Right. And note that, without regulation, there would never have been telephone service in many rural areas (and in some parts of some cities).
Quite frankly, I think the subsidies for rural telephone is a myth that AT&T perpetuated to keep its monopoly. "We need a monopoly so we can rob Peter with the justification of maybe paying Paul."
Farming is big business, if there was not a subsidized monopoly, you still would have seen a large number of rural cooperatives, and probably a faster evolution of telephony. In the end, the massive AT&T monopoly was proved overall setback, not a great leap forward for communication technologies.
Regardless of our interpretation of history, I think the wide number of options for rural users makes subsidies even worse. Farms are better served by wireless. There is less maintenance, they have the open bandwidth in the country, and it is more useful.
Costs of routing have dropped so dramatically, that the current tax structure costs more than the service, yet the government is addicted to taxes and will regulate just to collect taxes. They will justify their actions with anti-market myths like the rural phone gap. Don't give in to the game.
PS: If living in the city is more efficient, shouldn't we be encouraging people to live in cities. taxing city folk to give money to country folk ends up creating a market inefficiency.
Remember to leave your phone at home before you do your dastardly deeds. It will save the embarrassment of having to tense your hand in court so the glove won't fit.
BTW, this post is assuming that the phone company is keeping accurate records of every place your phone visits. Having the ability to track phones does not mean that telcos are tracking every phone at the moment.
I see our difference now. When talking of archiving, you are thinking of a single media. I think of archiving as a process. Archiving involves making multiple copies, routine maintenance and a process for copying the data to new drives if the media is deteriorating. Good archiving involves making copies in multiple cities.
I don't know if you ever heard of a thing called a RAID drive, or mirrored servers. They use multiple copies and various check sum techniques to restore data if a single disk fails. RAID isn't simply a medium, it is a process.
Digital media lends itself to an archival process because it is easy to copy.
Even with paper, archiving depends on a process.
The manuscripts from the ancients (the Bible, Aristotle, Plato...) had been transcribed several times and the originals lost. Archiving information for centuries require a process. The process generally involves making multiple copies and storing the copies in multiple cities.
Most of the books that are a 100 years old are really in horrible condition. Paper deteriorates. The printing press is a great archiving machine. You print 10,000 copies and perhaps 10 will be legible two hundred years later.
Archiving also involves establishing context. The problems with a lot of programs or just data on a CD is that the data on the CD has lost its context. You need a process to maintain the context.
The one problem with long term archival processes is that you are depending on future generations to maintain the process. That happens regardless of whether or not you are looking at paper, digital media or carvings in stone.
The main point of my post, however, was that in the last 10 years, I suspect more information has been printed on archival quality papers or entered into archival quality digital processes than at any time in history. The majority of what was printed or written a hundred years ago has vanished, even though it was printed on paper. The majority of stuff we do today will vanish, but we have a hundred thousand times more stuff in archival quality forms than people had a thousand years ago. We are not under archived.
I did not say file and hardware incompatibilities do not exist...just that we are not suffering the possibility of loss of our culture. Once data is on the network, the hardware problems become less severe. When one program replaces another, you migrate the data to the new servers.
The problems we will have with electronic media probably will have more to do with reinterpretation during the transfer. These same problems occurred with monks transcribing works. First they chose which works to keep and which to toss out, and they "corrected" the mistakes that they saw.
Far more information today is being recorded on long lived media formats than ever before at any time.
I really don't fall for the lost data due to file incompatibility issue. The last 50 years has recorded more information than any other corresponding period. Our biggest problem right now is information overload. We are recording more information than future generations can or will ever want to process. In this regards the electronic archives might prove more valuable as they can be processed by historians in a faster manner than paper.
books will remain indispensable, not only for literature but for any circumstances in which one needs to read carefully, not only in order to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it.
I found this quote from the article interesting. By being slashdotted, thousands of people are reading Eco at the moment. The slashdotters are actively engaged in trying to think of something clever to say for mod points. The blanket statement that people reflect when reading books, and don't with the net isn't quite true. People are engaged a little bit differently.
Yeah, but the company she pays $100 to in order for them to "optimize" her page sure does.
By the time that a SEO spam technique is being sold for $100.00 a shot, the technique is probably being scrutinized by Google. Ms. Gift Baskets is being had by the $100 solutions since the spam technique has a limited shelf life.
BTW, there are some really great small gift basket shops around. I think the challenge at Google is to find a way that the small shops making their own gift baskets can be heard among all the clatter created by the Hickory Farms of the world.
The problem faced by search engines is to get the good netizens heard over the SEO spammers. The real crime is that Ms. Gift Baskets has to pay $100.00.
