No, the opposite. Open. If I can share the software with my friends, and only I can decide who my friends are, then I am open to distribute the software to anybody. Maybe I have decided to be a friend to the whole world.
"What makes you think I'm claiming I'm not responsible for my own actions?"
Whoa, settle down there, cowboy. Who said anything about you? I referred to the people who "dreamed up" the no-free-will concept. Who most certainly were NOT you.
There is already something of an industry-wide standard for version numbers, and it fits with your definition pretty closely. It's just that many don't follow it. Including outfits like Mozilla, in recent years.
The standard calls for major and minor version numbers, followed (optionally) by a build or release number. E.g., 2.3.456.
Version 1.0 is supposed to be the initial, stable, core release, just as you say. But some groups (like Mozilla) insist on jumping the major version for relatively minor reasons, and others seem to get stuck at version 0.5 forever. But that's not because they can't agree on a standard. It's because they just don't follow it.
"How shall I make it hard for people to use Excel for just about anything."
I thought Microsoft did a pretty good job of that already.
Seriously... when Windows was still relatively new, 1-2-3 for Windows was pretty good, and there were some other very good spreadsheet programs available (sadly, absent from Wikipedia's spreadsheet history page). Then people started to actually use Microsoft Excel, which they greatly improved and stuck in their Office suite. But it wasn't that their product was better; they just had the OS and "Office" advantage, which pretty much guaranteed them market share.
"No the freedom being being restricted here is purely at the commerce level."
No, it isn't.
One person's pornography is another person's art. And vice versa. Art is a matter of free speech.
The only way you can get around that conundrum is to dream up some kind of fantasyland pornography that has no artistic merit to anybody, under any circumstances, ever.
Which is more-or-less the U.S. standard. It is only "obscene" if it has no artistic merit. Of course, again "artistic merit" is in the eyes of the beholder, to that is necessarily a pretty loose standard.
Forgot to throw in: violation of (1) or (2) would be a felony, carrying a sentence with real teeth. Like 10 years in prison. And not some country-club prison, either: an actual maximum-security facility.
"The legislation isn't even set up in a paranoid or ignorant fashion...it's set up to impose insane penalties on anyone who dares to violate IP laws."
But that is just a symptom of the underlying problem... our whole lobbying setup.
In order to fix it, we need to separate big money from politics. Period. It's not as difficult to do (in principle) as it seems. Although it may not be easy in practice.
If I could have it my way, I would amend the Constitution so that thse things are baked in:
(1) No elected official can accept any money, goods, or perks from anyone during their course of their term, except for the salary and benefits paid them by the government.
(2) The above won't do any good without campaign reform. Therefore: (A) NOBODY can contribute to political campaigns except individual citizens who are eligible to vote, and (B) to eliminate domination by the rich, such contribution from any individual will be capped at no more than 3% of the median American income according to the last census.
(3) End the Fed. The government's ability to print money at will via the Fed, with no standard to back it up, is one of the most baneful developments of our times. It MUST go.
"Then they'll remove the option to run any native (non-script) code that does not have an approved digital signature. That will eliminate option A."
Sure. That will eliminate it... for about a week. Until someone cracks that, too (if it hasn't already been).
"Option B, in their eyes, has been proven to be non-viable especially since some of the largest Office-to-OO conversion projects have recently failed."
Yeah, but that's a large part of the point here. "Their eyes" are not necessarily seeing very clearly. If they don't understand how much market share they have lost to FREE software, then they're stumbling in the dark.
Which boils down to: who cares much about "their eyes"? The simple fact is that there have been a large number of such conversions "behind the scenes" which don't make the press and aren't "announced" to Microsoft.
(I should add that the just-released new version of Libre Office addresses most of those former compatibility issues with Office products.)
In the long run, what this amounts to is Microsoft being out of touch with the real market, and their customers. They aren't the giant in the room anymore.
"install it in a virtual machine, run it from there, this is lame."
I would be inclined to go with one of 2 "solutions":
(A) Use a software crack. What the hell. I paid for it, it's mine, I'll do what I want with it.
(B) The choice I would more likely make: go with Open Office or Libre Office.
It's really not much of a contest, is it? I've been using Open Office and Libre Office for more than 10 years now, precisely because of this kind of horseshit from Microsoft.
