You can't waste money on the kind of scale it was wasted in the Internet Mania without terrible repercussions. Companies have taken on vast debt to finance expansion and have overbuilt massively on every front. Economists who seem to have a clue call this 'malinvestment'.
One spends money, as a business, in the expectation of generating more money in return. Wasted money means time lost while the business generates more revenue to re-invest in something else. Taking on debt for unproductive investments is much worse -- instead of just hoping for a payoff, now the business MUST generate the money that they expected their investment to create, and must also pay interest on the money to boot. Debt-driven expansion that does not pay off is VERY bad.
The huge amount of malinvestment during the Internet Mania will have repercussions for many years. Post-bubble fallout is always horrible, and this has been far and away the biggest bubble in human history by any measure. It makes the 1920s bull market and crash look minuscule by comparison. Businesses in every market, not just tech, have been cannibalizing their long-term prospects to drive up the stock price short term. This made the executives of these companies very wealthy via stock options, but it has done terrible hidden economic damage. Lucent, AT&T, Cendant, Xerox, and IBM are all good examples. (IBM just hasn't been found out yet by the mainstream.) There will be lots more of this going forward.
The 1920s stock market mania (they were overbought in manufacturing and automobiles) was catastrophic enough to lead into the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Crash of 1929 did not cause the Depression. In school I always had the image of a bunch of people who were eating caviar October 15 and homeless bums in the street on October 30. In actual fact, the decline took several years, steadily destroying wealth as it went.
The reason this wealth destruction was so catastropic was because people had taken on too much debt to buy stocks with. When the mania unwound they were left with huge debt and no possible way to pay it. The destruction of all that paper wealth and subsequent defaults caused a massive deflation. It took ten years for the economy to recover. And mark this: their whole economic expansion and stock market craze was driven by debt, just as ours has been.
The fallout was so bad it scared off an entire generation from credit. True full-blown manias are so awful, in fact, that historically they have only happened when almost all the people old enough to remember the last one are dead. It is no coincidence that few of the people who were adult in 1930 aren't around to warn us.
Worse still: we haven't even crashed all the way yet! The Nasdaq will drop by at least another 50%, and the Dow and S&P need to drop by 40% or so to bring themselves in line with historic valuations. The Nasdaq bubble popping alone might not be enough to trigger a full-scale crisis, but the Dow and S&P are teetering on the edge of the precipice even as I type. They might avoid this crisis. But eventually they will either decline, or the Fed will inflate the money supply so much that everything else will rise by the same amount. The overall outcome is inevitable, but whether we get there via inflation or deflation is up to a combination of investor sentiment and the Fed. So far, the Fed looks to be choosing inflation, as they are printing money at absolutely unprecedented rates. I don't have the numbers in front of me but I believe they grew the money supply at something like a 15% annualized rate last quarter. Money normally should grow about as fast as the economy does. 15% growth/year in the money supply is corrosion of wealth, a cancer -- most people don't know about the tumor yet but if left unchecked it will be lethal.
This was one of the most feared of all the Orwellian predictions, that having certain THOUGHTS could be considered illegal.
This is a dangerous and foolish step. Law must be based on what was actually done, not why it was done. The motivations of other people is something that can never be determined accurately. It can be guessed at over coffee, but has no place in a legal system.
There is a bill in Oregon to to have 'eco crimes' categorized as hate crimes. This would make the penalties most severe for exercising one's Constitutional right of assembly, as trespassing for the purpose of protesting damage to the environment will become a 'hate crime'.
That's only the start -- this isn't just a slippery slope, it's close to a frictionless surface.
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly -- this is much the same as 'pay per minute' access on telephone dial-in. When I was on my ISDN line, I had to think each and every time I dialed in whether or not I had enough time left, and had to track the minutes I used pretty closely. The whole process annoyed me.
I pay quite a bit more for my DSL line, but it is always on and I don't have to worry about usage. I'm not an inordinately heavy user, but the Net is important to me on a day-to-day basis and I much, much prefer not having to think about the minutes I am using.
For this reason I'm resistant to micropayments. I would have no problem subscribing to services I like. I was one of the (idiots?) folks who paid for Slate when it tried to go subscription. I subscribe to several online info sources and am budgeting for twice that much. But I don't like the idea of paying by click because then I have to think about it. It tends to restrain my urge to dig into a new idea or a new site.
I also am very concerned about the tracking capability. Anytime you have a payment system, you must have some method of accurately tracking how the billing and payments are done. That means that, absolutely without question, there is a record of what sites I am visiting. And we all know how long anonymity lasts in the US -- right up until someone gets interested enough to file court papers. Bush has even come out as being opposed to anonymity on the Net, which is horrible.
Anonymity matters. Lack of tracking matters. I won't subscribe to any micropayment system because of that. Yes, subscriptions to online services is a form of tracking, but showing that you subscribe to a site (no matter how politically uncorrect) is not the same as showing that you are actually reading it.
Call me paranoid, but the era of thoughtcrime has already begun, and I imagine it will go a lot further.
Services like Freedom are important -- support them.
I've been checking out Python, and like it pretty well from what I can see -- but I don't see too much ability to deal with regular expressions. I have become very hooked on that capability in Perl. It is *so* powerful for massaging text files.
Does Python have anything similar? I can get used to the other stuff (indents being code is one of the weird ones), but no regular expressions would be hard to live without. (!)
Note also that, if I remember correctly, we have not left a state of emergency for something like forty years. I read an article back in the 80's that talked about how every president for the past twenty years or so had extended the state of emergency by either issuing new executive orders or extending the old ones. I don't remember what triggered the original declaration.
Wouldn't surprise me a bit if it were still true.
Re:Why this is illegal, and a very bad thing to do
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Biggest reason is compatibility. If you think your product might be used as a part of something else, then you should probably pick either the BSD or the GPL license and stick with it. That way, it will be very clearly delineated where your code can and cannot be used. The BSD license, being less restrictive, will allow your code to be used in more places -- like Microsoft utilities.
