This is not an instance of "big brother". "Big brother" is the idea that controls on you are justified on the grounds that they keep YOU out of trouble. "We're the government and we're here to look out for you -- like a big brother."
This is the formation of a virtual community. If this were about bars owners in a small town telling each other about fighters and angry drunks, would you object? No. It's their right. Adding technology doesn't change that.
Re:I'm so unfashionable, it hurts...
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 1
Gaah! God no, not another TBL groupie!:)
It's not so much that I have a problem with... uh... TBL's current research interest, as it is that I just think it's kind of... obvious. The namespace issues are the really hard part, so in the end it just comes down to a lot of grunt work in getting those squared away.
I'd really like to know who you're talking about. Any help? I've recently become a bit of a language nut myself.
The providers of DSL know that they are getting an indirect subsidy from "free" music. There are people out there that are paying $40/month so they can download music. If customers had to pay for the music too, companies like Verizon would have fewer customers.
The telcos are just profiting from other peoples creative works. Of course they don't want this to stop.
The heady days of venture capitalists funding any idea with a Web presence and IPOs without business plans are long gone, but entrepreneurship existed prior to the Internet and will continue long past when the net becomes a ubiquitous utility like the telephone.
I hope he's right about entrepreneurship, because the lack of interest by other readers here is depressing to me.
This topic is on the front page, yet has 65 total comments while the story below has 572 and the story above, 491.
Oh, and don't forget the constant bashing of business and capitalism that constantly goes on around here. If entrepreneurship goes on, it will probably be without the most of the slashdot readership.
The problem is that in most companies, upper management makes decisions that affect the underlings, and unfortunatly, keeping the underlings in the dark is the only way to control them. Rarely do you see upper management being open with subordinates.
It works the other way around, too. How often to employees feel any obligation to stay on the current project if something better comes along? They'll keep silent until they phone from their new job saying "I quit, by the way."
There is also the very real threat of revenge by an employee. If your business is failing and people absolutely must be fired to keep the company alive, warning them two weeks in advance is going to get your assets destroyed or stolen. You're going to put yourself at serious risk for those two weeks.
It's really too bad things are like that. The possiblility of incivility by one party forces both to act uncivil to each other. Either you're fired with no notice, or you quit with no notice. Courtesy is thrown out the window.
When society at large returns to the idea that things like ethics, civility, and morality are worth at least talking about, things might change.
In college, you'll hear a lot of talk about how engineering is worthless because it only pays some petty 5 figure salary. People like to talk about how you should start a business, and how real losers become engineers. Increasingly, there's a trend for good American engineers to try and get their MBA or JD. All in all, I find the situation really disappointing and hard to cope with. I got into engineering thinking that I would be able to build cool things and be creative.
People that run successful businesses must be good social engineers.
And Social Engineering, being the most difficult kind of engineering pays the most.
Given that India's form of government is clearly different, this is much more chilling.
Don't confuse individual rights with democracy. They are not the same thing.
In fact, the ideas oppose each other. Democracy is about giving the majority control. Individual rights are there to protect us from the excesses of democracy.
As for your North Korea example, you seem to be getting things confused again. The number of truly non-capitalist countries in the world is very small, almost vanishingly so.
If you want to see just how free Africa is economically, look here.
It's pretty obvious that Africa mostly economically unfree. If you study the history of Africa, you'll find that most countries became socialist states during decolonialization in the 1960's.
I'm not sure if you've ever seen the punchcards up close, but I'd be surprised if you could push a wire hanger (or similar) though more than 5 or 6 of them stacked up, much less 100 or so.
I think it becomes easier to believe if you take into account the fact that many of the cards already have a punch through your candidate. This creates gaps between unpunched chads. That gap makes a big difference. I'm sure you've seen Karate experts smashing through multiple planks of wood before. Now, no one would be able to smash through 6 planks stacked right on top of each other, but put some space between each one and it becomes much easier.
The biggest flaw that I see in this "logic" is that all the cards would have a very similar hole in them, and due to the cards underneath the punch-thru hole would look much different than a normal legit punch.
Not really.
When a punch is made, the whole chad (usually) comes out. The impression of the punching device is left on the chad, not the punch-card.
