Unfortunately people who know what they are doing are in their cubes doing real work, while people who don't (perhaps management) are walking around asking advice from the exact people you are describing (who after all aren't doing any real work in their cubes).
Peter Principle: People rise to the level of their own incompetence
Dilbert Principle: If the moron can't do the job, promote them to management, it gets them out of the way and it's easier than firing them. Keep a resume standing by.
I am constantly amazed at the amount of really cool, really quality stuff, that people, real companies even, are pumping out for free. For a "free" OS, the QNX developers sure have put a lot of effort into something that wouldn't seem to me to generate any profit for them. According to the BeNews review, QNX looks and feels slick and trim. I am amazed at how much effort was put into making this a functional desktop OS. Add to that their full POSIX compliance and their (eventual if not immediate) open sourcing of a lot of the code.
Not to slight BeOS. BeOS is amazing as well. I think we geeks have it pretty damn good. I just wish I had enough machines and a big enough internet connection to play around with all these freebies.
IBM? That sounds strange to me. I mean, IBM has pretty much embraced the open source and open standards world. Their alphaWorks pumps out some really cool, free stuff. I'm sort of surprised they'd embark on YetAnotherSecureDigitalMusicFormat. Short of a noir futuristic scenario of pervasive thought policing I can't imagine there is any way to get around the plain physics of media distribution.
I'm a new linux user (read: above cluebie, but far from guru, although I've gained some shell scripting mojo;), and for the heck of it, I'm running Linux on an ancient ThinkPad (yes, I must be a masochist). Anyhow, for those of you with laptops out there, ThinkPads in particular, does Red Hat 7.0 offer much? It would be cool if they bundled in the latest pcmcia daemon, and laptop sound drivers...currently my pcmcia is held together with thread and glue, and sound is plain broke. Does XFree 4.0 offer anything for the RAM/CPU impaired?
According to the news I've heard, in some cases they are banning vendors from selling products that look like official sponsors' products. E.g., a burger stand was stopped from selling burgers because they looked too much like McDonalds or something. If that is not the height of stupidity and corporatization I don't know what is. What is really ironic is seeing athletes from third world countries plastered with logos of the likes of Nike and other companies, who are, in their very own country, exploiting the workforce with sweatshops and child labor. Dave Barry had a recent column on the 2000 Ford Exxon DuPont Toyota Traveler's Insurance McDonald's Olympics brought to you by Coca Cola, that was pretty good.
We also need to realize that "economic development" is not the panacea for all problems, and that we don't need to push it on everybody like a corner drug seller. Lots of problems are cultural and internal. No amount of money or food will solve them, and we just need to help foster a environment friendly to resolving these problems without sticking our nose in. "Progress", manifest destiny, to some intangible yet glorious and definite end is a peculiarly Christian and European idea. Ancient civilizations existed in perfect happiness and harmony without what we would today call "progress". Yes, on a global scale economy certainly plays a large role...we just need to realize that to helping people really means helping them help themselves, not forcing them to institute solutions to problems they don't. Open Source is an attractive proposition because it is both money-free and Free in the sense that communities and governments can customize it to their own ends...so I guess I agree that Open Source is a good compromise between people who think Palm Pilots will solve everybody's problems, and those who think that participating in technology is mutually exclusive with helping real people.
Ok, who else here is not amused by Feed's ascetic hip post-modern minimalist interface? Wasn't "Buttons with no contextual information" cardinal sin #1 of web page design? What the hell are those stupid chicklet buttons on the left...you have to roll over the damn 6x6 pixel things just to find out what the hell they mean. Maybe the colors are self-explanatory to really hip artsy people.
yes, it sucks. karma is sort of a matter of pride...you can identify those who are more meaningful to the community by it. Sure after a certain point it is not all that useful but it is still nice to see that ticker go up.
You know what's even more satisfying that both? Creating elegant and bugless code in the first place. Sure it may sound facetious, but I really do get a lot more satisfaction upon committing rock solid code that does its job right, and is designed well, than coding up some whizbang piece of code in a frenzy then leaving it for poor bug hunters to waste thier lives trawling through for bugs. I'm of the opinion that even if it takes you twice as the first time to get something right, that still far outweighs the penalty of having to come back over and over again to fix bugs. The only "bugs" there should be are either typos, brain-blackouts, or really subtle design issues like threading and locking, etc.
