1) Most people don't care about music. They put on the radio, and will buy a "Greatest Hits" collection perhaps once every 6 months, but that's about it.
2) The number of people who can be bothered to check out the iTMS, and know how to find Apple's software, and are savvy Internet users, is a minority of a minority of a minority. Sure, if all you read are trade rags on the Internet, you'd think it was the Second Coming of the Messiah. But most people couldn't care less.
3) So you're left with a comparatively small group of hipsters and gadgeteers who love music and know about the promotional offer. Now all that has to happen is for them to bump into a bottle (not can! not cup!) of Pepsi. Odds are pretty small.
Valenti is an interesting character. He knows a lot about movies and about the industry. He seems to have heart for the enterprise, both at a commercial as well as a creative and artistic level, even though his occupation has skewed his perspective towards the commercial aspects of moviemaking. Valenti is a man whose accomplishments practically defined the superstructure for US movie industry over the past 3 decades.
Keith Winstein gets an opportunity to speak with this man, on behalf of all of us, and is satisfied to knock down a few strawmen ("am I bad? am I a bad person?!"). He doesn't use his considerable knowledge to illuminate and explain the deeper issues. He's just interested in bashing Valenti's head in, using his knowledge as a club. With the result that the true issue gets snowed under. Because the problem isn't that there aren't any licensed DVD players for Linux. The problem is that you need licensing at all.
What a sad performance. Nerds, stop flashing your braincocks.
How about a little less religion and a little more compsci + logistics management + good coding practices? Making a stupid piece of code your god/way of life tends to blind one to using the intelligence that God gave them.
If that's gonna be your attitude, then why don't you write the stuff yourself, and spearhead your own distribution. If you don't feel any connection to the FOSS community, and why it does things the way it does them, then you will never understand how and why it works.
In other words: we need more people who are religiously committed to providing an outstanding Free software system, and fewer armchair managers lecturing us about business/corporate/desktop needs.
I've always wanted to contribute to linux, because I believe in the ideals the Open Source community represents.
The Open Source movement doesn't represent any ideals. It just posits that Open Source is better for business. The ideals are with the Free Software movement.
I am running an SMP system and doing a lot of sound work with very few problems whatsoever. Have you tried the very latest (1.0.3) ALSA drivers? Previous versions would always lock up my machine due to insufficient locking. Alternatively you could shell out some cash for the OSS drivers at 4front-tech.com, I've had very, very good experiences with them. But in your case (playing games) that may be a bridge too far.
They are going to spend the money on something, and it will be of use to someone, whether it is simply used to pay some guy's salary or for some government program, it is still put to way better use than if it stayed in the cheater's pocket.
That's total utter nonsense. How can you even say something like that.
It looks beautiful. So bloody obvious! Amazing nobody has figured this out before. I'm reminded of something a former boss of mine used to say: "It took 80 years after the invention of the printing press for someone to figure out page numbers are a good iea."
Really, I could probably come up with a whole range of criticisms, but why? This is a great idea. Practical, obvious, useful. The most negative thing I can say about this is probably that I feel sorry for the inventors. They'll probably be forgotten after Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation have released their own unspeakably crude and complexified implementations.
And all representations in a computer are mathematical, you may have painted over it with an abstract model, but at the heart, it's all boolean algebra.
I thought you meant the things that were being represented. I must have expressed myself poorly.
If you take the theory into account and check your cache boundaries, performing your operations so as to maximize cache-hits, you end up with a much better performance.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but again, how is this different from what "programmers" do?
Remember, at one point in time, auto mechanics were considered a very skilled white collar position.
I don't think this was ever true.
Computer Science on the other hand, is a mathematical discipline which involves working out how to do things better, faster, and with less energy. It's about algorithm design, and ways in which to make a computer most efficiently process mathematical representations.
Certainly, certainly, but how is this different from programming? Programmers work out how to do things better, faster, and with less energy. Programmers design algorithms. Programmers design ways to make a computer most efficiently process mathematical representations. And not just mathematical representations, either. All kinds of representations, in fact.
I won't dispute your central point. I think it's vital to make a distinction between hard programming and soft programming. But the gap between the theory and practice just isn't as clear cut with computer science as with other disciplines. There is a big difference between designing an engine and building one. The difference is much less pronounced in software, because at some point the design or description becomes a program in its own right.
To a good approximation, nobody has pressure sensitive tablets.
