Well, I used to be an academic too, and I must say I initially viewed the transition from tenure to contracting with trepidation, one extreme to the other in terms of security, or so I thought.
But it turned out to be quite different. Real security is when your skills are needed by virtually all modern corporates, and when the rewards are high enough that it takes only a few years to buy your house outright. The security of having a regular paycheck forever in academia (unless you bugger the burser, so to speak) that is so tiny that you don't expect to pay off the mortgage before retirement, well, let's just say that it leaves something to be desired.
You write: how can you compare decisions that may affect the lives of thousands of employees and/or shareholders and the decisions which may make it difficult for some users to read their mail for an hour or two?
You clearly underestimate the importance of computers and communications in modern living. You say "some users"... try "some millions" instead. Countless businesses depend on those communications, many for their primary source of income. Yet you contrast it with the jobs of board directors who's main accountability seems to be to their own bank accounts, and who if they screw up usually get "punished" with a golden handshake. And worse, who seem not to care at all about the lives of those employeees to which you referred. [Shareholders do seem to be cared for, admittedly.]
Well, let's put this on a more equal footing. There are many jobs in a corporation, some of which can be done by anybody and some of which can be done only by people with special skills. When it comes to ranking them, ask yourself a few simple questions, such as "Can the company survive without person or group X?", applied to everyone in the company. It might open your eyes a little.
In a closed system, most high-tech companies can survive without their top directors (because lower managers move up, and there are always some good ones around), but cannot survive at all without their skilled technical staff (promoting the tea lady doesn't help). Good directors and managers are important because they let the company do more than just survive, but still the key element is the technical one, a fact that they would like you to forget. In a non-closed system, professional skills are of course bought-in, and that's the case for tech positions now as much as directorships, and at long last, the rewards are starting to reflect the importance of technological expertise just as they have always reflected the importance of top management.
Some call this the Rise of the Techies, but whatever you call it, it's just a reflection on the realities in the world around us. Technology is become key.
Your experience may also have been the result of unwillingness to pay the market rate for quality contract staff. If you pay rates close to the bottom of the scale (which is still more than permanent staff get -- that's how the market works in this time of scarcity), you should expect less than top-notch excellence. Don't even bother offering less than 40 UKP/hr in the Internet area for example if you're looking for all-round competence, or 30 UKP/hr for good skill in any one subdiscipline. Rather than offering bottom rate, you'd be better off getting college dropouts, often good value because quite a few probably ended up playing with computers instead of studying.
The other possibility that comes to mind is that you've been hiring through cowboy agencies. You get what you pay for in agencies as well. A well-reputed agency will try to maintain that reputation, even to the extent of immediately replacing someone that hasn't come up to scratch. But it's important that you make it known to them that you are seeking top professional staff -- write it into your contract with them, so that *they* have to sort out the mess on your behalf should you ever have another such disastrous experience. Don't let them get away with supplying sub-standard placements, even in times of shortage.
I've reread what I wrote and I don't see how what you say could be inferred from that.
My piece referred to non-technical administrators and managers as being non-technical, not to technical people who work any particular number of hours. I think we must be talking at cross purposes, but I'm not sure exactly about what.
I am astounded by what you write about contractors. One of three things must have happened: either (i) contractors are different where you work [I can't believe that, since you're in the UK]; or (ii) you have had a huge number of awful experiences, in which case you must fire your supply agencies immediately (and sue them for being incompetent if you have a large legal department), and think about severely questioning the people who interviewed those contractors as they must have been deaf, blind and probably dumb; or (iii) you don't have enough skills to freelance yourself, you have a massive inferiority complex as a result of it, and you lie to boot.
In my fairly extensive career as a contractor, I have known several hundred others, as well as several hundred permanent colleagues. Of the contractors, maybe 2 were incompetent, and maybe 5 were 9-5 people to whom it was just a job. The number of permanent staff I have known in both of these categories is in the many dozens.
With very minor exceptions, in all those places I have worked (mainly large computer and communications companies), contractors behave as professionals, and very competent ones. If your experience is different then something is very, very wrong.
What I've never understood is why alleged supporters of the free market are happy with business costs and rewards being governed by supply and demand, and yet for some odd reason they feel that if they do the same it's predatory.
It's easy to see why employers sometimes encourage that view, but the technical community needs to see beyond it. It's a technical world now, it is *your* skills that are of utmost importance to your (presumably hi-tech) company, and there is no reason in the world why you should be earning less than a member of the Board of Directors --- top technical competence assumed, of course.
Anyone can push paper, but few can do our work. Why shouldn't your income reflect that?
You write: The main difference is, that when employed, but being paid by the hour, you can have a guaranteed minimum nr of hours you can work. So there's not as much risk involved.
In this business, there is zero risk of not reaching that minimum number of hours. The risk is entirely in the other direction, ie. being massively overworked. And if this doesn't apply to your company then clearly it's not part of the computing and Internet explosion. Maybe it's time to move elsewhere.
