Because anyone who is smart enough to make a $1 billion profit from a $2 billion space project is smart enough to make a $10 billion profit from any one of a thousand other investments of $2 billion, and they didn't get the first $2 billion by choosing $1 billion over $10 billion.
To say that the age of the PC is over is probably like saying that the age of TV ended in the late 80's or early 90's with the rise of the home PC. Of course, there are as many TV's as ever, but they no longer represent the defining technology of an era. How many people here hack their TV sets or digital cable boxes?
I think some people here may be frightened about obsolesence - after all this time developing mastery over a medium, and cultivating arrogance towards those who have failed to get it, could there be a little payback coming down the pike? (Many others, of course, I am sure will be quite able to translate existing expertise to deal with the new environment - I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with IPv6 myself.)
But I do think that the PC paradigm is inelegant. Cables and wires everywhere, big clunky boxes, etc. - from a design perspective and in terms of aesthetics, the whole thing could use a lot of improvement.
Often you see calls for boycotts here, against Amazon, Etoys, DVD's and the like. Boycotts feel good here, because they are a nice non-governmental mechanism for encouraging decent corporate behavior.
And they won't work, at least not the ones that are called for here.
Why? for one thing, how many boycotts for non-geekish issues do most of the people here participate in? How many of you are boycotting Monsanto or Nestle or Exxon or Mitsubishi? How many of you listen to the complaints of activists in other arenas against corporations' misbehavior? Damned few, I suspect. Geek-politics is deeply myopic, and frankly most global activists who coordinate and disseminate interest in boycotts are going to be a lot more concerned about environmental survival, labor rights, public health, and other issues that suffer massive geek-apathy. They (and even, to some extent, I) will ask 'what have you done for me lately' when you complain about intellectual property abuses. When some folks have complained vociferously about Microsoft, while continuing to line the coffers of Union Carbide, it is no wonder that the rest of the world sees hypocrisy and solipsism.
Also, those of us who care about DVD and other IP issues have done a piss-poor job of communicating with the world at large, treating the consuming public with contempt, arrogance, and indifference. That's all part and parcel of the pervasive social cluelessness that marks geek-culture, but it has a cost.
In general, boycotts are only effective when there's an issue that is important to a huge segment of the companie's target market (or its shareholders) - the issues here are clear for us, but really not for the public at large, and we don't have many good communicators among us (we have lots of good arguers and debaters, unfortunately.)
So, I don't have a lot of truck for calls for boycotts. I've participated in several boycotts, particularly related to the attempts to end apartheid and the Nestle boycott, and it takes things that this crowd just doesn't have.
You cannot prove the nonexistance of a thing 'x' if you mean by that a thing with properties 'a, b, and c' when non of those properties are constraints about time and place: i.e., you can demonstrate that no fat man in a red suit who flies around in a sled pulled by reindeer is at the north pole at any given moment, but of course you can not demonstrate that for all moments.
However, you CAN 'explain away' by demonstrating that the causes of the belief in 'x' at no point relied on the existence of 'x'; if you can demonstrate that the origin of the belief in Santa Claus is fully explained without recourse to the existance thereof, you have effectively 'explained him away:' the belief in his existence is no longer necessary to explain the belief in his existence.
For things like Santa Claus, unicorns, and fairies, that they don't exist is actually *part* of their feature-list. They have, for example, through selective breeding, bred a goat with a single horn in the middle of its head. Is it a unicorn? Most of us believe that if you genetically engineer a unicorn, it isn't a 'real' unicorn because it fails of one of the tests of unicorness - i.e., it exists! So instead of proving that at no point a creature with characteristics of faeries ever existed, it is more sensible and more persuasive to demonstrate that the belief in fairies is completely explained by causes A. B. and C. (The encounters with early pre-Celtic european cultures, hallucinagenic drug use, documented hoaxes in the 19th century, etc.)
Have these people ever heard of LIBRARIES? You know, places where you can go and check out books, cd's and videos for FREE and listen to them? I can go to the SF Public Library right now and buy a CD that I don't own, listen to it, and bring it back. I've paid not one dime for it (except in taxes to the city, which in this case I pay happily for library services.) Why do we not see the 3000 year old institution of the library decried as a threat to the income of authors?