I personally happen to like the GPL -- it strikes me as the path to maximum freedom, by limiting everyone's freedom just a little bit but forcing them to respect everyone else's. It definitely does put restrictions on the users of your code, and if you truly don't want to restrict them in *any way*, the GPL is a bad choice.
Because with each release and with each passing day, the value of GPLed code grows like a virus, I suspect that eventually the GPL or something like it will encompass most horizontal market software. But this will take a LONG time, probably decades. Open Source, oddly enough, is a lot like the cathedral projects of the middle ages -- people giving their whole lives to working on a project they would never see completed. ESR nothwithstanding, Open Source has a definite sort of cathedralness to it.:-)
I do suspect that most programmers living now will probably see 80% of the eventual outcome.
In my opinion, if Microsoft somehow gets GPLed code restricted in the US, eventually it will destroy the US as a globally competitive force in the software market. It will take awhile, but it will happen.
We're really a very small part of the world, and the only reason Ethiopians aren't writing code is because they can't afford computers. 1 in 50 Ethiopians, just like 1 in 50 Americans, will be a good programmer -- when computers get cheap enough and the basic needs like food and shelter are met on a more regular basis, the US code output will be dwarfed by the rest of the world. It would be smart to make sure we can leverage their IP later, by letting them leverage ours now.
Heh. My big science fair project was electroplating. I did electroplating of copper onto various other substances, mostly as a technical demonstration because I was interested in how it worked.
The funny/sad part is that no kid today could possibly do it the way I did it. Why? I went to an electroplating shop, told them I was going to do a science fair project on electroplating, and could they please help me out?
They gave me some chemicals. I don't remember exactly what they were anymore, but they warned me MOST emphatically that they were exceedingly poisonous and that even a couple flecks of powder on my skin could kill me. They gave me probably a half-pound of the stuff! I'm thinking it may even have been potassium cyanide, as I'm pretty sure there was potassium in it. (I remember it as being a bluish-white chalky powder, if that's a clue to anyone more educated than myself.)
Well, I was very careful indeed, and no lifeforms ceased to exist due to my toying around with electroplating. It worked wonderfully well, even with my homebrew rig in a Mason jar out in the garage. I used pennies as my copper source (wouldn't work now) and coated various substances. A copper quarter looked pretty cool.:-) It was really interesting how the detail was kept -- the copper was laid down with amazing uniformity even with my crappy equipment. I don't remember what the pennies looked like, I'm not sure I ever really looked at them -- I was interested in the results, not the process.:-)
I only won a second-place ribbon. I didn't do a very impressive looking display...hadn't thought about 'selling' it at all. I was interested in the project itself -- the actual exhibit was a huge hassle I didn't want to do.:-) I delivered a junky-looking little display with a couple of mason jars with what looked like blue water inside (big HANDS OFF signs scrawled with a marker on binder paper scattered around) and a few coppery things. Oh, and a notebook -- created at the last second in my horrible handwriting because I didn't realize you were supposed to have one.:-) It's really only now that I'm realizing that this was actually a most unusual science fair project. Proof, once again, that marketing matters in the real world.:-)
God, can you imagine any kid trying to learn about this stuff now? I did my project in around 1980. In just twenty years, we have gone from a "sure, kid, here's some highly lethal substances you can experiment with, BE CAREFUL!!" to "holy shit, this geek is trying to blow up his school!" And the modern liability issues would prevent them from giving me anything that dangerous anyway, for fear of being sued for millions of dollars.
Just 20 years ago they gave a 12 year old kid who walked in off the street some potassium something-or-other, nobody died, and some interesting experimentation got done. This isn't that long ago... what the HELL happened in the interim??
Am I the only one thinking that we have lost something really major?
There is no way they're going to make that much money off subscriptions. If they make it a pay service they'll keep a very small fraction of their existing customer base. That happens over and over again online -- you'd think by now they'd have figured this out.
And electronic file sharing is probably an ASSET to the record companies, not a 'theft' as they insist so fervently it is. People are musical by nature. The more we are exposed to, the more we tend to want. Nearly all of us would buy albums from groups we liked, even if we had the music free -- if for no other reason than to save time downloading and burning CDs.
So in essence they are promising money they will never make to be the best publicity vehicle those record labels could ask for.
Is it just me, or are they out of their bloody minds?
What's really disgusting here is that Napster could be a nicely profitable company and drive up music sales in the bargain. But the strain of meeting this kind of payment schedule will bankrupt them. Idiots.
And the record companies are still balking at the sweetheart deal to end all sweetheart deals. If Napster is dumb, I don't even want to think about the average IQ of the RIAA.
Yes, I agree that Windows would be much better-suited to MRAM than any of the free OSes -- instant-on technology just isn't that interesting when you never have to reboot!:-)
There is talent and there is experience. I'll take a brilliant newbie over a grizzled veteran idiot any day.
I have made the observation that experience is trading off talent for knowledge -- as you get older the brain slows down. I was much, much sharper at 18 than I am now, but I am a lot smarter about where I spend energy now. I suspect that a person's overall effectiveness is something like ((T+1)^sqrt(E)) -- at first experience rapidly magnifies raw talent, but past a certain level of experience, when competing with other people, it's talent that matters most.
And as you age and your brain slows down, eventually you start losing overall effectiveness no matter how much new experience you get. But if you start with a sufficiently high value of T, even at 75 with one fourth T left you may still compete well.
And I think most people who are *really* good at computers (instead of just pretending for the money) know this on some level.
One more thing -- don't bother with a degree. Get a technical certificate instead (something like MCSE.) A formal degree is very useful for a young person but by the time you got one you'd probably be 50. You'd likely be better off taking a short accelerated course and getting into the job market immediately.
I'm male, so this may not be quite what you wanted.
