It would be a lot easier to market stuff if we all wanted the same. But we don't! Even if most people seem to think that everybody wants to be just like themselves. Or if they don't want to, they should.
Some people want to be famous, and they try to be pop/film stars. Some people want to be intelligent, and they study science or engineering or coding... Some want to have lots of friends, and they try to be funny and fun to be with. Some want to devote their lives to God and become monks. Some want to be adventurous and take on adrenaline charged activities.
Through training, all these people develop different abilities and personality traits. Of course it will not be common for a football player to have the mental arithmetic of an accountant; and it won't be easy to find a geek who can crack jokes like a professional comedian; or a mathematician who feels as comfortable in front of a camera as your average pop star.
If you feel uneasy and uncomfortable with some aspect of your personality (you're too shy, too clever, too sexy...), it's good to have someone ready to help you deal with it. But I can't see the point of going around saying that if someone has such and such behaviour, they're not normal and need treatment. Bullocks to that!!! If you're reasonably happy with the way you are, and you are able to do the things you like to do, you're fine in my book!
What good are social skills if what you enjoy is being an ermit in your isolated cave? What good is being a top notch C++ guru if what you want is to be a chef?
Decide in which way you want to be different from the crowds, and then don't let anybody tell you you're not normal. Because you're not, but that's OK. And don't fool yourself: you're not better either.
He got it spot on when he says that the only way to sort this one out is to ask Stallman and Kuhn if they would pass a law to make proprietary licenses illegal.
It seems to me they wouldn't, but the difference here seems to be one side stressing the need for freedom to make a wrong choice, and the other stressing the moral imperative not to.
It reminds me of a (apocryphal) story about the US Congress discussing a few years ago a bill to allow patents to be taken on mathematical objects. Imagine paying royalties every time you use, say, Pythagoras' theorem! I think the issue with software is similar. When you have a working piece of code, what you have is the realisation of an idea of how to solve a particular problem. There's no justification (not in my eyes, anyway) for preventing other people with the same problem from using your idea. You can choose not to teach anyone how to use your idea, but if they can figure out how to do it by themselves, then there's nothing you can do.
Can programmers make a living? Of course! They should get paid to figure out how to solve a problem, but they shouldn't be paid again and again for other people using the solution they came up with. The situation is in some sense similar to that of universities, where people don't get paid for others using their research, but to do the research in the first place, and train students on how to use it.
IR vision, cool! A few cones for X-ray, like Superman? Wow!!! Why not add radio wavelenghts and UHF so we can listen to radio and TV broadcasts without needing any gadgets? All 5 gazillion cable channels at the same time! Cool! Oh, oh... sensory overload! I can't think anymore... I've turned into an antenna...
The way I see it, the problem here is the current mindset that the value of nearly everything can (and must) be given after a $ sign. The tax officer sees a product that is definitely valuable, assumes it must have a price (or at least that a price tag can be calculated), and proceeds to tax it accordingly. It all makes perfect sense as far as he's concerned! It makes good sense as well to all the companies that won't take free software because "if it's free, it can't be good!" (Which really means: if it had some value, somebody would charge a price for it.)
Next thing you know, they'll be taxing you for having friends! I mean, wouldn't you consider your friends an asset? Why not taxing it then? Or maybe they'll eventually understand that money isn't all there is. They might even someday understand what free software is all about! Or maybe not.
According to a quick calculation, the return trip would take slightly over 1/4 of a second. I suppose you'd have to add some delay introduced by the electronics, but I have no idea how to calculate that...
Well, according to Mainsoft's site, they're working with M$ to do this port, so it's kind of funny to see that M$ thinks otherwise...
But this isn't such a big deal, if you think about it. Most Linuxers who are interested in Office-like suites (I'm not, and I guess lots of/.ers aren't either), are more likely than not ex-Windowers. They knew pretty well what the trade-off was when they switched to Linux; do you really think M$ porting to Linux will make them change their mind?
Conversely, do you really believe that someone who uses computers mainly because of M$ Office will suddenly install Linux just because they can get the same apps? Of course not, they'll just stick to what they already have.
