"If the water system was truly privatized, the incentive would be that poor service would result in them losing the contract to provide the water service."
Er, no.
What has happened in a significant number of countries forced into 'Structural Adjustment' by the IMF and/or World bank is that the government is told to sell off publicly owned utilities or face complete loss of access to international finance.
The utilities (like water service) get sold off to private companies from developed nations, which inevitably raise rates beyond the point of affordability for the majority of customers. Revenues fall in certain neighbourhoods, and managers, arguing that it's not cost-effective to perform proper maintenance there, don't service the equipment.
Government officials - assuming they haven't been paid off - can gripe all they want. The managers of the utility blandly point out that they can't provide service in places where they can't make a buck, then head back to the golf^H^H^H^Hoffice.
How do I know? I'm living in a country where this exact process has crippled development of water, electricity and telecommunications services.
He didn't say that Linux and Perl were the most popular choices of programmers, he said *really great hackers* tend to choose them. Popularity among the general programming populace has no direct bearing on this metric.
So let's try and measure things differently. If we hang out in the perl and python communities, we *do* tend to find a surprising number of able hackers, many of whom display the qualities Graham describes.
The Visual Basic communities, however, are not quite so rife with mental agility.
BTW, when you read this, pretend I'm speaking *really* quickly. 8^)
"In other words, one thing is the government censoring the press and the tv, but censoring internet access and fruition is different. It's more personal...."
Damn right! The government will have to pry my fruition from my cold, dead fingers!
I used to work for a company that provided a customised Linux distro as part of our service offering. On a fairly regular basis, someone would start screaming in our forums when we wouldn't give them our source code for free. These people didn't read the GPL, which clearly states:
* that you can charge a fee for the transfer of the source,
* and that you only have to distribute the source with the binary.
Others, of course, can do what they wish with the source. So James seems to be skirting the intent, if not the letter, of the GPL by telling people that they can't redistribute the binaries.
We ran a network operations center to provide support for several hundred servers spread over two continents. Each hour, every server would 'phone home' to see if it needed updates or configuration changes. This was a fairly data-heavy operation, requiring many database lookups. We knew that we didn't want every server calling at the same time, so we had each server derive its own random integer between 1 and 59, and to use that as the minute of the hour to contact the NOC.
Before long we found that the NOC was dragging itself into a death spiral of overwork. The problem? By chance, an unusually large number of servers chose a very small range of numbers. Worse, they just happened to choose numbers close to 05, which just happened to be when some very large cron tasks were running as well.
Try rolling a die 100 times. Even though the odds are the same every time before you roll, the actual frequency of occurence of the individual numbers is not even. Leaving the choice of retrieval time to the client does not reliably reduce the chance of a server being overwhelmed. In fact, it more or less guarantees traffic spikes.
I'm not intimately familiar with RSS client or server implementations, but I suspect that it would be fairly easy to format a suggested refresh interval and refresh time on the server and send that to the client.
"In that sense, the original code remains free but the new code must also be similarly "free"."
Absolutely correct. If you choose to stand on the shoulders of this particular giant - who happens to want to remain free - you must respect its wishes.
"In that respect it "disrespects" the authors of the new software by preventing them from choosing the licensing terms they prefer."
Er... I believe you are trying to make the cart pull the horse here. If you choose to profit from someone else's labours by adding to them in some way, they have every right to have some influence on the terms under which you distribute the results. If you write new software (your word), then you too get to dictate the terms under which it is used. No one requires that you use GPL software in your own code.
"It seems that the FSF wants software to be free - but part of being free is having the right to develop non-free software."
Sorry, I may be frighteningly stupid, but in what way does the GPL prevent anyone from writing non-free software? The only limitation that I'm aware of is that if you use someone else's GPL'ed software, you have to respect their wish that their software remains free.
So, unless you can find a quote from RMS saying that there is only One True License, and that all developers should be forced to use it every time, I'd suggest that you're talking through your tin-foil hat.
"It's getting very tiring reading the overtly partisan comments on shashdot."
So, you'd rather see implicitly partisan comments? 8^)
"I would like to remind [...] everyone that there is an approximate even split in American public opinion on politics."
And I would like to remind you that, while slashdot is a site based in the US, its membership is comprised of people from all across the world, many of whom - rightly - have opinions about US politics, because it affects their lives, too, via foreign and market policies. The weight of opinion is far more one-sided outside your borders.
So please, remember that this is 'News for nerds, stuff that matters.' I believe that the outcome of the upcoming election will have repercussions that fall squarely into this definition.
