Actually, what I'd like to see is a/. charity of the month. Collecting the money and then squabbling over where it goes is a good way to piss people off. Much better is trying to raise funds for a cause CmdrTaco et al picks and states up front. Anyone who doesn't like a cause can then just wait for the next month's cause to roll around, nobody feels swindled.
The particular goods I see arising from a/. charity effort are:
Yes, we could all just try to go donate to the causes which please us, but it would be cool for/. to get the credit as the entity which got us to cough up.
Human nature is such that people who can only donate small amounts (such as students) often don't bother unless they see that it's part of a much larger effort. A sense of the collective might of/. itself might motivate more people to give even if only a little.
One big stumbling block to getting people to donate is the amount of trouble it is to do so. I know I am about 10^6x less likely to do anything which requires finding an envelop and a stamp. If there were a simple link to click on to do a pay-pal payment or some such, the odds of my participating go way up.
I would really like to see the amassed hordes of/. do something with real effect (positive). I just want to see us throw our weight around.;) ("Must use.... powers... only... for... good".) Too much talk, not enough action. Real action might be too much to ask of mouse potatos, but donating cash might just be low-effort enough.
Oh, yeah. I know what you mean. If only they wore decent clothes. If only they didn't act like that. They bring it on themselves. The people it happens to must have something wrong with them. It only happens to, you know, that kind of person. What do you expect going out dressed like that. Well, don't go out after dark alone. She was asking for it. She must be a tease. She must have done something to provoke him.
Oh, wait, I forgot: were we talking about women getting raped or geeks getting beaten up? Oh, it doesn't matter, the logic is the same: it must have been the victim's fault, right?
It'd just be easier if some people would realize that always being hostile or depressed is
self destructive - though that's easy to say in hindsight.
Being depressed is self-destructive? Gosh, I'm sure that all those depressed teen/.ers reading this will take this right to heart and stop being depressed right now! If only someone had told them earlier that their depression was the cause of the scorn of their peers, I'm sure they would have stopped immediately.
Dude, either (0) learn to read for content or (1) to pay attention to which post you Reply. Your post might have made some sense if the practice you criticized had actually been suggested in the post you replied to. Duh.
In addition to many of the things already suggested, my recommendation is: recommendations.
When one of those coders needs a new job or is applying to a school, they should be able to get a letter of recommendation from a contact they worked with in your corp, or be able to list that contact as a professional reference.
Since they might not even think to ask (since you are neither employer nor teacher), take the initiative of offering this service to them.
And if the coder says "Gee, thanks, but I don't plan on needing any recommendations in the next 6mos", say "OK, we'll write something up, for you to hold on to for when you do need it."
Telling someone you think he's a great coder is nice. Telling potential employers/professors he's a great coder, now that's worth something!
Why is it that when homeschoolers are wierd, homeschooling is quickly blamed, but no matter how badly behaving someone who was "socialized" in schools is, no one ever says "those schoolers, they're bizarre"?
That was a rhetorical question, of course: Most people have deep emotional reasons for wanting to argue the superiority of their own culture. Lots of (otherwise) bright people prefer to let their emotions overwhelm their reason where their own upbringing is concerned. Dissing homeschoolers is a cheap and easy way to stroke one's own ego. Double standards are always indicative of an inferiority complex.
Geez. From all the belly-aching here, you'd think that selling education was a crime against humanity.
Haven't any of you people ever taken karate lessons, ballet lessons, music lessons, etc as kids? Haven't you attended computer camp or a G&T summer school? Haven't you ever learned a new language at an intensive language school or took (or worked at!) a test prep service?
If it's OK for me to hang out my shingle and take piano students at $30/half-hour, why on earth should it not be OK to run an entire school which charges per semester? Sheesh.
Oh, agreed that e-communities are shakey. But which is cause and which is effect? I think that there are things which are functioning in a very community-like-manner, which without electronic mediation would be so frail as not to exist.
Also, I think that an very important point in all this is that the ability for a community to sustain itself (i.e. to exploit the affordances) of telecommunications (whether the internet or parchment epistles), is a memetic skill which a community can have or not. A community of people which, as part of its self-conception, includes valuing, say, literacy, is going to have much more success using writen forms of communication, than one which doesn't.
And it's not just literacy. Is (for a random example) a web board for skydivers going to be a robust community? Well, if it attacts a substantial number of skydivers who like to think of themselves as computer-savvy, it could. But (I don't know, I'm not a skydiver) if skydivers are mostly interested skydiving, and don't have any particular inclination to running/maintaining the board themselves, then it probably won't work. Why? Because -- even if someone else is running the board for them -- being passive consumers of the collective experience (instead of invested participants) is death to a would-be community. Attitude means a lot in community.
It's not that a on-line community must be made of hackers. But all the even vaguely successful on-line communities I have seen have had some commonality (sometimes other than their ostensible topic) which allowed its members to exploit the on-line affordances. For example, I observed a list for a sub-set of home-schooling parents which was particularly strong; the subscribers were mostly soccer-moms who weren't in the least bit technophilic, but the educational philosophy they subscribed to dictated that one must be open-minded and exploratory when encountering new things (to be an example to their kids), and that was all it took.
But I digress: the point is, that a community, or a group of people who would be a community, have certain collective values (or lack there of) which directly pertain to what resources they can exploit.
So, it does make me wonder if some of that shakiness is a function of people not yet being particularly good at it. Maybe more virtual communities will get stronger as more of them figure out how to be better communities, and how to propagate those memes to their new members.
Good heavens, why is this mod'd up to "insightful"?? If what this employee wants out of his job is such a calamity to his employeer -- "business cannot afford to keep on people that cannot grow with the business, and you
can be sure that when they hired you, they thought you had the ability to grow, or they would not have hired you." -- then how is going to "find a job somewhere else" feasible, plausible, desirable or useful?
If it is possible for a different company to hire him on the basis that he's not interested in managing for them, then it's quite possible for is current employer to cope with the same reality.
And what's with this "selfish" nonsense? He's not working for this company out of a sense of charity -- he's there for the pay. Why is a company looking after its bottom line considered perfectly decent and acceptible, but for an employee to look after his own bottom line is a moral failing? What an absurd double standard.
