The fundamental difference is that if you read the article at your friends house, you don't leave with the magazine. If you do then your friend no longer has the magazine either. It doesn't exist two places at once.
When you get into the electronic medium, things are simply different. The fact that you say 'I wasn't going to pay for it anyways' doesn't excuse theivery. Hell, MOST thieves who break into cars/houses aren't really going to actually buy any of the stuff they steal either. That's why their STEALING it.
Here it is in a nutshell, the movie/record producers produce a product that is valuable to a great many people. When you download a movie or MP3 you essentially are receiving that value at no cost. Just as the thief who stole my laptop last year received the VALUE of my laptop at no cost to him/herself. What your essentially saying is 'I don't value the music enough to spend $14 on the CD, but I DO Value it enough that if I can get it for free I will.' What about those who DO value the music enough to plop down $14? Now they too will tend to just download the music (it's free after all) without actually paying for it.
Fundamentally if you don't want to pay the cost of something, you have absolutely zero right to enjoy it. You may not want to spend $50 to get into Disney Land, but that doesn't give you the right to jump the fence to get in either.
I see that the legion of Slashdot Sysadmins gets up earlier than I do:)
The problem for me is actually not the system administrators. While they often have rather insane network policies and restrictions (that's a whole other Slashdot thread), they don't tend to impact me as a developer.
The bane of project development are the managers that are 'above' me on the corporate food chain.
My current job is a perfect example. When I began looking for a job, I purposely avoided big companies due to prior experience. The company I worked for started out quite small (I was the 5th employee I beleive), and was quite succesful. Our design tended to be fairly solid and we could move much faster than our competition was able to. A particularly memorable example occured when both ourselves and our primary competition (~40 employees on the project) began working on an identical feature. We delivered it in 3 months, they took a year.
Then we where bought up by a medium sized corporation, good benefits and they left us alone to keep doing what we do. That was great. Then we started dealing with larger companies who wanted to use our software. They came by and visited the company and decided to impose their corporate culture on us. Contracts required us to have a project manager, Q&A manager, etc.. The small company grew.
Now my days are spent rationalizing design decisions to my project manager, keeping the Q&A manager 'in the loop' to prepare for upcoming releases, and basically distracting myself from what I do best... develop software.
The point being, that the project management functions and Q&A functions where handled very well before the arrival of these new people. Our software was generally solid and delivered months ahead of time. The addition of these extra layers of administrators and managers turned an incredibly efficient company into a horribly inefficent one. We recently missed a delivery date for the first time since I've been here, and now our corporate owners are sending in MORE management to 'fix' the problems that 'they' created. Sick.
In the last 3 weeks alone I've heard of 4 different private file sharing networks. Just because they're being somewhat effective at ending widespread public sharing, there is a definite growth in the private file sharing arena. Fraternities, dorms, office workers, and almost any other similiar group are forming smaller networks of users, which is going to be VERY hard for the RIAA to fight.
It seems like one or two users are gathering content from (primarily) overseas file sharers and then making it available to their individual group. The current RIAA tactics don't work, because they simply don't have access to them.
This is actually a GOOD idea for any subscription service or monthly commitment. I've had my credit card rates cut, my satellite bill lowered, and many other things lowered all by threatening to cancel.
Even worse, there are pages out there that are just randomly creating pages based on dictionary words and then cross linking. I'm seeing these pages more and more, all with lots of ads and absolutely ZERO content.
While you qualify this 'especially for small projects', I feel that all projects (big or small) benefit from standard underpinnings when they are available. One of the absolute BIGGEST reasons to standardize on a open and free framework like Struts is a business buzzword known as 'knowledge management.'
It is MUCH easier to find a programmer familiar with Struts than it is to find one familiar with your framework. When you leave the company, move onto other projects, or (god/allah/diety of your choice forbid) are hit by a bus your proprietary framework now must be maintained by someone else. If you had used a standard framework to do the same thing, then you can easily go out and find a programmer who can more easily step in and fill that role.
There are, of course, lots of other benefits. When your framework has a bug, it requires your time to find and fix it. One open, free frameworks it's often fixed before you even know about it. When you have lots of developers working together on a mission critical piece (the framework), then your application benefits with only a small effort from you. The whole is MUCH greater than the sum of it's parts in this case.
The only caveat to this is knowing when a tool TRULY meets your needs. I'm a PalmOS C++ programmer (a rare beast:) ) and while there are a couple of nice C++ frameworks out there, neither begins to address the level of abstraction that I desired. I could have used them, but would have spent more time fighting the framework than I would from enjoying it's benefits. So I rolled my own. If there was a framework that truly met the needs of my application, I would have used it in a heartbeat. It sounds like the problem for your 'other groups' isn't the frameworks, but their inability to accurately understand how the framework fits into their product.
