They are very happy squandering more and more money into bigger and bigger trucks
That's all about to change. A very painful changeover is going to occur as U.S. gasoline prices rise and Americans look to replace their large SUV's with smaller more fuel-efficient vehicles, car pool, and ultimately look to public transportation and living where access to such transportation figures into their decision-making about purchasing a house.
But you're right - it's a sea change in thinking. But I believe that cold hard economics helps to clarify thinking that has for so long been in an emotional cloud.
Meanwhile, yes, high-speed, light rail, computerized robotic rail traffic could do wonders for the United States. Unfortunately, our existing rail system is lower speed, optimized for heavy cargo, and beset with many of the worst features of politics of a state-owned industry (Amtrack). That would include not just many employees of Amtrack doing things that don't make business sense, but also the trucking industry that doesn't want to see successful high-speed rail encroach into their business, or the automobile/refining industry that doesn't want Americans to buy fewer cars, etc.
Amtrack should not be allowed to go bankrupte and sold off just in time for a corporate monopoly to squeeze money of the assets as energy prices rise. But neither should it be fed a subsidy without a thorough shake-up.
For starters, if people driving on the U.S. government subsidized interstate highway system saw 250 mph light rail traffic running on the medians there would be a significant and invaluable education.
If those patents underlie an important part of peoples' lives and are long-lived, then they become a problem.
They become a drag on the efficiency of the marketplace; they are no different from a tax or a transfer payment, even if they are called by a different name and dressed up in noble language.
That said, these same product lines are still quite succesful in the corporate world. I'm talking the large companies with thousands of employees to deal with.
Large companies have a lot of inertia. But to survive in the long run they must constantly look for ways to cut costs and improve productivity.
Lowering software licensing costs, eliminating the need to ugprade hardware when the OS or application upgrades, lowering support costs, increasing reliability and increasing features all drive IT decision-making. MS does give their large corporate customers bits and pieces of the last two items at a controlled and measured pace. But because their customers live in an MS-defined world, MS can create a storyline: we understand your problems and here are new products within that world that make sense . In that blue pill world, that is. Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away.
In this envirnoment windows 2003 is attractive, even when linux is free, because it is jam packed with things to help in enterprise wide server administration.
Yes, it is attractive - from the perspective of Windows admins that are quite familiar with the limitations of the current situation.
Too often, MS comes out with a "feature" that is new to the Windows world and - to be honest - that new feature really does incrementally improve the lot of people using MS products. But it ignores the larger picture that many of the same technical innovations existed already for years elsewhere in the non-MS world.
That non-MS world: the internet, UNIX and Apple have been indirectly responsible for many of the improvements that MS customers eventually get to see.
MS customers willing to take the time and some risk prototype testing to learn more about the non-MS world will be rewarded more quickly and more generously than their colleagues. However, the bigger the organization and the higher the level of responsibility, the less of that willingness to take risk there is.
I was wondering how the members here at Slashdot feel about the security risks involved in submitting biometric data to small private companies?
I'd feel fine about it as long as the small private company signed a contract guaranteeing that the information they have about me would only be used for very specific purposes, never disclosed to third parties and that they would post a bond for compensation should any such disclosure, deliberate or inadvertent, ever occur.
I'm sure they'd hem and haw and try to get out of signing such a form and say they just couldn't do it.
Then I'd say that I'd take my business elsewhere.
But by then they would know exactly why they were losing my business. And that awareness is what is so desperately needed among consumers and businesses that take these issues far too glibly.
Just so you don't get forlorn people asking about how to undelete things, retrieve them from wastebaskets, etc., you might want to alias rm, mv, cp to use the -i option.
Later, after they get tired of answering yes they can learn how to edit their profile and remove the training wheels.
[Even then, I hope you have a good automated nightly backup running on the user's home directories.]
No....you don't mean...I, for one, would never believe that employers of workers with temporary visas or of illegal aliens would ever use the threat of deportation power as leverage to lower their labor costs.
So of course this was done to permit commercial entities to provide filtering software to slice out "objectionable" parts of a copyrighted work before it gets passed to a viewer.
Will it protect individual citizens from doing the same thing - that is, providing filtering software - supposing that my criterion for obscenity includes what others call "advertisements"?
