"This makes me wonder how the various third-world countries will start treating the various physical problems that come from computers. I bet most people in the target areas are not used to sitting hunched over a screen and there will be bad backs, bad legs (from the foot pedal), bad hands from the mouse and small keyboard, bad eyes from late night computing. Should be interesting in few years after launch to see how the native medicine peoples go about treating these."
Oh my, my. I'll try to put this gently. In one village I visited recently, people walk a few kilometres up a mountainside (often very muddy from rain), work all day bent double in the garden, then walk back to the village laden with up to 50 lbs. of produce, firewood, etc. on their back. Sitting down and pedalling a computer for an hour or so in the evening is luxury.
For an idea about the physical condition of people in the country where I live, see some photos here. The paramount chief of Loltong village, who's in in early seventies, took me for a 3 hour walk around his mountainous area that left me staggering, then cooked me lunch. He didn't seem to worried about RSIs when we talked about putting computers into the local youth centre. This chief from Koiovo village danced a very energetic custom dance (incidentally answering the 'boxers or briefs?' question all too frankly) and didn't even break a sweat. How many people in your town look like this in their fifties?
The younger folk are more or less the same. This guy was my project officer. Having a lazy desk job doesn't excuse you from cutting wood every day for the dinner fire.
(Sorry guys, no photos of the female physique. Very conservative society here, so I'd probably be deported if I started pointing my camera at beautiful young women. Put your hands back on the keyboard.)
To summarise: Don't worry, sore backs are the least of people's worries, where I live. 8^)
I was going to moderate this thread, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to knock down so many canards in one little reply.
"If you need full control, you make your own proprietary software."
Rubbish, and an utter non-sequitur. You're conflating 'control' with 'custom software development'. (I was going to say 'customisation', but a great deal of customisation is often possible with little effort or expertise because of the open nature of the software and the communities that support it.)
"OSS will only provide you control if you spend a lot of money to develop for it."
Rubbish again. See comment above.
"You aren't vendor independent if you want support, which you'll need since none of your IT guys will know what to do with it."
So there's only one ISV that supports Linux in your entire region? I didn't think so. The quality of support resources for FOSS surpasses those of proprietary software in most parts of the world. And FOSS operating systems require, on average, fewer support hours per installation than most proprietary products.
The second clause of that sentence is begging the question. Do you know for a fact that there is no in-house knowledge of FOSS? I didn't think so.
"Most businesses aren't paranoid enough to waste money on having code audited."
It's true that 'audit' is a strong term to use, because few people do that, as you rightly note. If the GP had said, 'we can look at the source whenever we need to,' the issue would have a very different complexion. I've quickly glanced through FOSS source code to better understand functionality, or to solve a problem, innumerable times. I have never had that luxury with proprietary software.
"Some companies may be willing to do some support for you, but you have to pay for that."
What you say? Pay for support? Well, forget it then; best to go back to the world of proprietary software where the Tech Support Fairy will fix anything for nothing more than a pat on the head and a cookie.
"If e.g. the CPU warms the air inside the case and the air now is capable of holding more water, will not the humidity inside the case increase and then the water condensate when it contacts the case which is cooled from the outside?"
BINGO. As others have rightly noted, the problem with running computers in a cold environment is not the cold, it's the humidity, to coin a phrase.
I ran an ISP in the Arctic for a few years back in the '90s, and our constant worry was not whether the equipment would get cold - computers actually run quite efficiently when they're cold - but what would happen when parts got close to freezing. All our equipment was delivered by plane, and stored in a warehouse that often reached well below -20 deg. C. We had to bring it into a perfectly dry environment and let it sit for a minimum of 24 hours before powering it on. Anything less would be been, er, expensive. 8^)
We had similar contingencies to cope with heating systems failure, which were not unknown in a place that saw at least one major blizzard (i.e. several days of ~100km/hr winds) a year.
Re:Walk into the room
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Computers mysteriously start working again when you enter the room? Feh. This hardly qualifies as Voodoo. I mean, it's got a perfectly rational explanation:
quantum bogodynamics:/kwontm boh`gohdi:namiks/, n.
