You completely missed the author's point. This isn't about someone lacking the passion or aptitude for engineering. It's not even about someone complaining that the material was too tough. It's about someone who was devastatingly demoralized by the negative, discouraging, sink-or-swim approach to undergraduate science/engineering/math education.
The author's point is that the math/engineering/science undergraduate environment is hugely demoralizing to the vast majority of people -- even people who are keenly interested in the material and capable of mastering it under more encouraging circumstances.
Yes, learning to think for one's self is the key underlying lesson college is supposed to teach. However, there are much better ways to teach it than by applying a "sink or swim" cutoff filter. Only the people who already know how to do it, or who are lucky enough to figure it out on their own somehow, will pass that filter and become degreed engineers. All the other engineering-capable people, who could have been taught how to think for themselves given an encouraging and fostering academic environment, will instead just give up, which is a huge shame and waste.
I went to Rice Unversity and attended the CS/ECE curriculum, ultimately getting a BS in ECE. Even though Rice consistently ranks as a top quality-of-education school (particularly in engineering), my experience was that many professors (Richard Smalley, nobel-prize winning buckyball researcher, for instance) had absolutely no interest in helping students learn anything, and were kept on-staff primarily to make the school look attractive and to do research. Many professors would intentionally direct their TA's to sit at their desks and deflect undergraduate students away when they would show up for office hours to get some actual clarification on something. Many professors would completely fail to teach the curriculum that was covered by exams. Many classes were taught by TA's who barely spoke English and were impossible to understand, and who exhibited amazingly unfriendly attitudes whenever a student asked for clarification on anything, as if they shouldn't be bothered to spend any time with undergraduates.
I was personally VERY demoralized by the Rice approach to teaching science/engineering. I do not think back on my time at Rice fondly -- more like four years of hell that I only endured because I knew I loved the subject matter and I kept my sights on getting the degree at the end. I saw many very intelligent friends drop out of CS/EE tracks precisely due to the demoralization, and I couldn't really fault them for it. I just knew that there was no alternative subject matter that I could see myself wanting to make a career out of.
Too many passwords are being lost in the dark Too many passwords are stained up or marked with the brown of coffee that must get spilled so that we can stay up without caffeine pills
Too many passwords are being posted on Fark Too many passwords are lost on a lark
What PHB decided it was a good idea to let anyone near a computer when they don't know what kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes are? If they lose productivity and efficiency because their "office workers" don't possess basic computer knowledge, I'd say that's entirely their own fault for making stupid hiring decisions.
The ethics and fairness of the issue are the same regardless of which country's laws you are talking about. If you properly compensated the creator for the content, the manufacturer for the manufacturing, and the distributor for getting the product into your hands, then you've paid all fair dues. From that point onward, you are ethically in the right to do whatever you want with the product you've purchased, *except* to give or sell new copies of the content to other people.
A lot of people on Slashdot still seem to get "legality" confused with "ethics" or "fairness". There's always a delta between the law of the land and what is fair and right. Any properly-working government should be working at all times to minimize that delta. Instead, the dysfunctional United States government works at all times to disproportionately kiss the asses of megacorporations and rich individuals, with no regard whatsoever to what is fair or ethical from the standpoint of individual citizens.
...Igor Kholodov has created a game designed to make learning the basics of programming fun.
Maybe it's just me, but I've always thought the "let's make learning fun!" approach to education is absurd and ultimately ineffective.
If a person finds the subject matter uninteresting, what is the point in dressing it up as something else? If you have to fool someone into being interested by dressing it up as something else, then they aren't really interested in it, period. Let them learn about something else.
Besides, you don't make learning fun by dressing it up as something else, because the learning itself *is* the fun part. Instead of trying to dress up programming by constructing some absurd artificial problem to solve or game to play, show people how the learned knowledge can be applied in useful ways to real problems to yield impressive results.
Re:Don't use your distro tools to install it...
on
Firefox 1.0.7 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Someone seriously needs to mod the parent UP. This is a very insightful observation about one of the fundamental, systemic problems with desktop OSes (Linux-based and otherwise).
