Chapter Three of Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design for Programmers has an excellent, clear presentation of this problem.
The summary (as I read it)? People like choice when it's related to what they want to do. If they're making a greeting card, they want to choose what font it uses and what overused clip-art to use. They don't want to choose its orientation as it comes out of the printer, or whether it's saved in MS Word or PDF or RTF or HTML or BMP.
So when I install a linux distribution, and I want to compose a word processing document? I don't care all that much whether I'm using KOffice or StarOffice or OpenOffice.org or AbiWord or whatever, because the point is not what program I'm using. The point is to write a document, and I shouldn't have to make a needless choice just to get to that point.
That's why modularity (versus "yes" or "no" to compiling it in) in the linux kernel is such a good idea, for example. It allows me to say, "make this choice for me if I need it, and don't hassle me about it."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of oo to get away from using ms products?
No, the point of OO.o is to be an office suite, first and foremost. Moving away from Microsoft lock-in is a nice advantage, but you're never going to sell businesses on the idea of switching if your only pitch is "it's not Microsoft".
And, because MS Office is so firmly entrenched, compatibility/integration with Exchange, Access, and (sadly) VBA will be a necessary part of improving OO.o's marketshare.
The Berne Convention, mentioned in the faq, requires that member nations may not impose formalities (read: registration) on works from other member nations.
Since authors are, largely, unlikely to care about the rights of people who want to derive from their works, couldn't a reinstatement of copyright registration for works within the United States theoretically drive authors to nominally publish their works in other nations (in order to get automatic protection as per the current U.S. system), and thus drive creativity out of the U.S.?
I don't know if this would occur in practice, and I'm not saying it's a good reason to maintain a flawed system, but it seems like something to think about if/when we design new copyright policy.
So at what level does a game have to reach in order to allowed to emulate a historical event?
What level does a porno have to reach in order to be considered a love story?
The regulation of the game industry, and the actions that publishers take in order to cram what they want to communicate into a specific rating, is directly comparable to the similar actions taken within the movie industry (and movies get "speech" protections).
Any given video game may or may not be an accurate portrayal of a factual event, but they can be; what I'm trying to point out is that the gamut of stories and messages that can be communicated by video games directly parallels the contents of books and movies. Video games are speech as much as Penthouse is speech as much as Citizen Kane is speech as much as Stairway to Heaven is speech.
At least this serves fairly well as an example of why video games should be considered speech. Bias aside, this is, on some level, a historical account. If one considers The Killer Angels to be speech, I see no reason why this (or a U.S. equivalent) shouldn't get similar protections.
If Stern's show really stepped over the line, people would stop listening to it.
Actually, the opposite is largely true. If you saw the movie Private Parts (if you haven't, don't), you'd know that Howard Stern almost wears that as a badge of pride, that people who like him tune in to see what he'll do next, and that people who hate him tune in to see what he'll do next.
This has no bearing on the validity of banning a word without regard to its usage or context, but I wanted to point out that your statement is not inherently true. "Crossing the line" is more likely to attract new viewers than repel existing ones, regardless of whether it's appropriate (by whatever definition).
If it was Viking 2, let's hope those martian conspiracy theorists only got a blurry picture. We wouldn't want to let them know that there's extramartian intelligence just yet. First we have to set up the slave camps.
So when I write code for my company in Prolog, using some obscure graphics library that was written in Sumerian by thirteenth-century monks, I'm sure that there will be no conflicts in someone else extending my work. If I leave my company, I'm sure they won't have any trouble finding someone of comparable skill with experience with those technologies.
There's value to "use what you know", but if we can slowly get everyone familiar one or two core APIs/languages/frameworks, we'll have a lot less wasted brain real estate. Not saying they can't also know their own pet libraries, but I don't want to have to learn something new every time I have to read someone else's code.
Quick! I haven't had my morning cup of "scientific study that 'proves' what I want to believe". I'm going to be a jittery wreck for the rest of the day if I can't get justification for my ridiculously bad nutritional habits!
Torvalds: Isn't that... I knew it!
McBride: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!!
Hmmm, what are you implying? All evidence I've seen indicates that Linus has a heart, the lion's share of courage (so to speak), plenty of brains, and he's nobody's lapdog. Where does that leave us, hmmm?
Well, even with switches like going from eight-track to cassette, we were ostensibly getting "more" each time we purchased a copy in the new medium. It used to be that the "more" was just better quality, which is a bit questionable when you're being asked to pay another eighteen bucks for the equivalent of a 32kbit/s improvement in sound on something you already own.
But DVDs have changed the landscape. I buy DVDs as much for the special features as the movie itself sometimes. I'm actually getting new value for my money, as opposed to just an improvement on existing value.
