Many of the reasons leveled at open source can also be leveled at commercial software. I've seen more than my fair share of commercial applications that lack features, have critical bugs, and are definitely hard to use. While some of these problems may be surmounted by purchasing additional software or employing the services of a consultant, that is rarely an option for non-revenue generating organizations (never mind most individual users).
So why do people drop it? Lack of familiarity is one big reason. If you're a Linux user who does specialized stuff with your system, try figuring out how to do that stuff in Windows. Can't find it in the UI or configuration files? No problem. Just read the documentation. Wow. What language does Microsoft write their documentation in? While it may not be quite as bad as another language, the jargon of the Windows world is definitely different from the jargon of the Linux world. This adds time and frustration to the process of learning a new technology. So if you're familiar with Linux, you'll probably stick to Linux. If you're familiar with Windows, you'll probably stick to Windows. Feel free to substitute Linux with your favorite open source application and Windows with your favorite commercial application. By in large, this barrier will still exist.
If that issues exists for technical people, imagine how hard it is for non-technical people to deal with similar problems. A function that is found in a different place or that works in a slightly different manner will cause a neophyte OpenOffice.org user to throw up their arms in frustration, call the product shit, and head directly back to Word. Many people are completely unwilling to adapt to change in a domain that does not interest them. (I've talked to some of these people, and intellectually they realize that OpenOffice.org is just different and that it would serve all of their needs. But emotionally they view it as a vastly inferior product.)
Sometimes bundling is a reason for adopting commercial products. I'm not talking about the bundling of software that you see with commercial vendors (e.g. the various Adobe suites). Rather I'm talking about the resources that are bundled with that software. When you download the Gimp or Inkscape, you get just the Gimp or just Inkscape. When you buy something like the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, you get fonts and clipart that you can use in your projects. When you buy the Microsoft Office Suite you get clipart and templates. Looking at my Linux setup, I have only one or two graphic fonts and no clipart to speak of. Even though I have the standard DTP and graphics software installed under it. Now I don't mind that. Actually I prefer it that way. Yet I can guarantee you that the run of the mill user will throw up their arms in frustration because they expect that stuff.
> A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny. I dunno I can't see myself enjoying it that much. Even if the jokes were intelligent and witty.
Normally I would agree with you, except Douglas Adams was the guy who introduced me to the pleasure of laughing. After all, he was the guy who figured out humour for the geek.
I agree that it is a bad law in the sense that it is difficult for a site to know if a customer is a minor. So this law will only play out in one of two ways in the courts: the majority of lawsuits will be successful, even though it is currently impossible to judge the age of the customer (they can't ask for ID if they look too young, and minors will lie if asked their age); or there will be a glut of lawsuits that will fail because the courts acknowledge that the vendor cannot judge the age of the customer.
On the otherhand, I don't think that it's a bad law from the perspective of maintaining marketing information. An adult can legally consent to giving away that information, and some will acknowledge that they are more than happy to give away that information. (I personally think that it is stupid to give away personal information, but that is just me.) Minors do not automatically have the privilege to give away that information, for a variety of good reasons. One reason is to protect them from a system that they do not necessarily understand. Another reason is to protect their guardians from minors who give away personal association assocated to those adults. Yet another reason is that the guardian is (in many respects) legally responsible for the actions of the minor.
So the question, in my mind, isn't so much, "is the law good?" The question is, "how can we implement this law effectively?"
It is easy to blame the totalitarian actions of governments or the protectionist desires of industry for bad laws, yet illegal activities that are screened by the relative anonymity of the Internet are a persistent problem. Screaming about our loss of freedoms and privacy through draconian laws does not solve the problem of illegal activities, because the government and industry are not the root of the problem. Indeed, it may even make the problem worse since those who commit the crime will believe that they won't have to do the time.
> What's the difference between the 10th edition you could use last year and the 11th edition you have to use this year?
Well, primary and secondary textbooks are a little different from college and university textbooks. This is reflected in both how they are published and how they are purchased.
With respect to publishing new editions: new editions tend to come out when curricular expectations change, and schools are generally expected to use the new editions because the content of the course (or even the approach for teaching it) has changed. I don't know how these things work in California, but my province seems to update the curriculum every 5 to 10 years. So you can usually expect new editions to come out on that timescale.
With respect to purchasing new books: most schools will only buy new books when the curricular expectations have changed, for replacement, or due to a change in the school's program (which usually involves changing publishers, not editions). This approach is much more fiscally prudent than students buying and selling their books on an annual basis, and the publishers must take that into consideration.
> Having employers deny applicants based on their credit could put people in a downward financial spiral.
Yipee! That means an upwards financial spiral for those of us with good credit!:)
Anyways, as unfair as this seems, would you really want to work for people who are so shallow that they believe that a credit report is an indication of a person's honesty (e.g. you won't steal). Even if you are willing to work for shallow people, are you willing to work for people who step over that rather fat line that divides a person's professional and personal lives?
The ribbon is a very bad thing, simply because it violates one of the basic concepts of usability: It breaks compatibility with the user's hard-earned knowledge.
While I agree that regularly changing a user interface is a bad thing, vendors of particularly long-lived products need to deal with changes in the sophistication of their product and its audience. Sometimes that means gutting what they have and rebuilding it in a new form. Given the complexity of Microsoft Office, and of OpenOffice.org, the time had/has come to do that.
