Ah, but the analogy applies keenly to medicine - to physicians - as well. The chain of command for medicine is pretty clear-cut: Med students report to interns; interns report to residents; residents report to attendings; attendings report to department chairs.
Only above the department chair level do non-physicians really start getting involved in supervision - and at that stage, you're really talking about running a department, not patient management.
Yeah, you've smacked that nail squarely on the head.
That's the most incredibly annoying feature of Product Activation. Why shouldn't I be allowed to install software - every kind, really - on both my notebook and on my home desktop server machine? Does Symantec really think they're going to double their sales - or, in fact, achieve anything except piss off their core users?
Antivirus software isn't a Windows monopoly. we have other options. They're not as good and polished as Symantec, but 3dfx learned the hard way that market leadership is often ephemeral.
Symantec should take a lesson from Intuit. Their TurboTax spyware/activation software thing turned into a total debacle, resulting in that rarest of all things - a corporate apology.
- David Stein
Small development vs. large development
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Razor Blade Games?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
(I think that the answer to this factoid observation is self-evident, but I'll post it anyway.)
The costs of developing large-scale games only affects the developers of large-scale games. As noted abundantly by others, such games tend to fit certain well-defined genres: RTS, MMORPG, FPS, RPG... indeed, the whole reason we even have and know these acronyms is because the styles of games have become extraordinarily pigeonholed.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Take Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - the game only works because gamers have been trained to go along with the scripting and accept the monolithic linearity of the missions. If you do, however, you get a pretty grand experience.
But the point is this: A few game niches have become so overproduced that independent developers can't hope to compete - but the rest of the market is wide open.
And what a wide-scale market that is! How many genres have barely been tapped, or not yet invented? How do you even classify something like Popcap's Insaniquarium? Or PaRappa the Rapper, or Dance Dance Revolution? Those are pretty easy games to design and develop, and they're fiercely fun. Window dressing is extra - but for these innovative games, window dressing is secondary to gameplay. (What a novel concept!)
Bottom line: Independent developers should not mimic Electronic Arts and try to compete in these highly stylized, overbudgeted affairs. But there's plenty of untapped gaming out there, just waiting for someone with a smidge of vision and a touch of imagination. Go get 'em, guys!
In almost every type of employment, your job is to make sure your supervisor is satisfied with your work. Their job is to oversee you and make sure you're doing a good job for the company.
Now, if you drop that into the guise of any client-oriented job - be it law, medicine, IT, or even a lowly customer service job - satisfying customers is not your primary and sole responsibility. You have to balance each client's interests against those of the company, other clients, and the priorities of your boss.
If a client is expecting too much, your mission is not to do everything they say - that's a great way to throw your priorities out of order. You're letting them detract from your other responsibilities. If you don't feel right telling them that they're not your only client, then apologize, tell them that you have other duties as well, and refer them to your boss. Let him deal with it. That's why he makes more than you do.
Really - I can't stress this enough. Keep your boss up-to-date on what you're doing, and let him guide your priorities. If anything or anyone is straining those priorities, let him deal with it.
Like I said - "pretty cool for LANs," such as your company's network. That's exactly what I meant. Similarly, I'll really enjoy running apps at full speed from another network computer's hard drive, or streaming full-screen video from a local network server.
My point was that, in the greater realm of network connections, LAN communication is sort of the minor usage - perhaps for businesses, and definitely for personal usage - and the bottlenecks in WAN communication are already enough to stymie the benefits of 100mbps (let alone 10,000,000mbps!)
Pretty cool for LANs, but otherwise rather useless.
We already have gigabit Ethernet - which (even rounding down somewhat to account for checksum and overhead and such) should be capable of transferring around 100 megabytes of data per second. How many of us have ever seen even 10% of this in practice for a general Internet connection? I'm lucky if I can pull one megabyte per second from an Internet site that doesn't happen to be, y'know, next door.
You know, when I look back at the thousands of games I've played, two distinct groups stand out.
There are the wildly ambitious ones (Star Control II, Zelda, Ultima Underworld, Alternate Reality, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night... even Dungeons of Daggorath - yeah, I'm 0ld-sk00l!), which are fun to play and revisit... but you wouldn't, y'know, sit down and play them for 20 minutes.
And then there are those simple but ridiculously fun games. Tetris, Bust-a-Move, Dance Dance Revolution, Scorched Earth, Discs of Tron, Minesweeper, Archon... really simple concepts, but you can lose frightening swaths of your life mastering your skills. It's not that they're oversimplified. They've just got a really rewarding learning curve.
One of the modern champions of the latter is PopCap, of course. I've spent ridiculous amounts of time playing Insaniquarium, to name but one.
