Software Industry Innately (Too) Conservative
on
The Humane Environment
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
>>...build on small things that already exist right now. Maybe change some major things, but keep the tried and true methods.
This is one big reason why the software industry is so innately conservative, all the media hype about the pace of change notwithstanding.
Developers, especially open source developers who are free of the need to sell familiar products into an established pool of customers, ought to avoid underestimating the abilities of users to comprehend and absorb change. After all, somone had to be the first to try one of those "tried and true methods".
I was thinking about grocery discount cards. Seems to always be my luck to get behind the guy who can't find his. Most people ought to be able to find their fingers.
They're too small, the handles break or the bottom drops out, and, worst of all, everything in the bag rolls out onto the car floor as soon as you take your first turn.
Gimme big solid paper bags with handles.
(On the other hand, the plastic bags come in handy as raingear in different parts of the world.)
I said I wouldn't want to be tried by emotional eunuchs, which is what it strikes me many self-described "logical" people are striving to be. Juries need to weigh the evidence, and jurors who pretend to be logical automatons can't do that.
Meanwhile, your llinking of "idiots" to partiality is typical of the kind of arrogant bias exhibited my many/. posters, who seem to believe that they're a privileged caste.
Loan sharking is illegal because the sharks charge illegally exorbitant interest rates, not because they are greedy. Banks are greedy, too, but their loans are legal.
And "we, the people" have nothing at all to do with deciding where ownership ends and greed begins. Ownership of something is a real, legal, fact. Greed is a human emotion.
It's the speed, not the altitude, that allows something to achieve orbit. The maximum speed of the V-2 was, I think, about 3600 MPH. That's about 20 percent of the velocity needed to put something in orbit. The entire rocket followed a ballistic trajectory back to the surface; no space junk was left behind.
Working for increased sales and larger market share is normal and legitimate behavior for any business, as is enticing customers with an initial low price.
Because consumers do, in fact, have the option to acquire other other non-Microsoft operating systems and applications, Microsoft is not a pure monopoly, but they obviously engatge in illegal monopolistic practices. They are supported in this by the almost universal belief among non-technical consumers that Windows is synonymous with computing. I.e., many people think a Mac can only run Apple software, and most people, I'm sure, have never heard of Linux.
I have no idea if there's a legal requirement for Microsoft to expose the terms of its contracts with these schools, but I'm sure that if there isn't, they won't. That upsets some people who expect businesses to behave as altruistic individuals. I don't expect that: Businesses are intended to make money, and are motivated to place their profit above the public's good.
A figure of speech, OK? The meaning of the sentence is clear as it stands. It would have been unnecessarily pedantic to point out that smaller numbers are, by defintion, fractions of larger number.
Not to be pedantic, but if Microsoft was as pure a monopoly as everyone says they are, then they'd have no interest in offering discount deals to anyone. As they only game in town, they could set their prices arbitrarily.
Of coure they'd know. First, you need a passport. To get that, you need to present a birth certificate or other legal proof of identity. Then, you plaster a nice mug shot of yourself on the passport.
If you fly, you'll need to present your passport multiple times before you board the aircraft. And, the airliner will feed all that lovely personal info into databases shared with scads of agencies.
Don't forget passport control at your place of departure and at your destination. Oh, odds are you'll need a visa to get into that Arab country. A passport alone won't cut it. More database entries.
Now, once you beyond passport control and out of the airport at your destination, smile at the local police officers, 'cause you are almost certainly already in there records. And, if you appear sufficently interesting, the local intelligence service knows you're there, too.
Orbital velocity is just a few miles per hour short of 18,000 MPH. Fail to reach orbital velocity and you'll fall back to Earth, no matter how high you go.
No WW 2, much less WW 1, aircraft were capable of reching even a fraction of orbital veleocity.
Ice Cream Lovers Refuse To Switch To Gnu Cream
on
Linux in the Workplace
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I stopped buying proprietary ice cream from the big monopoly dairy corporations a couple of years ago and now make my own free frozen dairy product -- I call it "Iced Gnu Cream" -- from open ingredients purchased at the co-op grocery about an hour's drive down the road. Sure, driving there and back takes time, and I've had to modify an old fashioned manual ice cream freezer to make this stuff (boy, cranking that thing is an effort!).