We just skipped the important debate about whether or not "architecture" is the right metaphor for most IT. Most IT involves systems that evolve, as such they are generally better served with a flat structure where multiple people have input on the design and direct responsibilities in regard to implementation.
The architect metaphor is from the construction industry. In construction, the architect is pretty much elevated one step above God. The metaphor demotes everyone else to the status of code monkey. While such social patterns might be needed in a packaged software environment, I think it is better for most companies to have a flatter political hierarchy where multiple people have input on design and have their own areas of responsibility.
Regardless, design patterns have a great deal to offer in flatter structures, as they give people greater ability to talk about design issues.
Design patterns give people a greater ability to talk about programs. Unforunately, it also comes with the hype that you will be able to just create UML model with your named patterns and a working bug free programs will drop out of the sky. For the most part, the ability to talk about programs abstractly is worth the effort to learn about patterns, although pattern-speak can add nasty dimensions to corporate politics...with one click pattern-speaking and another click not.
I think PREQUEL is the word for the thing that Robert Jordan is doing by writing about the war for Tar Valon that happened before his never to be completed Wheel of Time nth-ology.
A PREQUEL is a thing written after a popular series to give information on what happened before the series, and to make more money. The Simirilian [sp] would qualify as a prequel.
And I am shocked at even the suggestion that I be a trollin'
I can't wait either, and really wish I didn't have to as I fear the new things that have been added to the flick now that the production company is flush with cash.
I think the reason for the disappointment with a lot of sequels to popular flix is that they were filmed with more cash and star power. The producers would feel an expectation to be more in every way...which disappoints the audience that loved subtle nuances of the first films. The other extreme, of course, is for the film to become campy.
The main thing I am hoping for with LoTR III is continuity. As all three parts of the series were filmed at the same time; So, I think there is a good chance that they will stick with the same flavor and pace.
But they did have a year and a great deal of money. It is possible to a great deal of harm when you have a lot of money.
BTW, I read the book...and am still trying to figure out how this whole thing with Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gollum is going to end up with thirteen dwarves fighting a dragon over a treasure.
I agree, giving someone a one size fit all content management program with the idea that it will make their online experience a wonderland is absurd. I will just lead to a lot of work and unhappiness.
Personally, I think people are better off playing with a variety of programs. For example, you might try an online gallery with Yahoo, oFoto or those types of programs. Geocities pages are easy to maintain. There's tons of multiuser genealogy sites. If a person wants a simple home page for articles, I would just stick with one of the big blog companies.
The diversity approach gives people a chance to learn what they like and don't like. Online happiness comes from playing with different things. Instead of getting something large in scope, I would look to smaller things.
For example, there is a new railroad tycoon program out, I was thinking of getting that for the paternal unit. I wrote a PHP program so the maternal unit could publish her philosophical thoughts. Even an extremely limited scope web page for parents takes a great deal of work.
The Florida election was a marketer's dream. A good marketer know that the way to score big is to find a problem, then make it five times worse than it is. Finally, it doesn't matter if the product you sell doesn't really do anything.
As for evoting, why can't we just let the technology evolve? For that matter, the technology should be designed anticipating evolution. For example, maybe the software should not be bought from the same company selling the hardware...keep the programs independent.
I apologize in advance to any system architect reading this, but this vision we have a perfect designed voting system is bunk. It takes several iterations and gradual improvements to get it right.
The first post in this thread mention OSS for the voting systems. OSS is more open to gradual improvements, and it makes it easier for the same set of programs to be run on different machines.
Evolution will happen, the evolution in the closed system will happen by voting districts losing all of their ballots. The Florida fiasco was just part of the evolution.
First, we really don't know how much of the stuff in the library of Alexandria was garbage. I suspect the majority of writings in Alexandria was useless tripe.
As for MP3, the site contained a large number of high quality recordings that preceeded the digital age. In the classical and world music departments, there were collections of top rate recordings by professional artists that just didn't have the market to compete in the mainstream.
This destroying of what was shaping up to be one of the greatest open repositories of music is a black mark for the music industry.
I feel for Michael Robertson, however, we lost the site because he wasted his company the absurd Beam-It-Up lawsuit. We have to defend what we build or it goes away.
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I suspect that the/. affect is the thing the group is hoping to measure. Thousands of users slamming servers can provide a wonderful amount of click stream data.
For the most part, I agree with your scenario, except that the marketing hype that accompanies OSS includes a great deal of anti marketing rhetoric.
BTW, MS exists because IBM was worried about anti-trust enforcement if they moved in and took over the PC industry. MS didn't just have the better product. They were part of IBM's strategy to avoid anti trust legislation. Without antitrust worries, the PC industry would have simply been small number of proprietary systems like the Mac.