Who knows, maybe one day, democratic, affluent India and (dare I say it) China will be exporting their call-center and IT jobs back to the US.
Which would mirror what's happened in the car industry. It's been very interesting, but over the last few years so many of those auto jobs that where 'lost' to Japan and Korea have now returned.. this time it's those same Japanese and Korean auto makers actually building cars in the states. Turns out that it's cheaper and more efficient (the hallmarks of those companies after all) to simply build the cars in the U.S. to avoid having to transport them overseas.
The theory of 'localized globalism' is really starting to look more and more promising every day. Basically it states that as the overall wealth of the global economy increases, it will eventually become more desirable to localize the actual production of goods and execution of services. We've seen it in a number of different industries, all following this same pattern.
And how is discrimination based on social skills any different from discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or right-handedness? "Unpopular people need not apply"? Will they have you bring your high-school yearbook as references?
I can make a genuine good case that social skills play a VERY important role in what I do. I'm a programmer, working on large projects with many interconnected pieces. These pieces require interfaces that often have to be compromises between the 'best cases' of the two (or more) different components. When one programmer is incapable of communicating with the rest of the team, the product suffers. Plain and simple.. It's happened. We've had incredibly talented programmers who couldn't work with the rest of the team.. they no longer work here.
The difference between 'discrimination' based on social skills and ALL of those other criteria is that, in my mind, social skills are neccesary requisites for a job. Your argument is EXACTLY like saying 'How is discriminating based on athleticism in the NFL any different than....' I guess I should get in line and sue the NFL for ruining my football dream with those pesky physical standards.
I'm not asking for popular kids. I'm not even asking for the type of person that everyone can like (although I do prefer it), but I think it's completely reasonable that the people involved on projects be able to effectively communicate and work with everyone else. That, unfortunately, isn't true of every programmer I've ever met.
One of my all time favorite books on software engineering is titled 'antipatterns', it literally contains dozens of examples of what NOT to do in writing software.
This book, in combination with books that describe best practices (Design Patterns springs to mind) has made me a better engineer by giving me perspective on both sides of the fence. I don't see why this would be any different. Experience (both good and bad) is vital to success in almost any profession. Books like this allow managers to gain experience (through the eyes of others) of the negative kind.
It turns out that most of the managers in this book aren't stupid. Most of them are quite smart. It's that they didn't see the whole business, or properly weigh all of the variables before making decisions. Books like this allow managers who might make the same mistake to avoid it by falling back on the collective experience detailed in this title.
Funny, but unfortunately not exactly accurate. Copyright Infringement is (not yet anyways) a crime. You don't go to jail when you break copyright. It's a civil action only.
I love this particular argument, because it sounds incredibly profound but doesn't MEAN anything.
The 'technically oriented' are users just like anyone else. I've been using computers my entire life, and yes I make my living as a software developer. Yet I don't think I see the fundamental way I interface with the machine as being any different than anyone else. I may approach things a little more logically (thanks to my training), but I'm more like the average user than different.
The real problem to me is simple. The more experienced you become with computers,the more accustomed you become to spotting familiar patterns. Different button layouts, scroll bar positions, and (horrors) tab layouts become familiar. I find that I can pretty quickly pick up even the most poorly designed UI. For me it's a matter of patter recognition. I've seen the same bad design before, eventually figured it out and as such can much more easily make this new bad design work.
I think a lot of bad UI design comes from experienced users who have let bad design become so familiar that they see it as the 'standard' way of handling various problems. For a prime example, see the incredible over use of tabbed interfaces.. at this point we're all pretty familiar with tabs and can discern their meaning pretty quickly, even if the actual POINT of tabs (they're supposed to be ordered after all) has long been lost.
The novice/average user doesn't have this wealth of experience to fall back on. They are in the early part of the learning curve where they have to try and make sense of it all with very little in prior experience to guide them. To them your average Linux app is almost to complex for words.
This is precisely why Apple, Palm, Microsoft, and other OS vendors have embraced style guide lines. They preach over and over again that all applications should adhere to a standard set of guidelines which are designed to greatly improve the speed with which users can develop this pattern recognition. If 'Ok/Cancel' are always in the same place and always mean the same thing, then there is only 1 pattern to learn. If different components are used in consistent manners and in consistent locations the user will have a MUCH easier time moving between applications. This is why UI standards are so important, and is the one place where the 'bazaar' seems to fall flats on its face. We need some kind of incentive for application developers to adhere to standards, or give birth to a new breed of hackers whose contributions to products are all about getting them UI compliant with everyone else.