A theory that characterizes the universe in terms of bogon sources (such as politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, and suits in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and computers), and bogosity potential fields. Bogon absorption, of course, causes human beings to behave mindlessly and machines to fail (and may also cause both to emit secondary bogons); however, the precise mechanics of the bogon-computron interaction are not yet understood and remain to be elucidated. Quantum bogodynamics is most often invoked to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons, which the former absorb. See bogon, computron, suit, psyton.
Here is a representative QBD theory: The bogon is a boson (integral spin, +1 or -1), and has zero rest mass. In this respect it is very much like a photon. However, it has a much greater momentum, thus explaining its destructive effect on computer electronics and human nervous systems. The corollary to this is that bogons also have tremendous inertia, and therefore a bogon beam is deflected only with great difficulty. When the bogon encounters its antiparticle, the cluon, they mutually annihilate each other, releasing magic smoke. Furthermore 1 Lenat = 1 mole (6.022E23) of bogons (see microLenat).
"Performance testers call this "the 9am syndrome", and you'll need some fairly serious server bandwidth to handle everyone copying such a large file. This will turn your network, and the disc you're serving the images from, into a seething pile of molasses."
I've seen a room full of PCs simultaneously boot and load the same ~1GB Linux partition on a 100Mb network in no time. If they hadn't told me how it was working, I'd never have known they weren't loading a local partition.
'"I refuse to participate in your shared hallucination." -- Dilbert'
Wise words. I wish more people would live by them
I would find this whole airport security thing rather amusing, if it weren't such a pain in the tuckus. I think Bruce Schneier summed it up rather nicely in his latest Crypto-gram when he characterised all these draconian restrictions as 'Security Theatre' - something that looks like security to those who don't know any better, but ultimately has no real effect.
He also points out that if we're to learn anything from this event, it's that classical police/intelligence operations work. Authorities knew about the would-be bombers well in advance, they learned as much as they could about the cell, then shut it down before it could do damage. Biometric IDs, airport baggage checks, no-fly lists and other kinds of security theatre contributed nothing whatsoever to the outcome.
"The other option is lock down lowlevel access as much as possible and keep non M$ code out of kernel space lots of the biggest security problems become much easier to solve and M$ can produce a better product."
Exactly! I mean, that's how BSD and Linux do it... isn't it?
The fact that Joe Lieberman couldn't keep his website running is a good metaphor for why he lost this challenge by someone who even a few months ago was a nobody.
I think it's particularly interesting that political websites all across the US have been sluggish and crash-happy for most of the day. The amount of interest in this single campaign (a primary, ffs!) crashed not only Joe Lieberman's site, but forced Kos to run a stripped down front page, completely b0rked the official results page, and has slowed down just about any place with breaking news about this race.
I know it's inane to speak of the Power of the Web. The web's not doing anything; it's just people doing what they've always done - showing curiousity whenever something catches their interest. The difference here is that the medium has changed, and this particular medium has created the ability to generate political clout for those who know how to use it. I don't mean that in the Goebbels 'Big Lie' sense - quite the opposite. This campaign in particular has shown that on the Internet, all lies are shallow. And that's a direct challenge to American Politics as it's practised today.
"Bad lighting conditions? Remove dust? Come on. Last I checked CRT and LCDs glow... unless he was working from memory alone without the aid of a monitor, he's a flipping liar."
Not necessarily. I work in the developing world, and one of the biggest problems we face is poor quality monitors in rooms that are too bright. Most places in the tropics have very open buildings, and artificial lighting is a luxury, so one often finds oneself sitting in a room where an LCD screen is almost unusable. I imagine that, working as he does in Beirut, the circumstances he describes are quite plausible.
I'm not defending the photographer, by the way - I simply want to correct the assumption that he was talking nonsense.
"All accesses (to services, registry sections, config/admin programs, and anything that tries to change those) are based on ACLs (access control lists). How do I know this? I'm one of the contracted testers that is working with the vista firewall and its ACLs.... Is it perfect? I don't know."
You don't know? Why not? You're a contracted tester, which means you're supposed to know this stuff. You say you're testing the firewall, so how about doing an audit? Throw everything you have at a vanilla installation and see what happens. Document that and feed it back, to MS at least, and to us if you haven't signed an NDA. How hard can that be?
