Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs
on
A New Look For Firefox
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· Score: 1
Absolutely. Since some people prefer Qute, thus this was categorically a bad move.
Do people really think that a Slashdot or MozillaZine thread--where the people who are most likely to post are those who disagree with the decision, and where the user base is not even remotely representative, and where most of the posts are snap judgements based on one screenshot--is even remotely valid as an unbiased evaluation of this decision?
Well, if they are in the office at 2:30 AM, then they should have some way of being notified in the office (email, look at a screen, etc.). If they are at home, then the "no cell phones in the office" rule doesn't apply.
Unless of course you count instances of bugs, in which case the multiplication times the number of copies of Windows sold (directly or OEM) would tip the scale rather heavily against them.
The way I see it, this is ultimately a good thing. Right now, most people are totally unaware of how much info is out there about them, because it's not trivial for any random person to get. What they don't realize is that almost anyone could get this type of info if they wanted.
In the long run, this should make people realize what information about someone cannot be trusted as actually identifying that person... then maybe fewer people will think that their mother's maiden name is a good way to restrict access to important things like their utility accounts.
I'm pretty sure you are misunderstanding what he meant by "produce nothing valuable". This is extremely different from "is not valuable to the company"; "produce nothing valuable" means "creates nothing that can be sold to the customer for profit". The point being that an IT department's sole purpose is to make life run more smoothly for everyone else. Having a stable network servers no purpose by itself; no company's buisiness plan is "We'll set up a company that has a really good IT department, and hope that we magically make money" (excluding, of course, IT consulting companies).
So the point is, being a BOFH means you are doing the opposite of your job; making life harder for the revenue-generating people. The BOFH mindset is "I, and my network, are the most important thing". The good IT mindset is "Making sure that I, and the network, make the things that create profit easier is the most important thing". Sometimes it may look like an IT department is being a pain in the ass; if it's for a greater overall good, then great, but if it's only for the IT department's good, then the IT department is failing.
That doesn't mean that the IT guys should be treated like crap, or given no power/respect; as you say, they often serve a vital role in the company. But unless they are fulfilling that role, they are 100% dead weight, or worse.
What do you call someone who reads about an idea an digests it and communicates it better? A teacher. Yes. Since you are just finishing up a Masters, you very likely took courses. In each course, teachers plagiarized....
I don't know where you went to school, but my teachers never pretended that they had created all the ideas that they taught. They routinely gave direct credit to specific people who had first thought of the concepts they taugh, and the rest of the time the information was available right in our textbooks, in the form of very specific previous works. Essentially, the syllabus saying what the textbooks were was a default citation. A textbook that aggregates knowledge is a good textbook. A textbook that aggregates knowledge without any citation is a wholesale work of plagiarism, very very plainly. Similarly, any teacher pretending to have created the idea of, say, evolution or calculus is not likely to last long.
Can you honestly tell me that is using a word intelligently?
I'm not sure what you mean by "that". If you mean, "according to it's definition, rather than according to a massive oversimplification of the definition," then yes, I can honestly say that it is using the word intelligently.
Please take this simple test: To look up a chemical element's mass, I looked up the Periodic table. Is or is that plagiarism? Another student simply computed that based on the proton and electron numbers. Is that plagiarism? Who do you think is more accurate and precise? Do you think it matters?
Looking something up is never plagiarism. There's a "passing off as your own element" that is missing. Besides, it's a stupid example, because you've deliberately chosen something that is common knowledge, which many other posts have discussed.
To win an argument in slashdot, I checked up dictionary.com. Plagiarism. Waitaminute. Isn't the function of a dictionary to settle disputes like that? So it's plagiarism, but is ALLOWED PLAGIARISM. But me, asking people to make take the time to think about such differences, is somehow arguing against you.
What are you smoking? I attributed the source of the definition, I didn't pretend to have written it myself. You think citing your source is plagiarism, and you think I don't understand the word?
The chief effect of your stupid play with words, is to dull yourself into not thinking plagiarism is a crime. NOW THAT, is simply moronic.
Once again, you seem to have left the realm of reality. I'm not playing with words, I'm being more precise. I'm not saying plagiarism is ok, I'm saying that not only is it wrong, but a whole lot of other things are plagiarism, and therefore also wrong, that you simply eliminated from consideration with your vast oversimplification of the word.
But hey, if you want to make things up, pretend I said them, and then attack me for saying them just to feel better about yourself, who am I to stop you. Have fun with that.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Just to clarify my position a little though: it's not that I think that the ideas belong to anyone... it's not about ownership at all for me. It's just about respect. If someone has made an impression, passed on knowledge I might well never have seen otherwise, or given me a whole new way of looking at things, I think they deserve acknowledgement, and I think it's rude not to give it.
