I and others are happy creating GPL'ed software, but we are a very small minority of people producing creative works.
Interestingly, the GPL only works because of copyright. It's the protection that copyright affords the author of the code that gives him/her the right to attach the GPL and insist on the usage that code is put to.
If copyright didn't exist, there'd be nothing to stop people taking open sources and building their own binaries and selling them binary-only unimpeded. GPL would basically equal public domain; this is not the free software movement's aim at all.
Well that doesn't make me drool it makes me sick! When will people start thinking about doing some real work and how to make that easier.
How the heck does having my document half obscured by a calculator help me in any way!?
Get a life! Ask yourself what your GUI is actually FOR?? Seems like for most people here's it's for playing around with and looking 'kewl'! What a joke..
In Windows (the operating system I sit in front of more often than not), I always end up sticking any downloaded file, etc., etc on the desktop because at that exact moment I want to download it and probably run it / open straight away. And I prefer to download explicitly because otherwise word or excel or acrobat opens inside my browser window (mm good idea.. huh?) and then quite often crashes or makes IE behave oddly.
But the result is my desktop ends up covered in crap. What I really need to use a temp folder somewhere. But there's no shortcut to temp folder in the save as.. dialog. But if there's a shortcut to Desktop I can press that or otherwise just hit the Up directory button repeatedly without too much thought.
Then I guess I could stick a shorcut to this temp area onto my little task bar tool bar icon place. (Next to the start button in Windows 98+) Now that, I'm sorry to admit, is a brilliant feature. 95% of the time I run programs from the select few icons I've put there. No menu, no window on top of it, etc.
Which is the major problem with stuff on the desktop - if you're actually doing anything with the computer you've probably obscured it with various windows. Hence the "show desktop" shortcut icon and keypress.
Anyway I can't help feeling there's no going to be a major leap forward in UI until we abandon the whole desktop metaphor and while we're at the the filesystem is folders and files one too. At least the part the user cares about - i.e. wherever and however the computer keeps their work.
Just a thought experiment, but as other people have pointed out, they did it with VCRs, because they saw how VCRs worked, and that it was different to TVs and they made the analogue TV picture not friendly to VCRs.
Now take a look at how MP3 does its compression - psycho-acoustic masking, etc. etc. And look at how the ear listens. Probably a slightly different process (!).
So I imagine a distortion could be made to audio, in the analogue domain, that wasn't very hearable by humans, but totally screws the MP3 assumptions and results in a very very (audibly) lossy compression.
I'm not saying it's a fact, but it could be done. Then all the MP3 codecs would need to be re-worked to take that into account - but you could start a running battle that at least takes some of the ease out of it for the average joe.
Do I pay up front? (Like for example the BBC's flat-rate licence fee that every UK household with a television pays.) That way the amount the artist gets goes down the more people are downloading!!
Or is it billed each month, I get a bill for hundred of pounds/dollars, based on what my fellow customers were downloading that month!? I'm not going to want to pay for someone else's MP3 downloads. And I'm not going to enter into an agreement where I can get billed for essentially random amounts having nothing to do with what I downloaded?!
Maybe one way would be everyone pays per byte received. Then maybe some kind of tagging or fingerprinting can re-distribute the money to the right people. Sounds a bit like asking me to pay for content, except there is one difference - it can't be so easily circumvented. But the technology to say this byte moving to this end user means this $0.000000001 should be paid to XYZ seems impossible.
I see a drawing board.. perhaps it's time to get back there.
Re:great program, but it isn't keeping up
on
Gimp 1.2.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Maybe I didn't express (know?!) my point very clearly...:-)
First up, I have no comment about the technology issue - I agree a user doesn't need to be specially concerned about the underlying system architecture, as long as it meets her needs.
I was replying to a comment that I felt implied someone shouldn't ask for any features if they weren't prepared to code them themselves. I personally disagree, for the reasons I stated about efficiencies of having specialists. I make no comment about the particular request(s).
I believe access to source code is fundamental to advancing best coding practice and taking software development forward from its current very hit and miss results. But I don't really know if "Free Software" or "Commercial Software" is the answer to mankind's problems.
