If there's anything we learned from the PC universe, it's that many people would rather have viruses run transparently in the background than have their machines slow to a crawl because of overbearing security suites that often don't even identify proper threats.
That's a very interesting point. Virus used to wreak havoc on the targeted computer and destroy files, reboot the machine, etc... Nowadays, all that they hope for is to be able to steal stealthily a few percent of resources and bandwidth. About the same as the antivirus except he is not very stealthy about it.
Bad summary : the EU parliament voted to make it mandatory for the negociations to be public and to provide it with some guidelines (approximately says : respect the current EU law). That's all. They can't refuse a thing they don't even know the content.
You just have to hire 20 good interns from MIT, so easy... I wonder why everyone isn't doing that ?
Sigh...
Maybe the biggest mistake in the man-month is to believe than any (wo)man can replace any other hence, the cheapest the better. That's the point I see busted.
Here is some information about the body consumption (in kcal) for many activities :
Sleeping 70
Lying quietly 80
Sitting 100
Standing at ease 110
Conversation 110
Strolling 140
Driving a car 140
Playing violin or piano 140
Hiking, 4 mph 350 407
Swimming 500 582
Long-distance running 900
Sprinting 1400
So if we say piano requires the same amount of energy as coding (I would say it requires less mental effort as people develop automatisms at it) it is 40% more consuming that being a couch potato sitting in front of a TV, but still a far cry from running or even hiking. Similar however to walking quietly, which is what my doctor recommends me to do as a minimal exercise to not get unhealthily fat.
I have been studying without a single laptop in the classroom and I can confirm that for a witless stenographer a laptop is completely useless. Pen and papers work the same quite fine. There is a solution to remove this behavior, some of my teachers adopted it : to provide each student with a copy of the class ! Usually we note one these copies little details and focus more on the understanding of the matter being taught.
It was not widely popular however because teachers who were poor speakers and bad explainers usually ended up with no student in the room as the copy provided them with the complete class.
Teachers, don't be like the **AA : computers and internet change the way to do things. Don't fight the change, embrace it !
Given enough time even a random process will find the optimal solution. Speed has to be a factor in this discussion. I guess (hope) this point has been made.
Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?
Yes I did. I am not sure of the US system but here (France) any citizen is welcome to participate or oversee the public counting of ballots. We use transparent ballot boxes so you are free to stay in the voting office from the opening to the counting. There are always several people there including opponents.
Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes.
It is also the scale. Electronic voting makes nation-wide fraud possible. Electronic voting gives a single point of failure for fraud : the machine manufacturer.
Linux doesn't make electronic voting a good idea though. How can we check the published program is the one running ? It is akin to use opaque voting boxes without showing they are empty first.
Spread the word to fellow voters : if YOU can't understand how the vote is secured, refuse the voting system !
Interesting that the price didn't change. Because a huge thing has changed now : for $0, someone can have a feature-complete OS. The fact that they can maintain their old practice in e field where prices have fallen down dramatically is precisely what makes people say they are monopolistic. BTW, I still have Windows 1.0 on some 5.1/4 floppies and it came with a file manager and image viewer. I am not sure about the compression though (is there one in 7 ? XP surely doesn't have one). The latest versions of Windows actually come with LESS things installed : no programming language (qbasic was still something), no telnet in Vista, for example. The features offered have changed according to the market, but they didn't exactly make their bundle really competitive.
And a huge success.
Face it : the problem you mention exist today but are hidden to the public's eye. Giving the public a way to correct it is what wikipedia did and proved as workable.
Exactly. The only reason why flash and youtube had any success at all is Microsoft being unable to provide a good, streaming-able, movie player with Windows. History will probably repeat itself : Apple, Microsoft (Google ?) will all want to impose one format over the other, making the whole IT lose millions of man-hour writting compatibility layers instead of focusing on important developments.
Advice here from the PP-fr : the PP is an internet-based movement. Compared to a physical world movement it means that it will be easier to hear from friendly people but also that the proportion of friendly people you heard from that are actually enthusiastic enough to spend time helping/work for you is quite small. If you need to gather 20 people, better have 1000 people in your network as opposed to the 50/60 you would require in the physical-world case.
