This is "procedure" in an environment where IT decides the business rules. In a company where IT is a profit center, this makes sense. However, for most companies IT is a cost center - it exists as a cost of doing business. When an IT department actually makes it difficult to do the company's business (overly restrictive and inflexible email limits, aggressively locked down computers, etc) the IT department isn't doing its job of _serving the customers_. Yes, building a secure system that allows for user flexibility is much more work, has a greater possibility of failure, hacks, and social engineering; but if IT decisions are made outside the business realities (what you call politics) then they're bad policies.
Or maybe copying is great when it promotes you; it is criminal when it competes. It is unfair (and a logical fallacy to boot) to equate the purpose a demo tape - a product specifically created for the purposes of promotion and dissemination - with a commercially produced and promoted CD - a product created specifically for the purposes of revenue. Keep in mind, Metallica doesn't have a problem with the trading and sharing of live recordings - a scene they tacitly, if not outright support - but when you trade or sell studio recordings, you're going into direct competition with them without the legacy costs of actually writing, recording, and pressing the CDs.
That there was a time (and it still persists among much of the intellectual elite of America and Europe) that different views are fine as long as they are not grounded in religion, that vocal expressions of religious faith still scare many secularists (I happen to still have that visceral reaction at times) I think is the background in which the religious right seems to intransient.
In the 50s and 60s, the religious right could have made the argument "It makes me sick that rationalist wackos are given all the freedom to teach/live as they please, but fuck everyone else over with their opinionated bullshit."
Workplace problems aren't handled by the IT department in any company I've heard of. They're always handled by the HR department. Nevermind that having a vigilante IT administrator deciding to investigate his boss for wasting time is not going to inspire any other managers to trust this guy, even if he had succeeded in his goal of getting the boss fired.
In NY, the resistance to grade 3 testing has little to do with touchy-feely self-esteem issues; it is the draconian nature of the test's pass/fail system. The reason parents and educators are up in arms about it is NY wants to create a single standardized test for 3rd graders; pass it, you move to 4th grade, fail you stay back. No matter how well the child does in school that year, if they fail the test they're left back. There are so many reasons a child may perform badly on a 1-day test, to not factor in the child's academic work is almost criminal in it's oversight.
The major change going on in the content arena is content producers have been so accustomed to being proce makers they largely don't understand they need to rapidly move to becomming price takers in order to make money. Flat fee payment for music - where nearly all CDs are the same price - is no longer a reality because people have the option of bypassing the official distribution channel for an alternate route. If the content producers are not adjusting for this reality, they have no business selling things.
So I log onto the NY Times site to take a look at this article and am enticed to read these 11 "ideas" for needed inventions. The article ends after a page of setup, with no explanation of where to go next - no "next page" link, no, "Click on these links for the ideas" direction. I clicked on the printer-friendly button to see if that would reveal more of the article, to no avail. It took me almost 5 minutes to figure out the links to the rest of the article were embedded in the "related" box to the right of the story, buried around news trackers and advertisement.
BAD INTERFACE! BAD!
Then, after reading the rest of the article, I wish I had given up looking earlier. With the exception of Gibson's well-written tongue-in-cheek, this was a pretty poor list.
I don't think you really understand the concept of taxes here - the amount you contribute in no way should influence the treatment you receive from the government. Until Government decides to impugn the inalienable equality of all men under the law (and win the revolution which would hopefully follow such a declaration) the money you give or take from the government can not influence the weight of your voice.
I'm not entirely sure I buy your idea that Linux users are any better at using Google than Windows users. Searching is not programming, and crafting proper words to engage a search is no more difficult under Win32 than it is under Linux. Unless, despite your assertion this was not a troll, you are in fact calling Windows' users intelligence into question.
The desktop is hard. Everyone on this board has a reason why Windows is doing better than Linux. Blame it on economy of scale, blame it on whatever you want to feel better at night, but a really important reason - possibly the most inportant for the non-technical user - is the human-computer interface.
You see, commercial companies can afford to pay people like me who are trained to talk with an application's user base to better understand how they approach clumps of information on the screen. We work weeks, months, years building and refining the interaction these end-users have with their programs.
This kind of attention to detail doesn't come from calling them "lusers".
