The idea that the virus problem is purely human is specious.
Come on, for a virus to do serious damage, it needs permission to change system files, access logs, open ports, etc. In Windows, there's little stopping the virus, whereas in GNU/Linux or *BSD, you have a whole lot of problems to get past. The virus needs to be run, to begin with, as opposed to many Windows viruses that just break into the PC or auto-run through Outlook, ICQ, or some-such program. They need to run as root, or gain root permissions, which is a big hurdle that doesn't exist (by default, nor on most installations) in Windows.
Of course you could still have a GNU/Linux user who still downloads the virus executable and runs it as root, but I doubt that'd happen all that much.
Case in point: you're 13 year old sister doesn't need to know about xcopy or directory structures or file trees in order to save or retrieve files.
Well, let's not get carried away here. All users need to understand the concept of files and directories, and they need to understand that there are special kinds of files, device files, that refer to physical storage devices like hard drives, CDs, etc.
From experience as an IT trainer, teaching young tech savvy people and pensioners alike, I can say that students tend to get more confused when the computer doesn't make it clear where in the filesystem they are, and what device they're working on.
No amount of UI work can cover up some fundamental design flaws in Windows. Having C:\, D:\, A:\ etc. for for different devices continues to confuse users, no matter how much Microsoft try to hide it in the UI (only making it more confusing for many). Also, spreading files out in their chaotic "C:\Documents and Settings", My Documents etc. layout makes things really weird for users. I can't tell you how many times people accidentally moved up a directory and saved, and then wondered why they coudn't find the file.
GNU/Linux and MacOSX both have different solutions to this that are, to my mind, far easier to use, and that don't try to hide things from the user. Set-up a home directory with subdirectories for removable media (e.g./home/telex4/floppy,/home/telex4/cdrom) that automount when a medium is inserted, and you're immediately showing the user what devices there are, making it obvious if media are inserted, and you aren't letting users save their files in odd locations since they don't have permission to.
Windows, it seems, is ahead of GNU/Linux and the BSDs in terms of making the UI accessible to those who realy hate technology. But GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like systems have a much, much better base system on which to work. And give any experienced admin a day, a SuSE or RedHat box, and a specification of the customer and their needs, and I guarantee you the admin will set-up a far easier, more intuitive and useable system than Windows could ever manage.
If you think communism (by which I assume you mean Soviet and Chinese communism) have anything to do with freedom, you're nuts.
If you think that a statement can be dismissed because it shares ideas with a belief system you disagree with, you're nuts.
Hey, both Christianity and Islam and Buddhism and x other religions teach to love your fellow man. Help! I disagree with most of those religions, so does that mean I can't love my fellow man?
Compared to the other "scripting" languages I know (Perl, Bash, PHP, so fairly limited), Python has a few major differences:
o Python uses indentation to denote code blocks, rather than curly brackets {} or other methods. This, along with a few other layout rules, makes Python code very strictly laid out. This makes it both easy to read and code, and you really don't miss being able to use your own crazy layouts (ahhh, perl;)
o Python is totally object orientated, and very intelligently designed in this department. Whereas in Perl (5) you have to jump through hoops to create objects, especially OO modules, in Python it's as easy as assigning a variable a new value.
o Python has quite a few very useful built in object types, including strings, ints, floats, lists, tuples, dictionaries, functions, classes, and more. This makes things easy if you don't want to make complex matrices. It is also easy to make more complicated types by embedding C...
o It is really easy to embed C/C++ code in Python, and vice versa, so where Python suffers on performance you can boost it with C/C++, or use a Python tool appropriately called "boost"
Generally, Python is very handy for anything from one-time dirty scripts to full applications (there are some good GUI toolkit ports about.. PyGtk, PyQt, PyKDE, wxWindows, etc), and is also very handy when developing prototypes.
But what really makes me like Python (as I'm not a language nerd by any measure) is that it is just *easy* and *fast* to code in... it doesn't get in your way.
One way to avoid this problem of dependencies, and also to really boost the useability of your app, is to try hard to separate the GUI from the "guts" of the application, so it is reasonably easy to write multiple UIs (GUI or CLI) for the same application. Then you, or others, can come and develop new UIs for themselves. For example, when I started developing QuickRip, I began with a (Py)Qt interface. Someone requested a CLI interface, so I made the separation, and gave QuickRip two interfaces. Now some (Py)Gtk developers are adding a Gtk interface, because they don't want to use Qt. Lovely.
