I'm just getting into filmmaking right now. (I've only made one short film, which has been in 11 film festivals so far.) The problem that I see with most films (both Hollywood and indie) is the writing. In general, the technical work in movies is the best it's ever been. Acting is competent, at worst. The problems are in story construction and other aspects of writing. If you have a bad script, it doesn't matter how good your actors or photography or special effects are. Writing has been getting steadily worse for about 40 years. It has to do, IMO, with movie execs who are ignorant and illiterate. They don't know good writing -- as the great producers of the past did.
You seem to be misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying that you can't bump up the percentage of women (or left-handed people or albinos or Lutherans) working on a project by catering to them. I'm merely saying there is no reason to -- and that the people who care about a project or activity will find it by their own free will. We don't need to worry about recruiting to match any particular demographic mix.
Actually the answer to your question about Eastern European women is very easy. Until recently, women in those countries didn't have the CHOICE about what to pursue. They were steered by the state into whatever the state deemed the best use of their talents and intelligence. So what you're pointing to is a culture where people didn't have choice. They were forced into certain areas. Is that what you're advocating instead of individual choice? Odd argument.
Of course, there are cultural things that reinforce tendencies. The vast majority of those truly interested in IT careers are men, but there are quite a few brilliant women who pursue technical careers anyway. If you beg women to work in IT, you'll move the percentages slightly, but WHY is this a good thing? Just let people do whatever the heck they WANT to do. There is no reason to care that different percentages of the sexes are attracted to different industries. The women who are truly interested in the tech world are going to get there. I doubt anybody ever begged Ellen Hancock not to be intimidated and "pretty please, come play with the boys.":-)
As for your other question, I do whatever I'm attracted to. I've been a journalist, a consultant and a filmmaker. I'm not in IT full-time and don't want to be. If I had a serious interest in manicure tomorrow, I'd pursue it, because I don't care about gender roles. Some people (both men and women) ARE intimidated by cultural norms. So what? That's their decision.
The underlying assumption of programs such as this is that women are too insecure or too intimidated to do something they want to do unless somebody sets up a program to cajole thing into feeling comfortable. That's nuts. Women do whatever they happen to enjoy -- as individuals -- and men do the same. Some people just can't get over the fact that vastly more men than women want to develop software (or create hardware or whatever). Why is this so threatening to them? Because it goes against their deep-seated belief that everyone is born identical and it's only culture that makes us want different things. That's bull and it's always been bull. Men and women are different in some key ways -- on AVERAGE. There are some very brilliant women who care deeply about IT work, but the vast majority don't. That's not going to change, even for the ones who are plenty bright enough to do it.
If you think you need to set up programs to beg certain segments of the population that other people do because it's fun and exciting and rewarding to them, you're out of touch with reality about what makes people tick. Let the people who WANT to do technical work do it, whether they're men, women, black, white, pink or purple. It's about individual choice, not about counting numbers of certain groups.
You can probably get away with this if the audiences are small enough that nobody with the copyright holders ever finds out about what you're doing, but it seems clearly illegal and would be very bad judgment.
You would be using someone else's work product in a commercial environment. You open your company up to serious copyright lawsuits and bad PR. It's not worth it. If you truly need footage to illustrate something, buy permission to use something that you can actually afford. Or find public domain footage that does the same thing. (Check archive.org, for example.) Or pay somebody to shoot the footage you need. But you probably don't really NEED it to make your points. It's a needless legal risk, and I'd strongly suggest you consult a competent lawyer instead of trust the ignorant legal advice you're going to get on Slashdot.:-)
I'm supportive of the idea of running an ad to raise the profile of OpenOffice, but this ad is horrid. People in the FOSS community might link this to freedom, but the normal, typical end user couldn't care less about that. ALL he's interested in is whether this free product is good enough to take the place of something that he's paying for now (or that he might see as "free" since it came with his computer). Whoever designed this ad created something to appeal to the open-source advocates who care dearly about the "freedom to tinker and change." This is not a pitch that will have merit with the average end user.
If you doubt that, think about this question. Why do MOST people who use Firefox download it? Is it because they want the freedom to modify the source code? For a few geeks, yes. For normal people, no. It's because they've heard it's easier to use or it's less prone to security issues.
If you want to get people to use your product -- even if it's free -- you have to get their attention by speaking to what THEY are interested in, not what you're interested in. This ad fails miserably at that.
