First thing this reminded me of was the Simpsons' episode where Homer became a member of the Stonecutters...
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs the cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscars night?
We do! We do!
Yeah. I really want to be part of Orkut. Please, someone invite me. Not.
The point is not that he's a celebrity (because he's really not), but that he's influential. Like Leibniz, or Fourier, or any of those other brutally important innovators that most haven't heard of.
You aren't serious, are you? Comparing this guy to Leibniz and Fourier? Frankel comes no where near the stature of either of these two, sorry to say. How has he changed the world? He hasn't. He's simply built a better mouse-trap. He's nothing more than a programmer with long hair and a gotee who was in the right place at the right time.
Maybe the average guy on the street hasn't heard of Fourier or Leibniz, but you can't throw a stone without hitting something in today's society to which Fourier's and Leibniz's ideas did not contribute. I doubt very much you can say the same of Frankel, and I bet you 200 years from now the same will be true.
Don't begrudge him credit because your jealous.
I think the only reason many people on./ *are* giving him credit is because they are, in fact, jealous. They want to live vicariously through this guy.
There are a lot more people who I would label as "dangerous geeks" and people who subvert corporate control. Steve Mann and Richard Stallman immediately come to mind. Justin Frankel, though? I'm sure he's a nice guy (how can he not be, with the hippie image he portrays?), but he's just one of many who got rich off the dot-com bubble.
Viewed purely as a business decision, wouldn't it have made more sense for Microsoft to just pay the kid the $10,000 for which he was asking? I mean, isn't it going to cost more than $10,000 in lawyers' fees going court and eventually bringing the thing to trial (should it go that far)? The only way it's going to cost less than this is if Mr. Rowe gives in without a fight.
Someone pointed out that the only reason MS is pursuing this is because they aren't aware that it's a 17 year old kid behind the domain name, and that this is going to cause a lot of bad publicity for them. The thing is, in light of the above, I think that they're fully aware that it's a 17 year old kid, and that's specifically the reason why they're pursuing this in the way they are. They think that simply filing a lawsuit is going to scare the kid (and his parents) into giving up the domain name. No trial, no expensive lawyers, and M$ gets the domain name for less than $10,000. This is the only possible business rationale for the decision to file a lawsuit. They think Joe Schmoe, living in some middle-class suburb, isn't going to want to take on Microsoft and all its legal resources.
Yet another example of how, in America, justice is for sale to the highest bidder.
First, the blurred boundary between public and private spaces in only in the perception of the public itself, not by law. A business owner can, for any reason that he sees fit, decide to not serve a particular person or even a particular demographic.
Now you are professing your ignorance of the law. Here in Ontario (where I live) there is a thing called the 'Discriminatory Business Practices Act'. A business owner who refuses to engage in business with someone because that person is part of a particular demographic is committing an illegal act. Here is a link to the act. I would be very surprised if other parts of Canada, and the US, didn't have similar laws.
Although I admit that being followed around everywhere by people carrying video cameras watching my every move would in fact be uncomfortable, your hypothetical scenario of a world in which it happens everywhere would, if it were to ever happen, occur over a long time, not overnight, so by the time that actually was the norm, most people would probably be pretty used to it.
And this is what we are seeing: the *gradual* erosion of our public spaces into commercialized and private spaces where people accept things that, were they to be introduced overnight, people would otherwise find objectionable. Just because things are introduced gradually doesn't deter from the fact that in the end they are objectionable.
First of all, a store is NOT a piece of private property in the same way as you and I consider our home to be our private property. You can rant and rave about this point all you want, and it even may be the case that under the law (and we know the law is infallible, right?), they are equivalent, but the simple truth is: they are not! You and I do not open our homes to complete strangers for the purposes selling products and services with the expectation that hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people will show up on a regular basis. In reality, the boundary between public and private spaces is extremely blurred.
Secondly, just because it is private property, doesn't mean the owners can do anything they want on that property. Would you argue that an owner of a piece of property has the right commit murder on that property if he sees fit? Of course not. You may say, 'but videotaping is not murder.' No, it is not, but certain people (e.g. Mann) may find the practice objectionable. Aren't his concerns valid? You argue 'then he just shouldn't go there.' But the problem is, with the blurring of public and private spaces, and the commercialization and "privatization" of more and more spaces that are traditionally public, there may be fewer and fewer places where people can go. Rather than let things move even further in this direction, people like Mann challenge the status quo.
