Your statement is faulty because it assumes that I would use the software regardless, and the only issue is whether or not I pay for it. That's not the case. I used Photoshop (and others) because they were freely available to me. If I had to pay for them, I would have purchased a cheaper alternative, or gone without, because at the time (and this was widespread), I couldn't afford Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.
In point of fact, most pirated software is in far wider use just because it's pirated--because there's so many people using it who wouldn't be able to use it if they had to pay. That's one thing you never see calculated in the costs of piracy--the benefit to companies like Adobe that the skills to use their software are widely spread.
"For every copy of pirated software that is downloaded illegally a company is loosing money."
See, this is the faulty premise. As a web developer in the late 90s, working for a basement operation, almost all the software we used was warez, and if we couldn't get it, we wouldn't have bought it. If we couldn't be Photoshop gods for free, we would have been Paint Shop Pro gods for a lot less money. There's no one-to-one relationship between pirated software and lost sales.
How come some people have so much trouble believing that a widespread consensus might actually be right? Why is the popularity of a particular belief necessarily a mark against it? By your own inductive argument, the./ hive mind thinks that slavery is wrong, so you're for it?
You're an excellent example of a freak who does a particular thing very well, and so convinces others to do it not nearly as well as you can.
If you can code all day with minimal errors and minor cleanup afterwards, great, you've found what works for you.
But compiling frequently is sound advice for the vast majority of programmers, in line with the maxim to keep your code in a shippable state at all times so that bugs don't fester. Also, you're violating another maxim that may be false in your case, but is generally true and sound advice: design first, code later. According to you, the design is happening at coding time, which is something most programmers don't do well.
A top down programmer can still be an incremental developer by stubbing out the design, thus leaving it compilable without getting distracted coding helper methods.
Stewart wasn't saying that he's immune to criticism. He's saying that a comedy show exists for comedy, not to inform or to challenge; a comedy show has no duty to ask tough questions. A show bearing a pretense to be a watchdog of the political process does.
To put it another way: when the comedy show is held to higher standards than the news show, something's really wrong. When the comedy show actually does a better job adhering to those standards than the news show, well, it's all gone to shit.
Because the Star Wars movies entered their hearts when they were kids, so what's precious to them isn't the movies themselves, it's their memories of the movies. By altering the movies, their memories are being challenged, and the movies are exposed for the silly tripe they always were because they don't stand up to an updated interpretation (which is what the rereleases are).
[I say "they", but I'm as guilty as anyone of the same thing.]
It's closely related to the disgust most./ers feel when they see episodes I & II--those movies are silly tripe, and they violate the essential warmth we all have towards the '77 versions by reminding us that none of the Star Wars movies are that good.
Until you've worked in a large business, it's a little difficult to imagine the impact a 20% or greater drop in sales can have. The larger the organization, the closer to the bone they try to cut it to maximize volume. The basic problem is that it's just a loss of 20% of sales--they can't jack up their prices elsewhere to cover it. And these are public companies: their shareholders would scream bloody murder about why they removed themselves from the largest retailer in the world. And, as you pointed out, this is in the context of severe price compression in the whole recording industry.
Plus, there's a prisoner's dilemma here: they can't all agree to pull out of Walmart, because that's collusion (which is an antitrust violation). They have to pull out individually and hope their competitors do the same. They're a pseudo-monopoly, but if they tried to screw Walmart that way, Walmart would blow the whistle on them.
That's in fact what happened in the plastic storage market (where I worked in IT until a few months ago). Walmart and Target were pushing down hard on margins, seeing how far they could go. One company went bankrupt, Rubbermaid pulled out, and other manufacturers individually went back to their big customers and said "you've killed us, and we need more profit". To their credit, big guys like Target actually said OK to reasonable price increases, setting a hard floor on retail prices.
Walmart recognizes that they can't force the price to zero--they understand that it costs to make stuff. But their attitude is "until you threaten suicide by pulling out on us, we won't believe that you're not hiding a little profit somewhere that can be removed." That's how they get the lowest prices so they can offer the lowest prices.
Actually, they probably will lose 1 in 5 customers--or more likely, 1 in 7.
