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in reply to Re^2: Please remember that geeks have their own social mores.
in thread Please remember that geeks have their own social mores.

Hear, hear.

Cooperative development gave us the Lada and Trabant.

Competition gave us Toyota, Chrysler, VWAudi, Renault, Fiat, Kia ...


Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
  • Comment on Re^3: Please remember that geeks have their own social mores.

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Re^4: Please remember that geeks have their own social mores.
by Gavin (Archbishop) on Mar 30, 2008 at 15:03 UTC
    But hopefully cooperative development will give us "The Semantic Web".

      Somehow I seriously doubt it.

      I cannot see Intel very obligingly tagging their chip specs with

      <chip type='xyz' bus-speed='4GHz' performance='3.2 MIPS' />

      so that Motorola can easily locate that information for comparison with their similar chip that has a 'effective performance' of '3.5 MIPS'.

      Call me a semantic web skeptic, but I see three problems with it:

      • Companies and organisations (and individuals), will only tag what they want to tag.
      • Tags are as ambiguous as natural langauge.

        Unless you can program a computer to 'read' through all your web content and tag it, where is the ROI that will encourage companies to pay humans to do the job?

        The tag <BUG..../> could relate to computer programming, entomology, or a teenager angst site?

      • The spammers will start putting tags for everything in their pages advertising Via....

      If some organisation, say CERN, were to propose some "standard" for semantic tagging, then it would inevitably be a design-by-commitee thing so complex and unituative that noone would use it.

      The French would propose a "Toubon Laws" alternative ("économie et culture, même combat").

      Microsoft would extend it to support Silverlight. Adobe would (incompatibly) extend it to support Flash.

      The 'patent sponge' holding companies will start patenting every spelling (and misspelling, and aLt3Rn7iV3 aRraNGm3nt of letters) and sit back waiting for someone to use them as a tag.

      The US government will start reserving certain words for "security purposes only".

      The Chinese Government will start blocking any site that refers to Beijing as Peking.

      The UK government? They'll wait to see what the rest of the world does. Then commission a PPI to develop a comprehensive solution which will go 10 years and £2 billion over budget before being quietly cancelled.

      And then there will be the open source initative which will cobble together 17 SourceForge projects and wikipedia under a GNU 7 licence to ensure free access to information for all. Provided you run Linux or BSD, know how to use a compiler, don't mind spending your weekends compiling 17 disparate and incompatible packages, one of which will have a major release or unavoidable security patch every weekend of the year (except Thanksgiving weekend).

      Meanwhile Google will solve the problem, and make 2 cents on every tag followed or located by anyone, anywhere on the planet.


      Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
      "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
      In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
Re^4: Please remember that geeks have their own social mores.
by shmem (Chancellor) on Mar 30, 2008 at 18:04 UTC
    Cooperative development gave us the Lada and Trabant.

    Not too bad cars those, not too bad... specially the Lada_Niva (based on the old Shiguli), of which a fleet of 45 vehicles serviced the Euro Tunnel construction.

    But has their development really been cooperative? Not mandated, somehow?

    Competition gave us Toyota, Chrysler, VWAudi, Renault, Fiat, Kia ...

    ...and myriads of incompatible spare parts ;-)

    Thinking about that... cooperation (by necessity) made British Rail possible, imposed competition destroyed it... (not yet ;-)

    update: thinking about that again - privatizing public matters works as well as privatizing the republic (or the monetary system - see the FED) and equally well as creating private luxury by means of common effort...

    --shmem

    _($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                                  /\_¯/(q    /
    ----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
    ");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}
Re^4: Please remember that geeks have their own social mores.
by educated_foo (Vicar) on Mar 30, 2008 at 18:20 UTC
    "omg commies!" is *so* 80s...
        Lather rinse
        Arguments with the "geroff ma wimmin!" or Ayn Rand faction of the libertarian party are usually tedious, but... Chrysler was a pretty bad example to choose -- who buys one of those nowadays? American car companies are deservedly near bankruptcy. Toyota's a better example, but I attribute their quality (and Honda's) to a corporate culture that has more to do with working for the common good than Rugged Individualism and Free Markets.
Re^4: Please remember that geeks have their own social mores.
by zby (Vicar) on Oct 24, 2008 at 09:37 UTC
    I did not know that Toyota was build by one genius ingineer. I thought the cars are build by large teams of people and companies cooperating with each other.
        In context of my assertion that:
        Cooperation beats individual excellence. The culture that you describe here, with the prise for individual geniuses and disregard for social rules, sounds like some Wild West culture for 'real men' and I'll bet it will go away in much similar way as we conquer the new frontier of cyberspace.
        You wrote:
        Cooperative development gave us the Lada and Trabant. Competition gave us Toyota, ...
        I read it that you contrast the cooperative production of Lada with the competetive production of Toyota as if there was no cooperation in the Toyota production process.

        Eventually I do agree that my first statement was rather empty of meaning - you need both cooperation and competition in complex patterns.