I have paid out for just a handful of Android apps, but only after having tried them out beforehand in demo or ad-supported versions. Since I've been a denizen of the Linux/BSD world for over 15 years, I find it goes against the grain to pay for software - not because I am a cheapskate, but because I prefer the Free model. But I figure that for an an application that I use several times a day, I can afford the modest cost to reward the developer for his efforts.
It always strikes me that Facebook is like some overblown school reunion. People whom you would never ordinarily consider contacting are drawn into the endless feedback loop of a social networking site that uses emotional blackmail to keep you there. If you want to quit, you have to run the gauntlet of Facebook's messages claiming that you will "lose" all your "friends" if you go, and what will you do then...
Not for me. I was born into a world that had no internet, and although it is now part of my headspace (FWIW), I am happy to keep real friends at the end of an email, phone call or a knock on the door.
I agree, but my point was that if publishers will only supply a work in a given form (dead-tree in this case), that amounts to gouging, since they obviously have the text available in digital format, they just won't release it as such, even with their DRM.
I was bypassing any argument about pricing. Most publications that I have checked out seem to be priced just a little below the cost of the paper version. Not so much that the cost of printing and distribution are reflected in the price, but what the hell. I'll accept that there are some books that deserve the dignity of a decently bound edition (and physical accommodation on a shelf), while others with a low likelihood of being re-read are best bought in a format with no overhead.
I don't really know how many thousands of books I have, but having just moved house for the first time in 21 years, I really wish that some of those books were in a format that didn't take up so much physical space.
If you get 100 books to a box, then you either have very large boxes or very small books. My wife and I recently made an interstate move across Australia, and our books (I have no idea how many) occupied 190 boxes. The worst thing is, we no longer have the shelf space, so most of them are still in boxes on the garage.
It all depends on what discipline you're in. Back in the '70s and early '80s, I did quite well with FORTRAN, COBOL and Assemblers for various platforms, but textbooks were less useful than solid experience.
Having changed direction 12 years ago into the field of biotechnology, i.e. molecular biology, I quickly found that most resources were to be found in the current journal literature, so once I had got through the biochemistry prerequisites, my outlay on textbooks was nearly zero.
Indeed. Back in my parents' generation (I too was born in the early '60s) it was not that uncommon a virtue to be a polymath, and I was raised to believe that being one was a Good Thing(TM). I have, over the years, found a few rare examples of this species (and married one), and they are the best of my friends.
Back in the '90s I used to fret about our crappy acidic paper precipitating another Dark Age, but now I realise I was talking through my ass. Facebook and Twitter may not survive the next decade intact (who knows? Who cares?) but the trend for such a mode of interaction with the world is here to stay. And with people going to these sources for information or perspective, the inevitable result is a moronicization of consciouness.
I can't honestly say that the world is a better place for the LOTR books having been written.
Fair enough. But by the same token, it is certainly fair to say the world is no better a place for those books having been shoehorned into a movie format. The films sort of tell the story (less rather than more), but I challenge anyone to put hand on heart and say the films really do the books justice. I'm not claiming that the movies aren't entertaining in their own way, but many might have reason to feel the source material has been wasted.
Very occasionally, you come across a movie that actually does justice to the original book. One shining example that comes to mind is Like Water For Chocolate. Admittedly, I believe the author had some input with the production, but still...
But we haven't really established that there is a movement away from reading vs. other forms of entertainment.
Anecdotally (i.e. from observation of many friends and associates), I would suggest that there is indeed such a movement. Many people who read books in the past appear now to be unable to sustain the requisite attention span. A particularly shameful example is a very good friend (another denizen of Slashdot who, if he has managed to read this far will know whom I mean;-)) who recently attended a performance of King Lear with me and my wife, but prefers the Wikipedia synopsis.
I call the condition the "Twitterization" of the modern consciousness. It's a bit more charitable than some terms that come to mind...;-)
Ebooks will make up 95% of the market in the near future (say 10-20 years).
You might be right, and in the US things might already be going that way. But here in Australia, publishers still prefer to gouge their customers by only selling dead-tree copies of most quality fiction. And of course, international sites like Amazon, Borders et al. are only too happy to collude with this arrangement.
I realise there is plenty of interesting material on places like Project Gutenberg, but I have found that looking for decent and recent literature in digital form is often a frustrating experience. Admittedly, I've heard this partly at second hand, since my wife has a Sony PRS-650 reader which serves her purposes very well for when she feels like reading junky detective stories, but on her advice I'm hanging ten for a while before I get an e-reader for myself.
Given that (according to Wikipedia) Microsoft has paid out 32 times Skype's operating profits for the acquisition, I would be inclined to guess (or rather hope) that they might have something more in mind than shutting the door on competitors. Ballmer might act the buffoon from time to time, but if he made any serious attempt to operate against shareholders' interests for purely capricious reasons, I suspect he might be in swift contact with the business end of a boot.
