I find the idea of having lots of decentralized editors, each responsible for one small area, very appealing. The opportunity for distortion or bias is confined to each editor's individual subject.
It reminds me of Bucky Fuller's
Dymaxion World Map, which divides the earth into lots of triangles, then localizes map distortion into each triangle. The net result is that overall, the map is very accurate. In contrast, the Mercator Projection localizes all its error at the edge, so Greenland looks larger than North America.
In the same way, having lots of subject editors instead of one company doing the editing should in theory localize the bias to individual subjects. Chances are better that the Open Directory as a whole will be less biased.
I thought the most important quote of the piece was:
"If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain."
Ballmer is right to make the distinction between "free" software in the RMS sense, and public domain software which is free for anyone to use in any way, including embedding in a commercial product. While Free Software attempts to protect its creators by requiring that it only be used in other Free Software, public domain works are those whose intellectual property claims have expired and whose use is therefore unregulated.
Perhaps Free Software licenses should contain a time expiration like a patent or copyright, after which time they would become public domain works.
My favorite quote from the article was when he talked about squandering people's trust:
"On the Internet, even more than in other areas of our lives, trust is the real currency. Squander what you have and you'll find out how hard it can be to get more."
Just as a lot of venture capital was thrown at Internet companies, the community has similarly thrown a lot of trust at sites on the Internet. And just as VC is in short supply right now, I think there's been a contraction in trust level. Screw this up, and you'll find it hard to get people to trust you again.
In the second paragraph of the article, the author says:
"Schools depend on technology to transport their teachings to their students, as well as prepare these kids for survival in a high tech world."
This is the classical view of school as a factory, turning out one-size-fits-all students with identical "teachings". The computer's contribution is not in this area.
What is important about having computers around is that it promotes a different kind of learning than the traditional "Three R's". It promotes curiosity and exploration, because each web page links to others ad infinitum. It promotes creativity, because it makes the grunt work easier so the student can focus on the problem being solved. (This is true even if no special educational programs are present, just basics like word processor and spreadsheet). And it promotes interaction, via e-mail, chat and "design your own web page" sites.
These are not traits that the traditional educational establishment was designed to promote. Rather than a docile, compliant student who would be perfect as a docile, compliant factory worker, these traits create troublemakers: people who think for themselves and are assertive in communicating those thoughts to others.
It's user apathy that makes spam an acceptable risk for the spammers.
In high school I did an Earth Day project collecting paper junk mail. The thought was to collect barrels of it, and dump it on my legislator's desk to protest the preferential rates that bulk mailers get. Over four weeks of collecting, I only got a small bagful. Nobody cared.
I think it's the same way about spam. We all say we hate it, but it's just one of those annoyances that the average Joe doesn't care enough about to take action.
The OS/OF attack is more than "don't use this software because IP made this nation great and we want to own the IP on our software"
It's not IP that made this country great, it was the creative tension between IP and fair use. On one hand, IP enables artists to profit from their work, encouraging them to create. On the other hand, fair use gives other artists source material to create with. It's a synergistic relationship. It also creates a mass market for their works, because a certain amount of sharing can be seen as promoting the popularity of the work.
This was a dynamic balance that depended on scarcity: fair use couldn't be too extreme because it was hard to copy entire works, and IP was limited to the artist's lifetime (or thereabouts). But now, the IP side of the equation has become unbalanced due to the unlimited lifetime of corporations, and the fair use side has become unbalanced due to digital technologies that make copying easy.
I don't condone theft of IP, but something has to be done to address -- explicitly -- BOTH sides of the equation. If only one side predominates, the process of creating new art will be hindered.
Excellent point: computers have always been excellent filing cabinets. It's people who have trouble with this stuff.
What about Oracle's
Internet File System (iFS)? At the O/S level, you'd just configure a bunch of multi-GB database files. Then all the file objects would be stored in the database, with full search capabilities there.
I think it's probably only the professionals being given breaks like this. The average support worker -- secretaries, maintenance, accountants, etc -- will probably never see them. Reason? Intel is trying to protect its "talent pool" for the future, and the market considers these kinds of workers a commodity, not "talent".
