Lets stop looking at the amount spent on developing or purchasing software and look at the ROI on the software developed or purchased.
'Scuse me, how many posts on slashdot ever bring up actual figures? Lets stop looking verifiable numbers. That is just bogus rhetorical nonesense. But I give you one for your skillful employment of rhetoric.
I posted the numbers from large firms because the names are recognizable and publicly traded companies are required to report numbers. My experience is that FOSS is having the same affects throughout the industry. The companies doing FOSS are struggling to get the funds for further development.
We don't need to live in a rhetorical vacuum to look at the numbers.
As for the article, the article keeps mentioning that politicians just don't get the dialectics of OSS. Well, a large number of them do understand accounting and know how to look at balance sheets. The reason that they are horrified is because a small number of politicians look at balance sheets and right through the rhetoric.
Personally, I prefer small firms to the large ones mentioned. The affects OSS has on small firms in the development industry is magnified tenfold.
Regardless, I will not take your advice. I will not stop looking at numbers. For that matter, reading your post has given me greater appreciation for those who adhere to the scientific method and look at the numbers before pontificiation.
There are people that are willing to personally make that investment
Even worse, there are people who want to make it appear that they made a great altruistic contribution...but have the hopes of sticking you with something else. The program becomes a Trojan for whatever adware or other scheme a company has up its sleeves.
Bait and switch games have been around for a long time. This is one of the main reasons I prefer direct funding of development. Having some form or IP rights and a licensing scheme to created products creates a direct funding mechanism.
It doesn't take a huge investment to create software anymore.
I takes a great deal of investment, research and testing to figure out what the pieces are and which pieces play well together. An OSS program with a well developed mechanism for respecting IP and making payments helps lubricate the system.
Red Hat (RHAT) spent $26M on development compared to say Sun (SUNW) which spent $1,926M on development, Microsoft (MSFT) which spent $1659M, Adobe (ADBE) which spent $276M.
The list can go on as long as you like.
Personally, I care a great deal more for the small firm with a great idea that does have a support on hand to pay their development costs.
The problem is that Open Source Software has been manipulated into the anti-property rights corner. If you have no rights to any of the code you write, then there is no way you can sell it and you go bankrupt.
For OSS to really excel, there simply has to be a mechanism that allows people to get paid for their contributions to innovation.
Open source has the potential of bringing more developers into the software development process...but there needs to be a way for people to protect their investment in the development of the code. Without that piece, politicos like Gates will always be able to come down on it as being anti market.
The idea that people only get paid for installation and not development and that sysadmins will live a dual life installing software during the day for pay and writing code at night is really not tenable. Nor is the idea that software developers will live for extremely sporadic donations. If OSS came with a strong system of structured property rights, then OSS developers would make more money and it would be more exceptible to business types.
One possibility of a bidding for shift structure is that people will bid for more leisure.
I've been reading literature on the nurse shortage. They are saying we have a dire problem developing and maintaining this valuable resource. A direct feedback mechanims between hospitals and staff will hurt unions but it is likely to result in better utilization of a scarce resource. After reading and thinking about bidding for intraoffice work. I am writing this up as a major innovation in employment and resource management.
Unions replace one asymmetry with another. That is why they tend to great a very short term boost in the the conditions of the workers followed by a long term stagnation. Plus I think you are wrong about all businessmen hating unions. The process of unionization generally gives one or two firms a competitive advantage and the politicos in charge of the unions and the companies use that competitive advantage to clean out all of the small competing firms.
As for the people who hate unions...I think that is mainly due to the thugs that get in power in unionized shops.
The goal of the program is to create a more flexible mechanism for managing employees. I suspect that for hospitals implementing the program, the effects on wages are a secondary.
The primary concerns for hospitals is not the base level of salaries. Their primary concerns are how well they utilize their staff and that the salaries they pay are not way out of line with the industry.
I have had conversations with people at CompHealth which does temporary placement for doctors. The bidding process seems to be pushing wages up...not down.
I do agree there is a danger of implementing programs in ways that are one sided. However, I think the automatic asumption that the goal of the free market is to force everyone into subsistence is unwarranted.
Considering the shortage of nurses, wide scale adoption of temporary placement firms and bidding for shifts will push base wages up...not down. My personal observation is that programs that empower people tend to improve their condition. While those that limit choice tend to improverish people.
PS: I googled "eshift." I suspect that the program in question is flexestaff.com
Is the program in question the listed on the site Flexestaff.com. You'd a thought the/. submitter would have looked up and linked to the web site that makes the product...this being a web site about technology and all.
