My excuse is that I've been screwed by a trivial government mistake. In my case, it cost me a substantial amount of money at a vulnerable time when doing so could have meant I literally couldn't pay the rent, and it took months to clear up. In other words, my "faux outrage" isn't false at all, it's based on direct personal experience.
And that was "only money", though the implications at the time were serious. A similarly trivial mistake could easily result in someone being arrested and held for a considerable time, with all the long-term damage that causes even if ultimately released without charge. We know this has happened on literally thousands of occasions under the so-called anti-terrorism legislation.
If you think this is just paranoia and faux outrage, then I submit that you are the one with the problem here, not the rest of us.
They obviously have not gone after you. You are living counterevidence to your own point.
An interesting assumption on your part.
Actually, they demonstrably have gone after people for doing several things that I myself have done and that I consider perfectly reasonable behaviour. There, but for the grace of $DEITY, go I.
Purely mechanical instructions on how to do something destructive -- I'm skittish about this one.
Me too. That's restricting knowledge, and such knowledge probably has practical, legitimate applications for someone. Of course, one could also argue quite rationally that all knowledge is legitimate for its own sake, and that it is the acts one commits or does not commit using that knowledge that count.
I was actually thinking of things like serious deception (such as defamation that is wilfully damaging someone else's character, or providing professional advice when unqualified to do so) or incitement to commit a specific criminal act (such as asking someone to murder your adulterous wife). Even in the latter case, you inevitably walk a fine line: the UK government is now criminalising incitement to certain feelings, which is pretty much thoughtcrime.
I don't think the Internet is necessarily bad for professional writers. There is a trend, certainly among technical folks, to rely on blogs and wikis and the like for information, but I think that will pass. Just as politicians can get away with sound-bites for a while, so the technical audience will tire of reading the same 200-word blog posts with a somewhat rehashed idea of someone else's 200-word blog post, which was just a combination of a couple of ideas mentioned on a wiki they linked to anyway. People don't just read technical writing for a quick idea. They read it for some depth of understanding, an insightful explanation, clear examples, and countless other goals that Joe Amateur just can't satisfy with his 200 words of quickly and casually constructed blog post.
However, the Internet is going to be bad news for people who can't write for an Internet audience. You need a different writing style on-line. Most people don't sit down and read many screens of essay-like text all at once, nor do most people print such articles to read off-line. We can still have depth and insight and all that good stuff, but it has to be written the right way. It needs to be easy to scan. It needs to be organised in relatively short sections, or with other natural reading breaks that suit the material. There needs to be some effort put into effective presentation — and I don't mean turning every essay into a 3Gazzilibyte 1hour video interview, just because you can!
The Internet is also going to be bad news for bad writers. There are plenty of decent writers on the web, and more than enough excellent ones in technical fields. No-one needs to read paid-by-the-hour, padded-out-forever-to-bump-the-word-count text-that-goes-on-forever-pointlessly. Writers who have specialised in producing such text to satisfy their contracts are going to be out of luck.
The Internet is also going to be bad news for professional writers who occasionally write something really good, but mostly write filler. It is easy to link to a single article or blog post directly, and good work will typically be recognised as such. But if you want your home page to be the thing people think of, or you want people to subscribe to your blog, you're going to have to produce consistency. Sure, some work will always stand out from the everyday writing, even for the best author in the world. But no-one's getting famous for writing one article and then having nothing.
So the bottom line is, if you're a professional writer who can consistently produce worthwhile content with occasional really good stuff, and you can adapt your presentation to the medium, then there's no reason you can't be successful. If you're not a good writer, even if you once write a brilliant piece five years ago, or if you can't adapt your writing to the target audience, well, you're going to find fewer opportunities than you used to. It's not like writing books is going to die out (though writing for magazines is fast going that way), but the Internet is the ultimate meritocracy when it comes to content, so if you're not up to standard with enough material a cut above to get you noticed, this isn't the career for you.
Did he build a bomb? Did he threaten to use it? Did he do anything resembling a crime besides wanting to know something?
Actually, yes, he did plenty of other somewhat suspicious things, which taken in combination do not paint a pretty picture.
The question is why the presentation of this affair is all about the provocatively-titled text he had downloaded, not the other evidence, which paints a pretty unfortunate picture for the kid.
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security,
Actually, that's fair enough. For example, allowing blanket freedom of speech without any responsibility for the consequences is naive.
However, since the sort of thing described here is hardly in the interests of national security nor necessary in a democratic society, I fail to see how that exception applies.
