I don't think he's talking about you (the reasearchers). I'd be very interested to hear the decision making process in terms of where your officers decide allocate the R&D dollars.
What he's saying is somewhat true only in the sense that R&D companies wouldn't (or couldn't) sell cheap effective remedies if they couldn't sustain a huge business. It's not like a company would willingly make itself smaller, or take less profit, for the sake of humanity alone. Nobody is that naive.
Your work is appreicated, but remember that the reason the suits get paid more is that they have to make the decisions which really have a huge bearing on the future. While you work your ass off, and nothing could get done without you, the decision of what to work on, and with how many resources is a touchy subject.. and those are the things he's blindly attacking.
Not to say he's right, but I can tell you here at work that just because I work my ass off doesn't mean I can't appreicate that my company directs me to work my ass off for the sole benifit of the company instead of the benifit of our customers or humanity in some situations. My intent may be pure, but to assume that my company, as a system, isn't capable of actions with less-that-virtuous intents would be awfully reductionist.
Anyhow, hats off to you. Its us in the trenches that make the world work, no arguments there; I just wish sometimes we could have a little more say in identifying what problems we truely think are the most important to solve.
It's a difficult thing to prove quantitatively (although the market woes and the lack of any new groundbreaker like Viagra and Prozac in the pipeline is mentioned.. did you want that in a pie chart?).. especially since the questions of what drugs are important, which arn't, whether some drugs are actually better than the problem they cure.. these are not neccessarily quantifiable things.
The thing is, most of the people I know in the scienitific community right now agree with that main charge of this article. Yes, patents are important, but there is a crowing concensus that simply allowing anything and everything to be patented (which is increasingly the case) harms the very industry that patents were put in place to support.
We've become so engrossed in the battle for the pie that we ruined the pie for everybody in the first place. There's plenty to share, so we shouldn't focus so hard on ensuring that yoou'll get your pie. Or in another analogy, if capitalism is people in competition to the finish line, we've gotten so good at tripping each other up and not actually runny that we might as well have all walked the distance.
Yes, there is no quantitative proof, but the way the industry operates, you'd have to wait 5 or 10 years to see the effects that the current research climate has on the consumer end of the industry. So, we have to rely on people in-the-know to identify problems and solutions before we can tally them on a spread sheet.
Anyone who supplies SA's with an encryption product.. this doesn't sound like a per-seat deal, just a registration of the fact that you are selling a crypto product in SA.
Can you prove to me that this is a per-seat tarrif, or just an attempt at monitoring what crypto technologies have been imported into the country, let me know.
Until then, to suggest that they want to eliminate crypto via this registeration fee makes me ask: Why don't they just ban crypto altogether then?
> Why should Apple be the only company allowed to design software that hooks into certain parts of the interface or is part of the interface itself?
Nobody is saying they are allowed or not allowed to do it.. the market will vet their strategy, I suppose. I consider the kind of protocal-hiding/format-hiding tactics MS is known for to be fare more abusive than preventing 3rd party software makers from hooking into the interface behaviour layer. But thats just me. When it comes to data and communication that my computer is able to do with the outside world, don't fuck. If you wanna limit what I can do with the OS itself, thats fair game, and people will either buy or not buy the OS because of it.
I'm not loosing any sleep; Apple has consistantly demonstrated that its UI design is heads and tails above Windows. Windows needs fixing, as it OS9 to various degrees. This might not please everybody with respect to OSX, but I have no personal qualms about it. It's not really inteference with the market on the same scale that MS limits their users.
Because thinking different, contrary to the opinions of your 'rebel' 19 year old, is not wearing a different T-Shirt.
Think different means solve your problems creatively; it does not mean dress yourself creatively.
And guess what? You can use other window managers on OSX, so whats the problem? If you/really/ wanna Rage Against the Machine, you can use another WM.;)
C'mon.. technology lets us flap our lips, writing down whatever comes to mind without thinking about it or pondering the consequences of expressing a particular opinion.
Spelling is the least of my concerns when it comes to content posted to the web; the habit of stopping and thinking about what you're saying is the more important victim of msg-board style communities. Spelling is secondary, and unless its some written formal report where presentation and credibility of said views is actually important, I'm not going to care much if people mispell words.
