For most entities software is a cost center, not a profit center. Why would you expect FOSS to "produce" a profit? How much profit has Windows or Microsoft Office directly produced for you?
Paid support for software is called done all of the time. Ask the software consultants at your company if consulting is profitable. Then you will understand the only real software business model: you need a change, you pay me to make the change.
Of course there is a phase in every FOSS project which preceeds customer use (and paid customization). If you want to be "the expert" consultant it may make sense for you to put a lot of effort in at this stage. If you're good you can wait till the software is mostly done and then jump in, but quite likely the earlier the better if you can afford the investment.
FOSS is not a business model. It is way of licensing code that protects the user's ability to user and modify the software. It can also be seen as a vast body of resuable code for projects with compatible licenses. In the case of GNU/Linux it is also a software stack with $0 licensing fees, so conceivably it only costs as much as it takes to get it installed, maintain it, and extend it for a given business's purposes.
Paid support and customization of software IS a business model. It's called "software contracting."
That business model is well understood. It can be profitable, and can sustain most salaried engineers at a rate ABOVE their current salary, but not usually as profitable on a large scale as a software product company can be, because as part of the bargain we choose not to leverage the amazing power of government-granted monopoly profits.
However, given the success of the FOSS development model I wouldn't give mass-market proprietary software more than another 20 years unless the government(s) intervene to stop it, or consumers buy into locked-down platforms that will only run signed code.
From the programmer point of view it doesn't really matter. We seem to get paid the same whether our customer can make billions off of the bits we create, or only gets to charge a markup on our rate. Weird, huh?;-)
Ayn Rand... latecomer... I refer you to Adam Smith.
Capitalism would work just fine without intellectual property, in fact it would be a much better world for consumers. So much resources are diverted from otherwise useful pursuits because of corporations being able to acquire monopoly profits.
There are natural monopolies. Those we can do little about other than introduce government regulation to keep things from getting silly. But truly there is no longer a compelling reason for most intellectual property. Best case is it is abolished. Next best case is that terms are brought back onto a scale that actually strikes a reasonable balance between consumers and rights holders.
It is so out of wack with life+70 for copyright and 20 years for patents it would be funny if it weren't so disgusting. This is corruption of the government at its most apparent. The regulation of thought and action in such an incredibly insidious way... it purports to protect the individual and spur innovation but it really puts our very minds in shackles. If the government thinks a monopoly spurs innovation, great... but isn't it reasonable to only grant as much of a monopoly as is required to produce the desired effect?
As engineers we are the first to see the true issue because we are the first wave of citizens who actually create intellectual property as a matter of course. Authors and inventors used to be rare specialists. Today anyone who creates a web page is a creator. Another 20 years and I think the situation will become clear to most people. The "knowledge worker" must not be operating in a minefield, but allowed to produce freely. This will be better for everyone. I just tire of the "socialist" and "commie" comments. It is such a know-nothing attitude... the same people who spout such garbage would claim to be for a free market.
I'd be interesting in seeing a free market in intellectual property. I just don't think any politicians have the balls to give us such a free market.
If it funds the project would it really matter if the toolbar was on by default? A small price to pay.
After all, it's open source and if you wanted to make your own distribution which had the toolbar removed by default, you could.
Free software isn't about making sure no one ever makes money on software, or avoiding crappy defaults (default Emacs key bindings come to mind). It's about securing your freedom to use and modify, and redistribute software.
There's no comparison between this and IE. IE is a closed source product, and it ships by strongarm agreement with practically every computer sold.
In the short run, there would be no impact to the economy.
The cost of switching to new software is always weighed against the cost of making small improvements/changes to the software already being run. There is a cost to everything.
All the programmer jobs would not go up in a puff of smoke. Code is still there to be maintained.
If we had a free-market, efficient system of software development (no copyright, patent protection would do it) I think we really could get by with less programmers, and far fewer dollars wasted reinventing the wheel.
In fact, I think this would be a more efficient way to achieve the same goal, since there would be no-one picking winners and losers other than the free market. Research grants would continue to exist as they do today, to do the cutting edge research that few corps would see as short-term profitable. But the day to day coding and maintenance would be done on code in which a more forceful GPL type of license, but as law would hold sway.
If you didn't notice, we already have this system... they are called "research grants."
Would you say our system of funding the basic research that creates prescription drugs is socialist? The problem is it is rarely in the interest of a corporation to devote money to basic research. Sometimes the government needs to step in, or at least try to affect the direction of R&D.
Anyway, socialist/communist/etc is just a label. Engineers are more practical... we're in favor of whatever works in a particular situation. Sure, we could have a free market... get rid of patents, copyright, environmental regs, taxation, etc., etc. But most non-anarchists don't think that such a system would work.
