The only way that you get cheap internet service (or really, cheap anything) is by taking advantage of economies of scale. That means a lot of users, most of whom have different opinions from you about the tradeoff between limiting spam and blocking a few sites. So if you want to get those economy-of-scale DSL prices, you have to put up with what the vendors offer you.
If you want special, invidivualized service, you'll have to pay the price. And if you think you aren't alone, start an ISP and make some money off all those people who are being oppressed by the evil goons at MAPS. It looks like it's easy to do. If there are enough of you, you'll get the price as low as your current options.
This claim has often been made, but I've never seen anybody come up with decent proof for it.
The only remotely real thing I've seen is that above.net was, for a time, blocking all traffic from ORBS, because they objected to the ORBS scanning methods and didn't want their machines bugged. Unfortunately, ORBS gets some of their connectivity from an ISP that uses above.net. This may not be very neighborly, but I don't know how evil it is, either.
And either way, if you want to prove your claim that above.net is dropping all RBL traffic, you have some work to do.
As an RBL subscriber myself, I support this action, even to the extent of blocking other web sites.
When I started using the internet more than a decade ago, it was a neighborly place. When the green card lawyers did their massive spamming and followed it up with a big "fuck you", it was a shock to all of us.
To me, the RBL is about sorting out who has that old-school community spirit from those who don't. The jerks and idiots are welcome to talk to one another (and anybody else who cares to listen to them), but I want to keep them out of my inbox. If an ISP isn't playing by the same anti-spam rules, I cast my ostrakon for them. And if people want to support that ISP by doing business with them, that's swell too, but I don't much care to hear from them either.
As a practical matter, spam-friendly ISPs are often willing to move spammers around in a netblock to avoid a ban, so it could well be that MAPS has given up on anything less than netblock bans. Of course, we don't know the MAPS side of the story, because you didn't take the time to talk to them.
This isn't censorship, any more than banning spam is. Censorship is the banning of ideas, not of actaions.
They are blocking sites that sell spammer tools, which is providing support services to spammers. They don't ban sites that talk about open relays or holes in the e-mail system. They do not ban any of the organizations that use reasonably safe versions of opt-in email. They also don't ban organzations like the DMA, who advocate making spam legal. And as far as I know, they don't ban any of the many frothing sites devoted to hating them.
The freedom to speak freely is vitally important to a democratic society, but I don't see that being infringed.
The USPS turns a profit on junk mail. They like the stuff; they even run ads and build web sites encouraging it. This is part of why US letter rates are much cheaper than most countries.
For a business, the entire cost of making and delivering even the simplest piece of bulk mail is over a buck.
For the sender, the cost of spamming millions is less than the cost of a typical newspaper display ad.
When you think about these facts a little, you'll realize your plan doesn't make much sense.
These days, a lot of smart people put a lot of effort into nixing spam, and I still get 10-20 pieces a day. Why? Because it's so cheap! Even if 99.99% of people don't respond, that's still a hundred responses per million spams. A bulk mail campaign with a response rate like that would get the staff fired, but if you make a few bucks on each one, then that's enough to pay for the spam.
So since spam is orders of magnitude cheaper than paper mail, then making it legit will mean that you will get orders of magnitude more spam than you do paper junk mail. Everybody who now buys tiny ads in the backs of newspapers will realize that they get more for their money by sending our a million spams.
And since it's so cheap, they won't be careful where the send them, either. Will you still feel that spam is better when you're getting 100 a day? 200 a day? Your local newspaper has a lot more ads than that every day, and there are a lot of local newspapers in the world. I now regularly get spam for businesses on other continents, and the Internet has barely touched large parts of the world.
I agree with you that paper junk mail is annoying and a waste of good trees. But if you want to save trees, put a 100% tax on non-recycled paper and put the money into forest conservation. Don't ruin our in-boxes in hopes of making some Faustian pact with the marketing industry.
Probably the biggest problem for the targets that Java was aimed at is the fact that performace wise, most Java sucks compared to a good native code implementation.
Let's be honest here; about 99% of code currently in use sucks compared to a good native implementation. Although there are some delightful exceptions (e.g., a lot of the Linux kernel), most code is written to run adequately fast, rather than as fast as possible.
This isn't a bad thing; it's just that most programmers write code to solve a particular real-world problem, and stop when the problem has been solved. They only put a lot of work into performance when they're forced to.
Right now I'm in the middle of rewriting a high-volume Perl and C website using Java servlets. Initially, my code was slower than the C, but faster than the Perl. And then I spent a day using a performance analysis tool" and optimizing the bottlenecks and now it's faster than the C and about 10 times faster than the perl, even though it does more and is much more reliable.
This is not to knock Perl or C; I use 'em both when appropriate. But for most of the situations where you'd think about using Java, getting the most out of your CPU isn't the overriding concern.
If you don't need the accessors to be public, don't make 'em public. Private or package-visible accessors are still useful, and you can always make 'em public later. The general rule is that you should only make methods public if absolutely necessary.
But if you do use public accessors, then changing internal representation isn't a big deal. In your example, if a bunch of external code that you don't want to touch uses the variable as a double, then you can leave the public accessors handling doubles. They can look like this:
FixedPoint foo = new FixedPoint();
[...]
public double getFoo() {
return doubleFromFixedPoint(this.foo);
}
public void setFoo(double foo) {
this.foo=fixedPointFromDouble(foo);
}
If necessary, you could then add special accessors for the FixedPoint representation.
This is the advantage of accessors over public instance variables; internal representation is independent (or in the jargon, decoupled) from API. But public vs private is always a designer's option.
It's a randomly generated address only used for Slashdot postings. When some spambot picks it up, I change my Slashdot address and route the old one to/dev/null.
The rumour has it, that Sony is only releasing 8000 PS2 for Denmark thruout 2000.:-(
Isn't that two per person? That seems like plenty.
Re:Damned if you do, Damned if you don't
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 1
Considering that there's enough food in this world to feed every single person sufficiently, there is NO need for FrankenFood whatsoever... [...] Stop the overfeeding/fattening of the 1st world countries and feed the poorer countries..
Easy to say. How do you do it?
There's no obvious way to do what you want. There may be extra agricultural capacity here, but how does that translate to famine relief in the back end of Senegal?
Suppose you convince US voters to pay up for a famine relief program on a scale never before seen. Billions of dollars are given to farming companies, to trucking companies, to shipping companies. Billions more go to infrastructure upgrades in recipient countries, so that food can actually make it to the hungry people. And you manage to deliver free food to every man, woman, and child in the third world. This is great, right?
Wrong. You have now wiped out the local farming industry. With free, high-quality food from afar, who's going to pay up for scraggly local food? And since farms require constant upkeep, after a few years your recipients will be dependent on shipped food.
Even worse, you've removed a key check on population growth. When you remove the food supply constraint, there's a huge population boom for a couple of generations. (This isn't a third-world slam; we westerners did the same thing.) Are we committed to feeding them all? Forever? We had better be, because the land they live on can't support them now.
This doesn't sound like charity; it sounds like a sinister plot of the large western agriculture firms.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't try to help; I think we should. But simplistic solutions are a waste of resources and goodwill. They are also generally arrogant in the extreme; we haven't even figured out what to do with our own hungry and homeless, so solving the problems of the entire world seems a bit of a leap.
Around these parts, when we talk about the Constit uti on, we generally are referring to both the original and the changes to it. Sort of the same way that when people say "Linux" they're not talking about the 1.0 release.
Personally, I think the constitution is precious precisely because we can change it, (although I am pleased that it's pretty hard to change). The whole point is that the government is not some static thing handed down from on high; it's something we all do. Allowing the constitution to be ammended is just a recognition that a) circumstances change, and b) nothing is perfect, even if it seems that way at the time.
But you're right about the 18th amendment; that's why we repealed it.