I think to some extent that we in IT have been very, very spoiled. The economics and difficulty of computing have created a window of time in which our eccentricites were tolerated because the task was so difficult and we were in such short supply.
However, markets tend to correct themselves. They route around high costs the same way the Internet routes around net damage. I see a couple of trends converging, and the IT worker is unfortunately right at Ground Zero:
Smarter software. Application packages like SAP and Baan that were historically labor intensive to implement are coming out in newer, friendlier, "fast track" implementations. The most recent releases of both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases have as a design goal reducing DBA effort.
The shift to Application Service Providers and services on the web (Microsoft's.NET for example) means that there will be fewer, higher paid deep specialists working for megacorps and a lot of us generalists on the streets.
Globalization. I'm not competing with Chicago and New York any more, but with Singapore and Bangalore. It's just as easy to cut code and FTP it around the world as it is across town.
So on the one hand, the task is getting easier and becoming centralized so demand is going down. At the same time, supply is dramatically going up. It doesn't take a Milton Friedman to see the equations on the wall.
Email = wasted time is old paradigm
on
Buried in email?
·
· Score: 2
I always cringe a little when I hear a client (usually male) say that he won't give users email at the desktop because "it will waste too much time." Usually, these are older business owners/managers who are operating from a time-clock paradigm of what it means to "work." These are the same people who complain if someone talks to coworkers at the water cooler.
More and more, businesses are realizing the importance of the informal networks within a company (as opposed to the formal org chart.) As stated in The Cluetrain Manifesto, business is conversation, both within the company and between company and its customers. Email is the killer app for the Internet because it facilitates these conversations. Just as in real life, not all conversations are especially useful. But that's okay. You get clues about who people are and how they like to communicate, even if the substance of the message isn't on target.
I'll grant that anything can be abused, including time at the water cooler. Some email netiquette would go a long way to reducing the problem. But having said that, I think that on balance, letting people be people and communicate like people may seem to be wasting time, but it's not really. It's building a community.
Oracle is making a major push into its applications, transferring them to the Net as ASP services in an attempt to beat.Net to the punch. (See this link for background info.) If Oracle is successful, I can see them reaching the point at which they could consider the RDBMS a candidate for open source.
This is particularly likely if they decide to re-engineer the product's kernel to be more object-oriented. Oracle's attempts at adding object features to its database started at 7.3 with user defined data types, got a huge boost at version 8.0 with user-defined object types, and another kick forward in 8i (8.1) with the internal Java engine. But it's all just grafted onto a relational kernel that hasn't changed significantly since version 7. (The rumor is that Oracle's developers are afraid to touch it for fear of breaking something, so all new features are bolted on using PL/SQL packages.)
So, let's say they rewrite the kernel from the ground up and give it a new name. It becomes the flagship product, and that clears the way for Oracle to release the older source code to whomever wants it. They'd be making most of their money on subscriptions to their online apps anyway.
I found it interesting that this article is posted at O'Reilly & Associates web site. O'Reilly is making a big noise about peer-to-peer applications, of which SETI@Home is one of their primary examples (even though it seems more like client/server than P2P to me.)
As far as spending money on SETI rather than feeding the hungry, etc., my take on it is that SETI research, like NASA, is notable not for what it is itself but for what spins off from it.
In this very litigation-prone society, businesses are being advised to purge email as soon as feasible and to not keep many generations of backup. One of the first things a law firm does in a major suit is "discovery," where they demand copies of all your relevant records including email.
The effect of this upon history is obvious. Originally, historians thought that the digital age would be great for doing history, because so much source material would be available. The growth in data warehouses and similar archives indicates that it's human nature not to throw anything away. (That, and my garage!) But now, to prevent the risk of exposure during email discovery, there won't be anything left.
Did anyone else notice the incentives program they were offering to users? Based on the number of packets processed, you get brownie points toward prizes and drawings.
I'll bet that as altruistic as curing cancer sounds, many of those signing up will be doing so for the same reason they use Iwon.com as a search engine/home page.:-)
This reminds me of my favorite scene in Blade Runner -- Harrison Ford is talking to a little old Chinese woman in Chinatown, who just happens to be operating a scanning electron microscope. So instead of the Playstation IX, will we all have hot biotech gear in our garages?
