The Machine might be mediocre--much like many of the cheap desktops people are buying. However, a quick spin around the Wal*MART catalog shows that they are pushing the Sun Java Desktop brand along side Lindows and Lycoris. The Windows and No-OS machines they are selling use THE EXACT SAME HARDWARE, except that the Sun version costs $100 less than the Windows install. Sure, you can buy the WinXP box, but they're putting the same machines side-by side and effectively saying "Hey, you just use this for web browsing and email, why pay an extra $100 for the exactly the same machine that does exactly the same thing? Besides, Linux is cool and makes you look smart. You're smart, right?" Ka-ching.
Don't be so quick to write this off. They are truly offering what everyone has been asking for: CHOICE. Hell, I HATE Wal*Mart, but I give 'em kudos for this.
"Estimates for the mass of material that falls on Earth each year range from 37,000-78,000 tons. Most of this mass would come from dust-sized particles...Over the whole surface area of Earth, that translates to 18,000 to 84,000 meteorites bigger than 10 grams per year."
"Each day as many as 4 billion meteoroids, most miniscule in size, enter earth's atmosphere."
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/solar sy stem/meteors/ImpactHazard.html
How is this speculative bullshit? This notion that man-made objects are the problem is the speculative bullshit. There are FAR more hazards up there of the naturally occuring variety than everything we've sent up there to date.
That has been my entire argument. I didn't write a master's thesis in my post because it is obvious. Why you seem hellbent on proving to the world that I'm full of crap for pointing out the patently obvious is truly amazing.
We do make extra birds out of metal and fly them around airports. They're called "AIRPLANES" and they are known to, in whole or in part, collide with each other and other natrually occuring objects. Nice analogy, though. Thanks for making my point.
Lay off the abusive ad hominems--they betray themselves...if you get my drift.
Thanks for the Jr. High science lesson. The point was not that something small can't be dangerous--DUH. You don't need to work at Fermilab to figure that one out. The point was that there is so much naturally occuring crap up there that you'd have to prepare for it anyway even if we had sent nothing up there ourselves. Space may be a vacuum, but it's not empty.
But again, thanks for that little flashback to 8th grade science class--and how clever of you to identify my nick. Oh touche. But I'm not a chemist, which you might notice doesn't mean one knows noting of chemistry just as one doesn't need to be a physicist to understand the physics behind why a 1/4 inch long piece of metal can be deadly if, say, it is approaching your skull from the barrel of a gun.
All currently orbiting, or indeed travelling on interplanetary/interstellar (see: Voyager N) vehicles are shieled against naturally occuring micrometeors. An extra piece of junk thrown out by man is nothing compared to what is already out there --especially as concerns radiation. We could detonate every single nuclear weapon on the planet in relatively low orbit and barely register a blip compared to the naturally occuring radiation.
Seriously, the dinosaurs weren't wiped out by Sputnik. Yeah, there's a lot of man-made junk up there, but compared to what careens into the atmosphere from parts unknown every day, talk about a drop in the ocean.
Last I checked, the United Nations never forced German law on anyone. It's just a complete misreading of the UN to view it as imposing one nation's laws on another. It's a negotiating table and all parties must assent. That's the whole reason the Kyoto protocol and the whole UNFCCC has had such difficulties. There's no such thing as the UN foisting anyone's idea of anything on anyone unless they agree to it. Peacekeepers must be invited. Weapons Inspectors must be given permission. All of the enforcement tools the UN has are only as strong as the member states who choose to participate in those actions. The U.N. is not a superstate. That's it's greatest strength and it's greatest weakness.
That said, there is a great similarity between the structure of ICANN and that of, say, the security council. Leadership is rotational on an international scale. ICANN is not just some static cabal hiding away behind LAX machinating on world domination. That common portrayal seems to come from those who wouldn't recognize ICANN if they were standing on the corner of Mindanao and Admiralty facing north and looking upward 50 feet.
The reason people complain about the U.N. is generally that they haven't a clue what to EXPECT it to do. There are things the U.N. does very, very well through EcoSoc and there are things the U.N. isn't equipped for at all (see: waging war, NATO). There are dubious issues behind the IBRD and the IMF, but they _do_ serve a purpose as no other entities can. Then there's the ICC. Without the U.N. we wouldn't have created that venue for trying all of the world's Slobos and Saddams... not that this administration seems to care about that when they have a perfectly good illegal concentration camp.
Moreover, what we be the impact on anyone writing recursive indexes. *poof* Apple owns your b-trees as soon as they are populated with "artists" and "albums." This is asinine.
