It was a hot summer's day in the Marsh of the Dead There was fog crawling over the swamp I could listen to the screams of the Dead Men Calling I could see their empty eyes and the candles blowing in the wind. You were licking your finger With the Ring of Power and I was dying just to ask for a taste We were dancing together up on the Crack of Doom And no-ones gonna know what we've done.
This article posits the observation that EQ works via operant conditioning and shaping to guide the user to spending ever increasing amounts of time in pursuit of steadily decreasing rewards.
1. The computer pond is shrinking, but that's because it's been overstocked for quite a while. The talented, smart, crafty, dedicated fish will always be in demand, the ones who are simply looking for a paycheck will be walking an unemployment line.
Although I agree with the sentiment that this is how things should work, I'm sad to say that jobs like this are the exception, not the rule.
Instead, what mostly seems to be happening is that the folks who were drawn to the profession solely for money, and who don't really like using or programming computers per-se, are using every devious brown-nosing trick in the book to muscle out their more talented co-workers who might make them look bad to the clueless PHB.
If you are solely focussed on 'doing good work' you're gonna get axed in the next round of layoffs, and someone else will take credit for your results.
I don't think that's the sort of 'crafty' you meant.
For some reason, the table doesn't list the license or price of any of the surveyed tools. Only one tool even has the phrase 'open-source' in it's 'Notes' column. One other says 'source available', and a third seems to be hosted on sourceforge.net. Should I simply assume that the rest of these tools are proprietary?
Given the fact that I am (on occasion) willing to part with my $$$ for software if necessary, I definitely would have liked to see pricing information included in this table, if only to rule out those tools which are out of my price-range.
From various articles and references on the net, it's clear that Google uses a mix of languages in developing and deploying it's services. Languages I've seen cited are Python, Java, and C++. I assume this is not a complete list.
What programming languages do Google developers use, for which tasks are they used, and why?
"The great irony, of course, is that Disney is also using the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group to make it illegal to develop open source digital video applications."
As this is an example of a feedback loop, rather than the sort of coordinated manipulation that a GoogleBomb is, I felt it deserved it's own term, so I decided to call it GoogleThrashing since this could at least potentially cause the Google Pagerank algorithm to thrash, depending on the extent and type of feedback involved.
BTW, another Python fault is not consolidating dictionaries and classes. A class is simply a dictionary of methods and attributes with an inheritance option thrown in. Other scripting languages have successfully consolidated these two concepts. Python blew the opportunity IMO. (Dictionaries are great as interface mechanisms, such as passing and storing dynamic parameters. However, as a data container, they suck IMO because they don't scale in complexity, as already described.)
Python 2.2 now unifies types and classes, allowing you to subclass the built in data types, including dictionaries.
That's very interesting. Could you provide further info on that law?
BTW, I'm hardly a Democratic booster, so i'm not sure why you're attacking whatever political leanings you seem to think I have. By no means do I think either party has a monopoly on corruption, stupidity, ignorance, or self-serving motivations.
The biggest problem that Nevadans (like myself) have with Yucca Mountain is that the whole 'site selection' process has been a sham from the beginning. No other location has ever been under consideration, and the DOE has simply ramrodded this up the state's collective backside.
I mean, they've been constructing the project for quite a while now, in anticipation of the eventual selection of the site, despite the citizen protests and the fact that ground water has been discovered there during construction.
Despite all their protests that "we haven't really made up our minds yet", the writing has been on the wall from day one. And this announcement is a despicable PR sham.
I think the best approach would be to lobby for a "safe harbor" for Free Software from attacks by software patent holders - something that I think would be acceptable because of the pro-bono nature of Free Software. If the proprietary software businesses want to mess themselves up with software patents, that's their problem - but software patents simply aren't compatible with Free Software and we need to become more assertive about that.
I think this means we need a real lobbying organization. This is not EFF, because EFF's agenda is digital rights in general, while we need to represent Free Software developers over other interests. I think it also needs to be more inclusive than FSF, although of course FSF should be involved.
While proprietary software businesses seem to be gung-ho on the subject of software patents, I think that an overwhelming majority of practitioners in the field (even those who work for proprietary software businesses) are not. Software patents are one of the ways in which proprietary software businesses assert ownership over the work of their employees, and the conflict there falls along classic 'labour vs. management' lines.