It worries me a little to hear "coders do what they want, and the user's needs are a distant second".. what is this Free Software actually for? I'm reminded (with no accuracy!) of a comment Linus Torvalds make about comp sci masturbation or something.
Is it just so we software hacks have a fun time and then maybe move into real or commercial software roles to actually meet some of the world's needs?
Re:great program, but it isn't keeping up
on
Gimp 1.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, most computer program users don't write programs. They are the users. You don't grow the plants and keep the animals that you eat, do you? Probably not, and if you do, you almost certainly don't mine (or whatever?!?) the silicon that goes in your computer. etc etc. The standard of living we enjoy is because the economy grows through the
efficiency gain of people specialising in doing one thing well. A graphic designer shouldn't have to be a coder too.
Is open source just about writing code for other people who write code? I hope not. The comments/wishes/*needs* of the users should be paramount to the coding effort, surely?
Re:great program, but it isn't keeping up
on
Gimp 1.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I used to think that way ("why can't I just save as a GIF?") but then when I started using the program for some real work, and took a time to understand the issues involved (e.g. palettes/RGB, alpha channels, etc.), it was all very clear.
I think now I'd rather not have it deciding what palette to use for GIF conversion (to take that example). My personal preference is to learn from an obstinate but knowledgeable teacher who forces me to work things out myself, than have some-one else just do stuff for me...
Hmm, I got a scroll bar with both arrows at both ends.. woo innovation. Or, is it?
What's a scroll bar for.. do we need it? I don't have a scroll bar on my car or my filing cabinet or my desk or my favourite novel (shampoo planet). Do I need one on my screen?
Mice.. I stop using the mouse as soon as I learn the keystrokes.. it's easier for maybe 85% of tasks. Is a mouse really needed if I'm not producing graphics?
I'm not saying the answers are no, but that we need to be asking these questions and even higher level ones if there's going to be true innovation.
Overlapping windows - they suck! I maximise everthing and alt-tab between the full-screen programs. Unless I want to directly copy by eye-and-hand from one window to another or see two logs files or something. Dialogs pop up and take focus when I'm doing something else. GUIs hinder more than help a lot of the time.
Think outside the box.. don't just paint the sides a pretty colour.
Firstly I totally agree with the socialisation stuff people have written.
From my own experience of being (not very much) ahead of my peer group at school, comes this advice:
Teach the kid (if possible through experience) what to do when he/she doesn't "just get it."
Teach them real study skills.. the kind that the average kids *have* to learn to do well in the subjects anyway. Because if this kid or whoever is anything like me, they'll hit a point where they have to work a little to understand something.. and they might not know how to cope with that.
I found pretty much all the subjects at school easy.. to the extent that I never really studied, revised for exams or anything... and still was top of the class. Until around 2nd year of university, when suddenly things didn't magically just make sense to me... and I couldn't really cope with it. I didn't have the will power or self-control to sit down and actually work hard to understand the stuff.
Maybe it's just laziness. But when you go for years not finding something an effort, it's really hard to get motivated when you do.
I agree totally. For ages it's really bugged me that the super-duper much hyped wizzy new interfaces like KDE and Gnome actually just look like Windows or Mac. Where's the innovation there?
It's like the disappointment I felt after finally downloaded StarOffice (a long time ago now) and finding myself looking at a not very goot knock-off of Office97 running on Windows.
Take a step back, ask yourself what a workstation is for and what interface will acheive it. Learn from the current best but don't just copy them.
the question - which I read as "How can I prevent someone masquarading as me from a remote location at a given time?"
I'm not sure how read the question, but I started to think about the question "how can I prove after the event that I wasn't at the scene of a crime?"
Now at very first thinking various issues come up:
Data must be controlled by me - I don't want my location tracked by any third parties; I just want to be able to reveal/prove where I was at a certain time, at my instigation.
Maybe some kind of trusted third party injecting random but recorded bitstreams into the ether as radio waves at every gridpoint, and changing every minute or so.
