The design of systemd as a suite of integrated tools that each have their individual purposes but when used together are more than just the sum of the parts, that's pretty much at the core of UNIX philosophy.
I would say that he misunderstands the essence, the substance and possibly even the purpose of the UNIX philosophy... but I think he actually does understand. I think he's simply being disingenuous, twisting the definition to meet his desires. It's clear that this is a man who believes that he knows what's good and what's not.
The toolbox approach of classic Linux distributions is fantastic for people who want to put together their individual system, nicely adjusted to exactly what they need. However, this is not really how many of today's Linux systems are built, installed or updated. If you build any kind of embedded device, a server system, or even user systems, you frequently do your work based on complete system images, that are linearly versioned. You build these images somewhere, and then you replicate them atomically to a larger number of systems. On these systems, you don't install or remove packages, you get a defined set of files, and besides installing or updating the system there are no ways how to change the set of tools you get.
[Emphasis mine]
So the toolkit approach is not useful for someone who's deploying large numbers of commodity servers? This defies logic. It implies that somehow it's better to use commodity servers built using Lennart's toolkit than to have the capability to define one's own toolkit to build your own purpose-built standard image.
He's ignoring logic here in order to serve his own agenda, which of course consists of being smarter and sleeker and better than some crufty old Linux with 20 years of barnacles on its hull.
Init on Linux emphatically is ugly, but it's the product of a very large number of people coping with a very large set of circumstances, and finding a solution that is decidedly imperfect, but can be made to address most of the hundreds of thousands of peculiar and unique use cases in the world today.
Quoth Poettering:
The Linux model is the one where you have everything split up, and have different maintainers, different coding styles, different release cycles, different maintenance statuses. Much of the Linux userspace used to be pretty badly maintained, if at all. You had completely different styles, the commands worked differently – in the most superficial level, some used -h for help, and others ––help. It’s not uniform.
This really is the essence of it. When you get right down to it, he's just pissed at having to deal with other people's half-assed implementations of everything, and having to make all the bits work to a purpose. It's just too... democratic. I suspect he feels the same way George W. Bush did when he famously quipped that if he really were a dictator, he'd get a lot more done.
And that's really the essence of the problem. No matter how good systemd turns out to be, it's effectively less than a dozen core committers (the top 10 committers have submitted over 90% of the code) dictating how your modular system is going to run. They want a single group (themselves) and a single philosophy (theirs) to occupy pretty much the entire space between the kernel and userland. And that is not the Linux way of doing things.
Too late, Kim Jong Un ordered the general who bought the HP printer to be executed already, and ordered his brother to buy a Canon inkjet to replace it. The brother was also executed for bring imperialist Japanese goods into Korea, but at least they have a new national printer now. Both the PCs are now being studied by North Koreas elite hacking squad to see if the files can be removed without recompiling the whole system from scratch, but the results are not promising so we may see more outage on the North Korean netblock again this week.
"PC ROAD RETTER? What dis fuckin' PC ROAD RETTER? You die today, Minister!"
A real typewriter couldn't make two rapidfire Dings! in a row.
I think you've forgotten —or never knew— the carriage release. It was a feature on both my old Remington manual and my Underwood electric that allowed the carriage to slide all the way to the end with a single gesture. And depending on how you set your tabstops, you could probably get the same effect with the TAB key, too.
Near the end, there are several measures in which the bell rings after only three keystrokes, and without the carriage return sound, also impossible:
Most/.ers probably are not old enough to remember the days when all telecommunications were regulated under title II.
Are you implying that there was a time when residential internet was regulated under Title II? If so, I'd be interested to hear a great deal more.
Let's just say that costs were higher, innovation was essentially prohibited, and service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today.
And was that due specifically to Title II, or was it due to other regulation, which allowed the national, monolithic monopoly that Lily Tomlin (quite rightly) so loved to hate?
I stand to be corrected, but I believe that there's nothing currently in Title II that would result in the stagnation that AT&T brought about in its time. It's true that there would be greater scrutiny of how carriers manage their networks, which could conceivably result in slow-downs in deployment of certain management practices and technologies, but I'd venture to suggest that that's the fucking point.
When 'innovation' means a willingness to hold a content service's customers to ransom, then hell yes, I'd like to see that process slowed down. I'd even pay a little for the privilege of not getting fucked over.
I agree that it's unfortunate that such measures seem to be necessary. It would be nice to believe that the invisible hand would bitch slap any company that tried to play fast and loose with its customers. But tragically, because of the nature of communications networks, that doesn't always happen.
And let's make no mistake - it's the very companies who are guilty of these sins that are arguing that Title II is a return to the 'bad old days' of the 1930s, when the FCC was created and Title II came into being. It was during those 'bad old days', by the way, that the majority of Americans finally got telephone service, such as it was.
What I don't understand is why the big media conglomerates put such baffling restrictions into their licenses in the first place.
Do sociopaths need a reason other than the desire for control?
