You have raised a couple of fairly superficial points. Sure, the UI is what the user relates to and the intuitiveness of it is directly proportional to the adoption rate of the software. However, you try teaching my grandma (82 yrs old) how to install a new program from an rpm. Even with apt-get. Don't even get me started on compiling from source. The command line is a strange and mysterious place to her and is pretty much out of the question.
In windows, she can just "click here" and the installer does the rest. All she has to do is click "Next, I agree, Next^N, Finish" and she's done. She doesn't need to know anything about version numbering or dependencies, etc. Of course, that's how easy it is to install all sorts of other crap on Windows, too.
Granted, things like the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu are just about that easy but what if she wants an app that doesn't appear in that list?
Or what if the Linux installer doesn't auto-detect her printer correctly? Good luck, Grandma!
Don't get me wrong. I think package management and the whole user experience in Linux have come a long way over the years and Linux is ALMOST ready for the desktop. To say that it has been ready for several years I think is a stretch.
Who cares about my grandma? Well, that's just my usual usability metric. Substitute with any computer near-illiterate for the same effect.
if it could be done by some of the pioneering programs 10 years ago, why many programs now would recognize only individual letters and not words
I think what GP means is that you can speak whole words into a word processor and it will match them against words in its dictionary. Any it doesn't recognize would need to be spelled out.
When coding, We use a lot of words that aren't in the dictionary. if, else and switch would be ok but Degrees2Radians isn't going to be in any dictionary so you're going to end up spelling a lot of words.
Parent makes a good point and presents an alternative to the MS speech SDK as the submitter asked. Is it because he said "wine shit"?
Had he said "with no need for wine" would you have modded him down?
Even if he said "wine is shit", just because you don't agree with an ON TOPIC, informative post is no reason to mod it down. Read the moderator guidelines.
If so, I suppose it could be done in such a way to not specifically name Windows. "Since switching from proprietary software to FOSS in January, our company has found..."
There have been "independant" studies that show the TCO of OSS to be much higher than that of Windows. We very quickly dismissed these as being funded by Micro$oft. Fair enough for Slashdot, but those are the reports that get media attention and they're what the PHBes read.
What the OSS community really needs is a centralized place where businesses that have made "the switch" can provide testimonials about how much money they are really saving. It's hard to convince a PHB or beancounter *not* to believe something they see in a written report without being able to point to reliable counter evidence.
Does such a thing exist? If not, who is going to create it?
I agree that one truly nasty worm could do significant damage to MS' empire (though I wonder if it would utterly ruin them or not). I think the main reason this hasn't happened is that the risk/benefit ratio is too high. Look at parasites in nature. The ones that destroy a host quickly and utterly don't get a lot of time to reproduce themselves and ensure the continuation of their species and they end up having to find a new source of resources much too often. So what we're left with are ones that seek to remain undetected and feed off a host for a longer period of time while reproducing like crazy.
The obvious computer analogue is that wanton destruction is simply not profitable nor worth going to jail for. Selling personal data to spammers, phishers and shady marketing companies is.
I've been watching the bugtraq list via rss like I do every day. There have been (guessing) ~30 updates today and this one is no more earthshatteringly critical than any other. So why is this news and the others didn't make slashdot? The answer is in TFA: (emphasis mine)
Cooper says that the new WMF vulnerabilities are not a major cause for concern. "New malformed images that simply crash things aren't really that important unless they can be shown to cause code to execute," he said via instant message. "This is only getting any attention because it's WMF and Microsoft just released a WMF patch."
ho hum
The article's point is that as "alternative" (read non-MS) OSs and browsers gain popularity, they will garner proportionately more attention from crackers. The "dream world" they speak of is the notion that certain products are more secure because there are less attacks launched against them.
Not that I agree with TFA, but the point it is trying to make is that because these products have fewer deployments they are a less juicy target for crackers (opportunists). That will change and then we can really see how secure those products are.
Personally, I think they will stand up much better than the article suggests, but we can't really have an accurate picture until the playing field levels a bit.
How long this person has been running a mac has nothing to do with it.
And what's this nonsense about barcodes and speed concerns?
Well, I think the issue is that a human needs to turn each item so that the barcode can be seen by the laser. With RFID technology, everything could be identified as it whizzed by and throughput would indeed be greatly enhanced.
That's true, but as a consumer I don't want my purchases scanned that fast. At the grocery store, if there's a great sale on bananas, when I get to the till and the clerk scans it I get to see that I actually got the sale price and not the regular price. With the new RFID paradigm, I would have to check out my receipt AFTER flying through the till and then go BACK to get the difference.
About 100 new CDs were released in St John's (pop 150,000) in 2003. Almost none of them were supported by major record labels...
Out of curiosity, what sort of timeframe are you talking about here? 100 CD's.. ever? this year? Month?
most artists make money by having people pay $10 to see them. If 100 people come, then you've made $750 after you pay the sound guy.
Unless you're on the road. It's been my experience that the door pretty much pays your living and travelling expenses and merch is where you really make your money.
Oh, and if you bring your own sound tech with you you on the road you can save that $250. But watch out, ours typically drank all the beer!
Firstly, since cd sales do not appear to have suffered ANY ill effects in the 5 or so years that mp3s have been available to the public at large through file swapping services, I think its highly unlikely that the music industry will feel compelled to slash prices.
Good point. However: WalMart, iTunes, Starbucks.. as these things(*) start to gain momentum and p2p downloading becomes even more popular than it already is, I think we're going to start seeing a very slow erosion of prices in stores and a shift that will put power back in the hands of musicians. I never said it was happening already, nor did I say it would happen overnight. All I said, really, was that downloading will have an effect on the CD sales industry. I believe it's quite a positive one for consumers and for musicians.
The record companies, however, already have a very high markup so they can absorb a bit of a loss pretty easily which will slow the decline in prices as well.
If anything, I think the reason the music industry fights file sharing so hard is not because it hurts cd sales (we already know otherwise) but because it works against their efforts to create those "safe bets" you mentioned.
Another excellent point and I stand corrected. Hopefully, this will cause the record companies to start promoting the bands people are downloading and not the crap they tell us we want to hear. For the record companies to change their ways will take a massive revolution.
(*) Yes, I am aware that these things are paid services, but they will still have an effect on record stores if not record labels.
s it expensive to tour in Canada, or is it just not relatively worth it, because there are only about 8 "major" cities (Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Ottawa)..
Don't forget about the mritimes, too. There are a few big cities there and they're VERY receptive to anyone from outside the maritimes who tours there because they're kinda isolated in some ways. But yeah, a "big" city in the maritimes isn't like a "big" city in ON or PQ so I can see how they didn't make your list.
what I mean is, compared to, say, the US which is much more densely populated and you can drive 30 minutes to the next *major* venue, in Canada it's typically a long drive (about 8 hours on average) to get from major city to major city. Now, some of the most fun I've had on the road have been at less than major cities and smaller towns often yield good turnouts in bars because there's often nothing else to do at night. However, if you're targeting more of a University market you're looking at long drives.
In a nutshell, my argument is that the gig_money:gas_money ratio is worse in Canada than in more densely populated terrain.
While I support p2p, I think there are consequences that people should be aware of. The record companies will lose money as a result of slashing prices to compete. This will lead to them representing fewer acts and those will be only the ones that are safe bets (the heavily produced Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Enrique Iglesias, etc) and less of the risky (read: interesting) ones. Diversity in record stores will suffer as p2p flourishes. If you want an actual packaged CD of a band that is more intertesting than the aforementioned acts, you're eventually going to have to actually go out to their show and buy it from them yourself. I personally think that's a great thing. Supporting live music, giving more money to musicians and less to distributors is all good in my books. If you're a proponent of p2p filesharing as I am, don't later whine that there's nothing good in the stores.
Record labels and stores make most of the money from CD sales in stores while most musicians make their money from CD's and merchendise sold at the side of the stage at live events. Attendance is determined by the popularity of the band and without p2p filesharing, many Canadian bands wouldn't be as well known as they are. Canada is a sparsely populated landmass and it's expensive to tour. mp3's are the best way to reach the most people to boost attendance. So are you truly looking out for my best interests (I'm a Canadian musician with 3 Cd's in stores) or are you catering to the labels lobbying for legislation?
Why do you think MS has allowed all of the security holes for so long?
I think the reasons micros~1 left the security holes around tend more to simple economics than cut-throatery. (not that I'm naieve enough to think that M$ is above that or anything, and you may be partly right)
For a given vulnerability microsoft applies a very simple formula:
and that's about it. They fix the ones that are really embarrassing and are cheapest to patch up and they leave all the others open because they're too cheap to do otherwise.
The ways in which revenue_lost_to_hole increases are:
1) losing lawsuits
2) people, businesses and governments getting fed up and switching to other OS's which is the one that scares them.
As of right now, their income isn't suffering too much (deliberate understatement) because Joe Sixpack either doesn't know about other options or has been told that he wouldn't understand them. Hence, for most security holes, incentive_to_fix remains low.
I agree that the article was pretty detail deficient. What have they changed "under the hood" in this version? Just as a random example: If I want to manually reconfigure something, do I have to do it in three places and then find out that my changes were undone because I didn't go through the GUI config tool? I haven't used SuSe for a while, so I don't know what the current issues are with it but you get the idea. While, I'm sure the mountain photo is really cool, I'd appreciate some more "techie" details.
When does this madness stop? The guy is dead. His stuff should be PD at this point.
This should answer your question.. It's a table showing what sorts of works from which years are currently in the public domiain. Notice the "without subsequent registration" conditions? I'm willing to bet that Gail is keeping up with the copyright registrations to keep FZ's music out of the public domain.
I agree that standards exist for a reason, however, if the entire internet were homogeneous, if you found a way to exploit one platform, you've found a way to exploit all platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
You have raised a couple of fairly superficial points. Sure, the UI is what the user relates to and the intuitiveness of it is directly proportional to the adoption rate of the software. However, you try teaching my grandma (82 yrs old) how to install a new program from an rpm. Even with apt-get. Don't even get me started on compiling from source. The command line is a strange and mysterious place to her and is pretty much out of the question.
In windows, she can just "click here" and the installer does the rest. All she has to do is click "Next, I agree, Next^N, Finish" and she's done. She doesn't need to know anything about version numbering or dependencies, etc. Of course, that's how easy it is to install all sorts of other crap on Windows, too.
Granted, things like the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu are just about that easy but what if she wants an app that doesn't appear in that list?
Or what if the Linux installer doesn't auto-detect her printer correctly? Good luck, Grandma!
Don't get me wrong. I think package management and the whole user experience in Linux have come a long way over the years and Linux is ALMOST ready for the desktop. To say that it has been ready for several years I think is a stretch.
Who cares about my grandma? Well, that's just my usual usability metric. Substitute with any computer near-illiterate for the same effect.
what language was this?
/* always goes here */
/* some stuff happens */ /* that returns false, is completely legal but has no effect. */ /* x is still 10 */
/* goes in here but you might not expect it to */
"===" won't compile in any language I know.
Did you maybe mean the person used a SINGLE '=' where you would expect a double?
if (x = 10) {
}
or I could see it the other way around, too.
void foo()
{
int x = 10;
x == 0;
if (x != 0) {
}
}
if it could be done by some of the pioneering programs 10 years ago, why many programs now would recognize only individual letters and not words
I think what GP means is that you can speak whole words into a word processor and it will match them against words in its dictionary. Any it doesn't recognize would need to be spelled out.
When coding, We use a lot of words that aren't in the dictionary. if, else and switch would be ok but Degrees2Radians isn't going to be in any dictionary so you're going to end up spelling a lot of words.
Parent makes a good point and presents an alternative to the MS speech SDK as the submitter asked. Is it because he said "wine shit"?
Had he said "with no need for wine" would you have modded him down?
Even if he said "wine is shit", just because you don't agree with an ON TOPIC, informative post is no reason to mod it down. Read the moderator guidelines.
You can mod this down too if you like.
Are you serious?
If so, I suppose it could be done in such a way to not specifically name Windows. "Since switching from proprietary software to FOSS in January, our company has found..."
There have been "independant" studies that show the TCO of OSS to be much higher than that of Windows. We very quickly dismissed these as being funded by Micro$oft. Fair enough for Slashdot, but those are the reports that get media attention and they're what the PHBes read.
What the OSS community really needs is a centralized place where businesses that have made "the switch" can provide testimonials about how much money they are really saving. It's hard to convince a PHB or beancounter *not* to believe something they see in a written report without being able to point to reliable counter evidence.
Does such a thing exist? If not, who is going to create it?
I agree that one truly nasty worm could do significant damage to MS' empire (though I wonder if it would utterly ruin them or not). I think the main reason this hasn't happened is that the risk/benefit ratio is too high. Look at parasites in nature. The ones that destroy a host quickly and utterly don't get a lot of time to reproduce themselves and ensure the continuation of their species and they end up having to find a new source of resources much too often. So what we're left with are ones that seek to remain undetected and feed off a host for a longer period of time while reproducing like crazy.
The obvious computer analogue is that wanton destruction is simply not profitable nor worth going to jail for. Selling personal data to spammers, phishers and shady marketing companies is.
I've been watching the bugtraq list via rss like I do every day. There have been (guessing) ~30 updates today and this one is no more earthshatteringly critical than any other. So why is this news and the others didn't make slashdot? The answer is in TFA: (emphasis mine)
Cooper says that the new WMF vulnerabilities are not a major cause for concern. "New malformed images that simply crash things aren't really that important unless they can be shown to cause code to execute," he said via instant message. "This is only getting any attention because it's WMF and Microsoft just released a WMF patch."
ho hum
How is this "informative", mods?
The article's point is that as "alternative" (read non-MS) OSs and browsers gain popularity, they will garner proportionately more attention from crackers. The "dream world" they speak of is the notion that certain products are more secure because there are less attacks launched against them.
Not that I agree with TFA, but the point it is trying to make is that because these products have fewer deployments they are a less juicy target for crackers (opportunists). That will change and then we can really see how secure those products are.
Personally, I think they will stand up much better than the article suggests, but we can't really have an accurate picture until the playing field levels a bit.
How long this person has been running a mac has nothing to do with it.
And what's this nonsense about barcodes and speed concerns?
Well, I think the issue is that a human needs to turn each item so that the barcode can be seen by the laser. With RFID technology, everything could be identified as it whizzed by and throughput would indeed be greatly enhanced.
That's true, but as a consumer I don't want my purchases scanned that fast. At the grocery store, if there's a great sale on bananas, when I get to the till and the clerk scans it I get to see that I actually got the sale price and not the regular price. With the new RFID paradigm, I would have to check out my receipt AFTER flying through the till and then go BACK to get the difference.
I suppose we'll have to wait for a real scientific journal to publish this before we find out much more.
and heeeeeere's the journal!
I once again realized just how ugly the majority of PCs are. The replacing of a harddisk alone takes forever, on the Powermac? 2 Seconds...
..Takes me roughly 4x as long to upgrade the RAM in a standard PC than in the Mac.
;)
Memory? Same thing...
On the PC?...
Wow! It took you a whole (4 * 2 = 8) seconds to upgrade the RAM in your PC? Impressive!
About 100 new CDs were released in St John's (pop 150,000) in 2003. Almost none of them were supported by major record labels...
Out of curiosity, what sort of timeframe are you talking about here? 100 CD's.. ever? this year? Month?
most artists make money by having people pay $10 to see them. If 100 people come, then you've made $750 after you pay the sound guy.
Unless you're on the road. It's been my experience that the door pretty much pays your living and travelling expenses and merch is where you really make your money.
Oh, and if you bring your own sound tech with you you on the road you can save that $250. But watch out, ours typically drank all the beer!
Firstly, since cd sales do not appear to have suffered ANY ill effects in the 5 or so years that mp3s have been available to the public at large through file swapping services, I think its highly unlikely that the music industry will feel compelled to slash prices.
Good point. However: WalMart, iTunes, Starbucks.. as these things(*) start to gain momentum and p2p downloading becomes even more popular than it already is, I think we're going to start seeing a very slow erosion of prices in stores and a shift that will put power back in the hands of musicians. I never said it was happening already, nor did I say it would happen overnight. All I said, really, was that downloading will have an effect on the CD sales industry. I believe it's quite a positive one for consumers and for musicians.
The record companies, however, already have a very high markup so they can absorb a bit of a loss pretty easily which will slow the decline in prices as well.
If anything, I think the reason the music industry fights file sharing so hard is not because it hurts cd sales (we already know otherwise) but because it works against their efforts to create those "safe bets" you mentioned.
Another excellent point and I stand corrected. Hopefully, this will cause the record companies to start promoting the bands people are downloading and not the crap they tell us we want to hear. For the record companies to change their ways will take a massive revolution.
(*) Yes, I am aware that these things are paid services, but they will still have an effect on record stores if not record labels.
Thanks, AC.
...If you're a proponent of p2p filesharing as I am..."
If you had read my post, I said:
"While I support p2p,...
so I don't think p2p is evil. I think it's great. Try reading before you give a knee-jerk response. We're arguing the same point here.
You can also READ my previous post here
s it expensive to tour in Canada, or is it just not relatively worth it, because there are only about 8 "major" cities (Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Ottawa)..
Don't forget about the mritimes, too. There are a few big cities there and they're VERY receptive to anyone from outside the maritimes who tours there because they're kinda isolated in some ways. But yeah, a "big" city in the maritimes isn't like a "big" city in ON or PQ so I can see how they didn't make your list.
what I mean is, compared to, say, the US which is much more densely populated and you can drive 30 minutes to the next *major* venue, in Canada it's typically a long drive (about 8 hours on average) to get from major city to major city. Now, some of the most fun I've had on the road have been at less than major cities and smaller towns often yield good turnouts in bars because there's often nothing else to do at night. However, if you're targeting more of a University market you're looking at long drives.
In a nutshell, my argument is that the gig_money:gas_money ratio is worse in Canada than in more densely populated terrain.
Just an ammendment to clarify my views:
While I support p2p, I think there are consequences that people should be aware of. The record companies will lose money as a result of slashing prices to compete. This will lead to them representing fewer acts and those will be only the ones that are safe bets (the heavily produced Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Enrique Iglesias, etc) and less of the risky (read: interesting) ones. Diversity in record stores will suffer as p2p flourishes. If you want an actual packaged CD of a band that is more intertesting than the aforementioned acts, you're eventually going to have to actually go out to their show and buy it from them yourself. I personally think that's a great thing. Supporting live music, giving more money to musicians and less to distributors is all good in my books. If you're a proponent of p2p filesharing as I am, don't later whine that there's nothing good in the stores.
Here's what I just told her:
Record labels and stores make most of the money from CD sales in stores while most musicians make their money from CD's and merchendise sold at the side of the stage at live events. Attendance is determined by the popularity of the band and without p2p filesharing, many Canadian bands wouldn't be as well known as they are. Canada is a sparsely populated landmass and it's expensive to tour. mp3's are the best way to reach the most people to boost attendance. So are you truly looking out for my best interests (I'm a Canadian musician with 3 Cd's in stores) or are you catering to the labels lobbying for legislation?
The vast majority of those who voted believe that the Simpsons has yet to jump the shark.
Why do you think MS has allowed all of the security holes for so long?
I think the reasons micros~1 left the security holes around tend more to simple economics than cut-throatery. (not that I'm naieve enough to think that M$ is above that or anything, and you may be partly right)
For a given vulnerability microsoft applies a very simple formula:
incentive_to_fix = revenue_lost_to_hole - cost_to_fix
and that's about it. They fix the ones that are really embarrassing and are cheapest to patch up and they leave all the others open because they're too cheap to do otherwise.
The ways in which revenue_lost_to_hole increases are:
1) losing lawsuits
2) people, businesses and governments getting fed up and switching to other OS's which is the one that scares them.
As of right now, their income isn't suffering too much (deliberate understatement) because Joe Sixpack either doesn't know about other options or has been told that he wouldn't understand them. Hence, for most security holes, incentive_to_fix remains low.
I agree that the article was pretty detail deficient. What have they changed "under the hood" in this version? Just as a random example: If I want to manually reconfigure something, do I have to do it in three places and then find out that my changes were undone because I didn't go through the GUI config tool? I haven't used SuSe for a while, so I don't know what the current issues are with it but you get the idea. While, I'm sure the mountain photo is really cool, I'd appreciate some more "techie" details.
Good artists copy; great artists steal.
-- Me
No.. not you. Pablo Picasso. A pretty funny (IMO) misquote of which is
" Bed artists copy. Good artists steal. -Pablo Picasso"
When does this madness stop? The guy is dead. His stuff should be PD at this point.
This should answer your question.. It's a table showing what sorts of works from which years are currently in the public domiain. Notice the "without subsequent registration" conditions? I'm willing to bet that Gail is keeping up with the copyright registrations to keep FZ's music out of the public domain.
I agree that standards exist for a reason, however, if the entire internet were homogeneous, if you found a way to exploit one platform, you've found a way to exploit all platforms.