I'm not quite finished watching the video, but I think the most interesting thing about watching this guy is the unspoken attitude that he seems to have toward users. The most telling thing is when he expresses irritation that developers cheered a "crap" feature that it took him 10 minutes to write in a developer tool (but which those developers thought was very important) but didn't care much about another feature that was very difficult to write and took a lot of time and effort. He seems almost angry that users of his software don't appreciate how hard something was to do. He seems disdainful of the fact that the users have their own needs and desires for what is most useful to THEM. The attitude seems to be that the users are too stupid to understand what's important and what's not.
To me, he seems like a perfect example of a really smart person who doesn't understand that software is judged by how much easier it makes the user's life, not by how impressive the work is to his geek friends.
Over the years, I've owned quite a few first-generation Apple products, and I have tended to have excellent success with them. Most recently, I had one of the very first iMac G5s. I had one of the first video-enabled iPods. And I just bought one of the first MacBooks. Any product (first generation or otherwise) is going to have SOME issues. Some percentage of them are going to be DOA or have problems quickly. And it's not uncommon for there to be design issues uncovered after thousands or millions of a product get into the real world. But my experience is that Apple's first-generation products are as good as (or better than) any other company's new products.
If this were any other company, I would think about it being an intentional leak. That doesn't seem to be Apple's way of doing things (under Steve Jobs). Apple seems to prefer to present finished projects out of the blue when they're ready for us to buy them.
That's like saying you should be able to assemble a car before you can drive. Or put a stove together before you can cook. The fact that you even think this is another indication that many of the people who work in IT (or have serious interest in it) don't understand what the end user really needs. A normal, everyday user should be able to get real work done easily without having to understand all of the jargon that you and I understand. It's absurd to expect him to do so.
If you want to argue that THIS particular notebook won't be earthshatteringly innovative, that would be a reasonable argument (assuming that the reports about what it will have are true). The new MacBook will be a logical lower-end extension of the MacBook Pro. But to make the sweepting statement that Apple hardware is now boring is totally unsupported by any facts that I know or anything you covered in your post. Apple's lineup of hardware is very strong, IMO. The fact that we don't currently expect anything fascinating in this one product doesn't make the entire company's hardware boring (or anything close to it).
First, Apple needs to get schools looking at these models for next year. If the company waits much later, schools are already going to make plans based on existing models.
Second, I doubt Apple thinks it will be upstaged in ANY way by Nintendo -- and I think that judgment will be correct. Many gamers and geeks will be paying attention to Nintendo's announcement, but an Apple announcement will greatly upstage it in terms of media attention, IMO.
If the contract allows surfing the web on breaks AND this employee is guilty of doing nothing but surfing on breaks, then he would be guilty of NOTHING. But the AC says the judge is right. Since the judge ruled that the employee should be reprimanded, the AC would have us believe that the judge has correctly ruled that the employee should be reprimanded for doing nothing wrong. So which is it? Is the judge abusing the poor, innocent civil servant? Or do you admit that the person WAS doing something against the rules and the real argument is what punishment is appropriate. In LogicLand, you can't have it both ways.
Since you're just being a smart aleck, there's no reason to take your question seriously, but it happens that I am familiar with the case. And, yes, I think the judge is wrong as a matter of law, not just common sense.
First, a judge didn't rule in FAVOR of employees being allowed to surf the web at work. He ruled that firing was too severe a penalty in this narrow case. Second, this ruling applied to a government employee in a specific situation, not to someone in a private company.
I think the judge is nuts, but even so, the ruling only applies to a narrow class of public employees, many of whom were already notoriously slow and useless -- even before the days when web access was available.
I advocate that banks open their vaults to anyone who wants money. I advocate that car dealers leave their keys in the cars for anyone to take them. I advocate that restaurants make their food free. All of these things might kill the businesses involved, but it certainly would be nice for me and for other people who'd rather not pay for things.
First, I read the article when it first came out Sunday, you idiot. Second, to assume that I'm a conservative (or Rush Limbaugh fan) is even more stupid. I'm neither.
The logic behind using safe forms of nuclear power has been clear for a long, long time. It's nice to see some greens finally start accepting what has been obvious to some of us for 30 or 40 years. Now I'm curious how long it will be before the same people start realizing that they have been duped about global warming -- by the same people who duped us about the "coming Ice Age" and hundreds of millions of people supposedly dying of hunger from overpopulation in the '70s. The same crackpots who have been feeding us false predictions are still being given credibility today. Why people such as Lester Brown and Paul Erlich are given any credibility is beyond logic.
