Does this whole situation affect your choice of file system? Personally, I would have to say so. This is a very sad story. There is something very morbid about using the work of a murderer.
Based on simple statistics, odds are that among the tens of thousands of contributors to the average Linux distribution are a smattering of rapists, child molesters, murderers, thieves, domestic abusers, extortionists, con artists, embezzlers, stalkers, and various and sundry other undesirables, just like any other large grouping of ordinary people. And those are the ones that got away with it and are wandering around free writing software. If you let that kind of thing creep you out, you'd better avoid thinking about it altogether.
So no, I can't say it would bother me to use reiserfs knowing that the principal author murdered his wife. What would worry me is that the principal author has been imprisoned, and there are unlikely to be very many bugfixes and updates now.
Considering how often eBay gets sued in French courts, eBay management might want to consider doing a cost-benefit analysis of doing business in France in the first place. I'm not jumping on the knee-jerk anti-French bandwagon here -- it's their country, and they can run it any damn way they please -- but from a purely practical business standpoint, the barrage of lawsuits in the French market would give me pause, personally, if I was on the eBay board.
Computer-generated images are fairly easy to tell from real photographs -- if the quality of the image is high. In the case of things like crappy, low-res, low-framerate surveillance videos, the distinction could well be a lot harder to make. Obviously, that's not germane to the situation at hand, but it's not hard to imagine fabricated surveillance video fooling people using current technology. Whether it could fool software designed to detect fakes is an open question.
To my way of thinking, a person is ethically (or morally, if you like religion) accountable for the actions they undertake, regardless of whether they are undertaken on their own or on behalf of another. If I kick the shit out of some poor schmuck, that reflects badly on me. If I kick the shit out of some poor schmuck because somebody ordered me to do it, that additionally reflects badly on the person giving the orders, but all other things being equal, it still reflects no less badly on me.
It's fair to consider the circumstances. What happens to me if I disobey the order? If I get shot or my family gets sent to the camps, that might ameliorate my degree of culpability. But if -- and this would be Google's case -- I have a bunch of paperwork to deal with and lose some (or even a lot) money, I don't think that really buys me anything.
In short: Google cooperated in helping a government violate someone's basic human rights in order to protect their profits. That's scummy, and there's no way around that.
I've spent most of my professional career working for startups. Every one of them has been run by middle-aged entrepreneurs, most of them on their third or fourth attempt to run a successful business. I suspect this is because most investors wouldn't actually touch a startup with a ten foot pole, and most young people lack the personal resources to accumulate any startup cash. We hear about startups run college dropout wunderkinds precisely because they are unusual and therefore newsworthy, which is much the same reason we hear about absurd personal liability lawsuits instead of the millions of humdrum cases no one would bat an eyelash at.
If it were my ass on the line, I'd assume that the NSA can crack PGP. I remember many years ago when PGP first appeared and how much effort the NSA put into trying to get Congress to stuff the genie back into the bottle. Then, all of a sudden, they stopped resisting. Either the NSA decided they couldn't win -- which is frankly out of character for them -- or they found a way to crack it. Given the resources available to them, I wouldn't want to rely on any cryptographic system that doesn't bother them.
This is exactly the same behaviour which you are required to perform under Geneva Convention (GC) during a time of war. It sounds as if the police was an enemy entity (military, paramilitary, combatant) in a war of GC signees. So much for protection and service of a civilized society. Unfortunately, we live in a society where politicians build entire careers out of holding up a few extreme cases and making it appear as if society is "soft on crime". (Never mind that we have, both as a percentage of the population and in absolute numbers, more people in prison than any country on earth.) Moreover, prosecutors are elected officials in most jurisdictions, and their electability often hinges on the sheer volume of convictions they can generate. Even if that were not the case, if you spend your entire working life looking for criminals as the police do, even an honest cop is going to start to see them hiding behind every tree. In an ideal world, that would not be the case, but in this one, the only smart thing you can do -- besides voting for more reasonable politicians -- is to accept the circumstances for what they are and act accordingly.
This wasn't really a tough case for a jury of reasonable people to decide. The evidence, though circumstantial, was pretty damning all the same. Reiser's only chance was to keep his mouth shut and hope for a hung jury. Instead, he opened his mouth and created the impression that he was lying. Juries will sometimes overlook circumstantial evidence even when it is fairly compelling, but they seldom give the benefit of the doubt to defendants they think are lying. Asserting one's Fifth Amendment right not to testify may strike some people as suspicious, but it still doesn't look as bad as going ahead and creating the impression of dishonesty on the stand.
