OTOH: note how many of the Nobel prizes over
the last few years were awarded to members of
commercial labs.
In computer science, a lot of serious work is
being done in commercial labs. Microsoft's
research group publishes a LOT of papers, e.g.
graphics.
The academic world is just another self-interested pressure group.
Much cleaner to have corporations with clear self-interest doing the basic research. They publish because they are in a positive-sum game with other research groups.
Charity: I would never give $ or time to institutionalized charities. I give a lot individually, e.g. people in russia who need help.
Community: Giving $ to universities and other institutions is aiding a class of socialist meddlers, not primarily educating the next generation.
Volunteerism: I would never waste my time (while not retired) in helping a kid to read, local hospital,... I am more valuable to society than that working as a programmer. I only have so much time and brainpower, and I don't choose to invest them in $15/hour jobs. I can help more people with $ than with time.
Barsook is an ideologue. Let her define the terms, and she can make any group look any way she wants.
Thank god the babblers are perfect
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 1
or our society would be doomed.
Of course, any engineer with too much time on his hands could take Barstook's book or Katz's essay and use any word/phrase-replacing editor to critique any group x for lacking important dimensions y.
I know of no identifiable group which is perfect in every dimension. I don't find Barstook (an ideological dim bulb) to be the final authority on techys as a class nor the proper philosophy to adopt.
I see a world of interacting systems, through filters I can change according to MY requirements. Barstook and Katz see a completely different world through ideological filters.
To my empirical mind, ideology is surely the worst intellectual tool of the last few hundred years.
I know of several large web sites built entirely with PC hardware. (Walk around above.net in SJ and most cages don't have any SUN, SGI,... equipment, only PCs.)
Largest is 2M unique visitors per month, 20+M pages per month. 30GB database.
Hardware is dual 450MHz Pentium IIs, 2GB ECC DRAM, Mylex external RAID controllers for 2 chassis of 9GB IBM SCSI disks.
Software is Solaris/Oracle. Runs in 'recovery mode' (I am not a DBA) with log files copied to another system between DB backups.
Uptime is good. Main problems in the last 2 years have been Mylex controllers and a failed system disk in the PC chassis. Solaris provides software mirroring to avoid this kind of problem next time.
Disk I/O is the bottle-neck. More DRAM for caching is first improvement to be done, followed by next generation of RAID controllers with lots more cache, followed by more disks/heads.
I live in Silicon Valley, have been a programmer here for 20 years. I used to read the Murky News, but it rarely corresponds to the reality I am in contact with.
My friends and I are all in our late 40s/early 50s. We are mostly consultants. We have no trouble finding jobs in embedded systems and Unix or NT internals. Our rates are quite a lot higher than people with less than 25 years of experience.
FreeNet provides for distribution of non-localized docs, for which no single site can be held responsible.
So, anything which is/might be censored can be shifted into this realm, then referenced in un-censored publications.
Lew
Get serious. This is systems design, not ideology
on
The Corporate Republic
·
· Score: 1
Ideology has been repeatedly shown to be a profoundly lousy tool for comprehending the world.
Your utopia of "powerful gov controling corps in the name of the masses" is ideology, disconnected from any reality.
Our theory of gov, when the Constitution was created and for about 50 years thereafter, was:
a) We, the People, are sovereign. b) We sovereigns create the gov, and allocate it limited, enumerated powers. c) We People have Rights which pre-exist any gov.
Within this context, corps are easy: If you don't want to work for them, don't. If you don't want to buy their products, don't.
But, of course, that puts a price on your conscience, since alternatives to Nike may be less good/more expensive/less convenient.
And so, to avoid paying that price, you wish to grab some of the illegitimate gov power to make Nike do what you want. Nike, in defense, wishes to grab/purchase some of the illegitimate gov power to foil you.
A pox on both your houses.
In a system which prevents people like you from trying to use the gov to 'do good', we don't have any particular problems with corporations.
You completely avoided the impossibility of programming for an open environment with laws. Didn't understand programming, open environments, chaos, computational complexity,...?