The whole discussion of which hardware and operating systems and applications to install in schools pretty much misses the point, IMHO. The main issue is, what tools will best facilitate learning?
Linux may be open-source and therefore a wonderful education in computer science. But most classes are not about computer science. They're about math, language, history, art, science, etc.
Windows may be the current commercial standard for office software, but again, most classes are not about keyboarding, word processing, and other office skills.
Macintosh may be offered at deep discounts to schools, but that too is a lousy reason to choose a platform.
All that's required of a computer platform in a school is that it supports the educational objectives of the students and their teachers. At best, it should be flexible and configurable to demonstrate / simulate the lessons being taught. At worst, it should at least not get in the way (like both Linux and Windows all too often do.)
It's time to stop teaching kids ABOUT computers and start using them as mind-extending tools to learn about everything else.
See the Contract Employee's Handbook,
here, for a great discussion of the relationship between bill rate and pay rate, as well as how to tell fair agencies from those with fewer scruples.
It seems to me that refusing a training class is not an option. It would be a sure tipoff to the employer that you were looking -- and you might find yourself out of a job before lining up a new one. Not good.
As a recovering chataholic (uninstalled ICQ 19 months ago) I had to adopt the rule: would I do this if my wife was in the room? Online friends, sure. Cyber, no way.
Forget where I read it, but one consulting firm does deals where they take a lower hourly fee, but get a percent of the demonstrated Return On Investment (ROI) of the solution they come up with. Because their success is tied to the client's success, there is less motivation to pad hours or recommend non-optimal solutions. The quote I read was something to the effect that current consulting practices reward consultants for making mistakes, because it then requires more hours (billable of course) to get back on track. With an equity participation deal, such mistakes hurt the consultant instead of rewarding them.
Another approach is to become a statutory employee of a company who does your tax withholding and lets you participate in pre-tax benefit plans. You would get a W-2 at the end of the year instead of a 1099 form. One example of this is the Professional Association of Contract Employees. They still let you call the shots regarding assignments, work hours, etc. but just do the paperwork for you, at a fee of course.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I think what we need is the equivalent of a credit union for fringe benefits -- a member-owned organization independent of the employer, who offers a cafeteria plan of benefits. The employer just pays for them, it doesn't provide them. Both full-time employees and independents could benefit from a model like this. I posted a concept paper at http://www.flexiblebenefits.org if anyone's interested in the idea. (Yes, I know, the website itself sucks. Just read the paper, okay?;-)
I've had much the same thought about the "methodologies" I've been exposed to. They try to do it all and wind up being very expensive to follow. Maybe we need the project management equivalent of an LDAP -- X.500 tried to do it all regarding directory services, and wound up being difficult (impossible?) to fully implement. Along comes LDAP as X.500 Lite and it becomes widely adopted.
I think that Microsoft's current fascination with methodologies (i.e., their Enterprise Services Framework, that's so big it has three (!) sub-frameworks within it) might be useful for Boeing. But small companies could really use a lite version.
Slashdot Mirror
It reminds me of Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion World Map, which divides the earth into lots of triangles, then localizes map distortion into each triangle. The net result is that overall, the map is very accurate. In contrast, the Mercator Projection localizes all its error at the edge, so Greenland looks larger than North America.
In the same way, having lots of subject editors instead of one company doing the editing should in theory localize the bias to individual subjects. Chances are better that the Open Directory as a whole will be less biased.
Ballmer is right to make the distinction between "free" software in the RMS sense, and public domain software which is free for anyone to use in any way, including embedding in a commercial product. While Free Software attempts to protect its creators by requiring that it only be used in other Free Software, public domain works are those whose intellectual property claims have expired and whose use is therefore unregulated.
Perhaps Free Software licenses should contain a time expiration like a patent or copyright, after which time they would become public domain works.
This is the classical view of school as a factory, turning out one-size-fits-all students with identical "teachings". The computer's contribution is not in this area.