The objections to working freelance are entirely bogus, basically fostered by the management of yesteryear that is averse to paying the higher rates of technically skilled people on today's open market --- in other words, substantially more than they themselves are earning as non-technical administrators.
Welcome to the new world guys, which is a *technical* one in which it is tech skills that are the more important and scarce ones, and in which admin & management is in massive oversupply. Times change. Your should have studied those boring sciences at school.
As an addendum to the above, contracting implies hourly accounting, since that's the norm for freelance employment in the computer industry (maybe in all industries?).
Since we do outrageous hours (90 hours per week is not unusual for permanent and contract staff alike), the double benefit of higher and hourly rates should be obvious. Just keep your Palm Pilot with you, press IN/OUT when relevant, and at the end of the week you pop out a pretty timesheet. No hassle, and there's the added benefit that if management is tight with money and misguidedly pushes only permanent staff to work extra hours then you have more time to pursue your own interests. Hourly remuneration carries the huge advantage of making people at the top appreciate the work you do in the only way they understand.
Although it's perhaps not unexpected that permanent employees see money as the principal advantage of working freelance, that really misses the point entirely.
Contractor rates are higher only as a side effect of the main advantage, which is that you are independent and you negociate as a peer with customers and with agencies. This does translate into higher rates of earning, yes, but it has a much more important effect than just that. You're free, free of the corporate politics, free of the need to take crap just to stay on the career ladder, free to speak your mind as an independent computer professional rather than being just a cog in a machine. If you're good then technical management appreciates you regardless of whether you're permanent or contractor of course, but that's not true of PHBs and top management; they don't appreciate techies at all, so don't feel any qualms in making them pay decent market rates for their lack of appreciation that it's technology that underpins their business. Quite possibly they'll appreciate you more when you stand out on their spreadsheet.
I'd recommend it to anyone that knows his or her stuff. Far from lacking in job security as permanent staff would have you believe, it is an extraordinarily secure form of employment in the current burgeoning Internet environment where skills are the main bottleneck to corporate expansion online, as long as you site yourself within commuting distance of one of the corridors of activity. You'll never look back.
Something is wrong with PC pricing. At the huge volumes of these that are sold, our favourite toys should cost the same as household appliances and hifi equipment at the mass market end of the scale. We shouldn't be talking sub-$1000 at the bottom end, but sub-$100. A PC is not inherently more complex and hence expensive in its component parts than a set-top box, possibly minus display.
Are we talking cartel here, or is the demand so much greater than supply that prices bump around just under the ceiling rather than just above the floor?
Why does this happen (ie. education being short-shifted)? It happens because the citizenry is not free to choose the proportion of tax revenue that is allocated to each area of government expenditure, in this case education.
If one could choose just one tiny change that would have the widest possible effect in improving democratic responsibility and giving power to the people, that would have to be it.
The more we hear from SGI, the clearer it becomes that massive and fundamental changes have taken place inside the company, not just in public policy but in their understanding of their market and future prospects. Corporations of that size don't change direction on a whim and at a moment's notice. Like an oil tanker, there is a delay between cause and effect, so changes have to be well considered.
I don't have any involvement with SGI, but from the outside it seems to me that they've reached the following conclusions: (i) only their bigger machines are sector leaders and possibly still make a profit; (ii) their earlier preeminence in workstation graphics has been decimated by the collosal improvement in the capabilities of PC graphics cards; (iii) workstation-class CPUs and large memories are now commodity items, so SGI workstations can no longer claim that niche; (iv) SGI have excellent hardware techies but they cannot compete in this new commodity market because margins are far too small; (v) it is very difficult to compete against free software / open source in a market like theirs where users are technically competent, and "if you can't beat them, join them"; (vi) not all is well with the Microsoft titanic, and seats in the lifeboats are starting to look inviting so they are playing down their involvement with NT; (vii) in contrast, things look very rosy for Linux, in particular the wide acceptance among developers that this is A Good Platform, so they're playing that up to be developer-friendly and clearly "with it"; (viii) the synergy among other relevant corporates is massive in this area, and no way can SGI afford not to be on the same boat as, for example, Oracle; (ix) no major computer manufacturer has yet capitalized on the potential of Linux (nor the BSDs), and SGI could be The One that makes it "their own" if they genuinely adopt the ideals of the community; and finally, (x) software development (particularly maintenance) is incredibly expensive to provide, so making the most of open development on the Internet makes huge economic sense, ie. their overheads in that area could plummet.
All this adds up to a major shift, both internal and external: bye bye to the low-end proprietary stuff as per the announcement, leave computer basics to the commodity suppliers, at most customize PC workstations with high-end accelerators where margins still exist, leave Irix to their big systems where development costs won't decimate the spreadsheet, develop synergy with the free/OSS community, both as excellent value-for-money PR and as an essential component of their open support strategy, assist technically to give Linux some of the scalability that Irix has on their bigger machines, add in enterprise-critical facilities like a journalling filesystem, and in general hype up the whole scene so that they register in the books of PHBs as potential customers and shareholders.
