They didn't cry when seach engines began indexing and caching web sites. They didn't cry when services like TurnItIn began to index and cache academic journals, libraries, papers, etc. They didn't cry when the synopsis of their papers were included in journals and library indexes across the world.
But now they cry.
What is all the fuss about? This is a natural extension to what has been happening for years. If the above three things are not considered copyright infringement, then neither should Google's index of all of these works. Indexing and caching material is not copyright infringement, it is the merely automating a process that we expect of all of our librarians already. (Please find me a paper relevant to subject X; where did this quote come from?; A friend of mine read this book, about this guy, with a hat and a cane... I think it took place in England, or... maybe Pakistan. What was it called?)
Can anyone think of an intelligent way to help stop the problem (Jack Thompson)?
There are all sorts of idiots on the Internet who try to help by posting on forums and responding directly to Jack with hate mail; however, I don't think that sort of reaction will really help the situation. Responding to idiocy with further idiocy just fuels the fire.
If there is some intelligent way that I can help, please let me know. I'd like to do something, but I don't really have any good ideas.
Please keep in mind that I am Canadian, and thus do not have a senator to appeal to. (But if you can think of some American only solutions, post them as well).
You'll be allowed to keep the spoon. Chopsticks are gone though. Funny enough, I'm allowed to keep pens, pencils, (even pencil sharpeners), but not chopsticks.
"Entrants must be residents of the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal or Greece and aged 18 or over. Winners may be required to provide proof of age and address."
Before you get your knickers in a knot, I sugest that you read the article.
No, MainSoft is not a typo for Microsoft; MainSoft is an independent software company that makes a tool that allows for cross-platform development.
During the PDC, which was organized by Microsoft, one of the exhibitors (mainsoft) announced this contest which was intended to show off their products.
This is not an attempt by Microsoft to do any kind of cross-platform development.
To the best of my knowledge, neither of the groups organizing the event (MainSoft and CodeProject) are owned in whole, or in part, by Microsoft.
If you read the disclaimer on CodeProject, you will find the following groups barred from the contest:
The Code Project
Mainsoft Corporation
Novell
Zend
Macromedia
Microsoft Employees are not on this list. I really don't think that Microsoft has a great deal to do with this event.
I have a feeling that the windows/linux mangling that was happening was a result of not using the same version of the application.
Also, the linux/Windows mangling happened in early 2004. In fact, all of the mangling that I refer to happened in early 2004. I believe the version of the application installed on the linux machine was V 1.0 (possibly 1.1), and the version on the windows machine was 1.1. The version of Office would have been Office X for the mac, and Office XP for the Windows machine.
I'm sure that a lot has changed since I used the application. However, every time I read a review of OOo, I look for 'compatability with MS Office' and the reviewer always says 'OOo is great for writing up simple documents. Some of the more advanced features get mangled when you move between versions/platforms/to word.' Typically this is followed by 'But no one uses those features anyways, so it doesn't matter.'
Honestly, I'm not willing to invest the time to try out OOo until I hear that it can work with word for all layout issues. If a document will not display exactly the same in OOo as it does in word; and if a document cannot be edited in Word, then OOo and then Word again and retain all of the layout that I've done, I'm not interested. I m not talking about monolithic documents, just technical papers in the neighborhood of 5,000 - 10,000 words.
I realize that I'm being picky, but it really does make a difference if you care about the layout of the doc, rather than just the information.
I dunno. I kinda sympathize with the guy. I'm totally sick of reading pro-OpenOffice.org articles on Slashdot. The community is far too biased.
The product is really not of the same calibre, I'm sorry. However, every time there is an article about OOo, the only comments that get modded past +1 are pro-OOo. Anything that speaks ill of the product gets demoted to 0 or -1.
It's unfortunate that the product can't receive even remotely objective coverage.
I'm not sure baout 2.0, but 1.1.4 wasn't even worthy to use at school. The document format was completely incompatable with MS Word. Sure, the text would transfer fine, and simple styles would remain if you were lucky (bold, italics... anything HTML 1.0 compatable) but if you tried to do anything even remotely fancy, everything went to pot.