Alright, so first you toss the idiots. That makes sense.
Then you sort by GPA. Umm... that's not good.
Have you been to college? Have you taken an engineering course, or a physical chemistry course, or any kind of course that's a weed-out? These are the kinds of courses where the average on the exam is like 27%, the high is a 38%, and out of a group of 20 bright, hard-working students, the prof gives one A and three B's.
The impressiveness of a GPA is completely relative - varies significantly by school and by program type. Class rank is a little better, but not much.
Undoubtedly. It was awfully effective against Netscape, wasn't it? (And they're flaunting even the slap-on-the-wrist penalty from that fiasco.)
More on point:
MS has been talking about getting into computerized TV for, I dunno, at least six years. Yeah, I remember them talking about it in 1997. Started with thoughts of interactive TV - embedding HTML in the portion of a TV broadcast signal that carries hearing-impaired subtitles. But they couldn't find any killer app for that package, so it got scrapped.
But now we have the whole Tablet PC thing. The tablet is a commercial flop (not really MS's fault; the technology's just not there yet - e.g., battery life) - but profit, actually, wasn't its prime goal. Tablet PC is a proving-ground that Windows XP and Windows CE can overlap into something called Windows Media Center. It's been a successful push, so expect to see Windows trying to take a more central role in your home theater setup in the near future.
Further evidence: Windows Media Player.
Look at how much attention MS has placed on WMP. WMP is free and has no commercial value to Microsoft; and yet it's heavily supported. WMP version 9, people. That's impressive, for a free product made by a rabidly for-profit company.
Now - what's the point of that? MS is taking the software world from the core outward - so it loves owning the heart of the market. Look at history:
IE was a successful tool in capturing the vast internet-browser market, which bolsters support for its server market. Market leverage: because MS sets the standard for what works (or doesn't) on IE, it's implicit that MS-brand server software will offer the most compatible pages for 99.9% of browsers.
DirectX was a successful tool in capturing ownership of the 3D-graphics standard. DirectX successfully outmaneuvered OpenGL, Glide, etc. Obviously, you can't run 99% of today's computer games on anything except high-performance Windows machines. You might be able to run Warcraft III on Linux in, say, 2009. Result: More sales of Windows machines, software, etc. (and a friendly boost to hardware manufacturers, too.)
The company's past actions reveal its intentions. Tomorrow's home theater systems will feature streaming media, PVR-time-shifting, adaptive algorithms for predicting users' viewing preferences... in short, it needs lots of software at its core. Microsoft intends to occupy that spot, and is going in with guns blazing.
Oh, come now. How can you even begin to state that "they tend to get caught?" It's a little hard to compare with those who never get caught.
Trusting corporations is a bad idea. If you supervise a company and it does the right thing, what harm have you done? Maybe slowed down their productivity a little... small price for society to pay for strongly deterring or punishing malfeasance.
As for anonymous whistleblowing: Oh, sure, great idea. How hard is it for a company to learn who's had access to that particular batch of source code? Identifying the whistleblower would usually be a trivial matter - and then come the defamation lawsuits that wreck the whistleblower's career. Not very encouraging.
- David Stein
Re:Just how "careful" are they?
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Open Source at TiVo
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· Score: 3, Insightful
uradu is right on the money.
It's a well-known trend, called the "frontier effect" or something similar. Usual course of business:
1) One company creates a great product that comprises a brand-new market. Tons of R&D invested in development; research costs expected to be recouped once (their) market matures.
2) Product hits and causes a stir. Huge sales and good times for frontier company.
3) Entry of competitors, who produce similar (or better) products. They want a piece of the promising and profitable market, and they have an edge because they don't have to invest tons of R&D like the frontier corporation did.
4) Market becomes overcrowded; new entries are indistinguishable from other products. Profits grow thin. Mainstream companies (Microsoft, Dell, Sony) weigh in with their versions, which grab market share by branding otherwise bland products.
5) Frontier company is now struggling. Competitors moved in and devoured the market before the frontier company could recoup its huge R&D outlay. May fold or be acquired by a competitor.
Look at the burgeoning technology-gadget markets: MP3 players, DVD players, PDAs... this trend has hit virtually every new technology that comes out.
And this inevitable trend is why huge, bloated companies like Microsoft and Sony are so successful. Leave the risky, expensive, market-creation junk to foolhardy startups; weigh in with an entry once the market has proven itself. Fault MS for lots of things, but not this one - it's a wise strategy.
- David Stein
Re:Just how "careful" are they?
on
Open Source at TiVo
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Been in the business world a long time?;)
OK, serious response.
