Pardon me for going against the tide of slashdot opinions, but I still don't understand what has everyone so riled up. Perhaps I should blame the FBI for choosing a menacing sounding name like "Carnivore," but certainly their intentions are not to destroy or harm. The FBI is a very major government organization paid for by our tax dollars. I may not agree with their moves all the time, but I trust that they are only concerned about the best interest of our country. Why would they go out of their way to harm the very citizens who keep them running?
While I have no problems with a law enforcement agency such as the FBI enforcing a legitimately obtained wiretap order in order to catch the bad guys, it's clear that you don't live in Los Angeles.
To review, the Los Angeles police department is currently being investigated for a number of crimes carried out by bad police officers from the Rampart division. Latest estimates I heard indicated that something on the order of thousands of court cases may be thrown out because a few bad cops planted evidence, engaged in illegal activities (such as selling drugs or murdering suspects) while transfering the blaim to otherwise innocent people who are now sitting in jail. Those thousands of court cases translate to thousands of otherwise innocent citizens who are now sitting in jail due to a few rogue cops.
At the same time all this started comming out we also learned that the Los Angeles District Attorney's office in conjunction with the LAPD engaged in several hundreds or thousands of illegal wiretap operations, turning over the illegally gathered evidence to the LAPD for followup. Remember: an illegally obtained wiretap may be thrown out of court, but if no-one knows that the wiretap was in place in the first place, the evidence gathered afterwards will not be thrown out later.
(As an example of how an illegal wiretap could lead to an arrest without any connection to that illegal wiretap, suppose Joe Blow decides to sell cocaine to his friend in the back of the Ralphs supermarket at 9:00 tomorrow. All the LAPD has to do is to have a cop "happen to drive by" the Ralphs. His police report will read "in my routine survalence activities, I happened to catch Mr. Blow selling narcotics", not "I was tipped off by an illegal wiretap.")
Most of the people working for the LA DA's office and the LAPD are the most top-notch, professional police officers in the country, working under extreme conditions with very little community support. I have very deep respect for these people. And it is their sister organizations in the city of Glendale where I live, who I have interacted with at all levels (from being stopped on the street in the middle of the night while out walking to serving as a witness to a purse snatching) which has made Glendale the safest city of all cities with a population greater than 150,000 in the United States.
However, it only takes a rogue few to fuck things up totally, as they have in Los Angeles. (By the way, estimates are placing the cost to settle the civil cases caused by this handful of rogue enforcement officers at something like 25% of the total discretionary budget of Los Angeles--which buys a lot of libraries, squad cars, and fire trucks...)
That's the concern with Carnivore--not that it isn't a powerful law enforcement tool that will be used for lawful purposes. But that a few rogue officers (a'la L.A. Rampart) will abuse the tool in an illegal fashion--and we will have no way to discover their illegal activities. It's clear if you had read the paper refered to in the header that it is Tom Perrine's suggestion to modify how Carnivore is installed and maintained so that at least the ISP knows what the data Carnivore is gathering and if it is in accord to a legally obtained wiretap court order.
Trust, but verify. Verification creates professionalism, and professionalism creates Glendale (which is spitting distance from the Rampart district), instead of the LA Rampart district.
I'm still trying to figure out what the hell the PC has to do with cell phones? I can't imagine anyone but the dumbest columnist (Katz comes to mind) confusing wide acceptance of the PC with setting a standard for interoperability between cell phone systems. More likely than not, the lack of standard in cell phones has to do with the fact that the US is very large, and a lack of a coherent standard permits multiple vendors to compete against each other yet still turn enough of a profit to make their little island of interoperability still make economic sense.
Suggesting that there is a lack of cell phone standards because of our "love affair" with PCs is sort of like saying that the lack of standardization between Linux window managers is because of the relatively low price of bananas at the grocery store...
Therefore I urge you not to do business with Apple until they check their lawyers at the door and recognize the proper purpose of a legal system.
The proper purpose of a legal system is not to enforce a non-disclosure CONTRACT?
It's time to punish Apple for these tactics. If they spent half as much time and effort trying to develop their products as they do trying to squash ordinary rumours, maybe MacOS X would have shipped by now. The rule of law exists to protect against egregious offenses that threaten life or property. There is no way you can possibly tell me that rumours and leaks threaten Apple's property.
The rule of law ALSO exists in order to enforce non-life threatening or property threating agreements or contracts between two adults who otherwise are engaged in a normal business relationship. It is up to those two parties, not us nor the court system, to gage the degree of damage done when one of two consenting adults entering a contract decide not to carry out his part of that contract.
To assume that the law should not extend to governing contracts is to assume that contracts are worthless constructs, and that our society should behave as "who can fuck you before you can fuck them."
At which point, if this is the society you are advocating, then an employee of Apple has no recourse when Apple decides to take away his last month's pay.
I'm sorry, but the non-disclosure CONTRACT is just that: a contract. Just because some people can't be bothered to honor a contractual agreement they've entered because they don't appreciate the agreement doesn't mean they should be forgiven when they violate the contract. And just because we think this particular contract may be silly doesn't mean we should not enforce it: otherwise, other contractual agreements (such as sales contracts and work-for-hire contracts) may also be effectively null and void.
If the orginal (artist|programmer) explicitly states that they want restrictions on their creation (such as by using the GPL or a more restrictive license, or by simply by publicly stating that they do not want copies of their work traded), I will respect that.
Yet just about half of the folks here say 'fsck Metallica' when Metallica sued Napster.
For example, I no longer share Metallica mp3s.
Therein lies the heart of the problem with Napster: no-one asked. We had to wait until there was a lawsuit AND it was reported on AND Lars answered questions on/. BEFORE people realized "gee, maybe Metallica doesn't want us to share our MP3's." Of course EVEN AFTER ALL THAT, there is still a large contingency of people who say 'fsck Metallica: they don't get it.'
Perhaps I made a mistake in interpreting artist's long-term silence regarding napster and mp3s as implicit permission.
Well DUH!!!!! I mean, come on--most of these folks haven't even heard of Napster, and of those who have, most of them don't even know what's up with Napster other than it's some thing used by college students to rip off songs. And of those, most of them don't know how to reach out to their fans and say "hey, guys--don't do this."
And you interpret THIS as acceptance? Or are you just trying to pretend that stealing on the sly without the victim knowing about it is somehow justified because you didn't get a proclamation in the form of a another lawsuit against Napster?
It is reasonable for bands to ask services like Napster or mp3.com NOT to share their music. It would have been easy to design a filtering scheme into the original napster protocol so that search strings matching certain patterns could be refused or files matching certain patters could not be reported. Perhaps Napster will investigate such a hack...
It is NOT reasonable for Napster to be shut down, even though the majority of the traffic across Napster is against the artists wishes. Napster is simply a communciations system designed for sharing mp3s.
And if Napster chooses not to implement a filtering scheme even though we agree that it could be implemented, and internal documents reveal that Napster was stalling not for technical reasons but for political ones, do we still keep them around because they are "simply a communications system designed for sharing mp3s?"
Copying music is only stealing if the artist wants you to not copyright the music.
Correction: it's only stealing if you are copying without the permission of the copyright holder. Unfortunately, the artists are being screwed left and right by the RIAA. But as my grandfather once told me, two wrongs don't make a right--just because the RIAA is run by a bunch of thieves doesn't justify a Napster run by a bunch of thieves.
Final thought: those who say that copyright is dead and that intellectual property should give way to technology should think twice about it, if they strongly believe in the GPL--because without IP protections and copyright, the GPL is effectively dead, and a closed-source Microsoft Linux 2005 is just around the corner...
