It's quite likely the aspect of modernization that had the widest effect on the largest number of people. I'd call it a reasonably strong hypothesis for a causal explanation, at least.
Obligated to release the code to the world? No. Able to sue or jail anyone who copies it or tells someone how they did it? No. Patenting algorithms? No.
There's a difference between forcing someone to share a trade secret - if someone wants to build a business around a trade secret (instead of, say, providing better service at a better price) that's fine. I don't want them using my courts and my police system to protect their trade secret. If I can't afford the miracle drug that saves my life, maybe I can't force the pharmaceutical company to give it to me, but I will feel completely entitled to reverse-engineer it if I can.
I don't think he has much of a case, from what I see. No factual claims are being disputed.
The complaints about "comments taken out of context" are usually from people who don't really understand how the things they sound seem to the people who hear them, who are relatively unaware of what kind of figure they cut. People who are accustomed to dealing with the media know how to manage the impression they give: one good technique is to do practice interviews and videotape them.
Fanboys are the ultimate consumers. Blaming the corporations for exploiting them with the collector's editions and boxed sets and specia gift-packs would be like blaming someone for eating beef, after a cow walked up to them, started covering itself with steak sauce, and handing them a bag full of charcoal.
Here's the rub - he's aware that he needs to focus on his financial well-being; he admits that they need a better income, yet he plays constantly. He's wasting time that could be better spent improving his income position.
Why?
It's obvious why, on a psychological level. He's a computer hardware tech without a college degree and minimal social skills - nothing could be less comfortable for him than going out and finding a job, humbling himself dozens of times in interviews and probably having to settle for a rank-and-file position that doesn't pay that much. In the real world, he can't command a lot of status and he knows it.
On Anarchy Online, he is an eminence grise. He has the respect and admiration of hundreds.
People (in the initial stages, especially) pursue addictions because of some reward-structure involved, and the reward structure here is completely transparent. He gets a lot more positive feedback in AO than he does elsewhere. He's cathected his normal need for social validation into a domain where he has disprortionate success. I would probably do the same in his shoes: I have an ex-girlfriend who did, too. It's lucky for him he has a wife and an internal compass that keeps him realistic (the "move to Las Vegas" plan might actually not be a bad one) and I hope for the best for him.
I'm not that surprised he's married, though. He seems likeable and thoughtful and reasonably self-aware.
... and when someone with, say, a liver condition took acetaminophen and found it didn't work "just like aspirin," but made them sicker instead, there'd be a doozy of a lawsuit at hand, and Bayer could help propel it. (Tylenol is hepatotoxic, aspirin is not.)
And that metaphor applies here - there are consequences if associating with Unix would lead someone to generate an inaccurate expectation.
OK then: WinZip still seems to be doing a healthy business, as is Roxio, even though MS is shipping both zip-archive and CD-burning functionality in XP.
RedHat and OS X ship just as chock-full of features, gizmos, and software as Windows does. We long, long, LONG ago left the era when you knew every bit that was being loaded into memory It's bashing to complain about fairly basic elements shipping with the OS.
(And MSIE is not the "worst browser out there today" by any means. If it were, it *wouldn't* be hard to make a business building another - there's the factory vs. third-party automotive stereo counter example. Where MS has truly bad products - SQL Server, for example - competition is healthy.)
The best way to compete against Microsoft isn't to try to stop them from bundling, it's to come up with a compelling, competing bundle. I'm no laissez-faire economist, either, but this is just obvious. I'm more critical of the licensing restrictions and channel-abuse that MS engaged in than by any of the bundling.
It is hardly irrelevant what country a corporation resides in from the perspective of national policy to protect that corporation. The corporation's best paying jobs (and thus sources of political grease) are where it's HQ is, that's where it usually pays its taxes. When a company buys labor cheaply overseas, keeps its management jobs local, and then pipelines the sales revenue into the home country, that means a hell of a lot, politically. No Washington State politician will dare do anything that threatens Microsoft (or Boeing, for that matter) if they can possibly avoid it.
I have to agree. Bill Gates is a loveable, goofy sitcom character compared to Ellison. Larry Ellison could be cast as a Bond villain without a shred of acting.
Sterling summed up a strong response to Brin's idea -
But you're not anticipating what David Brin would call a transparent society?
David thinks this is great. David is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions. Just because it's the space age, it doesn't mean we're all going to end up in space.
Since people paid good money for televisions with antennas that worked. If I bought a TV last month, I'd expect to get at least a good few years of use of it - that's a reasonable expectation.
Write notes by hand, transcribe them into a laptop or desktop PC later. Transcription is one of the best ways to get the content into memory at a pace that's good to learn by, and in the process you can stop and "flesh out" the contents of lecture by checking references, following interesting digressions, etc.
Suppose my cousin liked the book. Suppose, as a matter of fact, that my cousin liked your lame college poems so much that he used one to propose to his fiance.