The other thing is that most of the ballots are read electronically. The machine doing the reading doesn't care what the hole looks like. The only ballots that get close looks are those with chads still hanging.
Seems more like a media conspiracy theory than a reality to me...
In Florida where I'm from there were rumors about people using stiff pieces of wire, like from a hanger, to punch holes in punch card ballots that were stacked-up 100's in a pile. The idea is that you can spoil large numbers of votes for opposing candidates by creating double-votes.
Otherwise, I can park across the street with a sign reading, "$1 Paid For Each Vote for Candidate X" and buy votes from people coming out of the polling place with proof of their vote. Some of the machines being discussed would enable corrupt voters to do exactly that.
Isn't that what ends up happening in democracies anyway?
Politicians are always promising to give more money to this group or that group. It's votes for dollars.
The problem with this suit is that the people who maintain and add to the system are almost all employed by publicly funded institutions and are public employees.
They already get paid through taxes for this work.
There are some here that suggest that taking DoD funding is immoral because it helps create weapons and promotes violence.
These same people on election day vote for people whose purpose is to use violence to effect social change. It isn't obvious because we pay someone else (police, federal agents, etc) to apply that violence for us.
Keep in mind: the government isn't there to give advice. Every law is backed by the threat of force. Every social program advocated and every tax dollar taken is backed up by the threat of violence. Anyone already taking some kind of public money is using the threat of violence to get paid. People that refuse to pay are threated with jail.
When you punch that chad in the voting booth, you set off a huge chain of consequences -- some of those chains lead to the possible imprisonment of others.
I may be stretching things a bit, but I can't help but see the similarity between voting and a kind of political "fire-and-forget" weapon.
Fundamental flaw in collective decision making
on
The Innovators' Ball
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I maybe stretching things, but I think part of the problem is with collective decision making itself. We tend to think that if everything is done democratically, we'll get the best results. So when a company is divided up amoung shareholders, as long as they get to vote, or have representatives to vote for them, we expect things to work out fine.
Unfortunately, it's been proven, under a few resonable assumptions, that there exists no fair voting system. This was proven by the economist Kenneth Arrow who won the Nobel prize for his work. A short discussion is here.
So what ever system of democratic decision-making you might create, it has fundamental weaknesses that are exploitable by the unscrupulous.
The only way to stay out of trouble is to find other ways of raising capital.
You said: Without corporations, life would be much harder. I think most anthropologists would disagree. There was a heck of a lot less stress and a lot more free time for hobbies in the hunter and gather societies.
As long as you are healthy in an H&G society, things are lot easier.
You can't be serious.
If you were right, then we would just revert back to H&G societies right now, reduce our stress, and get to those hobbies.
But we don't. We don't because most of us would starve.
What do you think of the way your administration is handling things the last 10 years? Don't you just hate the fact that big companies seem to have alot more influence on politics than the average Joe has?
Shouldn't this be changed as soon as possible to protect the rights you as a citizen should have?
Or put in another way: what is the reason the US has taken this 'corporate control' road? How did this happen? Why did you all allow this to happen?
Why the obsession with corporate power? Just how much influence do they have on politics?
Do they set the speed limits? Are they the reason I can't buy liquor on Sunday? Jeb Bush is the Governor of Florida. What corporation paid all those voters to vote for him? Jesus, Inc.? Are they responsible for the Patriot Act?
There's a point where anti-corporatism starts to sound like an ideology or religion. Where's the moderation? There's plenty of blame to go around.
I'd also like to point out that corporations for all their faults seem to be very effective ways of ordering people and resources for maximum effeciency. Most of the stuff you have in your house owes its existance to some corporation. Without corporations, life would be much harder.
I do agree that authors should be paid for their efforts, but this is not the way to do it. The adware mechanism is Gator which only ends up stealing money from someone else. So while the DivX folks get paid for their work, someone else no longer does. This isn't fair.
One way to get around this is to just strip out the Gator stuff after installation. The absolute best program for this sort of thing is Spybot. This is a great piece of software. It searches and eliminates something like 10,000 keyloggers, hijackers, trojans, dialers, and all sorts of other things.
Except "average Joes" are getting ripped off, through things like their 401k retirement funds ams and individual investments.
