I'm not sure I believe anything any of them say but it certain does provide a different view of it than the article portrays.
I don't understand what the fuss is about except that its trendy to dump on Facebook for any and every conceivable or even illogical reason. All cyber technology comes with and implicit and inherent danger that it will be either used nefariously or misused to harm. It was and remains perfectly legitimate subject matter.
Kurzweil in his discussion of the Singularity has made similar points in his books and you don't have to believe in the Singularity to understand the technological inertia he cites.
If a design attempts to answer the wrong question, no manifestation of that design can correct the original flaw.
The issue of gathering requirements is complex. One must distinguish between the raw and the cooked. Is the software breaking new ground or a refactored design of an existing system?
Care needs to be taken that legacy redesigns re-examine the premises that the original systems tried to solve.
a.) What was the system trying to accomplish and is that relevant today?
b.) Are the technological constraints that applied to the manifestation of the legacy system obsolete? today's solution to the original problem may require not a refactoring but a retooling as well (architectural considerations).
The design (including requirements) is the most important artifact of all processes. The design instructs all subsequent implementations regardless of components or coding conventions du jour.
Design also must define and inform cybernetic context. Where's the by-product fit? Where's the architectural edges? And what is it overlapping? In other words, how can a potential user or consumer make sense of the thing in plain verbal and visual language?
The input to design is the question to answer. The output are precise algorithms a tool to accomplish the task will need to accurately conform to.
How the design is built, imo, is out-of-scope and quite frankly an irrelevant distraction.
Actually, no. I agree with the reviewer that this is an excellent introduction to Ubuntu and the book holds great social value as well as technical instruction.
What I liked about this book is that any family can purchase it inexpensively, read it (and this is a very readable technical introduction, and come to understand that the Linux world is not some kind of scary place. In fact it is an operating system and family of free applications that celebrate individuality, freedom, and ease of use.
Or it can be recycled at community book recycling centers so that your neighbors can use it.
Secondly the DVD is a gold standard by which any of us can boot and install a contemporary version of Ubuntu. From there the system itself can be upgraded to the latest version if so desired. Updating the system is trivial. What is key is that the book buyer has a bulletproof copy of something that works independent of a copy burned by Skippy the geek neighbor.
For many teachers, schools, and families who cannot afford the Microsoft billing treadmill, this book, IMO, should be a mandatory purchase to be made available in teacher's lounges, PTA/PTO meetings, and fund-raisers.
Amazon was filled with cover songs. In fact there was a category for it.
The pre-upload agreement covered the liability.
As for the expense of maintaining the site, it is negligible. It was wholly unsupervised as certain artists posted and reposted the same stuff or volumes of stuff that simply spammed everyone else.
Amazon managed to drive away customers is all that happened, say a minimum of a dozen or so per artist who would, out of curiosity have to navigate past hundreds of product placements to see where the songs were on the charts.
It was a very smart program that some idiot managed to screw up.
It really is. My band and I were submitting very good content to Amazon who used to let bands simply upload MP3s to their site to see if anyone downloaded it.
This drove traffic to their site that wthey would never otherwise get.
As soon as you let private companies get their snouts into the public trough, they just rob their customers blind.
There is this magic hat illusion that privatization provides competition to lower costs.
That idea has no basis in reality except as a one-time ruse to start a stampede toward a bad privatization program that eventually bilks the newly captured and orphaned audience.
A few years ago in CT, seniors were lured into HMO health plans who, once they started losing money, began dropping high risk seniors - then even low risk seniors - a minor crisis for those who initially experienced cost savings then were stranded without any coverage.
Government and the private sector strike a delicate balance that in the US is irrevocably damaged. While our nation enjoyed the fruits of seemingly unlimited resources, everything ran smoothly. Today we talk about importing natural gas.
If libertarians believe limited government is good - leave - Iraq is your utopian state - enjoy. But don't lecture us that it's cheap or desirable.
MH - I think you're way over the top in saying something like that and it's bad form.
Considering your Nick one would think Wal*mart was the fulfillment of Marxism in America. Once all the competition is gone, everyone shops in the same place, same prices for everyone. The rich can't get rich if nobody plays.
This continuous elimination of competition is precisely the opposite of capitalism. Who said irony was dead, it's a doorbuster on Wall St.
