The trouble with automated methods of Progressive Disclosure is that nothing about it expects the ideas to make sense. It's just as possible to have 5 poorly-thought-out menu items sitting there until the program decides you are a Power User and randomly shows you 5 more poorly-thought-out menu items. The mechanism is totally orthoganal to how easy the concepts are to grasp.
My candidate for progressive disclosure is the Mac semantics for 'option clicking' on things. There are quite a few situations where basic functionality is used through normal clicks, and option-clicking delivers a new 'expert' set of features, different ones. Nothing about the program judges you and decides whether you're smart enough to get to use the extra features- it's simply a matter of whether, knowing about 'option clicks' or having RTFM, you know to optionclick the thing or not.
It was appalling handwaving, simplifying the problems of your approach dreadfully. You're clearly just as good as David Gelernter at handwaving, but frankly what you have is not likely to be good enough to establish another cozy computing monopoly- as you evidently would like to do. How much of what you have is patented? Sure enough, a patent announcement (on what seems to be a _concept!_) is the primary boast of your page. Why should we support or help you? "Because we are great and deserve your money!" is not an answer.
Open your stuff or get out of the way. You're in no position to run about handwaving in this day and age- the tired and insufficient file-folder hierarchy has _crushed_ everything else and to get your ideas out there and used, you will have to cooperate and come down from that glib ivory tower- if even that helps, as it doesn't look like your ideas are any better than simply storing different types of data in a common, 'theme' folder or dock with very _rudimentary_ support for organising by date (or frequency of modification, number of changes, or for that matter filesize and type, which you intentionally gloss over.)
Your pardon for the tone, but Gelernter's book ("Mirror Worlds") has always _really_ annoyed me, and I'd hoped you lot had failed in the market by now. What Gelernter wanted to push is nothing but 'agents' to the Nth power, combined with object-oriented abstraction like the worst of C++ also to the Nth power. He wanted users to be utter 'mouse potatoes', passively receiving the fruits of the various agent processes, with as much of the workings concealed as possible- 'topsight', in a word. It's a fine concept but it's a curse taken to the extreme Gelernter envisioned.
You haven't even managed that: all you have is a way to clutter GUI further while hiding important meta-data about the information, and you're taking pains to make even that proprietary. You take 'topsight' _literally_, which is ludicrous. Didn't you even _read_ Gelernter's book? It's horrible handwaving but at least he wasn't talking about viewing everything by date as a patentable concept!
My primary consolation in watching you people handwave over this nonsense is that it's never going to amount to anything anyhow: file/folder is locked in, there's no room for you the way you're behaving. I can't imagine what gives you the idea that you can run about patenting basic concepts (stack a bunch of actions and documents about a central subject on the screen in a sort of swoopy formation!) and expect to make headway against Microsoft. You're probably out to be bought by them, and I hope they do: they're already going nowhere, why not distract them even worse from the real work of user interface?
End rant. (_God_, do I hate interface handwaving. This rant would have been a lot milder if I hadn't painfully slogged through ALL of Gelernter's "Mirror Worlds" panning for sensible ideas. It was just about all baseless hype, and so is this.)
I've been writing GPLed software for the Mac, and there are some real obstacles you have to come to terms with- it'll be very much the same on Windows, so I'll share what it's been like for me, hoping that will bring some light.
First of all, in many cases you are forced to gloss over some serious problems regarding the freedom of your tools, and rely on making a good-faith effort to be obviously 'open' to the porting of your code to _really_ free languages. I use REALbasic (which is indeed a phenomenal RAD language). A _lot_ of Windows coders use Visual Basic. These are totally closed languages, in the same sense that if you're making Win32 API calls or Mac Toolbox calls they are closed calls. When you're working on a nonfree platform there's almost always _some_ point at which you're forced to interact with just the sort of 'black box' that you're just plain not allowed to use in your own GPLed code.
At the same time, it's usually possible to make a good faith effort to show that you are writing open code: for instance, the REALbasic 'code' is a single, compact file that makes no effort to be readable outside RB: but there's an option to export all the source as text, so I use that and take pains to offer both forms. This remains a problem, as REALbasic has a sophisticated interface builder, and the information for 'default' controls does _not_ get exported: only if you write actual code into the events of a control does it get exported. So the 'export as source' does not actually produce _all_ the information, it omits window object positioning information. However, there is a new RB third party tool called Project Cuisinart which _can_ produce every last detail in a text format- and so it goes, now that Project Cuisinart (which is not itself open) exists, my notion of 'open source' for REALbasic projects is the Cuisinart view of the total project file, complete with 'pushbutton 1' and a long list of properties- which itself is not open.
It can be very frustrating and disheartening. Some of the best tools aren't open. In many cases in order for them to be open, even if the tool itself thrived, there would be a team of good people out of work. Which leads me to...
Hostility. The problem with open source on Windows or Mac is partly that you can expect to be at war with your peers half the time. The best thing you can do is try to help newbies, share information both in the community and as GPLed source, and try to remember 'many enemies, much honor'. This is particularly relevant for me right now. REALbasic has an O'Reilly book, and the author is prone to give page numbers in answer to questions, and not bother answering the questions. You wouldn't believe how much hostility you'd get for objecting to, even questioning, this state of affairs, even if you spend an hour revising your messages to tone them down. Right now I am being publically humiliated on the REALbasic mailing list, with virtually no support except from a few people such as one fellow who asked me to let it lie so the argument would cool down, for this crime: I suggested that many O'Reilly books were the redistillation of community knowledge, and sell on convenience rather than being proprietary information to be withheld from people who haven't bought the book. I also suggested that Tim O'Reilly understood this and approved of his authors being active and helpful in their communities. And I'm being _crucified_ for having the gall to claim these things!
*sigh* If you write OSS for Windows, you can expect to put up with the same nonsense. You can expect to see everything from personal abuse to piles of FUD, you will be accused of wanting to destroy the livelihoods of your peers (to which my response is usually 'maybe';) ), and you might even end up in some ugly little tangle like claiming Apache (for instance) is open source, with your 'developer community' tearing you a new one and insisting there are bits you don't get to see, otherwise it wouldn't be secure! That may sound ridiculous, but I'd have thought "O'Reilly doesn't need to care about the community, it provides proprietary information in books and should be supported for doing it" was equally ridiculous, yet I'm sitting by letting myself be _roasted_ and my (such as it is) reputation savaged over just such a ridiculous distortion of what O'Reilly is about.
Best thing I can do is let 'em, and the next time some newbie asks a question I can answer, answer it helpfully while others give page numbers of their books or offer example projects that are proprietary or classes/plugins that are closed. Doing that makes the newbies want to cooperate, because they see some people freely helping them and others leaving strings attached and pontificating about how there's no free lunch. Well- cooperation _is_ a free lunch, it's just that you're giving it as well as getting it. And it would be a poor world if nobody could ever use open source software unless they were willing to use nothing but. Small pockets of cooperators can survive even in the midst of total hostility, and if you're a pocket of one, you're an ambassador. It's my job as such an ambassador to soak up the abuse, even when it's just unfair, and try to look like somebody to emulate. And the code I do release is licensed with the GPL: one thing about closed-land is that people don't seem to act like they get to 'rip off' open code. Instead they freak out at the requirements, and flame you to a crisp for _daring_ to require that they GPL derivative works, never mind that if they had a derivative work it's only by copying big chunks of the original work verbatim. But at least they _are_ freaking out, as it'd be worse if they just took whatever they wanted without asking.
Sometimes it's a real pain writing open on closed tools on a closed platform. Unfortunately, if nobody ever does, the closedness will never change. In that light, I have to encourage anyone trying to write open on Windows, in VB, or whatever. You'll get blasted from both sides- and you should try to set an example, _and_ take extra pains to make sure what you're doing _is_ as open as you possibly can make it- but it's worthwhile to do it.
Interestingly, what actually happens is this: progress does slow somewhat, but does not cease. It does, however, become illegal:)
For a change, it's easier for poorly-funded individuals to be illegal in this manner, and harder for big corporations and businesses to get away with it. So, interestingly, this might prove to actually be a mechanism to hurt large corporations and bullying businesses. Their very nature means they have nowhere to hide from the patent-oriented attacks of other large corporations and bullying businesses. Meanwhile, poorly funded individuals can, to some extent, completely scorn and ignore the patent system and just play the odds hoping to not be made an example- if caught, the thing to do would be to roll over and play dead and erase all your (GPLed, and widely mirrored) software and bow out of mailing lists and communities for a time. "Me, an intellectual property criminal? I _never_ coded that toolbar that is like the MS patent! It was a bunch of us over CVS at a server that used to be around at the time. No, I don't remember who else was there. It was dark;) Yes, I'll erase my copy and turn in my copy of the illegal crime tool 'egcs' to the police... *whistles innocently*"
I've been advocating this for some time, and would love to see the FSF do it. I'd prefer it not be limited to software concepts, either- science itself is beginning to chill from the effect of patents and intellectual property.
The one mistake here is this: you say the FSF would be able to accumulate a large portfolio of patents. That is incorrect and would also be phenomenally more expensive, wasteful, and ineffective for the desired purpose. The FSF is not _about_ hoarding and propagating restrictive intellectual property! That's appalling.
Instead, what I'd LOVE to see is the FSF maintaining such a database, for people to file anything they can which can be written in the form of a patent (i.e. detailed and explicit). The database would be broadly, publically accessible, but more importantly, there _is_ a substantially cheaper means to file a claim that a thing is in the public domain. It might still be costly for inventive but broke programmers living on Ramen, but it'd be well within the ability of the FSF to cover this cost for the idea donators.
Once an idea is filed with the patent office in this manner, it is _formally_ not available for a patent. I think this mechanism was originally intended as a block while a company got together a formal patent, but it's just sitting there waiting to be used by something like the FSF. Not only is it explicitly a public-domain-maker, patent-blocker by express design, it is also substantially cheaper than filing a patent! It'd be a terrific resource.
Please, FSF, start doing this! Hunt down the proper forms and arrange with somebody like SourceForge for the web space and bandwidth and throw open the doors for inventors and programmers to file ANTI-PATENTS, free for anybody to use with the one restriction being you can never file a patent on the things. It's the IP version of the GPL, complete with using the mechanisms of the patent process against itself. Please?
