Podcasting wasn't really "invented" by Adam Curry, a non-nerd technophile, but he did write the first script that did exactly what he wanted.
Podcasting existed before, somewhat, as other forms of scheduled downloading. There were companies spending money on making it happen.
Curry just happened to do it correctly, in the right environment, with the right gadgets, for the right audience, and gave it a name. Then he promoted it with content. But, give the geek credit.
Jabber was geek-ware.
So was Linux. Though, Linux was not really innovation as much as implementation.
Hypertext was invented by a geek, not a "nerd". Ted Nelson's Xanadu was invented on paper, by a writer.
Geeks make a lot of good things. They're interesting and practical.
They put real money at risk and are entitled to a return just as you are when you place your money in the bank. Except their return is not guaranteed and their entire investment could be lost. They are entitled to as much of a reward as their good judgement and tolerance for risk earns them.
Umm... not to get too nitpicky, but your first sentence contradicts your second and third. The first is incorrect. The second and third are less so.
People who buy securities are mostly speculating on future profits, gains, and dividends. They're mainly competing against other stock traders, trying to outguess each other about how things will turn out.
The level of risk they incur is relatively small. First of all, they have enough capital to invest in something besides their own careers and house -- their overall fiscal situation isn't that precarious. Second, though stock market crashes occur, they aren't as common as drunks losing $500 at the tables in Vegas.
The risk they incur is a tiny fraction of the risk that, say, a woman refugee from a war-torn country incurs by boarding a plane for America, with her kids, but without sponsors.
The thing to remember, as a technical worker, is that there's a symbiotic relationship between you and the company. You get to specialize and avoid developing advanced political skills (which you really should develop) and the owners get to make scads of money off your highly skilled labor.
OK, that didn't come out quite right.
Suppose you were a freelancer. You'd soon find that you'd want to hire people to do things you hate to do. Maybe it's networking and making pitches, or maybe it's accounting. In fact, you'd find that you NEED these people to make a living, and that would entail learning how to "tip" people for sending work your way. The tips would be small - a hundred here, or a couple hundred there.
Now, don't get me wrong. You would definitely end up doing a little of everything, but, eventually, you'd need to find people to complement you. Their strengths would make up for where you're weak. This is normal.
There are many mechanisms which can put into place that leverage the capabilities of a free market. This is quite different, actually, from democracy, where everyone decides what the organization does. Each player actually decides the best use of the assets he has, rather than trying to decide what others should do.
Kudos to you for being an honest "capitalist". Most never admit that capitalism isn't democratic.
You make a serious error, however. Democracy isn't founded on people deciding what "others" should do; it's deciding on what "we" should do. The idea of democracy is based around the idea of people having control over decisionmaking.
Ownership of a business -- that is what allows someone to decide what someone else should do. If the unemployment level is low, the worker can quit, and you can say it's a voluntary servitude. If unemployment is very high, then, it's not so voluntary.
Fundamentally, management represents the interests of the owners. That interest is to create or maintain profits.
"Leadership" is one way to get profits, especially if you are overseeing a labor force that's not captive, and enjoys low unemployment. Change the economics, or the economic context to high unemployment, and the "tyrant" or "assh---" model of management will start to make more sense.
The workplace without managers can operate, and well, if the economic situation is relatively static. Then, all the workers are working for the market -- the "boss" is the market, and the "boss" is predictable. I've seen a lot of co-ops do okay, sometimes for decades.
Schlumberger does oil. It's predictable and profitable.
In a dynamic market, though, you need focus and risk-taking, and that requires either a group of people with the same goal, all taking the risk together, or one maniac with a lot of money (or debt) and a less maniacal group of people who are paid to create that vision. Or, something in between.
In those situations, you need management to convince the workers that they aren't taking a huge personal risk by putting their faith in a maniac's dream. Management is there to hire people, and fire them., and prevent freakouts in both situations.
Therefore, only perform technical miracles for your boss' superiors, but not for your immediate boss.
Sounds about right. Some people call it kissing ass, but others call it being practical and not a slave.
The sale is the transaction, not the motivation behind it or the ethical content of what went before the transaction.
That's what his entire point it, I think. He's in this situation because a fraction AOL business is built around fraud, and in such a business (as in any business) the profit centers (sales, retention, etc.) make the most money, and the money pits (tech support) get paid the least.
Business is often about a little lie that everyone's getting a fair slice of the pie they helped to bake. In fact, it's based around how hungry people are for pie, and how much BS they're willing to put up with to get a slice.
You can't have a profit if you don't have a sale. The profit is the "proof in the pudding" that your overall business structure is sound, but, if you can't sell it (call it sales or marketing -- whatever) then you won't have the profit.
Some things sell themselves (food, mariujuana, alcohol, and sex, for example) but most things require a little sales pitch to create some demand.
Would some capitalist like to defend this?
Personally, I symathize with the toad. Business is business, and the key to a profitable business is sales. That's always number one. After that, you have things like value, customer service, keeping employees, producing things, being kind to people, and other things that steal dollars from the bottom line.
They got big because their software took care of a number of problems. First, their much hated DLLs got the people online, when the standard networking on Windows (and Mac) machines were not easy to configure (or to use to tunnel IP). Networking was focused on the LAN, and auto-configuring workgroup LANs. Remember that it took til around 1998 until the two big OSs had really functional "network installation wizards" for ISPs. Also, both MS and Apple had their own online services circa 1996-1998, and had little incentive to help their future competition operate well on their operating systems.
