Someone needs to mod this up, because it's absolutely true. In my experience, the more intelligent and observant and thoughtful someone is, and the more realistic they are, the less foolishly optimistic or happy they are about the world in which they live. The old saying, "ignorance is bliss," is quite true.
This is why you should be able to club marketing reps to death. Of course, Windows in general is an example of why you should be able to club marketing reps to death.
Honestly, do we even need an example to justify why you should be able to club marketing reps to death?
"But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true."
Honestly, what is this guy smoking? We are creative beings... It really doesn't matter what people decide to do with their source code, there will always be innovation because it is human nature to think of new ways to do things.
Actually, you are completely missing his point. Sure, individuals are creative, but individual creativity isn't the problem. The problem is harnessing the creativity and talent of a large collection of individuals and focusing it into a large-scale plan and design that possesses coherency and delivers on customer needs.
I challenge you to design, from scratch, something as complex as Windows or the space shuttle by having 10,000 people with no deadlines, deliverables, or clear management hierarchy work on a mere volunteer basis if and when they feel like it. And no, FOSS UNIX clones/variants or reimplementations of BeOS don't count, because those are not from-scratch designs.
The FOSS model of development has proven itself rather uncapable of accomplishing that -- that's why smaller FOSS projects with limited scope and fewer participants tend to be the best ones, while large-scale FOSS projects tend to devolve into infighting and stagnate once they finish reverse-engineering an existing design and move onto considering truly new things.
Or, to summarize, it's a problem of "too many cooks in the kitchen". Only commercial models with top-down infrastructure have proven themselves capable of turning out final, coherent, complex feats of large-scale engineering.
Um, yeah, that's kind of the point. There's a serious problem with the educational funding system when some high schools have radio stations and others can't even afford books.
I am one of the tech managers for my high school's FM radio station.
Sounds like your high school is pretty rich and elitist already, if they operate their own radio station and have multiple tech managers for it. Surely they could just afford to hire someone to break in once an hour all throughout the night to say the station ID. Maybe they could even get the janitor to do it.
As per most other hardware advancements, gaming has really defined the quality bar by being the most demanding application.
I was recently given a Microsoft Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 and a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0 to compare. They are basically the same mouse but one is wireless and one is corded. I tried both with Unreal Tournament 2003, and there's still of course a huge difference between corded and wireless. The wireless mouse is laggy and significantly less responsive than the corded one. It's so bad that it makes FPS games basically unplayable.
No wireless mouse will ever be able to match the responsiveness and precision of a corded mouse, so the simple fact that this "review" ranks a wireless mouse as the top choice just shows how worthless this review actually is. Even if 90% of your mouse usage is on standard desktop/GUI activities, and you only rarely fire up a game to play, you will still be far better off with a good corded mouse.
Furthermore, durability and drivers are two issues largely overlooked by this review. If you go to the Logitech support forums you can find tons of users who have problems with the MX510 and MX518's buttons failing. It appears to be a design defect. And you can find tons of frustrated MX518 users who are suffering from major bugs in the SetPoint drivers or who are unable to get drivers for their platform (the MX518 drivers are only available for WinXP). By comparison, the Microsoft IntelliPoint software isn't very feature-rich for gaming purposes, but it's totally stable and is available for nearly every Microsoft mouse on every windows version.
Microsoft is looking for true stories about people using Windows computers to pursue a passion or hobby.
I don't know anyone using a PC for non-business purposes whose software is all legitimately purchased. No one I know can afford to fork out hundreds of dollars for programs like SoundForge or PhotoShop just to use them for personal interests. Even gamers can't afford to shell out $60 a pop (and monthly subscription fees) for all the games they like to play.
If Microsoft is looking for people who use Windows computers to pursue a "passion or a hobby", then chances are they're not going to get many responses, because most people that meet that description are using pirated software to do it and are smart enough to not write into Microsoft and turn themselves in.
Authentication methods can all be broken down into the following categories: 1) Something you know (such as a password). 2) Something you have (such as a keycard). 3) Something you are (such as a fingerprint).