Of course, with this government the Human Rights Act upholds a very important principle, except when it gets in the way of being heavy-handed and authoritarian, in which case it's just a criminal's charter and we should all ignore it.
As the current administration has so capably demonstrated, it has no qualms about going after anyone. There was a story just last week about armed police taking two disabled guys down to the station and questioning them because they had the audacity to sit outside their local pub having a drink, open an item of mail, and look at the (heavily armed) police officers nearby. They were just outside the Labour Party conference — the same event, IIRC, where an 82-year-old, long-time member of the party and Holocaust survivor was forcibly ejected a couple of years ago for daring to heckle the man who took us into a highly dubious war, and then preventing from re-entering under the same Terrorism Act referred to in this story, and the following day an elected MP's camera was wiped because he had taken pictures of the queues to get in. Apparently that individual has enough backing that the people are willing to elect him their representative and let him make law on their behalf, yet he can't be trusted with a couple of photos of his own. Was that security, or just trying to prevent politically damaging material leaking out?
Wow, I just protested against a government policy, they better put me in jail before I kill someone.
They would, but the jails are all overcrowded, so there just isn't space...
This all just sounds barmy to me. There was probably more information useful for bomb-making in my A-level chemistry textbook (which I read at the age of 17) than in the Anarchist's Cookbook. Perhaps we should arrest everyone studying chemistry (and presumably physics, engineering...). And anyway, what self-respecting geek didn't read some book or other with a similarly provocative title at that age?
There are words that describe attempting to keep knowledge from the population, and criminalising people just for reading or watching something. There are words that describe governments that do it, too. But I guess they only apply to the bad guys, and our government are obviously the good guys.
Actually, it is the FSF that has been trying to remove the use of 'free' in the context of a piece of software not having typical proprietary restrictions
/me glances at the expansion of FSF.
Hmm... Not sure they're going to have much luck there.:-)
But in any case, I wouldn't agree with them any more if they called it liberty, libre, or any other word that equates with freedom. They have a philosophy which is perfectly reasonable, and I'll be the last person to object to someone advocating something they believe in, but it is not "free" either in the financial or the unrestricted sense. The latter would be more like a BSD-style licence, IMHO, or simply releasing the source code into the public domain with no licence at all. The GPL imposes more restrictions than this, and while the intent may be to promote some more general concept of equity and long-term usefulness, the lack of pure freedom is becoming all too evident from the recent silly politics surrounding GPL2 vs. GPL3 and the like. This is all a separate issue to the matter at hand, however, so I don't suggest that we get stuck into terminology any more here.
I'm sorry if my original terminology wasn't clear. As far I know, the expression "killer app" normally implies something so important that people will switch platforms just to get it: that one must-have game on the new console, the particular graphics software that makes the professional choose a Mac...
The examples in my previous post weren't intended to be exhaustive, but they are the sort of thing that typical people care about. They are end-user applications. They do real, useful things. No business is going to move to a Linux platform just because it has apt-get, or bash. Probably nobody is going to move just to get KOffice or AbiWord or Gnumeric, either. But give Linux an office suite that makes MS Office look hard to use, has no risks of vendor lock-in, has close-enough compatibility with existing documents, isn't full of bugs that get in the way of doing real work, and has support for useful features Microsoft still haven't got right, and now you've got a killer app for business.
Similarly, nobody at home is going to move to Linux just because it has a decent CD player. Any fool can download a decent CD player for any major platform. But write a beautifully simple, one-size-fits-all media management suite that lets you manage all your music, photos, video, etc., in a single, coherent place, doesn't mess you around trying to find common codecs or with licensing issues and separate downloads, hooks straight into your digital camera, camcorder, TV tuner card and external PVR as well the usual DVD/CD player, integrates with photo-sharing web sites, converts formats, and stores all this data in a method that works conveniently with leading graphics, sound and video editing packages, and now you've got a killer app for home users who spend a lot of time working with digital media.
Nobody is going to move to Linux just to get funky 3D user interfaces. But people buy whole consoles just to get one particular game, so it's not a stretch that people might try out Linux if the next great game was written there.
I have never intentionally moved my goalposts in this discussion, though I concede that the phrase "killer app" was not unambiguous in my original post, and that the list last time might have sounded definitive. To be clear, I have always meant that there are no applications on Linux, in areas of wide interest at least, that are so much better than anything you can get on Windows that users will change operating system just to be able to use them.
I am talking about software being free in a purely financial sense.