Face it, we're all just lazy. We just go looking for alternatives when there's something we want badly and can't have, be it tinkering with source code, freedom to share stuff with friends, or some killer app. That's what brought us GNU, Linux, *BSD... You didn't change OS because you could get all the same stuff, you changed because you could get stuff that was more important to you than what you left behind.
Most Linux users who would want any kind of Office suite used Windows before they changed OS. They knew pretty well what they were loosing/gaining. Now don't come and tell me that giving them M$ on Linux will make them change their minds... It just doesn't make any sense!
I wonder how long it will take for Slashdot to post a disclaimer...
"Yet another dumb tourist who didn't bother to learn some basic vocabulary before travelling... I haven't a clue what he's saying, but I can make a good guess of what he wants: let's give it to him before he shouts our ears off.
Pointing at things, speaking more clearly and slowly, trying different words, are all acceptable ways of dealing with this kind of situation. Shouting is just plain rude and ignorant. Just to let you know, in case you didn't already...
Come on, how can such a blatantly ignorant opinion make a post? This is just a silly guy who will trust some big company he buys software from, rather than employees he can actually choose himself through interviews or whatever selection process. Plainly stupid, but there's corporate culture for you...
But this is so obvious, I'm finding it difficult to understand why it's on/.
Press Release: M$ to drop Windows 2000, but will continue to sell licenses
According to inside sources, the corner stone of M$'s long-term strategy involves shifting from shipping software to selling licenses. The first step was recently taken when the company started charging for two licenses of Windows 2000 for each installed copy of the OS.
In the words of Bill Him$elf, "there's no future in selling software. Already at the present time, there are costless alternatives to our products, which unfortunately for us, are also better quality than ours. The picture is very different for licenses: all companies (including ours) keep hordes of idle lawyers on payroll, who are always looking for license or trademark infringements in order to get an opportunity to mimic their favourite actor in TV law soaps. So we predict that the market for licenses will grow very rapidly."
Displaying the acclaimed vision in IT related matters (e.g., M$ early strategy for the Internet) of its notorious founder, this change in strategy is being welcome by M$ investors excited about the future value of their holdings. "We were already making a lot of money by convincing everybody that they had to pay a lot of $$$ for our inferior products; now we'll get them to pay for no product at all! There's no better way to reduce operation costs."
Most M$ coders also seem to believe this is a turn for the best. "We haven't been using any of our own products for years now, so it's getting more and more difficult to work on software we hardly know at all. Also, we've pretty much used up all the bugs we can think of to keep releasing partially working versions of our products. The board keeps pressuring us to introduce some more bugs in the code, but it's getting difficult to be creative in this area."
M$ is expected to stop shipping their products early in 2002.
I don't think so: he doesn't seem to grasp the difference between free beer and free speech.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I see it, the Open Source concept exists because a large enough number of geeks wanted to enjoy the technical benefits of Free Software without the political strings attached. It seems to me that Open is rather more popular than Free among the geek community these days (even if I feel closer to Free's motivations myself, but then again I'm not really a geek!) What sense does it make then to cry "Geeks of the world, unite!", when they made it clear they wish to stay clear of politics?
...saying they had common law trademark rights to their names.
What??? Wow, I have trademark rights and I didn't even know it! You sure learn lots reading/.
Next step is registering my own www.MyNameIs.theNman.andILoveMyself.I'mSoWonderful .com, and then I'll go after people whose parents infringed on my rights by naming them after me. Wait... what if they were born before me? Damn philosophical questions, always getting in the way of good ideas...
When is all this crazy ® stuff going to stop? I mean, I can understand trade-marking a brand or something like that (as long as it isn't simply a word in common usage... like olympic), but who was the genius who first thought of trade-marking whole sentences ("Mr. Christie makes tasty biscuits."®, or something like that)? Or more importantly, who was the arse who granted it?
What if the IOC buys Olympia, where the original games took place? Do they then have a legitimate claim to ownership of the word olympic? What happens to the hundreds of places with similar or derived toponyms?