When I'm involved in hiring decisions (don't generally do them myself yet, I suspec that will start in the next year or two) what I look for mostly is brains, competence, and drive. I love people who really grok technology and I don't care about their age and/or gender. Some people are just meant to be working on computers, and it's those people I'm looking for.
At my last place we interviewed a lady in her middle 40s (I suspect) that I wanted to hire. She really impressed me. But I wasn't able to get anyone else to look at her seriously. I suspect it was unconscious age/sex discrimination. So I don't think you'll have an easy time of it. It would have been better if you had started last year -- the market is cooling off now and people aren't as desperate for trained technical help.
Keep in mind that you may not want a job in IT anyway. Usually it's long/weird hours and a lot of gruntish boring work. There are times when it is wonderful, but getting senior enough to get mostly the interesting projects is non-trivial. If you really want to get ahead in IT, you can pretty much count on giving up most other things in your life -- there's not time otherwise to learn all of what you need to know. It will take five to ten years of intense focus to get really expert.
Personally I do it because I'm not suited to anything else -- I'd do this work if I was paid half as much. (which I have been:-) )
If you are just interested in learning more about stuff like this without giving up your life to do it, I'd suggest checking into volunteer work. Get hooked up with someone who is implementing a small network for a charity somewhere. Be useful and listen. Most good computer people like to teach -- the knowledge was hard to get and it's nice to be able to see that effort pay off more than once.
In general, what I tell most folks who ask me about IT jobs is this: if you're not already tinkering around with this in your spare room/basement/whatever, if you're not interested in it enough to be doing it anyway, you'd probably be better off in other fields. If you have three machines at home and they all have the covers off because you are constantly fooling with them, then chnaces are you're a pretty good candidate for IT/MIS. If you're doing it anyway, you might as well get paid for it.:-)
That is one of the better ideas I've yet heard on/.
Setting it so that any post to that 'private' forum is reposted publicly in 30 days is an excellent idea -- but it would be important that the 30 day time limit be absolutely enforced and not revocable for 'just a little more time to fix bug X'. IE, short of the whole internet crashing, at 31+ days the entire world would be able to read any post/message to that list.
That seems fair and reasonable -- as long as it is ironclad.
Of course Linus is killing Linux. He has to, in order to aake any progress with it.
Linux has mostly been hope and dreams -- a tremendous amount of work has been done, and it has really changed computing, but everyone out there with a real interest in it has a vision of what it might be. And given a lot of differnet choices, Linus has to pick just a few, probably the ones that best suit the strengths of the main kernel coders.
He has to kill off imaginary might-be Linux to make the actual here-it-is-for-free Linux.
A committee would be likely to try to please everyone and end up pleasing nobody. But there is NOTHING stopping them from grabbing that code and forking it -- if they really think they can do better they are welcome to try. Journalists rarely seem to really get this.
And yes it is harder than hell to get something added to the kernel that Linus didn't pre-approve, but it can be done -- Reiserfs is finally going in based almost solely on the strength of its code, overriding (apparently) some very political factions in support of ext2/ext3.
As an example, if IBM really wants something added to the kernel they can probably make it happen. They claim they're doing a billion dollars' worth of development this year -- with that kind of money they can pay an awful lot of good programmers.
And if anyone could fork Linux and succeed with their version, IBM could -- although the thought of APARs in Linux is a bit frightening.:-)
Over the short haul I think Apple will do fairly well with OS X. A lot of people will be introduced to UNIX that otherwise wouldn't have touched it.
Over the long haul, I suspect it will provide a fertile ground from which to recruit new Linux users. Apple is not especially price-competitive and I suspect that, given a few years, the relentless improvements in the open source community will result in free OSes that have equivalent power. Maybe Apple will stay ahead, and maybe it won't.
Whatever happens on that front, the leap from OS/X to a freeware Unix is a heck of a lot smaller than the leap from the current System and Finder. I can't help but think that some percentage of that population is going to become interested in systems and projects that have all the source code available.
Anything that strengthens Unix overall strengthens Linux and the BSDs. They are free -- they don't have to worry about market share the same way that the commercial companies do. And a truly commercial Unix-based desktop is going to be a real kick in the pants for the entire Open Source community -- I suspect that the freeware OSes will move, for a time, faster than they ever have before, borging the best ideas from Apple and leaving behind the cruft.
And while I'm waiting (I'll NEVER EVER buy ANYTHING from Apple; they have screwed people over far, far too many times) there's always BeOS to play with.:-)
Re:I largely disagree with what he's saying...
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Information Poisoning
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argh. didn't proofread well. 'possible' not 'possibly'. *doh*
Re:I largely disagree with what he's saying...
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One thing I missed, in my original response to his supposed 'fixes', is that we haven't really demonstrated that the problem even exists! He states that technology is making people dumber, but his only proof is an anecdotal note or two about people he's met who can't think.
Personally, I find that the Net makes me A LOT smarter. I function at a level that I could never have attained on my own, because I have access to so many expert opinions on so many fields. The hard part, admittedly, is determining who is actually expert and who's full of BS. I'm not sure how hard that skill is to learn, but it doesn't seem all THAT difficult.
The REAL problem here is the Caleb Carr has seen a lot of stupid young people recently. That's all. That's the real problem; he assigns a causation to his observation and off he goes. There are many other possibly explanations; one I like is that the culture is failing to teach a good working ethic to young people. I don't think it's related to the Net at all, personally. If there is a problem, first we have to figure out what the problem actually is: he didn't even come close to doing that.
And I totally missed this in the first read. Shame on me!
Re:I largely disagree with what he's saying...
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Actually that's a good point. Information IS power and therefore it is dangerous. However, for the most part, information is only dangerous to existing social systems -- ie, new data or theories cause old social structures to be outmoded. So the perception of data as danger is going to be strongest by those who have power in the existing system.