The consequences are pretty dire either way. Continuing to build a product upon the old framework means that you are increasing the complexity of the product, while providing minimal options for simplifying it. In many cases, they are also forced to carry past mistakes forward or construct new features around old features that don't scale well. While existing users may be able to adapt to this situation, since they are simply building upon what they already know, new users will view the product as unnecessarily complex and will start searching for options elsewhere.
Radical changes risk alienating existing users, but properly implemented change may entice new users to pick-up or continue to use your product. This is because old mistakes can be fixed, and new features can be built upon a framework that will scale well. Arguably the risk of alienating existing users is less than alienating new users. Existing users will be more inclined to stick with the prior version of the product, and may follow your upgrade path when they are comfortable with it. Microsoft seems to acknowledge this approach since institutional purchasers do have downgrade rights from Office 2007 to Office 2003. Users of OpenOffice.org would also enjoy similar rights since anyone can download an older version of an open source product (much as we see with KDE).
The ribbon is a good idea because it accomplishes the following:
(a) It makes features more visible. Features are easier to discover when they are visible and have multiple representations (such as text and icons).
(b) It cleans up the user interface. The ribbon cleans up the user interface by combining the menu and button bar representations into a unified representation.
(c) It encourages a workflow. Document are created in stages, since things early editing and early formatting can hinder productivity. By grouping tools by function then maintaining the visibility of those tools in a modal manner, a workflow is encouraged.
That being said, this interface is patented and could probably use some work. OpenOffice.org also has deeper user interface and feature implementation problems than it's top-level menus and toolbars. So maybe they should work on fixing existing problems and then exploring novel interfaces.
Feature creep killed the XO, but it had nothing to do with the Microsoft lobby. A few things to consider:
The XO was originally intended to be a replacement for textbooks. It was not intended to serve as a general purpose computer. This feature creep meant that the XO needed additional hardware, higher performance hardware, and experimental hardware. None of this feature creep had anything to do with Microsoft. If you ever used Sugar on the XO, you would be more than aware of this because the performance is substandard. Not only is the system slow due to running interpreted software on a slower CPU, but the software is prone to failure due to there being insufficient memory. (There is no swap space, and two Activities will easily consume all of the RAM.) In other words, and internal desire for more features meant that the hundred dollar laptop would never cost a hundred dollars to build and that the software would never be reliable.
Just to re-iterate, the failure of the XO has positively nothing to do with Microsoft. It did not significantly alter the design of the XO. Nor did it significantly alter the software development process on the XO. About all that it did do was cause some in-fighting between bystanders who would never contribute to the project in the first place.
The main benefit of paper ballots are the many eyes and hands that the ballots and ballot boxes go through.
Think of it this way: the trademark images of the Iraqi elections a few years back were the inked thumb and the translucent ballot box. Neither are inherently secure, but the inked thumb made it more difficult for people to vote early and vote often without the risk of someone noticing it. Likewise, the translucent ballot boxes made it more difficult for the bins to be stuffed before hand without the risk of someone noticing it. Computers are so incredibly opaque that it is nearly impossible for someone to notice discreprancies without direct and intensive observations as well as a great deal of technical knowledge.
Now we all know that elections are fixed, even with pen and paper ballots. It is possible to pay off the right people so that they conveniently don't notice anything. Almost everyone else can be intimidated into not noticing anything. But, either way, more people will notice the discreprancies and people tend to have long memories about such things. So there is still a potential for them to remedy it.
The issue isn't people taking offense to things. The issue isn't even the website, though it is being used as a tool in this case. So what is the issue?
The issue is people using racism as a means of intimidation, either because they are on an ego trip or because they want to force the "outsiders" out. Toughening up may be an option in the first case, but I would argue that it isn't an ideal solution. The act of toughening up in order to preserve the "freedom to" of one group is at the cost of the "freedom from" of the second group. And once you have taken away the "freedom from" for a group of people, you have effectively taken away their "freedom to" as well. (They do not have the freedom of speech or movement, because they are under constant threat. Heck, they don't even have the freedom to define their own identity because it has already been defined by racial stereotypes as well as your desire for them to toughen up.)
Then there is that forcing out issue. Toughening up in anyway that is perceived as pushback or stubborness will only lead to violence. That is because a particular group of people is trying to purify their fraternity. Pushback and stubborness will escalate the situation because the target is not listening to the message. Or worse, they are fighting back against their fraternity.
While I do run Windows XP, since my computer came with it, I recently realised that virtually all of my software will run under Windows 2000. In the few cases where XP is necessary, it is usually possible to use the prior version of the software and pretty much accomplish the same task.
So what did I do: I dumped some money into acquiring VMware Workstation and some older copies of Windows. The system allows me to create separate virtual machines for separate tasks, thus allowing me to avoid (or at least isolate) many of the things that makes Windows frail.
That degree of isolation, in my books, would be a far more meaningful form of advance in operating systems than a resource intensive coating of eye-candy and a security mechanism that had to be scaled back in order to be considered as useful. Of course Microsoft is stuck in a corner where only the visualization of progress (eye-candy) and the perception of security (UAC) will sell their products, so I don't suppose that all of us will see the incentive to buy Windows 7 or its successors in the near future.
You don't have to be a great scientist or a great communicator to inspire a child with science. All that you really need to do is ask key questions that will encourage your children to observe the world around them, and to think about it rationally.