"So what probably happens in the cases you're talking about it is that some indivisible operation that is supposed to take only a short time actually ends up taking a long time (e.g. opening a file on a CDROM should only take a few 10s of milliseconds, but if the system hits a bad block it will repeatedly spin the disc down, back up, and retry, an operation that can take over a minute), and therefore the progress indicator is suddenly wrong *but the system has no way to know it until the operation completes"
It would be nice if that were true, but it's not. At least in some cases.
I have seen many situations in which the application has plenty of opportunity to update progress, but doesn't change the estimated time if things slow down. That's just plain doing it wrong.
"Consider this: Once you've put progress on a bar, you can't take it off. Suppose you start a process that should take 20 minutes, and do the first 5 minutes, progress is now at 25%. But then, partway through, something unexpected happens and you realize the process is actually going to take 40 minutes. You can't take the progress "back" now, that would disorient the user. So you have to rescale the remainder of the bar."
But that's not what this person's app did. Whoever wrote their progress bar did it wrong.
The problem with many of these progress indicators is that they only calculate the estimated time once. Then if the app gets stuck or slows down at, say, 75%, it might say "about one minute" for 10 minutes. But that should never happen.
Instead, estimated remaining time -- when it is appropriate, which is a lot less often than it is actually used -- should be updated right along with the % progress. So yeah, as you say, if done properly, it can start out at 5 minutes and creep up to 20 or whatever. But it should not just freeze at some time and stay there a while. If it's going to do that, the app should probably not be trying to estimate remaining time at all.
"Yes, the concept of 'Cybespace' is quite stupid."
No, it isn't. The idea that the Internet is "cyberspace" is stupid. But those are two different things.
But what really gets me is that I don't know ANYBODY who really has that idea in their heads... except maybe Lind himself. There is no reason to rail against this idea unless you think it's prevalent... and I don't think it is. Methinks Lind is looking more in a mirror than out the window.
"The "smart autofill" function is effectively magic; that wasn't added in until at least 2010. If you were hanging out on CS1 or CS2 that would be an easy incentive to upgrade."
But other products do the same thing, cheaper. Check out Xara for instance. It also does it faster.
"95% of users of Photoshop didn't pay for it either."
Maybe, but don't get cause and effect reversed.
Research over the last decade and a half has consistently shown that the majority of people who infringe software copyright do it precisely because they can't afford the high prices.
Those and similar studies have shown that when software products are offered at prices people feel are reasonable, more people buy and fewer people copy.
There is simply no factual basis for the idea that high prices are caused by copyright infringement. Statistics have consistently shown that it is the other way around.
Indeed. I have lived near the west coast and the east coast of the U.S., and in between. In the east, at least where I was, electricity cost me more than 6 times what it cost me in the west.
"And yes, growing up in Texas, we celebrated Cinco de Mayo, even if we didn't officially close on those days."
I think you have your head stuck in Texas. Because:
1. BFD. People near the northern borders recognize Cinco de Mayo, too. But that's a far cry from making it a Federal holiday.
2. I doubt it's as "international" as you say. I used to live in Texas. Including summer. And I never heard of Juneteenth until just now. I had to look it up on Wikipedia.
First, whether it is automated has absolutely nothing to do with motives behind what it is automated to do. I should know; I've done plenty of automation myself.
Second, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that automation would take it down. On what basis? There are hundreds if not thousands of videos of people shooting firearms on YouTube.
And if it was simply a matter of keywords triggering a takedown, it's still a dick move.
Slashdot Mirror
"So.. closed source, then."
No, the opposite. Open. If I can share the software with my friends, and only I can decide who my friends are, then I am open to distribute the software to anybody. Maybe I have decided to be a friend to the whole world.
"I have a hard time believing that porn really constitutes speech, free or otherwise."
But many other people have no such difficulty. Which is exactly the point, and why the U.S. law is the way it is.
"What makes you think I'm claiming I'm not responsible for my own actions?"
Whoa, settle down there, cowboy. Who said anything about you? I referred to the people who "dreamed up" the no-free-will concept. Who most certainly were NOT you.
"No. 2 in your list is a perfect opening for bundling."
No, you weren't paying attention. The ONLY money they'd be able to accept is INDIVIDUAL donations. Bundling doesn't apply.
"Let's get together on this, open source nerds."
There is already something of an industry-wide standard for version numbers, and it fits with your definition pretty closely. It's just that many don't follow it. Including outfits like Mozilla, in recent years.
The standard calls for major and minor version numbers, followed (optionally) by a build or release number. E.g., 2.3.456.
Version 1.0 is supposed to be the initial, stable, core release, just as you say. But some groups (like Mozilla) insist on jumping the major version for relatively minor reasons, and others seem to get stuck at version 0.5 forever. But that's not because they can't agree on a standard. It's because they just don't follow it.
"How shall I make it hard for people to use Excel for just about anything."
I thought Microsoft did a pretty good job of that already.
Seriously... when Windows was still relatively new, 1-2-3 for Windows was pretty good, and there were some other very good spreadsheet programs available (sadly, absent from Wikipedia's spreadsheet history page). Then people started to actually use Microsoft Excel, which they greatly improved and stuck in their Office suite. But it wasn't that their product was better; they just had the OS and "Office" advantage, which pretty much guaranteed them market share.
"No the freedom being being restricted here is purely at the commerce level."
No, it isn't.
One person's pornography is another person's art. And vice versa. Art is a matter of free speech.
The only way you can get around that conundrum is to dream up some kind of fantasyland pornography that has no artistic merit to anybody, under any circumstances, ever.
Which is more-or-less the U.S. standard. It is only "obscene" if it has no artistic merit. Of course, again "artistic merit" is in the eyes of the beholder, to that is necessarily a pretty loose standard.
"But there is no God, and there is no free will."
So something forced you to post those words? Fate, karma, predestination?
That whole "there is no free will" philosophy was dreamed up by people who refuse to be responsible for their own actions.
Forgot to throw in: violation of (1) or (2) would be a felony, carrying a sentence with real teeth. Like 10 years in prison. And not some country-club prison, either: an actual maximum-security facility.
"The legislation isn't even set up in a paranoid or ignorant fashion...it's set up to impose insane penalties on anyone who dares to violate IP laws."
But that is just a symptom of the underlying problem... our whole lobbying setup.
In order to fix it, we need to separate big money from politics. Period. It's not as difficult to do (in principle) as it seems. Although it may not be easy in practice.
If I could have it my way, I would amend the Constitution so that thse things are baked in:
(1) No elected official can accept any money, goods, or perks from anyone during their course of their term, except for the salary and benefits paid them by the government.
(2) The above won't do any good without campaign reform. Therefore: (A) NOBODY can contribute to political campaigns except individual citizens who are eligible to vote, and (B) to eliminate domination by the rich, such contribution from any individual will be capped at no more than 3% of the median American income according to the last census.
(3) End the Fed. The government's ability to print money at will via the Fed, with no standard to back it up, is one of the most baneful developments of our times. It MUST go.
There. Fixed that for you.
"Then they'll remove the option to run any native (non-script) code that does not have an approved digital signature. That will eliminate option A."
Sure. That will eliminate it... for about a week. Until someone cracks that, too (if it hasn't already been).
"Option B, in their eyes, has been proven to be non-viable especially since some of the largest Office-to-OO conversion projects have recently failed."
Yeah, but that's a large part of the point here. "Their eyes" are not necessarily seeing very clearly. If they don't understand how much market share they have lost to FREE software, then they're stumbling in the dark.
Which boils down to: who cares much about "their eyes"? The simple fact is that there have been a large number of such conversions "behind the scenes" which don't make the press and aren't "announced" to Microsoft.
(I should add that the just-released new version of Libre Office addresses most of those former compatibility issues with Office products.)
In the long run, what this amounts to is Microsoft being out of touch with the real market, and their customers. They aren't the giant in the room anymore.
"install it in a virtual machine, run it from there, this is lame."
I would be inclined to go with one of 2 "solutions":
(A) Use a software crack. What the hell. I paid for it, it's mine, I'll do what I want with it.
(B) The choice I would more likely make: go with Open Office or Libre Office.
It's really not much of a contest, is it? I've been using Open Office and Libre Office for more than 10 years now, precisely because of this kind of horseshit from Microsoft.
"So what probably happens in the cases you're talking about it is that some indivisible operation that is supposed to take only a short time actually ends up taking a long time (e.g. opening a file on a CDROM should only take a few 10s of milliseconds, but if the system hits a bad block it will repeatedly spin the disc down, back up, and retry, an operation that can take over a minute), and therefore the progress indicator is suddenly wrong *but the system has no way to know it until the operation completes"
It would be nice if that were true, but it's not. At least in some cases.
I have seen many situations in which the application has plenty of opportunity to update progress, but doesn't change the estimated time if things slow down. That's just plain doing it wrong.
"Consider this: Once you've put progress on a bar, you can't take it off. Suppose you start a process that should take 20 minutes, and do the first 5 minutes, progress is now at 25%. But then, partway through, something unexpected happens and you realize the process is actually going to take 40 minutes. You can't take the progress "back" now, that would disorient the user. So you have to rescale the remainder of the bar."
But that's not what this person's app did. Whoever wrote their progress bar did it wrong.
The problem with many of these progress indicators is that they only calculate the estimated time once. Then if the app gets stuck or slows down at, say, 75%, it might say "about one minute" for 10 minutes. But that should never happen.
Instead, estimated remaining time -- when it is appropriate, which is a lot less often than it is actually used -- should be updated right along with the % progress. So yeah, as you say, if done properly, it can start out at 5 minutes and creep up to 20 or whatever. But it should not just freeze at some time and stay there a while. If it's going to do that, the app should probably not be trying to estimate remaining time at all.
"Yes, the concept of 'Cybespace' is quite stupid."
No, it isn't. The idea that the Internet is "cyberspace" is stupid. But those are two different things.
But what really gets me is that I don't know ANYBODY who really has that idea in their heads... except maybe Lind himself. There is no reason to rail against this idea unless you think it's prevalent... and I don't think it is. Methinks Lind is looking more in a mirror than out the window.
"The "smart autofill" function is effectively magic; that wasn't added in until at least 2010. If you were hanging out on CS1 or CS2 that would be an easy incentive to upgrade."
But other products do the same thing, cheaper. Check out Xara for instance. It also does it faster.
"Actiblizzard is a private company and has every right to charge for World of Wharrgarbl in different countries!"
They probably do have that right. It often costs more to operate overseas than it does at home. But that doesn't explain gouging.
"95% of users of Photoshop didn't pay for it either."
Maybe, but don't get cause and effect reversed.
Research over the last decade and a half has consistently shown that the majority of people who infringe software copyright do it precisely because they can't afford the high prices.
Those and similar studies have shown that when software products are offered at prices people feel are reasonable, more people buy and fewer people copy.
There is simply no factual basis for the idea that high prices are caused by copyright infringement. Statistics have consistently shown that it is the other way around.
"As always, location is key."
Indeed. I have lived near the west coast and the east coast of the U.S., and in between. In the east, at least where I was, electricity cost me more than 6 times what it cost me in the west.
No, Goofy and Daffy.
Or maybe... Goofy and Minnie.
But having said that:
For 2013, Russia has pledged to spend more than 7 times NASA's budget on space.
What is our government doing?
"Wikipedia mentioned it as international. White people in Texas went out of their way to ignore it in Texas."
Okay. Point conceded. Since I lived in a predominantly (one might say "ostentatiously") white community, they might well have been ignoring it.
"Taking down videos that receive shitload of flagging is automated. It is a crappy system, but it saves Google money and hassle."
Well, that's true. But people who flag videos for dumb reasons should be taken out and sh... wait, never mind.
"And yes, growing up in Texas, we celebrated Cinco de Mayo, even if we didn't officially close on those days."
I think you have your head stuck in Texas. Because:
1. BFD. People near the northern borders recognize Cinco de Mayo, too. But that's a far cry from making it a Federal holiday.
2. I doubt it's as "international" as you say. I used to live in Texas. Including summer. And I never heard of Juneteenth until just now. I had to look it up on Wikipedia.
"There are no motives. Its all automated."
First, whether it is automated has absolutely nothing to do with motives behind what it is automated to do. I should know; I've done plenty of automation myself.
Second, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that automation would take it down. On what basis? There are hundreds if not thousands of videos of people shooting firearms on YouTube.
And if it was simply a matter of keywords triggering a takedown, it's still a dick move.