Thirdly, let me pose the following scenario to you: Suppose you walk into some store. Normally you don't think about the fact that there are security cameras in the ceiling and the corners of the store videotaping you, and even if you do realize it, it doesn't necessarily bother you. However, suppose that in this store, instead of having video cameras mounted and hidden behind dark pieces of glass and one way mirrors, it has part of its staff dedicated to following you around with a hand-held video camera. Now you're painfully aware of the fact that you are being videotaped. I would find it extremely hard to believe that you would not be made to feel uneasy in this type of situation. I'm guessing that your response would be 'but then I just wouldn't go to that weird-ass store anymore.' So, suppose that you woke up one day and found that it was common practice for all stores to employ this type of video surveillance. Are you just going to lock yourself in your house and not go anywhere? I suspect that any average person, unless he/she is some kind of voyeur, would find such surveillance practices objectionable. But if you think about it, you will realize that the only difference between my hypothetical scenario and the current type of videotaping that goes on in stores is that in my hypothetical scenario you are made painfully aware of the fact that you are being videotaped. So why should people accept being videotaped when they are not made aware of it? People may believe what they don't know won't hurt them, but often the opposite is true.
Just because a particular technology has the potential of being abused, does that mean it's a bad technology? No, certainly not. All the bad things that you indicate that can happen may very well happen, but there are also a lot of positive things that can come out of such technology.
Sticking our heads in the sand and becoming Luddites is not the solution. Examining how the potential abuses can occur, and targeting those things, rather than the technology itself, is what should be done.
So it must have been the martians who were responsible for 9/11. Why else would Bush want to invade... err.. send a manned-mission to Mars? I'm sure Bush has the best intentions of installing a democratic regime on Mars, ridding the solar system of evil, etc etc etc.
In all seriousness, though, does anyone else smell an election looming? Why else would he make a commitment to scientific exploration when this is something his government is clearly not interested in? He realizes that his support from the American people is borderline at best, so he needs something to give him that extra bit of support right before the election. I only hope that people can see through this.
I've got a 8088 PC sitting in my basement. I'm just letting it sit until it becomes a collector's item. Surely sometime in the future it will have some greater value. I remember paying over $1000 when I first bought the thing.
I am not saying the greedy CEO's and stockholders aren't to blame also - they are. But this kind of attitude just goes to show that many American works expect far more than they are worth. If US companies want to combat outsourcing they have to start from the bottom - offer lower pay to incoming workers, and somehow get rid of the top heavy "older" workers (attrition, lay off, whatever) from the 90's.
The problem with this attitude is that it doesn't take into account how the rest of the economy has evolved. High salaries in, say, California? Well, take a look at the cost of living there. You need close to six figures just to have a decent standard of living. Are you suggesting that people should move into the ghetto or live in wooden shacks as an alternative?
I agree, the excesses of the past are coming to haunt us. But the problem is, those excesses are not isolated to the the dot-bomb industry. US Workers are only reacting to their environment. We live in a capitalist system which runs on the notion of maximizing profit. Individuals living in such a system also want to maximize their profit, and hence you see high-tech workers demanding higher salaries while not providing a service that is commensurate to that salary. This is no different than corporations increasing the price of their products while not improving the quality or functionality of them. Capitalism at its best.
The real solution would be for a sane government to step in and stop all this social darwinistic free-market crap, and put into place some regulations that would benefit everyone. Of course, governments are funded by big business, so the chance of this happening is pretty slim.
Secondly, the quality of Indian schools is no where to the same degree of western equivalents, and hence those diploma mills they call universities are no more than trade schools.
I don't believe that this is entirely true. One exception that immediately comes to mind is the fact that the researchers who discovered that PRIMES are in P were at an Indian University. See this article.
The following is an excerpt from it:
The admissions procedure for
the Indian Institute of Technology
(IIT) is rigorous and selective.
There is a two-stage
common procedure called the
Joint Entrance Examination
(JEE) for admission to one of
the seven branches of the IIT
and two other institutions. Last
year 150,000 Indians applied
for admission, and after an initial
three-hour examination in
mathematics, physics, and
chemistry, 15,000 were invited
to a second test consisting of
a two-hour examination in
each of the three subjects. Finally
2,900 students were
awarded places, of which 45
were for computer science at
the very renowned IIT in Kanpur.
It is no wonder that good
money is earned in India for
preparing candidates for the
dreaded JEE, and graduates of
the IIT are eagerly hired worldwide.
Fact is, there probably are some very smart developers working in India, and there are probably some not-so-smart ones. Exactly like it is in North America. The difference is, smart or not, they will all to work for less than their western counter-parts. I suspect the reason for poor quality can be attributed to the same management attitude that lead to the outsourcing in the first place: management wants things done faster and cheaper. This will lead to unrealistic schedules, which, in turn, leads to poor quality products.
