That's at the bottom of Slashdot. Even though I own the comments, I cannot peruse or download all of my posts that Slashdot may have stored. It would be pretty nice to have that, and if Slashdot cannot be moved to provide it, a regulation to motivate that sounds good to me.
Yep. And, as I pointed out a few months ago on another FB bashing story, at least FB gives you the option to delete your account*. Slashdot does not.
* I know, who knows what they're doing with the data behind the scenes, never really deleted, blah blah blah. At least it's somewhat obscured or erased from public view.
Before the onslaught of a slew of "and nothing was lost" comments inspired by a mention only of social networks and Facebook, the Forbes article (as you can tell if you hover over it) is talking about any behemoth and specifically singles out Google and Facebook. The article title is actually "Here's Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years".
It's also not talking about a total disappearance:
there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 â" 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone.
So not quite the desolation that people are thinking. But if we're worried, why not look at what happened with Alta Vista or Geocities and go from there...
Golly. That's quite scary. 60% - or more! - of Americans who deliberately reject a useful education? Naturally, you have the statistics and references to back this up, unlike those other fools.
Actually, could you please provide your references for, umm, well, basically everything after the first three sentences?
a computer is sold with all of its hardware functional in Linux
That is compelling to me. One of the biggest impediments to me running Linux (as someone who no longer really cares about building my own systems) is the impression I get that putting Linux on a system is a game of chance, especially when it comes to sound, or networking, or multiple monitors. If I know I can buy a system that's pre-loaded, guaranteed to work with all components, and supported, then a significant barrier has just been removed.
Your stubborn refusal to consider someone else's feelings, combined with your signature, makes me think you have a remarkable lack of sensitivity, empathy, and social awareness. As such, you may not get much out of this post.
Sometimes one has to pick one's battles. You can choose to fight on the naming of a piece of software based on your assertion that it's only offensive to people who want to be offended. Alternatively, you can choose to accept that whether you agree with the sentiment or think it's foolish, nonetheless the term is offensive and/or silly and/or nebulous to potential users. The bigger issue could be that you want to spread the word about free and open source software and this is a great example of something that has come out of the community and matured, but which potentially is being held back by its name.
I'm not a FOSS evangelist, but if I were I'd think it was a valid concern and wonder if I could give up the battle ("I wanna keep the name GIMP!") so that I have a better shot at winning the war. (And I really dislike using that terminology, by the way, because it should be about choice and giving people something that's better, not a fight against the enemy.)
Look, it comes down to this. Like it or not, the name is a problem for more than a handful of people. Do you really want that to be the impediment that stops one of the best examples of free and open source software from being more widely adopted? Is it really that important to you? Where do your priorities lie?
(And no-one is going to call it "GNU Image Manipulation Program". One syllable versus eleven. Easy choice.)
Way too many possibilities, that's the problem. Any time this topic comes up in social discussions everyone in the room agrees it's just dumb. Look, a teacher is an enormous authority figure, and has an extraordinary amount of power. Ever heard of the saying "with great power comes great responsibility"? There's another saying about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. Teenagers are raging full of hormones and emotions and angst and anger and everything. And they seem compelled to spill hat out on Facebook.
Forget teacher-student relationships. Have you looked at what teenagers are posting on Facebook? Picures of them drinking underage. Pics of them smoking a joint. Status messages about "my boyfriend dumped me, I'm going to kill myself". Should a teacher do something about that? Will they feel compelled to say something the next day?
Guess what - a lot of companies frown upon workplace romances. Go ahead and say it's stupid, you wouldn't want to work for such a company, etc., etc. But if professional companies feel it necessary to have policies or even conventions about the relationships between two consenting adults, then it's difficult not to see how that extends down to children.
Read the footnotes. That's where you'll find the really juicy stuff. Not everything is disclosed, certainly; but the footnotes are where the traders spend the vast majority of their time.