(Even today, many companies have alternative network dialers for their customers. It's still that tough to get online, and there's still value in making it easy. The future will belong to the company that introduces no-configuration networking boxes that combine the router, managed firewall, and modem.)
The other thing AOL did correctly was put chat rooms and instant messaging into the core of their service. Other online services focused on message boards and treated chats as a secondary service. AOL went whole-hog for scheduled chats with famous people.
The facts are simple. People want to chat with each other in real time. The majority of regular people don't feel confident about their writing. The vast majority are intimidated by message boards frequented by college grads who write well. AOL, by having lousy message boards (they are garbage) and being a lousy place for bookish people, helped create an environment that was perceived as less hostile to their target market of average people.
Also, unlike the current internet, the high cost of AOL actually improved the quality of the users, at least in the chats. I think that was a happy accident for them. The Usenet and internet were great until the mid 90s, then it all went to hell. The exorbitant $25 per month fee and "silence the obnoxious" anti-free-speech policies of AOL served to keep the service a little more civil than the open services on the internet.
These are market forces in action.
Also, for all the disses against AOL software, it does outdo the web in some respects. For one, it has a better caching mechanism, so pages are downloaded only once. This improves overall responsiveness. The bookmarking is a little less confusing, because the authors use better titles. The "few features, big buttons" interface is easy to learn, even when they violate every GUI rule known to interface-dom.
I am not a big AOL user, though I did use it for work, and also played with it for a year or so just to see why it was so popular. It was okay. It's its own thing. Before you get the wrong impression of me, I've been online since the mid 80s, and have written networking software, so, please... I'm not a fool, but just a user trying to look at this dispassionately.
Google's just one company among many. There is no way that they can influence the entire labor market -- rather with their capitaliziation, they can influence the high pay for the top 5% or so of talent (who are making a lot already).
This is crony capitalism as practiced in an imperfect world where special interests will try to obtain favoritism and such wherever they can. This is not a problem of capitalism as much as it is a problem that any system run by men can be corrupted. As far as capitalistic countries do pick businesses to succeed is more of a vestige from dalliances with socialism and central planning than an inherent flaw of capitalism. Such practices should be squelched.
I think you're misinterpreting history. Capitalism developed from mercantile capitalism, which was completely regulated by the state. Socialism only emerged in the late 19th century as a political force, at which time, cronyism was common.
The political pressure of socialist movements criticizing capitalism, and threatening revolt, motivated the creation of a liberal reform movement in America to break up monopolies and trusts, and inject greater government regulation into the market. Cronyism is inherent in capitalism, which is why there are anti-trust laws to tell you what your business can and cannot do.
Also, regarding fascism -- the central command economy is socialist, and the fascists did align themselves with socialism, but they were reformers who advocated for a hybrid military-state-business alliance. Within their political contexts, each of the listed countries fascist groups and nationalist parties were the more conservative-moderate groups, competing for popularity against communists and liberal socialists.
In Germany in the 1930s, for example, two of the three big political parties were "socialist" and the third was the communist party. In that context, everyone was socialist. The fascists were the socialists who wanted to coordinate with industrial giants.
Not all totalitarians are fascist. Some are socialists. Saddam Hussein was a socialist. Turkye is a socialist nation. Not all fascists are in power, either; the Kurds have been called fascist, as have the Croats.
I will clarify: I did not say that fascism and capitalism are the same thing, just that they tend to find alliance, especially against socialism and communism.
Capitalism goes hand in hand with concepts of individual freedom, liberty and free thought. When I talk of freedom, I'm talking about the freedom of an individual to choose which trade he enters, where he lives or how he spends his time and money that is most suitable for himself. Capitalistic ideas. Socialism by definition must curtail and ration such freedoms to fit within a central plan.
The freedom you're describing is freedom within a market, not other kinds of freedom. Capitalism does afford that kind of freedom, which socialism curtails. There are, however, other kinds of freedom. There's the freedom of "liberty" or free will, to decide on your own future. That kind of freedom has numerous costs, like funding universal education, creating equal rights, expanding the idea of who is "human", and so forth. There's freedom from unnecessary death, and that implies a social organization that will take care of those who are invalid.
Also, capitalism doesn't naturally tend toward freedom. It tends toward monopolies, but those monopolies aren't always permanent. This is basic Adam Smith. Capitalism can be very restrictive, too. Insurance companies, condo homeowner associations, and company employee policies are private sector regulations on freedom. Most people don't have the ability to opt-out of these contracts.
I say it thusly: "free markets < freedom"
Such is life -- we cannot be free all the time. We must choose which freedoms to expand, and which
These numbers are somewhat mythical. I've read some studies that include contributions to churches, museum memberships, pet projects, and tax shelters (when you operate the nonprofit) as charity.
That's not to say we don't give a lot of money. We do. It's just not always for simple things like social welfare. If it were, we would not have this huge problem with millions of very poor, often troubled people, living on sidewalks. We would not have failing health care systems. Our social services apparatus, for poor people, is basically garbage.
Ultimately, it's an issue of priorities. In my city, Los Angeles, the priority is on building garbage like the Disney Concert Hall (which used public moneys to build a concert hall with expensive ticket prices), while, ten blocks away, there are vast encampments of people living in tents on the sidewalk. They can get food and treatment for their ills, sure, but they have to read the Bible to get it.
That's how it works in America. Scraps for the hopeless, carnivals for the comfortable, and opportunities to buy your way out of guilt, through religion.
Your first idea that choice is the most important difference between captialism and socialism is debatable. The main difference seems to be the relationship between the state and business. In capitalism, the state tends to pick businesses to succeed via regulation, outsourcing, and favortism. In socialism, the state tends to operate the businesses.