I for one won't consider releasing my material under the FreeBSD license given the current legal climage. All software I write is under the GPL because it achieves what I want, the guarantee that anyone can use my code for whatever purpose they want, as long as they share it with the rest of us.
But doing away with IP won't guarentee that someone will share his source code (or source code modifications) with the rest of us. That is, a world without IP restrictions is not equivalent to the license requirements provided for by the GPL license.
Unless you also want to do away with secrecy and privacy and permit strangers to sift through your computer without your permission to look for the source code.
The reality is this: if I distribute something without source code, the FSF says that I'm not freely giving away my source code. But giving away sources is something that takes an act of will: simply distributing the binaries is insufficient because it requires someone to reverse engineer my code. (Of course some people's programming styles are so obtuse that reverse engineering may be desirable than examining the original sources. But they are hopefully in the minority.)
A world free of IP is also not equivalent to the license restrictions of a BSD style license agreement because BSD explicitly forbits suing the original author of the code as one condition of using the source code--that is, it makes it clear that the source code is to be used "as is." In a world free of IP, people would also be free to sue each other for defective code: only by a license agreement which can be enforced through copyright can I legally short curcuit a lawsuit by saying to the court "see--he agreed not to sue me as a requirement of using this code."
(This "don't sue the author" restriction is also part of the GNU license, by the way.)
To summarize: the BSD license represents an ideal of where most of us want to be one day, but as long as the law is stacked so heavilly against freedom of information, the GPL is what is needed to get there.
No, because the GPL makes distributing the source code a requirement of distributing software--something which could not be enforced in a world free of Intellectual Property law unless we were also to do away with secrecy and privacy convenants as well. (Because only then can we go in and get the source code for ourselves rather than waiting for the author to cough the code up.)
So, essentially, the net effect of abolishing intellectual property would be that everything would have an implicit GPL license attached to it. I don't think the FSF would have a problem with that.
Actually, they would because the GPL currently requires that source code be distributed with binary executables--and in a world without IP protections, I could tell rms to go jump in the lake instead of posting the source code to NiftyDIFF that I built using the GNU diff sources.
Does your VCR have a big red sign on it that says "you may not use this device to make copies of commercial movies"? No.
You're absolutely right. In fact, the sign is a piece of 8.5"x11" yellow paper which has the notice, and it came inserted into the VCR's instruction manual, rather than affixed to the VCR itself.
Does your photocopy machine have a big red sign on it that says "you may only photocopy copyrighted works for personal research use or archival as per the fair use clause of the Copyright Act"? No.
Actually, it's small and silver, not big and red. But the sign is there.
It is entirely irrelevant if the device is used for illegal purposes (and I have to agree with Mr. Boies that the AHRA permits the trading of copyrighted works in this manner). If it can be used for wholly legal purposes (and clearly it can be and is) then it's not illegal.
Regardless if it is irrelevant to you, legally it is relevant if the device's primary purpose is to break the law or not--that's the legal theory which makes having lock pick sets illegal in some states unless you are a licensed and bonded lock smith. Because the primary purpose for a non-licensed and non-bonded private citizen having a lock pick set is to break and enter--and it doesn't matter one whit how great the gray pick is at getting food dislogged from between your teeth.
One person is a criminal. Ten people are a gang. A thousand people are a movement. 20 million people are a law-making and unstoppable force.
And if those twenty million happen to be wearing army jackets, carrying guns and answer to Saddam over in Bagdad, it's still a law-making and unstoppable force? Or an illegal invasion?
Ethics are tricky. It's not about bullshitting the people around you into doing what you want them to do--it's about setting rules we all can live by. And just because everyone on the road speeds on the highways doesn't mean that speeding isn't illegal and dangerous...
Err, no. You obviously don't get it because you're spouting the same tired line about how copying music is stealing. It's not. Get your facts straight before going around spouting the IP world's propaganda.
And I assume you would have no problems whatsoever if I were to slam some GPL code into my proprietary engine and keep the source code closed, right? After all, it ain't stealing--it's just copying intellectual property...
It would be a first, though, to have to ban a T-shirt for something other than indecency or hate. These are (so far) the only two types of speech which are not protected by the first amendment.
It's a sad precident when we have to ban any discussion of certain algorithms. What's next? Banning books on making bombs? Banning works of terrorism? Works by terrorists?
Once we go down that road, we're banning the Declaration of Independence (a work by terrorists)...
NeXT had it's cube. Also, Pixar released a dedicated rendering engine that used the Renderman algorithm around the same time that was also cube shaped. (Actually I liked the Pixar rendering engine's appearance, as they textured it to look like a large marble cube with an indent in the middle.)
The cube shape is nothing new. The only elements of the dress design which would make the Cobalt cube unique is the color, lighting scheme, and design elements beyond it's basic shape which differentiate it from other systems. And in that respect, the Apple Cube G4 has nothing in common with the Cobalt cube.
exactly - Katz's article is completely subjective and unimportant. How many of our lives are currently affected by computers? How many of our lives are currently affected by high-speed gene sequencers?
The thing Katz is forgetting in his usual attempts at fear-mongering in the name of editorializing is that as soon as gene sequencing becomes an important social issue--that is, as soon as someone proposes using the results of the HGP to start tinkering with the genome of a baby in a major way--we will get a crash course in who the players in the field are by the press. Just as we got a crash course in who Bill Gates was in '95 when the Feds went after Microsoft big-time for the first time in a press-worthy way.
Just as I'm currently getting a crash course (no pun intended) on the Concord after one crashed in France this morning, by CNBC.
The press doesn't bother telling us about people who aren't currently affecting our lives. But as soon as someone pops onto the cultural radar in a big way--for example, as soon as someone creates a successful fusion reactor (for example), I can guarentee that within 48 hours we will have an in-depth biography of the scientists who successfully created the reactor, the companies and universities who were working on the reactor, the reactions of the existing power companies, and all of the other details ad-nauseum.
Self-important judgemental jackass. Not everybody needs to care about the same things that you do. And those of us who don't are not "wrong" or somehow less intelligent or less morally-concerned than you are. We just lead different lives.
I have to agree. The fact of the matter is that while paranoid people like Katz may have visions of Gattaca dancing in his head, the reality is that the HGP currently only affects the potential long term investment outlook for the large pharmaceuticals. For someone who tends to watch CNBC in the morning (because I can't stomache Regis and Kathy Lee), I actually have heard of many of the players in the HGP--because at least in the relm of the drug companies (and people who may buy drug company stock), it's important stuff.
But just as soon as the results of the HGP affects more than the bottom line of a half-dozen large pharmacuticals, we'll get the in-depth biographies, the timelines, and the movie of the week.
Because the smaller co-location centers don't look for your system going into promiscuous mode. Granted they could detect this by looking at the switch, but the couple of smaller ISPs I've dealt with, the switch was located with it's lights pointed towards a blank wall.
Besides, if the FBI dropped a computer on a switch and told them the ISP it was going into promiscuous mode, and there ain't a damned thing you can do about it because we're the FBI, then I suspect they wouldn't shut the system down. Meaning that in a sense, Cringley is right: they don't have to locate the machine right next to the router as traffic comes into the ISP facility; they can locate the box just about anywhere and as long as there isn't a packet filter at the switch, the box could theoretically get every packet.
I do disagree with Cringley that the FBI wants the power to shut the Internet down. I suspect the FBI wants to place their machine right on the router as traffic comes in because they're too dumb to realize that they don't have to do this.
