Unions have tended either to comapaign simply for standard, uniform pay and conditions (which is fine for standard, uniform work, but not for what most of us do), or to try to bring about a revolution (the IWW is still out there, you know...).
Can we not have a union that negotiates for the things we want ? open source projects ? better coffee ? less uniform pay and conditions ?
Oh by the way, if people want to talk to you because you are a software engineer, please tell me where you live ! I want to move there..
Your primary point seems to be that the goods we associate with modern government (human rights, education, lack of violence in everyday life) are not directly tied to democracy, but can exist without democratic government. I agree with that if human nature were perfect, but it is not, and therefore it is better to design systems of government to account for the fact that anyone wanting to rule is likely to be a rotter.
Given that, we need to ensure they are as accountable to the values they are meant to uphold (liberalism, human rights, etc) as possible. Democracies accomplish this quite well, by ensuring, as long as elections are held, that governments will be punished for spoiling people's sense of wellbeing, and another part of the elite will be put in their place.
I completely acknowledge your point about Athens. Some of the things they did were barbaric. What a democracy acheives is hugely dependant on the values of the electorate, and some western democracies show occasional signs of going wrong for just that reason. I'd only argue that the democratic barbarians of Athens were better off than the non-democratic barbarians who surrounded them.
I don't really agree that people need much political sophistication to participate in a democracy. Giving people direct control over government, or encouraging activism, might lead to some very misguided policies. It is better in many ways that the mass of the population answer the question "do they suck or not ? and do you care ?" every few years.
You seem opposed to elitism, so you probably won't agree with that last paragraph, but consider this: can anyone program a computer ? mend a car ? build a house ? Then why is there such a widespread idea that anyone can run a country ? You need a certain personality and certain skills. The best the rest of us can do to experts in any field is keep tabs on how badly they suck, and avoid the ones who suck the worst.
The Nazi government in Germany had very little democratic mandate. They were selected to form a government in a parliament that had no clear majority, while their power was in decline. Its pretty hard to argue that the will of the German people was a Nazi government. In practice the will of the president was to keep the Commies out, and he thought the Nazis were the lesser evil. An argument against a political head of state perhaps ?
Which leads me on to saying that Britain's system of government is hugely complex, but largely informal. In practice the monarch acts as a guard against illegitimate governments. Any government that tried to get rid of the monarch out of anything other than republican principle (in which case they'd want to replace the rest of the system as well) would lose the good will of large and important parts of the public. This is probably as good a safeguard as any bit of paper.
Finally, Kosovo. International law, and therefore the UN, is mainly concerned with interaction between states. Conflicts on this level are rare these days, and therefore many situations lead to conflicts within states. These are not covered by any kind of law, and are fairly horrifying to nice western couch potatos. Our governments therefore feel driven to do something about them - at least those that occur in Europe, in places that don't matter much strategically (ie. not Turkey) etc.
What this proves is that international law is woefully inadequate, not that NATO acted with anything but the best of intentions. We have nothing against the Serbs and very little nice to say about the Albanians (indeed most westerners would be hard put to tell a Serb from an Albanian or find Serbia on a map). There is no failure to acknowledge Turkeys behaviour (indeed the EU has pissed Turkey off over this very issue). Its just that Turkey matters too much. I think that sucks too, but the appropriate thing to do is strengthen international instituations to deal with Turkey without threatening NATO's integrity, not to cry "let the poor Serbs alone" while they rape and pillage minority areas of their own country.
You have to use a command line to do effective systems administration on both systems. As an ordinary user, you can just about get away with using the GUI - again on both systems.
Unix file browsers tend to be a little under powered, and even GMC doesn't show much concern for usability. Thus most people resort to the command line much quicker on Unix.
Software, especially the OS, is a tool - a means to an end. Why should I study it before using it? Do you study the complex workings of your car engine before you drive it? Do you become an expert in Telecoms before switching on your TV?
