Cue the standard replies of "but the money will be made up in service!". That's what India is for.
Maybe. We'll see. The difference between "please execute this plan" and "How do we best do blah" is what I bet my company on. Sure, in theory you can outsource market knowledge. How many companies have oursourced executives, recently?
And anyways it ignores the reality that most organizations (and individuals) are trying to reduce their IT spending to $0, and they'll do whatever they can to achieve that.
Of course. I would like to reduce my housing budget to zero. Similarly, it would be cool if I could run a business supplying people with neat software without spending money. And I do, in fact, do whatever I can to lower the cost of labor. Frequently, that labor is mine. Sometimes, that's someone else's. And yes, when I can reduce it, there's a profit margin difference. Over time, it goes away, somthing I've experienced multiple times.
The Amish are regressive and creepy, to a big city denizen like me. I would never like to be a part of a religious community that takes such a strong interest in my personal life.
That said, there's a lot that it interesting about how the Amish regulate technology. My family used to buy milk (the unpasturized in-a-jug sort) from them, and some members of my family provide medical services to some of them.
I think you get the emphasis slightly wrong. While there is a "sanctity of the house" sort of thing going on, it isn't that simple. What is important is continuity of worship, maintenence of the community, and the notion that most of the world is out to get you. And, honestly, the third part of that isn't unreasonable, if you wrap your head around the first part, and then the second follows. There's also a notion of severance from the worldly-world; they participate, in recognition of physics, but would rather not, and as a compromise, enforce a barrier built out of arms-length dealing, clothing, and behaviour.
To be honest, they're my favorite cult, if I had to pick one. Menonites can be(and are, in places) a lot worse, and Adventists seem to spend a lot of time on the separation issue, to the pain of the adherents. I haven't had much contact with others, but we can all read about them.
For the record, I'm an athiest by faith, an agnostic by thought, and mostly interested in mathematical abstractions, which inform my worldview in much the same way that religion does for others. So what do I know, I'm a kook, as these things go.
The amusing questions won't be asked. But I do wonder if this announcement has anything to do with the unnamed, massive, something-to-do-with-space, spending bill that even pocket Republicans don't want to support.
I don't know who this "Thomas Jefferson" person is, but with that kind of commie pinko thinking, I shudder to think where this country would have gotten. Do you know anyone else who thinks like this? we should make some _lists_. Teach 'em a lesson.
At the risk of being arrogant, I consider myself a savvy admin, too. Admins who can keep users happy, actually plan operations with competency, and can handle the occasional serious issue (e.g., nail the cause with imperfect information under pressure and come up with a creative fix) are rare.
I think that's because if you're truly good at problem solving and have the learned the tricks of managing technical operations, you're probably not content to stay an admin. "Promoted to the point of incompentence", and all that. Me, I got sick of users and management, and started a business. So now, I'm attempting to become competent at sales, finance and sleep management. Ah, folly. Looked at sideways, it is more fun.
(1) It funds universities. Not a huge point, if you're not a university administrator, but a valid one - selling a college education is worth much more to the economy than selling an expensive car overseas.
(2) It feeds our skilled workforce. Many people who are educated here elect to stay. If you agree that top-flight people are worth having around, than this is good.
(3) It facillitates idea exchange. Folks at school learn from each other, sometimes more than fromtheir professors. I can't think of a downside here.
(4) It builds international connections. People who went to school together tend to stay in contact. They make business deals, diplomatic relations, and generally help countries understand each other.
If that really isn't enough for you, look to history for what happens to nations that become myopic. Don't think it won't happen here, unless you're prepared to explain how the U.S. is different from every other empire in history.
He rarely comments, usually he is reporting news that you wouldn't otherwise see.
Actually, he rarely reports anything other than potential talking points people are trialing to see if they'll take, random rumor and innuendo, and the like. He's a muppet, and you'd hear it from someone else if you didn't hear it from him.