The fact that it is possible for an application to be installed by any mechanism other than the official method provided by the desktop/OS, thus straying from all standard conventions defined by the desktop/OS, means it's too easy for users to screw up and break things. The fact that an application must come with its own installation executable just illustrates how the desktop/OS is failing to provide the services the application developers need.
The desktop/OS should require a software package to provide a data-based manifest of installation actions it needs (generally similar to Microsoft's MSI/Windows Installer technology, but without the notion of Custom Actions), and the desktop/OS should execute the installation. And that should be the ONLY way for anything to get installed onto the system (unlike the architecture of Windows, where standalone installers such as InstallShield can still bypass the central MSI/Windows Installer way of doing things).
Nintendo is wasting its time with this controller nonsense.
The most important thing for a console to succeed is to have a plethora of truly outstanding games available for it.
Whether a game is good or not has relatively little to do with the capabilities of the hardware or the uniqueness of the controls. It has to do with the artistry of the game designers and the ethic of the developers. Developers should not try to push hardware beyond its comfort zone (no slow frame rates or laggy scenes, please), and the designers should focus on fun gameplay and appropriate difficulty.
Nintendo's own games are nearly always outstanding, but Nintendo seems completely clueless about how to get other companies to make great games for its systems anymore.
Produce a console with over 200 games at launch and a quality-to-crap ratio of over 70% within that library, and you'll have a winner, period.
Someone needs to mod the parent up. It doesn't matter how "nice" a company is if its business model isn't sound.
Lego doesn't make profits by selling individual bricks (or bags of identical bricks) to DYIers. Lego makes its money by promoting a particular collection of bricks as a "set" for building some larger thing (a moon rover, a race car, whatever). The profit comes from being able to sell that special collection (plus the design it is intended for) in a marketable box plastered with enticing pictures of the assembled project.
If Lego cuts into that profit model just to please DYIers, then they may not be making a smart (i.e. long-term profitable) business move. Then again, if the way they work is to take the design contest winners' entries and turn them into more marketable profitable products, then it *could* be a smart long-term move.
Actually, your information is incorrect. In general, LCDs are brighter and more contrasty. And RAID mirroring actualy up-to-doubles read performance by permitting disk reads to be split up and subdivided across the two mirrored disks in parallel.
No, RAID is not equivalent to bullet-proof corporate backup procedures.
But for a personal/home individual with 100+ GB of data, RAID is certainly loads better than hassling with tape backups or trying to create split ZIP volumes to burn to a DVD set, etc, and it's definitely loads better than no form of backup at all, which is what most home users have.
A multiple-monitor setup using LCD flat panel displays should top the list. I can't begin to describe how much easier it is to do development work on a multi-monitor system, and I can tell you that if you work for a full day with an LCD (running via DVI connector, of course, not RGB/SVGA) side-by-side with even a good ViewSonic CRT, you'll be forever sold on the LCD panels because the brightness, contrast, color accuracy, and crispness are all so much better.
RAM and disk are the two biggest bottlenecks to development, in my experience. So the next most important thing is memory and storage. Get at least 2GB of RAM, and then get yourself set up with a RAID array with plenty of storage (200GB or more), running in a RAID mode that provides for full automatic recovery if a drive fails. Many motherboards now natively support RAID-mirror configurations (two drives) using SATA drives.
The RAID array will drastically improve disk performance. Plus, you'll never have to worry about backup/recovery again. The RAID array by definition always keeps itself "backed up" by its built-in redundancy, and recovery is as simple as popping in a new hard drive and letting the array rebuild to the new drive.
Why not gnaw your own arms off and independently figure out quantum mechanics, since you're already willing to endure the pain of learning how to configure Emacs?
Isn't this obvious? Some types of information (for instance, the fastest way to sort a list) should be freely available to everyone because people out there in the world may have legitimate needs for it. Other types of information (for instance, your social security number) should be kept secret because only certain parties legitimately need it.
