Alot of people think the success of Linux means the doom of Microsoft. Not Likley. It just means they'll have to play fair again.
I believe that the success of Linux means the doom of Microsoft, or at least of Microsoft as we know it. The success of Linux would force Microsoft to play fair, but that is not their core competency. Either they will make it a core competency right quick, or they will die.
Either way, the customer wins.
Apple had it wrong. They used to think that, for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose; they were correct. They were correct because, for Apple (or Linux) to win, the customer pretty much has to win. And for Microsoft to win, the customer has to lose.
I think that putting a user-friendly shell on Linux (such as Win95 over DOS) is a good idea. Here's the difference between how to do it in Linux, and how to do it in DOS:
In Linux, we have a user-friendly front end, but we don't require it.
Linux needs two front ends. One is the simplistic interface for someone who just wants to check their email and write memos. The other one is the current X-based "experts only" mode.
So long as the OS under the hood is rock-solid, the end user doesn't care. Having that second interface gives you more control (thus more power) at the cost of needing more mental effort. Drop that complex interface, and you lose the hackers. But here, you can have your cake and eat it, too.
While you cannot kill (or perhaps injure) a person just because you give them permission, you can abuse or take someone's property if they give you permission. If I put widgets in a box saying "Free sample", I can't have you arrested for "stealing" one. Indeed, there was one case where a car dealership put up a billboard in the shape of a coupon, saying to bring it in for a free car. Somebody dismantled the billboard and trucked the whole thing into the dealership. Not only could they not be sued or arrested for dismantling the billboard (it asked them to, thus implying permission), the courts ruled that the dealership owed them a car!
In the same way, this sort of B&E by permission is legit. This has been done by private "tiger teams" numerous times, in the private biz and the military. Microsoft has simply given B&E permission (to that one site) to the world, using the entier net.population as one honkin' huge tiger team.
My opinion? Forget about who owes what to whom. Microsoft is a symptom of a system that doesn't work.
Capitalism is a system that allows people to become wealthy by making other people wealthy. From a capitalism's perspective (which is not to say from a capitalist's perspective), the point of a company is to produce services and/or products for the people. Capitalism only works because of the honkin' huge carrot-on-a-stick of corporate profits.
Does this sound like communism? Think about it. Pyramid schemes are detestable by capitalist standards, specifically because they produce nothing. Extortion is uncapitalist. Capitalism works only so long as it is very hard to make money without giving something in return.
Does Microsoft give to the people? Only in the same way that a heroin dealer does. Microsoft software isn't good; it's addictive. You have to have it because everybody else has it.
The system we put in place to serve us has failed. This doesn't mean that we have a bad system; it means that we have to fix it. Until we do, our capitalism will continue degenerating into a nonproductive anarchy.
I won a WinCE box. My planner is plain paper. I tried it, but found it unusable as a planner. It's sitting in my trunk now, and I carry my dead trees around all day.
Amusingly, it's still better than on Intel. I wasn't able to crash my WinCE box...
I'm still working with a dead tree Franklin planner. I actually schlep it around everywhere. Then I won (not bought, won) a Wince box--for showing up at a meeting (go figure--the company had to give some away, I guess). Being the office anti-Windows bigot, I got a couple of ribs about it.
Then I tried using it. I don't know if it is because it's Wince, whether I am a dyed-in-the-wool Franklin addict, or the state of the art isn't quite there yet, but the result was the same; I have never been more disorganized in my life. Since I couldn't use it as an organizer, it became a lame game machine, doing nothing but sucking up time. Worse, I can't hack it. I'm not buying a compiler for it, I can't find a Perl interperter for it, and you can't replace hardware boards. It's now sitting in the trunk of my car.
Part of what bugged me is that I can't set it up the way I want about it. The reason I stick with a dead-tree planner is that paper is infinitely hackable. The Wince box forced me to plan its way, which had nothing to do with the way I do things.
The other problem stems from the fact that a PDA is not an island. You need to sync it up with desktop stuff. That's well and fine by itself, but how good is the desktop stuff? The only thing I would consider would be the Pilot/Franklin Software combo, but the Franklin Planner desktop software is Windows-only.
The PDA technology just seems too limited and immature to help me. I figure it does help others, but it just doesn't work for me. I'll check the field out in a few years, but for now I am using dead trees until the twisted sand can do better.
Remember Herbert's conclusion (or, if you prefer, Douglas Adams' conclusion): the best leader is the one who doesn't want the job.
Case in point: Linus Torvalds. All he wanted to do was putter around on a 386, and he finds himself "leading" millions of geeks into a place that Microsoft has already laid claim to.