Of course this approach is only usually worth it when most of the hard work is done in the guts, and when the UI itself isn't that much work to redo in a different toolkit. Nor does it work when you need a feature than is only available in a specific toolkit. But in many instances, it works fine.
So often there's no need to choose between toolkits... just choose them all!:)
When wxWindows gets decent support for toolkits other than Gtk+, it will make this even more trivial.
I'd be happy to take their money, it's their influence I don't want. As I see it, part of the freedom associated with free software is freedom from corporate or government bureaucracy deciding what goes into the software. I doubt most governments would agree to sponsor something if they could not exercise tight control over it.
There's a subtle distinction to be made here, that applies both to public and private funding...
I can be funded to do what I want (cool!)
I can be paid to do a specific job, and as the code is under the GPL, everyone benefits in some way
Government sponsorship would, I'd guess, be a mix of the two. Due to the nature of Free Software development, Governments could never exercise the kind of control you infer (i.e. controlling the direction of a whole project that they co-opt).
As well as emulators, those of us who use Operating Systems with poor unemulated support of commercial games inevitably fall back on timeless classics when programmers are too lazy or unskilled to write something as cool as Freeciv or Crystal Space.
That's good news about Mandrake, and it's good to see that some of their financial success is coming from community support (i.e. the club). It'd be interesting to get a breakdown of figures to see how much they rely on it.
Mandrake have put so much back into the community that it'd be fitting for the community to then help keep them afloat. It'd be a short-term disaster if they went under.
I wish I could do this on my Macintosh with my generic two-button scoll mouse.
Oh, wait (holds down command key) I can scroll horizontally. In any application. With no new drivers, equipment, or fuss.
Yay for Mac OS X, I guess. What's the big deal again?
Why is it that whenever a company people dislike (with good reason in this case) releases some new technology, everybody jumps to show that their new technology is stupid, or redundant, or both? You can be sure that if Apple released this exact same product, people like you would be extolling its virtues.
So yay, it's a new mouse idea, and maybe it will catch on and prove useful in some areas (like a large spreadsheet maybe, where you need horizontal scrolling and may already be employing your command key). Maybe then a company that we find agreeable will make a similar product and we can all go and buy our new dual-scrolling mouse.
The only people writing code for free these days are insanely wealthy introverts (few and far between) and the few college kids that are still supported by mommy and daddy, who also have the attention span of a gnat.
Just to throw a spanner in your appaulingly overrated statement... I'm a student who gets no money from his parents, so earns his rent, food, going out money, and who codes and writes in his free time because he enjoys it, because it's interesting, because people like his software, and because he feels that contributing to and participating in the Free Software community is important and worthwhile.
Dear fellow patriots... we all look forward to a world united under the flag of Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way
I hate to burst your bubble here, but is the American Way, led by the principles of freedom and democracy and free market capitalism, to give people the freedom to choose what they want? To let the market decide which products are bad and which are good? To engage other nations in dialogue and promote the values of liberty and democracy?
Was America not won from the British, supported industrially, and motivated ideologically by the French? Did these two countries not have a very good relationship for hundreds of years?
Oh, sorry, when you say The American Way, what you mean is the Neo-Colonial Conservative way, that belies instead in the preservation of successful American private enterprise for its own sake, the flattening of all who disagree with you, the curtailment of civil liberties and outright arrogance, and the selective use of tariffs to protect American industry against foreign competition, regardless of what you tell the rest of the world to do.
That's totally false. With music I can accept that things would be easier, but:
* Most (visual) artists make their money through prints, reproductions and serialisation of their work. That would go without copyright.
* How would writers earn money? Again, apart from the big names, most writers earn money from reprints in various publications, serialisation, having books published. That would go without copyright.
* How would games designers make a living? If you can't copyright any of it, then you can make maybe one sale, and you're left at the mercy of donations.
Expecting all of the (full-time/professional) arts to be sustained by voluntary donation is real head in the clouds stuff. It wouldn't work, and we'd all lose out as a result. Really it is the small artists that need copyright to make money, music nonwithstanding, and everyone that gains from diversifying and using copyright in new and creative ways (like offering free sample downloads, different routes of access to work, etc.)
