'Opponents of the proposed rules fear that, taken together, they ultimately could lead to a few powerful conglomerates controlling the flow of electronic information, from programming of television and radio news and entertainment to owning the pipes that connect people to the Internet.'
That's the way it already is, so what's the big deal? Anything that removes the totally nonsensical federal restriction that splits DSL providers in half (the physical line provider and the IP provider can't be the same company, can't share records, etc, and thus DSL is pure set up and customer service hell) would be a welcome change.
I don't need variety. I just need shit that works right end-to-end. If it takes a monopoly or an ogilopoly to pull that off, then so be it.
This is one of the problems with a business model that is based purely around the technical support of a product, rather than on the product itself.
The ideal business model (correct compromise between consumer needs/rights and corporate profit-making) would be to charge for packaged or subscription software -- enough to make profits -- but to also include the source code for the product, and to make all the tech support for it entirely free.
Then craft a license which states that the customer has the right to modify the source code for their own personal bugfixing and use, but that they cannot redistribute the full modified source or modified binaries (diffs are okay, for the sake of sharing improvements with people quickly). That way you (the company) reserve that right and can continue to make profits from it.
Someone needs to mod that up... that's the real reason music sales are down. The vast majority of new music (I would venture to say around 95% of it) is total shit, and nobody wants to buy it.
There IS good stuff out there, but it's not being picked up or promoted or advertised or played on the radio. You have to really hunt for it, and you're lucky if you can even find the stuff on CD anywhere.
Wrong! It depends on what works best for the largest majority of people. And WinXP's GUI has proven itself (over any other Linux desktop, or MacOS-X, for instance) a hundred million times over.
What this book totally neglects to mention is how awful all Linux distributions are at properly detecting and configuring hardware and settings, particularly when it comes to video cards and monitor refresh rates.
Until your average Joe can run through a distro's installer and end up with a beautiful X-Windows configuration that properly runs all the res modes and refresh rates of their grafx card and monitor, Linux as a desktop OS will never take off. Even the latest Gentoo release on my brother's GeForce 4 Ti and Hitachi 19" monitor absolutely refuses to understand that his video system is perfectly capable for 1280x1024@100Hz... instead, X-Windows will only let him do up to 1024x768@60Hz, and defaults to 640x480@60Hz. Absolutely pathetic for an OS that keeps claiming it is "easier to use".
The only way he has available to fix this is to use the clunky "xvidtune" program and take a 6-semester course in monitor timing formulas. What average user is going to do that? They won't. They'll say "fuck this, I'll use Windows".
You're completely right. This is just another example of the Linux community being completely out of touch with normal people.
It's obvious from the simple fact that there are a thousand and one ways to skin your desktop while there is still no simple, user-friendly way to quickly select correct resolutions and refresh rates for your monitor in X-Windows.
It's obvious from comments along the lines of, "Hey, we think this is so cool, so the whole world will love it and it will be the most popular thing ever!"
And it's painfully obvious when the community thinks fanatics like RMS or ESR make good PR spokesmen or that stunts like this get the attention of anyone outside the small community of Linux/"free software" fanatics that already exists.
In short, Linux is built by geeks, for geeks. It will never "take over the world" or beat out Microsoft or Windows because it will always be arcane, poorly documented, user-hostile, and difficult. It doesn't HAVE to be that way, but it WILL be, because of the attitudes and mindsets of most people in the community.
It's actually a real shame, because Linux has so much potential. But that potential will never be properly realized, at least not by any non-commercial developers. Obviously commercial distro makers are beginning to lead the community, with easier-to-use, more tolerable release such as Xandros, Lindows, or Lycoris.
If the Linux community spent half as much focus, energy, and time on improving the user experience of the whole GNU/Linux/KDE/Gnome system as it spends on stupid stunts like these, then maybe they would stand a chance. But the commercial developers are the only ones with focus and direction.
Amazing how money makes things happens.. I guess not everyone understood the failings of communism.
Get fluent with all of these and you'll be in high demand. These are the things that everyone knows are great ideas but don't allocate the time to learn. If you walk into a place already knowing these like the back of your hand, you'll be in demand.
The most important and timeless one is "debugging". Get REALLY GOOD at debugging and you will become a much more productive and respected employee. Be the guy who can sit down with basically any debugger and do things like pick function call parameters out of ASM-style register and stack dumps or figure out hairy multi-threading issues.