If someone gives me, say, a nice piece of art, then when friends compliment me on it I usually say, "I really like it too; It was a gift from so-and-so." It's not about who owns the gift, it's a way of expressing appreciation for it, and for the person who gave it to me. As hokey as it may sound, I view knowledge as a gift too.
Besides, if the line between plagiarism is between words and ideas, then where is the line? How many words, exactly, do I have to rearrange before I no longer need to recognize my source? I prefer to believe that the issue of plagiarism goes deeper, and that it's about respect for people's additions to my store of knowledge and world view instead a matter of what preposition I use and other details of sentence construction.
To each his own, I guess. On the rare occasions I see an OS 9 system, I think "I used to like that interface? It's ugly!" I'm an OS X convert, look and all.
I think this is the difference between casual conversation, and professional dialogue. If I print a paper in an academic journal that goes as far as using someone elses specific examples, that's plagarism. Is this really the same thing as writing on a blog as BillaBong13 about what you read on some other Blog posted by PowerPuffGirl45?
See my earlier post. They are both plagiarism, it's just that people feel like it's ok if there are no consequences (as there are in academics).
The wrong thing about plagarism is that academics live and die by their academic reputation. Me talking to my friends and not quoting sources for ideas is quite a different thing than posting an academic paper.
It's sad that you (and so many others) think that way. I think the wrong thing about plagiarism is that it's dishonest and disrespectful to pass someone else's ideas off as your own. Period.
I don't agree that your rephrasing has the same meaning: you are assuming that my "different degrees" span the entire spectrum of "stolen verbatim" to "completely orginial", which is not the case. My range encompases "stolen verbatim" to "significantly influenced/inspired by".
If your ideas were recently shaped in a significant way by one or more specific sources (i.e., not common knowledge), and you don't acknowledge that, it's plagiarism.
But this whole idea of people owning ideas is ridiculous. [...] How big does an idea have to be to be "copyrightable"
That's a whole separate issue. Citing sources has little to do with ownership of ideas, and a whole lot to do with recognition of people's ideas.
Are you saying every time I reference the idea of freedom I have to reference whoever came up with it first?
Of course not. Many, many ideas are common knowledge. We have spent a long time learning and synthesizing common knowledge as a community. Freedom is a concept we all have an understanding of that (hopefully) goes beyond any one piece of previous work. If I write a weblog entry about the idea of freedom, just because, there's nothing to attribute. On the other hand, if I just read someone else's weblog entry about freedom as it pertains to flying in a post-9/11 US, with specific examples of loss of freedom, then write about that very same topic, and give some of those same examples, but don't say where they come from, that's plagiarism, even if I contribute original thought. That's the kind of stuff that I (and the Wired article--see the example about "furry germs") am talking about.
Now if someone reads about an idea, digests it, and is able to communicate the idea BETTER, is that plagiarism?
Actually, yes. Yes it is.
Plagiarize (from Dictionary.com)
v. tr.
1. To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one's own.
2. To appropriate for use as one's own passages or ideas from (another).
v. intr.
To put forth as original to oneself the ideas or words of another.
I'm sorry, but the idea that plagiarizing refers only to use of copy and paste is actually the understanding that comes from grade school. Believe me, I do understand the situation and have a nuanced opinion (I've been deeply involved with an academic integrity board at a research university for several years). There are different degrees of plagiarism, some blatantly wrong and some blurring the line of acceptibility, but they are all plagiarism.
I've written several conference papers, and am finishing a master's thesis now. In the process of my research, I've read a number of papers, I've digested them, and I'm now expanding on them in new ways. I don't have any direct quotes, but I do have many, many references in my papers. Why? Because many of the ideas are not mine. So what if I digested them; I didn't create them independently. Not referencing the works that gave me my understanding, but instead passing it off as having sprung full-form from my head, would indeed be plagiarism.
Just because an idea has been considered by the person who re-tells it doesn't mean that the place that gave them the idea doesn't deserve credit. Granted, an academic environment is much stricter about these things... but that's a difference in tolerance of plagiarism, not of the definition of what plagiarism fundamentally is.
A better interpretation might be: "[Are the] Microsoft mailworms [part of a] gang war?". At which point the title goes way beyond the shortening that is generally acceptable for titles.
I didn't say that they would only spend the money if it's a valid case. I said the only way it's not a sleazy thing to do is if they believe it's a valid case. There's a big difference.
