As someone who has used facebook a bit, I can say it sucks! There are tons of opportunties to make something better (or worse, depending on your point of view), and Google is one company trying to do so.
Was Google too late when it started its search engine years after the first engines? Was gmail too late because Rocketmail was first? Was wikipedia too late, because Brittanica was already there? For that matter, was Facebook too late, because email had already existed for decades?
If a tool comes up that is a lot better, it has the chance to succeed. Since Facebook is so crappy, we should expect that in the short term (next year) either it will get a lot better or there will probably be something that takes its place in the sun. I have no opinion as to whether that will be opensocial or something else (let us not forget that the thing that gets everyone's attention next year may very well be an economic depression that puts the dotcom bust to shame).
In a serious sense, even were the OLPC (or the Intel machine in this arcile) what was needed to improve education in the third world, the reality is that I highly doubt the distribution will ever be fair.
Having lived in a poor country myself for a number of years, I suspect that some member of the ruling oligarchy (which controls a party as well as controlling much of business) in most countries will end up becoming the "importer" and in order to "recover costs" and "include taxes" and "shipping and handling", will find that the poorest people should buy one for 600 dollars, which will still be much less than other cheap laptops there are.
People will be offered microcredits to buy them for their children (maybe they will be required to do so), and will do so, because they think this cute little machine will advance them into the future. Of course, the wealthy friends of the oligarchs will get them for free. In the meantime, the end result will be a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Now, some of you will say, "No! There are protections to do that. These things are set up to avoid that." However, "transparency" is just a word that the systematically corrupt trot out -- when third world leaders/governments/systems claim to be transparent, you know that they just stole money. I know this is a pessimistic post, but it is based on a lot of experience. I hope that places like Uruguay are slightly better on this issue -- certainly better than most of Latin America, but I have little doubt that that is what will happen in Nigeria.
The money made will truly end up in some bank account. The Americans who will benefit are the stakeholders in the factories designing and producing these things, and poor Nigerians will still be poor, and no better educated.
Actually, this demonstrates some problems with the approach: for instance, it adds yet another place one needs to look for content. Whether good or not, the Pirate Bay successfully consolidates where one looks for media.
No need to look all over the place. I haven't tried to purchase the release, but I wonder what sort of server they are running. Could it handle the traffic? Bittorrent might be the logical approach.
Maybe they should have released directly to bittorrent with a 5 second "share-sic" ad before each song that said to buy it at "name your cost" prices on the website to remove the ad (naturally, anyone would figure out how to get rid of the ad, I just think that if they established themselves as the primary tracker for their music, others wouldn't bother, so at least they'd get their message out).
Of course, they could have given a free license to the whole thing, and said "screw copyrights!"
Also, long term profits/concert tickets/publicity/etc. will have to be calculated before evaluating their experiment from a capitalist/profit perspective.
I've also thought that maybe a system could be used such that each edit on the master document got a tag (from a predetermined list of tags such as "cited" "uncited" "opinionated" "controversial" etc). While in edit mode you would see everything. While in reading mode, you would see whatever you set your threshhold to. That way, the academics with sticks up their rears could see what they want to see, while others could see a lot more.
Yes, the discussion and history pages provides some of this, but they really aren't enough. There is a lot of great information being deleted, and I would like to be able to see it and a compromise would be reasonable. At the same time though, I find that trying to participate in the wikipedia is unbearable because of the snideness of so many people involved. Thus, I expect as the wikipedia culture becomes clubbier, the odds of it changing policies to allow more participation get lower and lower.
I now find contributing to Wikipedia unbearable. At one time, everyone was supposed to contribute what they knew. It was a place for the world to create a new form of reference based on everyone's knowledge. Now, I find that if I contribute about things I know, I am told to find a citation. Thus, incorrect information with citations is allowed on, and good information without citations is removed. The goal is to look academic (like tradition resources) and not to let everyone share (like it originally was). It was incredibly frustrating to have people who had no idea what they were talking about start telling me that I was in the wrong for changing things.