Information about things like bombs is not, in and of itself, dangerous, any more than a gun is dangerous without someone to use it. Information just is, it doesn't do anything by itself. (in fact you could argue that information doesn't actually exist until it's in someone's brain, which is much like the old question about trees falling in uninhabited forests making sounds.... ie, kind of fun to think about. Not relevant, however, so I'll get back to the main topic.:) )
In very general terms, restricting access to information means restricting access to power. Restricting access to power means concentrating that power. I suspect that power, like money, tends to accumulate; if you have money it's easier to make more money. If you have power, it's easier to get more of it. If this is true (and it seems powerfully true from what I can see), that means that the slide toward totalitarianism is the easiest and simplest path to follow -- water likes to flow downhill, power and money flow uphill. If that natural flow continues unchecked for too long, we have totalitarianism/1984.
Strikes me that just like we can get water to mountaintops, we can keep power and money in the hands of the masses. That does not mean that it can't be fought and delayed as long as possible. I would suggest that trying to keep information out of the hands of the masses does not encourage the fundamental principles of democracy and equality, and instead would work to concentrate power in the hands of existing institutions.
Considering how abusive they are becoming of the power they have already, giving them more just doesn't seem like a very good idea.
Remember, half of the population is below average intelligence. Do you really want to give government bureaucrats (not the brightest bulbs in the firmament) that much ability to tell you what you can read, think, and do?
I do agree with you that widespread, free access to information is dangerous, but I would suggest that the consequences of the alternatives are far worse.
Consider: the very first example he uses is 'pedophiles'. At the moment, there is no more hated and reviled group on the planet. (Personally, I don't really buy most of the noise -- I strongly, strongly suspect that it is nowhere near as bad as the politicians want you to believe.) There is no button that is hotter. Feelings on this matter run so strong that (so far) I have yet to see any rational discourse on the topic at all -- and that's his leadoff example. Not a good sign.
And then he goes on to say that information is dangerous, and that the state should be in the business of prior restraint of speech. Many people, he says, are incapable of separating fact from fiction, so that's why the content of the Internet should be regulated.
Well, gee. This is news? Most people I know just take the pap they're spoon fed by the media. So far, this hasn't been enough of a reason to license news agencies (to my knowledge) or to create a review board that would approve/deny any particular story or stories. We all know how quickly that would start being abused.
Consider: what if pedophilia actually isn't as bad as it's painted? (I"m not making that assertion, I'm just positing a hypothetical case.) In a system of prior restraint, that kind of topic would be very, very likely to be suppressed, or to be forced to take a label of 'fiction' rather than 'fact'. But ideas that are close to the mainstream, like 'The Internet is full of dangerous ideas and children shouldn't be exposed to them without content restrictions' would most likely be allowed to use a 'fact' tag. (heh, [FACT] [/FACT]:-) )
I can't imagine any better way to create even more of a feedback loop than we already have. Popular ideas get repeated, and dissenting ideas tend to be ignored. This has absolutely nothing to do with their actual truth or merit, just their popularity.
Any kind of governmental board would serve only to amplify this feedback loop. I can't imagine a faster way to destroy all possibility of rational discourse on truly disputed topics. It's a great way to make sure that the fundamental values remain unchallenged and that nothing ever REALLY changes.
As an aside, this guy also pisses me off. I'm perfectly capable of separating fact from fiction, and I'm quite capable of assembling a body of knowledge from disparate bits. The fact that there are people out there who cannot is simply no excuse to cripple my ability to gather information and decide for myself. It's just censorship in a slightly different form.
We can't run the Internet for stupid people. To do so will make everyone stupid.
It'll teach you how to think better. CIS (what I do) is primarily about making other people's systems work in the real world. CS is about inventing new systems from scratch.
Both have their upsides, but a CS degree should qualify you for an entry-level CIS job. The reverse is not true.
No, this is NOT absurd. It's not only possible, it has HAPPENED.
Not too long ago, there was some common system package where the original distribution files were replaced with hacked binaries. The 'trusted' distribution site had been compromised. It was caught relatively quickly (about a week I think), but quite a number of bad copies went out.
re: KDE, were you doing KDE 1 or 2? I was on a 733Mhz P3, fast SCSI drives, 256MB of RAM, and it took about six hours for the full compile-and-install process of KDE2. Further, the set of directions I was reading also suggested that it would take a very long time. Because of this, I suspect that you were doing KDE1.
Binary distribution seems entirely appropriate in this circumstance.
No, protected memory spaces give you robustness. The Amiga was preemptive from the very beginning but it ran all the programs in a single memory space, with no protection from one another. This significantly compromised the machine's stability until programmers learned the bugs in the (hugely complex at the time) AmigaOS. Any program could bring down the whole computer. Your system was only as stable as your worst running program.
To give you an idea of how bad it was at first, you could instantly tell anyone who had heavily used an Amiga during the first two years of its life, because they had all developed the habit of jiggling the mouse around a little while waiting for the computer, as an instant check to see if it had crashed. (The mouse would freeze when that happened.) I've finally gotten out of that habit, but it took years. And just ask around about the infamous Guru Meditation numbers.:-)
Whether or not cooperative multitasking is more 'efficient', it's a stupid idea most of the time. Just like the above, you multitask only as well as your least cooperative program.
Windows 3.1 used cooperative multitasking. We all know what a gem that was.
Well, one reason is because binaries can be trojaned and/or virused. Source also can be trojaned, but cannot at present be trojaned accidentally. Binaries can be modified by other sources, like a (presently non-existent) virus. Some people attribute the almost total lack of virii on Linux to be due to the relative scarcity of transmitted-and-executed binaries.
However, one strong argument in favor of binaries is KDE. I downloaded and compiled that monster -- it took something like SIX HOURS and I have a fast machine! I'm assuming that it is C++ that is causing the problem. KDE's source packages are pretty big, but I don't think any of them is even as big as the Linux kernel, which I can compile in around ten minutes.
I don't know if it's a problem with gcc or just in general with C++. From my experience so far, that language might be the best argument yet for distributed precompiled binaries.