When the time comes, your children will probably find their own heros from the world of science. These will people will reflect their own ambitions, may they be in physics or biology or chemistry (or even something as unscientific as mathematics).
And if they chose to go somewhere else in life, that should be fine to. As long as they have a clear vision on how they can contribute to the world, they will probably find some sort of direction in life. After all, even artists and tradespeople help to make our world a much richer and better place.
They aren't even derivative works. They're just copies. THEY'RE COPIES.
If you think that harvesting a few thousand images off of a website, then properly linking them into the Wikipedia is easy, then you clearly haven't tried making simple digital copies.
If you think that making a few thousand proper reproductions through photography or scanning is easy, then properly documenting building a gallery website out of those images is easy, then you clearly haven't tried bridging the analog and digital world.
A few things to consider: photography is hard, at least if you expect a decent result from it. You need to consider factors such as lighting and colour, and balance those out with the camera's limitations (such as the response curve of the photodetector to light and colour). Scanning a painting may make it easier, particularly when it comes to lighting and colour correction, but they can't exactly rush out an buy the cheapest model from the local discount electronics store. At the very least, you would need a large format scanner to handle most artwork. (Damn those artists who didn't paint on legal size paper, sometimes choosing a canvas that is just a fraction of an inch too deep.) Yet a commercial large format scanner probably wouldn't do the job either. You see, curators tend to be a wee bit finicky about what their collections are exposed to. They probably don't want to deal with the subtle alterations in the paint/dye chemistry that results from exposure to particular wavelengths of light or poor handling. I think that prior generations of curators and librarians learned from prior projects, such as the massive attempts to transfer works to microfiche or microfilm in decades past, that it is always best to maintain an original.
So while I have a hard time supporting the gallery's actions, I can also see that their digitization projects are non-trivial and that they probably should have the rights to deal with the results according to their own desires.
Does a fairly affluent school that is two blocks north of a prominent Canadian university count? Some teachers love making computers available to the children that they teach. Unfortunately, when board policies only allocate two per classroom and place the rest in computer labs, teachers often have to scrounge for what's cheap or free.
While on the note of obsolete technology in the classroom, I recently donated a Pentium 90 to another school in an affluent neighbourhood. In their case, the teacher actually wanted that extraordinarily old computer because many of the good educational games were designed to run on 486's or early Pentiums.
Mac OS 9 did not have memory protection or preemptive multitasking. It crashed a lot.
Just a note here: cooperative multitaking may cause a system to become unresponsive, but it won't cause a system to crash. In both the case of cooperative multitasking and the lack of memory protection, the stability issues were caused by applications rather than the operating system (in virtually every case). As such, it was quite possible to choose applications that did not affect the responsiveness or stability of the system as a whole. Granted, that was virtually impossible to do for web browsers in the case of the classic Mac OS.
Some well meaning person decided to get a site license for and install Symantec's anti-virus software on my school's networks. It was pulled off of the machines within a week. In a couple of cases, removal meant restoring the system from an image because their product refused to uninstall. The reason for the fuss is simple: their product was causing problems on a continuous basis, adding hours of work per day to my workload and making it impossible to use critical software.
A simple cost-benefit analysis showed that our systems could be destroyed every other week by the latest virus or worm then the systems could be restored from an image, and it would still involve less lost productivity than running their fine product. But the network doesn't get blasted by a virus that often. Probably because things have changed considerably over the past few years, ranging from user habits to the built-in security of Windows to hardware managing the network.
There are an unbelievable number of weapons out there, and it is unlikely that all of them are documented in mainstream or even specialist sources. So where do you look for information on something that was taken off of the body of common thug. You can do guesswork or rely upon hearsay, or you can look at non-traditional sources that document esoteric things. The Wikipedia is probably one of the more reliable esoteric sources that you can use because it has a number of checks and balances built into it.
Used properly, the Wikipedia can also be used to discern valid from invalid information. First of all, an officer can use their own background knowledge to discern what is obviously correct and what is obviously incorrect. The Wikipedia also provides a history of edits and (at some level) who edited it. If they do not provide a username, the police are in for a real treat because they (being the organisation, not necessarily the officer involved) do know what to do with information like that.
Let's say that you get these people online. They certainly won't be using the Internet in any manner remotely similar to how we use it. Consider the following:
1. Very few resources will be in their native language. This means that very few people in these countries can use it to learn more effective agricultural practices, learn how to obtain safe drinking water, or learn how the reduce the spread of disease. (Not to mention the millions of other things that we have access to with a keyword search.) A few people will be able to do this because they will have a second language that is used online, and will use it because they want to figure out how to solve local problems. Thing is, those are the people who would have sought out resources anyways.
2. Very few websites are designed for low bandwidth and low reliability connections. I work in a town with a satellite connection to the internet. Minimum latency on that is 0.25 seconds to go from the Earth to the satellite and back. Furthermore, satellite is expensive so bandwidth is limited. (A thousand people are served by less bandwidth than the typical Slashdotter has going into their home.) You would be surprised at how much stuff breaks (e.g. timeouts on either the client or server end) and how ploddingly slow stuff is. And that is using a relatively good connection to the outside world. Even if none of their infrastructure used satellites for any portion of the network, they would still have to deal with high latency due to most of the world's online resources being concentrated in developed nations.