Firstly, what should and shouldn't be is irrelevant in the real world. Idealistic attitudes will get you nowhere but the gutter, and if you don't like it, tough. This is a society - "social" being the same root. Your ideal situation doesn't matter, the actual happenings in the social (interpersonal) world do. I don't think looks should matter either (to an extent), but I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot and declare "if it's not the way I think it should be, I'll boycott it" with respect to society (buying CDs and software is a mainly a personal matter, so it's a different story). You're free to hold your belief, you're free to hold yourself back by clinging onto it, and we're free to not care. Sorry, but your theory will have only one immediate outcome: you will make less money, get worse jobs, and all the trickle down effects of monetary issues will follow. Cheers.
To quote Matt Daemon in Good Will Hunting, "Yeah, but at least I won't be unoriginal."
Throwing on whatever clothes are available suggests you'll do the minimal amount of work necessary for any task - not exactly the person I'd want working for me.
It's also possible that someone who throws on whatever clothes are available does so because they would rather invest their time in more substantial matters than merely impressing some brainless suit.
It's an easy way to make your own laziness or hatred of fashion into a righteous crusade. That may not be the case for you, but it is for many (most commonly seen in the goth/punk communities today). It's no surprise that there are far fewer punks/goths/etc over the age of 25 than under. People mature, and when they do, they realize that they're only hurting themselves by shunning societal norms.
ROFL. You're lumping goth/punks into the same group as unkempt intellectuals? You really are clueless. Goth/punks have far more in common with corporate types than they do with the frizzy-haired intellectual types. Goth/punks are EXTREMELY fashion conscious. Unless you break out the fishnets and black make-up, forget about being accepted by their little clique. This is very similar to the corporate mentality that requires one wear a suit and tie lest one be deemed "lazy" because he didn't spend any time on their appearance (as you described earlier).
Surpise... as in surpisingly bad considering all the rave reviews?
Lost in Translation was mildly amusing, but I definitely would not call it among the best of 2003. There was very little plot. The jokes repeated themselves (how many times can you make fun of the way Japanese people talk?). And the music was horribly out-of-place. The Jesus And Mary Chain's 'Just like Honey' in the closing scene as Bill Murray rides away? PLEASE! It was cool to see My Blody Valentine and JAMC get some mainstream play by being in the soundtrack of this movie, but they just didn't fit IMHO.
This is mildly off-topic with regards to the lawsuit, but as other people are taking the opportunity to comment on how badly RealPlayer sucks, I thought I would join in.
A while back I was getting extremely frustrated with RealPlayer. All I wanted to do was watch some streaming video on the internet. You think this would be a pretty simple task. Not so when it's in RealPlayer format (.ram,.rm,.ra). RealPlayer has got to be the absolute most CRAPTACULAR piece of software ever made in the existence of man. It's worse than anything M$ has ever produced, hands down.
My problem was with the pop-ups, always asking me to register, sign over my soul and my first-born, etc etc. I plowed through this garbage, usually cancelling the registration process, and most of the time (if I was lucky) I would be able to watch the streaming video that I wanted to watch in the first place. However, one time RealPlayer just stopped working. No warning about not having registered, nothing. The RealPlayer window would come up, say it was connecting, but then just die. No streaming video. For no reason. (At first I thought it might be something wrong with the site providing the streaming video, but I tried some sites that I knew should work for sure, and the same thing happened.)
This was the last straw. I made a concerted effort to find an alternative product to RealPlayer that would still allow me to watch real media files. I struck gold when I encountered this message on usenet suggesting JetAudio: message.
I've used JetAudio since then. No annoying pop-ups, and fairly stable. I'm using version 5.1 basic. YMMV with whatever the latest release is, but I'm much happier with this product than I ever was with RealPlayer.
Do you see M$ or Apple outosurcing to India/China? Hmm...
Actually, I do. At least M$. See this link.
Funniest quote from this article:
Commenting on the backlash in the US against offshoring to India among other countries, [some corporate VP at M$] said, "No one can have protective policy for businesses which are global in nature. Work should be done where skills are available."
I guess the skills just aren't available in North America. Yeah, right.
It is easier for a scientist to learn business than it is for a businessman to learn science.
Stated differently, it is easier for a human to pretend to be a monkey than it is for a monkey to pretend to be human.
Now, I ask you, how often does a human want to be a monkey?
Seriously, even though it may be easier for a scientist to learn business than a business man to learn science, I think most scientists would rather not touch the business-world with a ten-foot pole. They see it for what it really is: a world devoid of substance.
Agreed, unequivocally, 100%. You are absolutely right. Education should be free.
Now, is this ever going to happen anywhere in America or Canada (which is where I am)? Not bloody likely.
In fact, tuition is on the rise. In the particular province I live (Ontario), we were recently plagued by close to a decade of neo-con stupidity, masquerading under the name "Progressive Conservatives", that resulted in, among other things, tuition fees more than doubling.
