... if you bought quality up front you would have fewer problems and save money in the long run?
It has certainly occurred to me. The problem is, where do I find drives (or parts in general) which cost twice as much, but last three times longer? Or 50% more, but last 75% longer?
The manufacturers seem compete ONLY on price, until you get into the unix workstation price range. It seems we have the choice of kmart specials or gold-plated and priced to match.
Since I can still back up each single project on a single CD (actually, all of my projects, and/etc, and my ~/.files on a single CD), is it really worth my while to spend anything extra to increase the odds of that HD lasting that long from 90% to 99.9%? Maybe not. Maybe that's why the manufacturers compete only on price: quality suffices for most use, and RAID covers the few folks who need better quality on a PC.
A another thought is that I'll be wanting to replace my 30GB hard drive in another two years or so. It will have lasted about 4 to 5 years when it's replaced, and odds are that it will last that long.
My data and what-have-you seems to expand fast enough that I don't really need hard drives or computer hardware in general to last a full decade. I do still have a 10 year old laptop, but it's a toy today. It doesn't have an ethernet port, nor a modern modem, and no way to add either, so I can't even use it as a cheap router or xterm.
I suspect that if there was money to be made by making PC hardware that was significantly more reliable than the current standard, we'd see soemone filling that niche. The fact that none of the intensely competitive hard drive manufacturers are trying to fill that niche by selling specially inspected versions of their drives with extra warrenties suggests to me that we just don't want extra reliability enough to pay for it.
Perhaps another way of looking at it is that the hard drive manufacturers ARE making those specially inspected, high-reliability, long warrenty versions. They put SCSI interfaces on them to mark them as better than consumer grade, and sell them for the 50% to 100% extra that the extra quality control costs. That matches up pretty well with the stories I hear about the relative quality and price of SCSI versus IDE.
Hey Jeff, could you come over and take a look at my computer?
Sorry man, I could get in real trouble if I work on your computer. I don't have a license...
I was against it until you pointed this out.
This sort of idea amounts to restraint of trade, the sort of thing that IBM and Pitney Bowes and Microsoft have all been slapped for. These stupid, mandated, credentials devalue the experience and reputation of the truely competent, and do little to protect the public from the incompetent and the fraudulent. They DO help keep wages and prices up for the people who have bought the certifications.
Still, if it lets me get out of repairing folks' computers, it might be worth it.
But you find the URL of just the image you want and embed that in your post or personal web page.
If you don't want it linked to, don't put it on the web.
I think that what you describe would be nasty, and I suspect that the practice is already proscribed by our current copyright law. What you describe would amount to copying the image, which copyright law forbids. This approach would add insult to inujry, as you paid for the bandwidth. I don't see that the owner of the image would have any room to complain about the bandwidth, though, if he chose to post it in the first place.
Linking is simply telling someone where to look. That is clearly protected speech in the US.
If you want images on your site, and you're worried about that sort of thing, put your copyright notice on them, where it'll show. Then folks will be imbedding your info along with your image.
I think it's more akin to opening an office and prohibiting strangers from walking in off the street to use your bathroom.
I would have likened it to putting up flyers in the town square, advertising an event, then posting guards there in the town square to keep ``undesirables'' from reading them.
It isn't a matter of keeping strangers out of a private space, it's a matter of scummy, greedy fools trying to enclose the public space for their own, private use.
Re:Why so upset about this concept?
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You Can't Link Here
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe somebody has an underpowered server, or pays a high rate for bandwidth usage. Such people would prefer to avoid a/.ing that would kill their mission-critical machine or drive them into the poorhouse.
In cases like that, you simply don't put stuff on the web. You don't use publically accessible protocols, like http. Use your own protocol, and don't share it with others.
That's a perfectly valid reason to deny other sites permission to link.
Stupidly wrong. The web is ALL about linking. If you don't want links, there is no acceptable way to rule them out, and no excuse for trying. As I've already said, if you don't want it to be linked to, don't put it on the web.
In anything, if you want to participate, you have to follow the rules. One of the most basic rules on the web is that linking is ok.
Somehow I think it'll be a few years before my salary is comparable with the average doctor or lawyer.
Somehow, I think you're right. You are in this field because you want to teach, not because you can't make more money elsewhere. Or, you are in this field because you really can't make more money elsewhere. Neither of those possibilities is a recipe for high salaries.
It's my understanding that elementary and secondary teachers don't have to know anything about the subjects they teach. Your sig said that you're a CS teacher. You could be replaced, if need be, by someone who can't turn on a computer. Whatever your opportunity cost may be, that potential replacement is probably worth even less than the little you get. That's what keeps your salary low.