English is the bastard son of all languages, which is what makes it the lazy language for everyone to use (since it borrows from so many other languages), but a pain in the ass to learn. Exceptions up the ying yang. Korea apparently has the lowest illiteracy rate in the world, and apparently their written language is so synonymous with the spoken language that once you learn to read, apparently you will never mispronounce or misinterpret a written word.. even if you've never seen it before. I vote we all learn Korean (if only cause Korean chicks are hot!)
I feel sorry for these spelling nazis. It's sort of pitiful that they often get so worked up by small spelling mistakes that they commit a few errors themselves in their little diatribes.
Anyhow, the idiots arn't the ones that can't spell.. they're the ones that don't punctuate.;)
Until we have some sort of physical module standard, we'll never get to have all the best-of-breed things in one device.
But I imagine a time where you buy a 'display' platform - a screen and some input mechanisms (keyboard, speaker, mic). Then, you plug in the GSM-on-a-card, or the organizer-on-a-card, or the.. well, you get the idea.
There's no reason why there couldn't be one physical device if the tech industry could get it into their head that physical interoperability is going to be just as important in the future as software interoperability as consumers demand that they don't have to carry around 5 physical devices to get the best implementations of the various devices you list.
I think if you seperate the passive technologies (the screen, the inputs, outputs, storage), you could easily have these manufacturers competate for best-of-breed implementations without the consumer having to carry around X number of seperate devices..
Or maybe this gets even easier, as you say, with bluetooth. You keep all the functionality in your bag or pocket in the from of bluetooth enabled modules that speak to the central display and I/O device.
That way the market diferentiates between your interface layer (the physical device you view and provide input to), and the tasks it can accomplish, and consumers arn't left compromising functionality for the interface, or the interface for the functionality.
I'm not one to bite the hand that feeds me, but I agree./. is many things, but a source of useful reviews, it is not. I'm not sure why they continue to publish book reviews.. I mean, I'm more interested in the Jon Katz articles.
With with the net, if they keep the price the same (remember, its just what you're willing to pay for, right, so it shouldnt matter?), and way less distribution costs, they could make a killing! The irony of it all!
This just in: People kill each other. I guess its just a fact of life, eh?;)
Seriously tho, if you want to be the biggest player on the block, you'd better be prepared for more scrutiny. If you wanna be #1 in a market, you'll be the one wearing the biggest bullseye.
Just like bugs are a consequence of life, so are bullseyes. They have 40 billion in the bank to fight bugs with; most other companies do not. Where as other companies deserve some slack because they dont have these resources, MS does not.
Thats why I love the GPL - the only people it pisses off are the companies that have enough resources not to need it.
When Ballmer or whoever said the GPL was anti-American, I just had to laugh. Look at the BSD licence.. whats more anti-american than giving something away for free and demanding nothing (not even that that person honour your wish that they release their source code)..
Both licences have their times and places, and I'm not putting either above or below the other one, but it always struck me how the BSD licence is truely the anti-capitalist license in the sense that the 'cost' of using BSD'd software seems to be way lower than the cost of using GPL'd software.
But thats why its a semi-valid argument (even if they are wayyyy too anal about it).. BSD _doesn't_ come with GNU tools. You can get them if you like, but (most of? none of?) the stock tools that make up the BSD line of OSes arn't under the GPL as far as I know.
News works like this.. when a dog bites a man, thats relevant and important news (because you dont want to be bitten, right?) The problem is, its not news that sells. And so you end up with media that would rather print the "man bites dog" story intead of the "dog bites man" story, even tho "man bites dog" stories have little or no relation to your continued existance and are unlikely ever to affect your life.
So BSD has always been doing well in the server/ISP/*nix market, so its not news. Linux's surge in popularity, and thus all the wonderful brand value you can leech off of its popularist image, is responsible for all the bru-haha.
The only other thing worth mentionning is that most of the GUI stuff going on, which matters most to end users, was written by people on Linux.. and get ported to the BSDs after. From that perspective, you could argue that Linux is the more important OS for the end user since thats where all the desktop wars are being fought in the *nix world.
MS doesnt buy ads on/., their agency does. And if you angencies spend their clients money for something as trivial as mocking a demographic or mocking slashdot, I urge you to join us in the real world.:)
Disclosure: I work in the online advertising industry, so I'm somewhat familiar with the industry culture, if that lends any credibility to my assertion.
Freedom does not occurr in a vacuum. See: Freedom to kill other people and make them Unfree.