You don't need to learn everything, but you need to learn a bit. Noone expects you to know the kernel code, or the X protocol, backwards and forwards before booting a Linux system, but you are expected to do what you have to do with your car and TV.
You have to develop a mental model of how the thing in front of you works. At least the basis of that model has to be formed before you try to use it. Before trying to get them to drive, most driving instructors will tell their students roughly what effect each control has on the car. OSes are more powerful than cars (in the sense that they do more things) and therefore building up that mental model takes a bit longer.
You need to do this with Windows and BeOS just as much as with Linux. Its just that these OSes tend to be presented in slightly less abstract terms, and its easier for non-experts to get to grips with them. This is arguably also a function of the power of the system
Half and education is a terrible thing. X does not use networking locally. It uses local IPC. This is transparent. If its available many toolkits (including Gtk+) use the shared memory extension to get rid of even that overhead.
Network transparency is absolutely vital to large companies. If you want proof just look at the lengths people go to to acheive it under Windows.
Yes, X has problems. The protocol is showing its age a bit, and arguably the distinction between what runs on the client and what runs on the server is in the wrong place for many applications. The Berlin people are taking a different approach, but that too has its problems.
These products seem to be 'pure' Java (ie they use no non-standard native code). That means you can run them on any compliant runtime you like. HotSpot and GCJ ain't finished yet, but when they are you can just use them.
I'm not sure Cisco ever did reinvent themselves. They've always worked much that way AFAIK, and their business is in no way a natural monopoly like Intel's or Microsofts. Hence the need for efficiencies.
I agree, they're a bad example of how to transform a Company, but they're and example of how the thing can work. GM will certainly have a lot more issues in trying this kind of thing, but I'll bet you they will try. One of the big car manufacturers once redesigined the whole door of a model to save 3c per vehicle.
My guess is that no change in policy regarding Mozilla has occurred. It just seems to suggest that the senior management of Sun/AOL/Netscape have discussed the matter, and Sun ('we') are uneasy about Open Source (big shock there).
The only real complaint about Open Source in the article is that its failed to attract developers prepared to work for free and meet commercially imposed deadlines. Booo hooo. I'm afraid if you want to gaurantee you'll meet your deadlines you have to hire people. Maybe Sun are worried about contaminating Java with some nasty Open Source license.
Sun's source license for Java has a lot of problems. The biggest is that it does not attract outside developers who are prepared to share their changes, because they're not allowed to sell them themselves (though I think they can give them away ?).
The custom protocols currently used by big companies to bully (sorry, communicate with) their suppliers are being displaced by open internet standards. That was the main point being made in the review.
Purchasing departments will still be necessary. They'll just be allowed to concentrate on the interesting parts of their job. The economist has written many interesting articles, includign a recent review section, about changing patterns of work and the problems they present. If you are really interested, I suggest you go look at the web site again.
Cisco making money is not interesting. What is interesting is that when the market stop exploding, which must happen one day, the work they have put into their supply chain management will help support their already dominant position. What Cisco has done makes it hard for competitors to catch up with them now, and in the future will help retain their dominant position.
Oh, yeah. The New Republic. Definitely an unbiased commentator on weekly news reporting. Uh huh.
To be a little more serious: the economist is often wrong. Last time I checked, only god was expected to be prescient. The British are only expected to pretend they always knew what was going to happen. Since I disagree with almost everything in their editorial position, I read it primarily to have something well informed to disagree with.
Finally, I would like to point out yet again that the article is not about consumer to business commerce. It is about business to business commerce.
They talked a lot about "visions" and "explosive growth", but completely ignored the effects of global data warehousing on privacy and anonymity that will transform this society.
I too subscribe to the economist, and have been using it to kill insects since the age of eight, though never mice. I thought this was one of their more clueful articles about technology, to be honest.
They talked mostly about business models, and admittedly some of it was 'visonary' (ie. purely hypothetical), but they also talk a great deal about real examples of supply chain management (eg Cisco) and new-style 'infomediaries' (ick).