Styles, tables, tabs, borders, etc. All of these things were not compatable between MS Word and OOo.
Further, working in a school environment, you frequently need to collaborate with other people. OOo was terrible for that. If I sent a file to a partner (who would be lucky if they could even open the file and get it to render correctly) who edited it and sent it back, I had about an 80% chance of getting garbage back.
Even if that person used OOo I could get garbage; if they used the linux version, and I used the Windows version, the files got mangled.
And submitting to a prof... no way. If they can't open the file, I don't get marks.
OOo is simply unusable until it plays well with others. Unless of course you only need it for editing documents where you are the sole consumer.
Best computer mishap I remember was discovered in a friends basement. While we were hanging out playing some video game of some kind, I started noticing an odd smell (not that unusual in a Geek's basement). Looking around, I saw a little bit of smoke coming from the back of his desk.
'Dude, your computer's smoking!!'
When we took a look, we found a slurpee cup that had spilled over into the monitor, and a trail of ants crawling up the side of his case. For each three ants that walked in, one ant and two puffs of smoke came back out.
We watched this for about 20 minutes before washing the monitor down.
I sympathize. I made the move to OS X last year, and went for about 8 months without using a windows machine; then I was forced to switch for my job.
I'm a technical writer for a software company. I spend about 40% of my day managing large numbers of files (you've never experienced pain until you've had to work with the same content, in 9 languages, using 4 different file encodings), and another 20% copying-and-pasting.
For the first few months I kept saying things like 'I shoulda used a mac' or 'if this was Unix, I'd be done by now'. (don't worry, I slapped myself on each occaison for spouting such stereotypical garbage).
I honestly don't know how people get things done in the windows world. After working for 3 months without shell scripting I started pulling my hair out.
I eventually installed (and subsequently re-learned) perl, and began brushing up on batch files. I had to write custom apps on a number of occaisions for things that should be easy, but aren't.
I attribute almost all of my problems to file management issues. OS X and *nix allow me to work with a large number of files/applications simultaneously without pulling my hair out. Windows has made me prematurely bald.
The rest of my problems are because of MS Word. But those are not platform specific. So I'll save those up for a MS Word bashing article.
I don't know that this would help that much. In Canada, there is already legal enforcement that you are not allowed to sell an NC-17 game to a person under the age of 17. This might be true for other countries as well.
This doesn't stop under 17 year old kids from buying it though, they just get their parents to give the cashier the nod. Most parents don't seem to realize that video games can contain potentially violent or innapropriate content.
My wife and I, both ex-Futureshop (like Best Buy) employees, used to go out of our way to convince people not to let their kids by NC-17 games. We would explain that the game is rated NC-17, explain that it contained graphic violence, or explicit language, and explain that it contained adult themes. We would liken it to an R rated movie, or a CD with the Explicit Lyrics mark on it. Parents just let it go in one ear and out the other.
I think that we only twice received a reaction; both times it was when we compared the game to an R rated movie. The parents were temporarily shocked out of their head-nodding, and asked their kids why they were buying an R-rated game. The kids would say 'Johnny has it, I want to play online with him' and the parents would hand over the visa.
The wierd part is that Parents would often refuse to buy R rated DVDs or Explicit Lyric CDs.
If parents don't care, or don't listen, then the ratings do nothing.
(For the record, we tried to dissuade parents from buying the games as a personal challenge to see if we could do it, not because we had a problem with kids playing the games.)
Thanks for the comment. I was pretty sure that was the case, but figured that since they were making such a big deal about transparent windows that it must be a new feature.
So I'm not crazy, and this isn't as cool as they hink it is.
Dude, I don't know about you, but my University frequently used Beta textbooks.
We would get the draft, and would be expected to use it as if it was a normal book. If it was an alpha level book, we just got what looked like the output from Word (or latex) photocopied and shrink wrapped. If it was in Beta stages, then we might be lucky and just get a crappy printing of it.
The down side is that the book was not factually correct, and contained lots of mistakes.