Both of these issues (and a few others) means that the people who use communications technologies in the developing world will be primarily concerned with local communications. At which point you may as well ditch IP and use something that is more appropriate to their needs.
Microsoft isn't really shooting the competing horse. They know that they can't do that because it is illegal. It would also draw the government's attention to the problem of fixed horse races, and open the door to more legislation. No one really wants that.
The hardware vendors are more like the race track operators. They provide a venue in which anyone can compete, and will gladly let anyone participate if it reflects their business interests. Except that they have one little problem: the owner of the most popular horses is a spoil sport. Microsoft said that they would charge the race track operators more, or even pull their horses out of the race, if Linux's horses competes. Since Microsoft's horses bring in more money than Linux's horses, the business interests of the race track operators is quite clear and Linux's horses cannot compete.
Which may actually explain why Microsoft's OSes are so expensive in retail channels. Microsoft has virtually no control over who buys retail copies of Windows. At least not without facing a major anti-trust suit. So if a vendor wanted to sell Linux or Windows, based upon the customer's request, Microsoft could refuse to sell cheap licenses to them. The vendor could still buy retail copies or Windows, but it would drive up the cost of their Windows systems by 20% or more. So their Windows customers would evaporate since other vendors will always be cheaper.
I wasn't an undergrad too long ago, and I agree that many of the professors had more 'important' things to do (grad student research, obtaining funding, writing papers, conferences, journals, etc) than worry about their 500 student Comp Sci I course.
There are a huge number of factors to consider here, and they will vary from institution to institution. The university that I worked at had a magic formula that said the professor's role was 2 parts teaching, 2 parts research, and 1 part service. I don't know how these parts were measured when it came down to their evaluations, but I could easily imagine that it is easier to skimp on teaching than research. After all, research is measured in terms of citations (i.e. it is related to the numbers of papers published) and the amount of money brought in through external grants (i.e. writing research proposals and ensuring that the citation thing is up to par). Both writing papers and writing grant proposals are time consuming. It is easy to understand how those things would become more important.
On top of that, consider how people are employed in these institutions. Professors are mainly driven by the desire to do research. That's why they decided to go after tenure track, university positions. Yes, there are the exceptions. Yet, from what I've seen, those exceptions are primarily composed of professors who have tenure and decided to be less competitive in research. The other group consists of dedicated teaching staff. For the most part, these people are part-time employees of the university who have virtually no input on instruction. Since many of these positions hardly pay enough to survive (never mind offer the riches that they were promised before pursuing higher education), most of them have better things to do. Such as search for better forms of employment. (I have known a number of these people, and some of them literally work for three different universities or colleges.)
Yeah, instructors who reuse assignments and expect students to pay the price for that suck. On the other hand, those instructors are just as much the victims of circumstance as the students.
Simply put, instructors are not paid to develop courses and assess work in any manner that can be considered pedagogically sound. On top of that most professors (heck, even most school teachers) have responsibilities that extend beyond classroom teaching. So most of them are expected to use curricular materials that were developed once and used many times over, while reading at a speed more appropriate for an entertaining novel than a serious academic discourse. Instructors who go beyond that are virtually always sacrificing their own personal lives in order to improve the quality of education.
Teaching at any level is hard. Teaching in over crowded introductory university courses (that are often used to fund smaller upper year courses) is among the most challenging jobs that a professional can do. And, unfortunately, I doubt that battles like this one are doing anything to address the issue of the quality of education.
Why can't people just respect the author's wishes, and let the market decide?
There is nothing stipulating that you must read LeGuin's books, just as there is nothing compelling you to read Doctorow's ebooks. You read their stuff because you want to.
If you are driven to read one of their books, then you will do so even if it only comes in dead tree format. And yes, The Left Hand of Darkness is probably one of those books worth digging up even though that limitation exists. In a way, reading LeGuin's books electronically (or at least the two that I have read) seems to be inappropriate. To read them electronically would be to defy the cultural setting of the novel.
Likewise, you may feel that Doctorow's books are worth the read. I can't think of anything as compelling as LeGuin's aforementioned title, but they are certainly entertaining and convey messages that are relevant in a contemporary context. Sometimes that message is carried by the body of the work, and quite often it is accompanied by how the work is distributed. (Doctorow works seem to be very much about freedom, and he expresses that both in his stories and how he lets other interface with those stories.)
Of course, it goes beyond how the authors want to express themselves. It also delves into how the authors make a living. LeGuin seems to have met a lot of success in the medium of print. She wants to continue with that type of express because she probably measures her livelyhood by the number of copies sold and the royalties earned off of those copies. Doctorow, on the otherhand, seems to have built his success by writing contemporary stories in a contemporary medium. He seems to earn his livelyhood by earning the goodwill of his readers, and using that goodwill to propel him forwared.
Just because LeGuin's measure of success is based upon hard measures (copies, dollars, whatever) and Doctorow's measure of success is based upon soft measures (goodwill of the readership translating into readership support) doesn't mean that one system is inherently better than the other.
Though I do find it kinda ironic that LeGuin's measure of success is almost diametrically opposed to her writing, while Doctorow's measure of success is almost diametrically opposed to his writing.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the reasons leveled at open source can also be leveled at commercial software. I've seen more than my fair share of commercial applications that lack features, have critical bugs, and are definitely hard to use. While some of these problems may be surmounted by purchasing additional software or employing the services of a consultant, that is rarely an option for non-revenue generating organizations (never mind most individual users).