(another attempt to post- previous attempt refused to post the link. Then Slashdot fought me tooth and nail to stop me from quickly posting a correction. If it fails again, the link is http://marathon.bungie.org/story/contents.html)
There's a FPS with a similar engine to Doom, except that the story mattered, you needed to kill some things but not others, your allies would change based on the storyline, and rather than being bogged down in _your_ character development, you were a violent cipher acting first on behalf of a friendly AI ('Leela'), and then as Leela is destroyed, you end up acting on behalf of a mad AI whose motives are deeply questionable ('Durandal'). The literary quality is very high for a computer game, and the creativity is just off the scale. People have made elaborate web pages just _analyzing_ this game trilogy as if it was a literary work- yet reading the terminal texts straight through is not the way the work is meant to be experienced.
I'll concede that very few if any 16-year-old game hackers are capable of this sort of literary distinction. Of course, I'd be delighted to be proven wrong;)
Their review is just phenomenal, profoundly clued. However, one thing that struck me about it was this: the criticism of the UI is that it is pure eyecandy, very good at that, but woefully unorganised and incapable of scaling up to a power user level.
Well... that's a given. It's quite obvious. But might it be intentional? It seems to me the conventional wisdom is that usability does _not_ sell, and that flash is the only thing that drags in the consumers, many of which will never grow beyond basic web surfing and writing straight text in Word. Under those conditions the faults of OSX's GUI are not relevant, as the person would not be running two things at once except by accident (and guess what? for a change that would be instantly obvious!), and would never have learned any of the useful shortcuts of classic MacOS, whether it's ability to customise the Apple Menu or ability to do a contextual popup menu or use of the Control Strip. It's as if Aqua is designed to default to handhold the most relentlessly AOLish l^Huser. I'm not at all sure this _is_ a mistake.
Then the trick becomes finding ways to replace the dock, to get rid of the default stuff and use other methods. Surely this is not going to be so hard given that Darwin is OSS and we'd be _replacing_ the proprietary GUI, not tapping into it? By that I mean shutting _off_ the Dock rather than altering it, I don't mean ditching Display PDF and running KDE on it. That said, I just bet one of the first replacements is somebody hacking a Windows taskbar and start menu only in Aqua style. Furthermore, I fear and suspect it will be a _jello_ taskbar and start menu, translucent, and will wobble sproingily at all times in a continuing bit of very striking but very distracting animation. (Why??? 'Because we can!' This becomes a hell of a lot simpler hacking Aqua and using a vector GUI.) But... why not? It's not like I'd have to use it. I might prefer something like a root menu, and tend to avoid having desktop objects at all, like I do in X and in MacOS. For me, icons are for keeping in folders in disks- the desktop should have only clippings and work in progress. If I could remove the drive icons in MacOS and get the windows through a popup or something, I would.
There are a lot of things I like about Linux, mostly the freedom to be whimsical with the UI: I don't have to run a desktop if I don't feel like it. I can have taskbars of many different kinds, or not- I can have tiles and icons in many different ways, or not. However, I mostly run MacOS, partly because I know how to keep it running happy and stable, partly because its interface is more consistent (_especially_ text editing semantics- I'm sorry, X mouse text editing is crazed- even the 'windows imitations' are horribly inadequate compared with the traditional, post-Drag-and-Drop MacOS handling of it), partly because of access to tools. I write software for MacOS only- that is because it is a lot _easier_ to do, not because I don't want to code for Linux. I would really like to see some convergence here- in particular, I'd like to see OSX become popular in such a way that writing programs for it is closer to writing for Linux. Ideally I'd like to see some of the _great_ programming environments for MacOS (No I don't mean Codewarrior- I mean REALbasic. It's like a _really_ sophisticated GUI drag and drop object oriented interface builder only you code in Python- not really Python, but I'm told it's very Pythonish) evolve so they output code for OSX- at which point it becomes a lot easier for them to also output code for Linux.
As these companies and programmers start adapting to a more Unix-based environment, they can start coexisting with the OSS world. There _are_ Mac programmers who 'get' open source. It's an active area- one of the biggest Mac gaming hits _ever_, Bungie Software's 'Marathon', recently saw GPLing- Marathon 2 was released under the GPL, and in just a few months has been substantially debugged and tweaked and enhanced, longstanding engine limitations totally obliterated in a delightful burst of free hacker effort. As the Mac converges with Linux (I consider the move to Darwin and BSD underpinnings a convergence all by itself), this sort of thing will happen more often. The end result might well be a massive cross-pollination- tons of Linux code being adapted for use with Aqua, tons of Mac programmers and vendors suddenly beginning to release stuff on Linux as well.
When that starts to kick in, Windows can go pound sand >:)
Uh, you may be moderated as insightful and you may be all upset and kicking up a fuss, but you are also anonymous. Who is it that is speaking, please?
Me, I agree with him. I am solidly against software patents, and moderately against patents in general. This is not as an abstract concept, it's very much in line with how they are actually functioning in practice- if the world was different I might have a different opinion, but in the Real World (tm) 'solidly against software patents' describes me quite accurately.
That said, I am Chris Johnson. If you are determined to be seen publically opposing this perception, who exactly are you, and is it any of your business? You might be an Amazon stockholder who never invented anything in your life:)
The GPL is 'using copyright against copyright': it is using a person's ability to set forbidding-of-copying terms on something, to set terms that _mandate_ the ability to copy and propagating that ability.
The equivalent in patent terms is not a patent. It is the publication in a unarguably conspicuous place of the relevant ideas, in such a way that patent examiners can get access to and search for the ideas. Like the GPL, it impedes your ability to force people to pay for your idea (implementation is still fair game). Also like the GPL, it penalizes nobody and focusses on one key point: anyone can do anything with an established public domain idea _except_ patent it and restrict other people from using it.
The missing piece is this: we have no way of publishing any such ideas anywhere that will stand up in court as public domain. I feel strongly that just putting stuff on your website will not do- the patent examiners will not grovel through a million websites, and the whole point of the exercise is to make it possible to _block_ the blind granting of patents on things. There is a way to formally announce things as PD, but it costs money (much less than a patent) and is not a forum for sharing the ideas with a broad public. I've said before and I'll keep saying: we need a formal website for 'outing' ideas and inventions of all kinds, a centralised 'bazaar for inventions' that can be easily searched by patent examiners, individuals and corporations alike. The latter group is important: even if the patent examiners aren't on the ball, if you get two corporations grabbing a public domain idea, each one will bitterly deny the other's right to patent the idea- and the individuals and actual inventors won't have to concern themselves with that aspect. End result is that the idea stays public domain as intended.
Is anybody ever going to help put together such a site? I am getting desperate. The possibilities are great: even in the case of preexisting patents, it is often possible to come up with an invention of narrow focus that does not infringe on the patent. Such work done for an effective public domain resource would be able to rapidly propagate such workarounds to the public and to industry, quickly reducing the usefulness of existing patents unless they are genuinely brilliant inventions. But there has to be the site, it's useless to just have a bunch of random people putting stuff on their web pages...
I'd want to see the contract. I see no reason to assume O'Reilly is free to cut its ties to Amazon just because it wants to. I see every reason to ask whether Amazon affiliates are required to maintain the link/connection to Amazon for X amount of time if they want to get a percentage of the Amazon sales. Unfortunately, there is also the possibility of a 'You do not talk about Amazon contracts!' clause.
It's like this: Amazon has one of the highest valuations of Internet companies, but is the poster child for 'losing tons of money constantly and making it up on valuation'.
As a corporate entity they are _compelled_ to behave like this, in all seriousness, with no concern for whether it is fair, valid or even sensible. They are _one_ 'reality check' away from a major collapse of their valuation- which could really blow up in their faces. Everything depends on the world continuing to think 'Amazon will stomp all other online booksellers! Jeff Bezos is man of the year!'. The second that no longer makes sense to, say, Wall Street, the reality takes hold- the reality is that they've had a _lot_ of trouble getting anywhere close to turning a profit.
They _are_ serious, they are playing the patents as a game, and they will continue to abuse the system until they crash and burn, because that is basically all they have- that and brand name loyalty, which is being eroded by their actions. They might have nasty contracts for affiliates (has anyone asked CmdrTaco if he's legally allowed to _pull_ the links to Amazon? Or did he sign off on a contract mandating them for X amount of time?). But mostly they have a stock valuation that's keeping them going. If that fails and the perception is that they've stumbled and no longer dominate, they have very serious trouble.
There are some things more important than bullying corporations into line. I use the GPL. It places _no_ such restrictions: the one restriction it places is that any further use or modification of the code it licenses must also have the same availability and the same license, with no further clauses.
If I am not mistaken, your idea of placing conditions on people's freedom to enter into this license agreement with open source software is completely contrary to the spirit of the thing and specifically clashes with the GPL. I certainly will never support it, no matter how intensely I oppose corporations wielding software patents. It's almost as bad as the idea of building an 'open source patent portfolio' and then acting just like the corporations, to teach them a lesson! no no no;P
There are lots of comments on how ActiveX can make it easy for a company to take these actions, and how they gloss over the warning that they are taking these actions, but that aside there's one major point nobody seems to be addressing:
What entitles them to take such actions at all?
It might be vaguely arguable that anybody can come into your computer on the slightest pretext of having your consent, and change your homepage to theirs. That is intrusive, it is an imposition, but it is simply what _you_ see when you launch your browser. The most serious damage would be if you had a special homepage, kept no record of it and couldn't find it again: then you'd have suffered a loss due to this company's defacement of your property.
However- changing an _email_ sig? On the one hand this is just a line of text. On the other, it's a piece of text that is how you present yourself to the world, and the safe assumption is that this is a bit of text you intentionally chose to tell the reader something about yourself or what you consider important. In that light, the action this company takes is beyond inexcusable. It is like identity rape: to this company, not only is your computer's data not your property (so it can be freely tampered with for their benefit), but YOUR IDENTITY is not your property. The way you present yourself to others via electronic media is not your property! It is so inconsequential to them that they figure a mere 'sorry!' is all they owe you for hijacking parts of your IDENTITY for their own pleasure.
Again, it's one thing to examine the security implications, and the ways in which ActiveX can be used to build this behavior deeply into the system, making it hard to remove. But when did personal property become so meaningless that a stray click on a web page _allows_ a company to totally butcher your personal data for their own benefit?