I'll grant you that making GWB say something stupid is pretty sophomoric, but as Voltaire once said, I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it to the death.
Democracy - online and off - does involve the right to say stupid things. That's why we have moderators. 8^)
I personally take heart from the fact that graphic designers don't have time to work on FOSS, because in my experience they are guilty of some of the worst infractions against usability I've ever encountered.
I say this, by the way, as a graphic designer who graduated to software development, and who has been involved in UI development since before Nielsen invented the term 'usability'.
I mean, wi-fi on a boat is no big thing if the boat isn't moving. Effectively, it's just wi-fi on a house with ocean view, isn't it?
So please, somebody: Post a link to affordable wireless technologies that will actually help people on the fringes of the Internet. I'm writing from a South Pacific island where we have the dubious privilege of paying USD 200/month for dial-up access. Affordable wireless over distance is something we dream about so fervently we often have to clean the sheets in the morning.
I'm currently doing a volunteer IT gig in the South Pacific. I'm not saying it will be the same in Uganda, but in my experience, when computers go to schools, they go to administrators and teachers first. Consider putting straightforward office software on it, as well as educational goodies.
And... DO NOT put Microsoft anything on, if you can avoid it. Even trivial bugs can make a computer useless if it's unsupported. Spend some time configuring a bullet-proof installation of Linux with OO.o, and everything will be fine.
And before anyone moans about lack of training/experience with Linux. People generally don't have ANY training in ANYTHING, anyway. They can learn to navigate GNOME or KDE just as easily as Windows, and with far fewer hassles. I've watched people with little or no experience pick up and use OO.o productively within a day.
One of the biggest problems I run into is getting computers to play nice with printers. Nobody knows how to make these things work. In fact, I've seen printers put onto planes and shipped off for service because the driver wasn't installed correctly. If you could pick up one of those older portable inkjets, a bunch of cartridges, and send them along with the (preconfigured) laptop, you'd be rendering a significant service.
Yeah, it's probably more time, money and effort than you might have intended. But you DO want to help, don't you? 8^)
One more thing: A friend of mine from Kenya (who's worked in Uganda) tells me that in urban areas, computer usage is fairly high. In rural areas, it's almost nil, due to lack of power. Do you know where your laptop is going? You might want to send an extra battery, and/or consider sending a solar charger to accompany it. We use a LOT of them here.
[Sorry for the title, but with so much noise on this topic, I figured I'd have to do an Al Franken to get noticed.]
For the first time ever on slashdot, I gave up reading even the highest modded contents.
ATTENTION: MS Shills
When you're given your talking points, try not to quote them. Seeing the same key phrases in post after post makes you all look like - I have to say it - the Borg. Besides, it's hard to fake a groundswell when everyone arrives chanting the same slogan.
Also, you're not going to be effective if you monopolise the high karma. Let a few honest posts drift up to the top as well. It's called camouflage.
I don't know who's paying for this astroturf, but it sure needs trimming
I won't make any effort to defend Sterling's glibness. He's obviously not bothering to take the time to write coherent counter-arguments. I suspect, though, that he figures he doesn't have to.
I would have thought that people know where nuclear weapons fuel comes from. But most people posting responses to this article seem confused about why Sterling keeps equating the presence of nuclear energy with the presence of nuclear weapons. Well, it's not difficult to verify that the vast majority of countries possessing nuclear generating stations also - coincidentally? - possess nuclear weapons. Sterling suggests implicitly that nuclear technology proliferation leads inevitably to nuclear weapons proliferation. This is demonstrably true.
I would hope that in this day and age the perils of nuclear weapons proliferation don't need to be spelled out yet again.
People talk a *lot* about nuclear safety, and cite the low number of incidents resulting in injury as a measure of its safety. Perhaps. I know that in Canada this safety has come at unbelievable expense. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent building nuclear reactors that were taken offline far before their end of service because of significant safety failures. When you factor in the cost of repair, the cost in terms of shortened generating lifetime and the cost of paying for alternate sources of electricity at short-term (read: expensive) market rates, the price of this power source is immense.
So, if we do choose nuclear as the energy generation method for us, based on practical experience, we're faced with two mutually undesirable alternatives:
1) Live with the fact that the real cost of energy will skyrocket, because we know now that the cost of running these things safely is orders of magnitude greater than what was predicted.[*]
[*] And no, I don't even touch on the issue of disposal here. Operating costs only.
