True, but the neat thing is: For stuff like "evaluating the prospective success of employees", they utterly stomp the best humans can do with instinct or expertise right now. Want to measure likely future success? Even half-assed use of data and metrics will beat the best human evaluations available right now. See also Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow for lots of explanations and evidence.
There's no such assumption. It's just that, usually, people who visibly contribute to open source projects in their spare time are likely to be better on average, as a pool, than people who don't. Statistics. Not claims about individual people...
I see this assertion made a lot, but I've never seen anyone back it up with an explanation of why it is not conceptually possible for engineering to be applied to software.
Don't ask how to reduce free copying, ask how to increase sales. If you can increase sales while also increasing free copying, you get more money. If you are in it to be heard, or to make money, that's a win. The only way it's not a win is if your primary goal is control rather than either money or being heard.
Yeah, where was "society will adapt, etiquette is plenty to solve this" when Schmidt was whining about private parties using drones?
Why was he whining about drones after his famous "If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" idiocy?
So far as I can tell, this guy is absolutely free of any sort of comprehension that it's possible for other people to have different experiences or resources than he does. He is not a credible source on any topic to do with social policy or the impacts of anything on society, because he's judging everything by how it affects ludicriously wealthy guys.
This is a company that has come up with [b]and implemented[/b] ideas like automatically sending status updates on their customers to stalkers who were threatening those customers' lives. I do not think it makes sense to take their positions on these topics seriously.
Yeah, and civilization means most of us no longer get all our own food from scratch. So?
Fallbacks are nice, but keep in mind that many of these "failures" are still way above what we could have done without the technology in the first place. They just look worse because we're used to better.
Yeah, we can't meaningfully talk about things that are wholly unlike us, but... So far, nothing appears to have changed the existence of "wanting" as a concept, and it's inconceivable that anything would. Which means there's not much point arguing about it; this is off in "what if everything big became small, and everything small became big" territory.
The big problem is: "We don't know what X is like" is not evidence that X is unlike us.
DeluxePaint, various related programs. The IFF standard, which remains one of the nicer file formats. Deluxe Music Construction Set. Probably a lot of others forgotten in the mists of time.
You can pay for the phone and then be done paying for it. You aren't locked into a particular rate plan, and you don't keep paying for it after you've paid its full value. This doesn't sound at all deceptive to me. What they are offering is substantively different from cell service contracts.
I pretty much always use torrents to download OS installers (Linux, etc.). I don't know whether I've ever downloaded anything that wasn't totally legal. Probably have at some point, but I mostly use torrents for things where I want to be contributing bandwidth back to the community.
For quite a long time, Google Groups would let you add people to a group, then set the group to private, making it impossible to view the group or file a complaint, but Google ignored email complaints, claiming they had a web form. They still have absolutely no mechanism for reporting spam sent by their customers who aren't using a gmail address to send the spam. And they just don't care.
They have either given up entirely on "don't be evil", or not thought through the implications of being extremely large and very careless.
Right. Just like anyone who doesn't want elaborately-DRM-protected music that installs rootkits on their computer is perfectly welcome not to listen to that music.
It has to do with keeping other people's code which is derived from it free.
It has to do with ensuring that whoever you give the software to has the same rights you have. Necessarily this includes any changes you made prior to them receiving it.
Well, that's sort of the thing. The rights I have are that the software I started from was freely available to me. And everyone else already has those rights, no matter what I do or don't release. Before I started typing, no one had any rights to the code I was about to write. If they never get any rights to that code... They haven't lost any rights. They still have total free access to the free software.
The claim that something can make that code not-free is FUD.
If you make a derivative work by altering the sources, then you aren't giving them what you received. You've created something different. And if you aren't giving them those sources, then yes that code is not free.
Emphasis mine. It is something different which is not free. The code which was free in the first place is still free, period. Nothing done with derivative works can ever change that.
The GPL attempts to ensure not only that the code is free, but that everything derived from it is also free.