For what it's worth, based on what I've read about the trial, I'm strongly inclined to think he's guilty. There's no way to know if I'd have reached the same decision if I'd been on the jury, but I can't say I'm surprised in any way by the verdict.
Amen. Not talking to the police is the first -- and almost only -- rule in dealing with the police unless you are reporting a crime of which you are the victim. Just don't do it. In general, the most you are required to do is to confirm your identity, and you can do that by handing the arresting officer your license. They may feed you a line of shit about your refusal to talk being suspicious. Ignore it. If it comes up at trial, your attorney will rightly dismiss it as an example of someone simply following sound legal advice. Keep your mouth closed even if you are as innocent as the driven snow. If you shut the fuck up and let your attorney do the talking, the case might not even make it to trial. Concocting amateur legal theories is fun on Slashdot, but it is bizarre, self-destructive behavior in real life.
Let this case also stand as an object lesson in that other important rule: Once your attorney is there to do the talking, take his or her advice. If you are, oh, let's say an expert computer scientist with an advanced understanding of filesystem design, you wouldn't invite some random schmoe from the street to head your development team. That would be stupid. The converse applies: you are the random schmoe, so let the person with the legal degrees and an advanced understanding of criminal trials make the legal decisions.
Oh, and another thing: don't murder your estranged wife. Murder your uncle, your neighbor, or your boss if you absolutely must kill somebody. And then paint "PRIME SUSPECT" in three-foot-high red letters on your house. That is still an order of magnitude less suspicious than having your fucking wife go missing during the middle of an acrimonious custody dispute.
Now if you'll pardon me, the sudden revelation that any clueless jackhole can build a filesystem has me itching to fire up the ol' compiler.;)
I'm with you there. I don't find the notion of copyright objectionable in and of itself. The extension of the copyright privilege for a limited time is a good way to encourage people to produce creative works by creating an artificial scarcity that makes it profitable to do something that otherwise isn't profitable. It's one of our society's rare recognitions of the fact that not everything that is beneficial to the common good is, by itself, something you can make money with. "Doing the right thing" often doesn't make sense from a business standpoint, so if we want people to do the right thing, we must sometimes create artificial incentives for them. What I find objectionable is the creation of a lifelong (or longer) privilege on the bizarre theory that artists are somehow supposed to do something once and get paid for it forever, unlike everyone else, who must keep doing useful work if they want to keep getting paid.
That said, the reason that hardly any musicians make the list of the 1,000 richest people in the UK or anywhere else, is that supply vastly exceeds demand. There are so many highly skilled musicians in the world that they just aren't worth very much in the market. The whole reason that the media conglomerates are as wealthy as they are is that they act as gatekeepers, creating artificial scarcity by only exposing a hundred bands or so at once to the general public. And they will fight to the last to maintain the system of manufactured superstars because there's just no way to make money managing ten or a hundred thousand equally good but mutually competing bands. In this hypothetical, meritocratic world of equal access that the ideological opponents of the RIAA envision, hardly anyone makes more than modest sums from making music because superstardom is almost entirely a product of media manipulation at the hands of the current cartel. All acts essentially go back to being local acts. Radiohead and NIN wouldn't be making much money off of their current post-label efforts if they hadn't been given international prominence by the media machine to begin with.
I'm not sure that's a bad thing if you're a listener, but you can't expect the beneficiaries of the current system to be very enthusiastic about it. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Metallica's interest in the "new model" is just a pragmatic attempt to make as much money as they can before they go from being a "big" band to being just one of at least several hundred other equally good metal bands that didn't have the good fortune to be packaged by the media cartel.
Well, speaking from the point of view of management in this case, I sure wouldn't want it coded in Haskell, because Haskell programmers are a lot less common than C/C++ programmers and therefore probably more expensive and harder to find, and -- as management -- I want to make sure the code is going to be maintained, so obscure academic languages like Haskell are out, and the following possibilities remain: C++, C#, Java, and Visual Basic. To be fair, depending on what the app is, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby might be worth considering. And yes, I do know that there are other options that could be considered, but again, from a management point of view, what really matters is how easy is it to get decent coders who know Language X? It's safer to go with whatever is in common use.