2) Live with the lower operating costs and pretend that this won't result in a problem.
I personally don't like either one of those alternatives. I suspect that if people follow Lovelock's advice, they will opt for the latter.
So why did Sterling decide to answer in that manner, rather than sagely reasoning out his response? I can't answer for him, but I suspect it's because when he sees idiotic assertions stating that a third of us will die from cancer from oxygen anyway (what?!?), so that makes it okay for us to significantly increase our cancer risk (see item 2 above), maybe he figures that Lovelock's arguments are prima facie ridiculous. I'd be prone to agree. I think Sterling gives Lovelock's misinformed disingenuousness all the intellectual rigour it deserves.
Sure, anyone with a strong Wi-Fi antenna and a few IADs strewn about can make real-time interactive audio work. That's not the challenge. The challenge really lies in providing carrier-class services over IP. People expect phones to work, 100% of the time, between any two handsets worldwide. And they want audio quality and precision clarity.
When you say 'people', you mean 'Americans', right? Because where I live, this technology looks fantastic. Why? Because most people here don't have phones. The local telco has priced them out of reach.
Right now, the only way people in most villages are going to get voice and data service of any kind... is by rolling their own. Cringely's dead right about how we're going to do it.
I appreciate that you probably don't get out much. But please, the next time you start assuming that America is more than a tiny fraction of the world, think again.
Slashdot Mirror
"If the water system was truly privatized, the incentive would be that poor service would result in them losing the contract to provide the water service."
Er, no.
What has happened in a significant number of countries forced into 'Structural Adjustment' by the IMF and/or World bank is that the government is told to sell off publicly owned utilities or face complete loss of access to international finance.
The utilities (like water service) get sold off to private companies from developed nations, which inevitably raise rates beyond the point of affordability for the majority of customers. Revenues fall in certain neighbourhoods, and managers, arguing that it's not cost-effective to perform proper maintenance there, don't service the equipment.
Government officials - assuming they haven't been paid off - can gripe all they want. The managers of the utility blandly point out that they can't provide service in places where they can't make a buck, then head back to the golf^H^H^H^Hoffice.
How do I know? I'm living in a country where this exact process has crippled development of water, electricity and telecommunications services .
"(note to distributors: PLEASE start designing for a versioned /etc .)."
Done.
See, this is why I love Free Software.
"Talk about preaching to the converted! And how is this going to work???"
Well, unlike present company, us uber geek types just pretend to be clueless. Then we fix everything we break.
8^)
"Bill Gates's intellectual property guru talks to Brad Stone..."
Please, folks, not everyone is a guru.
It's bad enough that hackers lost their good name.
Translation: Corporate media sucks, and Microsoft does too. Go back to sleep.
What kind of a sysadmin ARE you? With a real sysadmin, the entire conversation looks like:
'Hey Bud-'
LART!
You've got your stats on backwards. 8^)
He didn't say that Linux and Perl were the most popular choices of programmers, he said *really great hackers* tend to choose them. Popularity among the general programming populace has no direct bearing on this metric.
So let's try and measure things differently. If we hang out in the perl and python communities, we *do* tend to find a surprising number of able hackers, many of whom display the qualities Graham describes.
The Visual Basic communities, however, are not quite so rife with mental agility.
BTW, when you read this, pretend I'm speaking *really* quickly. 8^)
" I'm not sure if this is a GPL is legally valid president...."
Well, I'm not sure Bush is, either, but we do have to put up with him for the time being.
8^)
"In other words, one thing is the government censoring the press and the tv, but censoring internet access and fruition is different. It's more personal...."
Damn right! The government will have to pry my fruition from my cold, dead fingers!
*blink*
I used to work for a company that provided a customised Linux distro as part of our service offering. On a fairly regular basis, someone would start screaming in our forums when we wouldn't give them our source code for free. These people didn't read the GPL, which clearly states:
... or thwim
* that you can charge a fee for the transfer of the source,
* and that you only have to distribute the source with the binary.
Others, of course, can do what they wish with the source. So James seems to be skirting the intent, if not the letter, of the GPL by telling people that they can't redistribute the binaries.
--
Think
back in the days when everyone ate apples. Now that it's Twinkies, however, it's bad.
Strange.
--
Think... or thwim
True story:
We ran a network operations center to provide support for several hundred servers spread over two continents. Each hour, every server would 'phone home' to see if it needed updates or configuration changes. This was a fairly data-heavy operation, requiring many database lookups. We knew that we didn't want every server calling at the same time, so we had each server derive its own random integer between 1 and 59, and to use that as the minute of the hour to contact the NOC.