One reason why the DVD coalition and the MPAA are so panicked - and why they are bringing their massive financial and personal resources (i.e., good old boy's network) to bear on this case - is that the DVD makers had assured the content producers that there would be no risk of piracy or unauthorized copying, that they had created a 'hack proof' technology and that the studios had no reason to fear moving their content over to DVD.
Presto: the protection is compromised, and the DVD coalition is vulnerable to their (erstwhile) partner's legal fury. The content owners could sue the DVD makers right into their pockets for failure to come through on the protection of their content if the DVD coalition doesn't nip this in the bud..
Now, you and me know that there's no way that they can nip this thing in the bud, that they should not have tried to sell disk encryption as part of the DVD package to the content people, but that's moot as far as they are concerned. In the long run, they are screwed, and they just want to take "us" down with them.
I understand what you are saying, but disagree. A separate category for women emphasizes the "under-represented and unrecognized" part. This isn't zero-sum, of course. There's room for a "Left field" award, which men and women are eligible for, and a "Smart women" award as well. The latter gives girls a clear set of role-models and even contacts, and highlights achievement against expectation.
The day that as much as 40% of the "left field" award goes to women would be the day that I would subscribe to your 'gender-blind' model.
The fact that the preponderance of the announcements of Hedy's death don't mention her intellectual accomplishments is an indication to me that we can't pretend a level playing field exists.
I don't think we are as colorblind and gender-free on the net as we might like to think - not because of any direct threats to our anonymity, but because habits of language often (not always, but often) betray our gender, our age, our educational level, and our origins.
Women tend to use more passive-tense language. It is well documented in sociolinguistic studies, and the tendencies persist in written communication as well as in spoken communication. They are more likely to use tentative language, offering suggestions and looking for consensus ('don't you think?' 'do you agree?' and 'please don't be mad at me') than men are. There's some evidence that this is fairly cross-cultural, that women actually think in a way that is more attuned to the social environment, but I'm sure there's a good amount of socialization involved, as well.
Ethnic and age differences are usually more subtle, and often complex (educated black people often show a *stricter* adherence to rules of grammar and usage, and try to affect near-Oxonian discourse, in order to combat the stereotypes of black people as uneducated, of urban black english as 'wrong,' of black intellectuals as unrigorous, etc.)
Because people, especially young people, are encouraged by the success of people who in some way resemble themselves in disciplines and fields in which people who resemble themselves in some way have not traditionally been recognized or are well represented.
Smart girls want and need to see examples of smart women identified and recognized.
They will go away when the disparities in pay balance out a bit and other career paths offer comparable rewards with all the opportunities that programmers currently have. Until then, people are going to crowd into the field until equilibrium is reached.
We are discouraged by the poor salaries for teaching, as well as for many of the other 'feminine' jobs, such as social work, human resources, and the like.
The only industries in which it seems women regularly earn as much as or more than men are modelling, pornography, prostitution, soap-opera acting and erotic dance - all industries fueled and funded by men's fantasies or women's anxieties.
Andrew Leonard is one of the most underrated technologoy journalists I know. He has always written balanced, well-researched articles that demonstrate both a sound understanding of the technologies and issues involved, as well as an insightful (+1!) eye towards social, cultural and political consequences. In this article, for example, he demonstrates a clearer understanding of the GPL than many/. denizens can boast.
I know that he occassional posts and reads here, to, so if you read this, Andrew, know that your work isn't going unappreciated.
Cmdr, Hemos, etc: Any chance of letting him author some pieces around here?
Online commerce will definitely be a larger economic sector (if you could even call it that) than operating systems and applications; it will also subsume a percentage of the latter.
However, that does not mean that it will be more profitable, and quite unlike the OS and application market, it will tend away from monopoly by its nature, rather than towards it. In the long term, I think it will be extremely difficult for Amazon to justify its market cap, unless it buys, say, a few Bolivian copper mines.
Closed source software companies have big budgets. They are likely to always have big budgets as long as they are able to sell software form $200 to $20,000 a seat. They use these big budgets to marshall and finance huge sales and marketing forces.
