"If you're so busy you can't dedicate one daily hour to a game, you shouldn't even try playing adventures."
Sadly adventure games are not the only ones who waste my time. The other canonic example are MMORPGs, but even those are just one genre among many that waste my time.
E.g.,
- Mandatory tutorials. You can find them in every single genre. (Don't get me wrong: _Optional_ tutorials rule. Hour-long mandatory tutorials suck.)
- Idiotic save restrictions to make a short game look longer, by forcing me to replay each map again and again and again. Again, it's not only about arcades or adventures: you can find that idiocy in every single genre, including FPS.
E.g., the one that rilled me the most was Hitman. That was one shameless waste of my time. (And they lost me as a customer for good.)
E.g., one console RPG at one point made me play for 10 hours straight before it gave me a save point. Roll it around in your head: TEN HOURS. I mean, geesh. Thank god it was Sunday, but even then it's _not_ funny.
- Yes, idiotic overuse of cut scene and animations.
Your FFX example is right on: I've tried to play the game three times so far, and invariably I get bored out of my skull of getting a 5 minute cut scene every 1 minute of playing. It's not a game, it's a bleeding tech-demo.
- Stupid illogical puzzles where you don't get enough data and feedback to actually solve a problem. You just have to spend hours trying every single button and lever combination, until one mysteriously works. That's not a mental exercise (as a puzzle should be), that's not a challenge, it's just a stupid waste of time. Again, that's being abused in all genres.
"If you want that, just try the lowest difficulty level and for many games you're set."
The lowest difficulty level in most games is _not_ easy enough for a casual gamer. Not everyone is a die-hard CS player, who instinctively circle-strafes, bunny-hops and headshots 9 times out of 10.
So, no, just making enemies kill you in 3 hits instead of 2, does _not_ count as a low enough difficulty for a casual gamer. Making bosses need 100 direct rocket hits to die, instead of 150, doesn't either.
But the biggest idiocy are games which attempt to basically _punish_ you for playing on a low difficulty. E.g., most adventure games give you half the xp if you're playing on a lower difficulty level.
The problem? Your character slowly falls behind, to the point where your "turn undead" spells don't turn anyone, and your sword swings never connect, and your healing spells don't even heal the damage an enemy does in one hit. The game actually becomes _more_ difficult for the poor buggers who explicitly requested a _lower_ difficulty. Idiotic game design at its finest.
Basically: the lowest difficult level in a game should basically be (demi)"god mode". It should be low enough that any non-gamer grandma off the street can beat the game. Low enough that a paraplegic on drugs can finish it. For everyone else, hey, they can choose a higher difficulty.
Serious Sam got that right. Most others did not.
"Trial and error is just fine."
Trial and error is _not_ fine in most games. In arcades, maybe. But what does it really bring to further the story in an RPG or FPS? Other than boredom and repetition, nothing.
"Best games for busy people are multiplayer games with short rounds. I don't really need the latest and greatest. There are many oldies that never get really old. Tekken 3 for instance allows for several rounds in 30 minutes. SNES Mario Kart, or N64 Diddy Kong Racing in multiplayer mode are also great options if you have someone around. You can also look for adversaries online: Bomberman Online for DC is just great, so is soldat for PC (give it a download). Crazy Taxi or Jet Set Radio allow for short sessions. Short deadmatches of your FPS of choice are also very adequate."
No offense, but here you're overstepping your prerogatives by a
The real long term investment is research and inventing new things. A ton of monkeys re-implementing the stone wheel doesn't produce any progress. Sure, you have cheap wheels, but you're still in the stone age.
If you have electric lighting today, it's because someone researched a way to produce electricity and a way to produce lightbulbs. And had a business plan to recoup investment and make money from that research.
If you can talk to people over the phone, is because a lot of people along the way had a commercial interest to invent the phone and a lot of improvements to it. And, yes, it involved one helluva lot of patents.
If you can drive a car or ride a bus, blimey, it's because someone had the financial incentive to invest in research. Again, it involved patents.
If you can ride the train, and it's quite a bit faster than the early 10mph engines, it's again because someone had the financial incentive to develop better ones. And yes, it did involve securing a market to recoup the investment. When not by patents, by other kinds of deals.
Or go look up the kind of infant mortality they had in the middle ages, or even as late as last century. If nowadays you didn't die in the first years after birth, it's because of all the doctors and pharmaceuticals companies who had good money to gain from keeping people alive. Yes, that involved patents too.
Etc.
So in the long run, all the armies of monkeys copying someone else's work aren't producing jack squat to help progress. If that's your ideal society, one where everyone reimplements the wheel and no funding ever goes into research, go join the Amish already.
And let me give you another thought to chew on: the real _waste_ is in the re-implementation. Do we need 100,000 different re-implementations of a simple e-commerce web site? Not really. One would be enough. Hundreds of billions yearly are _wasted_ on reimplementing the same things, again and again, the only difference being a new crop of bugs.
It's not a benefit to society, it's a _drain_ of useful resources. Those hundreds of billions would be better invested in either creating something new for a change, or just building a few new factories. Wasting them on reimplementing the same tired crap is _not_ a benefit.
So for all I care, even one company took monopoly of one thing... GOOD! Finally! Let them implement it only once and sell it. Maybe then the rest of us can move to better stuff. Or maybe then someone will invest in research, instead of just copy-and-pasting other people's work.
(And no, if anyone wants to come with stuff like "but people invent things without commercial incentive too! Benjamin Franklin flew a kite to discover electricity!"... I admire your idealism, but you don't know much history, do you?
Did Benjy also invent a way to produce that electricity on an industrial scale? Any means for distribution? Did he also invent any devices that use it? Etc. Well, blimey, nope. The actual useful stuff came from people who wanted to make money out of it, not from lone visionaries flying kites.)
I have an 120 GB and a 60 GB, both 7200 RPM, in my current computer. They work like a charm so far, and the noise is _much_ lower than the IBM and WD drives I had before.
I also have a 20 GB Seagate drive from 1999 or thereabout, also 7200 RPM, and it still works like a charm, if in a different computer. Seems to me like Seagate could have afforded a 5 year warranty on that already.
By contrast, in the meantime I had two IBMs and a WD that crapped and lost all data. Admittedly, in an overheating case that originally wasn't designed to have any fans. (In 1999 case fans weren't the norm.) Still, can't help noticing that the Seagate drive had no problems whatsoever in the same case.
Well, portage isn't a bad idea, but IMHO Gentoo could really use a decent installer. Dunno, maybe one which:
- can bloody remember the settings so it only needs to ask once. (As opposed to making me configure the ADSL settings _again_ after the compile.)
- present choices as civilized check-boxes or radio-buttons, instead of making me switch back and forth to a crappy text-based browser to read what to type next to just get a cron daemon installed.
- for that matter, if someone already went through the bother of typing what those options do, copy that to a small help next to the radio buttons. Again, to save me the stupidity of switching back and forth to a text-based browser.
Yes, people are greedy. Yes, those corporations want to make money. Never said otherwise. But the funny thing is: somehow that's what keeps capitalism working.
For better or worse, models which take humans as they are (i.e., yes, greedy) work better than idealistic utopias. "Well, if everyone played nice and gave everything away for free..." models are stupid. It just won't happen.
It's like arguing that CPUs are inherently evil on account of "but they need electricity!" Tough luck. That's how they work, and that's that. No matter how much you whine about it, you'll still need a PSU.
Same with humans. They're greedy. That's what makes society work. That's that. Deal with it.
And that's what fuelled progress so far. Pretty much every research made in the last 8000 years, was made because someone thought (A) they could make a ton of money with it, or (B) kill someone with it. The car you drive, the train or plane you ride, the computer you write this stuff on, the medicine which may one day save your life... they're all the product of human greed.
That's evil... how? Would you rather live like the Bushmen instead?
Yes, ideal sharing-and-caring tribal societies existed. E.g., the Bushmen. Wonderful culture, except... they're still in the stone age, because noone ever tried to get ahead. While the greed motivated world invented tons of stuff to shaft each other with.