I work at Microsoft. Trust me when I say that NO person of any level of strategic importance at our company sends e-mails that are anywhere near as lowly as the unprofessional, butchered, pigeon-English "leaked memo" reported on The Register.
Even if you swallow for a second the incredible claim that this memo was real, the question is, "So what?" Yes, Microsoft is a competitive company. No, we don't like to lose contracts to competitors, regardless of who they are. No, there's nothing illegal or unethical about any of the measures described in the "memo" as suggested actions for Microsoft marketing folk to take.
Slashdot should rename itself for accuracy: "SlashDot - News for the Paranoid, Semi-True Stories Designed to Get your Dander"
The reason this utopian model hasn't become reality is simple.
Most people don't actively seek out music. They just passively soak up whatever music they are bombarded with on television or radio. That becomes the only music they are aware of, and so that's all they buy.
The Internet doesn't "bombard" you with music. You have to seek it out.
The best idea in net-based music promotion that I've seen was the now-discontinued "MSN Chat Radio" a year or two ago. Basically a little net radio stream featuring less well-known artists was always invoked upon entering a chat room, so you would be bombarded with music in a not-so-obnoxious way (meaning that you probably don't mind listening to music while you chat anyway, and it doesn't keep you or interrupt you from doing what you went there to do). It built *awareness* of new music in the minds of people who used those chat rooms. I'm not sure, however, why MSN quit doing it. It's quite possible they found it to not be directly profitable. It would be interesting to know why they stopped.
The SlashDot crowd is hardly representative of "average" people or "most" people. We're better educated, more strongly motivated, and less satisfied to swallow the status quo. We actively seek out alternatives and information. Sometimes we need to remember that 90% of people aren't like us. To appeal to them and help move something innovative into mainstream adoption, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of "average" people who constitute the majority of the population.
Back when your 11 year old WD drive was made, WD was one of the best brands available, but today's Western Digital drives have high failure rates.
It doesn't surprise me that you had a WD drive from way back when that lasted 11 years without failing. They used to make good stuff.
Western Digital went from making high-performance, high-reliability drives targeted at "elite" consumers to making high-performance, low-reliability drives targeted at "budget" consumers.
As for your being lucky: yes, it sounds like you are lucky. Even if you do your homework and buy brands that (at the time of your purchase) are known for reliability, you'll still get a bad apple now and then.
You're totally right. Until all GNU/Linux productivity apps can perfectly and transparently import and export all file formats from all Microsoft productivity apps, they simply won't be able to take hold in the marketplace.
Microsoft knows this, which is why it doesn't publish those formats and changes them--sometimes unnecessarily--to stay one step ahead with each product release.
One common argument for software piracy is that software costs too much. For example, what college student can afford $600 for PhotoShop? The common conclusion people reach is that if software were simply priced more reasonably, then more people would opt to legitimately purchase it than to pirate it.
There is actually a lot of truth to this line of thinking. If PhotoShop were offered at a more reasonable price ($50) to non-business consumers, Adobe would undoubtedly see piracy rates drop and sales improve. So then why do Adobe and other software companies stupidly refuse to establish this kind of offering?
From a producer's perspective, the idea of protecting a person's ability to be financially rewarded for their work is an ethical one. This is the motivation for capitalism. Capitalism favors producers.
From a consumer's perspective, the idea of allowing people to freely exchange the fruits of labor for the equal benefit of all is an ethical one. This is the motivation for communism. Communism favors consumers.
The problem is that these motivations and economic approaches radically conflict. In the USA we do not have a capitalistic economy, nor do we have a communistic (or socialistic) economy. In reality, what we have is a blend. And the fine balance between philosophies is constantly being adjusted in an effort to be as ethically fair as possible while also keeping the economy as healthy as possible.
Software companies are producers, and they (incorrectly) market their products under the assumption that they are operating within a purely captialistic economy. When businesses market to, sell to, and buy from other businesses, an elite high-powered sub-economy is formed which is pretty close to true capitalism. But the truth is that the "home consumer" market is an entirely different sub-economy which is a consumer-focused market closer along the spectrum to communism. The mistake large companies often make is to neglect this home-consumer sub-economy, or to incorrectly treat it as just part of a larger "capitalistic" economy.