We will have to agree to disagree, in part because I don't have time to continue the discussion and in part because it wouldn't do any good for either of us. I'll simply say that you're using a corrupted definition which expands the meaning SO greatly as to render it mostly useless. I think you're ignoring evidence which logically narrows the definition to its original meaning. Either way, there's no rational way of using the term "censorship" to this Wikipedia case unless you assume that any editorial decision is censorship.
That's all I have time for, so you're welcome to have the last word if you'd like.:-)
Some people are so illogical that it's not worth having serious discourse with them. In this case, I didn't have any interest in convincing the AP of anything. I was just pointing out the illogic of what he was saying. He wasn't going to listen anyway.
I think the Oxford English Dictionary is more authoritative than the sources either of us has quoted so far. Here's their entry at "censor." I think it's very clear from context that censorship is an official action of some sort, not an action by people making changes to their own publication. The noun version makes it obvious, but I think that context (plus the derivation of the word) makes it clear what it is supposed to mean. Even the Merriam-Webster definition implies it when it refers to an "institution" or "system" of making changes. Unless you can argue that ANY change is censorship, there has to be outside influence for something to reasonably be considered censorship.
David
=====
censor
noun an official who examines material that is to be published and suppresses parts considered offensive or a threat to security.
verb suppress or remove unacceptable parts of (a book, film, etc.).
-- DERIVATIVES censorship noun.
-- ORIGIN Latin (denoting a magistrate in ancient Rome who held censuses and supervised public morals), from censere 'assess'.
That's easy. First, I don't care if someone loves Wikipedia or not. Second, you choose to be a part of the project; with your country of birth, it's random and beyond your control. Third, the Wikipedia editors have the authority to control their creation. To draw a comparison between a nation and an encyclopedia doesn't make any sense. Fourth, you seem to be making invalid assumptions that I like or agree with Wikipedia's editors in this case, when I've made it clear that I don't have an opinion about whether they're correct or not. I'm simply saying that they are making editorial decisions about what is right or in the best interests of their organization. That isn't the same as censorship.
There are plenty of terms that are basically oxymorons or are otherwise incorrect. Just because people like you use them incorrectly doesn't mean that's what they actually mean. By your logic, any time I change my mind about how to word a sentence, I'm censoring myself. It's a totally illogical concept.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just getting into filmmaking right now. (I've only made one short film, which has been in 11 film festivals so far.) The problem that I see with most films (both Hollywood and indie) is the writing. In general, the technical work in movies is the best it's ever been. Acting is competent, at worst. The problems are in story construction and other aspects of writing. If you have a bad script, it doesn't matter how good your actors or photography or special effects are. Writing has been getting steadily worse for about 40 years. It has to do, IMO, with movie execs who are ignorant and illiterate. They don't know good writing -- as the great producers of the past did.
David
You seem to be misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying that you can't bump up the percentage of women (or left-handed people or albinos or Lutherans) working on a project by catering to them. I'm merely saying there is no reason to -- and that the people who care about a project or activity will find it by their own free will. We don't need to worry about recruiting to match any particular demographic mix.
David
Actually the answer to your question about Eastern European women is very easy. Until recently, women in those countries didn't have the CHOICE about what to pursue. They were steered by the state into whatever the state deemed the best use of their talents and intelligence. So what you're pointing to is a culture where people didn't have choice. They were forced into certain areas. Is that what you're advocating instead of individual choice? Odd argument.
:-)
Of course, there are cultural things that reinforce tendencies. The vast majority of those truly interested in IT careers are men, but there are quite a few brilliant women who pursue technical careers anyway. If you beg women to work in IT, you'll move the percentages slightly, but WHY is this a good thing? Just let people do whatever the heck they WANT to do. There is no reason to care that different percentages of the sexes are attracted to different industries. The women who are truly interested in the tech world are going to get there. I doubt anybody ever begged Ellen Hancock not to be intimidated and "pretty please, come play with the boys."
As for your other question, I do whatever I'm attracted to. I've been a journalist, a consultant and a filmmaker. I'm not in IT full-time and don't want to be. If I had a serious interest in manicure tomorrow, I'd pursue it, because I don't care about gender roles. Some people (both men and women) ARE intimidated by cultural norms. So what? That's their decision.
David
The underlying assumption of programs such as this is that women are too insecure or too intimidated to do something they want to do unless somebody sets up a program to cajole thing into feeling comfortable. That's nuts. Women do whatever they happen to enjoy -- as individuals -- and men do the same. Some people just can't get over the fact that vastly more men than women want to develop software (or create hardware or whatever). Why is this so threatening to them? Because it goes against their deep-seated belief that everyone is born identical and it's only culture that makes us want different things. That's bull and it's always been bull. Men and women are different in some key ways -- on AVERAGE. There are some very brilliant women who care deeply about IT work, but the vast majority don't. That's not going to change, even for the ones who are plenty bright enough to do it.
