Yeah, Katz is doing net boosterism again. Why isn't this article Wired magazine?
As SpinyNorman points out, access to ePorn isn't really addressing social and economic inequality. Access is only part of the "divide" picture. What no-one's doubting is that the rise of the Internet is increasing the gaps between rich and poor.
The information economy facilitates transnational aggregation which kills many Mom & Pop businesses and allows unskilled work to be easily outsourced to areas without labour laws or basic standards of living that Western Economies take for granted. The virtual equivalents of cleaning or trash collection won't be available for those who can't read. Being able to manipulate information in sophisticated ways (such as posting to/.:) is a prerequisite for value creation in this economy. And those information manipulation skills are irrevoccably class-bound for a while yet.
I'm not complaining about it - it allows me to have a lifestyle well beyond what my parents could have expected - but I think it's pretty damn obvious that it's going to be much harder for working class people to make money in the online space than it is in the offline space, so talking about "increased access" = "end of digital divide" is stupid, when the opposite is probably true!
Anyone interested in these issues would do well to check out Charles Steinfield's "Community Level Impacts of Electronic Commerce for a no-nonsense take on the issues from a business perspective.
Explicit permission at every step puts an enormous damper on sexual relations (and by extension, on commercial relations). The entire notion of contract presupposes the need to lubricate (no pun intended) financial dealings so that each new transaction is not as the first and most awkward. To throw out these fundamental principles would be to throw out the very foundations of our economy.
This is simply not true anymore. In the online world it is trivial to verify any particular user's exact preferences. What do you think all those checkboxes are when you register for anything on a website? Have you heard of CRM databases? Permission Marketing? All of these are based on the idea that it is now possible to give users the level of privacy and communication that they want, not what a company thinks they want. I can't see how this is a problem, or how it's going to cause the free market to come grinding to a halt.
It's simply the flip side of the technologies which make it easier to reach users in the first place. Saying that there's no need to reinvent the wheel is silly when our means of communication have been turned upside down. There's a reason why we didn't need anti-spam devices, policies or legislation 10 years ago. If a company's retaining e-mail addresses, privacy preferences are simply another field in the database.
FWIW, if you've got decent communication skills it's actually not that hard to make a verbal contract on the level of sexual intimacy you want with someone. It's been a staple of the S&M scene since its inception, apparently. And rather than being an "enormous damper", it's actually a great way to get laid because it shows that you care about what the other person thinks and feels, which is by far the sexiest thing. And it's obviously not that hard to ask for extensions to that permission in a sexy way. Try it sometime!
Yep, and like other public utilities this is one of those areas where the "market" just isn't suited for the job. Don't get me wrong, the market does a pretty good job of moving commodities around and coming up with new products and other things which keep our society going. But infrastructure which requires long-term investment isn't suited to private enterprise in these "get rich quick" times.
We have a similar problem with telecommunications in New Zealand. The phone system was "deregulated" with little done to counter Telecom NZ's incumbent monopoly. Why? Well, that would have made it less valuable to sell off!
So in the name of getting the "best price", the telco was sold to primarily overseas interests, who have benefited by a CEO focused on maximising shareholder returns. Investment in infrastructure between 1990 and 2000 was less than depreciation!
This is a depressingly common scenario in "market economies" which definitely does not result in either lower prices or better services. It should give all market ideologues pause.
Look, yes, most of the companies suck big-time. But it's amazing that the/. culture is happy to come out and say "Banner ads don't work" based on their experience. It's like me saying "Linux doesn't work" because I was stupid enough to make my first newbie install attempt w/ slackware and I couldn't work out how to fix it.
Repeat after me: Click-throughs != effectiveness
1) Internet advertising can build brand. It's proven.
2) Internet advertising can generate a consumer response. That's proven too.
3) Building brand and generating response are two different objectives, requiring different strategies and - most of all - different means of measuring effectiveness.
Hardly Ph.D material. Yet even usually sane commentators such as the Industry Standard still point to declining click-through rates as an indicator that banners don't work. They obviously haven't read the recent AdKnowledge study which notes a slight *negative* correlation between customers who click-through and customers who buy.
If you need to know why clicks don't work, have a look at Rex Briggs' excellent (and brief) admonition: "Abolish Click-through Now!"
http://www.iab.net/conference/ny99/
abolish.html
If you're still thinking that online advertising doesn't work *at all*, you should probably check out the massive Online Advertising Effectiveness study led by Briggs for Milward Brown Interactive:
http://www.mbinteractive.com/site/iab/
exec.html
This is one of the largest advertising effectiveness surveys conducted in *any medium*, and if you're still listening to Nielsen sprouting his unsubstantiated opinions on this topic, you need your head examined.
When you move to another country, they aren't required to adapt to you at all, but if you want to have *ANY* hope of fitting in & making a life for yourself, you *MUST* learn at least their language & a lot of their customs (as long as said customs don't compromise your values).
There's no need to generalize your experience to the rest of the world. There are plenty of people who live in Belgium or any number of European and other nations who don't have a shared language. And guess what, this hasn't caused a complete breakdown in society!