The outcome is predictable. The gov has assumed ultra-Constitutional powers.
The corporations a) defend themselves via purchasing politicians and b) purchase the power seized by the corporations.
The problem ins't power of corps vs govs, it is gov vs people.
We no longer have a limited gov of enumerated powers. The Interstate Commerce clause of the US Constitution supports at least 3/4 of the current gov.
This has been done under the assumption that the gov could improve life for individuals == laws can be used to program an open environment to attain particular ends.
Lawyers must be smarter than me. In a carefully closed environment, with the ability to restart my programs in a known state, inspect the internals of the system, and otherwise test the hell out of it, I can often make small, simple programs work in a few days.
They claim to be able to write 10,000 page laws dealing with an open environment, very complex socio-techno-economic systesm (e.g. health care) and have them work so well they only need revisions every few years.
There are fundamental reasons that limited gov works better than un-limited gov.
What would the world be like if any of these inventions/developments were eliminated? Any one, and probably a lot of the others would have never happened, or never reached the current state of development.
Drop refrigeration, no mainframes because you couldn't have cooled all of the tube systems.
Etc.
This is another manifestation of a Newtonian mind, assuming infinite predictability into the future. How someone can maintain such a world-view in the face of everyday experience is a mystery to me.
My wife's family is Russian. All speak Russian at home. Kids don't know much English until 3.5 years.
Kids all prefer to speak English by 5.
Our kid has been bi-lingual from his first words. But, he went faster in English despite spending most of his time with mother or grandmother speaking Russian.
English words are shorter, grammar is easier (or at least lower learning curve to begin communications).
I concur with the 'evolution' position. English is an amalgum of languages, and natural selection in the minds of users prefers short and simple. The continual mixture of cultures has prevented development of an 'in-crowd' language of nuance, which has been a major advantage in a multi-cultural, technological era.
I believe breaking the company into 3 pieces is a great idea for everyone except MS's competition:
I will get MSOffice on BSD and Linux. (And all of the competition in the sheltered unix marketplace sill go broke.)
MS will be forced to abandon their hyper-integration of all apps and OSs. If this is continued, it will kill MS via geometric increases in complexity -- Windows2000 was supposed to be released years ago.
My company will finally have great servers, cheap. The OS company will not have enough to do, and will get serious about clusters, then push Intel on VIA. SUN's sales will start hurting a couple of years later.
The apps company will finally get serious about databases, and move it to BSD and Linux. Oracle needs some competition. (Nobody talks about what a bunch of used-car salesmen/mafia they are.)
The MS Apps company will no doubt do a Linux release of their own, as a bundle...
I love that future. Everyone who is so anti-MS will be hurt by the gov's decision, but MS and consumers of OSs and apps will do very well.
The last 50 years of = 1% of history's 5000 years.
The 20 Democratic countries of western Europe and the US = about 1% of the 200 or so in the UN.
This is much too un-representative a sample t oconclude that gov is benign.
Remember: Germany was one of the 3 (maybe 4 or 5) highest civilizations on earth in 1925. Science, art, technology, business, military. 25% of Jews were marrying outside of their faith in Berlin in 1925. They were completely integrated society. At the turn of the century, Mark Twain wrote an essay saying that anti-semitism was no longer an important force in German society.
By the early 1940s, Germans were killing their neighbors/relatives/friends with equanamity.
Never believe it can't happen in your home town. Never believe it can't be your group which is demonized, then rounded up and killed.
As one worrying trend, govs of the Western world are using demonization as a political/propaganda tool to an increasing extent : terrorists, smokers, gun-owners, 'religious nuts', immigrants,...
I have rule: I never buy anything I hear about from either spam or telemarketing. If I already use a service, I stop. I call the businesses and tell them -- they often don't know how much people hate telemarketeers.
(To the caller: "Have you considered taking up prostitution so that your mother could be proud of you?")
I never even read SPAM, unless it comes from a business I already patronize.
In this case, I let the business know I will NEVER use their produces/services again.
I keep a note book so that I can keep these promises.
If any significant number of people adopted these rules SPAM and telemarketing would die overnight.