Building a Webpage
Intro. to Windows
Intro to Macs
Office 101
Using E-Mail
Finances and Bills with Your Computer
An Introduction to Digital Photography
Here you have a perfect illustration of what to do, and what to avoid:)
The best thing you can do is to send people away with computer skills, NOT skills specific to a certain version of a certain application. Teaching someone to use Microsoft Outlook 2000 won't be helpful to those who don't use that email client, and it won't be much use when Outlook changes things around.
Courses like "introducing digital photography" and "introducing email", as well as "advanced x, y, z" are a really good approach. It also lets you introduce alternative applications where appropriate, e.g. Outlook / Eudora / Thunderbird, Windows / MacOS / GNU/Linux.
As for the idea of introducing Hacker Ethics and other such courses, if you can get people to attend, they'd be great, but I'd try to be a little more interesting and subtle in your approach. Get people who are interested in IT careers, school kids, CS students and other such people into more advanced classes and introduce Free Software in a big way, explaining why people use and develop FS instead of proprietary solutions, and try (if they seem responsive) to introduce the Hacker Ethic while you're at it. You could also use a similar approach on courses in managing offices where IT plays a big role. Go on... throw some community task driven management at followers of the top-down-monkey and see what happens!
But how would professional artists be sustained without copyright? That is my point, not that the current system is wonderful. Simply saying that all art can only be created in people's free time as a non-profit hobby is absurd - you'd dramatically reduce output, and nobody wants that (except from perhaps the industry rubbish).
Well if you think that society will benefit from the demolition of a system that only just sustains smaller artists, writers, etc, then fair enough, but I think that's extremely unrealistic.
Just a point of information: GNU/Linux, BSD, and most Free Software depends on the copyright system.
You copyright your code to give yourself exclusive rights over how that code is distributed, and then you release the code under a license which allows you to give people certain rights over your code. So if you release it under the GPL, you let people copy, modify & redistribute the code so long as it all stays under the GPL, forcing them to redistribute modified code, etc.
But it always remains copyrighted, so you, as the copyright holder, can always change the license if you have a change of heart.
If there were no copyright system, Free Software developers would have no way of forcing people to contribute their code changes, or redistribute under terms that won't confuse the community and compromise the original project, etc.
In other words, Free Software development depends on the copyright system, but it subtley subverts the way in which copyright is applied today, hence the (slightly jokey) term: copyleft.
Patents are, of course, another matter, and generally speaking most Free Software hackers would agree that they shouldn't apply to software full stop.
I didn't mean to imply that you got your knowledge of economics from Slashdot. I simply meant that people often put around very basic economics arguments that simply don't hold up in the real world, especially those that quote "economics 101".
I have to concede that, given two computers of equal hardware specification, one of which has a cheaper Operating System on, the consumer would but the cheaper one if he/she knew the cheaper OS was as good as the more expensive one (though of course most consumers who could afford the more expensive OS would be naturally suspicious as to why the other OS was so cheap, and so might give it a miss, especially if it were unfamiliar). That said, I still don't see how that would drive significant hardware sales.
The only sales it might drive are those of people who already have a computer, and who are thinking of getting a new computer but find it too much money to be worth it, and who might be swayed by a reduction of £100 in the price. So yes, some sales driven, but not, I fear, very many.
On the other hand, whilst I don't mean that FS doesn't drive sales at all (you're quite right, it does), because it is generally coded with efficiency in mind, and it is backwards compatable (so you will be less likely to need new hardware to take advantage of new features), it is less likely to have such high hardware demands as proprietary software, and so will drive less hardware sales.
Also, given that, at present, the gaming industry gives scant regard for Free Software platforms (a lamentable position), and that the gaming community is the biggest hardware consumer outside of business, a big switch to FS would certainly drive down those sales.
All in all, I am not saying that FS = bad hardware sales, but that your Econ101 analysis falls well short of anything resembling the truth. You probably realise that, and I'm sorry if I insulted you, but in my mind these things are worth addressing:-)
Econ 101 supports this idea, as lowering the total cost of owning computers should result in more being sold.
Beware any argument based on "SubjectX 101", especially if it's economics on Slashdot! Come on now, don't be so naive.