I don't like twisting the language to fit anyone's marketing agenda, and the way the FSF use the word free strikes me as doing that, so I tend to avoid it.
We're still talking at cross purposes. My point isn't changing: it has always been that no matter how convenient, secure and user-friendly your system itself is, it must do things that users want for it to be useful. Home users want to send an e-mail to their friends, or use their favourite social networking site, or listen to their CD, or play a game to entertain themselves, or write a letter. Business users want to automate their business processes, keep records efficiently, produce necessary documents, and so on. Unless you can name me a specific, Linux-based application that can do one of these things so much better than what people already have on Windows that real people would make a real decision to use Linux instead purely because of that application, then you have no killer app and there is nowhere for this discussion to go.
"The article poster is about to discover a harsh reality of the open source model: if you give your software away, profit-making businesses aren't going to pay for it unless there's something else in there to sweeten the deal and the software is just a means to that end."
I would not bet on this. If a piece of software is central to a business, they will want reliable support before commiting to that software. A smart business might just hold off until professional contracted support is available.
Sure, but then you're getting more than just the software for your money. Having free software and selling related support services is a credible business model. Having free software yet expecting businesses to pay for that software alone is not.
As you note yourself, another plausible alternative is effectively to have a patron who provides your funding because it's in their interests, and share the software freely afterwards if it does neither of you any harm to do so.
I don't think it's the civil court's place, within the current legal systems in places like the US and UK. But the legal system as a whole should act as a deterrent. We live in a society where technically speaking mass copying can take place trivially, but legally speaking this is not allowed without permission. The idea that in such a context you can have the only legal protection of copyright be a civil court which can at most refund the identified losses in a specific case when someone's been caught breaking the law is a legal nonsense: there is no deterrent at all, and people can break the law with impunity knowing that at worst they will only have to pay what they should have paid in the first place.
First off, you really need to check SourceForge.net or FreshMeat.net first. There there are plenty of POS software projects listed at both.
And how many of them are the foundations for a successful business?
The article poster is about to discover a harsh reality of the open source model: if you give your software away, profit-making businesses aren't going to pay for it unless there's something else in there to sweeten the deal and the software is just a means to that end. If you're expecting to make money just by developing and supplying open source POS software, you've got the wrong business model, and your chances of failure are approximately 100%.
That's fortunate, because you've hardly started. In fact, most of your post just repeated earlier examples, which do not contradict my point for the reasons I explained before.
You've obviously not been following the discussion closely, because you included Firefox. For one thing, that is also available for Windows. For another, it's not just the rendering issues that are the problem. The Firefox world has lost the plot with the extensions recently, to the extent that basically my entire configuration on one machine was reset to defaults, by an update to an extension that I didn't even ask to install. In fact, I've uninstalled more than half of the extensions I've tried recently, in most cases because they just didn't work properly. So much for independent, small, high quality components, yada yada yada. And in any case, it's not like people on Windows have to use IE if they don't use Firefox. Opera, for one, is a perfectly good (and now free of charge) alternative for your average home user.
None of your other software examples is even close to being a killer app. Sure, you've got a couple of good media viewers/players, but people don't switch operating system just for one of those. You need something so good and so essential that people will be willing to choose Linux over Windows just because it has that one application. Right now, that only happens in reverse, and lists of toys like the one you posted only fix that in your denying mind.
With WGA enabled you have all your legitimate Windows users using IE7 (or at least having it installed, remember IE7's browser components are used throughout XP - help files, embedded in other apps..) but everyone pirating it still uses the previous versions with no security updates installed.
Not necessarily. My home machine is 100% legal and always has been, but I have declined to install IE7 for the simple reason that I maintain a web site and more of my visitors run IE6, so that's my default testing ground. Someone mentioned this thing about standards and problems with not following them, but I can't remember what it was...
(I use other browsers for my personal browsing, and just fire up IE for testing things. Since I haven't yet found a way to have both IE6 and IE7 installed on the same machine, and I have only one machine available, IE7 loses out for the reason above.)
Why do you think we should teach history from any personal viewpoint? In my opinion, the point of history is to learn, as accurately as possible, what did actually happen, not what one side's version. I realize that in practice, that's an unattainable ideal, but still an ideal I think we should strive towards.
Personally, I think trying to teach history in isolation is the problem.
You can't just teach history as facts. That misses much of the point of the subject. At the very least, you need to teach people to evaluate information from different sources in light of the credibility and inherent bias in those sources. Expose them to different points of view, and allow them to learn that there is rarely an absolute "true" version of events that we can be confident about.
