New Features. Microsoft takes some rough shots from the open source community, but the open source folks are more or less playing catch-up with the feature-set in office. Not only do they need to catch up and match the features, they need to offer some significant improvements to make MS chase them for a change. That way, the software would not just be "Nearly as good as office and free", but "In competition with Office and free".
I will recommend the opposite: fewer features. I've observed a lot of friends, colleagues, and coworkers use office, and two things stand out as being very common. First, people use software very inefficiently. They stay in newbie mode for years. Very rarely do they use advanced features, or employ advanced, more efficient techniques that they didn't learn initially. Second, most features cause more problems than they solve. I've seen more people get trapped by all the extra features and end up with, for example, documents with strange formatting they don't know how to get rid of, than I have seen people make use of even relatively basic features. People might like the idea of having 40 choices of font and 8 different border styles with 20 variations each, but it doesn't really result in a better memo or more informative annual report, and it adds complexity and opportunity for error. Presentation features are generally a problem anyway because most people don't know enough about typesetting to pick the right border style in the first place. Giving them fewer choices reduces the chance that they'll pick something completely inappropriate. Publishers and typesetters do need those tools, but they're a specialty market and they probably wouldn't be caught trying to typeset on Word anyway.
If you took Word Pad and added a handful of features, perhaps tables, automatic pagination, page numbering, and maybe a half dozen other simple features, you would end up with a program that, to most people, would probably be more useful than Word. What would really help people out is to create a set of simple tools that are easy to learn, efficient to use right from the start, and which don't have too many options; the thing should Just Work.
If you tell someone that you have a free word processor that has even more features than Word, they'll probably respond that they already have Word, know how to use it, and don't need any new features. If you told them you had a small, fast word processor that you could teach them to use in an hour, didn't have lots of confusing options and menus, and which made preparing letters, reports, and other common office documents extremely easy,a and by the way it's free, you'd probably get more takers.
You can't over-hype virus issues. You can lie and say a problem exists that doesn't, but you can't stop stressing that antivirus software and common sense when opening attachments and securing connections is important.
Virus issues are hyped all the time. For every real virus or worm, there have been countless hoaxes which have caused needless panic and countless wasted hours and network bandwidth from people forwarding warning emails to everyone they know. Sort of a manually-operated worm. In the pre-Outlook days, the hyped-up hoaxes probably did more damage than the real things. But few people had enough knowledge to tell the difference.
Hype (short for hyperbole, isn't it?) is a bad thing. Ignorance is pervasive and hype tends to make it even more so. People who work on computers all day need real education about how they work and what can go wrong. They don't have to be sysadmins, but they should have a better understanding of the tool with which they earn their livelihoods than the fumbling tentative grasp most have now.
Virus detection software may be useful to a degree, but to most users it's just as magical as the worms and viruses themselves. Making people think they're safe just because they have AV software compounds the problem. Software shouldn't replace knowledge, it should be used to assist knowledgeable people. In virus detection as in everything else.
She's saying, "Wouldn't you be pissed if somebody else gained from your hard work without you getting a damn thing?" And she's hoping people will say, "Yes."
And she's hoping to keep the discussion that simple. There are other ways to pose the question that aren't so biased or cut-and-dried.
If someone could gain something from hard work you had already done, and with no additional effort on your part, but couldn't afford to give you anything in return, would you deny that person the benefit of your work if you could?
If someone could gain something from hard work you had already done, but didn't think it was worth giving you as much as you wanted in return, would you prefer to accept a lesser payment (as the effort has already been made, the work already done) in return, or to simply refuse the exchange altogether?
Whether these questions get answered "yes", "no", or "it depends" is not as clear-cut.
Rosen and the RIAA are being disingenuous. They seem to be trying to give the impression that they are arguing that artists deserve to be compensated for their hard work, but what they are really arguing is that no one should enjoy the benefits of an artist's work without paying an adequate amount for the privilege. The two can be made to sound similar, but they aren't. In the first case, it doesn't matter if everyone who benefits pays, as long as, in total, the artist is fairly compensated. In the second case, it doesn't matter whether the artist's compensation is fair and reasonable, as long as everyone who benefits pays for that benefit. A sort of zero-sum approach to music where the industry must suck a dollar out of society for every dollar's worth of enjoyment it injects into it.
The sad part about that, as we all know, is that once the record companies and artists have maximized their revenues, it should make no difference to them whether or not others who have not paid are allowed to make their own copies. But they desparately want to preserve their business model, which won't allow them to be magnanimous. They could change to a different model which focused on achieving fair returns for their efforts, but I don't suppose they're going to volunteer to do that anytime soon.
Leaving out or enabling the removal of a useful feature does not render the system as a whole non-functional. Microsoft's argument is that taking out components like IE and Media Player will result in a non-functional system. That is, if you take out IE, not only can you no longer browse the Web, but you can no longer use the system in any meaningful way at all.
A modular system means that you can have IE if you want to browse the Web, but you can rip it out and replace it with Mozilla if you prefer, or you can rip it out and not replace it if you don't want to browse the Web at all. Windows without IE is only crippled if it's not possible to add IE or some other browser.
My understanding of the proposal is not that the states want to force people to buy Windows with no browser, no multimedia, and no instant messaging. Rather, they want the decision of which browser, multimedia player, and instant messenger is enabled to be someone's other than Microsoft's. Typically, this would be the PC vendor so, for example, IBM could choose to ship Windows PCs with Mozilla, Windows Media Player, and ICQ. Compaq might offer a different combination, or even let the end user decide which.
Retail versions of Windows would presumably come with these features available, but would be added and removed only at the user's request and would not break other components in the process.
So why did VA stop selling Linux systems? Alleged Microsoft pressure on mainstream vendors not to sell Linux should only have made things better for VA, assuming there really was a market for Linux desktops. But the fact is that there is no serious market for Linux desktops.
This goes right to the heart of the whole issue. There is no serious market for Linux, BeOS, OS/2, or any other Intel desktop operating system. This is not because Windows is so close to OS nirvana that only the great Microsoft can improve upon it, but because Microsoft has managed to erect barriers around the market so high that it is extraordinarily difficult for anyone to gain any sort of serious market share, no matter how good their product.
Restricting Microsoft-OEM contract provisions won't, by itself, magically resurrect Be, re-kindle OS/2, spark ferocious demand for Linux, or allow a new operating system to grab hold of the market. But a reasonable set of measures designed to tear down existing barriers to entry and keep them down long enough for alternatives to establish themselves should stabilize the situation, re-introduce real innovation and quality into the operating systems and applications markets, and return real choice to the market.
From the standpoint of a consumer desktop system, both Windows and Linux are abominations. Neither one is designed to do what the end user wants. One will let you do anything you want, but only if you can figure out how. The other won't let you do anything that its creator disapproves of. One ships broken and has to be assembled, the other comes pre-assembled but quickly breaks. Both may appeal strongly to certain user groups, but in an OS market with properly restored competition, neither Windows nor Linux, in their current forms, would hold much market share.
I find it funny that government interference is so selective in this forum. For instance, when it is CD-R's which are being taxed it is a horrible justice, yet when it is microsoft whose only crime (at least its only crime which is being prosecuted) is the fact that it is too big, the people come out in force on how the government isn't doing enough.
With the amount of material that is now widely available explaining U.S. anti-trust law and the specifics of the Microsoft case, you would do well to become at least minimally informed about the nature of the charges and the case before making such statements. The people who moderated this comment up might do the same.
When will people realize that an economy with ANY government intervention cannot be just?
It is far from self-evident that anarchy is a practical or just state of affairs.
The entire purpose of government is to interfere and to exert control. Apart from a very small number of true anarchists, no one doubts the need for or desirability of having a government to regulate people's relationships with one another and with the environment. There is much disagreement over the appropriate scope and nature of this interference, but almost no one seriously believes that government should not interfere (and by implication should not exist) at all.
Remember that minimum wage laws, anti-fraud laws, environmental legislation, copyright, import/export regulations, product safety laws, controlled goods and substances laws, workplace safety rules, child labour laws, property laws in general, and enforcement of any of the same all constitute government intervention in the economy.
I think there's a strong case to be made for free software, but this ain't it. Bruce Perens touts the money saved by not buying MS software, but completely ignores the much more significant expenditures on people to administer all this software. Does it cost more to administer sendmail than Exchange? Apache vs. IIS? Is in-house development with VB cheaper to get the same results as Java on Linux?
This is actually quite a bad argument to put forward, because it commits the fallacy of composition. IIS is an administratively-intensive Web server--or at least many would argue that it is--but IIS is not necessarily representative of closed source software in general, or even of Microsoft software.
Moreover, TCO is not a solid basis for comparison because TCO is not solely dependent on the software itself. A shop with lots of MCSEs with no *nix experience is probably going to be a lot more efficient running Win/IIS than Linux/Apache. For certain applications, maintenance cost differences may be negligable. In any case, absent a specific context, it is very easy to spin the TCO argument to make it look like either option is better.
The best way to encourage the use of OSS is to point to solid, hard-to-dispute advantages of OSS and solid, hard-to-dispute disadvantages of proprietary software. License fees are one. These are insignificant in some cases, but can be deal-breakers in others. The other is, as Perens correctly points out, freedom from vendor tyrrany. I suspect that anyone who has been on the receiving end of a BSA shakedown would be especially receptive to this idea, but it should be easy to make most people understand the benefit of being able to switch support and service vendors at your pleasure, to upgrade when it makes sense for them, and to be able to contract out to a multitude of developers to modify your existing software base, rather than have to rely on the willingness of the vendor of a proprietary system to make the changes you want.