They didn't talk about data warehousing or about privacy concerns, because these were not the subject. Privacy was covered in another review a few weeks back. Admittedly the issues connect, but they were writing a review of business-to-business commerce on the internet, not business use of consumer information.
AFAIK There is only a half-arsed port of apache to NT. The difference in process models (multiple processes with some shared state and copy-on-write, versus one process with multiple threads) means a total rewrite would really be in order.
I recommend you read the rest of the review, especially the bit about Cisco. Any company trying to compete with them is going to have to adopt the same strategic thinking.
Then you should go read the article. It says very clearly that internet commerce is no big deal for consumers - just like telephone ordering only different. What the editorial, and to a much greater extent the review section, are saying is that business to business commerce will increasingly occur over the net.
Ethernet won because it was cheap and easy to maintain, and in a pinch can be assembled with no special tools. That makes it an excellent analogy. 'Market forces' do not exist in themselves, but always drive towards some objective.
I know most libertarians are not also conspiracy nuts, and that objectivists and libertarians only overlap slightly (and argumentatively). Many libertarians also have a less slavish view of capitalism to the guy I replied to. There is an intersection though - and the slightly paranoid tone of the post I followed up suggested that this person might be in it.
I actually was quite close to being a True Believer in the Libertarian thing at one point, but I always though Ayn Rand was silly, and I never touched the conspiracy stuff except in jest. I still think a libertarian world might be a good thing to try - but I do not have the same conviction that its the only morally justifiable world that some people have.
There is a difference between economics the sort-of-science and the normative interpretation of capitalism you are relying on to disparage people.
Economics says nothing about whether people deserve their wealth or whether they have any control over other people's. It is a science, and therefore makes no value judgements. It is not a very good science either, and therefore does not seem like a good basis for your morality.
Nice to see you've got a good persecution complex going there as well. Your post is a +1, insightful, which I have to say is not where I would have put it, since it has no relevance. Give it a few years and you'll be joining the libertarian party, reading Ayn Rand and being beseiged by the FBI in some compound in Montana.
To get back to the subject in hand, Economics says nothing about whether people 'deserve' their wealth. It most certainly does not say that people's wealth corresponds to 'how much value they've provided' (which incidentally is pretty close to being as daft as saying it corresponds to how hard they've worked). Thats a conclusion you can only reach by assuming all markets are perfect, which they domonstrably are not, and that people judge value correctly, which the do not.
The economic system, and most especially the stock market by means of which most fabulously rich people get that way, is a human construct, and as such we can change it. If we want to change so people are rewarded for working hard, so be it. Personally I don't, but I can see the appeal of the idea.
Only if the author retained copyright and can demonstrate this. In the cases where the hypothetical benefit of open source has been exploited and the code has been revised and reviewed by many people and these changes integrated into the main stream that will not be the case.
I do not think the renaming was randon. By and large the things he changed the names of played a major role in the plot (with the possible exception of 'Finux' which still got lots of mentions), and he said various things about them which are not true or only somewhat true and which could be considered libellous and/or were just dramatic embellishment.
The things he left were either not that important (Windows) or are so conspicous (Windows, Alan Turing, GPS) that it would be pointless to disguise them. He also largely limited himself to historically verifiable statements about these things.
My impression of this jumping backwards and forwards, especially in Bobby Shaftoes storyline, is that he was skipping between his present and his daydreaming about his traumatic experiences.
I think your confusion about whether you were still in the present was meant to reflect the character's. I think it worked quite well.
Presumably they actually sell their dog and cat coats *as* dog and cat coats, or at least as 'we're not telling you what this is unless you read the lable very carefully' coats, and not as walrus or something.
Frankly I think fur coats are disgusting, regardless of what animal they are made from, and you'll find that in the UK wearing one will not make you popular.
On the other hand, its deeply unfair of you to assume this company is a bunch of cheap sheysters just because they sell fur coats.
Slashdot Mirror
Unions have tended either to comapaign simply for standard, uniform pay and conditions (which is fine for standard, uniform work, but not for what most of us do), or to try to bring about a revolution (the IWW is still out there, you know...).
