Some thoughts on “problems” with the implementation of Wikis, echoing and illustrating my thoughts the other day. The comments are of particular interest.
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Doug
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Doug
Jim McGee takes a whack at John Dvorak:
John Dvorak has just discovered Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma and figures it’s a good excuse for a rant. Like many who’ve used it as a launching pad for their own purposes, there isn’t a lot of evidence that Dvorak has bothered to read the book.
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But then he isn’t really interested in advancing the dialog, just in getting us to read and link to his columns. Traditional media at its best.
Don’t be too hard on Dvorak, Jim. The natural consequence of his continual quest for readers is that he’s a great barometer. Dvorak is so reliably, completely wrong about everything that you can pretty much bet that something he scoffs at is either a great idea or a great product. Conversely, if John likes it it has to be a stinking pile of crap. His transparency and reliability is actually a virtue in an age where the traditional media is usually quite muddled and unclear in their thinking. Don’t berate him, thank him. His columns are a valuable public service!
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Doug
John Dvorak seems to think that Apple is getting ready to jump back into the handheld market with a Newton II. He also speculates that a convertible notebook similar to some varieties of the Tablet PC is in the works.
While I’d love to see a new Newton (I’ve even strongly considered buying a used Newton off Ebay), I’m skeptical. Aside from the repeated statements from Steve Jobs that Apple isn’t interested, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Apple to spend the R&D and product development dollars on a market that seems to be in decline. The same goes on the Tablet PC front: these devices aren’t exactly taking off, either.
Finally, my experience is that you can usually gauge the market by betting on the opposite of what Dvorak predicts. He’s so reliably wrong he’s a decent barometer for what’s happening in the industry.
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Doug
Martin Spernau starts to “get it” in relation to Tinderbox:
But then comes a phase where you get in deeper and start to ‘get it’. You learn new way to do things, learning to do them ‘inside the boundaries’. I’m at that point now. I can see that this tool at my disposal can do things I never dreamed of. And very often the solutions are far simpler than what I wanted to do…
In another post Martin remarks:
btw.: I’m very seriously considering if I will keep on refering to Tinderbox as an ‘outliner’. It does have an outline view… but a lot of it’s paradigmas are simply un-hierarchical in nature. I think the map-view is by far the more natural working mode for Tinderbox.
Which is precisely the point - Tinderbox is paradigm busting software. Most of the criticism I read of Tinderbox seems to me to arise from people approaching it with preconceived ideas about how it “should” work, and not being able to shed these preconceptions enough to understand how it actually does work. Nor is this problem limited to Tinderbox; I read similar remarks related to wikis, news readers - hell, it wasn’t all that long ago that I had discussions of a similar nature with people concerning web browsers.
I’m interested to follow Martin’s thoughts as he continues to work with Tinderbox, and particularly his thoughts on the different views the software provides. I completely agree that despite having an Outline View (and often being classed as outliner software), Tinderbox is inherently non-hierarchical. Having said that, I find that I don’t use Map View all that often myself - except of course when I do use Map View. Developing a feel for when a particular view makes the most sense is a big part of learning to use Tinderbox effectively. The fact that all of the different views are available and useful at different times for different purposes is part of the genius of the software.
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/dowehaveawinner.html
Tue, 13 Jul 2004 21:40:54 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/dowehaveawinner.htmlWhackos
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
Yahoo! News - Man Jailed for Shooting Off His Testicles: A British man who accidentally shot himself in the testicles after drinking 15 pints of beer was jailed for five years on Tuesday for possessing an illegal firearm, a court spokesman said.
Hello, Darwin Awards? I think we may haveYahoo! News - Man Jailed for Shooting Off His Testicles: A British man who accidentally shot himself in the testicles after drinking 15 pints of beer was jailed for five years on Tuesday for possessing an illegal firearm, a court spokesman said.
Hello, Darwin Awards? I think we may have a winner here for this year’s award…
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/thefinalvirus.html
Tue, 13 Jul 2004 21:38:09 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/thefinalvirus.htmlTechnology
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
The Final Virus: A Science-Fiction Story: Special to TechNewsNet, July 2005 — Millions of Microsoft users woke up to a new and deadlier Blue Screen of Death this morning. It said “This is the Final Virus. For spam to end, Windows must die!”. Rebooting got them nowhere, because their hard
The Final Virus: A Science-Fiction Story: Special to TechNewsNet, July 2005 — Millions of Microsoft users woke up to a new and deadlier Blue Screen of Death this morning. It said “This is the Final Virus. For spam to end, Windows must die!”. Rebooting got them nowhere, because their hard drives had been formatted. All their data was destroyed.
