I remember an interview I went on, for a Perl job. I passed the first interview with flying colors; talked about my programming philosophy with a programmer, got along great, got a second interview. Passed the second interview with a hiring manager. Then, was asked into a back room by the alpha geek of the organization, who hit me blindside with three bizarre perl questions (debugging problems? I don't know what else to call them). Each was totally bizarre, not even remotely connected to normal practice, and was the sort of thing you'd write a little driver program to check out anyway if you came up against it. For example, one had something to do with an arcane scoping issue, with a variable of the same name changing scope like, three times. Flabbergasted and freaked out, I failed his three "tests", and he smugly smiled at me and showed me out.
The only thing this proved was that the guy was a complete jackass. I mean, for example, who uses the same variable name in three different scopes that way? You'd have to be retarded. The questions were nonsensical. If he'd given me something normal to work on, I'd have been fine, and I'd have hired. For the record, I ended up working somewhere else, and built an application used throughout the organization among many other things, improving many of their internal systems and in general making myself very useful (not meaning to bang my own drum).
I guess my point is, if you subconsciously want to prove someone incompetent, you won't find it too hard to completely frustrate and annoy them, and "disqualify" them from consideration. A better approach is to try and see what they come up with in response to a real problem, without trying to catch them with brain teasers and such. I'm not saying that's what you did, mind you, but I've got experience with it and believe me, it isn't much fun to be on the receiving end. Especially when, if you're like most tech types, interviews freak you out anyway. crazyphilman@programmer.net
It IS a cool movie; I loved it, and so did my mom, who I took to see it (go ahead, guys, laugh all you want, I like taking my mom to movies, so there, nyah, nyah).
Is it dark, a little cold emotionally, and relatively nonviolent for a space-oriented movie? Sure. Of course. It's not meant to be a traditional shooter, no more than any of the Final Fantasy games were traditional first person shooters. Katz missed the whole point of this movie, which was deep and interesting with a flavor like anime. I won't ruin the plot, but the two main themes of this movie seem to be the importance of compassion and the value of studying a problem rather than jumping to conclusions and running off half cocked, gun in hand.
I won't say the movie doesn't have problems; some of its underlying mythology could have been posited in more detail, but then you could say that about a lot of anime. And, the technology isn't perfect yet -- obviously, this is an early, although very well done step towards a magnificent art form. But, I don't think any of the film's negatives are all that significant in light of the positive aspects of it, the technical skill with which it was put together and the interesting ideas in the story. Overall, this was a great flick.
To katz, I say this: Jesus, dude, chill out. Judge the movie fairly, on its merits. View the movie with the assumption that the technology is young, and give it some slack. They did a hell of a good job.
What a nasty post. It reminds me of when I lived in Arizona, and people on Sunset Boulevard I was walking with, on finding out where I lived, started calling me a "fucking Zonie" with no provocation. You Californians just hate everyone else, don't you? And, you blame all your problems on outsiders, instead of looking inward and solving them.
I'd like to make a point or two.
First of all, California has always been a place of hellacious traffic, all the way back to the twenties and thirties. LA was throttled with city-clogging traffic back in the twenties, for instance, and built the highway system in lieu of a train-based transit system to take the pressure off. It was reasoned that a distributed city would have less traffic. This worked for only a few years, and the traffic ended up being clogged all over the city anyway. I remember being stuck in LA traffic back when I was in the Marines. I thought I'd never get out. And, I'm originally from the NYC area, ok? LA traffic puts the cross-Bronx expressway to shame in terms of sheer buildup.
Second of all, you've got all your power blackouts not because Midwesterners came to live with you, but because your brain-dead state government deregulated power. Now, wholesale prices are skyrocketing and you want consumer price-caps, which results in bankrupt utilities. Hey, I live in New York, and I understand the issue. What's your excuse? Don't you read the papers?
Quit whining about outsiders coming in. Look back along your family tree and I bet you dig up some Spanish explorers (giving you a lot of credit there) dust-bowl okies, or maybe some gold-rushers, all of whom who are no different than the dot-commers you hate. Get used to the idea that unless you're a native american, you're not native to California, period.
Don't be such a snob! I mean, really! crazyphilman@programmer.net
I've read lots of your articles and you're generally on the ball; also I liked your book immensely. However, here I think you're worried about something that's really mostly irrelevant: the mass commercialization of the net. Here's why:
1. The interest of these media conglomerates in putting up massive content sites doesn't really hurt anyone at all. The reason the magazines failed is the same as the reason most dot-coms failed: lack of revenue. The magazines you mention (which are going out of business because they can't make enough profit to stay afloat) tried to follow a traditional model in publishing on the web. They hired staff, they rented offices, they incurred huge costs, and thus depended on huge revenues. This was a mistake! Without some kind of profit coming into a company, via an actual product line (e.g. print magazines, books, etc) this sort of business is entirely unsustainable! The collapse of the dot-com world should make this utterly clear. They failed not because they were in competition with the giants, but because they never had a means to make sufficient profit in the first place.
2. The media conglomerates aren't interested in shutting anyone up, except for the occasional person who gets annoyed and more or less spits in their eye (thus getting a call from the lawyers, etc). What they want to do is get everyone on a broadband connection so they can serve TV over the web, because that's how they think. This makes them A) harmless, and B) extremely useful. No other force is going to bring broadband to the American consumer, mark my words. No other entity cares. So, let AOL put webified tv shows online! Who cares? Some of it might even be good. It won't push anyone else offline -- in fact, it'll speed up everyone's connection, and make it that much easier for them to express their own opinions.
3. Although I dearly loved Suck, I didn't see it as any more than a witty commentary in my mailbox. I go to a variety of sites, like Slashdot, NewsForge, Mr. Cranky... And, if these sites were to go out of business, there would be many others popping up all over the place to access. Often, the best information comes from private people, because they don't care about funding (they use their jobs to fund themselves). It's true that the web is a publishing medium, but more than a newsstand, it's also a huge community bulletin board. The things regular people post, which you seem to hold in little regard, are the most interesting things available because of their lack of outside influence. Online, everyone can have his say -- and despite your attitude that this is just a giant peanut gallery, which by the way is beneath you, Katz, and uncalled for, this is what makes the web useful. Not someone's attempt to start their own company by putting up a magazine, ok? It's the people who don't make any money and who just have something to say, something they can't *not* say, that are interesting.