I may be a little biased, as my business builds this sort of thing for other companies. But You really have to build this stuff. There are nice tools out there that can serve as building blocks, but what you're really looking for is a business management package, which is going to be as specialized as your business. Automating proposals, ticket tracking, scheduling, billing and network diagramming is just not something that is out there as a pre-existing package.
Another thing to consider is that it is hard to move a company to a business automation system. You have to carefully get everyone lined up, take their concerns into account, watch for potential turf-wars, teach everyone to use if properly, and deploy it without a hitch. Oh, and that's assuming you built the right thing in the first place. Don't underestimate the difficulty of getting this sort of thing right - it is much more than a technical problem.
It is not your RIGHT to reverse the technology that makes it OS-specific and distribute those means to others.
Four questions:
- it is my 'RIGHT' to observe and learn the laws of mathematics?
- is it my 'RIGHT' to purchase a watch, look at what it does, and learn from what I see?
- is it my 'RIGHT' to busy myself with making things for others using my knowledge?
- Assuming you said 'yes' the the above (given the readership, not actually an entirely rhetorical question), what is the difference between the three activities listed above and reverse engineering software?
Making things complicated makes for a nice law practice, if that is what you're in to. Making things simple is what actually advances the human race.
The companies should do everything they can to prevent catastrophic failures of their products from harming human life. Yes, even if safety means they can't produce tiny products for tiny prices, I still expect them to make their product safe.
You have to define your terms. What does "safe" mean? Does it mean that the product will never harm someone? If so, then the product cannot be produced - there is no such thing as a perfectly safe object.
If you accept that it is acceptable that sold objects can have some margin of risk associated with them, then, yes, your next question comes into play.
If the phones had a 1 out of 500,000 chance of killing someone, would you still be okay with demanding the low price unsafe product?
That depends on the price point for more or less safety, the usage pattern, what exactly the "chance of killing someone" means (e.g., over the lifetime of the product, per use, etc.), and the actual utility of the item.
These are partially actuarial questions, and partially personal utility/economic questions only individuals can make for themselves. There are products out there that have much higher death/serious injury risks associated with them that are happily bought and sold every day (think parachutes and prescription drugs, for starters).
Bruce Schneier has a great quote about this:
More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows
just how good we are at evaluating risks.
- Bruce Schneier
Another example: More children drown every year in 5 gallon buckets than due to guns. I see no "million mom marches" against these preventable deaths, even though safety features could be thought up to prevent bucket drownings at significantly less cost-per-unit than some of the features proposed for guns. (Sorry, I couldn't find a reference for that figure on buckets online - I read it in the Economist some time back.)
If you don't accept that safety is an economic tradeoff, you'll never be able to make rational choices about safety.
(For my part, I hate cell phones, so I don't have one because the (negative) utility of the product is certainly not worth the cost - no risk analysis needed.)
Yet RedHat continues to use an inferior system, and people continue to use RedHat.
Hm, I'm not accusing RH of anything here, but it did just occur to me that dependency messes in RPMs could be a positive thing for RH - it provides an encouragement for the users they do have to *only* install RH packages, in order to avoid.so messes and whatnot.
Depends on how you count, I suppose. Hitler killed himself when things didn't work out for him. Tojo tried to kill himself, and then was executed as a direct result of his actions during the war.
Simply put, the only argument that you have put forward that IE is less secure is that the default installation is not locked down properly. This has nothing to do with something so grand as a security model, but is simply an issue of default misconfiguration.
So, providing a vector for the jerks of the world to infect grandma is OK by you, then, right?
I fully accept that it is possible to run IE securely,for some definitions of "secure". The question becomes, what best enables world commerce on the web? Remember to factor in Grandma, who can't move to Thailand to retire because Russian scammers tricked IE into tricking her. Her fault? Sure. But also the IE team's.
Past Presidents have taken it to whole new levels though. Hell, you can lie, be proven to be a liar and the public will still vote for you.
You fail to identify anyone, so I can only assume you're referring to Ronald "I don't recall" Reagan, and pointing at George "Read my lips" Bush as a cautionary tale.