Unfortunately, that's the nature of entertainment. Most of us aren't so callous as to go to an opera that has "issues" and immediately demand a refund. We pay for it, recognize it costs a huge amount of money even to put on crap, and cut our losses. You can sell your CD to a second-hand shop, but you can't sell your used opera tickets. In that sense, your argument isn't going to win anyone over. The person you are directing it toward has come to the exact same conclusion, despite the fact that you fail to recognize it, but on completely different premises--premises, I might add, that are utterly reasonable and justifiable. There quite simply is NOTHING honest about the P2P filesharing of the nature in question. Being coy about the facts comes off as disingenuous and will not be respected not matter how flowery the presentation.
Bull. By completely divorcing yourself from a commercial product, you're not going to be labeled a terrorist. It's that sort of defeatest attitude that transforms true "not caring" into apathy. There's a big difference. "I don't care what the RIAA has to say because I'm not their customer" is a great deal different that "I'm going to steal from them and not care if they try to catch me because they're evil and deserve to be ripped off." While the latter part of the latter statement may be true, you're playing their game and they WILL win if you do.
The problem is people have been conditioned to think they actually want the dreck that the members of the RIAA are peddling. They'll wrap themselves up in bullshit arguments about "fair use" (e.g. I buy a copy and lend it to 100 friends who make copies), but the fact is, for whatever reasons they _want_ the product. If they just truly didn't care, the conspiracy would be powerless because they (the entertainment industry) would have NOTHING to bargain with--if you don't have the product, don't need the product and don't even have a desire for the product, they've got nothing to argue about.
So, at base, just don't give a crap either way and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Unfortunately, most people want to not care, but they still want to get the goods, at which point, they've got you.
Like your life will end if you don't have the latest Celine Dion CD. Puh-lease. Get over it people. They're selling shit. Stop buying it and you'll stop worrying about the entire issue. The fact that you WANT what they're selling is the only reason they've got a leg to stand on.
I've neither purchased nor downloaded a single RIAA member's product for years and my life is no less enjoyable for it. In fact, I have several thousand dollars per year to spend on live music performed by people I care about.
What is going on is that even the evil forces of people like Orrin Hatch are realizing that criminal penalties are _not_ appropriate, that branding "otherwise law-abiding" people as felons for something that is individually rather trivial, but on a massive scale certainly non-trivial. It would behoove people to at least give them the credit for that observation rather than run headlong into Orwellian nightmares. Frankly, I don't feel sorry for anyone involved in this argument. No one is forcing you to play their game, but if you want their products, it shouldn't surprise you that they will do everything to ensure that you play by their rules.
What are we to do? Ignore them. Don't steal their products. Don't buy their products. Don't even listen to or watch their products wherever they might be. In the end, maybe by ignoring them for long enough they'll all go broke and die. In the meantime, get out of the damned house, go to a pub and throw your sheckles in the hats of your local musicians who really DO need the money. Buy their CDs. If you have a business, sponsor their gigs. You might even enjoy life a little more in the process.
My family's "mom-and-pop" business had multiple computers from 1981 on and was pleasantly Microsoft free for quite some time. We had Osbornes, Sperrys, various Commodores for play(C64s and Amigas) etc. We ran CP/M and DR-DOS. We used MicroPro and Wordperfect software and had contract programmers for specialized software to run the business. We only bought Microsoft when it was clearly becoming the only game in town, starting in around 1988. Functionally speaking, everything Microsoft has developed--or imitated and/or outright stolen--would have been developed otherwise, possibly worse, very likely better. The flagship MS products are not unique and they never have been. Personal computers were entering the home long before Microsoft had anything to sell and would have continued their progression unabated regardless.
If being spread across the globe under innumerable authorities subject to a constantly rotating advisory board of international directors from both the public and private sector is not decentralization, then there is no definition that would satisfy the de riguer "ICANN=EVIL" attitudes on/. save for complete anarchy.
ICANN decentralized the root servers from the beginning. ICANN is not even remotely a "centralized" organization as you suggest. ICANN is not simply supported by the United States government--it is global in nature. Just because they have an address in Marina del Rey doesn't mean it is just a U.S. game any more than it does for the United Nations for being on Manhattan. However, ICANN is not a huge bureaucracy. There is very little to corrupt or pervert and the disparate nature of it is designed to prevent that.
It amazes me that the complaints people have with ICANN are of a nature that could not be further to the opposite of reality, thus I wonder if most of the loudest voices have the slightest clue what they are talking about.