Therefore Adobe offers PhotoShop at one price to everyone. The price is reasonable for players within the business sub-economy, but it is outlandish for people within the home-consumer sub-economy. Result? The home-consumer sub-economy pirates the hell out of it, because they need the product just as much as the businesses do but they can't afford the pricing the way that businesses can.
Re:Linux is a horrible, lost cause
on
Undelete In Linux
·
· Score: 0
all the things you want are not even part of the operating system, just GUI sugar.
Incorrect. In a properly designed OS, they are a central part of the OS.
Free Software is a wonderful concept. Too bad that in practice most Free Software is total shit.
GNU/Linux is the biggest offender. There's no overall design or architecture. It began as a piece-meal reimplementation of an already messy system design (UNIX), and evolved into an even worse house-of-cards hack job.
The Free Software community would be doing itself a HUGE favor if it would DUMP all the "GNU" and "POSIX/UNIX" aspects of Linux and instead rework the Linux kernal to be the center of a much more sensible operating system design.
Functionality such as undelete/trash can, a centralized way to install and remove programs, a centralized place (and format) for storing configuration settings, a single (and consistent) GUI in which all apps play nicely together and utilize the same exact widgets/style/etc, should all be fundamental aspects of the system's design from the start, rather than being attempted as hack jobs on top of an already sloppy system.
In other words, no amount of makeup or plastic surgery can ever make Janet Reno beautiful. If you want to win the beauty contest, you have to start out with the real deal.
A product will practically market itself if it meets three criteria:
It's something people actually need
It's actually of good quality
It's priced reasonably
Assuming your product meets these, you only need to do two things:
Make the product easy for people to obtain. For software, sell it via a fast, reliable web site that accepts credit cards and offers immediate download upon purchase.
Happy users are the best marketing, and all you can really do is try to facilitate that. Provide a forum of communication for users and potential new users. Web-based discussion forums are a great way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
'Opponents of the proposed rules fear that, taken together, they ultimately could lead to a few powerful conglomerates controlling the flow of electronic information, from programming of television and radio news and entertainment to owning the pipes that connect people to the Internet.'
That's the way it already is, so what's the big deal? Anything that removes the totally nonsensical federal restriction that splits DSL providers in half (the physical line provider and the IP provider can't be the same company, can't share records, etc, and thus DSL is pure set up and customer service hell) would be a welcome change.
I don't need variety. I just need shit that works right end-to-end. If it takes a monopoly or an ogilopoly to pull that off, then so be it.
This is one of the problems with a business model that is based purely around the technical support of a product, rather than on the product itself.
The ideal business model (correct compromise between consumer needs/rights and corporate profit-making) would be to charge for packaged or subscription software -- enough to make profits -- but to also include the source code for the product, and to make all the tech support for it entirely free.
Then craft a license which states that the customer has the right to modify the source code for their own personal bugfixing and use, but that they cannot redistribute the full modified source or modified binaries (diffs are okay, for the sake of sharing improvements with people quickly). That way you (the company) reserve that right and can continue to make profits from it.
Someone needs to mod that up... that's the real reason music sales are down. The vast majority of new music (I would venture to say around 95% of it) is total shit, and nobody wants to buy it.
There IS good stuff out there, but it's not being picked up or promoted or advertised or played on the radio. You have to really hunt for it, and you're lucky if you can even find the stuff on CD anywhere.
Depends what you like, I suppose ;)
Wrong! It depends on what works best for the largest majority of people. And WinXP's GUI has proven itself (over any other Linux desktop, or MacOS-X, for instance) a hundred million times over.
It got modded up because it's NOT obvious by the list of toolkits. Not all of us are familiar with all these toolkits. Some of us actually have lives.
What this book totally neglects to mention is how awful all Linux distributions are at properly detecting and configuring hardware and settings, particularly when it comes to video cards and monitor refresh rates.
Until your average Joe can run through a distro's installer and end up with a beautiful X-Windows configuration that properly runs all the res modes and refresh rates of their grafx card and monitor, Linux as a desktop OS will never take off. Even the latest Gentoo release on my brother's GeForce 4 Ti and Hitachi 19" monitor absolutely refuses to understand that his video system is perfectly capable for 1280x1024@100Hz... instead, X-Windows will only let him do up to 1024x768@60Hz, and defaults to 640x480@60Hz. Absolutely pathetic for an OS that keeps claiming it is "easier to use".