First, general philosophy: History has show, consistently, that trusting corporations to do the right thing is a terrifically bad idea. Especially when it's more costly/troublesome than doing the wrong thing. Especially when the chances that they'll get caught, or punished, are insignificant. I needn't remind you that both Ken Lay and Martha Stewart still walk the streets as a reminder of this.
Now, practical response: Whistleblowers? Are you kidding? There's no better way to ruin one's career, permanently and irrevocably, than turning whistleblower. It's one thing if you're Dr. Jeffrey Wigand taking on tobacco companies who are killing people. It's another thing altogether to ruin your career because your employer stole some open-source wonk's implementation of the cosine function.
Sure, it is. It's a crappy factor, given that someone can probably slouch through Harvard as easily as their local community college.
But what other factors are you going to use? 10,000 John Andersons all apply to your school or for the first-job-after-college-type position. Only a few have any work experience, and generally it was just to make some money on the side. You have to sort them quickly. What other factors do you use?
- David Stein
Just how "careful" are they?
on
Open Source at TiVo
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Why do they have any incentive to be "careful" about their use of open-source? Why not just paste it into your proprietary, closed-source application? It's closed-source, so the chances that anyone finds out are slim to nil. Of course, you have to maintain that as the company line...
Indeed, given the "business ethics? we've heard of 'em" nature of business these days, carefully shepherding one's source code to respect open-source rights is a losing value proposition. It takes resources - time, employees' attention, assignment of responsibility, meetings - while helping the company avoid a terrifically small chance of a lawsuit. Not the *right* thing to do, by any means, but probably the *customary* thing to do.
I've been wondering quite a lot recently just how much respect closed-source developers typically afford to open-source code. I think the answer is a dirty little secret of the software biz.
But college recruiters and employers of recent grads have no work history to go by, except maybe for McDonald's or the local used CD shop.
The closest thing they may have to work experience is a summer internship. But students usually gain such opportunities (a) because their families, etc. have connections, and/or (b) because their families can afford to pay their living expenses while they spend the summer in unpaid work. Either way, that's relying on snobbery as a critical employment factor.
So - how else would you rapidly sort 10,000 applications?
Alright, but that's like the difference between, say, Slim-Fast ("you must eat our food") and Bill Phillips' Body-for-Life Plan ("you can eat whatever you want from this list, but not eating our food will be more difficult.")
Both publishers are in the business of selling their inside scoop on evaluating colleges. Both publishers give you some information for free, in order to tease you into buying their publication for the full story. The finer details aren't really relevant to their obvious goals of selling more publications.
Put yourself in the shoes of an employment recruiter or grad-school admissions committee. You have 10,000 applicants to your school/workplace. You don't have time to interview all 10,000. You have about twelve seconds to glance at their resume and decide whether or not you should interview them.
You mention virus propagation and spam. How are those promoted by pop3? Sure, the email doesn't remain on the server forever. But the admins can run the same blacklists on receipt. And until the user fetches it (rarely instantaneous), the admins can run the exact same Bayesian-filter/attachment-scanning mail tools on pop3 mail that they run on HTTP mail.
You're probably noting that, with web mail, attachments aren't downloaded unless the user actively downloads them. That's true, and that renders web mail somewhat more trustworthy than pop. But the security hole lies largely in Outlook's auto-execute-code functionality, which should have been disabled ages ago.
If you eliminate that, HTTP mail is exactly as (un)secure as Pop3. When the stupid user sees that "ClaudiaSchiffer.exe" attachment, it matters little if he has to download the file from the HTTP mail server vs. executing the attachment. Same result.
Consider: What does Outlook Express allow one to do? Well, for no more than the cost of Windows, the user gets an email client that allows them to fetch data from a POP server and store it on their hard drives.
Now think about Microsoft's "next-gen tech" initiatives. Let's see, there's three, really:
1) Blackcomb, which promises an explosion of metadata (read: data bloat) and phenomenal background cycle usage (read: mandatory hardware upgrades) for not much user benefit. (Have you looked at how much metadata is stored in the "Properties" pages of a Word XP document? Good grief, there's tons. Now how often do you use that? Roughly... never? Bingo.) Not really any connection here.
2) Trusted Computing/Palladium. Again, not much connection here. (Interesting that when MS says it's interested in protecting copyrighted works, it means media distributors' copyrighted works... not the copyrights that you own regarding the email that you write, which is open for pilferage by Outlook worm du jour.)
3) Hailstorm. DINGDINGDING! We have a winner.
An' it goes a little somethin' like dis:
Microsoft has realized that it can't easily sell many more upgrades of Windows or Office. The "more stable Windows" line has been exhausted from re-use. The Office paperclip is already in 3D and can't be improved more. So, to continue reaping monopoly profits, they want to move sofware to the rental model. They drop the initial price on their software, but bill you monthly for the rest of your life, and for the same software.
