It's a little known fact that initially the south supported this change. They repented thier moral wrongdoing, and the majority of southerners agreed to cooperate. The only provision was that the US government would compensate the south for thier losses. I.e. the country as a whole would pay for the regrettable history of slavery by putting tax dollars towards weaning the south away from slavery...and into a new business model which didn't require slavery. The northerners took the very selfish stance of claiming that it was the south's fault for using slaves in the first place, and that they didn't deserve any kind of financial support to help them make the transition.
Interesting... any sources (esp. online) where I can find out more about this?
Also, do you happen to be a southerner? You sure seem to understand the issues and people's sympathies. Perhaps you can explain why there's so much feeling for the days of the Confederacy? What inspires the depth of feeling? It can sure seem like the grass-is-greener to an outsider...
Well put, thank you for straightening out a misconception that was gathering steam.
I do still agree with the point that the additional time between releases will give a little more visibility to added Linux features, and will futher the market's movement towards providing products closely targeted to user's needs. The tight integration features that are at the fore in new Microsoft products are most useful to REALLY large organizations, but up to now, *nix was not appropriate for small to medium organizations because of the complexities of administering it. As the Linux distros and desktops work towards easily-administrable systems, they make a $800 devel or server package just for one feature you need. This is real money to little orgs and chump change to big orgs. Considering it regrowth of underlying flora.
OSS itself will probably eventually need to combine the approaches of big releases and small releases by figuring out good times to mark a big release, and then offering security updates and patches against those big releases. Hell, if cross compilation keeps improving, you could probably start company that builds up-to-date binaries for orgs running Linux.
To put this in a different perspective, we should be surprised we ever were without bacteria. As various clever posters have pointed out, bacteria are both everywhere (including in living in symbiosis inside us), and evolve easily and quickly. Of course the bacteria found a way to keep on living and reproducing. That's a pretty key goal for them.
So it's really a surprise, and notable accomplishment, and a setback that we found a method like antibiotics to hold them at bay for so long. The surprise and accomplishment should be obvious, but the setback is the following. It should be rapidly snapping into focus that human health, either on a personal or societal level involves balance, careful listening, and acceptance of risk. As all the informed consent speeches tell you, you may die anyway. There will not (and to my mind should not) be a moment when medicine will be able to insulate you from the risk that you could get sick and/or die. But as a consequence of advances in medical science such antibiotics as we've moved more and more towards magic bullet solutions of particular problems, and away from a simpler but subtler view that you have to take care of yourself to be healthy, and things might go left anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it wasn't good to quash the snake oils and tonics of the turn of the century with a little hard nosed science, nor is wrong to do so today, but to see the picture more fully, you've gotta step outside the scientific viewpoint. I strongly doubt the canon of scientific medicine will ever be complete enough for you to have to work hard at using your judgement about your health and accept the risks of disease. So kudos to those who bring together the insight of "scientific" medicine with other worldviews of medicine.
We are not talking about what makes a good operating system. We are talking about new ways to interface with computers that are inovative, efficient and radically different than the point and click GUI maps over the OS's.
it's just getting there that's the hassle. It is very hard to come up with a big idea that's really totally new. People are much better at synthesis than raw creation, so new ideas tend to be around the edges of bigger, older ideas. With time, though, these little changes wreak big changes. This is the evolution of software and hell, of understanding, that we are all involved in, and it will probably proceed somewhat slower than all us futurists wish, and be subject to accidents of history, but we'll get somewhere before too long.
The strategy of this professor, whose article seems to indicate a certain lack of restraint with respect to self-flattery, is one that we all can foresee - make the information work for people with as little intervening system as possible. While it is certainly a noble goal not have people be subject to the vagaries of some designer's view of the world, I think it's a little misguided. It sort of presumes that people follow some type of static model with respect to acquire information. I'm not sure quite how to put my finger on the problem, but it has to do with the relationship between knowing, which is information-based, and understanding, a phenomenon involves logically fuzzy concepts like insight, inspiration, and judgement, which evolve as you live. So the question is how to integrate logic and knowledge with the subtleties of understanding in a way that is meaningful for a variety of people, and how computers should participate in that.
Almost every distribution is running Mozilla 1.0.1 or 1.1 by now. I know I'm running 1.1 on my box, and Ximian GNOME is using 1.0.1.
The problem is, and will continue to be older distros. At least something like WindowsUpdate pushes the updates to your desktop more or less transparently. How do you update RedHat 6.2 transparently, or Mandrake 7? I have yet to see this kind of transparent updating under Linux, and I don't see that rosy a future for desktop Linux without it. I know RH7+ has RedHat network, but IMO it still doesn't work quite as slickly.
This is a really interesting post, both content-wise as a benchmark (to use a relevant term of art) of Slashdot.
Content-wise it's interesting not just becaue the poster knows his/her sh*t, but also because it highlights an approaching conundrum - lawmakers all over the US of A love to tout the technology sector as this great engine of economic growth, but clearly have very little understanding of how their actions affect the climate for the tech sector. It's not as simple as tax or don't tax, regulate or don't regulate in tech, and that confounds the parties' standard platitudes. So as the parent eloquently points out, there is not yet alignment of the parties with a particular stance on technology legislation, a state which begs techies to step into politics.
As for this:
Finally, the fact is, both parties screw you. You have to look at WHO in the party does what. If you vote on party lines, all you do is push party alignment on the issue. I don't want another NRA/Republican alignment. If "techies" (what the fuq is a techie really, and when did they all suddenly vote liberal?) were one and did all vote liberal, all the special interests will simply fund Republicans, and vice versa.
