There are many aspiring artists. Until they become known by the market, their skils are common and ordinary. Nobody will pay a street busker $10 million to hum a tune.
There are few companies who can take an aspiring artist to stardom, and each of those must gamble a large amount of money to do so. Their services are scarce and in demand. Hence, they can negotiate on favorable terms with an aspiring artist.
The "simple equation" falls short because it doesn't take into account boundary conditions or history, and since it assumes that a free market exists, so that "well, duh, just go to the competition" is a viable alternative.
In reality, there are a few gatekeepers who own government-granted licenses to the broadcast media, and some of them have leveraged these government-granted privileges to gain disproportionate market share in other distribution channels such as concert venues. Because of this, their power to set prices is unconstrained by any meaningful competition, and they parasitically use this pricing power to screw both the consumers and the producers of the goods they distribute.
Since broadcast licenses are awarded through a corrupt, opaque and highly uncompetitive process, since "intellectual property" rights are being massively redefined through legislation for hire to benefit the middlemen, and since the government has massively intervened to protect the obsolescent business model from competition, what possible reason could a rational person have for playing by the rules of such a flagrantly rigged, crooked game?
Every time I see one of these free-market arguments, I wonder why it isn't evident that, once a firm has grown to a certain size, the marginal cost of buying off legislators to create barriers to entry for new players is far lower than the cost of responding to legitimate competition. In other words, the free market contains in it the seeds of its own subversion once oligopoly emerges. When it's cheaper to rig the game than it is to play better, it's no longer a free market. It's just a racket.
What's odd is how many people defend the racketeers even when it's not in their interest to do so. The simplistic black-and-white ideology that underpins right-wing economics must have an incredibly strong emotional appeal. I suspect that it is akin to the appeal of fundamentalist religion, since the rhetoric is so often the same.
There's a strong precedent in US history for the institution of slavery as well. This country has been fallible, and if you go far enough back in history, you can find a preedent for every abuse. That's not a convincing argument.
And when you talk about not being able to afford to give protections to , I disagree. We give protection to everyone. Then the courts decide who the bad guys are, not the DOJ. I've lived in countries where the executive can do as it pleases. I found some of the goings-on there quite disturbing. But maybe you would like it better if the US became more like Saudi Arabia?
And no, you're wrong. Proponents of the PATRIOT Act should justify why these intrusions on our rights are so necessary. The benefit of the doubt has to be on the side of liberty, not more unaccountable state power. Or do you believe that we only have rights that are granted us by our wise and all-knowing leaders?
"Orin Kerr, Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University writes at The Volokh Conspiracy that the Department of Justice is having trouble finding abuses of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Or, to restate it: "The Department of Justice, which initially demanded the Patriot Act, denies having abused it."
Well, they would, wouldn't they?
Even with the best will in the world, internal investigations by any agency are seldom anything but whitewashes. If it's not an independent investigation, with full access to DOJ information, it has no credibility. Even if a true independent investigation comes up with a dry well, absence of evidence is not conclusive proof that everything was always wonderful-- only that that particular investigation didn't find anything. But if the DOJ denies the appropriateness of outside scrutiny, I for one would be profoundly suspicious of their reasons why.
This is especially true since so many provisions of the Patriot Act allow secret action by the DOJ. Not easy to establish accountability under those circumstances.
Put differently, if you were to ask Ashcroft or Gonzalez if they think they overreached in any way, what's the likelihood that they'd ever admit that they had only been crying wolf and that it would have been far better if the DOJ's authority were more constrained? I hope you're not holding your breath waiting for that.
Anyway, this whole approach is backwards. The principle should be that the DOJ has to positively demonstrate the benefits that have been derived from these encroachments on our rights. Not just the empty assertions that have been made so far. Then, that benefit should be weighed against the real costs to everyone of their draconian policies.
And there are moral principles at stake that supersede any such cost/benefit analysis. For example, if the DOJ has had any role in handing over people to be tortured in other countries, that's not a criterion for extending the Patriot Act-- that's a crime against humanity.
I wouldn't mind researching Peter Mandelson's position on this (as EU Trade Commissioner), actually. Nice way for Tony to get his best chum into power after being kicked out twice, but in a manner less susceptible to the scrutiny (and direct voting power) of the general public.
Kind of an ad-hominem argument, but Mandelson is a living example of why a No vote is the only option. The only way that union is legitimate is if it is not imposed from above. There has been no mass democratic movement demanding European union. What there has been is pressure from multinationals to create a venue for one-stop shopping. Cheaper for them to buy off a few Commissioners than legislators in dozens of countries.
Get it into your heads: the corporations will keep taking until the people forcibly tell them no. The existing system has been rigged so that you have no voice and the convoluted procedures are in place to hide accountability. It's a huge scam. Drive a stake into its heart while you still can.
If the code isn't transparent, it doesn't matter what the coder's background is.
Logical fallacy there? You're not addressing anything I've said, and I happen to agree completely.
Hm, I thought you were saying that there was some value in background checks. Excuse me if I misread you.
I wouldn't design a process solely to prevent such an occurrence, and the process proposed in the legislation won't achieve that anyway.
Yeah. I think you just basically want a good and open engineering process. They seem to at least have the right idea, and I don't know how much of the legislation actually INTERFERES with that.
Just the barriers they're adding by requiring background checks and the rather bizarre "chain of custody" requirements. Both require effort without adding value. I'd say that wortless and costly is very nearly equal to interference.
