Google don't own Android, the OPEN HANDSET ALLIANCE does, that's one. Second Android 3.0 is not closed source, you can get the source code if you want, the only thing that happened is that Google delayed the release of code for good(bad) reasons.
Be fair: Google is the creator/author of Android and they could release a new version under any license they want, from GPL3 to proprietary. That doesn't mean it's a valid business concern, and it doesn't make WebOS more attractive, but it could happen... just like MS could release their phone OS under the GPL.
Don't lump doctors in with the Insurance companies, they are not working together, doctors have to fight with them all the time.
I wish Doctors did not have to worry about money, but angry denial doesn't change the facts: Doctors have to justify treatments to accountants, and Administrators encourage financially sound decisions.
Its not different than a tech support company refusing data protection to customers not using anti virus
NB: this example is NOT about help-desk support, but about selling a kind of insurance. The financial incentive to "fire" a poor risk is OK in IT, but it shouldn't be a medical consideration.
If patients become sick the Doctor/HMO/Insurance company lose lots of money fixing everything. The financial incentive to "fire patients" shouldn't be ignored. Unfortunately in the US the financial incentives of the Doctors and Hospitals have been cooped by the Health Insurance industry.
~50 years of rationalizing US involvement in China has been predicated on the idea that the US will help make China a better place. Well, this is the decade of truth. Cisco got paid to build the 'Great Firewall of China', and Apple - and many others - have made fortunes exploiting cheap labor. Will the US now use it's hard won influence to make China better, or was that all bullshit?
So where do I make a blog or a Yahoo! store? Finding an uncluttered launch page doesn't change the basic problem: Yahoo! is a confusing mess, and the individual things you can do are not as good as what competitors offer.
I'm sure there's a nice, clean, straight forward link for making a Yahoo! store too... visitors just don't know what it is.
People can complain about Mozilla's changes or GNOME's changes over the past few years, but they've kept a strong direction and still know what they want to be. The same can't be said for Yahoo!
I keep thinking of people who use computers by rote (first I click here, then here, etc...) versus the rest of us who are actively looking for the right link or button, and trying to understand how to use it. Yahoo! has always struck me as the former, and maybe they don't change because they're afraid of losing their current user base.
They aren't confused. The RIAA/MPAA aren't trying to stop piracy, they are trying to keep prices high. They are trying to stop the Internet from changing their market. They want to keep their distribution oligarchy, and not compete in market of cheap, long-tail, indie producers. They want to keep $200 million dollar movies and abusive record deals. They want to create the new hit song they way they always have; by paying radio stations to play it over and over.
What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. -- David Byrne 12.18.07
I just went to yahoo.com, and what a confusing mess! It's packed with tiny pictures, lists of links, and generally seems like the site doesn't know what it wants to be. Where do I make a blog, or a Yahoo! store, I don't know. The AOL-style 'be all things' isn't going to work when competitors can be better at just one thing.
Revenue declining year after year isn't going help either.
The answer, I think, is that most people don't realize how arbitrary the process is that determines what issues get news coverage and which ones don't.
People know the selection of news is biased, sloppy, influenced by money and other media. They may not understand the particular mechanisms, like press releases or that newspapers follow the N.Y. Times, but they know it isn't some fair and balanced selection process. Why do newspapers have a business section and not a labor section?
In an earlier article, I proposed a system that would eliminate the arbitrariness in determining which pieces of content are selected to be "the best" and broadcast to a larger audience. I suggested using the algorithm to determine which songs could be pushed out to listeners of a streaming music system, but it could be modified to select which news stories would be considered "important" enough to push out to readers of a news site.
Instead of making an algorithm, you should try to create a framework that replaces the existing system in a more open manner. Otherwise you're just trying to make a better newspaper. Try to create new tools and options for the people selecting stories, so they don't just review the AP wire and what the NYT printed yesterday.
If what you really want to do is promote stories you think are important, you should just do what well funded PR groups do: pre-package the stories with quotes, photos, background facts, make people available for interviews, and offer pre-written stories.
Yes, but is the experience worth an extra $90,000 a year?
Speaking as a guy who just retired from running a tech company, yes, it is.