The only thing that isn't consistent with this is their statement about continuing to support their MIPs systems at least until 2006, but I suppose that can be put down to not wanting to abandon their old customer base. That makes sense, as long as they don't spend too much money in this area of diminishing returns.
All in all, if their thinking is anything like the above then I reckon they have a good chance of making a success of it. They certainly can't be accused of doing nothing as the wind changes direction.
Brent makes a very good point. Innovation is important, but not at the expense of any other good properties. Good additions are those that are not only good in themselves but also good in their integration and interaction with other subsystems around them. The decades-old buzzword of "modular" is as important today as ever, and the even older one of "coupling" still rules the roost. If a new subsystem spreads static tendrils throughout older well-proven code or interacts dynamically with many other parts in complex ways, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Talking about relevant terms, perhaps we should find a little more use for one that academia values a lot: elegance. It encompasses all of the above in one word, and certainly C++ would never have passed its harsh judgement.;-)
[I don't want to imply that DIPC wasn't up to scratch in that area. The user-level interface is wonderfully elegant, but I haven't looked at the implementation at all, yet.]
I've just had a browse of their mailing list archives to see if there is a licensing issue. It turns out that DIPC has been GPL'd since August. (No idea what it was before that.)
Trying to read between the lines in some of their posts, it doesn't seem that licensing was the issue though, because apparently DIPC was getting good support from Alan Cox in the way of header patches but no encouragement from Linus. (Despite being a fan, Alan is said not to have had the time to press the issue further). I get the impression that there was a lot left unsaid.
Each case has its own particulars, but leaving that aside, it's the general case that may be of some concern in the future. Linux is a standard-bearer in the free software community, so we need innovation to be encouraged in the kernel as elsewhere if we're not to be seen as lacking in that department. If the coding is of a good standard and is well integrated, the default answer to inclusion in the development branch needs to be "yes". (Hopefully it is, already -- maybe someone from the kernel list will comment). We can't afford SGI to be right about lack of innovation.
The statement that the open-source community is not a good innovator is, like most complex issues, both true and untrue.
On the one hand, only the most blind of observers would suggest that novel products are not emerging from that quarter. The sheer volume of announcements on Freshmeat is just flabbergasting, and scattered like jewels in among the 95% of fairly ordinary stuff are some really excellent software products and many priceless ideas.
But on the other hand, and maybe this is where SGI is coming from, innovation in the Linux kernel is comparatively minimal. I don't think anyone would go so far as to say that it is stifled, but the fact remains that the choice of which ideas are accepted into the official release and which are not is in the hands of a very few people (maybe three or four, or possibly just the one). That must have an effect on innovation, however much we respect the people in question.
As a little example of the above, the DIPC project implemented a gem of an idea (I have absolutely nothing to do with it, by the way): allowing processes that communicate through System V IPC mechanisms on a single host to do so even if they are on different machines, while maintaining 100% compile-time application compatibility because the only difference at the API is a single bit in the IPC headers which you'd flick off or on for single or multiple machine operation. That's innovation, usefulness and elegance rolled into one. But no, Linus didn't want to put it into the standard kernel, and to say that the developers were greatly dispirited is the understatement of the year.
It's worth reflecting that if a kernel facility isn't part of the standard distribution, or worse, if it's available only as a patch, then for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. We musn't get ourselves into a situation where innovation in the Linux kernel suffers as a result of this possibility.
Blame, blame, blame. "Who do we point the finger at?" "Who do we sue?"
That seems to be the main thing on the minds of managerial types when faced with the choice of competing technologies, once of which is free and reliable yet "cursed" with not having a legal "blame me" label attached to it.
Well, we need to make them see that that is a mentality for the incompetent, that blame is a concept for those that have no other weapon at their disposal. But if they choose wisely then they *do* give themselves additional weapons, and powerful ones, namely the ability of technically competent people to fix things that are open, to modify them to suit the requirement instead of relying on external parties.
So, I reject the premise on which this thread is based, ie. that party A or B is responsible for the end result. We each make our own nests, and if we choose our building materials unwisely and then seek to blame others, that just shows the height of our incompetence. If you're technically clued up but your advice is ignored, well that's their loss. Go where your skills are valued, and leave them to their problem and to their focus on who to blame for their own lack of skill.
Distributed keyservers, not central database
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There is no need for a central database of keys, nor indeed for a new database of any sort. The PGP "database" is an already existing widely implemented distributed repository of public PGP keys which is well supported worldwide.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of the keys available on keyservers.
Only public keys are stored on keyservers, and they're used by a message sender to encrypt messages destinated for the corresponding recipients who are the only people that can decrypt them because they alone hold the corresponding private keys. The NSA can't get the private keys from the keyservers because they aren't there.