The stuff I make is really cold, as cold as proprietary corporate ice cream, but I haven't figured out how to add flavoring unless I buy closed source vanilla or chocolate, so I've been eating it without flavor so far. But, at least, I'm not beholden to corporate America for my frozen treats. (If anyone else knows how to make open, non-proprietary chocolate, let me know, OK?)
I don't understand why everyone doesn't do the same thing.
If you're speaking of an office environment in which employees have no choice of OS or applications, then, in my experience, often little or no thought is given to all the costs of moving to a new OS and new applications. For a large organization, even the introduction of a single new application on a familiar OS -- say, for example, the replacement of Lotus Notes by Exchange -- will pull employees away from their jobs for at least 8 hours worth of training (typically buy a contract staff billing several thousand dollars or more). Add to that the actual cost of the installation, training the support staff, and absorbing the spike in one-to-one support ("where'd my archived mail go!!?"), and you tally up real costs that are there even if everything else is gratis. Imagine the extra costs inherent in switching out the entire OS and all the familiar apps.
Because of the gap in understanding between management and its IT staff (sustained, in many cases, I think, by mutual disdain for the other's profession), management often buys into new software that provides little or no improvemen.
Seems to me the geek community constantly overestimates the rest of the world's interest in and skills at using computers. Abruptly replacing Windows and Windows apps with Linux and a batch of Windows-wannabe apps would, from where I sit, produce three certain results in any typical office environment: An immediate and precipitous drop in productivity; flooding of tech support and management with questions and demands for training; and simmering discontent as users ask "If it's supposed to be just like Windows, why didn't we keep Windows in the first place?"
Remember, most users are no more interested in their computers than they are in their televisions. They just want them to do what they want them to do in the way they're used to doing that.
Whether or not Apple adds anything "to the core" is, I imagine, not important to Apple or to people who buy Macs. If your only use of a computer is to run character apps, then you obviously you don't need a Mac, or X for that matter.
Apple sells hardware to a broad base of consumers. Although they may advertise the Unix angle to the geek community to attract developers, that's the last thing they ought to do to generate sales elsewhere. The Unix toolset is, and will always remain, of little interest and use to the mainstream computer user.
Ummm...one assumes that Apple would want to invest in something that might actually make a long-term profit and build their core business. OSDN doesn't seem to meet those criteria.
I, for one, don't believe that millions are lyhing about being abducted. I believe that a very few people are running a scam to make money.
No other country has placed people on the moon because no other country had both the financial and technological esoruces to do it. The Soviets didn't have it in the 1960's (look up the fate of their N-1 booster), and today's Russian space program can barely afford to orbit an unmanned ISS resupply mission. Meanwhile, the Chinese are boilerplating 40-year old Soviet hardware.
The U.S. hasn't returned to the moon -- or gone anywhere else in space -- because the inflation fueled by the war in Vietnam (inflation blamed on Carter but caused by Johnson and Nixon) drained resources. In addition, it is difficult to underestimate the negative impact on the U.S. space effort of immediate post-Apollo decisions made by the Nixon administration. Having a right to be skeptical about the government doesn't equate to assuming that everything they say is a lie.
Trying to wack a little reality into the heads of these loons is a waste. While some apparently are faking their belief in this nonsense in order to make money, others are so alienated from reality that they're beyond redemption.
If someone has such a miserable little life that they have to prop it up by denying great achievements, give them your condolences and move on.
It is legal for shops to put CD's on the shelves because they purchased the merchandise from a distributor for the express purpose of retailing them. They did not purchase the right to make an arbitrary number of copies of each CD and keep selling them, over and over. By the same token, someone who purchases a CD for personal use has not purchased the right to make a digitized copy of that CD available to an arbitrary number of people via the Internet. Fair use does not encompass that.