You're forgetting: (4) Something you do. Everyone does things in subtly unique ways. If we could build a security mechanism that picked up on that, it would be the most effective, since you don't have to remember or carry around anything.
For instance, I bet everyone types differently. I bet if you profiled a person's typing and built up a record of the average timing that particular individual took between typing any two particular letters, you could have a program to figure out whether it was really the individual typing or not, regardless of what it was they typed. The login prompt could then just ask you to retype something shown on the screen so it can profile your typing characteristics.
Sure, at the moment this requires a bit too much guesswork or intelligence, but something like that would certainly be the most user-friendly and non-annoying implementation of security.
'There are smart people no longer even signing up to take our introductory courses. We need to fix it, or there's not going to be a U.S. work force in computer sciences.'
Well, maybe if a decent CS education and degree didn't cost upwards of $20,000 and the curriculum weren't 10x more demanding than your typical liberal arts major then we wouldn't have so few people able to sign up and complete the courses.
Face it folks, the supply/demand issue with officially trained and degreed computer professionals is headed the same way it has already gone with doctors and nurses. Doctors and nurses are in short supply relative to demand because very few people can afford the schooling or endure the unbelievably long and intense curriculum.
To get my ECE (Electrical & Computer Engineering) degree, I had to take a bunch of stuff only remotely tangentially related to the field, such as mechanical engineering and chemistry. If they had cut all the unnecessary bullshit from the curriculum and widdled it down to what was actually needed to be a competent computer hardware/software professional, I could have gotten out in about half the time and half the cost.
I imagine this won't put to rest the rumors of spyware in their recent players
That's because you're misunderstanding the "rumors" (which are not rumors, but facts, by the way). The problem is that Real's software (maybe not the very latest version, I haven't tried it, but for relatively recent versions this is certainly true) IS spyware in and of itself, because it (1) deceives users into installing stuff or signing up for stuff they didn't want or expect to be signed up for, (2) deeply integrates itself into the system in a variety of unwanted ways, and (3) makes itself almost impossible to cleanly and completely uninstall.
Totally agree. You're within your ethical right to do so if you already paid for the software. You're probably in your legal right as well... check the fine print / EULA. They're usually licensing the SOFTWARE to you, not a particular SERIAL NUMBER or KEY... if the EULA doesn't mention the key at all, then you should probably be in your legal right to use any crack or key you obtain to install the software you've legitimately bought. Although IANAUCL (I Am Not An Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer).
...will be when the day comes that every e-mail I receive has a "Detonate Sender" button that I can click to instantly cause all PCs owned by the sender (and ideally, through the wonders of GPS and RFID, the sender him/herself) to explode.
A similar feature, "Caller Detonate", is still also something that would be useful to have for the telephone and cellular networks.
If elected president, I promise to make spamming a federal crime punishable by the death penalty, along with driving slow in the fast lane, riding up on people's bumpers to try to get them to drive faster, and yakking away on cell phones in movie theaters.
Well, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: governments only offer to hear "public input" to pacify the citizenry -- they never really act on any of the public input or take it seriously.
That said, "fair use" and copyright law can and should be defined as follows:
Every person has the right to transfer (to/from any storage medium), transform (to/from any format, regardless of any intellectual property restrictions pertaining to the formats), or duplicate (an unlimited number of times), any content that person legitimately holds, so long as all instances of the content in any form remain under ownership of that person.
Every person has the right to make any subset of the content available for public consumption at no cost if and only if the purpose of doing so is to reference the content in the context of discussion, analysis, or parody of the content.
It is illegal for a person "A" to transfer any instances of the content to a second party "B" without transferring all instances of the content owned by the person "A".
That pretty much covers every case I can think of... right to parody, right to reference, right to analyze, right to decrypt any format, right to make personal copies, right to use that MP3 you bought in your car, iPod, and PC without having to buy it three separate times, and the right of the content producers to not be deprived of a potential sale by piracy/counterfitting.
I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me "Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid" - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically.
most innovative and original ideas are not good ideas; and those that are rarely get implemented well.