This is also the main reason I would like to see a unified desktop. With a standard look and more importantly with a standard set of components and guidelines on how to use them.
The amount of money MC/Visa stand to lose is a drop in the bucket. We've seen time and time again these companies trade a few bucks for their public image.
The bread and butter of the credit companies lies in standard retail purchases.. The idea here is that by exerting pressure on the credit card companies you can cut spam off at the source (the companies who finance it in the first place), as their lifeblood is most definitely in credit card purchases. In other words, they have much more to lose than MC/Visa do. At the same time it exerts tremendous pressure on the middle men who create these accounts in the first place.. they MOST DEFINITELY need the support of the credit card companies or they don't have a livelehood.
Assuming the fundamental thesis is true (these companies are in fact breaking the law with spam), this is the most plausible plan of attack I've seen yet.
How else do you expect this to work? JBoss is going to cover the costs of lawsuits for those that never contributed to JBoss the company in the first place?
JBoss is 'free', and if you choose to use in the 'free beer' sense then you take on the risk of dealing with lawsuits. That's pefectly in keeping with the ideology of open source.. with freedom comes responsibility, and by taking advantage of something that is free you assume the risk of whatever comes out of that.
If you choose to use JBoss the group, then they will guarantee you that it won't end up costing you lawsuit money if the lawyers come knocking. The code is free, the project is free, but the group that is using the project as a business is not. They charge money because this is how they make their living. Indemnification is just one more value-add that the JBoss commercial entity provides, and it's a good one in my opinion.
I beleive Warcraft 3 had pre-ordered at a million plus.
There are several fallacies here, and as a member of the game industry I'm more than happy to clear them up.
Also game writers are generally paid better then musicians.
Uhm.. sure. While I make a good salary, it's a fraction of what a commercially published musician generally makes. While they only see pennies on every CD sold.. those pennies add up really quickly. They have to afford all of that 'bling bling' somehow. Fact is, Game writers are generally paid about the going rate for software developers in whatever area they are in.
Game writer seldom get royalties, unless they have a stake in the company. I would love to get a royalty on software I have written, man I could retire.
Most game COMPANIES are paid almost solely in royalties. Most projects I have worked on had 'advances' from the publisher at certain milestones, with a ~9-12% take of the publishers net. That generally comes out to be something like $1.50 a box. So the royalty is pretty small considering the amount of time and effort put into making a game. For companies more closely associated with the publisher (such as Tiburon with EA) the deals are a little bit better.
The fact is, a ton of time and effort goes into making music AND making games. What most people fail to realize is that a lot of hours go into the music production process. It's not as simple as a band getting together over a weekend and recording a few tunes. It involves pre/post production and a lot of people throughout the process. All of these people have to get paid.. I do agree that CD's are over priced, mainly because of the amount of collusion that goes on in the music industry. There is nothing resembling competition, yet when pressed the music industry THEMSELVES will admit that they could easily shave a few bucks off of every CD.
At the same time games are actually probably to cheap. For the millions of dollars that go into a title, the rewards are rarely in line with the effort put forth. Succesful game companies are going under (looking glass springs to mind), even after publishing quality games. I know that a lot of development houses are looking for alternatives, hopefully we will find some.
You wouldn't condemn a man for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, would you?
I would condemn him for stealing a CD. Which is what he's doing here. Actually, come to think of it, I would condemn him for stealing bread as well (there are lawful ways to feed your family after all).. but that's another debate.
The price of CD's is not an excuse. The quality of the music is not an excuse. The monopolistic control is not an excuse. Stealing is stealing. If you really want to make a statement, visit the bajillion websites for 'alternative' bands on the Internet.. most of whom will gladly give you a track or two for free. Listen, decide if you like it, and support THOSE bands directly. That's the legal alternative.. If this was really about undermining the RIAA, then taking your EARS elsewhere is the way to do it. Alas, I think this is mostly about getting music that you would rather not pay for, for free. You can try to rationalize it however you'd like. That's what it comes down to.
I do not support the 'music industry' at all. I haven't purchased a CD in close to 5 years. I haven't listened to a music radio station in nearly as long. Instead I support the local Dallas bands (the Sparrows are my current favorite), buy their music and attend their shows. I find the music to be better and the terms much more reasonable. The best part is, it's completely legal. I just don't get why everyone feels the need to rationlize stealing, when such great alternatives exist.