There would need to be process and crytographic controls on this infrastructure.. might not be possible.
You would record the bitstreams on a pocket recorder or mobile phone device, and then you can say "look, the random code at this time and place was xxx".
Then there is the question of cheating... I just ask my friend who was there what the number was. So I guess I have to record the numbers on a "tamper proof" (see Secrets& Lies for why I put quotes around that) device like a Smart card, that only the "authorities" (whoever they are) can extract the information from.
There would need be a password protected scheme so I have to give my authorisation for a date-range of location data to be extracted as well. So I would have to trust this device, a lot more than I trust say Canivore.
Then what if know I'm going somewhere bad and I just give my card to a friend for a day or so. Not sure here.. maybe the device has to randomly demand some biometric data from me at random times.
Pretty interesting stuff.. gonna have to re-read Schneier's books (again). I recommend the section in Applied Cryptography that deals with protocols, for stuff along these lines.
I might put this up and work on it some more at my web site. Or I might not.
This is an unfair advantage to M$ that their competitors don't have and it needs to be brought to the attention of every city atty in the country.
Why does MS have this right and other software vendors don't? Surely that's not the case. Maybe other vendors don't include such a clause in their contracts, but they could...
It's a contract, if you don't agree with the contract then don't sign it. If you feel Microsoft software is so necessary to run your organisation then you're either going to have to try to negotiate different terms, or lump it.
Otherwise don't buy it. It's not a human right for software to be provided to you according to whatever terms you wish. It's a market place. Sure MS have distorted the market in other ways, but I don't think this is an example of that.
Even the guy in the article admits MS are within their contractual rights to ask for the audit.
Last year I finally got shot of a two year project to replace one in-house piece of operational software with another. Getting shot of it in this case meant dropping the project and buying something off-the-shelf.
Now, it's interesting to look at the requirements we were asked to fulfill, and the features of this off-the-shelf software, and see whether they match.
Therein lies the problem though, because the requirements were never documented properly. Basically my fault all along, but the project was allowed to mushroom into a nightmare because management knew how to run a software project even less than I did.
Having said all that, with open source projects, often there aren't any requirements from users. Especially in the 0.9 release. The first programmer probably knew roughly what he was trying to achieve and then put out the software when it did something. The community then has a need (its own implicit requirement) and finds xyz package that fits the need at least partially.
For example, I never specified the requirements of Samba, but when I heard about it, I realised it would make a neat solution enabling me to get rid of flaky PC NFS client software.
As an open source project gains momentum, requirements start to emerge, ad hoc, from the user community in the form of suggested enhancements, etc.
Turning back to Samba, we can see sometimes there can be conflicting requirements (especially their relative priorities) which a single project doesn't feel able to meet. Hence the code fork.
In a strict development cycle, there is a concept of a "user", the aim is to meet as many of their requirements as possible given the resources. In open source, I see that concept of "user", as well as customer/owner/stakeholder, etc., as hard to define.
For some interesting reading check out the famous "Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks, and various texts by Steve McConnell. I get the impression there is no agreed "best practice" in open or closed source development. It's still something of a black art.
Thing I love about google is that you can click "cached" next to the search result, and get a copy from google's cache, of pages that have been deleted. And quite often it's quicker!:-)
Just the wrong side of off-topic, but this whole phase tree thing, particularly the atomic switching of roots, reminds me of a system I made up to allow recording of TV soap opera episodes for later playback! No not TiVo, it's a manual procedure using two video tapes.
Jeremy Paxman (who is one of the UK's most well-known TV news anchors) was just speaking in an interviewee capacity on the BBC's 6 o'clock news.
He described and they showed the cardboard box stuffed with bubble-wrap that was posted to him. The machine is marked with the missing enigma's code number, but an expert is speeding to the BBC to verify it's identity apparently!
I was surprised him opening the unexpected package himself, seeing as he is so high-profile, and not always liked!
If you're interested in the science bit, read The Last Three Minutes:
Conjectures About the Ultimate Fate of the Universe (Science Masters Series)
by Paul Davies.
