No, a black hole doesn't have infinite mass, so it doesn't have an infinite gravitational field, either.
As mass increases, the escape velocity increases---escape velocity being the velocity necessary to escape the gravity well. When mass increases to the point where the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light, then nothing can escape. Hence, a black hole.
I just finished this book myself. It's well worth reading. It's well written and extremely funny in places.
However, you shouldn't read it for the author's critical view of the culture in Silicon Valley. She either doesn't understand most of what she's talking about, or (more likely) is too concerned about keeping her writing lively to spend much time on nuances. She spends most of the book setting up a series of straw men, each based on a wild caricature, and burning each in effigy. She doesn't often meet the opposition head-on. She tends to sideswipe, then move on before the reader notices that she hasn't really inflicted much real damage.
So why should you read this book? Because it's a fascinating, although unintended, glimpse into the way the Progressive subculture views, and pretty much completely misunderstands, the Valley subculture. If you ever tune in to Pacifica Radio, and wonder where their strange and schizophrenic ideas about high tech come from, this is a good place to start. If you've ever been on a blind date with an Arts student who seemed half afraid of you, you will know why after reading this book. (It has to do with geeks' well-known fascination with S&M---if you don't believe me, just read the book.) If you wonder why ex-hippy waitresses in Santa Cruz coffee shops react so strangely to your Cisco teeshirt, the explanation for that is probably here too.
Yes, "drivers of small SUVs are involved in more fatal rollover accidents than any other type of vehicle." The problem is in the adjectives. If you could take out "small" and/or "rollover" and have a true statement, that would be interesting. But you can't. First, most fatal accidents are front and side impacts not involving rollovers, and SUVs survive these better than smaller vehicles. Fatal rollovers are actually pretty rare. Second, if you are worried about fatal rollovers, get a large SUV.
There are reasons to dislike SUVs. Safety isn't a good one. They are safer than other vehicles.
1. It's going to be difficult to tax the internet very effectively for technical reasons. I think its more likely they will tax delivery systems such as FedEx and UPS.
2. It's going to be very difficult to regulate the internet effectively, again for technical reasons.
3. The main impetus for regulation will be to enforce taxation. If we pay close attention to both of these issues, we can probably forstall either one from happening.
4. The longer we delay, the harder it will be for governments to step in and change everything. The danger is greatest right now. As more people base life and business decisions on the current regime, it gets harder for the government to change things and step on all those toes.
Apparently the Barron's article is based on a study done by Pegasus Research International. Pegasus basically compared the "burn rate" of some internet companies with the amount of cash they had on hand. They found that some had only a few months worth of cash left, which seems problematic.
However, Pegasus seems to have overlooked some fairly important issues. Chiefly, investments. Most companies avoid keeping massive amounts of cash on hand simply because it's much better off invested in the stock market. See, for example, VerticalNet 's response. When investments are taken into account, at least some of the companies are much better off than the study suggests.
I first heard that usenet was dead in about 1983. At that time it was getting to the point where you couldn't read all the postings in an evening any more. There were more newsgroups than would fit on a 24-line terminal! Not only that, but the traffic on the newsgroup called "general" (no special topic, anything anyone wanted to talk about) was getting annoyingly heavy---hundreds of postings per day. And undergraduates had begun getting accounts at some universities. The old timers were convinced it was merely a matter of months before the whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own success.
Hurt? If Sun is being "hurt" I say bring on the pain. Sun has never done better. Look. Solaris doesn't compete with Linux. To about 5 decimal places, they are the same OS; I use one at work and one at home, and I barely notice the difference. And Sun doesn't care which you run, as long as you run it on Sun hardware. Sun is a hardware company. Sparc/Sun competes with x86/Intel/Dell/Gateway/etc.
Hurt? If Sun is being "hurt" I say bring on the pain. Sun stock has split twice in the past year. Every quarter they set new records. Basically, they have never done better.
Look. Solaris doesn't compete with Linux. To about 5 decimal places, they are the same OS; I use one at work and one at home, and I barely notice the difference. And Sun doesn't care which you run. Sun is a hardware company. Sparc/Sun competes with x86/Intel/Dell/Gateway/etc.