Finally, here's an interesting point: you claim to be annoyed by huge conglomerates and their commercial interests; but you conveniently forget that these online magazines you're weeping for are themselves, commercial entities. Perhaps unsuccessful ones, but nevertheless, commercial. They idenfitied a niche and tried to make a profit, did they not? You prefered their voice to that of the vanilla mainstream, but that doesn't make them any different in terms of what they were trying to accomplish. They were magazines; they didn't get enough revenue to stay afloat and now they're not. This does not imply conspiracy, John, and even if it did, it wouldn't matter.
The web that matters to me is the noncommercial web, where people say what they want to say just to say it. And no-one's taking that away -- in fact, commercial interests (Earthlink, Netcom, AT+T, etc) are making it possible for a wider group of people every year because it's wildly profitable (26 bucks a month, right, per person accessing the web?). Just relax, man. Everything's going to be okay. crazyphilman@programmer.net
I've worked at dot-coms, I've worked in a college IT department doing Y2K work, and I've worked in a traditional company, so I've met a lot of fellow programmers in the past few years. So, here's what I've noticed about the play-vs-work issue:
Generally, the people who see their work as play are the people who went to college for computer science, and are approaching it as their one true career, their calling if you will. They'd program whether they got paid or not; they might choose different projects (rather than archiving news articles, for instance, they might want to code a game, or write a special purpose web crawler) but they'd be programming even if they had to pay to do it (I know I would, but don't tell my boss, ha ha). These are the people who actually like reading up on newer technologies when they get home; they're the people who are aware of the direction the industry is going in, because they live and breathe it. Because they love it, they're good at it.
I've met a number of these people, and it's always been a joy to work with them. You can tell them about a cool technology you're dying to work with, and they "get" it, they understand. You can come up with something innovative with coworkers like this; they're not just punching a clock.
Workers who don't see their work as play, who see it as just a job and who aren't really into it (other than to pick up a paycheck, that is) don't love the work, and won't put the extra time in that results in not only a working project, but an elegant, beautiful piece of code. Their work isn't going to be as maintainable, for one thing, and it probably isn't going to work as well. It sure isn't going to be innovative -- it'll likely be more along the lines of the recipe-based programming advocated by all the java workshops that are springing up around the country: "Do A, then do B, then do C, and run this check". Duh. Why not just build an expert system to write the code and be done with it? But I digress...
Basically, I think the difference is this: people who love programming, who do it for the fun of it, generally are more fun to work with and do better work, not to mention that they tend to stay late a heck of a lot more often (not because the boss told them to, but because they got wrapped up in something and needed just a few more minutes...), so they get done with a project faster.
In a way, I think the difference is between what the old timers called a "Real Programmer" and a "Quiche Eater". If you think about it, you'll see what I mean (check out the article "Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche", available at sites with archives of computer humor, for a good laugh). Or at least -- the programmers among you will. Suits may not get the joke.;)
You said, very eloquently I might add, a whole lot of things that I've been quietly fuming about for a long time. I'm so pissed off about the way things are going I could spit.
The problem is, all these dot-commers think about is money. Money, money, money -- none of them are in it because programming is fun, none of them are involved because they like playing with computers -- these people are soulless wannabes, and all they can do is cook up get-rich-quick schemes and bother the rest of us. God, I get more upset every year.
You know what we need? We need to bring back local BBS'es, and ban commercial sites entirely. MUD's, Freenets, things like that are going to be our only escape in years to come.
I wanna marry a female hacker, move to the sticks, and set up a cabin with satellite-based internet service, work via email, and vanish. Modern life is starting to suck. crazyphilman@programmer.net
After reading this well-balanced, peaceful, tolerant post (man, you sure are warmer of heart than I am) I had to go read the editorial; Well, I've read the evil thing and I just had to put my two cents in. Just how long are we going to put up with these advertising flacks telling us what we'll have to put up with? Their greed and their arrogance are unparalleled in the modern world. Twenty second ads between every ten page views??? Fifty bucks a year to view a website??? The editorial writer is out of his mind.
First of all, I'd like to point out that his major excuse for this madness -- the demise of the banner ad -- is a red herring. Banner ads are not completely worthless. Although a tiny percentage of them get clicked, banner ads that point to something worth looking at do get clicked. I've clicked several of the banner ads here at slashdot, and not just because I want to help support the site -- some of them are actually interesting. ThinkGeek sells some cool stuff, for instance.
What the advertising industry means when it says that banner ads are dead is, for the first time the industry can really track what an ad does, and it's finding that ads are mostly ignored -- thus the industry, which can't admit that it's really more of an annoyance than a necessary part of our world, says, "oh, no, it's banner ads that are bad, bad banner ads, bad!" and it smacks the banner ad with a newspaper, like a beagle that made a mess on the rug.
So, now, the advertising industry is always looking for some new way to "monetize" (I'm aware that "monetize" isn't really a word, but they use it constantly) the internet (translation: bleed us all dry selling us content we don't really need anyway), and they've come up with a scheme to overcharge for a website as though it were a service like a utility, and use a twenty second advertisement every ten pages as the bludgeon to make us pay up. God, I hate these people.
When I worked at a dot-com in Chelsea, I used to go to internet parties, and I'd run into advertising flacks who were dying to cram their business cards down my throat. As soon as they found out I was a programmer, they'd lose interest, and fill up their vodka tonics... I saw one guy drink about twenty four or five ounce vodka tonics (light on the tonic) in less than two hours, and he didn't seem to be even slightly impaired. He couldn't have weighed more than 170, ok? I mean, THINK ABOUT THAT. I weigh about 280, and I was only on my second beer at that point.
But I digress...
Anyway, what I'm getting at is, the ad people ruined TV, they ruined radio, they fill our magazines and cram our newspapers with ads, throw billboards up to ruin our beautiful country, and in general make a nuisance out of themselves... And, now, they want to act like we're getting a free ride and they're going to show us a thing or two.