Before long we found that the NOC was dragging itself into a death spiral of overwork. The problem? By chance, an unusually large number of servers chose a very small range of numbers. Worse, they just happened to choose numbers close to 05, which just happened to be when some very large cron tasks were running as well.
Try rolling a die 100 times. Even though the odds are the same every time before you roll, the actual frequency of occurence of the individual numbers is not even. Leaving the choice of retrieval time to the client does not reliably reduce the chance of a server being overwhelmed. In fact, it more or less guarantees traffic spikes.
I'm not intimately familiar with RSS client or server implementations, but I suspect that it would be fairly easy to format a suggested refresh interval and refresh time on the server and send that to the client.
" Send the coder to the Open Source world because no one is going to pay him to code anymore."
Wow, does that mean that the $90K+/yr I made for the last three years working on FOSS wasn't real?
Maybe I should give my car back.... 8^)
"In that sense, the original code remains free but the new code must also be similarly "free"."
Absolutely correct. If you choose to stand on the shoulders of this particular giant - who happens to want to remain free - you must respect its wishes.
"In that respect it "disrespects" the authors of the new software by preventing them from choosing the licensing terms they prefer."
Er... I believe you are trying to make the cart pull the horse here. If you choose to profit from someone else's labours by adding to them in some way, they have every right to have some influence on the terms under which you distribute the results. If you write new software (your word), then you too get to dictate the terms under which it is used. No one requires that you use GPL software in your own code.
No disrespect there, as far as I can see....
"It seems that the FSF wants software to be free - but part of being free is having the right to develop non-free software."
Sorry, I may be frighteningly stupid, but in what way does the GPL prevent anyone from writing non-free software? The only limitation that I'm aware of is that if you use someone else's GPL'ed software, you have to respect their wish that their software remains free.
So, unless you can find a quote from RMS saying that there is only One True License, and that all developers should be forced to use it every time, I'd suggest that you're talking through your tin-foil hat.
I had to replace an expired passport last year, so now I get to wait until 2008 before I have to worry about this.
I'm sure they'll have the bugs worked out by then....
... Right?
"It's getting very tiring reading the overtly partisan comments on shashdot."
So, you'd rather see implicitly partisan comments? 8^)
"I would like to remind [...] everyone that there is an approximate even split in American public opinion on politics."
And I would like to remind you that, while slashdot is a site based in the US, its membership is comprised of people from all across the world, many of whom - rightly - have opinions about US politics, because it affects their lives, too, via foreign and market policies. The weight of opinion is far more one-sided outside your borders.
So please, remember that this is 'News for nerds, stuff that matters.' I believe that the outcome of the upcoming election will have repercussions that fall squarely into this definition.
I'll grant you that making GWB say something stupid is pretty sophomoric, but as Voltaire once said, I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it to the death.
Democracy - online and off - does involve the right to say stupid things. That's why we have moderators. 8^)
USABILITY != PRETTY
I personally take heart from the fact that graphic designers don't have time to work on FOSS, because in my experience they are guilty of some of the worst infractions against usability I've ever encountered.
I say this, by the way, as a graphic designer who graduated to software development, and who has been involved in UI development since before Nielsen invented the term 'usability'.
That is all
"...a host of Playboy centerfolds, who will then proceed to sexually pleasure me in ways unknown to mortal men..."
Er, be advised, those 'ways' involve haggis and bagpipes.
Sincerely,
The Highlander
I mean, wi-fi on a boat is no big thing if the boat isn't moving. Effectively, it's just wi-fi on a house with ocean view, isn't it?
So please, somebody: Post a link to affordable wireless technologies that will actually help people on the fringes of the Internet. I'm writing from a South Pacific island where we have the dubious privilege of paying USD 200/month for dial-up access. Affordable wireless over distance is something we dream about so fervently we often have to clean the sheets in the morning.
Crumb's Theorem:
The chances that George W. Bush actually is to blame is directly proportional to the number of months he has been in office.
I'm currently doing a volunteer IT gig in the South Pacific. I'm not saying it will be the same in Uganda, but in my experience, when computers go to schools, they go to administrators and teachers first. Consider putting straightforward office software on it, as well as educational goodies.
And... DO NOT put Microsoft anything on, if you can avoid it. Even trivial bugs can make a computer useless if it's unsupported. Spend some time configuring a bullet-proof installation of Linux with OO.o, and everything will be fine.