..
Can we not have a union that negotiates for the things we want ? open source projects ? better coffee ? less uniform pay and conditions ?
Oh by the way, if people want to talk to you because you are a software engineer, please tell me where you live ! I want to move there
Your primary point seems to be that the goods we associate with modern government (human rights, education, lack of violence in everyday life) are not directly tied to democracy, but can exist without democratic government. I agree with that if human nature were perfect, but it is not, and therefore it is better to design systems of government to account for the fact that anyone wanting to rule is likely to be a rotter.
Given that, we need to ensure they are as accountable to the values they are meant to uphold (liberalism, human rights, etc) as possible. Democracies accomplish this quite well, by ensuring, as long as elections are held, that governments will be punished for spoiling people's sense of wellbeing, and another part of the elite will be put in their place.
I completely acknowledge your point about Athens. Some of the things they did were barbaric. What a democracy acheives is hugely dependant on the values of the electorate, and some western democracies show occasional signs of going wrong for just that reason. I'd only argue that the democratic barbarians of Athens were better off than the non-democratic barbarians who surrounded them.
I don't really agree that people need much political sophistication to participate in a democracy. Giving people direct control over government, or encouraging activism, might lead to some very misguided policies. It is better in many ways that the mass of the population answer the question "do they suck or not ? and do you care ?" every few years.
You seem opposed to elitism, so you probably won't agree with that last paragraph, but consider this: can anyone program a computer ? mend a car ? build a house ? Then why is there such a widespread idea that anyone can run a country ? You need a certain personality and certain skills. The best the rest of us can do to experts in any field is keep tabs on how badly they suck, and avoid the ones who suck the worst.
The Nazi government in Germany had very little democratic mandate. They were selected to form a government in a parliament that had no clear majority, while their power was in decline. Its pretty hard to argue that the will of the German people was a Nazi government. In practice the will of the president was to keep the Commies out, and he thought the Nazis were the lesser evil. An argument against a political head of state perhaps ?
Which leads me on to saying that Britain's system of government is hugely complex, but largely informal. In practice the monarch acts as a guard against illegitimate governments. Any government that tried to get rid of the monarch out of anything other than republican principle (in which case they'd want to replace the rest of the system as well) would lose the good will of large and important parts of the public. This is probably as good a safeguard as any bit of paper.
Finally, Kosovo. International law, and therefore the UN, is mainly concerned with interaction between states. Conflicts on this level are rare these days, and therefore many situations lead to conflicts within states. These are not covered by any kind of law, and are fairly horrifying to nice western couch potatos. Our governments therefore feel driven to do something about them - at least those that occur in Europe, in places that don't matter much strategically (ie. not Turkey) etc.
What this proves is that international law is woefully inadequate, not that NATO acted with anything but the best of intentions. We have nothing against the Serbs and very little nice to say about the Albanians (indeed most westerners would be hard put to tell a Serb from an Albanian or find Serbia on a map). There is no failure to acknowledge Turkeys behaviour (indeed the EU has pissed Turkey off over this very issue). Its just that Turkey matters too much. I think that sucks too, but the appropriate thing to do is strengthen international instituations to deal with Turkey without threatening NATO's integrity, not to cry "let the poor Serbs alone" while they rape and pillage minority areas of their own country.
You have to use a command line to do effective systems administration on both systems. As an ordinary user, you can just about get away with using the GUI - again on both systems.
Unix file browsers tend to be a little under powered, and even GMC doesn't show much concern for usability. Thus most people resort to the command line much quicker on Unix.
Software, especially the OS, is a tool - a means to an end. Why should I study it before using it? Do you study the complex workings of your car engine before you drive it? Do you become an expert in Telecoms before switching on your TV?
You don't need to learn everything, but you need to learn a bit. Noone expects you to know the kernel code, or the X protocol, backwards and forwards before booting a Linux system, but you are expected to do what you have to do with your car and TV.