Now - how can it do that? If they give you the software, they can't prevent you from using some dirty h@x0r trick to crack it and then stop paying. So, they retain much program functionality on MS's servers. You no longer own a functional copy of Word. You just own an input/output web interface to their copy of Word.
But while they're on this track - while they're pushing you to surrender your software to MS - why not convince you to surrender your documents to MS as well? They'll store the data on their servers. It will always be accessible (so long as you pay your licensing fees like a good little serf), and you don't have to worry about hard drive crashes or data loss (disclaimer: no guarantees, understand; you waived your rights through shrink-wrap.) So now you can't switch to some dirty pirate-OS like Linux without forfeiting all of your data.
Of course, Hailstorm died a PR-debacle death, because users aren't quite that stupid (or more accurately, tech-savvy users anticipated their treachery.) But Microsoft's dreams of rental pricing didn't die. After all, they have no other real improvements to offer for their core products.
Hence, no more Outlook Express.
Where's the tie? Easy. OE allowed you to store your mail on your server. But of course, Hotmail and MSN store your data on their servers. It's prepping you for the day when all of your data is on their servers.
"'but Otzi is the first known homosexual man that enjoyed being [made a receptacle of lust].... Otzi was the passive partner--of this there is absolutely no doubt.... The sperm was carbon dated.'"
Y'know, at first, I thought: Why would they bother? He's been dead for like 60,000 years; why bother carbon-dating it? Can't we be sure that it's just about as old as ol' Otzi here? Even necrophiliacs wouldn't stoop that low.
Then I thought: Wait a minute, I'm questioning the bottom-line standards of necrophiliacs.
Then I stopped thinking about the issue altogether because I didn't like where it was heading. Ick.
I can think of a decent reason why Gateway would enter a market so late, and with such an underwhelming offering. They're probably trying to find some way into the palm-level computing market.
It makes sense. HP and Dell offer PDA's, but the PDA market is so commoditized that Gateway can't distinguish itself. A Gateway-brand MP3 player, now - that's an area that is (a) easy to enter, (b) easy to improve (just add a hard drive!), and (c) easy to distinguish the product once it's at that level. There are only a few hard-drive-sized MP3 players out there; it would be easy for Gateway's to stand out.
(Furthermore: No one's really taking the MP3 player market anywhere, so Gateway could be the first to do it. Video, images, Bluetooth/802.11, web serving, built-in cameras, Internet connectivity - next-gen MP3 players could benefit from all of these... but no one's offering anything of the kind. Consumers' best hope for all-in-one devices is that PDAs will gain access to hefty storage and eat the MP3 market - which is starting to happen.)
Given the impending convergence of portable computing markets - MP3 players, digicams, cell phones, portable media, and palmtop computers - this is one big, coalescing market. Of course Gateway wants to get in. I would, too.
David Stein, Esq.
The *real* boon in high-capacity CF (etc.) cards
on
4Gb CF Card Announced
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· Score: 3, Insightful
...will be the elimination of the MP3 player market.
It frustrates me to no end that I carry around a rather remarkably-specced PDA that could handily play MP3s... but I'm hampered by limited storage. It's like being unable to drive your Corvette because you can't buy enough gas.
The high-capacity portable-medium format will obsolesce one device from my gadget arsenal. One less battery to recharge; one less file store to maintain; one less device for firmware, driver updates, and connectors.
>It did not create "intellectual property", a highly offensive misnomer, it created a >temporary loan from the public domain, to which all ideas belong once expressed.
Interesting suggestion, but ultimately incorrect.
You suggest that people who create "intellectual property" - useful inventions and works of art - hold no rights over their inventions except those generously given to them by the government. That's great for the public and the public domain, but it's ultimately self-inhibiting.
Inventors and artists always have one kind of intellectual property right: trade secret. Inventors can use their useful techniques in the secrecy of their labs. Artists can choose to reveal their works under only strict confidentiality relationships. How are you going to stop this - require artists and inventors to disclose their inventions to the public or risk prison?
In the end, would it make much difference if the newest Harry Potter book were freely available in Borders but protected by copyright law, or whether it were sold only to customers who's signed the publisher's confidentiality agreement? The latter case may well result in even more absurd and draconian restrictions on the public.
The whole point of intellectual property law is to avoid this (much worse) scenario. The only realistic way to coerce authors and inventors to reveal their works to the world is to give them some kind of reward. The simplest - and, arguably, fairest - such reward is a recognition of their rights to their creation. It doesn't get much simpler than that.