The point is that there is a reasonable middle ground. BOTH extremes are bad. It's simply unreasonable to expect any organization to operate without contingency plans. By having well documented requirements, designs, tests and metrics, you don't suddenly jump all the way into some Dickensian sweatshop nightmare. That's just silly. If someone is so paranoid about losing their job that their work becomes completely ciphered beyond all recognition, they're going to be fired anyway and with good reason. That sort of behavior is what drives companies to the opposite repressive extreme. Thankfully, not all companies go there...
I've seen good projects go HORRIBLY wrong by adhering strictly to [insert your favorite or most hated methodology here] because someone generally perceived as "high on the food chain" misinterpreted "good practice" for "despotic feifdom" and so the projects got lost in a perpetual loop of procedural roadblocks and endless documentation with the end result that NOTHING got done and the team completely imploded through attrition.
So, yes, it's a pretty sharp double-edged sword and I can see how people can come to loathe the process to the point of wishing they could just go become hairdressers. Like all government, the world is arguably a better place for it, despite the fact that it can also be completely laid waste and destroyed by it causing people to self-immolate rather than put up with it.
Uhm, if you look at the LAST hundred years, ten bucks in 1904 was worth roughly what $200 is now. Assuming 'natural' inflation, that could be a SAVINGS of $5,508. Effectively, it's break-even in 45 years. They're just trying to grab all of the business customers who couldn't care less about $1k here or there and would much rather dispense with the headache of renewals effectively "forever."
Having "standards" and "accountability" do not a "code monkey" make. There's no conspiracy to deprive programmers of their art here, although people can certainly abuse the hell out of what are otherwise good practices. If you're in the field purely for the craft, perhaps it would be best to work for yourself.
Working with organizations requires the practices you so despise because of the many types of people that you must effectively communicate with. This is one of the reasons there is a certain disdain for programmers--they insist on being somewhat schitzoid, shying away from working with other people. I have heard this at EVERY interview I've had for fifteen years--"we hired you over the other candidates largely because you have social skills and can speak plain_fscking_English, which we hardly ever find in programmers." If you left or died, would someone else be able to continue your work or would it be more efficient to just start over? It's almost impossible to continue the work of an "artist." You can hardly fault anyone for encouraging practices that make continuity possible over mere aesthetic appreciation for the beautiful enigmas left by some mad scientist.
Except that under the current US Postal regulations, the UPS Store et. al. will not open an account for a non-resident. You can be a non-citizen, but you cannot be just some guy over the phone who will be jumping off a plane. While these outfits are not the USPS, they are still subject o USPS controls.
I've done this recently and even as a US Citizen it was a rather tedious affair.
I've made a number of lasting friends online. However, I wouldn't vouch for their ability to wipe their own asses for several years--just as with "real world" friends. Sure enough, after a year or two, quite a few of those online acquaintances turned out to be complete cons. Not so oddly enough, in the other cases when both parties moved from acquaintance to trusted friend, the online connection would become almost a guarded secret as neither party wanted to become that "IN" for some random con untill a decent vetting had occured. If you are in fact a trusted friend, I don't need a computer to remind me. This is the same as it's always been and the online non-solutions to this non-problem will not change a damned thing for anyone but multi-level marketers and serial fraudsters who ARE the problem to begin with.
Correct, RFCs are not "research." I mentioned that as they are easily accessible evidence of responsibility. The original poster was rather off-handedly and absurdly suggesting that university research has produced little results. This is a rather contemporary veil on "I don't like government subsidies, so I'm going to suggest that grants are wasted." This is, to put it politely, a mistaken notion.
TCP was developed primarily through DARPA funding handed out to CM, UC, Stanford and USC. RAND was in there as well. A great deal of the "basic research" was and is done within the confines of universities primarily through public, not private, funding. Even the private entities involved in the development of the protocols you referenced were operating through public funding.
I'm not at all criticizing the contribution of corporate labs. That would be as silly as the comment made by the poster I was responding to. However, since both the corporate and university labs are beholden to the same purse-strings, it's a bit inaccurate to say that one is a dependant of the other. They are symbiotic if anything, dependent on the same benefactors.
Read a few RFCs and cross reference with the university telephone directories at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Illinois and USC then get back to us about how the universities haven't been productive in your lifetime.
I've been pretty vociferously pessimistic about the Indian (or the rest of SE Asia, China, Eastern Europe etc.) outsourcing trend. It's scary. That copywriters are being outsourced might start getting the press to shift a little inward on the subject.