Recipients of incoming messages don't grab public keys from keyservers in order to decrypt the messages, but only to authenticate their signatures. For message signing, keys are used in reverse, ie. the sender signs his message with his private key and then recipients can check that it really came from him with the help of his public key.
Needless to say, even a non-clueful user has to generate his own keypair and place his public key on a default keyserver, but that operation can be completely hidden from him by being done at the time his email system is installed, configured, or just run for the first time. Sensible crypto users go to great lengths to select a good and long passphrase to protect their private key, but this is not necessary if the only goal is to defeat the snoops: the passphrase can be left completely empty by default, so the mailreader can decrypt incoming mail (which has been encrypted by the senders using the recipient's public key obtained from a keyserver) without bothering the user with a request for a passphrase. [Not ideal of course, but at least it would make the operation transparent.]
From small snoops spring large killer systems
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I think you may be missing the point here. Just because the vast majority of us "have nothing to worry about" personally, this doesn't mean that we should not worry about the issue generally. It's very similar to the burning down of rain forrests and 10 million other such areas of concern. Is it sensible that we ignore them just because the effect on us is not personal and immediate?
Snooping by three-letter agencies does indeed seem fairly innocuous (as long as you lay undistinguished and hence unseen among the teeming masses), but what if you have larger ambitions than to live and die unwitnessed? Whatever you do, even if it's totally legal, you're bound to annoy somebody sometime, and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that the snooped info will pop up to haunt you, because *all* information is for sale to someone at some price. You'll feel different about it then than you do now.
And longer term, what about the Terminator, Matrix, or even Borg scenarios? A system that knows everything about what's going on is a system that can kill you in the end, no matter how benign it is at the start. Don't dismiss it as "just SF". It'll be too late to say "Oops, I was wrong" when it happens.
Although the answer to electronic snooping is clearly encryption, anti-snooping and pro-privacy campaigners regularly bemoan the fact that encrypting one's email never really took off as the normal thing to do, despite a plethora of PGP wrappers.
I think the reason for that is pretty clear, and consequently the solution is as well: the major mailreaders needs to automatically retrieve PGP keys from default keyservers and automatically decrypt incoming mail *by default* for electronic envelopes to catch on in any significant way. [This is even more important than encrypting outgoing mail.] If there is any manual configuration involved, or any hassle whatsoever, or (shock horror!) any knowledge required, then it just won't happen. Clued up computer users simply aren't around in sufficient numbers to form a critical mass in the email world. For encrypted email to take off, Joe Bloggs has to be part of the revolution, without even being aware of it. [Just like he sends WINMAIL.DAT attachments everywhere without being aware of it.]
I guess this means that until Netscape and Microsoft implement the above in their respective products, nothing of any statistical significance will happen in this area.
There aren't going to be 10 zillion developers working on machines with hundreds of processors, multiple terabytes of disk, and who-knows-how-much tape storage. Your average developer isn't going to have access to such a machine.
The resources available to the average developer are irrelevant. What matters is that just one good developer has them available, and the lesson we've learned from Beowulf is that not just one but a lot of developers will find themselves suitably resourced.
You've got it back to front I think. Despite throwing the occasional olive branch as in this case, the RIAA has a massive problem with MP3s, because they're fighting for their very survival, even more so than the musicians. There are a lot of possible scenarios for the future of the music industry in which the RIAA ceases to exist utterly, along with the studios that they represent.
Their current actions are like the red flags that pressure groups walked in front of locomotives, and their mega-industry is every bit as collosal as the one that used to be centred on the horse for transport and which now does not exist at all except in tiny niches. The lesson of history is that even the most extensive and solid of institutions is not as permanent as it may seem in its heyday.
In the case of music, that impermanence couldn't be more clear. Before the invention of recording, it wasn't possible to make money from replication of musical performances. Then recording was invented but replication required massive plants and capital, which created the opportunity for an industry to be born and collosal profits to be made. And now the wheel of technological progress has turned again: replication can be performed by anyone and costs almost nothing, and the window of opportunity for making profits from it has closed again.
Despite their self-righteous rationalizations, there is no law of nature that says that the music industry will always be as lucrative as it has been for the last few decades. There are no fixed points where technology is concerned, and MP3s are a sign of that. This newest chapter in the empowerment of individuals effectively means that the time for massive profits from replication and controlled distribution is over, that the RIAA is in the throes of extinction or at least severe mutation, and that the relationship between musicians and their audience is in transition. And so be it.
Bye bye RIAA. No one really expects you to die quietly, but die you will, just like other prehistoric giants who were too set in their ways to adapt to changing conditions. And that's not a bad analogy, because once again it's those pesky little creatures underfoot that are in the ascendency.
Slashdot Mirror
And may it long continue!
Hehe, nice one.