I think that the teacher's unions have failed the teachers, and failed the kids. They've done a lot for the union organizers and employees, I suppose.
I am sure that this would give a whole new meaining to the free software movement - am I free to create software or not?!?
With a model like that, probably not. On the other hand, once you were admitted to the priesthood, you'd be set for life. Some folks would jump at a chance to make that tradeoff. Especially some of the ones who'd be grandfathered in, and wouldn't have to jump through the hoops.
I bet he would. Would he be willing to cut his income in half to get that help? If he was willing, could he afford it? Could another MD afford to come on board on those terms (half of what I assume is a midrange income for an MD)? Don't forget, MDs have huge debts when they finish med school. They NEED to make a lot.
Your doctor isn't the one who makes the decisions about standards: that's up to the MDs who are less patient-centered, who make time to work with their state medical association, and the state regulatory commissions which they influence.
Most MDs are good folks who go into the field to help others. They have huge debts by the time they finish med school, and they have EARNED the right to make a lot of money. Just ask 'em. (They're right about that, I think.)
The MDs who just want to heal the sick are busy doing exactly that. They don't pay much attention to the MDs who are into money and politics. Those are the ones who are busy doing things like making sure that med school and licensing standards are kept high enough to make sure that the supply of MDs stays a bit constrained and their salaries stay way up there. Of course, the MDs who just want to do good do realize that the high standards help keep their wages up, but that isn't intrinsically bad. They also realize that there aren't enough MDs to go around, but we do have to keep the standards high, to protect the public...
The point is that this seems to be a classic case of regulatory capture, with a very incestuous relation between the state regulators and the few politicised MDs who take time to be involved in the behind-the-scenes activities of their association. The majority of MDs are only peripherally aware that some of their collegues might have other motives than healing the sick, and are uneasily aware that speaking out will make them look like crackpot conspiricy theorists, and endanger their licenses. How can any responsible MD say publically that med school is too tough, or that the state licensing exams are too tough? Even if it is true, that'll never be a popular position with the press or the AMA.
After all, they can rationalize, it's better that those selfish MDs should be working to keep standards high than that they should be practicing bad medicine (because they don't care much about patients).
You're dead on in what you say. Did you notice the pattern? The great things you mention are all tools. LaTeX and emacs really are great tools!
If you aren't a tool user, you aren't happy with OSS/libre. If you are a tool user, you have an embarrasment of riches. Tool use has always been one of the defining attributes of humanity, so my choice of words says something about folks who prefer wordprocessors to text editors. Or, perhaps it says something about my attitude toward them.
There is a real shortage of children's software for Linux, and what little there is is either trivial toys (stickers, LinuxLetters) or aimed at building adult skills (e.g., tuxtyping, which can't hold an eight-year-old's attention for more than a few minutes). Children aren't very good at abstraction, and aren't ready to use advanced tools yet. They aren't well served by libre software yet.
You are quite right that libre software is built around the academic research model. I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it has aimed itself at the best and brightest, rather than business types. Maybe some researchers in fields like childhood development will use the libre base to implement and test some of their ideas about how to teach children, and we might get some good educational kids games out of that, to replace Reader Rabbit.
Innovators innovate need money, and open source don't provide.[sic]
I bet you thought you were saying something profound by that. I'll answer what I think you said.
Innovators need money. So do we all. What's new?
Some people do their work because they love that work, some because they love that money. Which group do you think does the better work? Which group do you think is more likely to get personally involved in their work, and make new ideas, or new uses for old ideas? Which group is more likely to be found working on libre software in their spare time?
Open source and libre software DO provide money to fund their developers. Companies like SGI, IBM and Sun all stand to gain by making software a cheap commodity product. You see, software is a complementary product to computer hardware. If software costs more, you will buy less of the hardware. So, hardware makers have strong incentive to pay for the development of free-to-the-user software. That's why those three companies, and many others, have been funding the development of libre software. All three have GPL'd some of their formerly proprietary programs (XFS, JFS, Staroffice, respectively), and all three are paying developers for things they need.
You might want to think about WHY they (eventually) choose the GPL, when Apple and Netscape (at least initially) chose more restrictive licenses. I'd suggest that they believe that they'll get more unpaid developer effort using that license. The number of people using and working on Linux, compared to the number using and working on BSD, suggests that they might be right.
