Well, that and the fact that the way it's distributed can add value. And that it is done because of the profit motive, which (theoretically) doesn't exist in communism.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to take issue with this. An information "gift economy" does not supersede capitalism; that's ridiculous.
Look at it: An information gift economy (the focus of the Salon piece) essentially allows information to be free (as in speech, not beer, according to the hallowed cliche). Does that mean that the info has no value? No, it means that information's value increases as it spreads. Essentially, it's the distribution of information that becomes important. Linuxcare and RedHat are good examples of this. Linuxcare offers support services, right? The information they provide is essentially already available if you know where to look and how to interpret it. But by providing it in a different format to people who don't know where to look or how to interpret the information themselves, there is value. And I daresay that the founders of Linuxcare were motivated (at least in part) by profit, the foundation of capitalism. RedHat is perhaps a better example, since they freely give away the OS via the Net, and allow you to redistribute copies of what you do buy. Again, the value comes from providing support information and services.
To take it a step further, yes, I can find all the information I want about, say, firewals on the Net. But I still own the O'Reilly book Building Internet Firewalls because there is so much information condensed that having it in book format is valuable. And as Tim O'Reilly has pointed out recently:) profit is among his motivations. Fine, that's the way the world works.
Taking a look away from the information economy (which is still far smaller than the rest of the economy), capitalism is in no real danger. Think GM's going to start giving away cars and trucks to just anybody? How about DeBeers opening up that warehouse?
C'mon folks, let's not get carried away. Information should be free, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to try to get ahead in life. That's the profit motive, and that's human nature.
Don't know about all your questions, but karma can in fact dwindle; it only counts the last few months of moderation (longer than the amount of time your comments show up on your user page).
At least, that's the way I understand it. Someone might be able to correct me.
...the hype that Handspring propagated through their self imposed silence.
"Hype" isn't silence... The price points seem "ground-breaking" for Palm OS devices, and although the functionality doesn't seem spectacular, it does sound like it's ahead of the regular Palms.
Maintaining silence is not hyping their product; we'd be ripping them even worse if they had been pushing the product constantly. Let's not get into a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
Sir Alec Guinness, one of the finest actors of this century, is essentially saying that the movie is not worth the obsession that millions of fans have developed. I'm a big Star Wars fan, and yes, I even have an Obi-Wan calendar here in my cubicle. But I can't say I've seen the movie 100 times like the 12-year-old mentioned in the article. If a youth is that interested in movies, or mythology, or science fiction, that's great -- but widen out a little bit!
Sir Guinness would, I'm sure, prefer to be remembered for his truly great roles, such as in Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. The fact that another fine actor, Liam Neeson, feels likewise about the series lends support to the view that maybe we're taking Star Wars just a little too seriously.
This is something I've been saying for a while: Linux is great, and I've used it for a while, but it is *not* necessarily going to achieve world domination. Technological superiority doesn't always win. In the end, it's a business decision, and denying that will get us nowhere.
The possible key difference is open-sourcing. If all bugs really are shallow to a sufficient number of eyeballs, then we should continue to see far more robust software. That can impact the bottom line for lots of corporations, and thus gain substantial extra market/mind share. But as far as the individual desktop goes, Linux (while always a viable alternative) won't succeed purely on the basis of being more robust. Users need out-of-the-box hardware support and the ability to run the software they want to run, from productivity apps to home applications (read: Quicken) to, yes, games.
Java hasn't won primarily because Sun seems to have forgotten that while technologically superior doesn't always win, it is important. I carpool with a Java programmer, and whenever I make the point that Java is slow, he tells me to run a performance VM. There's the flaw: a "performance" anything should be for excellent results, not acceptable results.
Linux needs to build on its technological achievements, always improving, to win corporate share, and on its fundamental usability (HW support, apps) for individual use. That's the way to avoid the Java trap.
All that this article really says is that it appears that certain natural data fit a distribution other than the Gaussian. OK, fine. So do other processes. Besides, without some details on the distribution itself (give me formulae!) there's no real way to evaluate it.
That all depends on what you consider to make a distro "Red Hat". If you purely mean the software on the CD, then yes, it's still RedHat. But since RedHat makes clear that their revenue stream is not the distribution of the CD itself, but the support arrangements and associated business, then what you're getting is not the RH core competency.