Currently, hardware is the main cost, and lowering the cost of software won't make much difference. No more hardware is sold for every bit of software you get... esentially it's the introductory package, so the OS, and very few even know that they're charged £100-200 for Windows.
Moreover, most new hardware nowadays is shipped by software companies either writing attractive nonstandard extensions that require specific hardware (e.g. graphics cards) or by making it require such high specs that people are forced to upgrade.
If anything, Free Software is bad for hardware sales, or at least worse than proprietary muck, because it isn't designed with shipping hardware in mind.
Bruce, we all know you're very active on the political side of hacking, and we also know that as a community, hackers aren't especially active. Given that a hacker who reads Slashdot cannot fail to be aware of the many issues that we face, and their gravity, what do you think hackers and geeks as individuals can do to be useful, and as a related question, how do you think the hacker community can best respond to the threats of the DMCA, EUCD, copy protected CDs, Palladium, and other digital rights issues?
However, did anyone else notice they still use words such as 'piracy' and 'intellectual property' instead of more conceptually correct words such as copyright infringement or copyrighted work?
I have to think that unfortunately this office is still largely a tool for and of the copyright mafia, if these are the terms they think in.
Of course they're exactly a tool for the copyright holders, be they large corporations or small businesses. Size shouldn't matter here. Let's stop being silly and pretending that the DoJ in this case should do anything other than uphold the law. If the law is wrong, then it will take sufficient civil disobedience and/or some interesting law cases to overturn it.
That said, you are very astute to pick out their abuse of terms like "piracy". The RIAA, MPAA and BSA have done such a good job of making copyright a one-way agenda (protecting property, rather than protecting a system that can be of huge benefit to society) that the first struggle is to redefine the terms in their original forms.
Interestingly, in the UK some mainstream journalists have started calling Copyprotected CDs "corrupt CDs". The backlash is starting, at last.
I will make this prediction: by 2008, every meal in every fast food restaurant will be ordered from a kiosk like this, or from a similar system embedded in each table.
Yeah, I'm going to go with a no on this one. Everyone said the same thing when ATMs came around, "Oh no, they're going to replace actual tellers!" But it didn't, banks still hire quite frequently for bank tellers.
But the two cases aren't the same. With bank tellers, often transactions are far more complicated than those that ATMs allow, or are far more convenient with a teller. With, for example, fast food, what is more convenient: pressing a button and getting the food without such large queues, or talking to a human and getting the food with large queues? In this case, the human contact is unecessary, so machines coudl easily replace humans.
It all depends on the context. As with anything related to AI, machines will be taken up where we don't need or appreciate human contact and human qualities like ingenuity, sympathy and creativeness, and where they are cheaper/more efficient than their human counterparts.
Re:In defense of "conservatives"...
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Saving the Net
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Lest we forget, it is actually the Democratic Party that is more in the pocket of Hollywood and the media companies, while the Republican Party tends to favor "big business" in general.
I think the problem with this whole conservative/liberal debate is that it has a very American perspective, and in American politics big business plays a far more significant role than in many other countries. This skews the general statements about liberals / socialists / conservatives which are being made here.
Doc was close when he said that conservatives tend to favour big business more because they believe in rewarding strength, not propping up failure; socialists tend to dislike big business because they believe in promoting equality, and big business often exploits the lower class; liberals don't favour or dislike big business, they just strive to ensure that the rules that structure a lightly regulated environment tend to promote performance and equality of opportunity.
The problem with America is that you don't have this kind of breakdown. The Republicans are a mix of liberals and conservatives, whilst the Democracts are essentially liberals with some vague hints of socialism. So trying to paint either side as being pro- or anti-big business just won't work.
Re:Doom 3 Specs will be outdated by then...
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No Doom 3 This Year?
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· Score: 1
Well for some users it might. Doom3 will be the next big game in the GNU/Linux gaming world, after the excitement of UT2003, which just about runs on my Duron800Mhz CPU with 256MB of RAM. If I wanted to play Doom3 and had the money (you never know;), Doom3 could be the reason.
I bet Intel, AMD, nVidia and ATI are all wetting their pants at the thought of the GNU/Linux gaming community upgrading;-)
I think when they say we need 100 addresses per human being, they may be referring to the total number (so about 650bn?), not the number that each human uses. Not all IPs are tied to individuals... Slashdot, Google, games servers, FTP servers, DNS servers, all kinds of services require IPs, and so I suppose they're saying that if we dished all of these out to individuals, we'd each get 100. Sounds a little excessive to me, but what do I know?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that the virus problem is purely human is specious.