In the moment of true, he showed that he has no ambition whatsoever. Isn't that a reason to get rid of him?
Well, no. Ambition is not the same thing as excellence. You need both to make a great company, but not necessarily in the same person. In fact, large numbers of excellent specialists who prefer to become more excellent, rather than move up the corporate ladder, is actually a considerable asset.
But if this boss is a high school drop out who started from nothing, he is likely to be pissed off by
the lack of responsibility of the said worker.
If the boss confuses lack of ambition for lack of responsibility. It is possible for someone to be extremely responsible for their job and to their company, without being responsible for subordinates.
Being the kind of manager who wants to see ambition in all his employees because he himself was ambitious, does not make one a good manager -- it makes one an insecure, neurotic fsck who needs to be surrounded by carbon copy minions, and who puts one's own ego gratification before the good of the enterprise.
It's the dedication that usually isn't there -
one person usually holds the bag for a while, then it collapses when he/she leaves. You need a large base of committed people to
bring it together - the larger, the better. So that if one person cannot contribute, others can.
True, but you're missing an important point. Most technologies on the Net are terrible at providing collaborative access, so even if there are individuals willing to contribute, the tech often foils them.
Pertinent example: Say Jane Random wants to collaboratively run a 'blog, and has a couple of friends who are eager to help with content. Jane can't afford the connectivity cost of running her own server -- and besides, none of the cable modem cos in her area sell fixed IPs -- so she's looking for a service on-line which will sell her vhosting and which will allow more than one account to access her web directory.
Sounds simple, doesn't it? But most ISPs make no provision for that, unless it's a "business account", which costs just as much as the cable access. For "home users" they sell one shell account, which alone can access the files to be served to the web. Now, provided Jane is savvy enough about such things to ask her ISP about setting up a permissions group, she now has the problem of getting her friend to pony up for accounts at the same ISP. The cost has just been shifted to her would-be collaborators.
Now, let's say Jane has a friend, Hiro, with a T1 to his house, running his own web server, and he owes Jane a favor. Jane goes to Hiro and ask if he will serve her collaborative 'blog for her. Hiro says he would be happy to give Jane a shell account on his machine and vhost her page, but he doesn't really know Jane's friends and doesn't want to give them shell access. He tells Jane that he's looking into Zope, and if all goes well, as soon as he gets around to it, he'll set something up. Someday.
All for a simple collaboratively maintained webpage. Not even a chat system like/, just a single stupid page.
So much of the net works that way though. I belong to a club that has constant problems with this. We have plenty of high-tech volunteers willing to help, but, dammit, if a web page needs to be updated while its owner is at Comdex, there's really not a thing the rest of us can do. (And our servers seem to have a preternatural ability to detect when their admins are out of town.)
This goes for listservs, too. Dunno about Mu*s.
If there were more and better ways for people to collaborate (especially in groups) on-line, community would be much easier.
It's not community if you only communicate with one another. You have to be able to work together, too.
Ha. Ill considered words, Zack, or should I say "J".:) Look at my user info if you don't know who I am. At least two meat.world communities to which you, personally, belong depend on their email lists to provide social glue among people who don't live and work together. Working on virtual community often is working on physical communities.
Though I am not the one addressed, I just have to answer.
Not only I have worked in the private sector tech industry, I'm a medievalist in my spare time.
You clearly don't know your history. What we are currently going through bears a striking resemblance to what happened to the labor market in the wake of the Black Plague.
To say "well, things are different now" is profoundly ignorant. It has happened before that there was, as there is, a seller's market in labor. And every time it has happened, it has been rare and brief.
History, sir, does record this. And it tells us that to presume the current state of affairs will last is folly.
So, I'm a temp. Have been for 9.5years (plus summers before then). I've never had any other kind of work except freelance contracting.
On one hand, I think this decision is a dreadful precident which will have a chilling effect on my career. Though I don't agree that the "most important" aspect of temping is in anyway a "circumvention" of employment regulations, temping is a path actively and freely chosen by some of us, because of benefits of that mode of work. And it worth mentioning: some temp agencies have benes. I am offered health insurance, 401(k), etc. by mine.
On the other hand, I remember 1993. Do you remember 1993? March/April, in particular. It was the bottom of the Recession. Remember the recession? I was doing reception jobs and being grateful to get them. One of those reception jobs was at, of all things, an employment agency. The Sunday before I started they had run an ad in the Boston Globe advertising five basic draftsmen positions. I started manning the phones on Monday morning, and the switchboard had lit up like the proverbial christmas tree. But not with draftsmen. With *architects* -- guys with 10 years of schooling -- with CAD/CAM experts with advance degrees -- all desperate for a job, even an entry level draftsman job.
It was around then that I got one of the worst temp jobs I've ever gotten. A certain University had screwed up some safety records big time. When I got there I found out how and why that had happened:
The U. had a two-tiered employee structure. Some employees with "normal" or "regular" employees. Others were "temporary", though in this case, it referred not to people hired through a temp agency but through people hired directly by the U. as "temporary employees". As such, they got no benes, less pay than the regular employees, and could be fired at any moment for no cause and with no warning. As it happened, the person neglecting the safety records was (A) a regular employee and (B) a bosom buddy and co-religionist of both the president and vice-president of that division. Every "temporary" employee in the division knew the safety records were being screwed up, but didn't dare report the responsible employee to anyone because they would lose a job they considered themselves lucky to have.
Someone below asks "who put the gun to their heads", to which, I confess, the obvious-seeming to me answer of "why, Ron Reagan and his pet recession" leaps to my lips. Regardless of whom you blame for the recession, corporations were quite ready to use the power a buyers market in labor gave them.
The idea that the market for labor is in any way a free market is patently ludicrous. As a temp, I actually interact with the labor market in a way which is a thousand times more market-like than someone who is a permanent/direct employee -- I sell my time by the hour on the open market -- and I am constantly astonished at how unfree the market is.
The demand of laborer for money (that is, the reciprocal of demand for labor) is brutally inelastic. While critics of consumerism are quick to point out that if people had less consumptive lifestyles they would need less money (e.g. the frugality movement), they always neglect to notice that the single greatest financial obligation of most debters is mortgages/rent.
