Yes, I will at times contribute to open source projects; usually when it's in my interest to do so
And that's why he's dead wrong. Because a lot of open source use/modification comes from the same thing - someone having a need, making a change, suggesting it back and the maintainer including it.
There were, ISTR, something like a dozen brokers who jumped out of windows. A dozen.
The other thing to remember is that life was pretty hard BEFORE the crash. Consider car ownership, life expectancy, infant mortality, and the numbers are way below what we have now. Our standard of life can drop considerably before we reach 1920s America.
No, that's not his point. His point is that 2000-2008 user-generated content is a blip, that even when the good times return, user-generated content won't come back with it.
It's a flawed argument because it assumes that people only do this stuff for direct financial gain, that somehow, they're expecting Rupert Murdoch to come along and offer them a million quid for their blog, and when that doesn't transpire, they'll all give it up.
A lot of his argument isn't about code, it's more about things like Facebook pages, Wikipedia and Flickr. These are not huge drains on people's time. A few minutes here and there.
I don't know what Keen's beef is with user-generated content. If some girl from MIT can make a cool rap, and people aren't watching some Simon Cowell competition, who cares?
Quite. I've written bits of code that I needed on someone's open source project, and decided to give my changes back. Didn't need to, but had nothing to lose by giving them to the guy.
There was also a possible gain. If he included my change, then I wouldn't have to patch it in to get his latest version.
There are a huge number of reasons to give source code away, that to suggest that it's just down to simple altruism (which will dry up) is stupid.
The man is a fucking moron, quite simply. We're all going to stop doing things we did for no financial gain? So, why did we do them for no financial gain previously?
He assumes that people's only motivation is direct financial reward. That people don't just update Wikipedia pages because something's irritating to them, that people don't just put photos on Flickr because they want to be more social. People will never take an iPod apart, wire it up to their SNES just because they are curious.
The fact is that people do things for all sorts of reasons. Financial (direct or indirect), social, psychological. I once built a bit of open source code to tell me about the traffic on a road I used. There was no sensible way to make money from it, so I gave it away.
Mostly by opinion and counter-opinion. If a blogger is full of crap, you'll see other bloggers using facts to tear their pieces apart.
Also engage your brain and think about what you're reading. We've long been given the belief that newspapers and TV are very high quality news gatherers, but I've read so much in blogs that shows that's not the case, that those media forms just prefer a sensational headline to well-checked content.
That's the problem for me. All "technology" coverage on TV seems to fall into "Oooh.... shiny". I've never heard anyone on TV discuss things like closed vs open formats (which is a valid discussion about the long term use of what you buy).
But TV has lost science and I doubt that it's ever getting it back now. People who really want to know about science get it all from the net now.
What I think is happening is that news and factual reporting is a deeper fracture between a "TV" and an "internet" audience.
The internet now provides news in incredible depth. If you read bloggers who really know their subject, you'll get far more depth than TV ever gave you, and often more depth than most newspapers. You ever heard a TV economics reporter explaining the Laffer Curve or Basquiat's Broken Window Fallacy? You just never get that stuff. When the political parties were arguing about post office closures, not one journalism did the digging that showed that it was basically an issue of EU subsidies (that the government couldn't fund Post Offices).
On the other hand, TV news is incredibly dumb now. A story like Kerry Katona being made bankrupt never made the news when I was a kid. It was almost entirely hard news.
If people want to know why there's a real lack of hard science on TV, it's for this reason. Because the science audience is gone. They're watching video clips on YouTube or reading papers about science. Science coverage on TV is more "technology" now (which actually just means gadget reporting).
There's always a sensible point at which you kill something off, but "a few years" is pretty ropey, especially when a new HD camera costs something like £600.
I think there might be like a "bottom end" range now (or is that desktops) but yes... Thinkpads are like the Land Rovers of the laptop world IMO - they may not be too pretty, but they just keep going.