Copyright and patent protection are like narcotics on a societal scale- useful and effective in small doses for limited times, but addictive and inducing delusional behavior if used for extended periods.
The irony is that you could probably get into a great deal of hot water in PRC by vigorously advocating that Marxist ideology be applied to liberating the oppressed workers of China right now.
Just like you could get into trouble in the USA by refusing to pay taxes to the official government, declaring your independence, forming a new government with the same rhetoric and other tools used by the founding fathers.
"Any time/money you save by cheaping out now, you'll wind up having to pay back twice over on the back end."
True enough. I subscribe to the philosophy of doing things the best right way personally, too.
But any manager could tell you that there is a time value to money, getting that money in hand sooner rather than later is better, and with the interest made on that money we can patch things up only as much as absolutely necessary (kind of like how successful landlords work - they want the money right now and they'll get to kludgy repairs some time next week as soon as he can get hold of that guy that does slipshod work for cheap).
When information is reported without your consent.
In the larger world of banks, magazines, health insurance companies, credit card companies, employers, etc. information about you is being reported without your consent every day.
Well, not entirely. Sometimes there are innocuous looking fine print near some agreement you signed years ago, just like clicking through a EULA, that provides those entities with those powers. But since it's inordinately difficult to travel by air and rent a car and afford health care if you don't sign those agreements, it's not like choosing privacy comes with as little cost as we might like.
SCO was obviously full of it and as the slow wheels of justice turn and grind exceedingly fine the world is finding out just how baseless were their claims.
Are those claims not so baseless and trumped up, and have not various stock price fluctuations occurred as a result that have enriched various individuals?
I'm wondering if the machinations behind the SCO move are not so flagrant that they could constitute a reason for ultimately piercing the corporate veil of protection. At the least, I would expect a functioning SEC to look over the SCO history with a microscope.
Mind you Apple are being taken to the European Court because they prevent UK downloaders from using the French and German iTunes sites and getting cheaper downloads.
So, thinking about where things might be cheaper, what about purchasing iTunes (or Windows, or anything like that) in China or India?
same consumer market that passed anti-gay marriage laws in 11 different states last November?
Yes, there is a consumer market for politics based on emotion.
[Time to burn some karma.]
Allow me to interject two cents, guaranteed to piss off both sides of the gay marriage debate.
To those opposed to gay rights to civil unions:
Given that marriage is holy, when have you ever relied upon the Government (you know, the one you mistrust, the one that used to have that paragon of moral virtue Bill Clinton leading it, the one that can't do anything right, etc.) to
sanctify anything, to make anything holy?
To those supporting gay marriage: (see same question above).
We have separation of church and state for a good reason. Secular laws provide secular protections and legal rights. The government should provide civil union protection to anyone who wants to so encumber themselves. As far as the government is concerned, marriage should be no more or no less holy than a Limited Power of Attorney, a Drivers License, or a Limited Liability Corporation.
The holy marriage part is something individuals should take up with their God and/or their church - certainly not with their government.
If we want the government to be involved in determining what is holy or not we'd move to Iran or Israel.
I would advocate minimum possible regulations, particularly ingredients that require rigorous identification, government screening to prevent "slander of the state", etc.
Delegate control and punishment measures down throught the DNS hierarchy - if you run an open relay that spews, then it's up to your provider to discipline you - or face worse consequences upstream as his provider gets angry about the flood.
when you are finished with a tube of toothpaste, there is still a little you can't squeeze out.
Place the nearly empty toothpaste tube on a hard flat surface, holding it from the flat tailend, and use a toothbrush handle to squeegee the last of the contents toward the tube opening.
You can extract a lot more by flattening a toothpase tube, especially compared with the fist-squeezing technique everyone learns at age 5.
Waste not, Want not Lesson #5. Next week - using mixers to extract that last bit of goodness from whiskey and vodka bottles.
Taking a page from another corporations playbook no this, Adobe needs to execute only three things.
Achieve near market dominance for Photoshop.
Provide excellent import/export capability for all the other camera brands.
Provide a glitchy interface for Nikon's format with an apologetic message (Your camera's format may experience some difficulty being imported into Adobe Photoshop. Contact your camera vendor or try a different camera.)
Inside, though, I have to smile at Adobe running into compatibility issues with locked proprietary formats.