It's not politics it's physics. You've got to throw away about nine times reaction mass just to get into orbit. Whether you do it all from your ship or from tanker ships that are suppling fuel at high altitude for the orbit boost, it's what takes to get to orbit baring magic. For this discussion I'm defining magic as technology needed to pursue a goal that does not have a foundation in practical or theorectical science. i.e. usable anti-gravity, FTL, etc. And the problem is we're damm short on that magic the Star Trek guys have bleeding from their ears.
I'm all for funding folks who want to create some of that "Star Trek" magic--even if they don't succeed, I suspect unleashing a bunch of guys to do this sort of research is bound to cough up something good.
And I know Space isn't the solution--frankly, opening up cheap interplanetary transport that is cheap enough to allow settlers to go to Mars will probably create as many social problems as it would claim to solve.
But damn it, I'm not going to sit around and allow some idiot to tell me what to do who thinks that we should not spend a dime on interplanetary travel until we create their earth-bound "utopia" first.
My father used to work for the Santa Fe. He worked as an "area sales rep", which meant that he was partially responsible for performing logistics work--that is, figuring out the cheapest way to handle product redistribution. Logistics as a science has reached such a high level of perfection in this country pre-Internet that we can ship millions of tons of rock ore from one point to another that cannot be warehoused, and have the trainloads of material that takes days to move from one part of the country to another show up moments before the ore needs to be dumped into the smelters for processing, without either delaying the smelters or wasting thousands of dollars on an idle train car.
When various web companies were initially started, they started on the extremely brash assumption that they could undercut the traditional "brick and mortar" operations by enough of a margin that they could not only make a larger profit, but be able to offer a larger product selection for a smaller price than any traditional operation. How? Through waving the "magic wand" of the Internet.
The other day my father was watching a news special where they showed order fulfillment through Amazon.com, the leader in this "using high tech to squeeze even more profits than old brick-and-mortar operations." And how were they filling orders? By having individual shoppers walk up and down large isles full of product pushing the equivalent of shopping carts.
My father died laughing! There are tons of ways you can handle order fulfillment--and Amazon picked the single most inefficient mechanism one can possibly use to fill small orders from a large stock selection. Hell, in about an hour doing a quick Internet search on the topic of "warehouse fulfillment logistics" I came up with a half-dozen papers on how to fill these orders which would improve their effectiveness by at least 50%!
An interesting conversation I had with a vulture^H^H^H^H^H^H venture capitalist told me why venture money is pulling out of "pure-play" internet retailers like Amazon.com. The first reason is that frankly, logistics has been brought to such a high art in this country that most companies weren't spending more than a few percent on logistics anyways. That is, for a $25.00 book, perhaps only about $1.00 was spent moving that book from the printers into a box waiting to be shipped by UPS on the loading docks of a mail order warehouse. So even if Amazon could perform it's logistics 20% more efficiently in order fulfillment at it's distribution warehouse, the best they could hope to squeeze out of shipping a $25.00 book is perhaps 10 cents, assuming 50% of the logistics costs is order fulfillment.
Meaning for Amazon to make a million dollars in profit from a 20% increase in efficiency in an already extremely efficient logistics situation, they would have to sell a quarter billion dollars worth of product.
Second, the venture money has realized that many of these "new economy businesses" are comprised of people who frankly think the "old farts" of the "old economy" have nothing to teach them. And so they screw up the very stuff we brought to a very high science in the 1970's! For example, I ordered four products from Amazon.com, and they charged me $10.00 shipping and handling--yet sent me four separate shipments from four separate warehouses (rather than consolidating the order and reducing shipping costs)--for a grand total of $22.00 in overall shipping costs, not counting handling and order picking costs! That is, Amazon, in thier "high-tech order fulfillment efficiency", lost $12.00 on my order because they can't get their logistics shit together!
Now perhaps this was an exceptional situation. And in one sense, I'm glad I got my order earlier than later. And I shouldn't be picking so heavily on Amazon, given that I own about $2K of their stock, and given that Amazon is actually better than most e-commerce sites.
But it does illustrate the fact that a lot of the "new economy gurus" out there are so full of bullshit they can't even pronounce logistics, much less deal with it. It's rather sad, given the fact that the Santa Fe did research more than 30 years ago which shows that logistics can represent as much as 40% of the total operational costs of a typical manufacturing or distribution company. And having good logistics can represent savings of around 15% up to 50% of the overall logistics costs--which for a company the size of Amazon represents hundreds of millions in overall operational costs.
And that's one of the biggest things the "old farts" bring to the table: about 10 to 30 years of experience on the logistics of order fulfillment, manufacturing, redistribution, and all those other things that can quite frankly mean the difference between making a good profit and declaring bankrupcy.
There is nothing wrong with spending money on trying to cure AIDS.
As to curing world hunger or promoting global peace, these are fundamentally political problems which cannot be cured with money. The best you can do with money is to create a band-aid, but world hunger will only be cured and global peace achieved when regional politicians put the good of the people and the good of local partnerships that create infrastructure and distribution centers above their own petty parochial squabbling.
But just because there is AIDS in the world and madmen who would blow you up rather than listen to your words, and just because politicians would rather allow the wondering nomadic people of northern Africa starve to death because it suits their political aims does not mean we should halt all other socio-economic activities cold until we can all come together and sing cumbya.
For example, have you sold your house and car, packed your bags, and moved to Somalia to feed the starving children? Should I? Should we dismantle/., sell the servers, and send the money to Africa? Or dismantle CNN? CBS? The Democratic Party?
To anyone who suggests we should solve the problems of earth before we reach the stars, I suggest that it is this very attitude that is creating the problems on earth in the first place. That is, it is the presumption that your own parochial desires (such as owning a house, having a Mercedes, or a seat in the corporate boardroom of Ted Turner's conglomerate) takes precedence over the "starving children", while my desires (such as making space tourism economically viable in my lifetime) should be set aside as "wasteful foolishness" until we achieve world peace.
It's this fundamental lack of respect for other people which cause the lack of world peace, and which cause politicians to act selfishly and prevent the infrastructure construction necessary to feed people through the world.
Bah. I have little patience with patently stupid crap like this.
(Yes, I know: you weren't advocating that we should cure AIDS before we spend money on a better orbital launch vehicle--only pointing out the argument made by others. I just had to get that rant out of my system.)
I take it this means that if they get the costs down, the government would insist that they charge less so they wouldn't make any money anyway. It's a fair comment, but I don't completely agree with this.
Unfortunately, that is the current financial situation "enjoyed" by government contractors today. This sort of ass-backwards thinking has been true for the last twenty years or so.
The idea used to be that the government would simply buy a product from government contractors, and it was up to the goverment contractors to figure out the cheapest way to fulfill their end of the contract. If a government contractor could make a huge profit by figuring out a cheaper way to do things, then they got to pocket the profits as a reward for innovation.
As far as the government was concerned, this created two "problems." First, bureaucrats were uncomfortable with the notion that a contractor would use it's profits from a prior assignment to perform R&D on a future assignment in order to maximize profits. (Yes, I know--this is how the private sector works. But from a government bureaucrat's point of view, this is the same as stealing from Peter to pay Paul.)
The second problem was that the public (read: politicians) disliked the notion of people getting rich off doing government work. Something to do with class envy or some such bullshit. At any rate, the notion that several companies could make billions by providing the government inexpensive state of the art products ahead of the and under budget is evil to many politicians.
So now modern government contracts have built-in profit margins, and are required to pass on savings back to the government or being penalized by lower contractually mandated profit margins.
That is, the government in essence requires the savings to be passed back to the government. That's why no-one cares that we're one mega-merger away from a monopoly in the airospace market--because government contract work is so heavily regulated it makes the electric company regulations of a half-dozen years ago seem like Lassie-Faire Capitalism by comparason.