Do you have a right to have your data for your homepage untampered with unless you explicitly and knowingly give permission for it to be altered?
If not, do you have a right for all of your writing to be untampered with, for instance if you downloaded some sort of grammar checker only to find that it runs and edits every ASCII file on your system that it can open? Is this a case of 'you should have kept backups' (let's hypothesize that it goes and edits all the backups too) or does this begin to look more like destruction of personal property?
Along the lines of this article, do you have a right for your email signature to be _your_ choice? Is it allowable for any joker who can get you to click on a clickwrap license to sneak in their own agenda, sigged to your mail as if it was your own agenda, so your friends can assume that you choose to 'push' this product or service? If so, is it then allowable for the clickwrap license to authorise the software to _send_ MLM-like mail to addresses on your mailing list, intentionally assuming your identity for the purposes of marketing, all in the background so the first you know of it is that you lose your ISP account for spamming, or lose friends over what they think you started doing?
It is informative and disturbing that this company already goes _almost_ to that extreme, and not as a joke. Surely the next step is intentional impersonation of a computer user, and marketing emails sent as if they were from that person- all sanctioned by the clickwrap license. It's almost here- just one tiny step from what GoHip is doing. It's so close...
And when that happens, I hope more people understand that this is not a security issue. It's not _about_ whether or not you are willing to psychologically barrier yourself in a concrete bunker, defying anyone's attempts to harm you.
Instead, it's about property rights, or a citizen's rights. It's about whether a regular person should even have to be concerned about these abuses. At the moment, in the computer industry, when you read about abuses like this, the first thought is "Security, so that you can stop people doing this to you, as they will no doubt try to do!". And that tells you something- because you never see anything to the effect of, "Screw security- this action is a crime against the person's property and an abuse of his identity. Click or no click, this is criminal! You're not allowed to hijack a person's identity and use their reputation as a marketing tool while trying hard to not alert them to it, and fighting their efforts to stop it happening!"
Am I off base here? Is it really so much to ask, to suggest that a person's arrangement of computer data is property, or at LEAST that the person's reputation and interactions with others is their property, and there is no intrinsic right to hijack that for profit? Not everything that is _possible_ and _profitable_ is legal. In this case, I can't think of a single thing more clearly property than a person's interaction with others, and their ability to determine how they express themselves. Suppose these same bright sparks at GoHip chose to globally replace the word 'video' with 'video (speaking of which, you have to check out GoHip.com! They're great with video)'? That is absolutely trivial, not so far from what they're doing now, and is absolutely, unarguably identity rape.
Is anybody ready to argue that this is defensible, or is strictly a 'security' issue where you only deserve the freedom you're ready to actively fight for? Does anybody seriously think this is 'opt-out' territory, that it's legitimate or right for any person's self-expression to be hijacked for commercial purposes?
If this goes on, forget watching TV and seeing 'the wrong' huge billboard on ESPN or in Times Square- it will be a world where you cannot even trust your own friends. Any of them could be speaking through a software filter that drastically changes what they say, and they would have no right to argue with this and no recourse except total paranoia. Even then, can you control _all_ the points your message passes through? What good will your security do you when your recipient has inadvertently installed a filter that changes your message _coming_ _in_, so that to their eyes, _you_ are the one saying "video (by the way, GoHip kicks ass!)."
Security is _such_ the wrong perspective to take on this stuff. This is civil liberties territory- and already shockingly close to paranoid fantasy. Yet it's not fantasy- people are _already_ having their identities and personal reputations hijacked by GoHip for marketing purposes, and this is seen as legitimate behavior, nasty but legal to do. How much farther do they have to go before the real issues are obvious?
Who'd have believed, six months ago, that you'd be reading "Are they going to patent air next?", not on Slashdot as usual, but ON CNET as a quote from a stock analyst?
Tells you something about how the mainstream perspective is being affected by this rotten Amazon behavior. Now we need a _judge_ going "Don't tell me, next you're going to patent the 'click'?" Then we'll be getting somewhere.
This gets a -1 as a 'troll'? That's ludicrous. It's bluntly put, but let's go over it point by point:
They are not to be trusted: this is hard to argue with. They win through playing business as a bloodsport and through using technical leverage where they can. I can't think of a single software business _less_ trustworthy.
They would intentionally break stuff: this is perhaps the most debatable point. I'd say it was even chances that they intentionally break things, versus just incompetence. However, the evidence that they intend to subvert existing net standards would seem to count as intentionally breaking stuff.
or use it to send information about my machine to them: this is another case where you need to accurately perceive their interests. They are less likely to send off bits of your global history to an MS server, and more likely to check for pirated programs. However, in saying this one has to take into account the known information: Word files are known to include decidedly unrelated information, such as extraneous filenames, lists of open files or lists of active connections. People opening Word files and grovelling through the data with a hex editor have discovered very startling things on the order of 'where'd it get _that_ information? That wasn't on an adjacent disk sector'. This _is_ known.
This is the outfit that brought obviously falsified video tapes to their trial: anyone wishing to argue this one might explain what purpose video editing served here, the outright changing of video evidence to flatly contradict what was claimed avout it. This is inexcusable, quite factual, and was an amazingly major gaffe on Microsoft's part.
They know no honest way of functioning: one might well ask why they would ever want to learn an honest way of functioning, as their essential dishonesty has earned them so much money. Crime pays if you don't get caught.
Running MS code under WINE is probably not going to be smart any longer either: in this case it's more like that was _never_ very smart. It's a losing game. It's normal behavior for MS to churn their APIs and change things around to screw up third parties. WINE is an energy hole: as it approaches near completion it will be trapped trying to keep up with undocumented changes, it can't possibly reach full compliance without the cooperation of Microsoft, which is not forthcoming.
I wouldn't put it past them to put in code to detect that situation and do ugliness: actually, they need never even be aware WINE exists. Their normal behavior is to put in code and shake things up a bit, or a lot. The fellow who writes The Hacker Diet had a lovely rant based on the fact that his relatively simple Excel spreadsheet for the diet required total revision for EVERY VERSION of Excel that ever came out- in other words, WINE or no WINE, they already do this, even to their own customers. Naturally this hurts WINE too. Rather than just trying to hit a moving target, WINE has to hit about 35 moving targets all moving in different directions.
They are very treacherous: yes.
Troll, hell. Seems quite factual and well-adjusted to _me_. Does being reasonable and intelligent require that you _trust_ the obviously untrustworthy? That seems like taking fairmindedness to an absurd extreme- when you get right down to it, some unpleasant things are still true.
Do you still want Microsoft and their Office to CONTROL EVERY COMPUTER PLATFORM IN EXISTENCE??
There's evidence to suggest that they control the Mac. How can anybody want them to get equivalent leverage (and ability to decree the killing of competing technology) on Linux? For God's sake, Linux is about the only place left that they don't get to say, "Kill that. We don't like it. Or we'll kill Office for your platform/withhold Windows/lock you out of the market/etc". And people want to hand them that power?
It's good to see this, because it confirms that the GPL is ideally suited to protecting the interests of proprietary software developers who understand their closed code loses its value after a while.
Carmack gets to release older engines and such things under the GPL, _knowing_ that nobody can take his work and build it into a competing closed source project. Granted, he can't cherry-pick ideas from the GPL stuff he seeded and use them in his closed stuff, but he doesn't need to, he has plenty of ideas of his own to use. The point is, Carmack does not want people to be 'free' to take the stuff he's giving to the opensource hackers, and turn it into a rival engine. He wants it to stay in the domain of the hackers, stay visible and accessible to all. If his GPLed works end up becoming terrific enough to compete with him (the recent GPLing of Bungie's Marathon 2 source resulted in the fixing of all the engine bugs, and a flurry of new mapmaking!), he'll make the effort to remain competitive, but that's still a very different thing from allowing his old code to go out there under a license that lets other companies take it, do proprietary mods on it, and then start selling that.
It's immensely gratifying to see that the GPL suits Carmack's purpose so well, what with the constant bashing it gets. Fact is, the only reason to bash the GPL is if you want to rip somebody off. If you are a creator and want to share, it's the single most effective way to ensure that sharing will happen _and_ that any resulting projects won't get in the way of any separate, proprietary projects you're depending on. I wish John Carmack the best in working out this little problem of his, and totally support his hard line. GPL means GPL. People choose it for a reason.
Time I spoke up... it's a very interesting topic to me, as I've played/interacted crossgender for a couple _years_ on a muck... and not as your stereotypical 'hottie', either, at least not the way that is usually meant;)
For me it's a bit like the way Lewis Carroll made the protagonist of his Wonderland books a female- there's a certain type of geekiness that just can't relate to trucks and boasting and fragging people in Quake and all that stuff, and this can easily be seen as a more female perspective. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it'd be equally helpful to just interact with really intense geeks who cared only about nifty algorithms and programming APIs (not so much CPUs- cpu dicksize wars is, well, rather male;) )
I did, however, spend an adolescence feeling very frustrated and outclassed and afraid to talk to girls, and never understood why none of them made the effort to reach out to me- and this is why I _know_ the genderbending thing can be educational, I've learned from it. I know some people get flustered from being hit on when they pose as females, but since I was trying to work out a comfortable persona to _stick_ with, I had to find answers to that problem- and I ended up being just like the girls who'd intimidated me so much when I was a teenager. There was no way around it- to cope at all with a flirting sort of situation I needed to deal with more confident people who were able to say what they thought, just the kind of person I wasn't. That kind of insight is something I never had as I was growing up.
I certainly agree that many males passing as females do a questionable job of it- certain attitudes and especially descriptions (!) just scream, "horny teenage boy living out fantasies!"- but it's not a rule that such genderbending is always spottable. I know that I've occasionally startled IRL women who'd assumed, after getting to know me, that I _was_ one of them. The trick is that you can't really cover up your true self, it will always show through one way or another- and hell, I've never understood Guy Stuff or felt like I belonged to Maleness anyhow. When my true self shows through, people take it to be a female self. This doesn't trouble me, because it doesn't really matter much in the long run- not like I have an active sex life so it's rather a moot point most of the time.