This leads me to the conclusion that a lobbying organization such as you describe should not focus on a 'safe harbour' for open-source/free-software developers, but should have a broader agenda of overturning the software-patents/business-method patents status quo in general, as they are harmful to our profession as a whole, not just those who develop free software. Such an organization would be able to find common cause with other organizations such as the ALA and ACM, free-software based businesses, service businesses such as ISPs, as well as an overwhelming number of developers (whoever their employer happens to be).
There's no question that core protocols and document formats have a far greater chance of being widely deployed and well-designed if they can be widely implemented, without payment of royalties. The question is whether that means that every spec W3C does has to be RF?
To a corporation with a patent, a non-core recomendation that then becomes (through the passage of time) a core 'standard' is the mother-lode of licensing fees, if the original recomendation was licensed RAND.
This is an obvious strategy for any entity that wishes to profit from the standard-making process, and does not require underhanded tactics such as 'submarine' patents. In fact, you could probably say that if a profit-making entity didn't believe that a field of endeavor could become part of the core infrastructure, they probably wouldn't be participating in the standards process for the reccomendation in the first place.
Given this, it seems to me that the W3C should not consider RAND licensing terms for recommedations that will (or potentially could) become core standards eventually. And if a reccomendation does not have that potential, why is the W3C enshrining it in a recomendation anyway?
Separation of content, logic, and presentation is very difficult to do in current web-app developments environments.
The breakdown is not on the logic/content side of the equation, or the presentation/content side, but mainly in the presentation/logic arena.
Imagine an HTML designer who has mocked up a page for a web-app, and hands it off to the dev team for them to add in the neccessary laogic to dynamically include the user-name, current balance, contents of the shopping cart, etc. Depending on the exact paragdigm taht their tools use, they will either:
a) Chop up the page and include various fragments in the programs that are designed to emit said fragments at the opportune times to be assembled into a text stream eventually recived by a browser
or b) Various bits of logic get stuck into the page in oder to parameterize and/or conditionalize it, using either some sort of speacial tagging format or actual inlined blocks of code.
Whichever approach the dev team's tools use, the result is the same: the designer can no longer change the altered page.
Even in case b), which maintains some semblance of a coherent 'page', the designer cannot load the page-with-logic into their favorite visual editor and see anything resembling the actual page. They certainly can't edit it to change the look-and-feel without breaking the carefully constructed logic.
The end result is that the designer has no recourse other than to take their page design, change it, and hand it over to the dev-team again for them to re-include (in some cases re-code) all of their logic.
This is obviously a very wasteful approach.
Amazingly, there actually is a solution to this problem. It's called Template Attribute Language (TAL), and it solves the problem by adding programming directives to the page via XHTML attributes on the existing tags. The language is deliberately designed to only be suitable for presentation logic, relegating business logic code to some other objects, where the designer can't see them. This helps enforce the appropriate distinction between presentation logic and business logic that most current development environments ignore, thus encouraging their admixture.
Currently, TAL (and the related specifications TALES and METAL) are only implemented in one environment, but the language has been deliberately designed to be as platform agnostic as possible. Other implementations of the specification are possible, and even desireable.
There is an alternative to reducing your pay rate, and that is to reduce the number of hours that you're working, and pro rate your salary.
This has several advantages; First, while it reduces the number of hours that you're working, your productivity will probably go up. Second, it provides a clear boundary condition for re-increasing salaries once the company has found it's footing, ie when your hours are brought back up. Third, it allows those employees who need the missing income to make it up through consulting work without increasing their workload to the point that the productivity in their main job suffers.
This is a much more equitable proposition, with a straightforward quid-pro-quo that balances the advantages and disadvantages for both the employer and employee.
The simplest way of implementing this is to either mandate three-day weekends (starting Friday), which is a 20% reduction in work hours, and a corresponding 20% reduction in salary, or a less drastic approach would be to let the individual employee choose a day of the week to make a half-day, which is a 10% reduction.
You can see that these all tracked each other fairly well up to December '99, when resumes/for-sale went off on their own, and apartments/housing stayed fairly even for a while.
Then, apartment availability started shooting up around August '00, kind of tracked resumes/for sale for a while, and then shot through resumes in February, picking up for-sale which has tracked it ever since.
I'll leave it as an excercize for the reader to correlate all this with external economic factors, but I think it's pretty clear that for a while people were selling stuff to make the rent while they were looking for work, and then between August and February people started selling stuff because they were leaving the area.
