Those two clash. Hard. Today. Which IMO isn't necessarily a bad thing. But linux may be user friendly, it's not average-user friendly. Does it have to be? Depends.
Where should FOSS be user friendly in the broad sense - and playing to the common denominator instead of the programmer's whim?
That's simple, no? There where the aim is market share. If you want linux desktops to succeed beyond the geek, you have to make it friendly and fool proof.
The good news is that with recent gains in both users and perception, more people will want to do things just like this project.
The bad news is... there isn't any bad news. For all people who think linux is fine just as it is, you will carry on just like before, building your stuff the way you like it, no?
The boring news is that usability is something that comes from the top, permeates the whole project and dictates - yes, dictates - to all who work with it.
So everybody working in a project that aims to please to the mythical joe sixpack will have to defer to the usability overlords.
Will that ever happen? Hopefully yes and no. A lot of linux developers tend to look for something that will plug in usability as an afterthought. It don't work that way. What I hope is that some projects will take linux usability to the next level and that some projects will not care one bit either way. So that in the end everybody is happy. And so that even those who don't give a rat's ass will still have an example that is NOT MS or Apple to look at when contemplating the user.
I've been impressed lately by some FOSS Internet server products, like Simple Machines BBS. It seems to be a perfect mix of user friendliness and geek heaven. It sacrifices some to both sides, but also pleases both camps. That's something OS X does very well, catering for the clueless and the übergeek alike. Something like that could happen with a more unified linux desktop, without threatening either side, since options and choice are what seems to be Linux's biggest appeal next to price and principles.
So there, that's my take on it. Good overall, as long as it doesn't want to change the whole linux thing. Because that would be impossible and insulting to those who develop in their free time.
That's a bit thin. They can want him to not say copying is not stealing, but I doubt he'd actively say that basically it's stealing just to appease them.
What I think is that he said it to cut through the crap and go on with the interview. Basically it is stealing can mean "I got punished for stealing", "whatever the technical crime, just so you get the picture, imagine I stole something" or it can mean he now views breaking and entering for the purpose of copying stealing.
TV is a push medium. You sit down, grab your beer and start to drool. Ads in this context are something I can live with. For me the fun ends with American style ads, where you get shouted at halfway through a 40 minute soap. But it is my understanding that lots of people can bear 3 to 4 interruptions. Whatever, it's still only an interruption when my brain is already half asleep. The Internet is largely a pull medium. You sit down, grab a coke and start to actively look for things. Most people won't be looking for ads. So if they are too "in your face" they distract from your main task. That's why obtrusive ads are such a pain.
For me it's not a matter of principle. I have faith in my innate avoidance strategies. But there are types of advertising that give me such NEGATIVE feelings about the products/brands advertised that I'm astonished that marketeers dare to do this. I know, bad publicity is still publicity, but less sales is less income.
That's just about the most idiotic generalization I've ever read, bar SCO propaganda. I'm quite confident to hand you this compliment even if I don't really know who this Kevin guy is. Have you any idea how many reasons one can have to admire someone? Being spineless seems like a very very distant reason to me. I don't know what it is that bugs you about this Kevin or his fan club, but just reading the article tells me there could be quite a lot to admire regardless of what people think he stands for. Admiration does not have to be coupled to the whole spectrum of human foibles and weaknesses. You can admire someone's guts even without having actually looked at his innards. You can hate someone's guts and equally admire him for it, etc etc etc... I think there's even cause to admire this guy just by the emotions he seems to evoke in total - (barely saved my karma there)...
What the guy says is "which is ESSENTIALLY stealing". What you say is that you don't respect him because it's not TECHNICALLY stealing at all.