As far as I can tell, this sort of power hasn't seemed to corrupt him in the least. He has something resembling a regular job. This is because power doesn't corrupt, it attracts the corruptable. But this power didn't attract him; he just produced it, almost by accident.
BTW, this is an advantage a monarchy has over a republic (though not enough for me to want a monarchy). In a monarchy, the leader does not attempt to become the leader; they just are by birth. In a republic, anyone running for office has selected themselves as a potential leader, as the power has attracted them. Thus, the fact that you want to lead is the first strike against your ability to do it well.
Without government intervention, the free market MUST provide consumers with the best possible products. This gets perverted when government incentives exist (subsidies, special protections). (side note: I believe there is a case for anti-trust law, but otherwise I am against governmental interference in the operation of a market.)
I think that governments need to have some legislation in place to produce an economic domain where capitalism works. Within this domain, the best way to gain wealth is to produce wealth for others; that is what capitalism is all about.
Capitalism is a set of natural laws describing how economic transactions occur. Many natural laws only hold true within a certain domain. For example, Newtonian physics only works when the objects it describes are over a certain size (not much smaller than an angstrom, say), and are not moving very close to the speed of light in a vacuum. If you go outside that realm, Newtonian physics break down and you need a new set of laws.
You need certain legislation to keep within the realm of capitalism. The most obvious such legislation is antitrust law. Others include truth-in-advertising laws and contract law; both enforce an ability to trust one's vendor. Tort (lawsuit) law also exists to enforce trust; this gives us reasonable ways to settle vendor-customer disagreements (the fact that tort law is now the first, rather than the last resort, is another problem entirely).
The government can destroy a capitalism in one of two ways. If it allows citizens to operate outside the realm of capitalism, making it possible for them to gain great gobs of wealth without producing significant wealth for others (say, lying through your teeth and selling snake oil), people will follow their profit motive in ways that don't help others. The other way to failure is to overlegislate, as you said. Overlegislation deadens the profit motive and produces a socialism.
So where are we (the US) now? IMHO, we are slightly overlegislated (less so than most "capitalist" countries) in most areas. However, we missed one key condition of capitalism: that economic success should not translate to political power in the government that set up the capitalism. Since we missed that trick, our largest companies (with the largest lobbies) are underlegislated, and able to make money by screwing the people over.
Intel is putting together a platform that is suboptimal for Windows. Microsoft is not planning to optimize Windows for that platform, but they will offer something that will limp along on it. The conclusion: this is an opportunity for alternate OSs to beat Windows.
Will somebody explain how this "Windows running suboptimally on an Intel platform" differs one iota from the situation today? Windows running suboptimally appears to have little effect on their market share.
There are a couple of big differences between the site lists and the current blockers. First off, you could choose multiple site lists, and add your own. Secondly, you choose your list independantly of your software. Currently, if I don't like the access I get with one site blocker, I have to buy new software to hook up with another one.
As far as letting someone else decide, I don't deny that you would do that by buying lists. But we constantly let other people make important decisions in our lives. Many of us let accountants do our taxes, let doctors diagnose our illnesses, let mutual fund managers do our investing for us.
This is not counter to keeping control. This world is extremely complicated; you simply cannot properly make all the decisions that need to be made in your life. That is why we submit to experts; we have doctors figure out why we're sick, mutual fund managers to handle our investments, lawyers to sue the idiot who ran into your car, geeks to keep our computers running.
So long as we have a large population of competent experts, we can use them to keep as much control as we can stand. We find an expert that makes decisions the way we would if we had the time and skill (for example, we pick our mutual fund managers based on our agressiveness in investing). We may have several experts (split our money up between funds; have specialist doctors), and we still have final say. If we disagree with an expert, we take our business elsewhere.
So it would be with lists. You could buy multiple lists (very good for special interests; NASA could make a smallish list of nothing but "safe" space exploration sites). You would also be able to add your own sites, or remove one that came from a list vendor. It all comes down to the question of "who do you trust?".
First, a kid can expand his or her horizons with or without the WWW. Likely, at least 50% of the Slashdot population grew up without the WWW. Methinks the average slashdotter's horizons are pretty expanded.
Secondly, there is an idea buried here. Perhaps the parent feeds the browser (or router) a list of approved sites and/or site domains. The parent can then add sites as needed or wanted (as kiddo whines, "Can I link to megasportssite.com?").