Politicians know that in order to get their message across to the population they have to translate it into language that Joe Average can understand.
They also know that they have a better chance of getting their message across if they clearly distinguish what makes them different from the alternatives.
1) MS-Office Presentations: If you saved your presentation in PDF format, then it will display properly on ANY computer system connected to the projector. The only thing you lose are pretty transitions.
Try convincing a Fortune 1000 company to go PDF for all their presentations. Not going to work, and it's not just because of transitions. PowerPoint is easy. Easier than anything else.
4) Packaging: It would be nice if the Linux community could settle on one packaging system. But, in general, I don't consider this to be a huge problem in Linux.
I'm a computer scientist and this, along with the "will the distro du jour be out of favor 12 months from now?" dilemma, is enough to stop me from going to Linux for my day to day work. I can figure it out, but I've got stuff to do. Frankly, I don't have the time to play around with this mess nowadays.
I don't click on attachments I don't know and I don't install a couple of dozen random pieces of software that I don't need. That makes Windows rock solid for me and as an added bonus it just works with video and sound when I want to connect my digital video camera and edit my kid's school play.
Why would I switch? You've got to convince me that Linux is not only as good as Windows at the tasks I want to use it for, but that there's some additional truly compelling reason for me to make the effort to switch. I've not heard it yet.
Looking at that paragraph, I suppose you can at a stretch state that RMS is not actively telling people to pirate software. In fact, he starts with the arrogant premise that anyone who doesn't want to share software is wrong. Wow. In other words, "f*** you if you don't agree with my principles, I'm better than you." Nice.
He then proceeds to explain how people who feel guilty about sharing software, despite knowing they're breaking the law, can make themselves feel better about it.
You're really reaching to explain away this garbage. I'd be a lot more impressed if people who claim to be so high and mighty on principles would actually show some backbone and say "I don't agree with your licenses, so I'm going to boycott your software", instead of "I don't agree with your licenses, but, umm, it's stuff I want, so I'm gonna pirate it. And if you don't like it I'll hold my breath until I turn blue!!! Nyah nyah sucks!"
Piracy is not as simple and black and white as you make out.
I'm not sure I make it out to be quite as black and white as you say; I did, after all, sprinkle my comments with the caveat/weasel word "usually". Without getting into all kinds of semantic arguments, I would say I don't see anything morally wrong with most or even all of the examples in your first paragraph. I'd hazard to state that most vendors wouldn't, either; as I commented in my post, the difference is intention. Your examples are all demonstrating an intention to do the right thing, by purchasing the software.
Vendors have made it very burdensome to maintain compliance.
Agreed. I'm pretty sure I said more or less the same thing.
Now the law is caught in their own web. They're the ones who let software licensing become such a mess.
This is probably the only point where I'd quibble, and it's really on technicalities. I don't think the law "let" anything happen. Vendors started with simplistic licensing models and as infrastructures have become ubiquitously more complex in the past decade (widespread adoption of multi-core machines and virtualization) they've looked to make a buck. Not defending it or criticizing it, but that's what's happened. Some vendors are trying to be fair, some are greedy. The software business isn't different from any other business area in that regard. I'm not convinced that it's the place of legislators, however, to regulate such business models.
Letting slide the inflammatory language, they are different.
Pirates are quite frank about their intentions - they usually want to get something for free because they don't see why they should have to pay for it. A pirate who is illegally downloading music or movies or software will admit they know what they're doing is copyright infringement, but claim it is justifiable because of the pricing structure or because of evilness on the part of the MPAA or because they wouldn't buy it anyway or some other rationale.
In the case of a corporation with a site license, their intentions are usually (not always) to be in compliance with the licensing structures. Enterprise licenses can get extremely complicated, based on how many seats you have, are you external facing, how many CPUs are being used, are you running on a VM, etc., etc. It is very easy to want to be good and buy the licenses you're supposed to, but get it wrong somewhere. This is allegedly what happened in this story - 6500 licenses purchased, many more in use.