The upshot of this is that it is in the best interest of Lockheed to keep launch costs at the top of the inelasticity plateau, because it maximizes their profits given the current regulatory environment.
Personally I think it's stupid--and it's why we see things like $8,000 toilets and $600 wrenches. It's also why we see an absolute lack of interest on the part of Lockheed to innovate except in the more esoteric areas of DoD spending--because all financial incentives for Lockheed to do anything other than what Congress directly mandates has been stripped from it.
That, combined with the "spend it or lose it" mentality of the Federal government's budget spending process, explains in large part why we can have so much waste while we simultaneously shackle some of the brightest minds on the planet.
There's nothing new here; cyberknowlegable private investigators have been doing this sort of stuff for years. And frankly, the service they are providing (connecting "rogue" web sites and postings with real names) can be done on most sites in a matter of minutes or hours. On other sites, it requires a court order--and a court order tends to require more than "he said something bad about me."
While I have no problems with hanging someone out to dry who was passing bogus stock tips in violation of SEC rules, I have a hard time seeing the value of going after a disgruntled ex-customer.
Anyways, this sounds like a great service--for separating paranoid companies from $5K...
But they'll never be able to do them well, without being able to actively engage the computer and understand how it works well enough to communicate to it what you want.
Even Macintosh people don't deny this.
However, there are two questions which begs to be asked. First, by redesigning the application around some simple (and consistant) user interface guidelines, how much functionality can be bring out to the casual user? Second, how can we design the application so that when a user decides to actively engage the software to better use it and understand how it works, can we provide a better roadmap and a better experience without frustraiting the user?
These two questions have nothing to do with having a pretty graphical user interface. What they have to do with is having a good human/computer interface, where the human is in direct control, and where the computer does not frustrate the user either by attempting to take control from what the programmer thought was a Luser (that cursed Microsoft paperclip comes to mind), or where the computer leaves the user hanging with some obscure "?SN#31192@coref3.c: operation cannot be completed" error message.
In order to make a user's experience better, programmers have to remember a few things. Casually dismissing these points runs the risk of making your software difficult to use--and as any Macintosh programmer will tell you, making your software difficult to use because you're too lazy to consider the users (NOT "lusers") is not elitism--it's just plain laziness.
1) The human is in charge. Don't grab the mouse pointer from him/her, or interrupt the input process with "helpful hints" or otherwise assume the user is trying to do something.
This means no "modes"--that is, don't force the human to walk through some sort of "maze" of program states which seem obvious to the (lazy) programmer but which is counterintuitive to the user. (In fact, if the only "mode" your program has is a modal dialog box saying "I'm broken--sorry", that's best.)
And this means providing some form of "undo" to the user who was just playing around with your program.
2) Make the often used features "obvious". Setting a font in a word processor should not be accomplished by hitting "Control+Alt+F3", which is "clearly documented" on page 172 of the manual, as a side note marked "unimportant."
This also means don't make the interface of your program inconsistant with other programs on the same platform. For example, setting the font on the Macintosh should be accomplished by having a "font" menu--this is part of the UI guidelines, and every other application on the Macintosh that makes setting the font a major feature (like word processors) do the same thing.
And this means eliminating unnecessary clutter--which is just a great way of hiding stuff in the open. Keep the design clean, though permit the user to dive down into the complexity if the user chooses. (That is, if part of your application permits the user to drop into an editor to edit the underlying perl scripts that drive your application, great! But don't force them to edit a perl script if they don't need to.)
These two rules are not rocket science. They're just good rules of thumb. Unfortunately, most Linux programmers and many Windows programmers seem to share two opinions which are contrary to these rather simple rules of thumb.
First, many programmers confuse power with obfustication.
And second, many programmers view users as "lusers," only worthy of their contempt and not worthy of their time or effort.
These two attitudes do not fly well in the Macintosh developer community.
Well, ESR is obviously right that Mackers can't tell the difference between the UI and the OS functionality because here (and elsewhere) Lewis himself keeps conflating UI and OS.
Question: is the UI part of the OS?
When we criticize Windows 2000 as being a large monolythic black box, we assume the UI is part of the OS--it's all in the same box. Nevermind the fact that the Windows 2000 OS is organized as a series of processes around a kernel on top of an HAL--we can't see the UI process, so it's obviously "integrated". That is, it's part of the OS, at least for purposes of Microsoft bashing.
But it's not part of Linux, because we can see the process launching, and we can turn the UI off if we choose to. In fact, we even know that there are hooks in the X server which allow us to hook in a different window manager--so we don't even consider the window manager as the overall UI.
Yet--the UI is part of the OS when someone is critical of Linux by claiming that all those wierdly named command-line tools are a pain in the ass to use. That is, we consider the UI part of the OS when someone says "Linux is hard to use by the typical consumer"--because XFree comes in the same RedHat box as the Linux kernel.
So is the UI part of the OS? I guess it depends on who is making the argument, and if it supports our arguments...
Bah!
There are inconsistencies within various WMs, by the way--some X applications don't go to the extra services provided by those WMs but roll their own (or include gadgets with other WM styles), and so some applications present an inconsistant UI from the surrounding WM when launched. This is often touted as a "good thing" by most Linux programmers, yet is it? That is, is it a good thing when xman presents a different scrollbar and gadget look and feel from Netscape?
Do MacDonald's in the States also have golden arches?
Yes, and the local outlet here has pizza as well. But I challenge you to tell the difference between a quarter pounder in Quebec and one made here in Los Angeles.
No; I do mind. And will come after you with a large baseball bat...actually, she also has a black belt and could probably take care of herself. But whatever's left is mine.
...pardon me, but isn't self-confidence, by virtue of its name, something that cannot be instilled by an external force?
Actually, self confidence is something that is both postiviely and negatively reinforced due to external stimuli.
If I tell you "Now Seumas, stop being a sexist pig," and others around you tell you the same thing, then eventually started shutting you out of the discussion, then your girlfriend left you because she thought you were a sexist pig, don't tell me this series of events wouldn't at least tarnish your self-confidence. Most people, after being pecked to death by ducks, will eventually at least stop sharing their ideas--that is, their confidence will stop being very strong.
Therein lies the problem that some women have faced. This constantly being shut down, told to stop asking questions, "go behave like a good girl and go play with your dolls"--this doesn't exactly help self-confidence in the technical arena. So by the fifth grade, the girls may not speak up because they've been constantly reminded in subtle and not so sublte ways to sit down and shut up.
So, should we punish boys because they're sometimes eager to learn?
Obviously not, but that's not the question. The question is why are girls less likely to pipe up, and if it is cultural (as I suspect it is, at least partially), then can we counteract those cultural stereotypes enough to allow women to be at least thought of as worthwile scientists, technicians and hackers while they are still in their formative years?
In that respect, women are no different from men. In fact, as fierce and unwavering as I've known many women to be, there should be less of an excuse.
While I have tremendous respect for your personal story, the problem is that most people aren't as mindful to their circumstances or as willing to change them as they should. And to that I think it's a crime that everyone doesn't fight the good fight as you have.
However, what I'm replying to is the assertion that the only thing that counts is the good fight. Suppose instead of landing a job in Silicon Valley, the person you interviewed with decided that you weren't worth hiring you because you're black. Or because you're latino. Would you have fought harder to succeed?
Should you have to fight harder to succeed?
I think it's unfair to place additional burdens on people due to their gender or skin color, simply because we're too lazy as a society to get over these prejudices. People already have enough burdens to shoulder due to their family situation, environment, or other circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon me for going against the tide of slashdot opinions, but I still don't understand what has everyone so riled up. Perhaps I should blame the FBI for choosing a menacing sounding name like "Carnivore," but certainly their intentions are not to destroy or harm. The FBI is a very major government organization paid for by our tax dollars. I may not agree with their moves all the time, but I trust that they are only concerned about the best interest of our country. Why would they go out of their way to harm the very citizens who keep them running?