The patent system is flawed - obviously, patents like Amazon's OneClick "business method" and faster-than-lightspeed communication should never be granted. The copyright system is even much more flawed - "limited term" should not be legally extensible to a trillion years. But, the fundamentals of intellectual property law are sound, and substantially different from your suggestion.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but the analogy applies keenly to medicine - to physicians - as well. The chain of command for medicine is pretty clear-cut: Med students report to interns; interns report to residents; residents report to attendings; attendings report to department chairs.
Only above the department chair level do non-physicians really start getting involved in supervision - and at that stage, you're really talking about running a department, not patient management.
- David Stein
Yeah, you've smacked that nail squarely on the head.
That's the most incredibly annoying feature of Product Activation. Why shouldn't I be allowed to install software - every kind, really - on both my notebook and on my home desktop server machine? Does Symantec really think they're going to double their sales - or, in fact, achieve anything except piss off their core users?
Antivirus software isn't a Windows monopoly. we have other options. They're not as good and polished as Symantec, but 3dfx learned the hard way that market leadership is often ephemeral.
Symantec should take a lesson from Intuit. Their TurboTax spyware/activation software thing turned into a total debacle, resulting in that rarest of all things - a corporate apology.
- David Stein
(I think that the answer to this factoid observation is self-evident, but I'll post it anyway.)
The costs of developing large-scale games only affects the developers of large-scale games. As noted abundantly by others, such games tend to fit certain well-defined genres: RTS, MMORPG, FPS, RPG... indeed, the whole reason we even have and know these acronyms is because the styles of games have become extraordinarily pigeonholed.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Take Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - the game only works because gamers have been trained to go along with the scripting and accept the monolithic linearity of the missions. If you do, however, you get a pretty grand experience.
But the point is this: A few game niches have become so overproduced that independent developers can't hope to compete - but the rest of the market is wide open.
And what a wide-scale market that is! How many genres have barely been tapped, or not yet invented? How do you even classify something like Popcap's Insaniquarium? Or PaRappa the Rapper, or Dance Dance Revolution? Those are pretty easy games to design and develop, and they're fiercely fun. Window dressing is extra - but for these innovative games, window dressing is secondary to gameplay. (What a novel concept!)
Bottom line: Independent developers should not mimic Electronic Arts and try to compete in these highly stylized, overbudgeted affairs. But there's plenty of untapped gaming out there, just waiting for someone with a smidge of vision and a touch of imagination. Go get 'em, guys!
David Stein, Esq.
In almost every type of employment, your job is to make sure your supervisor is satisfied with your work. Their job is to oversee you and make sure you're doing a good job for the company.
Now, if you drop that into the guise of any client-oriented job - be it law, medicine, IT, or even a lowly customer service job - satisfying customers is not your primary and sole responsibility. You have to balance each client's interests against those of the company, other clients, and the priorities of your boss.
If a client is expecting too much, your mission is not to do everything they say - that's a great way to throw your priorities out of order. You're letting them detract from your other responsibilities. If you don't feel right telling them that they're not your only client, then apologize, tell them that you have other duties as well, and refer them to your boss. Let him deal with it. That's why he makes more than you do.
Really - I can't stress this enough. Keep your boss up-to-date on what you're doing, and let him guide your priorities. If anything or anyone is straining those priorities, let him deal with it.
It's really that simple.
- David Stein
Like I said - "pretty cool for LANs," such as your company's network. That's exactly what I meant. Similarly, I'll really enjoy running apps at full speed from another network computer's hard drive, or streaming full-screen video from a local network server.
My point was that, in the greater realm of network connections, LAN communication is sort of the minor usage - perhaps for businesses, and definitely for personal usage - and the bottlenecks in WAN communication are already enough to stymie the benefits of 100mbps (let alone 10,000,000mbps!)
- David Stein
Pretty cool for LANs, but otherwise rather useless.
We already have gigabit Ethernet - which (even rounding down somewhat to account for checksum and overhead and such) should be capable of transferring around 100 megabytes of data per second. How many of us have ever seen even 10% of this in practice for a general Internet connection? I'm lucky if I can pull one megabyte per second from an Internet site that doesn't happen to be, y'know, next door.
- David Stein
You know, when I look back at the thousands of games I've played, two distinct groups stand out.
There are the wildly ambitious ones (Star Control II, Zelda, Ultima Underworld, Alternate Reality, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night... even Dungeons of Daggorath - yeah, I'm 0ld-sk00l!), which are fun to play and revisit... but you wouldn't, y'know, sit down and play them for 20 minutes.
And then there are those simple but ridiculously fun games. Tetris, Bust-a-Move, Dance Dance Revolution, Scorched Earth, Discs of Tron, Minesweeper, Archon... really simple concepts, but you can lose frightening swaths of your life mastering your skills. It's not that they're oversimplified. They've just got a really rewarding learning curve.