The whole problem with Walmart is that they're so big that, if you get just a couple of your products into their stores, it can increase your sales 20-40%. That's the free hit of crack. Then, once you've been selling to them for a year (and re-organized your whole business to sell to them, because they're a really tough customer to serve), you're looking at losing a third of your business if you piss them off. So when the unbelievable demands start coming, you cave and cave and cave until your profit margins are so thin that you can't afford to lose any more sales at all.
A few companies do pull out of Walmart--Rubbermaid just did last year, saying "sorry, you've made this whole market (plastic storage) so unprofitable that we can't stay in it". The Walmart buyers were pissed. But you have to be as big as Newell Rubbermaid to do that, and only then because Newell was already re-organizing itself.
Actually, that was largely the position I was in, and it made my job better. I couldn't be second-guessed or over-ruled, since they didn't know how. As long as I pushed good, accurate cost analyses up the chain, they left me alone to do my thing.
My point is that, if it's popular, then there's a reason that it's popular--like maybe, a lot of programmers (good, bad or otherwise) have found it useful.
You can't blame Sun's hype machine for all of Java's success--lots of technologies have been hyped to Hell and back and still fallen flat on their faces.
Anyone still concerned with whether or not their favoured language is cool or not is a 1) hack, 2) student, or 3) self-described 'geek' who's not nearly as good as he thinks he is.
Java works well in some environments and for some tasks, and poorly in others, and a lot of that depends on the programmer, not the platform.
Besides, success is its own argument. If you can't understand why Java is so big these days, maybe that's your fault, and not the world's.
Evidence against the Sappir-Worph hypothesis includes studies showing that people with color words for only dark colors and light colors couldn't reliably distinguish between dark red and dark blue. However, they could be *taught* the difference, and new color words, with no great difficulty, and could easily distinguish colors with those new words, showing that Sappir-Worph describes how language limits thought only circumstantially, not fundamentally. In other words, growing up with a lack of words for something doesn't mean one can't learn those words, concepts, and thoughts later on, so Sappir-Worph doesn't identify something fundamental about language use, only the rather obvious obvious conclusion that you can't put into words what you don't know the words for.
That's the problem with this psychologist's study--it doesn't say whether or not they learned larger numbers and applied them effectively.
You kind of answered your own question there, didn't you? Sunbird is a 700K plugin if you already have Gecko installed, 8 Megs if you don't. They all share instances of Gecko, I believe.
It's "10 printed pages" of Business 2.0 cliches that was probably lifted out of some dot-commies VC proposal:
One way to do this is to give developers ways to encapsulate their knowledge as reusable assets that others can apply. Is this far fetched? Patterns already demonstrate limited but effective knowledge reuse. The next step is to move from documentation to automation, using languages, frameworks, and tools to automate pattern application.
This is about the most concrete sentence I found, and it ain't all that concrete, besides simply repeating the same mantras we've been hearing for the last decade or so: code reuse is good, frameworks increase efficiency, design patterns are distilled knowledge... There's a bland and unhelpful, not to mention trite, rejection of comparing software development to the production of physical goods in manufacturing.
Ohhh, so he can sell his ideas but not his kidneys. I see. Who makes that decision, jjohnson? Sounds like a slippery slope to me.
The people who wrote the laws as they are today. Right or wrong, that's the circumstances under which he willingly signed the contract.
Copyright and Patent law (which I assume you are referring to) are based on expressions of ideas. Not the ideas themselves. Can I sell you the Copyright to this post? Yes. Can I sell you the abstract IDEAS that led to these words? Until we get brain tunnelling nanoprobes, I wouldn't know where to begin- though I'm sure Alcatel is looking forward to the day.
As the judgement clearly states, what he lost was the method that he articulated in a memo to his bosses. So not only did he sign a contract agreeing to disclose his ideas, he actually disclosed them. Double whammy. No wonder he lost the case.
The difference between his ideas and his kidneys is that he can sell his ideas--or the rights to them--but not his kidneys. He stupidly signed a contract handing over rights to his ideas, and then, suprise surprise, lost the rights to his ideas. If you hold that ideas can't be bought and sold, you undermine all intellectual property and licencing laws, upon which the GPL depends. Someday Linux will get its day in court in the US, and then (as happened in Germany), it will be upheld based on the fact that we have strong IP laws.
Look at it another way. Say he signed a contract stating that he would give you his car if you walked around the block three times, which you did. Wouldn't he then owe you his car, according to the contract he willingly signed?