While I have no problems with a law enforcement agency such as the FBI enforcing a legitimately obtained wiretap order in order to catch the bad guys, it's clear that you don't live in Los Angeles.
To review, the Los Angeles police department is currently being investigated for a number of crimes carried out by bad police officers from the Rampart division. Latest estimates I heard indicated that something on the order of thousands of court cases may be thrown out because a few bad cops planted evidence, engaged in illegal activities (such as selling drugs or murdering suspects) while transfering the blaim to otherwise innocent people who are now sitting in jail. Those thousands of court cases translate to thousands of otherwise innocent citizens who are now sitting in jail due to a few rogue cops.
At the same time all this started comming out we also learned that the Los Angeles District Attorney's office in conjunction with the LAPD engaged in several hundreds or thousands of illegal wiretap operations, turning over the illegally gathered evidence to the LAPD for followup. Remember: an illegally obtained wiretap may be thrown out of court, but if no-one knows that the wiretap was in place in the first place, the evidence gathered afterwards will not be thrown out later.
(As an example of how an illegal wiretap could lead to an arrest without any connection to that illegal wiretap, suppose Joe Blow decides to sell cocaine to his friend in the back of the Ralphs supermarket at 9:00 tomorrow. All the LAPD has to do is to have a cop "happen to drive by" the Ralphs. His police report will read "in my routine survalence activities, I happened to catch Mr. Blow selling narcotics", not "I was tipped off by an illegal wiretap.")
Most of the people working for the LA DA's office and the LAPD are the most top-notch, professional police officers in the country, working under extreme conditions with very little community support. I have very deep respect for these people. And it is their sister organizations in the city of Glendale where I live, who I have interacted with at all levels (from being stopped on the street in the middle of the night while out walking to serving as a witness to a purse snatching) which has made Glendale the safest city of all cities with a population greater than 150,000 in the United States.
However, it only takes a rogue few to fuck things up totally, as they have in Los Angeles. (By the way, estimates are placing the cost to settle the civil cases caused by this handful of rogue enforcement officers at something like 25% of the total discretionary budget of Los Angeles--which buys a lot of libraries, squad cars, and fire trucks...)
That's the concern with Carnivore--not that it isn't a powerful law enforcement tool that will be used for lawful purposes. But that a few rogue officers (a'la L.A. Rampart) will abuse the tool in an illegal fashion--and we will have no way to discover their illegal activities. It's clear if you had read the paper refered to in the header that it is Tom Perrine's suggestion to modify how Carnivore is installed and maintained so that at least the ISP knows what the data Carnivore is gathering and if it is in accord to a legally obtained wiretap court order.
Trust, but verify. Verification creates professionalism, and professionalism creates Glendale (which is spitting distance from the Rampart district), instead of the LA Rampart district.
I'm still trying to figure out what the hell the PC has to do with cell phones? I can't imagine anyone but the dumbest columnist (Katz comes to mind) confusing wide acceptance of the PC with setting a standard for interoperability between cell phone systems. More likely than not, the lack of standard in cell phones has to do with the fact that the US is very large, and a lack of a coherent standard permits multiple vendors to compete against each other yet still turn enough of a profit to make their little island of interoperability still make economic sense.
Suggesting that there is a lack of cell phone standards because of our "love affair" with PCs is sort of like saying that the lack of standardization between Linux window managers is because of the relatively low price of bananas at the grocery store...
Therefore I urge you not to do business with Apple until they check their lawyers at the door and recognize the proper purpose of a legal system.
The proper purpose of a legal system is not to enforce a non-disclosure CONTRACT?
It's time to punish Apple for these tactics. If they spent half as much time and effort trying to develop their products as they do trying to squash ordinary rumours, maybe MacOS X would have shipped by now. The rule of law exists to protect against egregious offenses that threaten life or property. There is no way you can possibly tell me that rumours and leaks threaten Apple's property.
The rule of law ALSO exists in order to enforce non-life threatening or property threating agreements or contracts between two adults who otherwise are engaged in a normal business relationship. It is up to those two parties, not us nor the court system, to gage the degree of damage done when one of two consenting adults entering a contract decide not to carry out his part of that contract.
To assume that the law should not extend to governing contracts is to assume that contracts are worthless constructs, and that our society should behave as "who can fuck you before you can fuck them."
At which point, if this is the society you are advocating, then an employee of Apple has no recourse when Apple decides to take away his last month's pay.
I'm sorry, but the non-disclosure CONTRACT is just that: a contract. Just because some people can't be bothered to honor a contractual agreement they've entered because they don't appreciate the agreement doesn't mean they should be forgiven when they violate the contract. And just because we think this particular contract may be silly doesn't mean we should not enforce it: otherwise, other contractual agreements (such as sales contracts and work-for-hire contracts) may also be effectively null and void.
If the orginal (artist|programmer) explicitly states that they want restrictions on their creation (such as by using the GPL or a more restrictive license, or by simply by publicly stating that they do not want copies of their work traded), I will respect that.
/. BEFORE people realized "gee, maybe Metallica doesn't want us to share our MP3's." Of course EVEN AFTER ALL THAT, there is still a large contingency of people who say 'fsck Metallica: they don't get it.'
Yet just about half of the folks here say 'fsck Metallica' when Metallica sued Napster.
For example, I no longer share Metallica mp3s.
Therein lies the heart of the problem with Napster: no-one asked. We had to wait until there was a lawsuit AND it was reported on AND Lars answered questions on
Perhaps I made a mistake in interpreting artist's long-term silence regarding napster and mp3s as implicit permission.
Well DUH!!!!! I mean, come on--most of these folks haven't even heard of Napster, and of those who have, most of them don't even know what's up with Napster other than it's some thing used by college students to rip off songs. And of those, most of them don't know how to reach out to their fans and say "hey, guys--don't do this."
And you interpret THIS as acceptance? Or are you just trying to pretend that stealing on the sly without the victim knowing about it is somehow justified because you didn't get a proclamation in the form of a another lawsuit against Napster?
It is reasonable for bands to ask services like Napster or mp3.com NOT to share their music. It would have been easy to design a filtering scheme into the original napster protocol so that search strings matching certain patterns could be refused or files matching certain patters could not be reported. Perhaps Napster will investigate such a hack...
It is NOT reasonable for Napster to be shut down, even though the majority of the traffic across Napster is against the artists wishes. Napster is simply a communciations system designed for sharing mp3s.
And if Napster chooses not to implement a filtering scheme even though we agree that it could be implemented, and internal documents reveal that Napster was stalling not for technical reasons but for political ones, do we still keep them around because they are "simply a communications system designed for sharing mp3s?"
Copying music is only stealing if the artist wants you to not copyright the music.
Correction: it's only stealing if you are copying without the permission of the copyright holder. Unfortunately, the artists are being screwed left and right by the RIAA. But as my grandfather once told me, two wrongs don't make a right--just because the RIAA is run by a bunch of thieves doesn't justify a Napster run by a bunch of thieves.
Final thought: those who say that copyright is dead and that intellectual property should give way to technology should think twice about it, if they strongly believe in the GPL--because without IP protections and copyright, the GPL is effectively dead, and a closed-source Microsoft Linux 2005 is just around the corner...
I for one won't consider releasing my material under the FreeBSD license given the current legal climage. All software I write is under the GPL because it achieves what I want, the guarantee that anyone can use my code for whatever purpose they want, as long as they share it with the rest of us.