I can understand people wanting to make sure that the right stuff is put on the wikipedia. But shouldn't it be people with experience in the subject matter of the topic who go through and find what is wrong? Instead it seems like people attach themselves to articles and feel like rules changes in the wikipedia give them the power to control articles and show their academic formatting superiority, even when they know nothing about the topic. I still use the wikipedia some, but this change has actually made me lose some of my trust in it. Whereas before the wikipedia more openly admitted that it was imperfect and I took it for what it was, now it pretends to be perfect and in order to do so is reducing its validity and I distrust it for that pretension.
I see nothing inherently wrong with a company editing its own entries...in fact it could often help improve information. The problem is that they'll likely try to censor aspects of the entry. Still, that's what everybody else is for. I've considered proposing at the organization I work at that we edit our Wikipedia entry. Right now, it has a couple of paragraphs (and they are accurate), but we certainly could make it more informative.
Joan Miró's family name was Miró, not Miro. That is a different spelling and pronounciation in Catalan. The Miro player should have no problem with the Miró family.
I stand by my statement. Relative to video production cost, it IS cheap and easy. Especially if the original creators of the video are the people doing it. My point is that they don't do so because they don't have to...
It is of course a very expensive and difficult problem to solve down the road, as currently must be done. That is what you are really saying. I have captioned videos, so I know the costs.
To be frank, the reason why TV has closed captioning is because of laws. I don't think it is a question of social libertarianism, but rather a question of equal access. There is NO reason of any sort why closed captioning can't be done. It is cheap and easy and the only thing it does is expand the market for the producers of videos. It is a thing that should be required, otherwise an important minority (people with hearing impairments) is being ignored. It has the added bonus that a lot of non-hearing impaired people like them.
The real question is, do the various video codecs include specifications for easy to add captions? I know that with videos I've worked on, I've just used Adobe Premiere to add in a text layer, and it seemed like a really clunky way of doing things.
Not only are people on the electric grid not being appropriately encouraged to use solar power, but people off the grid are in even worse shape. You get no rebates whatsoever if you are in rural areas where there is no electricity -- essentially meaning you should stick to a gasoline generator.
Sometimes I hope that if gasoline gets expensive enough it will cause people to get so upset that politicians will have to change their policy when it comes to energy. After all, I just read today that Condi Rice was on Chevron's board even as Chevron was giving kickbacks to Saddam Hussein to get Iraqi Oil. So, that means that she was contributing to a "rogue state" even as she was forming plans to overthrow it. Since then of course, we have a failed war and record oil company profits.
There will be no serious attempt to change our energy policies until we force it.
The street vendor is just a poor person trying to make a buck. He or she almost surely doesn't even own a computer. Now, the person pressing the CDs is another matter altogether -- there I could imagine trojans. Certainly in Ecuador computer viruses are out of control, but I've always attributed that to the fact that since fewer individuals own computers, many people are sharing each machine.
Essentially, pirating commercial software is a display of resistance against the concept and economics of intellectual property. The concept of "owning" ideas or things that can be "stolen" without taking property away from the "owner" is simply not inherent to humanity (compare that to stealing a car, where the person stolen from actually loses the car).
However, the resistance that piracy implies isn't sufficient. Free software (and other free knowledge) is a revolutionary concept that turns the base structure of the new information economy upside down. It allows everybody to share knowledge and self determine what they can and will do (as compared to accepting the limits imposed by "owned" knowledge...like accepting that powerpoint is the way a presentation should be made). This is much more important for the poor, especially in the third world, who do not have the capital to access source code and thus see how software (and the world) work.