That's true--but only if Microsoft truly believes that SCO's case is valid. Otherwise, it is, as people are saying here, a case of Microsoft funding what will hopefully be ruled illegal defamation/libel/slander/whatever, which is wrong.
Of course, we'll probably never know which, so we have complete freedom to assume the worst. This is Slashdot after all;)
... as strongly as I feel that rollover highlighting is a flawed UI concept...
Out of curiosity, why is rollover highlighting a flawed concept? I'm very interested in HCI/UI design, and this is a discussion I haven't encountered yet.
what I really think is going way too far is companies deciding who can or cannot be my friend. I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.
That's not insightful, it's just manipulation of words to thinly veil a support of wholesale piracy. In no meaningful way is a person whom you have never met--and with whom your only interaction ever is the trading of a song file--your "friend". Saying "I'm a friend to the world" doesn't change the fact that wholesale piracy is fundamentally different than sharing music with a close circle of actual friends.
It's pathetic when people try to make this defense of massive online filesharing (as opposed to, say, sharing within an actual, meaningful, community of people, be it online or in the real world). If you are for piracy, say so. Don't try to defend your position using meaningless redefinition of terms. There are grey areas in file swapping--calling everyone your friend is not one of them, and weakens much more legitimate arguments (such as calling a smallish online music discussion group a group of friends with whom sharing should be permissible).
Any crime can be "defended" by relabeling:
I didn't steal the car: I was borrowing it from my "friend"
I didn't murder him: I was helping my friend with an assisted suicide
He wasn't bribing me: I was just listening to the wisdom of my "friend", and he happened to be helping me out of a financial tight spot at the same time
I'm not a pimp, I just help my "friends" meet when I think they have interests in common
but the relabeling itself doesn't make the defense valid.
And I have to say, in the usability realm, open source software on any platform often sucks. The gimp is a popular example.
It is a popular example, but I often wonder how good an example it is. How often, when people say "X is much harder in The GIMP than in Photoshop", do they really mean (without realizing it) "I have been doing X in Photoshop for years, so I know how to do it in my sleep in Photoshop, but I'm not used to the differences in The GIMP".
I'm not saying that The GIMP is as good as Photoshop (I'm just a dabbler in both), or that you didn't run into a real usability problem. But I'm sure that that is the case for many people; an unfamiliar UI can feel like a bad UI at first, but being unfamiliar doesn't mean that it's bad. It means migration can be troublesome, sure, but it doesn't mean that the long-term usability is different.
To back up what I'm saying with some antecdotal evidence: I used to use a several-year old version of Photoshop (site license at my University), and I got along fine doing the little things I did. But when I switched to OS X and there was no license for Photoshop for OS X, I thought "Hey, I've heard that The GIMP is cool, I'll try that". So opened it up and started trying to use it (no looking at a guide, just playing--the same way I'd learned my rudimentary Photoshop skills). I hated it immediately and went back to using the old Classic version of Photoshop. About the time I realized that I was never using it because Classic was interacting badly with Photoshop, the school licensed the OS X version, so I grabbed that--and hated it too! They had changed things around enough in the last couple of versions that I felt just as out-of-place as in The GIMP. So I figured, if I have to relearn things anyway, why not stick with the free software. I looked through a short guide to doing basic stuff with it, played around again, and found it quite easy to use once I made the mental transition that this was a different piece of software, not a different-looking layer on top of Photoshop. Why had just messing around with Photoshop worked, but not The GIMP? Because I learned Photoshop with no expectations, but I had some built-in Photoshop responses when I was first trying out The GIMP.
Again, I'm not a power graphics user, so I don't want a lot of replies telling me that X, Y, and Z are impossible in The GIMP. I make no claims about their relative merits for anyone but myself. My point is that I don't agree with this:
I've used computers every day for 17 years and I couldn't figure something out! This is a sign of a chronic usability issue
Photoshop and The GIMP are very complicated pieces of software, with correspondingly complex interfaces. They are not the sort of program where every menu item, button, and control panel can be self explanatory. It is too much to be purely intuitive; it must be learned and memorized to an extent--it just doesn't feel that way once you've used something for a long time. I wonder how much of your frustration (and thus inability to find what you wanted) was due to a nagging feeling that "this is stupid, it should be easy, I know exactly how to do this in Photoshop".
There is certainly open-source software (and commercial software) with real UI problems. But many people attribute problems in using other systems or programs to bad UI when they are caused by simple lack of familiarity.
OTOH, there is this thing called democracy...and if the majority says something should be legal or illegal, then so be it! If the majority wanted Islam outlawed, then let it be outlawed. That's not "tyranny", that's "most people want this, so that's what we get."
He didn't say "tyranny", he say "tyranny of the majority", which is something entirely different. It also goes by "mob rule" (or "majority rule" if you are feeling friendly toward it).
Your comments betray your lack of knowledge about our government and the way it was intended to work; all of the points you are belittling are essential components of how our government was designed. I'd recommend reading Madison's notes from the Constitutional Convention, or at the very least studying some of the problems that cropped up under the Articles of Confederation, which were a whole lot more like mob rule in many places.
The point is that while there is a thing called democracy, there is also a thing called a republic--and that's what we have. The reason we have a republic is precisely because the drafters of the constitution recognized the serious problems with mob rule (not just in an abstract way; again, their recent history had abundant examples).
I don't know where you get off saying the American people want Islam outlawed just because most are Christian. I don't see anything close to a majority here pushing to outlaw Islam.
Clearly, he was exaggerating to make a point about mob rule. Consider the situation this way (call it a thought experiment if you like, but recognize that not that different from how things have worked in many places, throughout history): Another terrorist attack happens, and people get all fired up against Islam. Someone says, "let's kill them all!" People are angry, many of them agree. In fact, enough people are angry and not thinking straight that on the day after the attack 51% of the US is in favor of, say, flattening a few middle-eastern countries. Should we do it? Is it right? Mob rule says yes. A saner form of government recognizes that that's really *not* what people want in that it's not at all in their best interests, and says no.
On one hand, it's still a somewhat exaggerated example; on the other hand it's exaclty how lynchings happen, but on a larger scale. Lynching is mob-rule justice--is that really a form of government you think the US should have?
I didn't think that his accusations were all that "baseless" - granted, he didn't give specifics, but he did point out inconsistencies, eh? If you're not that familiar with the analogies he used, I suggest that you look them up.
I'm not sure what inconsistencies those would be... he asserted that Windows contains stolen code, and that the only way Windows would have been written is by using stolen code (note, he presents this more or less as fact, not as a hypothesis). When it was pointed out that he could not, in fact, know this, and that it was therefore just speculation presented as a certainty, he replied by making some marginally related, slashdot-trendy comparisons as if that settled the matter. Quoting lines from Star Trek (yes, I am familiar with the analogies) doesn't make what he said any more based in fact.
If the inconsintency is "embrace and extend" publicly, so why not privately by stealing code, I hardly consider that insightful (it's just as baseless, in fact). One may as well say, Microsoft likes to make money, so they must rob banks--Sure, they are related concepts, but one is completely and overtly illegal, and the other is not.
If you don't understand that, than you need to broaden your horizons (not a troll, a serious comment). Not everyone looks at things the way you do.
I'm not really sure what that means, but I am aware that not everyone thinks the same way I do; however that doesn't make them right any more than it makes them wrong, and I don't claim my speculation as fact. I have no love for Microsoft; I think they are an abusive monopoly--but I don't think that makes it anything but trolling to say "Microsoft stole code". Is it possible? Sure. But it's trolling to say it's true when everyone knows that he has no clue whether it's true or not.
Ok, nevermind, I see now. It was not my intent to quote out of context; I genuinely believed that to be what he was referring to even after reading the thread several times. Upon rereading, I guess he's probably talking about his government conspiracy.
You can't really blame me for having trouble following his post, since the format of the thread was:
Baseless accusation about Microsoft stealing code
(Random unrelated conspiracy theory)
Reply about stealing code
Rambling about Microsoft
More rambling about Microsoft
Sudden switch to ambiguous ranting about conspiracy theories, which has nothing to do with the reply he's replying to
Sorry to jump the gun in thinking you were clueless; I'll eat my words to you. I still stand by my assertion that being modded down for being a troll doesn't prove any conspiracy theories, especially since he was almost certainly modded down for the actual body of the original post, not the sidenote. But then, perhaps I only think that because I didn't put on my tinfoil hat to protect me from the government mind-control rays.
You quote one sentence out of his post, and flame him for something that he didn't say.
Actually, he did say it--in the post several levels above, which prompted the reply that he was in turn replying to. If you don't believe me, read it yourself. Of course, you'll have to browse at 0 to see it, since it was modded down as the rubbish it was.
Even older trick: fire off a caustic reply without knowing what you are talking about.
As for the idiot who modded me down to "Untouchable," does anyone need any further proof?
Huh? Your baseless accusations get modded down, and that is supposed to prove that Windows contains stolen source code? Even by Slashdot standards that doesn't make sense.