"I do know it feels pretty secure--not entirely different from the way things worked when I played around with setting up Linux server boxes in college (which was only a year ago)."
Ah, well that explains a lot. Why not post again when you've got more than a 'feeling' about things?
"I meant to say something about the Gates foundation spending money on mundane stuff like roads, instead of/in addition to the stuff they already do.... And by "roads", I do mean literally roads, but also any other infrastructure that we westerners might overlook as "obvious". How about some more phone lines, etc."
You're absolutely right about basic infrastructure. Transport and communications are integral to a viable economy. This, by the way, is exactly why we need tools like solar powered wireless - to bootstrap communications in areas where 'proper' infrastructure of the kind you see in North America or western Europe is just plain impossible.
You'll be glad to know, by the way, that the US is devoting USD 68 million to the country where I work to do exactly that. It's building roads, airstrips and wharfs. By all accounts, it's one of the best-run development projects this country has seen since colonial times.
"A $100 dollars for a laptop could provide medical care for a family of four for a year in many third-world countries. Which would you rather have?"
Both. Now quit offering these simplistic and narrow-minded false alternatives.
Did it ever occur to you that in order to deliver aid, people might need communications capability? Or that the vast majority of people are not dying of being poor, they're living with it. This means that if they're going to improve their lot - and everyone on the face of this earth has that right - they might need access to information in order to do so?
"Now not only can citizens of impoverished countries starve due to gross mismanagement of funds by their governments (who are themselves living very well off of foreign aid intended for the citizens) but they can IM each other about who has more flies."
I know you think you're being darkly humourous (or maybe just fasionably cynical - it's hard to tell), but there's a bit of truth in what you say.
I work on a project whose aim is very directly pointed at improving communications so that people in rural areas can actually find out just how bad things are in the capital. One of the biggest problems we face here in terms of political reform is the fact that there's absolutely no follow-up, no accountability for elected officials. They buy votes with a few pots and pans and bags of rice, then disappear for four years. But if their villagers actually knew just how much money they were making (and wasting on their cronies), there would be hell to pay.
So if someone with family in the city were to receive news (including, for example, photos of the MP in his fancy new car), it would be a lot harder for him to lie to them the next time around.
It's not a complete solution, by any means. We only need to look at the state of politics in our own so-called developed countries for evidence. But it's a good start, and a vast improvement on the utter lack of communications capacity that most places in the world have to deal with today.
"I can see the tv ads now "our ISP doesn't slow down VoIP provider X, so switch to our internet tubes today!"... Provided there are options, things will be just fine."
For heaven's sake, would you stop with this nonsense. This is not about ISPs; this is about carriers! I'm sick of people trotting out this mendacious argument that everything will be fine if we can just switch ISPs. Network Neutrality has little or nothing to do with the last mile. It's all about the backbone carriers, who are proposing to extract a tithe from anyone who wants to use their bandwidth, in spite of the fact that they've already paid for Internet access. This behaviour is unethical, and currently illegal. The carriers want to change the rules, and in so doing ring the death knell of free access to information.
There is nothing 'fine' about criminal conspiracy, whether Congress rubber stamps it or not.
For everyone else in the software world, 'beta' means 'feature freeze'. Beta is defined as the time when an application is feature complete, but whose features are still unstable, making the software unsuitable for production environments. This, by the way, is why so much FOSS spends literally years reaching the 1.0 mark. The software may (or may not) be stable, but because it's not feature-complete, it's not worthy of a 1.0 designation.
Commercial pressures have forced some products to move away from this, so that pre-beta software is released as beta, actual beta software gets an arbitrary version number (remember the version wars of the mid 90's?), and release software gets called a 'service pack'. It's kind of sad that it has to be this way, but marketing is a cross we all have to bear.
"It is commendable that Gates is making all of those charitable donations to alleviate hunger and poverty and disease. Nobody can fault him and his foundation on that. However, it will never solve the real problem keeping those people and countries in poverty."
I couldn't agree more. I work in development, in a country that's internationally known as a malaria hotspot. Several people I know are employed by Gates Foundation money, and everyone here agrees that this is a good thing. But there's a limit to how much good this kind of thing can do.