As a rule of thumb, if it's going to take longer than an hour to build, I'd strongly suggest distributing binaries with or in addition to a source package. Anything over an hour turns 'an experiment' into 'a project'.
As an aside, I sure hope the KDE developers are getting a benefit worth that kind of compile-time hit. God that installation sucked.:-(
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You can't waste money on the kind of scale it was wasted in the Internet Mania without terrible repercussions. Companies have taken on vast debt to finance expansion and have overbuilt massively on every front. Economists who seem to have a clue call this 'malinvestment'.
One spends money, as a business, in the expectation of generating more money in return. Wasted money means time lost while the business generates more revenue to re-invest in something else. Taking on debt for unproductive investments is much worse -- instead of just hoping for a payoff, now the business MUST generate the money that they expected their investment to create, and must also pay interest on the money to boot. Debt-driven expansion that does not pay off is VERY bad.
The huge amount of malinvestment during the Internet Mania will have repercussions for many years. Post-bubble fallout is always horrible, and this has been far and away the biggest bubble in human history by any measure. It makes the 1920s bull market and crash look minuscule by comparison. Businesses in every market, not just tech, have been cannibalizing their long-term prospects to drive up the stock price short term. This made the executives of these companies very wealthy via stock options, but it has done terrible hidden economic damage. Lucent, AT&T, Cendant, Xerox, and IBM are all good examples. (IBM just hasn't been found out yet by the mainstream.) There will be lots more of this going forward.
The 1920s stock market mania (they were overbought in manufacturing and automobiles) was catastrophic enough to lead into the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Crash of 1929 did not cause the Depression. In school I always had the image of a bunch of people who were eating caviar October 15 and homeless bums in the street on October 30. In actual fact, the decline took several years, steadily destroying wealth as it went.
The reason this wealth destruction was so catastropic was because people had taken on too much debt to buy stocks with. When the mania unwound they were left with huge debt and no possible way to pay it. The destruction of all that paper wealth and subsequent defaults caused a massive deflation. It took ten years for the economy to recover. And mark this: their whole economic expansion and stock market craze was driven by debt, just as ours has been.
The fallout was so bad it scared off an entire generation from credit. True full-blown manias are so awful, in fact, that historically they have only happened when almost all the people old enough to remember the last one are dead. It is no coincidence that few of the people who were adult in 1930 aren't around to warn us.
Worse still: we haven't even crashed all the way yet! The Nasdaq will drop by at least another 50%, and the Dow and S&P need to drop by 40% or so to bring themselves in line with historic valuations. The Nasdaq bubble popping alone might not be enough to trigger a full-scale crisis, but the Dow and S&P are teetering on the edge of the precipice even as I type. They might avoid this crisis. But eventually they will either decline, or the Fed will inflate the money supply so much that everything else will rise by the same amount. The overall outcome is inevitable, but whether we get there via inflation or deflation is up to a combination of investor sentiment and the Fed. So far, the Fed looks to be choosing inflation, as they are printing money at absolutely unprecedented rates. I don't have the numbers in front of me but I believe they grew the money supply at something like a 15% annualized rate last quarter. Money normally should grow about as fast as the economy does. 15% growth/year in the money supply is corrosion of wealth, a cancer -- most people don't know about the tumor yet but if left unchecked it will be lethal.
This was one of the most feared of all the Orwellian predictions, that having certain THOUGHTS could be considered illegal.
This is a dangerous and foolish step. Law must be based on what was actually done, not why it was done. The motivations of other people is something that can never be determined accurately. It can be guessed at over coffee, but has no place in a legal system.
There is a bill in Oregon to to have 'eco crimes' categorized as hate crimes. This would make the penalties most severe for exercising one's Constitutional right of assembly, as trespassing for the purpose of protesting damage to the environment will become a 'hate crime'.
That's only the start -- this isn't just a slippery slope, it's close to a frictionless surface.
I pay quite a bit more for my DSL line, but it is always on and I don't have to worry about usage. I'm not an inordinately heavy user, but the Net is important to me on a day-to-day basis and I much, much prefer not having to think about the minutes I am using.
For this reason I'm resistant to micropayments. I would have no problem subscribing to services I like. I was one of the (idiots?) folks who paid for Slate when it tried to go subscription. I subscribe to several online info sources and am budgeting for twice that much. But I don't like the idea of paying by click because then I have to think about it. It tends to restrain my urge to dig into a new idea or a new site.
I also am very concerned about the tracking capability. Anytime you have a payment system, you must have some method of accurately tracking how the billing and payments are done. That means that, absolutely without question, there is a record of what sites I am visiting. And we all know how long anonymity lasts in the US -- right up until someone gets interested enough to file court papers. Bush has even come out as being opposed to anonymity on the Net, which is horrible.
Anonymity matters. Lack of tracking matters. I won't subscribe to any micropayment system because of that. Yes, subscriptions to online services is a form of tracking, but showing that you subscribe to a site (no matter how politically uncorrect) is not the same as showing that you are actually reading it.
Call me paranoid, but the era of thoughtcrime has already begun, and I imagine it will go a lot further.
Services like Freedom are important -- support them.
I've been checking out Python, and like it pretty well from what I can see -- but I don't see too much ability to deal with regular expressions. I have become very hooked on that capability in Perl. It is *so* powerful for massaging text files.
Does Python have anything similar? I can get used to the other stuff (indents being code is one of the weird ones), but no regular expressions would be hard to live without. (!)
Note also that, if I remember correctly, we have not left a state of emergency for something like forty years. I read an article back in the 80's that talked about how every president for the past twenty years or so had extended the state of emergency by either issuing new executive orders or extending the old ones. I don't remember what triggered the original declaration.
Wouldn't surprise me a bit if it were still true.
