I have first-hand experience with this kind of work environment at my University job. It has really helped me produce much higher quality work (I'm a Web Designer and Developer using Perl, PHP, and MySQL). Of course, in my case it's somewhat accidental, but nevertheless I see a lot of this at the University.
The culture here is such that people are hired to handle a set of responsibilities rather than to produce 40 hours of solid work every week. Because there is no one clear goal in most University departments, you find a wide disparity of workloads.
I think there is one crucial distinction between people that needs to be judged before such a management is widely deployed, however. There are some people, when given spare time, will increase the quality of their work. Others however, will simply waste their extra time. I'm inclined to say that techies, being generally more interested in their work than the average full-time employee would fit into the first category. Upon reflection, however, I do not believe this is true. I think it just boils down to personal work ethic. I've seen people in what I consider to be dreadfully dull positions (retail management, facilities) coming up with all kinds of great ideas to further the goals of the organization. As with many things in business, hiring seems to make all the difference.
I think the argument is that open-source is not a blueprint of a rational set of requirements for all government software. Yes, it has benefits, but you seem to be claiming that the benefits are indisputably superior to anything proprietary software has to offer.
Sure people follow trends, but that's to increase efficiency. If you're primary business is somewhat similar to other businesses and is not IT-centric, then playing follow the leader can save you a lot of time and effort. You won't always get the greatest product, but you'll save a lot of money on research.
I don't mind paying more for more bandwidth, but does this really solve the cable provider's problems with 'greedy' users? I would think their big hits come from people who run P2P or other bandwidth intensive applications 24 hours a day.
Granted, tiered bandwidth cuts theoretical throughput, but is it the most effective way to share the cost of bandwidth? There are a hell of a lot of people who just want fast browsing, but will probably use less than a GB each month. Will this new pricing structure bring in more customers from this huge demographic?
Neurons are the transistors of the brain. They are the low level switching components out of which higher-order functionality is built. But like the individual transistor, studying the individual neuron tells us little about these higher functions.
This sounds like someone who doesn't really understand how all the transistors work. By jumping straight to high-level (XML for crying out loud) processing, you are making the assumption that transistors, logical units, chips, buses, memory, kernels, shells are functionally equivalent to neurons and all the chemical processes that our brains use. This seems like a HUGE jump to make, considering the obvious differences in the way a computer functions compared to what we know of the brain.
I find myself agreeing with the Churchlands that the notion of consciousness belongs to "folk psychology" and that there may be no clear brain correlates for the ego, id, emotions as they are commonly classified, and so on. But to me that does not rule out the possibility of reducing the mind to a mathematical description, which is more or less independent of the underlying brain archiecture. That baby doesn't go out with the bathwater. A.I. is possible precisely because there is nothing special about the brain as a computer. In fact the brain is a shitty computer. The brain has to sleep, needs food, thinks about sex all the time. Useless!
Hmm, the brain is evolved to keep us alive, computers can't keep themselves alive and reproduce, let alone adapt to changes. Perfect mathematical functioning is not a practical model for a lifeform in a world that is not static. The fact that Wallace views computers as better than a brain is very telling to me. To get philosophical, what makes any one thing better than another? I can not continue reasoning down a path that doesn't value human intelligence since I myself am human. To deny the value of my humanity would render me useless and so why go down that path?
And remember, no one has proved that our intelligence is a successful adaption, over the long term. It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created.
This is an unbelievable statement. The proof of our success is our population and physical dominance of the planet, what more do you need? If we destroy ourselves, then we weren't the ideal lifeform for this planet, but then again, ideal just depends on your concept of success. Nothing is forever anyway.
If consciousness is an illusion, is self-knowledge possible at all? For if we accept that consciousness is an illusion, we would never know it, because the illusion would always deceive us. Yet if we know our own consciousness is an illusion, then we would have some self-knowledge. The paradox appears to undermine the concept of an illusory consciousness, but just as Copernicus removed the giant Earth to a small planet in a much larger universe, so we may one day remove consciousness to the periphery of our theory of intelligence. There may exist a spark of creativity, or "soul," or "genius," but it is not that critical for being human.