Linux has the possibility of replacing the Window's world, but to get to the next level, it has to find away around the perception that it is anti-market or that it is just a personality cult.
You say this yet go on to act like Linux isn't a free market.
You are right, one of the attractions of Linux is that it is a little bit more like the traditional free market than MS. My rant was based on the article which was trying to make it sound as though Linux is just a personality cult. In truth, OSS is in part a reaction of free market proponents who are ticked at the way the market is controlled.
I think one of the gravest dangers that Linux and OSS faces is its getting pegged as an anti-market movement. Articles like this that try to say it is a Jimmy Jones type personality cult do a lot to undermine the potentials of the platform.
You see that because we can all work together to make our products better, the global knowledge is shared and improved upon.
The free market, BTW, does the same thing. The free market (with lots of little independent companies that buy sell and trade goods) creates a mutually profitable self organizing system where people exchange ideas and grow prosperous together.
I was turned off by this article because it assumes the world is simply the case of a monopolist verse a revolutionary leader.
The monopolist rules by capital he has aquired through the years. The revolutionary rules by charisma and his ability to get others to toe the line by coersion of their creative talents.
I seriously dislike the way that Gates has been actively seeking to destroy the free market. However there are still a few vestiges of the free market left. As long as there are still a few remaining outcrops of the free market, Gates will continue to be stronger than Linus, because Gates will be able to buy or re-engineer the creations of the free market.
BTW, I don't fall for the argument of wonderfullness of altruism. Gates uses altruism to destroy his enemies. Gates altruistically "gave" the world ie to destroy a serious rival Netscape. Altruism in business is generally a sign of ulterior motives.
Of course, in this world where the U.S. government makes no effective effort to address monopolies, the free market breaks down, and most of us are left in a world where we have no choice but to follow the revolutionaries.
I dislike the article as it makes the world sound as if we are having to choose between the world of Gates where one man owns all the world's resources, and that of Linus where no one is ever paid but everything is free (ie, people get what they can take).
The truth is that both ideas are ultimately feeding on the free market as the source of their power. Dammit, I want to live in a world with out these friggin' overlords and uber men around every corner. A free market with small companies still looks like the best of all worlds to me.
I'm sure that Linus has more friends than Bill Gates anyway.
Not when you include bought friends.
Of course, people who live in the power broker worlds of mega corporations and the revolutionary avant guard don't really have "friends." They have the people they are using and the people who are using them.
I simply don't see the corelation between OOP principles and file formats.
I tend to think ahead of myself. I started OOP with object databases, which focused largely on the nature of data. I was actually a reactionary who claimed that there were limits to OOP.
Good file format design starts with the data. You figure out the best way to store information to the disk. In relational databases you start by normalizing the data. In music, you try to figure out what information you need to record to get a good sound. The program that interprets the data is incidental. Data is independent of the program.
The extreme of OO design would say that there is no meaning to data outside the program to interpret it. Data is just a minor part of the overall object.
Now lets look at programming. Many of the first computers lacked good memory management procedure. There were all sorts of bugs caused by programs accessing memory from other programs. OO completely solved this at the programming level. It gave an absolute that only the object had access to the data owned by the object.
OO was working so well in computers, that it was natural to want to use it for other challenges.
OO is not just a programming language, it is a design principle. OOP works great when the life cycle of all the objects start and end in the user session. However, there are many objects that persist beyond the user session. For example, an employee object would exist from the hiring event to the mass lay off event.
This means that objects need to store data in a persistent medium. Theoretically, although this data is written in a file, it is still part of the object.
Current wisdom of the day would say that OO rules while the data of the object is in memory, but OS rules when it is stored to disk. Of course, the distinction between disk and RAM might someday blur.
Let's say you created an WMU player that only had RAM. This is high quality RAM that does not crash. Rather than downloading a music file, this program creates a music object. The object might have an encoded self destruct date, etc. Accessing this data by anything other than the encoded WMU object would entail actually reading the memory states of the RAM...which revisits the pre OOP days.
This is not a legal challenge. It is just a philosophical musing.
OOP principles, which are about how data is handled and manipulated within a program, have nothing to do with file formats, which is (primarily) about how data is stored when the program is not running.
The original OO ideal was that one object would own its data throughout the entire lifecycle of the object. Only the object that owned the data would be allowed access to the data of the object.
This is why OO programmers coined the phrase the problem of persistence. The problem is that it is harder to assure that a program owns its data when the data is written to disk. Many of the first OO languages were extremely adverse to writing any data to disk. Some had really funky programs that would write out the memory state. Some tried to lock written data so that no other programs could access it.
One of the goals of the original ODBMS craze was that objects would control all access to the data in the database.
You can see this design philosophy in the Windows Registry where one program owns access to the data in the registry. Why do you think the registry is so weird?
