And yet Linux managed to be built without requiring subscriptions or paid updates. If the community wants something then they will build it even without the funding models.
I don't want a decent salary for a mod author to come from the players, because that implies that the mod author is not a part of the community in the first place. I want mods from part time hobbyists, I don't want more DLCs, I *especially* don't want "Horse Armor" DLCs. Hobbyists promote the community; they say "look what I did", then someone else says "that's great, let me build on that", and the snowball starts rolling and something good can result at the end.
I'm not saying donations are bad - donations are good! I just think mandatory paid mods is a dumb idea. With computing, we've gone decades with working viable open source models in place that have created competitive products to commercial offerings. That open source world has had paid authors, it's had donations, it's had volunteer authors. What is has not had though is people who refuse to work unless the community pays them directly, because it's a community that grew up using sharing as an inherent virtue.
I've never demanded that other people pay me money to write my resume. So the modders who hope to break the incredibly long odds and get noticed/hired by a game company should not demand that they be paid to do so. (what, maybe less than ten people have ever gotten a a job this way?) Demanding to be paid is an insult to the community also, it implies that the modder is not a part of the community.
The people who are supremely talented but not financially empowered are not my responsibility. I should not be required to give them my charity. I'll pick and choose who I give charity too, and it won't be the guy with the retextured sword. The best mods out there were works from large teams anyway - Unofficial Patches mods (always mandatory), SKUI, SKSE, total world revamps, etc. You don't need finances to be a modder, you just need the game and the (usually) free modding tools; if you think you must have expensive commercial graphics/modeling tools in order to start them you're doing it wrong. Do not treat the gaming community as a way to pay for a bigger computer.
And besides, if someone wants a lot of exposure, the free mods always get the most exposure. Anyone who treats paid mods as more professionally made than free mods is delusional.
And if there is a market for paid mods from day one, there should still be a way to get free mods, a way to bypass the people who treat the community as a resource to be exploited and instead get mods from the people who are a part of the community.
The Steam Workshop was never the real place to get quality mods for Skyrim anyway.
My worry is that the new Bethesda network announced at E3 is a step towards them creating their own mod marketplace, all mods being curated and approved, followed by shutting down places like Nexus as being "unauthorized", so that free mods no long exist.
Sure there are places where paid mods are the norm - but those are also highly toxic places for rather dumb games anyway.
Adblock works on PC I think, as I've never seen an ad with youtube on the PC. On my TV though I don't have adblock, so I'm seeing ads. I'm told that I can add some blocking on my firewall but I haven't gotten around to researching that since it hasn't been annoying until recently.
Sure. Watch broadcast TV, listen to the radio, walk down the street. All free. All have ads though, but in every case you can opt out of the ads and refuse to watch or listen to them. In no case are you required to view to an ad, it doesn't suck up extra gasoline from your car, you can't get malware, etc. These are background ads, ignorable, totally unlike web ads.
Oh, and I pay subscription for some of those services too, including "free" radio. I'm not freeloading like the web advertisers are.
"Don't use GOTOs" is an absolutist statement. The original article from Dijkstra was called "GOTOs Considered Harmful" which was not the same as declaring them taboo.
Slashdot has said that I can opt out of ads. Which I don't bother doing since I have adblock, but... If it starts charing $0.17 a page, then I'll stop visiting. Other useful sites I may stick around with $0.17 a page (and it has to be per page, not per third party script/gif).
People cut the cord from cable companies which used to be considered unthinkable. So I think people will be able to wean themselves away from fluff web sites too.
But think of it this way, I'm already paying over $50/month to get on the web. Why should I be told that I have to pay extra or view ads just to click on a link to some bozo's blog? Worse, why should advertisers be allowed to STEAL my bandwidth and time by piggybacking on my ISP? Broadcast over the airwaves is fine with me, as long as I can look away from the TV and go get a sandwich; but borrowing my internet to show me an ad that I can't skip, that's just immoral.
A lot of these new languages are highly specialized languages. It's like everyone who has a special need and a hatred of general purpose languages thinks they'll just write a new language and solve the problem. Ie, there is no point whatsoever to have an language for developing IoT because we've already have such languages for decades, yet people are creating these new pointless languages.
I'd be good with that. Give everyone an incentive to never go to web sites again, or at least stop browsing mindlessly and instead pay attention to what they are doing. Not a bad thing. Society has functioned without web sites, and it will again (and pretty soon too as it's all moving to phones/tablets now anyway).