Five years ago you could get 56K, ISDN and Frame Relay as steps between dialup and T1. Probbably X.25 some other random X.25 services as well.
As you point out, frame relay was delivered over a T1, making it functionally equivalent to a fractional T1, at least as far as ISPs went.
And for internet service five years ago, a 56K link was a) hard to find, b) a pain to install, c) a worse deal than a fractional T1, and d) a stunningly awful deal compared to a dialup.
The same pretty much goes for ISDN; for 'high-speed' dialup, it was a good deal, but if you wanted a permanent connection from a fixed location, fractional T1s were also a better deal, at least under my RBOC.
And I've never heard of anybody offering internet service via X.25. Did this ever happen? If so, what were they thinking?
And the poster's point, which is that five years ago a small site pretty much had to get a T1, is still basically true. At the time we managed to talk an ISP into colocating a box, but at the time that was a pretty unusual thing.
"High-tech work takes on significance that transcends the rhetoric of efficiency, productivity and 'value added,' as it is used to make lives meaningful by aligning them with progressive forces."
Well, not for me.
There are two separate issues here. One is the jargon, which is awful. (Of course, so is a lot of technical writing.) But the other is the observation that many tech workers take their jobs a lot more seriously than the traditional 9-to-5er, and that some of the talk around it certainly sounds religous.
Sitting here in San Francisco, that strikes me as a pretty obvious observation. Read, for example, the first couple years of Wired; they were all fired up about how the world was going to change completely in practically the blink of an eye. That wasn't just rhetoric, either; I knew a lot of people at HotWired, their on-line arm, and many of the people there felt a sense of mission that was not obviously supported by rational belief.
And although it's slightly less fashionable now, I'd still say that one startup in two talks about how they are going to change the world, revolutionizing X, Y, or Z. Sure, some of this is marketing hype, but many people sincerely believe it. They regularly spend 100+ hours a week on it. Why? Some talk about the money, but that's often a socially acceptable excuse; see The New, New Thing for a character study that slyly shows that money is not really the point for Jim Clark, a big mover and shaker.
Or closer to home, read practially any Slashdot discussion around open source, Microsoft, or vi-vs-emacs. Note the jargon file entriesholy wars and religious issues. Or note the high-tech expression drinking the kool-aid, a reference to the Jim Jones cult suicide.
So I'll grant that for you, high-tech may be just another job. Oh, and given that you're hanging out on Slashdot, I guess I'd have to say "just another job, plus a subculture". But for a large number of people, especially here in the Bay Area and especially those working on the cutting edge, religion is not an inappropriate comparison.
I'll admit that a bunch of this research is garbage. But not all of it is. And dismissing the field like you do is exactly the same thing that most people do when they talk about issues we focus on here:
Open source? Closed source? Microsoft' tactics? I'm just sending a few business letters and playing a few games. Who cares about the rest of it, really? None of the MSCEs I know consider themselves part of any "evil global hegemonic empire". They're just geeks doing their jobs.
Just because you haven't noticed the bigger context doesn't mean that it's not there.
The whole idea of software as a service is sort of ludicrous.
Bzzt! Most people already think of it that way. When you buy new software, you expect them to keep coming out with bug fixes, security fixes, upgrades, and whatnot. And let's not forget tech support.
Over the last decade, the trend has been to be more and more stingy with tech support and upgrades. Why? Because those programmers have to be paid somehow, and people will pay up for those things.
A subscription model gives companies a steadier revenue stream and makes it so that then can release features as they're ready, rather than bundling them into massive upgrades that they then have to hype. It also reduces the incentive to force people to upgrade by, say, changing file formats all the time.
For a lot of software vendors, the subscription model makes at least as much sense as anything else. This isn't to say that Microsoft won't use this to gouge people. But they do that already, right?
The problem is that the basic Unix permission concept is *too* simple for many needs.
As one poster points out, most every daemon runs as root. Why? Because there's no easy way to say that arpwatch just needs raw read access to the ethernet devices. So it gets full access to everything.
