i often wonder how much economic activity results is attributable to this kind of deception, and to consumer irrationality when making buying decisions. it seems incredibly wasteful.
wouldn't effective consumer education on how to make rational buying decisions wring large amounts of pointless waste out of the economy? effort that could then be applied toward greater purposes?
about the same as those Nike trainers,starbucks coffee,Gap Shirt,Armani Trousers
its called branding, the selling of dreams
i agree with your point entirely, but IMHO starbucks French Roast (or Freedom Roast if you insist) is some of the best on the market, and i pay for it, even though i shun name brands in general specifically for the reasons you imply.
see, everyone knows that in a competitive, free-market economy with a rational marketplace (the assumptions that our entire economic system is based on, after all), either the marked-up models collect dust on the shelves, or alternative vendors would emerge overnight who produce the equivalent of the marked-up models at the lower price.
in further evidence that nothing sacred is safe from perversion, i offer that muzak has gone seriously downhill since the glory days of the seventies and even early eighties.
muzak used to be instantly recognizable as highly sanitized, soothing, mantovani-type music that could practically wipe your mind clean - almost physically unfocus your eyes and remove the expression from your face.
now they've gone all "hip" and environmental and electronic. i like environmental and electronic but sometimes you just want the classic muzak experience.
Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take.
...meaning the only way to get a feeling of satisfaction is to work, consume, breed, obey, belong, and distract oneself with silly mass-produced consumer items...
if science were able to produce a 'happy pill' that had no side-effects, no addiction issues, or any other consequences, it would still be knifed in the bed and made illegal. otherwise the herd animal known by some as "the working man" might ease up on the back-breaking labor that the leisure class depends on to make their own lives a paradise on earth.
They *should* have called it "Freedom Software" rather than hijacking the word free and beating everyone over the head with insane "free as in..." rants when people are rightly confused.
why? i wouldn't have the slightest idea what the awkwardly-named "freedom software" would be. is it a microsoft application for managing my freedom? is it "french software" before the french became official douchebags?
seems more sensible to me to pick the exact word you need to describe it, even if it has another meaning in different contexts.
Don't be fooled by their recent Linux-friendly stance. IBM are no different than Microsoft, HP, or any other big company
it's true that the interests of IBM and the F/OSS community just happen to coincide at the moment, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have a beer with them and accept any no-strings-attached help they might offer us.
Re:"open standard" are a waste of time
on
IT, Be Free!
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· Score: 4, Insightful
POSIX really represents everything that's wrong with the computer industry.
really? that's strange. if i were to pick something that "represents everything that's wrong with the computer industry", i'd have to say the POSIX standard is down around 12,543rd on my list.
No vendor really wants to implement a standard, they only do so grudgingly to apease customers.
what? vendors go to work every day merely to appease customers? what a scandal.
POSIX itself has been made largely irrelevant by the sucess of Linux. Standards orgainisations should learn from this - the world doesn't want standards that vendors can implement more or less correctly to provide a veneer of compatability. What the world wants is a free reference implementation that works and which other implemetations if they need to exist at all, can be compared to.
dude, you've been drinking the bong-water again, haven't you?
If vendors want to waste money funding organisations like the Open Group that's their problem, but organisations like the Open Group shouldn't expect anyone to really care about the useless documents they create.
you heard it here first folks: open standards are useless. now i think i'll just post this HTML reply here over this TCP/IP internet thingy so you can read it with the browser and operating system of your choice.
the good and the iffy
on
IT, Be Free!
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· Score: 1
i like the idea of a common "open standards statement" that explicitly lays out the advantages of using open standards. it could attain an identity, like the GPL has for licensing, and thus become a more concrete concept in developers' and IT managers' minds.
on the other hand, i don't care for the "whereas", "resolved", and "let it henceforth be known" style language used. it just sounds too much like one of those undergraduate student government resolutions denouncing female circumcision in west africa somewhere.
The pleasure of being able to see...always...and not becoming an invalid if my glasses break is priceless.
plus, if there's a nuclear war that kills everyone but you, and you want to spend the rest of your days reading all the books you never had a chance to read, you don't have to worry that an ironic accident will put the kibosh on your plans.
1) you are probably smarter than a sizable majority of the population
2) the targeted music 'consumer' would still crave brittany and justin even if the only way to get it were to have the broken pieces of the crushed-up CD's packed up their asses with a putty-knife.
3) the average Have (rich, educated, powerful, politically-connected) looks at the average Have-not (half-witted hand-to-mouth douchebag working at a car wash) more as a herd animal than a human being. ie, raw material to be managed for the maximum aggregate labor output with minimum unrest, carroted and sticked into whipping up a frothy lather of frivolous economic activity from which the Haves skim the cream.
I never read Atlas Shrugged, but did read Fountainhead like a million years ago. I seem to remember the Hero committing terrorism because someone stole his Intellectual Property.
His dad's a real interesting guy. He's a big supporter of inheritance taxes. if I remember correctly, he believes society got you where you are, so you need to give back when you go away.
that's great, it parallels what i've thought on the subject forever.
however, if i were gates sr., i wouldn't go on any isolated father-son fishing trips with billy, if ya know what i mean.
But it's reasonable to suppose that the machines of 100 years in the future will have at least as much horsepower and at least as much memory as the machines of today.
funny, lately when i think of the future, Road Warrior-like images flash through my mind.
i think about Ximian (and especially Evolution) and how that piece of software can become much better/bigger/worth more.
what i would love is a *cross-platform* evolution-like product, and a F/OSS groupware server on the back end. i've been hoping for that for four years...
the proper response to that is: "no problem, they'll both be on your machine. you can still use (unsafe) IE for the apps that depend on it, but use (safe and better) firefox as your default browser."
if anyone is ever murdered/raped/abducted, or if a robbery is ever reported, someone can check the recording and use the unique ID to tell almost instintaniously who the criminal is. There wouldn't even be a need to have a live watch over the feeds.