You have to develop a mental model of how the thing in front of you works. At least the basis of that model has to be formed before you try to use it. Before trying to get them to drive, most driving instructors will tell their students roughly what effect each control has on the car. OSes are more powerful than cars (in the sense that they do more things) and therefore building up that mental model takes a bit longer.
You need to do this with Windows and BeOS just as much as with Linux. Its just that these OSes tend to be presented in slightly less abstract terms, and its easier for non-experts to get to grips with them. This is arguably also a function of the power of the system
Yes. It used DPS as an extension language.
Half and education is a terrible thing. X does not use networking locally. It uses local IPC. This is transparent. If its available many toolkits (including Gtk+) use the shared memory extension to get rid of even that overhead.
Network transparency is absolutely vital to large companies. If you want proof just look at the lengths people go to to acheive it under Windows.
Yes, X has problems. The protocol is showing its age a bit, and arguably the distinction between what runs on the client and what runs on the server is in the wrong place for many applications. The Berlin people are taking a different approach, but that too has its problems.
Wasn't that what guile was for ? or has that fallen by the wayside ?
These products seem to be 'pure' Java (ie they use no non-standard native code). That means you can run them on any compliant runtime you like. HotSpot and GCJ ain't finished yet, but when they are you can just use them.
I'm not sure Cisco ever did reinvent themselves. They've always worked much that way AFAIK, and their business is in no way a natural monopoly like Intel's or Microsofts. Hence the need for efficiencies.
I agree, they're a bad example of how to transform a Company, but they're and example of how the thing can work. GM will certainly have a lot more issues in trying this kind of thing, but I'll bet you they will try. One of the big car manufacturers once redesigined the whole door of a model to save 3c per vehicle.
My guess is that no change in policy regarding Mozilla has occurred. It just seems to suggest that the senior management of Sun/AOL/Netscape have discussed the matter, and Sun ('we') are uneasy about Open Source (big shock there).
The only real complaint about Open Source in the article is that its failed to attract developers prepared to work for free and meet commercially imposed deadlines. Booo hooo. I'm afraid if you want to gaurantee you'll meet your deadlines you have to hire people. Maybe Sun are worried about contaminating Java with some nasty Open Source license.
Sun's source license for Java has a lot of problems. The biggest is that it does not attract outside developers who are prepared to share their changes, because they're not allowed to sell them themselves (though I think they can give them away ?).
The custom protocols currently used by big companies to bully (sorry, communicate with) their suppliers are being displaced by open
internet standards. That was the main point
being made in the review.
Purchasing departments will still be necessary. They'll just be allowed to concentrate on the interesting parts of their job. The economist has written many interesting articles, includign a recent review section, about changing patterns of work and the problems they present. If you are really interested, I suggest you go look at the web site again.
Cisco making money is not interesting. What is interesting is that when the market stop exploding, which must happen one day, the work they have put into their supply chain management will help support their already dominant position. What Cisco has done makes it hard for competitors to catch up with them now, and in the future will help retain their dominant position.
Oh, yeah. The New Republic. Definitely an unbiased commentator on weekly news reporting. Uh huh.
To be a little more serious: the economist is often wrong. Last time I checked, only god was expected to be prescient. The British are only expected to pretend they always knew what was going to happen. Since I disagree with almost everything in their editorial position, I read it primarily to have something well informed to disagree with.
Finally, I would like to point out yet again that the article is not about consumer to business commerce. It is about business to business commerce.
They talked a lot about "visions" and "explosive growth", but completely ignored the effects of global data warehousing on privacy and anonymity that will transform this society.
I too subscribe to the economist, and have been using it to kill insects since the age of eight, though never mice. I thought this was one of their more clueful articles about technology, to be honest.
They talked mostly about business models, and admittedly some of it was 'visonary' (ie. purely hypothetical), but they also talk a great deal about real examples of supply chain management (eg Cisco) and new-style 'infomediaries' (ick).