The paradox is easily resolved. Consciousness is not an illusion any more than reality is an illusion. Our consciousness is the definition of our reality, and is, in fact, the only self-evident truth in the universe.
Perhaps the real question posed here is do we have free will, or are we simply living out the physical inevitabilities set in motion at the beginning of the Universe. This is a sticky issue, but I choose to believe that we DO have free will, for the simple reason that without free will, nothing has meaning. Where do we get ourselves by the assertion that free will is an illusion? We come to a position where there is no point to making any effort or doing anything because whatever happens is inevitable.
I agree with the last part of this paragraph insomuch as it addresses human laziness, and the tendency to go on 'auto-pilot' without thinking about what we are doing. Yet we all, to some extent, can be communicated with on a philosophical level. This assertion that the human 'soul' is an insignificant portion of our humanity is just thrown out there without the slightest bit of evidence.
I wish Wallace luck in constructing a machine that can replicate human behaviour, but I think he is making a lot of assumptions about consciousness that are better left open for exploration.
That is pretty silly reasoning. When was the 2nd edition written? 1996? The JavaScript of those days is long gone my friend.
If you need a JavaScript reference, you are best served by looking for the best available book rather than making such decisions based on idealistic dogmatic opinions of publishers.
Yes, O'reilly isn't what it used to be, but what does that have to do with purchasing a book?
It's good to see some concrete reasons for making your platform decision rather than pure zealotry. I think OS X will probably come around for you eventually.
Apple does not make their money through monopolies or coersion. They have to sell hardware. It's a fact that Apple does not go out of it's way to support old hardware, but nor do they force obsolescence on us. Frankly, I am glad my new Apple software does not have to support 15 year old hardware. It would be as bloated as the Intel chip architecture.
There are so many things about OS X that are so far superior to OS 9, that I just don't buy the idea that it feels like an 'unfinished product'. From a work perspective (Web Design & Development) OS X gives me an unparalleled platform that makes me literally twice as productive. I felt like the 10.1 update was definitely necessary and was glad that they offered it for free. I won't mind paying for 10.2, however, because I'm totally happy with 10.1, and 10.2 seems to have gobs of new features.
I think we DO want to gain marketshare, for all the great reasons that have been outlined in the other responses. But I share your sentiment that the article was overdramatic.
Linux will not die, in fact, in a business world that is constantly evolving, open-source software is uniquely positioned to roll with the waves. Companies, Conglomerates, and even whole Industries have always resisted change insomuch as it threatens their bottom line. Inevitably the world changes, and open-source software is free to flow with the change rather than fight it.
Aside from certain doomsday scenarios for Linux involving even greater corporate controls and the proliferation of locked hardware (which I think is somewhat unlikely), I don't see any real tangible threats headed this way.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Although it may be fun to leave Linux as a geek's playground, there are very good reasons to make it useable by the masses. One of which might be guaranteeing your future ability to hack on Linux.
Having a homogenized default desktop doesn't have to mean you give up all your configurability, it just means people who don't like playing with the system can still use it. It seems to me there is infinite room for different solutions in OSS.
I can see how military strategy would need to be rewritten but I don't understand why lack of American casualties is somehow going to change the ethics of war.
I would argue that people are already distracted from our two-faced foreign policy. The American public is almost always in favor of war if the President tells them it's necessary.
You're right, i didn't mean change the ethics of war, but rather that any involvement and moral questioning of the American public will diminish from its already low levels to the point where the government really DOES have carte blanche to wage any war it sees fit. People may think it's already that way now, but just look at Somalia, and you can see a situation where the lack of American will caused us to pull out after a few casualties. Why? Because we didn't value the mission and so we really shouldn't have been there. With robots no one would have even noticed and who knows what kind of atrocities would have been perpetrated in the name of helping the Somali people.
Morality of war...
on
Robot Wars
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well war ethics are going to have to be completely re-written if this happens, because previously the idea was that to win a war you had to send some soldiers to their death. If we don't have to send in soldiers anymore then the American public will be easily distracted from our hideously hypocritical foreign policy decisions since they don't actually have to worry about their sons and daughters.
