For those of you who find Katz's "analysis" a bit thin and unsubstantiated, but are still interested in real questions about the sociology of the internet, I recommend two books: The Internet and Society by James Slevin, which is IMO the most sophisticated, well-researched, and well-thought-out work about the societies that "inhabit" the internet and the relationship that those net-based practices have on the societies in which they occur at large; and Communities in Cyberspace edited by Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock, an excellent collection of articles that includes some quantitative analysis of internet-based practices.
While I understand that Katz's position here is a precarious one, it saddens me a bit that he is the local "house humanist." As someone who migrated from the liberal arts to technology and science in his studies and in his career, I want to emphasize that as much intelligence and creativity and rigour (albeit without the same straightforward falsifiability) is possible in the social studies and even the humanities as in other fields, and that judging it by its most popular and accessible works and writers is like evaluating the state of computer science by reading the Foo For Dummies series.
Um, and I am one of those people; that is sort of my point. However, a lot of people like to have only one machine, or want to optimize the flexibilities of a machine. And there is some competition between OS's: yes, some are better at some things than others, but they are competing in a lot of fields and to think of that simply as "separate tools" that don't share a lot of functions is a bit naive. If it were simply a matter of what Linux was "good for," there probably wouldn't even be a Gnome or KDE - the very products imply an expectation to compete with Windows and MacOS in a lot of environments where they currently are not rivalled by the Unices.
You are not an island, and not only does your OS require applications that you may not have the time to write, you may well need or want to communicate with other people using file formats that must be readable by some application on your system. In order to preserve viable choice, rather than simple theoretical choice, a critical mass of acceptance is needed.
As it is, I know most people run at least one commercial (Windows usually, sometimes Apple) OS on their personal networks to do things like watch DVD's, look at the (quite numerous) video files made with the Sorenson CODEC or other formats for alternative OS' lack viewers, visit sites that require specialized plug-ins, and, if nothing else, play games.
Of course, if all you need from a home system is email and a SQL server, then you don't have a thing to worry about.
A slowdown in development cycle can have benefits elsewhere. If the hardware development slows down, then software development can ramp up knowing that they will have a longer window of viability before hardware improvements makes older software obsolete. Also, a more stable hardware environment benefits open source and alternative operating systems, who often get frozen out of hardware improvements and lag behind Windows in terms of driver support.
Whoever moderated the parent as a "troll" is guilty of hardcore moderator editorializing.
I agree completely with your characterization of Apple. What is a bit disturbing is that Microsoft is much less eager to use threats of lawyers against the user and street-level programmer communities. Was their ever a cease-and-desist letter written about FVWM-95? Apple is a thick with idle esquires, and has generally acted like a bigger prick than Microsoft for most of its career. If Microsoft is the hegemonic, arrogant and self-justifying U.S.A. of OS' and applications, Apple is the vicious brutal third-world dictatorship whose destructiveness is mostly limited by their weakness.
We are talking about different eras, I think - you are talking now about the 60's to 70's mainframe and minicomputer markets, when IBM was largely competing (in a very dirty way) against Burroughs. If you look at that period of time, there was essentially a wave of governmental response around the world, inc. Europe and Latin America, against their monopoly power. The other factors had more to do with their inability to completely dominate the PC market, although the consent decree had a lot to do with it, as did their generous but unprofitable decision to completely open the PC specs.
RMS does not have a particular vendetta against Microsoft, except insofar as they are just one of many close-source proprietary software vendors. ESR has a special animus against Microsoft, but is otherwise quite willing to work with closed source software vendors.
ESR believes that Open source software will prevail because it will outcompete closed source software in the market place. He does not see the difference between open and closed source in moral terms. RMS believes that it is quite possible that "the market" (with the assistance of intellectual property laws) will in fact will allow un-Free software to thrive at the expense of Free solutions, but that there is a definite ethical preference for the Free, even if it isn't guaranteed victory by 'destiny.'
I'll make no secret of the fact that I think RMS' stance is both more realistic and more sensible, because it views the choice to produce Free software as just that - an ethical choice - instead of invoking manifest destiny.
What you either don't know or don't say is that it was partially DOJ anti-trust action (a consent decree) that helped erode IBM's position. And that IBM's position was never, ever as strong as Microsoft's.
But, hey, 6 months isn't too long from now, let's just wait and see.
The crack-induced belief that Microsoft is in any kind of trouble right now is essentially Libertarian apologetics. "Oh, the magical mystical hand of the free market will kill the monopoly, there's no need for the DOJ/FTC/anti-trust legislation."