Jon has managed to make all three of the usual mistakes about free speech and censorship in one short article.
1. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone else has to subsidize your speech. Removing the taxpayers' subsidy of the Brooklyn Museum of Art is not censorship.
2. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that people can't ask you to leave the room. Jesse Ventura has a right to say anything he wants to Playboy, but others also have the right to ask him to leave the Reform Party. Ditto for Pat Buchannan and the Republican Party.
3. Freedom of speech doesn't imply that spirited or even demagogic disagreement is prohibited. I feel sorry for Peter Singer, but I don't think we should prevent people from disagreeing with him. Protesting someone's point of view is not censorship.
Lester is really an amazing person, in that he is actually an expert at being wrong. He shares with Paul Ehrlich the mind-boggling trait of being wrong more consistently than most experts are right. It seems to me that someone could get a reputation as a great economist by simply reading everything he writes and publishing the opposite as quickly as possible.
I don't think this is a bubble. Bubbles usually happen when there is a lot of speculation in business property. This drives up prices for business property; the price increases ripple into down-town apartment and condo prices; and finally single-family housing prices rise. The effect on prices is highest for business property and least for single-family houses in suburbia.
In the valley, the exact opposite is happening. The price increases are driven by an influx of people who have very productive jobs and want houses. Housing prices are rising faster than apartment and condo prices, which in turn are rising faster than business property. It will only burst if lots of people decide to leave. That doesn't seem likely, given the productivity and consequent high wages in the region.
I don't doubt that prices will fluctuate. I doubt that they will go down much, or for long, unless there is a really major economic dislocation that affects the whole world.
If you are renting in the valley, then housing is expensive: no doubt about it.
But if you are buying, then housing is not an expense, it is an investment. A very good one, lately. My wife and I moved to San Jose less than three years ago and bought a house for $400K; it's worth at least $750K now. Viewed this way, the cost of living is extremely low. Negative, in fact: the appreciation in the house is easily more than all the money we've spent living here. (Of, course we have to move away to realize the profit.)
A microprocessor design group's worth is in *both* the people and the accumulated organizational knowledge, some of which is embedded in software. The software isn't "more important", but the choice isn't software vs. people. The choice is secret software vs. public software. Sometimes the advantages of making it public outweigh the disadvantages, sometimes they don't.
And the point isn't specific to trade secrets. Lots of companies have software that they believe, rightly or wrongly, gives them a competitive advantage. That doesn't have to mean it's a trade secret. It can simply be a major investment that they don't think their competitors can match---or at least not match without neglecting something else.
Ignoring this point leaves a big hole in ESR's thesis. He is saying, "Look: you aren't planning to sell it anyway, and if you give it away you can still use it yourself, so why not give it away?" The answer he will get is, "Because my competitor will pick it up and use it to my disadvantage." He needs a convincing answer to that argument.
> A key fact that the distinction between use and sale value allows us > to notice is that only sale value is threatened by the shift from > closed to open source; use value is not. Let's say you hire someone to > write to order (say) a specialized accounting package for your > business. That problem won't be solved any better if the sources are > closed rather than open; the only rational reason you might want them > to be closed is if you want to sell the package to other people.
This is not true. ESR misses a very important and commonly stated reason: a company may believe that exclusive access to a piece of proprietary software provides the company with a competitive advantage. For example, a microprocessor-design company might embed considerable experience and research in a computer program to improve the quality of CPU designs. They might quite rationally believe that if they gave that software away, their competitors would use it to improve their own processors and take business away. H&R Block may quite rationally believe that their tax software is enough better than the competition that it garners them customers or increases the efficiency of their preparers. BMW may quite rationally believe that their engine-design software allows them to build better engines for less money and sell more cars.
In many cases, this is delusional, but in other cases it is undoubtedly quite justified.