Oddly enough, I am not wildly effeminate. I have to shave or I get 5-o-clock shadow, my voice is pretty deep, I have no complaints on a certain very private level *g* so I have to wonder- is my basic confidence in my physical maleness strong enough to totally permit my embracing of a _personality_ oriented femaleness? In other words, if I was hung like a chihuahua, would I be driving a pickup truck, lifting weights and fragging people in Quake with massive displays of virtual testosterone? *g* this notion amuses me greatly.
Well, _that_ was bizarre to talk about on Slashdot. Back to the normal posts for a while. Yeah, gimme that crakhor quake model! She's a real hottie plus I think the bounding box is smaller so you can beat the other guys and frag their asses! (huhuhuhuh, he said 'box');)
Things that interest me, in a general sense- although it might seem rather specialized.
I don't get any newspapers. I'd be somewhat more likely to get them if I had a wood-stove and had a use for burning them afterwards. I _do_ get some publications, though, and this tells you something about what I'd want from a newspaper. I get 'em from Baker's or a local bookstore, in one case by subscription.
I get MacAddict by subscription based on their habit of providing a CD-Rom with large numbers of recent programs and demos and things- it's like a sort of miniature MacOS Freshmeat or something. This is farthest from what a newspaper would need to be for me to buy it. I get Cinefex when it comes to the bookstore- this is a quarterly movie special effects journal that is extremely in touch with its industry and teaches me many things and gives me ideas. I get various ultralight and homebuilt-airplane magazines at Baker's (an office supplies store), because they're fun to read- I tend to scan them to see if there's any particular article appealing enough that I'd want to have the magazine around indefinitely.
In all of these cases (least so for MacAddict!) I am also interested in access to the advertisements- this is because on the one hand pro cinema effects technology, and on the other ultralight aircraft equipment, isn't a thing I see in daily life, or locally. (computer hype is everywhere and I'd be happier if MacAddict didn't even run advertisements:) )
So, logically, the way to sell printed paper to me is to deal with an area I want to know about, but can't get local access to- to deal with it expertly, knowing more than I do and knowing who else to interview and publish and write about- and to put me in touch with an entire community including pundits who know more than I do and advertisers selling specialised products that I don't ever see anywhere else. Do all that and I buy the printed paper- it's that simple. I don't say it's _easy_, but it's not particularly mysterious.
One interesting side note is that to do this, you positively have to take an interest in the subject matter to the point of being passionate about it. There's no room at all for token coverage and having your real focus be getting money from me. If you can't out-geek me in the area I want to hear about, then I'll tend to see through that right away and drop you like a hot rock. Whatever the common business wisdom is these days, if you want to sell a newspaper or magazine or journal, sincerity isn't just some selling point: it's the main reason for anybody to be listening to you. Who the hell would listen to somebody who didn't really care what they were talking about as long as they sold ad space?
Take it from a guy who spends most of his time in MacOS, often doing really demanding disk-space stuff like audio recording or video editing, and _still_ allocates a whole set of disk partitions to LinuxPPC (and bought the dist, too). It's not cost: it's freedom, and having an escape route. I am typing this in MacOS, and spend 99% of my time in MacOS, and know how to keep MacOS reliable and happy, and even write software for MacOS, but any MacOS developer or veteran user knows they are working with The Mothership (Apple), which can sometimes turn all corporate and horrible. My pet example- for over a year I used the Apple integrated browser (yes they wrote one), Cyberdog. It only got to a basic state, but some things about it still haven't been equalled, most of all the way that it built internet functionality right into the Finder if you wanted. From one 'program' (really a set of OpenDoc tools) you had email links that would open just a message send window, you had newsgroups that you could doubleclick and open any combination of groups from any servers, web page links of course, FTP links that would simply open up a window just like a Finder listview, only it was remote: in all respects it put your internet access all around you, and totally removed the hype and advertising from the process. You weren't running 'eudora', you ran email. You weren't launching 'Netscape', you launched a web page- no splash screens, ever, no little placards or logos. It felt like the future. Steve Jobs killed it, possibly because he had to cut a deal with Microsoft to endorse all their stuff instead.
This (he says, in Netscape, from a system that returned to the brandname days of Netscape and Eudora and Fetch with splashscreens galore) is the problem. In MacOS, things are convenient and one basically gets by comfortably if you have a clue, but although it's 'your space' more than a Windows box, you still don't get to control it completely- if The Mothership decides You Will Run IE for instance, and makes new OS pieces check for it and not install unless they install it, then you lose- either you jump through lots of hoops to maintain your own choices, or you cave and do things their way. And though they mostly behave *grumble about Cyberdog*, there is ALWAYS the possibility that someday they'll go somewhere that I just won't follow.
That's why I have LinuxPPC installed. It's my safety valve. I learn about it and grow to accept it for what it is, because it can be mine in a way impossible for corporate closed source OSes. It is dreadfully lacking in some ways, but then I feel that the Netscape and Eudora I use now are dreadfully lacking in some ways compared to Cyberdog, and that got taken away from me. Linux can't ever be taken away from me, so I won't ever forget it's there. It's important.
Re:But how stable is it?
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I had to jump in here: basically, the bizarre thing about MacOS is that to get it to _be_ very stable within its normal operating parameters (i.e. you shut it down when you're done with it each day, it's not about running 24/7), you have to really know what you're doing. This may seem strange considering that it's supposed to be Newbie Clueless Heaven, but it's still true: half the trouble is that many users don't know what they're doing and don't want to learn. They run lots of Microsoft apps, they don't know what they have in their extensions folder, they don't keep aware of stuff like known bugs and interactions with third party software- and if you know these things and are willing to put in a bit of effort and sometimes do workarounds, many Macs can be made very reliable and counted upon not to crash when running applications you know don't crash. In short, if you want to avoid crashing 3 times a day badly enough you can.
One factor that contributes to this acceptance of frequent crashing is that classic MacOS is very resilient, as is HFS: as a Mac tech I've seen many computers that have been hit with constant crashing for months on end, years even, and still managed to drag themselves along with one good finger despite massive disk damage and being forced to run Microsoft OLE extensions and two different old versions of IE and AOL at the same time plus weird menubar extensions and the dreaded Mystery Souped-Up CD-Rom Driver I kept seeing, thanks to some idiot magazine. A Windows box that badly damaged and confused would just be a doorstop, period. A Unix box that misconfigured would be rm -r * material, yet the Macs that crippled still manage to run for like five to fifteen minutes, and this is amazing! Maybe it's better if OSX _doesn't_ put up with abuse that severe, because it seems like if an OS _can_ put up with abuse that severe, then that's what it gets, and people only seem to see it when it's already a pile of slag and should be a doorstop, not dragging itself gamely along.
Hopefully OSX will either cope with luser abuse or make the abuse really hard to do. MacOS basically did the former, with predictable results. It's possible that OSX will do the latter, at which point you'll have clever magazines offering doubleclickable installers that will blithely replace huge big chunks of the kernel for some daft and vague performance benefit, and people will try them because idiots will be idiots. But extensions and control panels will be gone, gone, gone: and it's just possible that treating specifically the core of OSX as open (but not for desperately bright performance tweekers to meddle with) will result in a platform that, in practice, is as stable as a proper Unix mantained by a clued person.
I quite agree, and can think of cases where being a pirate has made publically held companies successful and their stockholders happy while tending to subvert capitalism and reduce consumers to a more 'communist masses' state.
Which only emphasizes the idea that what we have isn't capitalism. It's something resembling capitalism, but publically held companies change the dynamics of the equation drastically. Something strange is going on when a person can write in all seriousness, "The goal of a company isn't to provide a good product, or make its consumers happy", and be right. Only very large companies are far enough from capitalism that they can afford to control entire markets and eliminate choice- and only publically held companies are virtually forced to do this, given the option, knowing that customers will choose 'Give me better products' over 'Increase your own stranglehold' every time, if it's up to them.
Maybe in practice we already live in some sort of entirely non-capitalist system, in which the means of production are controlled by cartels and consumers can be expected to not have any choices to make about their purchases, their options constrained to a bare minimum, with no prospect of further choices on the horizon, only fewer choices. If this is so, hadn't we better wake up to it and start considering the idea that capitalism isn't, anymore- that it faded out about the same time that communism mostly did, and now we have a sort of global combination of both, ruled by corporate interests rather than by governments?
If your only requirement for 'capitalism' is 'companies can try to beat up other companies and kill them', there are many better models for such behavior. You could try communism, where the winner gets to make all other companies against the law, or fascism, where the whole _idea_ is to come up with one big winner that kills all the others. To call this capitalism is extremely unobservant, because you're only looking at the companies.
If you look at the companies' _environments_, you will see that the idea of capitalism is for different companies to provide products and services to _consumers_. This is unlike communism, where a central authority provides goods and services to consumers. The idea of capitalism is that the consumers, the buyers, expect to have a number of choices. If they only had one choice (the Winner), it would _be_ communism, except that rather than the government taking control and closing off other choices to the consumer, it would be the market leader taking control and closing off other choices to the consumer.
Closing off other choices to the consumer is NEVER capitalism. It's the opposite of capitalism. Companies can fight all they want, but the assumption is that no matter _how_ much they fight they can't really substantially close off other choices to the consumer- that there will always be a marketplace, a whole bunch of choices of basically equal value. That's what capitalism IS! That's why it's often worked pretty well.
In an age where market winners are increasingly able to seize control of the means of production and close off access for other companies, what we're seeing is not strictly capitalism anymore. Instead, it is a sort of decentralised communism in which the governing authority is not necessarily the military or civil authorities- it's the kingpins of economic sectors, the controllers of technology or commerce. Power used to only come out of the barrel of a gun- now _through_ the use of capitalism, power can also come out of the barrel of a contract. Through this development, capitalism gets to be the host for a sort of cancerous growth- only through capitalism do companies get to build businesses large enough to close down the marketplace of capitalism and replace it with a single-sourced sort of decentralised communism.
Capitalism is all about what's out there being available to consumers! You can't even _define_ capitalism without reference to the consumers, they are the whole point of the exercise. The only distinguishing _feature_ of capitalism is this idea that the consumers get a marketplace of comparable products and get to choose among them. Without that, it doesn't matter whether companies are mean or nice- it's NOT CAPITALISM if the interface to the consumers is choked off. The attitude of the companies is quite irrelevant to this...