One friend of mine once politely mentioned to a Gates Foundation researcher that we don't really need to know much more about malaria in this country. All we really need is trained and equipped medical staff within a day's walk of every man, woman and child. Malaria isn't a terribly dangerous disease if it's treated properly. I've had it myself, by the way, so I know whereof I speak.
The big problem in disease prevention around the world is an almost unbelievable shortage of health workers and medicines. Very little is being done to address these fundamental issues. Here's an interesting series of facts:
Number of new doctors sub-Saharan Africa would need for its per-capita number to match America's: 3,900,000
Number of new doctors produced by sub-Saharan Africa's universities each year: 4,000
Again, I respect the work being done by the Gates Foundation, and I've seen its benefits with my own eyes. But to assume that those people working to try and improve education and communications are not involved in something equally vital is a little silly. In fact, it smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude that tends to tarnish most donor-driven projects, and often results in people chasing 'sexy' aid projects at the expense of 'boring' things like making sure that the local nurse has enough pills for everyone, and can order more when he needs them.
"Ok. So what? This feature has been around for awhile, and if you have privacy issues, well just disable system restore (or whatever the equivalent option will be in Vista)."
I think that's a fair enough response. But nonetheless, I think it's also fair to question the design philosophy which MS is following here, and to challenge it on its merits. Personally, I think enabling extra features on the principle that they might be useful to a subset of users is a questionable practice. I'm especially leery of enabling features that make it possible for ignorant (i.e. not savvy) or careless users to do really bad things. And I'm most leery of features that actually encourage carelessness.
A lot of computerised data is important and needs to be treated carefully. This includes planning when and how to manage change. The prospect of a PHB telling staff to simply use a built-in and poorly understood versioning feature fills me with concern. For corporate data at least, I think an explicit, formalised process for change management should be required. I've consulted with very large corporations and advised such action in the past, to varying effect.
I'll be the first to agree that the sane thing to do is not to demand the feature be pulled (which, in fairness has not yet been suggested in this discussion) but to get a fuller understanding of its positive and negative attributes. I hesitate to come to a quick conclusion, but on the face of it, this feature seem to create more problems than it solves in a corporate environment:
It works across the entire file system, which creates questions about its efficiency;
Its 'all or nothing' implementation does create significant liability in places like law offices, as other have already noted;
It encourages laxness in data management; yet
It doesn't seem to be rich enough to support proper change management processes.
So without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I think it's fair and reasonable to suggest that this feature should be disabled by default, with an easy interface to enable it for those who decide they want it. I wouldn't equate this design decision with fiascos like ActiveX in IE (which IMO borders on criminal negligence), but I would suggest that its source is the same lack of focus coupled with the desire to make things easy without considering the costs of having done so.
"Would you let McDonald's do the FDA testing on their own food?"
Hate to burst your bubble, but that's exactly what the FDA does with pharmaceuticals. Both government and business will go out of their way to ignore safety issues when there's money involved.
"It's silly to think that developers should have full access to every single internal structure or API call. It's called "bad design principle". It means they can't change things internally."
WTF? I understand what you're getting at, but please think about what you've just written for a second.
It's not at all silly to give developers full access to your system internals, as long as you're clear about the repercussions of using them. In fact, there's a whole bunch of developers using this stuff called FOSS, which is based entirely on this principle.
I know, I know; your point is that if developers depend on a certain implementation, then the vendor is forced to continue supporting it forever, which, according to your reasoning, leaves them with no further room to grow or innovate. Unfortunately, that perspective is just bollocks. FOSS developers deal with this every day, and they've found a perfectly workable process:
Supported APIs are marked as such. Deprecated APIs are marked, too, with the clear warning that past this version, you're on your own. Unsupported interactions with the internals are marked - not fenced, but simply labled Here Be Dragons. You're welcome to venture there if you want, but don't go asking for help if something goes wrong. Most developers benefit from a better understanding of how the whole system works, and can in fact suggest or offer improvements in upstream functionality as well as better implementing their own.
I'd be fascinated to know why you think that things are somehow different for Microsoft than they are for IBM or Novell.
"I'm not convinced that you can jump-start a country's development by skipping important steps like industrialization and infrastructure."