It is odd that ESR missed this point, because I think it is the fundamental reason behind the difference between the GPL and BSD-style licenses. RMS realized that there is a large incentive for companies to "take software proprietary", and went to great lengths to prevent it in the GPL. If "taking software proprietary" were wholly irrational, there would be little reason for going out of one's way to prevent it.
ESR actually alludes to this, tangentially, later in the article:
> (One objection sometimes raised to open-sourcing hardware drivers is > that it may reveal important things about how your hardware operates > that competitors could copy, thus gaining an unfair competitive > advantage. Back in the days of three- to five-year product cycles this > was a valid argument. Today, the time your competitors' engineers > would need to spend copying and understanding the copy is a > substantial portion of the product cycle, time they are not spending > innovating or differentiating their own product. Plagiarism is a trap > you want your competitors to fall into.)
However, his rejection is rather specific to hardware drivers, and rather flippant as well. The real reason it is rational to open-source a hardware driver is that the expansion of the potential market to Linux and BSD users more than makes up for the loss of trade secrets.
I use Perl a lot, and have a lot of respect for Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, et. al. But Larry's comments about Perl being the first "postmodern" language are silly.
The Perl motto is cute, but it implictly sets up a strawman, because no language I can think of says "There's Only One Way To Do It." All languages, including Perl, put some restrictions on the programmer. That's pretty much what the word "language" means. Yes, in Python, you have to use whitespace as syntax. Oh, but in Perl you can't use whitespace as syntax. There may be more than one way to do it in Perl, but that ain't one of them. Yes, in Lisp you have to use parentheses. Oh, but in Perl you have to use "$", "@", and "%" to start names. Unpunctuated names aren't an option! There's only one way to do it!
Sorry for venting, but I get a little tired of the posturing in the Perl camp. They try to sell the language by implying that other languages are uncool, which is itself very uncool: "many programmers are still slaves of the cyber police." Give me a break.
I can't get excited about this. I think SETI is almost certain to be futile.
There are two possibilities. First, ETs may actively be trying to contact us. In that case, they will probably illuminate our solar system with a fairly powerful beam with a fairly obvious message: not one that requires distributed processing to decode.
Second, ETs might be accidentally leaking so much radiation into space that we can detect it. But that's unlikely. Broadcasting energy into space isn't very efficient. We will probably stop doing it within a few decades as better options become available. The chances that we are looking just when some civilization is going through it's primitive, wasteful broadcast phase is pretty small.
Strangely enough, on internet related issued, the Republicans are usually on the right side and the Domocrats are usually on the wrong side. The Clinton administration pushed for the CDA, signed it, and argued for it before the Supreme Court. Quite a few Republicans opposed it. Also, it is the Republicans who are pushing bills to allow export of encryption, which are blocked by the Clinton administration.
I've read articles with the same basic thrust several times in the last few months. Maybe I've just been lucky, but my experience has been quite the opposite.
I'm 43, and I have never felt more in demand. The company I work for seems to value me pretty highly---I make more in a month than my father ever did in a year. We're not only not laying anyone off, but working very hard to hire people faster. (There's a $5000 reward for a referral that pans out---send me resumes!) If times do get hard, I will probably talk to one of the head hunters who call me about once a week with "great opportunities." My management cares about my happiness. I don't have any illusion that this is pure altruism, but turnover is expensive and they know it. My only real concern with work is that there is a steady pressure to move from project leader into management, and I'm not quite ready to make that move.
Several of the statistics given by Katz---e.g., the drop in number of men aged 55-64 who work---can be interpreted in several ways. It may be that a lot more men aged 55 can afford to retire than in the past. Personally, I plan to be on-line, wirelessly, from a sailboat in the Caribbean before I get that old.
I think there is a nugget of truth in Katz's article, though. The lesson to take away is, Don't Become Inflexible. In particular, make sure you don't spend a decade working on something that has no future. Especially an internal, proprietary technology. Eventually, your company is going to wake up and realize that it has to go, and you will be in trouble.
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No, a black hole doesn't have infinite mass, so it doesn't have an infinite gravitational field, either.