Before the industrial revolution, "employment" as we think of it was a option, not a requirement. One could stay on the farm and work land that one or one's family owned. Indeed, the ideal of the farmer-citizen was part and parcel of the ideal of freedom to which the country aspired. Even if one did not own a farm, to own one's own house was considered basic. Today, to own a house is merely an aspiration for many people; attempting to do so chains them to jobs which in no way can then be considered gotten by free and uncoerced contract.
We are quick to condem a supplier who illegally drives all competition from the market so as to be able to fleece the buyers; we call that monopoly and have made it mostly illegal. But what about when a company manages to become the only source of demand -- for labor? If are a draftsman and you live in an area which once had 10 architects offices, but now has 1 architect's office, what will you do if the one remaining employer offers you exploitative terms of employment? You either take it or you change lines of work or you move. Choices two and three have non-trivial expenses associated with them, especially seeing that their costs are set by markets which in turn are often tied to the labor market.
So it is that when a market for labor collapses, the housing market does likewise (making it even more financially punative for homeowners to try to sell one's house and move) and other markets for labor also suffer (when architects stop hiring, often so too must general contractors, e.g.)
In light of this, I understand perfectly how badly these permatemps could have been screwed. The only employer of technical people in town won't hire them directly, but offers exploitative terms. Other issues make moving or changing fields prohibitively expensive.
I'm certain I don't know the solution to this problem. But its obviously nowhere as simple as most people are trying to make it out. It's not simply that temping exploits the temp (I am a temp and I am usually less exploited than direct employees.) It's not simply that the labor market is (or could be made to be) a free market (because it isn't and it can't).
Howdie. I'm a musician of 20 years experience, primarily instrumental, some vocal, classically trained, with forays into diverse aural and improvisatory genres; my focus for the last 10 years has been Renaissance and Medieval Western European musics.
With all respect due a fellow student of the Muses: you're full of huey.:)
The rock music on the radios today bears a striking stylistic resemblance to certain musical genres of the 1000 year period I study, and mostly convinces me that Nothing Ever Changes.
The reason, as far as I can tell, that the populace doesn't much care for Mozart operas is that they are not in a cultural head-space where Mozart operas speak to them. That doesn't mean they're dumb, or lazy, or foolish, or philistines, or morally destitute. It means their problems, their ideas, their imaginings, their passions are different than those of the people Mozart was writing to.
In the 14th&15th centuries, a bunch of english songs about love, sex, and death got written. Some brit chicks noticed, and formed a rock band (Medieval Baebes) singing this material. I went to a concert, and hordes of goths showed up, cause, you know what, love+sex+death speaks to them in their language.
The fact is that more musics are readily available to the (first world) public than have ever been available to a people in history: the miracle of recording not only allows many to hear where only a few used to fit, but our liberal, multi-cultural culture has thrown open the doors to genres unimagined to our grandparents: world music, historical music, new forms of popular music every month. There are more choices available to us.
Part of the reason the opera house down the street was packed with peasants was that those peasants were tired of hearing one another play on the vielle-a-roue, and they didn't get much else in the way of options.
Today, such overwhelming majorities in one genre of music are unlikely. You can basically say that most people like what is new, because we crave novelty, but "popular music" splinters into factions and styles if you examine it.
Perhaps (to wrench this back onto topic) what people are observing is that in comparison with older cultural forms (tv, music, literature) gaming is (comparatively, mind you) undifferentiated. As such all gamers appear as a single fan base -- and thus, large.
Perhaps in the not so distant future, gaming will fragment into stylistic factions so diverse that people will not consider "gamers" to be a culture any more than "music listeners" -- you will see the equivalent of "classical music afficianados" and "early music nuts" and "punks" and "goths" and "metalheads", and, and....
(We aren't there yet. Nobody would presume that because someone likes Wagner they would like Pink Floyd; but FPS players also do tabletop also do LARP also do tradable card.... The day someone says "Wow, you do cards and FPS? That's so eclectic" is the day we have reached the same level of diffentiation in gaming as music.)
A friend of mine who is a $200/hr alpha-geek programming god and entrepeneur saw something about Doctors Without Borders, and was so moved, he grabbed a similarly mage-like friend, convinced this guy of the righteousness of their cause, and went down to Doctors Without Borders and said: "We want to help! We'll help you network your computers! We'll help you with your computers! We'll do it for free and we'll even pay for equipment out of our own pockets."
And the flunky looked down his nose at them and said something like "We'll get back to you."
And never did.
There are a lot of non-profits, or so has been explained to me, which just don't know what they're doing technically. They don't know what they want to accomplish, or how to do it, or even how to let people do it for them.
1)
I've done tech-support and coding at non-profits, as a temp. I have found that they often have a very exploitative corporate culture.
The two worst ethical situations I have ever been put in (in over 50 clients) were at non-profits (both educational). Apparently there is something about working for a "higher cause" which convinces people that ordinary rules and laws are trumped by the moral righteousness of their mission. Ikk.
Even at places where things aren't quite that rotten, I have found that at non-profits, once you have demonstrated that you are willing to be moved by the "we're a good cause, help us" spiel, they keep loading more projects on your shoulders. People who were once saying "If only our mail server worked reliably, that's all we want", turn -- *bamf!* -- into people saying "You're incredible! Wonderful! Let's set up an extranet for every volunteer across the country, and set up an e-commerce system to take donations on it!"
It's one thing to be in the front lines, actually doing the primary mission work of the non-profit -- teaching students, helping the sick, donating to the deprived, whatever -- in which you are directly engaged in the mission. When you do that, you feel a connection with the purpose of the enterprise, and that in itself recharges you and inspires you to do more, give more.
But when you're in the back room with the servers, there is no recharge. It's just more work. The people out in the front lines -- who are giving 110% -- don't understand why the people in the back room just aren't so inspired. Well, duh. Could they be more disconnected from the point?
You're right that working at non-profits is not sufficiently rewarding for most geeks -- but the reward saught is not just money.
Add to that the fact the sysadmins are often treated as janitors, and often personally blamed for failures of the network, software, hardware, etc.... If you're going to be treated badly, you might as well be treated badly and well paid.