I think Paul Davies is an excellent science writer and and this book is one of his best.
eek.. Ericsson T28.. well mine is only dual band for the UK but I guess it has similar emissions.
anyway I use a simple hands-free earpiece thingy, there are all the rage over here in the UK, do you have/use them in the states?
It's just a walkman earpiece thing with a microphone just down the wire.. works well. I think the quality of the sound is better too, and you can put the phone in your pocket and carry on driving or typing or cooking or whatever with both hands *g*
Shirotae wrote some interesting stuff check it out above..
I guess in the end our decision was arbitrary. I think I liked the part about correctness over features, it just appealed to me personally. From what people have said here, I think I'll take a look at mod_ssl too, if I get a chance; the system is up and running already so like your case it's not a major priority for my company.
We don't use client certificates, so we never hit that issue.
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Interestingly, the GPL only works because of copyright. It's the protection that copyright affords the author of the code that gives him/her the right to attach the GPL and insist on the usage that code is put to.
If copyright didn't exist, there'd be nothing to stop people taking open sources and building their own binaries and selling them binary-only unimpeded. GPL would basically equal public domain; this is not the free software movement's aim at all.
Well that doesn't make me drool it makes me sick! When will people start thinking about doing some real work and how to make that easier.
How the heck does having my document half obscured by a calculator help me in any way!?
Get a life! Ask yourself what your GUI is actually FOR?? Seems like for most people here's it's for playing around with and looking 'kewl'! What a joke..
In Windows (the operating system I sit in front of more often than not), I always end up sticking any downloaded file, etc., etc on the desktop because at that exact moment I want to download it and probably run it / open straight away. And I prefer to download explicitly because otherwise word or excel or acrobat opens inside my browser window (mm good idea.. huh?) and then quite often crashes or makes IE behave oddly. But the result is my desktop ends up covered in crap. What I really need to use a temp folder somewhere. But there's no shortcut to temp folder in the save as.. dialog. But if there's a shortcut to Desktop I can press that or otherwise just hit the Up directory button repeatedly without too much thought. Then I guess I could stick a shorcut to this temp area onto my little task bar tool bar icon place. (Next to the start button in Windows 98+) Now that, I'm sorry to admit, is a brilliant feature. 95% of the time I run programs from the select few icons I've put there. No menu, no window on top of it, etc. Which is the major problem with stuff on the desktop - if you're actually doing anything with the computer you've probably obscured it with various windows. Hence the "show desktop" shortcut icon and keypress. Anyway I can't help feeling there's no going to be a major leap forward in UI until we abandon the whole desktop metaphor and while we're at the the filesystem is folders and files one too. At least the part the user cares about - i.e. wherever and however the computer keeps their work.
Here's the full Judgement. It's from Feb 14th, but it seems to have all the phrases quoted in the articles so I assume some other news got in the way!
Now take a look at how MP3 does its compression - psycho-acoustic masking, etc. etc. And look at how the ear listens. Probably a slightly different process (!).
So I imagine a distortion could be made to audio, in the analogue domain, that wasn't very hearable by humans, but totally screws the MP3 assumptions and results in a very very (audibly) lossy compression.
I'm not saying it's a fact, but it could be done. Then all the MP3 codecs would need to be re-worked to take that into account - but you could start a running battle that at least takes some of the ease out of it for the average joe.
Do I pay up front? (Like for example the BBC's flat-rate licence fee that every UK household with a television pays.) That way the amount the artist gets goes down the more people are downloading!!
Or is it billed each month, I get a bill for hundred of pounds/dollars, based on what my fellow customers were downloading that month!? I'm not going to want to pay for someone else's MP3 downloads. And I'm not going to enter into an agreement where I can get billed for essentially random amounts having nothing to do with what I downloaded?!
Maybe one way would be everyone pays per byte received. Then maybe some kind of tagging or fingerprinting can re-distribute the money to the right people. Sounds a bit like asking me to pay for content, except there is one difference - it can't be so easily circumvented. But the technology to say this byte moving to this end user means this $0.000000001 should be paid to XYZ seems impossible.