You musn't have been to any major city in California (where whites are now officially a minority) recently. Large numbers of people live their lives quite adequately without speaking English. Some of these people are even US Citizens. Goddammit - what happened to Mom and Apple Pie, eh? Better make sure we shut down bilingual education in those schools. Otherwise next thing there'll be ballot papers in Espanol as well!
It's always amazing to me that "Americans" so happy to promulgate diversity in the OSS realm can sprout such unquestioned nationalism in cultural matters. Why are you so emphatic about others needing to learn English? Does it really frighten you that much that others speak in a language you don't understand and can't be bothered learning?
It's all very well to be principled, but the reality is that Spanish is the second language in the US. If you're smart, you'll expand your ability to communicate with people by learning it and opening up some new horizons for yourself. You might even find it useful in daily conversation.
FWIW, I don't support Betanzos' comments, but I think it's important to take his comments as an opinion from a particular place in the academy, and not of Spanish-speaking individuals as a whole.
The classic photoshop rule of thumb was to have a image DPI 3x to 5x the LPI of the press.
Actually, that will just give your imagesetter a headache from the extraneous data you're downloading. 2xLPI is almost always an adequate resolution, and 2.2 is the absolute maximum you'll ever need. See http://www.adobe.com/support/tech doc s/c29e.htm or Ch. 3 of the Photoshop manual.
A vote for a third party candidate is not a waste. It is the exactly opposite in a swing state. If your vote changes who wins you have just shown that your vote matters.
This is faulty logic. You're assuming that the reason people vote for a third party is because they want to make their vote matter. Actually, people vote because they want to see their values approximated at government level.
If you're a liberal voter in a swinging state and you vote Nader, you're affecting the result alright, but you're moving it further from your ideal. This doesn't make sense. Your satisfaction at your vote "making a difference" doesn't mean anything at a representative level.
FWIW, I'm non-US and can't vote, but would have voted Nader in a safe Gore or Bush state, or Gore in a swinging state. The presidential elections are all about money, and the main reason to vote Nader is to try and push the Greens over the 5% threshold. Then they get funding next time and it's not a two horse race any more - that's real change!
However, the 5% is still a long shot, and you'd be playing the wrong odds if you were a liberal in a swinging seat trying to make it happen.
The posts in response to this story give me the same feeling most/.ers get at M$-funded FUD papers about Linux. A good reminder that being clueful in one area usually doesn't stop people from spouting off on stuff they know nothing about.
Most of the discussion (and satire) is centered around an idea of art (it "communicates" "meaning" based on the artists "intention") which hasn't been taken seriously in the art world for decades. The statement on the guy's site is pretty lame, but you'll note he doesn't talk about it meaning anything.
The whole point of being a visual artist is exploring what stuff looks like. How it relates to the world of meaning and context is an important issue, but generally there are other media which do a better job of transmitting meaning (like writing). This guy is messing around with the process of classical abstract painting in a novel way. That in itself justifies it's existence.
Whether you like looking at it or "find something" in it is something that you can work out for yourself. It doesn't really do it for me, even though I think the idea is interesting. But whether it's important in the larger scheme of contemporary art practice is something for the network of art critics, dealers, artists, and artgoers to work out.
So offer an opinion by all means, but unless you have a serious investment in the arts community it doesn't count for much more than my opinion on your object handling in C++ (which I know nothing about).
Yes, like the research which broke down the ratio of NNTP users as: 90% reader, 9% occasional poster, 1% active contributor and maintainer. You can look at it and say "Hey, 1% of the people are doing the real work!"
Or you can look at it and realise this is how all communities function. Those of us who act as maintainers of any community also get something out of their effort (e.g. recognition). The whole idea od the internet is that a whole lot of other people can benefit from that effort. I don't see the issue...
No-one realistically advocates the "strong" version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, but I wouldn't say it's out of favour. Actually, most contemporary literary theory takes as read that people's perception of the world is somehow shaped - if not 'determined' - by language.
Think about it: what binds together a community like/.? A big part of it is the shared language, and that translates into some level of shared culture as well - for better and worse...
Read this great article by Rex Briggs - "Abolish Clickthrough Now". Rex has done some major quantitative studies in support of the effectiveness of banners for branding. Advertisers are only just beginning to lose their prejudice - banners won't go away, and targeting will always attract a higher CPM. I don't see those Data Mining grads out of a job any time soon.
By saying that racism, sexism, etc. are all the same kind of proves the point. So a black man's experience is the same as a white woman's? Huh? Have you gone and talked to any?
The old saying goes "What you see depends on where you sit". No one's going to question your opinions on straight white male republicans. You are obviously in a strong position to talk knowledgeably about your community.
But racism, sexism, and heterosexism are concepts built around the experience of not being white, male, or straight. Now it's pretty obvious to me that no amount of good intentions on your part is going to make your opinions on these matters a heck of a lot more insightful.
If I got one thing from feminism, it was learning that it didn't help to have an opinion on everything, and knowing when to shut the fsck up and let somebody else have a say. Give it a try!
Either you want to pay fairly or you don't get the music.
The problem with the morality approach is that it's not mirrored anywhere else on the net. Why is eBay such a success? Dynamic pricing. It's happening everywhere.