Funnily enough airwindows.com is not on any list I've ever checked. I say that because in the fiction section is at least one completed novel with adult themes, one short story with adult themes, and an unfinished novel with even more adult themes. All are basically sci-fi or fantasy and none are really gratituous- the closest that I get to gratituous is the last one mentioned, 'Aquarius', which is sci-fi and deals with a society so advanced in genetic engineering that you have 'races' of cat-people, dog-people, wolf and fish and fox ad infinitum people- and the springboard for the adult theme is this: what if humans went into heat? More, what if this was socially unacceptable and got fixed through surgery and medication, but the untreated condition also brought the ability for sharper concentration and fits of intensely hard work? (not to mention the obvious 'private benefits'- and even here, there's a dark side, as in heart attack risks and added stress)
I don't know how many Slashdotters have done serious literary writing, or how many people with 'geek values' are also writers. I _do_ know that I've walked a fine line of MY OWN CHOOSING in writing these things- wanting to deal with the fascinating concepts (it's a very geeky trait of mine that even sex is something to intellectually study in fascination rather than just wallow in), but not wanting to be pigeonholed as a tacky porno writer. As a result, I've had to work quite hard (but am pleased to do so), because if you're writing decently about this subject it _must_ be sensed and felt. Fiction is not a HOWTO, but neither is it a scholarly essay. If I'm setting up tensions they must be felt, they must involve- and interestingly, there seems to _never_ be any reason to use 'dirty keywords' or phrases- it's a lot more effective to take the time and energy to write up such a scene properly. And 'effective' does mean inflaming the imagination- that's what fiction is _for_.
It's ironic- I've never been a particularly prurient writer. I've never written outright porn (this despite the fact that I know where I could sell it for a damned decent price, I might add). My fine line of decency is discreet enough that, even when I write about adult topics, I tend to delicately slip away from the focus of the matter. And yet, every time I read about this damn censorware nonsense, I am more inclined to take my existing approach and really _run_ with it. There's no reason I have to show such decorum. I'm quite capable of taking my SF/fantasy stuff, dealing with the adult topics that do interest me, absolutely going for the throat (or, uh, other areas:) ) and STILL not using any Dirty Keywords.
I consider this the hidden cost of what the censorware people are doing. Eventually they may just have to _read_ my fiction writing and ban me on _content_ alone despite my tendency to not use dirty words. If they are capable of banning 'gay culture', then they are capable of banning the adult situations of entirely fictional characters which aren't even human in the normal everyday sense. But to do so they'll have to actually read it- and they'll also have to really drop the pretense and stand revealed as the bookburners they are.
In conclusion: censorware people? "You are stupid". Pardon my _obscene_ _words_. furrfu.
Slashdot Mirror
My candidate for progressive disclosure is the Mac semantics for 'option clicking' on things. There are quite a few situations where basic functionality is used through normal clicks, and option-clicking delivers a new 'expert' set of features, different ones. Nothing about the program judges you and decides whether you're smart enough to get to use the extra features- it's simply a matter of whether, knowing about 'option clicks' or having RTFM, you know to optionclick the thing or not.
Open your stuff or get out of the way. You're in no position to run about handwaving in this day and age- the tired and insufficient file-folder hierarchy has _crushed_ everything else and to get your ideas out there and used, you will have to cooperate and come down from that glib ivory tower- if even that helps, as it doesn't look like your ideas are any better than simply storing different types of data in a common, 'theme' folder or dock with very _rudimentary_ support for organising by date (or frequency of modification, number of changes, or for that matter filesize and type, which you intentionally gloss over.)
Your pardon for the tone, but Gelernter's book ("Mirror Worlds") has always _really_ annoyed me, and I'd hoped you lot had failed in the market by now. What Gelernter wanted to push is nothing but 'agents' to the Nth power, combined with object-oriented abstraction like the worst of C++ also to the Nth power. He wanted users to be utter 'mouse potatoes', passively receiving the fruits of the various agent processes, with as much of the workings concealed as possible- 'topsight', in a word. It's a fine concept but it's a curse taken to the extreme Gelernter envisioned.
You haven't even managed that: all you have is a way to clutter GUI further while hiding important meta-data about the information, and you're taking pains to make even that proprietary. You take 'topsight' _literally_, which is ludicrous. Didn't you even _read_ Gelernter's book? It's horrible handwaving but at least he wasn't talking about viewing everything by date as a patentable concept!
My primary consolation in watching you people handwave over this nonsense is that it's never going to amount to anything anyhow: file/folder is locked in, there's no room for you the way you're behaving. I can't imagine what gives you the idea that you can run about patenting basic concepts (stack a bunch of actions and documents about a central subject on the screen in a sort of swoopy formation!) and expect to make headway against Microsoft. You're probably out to be bought by them, and I hope they do: they're already going nowhere, why not distract them even worse from the real work of user interface?
End rant. (_God_, do I hate interface handwaving. This rant would have been a lot milder if I hadn't painfully slogged through ALL of Gelernter's "Mirror Worlds" panning for sensible ideas. It was just about all baseless hype, and so is this.)
First of all, in many cases you are forced to gloss over some serious problems regarding the freedom of your tools, and rely on making a good-faith effort to be obviously 'open' to the porting of your code to _really_ free languages. I use REALbasic (which is indeed a phenomenal RAD language). A _lot_ of Windows coders use Visual Basic. These are totally closed languages, in the same sense that if you're making Win32 API calls or Mac Toolbox calls they are closed calls. When you're working on a nonfree platform there's almost always _some_ point at which you're forced to interact with just the sort of 'black box' that you're just plain not allowed to use in your own GPLed code.
At the same time, it's usually possible to make a good faith effort to show that you are writing open code: for instance, the REALbasic 'code' is a single, compact file that makes no effort to be readable outside RB: but there's an option to export all the source as text, so I use that and take pains to offer both forms. This remains a problem, as REALbasic has a sophisticated interface builder, and the information for 'default' controls does _not_ get exported: only if you write actual code into the events of a control does it get exported. So the 'export as source' does not actually produce _all_ the information, it omits window object positioning information. However, there is a new RB third party tool called Project Cuisinart which _can_ produce every last detail in a text format- and so it goes, now that Project Cuisinart (which is not itself open) exists, my notion of 'open source' for REALbasic projects is the Cuisinart view of the total project file, complete with 'pushbutton 1' and a long list of properties- which itself is not open.
It can be very frustrating and disheartening. Some of the best tools aren't open. In many cases in order for them to be open, even if the tool itself thrived, there would be a team of good people out of work. Which leads me to...
Hostility. The problem with open source on Windows or Mac is partly that you can expect to be at war with your peers half the time. The best thing you can do is try to help newbies, share information both in the community and as GPLed source, and try to remember 'many enemies, much honor'. This is particularly relevant for me right now. REALbasic has an O'Reilly book, and the author is prone to give page numbers in answer to questions, and not bother answering the questions. You wouldn't believe how much hostility you'd get for objecting to, even questioning, this state of affairs, even if you spend an hour revising your messages to tone them down. Right now I am being publically humiliated on the REALbasic mailing list, with virtually no support except from a few people such as one fellow who asked me to let it lie so the argument would cool down, for this crime: I suggested that many O'Reilly books were the redistillation of community knowledge, and sell on convenience rather than being proprietary information to be withheld from people who haven't bought the book. I also suggested that Tim O'Reilly understood this and approved of his authors being active and helpful in their communities. And I'm being _crucified_ for having the gall to claim these things!
*sigh* If you write OSS for Windows, you can expect to put up with the same nonsense. You can expect to see everything from personal abuse to piles of FUD, you will be accused of wanting to destroy the livelihoods of your peers (to which my response is usually 'maybe' ;) ), and you might even end up in some ugly little tangle like claiming Apache (for instance) is open source, with your 'developer community' tearing you a new one and insisting there are bits you don't get to see, otherwise it wouldn't be secure! That may sound ridiculous, but I'd have thought "O'Reilly doesn't need to care about the community, it provides proprietary information in books and should be supported for doing it" was equally ridiculous, yet I'm sitting by letting myself be _roasted_ and my (such as it is) reputation savaged over just such a ridiculous distortion of what O'Reilly is about.
Best thing I can do is let 'em, and the next time some newbie asks a question I can answer, answer it helpfully while others give page numbers of their books or offer example projects that are proprietary or classes/plugins that are closed. Doing that makes the newbies want to cooperate, because they see some people freely helping them and others leaving strings attached and pontificating about how there's no free lunch. Well- cooperation _is_ a free lunch, it's just that you're giving it as well as getting it. And it would be a poor world if nobody could ever use open source software unless they were willing to use nothing but. Small pockets of cooperators can survive even in the midst of total hostility, and if you're a pocket of one, you're an ambassador. It's my job as such an ambassador to soak up the abuse, even when it's just unfair, and try to look like somebody to emulate. And the code I do release is licensed with the GPL: one thing about closed-land is that people don't seem to act like they get to 'rip off' open code. Instead they freak out at the requirements, and flame you to a crisp for _daring_ to require that they GPL derivative works, never mind that if they had a derivative work it's only by copying big chunks of the original work verbatim. But at least they _are_ freaking out, as it'd be worse if they just took whatever they wanted without asking.
Sometimes it's a real pain writing open on closed tools on a closed platform. Unfortunately, if nobody ever does, the closedness will never change. In that light, I have to encourage anyone trying to write open on Windows, in VB, or whatever. You'll get blasted from both sides- and you should try to set an example, _and_ take extra pains to make sure what you're doing _is_ as open as you possibly can make it- but it's worthwhile to do it.
For a change, it's easier for poorly-funded individuals to be illegal in this manner, and harder for big corporations and businesses to get away with it. So, interestingly, this might prove to actually be a mechanism to hurt large corporations and bullying businesses. Their very nature means they have nowhere to hide from the patent-oriented attacks of other large corporations and bullying businesses. Meanwhile, poorly funded individuals can, to some extent, completely scorn and ignore the patent system and just play the odds hoping to not be made an example- if caught, the thing to do would be to roll over and play dead and erase all your (GPLed, and widely mirrored) software and bow out of mailing lists and communities for a time. "Me, an intellectual property criminal? I _never_ coded that toolbar that is like the MS patent! It was a bunch of us over CVS at a server that used to be around at the time. No, I don't remember who else was there. It was dark ;) Yes, I'll erase my copy and turn in my copy of the illegal crime tool 'egcs' to the police... *whistles innocently*"
The one mistake here is this: you say the FSF would be able to accumulate a large portfolio of patents. That is incorrect and would also be phenomenally more expensive, wasteful, and ineffective for the desired purpose. The FSF is not _about_ hoarding and propagating restrictive intellectual property! That's appalling.