But that's not the same thing as "ensuring that the code remains free". If I license code under the BSD license, then the code I licensed under the BSD license always remains free. Yes, people can make non-free things based on it, but those are, in your very own words, something different. Nothing about that something-different can make my code non-free.
The claim that the BSD-licensed code somehow becomes "non-free" when something different is non-free is pure FUD. It's not true. It is related to a true claim, but it's different from that claim.
The desire to have derivative works also remain free is a reasonable one. I can respect it. I can think of circumstances where I share it. But it's dishonest to portray it as "ensuring that the code stays free". The code stays free under the BSD license, too; it's something else that might later be non-free.
Except that has nothing to do with keeping the code free.
It has to do with keeping other people's code which is derived from it free.
If something's based on BSD or whatever, sure, people can make proprietary stuff around it -- but so what? The original code is still free. The claim that something can make that code not-free is FUD.
And yes, I've pretty much abandoned the GPL, because the GPLv3 is to open source what the anti-circumvention cause in the DMCA is to copyright. RMS had a vision of a cooperative paradise. Then he realized that some people wouldn't play nice, and did what everyone else does when they realize that not everyone will voluntarily adopt the business models they want everyone to use. Tried to figure out a way to make it happen by force.
So, yeah, I'll use the GPL where it's the established license, and some of the stuff I work on ends up being put out under LGPL. But for stuff I write because I want it to be open source? Permissive licenses. Usually the lightweight BSD (no advertising clause) or Artistic, or heck, public domain. My goal is to give stuff away, not to force other people to give stuff away.
It's the same thing that's happened to my morality over the years; I've started focusing more on living according to my own moral beliefs, and less on trying to find ways that society can force other people to do so too.
I think the thing is... A lot of anti-Democrats focus on the dollars spent in programs that are explicitly Spending Money -- stuff like welfare programs, health care, and so on. But then they come up with these elaborate anti-abortion laws, and they don't ask how those will get enforced. Oh, and Voter ID laws -- a wonderful bit of security theatre in which an insanely expensive set of rule changes is pushed at people on the grounds that it will "reduce voter fraud". How many cases of vote fraud would it prevent? Well, presumably, it would only prevent the cases in which a person shows up and pretends to be someone else in front of an election official who isn't complicit in the arrangement. Do you know of a single case of such a thing happening? Because I've never heard of one, and I have gone looking. (Yes, there's vote fraud out there. None of it would be prevented by any of the proposed "voter ID" legislation.)
Yes, I'm totally aware that these things do not entirely explain the growth of our government. My point is: No one who advocates for stricter laws on abortion, or marriage, or whatever else, can do so while claiming to be the party of "small government", unless they take the time to really talk about that tradeoff. As soon as you decide there's a category of things you want the government to do so much that you are not even willing to discuss their costs, that makes you not really interested in small government.
I would be all for a party that actually pursued smaller government spending if it did so in ways that were remotely sane. Right now, that's not really on the table. No one wants to actually figure out what's making our social service programs expensive; they just want to add layers of bureaucracy to "fight fraud", with the result that actual disabled people get screwed, while fraudsters with good lawyers breeze on through, and we end up paying a heck of a lot more than we would have otherwise. (For more on this, read the classic article "Million Dollar Murray".)
I would find this maybe sensical if the Republicans had, in the last ten or twenty years, ever actually tried to advocate for policies that were likely to actually lead to lower taxes. You can't be the party of small government while creating whole new categories of quasi-law-enforcement with unlimited powers and no accountability, and proposing to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money trying to force the creation of Creationist-friendly textbooks, prevent women from getting abortions, prevent gay people from marrying, and so on.
They aren't the party of smaller government, and haven't been in a long time. They are the party that uses the phrase "small government" a lot while constantly looking for new ways to expand government powers and spend more money.
That has been asserted, but never supported, and the paper trail shows clear, unambiguous, respects for FEMA's help, which were ignored because FEMA wasn't prepared to deal with them.
The theory about kickback money and so on is entirely off-topic; kickback money was weeks to months later, the early part was where emergency response was needed, but absent.
Don't ask how to deter piracy. Ask how to increase sales.