That aside, if it's going to take you six times as long to do it in C (or, more likely, C++) as in Haskell, you probably should consider learning and using, firstly, the STL, and secondly, any off-the-shelf libraries specific to the domain in question, of which there are likely to be several and which are almost always going to be cheaper to purchase and use than to pay someone to reinvent the wheel in-house.
Whether this serves the user any better is an open question, but if you're going to invoke the POV of management, you get into an entirely different set of considerations, most of which are aimed at making developers cheaper and easier to replace.
Don't get me wrong, they served us well for 36 years, but I think it's time again to begin caring more for the developers' requirements and less for the hardware requirements.
Maybe someday it will be fashionable to care about the users' requirements, which is all that really matters unless you're just coding for your own amusement. It may at least occasionally be the case that serving the user well will require the developer to use tools that are difficult or inconvenient.
That's not to say that in many applications, high-level languages and automated development tools aren't the right tool for the job, but it would be a good thing if we could turn down the narcissism of the programmer cult just enough to remember that software development isn't about developers.
which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence
Web presence doesn't equal much; it certainly doesn't equate to popularity. Nor do these numbers bear much resemblance to the mix of programming openings I see on job boards. C is number two? Really? Or are they just counting the number of times C shows up in the meaningless expression C/C++ ? Outside of the DSP and embedded devices niche, the appearance of "C/C++" in a job listing means they're looking for a C++ programmer, and it's generally followed by a list of C++ APIs that the successful candidate will be familiar with. And please, C fans, keep your flames low. C is my favorite language, but if it was really the second most popular programming language, I wouldn't spend eight to ten hours a day programming in C++ and PHP.
Anyway, the bit about the lack of garbage collection in C++ is a crock. There are a number of easy to learn and use GC libraries available for C++, and a number of them can be used in most cases with little to no code changes simply by linking them in. If the popularity of C++ is declining over GC, it's because people have gotten too lazy to type "c++ garbage collector" into Google. There are plenty of reasons to dislike C++, but that's just not one of them.
It really depends on the organization. There may be some overriding legal or safety reasons why you don't want to let anyone out of the sandbox: end user apps may not place nice with air traffic control or nuclear plants.;)
On the other hand, some IT departments fully live up to the Dilbert character, Mordac, Preventer of Information Services. My IT department happens to be one of those, and the main consequence of my supervisor's blanket refusal to do anything that bothers him is that everyone, including his boss, comes to me to get things done. And that's okay with my boss, because his real objection is to doing anything unfamiliar, not the fact that it's being done somewhere.
But that's obviously a dysfunctional situation. The problem is that our IT department -- and presumably many others, including some of the snitty, arrogant posters in this thread -- isn't doing its job. By definition, if the IT department is either preventing necessary work from being done, failing to help get it done, or imposing arbitrary obstacles to get out of doing work in the first place, the solution is not necessarily giving end users IT responsibilities; the solution is for upper management to kick ass and, if necessary, hire IT people willing to do their jobs.
Contrary to some of the polarized views I've seen here, IT isn't always the problem, nor are end-users always the problem. Most often, it's a failure of both to work constructively and flexibly together and a failure of upper management to insist that they do.
Of course, if the dysfunctionality in your company isn't going anywhere anytime soon, you may have to look for workarounds, and the solution proposed by the original poster might work in some situations.
It's worse than that -- the effect being described is pretty much universal across professions, not just IT. Large organizations are by their very nature bureaucratic and only become more top-heavy and inefficient over time. It's that process that makes them vulnerable to the smaller challengers that eventually eat their lunch. It's called the business cycle, and if the original poster is only now noticing it, it just means he's never taken an economics course or, more likely, lived long enough to see the 25- to 30-year cycle that most industries run through.
I'm not even sure it's a problem, per se. I've made a long career out of working for startups and small to medium sized companies. Either they fold, as is the case with the majority of startups, or they prosper and end up growing and eventually being bought by larger companies. Either way, when the bureaucracy becomes stifling, I collect my letters of recommendation and move somewhere more lively. Unless you work in oil or heavy industry, there's always a wave to ride, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. The pay is generally lower than what you'd get being a placeholder at a large company, but on the other hand, I've never had trouble paying the bills, either. Money isn't everything.
such an event would unify the world as never before
Sure, as long as you're talking about Mars, and that's just because there'd only be one guy there. Back here on Earth, everyone would go on fucking and fighting the way they always have, though a few might pause to watch some of the news coverage.
