It is highly unlikely that consumers will make a big effort to lobby for the public's interest, and
It is highly likely that the parties representing the copyright holders will expend enormous efforts and money to try and strengthen/extend/etc. copyrights.
The public is large, poorly organized and difficult to motivate to make a stand on copyrights. Essentially the problem is that changing copyrights don't fundamentally change the lives of most people. For the general public this is a problem somewhat similar to the Tragedy of the Commons, in that the common man doesn't really benefit much from his own efforts, but rather from the collective efforts of all common men, which is only marginally reduced by him being lazy and not doing anything. Unfortunately, this is true of all common men and the result is a tendency to be apathetic.
For the copyright holders, the situation is reversed. There is a relatively small set of major copyright holders, they are well organized and well funded. With the clock ticking on their valuable assets, they are highly motivated to attempt to squeeze more out of the system, and their own efforts are likely to change their own bottom line. They stand to gain (or better said, not lose) vast amounts of money when copyright terms are extended, and are therefore willing to spend lots on lobbying, public relations and other activities to influence politicians.
In the middle we have the copyright extension opponents only hope: the various public and private organizations. They, unfortunately, tend to be underfunded compared to the copyright holders. Their task is to motivate the public, to donate money or lobby their politicians. Most of the public, as previously stated, are not really bothered by copyrights.
The more likely scenario, in my opinion, is that industry lobbying will ultimately be successful (perhaps after numerous attempts) and copyright term will become, for practical purposes, unlimited. Draconian laws will probably be implemented for copyright infringers. However, most of the public won't really care and will continue to illegally share films, music and other copyright content. The legal system will not make (in fact, will not be able to make) a sufficient effort to combat the problem, as the politicians probably don't think they will have to keep their promises to the industry in the long-term. There may also be a backlash from the judicial system and the public about the appropriateness of the effort and money spent on copyright infringers vs. other priorities.
The result will be, more or less, the mess we currently have.
There is an extremely small chance that there will be a small number of content providers who get it and realize that a new business model is required that is not based on trying to to maintain a legal lock on content. If they get enough of a foothold in the market, which will require overpowering the powerful Hollywood cartels (e.g. TV, movie and music distribution), this could a massive shift in the way content is marketed. This is more likely to happen in the book industry, as there less of a lock on the distribution channels, and we are seeming a gradual increase in self-publishing.
I've seen a statistic somewhere, I think it was from Lloyds, which states that, on average, one ship gets lost per day somewhere in the world (I believe it included hijacking and piracy) . These are mostly small ships, but given that an occasional container ship goes missing, I wonder how many of the containers are lost due to entire ships sinking.
I also wonder how much theft and smuggling contributes to the number of 'lost' containers
The MIT Department of Nuclear Engineering has a web site, updated regularly, which acts as a hub for information about the nuclear crisis, including helpful background information.
As the article states, until we see numbers it is difficult to see what is going on.
The is a lot at stake here for Microsoft. If the project were successful, then it would open the floodgates for lots of similar efforts, and could even break Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop. Thus, Microsoft is obviously hoping that this project fails. Conspiracies aside, one way to help the transition back to Windows is to lower prices, offer special deals, free services, etc. I wouldn't surprise if this happened.
It could also be that the required device compatibility imposed a big programming cost, and it really did cost more than expected. I'm curious to learn if that cost could be amortized over larger/more government departments.
Moore made an observation that processing power on microprocessor chips would double every 18 months, and later adjusted the observation to be a doubling every two years. There was no explanation of causality.
At best it is a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the 'law' is now used as a standard for judging the industry, which strives to keep up with the predictions.
Yep, you hit the nail on the head. Production schedules required the 'conceptual' artwork to be done weeks in advance of the completion of the software.
I don't know what it was like at Parker Borthers, but Atari (we supplied game software and hardware design to them) got marketing people heavily involved. They were typically fresh out of some MBA mill and no understanding of the their target audience (apart from being given 'focus group' results) and little interest in video games beyond concerns about them being hits. I'm sure this helped widen the gap between the artwork and the way the game actually looked. It certainly helped drive Atari into the ground, as the titles got stupider and stupider, leading to the infamous Atari land fill.