If software were instrumented this way, you could also create a small industry of selling site lists. I could then subscribe to a site list, and they would send me a list of approved sites every month that I could "install" as part of my master list. Depending on my parental style, I could get my list from anybody from "Toys R Us" to Billy Graham (or even multiples--any site on any list can be accessed).
This would cause a very restricted browsing experience, but the restrictions could be dropped by parental control.
This doesn't help on accessing the Web from places other than home, but I'm not sure anything shy of "1984" would.
As long as big business is run by old men, there will be NO understanding of the internet. Bsides, all they're after is money. That's what companies do. Make money.
Ain't it grand?
You make "making money" sound like a bad thing. Frankly, it is a laudable goal.
Like everything else, there is a right way and a wrong way to make money. The right way (per capitalism) is to increase your wealth by increaing your customers' wealth. Take a car company for example. They increase their wealth by selling me a car. I increase my wealth by buying it; I lose money, but I gain the wealth of the ability to go 40 miles without breaking a sweat. The companies that can make their customers the wealthiest (the most prestigious car, the cheapest car, the most maintenence-free car), tend to come out on top. This is what capitalism is all about.
The wrong way is to get money from somebody else without giving him anything back. Extortionists and muggers do this. You can argue that peddlers in addictive drugs (or addictive operating systems) do the same.
BTW, not understanding the Internet is not about making money. Not understanding the Internet is just about incompetence. If you take two similar companies, and only one understands the Internet, it has a competitive edge. Ignorance in a capitalism is self-correcting; the ignorant tend to either get illuminized or replaced. The fact that it hasn't happened yet simply means that Titanics don't turn on dimes. Inertia only takes you so far.
The LINKING page could give explicit license to link to the page as long as certain criteria are met - any violation of the criteria voids the license immediately and may cause litigation.
But the basic problem is, I need absolutely no license to link to anything on anybody's site. The only possible exception is if I electronically "sign" an agreement (like you do with the NY Times site). If I don't have to do that, I can refer to the data however I care to.
The mundane equivalent to deep linking is referring or footnoting. If somebody publishes a book, and I access it (buy a copy and read it), I have the right to give referential or navigational data to anybody I care to. I can tell you that the good stuff is in figure 38 or page 182. I simply can't give you figure 38 or page 182, but I can tell you where to get it. This interferes with no copyright law, since I am copying nothing.
Per the above book-based example, ownership of content does not imply ownership of its locational metadata. That is all a URL is; locational metadata.
The fact that the end user sees it as a copy of the information is an illusion. The reference (URL) gets interperted by the browser, and the data is retrieved. This is only possible because the data is publicly accessable (not public domain).
This is like me referring to a publicly accessible book (say, one that is in libraries). The difference is that the browser will actually search the stacks and retrieve the book for you--all under the covers.
A LINKING document might be usable for politeness, stating the terms that one should link up. However, such a document should not carry the force of law. The legal precedents all flow the other way.
Disclaimer: My employer is in the e-commerce backend business. While we run Red Hat on our site, we are in no other business relationships with Red Hat. None of our products/services are currently in Red Hat's E-Commerce kit.
People sell these great "e-commerce" solutions that set up a beautiful storefront. They forget about accepting payment.
There's a lot of e-marketing software out there. Tease your eye, get you to buy. The rest of e-commerce is how to get your money, how to get the customer their product, how to track complaints...all the non-sexy stuff.
The packages that the RH kit ships with at least claim to work the backend, from payment processing and credit card authorization to order databases. As to how well the packages actually work, I have no personal experience.
As to whether it's worth the extra C-note, it's the same RH gambit: save you the trouble of getting it off the FTP site, likely bundled in with some installation support. When "trouble" can be measured in engineer-hours, that $149 is chicken feed.
I've seen both types of older programmers. On the one hand, I've had to deal with a FORTRAN-66 programmer who couldn't get the hang of either GUIs or the Internet. While I may have sympathy for this sort of fellow, it wouldn't extend to any payroll under my control.
OTOH, I've run into the guru who keeps up with the latest tech, and knows the old stuff. He doesn't have to write a line of code to increase our productivity; he earns his keep just by helping the rest of us with our programming issues. Having somebody who has been there and done that is invaluable.
The smart employer will see the difference, and discriminate accordingly. Having a guru on your team may be worth two or three newbies; the guru makes the newbies more effective.
Coffee? Coffee on the Web? People are complaining about porn and there are caffeine references out there?
That's disgusting!
The stuff stunts your growth. It shorts out your circuits. It's behind the thrtow-away, get-ahead culture we have today! It turns ordinary God-fearing people into programmers!.