So.. why not be the CEO then? If it's so easy to do, why isn't everyone doing it? Part of the skill isn't just in the work required to BE a CEO, but the fairly diverse skill set required to BECOME one in the first place.
If you don't like the system.. work hard, take a few risks, and create a succesful company that YOU can run. Then you can pass commentary about these people.
The reality is that most CEO's are truly good people. They work hard, and work to make their companies as good as possible. Sure they are compensated quite well, but I've never held anyones pay against them (no matter if it is higher or lower than mine).
What about things like the new Tivo home media thingie? Can't you effectively 'share' movies across the various Tivo receivers in your home with that? Are we gonna ship all Tivo users off to jail?
At what point does the network become large enough that you are breaking this law? If I share it on my home network? What about at work? What about at school?
The behavior of those swapping the movies would suggest that there is great value in it.
In college (I finished in 2001) I knew many many kids who would spend hours of every day trying to find new releases. It was an obsession. To be the first one to get ahold of the next big movie was the goal. All for the satisfaction of being able to say 'I already saw that.. it sucked' days before the movie opened. They craved being 'in the know' above everyone else.
That made these movies incredibly valuable to this group. The legisaltor quoted is exactly right, people do derive great value from these movies. Why else would so many of them invest huge amounts of time and money (DVD burners, high speed connections, etc..) primarily to get these works?
It seems very simple to me.. you can judge the general value of anything by the lengths people will go to get it (See: Water and food when there isn't any left). People go to great lengths to get these movies..
Your wrong. I bought redhat 9.1 two days before they made that announcement. It's installed on a fairly critical machine for me at work. I'm not a professional sys-admin (i'm a Programmer), but this is still a very important machine for us.
It's hard to explain to my bosses (who haven't been sold on this Linux idea to begin with) that the company we bought the software from has decided that it will only exist for another few months. Instead reccomending that we should buy yet another..MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE package instead.
My sell job consisted of A) It's much cheaper and B) A distribution such as Redhat provides vendor stability and long term upgradibility (updates and security fixes).
Two days later I find out that it's all gone in April. That's just peachy. I DO feel betrayed... and I have a very displeased boss to boot.
I can name ONE software company that I'm quite positive takes these reports quite seriously. We don't reward these people with cease and desist letters, but free copies of our software for life. We also take EVERY report investigate and fix anything we can verify as legitimate security holes.
There is fundamentally HUGE incentive for someone outside of the battery companies to do it. They've been working on it for years. This isn't for the lack of effort, just the lack of results.
These are not questions that Microsoft wants to raise. We've finally forced their hands, and for once I'm excited.
This is the opportunity for community leaders to finally start talking about the FUNDAMENTAL architecture differences between Windows and Unix variants that allow security issues to be contained (permissions/groups). It allows us to talk about the superior response time in fixing exploits, as well as the power of open coding in spotting them in the first place.
I think this type of FUD campaign aimed directly at our biggest (relative) strength is exactly what I've wanted for a very long time. It's an opening to get Linux onto the desktop.
In particular the performance comparisons between Word on the two different Machines. Word is a COMPLETELY seperate product with minimal code-in-common between the two platforms. Even the binary file format they save to is slightly different. What this basically shows is that Word on Windows is much more optimized than it is on the Mac. Shocking. You can likely make the same statement about the Premiere/Photoshop comparisons (although I know very little about those projects).
I'm not sure what is going on with the Premiere tests, there is definitely something of interest there.
These tests show how well one application runs in comparison to another on the two platforms. Notice that the performance winners where all over the place even among the PC models... I also question the accuracy of a PC Magazine with a stopwatch in hand.
Just to much in this article that makes me say 'uhuh'.
Disclaimer: I'm a PC hardware user, running Linux. Not a particular Mac fan... Just know statistical manipulation when I see it (well someties).
FUD. The Internet is far from being under the control of the U.S.
In most ways it's under the control of wherever the lines happen to run.
Examples:
--China has no problem effectively blocking 3/4 of the Internet from viewing.
--Germany/France have effectively censored certain portions of the net.
--Many countries have unique top level domains hosted within their countries.
The list goes on...
The point being, while the U.S. is definitely HEAVILY involved in the development, maintenence, and overall culture of the Internet (not surprising given the history of the network) it also far from being in any real control of it. Certain members of the U.S. government would like us to sieze control through a variety of means (primarily applying economic pressure to other countries), none of it has been particularly succesful (it turns out that most politicians A) don't care or B) 'get it').
Slashdot Mirror
The fundamental difference is that if you read the article at your friends house, you don't leave with the magazine. If you do then your friend no longer has the magazine either. It doesn't exist two places at once.