No company, not even Microsoft, can hire all the developers in the world. Even MS can't hire all of the best. However rich your organization, the majority of the developers in the world will be elsewhere, and among those outsiders will be some of the best. The only way you can harness the efforts of those outsiders to work on your program is to make the program you want them to work on libre. That assures them that any work they do will always remain open to them, and that they will be able to profit by it on an equal footing with you.
The fact that no manager can assign someone to do some dirty work is often seen as a disadvantage to libre development. In fact, that is a major source of invention and innovation. People who love their work can play with whatever they want to, even if it doesn't seem important to someone else. Just as with everything else in the world, 90%+ of these inventions and innovations are crap, but that ``wasted effort'' is the price we pay for the few jewels.
... I for one would be proud to join a programmers [sic] union that stood up for my rights, and gave me some job security.
It might be a good idea to organize, but let's look at the folks who make the big bucks: MD's and lawyers. They have associations which act as gate keepers (AMA and ABA). If you don't get permission from the AMA, you won't practice medicine. For the state medical exams, and for the state bar exams, the relevant association sets the standards, and they keep them high enough to safeguard the incomes of the ones who've already made it through. Any ``protection'' which the public gets is is a happy accident.
Even engineers have something like this. In most states, you can't hang out your shingle to provide engineering services unless you are a licensed professional engineer. The professional societies have a lot of influence over what the license requirements are.
This doesn't help the guys who work at Intel, but if you are a civil or mechanical engineer, or if you do power or RF engineering, having that PE gives a bit more job security, and a bit more pay.
Plumbers and electricians have similar deals with state licensing authorities, and are also fairly well paid. The important thing isn't collective bargaining (MD's and lawyers don't have it, plumbers and electricians do), but keeping out the ravening hordes who would run the wage down to the subsistance level.
My point? It might be better to avoid the old-fashioned union model, and start an AMA/ABA/IEEE-style professional association, and lobby for compulsory state standards, examinations and licensing for professional coders.
... the statistical chances of the %'s being well out and the firm choosing their employees regardless of race and sex, are very very low.
You have to be careful what you compare the ``%'s'' to. If you take a field like engineering, which few women enter, you won't find 50.5% women, even though that's the percentage of women in the general population.
If you see that an engineering firm has 20% women, and you know that about 10% of the membership of your professional association (e.g., IEEE) are women, you can guess that they are going out of their way to hire a LOT of women.
Since women and minorities tend to get paid less than white men (so the rumor has it, anyway), you might also guess that a company with an unusually high percentage of both was looking for docile, cheap employees. NOT a good place to work, whether you are female/minority or not.
Finally, what are the women/minorities doing there? Are they in the responsible and the technical jobs, as well as the chicken-plucking and data entry jobs?
The grandparent post said that presenting the simple percentages wasn't useful, and might suggest racisim. I think that they simply aren't useful. A company which looks very good by this simple-minded metric might be doing very badly indeed toward its employees. A company which looks bad might actually be trying to hire the best, regardless of race, and trying successfully to make minorities comfortable once hired.
There's a somewhat anti-Church theme in there as well,...
That sounds like the New Testament, particularly the Gosples and Acts. Christ was strongly (sometimes violently) opposed to religous orthodoxy. Don't confuse Christianity with church.
I read them too, and now I'm a Christian. I guess that based on our sample of two, we cannot reject the hypothesis that her writing has nothing to do with faith.
RedHat? IBM?
You are a primal fool if you think they are *any* different from Moft [sic].
Yep. They are nonetheless paying developers of Libre software, because it is in their selfish interest to do so.
Remember: even if you are Microsoft, you can't hire ALL the developers in the world. You can't even hire all of the best, or even the majority.
IBM and Redhat know that by eschewing a monopoly, they can get (potentially) all the developers in the world working part-time for them. That gives them a big advantage that all of Microsoft's $40Billion can't buy.
They are big corporations, and at the corporate level, THERE ARE NO MORALS... just like there is no ettiquette for hitting under the belt.
The proprietary software business model has its place, and so does the IBM/Redhat sell-services-and-give-away-software nonproprietary model. Neither one REQUIRES immoral behavior, and neither forecloses the possibility of acting immorally. Fortunately, the GPL eliminates the possibility of monopoly, and so it greatly reduces the scope for immoral action.
So, even if we assume that the leadership at places like IBM and Redhat would behave as badly as the leadership at Microsoft has been convicted of doing, we can also assume that they will have slightly less opportunity.