Unifying this world would take an alien invasion, and that would last just long enough for us to start losing badly against their superior technology, after which there would be an awe-inspiring race to stab each other in the back to curry favor with our new alien overlords. Face it, there's only so much you can do with a bunch of aggressive, paranoid primates no matter how smart they are.
The wealth created by software companies lies not primarily in those companies themselves, but in the companies that use their software to boost productivity and to create business opportunities that would not have existed before. The software industry could disappear tomorrow without causing much of a ripple, but without the software itself, the global economy would collapse. If FOSS makes more useful software available to more people than closed source software does, then it should boost the economy, not drag it down.
What this guy is bitching about is not being able to make money off the low-hanging fruit. If it can be done by individuals or small groups working in their spare time, then there will be one or more FOSS packages to do the job. There are any number of areas where FOSS is unlikely to make inroads by the very nature of the problem space, but writing software in those areas is a bit more challenging than implementing falling blocks on an 8-bit CPU, a task so simple that I've taught schoolchildren how to do it in BASIC on vintage Apple IIs. Aside from random luck, I'm afraid the road to prosperity involves lots of hard work, and there's no way around that.
It probably wouldn't kill device manufacturers to make the gestures on their devices customizable. That way, if you are used to the Apple gestures, you can use them; otherwise, you can use the defaults or whatever else you prefer. That would make Apple's patents irrelevant, as well as leave Apple at a disadvantage with its One UI to Rule Them All philosophy.
But I don't think the artists are losing much from those people anyway.
Indeed. The 16-year-old with a pirated copy of 3D Studio Max couldn't afford a legitimate copy if he or she wanted one. This is the problem with the absurd estimates of piracy losses groups like the BSA come up with. How many of those millions of copies of software would actually have been sold if they couldn't be pirated? Probably relatively few. The same applies to other media.
Books probably do represent a special case to some extent, though. Not very many people want to read an entire book on a monitor, and book lovers really do love physical books. So if they get a digital copy, read a couple of chapters, and enjoy it, they'll probably want the real thing. Baen Books has been making money hand over fist on that theory. This is probably a bit less true of music and software, where a copy is just as good as the original.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this whole situation affect your choice of file system? Personally, I would have to say so. This is a very sad story. There is something very morbid about using the work of a murderer.
Based on simple statistics, odds are that among the tens of thousands of contributors to the average Linux distribution are a smattering of rapists, child molesters, murderers, thieves, domestic abusers, extortionists, con artists, embezzlers, stalkers, and various and sundry other undesirables, just like any other large grouping of ordinary people. And those are the ones that got away with it and are wandering around free writing software. If you let that kind of thing creep you out, you'd better avoid thinking about it altogether.
So no, I can't say it would bother me to use reiserfs knowing that the principal author murdered his wife. What would worry me is that the principal author has been imprisoned, and there are unlikely to be very many bugfixes and updates now.
Considering how often eBay gets sued in French courts, eBay management might want to consider doing a cost-benefit analysis of doing business in France in the first place. I'm not jumping on the knee-jerk anti-French bandwagon here -- it's their country, and they can run it any damn way they please -- but from a purely practical business standpoint, the barrage of lawsuits in the French market would give me pause, personally, if I was on the eBay board.
Computer-generated images are fairly easy to tell from real photographs -- if the quality of the image is high. In the case of things like crappy, low-res, low-framerate surveillance videos, the distinction could well be a lot harder to make. Obviously, that's not germane to the situation at hand, but it's not hard to imagine fabricated surveillance video fooling people using current technology. Whether it could fool software designed to detect fakes is an open question.
To my way of thinking, a person is ethically (or morally, if you like religion) accountable for the actions they undertake, regardless of whether they are undertaken on their own or on behalf of another. If I kick the shit out of some poor schmuck, that reflects badly on me. If I kick the shit out of some poor schmuck because somebody ordered me to do it, that additionally reflects badly on the person giving the orders, but all other things being equal, it still reflects no less badly on me.
It's fair to consider the circumstances. What happens to me if I disobey the order? If I get shot or my family gets sent to the camps, that might ameliorate my degree of culpability. But if -- and this would be Google's case -- I have a bunch of paperwork to deal with and lose some (or even a lot) money, I don't think that really buys me anything.