But more than this, I wonder whether the subject shouldn't be presented at school level as part of a combination with other subjects such as ethics, philosophy, maybe even some basic politics and economics. While many of these subjects can be studied in detail in isolation, and indeed history can be studied purely out of interest, its benefit for many lies mostly in what it can teach us so that we can do better next time.
For example, it is no good pointing at the Crusades or the holocaust, and just presenting them in isolation. There is an underlying lesson about the power of religion and the danger of allowing it to be misused, which history teaches us time and again because we are too stupid to ever learn it properly. Perhaps if we did, we would be better placed to recognise and deal with the nutters of various religions who are screwing things up for people today.
Of course, history isn't all about bad stuff. On the happier side, perhaps if schoolkids were exposed to more examples of humanity's great advances and how they can bring people together, there would be more public support for ambitious new endeavours that could make the world a better place, more willingness to give things a fair try, more patience as the work is done, and less general cynicism about life.
I don't think you can convey any of this to children through mere repetition of facts and rote learning. Sure, you have to teach what happened, with due emphasis on quality of sources and conflicting reports. That's the basis for everything else. But it's only the basis. It's also important that kids learn to appreciate why some historical events are significant, and how we can learn from them.
Perhaps I didn't explain myself very well. I should have said useful applications. Of those you listed, I would only classify the first two as useful applications. Having security might be a good thing, but only if there's something useful you can do with your secure system. Being able to update things easily might be a good thing, but only if there's something useful to update. Running scripts is all very nice, but only if you have useful things to automate. You get the idea.
While you personally may state defiantly that you do not miss anything from Windows, I'm pretty sure a lot of business users would miss big name software like MS Office and the Adobe creative products, and even corporate monster software like SAP, not to mention the zillions of specialist business software products that have been built over the years and on which many businesses rely for their day-to-day operation. A lot of home users would miss the games too.
Say I stole a painting of your great grandmother (valuable to you, street value $25 for the frame). In my defense, I think it kinda resembles my great-grandmother which is why I took it. You sue me in small-claims and I lose. I would compensate you by either A) returning the painting or B) giving you some money to make up for the lost value (in the range of $20) or possibly both.
A penalty equivalent to the crime. Pretty simple and something we can all agree on.
We most certainly do not agree on that. The fact that the painting was only worth $25 on the street does not mean that it was worth only $25 to the original owner, for whom it may have had sentimental value. If damages are intended to compensate for loss suffered, then an award substantially higher than $25 is warranted in this case. The argument that no amount of money can compensate for a non-monetary loss, and therefore no additional compensation is due, is just a legal weasel argument attempting to justify something that is not justice. It is not the value of the painting to the thief that matters, but to the damaged party.
But how does that apply that to this case? There was no loss of property or the utility of the property. So, while she is guilty of copyright infringement, her penalty under something that would resemble common-law would be "delete the music from your computer and stop doing it!" No financial liability since their was no financial loss to the record company.
What?!
Firstly, your argument that there was no financial loss to the record company is as naive as the record company argument that every single copy represents a lost sale. It is an economic nonsense, and no matter how often this argument is repeated on Slashdot, it will still be an economic nonsense. It is also unethical to have a position where those who play by the rules subsidise those who do not. Any such system implicitly harms those who play by the rules, as can be readily seen by the fact that they pay more for the same thing, yet the system would not work at all if no-one played by the rules.
And in any case, your proposed penalty hardly makes a good deterrent, does it? How about, "If we catch you stealing our physical goods, you just have to give them back"? Or, "If we catch you driving so dangerously that you could easily kill someone, you just have to calm down and you can go on your way"? You can argue that this is a civil case and punitive damages are not appropriate, but again, this is legal weaselry to cover up the fact that you don't want this person to be punished despite the fact that they knowingly broke the law.
Thank you for that. As a viewer in the UK, I particularly appreciate how considerate you were to include the FBI warning and DMCA-related advice on every DVD I bought for the past year, and the way you ensured that I, too, couldn't accidentally miss this important and highly relevant information by locking it on my screen for 30 seconds. Your standard of customer care is truly in a class of its own, and you can be confident that I will take that fully into account when deciding about future purchases.
Slashdot Mirror
My excuse is that I've been screwed by a trivial government mistake. In my case, it cost me a substantial amount of money at a vulnerable time when doing so could have meant I literally couldn't pay the rent, and it took months to clear up. In other words, my "faux outrage" isn't false at all, it's based on direct personal experience.