Non-profits have to cultivate a culture -- perhaps different than they already have -- in which technical staff and technical volunteers are treated as partners in the mission, and keep them involved.
I sort of disagree. My understanding of human nature is (obviously) radically different from that of most/.rs (to say nothing of everybody else:), so I won't try to go into it in too much detail.
But simply put, there are people who are, as an inborn trait, more conformist than other, and this is a OK thing. These people (who are a sizable percentage of the population) contribute some good and important things to society, arising out of the same traits which make them conformist: they're wonderful at defending and protecting people, ideas, and things (though you may have to work at it to get them aimed in the right dirrection); their very change resistance makes them a kind of fly-wheel on society, which protects us from precipitous govermental overthrow for trivial reasons; at their best they are hardworking, loyal, etc.
But they aren't creative, iconoclastic, daring, brilliant, etc. That's not their gift. Trying to make them so is as unjust as trying to make geeks to be conformist.
So we don't need to teach non-conformity to all our kids. That would be unfair to conformists. What we do need to teach our kids is to respect differences, and even more importantly, how to act respectful.
We need for conformists to be raised to think of their non-conformist classmates in terms of "Gee, you are a threateningly weird-ass geek, but, damn, you're our threateningly weird-ass geek." We need for non-conformists -- that means you and me, dude -- to be raised to be just as tolerant, and not to sneer at the conformists: "Gee, you are all cookie-cutter people, but, damn, you're fine cookie-cutter people."
It needs to be equally OK for people to be conformist or non-conformist or to move back and forth as they see fit. That's justice.
You are confused. The DMCA, contrary to it's name, doesn't merely regulate copyright. It has anti-reverse-engineering provisions, which is the point of this conversation. In the above examples, proprietary formats would have to be reverse engineered, and that's at stake.
Admittedly, this can result in less-than-ideal formatting information, but in an ideal world it's the content that's much more valuable than the presentation.
Excuse me, reality interrupt.
First, you clearly haven't the faintest idea how much a quality designer costs per hour. I have worked for (among many others) grade-school textbook publishers. After spending thousands of man hours preparing camera-ready copy -- graphics, charts, graphs, layouts, formats, cross-indexing, etc. -- I assure you, the words are not the expensive part.
Second, one of the most popular applications used for precisely that kind of document is Quark which at least used to (dunno about now) had physical security. You had to put a dongle on your ABD chain, and if that frob got lost or damaged, you can kiss your documents goodby unless you're willing to pony up for another copy.
And if your copy of Quark or PageMaker decides not to let you access your document because it has decided that you might be a copyright infringer (not of your material, but of their software), suddenly you develop quite an appreciation for applications which crack the proprietary format of those documents and converts them to something useful.
Another example: I have been hired to do programming in Excel, which allows one to "protect" documents. I have been paid tens of thousands of dollars for single "Workbooks". If you were my client in such a case and discovered you had lost the password to a such a custom Excel document, how would you feel to be told that hiring a programmer to extract the code in such a document would be illegal.
And, Gosh, it would never happen that a secretary might quit a job in a huff and neglect to mention what password she used to "protect" her company's Excel spreadsheets or WordPerfect documents.
You know what? It's not illegal to break into your own home. It's not illegal to break into the home of someone else on their behest. It's not illegal to break into your own locked file cabinet. But the DMCA makes it effectively illegal to break into your own electronic home.
You lock yourself out of a document, you might be able to card the door (dictionary attack on password), but you most certainly can't break down the door (parsing the document into another format).
In some places (e.g. NY) it is illegal to own lockpicks -- if you're not a bonded locksmith. I do not see any provision in the DMCA which allows for the virtual equivalent of locksmiths -- people who own cracking tools and use them within the law.
Imagine if you had put a document into a file cabinet and locked the cabinet and then, oops, lost the key. Imagine the locksmith showing up and saying "Hey, can I borrow a bobby pin? I'm allowed to pick locks, but not if I use any tool designed to do so."
If the aliens wanted navigation beacons, and are so impressively advanced technologically - why not build them themselves? Why should they convince the native human populations who would take centuries to build them, and would require the entire economic output of the largest civilizations then in existence? If the aliens had the capacity to cross the gulf of space, why should they waste so much time on having us build these irregular beacons when they themselves could easily have built much better ones in a much shorter time?
Lucky bastard, you so clearly don't work in IT. Obviously, the aliens had "marketting" departments.
If I build a house, it is possible for anyone to go to the deeds office and find out that I own the land, and even how much the county thinks it is worth. If it is a commercial building, they may even give out the blueprints and results of code inspections. How is a domain name different?
Yes, how is it different? My last three landlords certainly didn't have their names on the deeds. Their properties were held by realty trusts, of which they were the beneficiaries, or corporations, of which they were effectively the owner.
A realty trust is the probate/tax equivalent of an alias. I don't see why we shouldn't have the same thing available for domain name registrations.
If your message is so important that you are willing to pay a regular fee and obtain the appropriate resources to make it available, it should be worth making it possible to contact you.
That is logically absurd. That's like saying "if you're willing to die for your cause, you should be willing to paint a target on your forehead."
If whois is really such an anathema, there are many other options available: the free nameserver pages (cjb.net, et al), free pages hosted on geocities, I suppose freenet if that ever becomes functional.
Last I checked most free web page services required a real name and addy. Of course, if they don't verify, it would be easy to circumvent, but just because you wish to get an unpopular message out doesn't mean you are a criminal, are willing to break the law, or are willing to enter into a contract in bad faith.
Freenet at the moment is vaporware. A lovely idea, I'll believe it when I see it.
Most people here are really only looking at this from the standpoint of the tech -- which surprizes me, usually/.rs are hip to the political consequences of things.
OK, I agree with the assertion that WHOIS records are vital -- I know I've used them for real work myself.
But as someone who just bought a domain name and really doesn't care to have to have my email address and home phone number publicized to every spammer and stalker on the planet, I am somewhat shocked at the/. collective brain's attitude.
This is a problem crying out for a technical solution. There is one obvious such solution, which was used at MIT on their finger server(s) for some time (dunno if it's still there): their fingerd would not serve more than N responses in M minutes to the same requesting IP address. This meant that downloading their finger db wholesale was not feasible.