That's your ideal world free of greed and patented research? Well, go join one of those tribes. Just look up their average life expectancy first. Chances are good you'd be already dead if you were actually born there. Chances also are that your first children will die in their first years of life. That's what life is in those non-evil societies.
However, you can't have your cake and eat it. You can't have all the benefits of greed, _and_ a world free of greed. An already greedy society can't go back to that point. Ever. You can't uninvent greed once it's entered the system. Consider it either good or evil if it makes you feel any better, but it's just the way Real Life _is_. Deal with it.
"If that guy has found difficult to "look under the hood", than he cannot understand other meaning of "free" - ability to fix, to improve etc. He is already deprived of this ability."
And if you can't understand that people have better things to do with their time than "look under the hood" for all the hundreds of packages on their system, then, well, you're lacking any understanding of what the end user wants.
The point is that I've looked under the hood of some projects, but typically _don't_ _want_ to. Other users actually less so.
A program is supposed to be a tool, and save me time. If on the average using a hypothetical word-processor cost me more time than using a typewriter, I'd use the typewriter. Code and technology in general is a _means_, not an end. It's that simple.
That _includes_ the hidden time costs of looking under the hood to fix bugs, or (my Linux favourite) track down and recompile half the libraries on the system just to get the damn thing compiled and running. If at every release I'm supposed to lose weeks just comparing code, merging my own changes, and fixing new problems in a hypothetical OSS word-processor, then that word-processor is _useless_. It's not only a worse proposition than going and buying MS Word, it's actually a worse proposition than going back to a low-tech typewriter.
Your average company is an even worse customer. They may look to Linux for the perceived cost advantages, but rest assured that they do _not_ want to pay a team that looks under the hood and fixes stuff. People are more expensive than Windows licenses. Paying a team to open the hood of all those packages and fix things is far more expensive than just getting a packaged closed solution from Microsoft, Sun, IBM, or whoever.
I.e., if the best business proposition you can come up with is "so shut the fsck up and fix it yourself", you've just lost the whole corporate market in one fell swoop. _And_ 99% of the home users.
Somewhat unrelated, IMHO all that list could be more or less seen as consequences of the one primordial problem: "scratching an itch." Too often the itch is "I wanna tinker with code", not "I want a program which does this and that just right." At which point the program's _only_ "advantage" is that someone else can tinker with it too.
Entirely too many OSS projects fall precisely into that category. They're there because someone had a vision of a better tool, but because they liked typing code. And the result shows it.
And retorts like "so fix it yourself" or "but it's good because you can look under the hood", are just symptoms of it. That person doesn't actually even start to understand the _user's_ itch.
Believe it or not, your inflated standard of living is _based_ on reaping the benefits of low cost work in other countries.
America has barely a few percent of the world's population, but consumes more than a half of the world's resources. That's where that standard high of living comes from.
Again, this means relying on low wages in other countries, all the way along the chain.
You get cheap raw materials (e.g., oil) because the people digging/pumping it out in those countries are paid barely enough not to starve. You get cheap shoes, clothes, CPUs, etc, because some people from other countries can be crammed in cheap sweatshops and overworked for ridiculously low wages.
And if you think you can build your own Chinese Wall, and become an isolationist nation, I have news for you. Bad news. Then you _won't_ keep that standard of living.
You may keep your job and your current wage, but suddenly everything will cost at least twice as much. I.e., effectively you've taken one big wage cut anyway: you can buy a lot less crap out of that wage.
You may look at how much of the world's oil did the USA produce before WW2, and how much it produces now. Right. Now all y'all driving SUVs and sports cars are doing it on imported oil. Why? Because if you paid to pump your own out, you'd start thinking more along the lines of "let's carpool" than "let's buy a SUV". That's life quality on cheap imported work for you.
Actually, let me rephrase that: you probably still _won't_ keep your high paid IT or marketting or management job anyway. You know why? Because all those white collar jobs are the result of an economy of abbundance. You have all the peons in Africa, South America, Asia, etc, doing the low level jobs, so you're mostly dealing with how to sell all that crap. Hence the massive advertising spending and all the jobs in marketting, research, legal, even services, etc.