Nah, wreck all you like. They'll print more! :-)
Biggest reason is compatibility. If you think your product might be used as a part of something else, then you should probably pick either the BSD or the GPL license and stick with it. That way, it will be very clearly delineated where your code can and cannot be used. The BSD license, being less restrictive, will allow your code to be used in more places -- like Microsoft utilities.
:-)
I personally happen to like the GPL -- it strikes me as the path to maximum freedom, by limiting everyone's freedom just a little bit but forcing them to respect everyone else's. It definitely does put restrictions on the users of your code, and if you truly don't want to restrict them in *any way*, the GPL is a bad choice.
Because with each release and with each passing day, the value of GPLed code grows like a virus, I suspect that eventually the GPL or something like it will encompass most horizontal market software. But this will take a LONG time, probably decades. Open Source, oddly enough, is a lot like the cathedral projects of the middle ages -- people giving their whole lives to working on a project they would never see completed. ESR nothwithstanding, Open Source has a definite sort of cathedralness to it.
I do suspect that most programmers living now will probably see 80% of the eventual outcome.
In my opinion, if Microsoft somehow gets GPLed code restricted in the US, eventually it will destroy the US as a globally competitive force in the software market. It will take awhile, but it will happen.
We're really a very small part of the world, and the only reason Ethiopians aren't writing code is because they can't afford computers. 1 in 50 Ethiopians, just like 1 in 50 Americans, will be a good programmer -- when computers get cheap enough and the basic needs like food and shelter are met on a more regular basis, the US code output will be dwarfed by the rest of the world. It would be smart to make sure we can leverage their IP later, by letting them leverage ours now.
My $0.02. Sorry for the rambling.
Heh. My big science fair project was electroplating. I did electroplating of copper onto various other substances, mostly as a technical demonstration because I was interested in how it worked.
:-) It was really interesting how the detail was kept -- the copper was laid down with amazing uniformity even with my crappy equipment. I don't remember what the pennies looked like, I'm not sure I ever really looked at them -- I was interested in the results, not the process. :-)
:-) I delivered a junky-looking little display with a couple of mason jars with what looked like blue water inside (big HANDS OFF signs scrawled with a marker on binder paper scattered around) and a few coppery things. Oh, and a notebook -- created at the last second in my horrible handwriting because I didn't realize you were supposed to have one. :-) It's really only now that I'm realizing that this was actually a most unusual science fair project. Proof, once again, that marketing matters in the real world. :-)
The funny/sad part is that no kid today could possibly do it the way I did it. Why? I went to an electroplating shop, told them I was going to do a science fair project on electroplating, and could they please help me out?
They gave me some chemicals. I don't remember exactly what they were anymore, but they warned me MOST emphatically that they were exceedingly poisonous and that even a couple flecks of powder on my skin could kill me. They gave me probably a half-pound of the stuff! I'm thinking it may even have been potassium cyanide, as I'm pretty sure there was potassium in it. (I remember it as being a bluish-white chalky powder, if that's a clue to anyone more educated than myself.)
Well, I was very careful indeed, and no lifeforms ceased to exist due to my toying around with electroplating. It worked wonderfully well, even with my homebrew rig in a Mason jar out in the garage. I used pennies as my copper source (wouldn't work now) and coated various substances. A copper quarter looked pretty cool.
I only won a second-place ribbon. I didn't do a very impressive looking display...hadn't thought about 'selling' it at all. I was interested in the project itself -- the actual exhibit was a huge hassle I didn't want to do.
God, can you imagine any kid trying to learn about this stuff now? I did my project in around 1980. In just twenty years, we have gone from a "sure, kid, here's some highly lethal substances you can experiment with, BE CAREFUL!!" to "holy shit, this geek is trying to blow up his school!" And the modern liability issues would prevent them from giving me anything that dangerous anyway, for fear of being sued for millions of dollars.
Just 20 years ago they gave a 12 year old kid who walked in off the street some potassium something-or-other, nobody died, and some interesting experimentation got done. This isn't that long ago... what the HELL happened in the interim??
Am I the only one thinking that we have lost something really major?
There is no way they're going to make that much money off subscriptions. If they make it a pay service they'll keep a very small fraction of their existing customer base. That happens over and over again online -- you'd think by now they'd have figured this out.
And electronic file sharing is probably an ASSET to the record companies, not a 'theft' as they insist so fervently it is. People are musical by nature. The more we are exposed to, the more we tend to want. Nearly all of us would buy albums from groups we liked, even if we had the music free -- if for no other reason than to save time downloading and burning CDs.
So in essence they are promising money they will never make to be the best publicity vehicle those record labels could ask for.
Is it just me, or are they out of their bloody minds?
What's really disgusting here is that Napster could be a nicely profitable company and drive up music sales in the bargain. But the strain of meeting this kind of payment schedule will bankrupt them. Idiots.
And the record companies are still balking at the sweetheart deal to end all sweetheart deals. If Napster is dumb, I don't even want to think about the average IQ of the RIAA.
They deserve extinction.
Yes, I agree that Windows would be much better-suited to MRAM than any of the free OSes -- instant-on technology just isn't that interesting when you never have to reboot! :-)
There is talent and there is experience. I'll take a brilliant newbie over a grizzled veteran idiot any day.
I have made the observation that experience is trading off talent for knowledge -- as you get older the brain slows down. I was much, much sharper at 18 than I am now, but I am a lot smarter about where I spend energy now. I suspect that a person's overall effectiveness is something like ((T+1)^sqrt(E)) -- at first experience rapidly magnifies raw talent, but past a certain level of experience, when competing with other people, it's talent that matters most.
And as you age and your brain slows down, eventually you start losing overall effectiveness no matter how much new experience you get. But if you start with a sufficiently high value of T, even at 75 with one fourth T left you may still compete well.
And I think most people who are *really* good at computers (instead of just pretending for the money) know this on some level.
One more thing -- don't bother with a degree. Get a technical certificate instead (something like MCSE.) A formal degree is very useful for a young person but by the time you got one you'd probably be 50. You'd likely be better off taking a short accelerated course and getting into the job market immediately.