We need new blocking software, or a new service. I'm going to talk with the guys at Cyber Patrol to see if I can't license their software and make a caffeine-blocking service. Anybody wants in on this fast-growing industry, I'm accepting venture capital. The first two sites to be blocked are Starbucks and Javasoft
And shall Disney tell its cable customers, resort guests, etc. that they have been boycotted by certain religions? More to the point, do Linux distributors have a responsibility to their customers to tell them that Microsoft will make their products gratuitously incompatible with Linux?
I don't feel that anybody has a responsibility to tell anybody else that some third party has blacklisted them. That's all blocking software is: automated blacklisting. I can't blame the ISP on that one.
Of course, it is good business to fix the blacklisting problem. One cheap and effective way to do this, that won't leave them open to lawsuits, is the following.
The ISP can set up another domain name on their current Web server. They suggest to their customers that they should move non-porn pages over there (letting them be hosted on both old and new domains) to get them out from under the blocking software.
If you assume that the porn page owners will play nice (yes, big assumption...more on this later), users can put themselves under the vanilla domain, which isn't blocked. Since the customers are choosing the new domain, the ISP isn't determining what is and isn't legit here. Thus, they are immune from the legal exposure of rating their own pages.
This can be screwed up if somebody moves a porn page onto the new domain. The ISP can't stop this, or it would be legally exposed. This should only happen if you have malicious users, or if someone moves a page over that is on the "borderline". In either case, the ISP loses, and is no better off than they were before.
However, they are not that much worse off. They need no new hardware, just a new domain name and some expert configuration work on their present Web server. While this strategy is not guaranteed to work, it stands good odds of working and failure isn't that bad, either.
It's Microsoft's pattern, and I'm so glad that Microsoft finally attempted to go against the only company, at this time, who has the power to fight back.
I'm only happy if this sort of war allows a proper solution to sneak up on them, which I doubt.
Microsoft's pattern is just as reprehensable when AOL is using it. It's not the company, it's the tactics of screwing the user for profit.
Just *think* before you take the kind of job with that sort of requirement. You cannot take vacation if you are on call all the time. You'll just end up physically ill and mentally infirm.
The company I work for expects everybody to take vacation. This forces people to learn enough to cover for each other, and to lose that "geek addiction"--the realization that a particular employee is as mission-critical as the RAID array. This also prevents burnout; this outfit is aggressive about reducing turnover.
It works about halfway decently; nowhere near perfectly, but better than if they weren't aggressive on this count.
Part of the reason for my company being "enlightened" is that we are a technical business. Life is probably much harder in an IS department for a non-computer company (like a financial outfit or retailer).
Another problem with voting with your feet is that you get trapped in a time loop. If the reason you are leaving is because you have no time, when will you find the time to interview?
This is a nasty little death spiral, and it takes a lot of effort to reach escape velocity. I've been there, I've done that, and my sympathy goes out to those who have neither the time to interview nor the money to just quit and be unemployed for a couple of months.
But, IMHO, it's worth it.
Also, remember to put your values in perspective. A lot of people are making high five figure or low six figure salaries. How important are those last few thousand dollars?
You don't live twice as well on $40k than $20k, nor twice as well at $80k than $40k. That first $20k or $30k is very important; you keep wheels on the street, roof over the head, and food in the fridge with that. Everything else is toys and gravy; the lifestyle equivalent of chrome. Many of us could afford to take a pay cut; for those of us who are losing their minds, that pay cut pays dividends in sanity.
One of my contacts is a consultant and family man who cannot stand 40-hour work weeks. He works ~20 hours per week, makes enough money to get by reasonably comfortably, and has the time to raise his kids. If you're making a lot of money, how important is that money to you? I've gotten to the point where I am not going to give significant new amounts of effort for any amount of money the corporate world wants to throw at me. I have enough; while more money may mean better toys,
I like the "Bar-Association" idea, but I wouldn't support a mandatory programmer association. The Bar is mandatory by law; it is usually illegal to practice law without being in the local Bar. This should not be the case for programming, for several reasons.
First off, we have less need for regulation than the legal industry. Software errors are still little to moderately dangerous; legal errors can stick you in a cell or an electric chair.
Secondly, the training required for programming has a short half-life. Many programmers don't learn this trade through the traditional channels, and I doubt that those who do are measurably better than those who don't. This, combined with the antiauthoritarianism of some programmers, would keep some of the brightest geeks out of the biz.
Third, we have a serious programmer defecit in this country. Even bad programmers can help, improving under the wings of better programmers.