That's a real quoteworthy gem you crafted there. In fact, I'm going to print it out and stick it up in my office.
Oddly, it relates to a special I saw on TV last night about Disney World and the "imagineers" who work there. One of them was asked if Disney kept a record of all their good ideas, and he responded something like, "No, we only keep and build the really GREAT ideas". Similar in concept to your quote.
I will not Ask Slashdot without trying Google first. I will not Ask Slashdot without trying Google first. I will not Ask Slashdot without trying Google first.
This particular Ask Slashdot has a dumbfoundingly obvious answer: most FOSS zealots try to convert users to FOSS software because they gut-wrenchingly hate and fundamentally mistrust businesses and want to do everything they can to stick it to businesses where it hurts.
On the other hand, most users don't care whether software is free (as in liberty) or not because they just copy whatever they want anyway, legally or not. Most users don't care whether software is open-source or not because most users are not programmers and have no interest in or need for source code. And most existing FOSS software today is more difficult to install/configure/maintain/use than commercial offerings.
So from the user's point of view, there's only one motivation to switch to FOSS software, and that's to get their obnoxious FOSS-touting acquaintances to shut the hell up. And as statistics suggest, this isn't enough of a reason to convince your average user to switch.
That is, unless you are a particularly hairy and foul-smelling breed of FOSS zealot and your victim is a reasonably good-looking young woman who would much prefer suffering through a difficult computing experience for the rest of her life over actually tolerating your incessant geek whining for yet another day.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone needs to mod this up, because it's absolutely true. In my experience, the more intelligent and observant and thoughtful someone is, and the more realistic they are, the less foolishly optimistic or happy they are about the world in which they live. The old saying, "ignorance is bliss," is quite true.
It sounds like a good idea, but if they really want the movie to be good, they really need to get George Lucas to direct it and write all the dialog.
Gee, maybe searching Google could be useful.
This is why you should be able to club marketing reps to death.
Of course, Windows in general is an example of why you should be able to club marketing reps to death.
Honestly, do we even need an example to justify why you should be able to club marketing reps to death?
"But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true."
Honestly, what is this guy smoking? We are creative beings... It really doesn't matter what people decide to do with their source code, there will always be innovation because it is human nature to think of new ways to do things.
Actually, you are completely missing his point. Sure, individuals are creative, but individual creativity isn't the problem. The problem is harnessing the creativity and talent of a large collection of individuals and focusing it into a large-scale plan and design that possesses coherency and delivers on customer needs.
I challenge you to design, from scratch, something as complex as Windows or the space shuttle by having 10,000 people with no deadlines, deliverables, or clear management hierarchy work on a mere volunteer basis if and when they feel like it. And no, FOSS UNIX clones/variants or reimplementations of BeOS don't count, because those are not from-scratch designs.
The FOSS model of development has proven itself rather uncapable of accomplishing that -- that's why smaller FOSS projects with limited scope and fewer participants tend to be the best ones, while large-scale FOSS projects tend to devolve into infighting and stagnate once they finish reverse-engineering an existing design and move onto considering truly new things.
Or, to summarize, it's a problem of "too many cooks in the kitchen". Only commercial models with top-down infrastructure have proven themselves capable of turning out final, coherent, complex feats of large-scale engineering.
...and that sometimes laws need to be changed.
Oh my god, what a revelation! I'm so glad we have such intelligent and experienced judges to figure such things out for us.
That's kind of hostile, isn't it?
Um, yeah, that's kind of the point. There's a serious problem with the educational funding system when some high schools have radio stations and others can't even afford books.
I am one of the tech managers for my high school's FM radio station.
Sounds like your high school is pretty rich and elitist already, if they operate their own radio station and have multiple tech managers for it. Surely they could just afford to hire someone to break in once an hour all throughout the night to say the station ID. Maybe they could even get the janitor to do it.
As per most other hardware advancements, gaming has really defined the quality bar by being the most demanding application.