It's like the old saying goes: never attribute to conspiracy what can easily be explained by people being able to tell you don't have a clue what you are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. Since some people prefer Qute, thus this was categorically a bad move.
Do people really think that a Slashdot or MozillaZine thread--where the people who are most likely to post are those who disagree with the decision, and where the user base is not even remotely representative, and where most of the posts are snap judgements based on one screenshot--is even remotely valid as an unbiased evaluation of this decision?
Well, if they are in the office at 2:30 AM, then they should have some way of being notified in the office (email, look at a screen, etc.). If they are at home, then the "no cell phones in the office" rule doesn't apply.
Unless of course you count instances of bugs, in which case the multiplication times the number of copies of Windows sold (directly or OEM) would tip the scale rather heavily against them.
The way I see it, this is ultimately a good thing. Right now, most people are totally unaware of how much info is out there about them, because it's not trivial for any random person to get. What they don't realize is that almost anyone could get this type of info if they wanted.
In the long run, this should make people realize what information about someone cannot be trusted as actually identifying that person... then maybe fewer people will think that their mother's maiden name is a good way to restrict access to important things like their utility accounts.
I'm pretty sure you are misunderstanding what he meant by "produce nothing valuable". This is extremely different from "is not valuable to the company"; "produce nothing valuable" means "creates nothing that can be sold to the customer for profit". The point being that an IT department's sole purpose is to make life run more smoothly for everyone else. Having a stable network servers no purpose by itself; no company's buisiness plan is "We'll set up a company that has a really good IT department, and hope that we magically make money" (excluding, of course, IT consulting companies).
So the point is, being a BOFH means you are doing the opposite of your job; making life harder for the revenue-generating people. The BOFH mindset is "I, and my network, are the most important thing". The good IT mindset is "Making sure that I, and the network, make the things that create profit easier is the most important thing". Sometimes it may look like an IT department is being a pain in the ass; if it's for a greater overall good, then great, but if it's only for the IT department's good, then the IT department is failing.
That doesn't mean that the IT guys should be treated like crap, or given no power/respect; as you say, they often serve a vital role in the company. But unless they are fulfilling that role, they are 100% dead weight, or worse.
What do you call someone who reads about an idea an digests it and communicates it better? A teacher. Yes. Since you are just finishing up a Masters, you very likely took courses. In each course, teachers plagiarized ....
I don't know where you went to school, but my teachers never pretended that they had created all the ideas that they taught. They routinely gave direct credit to specific people who had first thought of the concepts they taugh, and the rest of the time the information was available right in our textbooks, in the form of very specific previous works. Essentially, the syllabus saying what the textbooks were was a default citation. A textbook that aggregates knowledge is a good textbook. A textbook that aggregates knowledge without any citation is a wholesale work of plagiarism, very very plainly. Similarly, any teacher pretending to have created the idea of, say, evolution or calculus is not likely to last long.
Can you honestly tell me that is using a word intelligently?
I'm not sure what you mean by "that". If you mean, "according to it's definition, rather than according to a massive oversimplification of the definition," then yes, I can honestly say that it is using the word intelligently.
Please take this simple test: To look up a chemical element's mass, I looked up the Periodic table. Is or is that plagiarism? Another student simply computed that based on the proton and electron numbers. Is that plagiarism? Who do you think is more accurate and precise? Do you think it matters?
Looking something up is never plagiarism. There's a "passing off as your own element" that is missing. Besides, it's a stupid example, because you've deliberately chosen something that is common knowledge, which many other posts have discussed.
To win an argument in slashdot, I checked up dictionary.com. Plagiarism. Waitaminute. Isn't the function of a dictionary to settle disputes like that? So it's plagiarism, but is ALLOWED PLAGIARISM. But me, asking people to make take the time to think about such differences, is somehow arguing against you.
What are you smoking? I attributed the source of the definition, I didn't pretend to have written it myself. You think citing your source is plagiarism, and you think I don't understand the word?
The chief effect of your stupid play with words, is to dull yourself into not thinking plagiarism is a crime. NOW THAT, is simply moronic.
Once again, you seem to have left the realm of reality. I'm not playing with words, I'm being more precise. I'm not saying plagiarism is ok, I'm saying that not only is it wrong, but a whole lot of other things are plagiarism, and therefore also wrong, that you simply eliminated from consideration with your vast oversimplification of the word.