In Germany, Italy, and Japan circa the 1930s, the facsists were aligned with large business interests, and very open about it. Likewise, contemporary governments that tend to "go facsist" and increase police repression tend to be aligned with business.
A union is merely a formal bargaining agent for laborers. It's not that different from a company, insurance, or other collective agents. The entire point of the union is unity - to bargain collectively, and withhold labor (strike) collectively as leverage. That's why arch-right capitalists and apologists always advocate for "choice", because it destroys unity. Labor, atomized, competes against itself and lowers its hourly rate.
Lastly, the idea that capitalism is somehow connected with the englightenment idea of free thought is absurd. A factory isn't a place where you're supposed to have free thought. Not even "knowledge work" encourages free thought -- it's more like being paid to think and be rational.
The essence of capitalism is capital. It's the idea that capital is what makes the world what it is. It's not primarily labor, not religion, nor the state. It's the idea that "you have to spend money to make money" -- in other words, you have to invest money in land and equipment, to use the capital to create something to sell for a profit.
It's also about the idea of debt being good, because it is the main way that capital wealth is transferred from the wealthy to the poor. A person, company, or country, in debt, is beholden to pay back the debt, and the only way is to acquire income through trade. They can sell information, skills, goods, or, at a last resort, labor and bodies. Debt is the stick, and wealth is the carrot.
One important character of capitalism is that, as they grow, businesses tend to resemble banks. They tend to diversify their holdings into land, commodities, and investments into other businesses.
Insurance, which has as its goal, "taking care of people in hard times" and presents itself as a form of collective mutual aid, operates like a hybrid of bank and gambling operation.
Real estate, which used to be focused on selling houses, now sell financing. A 40 year home loan is not a "loan" as much as a long-term lease on capital. The same goes for auto dealers and mattress stores.
America doesn't have a "disdain for socialism." The industrial labor movement was birthed here, as were the ideas of equality and opportunity, universal public schools, and free libraries.
In the early 20th century, the rise of a possible socialist revolution in the US put the capitalists on alert. They have since carried out a sustained smear campaign against socialism, and specifically, against social welfare (which tends to keep people out of the labor market).
If you look at media from the 1930s to the 1950s, it was all very explicit, especially in business publications. Also during this time, the government and police went after communists, in the Palmer raids and the McCarthy witch hunts.
The majority will of the people is to heavily regulate health care and health insurance, and basically, to move to a single-payer system. Despite this, it doesn't happen, because people lack the courage (and know-how) to use their popular power to challenge the business interests.
Also, the "American Dream" was a car advertisement. When it became a political goal, it was effected, in part, by a combination of rapid industrialization and rising wages. The wages rose because for the early part of the 20th century, socialists and allies had fought (and died) to demand for the working people, the wealth working people helped create.
"That said, they are still a company trying to make a profit..."
That's the crux of all the arguments. The issue is that Microsoft is no longer "trying to make a profit" but is guaranteed of making a profit due to their dominance, and is doing everything to prevent competition that could put their dominance and guaranteed profit at risk.
Monopolies are bad because the monopolistic companies have a hard time avoiding destructive, monopolistic behaviors. It doesn't matter how nice the people are, or how altruistic the CEO is. The damage being done is systematic.
Marxists would call this "the logic of capitalism". Capitalism tends toward monopolies, and monopolies tend to persist by devoting resources to defending their markets from competition.
In fact, you can be pretty sure that there's monopolization in effect when the rhetoric of "competition is good" rears its obnoxious head. When there really is competition, the competing companies tend to say things like "the competition is tough out there, but we feel we can make it." When the competition is vanquished, then the victors tend to wax rhapsodic about "competition", to distract you from the fact that they won without competing, and stay powerful without competing.
It's not just about society. SF, especially fanboy or subgenre-bound SF, is about how people are alienated from society.
I think SF is an escape from the relative psychological complexity of traditional Western literature. Most stories that the mainstream considers "legitimate" are about middle class people having relationships and having adventures.
SF tends to occur within the context of work (a scientist is involved) or the military (Star Trek, Star Wars). The universe is often explicitly political. Relationships are often between archetypes. This is alienated.
There's nothing wrong with this. Parallel criticisms can be made about horror, mystery, military thriller, "nonfiction" exploitation, and romance genres. It's legitimate to write and read stuff that's meant to enterain.
That's why there's so much aversion to documentation. Many, if not most, people are averse to writing in any language. Their spelling isn't great, or their grammar isn't quite right, or they have some trauma they experienced in English class. These people develop an aversion to writing.
I like to write, to the point where I can even tolerate editing second and third drafts. Not surprisingly, I like to document code, edit the documentation, and even re-document code correctly if I screw it up the first time.
I do not, however, like the literate programming style. That's a whole different thing. My favorite style of documentation is JavaDoc, or PHPDocumentor.
JavaDoc rewards you for writing extensive documentation for your interfaces, and penalizes you for writing lots of comments in your code. It encourages you to develop a narrative about your objects, rather than a detailed outline of your code.
Not that there's something wrong with outlining code! I often start coding by writing a couple dozen lines of documentation about the specific alorithms and methods I'm using to implement a function. This kind of "documentation", however, isn't that useful to someone who needs to figure out if they're making changes in the right part of the application.
They need the overview, and that takes more effort to write.