The upside was that the book only cost us as much as photocopying 400 pages (so less than $20) instead of the expected cover price.
Some profs even gave course marks for finding mistakes..5% of your grade for a 'major' mistake..1% of your grade for a typo or grammatical error.
You want omnioutliner. I have very similar needs, and I have been very dissapointed with products offerings. Go check out omnioutliner and see what they have to offer.
If you can live without the reports and reminders, I think you will find it will do exactly what you are looking for.
If you need reports and reminders, then you do need to find something like project (although I sympathize with you for not wanting to go this route).
One problem that you may find with omnioutliner is that it only runs on OS X. This means you would either need to be running a mac currently, or would need to purchase one in order to use the software. That's an expensive piece of free software.
I recomend giving it (and a mac, if need be) a try. It really is great.
The two best apps I've ever used are Omnigraffle and iCal. Both for the mac.
iCal can do almost all of the things that I like about outlook (and that list isn't very long) and does it prettier, easier, and it makes more sense. the only thing that it cannot do is coordinate resource scheduling against an exchange server. But that isn't a big loss for me and how I work.
Omnioutliner is simply amazing. I like to assign myself tasks, and then break them down to subtasks, and then sub-subtasks, ad infinitum Apparently most people don't do this, or so I assume, considering I've only found one decent app to handle this sort of information sorting. Omnigraffle allows me to do this easily, and allows for some very useful features as well (to-do lists with large text fields attached, inserting images into the to do list, cascading summary information amongst tasks and subtasks, etc.)
Both of these apps were free (as in beer) with my powerbook.
Since selling my powerbook and switching back to a windows environment for work, I have nearly gone mental without omni outliner. The tasks in outlook are just so lame (as in a duck with no legs) in comparison.
iCal was replaceable. I just liked how it worked.
The other alternative that I've used in the past, and really enjoyed, is the Palm desktop.
What would really make this useful is if all smut was somehow forced to move to the.xxx domain. At that point I could finally use the internet without seeing reems and reems of pr0n.
unless of course that was what I was looking for; in which case it would be easier still to find adult material (anything.xxx would probably work).
You ever hear of a product called WebCT? It is a commonly used web application used for distributing course notes, grades, emails, and other related material. An overrated CMS.
Well, here is a brief history of WebCT. (some facts may be slightly off, this is recounted from memory)
It was originally developed at UBC (in Vancouver BC, Canada) by a prof and some students. As it was created at a public institution, using research money from the Government, the prof felt that it should be released for Free (as in beer). His thoughts were that the people had already paid for it through their taxes.
Well, the software took off, and gained a lot of popularity. Then the University stepped in and said 'only people from BC should get this for free, it was mostly funded by provincial money', and so the software remained free for BC organizations, but was sold to people outside of BC.
Then the software was outsourced/sold to a private company who promised to keep the same pricing model (free to BC people, not free to others). They kept up with it a bit, and maintained it a little.
Then that software company sold WebCT again, to a different company. The second company did not promise to keep it free and started charging everyone. The second company also stopped updating the software, and did nothing to improve it. Then they increased the cost. Now they charge people way way too much for software that sucks (read: doesn't work on anything other than IE in Windows).
And every CS student who has ever used the product claims 'I coulda made this crap for free...' and they probably could have, because it was University CS students that did make that crap, and for free.
Every IT department however, seems to think that they can only buy software.
OK, so if it had been released as free (as in speech) software, things would have been a little better, but still.
This is exactly what happened to my keyboards. Fujitsu keyboards are built with the same mechanism.
The nice thing about it is that you can buy a pen at local electronic stores that will allow you to draw the circuits back in, thus recovering the keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't cry when seach engines began indexing and caching web sites.
They didn't cry when services like TurnItIn began to index and cache academic journals, libraries, papers, etc.
They didn't cry when the synopsis of their papers were included in journals and library indexes across the world.
But now they cry.