The intentions are completely different, and because a corporation is usually intending to do the right thing, a vendor will frequently have a quiet word with them and say "look, honest mistake, we understand, these things happen, and we know you want to do the right thing, so here's the true-up bill and let's all keep on being friends". Why? Because they want to keep their large customers happy and they know that the intention is good.
Unlike a pirate who will proudly acknowledge that their intention is to "stick it to the man" or something equally silly asinine.
You need people who are focused on the information and technology, over the business ramifications. Those are your administrators, architecture managers, systems engineers.
Then you need people who are focused on both the technology and the business ramifications. Those are the business analysts and the managers.
If you don't have both, you're lost. Technology doesn't exist for its own ends; it exists to further the business. Someone needs to understand that.
Why the hell are you even bothering to read and post then? Just move on to the next story, if you are that vehemently opposed to it. What is wrong with you? Let people who enjoy it, enjoy it. You don't enjoy it? Ignore it. Why do you (and many, many other socially disconnected trolls on/.) feel like you must disparage something that doesn't appeal to you? Just leave it alone.
Okay, I read the story. Summary - Microsoft puts out a set of slides showing why Windows 7 is superior to Linux, and provides them to partners including Best Buy. And...this substantiates your allegations?
P.S. - throwing out some random name of someone I've never heard of is not exactly rock solid backup.
How are you defining "worth"? Stock value? Market capitalization? In other words, what is your rationale for stating AOL is "worth less" and Microsoft is "worth more"?
And in any case, you're using a 24 hour difference in "worth" as your basis. That doesn't jibe with long term shareholder value.
Honestly, as you're talking about insulting our intelligence but not going into any depth, I'd be interested to see your explanation for why this action won't create long term shareholder value.
Test your code. Forget adding buckets of new stuff. Focus on quality for a while. Make stuff work. I have no idea what new features are in Slashdot because I use it the same way I've been using it for the last five, eight, ten years. Why? Because every neat new feature is always broken and stays broken for so long that I give up trying it.
Expose your infrastructure. This is a geek site. You're moving to new hardware? Cool - tell us about it. About two or three years ago, I think, there was some story about a big migration, and a promise of a follow-up story "shortly" to go in-depth into the infrastructure. It never came. I posted a question one day asking about it, and got modded up to +5, so there were other people who were interested, too. You get a lot of traffic - what does it take to handle that? What lessons have you learned over the years?
Edit. Do a spell check. Check for obvious dupes. If a submission is clearly, obviously lacking in details, send back to the submitter and tell them thanks, but there's stuff missing.
But quit the editorializing. Maybe this is just me, but I get irritated to no end by the posting editor including his own snarky and biased jibe at the end of a submission. If you want to comment, do it in the comments section.
Some kind of standards, please. Go back and look at that Plantronics video from earlier this week. Lame. Totally devoid of content. Read over the transcript so you're not distracted by the blonde PR person. Ask yourself if this is really what would be of interest to a technically astute and geeky audience.
I'm guessing that anyone on Slashdot's staff who isn't totally out of touch with reality would be able to go back and take a look at that Plantronics video and say "yes, I can see how someone might come away with the impression it's a purchased spot".
People have been accusing us of slashvertising for years -- it generally just makes us chuckle, since it's so far removed from reality.
Rather than being condescending, how about taking a step back and saying, "gee, maybe there's a point here, even if it's based on a false premise"?
If some random company -- or some person who happens to work for a company -- is doing something legitimately cool, would you want to hear about it?
Well, yes. No question. Occasionally, that still happens within these hallowed pages. Not as often as it used to, but it does come across.
But that Plantronics video? I'm having a very difficult time seeing how that qualifies as legitimately cool, new, ground breaking, innovative, or, well, anything that could fairly be described as "news for nerds, stuff that matters". The summary describes the interviewee as a Plantronics PR person. Heck, read the transcript - can you seriously say there's anything of substance there? That one is just lame.
Slashdot Mirror
That's at the bottom of Slashdot. Even though I own the comments, I cannot peruse or download all of my posts that Slashdot may have stored. It would be pretty nice to have that, and if Slashdot cannot be moved to provide it, a regulation to motivate that sounds good to me.
Yep. And, as I pointed out a few months ago on another FB bashing story, at least FB gives you the option to delete your account*. Slashdot does not.
* I know, who knows what they're doing with the data behind the scenes, never really deleted, blah blah blah. At least it's somewhat obscured or erased from public view.
Before the onslaught of a slew of "and nothing was lost" comments inspired by a mention only of social networks and Facebook, the Forbes article (as you can tell if you hover over it) is talking about any behemoth and specifically singles out Google and Facebook. The article title is actually "Here's Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years".
It's also not talking about a total disappearance:
there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 â" 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone.
So not quite the desolation that people are thinking. But if we're worried, why not look at what happened with Alta Vista or Geocities and go from there...
Sounds like a bunch of 12-year-olds have invaded from 4chan or similar...
So, in other words, same old Slashdot as always...
Golly. That's quite scary. 60% - or more! - of Americans who deliberately reject a useful education? Naturally, you have the statistics and references to back this up, unlike those other fools.
Actually, could you please provide your references for, umm, well, basically everything after the first three sentences?
a computer is sold with all of its hardware functional in Linux
That is compelling to me. One of the biggest impediments to me running Linux (as someone who no longer really cares about building my own systems) is the impression I get that putting Linux on a system is a game of chance, especially when it comes to sound, or networking, or multiple monitors. If I know I can buy a system that's pre-loaded, guaranteed to work with all components, and supported, then a significant barrier has just been removed.
Your stubborn refusal to consider someone else's feelings, combined with your signature, makes me think you have a remarkable lack of sensitivity, empathy, and social awareness. As such, you may not get much out of this post.
Sometimes one has to pick one's battles. You can choose to fight on the naming of a piece of software based on your assertion that it's only offensive to people who want to be offended. Alternatively, you can choose to accept that whether you agree with the sentiment or think it's foolish, nonetheless the term is offensive and/or silly and/or nebulous to potential users. The bigger issue could be that you want to spread the word about free and open source software and this is a great example of something that has come out of the community and matured, but which potentially is being held back by its name.
I'm not a FOSS evangelist, but if I were I'd think it was a valid concern and wonder if I could give up the battle ("I wanna keep the name GIMP!") so that I have a better shot at winning the war. (And I really dislike using that terminology, by the way, because it should be about choice and giving people something that's better, not a fight against the enemy.)
Look, it comes down to this. Like it or not, the name is a problem for more than a handful of people. Do you really want that to be the impediment that stops one of the best examples of free and open source software from being more widely adopted? Is it really that important to you? Where do your priorities lie?
(And no-one is going to call it "GNU Image Manipulation Program". One syllable versus eleven. Easy choice.)
Way too many possibilities, that's the problem. Any time this topic comes up in social discussions everyone in the room agrees it's just dumb. Look, a teacher is an enormous authority figure, and has an extraordinary amount of power. Ever heard of the saying "with great power comes great responsibility"? There's another saying about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. Teenagers are raging full of hormones and emotions and angst and anger and everything. And they seem compelled to spill hat out on Facebook.
Forget teacher-student relationships. Have you looked at what teenagers are posting on Facebook? Picures of them drinking underage. Pics of them smoking a joint. Status messages about "my boyfriend dumped me, I'm going to kill myself". Should a teacher do something about that? Will they feel compelled to say something the next day?
Guess what - a lot of companies frown upon workplace romances. Go ahead and say it's stupid, you wouldn't want to work for such a company, etc., etc. But if professional companies feel it necessary to have policies or even conventions about the relationships between two consenting adults, then it's difficult not to see how that extends down to children.
Read the footnotes. That's where you'll find the really juicy stuff. Not everything is disclosed, certainly; but the footnotes are where the traders spend the vast majority of their time.
Politicians know that in order to get their message across to the population they have to translate it into language that Joe Average can understand.
They also know that they have a better chance of getting their message across if they clearly distinguish what makes them different from the alternatives.
1) MS-Office Presentations: If you saved your presentation in PDF format, then it will display properly on ANY computer system connected to the projector. The only thing you lose are pretty transitions.
Try convincing a Fortune 1000 company to go PDF for all their presentations. Not going to work, and it's not just because of transitions. PowerPoint is easy. Easier than anything else.
4) Packaging: It would be nice if the Linux community could settle on one packaging system. But, in general, I don't consider this to be a huge problem in Linux.
I'm a computer scientist and this, along with the "will the distro du jour be out of favor 12 months from now?" dilemma, is enough to stop me from going to Linux for my day to day work. I can figure it out, but I've got stuff to do. Frankly, I don't have the time to play around with this mess nowadays.
I don't click on attachments I don't know and I don't install a couple of dozen random pieces of software that I don't need. That makes Windows rock solid for me and as an added bonus it just works with video and sound when I want to connect my digital video camera and edit my kid's school play.
Why would I switch? You've got to convince me that Linux is not only as good as Windows at the tasks I want to use it for, but that there's some additional truly compelling reason for me to make the effort to switch. I've not heard it yet.
Someone's drunk the Kool-Aid...
Looking at that paragraph, I suppose you can at a stretch state that RMS is not actively telling people to pirate software. In fact, he starts with the arrogant premise that anyone who doesn't want to share software is wrong. Wow. In other words, "f*** you if you don't agree with my principles, I'm better than you." Nice.
He then proceeds to explain how people who feel guilty about sharing software, despite knowing they're breaking the law, can make themselves feel better about it.
You're really reaching to explain away this garbage. I'd be a lot more impressed if people who claim to be so high and mighty on principles would actually show some backbone and say "I don't agree with your licenses, so I'm going to boycott your software", instead of "I don't agree with your licenses, but, umm, it's stuff I want, so I'm gonna pirate it. And if you don't like it I'll hold my breath until I turn blue!!! Nyah nyah sucks!"
There does appear to be a certain haphazard logic there, you must admit...
Piracy is not as simple and black and white as you make out.
I'm not sure I make it out to be quite as black and white as you say; I did, after all, sprinkle my comments with the caveat/weasel word "usually". Without getting into all kinds of semantic arguments, I would say I don't see anything morally wrong with most or even all of the examples in your first paragraph. I'd hazard to state that most vendors wouldn't, either; as I commented in my post, the difference is intention. Your examples are all demonstrating an intention to do the right thing, by purchasing the software.
Vendors have made it very burdensome to maintain compliance.
Agreed. I'm pretty sure I said more or less the same thing.
Now the law is caught in their own web. They're the ones who let software licensing become such a mess.
This is probably the only point where I'd quibble, and it's really on technicalities. I don't think the law "let" anything happen. Vendors started with simplistic licensing models and as infrastructures have become ubiquitously more complex in the past decade (widespread adoption of multi-core machines and virtualization) they've looked to make a buck. Not defending it or criticizing it, but that's what's happened. Some vendors are trying to be fair, some are greedy. The software business isn't different from any other business area in that regard. I'm not convinced that it's the place of legislators, however, to regulate such business models.
Letting slide the inflammatory language, they are different.
Pirates are quite frank about their intentions - they usually want to get something for free because they don't see why they should have to pay for it. A pirate who is illegally downloading music or movies or software will admit they know what they're doing is copyright infringement, but claim it is justifiable because of the pricing structure or because of evilness on the part of the MPAA or because they wouldn't buy it anyway or some other rationale.