I'll take you at your word that you're not trolling, and in fairness, your scepticism is phrased a lot more gently than many others'.
I think your misunderstanding stems from the assumption that we'd be skipping an essential step, when in fact what's happening is that we're moving straight to a point that other (developed) nations had to reach in small increments.
Wireless networks like the kind used in these laptops are infrastructure. They're also many times more cost-effective than laying cable into every home, and many times more versatile as well. True, they come with their own contraints and limitations (e.g. calling 911 from a tunnel) but most people in the developing world are happy to accept them. You see, there's simply no way that they could pay for the kind of infrastructure that exists in the US, for example.
There are innumerable opportunities for people all over the world to work in service industries that require only a network-connected computer and a well-educated user. People living in many developing nations can leap straight to the head of this particular queue without having to spend a generation working in the sweatshops and mines as our grandparents and parents did. IMO, that's a Good Thing.
In some ways, this actually plays to the advantage of the developing world. It means that they can immediately derive the benefits of technological change that, elsewhere in the world, was achieved in small increments, and which is restricted in important ways by what came before. A good analogue for this is England's experience in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution. England pioneered most of the technologies and processes, and had pride of place for some time. But by the time Germany, France and the US got moving, they were able to move straight to the state of the art, while England still had a huge investment in first generation systems that were not nearly as competitive.
I don't often flame people who do this kind of work. On the contrary, I admire, support and participate in online activism in places where dissent can be uncomfortable, to say the least. I'm normally the first to applaud and embrace these technologies. BUT:
I hope their code is better than their understanding of HTML. Their User's Guide goes miles out of its way to break basic web functionality. It's like they're punishing the reader for not choosing PDF in the first place.
Seriously, this is more than a nitpick. If I'm going to trust these folks with information important - possibly dangerous - enough that I have a serious need to protect it, then for heaven's sake I want to know that they know what they're doing. I mean, honestly, this is emphatically not the place where anyone should tolerate hand-waving and pooh-poohing of 'minor' details.
In their own words:
ScatterChat is a HACKTIVIST WEAPON designed to allow non-technical human rights activists and political dissidents to communicate securely and anonymously while operating in hostile territory.
If you really mean this, don't you think you should fix your documentation?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh my, my. I'll try to put this gently. In one village I visited recently, people walk a few kilometres up a mountainside (often very muddy from rain), work all day bent double in the garden, then walk back to the village laden with up to 50 lbs. of produce, firewood, etc. on their back. Sitting down and pedalling a computer for an hour or so in the evening is luxury.
For an idea about the physical condition of people in the country where I live, see some photos here. The paramount chief of Loltong village, who's in in early seventies, took me for a 3 hour walk around his mountainous area that left me staggering, then cooked me lunch. He didn't seem to worried about RSIs when we talked about putting computers into the local youth centre. This chief from Koiovo village danced a very energetic custom dance (incidentally answering the 'boxers or briefs?' question all too frankly) and didn't even break a sweat. How many people in your town look like this in their fifties?
The younger folk are more or less the same. This guy was my project officer. Having a lazy desk job doesn't excuse you from cutting wood every day for the dinner fire.
(Sorry guys, no photos of the female physique. Very conservative society here, so I'd probably be deported if I started pointing my camera at beautiful young women. Put your hands back on the keyboard.)
To summarise: Don't worry, sore backs are the least of people's worries, where I live. 8^)
I was going to moderate this thread, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to knock down so many canards in one little reply.
Rubbish, and an utter non-sequitur. You're conflating 'control' with 'custom software development'. (I was going to say 'customisation', but a great deal of customisation is often possible with little effort or expertise because of the open nature of the software and the communities that support it.)
Rubbish again. See comment above.
So there's only one ISV that supports Linux in your entire region? I didn't think so. The quality of support resources for FOSS surpasses those of proprietary software in most parts of the world. And FOSS operating systems require, on average, fewer support hours per installation than most proprietary products.
The second clause of that sentence is begging the question. Do you know for a fact that there is no in-house knowledge of FOSS? I didn't think so.
It's true that 'audit' is a strong term to use, because few people do that, as you rightly note. If the GP had said, 'we can look at the source whenever we need to,' the issue would have a very different complexion. I've quickly glanced through FOSS source code to better understand functionality, or to solve a problem, innumerable times. I have never had that luxury with proprietary software.