However, as a longtime FOSS user, I'm going to make a note to steer clear of getting a Nikon when I do buy a digital camera.
even though OpenOffice should more than satisfy all curricular needs and save the district lots of money
Your case is hopeless. From what I understand school districts are awash in a sea of cash - there's tons of brand new unused textbooks laying in storage, teachers have pushed away from the table refusing the extra dollars the administration has tried to give to them, taxpayers keep on voting for more school levy taxes to help educate their kids; administrators are clamoring for the federal goverment to impose more unfunded mandates because they have all the resources they need to push the envelope further than it is where the American primary and secondary education system is the envy of the world.
outputs metrics such as income from works, amount of fair use,
Some interesting ideas there.
Consider freely distributed works (which cost hardly anything to download and listen/watch).
Each viewer/listener gets some enjoyment out of the content, so the global value will increase to its maximum as everyone who cares can obtain the work for the lowest possible cost without any copyright restrictions increasnig the cost either directly (through DRM) or indirectly, through risks of flouting the law.
In real life, any copyright protection will decrease the overall sum of global enjoyment of the work, but will provide some compensatory increase to copyright holders, so that it balances out to some degree.
I would not be surprised, though, if the optimum copyright term actually turns out to be zero.
Another factor to consider is that measuring gains/losses from policies can get distorted from a democratic ideal (1 person/1 vote - my pain equals your pain, etc.).
Some people with money, power, other influence may value their own gain and pain much more highly than the gain/pain of others (our collective nerves and brains aren't multiplexed). Those people have an impact on creating policy. So it might not be exactly an optimum in the "all people feel the same pain/gain" sense. In fact, it could result in something stupid.
but it does mean that consumers like me are steering away from Sony products that require me to use more expensive flash.
Somewhere inside Sony's marketing organization people have to be aware of this implicit cost upon tying products to products, but are probably afraid to bring the issue onto the table because memory sticks represent someone's sacred cow.
If one company can spend millions on FUD and get that FUD published or cited by seemingly reputable journalists, then less well capitalized technologies such as OSS are at a disadvantage.
You're being unfair.
Be sure to present the alternative viewpoint so that your post is properly balanced:
If FOSS can spend nothing on PR and get adopters to view it as superior based on rational decision-making, then greater financed FUD campaigns are at a distinct disadvantage.
Our schools should place less emphasis on critical rational analysis because it undermines the hardworking effort of private enterprise PR firms. Students should be conditioned to respond to stimuli at least as much as they are taught to step back and analyze problems objectively with logic.
This post brought to you by Citizens for Fair Enterprise. "We're helping to create a better America for working families and green flowers by making opportunities for local communities.:
On a serious note, it's good that this apparently oh so evil piece of software is finally out in the open, so that the people can see that all the fuss was about a tool that allows you to get your data that is managed by a propietary tool.
In a way it's good to have issues like this bubble up to give people a chance to really think about the fundamental principles involved in open source development.
For instance, it would be hypocritical to applaud Tridge for his work on reverse-engineering SMB to create Samba and to simultaneously criticize him for doing the exact same thing with BK.
Likewise, to criticize MS for using secrecy to make money with its products, while decrying the effect Tridge's reverse engineering has on the income of the Larry trying to feed his family by selling BK.
The principles have to hold independent of the emotional circumstances and the players of the game.
FOSS is all about the natural migration of more and more software technology into commodities. And that will inevitably be a difficult pill to swallow for anyone who has created new software that makes money for them. At some point, if the software is really useful, other competent programmers will look to produce a work-alike functionality. And it will be for the greater good of humanity as a whole because they will be able to use better tools for less money. Even as it erodes the financial benefits that accrue to one or to a few from having thought and done it first.
A happy ending would be Tridge's sofware encouraging more people to buy the BK core to interoperate with Sourcepuller. But, in the longer run, I expect a free core will eventually be developed and it will displace the proprietary one.
Slashdot Mirror
They are very happy squandering more and more money into bigger and bigger trucks
That's all about to change. A very painful changeover is going to occur as U.S. gasoline prices rise and Americans look to replace their large SUV's with smaller more fuel-efficient vehicles, car pool, and ultimately look to public transportation and living where access to such transportation figures into their decision-making about purchasing a house.
