One thing to keep in mind with Radiohead, Stephen King and many others that experiment with different models is that they are already famous. So if they send out their press release of their "new cool payment model" thing it will hit the headlines. If random Joe artists on the other side does something, it won't hit the headlines that easily.
As great as the Internet is, there is still a ton of dependency on classic media to get a work known to the masses.
The problem isn't getting the hardware, but getting the combination of software and hardware. If you go the TV PC way you will quickly find out that most software doesn't actually work with a gamepad or only works after quite a while of configuration with joy2key and friends. Searching for patches and entering cd-keys is also not fun when you are holding a gamepad. And keyboard/mouse is just unpractical on a couch. To make the PC on your TV work for the masses you would need it to be cheap, silent, standardized and have a large catalog of available TV-PC compatible software. Software that sort of kind of works isn't enough, you want an experience that is as polished as on consoles.
Downloadable patches is the current evil for console games
The problem isn't even the patching itself, but the way patches are implemented. On the PS3 you can't download them in the background, you have to let your console sit there for half an hour while its downloading that 500MB patch, in which you can't do anything else. If I could download the patches in the background while I would make my way through the tutorial they would bother me a lot less. And of course it would be nice if the console would download patches once they get available, not when I insert the disc and want to play the game. PlaystationPlus might fix that, but I am not going to pay money to get basically a non broken patch-system.
It is not really that far fetched of a feature to request. You could simply have different layers at different resolutions and it would already work, you could also go the next step and simply keep all brush strokes vectorized or use some clever in between. I wrote an app that could do that once, not practical as it wasn't optimized at all and thus got slower with increased image complexity, but fun to toy around with.
They always tell me they have to verify my identity first and I simply tell them that they called me. Then I point out that I have no way to verify who...
If even the big companies don't get it, how can we ever expect random Joe how to protect himself from scammers? It reminds me of phishing mails, they are big problem, yet they would be easy to defend against if only the companies would actually sign their mail, but hardly anybody does.
The problem in this case isn't that the criminals get away from the law, it is that there is no law to match the case and thus the scammers aren't even criminals. It is a legal loophole that needs to be plugged. Also the comparison with murderers doesn't fit, murder is for most part not a business model, scamming people on the other side is, often a quite successful one with no punishment even when you get caught. We had brilliant judgments over here in Germany where the scammer had to pay back the money he collected, but only to those that actually sued him, all the rest of the money he could keep and walk away free.
Education about SCAMS is the only way to avoid it.
The only way to avoid it is putting the scammers behind bars. If you try to educate people the scammers will simply come up with a more elaborate scam. And no, putting them behind bars isn't hard, most of the time there is a clear money trail to follow, quite often the scammers identity is even completly known.
How did Microsoft get the phone number?
Your ISP will have your phone number and maybe he will have a DPI running on your internet connection to scan for the latest worms and maybe he has some cooperation deal with Microsoft for the cleanup. Real? No. Completely plausible in theory, absolutely.
Believing that Microsoft knows or cares if your machine has a virus is flat out ignorant.
And what if they claim to be from your ISP? That would still be unlikely, but not that far fetched. Request for ISPs to shut down infected computers come up quite frequently when a worm is running wild, they just never have been put to practice.
Never mind shelling out hundreds to an stranger for doing nothing -- how many people are really so dense?
It don't have to be many to make it a win for the scammer. In Germany similar scams have made hundreds of thousands of euro.
The threat of violence is much closer to "violent" than "non-violent."
There is no violence, the gun isn't loaded, it might even be a toy gun and heck if you would have knowledge of weapons you might even be able to tell that from a distance.
Keep in mind that those scamers generally (not sure about this specific case) don't ask nicely for the money and then disappear. Most of the time they will threaten you with overdue fines and all kinds of legal lingo that bad things will happen if you don't pay quick, they might also call repeatably, sent you letters and whatever. You might still not call it violence, but when you threaten people with expensive lawsuits, thats close enough for me, even if the threat is in reality void. Just as with the fake violence that might simply be hard to tell for somebody not knowledgeable in the field.