Your cynical attitude towards politics in general prompts me to think that you're American (as am I), and it makes me sad. Of course both parties screw you, at the same time as their handing you manna. That's how power and politics have worked since the dawn of time. The military-industrial complex (definitely bipartisan, everyone wants a a lab or a military base in their district) begat DARPA and university network research begat the internet. At the same time, the military-industrial complex strengthed corporate hegemony which begat absurdly restrictive views of ideas as physical property begat DMCA. All brought to you by the same two parties, and quite likely the same cohort of politicians, or at least their proteges.
Don't help them align. Vote on the issues and the voting record, and look at campaign donations to then add relevance to your decision.
Interesting idea that well informed voters will help depolarize politics. I hope it's true, and I certainly support your claim that one should vote on issues, not a party line. I think a few more parties, a few new estates, like the "mythical" techies (who have a reputation for peppering their speech with slogans like "I hate stupidity", and fancying themselves independent thinkers), and perhaps some refined approaches to things like regulation will also help reduce some of this polarization.
To finish my other point... as a cultural milestone, these posts also interesting - just glancing through the responses shows that the site has succeeded in attracting politically knowledgeable people who have learned about tech, or vice-versa. I only hope that this crossover continues, and carries into other kinds of issues, like poverty, equality, and the environment.
I agree with your basic point, though I think you're stating it a bit strongly.
It's a question of brand and market positioning. SuSE is taking the groupware market as the one defined by Microsoft. As such, there's really only one, perhaps two brands in the market (Exchange, and Lotus Notes). If you're a relatively small company, it doesn't pay to take the time and money to build a brand from scratch in this market. The trick is to erode Microsoft's market share by selling a very similar product (read knock-off) and at the same time developing a brand that makes the product seem like its own thing. We'll see whether SuSE, and OSS in general can manage that.
I'd say I'm guardedly optimistic.
Kudos to the editors for posting this piece - it's an interesting forum in which to discuss this issue. Numerous people have posted personal experience with proper or improper diagnosis of Asperger's or autism.
One of the implicit themes I see here that has not gotten much open discussion is that of being smarter than other people, both as a kid and afterwards. This notion seems very deeply embedded in geek culture, and is tightly bound up the sense of alienation that seems so prevalent here. For some reason, being "smarter" than other kids seems to set one in the direction of alienting narcissism.
Here is Hernandez's assessment of Ivy League admissions officers: "They may consist of graduate students, former teachers, spouses of professors and college staff; and career administrators. The majority of this group did not graduate from any highly selective college, let alone an Ivy League one. . . . [Many] are not expert readers . . . and most of them are not scholars or intellectuals. . . . What I am trying to say without shocking too much is that the very best of applicants will often be brighter than many of those who will be evaluating them."
Oh my. I can only imagine, with horror, what might happen if an applicant accepted this analysis as a guide for proper interview behavior. It is not a good idea to think you are smarter than other people, particularly those from whom you need a favorable report. Say, for example, a young applicant in the middle of an interview mentions his term paper on progressive education and, trying to be helpful, says, "Maybe you haven't heard of John Dewey, he helped launched that movement." Or what will an alumni interviewer think when he asks an applicant about her science fair entry and hears these words: "Well, this gets very complicated, but I will try to summarize it for you."
This is some of this wisest advice I can imagine giving a teenager. First of all the notion of being "smarter" than other people is suspect - you have to define smart in a very narrow way to believe that. Or put another way, there sure are a lot of "dumb jerks" out there who seem to be able to accomplish many of their life goals. Are they "smart"? Who cares, they're getting what they're after.
None of this is to contest the more knowledgeable points of view on autism or Asperger's, but simply to point out that there's a pretty strong link between alienation and one-dimensional estimations of intelligence (see the work of Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences, and to encourage everyone in this very intellectual crowd, particularly those raising children (saw a couple disturbing posts of 40+ somethings who really think they're smarter than most others) to look hard at what it means to be smart, and at the consequences of teaching a child to be a particular kind of smart.
(At a technical institute I visited, there was a very formal hierarchy: students enrolled as Computer Engineering or EE, flunked 1st semester and switched to Computer Science or SE, and then became IT after flunking again).
Kudos to this school for teaching its students the essential skills of the software industry: thinking you're smarter than everyone else, not interacting well with other people, and resolutely explaining technical minutia whenevery a situation is threatening.
I've been wanting another degree - where do I enroll?
Well spoken! You've put your finger on something I've been trying to explain here for a long time. And in fact Microsoft prices their products at exactly such a price point as to keep them from being expensive in the individual. My most recent experience with this was when I looked at using MySQL vs MS SQL server. Since this place is already Windows shop, the cost for MSSQL would have been $2000 + CALS or something like that, with minimal training costs. The $2K or so they'd save by installing MySQl (even on Windows) is just not enough for them to bother with. If it was $10K, then more eyebrows would be raised. But it's not. And I do believe MS on this part of their TCO claims: it's cheaper to stay with MS than to switch. As to whether it's cheaper if you start with MS vs. Sun vs. OSS, I'd bet it's a pretty mixed bag.