My question is, isn't OS X essentially the answer to the question of "where is a unix my mom can use?". I mean, haven't Gnome and KDE always wanted to eventually have a seamless GUI that "hid" the complexity of unix from new users (and exposed it to power users)? Seems like OS X has trumped both Gnome and KDE in that respect. Of course Gnome and KDE have trumped OS X in the "Free" respect.
Is everybody out here in geek-land who was supporting Gnome and KDE because they wanted unix brought to the general user, going to go out and now recommend OS X?
Well, SDMI aside, the laws of physics (and logic) virtually preclude distribution of music and media that have to be played on physical apparatus the consumer owns, from being secured. Even the most "uncrackable" security mechanism is at best a big and annoying plastic seal that consumers have to rip open to get to their product. It's like trying to place a lock on a basketball. Just stupid.
(please support my karma whoring...slashdot is eating my karma for some reason;)
Re:Or in other words, "Karl Marx was wrong"
on
A Letter from 2020
·
· Score: 2
Yes, I think I'd tend to disagree with the basic underlying assumption: "People, almost ALL people, are selfish and greedy, and aim only to make their own lives easier and more comfortable, while not giving a damn about anyone else.".
I have a bit more faith in humanity. Take a worldwide survey, and I think you'll find that most *individuals* are pretty decent people who are not that greedy, who share, who have manners, who are modest, who respect each other, and want nothing more than a moderately happy and comfortable life and prospects for their children. I don't think people are inherently greedy and proud. Most people on earth I think are just trying to make a damn living, keep healthy and happy. They are not collecting the most toys to win the "game" of life. However, individual behavior is a lot different from *group* behavior. Start aggregating people and individual virtues become obscured by vice made possible by anonymity and group rationalization, etc. Then compare this with the sole purpose of corporations as generating profit, and I think you have a very bad situation where people end up isolating themselves and rationalizing away activity that would otherwise be stigmatized if they were acting as individuals.
As far as your two courses of action, I have chosen the latter, which means I might not be able to, as Denis Leary puts it, "get myself a 1967 Cadillac El Dorado convertible, hot pink with whaleskin hub caps and all leather cow interior and big brown baby seal eyes for headlights, yeah! And I'm gonna drive around in that baby at 115mph getting one mile per gallon, sucking down quarter pounder cheese burgers from McDonald's in the old-fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers and when I'm done sucking down those grease ball burgers, I'm gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag and then I'm gonna toss the styrofoam container right out the side and there ain't a God damned thing anybody can do about it."
While it means I might not be able to accumulate as much material "stuff", which is the measure of success in this society, I think I will have a much more fulfilling life.
Yes, cryptography is great, but until you can encrypt human beings you will not be able to construct the wonderful theoretically impervious systems thought up. Security will always be a set of tradeoffs, and never really bulletproof...security has to be thought of holistically as a system, environment, ecology.
I think 1984 and articles like these, while illustrative are subtley missing target. You want to know what the future will be like? You want to know how things will look? Too bad. You won't be able to know. And worse, you won't KNOW you that there is anything to know. The scariest thing is a future in which the transparent propagandizing and commercializing effect has made us clueless, and careless to reality. Who of us out there this morning watching Good Morning America and eating cereal pimped by that wholesome Rosie O'Donnel, was as aware or angry as I was about our government's involvement in Columbia, or the School of Americas? There are many issues that people are just simply unaware of. Ommission of information is sometimes worse than denial of it. Those who own information own reality. And the only way to defend yourself is make yourself aware of what is going on under your nose. Otherwise, when our horrible future comes...we will not even know it.
Re:Businesses don't corrupt politicians...
on
A Letter from 2020
·
· Score: 4
I'm not so willing to bet joe blue-collar-worker has exactly the same political ideas as niles upper-management. And guess who has the money? Upper management of course. And they give that money to political groups that represent *their* interests, not necessarily the interests of their employees. Corporations are not politically homogenous entities. In fact I'd say that the hierarchy in corporations reflect the general political differences of the population at large. Those at top have substantially different views than those at bottom. Now, if corporations where some sort of socialist communes, then perhaps we could get away with thinking that corporations are "us" therefore we have only to blame "ourselves". Just look at YOUR corporation and who is in charge. Do you coders in the trenches really have that much power over your ivory tower business school PHBs and marketing suits? Do you *really* think they share your political views identically?
Yes human nature is at fault. But the bad part of it is at fault more.
I'd post at 2 but unfortunately Slashdot feels it needs to radioactively decay my karma, which has been dropping without any downward moderation (hey, what gives, Taco?). So I'm posting at 1 just to make sure my mind's not playing games on me. Not that karma matters that much on second thought...