The net allows consumers to be more involved with the pricing and bundling of products. The old-world model you're talking about doesn't allow consumers to be involved in determining what they think is a fair price for your product. No wonder then that they'll go elsewhere - not just to get a better deal, but to be involved in price setting.
As other posters have indicated, the major labels make their money from selling low-involvement products to youth markets. It's no different to packaged goods like Oreos. How many online packaged goods successes have you seen? Uh-huh. Online, low-involvement products basically have to compete on price. And the best price is free. No amount of moralising about artist rights is going to change that. And yes, I have spent some of my life making my living off my music.
Look, the horse has bolted on online music. There was probably a point where a solid move by the labels could have maintained the status quo, but that time is passed. Music is highly commoditized, and just like every other content form there's a global oversupply, and the price is tending toward zero. I don't have a lot of time for the "artists rights" whingers. The fsking New York Times can't charge for its product online, and you think your musical masterwork should rake in $$ every time someone plays it? Puh-leeze.
There's nothing special about music. It's just content. Because the web is primarily a text medium, the business models are a lot more worked out for writing than anything else. Why not look there for innovative ways of pricing your work?
If you write the code, you can choose the terms. If I don't like your terms, I'll go elsewhere.
The problem with this approach is that it's not mirrored anywhere else on the net. Why is eBay such a success? Dynamic pricing. It's happening everywhere.
The net allows consumers to be more involved with the pricing and bundling of products. The old-world model you're talking about doesn't allow consumers to be involved in determining what they think is a fair price for your product. No wonder then that they'll go elsewhere.
As other posters have indicated, the major labels make their money from selling low-involvement products to youth markets. It's no different to packaged goods like Oreos. How many online packaged goods successes have you seen? Uh-huh. Online, low-involvement products basically have to compete on price. And the best price is free. No amount of moralising about artist rights is going to change that. And yes, I have spent some of my life making my living off my music.
Look, the horse has bolted on online music. It's highly commoditized, and just like every other content form there's a global oversupply, and the price is tending toward zero. I don't have a lot of time for the "artists rights" whingers. The fsking New York Times can't charge for its product online, and you think your musical masterwork should rake in $$ every time someone plays it? Puh-leeze.
There's nothing special about music. It's just content. Because the web is primarily a text medium, the business models are a lot more worked out for writing than anything else. Why not look there for innovative ways of pricing your work?
why EVERY DAMN OCCUPATION isn't 50% male, 50% female. it will *NEVER* be that way.
I think you're missing the point. Equality of representation is not about saying that gender differences don't exist. It's about saying "would the products of our labour be better if the field wasn't dominated by men?"
I always thought that computers were ultimately about making stuff for people. Half of those people are women. Like you say, men and women think differently - which means that there is a whole way of thinking and being which is underrepresented in CS.
With the rise of the Internet and the ability of computers to do things which normal people find useful, there has been a marked increase in the number of female users. IT people are also required to do a lot more interfacing with marketing types, human factors people, graphic designers, and a whole lot of other industries where women are well-represented. You can fight this all you want, but it's only getting "worse", and it's probably what keeps you in a job.
In this context, the under-representation of women in CS isn't a problem for women, it's a problem for CS.
This is true, and I think has got something to do with the way meta-moderation is not adequately distinguished from standard moderation in the UI. If you click on a pop-up next to a comment you *then* have to decide whether it's better to moderate or meta-moderate, and it's generally easier to just moderate and be done with it.
I think I'd like to see a system of meta-moderation which is completely distinct from standard moderation, maybe limited to 100 or so people (with great karma) at any one time. These people would get meta-moderation points which could not be used on standard moderation.
As M2 affects karma, this would have the effect of allowing high-karma users to concentrate on meta-moderation more than standard moderation. Which I think overall is a positive outcome for/. What do you think?
vlax worte: That 5% was a concession to the handful of linguists (mostly anthropologists) who still take some portion of Sapir-Whorf seriously.
Give it a rest. Add the ethnographers, media theorists, cultural theorists, historians of science, etc. etc. etc. and together they far outnumber the hard linguists. As Daniel Chandler notes, there is a "broad acceptance" within academia of a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Within 20 minutes of my first encounter with this scheme a perfect digital rip was made. But I guess that people outside the audio and music industry usually don't have access to an S/PDIF interface card.
There is an interesting conundrum here where the industry hyped new media like CDs which provide "better audio quality", requiring the music listener to ditch their reasonably adequate vinyl records. Most music listeners are actually quite happy with analogue sound - that's how it hits your ears!
But as part of pushing CDs, the industry created a demand for "digital sound" which is extending as far as digital USB speakers for your computer. But by making everything digital, they increase the number of places in the sound chain where the sound can be ripped!
This highlights the idiocy of the industry's attempts at copy protection. If they were going to be able to do it properly, they'll have to sew up not just the media, but all the places where D/A conversion occurs. S/PDIF may not be common now, but you can bet that pro level interfaces are *always* going to find their way to consumer level. You'd think they'd remember that DAT copy protection didn't work?