I'm a techie as well, recently married -- and we keep very active (once a day minimum). Then again, we got married three months ago, and we were both virgins in our 20's (believe it!)
So, while this was once true for me, I managed to balance things out, although it's possible I've gone to the other extreme...;>
Historically, nearly every new government has been based on something, whether it be common interests due to physical location, common heritage, ideals (as in the case of the USA), or whatnot. I read the constitution, and it seemed like there was no real basis, idealistic or otherwise, for this anarchistic nation or citizenship within it. Essentially, they're doing it because they can. This is a pointless effort, and one which accomplishes nothing.
Now, if they were to try to form a Snow Crash-style phyle (also see Diamond Age; Snow Crash may have used a different term), then that would be susbstantially more interesting, since it would be based on something. This is really just a souped-up version of a bunch of third-grade boys forming a club.
Then again, even the third-graders are a little more sophisticated, since a lot of them have at least some kind of qualification for entry ("No Girls Allowed!"):)
...the 20th century, sure to be remembered for monumental advances in technology.
Great, thanks for something we didn't already know.
Why is it, I wonder, that Katz seems totally unable to at least articulate his opponents' viewpoints? Not just the theaters and studios, but the common man? After all, wouldn't that be the best way to refute them?
Wait, I forgot, that only works if your viewpoint is logical...
Well, can't beat the 13 wks vacation, but here's what a large telecom company provides to us in Internal Networking:
Comp'ed high-speed access at home (DSL for me, on it's own phone line, natch)
Work from home on a frequent basis (ties in with the above)
Easy access to hardware to take home (workstations, webcams, my own Ethernet switch, etc) as long as we bring it back when requested, though that's usually to upgrade;)
Gym, restaurant, etc.
The cool thing is, a lot of those perks aren't to keep us in the office. The sad thing is, even when we're at home, we're at work.:)
Yeah, except I was kidding. I thought it was pretty clear that my remark was satirical. For those who care, I'm actually a poor geek just about to get out of college. There's no WAY my wife married me for my money -- I don't have any.
The fact remains, of course, that she's incredibly beautiful and I'm rather plain. I attribute it to the fact that I run Linux.:)
They're basically saying, "Oh, we were NEVER going to do anything more than monitor critical networks for anomalous activity..." That's still a little too much for me. Any banking concern or other enterprise that forms part of the "critical infrastructure" should already be paranoid about security, and doesn't need the feds to tell them when they're under attack or help them dig out of the situation. It's like Social Security: you must do your own retirement planning; if you rely on the government to do it, you're going to be poverty-stricken a year after you retire.
As usual, we're seeing the FBI (and most likely the NSA especially) trrying to stick its collective nose where it doesn't belong. Let us protect our own networks -- it's nobody else's business what traffic is on there. And I would tend to think it would be a lot easier for a foreign government to compromise one of these "trained, experienced analysts" once the system is in place than to actually crack all those thousands of systems and networks that such an analyst would be able to monitor.
Call me paranoid, but any security professional knows that paranoia doesn't go far enough.
I would tend to think that cool or really useful projects will still attract developers. Several of these types of projects have been around for a while, and Open Source is still doing fine.
The money will basically end up as a perk for some developers, although obviously in some cases projects will get better talent than they might have otherwise. IOW, it'll have an effect, but I can't see it devastating Open Source, since (as you pointed out) the "basic motivation" for such coders isn't money.
They've also got some Star Wars expansion stuff not mentioned in the article. Imagine a relatively intelligent R2 unit wandering around... Hmm, I need to look more at the specs for this thing: voice synthesization would be cool. Mouse droids, here I come...
This is a definite must-have for any hardware-tinkering geek.
that adults ought not be forced to intrude on their children's privacy
Does anyone else see a problem here? Isn't that sometimes a parent's job? IOW, there are times when a parent has to "intrude on their children's privacy" to assure that their kids are being raised the way they see fit. My parents restricted what I could watch when I was a kid (I'm 23 and married now), and I'm glad they did -- it showed me they cared.