It's naive, and as laden with hand-waving and blind faith as any 60's Maoist's ravings.
That was generally my point. They already know whether or not Ogg has infringed. They are just confident they can pull the wool over the eyes of enough lawyers, judges and perhaps juries to break Ogg.
The fact the Ogg Vorbis is GPL will only be relevant once the case begins, if it begins at all. The purpose of any litigation has nothing to do with truth or fairness, and everything to do with protecting Thompson's business. As the article says, the threat of litigation is enough to scare would-be hardware and software and content providers away. The idea is that Thompson has a big enough legal war chest to win even if they lose.
"This is what hardball is like" is what their representative said. Essentially, it's plutocracy as normal.
Re:Introverted isn't *bad*, but it isn't healthy
on
Gifts For Geeks
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· Score: 2
Re: introversion/extroversion and 'the natural,' humans (and the aspects of their physiology that create emotions and language) evolved to be in moderately sized, fairly stable clans, analogous to the way baboons live. And for most of our history, most of us had a relatively stable social environment in which you knew the same group of friends and neighbors over a lifetime - the changes were slow (except for historical cataclysms - pogroms, invasions and the such.) Now, we have a socially accelerated culture to at least the extent that we have a technologically accelerated culture - we have mobile careers with new colleagues every couple years, our families move constantly, our school lives are often as fractured - and just as some people have difficulty managing a technological environment they were never made ready for, others have the same difficulty with this social environment.
I sometimes think that the moves towards introversion and extroversion as such pronounced character traits are really a sort of reaction to trying to live in an environment for which humans are not really optimally designed. We are geared for a lot more social continuity than we can expect.
Thanks for saying that - it's high praise - but I'm not actually affiliated with UIUC. I'm a cog-sci/AI type, having studied history and philosophy before switching fields. Cog-sci students where I went (Berkeley) take a bunch of computer science classes, and I took more than that. But my first love was the humanities, and it's where I'll wind up again some day after I've squirrelled away my nest egg.
The Cybercinema project is cool, though - I've checked it out before. My handle is the name of the lead character from one of the films they look at (Alphaville).
Apologies in advance for the flame-tone of this, but: that is the one of the stupidest things I've heard in I don't know how long. A bad movie is a bad movie is a bad movie, and any movie that depends on you having interacted with its source material to be enjoyed or appreciated is a bad movie. You know what the movie should do? It should make you want to play the game, or read the book, or whatever. Peopl don't spend $35 million to filming a collection of in-jokes. Jeez, you should just watch the Summoner Geeks video if that's what you want.
Unfortunately, for the "unredeemed" geek who never gets an education in realms outside of math and science, there is too often a sort of stunted aesthetic growth - an inability to look at narrative in any but the most literal, transparent, "I wanna be like this guy" kind of way. Escapism is part of the story, a simplicity of imagination is another part of it. It may be part of a tragedy of hyper-specialization that occurs when one is merely taking refuge in, rather than building on, their intelligence.
I know this sounds cruel or pompous, but there are geeks who are so far from "getting it" - who will never understand why we could tell a movie like this was a stinker from a thousand miles away - just as there as some people who are so clueless about technology that it's almost pointless to try to explain it to them. Which is fine - we all have our blind spots - until they try to engage you on those topics. Having a discussion with a stereotypically 'unlettered' geek about film or books or art is as frustrating as having a conversation with a suit or your grandma* about technology. And like the luddite who brags about being clueless about computers, it's also sort of sad to see geeks brag about being clueless about art, literature, and film outside of science fiction.
*Please, no anecdotes about your asm-coding circuit-soldering grandmas. You know what I'm talking about.
Security through obscurity buys you time. If you've left your front door unlocked, you want to keep that fact as obscure as possible until you get home in time to lock it. The obscurity doesn't get you as much security as locking the door, but it sure as hell gets you a lot more security than telling the world about your unlocked door would.
I suspect you are simply reciting pieties, however, rather than actually thinking.
These sorts of serendipity do happen, and they are great things. They happen a lot more often in research being down in the military and space exploration sectors, since non-security-threatening discoveries are more freely passed on, because there isn't a push to lock up anything that might possibly be profitable and put it in a vault somewhere.
However, the best way to get research results is simply to not to build toys for multi-gazillionaires. Bell Labs, UIUC's labs, the MIT Labs, and the Lawrence Labs have discovered unimagineably, infinitely more by spending money on pure research than by catering to some plutocrat's whim.