This idea of data being owned by its object is also present in many security models where the security objects own the database of user names and passwords.
My guess is that you missed the part of the computer revolution where objects were the cure all to all ills that ever plagued mankind and that objects would replace legacy RDBMSs by 1989, or whenever it was.
This OO post was actually very relevant to the copyright issue here, because if you are holding the the original OO ideals that your program owns the data through the whole lifecycle of the object, then having other programs access your object breaks your design philosophy. Pointing this out is not all that trollish.
Personally, I do not agree with the absolutist OO design, I just thought the conflict was relevant.
This is one area where I think the object oriented ideals have hurt software.
Prior to OOP, the industry was concentrating on creating data format standards. Programs may change, but the data saved to the disk stays constant. In such a world, there would be standard document format such as SGML, HTML, MP3, GIF, JPEG...Different programs would read and write these formats.
OOP is really about memory management in the processor. However, it holds the ideal that the object owns the data. The ideal that a program "owns" the data encourages the development of proprietary data formats. This is why persistence was such a problem for early OOP implementations. When data is saved to a disk, any program can come in a dink with the data.
Anyway, if you hold to the ideal that an object is the owner of the data, then the question of different programs having access to data store takes on an ideological dimension. The data and code together make the object. Anyone trying to write programs to crack this dependency is violating the primary tenet of the code.
Even worse, your bulk email just might get you caught in St. Peter's spam filter. This of how horrible it would be to be stuck in some junk email list for eternity, while everyone gets to party.
I think there needs to be major changes to the copyright laws. MP3.com's engaging in a debate and lobbying for change was great.
The problem came when the company decided that it could simply force a change in the law by the overall mass of the internet and the size of its investor warchest. The Napster strategy was pretty much the same thing. Gain so much weight that they could force a change to the law...guess what? Politicians never respond well to force. Especially when they see that the change in the law would eliminate a lot of tax revenues.
Had MP3 simply backed down. Engaged in the debate and made it clear that they would stick with the law, then they probably would have eventually won their legal battle. Instead, the court decided to take the MP3.com war chest. The company failed. End of story.
Unfortunately, I fear that we will not get adequate copyright reform as long as the movement is perceived as a group of unprinciple radicals that will not abide by any new laws.
Democracy works by people arguing for positions, but by abiding by the laws even when they don't go your way.
For those confused by the above post. There is a world view that has been running around since the days of Zenos in ancient Greece. This view denies the possibility of multiplicity and holds that the idea of individual people existing is absurd. Your apparent existence in just an illusion. There really is just a great big world spirit running around that is resolving issues in a violent class of thesis and antithesis. Occasionally there are uber men who are catalizing forces in the great historical dance of world history.
The opposing view, which is rejected by most true scholars, but seems to hang around despite the fact that there is no justification for such petty beliefs, is that individual people actually do exist, and that individual people have existed throughout history. Individual people do things, and a great deal of the stuff around us the product of these people, their ideas and efforts. The right wing whackos that hold this position are more likely to conclude that the great world spirit is the myth...not the individual people.
The belief of the CEO as uberman is actually out of the world spirit view. It is one of those clever dialectical twists that is so easy to pull off. To get around the fact that Ayn Rand argued that the industrialists really were building something the world spirit crowd simply hijacked the theory, then raised the CEO to uberman status.
Anyway, the absurd belief that individual exist pretty much has this unworkable paradigm where people are trading goods and services. People holding this antiquated view, would actually even see the CEO as a individual human who is trading goods and services. Anyway, this childish belief that people exist is ___so___ middle class, petty and bourgeoise that it really shouldn't be discussed in an advanced intellectual format like/.
Ooops, I am typing to quickly. Have I mentioned in the post yet that the middle class is petty? It is really important in when writing to include a large number of jabs at the groups that you despise. I often forget the subtle jabs and they are the most important part of any writing, and I would hate for the world spirit to get mad at me.
The original MP3.com was the best thing to happen for independent artists in the history of recorded music. It was a nice, simple program where artists could upload songs, and make some beer money. Unfortunately, MP3.com wasted the entire opportunity on its stupid conjecture that they were so large, that they could effectively rewrite copyright laws just through their will alone.
Before we jump into the diatribe about how MP3 couldn't exist unless it had the top 40 music, I want to point out that the whole top 40 or die conjecture was built on the false premise held by all of the dot coms...that is: a company had to monopolize the market to exist.
Companies can exist without being a monopoly.
MP3.com was a great program. It was destroyed by arrogant snits who rejected the notion of rule of law. If MP3.com simply gave up on the Beam-It-Up program, it would have been in the position after the fall of Napster to capture the coveted position of internet's primary source for music. Instead, they wasted the company on a multimillion dollar law suit that anyone familar with the court system knew in advance that they would lose.