Here's my ALTERNATIVE proposal:
First of all, consider that if I'm not willing to pay more than twenty bucks for a magazine subscription, there's no way in hell I'm going to pay fifty for a website. It's just not going to happen. Ok? So, let's just get beyond that entirely. Anyone who charges more than about thirty bucks a year for a website that doesn't have naked women all over the place is out of his mind (and will soon be out of business). So, principle numero uno is, if you want to make money off your website, 1)make it useful enough that it's desireable, and 2) charge under thirty bucks a year, because twenty or thirty bucks feels like coffee money. Any more than that and I'll find someone else providing the same service.
The second thing I'd like to suggest is, the advertising world should get the cockamamie idea of ad interruptions out of their pointy little heads because any site that tries that crap on me is going to have a hard time getting me to sign up, period. And, I have a feeling that about 99% of the country feels about the same way. We're annoyed enough that we have to put up with commercial interruptions on TV and radio -- remember, it was one of the major selling points of cable in the first place that such interruptions were eliminated -- we're not going to sit still for that crap on the internet, where we have much better freedom to choose.
Finally, if I was an advertiser, I'd lose the attitude fast. On the coolness scale, advertisers rate lower than lawyers and pimps, ok? People HATE them. They're the idiots who came up with the thirty second spot, they're the bastards who con our DJ's into selling us weight loss pills between songs, they're the evil force that causes some dry peanuts to come out of the can burned and inedible. They don't rate an attitude. They should start all introductions with "I'm dreadfully sorry to inflict myself on you, but I'm an advertiser and I'd like to speak to you for a moment". At least, we'd have enough time to hit them with a cue stick before they threw their business card, shuriken style, at us.
I don't have a home yet -- I live in an apartment in East Patterson, NJ -- but I'm planning on buying a nice little Cape in the next couple of years, so I've got a plan laid out for wiring it (of course). Here it is:
1. I'd choose one closet, probably in the main hallway near the center of the house, and make that my server closet. In the server closet goes a Linux or BSD box set up as a firewall.
2. From the closet, I'd run some poly water pipe up to the attic, where a wider pipe would run the length of the house along the beam. I'd run one ethernet cable up to the attic from the firewall, and it'd come out at a waterproof plastic trunk or storage box in which I'd have a hub or router. Lines from the hub or router would run into the wide pipe, and smaller pipes would extend down behind the drywall in each bedroom, a study, the living room, the dining room, and the basement.
3. In each room, I'd find the best place to put a desk, and I'd mount an ethernet jack in the wall about two feet from the baseboard there. The small pipe would run to the jack, and the cable would attach to it, providing service to that room.
4. The pipe going down to the basement would lead to a six by nine room I'd frame in one of the corners, which would be another server closet, basically -- but this server wouldn't be set up as a firewall. Rather, it would be set up with control cards I'd buy from an electrical supply house, and linked up to the air conditioner, heat, etc, so I wouldn't have to walk down to the basement to turn stuff on. Also, it'd be on a UPS, and when detecting that the UPS is its primary power, it'd automatically turn on a generator for the house.
Finally, I'd put some small security cameras in the corners of most of my rooms, and some low-light ones outside to watch the outside of the house. These would be hooked up to a video capture card in the server in the basement, which would intermittently save files to a networked drive, so that I could surf in while I work and see what's been going on in my house. I'd use perl scripts to manage these, archiving them automatically, etc, and when certain events occurred, like a window opening (contact switches, etc) I'd have the machine call my cell phone and play a recorded message, something like "DUDE! Someone's messing with your goods, man..."
You have to admit, building it would be a hell of a lot of fun...
The fact that digital media isn't persistant isn't an issue just yet; nearly everything human beings have decided to save as information has been published in books, which are collected in the library system -- which is basically an analog sort of distributed, persistant storage. People have private copies of books, students keep their textbooks forever, and libraries buy copies of their own... Our culture will survive through its books and papers, as has every other culture we know about (even the Babylonians had clay tablets, thousands of years ago).
Virtually all of our government's papers have been preserved through the system of Federal Repositories, large libraries usually associated with a large state university. Most are on microfiche and microfilm, although some are available in paper form. As I understand it, the repositories were designed to preserve our government's records in the event something, ah, *happened* to Washington D.C. (cough, cough NUKE, cough cough).
While it's true that our personal correspondence is tending towards the digital (phone conversations and email) this doesn't mean that information about our lives isn't being stored. Biographies, personal accounts of experiences, a whole lot of serious fiction, and the personal papers of a number of important people are regularly published. Once it gets into a book, it's more or less immune to time, unless one of us burns it. It may be true that some of that correspondence is tainted (perhaps even entirely full of shit) not all of it is, and people will be able to check a number of sources to find things out...
Basically, I'm not too worried. As long as the tree huggers don't outlaw paper (or any plastic substitute we may be offered) we're pretty much A-OK. crazyphilman@programmer.net
Peer to peer isn't for the average joe; you're right about that, absolutely. Probably 90% of the people in this country have no need for peer to peer, or much of anything else on the net if you think about it. Let's set aside the trade in illicit music and software for a moment. If you think about it, the only other thing you can really use peer to peer for is collaboration, right? So, who, other than programmers, revolutionaries (I'll get to this in a minute), and scientists, would collaborate in this way?
However, I think peer-to-peer is important for an entirely different reason. Consider the direction the computer industry is heading in. Think about MS Passport -- read the slashdot article if you want to get your daily scare. Think about their.net initiative. Think about how it seems as though the internet gets more corporate every day. Those of us who use the internet mostly to exchange ideas and publish 'zines and such are in danger, whether it seems that way or not at this early stage. Eventually, our ability to publish what we want, and swap code and files as we choose, may be significantly diminished. We might have to worry about whether we're giving up ownership of our work when we send an email or post a web page, something that would RUIN the web as we know it. Think about it -- how hard would it be for Bill Gates to get just about every large ISP on board for his initiatives? And, once that happens, what happens to your intellectual property? Kiss it goodbye, chums. Maybe.
Here's where we get into what I'd use peer-to-peer for, and what I'd really like to see people start to do.