When using closed source software, one is essentially giving up the possibility of determining how you communicate and think in relation to machines -- and other humans. Having spent the last several years in the third world studying this specific issue (in Ecuador), it is clear that the availability of commercial software for a dollar or two is very dangerous for those countries. Any country that doesn't have a policy of supporting Free software is essentially allowing Microsoft, etc. to determine how it thinks and produces. Big software companies have no problem with this, they know that they wouldn't be selling large quantities of their software in poor countries anyway. While they may care about the big markets (China), I think most of their complaints about software piracy in the third world aren't because they care about those areas, but because they want to make sure that Americans know that piracy is an evil thing that foreigners do.
Unfortunately, most third world governments are so pathetically corrupt/incompetent that they don't take the freedom of Free software seriously. Some recommendations would be making all government sponsored software open sourced, requiring all government documents to use open standards, making public universities use free software, etc. There are several governments working on this, but they are few and far between. It is too bad, because the third world can benefit even more from Free software than the first world can.
I'm writing a thesis and I have noticed a few things I'd like:
1) I want to be able to bookmark/save a page locally. Bookmarking is way easier than the "save as" dialogue and is also much easier than finding something in cache. Let me bookmark a page locally, the page could then have a "check for changes" that would download the current version of the page in a new tab.
2) the reason for this? I want a whole highlighting system so that I can markup documents I have locally bookmarked and then look at them later (with those markups). The closest I've been able to get to this is with Firefox, saving the page on my harddisk and then using platypus to highlight paragraphs, but that is a suboptimal system.
3) I am sure I could add more nifty things to this setup. For instance, maybe I could assign keywords to each page I have locally bookmarked, I could have labels like in the mail program, etc (normal bookmarks could have these too, rather than the traditional folder system). The main thing is that almost no consideration is given by any browser to its use by students for research, think of those things!
Open source is very much an online phenomenon. Jesus, there have been decades of cyberpunk novels, and yet folks still don't seem to get that online is a place! That is where free software lives and it is what makes it such a great method of creation.
I've argued in an article to be published (sorry, I don't have it on the web yet) that basically there is no reason to limit ourselves. The end of the current intent to impose a regime of control over intellectual property will allow us both the ability to produce better AND the ability to live more harmoniously because humanity's knowledge, the most valuable thing that exists in today's economy, will be better distributed and thus poverty.
Here is an example: things like open source are often considered limited to software, but why? Here in Ecuador, people are worried about the patenting of plant genes that could be used for medicines. Why not just make a "copyleft" so that any medicine produced with genetic code needs to have its code shared? That would make it easier for better medicines to be produced, would make the distribution better because poor people will be able to afford them, and will make it easier for other people to further the work and learn about how to design medicines, thus as a whole health in the world would be improved.
What's the big negative? Profits would go way down for a very small number of people who usually hold patents. HOWEVER, profits would go up somewhat for a whole lot of people, people who could become involved in the production of medicines and in medicinal research who are prohibited from that now. So, overall wealth would be increased, even as a few people would lose out...equality would prevail.
The big negative always mentioned is that the profit motive would be lost, but as already pointed out, it would actually be benefitted for a lot of people. Furthermore, profit is not the only motive for people to work (note how many people participate enormous amounts in Slashdot conversations sharing knowledge and bad humour at no cost).
I think that we could find this sort of analysis in case after case. Certainly there is an argument for artists -- whose artistic vision is often based on the product being a unique idea from a single creator (or a group for that matter), but it seems to me that creative commons at least has some interesting proposals in that regard to allow that vision while at the same time letting other people build on it (after all, what artist has never been influenced by another).
I've argued that there ought to be some sort of free knowledge licence for this sort of stuff. It's great to develop new medicines, but if it is clearly based on existing knowledge or natural phenomena, it ought to have to be released for other people to study and improve. This is a major issue where I live (Ecuador), which is one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, but the odds are that with the new Free Trade Treaty with the United States that surely will be signed, this country will basically have to allow American companies to control whatever IP they want.
I think the key to thinking about open source/free software is not to focus on the monetary cost. Frankly, here in Ecuador, I can buy any commercial software I want for 2 dollars. If I buy a computer here, it comes pre-loaded with everything under the sun, for no additional price. Yes, maybe some government agencies or businesses can't do that, but frankly, I think many do anyway.