The article sounds like the primary purpose of the program is to give nurses greater flexibility over their schedule and not just bid down wages. The primary cost control is that the program is giving internal nurses a shot at the shifts hospitals were outsourcing.
The article says the unions are irate and doing everything they can to stop it. Giving Nurses the ability to set their own wages totally destroys the union power base. Even if the bidding resulted in a substantial improvement in the quality of life of the nurses, the union would oppose it.
Direct employee/employer negotiations destroys the illusion that the manna comes from the union.
BTW, why is there an automatic assumption that bidding mechanisms will lower wages? This product is being released in a nursing shortage. As such, I would think a bidding mechanism would dramatically increase wages.
IMHO, one of the biggest problems with the employment arrangement is that workers only get to negotiate their wage once...at hiring time when they are least in the position to negotiate. A bidding process creates a continuous feedback mechanism that will keep wages better in line with market forces.
Including adware with the file sharing programs and a small group of people will get extremely rich and powerful.
File sharing works as a backdoor viral type of advertising...It is more more effective than traditional advertising because the people doing it pretend that they are adbusters. Opening disparaging ads increases the effectiveness of one's message...increasing sales.
File sharing should be thought of as an ad source...just one of those ad channels that you didn't join willingly...but can be lucrative if you play it right. Personally, I think we should be able to run the entire planet from ad revenues. Everything can be free if we just splatter ads all over the place.
Please don't point out the obvious that if everything was free then there would be no-one to pay for the ads, I personally reject everything that is obvious as bourgeoise and petty.
You are right that trying to morph a patent process designed to protect physical designs is flawed...for that matter it is entirely contrary to the original intent of the patent process.
The original intent of the patent process was to give protection to physical inventions so that scientists would be more willing to advance science by making the core science behind their work known.
In the current age we find ourselve's faced with a different set of problems. There is a desire to make significant investments in computer infrastructure and there needs to be some way to protect that investment.
All software is in fact a math function. Math is not and cannot be an invention.
I must have missed the press release that logic is a subset of math. For that matter the work Frege, Hilbert, Russell, Cantor et al was to reduce math to logic.
If you are a Platonist, then math is the secret truth that you find when you crawl out of the cave. For the rest of us, math appears to be as much of an invention as anything else. Look at the complex mathematical models people make. They are clearly the creation of man. You remember Kronecker spouting "God created the integers, everything else is the creation of man."
The motivation of most university mathematicians has been to get things published and to receive acclaim. That is, their salary is paid for by students and governments.
As for altruism...professors love being altruistic with other people's money. Again, look at the history of math and you find that it is filled with people who are extremely jealous of their work. Step on a professor's turf or publish a paper that is just a tad too similar to that lovable gruffy professor and you will find yourself under attack like you never knew.
Professors are as jealous as everyone else. However, since they were seeking publication in print media, copyright laws seemed sufficient sufficient.
There are now new media. Did you know that computers didn't exist a short while ago. I, mean, seriously. They did not exist.
They are totally different from print media and physical things. It will take several generations to figure out just what these things are and how they fit in society.
With companies wanting to make big investments in their IT infrastructure, there does need to be some established rights to what they create.
If there are no rights for what I create, then the only way I can establish equity in my work would be to load it with obfuscations so that no-one can figure out the tricks in my software code.
For that matter, OSS depends on property rights. People are more willing to share their source code when there is a sense that there is some protection for the investment in that code.
I agree that you should not be able to own mental processes. What goes on inside a computer is not a mental process. I doubt that you've read even a full percent of the code that is currently running in your machine's computer.
We have new stuff. It is different from the old stuff and the laws aren't working.
Lets say I select some convient software patent and actually preform a demonstration executing that algorithm mentally.
You said in your post that processes could be patented. For that matter, you can say anything is a mental process. Nexium really is just a flipping recipe... a mental process. The little purple pills are just a manifestation of the process.
The fact that the patent generation is separate from invention and discovery is one of the main things that will destroy the machine. Personally, I think the solution to the patent process is not to stage a revolution against property rights but to continue to drive the issue that the system for issuing titles for intellectual property is out of kilter.
Fighting and pointing out the absurdities of patent abuse are a very good first step.
BTW, I suspect the typical car has more than 300 patents involved in its creation and manufacture. However, the shear number of patents developers face is a good method to show the problems faced by small businesses...as it is next to impossible to design any idea without touching on a patent of some sort.
Wanna see people driving around in Salt Lake City? You can see roads before you drive. When you are late for work, you can call your boss and prove that you are in a traffic jam. The technology is going to happen. Personally, I think our best bet is to keep it as open as possible.