Remember that the idea is not to promote specific packages, such as Apache over IIS or Linux over NT, but to argue that open source, in and of itself, confers distinct advantages that proprietary software cannot.
The thing that kills me it, COPY PREVENTION DOESN'T WORK! I've said before and I'll say it again, If I can listen to it, I can copy it. It's as simple as that.
Copy prevention, like any sort of security or control, is about limiting the scope of an activity, not eliminating the activity altogether. It misses the point to argue that anything can be copied; the idea is to put enough control in place so that only sufficiently determined or skilled people will be able to do so. It's the same reason I lock my front door even though anyone with a hammer can break a window.
The real question is whether the kind of copy prevention mechanisms they are considering will have any beneficial effect from a business standpoint. That is, will the technology generate enough new sales to make up for the cost of implementing and defending it in the first place? I have serious doubts about this. The software industry was big on copy control in the 1980s, but dropped it, presumably because of a combination of ineffectiveness and angry users. Ultimately, I think the software, music, and movie industries will realize that there is a finite amount of money that they can squeeze from consumers, and that higher profits will come from lowering production costs by producing fewer, but better, products rather than trying to sell as many cookie-cutter productions as they can.
Consumers don't need a law banning copy-protection on CDs. Manufacturers have a right to do this to their CDs.
That philosophy may work in the context of the free market, but the content of music CDs is typically the subject of a government-granted copyright monopoly.
If you could get the same music from someone else, one might argue that a manufacturer has the right to put copy and usage control technology on its CDs. But you can't get the same music from someone else.
Every other state-granted monopoly comes with a corresponding set of responsibilities. For example, AT&T may have been granted a monopoly over telephone service, but it was subject to rigorous controls: it was limited as to whom it could deny service, the minimum standard of service it could provide, what it was allowed to charge, and what uses of its network it was allowed to forbid.
It seems entirely reasonable that holding a copyright monopoly should be dependent on accepting certain conditions too. Perhaps not as strenuous, given the relative importance of the telephone network and Britney Spears' latest dreck, but it seems entirely reasonable that a copyright holder should be required to adhere to certain restrictions regarding price, use, and availability (i.e. you have an obligation to make sure the public has reasonable access to your work, at reasonable prices and with reasonable capabilites to use the work in a variety of ways, if you want to keep your copyright).
The arguments the "industry" keeps posing are like blaming the people who make ballpoint pens for ransom notes....
Actually, what the industry is doing is blaming everyone but itself for problems it created. They're afraid of music piracy, so they refuse to make music available in the formats and with the capabilities that people want, and insist on selling expensive bundles rather than single tracks.
I wonder if they ever asked themselves why people might be inclined to pirate music in the first place.
How will this really affect anyone?
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
The whole notion of trying to work copy protection into your hard disk is clearly ridiculous. It isn't going to seriously prevent movie piracy, and it isn't going to seriously increase the movie and record studios' bottom lines. I think that even Jack and Hillary know that (though maybe Fritz doesn't).
By and large, I don't really care if I can make copies of the stuff put out by the music and movie industries. If they want to make it hard for me to see their stuff, I suppose I will just have to see less of it. I don't plan to spend any more money under a pay-per-view regime; just view much less. When you get right down to it, I don't care if their crap is uncopyable, as long as I can continue to copy my own stuff and share it with other people.
Now, is it really possible that even the U.S. Congress would pass a law prohibiting people from copying even their own material? Is it reasonable that people will be forbidden from copying Word documents or sharing home videos over the Internet with their friends and with the public at large? If these things cannot be done, then personal computers as we understand them will not exist. Not even 100% paid-for congressmen are going to outlaw PCs; there is already too much infrastructure and dependency on them to outlaw them.
SSSCA will not increase the MPAA's profits, nor will it likely reduce piracy. It also attacks the principles of the public domain and fair use, but these things have been under assault for a long time, and the SSSCA isn't going to make or break the issue. It is a bad idea and should be challenged, but I have to wonder, apart from access to increasingly trite and repetitive movies and music, what would such a scheme really cost us in the long run?
Plus, if the software manufacturer is liable, and writes nearly perfect code, and then five years later somebody discovers a single bug and writes an exploit, who is liable?
Not everything has to be taken to ridiculous extremes. Are there any other products where the manufacturer is held responsible for any damage caused by way of use or failure of the product, no matter how caused and no matter what the standard of care taken?
Security is never an foolproof; any talk of liability that starts with the premise that all software must be 100% secure is likely either uninformed hyperbole or political posturing. The real issue is whether or not the developer of a product exercised a reasonable standard of care and is held to a reasonable standard of competence, given the nature of the product and the nature of the relationship between the manufacturer and end user. So things like commerical versus noncommercial and industry expert versus hobbyist do matter. Claims made about the quality or nature of the product (both in an outside of any EULA) also matter.
There is, for example, a big difference between programming mistakes and insecure program design. Buffer overflows are program mistakes. Microsoft Outlook is an insecure design. IIS plus Index server being installed by default even for workstation configurations of Windows 2000 is an insecure design. Anyone with even a modest background in security issues would have known not to enable a Web server by default on a workstation computer, because opening up ports always increases risk, and therefore should only be done when there is a good reason to do so. Anyone with a modest background in security would have known not to hide file extensions by default, not to require rendering email messages in HTML format, and not to allow active content in email messages by default. Active content should never be substituted for static data without a good reason and fair warning.
Without going to the ridiculous extreme of holding manufacturers to strict liability over every defect, we can certainly still insist on a certain standard of care and a guarantee that the product performs substantially as advertised. If some guy writes a mail client in his basement and distributes it for free, we may have to forgive him if the design is inherently insecure, but if a company with the resources of Microsoft or Oracle or Sun produces a design that any expert review would reveal as being fundamentally unsound and risky given its intended use and users, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to hold them accountable when people suffer from using the product as directed.
There are too many other responsible parties here that are DIRECTLY responsible to come after me with some tax or $30 increase on PC sales to try to resolve the problem. You want to solve the problem? Have China ban the practice. If China doesn't see it as a problem then why the hell should we?
You want a PC? You should pay the cost of the PC. The ENTIRE cost. That includes manufacture, delivery, maintenance, and disposal. Disposal includes the real cost of safely getting rid of not only the machine itself, but all of the other materials (such as packaging, including all of the packaging that is discarded long before the PC ever reaches the store) and pollutants (including the greenhouse gasses generated by the jet fuel burned to fly the parts over from Taiwan) generated in the process. The entire real cost of the PC should be borne by you; no one else should have to pay for your consumption or waste.
The Earth has a finite capability to absorb pollution. When this is exhausted, we all suffer. While economists may not figure its value into any of their equations because no one has attached a dollar value to it, the planet's ability to absorb pollution is an essential and finite resource. It is also a shared resource. You cannot use more than your share without affecting others. The simple rule is: if you make a mess, you clean it up. That someone else is willing to hide your poisonous garbage away for a small fee doesn't change the fact that it is garbage, that it has a negative effect on the entire population, and that you are responsible for it.
It's good that we all know that Linux and a Linux distribution are two different things, but it is also important to remember that a Linux distribution and a Linux installation are also two different things.
Looking at Debian Linux, I see almost everything needed to create a mom-friendly Linux installation. All that really needs to be done is to rewrite the admin scripts so that cron checks regularly to see what updates need to be done so mom doesn't need to keep her machine on all day to make sure logs get rotated and updatedb gets run. Everything else seems to be there. A spiffy, mom-friedly interface to apt and the appropriate databases should also make the installation of most new hardware and software easy. There may be a few issues if mom likes to add lots of new hardware and has to compile in support for new devices, but these things can be worked around relatively gracefully; certainly, it could be made no more painful than adding new hardware to Windows.
Of course, there is a difference between using a Linux desktop and installing a Linux desktop. My mom can't install Linux. But she can't install Windows either. That's Dell, Compaq, and IBM's job. If we could get vendors to ship working Linux systems and provide mom-friendly installation support for new hardware, we'd be set.
Kind of offtopic, but since you brought it up, there is a vital difference.
When someone makes a copy of a song, whether from a file sharing system, Usenet, or a friend, that may or may not represent a lost sale. It is possible that the individual made the copy in lieu of buying a copy, but it is also possible that the individual made the copy in lieu of not having a copy at all. In the latter case, it makes no immediate difference to the artist that a copy was made, because no copy would have been purchased in any event. In fact, it is almost certainly better for the artist that the individual did make the copy rather than do without, because it increases the chance of the individual later becoming a paying fan.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no strong evidence to suggest that people spend less money on buying recorded music if they have access to digital copies. The evidence seems to suggest more strongly that people simply acquire larger music collections.
On the other hand, when someone downloads a file from an online service, an actual sale is made. The customer has actually paid for the song, yet somehow practically no money makes it to the artist. This is more clearly a case of downloaded music harming the artist because the artist is getting only a negligable amount of money from someone who has actually paid for the music. Since the customer bought the track from the online service, it is unlikely that he will purchase the same music in another format which provides a higher royalty to the artist, such as a CD.
This suggests that the it is far more likely that a download from pressplay represents lost revenue opportunity for the artist than a download from Napster ever did.