This is plain and simply fraud and should be a crime like any other. Its quite sad that people can build business models around such scams and get away with it, your average bank robber makes less money then they do.
In the pre-VGA era sure, every Amiga kicked the PCs butt easily, but that is long long ago. Once there was VGA graphic card and then Soundblaster cards the PC was a perfectly fine gaming machine for quite a few years to come. More importantly the PC market was to a large degree completly separated from the console market. You played your Marios on console and your X-Wings on the PC. That is no longer the case, pretty much everything is multi platform now and even when its not, it is not for technical reasons, but simple politics.
The good thing however is that the whole hardware race seems to have slowed down, even an older PC can give you a decent gaming experince. It is no longer that you need to update your PC every two years, you can go for three or four and still have your fun. This in part is of course the consoles "fault", as they by nature have five year old tech.
The truth is that he is an old man rowing against the tide of history.
That might be true, but its perfectly understandable given that he is making his living that way. Also it is not like that we have come up with a brilliant working way to finance freely distributable stuff. Most people that create freely distributable things make no money at all. So if the choice is between being an old man rowing against the tide of history, but making money, or being a modern hipster who doesn't, its not that hard to pick a side.
And no, a random counter example of a successful person that distributes their content for free doesn't counter this point, as thats just the exception to the rule. Wake me when the Free Software/Open Content world makes money that gets anywhere near what the "old" content industries is making.
The GPL is about sharing, so is copyright infringement. GPL violations on the other side are about the exact opposite, keeping things to yourself. There simply is no contradiction.
He wanted her to understand that if you can't afford something, getting it for free isn't right.
The problem with that is that he is wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with copying stuff when you can't afford it and most children will realize that quickly, as they are the ones who can't afford what they want. Copying only becomes a problem when people who have the money copy the works instead of buying it, since thats the point where money gets lost. Which of course might be the case here as the kid might not only trade with other pure kids, but also with people who could afford to buy it, but arguing that you should buy it even when you don't have money just doesn't make sense.
In many countries, Germany for example, you actually pay for the right to copy your own CDs or copy pages of a book, there is an extra tax on CD-R and photocopy machines to handle that. On the Internet there is so far no extra tax, thus copying is not allowed. This is of course not quite true in reality, as you pay extra for DVD-R for example, yet copying a DVD is still forbidden. And of course there are plenty of questionable things in how the collected money is later distributed back to the artists. But in the end, people have installed laws to handle the normal copying, while the Internet is still a grey area.
It's share. And we have that right, should we decide to enforce it.
No, it is trade. The guy is referring to a specific webpage that uses trade, not just a page where you can download everything. See this FAQ, not sure if that is actually the site he is referring to, but it matches the description.
"Buy more monitors" isn't exactly the best way to fix a broken user interface. Gimp has to work in whatever environment the user has, that can be one monitor or two or three, that can be in Windows, Mac, Gnome, KDE or whatever window manager the user currently uses. If Gimp can't handle that, it is broken and needs fixing, its really as simple as that. Pretending that the problem does not exist just because there are some configuration make Gimp usable doesn't help.
Finding projects that need help is easy, finding projects that have well organized bite-sized tasks that need to be done however is far from easy. And many feature requests might be buried deep down in the bug tracker, making them hard to find for people who might have interest in working on them.
Also the asking part can be troublesome, as it might require extra work on the maintainers side. For Pingus for example I have a very simple task that needs to be done, play through all the currently non-GUI accessible levels, test them, sort them and make them accessible via the GUI. Very basic stuff that doesn't require programming. I explained and walked through at least ten people for that task that offered help, every single one of them just disappeared after a week or two and those that provided contributions where mostly useless (i.e. they just did the grouping, but skipped the far more important testing). All that explaining was just wasted time in which I could have just done it myself. So while a bit communication is of course needed, it is much better for the maintainer when the one offering help already has a really idea of what is going on, instead of having to walked through every tiny step. People that show up "Hey, how can I help" seldom prove useful, people that just come up with "Hey, here is a patch" are much more welcome.
However half the time it would be better to actually fix the broken uncomfortable user interface instead of documenting the brokenness and its workarounds. Documentation is nice to have, but its even better to not need them in the first place.