In the aggregate, however, MS products can get expensive, often based on the way they're bundled. Building an Access database is cheap and fast, until you have to buy Office pro for 20 members of your staff, 3 times in 8 years. And there are many situations where you need just one little bit of functionality contained in some other product, and then off you go again. This is where Open Source starts to pay off. Want your dev to do something semi-custom (a la Access)? The dev has his/her choice of 50000 libraries, all of which cost $0 as long as you're willing to accept the terms of OSS, so you can cobble together little bits from each of them without any incremental cost. All that's needed is some clever packaging of those bits so that they can be glued together quickly. Mozilla has a decent chance of doing just this.
Another place where dealing with MS gets particularly onerous is dealing with licenses. Even in the place I worked, where everyone was just fine with Microsoft because it let them not think too much about IT, people resented having to waste time screwing around with licenses.
Overall, I think your predictions for where you'll see Linux penetrate are pretty spot on, though I think once these public sector OSS projects start showing fruit, some slick boxed OSS solutions for smaller businesses will not be that far off, which will stir up the mix a bit.
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head with this:
It's just that the Windows User Interface and Windows applications are written under the assumption that users have complete control of the machine.
AFAICT, in terms of usability there is a profound unsolved problem here, which is twofold.
One is that many (most?) end users just want to do stuff on their computer, and as such they _sometimes_ need to be the administrator, without really understanding permissions or security. Remember Steve Gibson's rant about how XP by default has raw socket access for all users (b/c they are root). Microsoft has opted to make them administrators all the time to avoid explanation to a million disinterested and disgruntled XP users why they can't install the educational software their kids brought home from school.
A second, deeper problem affects both *nix and windows. The most serious threat in a compromised system is the loss of data, most of which lives in userland. But at least as far as I understand there's no clear way to determine what code and data to accept. Convenience dictates that stuff from outside the machine will need to find a home on your machine, while security dictates that it should at best be data only, and no code. As we move into a more networked world, this balance needs to be reexamined and retooled over and over. But I don't see *nix making great strides in that area, frankly.
Slow down a minute and let's put this in context: GAIM? You mean the program whpse name is the addition to the acronym AIM standing for (AOL Instant Messenger) of the letter G standing for GNOME or GTK toolkit or whatever? A program which depends on a protocol written by AOL and whose logins exchanges are mediated by AOL's servers? Now it happens that AOL has one of the IM networks with enough people to make it a useful communications medium, so it is reasonable to ask that they make it available to others, but.... they're still the ones who made the network happen. There are many important things to debate about whether such networks should open and publicly available, but just because a company built a private one doesn't mean they're a bad guy.
Here's an analogy: If I built a private road, I would feel free to tell a small trucking project that I didn't want it using my roads, for reasons including maintenance, liability, effect on the people who live by my road, etc. Even a "nice" trucking project. I might build a private road even though I believe roads should generally be public, simply because a public road is a more complicated and slower endeavour.
So take the debate back where it belongs:
Q: Should AOL allow other dialers? A: Probably, under certain circumstances and conditions. Q: Should AOL allow other projects to use its messaging network? A: Probably, under certain circumstances and conditions. And so on and so forth
I'm all for an intelligent conversation about these terms and conditions.
Not only that, but even if they were a simple bad guy, why would you call them names if you know your side will have to work with them at some point? It's just counterproductive.
Any firewall is easy to disable if you have adequate permission and knowhow- you either kill the process or unload the library. These days the knowhow is transmitted by the script, so that leaves the permission issue.
Aside from the issue that XP users normally un as root, if you can root the box, then you can disable a firewall - on Linux or Windows, all of which leaves us back at the same weakest link problem as always.
I'd wait before being quite so sure. There could well be plenty ugly Linux worms before too long, and they may be able to do just that...not to mention that skript kiddies luv Linux as much as any other flavor.
Well, I just read the text of bill, and I notice there is very little mention of damage to the network or connectivity providers. If the record companies decide to DDOS the subnet of a couple file traders, that could knock a lot of people offline, but without clear estimates of what such loss of connectivity means, there's not all that much protection for ISPs et al in this bill.
Another discomfiting idea is that file-trading software is any software "primarily used for exchanging files over a public network". An FTP client technically meets this definiton - not that I'd really expect a judge to buy this, but the vagueness could certainly provide a lot of leeway for the record companies.
On closer look, the notification clause follows the lines of the right to know your accuser. But it's not very specific either.
Overall, this bill seems rather vaguely worded to me, and that's a recipe for trouble.
Did anyone note the notification clause Berman mentioned?
Finally, the safe harbor is lost if the copyright owner fails to notify the Attorney General of the anti-piracy technologies she plans to use, or if she fails to identify herself to an inquiring file-trader. These notification provisions ensure that copyright owners who choose to employ self-help measures will operate in the light of day.
My first reaction is that this notification clause means that if you ask the person you are trading with whether they are knowlingly giving you a bogus file, then they are obligated by this bill to disclose that. Can that be right? Wouldn't that just mean that you could send a Kazaa IM saying "is this file legit", and if you get back an negative answer go ahead and download. That might be an interesting balance - if you had to do this by hand, it might move file trading back to a level difficulty similar to copying tapes (i.e., not that hard for one, but mass distribution's not worth it for the average consumer), which I think was a good balance.
Also interesting is the requirement of listing tactics with the AG's office. Is this information available under FOIA? What exactly do the record companies have to disclose?
Maybe I should peruse the text of the bill before coming up with more theories.
"[X] Easy to use Windows filesharing - KDE, Samba"
Easy to use Windows filesharing is clicking on a button that says share files and seeing that folder show up in Network Neighborhood. It's not SWAT
Damn stright, I agree. But KDE does have this ability - look for ksambakonquiplugin (shit name I know) on apps.kde.com. Its too bad the distros don't ship with it turned on by default.