It also requires administrators to be involved in a lot of things that they shouldn't care about. Say you're a student at a large university. You and a couple of other people get assigned a joint project. Why shouldn't you be able to created a shared directory and give your pals access? With standard Unix permissions, you need somebody with root to create a group entry (and then delete it two weeks later when you get another project).
Or consider the case of a file that needs to be accessed by two groups. Say you have a team of auditors turn up for a month who need to look over some (but not all) accounting records. With ACLs, you create a new group that is the union of the two groups, you change permission on all the files, and change it all back when they leave. Plus in the meantime when they add a new accountant, you need to make sure to remember to add him to the common groups. You can do it, but it's a big pain.
And if ACLs exist, it's not like you're required to use the added power; you can still do owner, exactly-one-group, and everybody-and-their-brother permissions.
Dude, I have an MBA, from a top-5 school, one of the
quantitative ones, and I concentrated in finance. If I wanted to
write a long post and quibble a lot, I could
Perhaps, dude, arguments from authority are accepted at top-5 MBA
schools, but on Slashdot they don't get you much.
I am often wrong (and always glad to learn why), but you won't
convince me (or most other geeks) without giving explanation and
information. Or at the very least, some references to specific books,
rather than just waving vaguely at the hundreds I own.
Anyhow, I'll grant some investing isn't gambling, and that part
does indeed have to do with productivity. If I loan my younger
brother $1000 to buy a car so he can get to a job, he'll be much more
productive than spending his summer on our dad's couch, so he'll be
able to pay me a decent return on my dough. And the same logic
applies to other investments; if somebody's borrowing an asset and
using it to create new value, then the asset's owner and the borrower
both win.
So I concur that, on average and in the long term, properly
managed assets do indeed increase in value, because those assets get
put to use creating more value. And I'm sure you'd grant that if we
were all-knowing and infinitely smart, then we would all agree on the
price of a share, a price that took into account all future creation
of value. If this were true, stocks would never change hands except
when people shifted their dough from investment to some other use.
In the real world, though, stocks change hands a lot. Generally
people sell one stock and buy another, in effect swapping stocks with
other investors. Why? Because they have differing opinions about the
future creation of value of a company. Some of those investors will be
right, getting higher returns than average. And some will be wrong,
losing their shirts.
So now let's come back to the post you were responding to. The guy
who said, "one day you win, the next you lose" put all his money in
Linux stocks. This is not long-term investing with a desire to get
the average rate of return by allowing the market to put your assets
to work; this is playing the ponies.
Like all gamblers, he thought he was smarter or more knowledgeable
than the average punter. He believed that other investors were
undervaluing Linux companies, and that he could therefore clean up by
betting on them. This is exactly equivalent to believing that winner
at the Kentucky Derby will be Prince of Thieves. Some days you're
right, some days you're wrong. On the good days, you win the money of people having bad days.
So as I said, the average investor can only make average rates of
return. To beat the average, you need to have a leg up on some other
investor, whose loss is your gain. And if you have that leg up (by
being, say, a skilled and savvy market maker or a genius with a
building full of computers) then you are, by definition, not an
average investor.
A reasonable person might now ask, "Well, Mr. Smarty, if that's true
then it shouldn't matter at all where I put my money, huh? As long
as it's not buried in a jar in my back yard, I'll make that same
average return whether I put it in stocks or bonds or CDs, right?"
On average, that would indeed be true, except for the differing
levels of risk. Averaged over the last century, US stocks have
outperformed bonds by, depending on who you believe, somewhere
between 3 and 5 percent in annualized real terms (The Economist, Feb
17 2000). Why? Because some people don't like risk.
Equities may pay
more on average, but that is precious little consolation to somebody
who needed to cash in their investments in November, 1929. Some people
can't afford the chance of a higher return if it means a bigger
chance of loss, so they put their money in safer investments. Thus
the risk premium is born. (Another way to look at it: People who
want safety pay an insurance premium to those who don't need it.)