As long as people continue to spend the same amount of money on music, and as long as the distribution of that money stays the same, it makes no difference to the income of the artists whether or not people also make copies and share their music with one another. While file sharing might reduce total spending on music, the pressplay revenue model will change the way in which the money that is made is distributed.
If a credible case could be made that file sharing was actually hurting artists financially, the issue of "piracy" might be worth looking into seriously. But as long as it is a matter of supposition and hypothetical dangers, there really doesn't seem to be any reason to get too excited about music sharing. It's not exactly a new phenomenon.
It's quite a stretch to equate the *voluntary* dissemination of HTTP, TCP, and other widely used technologies by their creators, with the *involuntary* sharing (theft) of the property of authors and musicians.
The point of the argument is that what you call theft is the foundation upon which evolving societies are built. Art and science evolve because people build upon the ideas and works of those who came before them. Today, the intellectual contributions of even the greatest artists and visionaries are insignificant compared to the pool of past ideas and insights from which they draw their knowledge and inspiration. Yet in many cases we allow them, through ownership of one small piece, to hold the entire puzzle for ransom for decades or even centuries. Disney can adapt the works of Shakespeare, without paying his estate a penny, even for a project he would never have approved of, but we cannot in turn adapt the resulting Disney-copyrighted product.
The whole notion of one's intellectual output as private property rather than contributions to a public resource is part of the recent shift in the view of society from a mechanism to work together for a greater common good to a mechanism allowing individuals to more effectively pursue their own selfish interests (with assurances to skeptics that a million people behaving selfishly usually somehow results in optimal outcomes for each of them).
Naomi Klein's book No Logo discusses this phenomenon in some detail. The most noteworthy point is that intellectual property rights changes the whole meaning of culture from something that is a participatory dialogue into something that is packaged and sold by rights owners and passively consumed by consumers, who are innundated with privately owned messages and images everywhere they go, but who are not allowed to build on or respond to these messages or images.
What the hell are they going to replace it with? Another "extreme" game show?!??! Another Survivor rip-off?! Maybe they'll show re-runs of Boston Public! Ooooh!
That wouldn't surprise me. The networks must love (un-)reality TV. It seems to draw large numbers of viewers, and I'm guessing the kind of viewer they draw tends to be more susceptible to advertising than people who enjoy shows like Futurama that are a little more oblique and sophisticated. (Not everyone is going to understand a joke involving Al Gore, Steven Hawking, and Gary Gygax, but a surprising number of people seem to get wrapped up in the coached petty bickering of the survivors.)
Not only that, but I suspect that these things are extremely cheap to produce. In a 1-hour TV drama, you have to pay a whole team of actors for every episode, but in survivor, they get 16 1-hour episodes or so and they only have to pay one person $1 million. Ted Danson made that for 1.5 30-minute episodes of Cheers; imagine what it would take to pay a whole cast of brand-name actors.
Talk shows proliferate because people are willing to embarass themselves to entertain others for nothing more than the opportunity to be on TV and maybe a nice hotel room. Judge Judy is great because people volunteer to be berated by an angry old woman for a chance at fleeting fame, "justice" and a small settlement. Weakest link contestants take even more abuse for an even smaller chance at a cash award. How expensive can it be to follow some cops around with a handycam or have John Edward impress gullible people for half an hour with half-assed cold reading? No writers. No screenplay. No expensive and tempermental actors with expensive and embarassing drug problems. These shows are as cheap as they are popular. I would guess that even animated shows like Futurama have fairly high production costs, and they don't appeal to as broad an audience.
Think about the music industry, if someone said, OK you can copy the music as much as you like then the recording industry would simply stop releasing music, then there would be nothing to copy!
Copyright is not a prerequisite for a commercial recorded music industry. The fact is that the music industry takes in billions of dollars each year, which means that people are willing to spend billions each year to acquire recorded music.
Given the choice of music for almost free or music for $20 a CD, music for free seems the most natural choice. If copyright were not granted to music publishers, widespread copying and drastically reduced payments the publishers is a very real possibility. (Though not necessarily inevitable.) As you note, at some point this would make music publishing unprofitable, and so publishers would cease to publish music. Or would they?
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it takes this to be the logical conclusion when it is only the mid-point of the journey.
If people aren't buying CDs, they're not spending all of those billions of dollars that they are spending on recorded music today. If you stop providing music fans with new music, but leave them with billions of dollars in unspent money, it seems entirely reasonable that the fans will want to spend that money to acquire new music. And so a new business model will emerge. One that doesn't depend on copyright and one that doesn't depend on limiting access to a particular recording strictly to those who pay for that particular recording. I don't know what that model would be. Maybe it would be fan club-based. Maybe it would be patronage-based. Maybe it would be something new. With billions of dollars and several established business empires at stake, I have faith that some business genius would figure out a way to make money by having beloved artists produce musical recordings. Everyone still gets paid (unless they are willing to volunteer their efforts) and, as an added bonus, the music becomes available to a wider audience than ever before.
This isn't meant to argue that copyright ought or ought not be abolished, but rather that copyright is not a prerequisite for a healthy, vibrant recorded music industry.
I think you're missing the point somewhat. In the first place, despite protestations to the contrary, neither Windows 98 nor Red Hat Linux 7.1 (for example) are operating systems. They are computing environments tha happen to include an operating system. One includes a very good operating system, and one includes an operating system that works just well enough to keep the computing environment running more or less most of the time.
X is not an operating system, nor is it part of Linux. The Windows GUI is not part of the Windows operating system, though the two are not modular and detachable in the way that Linux and X are.
In point of fact, Linux is a better operating system than Windows because it is more reliable and less obtrusive. In other words, it doesn't poke its head above the shell nearly as often as Windows. Both systems do, to one extent or another. For example, Linux's filesystem architecture becomes apparent when you pop a disk out of the floppy drive when/dev/fd0 mounted, and then try to insert and read another. Windows' architecture becomes apparent when you try to move all of those huge MS office binaries from C: to your new, spacious hard drive D: and then try to run Word. More obviously, Windows' architecture becomes apparent when you accidentally corrupt your registry, or when trying to print from Netscape causes the whole system to bluescreen and freeze. Both architectures become apparent when you do a hard reboot while the system is running Both operating systems do have characteristics that filter up into the user layers, but Linux can be kept under the surface much better than Windows, if only by virtue of the fact that it works the way it's supposed to more often than Windows does.
Most novices will not be able to use Disk Druid to partition a hard drive, this is true. Will the same novices be able to fdisk a FAT32 partition onto a naked drive? I'm thinking no. Novices don't install operating systems and, even if they did, it's not fair to compare the single-OS Windows install to the Windows/Linux dual-boot scenario that is common among first-time Linux users. If Compaq sold Linux desktops, they would come with Linux ready-to-run, just like Windows desktops do. If Windows desktops were sold with unpartitioned hard drives, a CD and a boot floppy, most novices would return them with a lot of cursing and swearing. Casual users can't install operating systems anymore than casual drivers can install car engines. They buy computers and it is up to the vendor to make the computer work.
On top of that you have a GUI environment, say X and Win32. True, the average user is not going to be able to hack a XF86Config file. But are they going to do any better with win.ini? Not likely. But configuring X and running X are two different things. Because Microsoft realizes that even users who do install or upgrade their OS aren't likely to want to hack a win.ini file by hand, they package Windows with an installer that does it for them. Corel, Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, even Slackware all do the same. Hacking XF86Config is only a requirement for geeks like you and me who buy all kinds of weird hardware and put it together ourselves.
I recently bought a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. The folks at Logitech were nice enough to ship a CD with an auto-installer to configure Windows to use the hardware. They weren't nice enough to ship an auto-installer to configure X to use the hardware, but that's not X's fault; it's Logitech's. It has nothing to do with the inherent ease or difficulty of using X. Rather, it has everything to do with the willingness of Logitech to support X and Linux users versus Windows users.
So let's look at what really matters: your system has been installed correctly so that, when you bring it home, it boots up and logs you in. You have a cascading menu showing all the programs you have on your system. You have a number of icons on your desktop which, when clicked, launch an application or open a file manager to view the contents of a drive. When you buy a new application on CD-ROM, you insert the disk, click the CD icon on your desktop, and an installer runs. It asks you a few questions, installs your application, and updates your desktop icons and menus. You can easily start your word processor, Web brower, email client, and so forth, and work with them.
This description is not inconsistent with Windows, nor is it inconsistent with Linux/X. With Windows today, it is a reality. With Linux/X, it is almost a reality. Apart from maybe a few shell scripts (e.g. mount/cdrom; if [ -f/cdrom/autorun.sh ]; then/cdrom/autorun.sh; else/usr/X11/bin/filemanager/cdrom; fi -- though I oversimplify here), the only real obstacle is vendor support. It's not that you can't write the equivalent of Install Shield under X, it's just that nobody has done it. Naturally, you can't write an auto-installer for every possible Linux/X/WM configuration, but you could, for example, probably write one that would work with any version of Red Hat 6.x or 7.x running X and KDE, or any Linux Standards Base-compliant system running KDE or Gnome.
Remember, IMacs ship with a Unix operating system; nobody says they are too hard to use.
Linux is NOT easy to use. Sure, it may be easy for US to use, but imagine a secretary, an HR guy, or (God forbid) the boss trying to use it on a daily basis. Give them XWindows and they'll be somewhat happy, but even the best XWindows setup pales in comparison the features and eye candy you'll find on Win2k and XP.