MP3.com was the one viable alternative to this ultra intrusive world that Microsoft is creating where every song you listen to is monitored and analyzed by Big Brother Bill, and independent artists are once again shuffled off to the furthest fringes.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite frankly, I think the subsidies for rural telephone is a myth that AT&T perpetuated to keep its monopoly. "We need a monopoly so we can rob Peter with the justification of maybe paying Paul."
Farming is big business, if there was not a subsidized monopoly, you still would have seen a large number of rural cooperatives, and probably a faster evolution of telephony. In the end, the massive AT&T monopoly was proved overall setback, not a great leap forward for communication technologies.
Regardless of our interpretation of history, I think the wide number of options for rural users makes subsidies even worse. Farms are better served by wireless. There is less maintenance, they have the open bandwidth in the country, and it is more useful.
Costs of routing have dropped so dramatically, that the current tax structure costs more than the service, yet the government is addicted to taxes and will regulate just to collect taxes. They will justify their actions with anti-market myths like the rural phone gap. Don't give in to the game.
PS: If living in the city is more efficient, shouldn't we be encouraging people to live in cities. taxing city folk to give money to country folk ends up creating a market inefficiency.
Remember to leave your phone at home before you do your dastardly deeds. It will save the embarrassment of having to tense your hand in court so the glove won't fit.
BTW, this post is assuming that the phone company is keeping accurate records of every place your phone visits. Having the ability to track phones does not mean that telcos are tracking every phone at the moment.
I see our difference now. When talking of archiving, you are thinking of a single media. I think of archiving as a process. Archiving involves making multiple copies, routine maintenance and a process for copying the data to new drives if the media is deteriorating. Good archiving involves making copies in multiple cities.
I don't know if you ever heard of a thing called a RAID drive, or mirrored servers. They use multiple copies and various check sum techniques to restore data if a single disk fails. RAID isn't simply a medium, it is a process.
Digital media lends itself to an archival process because it is easy to copy.
Even with paper, archiving depends on a process. The manuscripts from the ancients (the Bible, Aristotle, Plato...) had been transcribed several times and the originals lost. Archiving information for centuries require a process. The process generally involves making multiple copies and storing the copies in multiple cities.
Most of the books that are a 100 years old are really in horrible condition. Paper deteriorates. The printing press is a great archiving machine. You print 10,000 copies and perhaps 10 will be legible two hundred years later.
Archiving also involves establishing context. The problems with a lot of programs or just data on a CD is that the data on the CD has lost its context. You need a process to maintain the context.
The one problem with long term archival processes is that you are depending on future generations to maintain the process. That happens regardless of whether or not you are looking at paper, digital media or carvings in stone.
The main point of my post, however, was that in the last 10 years, I suspect more information has been printed on archival quality papers or entered into archival quality digital processes than at any time in history. The majority of what was printed or written a hundred years ago has vanished, even though it was printed on paper. The majority of stuff we do today will vanish, but we have a hundred thousand times more stuff in archival quality forms than people had a thousand years ago. We are not under archived.
I did not say file and hardware incompatibilities do not exist...just that we are not suffering the possibility of loss of our culture. Once data is on the network, the hardware problems become less severe. When one program replaces another, you migrate the data to the new servers.
The problems we will have with electronic media probably will have more to do with reinterpretation during the transfer. These same problems occurred with monks transcribing works. First they chose which works to keep and which to toss out, and they "corrected" the mistakes that they saw.
Far more information today is being recorded on long lived media formats than ever before at any time.
I really don't fall for the lost data due to file incompatibility issue. The last 50 years has recorded more information than any other corresponding period. Our biggest problem right now is information overload. We are recording more information than future generations can or will ever want to process. In this regards the electronic archives might prove more valuable as they can be processed by historians in a faster manner than paper.
I found this quote from the article interesting. By being slashdotted, thousands of people are reading Eco at the moment. The slashdotters are actively engaged in trying to think of something clever to say for mod points. The blanket statement that people reflect when reading books, and don't with the net isn't quite true. People are engaged a little bit differently.
By the time that a SEO spam technique is being sold for $100.00 a shot, the technique is probably being scrutinized by Google. Ms. Gift Baskets is being had by the $100 solutions since the spam technique has a limited shelf life.
BTW, there are some really great small gift basket shops around. I think the challenge at Google is to find a way that the small shops making their own gift baskets can be heard among all the clatter created by the Hickory Farms of the world.
The problem faced by search engines is to get the good netizens heard over the SEO spammers. The real crime is that Ms. Gift Baskets has to pay $100.00.
