Not hours out from me.. More like ten minutes down the road (and yep, the building's a mess). Rumour has it that the building, being pretty old (couple of hundred years I think) wasn't set up with a proper sprinkler system.
Modem connections? They're still around, and it's a pain in the derriere to download Firefox, plus extensions, plus thunderbird. All on one CD, chuck it in the drive and go. Much better solution.
Actually, a huge amount of people do stop listening. The high turnaround of 'artists' and 'trends' means that the recording industry just hopes to keep topping up the numbers from the younger generation just coming along, to which this is all new anyway.. These days, the younger generation seems to want to spend more of it's money across Videos and Games as well as music. The recording industry is worried that it's stock formula and heavy advertising won't compete with the advertising for games. Thus it wants to reach any source of money it can. And if it can't make money through doing business, it'll do it by litigation, which seems to be a highly popular business model these days.
Actually, there's a lot about your side of the debate that I'm quite in agreement. Other parts, I think are already present in the way things work today. For example, say there was a company that produced something that everyone relied on, and all of a sudden, they tried to pull the plug. I would hazard a guess that any government would pull eminent domain (or whatever the equivalent is in terms of virtual product). Much of the politicking and infiltration carried out by the western world is to ensure it has a firm grasp on the flow of oil. That's a debate that I'm not going to spark up here as it is done to death, and I refer to pretty much ALL western civilisation, not the US. Pretty much any and every government will take away civilian rights if it is deemed in the greater good.
However, with DNS, it's not a case of a company owning a particular product. DNS is an open standard that anybody and everybody can implement, and has done. Being an open standard, the world has adopted it (as it's pretty nifty). So, there are root DNS servers spread all over the globe, in many different countries. The large front to this is ICANN, which most people don't have an issue with an autonomous entitiy running the show. Behind that is the US Department of Commerce, which retains overall control. That is the crux of the issue. The whole of the world does not really want to be beholden to the US. Certainly not in the world climate today.
Now, the options are, to go with the flow, and hope that the US will always obey international law, and show good faith (which these days, nobody really believes anymore. I anticipate that changing in a few years, but not yet). Or setting something in place that's a little more resilient, and actually requires there to be a worldwide consensus of opinion before drastic action is taken. The latter, as the US founding fathers tried to do with having three distinct branches of government as checks and balances. I think they understood a lot about the world, and how it should work, and some of the things they needed in place to make sure it ran as well as it could. Everything can be subverted, however, and eventually will, which is why change is always needed. But not too much at a time, otherwise everything becomes chaos, and hasn't got the stability to grow anymore. What the UN is trying to do is put in place those checks and balances on a worldwide scale.
I think the UN are pretty set on making sure there are "world wide open" DNS root servers that every country has a say about, and these will happen. What it's most interested in doing is getting the US to back this, and be part of the bigger picture. If the split happens, the the net as a whole will suffer badly for quite a time to come, although in time will settle. How I'd see that as happening would be all the country specific TLDs would be accessed (outside the US anyway) from the UN backed tech consortium first, with a secondary fallback to the US roots (unless those become blocked on geographical location). COM, NET, ORG and US (plus any other US specific domains) would become the province of the US roots. Another layer of DNS servers would be required to deal with this correctly, or some mod to general DNS clients, but it would recover. The hit to businesses and general worldwide commerce would be pretty bad though, for a while.
Anyway, that's my take on it.. Still probably not putting it as well as I'd like, but, hopefully enough to paint some of the picture of what my belief is on the subject.
Weird to be told that from someone who doesn't really make sense..
You mention that the world relies on middle easter oil, so you (assuming you to be in the US, as it sounds from your mentioning of wheatfields in the US, and your ownership) then say effectively "The US should turn over ownership of a foreign country's resources to someone else." I hope you know just how wrong that sounds.
Nobody is mentioning anything about taking control of anything that affects US geographical territory. So the mention of wheat fields and so on is purely spurious. Which I'm sure you were well aware of when posting this.
As to interdependance of technologies, my post was simply stating that the world did have an interdependance on technology. I'm sure you'd be entirely miffed if some governing body still held on to an idea that it had created Agriculture, so it required scribes present on each US farm to oversee the fields you grew. Just to make sure.
As to the buildings housing root servers. The US doesn't actually own the buildings that many of them are held in (check out http://www.root-servers.org/ if you don't believe me).
Hoarding the root servers (meaning, keep direct control of them, without allowing the rest of the world to have a real say, even when it affects the world at large) is exactly what is happening. There again, I suspect you knew that also.
I hope that explains where I was coming from. And while I don't claim to have achieved true enlightenment, I'm actually working on it. I suggest you try the same.
Actually, I believe it's to keep it open. Censorship tends to happen by the will of small groups. For example, China, wishing to remove sites that pertain to freedom, democracy, or whatever. If this gets tabled to the UN, it would have exactly the same kind of treatment it would get in the US. Filter it yourself. There are a goodly mix of countries involved in the UN, and I don't think the government would be any more involved in the running of it that the US government is at the moment. In other words, it would be business as usual.
The point of my GP post (modded troll for some reason, along with informative. Good mix that.) was that the removal of complete control would prevent censorship, and help stop any one government interfering with issues.
The issue is not to remove the US from any role in proceedings, which seems to be suggested elsewhere. And I daresay, it'll still probably have the largest single voice in any new, international effort. It's to make sure that a single voice cannot censor things.
As to the US being a malevolent police state, my apologies if that's how it came to be percieved. My point was that the US, like it or not, is externally percieved to be untrustworthy, and is treated with a great deal of trepidation by the world at large.
If stating that gets me modded troll again, so be it. It happened last time there was any controversy about the US, and I spoke in a manner which didn't suggest the US was a shining beacon of enlightenment.
But hey, nice comeback to the original post. You make valid, interesting points. As a purely personal viewoint, I don't believe the reasons are true, but that doesn't mean you're wrong; I simply don't see enough evidence for the purpose of censorship to be the driving force behind this.
It sets the precedent that a lot of places are now subscribing to. "We don't want Microsoft to own all our data. Either follow an open standard, or get out of town." There have been a goodly many of these topics on Slashdot recently, all of which were greatly applauded by the large part of/.
So, this story has only been posted a short while, and already the posts saying "We'll do what we damn well please. We're untouchable. We can do without you all. We'll just pull the plug on things. We invented it. We paid for it." are running rife. All modded up as insightful and informative.