So what you're talking about is not a scalable user interface, i.e. one that scales to accomodate different capabilities, but a lowest common denominator interface.
The question then becomes, what's there left to choose, apart from superficialities such whether a buttton is on the left or on the right side of the screen?
But, those interfaces aren't ideal for all users, and would be best customized to the individual user's preferences. (see what I'm getting at here?)
No, not at all. I don't see any value in being able to choose what key combo saves a file or opens a new window. It just makes it harder to switch to a different machine.
your comment on the suitability of my ADB mouse to Linux, I can't think of anything less relevant to the discussion of scaleable user interfaces.
You must have misread. The issue was to what extent a backend needs to be changed to accomodate the frontend. The reason your ADB mouse works so well is because the MacOS backend can be made to support its capabilities.
Objects (or menu controls or widgets or physical UI elements) may not make sense for all systems, but users might like to be able to bolt them on to suit their own needs.
The question is how much time and money (in economic terms), or reliability and ease of maintenance (in engineering terms) one is willing to sacrifice for that goal. You seem to be arguing no such sacrifice has to be made.
Scaleable, customizeable user interfaces (with a decent interface to the customization features, of course. Don't know why you thought I was talking about modifying the source code) provides more users with more utility.
The source code is the most expressive means of customizing a program. It is also the most difficult. This is not a coincidence. The more expressive the means for customizations, the more difficult they become.
So what you find is that only the most trivial customizations can be expressed in a way that's still easy to use. Things like: "put buttons left/right/top/down". Or: "mouse button 1 emits PageUp key". If you think that constitutes a "scalable, customizable interface", well, then that's your prerogative. I had something different in mind.
No, you hand the user a well-constructed interface that works fine out of the box, and is also customizeable by somebody who knows what they are doing.
Source code is also customizable by somebody who knows what he is doing. The point being, that the flexibility is inversely proportional to the applicability.
Why would you have to write different back-end code to have a different user interface?
You cannot effectively support input devices such as pressure-sensitive tablets or 4, 5, 6 button mice without the back-end being aware of that capability. You cannot write a GUI wrapper around a text-mode daemon without the daemon providing at least some sort of status inquiry support: if only in the form of standardized messages on stdout.
I have had a Kensington four-button mouse on my Macintosh sinde 1994, and I really like it a lot. I can bind the buttons to do different things in different apps according to a scheme I design. I think it's superb.
I don't doubt that it is. It'll work a lot less well on Linux, though, since the back-end support isn't nearly as good as on the Mac (or even Windows).
As far as being a "Windows-ism", I don't know what that means.
That it's an integrated part of the Windows UI: it makes a lot of sense within that system, but not necessarily in other systems.
You set the user interface according to the preferences, and the abilities, of the user.
So, essentially you just hand the user a bag of bricks?
The perfect interface for the novice and for the computer expert are not the same.
It's not just the interface. It's the whole program. You can't just remove a few buttons and say "now the interface is perfect for the novice". You actually need completely different layouts and different functionality. Frankly I don't think it can be done. I think you'll almost always end up having to create different programs for novices and experts. It's a lot more involved than you seem to think.
Apple's one-button mouse is the perfect example.
I never feel the need for a two button mouse when working on a Mac. It's more of a Windows-ism.
Another choice to choose the level of choice? What a nightmare. Can you imagine the documentation? "Select Tools->Options, unless your user level is Clean, in which case you must go to Control Panels->User level, except when you're in Beginner mode, in which case you have to log out and..."
That's not making things easier. It's deferring responsibility.
Screw the science
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The whole argument misses the point. The point is not to get humans into space to perform scientific experiments. It's the other way around. The science is there to get humans into space.
I'm not saying that the time is ripe to start thinking about building bases on the Moon, or to travel to Mars. I don't know whether that's reasonable at this point in time. What I do know is that it makes absolutely no sense to portray human space travel as some kind of irresponsible folly, and the science as some dignified Cause. They're both human fancies, and as with all fancies, the only question is whether we can afford it or not.
The purpose isn't to destroy companies. Destroying a company like Microsoft would hurt customers even more than monopolistic practices. That would be diametrically opposed to the intended effect of the ruling.