This is a harmful myth that we tend to perpetuate. In the first place, remember that Linux is an operating system. Most users will not interact directly with the operating system; their use will be mediated, typically by a shell for expert users and a GUI for expert and novice alike. Moreover, the novice especially will tend to limit his or her shell/GUI interaction to launching applications. The application interface is the primary interface that most users interact with. Bash presents a very difficult interface to novices. X presents a difficult interface to novices. But so does Windows.
Basic Win32 functions like copying files, launching programs, and locating files are more difficult to many novices than it might at first seem -- just watch a novice or even a moderately experienced person use windows and see how they typically use rote memory to start up their applications, with which they are typically far more comfortable. Watch what features they never use, even when it would improve speed or help keep their computer running longer. How often do they run scandisk? Back up the registry? Customize the start menu to put commonly used programs on the main menu, rather than having to cascade down two or three levels? See what happens when you change the default load/save directory in Word -- many users are not able to find their files if you start them off in a different directory.
Given this, it is far more critical that the application present a good interface than the underling OS or shell/GUI. In point of fact, most applications written for Linux have interfaces that are not well-suited to novices. Applications like MS Office are better, but they still suffer from menuitis and featuritis. I believe that, if you could overcome the natural resistance most people have to trying something new once they have managed to learn how to coax some marginal productivity out of their current applications, there would be a tremendous market for a simpler, more straightforward version of Office that implemented all of the important features in a transparent and intuitive way, while eliminating or at least hiding many of the more marginal or downright dangerous features (like the ability to easily, often accidentally, add footers, borders, and other formatting that can't be equally easily removed, without knowing what they are and how they got added in the first place).
Whether this suite ran under X or XP would probably make little difference to the average user. As long as you set it up for them, show them how to turn it on, turn it off, and start the apps they need, the underlying OS or GUI really doesn't matter all that much.
Most people don't use Windows either; they use applications that happen to run on Windows. While Linux may be a hard sell on the desktop, it could succeed simply by being invisible and letting the user concentrate on the applicaiton. If Linux had a killer desktop app, it might stand a chance on the desktop.
In Ottawa, there is at least one large non-national (not Sympatico or a cableco) ISP that provides good DSL service. They also do corporate hosting and have a pretty impressive secure data centre. I signed up with Rogers because I was too far from a CO at the time, but I would have gone with this ISP if I could have. They charge $40/mo, plus $15 for modem rental (or about $200 to buy outright), plus $15 if you want a static IP address. They allow you to do whatever you want with the bandwidth, short of reselling it, and they even support Linux (officially just Red Hat) as a client OS. Plus their tech support is clued. That's pretty sweet.
BTW, I don't mind the idea of paying for the bandwidth I use, but if I also have to put up with Rogers' arrogance, incompetence, and "always blame the customer, no matter how overwhelming the evidence against the cableco" attitude, I think I deserve the rates I'm currently paying, regardless of any excessive usage.
George Will, in saying that government promotes capitalism, is wrong. Government does have a role, but that role (if you are to have pure capitalism) is very, very limited. Capitalism is intuitive and inherent in our nature.
Perhaps by "capitalism," you mean "market economy" which is not the same thing. (Though capitalists like to pretend that it is, probably so that they can claim that Adam Smith is on their side.)
Capitalism is founded on the notion of private property -- especially productive property like land and natural resources. Government is essential to capitalism, because government is the body responsible for enforcing the property laws, without which capitalism couldn't function. At its heart, captialism promotes private ownership of productive resources; things like land and factories and rights to natural resources and intellectual creations. Ownership of things like bicycles, televisions, and shoes (finished products useful in and of themselves) are irrelevant; even communists allow for the ownership of such personal effects.
Capitalism seems to be anything but inherent to our nature. The idea of portioning off bits of land and other natural resources and granting people ownership of them in the same way that they might own a pair of shoes isn't a feature of most primitive societies. Niether is the idea that speculation -- acquiring access to things you don't need because you think that other people will need them later, and then selling them at a profit, even though you haven't added any value to them -- is an ethical way to become wealthy. Rather, our natural inclination seems to be that wealth should only come to those who create wealth. The idea that people should be rewarded by actually creating scarcity -- by acquiring a large amount of a resource in order to decrease supply and increase demand and therefore price -- hardly seems like something humans would naturally see as an ethical or responsible thing to do. Yet these are both hallmarks of capitalism.
The best that can be said is that capitalism appeals to human greed. In theory, capitalism is promoted as a more efficient method of generating wealth than a system of publically-owned or controlled productive resources. But I suspect that it is the idea that you can become fabulously wealthy simply by owning property -- which increases in value all by itself -- is what makes capitalism, as opposed to a simple market economy, attractive to most people. Witness the investment frenzy of the dotcom boom, when people were so swept up in the idea that a few thousand dollars invested today could literally make you a millionaire in a year's time that they never stopped to ask how so little money could be turned into so much without anyone actually doing any work. Or at whose expense such a phenomenon might be happening.
As a Linux enthusiast myself (active in my LUG, promoting Linux wherever I can) it really saddens me that so many users will clamor for Linux games but won't actually pony up the money when they become available. It's very, very depressing.
But users are asking for more than simply "Linux games." For many, being able to play games under Linux, rather than having to maintain a separate Windows machine or partition for their gaming, is an idea that appeals to them, but that doesn't mean that getting rid of that Windows partition is the overriding concern.
Do Linux users hate the idea of using Windows or supporting Microsoft so much that they are willing to wait an extra 6 months and pay an extra $30 or more for what may well be a not-so-great port of a Windows game? Some are, but others may reason that they play games for enjoyment, and playing a game becomes less enjoyable when one has to fight an uphill battle to find, pay for, install, and run the game.
I've bought a few commercial Linux games. Some, like CIV:CTP, weren't that great as games to begin with, but my overall feeling is that the Linux ports of Windows games cost more and are somewhat less fun to play than the Windows versions. Personally, I would prefer to give my gaming money to a Linux developer than to a Windows developer, and I would even pay a modest premium to play a game on Linux rather than Windows, but I want a certain standard of quality. I want a game that works well with and is fun to play under Linux.
I think that there is a reason that Nethack is still quite popular; it certainly doesn't win any awards for sound and graphics (not even xnethack), but it is a fun game that is well-designed, and rather than behaving like a fish out of water, it works well in its environment. The fact that its open source is also great, but am more than willing to pay real money for proprietary Linux games, if they are fun.
This is only partly true, but the comparison is both misleading and misses the point.
In the first place, the United States began the modern era far, far, ahead of the Soviet Union. The two World Wars (a time of increased government regulation of the economy), in particular, gave the U.S. an enormous economic boost: productivity was maximized, war exports were enormous, and America's infrastructure suffered almost no damage, in sharp contrast to the devastation in Germany, Japan, Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R. The U.S. has done better to date than countries like Russia in no small part because it started out way ahead of the Russians.
How much has capitalism raised standards of living in South America, Africa, and Asia, where countries were poor to begin with?
Secondly, one must consider not just where one is, but where one is heading. Discussions of standards of living in the U.S. invariably make the point that the real standard of living for most Americans has actually *fallen* in the last 20 years. The numbers that I have read have it that 80% of Americans have seen their real income shrink during the last 20 years, despite an increase in working hours and an explosion in the number of two-income families. While the average American still lives far better than the average Russian ever did under Soviet communism, the trend towards ever-greater consolodation of property and worsening conditions for the masses is clear. The logical conclusion, if the system survives intact, is a straficiation of society where a tiny few have unimaginable wealth and the masses have barely enough to survive. Already, we have seen problems of personal bankruptcy, chronic unemployment, and even homelessness creep up from the traditional underclass and touch the formerly secure ranks of the skilled and educated. Three univeristy degrees and ten years experience no longer guarantees you a job, much less a well-paid one.
Perhaps it is not just a coincidence that the fall in living standards started around the early 1980s, about when strong laissez-faire capitalism began to replace a more regulated market economy in the U.S.
There are plenty of people who believe capitalism can do no right, to wit:
* They're automating the factories, driving workers out of their jobs!
* They're employing workers to do menial repetitive tasks better left to machines!
In the case where owner and worker are the same person, automation is a boon and market economics work great. If you can automate a job that you previously did manually, it frees you to do other work, or to enjoy liesure time. Because you own the fruits of your labour, anything you can do to improve your efficiency benefits you directly.
Unfortunately, over time, productive assets have been privatized, sold, and amalgamated by an ever-decreasing number of individuals. Everyone else is left with nothing, and so they must sell their labour to those who own the productive assets.
While automation for the labourer who owns their own productive assets means either less work or higher productivity, for the worker with no productive assets, it means more work for less pay, as similarly unendowed individuals engage in cuthroat competition with one another for ever-decreasing employment opportunities, and wages fall appropriately. It leads to people working harder, longer, and more efficiently, but actually earning less.
A futuristic Star Trek world where machines do everything and everyone enjoys the benefits is predicated on everyone sharing in the benefits of automation. In a society where only the few who own productive assets benefit, everyone else is eventually doomed to poverty and ruin as their only means of earning a living is replaced by automation.
That doesn't mean that capitalism has to fail to provide for the masses, but the overwhelming tendency of capitalism is to concentrate rather than distribute wealth, and the overwhelming tendency of technology is, personal computers excepted, to reduce rather than increase the need for labour. Together, they make a pretty dangerous poison.