Further, since many of their developers don't depend on them for a paycheck, it will be hard for them to continue taking advantage of folks if they foolishly waste the bit of goodwill they have by screwing over the public. How many people are working free of charge to give United Linux a competitive advantage over Redhat or Debian? How many people are working free of charge to make Debian better?
I think that the original idea that I was replying to was that developers of libre software can't get paid. My point was that many of them DO get paid, for the purely selfish reasons of their employers. Many more don't get paid for their work, because they have other motives.
Certainly most opensource and libre developers aren't giving up riches by giving away their code. Do you think that Linus Torvalds would have a marketable product today if he hadn't given away his kernel? RMS might have been able to make some sales of emacs if he'd kept it proprietary, but I doubt that he'd have any more money than he does today. Donald Knuth could have made a few extra bucks by keeping TeX proprietary, but it would probably be used only by math journals which Knuth edited. These guys are some of the really big names, the ones who made programs that matter. How likely is it that any of us lesser lights could get rich, or even pay for our hobby, if we didn't have all the libre infrastructure to build our little bits on, and with?
The ones working for Redhat? The businesses which buy their support services.
The ones working for IBM? The businesses which buy linux-related hardware and services from IBM.
The developers working for all the other businesses which sell hardware or services which rely on linux? Again, the customers.
The ones who are working on some libre project just for fun? No-one pays them for that. Why should they be paid for having fun? Indeed, that might take the fun out of it.
Some people work on libre/open source because their employer (for his own selfish reasons) has made it their job to do so, some do it for their own selfish reasons (which might include altruism). There are roughly 5 billion people in the world. Finding a few thousand who have a compelling, personal or business reason to work on some libre software project shouldn't be impossible.
The only problem I see here is that someone who wants to be the next Bill Gates needs to choose some other license than the BSD or GPL.
No problem.
I had declined to get Pullman's books for my ten-year-old daughter because I had mistaken them for the same kind of thinly-veiled Christian allegory one finds in C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle.
So, Christian allegory is bad, Christian heresy is good?
(Both of whom are excellent writers, but I'm too old to be suckered into their self-destructive superstitions.)
This part is what has me confused, I think: if Lewis and L'Engle are superstitious, how is Pullman's heresy non-superstitious?
It all seems very illogical to me.
L'Engle's allegory is veiled enough that I had never really associated her books with Christianity. I've bought three of her books for my kids recently. I'll have to go back and see if they look Christian to me now that I'm looking for it.
... Japan and Europe. Due to lowered levels of immigration those regions are experiencing an aging of the population.
Hate to pop your bubble, but it's due to low birth rates. The selfish buggers aren't even replacing themselves. Japan is xenophobic enough that they have NEVER had much immigration. Europe is experiencing a lot of social unrest because they have high immigration to make up for the low birth rates.
Immigrants add to the economy.... What they bring to the economy more than outweighs what they take out via usage of social services.
No, no, no. That sounds sort of Arab, and will get you put on a terrorist watch list, and abducted by aliens^H^H^H^H^H^H the US government. What you want is a name with ten syllables, like Pajamaramalamadingdongkadarian. That sounds non-threatening; no terrorist could even say that.
Oh and let's not forget, I'll need to bring 8k with me for that phony CS degree.
Man, if you could get a degree at one of the Indian Institutes, you wouldn't have any trouble getting a job here. Those places are good, and they turn out great grads.
sic referes [sic] to editorial changes made when quoting someone to correct for grammatical (or other) errors.
No. It is used to indicate that the error is in the original, to show that you didn't introduce the error while copying. By the way, lucky that you had that typo so I could demonstrate!
The AFL-CIO has put together that whole Techs Unite webpage [techsunite.org], which includes a number of interesting thoughts, like a union for Techs.
How unexpected: a union which is facing declining private-sector membership is proposing to unionize traditionally non-unionized workers. Who'd a thunk it?
It might be a good idea to organize, but let's look at the folks who make the big bucks: MD's and lawyers. They have associations which act as gate keepers (AMA and ABA). If you don't get permission from the AMA, you won't practice medicine. For the state medical exams, and for the state bar exams, the relevant association sets the standards, and they keep them high enough to safeguard the incomes of the ones who've laready made it through. Any ``protection'' which the public gets is is a happy accident.
Plumbers and electricians have similar deals with state licensing authorities, and are also fairly well paid. The important thing isn't collective bargaining (MD's and lawyers don't have it, plumbers and electricians do), but keeping out the ravening hordes who would run the wage down to the subsistance level.
My point? It might be better to avoid the AFL-CIO, and start an AMA/ABA/IEEE-style professional association, and lobby for compulsory state standards and examinations for professional coders.