Well, I used to be an academic too, and I must say I initially viewed the transition from tenure to contracting with trepidation, one extreme to the other in terms of security, or so I thought.
But it turned out to be quite different. Real security is when your skills are needed by virtually all modern corporates, and when the rewards are high enough that it takes only a few years to buy your house outright. The security of having a regular paycheck forever in academia (unless you bugger the burser, so to speak) that is so tiny that you don't expect to pay off the mortgage before retirement, well, let's just say that it leaves something to be desired.
Good. There have to be *some* people left running NT, otherwise whatever would we talk about here? ;-)
You write: how can you compare decisions that may affect the lives of thousands of employees and/or shareholders and the decisions which may make it difficult for some users to read their mail for an hour or two?
... try "some millions" instead. Countless businesses depend on those communications, many for their primary source of income. Yet you contrast it with the jobs of board directors who's main accountability seems to be to their own bank accounts, and who if they screw up usually get "punished" with a golden handshake. And worse, who seem not to care at all about the lives of those employeees to which you referred. [Shareholders do seem to be cared for, admittedly.]
You clearly underestimate the importance of computers and communications in modern living. You say "some users"
Well, let's put this on a more equal footing. There are many jobs in a corporation, some of which can be done by anybody and some of which can be done only by people with special skills. When it comes to ranking them, ask yourself a few simple questions, such as "Can the company survive without person or group X?", applied to everyone in the company. It might open your eyes a little.
In a closed system, most high-tech companies can survive without their top directors (because lower managers move up, and there are always some good ones around), but cannot survive at all without their skilled technical staff (promoting the tea lady doesn't help). Good directors and managers are important because they let the company do more than just survive, but still the key element is the technical one, a fact that they would like you to forget. In a non-closed system, professional skills are of course bought-in, and that's the case for tech positions now as much as directorships, and at long last, the rewards are starting to reflect the importance of technological expertise just as they have always reflected the importance of top management.
Some call this the Rise of the Techies, but whatever you call it, it's just a reflection on the realities in the world around us. Technology is become key.
Your experience may also have been the result of unwillingness to pay the market rate for quality contract staff. If you pay rates close to the bottom of the scale (which is still more than permanent staff get -- that's how the market works in this time of scarcity), you should expect less than top-notch excellence. Don't even bother offering less than 40 UKP/hr in the Internet area for example if you're looking for all-round competence, or 30 UKP/hr for good skill in any one subdiscipline. Rather than offering bottom rate, you'd be better off getting college dropouts, often good value because quite a few probably ended up playing with computers instead of studying.
The other possibility that comes to mind is that you've been hiring through cowboy agencies. You get what you pay for in agencies as well. A well-reputed agency will try to maintain that reputation, even to the extent of immediately replacing someone that hasn't come up to scratch. But it's important that you make it known to them that you are seeking top professional staff -- write it into your contract with them, so that *they* have to sort out the mess on your behalf should you ever have another such disastrous experience. Don't let them get away with supplying sub-standard placements, even in times of shortage.
I've reread what I wrote and I don't see how what you say could be inferred from that.
My piece referred to non-technical administrators and managers as being non-technical, not to technical people who work any particular number of hours. I think we must be talking at cross purposes, but I'm not sure exactly about what.
Martin
I am astounded by what you write about contractors. One of three things must have happened: either (i) contractors are different where you work [I can't believe that, since you're in the UK]; or (ii) you have had a huge number of awful experiences, in which case you must fire your supply agencies immediately (and sue them for being incompetent if you have a large legal department), and think about severely questioning the people who interviewed those contractors as they must have been deaf, blind and probably dumb; or (iii) you don't have enough skills to freelance yourself, you have a massive inferiority complex as a result of it, and you lie to boot.
In my fairly extensive career as a contractor, I have known several hundred others, as well as several hundred permanent colleagues. Of the contractors, maybe 2 were incompetent, and maybe 5 were 9-5 people to whom it was just a job. The number of permanent staff I have known in both of these categories is in the many dozens.
With very minor exceptions, in all those places I have worked (mainly large computer and communications companies), contractors behave as professionals, and very competent ones. If your experience is different then something is very, very wrong.
What I've never understood is why alleged supporters of the free market are happy with business costs and rewards being governed by supply and demand, and yet for some odd reason they feel that if they do the same it's predatory.
It's easy to see why employers sometimes encourage that view, but the technical community needs to see beyond it. It's a technical world now, it is *your* skills that are of utmost importance to your (presumably hi-tech) company, and there is no reason in the world why you should be earning less than a member of the Board of Directors --- top technical competence assumed, of course.
Anyone can push paper, but few can do our work. Why shouldn't your income reflect that?
You write: The main difference is, that when employed, but being paid by the hour, you can have a guaranteed minimum nr of hours you can work. So there's not as much risk involved.
