That is it, in a nutshell. There are multiple layers and flavors, but the heart of the matter is an over-familiarity with the computer or the problem, or both.
That is also why a good designer (or Software Architect, if you prefer) is neccessary. The lone coder working late at night munching burritos is not likely to fulfill that requirement ("not likely", I say, not "impossible").
I'll admit I engaged in a bit of exaggeration and satire to make my point. But that should be obvious, so I'll not apologize.
Believe me, we want to make it easy for the user. The easier the software is to use, the happier people will be with it, the better it will sell, the less you'll have to go back and rework interface elements.
I'm sure you and I believe that to be true, but the evidence seems to demostrate the opposite: we try to make easy software, but we continuously fail. It is perhaps because, as Alan Cooper said in his book, programmers make rotten designers for end-users. We see things differently and in different ways than the average user.
That's generally as it should be... if I'm working on a handy little Unix utility, I generally shouldn't bother to slap a GUI around it and design a nice icon; what my users are going to want is a solid set of (long and short) commandline options, a useful configuration file, and the ability to pass in data on stdin.
And that is good design--for an experience Unix user. It is standardized and ubiquitous. It is exactly the same as, say, the MacOS desktop, only implemented differently. If you use GNU tools you know that "--help" will give you a list of commandline options. You know that "man foo" will bring up the manual page for foo. I have no issue with this.
I do have an issue when you expand that into the ordinary computer user's world. They don't have the years of Unix background to rely on for experience, they don't know where to start. All they want to do is write a letter/balance their checkbook/look at porn. The Unix way is more complicated than what they need.
A good designer will say "let's do this and this to make it so Joe Average can use this program". A programmer says, as evidenced by the posts in this thread "Joe Average just needs to learn how to do it the Unix Way. If he can't, well, I guess he's just stupid".
People who learn the keyboard shortcuts for their apps do generally have far better performance.
Often stated, but wrong. Sorry, but the stopwatch doesn't lie. And it doesn't even take into account the lost time when somebody "rm's" the wrong directory or file or group of files.
The flipside is that advanced users tend to recommend applications that have very powerful interfaces, which newer users tend to have trouble with because they're so highly optimized: vim, emacs, Excel, Photoshop, ksh...
If somebody wants to look at their digital photos, I'll recommend Picture Viewer. If they want to resize, rotate, perhaps adjust colors, I'll recommend PhotoDeluxe or something similar. If they want to do pre-press work, or some other complex and complicated work, I'll recommend Photoshop.
In addition, what people recommend is a poor standard for quality. People recommend what they know: if you ask a construction worker what kind of drill to get, he'll recommend the Hole-Hog. If the guy asking for the recommendation is just trying to put up a shelf in his den, he's going to be sorely surprised when this highly recommended Hole-Hog punches right through the entire wall instantly, and will probably wish he had just gone to Wal-Mart and bought the $20 Black and Decker.
If this were done during the construction of a house, you would have spaghetti for plumbing, electrical wiring that wouldn't pass inspection, and it would probably float in the air by magic
Don't compare programming to construction. They are so similar, yet implemented so differently it's a shame. There are long lists of rules and codes by which construction has to do things. Are some of these things the "best" way? Probably not, but it is the accepted way and is therefore ubiquitous. Due to this, advances in construction techniques happen slowly, and usually come about through improved tools rather than new rules or codes.
However, in the programming world, nothing is standardized. There are approximately 8 bajillion ways to encode the alphabet. There are a dozen different libraries to display a bitmap image. There are 18 different widget sets in X to accomplish the same thing, and two major toolkits for writing software for Unix.
Advances happen often and create whole new directions to take programming, but these advances happen in the basic rules and codes while the programmer use the same old vi,gcc,gdb from the 19th century.
Computer nerds are poor designers, because they have a skewed outlook of what a computer can and should do. A nerd looks at a computer and sees a box filled with limitations. A nerd sees a computer as a natural extension of his hands and head. A user is 180 out of phase: they see a computer as a magick box with an obtuse and difficult operating mechanism.
Don't fool yourself. You wouldn't let a bridge be designed by Joe Average, now would you? Coding's at least as complex
I wouldn't let a programmer build a bridge either: they'd invent a new method of smelting ore and an entirely new branch of mathematics to build it, it would cost 3 times as much as was estimated, and would be 10 years late in construction. And, after it was built, it would fall into the river and the programmers would blame Microsoft.
