What the hell are you other people doing with yours?
You've been lucky. Accidents and errors happen. It's called being human.
Any technology that doesn't recognise that is broken. This is one of major problems with software companies, they assume that their technology is perfect. Bollocks.
A somewhat related story: Yesterday I had to install RedHat Linux because I was installing a product that depended on it. The product also required that the Linux to be online updated. RedHat, for no good reason, requires an account on RedHatNetwork to do this and in addition and also for no good reason, limits each account to updating only one computer. I had a dodgy network connection that caused the first update to fail. I restart and then find my "second" computer cannot be updated. Idiots. It's largely because of nonsense like this that I don't use MSWindows. I will never use, purchase or recommend RedHat again.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Both were replaced by the company for the cost of shipping when I sent in the dammaged CD.
Did they pay for your time and inconvenience? Did they handle the certainty that the company will eventually be out of business and replacements no longer available?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'm not so sure that is the case. It's a very generic name that has been used by a number of software communication packages. See google
It's a general problem actually, marketing types trying to coopt general language for their specific use rather than using more unique names. It leads to a sort of language inflation, with general terminology becoming less useful.
Just language evolution I guess though it can be very irritating sometimes trying to express ideas while avoiding the advertising e.g. "I want to access the database" or "I want to use the word processor" or "I'm going to start the window'ing system" or "This is a basic language".
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
So you are for restrictions keeping people or corperations from getting too rich or sucessful?
To the extent that it distorts the political and democratic process, yes. I see no reason why Bill Gates and the like should have more say in the political process than I do. This is the reality but that doesn't mean it's okay. This is particularly bad with the media cartels. Any view which is incompatible with the television license owners conservative, capitalist views pretty much doesn't exist in the popular media. A new kind of 1984 "unthink". Government stations at least have a mandate to present a broad spectrum of views.
I'm not saying you can't make a case against MS or RIAA (MS is clearly reaping monopoly rents, and the RIAA is a classic cartel). But the arguments you just put forward are simple jealousy.
No, I think you misunderstand. I have no problem with successful companies e.g. in cars, engineering or service industries. My concern is, why did these intellectual property cartels arise in the first place? In my view it was due to bad law that didn't recognise the special characteristics of IP. When a single company is making $35,000,000,000 per year, has been doing it for more than a decade, and even multiple free products have trouble competing then that's a pretty clear sign to me that the market is broken.
Like I said a true free market is a myth. If it did exist it would just be warlordism, might makes right. Real life markets have a huge number of rules balancing the rights of all participants. Business like to claim there is such a thing as a free market but that's just nonsense. Market structures are complex things with many tradeoffs.
But I personally am fine with Malaysis's "guidelines". If they make sense, then their public sector should operate more efficiently then their neighbors who have no such "guidelines" (like Thailand).
You are ignoring the tragedy of the commons. Decisions which are optimal for each purchaser may be suboptimal for the government or country as a whole. It is quite reasonable for the government to place restrictions on the purchasing decisions on individuals. Just like a large company may have a preferred (read required) supplier to get a bulk discount. In the case of government it simply makes rational economic sense to support open source software, where costs can be amortised over all users and where more money is kept in the country, even though commercial software may be more convenient or profitable (because of under-the-table kickbacks) for individual purchasers. Note that these arguments do not apply to niche software, where amortising costs over a large user base is not feasible, nor to military software and the like where security and other concerns may outweigh the economic benefits.
We shall see.
True.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
MS named a competing product almost the same thing, there would be OSS bedwetter outcry galore.
Like XWindows, Microsoft Windows, XBasic and XBox? Funny, that.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
In the long run restrictions tend to hurt more than they help, and often achieve the opposite (like rent control or job protection).
The "free" market is a myth. Every market has a huge number of written and unwritten rules discouraging negative competitive behaviour (anti-trust, fraud, truth in advertising, stock manipulation, copyright law etc.) and allowing positive competitive behaviour (improvement in product, lowering of price etc.). Law that stops tax payer money from being used inefficiently is a positive law.
Simple economics really.