The legislation should focus on ensuring that this process is open and verifiable. It appears instead that the proposed legislation is written by people who have no understanding of process integrity,
It is interesting you should say that. I got a different impression, that the legislation was written by people who know a lot about process integrity, but working under a different paradigm: lawyers. The whole "chain of evidence" thing seemed like a giveaway to me.
I've encountered "chain of custody" in the pharma industry and in military logistics. Hadn't considered its relationship to "chain of evidence" until now. Thanks for that insight. My issue with it in this legislation is the assumption that you're dealing with a unique, tangible artifact that gets handed over. At best that's only metaphorically true. So the right things to do aren't the same as if it were a physical chain of custody.
The employer would just as well spend the money on horoscopes, graphology or having the candidate's aura read. Employers use it not because it's useful, but because it's there.
That seems pretty silly to me. It's at the very least useful to know if someone working for you has a criminal history including embezzlement or homicide. Employers use it because in this regulatory and liability environment, they have to.
Ever see a background check? The criminal background check part is not that big a part of it. Most of it is the kind of thing you'd see on an Experian/Equifax report: past residences, financial info, etc. which is NOT relevant. And in this context, whether a code author has done time or not for embezzlement is not relevant either: the code they write stands on its own. Anyway, only the part of one's criminal record that is publicly available information appears in the background check: juvenile convictions, plea-bargains, anything erased from the record, etc, aren't in there (different for DOD checks, BTW). And I still maintain that, for example, a potential employer looking for a GUI coder who knows Struts has no business knowing if they'd had a pot-possession conviction eight years ago or that a candidate for the position of truck driver was once late in paying child support. As I mentioned in my post, there are times when it really matters, but employers act on this information out of proportion to its actual relevance. And yeah, I think you're right about the motivation being fear of being sued later.
The really great thing about our current environment is, you can call a person's former employer and (in most states, anyhow) they are not allowed to say "we fired so-and-so for embezzlement and pursued charges." Joy.
In most states, the law allows a former employer to state grounds for dismissal. However, corporate legal counsel's advice is never to say anything, which is certainly the least
MBA holding UNIX admin here, so I've got some knowledge of the problem. To manage a project effectively, you have to have some knowledge of the space in which the project lives. I'm not talking line-of-code specificity here, but (for instance) a web project cannot be properly managed by a guy whose most recent experience is in managing a COBOL app on a VAX. They're different, in important ways.
Yeah. And the other thing that a senior manager needs to be able to do is to drill down when necessary to find out what's going on at the workface. Lack of specific skills makes this harder, and finding a techie henchperson to do it for you is another minefield because now you've got to also weigh their credibility and agenda.
And I totally agree with your opinion that there is a widespread fallacy that software people aren't specialists as much as they're interchangeable clumps of biomass. Decisions based on that assumption often end in a train wreck.
Are you kidding? Pretty much every company I've ever seen is always jumping on the latest management or IT fad. Java, XML, Extreme Programming, Six Sigma, CMM, you name it.
All well-known software engineering techniques or tools that have been around for years. Many of them are quite useful when done in the right context. And what's "bleeding edge" about any of these?
What programmer hasn't been told by their management that they want to XMLify everything or convert all the in-house applications to jsp webapps, whether it made sense or not?
Usually it does make sense, because not doing so makes the company stay locked to proprietary, monolithic apps and undocumented data representations. This leads to high license fees, maintainability issues, and trouble when you need the data for some new purpose. Again, this is a well-known problem and there's little controversy around the solution of moving to generic data representations and web-accessible services. Except for some extremely high-volume back-end processing, this almost always makes sense to do.
Companies are even more bleeding edge than your average geek is. http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141566&c id=11860211
I cannot comment on the hypothetical "average geek," but almost all the companies I've worked for (dozens in the Fortune 500, I'm a consultant) are overly conservative and risk-averse, if anything. Hard to get them to even think about anything without immediate ROI lately.
People have lots and lots of data in formats that are only supported by proprietary Windows software. For example, my elderly neighbor has megabytes worth of genealogical material (digitized wills, etc.) on her Windows box in a format that she can only use with the proprietary genealogy software she bought http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141566&c id=11860401
And the proprietary standards aren't interoperable either. Same migration problems everyone has, going from obsolete OS's to new ones, from Windows to Linus, from Windows to a new version of Windows, from MacOS to anything. Ever look at any of the thousands of Linux apps out there? Many exist for precisely this reason. And all of this is a great argument for standards compliance, which free software is quite good at.
I never thought I'd say this, but sometimes you gotta give the devil his due.
A few years ago I would have entirely characterized MS as the second mouse that gets the cheese, letting someone else lose money innovating, then coming in after the heavy lifting is done to snarf up all the profits.
But some of what they've done with internationalization, and more importantly, with web services, isn't at all bad. And while their overall GUI is pretty horrendous, there are parts that are OK.
Having said that, I don't use MS products except at work where it's necessary to support the client. I came up with Solaris and Linux and on the whole think Linux is the most promising way forward.
But it's dangerous to underestimate the Beast of Redmond. It's a huge and in some ways amorphous organization. There are some pockets of true innovation there, some factions that might even work effectively with the free software community, along with the all-destroying marketing juggernaut, the insane inertia, the complacency, the dirty fighting through legislation-for-hire, and the bloat. It's not a monolith.
We cannot defeat MS outright in the near-term. It is too big and too pervasive. But we might stand a chance if we can exploit some of its internal contradictions to maintain a space where the commons can be preserved. So we need to be able to choose our battles, and even, in some instances, work with MS when it benefits the community to do so.
It is now just a matter of companies such as IDG/Gartner to point out that they were wrong on this as well.