Well.. That's the reason the UN really wants things to be run by an international board, not a US controlled one. The net, as the article states, is now vital to many countries. Which means the rest of the world would also like to have it's fair share of the say, without having to listen to the US, which has recently showed it's absolute contempt for international view (and in the posts here, is showing it all over again). The aim, from my interpretation of the article, is that an international body, that fills the shoes that ICANN now fills will be formed as a technical arena to ensure that the needs of the world are fulfilled. The rest of the world is perfectly able to build it's own root servers, although this will then lead to the US being cut off if it refuses to use the new ones, and fragmentation of the whole will occur. This is what the ongoing argument is about. Not 'Give us the root servers. All of them. Give us what you paid for.'. The infrastructure outside the US was paid for outside the US, by the companies that operate outside the US. Without that foreign buy in to a Standard, there would be no worldwide internet. It would be the US military net it started off as, or perhaps their academic net, like UK had JANET, and Europe's other competing national networks. What is being requested is that the ownership becomes joint. No one country can pull the plug and get overall control to suddenly yank a whole area out of the system at will.
The amount of inventions used in the US created outside of it (or before it existed) are many and multifarious. Without those, it's entirely probably that the ideas that lead to the creation of the Internet would have not formed for a goodly long time. But, the ideas did come around in the US, and honestly, all credit to the guys that did come up with it. And for the forsight to put it into the academic arena, which led to it's increase in scope worldwide (I still remember the net from it's almost entirely academic days).
Now the choice comes to either make it a truly worldwide and international entity and show real enlightenment, or to hoard it, use it as a lever to gain other concessions, or a stick to beat people with if needed. This whole issue is a lot more complex than most here give it credit for. Personally, I'm interested in seeing how it evolves. I think a lot of the character of both the UN and the US will come out here, and I very much doubt that either one will end up smelling of roses.
Actually, the US is so far from irrelevant, it's not funny. The economics alone show that it couldn't just be removed without the rest of the world going into a deep economic depression (well, maybe China, India and a few other countries coming out unscathed, but the first world would tank big time).
I think the UN is worrying about the way the US is behaving. In late 2001, it had the world behind it all the way. Now just 4 years later, and it's about the most distrusted nation out there. The ability to tweak the root zones is a rather large political stick. It can be used to gain concessions on such treaties as coverage of law (hey, the US controls the Root of the internet, thus traffic needs to use that to get the name, thus that name needs to obey US law). An incredibly large stick indeed. And once the treaties pass, it's a stepping stone to further legal shenanigans. Until eventually, the world falls to US law (and the endless lawsuits) though the back door. If the root servers were dropped outright from a given country, it's not as simple as slotting your own one in at that point, as there is no concensus in the world about where to look for definitive answers. Basically, people who don't control the root servers then are very, very screwed.
My personal belief from what I see is that the UN is trying to make sure that doesn't happen, by having more points of consensus internationally.
So, the great downloads of the software demos, the linux distros and so on haven't been legitimate? Again, I'm left feeling rather let down by statements that seem to indicate that unless somethings signed off and tide up by the content cartels, it's somehow illegitimate.
Interestingly, on the "It's not my job but I'll do something" vein, it reminds me of my first degree (which was, incidentally, in Chemical Engineering, just the one this chap dropped out of). Several of the lectures stressed me to my limits of understanding in tuition times, so that's why I joined a study group. That helped patch over the flaws. We had an absolutely terrible Computing teacher (I knew that, as I'd been coding professionaly for about 4 years, and on an amateur basis for almost 10, before hitting the Chem Eng course). His grasp of the subject was distinctly lacking (the concepts he was trying to teach were about 15 years out of date, and would seriously curtail anyone's aptitude in that field). On about the 5th lecture, when he was trying to explain the most effective way to obtain data from a set was using the read/restore directives, I put my hand up, waited for him to get to me, and explained (reasonably diplomatically) that he was talking out of his nether orifice. The stock reply of "If you think you can do better, you teach it" was put my way. So that's exactly what I did. And it worked really well. For the rest of the year's computing lessons, I prepared the lessons, according to the requirements of aptitude for the course. And frequently delivered the lectures too. My "payment" for this was that the lecturer bought me a pint of beer and a pizza for lunch the day of the lectures to be held. It was entirely unofficial, and was treated as me being his student assistant and volunteer, so it was shoehorned into complying with regulations. That aside, the guy was a top notch physical chemistry teacher; He was quite miffed the Uni had put him in charge of the Computing side of the course, as he knew he lacked the real up to date skills.
No idea how you got modded insightful on that one.
1) Yes, he had them in the past. Which was before he agreed not to have them anymore. This would be like convicting someone of cracking, and setting the terms of their release from jail as being "you shall not touch a computer for 4 years". Then as soon as they step outside, you pick them up and say "Well, you did touch a computer years back, so we're picking you up on that". Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense.
2)Yes, he used them on civilians. The US used nukes on civilians. And napalm on civilians. Your point in this is what? He's a bad man? This, again, has nothing to do with having WMD when the invasion force struck. As there were no weapons there.
3) He didn't refuse to allow a vigorous inspection. In fact, he'd agreed to open everything up. The inspectors were a little miffed about having to follow a beaurocratic trail, but explicitly stated that they did not believe (after spending years in situ) that anything was being hidden from them. The report at the time was basically that everyone inspecting on the ground didn't believe that there were any WMD. They just required a couple more months to check the last parts out, then they could, with a great degree of certainty, declare that there were no WMD hidden.
I just find it a little bit nuts that someone who has obviously not even read the public reports on the matter makes such blatant "The evidence says something, but I'll still bullheadedly believe something completely different" statements.
Odds on, you didn't bother reading the further progression of things, when the 'evidence' that Tony Blair presented to GW, on which they decided to start the invasion, was proved to be a forgery. Due diligence inside the intelligence agencies was not performed until after the invasion. Basically everyone BUT G.W. admitted there were no WMD.
Maybe, as I'm kicking one of your illusions over, I should tell you that there was no cheese on the moon until the little green men shipped it all away and replaced it with rock, just before the original moon landings.
I think you just about hit the nail on the head with the "Rest of us, quite frankly, don't really care" bit.