So why do people drop it? Lack of familiarity is one big reason. If you're a Linux user who does specialized stuff with your system, try figuring out how to do that stuff in Windows. Can't find it in the UI or configuration files? No problem. Just read the documentation. Wow. What language does Microsoft write their documentation in? While it may not be quite as bad as another language, the jargon of the Windows world is definitely different from the jargon of the Linux world. This adds time and frustration to the process of learning a new technology. So if you're familiar with Linux, you'll probably stick to Linux. If you're familiar with Windows, you'll probably stick to Windows. Feel free to substitute Linux with your favorite open source application and Windows with your favorite commercial application. By in large, this barrier will still exist.
If that issues exists for technical people, imagine how hard it is for non-technical people to deal with similar problems. A function that is found in a different place or that works in a slightly different manner will cause a neophyte OpenOffice.org user to throw up their arms in frustration, call the product shit, and head directly back to Word. Many people are completely unwilling to adapt to change in a domain that does not interest them. (I've talked to some of these people, and intellectually they realize that OpenOffice.org is just different and that it would serve all of their needs. But emotionally they view it as a vastly inferior product.)
Sometimes bundling is a reason for adopting commercial products. I'm not talking about the bundling of software that you see with commercial vendors (e.g. the various Adobe suites). Rather I'm talking about the resources that are bundled with that software. When you download the Gimp or Inkscape, you get just the Gimp or just Inkscape. When you buy something like the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, you get fonts and clipart that you can use in your projects. When you buy the Microsoft Office Suite you get clipart and templates. Looking at my Linux setup, I have only one or two graphic fonts and no clipart to speak of. Even though I have the standard DTP and graphics software installed under it. Now I don't mind that. Actually I prefer it that way. Yet I can guarantee you that the run of the mill user will throw up their arms in frustration because they expect that stuff.
And the list could go on.
> A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny. I dunno I can't see myself enjoying it that much. Even if the jokes were intelligent and witty.
Normally I would agree with you, except Douglas Adams was the guy who introduced me to the pleasure of laughing. After all, he was the guy who figured out humour for the geek.
I agree that it is a bad law in the sense that it is difficult for a site to know if a customer is a minor. So this law will only play out in one of two ways in the courts: the majority of lawsuits will be successful, even though it is currently impossible to judge the age of the customer (they can't ask for ID if they look too young, and minors will lie if asked their age); or there will be a glut of lawsuits that will fail because the courts acknowledge that the vendor cannot judge the age of the customer.
On the otherhand, I don't think that it's a bad law from the perspective of maintaining marketing information. An adult can legally consent to giving away that information, and some will acknowledge that they are more than happy to give away that information. (I personally think that it is stupid to give away personal information, but that is just me.) Minors do not automatically have the privilege to give away that information, for a variety of good reasons. One reason is to protect them from a system that they do not necessarily understand. Another reason is to protect their guardians from minors who give away personal association assocated to those adults. Yet another reason is that the guardian is (in many respects) legally responsible for the actions of the minor.
So the question, in my mind, isn't so much, "is the law good?" The question is, "how can we implement this law effectively?"
The judge is pissed off that his district is switching from WordPerfect to Word.
It is easy to blame the totalitarian actions of governments or the protectionist desires of industry for bad laws, yet illegal activities that are screened by the relative anonymity of the Internet are a persistent problem. Screaming about our loss of freedoms and privacy through draconian laws does not solve the problem of illegal activities, because the government and industry are not the root of the problem. Indeed, it may even make the problem worse since those who commit the crime will believe that they won't have to do the time.
> What's the difference between the 10th edition you could use last year and the 11th edition you have to use this year?
Well, primary and secondary textbooks are a little different from college and university textbooks. This is reflected in both how they are published and how they are purchased.
With respect to publishing new editions: new editions tend to come out when curricular expectations change, and schools are generally expected to use the new editions because the content of the course (or even the approach for teaching it) has changed. I don't know how these things work in California, but my province seems to update the curriculum every 5 to 10 years. So you can usually expect new editions to come out on that timescale.
With respect to purchasing new books: most schools will only buy new books when the curricular expectations have changed, for replacement, or due to a change in the school's program (which usually involves changing publishers, not editions). This approach is much more fiscally prudent than students buying and selling their books on an annual basis, and the publishers must take that into consideration.
> Having employers deny applicants based on their credit could put people in a downward financial spiral.
Yipee! That means an upwards financial spiral for those of us with good credit! :)
Anyways, as unfair as this seems, would you really want to work for people who are so shallow that they believe that a credit report is an indication of a person's honesty (e.g. you won't steal). Even if you are willing to work for shallow people, are you willing to work for people who step over that rather fat line that divides a person's professional and personal lives?
With 8-bit resolution, Apple can finally create a one button keyboard that accompanies their one button mice.
The ribbon is a very bad thing, simply because it violates one of the basic concepts of usability: It breaks compatibility with the user's hard-earned knowledge.
While I agree that regularly changing a user interface is a bad thing, vendors of particularly long-lived products need to deal with changes in the sophistication of their product and its audience. Sometimes that means gutting what they have and rebuilding it in a new form. Given the complexity of Microsoft Office, and of OpenOffice.org, the time had/has come to do that.