But hey, if you want to make things up, pretend I said them, and then attack me for saying them just to feel better about yourself, who am I to stop you. Have fun with that.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Just to clarify my position a little though: it's not that I think that the ideas belong to anyone... it's not about ownership at all for me. It's just about respect. If someone has made an impression, passed on knowledge I might well never have seen otherwise, or given me a whole new way of looking at things, I think they deserve acknowledgement, and I think it's rude not to give it.
If someone gives me, say, a nice piece of art, then when friends compliment me on it I usually say, "I really like it too; It was a gift from so-and-so." It's not about who owns the gift, it's a way of expressing appreciation for it, and for the person who gave it to me. As hokey as it may sound, I view knowledge as a gift too.
Besides, if the line between plagiarism is between words and ideas, then where is the line? How many words, exactly, do I have to rearrange before I no longer need to recognize my source? I prefer to believe that the issue of plagiarism goes deeper, and that it's about respect for people's additions to my store of knowledge and world view instead a matter of what preposition I use and other details of sentence construction.
To each his own, I guess. On the rare occasions I see an OS 9 system, I think "I used to like that interface? It's ugly!" I'm an OS X convert, look and all.
I think this is the difference between casual conversation, and professional dialogue. If I print a paper in an academic journal that goes as far as using someone elses specific examples, that's plagarism. Is this really the same thing as writing on a blog as BillaBong13 about what you read on some other Blog posted by PowerPuffGirl45?
See my earlier post. They are both plagiarism, it's just that people feel like it's ok if there are no consequences (as there are in academics).
The wrong thing about plagarism is that academics live and die by their academic reputation. Me talking to my friends and not quoting sources for ideas is quite a different thing than posting an academic paper.
It's sad that you (and so many others) think that way. I think the wrong thing about plagiarism is that it's dishonest and disrespectful to pass someone else's ideas off as your own. Period.
I don't agree that your rephrasing has the same meaning: you are assuming that my "different degrees" span the entire spectrum of "stolen verbatim" to "completely orginial", which is not the case. My range encompases "stolen verbatim" to "significantly influenced/inspired by".
If your ideas were recently shaped in a significant way by one or more specific sources (i.e., not common knowledge), and you don't acknowledge that, it's plagiarism.
But this whole idea of people owning ideas is ridiculous. [...] How big does an idea have to be to be "copyrightable"
That's a whole separate issue. Citing sources has little to do with ownership of ideas, and a whole lot to do with recognition of people's ideas.
Are you saying every time I reference the idea of freedom I have to reference whoever came up with it first?
Of course not. Many, many ideas are common knowledge. We have spent a long time learning and synthesizing common knowledge as a community. Freedom is a concept we all have an understanding of that (hopefully) goes beyond any one piece of previous work. If I write a weblog entry about the idea of freedom, just because, there's nothing to attribute. On the other hand, if I just read someone else's weblog entry about freedom as it pertains to flying in a post-9/11 US, with specific examples of loss of freedom, then write about that very same topic, and give some of those same examples, but don't say where they come from, that's plagiarism, even if I contribute original thought. That's the kind of stuff that I (and the Wired article--see the example about "furry germs") am talking about.
Now if someone reads about an idea, digests it, and is able to communicate the idea BETTER, is that plagiarism?
Actually, yes. Yes it is.
Plagiarize (from Dictionary.com) v. tr.1. To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one's own.
2. To appropriate for use as one's own passages or ideas from (another).
v. intr.
To put forth as original to oneself the ideas or words of another.
I'm sorry, but the idea that plagiarizing refers only to use of copy and paste is actually the understanding that comes from grade school. Believe me, I do understand the situation and have a nuanced opinion (I've been deeply involved with an academic integrity board at a research university for several years). There are different degrees of plagiarism, some blatantly wrong and some blurring the line of acceptibility, but they are all plagiarism.
I've written several conference papers, and am finishing a master's thesis now. In the process of my research, I've read a number of papers, I've digested them, and I'm now expanding on them in new ways. I don't have any direct quotes, but I do have many, many references in my papers. Why? Because many of the ideas are not mine. So what if I digested them; I didn't create them independently. Not referencing the works that gave me my understanding, but instead passing it off as having sprung full-form from my head, would indeed be plagiarism.
Just because an idea has been considered by the person who re-tells it doesn't mean that the place that gave them the idea doesn't deserve credit. Granted, an academic environment is much stricter about these things... but that's a difference in tolerance of plagiarism, not of the definition of what plagiarism fundamentally is.
A better interpretation might be: "[Are the] Microsoft mailworms [part of a] gang war?". At which point the title goes way beyond the shortening that is generally acceptable for titles.