Companies could hire experienced workers for dirt cheap, by just giving the retiring baby boomers what they really want: medical coverage, lots of time off with a flexible schedule, and a small amount of money to pay the bills. Imagine how many 60+ year old EE's you could hire with this deal:
* 1/4 salary ($37,500) * Work 3 days a week * 2 months vacation (40 days off) * Medical and other standard benefits
Many professionals have already saved for retirement and paid off the house, and they just want to take it easy. It's interesting to note that the economy already provides a version of this for experienced professionals: contracting. Working at high pay for very short periods of time, they get a small salary and lots of time off. But the companies get screwed rather then having a loyal employee who loves working for them!
As long as the US takes in big money from other countries (as we do today) because of absurd copyright laws, the other countries have strong incentive to be lax on enforcement. India, for example, may want to import copyrighted material from the US but they aren't going to kill their own movie industry in favor of Hollywood. They may need to sign treaties and talk tough about enforcement, but that doesn't mean they have to follow through.
Hacker: Are you saying that winking at corruption is government policy? Sir Humphrey: No, no, Minister! It could never be government policy. That is unthinkable! Only government practice.
Twitter will be replaced with something that has security built-in and fundamental to its nature. Message signing, sequence integrity, and a distributed hosting system are the obvious next steps.
Security needs to be designed in at the start. Changing any type of communication after its widespread adoption to be more secure against censorship and offer (more of) the protections of anonymity has proved difficult. Securing email hasn't worked. HTTP was supplemented with a separate protocol rather then having security added. Phones moved from analog to digital but didn't adopt encryption. DNSSEC is an exception that proves the rule.
Change from Twitter to a new system might take a long time due to the network effect, but people want free speech and the option of anonymity, so it's inevitable.
Is now out the window. Expect tons of lawsuits due to content posted/saved/viewed. They will now be liable for the content to, not just the end users.
Not a good status to lose, with the upcoming legislation like SOPA..
Appeasing governments will make Twitter less vulnerable to legal issues. Governments will now like Twitter rather than fear it, and have incentive to protect and promote it rather then other ways of communicating on the internet. This is an economic move, buying corporate stability at the expense of the users. RIM, Microsoft, Cisco and many other companies have followed this same strategy of appeasing governments at the expense of users.
Dear Sir,
I am glad to hear that your slashdot audience disapproves of the new skit as strongly as I. As a programmer I abhor the implication that IT is a haven for cannibalism. It is well known that we now have the problem relatively under control, and that it is Monty Python who now suffer the largest casualties in this area. And what do you think the Argylls ate in Aden. Arabs?
Yours etc. Captain B.J. Smethwick in a white wine sauce with shallots, mushrooms and garlic.
Real people like to deal with real people. Asking someone in India to do work for you feels like a bizarre gamble for your average business. That's your competitive advantage and you should use it.
Just to add to that, many small businesses want part-time/remote/on-call support, not a full time employee. Tell people you're a stay at home mom, that you may not respond right away, and that you're only interested in smaller projects. Combined with a cheap hourly rate and a sample portfolio, small business people will be happy to hire you. You can raise your rates with experience and contacts.
Also, learning the basics is essential and the right way to start, but you should also learn how do an entire website, from start to finish; buy a DNS name, install a database (or configure one that's hosted), change web server settings, etc.... Learning WordPress would probably be a good next step.
So will the transition be like the Great Depression? "Doing things that we'd consider utterly frivolous today" isn't going to pay much at the start of the transition, if you can even get such a job. Slashdot is full of people in a very good position for the next great economic revolution, but we owe it to everyone to try and make the transition humane. No one should have to literally 'work for their supper.'
The arrest of journalist Kristyna Wentz-Graff was not part of some systematic crack down on reporters/journalists. At best it was a swamped cop dealing with a large group and not noticing her credentials, at worst it was an idiot cop, maybe both. To infer, as I think the FA does, that the US is arresting journalists as part of some nation wide crackdown is completely false, or at least very misleading.
... and calling for the murder of Julian Assange was just a misunderstanding. Seriously, what facts or reasoning do you have to offer? You attribute the arrests to idiocy, but who knows for sure. If you're thinking that not enough journalists were arrested, maybe it's about quality and not quantity. How may other journalists learned of her arrest, and decided they'd better follow the rules? Also, do you know how many journalists were arrested? I don't.
The Occupy protests were not covered fairly by the corporate media. If Reporters Without Borders got the reasons wrong, thinking it was arrests instead of journalists being house-trained and leashed minions of multinationals, they still got to the right conclusion.