Regardless of your point of view on any IT topic, it is uusally possible to find a Gartner analyst to support it. Their only raison d'etre is to provide "authority" because firms don't listen to their own IT people and think that generic third-party analysis (well-larded with caveats and the infamous Magic Quadrants) is required to sprinkle the decision with magic pixie dust.
The correct approach is to hire credible IT people, make them accountable for their own analysis, and view the products of third-party analysts very critically (though some of their market trend reporting is actually worthwhile).
If the code isn't transparent, it doesn't matter what the coder's background is.
And your examples of latent bugs in BSD and Linux aren't actually examples of vulnerabilities being deliberately introduced. It would be interesting to know the odds of that really happening, but I wouldn't design a process solely to prevent such an occurrence, and the process proposed in the legislation won't achieve that anyway. Plain old vulnerabilities and bugs are known, more likely threats.
Instead, my point is that background checks add no value to the process. As a hypothetical example, the Feds could have run background checks on the long-suffering coders at Diebold and they probably would have passed. So what? Background checks don't guarantee competency or good design. And worse, consider a situation where, say, a Finnish student leads an effort to produce an OS. Not a US citizen, can't pass background check. So you can't use a product even if it happens to be well-suited to the requirements. So the system of background checks throws both false positives and false negatives. In fact, such checks add nothing but noise.
Yet another hypothetical situation: you publish your vote-counting code and solicit comments. Someone from (say) Oxford finds a vulnerability and sends you a patch. Are you going to reject the patch because you don't know the person? No. But if you follow best practice, you're going to subject it to stringent code review and regression testing.
Code is the product of a collaborative effort: the individual's role in its creation of the code is significant, but equally significant is the integrity of the process by which it is produced and validated. The legislation should focus on ensuring that this process is open and verifiable. It appears instead that the proposed legislation is written by people who have no understanding of process integrity, so instead they're trying to do a pointless tail-chasing exercise related to quasi-security-clearances and blame-assignment mumbo-jumbo.
And as for most individuals going through background checks anyway, that varies widely. Some employers use them, some don't. The employer would just as well spend the money on horoscopes, graphology or having the candidate's aura read. Employers use it not because it's useful, but because it's there.
...and if you can truly manage, it doesn't matter what the "subject" is really. If you have a grasp of the basics (and even most non-technical people have a grasp of some computer basics), and you know how to manage people, then you will do well.
This is the kind of thing that business schools tell their MBA students, and it's not true. I have seen people with good generic management skills fail dismally because of their inability to comprehend what they were managing. Without understanding what the job entails, a manager cannot establish appropriate metrics to measure progress, or know who's bullshitting. These are the key inputs to effective management decision making.
If you are managing a technical effort, you have to have technical understanding at a level far better than "basic." Otherwise you're reduced to beancounting and trying to find an authoritative source within the organization who will tell you what's going on without dragging their own agenda into it. Managers are usually not good at knowing who to listen to unless they have some means of reality-checking.
Senior executives (C-level and maybe their direct reports) are a different story, since they're not as close to the workface. But the idea that there's a generic skill that managers have that is independent of underlying subject matter is pernicious and contrary to real-life experience.
Having said that, technical skills on their own are not sufficient to make you an effective manager. Leadership is a whole different thing. So is strategy.
The bill stinks of having been written by lawyers with no worthwhile input from software people. The buzzwords are there, but the end product is incoherent.
If the code is open to inspection, there is no need for the background checks. That's just a way of inadvertently preventing the best people from working on the code. Any attempt to license coders sets a disastrous precendent in any event and should be rejected outright.
"Chain of custody" for code is bullshit; this isn't the pharmaceutical industry. What's really needed is verification that the binary is derived from the published source. The correct way to do that is to fully specify the development environment and configuration that generated the code. Then anyone else can reproduce it.
The other thing that's needed is a means of verifying that the binary loaded onto the machine is the one generated from the code using the specified development environment. SHA512 (or whatever) hashes can help with this, as can digital signatures. The "can't transfer over the Internet" requirement is inane and seems to be there only because of ignorance about methods of verifying integrity, regardless of how the file gets transferred. Think they've ever heard of VPNs? Do they think there's a risk in using them?
I agree with a number of the goals of this bill. But it kind of depresses me what a dog's breakfast they have produced.
There are a multitude of books, tools, and educational programs that deal with managing development projects. Whether you subscribe to IBM's Rational Unified Process or maybe SEI's Capability Maturity Model, whether you read Tom DeMarco's Peopleware or possibly Brooks' Mythical Man Month, there's something out there for you.
None of these has much to do with project management.
RUP is a development methodology. It says next to nothing about project managmenet.
The CMM is an assessment framework for technical competencies. As such it is not prescriptive.
The other two are good books that contain valuable anecdotes about project management. Neither is a methdology. I value Brooks far more highly, but that's just me.
Look at the Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) for something specific to project management. Brits seem to like PRINCE better.
As with any certification, neither PMI nor PRINCE can substitute for learning project management by managing projects. I've met a lot of PMI-certified nitwits. But having a common vocabulary and toolkit is still worthwhile.
This sounds resentful. Was there some kind of expectation that somebody would fund your trip to a conference? If you choose to write open source code, you are chosing to have no money. That's your choice. But dont complain about it.
1. My employer funds my trips to free software conferences. So do many other people's employers.
2. I write open source code, and I have money. Not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but more than most people I know.