Nobody should ever have to care about what browser they use. Most people don't have the skills to know what's needed, and what on earth the returned error messages are from sites.
It's the job of people in Disaster Recovery roles to ensure that people don't have to care. Whatever tools are available to help the people caught out by this should be able to work, no questions asked. The system should bend over backwards to accomodate them.
While slashdotting the FEMA servers isn't a good idea (I avoided going anywhere near them), the sending of a few mails to them to point out the error of their ways is a good move. Their Developers won't be on the front line helping out directly; they'll be in the office keeping the systems working. And they need to know there's a flaw in their system.
Once they fix it, it'll be as it should. Nobody will then care about what browser they use. And all is as it should be.
I would like to, politely, disagree with your take that everyone using a non-MS browser will have the skills to change back and know what it's all about. I know a goodly number of non-techs that now use linux. And those on Windows now use Mozilla (because that's what the systems have been set up with, by whoever did installs). Whole businesses remove IE from the desktop because it's a security hole. Not everyone using systems has the know how to get IE working if it's not immediately shown.
In any given disaster, you have absolutely no idea of what tools will be on hand to any given individual. So you have to spend the large part of your time making sure that just about anything that could feasibly help someone in the time of greatest need will work as they expect. First time. With no configuration needed.
It's not so much the "Damn FEMA for forcing me to install IE" that's the issue.. I honestly couldn't give a rats about IE vs. All other browsers. Like you, I'd want a system that just plain worked with whatever I pointed at it. When you've just lost home, possessions, and everything, the last thing you want to worry about is access to a particular type of computer. If you escaped to someone else's place, and all they could get hold of was a ten year old machine with a 9600 modem, you'd want the damn thing to work right on a site that was supposed to be there for you in a disaster.
Personally, I'd be highly offended if said site then turned round to me and said "Sorry, upgrade you system, or install a new operating system if you want to access this text information and send us the simple information". And upset.
All that aside.. You have my respect for being there, and putting your hand in on the practical side, and just doing things. People who move in and help their fellow man just because they can are more part of every solution than any given technical solution or government controlled department. Helping out and keeping people alive there does more good than all the posts to./ in a lifetime ever will.
Actually, we view it just the same in the UK.. It's pretty much the only vulgar expression that'll make me do a double take and react with general distaste, and I think I'm in with the majority on that. Wise word to avoid if you want people to take you seriously (or even listen properly to a word you say from that point on).
Wish I could use the mod points I've got to give you a raise in there. A lot of valid points coming to light.
The best team I've worked in, way back when was multidisciplinary. A PhD mathematician (who could take sections of the implementations I'd made and fine tune them to a level that left me boggling), myself (Real Time Systems Bsc), a couple of experience bods who'd worked their way up over time, and the boss who was an Elecronic Engineer (Msc).
I ended up doing the software engineering (as we didn't need formal spec) and systems architecture (along with a fair bit of coding afterwards), the mathematician took areas where the algorithms were inefficient, and optimised them away.. The experience coders did a good job of the coding.. And the boss knew exactly what management processes to use for engineering a project (from extensive experience).
A lot of the problems with software today are simply caused because people don't engineer them. Commerce is trying to make a fast buck, and, in the bridge analogy, is saying "We can put up a couple of ropes and tie them to a tree. What do you need a proper footbridge over the road for?".
So, a lot of software is built like the ropes over the road. It's cheap, shoddy, but does the job, with the odd few bits falling off and causing no end of consternation.
I'm behind you all the way on saying that a mathematician or an engineer (my first degree was in Chemical Engineering by the way) can apply the same processes as a CS grad, and will (in the longer term, which is where you should always be aiming anyway) be just as good. I was pointing out that the properly educated CS grad will from the word go have a better instinctive grasp of what to do as concerns the tools and methods of engineering as applied to software.
First choice for me on software hires is Computer related degree plus good experience and track record. Very closely followed by Engineering/Math/Philosophy/Science degrees with the same level of experience and track record. Then comes long track record and extensive experience with no degree, followed by Computing related degree with no/little experience, then the science/engineering degrees with little or no experience. For someone with a small track record, and no degree, I'd not really go for that. They may be good. They may be highly skilled. But if they're up against someone who's proved they have a high ability to learn, and has a good knowledge of a wide spectrum of theories in the field that they can bring to bear, they're just not going to get the job.
For much the same reason, I suspect, that you may find someone who knows how to build a bridge really really well.. You're just not going to hire him unless he's done that degree..
Really, I think it all boils down to me wanting to see that degree to prove someone's serious. I just have a slight preference for CS over the other disciplines (having done both, and seeing how my perspectives were altered slightly by doing the computing degree).
Take a long hard look at what kind of degree to what kind of role. I've done a lot of hiring work in the past, and will tell you straight that a degree gives you a huge level of credibility over someone who claims "x years of experience". The work market as is, those claims are almost invariably exaggerated. Which leaves either a work portfolio (which means you need someone with both time and qualification to audit it, and ensure it's actually their own work), or some form of accredited certification that they are capable. Now, I've done a degree (two actually), AND got commercial certification. From the two of those, I'll have to say that the commercial offering will let you push the buttons with a minimal knowledge of what is really happening behind the scenes. It leaves the person, if they're relying on this as their main source of info, woefully unprepared for the real world where things exist in heterogenous enviornments, and problems actually occur. Which leaves a University degree. Yes, it says that the person knows a lot in theory, but fresh out of Uni, they have little practical application of it yet. However, what is says is they understand WHY things work in their discipline, and can work it out with a book, and a very good grounding in first principles. In 95%+ of cases, they rapidly outstrip the 'experience only' people across a broad spectrum of understanding. Degrees train you how to learn, not spoon feed you a few lines that you quote back by rote. Is a degree a 'guarantee of a job'? Not at all these days. Will it give you a head and shoulders leap over someone with only experience? Absolutely. If someone working for me couldn't justify why they'd brought someone on board with experience only, over someone with experience plus degree, I'd want a very good reason as to why. Otherwise they'd find their ability to make any decision of responsibility removed sharpish.
Now that you're a manager, in a technical lead role, the aim is to make sure that you always see the bigger picture. You don't need to understand the detail as well as the people you've hired in. You just need to know that it will work, and have a ballpark figure of how much effort is likely to be involved. You take the aspects of the big picture that involve each of people you manage, and explain to them in concise terms (you need to understand the subject to convey correctly what you want someone to be doing/achieve) what the big picure involves, and what section you'd like them to take on. And who to talk to when they cross over into other people's remits.