An education is a right that is as fundamental as one's right to vote. By setting tuition fees too high, you effectively create a barrier for a certain segment of society that prevents them from getting an education. I know there's a couple of ranters and ravers who will say "oh, but I have no money, 10 kids to support, etc etc, but I was still able to get an education." Well, even if that story is true (I'm a skeptic), I would much rather believe the statistics than the fringe story of one or two people. Maybe it is possible in certain exceptional cases for someone from a poor background to get a good education, but overall the stats show that getting a higher education is correlated with how large one's family income is.
There is perhaps some hope that we will eventually progress as a society away from the idiocy of turning everything into a commodity, at least in the field of education. After all, in the 19th century, one's right to vote was not as fundamental as we consider it to be today. There was a time when you had to own a certain amount of property before you were allowed to cast a vote in an election. When we look at this now, we are able to recognize such a system for how terrible it was and be glad that we have advanced. Hopefully, 150 years from now, people will look back on our system of education in the early 21st century and be able to make the same judgement.
While we're at it why not order up world peace, and end to global hunger, a cure for all infectious diseases and an end to boybands.
I hope that list wasn't in order of priority. I think an end to boybands is by far the most important item; after that has been achieved, we can deal with the rest.
Seriously, though, you make it sound like a society and economy made to service our greed and vanity is inevitable. I don't believe this to be the case.
As human beings, we have a little thing called freedom of choice. The only reason we have the society and economy we have today is because we have chosen to have it. To some extent it has been a passive choice -- we have let the baser aspects of human nature take their course (e.g., our greed and vanity). Why should this be inevitable though?
Let me give you an example of something that is inevitable: the behaviour patterns of insects. Ants, spiders, roaches, etc -- all of them have particular actions which they carry out because it is hardwired into them. They cannot choose to do anything other than the repetitive and meaningless acts that they do. Do you want to suggest that human beings are no more advanced than this?
I'm not trying to imply that progressing from the current state of affairs will be easy. As a first step, it requires people to educate themselves and geniuinely desire change. Sure, we can all continue on the same course we are on now, saying that it's inevitable, muttering about how soul-crushing working in a cubicle is while doing nothing about it, etc, etc. But then we are relegated to the same type of inevitability that defines the insect world, and the progress of the human race will only be measured by things like how many transistors we can fit on an integrated circuit, instead of being qualified by our ability as a species to make everyone's life worth living. This choice does not particularly appeal to me, and I would hope that others also find it equally unappealing.
All you're doing is reinforcing my point! Of course no crackhead company is going to pay someone for being human. A company is as likely to pay someone for being human as I am likely to buy a VCR that doesn't work. In other words, companies will evaluate people the same why I would evaluate a product on a store shelf. This is wrong! Human beings are much more than products, and we need to develop a culture and system of economics which recognizes this fact.
I'm not implying companies should start hiring anyone who walks in their door, as your narrow-minded neo-con interpretation of my original message suggests. I'm trying to suggest a change much larger than this.
I've never worked at Microsoft, so I'm just speculating here based on what I've heard and what I've read on the MS Career website, but it seems to me that the type of developer that MS is likely to hire is the egotistical, arrogant "my-code-is-better-than-your-code" type of developer. Sure, some these individuals may be extremely smart and be able to pound out thousands of lines of code a day, but the thing is, the "cowboy coder" attitude does not work well when putting together large and complicated pieces of software. In such projects, there are times that developers need to cede to the fact that there may be a better way of doing something than their way, and writing some obscure and cryptic piece of code -- while intellectually satisfying -- yields systems that are not robust and hard to maintain.
Sure, some real estate costs might be saved by moving towards an open environment, but what are the trade offs? What's lost in the transition?
Every developer I've ever talked to has indicated that they do their best work when alone. Yeah, you need group meetings periodically, and every once in awhile need to bounce some ideas off a colleague. But when it comes down to finishing up some new module, or finding some tricky bug, focus and the ability to concentrate are key. This will become a lot harder in an "open" environment. So all that money saved in real estate costs will end up being gobbled up by lost productivity.
The other thing is, I bet you any money, managers still have offices. They had them before in cube-land, and they'll have them now. The difference is that the divide between lowly-developer and management will become even more pronounced. This doesn't lead to a very egalitarian work environment, meaning less job satisfaction among employees, which again translates to decreased productivity.
So why the transition to an "open" environment if there's going to be a decrease in productivity? Because saving costs on real estate is something that can be immediately quantified and measured by management. "Loss in productivity" is one of those wishy-washy things that can be attributed to half a dozen different things without any real certainty. Took longer to get version 2 out the door than version 1? It was because there were more complicated features to do for version 2, less skilled developers on the team this time around, etc, etc. (Of course, the one reason that would never be suggested -- at least by management -- is management's decision to change to an "open" work environment.) Being able to quantify something and show a short-term benefit on a balance sheet, while being oblivious to consequences that are less easily quanitified and more long-term, is what management types excel at.