Come on, for a virus to do serious damage, it needs permission to change system files, access logs, open ports, etc. In Windows, there's little stopping the virus, whereas in GNU/Linux or *BSD, you have a whole lot of problems to get past. The virus needs to be run, to begin with, as opposed to many Windows viruses that just break into the PC or auto-run through Outlook, ICQ, or some-such program. They need to run as root, or gain root permissions, which is a big hurdle that doesn't exist (by default, nor on most installations) in Windows.
Of course you could still have a GNU/Linux user who still downloads the virus executable and runs it as root, but I doubt that'd happen all that much.
Case in point: you're 13 year old sister doesn't need to know about xcopy or directory structures or file trees in order to save or retrieve files.
/home/telex4/floppy, /home/telex4/cdrom) that automount when a medium is inserted, and you're immediately showing the user what devices there are, making it obvious if media are inserted, and you aren't letting users save their files in odd locations since they don't have permission to.
Well, let's not get carried away here. All users need to understand the concept of files and directories, and they need to understand that there are special kinds of files, device files, that refer to physical storage devices like hard drives, CDs, etc.
From experience as an IT trainer, teaching young tech savvy people and pensioners alike, I can say that students tend to get more confused when the computer doesn't make it clear where in the filesystem they are, and what device they're working on.
No amount of UI work can cover up some fundamental design flaws in Windows. Having C:\, D:\, A:\ etc. for for different devices continues to confuse users, no matter how much Microsoft try to hide it in the UI (only making it more confusing for many). Also, spreading files out in their chaotic "C:\Documents and Settings", My Documents etc. layout makes things really weird for users. I can't tell you how many times people accidentally moved up a directory and saved, and then wondered why they coudn't find the file.
GNU/Linux and MacOSX both have different solutions to this that are, to my mind, far easier to use, and that don't try to hide things from the user. Set-up a home directory with subdirectories for removable media (e.g.
Windows, it seems, is ahead of GNU/Linux and the BSDs in terms of making the UI accessible to those who realy hate technology. But GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like systems have a much, much better base system on which to work. And give any experienced admin a day, a SuSE or RedHat box, and a specification of the customer and their needs, and I guarantee you the admin will set-up a far easier, more intuitive and useable system than Windows could ever manage.
If you think communism (by which I assume you mean Soviet and Chinese communism) have anything to do with freedom, you're nuts.
If you think that a statement can be dismissed because it shares ideas with a belief system you disagree with, you're nuts.
Hey, both Christianity and Islam and Buddhism and x other religions teach to love your fellow man. Help! I disagree with most of those religions, so does that mean I can't love my fellow man?
Compared to the other "scripting" languages I know (Perl, Bash, PHP, so fairly limited), Python has a few major differences:
;)
o Python uses indentation to denote code blocks, rather than curly brackets {} or other methods. This, along with a few other layout rules, makes Python code very strictly laid out. This makes it both easy to read and code, and you really don't miss being able to use your own crazy layouts (ahhh, perl
o Python is totally object orientated, and very intelligently designed in this department. Whereas in Perl (5) you have to jump through hoops to create objects, especially OO modules, in Python it's as easy as assigning a variable a new value.
o Python has quite a few very useful built in object types, including strings, ints, floats, lists, tuples, dictionaries, functions, classes, and more. This makes things easy if you don't want to make complex matrices. It is also easy to make more complicated types by embedding C...
o It is really easy to embed C/C++ code in Python, and vice versa, so where Python suffers on performance you can boost it with C/C++, or use a Python tool appropriately called "boost"
Generally, Python is very handy for anything from one-time dirty scripts to full applications (there are some good GUI toolkit ports about.. PyGtk, PyQt, PyKDE, wxWindows, etc), and is also very handy when developing prototypes.
But what really makes me like Python (as I'm not a language nerd by any measure) is that it is just *easy* and *fast* to code in... it doesn't get in your way.
(Pimping out...)