I know how complex programming is. I also know that "but it's so haaaard!" is a pretty lame excuse for not doing it right. Programmers, by and large, do not do it right when it comes to design. They are great implementers, but poor designers, because they end up solving the wrong problems.
Perhaps I'm unclear when I say "design"--I don't mean how the inner workings of a computer program passes bits around. That's not design. Designing comes long before fingers touch keyboards. It's where real designers decide what problem the program should solve and how the user will interact with the program. After this has been designed, then the programmers implement this set of specifications. I'm not talking about those designers who put a pretty picture on a CD-player program: I'm talking about real designers that work just as hard as programmers do to design, test, lather, repeat as neccessary to create a good, usable program.
First, I'm not defending the click-drag-drop so much as attacking the exposing of a computer's guts and forcing the user to accept the computer on the computer's terms rather than on their own terms.
Second, imagine if the checkout cashiers at your grocery store had to manually type out the price of each item. They don't anymore, because somebody saw that the process could be done more quickly, with fewer errors, if they just passed the item over a barcode reader.
Your example is closer to an argument in my favor--the command-line is like punching in the price manually, the proper UI (which is not neccessarily a GUI) is like the barcode reader.
A command-line is a good interface for a nerd. It is *most likely not* the best interface for somebody else. However, the CLI (or the GUI equivalent, which is what KDE/Gnome/Windows is) is what is forced on the non-nerd population.
A motorbike is incapable of hiding such information, because if it needs oil, it cannot magically produce it.
A computer, however--especially these fancy new ones you kids have today, with your gigahertzes and quarter-gig of RAM--is capable of hiding such things as the hard drive, the RAM, the directory structure... anything! All it requires is a bit (or a lot) of code written one time, and it can be running on millions of computers virtually for free. And, I might add, with no human intervention.
"But a computer needs maintenance too!" you cry. Yes, you are right. And, the computer can perform that maintenance all by itself as well. Virus scanning, defragmentation... all these things can happen without the user even knowing about it.
However, computers are not programmed that way. It's hard and complex, and programmers are fundamentally lazy, so they dump these decisions off onto an unprepared user.
I'll throw your analogy back at you: imagine if when you bought your motorbike it came in a big box, in pieces, and you had to put it together yourself with inadequate tools.
Imagine if when you turned the handle bars to the right to make a turn, a big window popped up that said "Turn right. Are you sure? [Yes] [No]", and refused to turn the wheel until you made your decision.
Since *I* don't have any problem with a complex machine, *EVERYBODY* else should find it easy as well. If they don't, they're just Lusers who need to get a life. Basically, they suck. I'm superior to them.
See, when I was in high school, I got teased and beat up a lot, and now that I'm in control of the machines that those lusers have to use everyday, I work *hard* to make them complex and unusable for their work (so I can make fun of how stupid they are and get back at them for those terrible years in high school), while I make it good for me and the things that I do.
This is classic nerd thinking. Alan Cooper wrote a whole book about how letting computer nerds design computer programs is wrong and stupid. The parent comment lends a lot of weight to his argument.
You're right. What we need at NASA is a grown-up Trekkie with a fire in his belly to put us on Mars in 10 years and taking day-trips to Venus in 15. Somebody who will do nothing but talk about space and space exploration, damn the cost.
You'd better be more careful in showing so much scorn, or I might figure out how many starving children the failed Climate Orbiter could have fed if those wonderful engineers of yours had excercised some form of due diligence (oooh.. a dirty, nasty accounting-type term...)
And produce the whole thing for say 10,000. Id buy one and it's doable, but unfortunatly we will never see it in our lifetime.
You'd be one of the very, very few.
While logically, it is cheaper to buy all this stuff at once and garner a cost savings through integration, it will never happen, because while the long term cost is less, the short term cost is so damn high.
If you can get this down to $1000, now you're talking. Until then, however, it's just mental masturbation.
Give the public what it wants! An all-in-one, big-screen home entertainment personal flying device!
If there was a device that had a 35" screen, a 10 terrabyte RAM cache, a 9 gigahertz processor, a jet-pack, and could fit in a purse or wallet, everybody and his brother would want one!