If you think you need to set up programs to beg certain segments of the population that other people do because it's fun and exciting and rewarding to them, you're out of touch with reality about what makes people tick. Let the people who WANT to do technical work do it, whether they're men, women, black, white, pink or purple. It's about individual choice, not about counting numbers of certain groups.
David
Your post is pretty good evidence of a broken education system. Where did you go to school? ;-)
David
You can probably get away with this if the audiences are small enough that nobody with the copyright holders ever finds out about what you're doing, but it seems clearly illegal and would be very bad judgment.
:-)
You would be using someone else's work product in a commercial environment. You open your company up to serious copyright lawsuits and bad PR. It's not worth it. If you truly need footage to illustrate something, buy permission to use something that you can actually afford. Or find public domain footage that does the same thing. (Check archive.org, for example.) Or pay somebody to shoot the footage you need. But you probably don't really NEED it to make your points. It's a needless legal risk, and I'd strongly suggest you consult a competent lawyer instead of trust the ignorant legal advice you're going to get on Slashdot.
David
I'm supportive of the idea of running an ad to raise the profile of OpenOffice, but this ad is horrid. People in the FOSS community might link this to freedom, but the normal, typical end user couldn't care less about that. ALL he's interested in is whether this free product is good enough to take the place of something that he's paying for now (or that he might see as "free" since it came with his computer). Whoever designed this ad created something to appeal to the open-source advocates who care dearly about the "freedom to tinker and change." This is not a pitch that will have merit with the average end user.
If you doubt that, think about this question. Why do MOST people who use Firefox download it? Is it because they want the freedom to modify the source code? For a few geeks, yes. For normal people, no. It's because they've heard it's easier to use or it's less prone to security issues.
If you want to get people to use your product -- even if it's free -- you have to get their attention by speaking to what THEY are interested in, not what you're interested in. This ad fails miserably at that.
David
Whether it's fair or not, that's VERY funny. :-)
David
I'm not quite finished watching the video, but I think the most interesting thing about watching this guy is the unspoken attitude that he seems to have toward users. The most telling thing is when he expresses irritation that developers cheered a "crap" feature that it took him 10 minutes to write in a developer tool (but which those developers thought was very important) but didn't care much about another feature that was very difficult to write and took a lot of time and effort. He seems almost angry that users of his software don't appreciate how hard something was to do. He seems disdainful of the fact that the users have their own needs and desires for what is most useful to THEM. The attitude seems to be that the users are too stupid to understand what's important and what's not.
To me, he seems like a perfect example of a really smart person who doesn't understand that software is judged by how much easier it makes the user's life, not by how impressive the work is to his geek friends.
David
Over the years, I've owned quite a few first-generation Apple products, and I have tended to have excellent success with them. Most recently, I had one of the very first iMac G5s. I had one of the first video-enabled iPods. And I just bought one of the first MacBooks. Any product (first generation or otherwise) is going to have SOME issues. Some percentage of them are going to be DOA or have problems quickly. And it's not uncommon for there to be design issues uncovered after thousands or millions of a product get into the real world. But my experience is that Apple's first-generation products are as good as (or better than) any other company's new products.
David
If this were any other company, I would think about it being an intentional leak. That doesn't seem to be Apple's way of doing things (under Steve Jobs). Apple seems to prefer to present finished projects out of the blue when they're ready for us to buy them.
David
That's like saying you should be able to assemble a car before you can drive. Or put a stove together before you can cook. The fact that you even think this is another indication that many of the people who work in IT (or have serious interest in it) don't understand what the end user really needs. A normal, everyday user should be able to get real work done easily without having to understand all of the jargon that you and I understand. It's absurd to expect him to do so.
David
If you want to argue that THIS particular notebook won't be earthshatteringly innovative, that would be a reasonable argument (assuming that the reports about what it will have are true). The new MacBook will be a logical lower-end extension of the MacBook Pro. But to make the sweepting statement that Apple hardware is now boring is totally unsupported by any facts that I know or anything you covered in your post. Apple's lineup of hardware is very strong, IMO. The fact that we don't currently expect anything fascinating in this one product doesn't make the entire company's hardware boring (or anything close to it).
David
First, Apple needs to get schools looking at these models for next year. If the company waits much later, schools are already going to make plans based on existing models.