For linux desktop applications to have anywhere near the appeal of their Windows counterparts, people are going to have to start spending money to develop proper interfaces for these products. This will require commercial companies - ones that have the money to fund non-programming positions - to enter linux space.
For better or for worse, most companies aren't convinced money can be made with Linux on the desktop, so they don't bother. So for people who want to "set it and forget it", Linux just doesn't make sense.
For the Linux users, ask yourself - "how long did it take me to get my system up and running to my staisaction? (including configuring the Window Manager to act like you want)" Quiz some of your Windows-using friends how long it took them to set up. But then I think y'all already know the answer.
The key for most successful companies is to serve the customers, because they give the company money, which serves the shareholders' interest. Sometimes - every so often - a company can please the shareholders despite how they treat the customers. Just look at regional coding on DVDs.
I hope after you pressed submit that you realized the idiocy of your statement. By creating parallel systems for users where one has all the benefits while the other is shackled with snooping restrictions, the natural inclination is to shift all work over to a "leisure" account. Any manager who is using matrics such as "time spent surfing the net" and ignoring "quantity and quality of outputted work" deserves to lose all the employees who decide to leave that tyrrany.
One of the natural reactions to the downturned economy is to remove some of the privledges that workers enjoyed through the salad years. When the labor market was tight, companies had to create a more open culture in the workplace, providing more services and benefits to the employees in order to get them in the door and convince them to continue sitting at their seats. Though unemployment has only creeped up 2 or so points, the more important problem is that the laor market isn't as fluid as it was; people are staying at their jobs longer because they're worried about finding a source of income. In this situation, the employers have the upper hand. They can demand more time from employees, who can be replaced with equally competent people who have been out of work for a while. In an employer's labor market, the employer gets to set a lot of the rules for work.
Formatting it in RTF format really doesn't make it available to _that_ many more people. There aren't many offices that haven't standardized on Word for their office productivity app.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that switching to RTF would affect productivity more than receiving the occasional request for a non.doc formatted document.
All of the examples listed are instances of practical application. Finance, business (not economics), management, MIS, and others that teach "practical" skills that have immediate use in a particular workplace were not usually part of a university's curriculum fifty years ago.
The main purpose of undergraduate study is to prepare a student with the skills of how to think. If high school is seen as the time when a student learns how to absorb knowledge, then the university makes much more sense as a place to learn how to _use_ knowledge. How to go beyond synthesis and regurgitation. The classic humanities and sciences curriculums serve not merely to teach mathematics or history or english or chemistry, but they teach a student how to think.
Over the past fifty years, the American academic system has been under siege by pundits insisting that school teach students things that they can use immediately. This is what allowed business schools to gain legitimacy in the academic system, and what has caused much of the natural and social science curriculums to become much more geared to "the first year in the workforce".
In short, the types of majors that are increasingly taking over the American university system are disciplines that would have been found at trade schools or colleges two generations ago.
Is this a good thing? Absolutely, for the businesses who profit greatly from cheap, well-trained labor that schools churn out each year. However, having computer scientists who have no background in other areas of study does a disservice to both the individual and to the society. When Jefferson and the other radical framers of the Constitution talked about a well-educated populace, they were not talking about a group with advanced skills, but people who were well-rounded contributors to society. Their focus was not merely on the paycheck and spending power, but on the well-informed and active intellectual contribution we all should make.
Not having the skills and information to be well informed is one of the greatest dangers to democracy and the university is one of the final preservers of this institution.
As quick as we are to point our fingers at the arab world for this terrorist attack, who else could be responsible? In other words, who has a motive?
* Iran, Iraq, or some group in the Arab-Muslim world - obvious and overt hatred of the US, especially with our sonstant support of Israel.
* China or some Chinese group - well, we haven't exactly had the greatest relations with the giant of the east. They have the money, the discipline, the technical know-how (to fly the plane) and the grudge against the US
* Russian group - while the government probably wouldn't sponsor this (they don't pay people enough over there to seal their lips about something this big) the Russian mafia has the money and ex-communist military personell have the technical know-how and grudge.
* Internal - we have a lot of people who are disgruntled with the government and the economy of this country. Look at Oklahoma City - Tim McVeigh and (I think) Terry Nichols were in the military. Could this have been a small ex-military group fed up with the US somehow? They would definitely have the expertise.