It seems that a checklist of warning signs is in order to help guard againt commercial entities acting in bad faith:
Does the company insist on copyright assignment of all contributed code?
Is the current codebase not available via anonymous CVS?
Are all of the key developers employees of a single company?
Does the company not state up front whether the code is available for commercial re-licensing?
Does the company not have a clear service-based business model?
Is the codebase in question the company's only form of intellectual property?
Are the company's developers participating in the public mailing lists and newsgroups, or is it just a 'community liason'?
Is this the first open source project this company has done?
Is this the first open source project the company's developers have done?
Does the project share its name with the company?
Is the company self hosting the project, or are they using Sourceforge?
I can't think of any more just now, feel free to add to the list.
I should also point out that I don't think that this company in particular exhibited all of these warning signs, nor are all of these signs necessarily bad (failure to request copyright assignment for contributed code could be considered a warning sign of inexperience, for example).
That really depends on your definition of 'success'.
They seem to be defining it as 'ICANN eventually becomes a legitimate quasi-governmental entity that is self perpetuating and has the power to direct the evolution of Internet infrastructure to it's own ends'.
I'd say they're well on their way to becoming 'successful'.
The reccomendation that the at-large membership be comprised of domain-name holders rather than the broader internet user population is setting up a conflict of interest.
Domain names are primarily valuable currently because they are a scarce resource. By creating an at-large membership comprised entirely of domain name holders, they are setting up an entrenched interest that will oppose the proliferation of gTLDs, as Karl Auerbach has been pushing for.
Clearly, they hope that this action will not lead to his re-election, but will place someone more 'reasonable' in his place.
This is just another tactic aimed at maintaining an artificial scarcity of domain names, and sharpening ICANN as a tool to manufacture and maintain this scarcity. ICANN is looking more like the diamond cartel every day.
I find it incredible that anyone is surprised that when complainants are give the choice of arbitrator, that they would choose arbitrators who have decided for the complainant more often.
Thus, there is a built-in incentive for arbitrators to decide for complainants rather than respondents.
Similarly, the US correctional system (which is run by for-profit corporations), has an incentive to make the situation worse rather than better, with the unfortunate result of these corporations funneling money to 'tough on crime' political candidates, and creating the 'war on some drugs' to incarcerate the perpetrators of victimless crimes.
These are examples of elementary positive feedback loops, and no-one should be surprised at the results.
Slashdot Mirror
And here is another long list of variations, including this one, as written by Meatloaf:
This article posits the observation that EQ works via operant conditioning and shaping to guide the user to spending ever increasing amounts of time in pursuit of steadily decreasing rewards.
Although I agree with the sentiment that this is how things should work, I'm sad to say that jobs like this are the exception, not the rule.
Instead, what mostly seems to be happening is that the folks who were drawn to the profession solely for money, and who don't really like using or programming computers per-se, are using every devious brown-nosing trick in the book to muscle out their more talented co-workers who might make them look bad to the clueless PHB.
If you are solely focussed on 'doing good work' you're gonna get axed in the next round of layoffs, and someone else will take credit for your results.
I don't think that's the sort of 'crafty' you meant.
For some reason, the table doesn't list the license or price of any of the surveyed tools. Only one tool even has the phrase 'open-source' in it's 'Notes' column. One other says 'source available', and a third seems to be hosted on sourceforge.net. Should I simply assume that the rest of these tools are proprietary?
Given the fact that I am (on occasion) willing to part with my $$$ for software if necessary, I definitely would have liked to see pricing information included in this table, if only to rule out those tools which are out of my price-range.
Thankfully, there is the Association of Science-fiction and Fantasy Artists which gives an annual award (The Chesley Award).
The Chesley awards are presented each year at the World Science Fiction Convention, which this year (later this month, in fact) is in San Jose.
The convention has an extensive art show, with many artists exhibiting their work.
There is even a 'real-world' gallery devoted to space art.
So, although the 'serious' art world looks down on this type of art, there are venues, and a market, for this work.
You can also buy limited editions of some of his work.
George Turner has a particular bent for dystopic stories. The most depressing thing about them is how plausible they are.