The web site owners don't know about any of this, they have farmed out their design to third parties and after signing a contract to an ad provider/server they wash their hands of responsibility (as long as they get revenue). The third parties don't want this idea because then it would be too easy to block them, as in loss of revenue.
I see things sort of analoguous to shaving microseconds off of financial transactions. There's someone in the middle making money without being either producer or consumer and providing no real world value of any sort. Sort of like leeches but not as cuddly.
I still haven't gone to the effort to block these on my TV. But normally it was 4 or 5 seconds before I could skip them, which was usually before you even knew what the ad was about. But the last week I've seen a few that refuse to let me skip the ads, AND the ads were entirely unrelated to the content as well. Screw em. Let youtube go back to being free with no one making money from them, hobbyists only with no youtube pros. Sorry PewDiePie, you need a real job.
Right, and human organ traffickers are stuck between a rock and hard place too but it's not my responsibility to help them out. So if advertisers can't make money without cheating then maybe they need to find a new career, and it's not our responsibility to put up with their tricks.
Also better if users learn to just stop going to web sites that they don't need to. If a site bombards you with ads, then rather than just turn on adblock there, just leave the site permanently and with prejudice. If it's your favorite blog site, then send an email complaining about how bad the ads are with the hope that someone gets the hint (it is not your job to provide charity to fund someone's hobby). This is analogous to people becoming fed up with cable companies and cutting the cord.
In the real world you can learn but you are most often prevented from putting the learning into practice. After 30 years programming, I still spend 95% of my time dealing with other people's code and "maintenance". The opportunity to do things the right way usually was passed years before I joined.
Actually real engineering disciplines screw up too and for some of the same reasons as software. Quick and dirty hacks in hardware driven by unrealistic deadlines from upper management, last minute bandaids applied because it's too expensive to redesign, confusing document control, lack of knowledge transfer if someone leaves the team, etc.
Also remember that the list is about open source software. Some of the things that are wrong there aren't wrong with proprietary software or internal tools, distributed teams have different requirements from teams that are all in the same aisle (ie, open source is greatly improved if there's a web based source code control browser, but that loses importance if everyone on the team already has a license of a the source code control system's GUI tool).
Open Source also means lots of college students or recent grads, full of excitement to get stuff done but without the real world experience to know how to go about it; and full of hobbyists who start off strong then slow down and stop; etc. For example, hobbyist has only a home PC with Windows, and for budget/time reasons does not want to bother with portability to hundreds of different types of systems; or the hobbyist is the sort who thinks Microsoft Visual Something is a really good state of the art tool and bases the entire project on that.
I didn't want it transparent, I just wanted the phones unaccessible so that the users could do something useful with their time instead of staring at the phones.
It's not as bad as it could be. While charging it seems to be efficient, as good as wired charging at least. Most of that efficiency is not from the induction charging but rather from better design of power supply, so you're relying on the manufacturers actually paying attention to efficiency. What's hard to determine is what is the power leakage when the system is not used. Is it better than a wall wart (remember people, unplug those when not in use), how much power is used to detect if there's a phone or not, will manufacturers even bother to turn off power if no phone is detected, yada yada.
The QI literature is 99% about convenience, that's their end-consumer marketing spiel, and the 1% time that they pay attention to efficiency is hard to track down. This is all amazingly consumer oriented (as in "buy me", "consume me", "be the first on your block", "stop thinking for yourself").
So, keep the cable. Cables are good. Except maybe for the people who think cordless mice are a good idea, because we just can't have enough batteries in our landfill. Conspicuous consumption goes hand in hand with conspicuous waste.
No, it's not hard. People just don't care. They want the latest cool thing, NOT the latest smart thing. It's a huge waste of power but who cares because they haven't had a brownout in a few years so as far as they know electricity is an infinite resource. Remember, these are the same people who buy a phone and then throw it into landfill after one year (ok, the "green" people will give it to a recycler who will then put it in the landfill on their behalf). Being smart is a social liability, but it's ok as we're breeding away those undesirable traits.
Slashdot Mirror
Or kickstarter.
And yet Linux managed to be built without requiring subscriptions or paid updates. If the community wants something then they will build it even without the funding models.