Finally, imagine what a regulated programmer's association would do to free software. Regulation of programmers would necessarily transfer to regulation of software. Linux might get canned for not being 100% association-compliant!
The use of such an association would be for identification, not regulation. A smart company could hire both associated programmers and disaccociated programmers, specifically putting the former over the latter. Part of the "oath" of such an association might be to help unassociated programmers gain their certification.
We have a lot of certification programs that show one's competence with a given technology. We need generally recognized certification programs for software development itself.
2. To sabotage distributed.net's operation. Why? Are you trying to find the key yourself? Better you should run the regular client, get a chance at the $1-2K prize!
A big point of the RSA contests is to show just how crackable weak encryption is, to push for legalization of strong encryption. There are several groups who wish to argue otherwise. Since I am an American, one of those groups is on my payroll, as it were (not that I agree with them).
While I doubt that is currently happening, there are entities with opportunity, motive, and weapon to do this sort of thing to protect the encryption status quo.
The thing is, if you've got a few degrees or at least a decent amount of experience, the market is such that you don't *have* to work on anything even tangentially related to M$, and certainly not at a financial loss.
In dealing with a software development headhunter back in 1997, he sets me up on two interviews the same day. I go to the first one, and they propose teaching me to program in Windows to convert some software. That interview went little further; I wasn't going to waste their time. Understand, BTW, that I told the headhunter that I wasn't going to develop in Windows.
I call the headhunter, and explain this to him. He notes that they were willing to teach me Windows programming. I note that it's not that I can't (I have), but that I won't. He notes that the second interview is also a Windows job, and then incredulously asks, "But how do you expect to get a software engineering job if you won't program in Windows?"
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that the success of Linux means the doom of Microsoft, or at least of Microsoft as we know it. The success of Linux would force Microsoft to play fair, but that is not their core competency. Either they will make it a core competency right quick, or they will die.
Either way, the customer wins.
Apple had it wrong. They used to think that, for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose; they were correct. They were correct because, for Apple (or Linux) to win, the customer pretty much has to win. And for Microsoft to win, the customer has to lose.
In Linux, we have a user-friendly front end, but we don't require it.
Linux needs two front ends. One is the simplistic interface for someone who just wants to check their email and write memos. The other one is the current X-based "experts only" mode.
So long as the OS under the hood is rock-solid, the end user doesn't care. Having that second interface gives you more control (thus more power) at the cost of needing more mental effort. Drop that complex interface, and you lose the hackers. But here, you can have your cake and eat it, too.
In the same way, this sort of B&E by permission is legit. This has been done by private "tiger teams" numerous times, in the private biz and the military. Microsoft has simply given B&E permission (to that one site) to the world, using the entier net.population as one honkin' huge tiger team.
Capitalism is a system that allows people to become wealthy by making other people wealthy. From a capitalism's perspective (which is not to say from a capitalist's perspective), the point of a company is to produce services and/or products for the people. Capitalism only works because of the honkin' huge carrot-on-a-stick of corporate profits.
Does this sound like communism? Think about it. Pyramid schemes are detestable by capitalist standards, specifically because they produce nothing. Extortion is uncapitalist. Capitalism works only so long as it is very hard to make money without giving something in return.
Does Microsoft give to the people? Only in the same way that a heroin dealer does. Microsoft software isn't good; it's addictive. You have to have it because everybody else has it.
The system we put in place to serve us has failed. This doesn't mean that we have a bad system; it means that we have to fix it. Until we do, our capitalism will continue degenerating into a nonproductive anarchy.
Amusingly, it's still better than on Intel. I wasn't able to crash my WinCE box...
Then I tried using it. I don't know if it is because it's Wince, whether I am a dyed-in-the-wool Franklin addict, or the state of the art isn't quite there yet, but the result was the same; I have never been more disorganized in my life. Since I couldn't use it as an organizer, it became a lame game machine, doing nothing but sucking up time. Worse, I can't hack it. I'm not buying a compiler for it, I can't find a Perl interperter for it, and you can't replace hardware boards. It's now sitting in the trunk of my car.
Part of what bugged me is that I can't set it up the way I want about it. The reason I stick with a dead-tree planner is that paper is infinitely hackable. The Wince box forced me to plan its way, which had nothing to do with the way I do things.
The other problem stems from the fact that a PDA is not an island. You need to sync it up with desktop stuff. That's well and fine by itself, but how good is the desktop stuff? The only thing I would consider would be the Pilot/Franklin Software combo, but the Franklin Planner desktop software is Windows-only.