Essentially, that doesn't make too much sense. Copyright infringement doesn't really come into this, or if it does, what he did goes a bit beyond your average copy protection circumvention (which I'm all for, btw). But when people come breaking into your computer and copying all you have, you can call it whatever you like;-)
There are several ways of bypassing the label thing, but not all of them are successful. Labels do know how to get you good distribution... so starting your own label and getting your songs in iTunes is very hard if you aren't someone "formerly known as". But I've heard very good things about CDBABY. They are distributors and store keepers. You, the independent artist can sell in their store (cdbaby.com). If you do, you can also opt for their digital distribution deal, which almost guarantees placement with iTunes, Napster and a whole bunch of other shops. Their cut is 9% of what you get per sale, and since you don't have a label, that means 91% of 65 cents.
So instead of only getting about 5 cents you get about 59 cents. Which is nice.
I propose we all donate so that Slashdot story submitters don't have to live under a bridge and can get back on top of tech news (instead of two weeks behind)...
Not that I'm sympathetic to banks (that would be like admiring roadkill or outlawing suicide: weird and pointless), but isn't this rather like making programmers solely responsible for IP infringement? Why would phishing then go away and what if it didn't, would banking become too expensive, would service become cumbersome and wouldn't we still get dressed down like the stupid schmucks we are? ATM has always been very popular in Belgium. As a matter of fact, we've been the world's testbed for this kind of thing. Used to be an almost 10 year gap between Belgium and Holland where normally we're behind on things. In Holland they had had a pretty big scandal, a bad experience. So for a long time you were extremely limited, while in Belgium we got used to the idea of being able to plunder our own account night and day. And in the end, everybody adopted our method of ATM and you can use most any kind of card to do a whole bunch of transactions. I'm not sure who's "responsible" if something goes wrong, but I am sure that today it is no safer to do all that than yesterday. And somehow, we take the bad, the chances, in the name of convenience. So while I don't think phishing is going away no matter who is responsible, I don't think it's a very big problem either in the long run. I do like my conveniences though. Human nature != intelligent behaviour...
Considering the logistics involved I'm not so optimistic. Today.
And I'm wary of revolutions. Mostly they are "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" affairs (quote "the Who"). Those with power and money will not be convinced by anything that takes theirs away.
So forget about taking away from them, that's messy. It'd rather have to be a matter of filling up the bottom instead of letting it leak from above. And that'll take a lot of cheap, even essentially free technology.
Some things don't have to be too difficult or expensive. You can buy a one dollar water purifier that'll clean your water for years and years. This developed by a Belgian scientist who'd given himself that mission after watching the usual Biafra horror on TV. Don't have a link, but Google always works.
"The entire system of capitalism and all the institutions connected with it (like money) require scarcity in order to operate. But the world won't long put up with artificially-induced scarcity. For one thing, it's clearly immoral."
Ahem, we put up with artificially-induced scarcity today. And even for very good reasons. Well, clearly not moral reasons, because who can defend the idea of burning produce in order to keep prices up while more than half the world population lives in poverty and hunger?
Nevertheless, we put up with it. TODAY, not somewhere in the future, but today, there is enough food to feed everybody, and enough produce to satisfy a lot of other needs as well.
But the poorest nations provide the richest nations with over 70% of their needs and manage to get poorer still in the process. And if the richest nations have too much produce, they rather burn it than distribute it. If not, all sorts of horrible things with interesting sounding names will happen and will seriously hurt our comfort level.
I'm a dad, so I'm more or less sensitive to that type of argument, but the irony of it all doesn't escape me. And I do know that blindly dumping surplus on already fragile markets sometimes creates more problems than it solves, like decimating local production capacity altogether.
I'm not offering solutions, I don't know any. Just the depressing news that moral grounds are worse than useless in geopolitics. Worse because they only depress people who still manage to look further than their own needs and thus wash out the very people needed to make sensible changes. And the way the world "moral" has been used the last five years doesn't give me confidence in our current crop of world leaders, especially those leading the free world...
"I dunno. The gap between "no smarter than people" and "smart enough to live on a planet" seems rather large from this side."