Well, purportedly, the reason for this is to ensure profits, but that doesn't compute. Even a business undergrad could tell you that with a little rationalisation in the business space, it would be possible for Hollywood to extend their control and improve their profits in the process. Somehow, though, the ridiculously hidebound distribution chain is successfully working against an improved industry. There are enough people with a vested interest in keeping things the way they were (the way things are is... obviously different) that they can cut off their proverbial face to spite their nose. Yes it's that illogical.
I'm really surprised that, even with over a decade to adjust, most media companies have yet to do so. Even telcos, the other digital industry we love to hate, have learned significant lessons and are in the process of taming a frontier they initially ignored. But media - their collective consciousness defies even a modicum of logic.
"I've got three witnesses that put you there, DNA evidence, and some video with someone wearing jeans and a white hoodie, just like you wear, though the face isn't visable. You'll get the death penalty. If you give me a confession, we can get it down to manslaughter. First offense. You'll probably just get probation. Here's some paper."
You might like to look up the difference between coercion and deception. One of them is almost always a crime; the other, not so much.
You're not a liberal arts major, by any chance, are you? 'Cuz one thing STEM tries to do is kill the belief that an anecdote counters data.
Why yes, I am a liberal arts major, who studied classical logic, among other things. I was responding to the assertion that 'most' liberal arts majors ended up as lowly restaurant workers. I countered that by asserting a) that restaurant workers are not so lowly as characterised; b) that drawing general conclusions about people's prospects based on their education does not bear out, particularly where some of the more respected and influential jobs are concerned; and c) that in a number of cases, a liberal arts education is a precursor to the kind of work that most people can only dream about.
You see, I was actually not making a positive argument so much as rebutting (and refuting) someone else's crass, inaccurate and unsubstantiated assertion that a liberal arts degree is valueless. Shocking, isn't it, to see a STEM major failing so badly at applying basic logic?
But yeah, the plural of anecdote is not always data.
P.S. For the humour-impaired: I'm a keyboard monkey, too. A liberal arts educated keyboard monkey.
I second this comment.
besides teaching college which will probably involve a graduate degree, most of thejobs with a liberal arts degree involve asking "Do you want fries with that?"
Two things:
First - I supported myself for a decade working in bars and restaurants. There are more interesting people living interesting lives employed in that sector than just about any other.
Second - Ridley Scott went to art college. Peter Jackson was self-taught. James Cameron was a truck driver. The people who have done more to shape your vision than you're likely able to realise followed no discernible pattern of behaviour. I'd advise you to save your derision until someone's earned it.
Case in point: One 'liberal arts' friend of mine plays the king of the White Walkers on GoT. Another works on The Daily Show. How's your job look now, keyboard monkey?
Have an English degree, found it useless. went back got my BSEE, been employed as such ever since. short version, go back and get your degree.
Did a double major in Theatre and English Literature. After 20 years of gainful employment in systems software development and consulting, I'm now CTO at an international think tank. I also know the value of capitalisation and punctuation.
Short version: It's horses for courses; reflect carefully, then do what you feel is best. If you're smart, the real determining factor is how hard you're willing to work, and how well you continue to learn.
I disagree. Encapsulation and abstraction of complexity is natural and humans are great at breaking complexity apart and making the common-man able to accomplish what was one impossible.
No dispute there. The problem, though, is not that we make easy things simple and hard things possible (pace, Larry Wall). It's that we have of late developed a tendency to simplify too far. Microsoft is famous for making systems administration and certain types of programming 'click-and-drool' easy. And hyperbole aside, the cost to society of the half-competent people who found gainful employment due to this charade can be measured in the many billions.
You're absolutely right in that commercial flying is safer than ever, notwithstanding the tendency in airlines to pressure senior pilots out in favour of cheaper, younger staff. And those working in HFT would likely be wreaking havoc by other means if they didn't have software and fibre-optics to enable them. I guess my tongue hadn't entirely left my cheek when I wrote that last para.
BUT... Microsoft has contributed significantly to a general downward trend in the quality of software and systems integrity. And they've done so by marketing the idea that with the right tools, tool users can be commoditised. And that really, really sucks.
Whatever it is that made Halo 4 (cloud-based or otherwise) should remain closed. Or better yet, incinerate it.
Agreed. 'Software that makes it easy for non-experts to do expert tasks' will one day be recognised for its role in causing the downfall of civilisation as we know it. By then, of course, it will be too late.
Some among you may think that's overstating things. Some among you are also.NET developers, so what do you know?
Seriously, though: From the Airbus crash to high frequency trading to the Sony hack, examples abound of how enabling and empowering mediocrity is the first ingredient of every modern tragedy.
This post, not least because of the sig, wins the internet today. It's why I persist in reading Slashdot. Even as this site declines, it still has moments like this when someone posts something intellectually challenging, scientifically insightful and sardonically clever as fuck.
The point the OP was trying to make was that Linus's Law [wikipedia.org], specifically Eric S. Raymond's "given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" argument, is ridiculously idealistic as it operates under the pretence that everyone has as much insight and knowledge into the software as the author(s) have, focusing solely on the quantity of eyes.