IMHO, email does not scale well...as such, it should be avoided. I generally try to get project related and other interoffice communications loaded into databases...with multiple views of the data, etc. The whole trick is to get things scaled correctly. For example, the department manager (the big picture guy) might have a view of all the communications. Others might only have the info for a particular task. The whole "use case" thang is not about consolidating power, but about empowering everyone in the organization with the ability to concentrate on their piece of the puzzle.
This multitasking issue is akin to the division of labor argument made by Adam Smith a few centuries ago. The productivity increases of the industrial age came by allowing people to concentrate on their piece of the puzzle. The tech boom is largely about speed and access to information...however, to solidify the gains we need to answer the scaling issue.
Your being 20 and driving a Camero is already figured in the rates. Now, if you were 20 and drove your Camero like a wuss...well, then the box is for you.
The one really big benefit of a box is that it might make it possible to charge insurance by the mile or hours driven...giving people an extra incentive to hoof it.
...bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers
What I am looking forward to the day when we finally get beyond the meaningless test data phase...uh, anyway, I looked at/. for the day and am off to the email account to perform a spam harvest.
it's because of the proportion of spam to useful mail. I don't know anyone in Asia, so unfortunalty it makes sense for me to use a provider that blocks them.
This is true for all nationalities. There is an extremely low ratio of real mail to spam for all email traffic that travels across borders...because most people really don't know a lot of people across borders. Hence the argument that other countries should shut off the US is as sound as for US ISPs shutting off Asia.
I remember when SCO was a respected and trusted name. They did Unix, they did Linux, they were cool.
I've heard that SCO is getting back to its Santa Cruz roots. Didn't the SCO Provo office recently start allowing clothing optional Fridays?
Of course, with the inbreeding of Provo, things get a bit awkward. I heard that several of the workers had a double take on the first clothing optional Friday when they discovered several of their co-workers had three nipples.
I doubt that many slashdotters will make the list of physic papers with the most impact. However, you can increase the impact of any physics paper by folding it into the shape of a plane, then sticking a needle out of tip of the plane.
The trick many not increase the number of physicist who cite your paper, but it will make a big impression on the physicists you site.
I agree with the point about including all business rules in a single location.
My tendency with data intensive applications is to put all of the business logic in Oracle stored procedures. I then have a variety of front end applications accessing the stored procedures. When the integrity of the database is the main concern of the application, I might write all of the business logic in a Java, PHP or C++ layer, hoping that no-one dinks with the data.
The big advantage of putting all of the business logic in the PL/SQL layer is that it helps make a very clean separation between the different tiers of the application.
Saying "hooked on" does not imply clinical dependency. It was the thing Kesey wanted to explore. "Hooked on Phonics" does not imply a clinical dependency on phonics. The only stated fact in the post was that governments have an on going interest in using drugs for controlling people.
Slashdot Mirror
'Scuse me, how many posts on slashdot ever bring up actual figures? Lets stop looking verifiable numbers. That is just bogus rhetorical nonesense. But I give you one for your skillful employment of rhetoric.
I posted the numbers from large firms because the names are recognizable and publicly traded companies are required to report numbers. My experience is that FOSS is having the same affects throughout the industry. The companies doing FOSS are struggling to get the funds for further development.
We don't need to live in a rhetorical vacuum to look at the numbers.
As for the article, the article keeps mentioning that politicians just don't get the dialectics of OSS. Well, a large number of them do understand accounting and know how to look at balance sheets. The reason that they are horrified is because a small number of politicians look at balance sheets and right through the rhetoric.
Personally, I prefer small firms to the large ones mentioned. The affects OSS has on small firms in the development industry is magnified tenfold.
Regardless, I will not take your advice. I will not stop looking at numbers. For that matter, reading your post has given me greater appreciation for those who adhere to the scientific method and look at the numbers before pontificiation.
Even worse, there are people who want to make it appear that they made a great altruistic contribution...but have the hopes of sticking you with something else. The program becomes a Trojan for whatever adware or other scheme a company has up its sleeves.
Bait and switch games have been around for a long time. This is one of the main reasons I prefer direct funding of development. Having some form or IP rights and a licensing scheme to created products creates a direct funding mechanism.
I takes a great deal of investment, research and testing to figure out what the pieces are and which pieces play well together. An OSS program with a well developed mechanism for respecting IP and making payments helps lubricate the system.
Red Hat (RHAT) spent $26M on development compared to say Sun (SUNW) which spent $1,926M on development, Microsoft (MSFT) which spent $1659M, Adobe (ADBE) which spent $276M.
The list can go on as long as you like.
Personally, I care a great deal more for the small firm with a great idea that does have a support on hand to pay their development costs.