So I'm going to stand by my statements for now. If I'm wrong, by all
means step up to the plate and let me know where. But no more of this
I'm-smarter-than-you-so-shut-up stuff, ok?
Slashdot Mirror
The only way that you get cheap internet service (or really, cheap anything) is by taking advantage of economies of scale. That means a lot of users, most of whom have different opinions from you about the tradeoff between limiting spam and blocking a few sites. So if you want to get those economy-of-scale DSL prices, you have to put up with what the vendors offer you.
If you want special, invidivualized service, you'll have to pay the price. And if you think you aren't alone, start an ISP and make some money off all those people who are being oppressed by the evil goons at MAPS. It looks like it's easy to do. If there are enough of you, you'll get the price as low as your current options.
This claim has often been made, but I've never seen anybody come up with decent proof for it.
The only remotely real thing I've seen is that above.net was, for a time, blocking all traffic from ORBS, because they objected to the ORBS scanning methods and didn't want their machines bugged. Unfortunately, ORBS gets some of their connectivity from an ISP that uses above.net. This may not be very neighborly, but I don't know how evil it is, either.
And either way, if you want to prove your claim that above.net is dropping all RBL traffic, you have some work to do.
As an RBL subscriber myself, I support this action, even to the extent of blocking other web sites.
When I started using the internet more than a decade ago, it was a neighborly place. When the green card lawyers did their massive spamming and followed it up with a big "fuck you", it was a shock to all of us.
To me, the RBL is about sorting out who has that old-school community spirit from those who don't. The jerks and idiots are welcome to talk to one another (and anybody else who cares to listen to them), but I want to keep them out of my inbox. If an ISP isn't playing by the same anti-spam rules, I cast my ostrakon for them. And if people want to support that ISP by doing business with them, that's swell too, but I don't much care to hear from them either.
As a practical matter, spam-friendly ISPs are often willing to move spammers around in a netblock to avoid a ban, so it could well be that MAPS has given up on anything less than netblock bans. Of course, we don't know the MAPS side of the story, because you didn't take the time to talk to them.
This isn't censorship, any more than banning spam is. Censorship is the banning of ideas, not of actaions.
They are blocking sites that sell spammer tools, which is providing support services to spammers. They don't ban sites that talk about open relays or holes in the e-mail system. They do not ban any of the organizations that use reasonably safe versions of opt-in email. They also don't ban organzations like the DMA, who advocate making spam legal. And as far as I know, they don't ban any of the many frothing sites devoted to hating them.
The freedom to speak freely is vitally important to a democratic society, but I don't see that being infringed.
When you think about these facts a little, you'll realize your plan doesn't make much sense.
These days, a lot of smart people put a lot of effort into nixing spam, and I still get 10-20 pieces a day. Why? Because it's so cheap! Even if 99.99% of people don't respond, that's still a hundred responses per million spams. A bulk mail campaign with a response rate like that would get the staff fired, but if you make a few bucks on each one, then that's enough to pay for the spam.
So since spam is orders of magnitude cheaper than paper mail, then making it legit will mean that you will get orders of magnitude more spam than you do paper junk mail. Everybody who now buys tiny ads in the backs of newspapers will realize that they get more for their money by sending our a million spams.
And since it's so cheap, they won't be careful where the send them, either. Will you still feel that spam is better when you're getting 100 a day? 200 a day? Your local newspaper has a lot more ads than that every day, and there are a lot of local newspapers in the world. I now regularly get spam for businesses on other continents, and the Internet has barely touched large parts of the world.
I agree with you that paper junk mail is annoying and a waste of good trees. But if you want to save trees, put a 100% tax on non-recycled paper and put the money into forest conservation. Don't ruin our in-boxes in hopes of making some Faustian pact with the marketing industry.
Given that x times thinner doesn't mean anything, how about we redefine it to mean 1/x as thick?