True, this is a nifty little extension to Konqueror, and should be shipped w/KDE. There's still a big hole it in it, though - adding shares requires (AFAICT) root access to modify smb.conf, and then restart smbd and nmbd. There ought to be a way for users to share their own files without the intervention of root.
Spot on! And not only does China have (and will continue to have) a vast dirt-poor labor pool, but it also has so many people and so much wealth that it can also compete on the high end - services, innovation, education, etc. It may be fashionable to say that China is the next big thing, but by all accounts, especially news stories about the Chinese developing a chip and a fab in under 5 years, it's really,really true.
All of which is why we should be putting a lot more work into playing nice with them than we are, especially since a fair bit of China is still pretty sore about being humiliated by Western powers under colonies.
On a side note, I wonder how long it will be before Western techies start job-hunting in China, not entirely out of love of Chinese culture, but because there's good pickins there.
Re:Choice of OS != intelligence? (Re:The problem)
on
AOL's new Linux PC
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· Score: 2
Here's the rub:
It's also a measure of judgement, not getting suckered in or brainwashed by a big name which you hear on TV or see in banners every minute. It's becoming more and more visible as they attempt to push their way into every aspect of life, and that lends to an increase in marketing audience, which is probably what this is mostly about.
Pardon me if this comes across as a rant, but I see a lot of this kind of crap in the Linux community, and elsewhere, and frankly I think it hinders not helps the process of acheiving a fair body of law about corporations. I don't much like modern marketing tactics, nor is there a lot of love lost between me and most large companies, but casting the decision to use a different ISP than AOL as a battle against the dark forces of consumer capitalist imperialism seems melodramatic with a self-congratulatory undertone for "freeing" yourself from these entraining influences. What about all the people who DO like AOL, are they yearning to break free and don't know it? Perhaps more simply not everyone wants to dedicate himself to outsider stance of opposing the everyday elements in his life, based on a veiled premise of a moral superiority?
Again, apologies if that sounded like a personal attack - it's not meant to be. I just think that constantly staking out the high ground is counterproductive. Come on down and play in middle, where things happen.
One of the big problems is in that making everything "easy", we make people less proficient.
This problem is the consistent bane of teachers. What people need to know to be considered "educated" is in tremendous flux these days, and really has been since the opportunity to seek higher education was offered to more than just a few elites. It's a tough question in computing. I agree that it's important that people understand enough about the machine to be able to control it, rather than the other way around. However, I don't necessarily think that GUI is dumber. It's just that, as in teaching, it's hard to design software that accounts for and leads users through widely varying levels of skill and experience.
Do you know how many people can't even format a disk, or run a program that's not in the start menu or desktop? It's scary.
See 1st point. Not wanting to know how to take apart a point-and-shoot-camera is not scary. Don't confuse undereducated with not technically oriented.
If it makes you feel better to call republicans cocks instead of engaging people on the issues you deserve the biased opinion indymedia will give you..
That's a great point. There is far too much demonizing of Republicans - and worse a lot of subtle patronizing of everybody - by left-oriented publications. And there are indeed two sides to every coin.
But the nastiness definitely cuts both ways. I don't need to remind you that Rush Limbaugh and many other cronies have spent a lot of time abusing things like the very idea of any legal protection for the environment, and always using the most scathing personal attacks.
Ultimately all media has an angle. I agree with the posters who complain that the consolidation of media in this country produces a flat point of view. But we've got internet news, let's use it. Read Indymedia, take it for what it's worth: a lefty, activist-friendly rag. Read other countries' major newspapers - almost all of them have English-language editions. Compare the Washington Post to the Boston Globe to Le Monde. You probably won't change your core beliefs, but you sure will get a broader perspective on all these things.
I am profoundly glad to see the merging of techies with global development.
As a note of caution: My own experience doing this (built a computer lab in Nicaragua) sort of thing suggests that these folks will run into many political and economic complexities in the places they go to install computers e.g.:
Computers tend to end up in homes and offices of well-connected people who tend have electricity and a place to put a computer
Often they molder away unused for lack of some kind of hardware or software fix
When you start asking how to robustly improve the welfare of a lot of citizens, it becomes a lot less clear whether donations simply improve the lot of a couple people, or are a band-aid, or really do something. No matter what, changing the fabric of a society takes years and years, a kind of progress us internet-speed twenty year-olds don't have much experiencew with.
In any event, I hope everyone involved will learn a lot from the process and it will motivate more geeks to get involved with those who have much less than themselves (not the least of the reasons being that it makes you happier).
Your post started out as a really good comparison, but devolved over time into a "this is what Windows doesn't have" rant.
Not that those points aren't well taken, but it it doesn't address the fact that most people don't really want to know the details of whether and how one thing is better than another. They just want to be convinced that it's "good" or "better" or "really good", whatever that thought process takes for em.
And I don't mean that in your standard "they're just not smart enough to see things scientifically" way, as there are plenty of brilliant people who just don't like taking stuff apart and putting it back together, digitally, mentally or otherwise.
Microsoft like any other company has some good products and some shoddy products. IMO, IE 5 is one of the best products Microsoft ever released. My roommate worked on MSN branding during IE5's final release phase, and when I first saw it, I knew they had made a browser that was simply better than Netscape, whose problems were, at that point, already starting to show.
I use Mozilla because IE abuses standards, and now Mozilla has some great features like ad blocking.
Also agreed. Just tried to write a simple hover method in CSS, only to find that IE breaks that, because it wanted to stay consistent with an older broken implementation.