Yep. $100 spent on commercial software can be used by only one person. $100 spent on open source software can potentially be used by millions. Even billions. Any large organisation including governments that doesn't invest in open source software and freeware is being long-term economically irrational.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I disagree in part. I've seen a number of large projects with dedicated, trained UI groups that managed to totally stuff up the user interface. User interfaces designed by committee can be just as bad as user interfaces designed by developers. I'm not sure what the silver bullet is but it's not throwing a horde of UI designers at it. Possibly the best thing to do is is to get a small number of gifted people and leverage/replicate their work massively, as Apple has done. That's the nice thing about software; somebody needs to do it once and then it can be easily copied a million times.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A good (bad?) point. Every person has their off days and user interfaces should be designed to accommodate that perfectly human failing.
I, a reasonably intelligent user, will never be insulted by a dumbed down interface. I want to devote my intelligence to useful things, not yet another user interface nightmare. If a dumbed down interface allows me to avoid learning useless things that will be out-of-date tomorrow, while still allowing me to do useful work, then I am all for it.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The Open Image dialog requires double clicking in the Folders list and there is no open Folder button. Users are not mind readers and should not have to be a detective. Double-clicking is not intuitive to most users and this is likely to be a show stopper.
On startup it comes up with a mess of useless, confusing options, all irrelevant to the only two (count them, 2!) common options of creating or opening a new image. This is a systemic problem in gimp, displaying non-available options. Gimp should never display anything that can't be used. At the very least it should grey them.
While I respect what the gimp designers have done (a lot!), and while gimp isn't even close to the worse UI programs out there, the gimp designers need to think much more in terms of naive users and standard user interfaces. Whether they like it or not 95% of (attempting) gimp users are naive. The designers should put their naive friends and relatives in front and see how far (and how slow) they get, without prompting. Judging by my neighbour it won't be far; all she wants to do is resize (making it possible to email over dialin) and crop her digital photos and scans. As a bonus making it easy for the naive user will often speed up the common workflow of the experienced user.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A good, basic GUI interface is not hard, it is easy. Too many programmers won't even spend the hour it takes to design. They incrementally add cruft for months and then wonder why the hell everybody complains about their program. It is a real shame the number of freeware programs out there where the programmer spends months on the code and seconds on the user interface. What a waste.
All they need to do is keep in mind one simple fact:
Will the naive, lowest common denominator user operating the program for the first time immediately know what to do next at every stage or do they have to be a mind reader or a detective?
Way too many programmers do not follow that simple principle. All they need to do is storyboard the common uses of the program (starting from before installation!), see where the roadblocks are and reorganise each part of the user interface causing a problem until their are no roadblocks left. Easy. If the programmer can't imagine what a naive user would be like just pick a naive friend or relative and (mentally) run them through the program assuming they will have no prompting or help at all.
Stop making excuses. If you want your program to be used, make it useable.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
They mean your correspondent can't use their good, fully configured email program (with logging of incoming/outgoing email, familiar editing, familiar display, spell checking, address book management and organised filing) for a piece of crap.
Use email forms if you must but always provide a real email address as well, encoded as an image if necessary, to avoid spam.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It simply isn't fair to blame Microsoft for the ignorance of their users.
But it is fair to blame them for designing a product that is inappropriate for the average user. Virtually all the problems IE causes were trivially predictable at design time.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I wouldn't trust these numbers too much. Large, multinational companies have many opportunities to manipulate their accounts for tax and other reasons.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Yep, M$ is being paid $3,000,000,000/month for it's software (mostly written more than a decade ago) and other companies with similarly functional software are being paid a tiny fraction of that. For some strange reason I don't find that reasonable. Piracy is a sensible response.
In non-IP industry companies are paid more-or-less proportional to the amount of work they do e.g. numbers of cars sold. That is reasonable.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nonsense. An optional luxury item like a Rolex is in no way comparable to an essential work item like a wordprocessor.
M$ is a monopoly. They didn't go from nothing to being one of the richest companies in world by giving customers value for money. They did it by manipulating the market, by being lucky, by largely buying, not creating, a few good software products and by being the beneficiary of an unstable market with an extreme economic network effect leading to winner-take-all. They are currently being paid something like $30,000,000,000 plus per year for a dozen programs they largely wrote more than a decade ago. That's insane.
Any system which allows this to happen is badly broken. You can bullshit all you like about rights and how they've earned it but the simple fact is these so-called rights are simply bad law, not natural human rights, and they haven't even remotely earned it. Any bleating by past and present microsofties about "rights" is nothing more than parasites worried that they might lose their free ride.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Impossible.:-) M$ would charge whatever the product is worth to the customer, less 1%. Net value to the customer next to nothing.