But you're right - it's a sea change in thinking. But I believe that cold hard economics helps to clarify thinking that has for so long been in an emotional cloud.
Meanwhile, yes, high-speed, light rail, computerized robotic rail traffic could do wonders for the United States. Unfortunately, our existing rail system is lower speed, optimized for heavy cargo, and beset with many of the worst features of politics of a state-owned industry (Amtrack). That would include not just many employees of Amtrack doing things that don't make business sense, but also the trucking industry that doesn't want to see successful high-speed rail encroach into their business, or the automobile/refining industry that doesn't want Americans to buy fewer cars, etc.
Amtrack should not be allowed to go bankrupte and sold off just in time for a corporate monopoly to squeeze money of the assets as energy prices rise. But neither should it be fed a subsidy without a thorough shake-up.
For starters, if people driving on the U.S. government subsidized interstate highway system saw 250 mph light rail traffic running on the medians there would be a significant and invaluable education.
Not all patents are a problem
If those patents underlie an important part of peoples' lives and are long-lived, then they become a problem.
They become a drag on the efficiency of the marketplace; they are no different from a tax or a transfer payment, even if they are called by a different name and dressed up in noble language.
That said, these same product lines are still quite succesful in the corporate world. I'm talking the large companies with thousands of employees to deal with.
Large companies have a lot of inertia. But to survive in the long run they must constantly look for ways to cut costs and improve productivity.
Lowering software licensing costs, eliminating the need to ugprade hardware when the OS or application upgrades, lowering support costs, increasing reliability and increasing features all drive IT decision-making. MS does give their large corporate customers bits and pieces of the last two items at a controlled and measured pace. But because their customers live in an MS-defined world, MS can create a storyline: we understand your problems and here are new products within that world that make sense . In that blue pill world, that is. Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away.
In this envirnoment windows 2003 is attractive, even when linux is free, because it is jam packed with things to help in enterprise wide server administration.
Yes, it is attractive - from the perspective of Windows admins that are quite familiar with the limitations of the current situation.
Too often, MS comes out with a "feature" that is new to the Windows world and - to be honest - that new feature really does incrementally improve the lot of people using MS products. But it ignores the larger picture that many of the same technical innovations existed already for years elsewhere in the non-MS world.
That non-MS world: the internet, UNIX and Apple have been indirectly responsible for many of the improvements that MS customers eventually get to see.
MS customers willing to take the time and some risk prototype testing to learn more about the non-MS world will be rewarded more quickly and more generously than their colleagues. However, the bigger the organization and the higher the level of responsibility, the less of that willingness to take risk there is.
Let n be the number of Firefox hits per day on some fairly popular site like Google, Yahoo, whatever, which will vary by date, d.
Let D be the number of downloads of Firefox up to a certain date, d.
Then, is it true that
IOW, are these downloads by users equally serious and intent upon using Firefox as the early adopters?I was wondering how the members here at Slashdot feel about the security risks involved in submitting biometric data to small private companies?
I'd feel fine about it as long as the small private company signed a contract guaranteeing that the information they have about me would only be used for very specific purposes, never disclosed to third parties and that they would post a bond for compensation should any such disclosure, deliberate or inadvertent, ever occur.
I'm sure they'd hem and haw and try to get out of signing such a form and say they just couldn't do it.
Then I'd say that I'd take my business elsewhere.
But by then they would know exactly why they were losing my business. And that awareness is what is so desperately needed among consumers and businesses that take these issues far too glibly.
Just so you don't get forlorn people asking about how to undelete things, retrieve them from wastebaskets, etc., you might want to alias rm, mv, cp to use the -i option.
Later, after they get tired of answering yes they can learn how to edit their profile and remove the training wheels.
[Even then, I hope you have a good automated nightly backup running on the user's home directories.]
No....you don't mean...I, for one, would never believe that employers of workers with temporary visas or of illegal aliens would ever use the threat of deportation power as leverage to lower their labor costs.
allows companies to provide filtering software
So of course this was done to permit commercial entities to provide filtering software to slice out "objectionable" parts of a copyrighted work before it gets passed to a viewer.
Will it protect individual citizens from doing the same thing - that is, providing filtering software - supposing that my criterion for obscenity includes what others call "advertisements"?
wrote this interesting piece on the subject.