Well, not to undo your argument, rather to add to it, even people haven't managed the "smart enough to live on a planet" phase. We're not too hot on protecting our habitat. Even without tinfoil hat on, it's easy to see we're pretty sloppy, and given our ever increasing numbers we could get into real trouble on a number of issues.
One very optimistic view would be that maybe computers would have the smarts not to saw off the branch they're sitting on, in other words, help us steer clear of our more obvious flaws when doing all those wonderful things with nano whatnots.
Since everything we make gets used more or less evenly for good and for bad (not to put too fine a point to it, and feel free to make your own balance), the potential to screw up at very fundamental levels will grow exponentially as well. Any help with that, even from pinhead-sized computers, is welcome indeed...
I expected them to be somewhere in the list, it is a popularity contest after all. I personally would have put Skype on top of it, who cares if it's a service. Saved me tons and tons of money.
Vendor lock-in is a bad thing, in general. This in general doesn't mean "but if Apple does it it's OK". But what we have right now is a plethora of music players, some good, some bad. iPod is no worse than the others. It lets you play a few open formats and a few Apple formats. The only lock-in happens if you buy music at the iTMS. Why should you? Now look at the other music stores: they don't sell to mac users. Period. Noooo, they choose WMA, because it's an "open" format. As far as this discussion goes, disliking iPod for vendor lock-in reeks of I don't know, ignorance or fanboyism.
First off, I don't see that hypothetical Googlix as a service, but as an OS that can offer integrated services. Those services could very well have advertising, or maybe Google would find another way to stay in business, who knows?
But why should YOUR OS have advertising? You use what you like, with or without the services. You can run OS X and not buy into the digital thing, and you can even use MS Windows without using IE, so I imagine that if you'd choose Google's Linux, you could use it without using the services (or use some clever scripting to avoid the ads). If however you choose to use the google thing, don't begrudge them their source of income.
Regardless, I've seen eye-tracking tests on online advertising, and it's almost scary how people can avoid looking at ads. The eyes literally just bounce off the edges of banners without even glancing at the banners themselves. So imo a lot of advertising angst is totally unfounded - and believe me, I myself have a very low advertising tolerance. And even without trusting my unconscious avoidance strategies, the only online advertising that's less obtrusive than Google ads is no advertising at all.
If there is one company I see succeeding in bringing linux to the masses it is Google. Too bad they aren't into the game (yet). They seem to have an understanding of the less is more attitude that makes average users happy (even those who swear they need more features instead of less). And they have that intangible extra quality to bring services to the desktop that others can't do as easily as them, much the same way as Apple incorporated "digital lifestyle" doodahs in their OS (iLife), to which MS still is clueless, even with their Home Theatre ventures (which I personally think is a good idea desperately in need of sensible execution).
I hope it's by now proven that it's not by mimicking king MS that you'll beat them, it's by going one further while at the same time covering the bases.
Apple does it pretty well for a rather small but vocal audience, linux makes assorted computer wizards happy, who however are totally clueless to what an average user is (the mithical Joe Sixpack) and will keep proclaiming next year to be the year of Linux desktop, somehow believing that at that year everybody will change into them (commandline wizards). And meanwhile MS sees everything is well.
Google could do some real damage to the crowd that doesn't really care but is fed up nevertheless without a clue as to what to do about it.
I do hope they won't try any clever name (like googlix) and go for something like Google Desktop or the like.
Slashdot Mirror
Those two clash. Hard. Today.
Which IMO isn't necessarily a bad thing. But linux may be user friendly, it's not average-user friendly. Does it have to be? Depends.
Where should FOSS be user friendly in the broad sense - and playing to the common denominator instead of the programmer's whim?
That's simple, no? There where the aim is market share. If you want linux desktops to succeed beyond the geek, you have to make it friendly and fool proof.
The good news is that with recent gains in both users and perception, more people will want to do things just like this project.