I'm sure other possibilities exist, but these are the few that came to the top of my head. Remember, the US has a lot of enemies.
That's usually not as easily said as it is done. Most consulting companies (most companies in general for that matter) make employees sign some sort of contract at the beginning saying that they can't pilfer employees from the ex-employer for x amount of time, etc...
Only business segments that have a high barrier to entry gravitate towards monopolies. A free market (in its most abstract concept) assums a low to no barrier to entry, and thus is able to maintain an equilibrium between price and providor.
I didn't once mention an MCSE. I said NT Admin. I am and NT admin (a pretty decent one, too) and I'm up at 2 AM reading Slashdot, drinking coke (well, caffinated beverages) and am quite happy at my job. When a server goes down, I know what to do most of the time without having to call MS tech support. Granted, my two NT webservers and 1 NT DB server haven't had any problems in the last year, but if something did happen to them I'm fairly confident I would know what to do. The UNIX admins at my company are definitely paid more than I am because they are difficult to find. A decent NT admin (again, not an MCSE paper person) who can really make NT do stuff is a little easier to find, and subsequently costs less. I have a little theory about this, though - maybe the UNIX people get paid more because the PHBs are scared of the command prompt? hmm..
If you're going to hire a staff person (staff people) to administer your UNIX/Linux network, you will pay considerably more than for staff person/people to take care of that NT network. First, skilled UNIX admins are few and far between, and they require much more training so they can command more money. An NT admin can be had for much less, which is important when figuring out TCO.
Well, the proof of fair use necessarily falls on the accused./. would need to prove that the people who posted the document did so with the intent of starting a public dialogue. But with subjects like "Screw MS's license, here's the document", it might be a little hard...
Slashdot Mirror
At the explanation of the Mona Lisa. Because, frankly, that piece of cultural errata always escaped me.
This is "procedure" in an environment where IT decides the business rules. In a company where IT is a profit center, this makes sense. However, for most companies IT is a cost center - it exists as a cost of doing business. When an IT department actually makes it difficult to do the company's business (overly restrictive and inflexible email limits, aggressively locked down computers, etc) the IT department isn't doing its job of _serving the customers_. Yes, building a secure system that allows for user flexibility is much more work, has a greater possibility of failure, hacks, and social engineering; but if IT decisions are made outside the business realities (what you call politics) then they're bad policies.
Or maybe copying is great when it promotes you; it is criminal when it competes. It is unfair (and a logical fallacy to boot) to equate the purpose a demo tape - a product specifically created for the purposes of promotion and dissemination - with a commercially produced and promoted CD - a product created specifically for the purposes of revenue. Keep in mind, Metallica doesn't have a problem with the trading and sharing of live recordings - a scene they tacitly, if not outright support - but when you trade or sell studio recordings, you're going into direct competition with them without the legacy costs of actually writing, recording, and pressing the CDs.
That there was a time (and it still persists among much of the intellectual elite of America and Europe) that different views are fine as long as they are not grounded in religion, that vocal expressions of religious faith still scare many secularists (I happen to still have that visceral reaction at times) I think is the background in which the religious right seems to intransient.
In the 50s and 60s, the religious right could have made the argument "It makes me sick that rationalist wackos are given all the freedom to teach/live as they please, but fuck everyone else over with their opinionated bullshit."
Workplace problems aren't handled by the IT department in any company I've heard of. They're always handled by the HR department. Nevermind that having a vigilante IT administrator deciding to investigate his boss for wasting time is not going to inspire any other managers to trust this guy, even if he had succeeded in his goal of getting the boss fired.
In NY, the resistance to grade 3 testing has little to do with touchy-feely self-esteem issues; it is the draconian nature of the test's pass/fail system. The reason parents and educators are up in arms about it is NY wants to create a single standardized test for 3rd graders; pass it, you move to 4th grade, fail you stay back. No matter how well the child does in school that year, if they fail the test they're left back. There are so many reasons a child may perform badly on a 1-day test, to not factor in the child's academic work is almost criminal in it's oversight.