PS - I'm not a big believer in using accurate variable names everywhere. I think it's often better to use generic names, preferably the ones used in the examples in the man pages, and explain what's going on in a couple lines above the code. Once you have the output you want, save the values to variables with long names, or better, save them into objects. Here's what I mean:
result = query("some query:); for (i=0; i=next(result); out += i); total_hours = out;
result = query("some other query:); for (i=0; i=next(result); out += i); total_break_time = out;
It's better to reuse the variables, because it's a way to signal to the reader that in both blocks of code, we're doing the exact same thing. This is "idiomatic" programming. At the top of the block, you "set up" the unique aspects of the block. At the bottom of the block of code, the output is assigned to a unique variable.
Arguably, you can put the repetitive code into a function or macro. However, it's not always worth the extra effort, and can be confusing if you have two or three very short, very similar function that differ in just one or two lines. Sometimes, unfactored code is okay.
(karma boost)
I do the same thing. I always tried to move important mail into an account that could be downloaded into an mbox-using email client. You get the mail into that account by mailing it there, or using IMAP to upload into a folder from the "bad" app, and downloading it with the "good" app.
The main clients that I used are Apple Mail, all the Mozilla mailers, PINE, and Eudora (a good one).
Stay away from Outlook, OE, some of the odd Mac mail software, AOL, etc.
Also, delete aggressively. I keep everything I write, and maybe.25% of the incoming stuff. I keep an archive folder organized by year and quarter. It's like my own little searchable database.
Instead of analogies, it's better to discuss realities.
One reason to participate in OS is to externalize development costs. The assumption is that if you help develop the core product, you will reap the benfits of others' work. Your interest is to have the overall project go in the direction of your company's larger goals.
Another reason is to support a project that undermines your competition's profitability. Indirectly, support of products like Apache web server undermines the profitability of Oracle, Microsoft, and Sun. That's an edge for pretty much any other vendor. The cost of supporting Apache is low compared to the cost of competing directly with Microsoft.
Another reason is ideological. A lot of people are dissatisfied with the current economic relationships, and wish to try out different ones, and F/OSS is a different one. It's new, and interesting, and fun. If enough people do something, then some people will make money from it, even if it's economically untenable.
I'm serious about this. How do you explain the comic book market, or religion, or the economy around the Grateful Dead. Consider that billions are spent each year on maintaining ethnic culture in America (or anywhere really) against the tide of McDonaldization and Wal-Martization. F/OSS can be described as a kind of cultural alternative as well.
i wish i could moderate you up.
too many "capitalists" ignore the realities of capitalism, like the fact it tends to form monopolies and dislikes competition.
and to say the Economist is anything but capitalist and pro-business is absurd. it's definitely both.
It's completely legitimate to demand that registrars take up the role of protecting trademarks, particularly under the.com domain. ICANN set up an (expensive) arbitration procedure, but, it would make life easy if the.com, but not other domains, were harmonized with trademark laws.
The tradeoff is this:.com domains will cost more, but also become more valuable, because they will become safer.
The other TLDs should not conform to these rules, and should develop their own, or new TLDs established with their own rules..coop is a good example, though I think they charge way too much, given the economics of coops.
The fault goes to the registrar. There should be an arbitration system, where PayPal can collect damages from the registrar and the registrant.
It seems to be, mainly, a fraud issue. Maybe it's a trademark issue.
Moreover, there is no simple technological solution for this problem. The existing technology, far from being flawed, actually makes it easier to spot the fake name. You *can* look at the source for the link. In contrast, if someone printed up "PayPal" letterhead, you wouldn't have been able to tell it's fake.
I'm not convinced. There's a lot of pirated software out there, and that must also have an effect on the value of software.
FOSS offerings simply legalize what the majority of end users are already doing. What people are doing, really, is figuring out a way to lower their cost of entry.
I haven't really sensed any stagnation. If anything, I see new kinds of software popping up all over, and the overall audience for software is increasing.
One effect I've seen is that software is becoming more like "media", like movies or music. It's more disposable. Websites are a good example: people use it, maybe pay for it, and then don't use it again.
Another effect is that some kinds of traditional software are remaining expensive, or getting more expensive to support. The "service contract" model is popular, and I think will remain so, and maybe even increase.
This is good, because it promotes a demand-driven style of software development: you write the code because someone's willing to pay for it, and you write no more "extra" code than that. Purchasing decisions are short-term, and even long-term decisions are measured in a few years.
As for the Apache web server example: I would counter that by saying there are hundreds of ISPs doing millions of dollars of business on top of Apache. Is the product stagnant? I don't think so. Most of the sites using it don't even tap into most of Apache's functionality.
There are other web servers out there. Netscape, Microsoft (another giveaway), Oracle, and many smaller companies. There are a lot of different app servers too. You don't buy these just to get a license -- you purchase so that you can call tech support, make improvement requests, and potentially purchase a service contract to get your bugs and features prioritized.
A better example would be AbiWord, which competes directly with MS Word. I really wonder what future Abi has, because it's really copycat software. I don't see the Abi dev team trying to get a company or government contract to customize the product. But, even Abi is a bad example, because MS Word's dominance continues.
Once FOSS gets back to original software, we'll really see what FOSS can produce.
A good example is MySQL. It made a new category of entry-level database server. It disrupted the market that was being dominated by Oracle and Microsoft, but not my competing directly. Instead, it helped create a whole generation of SQL hackers who started out making websites. The weblications are different from enterprise database applications. Oracle's still in business, and they deliver value to their clients. And those who don't think so now have more options.
It's a mistake to assume that the market drives all software development. Software for the market will always be a subset of all software development. Programmers adapt what they do for their bosses, who in turn adapt what they do, for the market.