It seems that you're focused on the value of a single commodity rather than on the whole web of economically significant interactions that includes that commodity. And if you think that you can predict whether proprietary or free software will maximize the value of that larger web of interactions, you are delusional. My own guess is that it won't make all that much difference either way to the overall value created, but that free software will shift the benefits more to the consumers and away from the biggest producers. But unless you're a lot better economic modeler than anyone else out there, the best you can do at this stage is to guess.
He knew that unregulated markets will be captured by suppliers, for example. Most of his self-styled followers can't seem to get that point. Maybe they're too distracted waiting for the Invisible Handjob.
I think a better question is that when computers are so pervasive and so integrated into the mechanisms of our daily lives, why isn't there a standard of quality for software and hardware enforced by the government?
We had that with telecoms before deregulation. Remember the old joke ad "We don't care. We don't have to." That said a lot about the extremely expensive, piss-poor service delivered by the regulated telcos.
While I have little sympathy for corporations, whenever they get regulated, the regulations always end up benefiting the regulated corporation and screwing the consumer.
One of the main reasons that software and systems have improved so much is precisely because they haven't been regulated. Down the regulation road lies Trusted Computing, more iterations of the DMCA, and similar idiocy.
I travel a lot on business. I've learned a few things:
1. Most hotel rooms are architected the same.
2. Furniture and electrical fittings in almost all hotel rooms seems to come from the same small handful of suppliers.
3. Same goes for bed linens.
Since the US is so huge, this means that there are potentially hundreds or thousands of matches for any set of hotel-room pictures.
So yeah, it may narrow the search space a little, and in this case maybe it's evident that it was Disney, but in the general case you won't learn much unless there are some exterior shots in the photo series. Therefore such information should be treated as far from conclusive.
So: Linux TCO sucks because monopoly practices mean you're forced to buy Microsoft anyway.
If that's a correct summary, then he's urging acceptance of what is likely to be a highly volatile status quo. That seems simultaneously fatalistic and a bit silly.
Sure, if you don't want support on any of those boxes. Businesses do, and for every 20 minutes that you're without support on that nice network you just invisioned, you've just lost your savings.
Unless you're paying big dinero for top-tier support, it'll take more than 20 minutes just to get through the voicemail maze. Windows support that's worth the money is a delusion. I worked projects where I had to deal with MS, Sun and Samba for support, Samba through discussion threads. Samba was most timely at actually fixing problems despite the absence of a support contract. Anecdotal, but it certainly doesn't back up the view that support contracts are worth the money paid for them.
The other thing to watch in TCO calculations is how cost tradeoffs are measured. If you're not tracking actual costs through the entire life cycle, the numbers are bullshit. And both training costs and estimates of improved or lost productivity are notoriously imprecise and sensitive to initial assumptions.
In fact, when I consult, I advise my clients to be wary of TCO calculations. The main reason is that the number that matters most to business is not TCO but return on investment (ROI). That's benefits minus costs. TCO comparisons assume equal benefits for the alternative approaches. But the goal of IT in a business is not just to reduce costs: if that were true, you could save a lot of money by ripping all your computers out. The goal is to maximize productivity. So ease of integration, stability of systems, ability to deploy new solutions in a controlled manner, all add to operational flexibility and are benefits. It's fallacious to look at IT solely as a cost center, and by allowing the debate to shift in that direction you're giving up a lot of winning arguments for Linux.
The Hebrew codes specified in Leviticus et al specify a code of life that is extremely survival oriented, efficiency oriented, and family oriented.
Based on what? Your wishful thinking?
Applying Occam's razor, it can be more plausibly asserted that the laws were nothing but a convenient pretext for the priests to oppress the people through superstition. Most of the rules show little but symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. They establish simplistic (and often demonstrably false) taxonomies and dichotomies and then attempt to enforce them whether they have a basis in fact or not. The underlying rule is often nothing more than "a place for everything and everything in its place." Those parts of nature that didn't fit into the arbitrary pigeonholes are assumed to be the work of Satan and therefore anathematized.
There is no reason to assume that, just because a primitive people believed in a load of tribal superstitions, that it follows that those beliefs had any survival value. If that were true, the same could be said for any other superstition that anyone once believed. That's flagrant nonsense unless you believe the Jews are somehow unique among all mankind. And if you really want to get Darwinian about it, consider that the Jews were unable to compete with the equally superstitious but more pragmatic Romans. So much for survival value.
To assert that all that idiocy was "for our own good" really presupposes the unvoiced explanation "it has to be that way because God said so." But in fact those laws were the works of profoundly ignorant and possibly ambitious, malevolent men.
Specifically, (1) Kosher laws have a ritual definition of cleanliness that has nothing to do with real sanitation. And it was lack of food that prevented obesity through most of history. Obesity just wasn't a problem back then. Unless you have hard evidence about disease rates among ancient Jews compared to other peoples in the same reason, you're talking out your ass.
(2) Clothing and houseware laws were ritually based and, again, unless you have some deep insights into the economies of the time, you cannot truthfully assert that they provided anything but a burden to the people who were subject to them.
(3) What is "the purity of the group"? Inbreeding? Sounds vaguely fascist to me.
(4) The only point I'll grant you is that tribal mutilation and initiation rituals and taboos do contribute to group cohesion.
This may not make sense biologically but it avoided the cultural confusion which we Americans are so fond of.
Directly contradicting your earlier assertion of survival value. And what "cultural confusion" are you referring to? I like cultural mixing and diversity. What's the alternative? "Racial purity"? The history of the previous century gives a number of reasons that you don't really want to go down that road.
they are just about the only cultural group of that period to have survived to the modern day.