One way to avoid this problem of dependencies, and also to really boost the useability of your app, is to try hard to separate the GUI from the "guts" of the application, so it is reasonably easy to write multiple UIs (GUI or CLI) for the same application. Then you, or others, can come and develop new UIs for themselves. For example, when I started developing QuickRip, I began with a (Py)Qt interface. Someone requested a CLI interface, so I made the separation, and gave QuickRip two interfaces. Now some (Py)Gtk developers are adding a Gtk interface, because they don't want to use Qt. Lovely.
:)
Of course this approach is only usually worth it when most of the hard work is done in the guts, and when the UI itself isn't that much work to redo in a different toolkit. Nor does it work when you need a feature than is only available in a specific toolkit. But in many instances, it works fine.
So often there's no need to choose between toolkits... just choose them all!
When wxWindows gets decent support for toolkits other than Gtk+, it will make this even more trivial.
I'd be happy to take their money, it's their influence I don't want. As I see it, part of the freedom associated with free software is freedom from corporate or government bureaucracy deciding what goes into the software. I doubt most governments would agree to sponsor something if they could not exercise tight control over it.
There's a subtle distinction to be made here, that applies both to public and private funding...
I can be funded to do what I want (cool!)
I can be paid to do a specific job, and as the code is under the GPL, everyone benefits in some way
Government sponsorship would, I'd guess, be a mix of the two. Due to the nature of Free Software development, Governments could never exercise the kind of control you infer (i.e. controlling the direction of a whole project that they co-opt).
As well as emulators, those of us who use Operating Systems with poor unemulated support of commercial games inevitably fall back on timeless classics when programmers are too lazy or unskilled to write something as cool as Freeciv or Crystal Space.
;)
Just check out The Linux Game Tome to see how old games can be kept alive
That's good news about Mandrake, and it's good to see that some of their financial success is coming from community support (i.e. the club). It'd be interesting to get a breakdown of figures to see how much they rely on it.
Mandrake have put so much back into the community that it'd be fitting for the community to then help keep them afloat. It'd be a short-term disaster if they went under.
I wish I could do this on my Macintosh with my generic two-button scoll mouse.
Oh, wait (holds down command key) I can scroll horizontally. In any application. With no new drivers, equipment, or fuss.
Yay for Mac OS X, I guess. What's the big deal again?
Why is it that whenever a company people dislike (with good reason in this case) releases some new technology, everybody jumps to show that their new technology is stupid, or redundant, or both? You can be sure that if Apple released this exact same product, people like you would be extolling its virtues.
So yay, it's a new mouse idea, and maybe it will catch on and prove useful in some areas (like a large spreadsheet maybe, where you need horizontal scrolling and may already be employing your command key). Maybe then a company that we find agreeable will make a similar product and we can all go and buy our new dual-scrolling mouse.
The only people writing code for free these days are insanely wealthy introverts (few and far between) and the few college kids that are still supported by mommy and daddy, who also have the attention span of a gnat.
Just to throw a spanner in your appaulingly overrated statement... I'm a student who gets no money from his parents, so earns his rent, food, going out money, and who codes and writes in his free time because he enjoys it, because it's interesting, because people like his software, and because he feels that contributing to and participating in the Free Software community is important and worthwhile.
Dear fellow patriots ...
we all look forward to a world united under the flag of Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way
I hate to burst your bubble here, but is the American Way, led by the principles of freedom and democracy and free market capitalism, to give people the freedom to choose what they want? To let the market decide which products are bad and which are good? To engage other nations in dialogue and promote the values of liberty and democracy?
Was America not won from the British, supported industrially, and motivated ideologically by the French? Did these two countries not have a very good relationship for hundreds of years?
Oh, sorry, when you say The American Way, what you mean is the Neo-Colonial Conservative way, that belies instead in the preservation of successful American private enterprise for its own sake, the flattening of all who disagree with you, the curtailment of civil liberties and outright arrogance, and the selective use of tariffs to protect American industry against foreign competition, regardless of what you tell the rest of the world to do.
That's totally false. With music I can accept that things would be easier, but:
* Most (visual) artists make their money through prints, reproductions and serialisation of their work. That would go without copyright.
* How would writers earn money? Again, apart from the big names, most writers earn money from reprints in various publications, serialisation, having books published. That would go without copyright.
* How would games designers make a living? If you can't copyright any of it, then you can make maybe one sale, and you're left at the mercy of donations.