When the hype dies off and the economy is in the hangover of its all-night eParty, I'll be waiting for the anti-Katz to lead the backlash against all us techo-elitists sitting in our ergonomic "productivity environments" drinking jolt and eating our cake, thinking our wonderful little thoughts about how information wants to be free and how open source will lead to free love and peace on earth. And the anti-Katz will launch into substanceless tirades about how people really want to pull out a wallet, slap down real money, and walk away with a real physical product without the barriers of net access, without being smothered by attempts at a "pleasent shopping experience", or risking malicious "hackers" stealing their "identity". He'll go on about how people want to get a book from the library and read it under a tree, not pay to wait to download a book to read on a blurry portable LCD screen til they go blind. He'll review books in which he'll proclaim the main characters to be the epitomy of the proletariat ethic. Physical products are changing *everything*!
So basically they're saying with a lot of words that gPulp will be a distributed search mechanism. Wow. Groundbreaking. The problem will probably not be getting it to work, but getting people to care. With free services like Google, there really isn't much reason for a general purpose distributed search system. Although there are several benefits, you have to convince the content providers to run the server themselves as opposed to just putting up content and letting somebody else spider it for them.
(note: I am now refusing my +1 bonus because although I haven't been moderated down that much, Slashdot has decided to decay my karma)
Yeah, really I am wondering if there are any math-geeks who are trying to figure out if freenet is actually even feasible...or will it just turn into p0rn-net and be overflooded with garbage.
The parent post gets me thinking...sure we open source people hate paying for stuff right? (well, no not exactly, but stay with me here)...but think for a second...what *if* we all decided to pay some pocket change every month to participate in a "new" internet like mojonation (or whatever). If Slashdot, and the other sites people usually peruse, were on mojonation, would anybody care about that other internet anyway? If this second sub or super net starts gaining critical mass, wouldn't, by necessity, everybody else have to flock towards it? Maybe we can change things. Or maybe I'm just having pipe dreams;)
I was just thinking of this! "Throw" computers away? Whah? I'd think it was some wierd Simpsons episode, if, for example, people weren't ACTUALLY using computers to pave roads.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately people who know what they are doing are in their cubes doing real work, while people who don't (perhaps management) are walking around asking advice from the exact people you are describing (who after all aren't doing any real work in their cubes).
Peter Principle: People rise to the level of their own incompetence
Dilbert Principle: If the moron can't do the job, promote them to management, it gets them out of the way and it's easier than firing them. Keep a resume standing by.
So, in short: It's the Humans Stupid.
I am constantly amazed at the amount of really cool, really quality stuff, that people, real companies even, are pumping out for free. For a "free" OS, the QNX developers sure have put a lot of effort into something that wouldn't seem to me to generate any profit for them. According to the BeNews review, QNX looks and feels slick and trim. I am amazed at how much effort was put into making this a functional desktop OS. Add to that their full POSIX compliance and their (eventual if not immediate) open sourcing of a lot of the code.
Not to slight BeOS. BeOS is amazing as well. I think we geeks have it pretty damn good. I just wish I had enough machines and a big enough internet connection to play around with all these freebies.
IBM? That sounds strange to me. I mean, IBM has pretty much embraced the open source and open standards world. Their alphaWorks pumps out some really cool, free stuff. I'm sort of surprised they'd embark on YetAnotherSecureDigitalMusicFormat. Short of a noir futuristic scenario of pervasive thought policing I can't imagine there is any way to get around the plain physics of media distribution.
I'm a new linux user (read: above cluebie, but far from guru, although I've gained some shell scripting mojo ;), and for the heck of it, I'm running Linux on an ancient ThinkPad (yes, I must be a masochist). Anyhow, for those of you with laptops out there, ThinkPads in particular, does Red Hat 7.0 offer much? It would be cool if they bundled in the latest pcmcia daemon, and laptop sound drivers...currently my pcmcia is held together with thread and glue, and sound is plain broke. Does XFree 4.0 offer anything for the RAM/CPU impaired?
According to the news I've heard, in some cases they are banning vendors from selling products that look like official sponsors' products. E.g., a burger stand was stopped from selling burgers because they looked too much like McDonalds or something. If that is not the height of stupidity and corporatization I don't know what is. What is really ironic is seeing athletes from third world countries plastered with logos of the likes of Nike and other companies, who are, in their very own country, exploiting the workforce with sweatshops and child labor. Dave Barry had a recent column on the 2000 Ford Exxon DuPont Toyota Traveler's Insurance McDonald's Olympics brought to you by Coca Cola, that was pretty good.