What you say? Pay for support? Well, forget it then; best to go back to the world of proprietary software where the Tech Support Fairy will fix anything for nothing more than a pat on the head and a cookie.
HTH HAND
I'm from Québec, you insensitive clod!
BINGO. As others have rightly noted, the problem with running computers in a cold environment is not the cold, it's the humidity, to coin a phrase.
I ran an ISP in the Arctic for a few years back in the '90s, and our constant worry was not whether the equipment would get cold - computers actually run quite efficiently when they're cold - but what would happen when parts got close to freezing. All our equipment was delivered by plane, and stored in a warehouse that often reached well below -20 deg. C. We had to bring it into a perfectly dry environment and let it sit for a minimum of 24 hours before powering it on. Anything less would be been, er, expensive. 8^)
We had similar contingencies to cope with heating systems failure, which were not unknown in a place that saw at least one major blizzard (i.e. several days of ~100km/hr winds) a year.
Computers mysteriously start working again when you enter the room? Feh. This hardly qualifies as Voodoo. I mean, it's got a perfectly rational explanation:
One word: Multicast.
I've seen a room full of PCs simultaneously boot and load the same ~1GB Linux partition on a 100Mb network in no time. If they hadn't told me how it was working, I'd never have known they weren't loading a local partition.
Wise words. I wish more people would live by them
I would find this whole airport security thing rather amusing, if it weren't such a pain in the tuckus. I think Bruce Schneier summed it up rather nicely in his latest Crypto-gram when he characterised all these draconian restrictions as 'Security Theatre' - something that looks like security to those who don't know any better, but ultimately has no real effect.
He also points out that if we're to learn anything from this event, it's that classical police/intelligence operations work. Authorities knew about the would-be bombers well in advance, they learned as much as they could about the cell, then shut it down before it could do damage. Biometric IDs, airport baggage checks, no-fly lists and other kinds of security theatre contributed nothing whatsoever to the outcome.
Exactly! I mean, that's how BSD and Linux do it... isn't it?
The fact that Joe Lieberman couldn't keep his website running is a good metaphor for why he lost this challenge by someone who even a few months ago was a nobody.
I think it's particularly interesting that political websites all across the US have been sluggish and crash-happy for most of the day. The amount of interest in this single campaign (a primary, ffs!) crashed not only Joe Lieberman's site, but forced Kos to run a stripped down front page, completely b0rked the official results page, and has slowed down just about any place with breaking news about this race.
I know it's inane to speak of the Power of the Web. The web's not doing anything; it's just people doing what they've always done - showing curiousity whenever something catches their interest. The difference here is that the medium has changed, and this particular medium has created the ability to generate political clout for those who know how to use it. I don't mean that in the Goebbels 'Big Lie' sense - quite the opposite. This campaign in particular has shown that on the Internet, all lies are shallow. And that's a direct challenge to American Politics as it's practised today.
Not necessarily. I work in the developing world, and one of the biggest problems we face is poor quality monitors in rooms that are too bright. Most places in the tropics have very open buildings, and artificial lighting is a luxury, so one often finds oneself sitting in a room where an LCD screen is almost unusable. I imagine that, working as he does in Beirut, the circumstances he describes are quite plausible.
I'm not defending the photographer, by the way - I simply want to correct the assumption that he was talking nonsense.
You don't know? Why not? You're a contracted tester, which means you're supposed to know this stuff. You say you're testing the firewall, so how about doing an audit? Throw everything you have at a vanilla installation and see what happens. Document that and feed it back, to MS at least, and to us if you haven't signed an NDA. How hard can that be?
Ah, well that explains a lot. Why not post again when you've got more than a 'feeling' about things?
HTH HAND
You're absolutely right about basic infrastructure. Transport and communications are integral to a viable economy. This, by the way, is exactly why we need tools like solar powered wireless - to bootstrap communications in areas where 'proper' infrastructure of the kind you see in North America or western Europe is just plain impossible.
You'll be glad to know, by the way, that the US is devoting USD 68 million to the country where I work to do exactly that. It's building roads, airstrips and wharfs. By all accounts, it's one of the best-run development projects this country has seen since colonial times.