In short: Google cooperated in helping a government violate someone's basic human rights in order to protect their profits. That's scummy, and there's no way around that.
I've spent most of my professional career working for startups. Every one of them has been run by middle-aged entrepreneurs, most of them on their third or fourth attempt to run a successful business. I suspect this is because most investors wouldn't actually touch a startup with a ten foot pole, and most young people lack the personal resources to accumulate any startup cash. We hear about startups run college dropout wunderkinds precisely because they are unusual and therefore newsworthy, which is much the same reason we hear about absurd personal liability lawsuits instead of the millions of humdrum cases no one would bat an eyelash at.
If it were my ass on the line, I'd assume that the NSA can crack PGP. I remember many years ago when PGP first appeared and how much effort the NSA put into trying to get Congress to stuff the genie back into the bottle. Then, all of a sudden, they stopped resisting. Either the NSA decided they couldn't win -- which is frankly out of character for them -- or they found a way to crack it. Given the resources available to them, I wouldn't want to rely on any cryptographic system that doesn't bother them.
This wasn't really a tough case for a jury of reasonable people to decide. The evidence, though circumstantial, was pretty damning all the same. Reiser's only chance was to keep his mouth shut and hope for a hung jury. Instead, he opened his mouth and created the impression that he was lying. Juries will sometimes overlook circumstantial evidence even when it is fairly compelling, but they seldom give the benefit of the doubt to defendants they think are lying. Asserting one's Fifth Amendment right not to testify may strike some people as suspicious, but it still doesn't look as bad as going ahead and creating the impression of dishonesty on the stand.
For what it's worth, based on what I've read about the trial, I'm strongly inclined to think he's guilty. There's no way to know if I'd have reached the same decision if I'd been on the jury, but I can't say I'm surprised in any way by the verdict.
Amen. Not talking to the police is the first -- and almost only -- rule in dealing with the police unless you are reporting a crime of which you are the victim. Just don't do it. In general, the most you are required to do is to confirm your identity, and you can do that by handing the arresting officer your license. They may feed you a line of shit about your refusal to talk being suspicious. Ignore it. If it comes up at trial, your attorney will rightly dismiss it as an example of someone simply following sound legal advice. Keep your mouth closed even if you are as innocent as the driven snow. If you shut the fuck up and let your attorney do the talking, the case might not even make it to trial. Concocting amateur legal theories is fun on Slashdot, but it is bizarre, self-destructive behavior in real life.
;)
Let this case also stand as an object lesson in that other important rule: Once your attorney is there to do the talking, take his or her advice. If you are, oh, let's say an expert computer scientist with an advanced understanding of filesystem design, you wouldn't invite some random schmoe from the street to head your development team. That would be stupid. The converse applies: you are the random schmoe, so let the person with the legal degrees and an advanced understanding of criminal trials make the legal decisions.
Oh, and another thing: don't murder your estranged wife. Murder your uncle, your neighbor, or your boss if you absolutely must kill somebody. And then paint "PRIME SUSPECT" in three-foot-high red letters on your house. That is still an order of magnitude less suspicious than having your fucking wife go missing during the middle of an acrimonious custody dispute.
Now if you'll pardon me, the sudden revelation that any clueless jackhole can build a filesystem has me itching to fire up the ol' compiler.
I'm with you there. I don't find the notion of copyright objectionable in and of itself. The extension of the copyright privilege for a limited time is a good way to encourage people to produce creative works by creating an artificial scarcity that makes it profitable to do something that otherwise isn't profitable. It's one of our society's rare recognitions of the fact that not everything that is beneficial to the common good is, by itself, something you can make money with. "Doing the right thing" often doesn't make sense from a business standpoint, so if we want people to do the right thing, we must sometimes create artificial incentives for them. What I find objectionable is the creation of a lifelong (or longer) privilege on the bizarre theory that artists are somehow supposed to do something once and get paid for it forever, unlike everyone else, who must keep doing useful work if they want to keep getting paid.