One huge element Mozilla lacks (AFAICT) is data-binding tools. You can't very well propose to rewrite someone's old FoxPro database as mozilla-compliant web app without some sort client data-caching mechanism. IE, reflecting MS' corporate focus, has methods for this. With Mozilla you have to roll your own. If I'm incorrect, and Mozilla does have I'd love it if somebody pointed me towards data-binding stuff in Mozilla.
I think a resource center would be a great idea, particularly if it involved a political organization element.
There's much deep political organization that needs to take place. So far, there's no political powerhouses (read voting blocks and/or economic drivers) explicitly opposing DRM. In fact, as far as any of us can tell, DRM is great news for hardware and software manufacturers. We need to rustle up some of these, or at least a journalist-joltin spin. The times that consumer protection groups have won against business have almost always involved danger to something with more impact than people's "right" to listen to their CD's through their 48x cdrom.
Furthermore, almost nobody in this portion of the tech community is proposing solutions that will address people's legitimate concerns about control of their intellectual work - legitimate because there are real reasons for authors to have SOME control over their works in the digital medium. This is what we need to do - give people reasons to go with fair, open solutions for dissemination management rather than these monolithic ones.
Does this mean that there won't be system administrators anymore? No. But I would say that system administrators are resources used up in ways secretaries used to. I remember when everybody wrote things by hand and gave them to secretaries to type up in offices. Now because people have better typing skills and typing is more important to even access information, there are fewer secretaries. Many secretaries are now far more multi-functional, handling numerous tasks in an office. The same will happen with system adminstrators.
This is an excellent point. A more frightening part of the trend is that the consolidation of jobs is happenly more and more quickly (it was only the late 80s when typist jobs start being eliminated in earnest). What worries me about this is whether education can keep up, particularly in the states. If these new jobs require employees to be more multi-talented, when and where these folks going to learn these new talents? There are also disturbing trends toward hiring people as temps - rather than having a multitalented person, you contract a multitalented temp agency- and that a greater proportion of lower income jobs don't involve developing any skills. On the sysadmin side, preparing the kind of sysadmins you describe would require a new approach to educating them, and academic institutions are hardly known for being nimbly managed....
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting... any sources (esp. online) where I can find out more about this?
Also, do you happen to be a southerner? You sure seem to understand the issues and people's sympathies. Perhaps you can explain why there's so much feeling for the days of the Confederacy? What inspires the depth of feeling? It can sure seem like the grass-is-greener to an outsider...
Well put, thank you for straightening out a misconception that was gathering steam.
I do still agree with the point that the additional time between releases will give a little more visibility to added Linux features, and will futher the market's movement towards providing products closely targeted to user's needs. The tight integration features that are at the fore in new Microsoft products are most useful to REALLY large organizations, but up to now, *nix was not appropriate for small to medium organizations because of the complexities of administering it. As the Linux distros and desktops work towards easily-administrable systems, they make a $800 devel or server package just for one feature you need. This is real money to little orgs and chump change to big orgs. Considering it regrowth of underlying flora.
OSS itself will probably eventually need to combine the approaches of big releases and small releases by figuring out good times to mark a big release, and then offering security updates and patches against those big releases. Hell, if cross compilation keeps improving, you could probably start company that builds up-to-date binaries for orgs running Linux.
To put this in a different perspective, we should be surprised we ever were without bacteria. As various clever posters have pointed out, bacteria are both everywhere (including in living in symbiosis inside us), and evolve easily and quickly. Of course the bacteria found a way to keep on living and reproducing. That's a pretty key goal for them.
So it's really a surprise, and notable accomplishment, and a setback that we found a method like antibiotics to hold them at bay for so long. The surprise and accomplishment should be obvious, but the setback is the following. It should be rapidly snapping into focus that human health, either on a personal or societal level involves balance, careful listening, and acceptance of risk. As all the informed consent speeches tell you, you may die anyway. There will not (and to my mind should not) be a moment when medicine will be able to insulate you from the risk that you could get sick and/or die. But as a consequence of advances in medical science such antibiotics as we've moved more and more towards magic bullet solutions of particular problems, and away from a simpler but subtler view that you have to take care of yourself to be healthy, and things might go left anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it wasn't good to quash the snake oils and tonics of the turn of the century with a little hard nosed science, nor is wrong to do so today, but to see the picture more fully, you've gotta step outside the scientific viewpoint. I strongly doubt the canon of scientific medicine will ever be complete enough for you to have to work hard at using your judgement about your health and accept the risks of disease. So kudos to those who bring together the insight of "scientific" medicine with other worldviews of medicine.
it's just getting there that's the hassle. It is very hard to come up with a big idea that's really totally new. People are much better at synthesis than raw creation, so new ideas tend to be around the edges of bigger, older ideas. With time, though, these little changes wreak big changes. This is the evolution of software and hell, of understanding, that we are all involved in, and it will probably proceed somewhat slower than all us futurists wish, and be subject to accidents of history, but we'll get somewhere before too long.
The strategy of this professor, whose article seems to indicate a certain lack of restraint with respect to self-flattery, is one that we all can foresee - make the information work for people with as little intervening system as possible. While it is certainly a noble goal not have people be subject to the vagaries of some designer's view of the world, I think it's a little misguided. It sort of presumes that people follow some type of static model with respect to acquire information. I'm not sure quite how to put my finger on the problem, but it has to do with the relationship between knowing, which is information-based, and understanding, a phenomenon involves logically fuzzy concepts like insight, inspiration, and judgement, which evolve as you live. So the question is how to integrate logic and knowledge with the subtleties of understanding in a way that is meaningful for a variety of people, and how computers should participate in that.