Expecting all of the (full-time/professional) arts to be sustained by voluntary donation is real head in the clouds stuff. It wouldn't work, and we'd all lose out as a result. Really it is the small artists that need copyright to make money, music nonwithstanding, and everyone that gains from diversifying and using copyright in new and creative ways (like offering free sample downloads, different routes of access to work, etc.)
Building a Webpage
:)
Intro. to Windows
Intro to Macs
Office 101
Using E-Mail
Finances and Bills with Your Computer
An Introduction to Digital Photography
Here you have a perfect illustration of what to do, and what to avoid
The best thing you can do is to send people away with computer skills, NOT skills specific to a certain version of a certain application. Teaching someone to use Microsoft Outlook 2000 won't be helpful to those who don't use that email client, and it won't be much use when Outlook changes things around.
Courses like "introducing digital photography" and "introducing email", as well as "advanced x, y, z" are a really good approach. It also lets you introduce alternative applications where appropriate, e.g. Outlook / Eudora / Thunderbird, Windows / MacOS / GNU/Linux.
As for the idea of introducing Hacker Ethics and other such courses, if you can get people to attend, they'd be great, but I'd try to be a little more interesting and subtle in your approach. Get people who are interested in IT careers, school kids, CS students and other such people into more advanced classes and introduce Free Software in a big way, explaining why people use and develop FS instead of proprietary solutions, and try (if they seem responsive) to introduce the Hacker Ethic while you're at it. You could also use a similar approach on courses in managing offices where IT plays a big role. Go on... throw some community task driven management at followers of the top-down-monkey and see what happens!
But how would professional artists be sustained without copyright? That is my point, not that the current system is wonderful. Simply saying that all art can only be created in people's free time as a non-profit hobby is absurd - you'd dramatically reduce output, and nobody wants that (except from perhaps the industry rubbish).
Well if you think that society will benefit from the demolition of a system that only just sustains smaller artists, writers, etc, then fair enough, but I think that's extremely unrealistic.
Just a point of information: GNU/Linux, BSD, and most Free Software depends on the copyright system.
You copyright your code to give yourself exclusive rights over how that code is distributed, and then you release the code under a license which allows you to give people certain rights over your code. So if you release it under the GPL, you let people copy, modify & redistribute the code so long as it all stays under the GPL, forcing them to redistribute modified code, etc.
But it always remains copyrighted, so you, as the copyright holder, can always change the license if you have a change of heart.
If there were no copyright system, Free Software developers would have no way of forcing people to contribute their code changes, or redistribute under terms that won't confuse the community and compromise the original project, etc.
In other words, Free Software development depends on the copyright system, but it subtley subverts the way in which copyright is applied today, hence the (slightly jokey) term: copyleft.
Patents are, of course, another matter, and generally speaking most Free Software hackers would agree that they shouldn't apply to software full stop.
I didn't mean to imply that you got your knowledge of economics from Slashdot. I simply meant that people often put around very basic economics arguments that simply don't hold up in the real world, especially those that quote "economics 101".
:-)
I have to concede that, given two computers of equal hardware specification, one of which has a cheaper Operating System on, the consumer would but the cheaper one if he/she knew the cheaper OS was as good as the more expensive one (though of course most consumers who could afford the more expensive OS would be naturally suspicious as to why the other OS was so cheap, and so might give it a miss, especially if it were unfamiliar). That said, I still don't see how that would drive significant hardware sales.
The only sales it might drive are those of people who already have a computer, and who are thinking of getting a new computer but find it too much money to be worth it, and who might be swayed by a reduction of £100 in the price. So yes, some sales driven, but not, I fear, very many.
On the other hand, whilst I don't mean that FS doesn't drive sales at all (you're quite right, it does), because it is generally coded with efficiency in mind, and it is backwards compatable (so you will be less likely to need new hardware to take advantage of new features), it is less likely to have such high hardware demands as proprietary software, and so will drive less hardware sales.
Also, given that, at present, the gaming industry gives scant regard for Free Software platforms (a lamentable position), and that the gaming community is the biggest hardware consumer outside of business, a big switch to FS would certainly drive down those sales.
All in all, I am not saying that FS = bad hardware sales, but that your Econ101 analysis falls well short of anything resembling the truth. You probably realise that, and I'm sorry if I insulted you, but in my mind these things are worth addressing
Econ 101 supports this idea, as lowering the total cost of owning computers should result in more being sold.