When you get into the electronic medium, things are simply different. The fact that you say 'I wasn't going to pay for it anyways' doesn't excuse theivery. Hell, MOST thieves who break into cars/houses aren't really going to actually buy any of the stuff they steal either. That's why their STEALING it.
Here it is in a nutshell, the movie/record producers produce a product that is valuable to a great many people. When you download a movie or MP3 you essentially are receiving that value at no cost. Just as the thief who stole my laptop last year received the VALUE of my laptop at no cost to him/herself. What your essentially saying is 'I don't value the music enough to spend $14 on the CD, but I DO Value it enough that if I can get it for free I will.' What about those who DO value the music enough to plop down $14? Now they too will tend to just download the music (it's free after all) without actually paying for it.
Fundamentally if you don't want to pay the cost of something, you have absolutely zero right to enjoy it. You may not want to spend $50 to get into Disney Land, but that doesn't give you the right to jump the fence to get in either.
I see that the legion of Slashdot Sysadmins gets up earlier than I do:)
The problem for me is actually not the system administrators. While they often have rather insane network policies and restrictions (that's a whole other Slashdot thread), they don't tend to impact me as a developer.
The bane of project development are the managers that are 'above' me on the corporate food chain.
My current job is a perfect example. When I began looking for a job, I purposely avoided big companies due to prior experience. The company I worked for started out quite small (I was the 5th employee I beleive), and was quite succesful. Our design tended to be fairly solid and we could move much faster than our competition was able to. A particularly memorable example occured when both ourselves and our primary competition (~40 employees on the project) began working on an identical feature. We delivered it in 3 months, they took a year.
Then we where bought up by a medium sized corporation, good benefits and they left us alone to keep doing what we do. That was great. Then we started dealing with larger companies who wanted to use our software. They came by and visited the company and decided to impose their corporate culture on us. Contracts required us to have a project manager, Q&A manager, etc.. The small company grew.
Now my days are spent rationalizing design decisions to my project manager, keeping the Q&A manager 'in the loop' to prepare for upcoming releases, and basically distracting myself from what I do best... develop software.
The point being, that the project management functions and Q&A functions where handled very well before the arrival of these new people. Our software was generally solid and delivered months ahead of time. The addition of these extra layers of administrators and managers turned an incredibly efficient company into a horribly inefficent one. We recently missed a delivery date for the first time since I've been here, and now our corporate owners are sending in MORE management to 'fix' the problems that 'they' created. Sick.
In the last 3 weeks alone I've heard of 4 different private file sharing networks. Just because they're being somewhat effective at ending widespread public sharing, there is a definite growth in the private file sharing arena. Fraternities, dorms, office workers, and almost any other similiar group are forming smaller networks of users, which is going to be VERY hard for the RIAA to fight.
It seems like one or two users are gathering content from (primarily) overseas file sharers and then making it available to their individual group. The current RIAA tactics don't work, because they simply don't have access to them.
This is actually a GOOD idea for any subscription service or monthly commitment. I've had my credit card rates cut, my satellite bill lowered, and many other things lowered all by threatening to cancel.
Even worse, there are pages out there that are just randomly creating pages based on dictionary words and then cross linking. I'm seeing these pages more and more, all with lots of ads and absolutely ZERO content.
While you qualify this 'especially for small projects', I feel that all projects (big or small) benefit from standard underpinnings when they are available. One of the absolute BIGGEST reasons to standardize on a open and free framework like Struts is a business buzzword known as 'knowledge management.'
It is MUCH easier to find a programmer familiar with Struts than it is to find one familiar with your framework. When you leave the company, move onto other projects, or (god/allah/diety of your choice forbid) are hit by a bus your proprietary framework now must be maintained by someone else. If you had used a standard framework to do the same thing, then you can easily go out and find a programmer who can more easily step in and fill that role.
There are, of course, lots of other benefits. When your framework has a bug, it requires your time to find and fix it. One open, free frameworks it's often fixed before you even know about it. When you have lots of developers working together on a mission critical piece (the framework), then your application benefits with only a small effort from you. The whole is MUCH greater than the sum of it's parts in this case.
The only caveat to this is knowing when a tool TRULY meets your needs. I'm a PalmOS C++ programmer (a rare beast:) ) and while there are a couple of nice C++ frameworks out there, neither begins to address the level of abstraction that I desired. I could have used them, but would have spent more time fighting the framework than I would from enjoying it's benefits. So I rolled my own. If there was a framework that truly met the needs of my application, I would have used it in a heartbeat. It sounds like the problem for your 'other groups' isn't the frameworks, but their inability to accurately understand how the framework fits into their product.