Why should we compare encryption to a physical safe? Electronic records are very different then paper records in a safe:
* They're exponentially larger and more detailed. * Digital logs are constantly created, by many different devices, unlike any other technology. * They record activity unknown by the user. (e.g. a browser fetching an undisplayed image) * They record activity poorly understood by the user. (e.g. Deleting an email doesn't erase it from the disk) * They're easily faked. Digital copies can't be examined like a letter head or signature on paper. * They record activities as if witnessed by an observer, rather then recorded after the fact by an observer. (Paper records are created by people for their own reasons, digital records don't share those motivations.)
New laws for new technology is the norm. The question is whether people will "be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" or we'll all live in panopticons in the future.
Subsidies are for Stadiums, Cable TV and Enterprise Zones, not for public access to the internet! The internet can either survive on its own without government subsidies, or it doesn't deserve to exist!
... you do however have an obligation to ensure fair working conditions and above-starvation wages for your workers.
No they don't, not unless the Governments, their employees, or their customers force them to do so. That's the real problem here; Apple is only motivated to make a profit, and basic human dignity doesn't have an entry on the ledger.
Capitalism offers the single motivation of profit. All other motivations must be supplied from outside the marketplace: respect for basic human dignity, restraint of fraud, control of pollution, respect for labor laws, etc... People bring these 'non-profit' motivations with them when working for companies, and we call it psychotic when companies (or CEOs) don't respect such motivations.
Apple is arguing that the profit motive gives them 'no choice' but to manufacture in China, dismissing all other motivations. They leave it to the apologists to argue that the working conditions are fair. Apple then adjusts their demands on Foxconn when the people buying their products are bothered by Apples actions.
They let the profit motive guide their actions, balancing it against all 'non-profit' motivations, to maximize profit.
If you can put together an error-free 7x9 table in Notepad++ in five seconds, get off Slashdot and get back to your hyperproductive life. (Also, I call BS.)
I agree that the previous poster was unhelpful, but I think text+browser design is faster then Dreamweaver. For one thing you get to test the design in multiple browsers easily/naturally.
Re:Lamar Smith still needs to lose his job over th
on
House Kills SOPA
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The lack of replies and tepid moderation for your comment is indicative of why the political system is broken: people barely care enough to complain, and when told the crisis is over they don't punish the politicians who are working against them.
Slashdot Mirror
Google don't own Android, the OPEN HANDSET ALLIANCE does, that's one. Second Android 3.0 is not closed source, you can get the source code if you want, the only thing that happened is that Google delayed the release of code for good(bad) reasons.
Be fair: Google is the creator/author of Android and they could release a new version under any license they want, from GPL3 to proprietary. That doesn't mean it's a valid business concern, and it doesn't make WebOS more attractive, but it could happen ... just like MS could release their phone OS under the GPL.
Don't lump doctors in with the Insurance companies, they are not working together, doctors have to fight with them all the time.
I wish Doctors did not have to worry about money, but angry denial doesn't change the facts: Doctors have to justify treatments to accountants, and Administrators encourage financially sound decisions.
Its not different than a tech support company refusing data protection to customers not using anti virus
NB: this example is NOT about help-desk support, but about selling a kind of insurance. The financial incentive to "fire" a poor risk is OK in IT, but it shouldn't be a medical consideration.
If patients become sick the Doctor/HMO/Insurance company lose lots of money fixing everything. The financial incentive to "fire patients" shouldn't be ignored. Unfortunately in the US the financial incentives of the Doctors and Hospitals have been cooped by the Health Insurance industry.
~50 years of rationalizing US involvement in China has been predicated on the idea that the US will help make China a better place. Well, this is the decade of truth. Cisco got paid to build the 'Great Firewall of China', and Apple - and many others - have made fortunes exploiting cheap labor. Will the US now use it's hard won influence to make China better, or was that all bullshit?
So where do I make a blog or a Yahoo! store? Finding an uncluttered launch page doesn't change the basic problem: Yahoo! is a confusing mess, and the individual things you can do are not as good as what competitors offer.
I'm sure there's a nice, clean, straight forward link for making a Yahoo! store too... visitors just don't know what it is.
(I just found it here: http://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo!+store)
People can complain about Mozilla's changes or GNOME's changes over the past few years, but they've kept a strong direction and still know what they want to be. The same can't be said for Yahoo!
I keep thinking of people who use computers by rote (first I click here, then here, etc...) versus the rest of us who are actively looking for the right link or button, and trying to understand how to use it. Yahoo! has always struck me as the former, and maybe they don't change because they're afraid of losing their current user base.