The Gimp palatte editor could use a lot of improvements, I have written up some possible feature here, that page also contains a few other issues that nag me in other software.
goes for some project management objectives that while probably easier to find within open sourced software packages are in fact independent of the distribution license.
The difference is that in a commercial piece of software it is not the developer making the decisions. If the boss says the users demand X, then the programmers will have to implement it in one form or another. With non-commercial Free Software the developer is making the decisions and requests by users are either ignored or even actively blocked. Of course you can have commercial Free Software, as in the Ubuntu/Canonical case, then you can basically have best of both worlds. The problem however is that Ubuntu just can't fix all of the Free Software out there, they don't even have enough man-power to just pack and support it. So yeah, its not the license, its just a development model that is very common in the Free Software world.
the interface has not been "fixed" because there is nothing wrong with it in the first place, the window behavior is unintuitive and annoying on microsoft windows because despite it's name, windows has really shitty window management.
You contradict yourself. If Gimps interface would be perfectly ok, then there wouldn't be a problem in Windows, yet you admit right there that it doesn't work in Windows, therefore its broken.
And no, blaming it on Windows doesn't make the issue go away, implementing on optional MDI way to handle windows in gimp on the other side would and thats what basically every commercial app does.
It is one thing to say "I have no time to fix that", but once you start to go the "Fuck you, I don't care about your problems" route you just give Free Software a bad reputation for no reason.
the developers would have a potentially very rich mine of information to work from.
The problem is that developers like to work on their problems, not somebody else problems. Other peoples problems just mean extra work on stuff they don't care about. Another big issue is that some problems are simply rooted in layers of APIs that can't be easily fixed, requesting consistent behaviour in any textbox on your desktop is easy, getting every GUI API on accepting and implementing that however isn't.
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One thing to keep in mind with Radiohead, Stephen King and many others that experiment with different models is that they are already famous. So if they send out their press release of their "new cool payment model" thing it will hit the headlines. If random Joe artists on the other side does something, it won't hit the headlines that easily.
As great as the Internet is, there is still a ton of dependency on classic media to get a work known to the masses.
The problem isn't getting the hardware, but getting the combination of software and hardware. If you go the TV PC way you will quickly find out that most software doesn't actually work with a gamepad or only works after quite a while of configuration with joy2key and friends. Searching for patches and entering cd-keys is also not fun when you are holding a gamepad. And keyboard/mouse is just unpractical on a couch. To make the PC on your TV work for the masses you would need it to be cheap, silent, standardized and have a large catalog of available TV-PC compatible software. Software that sort of kind of works isn't enough, you want an experience that is as polished as on consoles.
Downloadable patches is the current evil for console games
The problem isn't even the patching itself, but the way patches are implemented. On the PS3 you can't download them in the background, you have to let your console sit there for half an hour while its downloading that 500MB patch, in which you can't do anything else. If I could download the patches in the background while I would make my way through the tutorial they would bother me a lot less. And of course it would be nice if the console would download patches once they get available, not when I insert the disc and want to play the game. PlaystationPlus might fix that, but I am not going to pay money to get basically a non broken patch-system.
It is not really that far fetched of a feature to request. You could simply have different layers at different resolutions and it would already work, you could also go the next step and simply keep all brush strokes vectorized or use some clever in between. I wrote an app that could do that once, not practical as it wasn't optimized at all and thus got slower with increased image complexity, but fun to toy around with.
They always tell me they have to verify my identity first and I simply tell them that they called me. Then I point out that I have no way to verify who...
If even the big companies don't get it, how can we ever expect random Joe how to protect himself from scammers? It reminds me of phishing mails, they are big problem, yet they would be easy to defend against if only the companies would actually sign their mail, but hardly anybody does.
Yeah, that would work, it is however also completly unrealistic.
The problem in this case isn't that the criminals get away from the law, it is that there is no law to match the case and thus the scammers aren't even criminals. It is a legal loophole that needs to be plugged. Also the comparison with murderers doesn't fit, murder is for most part not a business model, scamming people on the other side is, often a quite successful one with no punishment even when you get caught. We had brilliant judgments over here in Germany where the scammer had to pay back the money he collected, but only to those that actually sued him, all the rest of the money he could keep and walk away free.