Please note that I'm not arguing for or against any technology. I'm just asserting that copying distributing the entirety of a copywritten product is illegal. The technololgy used to commit that illegal act -- the Internet, a printing press, a VCR -- is irrelevant.
I also have to believe that almost all the histrionics in support of the "right" to dissem music via the Internet is generated simply because people can get music for free that way. If, as you suggest, downloaders had to pay, say, a buck a track, there'd be a lot less posturing going on.
In the end, it doesn't matter if any individual considers such behavior "illegal but not wrong". the law is the law, until changed, and I doubt that the constituency for P2P filesharing (which appears to be largely confined to college-age males) has the clout to change the law.
>>...it is legal to share something with someone who already has it.
That's banal sophistry, I'd have to say. Why would you have a reason to "share" something with someone who already has it?
Suppose I grabbed tomorrow's New York Times off their satellite feed to a regional printing plant. Then, I print up a zillion duplicate copies, wait until the real paper hits the streets and proceed to distribute it all over New York City, to people wo already have a copy. Think that'd be called fair use? Think the Times' wouldn't have a field day with me in court? The only difference between that and dumping music on the P2P networks is the use of a different distribution media. And that means zip to the law.
People who upload copywritten material are placing it on a globally accessible network. They have no idea who is going to download it. "Sharing" the entirety of a copywritten work with the entire globe is not fair use.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who argues that kind of activity is legal is either deliberately ill-informed or convinced that his own sense of morality takes precedence over the legal system.
Your rights to publish what you choose on a website are exactly the same as they would be if you published the same information in a newspaper that you owned or broadcast it on a radio station that you owned, or stood up and shouted it at a public meeting.
Challenges to published information happen every day in all the media, and they've been happening for hundreds of years. (And if to you are ever slandered or libeled, you'll be glad of it.) The web is just another way to publish, that's all. No need for displays of testosterone. If you get a C&D letter, just get a lawyer and contest it.
Slashdot Mirror
>> ...build on small things that already exist right now. Maybe change some major things, but keep the tried and true methods.
This is one big reason why the software industry is so innately conservative, all the media hype about the pace of change notwithstanding.
Developers, especially open source developers who are free of the need to sell familiar products into an established pool of customers, ought to avoid underestimating the abilities of users to comprehend and absorb change. After all, somone had to be the first to try one of those "tried and true methods".
I was thinking about grocery discount cards. Seems to always be my luck to get behind the guy who can't find his. Most people ought to be able to find their fingers.
They're too small, the handles break or the bottom drops out, and, worst of all, everything in the bag rolls out onto the car floor as soon as you take your first turn.
Gimme big solid paper bags with handles.
(On the other hand, the plastic bags come in handy as raingear in different parts of the world.)
Sounds pretty good. It'd certainly move people through the lines faster.
Now, if they'd just do away with those little plastic bags.
Anyone with privacy concerns should use cash.
I said I wouldn't want to be tried by emotional eunuchs, which is what it strikes me many self-described "logical" people are striving to be. Juries need to weigh the evidence, and jurors who pretend to be logical automatons can't do that.
/. posters, who seem to believe that they're a privileged caste.
Meanwhile, your llinking of "idiots" to partiality is typical of the kind of arrogant bias exhibited my many
Loan sharking is illegal because the sharks charge illegally exorbitant interest rates, not because they are greedy. Banks are greedy, too, but their loans are legal.
/. find these people?
And "we, the people" have nothing at all to do with deciding where ownership ends and greed begins. Ownership of something is a real, legal, fact. Greed is a human emotion.
Where does
So people who don't exclusively use open source have no principles? Please explain.
Who decides that the judge is impartial?
Besides, I'm not sure I'd want to be tried by a panel of 12 unbiased emotional eunuchs.
None, unless it's as easy to install and use as Windows.
It's the speed, not the altitude, that allows something to achieve orbit. The maximum speed of the V-2 was, I think, about 3600 MPH. That's about 20 percent of the velocity needed to put something in orbit. The entire rocket followed a ballistic trajectory back to the surface; no space junk was left behind.