Both. Now quit offering these simplistic and narrow-minded false alternatives.
Did it ever occur to you that in order to deliver aid, people might need communications capability? Or that the vast majority of people are not dying of being poor, they're living with it. This means that if they're going to improve their lot - and everyone on the face of this earth has that right - they might need access to information in order to do so?
I know you think you're being darkly humourous (or maybe just fasionably cynical - it's hard to tell), but there's a bit of truth in what you say.
I work on a project whose aim is very directly pointed at improving communications so that people in rural areas can actually find out just how bad things are in the capital. One of the biggest problems we face here in terms of political reform is the fact that there's absolutely no follow-up, no accountability for elected officials. They buy votes with a few pots and pans and bags of rice, then disappear for four years. But if their villagers actually knew just how much money they were making (and wasting on their cronies), there would be hell to pay.
So if someone with family in the city were to receive news (including, for example, photos of the MP in his fancy new car), it would be a lot harder for him to lie to them the next time around.
It's not a complete solution, by any means. We only need to look at the state of politics in our own so-called developed countries for evidence. But it's a good start, and a vast improvement on the utter lack of communications capacity that most places in the world have to deal with today.
For heaven's sake, would you stop with this nonsense. This is not about ISPs; this is about carriers! I'm sick of people trotting out this mendacious argument that everything will be fine if we can just switch ISPs. Network Neutrality has little or nothing to do with the last mile. It's all about the backbone carriers, who are proposing to extract a tithe from anyone who wants to use their bandwidth, in spite of the fact that they've already paid for Internet access. This behaviour is unethical, and currently illegal. The carriers want to change the rules, and in so doing ring the death knell of free access to information.
There is nothing 'fine' about criminal conspiracy, whether Congress rubber stamps it or not.
For everyone else in the software world, 'beta' means 'feature freeze'. Beta is defined as the time when an application is feature complete, but whose features are still unstable, making the software unsuitable for production environments. This, by the way, is why so much FOSS spends literally years reaching the 1.0 mark. The software may (or may not) be stable, but because it's not feature-complete, it's not worthy of a 1.0 designation.
Commercial pressures have forced some products to move away from this, so that pre-beta software is released as beta, actual beta software gets an arbitrary version number (remember the version wars of the mid 90's?), and release software gets called a 'service pack'. It's kind of sad that it has to be this way, but marketing is a cross we all have to bear.
Please, if you're going to use football (sorry, 'soccer') metaphors, at least do it right. It should be:
"GGGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLL LLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
The Marianas Trench? Are you insane, man? Don't you remember what happened last time we dumped nukes in the Pacific?
I couldn't agree more. I work in development, in a country that's internationally known as a malaria hotspot. Several people I know are employed by Gates Foundation money, and everyone here agrees that this is a good thing. But there's a limit to how much good this kind of thing can do.
One friend of mine once politely mentioned to a Gates Foundation researcher that we don't really need to know much more about malaria in this country. All we really need is trained and equipped medical staff within a day's walk of every man, woman and child. Malaria isn't a terribly dangerous disease if it's treated properly. I've had it myself, by the way, so I know whereof I speak.
The big problem in disease prevention around the world is an almost unbelievable shortage of health workers and medicines. Very little is being done to address these fundamental issues. Here's an interesting series of facts:
(Source: Harper's Index.)
Again, I respect the work being done by the Gates Foundation, and I've seen its benefits with my own eyes. But to assume that those people working to try and improve education and communications are not involved in something equally vital is a little silly. In fact, it smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude that tends to tarnish most donor-driven projects, and often results in people chasing 'sexy' aid projects at the expense of 'boring' things like making sure that the local nurse has enough pills for everyone, and can order more when he needs them.
I think that's a fair enough response. But nonetheless, I think it's also fair to question the design philosophy which MS is following here, and to challenge it on its merits. Personally, I think enabling extra features on the principle that they might be useful to a subset of users is a questionable practice. I'm especially leery of enabling features that make it possible for ignorant (i.e. not savvy) or careless users to do really bad things. And I'm most leery of features that actually encourage carelessness.