Education about SCAMS is the only way to avoid it.
The only way to avoid it is putting the scammers behind bars. If you try to educate people the scammers will simply come up with a more elaborate scam. And no, putting them behind bars isn't hard, most of the time there is a clear money trail to follow, quite often the scammers identity is even completly known.
How did Microsoft get the phone number?
Your ISP will have your phone number and maybe he will have a DPI running on your internet connection to scan for the latest worms and maybe he has some cooperation deal with Microsoft for the cleanup. Real? No. Completely plausible in theory, absolutely.
Believing that Microsoft knows or cares if your machine has a virus is flat out ignorant.
And what if they claim to be from your ISP? That would still be unlikely, but not that far fetched. Request for ISPs to shut down infected computers come up quite frequently when a worm is running wild, they just never have been put to practice.
Never mind shelling out hundreds to an stranger for doing nothing -- how many people are really so dense?
It don't have to be many to make it a win for the scammer. In Germany similar scams have made hundreds of thousands of euro.
The threat of violence is much closer to "violent" than "non-violent."
There is no violence, the gun isn't loaded, it might even be a toy gun and heck if you would have knowledge of weapons you might even be able to tell that from a distance.
Keep in mind that those scamers generally (not sure about this specific case) don't ask nicely for the money and then disappear. Most of the time they will threaten you with overdue fines and all kinds of legal lingo that bad things will happen if you don't pay quick, they might also call repeatably, sent you letters and whatever. You might still not call it violence, but when you threaten people with expensive lawsuits, thats close enough for me, even if the threat is in reality void. Just as with the fake violence that might simply be hard to tell for somebody not knowledgeable in the field.
This is plain and simply fraud and should be a crime like any other. Its quite sad that people can build business models around such scams and get away with it, your average bank robber makes less money then they do.
Yes, but they are non-violent and require the cooperation of their "victims".
So does robbing somebody with an unloaded gun.
PCs used to be CRAP for games.
In the pre-VGA era sure, every Amiga kicked the PCs butt easily, but that is long long ago. Once there was VGA graphic card and then Soundblaster cards the PC was a perfectly fine gaming machine for quite a few years to come. More importantly the PC market was to a large degree completly separated from the console market. You played your Marios on console and your X-Wings on the PC. That is no longer the case, pretty much everything is multi platform now and even when its not, it is not for technical reasons, but simple politics.
The good thing however is that the whole hardware race seems to have slowed down, even an older PC can give you a decent gaming experince. It is no longer that you need to update your PC every two years, you can go for three or four and still have your fun. This in part is of course the consoles "fault", as they by nature have five year old tech.
The truth is that he is an old man rowing against the tide of history.
That might be true, but its perfectly understandable given that he is making his living that way. Also it is not like that we have come up with a brilliant working way to finance freely distributable stuff. Most people that create freely distributable things make no money at all. So if the choice is between being an old man rowing against the tide of history, but making money, or being a modern hipster who doesn't, its not that hard to pick a side.
And no, a random counter example of a successful person that distributes their content for free doesn't counter this point, as thats just the exception to the rule. Wake me when the Free Software/Open Content world makes money that gets anywhere near what the "old" content industries is making.
The GPL is about sharing, so is copyright infringement. GPL violations on the other side are about the exact opposite, keeping things to yourself. There simply is no contradiction.
He wanted her to understand that if you can't afford something, getting it for free isn't right.
The problem with that is that he is wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with copying stuff when you can't afford it and most children will realize that quickly, as they are the ones who can't afford what they want. Copying only becomes a problem when people who have the money copy the works instead of buying it, since thats the point where money gets lost. Which of course might be the case here as the kid might not only trade with other pure kids, but also with people who could afford to buy it, but arguing that you should buy it even when you don't have money just doesn't make sense.