A quote from the pirate: "We never anticipated that a company would lose a sale as a result of one guy in China downloading it and burning it onto a CD and selling it to half of China."
The article presents this as an attempt at a legitimate argument, but I can't imagine it being said with anything less than dripping sarcasm. I mean it already goes way beyond what any sane defendant would verbalize in this situation. I guess the guy really hasn't left his Mom's basement since high school.
Photoshop is expensive because of the professional quality of the tools. The money is reasonable because if you are the type of individual who needs that much power then it will increase your productivity enough to pay for within a matter of weeks if not days.
If you are a more casual user than Adobe still offers a product for you at a more reasonable price...
At first I missed the point of your analogy (because of the private nature of land versus the public nature of the web), but upon closer reflection it is gets right to the heart of the stupidity of this ruling.
In passing a law like this they are essentially trying to change the nature of the Web. The Web is supposed to be a means of linking information, and making it publicly available. Seems companies noticed how popular it is and now want to subvert it into a commercial engine where corporations make the rules.
The sickening part is how many different ways they could avoid this problem on the server side (even without referrers), but they see it as an opportunity to save money in development time while also potentially paving the way for profit through litigation.
What's scary is that technology is getting too complicated for the legal system to understand the implications of decisions like this. Without a deep understanding of technology, it becomes way too easy for judges to be convinced by the fast-talking techniques of companies crying foul.
Re:At least they follow their own advice.
on
Built For Use
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· Score: 2
True, but their site is also not a big design challenge. They only have one or two goals to accomplish and not very much content.
Yes it does, it means browsers are going against my will on my system. There should be checkboxes for sound and the ability to spawn new windows (the ability to spawn them under anything flat out shouldn't exist). There should be site by site control of cookies so I could allow sites very narrow usage if sites I want require them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Mozilla does a pretty good job of this. It's hypocritical to complain about what commercial vendors do with their products, because you yourself want complete freedom to do what you want with software you write.
It's easy to disagree with capitalist excess and pervasive commercialization of everything, but that is the cost of freedom. Saying what features browser makers should be mandated to add is like media conglomerates lobbying to get DRM hardware installed in every electronic device. Those guys think their side has the moral high ground too.
Numerous posts here proclaim that the Internet has already been ruined by big business. That is a load of crap. You can still write any software you please and deploy it over the Internet with no problems.
The fact that there are thousands of commercial web sites with pop-ups and cookies doesn't mean anything. Corporations should be free to make a profit just as you should be free to tune in to different sites.
The only thing that we have to worry about is hardware-based DRM and other such restrictions. Because of the investment and infrastructure needed to build a global network, we will be in a lot of trouble if restrictive HARDWARE manages to become the standard. Although such restrictions seem a long way off, it would be nice if some sort of democratic and non-profit institution could step in and start building network bandwidth in the event that the Comm. giants decide it's time to deploy a new 'Smart' Network.
The core of the problem: there is no concrete value of optimality that can be stated that is true in all infinite cases.
I wholeheartedly agree, however, the reason these issues are becoming so pressing these days is because the rate at which patent saturation is stifling innovation is increasing geometrically. For one thing computer code has a variety of attributes that were unforeseen 100 years ago:
Freely duplicable
Potentially short span between conception and implementation
Highly reusable
Highly expandable
I am a fiscal conservative, and I love the elegance of the Free Market system, but it's based on assumptions of the Industrial Age. Our economic system is splitting apart at the seams trying to reconcile all the implications of digital data and communications.
While you are right that there is no concrete optimal value (for anything really), our system will remain skewed until we figure out a more effective method of rewarding contribution to society rather than rewarding legal expertise and clever marketing.
For the love of America, politicians better wake up to this problem, because otherwise all the creative minds who are responsible for true innovation will all move overseas where they won't be squashed by huge corporations.