They would have worked on something which would have benefitted more people than one hyper-rich CEO. It's not about the waste of "money" as an abstraction, it's about the waste of labor on one person.
I couldn't agree more. But you make a mistake, or even implicitly a series of mistakes, that a lot of people make.
Larry Ellison is not the second richest guy in the world because he's a brilliant tech. He's a CEO. (He actually did a stint as a programmer of sorts, but not a particularly brilliant one.) CEO's aren't as a rule all that bright - they're charismatic in the way that effective bullies are charismatic.
And the story that the article told of the tech-support visit to his house - where Ellison threw a temper tantrum that broke a remote - indicates what we already knew: that Ellison is, at heart, an infantile bully. (I know Oracle v.p.'s and senior management types socially, so I'm not talking entirely out of my tuchus). Most CEO's have an elements of this personality type - glibly positive when things are going well (and since they get paid millions even when the company is tanking, they always seem to be positive in a professional context), childish and pathetic when they are not.
In many ways, I don't think the greatest tragedy of our times is that we've become too materialistic, or the inequity between the rich and the poor. I think it the characteristic tragedy of our era is that people like this are held up as heroes.
That's what a short-sighted company wants. A company that intends on being in business for a good long while wants to sell products that last so long that the user wishes it would break (as an excuse to buy a new one:)
Companies don't make decisions: individuals do. Individuals who believe - often quite accurately - that the benefit they derive from making a decision that increases this quarter's profits by 75% will far exceed any harm done to a company of which they may well not even be an employee three years down the line. (Or, if they are an employee still, they may be in another department.)
Large business have no stake in thinking ahead that far, because all the stakeholders can take the money and run while it looks good.
Slashdot Mirror
While I understand that Katz's position here is a precarious one, it saddens me a bit that he is the local "house humanist." As someone who migrated from the liberal arts to technology and science in his studies and in his career, I want to emphasize that as much intelligence and creativity and rigour (albeit without the same straightforward falsifiability) is possible in the social studies and even the humanities as in other fields, and that judging it by its most popular and accessible works and writers is like evaluating the state of computer science by reading the Foo For Dummies series.
Um, and I am one of those people; that is sort of my point. However, a lot of people like to have only one machine, or want to optimize the flexibilities of a machine. And there is some competition between OS's: yes, some are better at some things than others, but they are competing in a lot of fields and to think of that simply as "separate tools" that don't share a lot of functions is a bit naive. If it were simply a matter of what Linux was "good for," there probably wouldn't even be a Gnome or KDE - the very products imply an expectation to compete with Windows and MacOS in a lot of environments where they currently are not rivalled by the Unices.
As it is, I know most people run at least one commercial (Windows usually, sometimes Apple) OS on their personal networks to do things like watch DVD's, look at the (quite numerous) video files made with the Sorenson CODEC or other formats for alternative OS' lack viewers, visit sites that require specialized plug-ins, and, if nothing else, play games.
Of course, if all you need from a home system is email and a SQL server, then you don't have a thing to worry about.
s/Fell/Hell/
As far as the lion laying with the lamb, I feel a strict don't-ask-don't tell policy is appropriate.
A slowdown in development cycle can have benefits elsewhere. If the hardware development slows down, then software development can ramp up knowing that they will have a longer window of viability before hardware improvements makes older software obsolete. Also, a more stable hardware environment benefits open source and alternative operating systems, who often get frozen out of hardware improvements and lag behind Windows in terms of driver support.
I think that would be defensible in court. Sadly, even a successful defense is costly. That is how the threat of litigation works.
I agree completely with your characterization of Apple. What is a bit disturbing is that Microsoft is much less eager to use threats of lawyers against the user and street-level programmer communities. Was their ever a cease-and-desist letter written about FVWM-95? Apple is a thick with idle esquires, and has generally acted like a bigger prick than Microsoft for most of its career. If Microsoft is the hegemonic, arrogant and self-justifying U.S.A. of OS' and applications, Apple is the vicious brutal third-world dictatorship whose destructiveness is mostly limited by their weakness.
We are talking about different eras, I think - you are talking now about the 60's to 70's mainframe and minicomputer markets, when IBM was largely competing (in a very dirty way) against Burroughs. If you look at that period of time, there was essentially a wave of governmental response around the world, inc. Europe and Latin America, against their monopoly power. The other factors had more to do with their inability to completely dominate the PC market, although the consent decree had a lot to do with it, as did their generous but unprofitable decision to completely open the PC specs.