The bad news is... there isn't any bad news. For all people who think linux is fine just as it is, you will carry on just like before, building your stuff the way you like it, no?
The boring news is that usability is something that comes from the top, permeates the whole project and dictates - yes, dictates - to all who work with it.
So everybody working in a project that aims to please to the mythical joe sixpack will have to defer to the usability overlords.
Will that ever happen? Hopefully yes and no. A lot of linux developers tend to look for something that will plug in usability as an afterthought. It don't work that way. What I hope is that some projects will take linux usability to the next level and that some projects will not care one bit either way. So that in the end everybody is happy. And so that even those who don't give a rat's ass will still have an example that is NOT MS or Apple to look at when contemplating the user.
I've been impressed lately by some FOSS Internet server products, like Simple Machines BBS. It seems to be a perfect mix of user friendliness and geek heaven. It sacrifices some to both sides, but also pleases both camps. That's something OS X does very well, catering for the clueless and the übergeek alike. Something like that could happen with a more unified linux desktop, without threatening either side, since options and choice are what seems to be Linux's biggest appeal next to price and principles.
So there, that's my take on it. Good overall, as long as it doesn't want to change the whole linux thing. Because that would be impossible and insulting to those who develop in their free time.
That's a bit thin. They can want him to not say copying is not stealing, but I doubt he'd actively say that basically it's stealing just to appease them.
What I think is that he said it to cut through the crap and go on with the interview. Basically it is stealing can mean "I got punished for stealing", "whatever the technical crime, just so you get the picture, imagine I stole something" or it can mean he now views breaking and entering for the purpose of copying stealing.
Why not ask him?
TV is a push medium. You sit down, grab your beer and start to drool. Ads in this context are something I can live with. For me the fun ends with American style ads, where you get shouted at halfway through a 40 minute soap. But it is my understanding that lots of people can bear 3 to 4 interruptions. Whatever, it's still only an interruption when my brain is already half asleep.
The Internet is largely a pull medium. You sit down, grab a coke and start to actively look for things. Most people won't be looking for ads. So if they are too "in your face" they distract from your main task. That's why obtrusive ads are such a pain.
For me it's not a matter of principle. I have faith in my innate avoidance strategies. But there are types of advertising that give me such NEGATIVE feelings about the products/brands advertised that I'm astonished that marketeers dare to do this. I know, bad publicity is still publicity, but less sales is less income.
That's just about the most idiotic generalization I've ever read, bar SCO propaganda. I'm quite confident to hand you this compliment even if I don't really know who this Kevin guy is. Have you any idea how many reasons one can have to admire someone? Being spineless seems like a very very distant reason to me. I don't know what it is that bugs you about this Kevin or his fan club, but just reading the article tells me there could be quite a lot to admire regardless of what people think he stands for.
Admiration does not have to be coupled to the whole spectrum of human foibles and weaknesses. You can admire someone's guts even without having actually looked at his innards. You can hate someone's guts and equally admire him for it, etc etc etc...
I think there's even cause to admire this guy just by the emotions he seems to evoke in total - (barely saved my karma there)...
What the guy says is "which is ESSENTIALLY stealing".
;-)
What you say is that you don't respect him because it's not TECHNICALLY stealing at all.
Essentially, that doesn't make too much sense. Copyright infringement doesn't really come into this, or if it does, what he did goes a bit beyond your average copy protection circumvention (which I'm all for, btw).
But when people come breaking into your computer and copying all you have, you can call it whatever you like
There are several ways of bypassing the label thing, but not all of them are successful. Labels do know how to get you good distribution... so starting your own label and getting your songs in iTunes is very hard if you aren't someone "formerly known as".
But I've heard very good things about CDBABY. They are distributors and store keepers. You, the independent artist can sell in their store (cdbaby.com). If you do, you can also opt for their digital distribution deal, which almost guarantees placement with iTunes, Napster and a whole bunch of other shops. Their cut is 9% of what you get per sale, and since you don't have a label, that means 91% of 65 cents.