In this business, there is zero risk of not reaching that minimum number of hours. The risk is entirely in the other direction, ie. being massively overworked. And if this doesn't apply to your company then clearly it's not part of the computing and Internet explosion. Maybe it's time to move elsewhere.
The objections to working freelance are entirely bogus, basically fostered by the management of yesteryear that is averse to paying the higher rates of technically skilled people on today's open market --- in other words, substantially more than they themselves are earning as non-technical administrators.
Welcome to the new world guys, which is a *technical* one in which it is tech skills that are the more important and scarce ones, and in which admin & management is in massive oversupply. Times change. Your should have studied those boring sciences at school.
As an addendum to the above, contracting implies hourly accounting, since that's the norm for freelance employment in the computer industry (maybe in all industries?).
Since we do outrageous hours (90 hours per week is not unusual for permanent and contract staff alike), the double benefit of higher and hourly rates should be obvious. Just keep your Palm Pilot with you, press IN/OUT when relevant, and at the end of the week you pop out a pretty timesheet. No hassle, and there's the added benefit that if management is tight with money and misguidedly pushes only permanent staff to work extra hours then you have more time to pursue your own interests. Hourly remuneration carries the huge advantage of making people at the top appreciate the work you do in the only way they understand.
Although it's perhaps not unexpected that permanent employees see money as the principal advantage of working freelance, that really misses the point entirely.
Contractor rates are higher only as a side effect of the main advantage, which is that you are independent and you negociate as a peer with customers and with agencies. This does translate into higher rates of earning, yes, but it has a much more important effect than just that. You're free, free of the corporate politics, free of the need to take crap just to stay on the career ladder, free to speak your mind as an independent computer professional rather than being just a cog in a machine. If you're good then technical management appreciates you regardless of whether you're permanent or contractor of course, but that's not true of PHBs and top management; they don't appreciate techies at all, so don't feel any qualms in making them pay decent market rates for their lack of appreciation that it's technology that underpins their business. Quite possibly they'll appreciate you more when you stand out on their spreadsheet.
I'd recommend it to anyone that knows his or her stuff. Far from lacking in job security as permanent staff would have you believe, it is an extraordinarily secure form of employment in the current burgeoning Internet environment where skills are the main bottleneck to corporate expansion online, as long as you site yourself within commuting distance of one of the corridors of activity. You'll never look back.
Something is wrong with PC pricing. At the huge volumes of these that are sold, our favourite toys should cost the same as household appliances and hifi equipment at the mass market end of the scale. We shouldn't be talking sub-$1000 at the bottom end, but sub-$100. A PC is not inherently more complex and hence expensive in its component parts than a set-top box, possibly minus display.
Are we talking cartel here, or is the demand so much greater than supply that prices bump around just under the ceiling rather than just above the floor?
Why does this happen (ie. education being short-shifted)? It happens because the citizenry is not free to choose the proportion of tax revenue that is allocated to each area of government expenditure, in this case education.
If one could choose just one tiny change that would have the widest possible effect in improving democratic responsibility and giving power to the people, that would have to be it.
The more we hear from SGI, the clearer it becomes that massive and fundamental changes have taken place inside the company, not just in public policy but in their understanding of their market and future prospects. Corporations of that size don't change direction on a whim and at a moment's notice. Like an oil tanker, there is a delay between cause and effect, so changes have to be well considered.
I don't have any involvement with SGI, but from the outside it seems to me that they've reached the following conclusions: (i) only their bigger machines are sector leaders and possibly still make a profit; (ii) their earlier preeminence in workstation graphics has been decimated by the collosal improvement in the capabilities of PC graphics cards; (iii) workstation-class CPUs and large memories are now commodity items, so SGI workstations can no longer claim that niche; (iv) SGI have excellent hardware techies but they cannot compete in this new commodity market because margins are far too small; (v) it is very difficult to compete against free software / open source in a market like theirs where users are technically competent, and "if you can't beat them, join them"; (vi) not all is well with the Microsoft titanic, and seats in the lifeboats are starting to look inviting so they are playing down their involvement with NT; (vii) in contrast, things look very rosy for Linux, in particular the wide acceptance among developers that this is A Good Platform, so they're playing that up to be developer-friendly and clearly "with it"; (viii) the synergy among other relevant corporates is massive in this area, and no way can SGI afford not to be on the same boat as, for example, Oracle; (ix) no major computer manufacturer has yet capitalized on the potential of Linux (nor the BSDs), and SGI could be The One that makes it "their own" if they genuinely adopt the ideals of the community; and finally, (x) software development (particularly maintenance) is incredibly expensive to provide, so making the most of open development on the Internet makes huge economic sense, ie. their overheads in that area could plummet.
