyssmal as a means of infering much of anything about the impact of Napster on CD sales. Attacking suveys per se, however, needlessly slanders a fine (albeit imperfect) tool for the collection of human subject data. (If you want some research practices that deserve to be slandered, I can suggest a few.:-)) If you really want to encourage better research (in or out of the private sector), then I encourage you to look into the voluminous literature on psychometrics and survey methodology (the work of Norbert Schwarz is particularly appropriate here). If more citizens were informed regarding the actual capabilities and limitations of these tools, I suspect that all of us would be subject to fewer poorly informed policy decisions.
-Carter
Just because you have found a significant result does not mean you have found a result which is significant.
I am especially amused by the "Linux on the Desktop Is Dead" declaration because I have only in the past year or two gotten to the point where I can use Linux as my only desktop OS. I've got word processing, desktop publishing, graphics, user tools, statistical computing, software development, etc., etc., etc. at my fingertips, something which was not possible (at least, not with this quality) just three years or so ago.
Back in '93, my linux box was an interesting toy. Now, it does everything I need, and far better than Windows ever did. To hell with the rhetoric: the proof is in the performance. And I, for one, am never going back.
Long live Linux on the desktop! (Well, on mine, anyway....)
Because in 10 years
most businesses will be running dumb terminals and applications will be actually running inside the software giants
houses, whether something is open source or not is largely irrelevent.
Ah, Ye Olde Ten Year Prediction (TM). We all know how well those work, particularly when based on intuition rather than data....
But seriously, I suspect that a major factor in determining the computing model used by businesses (and everyone else) in 10 years will be the ratio between the cost of data transfer, and the cost of data processing/storage. If the former is cheaper than the latter, there will be a push towards centralized computing models: centralized file service, dumb terminals, etc. If, on the other hand, the latter is cheaper than the former, there will be a corresponding push towards decentralized computing models (i.e., PCs, local storage, etc.).
I suspect that, as this ratio oscillates over time (assuming it will, which I think is a safe assumption), the associated trends in computing centralization will follow. Of course, the names may change -- "terminals" become "thin clients," for instance -- and the details will vary, but my guess would be that the overall pattern will be largely cost-driven.
Of course, I could be mistaken; since I've not analyzed the pattern of past centralization trends, this is as much speculation as the earlier "10 year" prediction. That said, at least I can make an economic argument for my little model....
Slashdot Mirror
Your confusion on this point is understandable (there are a lot of licenses out there, after all), but unfortunate nonetheless. It is precisely this sort of misunderstanding which aids Microsoft's PR war against Open Source.
-Carter
Of course, there are always those who will hold out hope that, somehow, there could be an effect...but if it's there, it's so small as to be far less important than the myriad other risks to which you are exposed on a daily basis. Frankly, this sounds like a good, old-fashioned panic to me....
-Carter Butts
[Not any better than the others here, but it's yet another example for those who are seeking one....]
... Publicly Available Software includes, without limitation, software licensed or distributed under any of the following licenses or distribution models, or licenses or distribution models similar to any of the following: GNU's General Public License (GPL) or Lesser/Library GPL (LGPL); The Artistic License (e.g., PERL); the Mozilla Public License; the Netscape Public License; the Sun Community Source License (SCSL); ..."
I am writing to express my opposition to the proposed settlement in the Microsoft antitrust trial. As a scientist, I spend much of my time developing data analysis software for multiple platforms, including both UNIX and Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. My work is thus directly affected by the current proceedings, and I am concerned that a judgment be reached which is in the best interests of myself and other science and technology professionals.