However, I've been talking with a small software development company. They're in a niche market and do the vast majority of their development here in the US and aren't looking to outsource that anytime soon. There are WAY too many confidentiality issues with their clients. However, their web application development was shipped off to India. They didn't lay anyone off, they just started those projects in India from the beginning because they're far too expensive to do here. It's a small internally funded company and they don't want to get into the venture capital game. They simply can't afford the millions it would take to build commercial web applications. So, the proverbial "little guy" (in this case, mostly women) is bringing innovative products to American companies that they otherwise couldn't...and in the process hopefully paying my mortgage for awhile.
The "brains" are still here and the necessary knowledge behind the designs can't be outsourced--it's just too localized. So, who knows. I'm still very wary of this as there are too many companies where you have to wonder if they will have ANY jobs outside of executive management that aren't outsourced. However, anything that levels the playing field a little between small companies and huge faceless borg cubes can't be ALL bad. I'm not ready to jump on the cheering bandwagon yet, but I'm a little more willing to at least sit down at the negotiating table...
I had an interview recently where they were looking for someone who "knew" VB, a VERY obscure piece of middleware that runs both VB and Java, and Websphere. Ok, got all of the above. However, my working Java experience is limited to J2EE, you know, the sort of Java that's relevant to the aforementioned systems. The interviewer look utterly blank when I explained that, even though his job description did not explicitly say anything about Java that it was necessarily implied and that, yes, I have J2EE experience but not Swing/AWT GUI design, so please fortheloveofgod, make sure the Java you don't know you are asking for does not involve blasted Java GUIs. Sure, I *could* do it, but I've NEVER needed to and I don't want to. Ever. I hate AWT and Swing. Blech. Conversely, I know quite a few people who "know" Java in the sense of building pretty applications in Swing. God bless them, but they don't know the first thing about J2EE. Unfortunately, HR types wrap the whole thing up in "knows Java." That's as useful as "Knows C." Ok, now somewhere between "can write 'hello world'" and "can write nuclear power safety systems" we must find a usable definition of "knows," because if all you need is someone to write accounting functions and you've got a nuclear engineer across the desk, or vice versa, even "has the entire API committed to memory" is not a sufficient yardstick to work with.
There's a very good reason for this and the article touches on it, albeit briefly. Engineers are, ostensibly, good at making things work, hopefully by the most efficient, elegant means possible. In many fields, the end-users' expectations, behavior and sense of aesthetics can either be easily deduced or if ignored, not really get in the way. Think architecture and civil engineering. People won't stop using a bridge because they think it's ugly. They might choose not to occupy a building if it looks like crap, but unless it is truly god-awful, a misinterpretation by the engineers will not prevent the use of the product.
End-user software is a different story. I've been in this field for going on fifteen years and every single place I worked for has had the problem that most of the engineers DO NOT CARE about end-user software. They don't want to write it or support it. I'm not talking about companies that don't have qualified people. I'm talking about companies whose sole existence is computer science, but they don't give a rat's ass about anyone outside of the IT divisions. General user applications are generally BORING. What computer scientist's dream is writing really good financial reports? That would be, roughly, none.
So, you get bloated toolkits and IDEs aimed at empowering those alienated users resulting in poorly written software using those toolkits. You get crappy desktops and dormant windowing systems (*cough* X *cough*). You get lazy attempts to duplicate microsoft office and even more painfully plodding attempts to make windows software run on Linux--because most computer scientists really can't be bothered worrying about this crap. IT'S BORING.
Being nineteen and relatively idealistic (we ALL were and hopefully most of us still are a little bit), it's easy to ignore the fact that what goes on in academia takes many years, usually decades, to filter around in theoretical circles, let alone down to the 'grubby' world of practical application. OOP started going on forty years ago in 1960s. It took until the 1990s before it really took off outside computer science circles. That "programmers" are not "computer scientists" is no surprise. BASIC was written specifically so that scientists, but not computer scientists, could easliy write their own software--because computer scientists are neither qualified nor interested in writing the software in question. "Programming sucks" is just an artifact of that progression of programming as science to programming as practical application. It's not because mere "programmers" are equivalent to garbage men. It's because beginning roughly twenty-five years ago, EVERY science absorbed a bit of computer science, much to the chagrin of the computer scientists who occasionally run into the programming skills of economists, chemical engineers, social scientists and their likes--the people most high-level languages were specifically designed to empower so that they'd leave the real computer scientists alone to do their own work.