That would probably kill a lot of spam, while still allowing sysadmins to contact one another.
Secondly, some budding entrepreneur should set up an aliasing phone service and mail service, such that you can put into the WHOIS db their phone number plus your unique extension; and that you can configure your account with this service such that calls between 9am and 5pm are routed to your work addy, or are routed to a vmail service so you can call back if legitimate, or routed to/dev/null or whatever; that you can put their mail address down, and they will forward physical mail to you (like a PO Box only with home delivery); thus personal phone and home address are not available to the general public.
No, I haven't. I have, however, often been handed a key to the joint. I have even gotten the hours for my cardkey changed so I could get in late. I have a key now where I am currently working.
I confess I find the idea of a company throwing out it's employees at 5pm to be surpassingly strange.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing quite as disgusting as an author willing to sacrifice others' freedom of speech.
I can't remember the last time I saw someone so condescending to both his readers and towards the American public.
Actually, what I'd like to see is a
The particular goods I see arising from a /. charity effort are:
- Yes, we could all just try to go donate to the causes which please us, but it would be cool for
/. to get the credit as the entity which got us to cough up.
- Human nature is such that people who can only donate small amounts (such as students) often don't bother unless they see that it's part of a much larger effort. A sense of the collective might of
/. itself might motivate more people to give even if only a little.
- One big stumbling block to getting people to donate is the amount of trouble it is to do so. I know I am about 10^6x less likely to do anything which requires finding an envelop and a stamp. If there were a simple link to click on to do a pay-pal payment or some such, the odds of my participating go way up.
I would really like to see the amassed hordes ofOh, yeah. I know what you mean. If only they wore decent clothes. If only they didn't act like that. They bring it on themselves. The people it happens to must have something wrong with them. It only happens to, you know, that kind of person. What do you expect going out dressed like that. Well, don't go out after dark alone. She was asking for it. She must be a tease. She must have done something to provoke him.
Oh, wait, I forgot: were we talking about women getting raped or geeks getting beaten up? Oh, it doesn't matter, the logic is the same: it must have been the victim's fault, right?
Being depressed is self-destructive? Gosh, I'm sure that all those depressed teen /.ers reading this will take this right to heart and stop being depressed right now! If only someone had told them earlier that their depression was the cause of the scorn of their peers, I'm sure they would have stopped immediately.
Whoops, that was my sarcasm limit for the day...
Dude, either (0) learn to read for content or (1) to pay attention to which post you Reply. Your post might have made some sense if the practice you criticized had actually been suggested in the post you replied to. Duh.
In addition to many of the things already suggested, my recommendation is: recommendations.
When one of those coders needs a new job or is applying to a school, they should be able to get a letter of recommendation from a contact they worked with in your corp, or be able to list that contact as a professional reference.
Since they might not even think to ask (since you are neither employer nor teacher), take the initiative of offering this service to them.
And if the coder says "Gee, thanks, but I don't plan on needing any recommendations in the next 6mos", say "OK, we'll write something up, for you to hold on to for when you do need it."
Telling someone you think he's a great coder is nice. Telling potential employers/professors he's a great coder, now that's worth something!
Why is it that when homeschoolers are wierd, homeschooling is quickly blamed, but no matter how badly behaving someone who was "socialized" in schools is, no one ever says "those schoolers, they're bizarre"?
That was a rhetorical question, of course: Most people have deep emotional reasons for wanting to argue the superiority of their own culture. Lots of (otherwise) bright people prefer to let their emotions overwhelm their reason where their own upbringing is concerned. Dissing homeschoolers is a cheap and easy way to stroke one's own ego. Double standards are always indicative of an inferiority complex.
Geez. From all the belly-aching here, you'd think that selling education was a crime against humanity.
Haven't any of you people ever taken karate lessons, ballet lessons, music lessons, etc as kids? Haven't you attended computer camp or a G&T summer school? Haven't you ever learned a new language at an intensive language school or took (or worked at!) a test prep service?
If it's OK for me to hang out my shingle and take piano students at $30/half-hour, why on earth should it not be OK to run an entire school which charges per semester? Sheesh.
Oh, agreed that e-communities are shakey. But which is cause and which is effect? I think that there are things which are functioning in a very community-like-manner, which without electronic mediation would be so frail as not to exist.
Also, I think that an very important point in all this is that the ability for a community to sustain itself (i.e. to exploit the affordances) of telecommunications (whether the internet or parchment epistles), is a memetic skill which a community can have or not. A community of people which, as part of its self-conception, includes valuing, say, literacy, is going to have much more success using writen forms of communication, than one which doesn't.
And it's not just literacy. Is (for a random example) a web board for skydivers going to be a robust community? Well, if it attacts a substantial number of skydivers who like to think of themselves as computer-savvy, it could. But (I don't know, I'm not a skydiver) if skydivers are mostly interested skydiving, and don't have any particular inclination to running/maintaining the board themselves, then it probably won't work. Why? Because -- even if someone else is running the board for them -- being passive consumers of the collective experience (instead of invested participants) is death to a would-be community. Attitude means a lot in community.
It's not that a on-line community must be made of hackers. But all the even vaguely successful on-line communities I have seen have had some commonality (sometimes other than their ostensible topic) which allowed its members to exploit the on-line affordances. For example, I observed a list for a sub-set of home-schooling parents which was particularly strong; the subscribers were mostly soccer-moms who weren't in the least bit technophilic, but the educational philosophy they subscribed to dictated that one must be open-minded and exploratory when encountering new things (to be an example to their kids), and that was all it took.
But I digress: the point is, that a community, or a group of people who would be a community, have certain collective values (or lack there of) which directly pertain to what resources they can exploit.
So, it does make me wonder if some of that shakiness is a function of people not yet being particularly good at it. Maybe more virtual communities will get stronger as more of them figure out how to be better communities, and how to propagate those memes to their new members.
Good heavens, why is this mod'd up to "insightful"?? If what this employee wants out of his job is such a calamity to his employeer -- "business cannot afford to keep on people that cannot grow with the business, and you can be sure that when they hired you, they thought you had the ability to grow, or they would not have hired you." -- then how is going to "find a job somewhere else" feasible, plausible, desirable or useful?