We just skipped the important debate about whether or not "architecture" is the right metaphor for most IT. Most IT involves systems that evolve, as such they are generally better served with a flat structure where multiple people have input on the design and direct responsibilities in regard to implementation.
The architect metaphor is from the construction industry. In construction, the architect is pretty much elevated one step above God. The metaphor demotes everyone else to the status of code monkey. While such social patterns might be needed in a packaged software environment, I think it is better for most companies to have a flatter political hierarchy where multiple people have input on design and have their own areas of responsibility.
Regardless, design patterns have a great deal to offer in flatter structures, as they give people greater ability to talk about design issues.
Design patterns give people a greater ability to talk about programs. Unforunately, it also comes with the hype that you will be able to just create UML model with your named patterns and a working bug free programs will drop out of the sky. For the most part, the ability to talk about programs abstractly is worth the effort to learn about patterns, although pattern-speak can add nasty dimensions to corporate politics...with one click pattern-speaking and another click not.
I think PREQUEL is the word for the thing that Robert Jordan is doing by writing about the war for Tar Valon that happened before his never to be completed Wheel of Time nth-ology.
A PREQUEL is a thing written after a popular series to give information on what happened before the series, and to make more money. The Simirilian [sp] would qualify as a prequel.
And I am shocked at even the suggestion that I be a trollin'
I can't wait either, and really wish I didn't have to as I fear the new things that have been added to the flick now that the production company is flush with cash.
I think the reason for the disappointment with a lot of sequels to popular flix is that they were filmed with more cash and star power. The producers would feel an expectation to be more in every way...which disappoints the audience that loved subtle nuances of the first films. The other extreme, of course, is for the film to become campy.
The main thing I am hoping for with LoTR III is continuity. As all three parts of the series were filmed at the same time; So, I think there is a good chance that they will stick with the same flavor and pace.
But they did have a year and a great deal of money. It is possible to a great deal of harm when you have a lot of money.
BTW, I read the book...and am still trying to figure out how this whole thing with Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gollum is going to end up with thirteen dwarves fighting a dragon over a treasure.
I agree, giving someone a one size fit all content management program with the idea that it will make their online experience a wonderland is absurd. I will just lead to a lot of work and unhappiness.
Personally, I think people are better off playing with a variety of programs. For example, you might try an online gallery with Yahoo, oFoto or those types of programs. Geocities pages are easy to maintain. There's tons of multiuser genealogy sites. If a person wants a simple home page for articles, I would just stick with one of the big blog companies.
The diversity approach gives people a chance to learn what they like and don't like. Online happiness comes from playing with different things. Instead of getting something large in scope, I would look to smaller things.
For example, there is a new railroad tycoon program out, I was thinking of getting that for the paternal unit. I wrote a PHP program so the maternal unit could publish her philosophical thoughts. Even an extremely limited scope web page for parents takes a great deal of work.
The Florida election was a marketer's dream. A good marketer know that the way to score big is to find a problem, then make it five times worse than it is. Finally, it doesn't matter if the product you sell doesn't really do anything.
As for evoting, why can't we just let the technology evolve? For that matter, the technology should be designed anticipating evolution. For example, maybe the software should not be bought from the same company selling the hardware...keep the programs independent.
I apologize in advance to any system architect reading this, but this vision we have a perfect designed voting system is bunk. It takes several iterations and gradual improvements to get it right.
The first post in this thread mention OSS for the voting systems. OSS is more open to gradual improvements, and it makes it easier for the same set of programs to be run on different machines.
Evolution will happen, the evolution in the closed system will happen by voting districts losing all of their ballots. The Florida fiasco was just part of the evolution.
First, we really don't know how much of the stuff in the library of Alexandria was garbage. I suspect the majority of writings in Alexandria was useless tripe.
As for MP3, the site contained a large number of high quality recordings that preceeded the digital age. In the classical and world music departments, there were collections of top rate recordings by professional artists that just didn't have the market to compete in the mainstream.
This destroying of what was shaping up to be one of the greatest open repositories of music is a black mark for the music industry.
I feel for Michael Robertson, however, we lost the site because he wasted his company the absurd Beam-It-Up lawsuit. We have to defend what we build or it goes away.
I suspect that the /. affect is the thing the group is hoping to measure. Thousands of users slamming servers can provide a wonderful amount of click stream data.
For the most part, I agree with your scenario, except that the marketing hype that accompanies OSS includes a great deal of anti marketing rhetoric.
BTW, MS exists because IBM was worried about anti-trust enforcement if they moved in and took over the PC industry. MS didn't just have the better product. They were part of IBM's strategy to avoid anti trust legislation. Without antitrust worries, the PC industry would have simply been small number of proprietary systems like the Mac.