Well, yeah. Except maybe for the Arabs (who were preliterate but already a distinct culture), the Romans (all Europeans who speak Romance languages are their direct cultural descendants). Greeks. Germans. Armenians. Persians. Han Chinese. Celts. Many cultures in India, both north and south. To name a few billion.
Your presence there will help prop up the existing repressive regime.
Instead, stay here and work to ensure that our own government doesn't become that repressive, or worse. They're well on their way and it's going to take a lot of effort to stop them. Making a buck or having an interesting cultural experience in China just isn't as important.
I spent $10 on a bottle of wine. So should the headline read "Wine purchase costs banana growers $10"?
It's the same logic the RIAA and MPAA use, and it's fallacious.
It's not their money. It's not being taken from them. It's not costing them shit. It's just diverting money they think should be theirs to other, more worthwhile. uses. But there's no real evidence that it ever would have been spent on what they have to sell, rather than saved, or spent on any other thing in the world that can be bought.
These people's sense of entitlement to what they haven't earned is sickening. Bunch of corporate welfare scroungers. Next they'll go whining for the government to seize the money for them.
Please show me the part of this that makes you think "sharing" copyrighted material with any random person on the Internet is fair use.
So, if we agree that it's not fair use per USC17, what does that have to do with the issue that was being debated: whether it is stealing? Nothing whatsoever.
Here's an interpretation that's more legally and morally tenable: copyright gives you the right to distribute information for sale. The remedies for infringement are solely civil, and the copyright holder must prove damages. Nominal cost multiplied by number of downloads is not the formula: they must show how many of those downloads actually resulted in lost sales (demand when price is zero is always going to be higher than demand when the price s unreasonably high, so it's possible that no loss in sales really occurred).
And, in a further attempt to reduce the distortions caused by tendentious choice of language, let's call "infringement" what it really is: maximally discounted redistribution. And traditionally, copyright holders have had no say in distribution or resale; only in preventing others selling copies of their works for money.
The reality is that what we are seeing is a concerted attempt by Big Content corporations to massively extend a property right at the expense of the public good. This is nothing but a land grab, with legislation-for-hire to back it up. Anyone who supports it is either a dupe, a shill, or possibly someone who reads too much Ayn Rand.
But the economics of distribution don't change just because of screwed-up laws. We'll be damaging our society's competitiveness if we allow those bastards to put that straitjacket on us. The higher cost of information exchange will lead to even more ignorance and less shared culture. This will have disastrous consequences.
And it's bound to fail anyway since any society that defects from this regime will have a competitive advantage.
but the network that I was able to develop while at school is second to none.
Which is one of the many reasons I never hire Ivy grads. I want our firm to remain a meritocracy, which becomes more difficult when members of someone's network keep showing up at the door.
And I utterly loathe two categories of people:
1. Legacies.
2. Sellouts: those who work hard in high school, get excellent grades, then squander their achivevements by allowing themselves to be co-opted by the the old boys' network. These are the kind of people who grow up to be Condoleezza Rice. The elite are using your talent to reinforce their unfair access and preserve their unearned privilege. Instead they should be cut off entirely. As long as the elite can recruit new talent, they'll remain the elite. The correct response is to deny them access to the action entirely; otherwise they'll move in after you've done all the hard work and cash in on it once they've pushed you out. I've seen it happen in several firms I've been in.
Incidentally I have working class origins and was privately educated (though not at an Ivy institution). So I've seen the system work at first-hand. It is profoundly anti-democratic and corrupt. Harvard and its ilk should be nationalized and turned into museums, and their endowments used to fund scholarships for minorities and poor whites.
Legacies should be put into re-education camps.
Not that I have particularly strong views on this topic.
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In reality, there are a few gatekeepers who own government-granted licenses to the broadcast media, and some of them have leveraged these government-granted privileges to gain disproportionate market share in other distribution channels such as concert venues. Because of this, their power to set prices is unconstrained by any meaningful competition, and they parasitically use this pricing power to screw both the consumers and the producers of the goods they distribute.
Since broadcast licenses are awarded through a corrupt, opaque and highly uncompetitive process, since "intellectual property" rights are being massively redefined through legislation for hire to benefit the middlemen, and since the government has massively intervened to protect the obsolescent business model from competition, what possible reason could a rational person have for playing by the rules of such a flagrantly rigged, crooked game?
Every time I see one of these free-market arguments, I wonder why it isn't evident that, once a firm has grown to a certain size, the marginal cost of buying off legislators to create barriers to entry for new players is far lower than the cost of responding to legitimate competition. In other words, the free market contains in it the seeds of its own subversion once oligopoly emerges. When it's cheaper to rig the game than it is to play better, it's no longer a free market. It's just a racket.
What's odd is how many people defend the racketeers even when it's not in their interest to do so. The simplistic black-and-white ideology that underpins right-wing economics must have an incredibly strong emotional appeal. I suspect that it is akin to the appeal of fundamentalist religion, since the rhetoric is so often the same.
There's a strong precedent in US history for the institution of slavery as well. This country has been fallible, and if you go far enough back in history, you can find a preedent for every abuse. That's not a convincing argument.
And when you talk about not being able to afford to give protections to , I disagree. We give protection to everyone. Then the courts decide who the bad guys are, not the DOJ. I've lived in countries where the executive can do as it pleases. I found some of the goings-on there quite disturbing. But maybe you would like it better if the US became more like Saudi Arabia?
And no, you're wrong. Proponents of the PATRIOT Act should justify why these intrusions on our rights are so necessary. The benefit of the doubt has to be on the side of liberty, not more unaccountable state power. Or do you believe that we only have rights that are granted us by our wise and all-knowing leaders?