I don't want a decent salary for a mod author to come from the players, because that implies that the mod author is not a part of the community in the first place. I want mods from part time hobbyists, I don't want more DLCs, I *especially* don't want "Horse Armor" DLCs. Hobbyists promote the community; they say "look what I did", then someone else says "that's great, let me build on that", and the snowball starts rolling and something good can result at the end.
I'm not saying donations are bad - donations are good! I just think mandatory paid mods is a dumb idea. With computing, we've gone decades with working viable open source models in place that have created competitive products to commercial offerings. That open source world has had paid authors, it's had donations, it's had volunteer authors. What is has not had though is people who refuse to work unless the community pays them directly, because it's a community that grew up using sharing as an inherent virtue.
I've never demanded that other people pay me money to write my resume. So the modders who hope to break the incredibly long odds and get noticed/hired by a game company should not demand that they be paid to do so. (what, maybe less than ten people have ever gotten a a job this way?) Demanding to be paid is an insult to the community also, it implies that the modder is not a part of the community.
The people who are supremely talented but not financially empowered are not my responsibility. I should not be required to give them my charity. I'll pick and choose who I give charity too, and it won't be the guy with the retextured sword. The best mods out there were works from large teams anyway - Unofficial Patches mods (always mandatory), SKUI, SKSE, total world revamps, etc. You don't need finances to be a modder, you just need the game and the (usually) free modding tools; if you think you must have expensive commercial graphics/modeling tools in order to start them you're doing it wrong. Do not treat the gaming community as a way to pay for a bigger computer.
And besides, if someone wants a lot of exposure, the free mods always get the most exposure. Anyone who treats paid mods as more professionally made than free mods is delusional.
And if there is a market for paid mods from day one, there should still be a way to get free mods, a way to bypass the people who treat the community as a resource to be exploited and instead get mods from the people who are a part of the community.
The Steam Workshop was never the real place to get quality mods for Skyrim anyway.
My worry is that the new Bethesda network announced at E3 is a step towards them creating their own mod marketplace, all mods being curated and approved, followed by shutting down places like Nexus as being "unauthorized", so that free mods no long exist.
Sure there are places where paid mods are the norm - but those are also highly toxic places for rather dumb games anyway.
Adblock works on PC I think, as I've never seen an ad with youtube on the PC. On my TV though I don't have adblock, so I'm seeing ads. I'm told that I can add some blocking on my firewall but I haven't gotten around to researching that since it hasn't been annoying until recently.
Sure. Watch broadcast TV, listen to the radio, walk down the street. All free. All have ads though, but in every case you can opt out of the ads and refuse to watch or listen to them. In no case are you required to view to an ad, it doesn't suck up extra gasoline from your car, you can't get malware, etc. These are background ads, ignorable, totally unlike web ads.
Oh, and I pay subscription for some of those services too, including "free" radio. I'm not freeloading like the web advertisers are.
"Don't use GOTOs" is an absolutist statement. The original article from Dijkstra was called "GOTOs Considered Harmful" which was not the same as declaring them taboo.
Slashdot has said that I can opt out of ads. Which I don't bother doing since I have adblock, but... If it starts charing $0.17 a page, then I'll stop visiting. Other useful sites I may stick around with $0.17 a page (and it has to be per page, not per third party script/gif).
People cut the cord from cable companies which used to be considered unthinkable. So I think people will be able to wean themselves away from fluff web sites too.
But think of it this way, I'm already paying over $50/month to get on the web. Why should I be told that I have to pay extra or view ads just to click on a link to some bozo's blog? Worse, why should advertisers be allowed to STEAL my bandwidth and time by piggybacking on my ISP? Broadcast over the airwaves is fine with me, as long as I can look away from the TV and go get a sandwich; but borrowing my internet to show me an ad that I can't skip, that's just immoral.
Any fool can write buggy programs, but it takes a Senior Solutions Architect to really fuck things up.
A lot of these new languages are highly specialized languages. It's like everyone who has a special need and a hatred of general purpose languages thinks they'll just write a new language and solve the problem. Ie, there is no point whatsoever to have an language for developing IoT because we've already have such languages for decades, yet people are creating these new pointless languages.
I'd be good with that. Give everyone an incentive to never go to web sites again, or at least stop browsing mindlessly and instead pay attention to what they are doing. Not a bad thing. Society has functioned without web sites, and it will again (and pretty soon too as it's all moving to phones/tablets now anyway).