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The frightening thing about this story is how very little of it is fiction.
According to the ISPs who monitor these things, more than 80% of all Internet traffic is now spam, with the percentage still rising. And gone are the halcyon days when that spam was mostly porn-site solicitations and pyramid schemes; nowadays, most of it is either attempts to propagate viruses or bounce messages from failed attempts. Those viruses, in turn, are nowadays primarily designed to crack Windows machines and turn them into spam-sending zombies. Email users are in imminent danger of drowning in a flood of garbage; the spam and virus problems have become inextricably intertwined.
I don’t know how to keep this future from happening. The inertia of that huge mass of Windows users out there makes it very unlikely that we can convert everyone voluntarily before some fed-up, spam-victimized programmer decides to force the issue.
We’d better hope we find a way, though. If this is how Windows dies, it could very well take us down with it.
Frightening and ugly, but not terribly far-fetched. If not done by some pissed-off programmer, then quite possibly by an enemy of some sort seeking to disrupt Western economies. Such is the cost of a monoculture of software.
Worse, you know some pinhead read this off of Slashdot, thought it sounded like a cool idea, and is now eagerly working on the code
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/ironsunrise.html
Mon, 2 May 2005 20:57:45 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/ironsunrise.htmlBooks
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
It’s a testament to how much I enjoy Charlie Stross’ writing that I took his latest, Iron Sunrise, along with me on vacation. I’m glad I did; this sequel to Singularity Sky improves on the original and left me nearly unable to put the book down. While I did
It’s a testament to how much I enjoy Charlie Stross’ writing that I took his latest, Iron Sunrise, along with me on vacation. I’m glad I did; this sequel to Singularity Sky improves on the original and left me nearly unable to put the book down. While I did break up my reading with the occasional hike or soak in the hot tub, even my daughter observed that it must be a good book, since I seemed to be spending every spare minute reading it!
I’m not going to butcher Stross’ excellent prose by trying to describe it. The story is just too weird and wonderful for me to do it justice. Suffice to say that Stross is unquestionably the shining star of the Scottish SF universe. His ideas continually leave me astounded at their sheer coolness - and his inclusion of extrapolations of modern ‘net culture and inside web jokes (one character is a warblogger, and one chapter is titled “Set Us Up the Bomb, to name just two examples) are a delight.
At its heart, Iron Sunrise is a murder mystery - with the murder victim being an entire star system. Anyone who has read enough SF has read at least one story that at least mentions star destroying weapons. Stross goes one better; his initial chapters describing the actual mechanics of the star killer and its after-effects on the inhabited planet of the system in question are breathtaking and down-right frightening.
Stross manages to do something that many SF authors struggle with. His science and technology are engaging and mind stretching, while his stories are tightly plotted and his characters engaging and interesting. Iron Sunrise is good stuff.
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Doug
Compare and contrast:
Survey: CEO Pay Rises in 2003: The median pay for a CEO in the United States increased by 15 percent last year, and rose even more — 22 percent — for chiefs at larger companies, according to a survey by The Corporate Library.
The survey, released Wednesday, showed increases in almost every category of executive compensation, including base salary, annual bonus, total annual compensation, restricted stock, long-term incentive payouts and the value realized from the exercise of stock options. The only category to decline from 2002 to 2003 was the value of stock option grants.
The CEOs of four companies — Oracle Corp., Apple Computer Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Colgate-Palmolive Co. — watched their total compensation packages surge by more than 1,000 percent in 2003, largely through exercising stock options and receiving restricted stock.
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Yahoo! News - Wage Growth Slow, Jobless Claims Stable: First-time claims for U.S. jobless benefits last week held at a level suggesting an improving labor market, but wage growth over the past year has dragged along at its slowest pace in more than 20 years, government reports released on Thursday showed.