Well, they would, wouldn't they?
Even with the best will in the world, internal investigations by any agency are seldom anything but whitewashes. If it's not an independent investigation, with full access to DOJ information, it has no credibility. Even if a true independent investigation comes up with a dry well, absence of evidence is not conclusive proof that everything was always wonderful-- only that that particular investigation didn't find anything. But if the DOJ denies the appropriateness of outside scrutiny, I for one would be profoundly suspicious of their reasons why.
This is especially true since so many provisions of the Patriot Act allow secret action by the DOJ. Not easy to establish accountability under those circumstances.
Put differently, if you were to ask Ashcroft or Gonzalez if they think they overreached in any way, what's the likelihood that they'd ever admit that they had only been crying wolf and that it would have been far better if the DOJ's authority were more constrained? I hope you're not holding your breath waiting for that.
Anyway, this whole approach is backwards. The principle should be that the DOJ has to positively demonstrate the benefits that have been derived from these encroachments on our rights. Not just the empty assertions that have been made so far. Then, that benefit should be weighed against the real costs to everyone of their draconian policies.
And there are moral principles at stake that supersede any such cost/benefit analysis. For example, if the DOJ has had any role in handing over people to be tortured in other countries, that's not a criterion for extending the Patriot Act-- that's a crime against humanity.
Get it into your heads: the corporations will keep taking until the people forcibly tell them no. The existing system has been rigged so that you have no voice and the convoluted procedures are in place to hide accountability. It's a huge scam. Drive a stake into its heart while you still can.
Hm, I thought you were saying that there was some value in background checks. Excuse me if I misread you.
Just the barriers they're adding by requiring background checks and the rather bizarre "chain of custody" requirements. Both require effort without adding value. I'd say that wortless and costly is very nearly equal to interference.
I've encountered "chain of custody" in the pharma industry and in military logistics. Hadn't considered its relationship to "chain of evidence" until now. Thanks for that insight. My issue with it in this legislation is the assumption that you're dealing with a unique, tangible artifact that gets handed over. At best that's only metaphorically true. So the right things to do aren't the same as if it were a physical chain of custody.
Ever see a background check? The criminal background check part is not that big a part of it. Most of it is the kind of thing you'd see on an Experian/Equifax report: past residences, financial info, etc. which is NOT relevant. And in this context, whether a code author has done time or not for embezzlement is not relevant either: the code they write stands on its own. Anyway, only the part of one's criminal record that is publicly available information appears in the background check: juvenile convictions, plea-bargains, anything erased from the record, etc, aren't in there (different for DOD checks, BTW). And I still maintain that, for example, a potential employer looking for a GUI coder who knows Struts has no business knowing if they'd had a pot-possession conviction eight years ago or that a candidate for the position of truck driver was once late in paying child support. As I mentioned in my post, there are times when it really matters, but employers act on this information out of proportion to its actual relevance. And yeah, I think you're right about the motivation being fear of being sued later.
In most states, the law allows a former employer to state grounds for dismissal. However, corporate legal counsel's advice is never to say anything, which is certainly the least
And I totally agree with your opinion that there is a widespread fallacy that software people aren't specialists as much as they're interchangeable clumps of biomass. Decisions based on that assumption often end in a train wreck.
And the proprietary standards aren't interoperable either. Same migration problems everyone has, going from obsolete OS's to new ones, from Windows to Linus, from Windows to a new version of Windows, from MacOS to anything. Ever look at any of the thousands of Linux apps out there? Many exist for precisely this reason. And all of this is a great argument for standards compliance, which free software is quite good at.
I never thought I'd say this, but sometimes you gotta give the devil his due.
A few years ago I would have entirely characterized MS as the second mouse that gets the cheese, letting someone else lose money innovating, then coming in after the heavy lifting is done to snarf up all the profits.
But some of what they've done with internationalization, and more importantly, with web services, isn't at all bad. And while their overall GUI is pretty horrendous, there are parts that are OK.
Having said that, I don't use MS products except at work where it's necessary to support the client. I came up with Solaris and Linux and on the whole think Linux is the most promising way forward.
But it's dangerous to underestimate the Beast of Redmond. It's a huge and in some ways amorphous organization. There are some pockets of true innovation there, some factions that might even work effectively with the free software community, along with the all-destroying marketing juggernaut, the insane inertia, the complacency, the dirty fighting through legislation-for-hire, and the bloat. It's not a monolith.
We cannot defeat MS outright in the near-term. It is too big and too pervasive. But we might stand a chance if we can exploit some of its internal contradictions to maintain a space where the commons can be preserved. So we need to be able to choose our battles, and even, in some instances, work with MS when it benefits the community to do so.
The correct approach is to hire credible IT people, make them accountable for their own analysis, and view the products of third-party analysts very critically (though some of their market trend reporting is actually worthwhile).
If the code isn't transparent, it doesn't matter what the coder's background is.
And your examples of latent bugs in BSD and Linux aren't actually examples of vulnerabilities being deliberately introduced. It would be interesting to know the odds of that really happening, but I wouldn't design a process solely to prevent such an occurrence, and the process proposed in the legislation won't achieve that anyway. Plain old vulnerabilities and bugs are known, more likely threats.
Instead, my point is that background checks add no value to the process. As a hypothetical example, the Feds could have run background checks on the long-suffering coders at Diebold and they probably would have passed. So what? Background checks don't guarantee competency or good design. And worse, consider a situation where, say, a Finnish student leads an effort to produce an OS. Not a US citizen, can't pass background check. So you can't use a product even if it happens to be well-suited to the requirements. So the system of background checks throws both false positives and false negatives. In fact, such checks add nothing but noise.