I am particularly concerned that the Proposed Final Judgment does not adequately address the problem of Independent Software Vendors who ship Open Source applications. The Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1 SDK EULA, for instance, states in part that
"...you shall not distribute the REDISTRIBUTABLE COMPONENT in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software. "Publicly Available Software" means each of (i) any software that contains, or is derived in any manner (in whole or in part) from, any software that is distributed as free software, open source software (e.g. Linux) or similar licensing or distribution models
This and other similar EULAs severely limit the potential for software makers to build Open Source software which is compatible with, or which makes legitimate use of, Microsoft tools. Since scientific software is often "Publicly Available" as per the above definition -- in keeping with the duty of scientists (especially those with public funding) to make their work available to American government, business, and academic institutions -- it follows that such behaviors on the part of Microsoft serve to impair the ability of the scientific community to meet its public responsibilities. Given the finding of fact that Microsoft holds a monopoly on Intel-compatible PC operating systems, it is espectially important to guarantee that Microsoft will not be able to use its monopoly power to control Independent Software Vendors. The Proposed Final Judgment does not succeed in accomplishing this.
The United States Department of Justice was in the right to take action against Microsoft initially, and -- as a taxpayer -- I certainly hope they will see that justice is served. The Proposed Final Judgment, however, is insufficiently strong to prevent the abuses which resulted in the initial action, much less the potentially actionable practices already proposed by Microsoft in the coming years. A strong judgment, possibly including the breakup of Microsoft, is the only viable means of restoring the benefits of free competition to the American software industry.
Of course, there are still a few caveats. The first is that most of my writing these days is professional....thus, the automagic typesetting features of LaTeX are working for me, not against me. The second is that there has been something of a learning curve involved. I don't know about other users, but it took me a week or so to get up to speed with the basics, and I'm still (two to three years later) picking up tricks. (Note that I've been figuring things out as I go...if I'd had someone to show me how to get started, this would have taken only a fraction of the time.)
Anyway, having used both Word and LaTeX intensively for large, complex documents, I can unequivocally recommend the latter for serious projects. LaTeX has greatly increased my own productivity, and any urge I might have had to switch back has been stifled by watching my peers struggle continually with Word-based problems.
-Carter
Answer: Evidently the data generation process is non-ergodic. :-)
"What, those are great random numbers! They worked fine the last five hundred times...."
-Carter
Oddly, I am not aware of any such "features" (other than the built-in spyware, which I can do without). I have heard this line often from Windows users, but so far don't see any functionality which I personally would gain by switching from Linux to Windows (which I no longer use). Given that such a move would cost massive quantities of cash (not to mention any ideological issues), it sounds like all cost and no gain from my point of view....
In any event, you're going to need a vastly more persuasive argument than that to persuade some of us. I don't make any claims for the typicality/atypicality of my experience, but my computing experience -- and productivity -- has improved significantly as the result of my move away from MS products.
But hey, if it floats your proverbial boat....
-Carter
This seems to be a very common perception, but I must confess some skepticism on the matter. While I hear a lot of people asserting that posts which do not conform to some hypothetical "groupthink" line are inevitably modded down, I also note that many (not all, but many) of these same posts are themselves modded up.
The problem, I think, is that it is actually very hard to tell precisely which posts are being modded up/down for what reasons, without conducting a more extensive analysis. If one were able to collect data on a large, random sample of posts, blind-code those posts for content, and add codes for additional factors (like discussion context), one would then be in a position to determine whether there is actually a major problem of "Slashdot Censorship" here. This would be a nontrivial undertaking (well, the coding would be nontrivial, anyway -- the actual analysis would be fairly easy), and I do not expect that anyone here will volunteer for the job. (Don't look at me -- I've got a thesis to revise!
In any event, I would recommend against trusting your intuition on this one. People aren't very good at this sort of judgment task.
-Carter
Actually, my understanding is that real musicians play for a living. Despite the hyped dream of being able to "record once, get paid forever," the musicians that I have known (including my former teachers and their colleagues) made their livings by playing live on a regular basis. A glamorous lifestyle? No, but they weren't starving, either. Of course, to do this you have to be A) competent, B) versatile, and C) the sort of person who really loves to perform....but the career is there, for those who have the right stuff.