Linux has the possibility of replacing the Window's world, but to get to the next level, it has to find away around the perception that it is anti-market or that it is just a personality cult.
You are right, one of the attractions of Linux is that it is a little bit more like the traditional free market than MS. My rant was based on the article which was trying to make it sound as though Linux is just a personality cult. In truth, OSS is in part a reaction of free market proponents who are ticked at the way the market is controlled.
I think one of the gravest dangers that Linux and OSS faces is its getting pegged as an anti-market movement. Articles like this that try to say it is a Jimmy Jones type personality cult do a lot to undermine the potentials of the platform.
The free market, BTW, does the same thing. The free market (with lots of little independent companies that buy sell and trade goods) creates a mutually profitable self organizing system where people exchange ideas and grow prosperous together.
I was turned off by this article because it assumes the world is simply the case of a monopolist verse a revolutionary leader.
The monopolist rules by capital he has aquired through the years. The revolutionary rules by charisma and his ability to get others to toe the line by coersion of their creative talents.
I seriously dislike the way that Gates has been actively seeking to destroy the free market. However there are still a few vestiges of the free market left. As long as there are still a few remaining outcrops of the free market, Gates will continue to be stronger than Linus, because Gates will be able to buy or re-engineer the creations of the free market.
BTW, I don't fall for the argument of wonderfullness of altruism. Gates uses altruism to destroy his enemies. Gates altruistically "gave" the world ie to destroy a serious rival Netscape. Altruism in business is generally a sign of ulterior motives.
Of course, in this world where the U.S. government makes no effective effort to address monopolies, the free market breaks down, and most of us are left in a world where we have no choice but to follow the revolutionaries.
I dislike the article as it makes the world sound as if we are having to choose between the world of Gates where one man owns all the world's resources, and that of Linus where no one is ever paid but everything is free (ie, people get what they can take).
The truth is that both ideas are ultimately feeding on the free market as the source of their power. Dammit, I want to live in a world with out these friggin' overlords and uber men around every corner. A free market with small companies still looks like the best of all worlds to me.
Not when you include bought friends.
Of course, people who live in the power broker worlds of mega corporations and the revolutionary avant guard don't really have "friends." They have the people they are using and the people who are using them.
I tend to think ahead of myself. I started OOP with object databases, which focused largely on the nature of data. I was actually a reactionary who claimed that there were limits to OOP.
Good file format design starts with the data. You figure out the best way to store information to the disk. In relational databases you start by normalizing the data. In music, you try to figure out what information you need to record to get a good sound. The program that interprets the data is incidental. Data is independent of the program.
The extreme of OO design would say that there is no meaning to data outside the program to interpret it. Data is just a minor part of the overall object.
Now lets look at programming. Many of the first computers lacked good memory management procedure. There were all sorts of bugs caused by programs accessing memory from other programs. OO completely solved this at the programming level. It gave an absolute that only the object had access to the data owned by the object.
OO was working so well in computers, that it was natural to want to use it for other challenges.
OO is not just a programming language, it is a design principle. OOP works great when the life cycle of all the objects start and end in the user session. However, there are many objects that persist beyond the user session. For example, an employee object would exist from the hiring event to the mass lay off event.
This means that objects need to store data in a persistent medium. Theoretically, although this data is written in a file, it is still part of the object.
Current wisdom of the day would say that OO rules while the data of the object is in memory, but OS rules when it is stored to disk. Of course, the distinction between disk and RAM might someday blur.
Let's say you created an WMU player that only had RAM. This is high quality RAM that does not crash. Rather than downloading a music file, this program creates a music object. The object might have an encoded self destruct date, etc. Accessing this data by anything other than the encoded WMU object would entail actually reading the memory states of the RAM...which revisits the pre OOP days.
This is not a legal challenge. It is just a philosophical musing.
The original OO ideal was that one object would own its data throughout the entire lifecycle of the object. Only the object that owned the data would be allowed access to the data of the object.
This is why OO programmers coined the phrase the problem of persistence. The problem is that it is harder to assure that a program owns its data when the data is written to disk. Many of the first OO languages were extremely adverse to writing any data to disk. Some had really funky programs that would write out the memory state. Some tried to lock written data so that no other programs could access it.
One of the goals of the original ODBMS craze was that objects would control all access to the data in the database.
You can see this design philosophy in the Windows Registry where one program owns access to the data in the registry. Why do you think the registry is so weird?
This idea of data being owned by its object is also present in many security models where the security objects own the database of user names and passwords.
My guess is that you missed the part of the computer revolution where objects were the cure all to all ills that ever plagued mankind and that objects would replace legacy RDBMSs by 1989, or whenever it was.