I disagree that it is a ridiculously idealistic statement. It is more of a misunderstood rhetorical tautology than anything else.
A discovered bug obviously had enough eyeballs on it, and an as yet undiscovered bug hasn't had enough eyeballs on it.
Actually, I wish he had limited the statement to the persistence of known bugs in FOSS code bases. ESR said the bugs are easier to find as the number of beta testers and developers increases. This doesn't appear to be true. One thing that is true is that code quality is viewed differently in FOSS than in commercial, proprietary software. All too often, software businesses treat QA, debugging and code maintenance as overhead, so there's a perverse incentive to leave known bugs - even the most egregious ones - lying around indefinitely - or at least until someone publicly raises a stink. FOSS culture values code quality more highly and is less tolerant toward bugs, so generally speaking we see somewhat better code quality, and somewhat shorter known bug life than in similar proprietary projects.
Emphasis on 'generally speaking' in the above. Exceptions abound, but I think the trend is clear.
If we want to address this issue, we need a complete overhaul of our IP laws.
Er, no.
The 'why' has little to do with IP law and a lot to do with group dynamics, especially herd behaviour. Take this statement, for example:
One of my personal pet causes is developing a better alternative to HTML/CSS. This is a case where the metaphorical snowdrift is R&D on new platforms (which could at least initially compile to HTML/CSS).
The problem with the 'snowdrift' here, to abuse the metaphor, has nothing to do with IP law, and nothing to do with lack of innovation. It has everything to do with the size of the drift. You don't have any choice but to wait for someone else to come along to help shovel. But the author is trying to say, If everyone doesn't shovel, nobody gets out. And that's not always true.
A quick reminder: When HTML first came out, the very first thing virtually every proprietary software vendor of note did was publish their own website design tool. And each of those tools used proprietary extensions and/or unique behaviour in an attempt to corner the market on web development, and therefore on the web itself.
But the 'snowdrift' in this case was all the other companies. Because no single one of them was capable of establishing and holding overwhelming dominance, the 'drift' was doomed to remain more manageable by groups than by any single entity. (Microsoft came closest to achieving dominance, but ultimately their failure was such that they have in fact been weakened by the effort.)
Say what you like about the W3C, and draw what conclusions you will from the recent schism-and-reunification with WHATWG. The plain fact is that stodgy, not-too-volatile standards actually work in everybody's favour. To be clear: they provide the greatest benefit to the group, not to the enfant terrible programmer who thinks he knows better than multiple generations of his predecessors.
Yes, FOSS projects face institutional weaknesses, including a lack of funding. Especially on funding for R&D. But funded projects face significant weaknesses as well. Just look at the Node.JS / io.js fork, all because Joyent went overboard in its egalitarian zeal. Consider also that recent widely publicised bugs, despite the alarm they've caused, haven't really done much to affect the relative level of quality in funded vs proprietary vs unfunded code bases. They all have gaping holes, but the extent of their suckage seems to be dependent on factors other than funding. If not, Microsoft would be the ne plus ultra of software.
Weighed in the balance, therefore, FOSS's existential problems are real, and significant, but they're not as significant as those faced by all the other methods we've tried. So to those who have a better idea about how to balance community benefits and obligations, I can only reply as the Empress famously did when revolutionaries carried her bodily from the palace: 'I wish them well.'
Just because *some* or even *most* profit is reasonable, doesn't mean all profit is reasonable.
The term "profiteer" is used for people who put profit above a higher ethical claim; for example a citizen selling arms to an enemy during wartime.
I'm not sure that's really the canonical use of the term. I would think that selling said arms to one's own government at extortionate prices would be closer to the standard definition.
But niggling aside, the real problem with this article is that it equates the control of technology with control of behaviour, and assumes that it's even possible to usefully control the proliferation of technology.
Instead of advocating a software proscription list, why not seek to promote international legal standards concerning the right to privacy, and a respect for the rule of law among all nations?
Actually, don't answer that. I know why. Because building democracy is hard and even the purportedly enlightened, 'free' nations are busy backing away from individual human rights.
I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.
That's fantasy. The best ideas often wither while mediocre - even bad ones - flourish. It also makes the foolish assumption that "best" conflates with "broadest appeal".
Well, you need to define 'best' under these circumstances. The Linux kernel became 'best' when it was found that it supported and sustained the involvement of the widest developer/manufacturer constituency at a reasonable level of quality. That's hardly a glowing endorsement of the quality of the code or the operation of the kernel in real-world scenarios.
Remember that the abiding challenge for technologists is not so much 'best' as 'good enough'.