It's about competition. There are so many devices filling the "8GB music player" that the chances of Apple scoring a hit with a customer are lower than they previously were.
The real issue for Apple is that if things take off on Android, they won't be able to get developers back fast enough and iPhone will be a 2nd rate development platform like OSX is.
Android already had a benefit that it's Java rather than Objective-C based. You don't need to buy a Mac to play around with it, you can discuss it all over and there's tons of open source Java code and Java books.
The big question is whether, beyond storage, the iPod has any further to go. The latest releases suggest that it's run out of steam and the whole large flash/HDD MP3 player market is heading to be far more of a comodity market that is is now.
Also, the cost of an 8GB cellphone is coming down quite rapidly. You can get an N95 in the UK for free on a £35 contract now. The future is more likely phones with storage.
Quite. I remember seeing early (and nasty) video capture and within seconds realised that you could have a box which could collect all your TV programs allowing instant access and all that without VCR tapes. The only reason that all of us geeks who realised that idea within seconds of seeing the first video capture card was that hard drives were just too damn small to do it properly.
Patents should be rare. They should be a solution that almost no-one would think of when it came to a problem. Most software/interface/computer patents are just dumb. They're like a chef claiming they invented the raspberry sundae because they replaced strawberries.
It's a great example of why you should act rather than looking around to see if there's already something doing what you want to do. Because it may just be that what you come up with will be a lot better...
In the UK, I have the choice of electronic or paper, and every single time, I opt for paper.
There is absolutely no justification for electronic voting.
It isn't something where speed is a factor. UK votes on election night start at 10pm when the polls close and nearly all results are known before people wake up the next day (some rural areas take a little longer).
It isn't much cheaper. Computer systems gain through reuse - your bank spends millions on ATMs, but these are used every day for 24 hours for years.
You lose audit trail and forensic information. If someone changes the vote tallies on a machine to switch votes from A to B, who's going to know? Can you go back to the actual votes? If someone tampers with the totals per candidate, do you know that?
There's no need for communication. An ATM is beneficial because it connects you with your bank whereever you are in the world. There's none of that need with a voting machine except once at the end of the day.
It seems to me that voting machines are just a "throw technology at it" solution by people who know nothing about data processing.
I agree with your points. The problem is that I don't think he understands the challenges of the average users. I frequently work with people who aren't that technical. They don't want to have to read man pages to get something to work. They want to click something, record some information and click something else, and they'll pay someone else to give them that functionality.
The mistake of Stallman and things like the OLPC is to assume that everyone wants to code, and that all that's stopping them is closed software. Most coders can't paint or cut fabric for a couture house, so why don't we see that those people might not be wired for coding?
There's actually very little lock-in in any of the existing "cloud" services. Gmail has POP and IMAP access, Amazon's web services are all based on things like REST and SOAP.
In most walks of life, people are far more tolerant and understanding of other people's needs than software.
You don't meet guys building their own hot rod racer in their garage getting on their high horse to tell people with regular cars that they're giving up their freedom by not building their own cars, and how they're slaves to the auto makers. They understand that what they do is a rarity and most people want to get in, turn on the car and go to the shops.
When Stallman actually has a job where he gets paid for producing code for corporations, where he can't just wait for some open component so he can deliver what's required (how long has HURD been now?), I'll start respecting his opinion.
OK, you like your PC. You don't mind maintaining it, running anti-viruses and so on. But you're not everyone. A lot of people want their services managed. Other people might want a way to manage peaks in demand without buying server infrastructure for the rest of the time (one of the commonest uses of S3 seems to be companies putting their catalogue images on there).
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Yes, I will at times contribute to open source projects; usually when it's in my interest to do so
And that's why he's dead wrong. Because a lot of open source use/modification comes from the same thing - someone having a need, making a change, suggesting it back and the maintainer including it.
Most of which is just a gigantic amount of icing on a very small cake. Most TV takes a tiny interesting idea and pads the crap out of it to fill time.
