boycott boycottnovell.com
okay, I'll be the first to say that the Novell-Microsoft deal was bad - way bad. and I am boycotting Novell myself. to summarize my perspective on it, I'll simply present Moglen's analysis on the subject, which I consider to be one of the top 5 extemporaneous monologues of all time:
but I also take issue with the opposite extreme that, because Microsoft has done bad things with the community, they are comprehensively unable to do any good things with the community. I know that boycottnovell.com isn't the only crier of this fallacy, but they're the ones who are recently taking pot-shots at my employer - a company that I think has always valued, and continues to value, the success of the community, or else I would not have taken a job with them.
from the inside, I can tell it plainly that Microsoft is simply a sponsor and participant in our 2008 CCA awards. technically, I also happen to know that we did nothing more than pre-load a big list of Codeplex project names into our CCA 08 database. there's no conspiracy to go thru all of our projects and attach Codeplex EULA's to them, or to use our CCA awards to scare the OSS community, as Roy Schestowitz seems to imagine.
Roy's pieces at boycottnovell.com seem to flow from his presumed indisputable inference that the motivations of not only Microsoft, but also anyone who collaborates with Microsoft, are sinister in nature. and he's repeatedly making these near-libelous statements, which boycottnovell.com is enabling, and this is the reason I'm boycotting them in addition to boycotting Novell.
as I preview this post myself, it is comical to contrast Roy's proof-by-verbosity case with Moglen's eloquent and exemplary case against a specific abuse.
Austrians want to be FREE yo
wow - I must be pretty stirred to actually write a blog post again, but here it goes.
I'd call myself an Austrian-leaning student of economics. I got a minor in ECON, but that's pretty much just enough to know that I really don't know very much at all. I hit up RSS feeds from the likes of The Mises Institute to keep myself in Austrian shape.
I've also been a big fan of The Long Tail, both the book and the blog. and Chris Anderson is on the advisory board of my employer, so I respect and subscribe to pretty much all of his ideas.
so when a friend shared a Mises article discussing Anderson's upcoming book - FREE with me, my interest was most assuredly sparked. but as I read, I was disappointed to find Fernando dismissing, whole-sale, Chris's entire analysis.
I actually agree with Fernando's closing thought - "With time rightly identified as a scarce resource, economic theory is needed to understand the interchange process." and I'd be willing to bet Chris agrees as well, since Chris's article plainly states: "There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention [i.e. - time] in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later."
so really, I don't think Chris's latest thesis is contradictory to the "laws" of economics, as Fernando apparently perceives. my conclusion would rather be that new and innovative business models will live and die by how well they apply of the laws of economics to actually-scarce goods in a new "freeconomic" culture.
I think we just have two different-but-overlapping spheres of study - economics and business. Fernando cites Buchanan's explanation of why marginal costs don't determine prices - with which I agree. having not read the cited book, I poked thru it with Google Books for "marginal cost" and came onto a few interesting blurbs:
Instead he [welfare economists] would introduce, as Knight did, the possibility that hunters, generally, may have some non-pecuniary or noneconomic arguments in their utility functions.
emphasis mine. so Buchanan points out that price-marginal cost scenarios tend to rely on non-pecuniary circumstances. does he further go on to refute that those kinds of circumstances occur? nope, not really - it seems he merely elaborates on what kind of analysis is produced by their inclusion.
In resorting to noneconomic arguments in the utility function ... the economist has shifted the whole analysis from a predictive to a nonpredictive and purely logical theory.
I don't think Chris would have any qualms about admitting his idea is a "purely logical theory" rather than a "predictive economic theory", and that's how I look at it as well.
and from the perspective of an entrepreneur hoping to enter the market, do I really care which it is? isn't it enough to observe that prices are converging to marginal cost, that indeed I am able to buy marginal units of storage and process capacity, and that technological advance and competition are driving each other in a cycle?
all this stuff is pretty new - we're not re-hashing scenarios that have been recorded in dusty economics tomes for decades. sure there have always been such things as cross-subsidies and non-pecuniary psychic revenue driving free economies; Chris's theory should at least be respected because it indicates these underlying economic forces emerging in a noticeable change of our culture.
this theory is like an elephant, and we're all a bunch of blind folks getting a feel for different parts of it. some of us might be observing only this or that piece of it and get the wrong impression of what it really is, but it's certainly something - we shouldn't touch a single piece of it and dismiss it altogether.