Suppose 50 years later, they look for a copy of that poem, but they can't find it because you've made it illegal for anyone to produce a copy. At that point, I think your "rights" have made claims to the memories and imaginations of other people that it shouldn't have. Once you've released your "thought children" into the world, I think your rights are not so absolute. At that point, they become enmeshed in the thoughts and lives of other people. While I may defend your right to profit from your own creativity, I'd challenge your right to control every outcome of it.
Please don't mistake my analysis of either situation as approval of them. I'm not happy about US or Microsoft hegemony, but I'm not going to pretend that either don't exist. (And, frankly, I'm a little more worried about the former.)
It'll never be "over," because it's always possible for someone to run any browser they want, and be able to render the subset of pages that their quirkly little browser can render. The real question is: will it matter to a significant percentage of the people who place content and services online?
The browser wars are over the way that the Cold War is over. It is no longer the case of two contenders battling it out for dominance, with the consequence being that the consumer wins (since a split market means that developers would adhere to standards). Instead, one brower dominates the market, and the little browsers that "compete" with it do so by trying to keep up with its "functionality."
Every other day, I still come up to sites that require me to launch IE (Mozilla is my default browser on my Windows systems, but I still need IE every so often: likewise with OpenOffice and MSOffice.) Maybe the 2% of the population that won't or can't open IE just closes those windows and goes elsewhere, but that's something I just won't do - I use browsers to see content, I don't select content based on the brand of browser I run.
So, the browser wars are over the way that the cold war is over: there are still countries which aren't the US, but that's not really the issue - the US has demonstrated that it calls the shots and the rest of the world has to toe the line or get out of the way, and that's just what MS is doing with IE.
Sony pretty regularly releases for Europe at about the same time or sooner than the US. If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because the distribution channel is tighter and more coordinated in Europe (greater density, a more urbanized demographic, and all that) but that's a guess.
It'll be about private industry until United Spacelines and American Spacelines start losing too much money, and the space-citizens of the United Space-states of Earth have to shell out billions of space-dollars to keep them afloat. I mean, in orbit.
The job-hunter and the job-offerer simply do not have symmetrical power or luxury to walk away from the table, and it is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that they do. And the net effect of all those assymetrical relationships is a "race to the bottom," where an employer can pick between dozens of applicants, all of whom have families to feed, and simply let the sticklers go walking.
Reaching a bad and unequal equilibrium is not "balance."
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It's quite likely the aspect of modernization that had the widest effect on the largest number of people. I'd call it a reasonably strong hypothesis for a causal explanation, at least.
Obligated to release the code to the world? No. Able to sue or jail anyone who copies it or tells someone how they did it? No. Patenting algorithms? No.
There's a difference between forcing someone to share a trade secret - if someone wants to build a business around a trade secret (instead of, say, providing better service at a better price) that's fine. I don't want them using my courts and my police system to protect their trade secret. If I can't afford the miracle drug that saves my life, maybe I can't force the pharmaceutical company to give it to me, but I will feel completely entitled to reverse-engineer it if I can.
I don't think he has much of a case, from what I see. No factual claims are being disputed.
The complaints about "comments taken out of context" are usually from people who don't really understand how the things they sound seem to the people who hear them, who are relatively unaware of what kind of figure they cut. People who are accustomed to dealing with the media know how to manage the impression they give: one good technique is to do practice interviews and videotape them.
Fanboys are the ultimate consumers. Blaming the corporations for exploiting them with the collector's editions and boxed sets and specia gift-packs would be like blaming someone for eating beef, after a cow walked up to them, started covering itself with steak sauce, and handing them a bag full of charcoal.
Here's the rub - he's aware that he needs to focus on his financial well-being; he admits that they need a better income, yet he plays constantly. He's wasting time that could be better spent improving his income position.
Why?
It's obvious why, on a psychological level. He's a computer hardware tech without a college degree and minimal social skills - nothing could be less comfortable for him than going out and finding a job, humbling himself dozens of times in interviews and probably having to settle for a rank-and-file position that doesn't pay that much. In the real world, he can't command a lot of status and he knows it.
On Anarchy Online, he is an eminence grise. He has the respect and admiration of hundreds.
People (in the initial stages, especially) pursue addictions because of some reward-structure involved, and the reward structure here is completely transparent. He gets a lot more positive feedback in AO than he does elsewhere. He's cathected his normal need for social validation into a domain where he has disprortionate success. I would probably do the same in his shoes: I have an ex-girlfriend who did, too. It's lucky for him he has a wife and an internal compass that keeps him realistic (the "move to Las Vegas" plan might actually not be a bad one) and I hope for the best for him.
I'm not that surprised he's married, though. He seems likeable and thoughtful and reasonably self-aware.
... and when someone with, say, a liver condition took acetaminophen and found it didn't work "just like aspirin," but made them sicker instead, there'd be a doozy of a lawsuit at hand, and Bayer could help propel it. (Tylenol is hepatotoxic, aspirin is not.)
And that metaphor applies here - there are consequences if associating with Unix would lead someone to generate an inaccurate expectation.