Beware any argument based on "SubjectX 101", especially if it's economics on Slashdot! Come on now, don't be so naive.
Currently, hardware is the main cost, and lowering the cost of software won't make much difference. No more hardware is sold for every bit of software you get... esentially it's the introductory package, so the OS, and very few even know that they're charged £100-200 for Windows.
Moreover, most new hardware nowadays is shipped by software companies either writing attractive nonstandard extensions that require specific hardware (e.g. graphics cards) or by making it require such high specs that people are forced to upgrade.
If anything, Free Software is bad for hardware sales, or at least worse than proprietary muck, because it isn't designed with shipping hardware in mind.
Bruce, we all know you're very active on the political side of hacking, and we also know that as a community, hackers aren't especially active. Given that a hacker who reads Slashdot cannot fail to be aware of the many issues that we face, and their gravity, what do you think hackers and geeks as individuals can do to be useful, and as a related question, how do you think the hacker community can best respond to the threats of the DMCA, EUCD, copy protected CDs, Palladium, and other digital rights issues?
However, did anyone else notice they still use words such as 'piracy' and 'intellectual property' instead of more conceptually correct words such as copyright infringement or copyrighted work?
I have to think that unfortunately this office is still largely a tool for and of the copyright mafia, if these are the terms they think in.
Of course they're exactly a tool for the copyright holders, be they large corporations or small businesses. Size shouldn't matter here. Let's stop being silly and pretending that the DoJ in this case should do anything other than uphold the law. If the law is wrong, then it will take sufficient civil disobedience and/or some interesting law cases to overturn it.
That said, you are very astute to pick out their abuse of terms like "piracy". The RIAA, MPAA and BSA have done such a good job of making copyright a one-way agenda (protecting property, rather than protecting a system that can be of huge benefit to society) that the first struggle is to redefine the terms in their original forms.
Interestingly, in the UK some mainstream journalists have started calling Copyprotected CDs "corrupt CDs". The backlash is starting, at last.
All of a sudden I feel less secure in my smug "IANAL but..." comments
But the two cases aren't the same. With bank tellers, often transactions are far more complicated than those that ATMs allow, or are far more convenient with a teller. With, for example, fast food, what is more convenient: pressing a button and getting the food without such large queues, or talking to a human and getting the food with large queues? In this case, the human contact is unecessary, so machines coudl easily replace humans.
It all depends on the context. As with anything related to AI, machines will be taken up where we don't need or appreciate human contact and human qualities like ingenuity, sympathy and creativeness, and where they are cheaper/more efficient than their human counterparts.
Lest we forget, it is actually the Democratic Party that is more in the pocket of Hollywood and the media companies, while the Republican Party tends to favor "big business" in general.
I think the problem with this whole conservative/liberal debate is that it has a very American perspective, and in American politics big business plays a far more significant role than in many other countries. This skews the general statements about liberals / socialists / conservatives which are being made here.
Doc was close when he said that conservatives tend to favour big business more because they believe in rewarding strength, not propping up failure; socialists tend to dislike big business because they believe in promoting equality, and big business often exploits the lower class; liberals don't favour or dislike big business, they just strive to ensure that the rules that structure a lightly regulated environment tend to promote performance and equality of opportunity.
The problem with America is that you don't have this kind of breakdown. The Republicans are a mix of liberals and conservatives, whilst the Democracts are essentially liberals with some vague hints of socialism. So trying to paint either side as being pro- or anti-big business just won't work.
Well for some users it might. Doom3 will be the next big game in the GNU/Linux gaming world, after the excitement of UT2003, which just about runs on my Duron800Mhz CPU with 256MB of RAM. If I wanted to play Doom3 and had the money (you never know ;), Doom3 could be the reason.
;-)
I bet Intel, AMD, nVidia and ATI are all wetting their pants at the thought of the GNU/Linux gaming community upgrading
I think when they say we need 100 addresses per human being, they may be referring to the total number (so about 650bn?), not the number that each human uses. Not all IPs are tied to individuals... Slashdot, Google, games servers, FTP servers, DNS servers, all kinds of services require IPs, and so I suppose they're saying that if we dished all of these out to individuals, we'd each get 100. Sounds a little excessive to me, but what do I know? :-)