Working for increased sales and larger market share is normal and legitimate behavior for any business, as is enticing customers with an initial low price.
Because consumers do, in fact, have the option to acquire other other non-Microsoft operating systems and applications, Microsoft is not a pure monopoly, but they obviously engatge in illegal monopolistic practices. They are supported in this by the almost universal belief among non-technical consumers that Windows is synonymous with computing. I.e., many people think a Mac can only run Apple software, and most people, I'm sure, have never heard of Linux.
I have no idea if there's a legal requirement for Microsoft to expose the terms of its contracts with these schools, but I'm sure that if there isn't, they won't. That upsets some people who expect businesses to behave as altruistic individuals. I don't expect that: Businesses are intended to make money, and are motivated to place their profit above the public's good.
A figure of speech, OK? The meaning of the sentence is clear as it stands. It would have been unnecessarily pedantic to point out that smaller numbers are, by defintion, fractions of larger number.
Not to be pedantic, but if Microsoft was as pure a monopoly as everyone says they are, then they'd have no interest in offering discount deals to anyone. As they only game in town, they could set their prices arbitrarily.
Of coure they'd know. First, you need a passport. To get that, you need to present a birth certificate or other legal proof of identity. Then, you plaster a nice mug shot of yourself on the passport.
If you fly, you'll need to present your passport multiple times before you board the aircraft. And, the airliner will feed all that lovely personal info into databases shared with scads of agencies.
Don't forget passport control at your place of departure and at your destination. Oh, odds are you'll need a visa to get into that Arab country. A passport alone won't cut it. More database entries.
Now, once you beyond passport control and out of the airport at your destination, smile at the local police officers, 'cause you are almost certainly already in there records. And, if you appear sufficently interesting, the local intelligence service knows you're there, too.
Orbital velocity is just a few miles per hour short of 18,000 MPH. Fail to reach orbital velocity and you'll fall back to Earth, no matter how high you go.
No WW 2, much less WW 1, aircraft were capable of reching even a fraction of orbital veleocity.
I stopped buying proprietary ice cream from the big monopoly dairy corporations a couple of years ago and now make my own free frozen dairy product -- I call it "Iced Gnu Cream" -- from open ingredients purchased at the co-op grocery about an hour's drive down the road. Sure, driving there and back takes time, and I've had to modify an old fashioned manual ice cream freezer to make this stuff (boy, cranking that thing is an effort!).
The stuff I make is really cold, as cold as proprietary corporate ice cream, but I haven't figured out how to add flavoring unless I buy closed source vanilla or chocolate, so I've been eating it without flavor so far. But, at least, I'm not beholden to corporate America for my frozen treats. (If anyone else knows how to make open, non-proprietary chocolate, let me know, OK?)
I don't understand why everyone doesn't do the same thing.
If you're speaking of an office environment in which employees have no choice of OS or applications, then, in my experience, often little or no thought is given to all the costs of moving to a new OS and new applications. For a large organization, even the introduction of a single new application on a familiar OS -- say, for example, the replacement of Lotus Notes by Exchange -- will pull employees away from their jobs for at least 8 hours worth of training (typically buy a contract staff billing several thousand dollars or more). Add to that the actual cost of the installation, training the support staff, and absorbing the spike in one-to-one support ("where'd my archived mail go!!?"), and you tally up real costs that are there even if everything else is gratis. Imagine the extra costs inherent in switching out the entire OS and all the familiar apps.
Because of the gap in understanding between management and its IT staff (sustained, in many cases, I think, by mutual disdain for the other's profession), management often buys into new software that provides little or no improvemen.
Seems to me the geek community constantly overestimates the rest of the world's interest in and skills at using computers. Abruptly replacing Windows and Windows apps with Linux and a batch of Windows-wannabe apps would, from where I sit, produce three certain results in any typical office environment: An immediate and precipitous drop in productivity; flooding of tech support and management with questions and demands for training; and simmering discontent as users ask "If it's supposed to be just like Windows, why didn't we keep Windows in the first place?"