One of the modern champions of the latter is PopCap, of course. I've spent ridiculous amounts of time playing Insaniquarium, to name but one.
- David Stein
Alright, so first you toss the idiots. That makes sense.
Then you sort by GPA. Umm... that's not good.
Have you been to college? Have you taken an engineering course, or a physical chemistry course, or any kind of course that's a weed-out? These are the kinds of courses where the average on the exam is like 27%, the high is a 38%, and out of a group of 20 bright, hard-working students, the prof gives one A and three B's.
The impressiveness of a GPA is completely relative - varies significantly by school and by program type. Class rank is a little better, but not much.
- David Stein
More on point:
MS has been talking about getting into computerized TV for, I dunno, at least six years. Yeah, I remember them talking about it in 1997. Started with thoughts of interactive TV - embedding HTML in the portion of a TV broadcast signal that carries hearing-impaired subtitles. But they couldn't find any killer app for that package, so it got scrapped.
But now we have the whole Tablet PC thing. The tablet is a commercial flop (not really MS's fault; the technology's just not there yet - e.g., battery life) - but profit, actually, wasn't its prime goal. Tablet PC is a proving-ground that Windows XP and Windows CE can overlap into something called Windows Media Center. It's been a successful push, so expect to see Windows trying to take a more central role in your home theater setup in the near future.
Further evidence: Windows Media Player.
Look at how much attention MS has placed on WMP. WMP is free and has no commercial value to Microsoft; and yet it's heavily supported. WMP version 9, people. That's impressive, for a free product made by a rabidly for-profit company.
Now - what's the point of that? MS is taking the software world from the core outward - so it loves owning the heart of the market. Look at history:
The company's past actions reveal its intentions. Tomorrow's home theater systems will feature streaming media, PVR-time-shifting, adaptive algorithms for predicting users' viewing preferences... in short, it needs lots of software at its core. Microsoft intends to occupy that spot, and is going in with guns blazing.
- David Stein
Oh, come now. How can you even begin to state that "they tend to get caught?" It's a little hard to compare with those who never get caught.
Trusting corporations is a bad idea. If you supervise a company and it does the right thing, what harm have you done? Maybe slowed down their productivity a little... small price for society to pay for strongly deterring or punishing malfeasance.
As for anonymous whistleblowing: Oh, sure, great idea. How hard is it for a company to learn who's had access to that particular batch of source code? Identifying the whistleblower would usually be a trivial matter - and then come the defamation lawsuits that wreck the whistleblower's career. Not very encouraging.
- David Stein
uradu is right on the money.
It's a well-known trend, called the "frontier effect" or something similar. Usual course of business:
1) One company creates a great product that comprises a brand-new market. Tons of R&D invested in development; research costs expected to be recouped once (their) market matures.
2) Product hits and causes a stir. Huge sales and good times for frontier company.
3) Entry of competitors, who produce similar (or better) products. They want a piece of the promising and profitable market, and they have an edge because they don't have to invest tons of R&D like the frontier corporation did.
4) Market becomes overcrowded; new entries are indistinguishable from other products. Profits grow thin. Mainstream companies (Microsoft, Dell, Sony) weigh in with their versions, which grab market share by branding otherwise bland products.
5) Frontier company is now struggling. Competitors moved in and devoured the market before the frontier company could recoup its huge R&D outlay. May fold or be acquired by a competitor.
Look at the burgeoning technology-gadget markets: MP3 players, DVD players, PDAs... this trend has hit virtually every new technology that comes out.
And this inevitable trend is why huge, bloated companies like Microsoft and Sony are so successful. Leave the risky, expensive, market-creation junk to foolhardy startups; weigh in with an entry once the market has proven itself. Fault MS for lots of things, but not this one - it's a wise strategy.
- David Stein
Been in the business world a long time? ;)
OK, serious response.
First, general philosophy: History has show, consistently, that trusting corporations to do the right thing is a terrifically bad idea. Especially when it's more costly/troublesome than doing the wrong thing. Especially when the chances that they'll get caught, or punished, are insignificant. I needn't remind you that both Ken Lay and Martha Stewart still walk the streets as a reminder of this.
Now, practical response: Whistleblowers? Are you kidding? There's no better way to ruin one's career, permanently and irrevocably, than turning whistleblower. It's one thing if you're Dr. Jeffrey Wigand taking on tobacco companies who are killing people. It's another thing altogether to ruin your career because your employer stole some open-source wonk's implementation of the cosine function.
- David Stein
Sure, it is. It's a crappy factor, given that someone can probably slouch through Harvard as easily as their local community college.