I don't think this product is too far-fetched, if you take into account Moore's Law and magick pixie dust. I know of alchemists who are working on this right now.
It is still more complicated, and more expensive to re-distribute an analogue work than a digital one. Photocopying a book takes MUCH longer and is more expensive than burning a copy of a CD.
The issue isn't so much Fair Use. If everybody were *just* burning copies for themselves, I honestly think the RIAA, et. al. wouldn't have so much of their collective underwear in a knot. However, the practice of rampant piracy (delude yourself all you want, but KaZaA/Morpheus/Gnutella is primarily about getting free music and software) has them scared, and they want to defend their possessions.
Understand, I'm not passing judgement here, just observing--they have a legitimate fear: losing the ability to sell music and make a profit. Whether they actually would or would not make a profit in the future is not the issue: they can't bet their livlihoods on a "maybe".
The issue isn't increased wealth at all--at least, I don't think it is. They don't want their current level of revenues to decrease, which they are afraid of happening in the future when everybody has an OC-12 to their apartment. If you choose to denigrate them for not wanting to lose revenues, I respectfully ask you to go to your boss *right now* and ask for a pay cut.
Finally, if you're so confident in human goodness, quit your job and live on the street. Try to live solely off human goodness for a while, then come back and tell me how much of it there is. Or, for an easier metric, try to estimate the percentage of legal to illegal data gets passed around on the various P2P systems. Fair use *might* apply in the case of sharing an albumn with a close friend or family member, but it really doesn't apply to l0rdDoVVnl0d4r@KaZaA.com, whom you've never met (and probably wouldn't want to meet either).
FameSeeker writes: "Our upstart ego-stroking site, CleverFuckingDiphthong, has just posted a new story by some reasonably famous guy. The story, You can't see it anyway, is a detailed account of that semi-celebrity's navel-gazing. If you've ever read his I'm a Lame Idiot, and I Know It columns in the West Undershirt Times or his oft linked San Jose Mercury-News piece about gaming after Sept. 11 (no link, it's been linked to oft, you see), you know that Mr. Semi-famous takes a very personal approach to the exeperience [too much trouble to spell check] of autofellatio."
Here we have something as fundamental as a computer operating system designed around an idea that destroys rights we've otherwise enjoyed for literally hundreds of years - for nothing more than to line the pockets of people who are already famously rich.
I dislike this attitude, for many reasons.
1) Perhaps they are famously rich. So? Are they suddenly less-worthy as citizens, or as humans, if they are?
2) In the past, it was more difficult to distribute copies of a work. Some that weren't difficult (like audio tapes) had a built-in failsafe: after enough copies, the media wore out, or the quality degenerated after so many generations. Thus, the originators of the work sold more "genuine" copies, and became famously rich. If you take away the ability of the originators to become "famously rich"--or at least generate some money--they have no incentive to produce work outside of the goodness of their hearts.
3) Human goodness is remarkably scarce and short-lived when found. I don't care to depend on it too much.
Don't misunderstand, this is not to say that DRM isn't onerous: I only want to point out that the relative wealth of one of the parties is *NOT* a factor in the decision-making.
Good luck convincing IT to do an honest cost analysis. The collective IT folk use Microsoft software to feather their own nests.
Why go with Unix (where one $125,000/year guy runs 80 machines) or Mac (where each workstation is pretty much administered by the person using it), when you can run a Little Empire with 10-20 $40,000/year MCSEs keeping 100 stations and 10 servers up by ctrl-alt-del'ing every 54 days or so.
Since when is anybody's Perl code legible? And besides, CT is *certainly* not the best judge of legibility... hell, he thinks Duckpins is funny...
Re:applicability of Nobel Prizes in the modern wor
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Nobel Prizes Awarded
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Since the UN played a major role in the Vietnam conflict and the Korean war, not to mention Kosovo, Yugoslavia in general, and at least a finger in every conflict since the 1950s, I'm unsure as to how you derive "less war" from the benefits.
It's academic because the UN is a poorly thought-out idea, a poorly run implementation of said idea, and a generally terrible concept to begin with. We're lucky as hell that it hasn't been more successful than it is now.