I would never argue that file sharing doesn't hurt sales, I'm sure that it does. On the other hand, I know from personal experience, that downloading music can inspire you to go out and buy an album. I'm not going to buy something if I'm not sure I want it, and quite frankly the traditional music industry model of radio over-play does a lot less to inspire me to buy a CD than downloading something fresh and relatively obscure.
If the record companies have anything to fear it's the destruction of the mass-marketing business model. I'd like to see 10 times the number of artists on the radio so I don't just get sick of all of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I have first-hand experience with this kind of work environment at my University job. It has really helped me produce much higher quality work (I'm a Web Designer and Developer using Perl, PHP, and MySQL). Of course, in my case it's somewhat accidental, but nevertheless I see a lot of this at the University.
The culture here is such that people are hired to handle a set of responsibilities rather than to produce 40 hours of solid work every week. Because there is no one clear goal in most University departments, you find a wide disparity of workloads.
I think there is one crucial distinction between people that needs to be judged before such a management is widely deployed, however. There are some people, when given spare time, will increase the quality of their work. Others however, will simply waste their extra time. I'm inclined to say that techies, being generally more interested in their work than the average full-time employee would fit into the first category. Upon reflection, however, I do not believe this is true. I think it just boils down to personal work ethic. I've seen people in what I consider to be dreadfully dull positions (retail management, facilities) coming up with all kinds of great ideas to further the goals of the organization. As with many things in business, hiring seems to make all the difference.
I think the argument is that open-source is not a blueprint of a rational set of requirements for all government software. Yes, it has benefits, but you seem to be claiming that the benefits are indisputably superior to anything proprietary software has to offer.
Sure people follow trends, but that's to increase efficiency. If you're primary business is somewhat similar to other businesses and is not IT-centric, then playing follow the leader can save you a lot of time and effort. You won't always get the greatest product, but you'll save a lot of money on research.
I don't mind paying more for more bandwidth, but does this really solve the cable provider's problems with 'greedy' users? I would think their big hits come from people who run P2P or other bandwidth intensive applications 24 hours a day.
Granted, tiered bandwidth cuts theoretical throughput, but is it the most effective way to share the cost of bandwidth? There are a hell of a lot of people who just want fast browsing, but will probably use less than a GB each month. Will this new pricing structure bring in more customers from this huge demographic?
This sounds like someone who doesn't really understand how all the transistors work. By jumping straight to high-level (XML for crying out loud) processing, you are making the assumption that transistors, logical units, chips, buses, memory, kernels, shells are functionally equivalent to neurons and all the chemical processes that our brains use. This seems like a HUGE jump to make, considering the obvious differences in the way a computer functions compared to what we know of the brain.
I find myself agreeing with the Churchlands that the notion of consciousness belongs to "folk psychology" and that there may be no clear brain correlates for the ego, id, emotions as they are commonly classified, and so on. But to me that does not rule out the possibility of reducing the mind to a mathematical description, which is more or less independent of the underlying brain archiecture. That baby doesn't go out with the bathwater. A.I. is possible precisely because there is nothing special about the brain as a computer. In fact the brain is a shitty computer. The brain has to sleep, needs food, thinks about sex all the time. Useless!Hmm, the brain is evolved to keep us alive, computers can't keep themselves alive and reproduce, let alone adapt to changes. Perfect mathematical functioning is not a practical model for a lifeform in a world that is not static. The fact that Wallace views computers as better than a brain is very telling to me. To get philosophical, what makes any one thing better than another? I can not continue reasoning down a path that doesn't value human intelligence since I myself am human. To deny the value of my humanity would render me useless and so why go down that path?
And remember, no one has proved that our intelligence is a successful adaption, over the long term. It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created.This is an unbelievable statement. The proof of our success is our population and physical dominance of the planet, what more do you need? If we destroy ourselves, then we weren't the ideal lifeform for this planet, but then again, ideal just depends on your concept of success. Nothing is forever anyway.