Can they force him to explain his idea? No, but they can watch him implement it, and then step in, wave the contract around, and take the proceeds of his work, all because he signed the contract.
I feel zero sympathy for him. The contract was legally enforceable, as the story demonstrates. He should have had a lawyer look it over for him.
Graham essentially spouts a lot of geek cred virtues that suit the stereotype of hackers that we all, in some way, want to be. So we all read the article, see a little bit of ourselves in it ("yeah, I'm pretty politically incorrect, too."), and feel good about how special we are. Just like astrology profiles based on your sign contain a lot of qualified compliments ("you speak your mind, sometimes offending other people without meaning to."), Graham's articles have a constant thread of "geeks are special, and you're a geek, too."
Taken literally, the people Graham is talking about are perhaps 2-3% of the coding population. In other words, they're the equivalent of supermodels, rock stars, and brilliant twentysomething CEOs, and just as accessible to you or me. In practical terms, you'll almost never, ever work with, hire, or be the kind of person he's discussing, so put down the geek wank material.
Every time I read a Graham article, I feel dirty at the amount of false modesty and self-congratulation involved. He's like a digital Stuart Smalley.
"Put simply, it was an example of worse technology winning out over better technology, for market reasons."
Why are market reasons invalid when determining the quality of technology? How is it that the use of technology in the real world, something market reasons influence very strongly, is less important than the theoretical virtues?
If MS wanted to punish Slate's editors for allowing an article recommending Firefox over IE, someone would be fired, or more likely would resign for 'personal reasons' a few weeks later. Selling a division is a business issue, not a content issue. It's not even necessarily a punishment: Newell Rubbermaid just sold off a bunch of divisions that didn't turn clear profits, which put those companies into better positions to succeed because they didn't have to pay the parent company's tithe any longer (the division for which my brother works was bought by private investors who want to expand it). More likely, Ballmer has decided that MS needs to get out of the content game, at which they've never done very well.
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Your statement is faulty because it assumes that I would use the software regardless, and the only issue is whether or not I pay for it. That's not the case. I used Photoshop (and others) because they were freely available to me. If I had to pay for them, I would have purchased a cheaper alternative, or gone without, because at the time (and this was widespread), I couldn't afford Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.
In point of fact, most pirated software is in far wider use just because it's pirated--because there's so many people using it who wouldn't be able to use it if they had to pay. That's one thing you never see calculated in the costs of piracy--the benefit to companies like Adobe that the skills to use their software are widely spread.
"For every copy of pirated software that is downloaded illegally a company is loosing money."
See, this is the faulty premise. As a web developer in the late 90s, working for a basement operation, almost all the software we used was warez, and if we couldn't get it, we wouldn't have bought it. If we couldn't be Photoshop gods for free, we would have been Paint Shop Pro gods for a lot less money. There's no one-to-one relationship between pirated software and lost sales.
How come some people have so much trouble believing that a widespread consensus might actually be right? Why is the popularity of a particular belief necessarily a mark against it? By your own inductive argument, the ./ hive mind thinks that slavery is wrong, so you're for it?
You're an excellent example of a freak who does a particular thing very well, and so convinces others to do it not nearly as well as you can.
If you can code all day with minimal errors and minor cleanup afterwards, great, you've found what works for you.
But compiling frequently is sound advice for the vast majority of programmers, in line with the maxim to keep your code in a shippable state at all times so that bugs don't fester. Also, you're violating another maxim that may be false in your case, but is generally true and sound advice: design first, code later. According to you, the design is happening at coding time, which is something most programmers don't do well.
A top down programmer can still be an incremental developer by stubbing out the design, thus leaving it compilable without getting distracted coding helper methods.
Stewart wasn't saying that he's immune to criticism. He's saying that a comedy show exists for comedy, not to inform or to challenge; a comedy show has no duty to ask tough questions. A show bearing a pretense to be a watchdog of the political process does.
To put it another way: when the comedy show is held to higher standards than the news show, something's really wrong. When the comedy show actually does a better job adhering to those standards than the news show, well, it's all gone to shit.
Because the Star Wars movies entered their hearts when they were kids, so what's precious to them isn't the movies themselves, it's their memories of the movies. By altering the movies, their memories are being challenged, and the movies are exposed for the silly tripe they always were because they don't stand up to an updated interpretation (which is what the rereleases are).