The problem is that Open Source Software has been manipulated into the anti-property rights corner. If you have no rights to any of the code you write, then there is no way you can sell it and you go bankrupt.
For OSS to really excel, there simply has to be a mechanism that allows people to get paid for their contributions to innovation.
Open source has the potential of bringing more developers into the software development process...but there needs to be a way for people to protect their investment in the development of the code. Without that piece, politicos like Gates will always be able to come down on it as being anti market.
The idea that people only get paid for installation and not development and that sysadmins will live a dual life installing software during the day for pay and writing code at night is really not tenable. Nor is the idea that software developers will live for extremely sporadic donations. If OSS came with a strong system of structured property rights, then OSS developers would make more money and it would be more exceptible to business types.
Sorry, but, why would Mr. Gate want to take such a large cut in his polical influence and pay?
One possibility of a bidding for shift structure is that people will bid for more leisure.
I've been reading literature on the nurse shortage. They are saying we have a dire problem developing and maintaining this valuable resource. A direct feedback mechanims between hospitals and staff will hurt unions but it is likely to result in better utilization of a scarce resource. After reading and thinking about bidding for intraoffice work. I am writing this up as a major innovation in employment and resource management.
Unions replace one asymmetry with another. That is why they tend to great a very short term boost in the the conditions of the workers followed by a long term stagnation. Plus I think you are wrong about all businessmen hating unions. The process of unionization generally gives one or two firms a competitive advantage and the politicos in charge of the unions and the companies use that competitive advantage to clean out all of the small competing firms.
As for the people who hate unions...I think that is mainly due to the thugs that get in power in unionized shops.
The goal of the program is to create a more flexible mechanism for managing employees. I suspect that for hospitals implementing the program, the effects on wages are a secondary.
The primary concerns for hospitals is not the base level of salaries. Their primary concerns are how well they utilize their staff and that the salaries they pay are not way out of line with the industry.
I have had conversations with people at CompHealth which does temporary placement for doctors. The bidding process seems to be pushing wages up...not down.
I do agree there is a danger of implementing programs in ways that are one sided. However, I think the automatic asumption that the goal of the free market is to force everyone into subsistence is unwarranted.
Considering the shortage of nurses, wide scale adoption of temporary placement firms and bidding for shifts will push base wages up...not down. My personal observation is that programs that empower people tend to improve their condition. While those that limit choice tend to improverish people.
PS: I googled "eshift." I suspect that the program in question is flexestaff.com
Is the program in question the listed on the site Flexestaff.com. You'd a thought the /. submitter would have looked up and linked to the web site that makes the product...this being a web site about technology and all.
The article sounds like the primary purpose of the program is to give nurses greater flexibility over their schedule and not just bid down wages. The primary cost control is that the program is giving internal nurses a shot at the shifts hospitals were outsourcing.
The article says the unions are irate and doing everything they can to stop it. Giving Nurses the ability to set their own wages totally destroys the union power base. Even if the bidding resulted in a substantial improvement in the quality of life of the nurses, the union would oppose it.
Direct employee/employer negotiations destroys the illusion that the manna comes from the union.
BTW, why is there an automatic assumption that bidding mechanisms will lower wages? This product is being released in a nursing shortage. As such, I would think a bidding mechanism would dramatically increase wages.
IMHO, one of the biggest problems with the employment arrangement is that workers only get to negotiate their wage once...at hiring time when they are least in the position to negotiate. A bidding process creates a continuous feedback mechanism that will keep wages better in line with market forces.
Including adware with the file sharing programs and a small group of people will get extremely rich and powerful.
File sharing works as a backdoor viral type of advertising...It is more more effective than traditional advertising because the people doing it pretend that they are adbusters. Opening disparaging ads increases the effectiveness of one's message...increasing sales.
File sharing should be thought of as an ad source...just one of those ad channels that you didn't join willingly...but can be lucrative if you play it right. Personally, I think we should be able to run the entire planet from ad revenues. Everything can be free if we just splatter ads all over the place.
Please don't point out the obvious that if everything was free then there would be no-one to pay for the ads, I personally reject everything that is obvious as bourgeoise and petty.
And like God, beer can be healthy if you don't over do it.
You are right that trying to morph a patent process designed to protect physical designs is flawed...for that matter it is entirely contrary to the original intent of the patent process.
The original intent of the patent process was to give protection to physical inventions so that scientists would be more willing to advance science by making the core science behind their work known.
In the current age we find ourselve's faced with a different set of problems. There is a desire to make significant investments in computer infrastructure and there needs to be some way to protect that investment.
I must have missed the press release that logic is a subset of math. For that matter the work Frege, Hilbert, Russell, Cantor et al was to reduce math to logic.