So yes, GP is wrong to see the free market as one in which the best ideas win. They don't. But the most workable available solutions do tend to get the most support. In Commodore's case, their sin was failing to market it in a way that made it readily accessible (i.e. price, distribution and support) and usable (developer support and software market). So you can praise the quality of the device, but from the buyer's perspective, it wasn't the 'best' solution after all, was it?
eggcorn |egg korn| noun In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease".
humor
(h)yoomr
noun
noun: humour
1. the quality of being amusing or comic, especially as expressed in literature or speech. "his tales are full of humor"
You are assuming a perfect world where taxes are used efficiently, whereas most western government have rather low bang-for-the-buck. At the end of the day, what really happen is more of the realm of "Everyone pays taxes, but infrastructures still sucks".
No, actually. Unless by 'sucks' you mean, works imperfectly, but still better than those parts of the world that did not benefit from my tax dollars.
I say this with the benefit of experience. I've traveled to dozens of countries, rich and poor, and those with solid tax bases have dependably better public infrastructure than those without.
The cause of your crumbling infrastructure in the US is largely people not paying taxes.
I can't speak to Facebook, et. al., but please don't lump Wikipedia Zero into your attack above, it's a very different animal. WP Zero is the brainchild of some very smart, idealistic people whose primary mission in life is to spread as much free information around the globe as possible, and that in turn is just a facet of a deeper ideal that information is empowering, and lack of information is oppressive.
Whose brainchild, specifically? I'm very interested in knowing. Because I think you'll find that the idea did not originate in Wikipedia, but that it was presented to them by others.
I know some of the individuals involved in the WP Zero movement from the get-go. These are the in-the-trenches activists. They physically went to these developing nations to examine the situation because they saw a disturbing trend in their own analytical data: the most oppressed people on the planet, who had the most to gain from free information, were not taking advantage of Wikipedia's free information as much as expected.
I hope you'll forgive my cynicism, but 'physically going' to the developing world teaches very little indeed about the broader truths of living in poverty. I say this having lived the last 11 years in a Least Developed Country, and having worked for half a generation with a parade of well-intended people who, to put it bluntly, haven't got a fucking clue, but who suck up all the oxygen in the room, making it impossible to get real, meaningful work done.
Do I sound bitter? Yes. I believe I've earned that right. Does that diminish my determination to work on real issues? Not one iota.
What they found on the ground was that in many of these developing nations, school-aged children and young adults had access to cell phones (but usually not tablets or home computers), and these cell phones had browsers and data capabilities, but the carriers are charging an arm and a leg for bytes of data over the cellular network, and that's why they're not surfing Wikipedia (or anything else much either).
Yes, and instead of helping to fight this phenomenon through better policy and changed attitudes among the global institutions, what we get instead is people perpetuating the problem by empowering the very telcos who prey on those children.
Let's be perfectly clear about this: asking telcos to make a special exception for one or two services is probably the worst possible response to the situation. It's short-sighted, it generates little real benefit, and worst of all, it creates the impression that people are actually doing something, when they're doing less than the minimum needed to move the development markers.
You can defend these people all you like. I still maintain that:
a) They were misguided and wrong; and
b) The basic idea was inspired and promoted by a number of very cynical individuals to a bunch of very naïve (if well-intentioned) people with little meaningful experience in actual development work.
"We have a complicated relationship to it. We believe in net neutrality in America," said Gayle Karen Young, chief culture and talent officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. But, Young added, offering Wikipedia Zero requires a different perspective elsewhere. "Partnering with telecom companies in the near term, it blurs the net neutrality line in those areas. It fulfills our overall mission, though, which is providing free knowledge."
Let me state things clearly. These {facebook|wikipedia|whatever}.zero campaigns are a direct and unequivocal attack on Net Neutrality. They are the brainchild of some very smart, cynical people who know exactly how insidious the whole idea is, and whose job it is to set Open Data people against Open Networks people.
This is not an unintended consequence. This is the consequence.
My part of the world consists pretty much entirely of developing nations, and when we discussed these zero initiatives, we pretty quickly came to the conclusion that having offline versions of wikipedia (commonly available) was a more desirable thing than having a zero-cost version of it mediated by our friendly neighbourhood telco.
And Facebook zero was scoffed at when it was touted as a social Good.
Indeed. Now, most of you are out in the world seeking clarity. But, as long-time contributor Bennett Haselton writes, much more important than that is 'clarifice', the ability to explain truthiness without resorting to expertise or insight. Keep reading to see Bennett's clarification of how over two hundred years or jurisprudence can be usefully transposed onto decades-old technology....
You're right. You don't get points. You get funding and awareness which is far more important.
Not necessarily. If the vulnerability du jour is catching media attention the way Ebola did, then you're probably not doing work you should be doing because you've got a CEO who just publicly pronounced that not one of your customers ever is going to get $EBOLA because of you. And suddenly your entire development cycle is in ruins, every manager everywhere has to explain in voluminous detail why his business unit will not be the cause of the next $EBOLA crisis, consultants will be hired to waste your time confirming that you really never were going to contribute to the global $EBOLA scare anyway....