But what other factors are you going to use? 10,000 John Andersons all apply to your school or for the first-job-after-college-type position. Only a few have any work experience, and generally it was just to make some money on the side. You have to sort them quickly. What other factors do you use?
- David Stein
Why do they have any incentive to be "careful" about their use of open-source? Why not just paste it into your proprietary, closed-source application? It's closed-source, so the chances that anyone finds out are slim to nil. Of course, you have to maintain that as the company line...
Indeed, given the "business ethics? we've heard of 'em" nature of business these days, carefully shepherding one's source code to respect open-source rights is a losing value proposition. It takes resources - time, employees' attention, assignment of responsibility, meetings - while helping the company avoid a terrifically small chance of a lawsuit. Not the *right* thing to do, by any means, but probably the *customary* thing to do.
I've been wondering quite a lot recently just how much respect closed-source developers typically afford to open-source code. I think the answer is a dirty little secret of the software biz.
- David Stein
But college recruiters and employers of recent grads have no work history to go by, except maybe for McDonald's or the local used CD shop.
The closest thing they may have to work experience is a summer internship. But students usually gain such opportunities (a) because their families, etc. have connections, and/or (b) because their families can afford to pay their living expenses while they spend the summer in unpaid work. Either way, that's relying on snobbery as a critical employment factor.
So - how else would you rapidly sort 10,000 applications?
- David Stein
Alright, but that's like the difference between, say, Slim-Fast ("you must eat our food") and Bill Phillips' Body-for-Life Plan ("you can eat whatever you want from this list, but not eating our food will be more difficult.")
Both publishers are in the business of selling their inside scoop on evaluating colleges. Both publishers give you some information for free, in order to tease you into buying their publication for the full story. The finer details aren't really relevant to their obvious goals of selling more publications.
- David Stein
Eh, that's the nature of competition.
Put yourself in the shoes of an employment recruiter or grad-school admissions committee. You have 10,000 applicants to your school/workplace. You don't have time to interview all 10,000. You have about twelve seconds to glance at their resume and decide whether or not you should interview them.
What factors do you use?
- David Stein
(a/k/a: "Don't buy that 'U.S. News' crap! Instead, pay $12.95 for our book, which features a much better method of ranking schools.")
David Stein, Esq.
Wait - why is pop3 inherently unsecure?
You mention virus propagation and spam. How are those promoted by pop3? Sure, the email doesn't remain on the server forever. But the admins can run the same blacklists on receipt. And until the user fetches it (rarely instantaneous), the admins can run the exact same Bayesian-filter/attachment-scanning mail tools on pop3 mail that they run on HTTP mail.
You're probably noting that, with web mail, attachments aren't downloaded unless the user actively downloads them. That's true, and that renders web mail somewhat more trustworthy than pop. But the security hole lies largely in Outlook's auto-execute-code functionality, which should have been disabled ages ago.
If you eliminate that, HTTP mail is exactly as (un)secure as Pop3. When the stupid user sees that "ClaudiaSchiffer.exe" attachment, it matters little if he has to download the file from the HTTP mail server vs. executing the attachment. Same result.
David Stein, Esq.
Consider: What does Outlook Express allow one to do? Well, for no more than the cost of Windows, the user gets an email client that allows them to fetch data from a POP server and store it on their hard drives.
Now think about Microsoft's "next-gen tech" initiatives. Let's see, there's three, really:
1) Blackcomb, which promises an explosion of metadata (read: data bloat) and phenomenal background cycle usage (read: mandatory hardware upgrades) for not much user benefit. (Have you looked at how much metadata is stored in the "Properties" pages of a Word XP document? Good grief, there's tons. Now how often do you use that? Roughly... never? Bingo.) Not really any connection here.
2) Trusted Computing/Palladium. Again, not much connection here. (Interesting that when MS says it's interested in protecting copyrighted works, it means media distributors' copyrighted works... not the copyrights that you own regarding the email that you write, which is open for pilferage by Outlook worm du jour.)
3) Hailstorm. DINGDINGDING! We have a winner.
An' it goes a little somethin' like dis:
Microsoft has realized that it can't easily sell many more upgrades of Windows or Office. The "more stable Windows" line has been exhausted from re-use. The Office paperclip is already in 3D and can't be improved more. So, to continue reaping monopoly profits, they want to move sofware to the rental model. They drop the initial price on their software, but bill you monthly for the rest of your life, and for the same software.
Now - how can it do that? If they give you the software, they can't prevent you from using some dirty h@x0r trick to crack it and then stop paying. So, they retain much program functionality on MS's servers. You no longer own a functional copy of Word. You just own an input/output web interface to their copy of Word.