But doing away with IP won't guarentee that someone will share his source code (or source code modifications) with the rest of us. That is, a world without IP restrictions is not equivalent to the license requirements provided for by the GPL license.
Unless you also want to do away with secrecy and privacy and permit strangers to sift through your computer without your permission to look for the source code.
The reality is this: if I distribute something without source code, the FSF says that I'm not freely giving away my source code. But giving away sources is something that takes an act of will: simply distributing the binaries is insufficient because it requires someone to reverse engineer my code. (Of course some people's programming styles are so obtuse that reverse engineering may be desirable than examining the original sources. But they are hopefully in the minority.)
A world free of IP is also not equivalent to the license restrictions of a BSD style license agreement because BSD explicitly forbits suing the original author of the code as one condition of using the source code--that is, it makes it clear that the source code is to be used "as is." In a world free of IP, people would also be free to sue each other for defective code: only by a license agreement which can be enforced through copyright can I legally short curcuit a lawsuit by saying to the court "see--he agreed not to sue me as a requirement of using this code."
(This "don't sue the author" restriction is also part of the GNU license, by the way.)
To summarize: the BSD license represents an ideal of where most of us want to be one day, but as long as the law is stacked so heavilly against freedom of information, the GPL is what is needed to get there.
No, because the GPL makes distributing the source code a requirement of distributing software--something which could not be enforced in a world free of Intellectual Property law unless we were also to do away with secrecy and privacy convenants as well. (Because only then can we go in and get the source code for ourselves rather than waiting for the author to cough the code up.)
So, essentially, the net effect of abolishing intellectual property would be that everything would have an implicit GPL license attached to it. I don't think the FSF would have a problem with that.
Actually, they would because the GPL currently requires that source code be distributed with binary executables--and in a world without IP protections, I could tell rms to go jump in the lake instead of posting the source code to NiftyDIFF that I built using the GNU diff sources.
Does your VCR have a big red sign on it that says "you may not use this device to make copies of commercial movies"? No.
You're absolutely right. In fact, the sign is a piece of 8.5"x11" yellow paper which has the notice, and it came inserted into the VCR's instruction manual, rather than affixed to the VCR itself.
Does your photocopy machine have a big red sign on it that says "you may only photocopy copyrighted works for personal research use or archival as per the fair use clause of the Copyright Act"? No.
Actually, it's small and silver, not big and red. But the sign is there.
It is entirely irrelevant if the device is used for illegal purposes (and I have to agree with Mr. Boies that the AHRA permits the trading of copyrighted works in this manner). If it can be used for wholly legal purposes (and clearly it can be and is) then it's not illegal.
Regardless if it is irrelevant to you, legally it is relevant if the device's primary purpose is to break the law or not--that's the legal theory which makes having lock pick sets illegal in some states unless you are a licensed and bonded lock smith. Because the primary purpose for a non-licensed and non-bonded private citizen having a lock pick set is to break and enter--and it doesn't matter one whit how great the gray pick is at getting food dislogged from between your teeth.
One person is a criminal. Ten people are a gang. A thousand people are a movement. 20 million people are a law-making and unstoppable force.
And if those twenty million happen to be wearing army jackets, carrying guns and answer to Saddam over in Bagdad, it's still a law-making and unstoppable force? Or an illegal invasion?
Ethics are tricky. It's not about bullshitting the people around you into doing what you want them to do--it's about setting rules we all can live by. And just because everyone on the road speeds on the highways doesn't mean that speeding isn't illegal and dangerous...
Err, no. You obviously don't get it because you're spouting the same tired line about how copying music is stealing. It's not. Get your facts straight before going around spouting the IP world's propaganda.
And I assume you would have no problems whatsoever if I were to slam some GPL code into my proprietary engine and keep the source code closed, right? After all, it ain't stealing--it's just copying intellectual property...
It would be a first, though, to have to ban a T-shirt for something other than indecency or hate. These are (so far) the only two types of speech which are not protected by the first amendment.
It's a sad precident when we have to ban any discussion of certain algorithms. What's next? Banning books on making bombs? Banning works of terrorism? Works by terrorists?
Once we go down that road, we're banning the Declaration of Independence (a work by terrorists)...
NeXT had it's cube. Also, Pixar released a dedicated rendering engine that used the Renderman algorithm around the same time that was also cube shaped. (Actually I liked the Pixar rendering engine's appearance, as they textured it to look like a large marble cube with an indent in the middle.)
The cube shape is nothing new. The only elements of the dress design which would make the Cobalt cube unique is the color, lighting scheme, and design elements beyond it's basic shape which differentiate it from other systems. And in that respect, the Apple Cube G4 has nothing in common with the Cobalt cube.
Reminds me of a Monthy Python song:
"Every sperm is sacred,
Every sperm is great,
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate."
exactly - Katz's article is completely subjective and unimportant. How many of our lives are currently affected by computers? How many of our lives are currently affected by high-speed gene sequencers?
The thing Katz is forgetting in his usual attempts at fear-mongering in the name of editorializing is that as soon as gene sequencing becomes an important social issue--that is, as soon as someone proposes using the results of the HGP to start tinkering with the genome of a baby in a major way--we will get a crash course in who the players in the field are by the press. Just as we got a crash course in who Bill Gates was in '95 when the Feds went after Microsoft big-time for the first time in a press-worthy way.
Just as I'm currently getting a crash course (no pun intended) on the Concord after one crashed in France this morning, by CNBC.
The press doesn't bother telling us about people who aren't currently affecting our lives. But as soon as someone pops onto the cultural radar in a big way--for example, as soon as someone creates a successful fusion reactor (for example), I can guarentee that within 48 hours we will have an in-depth biography of the scientists who successfully created the reactor, the companies and universities who were working on the reactor, the reactions of the existing power companies, and all of the other details ad-nauseum.
Self-important judgemental jackass. Not everybody needs to care about the same things that you do. And those of us who don't are not "wrong" or somehow less intelligent or less morally-concerned than you are. We just lead different lives.
I have to agree. The fact of the matter is that while paranoid people like Katz may have visions of Gattaca dancing in his head, the reality is that the HGP currently only affects the potential long term investment outlook for the large pharmaceuticals. For someone who tends to watch CNBC in the morning (because I can't stomache Regis and Kathy Lee), I actually have heard of many of the players in the HGP--because at least in the relm of the drug companies (and people who may buy drug company stock), it's important stuff.
But just as soon as the results of the HGP affects more than the bottom line of a half-dozen large pharmacuticals, we'll get the in-depth biographies, the timelines, and the movie of the week.
You mean besides the fact that the FBI's request is a violation of the fourth amendment?
Because the smaller co-location centers don't look for your system going into promiscuous mode. Granted they could detect this by looking at the switch, but the couple of smaller ISPs I've dealt with, the switch was located with it's lights pointed towards a blank wall.
Besides, if the FBI dropped a computer on a switch and told them the ISP it was going into promiscuous mode, and there ain't a damned thing you can do about it because we're the FBI, then I suspect they wouldn't shut the system down. Meaning that in a sense, Cringley is right: they don't have to locate the machine right next to the router as traffic comes into the ISP facility; they can locate the box just about anywhere and as long as there isn't a packet filter at the switch, the box could theoretically get every packet.
I do disagree with Cringley that the FBI wants the power to shut the Internet down. I suspect the FBI wants to place their machine right on the router as traffic comes in because they're too dumb to realize that they don't have to do this.
It's not politics it's physics. You've got to throw away about nine times reaction mass just to get into orbit. Whether you do it all from your ship or from tanker ships that are suppling fuel at high altitude for the orbit boost, it's what takes to get to orbit baring magic.