The PDA technology just seems too limited and immature to help me. I figure it does help others, but it just doesn't work for me. I'll check the field out in a few years, but for now I am using dead trees until the twisted sand can do better.
Case in point: Linus Torvalds. All he wanted to do was putter around on a 386, and he finds himself "leading" millions of geeks into a place that Microsoft has already laid claim to.
As far as I can tell, this sort of power hasn't seemed to corrupt him in the least. He has something resembling a regular job. This is because power doesn't corrupt, it attracts the corruptable. But this power didn't attract him; he just produced it, almost by accident.
BTW, this is an advantage a monarchy has over a republic (though not enough for me to want a monarchy). In a monarchy, the leader does not attempt to become the leader; they just are by birth. In a republic, anyone running for office has selected themselves as a potential leader, as the power has attracted them. Thus, the fact that you want to lead is the first strike against your ability to do it well.
I think that governments need to have some legislation in place to produce an economic domain where capitalism works. Within this domain, the best way to gain wealth is to produce wealth for others; that is what capitalism is all about.
Capitalism is a set of natural laws describing how economic transactions occur. Many natural laws only hold true within a certain domain. For example, Newtonian physics only works when the objects it describes are over a certain size (not much smaller than an angstrom, say), and are not moving very close to the speed of light in a vacuum. If you go outside that realm, Newtonian physics break down and you need a new set of laws.
You need certain legislation to keep within the realm of capitalism. The most obvious such legislation is antitrust law. Others include truth-in-advertising laws and contract law; both enforce an ability to trust one's vendor. Tort (lawsuit) law also exists to enforce trust; this gives us reasonable ways to settle vendor-customer disagreements (the fact that tort law is now the first, rather than the last resort, is another problem entirely).
The government can destroy a capitalism in one of two ways. If it allows citizens to operate outside the realm of capitalism, making it possible for them to gain great gobs of wealth without producing significant wealth for others (say, lying through your teeth and selling snake oil), people will follow their profit motive in ways that don't help others. The other way to failure is to overlegislate, as you said. Overlegislation deadens the profit motive and produces a socialism.
So where are we (the US) now? IMHO, we are slightly overlegislated (less so than most "capitalist" countries) in most areas. However, we missed one key condition of capitalism: that economic success should not translate to political power in the government that set up the capitalism. Since we missed that trick, our largest companies (with the largest lobbies) are underlegislated, and able to make money by screwing the people over.
In short, the tyranny of the majority breaks down to "Kill all the liberals".
Intel is putting together a platform that is suboptimal for Windows. Microsoft is not planning to optimize Windows for that platform, but they will offer something that will limp along on it. The conclusion: this is an opportunity for alternate OSs to beat Windows.
Will somebody explain how this "Windows running suboptimally on an Intel platform" differs one iota from the situation today? Windows running suboptimally appears to have little effect on their market share.
Stanley Kubrick.
Alas.
As far as letting someone else decide, I don't deny that you would do that by buying lists. But we constantly let other people make important decisions in our lives. Many of us let accountants do our taxes, let doctors diagnose our illnesses, let mutual fund managers do our investing for us.
This is not counter to keeping control. This world is extremely complicated; you simply cannot properly make all the decisions that need to be made in your life. That is why we submit to experts; we have doctors figure out why we're sick, mutual fund managers to handle our investments, lawyers to sue the idiot who ran into your car, geeks to keep our computers running.
So long as we have a large population of competent experts, we can use them to keep as much control as we can stand. We find an expert that makes decisions the way we would if we had the time and skill (for example, we pick our mutual fund managers based on our agressiveness in investing). We may have several experts (split our money up between funds; have specialist doctors), and we still have final say. If we disagree with an expert, we take our business elsewhere.
So it would be with lists. You could buy multiple lists (very good for special interests; NASA could make a smallish list of nothing but "safe" space exploration sites). You would also be able to add your own sites, or remove one that came from a list vendor. It all comes down to the question of "who do you trust?".
Secondly, there is an idea buried here. Perhaps the parent feeds the browser (or router) a list of approved sites and/or site domains. The parent can then add sites as needed or wanted (as kiddo whines, "Can I link to megasportssite.com?").
If software were instrumented this way, you could also create a small industry of selling site lists. I could then subscribe to a site list, and they would send me a list of approved sites every month that I could "install" as part of my master list. Depending on my parental style, I could get my list from anybody from "Toys R Us" to Billy Graham (or even multiples--any site on any list can be accessed).
This would cause a very restricted browsing experience, but the restrictions could be dropped by parental control.