Slashdot Mirror
New Features. Microsoft takes some rough shots from the open source community, but the open source folks are more or less playing catch-up with the feature-set in office. Not only do they need to catch up and match the features, they need to offer some significant improvements to make MS chase them for a change. That way, the software would not just be "Nearly as good as office and free", but "In competition with Office and free".
I will recommend the opposite: fewer features. I've observed a lot of friends, colleagues, and coworkers use office, and two things stand out as being very common. First, people use software very inefficiently. They stay in newbie mode for years. Very rarely do they use advanced features, or employ advanced, more efficient techniques that they didn't learn initially. Second, most features cause more problems than they solve. I've seen more people get trapped by all the extra features and end up with, for example, documents with strange formatting they don't know how to get rid of, than I have seen people make use of even relatively basic features. People might like the idea of having 40 choices of font and 8 different border styles with 20 variations each, but it doesn't really result in a better memo or more informative annual report, and it adds complexity and opportunity for error. Presentation features are generally a problem anyway because most people don't know enough about typesetting to pick the right border style in the first place. Giving them fewer choices reduces the chance that they'll pick something completely inappropriate. Publishers and typesetters do need those tools, but they're a specialty market and they probably wouldn't be caught trying to typeset on Word anyway.
If you took Word Pad and added a handful of features, perhaps tables, automatic pagination, page numbering, and maybe a half dozen other simple features, you would end up with a program that, to most people, would probably be more useful than Word. What would really help people out is to create a set of simple tools that are easy to learn, efficient to use right from the start, and which don't have too many options; the thing should Just Work.
If you tell someone that you have a free word processor that has even more features than Word, they'll probably respond that they already have Word, know how to use it, and don't need any new features. If you told them you had a small, fast word processor that you could teach them to use in an hour, didn't have lots of confusing options and menus, and which made preparing letters, reports, and other common office documents extremely easy,a and by the way it's free, you'd probably get more takers.
You can't over-hype virus issues. You can lie and say a problem exists that doesn't, but you can't stop stressing that antivirus software and common sense when opening attachments and securing connections is important.
Virus issues are hyped all the time. For every real virus or worm, there have been countless hoaxes which have caused needless panic and countless wasted hours and network bandwidth from people forwarding warning emails to everyone they know. Sort of a manually-operated worm. In the pre-Outlook days, the hyped-up hoaxes probably did more damage than the real things. But few people had enough knowledge to tell the difference.
Hype (short for hyperbole, isn't it?) is a bad thing. Ignorance is pervasive and hype tends to make it even more so. People who work on computers all day need real education about how they work and what can go wrong. They don't have to be sysadmins, but they should have a better understanding of the tool with which they earn their livelihoods than the fumbling tentative grasp most have now.
Virus detection software may be useful to a degree, but to most users it's just as magical as the worms and viruses themselves. Making people think they're safe just because they have AV software compounds the problem. Software shouldn't replace knowledge, it should be used to assist knowledgeable people. In virus detection as in everything else.
She's saying, "Wouldn't you be pissed if somebody else gained from your hard work without you getting a damn thing?" And she's hoping people will say, "Yes."
And she's hoping to keep the discussion that simple. There are other ways to pose the question that aren't so biased or cut-and-dried.
If someone could gain something from hard work you had already done, and with no additional effort on your part, but couldn't afford to give you anything in return, would you deny that person the benefit of your work if you could?
If someone could gain something from hard work you had already done, but didn't think it was worth giving you as much as you wanted in return, would you prefer to accept a lesser payment (as the effort has already been made, the work already done) in return, or to simply refuse the exchange altogether?
Whether these questions get answered "yes", "no", or "it depends" is not as clear-cut.
Rosen and the RIAA are being disingenuous. They seem to be trying to give the impression that they are arguing that artists deserve to be compensated for their hard work, but what they are really arguing is that no one should enjoy the benefits of an artist's work without paying an adequate amount for the privilege. The two can be made to sound similar, but they aren't. In the first case, it doesn't matter if everyone who benefits pays, as long as, in total, the artist is fairly compensated. In the second case, it doesn't matter whether the artist's compensation is fair and reasonable, as long as everyone who benefits pays for that benefit. A sort of zero-sum approach to music where the industry must suck a dollar out of society for every dollar's worth of enjoyment it injects into it.
The sad part about that, as we all know, is that once the record companies and artists have maximized their revenues, it should make no difference to them whether or not others who have not paid are allowed to make their own copies. But they desparately want to preserve their business model, which won't allow them to be magnanimous. They could change to a different model which focused on achieving fair returns for their efforts, but I don't suppose they're going to volunteer to do that anytime soon.
Leaving out or enabling the removal of a useful feature does not render the system as a whole non-functional. Microsoft's argument is that taking out components like IE and Media Player will result in a non-functional system. That is, if you take out IE, not only can you no longer browse the Web, but you can no longer use the system in any meaningful way at all.
A modular system means that you can have IE if you want to browse the Web, but you can rip it out and replace it with Mozilla if you prefer, or you can rip it out and not replace it if you don't want to browse the Web at all. Windows without IE is only crippled if it's not possible to add IE or some other browser.
My understanding of the proposal is not that the states want to force people to buy Windows with no browser, no multimedia, and no instant messaging. Rather, they want the decision of which browser, multimedia player, and instant messenger is enabled to be someone's other than Microsoft's. Typically, this would be the PC vendor so, for example, IBM could choose to ship Windows PCs with Mozilla, Windows Media Player, and ICQ. Compaq might offer a different combination, or even let the end user decide which.
Retail versions of Windows would presumably come with these features available, but would be added and removed only at the user's request and would not break other components in the process.
So why did VA stop selling Linux systems? Alleged Microsoft pressure on mainstream vendors not to sell Linux should only have made things better for VA, assuming there really was a market for Linux desktops. But the fact is that there is no serious market for Linux desktops.
This goes right to the heart of the whole issue. There is no serious market for Linux, BeOS, OS/2, or any other Intel desktop operating system. This is not because Windows is so close to OS nirvana that only the great Microsoft can improve upon it, but because Microsoft has managed to erect barriers around the market so high that it is extraordinarily difficult for anyone to gain any sort of serious market share, no matter how good their product.
Restricting Microsoft-OEM contract provisions won't, by itself, magically resurrect Be, re-kindle OS/2, spark ferocious demand for Linux, or allow a new operating system to grab hold of the market. But a reasonable set of measures designed to tear down existing barriers to entry and keep them down long enough for alternatives to establish themselves should stabilize the situation, re-introduce real innovation and quality into the operating systems and applications markets, and return real choice to the market.
From the standpoint of a consumer desktop system, both Windows and Linux are abominations. Neither one is designed to do what the end user wants. One will let you do anything you want, but only if you can figure out how. The other won't let you do anything that its creator disapproves of. One ships broken and has to be assembled, the other comes pre-assembled but quickly breaks. Both may appeal strongly to certain user groups, but in an OS market with properly restored competition, neither Windows nor Linux, in their current forms, would hold much market share.
I find it funny that government interference is so selective in this forum. For instance, when it is CD-R's which are being taxed it is a horrible justice, yet when it is microsoft whose only crime (at least its only crime which is being prosecuted) is the fact that it is too big, the people come out in force on how the government isn't doing enough.
With the amount of material that is now widely available explaining U.S. anti-trust law and the specifics of the Microsoft case, you would do well to become at least minimally informed about the nature of the charges and the case before making such statements. The people who moderated this comment up might do the same.
When will people realize that an economy with ANY government intervention cannot be just?
It is far from self-evident that anarchy is a practical or just state of affairs.
The entire purpose of government is to interfere and to exert control. Apart from a very small number of true anarchists, no one doubts the need for or desirability of having a government to regulate people's relationships with one another and with the environment. There is much disagreement over the appropriate scope and nature of this interference, but almost no one seriously believes that government should not interfere (and by implication should not exist) at all.
Remember that minimum wage laws, anti-fraud laws, environmental legislation, copyright, import/export regulations, product safety laws, controlled goods and substances laws, workplace safety rules, child labour laws, property laws in general, and enforcement of any of the same all constitute government intervention in the economy.
I think there's a strong case to be made for free software, but this ain't it. Bruce Perens touts the money saved by not buying MS software, but completely ignores the much more significant expenditures on people to administer all this software. Does it cost more to administer sendmail than Exchange? Apache vs. IIS? Is in-house development with VB cheaper to get the same results as Java on Linux?
This is actually quite a bad argument to put forward, because it commits the fallacy of composition. IIS is an administratively-intensive Web server--or at least many would argue that it is--but IIS is not necessarily representative of closed source software in general, or even of Microsoft software.
Moreover, TCO is not a solid basis for comparison because TCO is not solely dependent on the software itself. A shop with lots of MCSEs with no *nix experience is probably going to be a lot more efficient running Win/IIS than Linux/Apache. For certain applications, maintenance cost differences may be negligable. In any case, absent a specific context, it is very easy to spin the TCO argument to make it look like either option is better.
The best way to encourage the use of OSS is to point to solid, hard-to-dispute advantages of OSS and solid, hard-to-dispute disadvantages of proprietary software. License fees are one. These are insignificant in some cases, but can be deal-breakers in others. The other is, as Perens correctly points out, freedom from vendor tyrrany. I suspect that anyone who has been on the receiving end of a BSA shakedown would be especially receptive to this idea, but it should be easy to make most people understand the benefit of being able to switch support and service vendors at your pleasure, to upgrade when it makes sense for them, and to be able to contract out to a multitude of developers to modify your existing software base, rather than have to rely on the willingness of the vendor of a proprietary system to make the changes you want.