Any Freedom you enjoy will have ramifications on other people. For that reason, Freedom of Speech does not permit you to run hatemail campaigns. There are instances in which freedom invades the freedom of other people to live.. well.. free lives.
As for Too Much Sex, they have a condition for that: nymphomania. People lose their friends, family, jobs over this stuff.
Every single thing can be overdone, because nothing occurrs in a vacuum. When you overdo one thing, it has implications on the other things you and we need to survive and progress.
So please, don't wrap yourself up in the flag and dream of ideals. I agree that we must work to protect each others freedoms, but the trick is in figuring out when granting people a certain freedom impedes others' freedom more than it benifits those you grant it to.
That being said, if the Patriot Act has these implications, thats crazy. I like the idea of the 1st amendment (so long as it doesn't excuses abusing it, a la hate campaigns or manipulation.. for instance, freedom of speech doesn't grant you the freedom to lie on your taxes.)
I don't know if it was a deliberate media placement buy, but think of MS's Return on Investment here. Low, I'm willing to wager. Real low./. gets money from MS, MS wastes a ton of money on/. invetory where the readers are very unlikely to actually purchase or clickthru on the ad.. whats not to like? MS wastes its money,/. makes it, and we get nice pretty color schemes (which is MS products' only redeeming value.)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think he's talking about you (the reasearchers). I'd be very interested to hear the decision making process in terms of where your officers decide allocate the R&D dollars.
.. and those are the things he's blindly attacking.
What he's saying is somewhat true only in the sense that R&D companies wouldn't (or couldn't) sell cheap effective remedies if they couldn't sustain a huge business. It's not like a company would willingly make itself smaller, or take less profit, for the sake of humanity alone. Nobody is that naive.
Your work is appreicated, but remember that the reason the suits get paid more is that they have to make the decisions which really have a huge bearing on the future. While you work your ass off, and nothing could get done without you, the decision of what to work on, and with how many resources is a touchy subject
Not to say he's right, but I can tell you here at work that just because I work my ass off doesn't mean I can't appreicate that my company directs me to work my ass off for the sole benifit of the company instead of the benifit of our customers or humanity in some situations. My intent may be pure, but to assume that my company, as a system, isn't capable of actions with less-that-virtuous intents would be awfully reductionist.
Anyhow, hats off to you. Its us in the trenches that make the world work, no arguments there; I just wish sometimes we could have a little more say in identifying what problems we truely think are the most important to solve.
It's a difficult thing to prove quantitatively (although the market woes and the lack of any new groundbreaker like Viagra and Prozac in the pipeline is mentioned .. did you want that in a pie chart?) .. especially since the questions of what drugs are important, which arn't, whether some drugs are actually better than the problem they cure .. these are not neccessarily quantifiable things.
The thing is, most of the people I know in the scienitific community right now agree with that main charge of this article. Yes, patents are important, but there is a crowing concensus that simply allowing anything and everything to be patented (which is increasingly the case) harms the very industry that patents were put in place to support.
We've become so engrossed in the battle for the pie that we ruined the pie for everybody in the first place. There's plenty to share, so we shouldn't focus so hard on ensuring that yoou'll get your pie. Or in another analogy, if capitalism is people in competition to the finish line, we've gotten so good at tripping each other up and not actually runny that we might as well have all walked the distance.
Yes, there is no quantitative proof, but the way the industry operates, you'd have to wait 5 or 10 years to see the effects that the current research climate has on the consumer end of the industry. So, we have to rely on people in-the-know to identify problems and solutions before we can tally them on a spread sheet.
Actually, the industry really does like stealing .... from you. They dont like it when you return the favour, is all.
> In standard /. "I never need to read the articles" mindset
/.'d), but my BS detector went BEEP BEEP when I read his post. :)
Thats because some of us dont have to read the articles not to make wild crazy silly illogical assumptions.
I didn't read the article (seems
?!?!
.. this doesn't sound like a per-seat deal, just a registration of the fact that you are selling a crypto product in SA.
WHAT?!
Anyone who supplies SA's with an encryption product
Can you prove to me that this is a per-seat tarrif, or just an attempt at monitoring what crypto technologies have been imported into the country, let me know.
Until then, to suggest that they want to eliminate crypto via this registeration fee makes me ask: Why don't they just ban crypto altogether then?