And what the greedy companies who follow this practice don't seem to realize is that they are effectively taking money out of the hands of the very people who would be buying their products.
What those greedy companies know that you don't seem to is that many of the people who would be buying their products (if only they had jobs) are living outside the US. By exporting those jobs, they might (in the short run) be reducing their market in the US, but they are (in the short run) expanding their market outside the US.
This is hard on us in the US (in the short run) but it will make the entire world richer, us included, in the long run.
An earlier post post pointed out that when the US was essentially a large, self-contained free-trade zone, life was good. There are some quibbles which could be made with that argument, but the point is a good one: if you let labor and capital compete freely, the results are good. Imagine how much better off we would all be if the entire world had that sort of free trade; the sort which exists between the states. It can't happen until the rest of the world catches up to the US, economically and politically. When that finally does happen, our descendents will think all these problems were worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
It has certainly occurred to me. The problem is, where do I find drives (or parts in general) which cost twice as much, but last three times longer? Or 50% more, but last 75% longer?
The manufacturers seem compete ONLY on price, until you get into the unix workstation price range. It seems we have the choice of kmart specials or gold-plated and priced to match.
Since I can still back up each single project on a single CD (actually, all of my projects, and /etc, and my ~/.files on a single CD), is it really worth my while to spend anything extra to increase the odds of that HD lasting that long from 90% to 99.9%? Maybe not. Maybe that's why the manufacturers compete only on price: quality suffices for most use, and RAID covers the few folks who need better quality on a PC.
A another thought is that I'll be wanting to replace my 30GB hard drive in another two years or so. It will have lasted about 4 to 5 years when it's replaced, and odds are that it will last that long.
My data and what-have-you seems to expand fast enough that I don't really need hard drives or computer hardware in general to last a full decade. I do still have a 10 year old laptop, but it's a toy today. It doesn't have an ethernet port, nor a modern modem, and no way to add either, so I can't even use it as a cheap router or xterm.
I suspect that if there was money to be made by making PC hardware that was significantly more reliable than the current standard, we'd see soemone filling that niche. The fact that none of the intensely competitive hard drive manufacturers are trying to fill that niche by selling specially inspected versions of their drives with extra warrenties suggests to me that we just don't want extra reliability enough to pay for it.
Perhaps another way of looking at it is that the hard drive manufacturers ARE making those specially inspected, high-reliability, long warrenty versions. They put SCSI interfaces on them to mark them as better than consumer grade, and sell them for the 50% to 100% extra that the extra quality control costs. That matches up pretty well with the stories I hear about the relative quality and price of SCSI versus IDE.
I guess some people find pleasure in this.. Personally I prefer women.
Women? For flipping bits? You are strange.
Sorry man, I could get in real trouble if I work on your computer. I don't have a license...
I was against it until you pointed this out.
This sort of idea amounts to restraint of trade, the sort of thing that IBM and Pitney Bowes and Microsoft have all been slapped for. These stupid, mandated, credentials devalue the experience and reputation of the truely competent, and do little to protect the public from the incompetent and the fraudulent. They DO help keep wages and prices up for the people who have bought the certifications.
Still, if it lets me get out of repairing folks' computers, it might be worth it.
If you don't want it linked to, don't put it on the web.
I think that what you describe would be nasty, and I suspect that the practice is already proscribed by our current copyright law. What you describe would amount to copying the image, which copyright law forbids. This approach would add insult to inujry, as you paid for the bandwidth. I don't see that the owner of the image would have any room to complain about the bandwidth, though, if he chose to post it in the first place.
Linking is simply telling someone where to look. That is clearly protected speech in the US.
If you want images on your site, and you're worried about that sort of thing, put your copyright notice on them, where it'll show. Then folks will be imbedding your info along with your image.
I would have likened it to putting up flyers in the town square, advertising an event, then posting guards there in the town square to keep ``undesirables'' from reading them.
It isn't a matter of keeping strangers out of a private space, it's a matter of scummy, greedy fools trying to enclose the public space for their own, private use.
In cases like that, you simply don't put stuff on the web. You don't use publically accessible protocols, like http. Use your own protocol, and don't share it with others.
That's a perfectly valid reason to deny other sites permission to link.
Stupidly wrong. The web is ALL about linking. If you don't want links, there is no acceptable way to rule them out, and no excuse for trying. As I've already said, if you don't want it to be linked to, don't put it on the web.
In anything, if you want to participate, you have to follow the rules. One of the most basic rules on the web is that linking is ok.