The problem is, and will continue to be older distros. At least something like WindowsUpdate pushes the updates to your desktop more or less transparently. How do you update RedHat 6.2 transparently, or Mandrake 7? I have yet to see this kind of transparent updating under Linux, and I don't see that rosy a future for desktop Linux without it. I know RH7+ has RedHat network, but IMO it still doesn't work quite as slickly.
Content-wise it's interesting not just becaue the poster knows his/her sh*t, but also because it highlights an approaching conundrum - lawmakers all over the US of A love to tout the technology sector as this great engine of economic growth, but clearly have very little understanding of how their actions affect the climate for the tech sector. It's not as simple as tax or don't tax, regulate or don't regulate in tech, and that confounds the parties' standard platitudes. So as the parent eloquently points out, there is not yet alignment of the parties with a particular stance on technology legislation, a state which begs techies to step into politics.
As for this:
Your cynical attitude towards politics in general prompts me to think that you're American (as am I), and it makes me sad. Of course both parties screw you, at the same time as their handing you manna. That's how power and politics have worked since the dawn of time. The military-industrial complex (definitely bipartisan, everyone wants a a lab or a military base in their district) begat DARPA and university network research begat the internet. At the same time, the military-industrial complex strengthed corporate hegemony which begat absurdly restrictive views of ideas as physical property begat DMCA. All brought to you by the same two parties, and quite likely the same cohort of politicians, or at least their proteges.
Interesting idea that well informed voters will help depolarize politics. I hope it's true, and I certainly support your claim that one should vote on issues, not a party line. I think a few more parties, a few new estates, like the "mythical" techies (who have a reputation for peppering their speech with slogans like "I hate stupidity", and fancying themselves independent thinkers), and perhaps some refined approaches to things like regulation will also help reduce some of this polarization.
To finish my other point... as a cultural milestone, these posts also interesting - just glancing through the responses shows that the site has succeeded in attracting politically knowledgeable people who have learned about tech, or vice-versa. I only hope that this crossover continues, and carries into other kinds of issues, like poverty, equality, and the environment.
I agree with your basic point, though I think you're stating it a bit strongly.
It's a question of brand and market positioning. SuSE is taking the groupware market as the one defined by Microsoft. As such, there's really only one, perhaps two brands in the market (Exchange, and Lotus Notes). If you're a relatively small company, it doesn't pay to take the time and money to build a brand from scratch in this market. The trick is to erode Microsoft's market share by selling a very similar product (read knock-off) and at the same time developing a brand that makes the product seem like its own thing. We'll see whether SuSE, and OSS in general can manage that.
I'd say I'm guardedly optimistic.
One of the implicit themes I see here that has not gotten much open discussion is that of being smarter than other people, both as a kid and afterwards. This notion seems very deeply embedded in geek culture, and is tightly bound up the sense of alienation that seems so prevalent here. For some reason, being "smarter" than other kids seems to set one in the direction of alienting narcissism.
As Jay Matthews, a very well-spoken education columnist for the Washington Post puts it in a piece on college interviews:
This is some of this wisest advice I can imagine giving a teenager. First of all the notion of being "smarter" than other people is suspect - you have to define smart in a very narrow way to believe that. Or put another way, there sure are a lot of "dumb jerks" out there who seem to be able to accomplish many of their life goals. Are they "smart"? Who cares, they're getting what they're after.
None of this is to contest the more knowledgeable points of view on autism or Asperger's, but simply to point out that there's a pretty strong link between alienation and one-dimensional estimations of intelligence (see the work of Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences, and to encourage everyone in this very intellectual crowd, particularly those raising children (saw a couple disturbing posts of 40+ somethings who really think they're smarter than most others) to look hard at what it means to be smart, and at the consequences of teaching a child to be a particular kind of smart.
Kudos to this school for teaching its students the essential skills of the software industry: thinking you're smarter than everyone else, not interacting well with other people, and resolutely explaining technical minutia whenevery a situation is threatening.
I've been wanting another degree - where do I enroll?
Well spoken! You've put your finger on something I've been trying to explain here for a long time. And in fact Microsoft prices their products at exactly such a price point as to keep them from being expensive in the individual. My most recent experience with this was when I looked at using MySQL vs MS SQL server. Since this place is already Windows shop, the cost for MSSQL would have been $2000 + CALS or something like that, with minimal training costs. The $2K or so they'd save by installing MySQl (even on Windows) is just not enough for them to bother with. If it was $10K, then more eyebrows would be raised. But it's not. And I do believe MS on this part of their TCO claims: it's cheaper to stay with MS than to switch. As to whether it's cheaper if you start with MS vs. Sun vs. OSS, I'd bet it's a pretty mixed bag.
In the aggregate, however, MS products can get expensive, often based on the way they're bundled. Building an Access database is cheap and fast, until you have to buy Office pro for 20 members of your staff, 3 times in 8 years. And there are many situations where you need just one little bit of functionality contained in some other product, and then off you go again. This is where Open Source starts to pay off. Want your dev to do something semi-custom (a la Access)? The dev has his/her choice of 50000 libraries, all of which cost $0 as long as you're willing to accept the terms of OSS, so you can cobble together little bits from each of them without any incremental cost. All that's needed is some clever packaging of those bits so that they can be glued together quickly. Mozilla has a decent chance of doing just this.