I didn't say that they would only spend the money if it's a valid case. I said the only way it's not a sleazy thing to do is if they believe it's a valid case. There's a big difference.
That's true--but only if Microsoft truly believes that SCO's case is valid. Otherwise, it is, as people are saying here, a case of Microsoft funding what will hopefully be ruled illegal defamation/libel/slander/whatever, which is wrong.
Of course, we'll probably never know which, so we have complete freedom to assume the worst. This is Slashdot after all ;)
Out of curiosity, why is rollover highlighting a flawed concept? I'm very interested in HCI/UI design, and this is a discussion I haven't encountered yet.
what I really think is going way too far is companies deciding who can or cannot be my friend. I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.
That's not insightful, it's just manipulation of words to thinly veil a support of wholesale piracy. In no meaningful way is a person whom you have never met--and with whom your only interaction ever is the trading of a song file--your "friend". Saying "I'm a friend to the world" doesn't change the fact that wholesale piracy is fundamentally different than sharing music with a close circle of actual friends.
It's pathetic when people try to make this defense of massive online filesharing (as opposed to, say, sharing within an actual, meaningful, community of people, be it online or in the real world). If you are for piracy, say so. Don't try to defend your position using meaningless redefinition of terms. There are grey areas in file swapping--calling everyone your friend is not one of them, and weakens much more legitimate arguments (such as calling a smallish online music discussion group a group of friends with whom sharing should be permissible).
Any crime can be "defended" by relabeling:
but the relabeling itself doesn't make the defense valid.
It's clearly unrelated to this topic. 2 seconds with Google gives us:
8 6& cid=7019194
.sig modded up.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=793
It's a troll because it's a stolen post used for the purpose of getting a
This is an offtopic comment: offtopic because it was stolen verbatim from a totally unrelated story:
8 6& cid=7019194
.sig modded up
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=793
It's just an excuse to get the
And I have to say, in the usability realm, open source software on any platform often sucks. The gimp is a popular example.
It is a popular example, but I often wonder how good an example it is. How often, when people say "X is much harder in The GIMP than in Photoshop", do they really mean (without realizing it) "I have been doing X in Photoshop for years, so I know how to do it in my sleep in Photoshop, but I'm not used to the differences in The GIMP".
I'm not saying that The GIMP is as good as Photoshop (I'm just a dabbler in both), or that you didn't run into a real usability problem. But I'm sure that that is the case for many people; an unfamiliar UI can feel like a bad UI at first, but being unfamiliar doesn't mean that it's bad. It means migration can be troublesome, sure, but it doesn't mean that the long-term usability is different.
To back up what I'm saying with some antecdotal evidence: I used to use a several-year old version of Photoshop (site license at my University), and I got along fine doing the little things I did. But when I switched to OS X and there was no license for Photoshop for OS X, I thought "Hey, I've heard that The GIMP is cool, I'll try that". So opened it up and started trying to use it (no looking at a guide, just playing--the same way I'd learned my rudimentary Photoshop skills). I hated it immediately and went back to using the old Classic version of Photoshop. About the time I realized that I was never using it because Classic was interacting badly with Photoshop, the school licensed the OS X version, so I grabbed that--and hated it too! They had changed things around enough in the last couple of versions that I felt just as out-of-place as in The GIMP. So I figured, if I have to relearn things anyway, why not stick with the free software. I looked through a short guide to doing basic stuff with it, played around again, and found it quite easy to use once I made the mental transition that this was a different piece of software, not a different-looking layer on top of Photoshop. Why had just messing around with Photoshop worked, but not The GIMP? Because I learned Photoshop with no expectations, but I had some built-in Photoshop responses when I was first trying out The GIMP.
Again, I'm not a power graphics user, so I don't want a lot of replies telling me that X, Y, and Z are impossible in The GIMP. I make no claims about their relative merits for anyone but myself. My point is that I don't agree with this:
I've used computers every day for 17 years and I couldn't figure something out! This is a sign of a chronic usability issue
Photoshop and The GIMP are very complicated pieces of software, with correspondingly complex interfaces. They are not the sort of program where every menu item, button, and control panel can be self explanatory. It is too much to be purely intuitive; it must be learned and memorized to an extent--it just doesn't feel that way once you've used something for a long time. I wonder how much of your frustration (and thus inability to find what you wanted) was due to a nagging feeling that "this is stupid, it should be easy, I know exactly how to do this in Photoshop".
There is certainly open-source software (and commercial software) with real UI problems. But many people attribute problems in using other systems or programs to bad UI when they are caused by simple lack of familiarity.