As an AC said before me, that currently doesn't work outside the US, for some reason best known to Google. But there are many (myself included) who consider video calls to be something of an intrusion; coping with international calls with an 8 to 10 hour time difference is unlikely to present me at my best, whatever that might be, and I (for one) choose to spare my friends and relations.
You're probably more or less right. If Microsoft makes Skype a Windows-only program, they will not only alienate Linux and Mac users, but also Android and iPhone users. This would really make the acquisition pretty much pointless, since there's not much point in cutting off revenue streams.
What MS almost certainly will do, however, is fail to pass on any value they might (hypothetically) succeed in adding to the product to non-Windows users. This is fairly unlikely to make any difference to me, since I only use the voice and IM capabilities of the technology, which aren't really that bad in terms of quality and reliability.
Thank goodness for Google docs which allows me to save as a pdf file.
OpenOffice has had the ability to save as PDF for years, and it even includes by default an unmistakable icon in the toolbar to do so. As for displaying.docx (or.doc for that matter) files, one can't even depend on any version of MSOffice to do that consistently.
TFA mentions the descent of Slackware from SoftLanding Linux System as an example to illustrate his point, but I'm not sure it really applies in this case. IIRC, the principal difference between SLS and Slack was originally the choice between a.out and ELF binaries. Although history has favoured the latter, the difference doesn't seem that significant in the light of the X.org/XFree86 or Open/LibreOffice shenanigans.
Don't get me wrong - I still love Slackware, and it is by far my first choice for any Linux server. In fact, until a year or two ago, it was still my first choice as a desktop platform too, but more recently Arch Linux has taken that position, since it has all of the elegant simplicity of Slackware in combination with a more modern (but still simple) package system.
What I don't get is what is so damn wrong with a view of wind turbines. Maybe I'm just weird or something, but I think they're beautiful. The fact that they give us (almost) free energy should be a win for everybody.
Indeed. I can (just about) understand if there's a chance that a windmill might clobber some unwary seagull who doesn't look where he's going, but don't expect me to be very sympathetic.
But given the Native American nations' historically much-vaunted regard for nature and the environment, it comes across as a savage indictment against them when their leaders put naked pecuniary interests ahead of ecologically sustainable energy.
I fart in the general direction of WYSIWYG. True editors (by which I mean Butterflies, TECO, Emacs and just possibly vi) should be YAFIYGI (You Asked For It, You Got It).
Oh dear. You have all got it completely wrong. There is only One True editor, and His name is Allah^W^W^W^W (oops, turned over two pages at once) that is TECO, for which Emacs was originally a set of macros. TECO is heavy on meatspace memory usage, but it is still by far the fastest and IMO best text editor on the planet.
And given that it is just about the same age as I am (approaching 50 terrestrial years), it definitely qualifies as being here for the long haul.
Funny, I seem to be able to download the open source compiler for Flash directly from Adobe.
Yes, but that doesn't help you very much if you happen to be a user who wants to copy/paste text from these presentations. And it doesn't really help very much even if all you want to do is read the text, since it forces you into a layout that is usually sub-optimal.
This is something I don't understand. The major desktop UIs common on Linux have just about always had autohidden panels. Hell, even Windows 95 had one. It's not as if autohide is anything new, any more than Apple's launch of "Spaces" was new to anyone with experience of any X11 desktop environment.
I'm not particularly a Mac fan (though I'm using a MacBook right now), but I don't really care where the Dock/Launcher/Panel/whatever is, so long as it's not at the top. I currently prefer the left-hand side.
But while I understand the philosophy behind a global menu bar, that is probably the one thing I dislike most about the Mac UI. What I don't understand is why the Unity developers bother with it, since it is not based on the application-centric framework central to the logic of the Mac UI. It seems to me that they have unnecessarily mongrelised an app-centric and window-centric UI for no particularly good reason.
That isn't to say I couldn't get used to it, since I consider myself capable of using any computer system, but some of these design concepts seem unnecessarily craniorectal. However, to be fair, my own desktop Arch Linux system has been through so many rolling-release upgrades and had dozens of UI components yanked and replaced, it is probably just as much a mongrel as Ubuntu's offering.
The difference, I guess, is that I don't impose my cranky set of values on anyone else. I'm happy enough to work with Ubuntu occasionally, if only to stay current, but over the years I have always found their capricious and unecessary meddling with things has always driven me away.
Incidentally, TFA mentions some of those wagons being stopped by having their tyres shot out. Seems to me that someone goofed there: there have been semi-solid alternatives to air (e.g. foam rubber) for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
I have paid out for just a handful of Android apps, but only after having tried them out beforehand in demo or ad-supported versions. Since I've been a denizen of the Linux/BSD world for over 15 years, I find it goes against the grain to pay for software - not because I am a cheapskate, but because I prefer the Free model. But I figure that for an an application that I use several times a day, I can afford the modest cost to reward the developer for his efforts.