But this just supports my point. It's only because average joes lost money that anyone is even paying attention to Enron. When larger investors get robbed by CEO's, no one cares.
People who rip off investors (think the leadership of Enron and Worldcom) can get away with it because they have high-profile friends and can afford expensive lawyers. It has nothing to do with what "average Joes" think.
One of the biggest reasons nothing is done is because investors that lost money are too embarrassed to make a case of it. They were swindled, but pride makes them eat it.
The other reason is that most of them know it would be a waste of time to try to get legal action taken. No one cares. The only people that seem to merit concern are little-old-ladies. They're the ones you see on the news.
If this guy had done the exact same thing for 10 billion dollars, lying about stocks on the exchange as he drove a company into the ground, he would be considered an investment guru would be free.
The difference is, when investors and shareholders are ripped-off, it's decided that it was just "a risky investment".
People have much less sympathy for capitalists than they do average Joes. This guy ripped-off average Joes so he gets hammered.
CEO's are just well-paid employees taking money mostly from rich capitalists.
Well, the first thing that jumped out at me was simply how it was shareware some times, and essentially freeware other times (just a short description, I know that's not exactly what he did)... That is the kind of thing that leads to confusion, to messages about one version the software being spread, and people making assumptions based upon that information. It is quite likely that the random behavior caused confusion.
Who is being confused? There was just one version of the software. There is no crippled version versus non-crippled version.
To write that this represents some sort of flaw in scientific methodology is silly.
For instance, he says (appropriately) that crippled shareware usually doesn't get distributed very far (eg. on BBSes), however, there is no way to know if the people that decided to put up that software had actually gotten the cripped, or the uncrippled versions...
Again, there was just one version of the software. You keep getting this wrong. Also, consider the 'random' decision to act as one version or the other... The interesting thing about randomness is that it's quite possible, that in a 50/50 choice, you could get the same result 100,000 times... Obviously, that's rare, but if this was truely random, that would be as likely as any other specific distribution. Since he had no way to either ensure that an even number of each version was installed, there is no way to know that his results aren't flawed.
I'd say it was rare -- it would happen once in 10e+30102 times. So ridiculously impossible that basing an argument on its happening is silly.
The other interesting thing about randomness, is that it takes a huge ammount of work to do it well... I'd have to see his randomizing code, and test it in different situations to ensure that it worked properly... It could have been more likely that users of one version of Windows would get one version of the software, and users of another version of windows would have been more likely to get a different version of the shareware.
Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my ass, too.
To say that the version of windows used makes a difference is just silly. The author most likely just used the standard c function rand() that came with his complier.
You really are a complete fool. I suppose I am too for wasted so much time with you.
Of course not. That study was just so poorly done that no fair conclusions can be based upon it. If it had a better methodology, I wouldn't have objected.
It's more of a moot point anyhow, since it's so far off the subject at hand...
Poorly done? Do you know anything about science?
The methodology was much better than many experiments that are called scientific.
He varied a single parameter and looked at the results. He used a control.
In fact, what's remarkable is that he thought enough to allow the program to randomly choose on its own whether it would be crippled or not -- he was trying to avoid selection bias.
He could have have used two entirely different programs. He could have given non-crippled versions to his friends and crippled versions to strangers. There's all kinds of things he could have gotten wrong but he didn't.
This is a good experiment.
So, tell me how his methodology was flawed. I doubt you'll say anything, though, since by your last comment you seem to know you are mistaken, but refuse to admit it.
In the test case, they broke their own rules for success:
(A)the quality of their SmartDoc software is suspect (it "only took a couple of days to put together"),
It doesn't follow that the software's quality is suspect just because it took a few days to put together. If fact, the experiment shows that the program was considered very useful, otherwise, why would people pay the registration fee at all? Yet, they do pay.
(B)and it's not something people really want/need except a slight niche that very possibly will use it once or twice, and never again, for what it's used for.
Again, people put up real money for the software. If they didn't need it, they never would have sent the checks.