Remember the Bulletin Board? Back in the '80s, when the net wasn't really all that available to most people, private individuals would start bulletin boards (BBS's) and do everything we now do on the net. There was no government control, or external influence, you just had to install a high-capacity modem and enough lines and you were in business. If you were slick, you could get a primitive internet connection and share it among your users (no web, just like, telnet and stuff).
BBS'es were great. You could share files, communicate with your friends, work on a shared server... So, picture this:
Microsoft gets its way. The internet is dumbed down, collaboration is affected because no one wants to let Passport's EULA dual-copyright their stuff, most people end up using stupid little net appliances... Techies everywhere are bummed. So, we get fed up, order DSL service, hack together a Linux box or three, and start non-passport servers. Then, we start a peer-to-peer network that encrypts communications between nodes so that they can't be captured except within the p2p network (where Passport,.net and similar setups are banned outright by OUR terms of use). An entire subculture forms around the peer to peer network being built, and it's used for collaboration between programmers, and web publishing among members of the group. Techie happiness returns to the world, Microsoft is foiled, and the lion lays down with the lamb.
It gets better.
As society gets more corporate and techies get more and more disillusioned and annoyed by what they're seeing around them, they decide to pull a mini-secession from the rest of the world and form a virtual nation. It's organized in the same way revolutionary cells were in old communist countries. One server is connected to a group of other servers, for one-way publishing downward, while they're connected to each other. No server "knows" anything about the server above it, or the servers below its peer servers, so you can think about the system as a big tree, with each node able to reference four or five children, and so on, and able to receive info from its parent node. Information can be quickly disseminated from a semi-central authority (which would have a number of peers itself, so the system would be quite redundant) throughout the network. If one node were to be shut down, at most you could shut down its peers and their child nodes. The controller of that node could then rebuild that part of the tree by assigning new systems in.
How about that, slashdotters? A whole underground society, working via an encrypted, heirarchial tree-like network of mini peer to peer networks, happily trading files and code and whatever else they want, without having to worry about corporate america at all. You could even arrange a currency and a work-reward system, and drop out of society entirely. Members would have to "show income" as organized crime used to in the twenties, so they could get joe jobs to cover their rent and food, and handle everything else on the black market. Think about THAT -- black market tech consulting. No taxes! heh heh heh...
JUST KIDDING -- don't sic the IRS on me.
But, seriously. Wouldn't that be something? crazyphilman@programmer.net
I don't think it's something we have to worry about, because enough records are kept on optical disks that they'd be able to be restored if necessary, and because any cataclysm that would be powerful enough to destroy all our hardware (I'm thinking along the lines of some kind of monster electromagnetic pulse, here) would probably fry us like eggs in a microwave.
Having said that, consider: this sort of thing would turn society upside down. It'd be a hundred years before we were even close to the level we're at now. We'd literally be returned to pre-electrical America, circa 1865. People in the cities would flock out to the country, there'd be more or less a civil war between rural and urban groups, and all hell would break loose. It would be a very stressful thing for everyone involved.
Except, that is, for me.
I'd pack up everything I've got in celebration of the destruction of the debt record, and build a cabin for my folks way up in the appalacian mountains. I'd grow potatoes and vegetables in a plot in the back, and use a still to make Vodka for trade. This, I'd bring by the gallon down to whatever town was closest, trading for guns, skins, and any creature comforts I could hook up. I'd spend my days fishing and hunting, and in general, not worrying about a thing.
Really? I read Friday years and years ago, I'll have to dig it up and give it another look. Heinlein was great, wasn't he? I still remember his advice about the organization of revolutionary cells, in a novel he wrote about a revolt on the moon (I don't remember the title -- was it "the moon is a harsh mistress?" Or was that a different book). Heinlein's awesome. If modern high-schoolers would check out more Heinlein, imagine the hell they could raise; picture a geek resistance organized by cell playing pranks on the suits and stiffs staffing their schools, and you'll see what I mean.;)
I agree. I've long followed the following set of principles in my dealings with others:
1. Most people aren't bad internally. The vast majority of us have regular jobs, don't injure others or take advantage of others, and in general, just want to be left alone.
2. Some people are naturally selfish, aggressive, ambitious, and prize monetary success more than anything else. They tend to be suits, but don't have to be. These are the people who swarm to credit agencies and the like, and who invent the policies we're suffering under.
3. Because of 2, you have to assume that these companies not only don't care about you, they feel some degree of contempt for you. Because you're just a number, a product, something to be sold and manipulated in their database. You have to understand how these people think; they want to improve their numbers, get a promotion, and move out of their current department. YOU, individually, don't even exist for them.
Given these three principles, my approach is thus:
1. Adopt a strong dislike for the people described in (2). Learn to hate them. Develop a desire to foil their upward mobility and their ability to track you.
2. Create false positives to throw off their accounting. Use your credit card to pay your bills and send the check to the credit card company instead, thus a) creating a positive credit report item, and b) pissing off the credit card company by not paying any interest on the transaction, having paid it off immediately. If you don't like this, drop off their radar: use USPS money orders to pay your bills.
3. Rediscover the cash economy: instead of using trackable methods for shopping, cash half of your paycheck and carry a money roll. This prevents people from tracking your spending habits.
4. When annoying clerks in record stores ask you for your zipcode, home telephone number, etc, make one up. Think of your information as your property.
5. Rent a PO Box and use that exclusively for all correspondence. Don't give out a street address. If you move into a new apartment, guard its location closely -- address EVERYTHING to the PO box. This helps you disappear, if you think about it. Your address on record won't match a physical one.
Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but I enjoy anonymity. Currently, I'm whaling away on my credit and debit cards to build up a stack of good transactions, but soon I'm going to pull a fade -- there'll be all these good transactions and then, suddenly, poof. Nothing. Maybe they'll be able to check utilities and such, but that's about it. And, I'll be gradually moving my finances towards the cash economy, and towards a lifestyle in which I won't leave traces behind. I'm 30 now; by the time I'm 31, I'll be a ghost to most of these agencies. Vanished. Think about that, ok? Now, doesn't that sound like fun?
Philip
P.S. Then, for years, occasional discriminate use of a single credit card to deliberately inject small, immediately paid off transactions from time to time and totally confuse marketers ("Nothing for three months, and then he buys 1.98 worth of feta cheese???").