Why do you envy those stockholders? Once the competition is gone what will make the stock worth holding? The economy has already moved underground to churches, gambling halls, and back rooms.
America is eating itself alive and voting for people who will make sure the citizenry is throughly cooked. I doubt you need to lift a finger except to stop resisting - the sooner things get worse the sooner things will get better.
Well. No the post did not start with that premise and no the cycle cannot continue indefinitely.
First, you asserted initially that lowered prices were *the same as a raise* and what I'm pointing out to you [and I'm not alone in having experienced this] that the prices of everyday goods may or may not go down but *for sure* the incomes of all kinds of knowledge workers is shrinking in the US.
And this shrinkage is dramatic - lower wages, fewer benies, larger co-pays, shorter vacations, nickle and diming of contracts at the edges, and so on.
I don't want to bore you with my own experience and I won't but I can assure you that when you lose the ability to find work, pay your bills, lose your health insurance, and have a family to feed, and getting hired becomes dependent on your credit record, you will shop at Walmart not out of greed but of necessity.
And, yes there are plenty of local merchants more deserving of my business who are not artificially bloating prices but who play by the rules just as most of us do.
And I will say to you that the demands of a PROFESSION such as ours that enables and enriches so many should never be reduced to the conditions we are now under. IT IS HUMILIATING to be in this business. One is afraid to say the wrong thing because there are dozens of grinning H-1Bs lined up to ratchet down your well-being one more notch.
Altruism in the profession is as hard to find as jobs. It is painful and often a personal sacrifice to be a professional in this business. Before Bush, neighbors used to respect the work we did. Today we are treated like hucksters begging for work.
The very psychology of Yourdon writing a book telling us how to prop ourselves up is insulting. For all of the taxes we paid for all the years of the computing boom, unemployment extentions were not granted at the height of Bush's economic IT blight but maybe Walmart sold the toilet paper three cents cheaper that day.
We aren't alone, medical doctors are fleeing their profession as well. America is being dumbed down to enjoy the enrichment of a few doorbuster consumer items. And every three months, Alan Greenspan shows up to say, "There will be winners and there will be losers."
Guess who's losing? We have become a class of Charlie Chaplin characters - smart, all dressed up - and no place to go - filling up our Walmart shopping carts with the two for one specials to eat.
the mix in the US gives real potential towards a Balkan-style civil war...
I think we're witnessing the advent of a sick misinterpretation of American law and social convention. Far too many lawmakers these days cannot think in the abstract.
In Connecticut [and MA] almost every major industry is experiencing closings, cutbacks, and diminished new work environments. The work that's being displace is going overseas and to the red states - Torrington Bearings went to Cinncinati before the election, Easco Tools to Arkansas and Tennessee, Electric Boat elsewhere, and so on. Most troubling in this equation is that highly skilled and very qualified technical persoonnel are being stranded and orphaned from good work.
The big news around election time was the *surplus* of flu vaccine in states like Nebraska. Just a few days ago CT issued a warning that the vaccine was scarce. Urban [blue] populations are being starved of federal resources while the great wide open spaces are having their taxes subsidized. My guess is that an epidemic is more likely to break out and rage out of control in urban areas rather than in the sand hills - just a guess. To me, it's a red flag that the bluetopians are expendable.
Now I can't imagine bluetopians running out and starting Liberal Gun Clubs but things will need to change to avert a major social schism.
I have to disagree with those boycotting Walmart. The best way to bring this beast to its knees is to overload it - demand more tax cuts, shop for the lowest common denominator, push instead of pull, spend blue. These days the reds have much more to lose than any of us.
In the absence of representation in government, the best thing the disenfranchised can do is to act in concert for change. There's nothing left to do.
Globally, a fork is being stuck into the American economy. One day soon, a creditor will flex their muscles and tell us in no uncertain terms who's in charge. It will, of course, come as a surprise and the media will scream, "How could this have happened?"
This last cruel election further seals our fate as a generation and as a country. The existing oligarchy is having the same effect on this country that termites have on a home - someday the structure will just collapse under the weight of what's left.
There is no technology, old or new, that under today's existing circumstances cannot be routinely migrated to friendlier production facilities elsewhere. Even more problematically, the next technology that the American labor force expects to suddenly reverse our fortunes will probably be invented and developed elsewhere first - the anti-intellectualism pervading our politics, media, and science is oppresive. The micro-impatience for real-time gratification of corporate stockholders further diminishes the chances of a technological fix here.