There are other modes of development. There's hacking for pleasure. There's hacking for universities. There are more opportunities to hack for the government. There's hacking for art.
I think of hacking like sex. It's best when it's done for free.
Slashdot Mirror
Podcasting wasn't really "invented" by Adam Curry, a non-nerd technophile, but he did write the first script that did exactly what he wanted.
Podcasting existed before, somewhat, as other forms of scheduled downloading. There were companies spending money on making it happen.
Curry just happened to do it correctly, in the right environment, with the right gadgets, for the right audience, and gave it a name. Then he promoted it with content. But, give the geek credit.
Jabber was geek-ware.
So was Linux. Though, Linux was not really innovation as much as implementation.
Hypertext was invented by a geek, not a "nerd". Ted Nelson's Xanadu was invented on paper, by a writer.
Geeks make a lot of good things. They're interesting and practical.
Umm... not to get too nitpicky, but your first sentence contradicts your second and third. The first is incorrect. The second and third are less so.
People who buy securities are mostly speculating on future profits, gains, and dividends. They're mainly competing against other stock traders, trying to outguess each other about how things will turn out.
The level of risk they incur is relatively small. First of all, they have enough capital to invest in something besides their own careers and house -- their overall fiscal situation isn't that precarious. Second, though stock market crashes occur, they aren't as common as drunks losing $500 at the tables in Vegas.
The risk they incur is a tiny fraction of the risk that, say, a woman refugee from a war-torn country incurs by boarding a plane for America, with her kids, but without sponsors.
serv: this is to the person you're replying.
The thing to remember, as a technical worker, is that there's a symbiotic relationship between you and the company. You get to specialize and avoid developing advanced political skills (which you really should develop) and the owners get to make scads of money off your highly skilled labor.
OK, that didn't come out quite right.
Suppose you were a freelancer. You'd soon find that you'd want to hire people to do things you hate to do. Maybe it's networking and making pitches, or maybe it's accounting. In fact, you'd find that you NEED these people to make a living, and that would entail learning how to "tip" people for sending work your way. The tips would be small - a hundred here, or a couple hundred there.
Now, don't get me wrong. You would definitely end up doing a little of everything, but, eventually, you'd need to find people to complement you. Their strengths would make up for where you're weak. This is normal.
Kudos to you for being an honest "capitalist". Most never admit that capitalism isn't democratic.
You make a serious error, however. Democracy isn't founded on people deciding what "others" should do; it's deciding on what "we" should do. The idea of democracy is based around the idea of people having control over decisionmaking.
Ownership of a business -- that is what allows someone to decide what someone else should do. If the unemployment level is low, the worker can quit, and you can say it's a voluntary servitude. If unemployment is very high, then, it's not so voluntary.
Fundamentally, management represents the interests of the owners. That interest is to create or maintain profits.
"Leadership" is one way to get profits, especially if you are overseeing a labor force that's not captive, and enjoys low unemployment. Change the economics, or the economic context to high unemployment, and the "tyrant" or "assh---" model of management will start to make more sense.
The workplace without managers can operate, and well, if the economic situation is relatively static. Then, all the workers are working for the market -- the "boss" is the market, and the "boss" is predictable. I've seen a lot of co-ops do okay, sometimes for decades.
Schlumberger does oil. It's predictable and profitable.
In a dynamic market, though, you need focus and risk-taking, and that requires either a group of people with the same goal, all taking the risk together, or one maniac with a lot of money (or debt) and a less maniacal group of people who are paid to create that vision. Or, something in between.
In those situations, you need management to convince the workers that they aren't taking a huge personal risk by putting their faith in a maniac's dream. Management is there to hire people, and fire them., and prevent freakouts in both situations.
Therefore, only perform technical miracles for your boss' superiors, but not for your immediate boss. Sounds about right. Some people call it kissing ass, but others call it being practical and not a slave.
The sale is the transaction, not the motivation behind it or the ethical content of what went before the transaction. That's what his entire point it, I think. He's in this situation because a fraction AOL business is built around fraud, and in such a business (as in any business) the profit centers (sales, retention, etc.) make the most money, and the money pits (tech support) get paid the least. Business is often about a little lie that everyone's getting a fair slice of the pie they helped to bake. In fact, it's based around how hungry people are for pie, and how much BS they're willing to put up with to get a slice.
You can't have a profit if you don't have a sale. The profit is the "proof in the pudding" that your overall business structure is sound, but, if you can't sell it (call it sales or marketing -- whatever) then you won't have the profit.
Some things sell themselves (food, mariujuana, alcohol, and sex, for example) but most things require a little sales pitch to create some demand.
Would some capitalist like to defend this? Personally, I symathize with the toad. Business is business, and the key to a profitable business is sales. That's always number one. After that, you have things like value, customer service, keeping employees, producing things, being kind to people, and other things that steal dollars from the bottom line.
They got big because their software took care of a number of problems. First, their much hated DLLs got the people online, when the standard networking on Windows (and Mac) machines were not easy to configure (or to use to tunnel IP). Networking was focused on the LAN, and auto-configuring workgroup LANs. Remember that it took til around 1998 until the two big OSs had really functional "network installation wizards" for ISPs. Also, both MS and Apple had their own online services circa 1996-1998, and had little incentive to help their future competition operate well on their operating systems.
(Even today, many companies have alternative network dialers for their customers. It's still that tough to get online, and there's still value in making it easy. The future will belong to the company that introduces no-configuration networking boxes that combine the router, managed firewall, and modem.)