Hiring people who know more than you do about sections of a subject, and acknowledging that fact pretty much shows that you're a good manager. Finding it difficult probably means you're making sure that all the issues of the people you've hired are dealt with effectively too.. Which means again that you're a good manager.
The general points in all these threads seem to point to the concept that as a manager, you need to know enough to know when you should be relying on someone else's experience, but know what lies firmly in your grasp enough to co-ordinate the right tasks to the right skillsets. Having done/doing management (and running my own company in the past), I'll agree that yes, doing it right is hard. That should mean the people who you manage find their tasks vastly simplified, and all they need to worry about is achieving their tasks, not budgets, corporate politics etc.
What he really means is "I can't get top engineers so I can't innovate as much".
Couldn't agree more.. Except I think he really means "I probably could get the engineers, except I don't want to pay them what Google does, and I'm not willing to match the working conditions whereby they have proven to be effective and creative.".
For some reason people seem to believe that the only people worth looking at are the 'names in lights'. Years ago, companies used to take people on, train them, educate them over years in apprenticeships until they fulfilled their full talents. Then they were looked after while they spent years producing works of art, and the company made back what they invested in the apprenticeship period.
For some reason, they now believe that highly skilled and trained people suddenly grow on trees, and should be available as and when they want them, whether colleges train them or not, or whether activities such as outsourcing mean that people just don't want to put their time into training for a job where they believe they'll spend two years designing something innovative, then have the foot work of incremental changes and maintenance shipped abroad while they get laid off until some company decides they need a highly trained innovative person for a while.
Most people who have done a true, old school CS degree (I did a real time systems BSc way back when) will tell you always do secondary subjects. They may not be taught to you, but you need them to improve your take on your subject. My speciality was Artificial Life. And as such, I took on Biology/Psychology as my secondaries, and frequently begged in on lectures from those courses, as it lead to me understanding the principles involved far more deeply. Those principles I learned made me far better at being able to solve the problems I was dealing with. However, knowing these other subjects never meant to me that I was taking a 'minor' or whatever in those subjects. I was simply learning what I needed from them to make my Computer Science more effective. I was always a CS person, pure and simple.
Pretty much, I can honestly say "Yes". It would all still be around. There were several competing OSs when DOS was around (such as CP/M, which Microsoft bought from a group that had copied to to make what became DOS). Then there was Apple with the MAC, and IBM with OS/2 which were in competition with Windows 3.0 and 3.1x. Really it's only MS's gargantuan Marketing Machine that kept Windows going in the latter part of that. Apple and OS/2 were gaining ground until several nasty marketing campaigns were unleashed that preyed on uncertainties in the business markets (basically, spreading FUD). The computers were being built anyway. And many of the home computers (Amiga, Atari, BBC Micro etc) were superior in their day to the PCs of the time. All without Microsoft "Leading the way and making it happen". Microsoft had the better legal/marketing departments, which is why they managed to press things forward to their liking, and gain ascendancy. That and theye exploited ease of pirating their products to spread business software to the home (capture the market by stealth). If anything, I'd say, if MS hadn't been as bad as they were, the computing marketplace would be significantly more healthy, diverse and rich today than it is. There would be more competition, and adherance to standards (and competing for places on merit within the scope of those standards). But, all in all, the bigger picture would be where it is now. I'm not an MS basher. I appreciate that they're trying to do some things right, I just detest their scorched earth strategy to making things work in their own way, and damn the rest of the world. There's a lot of good tech that's come from there (DHCP for one), but a lot (an awful lot) of very very nasty betrayals. I don't trust them (as a corporation), which is why I also explore other avenues alongside MS ones.
I don't consider you a troll, and think you made a valid attempt to put your point of view across. And in the honest spirit of debate, I disagree, and try and explain myself. Maybe at the end, we'll both achieve a little enlightenmen.
In economic terms, the bomb would now pretty much also be in the hands of China and India (as the major skillsets are now concentrating there). I get the feeling ten years down the line, the US will be concentrating on removing much of the legal cruft that's currently in place in an attempt to remain competitive with the upcoming economies.
In those cases, that's what a library is for. Or, at least that's what I used my Uni library for. The books that I thought I'd end up using later (most of which I still do) I bought. The ones I was wrong on, I sold on to other students, who picked them up for 50% of the list price of a book (in good nick, with just a few notes and observations in margins, which may add to or lower the value of the book, depending on your viewpoint). But the ones I was wrong on, I had a lot longer than 5 months to consider their real utility to me. And that's worth the approximately 17% value of a book that sat around for a while.
Like a lot of other people have noted, 5 months is no way near enough to have a reference textbook available to you. I could understand it if there was a minimal fee (a few pennies), and it was treated as a library withdrawal. I don't mind paying a little to borrow a book. However, as most of my old coursebooks cost about £40 or so, I really draw the line at spending about £25+ to borrow a reference book. Whoever thought out the timespan is a tad on the nuts side, even if it is for University use. You tend to use a particular book for a couple of months, then it stays on the shelf until it's time to revise. Perhaps it'll also be referenced in the next year from time to time. Also for a few weeks/couple of months, then sit on the shelf until revision. That means there's a good likelihood of someone rushing out to buy their coursebook, using it for the course. Finding it expired at revision time, having to rebuy it again (now cost 133% of the original dead tree version). If it's needed in the future, the economies just get worse.
The idea of technical reference books is that they're kept around to reference. It's not like a story, where you pick it up, read it, and vaguely remember the story for ever more.. You need the detail. If the books were priced at 0.1-0.5% of the cost of the actual dead tree, with a limit of, say one month, they'd have a great line going in the book lending area. For sales under their current scheme.. I'd love to know what reality they live in, but it sure doesn't look like the one most of us live in (without pharmaceutical intervention).
Just to add to that, in every job I've had since leaving my degrees, a fair quantity of the books I used back then have sat on a shelf, and have been referenced quie extensively. That's after around ten years. That 'deal' is one I wouldn't touch with somebody else's bargepole.
Slashdot Mirror
Not hours out from me.. More like ten minutes down the road (and yep, the building's a mess).
Rumour has it that the building, being pretty old (couple of hundred years I think) wasn't set up with a proper sprinkler system.