Yet another hypothetical situation: you publish your vote-counting code and solicit comments. Someone from (say) Oxford finds a vulnerability and sends you a patch. Are you going to reject the patch because you don't know the person? No. But if you follow best practice, you're going to subject it to stringent code review and regression testing.
Code is the product of a collaborative effort: the individual's role in its creation of the code is significant, but equally significant is the integrity of the process by which it is produced and validated. The legislation should focus on ensuring that this process is open and verifiable. It appears instead that the proposed legislation is written by people who have no understanding of process integrity, so instead they're trying to do a pointless tail-chasing exercise related to quasi-security-clearances and blame-assignment mumbo-jumbo.
And as for most individuals going through background checks anyway, that varies widely. Some employers use them, some don't. The employer would just as well spend the money on horoscopes, graphology or having the candidate's aura read. Employers use it not because it's useful, but because it's there.
If you are managing a technical effort, you have to have technical understanding at a level far better than "basic." Otherwise you're reduced to beancounting and trying to find an authoritative source within the organization who will tell you what's going on without dragging their own agenda into it. Managers are usually not good at knowing who to listen to unless they have some means of reality-checking.
Senior executives (C-level and maybe their direct reports) are a different story, since they're not as close to the workface. But the idea that there's a generic skill that managers have that is independent of underlying subject matter is pernicious and contrary to real-life experience.
Having said that, technical skills on their own are not sufficient to make you an effective manager. Leadership is a whole different thing. So is strategy.
The bill stinks of having been written by lawyers with no worthwhile input from software people. The buzzwords are there, but the end product is incoherent.
If the code is open to inspection, there is no need for the background checks. That's just a way of inadvertently preventing the best people from working on the code. Any attempt to license coders sets a disastrous precendent in any event and should be rejected outright.
"Chain of custody" for code is bullshit; this isn't the pharmaceutical industry. What's really needed is verification that the binary is derived from the published source. The correct way to do that is to fully specify the development environment and configuration that generated the code. Then anyone else can reproduce it.
The other thing that's needed is a means of verifying that the binary loaded onto the machine is the one generated from the code using the specified development environment. SHA512 (or whatever) hashes can help with this, as can digital signatures. The "can't transfer over the Internet" requirement is inane and seems to be there only because of ignorance about methods of verifying integrity, regardless of how the file gets transferred. Think they've ever heard of VPNs? Do they think there's a risk in using them?
I agree with a number of the goals of this bill. But it kind of depresses me what a dog's breakfast they have produced.
RUP is a development methodology. It says next to nothing about project managmenet.
The CMM is an assessment framework for technical competencies. As such it is not prescriptive.
The other two are good books that contain valuable anecdotes about project management. Neither is a methdology. I value Brooks far more highly, but that's just me.
Look at the Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) for something specific to project management. Brits seem to like PRINCE better.
As with any certification, neither PMI nor PRINCE can substitute for learning project management by managing projects. I've met a lot of PMI-certified nitwits. But having a common vocabulary and toolkit is still worthwhile.
2. I write open source code, and I have money. Not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but more than most people I know.
It seems that you're focused on the value of a single commodity rather than on the whole web of economically significant interactions that includes that commodity. And if you think that you can predict whether proprietary or free software will maximize the value of that larger web of interactions, you are delusional. My own guess is that it won't make all that much difference either way to the overall value created, but that free software will shift the benefits more to the consumers and away from the biggest producers. But unless you're a lot better economic modeler than anyone else out there, the best you can do at this stage is to guess.
He knew that unregulated markets will be captured by suppliers, for example. Most of his self-styled followers can't seem to get that point. Maybe they're too distracted waiting for the Invisible Handjob.
Well, he would, wouldn't he?
We had that with telecoms before deregulation. Remember the old joke ad "We don't care. We don't have to." That said a lot about the extremely expensive, piss-poor service delivered by the regulated telcos.
While I have little sympathy for corporations, whenever they get regulated, the regulations always end up benefiting the regulated corporation and screwing the consumer.
One of the main reasons that software and systems have improved so much is precisely because they haven't been regulated. Down the regulation road lies Trusted Computing, more iterations of the DMCA, and similar idiocy.
I travel a lot on business. I've learned a few things:
1. Most hotel rooms are architected the same.
2. Furniture and electrical fittings in almost all hotel rooms seems to come from the same small handful of suppliers.
3. Same goes for bed linens.
Since the US is so huge, this means that there are potentially hundreds or thousands of matches for any set of hotel-room pictures.
So yeah, it may narrow the search space a little, and in this case maybe it's evident that it was Disney, but in the general case you won't learn much unless there are some exterior shots in the photo series. Therefore such information should be treated as far from conclusive.
So: Linux TCO sucks because monopoly practices mean you're forced to buy Microsoft anyway.
If that's a correct summary, then he's urging acceptance of what is likely to be a highly volatile status quo. That seems simultaneously fatalistic and a bit silly.
The other thing to watch in TCO calculations is how cost tradeoffs are measured. If you're not tracking actual costs through the entire life cycle, the numbers are bullshit. And both training costs and estimates of improved or lost productivity are notoriously imprecise and sensitive to initial assumptions.