At least the first one had an excuse - mental problems should disqualify people from office, but currently don't.
A telling bit from one of the articles (emphasis mine):
Hoping to prevent the loss of a child through kidnapping or more innocent circumstances, a few schools have begun monitoring student arrivals and departures using technology similar to that used to track livestock and pallets of retail shipments.
Not my experience at all, but to each their own. Jumpstart, ssh and some fairly simple scripts made it all quite easy for me to deal with hundreds of boxes with time left over to handle the cranky crap and other systems.
You're right, I've never dealt with video tools. Not my area. X I have done, and had no problems porting things.
Administering Solaris has been, traditionally, as much work as administering 3 different Linux releases at the same time. The subtle distinctions between their various compilers, the oddness they did to X, and their refusal to replace their various shells and command line utilities like "compress" with the vastly superior open source tools like "gzip" meant that to do any real work, you had to spend a huge amount of time porting over your tools both ways.
I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps if you came to Solaris from the linux world and expected things to behave the same...
I used to maintain a huge pile of Sun boxes, and rather liked it. I was supporting FreeBSD boxes at the same time, and ditto. I started cursing a lot more after adding Linux to the mix, until I got used to it.
It you take the time to set up your environment, Solaris is no worse than anyone else. Of course, I _do_ really like apt, and wish everyone would use it, now that I'm used to it. But dealing with patchclusters is actually quite a lot more straightforward than the where-the-hell-is-libsuxx0r-3.1.25.6r.rpm,-and-now -I-have-to-upgrade-glibc game, IMHO.
And porting Solaris code to the non-Solaris world is often quite difficult.
Maybe so, if you don't write portable software... all of mine compiles on Solaris, fBSD, and the various Linuxen without a tweak.
That said, I'm glad I'm no longer a professional admin... I got really sick of it. But that's a different story.
You seem to be complaining that libertarianism is not a law of physics. And you're right. Nor is socialism, parlimentary democracy, Christianity, or putting down the seat after using the toilet. If any philosphy were comprable to the laws of thermodynamics, we wouldn't be having this discussion, we'd be living it.
There is a great body of moral philosphy that tends to support libertarianism; Start with most (though of course not all) Enlightenment era philosphers.
Like the salesman who phone me when I'm eating dinner telling me I should subscribe to The Gazette. I should subcribe to The Gazette. I should subscribe to libertarianism. These statments don't seem different in essence to me.
The difference is that the Gazette salesman does not have a coherent moral philosphy to back up why you should subscribe. Economic arguments work extremely well, too, if you're more of a utilitarianist.
I'm going to decline to offer a philosphy course here; if you're really interested in learning about it, check out some of the references here, under the libertarian sections.
The wider concept is commonly called "area denial" in military jargon, and that sort of thing is out there, and gaining wider military interest since landmines are becoming unpopular. See http://www.stormingmedia.us/keywords/area_denial.h tml.
I can't find a reference to it now, but I remember reading about a couple of prototype systems along these lines - one was an extremely high rate of fire machine gun (upwards of several 100K rounds/second) based on replacable preloaded barrels, and another was a sort of smart mortar with various electronic sensoria and payloads.
Still, you have much the same problem as with any booby-trap, which is why civilized people tend to frown on it...
There certainly is a small amount of "waste" that somehow has to be dealt with, but the point I'm making here is that there is considerable room for improvement, and we are no where near the limits you seem to be implying.
I may have been misleading, or you may have misread - I'm not interested in waste disposal, per se - that was just an example picked up from the parent post, used to talk about a different topic. My little kick is about systemic interactions when progress in one or more elements of the system hits a wall and cannot improve, due to thermodynamic, economic, or other reasons.
I know little more than how to categorize recyclables about waste disposal, so your post was interesting, in any case.
This is an extremely interesting thought to me, and I've been playing with it mentally for a while now. What happens at the limits of optimization?