Given that the Atari 2600 hardware only had 128 BYTES of RAM and that the entire game had to fit into a 2048 BYTE cartridge (later there were bank-switching cartridges with 4KB), it's amazing that the 2600 games had recognizable graphics at all.
As to the box artwork: I remember programmers commenting on the nice box artwork, but there was never any mention about how it didn't match the game. Like someone else said, it was like looking at a cover of a science fiction book, knowing that the contents were probably very different.
To put things into perspective: Back in those days pinball machines were still popular and people expectations of computer games were pretty realistic, e.g. rather low. The IBM AT and XT had just come out, and were targeted at businesses and considered too expensive for the normal household. Graphical user interfaces only existed in research labs and universities. Coin operated video games had much better (and much more expensive) hardware, as compared to the home versions. The home systems had to be less sophisticated, otherwise they would have been too expensive for their target market.
I used to program these things and remember late night sessions pouring over hex dumps trying to recover a byte or two. The initial programming was done in 6502 assembler (to keep the cost down the CPU packed in a 28-pin DIP, which allowed for all sorts of tricks for saving bytes by addressing memory in unconventional ways). The last few weeks of the programming was typically done in hex, looking for opcode sequences that could be used as data. E.g. we spent our time hand optimizing the hex code. Sometimes we found enough space to put in a new feature or two.
Now nearly 30 years later I can still remember some of the hex code a few of the 6502 instructions. 4C is JMP, A9 is LDA, etc.
And by the way, we considered C a high level language back then.
Ray Kurzweil has been making claims for AI for years. For example that we will have an AI singularity event and that society will be completely replaced my machines. Well, decades later it still hasn't happened and the only things in the field of computer science that seems to have a life of its own are spam and computer viruses. I'd like call them a life form.
Will we reverse engineer the brain any time soon? I doubt it. Part of the reason is practical. This would be an extremely expensive and time consuming undertaking. I'm not sure its even worth it, especially when this is compared to other branches of science which have made rapid advances. For one example, take a look at the field neuro-science and its use of fMRI scanning.
Reversing engineering the brain, probably is possible, but it's probably not worth it right now. Well have to wait another decade.. again.
I realize that this is slightly off-topic, but here's some food for thought concerning evolution in the Catholic and Jewish religions:
Consider what would happen (centuries or millennia ago) if you were a poor but very intelligent male child in Europe:
Depending on the religion of your family, you would probably come to attention of the local priest or rabbi.
If your family was Catholic you might be allowed to enter the priesthood, learn to read and write, and given initiative and some luck, you could rise through the ranks of the church hierarchy. Given you stay in the church it is unlikely that you would produce children.
If your family was Jewish, you might be tutored by the local rabbi, learn to read and write, and given initiative and some luck, you would likely marry someone from an educated and perhaps well to do family. It is likely that your children would get a head start in life, as compared to yourself.
Now consider what this difference means over thousands of years of evolution. The Catholics are removing intelligent people from the gene pool and the Jews are giving them a breeding advantage.
The Catholic religion has existed for over 2000 years, and the Jewish religion for much longer. This is may be enough time to produce measurable results. Think about the studies of the of the Ashkenazi Jewish community, which show a greater than 100 average IQ.
It's definitely safe. This problem was put to bed back in the 80s:
"Radiation, yes indeed! You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked, goggle-boxed do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand 100 chest x-rays a year. They ought to have 'em too." - J. Frank Parnell in "Repo Man"
So does this mean that WE finally have THEM by the balls?
It would be nice for the OS community to serve back what it's been receiving. I'm thinking of the patent trolls, copyright oppression, DCMA takedown notices and the like.
To answer your reasonable question about unfairly squashing
dissent:
From reading both, I tend to gravitate towards the failure side.
It's 2009 and only 10% migration? Wasn't this suppose to save money?
It's a frigging embarrassment! How are you suppose to point to Munich
as an example of free and open-source software working on a city scale
when they can't even implement it in a reasonable time-frame?
I think you got got labeled flamebait, not that I agree, because your
conclusions appear
unreasonable, namely that you are measuring the project on criteria
which do not match the project's own stated goals.
First of all: Munich was said that the their goal is not to save
money in the short-term, but to gain 'autonomy' from a single
supplier. The savings, if any, are to be realized in the long
term.