Ah, well, see sig.
We also need to realize that "economic development" is not the panacea for all problems, and that we don't need to push it on everybody like a corner drug seller. Lots of problems are cultural and internal. No amount of money or food will solve them, and we just need to help foster a environment friendly to resolving these problems without sticking our nose in. "Progress", manifest destiny, to some intangible yet glorious and definite end is a peculiarly Christian and European idea. Ancient civilizations existed in perfect happiness and harmony without what we would today call "progress". Yes, on a global scale economy certainly plays a large role...we just need to realize that to helping people really means helping them help themselves, not forcing them to institute solutions to problems they don't. Open Source is an attractive proposition because it is both money-free and Free in the sense that communities and governments can customize it to their own ends...so I guess I agree that Open Source is a good compromise between people who think Palm Pilots will solve everybody's problems, and those who think that participating in technology is mutually exclusive with helping real people.
Ok, who else here is not amused by Feed's ascetic hip post-modern minimalist interface? Wasn't "Buttons with no contextual information" cardinal sin #1 of web page design? What the hell are those stupid chicklet buttons on the left...you have to roll over the damn 6x6 pixel things just to find out what the hell they mean. Maybe the colors are self-explanatory to really hip artsy people.
Wow, imagine all the email addresses you could harvest from that...
(Taco, I'm still bitter about the hard cap on karma...)
yes, it sucks. karma is sort of a matter of pride...you can identify those who are more meaningful to the community by it. Sure after a certain point it is not all that useful but it is still nice to see that ticker go up.
You must play a lot of Jagged Alliance 2.
You know what's even more satisfying that both? Creating elegant and bugless code in the first place. Sure it may sound facetious, but I really do get a lot more satisfaction upon committing rock solid code that does its job right, and is designed well, than coding up some whizbang piece of code in a frenzy then leaving it for poor bug hunters to waste thier lives trawling through for bugs. I'm of the opinion that even if it takes you twice as the first time to get something right, that still far outweighs the penalty of having to come back over and over again to fix bugs. The only "bugs" there should be are either typos, brain-blackouts, or really subtle design issues like threading and locking, etc.
My question is, isn't OS X essentially the answer to the question of "where is a unix my mom can use?". I mean, haven't Gnome and KDE always wanted to eventually have a seamless GUI that "hid" the complexity of unix from new users (and exposed it to power users)? Seems like OS X has trumped both Gnome and KDE in that respect. Of course Gnome and KDE have trumped OS X in the "Free" respect.
Is everybody out here in geek-land who was supporting Gnome and KDE because they wanted unix brought to the general user, going to go out and now recommend OS X?
ArsTechnica has the hookup:
a tion-1.html
http://arstechnica.com/guide/networking/install
Well, SDMI aside, the laws of physics (and logic) virtually preclude distribution of music and media that have to be played on physical apparatus the consumer owns, from being secured. Even the most "uncrackable" security mechanism is at best a big and annoying plastic seal that consumers have to rip open to get to their product. It's like trying to place a lock on a basketball. Just stupid.
ArsTechnica has a pretty decent article:
v c-1.html
;)
RISC vs. CISC: the Post-RISC Era
http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/r
(please support my karma whoring...slashdot is eating my karma for some reason
Yes, I think I'd tend to disagree with the basic underlying assumption: "People, almost ALL people, are selfish and greedy, and aim only to make their own lives easier and more comfortable, while not giving a damn about anyone else.".
I have a bit more faith in humanity. Take a worldwide survey, and I think you'll find that most *individuals* are pretty decent people who are not that greedy, who share, who have manners, who are modest, who respect each other, and want nothing more than a moderately happy and comfortable life and prospects for their children. I don't think people are inherently greedy and proud. Most people on earth I think are just trying to make a damn living, keep healthy and happy. They are not collecting the most toys to win the "game" of life. However, individual behavior is a lot different from *group* behavior. Start aggregating people and individual virtues become obscured by vice made possible by anonymity and group rationalization, etc. Then compare this with the sole purpose of corporations as generating profit, and I think you have a very bad situation where people end up isolating themselves and rationalizing away activity that would otherwise be stigmatized if they were acting as individuals.