Who knows, maybe one day, democratic, affluent India and (dare I say it) China will be exporting their call-center and IT jobs back to the US.
Which would mirror what's happened in the car industry. It's been very interesting, but over the last few years so many of those auto jobs that where 'lost' to Japan and Korea have now returned.. this time it's those same Japanese and Korean auto makers actually building cars in the states. Turns out that it's cheaper and more efficient (the hallmarks of those companies after all) to simply build the cars in the U.S. to avoid having to transport them overseas.
The theory of 'localized globalism' is really starting to look more and more promising every day. Basically it states that as the overall wealth of the global economy increases, it will eventually become more desirable to localize the actual production of goods and execution of services. We've seen it in a number of different industries, all following this same pattern.
And how is discrimination based on social skills any different from discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or right-handedness?
"Unpopular people need not apply"? Will they have you bring your high-school yearbook as references?
I can make a genuine good case that social skills play a VERY important role in what I do. I'm a programmer, working on large projects with many interconnected pieces. These pieces require interfaces that often have to be compromises between the 'best cases' of the two (or more) different components. When one programmer is incapable of communicating with the rest of the team, the product suffers. Plain and simple.. It's happened. We've had incredibly talented programmers who couldn't work with the rest of the team.. they no longer work here.
The difference between 'discrimination' based on social skills and ALL of those other criteria is that, in my mind, social skills are neccesary requisites for a job. Your argument is EXACTLY like saying 'How is discriminating based on athleticism in the NFL any different than....' I guess I should get in line and sue the NFL for ruining my football dream with those pesky physical standards.
I'm not asking for popular kids. I'm not even asking for the type of person that everyone can like (although I do prefer it), but I think it's completely reasonable that the people involved on projects be able to effectively communicate and work with everyone else. That, unfortunately, isn't true of every programmer I've ever met.
One of my all time favorite books on software engineering is titled 'antipatterns', it literally contains dozens of examples of what NOT to do in writing software.
This book, in combination with books that describe best practices (Design Patterns springs to mind) has made me a better engineer by giving me perspective on both sides of the fence. I don't see why this would be any different. Experience (both good and bad) is vital to success in almost any profession. Books like this allow managers to gain experience (through the eyes of others) of the negative kind.
It turns out that most of the managers in this book aren't stupid. Most of them are quite smart. It's that they didn't see the whole business, or properly weigh all of the variables before making decisions. Books like this allow managers who might make the same mistake to avoid it by falling back on the collective experience detailed in this title.
Funny, but unfortunately not exactly accurate. Copyright Infringement is (not yet anyways) a crime. You don't go to jail when you break copyright. It's a civil action only.
I love this particular argument, because it sounds incredibly profound but doesn't MEAN anything.
,the more accustomed you become to spotting familiar patterns. Different button layouts, scroll bar positions, and (horrors) tab layouts become familiar. I find that I can pretty quickly pick up even the most poorly designed UI. For me it's a matter of patter recognition. I've seen the same bad design before, eventually figured it out and as such can much more easily make this new bad design work.
The 'technically oriented' are users just like anyone else. I've been using computers my entire life, and yes I make my living as a software developer. Yet I don't think I see the fundamental way I interface with the machine as being any different than anyone else. I may approach things a little more logically (thanks to my training), but I'm more like the average user than different.
The real problem to me is simple. The more experienced you become with computers
I think a lot of bad UI design comes from experienced users who have let bad design become so familiar that they see it as the 'standard' way of handling various problems. For a prime example, see the incredible over use of tabbed interfaces.. at this point we're all pretty familiar with tabs and can discern their meaning pretty quickly, even if the actual POINT of tabs (they're supposed to be ordered after all) has long been lost.
The novice/average user doesn't have this wealth of experience to fall back on. They are in the early part of the learning curve where they have to try and make sense of it all with very little in prior experience to guide them. To them your average Linux app is almost to complex for words.
This is precisely why Apple, Palm, Microsoft, and other OS vendors have embraced style guide lines. They preach over and over again that all applications should adhere to a standard set of guidelines which are designed to greatly improve the speed with which users can develop this pattern recognition. If 'Ok/Cancel' are always in the same place and always mean the same thing, then there is only 1 pattern to learn. If different components are used in consistent manners and in consistent locations the user will have a MUCH easier time moving between applications. This is why UI standards are so important, and is the one place where the 'bazaar' seems to fall flats on its face. We need some kind of incentive for application developers to adhere to standards, or give birth to a new breed of hackers whose contributions to products are all about getting them UI compliant with everyone else.