Re:applicability of Nobel Prizes in the modern wor
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Nobel Prizes Awarded
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That's easy--the WORLD gets the US'S DOLLARS.
What does the US get out of that deal, other than a "warm fuzzy" for shovelling out piles of tax money?
Re:applicability of Nobel Prizes in the modern wor
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Nobel Prizes Awarded
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· Score: 1, Troll
The only awards that I can inequivocably agree with are the literature and peace awards. The United Nations has done a lot of good work, and it is a shame that the American government is blind to the advantages of supporting it completely.
I'd like to hear about the good work the UN has done. It seems to me that they have been involved in enough boondoggles that their win-lose percentage can't be greater than 50%--a number easily reachable by a blind rhesus monkey throwing darts at a "Yes/No" decision board.
While you're helping me out here, I'd like to hear some of the advantages America would gain from supporting the UN.
Here's the problem in a nutshell, right there. "clueless masses"... they're only "clueless" because they don't understand the computer as well as you do, though they probably severely outclass you on other knowledge (history, or art, or automobile mechanics, or any one or more of a million other things). Does your lack of knowledge about 16th century French Realist poetry make you "clueless" as well?
This elitist attitude shows up again and again with advanced computer users and programmers--usually from people who should know better, like some of the wizard programmers I know who will try to plug an ISA card in a PCI slot: they may do fantastic software, but they're "idiots" when it comes to hardware. Are these guys "clueless"?
I'm sorry, but this attitude really needs to be adjusted. It's the difference between: Scenario A:
User -- "I saved this file, but now I can't find it! Is it gone?"
Programmer -- "You dummy! Hit Control-F and look for it!" sotto voce "Stupid lusers!"
Scenario B:
User -- "I saved this file, but now I can't find it! Is it gone?"
Programmer -- "Well, probably not. It probably got saved in an odd location. Hmm, this seems to happen a lot, I get a lot of complaints about this. Perhaps I should re-think this whole heirarchal filesystem, and instead think about how to use this powerful computer with scads of RAM to keep track of things like this in a relational database so you can arbitrarily organize files by date, project, or manager rather than the physical location on a spinning magnetic platter you probably have never seen."
The big problem with this is that perception is individualistic. Similar to how "golden ears" can perceive compression artifacts in MP3, "golden eyes" can perceive artifacts in compressed video.
For example, DVD compression drives me into a blind rage everytime I see those fat pixels in the shadows of dramatically lit masterpieces, I have to supress an urge to go on a murderous rampage across the desks of hundreds of idiots who thought that MPEG-2 would be "good enough".
Now, I am forced to rent a DVD before I'll consent to purchase it, just to see if I'm going to be irritated by compression artifacts. I'm not gonna blow some $20 on a screwed up compression job.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to be fair, there aren't many Al Qaeda members with red hair and freckles who speak in an Irish brogue.
When you're looking for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, you don't go looking in the VFW hall or round up the Penn State synchronized swimming team.
That is it, in a nutshell. There are multiple layers and flavors, but the heart of the matter is an over-familiarity with the computer or the problem, or both.
That is also why a good designer (or Software Architect, if you prefer) is neccessary. The lone coder working late at night munching burritos is not likely to fulfill that requirement ("not likely", I say, not "impossible").
I'll admit I engaged in a bit of exaggeration and satire to make my point. But that should be obvious, so I'll not apologize.
Believe me, we want to make it easy for the user. The easier the software is to use, the happier people will be with it, the better it will sell, the less you'll have to go back and rework interface elements.
I'm sure you and I believe that to be true, but the evidence seems to demostrate the opposite: we try to make easy software, but we continuously fail. It is perhaps because, as Alan Cooper said in his book, programmers make rotten designers for end-users. We see things differently and in different ways than the average user.
That's generally as it should be... if I'm working on a handy little Unix utility, I generally shouldn't bother to slap a GUI around it and design a nice icon; what my users are going to want is a solid set of (long and short) commandline options, a useful configuration file, and the ability to pass in data on stdin.
And that is good design--for an experience Unix user. It is standardized and ubiquitous. It is exactly the same as, say, the MacOS desktop, only implemented differently. If you use GNU tools you know that "--help" will give you a list of commandline options. You know that "man foo" will bring up the manual page for foo. I have no issue with this.