So let's see, Katz now advocates illegal acts (like copyright violation and illegally sneaking into movies) as well as a hands-off parenting approach? Doesn't sound like libertarianism, sounds like anarchy.
This was an outstanding article for the mainstream press that covered a number of key security issues that are fairly subtle to those who do not work in security (it even gets the "cracker"/"hacker" dichotomy right).
It also makes an interesting point, one that I've had to deal with for a long time, and most security folks have as well: One of the difficulties in securing information is that these measures many times make life difficult for the users, and when those users are technically skilled themselves, life gets that much more difficult.
The problem lies at the very essence of security. A secure system restricts the flow of information contained within it, but this is counterproductive to what users are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately for the users, sometimes it's more important to have secure information than ease of use. And as long as malicious individuals exist, this will be a "necessary evil".
Maybe I should have been clearer. I am not an "English-language chauvinist" -- I speak fluent Spanish, and that is the primary language in which my wife and I communicate, since that is what is easiest for her and I do just fine with it.
What I mean is, why does so much cool news like this come out only in C'T? One would think that the American tech press would pick up on some of this...
And yes, including the link to the article through Babelfish (as another poster pointed out) would be so much easier.
It has nothing to do with technology. This is a culture-related phenomenon -- like anything else, there is some tangential relationship to technology, but at its core, it's totally unrelated. If you want to criticize hero-worship, go ahead -- that's a valid target. But don't blame it on technology.
This article is as much fluff as anything else. Let's face it, the "declining quality of American public schools" is worthy of DISCUSSION, but it doesn't belong on the nightly news, since it's not an event. And while I didn't idolize JFK Jr. (I'm 22), I understand why my parents' generation did. He represented what they saw themselves as: a generation that was losing touch with its past.
Besides, how is Mother Teresa controversial? I'm not Catholic, and don't agree with most of her religious beliefs, but there's no denying that she did incredible work for the poor, and at great personal cost.
Katz is once again spouting a bunch of technobabble media buzzword nonsense, wanting everyone to denounce human nature (yes, hero-worship and Campbellian myths are ingrained in our basic makeup). Face it, Katz, you just need to have your name out there, don't you? Even if it means writing total nonsense.
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Well, that and the fact that the way it's distributed can add value. And that it is done because of the profit motive, which (theoretically) doesn't exist in communism.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to take issue with this. An information "gift economy" does not supersede capitalism; that's ridiculous.
:) profit is among his motivations. Fine, that's the way the world works.
Look at it: An information gift economy (the focus of the Salon piece) essentially allows information to be free (as in speech, not beer, according to the hallowed cliche). Does that mean that the info has no value? No, it means that information's value increases as it spreads. Essentially, it's the distribution of information that becomes important. Linuxcare and RedHat are good examples of this. Linuxcare offers support services, right? The information they provide is essentially already available if you know where to look and how to interpret it. But by providing it in a different format to people who don't know where to look or how to interpret the information themselves, there is value. And I daresay that the founders of Linuxcare were motivated (at least in part) by profit, the foundation of capitalism. RedHat is perhaps a better example, since they freely give away the OS via the Net, and allow you to redistribute copies of what you do buy. Again, the value comes from providing support information and services.
To take it a step further, yes, I can find all the information I want about, say, firewals on the Net. But I still own the O'Reilly book Building Internet Firewalls because there is so much information condensed that having it in book format is valuable. And as Tim O'Reilly has pointed out recently
Taking a look away from the information economy (which is still far smaller than the rest of the economy), capitalism is in no real danger. Think GM's going to start giving away cars and trucks to just anybody? How about DeBeers opening up that warehouse?
C'mon folks, let's not get carried away. Information should be free, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to try to get ahead in life. That's the profit motive, and that's human nature.
Yeah, but can I run RedHat on my Red Ball? :)
Don't know about all your questions, but karma can in fact dwindle; it only counts the last few months of moderation (longer than the amount of time your comments show up on your user page).
At least, that's the way I understand it. Someone might be able to correct me.
...the hype that Handspring propagated through their self imposed silence.
"Hype" isn't silence... The price points seem "ground-breaking" for Palm OS devices, and although the functionality doesn't seem spectacular, it does sound like it's ahead of the regular Palms.