Slashdot Mirror
I remember an interview I went on, for a Perl job. I passed the first interview with flying colors; talked about my programming philosophy with a programmer, got along great, got a second interview. Passed the second interview with a hiring manager. Then, was asked into a back room by the alpha geek of the organization, who hit me blindside with three bizarre perl questions (debugging problems? I don't know what else to call them). Each was totally bizarre, not even remotely connected to normal practice, and was the sort of thing you'd write a little driver program to check out anyway if you came up against it. For example, one had something to do with an arcane scoping issue, with a variable of the same name changing scope like, three times. Flabbergasted and freaked out, I failed his three "tests", and he smugly smiled at me and showed me out.
The only thing this proved was that the guy was a complete jackass. I mean, for example, who uses the same variable name in three different scopes that way? You'd have to be retarded. The questions were nonsensical. If he'd given me something normal to work on, I'd have been fine, and I'd have hired. For the record, I ended up working somewhere else, and built an application used throughout the organization among many other things, improving many of their internal systems and in general making myself very useful (not meaning to bang my own drum).
I guess my point is, if you subconsciously want to prove someone incompetent, you won't find it too hard to completely frustrate and annoy them, and "disqualify" them from consideration. A better approach is to try and see what they come up with in response to a real problem, without trying to catch them with brain teasers and such. I'm not saying that's what you did, mind you, but I've got experience with it and believe me, it isn't much fun to be on the receiving end. Especially when, if you're like most tech types, interviews freak you out anyway.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
It IS a cool movie; I loved it, and so did my mom, who I took to see it (go ahead, guys, laugh all you want, I like taking my mom to movies, so there, nyah, nyah).
Is it dark, a little cold emotionally, and relatively nonviolent for a space-oriented movie? Sure. Of course. It's not meant to be a traditional shooter, no more than any of the Final Fantasy games were traditional first person shooters. Katz missed the whole point of this movie, which was deep and interesting with a flavor like anime. I won't ruin the plot, but the two main themes of this movie seem to be the importance of compassion and the value of studying a problem rather than jumping to conclusions and running off half cocked, gun in hand.
I won't say the movie doesn't have problems; some of its underlying mythology could have been posited in more detail, but then you could say that about a lot of anime. And, the technology isn't perfect yet -- obviously, this is an early, although very well done step towards a magnificent art form. But, I don't think any of the film's negatives are all that significant in light of the positive aspects of it, the technical skill with which it was put together and the interesting ideas in the story. Overall, this was a great flick.
To katz, I say this: Jesus, dude, chill out. Judge the movie fairly, on its merits. View the movie with the assumption that the technology is young, and give it some slack. They did a hell of a good job.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
What a nasty post. It reminds me of when I lived in Arizona, and people on Sunset Boulevard I was walking with, on finding out where I lived, started calling me a "fucking Zonie" with no provocation. You Californians just hate everyone else, don't you? And, you blame all your problems on outsiders, instead of looking inward and solving them.
I'd like to make a point or two.
First of all, California has always been a place of hellacious traffic, all the way back to the twenties and thirties. LA was throttled with city-clogging traffic back in the twenties, for instance, and built the highway system in lieu of a train-based transit system to take the pressure off. It was reasoned that a distributed city would have less traffic. This worked for only a few years, and the traffic ended up being clogged all over the city anyway. I remember being stuck in LA traffic back when I was in the Marines. I thought I'd never get out. And, I'm originally from the NYC area, ok? LA traffic puts the cross-Bronx expressway to shame in terms of sheer buildup.
Second of all, you've got all your power blackouts not because Midwesterners came to live with you, but because your brain-dead state government deregulated power. Now, wholesale prices are skyrocketing and you want consumer price-caps, which results in bankrupt utilities. Hey, I live in New York, and I understand the issue. What's your excuse? Don't you read the papers?
Quit whining about outsiders coming in. Look back along your family tree and I bet you dig up some Spanish explorers (giving you a lot of credit there) dust-bowl okies, or maybe some gold-rushers, all of whom who are no different than the dot-commers you hate. Get used to the idea that unless you're a native american, you're not native to California, period.
Don't be such a snob! I mean, really!
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Dear Mr. Katz,
I've read lots of your articles and you're generally on the ball; also I liked your book immensely. However, here I think you're worried about something that's really mostly irrelevant: the mass commercialization of the net. Here's why:
1. The interest of these media conglomerates in putting up massive content sites doesn't really hurt anyone at all. The reason the magazines failed is the same as the reason most dot-coms failed: lack of revenue. The magazines you mention (which are going out of business because they can't make enough profit to stay afloat) tried to follow a traditional model in publishing on the web. They hired staff, they rented offices, they incurred huge costs, and thus depended on huge revenues. This was a mistake! Without some kind of profit coming into a company, via an actual product line (e.g. print magazines, books, etc) this sort of business is entirely unsustainable! The collapse of the dot-com world should make this utterly clear. They failed not because they were in competition with the giants, but because they never had a means to make sufficient profit in the first place.
2. The media conglomerates aren't interested in shutting anyone up, except for the occasional person who gets annoyed and more or less spits in their eye (thus getting a call from the lawyers, etc). What they want to do is get everyone on a broadband connection so they can serve TV over the web, because that's how they think. This makes them A) harmless, and B) extremely useful. No other force is going to bring broadband to the American consumer, mark my words. No other entity cares. So, let AOL put webified tv shows online! Who cares? Some of it might even be good. It won't push anyone else offline -- in fact, it'll speed up everyone's connection, and make it that much easier for them to express their own opinions.
3. Although I dearly loved Suck, I didn't see it as any more than a witty commentary in my mailbox. I go to a variety of sites, like Slashdot, NewsForge, Mr. Cranky... And, if these sites were to go out of business, there would be many others popping up all over the place to access. Often, the best information comes from private people, because they don't care about funding (they use their jobs to fund themselves). It's true that the web is a publishing medium, but more than a newsstand, it's also a huge community bulletin board. The things regular people post, which you seem to hold in little regard, are the most interesting things available because of their lack of outside influence. Online, everyone can have his say -- and despite your attitude that this is just a giant peanut gallery, which by the way is beneath you, Katz, and uncalled for, this is what makes the web useful. Not someone's attempt to start their own company by putting up a magazine, ok? It's the people who don't make any money and who just have something to say, something they can't *not* say, that are interesting.