Frankly, my sympathy here is somewhat limited: the rest of us get paid for the work we continue to perform on a daily basis, as do most professional musicians. I can fully see the allure of getting paid many times over for a single recording -- and I understand that even this does not lead to riches for most -- but my empathy for the desire does not translate into an endorsement of the system which brings it about. Just because someone wants to have a monopoly on information dissemination does not mean that the rest of us should give it to them (no matter how strong the emotional appeal).
-Carter
Well, no, actually, Microsoft has not won the desktop war....at least, not on my desktop.
And, in some sense, my little desktop matters more than one might think, because as long as there is a moderately large (in absolute, not relative terms) number of Linux desktop users, there will continue to be an incentive for Linux developers to keep churning software. As has been pointed out by other posters, MS is much more vulnerable to competition than is Linux; the latter can survive in a very small niche, since its development is not tied to the support of a massive corporate infrastructure. Of course, I (like many others) would love to see Linux adopted more broadly, but so long as the software works for me, I'm going to use it. Right now, Linux meets all of my desktop needs, and no "OS war" is going to make me switch back to MS.
Of course, legislation making Free Software difficult or impossible to make/distribute could pose a bigger problem, but that's another matter....
-Carter
Unlikely. In the former occasion, the US had a largely industrial economy; hence, the diversion of production to wartime needs was not as painful as it might have been, and the subsequent investment in production facilities was at least partially recoverable afterwards. We now have a service economy....disruptions in production/consumption patterns experienced during WWII would (I would imagine) be quite catastrophic to today's ecology of firms. Mess with the metaphorical trophic system badly enough (e.g., by making large classes of service/leisure goods difficult to supply or consume) and you're going to see a lot of firm mortality. If nothing else, that's going to create a lot of lost social capital, not to mention pretty serious shocks to the labor market....
And that doesn't even begin to get into the deadweight losses associated with interventions like price fixing, rationing, etc. which accompanied the WWII wartime economy in the US.
I'm not an economist, so you should check with someone who has studied the problem in more detail. I would be very suspicious, however, of any claims for the economic "benefits" of full-on war which do not factor in the production mix of the society in question.
-Carter
I didn't discover the BBS scene until '87 or thereabouts; a friend showed me his dad's new modem, and I was instantly hooked. That connect tone was like some magic gateway to a faraway land where your identity was based on what you said, rather than how old you were or what you looked like....and for a junior high deviant, that was pretty damn appealing. I stayed with the local scene (which wasn't too big -- I was in Durham, NC, and my parents wouldn't let me call long distance
I still do miss the sense of "place", though. The BBS was like a hangout, a bar or cafe, each with its own ambience. Then again, in the early '90s, the whole Net was a little like that. Then the corps got interested, the Eternal September hit, and before long the Mundane Hordes were talking about Net legislation....
But I digress. I owe my youth (misspent or otherwise) to those "cheap" modems, and the sysops who made a lively BBS scene possible in a mid-sized southern town. Wherever they may be (perhaps still at the Biscuit Kitchen
-Carter
(Once known as The Eagle, in younger and possibly more foolish days....)
You can "choose to believe" anything you wish, but reality is not obligated to agree with you. While it is certainly true that the US government has substantially improved its stance (from a libertarian point of view) on domestic human rights for women, racial minorities, and laborers in the workplace over the past 200 years, you seem to be unware of the fact that these gains were the result (at least in part) of persistent struggle by those who faced oppression. It is simply not the case that things just "got better" on their own, as anyone who participated in the fight for civil rights would tell you. Furthermore, the US has continued to commit acts of political repression right up to the present day; I've cited it here before, but It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America by Bud and Ruth Schultz is an excellent (and chilling) reference on the subject. I would suggest doing some reading from this or other relevant history texts before holding forth on the US human rights record.
In any event, if the present trend towards the expansion of government surveillance, unaccountability in law enforcement (e.g., secret evidence, detention without charge or trial, etc.), and military/law enforcement collaboration continues, the historical record strongly suggests that we will see substantial abuse of this power by government officials (corrupt or otherwise). I am aware of no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion that things will be different this time around.