Instead, what I'd LOVE to see is the FSF maintaining such a database, for people to file anything they can which can be written in the form of a patent (i.e. detailed and explicit). The database would be broadly, publically accessible, but more importantly, there _is_ a substantially cheaper means to file a claim that a thing is in the public domain. It might still be costly for inventive but broke programmers living on Ramen, but it'd be well within the ability of the FSF to cover this cost for the idea donators.
Once an idea is filed with the patent office in this manner, it is _formally_ not available for a patent. I think this mechanism was originally intended as a block while a company got together a formal patent, but it's just sitting there waiting to be used by something like the FSF. Not only is it explicitly a public-domain-maker, patent-blocker by express design, it is also substantially cheaper than filing a patent! It'd be a terrific resource.
Please, FSF, start doing this! Hunt down the proper forms and arrange with somebody like SourceForge for the web space and bandwidth and throw open the doors for inventors and programmers to file ANTI-PATENTS, free for anybody to use with the one restriction being you can never file a patent on the things. It's the IP version of the GPL, complete with using the mechanisms of the patent process against itself. Please?
The Marathon Story
There's a FPS with a similar engine to Doom, except that the story mattered, you needed to kill some things but not others, your allies would change based on the storyline, and rather than being bogged down in _your_ character development, you were a violent cipher acting first on behalf of a friendly AI ('Leela'), and then as Leela is destroyed, you end up acting on behalf of a mad AI whose motives are deeply questionable ('Durandal'). The literary quality is very high for a computer game, and the creativity is just off the scale. People have made elaborate web pages just _analyzing_ this game trilogy as if it was a literary work- yet reading the terminal texts straight through is not the way the work is meant to be experienced.
I'll concede that very few if any 16-year-old game hackers are capable of this sort of literary distinction. Of course, I'd be delighted to be proven wrong ;)
Well... that's a given. It's quite obvious. But might it be intentional? It seems to me the conventional wisdom is that usability does _not_ sell, and that flash is the only thing that drags in the consumers, many of which will never grow beyond basic web surfing and writing straight text in Word. Under those conditions the faults of OSX's GUI are not relevant, as the person would not be running two things at once except by accident (and guess what? for a change that would be instantly obvious!), and would never have learned any of the useful shortcuts of classic MacOS, whether it's ability to customise the Apple Menu or ability to do a contextual popup menu or use of the Control Strip. It's as if Aqua is designed to default to handhold the most relentlessly AOLish l^Huser. I'm not at all sure this _is_ a mistake.
Then the trick becomes finding ways to replace the dock, to get rid of the default stuff and use other methods. Surely this is not going to be so hard given that Darwin is OSS and we'd be _replacing_ the proprietary GUI, not tapping into it? By that I mean shutting _off_ the Dock rather than altering it, I don't mean ditching Display PDF and running KDE on it. That said, I just bet one of the first replacements is somebody hacking a Windows taskbar and start menu only in Aqua style. Furthermore, I fear and suspect it will be a _jello_ taskbar and start menu, translucent, and will wobble sproingily at all times in a continuing bit of very striking but very distracting animation. (Why??? 'Because we can!' This becomes a hell of a lot simpler hacking Aqua and using a vector GUI.) But... why not? It's not like I'd have to use it. I might prefer something like a root menu, and tend to avoid having desktop objects at all, like I do in X and in MacOS. For me, icons are for keeping in folders in disks- the desktop should have only clippings and work in progress. If I could remove the drive icons in MacOS and get the windows through a popup or something, I would.
There are a lot of things I like about Linux, mostly the freedom to be whimsical with the UI: I don't have to run a desktop if I don't feel like it. I can have taskbars of many different kinds, or not- I can have tiles and icons in many different ways, or not. However, I mostly run MacOS, partly because I know how to keep it running happy and stable, partly because its interface is more consistent (_especially_ text editing semantics- I'm sorry, X mouse text editing is crazed- even the 'windows imitations' are horribly inadequate compared with the traditional, post-Drag-and-Drop MacOS handling of it), partly because of access to tools. I write software for MacOS only- that is because it is a lot _easier_ to do, not because I don't want to code for Linux. I would really like to see some convergence here- in particular, I'd like to see OSX become popular in such a way that writing programs for it is closer to writing for Linux. Ideally I'd like to see some of the _great_ programming environments for MacOS (No I don't mean Codewarrior- I mean REALbasic. It's like a _really_ sophisticated GUI drag and drop object oriented interface builder only you code in Python- not really Python, but I'm told it's very Pythonish) evolve so they output code for OSX- at which point it becomes a lot easier for them to also output code for Linux.
As these companies and programmers start adapting to a more Unix-based environment, they can start coexisting with the OSS world. There _are_ Mac programmers who 'get' open source. It's an active area- one of the biggest Mac gaming hits _ever_, Bungie Software's 'Marathon', recently saw GPLing- Marathon 2 was released under the GPL, and in just a few months has been substantially debugged and tweaked and enhanced, longstanding engine limitations totally obliterated in a delightful burst of free hacker effort. As the Mac converges with Linux (I consider the move to Darwin and BSD underpinnings a convergence all by itself), this sort of thing will happen more often. The end result might well be a massive cross-pollination- tons of Linux code being adapted for use with Aqua, tons of Mac programmers and vendors suddenly beginning to release stuff on Linux as well.
When that starts to kick in, Windows can go pound sand >:)
Me, I agree with him. I am solidly against software patents, and moderately against patents in general. This is not as an abstract concept, it's very much in line with how they are actually functioning in practice- if the world was different I might have a different opinion, but in the Real World (tm) 'solidly against software patents' describes me quite accurately.
That said, I am Chris Johnson. If you are determined to be seen publically opposing this perception, who exactly are you, and is it any of your business? You might be an Amazon stockholder who never invented anything in your life :)
The equivalent in patent terms is not a patent. It is the publication in a unarguably conspicuous place of the relevant ideas, in such a way that patent examiners can get access to and search for the ideas. Like the GPL, it impedes your ability to force people to pay for your idea (implementation is still fair game). Also like the GPL, it penalizes nobody and focusses on one key point: anyone can do anything with an established public domain idea _except_ patent it and restrict other people from using it.
The missing piece is this: we have no way of publishing any such ideas anywhere that will stand up in court as public domain. I feel strongly that just putting stuff on your website will not do- the patent examiners will not grovel through a million websites, and the whole point of the exercise is to make it possible to _block_ the blind granting of patents on things. There is a way to formally announce things as PD, but it costs money (much less than a patent) and is not a forum for sharing the ideas with a broad public. I've said before and I'll keep saying: we need a formal website for 'outing' ideas and inventions of all kinds, a centralised 'bazaar for inventions' that can be easily searched by patent examiners, individuals and corporations alike. The latter group is important: even if the patent examiners aren't on the ball, if you get two corporations grabbing a public domain idea, each one will bitterly deny the other's right to patent the idea- and the individuals and actual inventors won't have to concern themselves with that aspect. End result is that the idea stays public domain as intended.
Is anybody ever going to help put together such a site? I am getting desperate. The possibilities are great: even in the case of preexisting patents, it is often possible to come up with an invention of narrow focus that does not infringe on the patent. Such work done for an effective public domain resource would be able to rapidly propagate such workarounds to the public and to industry, quickly reducing the usefulness of existing patents unless they are genuinely brilliant inventions. But there has to be the site, it's useless to just have a bunch of random people putting stuff on their web pages...
I'd want to see the contract. I see no reason to assume O'Reilly is free to cut its ties to Amazon just because it wants to. I see every reason to ask whether Amazon affiliates are required to maintain the link/connection to Amazon for X amount of time if they want to get a percentage of the Amazon sales. Unfortunately, there is also the possibility of a 'You do not talk about Amazon contracts!' clause.
As a corporate entity they are _compelled_ to behave like this, in all seriousness, with no concern for whether it is fair, valid or even sensible. They are _one_ 'reality check' away from a major collapse of their valuation- which could really blow up in their faces. Everything depends on the world continuing to think 'Amazon will stomp all other online booksellers! Jeff Bezos is man of the year!'. The second that no longer makes sense to, say, Wall Street, the reality takes hold- the reality is that they've had a _lot_ of trouble getting anywhere close to turning a profit.
They _are_ serious, they are playing the patents as a game, and they will continue to abuse the system until they crash and burn, because that is basically all they have- that and brand name loyalty, which is being eroded by their actions. They might have nasty contracts for affiliates (has anyone asked CmdrTaco if he's legally allowed to _pull_ the links to Amazon? Or did he sign off on a contract mandating them for X amount of time?). But mostly they have a stock valuation that's keeping them going. If that fails and the perception is that they've stumbled and no longer dominate, they have very serious trouble.
If I am not mistaken, your idea of placing conditions on people's freedom to enter into this license agreement with open source software is completely contrary to the spirit of the thing and specifically clashes with the GPL. I certainly will never support it, no matter how intensely I oppose corporations wielding software patents. It's almost as bad as the idea of building an 'open source patent portfolio' and then acting just like the corporations, to teach them a lesson! no no no ;P
What entitles them to take such actions at all?
It might be vaguely arguable that anybody can come into your computer on the slightest pretext of having your consent, and change your homepage to theirs. That is intrusive, it is an imposition, but it is simply what _you_ see when you launch your browser. The most serious damage would be if you had a special homepage, kept no record of it and couldn't find it again: then you'd have suffered a loss due to this company's defacement of your property.
However- changing an _email_ sig? On the one hand this is just a line of text. On the other, it's a piece of text that is how you present yourself to the world, and the safe assumption is that this is a bit of text you intentionally chose to tell the reader something about yourself or what you consider important. In that light, the action this company takes is beyond inexcusable. It is like identity rape: to this company, not only is your computer's data not your property (so it can be freely tampered with for their benefit), but YOUR IDENTITY is not your property. The way you present yourself to others via electronic media is not your property! It is so inconsequential to them that they figure a mere 'sorry!' is all they owe you for hijacking parts of your IDENTITY for their own pleasure.