The best environment I ever worked in was when I was at IBM and we had shared offices. There would be two developers to an office, one senior, and one more junior. That way the more junior developer could always have someone there to ask a question when he got stuck and the more senior developer was not just relegated to an isolated office to code all the really hard stuff by himself. That was several years ago; unfortunately, from what I've heard, since then IBM has also been moving to cubeland. (On a bright note though, even first-line managers get cubes, so they're "down in the trenches" with the developers, which is a good thing.)
The root of the problem is capitalism. IT personnel are nothing more than commodities. They can be pigeonholed with long lists of "skill sets" that are akin to the feature sets of VCRs and Microwaves. Until we learn to treat human beings as human beings instead of products, the present state of misery will continue.
I'll put my vote in for "Impossibility of Distributed Consensus With One Faulty Process", by Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson. This paper is better known in theoretical circles as the the FLP result. Quite a cool little paper. Consensus is a problem in which processes are expected to come to an agreement about some value based on the values that were initially proposed by the participating processes. Basically, at the start of any consensus algorithm, each process proposes some value $v \in S$ (where S is some predefined set of values), and when a process decides a value, no process can decide a different value and moreover it must be a value that was initially proposed by some process. There's also a liveness condition: processes must eventually make a decision. What FLP proved was that even when $S = \{0,1\}$ (i.e., they examined the binary consensus problem), and there was only 1 faulty process (i.e., one process may "crash" during the execution of the consensus algorithm), then in a purely asynchronous system, the consensus problem cannot be solved. For example, you can have 10^9 processes, and exactly 1 of those processes could be faulty, and there is absolutely no way in hell that those other 10^9-1 processes can reach any sort of an agreement. Cool, eh?
Meritocracy is the way to determine who knows their stuff and academic merit does not hold up well to real world merit in my experience. Of the best coders I have ever met many are college dropouts... .
Sigh. This debate seems to rage on without ever coming to a adequate conclusion. Does having a degree in Comp. Sci. mean you're a good coder? Obviously not. But it does actually indicate some very important things that may determine's one success in the business world.
First of all, a Comp Sci degree consists of more than simply programming courses. In fact, instruction in particular programming languages is minimal in any decent Comp Sci program of which I know. What you learn instead are concepts, which if you learn them adequately, you should be able to apply to any number of situations. Besides computer related courses, you are also required to take courses that may be in unrelated subjects like (gasp!) English, History, Philosophy, or the Arts and Social Sciences in general. Being able to succeed in a broad range of courses and being able to learn abstract concepts indicates to an employer that you can do more than just code. Frankly, I would rather take a job that requires a degree than one that doesn't, because chances are that the job that requires a degree will allow some career mobility and won't restrict you to solely being a coder for the time during which you are at the company. The job that requires only that you know umpteen million languages or software products basically means you will be confined to a very narrow role while you're employed in that job, and when those particular tasks are no longer relevant to the company, you will be expendable.
I have worked with "college dropouts" in the past, and my experience has not been the most positive. Some of them, I agree, were very good coders, but this seemed to be the extent of their abilities. There were certain aspects of the product on which I worked that had a more mathematical bent, and when these aspects of the product were discussed among the degreed developers, those without the degrees seemed to have no clue what we were talking about.
Having said all that, I have also worked with degreed developers who are incompetent. But, in general, my expereince has been that those with a degree are better overall developers than those without. I think people in the business world realize this as well, and that is why a lot of jobs in the software industry require a degree.
It's fine to take the son, daughter, and wife out to see a WWF event, where two people pretend to severely injure each other, or perhaps out to the latest Terminator flick (wait a sec, Arnie's governor of California now, so there probably won't be any more Terminator flicks), but let a child see two adults in an act of consensual love-making, and you can go to jail. What's wrong with this picture?
Slashdot Mirror
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs the cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscars night?
We do! We do!
Yeah. I really want to be part of Orkut. Please, someone invite me. Not.
Maybe the average guy on the street hasn't heard of Fourier or Leibniz, but you can't throw a stone without hitting something in today's society to which Fourier's and Leibniz's ideas did not contribute. I doubt very much you can say the same of Frankel, and I bet you 200 years from now the same will be true.
I think the only reason many people onThere are a lot more people who I would label as "dangerous geeks" and people who subvert corporate control. Steve Mann and Richard Stallman immediately come to mind. Justin Frankel, though? I'm sure he's a nice guy (how can he not be, with the hippie image he portrays?), but he's just one of many who got rich off the dot-com bubble.