... and meanwhile, your maintenance cycle is fucked, you have no budget left to do the upgrades that you need to avoid good old-fashioned data loss due to hardware failure, your children have forgotten who you are, and your wife just accidentally emailed her entire carpool pictures of her naughty bits (instead of her little piece on side, as she intended).
And your dog ran away.
NOW how does all that funding and awareness feel, eh kid?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a polite Canadian
There's another kind?
Of course dere is, you stupide fuckin' Englisher!! I spit on your politesse!
À bas la reine! Vive le Quebec libre!
He talks about it more here. I will quote him without giving any of my own commentary:
The design of systemd as a suite of integrated tools that each have their individual purposes but when used together are more than just the sum of the parts, that's pretty much at the core of UNIX philosophy.
I would say that he misunderstands the essence, the substance and possibly even the purpose of the UNIX philosophy... but I think he actually does understand. I think he's simply being disingenuous, twisting the definition to meet his desires. It's clear that this is a man who believes that he knows what's good and what's not.
This blog post from last September lays out in perfect clarity how dismissive he is of contrary points of view:
[Emphasis mine]
So the toolkit approach is not useful for someone who's deploying large numbers of commodity servers? This defies logic. It implies that somehow it's better to use commodity servers built using Lennart's toolkit than to have the capability to define one's own toolkit to build your own purpose-built standard image.
He's ignoring logic here in order to serve his own agenda, which of course consists of being smarter and sleeker and better than some crufty old Linux with 20 years of barnacles on its hull.
Init on Linux emphatically is ugly, but it's the product of a very large number of people coping with a very large set of circumstances, and finding a solution that is decidedly imperfect, but can be made to address most of the hundreds of thousands of peculiar and unique use cases in the world today.
Quoth Poettering:
This really is the essence of it. When you get right down to it, he's just pissed at having to deal with other people's half-assed implementations of everything, and having to make all the bits work to a purpose. It's just too... democratic. I suspect he feels the same way George W. Bush did when he famously quipped that if he really were a dictator, he'd get a lot more done.
And that's really the essence of the problem. No matter how good systemd turns out to be, it's effectively less than a dozen core committers (the top 10 committers have submitted over 90% of the code) dictating how your modular system is going to run. They want a single group (themselves) and a single philosophy (theirs) to occupy pretty much the entire space between the kernel and userland. And that is not the Linux way of doing things.
Too late, Kim Jong Un ordered the general who bought the HP printer to be executed already, and ordered his brother to buy a Canon inkjet to replace it. The brother was also executed for bring imperialist Japanese goods into Korea, but at least they have a new national printer now. Both the PCs are now being studied by North Koreas elite hacking squad to see if the files can be removed without recompiling the whole system from scratch, but the results are not promising so we may see more outage on the North Korean netblock again this week.
"PC ROAD RETTER? What dis fuckin' PC ROAD RETTER? You die today, Minister!"
A real typewriter couldn't make two rapidfire Dings! in a row.
I think you've forgotten —or never knew— the carriage release. It was a feature on both my old Remington manual and my Underwood electric that allowed the carriage to slide all the way to the end with a single gesture. And depending on how you set your tabstops, you could probably get the same effect with the TAB key, too.
Near the end, there are several measures in which the bell rings after only three keystrokes, and without the carriage return sound, also impossible:
See above.
Be careful what you ask for.
Most /.ers probably are not old enough to remember the days when all telecommunications were regulated under title II.
Are you implying that there was a time when residential internet was regulated under Title II? If so, I'd be interested to hear a great deal more.
Let's just say that costs were higher, innovation was essentially prohibited, and service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today.
And was that due specifically to Title II, or was it due to other regulation, which allowed the national, monolithic monopoly that Lily Tomlin (quite rightly) so loved to hate?
I stand to be corrected, but I believe that there's nothing currently in Title II that would result in the stagnation that AT&T brought about in its time. It's true that there would be greater scrutiny of how carriers manage their networks, which could conceivably result in slow-downs in deployment of certain management practices and technologies, but I'd venture to suggest that that's the fucking point.
When 'innovation' means a willingness to hold a content service's customers to ransom, then hell yes, I'd like to see that process slowed down. I'd even pay a little for the privilege of not getting fucked over.
I agree that it's unfortunate that such measures seem to be necessary. It would be nice to believe that the invisible hand would bitch slap any company that tried to play fast and loose with its customers. But tragically, because of the nature of communications networks, that doesn't always happen.
And let's make no mistake - it's the very companies who are guilty of these sins that are arguing that Title II is a return to the 'bad old days' of the 1930s, when the FCC was created and Title II came into being. It was during those 'bad old days', by the way, that the majority of Americans finally got telephone service, such as it was.
What I don't understand is why the big media conglomerates put such baffling restrictions into their licenses in the first place.
Do sociopaths need a reason other than the desire for control?
Well, purportedly, the reason for this is to ensure profits, but that doesn't compute. Even a business undergrad could tell you that with a little rationalisation in the business space, it would be possible for Hollywood to extend their control and improve their profits in the process. Somehow, though, the ridiculously hidebound distribution chain is successfully working against an improved industry. There are enough people with a vested interest in keeping things the way they were (the way things are is... obviously different) that they can cut off their proverbial face to spite their nose. Yes it's that illogical.