The consequences are pretty dire either way. Continuing to build a product upon the old framework means that you are increasing the complexity of the product, while providing minimal options for simplifying it. In many cases, they are also forced to carry past mistakes forward or construct new features around old features that don't scale well. While existing users may be able to adapt to this situation, since they are simply building upon what they already know, new users will view the product as unnecessarily complex and will start searching for options elsewhere.
Radical changes risk alienating existing users, but properly implemented change may entice new users to pick-up or continue to use your product. This is because old mistakes can be fixed, and new features can be built upon a framework that will scale well. Arguably the risk of alienating existing users is less than alienating new users. Existing users will be more inclined to stick with the prior version of the product, and may follow your upgrade path when they are comfortable with it. Microsoft seems to acknowledge this approach since institutional purchasers do have downgrade rights from Office 2007 to Office 2003. Users of OpenOffice.org would also enjoy similar rights since anyone can download an older version of an open source product (much as we see with KDE).
The ribbon is a good idea because it accomplishes the following:
(a) It makes features more visible. Features are easier to discover when they are visible and have multiple representations (such as text and icons).
(b) It cleans up the user interface. The ribbon cleans up the user interface by combining the menu and button bar representations into a unified representation.
(c) It encourages a workflow. Document are created in stages, since things early editing and early formatting can hinder productivity. By grouping tools by function then maintaining the visibility of those tools in a modal manner, a workflow is encouraged.
That being said, this interface is patented and could probably use some work. OpenOffice.org also has deeper user interface and feature implementation problems than it's top-level menus and toolbars. So maybe they should work on fixing existing problems and then exploring novel interfaces.
Feature creep killed the XO, but it had nothing to do with the Microsoft lobby. A few things to consider:
The XO was originally intended to be a replacement for textbooks. It was not intended to serve as a general purpose computer. This feature creep meant that the XO needed additional hardware, higher performance hardware, and experimental hardware. None of this feature creep had anything to do with Microsoft. If you ever used Sugar on the XO, you would be more than aware of this because the performance is substandard. Not only is the system slow due to running interpreted software on a slower CPU, but the software is prone to failure due to there being insufficient memory. (There is no swap space, and two Activities will easily consume all of the RAM.) In other words, and internal desire for more features meant that the hundred dollar laptop would never cost a hundred dollars to build and that the software would never be reliable.
Just to re-iterate, the failure of the XO has positively nothing to do with Microsoft. It did not significantly alter the design of the XO. Nor did it significantly alter the software development process on the XO. About all that it did do was cause some in-fighting between bystanders who would never contribute to the project in the first place.
The main benefit of paper ballots are the many eyes and hands that the ballots and ballot boxes go through.
Think of it this way: the trademark images of the Iraqi elections a few years back were the inked thumb and the translucent ballot box. Neither are inherently secure, but the inked thumb made it more difficult for people to vote early and vote often without the risk of someone noticing it. Likewise, the translucent ballot boxes made it more difficult for the bins to be stuffed before hand without the risk of someone noticing it. Computers are so incredibly opaque that it is nearly impossible for someone to notice discreprancies without direct and intensive observations as well as a great deal of technical knowledge.
Now we all know that elections are fixed, even with pen and paper ballots. It is possible to pay off the right people so that they conveniently don't notice anything. Almost everyone else can be intimidated into not noticing anything. But, either way, more people will notice the discreprancies and people tend to have long memories about such things. So there is still a potential for them to remedy it.
The issue isn't people taking offense to things. The issue isn't even the website, though it is being used as a tool in this case. So what is the issue?
The issue is people using racism as a means of intimidation, either because they are on an ego trip or because they want to force the "outsiders" out. Toughening up may be an option in the first case, but I would argue that it isn't an ideal solution. The act of toughening up in order to preserve the "freedom to" of one group is at the cost of the "freedom from" of the second group. And once you have taken away the "freedom from" for a group of people, you have effectively taken away their "freedom to" as well. (They do not have the freedom of speech or movement, because they are under constant threat. Heck, they don't even have the freedom to define their own identity because it has already been defined by racial stereotypes as well as your desire for them to toughen up.)
Then there is that forcing out issue. Toughening up in anyway that is perceived as pushback or stubborness will only lead to violence. That is because a particular group of people is trying to purify their fraternity. Pushback and stubborness will escalate the situation because the target is not listening to the message. Or worse, they are fighting back against their fraternity.
While I do run Windows XP, since my computer came with it, I recently realised that virtually all of my software will run under Windows 2000. In the few cases where XP is necessary, it is usually possible to use the prior version of the software and pretty much accomplish the same task.
So what did I do: I dumped some money into acquiring VMware Workstation and some older copies of Windows. The system allows me to create separate virtual machines for separate tasks, thus allowing me to avoid (or at least isolate) many of the things that makes Windows frail.
That degree of isolation, in my books, would be a far more meaningful form of advance in operating systems than a resource intensive coating of eye-candy and a security mechanism that had to be scaled back in order to be considered as useful. Of course Microsoft is stuck in a corner where only the visualization of progress (eye-candy) and the perception of security (UAC) will sell their products, so I don't suppose that all of us will see the incentive to buy Windows 7 or its successors in the near future.
> Perhaps next, they can follow Slashdot's example and phase out support for web browsers.