Further, there are any number of things that skew the results:
#1 -- shareware that is crippled inevitably gets really bad reviews on shareware sites, while PoNC gets nice reviews, especially when the software is something people tend to want. As far as utilities go, the community has decided that they don't like crippleware. While this attracts more freeloaders, there are many one-shot users, and the reviews will steer those who intend to buy towards non-crippled software unless the crippleware is just completely brilliant.
The problem with your argument is that you are forgetting that there was just ONE version of the software. It was crippled based on the generation of a random number.
But even if there were two versions, your argument falls on its face since it was the crippled instance of the software that got 5 times the number of registering users! By your logic, people must have preferred the crippled version.
#2 -- Prevalence of one-shot or "once in a blue moon" users abound. Crippling the features isn't a great way to get them to buy; offering EXTRA above and beyond the functionality, such as shareware games in episodes, was the best way to go about it. Offer a free download, and a pay-for-full download, and see what happens.
Again, as above, crippling got them to buy 5 times more often.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not an instance of "big brother". "Big brother" is the idea that controls on you are justified on the grounds that they keep YOU out of trouble. "We're the government and we're here to look out for you -- like a big brother."
This is the formation of a virtual community. If this were about bars owners in a small town telling each other about fighters and angry drunks, would you object? No. It's their right. Adding technology doesn't change that.
Gaah! God no, not another TBL groupie! :)
It's not so much that I have a problem with... uh... TBL's current research interest, as it is that I just think it's kind of... obvious. The namespace issues are the really hard part, so in the end it just comes down to a lot of grunt work in getting those squared away.
I'd really like to know who you're talking about. Any help? I've recently become a bit of a language nut myself.
The providers of DSL know that they are getting an indirect subsidy from "free" music. There are people out there that are paying $40/month so they can download music. If customers had to pay for the music too, companies like Verizon would have fewer customers.
The telcos are just profiting from other peoples creative works. Of course they don't want this to stop.
The heady days of venture capitalists funding any idea with a Web presence and IPOs without business plans are long gone, but entrepreneurship existed prior to the Internet and will continue long past when the net becomes a ubiquitous utility like the telephone.
I hope he's right about entrepreneurship, because the lack of interest by other readers here is depressing to me.
This topic is on the front page, yet has 65 total comments while the story below has 572 and the story above, 491.
Oh, and don't forget the constant bashing of business and capitalism that constantly goes on around here. If entrepreneurship goes on, it will probably be without the most of the slashdot readership.
The problem is that in most companies, upper management makes decisions that affect the underlings, and unfortunatly, keeping the underlings in the dark is the only way to control them. Rarely do you see upper management being open with subordinates.
It works the other way around, too. How often to employees feel any obligation to stay on the current project if something better comes along? They'll keep silent until they phone from their new job saying "I quit, by the way."
There is also the very real threat of revenge by an employee. If your business is failing and people absolutely must be fired to keep the company alive, warning them two weeks in advance is going to get your assets destroyed or stolen. You're going to put yourself at serious risk for those two weeks.
It's really too bad things are like that. The possiblility of incivility by one party forces both to act uncivil to each other. Either you're fired with no notice, or you quit with no notice. Courtesy is thrown out the window.
When society at large returns to the idea that things like ethics, civility, and morality are worth at least talking about, things might change.
Right now it's everyone for himself.
In college, you'll hear a lot of talk about how engineering is worthless because it only pays some petty 5 figure salary. People like to talk about how you should start a business, and how real losers become engineers. Increasingly, there's a trend for good American engineers to try and get their MBA or JD. All in all, I find the situation really disappointing and hard to cope with. I got into engineering thinking that I would be able to build cool things and be creative.
People that run successful businesses must be good social engineers.
And Social Engineering, being the most difficult kind of engineering pays the most.
Ummmm, giving the majority unconditional control
is not democracy, it is fascism. Democracy is
nothing if minority rights are not protected.
You wish.
Democracy just means majority rule.
Fascism is placing the nation above the individual.
These ideas are so similar it's frightening. They both make the individual secondary.
The idea of individual rights stands opposed to both.
Maybe you're thinking of republicanism (I don't necessarily mean the GOP).
Given that India's form of government is clearly different, this is much more chilling.
Don't confuse individual rights with democracy. They are not the same thing.
In fact, the ideas oppose each other. Democracy is about giving the majority control. Individual rights are there to protect us from the excesses of democracy.