At worst, it will divert some free software talents towards enhancing and maintaining a little used set of alternative tools, rather than enhancing the tools used by the rest of the community. Most likely, someone will have wasted US$200.000.
This "diverting talent" line really is bullshit.
Look, under the classic OSS model, community recognition, the greater good and sense of personal achievement is enough. Under OSS dogma, the fact that some tools are used by the rest of the community is going to keep those OSS-commited individuals working on those tools.
If people want to enter a competition to replace those tools, then surely, as far as they are concerned, those tools don't have enough promise/investment to retain their attention.
Salary means you're getting paid to do a job. Hourly remuneration can mean you're getting paid to fill in a timesheet.
If you're concerned about the performance of your employees, I'd suggest that method of remuneration is a fairly trivial place to start. The hardest thing in any organisation is developing a HR strategy where employees rewarded for outcomes and their true value, rather than being a body who clocks more hours in the office than anyone else.
I'd ask yourself some questions like:
Do I know the true value of my employees?
Do the performance criteria in their job descriptions reflect this value?
Is employee performance measured against these criteria and are reviews undertaken (by employees themselves, their peers, and management)
Are there rewards (financial or otherwise) for excelling at these criteria?
If you answered yes to all these questions, then you wouldn't be having any trouble with incentive under a salary based system. I know it sounds like hard work - but these people are the main source of value for your company! You've got to spend some time making sure they're working to their best and have opportunities to extend themselves.
If you don't have this stuff sorted out, hourly remuneration won't boost your productivity. In fact, it'll probably reduce it as people try and find ways to falsify time sheets etc.
When Linux naysayers claim "But Linux doesn't do X!" the usual slashdot response is like "Well hey dude, you can get involved and make it happen! That's the beauty of Linux!"
Calling for a boycott of sites which make use of functionality Linux doesn't have (and source licensing for the technology is *not* particularly relevant here) is a pretty good way of reinforcing the "Linux is totally open as long as you think like we do" mentality, which is reasonably prevalent IMHO.
It's not hard or overly expensive to implement hardware copy-protection, but how many companies do it? None at the consumer level. They claim that they're saving users "inconvenience" but the reality is that with tougher copy protection schemes, sales drop. Ask Macromedia and other companies who have liberalised their copy protection in recent years.
They can't admit it, but the sales are all that matters - not ethics or principles. And their sales depend on piracy to lock in users and generate awareness and formulate standards. The Internet economy shows us that standards make money. MS can't risk not being the standard - and they rely on piracy. Bottom line.
You start with a list of learning objectives. You come up with an assessment process which measures a student's achievement of those learning objectives.
Lazy educators focus on "end products" and "right answers" rather than learning processes. These are easily spoofed.
The corporate culture of "I want something delivered by tomorrow, no matter what" supports this kind of "educational production". Mainstream media makes an attempt at being outraged by cheats, but essentially the bottom line is that most organisations would rather hire a doofus MSCP than a less qualified person who really knew what they were doing. Not many people really want to spend the time measuring whether a job actually gets done properly (whether it's education or a LAN rollout) - they just want a set of bits of paper that tells them it's someone else's fault if things go wrong.
Competition is getting us to a point where this isn't good enough anymore. I think you'll start to see qualifications from places which focus on a student's ability to create/buy/steal end products lose their value, compared to those which measure learning more effectively.
This is just about power. Power is not something that exists in evil corporations. Power is the ability to make stuff happen. Try to make stuff happen, and you're assuming power. You're putting your stamp on the world.
Eric is someone who has made stuff happen. He seems like a relatively ambitious person: he can put his interests into a global context, and is looking for maximum impact from stuff he cares about, like Open Source. This is a Good Thing. Someone has to make stuff happen. Getting OSS inside the corporate IT mindset is as important a function in overall OSS development as Linux kernel development.
But assuming power redistributes it. By doing something you create an unequal power relation. This is why Eric is a Powerful Person.
However, as we know, power needs to be questioned and interrogated at every opportunity. If we care, we're also working to redistribute power to things which need it. We're assessing the power that people have and seeing that we can find a better use for it. That's politics! That's doing stuff.
So I don't have much time for bitching about "sniping". Sure, it's unhelpful a lot of the time. But it's an important part of being accountable to a community. Anyone assuming power needs to be ready for it, and confident in their ability to handle that criticism. If you're not, then you have to ask yourself how genuinely you can be representing this community (and don't give me the individualist "just my views" bullshit - if you talk about OSS you're adding to the collection of the community's viewpoints about OSS).
Being a leader is no place for sensitive egos and personal bullshit. Being a leader isn't about getting everyone to support your view. Being a leader is about getting the respect of a community with a lot of views *opposite* to your own. A community like/. is stronger because of these different views - and because of the sniping.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Katz is doing net boosterism again. Why isn't this article Wired magazine?
As SpinyNorman points out, access to ePorn isn't really addressing social and economic inequality. Access is only part of the "divide" picture. What no-one's doubting is that the rise of the Internet is increasing the gaps between rich and poor.
