The GPLv2 says you can redistribute code released under GPLv2 under GPLv2 or later. Linus can release it under v3 if he wants to. He has chosen not to.
Also, religion != race. Just thought you might wanna know...
I am married to an Iranian refugee with blond hair and green eyes. She is the child of two Muslims, although she is not religious herself.
In other words, I know.
However, the subtext in American public discourse associates Muslim terrorists with Arabs, the parent was clearly making a similar association, and you know it.
Anything that helps keep me safe against terrorism is alright in my book.
Hell no. Have you read what this system does? It reads (and presumably records) every license plate number driving on city roads. I think the risks here are too obvious for me to have to detail.
I will take freedom and risk over a police state and big brother any day.
It didn't take him a few hours to get it working, it took him a few hours to write another program that does the same thing. That means that, polish aside, the program that the developer was trying to charge for was probably not worth the asking price, yet people buy it anyway because it looks good. The point being, people pay bucks for stuff with animation, not stuff that does stuff, and that is f'ed up.
Stick out your arm, just do it. Now hold it there for 5 minutes. Do you start to feel a little tired? Now leave it out there for another 10 minutes, see how good you feel.
Now imagine doing that straight through an 8-hour work day.
I think you just found the solution to the nation's obesity problem. And we would all have sexy shoulders, too.
Since I said the mouse needed to be seriously re-examined as the primary device for interacting with the user-interface (see my previous entry), it's only fair that I give an example of a better way to do it. In this entry I explore one possible way to minimally change the interface to almost remove the mouse entirely, without increasing the difficulty of learning how to use software.
(Note: Click on Images for a full-size view.)
Original OOo Screenshot
(Here we have an unaltered screenshot of the experimental subject.)
First step: rip out essentially all of the traditional controls. That means drop-downs, buttons, and menus. Notable exceptions include the scroll bars and status bar (both of which provide excellent and frequently needed feedback like what the open file is, and where in the document the user is). Also, I'm going to take some liberties with the status bar to pull out some of the more cryptic (and rarely referenced) information in favor of somewhat more relevant data.
Original OOo Screenshot
(The closest thing to a decapitation of an application you'll see.)
Second step: sit a user down (possibly with a close supply of anti-anxiety medication for those less comfortable with change), and tell them that if they want to "Control" the application, they need to press the "Control" key (great name for that key, huh?). When they do, overlay the application window with something like the following:
Design proposal for mouseless GUI
(Okay, so I'm not a graphic designer, but I bet there are a few around who could pretty this up.)
Notes on the sketch: (1) Yes, this is a lot few functions than OpenOffice writer has. I'm just trying to present proof that all the icons and the most used part of the menu can readily be represented this way. Comprehensive feature lists are better represented by my menu-replacement sketch below. However, the idea is that that should be rarely needed. If it's used with any frequency, the application designer anticipated the user needs poorly. (2) I know some of the key-bindings are less than intuitive. I blame the 3am restarting of the whole design thanks to a bug that trashed my last design (followed by the same bug killing it a second time at 6am).
Now, there are some subtleties to the design. First, there could be two ways to access the dialog--tapping control, alt, or whatever could toggle the reference screen on until the modifier is tapped again, or, if the user holds down one of those modifiers, the reference screen disappears as soon as it's released. This makes the use of the control key much more accessible for those of us who haven't moved it from it's instant-carpel-tunnel-inducing location at the very edge of what an average-sized hand can reach.
Next, commands can be put in bold if they've been used recently. (The definition of "recently" was the subject of extensive debate when I was working with highlighting recently changed items in my last project. I'll leave "recent" undefined for lack of true resolution of that question for me.) Microsoft's "adaptive" menu system (also known as "Help! Where did half my menu go?") tries to address the same problem of adapting to user's usage patterns. This, however, is a much better way to speed finding of common commands. It doesn't shuffle items around or hide them, (both of which confound the user's ability to memorize the interface and wreaks havoc on users trying to use someone else's copy of a program).
Now, imagine the user's thought sequence as they try to enter a command. "Hm. I need to save. Hit 'Control,' save... ah, 's.'" Imagine that a few dozen times, and it starts to sound a lot like studying flashcards. For free, just by using the interface! Within weeks (assuming fairly sporadic usage), a user has memorized the shortcuts to all their common commands, obviating even looking as they execute them. Daily users could be fully proficient in even uncommonly-used combinations within days, with the pop-up
I had no problems reading it, but since you can't seem to get to it, here is the text:
Now, I am by no means hoping to abolish the mouse. Its price to performance ratio is unmatched, and the best alternative pointing device (the tablet) can't be found for much less than an order of magnitude greater expense: hard to justify for the relatively small performance edge it offers. What I do wish to decry is the enormous reliance on the mouse to cover every possible user interface situation, failing to take advantage of other, better designs. Years of lazy design and low opinions of the user's desire (even ability) to learn have left us with a constant testing of Fitts' Law for such trivial tasks as saving, broken paradigms (what about a real-world button relates to replacing an old document irrevocably with the current one?), and a user experience that is more patronizing than productive.
Let's start with a few key ideas about interface devices. The keyboard is quantized (that is, it consists of discrete units of input, like a piano's notes), while the mouse is continuous (its input ranges without breaks across the entire screen, like the strings of a violin which cover every possible pitch in their range).
Now, think about the actions you perform on your computer in a given day. You type, save, open, close, select, resize, navigate, refresh, cancel, approve, and perform scores of other actions.
Now divide the tasks into groups. Which ones consist of discrete actions, and which require fine, continuous control? I'll be generous (and rude to my fellow console text editors--I know vi/emacs can both comfortably rely on keyboard input only) and say text selection and input positioning, color selection, drawing, and most (spatial) navigation is most naturally, perhaps even most effectively, performed with a continuous input device such as a mouse.
Now, for the discrete actions: type, save, open, close, refresh, cancel, approve, and most of the other basic actions. In fact, I'd say many users could count scores of daily activities that are discrete, whereas breaking a dozen continuous actions would be a challenge. (Let's put aside all window management like switching between windows, resizing them, moving them, and so on. These mostly seem continuous but I'll explain in a later post why they're usually not.)
Now, which of those actions are new users taught to do with the discrete input device? Typing.
Now, advanced users have memorized ways to do a large fraction of (or, if they're fanatical, all) discrete actions with their discrete-input device. If you're looking for evidence of the superiority of a keyboard over a mouse in most situations, look at these users. There is a strong correlation between how much time a person uses computers (especially professionally) and how much they switch away from the mouse whenever readily possible. I challenge you to find a hundredth as many IT professionals who prefer the mouse as who prefer the keyboard when either will perform a given action.
Further advantage of a keyboard over the mouse lies in "muscle memory." (For those who might not be familiar with the term, it's the re-enforced skill of repeated actions--and the reason we can speak, write, type, and a host of other skills, without having to consciously perform every muscle contraction in careful coordination.) This, however, isn't because it's quantized, but rather because our position on the keyboard is generally absolute, whereas whenever we grab the mouse the cursor could be anywhere. In fact, there are only five pixels we can hit with our eyes closed--the one we're on plus the four corners. That's less than 1/150,000th of the median computer screen's real estate that can be associated with muscle memory. The keyboard, on the other hand, can be entirely memorized (or close to it) in the course of general computer use. With combinations of control, alt, and shift, and even the more modestly skilled typists have literally hundreds of key combinat
Its not really about consumers. The customers that this system sells to are people who have computers that they let other people use, such as companies or governments. This offers them protection against stupid/disgruntled employees. You will note in the article, the attack is targeted at controlled network access, such as protected networks that you find in say, a bank.
If you see this stuff in your commercial home system, it is mostly because, having spent the money to develop this technology for big customers, manufactures can sell the same machine to you and the big customers without having to change their assembly lines. Of course, the people in marketing try to make it sound interesting to consumers, but it isn't.
Ubuntu, for all the good work that they have done to promote Linux to the world, remains little more than Debian sid with bug fixes and a consistent theme, respun every 6 months. Those elitist geeks you so lightly dismiss built Ubuntu. Cannonical markets it. This relationship continues to this day, and this is why Debian will probably outlive Ubuntu.
If irregular releases really distressed people, Microsoft would have regular releases. I would argue that most people prefer the rock solid stability of Debian to a regular release cycle. That is why Mandrake, the Ubuntu of 5 years ago, did not become the wave of today: too buggy. Again, just as RedHat outlived Mandrake, Debian will outlive Ubuntu. (and yes, Ubuntu is buggy compared to Debian)
Oh, and I should also mention that if you take the time to ask questions on debian mailing lists (not the dev lists, of course) and you are polite, you will find that those "elitist geeks" take the time to help even the "lowly noobs".
"only 14 percent believe humans evolved without divine involvement."
You do of course realize that one can both believe that the theory of evolution is 100% correct and also believe that God created this process? I am not saying that we should teach that God/god/goddess/gods/goddesses directed evolution, just that the numbers you present are framed. After all, only atheists believe that humans evolved with no divine involvement at any juncture. I would really like to know which opinion polls the article refers to and how they were conducted, because I don't believe that these statistics reflect what Americans actually think.
I was an army officer until about a year ago. I never met an officer with a facebook account. Never even heard about facebook until I started retraining myself for civilian jobs. I therefore doubt that "officers use facebook" factored into the decision, although my evidence is anecdotal and starting to be a tad dated.
When I was 17 and I stole a keg off of my neighbor's front porch and got caught (because later that evening I passed out in his yard), I got charged with larceny. He got his keg back. I think the this kid should receive the same treatment that my neighbor did.
He was gracious enough to talk the DA into dropping the charge, by the way.
I am a small, independent web developer. I am glad that this is out so that I can finally verify that my pages render properly in Safari without having to track down somebody with a Mac. Sure, Safari is based on khtml like konqueror, but this release will still help me get that "warm and fuzzy" feeling of knowing that I did the job right.
It doesn't take much of gun expertise to know that NATO ammo doesn't go into an AK-47
When I was in the Army I was stationed at a training center as the Opposing Forces (during wargames we played the bad guys) and we had AKs. They took standard A059 ammunition; that is, the same 5.56mm stuff we put in the M16s and M4s. Looking at the wikipedia page for AK-47s, I see that these weapons are currently available on the open market from Bulgaria and Hungary. IIRC, we bought ours from Bulgaria.
That is why wikipedia requires sources, not reasoning.
I am not sure that I would call knoppix a lite distro. SLAX really is lite, and it has a subproject devoted to USB stick installs, although AFAIK nobody sells it like that.
It also has a bunch of tools devoted to security, but IMHO reinstalling XP from your system restore disks is easier and usually faster and more reliable than trying to "clean" a compromised PC.
MS would do better to stop piracy than to stop "clone products".
Every box running pirated copy of Windows is a box that doesn't have Linux (or any other OS) that would otherwise. Every competing product (what they are calling clone products here) that is running on a box is market- and mindshare taken from MS products. Therefore, I don't think that stopping piracy is in their interest, but stopping competing products is in their interest, hence the decision to start another FUD campaign in which they mention by name the two products that do the most to ease the Windows to Linux transition (openoffice and wine, which also means cxoffice and cedega).
Graying, shrinking Europe? The EU is expanding, the economy is on the rise in almost every sector in almost every member country (you've heard of the Irish Tiger?), and let's not forget that there are over 450 million of them.
By contrast, as an American living in Europe, I have watched the buying power of my savings in USD drop by 40% vs. the Euro since 2001.
At least someone's working on a project that's beneficial to growing metropolises (metropolii?)
France makes a train going 350mph. What does the US make as it's engineering masterpiece? The H3... This is useless for intra-city travel. The only stretches of track that are going to be capable of carrying trains like this are long ones between major cities with no intermediary stops, not to mention the amount of distance you need to get up to speed and slow down. This will be used for Paris-Marseille and nothing shorter. In most cases, these high-speed trains cannot even utilize the same track as the medium and short range trains; they have to build a completely separate infrastructure to support the TGV, ICE, or what have you. Basically, they are targeting the market space currently occupied by short distance airlines, with business travelers as their primary target audience.
That is actually a major problem across western Europe right now. Train companies are slowly abandoning medium and short range stretches in favor of the more lucrative business traveler market, and investment in the medium and short range track and trains is languishing, resulting in deteriorating quality and frequency of service. As such, people are forced from the trains to private cars, which bring all the problems of pollution and urban sprawl that we Americans know so well. Furthermore, at these speeds trains do not run much more energy efficiently than planes either.
That is what happens when you privatize things that should be public services.
1. You missed my point. We will not see a CIV5 because not very many people want CIV5. The idea is played. It has nothing to do with piracy, IMHO.
2. I am not judging by how pretty the screen shots are. From the screenshots and the forum discussions, the look like high-graphic clones of a lot of games in debian reops (ie, prettier versions). If I were judging by the screenshots alone, your games would win.
I think that the fact that these games are dying has more to do with the fact that not enough people want them than to piracy. You could develop a flight sim game that downloads maps pf the earth real-time-ish like google earth does. WoW or Second Life could easily develop single-player worlds served over their servers, so you have your single player RPGs and Sims like games; you could even take your MMPORG player on a single-world vacation or whatever. The reason they don't is that not very many people want this anymore.
I looked at your website, and I am not trying to be mean, but none of those games look particularly compelling. There are games in the Debian repos (ie, free and open source games) that cost nothing and look to be about the same quality, maybe with graphics that aren't as good. This is the market economy at work, not piracy. I feel for you, it has bitten me in the ass too, but that is the way western society works.
so how does someone writing a book do this then? "live readings" may not exactly be as profitable.
And how does this apply to people making software, movies or games? Books are a false parallel since technology is not threatening their existing business model: print books are still much more popular than e-books an will remain that way for a very long time. I suppose you could argue that people are reading less due to alternative activities (such as TV and the slashdot), but in that case authors are just losing out because nobody wants their product. Besides, the greatest literature or the english language (Shakespeare) was produced at a time when plagiarism was common, accepted practice. Seemed to work well enough to keep him writing for his entire lifetime.
As for software, most people who write Linux get paid for their efforts. I am sure that whoever owns WoW does not really mind if people pirate their game since most of their revenue is from subscriptions to their servers. For things that people want, ways to get paid for producing them exist without needing to hobble technology.
I think that people in some facets of the entertainment industry are going to have to accept that nobody is willing to pay them for what they do any more and they need to find a better way of making a living. Movies are probably a good example of an entertainment medium on the way out the door: why pay to go to a Lord of the Rings movie when you can be the Lord of the Rings in an on-line world?
With all other situations where people break the law, efforts are made to enforce it better. With copyright infringement, the call goes out to "change your broken business model". why? No, that is not true. If it were then alcohol would still be illegal in the US. People break the law to get it changed all the time. It is called civil disobedience. In the US it is the only way to challenge an unjust law in court. The call for the music industry to change their business model is not based on copyright infringement, it is based on the fact that media companies base their business model on content distribution methods that are obsolete. Rather than adapting to the new methods, they are trying to hobble the methods. If we as a society allow this kind of thing to happen, you would have laws protecting steam-engine manufactures from rouge internal combustion engines.
All business models will fail if people are allowed to break the law. No shop can employ enough security to prevent everyone shoplifting at once. Show me a business model that is not dependent on the law being adhered to. mercenaries?
The games industry is adapting to mass piracy by abandoing the open platform that is the PC, in favour of online games and consoles. For the singleplayer RPG or flight sim fan, the way piracy has forced a 're-evaluation of the business model' is just to wipe out the entire industry. Not exactly the optimal solution for consumers. BS. I can copy a console game easily. The game industry is moving to consoles because with dedicated hardware you can get performance on a $500 console that you need a $3,000 dollar computer to replicate.
I think the point is that they are not doing anything to "fight" piracy and condemn immoral pirates (if you bother to RTFA you will see that kink.com never talks about fighting piracy and they never call it wrong), they are trying to evolve their business model so that it is profitable in the age of modern technology. This is what the rest of the movie/recording industry should be doing as well, but since the "big four" have a voice loud enough to get politicians to change the laws, they are trying to support their obsolete business model through litigation. The adult entertainment industry, which does not have the luxury of such a public voice, is finding ways to innovate.
So the message is not, "hey you dirty immoral pirates take a lesson from us porn starts", the message is "hey you silly family entertainers, if a bunch of us porn stars can turn a profit with the help of modern technology, why can't you?"
I got a computer from tigerdirect.com a couple years ago with windows, OOo, and firefox. I thought I was screwed at the time because I assumed the "complete MS compatible office suite" they advertised was MS Office or MS Works at least, but it is how I, Joe Sixpack himself, discovered Open Source. That same computer now has debian.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPLv2 says you can redistribute code released under GPLv2 under GPLv2 or later. Linus can release it under v3 if he wants to. He has chosen not to.
In other words, I know.
However, the subtext in American public discourse associates Muslim terrorists with Arabs, the parent was clearly making a similar association, and you know it.
I will take freedom and risk over a police state and big brother any day.
It didn't take him a few hours to get it working, it took him a few hours to write another program that does the same thing. That means that, polish aside, the program that the developer was trying to charge for was probably not worth the asking price, yet people buy it anyway because it looks good. The point being, people pay bucks for stuff with animation, not stuff that does stuff, and that is f'ed up.
Its not really about consumers. The customers that this system sells to are people who have computers that they let other people use, such as companies or governments. This offers them protection against stupid/disgruntled employees. You will note in the article, the attack is targeted at controlled network access, such as protected networks that you find in say, a bank.
If you see this stuff in your commercial home system, it is mostly because, having spent the money to develop this technology for big customers, manufactures can sell the same machine to you and the big customers without having to change their assembly lines. Of course, the people in marketing try to make it sound interesting to consumers, but it isn't.
Ubuntu, for all the good work that they have done to promote Linux to the world, remains little more than Debian sid with bug fixes and a consistent theme, respun every 6 months. Those elitist geeks you so lightly dismiss built Ubuntu. Cannonical markets it. This relationship continues to this day, and this is why Debian will probably outlive Ubuntu.
If irregular releases really distressed people, Microsoft would have regular releases. I would argue that most people prefer the rock solid stability of Debian to a regular release cycle. That is why Mandrake, the Ubuntu of 5 years ago, did not become the wave of today: too buggy. Again, just as RedHat outlived Mandrake, Debian will outlive Ubuntu. (and yes, Ubuntu is buggy compared to Debian)
Oh, and I should also mention that if you take the time to ask questions on debian mailing lists (not the dev lists, of course) and you are polite, you will find that those "elitist geeks" take the time to help even the "lowly noobs".
"only 14 percent believe humans evolved without divine involvement."
You do of course realize that one can both believe that the theory of evolution is 100% correct and also believe that God created this process? I am not saying that we should teach that God/god/goddess/gods/goddesses directed evolution, just that the numbers you present are framed. After all, only atheists believe that humans evolved with no divine involvement at any juncture. I would really like to know which opinion polls the article refers to and how they were conducted, because I don't believe that these statistics reflect what Americans actually think.
I was an army officer until about a year ago. I never met an officer with a facebook account. Never even heard about facebook until I started retraining myself for civilian jobs. I therefore doubt that "officers use facebook" factored into the decision, although my evidence is anecdotal and starting to be a tad dated.
Hey, I've got mod points! So, uh, just how do I mod the article? I don't see the little box anywhere...
When I was 17 and I stole a keg off of my neighbor's front porch and got caught (because later that evening I passed out in his yard), I got charged with larceny. He got his keg back. I think the this kid should receive the same treatment that my neighbor did.
He was gracious enough to talk the DA into dropping the charge, by the way.
I am a small, independent web developer. I am glad that this is out so that I can finally verify that my pages render properly in Safari without having to track down somebody with a Mac. Sure, Safari is based on khtml like konqueror, but this release will still help me get that "warm and fuzzy" feeling of knowing that I did the job right.
This is a happy day for me, indeed.
Take care,
-mat
That is why wikipedia requires sources, not reasoning.
I am not sure that I would call knoppix a lite distro. SLAX really is lite, and it has a subproject devoted to USB stick installs, although AFAIK nobody sells it like that.
It also has a bunch of tools devoted to security, but IMHO reinstalling XP from your system restore disks is easier and usually faster and more reliable than trying to "clean" a compromised PC.
Take care,
-mat
Take care
-mat
Graying, shrinking Europe? The EU is expanding, the economy is on the rise in almost every sector in almost every member country (you've heard of the Irish Tiger?), and let's not forget that there are over 450 million of them.
By contrast, as an American living in Europe, I have watched the buying power of my savings in USD drop by 40% vs. the Euro since 2001.
Who is shrinking?
At least someone's working on a project that's beneficial to growing metropolises (metropolii?)
France makes a train going 350mph. What does the US make as it's engineering masterpiece? The H3... This is useless for intra-city travel. The only stretches of track that are going to be capable of carrying trains like this are long ones between major cities with no intermediary stops, not to mention the amount of distance you need to get up to speed and slow down. This will be used for Paris-Marseille and nothing shorter. In most cases, these high-speed trains cannot even utilize the same track as the medium and short range trains; they have to build a completely separate infrastructure to support the TGV, ICE, or what have you. Basically, they are targeting the market space currently occupied by short distance airlines, with business travelers as their primary target audience.
That is actually a major problem across western Europe right now. Train companies are slowly abandoning medium and short range stretches in favor of the more lucrative business traveler market, and investment in the medium and short range track and trains is languishing, resulting in deteriorating quality and frequency of service. As such, people are forced from the trains to private cars, which bring all the problems of pollution and urban sprawl that we Americans know so well. Furthermore, at these speeds trains do not run much more energy efficiently than planes either.
That is what happens when you privatize things that should be public services.
2. I am not judging by how pretty the screen shots are. From the screenshots and the forum discussions, the look like high-graphic clones of a lot of games in debian reops (ie, prettier versions). If I were judging by the screenshots alone, your games would win.
I looked at your website, and I am not trying to be mean, but none of those games look particularly compelling. There are games in the Debian repos (ie, free and open source games) that cost nothing and look to be about the same quality, maybe with graphics that aren't as good. This is the market economy at work, not piracy. I feel for you, it has bitten me in the ass too, but that is the way western society works.
And how does this apply to people making software, movies or games?
Books are a false parallel since technology is not threatening their existing business model: print books are still much more popular than e-books an will remain that way for a very long time. I suppose you could argue that people are reading less due to alternative activities (such as TV and the slashdot), but in that case authors are just losing out because nobody wants their product. Besides, the greatest literature or the english language (Shakespeare) was produced at a time when plagiarism was common, accepted practice. Seemed to work well enough to keep him writing for his entire lifetime.
As for software, most people who write Linux get paid for their efforts. I am sure that whoever owns WoW does not really mind if people pirate their game since most of their revenue is from subscriptions to their servers. For things that people want, ways to get paid for producing them exist without needing to hobble technology.
I think that people in some facets of the entertainment industry are going to have to accept that nobody is willing to pay them for what they do any more and they need to find a better way of making a living. Movies are probably a good example of an entertainment medium on the way out the door: why pay to go to a Lord of the Rings movie when you can be the Lord of the Rings in an on-line world?
With all other situations where people break the law, efforts are made to enforce it better. With copyright infringement, the call goes out to "change your broken business model". why? No, that is not true. If it were then alcohol would still be illegal in the US. People break the law to get it changed all the time. It is called civil disobedience. In the US it is the only way to challenge an unjust law in court. The call for the music industry to change their business model is not based on copyright infringement, it is based on the fact that media companies base their business model on content distribution methods that are obsolete. Rather than adapting to the new methods, they are trying to hobble the methods. If we as a society allow this kind of thing to happen, you would have laws protecting steam-engine manufactures from rouge internal combustion engines.All business models will fail if people are allowed to break the law. No shop can employ enough security to prevent everyone shoplifting at once. Show me a business model that is not dependent on the law being adhered to.
mercenaries? The games industry is adapting to mass piracy by abandoing the open platform that is the PC, in favour of online games and consoles. For the singleplayer RPG or flight sim fan, the way piracy has forced a 're-evaluation of the business model' is just to wipe out the entire industry. Not exactly the optimal solution for consumers. BS. I can copy a console game easily. The game industry is moving to consoles because with dedicated hardware you can get performance on a $500 console that you need a $3,000 dollar computer to replicate.
So the message is not, "hey you dirty immoral pirates take a lesson from us porn starts", the message is "hey you silly family entertainers, if a bunch of us porn stars can turn a profit with the help of modern technology, why can't you?"
I got a computer from tigerdirect.com a couple years ago with windows, OOo, and firefox. I thought I was screwed at the time because I assumed the "complete MS compatible office suite" they advertised was MS Office or MS Works at least, but it is how I, Joe Sixpack himself, discovered Open Source. That same computer now has debian.