What is important about having computers around is that it promotes a different kind of learning than the traditional "Three R's". It promotes curiosity and exploration, because each web page links to others ad infinitum. It promotes creativity, because it makes the grunt work easier so the student can focus on the problem being solved. (This is true even if no special educational programs are present, just basics like word processor and spreadsheet). And it promotes interaction, via e-mail, chat and "design your own web page" sites.
These are not traits that the traditional educational establishment was designed to promote. Rather than a docile, compliant student who would be perfect as a docile, compliant factory worker, these traits create troublemakers: people who think for themselves and are assertive in communicating those thoughts to others.
In high school I did an Earth Day project collecting paper junk mail. The thought was to collect barrels of it, and dump it on my legislator's desk to protest the preferential rates that bulk mailers get. Over four weeks of collecting, I only got a small bagful. Nobody cared.
I think it's the same way about spam. We all say we hate it, but it's just one of those annoyances that the average Joe doesn't care enough about to take action.
It's not IP that made this country great, it was the creative tension between IP and fair use. On one hand, IP enables artists to profit from their work, encouraging them to create. On the other hand, fair use gives other artists source material to create with. It's a synergistic relationship. It also creates a mass market for their works, because a certain amount of sharing can be seen as promoting the popularity of the work.
This was a dynamic balance that depended on scarcity: fair use couldn't be too extreme because it was hard to copy entire works, and IP was limited to the artist's lifetime (or thereabouts). But now, the IP side of the equation has become unbalanced due to the unlimited lifetime of corporations, and the fair use side has become unbalanced due to digital technologies that make copying easy.
I don't condone theft of IP, but something has to be done to address -- explicitly -- BOTH sides of the equation. If only one side predominates, the process of creating new art will be hindered.
What about Oracle's Internet File System (iFS)? At the O/S level, you'd just configure a bunch of multi-GB database files. Then all the file objects would be stored in the database, with full search capabilities there.
I think it's probably only the professionals being given breaks like this. The average support worker -- secretaries, maintenance, accountants, etc -- will probably never see them. Reason? Intel is trying to protect its "talent pool" for the future, and the market considers these kinds of workers a commodity, not "talent".
However, markets tend to correct themselves. They route around high costs the same way the Internet routes around net damage. I see a couple of trends converging, and the IT worker is unfortunately right at Ground Zero:
- Smarter software. Application packages like SAP and Baan that were historically labor intensive to implement are coming out in newer, friendlier, "fast track" implementations. The most recent releases of both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases have as a design goal reducing DBA effort.
- The shift to Application Service Providers and services on the web (Microsoft's
.NET for example) means that there will be fewer, higher paid deep specialists working for megacorps and a lot of us generalists on the streets.
- Globalization. I'm not competing with Chicago and New York any more, but with Singapore and Bangalore. It's just as easy to cut code and FTP it around the world as it is across town.
So on the one hand, the task is getting easier and becoming centralized so demand is going down. At the same time, supply is dramatically going up. It doesn't take a Milton Friedman to see the equations on the wall.More and more, businesses are realizing the importance of the informal networks within a company (as opposed to the formal org chart.) As stated in The Cluetrain Manifesto, business is conversation, both within the company and between company and its customers. Email is the killer app for the Internet because it facilitates these conversations. Just as in real life, not all conversations are especially useful. But that's okay. You get clues about who people are and how they like to communicate, even if the substance of the message isn't on target.
I'll grant that anything can be abused, including time at the water cooler. Some email netiquette would go a long way to reducing the problem. But having said that, I think that on balance, letting people be people and communicate like people may seem to be wasting time, but it's not really. It's building a community.
This is particularly likely if they decide to re-engineer the product's kernel to be more object-oriented. Oracle's attempts at adding object features to its database started at 7.3 with user defined data types, got a huge boost at version 8.0 with user-defined object types, and another kick forward in 8i (8.1) with the internal Java engine. But it's all just grafted onto a relational kernel that hasn't changed significantly since version 7. (The rumor is that Oracle's developers are afraid to touch it for fear of breaking something, so all new features are bolted on using PL/SQL packages.)