Public schools have been politicized, unionized, legalized, bureaucratized, professionalized, socialized, massified,...
All attempts at reform so far have merely enhanced these undesirable traits, and have NOT increased children's knowledge and intellectual capabilities. I don't know of examples of institutions which have been reformed (reduced any of these dimensions) after having been so degraded.
In any case, the public school system is merely another attempt to design an economy/social system, none of which have worked, none of which can possibly work.
Use/disuse of personal computers has nothing to do with these fundamentals.
Therefore, this discussion is yet another distraction from the required reform: tear it down and let the market fix the problem.
In my lifetime, the favorite example of the great benefits of socialism has shifted continuously == Scandanavia, Germany, France, Canada...
The continuous shifting is required because no socialist state can maintain itself -- economic productivity always falls below less-socialist states. Country after country has bankrupted itself and its people.
Socialism doesn't work for the very good reasons that 'fairness' is not a scalable concent and economies and societies are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH too complex to analyze or predict.
Focused, dedicated companies find it hard to make a profit. Political systems can't begin to manage an economy or society.
An acquaintance of mine told me that he had broken into a multics system by writing a driver which a) did the driver's job and b) read the password file and communicated it one bit at a time to a user-space program via toggling rwx bits in some file known to both driver and user program.
Fleming put the patent for penicillin into the public domain, resulting in a several-year delay until it got to patients: without a guaranteed profit, no company could afford the development and testing expenses.
That was in the 1940s, before we had massive regulation by the FDA. Now it costs $500M to develop a new drug and get it past the regulatory hurdles. --> the drug industry looks like a regulated monopoly or the high-end military supply industry.
If we want fast development of new drugs, abolish the FDA and get the gov out of the Human Genome business.
Compare progress of AIDS and lung cancer. AIDS had a pressure group to make the FDA relax regulations on experimental drugs. The 'fast track' approach killed people, but progress has been very rapid. With more absolute $s put into lung cancer (a simpler disease, I believe) people are still dying untreated and/or while participating in safety trials for the many new drugs becoming available.
My father-in-law was one such case. "No ill effect from the doses in the safety trial. Great, now go home and die." He did, within about 6 weeks.
"Kill or cure" would have been a choice available to him in the absence of a bureaucracy.
According to the guy who builds all of our systems, there are not reliable MBs for the Athlon chips.
There are also no multiporcessor MBs for Athlon chips, I am told.
Don't count Intel out yet. Micrprocessor wars always focus on the chip characteristics, but people buy SYSTEMS -- hardware, software, development tools,...
I quit because the SJ Murky News had a bunch of idiots on telephones calling me all the time to buy a subscription.
I had subscribed from one location for 8 years.
I couldn't get them to stop. Complained to subscription editor,...
My policy is to never buy anything from telephone sales people and to cancel if I already have it. No exceptions.
Having canceled, I don't miss it much. I have the AP wire on-line, and www.drudgereport.com is a great index to the best of the online and brick-and-mortar worlds.
Having read a lot of on-line debates, I now realize that the Murky News' best columnists are merely above-average cocktail party opinionators. Every serious debate in any political or social forum on-line has people of much greater depth of knowledge, experience, understanding of every aspect of ANYTHING.
Ditto the Murky News' business coverage -- they don't come close to info I can get online in half a dozen places.
Who needs them? When micro$ payment systems finally occur, B&M newspapers will disappear overnight because I can reward people I like to read without any intervening newspaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Guns are quite a simple issue -- the more guns any society has available to ordinary people, the more stable it is and the less crime it experiences.
Relative, of course, to the same society without guns in the hands of ordinary people.
This fact is well-proven, in many studies over many countries over many years.
As Katz said "Children are safer than ever."
All 20,000 gun-control laws are unConstitutional.
Lew Glendenning
OTOH: note how many of the Nobel prizes over
the last few years were awarded to members of
commercial labs.
In computer science, a lot of serious work is
being done in commercial labs. Microsoft's
research group publishes a LOT of papers, e.g.
graphics.