A bit of tongue-in-cheek hyperbole, but at the core are my actual beliefs.
Being able to run a windows installer != knowing what you are doing. I'm all for putting tools in the hands of people who are willing to put in the effort and take responsibility for owning a general purpose computer. I'm not saying there should be licenses to get on the net or buy a PC or anything like that. I'm just saying the culture of thinking "without any knowledge or effort I should be able to make good use of a general purpose computer" is simply wrong-headed and doomed to make computers and the Internet crappy for everybody.
I'm just saying it should be open and free for everyone who takes it seriously. Those who don't want to pay for their freedom with an investment in learning the basics of what they are doing should not get any help from the rest of us. We need not make it easy to be a netdolt.
It's like driving a car... we expect the people should know the rules of the road. We fine them for the transgressions witnessed. But we are pretty free with letting people get into cars without a lot of interference even though it is a heavy responsbility. But would you say the blind should be driving? Certainly it would be more egalitarian and empowering. Not the best example, since being blind is not a choice. But I'm not feeling terribly creative right now. Maybe someone else can come up with a better analogy.
Worst case I would expect something like GNU/Linux to become the commodity operating system, just as the open PC architecture is today the commodity hardware platform. The nice thing about GNU/Linux as a universal operating system is it can be different things for different people. Someone WILL come along and polish a Linux distro for noobs. Key point for these folks: making something easy to use is usually more about what you leave out than what you put in.
For the technologists among us, we will expect or distribution to do what we want, not limit our choices. Good defaults are nice though.
In my opinion, most people aren't really qualified to be using computers at all. And most that buy them don't really know what to do with them beyond surfing the web and getting/sending email.
Certainly it's a very small minority who are actually qualified to maintain their own computers. Hence the rampant virus issues with Windows boxes.
So given that, a) only people who need/understand computers should be allowed to use them. b) people who need computers but don't know what they are doing should be paying someone else to maintain their setup. c) Everyone else can have remotely managed set top boxes or something to get their email and use Google.
In such conditions, almost like magic Linux is ready for the desktop. Viruses cease to be a threat. The vast number of people working tech support will be relieved of their stressful jobs. Electricity usage will go down. There will be a culture of "paying for support" so we can get our leisure time back instead of maintaining family member's computer's for free. We won't have to talk about "can grandma use it" we can instead talk about "who let grandma touch a general purpose computer?"
I agree... one of Linux's strengths is its natural diversity and the pioneering attitude of many projects.
For example, my desktop is Ion3 wm. I have one main pane in the middle in which most desktop apps open as tabs. on the sides of the screen I have two 1 cm wide portins of panes that if I move my mouse to the edge or alt-tab to them, the come to the fore. On the left side, I have a clock/calendar (xfclock) and gkrellm which shows system stats and the weather. Also there is a pane xterm running there.
On the right "float" pane is Gvim in outline mode which keeps a detailed hierarchy of the tasks I'm working.
In the middle pane which has the foreground most of the time is Evolution, Firefox, and VMware which I use for Windows development.
With this wm I never need to fiddle with resizing applications, they all open just the way I want them, where I want them and it's totally configurable. My windowing manager actually manages windows!
100% gui and also 100% keyboard accessible.
Alt-2 away is a non-tabbed workspace for some problem applications which don't work well with Ion3 wm.
The idea though is that unique things are possible for any Linux user or distro creator. It is natural to have many flavors of Linux. I think it's possible that some distros can start "fashion trends," which is a good thing, but generally no distro is ever going to look like all the others and it is stupid to try. That would be giving up too much.
Concentrating on OSS advantages, it is actually possible to create an OS with a unified look across applications because we have the source to everything we use. In Windows, and Mac worlds this is plainly impossible. I think that would be nice to see with one of the more unique desktops/windowing management systems.
Compatibility with old software doesn't make a OS a slow beast.
It's layer upon layer of abstraction at the user level. Win32 is a mess and they just keep shoveling more on top of it. Extra services that no on needs. Overfactoring (seriously). Ignorant/lazy programmers that use up your CPU power for inefficient algorithms, etc.
That and pointless eye-candy kind of stuff.
NT kernel at the heart of Windows is actually very well designed.
Credit card numbers are not comparable to books. It takes very little bandwidth to grab a whole lot of credit card numbers. Also the economic damage of having a whole lot of credit card numbers is a whole lot more than a bunch of books 99% of which are already past the first printing and don't sell many copies anymore anyway.
Also each book downloaded is relatively time consuming. My point is someone would notice you stealing googlecopies.
As to time machines... do you seriously think the patent system is what makes the time machine industry viable? I think time machines have sufficient built-in economic incentives even if you aren't the first to market.