Brain Child
The Destiny Makers
Down There in the Darkness
The Drowning Towers
From various articles and references on the net, it's clear that Google uses a mix of languages in developing and deploying it's services. Languages I've seen cited are Python, Java, and C++. I assume this is not a complete list.
What programming languages do Google developers use, for which tasks are they used, and why?
As this is an example of a feedback loop, rather than the sort of coordinated manipulation that a GoogleBomb is, I felt it deserved it's own term, so I decided to call it GoogleThrashing since this could at least potentially cause the Google Pagerank algorithm to thrash, depending on the extent and type of feedback involved.
:-)
Besides, it sounds cool
I posted a short description of GoogleThrashing to my weblog and also posted it to the Google API discussion group.
Python 2.2 now unifies types and classes, allowing you to subclass the built in data types, including dictionaries.
That's very interesting. Could you provide further info on that law?
BTW, I'm hardly a Democratic booster, so i'm not sure why you're attacking whatever political leanings you seem to think I have. By no means do I think either party has a monopoly on corruption, stupidity, ignorance, or self-serving motivations.
The biggest problem that Nevadans (like myself) have with Yucca Mountain is that the whole 'site selection' process has been a sham from the beginning. No other location has ever been under consideration, and the DOE has simply ramrodded this up the state's collective backside.
I mean, they've been constructing the project for quite a while now, in anticipation of the eventual selection of the site, despite the citizen protests and the fact that ground water has been discovered there during construction.
Despite all their protests that "we haven't really made up our minds yet", the writing has been on the wall from day one. And this announcement is a despicable PR sham.
... On Usenet on November 4th, 1997.
...one of the intelligent books from Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks?
While proprietary software businesses seem to be gung-ho on the subject of software patents, I think that an overwhelming majority of practitioners in the field (even those who work for proprietary software businesses) are not. Software patents are one of the ways in which proprietary software businesses assert ownership over the work of their employees, and the conflict there falls along classic 'labour vs. management' lines.
This leads me to the conclusion that a lobbying organization such as you describe should not focus on a 'safe harbour' for open-source/free-software developers, but should have a broader agenda of overturning the software-patents/business-method patents status quo in general, as they are harmful to our profession as a whole, not just those who develop free software. Such an organization would be able to find common cause with other organizations such as the ALA and ACM, free-software based businesses, service businesses such as ISPs, as well as an overwhelming number of developers (whoever their employer happens to be).
This is an obvious strategy for any entity that wishes to profit from the standard-making process, and does not require underhanded tactics such as 'submarine' patents. In fact, you could probably say that if a profit-making entity didn't believe that a field of endeavor could become part of the core infrastructure, they probably wouldn't be participating in the standards process for the reccomendation in the first place.
Given this, it seems to me that the W3C should not consider RAND licensing terms for recommedations that will (or potentially could) become core standards eventually. And if a reccomendation does not have that potential, why is the W3C enshrining it in a recomendation anyway?
Separation of content, logic, and presentation is very difficult to do in current web-app developments environments.
The breakdown is not on the logic/content side of the equation, or the presentation/content side, but mainly in the presentation/logic arena.
Imagine an HTML designer who has mocked up a page for a web-app, and hands it off to the dev team for them to add in the neccessary laogic to dynamically include the user-name, current balance, contents of the shopping cart, etc. Depending on the exact paragdigm taht their tools use, they will either:
a) Chop up the page and include various fragments in the programs that are designed to emit said fragments at the opportune times to be assembled into a text stream eventually recived by a browser
or b) Various bits of logic get stuck into the page in oder to parameterize and/or conditionalize it, using either some sort of speacial tagging format or actual inlined blocks of code.
Whichever approach the dev team's tools use, the result is the same: the designer can no longer change the altered page.
Even in case b), which maintains some semblance of a coherent 'page', the designer cannot load the page-with-logic into their favorite visual editor and see anything resembling the actual page. They certainly can't edit it to change the look-and-feel without breaking the carefully constructed logic.
The end result is that the designer has no recourse other than to take their page design, change it, and hand it over to the dev-team again for them to re-include (in some cases re-code) all of their logic.
This is obviously a very wasteful approach.
Amazingly, there actually is a solution to this problem. It's called Template Attribute Language (TAL), and it solves the problem by adding programming directives to the page via XHTML attributes on the existing tags. The language is deliberately designed to only be suitable for presentation logic, relegating business logic code to some other objects, where the designer can't see them. This helps enforce the appropriate distinction between presentation logic and business logic that most current development environments ignore, thus encouraging their admixture.