Now, we're seeing CDs slowly start to come with extra features, like an extra disc with music videos or something. People are realizing that they don't care about the quality differences between the newer formats that much, so the studios have had to come up with a real way of getting new revenue. And this is a Good Thing.
Discussion on the merits of Open-Source-Software-for-a-living have been largely anecdotal, and more importantly, academic (IMO). I don't think we have an economic model that properly describes Free intellectual property that is infinitely redistributable at insignificant cost and is created by volunteers. The concept is just too new.
Our previous understanding of economics has been based on the idea of "content is indistinguishable from media", so that we could plug in the costs of making CDs into excel spreadsheets, and call the money given to the artist an "R&D" cost. But these models were incomplete at best and disingenuous at worst; people aren't buying a circular piece of vinyl or some wound-up magnetic tape (or stacks of paper bound together, for that matter), they're buying the content printed on those objects.
So we're already ill-prepared to "logically" analyze intellectual property models, let alone the idea that people might contribute that property without expecting financial compensation.
Contrastingly, medicine is a relatively mature field; the cause-and-effect patterns have been well established, and are not academic high-chair theories based on inapplicable models. I would trust a doctor to tell me how to treat cancer, I would not trust a high school kid to tell me how to support a family.
So yes, I'm disregarding the viewpoints of people who (I believe) could not possibly understand the realities of earning stable income by writing software for free.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm saying that I'm only going to listen to the opinions of people in this thread who use open source as a sustainable income source (working for Red Hat counts). I'm not saying that those people don't exist, nor am I saying that it's an invalid business model. But I'm not going to pay attention to the naive, idealistic opinions of someone who has never needed to support him or herself.
I really think that no one should be arguing with this guy unless they have been making a sustainable living writing and supporting Free/Open Source software. This means supporting a family in a reasonably nice environment, folks.
I saw a post from some seventeen year old bragging about how he'd been working on open source stuff for a while, and isn't that just fine. But sorry, at seventeen you know so little that you don't even realize how little you know.
Sure, we can all point to Linus and ESR and say "Hey, they've made it big, therefore the business model to which we aspire must be valid!"... It may be valid, but it's hardly useful to refer to anecdotal evidence in support of that point.
So I reiterate - the only people I will personally listen to in this thread are people who can personally attest to living in the REAL world, and living REAL lives, entirely on Open Source dollars.
Unless you can explain how my causing one computer to send bits to another computer is a credible threat to the basic rights and liberties of others, keep your laws off my computer.
A mob boss sends an email to an underling telling him to kill someone. That good enough for you? The murder itself is not the entirety of the crime, because that kind of thinking would make powerful people immune to the consequences of any abuse of their power, as long as they didn't execute it themselves. So there's obviously something inherent to the communication that must be made illegal.
That doesn't mean I'm in favor of any censorship that claims to prevent other illegal acts, but it's a valid example of something that counters your claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, guys, can we stop appending to acronyms?
RPG was okay. MMORPG was obscure, but acceptable. But what, now we have MMMMORPG?
The summary (as I read it)? People like choice when it's related to what they want to do. If they're making a greeting card, they want to choose what font it uses and what overused clip-art to use. They don't want to choose its orientation as it comes out of the printer, or whether it's saved in MS Word or PDF or RTF or HTML or BMP.
So when I install a linux distribution, and I want to compose a word processing document? I don't care all that much whether I'm using KOffice or StarOffice or OpenOffice.org or AbiWord or whatever, because the point is not what program I'm using. The point is to write a document, and I shouldn't have to make a needless choice just to get to that point.
That's why modularity (versus "yes" or "no" to compiling it in) in the linux kernel is such a good idea, for example. It allows me to say, "make this choice for me if I need it, and don't hassle me about it."
No, the point of OO.o is to be an office suite, first and foremost. Moving away from Microsoft lock-in is a nice advantage, but you're never going to sell businesses on the idea of switching if your only pitch is "it's not Microsoft".
And, because MS Office is so firmly entrenched, compatibility/integration with Exchange, Access, and (sadly) VBA will be a necessary part of improving OO.o's marketshare.
Since authors are, largely, unlikely to care about the rights of people who want to derive from their works, couldn't a reinstatement of copyright registration for works within the United States theoretically drive authors to nominally publish their works in other nations (in order to get automatic protection as per the current U.S. system), and thus drive creativity out of the U.S.?
I don't know if this would occur in practice, and I'm not saying it's a good reason to maintain a flawed system, but it seems like something to think about if/when we design new copyright policy.
No, that's just how you pause.
At least this serves fairly well as an example of why video games should be considered speech. Bias aside, this is, on some level, a historical account. If one considers The Killer Angels to be speech, I see no reason why this (or a U.S. equivalent) shouldn't get similar protections.