This doesn't help on accessing the Web from places other than home, but I'm not sure anything shy of "1984" would.
Ain't it grand?
You make "making money" sound like a bad thing. Frankly, it is a laudable goal.
Like everything else, there is a right way and a wrong way to make money. The right way (per capitalism) is to increase your wealth by increaing your customers' wealth. Take a car company for example. They increase their wealth by selling me a car. I increase my wealth by buying it; I lose money, but I gain the wealth of the ability to go 40 miles without breaking a sweat. The companies that can make their customers the wealthiest (the most prestigious car, the cheapest car, the most maintenence-free car), tend to come out on top. This is what capitalism is all about.
The wrong way is to get money from somebody else without giving him anything back. Extortionists and muggers do this. You can argue that peddlers in addictive drugs (or addictive operating systems) do the same.
BTW, not understanding the Internet is not about making money. Not understanding the Internet is just about incompetence. If you take two similar companies, and only one understands the Internet, it has a competitive edge. Ignorance in a capitalism is self-correcting; the ignorant tend to either get illuminized or replaced. The fact that it hasn't happened yet simply means that Titanics don't turn on dimes. Inertia only takes you so far.
But the basic problem is, I need absolutely no license to link to anything on anybody's site. The only possible exception is if I electronically "sign" an agreement (like you do with the NY Times site). If I don't have to do that, I can refer to the data however I care to.
The mundane equivalent to deep linking is referring or footnoting. If somebody publishes a book, and I access it (buy a copy and read it), I have the right to give referential or navigational data to anybody I care to. I can tell you that the good stuff is in figure 38 or page 182. I simply can't give you figure 38 or page 182, but I can tell you where to get it. This interferes with no copyright law, since I am copying nothing.
Per the above book-based example, ownership of content does not imply ownership of its locational metadata. That is all a URL is; locational metadata.
The fact that the end user sees it as a copy of the information is an illusion. The reference (URL) gets interperted by the browser, and the data is retrieved. This is only possible because the data is publicly accessable (not public domain).
This is like me referring to a publicly accessible book (say, one that is in libraries). The difference is that the browser will actually search the stacks and retrieve the book for you--all under the covers.
A LINKING document might be usable for politeness, stating the terms that one should link up. However, such a document should not carry the force of law. The legal precedents all flow the other way.
Disclaimer: My employer is in the e-commerce backend business. While we run Red Hat on our site, we are in no other business relationships with Red Hat. None of our products/services are currently in Red Hat's E-Commerce kit.
How about:
hype + forms + hype + ssl + hype + CGI + hype + credit card processing + hype + tracking orders?
People sell these great "e-commerce" solutions that set up a beautiful storefront. They forget about accepting payment.
There's a lot of e-marketing software out there. Tease your eye, get you to buy. The rest of e-commerce is how to get your money, how to get the customer their product, how to track complaints...all the non-sexy stuff.
The packages that the RH kit ships with at least claim to work the backend, from payment processing and credit card authorization to order databases. As to how well the packages actually work, I have no personal experience.
As to whether it's worth the extra C-note, it's the same RH gambit: save you the trouble of getting it off the FTP site, likely bundled in with some installation support. When "trouble" can be measured in engineer-hours, that $149 is chicken feed.
OTOH, I've run into the guru who keeps up with the latest tech, and knows the old stuff. He doesn't have to write a line of code to increase our productivity; he earns his keep just by helping the rest of us with our programming issues. Having somebody who has been there and done that is invaluable.
The smart employer will see the difference, and discriminate accordingly. Having a guru on your team may be worth two or three newbies; the guru makes the newbies more effective.
Coffee? Coffee on the Web? People are complaining about porn and there are caffeine references out there?
That's disgusting!
The stuff stunts your growth. It shorts out your circuits. It's behind the thrtow-away, get-ahead culture we have today! It turns ordinary God-fearing people into programmers!.
How many people realize that Starbucks has a Web site?
We need new blocking software, or a new service. I'm going to talk with the guys at Cyber Patrol to see if I can't license their software and make a caffeine-blocking service. Anybody wants in on this fast-growing industry, I'm accepting venture capital. The first two sites to be blocked are Starbucks and Javasoft
Excuse me, I've got to refill my espresso...
I don't feel that anybody has a responsibility to tell anybody else that some third party has blacklisted them. That's all blocking software is: automated blacklisting. I can't blame the ISP on that one.
Of course, it is good business to fix the blacklisting problem. One cheap and effective way to do this, that won't leave them open to lawsuits, is the following.