The information economy facilitates transnational aggregation which kills many Mom & Pop businesses and allows unskilled work to be easily outsourced to areas without labour laws or basic standards of living that Western Economies take for granted. The virtual equivalents of cleaning or trash collection won't be available for those who can't read. Being able to manipulate information in sophisticated ways (such as posting to /. :) is a prerequisite for value creation in this economy. And those information manipulation skills are irrevoccably class-bound for a while yet.
I'm not complaining about it - it allows me to have a lifestyle well beyond what my parents could have expected - but I think it's pretty damn obvious that it's going to be much harder for working class people to make money in the online space than it is in the offline space, so talking about "increased access" = "end of digital divide" is stupid, when the opposite is probably true!
Anyone interested in these issues would do well to check out Charles Steinfield's "Community Level Impacts of Electronic Commerce for a no-nonsense take on the issues from a business perspective.
Danny
Explicit permission at every step puts an enormous damper on sexual relations (and by extension, on commercial relations). The entire notion of contract presupposes the need to lubricate (no pun intended) financial dealings so that each new transaction is not as the first and most awkward. To throw out these fundamental principles would be to throw out the very foundations of our economy.
This is simply not true anymore. In the online world it is trivial to verify any particular user's exact preferences. What do you think all those checkboxes are when you register for anything on a website? Have you heard of CRM databases? Permission Marketing? All of these are based on the idea that it is now possible to give users the level of privacy and communication that they want, not what a company thinks they want. I can't see how this is a problem, or how it's going to cause the free market to come grinding to a halt.
It's simply the flip side of the technologies which make it easier to reach users in the first place. Saying that there's no need to reinvent the wheel is silly when our means of communication have been turned upside down. There's a reason why we didn't need anti-spam devices, policies or legislation 10 years ago. If a company's retaining e-mail addresses, privacy preferences are simply another field in the database.
FWIW, if you've got decent communication skills it's actually not that hard to make a verbal contract on the level of sexual intimacy you want with someone. It's been a staple of the S&M scene since its inception, apparently. And rather than being an "enormous damper", it's actually a great way to get laid because it shows that you care about what the other person thinks and feels, which is by far the sexiest thing. And it's obviously not that hard to ask for extensions to that permission in a sexy way. Try it sometime!
Yep, and like other public utilities this is one of those areas where the "market" just isn't suited for the job. Don't get me wrong, the market does a pretty good job of moving commodities around and coming up with new products and other things which keep our society going. But infrastructure which requires long-term investment isn't suited to private enterprise in these "get rich quick" times.
We have a similar problem with telecommunications in New Zealand. The phone system was "deregulated" with little done to counter Telecom NZ's incumbent monopoly. Why? Well, that would have made it less valuable to sell off!
So in the name of getting the "best price", the telco was sold to primarily overseas interests, who have benefited by a CEO focused on maximising shareholder returns. Investment in infrastructure between 1990 and 2000 was less than depreciation!
This is a depressingly common scenario in "market economies" which definitely does not result in either lower prices or better services. It should give all market ideologues pause.
- Danny
Look, yes, most of the companies suck big-time. But it's amazing that the /. culture is happy to come out and say "Banner ads don't work" based on their experience. It's like me saying "Linux doesn't work" because I was stupid enough to make my first newbie install attempt w/ slackware and I couldn't work out how to fix it.
Repeat after me: Click-throughs != effectiveness
1) Internet advertising can build brand. It's proven.
2) Internet advertising can generate a consumer response. That's proven too.
3) Building brand and generating response are two different objectives, requiring different strategies and - most of all - different means of measuring effectiveness.
Hardly Ph.D material. Yet even usually sane commentators such as the Industry Standard still point to declining click-through rates as an indicator that banners don't work. They obviously haven't read the recent AdKnowledge study which notes a slight *negative* correlation between customers who click-through and customers who buy.
If you need to know why clicks don't work, have a look at Rex Briggs' excellent (and brief) admonition: "Abolish Click-through Now!"
http://www.iab.net/conference/ny99/ abolish.html
If you're still thinking that online advertising doesn't work *at all*, you should probably check out the massive Online Advertising Effectiveness study led by Briggs for Milward Brown Interactive:
http://www.mbinteractive.com/site/iab/ exec.html
This is one of the largest advertising effectiveness surveys conducted in *any medium*, and if you're still listening to Nielsen sprouting his unsubstantiated opinions on this topic, you need your head examined.
- Danny
I think you had that thinnest book list a little wrong:
The Emotional Intelligence of Geeks: Hackers describe their feelings about love and relationships
A Treasury of North American Irony - The Slashdot Chronicles
Knock 'em Down, Knock 'em Up: White U.S. Men Share their Romantic Secrets
Integrity Under Pressure: U.S. action against human rights abuses by Israel, Indonesia, and other significant trading partners.
Yep, just find an outside group and ridicule how different they are. Instant classic humour! Oh wait, you mean it's not 1952 any more? :7
When you move to another country, they aren't required to adapt to you at all, but if you want to have *ANY* hope of fitting in & making a life for yourself, you *MUST* learn at least their language & a lot of their customs (as long as said customs don't compromise your values).