Copyright and patent protection are like narcotics on a societal scale- useful and effective in small doses for limited times, but addictive and inducing delusional behavior if used for extended periods.
you traitorous capitalist.
The irony is that you could probably get into a great deal of hot water in PRC by vigorously advocating that Marxist ideology be applied to liberating the oppressed workers of China right now.
Just like you could get into trouble in the USA by refusing to pay taxes to the official government, declaring your independence, forming a new government with the same rhetoric and other tools used by the founding fathers.
"Any time/money you save by cheaping out now, you'll wind up having to pay back twice over on the back end."
True enough. I subscribe to the philosophy of doing things the best right way personally, too.
But any manager could tell you that there is a time value to money, getting that money in hand sooner rather than later is better, and with the interest made on that money we can patch things up only as much as absolutely necessary (kind of like how successful landlords work - they want the money right now and they'll get to kludgy repairs some time next week as soon as he can get hold of that guy that does slipshod work for cheap).
When information is reported without your consent.
In the larger world of banks, magazines, health insurance companies, credit card companies, employers, etc. information about you is being reported without your consent every day.
Well, not entirely. Sometimes there are innocuous looking fine print near some agreement you signed years ago, just like clicking through a EULA, that provides those entities with those powers. But since it's inordinately difficult to travel by air and rent a car and afford health care if you don't sign those agreements, it's not like choosing privacy comes with as little cost as we might like.
SCO was obviously full of it and as the slow wheels of justice turn and grind exceedingly fine the world is finding out just how baseless were their claims.
Are those claims not so baseless and trumped up, and have not various stock price fluctuations occurred as a result that have enriched various individuals?
I'm wondering if the machinations behind the SCO move are not so flagrant that they could constitute a reason for ultimately piercing the corporate veil of protection. At the least, I would expect a functioning SEC to look over the SCO history with a microscope.
Mind you Apple are being taken to the European Court because they prevent UK downloaders from using the French and German iTunes sites and getting cheaper downloads.
So, thinking about where things might be cheaper, what about purchasing iTunes (or Windows, or anything like that) in China or India?
same consumer market that passed anti-gay marriage laws in 11 different states last November?
Yes, there is a consumer market for politics based on emotion.
[Time to burn some karma.]
Allow me to interject two cents, guaranteed to piss off both sides of the gay marriage debate.
To those opposed to gay rights to civil unions:
To those supporting gay marriage: (see same question above).We have separation of church and state for a good reason. Secular laws provide secular protections and legal rights. The government should provide civil union protection to anyone who wants to so encumber themselves. As far as the government is concerned, marriage should be no more or no less holy than a Limited Power of Attorney, a Drivers License, or a Limited Liability Corporation.
The holy marriage part is something individuals should take up with their God and/or their church - certainly not with their government.
If we want the government to be involved in determining what is holy or not we'd move to Iran or Israel.
I would advocate minimum possible regulations, particularly ingredients that require rigorous identification, government screening to prevent "slander of the state", etc.
Delegate control and punishment measures down throught the DNS hierarchy - if you run an open relay that spews, then it's up to your provider to discipline you - or face worse consequences upstream as his provider gets angry about the flood.
How many people carried around floppies?
You've no idea of the admiring glances I get in public when I wear my chic Red Hat 6.0 boot/root floppy disks on a string around my neck.
when you are finished with a tube of toothpaste, there is still a little you can't squeeze out.
Place the nearly empty toothpaste tube on a hard flat surface, holding it from the flat tailend, and use a toothbrush handle to squeegee the last of the contents toward the tube opening.
You can extract a lot more by flattening a toothpase tube, especially compared with the fist-squeezing technique everyone learns at age 5.
Waste not, Want not Lesson #5. Next week - using mixers to extract that last bit of goodness from whiskey and vodka bottles.
Taking a page from another corporations playbook no this, Adobe needs to execute only three things.
Inside, though, I have to smile at Adobe running into compatibility issues with locked proprietary formats.
However, as a longtime FOSS user, I'm going to make a note to steer clear of getting a Nikon when I do buy a digital camera.
That should apply to everybody, not just the poor. This is a good chance for a lot of people to learn to live without that damn box.