I'd better go and trade-mark my name before someone gets there first...®
Sure, everybody seems to be pretty confused about violence nowadays. I guess most people would agree putting your fists up is OK when you're being punched in the face, but not when you're trying to get a seat in a crowded bus. And that's the point you're missing: gratuitous violence (as in kill, get the bonus score, go on to kill some more) serves no purpose, and children who are young enough that they might be led into thinking that's acceptable should be protected. Granted, I'd rather have parents taking the responsibility for that, but it's not a perfect world and most people are lazy and prefer to have the government take care of everything for them.
Anyway, that's not the point I'm trying to make. I've had enough of the crap moral stand that vegetarians and such take, about how they care a lot about cruelty and violence towards animals. Good for you, but guess what? The use of violence for getting food is as valid as putting up your fists when you're getting hit. Isn't it violent to kill plants, or their seeds, for food, just because they don't have cute faces we can look at and feel pitiful? Get a grip! If you don't like beef or pork, don't eat it. But don't go around boasting what a nice guy you are because of it!
I don't expect you to understand what I'm saying, since your narrow views led you on a rant about how great it is to be a vegan, on what was supposedly a post on violence in computer games...
What most people really admire is someone achieving something against all odds. That's what makes Gattaca such an enthralling movie, isn't it? Why would anyone decide to make his children feel deprived of any sense of fulfillment by giving them a perfect genotype and upbringing? Only someone who wants to rub his own ego at the expense of his kids' happiness.
Hmmm... now I'm getting worried, 'cos you do see a lot of that sort of twisted parenting around. Hey, maybe this is the answer to overpopulation: give people all the tools they need to really feel depressed and frustrated, and sit back and wait for the surge in suicide rates! I reckon this wasn't one of the original aims of the HGP, but science can have all sorts of interesting side-effects.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be a lot easier to market stuff if we all wanted the same. But we don't! Even if most people seem to think that everybody wants to be just like themselves. Or if they don't want to, they should.
Some people want to be famous, and they try to be pop/film stars. Some people want to be intelligent, and they study science or engineering or coding... Some want to have lots of friends, and they try to be funny and fun to be with. Some want to devote their lives to God and become monks. Some want to be adventurous and take on adrenaline charged activities.
Through training, all these people develop different abilities and personality traits. Of course it will not be common for a football player to have the mental arithmetic of an accountant; and it won't be easy to find a geek who can crack jokes like a professional comedian; or a mathematician who feels as comfortable in front of a camera as your average pop star.
If you feel uneasy and uncomfortable with some aspect of your personality (you're too shy, too clever, too sexy...), it's good to have someone ready to help you deal with it. But I can't see the point of going around saying that if someone has such and such behaviour, they're not normal and need treatment. Bullocks to that!!! If you're reasonably happy with the way you are, and you are able to do the things you like to do, you're fine in my book!
What good are social skills if what you enjoy is being an ermit in your isolated cave? What good is being a top notch C++ guru if what you want is to be a chef?
Decide in which way you want to be different from the crowds, and then don't let anybody tell you you're not normal. Because you're not, but that's OK. And don't fool yourself: you're not better either.
He got it spot on when he says that the only way to sort this one out is to ask Stallman and Kuhn if they would pass a law to make proprietary licenses illegal.
It seems to me they wouldn't, but the difference here seems to be one side stressing the need for freedom to make a wrong choice, and the other stressing the moral imperative not to.
It reminds me of a (apocryphal) story about the US Congress discussing a few years ago a bill to allow patents to be taken on mathematical objects. Imagine paying royalties every time you use, say, Pythagoras' theorem! I think the issue with software is similar. When you have a working piece of code, what you have is the realisation of an idea of how to solve a particular problem. There's no justification (not in my eyes, anyway) for preventing other people with the same problem from using your idea. You can choose not to teach anyone how to use your idea, but if they can figure out how to do it by themselves, then there's nothing you can do.
Can programmers make a living? Of course! They should get paid to figure out how to solve a problem, but they shouldn't be paid again and again for other people using the solution they came up with. The situation is in some sense similar to that of universities, where people don't get paid for others using their research, but to do the research in the first place, and train students on how to use it.