A lot of computerised data is important and needs to be treated carefully. This includes planning when and how to manage change. The prospect of a PHB telling staff to simply use a built-in and poorly understood versioning feature fills me with concern. For corporate data at least, I think an explicit, formalised process for change management should be required. I've consulted with very large corporations and advised such action in the past, to varying effect.
I'll be the first to agree that the sane thing to do is not to demand the feature be pulled (which, in fairness has not yet been suggested in this discussion) but to get a fuller understanding of its positive and negative attributes. I hesitate to come to a quick conclusion, but on the face of it, this feature seem to create more problems than it solves in a corporate environment:
So without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I think it's fair and reasonable to suggest that this feature should be disabled by default, with an easy interface to enable it for those who decide they want it. I wouldn't equate this design decision with fiascos like ActiveX in IE (which IMO borders on criminal negligence), but I would suggest that its source is the same lack of focus coupled with the desire to make things easy without considering the costs of having done so.
Hate to burst your bubble, but that's exactly what the FDA does with pharmaceuticals. Both government and business will go out of their way to ignore safety issues when there's money involved.
WTF? I understand what you're getting at, but please think about what you've just written for a second.
It's not at all silly to give developers full access to your system internals, as long as you're clear about the repercussions of using them. In fact, there's a whole bunch of developers using this stuff called FOSS, which is based entirely on this principle.
I know, I know; your point is that if developers depend on a certain implementation, then the vendor is forced to continue supporting it forever, which, according to your reasoning, leaves them with no further room to grow or innovate. Unfortunately, that perspective is just bollocks. FOSS developers deal with this every day, and they've found a perfectly workable process:
Supported APIs are marked as such. Deprecated APIs are marked, too, with the clear warning that past this version, you're on your own. Unsupported interactions with the internals are marked - not fenced, but simply labled Here Be Dragons. You're welcome to venture there if you want, but don't go asking for help if something goes wrong. Most developers benefit from a better understanding of how the whole system works, and can in fact suggest or offer improvements in upstream functionality as well as better implementing their own.
I'd be fascinated to know why you think that things are somehow different for Microsoft than they are for IBM or Novell.
I'll take you at your word that you're not trolling, and in fairness, your scepticism is phrased a lot more gently than many others'.
I think your misunderstanding stems from the assumption that we'd be skipping an essential step, when in fact what's happening is that we're moving straight to a point that other (developed) nations had to reach in small increments.
Wireless networks like the kind used in these laptops are infrastructure. They're also many times more cost-effective than laying cable into every home, and many times more versatile as well. True, they come with their own contraints and limitations (e.g. calling 911 from a tunnel) but most people in the developing world are happy to accept them. You see, there's simply no way that they could pay for the kind of infrastructure that exists in the US, for example.
There are innumerable opportunities for people all over the world to work in service industries that require only a network-connected computer and a well-educated user. People living in many developing nations can leap straight to the head of this particular queue without having to spend a generation working in the sweatshops and mines as our grandparents and parents did. IMO, that's a Good Thing.
In some ways, this actually plays to the advantage of the developing world. It means that they can immediately derive the benefits of technological change that, elsewhere in the world, was achieved in small increments, and which is restricted in important ways by what came before. A good analogue for this is England's experience in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution. England pioneered most of the technologies and processes, and had pride of place for some time. But by the time Germany, France and the US got moving, they were able to move straight to the state of the art, while England still had a huge investment in first generation systems that were not nearly as competitive.
The word you're looking for is propagandist. 8^)
I don't often flame people who do this kind of work. On the contrary, I admire, support and participate in online activism in places where dissent can be uncomfortable, to say the least. I'm normally the first to applaud and embrace these technologies. BUT:
I hope their code is better than their understanding of HTML. Their User's Guide goes miles out of its way to break basic web functionality. It's like they're punishing the reader for not choosing PDF in the first place.
Seriously, this is more than a nitpick. If I'm going to trust these folks with information important - possibly dangerous - enough that I have a serious need to protect it, then for heaven's sake I want to know that they know what they're doing. I mean, honestly, this is emphatically not the place where anyone should tolerate hand-waving and pooh-poohing of 'minor' details.
In their own words:
If you really mean this, don't you think you should fix your documentation?