And that was "only money", though the implications at the time were serious. A similarly trivial mistake could easily result in someone being arrested and held for a considerable time, with all the long-term damage that causes even if ultimately released without charge. We know this has happened on literally thousands of occasions under the so-called anti-terrorism legislation.
If you think this is just paranoia and faux outrage, then I submit that you are the one with the problem here, not the rest of us.
They obviously have not gone after you. You are living counterevidence to your own point.
An interesting assumption on your part.
Actually, they demonstrably have gone after people for doing several things that I myself have done and that I consider perfectly reasonable behaviour. There, but for the grace of $DEITY, go I.
Purely mechanical instructions on how to do something destructive -- I'm skittish about this one.
Me too. That's restricting knowledge, and such knowledge probably has practical, legitimate applications for someone. Of course, one could also argue quite rationally that all knowledge is legitimate for its own sake, and that it is the acts one commits or does not commit using that knowledge that count.
I was actually thinking of things like serious deception (such as defamation that is wilfully damaging someone else's character, or providing professional advice when unqualified to do so) or incitement to commit a specific criminal act (such as asking someone to murder your adulterous wife). Even in the latter case, you inevitably walk a fine line: the UK government is now criminalising incitement to certain feelings, which is pretty much thoughtcrime.
I don't think the Internet is necessarily bad for professional writers. There is a trend, certainly among technical folks, to rely on blogs and wikis and the like for information, but I think that will pass. Just as politicians can get away with sound-bites for a while, so the technical audience will tire of reading the same 200-word blog posts with a somewhat rehashed idea of someone else's 200-word blog post, which was just a combination of a couple of ideas mentioned on a wiki they linked to anyway. People don't just read technical writing for a quick idea. They read it for some depth of understanding, an insightful explanation, clear examples, and countless other goals that Joe Amateur just can't satisfy with his 200 words of quickly and casually constructed blog post.
However, the Internet is going to be bad news for people who can't write for an Internet audience. You need a different writing style on-line. Most people don't sit down and read many screens of essay-like text all at once, nor do most people print such articles to read off-line. We can still have depth and insight and all that good stuff, but it has to be written the right way. It needs to be easy to scan. It needs to be organised in relatively short sections, or with other natural reading breaks that suit the material. There needs to be some effort put into effective presentation — and I don't mean turning every essay into a 3Gazzilibyte 1hour video interview, just because you can!
The Internet is also going to be bad news for bad writers. There are plenty of decent writers on the web, and more than enough excellent ones in technical fields. No-one needs to read paid-by-the-hour, padded-out-forever-to-bump-the-word-count text-that-goes-on-forever-pointlessly. Writers who have specialised in producing such text to satisfy their contracts are going to be out of luck.
The Internet is also going to be bad news for professional writers who occasionally write something really good, but mostly write filler. It is easy to link to a single article or blog post directly, and good work will typically be recognised as such. But if you want your home page to be the thing people think of, or you want people to subscribe to your blog, you're going to have to produce consistency. Sure, some work will always stand out from the everyday writing, even for the best author in the world. But no-one's getting famous for writing one article and then having nothing.
So the bottom line is, if you're a professional writer who can consistently produce worthwhile content with occasional really good stuff, and you can adapt your presentation to the medium, then there's no reason you can't be successful. If you're not a good writer, even if you once write a brilliant piece five years ago, or if you can't adapt your writing to the target audience, well, you're going to find fewer opportunities than you used to. It's not like writing books is going to die out (though writing for magazines is fast going that way), but the Internet is the ultimate meritocracy when it comes to content, so if you're not up to standard with enough material a cut above to get you noticed, this isn't the career for you.
Did he build a bomb? Did he threaten to use it? Did he do anything resembling a crime besides wanting to know something?
Actually, yes, he did plenty of other somewhat suspicious things, which taken in combination do not paint a pretty picture.
The question is why the presentation of this affair is all about the provocatively-titled text he had downloaded, not the other evidence, which paints a pretty unfortunate picture for the kid.
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security,
Actually, that's fair enough. For example, allowing blanket freedom of speech without any responsibility for the consequences is naive.
However, since the sort of thing described here is hardly in the interests of national security nor necessary in a democratic society, I fail to see how that exception applies.
Of course, with this government the Human Rights Act upholds a very important principle, except when it gets in the way of being heavy-handed and authoritarian, in which case it's just a criminal's charter and we should all ignore it.
Aaarrgh.... too much paranoia.