IR vision, cool! A few cones for X-ray, like Superman? Wow!!! Why not add radio wavelenghts and UHF so we can listen to radio and TV broadcasts without needing any gadgets? All 5 gazillion cable channels at the same time! Cool! Oh, oh... sensory overload! I can't think anymore... I've turned into an antenna...
--
The way I see it, the problem here is the current mindset that the value of nearly everything can (and must) be given after a $ sign. The tax officer sees a product that is definitely valuable, assumes it must have a price (or at least that a price tag can be calculated), and proceeds to tax it accordingly. It all makes perfect sense as far as he's concerned! It makes good sense as well to all the companies that won't take free software because "if it's free, it can't be good!" (Which really means: if it had some value, somebody would charge a price for it.)
Next thing you know, they'll be taxing you for having friends! I mean, wouldn't you consider your friends an asset? Why not taxing it then? Or maybe they'll eventually understand that money isn't all there is. They might even someday understand what free software is all about! Or maybe not.
--
--
Well, according to Mainsoft's site, they're working with M$ to do this port, so it's kind of funny to see that M$ thinks otherwise...
But this isn't such a big deal, if you think about it. Most Linuxers who are interested in Office-like suites (I'm not, and I guess lots of /.ers aren't either), are more likely than not ex-Windowers. They knew pretty well what the trade-off was when they switched to Linux; do you really think M$ porting to Linux will make them change their mind?
Conversely, do you really believe that someone who uses computers mainly because of M$ Office will suddenly install Linux just because they can get the same apps? Of course not, they'll just stick to what they already have.
Face it, we're all just lazy. We just go looking for alternatives when there's something we want badly and can't have, be it tinkering with source code, freedom to share stuff with friends, or some killer app. That's what brought us GNU, Linux, *BSD... You didn't change OS because you could get all the same stuff, you changed because you could get stuff that was more important to you than what you left behind.
--
This arse hole is repeatedly (>10x) posting this shit.
Someone please kick him/her out of /. quickly!
--
Come on, guys, be serious!
Most Linux users who would want any kind of Office suite used Windows before they changed OS. They knew pretty well what they were loosing/gaining. Now don't come and tell me that giving them M$ on Linux will make them change their minds... It just doesn't make any sense!
I wonder how long it will take for Slashdot to post a disclaimer...
--
Here's what people are thinking when you shout:
"Yet another dumb tourist who didn't bother to learn some basic vocabulary before travelling... I haven't a clue what he's saying, but I can make a good guess of what he wants: let's give it to him before he shouts our ears off.
Pointing at things, speaking more clearly and slowly, trying different words, are all acceptable ways of dealing with this kind of situation. Shouting is just plain rude and ignorant. Just to let you know, in case you didn't already...
--
No, dist-upgrade will only upgrade packages you already have installed in your machine. If you need/want any new ones, just apt-get install .
--
Come on, how can such a blatantly ignorant opinion make a post? This is just a silly guy who will trust some big company he buys software from, rather than employees he can actually choose himself through interviews or whatever selection process. Plainly stupid, but there's corporate culture for you...
But this is so obvious, I'm finding it difficult to understand why it's on /.
--
Press Release: M$ to drop Windows 2000, but will continue to sell licenses
According to inside sources, the corner stone of M$'s long-term strategy involves shifting from shipping software to selling licenses. The first step was recently taken when the company started charging for two licenses of Windows 2000 for each installed copy of the OS.
In the words of Bill Him$elf, "there's no future in selling software. Already at the present time, there are costless alternatives to our products, which unfortunately for us, are also better quality than ours. The picture is very different for licenses: all companies (including ours) keep hordes of idle lawyers on payroll, who are always looking for license or trademark infringements in order to get an opportunity to mimic their favourite actor in TV law soaps. So we predict that the market for licenses will grow very rapidly."