The key is the ability to be able to design your own software and the importance that plays in an era leading towards the increasing integration of society, culture, and computers/artificial intelligences. Allowing Microsoft to determine that is not the best answer, and open software frecuently does allow better opportunities to design the infrastructure of our means of communication. Furthermore, it also frequently runs on slower hardware, which most definitely is NOT free.
So, to save myself a couple of minutes... how do you make those table of content links for the PDF?
As a side note, I have been wondering why some clever company like Apple hasnt taken lyx and prettied and fixed it up a bit and release it as iWrite for those of us who think different (tm)? With a bit of work, it seems like it could be an obvious alternative for both beginners and advanced users. As I understand it (though my memory may fail), one of the early lead developers of Lyx was also an early lead developer of KDE, it would have been groovy if kword had been based on lyx. Oh well.
Hey, I live in Ecuador, and I've always looked for sci-fi written originally in Spanish, but darned if I can find much. What authors write in other languages, and do they ever get Hugo awards?
I have decided that the major thing that Firefox needs at this point is for the extension manager to be like synaptic and for extensions (and themes I guess) to be like deb packages (and for there to be people like the Debian people who judge and approve the extensions so that only stable ones are allowed, at least via some sort of default extensions server, other people could set up an unstable server). It would make the whole extensions system a ton easier and would mean that firefox could remain minimalist, but at the same time easily offer powerful features. The manager (like Synaptic) should have checkboxes beside each package to install a bunch at a time, and should also have an export/import list of installed packages so that one could have a simple text file with a list of all installed extensions and take it to another computer to automatically download them. It seems like the main work would be in the testing of packages, because the actual interface could be handled by the browser engine itself. At that point, Firefox would clearly defeat Opera except on old computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude(tte)s,
As someone who has used facebook a bit, I can say it sucks! There are tons of opportunties to make something better (or worse, depending on your point of view), and Google is one company trying to do so.
Was Google too late when it started its search engine years after the first engines? Was gmail too late because Rocketmail was first? Was wikipedia too late, because Brittanica was already there? For that matter, was Facebook too late, because email had already existed for decades?
If a tool comes up that is a lot better, it has the chance to succeed. Since Facebook is so crappy, we should expect that in the short term (next year) either it will get a lot better or there will probably be something that takes its place in the sun. I have no opinion as to whether that will be opensocial or something else (let us not forget that the thing that gets everyone's attention next year may very well be an economic depression that puts the dotcom bust to shame).
In a serious sense, even were the OLPC (or the Intel machine in this arcile) what was needed to improve education in the third world, the reality is that I highly doubt the distribution will ever be fair.
Having lived in a poor country myself for a number of years, I suspect that some member of the ruling oligarchy (which controls a party as well as controlling much of business) in most countries will end up becoming the "importer" and in order to "recover costs" and "include taxes" and "shipping and handling", will find that the poorest people should buy one for 600 dollars, which will still be much less than other cheap laptops there are.
People will be offered microcredits to buy them for their children (maybe they will be required to do so), and will do so, because they think this cute little machine will advance them into the future. Of course, the wealthy friends of the oligarchs will get them for free. In the meantime, the end result will be a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Now, some of you will say, "No! There are protections to do that. These things are set up to avoid that." However, "transparency" is just a word that the systematically corrupt trot out -- when third world leaders/governments/systems claim to be transparent, you know that they just stole money. I know this is a pessimistic post, but it is based on a lot of experience. I hope that places like Uruguay are slightly better on this issue -- certainly better than most of Latin America, but I have little doubt that that is what will happen in Nigeria.
The money made will truly end up in some bank account. The Americans who will benefit are the stakeholders in the factories designing and producing these things, and poor Nigerians will still be poor, and no better educated.
Actually, this demonstrates some problems with the approach: for instance, it adds yet another place one needs to look for content. Whether good or not, the Pirate Bay successfully consolidates where one looks for media.