In the past, it has been precisely this sort of "rights complaining" which has kept authoritarian interests in check. Perhaps, when you or a loved one is hauled off due to having spoken out against state policy, having angered an official, having been the victim of a beauracratic mistake, or simply having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, you will reconsider your assessment of us. It has happened before, and -- if you have your way -- it will happen again.
Of course, by then it will be too late. Let's just hope that there are enough "spoiled brats" out there to keep this from happening.
-Carter
But I'm sure they'll never come for you, or anyone you care about. After all, you don't break the law, do you? And justice always prevails, does it not?
Never make the mistake of thinking that because you are law-abiding, you are safe.
-Carter
Either the very idea of prohibiting cryptography is trivially unconstitutional, or else the US is permitted to decide what languages can and cannot be spoken within its borders. IANAL, but I have difficulty in seeing how the latter could hold up. Not that logic has any importance in such matters, mind you.....
-Carter
If we surrender a "little" freedom on issues like cryptography, fourth and second amendment rights, and the all-important right to free speech, there most certainly will be long-term consequences. American history is littered with examples of the abuse of State power to suppress dissenters, a fact which is all too quickly forgotten by the American people. (I would suggest books such as Lies My Teacher Told Me or It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Oppression in America for those who are unfamiliar with these events; such reading is not for the faint of heart, I warn you.) Make no mistake: any abridgments of our freedoms which we permit now will be used when the next wave of political repression hits.
I don't know who that wave will target. In the 1920s, it was anarchists and labor unionists who suffered. In the 1940s, they locked up, seized the property of, and generally harrassed persons of Japanese and German descent. In the 1950s, homosexuals and suspected "communists" were targeted. In the 1960s, they went after civil rights and peace activists.
Perhaps you, or someone you love, will be next.
Think twice before squandering your freedom.
-Carter
You're clearly not a jazz musician, then. The entire genre is based on "forked" music, played -- and modified -- by different artists. It is an oddity of modern rock music that bands are considered to have an exclusive connection to the songs they happened to write, and that the "covering" of older songs is considered to be a mark of immaturity. Genres predating the current era of copyright madness generally admit forking, and indeed many are based on it....
"Open music" has existed for aeons. "Closed music" is a thoroughly modern idea, and a pretty sad one at that.
-Carter
Spoken like someone with a very short memory. As someone who had to migrate his user base to Windows in the first place, I can tell you that Windows was not intuitive nor easy for many end users. To those who were trained in the command-line and text-menu environments which preceded it, the iconographic conventions of Windows were often very confusing. Hell, even the mouse took getting used to for some folx! Over and over again, we'd get complaints that Windows was "too hard" or "too confusing" from people who had no trouble with WordPerfect 5.1....
The point of this, of course, is that no interface is truly "intuitive"; the approachability of a new interface is rather a factor of the extent to which it mirrors those with which you are already familiar. For those who were raised on Windows, it is "obvious" that Windows is the more "intuitive" OS. For someone raised in DOS, Linux, CP/M, TOPS 20, or what-the-hell-ever, it would be equally "obvious" that theirs was the "intuitive" one.
Don't confuse your implicit training with an inherent feature of the OS.
-Carter
Actually, what seems to be "lost" on many Slashdotters is the fact that the Enforcers of Law (TM) themselves are neither infallible nor even necessarily law abiding. Sure, you may be doing nothing "wrong" (though, with the Christian Coalition and friends in power, this is an increasingly large category of activities), but that doesn't mean you won't get falsely accused because:
The history of the United States (not to mention other nations) is filled with examples of people who had "done nothing wrong," but who were mercilessly hounded by the state. (I recommend books such as It Did Happen Here or Lies My Teacher Told Me for the uninitiated.) If you install a system such as this, in which people's identities are continuously "searched" by law enforcement authorities, then -- mark my words -- you have created a situation in which substantial abuse is all but inevitable. By a combination of technical error, maliciousness, bigotry, corruption, and good, old-fashioned incompetence, you're going to get a large number of substantively innocent people who will be harassed, charged, and jailed (or worse) because of this kind of omnipresent enforcement system.