Let's be honest here; about 99% of code currently in use sucks compared to a good native implementation. Although there are some delightful exceptions (e.g., a lot of the Linux kernel), most code is written to run adequately fast, rather than as fast as possible.
This isn't a bad thing; it's just that most programmers write code to solve a particular real-world problem, and stop when the problem has been solved. They only put a lot of work into performance when they're forced to.
Right now I'm in the middle of rewriting a high-volume Perl and C website using Java servlets. Initially, my code was slower than the C, but faster than the Perl. And then I spent a day using a performance analysis tool" and optimizing the bottlenecks and now it's faster than the C and about 10 times faster than the perl, even though it does more and is much more reliable.
This is not to knock Perl or C; I use 'em both when appropriate. But for most of the situations where you'd think about using Java, getting the most out of your CPU isn't the overriding concern.
If you don't need the accessors to be public, don't make 'em public. Private or package-visible accessors are still useful, and you can always make 'em public later. The general rule is that you should only make methods public if absolutely necessary.
But if you do use public accessors, then changing internal representation isn't a big deal. In your example, if a bunch of external code that you don't want to touch uses the variable as a double, then you can leave the public accessors handling doubles. They can look like this:
FixedPoint foo = new FixedPoint();
[...]
public double getFoo() {
return doubleFromFixedPoint(this.foo);
}
public void setFoo(double foo) {
this.foo=fixedPointFromDouble(foo);
}
If necessary, you could then add special accessors for the FixedPoint representation.
This is the advantage of accessors over public instance variables; internal representation is independent (or in the jargon, decoupled) from API. But public vs private is always a designer's option.
It's a randomly generated address only used for Slashdot postings. When some spambot picks it up, I change my Slashdot address and route the old one to /dev/null.
Since videophones have now nearly replaced the ordinary audiophone, it's about time that they finally made a mobile phone that does video!
And this will be so much better for all those people who drive and talk on their phones, too!
I think there is a more relevant reference.
Isn't that two per person? That seems like plenty.
Easy to say. How do you do it?
There's no obvious way to do what you want. There may be extra agricultural capacity here, but how does that translate to famine relief in the back end of Senegal?
Suppose you convince US voters to pay up for a famine relief program on a scale never before seen. Billions of dollars are given to farming companies, to trucking companies, to shipping companies. Billions more go to infrastructure upgrades in recipient countries, so that food can actually make it to the hungry people. And you manage to deliver free food to every man, woman, and child in the third world. This is great, right?
Wrong. You have now wiped out the local farming industry. With free, high-quality food from afar, who's going to pay up for scraggly local food? And since farms require constant upkeep, after a few years your recipients will be dependent on shipped food.
Even worse, you've removed a key check on population growth. When you remove the food supply constraint, there's a huge population boom for a couple of generations. (This isn't a third-world slam; we westerners did the same thing.) Are we committed to feeding them all? Forever? We had better be, because the land they live on can't support them now.
This doesn't sound like charity; it sounds like a sinister plot of the large western agriculture firms.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't try to help; I think we should. But simplistic solutions are a waste of resources and goodwill. They are also generally arrogant in the extreme; we haven't even figured out what to do with our own hungry and homeless, so solving the problems of the entire world seems a bit of a leap.
Around these parts, when we talk about the Constit uti on, we generally are referring to both the original and the changes to it. Sort of the same way that when people say "Linux" they're not talking about the 1.0 release.
Personally, I think the constitution is precious precisely because we can change it, (although I am pleased that it's pretty hard to change). The whole point is that the government is not some static thing handed down from on high; it's something we all do. Allowing the constitution to be ammended is just a recognition that a) circumstances change, and b) nothing is perfect, even if it seems that way at the time.
But you're right about the 18th amendment; that's why we repealed it.
The constitution, alas, only tries to keep the government from interfering. Private citizens are, regrettably, allowed to be as dumb as they want.
If your queen ever lets you have a constitution, you should think about putting something like that in.
As you point out, frame relay was delivered over a T1, making it functionally equivalent to a fractional T1, at least as far as ISPs went.