If you are a Platonist, then math is the secret truth that you find when you crawl out of the cave. For the rest of us, math appears to be as much of an invention as anything else. Look at the complex mathematical models people make. They are clearly the creation of man. You remember Kronecker spouting "God created the integers, everything else is the creation of man."
The motivation of most university mathematicians has been to get things published and to receive acclaim. That is, their salary is paid for by students and governments.
As for altruism...professors love being altruistic with other people's money. Again, look at the history of math and you find that it is filled with people who are extremely jealous of their work. Step on a professor's turf or publish a paper that is just a tad too similar to that lovable gruffy professor and you will find yourself under attack like you never knew.
Professors are as jealous as everyone else. However, since they were seeking publication in print media, copyright laws seemed sufficient sufficient.
There are now new media. Did you know that computers didn't exist a short while ago. I, mean, seriously. They did not exist.
They are totally different from print media and physical things. It will take several generations to figure out just what these things are and how they fit in society.
With companies wanting to make big investments in their IT infrastructure, there does need to be some established rights to what they create.
If there are no rights for what I create, then the only way I can establish equity in my work would be to load it with obfuscations so that no-one can figure out the tricks in my software code.
For that matter, OSS depends on property rights. People are more willing to share their source code when there is a sense that there is some protection for the investment in that code.
I agree that you should not be able to own mental processes. What goes on inside a computer is not a mental process. I doubt that you've read even a full percent of the code that is currently running in your machine's computer.
We have new stuff. It is different from the old stuff and the laws aren't working.
You said in your post that processes could be patented. For that matter, you can say anything is a mental process. Nexium really is just a flipping recipe... a mental process. The little purple pills are just a manifestation of the process.
The fact that the patent generation is separate from invention and discovery is one of the main things that will destroy the machine. Personally, I think the solution to the patent process is not to stage a revolution against property rights but to continue to drive the issue that the system for issuing titles for intellectual property is out of kilter.
Fighting and pointing out the absurdities of patent abuse are a very good first step.
BTW, I suspect the typical car has more than 300 patents involved in its creation and manufacture. However, the shear number of patents developers face is a good method to show the problems faced by small businesses...as it is next to impossible to design any idea without touching on a patent of some sort.
Wanna see people driving around in Salt Lake City? You can see roads before you drive. When you are late for work, you can call your boss and prove that you are in a traffic jam. The technology is going to happen. Personally, I think our best bet is to keep it as open as possible.
...now, if we were talking about the weight of egos...
This multitasking issue is akin to the division of labor argument made by Adam Smith a few centuries ago. The productivity increases of the industrial age came by allowing people to concentrate on their piece of the puzzle. The tech boom is largely about speed and access to information...however, to solidify the gains we need to answer the scaling issue.
Your being 20 and driving a Camero is already figured in the rates. Now, if you were 20 and drove your Camero like a wuss...well, then the box is for you.
The one really big benefit of a box is that it might make it possible to charge insurance by the mile or hours driven...giving people an extra incentive to hoof it.
What I am looking forward to the day when we finally get beyond the meaningless test data phase...uh, anyway, I looked at /. for the day and am off to the email account to perform a spam harvest.
This is true for all nationalities. There is an extremely low ratio of real mail to spam for all email traffic that travels across borders...because most people really don't know a lot of people across borders. Hence the argument that other countries should shut off the US is as sound as for US ISPs shutting off Asia.
I've heard that SCO is getting back to its Santa Cruz roots. Didn't the SCO Provo office recently start allowing clothing optional Fridays?
Of course, with the inbreeding of Provo, things get a bit awkward. I heard that several of the workers had a double take on the first clothing optional Friday when they discovered several of their co-workers had three nipples.
I doubt that many slashdotters will make the list of physic papers with the most impact. However, you can increase the impact of any physics paper by folding it into the shape of a plane, then sticking a needle out of tip of the plane.
The trick many not increase the number of physicist who cite your paper, but it will make a big impression on the physicists you site.
I agree with the point about including all business rules in a single location.
My tendency with data intensive applications is to put all of the business logic in Oracle stored procedures. I then have a variety of front end applications accessing the stored procedures. When the integrity of the database is the main concern of the application, I might write all of the business logic in a Java, PHP or C++ layer, hoping that no-one dinks with the data.
The big advantage of putting all of the business logic in the PL/SQL layer is that it helps make a very clean separation between the different tiers of the application.
Saying "hooked on" does not imply clinical dependency. It was the thing Kesey wanted to explore. "Hooked on Phonics" does not imply a clinical dependency on phonics. The only stated fact in the post was that governments have an on going interest in using drugs for controlling people.