Remember that the idea is not to promote specific packages, such as Apache over IIS or Linux over NT, but to argue that open source, in and of itself, confers distinct advantages that proprietary software cannot.
The thing that kills me it, COPY PREVENTION DOESN'T WORK! I've said before and I'll say it again, If I can listen to it, I can copy it. It's as simple as that.
Copy prevention, like any sort of security or control, is about limiting the scope of an activity, not eliminating the activity altogether. It misses the point to argue that anything can be copied; the idea is to put enough control in place so that only sufficiently determined or skilled people will be able to do so. It's the same reason I lock my front door even though anyone with a hammer can break a window.
The real question is whether the kind of copy prevention mechanisms they are considering will have any beneficial effect from a business standpoint. That is, will the technology generate enough new sales to make up for the cost of implementing and defending it in the first place? I have serious doubts about this. The software industry was big on copy control in the 1980s, but dropped it, presumably because of a combination of ineffectiveness and angry users. Ultimately, I think the software, music, and movie industries will realize that there is a finite amount of money that they can squeeze from consumers, and that higher profits will come from lowering production costs by producing fewer, but better, products rather than trying to sell as many cookie-cutter productions as they can.
Consumers don't need a law banning copy-protection on CDs. Manufacturers have a right to do this to their CDs.
That philosophy may work in the context of the free market, but the content of music CDs is typically the subject of a government-granted copyright monopoly.
If you could get the same music from someone else, one might argue that a manufacturer has the right to put copy and usage control technology on its CDs. But you can't get the same music from someone else.
Every other state-granted monopoly comes with a corresponding set of responsibilities. For example, AT&T may have been granted a monopoly over telephone service, but it was subject to rigorous controls: it was limited as to whom it could deny service, the minimum standard of service it could provide, what it was allowed to charge, and what uses of its network it was allowed to forbid.
It seems entirely reasonable that holding a copyright monopoly should be dependent on accepting certain conditions too. Perhaps not as strenuous, given the relative importance of the telephone network and Britney Spears' latest dreck, but it seems entirely reasonable that a copyright holder should be required to adhere to certain restrictions regarding price, use, and availability (i.e. you have an obligation to make sure the public has reasonable access to your work, at reasonable prices and with reasonable capabilites to use the work in a variety of ways, if you want to keep your copyright).
The arguments the "industry" keeps posing are like blaming the people who make ballpoint pens for ransom notes....
Actually, what the industry is doing is blaming everyone but itself for problems it created. They're afraid of music piracy, so they refuse to make music available in the formats and with the capabilities that people want, and insist on selling expensive bundles rather than single tracks.
I wonder if they ever asked themselves why people might be inclined to pirate music in the first place.
The whole notion of trying to work copy protection into your hard disk is clearly ridiculous. It isn't going to seriously prevent movie piracy, and it isn't going to seriously increase the movie and record studios' bottom lines. I think that even Jack and Hillary know that (though maybe Fritz doesn't).
By and large, I don't really care if I can make copies of the stuff put out by the music and movie industries. If they want to make it hard for me to see their stuff, I suppose I will just have to see less of it. I don't plan to spend any more money under a pay-per-view regime; just view much less. When you get right down to it, I don't care if their crap is uncopyable, as long as I can continue to copy my own stuff and share it with other people.
Now, is it really possible that even the U.S. Congress would pass a law prohibiting people from copying even their own material? Is it reasonable that people will be forbidden from copying Word documents or sharing home videos over the Internet with their friends and with the public at large? If these things cannot be done, then personal computers as we understand them will not exist. Not even 100% paid-for congressmen are going to outlaw PCs; there is already too much infrastructure and dependency on them to outlaw them.
SSSCA will not increase the MPAA's profits, nor will it likely reduce piracy. It also attacks the principles of the public domain and fair use, but these things have been under assault for a long time, and the SSSCA isn't going to make or break the issue. It is a bad idea and should be challenged, but I have to wonder, apart from access to increasingly trite and repetitive movies and music, what would such a scheme really cost us in the long run?
Plus, if the software manufacturer is liable, and writes nearly perfect code, and then five years later somebody discovers a single bug and writes an exploit, who is liable?
Not everything has to be taken to ridiculous extremes. Are there any other products where the manufacturer is held responsible for any damage caused by way of use or failure of the product, no matter how caused and no matter what the standard of care taken?
Security is never an foolproof; any talk of liability that starts with the premise that all software must be 100% secure is likely either uninformed hyperbole or political posturing. The real issue is whether or not the developer of a product exercised a reasonable standard of care and is held to a reasonable standard of competence, given the nature of the product and the nature of the relationship between the manufacturer and end user. So things like commerical versus noncommercial and industry expert versus hobbyist do matter. Claims made about the quality or nature of the product (both in an outside of any EULA) also matter.
There is, for example, a big difference between programming mistakes and insecure program design. Buffer overflows are program mistakes. Microsoft Outlook is an insecure design. IIS plus Index server being installed by default even for workstation configurations of Windows 2000 is an insecure design. Anyone with even a modest background in security issues would have known not to enable a Web server by default on a workstation computer, because opening up ports always increases risk, and therefore should only be done when there is a good reason to do so. Anyone with a modest background in security would have known not to hide file extensions by default, not to require rendering email messages in HTML format, and not to allow active content in email messages by default. Active content should never be substituted for static data without a good reason and fair warning.
Without going to the ridiculous extreme of holding manufacturers to strict liability over every defect, we can certainly still insist on a certain standard of care and a guarantee that the product performs substantially as advertised. If some guy writes a mail client in his basement and distributes it for free, we may have to forgive him if the design is inherently insecure, but if a company with the resources of Microsoft or Oracle or Sun produces a design that any expert review would reveal as being fundamentally unsound and risky given its intended use and users, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to hold them accountable when people suffer from using the product as directed.
There are too many other responsible parties here that are DIRECTLY responsible to come after me with some tax or $30 increase on PC sales to try to resolve the problem. You want to solve the problem? Have China ban the practice. If China doesn't see it as a problem then why the hell should we?
You want a PC? You should pay the cost of the PC. The ENTIRE cost. That includes manufacture, delivery, maintenance, and disposal. Disposal includes the real cost of safely getting rid of not only the machine itself, but all of the other materials (such as packaging, including all of the packaging that is discarded long before the PC ever reaches the store) and pollutants (including the greenhouse gasses generated by the jet fuel burned to fly the parts over from Taiwan) generated in the process. The entire real cost of the PC should be borne by you; no one else should have to pay for your consumption or waste.
The Earth has a finite capability to absorb pollution. When this is exhausted, we all suffer. While economists may not figure its value into any of their equations because no one has attached a dollar value to it, the planet's ability to absorb pollution is an essential and finite resource. It is also a shared resource. You cannot use more than your share without affecting others. The simple rule is: if you make a mess, you clean it up. That someone else is willing to hide your poisonous garbage away for a small fee doesn't change the fact that it is garbage, that it has a negative effect on the entire population, and that you are responsible for it.
It's good that we all know that Linux and a Linux distribution are two different things, but it is also important to remember that a Linux distribution and a Linux installation are also two different things.
Looking at Debian Linux, I see almost everything needed to create a mom-friendly Linux installation. All that really needs to be done is to rewrite the admin scripts so that cron checks regularly to see what updates need to be done so mom doesn't need to keep her machine on all day to make sure logs get rotated and updatedb gets run. Everything else seems to be there. A spiffy, mom-friedly interface to apt and the appropriate databases should also make the installation of most new hardware and software easy. There may be a few issues if mom likes to add lots of new hardware and has to compile in support for new devices, but these things can be worked around relatively gracefully; certainly, it could be made no more painful than adding new hardware to Windows.
Of course, there is a difference between using a Linux desktop and installing a Linux desktop. My mom can't install Linux. But she can't install Windows either. That's Dell, Compaq, and IBM's job. If we could get vendors to ship working Linux systems and provide mom-friendly installation support for new hardware, we'd be set.
Kind of offtopic, but since you brought it up, there is a vital difference.
When someone makes a copy of a song, whether from a file sharing system, Usenet, or a friend, that may or may not represent a lost sale. It is possible that the individual made the copy in lieu of buying a copy, but it is also possible that the individual made the copy in lieu of not having a copy at all. In the latter case, it makes no immediate difference to the artist that a copy was made, because no copy would have been purchased in any event. In fact, it is almost certainly better for the artist that the individual did make the copy rather than do without, because it increases the chance of the individual later becoming a paying fan.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no strong evidence to suggest that people spend less money on buying recorded music if they have access to digital copies. The evidence seems to suggest more strongly that people simply acquire larger music collections.
On the other hand, when someone downloads a file from an online service, an actual sale is made. The customer has actually paid for the song, yet somehow practically no money makes it to the artist. This is more clearly a case of downloaded music harming the artist because the artist is getting only a negligable amount of money from someone who has actually paid for the music. Since the customer bought the track from the online service, it is unlikely that he will purchase the same music in another format which provides a higher royalty to the artist, such as a CD.
This suggests that the it is far more likely that a download from pressplay represents lost revenue opportunity for the artist than a download from Napster ever did.