Actually the two systems are completely apples and oranges.
The Google system is a search system through open and closed content.
The Open Content Alliance's goal is to make the content available.
So the Google system should be able to index OCAs work just as Yahoo will do.
The overlap comes in areas where Google has already secured rights or where the work is in the public domain, in which case Google is providing the content as well.
The "opt-in" part of making your content available is available to everyone irrespective of Google or OCA. It's called a license to redistribute. Creative Commons licenses are quite flexible and already fill that niche pretty well.
I see OCA as more of a book-focused initiative to get public domain and licensed work available to the public.
A) I don't see that as a leak of that size as a likely scenario. That much data doesn't escape by accident. B) Oh what a nightmare if it did and we had an electronic backup of every book in existence...
The fact is that copyright infringement of books is already easy. All it takes is an automatic document feeder and a good PDF generator. $500.
It's happening and it will continue to happen. But Google is acting very responsibly so the publishers are better off with them than leaving users to their own creative pursuits.
I seriously doubt that illegal trading of music would be so big if iTunes or something like it had been around from the beginning. But the industry couldn't get their act together.
Usually Star Trek, even the original show is not cheesy. Hard sci-fi it ain't but they usually don't give the impression they think their viewers are idiots.
But "Spock's Brain" is definitely some stinky cheese. Aside from Star Trek V, and the next gen episode where everyone devolves into creatures which, mostly they didn't actually evolve from (so bad I have never looked back to learn the name of the episode).
Actually, I try to predict the byline on Slashdot stories and I think this is definitely from the missed opportunity department...
As much as I don't like Dvorak, he has a point about the 20 steps to something being a pain in the ass to keep track of.
Every time I have to search google for a common sequence of steps it's a failure of the program or help in the program I am using. Half the time I can't remember immediately the magic Google incantation that finds me the 20 steps that it took me last time.
Yes you're right, some actions a user might want to take are inherently complex. No, we cannot make macro keys or wizards for everything, especially activities that require our brain as input.
However, there really ought to be a better way to dynamically build help systems that help you keep track of how to do complex things. The fact is that if I don't use a program at least once every couple of weeks, if it is complex at all I'm going to hit the learning curve every time I use that program.
The bottom line is that there is a real fundamental issue there, and where there are fundamental issues there is room to create new solutions.
Example: imagine every time you searched google it was dead-bang-simple to associate results of searches with the program you are using. Further imagine that anyone could easily record and publish a wizard/script for any application. Actually I am thinking more of a tutor than a wizard; rather then doing the task for you, it teaches you how to do the task. You would keep the tutor around until you don't need it any more.
That I think would be an interesting middle ground. You still have the full functionality of the app, but complex tasks always have tutors that walk you through it as necessary.
I agree with that. Developing web pages and scripts is the most natural way to learn to programming. No barrier to entry for most folks. Everone has the tools and there are lots of docs free on the web.
Actually, I would suggests starting with HTML. It's not programming per se, but it is a close relative, and many of the same skills are required. Just make sure you use a text editor to write your code, not a crutch web page generator, at least not for this purpose. Vi, emacs, or even something like notepad is OK.
Then JavaScript, then Java or C# or C. Eventually, you must get to C. It will probably take a while to "get" C pointers, but it is so for everyone.
General advice: you're the programmer. Everything is *your* fault. This is a mistake fledgling programmers make: they tend to be ready to blame the interpreter, the computer, the disk drive. But 99% of the time, the problem is your code. The other side of that coin is most of the software challenges you will encounter are doable if you put the effort into it. Always have Google handy to look things up and find the easy way to do it.
On that score: good programmers are usually interested in "The Right Way" to do a thing. If the way you've chosen seems klunky and inefficient and that there is a better way: well, that's because there probably is a better way. Seek out the "best ways" (there is usually only one best way... yes, it's weird). It takes time, but that's how you learn.
Oh yeah, laziness: if you aren't maximizing laziness (in the sense of putting extra effort now to avoid work later) you aren't a Real Programmer.
You misunderstand me... I'm not saying journalists shouldn't get special treatment. They do and they should.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't take a degree or a particular employer, or pants to magically transform you into a journalist. A journalist is someone who practices journalism.
That transformation from regular citizen to journalist happens when you excercise your free speech right to purvey information to the general public via any broadcast medium, like TV, radio, newspaper, and certainly the web. In performing a journalist act you deserve any and every protection any other member of the press gets covering you in that action of free speech. Any information you gather from sources related to the act of journalism should be protected if the primary intent of gathering that information was to disseminate it to the general public via some broadcast medium. There's a a rough definition, turned into legalese it would probably be good enough for the courts, and totally unrestrictive.