It's all basically just society's way of dealing with a massive surpluss, and basically a chronic lack of need for manufacturing jobs. People get shifted into other jobs which don't directly produce anything tangible.
Now take away the surplus out of that economy, and you'll find yourself back to 1900 indeed. When you _need_ to dig out 100% of your ore needs yourself, _and_ pump (or synthetise) your own oil, _and_ manufacture shoes locally for everyone, and clothes, and cars, and everything... that all takes manpower.
Suddenly your problem is having people to sew clothes, not white collar marketeers to sell them. The supply and demand ratio got turned exactly on its head. Guess which jobs will be the first to get reduced within half a decade of isolationism?
I.e., if you want to try isolationism, be my guest. But if you think that'll keep your inflated living standard, you might be in for a very nasty surprise.
In the unlikely case that you haven't figured the standard slashdotter codex by now, it goes somewhat like this:
- Any form of corporation is pure evil. (Unless they're currently fighting Microsoft or SCO, that is.)
- That goes double for corporations which actually invest in research, and need patents to protect their investment. (Here's a thought for all the anti-IP zealots: no company would invest hundreds of millions in researching a new drug, if after that everyone could legally brew the same thing in a bathtub and drive down costs to the point where you can't recoup the research costs.)
- Paying for anything is evil. (Whether it's patent license fees, music, movies, or medicine, the ISO-standard/. whiner should never have to pay for anything. Yeah, verily, the pharmaceuticals corporations should just donate medicine for free to everyone.)
- Governments are inherently evil (and sometimes controlled by every single conspiracy ever invented.)
- Any kind of hierarchy or authority is bad, for that matter. (Gee, life would be so much easier without these pesky bosses telling me what the client wants. I know the client would be happier if they got a flight sim, not a B2B web site.)
- Anything can be explained by a good conspiracy theory. (E.g., if some disease can't be cured yet, then every single medic, pharmacist and pharma company is part of a conspiracy to not invent a cure.)
Sad thing is, I don't even think that we simply have a population of mentally-deranged social-misfits. My theory is that, well, we basically have what another site called the SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim) syndrome. On/. it's _fashionable_ to be a misfit.
"If people could not patent obvious ideas that had already been implemented by other people they would be less of a problem. In this world though, the patent office would just give them all those patents, as the USPTO has, and give a horde of lawyers an excuse to sue you at any time. Even with specific compression algorithms they give the patent for the same algorithm to multiple people (e.g. Unisys and IBM for LZW) because they don't check them."
Look, I'm not saying that the patents process is perfect. God knows there are tons of ludicrious patents, or yes, duplicate patents, and 99% of those don't even have anything to do with software.
But the solution IMHO is to fix it, not to throw it all away just because it's not 100% perfect. Cars aren't 100% perfect either, yet you probably still use one. Computers aren't anywhere _near_ perfect, but you still use them. Software, heck, honestly speaking after a day with WebSphere... it's mostly a fscking disaster, but people still use it.
Why? Because the benefits outweigh the problems.
Same with patents. There's a ton of research which wouldn't happen without patents. Go look up the costs to develop and test a new drug sometime. Without patents, the whole pharmaceuticals industry would probably be 50 years back in time.
"Being a coder I see the threat of being sued for bogus patents (on "ones and zeros", or using RAM to hold the contents of a video screen, or using the internet, etc.) as being worse that the hypothetical payoff for devising something worth patenting."
Here's a novel idea for you: so research and have some patents of your own. That's another neat side-effect of patents: everyone tries to have their own portfolio of nukes. Which means: more incentive to research.
You know what? I'll be damned if that doesn't sound _good_ to me.
And the much bemoaned "stopping progress" effects mostly only exist in/. and EFF whining. Real world is a bit more relaxed. Precisely because everyone wants some of someone else's patents, there are a ton of cross-licensing deals. (Basically, I'll give you mine if you give me yours.)
E.g., you probably like your new graphics card, whatever it may be. ATI, NVidia, Matrox, whatever. Well, whatever it may be, it contains technology licensed from the competition. DirectX texture compression is licensed from S3, for example.
You didn't see patents slowing those down, did you?