No need to look all over the place. I haven't tried to purchase the release, but I wonder what sort of server they are running. Could it handle the traffic? Bittorrent might be the logical approach.
Maybe they should have released directly to bittorrent with a 5 second "share-sic" ad before each song that said to buy it at "name your cost" prices on the website to remove the ad (naturally, anyone would figure out how to get rid of the ad, I just think that if they established themselves as the primary tracker for their music, others wouldn't bother, so at least they'd get their message out).
Of course, they could have given a free license to the whole thing, and said "screw copyrights!"
Also, long term profits/concert tickets/publicity/etc. will have to be calculated before evaluating their experiment from a capitalist/profit perspective.
I've also thought that maybe a system could be used such that each edit on the master document got a tag (from a predetermined list of tags such as "cited" "uncited" "opinionated" "controversial" etc). While in edit mode you would see everything. While in reading mode, you would see whatever you set your threshhold to. That way, the academics with sticks up their rears could see what they want to see, while others could see a lot more.
Yes, the discussion and history pages provides some of this, but they really aren't enough. There is a lot of great information being deleted, and I would like to be able to see it and a compromise would be reasonable. At the same time though, I find that trying to participate in the wikipedia is unbearable because of the snideness of so many people involved. Thus, I expect as the wikipedia culture becomes clubbier, the odds of it changing policies to allow more participation get lower and lower.
I now find contributing to Wikipedia unbearable. At one time, everyone was supposed to contribute what they knew. It was a place for the world to create a new form of reference based on everyone's knowledge. Now, I find that if I contribute about things I know, I am told to find a citation. Thus, incorrect information with citations is allowed on, and good information without citations is removed. The goal is to look academic (like tradition resources) and not to let everyone share (like it originally was). It was incredibly frustrating to have people who had no idea what they were talking about start telling me that I was in the wrong for changing things.
I can understand people wanting to make sure that the right stuff is put on the wikipedia. But shouldn't it be people with experience in the subject matter of the topic who go through and find what is wrong? Instead it seems like people attach themselves to articles and feel like rules changes in the wikipedia give them the power to control articles and show their academic formatting superiority, even when they know nothing about the topic. I still use the wikipedia some, but this change has actually made me lose some of my trust in it. Whereas before the wikipedia more openly admitted that it was imperfect and I took it for what it was, now it pretends to be perfect and in order to do so is reducing its validity and I distrust it for that pretension.
I see nothing inherently wrong with a company editing its own entries...in fact it could often help improve information. The problem is that they'll likely try to censor aspects of the entry. Still, that's what everybody else is for. I've considered proposing at the organization I work at that we edit our Wikipedia entry. Right now, it has a couple of paragraphs (and they are accurate), but we certainly could make it more informative.
Even evil people are human. That's what makes humanity so scary.
"FLOSS just tends to be slightly more nitpicky about being excessively verbose and honest with these issues"
I agree that it is more honest. However, nothing is more verbose than EULA's....
Joan Miró's family name was Miró, not Miro. That is a different spelling and pronounciation in Catalan. The Miro player should have no problem with the Miró family.
I second the recomendation of "Empire" and just wanted to add that you can download the e-book for free:
http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/
I stand by my statement. Relative to video production cost, it IS cheap and easy. Especially if the original creators of the video are the people doing it. My point is that they don't do so because they don't have to...
It is of course a very expensive and difficult problem to solve down the road, as currently must be done. That is what you are really saying. I have captioned videos, so I know the costs.
To be frank, the reason why TV has closed captioning is because of laws. I don't think it is a question of social libertarianism, but rather a question of equal access. There is NO reason of any sort why closed captioning can't be done. It is cheap and easy and the only thing it does is expand the market for the producers of videos. It is a thing that should be required, otherwise an important minority (people with hearing impairments) is being ignored. It has the added bonus that a lot of non-hearing impaired people like them.