Wages and salaries rose a slim 0.6 percent in the second quarter and are up just 2.5 percent over the past 12 months, matching the period through March as the smallest 12-month gain on records dating to 1982, the Labor Department (news - web sites) said in a report offering fuel for an election-year debate over jobs.
This is the new American dream folks, better wake up to it. Your income will barely keep pace with inflation (or you’ll see increases below the rate of inflation), while your CEO rakes in the coin. I do not envy anyone who works in Corporate America any more (except, perhaps, those self-same CEO’s, who definitely seem to have it made).
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Doug
Valley firms ditch desks to cut costs - Freeing workers from their cubicles has been touted for at least two decades as a way to cut corporate real estate costs. Now, spurred by the sluggish economy and new technology, some of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms seem to be taking the advice seriously.
Executives at Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel say they have reduced their building needs by hundreds of thousands of square feet — or expect to do so in the near future — by eliminating offices for many of their employees.
Encore Technical Staffing, a headhunting firm, closed its Redwood City office about three years ago to avoid a rent increase and asked its 40-or-so employees to be mobile. But some proved unproductive and were fired.
“The downside is finding people who can work independently,” said Dan Wooldridge, part owner of the company. “It’s just a matter of self-discipline, and a lot of people don’t have that.”
There’s the predictable ranting, both pro and con about this trend over on Slashdot, with the pros focusing mostly on how great it is to work from home, and the cons screaming about the oppression of our Corporate Overlords, particularly on those with ADHD and ADD. The business types are of course focused on cost savings. I think everyone is missing the bigger impact of this and other similar trends in the workplace.
The key phrase is “The downside is finding people that can work independently.” The overwhelming trend in management today, at least from where I sit, is for companies to stop managing people. Outsourcing, the rise of the temp worker, repeated and constant layoffs, telecommuting, and to a lesser extent, hoteling as described in this article all are leading to one inexorable conclusion: companies of the future will be smaller and smaller, and increasingly composed of a core group of managers/investors/owners, with the bulk of the implementation work being done by people who don’t work directly for the company.
There are a lot of reasons for this trend. The cost of actually having an employee on the payroll is constantly increasing, and I’m not just talking about salary. Benefit costs, particularly health care, are going through the ceiling. The layoff/rehire cycle means increased recruitment and training costs, which eat into overhead. As the article discusses, office space, particularly in prime locations, is expensive.
More to the point, most “managers” spend a great deal of their time, perhaps most of it, dealing with “people problems.” While you and I may think that this is their natural function, many managers, lacking the skills to effectively work with people, don’t agree. Worse, corporate leadership often sees this as a drag on the bottom line, and one of the few areas remaining where automation can’t effectively increase productivity. Dealing with an employee who is having personal problems of one sort or another costs time and effort, means the company has to maintain an expensive HR staff, means we have to spend more time training managers of “soft skills” and requires a raft of documentation. If we end up firing that employee, there’s a good chance we’ll get sued, which means legal costs and even more documentation. It’s far easier (and more profitable) to dump that responsibility on to someone else, be it a consulting company, temp agency, or the employee himself.
A big part of the advantage US companies have had over their European counterparts is the fluidity of the labor force. US managers have always had an easier time both adding and subtracting workers than European managers, and that often shows up in greater flexibility, improved productivity, and greater profit margins. The trend toward getting rid of full-time workers is a natural extension of this view of the workforce. This is simply the ultimate expression of the teachings of managerial capitalism as applied to labor. The aim is to drive as much labor cost out of your business model as possible. Increased global competition only heightens the urgency of doing so. Constantly improving technology provides the tools.
We are headed toward an age where nearly everyone is an independent contractor or temporary worker both in fact and in name. In reality, given the fluidity of labor in the US, you’re probably already mostly an independent or temporary worker in fact, even if you aren’t called that. “Job security” is mostly a thing of the past in the corporate world.
Surprisingly, this can work, at least in some situations. This is very much the scenario we have today in real estate. Every real estate agent is an independent contractor, often “affiliated” with a particular company, sometimes not. We don’t work directly for the company we’re affiliated with, and receive no benefits or anything else. We are furnished with a desk and telephone, access to company marketing materials, some administrative support, and have the right/obligation to use the company name, but we pay for all of that. Nothing comes free.