In many countries, Germany for example, you actually pay for the right to copy your own CDs or copy pages of a book, there is an extra tax on CD-R and photocopy machines to handle that. On the Internet there is so far no extra tax, thus copying is not allowed. This is of course not quite true in reality, as you pay extra for DVD-R for example, yet copying a DVD is still forbidden. And of course there are plenty of questionable things in how the collected money is later distributed back to the artists. But in the end, people have installed laws to handle the normal copying, while the Internet is still a grey area.
It's share. And we have that right, should we decide to enforce it.
No, it is trade. The guy is referring to a specific webpage that uses trade, not just a page where you can download everything. See this FAQ, not sure if that is actually the site he is referring to, but it matches the description.
"Buy more monitors" isn't exactly the best way to fix a broken user interface. Gimp has to work in whatever environment the user has, that can be one monitor or two or three, that can be in Windows, Mac, Gnome, KDE or whatever window manager the user currently uses. If Gimp can't handle that, it is broken and needs fixing, its really as simple as that. Pretending that the problem does not exist just because there are some configuration make Gimp usable doesn't help.
then the problem can be effectively communicated to whichever developer wishes to tackle it.
Or your bug will simply get market as "WONT FIX" and disappear into the bug tracker history, which I have seen numerous times, even on rather obvious and simple to fix bugs. Need an example? Firefox: Difficult to find out how to use multiple profiles at the same time.
Why would there be a "job" listing?
Finding projects that need help is easy, finding projects that have well organized bite-sized tasks that need to be done however is far from easy. And many feature requests might be buried deep down in the bug tracker, making them hard to find for people who might have interest in working on them.
Also the asking part can be troublesome, as it might require extra work on the maintainers side. For Pingus for example I have a very simple task that needs to be done, play through all the currently non-GUI accessible levels, test them, sort them and make them accessible via the GUI. Very basic stuff that doesn't require programming. I explained and walked through at least ten people for that task that offered help, every single one of them just disappeared after a week or two and those that provided contributions where mostly useless (i.e. they just did the grouping, but skipped the far more important testing). All that explaining was just wasted time in which I could have just done it myself. So while a bit communication is of course needed, it is much better for the maintainer when the one offering help already has a really idea of what is going on, instead of having to walked through every tiny step. People that show up "Hey, how can I help" seldom prove useful, people that just come up with "Hey, here is a patch" are much more welcome.
However half the time it would be better to actually fix the broken uncomfortable user interface instead of documenting the brokenness and its workarounds. Documentation is nice to have, but its even better to not need them in the first place.
The Gimp palatte editor could use a lot of improvements, I have written up some possible feature here, that page also contains a few other issues that nag me in other software.
goes for some project management objectives that while probably easier to find within open sourced software packages are in fact independent of the distribution license.
The difference is that in a commercial piece of software it is not the developer making the decisions. If the boss says the users demand X, then the programmers will have to implement it in one form or another. With non-commercial Free Software the developer is making the decisions and requests by users are either ignored or even actively blocked. Of course you can have commercial Free Software, as in the Ubuntu/Canonical case, then you can basically have best of both worlds. The problem however is that Ubuntu just can't fix all of the Free Software out there, they don't even have enough man-power to just pack and support it. So yeah, its not the license, its just a development model that is very common in the Free Software world.
the interface has not been "fixed" because there is nothing wrong with it in the first place, the window behavior is unintuitive and annoying on microsoft windows because despite it's name, windows has really shitty window management.
You contradict yourself. If Gimps interface would be perfectly ok, then there wouldn't be a problem in Windows, yet you admit right there that it doesn't work in Windows, therefore its broken.
And no, blaming it on Windows doesn't make the issue go away, implementing on optional MDI way to handle windows in gimp on the other side would and thats what basically every commercial app does.
It is one thing to say "I have no time to fix that", but once you start to go the "Fuck you, I don't care about your problems" route you just give Free Software a bad reputation for no reason.
the developers would have a potentially very rich mine of information to work from.
The problem is that developers like to work on their problems, not somebody else problems. Other peoples problems just mean extra work on stuff they don't care about. Another big issue is that some problems are simply rooted in layers of APIs that can't be easily fixed, requesting consistent behaviour in any textbox on your desktop is easy, getting every GUI API on accepting and implementing that however isn't.