I'm really surprised that, even with over a decade to adjust, most media companies have yet to do so. Even telcos, the other digital industry we love to hate, have learned significant lessons and are in the process of taming a frontier they initially ignored. But media - their collective consciousness defies even a modicum of logic.
Bingo. You're absolutely correct.
"I've got three witnesses that put you there, DNA evidence, and some video with someone wearing jeans and a white hoodie, just like you wear, though the face isn't visable. You'll get the death penalty. If you give me a confession, we can get it down to manslaughter. First offense. You'll probably just get probation. Here's some paper."
You might like to look up the difference between coercion and deception. One of them is almost always a crime; the other, not so much.
You're not a liberal arts major, by any chance, are you? 'Cuz one thing STEM tries to do is kill the belief that an anecdote counters data.
Why yes, I am a liberal arts major, who studied classical logic, among other things. I was responding to the assertion that 'most' liberal arts majors ended up as lowly restaurant workers. I countered that by asserting a) that restaurant workers are not so lowly as characterised; b) that drawing general conclusions about people's prospects based on their education does not bear out, particularly where some of the more respected and influential jobs are concerned; and c) that in a number of cases, a liberal arts education is a precursor to the kind of work that most people can only dream about.
You see, I was actually not making a positive argument so much as rebutting (and refuting) someone else's crass, inaccurate and unsubstantiated assertion that a liberal arts degree is valueless. Shocking, isn't it, to see a STEM major failing so badly at applying basic logic?
But yeah, the plural of anecdote is not always data.
P.S. For the humour-impaired: I'm a keyboard monkey, too. A liberal arts educated keyboard monkey.
I second this comment. besides teaching college which will probably involve a graduate degree, most of thejobs with a liberal arts degree involve asking "Do you want fries with that?"
Two things:
First - I supported myself for a decade working in bars and restaurants. There are more interesting people living interesting lives employed in that sector than just about any other.
Second - Ridley Scott went to art college. Peter Jackson was self-taught. James Cameron was a truck driver. The people who have done more to shape your vision than you're likely able to realise followed no discernible pattern of behaviour. I'd advise you to save your derision until someone's earned it.
Case in point: One 'liberal arts' friend of mine plays the king of the White Walkers on GoT. Another works on The Daily Show. How's your job look now, keyboard monkey?
Have an English degree, found it useless. went back got my BSEE, been employed as such ever since. short version, go back and get your degree.
Did a double major in Theatre and English Literature. After 20 years of gainful employment in systems software development and consulting, I'm now CTO at an international think tank. I also know the value of capitalisation and punctuation.
Short version: It's horses for courses; reflect carefully, then do what you feel is best. If you're smart, the real determining factor is how hard you're willing to work, and how well you continue to learn.
I disagree. Encapsulation and abstraction of complexity is natural and humans are great at breaking complexity apart and making the common-man able to accomplish what was one impossible.
No dispute there. The problem, though, is not that we make easy things simple and hard things possible (pace, Larry Wall). It's that we have of late developed a tendency to simplify too far. Microsoft is famous for making systems administration and certain types of programming 'click-and-drool' easy. And hyperbole aside, the cost to society of the half-competent people who found gainful employment due to this charade can be measured in the many billions.
You're absolutely right in that commercial flying is safer than ever, notwithstanding the tendency in airlines to pressure senior pilots out in favour of cheaper, younger staff. And those working in HFT would likely be wreaking havoc by other means if they didn't have software and fibre-optics to enable them. I guess my tongue hadn't entirely left my cheek when I wrote that last para.
BUT... Microsoft has contributed significantly to a general downward trend in the quality of software and systems integrity. And they've done so by marketing the idea that with the right tools, tool users can be commoditised. And that really, really sucks.
Whatever it is that made Halo 4 (cloud-based or otherwise) should remain closed. Or better yet, incinerate it.
Agreed. 'Software that makes it easy for non-experts to do expert tasks' will one day be recognised for its role in causing the downfall of civilisation as we know it. By then, of course, it will be too late.
Some among you may think that's overstating things. Some among you are also .NET developers, so what do you know?
Seriously, though: From the Airbus crash to high frequency trading to the Sony hack, examples abound of how enabling and empowering mediocrity is the first ingredient of every modern tragedy.
This post, not least because of the sig, wins the internet today. It's why I persist in reading Slashdot. Even as this site declines, it still has moments like this when someone posts something intellectually challenging, scientifically insightful and sardonically clever as fuck.
I disagree that it is a ridiculously idealistic statement. It is more of a misunderstood rhetorical tautology than anything else.
A discovered bug obviously had enough eyeballs on it, and an as yet undiscovered bug hasn't had enough eyeballs on it.