Simultaneously, the company I’m affiliated with is the most caring company I’ve ever worked for. They are more concerned with my well-being than any employer I’ve ever had. I have complete flexibility in how I chose to handle my business, the only requirements are that I not break any laws and that I produce revenue. Producing revenue is obviously top of mind for me, since I receive no salary at all.
Beyond the company level, many real estate agents participate in larger associations that have somewhat the flavor of guilds and somewhat the flavor of unions. For example, in addition to being associated with the F.C. Tucker Company, Inc. I also belong to the Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of REALTORS® (MIBOR), the Indiana Association of REALTORS® (IAR), and the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR). MIBOR has the most immediate impact on my life and business, in that it provides and maintains the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS). Beyond that, however, MIBOR provides training, monitors compliance with ethics, interacts with local political entities concerning local laws that impact real estate, mediates and arbitrates between board members in the event of a dispute, has the power to levy fines and sanctions, and in general governs business practices of board members beyond what is specified in the state’s Real Estate Licensure Law. IAR and NAR are more concerned with broad political and legal issues at the state and national level; NAR also publishes the Code of Ethics that all REALTORS® adhere to.
Now, regardless of what real estate company I’m affiliated with, I’m still going to be a member of MIBOR, IAR, and NAR. These associations provide continuity, important business tools and some level of support beyond that supplied by whatever company I’m affiliated with, or that I could supply on my own. MIBOR in particular acts very much like the old-style guilds did. Further, all of these organizations function in a more or less democratic fashion, holding elections every year to fill the various governance roles each has.
Even should the company I’m affiliated with go out of business, I can go right on selling real estate and making money as long as I still have my license and belong to MIBOR. Affiliation with a company helps my business, but the continuance or presence of any particular company does not drastically impact my ability to earn a living.
Part of the reason this works reasonably well in real estate is the geographic and personal nature of the profession, and for that reason I’m not totally confident that a similar model could be implemented in other professions. What this system has created in the real estate profession is, on the one hand a very Darwinian environment where only those who can successfully function independently last any time at all, and on the other hand an environment where real estate companies continually seek to please their experienced and high-performing talent, lest those people move, quite easily, to a different company. An angry or upset agent has few impediments that prevent her from “jumping ship” at the least provocation - taking her several millions of dollars in revenue production with her, and out of the coffers of the company that pissed her off.
So, over the past half-century or so a system has been created in the real estate industry that addresses many of the issues beginning to appear in the corporate world. As more and more employees become less and less attached to the companies they work for and their identities center more around what they do, I expect we’ll see similar structures and systems start to arise in other fields. For more highly trained knowledge workers, I suspect professional organizations will begin to turn into structures very similar to MIBOR and NAR, providing “guild-like” protections, support, and political lobbying power to more highly-educated professionals, as well as enforcing minimum standards of practice and conduct. Essentially, the idea will be to protect the educational investments of their members by enforcing standards stringent enough to create some shortage of these professionals in the marketplace, thereby making them more valuable. A potential model for these organizations is legal profession’s Bar Association, which functions much like what I’ve described above.
For those less skilled and educated, I think the temporary and lower-end consulting companies will begin to fill this role. Project work will be the name of the game, as these temp houses take on more and more of a role in providing staffing for corporations. As more of the workforce shifts into this type of employment, government will step in to regulate it more thoroughly to prevent the worst sort of abuses, though I think there will be an ugly few years with a lot of exploitation before that happens.
Companies themselves will only seek to permanently retain those workers that have mission-critical skills and information - and those people will often be at least part owners of the company. This trend will likely accelerate as existing corporations struggle with the burden of paying for the pensions of the retiring baby-boomers, which will eat into their ability to hire and retain new workers.
This isn’t going to happen overnight, and I think we’ll still have some large corporations that directly employ a lot of people. One only has to look at the legions of contractors employed by companies like Microsoft, however, to see where the future is taking us. Like it or not, your primary employer is you. The days of the paternalistic organization are passing, the social contract that existed in your grandfather’s day is in shreds, and a new one is being written.
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Doug
Now that my obligatory 1 year license for TopProducer is about up, I’m giving Crm4Mac a try as a Mac-native solution to my contact and task management needs. Not being purpose-designed for use in real estate it’s not a drop-in replacement, but I found I wasn’t using a lot of the real estate specific functionality of TopProducer anyway.