Slashdot Mirror
The Machine might be mediocre--much like many of the cheap desktops people are buying. However, a quick spin around the Wal*MART catalog shows that they are pushing the Sun Java Desktop brand along side Lindows and Lycoris. The Windows and No-OS machines they are selling use THE EXACT SAME HARDWARE, except that the Sun version costs $100 less than the Windows install. Sure, you can buy the WinXP box, but they're putting the same machines side-by side and effectively saying "Hey, you just use this for web browsing and email, why pay an extra $100 for the exactly the same machine that does exactly the same thing? Besides, Linux is cool and makes you look smart. You're smart, right?" Ka-ching.
Don't be so quick to write this off. They are truly offering what everyone has been asking for: CHOICE. Hell, I HATE Wal*Mart, but I give 'em kudos for this.
This is what I'm talking about:
u mb er=470
r sy stem/meteors/ImpactHazard.html
"Estimates for the mass of material that falls on Earth each year range from 37,000-78,000 tons. Most of this mass would come from dust-sized particles...Over the whole surface area of Earth, that translates to 18,000 to 84,000 meteorites bigger than 10 grams per year."
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?n
Cornell might not be up to snuff, so here's NASA:
"Each day as many as 4 billion meteoroids, most miniscule in size, enter earth's atmosphere."
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/sola
How is this speculative bullshit? This notion that man-made objects are the problem is the speculative bullshit. There are FAR more hazards up there of the naturally occuring variety than everything we've sent up there to date.
That has been my entire argument. I didn't write a master's thesis in my post because it is obvious. Why you seem hellbent on proving to the world that I'm full of crap for pointing out the patently obvious is truly amazing.
We do make extra birds out of metal and fly them around airports. They're called "AIRPLANES" and they are known to, in whole or in part, collide with each other and other natrually occuring objects. Nice analogy, though. Thanks for making my point.
Lay off the abusive ad hominems--they betray themselves...if you get my drift.
Thanks for the Jr. High science lesson. The point was not that something small can't be dangerous--DUH. You don't need to work at Fermilab to figure that one out. The point was that there is so much naturally occuring crap up there that you'd have to prepare for it anyway even if we had sent nothing up there ourselves. Space may be a vacuum, but it's not empty. But again, thanks for that little flashback to 8th grade science class--and how clever of you to identify my nick. Oh touche. But I'm not a chemist, which you might notice doesn't mean one knows noting of chemistry just as one doesn't need to be a physicist to understand the physics behind why a 1/4 inch long piece of metal can be deadly if, say, it is approaching your skull from the barrel of a gun.
Paint chips?
All currently orbiting, or indeed travelling on interplanetary/interstellar (see: Voyager N) vehicles are shieled against naturally occuring micrometeors. An extra piece of junk thrown out by man is nothing compared to what is already out there --especially as concerns radiation. We could detonate every single nuclear weapon on the planet in relatively low orbit and barely register a blip compared to the naturally occuring radiation.
Seriously, the dinosaurs weren't wiped out by Sputnik. Yeah, there's a lot of man-made junk up there, but compared to what careens into the atmosphere from parts unknown every day, talk about a drop in the ocean.
Last I checked, the United Nations never forced German law on anyone. It's just a complete misreading of the UN to view it as imposing one nation's laws on another. It's a negotiating table and all parties must assent. That's the whole reason the Kyoto protocol and the whole UNFCCC has had such difficulties. There's no such thing as the UN foisting anyone's idea of anything on anyone unless they agree to it. Peacekeepers must be invited. Weapons Inspectors must be given permission. All of the enforcement tools the UN has are only as strong as the member states who choose to participate in those actions. The U.N. is not a superstate. That's it's greatest strength and it's greatest weakness.
That said, there is a great similarity between the structure of ICANN and that of, say, the security council. Leadership is rotational on an international scale. ICANN is not just some static cabal hiding away behind LAX machinating on world domination. That common portrayal seems to come from those who wouldn't recognize ICANN if they were standing on the corner of Mindanao and Admiralty facing north and looking upward 50 feet.
Thank God someone here "gets it."
The reason people complain about the U.N. is generally that they haven't a clue what to EXPECT it to do. There are things the U.N. does very, very well through EcoSoc and there are things the U.N. isn't equipped for at all (see: waging war, NATO). There are dubious issues behind the IBRD and the IMF, but they _do_ serve a purpose as no other entities can. Then there's the ICC. Without the U.N. we wouldn't have created that venue for trying all of the world's Slobos and Saddams... not that this administration seems to care about that when they have a perfectly good illegal concentration camp.
Moreover, what we be the impact on anyone writing recursive indexes. *poof* Apple owns your b-trees as soon as they are populated with "artists" and "albums." This is asinine.