Trust me, if marketing, advertising and sales techniques didn't work, capitalism would have saved that money and stopped using them a LONG time ago.
So, point 1: superiority based on the merits of the software is not enough; it is perception and business relationships that matter, and point 2:even with these big old market caps, I can see no way for free software to fund the marketing and sales forces needed to compete with the closed alternatives, since per-seat licenses generate so much revenue so quickly. Only Apache and some infrastructure software is exempt from this situation, because infrastructure software is sourced and implemented by IT people, who are more likely to be informed of the actual options.
I see the strongest model for free software development in the public sector as coming from a commission model: the water utility needs to upgrade its systems, it looks for bidders to design an open/free solution, and then pays them to do it. The product of that work remains public and available for peer review and improvement, and available to other water districts. Software development becomes a service industry with a collegial environment - and, without all the detritus from trying to ape a manufacturing model replete with sales and marketing forces (above a bare mininum) I think you could expect developers to make a LOT more.
No, there's another bug which is related to nested mode, which is how I read. It has to do with cumulative page size and/or thread length, not with number of comments. This is, I think, a "known bug" that a couple others have caught.
Ack, feel free to mark me as redundant. I had been cruising around with a 2+ threshold. I should have realized that others would have made the same observation by now.
By the way, I'm running around with a 2+ threshold because Slashdot seems broken when a critical-mass threshold of messages is passed. The comment page gets cut off mid-way; the high threshold is just to keep the pages short, not to avoid reading. Is there a fix in the works for the html problem?
Insofar as Latin American IT is my field, I'm really excited by all the news (even the bad) that has been coming through the pike about it lately.
Here are some issues to consider:
It could be argued that any non-American government would be insane not to use Open Source software, in light of the possibility of sabotage with hidden calls, compromised security, etc. Right now trade relations between the US and Brazil are, if not hostile, a little bumpy, and Brazil is probably not entirely comfortable with not knowing what their software is doing. No country could be sure that US software companies aren't being pressured by the NSA etc. to put back doors in their software, especially in light of the Echelon scare.
This is going to change the way that software is sold and supported in Latin America. Right now, the west is trying to push the software-as-sold-object model. The anti-piracy campaign is an example of this. It's really deep in the local mindset that if you have lost nothing by my copying something, I haven't really stolen anything. The amount of government pressure required to change that has made a lot of enemies down here. Some of them are frankly pissed at what they feel is a blackmail attempt by anti-piracy forces, who on one hand will encourage distribution of software to people in the ranks, then fly in with lawyers and gov't agents to see that everything is all in paid for - piracy is used to leverage sales down here, it's the biggest dirty little secret in the industry. By taking government agencies outside that whole game, the software industry changes.
Corollary to the above, the current model exalts sales people far over engineers and developers. When support and implementation become the key to the software industry, that's going to have wide-ranging implications for those affected business cultures - you might see technical pay scales rise vis-a-vis sales pay scales (since the development for the closed source software was usually done in the US or Europe, local programmers aren't really benefitting from the current model.) All in all, I think this is an excellent development, and I hope other Latin American countries follow suit.
That's not true. The first time I ever played Quake III was at a LAN party outside of Buenos Aires. The folks I've met here have pretty up-to-date systems with good accelerators, nice big monitors, and the like.
The one thing that gets me is that they ALL used two-button mice. I am SO used to 3-button wheel mice for Quake, I couldn't see using anything else.
However, the retro "Best of ID" c.d. is popular out here for nostalgic reasons. That's probably the release that will get pinged by this.
Of course this is a ridiculous over-reaction, and misguided as well as misapplied. Entirely in keeping with Brazil's governence-by-overreaction (there's an interesting situation regarding the issuance of travel visas that is largely a consequence of this attitude.)
However, let's put things in perspective - Brazil would never ban a game for nudity or sexual depictions. As wrong as this action is, it should be compared with American tolerance - even mainstream celebration - of hardcore violence, couple with their puritanical fear of sexuality (as if people aren't supposed to be sexual before the age 21!) Despite the wrongheadedness of the approach, I think Brazil has its priorities right.