As mass increases, the escape velocity increases---escape velocity being the velocity necessary to escape the gravity well. When mass increases to the point where the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light, then nothing can escape. Hence, a black hole.
I just finished this book myself. It's well worth reading. It's well written and extremely funny in places.
However, you shouldn't read it for the author's critical view of the culture in Silicon Valley. She either doesn't understand most of what she's talking about, or (more likely) is too concerned about keeping her writing lively to spend much time on nuances. She spends most of the book setting up a series of straw men, each based on a wild caricature, and burning each in effigy. She doesn't often meet the opposition head-on. She tends to sideswipe, then move on before the reader notices that she hasn't really inflicted much real damage.
So why should you read this book? Because it's a fascinating, although unintended, glimpse into the way the Progressive subculture views, and pretty much completely misunderstands, the Valley subculture. If you ever tune in to Pacifica Radio, and wonder where their strange and schizophrenic ideas about high tech come from, this is a good place to start. If you've ever been on a blind date with an Arts student who seemed half afraid of you, you will know why after reading this book. (It has to do with geeks' well-known fascination with S&M---if you don't believe me, just read the book.) If you wonder why ex-hippy waitresses in Santa Cruz coffee shops react so strangely to your Cisco teeshirt, the explanation for that is probably here too.
Yes, "drivers of small SUVs are involved in more fatal rollover accidents than any other type of vehicle." The problem is in the adjectives. If you could take out "small" and/or "rollover" and have a true statement, that would be interesting. But you can't. First, most fatal accidents are front and side impacts not involving rollovers, and SUVs survive these better than smaller vehicles. Fatal rollovers are actually pretty rare. Second, if you are worried about fatal rollovers, get a large SUV.
There are reasons to dislike SUVs. Safety isn't a good one. They are safer than other vehicles.
Actually, they called themselves "Socialist".
It was in the party name.
1. It's going to be difficult to tax the internet very effectively for technical reasons. I think its more likely they will tax delivery systems such as FedEx and UPS.
2. It's going to be very difficult to regulate the internet effectively, again for technical reasons.
3. The main impetus for regulation will be to enforce taxation. If we pay close attention to both of these issues, we can probably forstall either one from happening.
4. The longer we delay, the harder it will be for governments to step in and change everything. The danger is greatest right now. As more people base life and business decisions on the current regime, it gets harder for the government to change things and step on all those toes.
However, Pegasus seems to have overlooked some fairly important issues. Chiefly, investments. Most companies avoid keeping massive amounts of cash on hand simply because it's much better off invested in the stock market. See, for example, VerticalNet 's response. When investments are taken into account, at least some of the companies are much better off than the study suggests.
Yes, and Microsoft sells 85% of the world's
operating systems. And McDonalds sells a lot
of hamburgers. What's your point?
I first heard that usenet was dead in about 1983. At that time it was getting to the point where you couldn't read all the postings in an evening any more. There were more newsgroups than would fit on a 24-line terminal! Not only that, but the traffic on the newsgroup called "general" (no special topic, anything anyone wanted to talk about) was getting annoyingly heavy---hundreds of postings per day. And undergraduates had begun getting accounts at some universities. The old timers were convinced it was merely a matter of months before the whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own success.
Hurt? If Sun is being "hurt" I say bring on the pain. Sun has never done better. Look. Solaris doesn't compete with Linux. To about 5 decimal places, they are the same OS; I use one at work and one at home, and I barely notice the difference. And Sun doesn't care which you run, as long as you run it on Sun hardware. Sun is a hardware company. Sparc/Sun competes with x86/Intel/Dell/Gateway/etc.
Hurt? If Sun is being "hurt" I say bring on the pain. Sun stock has split twice in the past year. Every quarter they set new records. Basically, they have never done better.
Look. Solaris doesn't compete with Linux. To about 5 decimal places, they are the same OS; I use one at work and one at home, and I barely notice the difference. And Sun doesn't care which you run. Sun is a hardware company. Sparc/Sun competes with x86/Intel/Dell/Gateway/etc.
Jon has managed to make all three of the usual mistakes about free speech and censorship in one short article.
1. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone else has to subsidize your speech. Removing the taxpayers' subsidy of the Brooklyn Museum of Art is not censorship.
2. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that people can't ask you to leave the room. Jesse Ventura has a right to say anything he wants to Playboy, but others also have the right to ask him to leave the Reform Party. Ditto for Pat Buchannan and the Republican Party.
3. Freedom of speech doesn't imply that spirited or even demagogic disagreement is prohibited. I feel sorry for Peter Singer, but I don't think we should prevent people from disagreeing with him. Protesting someone's point of view is not censorship.
Before you do this, go see the movie Brazil.
Lester is really an amazing person, in that he is actually an expert at being wrong. He shares with Paul Ehrlich the mind-boggling trait of being wrong more consistently than most experts are right. It seems to me that someone could get a reputation as a great economist by simply reading everything he writes and publishing the opposite as quickly as possible.
What they *should* be trying to do is use the traffic as a computer. Manipulate the lights in such a way as to have the traffic break RSA...
I don't think this is a bubble. Bubbles usually happen when there is a lot of speculation in business property. This drives up prices for business property; the price increases ripple into down-town apartment and condo prices; and finally single-family housing prices rise. The effect on prices is highest for business property and least for single-family houses in suburbia.
In the valley, the exact opposite is happening. The price increases are driven by an influx of people who have very productive jobs and want houses. Housing prices are rising faster than apartment and condo prices, which in turn are rising faster than business property. It will only burst if lots of people decide to leave. That doesn't seem likely, given the productivity and consequent high wages in the region.
I don't doubt that prices will fluctuate. I doubt that they will go down much, or for long, unless there is a really major economic dislocation that affects the whole world.
If you are renting in the valley, then housing is expensive: no doubt about it.
But if you are buying, then housing is not an expense, it is an investment. A very good one, lately. My wife and I moved to San Jose less than three years ago and bought a house for $400K; it's worth at least $750K now. Viewed this way, the cost of living is extremely low. Negative, in fact: the appreciation in the house is easily more than all the money we've spent living here. (Of, course we have to move away to realize the profit.)
A microprocessor design group's worth is in *both* the people and the accumulated organizational knowledge, some of which is embedded in software. The software isn't "more important", but the
choice isn't software vs. people. The choice is secret software vs. public software. Sometimes the advantages of making it public outweigh the disadvantages, sometimes they don't.
And the point isn't specific to trade secrets. Lots of companies have software that they believe, rightly or wrongly, gives them a competitive advantage. That doesn't have to mean it's a trade secret. It can simply be a major investment that they don't think their competitors can match---or at least not match without neglecting something else.
Ignoring this point leaves a big hole in ESR's thesis. He is saying, "Look: you aren't planning to sell it anyway, and if you give it away you can still use it yourself, so why not give it away?" The answer he will get is, "Because my competitor will pick it up and use it to my disadvantage." He needs a convincing answer to that argument.
> A key fact that the distinction between use and sale value allows us
> to notice is that only sale value is threatened by the shift from
> closed to open source; use value is not. Let's say you hire someone to
> write to order (say) a specialized accounting package for your
> business. That problem won't be solved any better if the sources are
> closed rather than open; the only rational reason you might want them
> to be closed is if you want to sell the package to other people.
This is not true. ESR misses a very important and commonly stated
reason: a company may believe that exclusive access to a piece of
proprietary software provides the company with a competitive
advantage. For example, a microprocessor-design company might embed
considerable experience and research in a computer program to improve
the quality of CPU designs. They might quite rationally believe that
if they gave that software away, their competitors would use it to
improve their own processors and take business away. H&R Block may
quite rationally believe that their tax software is enough better than
the competition that it garners them customers or increases the
efficiency of their preparers. BMW may quite rationally believe that
their engine-design software allows them to build better engines for
less money and sell more cars.
In many cases, this is delusional, but in other cases it is
undoubtedly quite justified.