Vinge, and others, have played with this concept in a sci-fi arena, but I wonder - what happens when, to take your example, garbage men hit the wall on efficiency at disposing garbage? (This implies the whole supply chain - or perhaps I should say the removal chain - of garbage mitigation specialists hitting a limit, including recyclers, dumpers, shippers, lobbyists, specialist accountants, etc.) Inputs to the garbage industry will likely be still capable of increasing demand (or, again oddly for this example, an aspect of supply), so economics start kicking in, raising costs of disposal. With garbage, we're seeing the start of this already, and in some extreme cases, lots of noise (a certain mountain in Navada, for instance).
This has, in turn, second order effects for lots of other industries and people, and almost nobody understands the problem, other than the people who are the maxed out specialists, for a given social, technological and economic milleu. Problems, solutions and examples of poor communication and scams start to multiply.
It is fun stuff to think about, especially because I think we're getting a little close in certain areas. I hope to have a paper out on this soonish.
Are you being disingenuous? Not everything defended as exercise of first amendment rights is genuine "speech." This should be obvious to anyone familiar with either the absurd or almost-reasonable-sounding cases that have been through the courts.
You know, I did write out a response to this, with complicated legal reasoning on your points. I lost it, when I rebooted, (I thought I posted it). But coming back to this, I see the fundamental disagreement: you seem to believe that what the courts say should be law, no matter what. I believe, on the other hand, that if laws stop making sense, then they should be ignored. I suppose this is probably the fundamental disagreement.
For the record, I was being just a little disingenous, but this is slashdot. And actions are speech, whether they are me doodling on paper, someone's back, or blathering on a soap box. Sorry if you don't like that.
The best way to tell if someone supports free will is to see if they follow the statement up with the term, 'but'.
Slashdot Mirror
(Wrong character set, but I think the point holds.)
Maybe. We'll see. The difference between "please execute this plan" and "How do we best do blah" is what I bet my company on. Sure, in theory you can outsource market knowledge. How many companies have oursourced executives, recently?
And anyways it ignores the reality that most organizations (and individuals) are trying to reduce their IT spending to $0, and they'll do whatever they can to achieve that.
Of course. I would like to reduce my housing budget to zero. Similarly, it would be cool if I could run a business supplying people with neat software without spending money. And I do, in fact, do whatever I can to lower the cost of labor. Frequently, that labor is mine. Sometimes, that's someone else's. And yes, when I can reduce it, there's a profit margin difference. Over time, it goes away, somthing I've experienced multiple times.
What is your question again?
That said, there's a lot that it interesting about how the Amish regulate technology. My family used to buy milk (the unpasturized in-a-jug sort) from them, and some members of my family provide medical services to some of them.
I think you get the emphasis slightly wrong. While there is a "sanctity of the house" sort of thing going on, it isn't that simple. What is important is continuity of worship, maintenence of the community, and the notion that most of the world is out to get you. And, honestly, the third part of that isn't unreasonable, if you wrap your head around the first part, and then the second follows. There's also a notion of severance from the worldly-world; they participate, in recognition of physics, but would rather not, and as a compromise, enforce a barrier built out of arms-length dealing, clothing, and behaviour.
To be honest, they're my favorite cult, if I had to pick one. Menonites can be(and are, in places) a lot worse, and Adventists seem to spend a lot of time on the separation issue, to the pain of the adherents. I haven't had much contact with others, but we can all read about them.
For the record, I'm an athiest by faith, an agnostic by thought, and mostly interested in mathematical abstractions, which inform my worldview in much the same way that religion does for others. So what do I know, I'm a kook, as these things go.
The amusing questions won't be asked. But I do wonder if this announcement has anything to do with the unnamed, massive, something-to-do-with-space, spending bill that even pocket Republicans don't want to support.
I don't know who this "Thomas Jefferson" person is, but with that kind of commie pinko thinking, I shudder to think where this country would have gotten. Do you know anyone else who thinks like this? we should make some _lists_. Teach 'em a lesson.