Another place where dealing with MS gets particularly onerous is dealing with licenses. Even in the place I worked, where everyone was just fine with Microsoft because it let them not think too much about IT, people resented having to waste time screwing around with licenses.
Overall, I think your predictions for where you'll see Linux penetrate are pretty spot on, though I think once these public sector OSS projects start showing fruit, some slick boxed OSS solutions for smaller businesses will not be that far off, which will stir up the mix a bit.
We live in interesting times...
AFAICT, in terms of usability there is a profound unsolved problem here, which is twofold.
One is that many (most?) end users just want to do stuff on their computer, and as such they _sometimes_ need to be the administrator, without really understanding permissions or security. Remember Steve Gibson's rant about how XP by default has raw socket access for all users (b/c they are root). Microsoft has opted to make them administrators all the time to avoid explanation to a million disinterested and disgruntled XP users why they can't install the educational software their kids brought home from school.
A second, deeper problem affects both *nix and windows. The most serious threat in a compromised system is the loss of data, most of which lives in userland. But at least as far as I understand there's no clear way to determine what code and data to accept. Convenience dictates that stuff from outside the machine will need to find a home on your machine, while security dictates that it should at best be data only, and no code. As we move into a more networked world, this balance needs to be reexamined and retooled over and over. But I don't see *nix making great strides in that area, frankly.
GAIM? You mean the program whpse name is the addition to the acronym AIM standing for (AOL Instant Messenger) of the letter G standing for GNOME or GTK toolkit or whatever? A program which depends on a protocol written by AOL and whose logins exchanges are mediated by AOL's servers? Now it happens that AOL has one of the IM networks with enough people to make it a useful communications medium, so it is reasonable to ask that they make it available to others, but.... they're still the ones who made the network happen. There are many important things to debate about whether such networks should open and publicly available, but just because a company built a private one doesn't mean they're a bad guy.
Here's an analogy:
If I built a private road, I would feel free to tell a small trucking project that I didn't want it using my roads, for reasons including maintenance, liability, effect on the people who live by my road, etc. Even a "nice" trucking project. I might build a private road even though I believe roads should generally be public, simply because a public road is a more complicated and slower endeavour.
So take the debate back where it belongs:
I'm all for an intelligent conversation about these terms and conditions.
Not only that, but even if they were a simple bad guy, why would you call them names if you know your side will have to work with them at some point? It's just counterproductive.
Any firewall is easy to disable if you have adequate permission and knowhow- you either kill the process or unload the library. These days the knowhow is transmitted by the script, so that leaves the permission issue.
Aside from the issue that XP users normally un as root, if you can root the box, then you can disable a firewall - on Linux or Windows, all of which leaves us back at the same weakest link problem as always.
I'd wait before being quite so sure. There could well be plenty ugly Linux worms before too long, and they may be able to do just that...not to mention that skript kiddies luv Linux as much as any other flavor.
Well, I just read the text of bill, and I notice there is very little mention of damage to the network or connectivity providers. If the record companies decide to DDOS the subnet of a couple file traders, that could knock a lot of people offline, but without clear estimates of what such loss of connectivity means, there's not all that much protection for ISPs et al in this bill.
Another discomfiting idea is that file-trading software is any software "primarily used for exchanging files over a public network". An FTP client technically meets this definiton - not that I'd really expect a judge to buy this, but the vagueness could certainly provide a lot of leeway for the record companies.
On closer look, the notification clause follows the lines of the right to know your accuser. But it's not very specific either.
Overall, this bill seems rather vaguely worded to me, and that's a recipe for trouble.
My first reaction is that this notification clause means that if you ask the person you are trading with whether they are knowlingly giving you a bogus file, then they are obligated by this bill to disclose that. Can that be right? Wouldn't that just mean that you could send a Kazaa IM saying "is this file legit", and if you get back an negative answer go ahead and download. That might be an interesting balance - if you had to do this by hand, it might move file trading back to a level difficulty similar to copying tapes (i.e., not that hard for one, but mass distribution's not worth it for the average consumer), which I think was a good balance.
Also interesting is the requirement of listing tactics with the AG's office. Is this information available under FOIA? What exactly do the record companies have to disclose?
Maybe I should peruse the text of the bill before coming up with more theories.
True, this is a nifty little extension to Konqueror, and should be shipped w/KDE. There's still a big hole it in it, though - adding shares requires (AFAICT) root access to modify smb.conf, and then restart smbd and nmbd. There ought to be a way for users to share their own files without the intervention of root.
Spot on!
And not only does China have (and will continue to have) a vast dirt-poor labor pool, but it also has so many people and so much wealth that it can also compete on the high end - services, innovation, education, etc. It may be fashionable to say that China is the next big thing, but by all accounts, especially news stories about the Chinese developing a chip and a fab in under 5 years, it's really,really true.
All of which is why we should be putting a lot more work into playing nice with them than we are, especially since a fair bit of China is still pretty sore about being humiliated by Western powers under colonies.
On a side note, I wonder how long it will be before Western techies start job-hunting in China, not entirely out of love of Chinese culture, but because there's good pickins there.
Here's the rub:
It's also a measure of judgement, not getting suckered in or brainwashed by a big name which you hear on TV or see in banners every minute. It's becoming more and more visible as they attempt to push their way into every aspect of life, and that lends to an increase in marketing audience, which is probably what this is mostly about.