There are plenty of employed people who call themselves journalists who are not (most of the talking heads and hair+teeth folks on television count here). There are a whole lot more regular citizens who don't practice journalism often enough to care one way or another. But leave it to the courts to decide who is in which camp and when, not in a strict a priori legal definition by congress.
I think it is quite reasonable to want to protect derivative sources of information. Just because someone is interpreting news should not exclude them from a potential shield law. What should exclude them, plain and simple is pretending to be a journalist. That's why I say leave it to the courts and juries who can better decide an individual's intent than Congress can a priori.
The larger point is that this should be egalitarian. Wearing pants, or writing your stories from a cube farm instead of your home office should make absolutely no difference. There should be no special protections for someone doing something professionally in the private sector versus as a private citizen. In fact, if anything I'd expect more protections as a private citizen since the stakes are so much higher, my work is not vetted by others, and others in the society really ought to be taking what a blogger says with several inch sized cubes of salt anyway...
The primary definition is simply "one whose occupation is journalism."
On the same site, journalism is defined quite broadly in a way that would include most every blogger, and certainly DOES NOT exclude "editorialism" (and I don't think it's just missing because editorialism isn't a word). The definition of journalism there is:
1. The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.
2. Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast.
3. The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.
4. Newspapers and magazines.
5. An academic course training students in journalism.
6. Written material of current interest or wide popular appeal.
A little outmoded since it doesn't consider journalists publishing via the Internet (strange for a dictionary on the web), but I can't see how you wouldn't classify a blogger somewhere in there.
Anyone can send you a letter, and anyone can sue you at any time. Nothing in this law will change that. Also, people that sue you usually do it because they expect to win.
What I'm suggesting is that a court can make the best determination of whether you are acting primarily as a journalist and so the bar should be raised as to whether you must divulge a source. If you are acting as a journalist, you wouldn't have much to worry about. The alternative of only protecting people who journalize while wearing pants is much less attractive alternative. Face it... the Congress is NOT going grant to give immunity to everyone who wants it from divulging sources. The standard is going to be much higher than whether the person rigged up a blog to spew their libels.
Anyway, what do cease & desist, DMCA etc have to do with a shield law? You are always liable for your actions, shield law or not, including many cases where there is no specific law to fit your action, including the broad concept of "negligence."
How would you define 'journalist' in a narrow enough way that you capture serious bloggers versus interlopers?
How about the "Pants Test." If an article was not written while wearing pants (pajama bottoms don't count), then you don't get protection under the shield law.
Really though, I think the Congress should just word it broadly and let the courts decide on a case-by-case basis whether someone was primarily acting as a journalist or not. As you say, there's really no good way to decide whether someone is acting as a journalist or just going through the motions to allow themselves to hide sources of information. There can be no bright-line test.
Basically at this point the Mac/Windows style interface is creaky and aging. Does your gut tell you that this style of interaction with the computer is really the best way to go?
I'd like to see some really innovative desktop environments... for myself I tend to experiment with the tabbed window managers that maintain your layout, for me Ion3 seems to be doing the job.
On top of that it would be nice if the interface was more naturally productive. Basically, your applications should be persistent and state should collect up as tasks... so if I'm working on a document, and I do some research in Google it would be good if there was a straightforward, natural way for this info to collect together, and save some history automatically.
Anytime I want to restart a task it should bring up my document, and history for the searches I was doing, etc. Why should I have to hunt around for documents and pop all those windows open again, rearrange them on screen in a productive way...
Productive is a lot more important to me than "usable" where usable means Mac- or Windows-like. Strategically it makes no sense to play follow the leader when we have an opportunity to get out in front.
Well, it seems clear that the customer would have an obligation to when they distribute it. The creator of the wizard supplies a tool that downloads the kernel from kernel.org and patches it. The user runs the tool, so the user downloads the kernel, the user does the patches. the user redistributes the end result in their product.
Who has liability? The end user certainly. But what about the creator of the wizard? Quite possibly, none at all.
The creator of the wizard never redistributed the kernel, so the GPL is not binding on them. Patches typically contain some context information (lines of source) for syncing up the patch tool, but that could be considered 'fair use.'
So is the kernel redistributable under the GPL once it has been patched by WindRiver's wizard? Anyone know the license they use on the patches, or do you end up with a tainted kernel which cannot be redistributed without a separate license agreement from WindRiver?
Such a wizard sounds like a great way to sneak around the license to me, or at least pass on liability to customers.
Slashdot Mirror
For most entities software is a cost center, not a profit center. Why would you expect FOSS to "produce" a profit? How much profit has Windows or Microsoft Office directly produced for you?