Remember, most users are no more interested in their computers than they are in their televisions. They just want them to do what they want them to do in the way they're used to doing that.
Whether or not Apple adds anything "to the core" is, I imagine, not important to Apple or to people who buy Macs. If your only use of a computer is to run character apps, then you obviously you don't need a Mac, or X for that matter.
Apple sells hardware to a broad base of consumers. Although they may advertise the Unix angle to the geek community to attract developers, that's the last thing they ought to do to generate sales elsewhere. The Unix toolset is, and will always remain, of little interest and use to the mainstream computer user.
Ummm...one assumes that Apple would want to invest in something that might actually make a long-term profit and build their core business. OSDN doesn't seem to meet those criteria.
I, for one, don't believe that millions are lyhing about being abducted. I believe that a very few people are running a scam to make money.
No other country has placed people on the moon because no other country had both the financial and technological esoruces to do it. The Soviets didn't have it in the 1960's (look up the fate of their N-1 booster), and today's Russian space program can barely afford to orbit an unmanned ISS resupply mission. Meanwhile, the Chinese are boilerplating 40-year old Soviet hardware.
The U.S. hasn't returned to the moon -- or gone anywhere else in space -- because the inflation fueled by the war in Vietnam (inflation blamed on Carter but caused by Johnson and Nixon) drained resources. In addition, it is difficult to underestimate the negative impact on the U.S. space effort of immediate post-Apollo decisions made by the Nixon administration.
Having a right to be skeptical about the government doesn't equate to assuming that everything they say is a lie.
Trying to wack a little reality into the heads of these loons is a waste. While some apparently are faking their belief in this nonsense in order to make money, others are so alienated from reality that they're beyond redemption.
If someone has such a miserable little life that they have to prop it up by denying great achievements, give them your condolences and move on.
It is legal for shops to put CD's on the shelves because they purchased the merchandise from a distributor for the express purpose of retailing them. They did not purchase the right to make an arbitrary number of copies of each CD and keep selling them, over and over. By the same token, someone who purchases a CD for personal use has not purchased the right to make a digitized copy of that CD available to an arbitrary number of people via the Internet. Fair use does not encompass that.
Please note that I'm not arguing for or against any technology. I'm just asserting that copying distributing the entirety of a copywritten product is illegal. The technololgy used to commit that illegal act -- the Internet, a printing press, a VCR -- is irrelevant.
I also have to believe that almost all the histrionics in support of the "right" to dissem music via the Internet is generated simply because people can get music for free that way. If, as you suggest, downloaders had to pay, say, a buck a track, there'd be a lot less posturing going on.
In the end, it doesn't matter if any individual considers such behavior "illegal but not wrong". the law is the law, until changed, and I doubt that the constituency for P2P filesharing (which appears to be largely confined to college-age males) has the clout to change the law.
>> ...it is legal to share something with someone who already has it.
That's banal sophistry, I'd have to say. Why would you have a reason to "share" something with someone who already has it?
Suppose I grabbed tomorrow's New York Times off their satellite feed to a regional printing plant. Then, I print up a zillion duplicate copies, wait until the real paper hits the streets and proceed to distribute it all over New York City, to people wo already have a copy. Think that'd be called fair use? Think the Times' wouldn't have a field day with me in court? The only difference between that and dumping music on the P2P networks is the use of a different distribution media. And that means zip to the law.
People who upload copywritten material are placing it on a globally accessible network. They have no idea who is going to download it. "Sharing" the entirety of a copywritten work with the entire globe is not fair use.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who argues that kind of activity is legal is either deliberately ill-informed or convinced that his own sense of morality takes precedence over the legal system.
Your rights to publish what you choose on a website are exactly the same as they would be if you published the same information in a newspaper that you owned or broadcast it on a radio station that you owned, or stood up and shouted it at a public meeting.
Challenges to published information happen every day in all the media, and they've been happening for hundreds of years. (And if to you are ever slandered or libeled, you'll be glad of it.) The web is just another way to publish, that's all.
No need for displays of testosterone. If you get a C&D letter, just get a lawyer and contest it.