It's one reason people watch YouTube. Because if someone comes up with something cool, you don't want to get to the guts of it.
There were, ISTR, something like a dozen brokers who jumped out of windows. A dozen.
The other thing to remember is that life was pretty hard BEFORE the crash. Consider car ownership, life expectancy, infant mortality, and the numbers are way below what we have now. Our standard of life can drop considerably before we reach 1920s America.
No, that's not his point. His point is that 2000-2008 user-generated content is a blip, that even when the good times return, user-generated content won't come back with it.
It's a flawed argument because it assumes that people only do this stuff for direct financial gain, that somehow, they're expecting Rupert Murdoch to come along and offer them a million quid for their blog, and when that doesn't transpire, they'll all give it up.
A lot of his argument isn't about code, it's more about things like Facebook pages, Wikipedia and Flickr. These are not huge drains on people's time. A few minutes here and there.
I don't know what Keen's beef is with user-generated content. If some girl from MIT can make a cool rap, and people aren't watching some Simon Cowell competition, who cares?
I watched one of the Google Tech Talks about Bigtable. Mindblowing stuff, but you'll never get it on TV.
Quite. I've written bits of code that I needed on someone's open source project, and decided to give my changes back. Didn't need to, but had nothing to lose by giving them to the guy.
There was also a possible gain. If he included my change, then I wouldn't have to patch it in to get his latest version.
There are a huge number of reasons to give source code away, that to suggest that it's just down to simple altruism (which will dry up) is stupid.
The man is a fucking moron, quite simply. We're all going to stop doing things we did for no financial gain? So, why did we do them for no financial gain previously?
He assumes that people's only motivation is direct financial reward. That people don't just update Wikipedia pages because something's irritating to them, that people don't just put photos on Flickr because they want to be more social. People will never take an iPod apart, wire it up to their SNES just because they are curious.
The fact is that people do things for all sorts of reasons. Financial (direct or indirect), social, psychological. I once built a bit of open source code to tell me about the traffic on a road I used. There was no sensible way to make money from it, so I gave it away.
Mostly by opinion and counter-opinion. If a blogger is full of crap, you'll see other bloggers using facts to tear their pieces apart.
Also engage your brain and think about what you're reading. We've long been given the belief that newspapers and TV are very high quality news gatherers, but I've read so much in blogs that shows that's not the case, that those media forms just prefer a sensational headline to well-checked content.
That's the problem for me. All "technology" coverage on TV seems to fall into "Oooh.... shiny". I've never heard anyone on TV discuss things like closed vs open formats (which is a valid discussion about the long term use of what you buy).
But TV has lost science and I doubt that it's ever getting it back now. People who really want to know about science get it all from the net now.
What I think is happening is that news and factual reporting is a deeper fracture between a "TV" and an "internet" audience.
The internet now provides news in incredible depth. If you read bloggers who really know their subject, you'll get far more depth than TV ever gave you, and often more depth than most newspapers. You ever heard a TV economics reporter explaining the Laffer Curve or Basquiat's Broken Window Fallacy? You just never get that stuff. When the political parties were arguing about post office closures, not one journalism did the digging that showed that it was basically an issue of EU subsidies (that the government couldn't fund Post Offices).
On the other hand, TV news is incredibly dumb now. A story like Kerry Katona being made bankrupt never made the news when I was a kid. It was almost entirely hard news.
If people want to know why there's a real lack of hard science on TV, it's for this reason. Because the science audience is gone. They're watching video clips on YouTube or reading papers about science. Science coverage on TV is more "technology" now (which actually just means gadget reporting).
There's always a sensible point at which you kill something off, but "a few years" is pretty ropey, especially when a new HD camera costs something like £600.
I think there might be like a "bottom end" range now (or is that desktops) but yes... Thinkpads are like the Land Rovers of the laptop world IMO - they may not be too pretty, but they just keep going.