All this adds up to a major shift, both internal and external: bye bye to the low-end proprietary stuff as per the announcement, leave computer basics to the commodity suppliers, at most customize PC workstations with high-end accelerators where margins still exist, leave Irix to their big systems where development costs won't decimate the spreadsheet, develop synergy with the free/OSS community, both as excellent value-for-money PR and as an essential component of their open support strategy, assist technically to give Linux some of the scalability that Irix has on their bigger machines, add in enterprise-critical facilities like a journalling filesystem, and in general hype up the whole scene so that they register in the books of PHBs as potential customers and shareholders.
The only thing that isn't consistent with this is their statement about continuing to support their MIPs systems at least until 2006, but I suppose that can be put down to not wanting to abandon their old customer base. That makes sense, as long as they don't spend too much money in this area of diminishing returns.
All in all, if their thinking is anything like the above then I reckon they have a good chance of making a success of it. They certainly can't be accused of doing nothing as the wind changes direction.
Brent makes a very good point. Innovation is important, but not at the expense of any other good properties. Good additions are those that are not only good in themselves but also good in their integration and interaction with other subsystems around them. The decades-old buzzword of "modular" is as important today as ever, and the even older one of "coupling" still rules the roost. If a new subsystem spreads static tendrils throughout older well-proven code or interacts dynamically with many other parts in complex ways, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
;-)
Talking about relevant terms, perhaps we should find a little more use for one that academia values a lot: elegance. It encompasses all of the above in one word, and certainly C++ would never have passed its harsh judgement.
[I don't want to imply that DIPC wasn't up to scratch in that area. The user-level interface is wonderfully elegant, but I haven't looked at the implementation at all, yet.]
I've just had a browse of their mailing list archives to see if there is a licensing issue. It turns out that DIPC has been GPL'd since August. (No idea what it was before that.)
Trying to read between the lines in some of their posts, it doesn't seem that licensing was the issue though, because apparently DIPC was getting good support from Alan Cox in the way of header patches but no encouragement from Linus. (Despite being a fan, Alan is said not to have had the time to press the issue further). I get the impression that there was a lot left unsaid.
Each case has its own particulars, but leaving that aside, it's the general case that may be of some concern in the future. Linux is a standard-bearer in the free software community, so we need innovation to be encouraged in the kernel as elsewhere if we're not to be seen as lacking in that department. If the coding is of a good standard and is well integrated, the default answer to inclusion in the development branch needs to be "yes". (Hopefully it is, already -- maybe someone from the kernel list will comment). We can't afford SGI to be right about lack of innovation.
The statement that the open-source community is not a good innovator is, like most complex issues, both true and untrue.
On the one hand, only the most blind of observers would suggest that novel products are not emerging from that quarter. The sheer volume of announcements on Freshmeat is just flabbergasting, and scattered like jewels in among the 95% of fairly ordinary stuff are some really excellent software products and many priceless ideas.
But on the other hand, and maybe this is where SGI is coming from, innovation in the Linux kernel is comparatively minimal. I don't think anyone would go so far as to say that it is stifled, but the fact remains that the choice of which ideas are accepted into the official release and which are not is in the hands of a very few people (maybe three or four, or possibly just the one). That must have an effect on innovation, however much we respect the people in question.
As a little example of the above, the DIPC project implemented a gem of an idea (I have absolutely nothing to do with it, by the way): allowing processes that communicate through System V IPC mechanisms on a single host to do so even if they are on different machines, while maintaining 100% compile-time application compatibility because the only difference at the API is a single bit in the IPC headers which you'd flick off or on for single or multiple machine operation. That's innovation, usefulness and elegance rolled into one. But no, Linus didn't want to put it into the standard kernel, and to say that the developers were greatly dispirited is the understatement of the year.
It's worth reflecting that if a kernel facility isn't part of the standard distribution, or worse, if it's available only as a patch, then for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. We musn't get ourselves into a situation where innovation in the Linux kernel suffers as a result of this possibility.
Blame, blame, blame. "Who do we point the finger at?" "Who do we sue?"
That seems to be the main thing on the minds of managerial types when faced with the choice of competing technologies, once of which is free and reliable yet "cursed" with not having a legal "blame me" label attached to it.
Well, we need to make them see that that is a mentality for the incompetent, that blame is a concept for those that have no other weapon at their disposal. But if they choose wisely then they *do* give themselves additional weapons, and powerful ones, namely the ability of technically competent people to fix things that are open, to modify them to suit the requirement instead of relying on external parties.
So, I reject the premise on which this thread is based, ie. that party A or B is responsible for the end result. We each make our own nests, and if we choose our building materials unwisely and then seek to blame others, that just shows the height of our incompetence. If you're technically clued up but your advice is ignored, well that's their loss. Go where your skills are valued, and leave them to their problem and to their focus on who to blame for their own lack of skill.
There is no need for a central database of keys, nor indeed for a new database of any sort. The PGP "database" is an already existing widely implemented distributed repository of public PGP keys which is well supported worldwide.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of the keys available on keyservers.