The real question is, do the various video codecs include specifications for easy to add captions? I know that with videos I've worked on, I've just used Adobe Premiere to add in a text layer, and it seemed like a really clunky way of doing things.
Not only are people on the electric grid not being appropriately encouraged to use solar power, but people off the grid are in even worse shape. You get no rebates whatsoever if you are in rural areas where there is no electricity -- essentially meaning you should stick to a gasoline generator.
Sometimes I hope that if gasoline gets expensive enough it will cause people to get so upset that politicians will have to change their policy when it comes to energy. After all, I just read today that Condi Rice was on Chevron's board even as Chevron was giving kickbacks to Saddam Hussein to get Iraqi Oil. So, that means that she was contributing to a "rogue state" even as she was forming plans to overthrow it. Since then of course, we have a failed war and record oil company profits.
There will be no serious attempt to change our energy policies until we force it.
The street vendor is just a poor person trying to make a buck. He or she almost surely doesn't even own a computer. Now, the person pressing the CDs is another matter altogether -- there I could imagine trojans. Certainly in Ecuador computer viruses are out of control, but I've always attributed that to the fact that since fewer individuals own computers, many people are sharing each machine.
Essentially, pirating commercial software is a display of resistance against the concept and economics of intellectual property. The concept of "owning" ideas or things that can be "stolen" without taking property away from the "owner" is simply not inherent to humanity (compare that to stealing a car, where the person stolen from actually loses the car).
However, the resistance that piracy implies isn't sufficient. Free software (and other free knowledge) is a revolutionary concept that turns the base structure of the new information economy upside down. It allows everybody to share knowledge and self determine what they can and will do (as compared to accepting the limits imposed by "owned" knowledge...like accepting that powerpoint is the way a presentation should be made). This is much more important for the poor, especially in the third world, who do not have the capital to access source code and thus see how software (and the world) work.
When using closed source software, one is essentially giving up the possibility of determining how you communicate and think in relation to machines -- and other humans. Having spent the last several years in the third world studying this specific issue (in Ecuador), it is clear that the availability of commercial software for a dollar or two is very dangerous for those countries. Any country that doesn't have a policy of supporting Free software is essentially allowing Microsoft, etc. to determine how it thinks and produces. Big software companies have no problem with this, they know that they wouldn't be selling large quantities of their software in poor countries anyway. While they may care about the big markets (China), I think most of their complaints about software piracy in the third world aren't because they care about those areas, but because they want to make sure that Americans know that piracy is an evil thing that foreigners do.
Unfortunately, most third world governments are so pathetically corrupt/incompetent that they don't take the freedom of Free software seriously. Some recommendations would be making all government sponsored software open sourced, requiring all government documents to use open standards, making public universities use free software, etc. There are several governments working on this, but they are few and far between. It is too bad, because the third world can benefit even more from Free software than the first world can.
I'm writing a thesis and I have noticed a few things I'd like:
1) I want to be able to bookmark/save a page locally. Bookmarking is way easier than the "save as" dialogue and is also much easier than finding something in cache. Let me bookmark a page locally, the page could then have a "check for changes" that would download the current version of the page in a new tab.
2) the reason for this? I want a whole highlighting system so that I can markup documents I have locally bookmarked and then look at them later (with those markups). The closest I've been able to get to this is with Firefox, saving the page on my harddisk and then using platypus to highlight paragraphs, but that is a suboptimal system.
3) I am sure I could add more nifty things to this setup. For instance, maybe I could assign keywords to each page I have locally bookmarked, I could have labels like in the mail program, etc (normal bookmarks could have these too, rather than the traditional folder system). The main thing is that almost no consideration is given by any browser to its use by students for research, think of those things!
Open source is very much an online phenomenon. Jesus, there have been decades of cyberpunk novels, and yet folks still don't seem to get that online is a place! That is where free software lives and it is what makes it such a great method of creation.