Re: An Open Letter to the Ron Paul Faithful
I don't want to simply rant or YELL at you, but I'd like to make a few points in response to your pseudo-accusatory remarks directed at Ron Paul supporters.
First, when you say that, " ... these Internet polls are admittedly unscientific and subject to hacking," you are incorrectly implying that other "legit" polls are not so. As I understand it, a "traditional" poll method leading up to primaries is to call 400 land-line numbers of previous primary voters. This alone introduces selection bias which detracts from the "scientific" accuracy of results.
Then, you go on to conclude that, "Our poll was either hacked or the target of a campaign." Now, whether or not your poll was hacked can only be known by CNBC and your web administrators. But since your core business is to deliver accurate financial information to the public, one would hope the security and reliability of your information isn't compromised. To give you the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume that your website is reliable and, also assuming very little "legit" Ron Paul support exists, that the poll was "the target of a campaign." Is this not, for better or worse, the way our political system works? Isn't the primary vote, the presidential vote, and the votes for every other elected position in our government the "target of a campaign?" So clearly, this isn't a sufficient reason to remove the poll, or else you would also have to remove coverage of every vote ever conducted. Your reasoning doesn't add up, so to remove *this* poll is to censor and edit facts based on some other judgment. If the actions of a well-organized campaign of individuals, acting within the rules *you* establish, makes a poll un-scientific, then how much more-so does your action of censorship?
Though your "show of hands" analogy is an admiral objective, you either intentionally refuse or ignorantly fail to see where it breaks down. It seems the poll was meant to be a "show of hands" of a certain or select few people in a certain or select space you consider to be "scientifically" representative. What actually happened is that masses of people from outside your pre-supposed space poured in to demonstrate not just their support they have for one of the options you were offering, but also to indirectly demonstrate the clumsiness and inappropriateness of your selection of individuals and space. Admittedly, this is more a criticism of all of "old media" than your poll specifically, but your poll is just another example of new forces at work in our country, and in your industry specifically. I.e., "old media" used to be the ' ... well-organized and committed "few" ... ' guiding ' ... a system meant to reflect the sentiments of "the many"' but that is changing. You should be worried.
-L
Ron Paul Excluded in Iowa, pt. 2 electric Bugaloo
I try not to post about political subjects, but this debacle is just too ripe and Ron Paul is just too cool for me to follow my normal political blog silence. Give an idiot a microphone, and I'll use it...
Ron Paul is being excluded from an upcoming presidential candidates' forum sponsored by Iowans for Tax Relief and Iowa Christian Alliance. Now, they have every right to exclude anyone they want, and no-one is arguing about that. But, if you know anything about Ron Paul, you're shocked to think that these two organization would exclude Dr. Paul, of all people. Ron Paul's campaign posted the public contact information (taken from their websites) for these two organizations and encouraged supporters to call and question the action. Apparently, the response is overwhelming the organizations, and a local radio show picked up the story and interviewed parties from both Ron Paul's campaign (Kent Snyder), and Ed Failor from Iowans for Tax Relief. The result is a pretty comical display of Failor's total ineptitude in explaining any kind of rational argument.
In response to the simple question: "Why was Ron Paul excluded?" he offers the following answer a number of times: "Because we drew a line of exclusion months ago." But this is nothing more than saying Ron Paul was excluded because he was excluded. It's circular non-sense.
Failor also offers up a dog's breakfast of off-the-cuff trite arguments in a scattershot manner.