Also, $613 million is a serious figure. Nick Leeson broke the Barings Bank in the '90s on of just over twice that amount. Enron (partly) collapsed over a $563 million deficit. Remember, it's not like those $50 billion are in a big jar that everybody can take some of when they feel like it. Divisions are accountable, managers are accountable, books have to be kept. Combined with the other rulings, this should be understood as a severe penalty for Microsoft Europe.
Uh, there is a lot more to MPlayer and Xine than just that. MPlayer includes its own drivers for video hardware, massive assembly optimizations for decoding and playback, a large number of audio and video codecs and filters, and can transcode video through MEncoder. Also, it's really quite a lot harder than you think to use proprietary DLL's, since you have to reverse-engineer the data that goes in and comes out from nothing but the bits. It was the MPlayer team who first got Windows Media Player 9 files to work on Linux, and MPlayer which first figured out how to talk to the Real.so's. These are _hard_ problems.
Developing and debugging new components from scratch is harder than reusing them.
Yes, because components need to be reusable. Code that doesn't need to be reusable is much easier to write than code that does need to be reusable.
You're saying you don't think software development would be easier if every developer could come to a project with a vast toolbox at his disposal, likely within a given problem domain?
The vast toolbox is only necessary because we need to interface with so many complex systems. You don't need an XML toolbox if you're not using XML. You don't need a malloc() library if you fix the number of objects that you're going to use.
But we use XML and malloc() because it makes our programs more flexible. The fact remains that it also makes them more complex.
Does anybody really write their own database any more?
The real question is, why is everybody not using the same database.
I think you misunderstood my point. What I'm saying is that writing (and understanding) highly flexible software is much harder than writing software which just performs a single task within carefully proscribed constraints. So even though highly flexible software may be desirable for all sorts of reasons, it is not always the best, the most advanced, or the most practical solution for any particular task.
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If Apple doesn't want people to hack iTunes, they need to provide a way of playing the files on operating systems other than Windows and Mac OS.
No, they don't. They just have to get out of our way as we hack it.
The target group for this just wasn't that big.
1) Most people don't care about music. They put on the radio, and will buy a "Greatest Hits" collection perhaps once every 6 months, but that's about it.
2) The number of people who can be bothered to check out the iTMS, and know how to find Apple's software, and are savvy Internet users, is a minority of a minority of a minority. Sure, if all you read are trade rags on the Internet, you'd think it was the Second Coming of the Messiah. But most people couldn't care less.
3) So you're left with a comparatively small group of hipsters and gadgeteers who love music and know about the promotional offer. Now all that has to happen is for them to bump into a bottle (not can! not cup!) of Pepsi. Odds are pretty small.
Valenti is an interesting character. He knows a lot about movies and about the industry. He seems to have heart for the enterprise, both at a commercial as well as a creative and artistic level, even though his occupation has skewed his perspective towards the commercial aspects of moviemaking. Valenti is a man whose accomplishments practically defined the superstructure for US movie industry over the past 3 decades.
Keith Winstein gets an opportunity to speak with this man, on behalf of all of us, and is satisfied to knock down a few strawmen ("am I bad? am I a bad person?!"). He doesn't use his considerable knowledge to illuminate and explain the deeper issues. He's just interested in bashing Valenti's head in, using his knowledge as a club. With the result that the true issue gets snowed under. Because the problem isn't that there aren't any licensed DVD players for Linux. The problem is that you need licensing at all.
What a sad performance. Nerds, stop flashing your braincocks.
How about a little less religion and a little more compsci + logistics management + good coding practices? Making a stupid piece of code your god/way of life tends to blind one to using the intelligence that God gave them.
If that's gonna be your attitude, then why don't you write the stuff yourself, and spearhead your own distribution. If you don't feel any connection to the FOSS community, and why it does things the way it does them, then you will never understand how and why it works.
In other words: we need more people who are religiously committed to providing an outstanding Free software system, and fewer armchair managers lecturing us about business/corporate/desktop needs.
I've always wanted to contribute to linux, because I believe in the ideals the Open Source community represents.
The Open Source movement doesn't represent any ideals. It just posits that Open Source is better for business. The ideals are with the Free Software movement.
That claim is quite obviously intended as sarcasm. It mocks the following Craig Silverstein quote:
Then the site goes on to ask (for the truly daft, this is where the sarcasm comes in):It's nothing like what you are suggesting. You just kneejerked into some kind of I-MUST-SHOW-SLASHDOT-I-KNOW-ABOUT-THE-UNIX-EPOCH mode.