I was recently given a Microsoft Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 and a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0 to compare. They are basically the same mouse but one is wireless and one is corded. I tried both with Unreal Tournament 2003, and there's still of course a huge difference between corded and wireless. The wireless mouse is laggy and significantly less responsive than the corded one. It's so bad that it makes FPS games basically unplayable.
No wireless mouse will ever be able to match the responsiveness and precision of a corded mouse, so the simple fact that this "review" ranks a wireless mouse as the top choice just shows how worthless this review actually is. Even if 90% of your mouse usage is on standard desktop/GUI activities, and you only rarely fire up a game to play, you will still be far better off with a good corded mouse.
Furthermore, durability and drivers are two issues largely overlooked by this review. If you go to the Logitech support forums you can find tons of users who have problems with the MX510 and MX518's buttons failing. It appears to be a design defect. And you can find tons of frustrated MX518 users who are suffering from major bugs in the SetPoint drivers or who are unable to get drivers for their platform (the MX518 drivers are only available for WinXP). By comparison, the Microsoft IntelliPoint software isn't very feature-rich for gaming purposes, but it's totally stable and is available for nearly every Microsoft mouse on every windows version.
Microsoft is looking for true stories about people using Windows computers to pursue a passion or hobby.
I don't know anyone using a PC for non-business purposes whose software is all legitimately purchased. No one I know can afford to fork out hundreds of dollars for programs like SoundForge or PhotoShop just to use them for personal interests. Even gamers can't afford to shell out $60 a pop (and monthly subscription fees) for all the games they like to play.
If Microsoft is looking for people who use Windows computers to pursue a "passion or a hobby", then chances are they're not going to get many responses, because most people that meet that description are using pirated software to do it and are smart enough to not write into Microsoft and turn themselves in.
Authentication methods can all be broken down into the following categories:
1) Something you know (such as a password).
2) Something you have (such as a keycard).
3) Something you are (such as a fingerprint).
You're forgetting: (4) Something you do. Everyone does things in subtly unique ways. If we could build a security mechanism that picked up on that, it would be the most effective, since you don't have to remember or carry around anything.
For instance, I bet everyone types differently. I bet if you profiled a person's typing and built up a record of the average timing that particular individual took between typing any two particular letters, you could have a program to figure out whether it was really the individual typing or not, regardless of what it was they typed. The login prompt could then just ask you to retype something shown on the screen so it can profile your typing characteristics.
Sure, at the moment this requires a bit too much guesswork or intelligence, but something like that would certainly be the most user-friendly and non-annoying implementation of security.
'There are smart people no longer even signing up to take our introductory courses. We need to fix it, or there's not going to be a U.S. work force in computer sciences.'
Well, maybe if a decent CS education and degree didn't cost upwards of $20,000 and the curriculum weren't 10x more demanding than your typical liberal arts major then we wouldn't have so few people able to sign up and complete the courses.
Face it folks, the supply/demand issue with officially trained and degreed computer professionals is headed the same way it has already gone with doctors and nurses. Doctors and nurses are in short supply relative to demand because very few people can afford the schooling or endure the unbelievably long and intense curriculum.
To get my ECE (Electrical & Computer Engineering) degree, I had to take a bunch of stuff only remotely tangentially related to the field, such as mechanical engineering and chemistry. If they had cut all the unnecessary bullshit from the curriculum and widdled it down to what was actually needed to be a competent computer hardware/software professional, I could have gotten out in about half the time and half the cost.
See this page and be sure to read it in its entirety. It answers all your questions. Especially read point #6 regarding the deceiving of users.
This is not fair!!
Welcome to the world.
I imagine this won't put to rest the rumors of spyware in their recent players
That's because you're misunderstanding the "rumors" (which are not rumors, but facts, by the way). The problem is that Real's software (maybe not the very latest version, I haven't tried it, but for relatively recent versions this is certainly true) IS spyware in and of itself, because it (1) deceives users into installing stuff or signing up for stuff they didn't want or expect to be signed up for, (2) deeply integrates itself into the system in a variety of unwanted ways, and (3) makes itself almost impossible to cleanly and completely uninstall.