Coincidentally enough, I'm in Rio do Janeiro at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of applications that are orders of magnitude more expensive than the hardware and OS that they run on.
Next question?
To say that the age of the PC is over is probably like saying that the age of TV ended in the late 80's or early 90's with the rise of the home PC. Of course, there are as many TV's as ever, but they no longer represent the defining technology of an era. How many people here hack their TV sets or digital cable boxes?
I think some people here may be frightened about obsolesence - after all this time developing mastery over a medium, and cultivating arrogance towards those who have failed to get it, could there be a little payback coming down the pike? (Many others, of course, I am sure will be quite able to translate existing expertise to deal with the new environment - I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with IPv6 myself.)
But I do think that the PC paradigm is inelegant. Cables and wires everywhere, big clunky boxes, etc. - from a design perspective and in terms of aesthetics, the whole thing could use a lot of improvement.
And they won't work, at least not the ones that are called for here.
Why? for one thing, how many boycotts for non-geekish issues do most of the people here participate in? How many of you are boycotting Monsanto or Nestle or Exxon or Mitsubishi? How many of you listen to the complaints of activists in other arenas against corporations' misbehavior? Damned few, I suspect. Geek-politics is deeply myopic, and frankly most global activists who coordinate and disseminate interest in boycotts are going to be a lot more concerned about environmental survival, labor rights, public health, and other issues that suffer massive geek-apathy. They (and even, to some extent, I) will ask 'what have you done for me lately' when you complain about intellectual property abuses. When some folks have complained vociferously about Microsoft, while continuing to line the coffers of Union Carbide, it is no wonder that the rest of the world sees hypocrisy and solipsism.
Also, those of us who care about DVD and other IP issues have done a piss-poor job of communicating with the world at large, treating the consuming public with contempt, arrogance, and indifference. That's all part and parcel of the pervasive social cluelessness that marks geek-culture, but it has a cost.
In general, boycotts are only effective when there's an issue that is important to a huge segment of the companie's target market (or its shareholders) - the issues here are clear for us, but really not for the public at large, and we don't have many good communicators among us (we have lots of good arguers and debaters, unfortunately.)
So, I don't have a lot of truck for calls for boycotts. I've participated in several boycotts, particularly related to the attempts to end apartheid and the Nestle boycott, and it takes things that this crowd just doesn't have.
However, you CAN 'explain away' by demonstrating that the causes of the belief in 'x' at no point relied on the existence of 'x'; if you can demonstrate that the origin of the belief in Santa Claus is fully explained without recourse to the existance thereof, you have effectively 'explained him away:' the belief in his existence is no longer necessary to explain the belief in his existence.
For things like Santa Claus, unicorns, and fairies, that they don't exist is actually *part* of their feature-list. They have, for example, through selective breeding, bred a goat with a single horn in the middle of its head. Is it a unicorn? Most of us believe that if you genetically engineer a unicorn, it isn't a 'real' unicorn because it fails of one of the tests of unicorness - i.e., it exists! So instead of proving that at no point a creature with characteristics of faeries ever existed, it is more sensible and more persuasive to demonstrate that the belief in fairies is completely explained by causes A. B. and C. (The encounters with early pre-Celtic european cultures, hallucinagenic drug use, documented hoaxes in the 19th century, etc.)
Have these people ever heard of LIBRARIES? You know, places where you can go and check out books, cd's and videos for FREE and listen to them? I can go to the SF Public Library right now and buy a CD that I don't own, listen to it, and bring it back. I've paid not one dime for it (except in taxes to the city, which in this case I pay happily for library services.) Why do we not see the 3000 year old institution of the library decried as a threat to the income of authors?
Presto: the protection is compromised, and the DVD coalition is vulnerable to their (erstwhile) partner's legal fury. The content owners could sue the DVD makers right into their pockets for failure to come through on the protection of their content if the DVD coalition doesn't nip this in the bud..
Now, you and me know that there's no way that they can nip this thing in the bud, that they should not have tried to sell disk encryption as part of the DVD package to the content people, but that's moot as far as they are concerned. In the long run, they are screwed, and they just want to take "us" down with them.
The day that as much as 40% of the "left field" award goes to women would be the day that I would subscribe to your 'gender-blind' model.