Maintaining silence is not hyping their product; we'd be ripping them even worse if they had been pushing the product constantly. Let's not get into a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
Sir Alec Guinness, one of the finest actors of this century, is essentially saying that the movie is not worth the obsession that millions of fans have developed. I'm a big Star Wars fan, and yes, I even have an Obi-Wan calendar here in my cubicle. But I can't say I've seen the movie 100 times like the 12-year-old mentioned in the article. If a youth is that interested in movies, or mythology, or science fiction, that's great -- but widen out a little bit!
Sir Guinness would, I'm sure, prefer to be remembered for his truly great roles, such as in Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. The fact that another fine actor, Liam Neeson, feels likewise about the series lends support to the view that maybe we're taking Star Wars just a little too seriously.
This is something I've been saying for a while: Linux is great, and I've used it for a while, but it is *not* necessarily going to achieve world domination. Technological superiority doesn't always win. In the end, it's a business decision, and denying that will get us nowhere.
The possible key difference is open-sourcing. If all bugs really are shallow to a sufficient number of eyeballs, then we should continue to see far more robust software. That can impact the bottom line for lots of corporations, and thus gain substantial extra market/mind share. But as far as the individual desktop goes, Linux (while always a viable alternative) won't succeed purely on the basis of being more robust. Users need out-of-the-box hardware support and the ability to run the software they want to run, from productivity apps to home applications (read: Quicken) to, yes, games.
Java hasn't won primarily because Sun seems to have forgotten that while technologically superior doesn't always win, it is important. I carpool with a Java programmer, and whenever I make the point that Java is slow, he tells me to run a performance VM. There's the flaw: a "performance" anything should be for excellent results, not acceptable results.
Linux needs to build on its technological achievements, always improving, to win corporate share, and on its fundamental usability (HW support, apps) for individual use. That's the way to avoid the Java trap.
Almost... the correct equivalency is:
p = That that is is that that is not is not == That that is not is not that that is is.
Or,
p == That that is not is that that is is not.
All that this article really says is that it appears that certain natural data fit a distribution other than the Gaussian. OK, fine. So do other processes. Besides, without some details on the distribution itself (give me formulae!) there's no real way to evaluate it.
That all depends on what you consider to make a distro "Red Hat". If you purely mean the software on the CD, then yes, it's still RedHat. But since RedHat makes clear that their revenue stream is not the distribution of the CD itself, but the support arrangements and associated business, then what you're getting is not the RH core competency.
I'm a techie as well, recently married -- and we keep very active (once a day minimum). Then again, we got married three months ago, and we were both virgins in our 20's (believe it!)
;>
So, while this was once true for me, I managed to balance things out, although it's possible I've gone to the other extreme...
Historically, nearly every new government has been based on something, whether it be common interests due to physical location, common heritage, ideals (as in the case of the USA), or whatnot. I read the constitution, and it seemed like there was no real basis, idealistic or otherwise, for this anarchistic nation or citizenship within it. Essentially, they're doing it because they can. This is a pointless effort, and one which accomplishes nothing.
:)
Now, if they were to try to form a Snow Crash-style phyle (also see Diamond Age; Snow Crash may have used a different term), then that would be susbstantially more interesting, since it would be based on something. This is really just a souped-up version of a bunch of third-grade boys forming a club.
Then again, even the third-graders are a little more sophisticated, since a lot of them have at least some kind of qualification for entry ("No Girls Allowed!")
Why is it, I wonder, that Katz seems totally unable to at least articulate his opponents' viewpoints? Not just the theaters and studios, but the common man? After all, wouldn't that be the best way to refute them?
Wait, I forgot, that only works if your viewpoint is logical...
Comp'ed high-speed access at home (DSL for me, on it's own phone line, natch)
Work from home on a frequent basis (ties in with the above)
Easy access to hardware to take home (workstations, webcams, my own Ethernet switch, etc) as long as we bring it back when requested, though that's usually to upgrade ;)
Gym, restaurant, etc.
:)
The cool thing is, a lot of those perks aren't to keep us in the office. The sad thing is, even when we're at home, we're at work.