Let me think... This is for the road warrior who frequently gets abducted but still needs to get to his meetings on time?
No, it's actually the right tool for the job. The only problem is that he'll be wasting an awful lots of people's memory.
I am running an SMP system and doing a lot of sound work with very few problems whatsoever. Have you tried the very latest (1.0.3) ALSA drivers? Previous versions would always lock up my machine due to insufficient locking. Alternatively you could shell out some cash for the OSS drivers at 4front-tech.com, I've had very, very good experiences with them. But in your case (playing games) that may be a bridge too far.
Good luck!
Now if you want to talk sound drivers on SMP machines, then we can talk about gratuitous crashing...
Which drivers exactly?
They are going to spend the money on something, and it will be of use to someone, whether it is simply used to pay some guy's salary or for some government program, it is still put to way better use than if it stayed in the cheater's pocket.
That's total utter nonsense. How can you even say something like that.
If you're heading for the hills, can I have your computer?
Thirty years from now, we'll clearly see how this helped.
Like we've seen how alchemy has helped us to create gold from lead?
It looks beautiful. So bloody obvious! Amazing nobody has figured this out before. I'm reminded of something a former boss of mine used to say: "It took 80 years after the invention of the printing press for someone to figure out page numbers are a good iea."
Really, I could probably come up with a whole range of criticisms, but why? This is a great idea. Practical, obvious, useful. The most negative thing I can say about this is probably that I feel sorry for the inventors. They'll probably be forgotten after Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation have released their own unspeakably crude and complexified implementations.
And all representations in a computer are mathematical, you may have painted over it with an abstract model, but at the heart, it's all boolean algebra.
I thought you meant the things that were being represented. I must have expressed myself poorly.
If you take the theory into account and check your cache boundaries, performing your operations so as to maximize cache-hits, you end up with a much better performance.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but again, how is this different from what "programmers" do?
Remember, at one point in time, auto mechanics were considered a very skilled white collar position.
I don't think this was ever true.
Computer Science on the other hand, is a mathematical discipline which involves working out how to do things better, faster, and with less energy. It's about algorithm design, and ways in which to make a computer most efficiently process mathematical representations.
Certainly, certainly, but how is this different from programming? Programmers work out how to do things better, faster, and with less energy. Programmers design algorithms. Programmers design ways to make a computer most efficiently process mathematical representations. And not just mathematical representations, either. All kinds of representations, in fact.
I won't dispute your central point. I think it's vital to make a distinction between hard programming and soft programming. But the gap between the theory and practice just isn't as clear cut with computer science as with other disciplines. There is a big difference between designing an engine and building one. The difference is much less pronounced in software, because at some point the design or description becomes a program in its own right.
To a good approximation, nobody has pressure sensitive tablets.
So what you're talking about is not a scalable user interface, i.e. one that scales to accomodate different capabilities, but a lowest common denominator interface.
The question then becomes, what's there left to choose, apart from superficialities such whether a buttton is on the left or on the right side of the screen?
But, those interfaces aren't ideal for all users, and would be best customized to the individual user's preferences. (see what I'm getting at here?)
No, not at all. I don't see any value in being able to choose what key combo saves a file or opens a new window. It just makes it harder to switch to a different machine.
your comment on the suitability of my ADB mouse to Linux, I can't think of anything less relevant to the discussion of scaleable user interfaces.
You must have misread. The issue was to what extent a backend needs to be changed to accomodate the frontend. The reason your ADB mouse works so well is because the MacOS backend can be made to support its capabilities.
Objects (or menu controls or widgets or physical UI elements) may not make sense for all systems, but users might like to be able to bolt them on to suit their own needs.
The question is how much time and money (in economic terms), or reliability and ease of maintenance (in engineering terms) one is willing to sacrifice for that goal. You seem to be arguing no such sacrifice has to be made.
Scaleable, customizeable user interfaces (with a decent interface to the customization features, of course. Don't know why you thought I was talking about modifying the source code) provides more users with more utility.
The source code is the most expressive means of customizing a program. It is also the most difficult. This is not a coincidence. The more expressive the means for customizations, the more difficult they become.
So what you find is that only the most trivial customizations can be expressed in a way that's still easy to use. Things like: "put buttons left/right/top/down". Or: "mouse button 1 emits PageUp key". If you think that constitutes a "scalable, customizable interface", well, then that's your prerogative. I had something different in mind.