Second: Schedule and cost overruns are (unfortunately) normal for
projects this size and complexity. What is your idea of a reasonable
time scale anyways? With some searching I can probably identify
other similar sized projects which eventually succeeded, in spite of
serious schedule overruns.
BTW: The sound byte that only 10% of the workstations
have been migrated in X years doesn't scale to mean that it will take
9 * X more years to complete to rest of them. I know you didn't
state this, but the LimuxWatch blog implies this in many of
their schedule slip lists.
Third: There is more at stake than producing Linux-based work
stations and a support infrastructure for Munich. This is a first
of it's type project, meaning a major public-sector open source
deployment on the desktop. If this succeeds, then the lessons
learned will form the basis for other similar projects.
In other words, don't be surprised if LimuxWatch blog has a
hidden agenda.
Considering what's at stake for Microsoft, it's amazing that
Munich's Limux project continues.
Over the years I've read a great deal about various efforts
to belittle and undermine it. The Munich Limux Watch blog
seems like an attempt to systematically discredit the entire
project. I'd love to find out who's behind it. I doubt it's
directly supported Microsoft, but I'd wouldn't be surprised
if there is some business interest, perhaps a disgruntled
IT supplier or even a public sector employee who doesn't want
their desktop system changed, behind it. Perhaps some clever
Slashdot reader can find out more.
Don't be surprised that there are unexpected costs on a
project of this size and complexity. Think about similar
projects in the (semi-)public sector, some of which had
factor 10 cost overruns and were abandoned (for example:
Denver airport luggage processing system). In the end, the
ability to actually complete the project, even if years
late, and the long-term cost savings will determine its real
success. [See my signature below]
We shouldn't expect Limux to have an instant pay back. Even
though the operating system is free, the installation
scripting, customization, roll-out, training and support have
real costs, which will take years to amortize. The gain will
only be in the long-term when the infrastructure to support
Limux is in place and saves from not having license costs
associated with forced upgrades are realized.
Further, you must bear in mind that Munich is a pioneer in
even attempting to replace a major Microsoft based
infrastructure with open source software. They are having to
to do everything from scratch, which I'm sure increases the
cost.
Munich's Limux project is a battleground for Microsoft. It
it succeeds then it will become the model for similar
initiatives. This could make non-Microsoft desktop systems
a real alternative for large institutions. This is
Microsoft's disaster scenario, and could ruin their
monopoly hold on the marker. They might even have to,
gasp, compete.
Engineers are taught:
Your model is only a model, and does not necessarily capture the
complete behavior of the thing being modeled. You must understand
the limitations of the model.
That Gaussian curves are a poor model for unlikely events has
been known for quite some time. This is best explained by Nassim
Taleb in the following books:
Fooled by Randomness
The Black Swan
His main thesis is that the markets are essentially random
and are basically impossible to predict in any meaningful way.
Further there are unlikely unknown unknowns can cannot
be predicted until the they occur, usually with disastrous
consequences.
Michael Crichton actually dropped out of medical to become a full time writer. He had a solid understanding of basic science and this is reflected in his books. That said, he wrote science fiction, which means that the science only needed to be good enough to support the story, and not be provably correct.
A common theme in Crichton's books is the human element in technology. The villains in his books are often those who unerringly believe in the application of advanced technology to 'fix everything', without considering the unintended side effects that could occur.
A typical Crichton book starts with some genius who invents an advanced technology, and then all goes to hell as the unintended side affects cascade into near disaster. The conflict is often between the technology itself and normal people who have real trouble dealing with the dangers it causes.
His earlier books are very much better than the later ones. I suspect that Crichton got co-opted by Hollywood once got the contacts to get contracts to write screens plays for big name directors (e.g. Spielberg). You can see the transition, as the later books, like Jurassic Park, are actually written like screen plays.
Crichton wasn't afraid to promote his politics in his books. The Rising Sun has a strong political statement, nearing on the 'Japan Bashing' that was prevalent in the press at the time. It's saving grace was a good plot and some interesting characters. Had he not been so insistent on blowing on his political horn, it would have been a better book.
My biggest disappointment with Crichton was State of Fear. The book was essentially a anti-global warming manifesto. The huge list of bibliographic entries reinforces my opinion that his primary goal was trying to debunk global warming rather than write a fictional work.