RMS does not have a particular vendetta against Microsoft, except insofar as they are just one of many close-source proprietary software vendors. ESR has a special animus against Microsoft, but is otherwise quite willing to work with closed source software vendors.
ESR believes that Open source software will prevail because it will outcompete closed source software in the market place. He does not see the difference between open and closed source in moral terms. RMS believes that it is quite possible that "the market" (with the assistance of intellectual property laws) will in fact will allow un-Free software to thrive at the expense of Free solutions, but that there is a definite ethical preference for the Free, even if it isn't guaranteed victory by 'destiny.'
I'll make no secret of the fact that I think RMS' stance is both more realistic and more sensible, because it views the choice to produce Free software as just that - an ethical choice - instead of invoking manifest destiny.
But, hey, 6 months isn't too long from now, let's just wait and see.
It's naive, and as laden with hand-waving and blind faith as any 60's Maoist's ravings.
That was generally my point. They already know whether or not Ogg has infringed. They are just confident they can pull the wool over the eyes of enough lawyers, judges and perhaps juries to break Ogg.
In this case, if you abandon your principles, survival becomes irrelevant. What does survival in this context mean?
"This is what hardball is like" is what their representative said. Essentially, it's plutocracy as normal.
I sometimes think that the moves towards introversion and extroversion as such pronounced character traits are really a sort of reaction to trying to live in an environment for which humans are not really optimally designed. We are geared for a lot more social continuity than we can expect.
You may have willingly or even proudly served, but if you would have "gladly" served, you know nothing about war or service.
The Cybercinema project is cool, though - I've checked it out before. My handle is the name of the lead character from one of the films they look at (Alphaville).
Now, go study!
Apologies in advance for the flame-tone of this, but: that is the one of the stupidest things I've heard in I don't know how long. A bad movie is a bad movie is a bad movie, and any movie that depends on you having interacted with its source material to be enjoyed or appreciated is a bad movie. You know what the movie should do? It should make you want to play the game, or read the book, or whatever. Peopl don't spend $35 million to filming a collection of in-jokes. Jeez, you should just watch the Summoner Geeks video if that's what you want.
I know this sounds cruel or pompous, but there are geeks who are so far from "getting it" - who will never understand why we could tell a movie like this was a stinker from a thousand miles away - just as there as some people who are so clueless about technology that it's almost pointless to try to explain it to them. Which is fine - we all have our blind spots - until they try to engage you on those topics. Having a discussion with a stereotypically 'unlettered' geek about film or books or art is as frustrating as having a conversation with a suit or your grandma* about technology. And like the luddite who brags about being clueless about computers, it's also sort of sad to see geeks brag about being clueless about art, literature, and film outside of science fiction.
*Please, no anecdotes about your asm-coding circuit-soldering grandmas. You know what I'm talking about.
I suspect you are simply reciting pieties, however, rather than actually thinking.
However, the best way to get research results is simply to not to build toys for multi-gazillionaires. Bell Labs, UIUC's labs, the MIT Labs, and the Lawrence Labs have discovered unimagineably, infinitely more by spending money on pure research than by catering to some plutocrat's whim.
They would have worked on something which would have benefitted more people than one hyper-rich CEO. It's not about the waste of "money" as an abstraction, it's about the waste of labor on one person.
Larry Ellison is not the second richest guy in the world because he's a brilliant tech. He's a CEO. (He actually did a stint as a programmer of sorts, but not a particularly brilliant one.) CEO's aren't as a rule all that bright - they're charismatic in the way that effective bullies are charismatic.
And the story that the article told of the tech-support visit to his house - where Ellison threw a temper tantrum that broke a remote - indicates what we already knew: that Ellison is, at heart, an infantile bully. (I know Oracle v.p.'s and senior management types socially, so I'm not talking entirely out of my tuchus). Most CEO's have an elements of this personality type - glibly positive when things are going well (and since they get paid millions even when the company is tanking, they always seem to be positive in a professional context), childish and pathetic when they are not.
In many ways, I don't think the greatest tragedy of our times is that we've become too materialistic, or the inequity between the rich and the poor. I think it the characteristic tragedy of our era is that people like this are held up as heroes.
Companies don't make decisions: individuals do. Individuals who believe - often quite accurately - that the benefit they derive from making a decision that increases this quarter's profits by 75% will far exceed any harm done to a company of which they may well not even be an employee three years down the line. (Or, if they are an employee still, they may be in another department.)
Large business have no stake in thinking ahead that far, because all the stakeholders can take the money and run while it looks good.