E.g., a lot of the technology in your CPU, motherboard, etc, whatever brand it may be, is licensed from someone else. If you have a TFT display, almost everything in those is patented too. Didn't seem to stop progress in those areas, did it?
Even with software, for example the price charged by Unisys for LZW was mostly symbolic. Definitely cheaper than trying to _invent_ your own compression algorithm. (Try it.) _And_ it had the neat side-effect that it stimulated people to research other formats: e.g., PNG.
A. Too often I've been trapped behind fuckwits^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H non-technical persons blocking the only two clerks in a store with endless conversations that don't even make any sense. Especially during holiday shopping seasons, I swear they breed like rabbits.
E.g., I swear to god I'm not making this up, someone in front of me spent an hour debating with the clerk whether she wants her new computer without a power supply or without a CD-ROM drive. Apparently she had a hard limit on how much money she wanted to spend, and by jingo, she was going to get it at that cost even if she can't start it.
E.g., in the same day the other clerk was busy with a stupid conversation like this:
Customer, with a boxed ProductX: "Why do you charge so much for this? At the other shop I've seen this 50 Euros cheaper." Clerk: "The same product?" Customer: "No, it was ProductY from a whole other manufacturer, but it still does the same thing doesn't it?" Clerk: "No, it doesn't. You can't do <insert list of stuff> with ProductY." Customer: "Yeah, but it's cheaper." Clerk: "Well, you know better what you need it for. If what ProductY does is enough for you, sure, buy ProductY instead." Customer: "Yeah, but I want this one. Why can't I get it for the same price?" Clerk: "Because it's a more expensive model." Customer: "But it does the same thing." Clerk: "Again, it doesn't." Customer: "But I really want this one, but I can only pay as much as ProductY costs." Clerk: "I'm sorry, then. If you can't afford ProductX, then yeah, you'll probably have to buy ProductY instead." Customer: "But why can't I buy ProductX for the same money?" (... at which point it continued in a loop, like a broken record for another hour...)
After one hour I got fed up and left the shop. Other people left earlier. Those two people basically cost the shop a bunch of money in lost revenue.
B. To be entirely fair, entirely too often the fuckwit is on the other side of the counter. It's the clerk. Either a really non-technical person, or a dishonest one just trying to make a sale.
On one occasion I was behind some old guy who explicitly only wanted a cheap computer to surf the web, send emails and write the occasional document in Word. He explicitly said that he never plays games, encode DVDs or whatever. The clerk talked him into buying an uber-gaming machine, with the most expensive CPU available, the most expensive 3D graphics card, enough RAM for a small corporate server, etc. ("Yeah, you really need a powerful video card if you want to do graphics stuff. E.g., open your kids' photos that they sent you per email.")
So, dunno, it seems to me that _if_ someone could make a machine that can _really_ replace a clerk, it would be a win-win. Let the people from point A talk to a machine for hours instead of jamming the whole shop and preventing any sales. And keep the rest of the customers safe from the kind of clerks from point B.
There are job ads for mathematicians in financial companies in the City of London. I guess they just don't publish the source code to their stock analysis programs on the internet.
Which is exactly the other point that patents were supposed to solve: encouraging people to _publish_ their research. The deal is "ok, you get 20 years monopoly on this idea, but after that _everyone_ gets to use it for free."
Whereas what happened in most programming outfits instead? _If_ anyone actually had a stroke of genius and invented something revolutionary (in spite of receiving exactly zero funding or time for that), it's buried 6 ft under in closed-source code, behind a wall of NDAs.
Any brilliant ideas that may have been coded in, say, 1984, would have been public domain by now, if they were patented. As it is, they're probably indented 6 ft under and covered with dirt, in some COBOL program that noone even understands any more. Or in some huge PDP-11 assembly program that noone can even read any more.
And even if the original author wanted to divulge the secret after all these years, or reimplement it somewhere else, chances are they'd get their pants sued off for NDA breach by the original company.
Which is another point why I'm looking forward to software patents. I wish people would give me a break with the stupid NDAs and non-compete clauses already. If it's that great an idea, go patent it, don't make me sign a stupidity that forbids me from even selling soap for two years after I quit the job.