That's a big problem for closed source. Monopolies, market segmentation and the high personal/business cost of switching software products means that the customer is given almost no value. As studies have shown.
Contrast that with open source and freeware. Without per-copy costing to concentrate the value in one business large numbers of copies can sometimes create enormous value for society-at-large.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
IT'S JUST A COMPUTER PROGRAM and it WILL NOT change the world.
Bullshit. Software now touches every aspect of our lives. If that's not political, what is?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nope, piracy will solve itself once somebody comes up with a solution to the problem in the signature below. Most people feel no moral obligation to take piracy seriously when IP law gives away such ridiculous, unfair advantage to oligopoly players.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'm getting very sick of astroturfers trying to push their marketing drivel (straight out of South Park: "closed source is gooood") at the start of slashdot replies.
By definition, for the customer (us!), open source must provide at least all the options of closed source. All the grandparent did was highlight what is probably the most beneficial potential change for slashdot'ers. If NVidia had released the source as that poster had suggested the 4K problem probably would've been fixed within hours.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
For example, XBOX Live isn't sitting on a couple of PC's in somebodies basement, it is a world wide gaming service connecting approximately 1 million gamers together. That doesn't cost nothing, it takes money to run it and Microsoft asks a fee to use it, which I think is entirely reasonable.
Yep, and given a million gamers a fee of a dollar per gamer per month would be way more than reasonable. Dominant, particularly monopoly, companies like M$ love to pretend that they do not have massive economies scale.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Why must you assume that they are guilty of piracy if they don't have some piece of paper? In other words why are you assuming they are guilty until proven innocent?
I love the way that software vendors assume that lost paperwork gives them the right to control legitimate software use. This is a real problem in large organisations where paperwork is frequently misplaced, they've bought many different vendor's software and vendor licensing policies/standardisation is a complete mess.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
While the Open-source people here usually have a hard time comprehending why someone like yahoo would do this
Not true, open source people here usually have a very good understanding of why someone would do this.
Ad revenue from y! Instant Messenger: $$$ As revenue from user connected to trillian: 0 Of course yahoo understands that their client may not be the best out there, yet without any additional ad revenues it makes it tough to explain to upper management that it is worth allowing any old client to connect.
That's an oversimplification. While of course true there are many other factors at play including good will, the ability to connect customers with non-customers and propagate word-of-mouth, the cheapness of running servers, the increased saleable value of a messaging service with more users, even if not all the users are receiving ad's, the ability to manipulate the protocol for business advantage completely unrelated to locking out non-ad users, the ability to not irritate a minor percentage of users who are probably not going to buy from the ad's anyway etc. etc.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nice try, but you're committing the classic mistake: retrospectively assessing an invention. Many inventions look deceptively simple and obvious in hindsight. In fact, it's often the hallmark of a brilliant invention that it's so simple.
A pretty sounding but faulty argument that patent supporters like to use. Retrospective assessment, by definition, will have more facts available to make a judgment and therefore will be a better judgement.True innovation is obvious both pre- and post- innovation.
Often, so-called innovation is merely an idea whose time has come that will be invented independently in a short period of time by many people with no so-called "prior art". None. The the patent office gives a monopoly to one "inventor", sometimes giving them a multi-million dollar advantage, and penalises many others who've done exactly the same thing. Yet another example of how unfair the patent system is.
If the patent system truly reflected the reality of IP invention rather than some lawyer fiction at a minimum it would allow multiple near simultaneous invention. It would also not make "prior art" the definition of innovation but "obvious to an expert in the field" (not some patent office non-inventor) instead. In addition it would also assume that simultaneous inventors are innocent of copying until proven guilty with a chain of evidence, like most law.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Thanks for the correction. The main point stands however; the M$ tax is still included in the price of the laptop, whether they're using M$Windows or not, thus making true price competition on the OS impossible.
Almost none of them care, because they understand the situation
Yes, customers are resigned to it. That doesn't mean it's right.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
EmperorLinux had to uninstall M$Windows before installing Linux because the 3D laptop is not available unbundled with an M$Windows license.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you other people doing with yours?
You've been lucky. Accidents and errors happen. It's called being human.
Any technology that doesn't recognise that is broken. This is one of major problems with software companies, they assume that their technology is perfect. Bollocks.
A somewhat related story: Yesterday I had to install RedHat Linux because I was installing a product that depended on it. The product also required that the Linux to be online updated. RedHat, for no good reason, requires an account on RedHatNetwork to do this and in addition and also for no good reason, limits each account to updating only one computer. I had a dodgy network connection that caused the first update to fail. I restart and then find my "second" computer cannot be updated. Idiots. It's largely because of nonsense like this that I don't use MSWindows. I will never use, purchase or recommend RedHat again.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Both were replaced by the company for the cost of shipping when I sent in the dammaged CD.
Did they pay for your time and inconvenience? Did they handle the certainty that the company will eventually be out of business and replacements no longer available?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
OpenTalk is the perfect name.
I'm not so sure that is the case. It's a very generic name that has been used by a number of software communication packages. See google
It's a general problem actually, marketing types trying to coopt general language for their specific use rather than using more unique names. It leads to a sort of language inflation, with general terminology becoming less useful.
Just language evolution I guess though it can be very irritating sometimes trying to express ideas while avoiding the advertising e.g. "I want to access the database" or "I want to use the word processor" or "I'm going to start the window'ing system" or "This is a basic language".
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
So you are for restrictions keeping people or corperations from getting too rich or sucessful?
To the extent that it distorts the political and democratic process, yes. I see no reason why Bill Gates and the like should have more say in the political process than I do. This is the reality but that doesn't mean it's okay. This is particularly bad with the media cartels. Any view which is incompatible with the television license owners conservative, capitalist views pretty much doesn't exist in the popular media. A new kind of 1984 "unthink". Government stations at least have a mandate to present a broad spectrum of views.
I'm not saying you can't make a case against MS or RIAA (MS is clearly reaping monopoly rents, and the RIAA is a classic cartel). But the arguments you just put forward are simple jealousy.
No, I think you misunderstand. I have no problem with successful companies e.g. in cars, engineering or service industries. My concern is, why did these intellectual property cartels arise in the first place? In my view it was due to bad law that didn't recognise the special characteristics of IP. When a single company is making $35,000,000,000 per year, has been doing it for more than a decade, and even multiple free products have trouble competing then that's a pretty clear sign to me that the market is broken.
Like I said a true free market is a myth. If it did exist it would just be warlordism, might makes right. Real life markets have a huge number of rules balancing the rights of all participants. Business like to claim there is such a thing as a free market but that's just nonsense. Market structures are complex things with many tradeoffs.
But I personally am fine with Malaysis's "guidelines". If they make sense, then their public sector should operate more efficiently then their neighbors who have no such "guidelines" (like Thailand).
You are ignoring the tragedy of the commons. Decisions which are optimal for each purchaser may be suboptimal for the government or country as a whole. It is quite reasonable for the government to place restrictions on the purchasing decisions on individuals. Just like a large company may have a preferred (read required) supplier to get a bulk discount. In the case of government it simply makes rational economic sense to support open source software, where costs can be amortised over all users and where more money is kept in the country, even though commercial software may be more convenient or profitable (because of under-the-table kickbacks) for individual purchasers. Note that these arguments do not apply to niche software, where amortising costs over a large user base is not feasible, nor to military software and the like where security and other concerns may outweigh the economic benefits.
We shall see.
True.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
MS named a competing product almost the same thing, there would be OSS bedwetter outcry galore.
Like XWindows, Microsoft Windows, XBasic and XBox? Funny, that.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
In the long run restrictions tend to hurt more than they help, and often achieve the opposite (like rent control or job protection).
The "free" market is a myth. Every market has a huge number of written and unwritten rules discouraging negative competitive behaviour (anti-trust, fraud, truth in advertising, stock manipulation, copyright law etc.) and allowing positive competitive behaviour (improvement in product, lowering of price etc.). Law that stops tax payer money from being used inefficiently is a positive law.
Simple economics really.
Yep. $100 spent on commercial software can be used by only one person. $100 spent on open source software can potentially be used by millions. Even billions. Any large organisation including governments that doesn't invest in open source software and freeware is being long-term economically irrational.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
you need a team of professionals
I disagree in part. I've seen a number of large projects with dedicated, trained UI groups that managed to totally stuff up the user interface. User interfaces designed by committee can be just as bad as user interfaces designed by developers. I'm not sure what the silver bullet is but it's not throwing a horde of UI designers at it. Possibly the best thing to do is is to get a small number of gifted people and leverage/replicate their work massively, as Apple has done. That's the nice thing about software; somebody needs to do it once and then it can be easily copied a million times.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
would insult the operator's intelligence
A good (bad?) point. Every person has their off days and user interfaces should be designed to accommodate that perfectly human failing.
I, a reasonably intelligent user, will never be insulted by a dumbed down interface. I want to devote my intelligence to useful things, not yet another user interface nightmare. If a dumbed down interface allows me to avoid learning useless things that will be out-of-date tomorrow, while still allowing me to do useful work, then I am all for it.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A couple of example problems in the Gimp 2.0 UI:
The Open Image dialog requires double clicking in the Folders list and there is no open Folder button. Users are not mind readers and should not have to be a detective. Double-clicking is not intuitive to most users and this is likely to be a show stopper.
On startup it comes up with a mess of useless, confusing options, all irrelevant to the only two (count them, 2!) common options of creating or opening a new image. This is a systemic problem in gimp, displaying non-available options. Gimp should never display anything that can't be used. At the very least it should grey them.
While I respect what the gimp designers have done (a lot!), and while gimp isn't even close to the worse UI programs out there, the gimp designers need to think much more in terms of naive users and standard user interfaces. Whether they like it or not 95% of (attempting) gimp users are naive. The designers should put their naive friends and relatives in front and see how far (and how slow) they get, without prompting. Judging by my neighbour it won't be far; all she wants to do is resize (making it possible to email over dialin) and crop her digital photos and scans. As a bonus making it easy for the naive user will often speed up the common workflow of the experienced user.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Agreed, way too many programmers make excuses.
A good, basic GUI interface is not hard, it is easy. Too many programmers won't even spend the hour it takes to design. They incrementally add cruft for months and then wonder why the hell everybody complains about their program. It is a real shame the number of freeware programs out there where the programmer spends months on the code and seconds on the user interface. What a waste.
All they need to do is keep in mind one simple fact:
Will the naive, lowest common denominator user operating the program for the first time immediately know what to do next at every stage or do they have to be a mind reader or a detective?
Way too many programmers do not follow that simple principle. All they need to do is storyboard the common uses of the program (starting from before installation!), see where the roadblocks are and reorganise each part of the user interface causing a problem until their are no roadblocks left. Easy. If the programmer can't imagine what a naive user would be like just pick a naive friend or relative and (mentally) run them through the program assuming they will have no prompting or help at all.
Stop making excuses. If you want your program to be used, make it useable.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Simply code a form for contacting you via email
I hate email forms.
They mean your correspondent can't use their good, fully configured email program (with logging of incoming/outgoing email, familiar editing, familiar display, spell checking, address book management and organised filing) for a piece of crap.
Use email forms if you must but always provide a real email address as well, encoded as an image if necessary, to avoid spam.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It simply isn't fair to blame Microsoft for the ignorance of their users.
But it is fair to blame them for designing a product that is inappropriate for the average user. Virtually all the problems IE causes were trivially predictable at design time.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
M$ financials
I wouldn't trust these numbers too much. Large, multinational companies have many opportunities to manipulate their accounts for tax and other reasons.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
it's an inbalance of the equation
Yep, M$ is being paid $3,000,000,000/month for it's software (mostly written more than a decade ago) and other companies with similarly functional software are being paid a tiny fraction of that. For some strange reason I don't find that reasonable. Piracy is a sensible response.
In non-IP industry companies are paid more-or-less proportional to the amount of work they do e.g. numbers of cars sold. That is reasonable.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nonsense. An optional luxury item like a Rolex is in no way comparable to an essential work item like a wordprocessor.
M$ is a monopoly. They didn't go from nothing to being one of the richest companies in world by giving customers value for money. They did it by manipulating the market, by being lucky, by largely buying, not creating, a few good software products and by being the beneficiary of an unstable market with an extreme economic network effect leading to winner-take-all. They are currently being paid something like $30,000,000,000 plus per year for a dozen programs they largely wrote more than a decade ago. That's insane.
Any system which allows this to happen is badly broken. You can bullshit all you like about rights and how they've earned it but the simple fact is these so-called rights are simply bad law, not natural human rights, and they haven't even remotely earned it. Any bleating by past and present microsofties about "rights" is nothing more than parasites worried that they might lose their free ride.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Even if eventually MCE became the better product?
Impossible. :-) M$ would charge whatever the product is worth to the customer, less 1%. Net value to the customer next to nothing.
That's a big problem for closed source. Monopolies, market segmentation and the high personal/business cost of switching software products means that the customer is given almost no value. As studies have shown.
Contrast that with open source and freeware. Without per-copy costing to concentrate the value in one business large numbers of copies can sometimes create enormous value for society-at-large.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
IT'S JUST A COMPUTER PROGRAM and it WILL NOT change the world.
Bullshit. Software now touches every aspect of our lives. If that's not political, what is?
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nope, piracy will solve itself once somebody comes up with a solution to the problem in the signature below. Most people feel no moral obligation to take piracy seriously when IP law gives away such ridiculous, unfair advantage to oligopoly players.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'm getting very sick of astroturfers trying to push their marketing drivel (straight out of South Park: "closed source is gooood") at the start of slashdot replies.
By definition, for the customer (us!), open source must provide at least all the options of closed source. All the grandparent did was highlight what is probably the most beneficial potential change for slashdot'ers. If NVidia had released the source as that poster had suggested the 4K problem probably would've been fixed within hours.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
For example, XBOX Live isn't sitting on a couple of PC's in somebodies basement, it is a world wide gaming service connecting approximately 1 million gamers together. That doesn't cost nothing, it takes money to run it and Microsoft asks a fee to use it, which I think is entirely reasonable.
Yep, and given a million gamers a fee of a dollar per gamer per month would be way more than reasonable. Dominant, particularly monopoly, companies like M$ love to pretend that they do not have massive economies scale.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Why must you assume that they are guilty of piracy if they don't have some piece of paper? In other words why are you assuming they are guilty until proven innocent?
I love the way that software vendors assume that lost paperwork gives them the right to control legitimate software use. This is a real problem in large organisations where paperwork is frequently misplaced, they've bought many different vendor's software and vendor licensing policies/standardisation is a complete mess.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
While the Open-source people here usually have a hard time comprehending why someone like yahoo would do this
Not true, open source people here usually have a very good understanding of why someone would do this.
Ad revenue from y! Instant Messenger: $$$ As revenue from user connected to trillian: 0 Of course yahoo understands that their client may not be the best out there, yet without any additional ad revenues it makes it tough to explain to upper management that it is worth allowing any old client to connect.
That's an oversimplification. While of course true there are many other factors at play including good will, the ability to connect customers with non-customers and propagate word-of-mouth, the cheapness of running servers, the increased saleable value of a messaging service with more users, even if not all the users are receiving ad's, the ability to manipulate the protocol for business advantage completely unrelated to locking out non-ad users, the ability to not irritate a minor percentage of users who are probably not going to buy from the ad's anyway etc. etc.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nice try, but you're committing the classic mistake: retrospectively assessing an invention. Many inventions look deceptively simple and obvious in hindsight. In fact, it's often the hallmark of a brilliant invention that it's so simple.
A pretty sounding but faulty argument that patent supporters like to use. Retrospective assessment, by definition, will have more facts available to make a judgment and therefore will be a better judgement.True innovation is obvious both pre- and post- innovation.
Often, so-called innovation is merely an idea whose time has come that will be invented independently in a short period of time by many people with no so-called "prior art". None. The the patent office gives a monopoly to one "inventor", sometimes giving them a multi-million dollar advantage, and penalises many others who've done exactly the same thing. Yet another example of how unfair the patent system is.
If the patent system truly reflected the reality of IP invention rather than some lawyer fiction at a minimum it would allow multiple near simultaneous invention. It would also not make "prior art" the definition of innovation but "obvious to an expert in the field" (not some patent office non-inventor) instead. In addition it would also assume that simultaneous inventors are innocent of copying until proven guilty with a chain of evidence, like most law.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Thanks for the correction. The main point stands however; the M$ tax is still included in the price of the laptop, whether they're using M$Windows or not, thus making true price competition on the OS impossible.
Microsoft has very strong contracts
True. They have been the subject of anti-trust court cases.
Almost none of them care, because they understand the situation
Yes, customers are resigned to it. That doesn't mean it's right.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Classic. They are paying the M$ tax.
EmperorLinux had to uninstall M$Windows before installing Linux because the 3D laptop is not available unbundled with an M$Windows license.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.