As for your North Korea example, you seem to be getting things confused again. The number of truly non-capitalist countries in the world is very small, almost vanishingly so.
If you want to see just how free Africa is economically, look here.
It's pretty obvious that Africa mostly economically unfree. If you study the history of Africa, you'll find that most countries became socialist states during decolonialization in the 1960's.
I'm not sure if you've ever seen the punchcards up close, but I'd be surprised if you could push a wire hanger (or similar) though more than 5 or 6 of them stacked up, much less 100 or so.
I think it becomes easier to believe if you take into account the fact that many of the cards already have a punch through your candidate. This creates gaps between unpunched chads. That gap makes a big difference. I'm sure you've seen Karate experts smashing through multiple planks of wood before. Now, no one would be able to smash through 6 planks stacked right on top of each other, but put some space between each one and it becomes much easier.
The biggest flaw that I see in this "logic" is that all the cards would have a very similar hole in them, and due to the cards underneath the punch-thru hole would look much different than a normal legit punch.
Not really.
When a punch is made, the whole chad (usually) comes out. The impression of the punching device is left on the chad, not the punch-card.
The other thing is that most of the ballots are read electronically. The machine doing the reading doesn't care what the hole looks like. The only ballots that get close looks are those with chads still hanging.
Seems more like a media conspiracy theory than a reality to me...
Well, a 30% above average spoilage rate seems unusual to me.
No, now we just require more money. Just give a couple of thousand to a good programmer, and they'll handle it.
A wire hanger pushed through a number of ballots costs a lot less than a programmer.
My only point was that cheating becomes more difficult -- not impossible.
In Florida where I'm from there were rumors about people using stiff pieces of wire, like from a hanger, to punch holes in punch card ballots that were stacked-up 100's in a pile. The idea is that you can spoil large numbers of votes for opposing candidates by creating double-votes.
In fact, there were counties where the rate of spoiled ballots was 30% greater than the average for the state.
Now this technique doesn't take a lot of effort to make work and just about anyone can do it.
By making voting electronic, don't we at least make it more difficult to cheat?
Otherwise, I can park across the street with a sign reading, "$1 Paid For Each Vote for Candidate X" and buy votes from people coming out of the polling place with proof of their vote. Some of the machines being discussed would enable corrupt voters to do exactly that.
Isn't that what ends up happening in democracies anyway?
Politicians are always promising to give more money to this group or that group. It's votes for dollars.
The problem with this suit is that the people who maintain and add to the system are almost all employed by publicly funded institutions and are public employees.
They already get paid through taxes for this work.
They're trying to double dip here.
There are some here that suggest that taking DoD funding is immoral because it helps create weapons and promotes violence.
These same people on election day vote for people whose purpose is to use violence to effect social change. It isn't obvious because we pay someone else (police, federal agents, etc) to apply that violence for us.
Keep in mind: the government isn't there to give advice. Every law is backed by the threat of force. Every social program advocated and every tax dollar taken is backed up by the threat of violence. Anyone already taking some kind of public money is using the threat of violence to get paid. People that refuse to pay are threated with jail.
When you punch that chad in the voting booth, you set off a huge chain of consequences -- some of those chains lead to the possible imprisonment of others.
I may be stretching things a bit, but I can't help but see the similarity between voting and a kind of political "fire-and-forget" weapon.
I maybe stretching things, but I think part of the problem is with collective decision making itself. We tend to think that if everything is done democratically, we'll get the best results. So when a company is divided up amoung shareholders, as long as they get to vote, or have representatives to vote for them, we expect things to work out fine.
Unfortunately, it's been proven, under a few resonable assumptions, that there exists no fair voting system. This was proven by the economist Kenneth Arrow who won the Nobel prize for his work. A short discussion is here.
So what ever system of democratic decision-making you might create, it has fundamental weaknesses that are exploitable by the unscrupulous.
The only way to stay out of trouble is to find other ways of raising capital.