Paid support for software is called done all of the time. Ask the software consultants at your company if consulting is profitable. Then you will understand the only real software business model: you need a change, you pay me to make the change.
Of course there is a phase in every FOSS project which preceeds customer use (and paid customization). If you want to be "the expert" consultant it may make sense for you to put a lot of effort in at this stage. If you're good you can wait till the software is mostly done and then jump in, but quite likely the earlier the better if you can afford the investment.
-- John.
FOSS is not a business model. It is way of licensing code that protects the user's ability to user and modify the software. It can also be seen as a vast body of resuable code for projects with compatible licenses. In the case of GNU/Linux it is also a software stack with $0 licensing fees, so conceivably it only costs as much as it takes to get it installed, maintain it, and extend it for a given business's purposes.
;-)
Paid support and customization of software IS a business model. It's called "software contracting."
That business model is well understood. It can be profitable, and can sustain most salaried engineers at a rate ABOVE their current salary, but not usually as profitable on a large scale as a software product company can be, because as part of the bargain we choose not to leverage the amazing power of government-granted monopoly profits.
However, given the success of the FOSS development model I wouldn't give mass-market proprietary software more than another 20 years unless the government(s) intervene to stop it, or consumers buy into locked-down platforms that will only run signed code.
From the programmer point of view it doesn't really matter. We seem to get paid the same whether our customer can make billions off of the bits we create, or only gets to charge a markup on our rate. Weird, huh?
-- John.
Ayn Rand... latecomer... I refer you to Adam Smith.
Capitalism would work just fine without intellectual property, in fact it would be a much better world for consumers. So much resources are diverted from otherwise useful pursuits because of corporations being able to acquire monopoly profits.
There are natural monopolies. Those we can do little about other than introduce government regulation to keep things from getting silly. But truly there is no longer a compelling reason for most intellectual property. Best case is it is abolished. Next best case is that terms are brought back onto a scale that actually strikes a reasonable balance between consumers and rights holders.
It is so out of wack with life+70 for copyright and 20 years for patents it would be funny if it weren't so disgusting. This is corruption of the government at its most apparent. The regulation of thought and action in such an incredibly insidious way... it purports to protect the individual and spur innovation but it really puts our very minds in shackles. If the government thinks a monopoly spurs innovation, great... but isn't it reasonable to only grant as much of a monopoly as is required to produce the desired effect?
As engineers we are the first to see the true issue because we are the first wave of citizens who actually create intellectual property as a matter of course. Authors and inventors used to be rare specialists. Today anyone who creates a web page is a creator. Another 20 years and I think the situation will become clear to most people. The "knowledge worker" must not be operating in a minefield, but allowed to produce freely. This will be better for everyone. I just tire of the "socialist" and "commie" comments. It is such a know-nothing attitude... the same people who spout such garbage would claim to be for a free market.
I'd be interesting in seeing a free market in intellectual property. I just don't think any politicians have the balls to give us such a free market.
If it funds the project would it really matter if the toolbar was on by default? A small price to pay.
After all, it's open source and if you wanted to make your own distribution which had the toolbar removed by default, you could.
Free software isn't about making sure no one ever makes money on software, or avoiding crappy defaults (default Emacs key bindings come to mind). It's about securing your freedom to use and modify, and redistribute software.
There's no comparison between this and IE. IE is a closed source product, and it ships by strongarm agreement with practically every computer sold.
-- John.
In the short run, there would be no impact to the economy.
The cost of switching to new software is always weighed against the cost of making small improvements/changes to the software already being run. There is a cost to everything.
All the programmer jobs would not go up in a puff of smoke. Code is still there to be maintained.
If we had a free-market, efficient system of software development (no copyright, patent protection would do it) I think we really could get by with less programmers, and far fewer dollars wasted reinventing the wheel.
In fact, I think this would be a more efficient way to achieve the same goal, since there would be no-one picking winners and losers other than the free market. Research grants would continue to exist as they do today, to do the cutting edge research that few corps would see as short-term profitable. But the day to day coding and maintenance would be done on code in which a more forceful GPL type of license, but as law would hold sway.
Then we could get this massive reuse holy grail.
-- John.
If you didn't notice, we already have this system... they are called "research grants."
Would you say our system of funding the basic research that creates prescription drugs is socialist? The problem is it is rarely in the interest of a corporation to devote money to basic research. Sometimes the government needs to step in, or at least try to affect the direction of R&D.
Anyway, socialist/communist/etc is just a label. Engineers are more practical... we're in favor of whatever works in a particular situation. Sure, we could have a free market... get rid of patents, copyright, environmental regs, taxation, etc., etc. But most non-anarchists don't think that such a system would work.
-- Johh.
A bit of tongue-in-cheek hyperbole, but at the core are my actual beliefs.