Going away parties at American corporations will begin to get morose. Workers who retire will not only be over the hill, fellow workers may be spreading their ashes among the cubicules one has homesteaded over time - "We'll miss you, don't change - ahhhh, ahhhh, chooooooo!"
The only robot we're likely to encounter is the sweeper-vac that finally disposes our ashes in the corporate dumpster. Metaphorically speaking, this will be at least the second time that's happened to us.
Bearing witness to America these days is like being part of a national train wreck that's happening in slow motion - everyone's making some kind of noise that resembles a scream but nothing is heard.
The apologists for globalism often use condescending rhetoric to justify the plunder of the American labor force. It's not xenophobia, it's almost exactly the opposite - a soft, indentured servitude admiration for these new labor pools that's troubling.
PBS has sold its soul to every pandering Wall St. talk show available will routinely have guests intimating that Americans will do 'design' work and foreigners will do the so-called mundane tasks. Yes, Wall St. would have us believe that we'll all be techno-plantation owners reaping the rewards of outsourcing to the lowest bidders.
This rhetoric of course flies in the face of American Universities going into intellectual withdrawal and begging for their submissive foreign doctoral candidates back.
It's not greed driving this phenomenon, it's the worldwide breakdown of national governments. Increasingly the world is governed by rogues, mafias, and wealthy power-mongers. The race is to monopolize the world with cola, burgers, fashion label merchandise. There's no one regulating these stateless corporate entities any more. And their wealth is so vast that national politics are mere inconveniences in exacting ever more control over global commerce.
Greed implies the ultra-wealthy care a whit about another unit of wealth. Today the game is power politics - Iraq being a prime example of corporate interests directing America's military to secure product.
Yourdon is a choirboy witness reciting an irrelevent rosary of homilies about self-sufficiency and dressing for success. The economic reality of reckless outsourcing will wash us away like yesterday's tragic Tsunami.
Silly as it is, the prediction is not a 'failed' one. Carter did not predict a physical event like the earth stopping its spin. We've had worldwide atrocities and the world still spins.
The question is, what of democracy? We have witnessed the wholesale purchase of the American politic by monied interests who care little for democracy except as window dressing for a rigged election ceremony.
As the states begin to feel the pinch of the federal tax cuts we witness the closing of local libraries, the consolidation of media toward a single, ubiquitous propaganda, and the absence of any checks or balances in our government.
And for all this, we race headlong into greater oil dependency coupled with massive foreign debt. Congress does nothing and the earth still spins and soon larger and larger numbers of unemployed Anmerivcans will have little mnore to do than watch the clouds go by.
I did have a proof-reader (not a professional) who didn't catch my Pultizer Prize brain cloud.
Writing a review of this book is extremely difficult because of the intricate plots - I did not want to spoil the fun of discovery.
Secondly, I wanted to avoid being redundant - I consciously avoided repeating the territory of previous book reviewers. I consider this review supplementary to many other excellent reviews.
My point of view in reviewing the book comes from my own love of comic books. Without that context, my review must certainly be incoherent to you and others. The characters are archetypes for the real-life creators of the Golden Age of comics. The creation of this fictional artist/writer team create their own characters. Again, you have to love comics to understand why any of this might make sense.
By giving the geographic scope of book events I was attempting to map significant comic myth locations with Chabon's characters. Comic book fans will associate the World's Fair with Golden Age Heroes such as Captain Marvel, Superman, and so on - much as the Statue of Liberty is significant in the X-Men movie.
The book works at so many levels that there is no short, convenient summary that I can come up with. But that's why books like this are worth reading.
I cannot speak for anyone else but this is the first thing I've submitted to Slashdot and I'm grateful they included it.
It is a glowing review because the work deserves it. However, it is a long book. Had I not enjoyed it, I would not have been able to write a critical review because I wouldn't have wasted my time.
The reason I submitted it is because so many of us grew up reading science fiction and comics. This book is the motherlode of where much of the technical imagination springs from - especially when it comes to games, heroes, and archetypes.
Finally, this is an older book that I didn't get around to reading because of my schedule. Again, I'm grateful that slashdot links it because usually only brand new stuff gets consideration and this book slipped under my reading radar for quite a while.