Those who consider such concerns to be "paranoia" are in dire need of a history lesson. Alas, I fear that they will suffer precisely the society that they deserve....
-Carter
Alas, given a few more years of this, I fear that the folk misconception will have become true. It's hard to communicate to people that you're in favor of peaceful cooperation when the self-proclaimed "anarchist" next door is randomly breaking stuff....
Maybe we ought to trademark Anarchism (TM). Then we could get government enforcement for correct usage of the term. ;-)
-Carter
Sigh. As others have said, the author just doesn't get it. (I wasn't impressed by his "Rape in Cyberspace," either.) But I suppose every parlour has its pigs....
-Carter
PS. I thought his style to be a bit pompous, too. Not that I should talk. ;-)
First, the authors are not studying friendship networks as the term is usually deployed in the network literature. They are studying citations on homepages, which is not the same thing. While they may be justified in arguing that these citations are in some way a proxy for the actual friendship network, the paper does not present any data to support this claim (or, more importantly, to assess the degree of measurement error inherent in the use of citations as proxy data). In showing, therefore, that there are associations between web page content or mutual citations and direct citations, the authors are merely using web pages to predict web pages. This would be expected to inflate the strength of the observed relationship (since there may be mechanisms encouraging (for instance) transitivity of web page citations which are not present between web page citations and friendship), and would lead me to question the validity of the research findings. At the very least, I find the title and abstract misleading and believe that the authors should be much more upfront about what it is that they are actually studying.
As a second concern, I was a bit irked by the fact that the authors continued to perpetuate the myth that degree (number of ties) for actors in most social networks is power law distributed. While it is true that some social networks exhibit this property, it is most emphatically not the case that all do. For instance, degree distributions resulting from the GSS network module are not even vaguely power-law distributed, and neither are most of the standard data sets distributed with UCINET (the bulk of them seem to be approximately normal based on my tests, which is exactly what you'd expect from a sum of random variables). The fact that web pages seem to exhibit power-law distributions in degree suggests that their networks are actually quite different from face to face networks, a finding which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Alas, since citations are being used here as a proxy for friendship relations, this does not exactly inspire confidence in the data.
All in all, this is an interesting paper; unfortunately, I think it suffers greatly from the "siren song of the web." As the authors note, it is very easy to collect large quantities of data from web pages...alas, methinks it might be a bit too easy. I am aware of no extant data to support the proposition that hypertext citation networks taken from the W3 can be used as a reasonable proxy for more general interpersonal relations, but I fear that the lure of trivial data collection may seduce many researchers to look the other way when opportunities like this arise. Maybe it will turn out that web-based citation networks can be used in this way, but I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, I'll stick to my fogeyesque position that real progress vis a vis the study of interpersonal relations depends on more traditional observation and elicitation schemes.
-Carter
To a great extent, it isn't: a lot of the work on interaction via electronic media suggests that people in fact tend to use electronic communications to maintain ties formed through conventional means. This may seem counterintuitive, but then the correlations between self-report and actual behavior for both net use and interaction are pretty poor in the studies I've seen; people may think that their ties are formed differently now, but when you look at actual logs the data tells a different story.
Of course, things are still in flux, and these earlier findings could get washed away with time. We'll see....
-Carter
This is simply untrue. While it is true that there are certainly important limitations on the sorts of research questions one can address via survey methods, a properly constructed and administered survey instrument is a perfectly valid means of gathering data. The survey instrument is a stimulus, like any other; provided that the researcher has done his or her homework in ensuring that said stimulus will result in the appropriate response pattern, there is no inherent problem with using it. In fact, there are some circumstances (e.g., when one is interested in studying a problem which requires that a fairly simple stimulus be administered uniformly to a very large population) in which surveys are probably better than the alternatives. One can often (though not always) get better samples of large populations using survey methods than with interview or laboratory recruitment, and the uniformity of the survey instrument can eliminate certain kinds of idiosyncratic bias which can surface in, for instance, face-to-face interview settings.