> Why should Apple be the only company allowed to design software that hooks into certain parts of the interface or is part of the interface itself?
.. the market will vet their strategy, I suppose. I consider the kind of protocal-hiding/format-hiding tactics MS is known for to be fare more abusive than preventing 3rd party software makers from hooking into the interface behaviour layer. But thats just me. When it comes to data and communication that my computer is able to do with the outside world, don't fuck. If you wanna limit what I can do with the OS itself, thats fair game, and people will either buy or not buy the OS because of it.
Nobody is saying they are allowed or not allowed to do it
I'm not loosing any sleep; Apple has consistantly demonstrated that its UI design is heads and tails above Windows. Windows needs fixing, as it OS9 to various degrees. This might not please everybody with respect to OSX, but I have no personal qualms about it. It's not really inteference with the market on the same scale that MS limits their users.
Because thinking different, contrary to the opinions of your 'rebel' 19 year old, is not wearing a different T-Shirt.
/really/ wanna Rage Against the Machine, you can use another WM. ;)
Think different means solve your problems creatively; it does not mean dress yourself creatively.
And guess what? You can use other window managers on OSX, so whats the problem? If you
Thats a misleading article.
.. right?), you still have choice.
They don't want you messing around with the functionality of the widgets. You know what? I agree with them.
Esp. since you can run other window managers under Darwin (uh
And this article says nothing about them trying to prevent the kind of 'tweaking' most Wintel users use - namely, performance, setup, etc.
I don't have any problems with Apple trying to kill utilities that tweak the UI. There's still choice, and there wasn't in OS9.
As for Jobs saying, "Themes are dead", is he on crack? Or by dead, does he mean, "They're dead, because I killed them on this platform."?
just so long as nobody can install a stroke-logger in my undies
> Where's my blue shirt? I'll just ping it!
ping: cannot ping blueshirt.myhouse.pvt: destination shirt unbleachable
C'mon .. technology lets us flap our lips, writing down whatever comes to mind without thinking about it or pondering the consequences of expressing a particular opinion.
Spelling is the least of my concerns when it comes to content posted to the web; the habit of stopping and thinking about what you're saying is the more important victim of msg-board style communities. Spelling is secondary, and unless its some written formal report where presentation and credibility of said views is actually important, I'm not going to care much if people mispell words.
No argument here.
.. even if you've never seen it before. I vote we all learn Korean (if only cause Korean chicks are hot!)
.. they're the ones that don't punctuate. ;)
English is the bastard son of all languages, which is what makes it the lazy language for everyone to use (since it borrows from so many other languages), but a pain in the ass to learn. Exceptions up the ying yang. Korea apparently has the lowest illiteracy rate in the world, and apparently their written language is so synonymous with the spoken language that once you learn to read, apparently you will never mispronounce or misinterpret a written word
I feel sorry for these spelling nazis. It's sort of pitiful that they often get so worked up by small spelling mistakes that they commit a few errors themselves in their little diatribes.
Anyhow, the idiots arn't the ones that can't spell
One word: modules!
.. well, you get the idea.
..
Until we have some sort of physical module standard, we'll never get to have all the best-of-breed things in one device.
But I imagine a time where you buy a 'display' platform - a screen and some input mechanisms (keyboard, speaker, mic). Then, you plug in the GSM-on-a-card, or the organizer-on-a-card, or the
There's no reason why there couldn't be one physical device if the tech industry could get it into their head that physical interoperability is going to be just as important in the future as software interoperability as consumers demand that they don't have to carry around 5 physical devices to get the best implementations of the various devices you list.
I think if you seperate the passive technologies (the screen, the inputs, outputs, storage), you could easily have these manufacturers competate for best-of-breed implementations without the consumer having to carry around X number of seperate devices
Or maybe this gets even easier, as you say, with bluetooth. You keep all the functionality in your bag or pocket in the from of bluetooth enabled modules that speak to the central display and I/O device.
That way the market diferentiates between your interface layer (the physical device you view and provide input to), and the tasks it can accomplish, and consumers arn't left compromising functionality for the interface, or the interface for the functionality.
I'm not one to bite the hand that feeds me, but I agree. /. is many things, but a source of useful reviews, it is not. I'm not sure why they continue to publish book reviews .. I mean, I'm more interested in the Jon Katz articles.
okay, I have to go take a shower now.