The pros so far are:
* OS X native, so I don’t have to run Virtual PC just so I can run IE to have access to the Microsoft Java VM
* It doesn’t require me to be online to get at my data
* It leverages my already substantial investment in other Mac apps like Mail, Address Book, and iCal, and thereby avoids time-wasting double entry
Because it does the above, it’s easy to keep the data synchronized with my phone
Works well with my local file system, making it way easier to keep track of documents associated with a particular client or transaction
* At $49 for a liscense, it’s quite a bit cheaper than the $35+ per month cost of TopProducerCons include:
* It’s kind of ugly, and the UI needs some work.
* It doesn’t handle To-Do’s at all
* No way to template a set of tasks or documents to be easily applied to a contact, such as for a new project
Lack of a few real estate specific features I do find useful
* Did I mention it’s kind of ugly?Making the switch involves modifying the workflow I’ve developed over the course of the past year, which is always a pain. My initial reaction is generally positive, however, and I suspect I’ll actually be more productive using Crm4Mac than I have been with TopProducer. If nothing else I think it’s more convenient to use, which means I’ll use it more.
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Doug
code: theWebSocket; :Wear gloves, boys and girls: My prediction: Short of someone doing a little after-hours dumpster diving, there will continue to be no news out of this convention, and there won’t be any out of the Republican shindig either.
And if there is any news, it will probably be that the blogger developed a subdural after cracking heads with a NYT reporter, scrabbling around in the muck in search of his own 15 minutes.
Agreed. I had the dubious pleasure of listening to most of Ted Kennedy’s speech tonight on NPR on my way home. It sounded amazingly like a series of 30-second political ads strung together.
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/nosuchthingaswebpriv.html
Tue, 27 Jul 2004 23:14:26 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/nosuchthingaswebpriv.htmlLaw
Privacy
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
Federal court: web privacy policies mean nothing: Essentially, what this means is that all those long-winded fine print agreements you have agreed to may not protect your personal information at all.
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With E-Commerce growth showing no signs of ebbing, the question of how confidential customer information is handled onlineFederal court: web privacy policies mean nothing: Essentially, what this means is that all those long-winded fine print agreements you have agreed to may not protect your personal information at all.
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With E-Commerce growth showing no signs of ebbing, the question of how confidential customer information is handled online is going to become increasingly urgent. Without any privacy protection at all, you are at the mercy of the company you are doing business with to honor the agreement. If they do not, then according to Judge Magnuson, you have no legal recourse at all.
Isn’t that just dandy? It certainly makes me wish I’d never spent any time tweaking recommendations at Amazon or providing any personal information to any online retailer at all.
So, on the one hand we have a Federal judge ruling that any personal information given out by individuals is not the individual’s personal property, but rather belongs to whatever corporation the individual provided it to. On the other hand, we have increasingly ludicrous assertions of copyright on the part of corporations to ensure that any information under their control remains firmly, forever in their control.
Is it just me, or does this strike anyone else as patently ridiculous (pun intended)?
Perhaps what we need is something along the lines of Creative Commons-style licenses that we can attach to personal information we provide to companies to protect our own personal information. Until some mechanism is put in place where individuals enjoy “personal intellectual property” protections similar to those granted to corporations, we’re screwed.
I should also note that it seems incredibly odd to me that personal information that is provided to a company via a web site is treated differently than if that information were provided by some other means, even verbally. As an example, as a REALTOR® and real estate agent, I am liable if I disclose personal, private information about a client without their permission. Further, not only am I liable for civil litigation, I could lose my license if I should do so. Under various Federal laws, I can’t even legally divulge personal details to a mortgage loan officer that’s working with my client without that client’s permission - and the loan officer can’t tell me much about their personal financial situation. Yet if Judge Magnuson’s ruling stands, a client who submits that same information to my broker via our website should have no expectation of privacy. Obviously, IANAL, but that seems, well, stupid.
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/twomillion.html
Mon, 26 Jul 2004 21:35:38 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/twomillion.htmlWork
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
Last week I crossed the magical $2 million in pended sales volume for the year. Ka-Ching!
Last week I crossed the magical $2 million in pended sales volume for the year. Ka-Ching!