Actually, the opposite is largely true. If you saw the movie Private Parts (if you haven't, don't), you'd know that Howard Stern almost wears that as a badge of pride, that people who like him tune in to see what he'll do next, and that people who hate him tune in to see what he'll do next.
This has no bearing on the validity of banning a word without regard to its usage or context, but I wanted to point out that your statement is not inherently true. "Crossing the line" is more likely to attract new viewers than repel existing ones, regardless of whether it's appropriate (by whatever definition).
No, they'll probably just think leaders of their ancient civilizations are buried inside, if we're any indication. :)
If it was Viking 2, let's hope those martian conspiracy theorists only got a blurry picture. We wouldn't want to let them know that there's extramartian intelligence just yet. First we have to set up the slave camps.
So when I write code for my company in Prolog, using some obscure graphics library that was written in Sumerian by thirteenth-century monks, I'm sure that there will be no conflicts in someone else extending my work. If I leave my company, I'm sure they won't have any trouble finding someone of comparable skill with experience with those technologies.
There's value to "use what you know", but if we can slowly get everyone familiar one or two core APIs/languages/frameworks, we'll have a lot less wasted brain real estate. Not saying they can't also know their own pet libraries, but I don't want to have to learn something new every time I have to read someone else's code.
I dunno, that iPod has always had a "good sense of style", if you know what I mean... :)
Damn straight, several extra billion dollars a year would make me a very happy Boing.
Oh, did you mean Boeing?
Quick! I haven't had my morning cup of "scientific study that 'proves' what I want to believe". I'm going to be a jittery wreck for the rest of the day if I can't get justification for my ridiculously bad nutritional habits!
Great! Then he'd be able to "show people the moon" no matter which way he was facing!
<insert bad "Jaws" imitation>
We're going to need a bigger boat.
Hmmm, what are you implying? All evidence I've seen indicates that Linus has a heart, the lion's share of courage (so to speak), plenty of brains, and he's nobody's lapdog. Where does that leave us, hmmm?
Never saw it myself, but a lot of people would be mad that you forgot "Freaks and Geeks".
Yeah, you know, that uppercase eight can be a tricky one. :)
But DVDs have changed the landscape. I buy DVDs as much for the special features as the movie itself sometimes. I'm actually getting new value for my money, as opposed to just an improvement on existing value.
Now, we're seeing CDs slowly start to come with extra features, like an extra disc with music videos or something. People are realizing that they don't care about the quality differences between the newer formats that much, so the studios have had to come up with a real way of getting new revenue. And this is a Good Thing.
Our previous understanding of economics has been based on the idea of "content is indistinguishable from media", so that we could plug in the costs of making CDs into excel spreadsheets, and call the money given to the artist an "R&D" cost. But these models were incomplete at best and disingenuous at worst; people aren't buying a circular piece of vinyl or some wound-up magnetic tape (or stacks of paper bound together, for that matter), they're buying the content printed on those objects.
So we're already ill-prepared to "logically" analyze intellectual property models, let alone the idea that people might contribute that property without expecting financial compensation.
Contrastingly, medicine is a relatively mature field; the cause-and-effect patterns have been well established, and are not academic high-chair theories based on inapplicable models. I would trust a doctor to tell me how to treat cancer, I would not trust a high school kid to tell me how to support a family.
So yes, I'm disregarding the viewpoints of people who (I believe) could not possibly understand the realities of earning stable income by writing software for free.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm saying that I'm only going to listen to the opinions of people in this thread who use open source as a sustainable income source (working for Red Hat counts). I'm not saying that those people don't exist, nor am I saying that it's an invalid business model. But I'm not going to pay attention to the naive, idealistic opinions of someone who has never needed to support him or herself.
I saw a post from some seventeen year old bragging about how he'd been working on open source stuff for a while, and isn't that just fine. But sorry, at seventeen you know so little that you don't even realize how little you know.
Sure, we can all point to Linus and ESR and say "Hey, they've made it big, therefore the business model to which we aspire must be valid!"... It may be valid, but it's hardly useful to refer to anecdotal evidence in support of that point.
So I reiterate - the only people I will personally listen to in this thread are people who can personally attest to living in the REAL world, and living REAL lives, entirely on Open Source dollars.
A mob boss sends an email to an underling telling him to kill someone. That good enough for you? The murder itself is not the entirety of the crime, because that kind of thinking would make powerful people immune to the consequences of any abuse of their power, as long as they didn't execute it themselves. So there's obviously something inherent to the communication that must be made illegal.
That doesn't mean I'm in favor of any censorship that claims to prevent other illegal acts, but it's a valid example of something that counters your claim.
Modded funny? What? I don't get it, is there a joke in there? It looked like it was spelled like a normal slashdot comment to me!