For this discussion I'm defining magic as technology needed to pursue a goal that does not have a foundation in practical or theorectical science. i.e. usable anti-gravity, FTL, etc. And the problem is we're damm short on that magic the Star Trek guys have bleeding from their ears.
I'm all for funding folks who want to create some of that "Star Trek" magic--even if they don't succeed, I suspect unleashing a bunch of guys to do this sort of research is bound to cough up something good.
And I know Space isn't the solution--frankly, opening up cheap interplanetary transport that is cheap enough to allow settlers to go to Mars will probably create as many social problems as it would claim to solve.
But damn it, I'm not going to sit around and allow some idiot to tell me what to do who thinks that we should not spend a dime on interplanetary travel until we create their earth-bound "utopia" first.
Here's an example for you.
My father used to work for the Santa Fe. He worked as an "area sales rep", which meant that he was partially responsible for performing logistics work--that is, figuring out the cheapest way to handle product redistribution. Logistics as a science has reached such a high level of perfection in this country pre-Internet that we can ship millions of tons of rock ore from one point to another that cannot be warehoused, and have the trainloads of material that takes days to move from one part of the country to another show up moments before the ore needs to be dumped into the smelters for processing, without either delaying the smelters or wasting thousands of dollars on an idle train car.
When various web companies were initially started, they started on the extremely brash assumption that they could undercut the traditional "brick and mortar" operations by enough of a margin that they could not only make a larger profit, but be able to offer a larger product selection for a smaller price than any traditional operation. How? Through waving the "magic wand" of the Internet.
The other day my father was watching a news special where they showed order fulfillment through Amazon.com, the leader in this "using high tech to squeeze even more profits than old brick-and-mortar operations." And how were they filling orders? By having individual shoppers walk up and down large isles full of product pushing the equivalent of shopping carts.
My father died laughing! There are tons of ways you can handle order fulfillment--and Amazon picked the single most inefficient mechanism one can possibly use to fill small orders from a large stock selection. Hell, in about an hour doing a quick Internet search on the topic of "warehouse fulfillment logistics" I came up with a half-dozen papers on how to fill these orders which would improve their effectiveness by at least 50%!
An interesting conversation I had with a vulture^H^H^H^H^H^H venture capitalist told me why venture money is pulling out of "pure-play" internet retailers like Amazon.com. The first reason is that frankly, logistics has been brought to such a high art in this country that most companies weren't spending more than a few percent on logistics anyways. That is, for a $25.00 book, perhaps only about $1.00 was spent moving that book from the printers into a box waiting to be shipped by UPS on the loading docks of a mail order warehouse. So even if Amazon could perform it's logistics 20% more efficiently in order fulfillment at it's distribution warehouse, the best they could hope to squeeze out of shipping a $25.00 book is perhaps 10 cents, assuming 50% of the logistics costs is order fulfillment.
Meaning for Amazon to make a million dollars in profit from a 20% increase in efficiency in an already extremely efficient logistics situation, they would have to sell a quarter billion dollars worth of product.
Second, the venture money has realized that many of these "new economy businesses" are comprised of people who frankly think the "old farts" of the "old economy" have nothing to teach them. And so they screw up the very stuff we brought to a very high science in the 1970's! For example, I ordered four products from Amazon.com, and they charged me $10.00 shipping and handling--yet sent me four separate shipments from four separate warehouses (rather than consolidating the order and reducing shipping costs)--for a grand total of $22.00 in overall shipping costs, not counting handling and order picking costs! That is, Amazon, in thier "high-tech order fulfillment efficiency", lost $12.00 on my order because they can't get their logistics shit together!
Now perhaps this was an exceptional situation. And in one sense, I'm glad I got my order earlier than later. And I shouldn't be picking so heavily on Amazon, given that I own about $2K of their stock, and given that Amazon is actually better than most e-commerce sites.
But it does illustrate the fact that a lot of the "new economy gurus" out there are so full of bullshit they can't even pronounce logistics, much less deal with it. It's rather sad, given the fact that the Santa Fe did research more than 30 years ago which shows that logistics can represent as much as 40% of the total operational costs of a typical manufacturing or distribution company. And having good logistics can represent savings of around 15% up to 50% of the overall logistics costs--which for a company the size of Amazon represents hundreds of millions in overall operational costs.
And that's one of the biggest things the "old farts" bring to the table: about 10 to 30 years of experience on the logistics of order fulfillment, manufacturing, redistribution, and all those other things that can quite frankly mean the difference between making a good profit and declaring bankrupcy.
There is nothing wrong with spending money on trying to cure AIDS.
/., sell the servers, and send the money to Africa? Or dismantle CNN? CBS? The Democratic Party?
As to curing world hunger or promoting global peace, these are fundamentally political problems which cannot be cured with money. The best you can do with money is to create a band-aid, but world hunger will only be cured and global peace achieved when regional politicians put the good of the people and the good of local partnerships that create infrastructure and distribution centers above their own petty parochial squabbling.
But just because there is AIDS in the world and madmen who would blow you up rather than listen to your words, and just because politicians would rather allow the wondering nomadic people of northern Africa starve to death because it suits their political aims does not mean we should halt all other socio-economic activities cold until we can all come together and sing cumbya.
For example, have you sold your house and car, packed your bags, and moved to Somalia to feed the starving children? Should I? Should we dismantle
To anyone who suggests we should solve the problems of earth before we reach the stars, I suggest that it is this very attitude that is creating the problems on earth in the first place. That is, it is the presumption that your own parochial desires (such as owning a house, having a Mercedes, or a seat in the corporate boardroom of Ted Turner's conglomerate) takes precedence over the "starving children", while my desires (such as making space tourism economically viable in my lifetime) should be set aside as "wasteful foolishness" until we achieve world peace.
It's this fundamental lack of respect for other people which cause the lack of world peace, and which cause politicians to act selfishly and prevent the infrastructure construction necessary to feed people through the world.
Bah. I have little patience with patently stupid crap like this.
(Yes, I know: you weren't advocating that we should cure AIDS before we spend money on a better orbital launch vehicle--only pointing out the argument made by others. I just had to get that rant out of my system.)
I take it this means that if they get the costs down, the government would insist that they charge less so they wouldn't make any money anyway. It's a fair comment, but I don't completely agree with this.
Unfortunately, that is the current financial situation "enjoyed" by government contractors today. This sort of ass-backwards thinking has been true for the last twenty years or so.
The idea used to be that the government would simply buy a product from government contractors, and it was up to the goverment contractors to figure out the cheapest way to fulfill their end of the contract. If a government contractor could make a huge profit by figuring out a cheaper way to do things, then they got to pocket the profits as a reward for innovation.
As far as the government was concerned, this created two "problems." First, bureaucrats were uncomfortable with the notion that a contractor would use it's profits from a prior assignment to perform R&D on a future assignment in order to maximize profits. (Yes, I know--this is how the private sector works. But from a government bureaucrat's point of view, this is the same as stealing from Peter to pay Paul.)
The second problem was that the public (read: politicians) disliked the notion of people getting rich off doing government work. Something to do with class envy or some such bullshit. At any rate, the notion that several companies could make billions by providing the government inexpensive state of the art products ahead of the and under budget is evil to many politicians.
So now modern government contracts have built-in profit margins, and are required to pass on savings back to the government or being penalized by lower contractually mandated profit margins.
That is, the government in essence requires the savings to be passed back to the government. That's why no-one cares that we're one mega-merger away from a monopoly in the airospace market--because government contract work is so heavily regulated it makes the electric company regulations of a half-dozen years ago seem like Lassie-Faire Capitalism by comparason.