You care about the number of sales you make. That affects you. The number of people who rip you off is totally irrelevant except as a proxy measure for sales impact -- but it's an awful measure for sales impact. If some of the people who rip you off end up buying your stuff later, or showing it to people who buy it, you might come out ahead.
Start by clearly understanding what you want. Unless you are very petty, "maximize sales" is more important than "minimize piracy". If you have a choice between:
1. 100 people buy your program. 0 people pirate it. 2. 101 people buy your program. 1,000,000 people pirate it.
The second is a better deal for you, because it's got more sales.
Also, consider "value to people who buy it". A thing that won't screw them by failing to run under some future circumstances is worth more.
I followed some of the threads on this on MacRumors. Problem: A lot of the users there will automatically and unquestioningly attack anyone who suggests that an Apple product is imperfect in any way, or pick a random third-party to indict.
My experience has been that, in general, basically all IPS displays are subject to temporary ghosting effects. I have never used an IPS display which did not get some degree of these effects. iPad 3 and 4, with their shiny high-res IPS displays? Ghosting. My NEC monitor from a couple years back? Ghosting. HP IPS display? Ghosting. I've never seen an IPS display that didn't show any of this at all. Certainly, some are more obvious than others -- my NEC display which is a few years old has always had relatively severe ghosting, as does my iPad 3, while my shiny and somewhat newer HP display has less.
But it's always there, and I don't think it's that big a deal.
The prediction about outcomes may not have turned out, but the fact is, their handling of it is such that I'm more likely to buy games from Stardock than I am from, say, EA or Ubisoft. So that seems to be working.
Well, uhm. "Had to"? See, that's sort of the thing that makes it credible -- that the guy who promotes this does, in fact, feel an obligation to make it up to people if his company screws up a release. So I'd tend to think that this makes it more credible than it would be coming from someone with no such track record. He's made it clear that his money is where his mouth is.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but the neat thing is: For stuff like "evaluating the prospective success of employees", they utterly stomp the best humans can do with instinct or expertise right now. Want to measure likely future success? Even half-assed use of data and metrics will beat the best human evaluations available right now. See also Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow for lots of explanations and evidence.
There's no such assumption. It's just that, usually, people who visibly contribute to open source projects in their spare time are likely to be better on average, as a pool, than people who don't. Statistics. Not claims about individual people...
If programming is not one of your hobbies, you are going to be worse at it than most of the people for whom it is also a hobby.
Passion matters. So does experience. People who enjoy programming will have more of both.
I see this assertion made a lot, but I've never seen anyone back it up with an explanation of why it is not conceptually possible for engineering to be applied to software.
Don't ask how to reduce free copying, ask how to increase sales. If you can increase sales while also increasing free copying, you get more money. If you are in it to be heard, or to make money, that's a win. The only way it's not a win is if your primary goal is control rather than either money or being heard.
Yeah, where was "society will adapt, etiquette is plenty to solve this" when Schmidt was whining about private parties using drones?
Why was he whining about drones after his famous "If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" idiocy?
So far as I can tell, this guy is absolutely free of any sort of comprehension that it's possible for other people to have different experiences or resources than he does. He is not a credible source on any topic to do with social policy or the impacts of anything on society, because he's judging everything by how it affects ludicriously wealthy guys.
This is a company that has come up with [b]and implemented[/b] ideas like automatically sending status updates on their customers to stalkers who were threatening those customers' lives. I do not think it makes sense to take their positions on these topics seriously.
Yeah, and civilization means most of us no longer get all our own food from scratch. So?
Fallbacks are nice, but keep in mind that many of these "failures" are still way above what we could have done without the technology in the first place. They just look worse because we're used to better.
Yeah, we can't meaningfully talk about things that are wholly unlike us, but... So far, nothing appears to have changed the existence of "wanting" as a concept, and it's inconceivable that anything would. Which means there's not much point arguing about it; this is off in "what if everything big became small, and everything small became big" territory.
The big problem is:
"We don't know what X is like" is not evidence that X is unlike us.
DeluxePaint, various related programs. The IFF standard, which remains one of the nicer file formats. Deluxe Music Construction Set. Probably a lot of others forgotten in the mists of time.
You can pay for the phone and then be done paying for it. You aren't locked into a particular rate plan, and you don't keep paying for it after you've paid its full value. This doesn't sound at all deceptive to me. What they are offering is substantively different from cell service contracts.
I pretty much always use torrents to download OS installers (Linux, etc.). I don't know whether I've ever downloaded anything that wasn't totally legal. Probably have at some point, but I mostly use torrents for things where I want to be contributing bandwidth back to the community.
For quite a long time, Google Groups would let you add people to a group, then set the group to private, making it impossible to view the group or file a complaint, but Google ignored email complaints, claiming they had a web form. They still have absolutely no mechanism for reporting spam sent by their customers who aren't using a gmail address to send the spam. And they just don't care.
They have either given up entirely on "don't be evil", or not thought through the implications of being extremely large and very careless.
Right. Just like anyone who doesn't want elaborately-DRM-protected music that installs rootkits on their computer is perfectly welcome not to listen to that music.
Same deal.
Well, yes.
Gaze too long into the abyss, and the abyss also gazes into you.
It has to do with ensuring that whoever you give the software to has the same rights you have. Necessarily this includes any changes you made prior to them receiving it.
Well, that's sort of the thing. The rights I have are that the software I started from was freely available to me. And everyone else already has those rights, no matter what I do or don't release. Before I started typing, no one had any rights to the code I was about to write. If they never get any rights to that code... They haven't lost any rights. They still have total free access to the free software.
The claim that something can make that code not-free is FUD.
If you make a derivative work by altering the sources, then you aren't giving them what you received. You've created something different. And if you aren't giving them those sources, then yes that code is not free.
Emphasis mine. It is something different which is not free. The code which was free in the first place is still free, period. Nothing done with derivative works can ever change that.
The GPL attempts to ensure not only that the code is free, but that everything derived from it is also free.
But that's not the same thing as "ensuring that the code remains free". If I license code under the BSD license, then the code I licensed under the BSD license always remains free. Yes, people can make non-free things based on it, but those are, in your very own words, something different. Nothing about that something-different can make my code non-free.
The claim that the BSD-licensed code somehow becomes "non-free" when something different is non-free is pure FUD. It's not true. It is related to a true claim, but it's different from that claim.
The desire to have derivative works also remain free is a reasonable one. I can respect it. I can think of circumstances where I share it. But it's dishonest to portray it as "ensuring that the code stays free". The code stays free under the BSD license, too; it's something else that might later be non-free.
Except that has nothing to do with keeping the code free.
It has to do with keeping other people's code which is derived from it free.
If something's based on BSD or whatever, sure, people can make proprietary stuff around it -- but so what? The original code is still free. The claim that something can make that code not-free is FUD.
I am pretty sure I'm not the younger generation.
And yes, I've pretty much abandoned the GPL, because the GPLv3 is to open source what the anti-circumvention cause in the DMCA is to copyright. RMS had a vision of a cooperative paradise. Then he realized that some people wouldn't play nice, and did what everyone else does when they realize that not everyone will voluntarily adopt the business models they want everyone to use. Tried to figure out a way to make it happen by force.
So, yeah, I'll use the GPL where it's the established license, and some of the stuff I work on ends up being put out under LGPL. But for stuff I write because I want it to be open source? Permissive licenses. Usually the lightweight BSD (no advertising clause) or Artistic, or heck, public domain. My goal is to give stuff away, not to force other people to give stuff away.
It's the same thing that's happened to my morality over the years; I've started focusing more on living according to my own moral beliefs, and less on trying to find ways that society can force other people to do so too.
Texas.
