Your way of thinking totally pummels popular tourist destinations with an unfair amount of extra wear they are not getting any money for.
The point is that the system doesn't need to be absolutely accurate right down to the mile. If you're concerned about the effect of tourism on the roads, I'm sure census data could be used to determine some basic figures regarding how much travel goes to each state, and from which states. From there you can determine a simple redistribution formula.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough, and perfection is simply not necessary in this case, especially if perfection comes at the expense of privacy for all citizens.
So, most people see the choice as this: either buy the product as its offered and accept its limitations, or go to the black market to get what you want and send a message to the producer that their product is not acceptable.
And therein lies the false dichotomy. There's another option:
DON'T OBTAIN THE MATERIAL.
You don't need the movie that much. You can choose neither, and still send the message that the product is not acceptable.
It's not a false dichotomy. Yes, you always have the option of not acquiring the product at all. What I was discussing was the options available that result in getting the desired movie.
All discussion of whether or not we really truly need movies/music/etc in the grand scheme of things aside, when looking at choices that result in actually getting the movie, people only see the two choices I described previously. Your third choice has a completely different outcome, and is a valid choice (you're right, I should have mentioned it), but with the realization that it is a different category of choice.
The producer does not know that you download your movies from the pirate bay, and as you are no longer participating in the only market where they can make a living, they do not care either.
So, they're trying to shut down services like TPB because they don't know anyone's using them and they don't care?
Because whatever quality they get is good enough, and the extra money doesn't justify the cost.
This is exactly it. "Good enough" is more than enough for most people. DVDs are good enough. In fact, VHS is usually good enough.
I still watch the occasional VHS tape. When I do, I always find that for the first 20 seconds or so, I'm noticing the poor picture quality in comparison to what I'm used to watching (DVDs and downloaded AVIs). After the first 20 seconds, I'm too engrossed in the story to care about picture quality.
That's the thing: you don't watch the picture, you watch the movie. It's always nice to have decent quality, and really poor quality can detract from the movie, but as long as the quality is good enough to not detract from the movie, then any higher quality is pointless.
Yeah, that would be nice. However, because you don't have that option, you/are/ paying for the original product before downloading in this super-convenient format, right? Because you think that you should be paying for products and services you enjoy?
But, by doing that, people would be discarding their ability to influence the market, thus causing the market to fail.
You see, if a producer is providing a product that isn't to your liking, what is supposed to happen is that you turn to the competitor instead, thereby informing the producer through your lack of purchasing their product that the product is not what you want. This, ideally, will influence the producer to change the product in order to compete.
If, however, the black market is the only competitor, and you try to "do the right thing" by buying the product and then getting its more convenient equivalent from the black market, you are telling the producer that their product is what you want, and therefore failing to influence the producer to change their product in order to compete.
So, most people see the choice as this: either buy the product as its offered and accept its limitations, or go to the black market to get what you want and send a message to the producer that their product is not acceptable.
What GP was saying is that he'd like to send the appropriate message to the producer, while still rewarding the creators for their effort (note: creators != producers).
So what's the difference between the crowd making a mistale and the police making a mistake?
The police and the rest of the criminal justice system are bound by rules designed to at least attempt to "get it right". The crowd is not. The crowd will make more serious mistakes more frequently than the criminal justice system.
That's quite interesting. I clicked your link and read the story before I read this last response with your explanation of the Nature/Science joke. As I was reading it, I wondered if Nature was the actual n-word used in the original. It seemed to me that what the machine was creating wasn't really Nature, although arguably it was creating a demonstration of "human nature". I thought that maybe that was the joke. Perhaps the translator was attempting to make that association, in which case it worked, only it was more subtle than the original joke.
Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." (from Wikipedia, of course)
What the article submitter really means is that he's the only technical support person in a 60-person software company.
I'm a software developer. I've worked on software ranging from extremely simple to extremely complex. It seems to me that this kind of software would fall under the "extremely simple" category. In fact, I'd say the entire business logic of the application should look something like this:
One thing that's confused me about Lem's books is the wordplay he does and how the hell anyone can translate that from Polish to English so flawlessly that the alliteration and prefix/suffix work moves from one language to another. Perhaps these two languages are more closely related than I know but I am always impressed with the translations.