This is also the main reason I would like to see a unified desktop. With a standard look and more importantly with a standard set of components and guidelines on how to use them.
The amount of money MC/Visa stand to lose is a drop in the bucket. We've seen time and time again these companies trade a few bucks for their public image.
The bread and butter of the credit companies lies in standard retail purchases.. The idea here is that by exerting pressure on the credit card companies you can cut spam off at the source (the companies who finance it in the first place), as their lifeblood is most definitely in credit card purchases. In other words, they have much more to lose than MC/Visa do. At the same time it exerts tremendous pressure on the middle men who create these accounts in the first place.. they MOST DEFINITELY need the support of the credit card companies or they don't have a livelehood.
Assuming the fundamental thesis is true (these companies are in fact breaking the law with spam), this is the most plausible plan of attack I've seen yet.
How else do you expect this to work? JBoss is going to cover the costs of lawsuits for those that never contributed to JBoss the company in the first place?
JBoss is 'free', and if you choose to use in the 'free beer' sense then you take on the risk of dealing with lawsuits. That's pefectly in keeping with the ideology of open source.. with freedom comes responsibility, and by taking advantage of something that is free you assume the risk of whatever comes out of that.
If you choose to use JBoss the group, then they will guarantee you that it won't end up costing you lawsuit money if the lawyers come knocking. The code is free, the project is free, but the group that is using the project as a business is not. They charge money because this is how they make their living. Indemnification is just one more value-add that the JBoss commercial entity provides, and it's a good one in my opinion.
I beleive Warcraft 3 had pre-ordered at a million plus.
There are several fallacies here, and as a member of the game industry I'm more than happy to clear them up.
Also game writers are generally paid better then musicians.
Uhm.. sure. While I make a good salary, it's a fraction of what a commercially published musician generally makes. While they only see pennies on every CD sold.. those pennies add up really quickly. They have to afford all of that 'bling bling' somehow. Fact is, Game writers are generally paid about the going rate for software developers in whatever area they are in.
Game writer seldom get royalties, unless they have a stake in the company. I would love to get a royalty on software I have written, man I could retire.
Most game COMPANIES are paid almost solely in royalties. Most projects I have worked on had 'advances' from the publisher at certain milestones, with a ~9-12% take of the publishers net. That generally comes out to be something like $1.50 a box. So the royalty is pretty small considering the amount of time and effort put into making a game. For companies more closely associated with the publisher (such as Tiburon with EA) the deals are a little bit better.
The fact is, a ton of time and effort goes into making music AND making games. What most people fail to realize is that a lot of hours go into the music production process. It's not as simple as a band getting together over a weekend and recording a few tunes. It involves pre/post production and a lot of people throughout the process. All of these people have to get paid.. I do agree that CD's are over priced, mainly because of the amount of collusion that goes on in the music industry. There is nothing resembling competition, yet when pressed the music industry THEMSELVES will admit that they could easily shave a few bucks off of every CD.
At the same time games are actually probably to cheap. For the millions of dollars that go into a title, the rewards are rarely in line with the effort put forth. Succesful game companies are going under (looking glass springs to mind), even after publishing quality games. I know that a lot of development houses are looking for alternatives, hopefully we will find some.
You wouldn't condemn a man for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, would you?
I would condemn him for stealing a CD. Which is what he's doing here. Actually, come to think of it, I would condemn him for stealing bread as well (there are lawful ways to feed your family after all).. but that's another debate.
The price of CD's is not an excuse. The quality of the music is not an excuse. The monopolistic control is not an excuse. Stealing is stealing. If you really want to make a statement, visit the bajillion websites for 'alternative' bands on the Internet.. most of whom will gladly give you a track or two for free. Listen, decide if you like it, and support THOSE bands directly. That's the legal alternative.. If this was really about undermining the RIAA, then taking your EARS elsewhere is the way to do it. Alas, I think this is mostly about getting music that you would rather not pay for, for free. You can try to rationalize it however you'd like. That's what it comes down to.
I do not support the 'music industry' at all. I haven't purchased a CD in close to 5 years. I haven't listened to a music radio station in nearly as long. Instead I support the local Dallas bands (the Sparrows are my current favorite), buy their music and attend their shows. I find the music to be better and the terms much more reasonable. The best part is, it's completely legal. I just don't get why everyone feels the need to rationlize stealing, when such great alternatives exist.
So.. why not be the CEO then? If it's so easy to do, why isn't everyone doing it? Part of the skill isn't just in the work required to BE a CEO, but the fairly diverse skill set required to BECOME one in the first place.