Actually, I wish he had limited the statement to the persistence of known bugs in FOSS code bases. ESR said the bugs are easier to find as the number of beta testers and developers increases. This doesn't appear to be true. One thing that is true is that code quality is viewed differently in FOSS than in commercial, proprietary software. All too often, software businesses treat QA, debugging and code maintenance as overhead, so there's a perverse incentive to leave known bugs - even the most egregious ones - lying around indefinitely - or at least until someone publicly raises a stink. FOSS culture values code quality more highly and is less tolerant toward bugs, so generally speaking we see somewhat better code quality, and somewhat shorter known bug life than in similar proprietary projects.
Emphasis on 'generally speaking' in the above. Exceptions abound, but I think the trend is clear.
If there were a just and caring God, he would never let geeks name things.
POODLE?
Jesus wept. Literally. He heard the name and wept tears.
Geeks made baby Jesus cry.
If we want to address this issue, we need a complete overhaul of our IP laws.
Er, no.
The 'why' has little to do with IP law and a lot to do with group dynamics, especially herd behaviour. Take this statement, for example:
The problem with the 'snowdrift' here, to abuse the metaphor, has nothing to do with IP law, and nothing to do with lack of innovation. It has everything to do with the size of the drift. You don't have any choice but to wait for someone else to come along to help shovel. But the author is trying to say, If everyone doesn't shovel, nobody gets out. And that's not always true.
A quick reminder: When HTML first came out, the very first thing virtually every proprietary software vendor of note did was publish their own website design tool. And each of those tools used proprietary extensions and/or unique behaviour in an attempt to corner the market on web development, and therefore on the web itself.
But the 'snowdrift' in this case was all the other companies. Because no single one of them was capable of establishing and holding overwhelming dominance, the 'drift' was doomed to remain more manageable by groups than by any single entity. (Microsoft came closest to achieving dominance, but ultimately their failure was such that they have in fact been weakened by the effort.)
Say what you like about the W3C, and draw what conclusions you will from the recent schism-and-reunification with WHATWG. The plain fact is that stodgy, not-too-volatile standards actually work in everybody's favour. To be clear: they provide the greatest benefit to the group, not to the enfant terrible programmer who thinks he knows better than multiple generations of his predecessors.
Yes, FOSS projects face institutional weaknesses, including a lack of funding. Especially on funding for R&D. But funded projects face significant weaknesses as well. Just look at the Node.JS / io.js fork, all because Joyent went overboard in its egalitarian zeal. Consider also that recent widely publicised bugs, despite the alarm they've caused, haven't really done much to affect the relative level of quality in funded vs proprietary vs unfunded code bases. They all have gaping holes, but the extent of their suckage seems to be dependent on factors other than funding. If not, Microsoft would be the ne plus ultra of software.
Weighed in the balance, therefore, FOSS's existential problems are real, and significant, but they're not as significant as those faced by all the other methods we've tried. So to those who have a better idea about how to balance community benefits and obligations, I can only reply as the Empress famously did when revolutionaries carried her bodily from the palace: 'I wish them well.'
Just because *some* or even *most* profit is reasonable, doesn't mean all profit is reasonable.
The term "profiteer" is used for people who put profit above a higher ethical claim; for example a citizen selling arms to an enemy during wartime.
I'm not sure that's really the canonical use of the term. I would think that selling said arms to one's own government at extortionate prices would be closer to the standard definition.
But niggling aside, the real problem with this article is that it equates the control of technology with control of behaviour, and assumes that it's even possible to usefully control the proliferation of technology.
Instead of advocating a software proscription list, why not seek to promote international legal standards concerning the right to privacy, and a respect for the rule of law among all nations?
Actually, don't answer that. I know why. Because building democracy is hard and even the purportedly enlightened, 'free' nations are busy backing away from individual human rights.
I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.
That's fantasy. The best ideas often wither while mediocre - even bad ones - flourish. It also makes the foolish assumption that "best" conflates with "broadest appeal".
Well, you need to define 'best' under these circumstances. The Linux kernel became 'best' when it was found that it supported and sustained the involvement of the widest developer/manufacturer constituency at a reasonable level of quality. That's hardly a glowing endorsement of the quality of the code or the operation of the kernel in real-world scenarios.
Remember that the abiding challenge for technologists is not so much 'best' as 'good enough'.
So yes, GP is wrong to see the free market as one in which the best ideas win. They don't. But the most workable available solutions do tend to get the most support. In Commodore's case, their sin was failing to market it in a way that made it readily accessible (i.e. price, distribution and support) and usable (developer support and software market). So you can praise the quality of the device, but from the buyer's perspective, it wasn't the 'best' solution after all, was it?
eggcorn |egg korn| noun In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease".
humor
(h)yoomr
noun
noun: humour
1. the quality of being amusing or comic, especially as expressed in literature or speech. "his tales are full of humor"
You are assuming a perfect world where taxes are used efficiently, whereas most western government have rather low bang-for-the-buck. At the end of the day, what really happen is more of the realm of "Everyone pays taxes, but infrastructures still sucks".