The only way he has available to fix this is to use the clunky "xvidtune" program and take a 6-semester course in monitor timing formulas. What average user is going to do that? They won't. They'll say "fuck this, I'll use Windows".
You're completely right. This is just another example of the Linux community being completely out of touch with normal people.
It's obvious from the simple fact that there are a thousand and one ways to skin your desktop while there is still no simple, user-friendly way to quickly select correct resolutions and refresh rates for your monitor in X-Windows.
It's obvious from comments along the lines of, "Hey, we think this is so cool, so the whole world will love it and it will be the most popular thing ever!"
And it's painfully obvious when the community thinks fanatics like RMS or ESR make good PR spokesmen or that stunts like this get the attention of anyone outside the small community of Linux/"free software" fanatics that already exists.
In short, Linux is built by geeks, for geeks. It will never "take over the world" or beat out Microsoft or Windows because it will always be arcane, poorly documented, user-hostile, and difficult. It doesn't HAVE to be that way, but it WILL be, because of the attitudes and mindsets of most people in the community.
It's actually a real shame, because Linux has so much potential. But that potential will never be properly realized, at least not by any non-commercial developers. Obviously commercial distro makers are beginning to lead the community, with easier-to-use, more tolerable release such as Xandros, Lindows, or Lycoris.
If the Linux community spent half as much focus, energy, and time on improving the user experience of the whole GNU/Linux/KDE/Gnome system as it spends on stupid stunts like these, then maybe they would stand a chance. But the commercial developers are the only ones with focus and direction.
Amazing how money makes things happens.. I guess not everyone understood the failings of communism.
Get fluent with all of these and you'll be in high demand. These are the things that everyone knows are great ideas but don't allocate the time to learn. If you walk into a place already knowing these like the back of your hand, you'll be in demand.
The most important and timeless one is "debugging". Get REALLY GOOD at debugging and you will become a much more productive and respected employee. Be the guy who can sit down with basically any debugger and do things like pick function call parameters out of ASM-style register and stack dumps or figure out hairy multi-threading issues.
Anyone else a bulging pocketed geek-scout?
Um... if they were, do you think they would tell you? Pervert!
I work at Microsoft. Trust me when I say that NO person of any level of strategic importance at our company sends e-mails that are anywhere near as lowly as the unprofessional, butchered, pigeon-English "leaked memo" reported on The Register.
Even if you swallow for a second the incredible claim that this memo was real, the question is, "So what?" Yes, Microsoft is a competitive company. No, we don't like to lose contracts to competitors, regardless of who they are. No, there's nothing illegal or unethical about any of the measures described in the "memo" as suggested actions for Microsoft marketing folk to take.
Slashdot should rename itself for accuracy: "SlashDot - News for the Paranoid, Semi-True Stories Designed to Get your Dander"
The reason this utopian model hasn't become reality is simple.
Most people don't actively seek out music. They just passively soak up whatever music they are bombarded with on television or radio. That becomes the only music they are aware of, and so that's all they buy.
The Internet doesn't "bombard" you with music. You have to seek it out.
The best idea in net-based music promotion that I've seen was the now-discontinued "MSN Chat Radio" a year or two ago. Basically a little net radio stream featuring less well-known artists was always invoked upon entering a chat room, so you would be bombarded with music in a not-so-obnoxious way (meaning that you probably don't mind listening to music while you chat anyway, and it doesn't keep you or interrupt you from doing what you went there to do). It built *awareness* of new music in the minds of people who used those chat rooms. I'm not sure, however, why MSN quit doing it. It's quite possible they found it to not be directly profitable. It would be interesting to know why they stopped.
The SlashDot crowd is hardly representative of "average" people or "most" people. We're better educated, more strongly motivated, and less satisfied to swallow the status quo. We actively seek out alternatives and information. Sometimes we need to remember that 90% of people aren't like us. To appeal to them and help move something innovative into mainstream adoption, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of "average" people who constitute the majority of the population.
Yes, obviously it was just a troll. That's why I posted using my user account, whereas you posted as an AC.