Someone pointed out that the only reason MS is pursuing this is because they aren't aware that it's a 17 year old kid behind the domain name, and that this is going to cause a lot of bad publicity for them. The thing is, in light of the above, I think that they're fully aware that it's a 17 year old kid, and that's specifically the reason why they're pursuing this in the way they are. They think that simply filing a lawsuit is going to scare the kid (and his parents) into giving up the domain name. No trial, no expensive lawyers, and M$ gets the domain name for less than $10,000. This is the only possible business rationale for the decision to file a lawsuit. They think Joe Schmoe, living in some middle-class suburb, isn't going to want to take on Microsoft and all its legal resources.
Yet another example of how, in America, justice is for sale to the highest bidder.
First of all, a store is NOT a piece of private property in the same way as you and I consider our home to be our private property. You can rant and rave about this point all you want, and it even may be the case that under the law (and we know the law is infallible, right?), they are equivalent, but the simple truth is: they are not! You and I do not open our homes to complete strangers for the purposes selling products and services with the expectation that hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people will show up on a regular basis. In reality, the boundary between public and private spaces is extremely blurred.
Secondly, just because it is private property, doesn't mean the owners can do anything they want on that property. Would you argue that an owner of a piece of property has the right commit murder on that property if he sees fit? Of course not. You may say, 'but videotaping is not murder.' No, it is not, but certain people (e.g. Mann) may find the practice objectionable. Aren't his concerns valid? You argue 'then he just shouldn't go there.' But the problem is, with the blurring of public and private spaces, and the commercialization and "privatization" of more and more spaces that are traditionally public, there may be fewer and fewer places where people can go. Rather than let things move even further in this direction, people like Mann challenge the status quo.
Thirdly, let me pose the following scenario to you: Suppose you walk into some store. Normally you don't think about the fact that there are security cameras in the ceiling and the corners of the store videotaping you, and even if you do realize it, it doesn't necessarily bother you. However, suppose that in this store, instead of having video cameras mounted and hidden behind dark pieces of glass and one way mirrors, it has part of its staff dedicated to following you around with a hand-held video camera. Now you're painfully aware of the fact that you are being videotaped. I would find it extremely hard to believe that you would not be made to feel uneasy in this type of situation. I'm guessing that your response would be 'but then I just wouldn't go to that weird-ass store anymore.' So, suppose that you woke up one day and found that it was common practice for all stores to employ this type of video surveillance. Are you just going to lock yourself in your house and not go anywhere? I suspect that any average person, unless he/she is some kind of voyeur, would find such surveillance practices objectionable. But if you think about it, you will realize that the only difference between my hypothetical scenario and the current type of videotaping that goes on in stores is that in my hypothetical scenario you are made painfully aware of the fact that you are being videotaped. So why should people accept being videotaped when they are not made aware of it? People may believe what they don't know won't hurt them, but often the opposite is true.
Sticking our heads in the sand and becoming Luddites is not the solution. Examining how the potential abuses can occur, and targeting those things, rather than the technology itself, is what should be done.
In all seriousness, though, does anyone else smell an election looming? Why else would he make a commitment to scientific exploration when this is something his government is clearly not interested in? He realizes that his support from the American people is borderline at best, so he needs something to give him that extra bit of support right before the election. I only hope that people can see through this.
I've got a 8088 PC sitting in my basement. I'm just letting it sit until it becomes a collector's item. Surely sometime in the future it will have some greater value. I remember paying over $1000 when I first bought the thing.
I agree, the excesses of the past are coming to haunt us. But the problem is, those excesses are not isolated to the the dot-bomb industry. US Workers are only reacting to their environment. We live in a capitalist system which runs on the notion of maximizing profit. Individuals living in such a system also want to maximize their profit, and hence you see high-tech workers demanding higher salaries while not providing a service that is commensurate to that salary. This is no different than corporations increasing the price of their products while not improving the quality or functionality of them. Capitalism at its best.
The real solution would be for a sane government to step in and stop all this social darwinistic free-market crap, and put into place some regulations that would benefit everyone. Of course, governments are funded by big business, so the chance of this happening is pretty slim.
Lost in Translation was mildly amusing, but I definitely would not call it among the best of 2003. There was very little plot. The jokes repeated themselves (how many times can you make fun of the way Japanese people talk?). And the music was horribly out-of-place. The Jesus And Mary Chain's 'Just like Honey' in the closing scene as Bill Murray rides away? PLEASE! It was cool to see My Blody Valentine and JAMC get some mainstream play by being in the soundtrack of this movie, but they just didn't fit IMHO.
A while back I was getting extremely frustrated with RealPlayer. All I wanted to do was watch some streaming video on the internet. You think this would be a pretty simple task. Not so when it's in RealPlayer format (.ram, .rm, .ra). RealPlayer has got to be the absolute most CRAPTACULAR piece of software ever made in the existence of man. It's worse than anything M$ has ever produced, hands down.