But while they're on this track - while they're pushing you to surrender your software to MS - why not convince you to surrender your documents to MS as well? They'll store the data on their servers. It will always be accessible (so long as you pay your licensing fees like a good little serf), and you don't have to worry about hard drive crashes or data loss (disclaimer: no guarantees, understand; you waived your rights through shrink-wrap.) So now you can't switch to some dirty pirate-OS like Linux without forfeiting all of your data.
Of course, Hailstorm died a PR-debacle death, because users aren't quite that stupid (or more accurately, tech-savvy users anticipated their treachery.) But Microsoft's dreams of rental pricing didn't die. After all, they have no other real improvements to offer for their core products.
Hence, no more Outlook Express.
Where's the tie? Easy. OE allowed you to store your mail on your server. But of course, Hotmail and MSN store your data on their servers. It's prepping you for the day when all of your data is on their servers.
Welcome to the future. Prepare to be assimilated.
David Stein, Esq.
This part of the article is interesting...
"'but Otzi is the first known homosexual man that enjoyed being [made a receptacle of lust].... Otzi was the passive partner--of this there is absolutely no doubt.... The sperm was carbon dated.'"
Y'know, at first, I thought: Why would they bother? He's been dead for like 60,000 years; why bother carbon-dating it? Can't we be sure that it's just about as old as ol' Otzi here? Even necrophiliacs wouldn't stoop that low.
Then I thought: Wait a minute, I'm questioning the bottom-line standards of necrophiliacs.
Then I stopped thinking about the issue altogether because I didn't like where it was heading. Ick.
- David Stein
I can think of a decent reason why Gateway would enter a market so late, and with such an underwhelming offering. They're probably trying to find some way into the palm-level computing market.
It makes sense. HP and Dell offer PDA's, but the PDA market is so commoditized that Gateway can't distinguish itself. A Gateway-brand MP3 player, now - that's an area that is (a) easy to enter, (b) easy to improve (just add a hard drive!), and (c) easy to distinguish the product once it's at that level. There are only a few hard-drive-sized MP3 players out there; it would be easy for Gateway's to stand out.
(Furthermore: No one's really taking the MP3 player market anywhere, so Gateway could be the first to do it. Video, images, Bluetooth/802.11, web serving, built-in cameras, Internet connectivity - next-gen MP3 players could benefit from all of these... but no one's offering anything of the kind. Consumers' best hope for all-in-one devices is that PDAs will gain access to hefty storage and eat the MP3 market - which is starting to happen.)
Given the impending convergence of portable computing markets - MP3 players, digicams, cell phones, portable media, and palmtop computers - this is one big, coalescing market. Of course Gateway wants to get in. I would, too.
David Stein, Esq.
...will be the elimination of the MP3 player market.
It frustrates me to no end that I carry around a rather remarkably-specced PDA that could handily play MP3s... but I'm hampered by limited storage. It's like being unable to drive your Corvette because you can't buy enough gas.
The high-capacity portable-medium format will obsolesce one device from my gadget arsenal. One less battery to recharge; one less file store to maintain; one less device for firmware, driver updates, and connectors.
David Stein, Esq.
>It did not create "intellectual property", a highly offensive misnomer, it created a
>temporary loan from the public domain, to which all ideas belong once expressed.
Interesting suggestion, but ultimately incorrect.
You suggest that people who create "intellectual property" - useful inventions and works of art - hold no rights over their inventions except those generously given to them by the government. That's great for the public and the public domain, but it's ultimately self-inhibiting.
Inventors and artists always have one kind of intellectual property right: trade secret. Inventors can use their useful techniques in the secrecy of their labs. Artists can choose to reveal their works under only strict confidentiality relationships. How are you going to stop this - require artists and inventors to disclose their inventions to the public or risk prison?
In the end, would it make much difference if the newest Harry Potter book were freely available in Borders but protected by copyright law, or whether it were sold only to customers who's signed the publisher's confidentiality agreement? The latter case may well result in even more absurd and draconian restrictions on the public.
The whole point of intellectual property law is to avoid this (much worse) scenario. The only realistic way to coerce authors and inventors to reveal their works to the world is to give them some kind of reward. The simplest - and, arguably, fairest - such reward is a recognition of their rights to their creation. It doesn't get much simpler than that.
The patent system is flawed - obviously, patents like Amazon's OneClick "business method" and faster-than-lightspeed communication should never be granted. The copyright system is even much more flawed - "limited term" should not be legally extensible to a trillion years. But, the fundamentals of intellectual property law are sound, and substantially different from your suggestion.
David Stein, Esq.
And the message is........ "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
[NASA engineer] Son of a bitch!