Modem connections? They're still around, and it's a pain in the derriere to download Firefox, plus extensions, plus thunderbird.
All on one CD, chuck it in the drive and go. Much better solution.
Actually, a huge amount of people do stop listening. The high turnaround of 'artists' and 'trends' means that the recording industry just hopes to keep topping up the numbers from the younger generation just coming along, to which this is all new anyway..
These days, the younger generation seems to want to spend more of it's money across Videos and Games as well as music.
The recording industry is worried that it's stock formula and heavy advertising won't compete with the advertising for games. Thus it wants to reach any source of money it can. And if it can't make money through doing business, it'll do it by litigation, which seems to be a highly popular business model these days.
Actually, there's a lot about your side of the debate that I'm quite in agreement. Other parts, I think are already present in the way things work today.
For example, say there was a company that produced something that everyone relied on, and all of a sudden, they tried to pull the plug.
I would hazard a guess that any government would pull eminent domain (or whatever the equivalent is in terms of virtual product).
Much of the politicking and infiltration carried out by the western world is to ensure it has a firm grasp on the flow of oil. That's a debate that I'm not going to spark up here as it is done to death, and I refer to pretty much ALL western civilisation, not the US.
Pretty much any and every government will take away civilian rights if it is deemed in the greater good.
However, with DNS, it's not a case of a company owning a particular product. DNS is an open standard that anybody and everybody can implement, and has done.
Being an open standard, the world has adopted it (as it's pretty nifty).
So, there are root DNS servers spread all over the globe, in many different countries.
The large front to this is ICANN, which most people don't have an issue with an autonomous entitiy running the show.
Behind that is the US Department of Commerce, which retains overall control.
That is the crux of the issue.
The whole of the world does not really want to be beholden to the US. Certainly not in the world climate today.
Now, the options are, to go with the flow, and hope that the US will always obey international law, and show good faith (which these days, nobody really believes anymore. I anticipate that changing in a few years, but not yet).
Or setting something in place that's a little more resilient, and actually requires there to be a worldwide consensus of opinion before drastic action is taken.
The latter, as the US founding fathers tried to do with having three distinct branches of government as checks and balances. I think they understood a lot about the world, and how it should work, and some of the things they needed in place to make sure it ran as well as it could.
Everything can be subverted, however, and eventually will, which is why change is always needed. But not too much at a time, otherwise everything becomes chaos, and hasn't got the stability to grow anymore.
What the UN is trying to do is put in place those checks and balances on a worldwide scale.
I think the UN are pretty set on making sure there are "world wide open" DNS root servers that every country has a say about, and these will happen.
What it's most interested in doing is getting the US to back this, and be part of the bigger picture.
If the split happens, the the net as a whole will suffer badly for quite a time to come, although in time will settle.
How I'd see that as happening would be all the country specific TLDs would be accessed (outside the US anyway) from the UN backed tech consortium first, with a secondary fallback to the US roots (unless those become blocked on geographical location).
COM, NET, ORG and US (plus any other US specific domains) would become the province of the US roots. Another layer of DNS servers would be required to deal with this correctly, or some mod to general DNS clients, but it would recover.
The hit to businesses and general worldwide commerce would be pretty bad though, for a while.
Anyway, that's my take on it.. Still probably not putting it as well as I'd like, but, hopefully enough to paint some of the picture of what my belief is on the subject.
Weird to be told that from someone who doesn't really make sense..
You mention that the world relies on middle easter oil, so you (assuming you to be in the US, as it sounds from your mentioning of wheatfields in the US, and your ownership) then say effectively "The US should turn over ownership of a foreign country's resources to someone else."
I hope you know just how wrong that sounds.
Nobody is mentioning anything about taking control of anything that affects US geographical territory. So the mention of wheat fields and so on is purely spurious. Which I'm sure you were well aware of when posting this.
As to interdependance of technologies, my post was simply stating that the world did have an interdependance on technology. I'm sure you'd be entirely miffed if some governing body still held on to an idea that it had created Agriculture, so it required scribes present on each US farm to oversee the fields you grew. Just to make sure.
As to the buildings housing root servers. The US doesn't actually own the buildings that many of them are held in (check out http://www.root-servers.org/ if you don't believe me).
Hoarding the root servers (meaning, keep direct control of them, without allowing the rest of the world to have a real say, even when it affects the world at large) is exactly what is happening.
There again, I suspect you knew that also.
I hope that explains where I was coming from. And while I don't claim to have achieved true enlightenment, I'm actually working on it.
I suggest you try the same.
Actually, I believe it's to keep it open. Censorship tends to happen by the will of small groups. For example, China, wishing to remove sites that pertain to freedom, democracy, or whatever.
If this gets tabled to the UN, it would have exactly the same kind of treatment it would get in the US. Filter it yourself.
There are a goodly mix of countries involved in the UN, and I don't think the government would be any more involved in the running of it that the US government is at the moment.
In other words, it would be business as usual.
The point of my GP post (modded troll for some reason, along with informative. Good mix that.) was that the removal of complete control would prevent censorship, and help stop any one government interfering with issues.
The issue is not to remove the US from any role in proceedings, which seems to be suggested elsewhere. And I daresay, it'll still probably have the largest single voice in any new, international effort.
It's to make sure that a single voice cannot censor things.
As to the US being a malevolent police state, my apologies if that's how it came to be percieved. My point was that the US, like it or not, is externally percieved to be untrustworthy, and is treated with a great deal of trepidation by the world at large.
If stating that gets me modded troll again, so be it. It happened last time there was any controversy about the US, and I spoke in a manner which didn't suggest the US was a shining beacon of enlightenment.
But hey, nice comeback to the original post. You make valid, interesting points. As a purely personal viewoint, I don't believe the reasons are true, but that doesn't mean you're wrong; I simply don't see enough evidence for the purpose of censorship to be the driving force behind this.
It sets the precedent that a lot of places are now subscribing to. /.
"We don't want Microsoft to own all our data. Either follow an open standard, or get out of town."
There have been a goodly many of these topics on Slashdot recently, all of which were greatly applauded by the large part of
So, this story has only been posted a short while, and already the posts saying "We'll do what we damn well please. We're untouchable. We can do without you all. We'll just pull the plug on things. We invented it. We paid for it." are running rife.
All modded up as insightful and informative.