As far as your two courses of action, I have chosen the latter, which means I might not be able to, as Denis Leary puts it, "get myself a 1967 Cadillac El Dorado convertible, hot pink with whaleskin hub caps and all leather cow interior and big brown baby seal eyes for headlights, yeah! And I'm gonna drive around in that baby at 115mph getting one mile per gallon, sucking down quarter pounder cheese burgers from McDonald's in the old-fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers and when I'm done sucking down those grease ball burgers, I'm gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag and then I'm gonna toss the styrofoam container right out the side and there ain't a God damned thing anybody can do about it."
While it means I might not be able to accumulate as much material "stuff", which is the measure of success in this society, I think I will have a much more fulfilling life.
Yes, cryptography is great, but until you can encrypt human beings you will not be able to construct the wonderful theoretically impervious systems thought up. Security will always be a set of tradeoffs, and never really bulletproof...security has to be thought of holistically as a system, environment, ecology.
I think 1984 and articles like these, while illustrative are subtley missing target. You want to know what the future will be like? You want to know how things will look? Too bad. You won't be able to know. And worse, you won't KNOW you that there is anything to know. The scariest thing is a future in which the transparent propagandizing and commercializing effect has made us clueless, and careless to reality. Who of us out there this morning watching Good Morning America and eating cereal pimped by that wholesome Rosie O'Donnel, was as aware or angry as I was about our government's involvement in Columbia, or the School of Americas? There are many issues that people are just simply unaware of. Ommission of information is sometimes worse than denial of it. Those who own information own reality. And the only way to defend yourself is make yourself aware of what is going on under your nose. Otherwise, when our horrible future comes...we will not even know it.
I'm not so willing to bet joe blue-collar-worker has exactly the same political ideas as niles upper-management. And guess who has the money? Upper management of course. And they give that money to political groups that represent *their* interests, not necessarily the interests of their employees. Corporations are not politically homogenous entities. In fact I'd say that the hierarchy in corporations reflect the general political differences of the population at large. Those at top have substantially different views than those at bottom. Now, if corporations where some sort of socialist communes, then perhaps we could get away with thinking that corporations are "us" therefore we have only to blame "ourselves". Just look at YOUR corporation and who is in charge. Do you coders in the trenches really have that much power over your ivory tower business school PHBs and marketing suits? Do you *really* think they share your political views identically?
Yes human nature is at fault. But the bad part of it is at fault more.
I'd post at 2 but unfortunately Slashdot feels it needs to radioactively decay my karma, which has been dropping without any downward moderation (hey, what gives, Taco?). So I'm posting at 1 just to make sure my mind's not playing games on me. Not that karma matters that much on second thought...
When the hype dies off and the economy is in the hangover of its all-night eParty, I'll be waiting for the anti-Katz to lead the backlash against all us techo-elitists sitting in our ergonomic "productivity environments" drinking jolt and eating our cake, thinking our wonderful little thoughts about how information wants to be free and how open source will lead to free love and peace on earth. And the anti-Katz will launch into substanceless tirades about how people really want to pull out a wallet, slap down real money, and walk away with a real physical product without the barriers of net access, without being smothered by attempts at a "pleasent shopping experience", or risking malicious "hackers" stealing their "identity". He'll go on about how people want to get a book from the library and read it under a tree, not pay to wait to download a book to read on a blurry portable LCD screen til they go blind. He'll review books in which he'll proclaim the main characters to be the epitomy of the proletariat ethic. Physical products are changing *everything*!
So basically they're saying with a lot of words that gPulp will be a distributed search mechanism. Wow. Groundbreaking. The problem will probably not be getting it to work, but getting people to care. With free services like Google, there really isn't much reason for a general purpose distributed search system. Although there are several benefits, you have to convince the content providers to run the server themselves as opposed to just putting up content and letting somebody else spider it for them.
(note: I am now refusing my +1 bonus because although I haven't been moderated down that much, Slashdot has decided to decay my karma)
Yeah, really I am wondering if there are any math-geeks who are trying to figure out if freenet is actually even feasible...or will it just turn into p0rn-net and be overflooded with garbage.
;)
The parent post gets me thinking...sure we open source people hate paying for stuff right? (well, no not exactly, but stay with me here)...but think for a second...what *if* we all decided to pay some pocket change every month to participate in a "new" internet like mojonation (or whatever). If Slashdot, and the other sites people usually peruse, were on mojonation, would anybody care about that other internet anyway? If this second sub or super net starts gaining critical mass, wouldn't, by necessity, everybody else have to flock towards it? Maybe we can change things. Or maybe I'm just having pipe dreams
I was just thinking of this! "Throw" computers away? Whah? I'd think it was some wierd Simpsons episode, if, for example, people weren't ACTUALLY using computers to pave roads.