If it is possible for a different company to hire him on the basis that he's not interested in managing for them, then it's quite possible for is current employer to cope with the same reality.
And what's with this "selfish" nonsense? He's not working for this company out of a sense of charity -- he's there for the pay. Why is a company looking after its bottom line considered perfectly decent and acceptible, but for an employee to look after his own bottom line is a moral failing? What an absurd double standard.
Well, no. Ambition is not the same thing as excellence. You need both to make a great company, but not necessarily in the same person. In fact, large numbers of excellent specialists who prefer to become more excellent, rather than move up the corporate ladder, is actually a considerable asset.
If the boss confuses lack of ambition for lack of responsibility. It is possible for someone to be extremely responsible for their job and to their company, without being responsible for subordinates.
Being the kind of manager who wants to see ambition in all his employees because he himself was ambitious, does not make one a good manager -- it makes one an insecure, neurotic fsck who needs to be surrounded by carbon copy minions, and who puts one's own ego gratification before the good of the enterprise.
True, but you're missing an important point. Most technologies on the Net are terrible at providing collaborative access, so even if there are individuals willing to contribute, the tech often foils them.
Pertinent example: Say Jane Random wants to collaboratively run a 'blog, and has a couple of friends who are eager to help with content. Jane can't afford the connectivity cost of running her own server -- and besides, none of the cable modem cos in her area sell fixed IPs -- so she's looking for a service on-line which will sell her vhosting and which will allow more than one account to access her web directory.
Sounds simple, doesn't it? But most ISPs make no provision for that, unless it's a "business account", which costs just as much as the cable access. For "home users" they sell one shell account, which alone can access the files to be served to the web. Now, provided Jane is savvy enough about such things to ask her ISP about setting up a permissions group, she now has the problem of getting her friend to pony up for accounts at the same ISP. The cost has just been shifted to her would-be collaborators.
Now, let's say Jane has a friend, Hiro, with a T1 to his house, running his own web server, and he owes Jane a favor. Jane goes to Hiro and ask if he will serve her collaborative 'blog for her. Hiro says he would be happy to give Jane a shell account on his machine and vhost her page, but he doesn't really know Jane's friends and doesn't want to give them shell access. He tells Jane that he's looking into Zope, and if all goes well, as soon as he gets around to it, he'll set something up. Someday.
All for a simple collaboratively maintained webpage. Not even a chat system like /, just a single stupid page.
So much of the net works that way though. I belong to a club that has constant problems with this. We have plenty of high-tech volunteers willing to help, but, dammit, if a web page needs to be updated while its owner is at Comdex, there's really not a thing the rest of us can do. (And our servers seem to have a preternatural ability to detect when their admins are out of town.)
This goes for listservs, too. Dunno about Mu*s.
If there were more and better ways for people to collaborate (especially in groups) on-line, community would be much easier.
It's not community if you only communicate with one another. You have to be able to work together, too.
Ha. Ill considered words, Zack, or should I say "J".
-- T.
Though I am not the one addressed, I just have to answer.
Not only I have worked in the private sector tech industry, I'm a medievalist in my spare time.
You clearly don't know your history. What we are currently going through bears a striking resemblance to what happened to the labor market in the wake of the Black Plague.
To say "well, things are different now" is profoundly ignorant. It has happened before that there was, as there is, a seller's market in labor. And every time it has happened, it has been rare and brief.
History, sir, does record this. And it tells us that to presume the current state of affairs will last is folly.
So, I'm a temp. Have been for 9.5years (plus summers before then). I've never had any other kind of work except freelance contracting.
On one hand, I think this decision is a dreadful precident which will have a chilling effect on my career. Though I don't agree that the "most important" aspect of temping is in anyway a "circumvention" of employment regulations, temping is a path actively and freely chosen by some of us, because of benefits of that mode of work. And it worth mentioning: some temp agencies have benes. I am offered health insurance, 401(k), etc. by mine.
On the other hand, I remember 1993. Do you remember 1993? March/April, in particular. It was the bottom of the Recession. Remember the recession? I was doing reception jobs and being grateful to get them. One of those reception jobs was at, of all things, an employment agency. The Sunday before I started they had run an ad in the Boston Globe advertising five basic draftsmen positions. I started manning the phones on Monday morning, and the switchboard had lit up like the proverbial christmas tree. But not with draftsmen. With *architects* -- guys with 10 years of schooling -- with CAD/CAM experts with advance degrees -- all desperate for a job, even an entry level draftsman job.
It was around then that I got one of the worst temp jobs I've ever gotten. A certain University had screwed up some safety records big time. When I got there I found out how and why that had happened:
The U. had a two-tiered employee structure. Some employees with "normal" or "regular" employees. Others were "temporary", though in this case, it referred not to people hired through a temp agency but through people hired directly by the U. as "temporary employees". As such, they got no benes, less pay than the regular employees, and could be fired at any moment for no cause and with no warning. As it happened, the person neglecting the safety records was (A) a regular employee and (B) a bosom buddy and co-religionist of both the president and vice-president of that division. Every "temporary" employee in the division knew the safety records were being screwed up, but didn't dare report the responsible employee to anyone because they would lose a job they considered themselves lucky to have.
Someone below asks "who put the gun to their heads", to which, I confess, the obvious-seeming to me answer of "why, Ron Reagan and his pet recession" leaps to my lips. Regardless of whom you blame for the recession, corporations were quite ready to use the power a buyers market in labor gave them.
The idea that the market for labor is in any way a free market is patently ludicrous. As a temp, I actually interact with the labor market in a way which is a thousand times more market-like than someone who is a permanent/direct employee -- I sell my time by the hour on the open market -- and I am constantly astonished at how unfree the market is.
The demand of laborer for money (that is, the reciprocal of demand for labor) is brutally inelastic. While critics of consumerism are quick to point out that if people had less consumptive lifestyles they would need less money (e.g. the frugality movement), they always neglect to notice that the single greatest financial obligation of most debters is mortgages/rent.