Whatever happens, we win! After eight years of the Bush administration, the world is much worse off, and now that it's coming to end, much of the rest of the world is going to collectively sigh with relief.
While Bush & Co. are not directly responsible for the 9-11 attacks, with their hubris and mismanagement, they certainly succeeded in making a bad situation much worse. Many countries are suffering due to the US's inept diplomacy and military policies. The current administration has also been the role model for many despots, rolling back hard won freedoms in countries where democracy has yet to set strong roots.
The blame for the recent economic meltdown can also be laid at Bush's feet. The massive tax cuts and deficit spending, combined with poor oversight of the financial situation has led to today's mess. Enron should have warned us about what was to come.
For me, here in Switzerland, it doesn't really matter who wins, the main thing is that the current administration is out. It may actually be better to have a republican president and a democratic house/senate, in order to prevent the excesses that are likely to follow if the Democrats gain control of everything. I seem to remember reading that the US government functions better when the executive and legislative branches are controlled by different parties.
Personally, I'm looking forward to a return to multilateralism and sensible financial policies.
As usual, after a regime change, the pendulum will swing the other way and, unfortunately, the US tendency is that it will probably swing too far. So be careful what you wish for!
..or flow charts and those cool green templates from IBM for drawing them.
This was all part of the set of diagraming methodologies for structured
programming. They are all gone now, which is unfortunate, and they have
lessons for today's object oriented world. Which is to say that
we're now re-living the same evolution for object oriented systems. The
results will probably be the same. System generation from diagrams (now
called MDA) probably isn't worth it.
For the uninitiated, Jackson (structure charts) and Ward & Mellow (real-time
system modelling) were diagramming methodologies to help design systems
written in structured languages (assembly, COBOL, FORTRAN, C, etc.). There were
lots of others, but I can't remember all the names.
It all culminated in CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering). Which, in it's
extreme form, called 'strong case', was trying to be a CAD system for replacing
programming. Like today's UML the intent was to generate code directly from
the diagrams. It didn't work too well on real projects and gradually faded away.
There was also a 'weak case' faction, that wanted to use the diagrams merely to
do early design and document the resulting system. The intent was to have a
lingua-franca in which you could quickly express design concepts using a simple
standardized notation. This is where ULM started. It not a bad idea, as long as you
keep the diagramming system fairly simple, which means it won't be rich enough to
generate code from.
The 'strong case' equivalent in the object world is MDA (Model Driven
Architecture), which from what I've seen and read about is doomed to failure.
I believe that the diagram to code gap is just too large and the programming
detail required to actually implement a system is too difficult to capture
in simple diagrams (which is what you want in the design stage).
Uhm no. The link I gave was indeed a text 'In the Beginning Was the Command Line', by Neal
Stephenson (and I knew that already). That's not what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for a much shorter essay written by a programmer which focuses specifically on
the virtures of the command line (and especially the keyboard) vs. GUI/mouse based systems.
http://www.spack.org/wiki/InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine
And somebody help me find the essay about the command line vs. GUI environments, where the author
rants about how inefficient GUIs are for development work. It may have been written by Larry Wall
or somebody like him.
No. 2007 is now. And yes, in 2007 another public official was
executed for corruption in China. Zheng Xiaoyu was probably
not the only, nor will he be the last, government official to
be executed in China for corruption. Believe it or not, I am
aware that China still executes govenment officials (and also
the occasional businessman) for corruption.
Please re-read what I wrote:
A few high profile cases will be dealt with, but
the rest will be window dressing.
The death penalty for corruption was enacted over a decade
ago, and, as you correctly imply, remains in force to this day.
I didn't mean to imply that executions for corruption have stopped,
my point was, that in spite of the the death penalty, corruption is
still widespread in China.
I further believe that, as one of the other replies also stated,
the fix for corruption is transparency. Unfortunately, barring a
major shake up in China, massive transparency is not likely to
happen in China anytime soon (think about the Great Firewall).
I don't believe that the death penalty for corruption is
being applied consistently or fairly (in the sense of all people
being equal under the law), and consequently it loses its
deterrent effect.