It's only paranoia if they're not out to get you.
As the current administration has so capably demonstrated, it has no qualms about going after anyone. There was a story just last week about armed police taking two disabled guys down to the station and questioning them because they had the audacity to sit outside their local pub having a drink, open an item of mail, and look at the (heavily armed) police officers nearby. They were just outside the Labour Party conference — the same event, IIRC, where an 82-year-old, long-time member of the party and Holocaust survivor was forcibly ejected a couple of years ago for daring to heckle the man who took us into a highly dubious war, and then preventing from re-entering under the same Terrorism Act referred to in this story, and the following day an elected MP's camera was wiped because he had taken pictures of the queues to get in. Apparently that individual has enough backing that the people are willing to elect him their representative and let him make law on their behalf, yet he can't be trusted with a couple of photos of his own. Was that security, or just trying to prevent politically damaging material leaking out?
Wow, I just protested against a government policy, they better put me in jail before I kill someone.
They would, but the jails are all overcrowded, so there just isn't space...
This all just sounds barmy to me. There was probably more information useful for bomb-making in my A-level chemistry textbook (which I read at the age of 17) than in the Anarchist's Cookbook. Perhaps we should arrest everyone studying chemistry (and presumably physics, engineering...). And anyway, what self-respecting geek didn't read some book or other with a similarly provocative title at that age?
There are words that describe attempting to keep knowledge from the population, and criminalising people just for reading or watching something. There are words that describe governments that do it, too. But I guess they only apply to the bad guys, and our government are obviously the good guys.
Actually, it is the FSF that has been trying to remove the use of 'free' in the context of a piece of software not having typical proprietary restrictions
/me glances at the expansion of FSF.
Hmm... Not sure they're going to have much luck there. :-)
But in any case, I wouldn't agree with them any more if they called it liberty, libre, or any other word that equates with freedom. They have a philosophy which is perfectly reasonable, and I'll be the last person to object to someone advocating something they believe in, but it is not "free" either in the financial or the unrestricted sense. The latter would be more like a BSD-style licence, IMHO, or simply releasing the source code into the public domain with no licence at all. The GPL imposes more restrictions than this, and while the intent may be to promote some more general concept of equity and long-term usefulness, the lack of pure freedom is becoming all too evident from the recent silly politics surrounding GPL2 vs. GPL3 and the like. This is all a separate issue to the matter at hand, however, so I don't suggest that we get stuck into terminology any more here.
I'm sorry if my original terminology wasn't clear. As far I know, the expression "killer app" normally implies something so important that people will switch platforms just to get it: that one must-have game on the new console, the particular graphics software that makes the professional choose a Mac...
The examples in my previous post weren't intended to be exhaustive, but they are the sort of thing that typical people care about. They are end-user applications. They do real, useful things. No business is going to move to a Linux platform just because it has apt-get, or bash. Probably nobody is going to move just to get KOffice or AbiWord or Gnumeric, either. But give Linux an office suite that makes MS Office look hard to use, has no risks of vendor lock-in, has close-enough compatibility with existing documents, isn't full of bugs that get in the way of doing real work, and has support for useful features Microsoft still haven't got right, and now you've got a killer app for business.
Similarly, nobody at home is going to move to Linux just because it has a decent CD player. Any fool can download a decent CD player for any major platform. But write a beautifully simple, one-size-fits-all media management suite that lets you manage all your music, photos, video, etc., in a single, coherent place, doesn't mess you around trying to find common codecs or with licensing issues and separate downloads, hooks straight into your digital camera, camcorder, TV tuner card and external PVR as well the usual DVD/CD player, integrates with photo-sharing web sites, converts formats, and stores all this data in a method that works conveniently with leading graphics, sound and video editing packages, and now you've got a killer app for home users who spend a lot of time working with digital media.
Nobody is going to move to Linux just to get funky 3D user interfaces. But people buy whole consoles just to get one particular game, so it's not a stretch that people might try out Linux if the next great game was written there.
I have never intentionally moved my goalposts in this discussion, though I concede that the phrase "killer app" was not unambiguous in my original post, and that the list last time might have sounded definitive. To be clear, I have always meant that there are no applications on Linux, in areas of wide interest at least, that are so much better than anything you can get on Windows that users will change operating system just to be able to use them.
I am talking about software being free in a purely financial sense.
I don't like twisting the language to fit anyone's marketing agenda, and the way the FSF use the word free strikes me as doing that, so I tend to avoid it.