I do have an issue when you expand that into the ordinary computer user's world. They don't have the years of Unix background to rely on for experience, they don't know where to start. All they want to do is write a letter/balance their checkbook/look at porn. The Unix way is more complicated than what they need.
A good designer will say "let's do this and this to make it so Joe Average can use this program". A programmer says, as evidenced by the posts in this thread "Joe Average just needs to learn how to do it the Unix Way. If he can't, well, I guess he's just stupid".
People who learn the keyboard shortcuts for their apps do generally have far better performance.
Often stated, but wrong. Sorry, but the stopwatch doesn't lie. And it doesn't even take into account the lost time when somebody "rm's" the wrong directory or file or group of files.
The flipside is that advanced users tend to recommend applications that have very powerful interfaces, which newer users tend to have trouble with because they're so highly optimized: vim, emacs, Excel, Photoshop, ksh...
If somebody wants to look at their digital photos, I'll recommend Picture Viewer. If they want to resize, rotate, perhaps adjust colors, I'll recommend PhotoDeluxe or something similar. If they want to do pre-press work, or some other complex and complicated work, I'll recommend Photoshop.
In addition, what people recommend is a poor standard for quality. People recommend what they know: if you ask a construction worker what kind of drill to get, he'll recommend the Hole-Hog. If the guy asking for the recommendation is just trying to put up a shelf in his den, he's going to be sorely surprised when this highly recommended Hole-Hog punches right through the entire wall instantly, and will probably wish he had just gone to Wal-Mart and bought the $20 Black and Decker.
Don't compare programming to construction. They are so similar, yet implemented so differently it's a shame. There are long lists of rules and codes by which construction has to do things. Are some of these things the "best" way? Probably not, but it is the accepted way and is therefore ubiquitous. Due to this, advances in construction techniques happen slowly, and usually come about through improved tools rather than new rules or codes.
However, in the programming world, nothing is standardized. There are approximately 8 bajillion ways to encode the alphabet. There are a dozen different libraries to display a bitmap image. There are 18 different widget sets in X to accomplish the same thing, and two major toolkits for writing software for Unix.
Advances happen often and create whole new directions to take programming, but these advances happen in the basic rules and codes while the programmer use the same old vi,gcc,gdb from the 19th century.
Computer nerds are poor designers, because they have a skewed outlook of what a computer can and should do. A nerd looks at a computer and sees a box filled with limitations. A nerd sees a computer as a natural extension of his hands and head. A user is 180 out of phase: they see a computer as a magick box with an obtuse and difficult operating mechanism.
Don't fool yourself. You wouldn't let a bridge be designed by Joe Average, now would you? Coding's at least as complex
I wouldn't let a programmer build a bridge either: they'd invent a new method of smelting ore and an entirely new branch of mathematics to build it, it would cost 3 times as much as was estimated, and would be 10 years late in construction. And, after it was built, it would fall into the river and the programmers would blame Microsoft.
I know how complex programming is. I also know that "but it's so haaaard!" is a pretty lame excuse for not doing it right. Programmers, by and large, do not do it right when it comes to design. They are great implementers, but poor designers, because they end up solving the wrong problems.
Perhaps I'm unclear when I say "design"--I don't mean how the inner workings of a computer program passes bits around. That's not design. Designing comes long before fingers touch keyboards. It's where real designers decide what problem the program should solve and how the user will interact with the program. After this has been designed, then the programmers implement this set of specifications. I'm not talking about those designers who put a pretty picture on a CD-player program: I'm talking about real designers that work just as hard as programmers do to design, test, lather, repeat as neccessary to create a good, usable program.
First, I'm not defending the click-drag-drop so much as attacking the exposing of a computer's guts and forcing the user to accept the computer on the computer's terms rather than on their own terms.
Second, imagine if the checkout cashiers at your grocery store had to manually type out the price of each item. They don't anymore, because somebody saw that the process could be done more quickly, with fewer errors, if they just passed the item over a barcode reader.
Your example is closer to an argument in my favor--the command-line is like punching in the price manually, the proper UI (which is not neccessarily a GUI) is like the barcode reader.
A command-line is a good interface for a nerd. It is *most likely not* the best interface for somebody else. However, the CLI (or the GUI equivalent, which is what KDE/Gnome/Windows is) is what is forced on the non-nerd population.