As long as people continue to spend the same amount of money on music, and as long as the distribution of that money stays the same, it makes no difference to the income of the artists whether or not people also make copies and share their music with one another. While file sharing might reduce total spending on music, the pressplay revenue model will change the way in which the money that is made is distributed.
If a credible case could be made that file sharing was actually hurting artists financially, the issue of "piracy" might be worth looking into seriously. But as long as it is a matter of supposition and hypothetical dangers, there really doesn't seem to be any reason to get too excited about music sharing. It's not exactly a new phenomenon.
It's quite a stretch to equate the *voluntary* dissemination of HTTP, TCP, and other widely used technologies by their creators, with the *involuntary* sharing (theft) of the property of authors and musicians.
The point of the argument is that what you call theft is the foundation upon which evolving societies are built. Art and science evolve because people build upon the ideas and works of those who came before them. Today, the intellectual contributions of even the greatest artists and visionaries are insignificant compared to the pool of past ideas and insights from which they draw their knowledge and inspiration. Yet in many cases we allow them, through ownership of one small piece, to hold the entire puzzle for ransom for decades or even centuries. Disney can adapt the works of Shakespeare, without paying his estate a penny, even for a project he would never have approved of, but we cannot in turn adapt the resulting Disney-copyrighted product.
The whole notion of one's intellectual output as private property rather than contributions to a public resource is part of the recent shift in the view of society from a mechanism to work together for a greater common good to a mechanism allowing individuals to more effectively pursue their own selfish interests (with assurances to skeptics that a million people behaving selfishly usually somehow results in optimal outcomes for each of them).
Naomi Klein's book No Logo discusses this phenomenon in some detail. The most noteworthy point is that intellectual property rights changes the whole meaning of culture from something that is a participatory dialogue into something that is packaged and sold by rights owners and passively consumed by consumers, who are innundated with privately owned messages and images everywhere they go, but who are not allowed to build on or respond to these messages or images.
What the hell are they going to replace it with? Another "extreme" game show?!??! Another Survivor rip-off?! Maybe they'll show re-runs of Boston Public! Ooooh!
That wouldn't surprise me. The networks must love (un-)reality TV. It seems to draw large numbers of viewers, and I'm guessing the kind of viewer they draw tends to be more susceptible to advertising than people who enjoy shows like Futurama that are a little more oblique and sophisticated. (Not everyone is going to understand a joke involving Al Gore, Steven Hawking, and Gary Gygax, but a surprising number of people seem to get wrapped up in the coached petty bickering of the survivors.)
Not only that, but I suspect that these things are extremely cheap to produce. In a 1-hour TV drama, you have to pay a whole team of actors for every episode, but in survivor, they get 16 1-hour episodes or so and they only have to pay one person $1 million. Ted Danson made that for 1.5 30-minute episodes of Cheers; imagine what it would take to pay a whole cast of brand-name actors.
Talk shows proliferate because people are willing to embarass themselves to entertain others for nothing more than the opportunity to be on TV and maybe a nice hotel room. Judge Judy is great because people volunteer to be berated by an angry old woman for a chance at fleeting fame, "justice" and a small settlement. Weakest link contestants take even more abuse for an even smaller chance at a cash award. How expensive can it be to follow some cops around with a handycam or have John Edward impress gullible people for half an hour with half-assed cold reading? No writers. No screenplay. No expensive and tempermental actors with expensive and embarassing drug problems. These shows are as cheap as they are popular. I would guess that even animated shows like Futurama have fairly high production costs, and they don't appeal to as broad an audience.
Think about the music industry, if someone said, OK you can copy the music as much as you like then the recording industry would simply stop releasing music, then there would be nothing to copy!
Copyright is not a prerequisite for a commercial recorded music industry. The fact is that the music industry takes in billions of dollars each year, which means that people are willing to spend billions each year to acquire recorded music.
Given the choice of music for almost free or music for $20 a CD, music for free seems the most natural choice. If copyright were not granted to music publishers, widespread copying and drastically reduced payments the publishers is a very real possibility. (Though not necessarily inevitable.) As you note, at some point this would make music publishing unprofitable, and so publishers would cease to publish music. Or would they?
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it takes this to be the logical conclusion when it is only the mid-point of the journey.
If people aren't buying CDs, they're not spending all of those billions of dollars that they are spending on recorded music today. If you stop providing music fans with new music, but leave them with billions of dollars in unspent money, it seems entirely reasonable that the fans will want to spend that money to acquire new music. And so a new business model will emerge. One that doesn't depend on copyright and one that doesn't depend on limiting access to a particular recording strictly to those who pay for that particular recording. I don't know what that model would be. Maybe it would be fan club-based. Maybe it would be patronage-based. Maybe it would be something new. With billions of dollars and several established business empires at stake, I have faith that some business genius would figure out a way to make money by having beloved artists produce musical recordings. Everyone still gets paid (unless they are willing to volunteer their efforts) and, as an added bonus, the music becomes available to a wider audience than ever before.
This isn't meant to argue that copyright ought or ought not be abolished, but rather that copyright is not a prerequisite for a healthy, vibrant recorded music industry.
I think you're missing the point somewhat. In the first place, despite protestations to the contrary, neither Windows 98 nor Red Hat Linux 7.1 (for example) are operating systems. They are computing environments tha happen to include an operating system. One includes a very good operating system, and one includes an operating system that works just well enough to keep the computing environment running more or less most of the time.
/dev/fd0 mounted, and then try to insert and read another. Windows' architecture becomes apparent when you try to move all of those huge MS office binaries from C: to your new, spacious hard drive D: and then try to run Word. More obviously, Windows' architecture becomes apparent when you accidentally corrupt your registry, or when trying to print from Netscape causes the whole system to bluescreen and freeze. Both architectures become apparent when you do a hard reboot while the system is running Both operating systems do have characteristics that filter up into the user layers, but Linux can be kept under the surface much better than Windows, if only by virtue of the fact that it works the way it's supposed to more often than Windows does.
/cdrom; if [ -f /cdrom/autorun.sh ]; then /cdrom/autorun.sh; else /usr/X11/bin/filemanager /cdrom; fi -- though I oversimplify here), the only real obstacle is vendor support. It's not that you can't write the equivalent of Install Shield under X, it's just that nobody has done it. Naturally, you can't write an auto-installer for every possible Linux/X/WM configuration, but you could, for example, probably write one that would work with any version of Red Hat 6.x or 7.x running X and KDE, or any Linux Standards Base-compliant system running KDE or Gnome.
X is not an operating system, nor is it part of Linux. The Windows GUI is not part of the Windows operating system, though the two are not modular and detachable in the way that Linux and X are.
In point of fact, Linux is a better operating system than Windows because it is more reliable and less obtrusive. In other words, it doesn't poke its head above the shell nearly as often as Windows. Both systems do, to one extent or another. For example, Linux's filesystem architecture becomes apparent when you pop a disk out of the floppy drive when
Most novices will not be able to use Disk Druid to partition a hard drive, this is true. Will the same novices be able to fdisk a FAT32 partition onto a naked drive? I'm thinking no. Novices don't install operating systems and, even if they did, it's not fair to compare the single-OS Windows install to the Windows/Linux dual-boot scenario that is common among first-time Linux users. If Compaq sold Linux desktops, they would come with Linux ready-to-run, just like Windows desktops do. If Windows desktops were sold with unpartitioned hard drives, a CD and a boot floppy, most novices would return them with a lot of cursing and swearing. Casual users can't install operating systems anymore than casual drivers can install car engines. They buy computers and it is up to the vendor to make the computer work.
On top of that you have a GUI environment, say X and Win32. True, the average user is not going to be able to hack a XF86Config file. But are they going to do any better with win.ini? Not likely. But configuring X and running X are two different things. Because Microsoft realizes that even users who do install or upgrade their OS aren't likely to want to hack a win.ini file by hand, they package Windows with an installer that does it for them. Corel, Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, even Slackware all do the same. Hacking XF86Config is only a requirement for geeks like you and me who buy all kinds of weird hardware and put it together ourselves.
I recently bought a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. The folks at Logitech were nice enough to ship a CD with an auto-installer to configure Windows to use the hardware. They weren't nice enough to ship an auto-installer to configure X to use the hardware, but that's not X's fault; it's Logitech's. It has nothing to do with the inherent ease or difficulty of using X. Rather, it has everything to do with the willingness of Logitech to support X and Linux users versus Windows users.
So let's look at what really matters: your system has been installed correctly so that, when you bring it home, it boots up and logs you in. You have a cascading menu showing all the programs you have on your system. You have a number of icons on your desktop which, when clicked, launch an application or open a file manager to view the contents of a drive. When you buy a new application on CD-ROM, you insert the disk, click the CD icon on your desktop, and an installer runs. It asks you a few questions, installs your application, and updates your desktop icons and menus. You can easily start your word processor, Web brower, email client, and so forth, and work with them.
This description is not inconsistent with Windows, nor is it inconsistent with Linux/X. With Windows today, it is a reality. With Linux/X, it is almost a reality. Apart from maybe a few shell scripts (e.g. mount
Remember, IMacs ship with a Unix operating system; nobody says they are too hard to use.
Linux is NOT easy to use. Sure, it may be easy for US to use, but imagine a secretary, an HR guy, or (God forbid) the boss trying to use it on a daily basis. Give them XWindows and they'll be somewhat happy, but even the best XWindows setup pales in comparison the features and eye candy you'll find on Win2k and XP.