This doesn't invalidate my points:
That the Chinese government is facing an insurmountable task
in attempting to stop corruption.
That the Chinese government is quite concerned with
staying in power, and this means that its goals of collecting
information about corruption may not be limited to identifying
corrupt officials.
Slashdot Mirror
The public is large, poorly organized and difficult to motivate to make a stand on copyrights. Essentially the problem is that changing copyrights don't fundamentally change the lives of most people. For the general public this is a problem somewhat similar to the Tragedy of the Commons, in that the common man doesn't really benefit much from his own efforts, but rather from the collective efforts of all common men, which is only marginally reduced by him being lazy and not doing anything. Unfortunately, this is true of all common men and the result is a tendency to be apathetic.
For the copyright holders, the situation is reversed. There is a relatively small set of major copyright holders, they are well organized and well funded. With the clock ticking on their valuable assets, they are highly motivated to attempt to squeeze more out of the system, and their own efforts are likely to change their own bottom line. They stand to gain (or better said, not lose) vast amounts of money when copyright terms are extended, and are therefore willing to spend lots on lobbying, public relations and other activities to influence politicians.
In the middle we have the copyright extension opponents only hope: the various public and private organizations. They, unfortunately, tend to be underfunded compared to the copyright holders. Their task is to motivate the public, to donate money or lobby their politicians. Most of the public, as previously stated, are not really bothered by copyrights.
The more likely scenario, in my opinion, is that industry lobbying will ultimately be successful (perhaps after numerous attempts) and copyright term will become, for practical purposes, unlimited. Draconian laws will probably be implemented for copyright infringers. However, most of the public won't really care and will continue to illegally share films, music and other copyright content. The legal system will not make (in fact, will not be able to make) a sufficient effort to combat the problem, as the politicians probably don't think they will have to keep their promises to the industry in the long-term. There may also be a backlash from the judicial system and the public about the appropriateness of the effort and money spent on copyright infringers vs. other priorities.
The result will be, more or less, the mess we currently have.
There is an extremely small chance that there will be a small number of content providers who get it and realize that a new business model is required that is not based on trying to to maintain a legal lock on content. If they get enough of a foothold in the market, which will require overpowering the powerful Hollywood cartels (e.g. TV, movie and music distribution), this could a massive shift in the way content is marketed. This is more likely to happen in the book industry, as there less of a lock on the distribution channels, and we are seeming a gradual increase in self-publishing.
I've seen a statistic somewhere, I think it was from Lloyds, which states that, on average, one ship gets lost per day somewhere in the world (I believe it included hijacking and piracy) . These are mostly small ships, but given that an occasional container ship goes missing, I wonder how many of the containers are lost due to entire ships sinking.
I also wonder how much theft and smuggling contributes to the number of 'lost' containers
The MIT Department of Nuclear Engineering has a web site, updated regularly, which acts as a hub for information about the nuclear crisis, including helpful background information.
See it at: http://mitnse.com/
As the article states, until we see numbers it is difficult to see what is going on.
The is a lot at stake here for Microsoft. If the project were successful, then it would open the floodgates for lots of similar efforts, and could even break Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop. Thus, Microsoft is obviously hoping that this project fails. Conspiracies aside, one way to help the transition back to Windows is to lower prices, offer special deals, free services, etc. I wouldn't surprise if this happened.
It could also be that the required device compatibility imposed a big programming cost, and it really did cost more than expected. I'm curious to learn if that cost could be amortized over larger/more government departments.
Let's get the full facts first before we judge.
At best it is a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the 'law' is now used as a standard for judging the industry, which strives to keep up with the predictions.
P.S. Someone should invent a social media symbolic language. I bet you could cover the majority of posts with very few symbols.
The have. It's called emoticon. And you're right, 95% of all forum conversations can be expressed in emoticon with just two words :) and :(
I don't know what it was like at Parker Borthers, but Atari (we supplied game software and hardware design to them) got marketing people heavily involved. They were typically fresh out of some MBA mill and no understanding of the their target audience (apart from being given 'focus group' results) and little interest in video games beyond concerns about them being hits. I'm sure this helped widen the gap between the artwork and the way the game actually looked. It certainly helped drive Atari into the ground, as the titles got stupider and stupider, leading to the infamous Atari land fill.