Well.. That's the reason the UN really wants things to be run by an international board, not a US controlled one. The net, as the article states, is now vital to many countries.
Which means the rest of the world would also like to have it's fair share of the say, without having to listen to the US, which has recently showed it's absolute contempt for international view (and in the posts here, is showing it all over again).
The aim, from my interpretation of the article, is that an international body, that fills the shoes that ICANN now fills will be formed as a technical arena to ensure that the needs of the world are fulfilled.
The rest of the world is perfectly able to build it's own root servers, although this will then lead to the US being cut off if it refuses to use the new ones, and fragmentation of the whole will occur.
This is what the ongoing argument is about.
Not 'Give us the root servers. All of them. Give us what you paid for.'.
The infrastructure outside the US was paid for outside the US, by the companies that operate outside the US.
Without that foreign buy in to a Standard, there would be no worldwide internet. It would be the US military net it started off as, or perhaps their academic net, like UK had JANET, and Europe's other competing national networks.
What is being requested is that the ownership becomes joint. No one country can pull the plug and get overall control to suddenly yank a whole area out of the system at will.
The amount of inventions used in the US created outside of it (or before it existed) are many and multifarious.
Without those, it's entirely probably that the ideas that lead to the creation of the Internet would have not formed for a goodly long time.
But, the ideas did come around in the US, and honestly, all credit to the guys that did come up with it. And for the forsight to put it into the academic arena, which led to it's increase in scope worldwide (I still remember the net from it's almost entirely academic days).
Now the choice comes to either make it a truly worldwide and international entity and show real enlightenment, or to hoard it, use it as a lever to gain other concessions, or a stick to beat people with if needed.
This whole issue is a lot more complex than most here give it credit for.
Personally, I'm interested in seeing how it evolves.
I think a lot of the character of both the UN and the US will come out here, and I very much doubt that either one will end up smelling of roses.
Actually, the US is so far from irrelevant, it's not funny.
The economics alone show that it couldn't just be removed without the rest of the world going into a deep economic depression (well, maybe China, India and a few other countries coming out unscathed, but the first world would tank big time).
I think the UN is worrying about the way the US is behaving. In late 2001, it had the world behind it all the way. Now just 4 years later, and it's about the most distrusted nation out there.
The ability to tweak the root zones is a rather large political stick. It can be used to gain concessions on such treaties as coverage of law (hey, the US controls the Root of the internet, thus traffic needs to use that to get the name, thus that name needs to obey US law).
An incredibly large stick indeed. And once the treaties pass, it's a stepping stone to further legal shenanigans. Until eventually, the world falls to US law (and the endless lawsuits) though the back door.
If the root servers were dropped outright from a given country, it's not as simple as slotting your own one in at that point, as there is no concensus in the world about where to look for definitive answers.
Basically, people who don't control the root servers then are very, very screwed.
My personal belief from what I see is that the UN is trying to make sure that doesn't happen, by having more points of consensus internationally.
So, the great downloads of the software demos, the linux distros and so on haven't been legitimate?
Again, I'm left feeling rather let down by statements that seem to indicate that unless somethings signed off and tide up by the content cartels, it's somehow illegitimate.
But they'd be happy if you posted small snippets (say a few sentences) and put links to the store to buy their books right next to it..
Interestingly, on the "It's not my job but I'll do something" vein, it reminds me of my first degree (which was, incidentally, in Chemical Engineering, just the one this chap dropped out of).
Several of the lectures stressed me to my limits of understanding in tuition times, so that's why I joined a study group. That helped patch over the flaws.
We had an absolutely terrible Computing teacher (I knew that, as I'd been coding professionaly for about 4 years, and on an amateur basis for almost 10, before hitting the Chem Eng course). His grasp of the subject was distinctly lacking (the concepts he was trying to teach were about 15 years out of date, and would seriously curtail anyone's aptitude in that field).
On about the 5th lecture, when he was trying to explain the most effective way to obtain data from a set was using the read/restore directives, I put my hand up, waited for him to get to me, and explained (reasonably diplomatically) that he was talking out of his nether orifice.
The stock reply of "If you think you can do better, you teach it" was put my way.
So that's exactly what I did. And it worked really well.
For the rest of the year's computing lessons, I prepared the lessons, according to the requirements of aptitude for the course. And frequently delivered the lectures too.
My "payment" for this was that the lecturer bought me a pint of beer and a pizza for lunch the day of the lectures to be held. It was entirely unofficial, and was treated as me being his student assistant and volunteer, so it was shoehorned into complying with regulations.
That aside, the guy was a top notch physical chemistry teacher; He was quite miffed the Uni had put him in charge of the Computing side of the course, as he knew he lacked the real up to date skills.
1) Yes, he had them in the past. Which was before he agreed not to have them anymore.
This would be like convicting someone of cracking, and setting the terms of their release from jail as being "you shall not touch a computer for 4 years". Then as soon as they step outside, you pick them up and say "Well, you did touch a computer years back, so we're picking you up on that".
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense.
2)Yes, he used them on civilians. The US used nukes on civilians. And napalm on civilians. Your point in this is what? He's a bad man? This, again, has nothing to do with having WMD when the invasion force struck. As there were no weapons there.
3) He didn't refuse to allow a vigorous inspection. In fact, he'd agreed to open everything up. The inspectors were a little miffed about having to follow a beaurocratic trail, but explicitly stated that they did not believe (after spending years in situ) that anything was being hidden from them.
I just find it a little bit nuts that someone who has obviously not even read the public reports on the matter makes such blatant "The evidence says something, but I'll still bullheadedly believe something completely different" statements.The report at the time was basically that everyone inspecting on the ground didn't believe that there were any WMD. They just required a couple more months to check the last parts out, then they could, with a great degree of certainty, declare that there were no WMD hidden.
Odds on, you didn't bother reading the further progression of things, when the 'evidence' that Tony Blair presented to GW, on which they decided to start the invasion, was proved to be a forgery. Due diligence inside the intelligence agencies was not performed until after the invasion. Basically everyone BUT G.W. admitted there were no WMD.
Maybe, as I'm kicking one of your illusions over, I should tell you that there was no cheese on the moon until the little green men shipped it all away and replaced it with rock, just before the original moon landings.
I think you just about hit the nail on the head with the "Rest of us, quite frankly, don't really care" bit. Nobody should ever have to care about what browser they use. Most people don't have the skills to know what's needed, and what on earth the returned error messages are from sites.