Again, it's one thing to examine the security implications, and the ways in which ActiveX can be used to build this behavior deeply into the system, making it hard to remove. But when did personal property become so meaningless that a stray click on a web page _allows_ a company to totally butcher your personal data for their own benefit?
Do you have a right to have your data for your homepage untampered with unless you explicitly and knowingly give permission for it to be altered?
If not, do you have a right for all of your writing to be untampered with, for instance if you downloaded some sort of grammar checker only to find that it runs and edits every ASCII file on your system that it can open? Is this a case of 'you should have kept backups' (let's hypothesize that it goes and edits all the backups too) or does this begin to look more like destruction of personal property?
Along the lines of this article, do you have a right for your email signature to be _your_ choice? Is it allowable for any joker who can get you to click on a clickwrap license to sneak in their own agenda, sigged to your mail as if it was your own agenda, so your friends can assume that you choose to 'push' this product or service? If so, is it then allowable for the clickwrap license to authorise the software to _send_ MLM-like mail to addresses on your mailing list, intentionally assuming your identity for the purposes of marketing, all in the background so the first you know of it is that you lose your ISP account for spamming, or lose friends over what they think you started doing?
It is informative and disturbing that this company already goes _almost_ to that extreme, and not as a joke. Surely the next step is intentional impersonation of a computer user, and marketing emails sent as if they were from that person- all sanctioned by the clickwrap license. It's almost here- just one tiny step from what GoHip is doing. It's so close...
And when that happens, I hope more people understand that this is not a security issue. It's not _about_ whether or not you are willing to psychologically barrier yourself in a concrete bunker, defying anyone's attempts to harm you.
Instead, it's about property rights, or a citizen's rights. It's about whether a regular person should even have to be concerned about these abuses. At the moment, in the computer industry, when you read about abuses like this, the first thought is "Security, so that you can stop people doing this to you, as they will no doubt try to do!". And that tells you something- because you never see anything to the effect of, "Screw security- this action is a crime against the person's property and an abuse of his identity. Click or no click, this is criminal! You're not allowed to hijack a person's identity and use their reputation as a marketing tool while trying hard to not alert them to it, and fighting their efforts to stop it happening!"
Am I off base here? Is it really so much to ask, to suggest that a person's arrangement of computer data is property, or at LEAST that the person's reputation and interactions with others is their property, and there is no intrinsic right to hijack that for profit? Not everything that is _possible_ and _profitable_ is legal. In this case, I can't think of a single thing more clearly property than a person's interaction with others, and their ability to determine how they express themselves. Suppose these same bright sparks at GoHip chose to globally replace the word 'video' with 'video (speaking of which, you have to check out GoHip.com! They're great with video)'? That is absolutely trivial, not so far from what they're doing now, and is absolutely, unarguably identity rape.
Is anybody ready to argue that this is defensible, or is strictly a 'security' issue where you only deserve the freedom you're ready to actively fight for? Does anybody seriously think this is 'opt-out' territory, that it's legitimate or right for any person's self-expression to be hijacked for commercial purposes?
If this goes on, forget watching TV and seeing 'the wrong' huge billboard on ESPN or in Times Square- it will be a world where you cannot even trust your own friends. Any of them could be speaking through a software filter that drastically changes what they say, and they would have no right to argue with this and no recourse except total paranoia. Even then, can you control _all_ the points your message passes through? What good will your security do you when your recipient has inadvertently installed a filter that changes your message _coming_ _in_, so that to their eyes, _you_ are the one saying "video (by the way, GoHip kicks ass!)."
Security is _such_ the wrong perspective to take on this stuff. This is civil liberties territory- and already shockingly close to paranoid fantasy. Yet it's not fantasy- people are _already_ having their identities and personal reputations hijacked by GoHip for marketing purposes, and this is seen as legitimate behavior, nasty but legal to do. How much farther do they have to go before the real issues are obvious?
Tells you something about how the mainstream perspective is being affected by this rotten Amazon behavior. Now we need a _judge_ going "Don't tell me, next you're going to patent the 'click'?" Then we'll be getting somewhere.
- They are not to be trusted: this is hard to argue with. They win through playing business as a bloodsport and through using technical leverage where they can. I can't think of a single software business _less_ trustworthy.
- They would intentionally break stuff: this is perhaps the most debatable point. I'd say it was even chances that they intentionally break things, versus just incompetence. However, the evidence that they intend to subvert existing net standards would seem to count as intentionally breaking stuff.
- or use it to send information about my machine to them: this is another case where you need to accurately perceive their interests. They are less likely to send off bits of your global history to an MS server, and more likely to check for pirated programs. However, in saying this one has to take into account the known information: Word files are known to include decidedly unrelated information, such as extraneous filenames, lists of open files or lists of active connections. People opening Word files and grovelling through the data with a hex editor have discovered very startling things on the order of 'where'd it get _that_ information? That wasn't on an adjacent disk sector'. This _is_ known.
- This is the outfit that brought obviously falsified video tapes to their trial: anyone wishing to argue this one might explain what purpose video editing served here, the outright changing of video evidence to flatly contradict what was claimed avout it. This is inexcusable, quite factual, and was an amazingly major gaffe on Microsoft's part.
- They know no honest way of functioning: one might well ask why they would ever want to learn an honest way of functioning, as their essential dishonesty has earned them so much money. Crime pays if you don't get caught.
- Running MS code under WINE is probably not going to be smart any longer either: in this case it's more like that was _never_ very smart. It's a losing game. It's normal behavior for MS to churn their APIs and change things around to screw up third parties. WINE is an energy hole: as it approaches near completion it will be trapped trying to keep up with undocumented changes, it can't possibly reach full compliance without the cooperation of Microsoft, which is not forthcoming.
- I wouldn't put it past them to put in code to detect that situation and do ugliness: actually, they need never even be aware WINE exists. Their normal behavior is to put in code and shake things up a bit, or a lot. The fellow who writes The Hacker Diet had a lovely rant based on the fact that his relatively simple Excel spreadsheet for the diet required total revision for EVERY VERSION of Excel that ever came out- in other words, WINE or no WINE, they already do this, even to their own customers. Naturally this hurts WINE too. Rather than just trying to hit a moving target, WINE has to hit about 35 moving targets all moving in different directions.
- They are very treacherous: yes.
Troll, hell. Seems quite factual and well-adjusted to _me_. Does being reasonable and intelligent require that you _trust_ the obviously untrustworthy? That seems like taking fairmindedness to an absurd extreme- when you get right down to it, some unpleasant things are still true.Read this: Fear And Trembling In Silicon Valley
Do you still want Microsoft and their Office to CONTROL EVERY COMPUTER PLATFORM IN EXISTENCE??
There's evidence to suggest that they control the Mac. How can anybody want them to get equivalent leverage (and ability to decree the killing of competing technology) on Linux? For God's sake, Linux is about the only place left that they don't get to say, "Kill that. We don't like it. Or we'll kill Office for your platform/withhold Windows/lock you out of the market/etc". And people want to hand them that power?
Carmack gets to release older engines and such things under the GPL, _knowing_ that nobody can take his work and build it into a competing closed source project. Granted, he can't cherry-pick ideas from the GPL stuff he seeded and use them in his closed stuff, but he doesn't need to, he has plenty of ideas of his own to use. The point is, Carmack does not want people to be 'free' to take the stuff he's giving to the opensource hackers, and turn it into a rival engine. He wants it to stay in the domain of the hackers, stay visible and accessible to all. If his GPLed works end up becoming terrific enough to compete with him (the recent GPLing of Bungie's Marathon 2 source resulted in the fixing of all the engine bugs, and a flurry of new mapmaking!), he'll make the effort to remain competitive, but that's still a very different thing from allowing his old code to go out there under a license that lets other companies take it, do proprietary mods on it, and then start selling that.
It's immensely gratifying to see that the GPL suits Carmack's purpose so well, what with the constant bashing it gets. Fact is, the only reason to bash the GPL is if you want to rip somebody off. If you are a creator and want to share, it's the single most effective way to ensure that sharing will happen _and_ that any resulting projects won't get in the way of any separate, proprietary projects you're depending on. I wish John Carmack the best in working out this little problem of his, and totally support his hard line. GPL means GPL. People choose it for a reason.
For me it's a bit like the way Lewis Carroll made the protagonist of his Wonderland books a female- there's a certain type of geekiness that just can't relate to trucks and boasting and fragging people in Quake and all that stuff, and this can easily be seen as a more female perspective. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it'd be equally helpful to just interact with really intense geeks who cared only about nifty algorithms and programming APIs (not so much CPUs- cpu dicksize wars is, well, rather male ;) )
I did, however, spend an adolescence feeling very frustrated and outclassed and afraid to talk to girls, and never understood why none of them made the effort to reach out to me- and this is why I _know_ the genderbending thing can be educational, I've learned from it. I know some people get flustered from being hit on when they pose as females, but since I was trying to work out a comfortable persona to _stick_ with, I had to find answers to that problem- and I ended up being just like the girls who'd intimidated me so much when I was a teenager. There was no way around it- to cope at all with a flirting sort of situation I needed to deal with more confident people who were able to say what they thought, just the kind of person I wasn't. That kind of insight is something I never had as I was growing up.
I certainly agree that many males passing as females do a questionable job of it- certain attitudes and especially descriptions (!) just scream, "horny teenage boy living out fantasies!"- but it's not a rule that such genderbending is always spottable. I know that I've occasionally startled IRL women who'd assumed, after getting to know me, that I _was_ one of them. The trick is that you can't really cover up your true self, it will always show through one way or another- and hell, I've never understood Guy Stuff or felt like I belonged to Maleness anyhow. When my true self shows through, people take it to be a female self. This doesn't trouble me, because it doesn't really matter much in the long run- not like I have an active sex life so it's rather a moot point most of the time.
Oddly enough, I am not wildly effeminate. I have to shave or I get 5-o-clock shadow, my voice is pretty deep, I have no complaints on a certain very private level *g* so I have to wonder- is my basic confidence in my physical maleness strong enough to totally permit my embracing of a _personality_ oriented femaleness? In other words, if I was hung like a chihuahua, would I be driving a pickup truck, lifting weights and fragging people in Quake with massive displays of virtual testosterone? *g* this notion amuses me greatly.