I've argued in an article to be published (sorry, I don't have it on the web yet) that basically there is no reason to limit ourselves. The end of the current intent to impose a regime of control over intellectual property will allow us both the ability to produce better AND the ability to live more harmoniously because humanity's knowledge, the most valuable thing that exists in today's economy, will be better distributed and thus poverty.
Here is an example: things like open source are often considered limited to software, but why? Here in Ecuador, people are worried about the patenting of plant genes that could be used for medicines. Why not just make a "copyleft" so that any medicine produced with genetic code needs to have its code shared? That would make it easier for better medicines to be produced, would make the distribution better because poor people will be able to afford them, and will make it easier for other people to further the work and learn about how to design medicines, thus as a whole health in the world would be improved.
What's the big negative? Profits would go way down for a very small number of people who usually hold patents. HOWEVER, profits would go up somewhat for a whole lot of people, people who could become involved in the production of medicines and in medicinal research who are prohibited from that now. So, overall wealth would be increased, even as a few people would lose out...equality would prevail.
The big negative always mentioned is that the profit motive would be lost, but as already pointed out, it would actually be benefitted for a lot of people. Furthermore, profit is not the only motive for people to work (note how many people participate enormous amounts in Slashdot conversations sharing knowledge and bad humour at no cost).
I think that we could find this sort of analysis in case after case. Certainly there is an argument for artists -- whose artistic vision is often based on the product being a unique idea from a single creator (or a group for that matter), but it seems to me that creative commons at least has some interesting proposals in that regard to allow that vision while at the same time letting other people build on it (after all, what artist has never been influenced by another).
Peace
I've argued that there ought to be some sort of free knowledge licence for this sort of stuff. It's great to develop new medicines, but if it is clearly based on existing knowledge or natural phenomena, it ought to have to be released for other people to study and improve. This is a major issue where I live (Ecuador), which is one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, but the odds are that with the new Free Trade Treaty with the United States that surely will be signed, this country will basically have to allow American companies to control whatever IP they want.
I think the key to thinking about open source/free software is not to focus on the monetary cost. Frankly, here in Ecuador, I can buy any commercial software I want for 2 dollars. If I buy a computer here, it comes pre-loaded with everything under the sun, for no additional price. Yes, maybe some government agencies or businesses can't do that, but frankly, I think many do anyway.
The key is the ability to be able to design your own software and the importance that plays in an era leading towards the increasing integration of society, culture, and computers/artificial intelligences. Allowing Microsoft to determine that is not the best answer, and open software frecuently does allow better opportunities to design the infrastructure of our means of communication. Furthermore, it also frequently runs on slower hardware, which most definitely is NOT free.
So, to save myself a couple of minutes... how do you make those table of content links for the PDF?
As a side note, I have been wondering why some clever company like Apple hasnt taken lyx and prettied and fixed it up a bit and release it as iWrite for those of us who think different (tm)? With a bit of work, it seems like it could be an obvious alternative for both beginners and advanced users. As I understand it (though my memory may fail), one of the early lead developers of Lyx was also an early lead developer of KDE, it would have been groovy if kword had been based on lyx. Oh well.
Thanks in advance,
Gabriel
Hey, I live in Ecuador, and I've always looked for sci-fi written originally in Spanish, but darned if I can find much. What authors write in other languages, and do they ever get Hugo awards?
I have decided that the major thing that Firefox needs at this point is for the extension manager to be like synaptic and for extensions (and themes I guess) to be like deb packages (and for there to be people like the Debian people who judge and approve the extensions so that only stable ones are allowed, at least via some sort of default extensions server, other people could set up an unstable server). It would make the whole extensions system a ton easier and would mean that firefox could remain minimalist, but at the same time easily offer powerful features. The manager (like Synaptic) should have checkboxes beside each package to install a bunch at a time, and should also have an export/import list of installed packages so that one could have a simple text file with a list of all installed extensions and take it to another computer to automatically download them. It seems like the main work would be in the testing of packages, because the actual interface could be handled by the browser engine itself. At that point, Firefox would clearly defeat Opera except on old computers.