I'm certain some means will be found to prevent an interruption of TV service, particularly for poor people.
If the poor were permitted to sit, read, notice reality, calmly think about things that affect their lives, then where would we be? In a damn pickle! The success of our government relies on a system of checks and balances: the free market purchase of government influence and corresponding market access to media so that the proper education of the people can be achieved. You know - Michael Jackson 24/7 to a quarter billion pairs of eyeballs who need to know © important things that affect their daily lives.
No, given the stakes, you can expect Bread & Circus to be continued despite the impending analog TV doom scheduled for 2006.
even though OpenOffice should more than satisfy all curricular needs and save the district lots of money
Your case is hopeless. From what I understand school districts are awash in a sea of cash - there's tons of brand new unused textbooks laying in storage, teachers have pushed away from the table refusing the extra dollars the administration has tried to give to them, taxpayers keep on voting for more school levy taxes to help educate their kids; administrators are clamoring for the federal goverment to impose more unfunded mandates because they have all the resources they need to push the envelope further than it is where the American primary and secondary education system is the envy of the world.
outputs metrics such as income from works, amount of fair use,
Some interesting ideas there.
Consider freely distributed works (which cost hardly anything to download and listen/watch).
Each viewer/listener gets some enjoyment out of the content, so the global value will increase to its maximum as everyone who cares can obtain the work for the lowest possible cost without any copyright restrictions increasnig the cost either directly (through DRM) or indirectly, through risks of flouting the law.
In real life, any copyright protection will decrease the overall sum of global enjoyment of the work, but will provide some compensatory increase to copyright holders, so that it balances out to some degree.
I would not be surprised, though, if the optimum copyright term actually turns out to be zero.
Another factor to consider is that measuring gains/losses from policies can get distorted from a democratic ideal (1 person/1 vote - my pain equals your pain, etc.).
Some people with money, power, other influence may value their own gain and pain much more highly than the gain/pain of others (our collective nerves and brains aren't multiplexed). Those people have an impact on creating policy. So it might not be exactly an optimum in the "all people feel the same pain/gain" sense. In fact, it could result in something stupid.
Doesn't mean memory sticks don't suck
but it does mean that consumers like me are steering away from Sony products that require me to use more expensive flash.
Somewhere inside Sony's marketing organization people have to be aware of this implicit cost upon tying products to products, but are probably afraid to bring the issue onto the table because memory sticks represent someone's sacred cow.
If one company can spend millions on FUD and get that FUD published or cited by seemingly reputable journalists, then less well capitalized technologies such as OSS are at a disadvantage.
You're being unfair.
Be sure to present the alternative viewpoint so that your post is properly balanced:
Our schools should place less emphasis on critical rational analysis because it undermines the hardworking effort of private enterprise PR firms. Students should be conditioned to respond to stimuli at least as much as they are taught to step back and analyze problems objectively with logic.
This post brought to you by Citizens for Fair Enterprise. "We're helping to create a better America for working families and green flowers by making opportunities for local communities.:
On a serious note, it's good that this apparently oh so evil piece of software is finally out in the open, so that the people can see that all the fuss was about a tool that allows you to get your data that is managed by a propietary tool.
In a way it's good to have issues like this bubble up to give people a chance to really think about the fundamental principles involved in open source development.
For instance, it would be hypocritical to applaud Tridge for his work on reverse-engineering SMB to create Samba and to simultaneously criticize him for doing the exact same thing with BK.
Likewise, to criticize MS for using secrecy to make money with its products, while decrying the effect Tridge's reverse engineering has on the income of the Larry trying to feed his family by selling BK.
The principles have to hold independent of the emotional circumstances and the players of the game.
FOSS is all about the natural migration of more and more software technology into commodities. And that will inevitably be a difficult pill to swallow for anyone who has created new software that makes money for them. At some point, if the software is really useful, other competent programmers will look to produce a work-alike functionality. And it will be for the greater good of humanity as a whole because they will be able to use better tools for less money. Even as it erodes the financial benefits that accrue to one or to a few from having thought and done it first.
A happy ending would be Tridge's sofware encouraging more people to buy the BK core to interoperate with Sourcepuller. But, in the longer run, I expect a free core will eventually be developed and it will displace the proprietary one.