Somehow, I think you're right. You are in this field because you want to teach, not because you can't make more money elsewhere. Or, you are in this field because you really can't make more money elsewhere. Neither of those possibilities is a recipe for high salaries.
It's my understanding that elementary and secondary teachers don't have to know anything about the subjects they teach. Your sig said that you're a CS teacher. You could be replaced, if need be, by someone who can't turn on a computer. Whatever your opportunity cost may be, that potential replacement is probably worth even less than the little you get. That's what keeps your salary low.
I think that the teacher's unions have failed the teachers, and failed the kids. They've done a lot for the union organizers and employees, I suppose.
With a model like that, probably not. On the other hand, once you were admitted to the priesthood, you'd be set for life. Some folks would jump at a chance to make that tradeoff. Especially some of the ones who'd be grandfathered in, and wouldn't have to jump through the hoops.
I bet he would. Would he be willing to cut his income in half to get that help? If he was willing, could he afford it? Could another MD afford to come on board on those terms (half of what I assume is a midrange income for an MD)? Don't forget, MDs have huge debts when they finish med school. They NEED to make a lot.
Your doctor isn't the one who makes the decisions about standards: that's up to the MDs who are less patient-centered, who make time to work with their state medical association, and the state regulatory commissions which they influence.
The MDs who just want to heal the sick are busy doing exactly that. They don't pay much attention to the MDs who are into money and politics. Those are the ones who are busy doing things like making sure that med school and licensing standards are kept high enough to make sure that the supply of MDs stays a bit constrained and their salaries stay way up there. Of course, the MDs who just want to do good do realize that the high standards help keep their wages up, but that isn't intrinsically bad. They also realize that there aren't enough MDs to go around, but we do have to keep the standards high, to protect the public ...
The point is that this seems to be a classic case of regulatory capture, with a very incestuous relation between the state regulators and the few politicised MDs who take time to be involved in the behind-the-scenes activities of their association. The majority of MDs are only peripherally aware that some of their collegues might have other motives than healing the sick, and are uneasily aware that speaking out will make them look like crackpot conspiricy theorists, and endanger their licenses. How can any responsible MD say publically that med school is too tough, or that the state licensing exams are too tough? Even if it is true, that'll never be a popular position with the press or the AMA.
After all, they can rationalize, it's better that those selfish MDs should be working to keep standards high than that they should be practicing bad medicine (because they don't care much about patients).
If you aren't a tool user, you aren't happy with OSS/libre. If you are a tool user, you have an embarrasment of riches. Tool use has always been one of the defining attributes of humanity, so my choice of words says something about folks who prefer wordprocessors to text editors. Or, perhaps it says something about my attitude toward them.
There is a real shortage of children's software for Linux, and what little there is is either trivial toys (stickers, LinuxLetters) or aimed at building adult skills (e.g., tuxtyping, which can't hold an eight-year-old's attention for more than a few minutes). Children aren't very good at abstraction, and aren't ready to use advanced tools yet. They aren't well served by libre software yet.
You are quite right that libre software is built around the academic research model. I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it has aimed itself at the best and brightest, rather than business types. Maybe some researchers in fields like childhood development will use the libre base to implement and test some of their ideas about how to teach children, and we might get some good educational kids games out of that, to replace Reader Rabbit.
I bet you thought you were saying something profound by that. I'll answer what I think you said.
Innovators need money. So do we all. What's new?
Some people do their work because they love that work, some because they love that money. Which group do you think does the better work? Which group do you think is more likely to get personally involved in their work, and make new ideas, or new uses for old ideas? Which group is more likely to be found working on libre software in their spare time?
Open source and libre software DO provide money to fund their developers. Companies like SGI, IBM and Sun all stand to gain by making software a cheap commodity product. You see, software is a complementary product to computer hardware. If software costs more, you will buy less of the hardware. So, hardware makers have strong incentive to pay for the development of free-to-the-user software. That's why those three companies, and many others, have been funding the development of libre software. All three have GPL'd some of their formerly proprietary programs (XFS, JFS, Staroffice, respectively), and all three are paying developers for things they need.
You might want to think about WHY they (eventually) choose the GPL, when Apple and Netscape (at least initially) chose more restrictive licenses. I'd suggest that they believe that they'll get more unpaid developer effort using that license. The number of people using and working on Linux, compared to the number using and working on BSD, suggests that they might be right.