They aren't confused. The RIAA/MPAA aren't trying to stop piracy, they are trying to keep prices high. They are trying to stop the Internet from changing their market. They want to keep their distribution oligarchy, and not compete in market of cheap, long-tail, indie producers. They want to keep $200 million dollar movies and abusive record deals. They want to create the new hit song they way they always have; by paying radio stations to play it over and over.
What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. -- David Byrne 12.18.07
I just went to yahoo.com, and what a confusing mess! It's packed with tiny pictures, lists of links, and generally seems like the site doesn't know what it wants to be. Where do I make a blog, or a Yahoo! store, I don't know. The AOL-style 'be all things' isn't going to work when competitors can be better at just one thing.
Revenue declining year after year isn't going help either.
The answer, I think, is that most people don't realize how arbitrary the process is that determines what issues get news coverage and which ones don't.
People know the selection of news is biased, sloppy, influenced by money and other media. They may not understand the particular mechanisms, like press releases or that newspapers follow the N.Y. Times, but they know it isn't some fair and balanced selection process. Why do newspapers have a business section and not a labor section?
In an earlier article, I proposed a system that would eliminate the arbitrariness in determining which pieces of content are selected to be "the best" and broadcast to a larger audience. I suggested using the algorithm to determine which songs could be pushed out to listeners of a streaming music system, but it could be modified to select which news stories would be considered "important" enough to push out to readers of a news site.
Instead of making an algorithm, you should try to create a framework that replaces the existing system in a more open manner. Otherwise you're just trying to make a better newspaper. Try to create new tools and options for the people selecting stories, so they don't just review the AP wire and what the NYT printed yesterday.
If what you really want to do is promote stories you think are important, you should just do what well funded PR groups do: pre-package the stories with quotes, photos, background facts, make people available for interviews, and offer pre-written stories.
Yes, but is the experience worth an extra $90,000 a year?
Speaking as a guy who just retired from running a tech company, yes, it is.
Companies could hire experienced workers for dirt cheap, by just giving the retiring baby boomers what they really want: medical coverage, lots of time off with a flexible schedule, and a small amount of money to pay the bills. Imagine how many 60+ year old EE's you could hire with this deal:
* 1/4 salary ($37,500)
* Work 3 days a week
* 2 months vacation (40 days off)
* Medical and other standard benefits
Many professionals have already saved for retirement and paid off the house, and they just want to take it easy. It's interesting to note that the economy already provides a version of this for experienced professionals: contracting. Working at high pay for very short periods of time, they get a small salary and lots of time off. But the companies get screwed rather then having a loyal employee who loves working for them!
As long as the US takes in big money from other countries (as we do today) because of absurd copyright laws, the other countries have strong incentive to be lax on enforcement. India, for example, may want to import copyrighted material from the US but they aren't going to kill their own movie industry in favor of Hollywood. They may need to sign treaties and talk tough about enforcement, but that doesn't mean they have to follow through.
Hacker: Are you saying that winking at corruption is government policy?
Sir Humphrey: No, no, Minister! It could never be government policy. That is unthinkable! Only government practice.
Great read. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
Twitter will be replaced with something that has security built-in and fundamental to its nature. Message signing, sequence integrity, and a distributed hosting system are the obvious next steps.
Security needs to be designed in at the start. Changing any type of communication after its widespread adoption to be more secure against censorship and offer (more of) the protections of anonymity has proved difficult. Securing email hasn't worked. HTTP was supplemented with a separate protocol rather then having security added. Phones moved from analog to digital but didn't adopt encryption. DNSSEC is an exception that proves the rule.
Change from Twitter to a new system might take a long time due to the network effect, but people want free speech and the option of anonymity, so it's inevitable.
Is now out the window. Expect tons of lawsuits due to content posted/saved/viewed. They will now be liable for the content to, not just the end users.
Not a good status to lose, with the upcoming legislation like SOPA..
Appeasing governments will make Twitter less vulnerable to legal issues. Governments will now like Twitter rather than fear it, and have incentive to protect and promote it rather then other ways of communicating on the internet. This is an economic move, buying corporate stability at the expense of the users. RIM, Microsoft, Cisco and many other companies have followed this same strategy of appeasing governments at the expense of users.
Dear Sir,
I am glad to hear that your slashdot audience disapproves of the new skit as strongly as I. As a programmer I abhor the implication that IT is a haven for cannibalism. It is well known that we now have the problem relatively under control, and that it is Monty Python who now suffer the largest casualties in this area. And what do you think the Argylls ate in Aden. Arabs?