./ers feel when they see episodes I & II--those movies are silly tripe, and they violate the essential warmth we all have towards the '77 versions by reminding us that none of the Star Wars movies are that good.
[I say "they", but I'm as guilty as anyone of the same thing.]
It's closely related to the disgust most
Until you've worked in a large business, it's a little difficult to imagine the impact a 20% or greater drop in sales can have. The larger the organization, the closer to the bone they try to cut it to maximize volume. The basic problem is that it's just a loss of 20% of sales--they can't jack up their prices elsewhere to cover it. And these are public companies: their shareholders would scream bloody murder about why they removed themselves from the largest retailer in the world. And, as you pointed out, this is in the context of severe price compression in the whole recording industry.
Plus, there's a prisoner's dilemma here: they can't all agree to pull out of Walmart, because that's collusion (which is an antitrust violation). They have to pull out individually and hope their competitors do the same. They're a pseudo-monopoly, but if they tried to screw Walmart that way, Walmart would blow the whistle on them.
That's in fact what happened in the plastic storage market (where I worked in IT until a few months ago). Walmart and Target were pushing down hard on margins, seeing how far they could go. One company went bankrupt, Rubbermaid pulled out, and other manufacturers individually went back to their big customers and said "you've killed us, and we need more profit". To their credit, big guys like Target actually said OK to reasonable price increases, setting a hard floor on retail prices.
Walmart recognizes that they can't force the price to zero--they understand that it costs to make stuff. But their attitude is "until you threaten suicide by pulling out on us, we won't believe that you're not hiding a little profit somewhere that can be removed." That's how they get the lowest prices so they can offer the lowest prices.
Actually, they probably will lose 1 in 5 customers--or more likely, 1 in 7.
The whole problem with Walmart is that they're so big that, if you get just a couple of your products into their stores, it can increase your sales 20-40%. That's the free hit of crack. Then, once you've been selling to them for a year (and re-organized your whole business to sell to them, because they're a really tough customer to serve), you're looking at losing a third of your business if you piss them off. So when the unbelievable demands start coming, you cave and cave and cave until your profit margins are so thin that you can't afford to lose any more sales at all.
A few companies do pull out of Walmart--Rubbermaid just did last year, saying "sorry, you've made this whole market (plastic storage) so unprofitable that we can't stay in it". The Walmart buyers were pissed. But you have to be as big as Newell Rubbermaid to do that, and only then because Newell was already re-organizing itself.
Actually, that was largely the position I was in, and it made my job better. I couldn't be second-guessed or over-ruled, since they didn't know how. As long as I pushed good, accurate cost analyses up the chain, they left me alone to do my thing.
Do you mean there was a time when people *were* making unbiased decisions?
My point is that, if it's popular, then there's a reason that it's popular--like maybe, a lot of programmers (good, bad or otherwise) have found it useful.
You can't blame Sun's hype machine for all of Java's success--lots of technologies have been hyped to Hell and back and still fallen flat on their faces.
Anyone still concerned with whether or not their favoured language is cool or not is a 1) hack, 2) student, or 3) self-described 'geek' who's not nearly as good as he thinks he is.
Java works well in some environments and for some tasks, and poorly in others, and a lot of that depends on the programmer, not the platform.
Besides, success is its own argument. If you can't understand why Java is so big these days, maybe that's your fault, and not the world's.
If you have any proof of this, it's a huge story that the media would go ape-shit over. Seriously, it would be a public service, too.
Kim Jong Il was rummaging in the fridge when the picture was taken.
Evidence against the Sappir-Worph hypothesis includes studies showing that people with color words for only dark colors and light colors couldn't reliably distinguish between dark red and dark blue. However, they could be *taught* the difference, and new color words, with no great difficulty, and could easily distinguish colors with those new words, showing that Sappir-Worph describes how language limits thought only circumstantially, not fundamentally. In other words, growing up with a lack of words for something doesn't mean one can't learn those words, concepts, and thoughts later on, so Sappir-Worph doesn't identify something fundamental about language use, only the rather obvious obvious conclusion that you can't put into words what you don't know the words for.
That's the problem with this psychologist's study--it doesn't say whether or not they learned larger numbers and applied them effectively.
You kind of answered your own question there, didn't you? Sunbird is a 700K plugin if you already have Gecko installed, 8 Megs if you don't. They all share instances of Gecko, I believe.