In fact, when I consult, I advise my clients to be wary of TCO calculations. The main reason is that the number that matters most to business is not TCO but return on investment (ROI). That's benefits minus costs. TCO comparisons assume equal benefits for the alternative approaches. But the goal of IT in a business is not just to reduce costs: if that were true, you could save a lot of money by ripping all your computers out. The goal is to maximize productivity. So ease of integration, stability of systems, ability to deploy new solutions in a controlled manner, all add to operational flexibility and are benefits. It's fallacious to look at IT solely as a cost center, and by allowing the debate to shift in that direction you're giving up a lot of winning arguments for Linux.
Based on what? Your wishful thinking?
Applying Occam's razor, it can be more plausibly asserted that the laws were nothing but a convenient pretext for the priests to oppress the people through superstition. Most of the rules show little but symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. They establish simplistic (and often demonstrably false) taxonomies and dichotomies and then attempt to enforce them whether they have a basis in fact or not. The underlying rule is often nothing more than "a place for everything and everything in its place." Those parts of nature that didn't fit into the arbitrary pigeonholes are assumed to be the work of Satan and therefore anathematized.
There is no reason to assume that, just because a primitive people believed in a load of tribal superstitions, that it follows that those beliefs had any survival value. If that were true, the same could be said for any other superstition that anyone once believed. That's flagrant nonsense unless you believe the Jews are somehow unique among all mankind. And if you really want to get Darwinian about it, consider that the Jews were unable to compete with the equally superstitious but more pragmatic Romans. So much for survival value.
To assert that all that idiocy was "for our own good" really presupposes the unvoiced explanation "it has to be that way because God said so." But in fact those laws were the works of profoundly ignorant and possibly ambitious, malevolent men.
Specifically, (1) Kosher laws have a ritual definition of cleanliness that has nothing to do with real sanitation. And it was lack of food that prevented obesity through most of history. Obesity just wasn't a problem back then. Unless you have hard evidence about disease rates among ancient Jews compared to other peoples in the same reason, you're talking out your ass.
(2) Clothing and houseware laws were ritually based and, again, unless you have some deep insights into the economies of the time, you cannot truthfully assert that they provided anything but a burden to the people who were subject to them.
(3) What is "the purity of the group"? Inbreeding? Sounds vaguely fascist to me. (4) The only point I'll grant you is that tribal mutilation and initiation rituals and taboos do contribute to group cohesion.
Directly contradicting your earlier assertion of survival value. And what "cultural confusion" are you referring to? I like cultural mixing and diversity. What's the alternative? "Racial purity"? The history of the previous century gives a number of reasons that you don't really want to go down that road. Well, yeah. Except maybe for the Arabs (who were preliterate but already a distinct culture), the Romans (all Europeans who speak Romance languages are their direct cultural descendants). Greeks. Germans. Armenians. Persians. Han Chinese. Celts. Many cultures in India, both north and south. To name a few billion.
Your presence there will help prop up the existing repressive regime.
Instead, stay here and work to ensure that our own government doesn't become that repressive, or worse. They're well on their way and it's going to take a lot of effort to stop them. Making a buck or having an interesting cultural experience in China just isn't as important.
I spent $10 on a bottle of wine. So should the headline read "Wine purchase costs banana growers $10"?
It's the same logic the RIAA and MPAA use, and it's fallacious.
It's not their money. It's not being taken from them. It's not costing them shit. It's just diverting money they think should be theirs to other, more worthwhile. uses. But there's no real evidence that it ever would have been spent on what they have to sell, rather than saved, or spent on any other thing in the world that can be bought.
These people's sense of entitlement to what they haven't earned is sickening. Bunch of corporate welfare scroungers. Next they'll go whining for the government to seize the money for them.
Here's an interpretation that's more legally and morally tenable: copyright gives you the right to distribute information for sale. The remedies for infringement are solely civil, and the copyright holder must prove damages. Nominal cost multiplied by number of downloads is not the formula: they must show how many of those downloads actually resulted in lost sales (demand when price is zero is always going to be higher than demand when the price s unreasonably high, so it's possible that no loss in sales really occurred).
And, in a further attempt to reduce the distortions caused by tendentious choice of language, let's call "infringement" what it really is: maximally discounted redistribution. And traditionally, copyright holders have had no say in distribution or resale; only in preventing others selling copies of their works for money.
The reality is that what we are seeing is a concerted attempt by Big Content corporations to massively extend a property right at the expense of the public good. This is nothing but a land grab, with legislation-for-hire to back it up. Anyone who supports it is either a dupe, a shill, or possibly someone who reads too much Ayn Rand.
But the economics of distribution don't change just because of screwed-up laws. We'll be damaging our society's competitiveness if we allow those bastards to put that straitjacket on us. The higher cost of information exchange will lead to even more ignorance and less shared culture. This will have disastrous consequences.
And it's bound to fail anyway since any society that defects from this regime will have a competitive advantage.
And I utterly loathe two categories of people:
1. Legacies.
2. Sellouts: those who work hard in high school, get excellent grades, then squander their achivevements by allowing themselves to be co-opted by the the old boys' network. These are the kind of people who grow up to be Condoleezza Rice. The elite are using your talent to reinforce their unfair access and preserve their unearned privilege. Instead they should be cut off entirely. As long as the elite can recruit new talent, they'll remain the elite. The correct response is to deny them access to the action entirely; otherwise they'll move in after you've done all the hard work and cash in on it once they've pushed you out. I've seen it happen in several firms I've been in.
Incidentally I have working class origins and was privately educated (though not at an Ivy institution). So I've seen the system work at first-hand. It is profoundly anti-democratic and corrupt. Harvard and its ilk should be nationalized and turned into museums, and their endowments used to fund scholarships for minorities and poor whites.
Legacies should be put into re-education camps.
Not that I have particularly strong views on this topic.