The academic world is just another self-interested pressure group.
Much cleaner to have corporations with clear self-interest doing the basic research. They publish because they are in a positive-sum game with other research groups.
Lew Glendenning
Charity: I would never give $ or time to institutionalized charities. I give a lot individually, e.g. people in russia who need help.
Community: Giving $ to universities and other institutions is aiding a class of socialist meddlers, not primarily educating the next generation.
Volunteerism: I would never waste my time (while not retired) in helping a kid to read, local hospital,
Barsook is an ideologue. Let her define the terms, and she can make any group look any way she wants.
Lew
+ ginko
Possibly 5HTP if you are a bit depressed.
Lew
or our society would be doomed.
Of course, any engineer with too much time on his hands could take Barstook's book or Katz's essay and use any word/phrase-replacing editor to critique any group x for lacking important dimensions y.
I know of no identifiable group which is perfect in every dimension. I don't find Barstook (an ideological dim bulb) to be the final authority on techys as a class nor the proper philosophy to adopt.
I see a world of interacting systems, through filters I can change according to MY requirements. Barstook and Katz see a completely different world through ideological filters.
To my empirical mind, ideology is surely the worst intellectual tool of the last few hundred years.
Lew
I am a consultant - programming, sysadmin,
I know of several large web sites built entirely with PC hardware. (Walk around above.net in SJ and most cages don't have any SUN, SGI,
Largest is 2M unique visitors per month, 20+M pages per month. 30GB database.
Hardware is dual 450MHz Pentium IIs, 2GB ECC DRAM,
Mylex external RAID controllers for 2 chassis of
9GB IBM SCSI disks.
Software is Solaris/Oracle. Runs in 'recovery mode' (I am not a DBA) with log files copied to
another system between DB backups.
Uptime is good. Main problems in the last 2 years have been Mylex controllers and a failed
system disk in the PC chassis. Solaris provides
software mirroring to avoid this kind of problem
next time.
Disk I/O is the bottle-neck. More DRAM for caching is first improvement to be done, followed by next generation of RAID controllers with lots more cache, followed by more disks/heads.
Lew
Who would have ever guessed?
If we froze time, he could complain about the Mexicans dying in poverty in Mexico, instead of the US where their wives deliver children at Stanford
I live in SV. Neat place. Lots of community, if you have time for it. Ranter needs a kid in a school
Lew
And this is an example of the protectors being rewarded by the protectees.
The guy who prosecuted IBM 30 years ago became IBM's chief counsel, I believe.
lew
Seems a perfect use for this wonderful mechanism.
Lew
I live in Silicon Valley, have been a programmer here for 20 years. I used to read the Murky News, but it rarely corresponds to the reality I am in contact with.
My friends and I are all in our late 40s/early 50s. We are mostly consultants. We have no trouble finding jobs in embedded systems and Unix or NT internals. Our rates are quite a lot higher than people with less than 25 years of experience.
Lew
FreeNet provides for distribution of non-localized docs, for which no single site can be held responsible.
So, anything which is/might be censored can be shifted into this realm, then referenced in un-censored publications.
Lew
Ideology has been repeatedly shown to be a profoundly lousy tool for comprehending the world.
Your utopia of "powerful gov controling corps in the name of the masses" is ideology, disconnected from any reality.
Our theory of gov, when the Constitution was created and for about 50 years thereafter, was:
a) We, the People, are sovereign.
b) We sovereigns create the gov, and allocate it limited, enumerated powers.
c) We People have Rights which pre-exist any gov.
Within this context, corps are easy: If you don't want to work for them, don't. If you don't want to buy their products, don't.
But, of course, that puts a price on your conscience, since alternatives to Nike may be less good/more expensive/less convenient.
And so, to avoid paying that price, you wish to grab some of the illegitimate gov power to make Nike do what you want. Nike, in defense, wishes to grab/purchase some of the illegitimate gov power to foil you.
A pox on both your houses.
In a system which prevents people like you from trying to use the gov to 'do good', we don't have any particular problems with corporations.