I think the thing is... A lot of anti-Democrats focus on the dollars spent in programs that are explicitly Spending Money -- stuff like welfare programs, health care, and so on. But then they come up with these elaborate anti-abortion laws, and they don't ask how those will get enforced. Oh, and Voter ID laws -- a wonderful bit of security theatre in which an insanely expensive set of rule changes is pushed at people on the grounds that it will "reduce voter fraud". How many cases of vote fraud would it prevent? Well, presumably, it would only prevent the cases in which a person shows up and pretends to be someone else in front of an election official who isn't complicit in the arrangement. Do you know of a single case of such a thing happening? Because I've never heard of one, and I have gone looking. (Yes, there's vote fraud out there. None of it would be prevented by any of the proposed "voter ID" legislation.)
Yes, I'm totally aware that these things do not entirely explain the growth of our government. My point is: No one who advocates for stricter laws on abortion, or marriage, or whatever else, can do so while claiming to be the party of "small government", unless they take the time to really talk about that tradeoff. As soon as you decide there's a category of things you want the government to do so much that you are not even willing to discuss their costs, that makes you not really interested in small government.
I would be all for a party that actually pursued smaller government spending if it did so in ways that were remotely sane. Right now, that's not really on the table. No one wants to actually figure out what's making our social service programs expensive; they just want to add layers of bureaucracy to "fight fraud", with the result that actual disabled people get screwed, while fraudsters with good lawyers breeze on through, and we end up paying a heck of a lot more than we would have otherwise. (For more on this, read the classic article "Million Dollar Murray".)
Well, Eric:
If you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Some guy said that.
I would find this maybe sensical if the Republicans had, in the last ten or twenty years, ever actually tried to advocate for policies that were likely to actually lead to lower taxes. You can't be the party of small government while creating whole new categories of quasi-law-enforcement with unlimited powers and no accountability, and proposing to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money trying to force the creation of Creationist-friendly textbooks, prevent women from getting abortions, prevent gay people from marrying, and so on.
They aren't the party of smaller government, and haven't been in a long time. They are the party that uses the phrase "small government" a lot while constantly looking for new ways to expand government powers and spend more money.
That has been asserted, but never supported, and the paper trail shows clear, unambiguous, respects for FEMA's help, which were ignored because FEMA wasn't prepared to deal with them.
The theory about kickback money and so on is entirely off-topic; kickback money was weeks to months later, the early part was where emergency response was needed, but absent.
Don't ask how to deter piracy. Ask how to increase sales.
You care about the number of sales you make. That affects you. The number of people who rip you off is totally irrelevant except as a proxy measure for sales impact -- but it's an awful measure for sales impact. If some of the people who rip you off end up buying your stuff later, or showing it to people who buy it, you might come out ahead.
Start by clearly understanding what you want. Unless you are very petty, "maximize sales" is more important than "minimize piracy". If you have a choice between:
1. 100 people buy your program. 0 people pirate it.
2. 101 people buy your program. 1,000,000 people pirate it.
The second is a better deal for you, because it's got more sales.
Also, consider "value to people who buy it". A thing that won't screw them by failing to run under some future circumstances is worth more.
I followed some of the threads on this on MacRumors. Problem: A lot of the users there will automatically and unquestioningly attack anyone who suggests that an Apple product is imperfect in any way, or pick a random third-party to indict.
My experience has been that, in general, basically all IPS displays are subject to temporary ghosting effects. I have never used an IPS display which did not get some degree of these effects. iPad 3 and 4, with their shiny high-res IPS displays? Ghosting. My NEC monitor from a couple years back? Ghosting. HP IPS display? Ghosting. I've never seen an IPS display that didn't show any of this at all. Certainly, some are more obvious than others -- my NEC display which is a few years old has always had relatively severe ghosting, as does my iPad 3, while my shiny and somewhat newer HP display has less.
But it's always there, and I don't think it's that big a deal.
The prediction about outcomes may not have turned out, but the fact is, their handling of it is such that I'm more likely to buy games from Stardock than I am from, say, EA or Ubisoft. So that seems to be working.
Well, uhm. "Had to"? See, that's sort of the thing that makes it credible -- that the guy who promotes this does, in fact, feel an obligation to make it up to people if his company screws up a release. So I'd tend to think that this makes it more credible than it would be coming from someone with no such track record. He's made it clear that his money is where his mouth is.