It would be a bit of a stretch, but you could answer "Why, VMS, of course."
OK then: WinZip still seems to be doing a healthy business, as is Roxio, even though MS is shipping both zip-archive and CD-burning functionality in XP.
RedHat and OS X ship just as chock-full of features, gizmos, and software as Windows does. We long, long, LONG ago left the era when you knew every bit that was being loaded into memory It's bashing to complain about fairly basic elements shipping with the OS.
(And MSIE is not the "worst browser out there today" by any means. If it were, it *wouldn't* be hard to make a business building another - there's the factory vs. third-party automotive stereo counter example. Where MS has truly bad products - SQL Server, for example - competition is healthy.)
The best way to compete against Microsoft isn't to try to stop them from bundling, it's to come up with a compelling, competing bundle. I'm no laissez-faire economist, either, but this is just obvious. I'm more critical of the licensing restrictions and channel-abuse that MS engaged in than by any of the bundling.
It is hardly irrelevant what country a corporation resides in from the perspective of national policy to protect that corporation. The corporation's best paying jobs (and thus sources of political grease) are where it's HQ is, that's where it usually pays its taxes. When a company buys labor cheaply overseas, keeps its management jobs local, and then pipelines the sales revenue into the home country, that means a hell of a lot, politically. No Washington State politician will dare do anything that threatens Microsoft (or Boeing, for that matter) if they can possibly avoid it.
I have to agree. Bill Gates is a loveable, goofy sitcom character compared to Ellison. Larry Ellison could be cast as a Bond villain without a shred of acting.
Sterling summed up a strong response to Brin's idea -
But you're not anticipating what David Brin would call a transparent society?
David thinks this is great. David is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions. Just because it's the space age, it doesn't mean we're all going to end up in space.
Since people paid good money for televisions with antennas that worked. If I bought a TV last month, I'd expect to get at least a good few years of use of it - that's a reasonable expectation.
Write notes by hand, transcribe them into a laptop or desktop PC later. Transcription is one of the best ways to get the content into memory at a pace that's good to learn by, and in the process you can stop and "flesh out" the contents of lecture by checking references, following interesting digressions, etc.
Um, reread the post. That was "possibility 2" that he enumerated. He's not wrong, he's right.
Exactly. My waistline is definitely not conquering.
Just when did SCO become the North Korea of IT?
Suppose my cousin liked the book. Suppose, as a matter of fact, that my cousin liked your lame college poems so much that he used one to propose to his fiance.
Suppose 50 years later, they look for a copy of that poem, but they can't find it because you've made it illegal for anyone to produce a copy. At that point, I think your "rights" have made claims to the memories and imaginations of other people that it shouldn't have. Once you've released your "thought children" into the world, I think your rights are not so absolute. At that point, they become enmeshed in the thoughts and lives of other people. While I may defend your right to profit from your own creativity, I'd challenge your right to control every outcome of it.
Please don't mistake my analysis of either situation as approval of them. I'm not happy about US or Microsoft hegemony, but I'm not going to pretend that either don't exist. (And, frankly, I'm a little more worried about the former.)
It'll never be "over," because it's always possible for someone to run any browser they want, and be able to render the subset of pages that their quirkly little browser can render. The real question is: will it matter to a significant percentage of the people who place content and services online?
The browser wars are over the way that the Cold War is over. It is no longer the case of two contenders battling it out for dominance, with the consequence being that the consumer wins (since a split market means that developers would adhere to standards). Instead, one brower dominates the market, and the little browsers that "compete" with it do so by trying to keep up with its "functionality."
Every other day, I still come up to sites that require me to launch IE (Mozilla is my default browser on my Windows systems, but I still need IE every so often: likewise with OpenOffice and MSOffice.) Maybe the 2% of the population that won't or can't open IE just closes those windows and goes elsewhere, but that's something I just won't do - I use browsers to see content, I don't select content based on the brand of browser I run.
So, the browser wars are over the way that the cold war is over: there are still countries which aren't the US, but that's not really the issue - the US has demonstrated that it calls the shots and the rest of the world has to toe the line or get out of the way, and that's just what MS is doing with IE.
Which, of course, makes many of the RBL's useless or next to useless to those of us with colleagues and friends in Korea.
Sony pretty regularly releases for Europe at about the same time or sooner than the US. If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because the distribution channel is tighter and more coordinated in Europe (greater density, a more urbanized demographic, and all that) but that's a guess.
It'll be about private industry until United Spacelines and American Spacelines start losing too much money, and the space-citizens of the United Space-states of Earth have to shell out billions of space-dollars to keep them afloat. I mean, in orbit.
The job-hunter and the job-offerer simply do not have symmetrical power or luxury to walk away from the table, and it is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that they do. And the net effect of all those assymetrical relationships is a "race to the bottom," where an employer can pick between dozens of applicants, all of whom have families to feed, and simply let the sticklers go walking.
Reaching a bad and unequal equilibrium is not "balance."