Original found on Usenet.
okra - sterculic acid (anti-metabolite)
celery - psoralins (light-stimulated carcinogens)
crucifers - goitrin (turns off your thyroid)
litchee - hypoglycin-A (L-a-amino-b-[methylene
cyclopropyl]propionic acid)
peanuts - aflatoxcins (fungal metabolites; hepatic carcinogens)
lima beans - cyanogenic glycosides
carrots - carotatoxin (neurotxin)
mushrooms - hydrazines (carcinogen; holy Alar, Batman!)
tomatoes - tomatine (neurotoxin), quercetin glycosides (carcinogens)
broccoli - benzpyrene (carcinogin), goitrin (shuts down thyroid)
potatoes - solanine (toxin; causes spina bifida), chaconine
(neutrotoxin), isoflavones (estrogens), arsenic
cassava - linamarin (cyanogenic glycoside)
broad bean - vicine (hemolytic)
chick pea - beta-N-oxalylamino-L-alanine (lathyrogenic factor)
fiddlehead - ptaquiloside (leukopenia, thrombocytopenia, hemolysis;
bladder and intestinal carcinogen)
comfrey - pyrrolizidine alkaloids (hepatotoxin)
cabbage - thiocyanates (shuts down thyroid)
spinach - phytanic acid (chelates iron adn zinc - no absorption)
soy - genistin, daidzin, coumesterol (phytoestrogens)
wheat germ - phytoestrogens
nutmeg - myristicin (hallucinogen, spasmodic)
mustard - allyl isothiocyanate (war gas)
alfalfa sprouts - canavanine (arginine mimic; highly toxic to growing
mammals)
You said: Without corporations, life would be much harder.
I think most anthropologists would disagree. There was a heck of a lot less stress and a lot more free time for hobbies in the hunter and gather societies.
As long as you are healthy in an H&G society, things are lot easier.
You can't be serious.
If you were right, then we would just revert back to H&G societies right now, reduce our stress, and get to those hobbies.
But we don't. We don't because most of us would starve.
What do you think of the way your administration is handling things the last 10 years? Don't you just hate the fact that big companies seem to have alot more influence on politics than the average Joe has?
Shouldn't this be changed as soon as possible to protect the rights you as a citizen should have?
Or put in another way: what is the reason the US has taken this 'corporate control' road? How did this happen? Why did you all allow this to happen?
Why the obsession with corporate power? Just how much influence do they have on politics?
Do they set the speed limits?
Are they the reason I can't buy liquor on Sunday?
Jeb Bush is the Governor of Florida. What corporation paid all those voters to vote for him? Jesus, Inc.?
Are they responsible for the Patriot Act?
There's a point where anti-corporatism starts to sound like an ideology or religion. Where's the moderation? There's plenty of blame to go around.
I'd also like to point out that corporations for all their faults seem to be very effective ways of ordering people and resources for maximum effeciency. Most of the stuff you have in your house owes its existance to some corporation. Without corporations, life would be much harder.
I do agree that authors should be paid for their efforts, but this is not the way to do it. The adware mechanism is Gator which only ends up stealing money from someone else. So while the DivX folks get paid for their work, someone else no longer does. This isn't fair.
One way to get around this is to just strip out the Gator stuff after installation. The absolute best program for this sort of thing is Spybot. This is a great piece of software. It searches and eliminates something like 10,000 keyloggers, hijackers, trojans, dialers, and all sorts of other things.
Here is a list of threats covered.
After downloading the Divx software, I ran Spybot and all the Gator stuff was removed.
Except "average Joes" are getting ripped off, through things like their 401k
retirement funds ams and individual investments.
But this just supports my point. It's only because average joes lost money that anyone is even paying attention to Enron. When larger investors get robbed by CEO's, no one cares.
People who rip off investors (think the leadership of Enron and Worldcom) can get away with it because they have high-profile friends and can afford expensive lawyers. It has nothing to do with what "average Joes" think.
One of the biggest reasons nothing is done is because investors that lost money are too embarrassed to make a case of it. They were swindled, but pride makes them eat it.
The other reason is that most of them know it would be a waste of time to try to get legal action taken. No one cares. The only people that seem to merit concern are little-old-ladies. They're the ones you see on the news.
If this guy had done the exact same thing for 10 billion dollars, lying about stocks on the exchange as he drove a company into the ground, he would be considered an investment guru would be free.