Currently, TAL (and the related specifications TALES and METAL) are only implemented in one environment, but the language has been deliberately designed to be as platform agnostic as possible. Other implementations of the specification are possible, and even desireable.
Articles:
Zope Page Templates: Getting Started
Zope Page Templates: Advanced Usage
Using Zope with Amaya, Dreamweaver, and other WYSIWYG Tools
There is an alternative to reducing your pay rate, and that is to reduce the number of hours that you're working, and pro rate your salary.
This has several advantages; First, while it reduces the number of hours that you're working, your productivity will probably go up. Second, it provides a clear boundary condition for re-increasing salaries once the company has found it's footing, ie when your hours are brought back up. Third, it allows those employees who need the missing income to make it up through consulting work without increasing their workload to the point that the productivity in their main job suffers.
This is a much more equitable proposition, with a straightforward quid-pro-quo that balances the advantages and disadvantages for both the employer and employee.
The simplest way of implementing this is to either mandate three-day weekends (starting Friday), which is a 20% reduction in work hours, and a corresponding 20% reduction in salary, or a less drastic approach would be to let the individual employee choose a day of the week to make a half-day, which is a 10% reduction.
%0K you cite a source for this information?
- March '98 to August '01
- apartments avaliable
- housing wanted
- resumes
- for sale
You can see that these all tracked each other fairly well up to December '99, when resumes/for-sale went off on their own, and apartments/housing stayed fairly even for a while.Then, apartment availability started shooting up around August '00, kind of tracked resumes/for sale for a while, and then shot through resumes in February, picking up for-sale which has tracked it ever since.
I'll leave it as an excercize for the reader to correlate all this with external economic factors, but I think it's pretty clear that for a while people were selling stuff to make the rent while they were looking for work, and then between August and February people started selling stuff because they were leaving the area.
It seems that a checklist of warning signs is in order to help guard againt commercial entities acting in bad faith:
- Does the company insist on copyright assignment of all contributed code?
- Is the current codebase not available via anonymous CVS?
- Are all of the key developers employees of a single company?
- Does the company not state up front whether the code is available for commercial re-licensing?
- Does the company not have a clear service-based business model?
- Is the codebase in question the company's only form of intellectual property?
- Are the company's developers participating in the public mailing lists and newsgroups, or is it just a 'community liason'?
- Is this the first open source project this company has done?
- Is this the first open source project the company's developers have done?
- Does the project share its name with the company?
- Is the company self hosting the project, or are they using Sourceforge?
I can't think of any more just now, feel free to add to the list.I should also point out that I don't think that this company in particular exhibited all of these warning signs, nor are all of these signs necessarily bad (failure to request copyright assignment for contributed code could be considered a warning sign of inexperience, for example).
That really depends on your definition of 'success'.
They seem to be defining it as 'ICANN eventually becomes a legitimate quasi-governmental entity that is self perpetuating and has the power to direct the evolution of Internet infrastructure to it's own ends'.
I'd say they're well on their way to becoming 'successful'.
The reccomendation that the at-large membership be comprised of domain-name holders rather than the broader internet user population is setting up a conflict of interest.
Domain names are primarily valuable currently because they are a scarce resource. By creating an at-large membership comprised entirely of domain name holders, they are setting up an entrenched interest that will oppose the proliferation of gTLDs, as Karl Auerbach has been pushing for.
Clearly, they hope that this action will not lead to his re-election, but will place someone more 'reasonable' in his place.
This is just another tactic aimed at maintaining an artificial scarcity of domain names, and sharpening ICANN as a tool to manufacture and maintain this scarcity. ICANN is looking more like the diamond cartel every day.
For the record, I currently own 35 domain names.
I find it incredible that anyone is surprised that when complainants are give the choice of arbitrator, that they would choose arbitrators who have decided for the complainant more often.
Thus, there is a built-in incentive for arbitrators to decide for complainants rather than respondents.
Similarly, the US correctional system (which is run by for-profit corporations), has an incentive to make the situation worse rather than better, with the unfortunate result of these corporations funneling money to 'tough on crime' political candidates, and creating the 'war on some drugs' to incarcerate the perpetrators of victimless crimes.
These are examples of elementary positive feedback loops, and no-one should be surprised at the results.