That said, the reason that hardly any musicians make the list of the 1,000 richest people in the UK or anywhere else, is that supply vastly exceeds demand. There are so many highly skilled musicians in the world that they just aren't worth very much in the market. The whole reason that the media conglomerates are as wealthy as they are is that they act as gatekeepers, creating artificial scarcity by only exposing a hundred bands or so at once to the general public. And they will fight to the last to maintain the system of manufactured superstars because there's just no way to make money managing ten or a hundred thousand equally good but mutually competing bands. In this hypothetical, meritocratic world of equal access that the ideological opponents of the RIAA envision, hardly anyone makes more than modest sums from making music because superstardom is almost entirely a product of media manipulation at the hands of the current cartel. All acts essentially go back to being local acts. Radiohead and NIN wouldn't be making much money off of their current post-label efforts if they hadn't been given international prominence by the media machine to begin with.
I'm not sure that's a bad thing if you're a listener, but you can't expect the beneficiaries of the current system to be very enthusiastic about it. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Metallica's interest in the "new model" is just a pragmatic attempt to make as much money as they can before they go from being a "big" band to being just one of at least several hundred other equally good metal bands that didn't have the good fortune to be packaged by the media cartel.
Well, speaking from the point of view of management in this case, I sure wouldn't want it coded in Haskell, because Haskell programmers are a lot less common than C/C++ programmers and therefore probably more expensive and harder to find, and -- as management -- I want to make sure the code is going to be maintained, so obscure academic languages like Haskell are out, and the following possibilities remain: C++, C#, Java, and Visual Basic. To be fair, depending on what the app is, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby might be worth considering. And yes, I do know that there are other options that could be considered, but again, from a management point of view, what really matters is how easy is it to get decent coders who know Language X? It's safer to go with whatever is in common use.
That aside, if it's going to take you six times as long to do it in C (or, more likely, C++) as in Haskell, you probably should consider learning and using, firstly, the STL, and secondly, any off-the-shelf libraries specific to the domain in question, of which there are likely to be several and which are almost always going to be cheaper to purchase and use than to pay someone to reinvent the wheel in-house.
Whether this serves the user any better is an open question, but if you're going to invoke the POV of management, you get into an entirely different set of considerations, most of which are aimed at making developers cheaper and easier to replace.
Don't get me wrong, they served us well for 36 years, but I think it's time again to begin caring more for the developers' requirements and less for the hardware requirements.
Maybe someday it will be fashionable to care about the users' requirements, which is all that really matters unless you're just coding for your own amusement. It may at least occasionally be the case that serving the user well will require the developer to use tools that are difficult or inconvenient.
That's not to say that in many applications, high-level languages and automated development tools aren't the right tool for the job, but it would be a good thing if we could turn down the narcissism of the programmer cult just enough to remember that software development isn't about developers.
The astronauts also put out a request for new ideas for space sports. Have any suggestions?
You mean other than the obvious one we all wonder about?
which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence
Web presence doesn't equal much; it certainly doesn't equate to popularity. Nor do these numbers bear much resemblance to the mix of programming openings I see on job boards. C is number two? Really? Or are they just counting the number of times C shows up in the meaningless expression C/C++ ? Outside of the DSP and embedded devices niche, the appearance of "C/C++" in a job listing means they're looking for a C++ programmer, and it's generally followed by a list of C++ APIs that the successful candidate will be familiar with. And please, C fans, keep your flames low. C is my favorite language, but if it was really the second most popular programming language, I wouldn't spend eight to ten hours a day programming in C++ and PHP.
Anyway, the bit about the lack of garbage collection in C++ is a crock. There are a number of easy to learn and use GC libraries available for C++, and a number of them can be used in most cases with little to no code changes simply by linking them in. If the popularity of C++ is declining over GC, it's because people have gotten too lazy to type "c++ garbage collector" into Google. There are plenty of reasons to dislike C++, but that's just not one of them.
I'm not terribly interested in having my genetic information be "universally accessible and useful".
I'm sure Google will enable one to opt out of this kind of thing, but I'm not sure which chromosome I need to store my robots.txt file in.
It really depends on the organization. There may be some overriding legal or safety reasons why you don't want to let anyone out of the sandbox: end user apps may not place nice with air traffic control or nuclear plants. ;)
On the other hand, some IT departments fully live up to the Dilbert character, Mordac, Preventer of Information Services. My IT department happens to be one of those, and the main consequence of my supervisor's blanket refusal to do anything that bothers him is that everyone, including his boss, comes to me to get things done. And that's okay with my boss, because his real objection is to doing anything unfamiliar, not the fact that it's being done somewhere.