It is odd that ESR missed this point, because I think it is the
fundamental reason behind the difference between the GPL and BSD-style
licenses. RMS realized that there is a large incentive for companies
to "take software proprietary", and went to great lengths to prevent
it in the GPL. If "taking software proprietary" were wholly
irrational, there would be little reason for going out of one's way to
prevent it.
ESR actually alludes to this, tangentially, later in the article:
> (One objection sometimes raised to open-sourcing hardware drivers is
> that it may reveal important things about how your hardware operates
> that competitors could copy, thus gaining an unfair competitive
> advantage. Back in the days of three- to five-year product cycles this
> was a valid argument. Today, the time your competitors' engineers
> would need to spend copying and understanding the copy is a
> substantial portion of the product cycle, time they are not spending
> innovating or differentiating their own product. Plagiarism is a trap
> you want your competitors to fall into.)
However, his rejection is rather specific to hardware drivers, and
rather flippant as well. The real reason it is rational to
open-source a hardware driver is that the expansion of the potential
market to Linux and BSD users more than makes up for the loss of
trade secrets.
I use Perl a lot, and have a lot of respect for Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, et. al. But Larry's comments about Perl being the first "postmodern" language are silly.
The Perl motto is cute, but it implictly sets up a strawman, because no language I can think of says "There's Only One Way To Do It." All languages, including Perl, put some restrictions on the programmer. That's pretty much what the word "language" means. Yes, in Python, you have to use whitespace as syntax. Oh, but in Perl you can't use whitespace as syntax. There may be more than one way to do it in Perl, but that ain't one of them. Yes, in Lisp you have to use parentheses. Oh, but in Perl you have to use "$", "@", and "%" to start names. Unpunctuated names aren't an option! There's only one way to do it!
Sorry for venting, but I get a little tired of the posturing in the Perl camp. They try to sell the language by implying that other languages are uncool, which is itself very uncool: "many programmers are still slaves of the cyber police." Give me a break.
I can't get excited about this. I think SETI is almost certain to be futile.
There are two possibilities. First, ETs may actively be trying to contact us. In that case, they will probably illuminate our solar system with a fairly powerful beam with a fairly obvious message: not one that requires distributed processing to decode.
Second, ETs might be accidentally leaking so much radiation into space that we can detect it. But that's unlikely. Broadcasting energy into space isn't very efficient. We will probably stop doing it within a few decades as better options become available. The chances that we are looking just when some civilization is going through it's primitive, wasteful broadcast phase is pretty small.
There is nothing "zero sum" about a market conomy. Where did he get that idea? Game theory is not economics.
Strangely enough, on internet related issued, the Republicans are usually on the right side and the Domocrats are usually on the wrong side. The Clinton administration pushed for the CDA, signed it, and argued for it before the Supreme Court. Quite a few Republicans opposed it. Also, it is the Republicans who are pushing bills to allow export of encryption, which are blocked by the Clinton administration.
I've read articles with the same basic thrust several times in the last few months. Maybe I've just been lucky, but my experience has been quite the opposite.
I'm 43, and I have never felt more in demand. The company I work for seems to value me pretty highly---I make more in a month than my father ever did in a year. We're not only not laying anyone off, but working very hard to hire people faster. (There's a $5000 reward for a referral that pans out---send me resumes!) If times do get hard, I will probably talk to one of the head hunters who call me about once a week with "great opportunities." My management cares about my happiness. I don't have any illusion that this is pure altruism, but turnover is expensive and they know it. My only real concern with work is that there is a steady pressure to move from project leader into management, and I'm not quite ready to make that move.
Several of the statistics given by Katz---e.g., the drop in number of men aged 55-64 who work---can be interpreted in several ways. It may be that a lot more men aged 55 can afford to retire than in the past. Personally, I plan to be on-line, wirelessly, from a sailboat in the Caribbean before I get that old.
I think there is a nugget of truth in Katz's article, though. The lesson to take away is, Don't Become Inflexible. In particular, make sure you don't spend a decade working on something that has no future. Especially an internal, proprietary technology. Eventually, your company is going to wake up and realize that it has to go, and you will be in trouble.