There's no need to generalize your experience to the rest of the world. There are plenty of people who live in Belgium or any number of European and other nations who don't have a shared language. And guess what, this hasn't caused a complete breakdown in society!
You musn't have been to any major city in California (where whites are now officially a minority) recently. Large numbers of people live their lives quite adequately without speaking English. Some of these people are even US Citizens. Goddammit - what happened to Mom and Apple Pie, eh? Better make sure we shut down bilingual education in those schools. Otherwise next thing there'll be ballot papers in Espanol as well!
It's always amazing to me that "Americans" so happy to promulgate diversity in the OSS realm can sprout such unquestioned nationalism in cultural matters. Why are you so emphatic about others needing to learn English? Does it really frighten you that much that others speak in a language you don't understand and can't be bothered learning?
It's all very well to be principled, but the reality is that Spanish is the second language in the US. If you're smart, you'll expand your ability to communicate with people by learning it and opening up some new horizons for yourself. You might even find it useful in daily conversation.
FWIW, I don't support Betanzos' comments, but I think it's important to take his comments as an opinion from a particular place in the academy, and not of Spanish-speaking individuals as a whole.
Danny
The classic photoshop rule of thumb was to have a image DPI 3x to 5x the LPI of the press.
Actually, that will just give your imagesetter a headache from the extraneous data you're downloading. 2xLPI is almost always an adequate resolution, and 2.2 is the absolute maximum you'll ever need. See http://www.adobe.com/support/tech doc s/c29e.htm or Ch. 3 of the Photoshop manual.
Danny
A vote for a third party candidate is not a waste. It is the exactly opposite in a swing state. If your vote changes who wins you have just shown that your vote matters.
This is faulty logic. You're assuming that the reason people vote for a third party is because they want to make their vote matter. Actually, people vote because they want to see their values approximated at government level.
If you're a liberal voter in a swinging state and you vote Nader, you're affecting the result alright, but you're moving it further from your ideal. This doesn't make sense. Your satisfaction at your vote "making a difference" doesn't mean anything at a representative level.
FWIW, I'm non-US and can't vote, but would have voted Nader in a safe Gore or Bush state, or Gore in a swinging state. The presidential elections are all about money, and the main reason to vote Nader is to try and push the Greens over the 5% threshold. Then they get funding next time and it's not a two horse race any more - that's real change!
However, the 5% is still a long shot, and you'd be playing the wrong odds if you were a liberal in a swinging seat trying to make it happen.
My $0.02
Danny
The posts in response to this story give me the same feeling most /.ers get at M$-funded FUD papers about Linux. A good reminder that being clueful in one area usually doesn't stop people from spouting off on stuff they know nothing about.
Most of the discussion (and satire) is centered around an idea of art (it "communicates" "meaning" based on the artists "intention") which hasn't been taken seriously in the art world for decades. The statement on the guy's site is pretty lame, but you'll note he doesn't talk about it meaning anything.
The whole point of being a visual artist is exploring what stuff looks like. How it relates to the world of meaning and context is an important issue, but generally there are other media which do a better job of transmitting meaning (like writing). This guy is messing around with the process of classical abstract painting in a novel way. That in itself justifies it's existence.
Whether you like looking at it or "find something" in it is something that you can work out for yourself. It doesn't really do it for me, even though I think the idea is interesting. But whether it's important in the larger scheme of contemporary art practice is something for the network of art critics, dealers, artists, and artgoers to work out.
So offer an opinion by all means, but unless you have a serious investment in the arts community it doesn't count for much more than my opinion on your object handling in C++ (which I know nothing about).
Danny
Yes, like the research which broke down the ratio of NNTP users as: 90% reader, 9% occasional poster, 1% active contributor and maintainer. You can look at it and say "Hey, 1% of the people are doing the real work!"
Or you can look at it and realise this is how all communities function. Those of us who act as maintainers of any community also get something out of their effort (e.g. recognition). The whole idea od the internet is that a whole lot of other people can benefit from that effort. I don't see the issue...
No-one realistically advocates the "strong" version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, but I wouldn't say it's out of favour. Actually, most contemporary literary theory takes as read that people's perception of the world is somehow shaped - if not 'determined' - by language.
Think about it: what binds together a community like /.? A big part of it is the shared language, and that translates into some level of shared culture as well - for better and worse...
Read this great article by Rex Briggs - "Abolish Clickthrough Now". Rex has done some major quantitative studies in support of the effectiveness of banners for branding. Advertisers are only just beginning to lose their prejudice - banners won't go away, and targeting will always attract a higher CPM. I don't see those Data Mining grads out of a job any time soon.
www.iab.net/conference/ny99/abolish.html
By saying that racism, sexism, etc. are all the same kind of proves the point. So a black man's experience is the same as a white woman's? Huh? Have you gone and talked to any?
The old saying goes "What you see depends on where you sit". No one's going to question your opinions on straight white male republicans. You are obviously in a strong position to talk knowledgeably about your community.
But racism, sexism, and heterosexism are concepts built around the experience of not being white, male, or straight. Now it's pretty obvious to me that no amount of good intentions on your part is going to make your opinions on these matters a heck of a lot more insightful.