My bad. Pulitzer Prize is correct. No Nobel Prize. This book received numerous awards and I was writing this review late at night without a net (editor).
Slashdot Mirror
https://mobile.twitter.com/boz...
I'm not sure I believe anything any of them say but it certain does provide a different view of it than the article portrays.
I don't understand what the fuss is about except that its trendy to dump on Facebook for any and every conceivable or even illogical reason. All cyber technology comes with and implicit and inherent danger that it will be either used nefariously or misused to harm. It was and remains perfectly legitimate subject matter. Kurzweil in his discussion of the Singularity has made similar points in his books and you don't have to believe in the Singularity to understand the technological inertia he cites.
Most recently, AI folks discuss the same subject matter; https://www.edge.org/conversat...
If a design attempts to answer the wrong question, no manifestation of that design can correct the original flaw.
The issue of gathering requirements is complex. One must distinguish between the raw and the cooked. Is the software breaking new ground or a refactored design of an existing system?
Care needs to be taken that legacy redesigns re-examine the premises that the original systems tried to solve.
a.) What was the system trying to accomplish and is that relevant today?
b.) Are the technological constraints that applied to the manifestation of the legacy system obsolete? today's solution to the original problem may require not a refactoring but a retooling as well (architectural considerations).
The design (including requirements) is the most important artifact of all processes. The design instructs all subsequent implementations regardless of components or coding conventions du jour.
Design also must define and inform cybernetic context. Where's the by-product fit? Where's the architectural edges? And what is it overlapping? In other words, how can a potential user or consumer make sense of the thing in plain verbal and visual language?
The input to design is the question to answer. The output are precise algorithms a tool to accomplish the task will need to accurately conform to.
How the design is built, imo, is out-of-scope and quite frankly an irrelevant distraction.
Actually, no. I agree with the reviewer that this is an excellent introduction to Ubuntu and the book holds great social value as well as technical instruction.
What I liked about this book is that any family can purchase it inexpensively, read it (and this is a very readable technical introduction, and come to understand that the Linux world is not some kind of scary place. In fact it is an operating system and family of free applications that celebrate individuality, freedom, and ease of use.
Or it can be recycled at community book recycling centers so that your neighbors can use it.
Secondly the DVD is a gold standard by which any of us can boot and install a contemporary version of Ubuntu. From there the system itself can be upgraded to the latest version if so desired. Updating the system is trivial. What is key is that the book buyer has a bulletproof copy of something that works independent of a copy burned by Skippy the geek neighbor.
For many teachers, schools, and families who cannot afford the Microsoft billing treadmill, this book, IMO, should be a mandatory purchase to be made available in teacher's lounges, PTA/PTO meetings, and fund-raisers.
- krasicki
http://region19.bogspot.com/
The pre-upload agreement covered the liability.
As for the expense of maintaining the site, it is negligible. It was wholly unsupervised as certain artists posted and reposted the same stuff or volumes of stuff that simply spammed everyone else.
Amazon managed to drive away customers is all that happened, say a minimum of a dozen or so per artist who would, out of curiosity have to navigate past hundreds of product placements to see where the songs were on the charts.
It was a very smart program that some idiot managed to screw up.
This drove traffic to their site that wthey would never otherwise get.
So some genius in marketing stopped the practice!
Is this an anti-pattern?
Anyway, thank KYOU.
There is this magic hat illusion that privatization provides competition to lower costs.
That idea has no basis in reality except as a one-time ruse to start a stampede toward a bad privatization program that eventually bilks the newly captured and orphaned audience.
A few years ago in CT, seniors were lured into HMO health plans who, once they started losing money, began dropping high risk seniors - then even low risk seniors - a minor crisis for those who initially experienced cost savings then were stranded without any coverage.
Government and the private sector strike a delicate balance that in the US is irrevocably damaged. While our nation enjoyed the fruits of seemingly unlimited resources, everything ran smoothly. Today we talk about importing natural gas.
If libertarians believe limited government is good - leave - Iraq is your utopian state - enjoy. But don't lecture us that it's cheap or desirable.
MH - I think you're way over the top in saying something like that and it's bad form.
Considering your Nick one would think Wal*mart was the fulfillment of Marxism in America. Once all the competition is gone, everyone shops in the same place, same prices for everyone. The rich can't get rich if nobody plays.