The difference is, when investors and shareholders are ripped-off, it's decided that it was just "a risky investment".
People have much less sympathy for capitalists than they do average Joes. This guy ripped-off average Joes so he gets hammered.
CEO's are just well-paid employees taking money mostly from rich capitalists.
Well, the first thing that jumped out at me was simply how it was shareware some times, and essentially freeware other times (just a short description, I know that's not exactly what he did)... That is the kind of thing that leads to confusion, to messages about one version the software being spread, and people making assumptions based upon that information. It is quite likely that the random behavior caused confusion.
Who is being confused? There was just one version of the software. There is no crippled version versus non-crippled version.
To write that this represents some sort of flaw in scientific methodology is silly.
For instance, he says (appropriately) that crippled shareware usually doesn't get distributed very far (eg. on BBSes), however, there is no way to know if the people that decided to put up that software had actually gotten the cripped, or the uncrippled versions...
Again, there was just one version of the software. You keep getting this wrong.
Also, consider the 'random' decision to act as one version or the other... The interesting thing about randomness is that it's quite possible, that in a 50/50 choice, you could get the same result 100,000 times... Obviously, that's rare, but if this was truely random, that would be as likely as any other specific distribution. Since he had no way to either ensure that an even number of each version was installed, there is no way to know that his results aren't flawed.
I'd say it was rare -- it would happen once in 10e+30102 times. So ridiculously impossible that basing an argument on its happening is silly.
The other interesting thing about randomness, is that it takes a huge ammount of work to do it well... I'd have to see his randomizing code, and test it in different situations to ensure that it worked properly... It could have been more likely that users of one version of Windows would get one version of the software, and users of another version of windows would have been more likely to get a different version of the shareware.
Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my ass, too.
To say that the version of windows used makes a difference is just silly. The author most likely just used the standard c function rand() that came with his complier.
You really are a complete fool. I suppose I am too for wasted so much time with you.
Of course not. That study was just so poorly done that no fair conclusions can be based upon it. If it had a better methodology, I wouldn't have objected.
It's more of a moot point anyhow, since it's so far off the subject at hand...
Poorly done? Do you know anything about science?
The methodology was much better than many experiments that are called scientific.
He varied a single parameter and looked at the results. He used a control.
In fact, what's remarkable is that he thought enough to allow the program to randomly choose on its own whether it would be crippled or not -- he was trying to avoid selection bias.
He could have have used two entirely different programs. He could have given non-crippled versions to his friends and crippled versions to strangers. There's all kinds of things he could have gotten wrong but he didn't.
This is a good experiment.
So, tell me how his methodology was flawed. I doubt you'll say anything, though, since by your last comment you seem to know you are mistaken, but refuse to admit it.
Look at the experiments.
In the test case, they broke their own rules for success:
(A)the quality of their SmartDoc software is suspect (it "only took a couple of days to put together"),
It doesn't follow that the software's quality is suspect just because it took a few days to put together. If fact, the experiment shows that the program was considered very useful, otherwise, why would people pay the registration fee at all? Yet, they do pay.
(B)and it's not something people really want/need except a slight niche that very possibly will use it once or twice, and never again, for what it's used for.
Again, people put up real money for the software. If they didn't need it, they never would have sent the checks.
Further, there are any number of things that skew the results:
#1 -- shareware that is crippled inevitably gets really bad reviews on shareware sites, while PoNC gets nice reviews, especially when the software is something people tend to want. As far as utilities go, the community has decided that they don't like crippleware. While this attracts more freeloaders, there are many one-shot users, and the reviews will steer those who intend to buy towards non-crippled software unless the crippleware is just completely brilliant.
The problem with your argument is that you are forgetting that there was just ONE version of the software. It was crippled based on the generation of a random number.
But even if there were two versions, your argument falls on its face since it was the crippled instance of the software that got 5 times the number of registering users! By your logic, people must have preferred the crippled version.
#2 -- Prevalence of one-shot or "once in a blue moon" users abound. Crippling the features isn't a great way to get them to buy; offering EXTRA above and beyond the functionality, such as shareware games in episodes, was the best way to go about it. Offer a free download, and a pay-for-full download, and see what happens.
Again, as above, crippling got them to buy 5 times more often.