I think that's because if you're truly good at problem solving and have the learned the tricks of managing technical operations, you're probably not content to stay an admin. "Promoted to the point of incompentence", and all that. Me, I got sick of users and management, and started a business. So now, I'm attempting to become competent at sales, finance and sleep management. Ah, folly. Looked at sideways, it is more fun.
(2) It feeds our skilled workforce. Many people who are educated here elect to stay. If you agree that top-flight people are worth having around, than this is good.
(3) It facillitates idea exchange. Folks at school learn from each other, sometimes more than fromtheir professors. I can't think of a downside here.
(4) It builds international connections. People who went to school together tend to stay in contact. They make business deals, diplomatic relations, and generally help countries understand each other.
If that really isn't enough for you, look to history for what happens to nations that become myopic. Don't think it won't happen here, unless you're prepared to explain how the U.S. is different from every other empire in history.
Actually, he rarely reports anything other than potential talking points people are trialing to see if they'll take, random rumor and innuendo, and the like. He's a muppet, and you'd hear it from someone else if you didn't hear it from him.
Another thing to consider is that it is hard to move a company to a business automation system. You have to carefully get everyone lined up, take their concerns into account, watch for potential turf-wars, teach everyone to use if properly, and deploy it without a hitch. Oh, and that's assuming you built the right thing in the first place. Don't underestimate the difficulty of getting this sort of thing right - it is much more than a technical problem.
Four questions:
- it is my 'RIGHT' to observe and learn the laws of mathematics?
- is it my 'RIGHT' to purchase a watch, look at what it does, and learn from what I see?
- is it my 'RIGHT' to busy myself with making things for others using my knowledge?
- Assuming you said 'yes' the the above (given the readership, not actually an entirely rhetorical question), what is the difference between the three activities listed above and reverse engineering software?
Making things complicated makes for a nice law practice, if that is what you're in to. Making things simple is what actually advances the human race.
Obviously sloppy language. Sorry. I meant "More children drown every year in 5 gallon buckets than die due to guns."
You have to define your terms. What does "safe" mean? Does it mean that the product will never harm someone? If so, then the product cannot be produced - there is no such thing as a perfectly safe object.
If you accept that it is acceptable that sold objects can have some margin of risk associated with them, then, yes, your next question comes into play.
If the phones had a 1 out of 500,000 chance of killing someone, would you still be okay with demanding the low price unsafe product?
That depends on the price point for more or less safety, the usage pattern, what exactly the "chance of killing someone" means (e.g., over the lifetime of the product, per use, etc.), and the actual utility of the item.
These are partially actuarial questions, and partially personal utility/economic questions only individuals can make for themselves. There are products out there that have much higher death/serious injury risks associated with them that are happily bought and sold every day (think parachutes and prescription drugs, for starters).
Bruce Schneier has a great quote about this:
Another example: More children drown every year in 5 gallon buckets than due to guns. I see no "million mom marches" against these preventable deaths, even though safety features could be thought up to prevent bucket drownings at significantly less cost-per-unit than some of the features proposed for guns. (Sorry, I couldn't find a reference for that figure on buckets online - I read it in the Economist some time back.)If you don't accept that safety is an economic tradeoff, you'll never be able to make rational choices about safety.
(For my part, I hate cell phones, so I don't have one because the (negative) utility of the product is certainly not worth the cost - no risk analysis needed.)
Hm, I'm not accusing RH of anything here, but it did just occur to me that dependency messes in RPMs could be a positive thing for RH - it provides an encouragement for the users they do have to *only* install RH packages, in order to avoid .so messes and whatnot.
...a person who supports Liberachi for President, I believe.
Depends on how you count, I suppose. Hitler killed himself when things didn't work out for him. Tojo tried to kill himself, and then was executed as a direct result of his actions during the war.
So, providing a vector for the jerks of the world to infect grandma is OK by you, then, right?
I fully accept that it is possible to run IE securely,for some definitions of "secure". The question becomes, what best enables world commerce on the web? Remember to factor in Grandma, who can't move to Thailand to retire because Russian scammers tricked IE into tricking her. Her fault? Sure. But also the IE team's.