The other thing AOL did correctly was put chat rooms and instant messaging into the core of their service. Other online services focused on message boards and treated chats as a secondary service. AOL went whole-hog for scheduled chats with famous people.
The facts are simple. People want to chat with each other in real time. The majority of regular people don't feel confident about their writing. The vast majority are intimidated by message boards frequented by college grads who write well. AOL, by having lousy message boards (they are garbage) and being a lousy place for bookish people, helped create an environment that was perceived as less hostile to their target market of average people.
Also, unlike the current internet, the high cost of AOL actually improved the quality of the users, at least in the chats. I think that was a happy accident for them. The Usenet and internet were great until the mid 90s, then it all went to hell. The exorbitant $25 per month fee and "silence the obnoxious" anti-free-speech policies of AOL served to keep the service a little more civil than the open services on the internet.
These are market forces in action.
Also, for all the disses against AOL software, it does outdo the web in some respects. For one, it has a better caching mechanism, so pages are downloaded only once. This improves overall responsiveness. The bookmarking is a little less confusing, because the authors use better titles. The "few features, big buttons" interface is easy to learn, even when they violate every GUI rule known to interface-dom.
I am not a big AOL user, though I did use it for work, and also played with it for a year or so just to see why it was so popular. It was okay. It's its own thing. Before you get the wrong impression of me, I've been online since the mid 80s, and have written networking software, so, please... I'm not a fool, but just a user trying to look at this dispassionately.
Google's just one company among many. There is no way that they can influence the entire labor market -- rather with their capitaliziation, they can influence the high pay for the top 5% or so of talent (who are making a lot already).
This is crony capitalism as practiced in an imperfect world where special interests will try to obtain favoritism and such wherever they can. This is not a problem of capitalism as much as it is a problem that any system run by men can be corrupted. As far as capitalistic countries do pick businesses to succeed is more of a vestige from dalliances with socialism and central planning than an inherent flaw of capitalism. Such practices should be squelched.
I think you're misinterpreting history. Capitalism developed from mercantile capitalism, which was completely regulated by the state. Socialism only emerged in the late 19th century as a political force, at which time, cronyism was common.
The political pressure of socialist movements criticizing capitalism, and threatening revolt, motivated the creation of a liberal reform movement in America to break up monopolies and trusts, and inject greater government regulation into the market. Cronyism is inherent in capitalism, which is why there are anti-trust laws to tell you what your business can and cannot do.
Also, regarding fascism -- the central command economy is socialist, and the fascists did align themselves with socialism, but they were reformers who advocated for a hybrid military-state-business alliance. Within their political contexts, each of the listed countries fascist groups and nationalist parties were the more conservative-moderate groups, competing for popularity against communists and liberal socialists.
In Germany in the 1930s, for example, two of the three big political parties were "socialist" and the third was the communist party. In that context, everyone was socialist. The fascists were the socialists who wanted to coordinate with industrial giants.
As for contemporary fascism favoring business:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suharto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Duvalier
Not all totalitarians are fascist. Some are socialists. Saddam Hussein was a socialist. Turkye is a socialist nation. Not all fascists are in power, either; the Kurds have been called fascist, as have the Croats.
I will clarify: I did not say that fascism and capitalism are the same thing, just that they tend to find alliance, especially against socialism and communism.
Capitalism goes hand in hand with concepts of individual freedom, liberty and free thought. When I talk of freedom, I'm talking about the freedom of an individual to choose which trade he enters, where he lives or how he spends his time and money that is most suitable for himself. Capitalistic ideas. Socialism by definition must curtail and ration such freedoms to fit within a central plan.
The freedom you're describing is freedom within a market, not other kinds of freedom. Capitalism does afford that kind of freedom, which socialism curtails. There are, however, other kinds of freedom. There's the freedom of "liberty" or free will, to decide on your own future. That kind of freedom has numerous costs, like funding universal education, creating equal rights, expanding the idea of who is "human", and so forth. There's freedom from unnecessary death, and that implies a social organization that will take care of those who are invalid.
Also, capitalism doesn't naturally tend toward freedom. It tends toward monopolies, but those monopolies aren't always permanent. This is basic Adam Smith. Capitalism can be very restrictive, too. Insurance companies, condo homeowner associations, and company employee policies are private sector regulations on freedom. Most people don't have the ability to opt-out of these contracts.
I say it thusly: "free markets < freedom"
Such is life -- we cannot be free all the time. We must choose which freedoms to expand, and which
These numbers are somewhat mythical. I've read some studies that include contributions to churches, museum memberships, pet projects, and tax shelters (when you operate the nonprofit) as charity. That's not to say we don't give a lot of money. We do. It's just not always for simple things like social welfare. If it were, we would not have this huge problem with millions of very poor, often troubled people, living on sidewalks. We would not have failing health care systems. Our social services apparatus, for poor people, is basically garbage. Ultimately, it's an issue of priorities. In my city, Los Angeles, the priority is on building garbage like the Disney Concert Hall (which used public moneys to build a concert hall with expensive ticket prices), while, ten blocks away, there are vast encampments of people living in tents on the sidewalk. They can get food and treatment for their ills, sure, but they have to read the Bible to get it. That's how it works in America. Scraps for the hopeless, carnivals for the comfortable, and opportunities to buy your way out of guilt, through religion.
Your first idea that choice is the most important difference between captialism and socialism is debatable. The main difference seems to be the relationship between the state and business. In capitalism, the state tends to pick businesses to succeed via regulation, outsourcing, and favortism. In socialism, the state tends to operate the businesses.