No company, not even Microsoft, can hire all the developers in the world. Even MS can't hire all of the best. However rich your organization, the majority of the developers in the world will be elsewhere, and among those outsiders will be some of the best. The only way you can harness the efforts of those outsiders to work on your program is to make the program you want them to work on libre. That assures them that any work they do will always remain open to them, and that they will be able to profit by it on an equal footing with you.
The fact that no manager can assign someone to do some dirty work is often seen as a disadvantage to libre development. In fact, that is a major source of invention and innovation. People who love their work can play with whatever they want to, even if it doesn't seem important to someone else. Just as with everything else in the world, 90%+ of these inventions and innovations are crap, but that ``wasted effort'' is the price we pay for the few jewels.
It might be a good idea to organize, but let's look at the folks who make the big bucks: MD's and lawyers. They have associations which act as gate keepers (AMA and ABA). If you don't get permission from the AMA, you won't practice medicine. For the state medical exams, and for the state bar exams, the relevant association sets the standards, and they keep them high enough to safeguard the incomes of the ones who've already made it through. Any ``protection'' which the public gets is is a happy accident.
Even engineers have something like this. In most states, you can't hang out your shingle to provide engineering services unless you are a licensed professional engineer. The professional societies have a lot of influence over what the license requirements are.
This doesn't help the guys who work at Intel, but if you are a civil or mechanical engineer, or if you do power or RF engineering, having that PE gives a bit more job security, and a bit more pay.
Plumbers and electricians have similar deals with state licensing authorities, and are also fairly well paid. The important thing isn't collective bargaining (MD's and lawyers don't have it, plumbers and electricians do), but keeping out the ravening hordes who would run the wage down to the subsistance level.
My point? It might be better to avoid the old-fashioned union model, and start an AMA/ABA/IEEE-style professional association, and lobby for compulsory state standards, examinations and licensing for professional coders.
You have to be careful what you compare the ``%'s'' to. If you take a field like engineering, which few women enter, you won't find 50.5% women, even though that's the percentage of women in the general population.
If you see that an engineering firm has 20% women, and you know that about 10% of the membership of your professional association (e.g., IEEE) are women, you can guess that they are going out of their way to hire a LOT of women.
Since women and minorities tend to get paid less than white men (so the rumor has it, anyway), you might also guess that a company with an unusually high percentage of both was looking for docile, cheap employees. NOT a good place to work, whether you are female/minority or not.
Finally, what are the women/minorities doing there? Are they in the responsible and the technical jobs, as well as the chicken-plucking and data entry jobs?
The grandparent post said that presenting the simple percentages wasn't useful, and might suggest racisim. I think that they simply aren't useful. A company which looks very good by this simple-minded metric might be doing very badly indeed toward its employees. A company which looks bad might actually be trying to hire the best, regardless of race, and trying successfully to make minorities comfortable once hired.
That sounds like the New Testament, particularly the Gosples and Acts. Christ was strongly (sometimes violently) opposed to religous orthodoxy. Don't confuse Christianity with church.
You make it sound as if it's worth checking out.
They are a good read, though.
Yep. They are nonetheless paying developers of Libre software, because it is in their selfish interest to do so.
Remember: even if you are Microsoft, you can't hire ALL the developers in the world. You can't even hire all of the best, or even the majority.
IBM and Redhat know that by eschewing a monopoly, they can get (potentially) all the developers in the world working part-time for them. That gives them a big advantage that all of Microsoft's $40Billion can't buy.
They are big corporations, and at the corporate level, THERE ARE NO MORALS... just like there is no ettiquette for hitting under the belt.
The proprietary software business model has its place, and so does the IBM/Redhat sell-services-and-give-away-software nonproprietary model. Neither one REQUIRES immoral behavior, and neither forecloses the possibility of acting immorally. Fortunately, the GPL eliminates the possibility of monopoly, and so it greatly reduces the scope for immoral action.
So, even if we assume that the leadership at places like IBM and Redhat would behave as badly as the leadership at Microsoft has been convicted of doing, we can also assume that they will have slightly less opportunity.
Further, since many of their developers don't depend on them for a paycheck, it will be hard for them to continue taking advantage of folks if they foolishly waste the bit of goodwill they have by screwing over the public. How many people are working free of charge to give United Linux a competitive advantage over Redhat or Debian? How many people are working free of charge to make Debian better?
I think that the original idea that I was replying to was that developers of libre software can't get paid. My point was that many of them DO get paid, for the purely selfish reasons of their employers. Many more don't get paid for their work, because they have other motives.