You wouldn't mind that, would you?
i sure would - it would put a major crimp in my murder/rape/abduction/robbery activities.
Linspire is a consumer distro - that's the big news here. they aren't targeting the workplace with workstation-class machines set up with corporate-friendly red hat - they're targeting average joes and josephines.
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wouldn't effective consumer education on how to make rational buying decisions wring large amounts of pointless waste out of the economy? effort that could then be applied toward greater purposes?
or is the "consumer" hopelessly irrational?
so, presumably you were fired after your arm involuntarily punched him in the face?
"the trusted name in ZIP compression"? christ.
its called branding, the selling of dreams
i agree with your point entirely, but IMHO starbucks French Roast (or Freedom Roast if you insist) is some of the best on the market, and i pay for it, even though i shun name brands in general specifically for the reasons you imply.
EIN MARKET UBER ALLES!
technically correct. more precisely, it's taxes. that the citizens pay. for the operation of their government.
which, in theory, is not supposed to be a whoring billboard for the highest bidder.
in further evidence that nothing sacred is safe from perversion, i offer that muzak has gone seriously downhill since the glory days of the seventies and even early eighties.
muzak used to be instantly recognizable as highly sanitized, soothing, mantovani-type music that could practically wipe your mind clean - almost physically unfocus your eyes and remove the expression from your face.
now they've gone all "hip" and environmental and electronic. i like environmental and electronic but sometimes you just want the classic muzak experience.
if science were able to produce a 'happy pill' that had no side-effects, no addiction issues, or any other consequences, it would still be knifed in the bed and made illegal. otherwise the herd animal known by some as "the working man" might ease up on the back-breaking labor that the leisure class depends on to make their own lives a paradise on earth.
why? i wouldn't have the slightest idea what the awkwardly-named "freedom software" would be. is it a microsoft application for managing my freedom? is it "french software" before the french became official douchebags?
seems more sensible to me to pick the exact word you need to describe it, even if it has another meaning in different contexts.
it's true that the interests of IBM and the F/OSS community just happen to coincide at the moment, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have a beer with them and accept any no-strings-attached help they might offer us.
really? that's strange. if i were to pick something that "represents everything that's wrong with the computer industry", i'd have to say the POSIX standard is down around 12,543rd on my list.
No vendor really wants to implement a standard, they only do so grudgingly to apease customers.
what? vendors go to work every day merely to appease customers? what a scandal.
POSIX itself has been made largely irrelevant by the sucess of Linux. Standards orgainisations should learn from this - the world doesn't want standards that vendors can implement more or less correctly to provide a veneer of compatability. What the world wants is a free reference implementation that works and which other implemetations if they need to exist at all, can be compared to.
dude, you've been drinking the bong-water again, haven't you?
If vendors want to waste money funding organisations like the Open Group that's their problem, but organisations like the Open Group shouldn't expect anyone to really care about the useless documents they create.
you heard it here first folks: open standards are useless. now i think i'll just post this HTML reply here over this TCP/IP internet thingy so you can read it with the browser and operating system of your choice.
on the other hand, i don't care for the "whereas", "resolved", and "let it henceforth be known" style language used. it just sounds too much like one of those undergraduate student government resolutions denouncing female circumcision in west africa somewhere.
plus, if there's a nuclear war that kills everyone but you, and you want to spend the rest of your days reading all the books you never had a chance to read, you don't have to worry that an ironic accident will put the kibosh on your plans.
1) you are probably smarter than a sizable majority of the population
2) the targeted music 'consumer' would still crave brittany and justin even if the only way to get it were to have the broken pieces of the crushed-up CD's packed up their asses with a putty-knife.
3) the average Have (rich, educated, powerful, politically-connected) looks at the average Have-not (half-witted hand-to-mouth douchebag working at a car wash) more as a herd animal than a human being. ie, raw material to be managed for the maximum aggregate labor output with minimum unrest, carroted and sticked into whipping up a frothy lather of frivolous economic activity from which the Haves skim the cream.
4) darwin was right.
VERy interesting and timely interpretation!
that's great, it parallels what i've thought on the subject forever.
however, if i were gates sr., i wouldn't go on any isolated father-son fishing trips with billy, if ya know what i mean.
"User #2 is a little bitch."
don't tell me the F/OSS community doesn't understand usability!
for example, "you put in better backdoor capabilities for us, and we'll make the remainder of the anti-trust issues disappear".
i hope sco wins that breath-holding contest. really, really wins, if ya know what i mean.
most rational people agree - that guy was an idiot.
funny, lately when i think of the future, Road Warrior-like images flash through my mind.
what i would love is a *cross-platform* evolution-like product, and a F/OSS groupware server on the back end. i've been hoping for that for four years...
the proper response to that is: "no problem, they'll both be on your machine. you can still use (unsafe) IE for the apps that depend on it, but use (safe and better) firefox as your default browser."
i sure would - it would put a major crimp in my murder/rape/abduction/robbery activities.
Linspire is a consumer distro - that's the big news here. they aren't targeting the workplace with workstation-class machines set up with corporate-friendly red hat - they're targeting average joes and josephines.
those cancerous, unamerican communists! they're destroying the IT industry!