There was copyright in Shakespeare's day.
It's about competition. There are so many devices filling the "8GB music player" that the chances of Apple scoring a hit with a customer are lower than they previously were.
The real issue for Apple is that if things take off on Android, they won't be able to get developers back fast enough and iPhone will be a 2nd rate development platform like OSX is.
Android already had a benefit that it's Java rather than Objective-C based. You don't need to buy a Mac to play around with it, you can discuss it all over and there's tons of open source Java code and Java books.
The big question is whether, beyond storage, the iPod has any further to go. The latest releases suggest that it's run out of steam and the whole large flash/HDD MP3 player market is heading to be far more of a comodity market that is is now.
Also, the cost of an 8GB cellphone is coming down quite rapidly. You can get an N95 in the UK for free on a £35 contract now. The future is more likely phones with storage.
Quite. I remember seeing early (and nasty) video capture and within seconds realised that you could have a box which could collect all your TV programs allowing instant access and all that without VCR tapes. The only reason that all of us geeks who realised that idea within seconds of seeing the first video capture card was that hard drives were just too damn small to do it properly.
Patents should be rare. They should be a solution that almost no-one would think of when it came to a problem. Most software/interface/computer patents are just dumb. They're like a chef claiming they invented the raspberry sundae because they replaced strawberries.
It's a great example of why you should act rather than looking around to see if there's already something doing what you want to do. Because it may just be that what you come up with will be a lot better...
In the UK, I have the choice of electronic or paper, and every single time, I opt for paper.
There is absolutely no justification for electronic voting.
It isn't something where speed is a factor. UK votes on election night start at 10pm when the polls close and nearly all results are known before people wake up the next day (some rural areas take a little longer).
It isn't much cheaper. Computer systems gain through reuse - your bank spends millions on ATMs, but these are used every day for 24 hours for years.
You lose audit trail and forensic information. If someone changes the vote tallies on a machine to switch votes from A to B, who's going to know? Can you go back to the actual votes? If someone tampers with the totals per candidate, do you know that?
There's no need for communication. An ATM is beneficial because it connects you with your bank whereever you are in the world. There's none of that need with a voting machine except once at the end of the day.
It seems to me that voting machines are just a "throw technology at it" solution by people who know nothing about data processing.
I agree with your points. The problem is that I don't think he understands the challenges of the average users. I frequently work with people who aren't that technical. They don't want to have to read man pages to get something to work. They want to click something, record some information and click something else, and they'll pay someone else to give them that functionality.
The mistake of Stallman and things like the OLPC is to assume that everyone wants to code, and that all that's stopping them is closed software. Most coders can't paint or cut fabric for a couture house, so why don't we see that those people might not be wired for coding?
Because he couldn't just get a job, could he?
and what if the car maker goes bankrupt? Where are you going to get spare parts from?
all issues in business are about cost, benefit and risk. Many people would assume that Amazon and Google are probably safer than Ford are.
There's actually very little lock-in in any of the existing "cloud" services. Gmail has POP and IMAP access, Amazon's web services are all based on things like REST and SOAP.
In most walks of life, people are far more tolerant and understanding of other people's needs than software.
You don't meet guys building their own hot rod racer in their garage getting on their high horse to tell people with regular cars that they're giving up their freedom by not building their own cars, and how they're slaves to the auto makers. They understand that what they do is a rarity and most people want to get in, turn on the car and go to the shops.
When Stallman actually has a job where he gets paid for producing code for corporations, where he can't just wait for some open component so he can deliver what's required (how long has HURD been now?), I'll start respecting his opinion.
OK, you like your PC. You don't mind maintaining it, running anti-viruses and so on. But you're not everyone. A lot of people want their services managed. Other people might want a way to manage peaks in demand without buying server infrastructure for the rest of the time (one of the commonest uses of S3 seems to be companies putting their catalogue images on there).