No, actually. Unless by 'sucks' you mean, works imperfectly, but still better than those parts of the world that did not benefit from my tax dollars.
I say this with the benefit of experience. I've traveled to dozens of countries, rich and poor, and those with solid tax bases have dependably better public infrastructure than those without.
The cause of your crumbling infrastructure in the US is largely people not paying taxes.
I can't speak to Facebook, et. al., but please don't lump Wikipedia Zero into your attack above, it's a very different animal. WP Zero is the brainchild of some very smart, idealistic people whose primary mission in life is to spread as much free information around the globe as possible, and that in turn is just a facet of a deeper ideal that information is empowering, and lack of information is oppressive.
Whose brainchild, specifically? I'm very interested in knowing. Because I think you'll find that the idea did not originate in Wikipedia, but that it was presented to them by others.
I know some of the individuals involved in the WP Zero movement from the get-go. These are the in-the-trenches activists. They physically went to these developing nations to examine the situation because they saw a disturbing trend in their own analytical data: the most oppressed people on the planet, who had the most to gain from free information, were not taking advantage of Wikipedia's free information as much as expected.
I hope you'll forgive my cynicism, but 'physically going' to the developing world teaches very little indeed about the broader truths of living in poverty. I say this having lived the last 11 years in a Least Developed Country, and having worked for half a generation with a parade of well-intended people who, to put it bluntly, haven't got a fucking clue, but who suck up all the oxygen in the room, making it impossible to get real, meaningful work done.
Do I sound bitter? Yes. I believe I've earned that right. Does that diminish my determination to work on real issues? Not one iota.
What they found on the ground was that in many of these developing nations, school-aged children and young adults had access to cell phones (but usually not tablets or home computers), and these cell phones had browsers and data capabilities, but the carriers are charging an arm and a leg for bytes of data over the cellular network, and that's why they're not surfing Wikipedia (or anything else much either).
Yes, and instead of helping to fight this phenomenon through better policy and changed attitudes among the global institutions, what we get instead is people perpetuating the problem by empowering the very telcos who prey on those children.
Let's be perfectly clear about this: asking telcos to make a special exception for one or two services is probably the worst possible response to the situation. It's short-sighted, it generates little real benefit, and worst of all, it creates the impression that people are actually doing something, when they're doing less than the minimum needed to move the development markers.
You can defend these people all you like. I still maintain that:
a) They were misguided and wrong; and
b) The basic idea was inspired and promoted by a number of very cynical individuals to a bunch of very naïve (if well-intentioned) people with little meaningful experience in actual development work.
"We have a complicated relationship to it. We believe in net neutrality in America," said Gayle Karen Young, chief culture and talent officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. But, Young added, offering Wikipedia Zero requires a different perspective elsewhere. "Partnering with telecom companies in the near term, it blurs the net neutrality line in those areas. It fulfills our overall mission, though, which is providing free knowledge."
Let me state things clearly. These {facebook|wikipedia|whatever}.zero campaigns are a direct and unequivocal attack on Net Neutrality. They are the brainchild of some very smart, cynical people who know exactly how insidious the whole idea is, and whose job it is to set Open Data people against Open Networks people.
This is not an unintended consequence. This is the consequence.
My part of the world consists pretty much entirely of developing nations, and when we discussed these zero initiatives, we pretty quickly came to the conclusion that having offline versions of wikipedia (commonly available) was a more desirable thing than having a zero-cost version of it mediated by our friendly neighbourhood telco.
And Facebook zero was scoffed at when it was touted as a social Good.
ARRRGGGHHHHH.... CLARIFIC-I-ATION. I can't even spell it wrong when I WANT to!
Don't you wanna read about "clarificiations"?
Indeed. Now, most of you are out in the world seeking clarity. But, as long-time contributor Bennett Haselton writes, much more important than that is 'clarifice', the ability to explain truthiness without resorting to expertise or insight. Keep reading to see Bennett's clarification of how over two hundred years or jurisprudence can be usefully transposed onto decades-old technology....
You don't get points for media mentions.
You're right. You don't get points. You get funding and awareness which is far more important.
Not necessarily. If the vulnerability du jour is catching media attention the way Ebola did, then you're probably not doing work you should be doing because you've got a CEO who just publicly pronounced that not one of your customers ever is going to get $EBOLA because of you. And suddenly your entire development cycle is in ruins, every manager everywhere has to explain in voluminous detail why his business unit will not be the cause of the next $EBOLA crisis, consultants will be hired to waste your time confirming that you really never were going to contribute to the global $EBOLA scare anyway....
... and meanwhile, your maintenance cycle is fucked, you have no budget left to do the upgrades that you need to avoid good old-fashioned data loss due to hardware failure, your children have forgotten who you are, and your wife just accidentally emailed her entire carpool pictures of her naughty bits (instead of her little piece on side, as she intended).
And your dog ran away.
NOW how does all that funding and awareness feel, eh kid?