It always strikes me that Facebook is like some overblown school reunion. People whom you would never ordinarily consider contacting are drawn into the endless feedback loop of a social networking site that uses emotional blackmail to keep you there. If you want to quit, you have to run the gauntlet of Facebook's messages claiming that you will "lose" all your "friends" if you go, and what will you do then...
Not for me. I was born into a world that had no internet, and although it is now part of my headspace (FWIW), I am happy to keep real friends at the end of an email, phone call or a knock on the door.
I agree, but my point was that if publishers will only supply a work in a given form (dead-tree in this case), that amounts to gouging, since they obviously have the text available in digital format, they just won't release it as such, even with their DRM.
I was bypassing any argument about pricing. Most publications that I have checked out seem to be priced just a little below the cost of the paper version. Not so much that the cost of printing and distribution are reflected in the price, but what the hell. I'll accept that there are some books that deserve the dignity of a decently bound edition (and physical accommodation on a shelf), while others with a low likelihood of being re-read are best bought in a format with no overhead.
I don't really know how many thousands of books I have, but having just moved house for the first time in 21 years, I really wish that some of those books were in a format that didn't take up so much physical space.
If you get 100 books to a box, then you either have very large boxes or very small books. My wife and I recently made an interstate move across Australia, and our books (I have no idea how many) occupied 190 boxes. The worst thing is, we no longer have the shelf space, so most of them are still in boxes on the garage.
It all depends on what discipline you're in. Back in the '70s and early '80s, I did quite well with FORTRAN, COBOL and Assemblers for various platforms, but textbooks were less useful than solid experience.
Having changed direction 12 years ago into the field of biotechnology, i.e. molecular biology, I quickly found that most resources were to be found in the current journal literature, so once I had got through the biochemistry prerequisites, my outlay on textbooks was nearly zero.
Indeed. Back in my parents' generation (I too was born in the early '60s) it was not that uncommon a virtue to be a polymath, and I was raised to believe that being one was a Good Thing(TM). I have, over the years, found a few rare examples of this species (and married one), and they are the best of my friends.
Back in the '90s I used to fret about our crappy acidic paper precipitating another Dark Age, but now I realise I was talking through my ass. Facebook and Twitter may not survive the next decade intact (who knows? Who cares?) but the trend for such a mode of interaction with the world is here to stay. And with people going to these sources for information or perspective, the inevitable result is a moronicization of consciouness.
I can't honestly say that the world is a better place for the LOTR books having been written.
Fair enough. But by the same token, it is certainly fair to say the world is no better a place for those books having been shoehorned into a movie format. The films sort of tell the story (less rather than more), but I challenge anyone to put hand on heart and say the films really do the books justice. I'm not claiming that the movies aren't entertaining in their own way, but many might have reason to feel the source material has been wasted.
Very occasionally, you come across a movie that actually does justice to the original book. One shining example that comes to mind is Like Water For Chocolate. Admittedly, I believe the author had some input with the production, but still...
But we haven't really established that there is a movement away from reading vs. other forms of entertainment.
Anecdotally (i.e. from observation of many friends and associates), I would suggest that there is indeed such a movement. Many people who read books in the past appear now to be unable to sustain the requisite attention span. A particularly shameful example is a very good friend (another denizen of Slashdot who, if he has managed to read this far will know whom I mean ;-)) who recently attended a performance of King Lear with me and my wife, but prefers the Wikipedia synopsis.
;-)
I call the condition the "Twitterization" of the modern consciousness. It's a bit more charitable than some terms that come to mind...
Ebooks will make up 95% of the market in the near future (say 10-20 years).
You might be right, and in the US things might already be going that way. But here in Australia, publishers still prefer to gouge their customers by only selling dead-tree copies of most quality fiction. And of course, international sites like Amazon, Borders et al. are only too happy to collude with this arrangement.
I realise there is plenty of interesting material on places like Project Gutenberg, but I have found that looking for decent and recent literature in digital form is often a frustrating experience. Admittedly, I've heard this partly at second hand, since my wife has a Sony PRS-650 reader which serves her purposes very well for when she feels like reading junky detective stories, but on her advice I'm hanging ten for a while before I get an e-reader for myself.
Given that (according to Wikipedia) Microsoft has paid out 32 times Skype's operating profits for the acquisition, I would be inclined to guess (or rather hope) that they might have something more in mind than shutting the door on competitors. Ballmer might act the buffoon from time to time, but if he made any serious attempt to operate against shareholders' interests for purely capricious reasons, I suspect he might be in swift contact with the business end of a boot.