OTOH, there is this thing called democracy...and if the majority says something should be legal or illegal, then so be it! If the majority wanted Islam outlawed, then let it be outlawed. That's not "tyranny", that's "most people want this, so that's what we get."
He didn't say "tyranny", he say "tyranny of the majority", which is something entirely different. It also goes by "mob rule" (or "majority rule" if you are feeling friendly toward it).
Your comments betray your lack of knowledge about our government and the way it was intended to work; all of the points you are belittling are essential components of how our government was designed. I'd recommend reading Madison's notes from the Constitutional Convention, or at the very least studying some of the problems that cropped up under the Articles of Confederation, which were a whole lot more like mob rule in many places.
The point is that while there is a thing called democracy, there is also a thing called a republic--and that's what we have. The reason we have a republic is precisely because the drafters of the constitution recognized the serious problems with mob rule (not just in an abstract way; again, their recent history had abundant examples).
I don't know where you get off saying the American people want Islam outlawed just because most are Christian. I don't see anything close to a majority here pushing to outlaw Islam.
Clearly, he was exaggerating to make a point about mob rule. Consider the situation this way (call it a thought experiment if you like, but recognize that not that different from how things have worked in many places, throughout history): Another terrorist attack happens, and people get all fired up against Islam. Someone says, "let's kill them all!" People are angry, many of them agree. In fact, enough people are angry and not thinking straight that on the day after the attack 51% of the US is in favor of, say, flattening a few middle-eastern countries. Should we do it? Is it right? Mob rule says yes. A saner form of government recognizes that that's really *not* what people want in that it's not at all in their best interests, and says no.
On one hand, it's still a somewhat exaggerated example; on the other hand it's exaclty how lynchings happen, but on a larger scale. Lynching is mob-rule justice--is that really a form of government you think the US should have?
I didn't think that his accusations were all that "baseless" - granted, he didn't give specifics, but he did point out inconsistencies, eh? If you're not that familiar with the analogies he used, I suggest that you look them up.
I'm not sure what inconsistencies those would be... he asserted that Windows contains stolen code, and that the only way Windows would have been written is by using stolen code (note, he presents this more or less as fact, not as a hypothesis). When it was pointed out that he could not, in fact, know this, and that it was therefore just speculation presented as a certainty, he replied by making some marginally related, slashdot-trendy comparisons as if that settled the matter. Quoting lines from Star Trek (yes, I am familiar with the analogies) doesn't make what he said any more based in fact.
If the inconsintency is "embrace and extend" publicly, so why not privately by stealing code, I hardly consider that insightful (it's just as baseless, in fact). One may as well say, Microsoft likes to make money, so they must rob banks--Sure, they are related concepts, but one is completely and overtly illegal, and the other is not.
If you don't understand that, than you need to broaden your horizons (not a troll, a serious comment). Not everyone looks at things the way you do.
I'm not really sure what that means, but I am aware that not everyone thinks the same way I do; however that doesn't make them right any more than it makes them wrong, and I don't claim my speculation as fact. I have no love for Microsoft; I think they are an abusive monopoly--but I don't think that makes it anything but trolling to say "Microsoft stole code". Is it possible? Sure. But it's trolling to say it's true when everyone knows that he has no clue whether it's true or not.
Ok, nevermind, I see now. It was not my intent to quote out of context; I genuinely believed that to be what he was referring to even after reading the thread several times. Upon rereading, I guess he's probably talking about his government conspiracy.
You can't really blame me for having trouble following his post, since the format of the thread was:
Sorry to jump the gun in thinking you were clueless; I'll eat my words to you. I still stand by my assertion that being modded down for being a troll doesn't prove any conspiracy theories, especially since he was almost certainly modded down for the actual body of the original post, not the sidenote. But then, perhaps I only think that because I didn't put on my tinfoil hat to protect me from the government mind-control rays.
You quote one sentence out of his post, and flame him for something that he didn't say.
Actually, he did say it--in the post several levels above, which prompted the reply that he was in turn replying to. If you don't believe me, read it yourself. Of course, you'll have to browse at 0 to see it, since it was modded down as the rubbish it was.
Even older trick: fire off a caustic reply without knowing what you are talking about.
As for the idiot who modded me down to "Untouchable," does anyone need any further proof?
Huh? Your baseless accusations get modded down, and that is supposed to prove that Windows contains stolen source code? Even by Slashdot standards that doesn't make sense.
It's like the old saying goes: never attribute to conspiracy what can easily be explained by people being able to tell you don't have a clue what you are talking about.