Well, _that_ was bizarre to talk about on Slashdot. Back to the normal posts for a while. Yeah, gimme that crakhor quake model! She's a real hottie plus I think the bounding box is smaller so you can beat the other guys and frag their asses! (huhuhuhuh, he said 'box') ;)
Better writing than I would find on the Web.
Things that interest me, in a general sense- although it might seem rather specialized.
I don't get any newspapers. I'd be somewhat more likely to get them if I had a wood-stove and had a use for burning them afterwards. I _do_ get some publications, though, and this tells you something about what I'd want from a newspaper. I get 'em from Baker's or a local bookstore, in one case by subscription.
I get MacAddict by subscription based on their habit of providing a CD-Rom with large numbers of recent programs and demos and things- it's like a sort of miniature MacOS Freshmeat or something. This is farthest from what a newspaper would need to be for me to buy it. I get Cinefex when it comes to the bookstore- this is a quarterly movie special effects journal that is extremely in touch with its industry and teaches me many things and gives me ideas. I get various ultralight and homebuilt-airplane magazines at Baker's (an office supplies store), because they're fun to read- I tend to scan them to see if there's any particular article appealing enough that I'd want to have the magazine around indefinitely.
In all of these cases (least so for MacAddict!) I am also interested in access to the advertisements- this is because on the one hand pro cinema effects technology, and on the other ultralight aircraft equipment, isn't a thing I see in daily life, or locally. (computer hype is everywhere and I'd be happier if MacAddict didn't even run advertisements :) )
So, logically, the way to sell printed paper to me is to deal with an area I want to know about, but can't get local access to- to deal with it expertly, knowing more than I do and knowing who else to interview and publish and write about- and to put me in touch with an entire community including pundits who know more than I do and advertisers selling specialised products that I don't ever see anywhere else. Do all that and I buy the printed paper- it's that simple. I don't say it's _easy_, but it's not particularly mysterious.
One interesting side note is that to do this, you positively have to take an interest in the subject matter to the point of being passionate about it. There's no room at all for token coverage and having your real focus be getting money from me. If you can't out-geek me in the area I want to hear about, then I'll tend to see through that right away and drop you like a hot rock. Whatever the common business wisdom is these days, if you want to sell a newspaper or magazine or journal, sincerity isn't just some selling point: it's the main reason for anybody to be listening to you. Who the hell would listen to somebody who didn't really care what they were talking about as long as they sold ad space?
This (he says, in Netscape, from a system that returned to the brandname days of Netscape and Eudora and Fetch with splashscreens galore) is the problem. In MacOS, things are convenient and one basically gets by comfortably if you have a clue, but although it's 'your space' more than a Windows box, you still don't get to control it completely- if The Mothership decides You Will Run IE for instance, and makes new OS pieces check for it and not install unless they install it, then you lose- either you jump through lots of hoops to maintain your own choices, or you cave and do things their way. And though they mostly behave *grumble about Cyberdog*, there is ALWAYS the possibility that someday they'll go somewhere that I just won't follow.
That's why I have LinuxPPC installed. It's my safety valve. I learn about it and grow to accept it for what it is, because it can be mine in a way impossible for corporate closed source OSes. It is dreadfully lacking in some ways, but then I feel that the Netscape and Eudora I use now are dreadfully lacking in some ways compared to Cyberdog, and that got taken away from me. Linux can't ever be taken away from me, so I won't ever forget it's there. It's important.
One factor that contributes to this acceptance of frequent crashing is that classic MacOS is very resilient, as is HFS: as a Mac tech I've seen many computers that have been hit with constant crashing for months on end, years even, and still managed to drag themselves along with one good finger despite massive disk damage and being forced to run Microsoft OLE extensions and two different old versions of IE and AOL at the same time plus weird menubar extensions and the dreaded Mystery Souped-Up CD-Rom Driver I kept seeing, thanks to some idiot magazine. A Windows box that badly damaged and confused would just be a doorstop, period. A Unix box that misconfigured would be rm -r * material, yet the Macs that crippled still manage to run for like five to fifteen minutes, and this is amazing! Maybe it's better if OSX _doesn't_ put up with abuse that severe, because it seems like if an OS _can_ put up with abuse that severe, then that's what it gets, and people only seem to see it when it's already a pile of slag and should be a doorstop, not dragging itself gamely along.
Hopefully OSX will either cope with luser abuse or make the abuse really hard to do. MacOS basically did the former, with predictable results. It's possible that OSX will do the latter, at which point you'll have clever magazines offering doubleclickable installers that will blithely replace huge big chunks of the kernel for some daft and vague performance benefit, and people will try them because idiots will be idiots. But extensions and control panels will be gone, gone, gone: and it's just possible that treating specifically the core of OSX as open (but not for desperately bright performance tweekers to meddle with) will result in a platform that, in practice, is as stable as a proper Unix mantained by a clued person.
Which only emphasizes the idea that what we have isn't capitalism. It's something resembling capitalism, but publically held companies change the dynamics of the equation drastically. Something strange is going on when a person can write in all seriousness, "The goal of a company isn't to provide a good product, or make its consumers happy", and be right. Only very large companies are far enough from capitalism that they can afford to control entire markets and eliminate choice- and only publically held companies are virtually forced to do this, given the option, knowing that customers will choose 'Give me better products' over 'Increase your own stranglehold' every time, if it's up to them.
Maybe in practice we already live in some sort of entirely non-capitalist system, in which the means of production are controlled by cartels and consumers can be expected to not have any choices to make about their purchases, their options constrained to a bare minimum, with no prospect of further choices on the horizon, only fewer choices. If this is so, hadn't we better wake up to it and start considering the idea that capitalism isn't, anymore- that it faded out about the same time that communism mostly did, and now we have a sort of global combination of both, ruled by corporate interests rather than by governments?
If you look at the companies' _environments_, you will see that the idea of capitalism is for different companies to provide products and services to _consumers_. This is unlike communism, where a central authority provides goods and services to consumers. The idea of capitalism is that the consumers, the buyers, expect to have a number of choices. If they only had one choice (the Winner), it would _be_ communism, except that rather than the government taking control and closing off other choices to the consumer, it would be the market leader taking control and closing off other choices to the consumer.
Closing off other choices to the consumer is NEVER capitalism. It's the opposite of capitalism. Companies can fight all they want, but the assumption is that no matter _how_ much they fight they can't really substantially close off other choices to the consumer- that there will always be a marketplace, a whole bunch of choices of basically equal value. That's what capitalism IS! That's why it's often worked pretty well.
In an age where market winners are increasingly able to seize control of the means of production and close off access for other companies, what we're seeing is not strictly capitalism anymore. Instead, it is a sort of decentralised communism in which the governing authority is not necessarily the military or civil authorities- it's the kingpins of economic sectors, the controllers of technology or commerce. Power used to only come out of the barrel of a gun- now _through_ the use of capitalism, power can also come out of the barrel of a contract. Through this development, capitalism gets to be the host for a sort of cancerous growth- only through capitalism do companies get to build businesses large enough to close down the marketplace of capitalism and replace it with a single-sourced sort of decentralised communism.
Capitalism is all about what's out there being available to consumers! You can't even _define_ capitalism without reference to the consumers, they are the whole point of the exercise. The only distinguishing _feature_ of capitalism is this idea that the consumers get a marketplace of comparable products and get to choose among them. Without that, it doesn't matter whether companies are mean or nice- it's NOT CAPITALISM if the interface to the consumers is choked off. The attitude of the companies is quite irrelevant to this...
DOH! Color me porn!
Funnily enough airwindows.com is not on any list I've ever checked. I say that because in the fiction section is at least one completed novel with adult themes, one short story with adult themes, and an unfinished novel with even more adult themes. All are basically sci-fi or fantasy and none are really gratituous- the closest that I get to gratituous is the last one mentioned, 'Aquarius', which is sci-fi and deals with a society so advanced in genetic engineering that you have 'races' of cat-people, dog-people, wolf and fish and fox ad infinitum people- and the springboard for the adult theme is this: what if humans went into heat? More, what if this was socially unacceptable and got fixed through surgery and medication, but the untreated condition also brought the ability for sharper concentration and fits of intensely hard work? (not to mention the obvious 'private benefits'- and even here, there's a dark side, as in heart attack risks and added stress)
I don't know how many Slashdotters have done serious literary writing, or how many people with 'geek values' are also writers. I _do_ know that I've walked a fine line of MY OWN CHOOSING in writing these things- wanting to deal with the fascinating concepts (it's a very geeky trait of mine that even sex is something to intellectually study in fascination rather than just wallow in), but not wanting to be pigeonholed as a tacky porno writer. As a result, I've had to work quite hard (but am pleased to do so), because if you're writing decently about this subject it _must_ be sensed and felt. Fiction is not a HOWTO, but neither is it a scholarly essay. If I'm setting up tensions they must be felt, they must involve- and interestingly, there seems to _never_ be any reason to use 'dirty keywords' or phrases- it's a lot more effective to take the time and energy to write up such a scene properly. And 'effective' does mean inflaming the imagination- that's what fiction is _for_.
It's ironic- I've never been a particularly prurient writer. I've never written outright porn (this despite the fact that I know where I could sell it for a damned decent price, I might add). My fine line of decency is discreet enough that, even when I write about adult topics, I tend to delicately slip away from the focus of the matter. And yet, every time I read about this damn censorware nonsense, I am more inclined to take my existing approach and really _run_ with it. There's no reason I have to show such decorum. I'm quite capable of taking my SF/fantasy stuff, dealing with the adult topics that do interest me, absolutely going for the throat (or, uh, other areas :) ) and STILL not using any Dirty Keywords.
I consider this the hidden cost of what the censorware people are doing. Eventually they may just have to _read_ my fiction writing and ban me on _content_ alone despite my tendency to not use dirty words. If they are capable of banning 'gay culture', then they are capable of banning the adult situations of entirely fictional characters which aren't even human in the normal everyday sense. But to do so they'll have to actually read it- and they'll also have to really drop the pretense and stand revealed as the bookburners they are.
In conclusion: censorware people? "You are stupid". Pardon my _obscene_ _words_. furrfu.