Certainly most opensource and libre developers aren't giving up riches by giving away their code. Do you think that Linus Torvalds would have a marketable product today if he hadn't given away his kernel? RMS might have been able to make some sales of emacs if he'd kept it proprietary, but I doubt that he'd have any more money than he does today. Donald Knuth could have made a few extra bucks by keeping TeX proprietary, but it would probably be used only by math journals which Knuth edited. These guys are some of the really big names, the ones who made programs that matter. How likely is it that any of us lesser lights could get rich, or even pay for our hobby, if we didn't have all the libre infrastructure to build our little bits on, and with?
Which developer would that be?
The ones working for Redhat? The businesses which buy their support services.
The ones working for IBM? The businesses which buy linux-related hardware and services from IBM.
The developers working for all the other businesses which sell hardware or services which rely on linux? Again, the customers.
The ones who are working on some libre project just for fun? No-one pays them for that. Why should they be paid for having fun? Indeed, that might take the fun out of it.
Some people work on libre/open source because their employer (for his own selfish reasons) has made it their job to do so, some do it for their own selfish reasons (which might include altruism). There are roughly 5 billion people in the world. Finding a few thousand who have a compelling, personal or business reason to work on some libre software project shouldn't be impossible.
The only problem I see here is that someone who wants to be the next Bill Gates needs to choose some other license than the BSD or GPL.
No problem.
So, Christian allegory is bad, Christian heresy is good?
(Both of whom are excellent writers, but I'm too old to be suckered into their self-destructive superstitions.)
This part is what has me confused, I think: if Lewis and L'Engle are superstitious, how is Pullman's heresy non-superstitious? It all seems very illogical to me.
L'Engle's allegory is veiled enough that I had never really associated her books with Christianity. I've bought three of her books for my kids recently. I'll have to go back and see if they look Christian to me now that I'm looking for it.
Except one from Armenia. :-D
It doesn't matter. By the time anyone gets close to the end of that one, their eyes will have glazed over.
Hate to pop your bubble, but it's due to low birth rates. The selfish buggers aren't even replacing themselves. Japan is xenophobic enough that they have NEVER had much immigration. Europe is experiencing a lot of social unrest because they have high immigration to make up for the low birth rates.
Immigrants add to the economy. ... What they bring to the economy more than outweighs what they take out via usage of social services.
Probably true.
No, no, no. That sounds sort of Arab, and will get you put on a terrorist watch list, and abducted by aliens^H^H^H^H^H^H the US government. What you want is a name with ten syllables, like Pajamaramalamadingdongkadarian. That sounds non-threatening; no terrorist could even say that.
Oh and let's not forget, I'll need to bring 8k with me for that phony CS degree.
Man, if you could get a degree at one of the Indian Institutes, you wouldn't have any trouble getting a job here. Those places are good, and they turn out great grads.
No. It is used to indicate that the error is in the original, to show that you didn't introduce the error while copying. By the way, lucky that you had that typo so I could demonstrate!
How unexpected: a union which is facing declining private-sector membership is proposing to unionize traditionally non-unionized workers. Who'd a thunk it?
It might be a good idea to organize, but let's look at the folks who make the big bucks: MD's and lawyers. They have associations which act as gate keepers (AMA and ABA). If you don't get permission from the AMA, you won't practice medicine. For the state medical exams, and for the state bar exams, the relevant association sets the standards, and they keep them high enough to safeguard the incomes of the ones who've laready made it through. Any ``protection'' which the public gets is is a happy accident.
Plumbers and electricians have similar deals with state licensing authorities, and are also fairly well paid. The important thing isn't collective bargaining (MD's and lawyers don't have it, plumbers and electricians do), but keeping out the ravening hordes who would run the wage down to the subsistance level.
My point? It might be better to avoid the AFL-CIO, and start an AMA/ABA/IEEE-style professional association, and lobby for compulsory state standards and examinations for professional coders.
What those greedy companies know that you don't seem to is that many of the people who would be buying their products (if only they had jobs) are living outside the US. By exporting those jobs, they might (in the short run) be reducing their market in the US, but they are (in the short run) expanding their market outside the US.
This is hard on us in the US (in the short run) but it will make the entire world richer, us included, in the long run.
An earlier post post pointed out that when the US was essentially a large, self-contained free-trade zone, life was good. There are some quibbles which could be made with that argument, but the point is a good one: if you let labor and capital compete freely, the results are good. Imagine how much better off we would all be if the entire world had that sort of free trade; the sort which exists between the states. It can't happen until the rest of the world catches up to the US, economically and politically. When that finally does happen, our descendents will think all these problems were worth it.