If consciousness is an illusion, is self-knowledge possible at all? For if we accept that consciousness is an illusion, we would never know it, because the illusion would always deceive us. Yet if we know our own consciousness is an illusion, then we would have some self-knowledge. The paradox appears to undermine the concept of an illusory consciousness, but just as Copernicus removed the giant Earth to a small planet in a much larger universe, so we may one day remove consciousness to the periphery of our theory of intelligence. There may exist a spark of creativity, or "soul," or "genius," but it is not that critical for being human.The paradox is easily resolved. Consciousness is not an illusion any more than reality is an illusion. Our consciousness is the definition of our reality, and is, in fact, the only self-evident truth in the universe.
Perhaps the real question posed here is do we have free will, or are we simply living out the physical inevitabilities set in motion at the beginning of the Universe. This is a sticky issue, but I choose to believe that we DO have free will, for the simple reason that without free will, nothing has meaning. Where do we get ourselves by the assertion that free will is an illusion? We come to a position where there is no point to making any effort or doing anything because whatever happens is inevitable.
I agree with the last part of this paragraph insomuch as it addresses human laziness, and the tendency to go on 'auto-pilot' without thinking about what we are doing. Yet we all, to some extent, can be communicated with on a philosophical level. This assertion that the human 'soul' is an insignificant portion of our humanity is just thrown out there without the slightest bit of evidence.
I wish Wallace luck in constructing a machine that can replicate human behaviour, but I think he is making a lot of assumptions about consciousness that are better left open for exploration.
That is pretty silly reasoning. When was the 2nd edition written? 1996? The JavaScript of those days is long gone my friend.
If you need a JavaScript reference, you are best served by looking for the best available book rather than making such decisions based on idealistic dogmatic opinions of publishers.
Yes, O'reilly isn't what it used to be, but what does that have to do with purchasing a book?
It's good to see some concrete reasons for making your platform decision rather than pure zealotry. I think OS X will probably come around for you eventually.
Apple does not make their money through monopolies or coersion. They have to sell hardware. It's a fact that Apple does not go out of it's way to support old hardware, but nor do they force obsolescence on us. Frankly, I am glad my new Apple software does not have to support 15 year old hardware. It would be as bloated as the Intel chip architecture.
There are so many things about OS X that are so far superior to OS 9, that I just don't buy the idea that it feels like an 'unfinished product'. From a work perspective (Web Design & Development) OS X gives me an unparalleled platform that makes me literally twice as productive. I felt like the 10.1 update was definitely necessary and was glad that they offered it for free. I won't mind paying for 10.2, however, because I'm totally happy with 10.1, and 10.2 seems to have gobs of new features.
I think we DO want to gain marketshare, for all the great reasons that have been outlined in the other responses. But I share your sentiment that the article was overdramatic.
Linux will not die, in fact, in a business world that is constantly evolving, open-source software is uniquely positioned to roll with the waves. Companies, Conglomerates, and even whole Industries have always resisted change insomuch as it threatens their bottom line. Inevitably the world changes, and open-source software is free to flow with the change rather than fight it.
Aside from certain doomsday scenarios for Linux involving even greater corporate controls and the proliferation of locked hardware (which I think is somewhat unlikely), I don't see any real tangible threats headed this way.
Coldstone is a new and cool game construction kit. I haven't used it, but it looks promising.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Although it may be fun to leave Linux as a geek's playground, there are very good reasons to make it useable by the masses. One of which might be guaranteeing your future ability to hack on Linux.
Having a homogenized default desktop doesn't have to mean you give up all your configurability, it just means people who don't like playing with the system can still use it. It seems to me there is infinite room for different solutions in OSS.
Yes, but they need our money, and lots of it, otherwise they'll end up starving and turn to the record companies.
I would argue that people are already distracted from our two-faced foreign policy. The American public is almost always in favor of war if the President tells them it's necessary.
You're right, i didn't mean change the ethics of war, but rather that any involvement and moral questioning of the American public will diminish from its already low levels to the point where the government really DOES have carte blanche to wage any war it sees fit. People may think it's already that way now, but just look at Somalia, and you can see a situation where the lack of American will caused us to pull out after a few casualties. Why? Because we didn't value the mission and so we really shouldn't have been there. With robots no one would have even noticed and who knows what kind of atrocities would have been perpetrated in the name of helping the Somali people.