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/moreantiterrorismidi.html
Mon, 26 Jul 2004 21:29:36 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/moreantiterrorismidi.htmlPolitics
Whackos
Law
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
This so totally blows that I’m left nearly speechless:
Boing Boing: Stargate fan-site operator busted under anti-terrorism law: The creator of an SG-1 fansite has been charged by the FBI with criminal copyright infringment, the result of an investigation that involved a USA PATRIOT Act warrant against the site’s ISPThis so totally blows that I’m left nearly speechless:
Boing Boing: Stargate fan-site operator busted under anti-terrorism law: The creator of an SG-1 fansite has been charged by the FBI with criminal copyright infringment, the result of an investigation that involved a USA PATRIOT Act warrant against the site’s ISP to gather intelligence.
Shades of the Steve Jackson Games debacle. Hey, FBI, is it possible for you lot to suck any worse? What happened, did you get so pissed off by the drubbing you took from the 9/11 Commission that you decided you just had to go out and fuck with somebody?
The amazing thing here is that even in an economic climate where geeks have a tough time finding good jobs, it’s obvious that Federal law enforcement agencies still can’t manage to find and retain quality IT talent. In fact, as accounts similar to this mess continue to become more common, I expect the situation to only get worse. The unfortunate message being sent to talented young geeks by this sort of rampant cluelessness if the the Feebs are the bad guys - and worse they’re idiots. Spammers have proven that if you wave enough money around you can get good geeks to work for the bad guys, but no geek with a shred of talent wants to work for someone so demonstrably stupid.
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/wirelesscustomerserv.html
Mon, 26 Jul 2004 21:09:53 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/wirelesscustomerserv.htmlMobile
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
MobileWhack: OK, I guess most of you aren’t too surprised. J.D. Power & Associates surveyed 7,469 mobile customers and found a 7% decline in customer satisfaction.
Rael goes on to quote a Techweb article that spells out the ranking of the various players. Of particular interest to me was theMobileWhack: OK, I guess most of you aren’t too surprised. J.D. Power & Associates surveyed 7,469 mobile customers and found a 7% decline in customer satisfaction.
Rael goes on to quote a Techweb article that spells out the ranking of the various players. Of particular interest to me was the fact that AT&T Wireless and Cingular are the second and third worst worst in terms of customer service satisfaction. Of course, AT&T Wireless (my current service provider) has just merged with Cingular, a situation analogous to two mentally deficient redneck first cousins getting married and giving birth to a truly deformed evolutionary throwback of a child.
Having just spent more than a few hours last week dealing with AT&T Wireless’ ever more Byzantine customer service policies that culminated in me throwing a full-bore hissy fit at the local store, I can attest first hand to how bad things are. I would cheerfully switch providers - if anything less brain damaged was available. As mentioned in the article, Sprint is even worse, so they’re out. Verizon, at least around here, only carries phones that are two years or more behind the U.S. state-of-the-art (meaning three to four years behind Asia and Europe). T-Mobile in Indiana doesn’t carry many great phones either, but at least they were willing to let me use a Sony Ericsson P900 on their network, assuming I could bribe someone in the U.S. to sell me one. Unfortunately, their coverage in Indiana is total ass, and I just can’t afford that problem. Nextel only sells phones with features I don’t want or need, with none of the features I do want.
What left me totally gob-smacked was the conversation I had with the T-Mobile guy, when I was complaining to him about the lack of phones with advanced features available in the Indiana market. He explained that he thought it was odd too, at first - and then he realized that customers have such an expectation to get their phones for free that none of the carriers could afford to carry high-end phones. No one would buy them, he explained, and the carriers certainly aren’t going to give those sorts of phones away.
That sounded logical enough - until I started to think about who was responsible for starting the idea that customers should expect to get their phones for free in the first place…
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Doug
Gizmodo : Cingular + AT&T Wireless?: Lots of speculation that Cingular is weighing a merger with or acquisition of competitor AT&T Wireless. While we like the idea of there being more, rather than fewer, carriers (the cut-throat competition keeps prices down), some sort of consolidation in the post-number portability world is simply inevitable, and it’s really just a matter of who and when.
Great Ghu, I hope the hell not! I’m with AT&T Wireless now, and I used to be with Cingular. I left Cingular because of poor service and their complete inability to furnish me with modern phone technology. A Cingular rep actually once tried to convince me that my over two year old phone was in fact the latest phone technology they had available. I’m no big fan of Verizon, either, so I guess I’ll be forced to try Sprint if this merger were to actually happen.