So instead of only getting about 5 cents you get about 59 cents. Which is nice.
I want the music industry to pay me for playing Madonna. Only right, since they're making a profit from my music buying, right?
"If you don't like the timelyness of the stories, submit more timely stories. "
I get it! You're trying to taunt me into joking about spelling mistakes, aren't you? Tough luck. I happen to find spelling mistakes very endeering.
BTW I don't care about the timing, when someone throws a ball, kick it, is my motto for today!
Cheers!
I propose we all donate so that Slashdot story submitters don't have to live under a bridge and can get back on top of tech news (instead of two weeks behind)...
Not that I'm sympathetic to banks (that would be like admiring roadkill or outlawing suicide: weird and pointless), but isn't this rather like making programmers solely responsible for IP infringement?
Why would phishing then go away and what if it didn't, would banking become too expensive, would service become cumbersome and wouldn't we still get dressed down like the stupid schmucks we are?
ATM has always been very popular in Belgium. As a matter of fact, we've been the world's testbed for this kind of thing. Used to be an almost 10 year gap between Belgium and Holland where normally we're behind on things. In Holland they had had a pretty big scandal, a bad experience. So for a long time you were extremely limited, while in Belgium we got used to the idea of being able to plunder our own account night and day.
And in the end, everybody adopted our method of ATM and you can use most any kind of card to do a whole bunch of transactions. I'm not sure who's "responsible" if something goes wrong, but I am sure that today it is no safer to do all that than yesterday. And somehow, we take the bad, the chances, in the name of convenience. So while I don't think phishing is going away no matter who is responsible, I don't think it's a very big problem either in the long run. I do like my conveniences though. Human nature != intelligent behaviour...
I have a microsoft mouse.
It is bud-ugly though...
Considering the logistics involved I'm not so optimistic. Today.
And I'm wary of revolutions. Mostly they are "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" affairs (quote "the Who"). Those with power and money will not be convinced by anything that takes theirs away.
So forget about taking away from them, that's messy. It'd rather have to be a matter of filling up the bottom instead of letting it leak from above. And that'll take a lot of cheap, even essentially free technology.
Some things don't have to be too difficult or expensive. You can buy a one dollar water purifier that'll clean your water for years and years. This developed by a Belgian scientist who'd given himself that mission after watching the usual Biafra horror on TV. Don't have a link, but Google always works.
"The entire system of capitalism and all the institutions connected with it (like money) require scarcity in order to operate. But the world won't long put up with artificially-induced scarcity. For one thing, it's clearly immoral."
:-)
Ahem, we put up with artificially-induced scarcity today. And even for very good reasons. Well, clearly not moral reasons, because who can defend the idea of burning produce in order to keep prices up while more than half the world population lives in poverty and hunger?
Nevertheless, we put up with it. TODAY, not somewhere in the future, but today, there is enough food to feed everybody, and enough produce to satisfy a lot of other needs as well.
But the poorest nations provide the richest nations with over 70% of their needs and manage to get poorer still in the process. And if the richest nations have too much produce, they rather burn it than distribute it. If not, all sorts of horrible things with interesting sounding names will happen and will seriously hurt our comfort level.
I'm a dad, so I'm more or less sensitive to that type of argument, but the irony of it all doesn't escape me. And I do know that blindly dumping surplus on already fragile markets sometimes creates more problems than it solves, like decimating local production capacity altogether.
I'm not offering solutions, I don't know any. Just the depressing news that moral grounds are worse than useless in geopolitics. Worse because they only depress people who still manage to look further than their own needs and thus wash out the very people needed to make sensible changes. And the way the world "moral" has been used the last five years doesn't give me confidence in our current crop of world leaders, especially those leading the free world...
Oh well, have a nice day anyway
Things are a lot better. What, you want me to stop complaining? Never!!!!!!