As to the box artwork: I remember programmers commenting on the nice box artwork, but there was never any mention about how it didn't match the game. Like someone else said, it was like looking at a cover of a science fiction book, knowing that the contents were probably very different.
To put things into perspective: Back in those days pinball machines were still popular and people expectations of computer games were pretty realistic, e.g. rather low. The IBM AT and XT had just come out, and were targeted at businesses and considered too expensive for the normal household. Graphical user interfaces only existed in research labs and universities. Coin operated video games had much better (and much more expensive) hardware, as compared to the home versions. The home systems had to be less sophisticated, otherwise they would have been too expensive for their target market.
I used to program these things and remember late night sessions pouring over hex dumps trying to recover a byte or two. The initial programming was done in 6502 assembler (to keep the cost down the CPU packed in a 28-pin DIP, which allowed for all sorts of tricks for saving bytes by addressing memory in unconventional ways). The last few weeks of the programming was typically done in hex, looking for opcode sequences that could be used as data. E.g. we spent our time hand optimizing the hex code. Sometimes we found enough space to put in a new feature or two.
Now nearly 30 years later I can still remember some of the hex code a few of the 6502 instructions. 4C is JMP, A9 is LDA, etc.
And by the way, we considered C a high level language back then.
Ray Kurzweil has been making claims for AI for years. For example that we will have an AI singularity event and that
society will be completely replaced my machines. Well, decades later it still hasn't happened and the only things in the
field of computer science that seems to have a life of its own are spam and computer viruses. I'd like call them a
life form.
Will we reverse engineer the brain any time soon? I doubt it. Part of the reason is practical. This would be an
extremely expensive and time consuming undertaking. I'm not sure its even worth it, especially when this is
compared to other branches of science which have made rapid advances. For one example, take a look at
the field neuro-science and its use of fMRI scanning.
Reversing engineering the brain, probably is possible, but it's probably not worth it right now. Well have
to wait another decade.. again.
The news is that it's not new news, but rather a trend that's been apparent for nearly a decade..
http://www.softxs.ch/alan/essays/googlebomb.html
I realize that this is slightly off-topic, but here's some food for thought concerning evolution in the Catholic and Jewish religions:
Consider what would happen (centuries or millennia ago) if you were a poor but very intelligent male child in Europe:
Depending on the religion of your family, you would probably come to attention of the local priest or rabbi.
If your family was Catholic you might be allowed to enter the priesthood, learn to read and write, and given initiative and some luck, you could rise through the ranks of the church hierarchy. Given you stay in the church it is unlikely that you would produce children.
If your family was Jewish, you might be tutored by the local rabbi, learn to read and write, and given initiative and some luck, you would likely marry someone from an educated and perhaps well to do family. It is likely that your children would get a head start in life, as compared to yourself.
Now consider what this difference means over thousands of years of evolution. The Catholics are removing intelligent people from the gene pool and the Jews are giving them a breeding advantage.
The Catholic religion has existed for over 2000 years, and the Jewish religion for much longer. This is may be enough time to produce measurable results. Think about the studies of the of the Ashkenazi Jewish community, which show a greater than 100 average IQ.
It's definitely safe. This problem was put to bed back in the 80s:
"Radiation, yes indeed! You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked, goggle-boxed do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand 100 chest x-rays a year. They ought to have 'em too."
- J. Frank Parnell in "Repo Man"
There, now that that's solved...
So does this mean that WE finally have THEM by the balls?
It would be nice for the OS community to serve back what it's been receiving. I'm thinking
of the patent trolls, copyright oppression, DCMA takedown notices and the like.
Fantastic. An App Store puts democracy back into the hands of the ordinary citizen.
In fact, I think open an account right now, and buy myself a congressman.
From reading both, I tend to gravitate towards the failure side. It's 2009 and only 10% migration? Wasn't this suppose to save money? It's a frigging embarrassment! How are you suppose to point to Munich as an example of free and open-source software working on a city scale when they can't even implement it in a reasonable time-frame?
I think you got got labeled flamebait, not that I agree, because your conclusions appear unreasonable, namely that you are measuring the project on criteria which do not match the project's own stated goals.