Being able to run a windows installer != knowing what you are doing. I'm all for putting tools in the hands of people who are willing to put in the effort and take responsibility for owning a general purpose computer. I'm not saying there should be licenses to get on the net or buy a PC or anything like that. I'm just saying the culture of thinking "without any knowledge or effort I should be able to make good use of a general purpose computer" is simply wrong-headed and doomed to make computers and the Internet crappy for everybody.
I'm just saying it should be open and free for everyone who takes it seriously. Those who don't want to pay for their freedom with an investment in learning the basics of what they are doing should not get any help from the rest of us. We need not make it easy to be a netdolt.
It's like driving a car... we expect the people should know the rules of the road. We fine them for the transgressions witnessed. But we are pretty free with letting people get into cars without a lot of interference even though it is a heavy responsbility. But would you say the blind should be driving? Certainly it would be more egalitarian and empowering. Not the best example, since being blind is not a choice. But I'm not feeling terribly creative right now. Maybe someone else can come up with a better analogy.
Worst case I would expect something like GNU/Linux to become the commodity operating system, just as the open PC architecture is today the commodity hardware platform. The nice thing about GNU/Linux as a universal operating system is it can be different things for different people. Someone WILL come along and polish a Linux distro for noobs. Key point for these folks: making something easy to use is usually more about what you leave out than what you put in.
For the technologists among us, we will expect or distribution to do what we want, not limit our choices. Good defaults are nice though.
-- John.
Maybe we approach it from the wrong angle.
In my opinion, most people aren't really qualified to be using computers at all. And most that buy them don't really know what to do with them beyond surfing the web and getting/sending email.
Certainly it's a very small minority who are actually qualified to maintain their own computers. Hence the rampant virus issues with Windows boxes.
So given that, a) only people who need/understand computers should be allowed to use them. b) people who need computers but don't know what they are doing should be paying someone else to maintain their setup. c) Everyone else can have remotely managed set top boxes or something to get their email and use Google.
In such conditions, almost like magic Linux is ready for the desktop. Viruses cease to be a threat. The vast number of people working tech support will be relieved of their stressful jobs. Electricity usage will go down. There will be a culture of "paying for support" so we can get our leisure time back instead of maintaining family member's computer's for free. We won't have to talk about "can grandma use it" we can instead talk about "who let grandma touch a general purpose computer?"
Who's with me?
-- John.
I agree... one of Linux's strengths is its natural diversity and the pioneering attitude of many projects.
For example, my desktop is Ion3 wm. I have one main pane in the middle in which most desktop apps open as tabs. on the sides of the screen I have two 1 cm wide portins of panes that if I move my mouse to the edge or alt-tab to them, the come to the fore. On the left side, I have a clock/calendar (xfclock) and gkrellm which shows system stats and the weather. Also there is a pane xterm running there.
On the right "float" pane is Gvim in outline mode which keeps a detailed hierarchy of the tasks I'm working.
In the middle pane which has the foreground most of the time is Evolution, Firefox, and VMware which I use for Windows development.
With this wm I never need to fiddle with resizing applications, they all open just the way I want them, where I want them and it's totally configurable. My windowing manager actually manages windows!
100% gui and also 100% keyboard accessible.
Alt-2 away is a non-tabbed workspace for some problem applications which don't work well with Ion3 wm.
The idea though is that unique things are possible for any Linux user or distro creator. It is natural to have many flavors of Linux. I think it's possible that some distros can start "fashion trends," which is a good thing, but generally no distro is ever going to look like all the others and it is stupid to try. That would be giving up too much.
Concentrating on OSS advantages, it is actually possible to create an OS with a unified look across applications because we have the source to everything we use. In Windows, and Mac worlds this is plainly impossible. I think that would be nice to see with one of the more unique desktops/windowing management systems.
-- John.
Compatibility with old software doesn't make a OS a slow beast.
It's layer upon layer of abstraction at the user level. Win32 is a mess and they just keep shoveling more on top of it. Extra services that no on needs. Overfactoring (seriously). Ignorant/lazy programmers that use up your CPU power for inefficient algorithms, etc.
That and pointless eye-candy kind of stuff.
NT kernel at the heart of Windows is actually very well designed.
-- John.
Credit card numbers are not comparable to books. It takes very little bandwidth to grab a whole lot of credit card numbers. Also the economic damage of having a whole lot of credit card numbers is a whole lot more than a bunch of books 99% of which are already past the first printing and don't sell many copies anymore anyway.
Also each book downloaded is relatively time consuming. My point is someone would notice you stealing googlecopies.
As to time machines... do you seriously think the patent system is what makes the time machine industry viable? I think time machines have sufficient built-in economic incentives even if you aren't the first to market.