Finally, here's an interesting point: you claim to be annoyed by huge conglomerates and their commercial interests; but you conveniently forget that these online magazines you're weeping for are themselves, commercial entities. Perhaps unsuccessful ones, but nevertheless, commercial. They idenfitied a niche and tried to make a profit, did they not? You prefered their voice to that of the vanilla mainstream, but that doesn't make them any different in terms of what they were trying to accomplish. They were magazines; they didn't get enough revenue to stay afloat and now they're not. This does not imply conspiracy, John, and even if it did, it wouldn't matter.
The web that matters to me is the noncommercial web, where people say what they want to say just to say it. And no-one's taking that away -- in fact, commercial interests (Earthlink, Netcom, AT+T, etc) are making it possible for a wider group of people every year because it's wildly profitable (26 bucks a month, right, per person accessing the web?). Just relax, man. Everything's going to be okay.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
I've worked at dot-coms, I've worked in a college IT department doing Y2K work, and I've worked in a traditional company, so I've met a lot of fellow programmers in the past few years. So, here's what I've noticed about the play-vs-work issue:
;)
Generally, the people who see their work as play are the people who went to college for computer science, and are approaching it as their one true career, their calling if you will. They'd program whether they got paid or not; they might choose different projects (rather than archiving news articles, for instance, they might want to code a game, or write a special purpose web crawler) but they'd be programming even if they had to pay to do it (I know I would, but don't tell my boss, ha ha). These are the people who actually like reading up on newer technologies when they get home; they're the people who are aware of the direction the industry is going in, because they live and breathe it. Because they love it, they're good at it.
I've met a number of these people, and it's always been a joy to work with them. You can tell them about a cool technology you're dying to work with, and they "get" it, they understand. You can come up with something innovative with coworkers like this; they're not just punching a clock.
Workers who don't see their work as play, who see it as just a job and who aren't really into it (other than to pick up a paycheck, that is) don't love the work, and won't put the extra time in that results in not only a working project, but an elegant, beautiful piece of code. Their work isn't going to be as maintainable, for one thing, and it probably isn't going to work as well. It sure isn't going to be innovative -- it'll likely be more along the lines of the recipe-based programming advocated by all the java workshops that are springing up around the country: "Do A, then do B, then do C, and run this check". Duh. Why not just build an expert system to write the code and be done with it? But I digress...
Basically, I think the difference is this: people who love programming, who do it for the fun of it, generally are more fun to work with and do better work, not to mention that they tend to stay late a heck of a lot more often (not because the boss told them to, but because they got wrapped up in something and needed just a few more minutes...), so they get done with a project faster.
In a way, I think the difference is between what the old timers called a "Real Programmer" and a "Quiche Eater". If you think about it, you'll see what I mean (check out the article "Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche", available at sites with archives of computer humor, for a good laugh). Or at least -- the programmers among you will. Suits may not get the joke.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Bitterman! Dude!
You said, very eloquently I might add, a whole lot of things that I've been quietly fuming about for a long time. I'm so pissed off about the way things are going I could spit.
The problem is, all these dot-commers think about is money. Money, money, money -- none of them are in it because programming is fun, none of them are involved because they like playing with computers -- these people are soulless wannabes, and all they can do is cook up get-rich-quick schemes and bother the rest of us. God, I get more upset every year.
You know what we need? We need to bring back local BBS'es, and ban commercial sites entirely. MUD's, Freenets, things like that are going to be our only escape in years to come.
I wanna marry a female hacker, move to the sticks, and set up a cabin with satellite-based internet service, work via email, and vanish. Modern life is starting to suck.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
After reading this well-balanced, peaceful, tolerant post (man, you sure are warmer of heart than I am) I had to go read the editorial; Well, I've read the evil thing and I just had to put my two cents in. Just how long are we going to put up with these advertising flacks telling us what we'll have to put up with? Their greed and their arrogance are unparalleled in the modern world. Twenty second ads between every ten page views??? Fifty bucks a year to view a website??? The editorial writer is out of his mind.
First of all, I'd like to point out that his major excuse for this madness -- the demise of the banner ad -- is a red herring. Banner ads are not completely worthless. Although a tiny percentage of them get clicked, banner ads that point to something worth looking at do get clicked. I've clicked several of the banner ads here at slashdot, and not just because I want to help support the site -- some of them are actually interesting. ThinkGeek sells some cool stuff, for instance.
What the advertising industry means when it says that banner ads are dead is, for the first time the industry can really track what an ad does, and it's finding that ads are mostly ignored -- thus the industry, which can't admit that it's really more of an annoyance than a necessary part of our world, says, "oh, no, it's banner ads that are bad, bad banner ads, bad!" and it smacks the banner ad with a newspaper, like a beagle that made a mess on the rug.
So, now, the advertising industry is always looking for some new way to "monetize" (I'm aware that "monetize" isn't really a word, but they use it constantly) the internet (translation: bleed us all dry selling us content we don't really need anyway), and they've come up with a scheme to overcharge for a website as though it were a service like a utility, and use a twenty second advertisement every ten pages as the bludgeon to make us pay up. God, I hate these people.
When I worked at a dot-com in Chelsea, I used to go to internet parties, and I'd run into advertising flacks who were dying to cram their business cards down my throat. As soon as they found out I was a programmer, they'd lose interest, and fill up their vodka tonics... I saw one guy drink about twenty four or five ounce vodka tonics (light on the tonic) in less than two hours, and he didn't seem to be even slightly impaired. He couldn't have weighed more than 170, ok? I mean, THINK ABOUT THAT. I weigh about 280, and I was only on my second beer at that point.
But I digress...
Anyway, what I'm getting at is, the ad people ruined TV, they ruined radio, they fill our magazines and cram our newspapers with ads, throw billboards up to ruin our beautiful country, and in general make a nuisance out of themselves... And, now, they want to act like we're getting a free ride and they're going to show us a thing or two.