The upshot of this is that it is in the best interest of Lockheed to keep launch costs at the top of the inelasticity plateau, because it maximizes their profits given the current regulatory environment.
Personally I think it's stupid--and it's why we see things like $8,000 toilets and $600 wrenches. It's also why we see an absolute lack of interest on the part of Lockheed to innovate except in the more esoteric areas of DoD spending--because all financial incentives for Lockheed to do anything other than what Congress directly mandates has been stripped from it.
That, combined with the "spend it or lose it" mentality of the Federal government's budget spending process, explains in large part why we can have so much waste while we simultaneously shackle some of the brightest minds on the planet.
There's nothing new here; cyberknowlegable private investigators have been doing this sort of stuff for years. And frankly, the service they are providing (connecting "rogue" web sites and postings with real names) can be done on most sites in a matter of minutes or hours. On other sites, it requires a court order--and a court order tends to require more than "he said something bad about me."
While I have no problems with hanging someone out to dry who was passing bogus stock tips in violation of SEC rules, I have a hard time seeing the value of going after a disgruntled ex-customer.
Anyways, this sounds like a great service--for separating paranoid companies from $5K...
But they'll never be able to do them well, without being able to actively engage the computer and understand how it works well enough to communicate to it what you want.
Even Macintosh people don't deny this.
However, there are two questions which begs to be asked. First, by redesigning the application around some simple (and consistant) user interface guidelines, how much functionality can be bring out to the casual user? Second, how can we design the application so that when a user decides to actively engage the software to better use it and understand how it works, can we provide a better roadmap and a better experience without frustraiting the user?
These two questions have nothing to do with having a pretty graphical user interface. What they have to do with is having a good human/computer interface, where the human is in direct control, and where the computer does not frustrate the user either by attempting to take control from what the programmer thought was a Luser (that cursed Microsoft paperclip comes to mind), or where the computer leaves the user hanging with some obscure "?SN#31192@coref3.c: operation cannot be completed" error message.
In order to make a user's experience better, programmers have to remember a few things. Casually dismissing these points runs the risk of making your software difficult to use--and as any Macintosh programmer will tell you, making your software difficult to use because you're too lazy to consider the users (NOT "lusers") is not elitism--it's just plain laziness.
1) The human is in charge. Don't grab the mouse pointer from him/her, or interrupt the input process with "helpful hints" or otherwise assume the user is trying to do something.
This means no "modes"--that is, don't force the human to walk through some sort of "maze" of program states which seem obvious to the (lazy) programmer but which is counterintuitive to the user. (In fact, if the only "mode" your program has is a modal dialog box saying "I'm broken--sorry", that's best.)
And this means providing some form of "undo" to the user who was just playing around with your program.
2) Make the often used features "obvious". Setting a font in a word processor should not be accomplished by hitting "Control+Alt+F3", which is "clearly documented" on page 172 of the manual, as a side note marked "unimportant."
This also means don't make the interface of your program inconsistant with other programs on the same platform. For example, setting the font on the Macintosh should be accomplished by having a "font" menu--this is part of the UI guidelines, and every other application on the Macintosh that makes setting the font a major feature (like word processors) do the same thing.
And this means eliminating unnecessary clutter--which is just a great way of hiding stuff in the open. Keep the design clean, though permit the user to dive down into the complexity if the user chooses. (That is, if part of your application permits the user to drop into an editor to edit the underlying perl scripts that drive your application, great! But don't force them to edit a perl script if they don't need to.)
These two rules are not rocket science. They're just good rules of thumb. Unfortunately, most Linux programmers and many Windows programmers seem to share two opinions which are contrary to these rather simple rules of thumb.
First, many programmers confuse power with obfustication.
And second, many programmers view users as "lusers," only worthy of their contempt and not worthy of their time or effort.
These two attitudes do not fly well in the Macintosh developer community.
Well, ESR is obviously right that Mackers can't tell the difference between the UI and the OS functionality because here (and elsewhere) Lewis himself keeps conflating UI and OS.
Question: is the UI part of the OS?
When we criticize Windows 2000 as being a large monolythic black box, we assume the UI is part of the OS--it's all in the same box. Nevermind the fact that the Windows 2000 OS is organized as a series of processes around a kernel on top of an HAL--we can't see the UI process, so it's obviously "integrated". That is, it's part of the OS, at least for purposes of Microsoft bashing.
But it's not part of Linux, because we can see the process launching, and we can turn the UI off if we choose to. In fact, we even know that there are hooks in the X server which allow us to hook in a different window manager--so we don't even consider the window manager as the overall UI.
Yet--the UI is part of the OS when someone is critical of Linux by claiming that all those wierdly named command-line tools are a pain in the ass to use. That is, we consider the UI part of the OS when someone says "Linux is hard to use by the typical consumer"--because XFree comes in the same RedHat box as the Linux kernel.
So is the UI part of the OS? I guess it depends on who is making the argument, and if it supports our arguments...
Bah!
There are inconsistencies within various WMs, by the way--some X applications don't go to the extra services provided by those WMs but roll their own (or include gadgets with other WM styles), and so some applications present an inconsistant UI from the surrounding WM when launched. This is often touted as a "good thing" by most Linux programmers, yet is it? That is, is it a good thing when xman presents a different scrollbar and gadget look and feel from Netscape?
Do MacDonald's in the States also have golden arches?
Yes, and the local outlet here has pizza as well. But I challenge you to tell the difference between a quarter pounder in Quebec and one made here in Los Angeles.
No; I do mind. And will come after you with a large baseball bat...actually, she also has a black belt and could probably take care of herself. But whatever's left is mine.
Except that it was an entirely American ran subdivision--I didn't run into a single Japanese person at this particular office.
...pardon me, but isn't self-confidence, by virtue of its name, something that cannot be instilled by an external force?
Actually, self confidence is something that is both postiviely and negatively reinforced due to external stimuli.
If I tell you "Now Seumas, stop being a sexist pig," and others around you tell you the same thing, then eventually started shutting you out of the discussion, then your girlfriend left you because she thought you were a sexist pig, don't tell me this series of events wouldn't at least tarnish your self-confidence. Most people, after being pecked to death by ducks, will eventually at least stop sharing their ideas--that is, their confidence will stop being very strong.
Therein lies the problem that some women have faced. This constantly being shut down, told to stop asking questions, "go behave like a good girl and go play with your dolls"--this doesn't exactly help self-confidence in the technical arena. So by the fifth grade, the girls may not speak up because they've been constantly reminded in subtle and not so sublte ways to sit down and shut up.
So, should we punish boys because they're sometimes eager to learn?
Obviously not, but that's not the question. The question is why are girls less likely to pipe up, and if it is cultural (as I suspect it is, at least partially), then can we counteract those cultural stereotypes enough to allow women to be at least thought of as worthwile scientists, technicians and hackers while they are still in their formative years?
In that respect, women are no different from men. In fact, as fierce and unwavering as I've known many women to be, there should be less of an excuse.
While I have tremendous respect for your personal story, the problem is that most people aren't as mindful to their circumstances or as willing to change them as they should. And to that I think it's a crime that everyone doesn't fight the good fight as you have.
However, what I'm replying to is the assertion that the only thing that counts is the good fight. Suppose instead of landing a job in Silicon Valley, the person you interviewed with decided that you weren't worth hiring you because you're black. Or because you're latino. Would you have fought harder to succeed?
Should you have to fight harder to succeed?
I think it's unfair to place additional burdens on people due to their gender or skin color, simply because we're too lazy as a society to get over these prejudices. People already have enough burdens to shoulder due to their family situation, environment, or other circumstances.