In Germany, Italy, and Japan circa the 1930s, the facsists were aligned with large business interests, and very open about it. Likewise, contemporary governments that tend to "go facsist" and increase police repression tend to be aligned with business.
A union is merely a formal bargaining agent for laborers. It's not that different from a company, insurance, or other collective agents. The entire point of the union is unity - to bargain collectively, and withhold labor (strike) collectively as leverage. That's why arch-right capitalists and apologists always advocate for "choice", because it destroys unity. Labor, atomized, competes against itself and lowers its hourly rate.
Lastly, the idea that capitalism is somehow connected with the englightenment idea of free thought is absurd. A factory isn't a place where you're supposed to have free thought. Not even "knowledge work" encourages free thought -- it's more like being paid to think and be rational.
The essence of capitalism is capital. It's the idea that capital is what makes the world what it is. It's not primarily labor, not religion, nor the state. It's the idea that "you have to spend money to make money" -- in other words, you have to invest money in land and equipment, to use the capital to create something to sell for a profit.
It's also about the idea of debt being good, because it is the main way that capital wealth is transferred from the wealthy to the poor. A person, company, or country, in debt, is beholden to pay back the debt, and the only way is to acquire income through trade. They can sell information, skills, goods, or, at a last resort, labor and bodies. Debt is the stick, and wealth is the carrot.
One important character of capitalism is that, as they grow, businesses tend to resemble banks. They tend to diversify their holdings into land, commodities, and investments into other businesses.
Insurance, which has as its goal, "taking care of people in hard times" and presents itself as a form of collective mutual aid, operates like a hybrid of bank and gambling operation.
Real estate, which used to be focused on selling houses, now sell financing. A 40 year home loan is not a "loan" as much as a long-term lease on capital. The same goes for auto dealers and mattress stores.
That's capitalism in action.
America doesn't have a "disdain for socialism." The industrial labor movement was birthed here, as were the ideas of equality and opportunity, universal public schools, and free libraries.
In the early 20th century, the rise of a possible socialist revolution in the US put the capitalists on alert. They have since carried out a sustained smear campaign against socialism, and specifically, against social welfare (which tends to keep people out of the labor market).
If you look at media from the 1930s to the 1950s, it was all very explicit, especially in business publications. Also during this time, the government and police went after communists, in the Palmer raids and the McCarthy witch hunts.
The majority will of the people is to heavily regulate health care and health insurance, and basically, to move to a single-payer system. Despite this, it doesn't happen, because people lack the courage (and know-how) to use their popular power to challenge the business interests.
Also, the "American Dream" was a car advertisement. When it became a political goal, it was effected, in part, by a combination of rapid industrialization and rising wages. The wages rose because for the early part of the 20th century, socialists and allies had fought (and died) to demand for the working people, the wealth working people helped create.
That's the crux of all the arguments. The issue is that Microsoft is no longer "trying to make a profit" but is guaranteed of making a profit due to their dominance, and is doing everything to prevent competition that could put their dominance and guaranteed profit at risk.
Monopolies are bad because the monopolistic companies have a hard time avoiding destructive, monopolistic behaviors. It doesn't matter how nice the people are, or how altruistic the CEO is. The damage being done is systematic.
Marxists would call this "the logic of capitalism". Capitalism tends toward monopolies, and monopolies tend to persist by devoting resources to defending their markets from competition.
In fact, you can be pretty sure that there's monopolization in effect when the rhetoric of "competition is good" rears its obnoxious head. When there really is competition, the competing companies tend to say things like "the competition is tough out there, but we feel we can make it." When the competition is vanquished, then the victors tend to wax rhapsodic about "competition", to distract you from the fact that they won without competing, and stay powerful without competing.
It's not just about society. SF, especially fanboy or subgenre-bound SF, is about how people are alienated from society.
I think SF is an escape from the relative psychological complexity of traditional Western literature. Most stories that the mainstream considers "legitimate" are about middle class people having relationships and having adventures.
SF tends to occur within the context of work (a scientist is involved) or the military (Star Trek, Star Wars). The universe is often explicitly political. Relationships are often between archetypes. This is alienated.
There's nothing wrong with this. Parallel criticisms can be made about horror, mystery, military thriller, "nonfiction" exploitation, and romance genres. It's legitimate to write and read stuff that's meant to enterain.
That's why there's so much aversion to documentation. Many, if not most, people are averse to writing in any language. Their spelling isn't great, or their grammar isn't quite right, or they have some trauma they experienced in English class. These people develop an aversion to writing.
I like to write, to the point where I can even tolerate editing second and third drafts. Not surprisingly, I like to document code, edit the documentation, and even re-document code correctly if I screw it up the first time.
I do not, however, like the literate programming style. That's a whole different thing. My favorite style of documentation is JavaDoc, or PHPDocumentor.
JavaDoc rewards you for writing extensive documentation for your interfaces, and penalizes you for writing lots of comments in your code. It encourages you to develop a narrative about your objects, rather than a detailed outline of your code.
Not that there's something wrong with outlining code! I often start coding by writing a couple dozen lines of documentation about the specific alorithms and methods I'm using to implement a function. This kind of "documentation", however, isn't that useful to someone who needs to figure out if they're making changes in the right part of the application.
They need the overview, and that takes more effort to write.