Here's my ALTERNATIVE proposal:
First of all, consider that if I'm not willing to pay more than twenty bucks for a magazine subscription, there's no way in hell I'm going to pay fifty for a website. It's just not going to happen. Ok? So, let's just get beyond that entirely. Anyone who charges more than about thirty bucks a year for a website that doesn't have naked women all over the place is out of his mind (and will soon be out of business). So, principle numero uno is, if you want to make money off your website, 1)make it useful enough that it's desireable, and 2) charge under thirty bucks a year, because twenty or thirty bucks feels like coffee money. Any more than that and I'll find someone else providing the same service.
The second thing I'd like to suggest is, the advertising world should get the cockamamie idea of ad interruptions out of their pointy little heads because any site that tries that crap on me is going to have a hard time getting me to sign up, period. And, I have a feeling that about 99% of the country feels about the same way. We're annoyed enough that we have to put up with commercial interruptions on TV and radio -- remember, it was one of the major selling points of cable in the first place that such interruptions were eliminated -- we're not going to sit still for that crap on the internet, where we have much better freedom to choose.
Finally, if I was an advertiser, I'd lose the attitude fast. On the coolness scale, advertisers rate lower than lawyers and pimps, ok? People HATE them. They're the idiots who came up with the thirty second spot, they're the bastards who con our DJ's into selling us weight loss pills between songs, they're the evil force that causes some dry peanuts to come out of the can burned and inedible. They don't rate an attitude. They should start all introductions with "I'm dreadfully sorry to inflict myself on you, but I'm an advertiser and I'd like to speak to you for a moment". At least, we'd have enough time to hit them with a cue stick before they threw their business card, shuriken style, at us.
Gawd! Will it never end???
Phil...
crazyphilman@programmer.net
I don't have a home yet -- I live in an apartment in East Patterson, NJ -- but I'm planning on buying a nice little Cape in the next couple of years, so I've got a plan laid out for wiring it (of course). Here it is:
1. I'd choose one closet, probably in the main hallway near the center of the house, and make that my server closet. In the server closet goes a Linux or BSD box set up as a firewall.
2. From the closet, I'd run some poly water pipe up to the attic, where a wider pipe would run the length of the house along the beam. I'd run one ethernet cable up to the attic from the firewall, and it'd come out at a waterproof plastic trunk or storage box in which I'd have a hub or router. Lines from the hub or router would run into the wide pipe, and smaller pipes would extend down behind the drywall in each bedroom, a study, the living room, the dining room, and the basement.
3. In each room, I'd find the best place to put a desk, and I'd mount an ethernet jack in the wall about two feet from the baseboard there. The small pipe would run to the jack, and the cable would attach to it, providing service to that room.
4. The pipe going down to the basement would lead to a six by nine room I'd frame in one of the corners, which would be another server closet, basically -- but this server wouldn't be set up as a firewall. Rather, it would be set up with control cards I'd buy from an electrical supply house, and linked up to the air conditioner, heat, etc, so I wouldn't have to walk down to the basement to turn stuff on. Also, it'd be on a UPS, and when detecting that the UPS is its primary power, it'd automatically turn on a generator for the house.
Finally, I'd put some small security cameras in the corners of most of my rooms, and some low-light ones outside to watch the outside of the house. These would be hooked up to a video capture card in the server in the basement, which would intermittently save files to a networked drive, so that I could surf in while I work and see what's been going on in my house. I'd use perl scripts to manage these, archiving them automatically, etc, and when certain events occurred, like a window opening (contact switches, etc) I'd have the machine call my cell phone and play a recorded message, something like "DUDE! Someone's messing with your goods, man..."
You have to admit, building it would be a hell of a lot of fun...
Phil.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
The fact that digital media isn't persistant isn't an issue just yet; nearly everything human beings have decided to save as information has been published in books, which are collected in the library system -- which is basically an analog sort of distributed, persistant storage. People have private copies of books, students keep their textbooks forever, and libraries buy copies of their own... Our culture will survive through its books and papers, as has every other culture we know about (even the Babylonians had clay tablets, thousands of years ago).
Virtually all of our government's papers have been preserved through the system of Federal Repositories, large libraries usually associated with a large state university. Most are on microfiche and microfilm, although some are available in paper form. As I understand it, the repositories were designed to preserve our government's records in the event something, ah, *happened* to Washington D.C. (cough, cough NUKE, cough cough).
While it's true that our personal correspondence is tending towards the digital (phone conversations and email) this doesn't mean that information about our lives isn't being stored. Biographies, personal accounts of experiences, a whole lot of serious fiction, and the personal papers of a number of important people are regularly published. Once it gets into a book, it's more or less immune to time, unless one of us burns it. It may be true that some of that correspondence is tainted (perhaps even entirely full of shit) not all of it is, and people will be able to check a number of sources to find things out...
Basically, I'm not too worried. As long as the tree huggers don't outlaw paper (or any plastic substitute we may be offered) we're pretty much A-OK.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Peer to peer isn't for the average joe; you're right about that, absolutely. Probably 90% of the people in this country have no need for peer to peer, or much of anything else on the net if you think about it. Let's set aside the trade in illicit music and software for a moment. If you think about it, the only other thing you can really use peer to peer for is collaboration, right? So, who, other than programmers, revolutionaries (I'll get to this in a minute), and scientists, would collaborate in this way?
.net initiative. Think about how it seems as though the internet gets more corporate every day. Those of us who use the internet mostly to exchange ideas and publish 'zines and such are in danger, whether it seems that way or not at this early stage. Eventually, our ability to publish what we want, and swap code and files as we choose, may be significantly diminished. We might have to worry about whether we're giving up ownership of our work when we send an email or post a web page, something that would RUIN the web as we know it. Think about it -- how hard would it be for Bill Gates to get just about every large ISP on board for his initiatives? And, once that happens, what happens to your intellectual property? Kiss it goodbye, chums. Maybe.
.net and similar setups are banned outright by OUR terms of use). An entire subculture forms around the peer to peer network being built, and it's used for collaboration between programmers, and web publishing among members of the group. Techie happiness returns to the world, Microsoft is foiled, and the lion lays down with the lamb.