Apple....Orange
A motorbike is incapable of hiding such information, because if it needs oil, it cannot magically produce it.
A computer, however--especially these fancy new ones you kids have today, with your gigahertzes and quarter-gig of RAM--is capable of hiding such things as the hard drive, the RAM, the directory structure... anything! All it requires is a bit (or a lot) of code written one time, and it can be running on millions of computers virtually for free. And, I might add, with no human intervention.
"But a computer needs maintenance too!" you cry. Yes, you are right. And, the computer can perform that maintenance all by itself as well. Virus scanning, defragmentation... all these things can happen without the user even knowing about it.
However, computers are not programmed that way. It's hard and complex, and programmers are fundamentally lazy, so they dump these decisions off onto an unprepared user.
I'll throw your analogy back at you: imagine if when you bought your motorbike it came in a big box, in pieces, and you had to put it together yourself with inadequate tools.
Imagine if when you turned the handle bars to the right to make a turn, a big window popped up that said "Turn right. Are you sure? [Yes] [No]", and refused to turn the wheel until you made your decision.
Since *I* don't have any problem with a complex machine, *EVERYBODY* else should find it easy as well. If they don't, they're just Lusers who need to get a life. Basically, they suck. I'm superior to them.
See, when I was in high school, I got teased and beat up a lot, and now that I'm in control of the machines that those lusers have to use everyday, I work *hard* to make them complex and unusable for their work (so I can make fun of how stupid they are and get back at them for those terrible years in high school), while I make it good for me and the things that I do.
This is classic nerd thinking. Alan Cooper wrote a whole book about how letting computer nerds design computer programs is wrong and stupid. The parent comment lends a lot of weight to his argument.
You're right. What we need at NASA is a grown-up Trekkie with a fire in his belly to put us on Mars in 10 years and taking day-trips to Venus in 15. Somebody who will do nothing but talk about space and space exploration, damn the cost.
You'd better be more careful in showing so much scorn, or I might figure out how many starving children the failed Climate Orbiter could have fed if those wonderful engineers of yours had excercised some form of due diligence (oooh.. a dirty, nasty accounting-type term...)
You'd be one of the very, very few.
While logically, it is cheaper to buy all this stuff at once and garner a cost savings through integration, it will never happen, because while the long term cost is less, the short term cost is so damn high.
If you can get this down to $1000, now you're talking. Until then, however, it's just mental masturbation.
Give the public what it wants! An all-in-one, big-screen home entertainment personal flying device!
If there was a device that had a 35" screen, a 10 terrabyte RAM cache, a 9 gigahertz processor, a jet-pack, and could fit in a purse or wallet, everybody and his brother would want one!
I don't think this product is too far-fetched, if you take into account Moore's Law and magick pixie dust. I know of alchemists who are working on this right now.
It is still more complicated, and more expensive to re-distribute an analogue work than a digital one. Photocopying a book takes MUCH longer and is more expensive than burning a copy of a CD.
The issue isn't so much Fair Use. If everybody were *just* burning copies for themselves, I honestly think the RIAA, et. al. wouldn't have so much of their collective underwear in a knot. However, the practice of rampant piracy (delude yourself all you want, but KaZaA/Morpheus/Gnutella is primarily about getting free music and software) has them scared, and they want to defend their possessions.
Understand, I'm not passing judgement here, just observing--they have a legitimate fear: losing the ability to sell music and make a profit. Whether they actually would or would not make a profit in the future is not the issue: they can't bet their livlihoods on a "maybe".
The issue isn't increased wealth at all--at least, I don't think it is. They don't want their current level of revenues to decrease, which they are afraid of happening in the future when everybody has an OC-12 to their apartment. If you choose to denigrate them for not wanting to lose revenues, I respectfully ask you to go to your boss *right now* and ask for a pay cut.
Finally, if you're so confident in human goodness, quit your job and live on the street. Try to live solely off human goodness for a while, then come back and tell me how much of it there is. Or, for an easier metric, try to estimate the percentage of legal to illegal data gets passed around on the various P2P systems. Fair use *might* apply in the case of sharing an albumn with a close friend or family member, but it really doesn't apply to l0rdDoVVnl0d4r@KaZaA.com, whom you've never met (and probably wouldn't want to meet either).