Unfortunately, that's the nature of entertainment. Most of us aren't so callous as to go to an opera that has "issues" and immediately demand a refund. We pay for it, recognize it costs a huge amount of money even to put on crap, and cut our losses. You can sell your CD to a second-hand shop, but you can't sell your used opera tickets. In that sense, your argument isn't going to win anyone over. The person you are directing it toward has come to the exact same conclusion, despite the fact that you fail to recognize it, but on completely different premises--premises, I might add, that are utterly reasonable and justifiable. There quite simply is NOTHING honest about the P2P filesharing of the nature in question. Being coy about the facts comes off as disingenuous and will not be respected not matter how flowery the presentation.
Bull. By completely divorcing yourself from a commercial product, you're not going to be labeled a terrorist. It's that sort of defeatest attitude that transforms true "not caring" into apathy. There's a big difference. "I don't care what the RIAA has to say because I'm not their customer" is a great deal different that "I'm going to steal from them and not care if they try to catch me because they're evil and deserve to be ripped off." While the latter part of the latter statement may be true, you're playing their game and they WILL win if you do.
The problem is people have been conditioned to think they actually want the dreck that the members of the RIAA are peddling. They'll wrap themselves up in bullshit arguments about "fair use" (e.g. I buy a copy and lend it to 100 friends who make copies), but the fact is, for whatever reasons they _want_ the product. If they just truly didn't care, the conspiracy would be powerless because they (the entertainment industry) would have NOTHING to bargain with--if you don't have the product, don't need the product and don't even have a desire for the product, they've got nothing to argue about.
So, at base, just don't give a crap either way and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Unfortunately, most people want to not care, but they still want to get the goods, at which point, they've got you.
Like your life will end if you don't have the latest Celine Dion CD. Puh-lease. Get over it people. They're selling shit. Stop buying it and you'll stop worrying about the entire issue. The fact that you WANT what they're selling is the only reason they've got a leg to stand on.
I've neither purchased nor downloaded a single RIAA member's product for years and my life is no less enjoyable for it. In fact, I have several thousand dollars per year to spend on live music performed by people I care about.
What a concept.
What is going on is that even the evil forces of people like Orrin Hatch are realizing that criminal penalties are _not_ appropriate, that branding "otherwise law-abiding" people as felons for something that is individually rather trivial, but on a massive scale certainly non-trivial. It would behoove people to at least give them the credit for that observation rather than run headlong into Orwellian nightmares. Frankly, I don't feel sorry for anyone involved in this argument. No one is forcing you to play their game, but if you want their products, it shouldn't surprise you that they will do everything to ensure that you play by their rules.
What are we to do? Ignore them. Don't steal their products. Don't buy their products. Don't even listen to or watch their products wherever they might be. In the end, maybe by ignoring them for long enough they'll all go broke and die. In the meantime, get out of the damned house, go to a pub and throw your sheckles in the hats of your local musicians who really DO need the money. Buy their CDs. If you have a business, sponsor their gigs. You might even enjoy life a little more in the process.
My family's "mom-and-pop" business had multiple computers from 1981 on and was pleasantly Microsoft free for quite some time. We had Osbornes, Sperrys, various Commodores for play(C64s and Amigas) etc. We ran CP/M and DR-DOS. We used MicroPro and Wordperfect software and had contract programmers for specialized software to run the business. We only bought Microsoft when it was clearly becoming the only game in town, starting in around 1988. Functionally speaking, everything Microsoft has developed--or imitated and/or outright stolen--would have been developed otherwise, possibly worse, very likely better. The flagship MS products are not unique and they never have been. Personal computers were entering the home long before Microsoft had anything to sell and would have continued their progression unabated regardless.
If being spread across the globe under innumerable authorities subject to a constantly rotating advisory board of international directors from both the public and private sector is not decentralization, then there is no definition that would satisfy the de riguer "ICANN=EVIL" attitudes on /. save for complete anarchy.
In a word: whatever.
ICANN decentralized the root servers from the beginning. ICANN is not even remotely a "centralized" organization as you suggest. ICANN is not simply supported by the United States government--it is global in nature. Just because they have an address in Marina del Rey doesn't mean it is just a U.S. game any more than it does for the United Nations for being on Manhattan. However, ICANN is not a huge bureaucracy. There is very little to corrupt or pervert and the disparate nature of it is designed to prevent that.
It amazes me that the complaints people have with ICANN are of a nature that could not be further to the opposite of reality, thus I wonder if most of the loudest voices have the slightest clue what they are talking about.