We're still talking at cross purposes. My point isn't changing: it has always been that no matter how convenient, secure and user-friendly your system itself is, it must do things that users want for it to be useful. Home users want to send an e-mail to their friends, or use their favourite social networking site, or listen to their CD, or play a game to entertain themselves, or write a letter. Business users want to automate their business processes, keep records efficiently, produce necessary documents, and so on. Unless you can name me a specific, Linux-based application that can do one of these things so much better than what people already have on Windows that real people would make a real decision to use Linux instead purely because of that application, then you have no killer app and there is nowhere for this discussion to go.
"The article poster is about to discover a harsh reality of the open source model: if you give your software away, profit-making businesses aren't going to pay for it unless there's something else in there to sweeten the deal and the software is just a means to that end."
I would not bet on this. If a piece of software is central to a business, they will want reliable support before commiting to that software. A smart business might just hold off until professional contracted support is available.
Sure, but then you're getting more than just the software for your money. Having free software and selling related support services is a credible business model. Having free software yet expecting businesses to pay for that software alone is not.
As you note yourself, another plausible alternative is effectively to have a patron who provides your funding because it's in their interests, and share the software freely afterwards if it does neither of you any harm to do so.
I don't think it's the civil court's place, within the current legal systems in places like the US and UK. But the legal system as a whole should act as a deterrent. We live in a society where technically speaking mass copying can take place trivially, but legally speaking this is not allowed without permission. The idea that in such a context you can have the only legal protection of copyright be a civil court which can at most refund the identified losses in a specific case when someone's been caught breaking the law is a legal nonsense: there is no deterrent at all, and people can break the law with impunity knowing that at worst they will only have to pay what they should have paid in the first place.
First off, you really need to check SourceForge.net or FreshMeat.net first. There there are plenty of POS software projects listed at both.
And how many of them are the foundations for a successful business?
The article poster is about to discover a harsh reality of the open source model: if you give your software away, profit-making businesses aren't going to pay for it unless there's something else in there to sweeten the deal and the software is just a means to that end. If you're expecting to make money just by developing and supplying open source POS software, you've got the wrong business model, and your chances of failure are approximately 100%.
I can keep this up.
That's fortunate, because you've hardly started. In fact, most of your post just repeated earlier examples, which do not contradict my point for the reasons I explained before.
You've obviously not been following the discussion closely, because you included Firefox. For one thing, that is also available for Windows. For another, it's not just the rendering issues that are the problem. The Firefox world has lost the plot with the extensions recently, to the extent that basically my entire configuration on one machine was reset to defaults, by an update to an extension that I didn't even ask to install. In fact, I've uninstalled more than half of the extensions I've tried recently, in most cases because they just didn't work properly. So much for independent, small, high quality components, yada yada yada. And in any case, it's not like people on Windows have to use IE if they don't use Firefox. Opera, for one, is a perfectly good (and now free of charge) alternative for your average home user.
None of your other software examples is even close to being a killer app. Sure, you've got a couple of good media viewers/players, but people don't switch operating system just for one of those. You need something so good and so essential that people will be willing to choose Linux over Windows just because it has that one application. Right now, that only happens in reverse, and lists of toys like the one you posted only fix that in your denying mind.
I have no idea. I've never seen an Interpol ad, in any language, on any DVD, from any source. Maybe they just don't like you?
Thanks, that looks very useful. I'll check it out.
With WGA enabled you have all your legitimate Windows users using IE7 (or at least having it installed, remember IE7's browser components are used throughout XP - help files, embedded in other apps..) but everyone pirating it still uses the previous versions with no security updates installed.
Not necessarily. My home machine is 100% legal and always has been, but I have declined to install IE7 for the simple reason that I maintain a web site and more of my visitors run IE6, so that's my default testing ground. Someone mentioned this thing about standards and problems with not following them, but I can't remember what it was...
(I use other browsers for my personal browsing, and just fire up IE for testing things. Since I haven't yet found a way to have both IE6 and IE7 installed on the same machine, and I have only one machine available, IE7 loses out for the reason above.)
Why do you think we should teach history from any personal viewpoint? In my opinion, the point of history is to learn, as accurately as possible, what did actually happen, not what one side's version. I realize that in practice, that's an unattainable ideal, but still an ideal I think we should strive towards.
Personally, I think trying to teach history in isolation is the problem.
You can't just teach history as facts. That misses much of the point of the subject. At the very least, you need to teach people to evaluate information from different sources in light of the credibility and inherent bias in those sources. Expose them to different points of view, and allow them to learn that there is rarely an absolute "true" version of events that we can be confident about.