It's the job of people in Disaster Recovery roles to ensure that people don't have to care. Whatever tools are available to help the people caught out by this should be able to work, no questions asked. The system should bend over backwards to accomodate them.
While slashdotting the FEMA servers isn't a good idea (I avoided going anywhere near them), the sending of a few mails to them to point out the error of their ways is a good move. Their Developers won't be on the front line helping out directly; they'll be in the office keeping the systems working. And they need to know there's a flaw in their system.
Once they fix it, it'll be as it should. Nobody will then care about what browser they use. And all is as it should be.
I would like to, politely, disagree with your take that everyone using a non-MS browser will have the skills to change back and know what it's all about. I know a goodly number of non-techs that now use linux. And those on Windows now use Mozilla (because that's what the systems have been set up with, by whoever did installs). Whole businesses remove IE from the desktop because it's a security hole. Not everyone using systems has the know how to get IE working if it's not immediately shown.
In any given disaster, you have absolutely no idea of what tools will be on hand to any given individual. So you have to spend the large part of your time making sure that just about anything that could feasibly help someone in the time of greatest need will work as they expect. First time. With no configuration needed.
It's not so much the "Damn FEMA for forcing me to install IE" that's the issue.. I honestly couldn't give a rats about IE vs. All other browsers. Like you, I'd want a system that just plain worked with whatever I pointed at it. When you've just lost home, possessions, and everything, the last thing you want to worry about is access to a particular type of computer. If you escaped to someone else's place, and all they could get hold of was a ten year old machine with a 9600 modem, you'd want the damn thing to work right on a site that was supposed to be there for you in a disaster.
Personally, I'd be highly offended if said site then turned round to me and said "Sorry, upgrade you system, or install a new operating system if you want to access this text information and send us the simple information". And upset.
All that aside.. You have my respect for being there, and putting your hand in on the practical side, and just doing things. People who move in and help their fellow man just because they can are more part of every solution than any given technical solution or government controlled department. Helping out and keeping people alive there does more good than all the posts to ./ in a lifetime ever will.
Actually, we view it just the same in the UK..
It's pretty much the only vulgar expression that'll make me do a double take and react with general distaste, and I think I'm in with the majority on that.
Wise word to avoid if you want people to take you seriously (or even listen properly to a word you say from that point on).
Wish I could use the mod points I've got to give you a raise in there.
A lot of valid points coming to light.
The best team I've worked in, way back when was multidisciplinary. A PhD mathematician (who could take sections of the implementations I'd made and fine tune them to a level that left me boggling), myself (Real Time Systems Bsc), a couple of experience bods who'd worked their way up over time, and the boss who was an Elecronic Engineer (Msc).
I ended up doing the software engineering (as we didn't need formal spec) and systems architecture (along with a fair bit of coding afterwards), the mathematician took areas where the algorithms were inefficient, and optimised them away.. The experience coders did a good job of the coding..
And the boss knew exactly what management processes to use for engineering a project (from extensive experience).
A lot of the problems with software today are simply caused because people don't engineer them.
Commerce is trying to make a fast buck, and, in the bridge analogy, is saying "We can put up a couple of ropes and tie them to a tree. What do you need a proper footbridge over the road for?".
So, a lot of software is built like the ropes over the road. It's cheap, shoddy, but does the job, with the odd few bits falling off and causing no end of consternation.
I'm behind you all the way on saying that a mathematician or an engineer (my first degree was in Chemical Engineering by the way) can apply the same processes as a CS grad, and will (in the longer term, which is where you should always be aiming anyway) be just as good.
I was pointing out that the properly educated CS grad will from the word go have a better instinctive grasp of what to do as concerns the tools and methods of engineering as applied to software.
First choice for me on software hires is Computer related degree plus good experience and track record. Very closely followed by Engineering/Math/Philosophy/Science degrees with the same level of experience and track record.
Then comes long track record and extensive experience with no degree, followed by Computing related degree with no/little experience, then the science/engineering degrees with little or no experience.
For someone with a small track record, and no degree, I'd not really go for that. They may be good. They may be highly skilled.
But if they're up against someone who's proved they have a high ability to learn, and has a good knowledge of a wide spectrum of theories in the field that they can bring to bear, they're just not going to get the job.
For much the same reason, I suspect, that you may find someone who knows how to build a bridge really really well.. You're just not going to hire him unless he's done that degree..
Really, I think it all boils down to me wanting to see that degree to prove someone's serious. I just have a slight preference for CS over the other disciplines (having done both, and seeing how my perspectives were altered slightly by doing the computing degree).
Take a long hard look at what kind of degree to what kind of role.
I've done a lot of hiring work in the past, and will tell you straight that a degree gives you a huge level of credibility over someone who claims "x years of experience".
The work market as is, those claims are almost invariably exaggerated.
Which leaves either a work portfolio (which means you need someone with both time and qualification to audit it, and ensure it's actually their own work), or some form of accredited certification that they are capable.
Now, I've done a degree (two actually), AND got commercial certification.
From the two of those, I'll have to say that the commercial offering will let you push the buttons with a minimal knowledge of what is really happening behind the scenes. It leaves the person, if they're relying on this as their main source of info, woefully unprepared for the real world where things exist in heterogenous enviornments, and problems actually occur.
Which leaves a University degree.
Yes, it says that the person knows a lot in theory, but fresh out of Uni, they have little practical application of it yet.
However, what is says is they understand WHY things work in their discipline, and can work it out with a book, and a very good grounding in first principles.
In 95%+ of cases, they rapidly outstrip the 'experience only' people across a broad spectrum of understanding. Degrees train you how to learn, not spoon feed you a few lines that you quote back by rote.
Is a degree a 'guarantee of a job'? Not at all these days. Will it give you a head and shoulders leap over someone with only experience? Absolutely.
If someone working for me couldn't justify why they'd brought someone on board with experience only, over someone with experience plus degree, I'd want a very good reason as to why. Otherwise they'd find their ability to make any decision of responsibility removed sharpish.
Now that you're a manager, in a technical lead role, the aim is to make sure that you always see the bigger picture.
You don't need to understand the detail as well as the people you've hired in.
You just need to know that it will work, and have a ballpark figure of how much effort is likely to be involved.