Before the industrial revolution, "employment" as we think of it was a option, not a requirement. One could stay on the farm and work land that one or one's family owned. Indeed, the ideal of the farmer-citizen was part and parcel of the ideal of freedom to which the country aspired. Even if one did not own a farm, to own one's own house was considered basic. Today, to own a house is merely an aspiration for many people; attempting to do so chains them to jobs which in no way can then be considered gotten by free and uncoerced contract.
We are quick to condem a supplier who illegally drives all competition from the market so as to be able to fleece the buyers; we call that monopoly and have made it mostly illegal. But what about when a company manages to become the only source of demand -- for labor? If are a draftsman and you live in an area which once had 10 architects offices, but now has 1 architect's office, what will you do if the one remaining employer offers you exploitative terms of employment? You either take it or you change lines of work or you move. Choices two and three have non-trivial expenses associated with them, especially seeing that their costs are set by markets which in turn are often tied to the labor market.
So it is that when a market for labor collapses, the housing market does likewise (making it even more financially punative for homeowners to try to sell one's house and move) and other markets for labor also suffer (when architects stop hiring, often so too must general contractors, e.g.)
In light of this, I understand perfectly how badly these permatemps could have been screwed. The only employer of technical people in town won't hire them directly, but offers exploitative terms. Other issues make moving or changing fields prohibitively expensive.
I'm certain I don't know the solution to this problem. But its obviously nowhere as simple as most people are trying to make it out. It's not simply that temping exploits the temp (I am a temp and I am usually less exploited than direct employees.) It's not simply that the labor market is (or could be made to be) a free market (because it isn't and it can't).
Howdie. I'm a musician of 20 years experience, primarily instrumental, some vocal, classically trained, with forays into diverse aural and improvisatory genres; my focus for the last 10 years has been Renaissance and Medieval Western European musics.
With all respect due a fellow student of the Muses: you're full of huey. :)
The rock music on the radios today bears a striking stylistic resemblance to certain musical genres of the 1000 year period I study, and mostly convinces me that Nothing Ever Changes.
The reason, as far as I can tell, that the populace doesn't much care for Mozart operas is that they are not in a cultural head-space where Mozart operas speak to them. That doesn't mean they're dumb, or lazy, or foolish, or philistines, or morally destitute. It means their problems, their ideas, their imaginings, their passions are different than those of the people Mozart was writing to.
In the 14th&15th centuries, a bunch of english songs about love, sex, and death got written. Some brit chicks noticed, and formed a rock band (Medieval Baebes) singing this material. I went to a concert, and hordes of goths showed up, cause, you know what, love+sex+death speaks to them in their language.
The fact is that more musics are readily available to the (first world) public than have ever been available to a people in history: the miracle of recording not only allows many to hear where only a few used to fit, but our liberal, multi-cultural culture has thrown open the doors to genres unimagined to our grandparents: world music, historical music, new forms of popular music every month. There are more choices available to us.
Part of the reason the opera house down the street was packed with peasants was that those peasants were tired of hearing one another play on the vielle-a-roue, and they didn't get much else in the way of options.
Today, such overwhelming majorities in one genre of music are unlikely. You can basically say that most people like what is new, because we crave novelty, but "popular music" splinters into factions and styles if you examine it.
Perhaps (to wrench this back onto topic) what people are observing is that in comparison with older cultural forms (tv, music, literature) gaming is (comparatively, mind you) undifferentiated. As such all gamers appear as a single fan base -- and thus, large.
Perhaps in the not so distant future, gaming will fragment into stylistic factions so diverse that people will not consider "gamers" to be a culture any more than "music listeners" -- you will see the equivalent of "classical music afficianados" and "early music nuts" and "punks" and "goths" and "metalheads", and, and....
(We aren't there yet. Nobody would presume that because someone likes Wagner they would like Pink Floyd; but FPS players also do tabletop also do LARP also do tradable card.... The day someone says "Wow, you do cards and FPS? That's so eclectic" is the day we have reached the same level of diffentiation in gaming as music.)
Howdie! Two stories.
0)
A friend of mine who is a $200/hr alpha-geek programming god and entrepeneur saw something about Doctors Without Borders, and was so moved, he grabbed a similarly mage-like friend, convinced this guy of the righteousness of their cause, and went down to Doctors Without Borders and said: "We want to help! We'll help you network your computers! We'll help you with your computers! We'll do it for free and we'll even pay for equipment out of our own pockets."
And the flunky looked down his nose at them and said something like "We'll get back to you."
And never did.
There are a lot of non-profits, or so has been explained to me, which just don't know what they're doing technically. They don't know what they want to accomplish, or how to do it, or even how to let people do it for them.
1)
I've done tech-support and coding at non-profits, as a temp. I have found that they often have a very exploitative corporate culture.
The two worst ethical situations I have ever been put in (in over 50 clients) were at non-profits (both educational). Apparently there is something about working for a "higher cause" which convinces people that ordinary rules and laws are trumped by the moral righteousness of their mission. Ikk.
Even at places where things aren't quite that rotten, I have found that at non-profits, once you have demonstrated that you are willing to be moved by the "we're a good cause, help us" spiel, they keep loading more projects on your shoulders. People who were once saying "If only our mail server worked reliably, that's all we want", turn -- *bamf!* -- into people saying "You're incredible! Wonderful! Let's set up an extranet for every volunteer across the country, and set up an e-commerce system to take donations on it!"
It's one thing to be in the front lines, actually doing the primary mission work of the non-profit -- teaching students, helping the sick, donating to the deprived, whatever -- in which you are directly engaged in the mission. When you do that, you feel a connection with the purpose of the enterprise, and that in itself recharges you and inspires you to do more, give more.
But when you're in the back room with the servers, there is no recharge. It's just more work. The people out in the front lines -- who are giving 110% -- don't understand why the people in the back room just aren't so inspired. Well, duh. Could they be more disconnected from the point?
You're right that working at non-profits is not sufficiently rewarding for most geeks -- but the reward saught is not just money.
Add to that the fact the sysadmins are often treated as janitors, and often personally blamed for failures of the network, software, hardware, etc.... If you're going to be treated badly, you might as well be treated badly and well paid.
Non-profits have to cultivate a culture -- perhaps different than they already have -- in which technical staff and technical volunteers are treated as partners in the mission, and keep them involved.