As I understand it, most translators will not simply translate the book word for word, but instead will try to recreate the spirit of the writing, while staying as faithful as possible to the literal story. So, in the case where there is some sort of wordplay, they may translate it in a way that's actually literally quite different, but communicates the same sort of imagery. If alliteration is used in the source language, they may change the wording entirely in order to use alliteration in the target language.
Translating books is a creative process. It's not simply translation of the work, but rather creation of a complementary work in a different language.
All of that sounds to me like a substitute for evaluating the merits of all of your available software options and making your own decision based on your needs.
It would be great if 100% of all decisions were based on that kind of rational analysis. Unfortunately, there's one problem: people.
People are subject to bias. People "go with their gut". And people's "gut" can be influenced.
You may dislike marketing, but there's a simple reason companies spend boatloads of money on it: it works. People can be influenced. And people are being influenced, in one way or another, with respect to their views of open software.
But there is a brand whether or not it's intentionally created. The output of this "random barbarian horde of software developers" all falls under a single label, "open source", and therefore has the "open source" brand. He describes a brand as being "anyone's gut feeling". In other words, what is it that people think of when they hear "open source software"? Well, that's the brand. It may not have been shaped by anyone intentionally, but it still exists. So, he wants to shape it.
He also makes the point that the de facto brand is actually shaped by those who compete with open source. Microsoft, for example, shapes the open source brand through its marketing. Therefore, by not making a concerted effort to shape the brand in a positive way, the community is effectively allowing it to be shaped in a negative way.
Although he insists that there's no difference between "Free Software" and "Open Software", he needs to realize that he won't get far in truly creating a "brand", which he also refers to as "anyone's gut feeling", using a word that the majority of those "anyone"s out there have a "gut feeling" means something other than what he intends it to mean.
To anyone who is not part of the F/OSS movement, "free software" means software that doesn't cost anything, and it always will. Don't try to change people's perception of words to match what your product is, change the words you use to steer people's perception of the product. If it's freedom you want to communicate, then do it with the word "freedom", or the word "open", or something similar, but not "free", which, when placed in front of a product (such as "software"), always implies "zero dollars" to the rest of the world.
When I'm in control of a situation VS when I'm not. I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding...
To some extent this is true, but to some extent the sense of control over a situation is still a false sense of security. For example, I have a private pilot license and fly single-engine aircraft for fun. I have about 80 hours of total flight time, which basically means I'm a total n00b. When I'm landing my plane, I'm calm, relaxed, and feel completely safe. However, when I'm on a commercial flight, and the plane is being landed by a highly-trained professional pilot with many thousands of hours of flight training who has performed more landings this month than I've done in my entire life, I tend to get a little nervous.
Of course, part of that nervousness might come from the knowledge that if my Cessna 172 hits the ground wrong at < 60 knots, I could very likely walk away a little bit bruised and shaken, but if the commercial A320 hits the ground wrong at whatever ridiculous speed they touch down at, the result will likely not be as pretty.
The dog is simply trained to smell chemicals used to manufacture CDs/DVDs if they're in a large enough concentration (like, say, 35,000 in a warehouse). It's up to the investigators to decide if they're counterfeit or not (which can't be too difficult if they find, say, 35,000 in a warehouse that has no records of legitimate CDs/DVDs being stored in it).
It's not that the thing's 'ready to go', the problem still remains that the majority people currently using windows are use to windows and don't want to spend another 5 years learning a new operating system with new software.
You're absolutely right. The "Year of the Linux Desktop" people need to get it through their heads that most people aren't interested in changing their OS. Sure, lots of people bitch and complain about Windows, but most are content sticking with what they already have.
We really need to target the younger audiences and schools if we want to make progress. It's something that windows did early on, and something that worked very well.
Targeting schools would only be effective if the schools' students didn't already have Windows machines at home, which they mostly do. Sure, you may end up with a generation of kids that are more adaptable, with both Windows and Linux skills, but they're still going to end up in a workplace that uses Windows, and dealing with family and friends who use Windows.