Well war ethics are going to have to be completely re-written if this happens, because previously the idea was that to win a war you had to send some soldiers to their death. If we don't have to send in soldiers anymore then the American public will be easily distracted from our hideously hypocritical foreign policy decisions since they don't actually have to worry about their sons and daughters.
"We never anticipated that a company would lose a sale as a result of one guy in China downloading it and burning it onto a CD and selling it to half of China."
The article presents this as an attempt at a legitimate argument, but I can't imagine it being said with anything less than dripping sarcasm. I mean it already goes way beyond what any sane defendant would verbalize in this situation. I guess the guy really hasn't left his Mom's basement since high school.
If you are a more casual user than Adobe still offers a product for you at a more reasonable price...
At first I missed the point of your analogy (because of the private nature of land versus the public nature of the web), but upon closer reflection it is gets right to the heart of the stupidity of this ruling.
In passing a law like this they are essentially trying to change the nature of the Web. The Web is supposed to be a means of linking information, and making it publicly available. Seems companies noticed how popular it is and now want to subvert it into a commercial engine where corporations make the rules.
The sickening part is how many different ways they could avoid this problem on the server side (even without referrers), but they see it as an opportunity to save money in development time while also potentially paving the way for profit through litigation.
What's scary is that technology is getting too complicated for the legal system to understand the implications of decisions like this. Without a deep understanding of technology, it becomes way too easy for judges to be convinced by the fast-talking techniques of companies crying foul.
True, but their site is also not a big design challenge. They only have one or two goals to accomplish and not very much content.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Mozilla does a pretty good job of this. It's hypocritical to complain about what commercial vendors do with their products, because you yourself want complete freedom to do what you want with software you write.
It's easy to disagree with capitalist excess and pervasive commercialization of everything, but that is the cost of freedom. Saying what features browser makers should be mandated to add is like media conglomerates lobbying to get DRM hardware installed in every electronic device. Those guys think their side has the moral high ground too.
Numerous posts here proclaim that the Internet has already been ruined by big business. That is a load of crap. You can still write any software you please and deploy it over the Internet with no problems.
The fact that there are thousands of commercial web sites with pop-ups and cookies doesn't mean anything. Corporations should be free to make a profit just as you should be free to tune in to different sites.
The only thing that we have to worry about is hardware-based DRM and other such restrictions. Because of the investment and infrastructure needed to build a global network, we will be in a lot of trouble if restrictive HARDWARE manages to become the standard. Although such restrictions seem a long way off, it would be nice if some sort of democratic and non-profit institution could step in and start building network bandwidth in the event that the Comm. giants decide it's time to deploy a new 'Smart' Network.
- Freely duplicable
- Potentially short span between conception and implementation
- Highly reusable
- Highly expandable
I am a fiscal conservative, and I love the elegance of the Free Market system, but it's based on assumptions of the Industrial Age. Our economic system is splitting apart at the seams trying to reconcile all the implications of digital data and communications.While you are right that there is no concrete optimal value (for anything really), our system will remain skewed until we figure out a more effective method of rewarding contribution to society rather than rewarding legal expertise and clever marketing.
For the love of America, politicians better wake up to this problem, because otherwise all the creative minds who are responsible for true innovation will all move overseas where they won't be squashed by huge corporations.
I would never argue that file sharing doesn't hurt sales, I'm sure that it does. On the other hand, I know from personal experience, that downloading music can inspire you to go out and buy an album. I'm not going to buy something if I'm not sure I want it, and quite frankly the traditional music industry model of radio over-play does a lot less to inspire me to buy a CD than downloading something fresh and relatively obscure.
If the record companies have anything to fear it's the destruction of the mass-marketing business model. I'd like to see 10 times the number of artists on the radio so I don't just get sick of all of them.
ColdFusion for large apps? Now that's a scary thought.
Sure you can, and you probably will, by not leaving the house for 3 months.