The major change going on in the content arena is content producers have been so accustomed to being proce makers they largely don't understand they need to rapidly move to becomming price takers in order to make money. Flat fee payment for music - where nearly all CDs are the same price - is no longer a reality because people have the option of bypassing the official distribution channel for an alternate route. If the content producers are not adjusting for this reality, they have no business selling things.
If lost of IT-type high-paying jobs are now in India, where does the money for an overpriced cappucino, never mind the wifi laptop, come from?
Because Apple's bottom line is far better served if a person spends $400 on a 20 gig model than $100 on a 2 gig model.
In that sense, it makes perfect business sense.
So I log onto the NY Times site to take a look at this article and am enticed to read these 11 "ideas" for needed inventions. The article ends after a page of setup, with no explanation of where to go next - no "next page" link, no, "Click on these links for the ideas" direction. I clicked on the printer-friendly button to see if that would reveal more of the article, to no avail. It took me almost 5 minutes to figure out the links to the rest of the article were embedded in the "related" box to the right of the story, buried around news trackers and advertisement.
BAD INTERFACE! BAD!
Then, after reading the rest of the article, I wish I had given up looking earlier. With the exception of Gibson's well-written tongue-in-cheek, this was a pretty poor list.
I don't think you really understand the concept of taxes here - the amount you contribute in no way should influence the treatment you receive from the government. Until Government decides to impugn the inalienable equality of all men under the law (and win the revolution which would hopefully follow such a declaration) the money you give or take from the government can not influence the weight of your voice.
I'm not entirely sure I buy your idea that Linux users are any better at using Google than Windows users. Searching is not programming, and crafting proper words to engage a search is no more difficult under Win32 than it is under Linux. Unless, despite your assertion this was not a troll, you are in fact calling Windows' users intelligence into question.
The desktop is hard. Everyone on this board has a reason why Windows is doing better than Linux. Blame it on economy of scale, blame it on whatever you want to feel better at night, but a really important reason - possibly the most inportant for the non-technical user - is the human-computer interface.
You see, commercial companies can afford to pay people like me who are trained to talk with an application's user base to better understand how they approach clumps of information on the screen. We work weeks, months, years building and refining the interaction these end-users have with their programs.
This kind of attention to detail doesn't come from calling them "lusers".
For linux desktop applications to have anywhere near the appeal of their Windows counterparts, people are going to have to start spending money to develop proper interfaces for these products. This will require commercial companies - ones that have the money to fund non-programming positions - to enter linux space.
For better or for worse, most companies aren't convinced money can be made with Linux on the desktop, so they don't bother. So for people who want to "set it and forget it", Linux just doesn't make sense.
For the Linux users, ask yourself - "how long did it take me to get my system up and running to my staisaction? (including configuring the Window Manager to act like you want)" Quiz some of your Windows-using friends how long it took them to set up. But then I think y'all already know the answer.
The key for most successful companies is to serve the customers, because they give the company money, which serves the shareholders' interest. Sometimes - every so often - a company can please the shareholders despite how they treat the customers. Just look at regional coding on DVDs.
I hope after you pressed submit that you realized the idiocy of your statement. By creating parallel systems for users where one has all the benefits while the other is shackled with snooping restrictions, the natural inclination is to shift all work over to a "leisure" account. Any manager who is using matrics such as "time spent surfing the net" and ignoring "quantity and quality of outputted work" deserves to lose all the employees who decide to leave that tyrrany.
One of the natural reactions to the downturned economy is to remove some of the privledges that workers enjoyed through the salad years. When the labor market was tight, companies had to create a more open culture in the workplace, providing more services and benefits to the employees in order to get them in the door and convince them to continue sitting at their seats. Though unemployment has only creeped up 2 or so points, the more important problem is that the laor market isn't as fluid as it was; people are staying at their jobs longer because they're worried about finding a source of income. In this situation, the employers have the upper hand. They can demand more time from employees, who can be replaced with equally competent people who have been out of work for a while. In an employer's labor market, the employer gets to set a lot of the rules for work.
Formatting it in RTF format really doesn't make it available to _that_ many more people. There aren't many offices that haven't standardized on Word for their office productivity app.