This continuous elimination of competition is precisely the opposite of capitalism. Who said irony was dead, it's a doorbuster on Wall St.
Why do you envy those stockholders? Once the competition is gone what will make the stock worth holding? The economy has already moved underground to churches, gambling halls, and back rooms.
America is eating itself alive and voting for people who will make sure the citizenry is throughly cooked. I doubt you need to lift a finger except to stop resisting - the sooner things get worse the sooner things will get better.
First, you asserted initially that lowered prices were *the same as a raise* and what I'm pointing out to you [and I'm not alone in having experienced this] that the prices of everyday goods may or may not go down but *for sure* the incomes of all kinds of knowledge workers is shrinking in the US.
And this shrinkage is dramatic - lower wages, fewer benies, larger co-pays, shorter vacations, nickle and diming of contracts at the edges, and so on.
I don't want to bore you with my own experience and I won't but I can assure you that when you lose the ability to find work, pay your bills, lose your health insurance, and have a family to feed, and getting hired becomes dependent on your credit record, you will shop at Walmart not out of greed but of necessity.
And, yes there are plenty of local merchants more deserving of my business who are not artificially bloating prices but who play by the rules just as most of us do.
And I will say to you that the demands of a PROFESSION such as ours that enables and enriches so many should never be reduced to the conditions we are now under. IT IS HUMILIATING to be in this business. One is afraid to say the wrong thing because there are dozens of grinning H-1Bs lined up to ratchet down your well-being one more notch.
Altruism in the profession is as hard to find as jobs. It is painful and often a personal sacrifice to be a professional in this business. Before Bush, neighbors used to respect the work we did. Today we are treated like hucksters begging for work.
The very psychology of Yourdon writing a book telling us how to prop ourselves up is insulting. For all of the taxes we paid for all the years of the computing boom, unemployment extentions were not granted at the height of Bush's economic IT blight but maybe Walmart sold the toilet paper three cents cheaper that day.
We aren't alone, medical doctors are fleeing their profession as well. America is being dumbed down to enjoy the enrichment of a few doorbuster consumer items. And every three months, Alan Greenspan shows up to say, "There will be winners and there will be losers."
Guess who's losing? We have become a class of Charlie Chaplin characters - smart, all dressed up - and no place to go - filling up our Walmart shopping carts with the two for one specials to eat.
Absurd.
Thus, your paycheck buys more as production becomes more efficient.
Ahem. Your paycheck gets smaller [if you're lucky enough to get one] to make that so-called efficiency possible.
the mix in the US gives real potential towards a Balkan-style civil war...
I think we're witnessing the advent of a sick misinterpretation of American law and social convention. Far too many lawmakers these days cannot think in the abstract.
In Connecticut [and MA] almost every major industry is experiencing closings, cutbacks, and diminished new work environments. The work that's being displace is going overseas and to the red states - Torrington Bearings went to Cinncinati before the election, Easco Tools to Arkansas and Tennessee, Electric Boat elsewhere, and so on. Most troubling in this equation is that highly skilled and very qualified technical persoonnel are being stranded and orphaned from good work.
The big news around election time was the *surplus* of flu vaccine in states like Nebraska. Just a few days ago CT issued a warning that the vaccine was scarce. Urban [blue] populations are being starved of federal resources while the great wide open spaces are having their taxes subsidized. My guess is that an epidemic is more likely to break out and rage out of control in urban areas rather than in the sand hills - just a guess. To me, it's a red flag that the bluetopians are expendable.
Now I can't imagine bluetopians running out and starting Liberal Gun Clubs but things will need to change to avert a major social schism.
I have to disagree with those boycotting Walmart. The best way to bring this beast to its knees is to overload it - demand more tax cuts, shop for the lowest common denominator, push instead of pull, spend blue. These days the reds have much more to lose than any of us.
In the absence of representation in government, the best thing the disenfranchised can do is to act in concert for change. There's nothing left to do.
Globally, a fork is being stuck into the American economy. One day soon, a creditor will flex their muscles and tell us in no uncertain terms who's in charge. It will, of course, come as a surprise and the media will scream, "How could this have happened?"
Hello, world.
Very asute observations.
This last cruel election further seals our fate as a generation and as a country. The existing oligarchy is having the same effect on this country that termites have on a home - someday the structure will just collapse under the weight of what's left.