However, I think peer-to-peer is important for an entirely different reason. Consider the direction the computer industry is heading in. Think about MS Passport -- read the slashdot article if you want to get your daily scare. Think about their
Here's where we get into what I'd use peer-to-peer for, and what I'd really like to see people start to do.
Remember the Bulletin Board? Back in the '80s, when the net wasn't really all that available to most people, private individuals would start bulletin boards (BBS's) and do everything we now do on the net. There was no government control, or external influence, you just had to install a high-capacity modem and enough lines and you were in business. If you were slick, you could get a primitive internet connection and share it among your users (no web, just like, telnet and stuff).
BBS'es were great. You could share files, communicate with your friends, work on a shared server... So, picture this:
Microsoft gets its way. The internet is dumbed down, collaboration is affected because no one wants to let Passport's EULA dual-copyright their stuff, most people end up using stupid little net appliances... Techies everywhere are bummed. So, we get fed up, order DSL service, hack together a Linux box or three, and start non-passport servers. Then, we start a peer-to-peer network that encrypts communications between nodes so that they can't be captured except within the p2p network (where Passport,
It gets better.
As society gets more corporate and techies get more and more disillusioned and annoyed by what they're seeing around them, they decide to pull a mini-secession from the rest of the world and form a virtual nation. It's organized in the same way revolutionary cells were in old communist countries. One server is connected to a group of other servers, for one-way publishing downward, while they're connected to each other. No server "knows" anything about the server above it, or the servers below its peer servers, so you can think about the system as a big tree, with each node able to reference four or five children, and so on, and able to receive info from its parent node. Information can be quickly disseminated from a semi-central authority (which would have a number of peers itself, so the system would be quite redundant) throughout the network. If one node were to be shut down, at most you could shut down its peers and their child nodes. The controller of that node could then rebuild that part of the tree by assigning new systems in.
How about that, slashdotters? A whole underground society, working via an encrypted, heirarchial tree-like network of mini peer to peer networks, happily trading files and code and whatever else they want, without having to worry about corporate america at all. You could even arrange a currency and a work-reward system, and drop out of society entirely. Members would have to "show income" as organized crime used to in the twenties, so they could get joe jobs to cover their rent and food, and handle everything else on the black market. Think about THAT -- black market tech consulting. No taxes! heh heh heh...
JUST KIDDING -- don't sic the IRS on me.
But, seriously. Wouldn't that be something?
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Having said that, consider: this sort of thing would turn society upside down. It'd be a hundred years before we were even close to the level we're at now. We'd literally be returned to pre-electrical America, circa 1865. People in the cities would flock out to the country, there'd be more or less a civil war between rural and urban groups, and all hell would break loose. It would be a very stressful thing for everyone involved.
Except, that is, for me.
I'd pack up everything I've got in celebration of the destruction of the debt record, and build a cabin for my folks way up in the appalacian mountains. I'd grow potatoes and vegetables in a plot in the back, and use a still to make Vodka for trade. This, I'd bring by the gallon down to whatever town was closest, trading for guns, skins, and any creature comforts I could hook up. I'd spend my days fishing and hunting, and in general, not worrying about a thing.
Philman, Mountain Man! Yee, hah!
Really? I read Friday years and years ago, I'll have to dig it up and give it another look. Heinlein was great, wasn't he? I still remember his advice about the organization of revolutionary cells, in a novel he wrote about a revolt on the moon (I don't remember the title -- was it "the moon is a harsh mistress?" Or was that a different book). Heinlein's awesome. If modern high-schoolers would check out more Heinlein, imagine the hell they could raise; picture a geek resistance organized by cell playing pranks on the suits and stiffs staffing their schools, and you'll see what I mean. ;)
I agree. I've long followed the following set of principles in my dealings with others:
1. Most people aren't bad internally. The vast majority of us have regular jobs, don't injure others or take advantage of others, and in general, just want to be left alone.
2. Some people are naturally selfish, aggressive, ambitious, and prize monetary success more than anything else. They tend to be suits, but don't have to be. These are the people who swarm to credit agencies and the like, and who invent the policies we're suffering under.
3. Because of 2, you have to assume that these companies not only don't care about you, they feel some degree of contempt for you. Because you're just a number, a product, something to be sold and manipulated in their database. You have to understand how these people think; they want to improve their numbers, get a promotion, and move out of their current department. YOU, individually, don't even exist for them.
Given these three principles, my approach is thus:
1. Adopt a strong dislike for the people described in (2). Learn to hate them. Develop a desire to foil their upward mobility and their ability to track you.
2. Create false positives to throw off their accounting. Use your credit card to pay your bills and send the check to the credit card company instead, thus a) creating a positive credit report item, and b) pissing off the credit card company by not paying any interest on the transaction, having paid it off immediately. If you don't like this, drop off their radar: use USPS money orders to pay your bills.
3. Rediscover the cash economy: instead of using trackable methods for shopping, cash half of your paycheck and carry a money roll. This prevents people from tracking your spending habits.
4. When annoying clerks in record stores ask you for your zipcode, home telephone number, etc, make one up. Think of your information as your property.
5. Rent a PO Box and use that exclusively for all correspondence. Don't give out a street address. If you move into a new apartment, guard its location closely -- address EVERYTHING to the PO box. This helps you disappear, if you think about it. Your address on record won't match a physical one.
Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but I enjoy anonymity. Currently, I'm whaling away on my credit and debit cards to build up a stack of good transactions, but soon I'm going to pull a fade -- there'll be all these good transactions and then, suddenly, poof. Nothing. Maybe they'll be able to check utilities and such, but that's about it. And, I'll be gradually moving my finances towards the cash economy, and towards a lifestyle in which I won't leave traces behind. I'm 30 now; by the time I'm 31, I'll be a ghost to most of these agencies. Vanished. Think about that, ok? Now, doesn't that sound like fun?
Philip
P.S. Then, for years, occasional discriminate use of a single credit card to deliberately inject small, immediately paid off transactions from time to time and totally confuse marketers ("Nothing for three months, and then he buys 1.98 worth of feta cheese???").