PS - I'm not a big believer in using accurate variable names everywhere. I think it's often better to use generic names, preferably the ones used in the examples in the man pages, and explain what's going on in a couple lines above the code. Once you have the output you want, save the values to variables with long names, or better, save them into objects. Here's what I mean:
result = query("some query:);
for (i=0; i=next(result); out += i);
total_hours = out;
result = query("some other query:);
for (i=0; i=next(result); out += i);
total_break_time = out;
It's better to reuse the variables, because it's a way to signal to the reader that in both blocks of code, we're doing the exact same thing. This is "idiomatic" programming. At the top of the block, you "set up" the unique aspects of the block. At the bottom of the block of code, the output is assigned to a unique variable.
Arguably, you can put the repetitive code into a function or macro. However, it's not always worth the extra effort, and can be confusing if you have two or three very short, very similar function that differ in just one or two lines. Sometimes, unfactored code is okay.
(karma boost) I do the same thing. I always tried to move important mail into an account that could be downloaded into an mbox-using email client. You get the mail into that account by mailing it there, or using IMAP to upload into a folder from the "bad" app, and downloading it with the "good" app. The main clients that I used are Apple Mail, all the Mozilla mailers, PINE, and Eudora (a good one). Stay away from Outlook, OE, some of the odd Mac mail software, AOL, etc. Also, delete aggressively. I keep everything I write, and maybe .25% of the incoming stuff. I keep an archive folder organized by year and quarter. It's like my own little searchable database.
Instead of analogies, it's better to discuss realities. One reason to participate in OS is to externalize development costs. The assumption is that if you help develop the core product, you will reap the benfits of others' work. Your interest is to have the overall project go in the direction of your company's larger goals. Another reason is to support a project that undermines your competition's profitability. Indirectly, support of products like Apache web server undermines the profitability of Oracle, Microsoft, and Sun. That's an edge for pretty much any other vendor. The cost of supporting Apache is low compared to the cost of competing directly with Microsoft. Another reason is ideological. A lot of people are dissatisfied with the current economic relationships, and wish to try out different ones, and F/OSS is a different one. It's new, and interesting, and fun. If enough people do something, then some people will make money from it, even if it's economically untenable. I'm serious about this. How do you explain the comic book market, or religion, or the economy around the Grateful Dead. Consider that billions are spent each year on maintaining ethnic culture in America (or anywhere really) against the tide of McDonaldization and Wal-Martization. F/OSS can be described as a kind of cultural alternative as well.
i wish i could moderate you up. too many "capitalists" ignore the realities of capitalism, like the fact it tends to form monopolies and dislikes competition. and to say the Economist is anything but capitalist and pro-business is absurd. it's definitely both.
It's completely legitimate to demand that registrars take up the role of protecting trademarks, particularly under the .com domain. ICANN set up an (expensive) arbitration procedure, but, it would make life easy if the .com, but not other domains, were harmonized with trademark laws.
The tradeoff is this: .com domains will cost more, but also become more valuable, because they will become safer.
The other TLDs should not conform to these rules, and should develop their own, or new TLDs established with their own rules. .coop is a good example, though I think they charge way too much, given the economics of coops.
The fault goes to the registrar. There should be an arbitration system, where PayPal can collect damages from the registrar and the registrant. It seems to be, mainly, a fraud issue. Maybe it's a trademark issue. Moreover, there is no simple technological solution for this problem. The existing technology, far from being flawed, actually makes it easier to spot the fake name. You *can* look at the source for the link. In contrast, if someone printed up "PayPal" letterhead, you wouldn't have been able to tell it's fake.
I'm not convinced. There's a lot of pirated software out there, and that must also have an effect on the value of software.
FOSS offerings simply legalize what the majority of end users are already doing. What people are doing, really, is figuring out a way to lower their cost of entry.
I haven't really sensed any stagnation. If anything, I see new kinds of software popping up all over, and the overall audience for software is increasing.
One effect I've seen is that software is becoming more like "media", like movies or music. It's more disposable. Websites are a good example: people use it, maybe pay for it, and then don't use it again.
Another effect is that some kinds of traditional software are remaining expensive, or getting more expensive to support. The "service contract" model is popular, and I think will remain so, and maybe even increase.
This is good, because it promotes a demand-driven style of software development: you write the code because someone's willing to pay for it, and you write no more "extra" code than that. Purchasing decisions are short-term, and even long-term decisions are measured in a few years.
As for the Apache web server example: I would counter that by saying there are hundreds of ISPs doing millions of dollars of business on top of Apache. Is the product stagnant? I don't think so. Most of the sites using it don't even tap into most of Apache's functionality.
There are other web servers out there. Netscape, Microsoft (another giveaway), Oracle, and many smaller companies. There are a lot of different app servers too. You don't buy these just to get a license -- you purchase so that you can call tech support, make improvement requests, and potentially purchase a service contract to get your bugs and features prioritized.
A better example would be AbiWord, which competes directly with MS Word. I really wonder what future Abi has, because it's really copycat software. I don't see the Abi dev team trying to get a company or government contract to customize the product. But, even Abi is a bad example, because MS Word's dominance continues.
Once FOSS gets back to original software, we'll really see what FOSS can produce.
A good example is MySQL. It made a new category of entry-level database server. It disrupted the market that was being dominated by Oracle and Microsoft, but not my competing directly. Instead, it helped create a whole generation of SQL hackers who started out making websites. The weblications are different from enterprise database applications. Oracle's still in business, and they deliver value to their clients. And those who don't think so now have more options.
It's a mistake to assume that the market drives all software development. Software for the market will always be a subset of all software development. Programmers adapt what they do for their bosses, who in turn adapt what they do, for the market.
There are other modes of development. There's hacking for pleasure. There's hacking for universities. There are more opportunities to hack for the government. There's hacking for art.
I think of hacking like sex. It's best when it's done for free.