What is all the fuss about? This is a natural extension to what has been happening for years. If the above three things are not considered copyright infringement, then neither should Google's index of all of these works. Indexing and caching material is not copyright infringement, it is the merely automating a process that we expect of all of our librarians already. (Please find me a paper relevant to subject X; where did this quote come from?; A friend of mine read this book, about this guy, with a hat and a cane... I think it took place in England, or... maybe Pakistan. What was it called?)
Can anyone think of an intelligent way to help stop the problem (Jack Thompson)?
There are all sorts of idiots on the Internet who try to help by
posting on forums and responding directly to Jack with hate mail;
however, I don't think that sort of reaction will really help the
situation. Responding to idiocy with further idiocy just fuels the
fire.
If there is some intelligent way that I can help, please let me know. I'd like to do something, but I don't really have any good ideas.
Please keep in mind that I am Canadian, and thus do not have a senator to appeal to. (But if you can think of some American only solutions, post them as well).
Thanks.
"No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will..."
Sounds like my cell phone contract.
You'll be allowed to keep the spoon. Chopsticks are gone though.
Funny enough, I'm allowed to keep pens, pencils, (even pencil sharpeners), but not chopsticks.
From the terms and conditions:
"Entrants must be residents of the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal or Greece and aged 18 or over. Winners may be required to provide proof of age and address."
No, MainSoft is not a typo for Microsoft; MainSoft is an independent software company that makes a tool that allows for cross-platform development.
During the PDC, which was organized by Microsoft, one of the exhibitors (mainsoft) announced this contest which was intended to show off their products.
This is not an attempt by Microsoft to do any kind of cross-platform development.
To the best of my knowledge, neither of the groups organizing the event (MainSoft and CodeProject) are owned in whole, or in part, by Microsoft.
If you read the disclaimer on CodeProject, you will find the following groups barred from the contest:
Microsoft Employees are not on this list. I really don't think that Microsoft has a great deal to do with this event.
I have a feeling that the windows/linux mangling that was happening was a result of not using the same version of the application.
Also, the linux/Windows mangling happened in early 2004. In fact, all of the mangling that I refer to happened in early 2004. I believe the version of the application installed on the linux machine was V 1.0 (possibly 1.1), and the version on the windows machine was 1.1. The version of Office would have been Office X for the mac, and Office XP for the Windows machine.
I'm sure that a lot has changed since I used the application. However, every time I read a review of OOo, I look for 'compatability with MS Office' and the reviewer always says 'OOo is great for writing up simple documents. Some of the more advanced features get mangled when you move between versions/platforms/to word.' Typically this is followed by 'But no one uses those features anyways, so it doesn't matter.'
Honestly, I'm not willing to invest the time to try out OOo until I hear that it can work with word for all layout issues. If a document will not display exactly the same in OOo as it does in word; and if a document cannot be edited in Word, then OOo and then Word again and retain all of the layout that I've done, I'm not interested. I
m not talking about monolithic documents, just technical papers in the neighborhood of 5,000 - 10,000 words.
I realize that I'm being picky, but it really does make a difference if you care about the layout of the doc, rather than just the information.
OK. Valid point. I probably should have left that part out.
However, the submision aside, I still am unable to work with others, or even myself (if I'm on two different platforms).
I dunno. I kinda sympathize with the guy.
I'm totally sick of reading pro-OpenOffice.org articles on Slashdot. The community is far too biased.
The product is really not of the same calibre, I'm sorry. However, every time there is an article about OOo, the only comments that get modded past +1 are pro-OOo. Anything that speaks ill of the product gets demoted to 0 or -1.
It's unfortunate that the product can't receive even remotely objective coverage.
I'm not sure baout 2.0, but 1.1.4 wasn't even worthy to use at school. The document format was completely incompatable with MS Word. Sure, the text would transfer fine, and simple styles would remain if you were lucky (bold, italics... anything HTML 1.0 compatable) but if you tried to do anything even remotely fancy, everything went to pot.
Styles, tables, tabs, borders, etc. All of these things were not compatable between MS Word and OOo.
Further, working in a school environment, you frequently need to collaborate with other people. OOo was terrible for that. If I sent a file to a partner (who would be lucky if they could even open the file and get it to render correctly) who edited it and sent it back, I had about an 80% chance of getting garbage back.
Even if that person used OOo I could get garbage; if they used the linux version, and I used the Windows version, the files got mangled.
And submitting to a prof... no way. If they can't open the file, I don't get marks.
OOo is simply unusable until it plays well with others. Unless of course you only need it for editing documents where you are the sole consumer.
Best computer mishap I remember was discovered in a friends basement. While we were hanging out playing some video game of some kind, I started noticing an odd smell (not that unusual in a Geek's basement). Looking around, I saw a little bit of smoke coming from the back of his desk.
'Dude, your computer's smoking!!'
When we took a look, we found a slurpee cup that had spilled over into the monitor, and a trail of ants crawling up the side of his case. For each three ants that walked in, one ant and two puffs of smoke came back out.
We watched this for about 20 minutes before washing the monitor down.
I sympathize.
I made the move to OS X last year, and went for about 8 months without using a windows machine; then I was forced to switch for my job.
I'm a technical writer for a software company. I spend about 40% of my day managing large numbers of files (you've never experienced pain until you've had to work with the same content, in 9 languages, using 4 different file encodings), and another 20% copying-and-pasting.
For the first few months I kept saying things like 'I shoulda used a mac' or 'if this was Unix, I'd be done by now'. (don't worry, I slapped myself on each occaison for spouting such stereotypical garbage).
I honestly don't know how people get things done in the windows world. After working for 3 months without shell scripting I started pulling my hair out.
I eventually installed (and subsequently re-learned) perl, and began brushing up on batch files. I had to write custom apps on a number of occaisions for things that should be easy, but aren't.
I attribute almost all of my problems to file management issues. OS X and *nix allow me to work with a large number of files/applications simultaneously without pulling my hair out. Windows has made me prematurely bald.
The rest of my problems are because of MS Word. But those are not platform specific. So I'll save those up for a MS Word bashing article.
Perhaps I'm just dumb, but I rtfa, both of them, and I can't figure out how to access this money?
Has anyone else found the forms yet?
I don't know that this would help that much.
In Canada, there is already legal enforcement that you are not allowed to sell an NC-17 game to a person under the age of 17. This might be true for other countries as well.
This doesn't stop under 17 year old kids from buying it though, they just get their parents to give the cashier the nod. Most parents don't seem to realize that video games can contain potentially violent or innapropriate content.
My wife and I, both ex-Futureshop (like Best Buy) employees, used to go out of our way to convince people not to let their kids by NC-17 games. We would explain that the game is rated NC-17, explain that it contained graphic violence, or explicit language, and explain that it contained adult themes. We would liken it to an R rated movie, or a CD with the Explicit Lyrics mark on it. Parents just let it go in one ear and out the other.
I think that we only twice received a reaction; both times it was when we compared the game to an R rated movie. The parents were temporarily shocked out of their head-nodding, and asked their kids why they were buying an R-rated game. The kids would say 'Johnny has it, I want to play online with him' and the parents would hand over the visa.
The wierd part is that Parents would often refuse to buy R rated DVDs or Explicit Lyric CDs.
If parents don't care, or don't listen, then the ratings do nothing.
(For the record, we tried to dissuade parents from buying the games as a personal challenge to see if we could do it, not because we had a problem with kids playing the games.)
Thanks for the comment. I was pretty sure that was the case, but figured that since they were making such a big deal about transparent windows that it must be a new feature.
So I'm not crazy, and this isn't as cool as they hink it is.
I'm gonna turn all my spam filters off right this second! If I read enough of those emails, I'll get rich quick, AND get a bigger wang.
I could do with out the steamy hot horse sex though, I hope I don't have to take the good with the bad.
Only $9.50?
Dude, where I live movies can cost as much as $16 CDN per person. Even after the conversion, I wish I had it as good as $9.50.
Dude, I don't know about you, but my University frequently used Beta textbooks.
.5% of your grade for a 'major' mistake. .1% of your grade for a typo or grammatical error.
We would get the draft, and would be expected to use it as if it was a normal book. If it was an alpha level book, we just got what looked like the output from Word (or latex) photocopied and shrink wrapped. If it was in Beta stages, then we might be lucky and just get a crappy printing of it.
The down side is that the book was not factually correct, and contained lots of mistakes.
The upside was that the book only cost us as much as photocopying 400 pages (so less than $20) instead of the expected cover price.
Some profs even gave course marks for finding mistakes.
You want omnioutliner.
I have very similar needs, and I have been very dissapointed with products offerings. Go check out omnioutliner and see what they have to offer.
If you can live without the reports and reminders, I think you will find it will do exactly what you are looking for.
If you need reports and reminders, then you do need to find something like project (although I sympathize with you for not wanting to go this route).
One problem that you may find with omnioutliner is that it only runs on OS X. This means you would either need to be running a mac currently, or would need to purchase one in order to use the software. That's an expensive piece of free software.
I recomend giving it (and a mac, if need be) a try. It really is great.
The two best apps I've ever used are Omnigraffle and iCal. Both for the mac.
iCal can do almost all of the things that I like about outlook (and that list isn't very long) and does it prettier, easier, and it makes more sense. the only thing that it cannot do is coordinate resource scheduling against an exchange server. But that isn't a big loss for me and how I work.
Omnioutliner is simply amazing. I like to assign myself tasks, and then break them down to subtasks, and then sub-subtasks, ad infinitum Apparently most people don't do this, or so I assume, considering I've only found one decent app to handle this sort of information sorting. Omnigraffle allows me to do this easily, and allows for some very useful features as well (to-do lists with large text fields attached, inserting images into the to do list, cascading summary information amongst tasks and subtasks, etc.)
Both of these apps were free (as in beer) with my powerbook.
Since selling my powerbook and switching back to a windows environment for work, I have nearly gone mental without omni outliner. The tasks in outlook are just so lame (as in a duck with no legs) in comparison.
iCal was replaceable. I just liked how it worked.
The other alternative that I've used in the past, and really enjoyed, is the Palm desktop.
What would really make this useful is if all smut was somehow forced to move to the .xxx domain. At that point I could finally use the internet without seeing reems and reems of pr0n.
unless of course that was what I was looking for; in which case it would be easier still to find adult material (anything.xxx would probably work).
sadly, it's not likely to happen.
wow.
Ahh... easy rebuttal.
My knowledge is accurate as of about 18 months ago. Since then I'm sure it has been updated a bit.
You ever hear of a product called WebCT? It is a commonly used web application used for distributing course notes, grades, emails, and other related material. An overrated CMS.
Well, here is a brief history of WebCT. (some facts may be slightly off, this is recounted from memory)
It was originally developed at UBC (in Vancouver BC, Canada) by a prof and some students. As it was created at a public institution, using research money from the Government, the prof felt that it should be released for Free (as in beer). His thoughts were that the people had already paid for it through their taxes.
Well, the software took off, and gained a lot of popularity. Then the University stepped in and said 'only people from BC should get this for free, it was mostly funded by provincial money', and so the software remained free for BC organizations, but was sold to people outside of BC.
Then the software was outsourced/sold to a private company who promised to keep the same pricing model (free to BC people, not free to others). They kept up with it a bit, and maintained it a little.
Then that software company sold WebCT again, to a different company. The second company did not promise to keep it free and started charging everyone. The second company also stopped updating the software, and did nothing to improve it. Then they increased the cost. Now they charge people way way too much for software that sucks (read: doesn't work on anything other than IE in Windows).
And every CS student who has ever used the product claims 'I coulda made this crap for free...' and they probably could have, because it was University CS students that did make that crap, and for free.
Every IT department however, seems to think that they can only buy software.
OK, so if it had been released as free (as in speech) software, things would have been a little better, but still.
This is exactly what happened to my keyboards. Fujitsu keyboards are built with the same mechanism.
The nice thing about it is that you can buy a pen at local electronic stores that will allow you to draw the circuits back in, thus recovering the keyboard.