If you don't like the system.. work hard, take a few risks, and create a succesful company that YOU can run. Then you can pass commentary about these people.
The reality is that most CEO's are truly good people. They work hard, and work to make their companies as good as possible. Sure they are compensated quite well, but I've never held anyones pay against them (no matter if it is higher or lower than mine).
Interesting...
What about things like the new Tivo home media thingie? Can't you effectively 'share' movies across the various Tivo receivers in your home with that? Are we gonna ship all Tivo users off to jail?
At what point does the network become large enough that you are breaking this law? If I share it on my home network? What about at work? What about at school?
Lots of questions here.
The behavior of those swapping the movies would suggest that there is great value in it.
In college (I finished in 2001) I knew many many kids who would spend hours of every day trying to find new releases. It was an obsession. To be the first one to get ahold of the next big movie was the goal. All for the satisfaction of being able to say 'I already saw that.. it sucked' days before the movie opened. They craved being 'in the know' above everyone else.
That made these movies incredibly valuable to this group. The legisaltor quoted is exactly right, people do derive great value from these movies. Why else would so many of them invest huge amounts of time and money (DVD burners, high speed connections, etc..) primarily to get these works?
It seems very simple to me.. you can judge the general value of anything by the lengths people will go to get it (See: Water and food when there isn't any left). People go to great lengths to get these movies..
Why should I trust Redhat to continue providing Enterprise support when another hot new niche becomes available to them?
I feel like a peoplesoft customer, who are facing the loss of huge investments in time and money if Oracle succeeds in buying them out.
Your wrong. I bought redhat 9.1 two days before they made that announcement. It's installed on a fairly critical machine for me at work. I'm not a professional sys-admin (i'm a Programmer), but this is still a very important machine for us.
It's hard to explain to my bosses (who haven't been sold on this Linux idea to begin with) that the company we bought the software from has decided that it will only exist for another few months. Instead reccomending that we should buy yet another..MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE package instead.
My sell job consisted of A) It's much cheaper and B) A distribution such as Redhat provides vendor stability and long term upgradibility (updates and security fixes).
Two days later I find out that it's all gone in April. That's just peachy. I DO feel betrayed... and I have a very displeased boss to boot.
Not true not true...
I can name ONE software company that I'm quite positive takes these reports quite seriously. We don't reward these people with cease and desist letters, but free copies of our software for life. We also take EVERY report investigate and fix anything we can verify as legitimate security holes.
There is fundamentally HUGE incentive for someone outside of the battery companies to do it. They've been working on it for years. This isn't for the lack of effort, just the lack of results.
These are not questions that Microsoft wants to raise. We've finally forced their hands, and for once I'm excited.
This is the opportunity for community leaders to finally start talking about the FUNDAMENTAL architecture differences between Windows and Unix variants that allow security issues to be contained (permissions/groups). It allows us to talk about the superior response time in fixing exploits, as well as the power of open coding in spotting them in the first place.
I think this type of FUD campaign aimed directly at our biggest (relative) strength is exactly what I've wanted for a very long time. It's an opening to get Linux onto the desktop.
These are stupid benchmarks.
In particular the performance comparisons between Word on the two different Machines. Word is a COMPLETELY seperate product with minimal code-in-common between the two platforms. Even the binary file format they save to is slightly different. What this basically shows is that Word on Windows is much more optimized than it is on the Mac. Shocking. You can likely make the same statement about the Premiere/Photoshop comparisons (although I know very little about those projects).
I'm not sure what is going on with the Premiere tests, there is definitely something of interest there.
These tests show how well one application runs in comparison to another on the two platforms. Notice that the performance winners where all over the place even among the PC models... I also question the accuracy of a PC Magazine with a stopwatch in hand.
Just to much in this article that makes me say 'uhuh'.
Disclaimer: I'm a PC hardware user, running Linux. Not a particular Mac fan... Just know statistical manipulation when I see it (well someties).
FUD. The Internet is far from being under the control of the U.S.
In most ways it's under the control of wherever the lines happen to run.
Examples:
--China has no problem effectively blocking 3/4 of the Internet from viewing.
--Germany/France have effectively censored certain portions of the net.
--Many countries have unique top level domains hosted within their countries.
The list goes on...
The point being, while the U.S. is definitely HEAVILY involved in the development, maintenence, and overall culture of the Internet (not surprising given the history of the network) it also far from being in any real control of it. Certain members of the U.S. government would like us to sieze control through a variety of means (primarily applying economic pressure to other countries), none of it has been particularly succesful (it turns out that most politicians A) don't care or B) 'get it').