The fact that the preponderance of the announcements of Hedy's death don't mention her intellectual accomplishments is an indication to me that we can't pretend a level playing field exists.
Women tend to use more passive-tense language. It is well documented in sociolinguistic studies, and the tendencies persist in written communication as well as in spoken communication. They are more likely to use tentative language, offering suggestions and looking for consensus ('don't you think?' 'do you agree?' and 'please don't be mad at me') than men are. There's some evidence that this is fairly cross-cultural, that women actually think in a way that is more attuned to the social environment, but I'm sure there's a good amount of socialization involved, as well.
Ethnic and age differences are usually more subtle, and often complex (educated black people often show a *stricter* adherence to rules of grammar and usage, and try to affect near-Oxonian discourse, in order to combat the stereotypes of black people as uneducated, of urban black english as 'wrong,' of black intellectuals as unrigorous, etc.)
Smart girls want and need to see examples of smart women identified and recognized.
They will go away when the disparities in pay balance out a bit and other career paths offer comparable rewards with all the opportunities that programmers currently have. Until then, people are going to crowd into the field until equilibrium is reached.
If this doesn't get moderated up as Funny, /. really has lost its consituency.
So, what color is the sky on your home planet?
The only industries in which it seems women regularly earn as much as or more than men are modelling, pornography, prostitution, soap-opera acting and erotic dance - all industries fueled and funded by men's fantasies or women's anxieties.
Well, I guess it is informative in a way. I mean, I certainly didn't know that about Geri Halliwell's hair.
I know that he occassional posts and reads here, to, so if you read this, Andrew, know that your work isn't going unappreciated.
Cmdr, Hemos, etc: Any chance of letting him author some pieces around here?
However, that does not mean that it will be more profitable, and quite unlike the OS and application market, it will tend away from monopoly by its nature, rather than towards it. In the long term, I think it will be extremely difficult for Amazon to justify its market cap, unless it buys, say, a few Bolivian copper mines.
Trust me, if marketing, advertising and sales techniques didn't work, capitalism would have saved that money and stopped using them a LONG time ago.
So, point 1: superiority based on the merits of the software is not enough; it is perception and business relationships that matter, and point 2:even with these big old market caps, I can see no way for free software to fund the marketing and sales forces needed to compete with the closed alternatives, since per-seat licenses generate so much revenue so quickly. Only Apache and some infrastructure software is exempt from this situation, because infrastructure software is sourced and implemented by IT people, who are more likely to be informed of the actual options.
I see the strongest model for free software development in the public sector as coming from a commission model: the water utility needs to upgrade its systems, it looks for bidders to design an open/free solution, and then pays them to do it. The product of that work remains public and available for peer review and improvement, and available to other water districts. Software development becomes a service industry with a collegial environment - and, without all the detritus from trying to ape a manufacturing model replete with sales and marketing forces (above a bare mininum) I think you could expect developers to make a LOT more.
No, there's another bug which is related to nested mode, which is how I read. It has to do with cumulative page size and/or thread length, not with number of comments. This is, I think, a "known bug" that a couple others have caught.
By the way, I'm running around with a 2+ threshold because Slashdot seems broken when a critical-mass threshold of messages is passed. The comment page gets cut off mid-way; the high threshold is just to keep the pages short, not to avoid reading. Is there a fix in the works for the html problem?
JEEZ. Talk about national solipsism.
Here are some issues to consider:
Ooosp, I meant outside of Sao Paulo, not Buenos Aires.
The one thing that gets me is that they ALL used two-button mice. I am SO used to 3-button wheel mice for Quake, I couldn't see using anything else.
However, the retro "Best of ID" c.d. is popular out here for nostalgic reasons. That's probably the release that will get pinged by this.
However, let's put things in perspective - Brazil would never ban a game for nudity or sexual depictions. As wrong as this action is, it should be compared with American tolerance - even mainstream celebration - of hardcore violence, couple with their puritanical fear of sexuality (as if people aren't supposed to be sexual before the age 21!) Despite the wrongheadedness of the approach, I think Brazil has its priorities right.
Coincidentally enough, I'm in Rio do Janeiro at the moment.