So, let's say they rewrite the kernel from the ground up and give it a new name. It becomes the flagship product, and that clears the way for Oracle to release the older source code to whomever wants it. They'd be making most of their money on subscriptions to their online apps anyway.
I found it interesting that this article is posted at O'Reilly & Associates web site. O'Reilly is making a big noise about peer-to-peer applications, of which SETI@Home is one of their primary examples (even though it seems more like client/server than P2P to me.) As far as spending money on SETI rather than feeding the hungry, etc., my take on it is that SETI research, like NASA, is notable not for what it is itself but for what spins off from it.
The effect of this upon history is obvious. Originally, historians thought that the digital age would be great for doing history, because so much source material would be available. The growth in data warehouses and similar archives indicates that it's human nature not to throw anything away. (That, and my garage!) But now, to prevent the risk of exposure during email discovery, there won't be anything left.
What a shame.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." -- Alan Kay
I'll bet that as altruistic as curing cancer sounds, many of those signing up will be doing so for the same reason they use Iwon.com as a search engine/home page. :-)
This reminds me of my favorite scene in Blade Runner -- Harrison Ford is talking to a little old Chinese woman in Chinatown, who just happens to be operating a scanning electron microscope. So instead of the Playstation IX, will we all have hot biotech gear in our garages?
Linux may be open-source and therefore a wonderful education in computer science. But most classes are not about computer science. They're about math, language, history, art, science, etc.
Windows may be the current commercial standard for office software, but again, most classes are not about keyboarding, word processing, and other office skills.
Macintosh may be offered at deep discounts to schools, but that too is a lousy reason to choose a platform.
All that's required of a computer platform in a school is that it supports the educational objectives of the students and their teachers. At best, it should be flexible and configurable to demonstrate / simulate the lessons being taught. At worst, it should at least not get in the way (like both Linux and Windows all too often do.)
It's time to stop teaching kids ABOUT computers and start using them as mind-extending tools to learn about everything else.
See the Contract Employee's Handbook, here, for a great discussion of the relationship between bill rate and pay rate, as well as how to tell fair agencies from those with fewer scruples.
It seems to me that refusing a training class is not an option. It would be a sure tipoff to the employer that you were looking -- and you might find yourself out of a job before lining up a new one. Not good.
As a recovering chataholic (uninstalled ICQ 19 months ago) I had to adopt the rule: would I do this if my wife was in the room? Online friends, sure. Cyber, no way.
Forget where I read it, but one consulting firm does deals where they take a lower hourly fee, but get a percent of the demonstrated Return On Investment (ROI) of the solution they come up with. Because their success is tied to the client's success, there is less motivation to pad hours or recommend non-optimal solutions. The quote I read was something to the effect that current consulting practices reward consultants for making mistakes, because it then requires more hours (billable of course) to get back on track. With an equity participation deal, such mistakes hurt the consultant instead of rewarding them.
Another approach is to become a statutory employee of a company who does your tax withholding and lets you participate in pre-tax benefit plans. You would get a W-2 at the end of the year instead of a 1099 form. One example of this is the Professional Association of Contract Employees. They still let you call the shots regarding assignments, work hours, etc. but just do the paperwork for you, at a fee of course.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I think what we need is the equivalent of a credit union for fringe benefits -- a member-owned organization independent of the employer, who offers a cafeteria plan of benefits. The employer just pays for them, it doesn't provide them. Both full-time employees and independents could benefit from a model like this. I posted a concept paper at http://www.flexiblebenefits.org if anyone's interested in the idea. (Yes, I know, the website itself sucks. Just read the paper, okay? ;-)
I've had much the same thought about the "methodologies" I've been exposed to. They try to do it all and wind up being very expensive to follow. Maybe we need the project management equivalent of an LDAP -- X.500 tried to do it all regarding directory services, and wound up being difficult (impossible?) to fully implement. Along comes LDAP as X.500 Lite and it becomes widely adopted. I think that Microsoft's current fascination with methodologies (i.e., their Enterprise Services Framework, that's so big it has three (!) sub-frameworks within it) might be useful for Boeing. But small companies could really use a lite version.