-- John.
Actually the two systems are completely apples and oranges.
The Google system is a search system through open and closed content.
The Open Content Alliance's goal is to make the content available.
So the Google system should be able to index OCAs work just as Yahoo will do.
The overlap comes in areas where Google has already secured rights or where the work is in the public domain, in which case Google is providing the content as well.
The "opt-in" part of making your content available is available to everyone irrespective of Google or OCA. It's called a license to redistribute. Creative Commons licenses are quite flexible and already fill that niche pretty well.
I see OCA as more of a book-focused initiative to get public domain and licensed work available to the public.
-- John.
A) I don't see that as a leak of that size as a likely scenario. That much data doesn't escape by accident.
B) Oh what a nightmare if it did and we had an electronic backup of every book in existence...
The fact is that copyright infringement of books is already easy. All it takes is an automatic document feeder and a good PDF generator. $500.
It's happening and it will continue to happen. But Google is acting very responsibly so the publishers are better off with them than leaving users to their own creative pursuits.
I seriously doubt that illegal trading of music would be so big if iTunes or something like it had been around from the beginning. But the industry couldn't get their act together.
-- John.
Usually Star Trek, even the original show is not cheesy. Hard sci-fi it ain't but they usually don't give the impression they think their viewers are idiots.
But "Spock's Brain" is definitely some stinky cheese. Aside from Star Trek V, and the next gen episode where everyone devolves into creatures which, mostly they didn't actually evolve from (so bad I have never looked back to learn the name of the episode).
Actually, I try to predict the byline on Slashdot stories and I think this is definitely from the missed opportunity department...
-- John.
As much as I don't like Dvorak, he has a point about the 20 steps to something being a pain in the ass to keep track of.
Every time I have to search google for a common sequence of steps it's a failure of the program or help in the program I am using. Half the time I can't remember immediately the magic Google incantation that finds me the 20 steps that it took me last time.
Yes you're right, some actions a user might want to take are inherently complex. No, we cannot make macro keys or wizards for everything, especially activities that require our brain as input.
However, there really ought to be a better way to dynamically build help systems that help you keep track of how to do complex things. The fact is that if I don't use a program at least once every couple of weeks, if it is complex at all I'm going to hit the learning curve every time I use that program.
The bottom line is that there is a real fundamental issue there, and where there are fundamental issues there is room to create new solutions.
Example: imagine every time you searched google it was dead-bang-simple to associate results of searches with the program you are using. Further imagine that anyone could easily record and publish a wizard/script for any application. Actually I am thinking more of a tutor than a wizard; rather then doing the task for you, it teaches you how to do the task. You would keep the tutor around until you don't need it any more.
That I think would be an interesting middle ground. You still have the full functionality of the app, but complex tasks always have tutors that walk you through it as necessary.
-- John.
I agree with that. Developing web pages and scripts is the most natural way to learn to programming. No barrier to entry for most folks. Everone has the tools and there are lots of docs free on the web.
Actually, I would suggests starting with HTML. It's not programming per se, but it is a close relative, and many of the same skills are required. Just make sure you use a text editor to write your code, not a crutch web page generator, at least not for this purpose. Vi, emacs, or even something like notepad is OK.
Then JavaScript, then Java or C# or C. Eventually, you must get to C. It will probably take a while to "get" C pointers, but it is so for everyone.
General advice: you're the programmer. Everything is *your* fault. This is a mistake fledgling programmers make: they tend to be ready to blame the interpreter, the computer, the disk drive. But 99% of the time, the problem is your code. The other side of that coin is most of the software challenges you will encounter are doable if you put the effort into it. Always have Google handy to look things up and find the easy way to do it.
On that score: good programmers are usually interested in "The Right Way" to do a thing. If the way you've chosen seems klunky and inefficient and that there is a better way: well, that's because there probably is a better way. Seek out the "best ways" (there is usually only one best way... yes, it's weird). It takes time, but that's how you learn.
Oh yeah, laziness: if you aren't maximizing laziness (in the sense of putting extra effort now to avoid work later) you aren't a Real Programmer.
-- John.
Obviously, Scotty was a retrocomputing buff.
-- John.
You misunderstand me... I'm not saying journalists shouldn't get special treatment. They do and they should.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't take a degree or a particular employer, or pants to magically transform you into a journalist. A journalist is someone who practices journalism.
That transformation from regular citizen to journalist happens when you excercise your free speech right to purvey information to the general public via any broadcast medium, like TV, radio, newspaper, and certainly the web. In performing a journalist act you deserve any and every protection any other member of the press gets covering you in that action of free speech. Any information you gather from sources related to the act of journalism should be protected if the primary intent of gathering that information was to disseminate it to the general public via some broadcast medium. There's a a rough definition, turned into legalese it would probably be good enough for the courts, and totally unrestrictive.