As an AC said before me, that currently doesn't work outside the US, for some reason best known to Google. But there are many (myself included) who consider video calls to be something of an intrusion; coping with international calls with an 8 to 10 hour time difference is unlikely to present me at my best, whatever that might be, and I (for one) choose to spare my friends and relations.
You're probably more or less right. If Microsoft makes Skype a Windows-only program, they will not only alienate Linux and Mac users, but also Android and iPhone users. This would really make the acquisition pretty much pointless, since there's not much point in cutting off revenue streams.
What MS almost certainly will do, however, is fail to pass on any value they might (hypothetically) succeed in adding to the product to non-Windows users. This is fairly unlikely to make any difference to me, since I only use the voice and IM capabilities of the technology, which aren't really that bad in terms of quality and reliability.
Thank goodness for Google docs which allows me to save as a pdf file.
OpenOffice has had the ability to save as PDF for years, and it even includes by default an unmistakable icon in the toolbar to do so. As for displaying .docx (or .doc for that matter) files, one can't even depend on any version of MSOffice to do that consistently.
TFA mentions the descent of Slackware from SoftLanding Linux System as an example to illustrate his point, but I'm not sure it really applies in this case. IIRC, the principal difference between SLS and Slack was originally the choice between a.out and ELF binaries. Although history has favoured the latter, the difference doesn't seem that significant in the light of the X.org/XFree86 or Open/LibreOffice shenanigans.
Don't get me wrong - I still love Slackware, and it is by far my first choice for any Linux server. In fact, until a year or two ago, it was still my first choice as a desktop platform too, but more recently Arch Linux has taken that position, since it has all of the elegant simplicity of Slackware in combination with a more modern (but still simple) package system.
What I don't get is what is so damn wrong with a view of wind turbines. Maybe I'm just weird or something, but I think they're beautiful. The fact that they give us (almost) free energy should be a win for everybody.
Indeed. I can (just about) understand if there's a chance that a windmill might clobber some unwary seagull who doesn't look where he's going, but don't expect me to be very sympathetic.
But given the Native American nations' historically much-vaunted regard for nature and the environment, it comes across as a savage indictment against them when their leaders put naked pecuniary interests ahead of ecologically sustainable energy.
What a great post. Well said. Just when I had started to regret what I said earlier on in this thread... :-}
I fart in the general direction of WYSIWYG. True editors (by which I mean Butterflies, TECO, Emacs and just possibly vi) should be YAFIYGI (You Asked For It, You Got It).
Also, hardly anyone here bothers to proof-read their posts...
Or more likely, they suffer from the Mispeling Vyrus. [A virtual beer to enlightened souls who spot the reference...]
Oh dear. You have all got it completely wrong. There is only One True editor, and His name is Allah^W^W^W^W (oops, turned over two pages at once) that is TECO, for which Emacs was originally a set of macros. TECO is heavy on meatspace memory usage, but it is still by far the fastest and IMO best text editor on the planet.
And given that it is just about the same age as I am (approaching 50 terrestrial years), it definitely qualifies as being here for the long haul.
Funny, I seem to be able to download the open source compiler for Flash directly from Adobe.
Yes, but that doesn't help you very much if you happen to be a user who wants to copy/paste text from these presentations. And it doesn't really help very much even if all you want to do is read the text, since it forces you into a layout that is usually sub-optimal.
This is something I don't understand. The major desktop UIs common on Linux have just about always had autohidden panels. Hell, even Windows 95 had one. It's not as if autohide is anything new, any more than Apple's launch of "Spaces" was new to anyone with experience of any X11 desktop environment.
I'm not particularly a Mac fan (though I'm using a MacBook right now), but I don't really care where the Dock/Launcher/Panel/whatever is, so long as it's not at the top. I currently prefer the left-hand side.
But while I understand the philosophy behind a global menu bar, that is probably the one thing I dislike most about the Mac UI. What I don't understand is why the Unity developers bother with it, since it is not based on the application-centric framework central to the logic of the Mac UI. It seems to me that they have unnecessarily mongrelised an app-centric and window-centric UI for no particularly good reason.
That isn't to say I couldn't get used to it, since I consider myself capable of using any computer system, but some of these design concepts seem unnecessarily craniorectal. However, to be fair, my own desktop Arch Linux system has been through so many rolling-release upgrades and had dozens of UI components yanked and replaced, it is probably just as much a mongrel as Ubuntu's offering.
The difference, I guess, is that I don't impose my cranky set of values on anyone else. I'm happy enough to work with Ubuntu occasionally, if only to stay current, but over the years I have always found their capricious and unecessary meddling with things has always driven me away.
Incidentally, TFA mentions some of those wagons being stopped by having their tyres shot out. Seems to me that someone goofed there: there have been semi-solid alternatives to air (e.g. foam rubber) for decades.