.doc formatted document.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that switching to RTF would affect productivity more than receiving the occasional request for a non
All of the examples listed are instances of practical application. Finance, business (not economics), management, MIS, and others that teach "practical" skills that have immediate use in a particular workplace were not usually part of a university's curriculum fifty years ago.
The main purpose of undergraduate study is to prepare a student with the skills of how to think. If high school is seen as the time when a student learns how to absorb knowledge, then the university makes much more sense as a place to learn how to _use_ knowledge. How to go beyond synthesis and regurgitation. The classic humanities and sciences curriculums serve not merely to teach mathematics or history or english or chemistry, but they teach a student how to think.
Over the past fifty years, the American academic system has been under siege by pundits insisting that school teach students things that they can use immediately. This is what allowed business schools to gain legitimacy in the academic system, and what has caused much of the natural and social science curriculums to become much more geared to "the first year in the workforce".
In short, the types of majors that are increasingly taking over the American university system are disciplines that would have been found at trade schools or colleges two generations ago.
Is this a good thing? Absolutely, for the businesses who profit greatly from cheap, well-trained labor that schools churn out each year. However, having computer scientists who have no background in other areas of study does a disservice to both the individual and to the society. When Jefferson and the other radical framers of the Constitution talked about a well-educated populace, they were not talking about a group with advanced skills, but people who were well-rounded contributors to society. Their focus was not merely on the paycheck and spending power, but on the well-informed and active intellectual contribution we all should make.
Not having the skills and information to be well informed is one of the greatest dangers to democracy and the university is one of the final preservers of this institution.
As quick as we are to point our fingers at the arab world for this terrorist attack, who else could be responsible? In other words, who has a motive?
* Iran, Iraq, or some group in the Arab-Muslim world - obvious and overt hatred of the US, especially with our sonstant support of Israel.
* China or some Chinese group - well, we haven't exactly had the greatest relations with the giant of the east. They have the money, the discipline, the technical know-how (to fly the plane) and the grudge against the US
* Russian group - while the government probably wouldn't sponsor this (they don't pay people enough over there to seal their lips about something this big) the Russian mafia has the money and ex-communist military personell have the technical know-how and grudge.
* Internal - we have a lot of people who are disgruntled with the government and the economy of this country. Look at Oklahoma City - Tim McVeigh and (I think) Terry Nichols were in the military. Could this have been a small ex-military group fed up with the US somehow? They would definitely have the expertise.
I'm sure other possibilities exist, but these are the few that came to the top of my head. Remember, the US has a lot of enemies.
Hey Rob,
The leaset you could have done is titled your editorial "A Modest Proposal", in light of it being as silly as Swift's solution to poverty in Ireland.
For those of you who haven't read it, check out: A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being Aburden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public
That's usually not as easily said as it is done. Most consulting companies (most companies in general for that matter) make employees sign some sort of contract at the beginning saying that they can't pilfer employees from the ex-employer for x amount of time, etc ...
Only business segments that have a high barrier to entry gravitate towards monopolies. A free market (in its most abstract concept) assums a low to no barrier to entry, and thus is able to maintain an equilibrium between price and providor.
I didn't once mention an MCSE. I said NT Admin. I am and NT admin (a pretty decent one, too) and I'm up at 2 AM reading Slashdot, drinking coke (well, caffinated beverages) and am quite happy at my job. When a server goes down, I know what to do most of the time without having to call MS tech support. Granted, my two NT webservers and 1 NT DB server haven't had any problems in the last year, but if something did happen to them I'm fairly confident I would know what to do. The UNIX admins at my company are definitely paid more than I am because they are difficult to find. A decent NT admin (again, not an MCSE paper person) who can really make NT do stuff is a little easier to find, and subsequently costs less. I have a little theory about this, though - maybe the UNIX people get paid more because the PHBs are scared of the command prompt? hmm..
If you're going to hire a staff person (staff people) to administer your UNIX/Linux network, you will pay considerably more than for staff person/people to take care of that NT network. First, skilled UNIX admins are few and far between, and they require much more training so they can command more money. An NT admin can be had for much less, which is important when figuring out TCO.
Well, the proof of fair use necessarily falls on the accused. /. would need to prove that the people who posted the document did so with the intent of starting a public dialogue. But with subjects like "Screw MS's license, here's the document", it might be a little hard...