I sort of disagree. My understanding of human nature is (obviously) radically different from that of most
But simply put, there are people who are, as an inborn trait, more conformist than other, and this is a OK thing. These people (who are a sizable percentage of the population) contribute some good and important things to society, arising out of the same traits which make them conformist: they're wonderful at defending and protecting people, ideas, and things (though you may have to work at it to get them aimed in the right dirrection); their very change resistance makes them a kind of fly-wheel on society, which protects us from precipitous govermental overthrow for trivial reasons; at their best they are hardworking, loyal, etc.
But they aren't creative, iconoclastic, daring, brilliant, etc. That's not their gift. Trying to make them so is as unjust as trying to make geeks to be conformist.
So we don't need to teach non-conformity to all our kids. That would be unfair to conformists. What we do need to teach our kids is to respect differences, and even more importantly, how to act respectful.
We need for conformists to be raised to think of their non-conformist classmates in terms of "Gee, you are a threateningly weird-ass geek, but, damn, you're our threateningly weird-ass geek." We need for non-conformists -- that means you and me, dude -- to be raised to be just as tolerant, and not to sneer at the conformists: "Gee, you are all cookie-cutter people, but, damn, you're fine cookie-cutter people."
It needs to be equally OK for people to be conformist or non-conformist or to move back and forth as they see fit. That's justice.
*HONK!* Better luck next time.
He said it would triple their market value, i.e. Y=3X.
He didn't say what Y was. He didn't say what X was.
You clearly have an opinion as to what Y realistically could be. OK. Solve for X.
"Ouch."
Yeah, doing Mac support is not terribly lucrative right now.
You are confused. The DMCA, contrary to it's name, doesn't merely regulate copyright. It has anti-reverse-engineering provisions, which is the point of this conversation. In the above examples, proprietary formats would have to be reverse engineered, and that's at stake.
Excuse me, reality interrupt.
First, you clearly haven't the faintest idea how much a quality designer costs per hour. I have worked for (among many others) grade-school textbook publishers. After spending thousands of man hours preparing camera-ready copy -- graphics, charts, graphs, layouts, formats, cross-indexing, etc. -- I assure you, the words are not the expensive part.
Second, one of the most popular applications used for precisely that kind of document is Quark which at least used to (dunno about now) had physical security. You had to put a dongle on your ABD chain, and if that frob got lost or damaged, you can kiss your documents goodby unless you're willing to pony up for another copy.
And if your copy of Quark or PageMaker decides not to let you access your document because it has decided that you might be a copyright infringer (not of your material, but of their software), suddenly you develop quite an appreciation for applications which crack the proprietary format of those documents and converts them to something useful.
Another example: I have been hired to do programming in Excel, which allows one to "protect" documents. I have been paid tens of thousands of dollars for single "Workbooks". If you were my client in such a case and discovered you had lost the password to a such a custom Excel document, how would you feel to be told that hiring a programmer to extract the code in such a document would be illegal.
And, Gosh, it would never happen that a secretary might quit a job in a huff and neglect to mention what password she used to "protect" her company's Excel spreadsheets or WordPerfect documents.
You know what? It's not illegal to break into your own home. It's not illegal to break into the home of someone else on their behest. It's not illegal to break into your own locked file cabinet. But the DMCA makes it effectively illegal to break into your own electronic home. You lock yourself out of a document, you might be able to card the door (dictionary attack on password), but you most certainly can't break down the door (parsing the document into another format).
In some places (e.g. NY) it is illegal to own lockpicks -- if you're not a bonded locksmith. I do not see any provision in the DMCA which allows for the virtual equivalent of locksmiths -- people who own cracking tools and use them within the law.
Imagine if you had put a document into a file cabinet and locked the cabinet and then, oops, lost the key. Imagine the locksmith showing up and saying "Hey, can I borrow a bobby pin? I'm allowed to pick locks, but not if I use any tool designed to do so."
Welcome to America under the DMCA.
Lucky bastard, you so clearly don't work in IT. Obviously, the aliens had "marketting" departments.
Yes, how is it different? My last three landlords certainly didn't have their names on the deeds. Their properties were held by realty trusts, of which they were the beneficiaries, or corporations, of which they were effectively the owner.
A realty trust is the probate/tax equivalent of an alias. I don't see why we shouldn't have the same thing available for domain name registrations.
That is logically absurd. That's like saying "if you're willing to die for your cause, you should be willing to paint a target on your forehead."
Last I checked most free web page services required a real name and addy. Of course, if they don't verify, it would be easy to circumvent, but just because you wish to get an unpopular message out doesn't mean you are a criminal, are willing to break the law, or are willing to enter into a contract in bad faith.
Freenet at the moment is vaporware. A lovely idea, I'll believe it when I see it.
Most people here are really only looking at this from the standpoint of the tech -- which surprizes me, usually /.rs are hip to the political consequences of things.
OK, I agree with the assertion that WHOIS records are vital -- I know I've used them for real work myself.
But as someone who just bought a domain name and really doesn't care to have to have my email address and home phone number publicized to every spammer and stalker on the planet, I am somewhat shocked at the /. collective brain's attitude.
This is a problem crying out for a technical solution. There is one obvious such solution, which was used at MIT on their finger server(s) for some time (dunno if it's still there): their fingerd would not serve more than N responses in M minutes to the same requesting IP address. This meant that downloading their finger db wholesale was not feasible.
That would probably kill a lot of spam, while still allowing sysadmins to contact one another.
Secondly, some budding entrepreneur should set up an aliasing phone service and mail service, such that you can put into the WHOIS db their phone number plus your unique extension; and that you can configure your account with this service such that calls between 9am and 5pm are routed to your work addy, or are routed to a vmail service so you can call back if legitimate, or routed to /dev/null or whatever; that you can put their mail address down, and they will forward physical mail to you (like a PO Box only with home delivery); thus personal phone and home address are not available to the general public.
This would basically solve the problem.
No, I haven't. I have, however, often been handed a key to the joint. I have even gotten the hours for my cardkey changed so I could get in late. I have a key now where I am currently working.
I confess I find the idea of a company throwing out it's employees at 5pm to be surpassingly strange.