Yeah, except I was kidding. I thought it was pretty clear that my remark was satirical. For those who care, I'm actually a poor geek just about to get out of college. There's no WAY my wife married me for my money -- I don't have any.
:)
The fact remains, of course, that she's incredibly beautiful and I'm rather plain. I attribute it to the fact that I run Linux.
For those who want to read the article, he re it is.
That explains why my new wife, who is incredibly attractive, married me, who is NOT.
:)
The cited link doesn't work...
They're basically saying, "Oh, we were NEVER going to do anything more than monitor critical networks for anomalous activity..." That's still a little too much for me. Any banking concern or other enterprise that forms part of the "critical infrastructure" should already be paranoid about security, and doesn't need the feds to tell them when they're under attack or help them dig out of the situation. It's like Social Security: you must do your own retirement planning; if you rely on the government to do it, you're going to be poverty-stricken a year after you retire.
As usual, we're seeing the FBI (and most likely the NSA especially) trrying to stick its collective nose where it doesn't belong. Let us protect our own networks -- it's nobody else's business what traffic is on there. And I would tend to think it would be a lot easier for a foreign government to compromise one of these "trained, experienced analysts" once the system is in place than to actually crack all those thousands of systems and networks that such an analyst would be able to monitor.
Call me paranoid, but any security professional knows that paranoia doesn't go far enough.
I would tend to think that cool or really useful projects will still attract developers. Several of these types of projects have been around for a while, and Open Source is still doing fine.
The money will basically end up as a perk for some developers, although obviously in some cases projects will get better talent than they might have otherwise. IOW, it'll have an effect, but I can't see it devastating Open Source, since (as you pointed out) the "basic motivation" for such coders isn't money.
They've also got some Star Wars expansion stuff not mentioned in the article. Imagine a relatively intelligent R2 unit wandering around... Hmm, I need to look more at the specs for this thing: voice synthesization would be cool. Mouse droids, here I come...
This is a definite must-have for any hardware-tinkering geek.
So let's see, Katz now advocates illegal acts (like copyright violation and illegally sneaking into movies) as well as a hands-off parenting approach? Doesn't sound like libertarianism, sounds like anarchy.
This was an outstanding article for the mainstream press that covered a number of key security issues that are fairly subtle to those who do not work in security (it even gets the "cracker"/"hacker" dichotomy right).
It also makes an interesting point, one that I've had to deal with for a long time, and most security folks have as well: One of the difficulties in securing information is that these measures many times make life difficult for the users, and when those users are technically skilled themselves, life gets that much more difficult.
The problem lies at the very essence of security. A secure system restricts the flow of information contained within it, but this is counterproductive to what users are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately for the users, sometimes it's more important to have secure information than ease of use. And as long as malicious individuals exist, this will be a "necessary evil".
Maybe I should have been clearer. I am not an "English-language chauvinist" -- I speak fluent Spanish, and that is the primary language in which my wife and I communicate, since that is what is easiest for her and I do just fine with it.
What I mean is, why does so much cool news like this come out only in C'T? One would think that the American tech press would pick up on some of this...
And yes, including the link to the article through Babelfish (as another poster pointed out) would be so much easier.
It has nothing to do with technology. This is a culture-related phenomenon -- like anything else, there is some tangential relationship to technology, but at its core, it's totally unrelated. If you want to criticize hero-worship, go ahead -- that's a valid target. But don't blame it on technology.
This article is as much fluff as anything else. Let's face it, the "declining quality of American public schools" is worthy of DISCUSSION, but it doesn't belong on the nightly news, since it's not an event. And while I didn't idolize JFK Jr. (I'm 22), I understand why my parents' generation did. He represented what they saw themselves as: a generation that was losing touch with its past.
Besides, how is Mother Teresa controversial? I'm not Catholic, and don't agree with most of her religious beliefs, but there's no denying that she did incredible work for the poor, and at great personal cost.
Katz is once again spouting a bunch of technobabble media buzzword nonsense, wanting everyone to denounce human nature (yes, hero-worship and Campbellian myths are ingrained in our basic makeup). Face it, Katz, you just need to have your name out there, don't you? Even if it means writing total nonsense.