You completely avoided the impossibility of programming for an open environment with laws. Didn't understand programming, open environments, chaos, computational complexity,
Lew
The outcome is predictable. The gov has assumed ultra-Constitutional powers.
The corporations a) defend themselves via purchasing politicians and b) purchase the power seized by the corporations.
The problem ins't power of corps vs govs, it is gov vs people.
We no longer have a limited gov of enumerated powers. The Interstate Commerce clause of the US Constitution supports at least 3/4 of the current gov.
This has been done under the assumption that the gov could improve life for individuals == laws can be used to program an open environment to attain particular ends.
Lawyers must be smarter than me. In a carefully closed environment, with the ability to restart my programs in a known state, inspect the internals of the system, and otherwise test the hell out of it, I can often make small, simple programs work in a few days.
They claim to be able to write 10,000 page laws dealing with an open environment, very complex socio-techno-economic systesm (e.g. health care) and have them work so well they only need revisions every few years.
There are fundamental reasons that limited gov works better than un-limited gov.
Lew
Crazy view. A list of importance in order.
What would the world be like if any of these inventions/developments were eliminated? Any one, and probably a lot of the others would have never happened, or never reached the current state of development.
Drop refrigeration, no mainframes because you couldn't have cooled all of the tube systems.
Etc.
This is another manifestation of a Newtonian mind, assuming infinite predictability into the future. How someone can maintain such a world-view in the face of everyday experience is a mystery to me.
Lew
My wife's family is Russian. All speak Russian
at home. Kids don't know much English until
3.5 years.
Kids all prefer to speak English by 5.
Our kid has been bi-lingual from his first words. But, he went faster in English despite spending most of his time with mother or grandmother speaking Russian.
English words are shorter, grammar is easier (or at least lower learning curve to begin communications).
I concur with the 'evolution' position. English is an amalgum of languages, and natural selection in the minds of users prefers short and simple. The continual mixture of cultures has prevented development of an 'in-crowd' language of nuance, which has been a major advantage in a multi-cultural, technological era.
Lew
I believe breaking the company into 3 pieces is a great idea for everyone except MS's competition:
I will get MSOffice on BSD and Linux. (And all of the competition in the sheltered unix marketplace sill go broke.)
MS will be forced to abandon their hyper-integration of all apps and OSs. If this is continued, it will kill MS via geometric increases in complexity -- Windows2000 was supposed to be released years ago.
My company will finally have great servers, cheap. The OS company will not have enough to do, and will get serious about clusters, then push Intel on VIA. SUN's sales will start hurting a couple of years later.
The apps company will finally get serious about databases, and move it to BSD and Linux. Oracle needs some competition. (Nobody talks about what a bunch of used-car salesmen/mafia they are.)
The MS Apps company will no doubt do a Linux release of their own, as a bundle
I love that future. Everyone who is so anti-MS will be hurt by the gov's decision, but MS and consumers of OSs and apps will do very well.
Lew
The last 50 years of = 1% of history's 5000 years.
The 20 Democratic countries of western Europe and the US = about 1% of the 200 or so in the UN.
This is much too un-representative a sample t oconclude that gov is benign.
Remember: Germany was one of the 3 (maybe 4 or 5) highest civilizations on earth in 1925. Science, art, technology, business, military. 25% of Jews were marrying outside of their faith in Berlin in 1925. They were completely integrated society. At the turn of the century, Mark Twain wrote an essay saying that anti-semitism was no longer an important force in German society.
By the early 1940s, Germans were killing their neighbors/relatives/friends with equanamity.
Never believe it can't happen in your home town. Never believe it can't be your group which is demonized, then rounded up and killed.
As one worrying trend, govs of the Western world are using demonization as a political/propaganda tool to an increasing extent : terrorists, smokers, gun-owners, 'religious nuts', immigrants,
Lew
Spam and telemarketing can be stopped, easily.
I have rule: I never buy anything I hear about from either spam or telemarketing. If I already use a service, I stop. I call the businesses and tell them -- they often don't know how much people hate telemarketeers.
(To the caller: "Have you considered taking up prostitution so that your mother could be proud of you?")