This may actually be an advantage:
show_articles.sh YouTube-Phasing-Out-Support-For-IE6 | sed s/IE6/Windows/g | more
You don't have to be a great scientist or a great communicator to inspire a child with science. All that you really need to do is ask key questions that will encourage your children to observe the world around them, and to think about it rationally.
When the time comes, your children will probably find their own heros from the world of science. These will people will reflect their own ambitions, may they be in physics or biology or chemistry (or even something as unscientific as mathematics).
And if they chose to go somewhere else in life, that should be fine to. As long as they have a clear vision on how they can contribute to the world, they will probably find some sort of direction in life. After all, even artists and tradespeople help to make our world a much richer and better place.
They aren't even derivative works. They're just copies. THEY'RE COPIES.
If you think that harvesting a few thousand images off of a website, then properly linking them into the Wikipedia is easy, then you clearly haven't tried making simple digital copies.
If you think that making a few thousand proper reproductions through photography or scanning is easy, then properly documenting building a gallery website out of those images is easy, then you clearly haven't tried bridging the analog and digital world.
A few things to consider: photography is hard, at least if you expect a decent result from it. You need to consider factors such as lighting and colour, and balance those out with the camera's limitations (such as the response curve of the photodetector to light and colour). Scanning a painting may make it easier, particularly when it comes to lighting and colour correction, but they can't exactly rush out an buy the cheapest model from the local discount electronics store. At the very least, you would need a large format scanner to handle most artwork. (Damn those artists who didn't paint on legal size paper, sometimes choosing a canvas that is just a fraction of an inch too deep.) Yet a commercial large format scanner probably wouldn't do the job either. You see, curators tend to be a wee bit finicky about what their collections are exposed to. They probably don't want to deal with the subtle alterations in the paint/dye chemistry that results from exposure to particular wavelengths of light or poor handling. I think that prior generations of curators and librarians learned from prior projects, such as the massive attempts to transfer works to microfiche or microfilm in decades past, that it is always best to maintain an original.
So while I have a hard time supporting the gallery's actions, I can also see that their digitization projects are non-trivial and that they probably should have the rights to deal with the results according to their own desires.
Name me one school that still uses old Macs
Does a fairly affluent school that is two blocks north of a prominent Canadian university count? Some teachers love making computers available to the children that they teach. Unfortunately, when board policies only allocate two per classroom and place the rest in computer labs, teachers often have to scrounge for what's cheap or free.
While on the note of obsolete technology in the classroom, I recently donated a Pentium 90 to another school in an affluent neighbourhood. In their case, the teacher actually wanted that extraordinarily old computer because many of the good educational games were designed to run on 486's or early Pentiums.
Mac OS 9 did not have memory protection or preemptive multitasking. It crashed a lot.
Just a note here: cooperative multitaking may cause a system to become unresponsive, but it won't cause a system to crash. In both the case of cooperative multitasking and the lack of memory protection, the stability issues were caused by applications rather than the operating system (in virtually every case). As such, it was quite possible to choose applications that did not affect the responsiveness or stability of the system as a whole. Granted, that was virtually impossible to do for web browsers in the case of the classic Mac OS.
Some well meaning person decided to get a site license for and install Symantec's anti-virus software on my school's networks. It was pulled off of the machines within a week. In a couple of cases, removal meant restoring the system from an image because their product refused to uninstall. The reason for the fuss is simple: their product was causing problems on a continuous basis, adding hours of work per day to my workload and making it impossible to use critical software.
A simple cost-benefit analysis showed that our systems could be destroyed every other week by the latest virus or worm then the systems could be restored from an image, and it would still involve less lost productivity than running their fine product. But the network doesn't get blasted by a virus that often. Probably because things have changed considerably over the past few years, ranging from user habits to the built-in security of Windows to hardware managing the network.
There are an unbelievable number of weapons out there, and it is unlikely that all of them are documented in mainstream or even specialist sources. So where do you look for information on something that was taken off of the body of common thug. You can do guesswork or rely upon hearsay, or you can look at non-traditional sources that document esoteric things. The Wikipedia is probably one of the more reliable esoteric sources that you can use because it has a number of checks and balances built into it.
Used properly, the Wikipedia can also be used to discern valid from invalid information. First of all, an officer can use their own background knowledge to discern what is obviously correct and what is obviously incorrect. The Wikipedia also provides a history of edits and (at some level) who edited it. If they do not provide a username, the police are in for a real treat because they (being the organisation, not necessarily the officer involved) do know what to do with information like that.
Let's say that you get these people online. They certainly won't be using the Internet in any manner remotely similar to how we use it. Consider the following:
1. Very few resources will be in their native language. This means that very few people in these countries can use it to learn more effective agricultural practices, learn how to obtain safe drinking water, or learn how the reduce the spread of disease. (Not to mention the millions of other things that we have access to with a keyword search.) A few people will be able to do this because they will have a second language that is used online, and will use it because they want to figure out how to solve local problems. Thing is, those are the people who would have sought out resources anyways.
2. Very few websites are designed for low bandwidth and low reliability connections. I work in a town with a satellite connection to the internet. Minimum latency on that is 0.25 seconds to go from the Earth to the satellite and back. Furthermore, satellite is expensive so bandwidth is limited. (A thousand people are served by less bandwidth than the typical Slashdotter has going into their home.) You would be surprised at how much stuff breaks (e.g. timeouts on either the client or server end) and how ploddingly slow stuff is. And that is using a relatively good connection to the outside world. Even if none of their infrastructure used satellites for any portion of the network, they would still have to deal with high latency due to most of the world's online resources being concentrated in developed nations.
Both of these issues (and a few others) means that the people who use communications technologies in the developing world will be primarily concerned with local communications. At which point you may as well ditch IP and use something that is more appropriate to their needs.
Microsoft isn't really shooting the competing horse. They know that they can't do that because it is illegal. It would also draw the government's attention to the problem of fixed horse races, and open the door to more legislation. No one really wants that.
The hardware vendors are more like the race track operators. They provide a venue in which anyone can compete, and will gladly let anyone participate if it reflects their business interests. Except that they have one little problem: the owner of the most popular horses is a spoil sport. Microsoft said that they would charge the race track operators more, or even pull their horses out of the race, if Linux's horses competes. Since Microsoft's horses bring in more money than Linux's horses, the business interests of the race track operators is quite clear and Linux's horses cannot compete.
Which may actually explain why Microsoft's OSes are so expensive in retail channels. Microsoft has virtually no control over who buys retail copies of Windows. At least not without facing a major anti-trust suit. So if a vendor wanted to sell Linux or Windows, based upon the customer's request, Microsoft could refuse to sell cheap licenses to them. The vendor could still buy retail copies or Windows, but it would drive up the cost of their Windows systems by 20% or more. So their Windows customers would evaporate since other vendors will always be cheaper.
I wasn't an undergrad too long ago, and I agree that many of the professors had more 'important' things to do (grad student research, obtaining funding, writing papers, conferences, journals, etc) than worry about their 500 student Comp Sci I course.
There are a huge number of factors to consider here, and they will vary from institution to institution. The university that I worked at had a magic formula that said the professor's role was 2 parts teaching, 2 parts research, and 1 part service. I don't know how these parts were measured when it came down to their evaluations, but I could easily imagine that it is easier to skimp on teaching than research. After all, research is measured in terms of citations (i.e. it is related to the numbers of papers published) and the amount of money brought in through external grants (i.e. writing research proposals and ensuring that the citation thing is up to par). Both writing papers and writing grant proposals are time consuming. It is easy to understand how those things would become more important.
On top of that, consider how people are employed in these institutions. Professors are mainly driven by the desire to do research. That's why they decided to go after tenure track, university positions. Yes, there are the exceptions. Yet, from what I've seen, those exceptions are primarily composed of professors who have tenure and decided to be less competitive in research. The other group consists of dedicated teaching staff. For the most part, these people are part-time employees of the university who have virtually no input on instruction. Since many of these positions hardly pay enough to survive (never mind offer the riches that they were promised before pursuing higher education), most of them have better things to do. Such as search for better forms of employment. (I have known a number of these people, and some of them literally work for three different universities or colleges.)
So yeah, a big part of the problem is higher up.
Yeah, instructors who reuse assignments and expect students to pay the price for that suck. On the other hand, those instructors are just as much the victims of circumstance as the students.
Simply put, instructors are not paid to develop courses and assess work in any manner that can be considered pedagogically sound. On top of that most professors (heck, even most school teachers) have responsibilities that extend beyond classroom teaching. So most of them are expected to use curricular materials that were developed once and used many times over, while reading at a speed more appropriate for an entertaining novel than a serious academic discourse. Instructors who go beyond that are virtually always sacrificing their own personal lives in order to improve the quality of education.
Teaching at any level is hard. Teaching in over crowded introductory university courses (that are often used to fund smaller upper year courses) is among the most challenging jobs that a professional can do. And, unfortunately, I doubt that battles like this one are doing anything to address the issue of the quality of education.
Why can't people just respect the author's wishes, and let the market decide?
There is nothing stipulating that you must read LeGuin's books, just as there is nothing compelling you to read Doctorow's ebooks. You read their stuff because you want to.
If you are driven to read one of their books, then you will do so even if it only comes in dead tree format. And yes, The Left Hand of Darkness is probably one of those books worth digging up even though that limitation exists. In a way, reading LeGuin's books electronically (or at least the two that I have read) seems to be inappropriate. To read them electronically would be to defy the cultural setting of the novel.
Likewise, you may feel that Doctorow's books are worth the read. I can't think of anything as compelling as LeGuin's aforementioned title, but they are certainly entertaining and convey messages that are relevant in a contemporary context. Sometimes that message is carried by the body of the work, and quite often it is accompanied by how the work is distributed. (Doctorow works seem to be very much about freedom, and he expresses that both in his stories and how he lets other interface with those stories.)
Of course, it goes beyond how the authors want to express themselves. It also delves into how the authors make a living. LeGuin seems to have met a lot of success in the medium of print. She wants to continue with that type of express because she probably measures her livelyhood by the number of copies sold and the royalties earned off of those copies. Doctorow, on the otherhand, seems to have built his success by writing contemporary stories in a contemporary medium. He seems to earn his livelyhood by earning the goodwill of his readers, and using that goodwill to propel him forwared.
Just because LeGuin's measure of success is based upon hard measures (copies, dollars, whatever) and Doctorow's measure of success is based upon soft measures (goodwill of the readership translating into readership support) doesn't mean that one system is inherently better than the other.
Though I do find it kinda ironic that LeGuin's measure of success is almost diametrically opposed to her writing, while Doctorow's measure of success is almost diametrically opposed to his writing.