My problem was with the pop-ups, always asking me to register, sign over my soul and my first-born, etc etc. I plowed through this garbage, usually cancelling the registration process, and most of the time (if I was lucky) I would be able to watch the streaming video that I wanted to watch in the first place. However, one time RealPlayer just stopped working. No warning about not having registered, nothing. The RealPlayer window would come up, say it was connecting, but then just die. No streaming video. For no reason. (At first I thought it might be something wrong with the site providing the streaming video, but I tried some sites that I knew should work for sure, and the same thing happened.)
This was the last straw. I made a concerted effort to find an alternative product to RealPlayer that would still allow me to watch real media files. I struck gold when I encountered this message on usenet suggesting JetAudio: message.
I've used JetAudio since then. No annoying pop-ups, and fairly stable. I'm using version 5.1 basic. YMMV with whatever the latest release is, but I'm much happier with this product than I ever was with RealPlayer.
(BTW, I'm in no way affiliated with JetAudio.)
Now, I ask you, how often does a human want to be a monkey?
Seriously, even though it may be easier for a scientist to learn business than a business man to learn science, I think most scientists would rather not touch the business-world with a ten-foot pole. They see it for what it really is: a world devoid of substance.
Now, is this ever going to happen anywhere in America or Canada (which is where I am)? Not bloody likely.
In fact, tuition is on the rise. In the particular province I live (Ontario), we were recently plagued by close to a decade of neo-con stupidity, masquerading under the name "Progressive Conservatives", that resulted in, among other things, tuition fees more than doubling.
An education is a right that is as fundamental as one's right to vote. By setting tuition fees too high, you effectively create a barrier for a certain segment of society that prevents them from getting an education. I know there's a couple of ranters and ravers who will say "oh, but I have no money, 10 kids to support, etc etc, but I was still able to get an education." Well, even if that story is true (I'm a skeptic), I would much rather believe the statistics than the fringe story of one or two people. Maybe it is possible in certain exceptional cases for someone from a poor background to get a good education, but overall the stats show that getting a higher education is correlated with how large one's family income is.
There is perhaps some hope that we will eventually progress as a society away from the idiocy of turning everything into a commodity, at least in the field of education. After all, in the 19th century, one's right to vote was not as fundamental as we consider it to be today. There was a time when you had to own a certain amount of property before you were allowed to cast a vote in an election. When we look at this now, we are able to recognize such a system for how terrible it was and be glad that we have advanced. Hopefully, 150 years from now, people will look back on our system of education in the early 21st century and be able to make the same judgement.
I hope that list wasn't in order of priority. I think an end to boybands is by far the most important item; after that has been achieved, we can deal with the rest.
Seriously, though, you make it sound like a society and economy made to service our greed and vanity is inevitable. I don't believe this to be the case. As human beings, we have a little thing called freedom of choice. The only reason we have the society and economy we have today is because we have chosen to have it. To some extent it has been a passive choice -- we have let the baser aspects of human nature take their course (e.g., our greed and vanity). Why should this be inevitable though?
Let me give you an example of something that is inevitable: the behaviour patterns of insects. Ants, spiders, roaches, etc -- all of them have particular actions which they carry out because it is hardwired into them. They cannot choose to do anything other than the repetitive and meaningless acts that they do. Do you want to suggest that human beings are no more advanced than this?
I'm not trying to imply that progressing from the current state of affairs will be easy. As a first step, it requires people to educate themselves and geniuinely desire change. Sure, we can all continue on the same course we are on now, saying that it's inevitable, muttering about how soul-crushing working in a cubicle is while doing nothing about it, etc, etc. But then we are relegated to the same type of inevitability that defines the insect world, and the progress of the human race will only be measured by things like how many transistors we can fit on an integrated circuit, instead of being qualified by our ability as a species to make everyone's life worth living. This choice does not particularly appeal to me, and I would hope that others also find it equally unappealing.
I'm not implying companies should start hiring anyone who walks in their door, as your narrow-minded neo-con interpretation of my original message suggests. I'm trying to suggest a change much larger than this.
I've never worked at Microsoft, so I'm just speculating here based on what I've heard and what I've read on the MS Career website, but it seems to me that the type of developer that MS is likely to hire is the egotistical, arrogant "my-code-is-better-than-your-code" type of developer. Sure, some these individuals may be extremely smart and be able to pound out thousands of lines of code a day, but the thing is, the "cowboy coder" attitude does not work well when putting together large and complicated pieces of software. In such projects, there are times that developers need to cede to the fact that there may be a better way of doing something than their way, and writing some obscure and cryptic piece of code -- while intellectually satisfying -- yields systems that are not robust and hard to maintain.