And for internet service five years ago, a 56K link was a) hard to find, b) a pain to install, c) a worse deal than a fractional T1, and d) a stunningly awful deal compared to a dialup.
The same pretty much goes for ISDN; for 'high-speed' dialup, it was a good deal, but if you wanted a permanent connection from a fixed location, fractional T1s were also a better deal, at least under my RBOC.
And I've never heard of anybody offering internet service via X.25. Did this ever happen? If so, what were they thinking?
And the poster's point, which is that five years ago a small site pretty much had to get a T1, is still basically true. At the time we managed to talk an ISP into colocating a box, but at the time that was a pretty unusual thing.
The one I use, SpamcopWill alert ISPs of contact addresses. It's great!
An excellent book on how it might have happened on earth is Seven Clues To The Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story by Alexander Grahm Cairns-Smith.
Yup! I have my domains set up to send all improperly addressed stuff to me. I then route it to the proper recipient, which is usually me anyhow.
Unfortunately, some spam list now contain a number of fake e-mail addresses from scripts like this, all of which get delivered to me.
For me, that's fine; I just feed 'em to Spamcop. But I'd be pretty pissed otherwise.
There are two separate issues here. One is the jargon, which is awful. (Of course, so is a lot of technical writing.) But the other is the observation that many tech workers take their jobs a lot more seriously than the traditional 9-to-5er, and that some of the talk around it certainly sounds religous.
Sitting here in San Francisco, that strikes me as a pretty obvious observation. Read, for example, the first couple years of Wired; they were all fired up about how the world was going to change completely in practically the blink of an eye. That wasn't just rhetoric, either; I knew a lot of people at HotWired, their on-line arm, and many of the people there felt a sense of mission that was not obviously supported by rational belief.
And although it's slightly less fashionable now, I'd still say that one startup in two talks about how they are going to change the world, revolutionizing X, Y, or Z. Sure, some of this is marketing hype, but many people sincerely believe it. They regularly spend 100+ hours a week on it. Why? Some talk about the money, but that's often a socially acceptable excuse; see The New, New Thing for a character study that slyly shows that money is not really the point for Jim Clark, a big mover and shaker.
Or closer to home, read practially any Slashdot discussion around open source, Microsoft, or vi-vs-emacs. Note the jargon file entries holy wars and religious issues. Or note the high-tech expression drinking the kool-aid, a reference to the Jim Jones cult suicide.
So I'll grant that for you, high-tech may be just another job. Oh, and given that you're hanging out on Slashdot, I guess I'd have to say "just another job, plus a subculture". But for a large number of people, especially here in the Bay Area and especially those working on the cutting edge, religion is not an inappropriate comparison.
I'll admit that a bunch of this research is garbage. But not all of it is. And dismissing the field like you do is exactly the same thing that most people do when they talk about issues we focus on here:
Open source? Closed source? Microsoft' tactics? I'm just sending a few business letters and playing a few games. Who cares about the rest of it, really? None of the MSCEs I know consider themselves part of any "evil global hegemonic empire". They're just geeks doing their jobs.
Just because you haven't noticed the bigger context doesn't mean that it's not there.
Bzzt! Most people already think of it that way. When you buy new software, you expect them to keep coming out with bug fixes, security fixes, upgrades, and whatnot. And let's not forget tech support.
Over the last decade, the trend has been to be more and more stingy with tech support and upgrades. Why? Because those programmers have to be paid somehow, and people will pay up for those things.
A subscription model gives companies a steadier revenue stream and makes it so that then can release features as they're ready, rather than bundling them into massive upgrades that they then have to hype. It also reduces the incentive to force people to upgrade by, say, changing file formats all the time.
For a lot of software vendors, the subscription model makes at least as much sense as anything else. This isn't to say that Microsoft won't use this to gouge people. But they do that already, right?
The problem is that the basic Unix permission concept is *too* simple for many needs.