With with the net, if they keep the price the same (remember, its just what you're willing to pay for, right, so it shouldnt matter?), and way less distribution costs, they could make a killing! The irony of it all!
This just in: People kill each other. I guess its just a fact of life, eh? ;)
Seriously tho, if you want to be the biggest player on the block, you'd better be prepared for more scrutiny. If you wanna be #1 in a market, you'll be the one wearing the biggest bullseye.
Just like bugs are a consequence of life, so are bullseyes. They have 40 billion in the bank to fight bugs with; most other companies do not. Where as other companies deserve some slack because they dont have these resources, MS does not.
Thats why I love the GPL - the only people it pisses off are the companies that have enough resources not to need it.
.. whats more anti-american than giving something away for free and demanding nothing (not even that that person honour your wish that they release their source code) ..
When Ballmer or whoever said the GPL was anti-American, I just had to laugh. Look at the BSD licence
Both licences have their times and places, and I'm not putting either above or below the other one, but it always struck me how the BSD licence is truely the anti-capitalist license in the sense that the 'cost' of using BSD'd software seems to be way lower than the cost of using GPL'd software.
But thats why its a semi-valid argument (even if they are wayyyy too anal about it) .. BSD _doesn't_ come with GNU tools. You can get them if you like, but (most of? none of?) the stock tools that make up the BSD line of OSes arn't under the GPL as far as I know.
One word: optics.
.. when a dog bites a man, thats relevant and important news (because you dont want to be bitten, right?) The problem is, its not news that sells. And so you end up with media that would rather print the "man bites dog" story intead of the "dog bites man" story, even tho "man bites dog" stories have little or no relation to your continued existance and are unlikely ever to affect your life.
.. and get ported to the BSDs after. From that perspective, you could argue that Linux is the more important OS for the end user since thats where all the desktop wars are being fought in the *nix world.
News works like this
So BSD has always been doing well in the server/ISP/*nix market, so its not news. Linux's surge in popularity, and thus all the wonderful brand value you can leech off of its popularist image, is responsible for all the bru-haha.
The only other thing worth mentionning is that most of the GUI stuff going on, which matters most to end users, was written by people on Linux
The question is, would they still be free had AOL not stepped in and funded their continued development thanks to their subscribers' revenue?
:)
Maybe. Maybe not.
> and last time I checked my cat wasn't talking.
The CIA has a way around this. They drop 2 tabs of acid, each, wait a while, and then furiously start writing down anything your cat says.
They're way ahead of you.
Yeah, I got this dog named Tangent!
... ;)
Anyhow, speaking of dogs
MS doesnt buy ads on /., their agency does. And if you angencies spend their clients money for something as trivial as mocking a demographic or mocking slashdot, I urge you to join us in the real world. :)
Disclosure: I work in the online advertising industry, so I'm somewhat familiar with the industry culture, if that lends any credibility to my assertion.
Freedom does not occurr in a vacuum. See: Freedom to kill other people and make them Unfree.
.. well .. free lives.
.. for instance, freedom of speech doesn't grant you the freedom to lie on your taxes.)
Any Freedom you enjoy will have ramifications on other people. For that reason, Freedom of Speech does not permit you to run hatemail campaigns. There are instances in which freedom invades the freedom of other people to live
As for Too Much Sex, they have a condition for that: nymphomania. People lose their friends, family, jobs over this stuff.
Every single thing can be overdone, because nothing occurrs in a vacuum. When you overdo one thing, it has implications on the other things you and we need to survive and progress.
So please, don't wrap yourself up in the flag and dream of ideals. I agree that we must work to protect each others freedoms, but the trick is in figuring out when granting people a certain freedom impedes others' freedom more than it benifits those you grant it to.
That being said, if the Patriot Act has these implications, thats crazy. I like the idea of the 1st amendment (so long as it doesn't excuses abusing it, a la hate campaigns or manipulation
Are you joking me? /. is fucking MS here.
/. gets money from MS, MS wastes a ton of money on /. invetory where the readers are very unlikely to actually purchase or clickthru on the ad .. whats not to like? MS wastes its money, /. makes it, and we get nice pretty color schemes (which is MS products' only redeeming value.)
I don't know if it was a deliberate media placement buy, but think of MS's Return on Investment here. Low, I'm willing to wager. Real low.