(Yes, one non-compete and non-disclosure contract someone wanted me to sign, actually forbade me from ever competing not only with that company, but also with their partners, and their partners' partners, and everyone who every came in contact with those. Taken literally, I probably would have even been forbidden from blogging because that would be competing with some clients' client's news site or newspaper.)
And for what? Especially during the dot-com fraud noone actually had a new idea. Most had the same idiotic "ooh, we'll make a site with bright colours, lots of flash, and 1 MB rollover graphics per page, and no business plan" idea. And everyone thought they surely were the first one to ever think of that... even those who "had that idea" after reading about the inflated IPO of some company who already tried that business plan. And then went bust.
Yet they made you sign tome sized NDAs and non-compete contracts, to protect that preciousss idea. Gimme a break.
Let them go to the patent office instead. In 99% of the cases they'll just get told that someone patented that idea already, or just got overturned. (Plenty of prior art of flashy web sites that failed.) And if the remaining 1% are of any actual use, well, at least they'll be in the public domain after 20 years.
Darnok, I'm in Europe too, and let me tell you I'm looking forward to software patents.
You're probably working for some European software outfit or IT department, if you're worried about this, so let me ask you:
- How many people in your company are paid to _research_ new algoritms? How many of them are _mathematicians_. (And not maths guys who learned VB and are coding crappy web sites. Mathematicians hired as exactly that.)
Chances are: zero out of zero. Just like in every company I've worked for.
- How many usability experts does your company employ? When was the last time they actually did any _research_?
Let me tell you that only at the present job we even have a usability expert at all. That is, a programmer who's read a couple of usability books, and she's just regurgitating what she's read. Never actually did any research, probably because the boss would never pay for that.
- When was the last time your company actually had a research project? _Any_ research project. No, honestly. Did you guys _ever_ try discovering anything, as opposed to copy-and-pasting other people's work? (Even if from books, it's still copy-and-pasting someone else's algorithms and "patterns". No offense intended, that's what my job involves too.)
Let me tell you, here we _almost_ had one, but even that was conditioned on the German government's being willing to subsidize it. When they weren't, the boss simply nuked the project and dismantled the team.
Etc.
The funny thing is that you even say:
"In fact, granting ridiculous patents to US companies is quite a viable way of shoring up the US economy in the future; it must be nice to know that US companies can ensure a flow of patent licence cash into the US whenever they see fit to do so. Fixing the US patent system could ultimately cost US citizens a lot of money"
But you fail to see that you've just illustrated why lack of patents was a problem for Europe. Those guys in the US researched, while we just sat around and copied each other's code.
It's not that Europe doesn't have intelligent or capable people. I'm sure that per thousand people we have exactly as many smart people as the US does. (And viceversa.)
Europe has a lot of research and _patents_ for pharmaceuticals, cars, electronics, etc. But it has virtually no software research whatsoever. Did you ever wonder: why? Because without patents here the "smart" choice was to not bother paying for any software research.
That's the problem with lack of patents. The viability of any research becomes measured in "how much profit we can make out of this in 1 month, after which everyone else copies our idea?" Which usually means it's not worth even trying.
And the sooner this aberrant situation gets buried, the more cheerfully I'll dance on its grave.
As far as I know (or "the way I heard that legend") the problem QWERTY "solved" wasn't that of speed. It was one of physical proximity. If you haven't owned one of those old purely-mechanical typewriters, basically:
1. The mechanism was basically based on thin metal levers, with a key at one end and a small metal hammer with an embossed letter on it at the other end. You pressed the key, the little hammer was pushed towards the paper. (You had to actually hit the keys pretty hard, too, especially when you wanted 2 carbon copies.)
2. Because it was a mechanical contraption, rather than wires, the whole mechanism was arranged in the only way that was easy to make and robust to operate: with as little overlap as possible. I.e., for keys that were physically near each other (e.g., A and Q, or A and S), the hammers would also be near each other.
3. Unfortunately, due to the very construction, the closer two hammers were, the easier it was to jam the typewriter if you pressed both at the same time. E.g., if you pressed Q and W at the same time, the machine would pretty much always jam, whereas pressing Q and P at the same time would almost never jam.