If I got one thing from feminism, it was learning that it didn't help to have an opinion on everything, and knowing when to shut the fsck up and let somebody else have a say. Give it a try!
Danny
Either you want to pay fairly or you don't get the music.
The problem with the morality approach is that it's not mirrored anywhere else on the net. Why is eBay such a success? Dynamic pricing. It's happening everywhere.
The net allows consumers to be more involved with the pricing and bundling of products. The old-world model you're talking about doesn't allow consumers to be involved in determining what they think is a fair price for your product. No wonder then that they'll go elsewhere - not just to get a better deal, but to be involved in price setting.
As other posters have indicated, the major labels make their money from selling low-involvement products to youth markets. It's no different to packaged goods like Oreos. How many online packaged goods successes have you seen? Uh-huh. Online, low-involvement products basically have to compete on price. And the best price is free. No amount of moralising about artist rights is going to change that. And yes, I have spent some of my life making my living off my music.
Look, the horse has bolted on online music. There was probably a point where a solid move by the labels could have maintained the status quo, but that time is passed. Music is highly commoditized, and just like every other content form there's a global oversupply, and the price is tending toward zero. I don't have a lot of time for the "artists rights" whingers. The fsking New York Times can't charge for its product online, and you think your musical masterwork should rake in $$ every time someone plays it? Puh-leeze.
There's nothing special about music. It's just content. Because the web is primarily a text medium, the business models are a lot more worked out for writing than anything else. Why not look there for innovative ways of pricing your work?
Danny
If you write the code, you can choose the terms. If I don't like your terms, I'll go elsewhere.
The problem with this approach is that it's not mirrored anywhere else on the net. Why is eBay such a success? Dynamic pricing. It's happening everywhere.
The net allows consumers to be more involved with the pricing and bundling of products. The old-world model you're talking about doesn't allow consumers to be involved in determining what they think is a fair price for your product. No wonder then that they'll go elsewhere.
As other posters have indicated, the major labels make their money from selling low-involvement products to youth markets. It's no different to packaged goods like Oreos. How many online packaged goods successes have you seen? Uh-huh. Online, low-involvement products basically have to compete on price. And the best price is free. No amount of moralising about artist rights is going to change that. And yes, I have spent some of my life making my living off my music.
Look, the horse has bolted on online music. It's highly commoditized, and just like every other content form there's a global oversupply, and the price is tending toward zero. I don't have a lot of time for the "artists rights" whingers. The fsking New York Times can't charge for its product online, and you think your musical masterwork should rake in $$ every time someone plays it? Puh-leeze.
There's nothing special about music. It's just content. Because the web is primarily a text medium, the business models are a lot more worked out for writing than anything else. Why not look there for innovative ways of pricing your work?
Danny
why EVERY DAMN OCCUPATION isn't 50% male, 50% female. it will *NEVER* be that way.
I think you're missing the point. Equality of representation is not about saying that gender differences don't exist. It's about saying "would the products of our labour be better if the field wasn't dominated by men?"
I always thought that computers were ultimately about making stuff for people. Half of those people are women. Like you say, men and women think differently - which means that there is a whole way of thinking and being which is underrepresented in CS.
With the rise of the Internet and the ability of computers to do things which normal people find useful, there has been a marked increase in the number of female users. IT people are also required to do a lot more interfacing with marketing types, human factors people, graphic designers, and a whole lot of other industries where women are well-represented. You can fight this all you want, but it's only getting "worse", and it's probably what keeps you in a job.
In this context, the under-representation of women in CS isn't a problem for women, it's a problem for CS.
Danny
not enough people meta-moderate
This is true, and I think has got something to do with the way meta-moderation is not adequately distinguished from standard moderation in the UI. If you click on a pop-up next to a comment you *then* have to decide whether it's better to moderate or meta-moderate, and it's generally easier to just moderate and be done with it.
I think I'd like to see a system of meta-moderation which is completely distinct from standard moderation, maybe limited to 100 or so people (with great karma) at any one time. These people would get meta-moderation points which could not be used on standard moderation.
As M2 affects karma, this would have the effect of allowing high-karma users to concentrate on meta-moderation more than standard moderation. Which I think overall is a positive outcome for /. What do you think?
vlax worte: That 5% was a concession to the handful of linguists (mostly anthropologists) who still take some portion of Sapir-Whorf seriously.
Give it a rest. Add the ethnographers, media theorists, cultural theorists, historians of science, etc. etc. etc. and together they far outnumber the hard linguists. As Daniel Chandler notes, there is a "broad acceptance" within academia of a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
See: http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/whorf.html
A lot of geeks resist the idea that language constrains reality because they can't bear the thought of their world being C++. :-7
Danny
Within 20 minutes of my first encounter with this scheme a perfect digital rip was made. But I guess that people outside the audio and music industry usually don't have access to an S/PDIF interface card.
There is an interesting conundrum here where the industry hyped new media like CDs which provide "better audio quality", requiring the music listener to ditch their reasonably adequate vinyl records. Most music listeners are actually quite happy with analogue sound - that's how it hits your ears!