The ISP can set up another domain name on their current Web server. They suggest to their customers that they should move non-porn pages over there (letting them be hosted on both old and new domains) to get them out from under the blocking software.
If you assume that the porn page owners will play nice (yes, big assumption...more on this later), users can put themselves under the vanilla domain, which isn't blocked. Since the customers are choosing the new domain, the ISP isn't determining what is and isn't legit here. Thus, they are immune from the legal exposure of rating their own pages.
This can be screwed up if somebody moves a porn page onto the new domain. The ISP can't stop this, or it would be legally exposed. This should only happen if you have malicious users, or if someone moves a page over that is on the "borderline". In either case, the ISP loses, and is no better off than they were before.
However, they are not that much worse off. They need no new hardware, just a new domain name and some expert configuration work on their present Web server. While this strategy is not guaranteed to work, it stands good odds of working and failure isn't that bad, either.
I'm only happy if this sort of war allows a proper solution to sneak up on them, which I doubt.
Microsoft's pattern is just as reprehensable when AOL is using it. It's not the company, it's the tactics of screwing the user for profit.
The company I work for expects everybody to take vacation. This forces people to learn enough to cover for each other, and to lose that "geek addiction"--the realization that a particular employee is as mission-critical as the RAID array. This also prevents burnout; this outfit is aggressive about reducing turnover.
It works about halfway decently; nowhere near perfectly, but better than if they weren't aggressive on this count.
Part of the reason for my company being "enlightened" is that we are a technical business. Life is probably much harder in an IS department for a non-computer company (like a financial outfit or retailer).
This is a nasty little death spiral, and it takes a lot of effort to reach escape velocity. I've been there, I've done that, and my sympathy goes out to those who have neither the time to interview nor the money to just quit and be unemployed for a couple of months.
But, IMHO, it's worth it.
Also, remember to put your values in perspective. A lot of people are making high five figure or low six figure salaries. How important are those last few thousand dollars?
You don't live twice as well on $40k than $20k, nor twice as well at $80k than $40k. That first $20k or $30k is very important; you keep wheels on the street, roof over the head, and food in the fridge with that. Everything else is toys and gravy; the lifestyle equivalent of chrome. Many of us could afford to take a pay cut; for those of us who are losing their minds, that pay cut pays dividends in sanity.
One of my contacts is a consultant and family man who cannot stand 40-hour work weeks. He works ~20 hours per week, makes enough money to get by reasonably comfortably, and has the time to raise his kids. If you're making a lot of money, how important is that money to you? I've gotten to the point where I am not going to give significant new amounts of effort for any amount of money the corporate world wants to throw at me. I have enough; while more money may mean better toys,
First off, we have less need for regulation than the legal industry. Software errors are still little to moderately dangerous; legal errors can stick you in a cell or an electric chair.
Secondly, the training required for programming has a short half-life. Many programmers don't learn this trade through the traditional channels, and I doubt that those who do are measurably better than those who don't. This, combined with the antiauthoritarianism of some programmers, would keep some of the brightest geeks out of the biz.
Third, we have a serious programmer defecit in this country. Even bad programmers can help, improving under the wings of better programmers.
Finally, imagine what a regulated programmer's association would do to free software. Regulation of programmers would necessarily transfer to regulation of software. Linux might get canned for not being 100% association-compliant!
The use of such an association would be for identification, not regulation. A smart company could hire both associated programmers and disaccociated programmers, specifically putting the former over the latter. Part of the "oath" of such an association might be to help unassociated programmers gain their certification.
We have a lot of certification programs that show one's competence with a given technology. We need generally recognized certification programs for software development itself.
A big point of the RSA contests is to show just how crackable weak encryption is, to push for legalization of strong encryption. There are several groups who wish to argue otherwise. Since I am an American, one of those groups is on my payroll, as it were (not that I agree with them).
While I doubt that is currently happening, there are entities with opportunity, motive, and weapon to do this sort of thing to protect the encryption status quo.
In dealing with a software development headhunter back in 1997, he sets me up on two interviews the same day. I go to the first one, and they propose teaching me to program in Windows to convert some software. That interview went little further; I wasn't going to waste their time. Understand, BTW, that I told the headhunter that I wasn't going to develop in Windows.
I call the headhunter, and explain this to him. He notes that they were willing to teach me Windows programming. I note that it's not that I can't (I have), but that I won't. He notes that the second interview is also a Windows job, and then incredulously asks, "But how do you expect to get a software engineering job if you won't program in Windows?"
I dropped that headhunter like a hot isotope.