There are plenty of employed people who call themselves journalists who are not (most of the talking heads and hair+teeth folks on television count here). There are a whole lot more regular citizens who don't practice journalism often enough to care one way or another. But leave it to the courts to decide who is in which camp and when, not in a strict a priori legal definition by congress.
-- John.
I think it is quite reasonable to want to protect derivative sources of information. Just because someone is interpreting news should not exclude them from a potential shield law. What should exclude them, plain and simple is pretending to be a journalist. That's why I say leave it to the courts and juries who can better decide an individual's intent than Congress can a priori.
The larger point is that this should be egalitarian. Wearing pants, or writing your stories from a cube farm instead of your home office should make absolutely no difference. There should be no special protections for someone doing something professionally in the private sector versus as a private citizen. In fact, if anything I'd expect more protections as a private citizen since the stakes are so much higher, my work is not vetted by others, and others in the society really ought to be taking what a blogger says with several inch sized cubes of salt anyway...
-- John.
That's the second definition.
The primary definition is simply "one whose occupation is journalism."
On the same site, journalism is defined quite broadly in a way that would include most every blogger, and certainly DOES NOT exclude "editorialism" (and I don't think it's just missing because editorialism isn't a word). The definition of journalism there is:
1. The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.
2. Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast.
3. The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.
4. Newspapers and magazines.
5. An academic course training students in journalism.
6. Written material of current interest or wide popular appeal.
A little outmoded since it doesn't consider journalists publishing via the Internet (strange for a dictionary on the web), but I can't see how you wouldn't classify a blogger somewhere in there.
-- John.
Anyone can send you a letter, and anyone can sue you at any time. Nothing in this law will change that. Also, people that sue you usually do it because they expect to win.
What I'm suggesting is that a court can make the best determination of whether you are acting primarily as a journalist and so the bar should be raised as to whether you must divulge a source. If you are acting as a journalist, you wouldn't have much to worry about. The alternative of only protecting people who journalize while wearing pants is much less attractive alternative. Face it... the Congress is NOT going grant to give immunity to everyone who wants it from divulging sources. The standard is going to be much higher than whether the person rigged up a blog to spew their libels.
Anyway, what do cease & desist, DMCA etc have to do with a shield law? You are always liable for your actions, shield law or not, including many cases where there is no specific law to fit your action, including the broad concept of "negligence."
How would you define 'journalist' in a narrow enough way that you capture serious bloggers versus interlopers?
-- John.
How about the "Pants Test." If an article was not written while wearing pants (pajama bottoms don't count), then you don't get protection under the shield law.
Really though, I think the Congress should just word it broadly and let the courts decide on a case-by-case basis whether someone was primarily acting as a journalist or not. As you say, there's really no good way to decide whether someone is acting as a journalist or just going through the motions to allow themselves to hide sources of information. There can be no bright-line test.
-- John.
Basically at this point the Mac/Windows style interface is creaky and aging. Does your gut tell you that this style of interaction with the computer is really the best way to go?
I'd like to see some really innovative desktop environments... for myself I tend to experiment with the tabbed window managers that maintain your layout, for me Ion3 seems to be doing the job.
On top of that it would be nice if the interface was more naturally productive. Basically, your applications should be persistent and state should collect up as tasks... so if I'm working on a document, and I do some research in Google it would be good if there was a straightforward, natural way for this info to collect together, and save some history automatically.
Anytime I want to restart a task it should bring up my document, and history for the searches I was doing, etc. Why should I have to hunt around for documents and pop all those windows open again, rearrange them on screen in a productive way...
Productive is a lot more important to me than "usable" where usable means Mac- or Windows-like. Strategically it makes no sense to play follow the leader when we have an opportunity to get out in front.
-- John.
Well, it seems clear that the customer would have an obligation to when they distribute it. The creator of the wizard supplies a tool that downloads the kernel from kernel.org and patches it. The user runs the tool, so the user downloads the kernel, the user does the patches. the user redistributes the end result in their product.
Who has liability? The end user certainly. But what about the creator of the wizard? Quite possibly, none at all.
The creator of the wizard never redistributed the kernel, so the GPL is not binding on them. Patches typically contain some context information (lines of source) for syncing up the patch tool, but that could be considered 'fair use.'
-- John.
So is the kernel redistributable under the GPL once it has been patched by WindRiver's wizard? Anyone know the license they use on the patches, or do you end up with a tainted kernel which cannot be redistributed without a separate license agreement from WindRiver?
Such a wizard sounds like a great way to sneak around the license to me, or at least pass on liability to customers.
-- John