"I dunno. The gap between "no smarter than people" and "smart enough to live on a planet" seems rather large from this side."
Well, not to undo your argument, rather to add to it, even people haven't managed the "smart enough to live on a planet" phase. We're not too hot on protecting our habitat. Even without tinfoil hat on, it's easy to see we're pretty sloppy, and given our ever increasing numbers we could get into real trouble on a number of issues.
One very optimistic view would be that maybe computers would have the smarts not to saw off the branch they're sitting on, in other words, help us steer clear of our more obvious flaws when doing all those wonderful things with nano whatnots.
Since everything we make gets used more or less evenly for good and for bad (not to put too fine a point to it, and feel free to make your own balance), the potential to screw up at very fundamental levels will grow exponentially as well. Any help with that, even from pinhead-sized computers, is welcome indeed...
Cheers
"I want a Marvin.
Marvin doesn't want you. "
Well of course not! That's the whole point, innit?
I want a Marvin.
I expected them to be somewhere in the list, it is a popularity contest after all. I personally would have put Skype on top of it, who cares if it's a service. Saved me tons and tons of money.
Cheers
Vendor lock-in is a bad thing, in general. This in general doesn't mean "but if Apple does it it's OK". But what we have right now is a plethora of music players, some good, some bad. iPod is no worse than the others. It lets you play a few open formats and a few Apple formats. The only lock-in happens if you buy music at the iTMS. Why should you?
Now look at the other music stores: they don't sell to mac users. Period. Noooo, they choose WMA, because it's an "open" format.
As far as this discussion goes, disliking iPod for vendor lock-in reeks of I don't know, ignorance or fanboyism.
Ahem, got it.
Was thinking along the lines of "who in earth would be interested in MY pictures?"
"Why would you think Apple would restrict it to just cameras, hmm?"
I don't know, feel free to fill me in though.
Cheers
imnsho
First off, I don't see that hypothetical Googlix as a service, but as an OS that can offer integrated services. Those services could very well have advertising, or maybe Google would find another way to stay in business, who knows?
But why should YOUR OS have advertising? You use what you like, with or without the services. You can run OS X and not buy into the digital thing, and you can even use MS Windows without using IE, so I imagine that if you'd choose Google's Linux, you could use it without using the services (or use some clever scripting to avoid the ads). If however you choose to use the google thing, don't begrudge them their source of income.
Regardless, I've seen eye-tracking tests on online advertising, and it's almost scary how people can avoid looking at ads. The eyes literally just bounce off the edges of banners without even glancing at the banners themselves. So imo a lot of advertising angst is totally unfounded - and believe me, I myself have a very low advertising tolerance. And even without trusting my unconscious avoidance strategies, the only online advertising that's less obtrusive than Google ads is no advertising at all.
"Open source has by far the best business model in developing nations"
Agreed.
If there is one company I see succeeding in bringing linux to the masses it is Google. Too bad they aren't into the game (yet). They seem to have an understanding of the less is more attitude that makes average users happy (even those who swear they need more features instead of less).
And they have that intangible extra quality to bring services to the desktop that others can't do as easily as them, much the same way as Apple incorporated "digital lifestyle" doodahs in their OS (iLife), to which MS still is clueless, even with their Home Theatre ventures (which I personally think is a good idea desperately in need of sensible execution).
I hope it's by now proven that it's not by mimicking king MS that you'll beat them, it's by going one further while at the same time covering the bases.
Apple does it pretty well for a rather small but vocal audience, linux makes assorted computer wizards happy, who however are totally clueless to what an average user is (the mithical Joe Sixpack) and will keep proclaiming next year to be the year of Linux desktop, somehow believing that at that year everybody will change into them (commandline wizards). And meanwhile MS sees everything is well.
Google could do some real damage to the crowd that doesn't really care but is fed up nevertheless without a clue as to what to do about it.
I do hope they won't try any clever name (like googlix) and go for something like Google Desktop or the like.