There is no technology, old or new, that under today's existing circumstances cannot be routinely migrated to friendlier production facilities elsewhere. Even more problematically, the next technology that the American labor force expects to suddenly reverse our fortunes will probably be invented and developed elsewhere first - the anti-intellectualism pervading our politics, media, and science is oppresive. The micro-impatience for real-time gratification of corporate stockholders further diminishes the chances of a technological fix here.
Going away parties at American corporations will begin to get morose. Workers who retire will not only be over the hill, fellow workers may be spreading their ashes among the cubicules one has homesteaded over time - "We'll miss you, don't change - ahhhh, ahhhh, chooooooo!"
The only robot we're likely to encounter is the sweeper-vac that finally disposes our ashes in the corporate dumpster. Metaphorically speaking, this will be at least the second time that's happened to us.
Bearing witness to America these days is like being part of a national train wreck that's happening in slow motion - everyone's making some kind of noise that resembles a scream but nothing is heard.
PBS has sold its soul to every pandering Wall St. talk show available will routinely have guests intimating that Americans will do 'design' work and foreigners will do the so-called mundane tasks. Yes, Wall St. would have us believe that we'll all be techno-plantation owners reaping the rewards of outsourcing to the lowest bidders.
This rhetoric of course flies in the face of American Universities going into intellectual withdrawal and begging for their submissive foreign doctoral candidates back.
It's not greed driving this phenomenon, it's the worldwide breakdown of national governments. Increasingly the world is governed by rogues, mafias, and wealthy power-mongers. The race is to monopolize the world with cola, burgers, fashion label merchandise. There's no one regulating these stateless corporate entities any more. And their wealth is so vast that national politics are mere inconveniences in exacting ever more control over global commerce.
Greed implies the ultra-wealthy care a whit about another unit of wealth. Today the game is power politics - Iraq being a prime example of corporate interests directing America's military to secure product.
Yourdon is a choirboy witness reciting an irrelevent rosary of homilies about self-sufficiency and dressing for success. The economic reality of reckless outsourcing will wash us away like yesterday's tragic Tsunami.
The question is, what of democracy? We have witnessed the wholesale purchase of the American politic by monied interests who care little for democracy except as window dressing for a rigged election ceremony.
As the states begin to feel the pinch of the federal tax cuts we witness the closing of local libraries, the consolidation of media toward a single, ubiquitous propaganda, and the absence of any checks or balances in our government.
And for all this, we race headlong into greater oil dependency coupled with massive foreign debt. Congress does nothing and the earth still spins and soon larger and larger numbers of unemployed Anmerivcans will have little mnore to do than watch the clouds go by.
won
I did have a proof-reader (not a professional) who didn't catch my Pultizer Prize brain cloud.
Writing a review of this book is extremely difficult because of the intricate plots - I did not want to spoil the fun of discovery.
Secondly, I wanted to avoid being redundant - I consciously avoided repeating the territory of previous book reviewers. I consider this review supplementary to many other excellent reviews.
My point of view in reviewing the book comes from my own love of comic books. Without that context, my review must certainly be incoherent to you and others.
The characters are archetypes for the real-life creators of the Golden Age of comics. The creation of this fictional artist/writer team create their own characters. Again, you have to love comics to understand why any of this might make sense.
By giving the geographic scope of book events I was attempting to map significant comic myth locations with Chabon's characters. Comic book fans will associate the World's Fair with Golden Age Heroes such as Captain Marvel, Superman, and so on - much as the Statue of Liberty is significant in the X-Men movie.
The book works at so many levels that there is no short, convenient summary that I can come up with. But that's why books like this are worth reading.
- krasicki
It is a glowing review because the work deserves it.
However, it is a long book. Had I not enjoyed it, I would not have been able to write a critical review because I wouldn't have wasted my time.
The reason I submitted it is because so many of us grew up reading science fiction and comics. This book is the motherlode of where much of the technical imagination springs from - especially when it comes to games, heroes, and archetypes.
Finally, this is an older book that I didn't get around to reading because of my schedule. Again, I'm grateful that slashdot links it because usually only brand new stuff gets consideration and this book slipped under my reading radar for quite a while.
cheers,
- krasicki
Thanks to all for the correction.
- krasicki