But more than this, I wonder whether the subject shouldn't be presented at school level as part of a combination with other subjects such as ethics, philosophy, maybe even some basic politics and economics. While many of these subjects can be studied in detail in isolation, and indeed history can be studied purely out of interest, its benefit for many lies mostly in what it can teach us so that we can do better next time.
For example, it is no good pointing at the Crusades or the holocaust, and just presenting them in isolation. There is an underlying lesson about the power of religion and the danger of allowing it to be misused, which history teaches us time and again because we are too stupid to ever learn it properly. Perhaps if we did, we would be better placed to recognise and deal with the nutters of various religions who are screwing things up for people today.
Of course, history isn't all about bad stuff. On the happier side, perhaps if schoolkids were exposed to more examples of humanity's great advances and how they can bring people together, there would be more public support for ambitious new endeavours that could make the world a better place, more willingness to give things a fair try, more patience as the work is done, and less general cynicism about life.
I don't think you can convey any of this to children through mere repetition of facts and rote learning. Sure, you have to teach what happened, with due emphasis on quality of sources and conflicting reports. That's the basis for everything else. But it's only the basis. It's also important that kids learn to appreciate why some historical events are significant, and how we can learn from them.
Perhaps I didn't explain myself very well. I should have said useful applications. Of those you listed, I would only classify the first two as useful applications. Having security might be a good thing, but only if there's something useful you can do with your secure system. Being able to update things easily might be a good thing, but only if there's something useful to update. Running scripts is all very nice, but only if you have useful things to automate. You get the idea.
While you personally may state defiantly that you do not miss anything from Windows, I'm pretty sure a lot of business users would miss big name software like MS Office and the Adobe creative products, and even corporate monster software like SAP, not to mention the zillions of specialist business software products that have been built over the years and on which many businesses rely for their day-to-day operation. A lot of home users would miss the games too.
Say I stole a painting of your great grandmother (valuable to you, street value $25 for the frame). In my defense, I think it kinda resembles my great-grandmother which is why I took it. You sue me in small-claims and I lose. I would compensate you by either A) returning the painting or B) giving you some money to make up for the lost value (in the range of $20) or possibly both.
A penalty equivalent to the crime. Pretty simple and something we can all agree on.
We most certainly do not agree on that. The fact that the painting was only worth $25 on the street does not mean that it was worth only $25 to the original owner, for whom it may have had sentimental value. If damages are intended to compensate for loss suffered, then an award substantially higher than $25 is warranted in this case. The argument that no amount of money can compensate for a non-monetary loss, and therefore no additional compensation is due, is just a legal weasel argument attempting to justify something that is not justice. It is not the value of the painting to the thief that matters, but to the damaged party.
But how does that apply that to this case? There was no loss of property or the utility of the property. So, while she is guilty of copyright infringement, her penalty under something that would resemble common-law would be "delete the music from your computer and stop doing it!" No financial liability since their was no financial loss to the record company.
What?!
Firstly, your argument that there was no financial loss to the record company is as naive as the record company argument that every single copy represents a lost sale. It is an economic nonsense, and no matter how often this argument is repeated on Slashdot, it will still be an economic nonsense. It is also unethical to have a position where those who play by the rules subsidise those who do not. Any such system implicitly harms those who play by the rules, as can be readily seen by the fact that they pay more for the same thing, yet the system would not work at all if no-one played by the rules.
And in any case, your proposed penalty hardly makes a good deterrent, does it? How about, "If we catch you stealing our physical goods, you just have to give them back"? Or, "If we catch you driving so dangerously that you could easily kill someone, you just have to calm down and you can go on your way"? You can argue that this is a civil case and punitive damages are not appropriate, but again, this is legal weaselry to cover up the fact that you don't want this person to be punished despite the fact that they knowingly broke the law.
Thank you for that. As a viewer in the UK, I particularly appreciate how considerate you were to include the FBI warning and DMCA-related advice on every DVD I bought for the past year, and the way you ensured that I, too, couldn't accidentally miss this important and highly relevant information by locking it on my screen for 30 seconds. Your standard of customer care is truly in a class of its own, and you can be confident that I will take that fully into account when deciding about future purchases.
I use Vista on a daily basis and like it. What am I doing wrong?
That would be the "liking it" part. :-)
All circles are octogonal, for large values of eight.
Or if you use Excel 2007 to calculate the input data for your rendering...