No, you hand the user a well-constructed interface that works fine out of the box, and is also customizeable by somebody who knows what they are doing.
Source code is also customizable by somebody who knows what he is doing. The point being, that the flexibility is inversely proportional to the applicability.
Why would you have to write different back-end code to have a different user interface?
You cannot effectively support input devices such as pressure-sensitive tablets or 4, 5, 6 button mice without the back-end being aware of that capability. You cannot write a GUI wrapper around a text-mode daemon without the daemon providing at least some sort of status inquiry support: if only in the form of standardized messages on stdout.
I have had a Kensington four-button mouse on my Macintosh sinde 1994, and I really like it a lot. I can bind the buttons to do different things in different apps according to a scheme I design. I think it's superb.
I don't doubt that it is. It'll work a lot less well on Linux, though, since the back-end support isn't nearly as good as on the Mac (or even Windows).
As far as being a "Windows-ism", I don't know what that means.
That it's an integrated part of the Windows UI: it makes a lot of sense within that system, but not necessarily in other systems.
You set the user interface according to the preferences, and the abilities, of the user.
So, essentially you just hand the user a bag of bricks?
The perfect interface for the novice and for the computer expert are not the same.
It's not just the interface. It's the whole program. You can't just remove a few buttons and say "now the interface is perfect for the novice". You actually need completely different layouts and different functionality. Frankly I don't think it can be done. I think you'll almost always end up having to create different programs for novices and experts. It's a lot more involved than you seem to think.
Apple's one-button mouse is the perfect example.
I never feel the need for a two button mouse when working on a Mac. It's more of a Windows-ism.
Another choice to choose the level of choice? What a nightmare. Can you imagine the documentation? "Select Tools->Options, unless your user level is Clean, in which case you must go to Control Panels->User level, except when you're in Beginner mode, in which case you have to log out and ..."
That's not making things easier. It's deferring responsibility.
The whole argument misses the point. The point is not to get humans into space to perform scientific experiments. It's the other way around. The science is there to get humans into space.
I'm not saying that the time is ripe to start thinking about building bases on the Moon, or to travel to Mars. I don't know whether that's reasonable at this point in time. What I do know is that it makes absolutely no sense to portray human space travel as some kind of irresponsible folly, and the science as some dignified Cause. They're both human fancies, and as with all fancies, the only question is whether we can afford it or not.
The purpose isn't to destroy companies. Destroying a company like Microsoft would hurt customers even more than monopolistic practices. That would be diametrically opposed to the intended effect of the ruling.
Also, $613 million is a serious figure. Nick Leeson broke the Barings Bank in the '90s on of just over twice that amount. Enron (partly) collapsed over a $563 million deficit. Remember, it's not like those $50 billion are in a big jar that everybody can take some of when they feel like it. Divisions are accountable, managers are accountable, books have to be kept. Combined with the other rulings, this should be understood as a severe penalty for Microsoft Europe.
Uh, there is a lot more to MPlayer and Xine than just that. MPlayer includes its own drivers for video hardware, massive assembly optimizations for decoding and playback, a large number of audio and video codecs and filters, and can transcode video through MEncoder. Also, it's really quite a lot harder than you think to use proprietary DLL's, since you have to reverse-engineer the data that goes in and comes out from nothing but the bits. It was the MPlayer team who first got Windows Media Player 9 files to work on Linux, and MPlayer which first figured out how to talk to the Real .so's. These are _hard_ problems.
Developing and debugging new components from scratch is harder than reusing them.
Yes, because components need to be reusable. Code that doesn't need to be reusable is much easier to write than code that does need to be reusable.
You're saying you don't think software development would be easier if every developer could come to a project with a vast toolbox at his disposal, likely within a given problem domain?
The vast toolbox is only necessary because we need to interface with so many complex systems. You don't need an XML toolbox if you're not using XML. You don't need a malloc() library if you fix the number of objects that you're going to use.
But we use XML and malloc() because it makes our programs more flexible. The fact remains that it also makes them more complex.
Does anybody really write their own database any more?
The real question is, why is everybody not using the same database.
I think you misunderstood my point. What I'm saying is that writing (and understanding) highly flexible software is much harder than writing software which just performs a single task within carefully proscribed constraints. So even though highly flexible software may be desirable for all sorts of reasons, it is not always the best, the most advanced, or the most practical solution for any particular task.