Now Apple is making their technology less accessible. I know a dozen people who can't use earbuds, either because of the shape of their ears, or their need for a hearing aid. They tend to try a bunch of headphones until they find one that fits or works.
There's nothing magical about developing software without authoritarian relationships.
If someone says: 'we need a website that lets everyone shop for the cheapest insurance', a developer without a spec would simply start asking questions.
Where does the data come from? Who is allowed to register? How do we inform the insurance company? What are the policy options? How do we know the policies conform to regulation?
Seriously, any small unmanaged team of rational programmers would ask these questions. If they pursue the answers, they'll build a more realistic specification and tractable project than any bureaucratic management branded-nonsense-process could ever provide.
I'll admit, they would need to be motivated. And I don't mean 'more money'. I mean developers who think the project is important. But, for a project like this, how hard could that be?
Oregon produced an audit of the Oracle Debacle here: http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/docs...
The audit answered the wrong questions. It accepted the magical notions and vapor roles of Oracle's corporate propaganda. For example, it focuses on the need for a 'systems integrator', as if every engineer should -not- be responsible for integration.
The two big problems:
1) The computer industry's current authoritarian obsession with subdivided tasks, specialization, core competence, detailed requirements, 'no surprises' (meaning no good surprises, either), and dogmatic 'best practices' has created a generation of corporate slaves who aren't allowed to use their minds or take responsibility for anything important.
2) Which brings us to motivation. Oracle and other corporate oligarchs only want money. They have no responsibility to do anything else. Maximizing the bill is the sole priority. Three programmers, picked at random, who live in Oregon, and who have friends that need insurance, would have finished this job with FOSS, not proprietary software, in half the time a fraudulent Oracle and a corrupt State's office took to generate a broken system.
This project seems ignorant of current first-response medical practice. The soldier in the rendering would choke, injure neck vertebra, and exacerbate internal injuries by the time the MediTeddy brought him to safety. If they are going to automate the recovery of wounded, they need to immobilize the patient. This looks like low-end science-fiction mashed-up with an old hollywood war-movie.
During the Internet boom, we thought that computer companies would become fair places to work. Post-boom, we think that blogs & transparency will take over the world. But Jobs fires whole departments from Apple when there's a leak in some insanely trivial product announcement. The place is a dictatorship. Some of their products are ok, especially compared to products from other dictatorships. But I hardly think the Slashdot crowd, impressed by technical achievements & the promise of digital liberation, is interested in celebrating mean capitalists who run private tyrannies. If he represents the future, it's going to be terribly unpleasant in the digital age.
Their idea of geocoding doesn't integrate well with their map interface yet. Geocoding, for Google, is a part of search, and if you search, you have to geocode against Page Rank and the bounding box of the map you're looking at... and this doesn't work right at all. It currently always gives strange results.
They put the satellite views in! That lets everyone inject a bit of reality into their web pages. This API is so simple... soon little maps & satellite images, with GIS overlays, will be dripping from every website.
IBM could easily keep workers where they are. But multinational corporations are designed to maximize profit at the expense of everyone else.
India's poor majority had their land and water stolen, by international big business. So they're starving, but the corporate-ruled Indian government is closing its eyes to the trend. They happily give government resources to the technology elite, and pass new laws to benefit monopoly capital.
The worst example recently, was their recognition of international patent law on medicine. This was a horrible triumph of profit over people, and is the moral equivalent of slaughtering sick people.
This is all unsustainable. But multinationals don't care. They're interested in short-term profit. Tech workers are just the latest members in the club of commodity labor.
"Personal property", i.e. your house, has nothing to do with "Corporate property", i.e. strip-mines, clear-cuts, multiplexes, shopping malls, archives of intellectual property, privatized railways, privatized power companies, etc.
People confuse them both as "private property". We're confused because large corporations want us to confuse the two.
The next time some corporation protests that their "private property" must be protected, on principle, call them on it! Your private property isn't protected, unless you're powerful!
Most corporate property used to belong to everyone, in commons, before it was stolen, subsidized, extracted, and polluted. We pay the bills to clean the mess up. Yet we can't keep our houses!
Although subsidized-WiFi isn't as important as subsidized health, housing, education, etc... at least it's a public service subsidy. Most government subsidies just go to a few corporate stockholders.
If you're going to push something like this in the civic sector, you need to push the non-laptop uses... kiosks, for example. At malls we're starting to see health & human service kiosks provided by non-profits & public agencies. This would be a lot cheaper to do if WiFi was pervasive.
Slashdot Mirror
Stealing power is Yet Another Beautiful Thing Amazon Delivered to the world. Yabtad.