In the case of a corporation with a site license, their intentions are usually (not always) to be in compliance with the licensing structures. Enterprise licenses can get extremely complicated, based on how many seats you have, are you external facing, how many CPUs are being used, are you running on a VM, etc., etc. It is very easy to want to be good and buy the licenses you're supposed to, but get it wrong somewhere. This is allegedly what happened in this story - 6500 licenses purchased, many more in use.
The intentions are completely different, and because a corporation is usually intending to do the right thing, a vendor will frequently have a quiet word with them and say "look, honest mistake, we understand, these things happen, and we know you want to do the right thing, so here's the true-up bill and let's all keep on being friends". Why? Because they want to keep their large customers happy and they know that the intention is good.
Unlike a pirate who will proudly acknowledge that their intention is to "stick it to the man" or something equally silly asinine.
As a computer science graduate I often ask why I did not have the choice to get a degree in systems administration.
For the same reason an aeronautical engineer didn't have the choice to get a degree to be a pilot.
As others say, if that was what you wanted then you should've gone to a trade school or a technical institute.
You need people who are focused on the information and technology, over the business ramifications. Those are your administrators, architecture managers, systems engineers.
Then you need people who are focused on both the technology and the business ramifications. Those are the business analysts and the managers.
If you don't have both, you're lost. Technology doesn't exist for its own ends; it exists to further the business. Someone needs to understand that.
You know, if you have a CIO with business sense and tech sense, why do you need the CEO?
That this was flagged as +5 Insightful demonstrates pretty darned clearly just how extraordinarily naive are some people with mod points.
Why the hell are you even bothering to read and post then? Just move on to the next story, if you are that vehemently opposed to it. What is wrong with you? Let people who enjoy it, enjoy it. You don't enjoy it? Ignore it. Why do you (and many, many other socially disconnected trolls on /.) feel like you must disparage something that doesn't appeal to you? Just leave it alone.
Okay, I read the story. Summary - Microsoft puts out a set of slides showing why Windows 7 is superior to Linux, and provides them to partners including Best Buy. And...this substantiates your allegations?
P.S. - throwing out some random name of someone I've never heard of is not exactly rock solid backup.
I also know people who have worked at Best Buy in the past who admitted it is official company policy to lie to customers.
And of course you can back that up somehow. Otherwise you're committing libel.
The good news is that these screens won't cost the taxpayers anything. The bad news is that they will be supported by advertising.
So how else would you suggest they be paid for? Fairy dust and happy thoughts? Tell me just why this is bad news...
Honestly, as you're talking about insulting our intelligence but not going into any depth, I'd be interested to see your explanation for why this action won't create long term shareholder value.
We're also planning to start finding and documenting some creative means of destruction for naughty hardware
Ohh I missed that bit.
Slashdot - if your target demographic is 15-19 year old males, just say so and I'll know I'm too mature-I-mean-old for this site and leave.
I'm guessing that anyone on Slashdot's staff who isn't totally out of touch with reality would be able to go back and take a look at that Plantronics video and say "yes, I can see how someone might come away with the impression it's a purchased spot".
People have been accusing us of slashvertising for years -- it generally just makes us chuckle, since it's so far removed from reality.
Rather than being condescending, how about taking a step back and saying, "gee, maybe there's a point here, even if it's based on a false premise"?
If some random company -- or some person who happens to work for a company -- is doing something legitimately cool, would you want to hear about it?
Well, yes. No question. Occasionally, that still happens within these hallowed pages. Not as often as it used to, but it does come across.
But that Plantronics video? I'm having a very difficult time seeing how that qualifies as legitimately cool, new, ground breaking, innovative, or, well, anything that could fairly be described as "news for nerds, stuff that matters". The summary describes the interviewee as a Plantronics PR person. Heck, read the transcript - can you seriously say there's anything of substance there? That one is just lame.