Failor also tries to explain the exclusion by saying that they have an obligation to be educational and can't slant or bias their invitations towards people who favor any certain political agenda. But cutting taxes is already a political agenda, and the other candidates invited have pro-tax-cuts agendas, just as Ron Paul does - though none of them have the 100% record he has.
Failor then tries to explain that the exclusion of Ron Paul is done on a basis of credibility and that Ron Paul has less than 1% support in popular polls. However, Tom Tancredo consistently scores lower than Ron Paul and he was invited. In addition, Ron Paul's rise in internet popularity is nothing less than meteoric. http://www.pollingreport.com/wh08rep.htm
Failor says that they can't alter their lineup for logistical reasons. But he also says they are non-partisan and so they have to invite all candidates - not just Republicans - and they have to account for the possibility that ALL invitees could attend. If that's the case, then clearly, the event could have accommodated many more speakers - the Democrats who were invited but refused.
Failor tries to say that because they have to put on events that are reflective of what their members want to see, and because only a tiny portion of the response they've gotten has been from Iowans, that they were correct in their exclusion of Ron Paul. But Ron Paul's national popularity does not imply un-popularity in Iowa. It's a logical fallacy, and it doesn't prove anything.
Failor also tries to say that Ron Paul's supporters exhibiting "fringe-type" behavior shows that Ron Paul is not a serious candidate. He says supporters have called his home phone at all hours and said rude things to his family. But Snyder explains that the campaign only published the already-public contact information from the two groups' websites, and nothing more. Ron Paul's campaign is every bit as credible, based on its behavior, as any other candidate.
It seems to me this organization should have invited Dr. Paul first and foremost among all candidates, or at least that they should have jumped on the opportunity to get such a great speaker added to their forum. Instead, they've decided to be completely inflexible for a bunch of poor reasons. That's their prerogative, I suppose.
Continuous Integration
This is another Agile/XP practice with which I'm fairly happy; although I haven't yet seen it live up to its full potential, that potential is great enough to make me a believer.
Continuous Integration is a process that completely builds and tests code frequently. The "process" usually takes the form of a dedicated server running special software that continuously performs a series of tasks similar to the following:
(though apparently this process can be un-automated by using a rubber chicken)
1. Perform an update from the code repository
2. If changes are found, run a build (compile, test) of the latest code
3. a) If successful, package the latest code for deployment or b) If failure, report failure
Although I'm a fan of CI, it seems to be a more complicated practice than TDD. Though my experience may be tainted by bad hardware + software on which our CI depends.
CI requires that you maintain an automated build script. This isn't a tall order amongst Java and other compiled-language developers since projects of any moderate size need an automated build to simply compile and to separate source code from compiled code.
Interpreted languages are a bit different, though, in that they can usually be tested immediately upon edit. As such, automated build scripts are a bit more un-common for software written in interpreted languages. But most interpreted language software projects of any moderate size do have a consistent process for deployment, even if it's as simple as: make db changes, move files - and most interpreted languages have builders to automated this consistent process. In PHP, I've been looking at Phing.
CI is really most helpful when the build process includes a solid test suite. (Defining "solid test suite" is an exercise left to the reader.) With a solid test suite, CI can help you catch bugs earlier than usual because it typically re-runs all those tests after every check-in.
In addition, CI gives creates a vast sequence of clean builds similar to the "nightly builds" you hear about in open-source projects - a finalized packaged release of the project ready for deployment.
Finally, if you ensure that your CI platform replicates your target production platform(s), you can use it as a reliable measure of your project's production-platform readiness. This can be a double-edged sword, however - if your CI platform is different than your target production platform, it can give you false confidence of production-readiness, and even cause problems that aren't caught until later in QA or worse, actual production.
As with TDD, the benefits are not without drawbacks and you should weigh them for your own project before deciding if/which/how Agile practices are adopted. CI has the above benefits, but it is also a fairly complicated development platform for which engineers will be primarily responsible - it sometimes requires a good deal of time and attention to keep going. You still have to judge for yourself if it fits into your project, goals, and style.