The web site owners don't know about any of this, they have farmed out their design to third parties and after signing a contract to an ad provider/server they wash their hands of responsibility (as long as they get revenue). The third parties don't want this idea because then it would be too easy to block them, as in loss of revenue.
I see things sort of analoguous to shaving microseconds off of financial transactions. There's someone in the middle making money without being either producer or consumer and providing no real world value of any sort. Sort of like leeches but not as cuddly.
I still haven't gone to the effort to block these on my TV. But normally it was 4 or 5 seconds before I could skip them, which was usually before you even knew what the ad was about. But the last week I've seen a few that refuse to let me skip the ads, AND the ads were entirely unrelated to the content as well. Screw em. Let youtube go back to being free with no one making money from them, hobbyists only with no youtube pros. Sorry PewDiePie, you need a real job.
Right, and human organ traffickers are stuck between a rock and hard place too but it's not my responsibility to help them out. So if advertisers can't make money without cheating then maybe they need to find a new career, and it's not our responsibility to put up with their tricks.
Also better if users learn to just stop going to web sites that they don't need to. If a site bombards you with ads, then rather than just turn on adblock there, just leave the site permanently and with prejudice. If it's your favorite blog site, then send an email complaining about how bad the ads are with the hope that someone gets the hint (it is not your job to provide charity to fund someone's hobby). This is analogous to people becoming fed up with cable companies and cutting the cord.
Imagine if all the effort and resources put into advertising were instead redirected to productive purposes.
Then don't you feel jaunty and stupid at the same time? Although with enough jaunty then you might not care anymore.
Oh, what's the selling price? *checks wallet*
In the real world you can learn but you are most often prevented from putting the learning into practice. After 30 years programming, I still spend 95% of my time dealing with other people's code and "maintenance". The opportunity to do things the right way usually was passed years before I joined.
Actually real engineering disciplines screw up too and for some of the same reasons as software. Quick and dirty hacks in hardware driven by unrealistic deadlines from upper management, last minute bandaids applied because it's too expensive to redesign, confusing document control, lack of knowledge transfer if someone leaves the team, etc.
Also remember that the list is about open source software. Some of the things that are wrong there aren't wrong with proprietary software or internal tools, distributed teams have different requirements from teams that are all in the same aisle (ie, open source is greatly improved if there's a web based source code control browser, but that loses importance if everyone on the team already has a license of a the source code control system's GUI tool).
Open Source also means lots of college students or recent grads, full of excitement to get stuff done but without the real world experience to know how to go about it; and full of hobbyists who start off strong then slow down and stop; etc. For example, hobbyist has only a home PC with Windows, and for budget/time reasons does not want to bother with portability to hundreds of different types of systems; or the hobbyist is the sort who thinks Microsoft Visual Something is a really good state of the art tool and bases the entire project on that.
That's not the real list, follow the link to the link.
http://spot.livejournal.com/30...
I didn't want it transparent, I just wanted the phones unaccessible so that the users could do something useful with their time instead of staring at the phones.
It's not as bad as it could be. While charging it seems to be efficient, as good as wired charging at least. Most of that efficiency is not from the induction charging but rather from better design of power supply, so you're relying on the manufacturers actually paying attention to efficiency. What's hard to determine is what is the power leakage when the system is not used. Is it better than a wall wart (remember people, unplug those when not in use), how much power is used to detect if there's a phone or not, will manufacturers even bother to turn off power if no phone is detected, yada yada.
The QI literature is 99% about convenience, that's their end-consumer marketing spiel, and the 1% time that they pay attention to efficiency is hard to track down. This is all amazingly consumer oriented (as in "buy me", "consume me", "be the first on your block", "stop thinking for yourself").
Encase those phones in a block of solid quartz. Even better if the quartz is opaque.
So, keep the cable. Cables are good. Except maybe for the people who think cordless mice are a good idea, because we just can't have enough batteries in our landfill. Conspicuous consumption goes hand in hand with conspicuous waste.
No, it's not hard. People just don't care. They want the latest cool thing, NOT the latest smart thing. It's a huge waste of power but who cares because they haven't had a brownout in a few years so as far as they know electricity is an infinite resource. Remember, these are the same people who buy a phone and then throw it into landfill after one year (ok, the "green" people will give it to a recycler who will then put it in the landfill on their behalf). Being smart is a social liability, but it's ok as we're breeding away those undesirable traits.