First of all: Munich was said that the their goal is not to save money in the short-term, but to gain 'autonomy' from a single supplier. The savings, if any, are to be realized in the long term.
Second: Schedule and cost overruns are (unfortunately) normal for projects this size and complexity. What is your idea of a reasonable time scale anyways? With some searching I can probably identify other similar sized projects which eventually succeeded, in spite of serious schedule overruns. BTW: The sound byte that only 10% of the workstations have been migrated in X years doesn't scale to mean that it will take 9 * X more years to complete to rest of them. I know you didn't state this, but the LimuxWatch blog implies this in many of their schedule slip lists.
Third: There is more at stake than producing Linux-based work stations and a support infrastructure for Munich. This is a first of it's type project, meaning a major public-sector open source deployment on the desktop. If this succeeds, then the lessons learned will form the basis for other similar projects. In other words, don't be surprised if LimuxWatch blog has a hidden agenda.
Over the years I've read a great deal about various efforts to belittle and undermine it. The Munich Limux Watch blog seems like an attempt to systematically discredit the entire project. I'd love to find out who's behind it. I doubt it's directly supported Microsoft, but I'd wouldn't be surprised if there is some business interest, perhaps a disgruntled IT supplier or even a public sector employee who doesn't want their desktop system changed, behind it. Perhaps some clever Slashdot reader can find out more.
Don't be surprised that there are unexpected costs on a project of this size and complexity. Think about similar projects in the (semi-)public sector, some of which had factor 10 cost overruns and were abandoned (for example: Denver airport luggage processing system). In the end, the ability to actually complete the project, even if years late, and the long-term cost savings will determine its real success. [See my signature below]
We shouldn't expect Limux to have an instant pay back. Even though the operating system is free, the installation scripting, customization, roll-out, training and support have real costs, which will take years to amortize. The gain will only be in the long-term when the infrastructure to support Limux is in place and saves from not having license costs associated with forced upgrades are realized.
Further, you must bear in mind that Munich is a pioneer in even attempting to replace a major Microsoft based infrastructure with open source software. They are having to to do everything from scratch, which I'm sure increases the cost.
Munich's Limux project is a battleground for Microsoft. It it succeeds then it will become the model for similar initiatives. This could make non-Microsoft desktop systems a real alternative for large institutions. This is Microsoft's disaster scenario, and could ruin their monopoly hold on the marker. They might even have to, gasp, compete.
That Gaussian curves are a poor model for unlikely events has been known for quite some time. This is best explained by Nassim Taleb in the following books:
His main thesis is that the markets are essentially random and are basically impossible to predict in any meaningful way. Further there are unlikely unknown unknowns can cannot be predicted until the they occur, usually with disastrous consequences.
Michael Crichton actually dropped out of medical to become a full time writer. He had a solid understanding of basic science and this is reflected in his books. That said, he wrote science fiction, which means that the science only needed to be good enough to support the story, and not be provably correct.
A common theme in Crichton's books is the human element in technology. The villains in his books are often those who unerringly believe in the application of advanced technology to 'fix everything', without considering the unintended side effects that could occur.
A typical Crichton book starts with some genius who invents an advanced technology, and then all goes to hell as the unintended side affects cascade into near disaster. The conflict is often between the technology itself and normal people who have real trouble dealing with the dangers it causes.
His earlier books are very much better than the later ones. I suspect that Crichton got co-opted by Hollywood once got the contacts to get contracts to write screens plays for big name directors (e.g. Spielberg). You can see the transition, as the later books, like Jurassic Park, are actually written like screen plays.
Crichton wasn't afraid to promote his politics in his books. The Rising Sun has a strong political statement, nearing on the 'Japan Bashing' that was prevalent in the press at the time. It's saving grace was a good plot and some interesting characters. Had he not been so insistent on blowing on his political horn, it would have been a better book.
My biggest disappointment with Crichton was State of Fear. The book was essentially a anti-global warming manifesto. The huge list of bibliographic entries reinforces my opinion that his primary goal was trying to debunk global warming rather than write a fictional work.
Whatever happens, we win! After eight years of the Bush
administration, the world is much worse off, and now that
it's coming to end, much of the rest of the world is going
to collectively sigh with relief.