I see a drawing board.. perhaps it's time to get back there.
First up, I have no comment about the technology issue - I agree a user doesn't need to be specially concerned about the underlying system architecture, as long as it meets her needs.
I was replying to a comment that I felt implied someone shouldn't ask for any features if they weren't prepared to code them themselves. I personally disagree, for the reasons I stated about efficiencies of having specialists. I make no comment about the particular request(s).
I believe access to source code is fundamental to advancing best coding practice and taking software development forward from its current very hit and miss results. But I don't really know if "Free Software" or "Commercial Software" is the answer to mankind's problems.
It worries me a little to hear "coders do what they want, and the user's needs are a distant second".. what is this Free Software actually for? I'm reminded (with no accuracy!) of a comment Linus Torvalds make about comp sci masturbation or something.
Is it just so we software hacks have a fun time and then maybe move into real or commercial software roles to actually meet some of the world's needs?
Is open source just about writing code for other people who write code? I hope not. The comments/wishes/*needs* of the users should be paramount to the coding effort, surely?
I think now I'd rather not have it deciding what palette to use for GIF conversion (to take that example). My personal preference is to learn from an obstinate but knowledgeable teacher who forces me to work things out myself, than have some-one else just do stuff for me...
What's a scroll bar for.. do we need it? I don't have a scroll bar on my car or my filing cabinet or my desk or my favourite novel (shampoo planet). Do I need one on my screen?
Mice.. I stop using the mouse as soon as I learn the keystrokes.. it's easier for maybe 85% of tasks. Is a mouse really needed if I'm not producing graphics?
I'm not saying the answers are no, but that we need to be asking these questions and even higher level ones if there's going to be true innovation.
Overlapping windows - they suck! I maximise everthing and alt-tab between the full-screen programs. Unless I want to directly copy by eye-and-hand from one window to another or see two logs files or something. Dialogs pop up and take focus when I'm doing something else. GUIs hinder more than help a lot of the time.
Think outside the box.. don't just paint the sides a pretty colour.
I don't know who is the idiot but I think you misunderstand what I meant.
I didn't "choose" any of those things, I evaluated them, and I passed because of the fact they were just windows clones.
I just carried on using Office 97 on Win 98 because it's actually pretty good and much better than any clone.
I was hoping for some true usability innovation. Something I haven't seen in FVWM or CDE either.
From my own experience of being (not very much) ahead of my peer group at school, comes this advice:
Teach the kid (if possible through experience) what to do when he/she doesn't "just get it."
Teach them real study skills.. the kind that the average kids *have* to learn to do well in the subjects anyway. Because if this kid or whoever is anything like me, they'll hit a point where they have to work a little to understand something.. and they might not know how to cope with that.
I found pretty much all the subjects at school easy.. to the extent that I never really studied, revised for exams or anything... and still was top of the class. Until around 2nd year of university, when suddenly things didn't magically just make sense to me... and I couldn't really cope with it. I didn't have the will power or self-control to sit down and actually work hard to understand the stuff.
Maybe it's just laziness. But when you go for years not finding something an effort, it's really hard to get motivated when you do.
It's like the disappointment I felt after finally downloaded StarOffice (a long time ago now) and finding myself looking at a not very goot knock-off of Office97 running on Windows.
Take a step back, ask yourself what a workstation is for and what interface will acheive it. Learn from the current best but don't just copy them.
Brilliant!! :-) +5 funny definitely.
You just gotta love geek humour...
I'm not sure how read the question, but I started to think about the question "how can I prove after the event that I wasn't at the scene of a crime?"
Now at very first thinking various issues come up:
Data must be controlled by me - I don't want my location tracked by any third parties; I just want to be able to reveal/prove where I was at a certain time, at my instigation.
Maybe some kind of trusted third party injecting random but recorded bitstreams into the ether as radio waves at every gridpoint, and changing every minute or so.
There would need to be process and crytographic controls on this infrastructure.. might not be possible.
You would record the bitstreams on a pocket recorder or mobile phone device, and then you can say "look, the random code at this time and place was xxx".