Information privacy should be based on the "do you have a legitimate need" criteria. Then the only thing up for debate is what constitutes a "legitimate need". I for one would argue that mankind's / society's overall technical advancement gives the general public a legitimate need for any scientific/research/discovery-type information, regardless of who found it first.
English is a living language, why do i care if "should have" is technically correct according to some english professor somewhere.
You should care because it makes you look like a careless jackass in the eyes of anyone who knows better. That was the original poster's point. It's all about the presentation and what it leads other people to think about you and what you've written.
If you repeatedly and blatantly butcher spelling and grammar then the reader will know that you don't care about how you come across. They will see that you don't put any care into your writing or take any pride in your own work. They won't respect your writing or pay any attention to it if you won't do that yourself in the first place when you're writing it.
7. If the only method you provide for customers to contact your company is e-mail, then that address had better not bounce or issue "mailbox is full" errors, you'd better answer the e-mail promptly (say, within 12 hours), and you'd better not just send an unhelpful form letter. Do not under any circumstances treat e-mail as a way to route customer contact straight to/dev/null.
8. Provide 24/7/365 customer service. If you can't afford to do that, and your products or services are directed at home consumers, then provide customer service during the hours when people are typically NOT at work. It's totally unhelpful to me if your customer service is only open 9-5 Mon-Fri, because I'm at work during those hours and don't have time to hassle with you.
9. On a related note, you should never make me have to think about time zones. Don't just say, "we are open 8am-6pm Pacific Time" and make me figure out what that is in MY time zone. Do the math for me and list hours for ALL time zones.
10. You should pick up ALL costs associated with flaws or problems with YOUR products or services. If you provide phone support, it should be a toll-free number. If you need me to ship a product back to you, you should reimburse me for ALL my shipping costs.
11. Minimize MY hassle and downtime by sending out a replacement unit first, and then let me ship the defective one back to you in the same packaging with shipping pre-paid. Some hard drive manufacturers have taken this approach for years now, and it works really well. All companies should offer the same level of support.
Okay, this is just common sense. Here are some thing I expect from technical support:
1. Have a real human being answer your fucking phone immediately, instead of making me navigate an automated phone menu and sit on hold for 30 minutes or longer.
2. Do not under any circumstances assume that I'm a dumbass, or treat me like one by default, and make me go through a series of asinine basic scripted troubleshooting steps. I wouldn't be CALLING tech support if I hadn't already tried all those things first.
3. Admit known flaws with your products. Instead of trying to pretend that design flaw with your hardware or bug in your driver doesn't exist, try being forthcoming and apologetic about it. Add my name to a "to be notified" list for that particular issue so that when a BIOS update or driver fix becomes available I'll be the first to know. That way I can go on about my life instead of wasting even more evenings away trying to get your product to behave in a stable manner when it would be impossible for me to do so due to a flaw in its design.
4. Issue lifetime warranties for all of your products, or at least be more reasonable with your warranty periods. If you make a product, and it dies 30 days after the warranty expired, and I call technical support, from an ethical point of view, I still expect you to stand behind your product and provide me with a free replacement. The fact that it died 30 days beyond the warranty period is a fucking technicality that you shouldn't be using as an excuse to not stand behind your products' quality.
5. Hire tech support reps who are actually experts on your own products and who actually know more about them than I do.
6. If your tech support rep says they will have to call me back, and they go to the trouble of taking down my name and telephone number and they say they will call me back tomorrow with more information regarding my case, then make sure they actually call me back by the time they say they are going to.
From an ethical point of view, counterfitting and piracy are two completely different things.
Someone trying to pass pirated goods off as the real deal (fake instruction manuals and box art, etc) is counterfitting. That is unethical because it's a form of deceipt.
If a friend burns the content to TDK CD-R blanks and writes on them with magic marker and gives it to me for free, that's not counterfitting, and it's not unethical. They're not trying to "pull one over" on me or trying to make money on someone else's content. They're just trying to share something with me and save me some money. There's nothing unethical about that.