So, in your mind, if you think it's stupid and lame, it is stupid and lame for everybody?
Applying your logic, if DRM is good for the RIAA, then it is good for everybody. What's your complaint?
Gah...
I dislike this attitude, for many reasons.
1) Perhaps they are famously rich. So? Are they suddenly less-worthy as citizens, or as humans, if they are?
2) In the past, it was more difficult to distribute copies of a work. Some that weren't difficult (like audio tapes) had a built-in failsafe: after enough copies, the media wore out, or the quality degenerated after so many generations. Thus, the originators of the work sold more "genuine" copies, and became famously rich. If you take away the ability of the originators to become "famously rich"--or at least generate some money--they have no incentive to produce work outside of the goodness of their hearts.
3) Human goodness is remarkably scarce and short-lived when found. I don't care to depend on it too much.
Don't misunderstand, this is not to say that DRM isn't onerous: I only want to point out that the relative wealth of one of the parties is *NOT* a factor in the decision-making.
Or, at least, it *shouldn't* be.
Too bad -- you prolly got better news from BBC S/W than from whatever reconstituted pap you'll get over satellite. tho, NPR isn't bad.
Good luck convincing IT to do an honest cost analysis. The collective IT folk use Microsoft software to feather their own nests.
Why go with Unix (where one $125,000/year guy runs 80 machines) or Mac (where each workstation is pretty much administered by the person using it), when you can run a Little Empire with 10-20 $40,000/year MCSEs keeping 100 stations and 10 servers up by ctrl-alt-del'ing every 54 days or so.
I'm not terribly shocked--using a 3-letter extension to store that much metadata is absurd.
Luckily, the MacOS doesn't do tha.... oh, wait.... they do now...
These are beer-guided MP3 players, evidinced by the second photograph down.
Not sure I want my MPEG decoder chips soldered by some beer-swilling hacker... :)
Since when is anybody's Perl code legible? And besides, CT is *certainly* not the best judge of legibility... hell, he thinks Duckpins is funny...
Since the UN played a major role in the Vietnam conflict and the Korean war, not to mention Kosovo, Yugoslavia in general, and at least a finger in every conflict since the 1950s, I'm unsure as to how you derive "less war" from the benefits.
It's academic because the UN is a poorly thought-out idea, a poorly run implementation of said idea, and a generally terrible concept to begin with. We're lucky as hell that it hasn't been more successful than it is now.
That's easy--the WORLD gets the US'S DOLLARS.
What does the US get out of that deal, other than a "warm fuzzy" for shovelling out piles of tax money?
I'd like to hear about the good work the UN has done. It seems to me that they have been involved in enough boondoggles that their win-lose percentage can't be greater than 50%--a number easily reachable by a blind rhesus monkey throwing darts at a "Yes/No" decision board.
While you're helping me out here, I'd like to hear some of the advantages America would gain from supporting the UN.
... and the point whizzed right over your head...
Here's the problem in a nutshell, right there. "clueless masses"... they're only "clueless" because they don't understand the computer as well as you do, though they probably severely outclass you on other knowledge (history, or art, or automobile mechanics, or any one or more of a million other things). Does your lack of knowledge about 16th century French Realist poetry make you "clueless" as well?
This elitist attitude shows up again and again with advanced computer users and programmers--usually from people who should know better, like some of the wizard programmers I know who will try to plug an ISA card in a PCI slot: they may do fantastic software, but they're "idiots" when it comes to hardware. Are these guys "clueless"?
I'm sorry, but this attitude really needs to be adjusted. It's the difference between:
Scenario A:
Scenario B:
The big problem with this is that perception is individualistic. Similar to how "golden ears" can perceive compression artifacts in MP3, "golden eyes" can perceive artifacts in compressed video.
For example, DVD compression drives me into a blind rage everytime I see those fat pixels in the shadows of dramatically lit masterpieces, I have to supress an urge to go on a murderous rampage across the desks of hundreds of idiots who thought that MPEG-2 would be "good enough".
Now, I am forced to rent a DVD before I'll consent to purchase it, just to see if I'm going to be irritated by compression artifacts. I'm not gonna blow some $20 on a screwed up compression job.