You take the aspects of the big picture that involve each of people you manage, and explain to them in concise terms (you need to understand the subject to convey correctly what you want someone to be doing/achieve) what the big picure involves, and what section you'd like them to take on.
And who to talk to when they cross over into other people's remits.
Hiring people who know more than you do about sections of a subject, and acknowledging that fact pretty much shows that you're a good manager. Finding it difficult probably means you're making sure that all the issues of the people you've hired are dealt with effectively too.. Which means again that you're a good manager.
The general points in all these threads seem to point to the concept that as a manager, you need to know enough to know when you should be relying on someone else's experience, but know what lies firmly in your grasp enough to co-ordinate the right tasks to the right skillsets.
Having done/doing management (and running my own company in the past), I'll agree that yes, doing it right is hard.
That should mean the people who you manage find their tasks vastly simplified, and all they need to worry about is achieving their tasks, not budgets, corporate politics etc.
Couldn't agree more.. Except I think he really means "I probably could get the engineers, except I don't want to pay them what Google does, and I'm not willing to match the working conditions whereby they have proven to be effective and creative.".
For some reason people seem to believe that the only people worth looking at are the 'names in lights'. Years ago, companies used to take people on, train them, educate them over years in apprenticeships until they fulfilled their full talents. Then they were looked after while they spent years producing works of art, and the company made back what they invested in the apprenticeship period.
For some reason, they now believe that highly skilled and trained people suddenly grow on trees, and should be available as and when they want them, whether colleges train them or not, or whether activities such as outsourcing mean that people just don't want to put their time into training for a job where they believe they'll spend two years designing something innovative, then have the foot work of incremental changes and maintenance shipped abroad while they get laid off until some company decides they need a highly trained innovative person for a while.
Perhaps this is a long awaited wakeup call.
Most people who have done a true, old school CS degree (I did a real time systems BSc way back when) will tell you always do secondary subjects.
They may not be taught to you, but you need them to improve your take on your subject.
My speciality was Artificial Life. And as such, I took on Biology/Psychology as my secondaries, and frequently begged in on lectures from those courses, as it lead to me understanding the principles involved far more deeply.
Those principles I learned made me far better at being able to solve the problems I was dealing with.
However, knowing these other subjects never meant to me that I was taking a 'minor' or whatever in those subjects. I was simply learning what I needed from them to make my Computer Science more effective. I was always a CS person, pure and simple.
Pretty much, I can honestly say "Yes".
It would all still be around.
There were several competing OSs when DOS was around (such as CP/M, which Microsoft bought from a group that had copied to to make what became DOS).
Then there was Apple with the MAC, and IBM with OS/2 which were in competition with Windows 3.0 and 3.1x. Really it's only MS's gargantuan Marketing Machine that kept Windows going in the latter part of that. Apple and OS/2 were gaining ground until several nasty marketing campaigns were unleashed that preyed on uncertainties in the business markets (basically, spreading FUD).
The computers were being built anyway. And many of the home computers (Amiga, Atari, BBC Micro etc) were superior in their day to the PCs of the time.
All without Microsoft "Leading the way and making it happen".
Microsoft had the better legal/marketing departments, which is why they managed to press things forward to their liking, and gain ascendancy. That and theye exploited ease of pirating their products to spread business software to the home (capture the market by stealth).
If anything, I'd say, if MS hadn't been as bad as they were, the computing marketplace would be significantly more healthy, diverse and rich today than it is.
There would be more competition, and adherance to standards (and competing for places on merit within the scope of those standards).
But, all in all, the bigger picture would be where it is now.
I'm not an MS basher. I appreciate that they're trying to do some things right, I just detest their scorched earth strategy to making things work in their own way, and damn the rest of the world.
There's a lot of good tech that's come from there (DHCP for one), but a lot (an awful lot) of very very nasty betrayals.
I don't trust them (as a corporation), which is why I also explore other avenues alongside MS ones.
I don't consider you a troll, and think you made a valid attempt to put your point of view across. And in the honest spirit of debate, I disagree, and try and explain myself. Maybe at the end, we'll both achieve a little enlightenmen.
In economic terms, the bomb would now pretty much also be in the hands of China and India (as the major skillsets are now concentrating there).
I get the feeling ten years down the line, the US will be concentrating on removing much of the legal cruft that's currently in place in an attempt to remain competitive with the upcoming economies.
In those cases, that's what a library is for. Or, at least that's what I used my Uni library for.
The books that I thought I'd end up using later (most of which I still do) I bought.
The ones I was wrong on, I sold on to other students, who picked them up for 50% of the list price of a book (in good nick, with just a few notes and observations in margins, which may add to or lower the value of the book, depending on your viewpoint).
But the ones I was wrong on, I had a lot longer than 5 months to consider their real utility to me. And that's worth the approximately 17% value of a book that sat around for a while.
Like a lot of other people have noted, 5 months is no way near enough to have a reference textbook available to you.
I could understand it if there was a minimal fee (a few pennies), and it was treated as a library withdrawal. I don't mind paying a little to borrow a book.
However, as most of my old coursebooks cost about £40 or so, I really draw the line at spending about £25+ to borrow a reference book.
Whoever thought out the timespan is a tad on the nuts side, even if it is for University use.
You tend to use a particular book for a couple of months, then it stays on the shelf until it's time to revise.
Perhaps it'll also be referenced in the next year from time to time. Also for a few weeks/couple of months, then sit on the shelf until revision.
That means there's a good likelihood of someone rushing out to buy their coursebook, using it for the course. Finding it expired at revision time, having to rebuy it again (now cost 133% of the original dead tree version). If it's needed in the future, the economies just get worse.
The idea of technical reference books is that they're kept around to reference. It's not like a story, where you pick it up, read it, and vaguely remember the story for ever more..
You need the detail.
If the books were priced at 0.1-0.5% of the cost of the actual dead tree, with a limit of, say one month, they'd have a great line going in the book lending area.
For sales under their current scheme..
I'd love to know what reality they live in, but it sure doesn't look like the one most of us live in (without pharmaceutical intervention).
Just to add to that, in every job I've had since leaving my degrees, a fair quantity of the books I used back then have sat on a shelf, and have been referenced quie extensively. That's after around ten years.
That 'deal' is one I wouldn't touch with somebody else's bargepole.
people would be quite correct in saying that the wiring inside their device was crap!