They didn't talk about data warehousing or about privacy concerns, because these were not the subject. Privacy was covered in another review a few weeks back. Admittedly the issues connect, but they were writing a review of business-to-business commerce on the internet, not business use of consumer information.
AFAIK There is only a half-arsed port of apache to NT. The difference in process models (multiple processes with some shared state and copy-on-write, versus one process with multiple threads) means a total rewrite would really be in order.
I recommend you read the rest of the review, especially the bit about Cisco. Any company trying to compete with them is going to have to adopt the same strategic thinking.
Then you should go read the article. It says very clearly that internet commerce is no big deal for consumers - just like telephone ordering only different. What the editorial, and to a much greater extent the review section, are saying is that business to business commerce will increasingly occur over the net.
Ethernet won because it was cheap and easy to maintain, and in a pinch can be assembled with no special tools. That makes it an excellent analogy. 'Market forces' do not exist in themselves, but always drive towards some objective.
I know most libertarians are not also conspiracy nuts, and that objectivists and libertarians only overlap slightly (and argumentatively). Many libertarians also have a less slavish view of capitalism to the guy I replied to. There is an intersection though - and the slightly paranoid tone of the post I followed up suggested that this person might be in it.
I actually was quite close to being a True Believer in the Libertarian thing at one point, but I always though Ayn Rand was silly, and I never touched the conspiracy stuff except in jest. I still think a libertarian world might be a good thing to try - but I do not have the same conviction that its the only morally justifiable world that some people have.
There is a difference between economics the sort-of-science and the normative interpretation of capitalism you are relying on to disparage people.
Economics says nothing about whether people deserve their wealth or whether they have any control over other people's. It is a science, and therefore makes no value judgements. It is not a very good science either, and therefore does not seem like a good basis for your morality.
Nice to see you've got a good persecution complex going there as well. Your post is a +1, insightful, which I have to say is not where I would have put it, since it has no relevance. Give it a few years and you'll be joining the libertarian party, reading Ayn Rand and being beseiged by the FBI in some compound in Montana.
To get back to the subject in hand, Economics says nothing about whether people 'deserve' their wealth. It most certainly does not say that people's wealth corresponds to 'how much value they've provided' (which incidentally is pretty close to being as daft as saying it corresponds to how hard they've worked). Thats a conclusion you can only reach by assuming all markets are perfect, which they domonstrably are not, and that people judge value correctly, which the do not.
The economic system, and most especially the stock market by means of which most fabulously rich people get that way, is a human construct, and as such we can change it. If we want to change so people are rewarded for working hard, so be it. Personally I don't, but I can see the appeal of the idea.
Only if the author retained copyright and can demonstrate this. In the cases where the hypothetical benefit of open source has been exploited and the code has been revised and reviewed by many people and these changes integrated into the main stream that will not be the case.
By the way, did anyone else catch that Miss Matheson in Diamond Age was Y.T. from Snow Crash?
I thought it was likely, but I could not find anything very solid to back up my feeling with
I do not think the renaming was randon. By and large the things he changed the names of played a major role in the plot (with the possible exception of 'Finux' which still got lots of mentions), and he said various things about them which are not true or only somewhat true and which could be considered libellous and/or were just dramatic embellishment.
The things he left were either not that important (Windows) or are so conspicous (Windows, Alan Turing, GPS) that it would be pointless to disguise them. He also largely limited himself to historically verifiable statements about these things.
My impression of this jumping backwards and forwards, especially in Bobby Shaftoes storyline, is that he was skipping between his present and his daydreaming about his traumatic experiences.
I think your confusion about whether you were still in the present was meant to reflect the character's. I think it worked quite well.
Presumably they actually sell their dog and cat coats *as* dog and cat coats, or at least as 'we're not telling you what this is unless you read the lable very carefully' coats, and not as walrus or something.
Frankly I think fur coats are disgusting, regardless of what animal they are made from, and you'll find that in the UK wearing one will not make you popular.
On the other hand, its deeply unfair of you to assume this company is a bunch of cheap sheysters just because they sell fur coats.
Simon