Now Apple is making their technology less accessible. I know a dozen people who can't use earbuds, either because of the shape of their ears, or their need for a hearing aid. They tend to try a bunch of headphones until they find one that fits or works.
There's nothing magical about developing software without authoritarian relationships. If someone says: 'we need a website that lets everyone shop for the cheapest insurance', a developer without a spec would simply start asking questions. Where does the data come from? Who is allowed to register? How do we inform the insurance company? What are the policy options? How do we know the policies conform to regulation? Seriously, any small unmanaged team of rational programmers would ask these questions. If they pursue the answers, they'll build a more realistic specification and tractable project than any bureaucratic management branded-nonsense-process could ever provide. I'll admit, they would need to be motivated. And I don't mean 'more money'. I mean developers who think the project is important. But, for a project like this, how hard could that be?
Oregon produced an audit of the Oracle Debacle here: http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/docs... The audit answered the wrong questions. It accepted the magical notions and vapor roles of Oracle's corporate propaganda. For example, it focuses on the need for a 'systems integrator', as if every engineer should -not- be responsible for integration. The two big problems: 1) The computer industry's current authoritarian obsession with subdivided tasks, specialization, core competence, detailed requirements, 'no surprises' (meaning no good surprises, either), and dogmatic 'best practices' has created a generation of corporate slaves who aren't allowed to use their minds or take responsibility for anything important. 2) Which brings us to motivation. Oracle and other corporate oligarchs only want money. They have no responsibility to do anything else. Maximizing the bill is the sole priority. Three programmers, picked at random, who live in Oregon, and who have friends that need insurance, would have finished this job with FOSS, not proprietary software, in half the time a fraudulent Oracle and a corrupt State's office took to generate a broken system.
This project seems ignorant of current first-response medical practice. The soldier in the rendering would choke, injure neck vertebra, and exacerbate internal injuries by the time the MediTeddy brought him to safety. If they are going to automate the recovery of wounded, they need to immobilize the patient. This looks like low-end science-fiction mashed-up with an old hollywood war-movie.
During the Internet boom, we thought that computer companies would become fair places to work. Post-boom, we think that blogs & transparency will take over the world. But Jobs fires whole departments from Apple when there's a leak in some insanely trivial product announcement. The place is a dictatorship. Some of their products are ok, especially compared to products from other dictatorships. But I hardly think the Slashdot crowd, impressed by technical achievements & the promise of digital liberation, is interested in celebrating mean capitalists who run private tyrannies. If he represents the future, it's going to be terribly unpleasant in the digital age.
Personally, I feel I have rights to any radio waves traveling through my body.
Their idea of geocoding doesn't integrate well with their map interface yet. Geocoding, for Google, is a part of search, and if you search, you have to geocode against Page Rank and the bounding box of the map you're looking at ... and this doesn't work right at all. It currently always gives strange results.
They put the satellite views in! That lets everyone inject a bit of reality into their web pages. This API is so simple ... soon little maps & satellite images, with GIS overlays, will be dripping from every website.
IBM could easily keep workers where they are. But multinational corporations are designed to maximize profit at the expense of everyone else.
India's poor majority had their land and water stolen, by international big business. So they're starving, but the corporate-ruled Indian government is closing its eyes to the trend. They happily give government resources to the technology elite, and pass new laws to benefit monopoly capital.
The worst example recently, was their recognition of international patent law on medicine. This was a horrible triumph of profit over people, and is the moral equivalent of slaughtering sick people.
This is all unsustainable. But multinationals don't care. They're interested in short-term profit. Tech workers are just the latest members in the club of commodity labor.
The city's actions couldn't make it more clear:
"Personal property", i.e. your house, has nothing to do with "Corporate property", i.e. strip-mines, clear-cuts, multiplexes, shopping malls, archives of intellectual property, privatized railways, privatized power companies, etc.
People confuse them both as "private property". We're confused because large corporations want us to confuse the two.
The next time some corporation protests that their "private property" must be protected, on principle, call them on it! Your private property isn't protected, unless you're powerful!
Most corporate property used to belong to everyone, in commons, before it was stolen, subsidized, extracted, and polluted. We pay the bills to clean the mess up. Yet we can't keep our houses!
Although subsidized-WiFi isn't as important as subsidized health, housing, education, etc... at least it's a public service subsidy. Most government subsidies just go to a few corporate stockholders.
If you're going to push something like this in the civic sector, you need to push the non-laptop uses ... kiosks, for example. At malls we're starting to see health & human service kiosks provided by non-profits & public agencies. This would be a lot cheaper to do if WiFi was pervasive.