But as part of pushing CDs, the industry created a demand for "digital sound" which is extending as far as digital USB speakers for your computer. But by making everything digital, they increase the number of places in the sound chain where the sound can be ripped!
This highlights the idiocy of the industry's attempts at copy protection. If they were going to be able to do it properly, they'll have to sew up not just the media, but all the places where D/A conversion occurs. S/PDIF may not be common now, but you can bet that pro level interfaces are *always* going to find their way to consumer level. You'd think they'd remember that DAT copy protection didn't work?
Danny
At worst, it will divert some free software talents towards enhancing and maintaining a little used set of alternative tools, rather than enhancing the tools used by the rest of the community. Most likely, someone will have wasted US$200.000.
This "diverting talent" line really is bullshit.
Look, under the classic OSS model, community recognition, the greater good and sense of personal achievement is enough. Under OSS dogma, the fact that some tools are used by the rest of the community is going to keep those OSS-commited individuals working on those tools.
If people want to enter a competition to replace those tools, then surely, as far as they are concerned, those tools don't have enough promise/investment to retain their attention.
Or have I missed something?
Danny
Salary means you're getting paid to do a job. Hourly remuneration can mean you're getting paid to fill in a timesheet.
If you're concerned about the performance of your employees, I'd suggest that method of remuneration is a fairly trivial place to start. The hardest thing in any organisation is developing a HR strategy where employees rewarded for outcomes and their true value, rather than being a body who clocks more hours in the office than anyone else.
I'd ask yourself some questions like:
If you answered yes to all these questions, then you wouldn't be having any trouble with incentive under a salary based system. I know it sounds like hard work - but these people are the main source of value for your company! You've got to spend some time making sure they're working to their best and have opportunities to extend themselves.
If you don't have this stuff sorted out, hourly remuneration won't boost your productivity. In fact, it'll probably reduce it as people try and find ways to falsify time sheets etc.
My 0.02
Danny
When Linux naysayers claim "But Linux doesn't do X!" the usual slashdot response is like "Well hey dude, you can get involved and make it happen! That's the beauty of Linux!"
Calling for a boycott of sites which make use of functionality Linux doesn't have (and source licensing for the technology is *not* particularly relevant here) is a pretty good way of reinforcing the "Linux is totally open as long as you think like we do" mentality, which is reasonably prevalent IMHO.
My $0.02
Danny
It's not hard or overly expensive to implement hardware copy-protection, but how many companies do it? None at the consumer level. They claim that they're saving users "inconvenience" but the reality is that with tougher copy protection schemes, sales drop. Ask Macromedia and other companies who have liberalised their copy protection in recent years.
They can't admit it, but the sales are all that matters - not ethics or principles. And their sales depend on piracy to lock in users and generate awareness and formulate standards. The Internet economy shows us that standards make money. MS can't risk not being the standard - and they rely on piracy. Bottom line.
Danny
The bottom line is simple educational theory.
You start with a list of learning objectives. You come up with an assessment process which measures a student's achievement of those learning objectives.
Lazy educators focus on "end products" and "right answers" rather than learning processes. These are easily spoofed.
The corporate culture of "I want something delivered by tomorrow, no matter what" supports this kind of "educational production". Mainstream media makes an attempt at being outraged by cheats, but essentially the bottom line is that most organisations would rather hire a doofus MSCP than a less qualified person who really knew what they were doing. Not many people really want to spend the time measuring whether a job actually gets done properly (whether it's education or a LAN rollout) - they just want a set of bits of paper that tells them it's someone else's fault if things go wrong.
Competition is getting us to a point where this isn't good enough anymore. I think you'll start to see qualifications from places which focus on a student's ability to create/buy/steal end products lose their value, compared to those which measure learning more effectively.
Danny
This is just about power. Power is not something that exists in evil corporations. Power is the ability to make stuff happen. Try to make stuff happen, and you're assuming power. You're putting your stamp on the world.
Eric is someone who has made stuff happen. He seems like a relatively ambitious person: he can put his interests into a global context, and is looking for maximum impact from stuff he cares about, like Open Source. This is a Good Thing. Someone has to make stuff happen. Getting OSS inside the corporate IT mindset is as important a function in overall OSS development as Linux kernel development.
But assuming power redistributes it. By doing something you create an unequal power relation. This is why Eric is a Powerful Person.
However, as we know, power needs to be questioned and interrogated at every opportunity. If we care, we're also working to redistribute power to things which need it. We're assessing the power that people have and seeing that we can find a better use for it. That's politics! That's doing stuff.
So I don't have much time for bitching about "sniping". Sure, it's unhelpful a lot of the time. But it's an important part of being accountable to a community. Anyone assuming power needs to be ready for it, and confident in their ability to handle that criticism. If you're not, then you have to ask yourself how genuinely you can be representing this community (and don't give me the individualist "just my views" bullshit - if you talk about OSS you're adding to the collection of the community's viewpoints about OSS).
Being a leader is no place for sensitive egos and personal bullshit. Being a leader isn't about getting everyone to support your view. Being a leader is about getting the respect of a community with a lot of views *opposite* to your own. A community like /. is stronger because of these different views - and because of the sniping.
Get used to it!
Danny