It's "10 printed pages" of Business 2.0 cliches that was probably lifted out of some dot-commies VC proposal:
One way to do this is to give developers ways to encapsulate their knowledge as reusable assets that others can apply. Is this far fetched? Patterns already demonstrate limited but effective knowledge reuse. The next step is to move from documentation to automation, using languages, frameworks, and tools to automate pattern application.
This is about the most concrete sentence I found, and it ain't all that concrete, besides simply repeating the same mantras we've been hearing for the last decade or so: code reuse is good, frameworks increase efficiency, design patterns are distilled knowledge... There's a bland and unhelpful, not to mention trite, rejection of comparing software development to the production of physical goods in manufacturing.
Don't bother wading through it. It's tripe.
Ohhh, so he can sell his ideas but not his kidneys. I see. Who makes that decision, jjohnson? Sounds like a slippery slope to me.
The people who wrote the laws as they are today. Right or wrong, that's the circumstances under which he willingly signed the contract.
Copyright and Patent law (which I assume you are referring to) are based on expressions of ideas. Not the ideas themselves. Can I sell you the Copyright to this post? Yes. Can I sell you the abstract IDEAS that led to these words? Until we get brain tunnelling nanoprobes, I wouldn't know where to begin- though I'm sure Alcatel is looking forward to the day.
As the judgement clearly states, what he lost was the method that he articulated in a memo to his bosses. So not only did he sign a contract agreeing to disclose his ideas, he actually disclosed them. Double whammy. No wonder he lost the case.
The difference between his ideas and his kidneys is that he can sell his ideas--or the rights to them--but not his kidneys. He stupidly signed a contract handing over rights to his ideas, and then, suprise surprise, lost the rights to his ideas. If you hold that ideas can't be bought and sold, you undermine all intellectual property and licencing laws, upon which the GPL depends. Someday Linux will get its day in court in the US, and then (as happened in Germany), it will be upheld based on the fact that we have strong IP laws.
Look at it another way. Say he signed a contract stating that he would give you his car if you walked around the block three times, which you did. Wouldn't he then owe you his car, according to the contract he willingly signed?
Can they force him to explain his idea? No, but they can watch him implement it, and then step in, wave the contract around, and take the proceeds of his work, all because he signed the contract.
I feel zero sympathy for him. The contract was legally enforceable, as the story demonstrates. He should have had a lawyer look it over for him.
D00d! When you fight the power, can I hold your jacket?
This is much more believable than "great hackers use Python."
Graham essentially spouts a lot of geek cred virtues that suit the stereotype of hackers that we all, in some way, want to be. So we all read the article, see a little bit of ourselves in it ("yeah, I'm pretty politically incorrect, too."), and feel good about how special we are. Just like astrology profiles based on your sign contain a lot of qualified compliments ("you speak your mind, sometimes offending other people without meaning to."), Graham's articles have a constant thread of "geeks are special, and you're a geek, too."
Taken literally, the people Graham is talking about are perhaps 2-3% of the coding population. In other words, they're the equivalent of supermodels, rock stars, and brilliant twentysomething CEOs, and just as accessible to you or me. In practical terms, you'll almost never, ever work with, hire, or be the kind of person he's discussing, so put down the geek wank material.
Every time I read a Graham article, I feel dirty at the amount of false modesty and self-congratulation involved. He's like a digital Stuart Smalley.
"Put simply, it was an example of worse technology winning out over better technology, for market reasons."
Why are market reasons invalid when determining the quality of technology? How is it that the use of technology in the real world, something market reasons influence very strongly, is less important than the theoretical virtues?
If MS wanted to punish Slate's editors for allowing an article recommending Firefox over IE, someone would be fired, or more likely would resign for 'personal reasons' a few weeks later. Selling a division is a business issue, not a content issue. It's not even necessarily a punishment: Newell Rubbermaid just sold off a bunch of divisions that didn't turn clear profits, which put those companies into better positions to succeed because they didn't have to pay the parent company's tithe any longer (the division for which my brother works was bought by private investors who want to expand it). More likely, Ballmer has decided that MS needs to get out of the content game, at which they've never done very well.
Quake 3 had a multi-processor mode that could be enabled on the command line. Will Doom 3 have that?
When are we finally gonna get games that can take advantage of my dual-Xeon workstation?