Then there is the question of cheating... I just ask my friend who was there what the number was. So I guess I have to record the numbers on a "tamper proof" (see Secrets& Lies for why I put quotes around that) device like a Smart card, that only the "authorities" (whoever they are) can extract the information from.
There would need be a password protected scheme so I have to give my authorisation for a date-range of location data to be extracted as well. So I would have to trust this device, a lot more than I trust say Canivore.
Then what if know I'm going somewhere bad and I just give my card to a friend for a day or so. Not sure here.. maybe the device has to randomly demand some biometric data from me at random times.
Pretty interesting stuff.. gonna have to re-read Schneier's books (again). I recommend the section in Applied Cryptography that deals with protocols, for stuff along these lines.
I might put this up and work on it some more at my web site. Or I might not.
Why does MS have this right and other software vendors don't? Surely that's not the case. Maybe other vendors don't include such a clause in their contracts, but they could...
It's a contract, if you don't agree with the contract then don't sign it. If you feel Microsoft software is so necessary to run your organisation then you're either going to have to try to negotiate different terms, or lump it.
Otherwise don't buy it. It's not a human right for software to be provided to you according to whatever terms you wish. It's a market place. Sure MS have distorted the market in other ways, but I don't think this is an example of that.
Even the guy in the article admits MS are within their contractual rights to ask for the audit.
Last year I finally got shot of a two year project to replace one in-house piece of operational software with another. Getting shot of it in this case meant dropping the project and buying something off-the-shelf.
Now, it's interesting to look at the requirements we were asked to fulfill, and the features of this off-the-shelf software, and see whether they match.
Therein lies the problem though, because the requirements were never documented properly. Basically my fault all along, but the project was allowed to mushroom into a nightmare because management knew how to run a software project even less than I did.
Having said all that, with open source projects, often there aren't any requirements from users. Especially in the 0.9 release. The first programmer probably knew roughly what he was trying to achieve and then put out the software when it did something. The community then has a need (its own implicit requirement) and finds xyz package that fits the need at least partially.
For example, I never specified the requirements of Samba, but when I heard about it, I realised it would make a neat solution enabling me to get rid of flaky PC NFS client software.
As an open source project gains momentum, requirements start to emerge, ad hoc, from the user community in the form of suggested enhancements, etc.
Turning back to Samba, we can see sometimes there can be conflicting requirements (especially their relative priorities) which a single project doesn't feel able to meet. Hence the code fork.
In a strict development cycle, there is a concept of a "user", the aim is to meet as many of their requirements as possible given the resources. In open source, I see that concept of "user", as well as customer/owner/stakeholder, etc., as hard to define.
For some interesting reading check out the famous "Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks, and various texts by Steve McConnell. I get the impression there is no agreed "best practice" in open or closed source development. It's still something of a black art.
Thing I love about google is that you can click "cached" next to the search result, and get a copy from google's cache, of pages that have been deleted. And quite often it's quicker! :-)
Scoff at it here.
He described and they showed the cardboard box stuffed with bubble-wrap that was posted to him. The machine is marked with the missing enigma's code number, but an expert is speeding to the BBC to verify it's identity apparently!
I was surprised him opening the unexpected package himself, seeing as he is so high-profile, and not always liked!
I think Paul Davies is an excellent science writer and and this book is one of his best.
anyway I use a simple hands-free earpiece thingy, there are all the rage over here in the UK, do you have/use them in the states?
It's just a walkman earpiece thing with a microphone just down the wire.. works well. I think the quality of the sound is better too, and you can put the phone in your pocket and carry on driving or typing or cooking or whatever with both hands *g*
Note it's a commercial product, you can get a 30 day eval copy, after that your encrypted filesystem will become read only.
I guess in the end our decision was arbitrary. I think I liked the part about correctness over features, it just appealed to me personally. From what people have said here, I think I'll take a look at mod_ssl too, if I get a chance; the system is up and running already so like your case it's not a major priority for my company.
We don't use client certificates, so we never hit that issue.