Totally agree. You're within your ethical right to do so if you already paid for the software. You're probably in your legal right as well... check the fine print / EULA. They're usually licensing the SOFTWARE to you, not a particular SERIAL NUMBER or KEY... if the EULA doesn't mention the key at all, then you should probably be in your legal right to use any crack or key you obtain to install the software you've legitimately bought. Although IANAUCL (I Am Not An Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer).
...will be when the day comes that every e-mail I receive has a "Detonate Sender" button that I can click to instantly cause all PCs owned by the sender (and ideally, through the wonders of GPS and RFID, the sender him/herself) to explode.
A similar feature, "Caller Detonate", is still also something that would be useful to have for the telephone and cellular networks.
If elected president, I promise to make spamming a federal crime punishable by the death penalty, along with driving slow in the fast lane, riding up on people's bumpers to try to get them to drive faster, and yakking away on cell phones in movie theaters.
Well, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: governments only offer to hear "public input" to pacify the citizenry -- they never really act on any of the public input or take it seriously.
That said, "fair use" and copyright law can and should be defined as follows:
Every person has the right to transfer (to/from any storage medium), transform (to/from any format, regardless of any intellectual property restrictions pertaining to the formats), or duplicate (an unlimited number of times), any content that person legitimately holds, so long as all instances of the content in any form remain under ownership of that person.
Every person has the right to make any subset of the content available for public consumption at no cost if and only if the purpose of doing so is to reference the content in the context of discussion, analysis, or parody of the content.
It is illegal for a person "A" to transfer any instances of the content to a second party "B" without transferring all instances of the content owned by the person "A".
That pretty much covers every case I can think of... right to parody, right to reference, right to analyze, right to decrypt any format, right to make personal copies, right to use that MP3 you bought in your car, iPod, and PC without having to buy it three separate times, and the right of the content producers to not be deprived of a potential sale by piracy/counterfitting.
Your argument reminds me of this bit from a Douglas Adams interview:
I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me "Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid" - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically.most innovative and original ideas are not good ideas; and those that are rarely get implemented well.
That's a real quoteworthy gem you crafted there. In fact, I'm going to print it out and stick it up in my office.
Oddly, it relates to a special I saw on TV last night about Disney World and the "imagineers" who work there. One of them was asked if Disney kept a record of all their good ideas, and he responded something like, "No, we only keep and build the really GREAT ideas". Similar in concept to your quote.
Just literally plugging the question into Google usually yields plenty of information:
Personal Use FLAC Streaming Solutions?
It's a fun game to play -- try it with other recent Ask Slashdot entries and you start to see how asinine most of the posted questions actually are.
I will not Ask Slashdot without trying Google first.
I will not Ask Slashdot without trying Google first.
I will not Ask Slashdot without trying Google first.
This particular Ask Slashdot has a dumbfoundingly obvious answer: most FOSS zealots try to convert users to FOSS software because they gut-wrenchingly hate and fundamentally mistrust businesses and want to do everything they can to stick it to businesses where it hurts.
On the other hand, most users don't care whether software is free (as in liberty) or not because they just copy whatever they want anyway, legally or not. Most users don't care whether software is open-source or not because most users are not programmers and have no interest in or need for source code. And most existing FOSS software today is more difficult to install/configure/maintain/use than commercial offerings.
So from the user's point of view, there's only one motivation to switch to FOSS software, and that's to get their obnoxious FOSS-touting acquaintances to shut the hell up. And as statistics suggest, this isn't enough of a reason to convince your average user to switch.
That is, unless you are a particularly hairy and foul-smelling breed of FOSS zealot and your victim is a reasonably good-looking young woman who would much prefer suffering through a difficult computing experience for the rest of her life over actually tolerating your incessant geek whining for yet another day.
Sounds fine and dandy, until you realize that the general population only thinks of "libre" as a style of body piercing through one's lower lip.
Bah - just accuse them of being gay or an atheist - the BSA will deal with them in no time.
No, you're thinking of the Republicans.