Seriously, people, look before you leap:
http://www.icann.org/general/
The point is that there is a reasonable middle ground. BOTH extremes are bad. It's simply unreasonable to expect any organization to operate without contingency plans. By having well documented requirements, designs, tests and metrics, you don't suddenly jump all the way into some Dickensian sweatshop nightmare. That's just silly. If someone is so paranoid about losing their job that their work becomes completely ciphered beyond all recognition, they're going to be fired anyway and with good reason. That sort of behavior is what drives companies to the opposite repressive extreme. Thankfully, not all companies go there...
I've seen good projects go HORRIBLY wrong by adhering strictly to [insert your favorite or most hated methodology here] because someone generally perceived as "high on the food chain" misinterpreted "good practice" for "despotic feifdom" and so the projects got lost in a perpetual loop of procedural roadblocks and endless documentation with the end result that NOTHING got done and the team completely imploded through attrition.
So, yes, it's a pretty sharp double-edged sword and I can see how people can come to loathe the process to the point of wishing they could just go become hairdressers. Like all government, the world is arguably a better place for it, despite the fact that it can also be completely laid waste and destroyed by it causing people to self-immolate rather than put up with it.
Thankfully, though, not everyone uses RUP.
Uhm, if you look at the LAST hundred years, ten bucks in 1904 was worth roughly what $200 is now. Assuming 'natural' inflation, that could be a SAVINGS of $5,508. Effectively, it's break-even in 45 years. They're just trying to grab all of the business customers who couldn't care less about $1k here or there and would much rather dispense with the headache of renewals effectively "forever."
Having "standards" and "accountability" do not a "code monkey" make. There's no conspiracy to deprive programmers of their art here, although people can certainly abuse the hell out of what are otherwise good practices. If you're in the field purely for the craft, perhaps it would be best to work for yourself.
Working with organizations requires the practices you so despise because of the many types of people that you must effectively communicate with. This is one of the reasons there is a certain disdain for programmers--they insist on being somewhat schitzoid, shying away from working with other people. I have heard this at EVERY interview I've had for fifteen years--"we hired you over the other candidates largely because you have social skills and can speak plain_fscking_English, which we hardly ever find in programmers." If you left or died, would someone else be able to continue your work or would it be more efficient to just start over? It's almost impossible to continue the work of an "artist." You can hardly fault anyone for encouraging practices that make continuity possible over mere aesthetic appreciation for the beautiful enigmas left by some mad scientist.
Except that under the current US Postal regulations, the UPS Store et. al. will not open an account for a non-resident. You can be a non-citizen, but you cannot be just some guy over the phone who will be jumping off a plane. While these outfits are not the USPS, they are still subject o USPS controls.
I've done this recently and even as a US Citizen it was a rather tedious affair.
I've made a number of lasting friends online. However, I wouldn't vouch for their ability to wipe their own asses for several years--just as with "real world" friends. Sure enough, after a year or two, quite a few of those online acquaintances turned out to be complete cons. Not so oddly enough, in the other cases when both parties moved from acquaintance to trusted friend, the online connection would become almost a guarded secret as neither party wanted to become that "IN" for some random con untill a decent vetting had occured. If you are in fact a trusted friend, I don't need a computer to remind me. This is the same as it's always been and the online non-solutions to this non-problem will not change a damned thing for anyone but multi-level marketers and serial fraudsters who ARE the problem to begin with.
Correct, RFCs are not "research." I mentioned that as they are easily accessible evidence of responsibility. The original poster was rather off-handedly and absurdly suggesting that university research has produced little results. This is a rather contemporary veil on "I don't like government subsidies, so I'm going to suggest that grants are wasted." This is, to put it politely, a mistaken notion.
TCP was developed primarily through DARPA funding handed out to CM, UC, Stanford and USC. RAND was in there as well. A great deal of the "basic research" was and is done within the confines of universities primarily through public, not private, funding. Even the private entities involved in the development of the protocols you referenced were operating through public funding.
I'm not at all criticizing the contribution of corporate labs. That would be as silly as the comment made by the poster I was responding to. However, since both the corporate and university labs are beholden to the same purse-strings, it's a bit inaccurate to say that one is a dependant of the other. They are symbiotic if anything, dependent on the same benefactors.
Read a few RFCs and cross reference with the university telephone directories at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Illinois and USC then get back to us about how the universities haven't been productive in your lifetime.
I've been pretty vociferously pessimistic about the Indian (or the rest of SE Asia, China, Eastern Europe etc.) outsourcing trend. It's scary. That copywriters are being outsourced might start getting the press to shift a little inward on the subject.