This is correct. As with any other method of data collection, the unscrupulous can (and sometimes will) manipulate the data collection procedure so as to ensure that the results come out "their way." In general, one should be very careful in interpreting survey results; knowing both the exact question wording and the context of the question (i.e., what other questions were being asked) is key (as is knowing the details of the sample, in many cases, but I digress).
(Of course, a positive feature of the survey instrument is that one often can make sense of the results, given the above information. With experiments, you really can't interpret the results without knowing the procedure...and don't get me started on how hard it is to verify the necessary details of unstructured interviews or ethnographies....)
All results are suspect, and all results which run contrary to prior information should be taken with a grain of salt. (Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and all that.) Surveys are not unique in this regard.
Sounds like you didn't run an adequate pilot study, and/or your measures hadn't been properly validated elsewhere. In general, if you want to get useful data from a survey instrument, you usually have to either validate it on a pilot population using supplemental data (for behavioral reports) or assess its psychometric properties (for attitudinal items). Simply coming up with questions which seem "very clear" often won't do it: what seems clear to the researcher may not be clear to the subject.
BTW, I should point out that if you were trying to use self-reports as proxies for behavioral data, then validation would have been crucial. Subjects usually don't know with whom they had lunch last week, much less the exact number of alchoholic drinks they have had over the past year (a commonly used item, frighteningly enough). In this sense, your trepidation with respect to surveys is sensible...but I am aware of no evidence to suggest that interviews or other elicitation procedures are any better. (Use infallible unobtrusive measures if you can; otherwise, diary/pager studies are about as good as you're likely to get.)
Well, certainly not by asking people "Does Napster cause you to buy more or less music?". Using a survey instrument to assess CD purchasing behavior might get reasonable data (though I would need to see information on the reliability/validity of self-reports of CD purchases and Napster use, which I do not have), however, so "never" is probably too strong a statement.
Indeed. But the issue here is less about surveys per se than it is about research design. I will completely agree that the Napster survey described here appears abyssmal as a means of infering much of anything about the impact of Napster on CD sales. Attacking suveys per se, however, needlessly slanders a fine (albeit imperfect) tool for the collection of human subject data. (If you want some research practices that deserve to be slandered, I can suggest a few. :-)) If you really want to encourage better research (in or out of the private sector), then I encourage you to look into the voluminous literature on psychometrics and survey methodology (the work of Norbert Schwarz is particularly appropriate here). If more citizens were informed regarding the actual capabilities and limitations of these tools, I suspect that all of us would be subject to fewer poorly informed policy decisions.
-Carter
Just because you have found a significant result does not mean you have found a result which is significant.
Back in '93, my linux box was an interesting toy. Now, it does everything I need, and far better than Windows ever did. To hell with the rhetoric: the proof is in the performance. And I, for one, am never going back.
Long live Linux on the desktop! (Well, on mine, anyway....)
-Carter
Ah, Ye Olde Ten Year Prediction (TM). We all know how well those work, particularly when based on intuition rather than data....
But seriously, I suspect that a major factor in determining the computing model used by businesses (and everyone else) in 10 years will be the ratio between the cost of data transfer, and the cost of data processing/storage. If the former is cheaper than the latter, there will be a push towards centralized computing models: centralized file service, dumb terminals, etc. If, on the other hand, the latter is cheaper than the former, there will be a corresponding push towards decentralized computing models (i.e., PCs, local storage, etc.).
I suspect that, as this ratio oscillates over time (assuming it will, which I think is a safe assumption), the associated trends in computing centralization will follow. Of course, the names may change -- "terminals" become "thin clients," for instance -- and the details will vary, but my guess would be that the overall pattern will be largely cost-driven.
Of course, I could be mistaken; since I've not analyzed the pattern of past centralization trends, this is as much speculation as the earlier "10 year" prediction. That said, at least I can make an economic argument for my little model....
Time will tell, I suppose.
-Carter