I can't say for sure this is your case but don't misunderstand that phenomenon for apathy. It is quite natural and quite positive but can give wrong expectations in terms of active membership.
Some ideas:
* Subscription-based a la WoW
* Ransom model ("Here is the first level, I'll release the second one when the $10,000 mark will be reached)
* Donation model (Dwarf Fortress works like that, they make $1000-$2000 a month IIRC)
* For all the rest, there is (or will be) Flattr. Brought to you by The Pirate Bay creators, because the entertainment industries specialists were too dumb to figure it by themselves.
There is one thing to repeat over and over and over : retribution of the artist cannot come anymore from the control of the distribution chain of copies. This time is OVER. Any music/movie/video game enthusiast is aware that such a retribution is important. And that is why we are hostile to the **AA crowd : they can't get a good one, despite it being their damn (overpaid) job.
I only know the official positions of the Swedish and French Pirate Party but what they propose is :
- A 5 years period, running from the first publication, copyright granting exclusive commercial rights
- Legalizing sharing of copies with no commercial goal, even during the 5 years period
- Extend the period for 5 years for every of these clauses the author adds : free to modify non commercially, free to use commercially, free to modify and use commercially (in the latter the author still is the recognize author with all the moral rights it encompasses, after this period it goes into public domain)
It may seem extreme to some but it looks quite fair to me.
Obviously this comment is too short to be informative as I wrote it quickly. Gah.... I wish Slashdot would grow a bit over this time limitation for posts...
In EU, software patentes are illegal but accepted by the patent office. None of them ever was used in a court case. Come on Microsoft, come play here. I want to see in what kind of country I'm living.
Slashdot Mirror
William Shatner was slashdotted. The internet has accomplished its purpose. It may now rest in peace.
If there's anything we learned from the PC universe, it's that many people would rather have viruses run transparently in the background than have their machines slow to a crawl because of overbearing security suites that often don't even identify proper threats.
That's a very interesting point. Virus used to wreak havoc on the targeted computer and destroy files, reboot the machine, etc... Nowadays, all that they hope for is to be able to steal stealthily a few percent of resources and bandwidth. About the same as the antivirus except he is not very stealthy about it.
Leaving Kaspersky out is the first interesting feature I see in this whole Apple App Store scheme !
Bad summary : the EU parliament voted to make it mandatory for the negociations to be public and to provide it with some guidelines (approximately says : respect the current EU law). That's all. They can't refuse a thing they don't even know the content.
You just have to hire 20 good interns from MIT, so easy... I wonder why everyone isn't doing that ?
Sigh...
Maybe the biggest mistake in the man-month is to believe than any (wo)man can replace any other hence, the cheapest the better. That's the point I see busted.
Had this guy died yesterday, this work would likely be gone forever.
End the copyrigth madness NOW !
The 4th comment here is interesting :
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-42053.html
Here is some information about the body consumption (in kcal) for many activities :
Sleeping 70
Lying quietly 80
Sitting 100
Standing at ease 110
Conversation 110
Strolling 140
Driving a car 140
Playing violin or piano 140
Hiking, 4 mph 350 407
Swimming 500 582
Long-distance running 900
Sprinting 1400
So if we say piano requires the same amount of energy as coding (I would say it requires less mental effort as people develop automatisms at it) it is 40% more consuming that being a couch potato sitting in front of a TV, but still a far cry from running or even hiking. Similar however to walking quietly, which is what my doctor recommends me to do as a minimal exercise to not get unhealthily fat.
But when you code, you don't have a voice suddenly shouting "hmmmmm, I would like some veeeery fat and cheesy pizza! Yummy !"
I have been studying without a single laptop in the classroom and I can confirm that for a witless stenographer a laptop is completely useless. Pen and papers work the same quite fine. There is a solution to remove this behavior, some of my teachers adopted it : to provide each student with a copy of the class ! Usually we note one these copies little details and focus more on the understanding of the matter being taught.
It was not widely popular however because teachers who were poor speakers and bad explainers usually ended up with no student in the room as the copy provided them with the complete class.
Teachers, don't be like the **AA : computers and internet change the way to do things. Don't fight the change, embrace it !
Given enough time even a random process will find the optimal solution. Speed has to be a factor in this discussion. I guess (hope) this point has been made.
Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?
Yes I did. I am not sure of the US system but here (France) any citizen is welcome to participate or oversee the public counting of ballots. We use transparent ballot boxes so you are free to stay in the voting office from the opening to the counting. There are always several people there including opponents.
Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes.
It is also the scale. Electronic voting makes nation-wide fraud possible. Electronic voting gives a single point of failure for fraud : the machine manufacturer.
Linux doesn't make electronic voting a good idea though. How can we check the published program is the one running ? It is akin to use opaque voting boxes without showing they are empty first.
Spread the word to fellow voters : if YOU can't understand how the vote is secured, refuse the voting system !
Interesting that the price didn't change. Because a huge thing has changed now : for $0, someone can have a feature-complete OS. The fact that they can maintain their old practice in e field where prices have fallen down dramatically is precisely what makes people say they are monopolistic. BTW, I still have Windows 1.0 on some 5.1/4 floppies and it came with a file manager and image viewer. I am not sure about the compression though (is there one in 7 ? XP surely doesn't have one). The latest versions of Windows actually come with LESS things installed : no programming language (qbasic was still something), no telnet in Vista, for example. The features offered have changed according to the market, but they didn't exactly make their bundle really competitive.
And a huge success.
Face it : the problem you mention exist today but are hidden to the public's eye. Giving the public a way to correct it is what wikipedia did and proved as workable.
Add a capacitor, have ten thousand of these wires in a box and lit one of them when the capacitor is empty.
But what it lacks is a recharging mechanism...
Exactly. The only reason why flash and youtube had any success at all is Microsoft being unable to provide a good, streaming-able, movie player with Windows. History will probably repeat itself : Apple, Microsoft (Google ?) will all want to impose one format over the other, making the whole IT lose millions of man-hour writting compatibility layers instead of focusing on important developments.
I get it that the software can monitor charging, report stuff, advertise... But how does Energizer feel now, with egg on their faces?
They blame Microsoft/subcontractors/trojan writers/OpenSource hippies, and it will not have any consequences for them.
It is a prerequisite and business-practice that any software on windows has as many vulnerable modules load by default as possible.
Advice here from the PP-fr : the PP is an internet-based movement. Compared to a physical world movement it means that it will be easier to hear from friendly people but also that the proportion of friendly people you heard from that are actually enthusiastic enough to spend time helping/work for you is quite small. If you need to gather 20 people, better have 1000 people in your network as opposed to the 50/60 you would require in the physical-world case.
I can't say for sure this is your case but don't misunderstand that phenomenon for apathy. It is quite natural and quite positive but can give wrong expectations in terms of active membership.
Some ideas :
* Subscription-based a la WoW
* Ransom model ("Here is the first level, I'll release the second one when the $10,000 mark will be reached)
* Donation model (Dwarf Fortress works like that, they make $1000-$2000 a month IIRC)
* For all the rest, there is (or will be) Flattr. Brought to you by The Pirate Bay creators, because the entertainment industries specialists were too dumb to figure it by themselves.
There is one thing to repeat over and over and over : retribution of the artist cannot come anymore from the control of the distribution chain of copies. This time is OVER. Any music/movie/video game enthusiast is aware that such a retribution is important. And that is why we are hostile to the **AA crowd : they can't get a good one, despite it being their damn (overpaid) job.
I only know the official positions of the Swedish and French Pirate Party but what they propose is :
- A 5 years period, running from the first publication, copyright granting exclusive commercial rights
- Legalizing sharing of copies with no commercial goal, even during the 5 years period
- Extend the period for 5 years for every of these clauses the author adds : free to modify non commercially, free to use commercially, free to modify and use commercially (in the latter the author still is the recognize author with all the moral rights it encompasses, after this period it goes into public domain)
It may seem extreme to some but it looks quite fair to me.
Just be prepared for the day they won't be in charge anymore.
Yes
Obviously this comment is too short to be informative as I wrote it quickly. Gah.... I wish Slashdot would grow a bit over this time limitation for posts...
In EU, software patentes are illegal but accepted by the patent office. None of them ever was used in a court case. Come on Microsoft, come play here. I want to see in what kind of country I'm living.
It moves the problem, it doesn't solve it.