I'm male, so this may not be quite what you wanted.
:-) )
:-)
When I'm involved in hiring decisions (don't generally do them myself yet, I suspec that will start in the next year or two) what I look for mostly is brains, competence, and drive. I love people who really grok technology and I don't care about their age and/or gender. Some people are just meant to be working on computers, and it's those people I'm looking for.
At my last place we interviewed a lady in her middle 40s (I suspect) that I wanted to hire. She really impressed me. But I wasn't able to get anyone else to look at her seriously. I suspect it was unconscious age/sex discrimination. So I don't think you'll have an easy time of it. It would have been better if you had started last year -- the market is cooling off now and people aren't as desperate for trained technical help.
Keep in mind that you may not want a job in IT anyway. Usually it's long/weird hours and a lot of gruntish boring work. There are times when it is wonderful, but getting senior enough to get mostly the interesting projects is non-trivial. If you really want to get ahead in IT, you can pretty much count on giving up most other things in your life -- there's not time otherwise to learn all of what you need to know. It will take five to ten years of intense focus to get really expert.
Personally I do it because I'm not suited to anything else -- I'd do this work if I was paid half as much. (which I have been
If you are just interested in learning more about stuff like this without giving up your life to do it, I'd suggest checking into volunteer work. Get hooked up with someone who is implementing a small network for a charity somewhere. Be useful and listen. Most good computer people like to teach -- the knowledge was hard to get and it's nice to be able to see that effort pay off more than once.
In general, what I tell most folks who ask me about IT jobs is this: if you're not already tinkering around with this in your spare room/basement/whatever, if you're not interested in it enough to be doing it anyway, you'd probably be better off in other fields. If you have three machines at home and they all have the covers off because you are constantly fooling with them, then chnaces are you're a pretty good candidate for IT/MIS. If you're doing it anyway, you might as well get paid for it.
That is one of the better ideas I've yet heard on /.
Setting it so that any post to that 'private' forum is reposted publicly in 30 days is an excellent idea -- but it would be important that the 30 day time limit be absolutely enforced and not revocable for 'just a little more time to fix bug X'. IE, short of the whole internet crashing, at 31+ days the entire world would be able to read any post/message to that list.
That seems fair and reasonable -- as long as it is ironclad.
Of course Linus is killing Linux. He has to, in order to aake any progress with it.
:-)
Linux has mostly been hope and dreams -- a tremendous amount of work has been done, and it has really changed computing, but everyone out there with a real interest in it has a vision of what it might be. And given a lot of differnet choices, Linus has to pick just a few, probably the ones that best suit the strengths of the main kernel coders.
He has to kill off imaginary might-be Linux to make the actual here-it-is-for-free Linux.
A committee would be likely to try to please everyone and end up pleasing nobody. But there is NOTHING stopping them from grabbing that code and forking it -- if they really think they can do better they are welcome to try. Journalists rarely seem to really get this.
And yes it is harder than hell to get something added to the kernel that Linus didn't pre-approve, but it can be done -- Reiserfs is finally going in based almost solely on the strength of its code, overriding (apparently) some very political factions in support of ext2/ext3.
As an example, if IBM really wants something added to the kernel they can probably make it happen. They claim they're doing a billion dollars' worth of development this year -- with that kind of money they can pay an awful lot of good programmers.
And if anyone could fork Linux and succeed with their version, IBM could -- although the thought of APARs in Linux is a bit frightening.
"Give me a shoe with cheese on it, shove it down my throat, and I'd like to massage your grandmother."
:-)
Apologies to Steve Martin.
Over the short haul I think Apple will do fairly well with OS X. A lot of people will be introduced to UNIX that otherwise wouldn't have touched it.
:-)
Over the long haul, I suspect it will provide a fertile ground from which to recruit new Linux users. Apple is not especially price-competitive and I suspect that, given a few years, the relentless improvements in the open source community will result in free OSes that have equivalent power. Maybe Apple will stay ahead, and maybe it won't.
Whatever happens on that front, the leap from OS/X to a freeware Unix is a heck of a lot smaller than the leap from the current System and Finder. I can't help but think that some percentage of that population is going to become interested in systems and projects that have all the source code available.
Anything that strengthens Unix overall strengthens Linux and the BSDs. They are free -- they don't have to worry about market share the same way that the commercial companies do. And a truly commercial Unix-based desktop is going to be a real kick in the pants for the entire Open Source community -- I suspect that the freeware OSes will move, for a time, faster than they ever have before, borging the best ideas from Apple and leaving behind the cruft.
And while I'm waiting (I'll NEVER EVER buy ANYTHING from Apple; they have screwed people over far, far too many times) there's always BeOS to play with.
argh. didn't proofread well. 'possible' not 'possibly'. *doh*
Personally, I find that the Net makes me A LOT smarter. I function at a level that I could never have attained on my own, because I have access to so many expert opinions on so many fields. The hard part, admittedly, is determining who is actually expert and who's full of BS. I'm not sure how hard that skill is to learn, but it doesn't seem all THAT difficult.
The REAL problem here is the Caleb Carr has seen a lot of stupid young people recently. That's all. That's the real problem; he assigns a causation to his observation and off he goes. There are many other possibly explanations; one I like is that the culture is failing to teach a good working ethic to young people. I don't think it's related to the Net at all, personally. If there is a problem, first we have to figure out what the problem actually is: he didn't even come close to doing that.
And I totally missed this in the first read. Shame on me!
Actually that's a good point. Information IS power and therefore it is dangerous. However, for the most part, information is only dangerous to existing social systems -- ie, new data or theories cause old social structures to be outmoded. So the perception of data as danger is going to be strongest by those who have power in the existing system.