And before anyone moans about lack of training/experience with Linux. People generally don't have ANY training in ANYTHING, anyway. They can learn to navigate GNOME or KDE just as easily as Windows, and with far fewer hassles. I've watched people with little or no experience pick up and use OO.o productively within a day.
One of the biggest problems I run into is getting computers to play nice with printers. Nobody knows how to make these things work. In fact, I've seen printers put onto planes and shipped off for service because the driver wasn't installed correctly. If you could pick up one of those older portable inkjets, a bunch of cartridges, and send them along with the (preconfigured) laptop, you'd be rendering a significant service.
Yeah, it's probably more time, money and effort than you might have intended. But you DO want to help, don't you? 8^)
One more thing: A friend of mine from Kenya (who's worked in Uganda) tells me that in urban areas, computer usage is fairly high. In rural areas, it's almost nil, due to lack of power. Do you know where your laptop is going? You might want to send an extra battery, and/or consider sending a solar charger to accompany it. We use a LOT of them here.
[Sorry for the title, but with so much noise on this topic, I figured I'd have to do an Al Franken to get noticed.]
For the first time ever on slashdot, I gave up reading even the highest modded contents.
ATTENTION: MS Shills
When you're given your talking points, try not to quote them. Seeing the same key phrases in post after post makes you all look like - I have to say it - the Borg. Besides, it's hard to fake a groundswell when everyone arrives chanting the same slogan.
Also, you're not going to be effective if you monopolise the high karma. Let a few honest posts drift up to the top as well. It's called camouflage.
I don't know who's paying for this astroturf, but it sure needs trimming
... Let's think about this for a second.
I won't make any effort to defend Sterling's glibness. He's obviously not bothering to take the time to write coherent counter-arguments. I suspect, though, that he figures he doesn't have to.
I would have thought that people know where nuclear weapons fuel comes from. But most people posting responses to this article seem confused about why Sterling keeps equating the presence of nuclear energy with the presence of nuclear weapons. Well, it's not difficult to verify that the vast majority of countries possessing nuclear generating stations also - coincidentally? - possess nuclear weapons. Sterling suggests implicitly that nuclear technology proliferation leads inevitably to nuclear weapons proliferation. This is demonstrably true.
I would hope that in this day and age the perils of nuclear weapons proliferation don't need to be spelled out yet again.
People talk a *lot* about nuclear safety, and cite the low number of incidents resulting in injury as a measure of its safety. Perhaps. I know that in Canada this safety has come at unbelievable expense. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent building nuclear reactors that were taken offline far before their end of service because of significant safety failures. When you factor in the cost of repair, the cost in terms of shortened generating lifetime and the cost of paying for alternate sources of electricity at short-term (read: expensive) market rates, the price of this power source is immense.
So, if we do choose nuclear as the energy generation method for us, based on practical experience, we're faced with two mutually undesirable alternatives:
1) Live with the fact that the real cost of energy will skyrocket, because we know now that the cost of running these things safely is orders of magnitude greater than what was predicted.[*]
[*] And no, I don't even touch on the issue of disposal here. Operating costs only.
2) Live with the lower operating costs and pretend that this won't result in a problem.
I personally don't like either one of those alternatives. I suspect that if people follow Lovelock's advice, they will opt for the latter.
So why did Sterling decide to answer in that manner, rather than sagely reasoning out his response? I can't answer for him, but I suspect it's because when he sees idiotic assertions stating that a third of us will die from cancer from oxygen anyway (what?!?), so that makes it okay for us to significantly increase our cancer risk (see item 2 above), maybe he figures that Lovelock's arguments are prima facie ridiculous. I'd be prone to agree. I think Sterling gives Lovelock's misinformed disingenuousness all the intellectual rigour it deserves.
Quoth parent:
Sure, anyone with a strong Wi-Fi antenna and a few IADs strewn about can make real-time interactive audio work. That's not the challenge. The challenge really lies in providing carrier-class services over IP. People expect phones to work, 100% of the time, between any two handsets worldwide. And they want audio quality and precision clarity.
When you say 'people', you mean 'Americans', right? Because where I live, this technology looks fantastic. Why? Because most people here don't have phones. The local telco has priced them out of reach.
Right now, the only way people in most villages are going to get voice and data service of any kind... is by rolling their own. Cringely's dead right about how we're going to do it.
I appreciate that you probably don't get out much. But please, the next time you start assuming that America is more than a tiny fraction of the world, think again.
Love,
The developing world