But that's obviously a dysfunctional situation. The problem is that our IT department -- and presumably many others, including some of the snitty, arrogant posters in this thread -- isn't doing its job. By definition, if the IT department is either preventing necessary work from being done, failing to help get it done, or imposing arbitrary obstacles to get out of doing work in the first place, the solution is not necessarily giving end users IT responsibilities; the solution is for upper management to kick ass and, if necessary, hire IT people willing to do their jobs.
Contrary to some of the polarized views I've seen here, IT isn't always the problem, nor are end-users always the problem. Most often, it's a failure of both to work constructively and flexibly together and a failure of upper management to insist that they do.
Of course, if the dysfunctionality in your company isn't going anywhere anytime soon, you may have to look for workarounds, and the solution proposed by the original poster might work in some situations.
It's worse than that -- the effect being described is pretty much universal across professions, not just IT. Large organizations are by their very nature bureaucratic and only become more top-heavy and inefficient over time. It's that process that makes them vulnerable to the smaller challengers that eventually eat their lunch. It's called the business cycle, and if the original poster is only now noticing it, it just means he's never taken an economics course or, more likely, lived long enough to see the 25- to 30-year cycle that most industries run through.
I'm not even sure it's a problem, per se. I've made a long career out of working for startups and small to medium sized companies. Either they fold, as is the case with the majority of startups, or they prosper and end up growing and eventually being bought by larger companies. Either way, when the bureaucracy becomes stifling, I collect my letters of recommendation and move somewhere more lively. Unless you work in oil or heavy industry, there's always a wave to ride, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. The pay is generally lower than what you'd get being a placeholder at a large company, but on the other hand, I've never had trouble paying the bills, either. Money isn't everything.
I was wondering if anyone else noticed that. The more things change...
So you think your "golden years" are when you're 53? What are you now, thirteen?
Finally, technology has caught up with narcissism.
such an event would unify the world as never before
Sure, as long as you're talking about Mars, and that's just because there'd only be one guy there. Back here on Earth, everyone would go on fucking and fighting the way they always have, though a few might pause to watch some of the news coverage.
Unifying this world would take an alien invasion, and that would last just long enough for us to start losing badly against their superior technology, after which there would be an awe-inspiring race to stab each other in the back to curry favor with our new alien overlords. Face it, there's only so much you can do with a bunch of aggressive, paranoid primates no matter how smart they are.
The wealth created by software companies lies not primarily in those companies themselves, but in the companies that use their software to boost productivity and to create business opportunities that would not have existed before. The software industry could disappear tomorrow without causing much of a ripple, but without the software itself, the global economy would collapse. If FOSS makes more useful software available to more people than closed source software does, then it should boost the economy, not drag it down.
What this guy is bitching about is not being able to make money off the low-hanging fruit. If it can be done by individuals or small groups working in their spare time, then there will be one or more FOSS packages to do the job. There are any number of areas where FOSS is unlikely to make inroads by the very nature of the problem space, but writing software in those areas is a bit more challenging than implementing falling blocks on an 8-bit CPU, a task so simple that I've taught schoolchildren how to do it in BASIC on vintage Apple IIs. Aside from random luck, I'm afraid the road to prosperity involves lots of hard work, and there's no way around that.
It probably wouldn't kill device manufacturers to make the gestures on their devices customizable. That way, if you are used to the Apple gestures, you can use them; otherwise, you can use the defaults or whatever else you prefer. That would make Apple's patents irrelevant, as well as leave Apple at a disadvantage with its One UI to Rule Them All philosophy.
But I don't think the artists are losing much from those people anyway.
Indeed. The 16-year-old with a pirated copy of 3D Studio Max couldn't afford a legitimate copy if he or she wanted one. This is the problem with the absurd estimates of piracy losses groups like the BSA come up with. How many of those millions of copies of software would actually have been sold if they couldn't be pirated? Probably relatively few. The same applies to other media.
Books probably do represent a special case to some extent, though. Not very many people want to read an entire book on a monitor, and book lovers really do love physical books. So if they get a digital copy, read a couple of chapters, and enjoy it, they'll probably want the real thing. Baen Books has been making money hand over fist on that theory. This is probably a bit less true of music and software, where a copy is just as good as the original.
...after all, any operating system that is basically unusable is going to have fewer vulnerabilities as a matter of course.
The Federal Service Impasses Panel?
Am I the only one here who thinks the existence of that agency is the real story?