Finally, all these claims by companies that every pirated copy represents a lost sale are complete bullshit. The vast majority of piracy occurs because people can't afford to pay the retail price to purchase it legitimately. The only two choices in front of the person are "pirate it and have it, or don't pirate it and don't have it". The piracy is not a lost sale by any stretch of the imagination.
Plus, think about it -- Microsoft wouldn't be where it is today without millions of people pirating DOS and Windows and Office over the last twenty years. The rampant piracy of those software packages is a large part of what established them as standards.
Then they can pay someone to support their computer just like they pay someone to fix their car, home, or other appliances when they don't want to take the time to figure out what to do themselves.
You just made my point for me -- FOSS software is not actually "free". It's only "free" if you're already a UNIX demigod or if you consider your time worthless. ALL Linux or BSD FOSS systems should state that honestly and accurately up-front, and then you wouldn't have the "we just want it to work" folks attempting to install or use it.
It's a simple thing I'm suggesting, actually: truth in advertising. You know, that same thing that FOSS zealots are always bitching at Microsoft about.
Then it's a hidden cost that needs to be honestly and accurately stated up-front. I get sick of seeing various Linux distributions touting themselves as "easy to use" when in fact you have to resort to arcane command-line tactics to accomplish the simplest of daily needs, or understand technical things like package dependencies or disk partitions just to install. If expectations were set realistically up front by the distros, stating something to the effect of, "This software is really only suitable for computer experts and you shouldn't expect it to be as easy as a Mac or Windows", then people wouldn't walk into it expecting it to be user-friendly.
If you have a problem that is interesting to the developers, the free support is better than anything you can buy. However, there is no guarantee that your problems have any interest to anyone else.
And that's exactly the major impediment that prevents the software from meetings the needs of ordinary people and which prevents ordinary people from having success with the software.
Slashdot Mirror
You completely missed the author's point. This isn't about someone lacking the passion or aptitude for engineering. It's not even about someone complaining that the material was too tough. It's about someone who was devastatingly demoralized by the negative, discouraging, sink-or-swim approach to undergraduate science/engineering/math education.
The author's point is that the math/engineering/science undergraduate environment is hugely demoralizing to the vast majority of people -- even people who are keenly interested in the material and capable of mastering it under more encouraging circumstances.
Yes, learning to think for one's self is the key underlying lesson college is supposed to teach. However, there are much better ways to teach it than by applying a "sink or swim" cutoff filter. Only the people who already know how to do it, or who are lucky enough to figure it out on their own somehow, will pass that filter and become degreed engineers. All the other engineering-capable people, who could have been taught how to think for themselves given an encouraging and fostering academic environment, will instead just give up, which is a huge shame and waste.
I went to Rice Unversity and attended the CS/ECE curriculum, ultimately getting a BS in ECE. Even though Rice consistently ranks as a top quality-of-education school (particularly in engineering), my experience was that many professors (Richard Smalley, nobel-prize winning buckyball researcher, for instance) had absolutely no interest in helping students learn anything, and were kept on-staff primarily to make the school look attractive and to do research. Many professors would intentionally direct their TA's to sit at their desks and deflect undergraduate students away when they would show up for office hours to get some actual clarification on something. Many professors would completely fail to teach the curriculum that was covered by exams. Many classes were taught by TA's who barely spoke English and were impossible to understand, and who exhibited amazingly unfriendly attitudes whenever a student asked for clarification on anything, as if they shouldn't be bothered to spend any time with undergraduates.
I was personally VERY demoralized by the Rice approach to teaching science/engineering. I do not think back on my time at Rice fondly -- more like four years of hell that I only endured because I knew I loved the subject matter and I kept my sights on getting the degree at the end. I saw many very intelligent friends drop out of CS/EE tracks precisely due to the demoralization, and I couldn't really fault them for it. I just knew that there was no alternative subject matter that I could see myself wanting to make a career out of.
Too many passwords
are being lost in the dark
Too many passwords
are stained up or marked
with the brown of coffee that must get spilled
so that we can stay up without caffeine pills
Too many passwords
are being posted on Fark
Too many passwords
are lost on a lark
Just stop hiring people who don't know the lingo.