Pardon me if this comes across as a rant, but I see a lot of this kind of crap in the Linux community, and elsewhere, and frankly I think it hinders not helps the process of acheiving a fair body of law about corporations. I don't much like modern marketing tactics, nor is there a lot of love lost between me and most large companies, but casting the decision to use a different ISP than AOL as a battle against the dark forces of consumer capitalist imperialism seems melodramatic with a self-congratulatory undertone for "freeing" yourself from these entraining influences. What about all the people who DO like AOL, are they yearning to break free and don't know it? Perhaps more simply not everyone wants to dedicate himself to outsider stance of opposing the everyday elements in his life, based on a veiled premise of a moral superiority?
Again, apologies if that sounded like a personal attack - it's not meant to be. I just think that constantly staking out the high ground is counterproductive. Come on down and play in middle, where things happen.
One of the big problems is in that making everything "easy", we make people less proficient.
This problem is the consistent bane of teachers. What people need to know to be considered "educated" is in tremendous flux these days, and really has been since the opportunity to seek higher education was offered to more than just a few elites. It's a tough question in computing. I agree that it's important that people understand enough about the machine to be able to control it, rather than the other way around. However, I don't necessarily think that GUI is dumber. It's just that, as in teaching, it's hard to design software that accounts for and leads users through widely varying levels of skill and experience.
Do you know how many people can't even format a disk, or run a program that's not in the start menu or desktop? It's scary.
See 1st point. Not wanting to know how to take apart a point-and-shoot-camera is not scary. Don't confuse undereducated with not technically oriented.
If it makes you feel better to call republicans cocks instead of engaging people on the issues you deserve the biased opinion indymedia will give you..
That's a great point. There is far too much demonizing of Republicans - and worse a lot of subtle patronizing of everybody - by left-oriented publications. And there are indeed two sides to every coin.
But the nastiness definitely cuts both ways. I don't need to remind you that Rush Limbaugh and many other cronies have spent a lot of time abusing things like the very idea of any legal protection for the environment, and always using the most scathing personal attacks.
Ultimately all media has an angle. I agree with the posters who complain that the consolidation of media in this country produces a flat point of view. But we've got internet news, let's use it. Read Indymedia, take it for what it's worth: a lefty, activist-friendly rag. Read other countries' major newspapers - almost all of them have English-language editions. Compare the Washington Post to the Boston Globe to Le Monde. You probably won't change your core beliefs, but you sure will get a broader perspective on all these things.
As a note of caution:
My own experience doing this (built a computer lab in Nicaragua) sort of thing suggests that these folks will run into many political and economic complexities in the places they go to install computers e.g.:
In any event, I hope everyone involved will learn a lot from the process and it will motivate more geeks to get involved with those who have much less than themselves (not the least of the reasons being that it makes you happier).
Your post started out as a really good comparison, but devolved over time into a
"this is what Windows doesn't have" rant.
Not that those points aren't well taken, but it it doesn't address the fact that most people don't really want to know the details of whether and how one thing is better than another. They just want to be convinced that it's "good" or "better" or "really good", whatever that thought process takes for em.
And I don't mean that in your standard "they're just not smart enough to see things scientifically" way, as there are plenty of brilliant people who just don't like taking stuff apart and putting it back together, digitally, mentally or otherwise.
Brilliant post!
Microsoft like any other company has some good products and some shoddy products. IMO, IE 5 is one of the best products Microsoft ever released. My roommate worked on MSN branding during IE5's final release phase, and when I first saw it, I knew they had made a browser that was simply better than Netscape, whose problems were, at that point, already starting to show.
I use Mozilla because IE abuses standards, and now Mozilla has some great features like ad blocking.
Also agreed. Just tried to write a simple hover method in CSS, only to find that IE breaks that, because it wanted to stay consistent with an older broken implementation.
One huge element Mozilla lacks (AFAICT) is data-binding tools. You can't very well propose to rewrite someone's old FoxPro database as mozilla-compliant web app without some sort client data-caching mechanism. IE, reflecting MS' corporate focus, has methods for this. With Mozilla you have to roll your own. If I'm incorrect, and Mozilla does have I'd love it if somebody pointed me towards data-binding stuff in Mozilla.
I think a resource center would be a great idea, particularly if it involved a political organization element.
There's much deep political organization that needs to take place. So far, there's no political powerhouses (read voting blocks and/or economic drivers) explicitly opposing DRM. In fact, as far as any of us can tell, DRM is great news for hardware and software manufacturers. We need to rustle up some of these, or at least a journalist-joltin spin. The times that consumer protection groups have won against business have almost always involved danger to something with more impact than people's "right" to listen to their CD's through their 48x cdrom.
Furthermore, almost nobody in this portion of the tech community is proposing solutions that will address people's legitimate concerns about control of their intellectual work - legitimate because there are real reasons for authors to have SOME control over their works in the digital medium. This is what we need to do - give people reasons to go with fair, open solutions for dissemination management rather than these monolithic ones.
This is an excellent point. A more frightening part of the trend is that the consolidation of jobs is happenly more and more quickly (it was only the late 80s when typist jobs start being eliminated in earnest). What worries me about this is whether education can keep up, particularly in the states. If these new jobs require employees to be more multi-talented, when and where these folks going to learn these new talents? There are also disturbing trends toward hiring people as temps - rather than having a multitalented person, you contract a multitalented temp agency- and that a greater proportion of lower income jobs don't involve developing any skills. On the sysadmin side, preparing the kind of sysadmins you describe would require a new approach to educating them, and academic institutions are hardly known for being nimbly managed....