This OO post was actually very relevant to the copyright issue here, because if you are holding the the original OO ideals that your program owns the data through the whole lifecycle of the object, then having other programs access your object breaks your design philosophy. Pointing this out is not all that trollish.
Personally, I do not agree with the absolutist OO design, I just thought the conflict was relevant.
This is one area where I think the object oriented ideals have hurt software.
Prior to OOP, the industry was concentrating on creating data format standards. Programs may change, but the data saved to the disk stays constant. In such a world, there would be standard document format such as SGML, HTML, MP3, GIF, JPEG...Different programs would read and write these formats.
OOP is really about memory management in the processor. However, it holds the ideal that the object owns the data. The ideal that a program "owns" the data encourages the development of proprietary data formats. This is why persistence was such a problem for early OOP implementations. When data is saved to a disk, any program can come in a dink with the data.
Anyway, if you hold to the ideal that an object is the owner of the data, then the question of different programs having access to data store takes on an ideological dimension. The data and code together make the object. Anyone trying to write programs to crack this dependency is violating the primary tenet of the code.
Even worse, your bulk email just might get you caught in St. Peter's spam filter. This of how horrible it would be to be stuck in some junk email list for eternity, while everyone gets to party.
I think there needs to be major changes to the copyright laws. MP3.com's engaging in a debate and lobbying for change was great.
The problem came when the company decided that it could simply force a change in the law by the overall mass of the internet and the size of its investor warchest. The Napster strategy was pretty much the same thing. Gain so much weight that they could force a change to the law...guess what? Politicians never respond well to force. Especially when they see that the change in the law would eliminate a lot of tax revenues.
Had MP3 simply backed down. Engaged in the debate and made it clear that they would stick with the law, then they probably would have eventually won their legal battle. Instead, the court decided to take the MP3.com war chest. The company failed. End of story.
Unfortunately, I fear that we will not get adequate copyright reform as long as the movement is perceived as a group of unprinciple radicals that will not abide by any new laws.
Democracy works by people arguing for positions, but by abiding by the laws even when they don't go your way.
For those confused by the above post. There is a world view that has been running around since the days of Zenos in ancient Greece. This view denies the possibility of multiplicity and holds that the idea of individual people existing is absurd. Your apparent existence in just an illusion. There really is just a great big world spirit running around that is resolving issues in a violent class of thesis and antithesis. Occasionally there are uber men who are catalizing forces in the great historical dance of world history.
The opposing view, which is rejected by most true scholars, but seems to hang around despite the fact that there is no justification for such petty beliefs, is that individual people actually do exist, and that individual people have existed throughout history. Individual people do things, and a great deal of the stuff around us the product of these people, their ideas and efforts. The right wing whackos that hold this position are more likely to conclude that the great world spirit is the myth...not the individual people.
The belief of the CEO as uberman is actually out of the world spirit view. It is one of those clever dialectical twists that is so easy to pull off. To get around the fact that Ayn Rand argued that the industrialists really were building something the world spirit crowd simply hijacked the theory, then raised the CEO to uberman status.
Anyway, the absurd belief that individual exist pretty much has this unworkable paradigm where people are trading goods and services. People holding this antiquated view, would actually even see the CEO as a individual human who is trading goods and services. Anyway, this childish belief that people exist is ___so___ middle class, petty and bourgeoise that it really shouldn't be discussed in an advanced intellectual format like /.
Ooops, I am typing to quickly. Have I mentioned in the post yet that the middle class is petty? It is really important in when writing to include a large number of jabs at the groups that you despise. I often forget the subtle jabs and they are the most important part of any writing, and I would hate for the world spirit to get mad at me.
The original MP3.com was the best thing to happen for independent artists in the history of recorded music. It was a nice, simple program where artists could upload songs, and make some beer money. Unfortunately, MP3.com wasted the entire opportunity on its stupid conjecture that they were so large, that they could effectively rewrite copyright laws just through their will alone.
Before we jump into the diatribe about how MP3 couldn't exist unless it had the top 40 music, I want to point out that the whole top 40 or die conjecture was built on the false premise held by all of the dot coms...that is: a company had to monopolize the market to exist.
Companies can exist without being a monopoly.
MP3.com was a great program. It was destroyed by arrogant snits who rejected the notion of rule of law. If MP3.com simply gave up on the Beam-It-Up program, it would have been in the position after the fall of Napster to capture the coveted position of internet's primary source for music. Instead, they wasted the company on a multimillion dollar law suit that anyone familar with the court system knew in advance that they would lose.
MP3.com was the one viable alternative to this ultra intrusive world that Microsoft is creating where every song you listen to is monitored and analyzed by Big Brother Bill, and independent artists are once again shuffled off to the furthest fringes.