:) )
Information about things like bombs is not, in and of itself, dangerous, any more than a gun is dangerous without someone to use it. Information just is, it doesn't do anything by itself. (in fact you could argue that information doesn't actually exist until it's in someone's brain, which is much like the old question about trees falling in uninhabited forests making sounds.... ie, kind of fun to think about. Not relevant, however, so I'll get back to the main topic.
In very general terms, restricting access to information means restricting access to power. Restricting access to power means concentrating that power. I suspect that power, like money, tends to accumulate; if you have money it's easier to make more money. If you have power, it's easier to get more of it. If this is true (and it seems powerfully true from what I can see), that means that the slide toward totalitarianism is the easiest and simplest path to follow -- water likes to flow downhill, power and money flow uphill. If that natural flow continues unchecked for too long, we have totalitarianism/1984.
Strikes me that just like we can get water to mountaintops, we can keep power and money in the hands of the masses. That does not mean that it can't be fought and delayed as long as possible. I would suggest that trying to keep information out of the hands of the masses does not encourage the fundamental principles of democracy and equality, and instead would work to concentrate power in the hands of existing institutions.
Considering how abusive they are becoming of the power they have already, giving them more just doesn't seem like a very good idea.
Remember, half of the population is below average intelligence. Do you really want to give government bureaucrats (not the brightest bulbs in the firmament) that much ability to tell you what you can read, think, and do?
I do agree with you that widespread, free access to information is dangerous, but I would suggest that the consequences of the alternatives are far worse.
Consider: the very first example he uses is 'pedophiles'. At the moment, there is no more hated and reviled group on the planet. (Personally, I don't really buy most of the noise -- I strongly, strongly suspect that it is nowhere near as bad as the politicians want you to believe.) There is no button that is hotter. Feelings on this matter run so strong that (so far) I have yet to see any rational discourse on the topic at all -- and that's his leadoff example. Not a good sign.
And then he goes on to say that information is dangerous, and that the state should be in the business of prior restraint of speech. Many people, he says, are incapable of separating fact from fiction, so that's why the content of the Internet should be regulated.
Well, gee. This is news? Most people I know just take the pap they're spoon fed by the media. So far, this hasn't been enough of a reason to license news agencies (to my knowledge) or to create a review board that would approve/deny any particular story or stories. We all know how quickly that would start being abused.
Consider: what if pedophilia actually isn't as bad as it's painted? (I"m not making that assertion, I'm just positing a hypothetical case.) In a system of prior restraint, that kind of topic would be very, very likely to be suppressed, or to be forced to take a label of 'fiction' rather than 'fact'. But ideas that are close to the mainstream, like 'The Internet is full of dangerous ideas and children shouldn't be exposed to them without content restrictions' would most likely be allowed to use a 'fact' tag. (heh, [FACT] [/FACT] :-) )
I can't imagine any better way to create even more of a feedback loop than we already have. Popular ideas get repeated, and dissenting ideas tend to be ignored. This has absolutely nothing to do with their actual truth or merit, just their popularity.
Any kind of governmental board would serve only to amplify this feedback loop. I can't imagine a faster way to destroy all possibility of rational discourse on truly disputed topics. It's a great way to make sure that the fundamental values remain unchallenged and that nothing ever REALLY changes.
As an aside, this guy also pisses me off. I'm perfectly capable of separating fact from fiction, and I'm quite capable of assembling a body of knowledge from disparate bits. The fact that there are people out there who cannot is simply no excuse to cripple my ability to gather information and decide for myself. It's just censorship in a slightly different form.
We can't run the Internet for stupid people. To do so will make everyone stupid.
It'll teach you how to think better. CIS (what I do) is primarily about making other people's systems work in the real world. CS is about inventing new systems from scratch.
Both have their upsides, but a CS degree should qualify you for an entry-level CIS job. The reverse is not true.
No, this is NOT absurd. It's not only possible, it has HAPPENED.
Not too long ago, there was some common system package where the original distribution files were replaced with hacked binaries. The 'trusted' distribution site had been compromised. It was caught relatively quickly (about a week I think), but quite a number of bad copies went out.
re: KDE, were you doing KDE 1 or 2? I was on a 733Mhz P3, fast SCSI drives, 256MB of RAM, and it took about six hours for the full compile-and-install process of KDE2. Further, the set of directions I was reading also suggested that it would take a very long time. Because of this, I suspect that you were doing KDE1.
Binary distribution seems entirely appropriate in this circumstance.
No, protected memory spaces give you robustness. The Amiga was preemptive from the very beginning but it ran all the programs in a single memory space, with no protection from one another. This significantly compromised the machine's stability until programmers learned the bugs in the (hugely complex at the time) AmigaOS. Any program could bring down the whole computer. Your system was only as stable as your worst running program.
:-)
To give you an idea of how bad it was at first, you could instantly tell anyone who had heavily used an Amiga during the first two years of its life, because they had all developed the habit of jiggling the mouse around a little while waiting for the computer, as an instant check to see if it had crashed. (The mouse would freeze when that happened.) I've finally gotten out of that habit, but it took years. And just ask around about the infamous Guru Meditation numbers.
Whether or not cooperative multitasking is more 'efficient', it's a stupid idea most of the time. Just like the above, you multitask only as well as your least cooperative program.
Windows 3.1 used cooperative multitasking. We all know what a gem that was.
However, one strong argument in favor of binaries is KDE. I downloaded and compiled that monster -- it took something like SIX HOURS and I have a fast machine! I'm assuming that it is C++ that is causing the problem. KDE's source packages are pretty big, but I don't think any of them is even as big as the Linux kernel, which I can compile in around ten minutes.
I don't know if it's a problem with gcc or just in general with C++. From my experience so far, that language might be the best argument yet for distributed precompiled binaries.
As a rule of thumb, if it's going to take longer than an hour to build, I'd strongly suggest distributing binaries with or in addition to a source package. Anything over an hour turns 'an experiment' into 'a project'.
As an aside, I sure hope the KDE developers are getting a benefit worth that kind of compile-time hit. God that installation sucked. :-(