Only public keys are stored on keyservers, and they're used by a message sender to encrypt messages destinated for the corresponding recipients who are the only people that can decrypt them because they alone hold the corresponding private keys. The NSA can't get the private keys from the keyservers because they aren't there.
Recipients of incoming messages don't grab public keys from keyservers in order to decrypt the messages, but only to authenticate their signatures. For message signing, keys are used in reverse, ie. the sender signs his message with his private key and then recipients can check that it really came from him with the help of his public key.
Needless to say, even a non-clueful user has to generate his own keypair and place his public key on a default keyserver, but that operation can be completely hidden from him by being done at the time his email system is installed, configured, or just run for the first time. Sensible crypto users go to great lengths to select a good and long passphrase to protect their private key, but this is not necessary if the only goal is to defeat the snoops: the passphrase can be left completely empty by default, so the mailreader can decrypt incoming mail (which has been encrypted by the senders using the recipient's public key obtained from a keyserver) without bothering the user with a request for a passphrase. [Not ideal of course, but at least it would make the operation transparent.]
I think you may be missing the point here. Just because the vast majority of us "have nothing to worry about" personally, this doesn't mean that we should not worry about the issue generally. It's very similar to the burning down of rain forrests and 10 million other such areas of concern. Is it sensible that we ignore them just because the effect on us is not personal and immediate?
Snooping by three-letter agencies does indeed seem fairly innocuous (as long as you lay undistinguished and hence unseen among the teeming masses), but what if you have larger ambitions than to live and die unwitnessed? Whatever you do, even if it's totally legal, you're bound to annoy somebody sometime, and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that the snooped info will pop up to haunt you, because *all* information is for sale to someone at some price. You'll feel different about it then than you do now.
And longer term, what about the Terminator, Matrix, or even Borg scenarios? A system that knows everything about what's going on is a system that can kill you in the end, no matter how benign it is at the start. Don't dismiss it as "just SF". It'll be too late to say "Oops, I was wrong" when it happens.
Although the answer to electronic snooping is clearly encryption, anti-snooping and pro-privacy campaigners regularly bemoan the fact that encrypting one's email never really took off as the normal thing to do, despite a plethora of PGP wrappers.
I think the reason for that is pretty clear, and consequently the solution is as well: the major mailreaders needs to automatically retrieve PGP keys from default keyservers and automatically decrypt incoming mail *by default* for electronic envelopes to catch on in any significant way. [This is even more important than encrypting outgoing mail.] If there is any manual configuration involved, or any hassle whatsoever, or (shock horror!) any knowledge required, then it just won't happen. Clued up computer users simply aren't around in sufficient numbers to form a critical mass in the email world. For encrypted email to take off, Joe Bloggs has to be part of the revolution, without even being aware of it. [Just like he sends WINMAIL.DAT attachments everywhere without being aware of it.]
I guess this means that until Netscape and Microsoft implement the above in their respective products, nothing of any statistical significance will happen in this area.
There aren't going to be 10 zillion developers working on machines with hundreds of processors, multiple terabytes of disk, and who-knows-how-much tape storage. Your average developer isn't going to have access to such a machine.
The resources available to the average developer are irrelevant. What matters is that just one good developer has them available, and the lesson we've learned from Beowulf is that not just one but a lot of developers will find themselves suitably resourced.
You've got it back to front I think. Despite throwing the occasional olive branch as in this case, the RIAA has a massive problem with MP3s, because they're fighting for their very survival, even more so than the musicians. There are a lot of possible scenarios for the future of the music industry in which the RIAA ceases to exist utterly, along with the studios that they represent.
Their current actions are like the red flags that pressure groups walked in front of locomotives, and their mega-industry is every bit as collosal as the one that used to be centred on the horse for transport and which now does not exist at all except in tiny niches. The lesson of history is that even the most extensive and solid of institutions is not as permanent as it may seem in its heyday.
In the case of music, that impermanence couldn't be more clear. Before the invention of recording, it wasn't possible to make money from replication of musical performances. Then recording was invented but replication required massive plants and capital, which created the opportunity for an industry to be born and collosal profits to be made. And now the wheel of technological progress has turned again: replication can be performed by anyone and costs almost nothing, and the window of opportunity for making profits from it has closed again.
Despite their self-righteous rationalizations, there is no law of nature that says that the music industry will always be as lucrative as it has been for the last few decades. There are no fixed points where technology is concerned, and MP3s are a sign of that. This newest chapter in the empowerment of individuals effectively means that the time for massive profits from replication and controlled distribution is over, that the RIAA is in the throes of extinction or at least severe mutation, and that the relationship between musicians and their audience is in transition. And so be it.
Bye bye RIAA. No one really expects you to die quietly, but die you will, just like other prehistoric giants who were too set in their ways to adapt to changing conditions. And that's not a bad analogy, because once again it's those pesky little creatures underfoot that are in the ascendency.
Hahaha, nice one! :-)