You fail to identify anyone, so I can only assume you're referring to Ronald "I don't recall" Reagan, and pointing at George "Read my lips" Bush as a cautionary tale.
At least the first one had an excuse - mental problems should disqualify people from office, but currently don't.
Hoping to prevent the loss of a child through kidnapping or more innocent circumstances, a few schools have begun monitoring student arrivals and departures using technology similar to that used to track livestock and pallets of retail shipments.
You're right, I've never dealt with video tools. Not my area. X I have done, and had no problems porting things.
I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps if you came to Solaris from the linux world and expected things to behave the same...
I used to maintain a huge pile of Sun boxes, and rather liked it. I was supporting FreeBSD boxes at the same time, and ditto. I started cursing a lot more after adding Linux to the mix, until I got used to it.
It you take the time to set up your environment, Solaris is no worse than anyone else. Of course, I _do_ really like apt, and wish everyone would use it, now that I'm used to it. But dealing with patchclusters is actually quite a lot more straightforward than the where-the-hell-is-libsuxx0r-3.1.25.6r.rpm,-and-now -I-have-to-upgrade-glibc game, IMHO.
And porting Solaris code to the non-Solaris world is often quite difficult.
Maybe so, if you don't write portable software... all of mine compiles on Solaris, fBSD, and the various Linuxen without a tweak.
That said, I'm glad I'm no longer a professional admin... I got really sick of it. But that's a different story.
There is a great body of moral philosphy that tends to support libertarianism; Start with most (though of course not all) Enlightenment era philosphers.
Like the salesman who phone me when I'm eating dinner telling me I should subscribe to The Gazette. I should subcribe to The Gazette. I should subscribe to libertarianism. These statments don't seem different in essence to me.
The difference is that the Gazette salesman does not have a coherent moral philosphy to back up why you should subscribe. Economic arguments work extremely well, too, if you're more of a utilitarianist.
I'm going to decline to offer a philosphy course here; if you're really interested in learning about it, check out some of the references here, under the libertarian sections.
Still, you have much the same problem as with any booby-trap, which is why civilized people tend to frown on it...
I may have been misleading, or you may have misread - I'm not interested in waste disposal, per se - that was just an example picked up from the parent post, used to talk about a different topic. My little kick is about systemic interactions when progress in one or more elements of the system hits a wall and cannot improve, due to thermodynamic, economic, or other reasons.
I know little more than how to categorize recyclables about waste disposal, so your post was interesting, in any case.
Vinge, and others, have played with this concept in a sci-fi arena, but I wonder - what happens when, to take your example, garbage men hit the wall on efficiency at disposing garbage? (This implies the whole supply chain - or perhaps I should say the removal chain - of garbage mitigation specialists hitting a limit, including recyclers, dumpers, shippers, lobbyists, specialist accountants, etc.) Inputs to the garbage industry will likely be still capable of increasing demand (or, again oddly for this example, an aspect of supply), so economics start kicking in, raising costs of disposal. With garbage, we're seeing the start of this already, and in some extreme cases, lots of noise (a certain mountain in Navada, for instance).
This has, in turn, second order effects for lots of other industries and people, and almost nobody understands the problem, other than the people who are the maxed out specialists, for a given social, technological and economic milleu. Problems, solutions and examples of poor communication and scams start to multiply.
It is fun stuff to think about, especially because I think we're getting a little close in certain areas. I hope to have a paper out on this soonish.
You know, I did write out a response to this, with complicated legal reasoning on your points. I lost it, when I rebooted, (I thought I posted it). But coming back to this, I see the fundamental disagreement: you seem to believe that what the courts say should be law, no matter what. I believe, on the other hand, that if laws stop making sense, then they should be ignored. I suppose this is probably the fundamental disagreement.
For the record, I was being just a little disingenous, but this is slashdot. And actions are speech, whether they are me doodling on paper, someone's back, or blathering on a soap box. Sorry if you don't like that.
The best way to tell if someone supports free will is to see if they follow the statement up with the term, 'but'.