Yours etc.
Captain B.J. Smethwick in a white wine sauce with shallots, mushrooms and garlic.
Real people like to deal with real people. Asking someone in India to do work for you feels like a bizarre gamble for your average business. That's your competitive advantage and you should use it.
Just to add to that, many small businesses want part-time/remote/on-call support, not a full time employee. Tell people you're a stay at home mom, that you may not respond right away, and that you're only interested in smaller projects. Combined with a cheap hourly rate and a sample portfolio, small business people will be happy to hire you. You can raise your rates with experience and contacts.
Also, learning the basics is essential and the right way to start, but you should also learn how do an entire website, from start to finish; buy a DNS name, install a database (or configure one that's hosted), change web server settings, etc.... Learning WordPress would probably be a good next step.
So will the transition be like the Great Depression? "Doing things that we'd consider utterly frivolous today" isn't going to pay much at the start of the transition, if you can even get such a job. Slashdot is full of people in a very good position for the next great economic revolution, but we owe it to everyone to try and make the transition humane. No one should have to literally 'work for their supper.'
The arrest of journalist Kristyna Wentz-Graff was not part of some systematic crack down on reporters/journalists. At best it was a swamped cop dealing with a large group and not noticing her credentials, at worst it was an idiot cop, maybe both. To infer, as I think the FA does, that the US is arresting journalists as part of some nation wide crackdown is completely false, or at least very misleading.
... and calling for the murder of Julian Assange was just a misunderstanding. Seriously, what facts or reasoning do you have to offer? You attribute the arrests to idiocy, but who knows for sure. If you're thinking that not enough journalists were arrested, maybe it's about quality and not quantity. How may other journalists learned of her arrest, and decided they'd better follow the rules? Also, do you know how many journalists were arrested? I don't.
The Occupy protests were not covered fairly by the corporate media. If Reporters Without Borders got the reasons wrong, thinking it was arrests instead of journalists being house-trained and leashed minions of multinationals, they still got to the right conclusion.
Why should we compare encryption to a physical safe? Electronic records are very different then paper records in a safe:
* They're exponentially larger and more detailed.
* Digital logs are constantly created, by many different devices, unlike any other technology.
* They record activity unknown by the user. (e.g. a browser fetching an undisplayed image)
* They record activity poorly understood by the user. (e.g. Deleting an email doesn't erase it from the disk)
* They're easily faked. Digital copies can't be examined like a letter head or signature on paper.
* They record activities as if witnessed by an observer, rather then recorded after the fact by an observer. (Paper records are created by people for their own reasons, digital records don't share those motivations.)
New laws for new technology is the norm. The question is whether people will "be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" or we'll all live in panopticons in the future.
Subsidies are for Stadiums, Cable TV and Enterprise Zones, not for public access to the internet! The internet can either survive on its own without government subsidies, or it doesn't deserve to exist!
... you do however have an obligation to ensure fair working conditions and above-starvation wages for your workers.
No they don't, not unless the Governments, their employees, or their customers force them to do so. That's the real problem here; Apple is only motivated to make a profit, and basic human dignity doesn't have an entry on the ledger.
Capitalism offers the single motivation of profit. All other motivations must be supplied from outside the marketplace: respect for basic human dignity, restraint of fraud, control of pollution, respect for labor laws, etc... People bring these 'non-profit' motivations with them when working for companies, and we call it psychotic when companies (or CEOs) don't respect such motivations.
Apple is arguing that the profit motive gives them 'no choice' but to manufacture in China, dismissing all other motivations. They leave it to the apologists to argue that the working conditions are fair. Apple then adjusts their demands on Foxconn when the people buying their products are bothered by Apples actions.
They let the profit motive guide their actions, balancing it against all 'non-profit' motivations, to maximize profit.
If you can put together an error-free 7x9 table in Notepad++ in five seconds, get off Slashdot and get back to your hyperproductive life. (Also, I call BS.)
Use zen coding: table>tbody>tr*7>td*9
I agree that the previous poster was unhelpful, but I think text+browser design is faster then Dreamweaver. For one thing you get to test the design in multiple browsers easily/naturally.
The lack of replies and tepid moderation for your comment is indicative of why the political system is broken: people barely care enough to complain, and when told the crisis is over they don't punish the politicians who are working against them.