However, I've been talking with a small software development company. They're in a niche market and do the vast majority of their development here in the US and aren't looking to outsource that anytime soon. There are WAY too many confidentiality issues with their clients. However, their web application development was shipped off to India. They didn't lay anyone off, they just started those projects in India from the beginning because they're far too expensive to do here. It's a small internally funded company and they don't want to get into the venture capital game. They simply can't afford the millions it would take to build commercial web applications. So, the proverbial "little guy" (in this case, mostly women) is bringing innovative products to American companies that they otherwise couldn't...and in the process hopefully paying my mortgage for awhile.
The "brains" are still here and the necessary knowledge behind the designs can't be outsourced--it's just too localized. So, who knows. I'm still very wary of this as there are too many companies where you have to wonder if they will have ANY jobs outside of executive management that aren't outsourced. However, anything that levels the playing field a little between small companies and huge faceless borg cubes can't be ALL bad. I'm not ready to jump on the cheering bandwagon yet, but I'm a little more willing to at least sit down at the negotiating table...
I had an interview recently where they were looking for someone who "knew" VB, a VERY obscure piece of middleware that runs both VB and Java, and Websphere. Ok, got all of the above. However, my working Java experience is limited to J2EE, you know, the sort of Java that's relevant to the aforementioned systems. The interviewer look utterly blank when I explained that, even though his job description did not explicitly say anything about Java that it was necessarily implied and that, yes, I have J2EE experience but not Swing/AWT GUI design, so please fortheloveofgod, make sure the Java you don't know you are asking for does not involve blasted Java GUIs. Sure, I *could* do it, but I've NEVER needed to and I don't want to. Ever. I hate AWT and Swing. Blech. Conversely, I know quite a few people who "know" Java in the sense of building pretty applications in Swing. God bless them, but they don't know the first thing about J2EE. Unfortunately, HR types wrap the whole thing up in "knows Java." That's as useful as "Knows C." Ok, now somewhere between "can write 'hello world'" and "can write nuclear power safety systems" we must find a usable definition of "knows," because if all you need is someone to write accounting functions and you've got a nuclear engineer across the desk, or vice versa, even "has the entire API committed to memory" is not a sufficient yardstick to work with.
There's a very good reason for this and the article touches on it, albeit briefly. Engineers are, ostensibly, good at making things work, hopefully by the most efficient, elegant means possible. In many fields, the end-users' expectations, behavior and sense of aesthetics can either be easily deduced or if ignored, not really get in the way. Think architecture and civil engineering. People won't stop using a bridge because they think it's ugly. They might choose not to occupy a building if it looks like crap, but unless it is truly god-awful, a misinterpretation by the engineers will not prevent the use of the product.
End-user software is a different story. I've been in this field for going on fifteen years and every single place I worked for has had the problem that most of the engineers DO NOT CARE about end-user software. They don't want to write it or support it. I'm not talking about companies that don't have qualified people. I'm talking about companies whose sole existence is computer science, but they don't give a rat's ass about anyone outside of the IT divisions. General user applications are generally BORING. What computer scientist's dream is writing really good financial reports? That would be, roughly, none.
So, you get bloated toolkits and IDEs aimed at empowering those alienated users resulting in poorly written software using those toolkits. You get crappy desktops and dormant windowing systems (*cough* X *cough*). You get lazy attempts to duplicate microsoft office and even more painfully plodding attempts to make windows software run on Linux--because most computer scientists really can't be bothered worrying about this crap. IT'S BORING.
Being nineteen and relatively idealistic (we ALL were and hopefully most of us still are a little bit), it's easy to ignore the fact that what goes on in academia takes many years, usually decades, to filter around in theoretical circles, let alone down to the 'grubby' world of practical application. OOP started going on forty years ago in 1960s. It took until the 1990s before it really took off outside computer science circles. That "programmers" are not "computer scientists" is no surprise. BASIC was written specifically so that scientists, but not computer scientists, could easliy write their own software--because computer scientists are neither qualified nor interested in writing the software in question. "Programming sucks" is just an artifact of that progression of programming as science to programming as practical application. It's not because mere "programmers" are equivalent to garbage men. It's because beginning roughly twenty-five years ago, EVERY science absorbed a bit of computer science, much to the chagrin of the computer scientists who occasionally run into the programming skills of economists, chemical engineers, social scientists and their likes--the people most high-level languages were specifically designed to empower so that they'd leave the real computer scientists alone to do their own work.