Every developer I've ever talked to has indicated that they do their best work when alone. Yeah, you need group meetings periodically, and every once in awhile need to bounce some ideas off a colleague. But when it comes down to finishing up some new module, or finding some tricky bug, focus and the ability to concentrate are key. This will become a lot harder in an "open" environment. So all that money saved in real estate costs will end up being gobbled up by lost productivity.
The other thing is, I bet you any money, managers still have offices. They had them before in cube-land, and they'll have them now. The difference is that the divide between lowly-developer and management will become even more pronounced. This doesn't lead to a very egalitarian work environment, meaning less job satisfaction among employees, which again translates to decreased productivity.
So why the transition to an "open" environment if there's going to be a decrease in productivity? Because saving costs on real estate is something that can be immediately quantified and measured by management. "Loss in productivity" is one of those wishy-washy things that can be attributed to half a dozen different things without any real certainty. Took longer to get version 2 out the door than version 1? It was because there were more complicated features to do for version 2, less skilled developers on the team this time around, etc, etc. (Of course, the one reason that would never be suggested -- at least by management -- is management's decision to change to an "open" work environment.) Being able to quantify something and show a short-term benefit on a balance sheet, while being oblivious to consequences that are less easily quanitified and more long-term, is what management types excel at.
The best environment I ever worked in was when I was at IBM and we had shared offices. There would be two developers to an office, one senior, and one more junior. That way the more junior developer could always have someone there to ask a question when he got stuck and the more senior developer was not just relegated to an isolated office to code all the really hard stuff by himself. That was several years ago; unfortunately, from what I've heard, since then IBM has also been moving to cubeland. (On a bright note though, even first-line managers get cubes, so they're "down in the trenches" with the developers, which is a good thing.)
The root of the problem is capitalism. IT personnel are nothing more than commodities. They can be pigeonholed with long lists of "skill sets" that are akin to the feature sets of VCRs and Microwaves. Until we learn to treat human beings as human beings instead of products, the present state of misery will continue.
I'll put my vote in for "Impossibility of Distributed Consensus With One Faulty Process", by Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson. This paper is better known in theoretical circles as the the FLP result. Quite a cool little paper. Consensus is a problem in which processes are expected to come to an agreement about some value based on the values that were initially proposed by the participating processes. Basically, at the start of any consensus algorithm, each process proposes some value $v \in S$ (where S is some predefined set of values), and when a process decides a value, no process can decide a different value and moreover it must be a value that was initially proposed by some process. There's also a liveness condition: processes must eventually make a decision. What FLP proved was that even when $S = \{0,1\}$ (i.e., they examined the binary consensus problem), and there was only 1 faulty process (i.e., one process may "crash" during the execution of the consensus algorithm), then in a purely asynchronous system, the consensus problem cannot be solved. For example, you can have 10^9 processes, and exactly 1 of those processes could be faulty, and there is absolutely no way in hell that those other 10^9-1 processes can reach any sort of an agreement. Cool, eh?
First of all, a Comp Sci degree consists of more than simply programming courses. In fact, instruction in particular programming languages is minimal in any decent Comp Sci program of which I know. What you learn instead are concepts, which if you learn them adequately, you should be able to apply to any number of situations. Besides computer related courses, you are also required to take courses that may be in unrelated subjects like (gasp!) English, History, Philosophy, or the Arts and Social Sciences in general. Being able to succeed in a broad range of courses and being able to learn abstract concepts indicates to an employer that you can do more than just code. Frankly, I would rather take a job that requires a degree than one that doesn't, because chances are that the job that requires a degree will allow some career mobility and won't restrict you to solely being a coder for the time during which you are at the company. The job that requires only that you know umpteen million languages or software products basically means you will be confined to a very narrow role while you're employed in that job, and when those particular tasks are no longer relevant to the company, you will be expendable.
I have worked with "college dropouts" in the past, and my experience has not been the most positive. Some of them, I agree, were very good coders, but this seemed to be the extent of their abilities. There were certain aspects of the product on which I worked that had a more mathematical bent, and when these aspects of the product were discussed among the degreed developers, those without the degrees seemed to have no clue what we were talking about.
Having said all that, I have also worked with degreed developers who are incompetent. But, in general, my expereince has been that those with a degree are better overall developers than those without. I think people in the business world realize this as well, and that is why a lot of jobs in the software industry require a degree.
It's fine to take the son, daughter, and wife out to see a WWF event, where two people pretend to severely injure each other, or perhaps out to the latest Terminator flick (wait a sec, Arnie's governor of California now, so there probably won't be any more Terminator flicks), but let a child see two adults in an act of consensual love-making, and you can go to jail. What's wrong with this picture?