Displaying the acclaimed vision in IT related matters (e.g., M$ early strategy for the Internet) of its notorious founder, this change in strategy is being welcome by M$ investors excited about the future value of their holdings. "We were already making a lot of money by convincing everybody that they had to pay a lot of $$$ for our inferior products; now we'll get them to pay for no product at all! There's no better way to reduce operation costs."
Most M$ coders also seem to believe this is a turn for the best. "We haven't been using any of our own products for years now, so it's getting more and more difficult to work on software we hardly know at all. Also, we've pretty much used up all the bugs we can think of to keep releasing partially working versions of our products. The board keeps pressuring us to introduce some more bugs in the code, but it's getting difficult to be creative in this area."
M$ is expected to stop shipping their products early in 2002.
--
I don't think so: he doesn't seem to grasp the difference between free beer and free speech.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I see it, the Open Source concept exists because a large enough number of geeks wanted to enjoy the technical benefits of Free Software without the political strings attached. It seems to me that Open is rather more popular than Free among the geek community these days (even if I feel closer to Free's motivations myself, but then again I'm not really a geek!) What sense does it make then to cry "Geeks of the world, unite!", when they made it clear they wish to stay clear of politics?
No, I'm afraid Katz isn't RMS at all...
Let's face it, M$ needs it a lot more than all sysadmins put together... I propose October 28.
From the article:
What??? Wow, I have trademark rights and I didn't even know it! You sure learn lots reading /.
Next step is registering my own www.MyNameIs.theNman.andILoveMyself.I'mSoWonderful .com, and then I'll go after people whose parents infringed on my rights by naming them after me. Wait... what if they were born before me? Damn philosophical questions, always getting in the way of good ideas...
Nuno Nunes ®
In short, he's producing the literary equivalent of hamburgers because he knows he'll sell them.
Sizzling novels by Stephen "Burger" King:
!!!Now ONLY $1!!!
When is all this crazy ® stuff going to stop? I mean, I can understand trade-marking a brand or something like that (as long as it isn't simply a word in common usage... like olympic), but who was the genius who first thought of trade-marking whole sentences ("Mr. Christie makes tasty biscuits."®, or something like that)? Or more importantly, who was the arse who granted it?
What if the IOC buys Olympia, where the original games took place? Do they then have a legitimate claim to ownership of the word olympic? What happens to the hundreds of places with similar or derived toponyms?
I'd better go and trade-mark my name before someone gets there first...®
Sure, everybody seems to be pretty confused about violence nowadays. I guess most people would agree putting your fists up is OK when you're being punched in the face, but not when you're trying to get a seat in a crowded bus. And that's the point you're missing: gratuitous violence (as in kill, get the bonus score, go on to kill some more) serves no purpose, and children who are young enough that they might be led into thinking that's acceptable should be protected. Granted, I'd rather have parents taking the responsibility for that, but it's not a perfect world and most people are lazy and prefer to have the government take care of everything for them.
Anyway, that's not the point I'm trying to make. I've had enough of the crap moral stand that vegetarians and such take, about how they care a lot about cruelty and violence towards animals. Good for you, but guess what? The use of violence for getting food is as valid as putting up your fists when you're getting hit. Isn't it violent to kill plants, or their seeds, for food, just because they don't have cute faces we can look at and feel pitiful? Get a grip! If you don't like beef or pork, don't eat it. But don't go around boasting what a nice guy you are because of it!
I don't expect you to understand what I'm saying, since your narrow views led you on a rant about how great it is to be a vegan, on what was supposedly a post on violence in computer games...
"Are you a man or a mouse?"
What most people really admire is someone achieving something against all odds. That's what makes Gattaca such an enthralling movie, isn't it? Why would anyone decide to make his children feel deprived of any sense of fulfillment by giving them a perfect genotype and upbringing? Only someone who wants to rub his own ego at the expense of his kids' happiness.
Hmmm... now I'm getting worried, 'cos you do see a lot of that sort of twisted parenting around. Hey, maybe this is the answer to overpopulation: give people all the tools they need to really feel depressed and frustrated, and sit back and wait for the surge in suicide rates! I reckon this wasn't one of the original aims of the HGP, but science can have all sorts of interesting side-effects.