I never even read SPAM, unless it comes from a business I already patronize.
In this case, I let the business know I will NEVER use their produces/services again.
I keep a note book so that I can keep these promises.
If any significant number of people adopted these rules SPAM and telemarketing would die overnight.
Lew
Public schools have been politicized, unionized, legalized, bureaucratized, professionalized, socialized, massified,
All attempts at reform so far have merely enhanced these undesirable traits, and have NOT increased children's knowledge and intellectual capabilities. I don't know of examples of institutions which have been reformed (reduced any of these dimensions) after having been so degraded.
In any case, the public school system is merely another attempt to design an economy/social system, none of which have worked, none of which can possibly work.
Use/disuse of personal computers has nothing to do with these fundamentals.
Therefore, this discussion is yet another distraction from the required reform: tear it down and let the market fix the problem.
Lew
There is quite a long history of socialism.
...
In my lifetime, the favorite example of the great benefits of socialism has shifted continuously == Scandanavia, Germany, France, Canada
The continuous shifting is required because no socialist state can maintain itself -- economic productivity always falls below less-socialist states. Country after country has bankrupted itself and its people.
Socialism doesn't work for the very good reasons that 'fairness' is not a scalable concent and economies and societies are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH too complex to analyze or predict.
Focused, dedicated companies find it hard to make a profit. Political systems can't begin to manage an economy or society.
Lew
An acquaintance of mine told me that he had broken into a multics system by writing a driver which a) did the driver's job and b) read the password file and communicated it one bit at a time to a user-space program via toggling rwx bits in some file known to both driver and user program.
He was smart enough that it was probably true.
Fleming put the patent for penicillin into the public domain, resulting in a several-year delay until it got to patients: without a guaranteed profit, no company could afford the development and testing expenses.
That was in the 1940s, before we had massive regulation by the FDA. Now it costs $500M to develop a new drug and get it past the regulatory hurdles. --> the drug industry looks like a regulated monopoly or the high-end military supply industry.
If we want fast development of new drugs, abolish the FDA and get the gov out of the Human Genome business.
Compare progress of AIDS and lung cancer. AIDS had a pressure group to make the FDA relax regulations on experimental drugs. The 'fast track' approach killed people, but progress has been very rapid. With more absolute $s put into lung cancer (a simpler disease, I believe) people are still dying untreated and/or while participating in safety trials for the many new drugs becoming available.
My father-in-law was one such case. "No ill effect from the doses in the safety trial. Great, now go home and die." He did, within about 6 weeks.
"Kill or cure" would have been a choice available to him in the absence of a bureaucracy.
Lew
According to the guy who builds all of our systems, there are not reliable MBs for the Athlon chips.
There are also no multiporcessor MBs for Athlon chips, I am told.
Don't count Intel out yet. Micrprocessor wars always focus on the chip characteristics, but people buy SYSTEMS -- hardware, software, development tools,
Lew
Dan Gillmor of the SJ Murky News is one of the weakest reporter/opinionators you could have mentioned.
He has a simplistic, moralistic, leftist slant on everything.
You apparently, from your list, appreciate the leftward slant of the standard media.
I quit because the SJ Murky News had a bunch of idiots on telephones calling me all the time to buy a subscription.
...
I had subscribed from one location for 8 years.
I couldn't get them to stop. Complained to subscription editor,
My policy is to never buy anything from telephone sales people and to cancel if I already have it. No exceptions.
Having canceled, I don't miss it much. I have the AP wire on-line, and www.drudgereport.com is a great index to the best of the online and brick-and-mortar worlds.
Having read a lot of on-line debates, I now realize that the Murky News' best columnists are merely above-average cocktail party opinionators. Every serious debate in any political or social forum on-line has people of much greater depth of knowledge, experience, understanding of every aspect of ANYTHING.
Ditto the Murky News' business coverage -- they don't come close to info I can get online in half a dozen places.
Who needs them? When micro$ payment systems finally occur, B&M newspapers will disappear overnight because I can reward people I like to read without any intervening newspaper.
Lew