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Doug
Last week, Jay McCarthy pointed to several articles discussing the concept of a “Hive Mind.” On the same day, Jay continued his discussions and observations regarding Libertarian philosophy. This juxtaposition jumped out at me since I’m currently reading The Golden Transcendence, the third novel in John Wright’s “Golden Oecumene” trilogy, which discusses the same topics at length.
In contrast to other utopian views of the future common in much current science fiction, Wright’s vision is of an unabashedly Libertarian human society. Throughout the three books, we get some tantalizing glimpses at the back story of how humanity reached this state through the 10,000+ years between today and the setting of the novels. Along the way we encounter several group mind entities, many of which are remnants of a period of human history where most, if not all humans were part of a planet-spanning group consciousness.
The back story of conflict between these group minds and other, more independent styles of human thought serves to illustrate the central conflict of the books: the conflict between Phaethon, the main character, who wishes to explore the stars and seed colonies of Earth, and society at large, which, though Libertarian in nature, has ossified into a more conservative culture that wants beyond anything to preserve the current utopian status quo. The society of the Golden Ouecemene views itself as the pinnacle of human achievement and freedom - and can not countenance the idea that a rival society might develop around a distant star that might challenge it.
While Wright seems to be very pro-Libertarian in his philosophies, he presents some compelling examples of how even the most personal liberty respecting society can become corrupt. When Phaethon sets out to build a starship capable of carrying out his dreams of exploration and colonization, he is repeatedly oppressed and thwarted by a quasi-governmental group called the College of Hortators. Although the Hortators have no officially sanctioned power in the society of the Golden Oecumene, the enormous societal prestige and wealth allow them incredible societal influence. Indeed, they’re able to eventually hound Phaethon into near ruin by voting to ostracize him from society - with the added stipulation that any member of the Golden Oecumene that so much as speaks to him will share this ostracism. Phaethon has broken no laws, or harmed anyone. His only offense is to hold views that have the potential to reduce the influence and power of the Hortators by changing the status quo - and so they choose to attempt to coerce him into “proper behavior.” This part of the plot of Wright’s novels illustrates one of the primary concerns I’ve always had with Libertarian philosophy.
Wright writing isn’t all that great, but the vision he paints of his future world is breathtaking and deep. The technology is stunning, the culture is challenging, and the philosophy compelling. I’d love to learn more detail about the back story, particularly the origin and development of the hive/group minds. They seem to be a logical extrapolation from today’s technology and societal trends.
I won’t be surprised at all to see a true, technologically-mediated human group consciousness arise within the next century or so. It may take the form of a temporary joining of convenience to directly harness more human brain-power toward solving complex tasks; a straightforward but deeper extrapolation of how many of us use computer-mediated communications today.
Or, it may take a more permanent form, where members subsume their individuality into a single, self-sustaining entity for deeper societal and spiritual reasons. Certainly people claim to desperately fear losing their individuality - but take a look at the groups, clubs and organizations that people already participate in that require them to surrender at least a portion of that individuality in exchange for the benefits of belonging to said group. It happens all them time. I’m sure everyone knows someone who is lost, frightened, and vulnerable when they aren’t part of such a group. Combine modern marketing techniques with the promise that group mind members will be smarter, will always be taken care of, and will never be alone - I think there’ll be many more takers for that than we’d like to acknowledge.
Wright also offers some novel approaches to Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology, macro-scale engineering and functional immortality. Indeed, he explores the functioning behind these technologies in greater depth and detail than nearly any other modern SF writer I’ve read. Perhaps the most interesting an compelling technology he presents involves the creation and functioning of varied human neuroforms, or different, genetically engineered human neurological systems. Such genetic/neurological engineering has become so prevalent in Wright’s society that he goes so far to present his dramatis personae organized according to their neuroforms.
Like any work of science fiction, the Golden Oecumene trilogy is more about the time it was written in than it is about the future. Though not as well written as works like Charlie Stross’ Singularity Sky, Dan Simmons’ Hyperion novels, or Vinge’s Peace War/Realtime stories, the Golden Oecumene has some interesting things to say about today and the future, and does so in a thought-provoking, entertaining way.