As one poster points out, most every daemon runs as root. Why? Because there's no easy way to say that arpwatch just needs raw read access to the ethernet devices. So it gets full access to everything.
It also requires administrators to be involved in a lot of things that they shouldn't care about. Say you're a student at a large university. You and a couple of other people get assigned a joint project. Why shouldn't you be able to created a shared directory and give your pals access? With standard Unix permissions, you need somebody with root to create a group entry (and then delete it two weeks later when you get another project).
Or consider the case of a file that needs to be accessed by two groups. Say you have a team of auditors turn up for a month who need to look over some (but not all) accounting records. With ACLs, you create a new group that is the union of the two groups, you change permission on all the files, and change it all back when they leave. Plus in the meantime when they add a new accountant, you need to make sure to remember to add him to the common groups. You can do it, but it's a big pain.
And if ACLs exist, it's not like you're required to use the added power; you can still do owner, exactly-one-group, and everybody-and-their-brother permissions.
I am often wrong (and always glad to learn why), but you won't convince me (or most other geeks) without giving explanation and information. Or at the very least, some references to specific books, rather than just waving vaguely at the hundreds I own.
Anyhow, I'll grant some investing isn't gambling, and that part does indeed have to do with productivity. If I loan my younger brother $1000 to buy a car so he can get to a job, he'll be much more productive than spending his summer on our dad's couch, so he'll be able to pay me a decent return on my dough. And the same logic applies to other investments; if somebody's borrowing an asset and using it to create new value, then the asset's owner and the borrower both win.
So I concur that, on average and in the long term, properly managed assets do indeed increase in value, because those assets get put to use creating more value. And I'm sure you'd grant that if we were all-knowing and infinitely smart, then we would all agree on the price of a share, a price that took into account all future creation of value. If this were true, stocks would never change hands except when people shifted their dough from investment to some other use.
In the real world, though, stocks change hands a lot. Generally people sell one stock and buy another, in effect swapping stocks with other investors. Why? Because they have differing opinions about the future creation of value of a company. Some of those investors will be right, getting higher returns than average. And some will be wrong, losing their shirts.
So now let's come back to the post you were responding to. The guy who said, "one day you win, the next you lose" put all his money in Linux stocks. This is not long-term investing with a desire to get the average rate of return by allowing the market to put your assets to work; this is playing the ponies.
Like all gamblers, he thought he was smarter or more knowledgeable than the average punter. He believed that other investors were undervaluing Linux companies, and that he could therefore clean up by betting on them. This is exactly equivalent to believing that winner at the Kentucky Derby will be Prince of Thieves. Some days you're right, some days you're wrong. On the good days, you win the money of people having bad days.
So as I said, the average investor can only make average rates of return. To beat the average, you need to have a leg up on some other investor, whose loss is your gain. And if you have that leg up (by being, say, a skilled and savvy market maker or a genius with a building full of computers) then you are, by definition, not an average investor.
A reasonable person might now ask, "Well, Mr. Smarty, if that's true then it shouldn't matter at all where I put my money, huh? As long as it's not buried in a jar in my back yard, I'll make that same average return whether I put it in stocks or bonds or CDs, right?"
On average, that would indeed be true, except for the differing levels of risk. Averaged over the last century, US stocks have outperformed bonds by, depending on who you believe, somewhere between 3 and 5 percent in annualized real terms (The Economist, Feb 17 2000). Why? Because some people don't like risk.
Equities may pay more on average, but that is precious little consolation to somebody who needed to cash in their investments in November, 1929. Some people can't afford the chance of a higher return if it means a bigger chance of loss, so they put their money in safer investments. Thus the risk premium is born. (Another way to look at it: People who want safety pay an insurance premium to those who don't need it.)
So I'm going to stand by my statements for now. If I'm wrong, by all means step up to the plate and let me know where. But no more of this I'm-smarter-than-you-so-shut-up stuff, ok?
If you lay out your URLs properly, ht://Dig may be enough; it allows you to restrict searches by URL pattern. See the docs for the restrict keyword.