:-)
Good going
Back when your 11 year old WD drive was made, WD was one of the best brands available, but today's Western Digital drives have high failure rates.
It doesn't surprise me that you had a WD drive from way back when that lasted 11 years without failing. They used to make good stuff.
Western Digital went from making high-performance, high-reliability drives targeted at "elite" consumers to making high-performance, low-reliability drives targeted at "budget" consumers.
As for your being lucky: yes, it sounds like you are lucky. Even if you do your homework and buy brands that (at the time of your purchase) are known for reliability, you'll still get a bad apple now and then.
You're totally right. Until all GNU/Linux productivity apps can perfectly and transparently import and export all file formats from all Microsoft productivity apps, they simply won't be able to take hold in the marketplace.
Microsoft knows this, which is why it doesn't publish those formats and changes them--sometimes unnecessarily--to stay one step ahead with each product release.
You're simply wrong. Western Digital drives have a terribly high failure rate compared to Maxtor drives, for instance.
One common argument for software piracy is that software costs too much. For example, what college student can afford $600 for PhotoShop? The common conclusion people reach is that if software were simply priced more reasonably, then more people would opt to legitimately purchase it than to pirate it.
There is actually a lot of truth to this line of thinking. If PhotoShop were offered at a more reasonable price ($50) to non-business consumers, Adobe would undoubtedly see piracy rates drop and sales improve. So then why do Adobe and other software companies stupidly refuse to establish this kind of offering?
From a producer's perspective, the idea of protecting a person's ability to be financially rewarded for their work is an ethical one. This is the motivation for capitalism. Capitalism favors producers.
From a consumer's perspective, the idea of allowing people to freely exchange the fruits of labor for the equal benefit of all is an ethical one. This is the motivation for communism. Communism favors consumers.
The problem is that these motivations and economic approaches radically conflict. In the USA we do not have a capitalistic economy, nor do we have a communistic (or socialistic) economy. In reality, what we have is a blend. And the fine balance between philosophies is constantly being adjusted in an effort to be as ethically fair as possible while also keeping the economy as healthy as possible.
Software companies are producers, and they (incorrectly) market their products under the assumption that they are operating within a purely captialistic economy. When businesses market to, sell to, and buy from other businesses, an elite high-powered sub-economy is formed which is pretty close to true capitalism. But the truth is that the "home consumer" market is an entirely different sub-economy which is a consumer-focused market closer along the spectrum to communism. The mistake large companies often make is to neglect this home-consumer sub-economy, or to incorrectly treat it as just part of a larger "capitalistic" economy.
Therefore Adobe offers PhotoShop at one price to everyone. The price is reasonable for players within the business sub-economy, but it is outlandish for people within the home-consumer sub-economy. Result? The home-consumer sub-economy pirates the hell out of it, because they need the product just as much as the businesses do but they can't afford the pricing the way that businesses can.
all the things you want are not even part of the operating system, just GUI sugar.
Incorrect. In a properly designed OS, they are a central part of the OS.
cyclops asks: "I have been contemplating about going for LASIK surgery...
Am I the only one who finds humor in the fact that a guy named cyclops is doing the asking here?
Free Software is a wonderful concept. Too bad that in practice most Free Software is total shit.
GNU/Linux is the biggest offender. There's no overall design or architecture. It began as a piece-meal reimplementation of an already messy system design (UNIX), and evolved into an even worse house-of-cards hack job.
The Free Software community would be doing itself a HUGE favor if it would DUMP all the "GNU" and "POSIX/UNIX" aspects of Linux and instead rework the Linux kernal to be the center of a much more sensible operating system design.
Functionality such as undelete/trash can, a centralized way to install and remove programs, a centralized place (and format) for storing configuration settings, a single (and consistent) GUI in which all apps play nicely together and utilize the same exact widgets/style/etc, should all be fundamental aspects of the system's design from the start, rather than being attempted as hack jobs on top of an already sloppy system.
In other words, no amount of makeup or plastic surgery can ever make Janet Reno beautiful. If you want to win the beauty contest, you have to start out with the real deal.
Is this wrong? Or do those with power get to do whatever they want?
Both! It's wrong, AND those with power get to do whatever they want!
A product will practically market itself if it meets three criteria:
Assuming your product meets these, you only need to do two things: