...What's wrong with capitalism? Shouldn't artists be paid for their work?...
You yell about capitalism (and communism earlier on), but monopolies are not found in the open market capitalism needs to thrive. Copyright, patents, etc are monopolies granted for a limited time. They are not any more capitalist than any other legal construct.
Not knowing whether you are a free market capitalist, I can't really talk much about your views, except that an earnest appeal to 'play nice and pay the artis what he deserves' is much more socialist than capitalist. After all, you would probably buy generic medicine, non-branded cornflakes, etc. if they were the same as the branded products but cost way less. So where's the sympathy for the producer there? Capitalism is a bitch.
a company that actually has to pay royalties to the artists *and* pay the salaries of all the people working to produce and distribute that music CAN NOT "compete" with someone who contributes 0% to the artist or the company that produces the album.
Not so, say I. Imagine someone wanted to sell you a copy of something like a newspaper. Do you honestly think they would be able to produce a reasonable copy for less than the pittance you are paying now? Newspapers have people working for them, writing for them. They have found a model where they get revenue from advertising[1] and can put out a product so cheaply that there is no real fear of 'pirating' newspapers[2]. Of course, large companies also benifit from the economies of scale more than the small-scale "pirate"
The point? Changing markets need new models. The market is changing to a point where perfect copies of CDs are the norm. Time for a new model.
[1] I am not saying that advertising is a valid way to get the music distribution going - it's just an example.
[2] I guess the fact that news ages very quickly helps
My fundamental gripe is not with the benevolence of society, but rather with the control of something so inherently unsuited for control as ideas.
I have formulated this under the broad theory that the only viable product (for sale) is irreproducable goods. In other words, there is no problem with the artist selling his performance once, as his time is not reproducable. However, selling copies of CDs at considerably less than the price of production is bound to fail in time. The only reason it has worked for a time is the clever legal restrictions placed artificially on these goods. As the means of copying become more distributed, the whole model is bound to fail.
There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the fall of the sale of reproducable goods is doomed.
The big thing here is selling something which is easily reproduced. If your work is easily reproduced (or replaced by robots), you might very well be riding a wave of luck that someone has been willing to pay for your product.
However, in most cases, your work is not reproducable at a cost considerably less than the cost of the work, as it involves time which can not be copied. Music, ideas, patents, all can be copied at negligable cost, and will therefore go the way of all comodities, approaching the cost of production.
People have a right to make money of talents and work...
I beg to differ. Who says you have this 'right' to make money in any way you please? Do I have a right to make money off lying on my bed?
If I could find a clever way of getting people to pay me for anything I do, it is my good fortune/cleverness that has made it so, not some 'right' to earn money. And just because something has been shown to earn money in the past doesn't mean it should do so in the future. This is known as a changing business model, and the music industry will have to adapt to freely available copies of their music. It is not impossible.
I understand that it's supposed to generate "good mathematics" that will supposedly help us solve practical problems eventually.. but why not offer the reward for actual practical mathematics
Because practical mathematics already has a monetary reward?
This sounds remarkably similar to an "Engineering vs Mathematics" argument that is heard in Universities all around the world. The mathematicians are not generally interested in solving real world problems. They are interested in generating math. Engineers are not interested in math, but need it to solve the 'real problems'.
Bash does have a history. If you use the emacs keybindings for killing text (C-w, C-k and C-u), you can use C-y to yank that text, then press M-y to rotate the kill ring, effectively cycling through recent kills. This is all supplied by GNU readline, free of charge.
Unfortunately, the kill ring is not shared between different bash sessions.
Printing to PS is not all that satisfying when you have 200 SVG graphics that you need to convert to eps to include in your LaTeX document. I have not been successful in finding a svg->eps batch conversion program.
I am surprised that no-one has mentioned TeXmacs. Brilliant and powerful. I use emacs for my LaTeX editing, but this is really cool and actively maintained.
Best calculator ever (Why do I need buttons with a perfectly good keyboard attached to my computer) is Frink. Automatic unit conversion and a real programming language behind it. Java makes it cross-platform too.
2. Some people expect keyboard shortcuts to do something that isn't documented (Shift-Ins? Huh?) because it worked on one app they tried.
I don't find that the clipboard is broken, but this point is a bit strange. Having things work across all the apps you've tried (like pressing F2 to rename things in lists) without being documented is a big plus. It makes you feel like you know this stuff.
A point in case was when I noticed that I could use emacs-style shortcuts in the Bash command line. Not because I read a doc, but because the shortcuts came naturally and I did't think about it. Later I thought -- hey, that's cool, it works in Bash too.
This is a feature of a usable system, and should not be dissed.
I must also add that I believe the problem with 'I selected something, closed the window and the selection was gone' can be alleviated by not closing the window. What situation makes it essential to close a window before pasting something? The select, middle click method has always made sense to me as a delayed drag. In that case you're screwed if you close the window as well.
I don't know. Each time this kind of conversation starts, there is a lot of talk about standardisation and 'the one true interface'. I am replying to this thread because I have read two very well thought out replies and thought 'this I can talk about'.
Your points about shortcut keys and the like are interesting. I will admit that most windows apps I use share the same shortcuts, but then most of the Linux apps I use do too. I am typing this in Mozilla (I know -- the cross-platform nature of the app makes this more windows-like), and it obeys all the rules you mentioned. Likewise Openoffice, Koffice, gnumeric, etc.
On the other hand I type almost all my documents in Emacs, and the bindings I had to relearn there are used consistently in my Matlab editor and on the Bash command line.
In my experience, most users will see buttons as buttons regardless of the exact widget set you are using. Take winamp as a good example, or any recent game. Their interfaces look as similar to the standard windows interface as many of the linux apps I run. Because of the power of the GUI and the basic widgets everyone knows, they can learn to recognise that something that looks like a button probably is.
Most linux window managers mimic the Windows setup of close button top right, but it irritates me no end, as I keep closing stuff when I want to max/min it. So I have moved my close button to lop left.
The point I am trying to make is that for most of the applications people use regularly, the interfaces have been standardised enough already. The apps with confusing config files and the like are probably that way because of a user base that is familiar with the way things work and would probably be confused more by a change to a user friendly GUI than anything else. So how much more standard do the applications have to be?
There is a fundamental difference between software and doughnuts: software (and other so-called "intellectual property") is easily copied. What I mean is that ideas and code and music are all kind of ethereal -- it costs next to nothing to reproduce them.
In normal accounting, there is a balance system. I give you something to compensate for your loss of that thing. So you give me an apple, but you now have a buck that could get you another apple. The same goes for time -- you can't easily duplicate time spent on a project, and I am compensating you for the time you lost. You can use you money to buy someone else's time.
On the ideas front, you give me an idea and you still have it. It's the double entry accounting system that needs to force these transactions into a 'goods model'. The opposing idea is that you have divided the worth of your idea by two by sharing it with one person. One idea in one head is worth more than one idea in the heads of many people, and you should be compensated for the loss in worth.
So, there is a big difference between these things. Unfortunately it's a vast subject. Just look into the issues before making simplifications like 'software is just like support and doughnuts'.
We come yet again to what the average user's perception of 'fast' is. I performed your test in Windows using Palm Desktop in the background and noticed considerable redraw delay. I constantly experience problems in MS Word when scrolling graphics-heavy documents -- the graphics redraw slowly/badly or have pieces missing. Granted, the MS widget set draws quickly, but then I can get very good performance on my Linux box using OpenBox and a light widget set.
But your post is valid for one reason: The perception of speed is more important than speed itself. This is why standard profiling tools that spit out graphs of response times, etc are not so useful in GUI design, as a few miliseconds can change the perception of 'Slow' to 'fast'. Perhaps more advanced compositing a la freedesktop.org's X server will help here as pdf compositing did for MacOS X.
If you find any video anomaly "Gross. Ugly. Unacceptable" , I recommend you switch to a high-end Mac. Me, I'll stick with my X.
You say unlike most of the slashdot crowd, the general public simply does not have the patience to try and troubleshoot a problem or PAY anyone, for that matter to get the same functionality that they had before
They don't have patience/time, they don't want to pay. Then they're pretty much screwed. Unfortunately we live in an entropic world -- nothing just jumps into order. Now I'm not for proprietary software, but the reason some people pay for the stuff is that it saves them time, which costs money. The problem you described is easy enough to do with a GUI in KDE/Gnome. It just isn't possible for the computer to read your mind and give you everything you ever wanted without you having to lift a finger -- it is against the laws of thermodynamics.
Oh, and one more thing -- if we always designed everything from the Windows POV, we would be accused of lack of innovation. Catch 22, huh?
Most modern compiliers would pick up on constant operations and optimise them in the executable with no extra work on the coder's part. I think Borland C++ was the first to do this back in the day. Intelligent compilers are great for everything, including readability. Now you don't have to think about optimisation and introduce arguments like the one above, where errors can creep in and changes in datatypes can't easily be propagated.
I hear what you are saying, but there is one assumption you make that is not exactly valid. This is that what you do has no impact on another person if it does not involve them physically. You are saying: 'Let the Christians not use the research, but don't let them stop me from using it'. This sounds rational to most people on Slashdot (including me), but many fundamentalist groups (not just the Christians) feel that they are directly affected by people doing 'evil' things. The people against stem cell research and genetics in general are often not Christians, but people with specific ethics and beliefs. Think of some of the people killing doctors offering abortions, or the more violent guys from Greenpeace. I am pretty sure that these people are from diverse religious backgrounds.
So I guess both you and I are against mindless fundamentalism.
I just have to say that if God's will were that clear, I would follow it without question. One 100% deserves another. If God appeared to you and you were 100% certain of what He said, would you tell Him to get lost? I don't think so. It's uncertainty that leads to caution, and I think God's will on this research is far from clear.
Slashdot Mirror
...What's wrong with capitalism? Shouldn't artists be paid for their work?...
You yell about capitalism (and communism earlier on), but monopolies are not found in the open market capitalism needs to thrive. Copyright, patents, etc are monopolies granted for a limited time. They are not any more capitalist than any other legal construct.
Not knowing whether you are a free market capitalist, I can't really talk much about your views, except that an earnest appeal to 'play nice and pay the artis what he deserves' is much more socialist than capitalist. After all, you would probably buy generic medicine, non-branded cornflakes, etc. if they were the same as the branded products but cost way less. So where's the sympathy for the producer there? Capitalism is a bitch.
a company that actually has to pay royalties to the artists *and* pay the salaries of all the people working to produce and distribute that music CAN NOT "compete" with someone who contributes 0% to the artist or the company that produces the album.
Not so, say I. Imagine someone wanted to sell you a copy of something like a newspaper. Do you honestly think they would be able to produce a reasonable copy for less than the pittance you are paying now? Newspapers have people working for them, writing for them. They have found a model where they get revenue from advertising[1] and can put out a product so cheaply that there is no real fear of 'pirating' newspapers[2]. Of course, large companies also benifit from the economies of scale more than the small-scale "pirate"
The point? Changing markets need new models. The market is changing to a point where perfect copies of CDs are the norm. Time for a new model.
[1] I am not saying that advertising is a valid way to get the music distribution going - it's just an example.
[2] I guess the fact that news ages very quickly helps
But, Brain, where would we get a beowulf cluster of windows VNC boxes?
I'd say that, generally, old-school hackers are more respectful of intellectual property than new-school hackers. (yes, that was a generality)
I reckon RMS is about as old-school as you can get, and he tends not even to like the term "intellectual property"...
My fundamental gripe is not with the benevolence of society, but rather with the control of something so inherently unsuited for control as ideas.
I have formulated this under the broad theory that the only viable product (for sale) is irreproducable goods. In other words, there is no problem with the artist selling his performance once, as his time is not reproducable. However, selling copies of CDs at considerably less than the price of production is bound to fail in time. The only reason it has worked for a time is the clever legal restrictions placed artificially on these goods. As the means of copying become more distributed, the whole model is bound to fail.
There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the fall of the sale of reproducable goods is doomed.
The big thing here is selling something which is easily reproduced. If your work is easily reproduced (or replaced by robots), you might very well be riding a wave of luck that someone has been willing to pay for your product.
However, in most cases, your work is not reproducable at a cost considerably less than the cost of the work, as it involves time which can not be copied. Music, ideas, patents, all can be copied at negligable cost, and will therefore go the way of all comodities, approaching the cost of production.
People have a right to make money of talents and work...
I beg to differ. Who says you have this 'right' to make money in any way you please? Do I have a right to make money off lying on my bed?
If I could find a clever way of getting people to pay me for anything I do, it is my good fortune/cleverness that has made it so, not some 'right' to earn money. And just because something has been shown to earn money in the past doesn't mean it should do so in the future. This is known as a changing business model, and the music industry will have to adapt to freely available copies of their music. It is not impossible.
Wouldn't Allah be a better candidate to whale on the US?
I understand that it's supposed to generate "good mathematics" that will supposedly help us solve practical problems eventually .. but why not offer the reward for actual practical mathematics
Because practical mathematics already has a monetary reward?
This sounds remarkably similar to an "Engineering vs Mathematics" argument that is heard in Universities all around the world. The mathematicians are not generally interested in solving real world problems. They are interested in generating math. Engineers are not interested in math, but need it to solve the 'real problems'.
The only real problem is division by 3. And how often do you refer to 20 minutes as a 'third of an hour'? I mostly refer to half and quarter.
Bash does have a history. If you use the emacs keybindings for killing text (C-w, C-k and C-u), you can use C-y to yank that text, then press M-y to rotate the kill ring, effectively cycling through recent kills. This is all supplied by GNU readline, free of charge.
Unfortunately, the kill ring is not shared between different bash sessions.
Printing to PS is not all that satisfying when you have 200 SVG graphics that you need to convert to eps to include in your LaTeX document. I have not been successful in finding a svg->eps batch conversion program.
I am surprised that no-one has mentioned TeXmacs. Brilliant and powerful. I use emacs for my LaTeX editing, but this is really cool and actively maintained.
Best calculator ever (Why do I need buttons with a perfectly good keyboard attached to my computer) is Frink. Automatic unit conversion and a real programming language behind it. Java makes it cross-platform too.
I don't find that the clipboard is broken, but this point is a bit strange. Having things work across all the apps you've tried (like pressing F2 to rename things in lists) without being documented is a big plus. It makes you feel like you know this stuff.
A point in case was when I noticed that I could use emacs-style shortcuts in the Bash command line. Not because I read a doc, but because the shortcuts came naturally and I did't think about it. Later I thought -- hey, that's cool, it works in Bash too.
This is a feature of a usable system, and should not be dissed.
I must also add that I believe the problem with 'I selected something, closed the window and the selection was gone' can be alleviated by not closing the window. What situation makes it essential to close a window before pasting something? The select, middle click method has always made sense to me as a delayed drag. In that case you're screwed if you close the window as well.
Dude, where are these cut and pase issues you speak of? Select middle click or use cut/paste in the app of your choice. What's missing?
I don't know. Each time this kind of conversation starts, there is a lot of talk about standardisation and 'the one true interface'. I am replying to this thread because I have read two very well thought out replies and thought 'this I can talk about'.
Your points about shortcut keys and the like are interesting. I will admit that most windows apps I use share the same shortcuts, but then most of the Linux apps I use do too. I am typing this in Mozilla (I know -- the cross-platform nature of the app makes this more windows-like), and it obeys all the rules you mentioned. Likewise Openoffice, Koffice, gnumeric, etc.
On the other hand I type almost all my documents in Emacs, and the bindings I had to relearn there are used consistently in my Matlab editor and on the Bash command line.
In my experience, most users will see buttons as buttons regardless of the exact widget set you are using. Take winamp as a good example, or any recent game. Their interfaces look as similar to the standard windows interface as many of the linux apps I run. Because of the power of the GUI and the basic widgets everyone knows, they can learn to recognise that something that looks like a button probably is.
Most linux window managers mimic the Windows setup of close button top right, but it irritates me no end, as I keep closing stuff when I want to max/min it. So I have moved my close button to lop left.
The point I am trying to make is that for most of the applications people use regularly, the interfaces have been standardised enough already. The apps with confusing config files and the like are probably that way because of a user base that is familiar with the way things work and would probably be confused more by a change to a user friendly GUI than anything else. So how much more standard do the applications have to be?
FluxBox , based upon BlackBox, is more feature rich but still very fast. No graphical pager though ;-)
Try this Graphical Pager.
For commandline users: $sudo urpmi mplayer
For GUI users: Gnome/KDE button|Configuration|Install software
Search for mplayer, click install.
There is a fundamental difference between software and doughnuts: software (and other so-called "intellectual property") is easily copied. What I mean is that ideas and code and music are all kind of ethereal -- it costs next to nothing to reproduce them.
In normal accounting, there is a balance system. I give you something to compensate for your loss of that thing. So you give me an apple, but you now have a buck that could get you another apple. The same goes for time -- you can't easily duplicate time spent on a project, and I am compensating you for the time you lost. You can use you money to buy someone else's time.
On the ideas front, you give me an idea and you still have it. It's the double entry accounting system that needs to force these transactions into a 'goods model'. The opposing idea is that you have divided the worth of your idea by two by sharing it with one person. One idea in one head is worth more than one idea in the heads of many people, and you should be compensated for the loss in worth.
So, there is a big difference between these things. Unfortunately it's a vast subject. Just look into the issues before making simplifications like 'software is just like support and doughnuts'.
We come yet again to what the average user's perception of 'fast' is. I performed your test in Windows using Palm Desktop in the background and noticed considerable redraw delay. I constantly experience problems in MS Word when scrolling graphics-heavy documents -- the graphics redraw slowly/badly or have pieces missing. Granted, the MS widget set draws quickly, but then I can get very good performance on my Linux box using OpenBox and a light widget set.
But your post is valid for one reason: The perception of speed is more important than speed itself. This is why standard profiling tools that spit out graphs of response times, etc are not so useful in GUI design, as a few miliseconds can change the perception of 'Slow' to 'fast'. Perhaps more advanced compositing a la freedesktop.org's X server will help here as pdf compositing did for MacOS X.
If you find any video anomaly "Gross. Ugly. Unacceptable" , I recommend you switch to a high-end Mac. Me, I'll stick with my X.
You say unlike most of the slashdot crowd, the general public simply does not have the patience to try and troubleshoot a problem or PAY anyone, for that matter to get the same functionality that they had before
They don't have patience/time, they don't want to pay. Then they're pretty much screwed. Unfortunately we live in an entropic world -- nothing just jumps into order. Now I'm not for proprietary software, but the reason some people pay for the stuff is that it saves them time, which costs money. The problem you described is easy enough to do with a GUI in KDE/Gnome. It just isn't possible for the computer to read your mind and give you everything you ever wanted without you having to lift a finger -- it is against the laws of thermodynamics.
Oh, and one more thing -- if we always designed everything from the Windows POV, we would be accused of lack of innovation. Catch 22, huh?
Most modern compiliers would pick up on constant operations and optimise them in the executable with no extra work on the coder's part. I think Borland C++ was the first to do this back in the day. Intelligent compilers are great for everything, including readability. Now you don't have to think about optimisation and introduce arguments like the one above, where errors can creep in and changes in datatypes can't easily be propagated.
I hear what you are saying, but there is one assumption you make that is not exactly valid. This is that what you do has no impact on another person if it does not involve them physically. You are saying: 'Let the Christians not use the research, but don't let them stop me from using it'. This sounds rational to most people on Slashdot (including me), but many fundamentalist groups (not just the Christians) feel that they are directly affected by people doing 'evil' things. The people against stem cell research and genetics in general are often not Christians, but people with specific ethics and beliefs. Think of some of the people killing doctors offering abortions, or the more violent guys from Greenpeace. I am pretty sure that these people are from diverse religious backgrounds.
So I guess both you and I are against mindless fundamentalism.
I just have to say that if God's will were that clear, I would follow it without question. One 100% deserves another. If God appeared to you and you were 100% certain of what He said, would you tell Him to get lost? I don't think so. It's uncertainty that leads to caution, and I think God's will on this research is far from clear.