Honestly, I love the idea of Linux (and F/OSS in general), I love Linux on the server (it's all I use on servers), and I even like (not love) Linux on the desktop, but I don't see myself switching from Windows in the foreseeable future. I seriously doubt the "Year of the Linux Desktop" is ever going to happen.
Re:Books Are Just Office Trophies
on
SQL in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have a large library of technical books, but I also use Google as my primary reference source. The reasons I continue to buy books are:
I read them on the bus to and from work.
Occasionally I can find something quicker in a book that I'm familiar with which is focused on a single topic, whereas Google is generic and often full of useless crap.
I get my books paid for by the company I work for, and they make nice trophies.;)
Re:Why only one database language?
on
SQL in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 1
Programming languages do many, many, many different things in many, many, many different environments. Database query languages do, more or less, one thing in one environment. If you've built a good database query language, there's no need to build another one. However, if you've built a good programming language, somebody else will find a situation in which it's not so good, and will therefore want/need a different one.
Slashdotters all seem to think that advertising is Google's only source of revenue, and I think that's what GP was getting at. In actuality, they also sell their search engine (Google Search Appliance), Gmail & Docs (corporate licensing as well as self-hosted versions), and their hosting (Google App Engine). Those are just a few off the top of my head. I'm sure there's much more that they sell that I'm not aware of.
Could be useful too. Turn it off if you don't like it. Another non-point.
Reading this point, I wondered what the guy does in meetings. You know, the real world kind of meetings, where a bunch of people are sitting in a room together, talking. Because, you see, when you speak in a meeting, the other attendees hear each word in real time. There is no backspace key.
The only potentially good point he made was at the very end, which is basically that nobody's really looking for an alternative to IM/email.
Slashdot Mirror
What if my driving is done already mostly on toll roads?
I get to pay twice for the privilege to be on their road?
Since you're being taxed on your fuel, you're already paying twice for the privilege of being on their road.
Toll roads should be eliminated no matter what system is used.
Your way of thinking totally pummels popular tourist destinations with an unfair amount of extra wear they are not getting any money for.
The point is that the system doesn't need to be absolutely accurate right down to the mile. If you're concerned about the effect of tourism on the roads, I'm sure census data could be used to determine some basic figures regarding how much travel goes to each state, and from which states. From there you can determine a simple redistribution formula.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough, and perfection is simply not necessary in this case, especially if perfection comes at the expense of privacy for all citizens.
So, most people see the choice as this: either buy the product as its offered and accept its limitations, or go to the black market to get what you want and send a message to the producer that their product is not acceptable.
And therein lies the false dichotomy. There's another option:
DON'T OBTAIN THE MATERIAL.
You don't need the movie that much. You can choose neither, and still send the message that the product is not acceptable.
It's not a false dichotomy. Yes, you always have the option of not acquiring the product at all. What I was discussing was the options available that result in getting the desired movie.
All discussion of whether or not we really truly need movies/music/etc in the grand scheme of things aside, when looking at choices that result in actually getting the movie, people only see the two choices I described previously. Your third choice has a completely different outcome, and is a valid choice (you're right, I should have mentioned it), but with the realization that it is a different category of choice.
The producer does not know that you download your movies from the pirate bay, and as you are no longer participating in the only market where they can make a living, they do not care either.
So, they're trying to shut down services like TPB because they don't know anyone's using them and they don't care?
Wait... what?
My guess is that this is aimed more at individuals who are writing blogs and contact managers...
Not likely. The focus seems to be on sharing and analyzing data, not just storing for retrieval on a web page. This is more BI than read-mostly RDBMS.
Because whatever quality they get is good enough, and the extra money doesn't justify the cost.
This is exactly it. "Good enough" is more than enough for most people. DVDs are good enough. In fact, VHS is usually good enough.
I still watch the occasional VHS tape. When I do, I always find that for the first 20 seconds or so, I'm noticing the poor picture quality in comparison to what I'm used to watching (DVDs and downloaded AVIs). After the first 20 seconds, I'm too engrossed in the story to care about picture quality.
That's the thing: you don't watch the picture, you watch the movie. It's always nice to have decent quality, and really poor quality can detract from the movie, but as long as the quality is good enough to not detract from the movie, then any higher quality is pointless.
Yeah, that would be nice. However, because you don't have that option, you /are/ paying for the original product before downloading in this super-convenient format, right? Because you think that you should be paying for products and services you enjoy?
But, by doing that, people would be discarding their ability to influence the market, thus causing the market to fail.
You see, if a producer is providing a product that isn't to your liking, what is supposed to happen is that you turn to the competitor instead, thereby informing the producer through your lack of purchasing their product that the product is not what you want. This, ideally, will influence the producer to change the product in order to compete.
If, however, the black market is the only competitor, and you try to "do the right thing" by buying the product and then getting its more convenient equivalent from the black market, you are telling the producer that their product is what you want, and therefore failing to influence the producer to change their product in order to compete.
So, most people see the choice as this: either buy the product as its offered and accept its limitations, or go to the black market to get what you want and send a message to the producer that their product is not acceptable.
What GP was saying is that he'd like to send the appropriate message to the producer, while still rewarding the creators for their effort (note: creators != producers).
It's not like they are hunting the person down in order to physically assault them...
...yet.
And how long until they go after an innocent person?
So what's the difference between the crowd making a mistale and the police making a mistake?
The police and the rest of the criminal justice system are bound by rules designed to at least attempt to "get it right". The crowd is not. The crowd will make more serious mistakes more frequently than the criminal justice system.
That's quite interesting. I clicked your link and read the story before I read this last response with your explanation of the Nature/Science joke. As I was reading it, I wondered if Nature was the actual n-word used in the original. It seemed to me that what the machine was creating wasn't really Nature, although arguably it was creating a demonstration of "human nature". I thought that maybe that was the joke. Perhaps the translator was attempting to make that association, in which case it worked, only it was more subtle than the original joke.
Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." (from Wikipedia, of course)
What the article submitter really means is that he's the only technical support person in a 60-person software company.
I've never been able to figure this out myself.
I'm a software developer. I've worked on software ranging from extremely simple to extremely complex. It seems to me that this kind of software would fall under the "extremely simple" category. In fact, I'd say the entire business logic of the application should look something like this:
votes[selection] ++;
How, exactly, do you fuck that up?
One thing that's confused me about Lem's books is the wordplay he does and how the hell anyone can translate that from Polish to English so flawlessly that the alliteration and prefix/suffix work moves from one language to another. Perhaps these two languages are more closely related than I know but I am always impressed with the translations.
As I understand it, most translators will not simply translate the book word for word, but instead will try to recreate the spirit of the writing, while staying as faithful as possible to the literal story. So, in the case where there is some sort of wordplay, they may translate it in a way that's actually literally quite different, but communicates the same sort of imagery. If alliteration is used in the source language, they may change the wording entirely in order to use alliteration in the target language.
Translating books is a creative process. It's not simply translation of the work, but rather creation of a complementary work in a different language.
All of that sounds to me like a substitute for evaluating the merits of all of your available software options and making your own decision based on your needs.
It would be great if 100% of all decisions were based on that kind of rational analysis. Unfortunately, there's one problem: people.
People are subject to bias. People "go with their gut". And people's "gut" can be influenced.
You may dislike marketing, but there's a simple reason companies spend boatloads of money on it: it works. People can be influenced. And people are being influenced, in one way or another, with respect to their views of open software.
Yes, that was a typo on my part, but it is perhaps a better term. I'll happily take all credit if it catches on. :)
But there is a brand whether or not it's intentionally created. The output of this "random barbarian horde of software developers" all falls under a single label, "open source", and therefore has the "open source" brand. He describes a brand as being "anyone's gut feeling". In other words, what is it that people think of when they hear "open source software"? Well, that's the brand. It may not have been shaped by anyone intentionally, but it still exists. So, he wants to shape it.
He also makes the point that the de facto brand is actually shaped by those who compete with open source. Microsoft, for example, shapes the open source brand through its marketing. Therefore, by not making a concerted effort to shape the brand in a positive way, the community is effectively allowing it to be shaped in a negative way.