What PHB decided it was a good idea to let anyone near a computer when they don't know what kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes are? If they lose productivity and efficiency because their "office workers" don't possess basic computer knowledge, I'd say that's entirely their own fault for making stupid hiring decisions.
The ethics and fairness of the issue are the same regardless of which country's laws you are talking about. If you properly compensated the creator for the content, the manufacturer for the manufacturing, and the distributor for getting the product into your hands, then you've paid all fair dues. From that point onward, you are ethically in the right to do whatever you want with the product you've purchased, *except* to give or sell new copies of the content to other people.
A lot of people on Slashdot still seem to get "legality" confused with "ethics" or "fairness". There's always a delta between the law of the land and what is fair and right. Any properly-working government should be working at all times to minimize that delta. Instead, the dysfunctional United States government works at all times to disproportionately kiss the asses of megacorporations and rich individuals, with no regard whatsoever to what is fair or ethical from the standpoint of individual citizens.
Aparently you missed the part about the quality-to-crap ratio needing to be high.
...Igor Kholodov has created a game designed to make learning the basics of programming fun.
Maybe it's just me, but I've always thought the "let's make learning fun!" approach to education is absurd and ultimately ineffective.
If a person finds the subject matter uninteresting, what is the point in dressing it up as something else? If you have to fool someone into being interested by dressing it up as something else, then they aren't really interested in it, period. Let them learn about something else.
Besides, you don't make learning fun by dressing it up as something else, because the learning itself *is* the fun part. Instead of trying to dress up programming by constructing some absurd artificial problem to solve or game to play, show people how the learned knowledge can be applied in useful ways to real problems to yield impressive results.
Someone seriously needs to mod the parent UP. This is a very insightful observation about one of the fundamental, systemic problems with desktop OSes (Linux-based and otherwise).
The fact that it is possible for an application to be installed by any mechanism other than the official method provided by the desktop/OS, thus straying from all standard conventions defined by the desktop/OS, means it's too easy for users to screw up and break things. The fact that an application must come with its own installation executable just illustrates how the desktop/OS is failing to provide the services the application developers need.
The desktop/OS should require a software package to provide a data-based manifest of installation actions it needs (generally similar to Microsoft's MSI/Windows Installer technology, but without the notion of Custom Actions), and the desktop/OS should execute the installation. And that should be the ONLY way for anything to get installed onto the system (unlike the architecture of Windows, where standalone installers such as InstallShield can still bypass the central MSI/Windows Installer way of doing things).
Nintendo is wasting its time with this controller nonsense.
The most important thing for a console to succeed is to have a plethora of truly outstanding games available for it.
Whether a game is good or not has relatively little to do with the capabilities of the hardware or the uniqueness of the controls. It has to do with the artistry of the game designers and the ethic of the developers. Developers should not try to push hardware beyond its comfort zone (no slow frame rates or laggy scenes, please), and the designers should focus on fun gameplay and appropriate difficulty.
Nintendo's own games are nearly always outstanding, but Nintendo seems completely clueless about how to get other companies to make great games for its systems anymore.
Produce a console with over 200 games at launch and a quality-to-crap ratio of over 70% within that library, and you'll have a winner, period.
Someone needs to mod the parent up. It doesn't matter how "nice" a company is if its business model isn't sound.
Lego doesn't make profits by selling individual bricks (or bags of identical bricks) to DYIers. Lego makes its money by promoting a particular collection of bricks as a "set" for building some larger thing (a moon rover, a race car, whatever). The profit comes from being able to sell that special collection (plus the design it is intended for) in a marketable box plastered with enticing pictures of the assembled project.
If Lego cuts into that profit model just to please DYIers, then they may not be making a smart (i.e. long-term profitable) business move. Then again, if the way they work is to take the design contest winners' entries and turn them into more marketable profitable products, then it *could* be a smart long-term move.
Actually, your information is incorrect. In general, LCDs are brighter and more contrasty. And RAID mirroring actualy up-to-doubles read performance by permitting disk reads to be split up and subdivided across the two mirrored disks in parallel.
No, RAID is not equivalent to bullet-proof corporate backup procedures.
But for a personal/home individual with 100+ GB of data, RAID is certainly loads better than hassling with tape backups or trying to create split ZIP volumes to burn to a DVD set, etc, and it's definitely loads better than no form of backup at all, which is what most home users have.
A multiple-monitor setup using LCD flat panel displays should top the list. I can't begin to describe how much easier it is to do development work on a multi-monitor system, and I can tell you that if you work for a full day with an LCD (running via DVI connector, of course, not RGB/SVGA) side-by-side with even a good ViewSonic CRT, you'll be forever sold on the LCD panels because the brightness, contrast, color accuracy, and crispness are all so much better.
RAM and disk are the two biggest bottlenecks to development, in my experience. So the next most important thing is memory and storage. Get at least 2GB of RAM, and then get yourself set up with a RAID array with plenty of storage (200GB or more), running in a RAID mode that provides for full automatic recovery if a drive fails. Many motherboards now natively support RAID-mirror configurations (two drives) using SATA drives.
The RAID array will drastically improve disk performance. Plus, you'll never have to worry about backup/recovery again. The RAID array by definition always keeps itself "backed up" by its built-in redundancy, and recovery is as simple as popping in a new hard drive and letting the array rebuild to the new drive.
Why not gnaw your own arms off and independently figure out quantum mechanics, since you're already willing to endure the pain of learning how to configure Emacs?
Isn't this obvious? Some types of information (for instance, the fastest way to sort a list) should be freely available to everyone because people out there in the world may have legitimate needs for it. Other types of information (for instance, your social security number) should be kept secret because only certain parties legitimately need it.
Information privacy should be based on the "do you have a legitimate need" criteria. Then the only thing up for debate is what constitutes a "legitimate need". I for one would argue that mankind's / society's overall technical advancement gives the general public a legitimate need for any scientific/research/discovery-type information, regardless of who found it first.
English is a living language, why do i care if "should have" is technically correct according to some english professor somewhere.
You should care because it makes you look like a careless jackass in the eyes of anyone who knows better. That was the original poster's point. It's all about the presentation and what it leads other people to think about you and what you've written.
If you repeatedly and blatantly butcher spelling and grammar then the reader will know that you don't care about how you come across. They will see that you don't put any care into your writing or take any pride in your own work. They won't respect your writing or pay any attention to it if you won't do that yourself in the first place when you're writing it.
Instead, the electricity gobbled up by these sets is used to play videogames, watch movies on DVD, or view old Jane Fonda exercise tapes.
Yeah, you know... old Jane Fonda tapes.
For exercise.
Yeah.
Okay, I thought of some more:
/dev/null.
7. If the only method you provide for customers to contact your company is e-mail, then that address had better not bounce or issue "mailbox is full" errors, you'd better answer the e-mail promptly (say, within 12 hours), and you'd better not just send an unhelpful form letter. Do not under any circumstances treat e-mail as a way to route customer contact straight to
8. Provide 24/7/365 customer service. If you can't afford to do that, and your products or services are directed at home consumers, then provide customer service during the hours when people are typically NOT at work. It's totally unhelpful to me if your customer service is only open 9-5 Mon-Fri, because I'm at work during those hours and don't have time to hassle with you.
9. On a related note, you should never make me have to think about time zones. Don't just say, "we are open 8am-6pm Pacific Time" and make me figure out what that is in MY time zone. Do the math for me and list hours for ALL time zones.
10. You should pick up ALL costs associated with flaws or problems with YOUR products or services. If you provide phone support, it should be a toll-free number. If you need me to ship a product back to you, you should reimburse me for ALL my shipping costs.
11. Minimize MY hassle and downtime by sending out a replacement unit first, and then let me ship the defective one back to you in the same packaging with shipping pre-paid. Some hard drive manufacturers have taken this approach for years now, and it works really well. All companies should offer the same level of support.
Wired's been more about style rather than tech since the late 90s, but have they finally dropped science in favor of science fiction?
Isn't that a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?
In other news, researchers have discovered that it takes six top stories being posted to Slashdot to get one piece of real news.
Okay, this is just common sense. Here are some thing I expect from technical support:
1. Have a real human being answer your fucking phone immediately, instead of making me navigate an automated phone menu and sit on hold for 30 minutes or longer.
2. Do not under any circumstances assume that I'm a dumbass, or treat me like one by default, and make me go through a series of asinine basic scripted troubleshooting steps. I wouldn't be CALLING tech support if I hadn't already tried all those things first.
3. Admit known flaws with your products. Instead of trying to pretend that design flaw with your hardware or bug in your driver doesn't exist, try being forthcoming and apologetic about it. Add my name to a "to be notified" list for that particular issue so that when a BIOS update or driver fix becomes available I'll be the first to know. That way I can go on about my life instead of wasting even more evenings away trying to get your product to behave in a stable manner when it would be impossible for me to do so due to a flaw in its design.
4. Issue lifetime warranties for all of your products, or at least be more reasonable with your warranty periods. If you make a product, and it dies 30 days after the warranty expired, and I call technical support, from an ethical point of view, I still expect you to stand behind your product and provide me with a free replacement. The fact that it died 30 days beyond the warranty period is a fucking technicality that you shouldn't be using as an excuse to not stand behind your products' quality.
5. Hire tech support reps who are actually experts on your own products and who actually know more about them than I do.
6. If your tech support rep says they will have to call me back, and they go to the trouble of taking down my name and telephone number and they say they will call me back tomorrow with more information regarding my case, then make sure they actually call me back by the time they say they are going to.
From an ethical point of view, counterfitting and piracy are two completely different things.
Someone trying to pass pirated goods off as the real deal (fake instruction manuals and box art, etc) is counterfitting. That is unethical because it's a form of deceipt.
If a friend burns the content to TDK CD-R blanks and writes on them with magic marker and gives it to me for free, that's not counterfitting, and it's not unethical. They're not trying to "pull one over" on me or trying to make money on someone else's content. They're just trying to share something with me and save me some money. There's nothing unethical about that.
Finally, all these claims by companies that every pirated copy represents a lost sale are complete bullshit. The vast majority of piracy occurs because people can't afford to pay the retail price to purchase it legitimately. The only two choices in front of the person are "pirate it and have it, or don't pirate it and don't have it". The piracy is not a lost sale by any stretch of the imagination.
Plus, think about it -- Microsoft wouldn't be where it is today without millions of people pirating DOS and Windows and Office over the last twenty years. The rampant piracy of those software packages is a large part of what established them as standards.
Porn actor.
Then they can pay someone to support their computer just like they pay someone to fix their car, home, or other appliances when they don't want to take the time to figure out what to do themselves.
You just made my point for me -- FOSS software is not actually "free". It's only "free" if you're already a UNIX demigod or if you consider your time worthless. ALL Linux or BSD FOSS systems should state that honestly and accurately up-front, and then you wouldn't have the "we just want it to work" folks attempting to install or use it.
It's a simple thing I'm suggesting, actually: truth in advertising. You know, that same thing that FOSS zealots are always bitching at Microsoft about.
Moderators -- please mod the parent up as "Insightful".
But that is the price of free software.
Then it's a hidden cost that needs to be honestly and accurately stated up-front. I get sick of seeing various Linux distributions touting themselves as "easy to use" when in fact you have to resort to arcane command-line tactics to accomplish the simplest of daily needs, or understand technical things like package dependencies or disk partitions just to install. If expectations were set realistically up front by the distros, stating something to the effect of, "This software is really only suitable for computer experts and you shouldn't expect it to be as easy as a Mac or Windows", then people wouldn't walk into it expecting it to be user-friendly.
If you have a problem that is interesting to the developers, the free support is better than anything you can buy. However, there is no guarantee that your problems have any interest to anyone else.
And that's exactly the major impediment that prevents the software from meetings the needs of ordinary people and which prevents ordinary people from having success with the software.