While Bush & Co. are not directly responsible for the 9-11
attacks, with their hubris and mismanagement, they certainly
succeeded in making a bad situation much worse. Many countries
are suffering due to the US's inept diplomacy and military
policies. The current administration has also been the role
model for many despots, rolling back hard won freedoms in
countries where democracy has yet to set strong roots.
The blame for the recent economic meltdown can also be laid
at Bush's feet. The massive tax cuts and deficit spending,
combined with poor oversight of the financial situation
has led to today's mess. Enron should have warned us about
what was to come.
For me, here in Switzerland, it doesn't really matter who wins,
the main thing is that the current administration is out. It
may actually be better to have a republican president and a
democratic house/senate, in order to prevent the excesses
that are likely to follow if the Democrats gain control of
everything. I seem to remember reading that the US government
functions better when the executive and legislative branches
are controlled by different parties.
Personally, I'm looking forward to a return to multilateralism
and sensible financial policies.
As usual, after a regime change, the pendulum will swing the
other way and, unfortunately, the US tendency is that it will
probably swing too far. So be careful what you wish for!
This was all part of the set of diagraming methodologies for structured programming. They are all gone now, which is unfortunate, and they have lessons for today's object oriented world. Which is to say that we're now re-living the same evolution for object oriented systems. The results will probably be the same. System generation from diagrams (now called MDA) probably isn't worth it.
For the uninitiated, Jackson (structure charts) and Ward & Mellow (real-time system modelling) were diagramming methodologies to help design systems written in structured languages (assembly, COBOL, FORTRAN, C, etc.). There were lots of others, but I can't remember all the names.
It all culminated in CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering). Which, in it's extreme form, called 'strong case', was trying to be a CAD system for replacing programming. Like today's UML the intent was to generate code directly from the diagrams. It didn't work too well on real projects and gradually faded away.
There was also a 'weak case' faction, that wanted to use the diagrams merely to do early design and document the resulting system. The intent was to have a lingua-franca in which you could quickly express design concepts using a simple standardized notation. This is where ULM started. It not a bad idea, as long as you keep the diagramming system fairly simple, which means it won't be rich enough to generate code from.
The 'strong case' equivalent in the object world is MDA (Model Driven Architecture), which from what I've seen and read about is doomed to failure. I believe that the diagram to code gap is just too large and the programming detail required to actually implement a system is too difficult to capture in simple diagrams (which is what you want in the design stage).
Have a look at Pros and Cons of MDA Code Generators? and my experience on a MDA project.
I suspect frameworks, like Struts and the like, are a much better approach.
A: No. Microsoft needs to go. Hopefully the new low-spec laptops (EEPC, OLPC, etc.) will help the process along.
Uhm no. The link I gave was indeed a text 'In the Beginning Was the Command Line', by Neal Stephenson (and I knew that already). That's not what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for a much shorter essay written by a programmer which focuses specifically on the virtures of the command line (and especially the keyboard) vs. GUI/mouse based systems.
http://www.spack.org/wiki/InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine
And somebody help me find the essay about the command line vs. GUI environments, where the author rants about how inefficient GUIs are for development work. It may have been written by Larry Wall or somebody like him.
Apropros: It's uncommon, but it does happen:
..rather a sad story.
http://fathersforlife.org/suicides/Allen_Wells/key_page.htm
No. 2007 is now. And yes, in 2007 another public official was executed for corruption in China. Zheng Xiaoyu was probably not the only, nor will he be the last, government official to be executed in China for corruption. Believe it or not, I am aware that China still executes govenment officials (and also the occasional businessman) for corruption.
Please re-read what I wrote:
- A few high profile cases will be dealt with, but
the rest will be window dressing.
The death penalty for corruption was enacted over a decade ago, and, as you correctly imply, remains in force to this day. I didn't mean to imply that executions for corruption have stopped, my point was, that in spite of the the death penalty, corruption is still widespread in China.I further believe that, as one of the other replies also stated, the fix for corruption is transparency. Unfortunately, barring a major shake up in China, massive transparency is not likely to happen in China anytime soon (think about the Great Firewall).
I don't believe that the death penalty for corruption is being applied consistently or fairly (in the sense of all people being equal under the law), and consequently it loses its deterrent effect.
This doesn't invalidate my points: