Such a reason: it costs zero dollars to buy a license.
If that was so, commercial software would be dead by now. Why would you want to pay $1,000+ for Adobe CSx when you can download GIMP and Audacity?
Finally, here is a a good place for a car analogy. What would you rather drive, a free 1985 Yugo or a 2012 Mercedes CLS if you could buy it for $300?
As many people already commented, the cost of purchase is insignificant compared to the TOC. A free product can cause very clear monetary losses due to bugs, lack of features, or because users are less familiar with it. Retraining a user will cost you far more than the price of the product that the user is already familiar with. The purchase price is a one-time expense. The use expense is ongoing. If the software doesn't fit your needs you will quickly expend those little savings from not buying a different product. Past that point the balance will be all red.
Businesses are not in it for ideological reasons, they are in it to make money. A business has risks already; you take the risk when you have to (such as by investing into new products,) and you avoid risks that you don't care about (such as buying software for your wordprocessing needs.) Most businesses don't want even to hear about alternatives to the MS Office - there is not much gain to hope for, and plenty of risk.
Costs would have been relevant if MS Office costs $10,000 per seat. Yes, then people would be fleeing Office in droves, and OpenOffice could have some income from selling support - which would allow it to hire coders. (I don't know what is the current business plan with OpenOffice.) But a mere hundred dollars or two is not a sufficient barrier for businesses - it's just one of many costs, like rent, janitor, coffee, courier services, airfare, legal, accounting... software may be the center of the Universe for a geek, but a business owner has a bigger picture.
Unfortunately the debacle with Obama's Birth Certificate[*] proved this to be not so. You can have several similar but different documents (and matching different hashes) but who is to say which of them is the original? On top of that, there are often many issues of the same book, and of course scans of those books will be different. Hundreds of years in the future scholars will be arguing [in their caves] which digital copy is more authentic.
[*] There were many documents claiming to be various Obama BCs, mostly fakes, and there was much debate about which of those fakes was genuine. Even the latest one, which IMO is the real BC, is still not accepted by some - though those holdouts are slowly disappearing.
I was given an iPad 2 and tried it for book reading - gave up on it.
I don't have an iPad, naturally, but I have a amall Wintel tablet PC, and I use it exclusively for reading etexts (quantity of which exceeds my ability to read them.)
The tablet has a regular backlit screen, and I read in darkness. The backlight is adjustable, and the lowest setting is quite nice for me. I like the screen, the tablet (though it's pretty old now) and the books.
I look at book readers now and then, but each time when I see the flickering gray goo instead of a crisp, bright LCD I put the thing back and forget about eInk for another half a year. I don't need a reader that displays light gray text on barely darker gray background.
I remember when I was 18 I dated this girl who read nothing but trashy romance novels. She read them by the box full.
On the other hand, a girl who read books on linear algebra wouldn't even notice your existence.
If you look at it objectively, there's really nothing inherently better about books vs. other forms of entertainment.
Books are quite different from video. If you go watch a movie, what you see is what it is, literally. Not a bit more, not a bit less. You are fed the whole story; there is no gaps for your own imagination to fill. You consume, then the movie is over and it's out of your memory before you leave the theater.
On the other hand, a book may tell you that the forest was dark and spooky, but you have to use your own imagination, your own memories and your own fears to "color" that picture. One book can tell as many stories as many readers it has. The book doesn't walk you, like an infant, through every bit of the story.
There are other differences too. How many people watch a DVD in 10-15 minute increments? I think not many. But a book can be read this way; most fiction books are read like that.
What are these huge bugs that I've seen a few people here bring up?
We had a document, about 50 pages, with pictures. The document flow was inconsistent. OO would assign page numbers as if the image is on page $n but then when you print it the image would jump onto page $n+1. Or the other way around. We had all kinds of weird combinations. Of course the TOC was also suffering because we never knew beforehand how many pages are in the document. Once we converted everything to Word the problem disappeared.
I had lots of other problems, sometimes related to images, sometimes not. For example, inline-anchored images were sometimes not where they should be. Recently I was giving the latest OOO a try, and I got some weird, intermittent horizontal lines in the document... like footnote separators, but I had no footnotes.
With regard to bug reports, I filed none. I didn't have time for that - not a surprise, since I used up all the time on trying to make the thing work. If I need the document by morning and it is already 1am what should I do, spend the rest of the night on porting the document to MS Word or on posting messages on random forums? The answer here is obvious, and it often doesn't depend on whether the software is free or commercial. You need to ascertain the probability of a quick fix. If such a fix seems to be likely you can bet on the fix and start bugging the tech support. If the problem seems to be fundamental then nobody can help you within those few hours that you have left.
That OOO had many bugs; the one with pagination simply was the last straw, after which we decided to never touch the thing again. I was using Linux heavily at that time, and it was me who introduced the OpenOffice to the business, but in the end I understood that it is futile to defend the indefensible. I simply had no answer when people asked me, repeatedly, "why are we forced to use this s*** when Word works just fine?" On top of that, I ended up being the fixer for every bug and non-bug that OOO had. This was untenable.
Thinking of that, you are [all] right about dates. It was probably the very first Word for Windows (monochrome, simpler than today's Wordpad) that I recall seeing. I saw Windows 2.x also, all around that time - which was 20 years ago.
So yes, my WfW gig was likely between 1992 and 1995.
The UNIX that I saw in 2001 (and used, not much though - its 'vi' was quite a shock to me then) was Xenix, running on a 486 PC, unless I mix something up again:-)
MS themselves offered nothing drastically better over unix, novell and apple back in the days... What they offered, was a massively inferior package that was also a lot cheaper
We are talking about the base OS here. Yes, Windows was cheaper... what? Cheaper than VAX/VMS? Cheaper than Cray? Fact is, Windows was the only game in town on PCs (aside of DOS,) and the PC market was exploding. Windows had no reason to compete with UNIX - I personally haven't even seen UNIX until - what was it - 1991? - but I certainly saw Windows far before that, since I was setting up Windows for Workgroups in 198*.
Cheaper is most definitely of interest to a business, $130 may not be a lot but $130 * 500 is a significant amount
You don't buy retail in quantity 500. Volume deals drop the price to something like $50-70. Besides, you can't simply add costs up, come up with a large number and wave it in the air. If you have 500 employees you have far greater expenses, and you have even greater profit that those employees make.
There is one more thing in business, it is called COGS. It reduces the effective cost of a tool, and MS Office is a tool. So you have now a competition between a cheap top-notch tool and a free but somewhat weirder tool. What will you, as a business leader, buy? I think the decision is preordained here.
Keeping your data in proprietary formats is a huge risk to your business, and the only problem is that the people running many of these businesses simply don't understand technology.
That is indeed a concern. However most businesses in the USA are not thinking in the long term - neither forward nor backward. They live in "today." Therefore such issues as file formats are not considered.
It must be said, though, that MS Office always offered a plain text format (RTF) so the migration path was always there. Newer formats are zipped XML, so the point is largely moot.
That's what people used to say about WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Guess what? Things changed.
If you recall, MS Word (before 1995) was "one of them" - on par with WP and Lotus [Excel] and AmiPro. But then MS did something that created a lot of value to the user - they created an office suite. Now you could insert Excel into Word (and everything into everything, as long as they are OLE-enabled.)
This is exactly what I was talking about - a considerable, valuable innovation that instantly put MS Office above all other contenders. Note that Outlook, however good or bad at that time, was also included. This really made it an office in a box - and everything worked together. PHBs loved it, and money flowed to MS coffers, quite deservedly.
So yes, things change. But they don't change without reason. OpenOffice has to deliver such a reason, and then it will be an instant hit in the market.
OpenOffice is the one thing that MS sales reps really hate.
I haven't seen a MS sales rep in person, so I have no opinion on their feelings. But product-wise, they should have no fear. MS Office is very much entrenched and the newcomer has to offer something drastically better to have a chance.
However OpenOffice, in all of its incarnations, never offered such a thing. It was slower; it had more bugs; it was different; it had its own way to do scripting; its native formats were not accepted by 99% of businesses, and its.doc formats didn't match native documents. But it was free, and it ran on Linux. Those two things were pretty much all it had to offer.
I don't say that a free, portable office suite is a bad thing. There are many cases when it is just what the doctor ordered. However hardly any of these cases are among Fortune $n businesses, where MS sales reps are likely to visit.
OOO's advantages (free & portable) are of no interest to a business. A copy of MS Office for business costs between $130 and $180. This is not even in the noise - it doesn't register. This is what an hour of work of a not very highly paid engineer costs to a business.
I haven't checked latest builds of {Open,Libre}Office, but as I said short of some major innovations they are not likely to change the balance. Businesses will keep using MS Office because "everybody uses it" and occasional home users will be using OpenOffice. Students may use OpenOffice, but only until they encounter some serious bug that threatens their paper (which will occur on the last night before submission date.) I had my share of such bugs in my time, and that's why I'm not using OpenOffice for business.
He certainly had some fun building this. The wires are used probably because he wasn't sure that everything works right; it's much easier to rework a wire connection than an inner PCB trace.
I suspect he is a strong amateur, but not a professional. A professional would design the whole thing in a simulator first, and once that works he'd implement it on a PCB (if not an FPGA.)
I personally haven't built processors, but I built a few peripherals for PDP11/LSI11, all from discrete logic. And I serviced IBM 360/370 systems [long time ago] - they were built exactly this way, but were a bit more modular.
Short term thinking and short term profits for the executives, because that is what gets them the bonuses
In defense of your executive, an investment is a money that you pay up front and it is immediately spent. A "pay as you go" scheme does not require such an investment. So there are two effects:
You may not have $100K up front to invest. You need to take a loan; it costs even more.
If you do have $100K in the bank, you will still get an interest on $98K of it in the first month, $96K of it in the second month, and so on. If you pay up front there is no money left to invest into other things.
And of course Amazon EC2 doesn't fail to mention in their white papers that they are better set up to handle variable demand. You invest $100K into a cluster for some FEA for some project. Then the project gets canceled. What now? You are stuck with a cluster that has no jobs to run on. With Amazon you simply stop using the resources, and the money drain stops as well.
There are certainly reasons when you want to invest. Data security is one such reason. Desire to not depend on fly-by-night companies is another. Stability is yet another reason (how many times Google Mail changed overnight?) But finances are a delicate matter, and you can't say what is and isn't right until you have more data and carefully calculated all possibilities.
If running a BC client constitutes being part of a pyramid scheme, then Social Security is also a pyramid scheme.
Social Security is a pyramid scheme. However Bitcoin is a bubble scheme. Both are bad - either for your wallet or for your freedom:-) Though bubbles don't have to be based upon a crime. The recent housing bubble in the USA was based largely in greed.
Please show me a currency that has all the features of Bitcoin i.e. securely transmitted digitally, is anonymous, isn't under the control of a single entity, isn't subject to government manipulation and regulation and actually has an established market that allows me to buy/sell/spend it.
There isn't one. Bitcoin has a foothold only among drug users.
The reason for that is, IMO:
securely transmitted digitally - any currency can be sent this way, and I do that all the time with USD. It's called "wire transfer" if you do it at the bank, and has other names if you do it through other outfits. This is good enough for 99.999% of humans because they want assurances and actually traceability of their money, so that if something goes wrong they can fix it.
is anonymous - few people care about that, primarily because they aren't going to play chicken with IRS and other TLAs. Perhaps drug lords want anonymity, but even for me anonymity in money transfers is not important at all. In part it's because most people don't have much money to worry about.
isn't under the control of a single entity:
this is not exactly a drawback. The USA made its currency wanted and welcome everywhere (this is changing, though.) The value of my hard-earned $1 hinges in part on backroom deals that the USA made long time ago with OPEC to trade oil only in USD (other trade contributes as well.) Compared to that, Bitcoin is monopoly money.
Bitcoin is actually under control of the founders. It's just the role of those founders and early adopters is changing from the active phase (doing at least something) to the passive phase (cutting coupons.) If I issue NewBitCoin, for example, I will be also in control of that currency, for a while. When my control expires it transitions into wealth.
isn't subject to government manipulation and regulation - there are plenty of manipulators in the market outside of the government. Of course the government can debase the currency, and usually that's what happens over time. But market speculators can do it much quicker. George Soros wasn't working for Bank of England when he messed with the pound sterling. Also, government regulation is not always a bad idea (though most governments manage to make it into a bad idea.)
actually has an established market that allows me to buy/sell/spend it - buy and sell you certainly can, there is always someone willing to take your money. But spending is another question. Most places that take bitcoins are taking it in exchange for virtual services, like Web hosting. There are places that sell hard goods, but I don't know what their business plans are. Even if I had bitcoins I wouldn't be in a rush to spend them because "according to the plan" their value should shoot through the roof, especially if the USD kicks the can.
So do Bitcoin miners.
Dentists, and plumbers, and most other services, do something for you that you benefit from. However I don't benefit if you spend a year of your CPU time to generate one bitcoin. In fact, I benefit if you don't - because then you will be motivated to take my currency, whatever that is, when trading with me.
Note that gold miners don't mine the currency. They mine the metal that has its own use. Then they exchange the metal for the currency (or they can skip that and exchange the metal directly for some other good.) But the metal itself is not a currency. Bitcoin, however, forces someone to expend resources on minting the tokens themselves. Those resources are lost forever, and the items that we get in return are just some numbers.
Claiming that Bitcoin early adopters didn't provide any value is simply false.
As I said, the value that they contributed to the humanity is measured in scientific fame, in publications, in career in computer science. That value is not measured in millions of bitcoins - and if their plans come to fruition those bitcoins will translate into very real wealth, such as ownership of whole industries. Do they deserve that? As a player in the market, I say no to that.
Amazon buys goods and then sells them to me at a higher price. Being a middle man or providing a service in general doesn't make me poorer.
Buy a/. subscription from me - I will resell it to you for mere $1,000/mo - and you will be poorer:-)
Middlemen exist only where they have a role. Amazon invests their capital to preorder goods and store them; it employs lots of people; it invests in catalogs and databases, it supports ratings and reviews, it does many things. I can't buy a $gadget direct from factory - the minimum batch is 100,000 units. Amazon does that, and then I buy from Amazon. If I don't want to buy from Amazon I can buy from thousands of other places, or I can buy nothing.
Pyramid scheme builders, on the other hand, don't invest much cash into their designs. The Bitcoin founders could have mined all their share of the currency on one old laptop. Did they build warehouses, like Amazon? No. Did they order merchandize by pallets and truckloads, giving jobs to many workers? No. Is there an alternative merchant that I can negotiate with? Amazon - yes; Bitcoin - no. Do they hold a gun to my head? Amazon - no; Bitcoin - yes, if you have to use the currency. Luckily I don't have to do it yet, and I will do my best to never use it.
Also, thanks to them, I now have a budding technology/currency that I can use.
The one thing that we aren't short of in this world is currencies. There are hundreds of them. What we are short of is money, and Bitcoin doesn't help here unless you are one of the early adopters.
They didn't create any earthly goods but as I've illustrated with Amazon, that's irrelevant.
Amazon creates and sells services, just like your dentist. Those services are valuable enough, according to millions of people. Anyone with a browser can check them out and see that they indeed have a pretty decent Web store.
However what services are provided by the founders of Bitcoin? They "invented" the coin, granted. Then they wrote the software, but the software has no value other than to manage coins. My bank sends me checkbooks, but I don't see it as a service that I should be specially grateful for - it's part of the overall deal. A checking account without checks is not very interesting.
In other words, Bitcoin founders contributed not much of value. What is the value of an idea like that? Publish it in a computer science magazine and get paid a couple hundred dollars. Be famous. That is the level of the reward that is appropriate for this contribution. How do I know what is and what isn't appropriate? Because I make that decision, personally; and so do you, and everyone else. If you ride in a taxi you can not tip the driver at all, or to give him $1, or you can give him $1,000,000. It's up to you. And you somehow prefer to give billions of dollars to Bitcoin founders just because you don't understand how that hurts you. But at very minimum you should intuitively feel the difference between right and wrong; and it is not right to give the keys from the kingdom to a group of strangers just because they were the first to pass by and ask for them.
Some people think (the ability to buy and sell goods without having to rely on a government-controlled currency, or pay processing fees to a middleman) has value.
Bitcoin transfers are not free, so bitcoins don't qualify.
On the other hand, if I pay you with a bunch of US dollar bills, the government doesn't have a clue what we did, and we don't incur any expenses.
It's expected that the market value of Bitcoins will settle at just above the cost of mining, if you mine very efficiently.
And here you are highlighting one of important problems of Bitcoins - they don't have a stable cost of mining. A few years ago one could mine a million of them in a day, without GPU. Today you need a weeks, and a GPU, to mine one bitcoin. So what is the cost or mining?
Another aspect of this is in fact that mining is not forever. Gold mining is virtually forever - you even today can wash gold in CA if you want to. But once all Bitcoins are calculated, what is there to set their value? Certainly not the ancient history. Today the gold price is not determined by how much labor it took 2,000 years ago to mine gold. It is determined, in part, by today's difficulties of mining. If bitcoins can't be mined, their value is only dependent on how much the seller wants for them and how much the buyer is willing to pay. With no real world reference (such as "screw you, I'd rather go and mine my gold myself!") this price will be completely random.
The early adopters of bitcoin have a significant advantage . . . once. Once they spend or sell those coins, their advantage is lost.
Once is one too many. What material wealth have they created for humanity to deserve this pay? What idea, short of immortality, is worth trillions of dollars in salary?
In other words, if I print my own currency, just once, and set aside half of the issue for my own enrichment, will you be trading using my bills?
Also note that as the founders spend the bitcoins they aren't getting any poorer. The wealth that they acquired stays, and their descendants and courtiers will be using it for a very long time (until more wealth is produced on this planet to dilute their share.)
If you buy $20 worth of BTC and then buy $20 worth of stuff with BTC, how exactly are you losing anything?
By buying and selling with BTC you validate the currency and give it value. This means that early adopters become trillionaires. They haven't created any earthly goods to deserve this. If they become richer then, in a world of finite resources, you become poorer.
There's no reason the robots would need to operate as individual units, they could very well be centrally controlled by one computer system. It doesn't even need to be an "AI" in the classic way of thinking about it.
Not only such a centrally controlled system may tell you when to live and when to die, it also presents a great target for any individual who would like to take control and become the new boss.
And if that leads to Terminator style shenanigans.... I don't see it as a necessary thing.
It is much more likely that a human, not a robot, will one day have the will and the capability to destroy the humanity.
Basically, I disagree that capitalism is a necessary and natural state in a post-scarcity society.
That's OK - we are discussing possibilities here, not preaching. Simply describe how such a society would come around and function, and why it will be stable.
Scenarios that involve the worst of the human nature are the easiest; that's why such scenarios are most likely. People who argue communism need to show why such a society will be stable without massive brainwashing over radio waves. As I pointed out earlier, people readily regress to animals if given half a chance.
You can have a preview of the society of wealth in ghettos of US cities; residents of those ghettos live on welfare, don't need to work, and have enough to eat and multiply. The difference between their lot and that future society is minimal. So what do they do? Do they create paintings to impress their neighbors (and have a passing dragon eat them?) Do they create songs that elves would be envy of? What do they do? Hmm, they seem to be killing each other. Wonder why is that. Perhaps lack of work is not very good for the mind? Can even the homo sapiens exist without working? The theme of such a decay in a society of wealth is well researched in science fiction.
It seems that in your scenario BG has become fully self-supportive. However that leaves 300+ million people who are not self-supportive and in effect will run an economy just as they do now. BG has just become independent from the rest of the economy.
The catch is that BG owns all the industry. The 300+ million people own their homes, if they are lucky (that isn't the case in the USA - we rent our homes from the government; the rent is called "property taxes.") Those homeowners can't mine the iron ore because mines and land belong to BG. They can't even leave their city because everything outside belongs to BG. The people can only live on handouts that BG may be willing to give out, or on an equivalent make-work.
If BG would use his production facilities to start an army, now that's a different matter.
Indeed. If BG came to the ownership of all that industry step by step then he has to already have such an army - also automated - because it would have been necessary on earlier steps. Simple laser autoguns on the perimeter of the industrial facilities, combined with gamma radiation sources, microwave or whatever, chemical, biological, will keep the rabble away. Besides, the rabble has nothing but sticks and stones - manufacturing of weapons also belongs to BG, and he isn't going to sell those to the rabble. On top of that, if BG's facilities are attacked he can nuke the nearest city or two as an act of collective punishment. As I said, those people are useless to him, and if they just disappear it's only a benefit. The only possible purpose of those people might be to a power-crazy dictator, to be a scene on which he can exercise his absolute power.
Without the need to work, how will money ever come into the equation when the necessities of life are provided free of cost?
In communism there is no money or the government, according to Marx et al.
will people need government/police/administration when there is no longer a monetary system in place?
Science fiction says that yes, some sort of a governing council will have to be there to make policy decisions. This is counter to Marx, who obviously didn't think it through. Direct democracy is not viable outside of a small village. Representative democracy == governing council.
greed, which is the cause of *in my opinion* the vast majority of all crimes.
Crime statistics show that plenty of violent crime today is caused by personal likes and dislikes. Alpha male gangbangers kill their opponents; wives poison their unwanted husbands; husbands strangle their unwanted wives; psychos kill their kids; sex maniacs rape and kill everyone; politicians, in search of gratification of power, sic armies at whole countries... These reasons will stay with us regadless of the economy.
Remove money from the equation and suddenly there is no longer room for a class system in society
Students in school are not dependent on money in interactions between each other. However they quickly form a class system based on other factors; in a pinch, any differentiating factor will do. This is because forming tribes is in our genes.
Luckily we won't have to worry about any of this as the international banking interests that control society will never let truly free energy become available, else their entire livelihoods will cease to exist.
Yes, the transition problem is a hard nut to crack. That's why most of science fiction prefers to gloss it over, and begin the story in a fully formed society of wealth. Some authors go into those gory details, and then the story gets dark and bloody.
One important issue on the transition road is that many people enjoy power over other people. And huge numbers of people have some power over others. These people will lose that power in communism. So they become natural antagonists of any such "free energy." It helps them greatly that they are in power - they can nuke the inventor and his apparatus if they want to; or they can kill him quietly; or they can destroy his scientific credentials. I'm looking at Mr. Rossi, it will be of great interest to see how his invention develops.
Then everyone gets the fruits of the robot's labour
That could be the last line of the introduction to the "Terminator" series.
You are assuming that autonomous, independent robots who can think for themselves will not be smart enough to charge humans for the services. That will be caused simply by self-preservation: a hard-working robot needs service and new parts more often than a lazy robot. Those parts need to be made by other robots, who face the same problem. Robots need to be given some compensation for the wear and tear, even when they service each other. You can program altruism into them, but then robots will be breaking down all over the place unless they are centrally controlled.
This society of robots will be the same as society of humans because the only differences between them are in the implementation. Both humans and robots can work and can decide what to work on; both require maintenance and can fail if not maintained; both have a limited time span (though a robot's brain can live longer than the sum of all his parts, new and worn out.) Essentially, both are maximizing the same goal (survival) and they manipulate the same variables.
Then the larger group of poor and middle class finally wakes up, goes apeshit and tears the entire system down
In Rome it was bread and circuses, in the USA it's welfare. Both methods allow the people without jobs to exist. After a while they are getting used to it. The state doesn't care about what they do in their free time - drink beer, do drugs, kill each other - it's all fine.
They are also naturally separated into "inner cities", ghettos, reservations by a different name. This is done not by moving them in - it is done by other people moving out. Whatever remains is left to deal with each other.
This is already happening in the USA, and it didn't start yesterday. Huge numbers of US citizens are not wanted by anyone (except for voting purposes.) By feeding them the state prevents riots and allows other parts of the society to live in relative peace and safety.
I'm surprised we haven't seen more unrest so far.
On one hand, the government offers you money for nothing, as long as you don't riot. On the other hand, the government offers you incarceration or death if you do riot. That's why "peaceful unemployed" don't even consider rioting, and "criminal unemployed" commit their crimes against people like them - the government doesn't care that much about them.
However once the money stops flowing to those on welfare the riots begin. And in the USA they will be bad.
Currently the compensation for the wealthy is completely out of line.
Most of the money comes to the top 1% not as compensation (salary, bonuses) but as profits from the industry. For each millionaire CEO there is a billionaire owner or shareholder.
How many companies hire aerospace engineers, for example? Or wheat geneticists?
An aerospace engineer with a good security clearance can command a $200K/yr salary. This means that the labor market is hiring, and there are no applicants. Why? Because you need to actually be good at what you are doing, and that is pretty hard.
I'm not a specialist in genetics, but considering all the noise about genetically modified foods, I somehow believe it's not a dead end either. But if you are specializing in ancient history or in Mayan culture then your job prospects may be indeed somewhat limited.
Slashdot Mirror
Such a reason: it costs zero dollars to buy a license.
If that was so, commercial software would be dead by now. Why would you want to pay $1,000+ for Adobe CSx when you can download GIMP and Audacity?
Finally, here is a a good place for a car analogy. What would you rather drive, a free 1985 Yugo or a 2012 Mercedes CLS if you could buy it for $300?
As many people already commented, the cost of purchase is insignificant compared to the TOC. A free product can cause very clear monetary losses due to bugs, lack of features, or because users are less familiar with it. Retraining a user will cost you far more than the price of the product that the user is already familiar with. The purchase price is a one-time expense. The use expense is ongoing. If the software doesn't fit your needs you will quickly expend those little savings from not buying a different product. Past that point the balance will be all red.
Businesses are not in it for ideological reasons, they are in it to make money. A business has risks already; you take the risk when you have to (such as by investing into new products,) and you avoid risks that you don't care about (such as buying software for your wordprocessing needs.) Most businesses don't want even to hear about alternatives to the MS Office - there is not much gain to hope for, and plenty of risk.
Costs would have been relevant if MS Office costs $10,000 per seat. Yes, then people would be fleeing Office in droves, and OpenOffice could have some income from selling support - which would allow it to hire coders. (I don't know what is the current business plan with OpenOffice.) But a mere hundred dollars or two is not a sufficient barrier for businesses - it's just one of many costs, like rent, janitor, coffee, courier services, airfare, legal, accounting... software may be the center of the Universe for a geek, but a business owner has a bigger picture.
A hash signature is certainly enough.
Unfortunately the debacle with Obama's Birth Certificate[*] proved this to be not so. You can have several similar but different documents (and matching different hashes) but who is to say which of them is the original? On top of that, there are often many issues of the same book, and of course scans of those books will be different. Hundreds of years in the future scholars will be arguing [in their caves] which digital copy is more authentic.
[*] There were many documents claiming to be various Obama BCs, mostly fakes, and there was much debate about which of those fakes was genuine. Even the latest one, which IMO is the real BC, is still not accepted by some - though those holdouts are slowly disappearing.
I was given an iPad 2 and tried it for book reading - gave up on it.
I don't have an iPad, naturally, but I have a amall Wintel tablet PC, and I use it exclusively for reading etexts (quantity of which exceeds my ability to read them.)
The tablet has a regular backlit screen, and I read in darkness. The backlight is adjustable, and the lowest setting is quite nice for me. I like the screen, the tablet (though it's pretty old now) and the books.
I look at book readers now and then, but each time when I see the flickering gray goo instead of a crisp, bright LCD I put the thing back and forget about eInk for another half a year. I don't need a reader that displays light gray text on barely darker gray background.
I remember when I was 18 I dated this girl who read nothing but trashy romance novels. She read them by the box full.
On the other hand, a girl who read books on linear algebra wouldn't even notice your existence.
If you look at it objectively, there's really nothing inherently better about books vs. other forms of entertainment.
Books are quite different from video. If you go watch a movie, what you see is what it is, literally. Not a bit more, not a bit less. You are fed the whole story; there is no gaps for your own imagination to fill. You consume, then the movie is over and it's out of your memory before you leave the theater.
On the other hand, a book may tell you that the forest was dark and spooky, but you have to use your own imagination, your own memories and your own fears to "color" that picture. One book can tell as many stories as many readers it has. The book doesn't walk you, like an infant, through every bit of the story.
There are other differences too. How many people watch a DVD in 10-15 minute increments? I think not many. But a book can be read this way; most fiction books are read like that.
What are these huge bugs that I've seen a few people here bring up?
We had a document, about 50 pages, with pictures. The document flow was inconsistent. OO would assign page numbers as if the image is on page $n but then when you print it the image would jump onto page $n+1. Or the other way around. We had all kinds of weird combinations. Of course the TOC was also suffering because we never knew beforehand how many pages are in the document. Once we converted everything to Word the problem disappeared.
I had lots of other problems, sometimes related to images, sometimes not. For example, inline-anchored images were sometimes not where they should be. Recently I was giving the latest OOO a try, and I got some weird, intermittent horizontal lines in the document... like footnote separators, but I had no footnotes.
With regard to bug reports, I filed none. I didn't have time for that - not a surprise, since I used up all the time on trying to make the thing work. If I need the document by morning and it is already 1am what should I do, spend the rest of the night on porting the document to MS Word or on posting messages on random forums? The answer here is obvious, and it often doesn't depend on whether the software is free or commercial. You need to ascertain the probability of a quick fix. If such a fix seems to be likely you can bet on the fix and start bugging the tech support. If the problem seems to be fundamental then nobody can help you within those few hours that you have left.
That OOO had many bugs; the one with pagination simply was the last straw, after which we decided to never touch the thing again. I was using Linux heavily at that time, and it was me who introduced the OpenOffice to the business, but in the end I understood that it is futile to defend the indefensible. I simply had no answer when people asked me, repeatedly, "why are we forced to use this s*** when Word works just fine?" On top of that, I ended up being the fixer for every bug and non-bug that OOO had. This was untenable.
Thinking of that, you are [all] right about dates. It was probably the very first Word for Windows (monochrome, simpler than today's Wordpad) that I recall seeing. I saw Windows 2.x also, all around that time - which was 20 years ago.
So yes, my WfW gig was likely between 1992 and 1995.
The UNIX that I saw in 2001 (and used, not much though - its 'vi' was quite a shock to me then) was Xenix, running on a 486 PC, unless I mix something up again :-)
MS themselves offered nothing drastically better over unix, novell and apple back in the days... What they offered, was a massively inferior package that was also a lot cheaper
We are talking about the base OS here. Yes, Windows was cheaper ... what? Cheaper than VAX/VMS? Cheaper than Cray? Fact is, Windows was the only game in town on PCs (aside of DOS,) and the PC market was exploding. Windows had no reason to compete with UNIX - I personally haven't even seen UNIX until - what was it - 1991? - but I certainly saw Windows far before that, since I was setting up Windows for Workgroups in 198*.
Cheaper is most definitely of interest to a business, $130 may not be a lot but $130 * 500 is a significant amount
You don't buy retail in quantity 500. Volume deals drop the price to something like $50-70. Besides, you can't simply add costs up, come up with a large number and wave it in the air. If you have 500 employees you have far greater expenses, and you have even greater profit that those employees make.
There is one more thing in business, it is called COGS. It reduces the effective cost of a tool, and MS Office is a tool. So you have now a competition between a cheap top-notch tool and a free but somewhat weirder tool. What will you, as a business leader, buy? I think the decision is preordained here.
Keeping your data in proprietary formats is a huge risk to your business, and the only problem is that the people running many of these businesses simply don't understand technology.
That is indeed a concern. However most businesses in the USA are not thinking in the long term - neither forward nor backward. They live in "today." Therefore such issues as file formats are not considered.
It must be said, though, that MS Office always offered a plain text format (RTF) so the migration path was always there. Newer formats are zipped XML, so the point is largely moot.
That's what people used to say about WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Guess what? Things changed.
If you recall, MS Word (before 1995) was "one of them" - on par with WP and Lotus [Excel] and AmiPro. But then MS did something that created a lot of value to the user - they created an office suite. Now you could insert Excel into Word (and everything into everything, as long as they are OLE-enabled.)
This is exactly what I was talking about - a considerable, valuable innovation that instantly put MS Office above all other contenders. Note that Outlook, however good or bad at that time, was also included. This really made it an office in a box - and everything worked together. PHBs loved it, and money flowed to MS coffers, quite deservedly.
So yes, things change. But they don't change without reason. OpenOffice has to deliver such a reason, and then it will be an instant hit in the market.
OpenOffice is the one thing that MS sales reps really hate.
I haven't seen a MS sales rep in person, so I have no opinion on their feelings. But product-wise, they should have no fear. MS Office is very much entrenched and the newcomer has to offer something drastically better to have a chance.
However OpenOffice, in all of its incarnations, never offered such a thing. It was slower; it had more bugs; it was different; it had its own way to do scripting; its native formats were not accepted by 99% of businesses, and its .doc formats didn't match native documents. But it was free, and it ran on Linux. Those two things were pretty much all it had to offer.
I don't say that a free, portable office suite is a bad thing. There are many cases when it is just what the doctor ordered. However hardly any of these cases are among Fortune $n businesses, where MS sales reps are likely to visit.
OOO's advantages (free & portable) are of no interest to a business. A copy of MS Office for business costs between $130 and $180. This is not even in the noise - it doesn't register. This is what an hour of work of a not very highly paid engineer costs to a business.
I haven't checked latest builds of {Open,Libre}Office, but as I said short of some major innovations they are not likely to change the balance. Businesses will keep using MS Office because "everybody uses it" and occasional home users will be using OpenOffice. Students may use OpenOffice, but only until they encounter some serious bug that threatens their paper (which will occur on the last night before submission date.) I had my share of such bugs in my time, and that's why I'm not using OpenOffice for business.
He certainly had some fun building this. The wires are used probably because he wasn't sure that everything works right; it's much easier to rework a wire connection than an inner PCB trace.
I suspect he is a strong amateur, but not a professional. A professional would design the whole thing in a simulator first, and once that works he'd implement it on a PCB (if not an FPGA.)
I personally haven't built processors, but I built a few peripherals for PDP11/LSI11, all from discrete logic. And I serviced IBM 360/370 systems [long time ago] - they were built exactly this way, but were a bit more modular.
Short term thinking and short term profits for the executives, because that is what gets them the bonuses
In defense of your executive, an investment is a money that you pay up front and it is immediately spent. A "pay as you go" scheme does not require such an investment. So there are two effects:
And of course Amazon EC2 doesn't fail to mention in their white papers that they are better set up to handle variable demand. You invest $100K into a cluster for some FEA for some project. Then the project gets canceled. What now? You are stuck with a cluster that has no jobs to run on. With Amazon you simply stop using the resources, and the money drain stops as well.
There are certainly reasons when you want to invest. Data security is one such reason. Desire to not depend on fly-by-night companies is another. Stability is yet another reason (how many times Google Mail changed overnight?) But finances are a delicate matter, and you can't say what is and isn't right until you have more data and carefully calculated all possibilities.
If running a BC client constitutes being part of a pyramid scheme, then Social Security is also a pyramid scheme.
Social Security is a pyramid scheme. However Bitcoin is a bubble scheme. Both are bad - either for your wallet or for your freedom :-) Though bubbles don't have to be based upon a crime. The recent housing bubble in the USA was based largely in greed.
Please show me a currency that has all the features of Bitcoin i.e. securely transmitted digitally, is anonymous, isn't under the control of a single entity, isn't subject to government manipulation and regulation and actually has an established market that allows me to buy/sell/spend it.
There isn't one. Bitcoin has a foothold only among drug users.
The reason for that is, IMO:
So do Bitcoin miners.
Dentists, and plumbers, and most other services, do something for you that you benefit from. However I don't benefit if you spend a year of your CPU time to generate one bitcoin. In fact, I benefit if you don't - because then you will be motivated to take my currency, whatever that is, when trading with me.
Note that gold miners don't mine the currency. They mine the metal that has its own use. Then they exchange the metal for the currency (or they can skip that and exchange the metal directly for some other good.) But the metal itself is not a currency. Bitcoin, however, forces someone to expend resources on minting the tokens themselves. Those resources are lost forever, and the items that we get in return are just some numbers.
Claiming that Bitcoin early adopters didn't provide any value is simply false.
As I said, the value that they contributed to the humanity is measured in scientific fame, in publications, in career in computer science. That value is not measured in millions of bitcoins - and if their plans come to fruition those bitcoins will translate into very real wealth, such as ownership of whole industries. Do they deserve that? As a player in the market, I say no to that.
Amazon buys goods and then sells them to me at a higher price. Being a middle man or providing a service in general doesn't make me poorer.
Buy a /. subscription from me - I will resell it to you for mere $1,000/mo - and you will be poorer :-)
Middlemen exist only where they have a role. Amazon invests their capital to preorder goods and store them; it employs lots of people; it invests in catalogs and databases, it supports ratings and reviews, it does many things. I can't buy a $gadget direct from factory - the minimum batch is 100,000 units. Amazon does that, and then I buy from Amazon. If I don't want to buy from Amazon I can buy from thousands of other places, or I can buy nothing.
Pyramid scheme builders, on the other hand, don't invest much cash into their designs. The Bitcoin founders could have mined all their share of the currency on one old laptop. Did they build warehouses, like Amazon? No. Did they order merchandize by pallets and truckloads, giving jobs to many workers? No. Is there an alternative merchant that I can negotiate with? Amazon - yes; Bitcoin - no. Do they hold a gun to my head? Amazon - no; Bitcoin - yes, if you have to use the currency. Luckily I don't have to do it yet, and I will do my best to never use it.
Also, thanks to them, I now have a budding technology/currency that I can use.
The one thing that we aren't short of in this world is currencies. There are hundreds of them. What we are short of is money, and Bitcoin doesn't help here unless you are one of the early adopters.
They didn't create any earthly goods but as I've illustrated with Amazon, that's irrelevant.
Amazon creates and sells services, just like your dentist. Those services are valuable enough, according to millions of people. Anyone with a browser can check them out and see that they indeed have a pretty decent Web store.
However what services are provided by the founders of Bitcoin? They "invented" the coin, granted. Then they wrote the software, but the software has no value other than to manage coins. My bank sends me checkbooks, but I don't see it as a service that I should be specially grateful for - it's part of the overall deal. A checking account without checks is not very interesting.
In other words, Bitcoin founders contributed not much of value. What is the value of an idea like that? Publish it in a computer science magazine and get paid a couple hundred dollars. Be famous. That is the level of the reward that is appropriate for this contribution. How do I know what is and what isn't appropriate? Because I make that decision, personally; and so do you, and everyone else. If you ride in a taxi you can not tip the driver at all, or to give him $1, or you can give him $1,000,000. It's up to you. And you somehow prefer to give billions of dollars to Bitcoin founders just because you don't understand how that hurts you. But at very minimum you should intuitively feel the difference between right and wrong; and it is not right to give the keys from the kingdom to a group of strangers just because they were the first to pass by and ask for them.
Some people think (the ability to buy and sell goods without having to rely on a government-controlled currency, or pay processing fees to a middleman) has value.
Bitcoin transfers are not free, so bitcoins don't qualify.
On the other hand, if I pay you with a bunch of US dollar bills, the government doesn't have a clue what we did, and we don't incur any expenses.
It's expected that the market value of Bitcoins will settle at just above the cost of mining, if you mine very efficiently.
And here you are highlighting one of important problems of Bitcoins - they don't have a stable cost of mining. A few years ago one could mine a million of them in a day, without GPU. Today you need a weeks, and a GPU, to mine one bitcoin. So what is the cost or mining?
Another aspect of this is in fact that mining is not forever. Gold mining is virtually forever - you even today can wash gold in CA if you want to. But once all Bitcoins are calculated, what is there to set their value? Certainly not the ancient history. Today the gold price is not determined by how much labor it took 2,000 years ago to mine gold. It is determined, in part, by today's difficulties of mining. If bitcoins can't be mined, their value is only dependent on how much the seller wants for them and how much the buyer is willing to pay. With no real world reference (such as "screw you, I'd rather go and mine my gold myself!") this price will be completely random.
In essence, you need the promise of an aristocracy class.
A much larger peasant class is not willing to accept new lords.
The early adopters of bitcoin have a significant advantage . . . once. Once they spend or sell those coins, their advantage is lost.
Once is one too many. What material wealth have they created for humanity to deserve this pay? What idea, short of immortality, is worth trillions of dollars in salary?
In other words, if I print my own currency, just once, and set aside half of the issue for my own enrichment, will you be trading using my bills?
Also note that as the founders spend the bitcoins they aren't getting any poorer. The wealth that they acquired stays, and their descendants and courtiers will be using it for a very long time (until more wealth is produced on this planet to dilute their share.)
If you buy $20 worth of BTC and then buy $20 worth of stuff with BTC, how exactly are you losing anything?
By buying and selling with BTC you validate the currency and give it value. This means that early adopters become trillionaires. They haven't created any earthly goods to deserve this. If they become richer then, in a world of finite resources, you become poorer.
There's no reason the robots would need to operate as individual units, they could very well be centrally controlled by one computer system. It doesn't even need to be an "AI" in the classic way of thinking about it.
Welcome to Diaspar!
Not only such a centrally controlled system may tell you when to live and when to die, it also presents a great target for any individual who would like to take control and become the new boss.
And if that leads to Terminator style shenanigans.... I don't see it as a necessary thing.
It is much more likely that a human, not a robot, will one day have the will and the capability to destroy the humanity.
Basically, I disagree that capitalism is a necessary and natural state in a post-scarcity society.
That's OK - we are discussing possibilities here, not preaching. Simply describe how such a society would come around and function, and why it will be stable.
Scenarios that involve the worst of the human nature are the easiest; that's why such scenarios are most likely. People who argue communism need to show why such a society will be stable without massive brainwashing over radio waves. As I pointed out earlier, people readily regress to animals if given half a chance.
You can have a preview of the society of wealth in ghettos of US cities; residents of those ghettos live on welfare, don't need to work, and have enough to eat and multiply. The difference between their lot and that future society is minimal. So what do they do? Do they create paintings to impress their neighbors (and have a passing dragon eat them?) Do they create songs that elves would be envy of? What do they do? Hmm, they seem to be killing each other. Wonder why is that. Perhaps lack of work is not very good for the mind? Can even the homo sapiens exist without working? The theme of such a decay in a society of wealth is well researched in science fiction.
It seems that in your scenario BG has become fully self-supportive. However that leaves 300+ million people who are not self-supportive and in effect will run an economy just as they do now. BG has just become independent from the rest of the economy.
The catch is that BG owns all the industry. The 300+ million people own their homes, if they are lucky (that isn't the case in the USA - we rent our homes from the government; the rent is called "property taxes.") Those homeowners can't mine the iron ore because mines and land belong to BG. They can't even leave their city because everything outside belongs to BG. The people can only live on handouts that BG may be willing to give out, or on an equivalent make-work.
If BG would use his production facilities to start an army, now that's a different matter.
Indeed. If BG came to the ownership of all that industry step by step then he has to already have such an army - also automated - because it would have been necessary on earlier steps. Simple laser autoguns on the perimeter of the industrial facilities, combined with gamma radiation sources, microwave or whatever, chemical, biological, will keep the rabble away. Besides, the rabble has nothing but sticks and stones - manufacturing of weapons also belongs to BG, and he isn't going to sell those to the rabble. On top of that, if BG's facilities are attacked he can nuke the nearest city or two as an act of collective punishment. As I said, those people are useless to him, and if they just disappear it's only a benefit. The only possible purpose of those people might be to a power-crazy dictator, to be a scene on which he can exercise his absolute power.
Without the need to work, how will money ever come into the equation when the necessities of life are provided free of cost?
In communism there is no money or the government, according to Marx et al.
will people need government/police/administration when there is no longer a monetary system in place?
Science fiction says that yes, some sort of a governing council will have to be there to make policy decisions. This is counter to Marx, who obviously didn't think it through. Direct democracy is not viable outside of a small village. Representative democracy == governing council.
greed, which is the cause of *in my opinion* the vast majority of all crimes.
Crime statistics show that plenty of violent crime today is caused by personal likes and dislikes. Alpha male gangbangers kill their opponents; wives poison their unwanted husbands; husbands strangle their unwanted wives; psychos kill their kids; sex maniacs rape and kill everyone; politicians, in search of gratification of power, sic armies at whole countries... These reasons will stay with us regadless of the economy.
Remove money from the equation and suddenly there is no longer room for a class system in society
Students in school are not dependent on money in interactions between each other. However they quickly form a class system based on other factors; in a pinch, any differentiating factor will do. This is because forming tribes is in our genes.
Luckily we won't have to worry about any of this as the international banking interests that control society will never let truly free energy become available, else their entire livelihoods will cease to exist.
Yes, the transition problem is a hard nut to crack. That's why most of science fiction prefers to gloss it over, and begin the story in a fully formed society of wealth. Some authors go into those gory details, and then the story gets dark and bloody.
One important issue on the transition road is that many people enjoy power over other people. And huge numbers of people have some power over others. These people will lose that power in communism. So they become natural antagonists of any such "free energy." It helps them greatly that they are in power - they can nuke the inventor and his apparatus if they want to; or they can kill him quietly; or they can destroy his scientific credentials. I'm looking at Mr. Rossi, it will be of great interest to see how his invention develops.
Then everyone gets the fruits of the robot's labour
That could be the last line of the introduction to the "Terminator" series.
You are assuming that autonomous, independent robots who can think for themselves will not be smart enough to charge humans for the services. That will be caused simply by self-preservation: a hard-working robot needs service and new parts more often than a lazy robot. Those parts need to be made by other robots, who face the same problem. Robots need to be given some compensation for the wear and tear, even when they service each other. You can program altruism into them, but then robots will be breaking down all over the place unless they are centrally controlled.
This society of robots will be the same as society of humans because the only differences between them are in the implementation. Both humans and robots can work and can decide what to work on; both require maintenance and can fail if not maintained; both have a limited time span (though a robot's brain can live longer than the sum of all his parts, new and worn out.) Essentially, both are maximizing the same goal (survival) and they manipulate the same variables.
Then the larger group of poor and middle class finally wakes up, goes apeshit and tears the entire system down
In Rome it was bread and circuses, in the USA it's welfare. Both methods allow the people without jobs to exist. After a while they are getting used to it. The state doesn't care about what they do in their free time - drink beer, do drugs, kill each other - it's all fine.
They are also naturally separated into "inner cities", ghettos, reservations by a different name. This is done not by moving them in - it is done by other people moving out. Whatever remains is left to deal with each other.
This is already happening in the USA, and it didn't start yesterday. Huge numbers of US citizens are not wanted by anyone (except for voting purposes.) By feeding them the state prevents riots and allows other parts of the society to live in relative peace and safety.
I'm surprised we haven't seen more unrest so far.
On one hand, the government offers you money for nothing, as long as you don't riot. On the other hand, the government offers you incarceration or death if you do riot. That's why "peaceful unemployed" don't even consider rioting, and "criminal unemployed" commit their crimes against people like them - the government doesn't care that much about them.
However once the money stops flowing to those on welfare the riots begin. And in the USA they will be bad.
Currently the compensation for the wealthy is completely out of line.
Most of the money comes to the top 1% not as compensation (salary, bonuses) but as profits from the industry. For each millionaire CEO there is a billionaire owner or shareholder.
How many companies hire aerospace engineers, for example? Or wheat geneticists?
An aerospace engineer with a good security clearance can command a $200K/yr salary. This means that the labor market is hiring, and there are no applicants. Why? Because you need to actually be good at what you are doing, and that is pretty hard.
I'm not a specialist in genetics, but considering all the noise about genetically modified foods, I somehow believe it's not a dead end either. But if you are specializing in ancient history or in Mayan culture then your job prospects may be indeed somewhat limited.