Second, I doubt Apple thinks it will be upstaged in ANY way by Nintendo -- and I think that judgment will be correct. Many gamers and geeks will be paying attention to Nintendo's announcement, but an Apple announcement will greatly upstage it in terms of media attention, IMO.
David
If the contract allows surfing the web on breaks AND this employee is guilty of doing nothing but surfing on breaks, then he would be guilty of NOTHING. But the AC says the judge is right. Since the judge ruled that the employee should be reprimanded, the AC would have us believe that the judge has correctly ruled that the employee should be reprimanded for doing nothing wrong. So which is it? Is the judge abusing the poor, innocent civil servant? Or do you admit that the person WAS doing something against the rules and the real argument is what punishment is appropriate. In LogicLand, you can't have it both ways.
David
Since you're just being a smart aleck, there's no reason to take your question seriously, but it happens that I am familiar with the case. And, yes, I think the judge is wrong as a matter of law, not just common sense.
David
First, a judge didn't rule in FAVOR of employees being allowed to surf the web at work. He ruled that firing was too severe a penalty in this narrow case. Second, this ruling applied to a government employee in a specific situation, not to someone in a private company.
I think the judge is nuts, but even so, the ruling only applies to a narrow class of public employees, many of whom were already notoriously slow and useless -- even before the days when web access was available.
David
I advocate that banks open their vaults to anyone who wants money. I advocate that car dealers leave their keys in the cars for anyone to take them. I advocate that restaurants make their food free. All of these things might kill the businesses involved, but it certainly would be nice for me and for other people who'd rather not pay for things.
David
First, I read the article when it first came out Sunday, you idiot. Second, to assume that I'm a conservative (or Rush Limbaugh fan) is even more stupid. I'm neither.
David
The logic behind using safe forms of nuclear power has been clear for a long, long time. It's nice to see some greens finally start accepting what has been obvious to some of us for 30 or 40 years. Now I'm curious how long it will be before the same people start realizing that they have been duped about global warming -- by the same people who duped us about the "coming Ice Age" and hundreds of millions of people supposedly dying of hunger from overpopulation in the '70s. The same crackpots who have been feeding us false predictions are still being given credibility today. Why people such as Lester Brown and Paul Erlich are given any credibility is beyond logic.
David
We will have to agree to disagree, in part because I don't have time to continue the discussion and in part because it wouldn't do any good for either of us. I'll simply say that you're using a corrupted definition which expands the meaning SO greatly as to render it mostly useless. I think you're ignoring evidence which logically narrows the definition to its original meaning. Either way, there's no rational way of using the term "censorship" to this Wikipedia case unless you assume that any editorial decision is censorship.
:-)
That's all I have time for, so you're welcome to have the last word if you'd like.
David
Some people are so illogical that it's not worth having serious discourse with them. In this case, I didn't have any interest in convincing the AP of anything. I was just pointing out the illogic of what he was saying. He wasn't going to listen anyway.
David
I think the Oxford English Dictionary is more authoritative than the sources either of us has quoted so far. Here's their entry at "censor." I think it's very clear from context that censorship is an official action of some sort, not an action by people making changes to their own publication. The noun version makes it obvious, but I think that context (plus the derivation of the word) makes it clear what it is supposed to mean. Even the Merriam-Webster definition implies it when it refers to an "institution" or "system" of making changes. Unless you can argue that ANY change is censorship, there has to be outside influence for something to reasonably be considered censorship.
David
=====
censor
noun an official who examines material that is to be published and suppresses parts considered offensive or a threat to security.
verb suppress or remove unacceptable parts of (a book, film, etc.).
-- DERIVATIVES censorship noun.
-- ORIGIN Latin (denoting a magistrate in ancient Rome who held censuses and supervised public morals), from censere 'assess'.
That's easy. First, I don't care if someone loves Wikipedia or not. Second, you choose to be a part of the project; with your country of birth, it's random and beyond your control. Third, the Wikipedia editors have the authority to control their creation. To draw a comparison between a nation and an encyclopedia doesn't make any sense. Fourth, you seem to be making invalid assumptions that I like or agree with Wikipedia's editors in this case, when I've made it clear that I don't have an opinion about whether they're correct or not. I'm simply saying that they are making editorial decisions about what is right or in the best interests of their organization. That isn't the same as censorship.
David
There are plenty of terms that are basically oxymorons or are otherwise incorrect. Just because people like you use them incorrectly doesn't mean that's what they actually mean. By your logic, any time I change my mind about how to word a sentence, I'm censoring myself. It's a totally illogical concept.
David