This is a harmful myth that we tend to perpetuate. In the first place, remember that Linux is an operating system. Most users will not interact directly with the operating system; their use will be mediated, typically by a shell for expert users and a GUI for expert and novice alike. Moreover, the novice especially will tend to limit his or her shell/GUI interaction to launching applications. The application interface is the primary interface that most users interact with. Bash presents a very difficult interface to novices. X presents a difficult interface to novices. But so does Windows.
Basic Win32 functions like copying files, launching programs, and locating files are more difficult to many novices than it might at first seem -- just watch a novice or even a moderately experienced person use windows and see how they typically use rote memory to start up their applications, with which they are typically far more comfortable. Watch what features they never use, even when it would improve speed or help keep their computer running longer. How often do they run scandisk? Back up the registry? Customize the start menu to put commonly used programs on the main menu, rather than having to cascade down two or three levels? See what happens when you change the default load/save directory in Word -- many users are not able to find their files if you start them off in a different directory.
Given this, it is far more critical that the application present a good interface than the underling OS or shell/GUI. In point of fact, most applications written for Linux have interfaces that are not well-suited to novices. Applications like MS Office are better, but they still suffer from menuitis and featuritis. I believe that, if you could overcome the natural resistance most people have to trying something new once they have managed to learn how to coax some marginal productivity out of their current applications, there would be a tremendous market for a simpler, more straightforward version of Office that implemented all of the important features in a transparent and intuitive way, while eliminating or at least hiding many of the more marginal or downright dangerous features (like the ability to easily, often accidentally, add footers, borders, and other formatting that can't be equally easily removed, without knowing what they are and how they got added in the first place).
Whether this suite ran under X or XP would probably make little difference to the average user. As long as you set it up for them, show them how to turn it on, turn it off, and start the apps they need, the underlying OS or GUI really doesn't matter all that much.
Most people don't use Windows either; they use applications that happen to run on Windows. While Linux may be a hard sell on the desktop, it could succeed simply by being invisible and letting the user concentrate on the applicaiton. If Linux had a killer desktop app, it might stand a chance on the desktop.
In Ottawa, there is at least one large non-national (not Sympatico or a cableco) ISP that provides good DSL service. They also do corporate hosting and have a pretty impressive secure data centre. I signed up with Rogers because I was too far from a CO at the time, but I would have gone with this ISP if I could have. They charge $40/mo, plus $15 for modem rental (or about $200 to buy outright), plus $15 if you want a static IP address. They allow you to do whatever you want with the bandwidth, short of reselling it, and they even support Linux (officially just Red Hat) as a client OS. Plus their tech support is clued. That's pretty sweet.
BTW, I don't mind the idea of paying for the bandwidth I use, but if I also have to put up with Rogers' arrogance, incompetence, and "always blame the customer, no matter how overwhelming the evidence against the cableco" attitude, I think I deserve the rates I'm currently paying, regardless of any excessive usage.
George Will, in saying that government promotes capitalism, is wrong. Government does have a role, but that role (if you are to have pure capitalism) is very, very limited. Capitalism is intuitive and inherent in our nature.
Perhaps by "capitalism," you mean "market economy" which is not the same thing. (Though capitalists like to pretend that it is, probably so that they can claim that Adam Smith is on their side.)
Capitalism is founded on the notion of private property -- especially productive property like land and natural resources. Government is essential to capitalism, because government is the body responsible for enforcing the property laws, without which capitalism couldn't function. At its heart, captialism promotes private ownership of productive resources; things like land and factories and rights to natural resources and intellectual creations. Ownership of things like bicycles, televisions, and shoes (finished products useful in and of themselves) are irrelevant; even communists allow for the ownership of such personal effects.
Capitalism seems to be anything but inherent to our nature. The idea of portioning off bits of land and other natural resources and granting people ownership of them in the same way that they might own a pair of shoes isn't a feature of most primitive societies. Niether is the idea that speculation -- acquiring access to things you don't need because you think that other people will need them later, and then selling them at a profit, even though you haven't added any value to them -- is an ethical way to become wealthy. Rather, our natural inclination seems to be that wealth should only come to those who create wealth. The idea that people should be rewarded by actually creating scarcity -- by acquiring a large amount of a resource in order to decrease supply and increase demand and therefore price -- hardly seems like something humans would naturally see as an ethical or responsible thing to do. Yet these are both hallmarks of capitalism.
The best that can be said is that capitalism appeals to human greed. In theory, capitalism is promoted as a more efficient method of generating wealth than a system of publically-owned or controlled productive resources. But I suspect that it is the idea that you can become fabulously wealthy simply by owning property -- which increases in value all by itself -- is what makes capitalism, as opposed to a simple market economy, attractive to most people. Witness the investment frenzy of the dotcom boom, when people were so swept up in the idea that a few thousand dollars invested today could literally make you a millionaire in a year's time that they never stopped to ask how so little money could be turned into so much without anyone actually doing any work. Or at whose expense such a phenomenon might be happening.
As a Linux enthusiast myself (active in my LUG, promoting Linux wherever I can) it really saddens me that so many users will clamor for Linux games but won't actually pony up the money when they become available. It's very, very depressing.
But users are asking for more than simply "Linux games." For many, being able to play games under Linux, rather than having to maintain a separate Windows machine or partition for their gaming, is an idea that appeals to them, but that doesn't mean that getting rid of that Windows partition is the overriding concern.
Do Linux users hate the idea of using Windows or supporting Microsoft so much that they are willing to wait an extra 6 months and pay an extra $30 or more for what may well be a not-so-great port of a Windows game? Some are, but others may reason that they play games for enjoyment, and playing a game becomes less enjoyable when one has to fight an uphill battle to find, pay for, install, and run the game.
I've bought a few commercial Linux games. Some, like CIV:CTP, weren't that great as games to begin with, but my overall feeling is that the Linux ports of Windows games cost more and are somewhat less fun to play than the Windows versions. Personally, I would prefer to give my gaming money to a Linux developer than to a Windows developer, and I would even pay a modest premium to play a game on Linux rather than Windows, but I want a certain standard of quality. I want a game that works well with and is fun to play under Linux.
I think that there is a reason that Nethack is still quite popular; it certainly doesn't win any awards for sound and graphics (not even xnethack), but it is a fun game that is well-designed, and rather than behaving like a fish out of water, it works well in its environment. The fact that its open source is also great, but am more than willing to pay real money for proprietary Linux games, if they are fun.
This is only partly true, but the comparison is both misleading and misses the point.
In the first place, the United States began the modern era far, far, ahead of the Soviet Union. The two World Wars (a time of increased government regulation of the economy), in particular, gave the U.S. an enormous economic boost: productivity was maximized, war exports were enormous, and America's infrastructure suffered almost no damage, in sharp contrast to the devastation in Germany, Japan, Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R. The U.S. has done better to date than countries like Russia in no small part because it started out way ahead of the Russians.
How much has capitalism raised standards of living in South America, Africa, and Asia, where countries were poor to begin with?
Secondly, one must consider not just where one is, but where one is heading. Discussions of standards of living in the U.S. invariably make the point that the real standard of living for most Americans has actually *fallen* in the last 20 years. The numbers that I have read have it that 80% of Americans have seen their real income shrink during the last 20 years, despite an increase in working hours and an explosion in the number of two-income families. While the average American still lives far better than the average Russian ever did under Soviet communism, the trend towards ever-greater consolodation of property and worsening conditions for the masses is clear. The logical conclusion, if the system survives intact, is a straficiation of society where a tiny few have unimaginable wealth and the masses have barely enough to survive. Already, we have seen problems of personal bankruptcy, chronic unemployment, and even homelessness creep up from the traditional underclass and touch the formerly secure ranks of the skilled and educated. Three univeristy degrees and ten years experience no longer guarantees you a job, much less a well-paid one.
Perhaps it is not just a coincidence that the fall in living standards started around the early 1980s, about when strong laissez-faire capitalism began to replace a more regulated market economy in the U.S.
There are plenty of people who believe capitalism can do no right, to wit:
* They're automating the factories, driving workers out of their jobs!
* They're employing workers to do menial repetitive tasks better left to machines!
In the case where owner and worker are the same person, automation is a boon and market economics work great. If you can automate a job that you previously did manually, it frees you to do other work, or to enjoy liesure time. Because you own the fruits of your labour, anything you can do to improve your efficiency benefits you directly.
Unfortunately, over time, productive assets have been privatized, sold, and amalgamated by an ever-decreasing number of individuals. Everyone else is left with nothing, and so they must sell their labour to those who own the productive assets.
While automation for the labourer who owns their own productive assets means either less work or higher productivity, for the worker with no productive assets, it means more work for less pay, as similarly unendowed individuals engage in cuthroat competition with one another for ever-decreasing employment opportunities, and wages fall appropriately. It leads to people working harder, longer, and more efficiently, but actually earning less.
A futuristic Star Trek world where machines do everything and everyone enjoys the benefits is predicated on everyone sharing in the benefits of automation. In a society where only the few who own productive assets benefit, everyone else is eventually doomed to poverty and ruin as their only means of earning a living is replaced by automation.
That doesn't mean that capitalism has to fail to provide for the masses, but the overwhelming tendency of capitalism is to concentrate rather than distribute wealth, and the overwhelming tendency of technology is, personal computers excepted, to reduce rather than increase the need for labour. Together, they make a pretty dangerous poison.