Although he insists that there's no difference between "Free Software" and "Open Software", he needs to realize that he won't get far in truly creating a "brand", which he also refers to as "anyone's gut feeling", using a word that the majority of those "anyone"s out there have a "gut feeling" means something other than what he intends it to mean.
To anyone who is not part of the F/OSS movement, "free software" means software that doesn't cost anything, and it always will. Don't try to change people's perception of words to match what your product is, change the words you use to steer people's perception of the product. If it's freedom you want to communicate, then do it with the word "freedom", or the word "open", or something similar, but not "free", which, when placed in front of a product (such as "software"), always implies "zero dollars" to the rest of the world.
When I'm in control of a situation VS when I'm not. I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding...
To some extent this is true, but to some extent the sense of control over a situation is still a false sense of security. For example, I have a private pilot license and fly single-engine aircraft for fun. I have about 80 hours of total flight time, which basically means I'm a total n00b. When I'm landing my plane, I'm calm, relaxed, and feel completely safe. However, when I'm on a commercial flight, and the plane is being landed by a highly-trained professional pilot with many thousands of hours of flight training who has performed more landings this month than I've done in my entire life, I tend to get a little nervous.
Of course, part of that nervousness might come from the knowledge that if my Cessna 172 hits the ground wrong at < 60 knots, I could very likely walk away a little bit bruised and shaken, but if the commercial A320 hits the ground wrong at whatever ridiculous speed they touch down at, the result will likely not be as pretty.
The dog is simply trained to smell chemicals used to manufacture CDs/DVDs if they're in a large enough concentration (like, say, 35,000 in a warehouse). It's up to the investigators to decide if they're counterfeit or not (which can't be too difficult if they find, say, 35,000 in a warehouse that has no records of legitimate CDs/DVDs being stored in it).
The original story has details.
It's not that the thing's 'ready to go', the problem still remains that the majority people currently using windows are use to windows and don't want to spend another 5 years learning a new operating system with new software.
You're absolutely right. The "Year of the Linux Desktop" people need to get it through their heads that most people aren't interested in changing their OS. Sure, lots of people bitch and complain about Windows, but most are content sticking with what they already have.
We really need to target the younger audiences and schools if we want to make progress. It's something that windows did early on, and something that worked very well.
Targeting schools would only be effective if the schools' students didn't already have Windows machines at home, which they mostly do. Sure, you may end up with a generation of kids that are more adaptable, with both Windows and Linux skills, but they're still going to end up in a workplace that uses Windows, and dealing with family and friends who use Windows.
Honestly, I love the idea of Linux (and F/OSS in general), I love Linux on the server (it's all I use on servers), and I even like (not love) Linux on the desktop, but I don't see myself switching from Windows in the foreseeable future. I seriously doubt the "Year of the Linux Desktop" is ever going to happen.
But it fails to answer this important question!
Notice how Google gets it right.
You just have to phrase it right.
It seems it does other calculations too.
I have a large library of technical books, but I also use Google as my primary reference source. The reasons I continue to buy books are:
Programming languages do many, many, many different things in many, many, many different environments. Database query languages do, more or less, one thing in one environment. If you've built a good database query language, there's no need to build another one. However, if you've built a good programming language, somebody else will find a situation in which it's not so good, and will therefore want/need a different one.
Slashdotters all seem to think that advertising is Google's only source of revenue, and I think that's what GP was getting at. In actuality, they also sell their search engine (Google Search Appliance), Gmail & Docs (corporate licensing as well as self-hosted versions), and their hosting (Google App Engine). Those are just a few off the top of my head. I'm sure there's much more that they sell that I'm not aware of.
* Key Stroke by Key Stroke View Could Be Annoying
Could be useful too. Turn it off if you don't like it. Another non-point.
Reading this point, I wondered what the guy does in meetings. You know, the real world kind of meetings, where a bunch of people are sitting in a room together, talking. Because, you see, when you speak in a meeting, the other attendees hear each word in real time. There is no backspace key.
The only potentially good point he made was at the very end, which is basically that nobody's really looking for an alternative to IM/email.