So the problem was basically not how fast you typed, but whether you pressed two adjacent keys at the same time. E.g., if you typed "assassin", and starting pressing the S before the A was released, or viceversa, you'd have a good probability to jam the thing.
I.e., again, QWERTY was not supposed to slow people down, per se, but rather simply to reduce the probability that two consecutively used hammers would be phyisically near each other. That was the problem: the hammers, not the keys, not the typist speed as such. However, due to the purely mechanical (and somewhat primitive) relationship between keys and hammers, the easiest way to solve that was to rearrange the keys too.
Think "side-effect", rather than "goal."
The "goal" for the key layout itself was actually the opposite: to convince that time's PHBs that the new layout _doesn't_ slow people down too much. Or at least less than stopping to unjam the typewriter did.
Hence the "QWERTYUIOP" row. The rigged tech demo involved was basically "look! I can type TYPEWRITER quickly! It must be an optimal layout!" So all the keys in that word had to be on the same row. Even at the expense of being less effective at preventing jams.
Just, you know, in case you thought idiotic technical decisions being taken by complete incompetents required computers. There you go. A business decision, which was sold based on a rigged and non-representative tech demo. And we're still stuck with it:)
And a fake Rolex is ground-breaking research... how? Did they invent a whole new kind of watch? Did they invent a groundbreaking new manufacturing process? Anything? _What_ brand new new research was spawned by that copying?
I.e., you, my friend, have no fscking clue what inventing stuff even means.
And are Rolex watches even patented? No, seriously. Even if there originally was any patent regarding those, it would have expired a long time ago. AFAIK those counterfeit watches were a _trademark_ infringement, _not_ a patent infringement.
Again, _patents_ expire in 20 years. _Trademarks_ never do, if properly defended.
I.e., as far as _patents_ are concerned, you could jolly well make an identical watch and sell it. As long as you don't also infringe on a _trademark_, go ahead. You won't see a lawyer nastygram for that.
Do you even know the difference between a patent and a trademark? No, seriously.
" Imagine if someone had patented conjunctions..."
I'll call bullshit on that fallacy too. Yeah, yeah, I keep hearing such heart-warming appeals to strong feelings as "but what if someone pattented sex?" Or "but what if someone patented making food, and you had to go to bed hungry?"
(Believe it or not, I didn't pull those out of the hat. They come almost verbatim from the homepage of someone whose programming work I still respect A LOT. His views on patents, well, let's just say I respect a whole lot less.)
The problem with that fallacy is two-fold:
1. Prior art. Noone could actually patent conjunctions, sex or food, because they bloody exist already. Or would get that patent overturned in a jiffy.
2. Patents expire. If someone actually invested enough time and research to invent a brand new grammatical structure, or a brand new way to have sex, or a brand new way of cooking food... and it's so useful and revolutionary that everyone wants to use it right now... what's the problem with letting patenting it?
It would mean that patents actually worked: they gave someone incentive to research something new. And in 20 years, which is a ridiculously short time on a history scale, we get it in the public domain.
Whereas without that, we probably wouldn't have got that thing researched at all.
I.e., between:
A. we get some new useful invention, but get to wait 20 years before it's public domain, and
B. we _might_ get it in 100 years or not at all, ever, because it wasn't economical for anyone to pay for that research...
which would you choose?
I'll choose A any time.
If your ideal world is more like B, may I suggest you go join the Amish or some other such fine group? Just pretend you're in an alternate universe where patents never existed, and not much new ever got invented.
AGAIN: the MS patent is strictly for a new way to control a PDA device. It is _not_ about mouse double-clicks or whatnot. So please spare me the inflamatory "Microsoft patented the double-click!" bullshit.
Here's an idea for all you "all software/interface patents are bad/obvious" or "waah! but they're threatening small companies" folks:
Maybe you actually work for one of those threatened small companies or OSS projects. How much _research_ does your company do? Chances are it's _zero_. Nada. Nil. Zilch.
How many mathematicians researching new algorithms does your company pay? No, I don't mean "mathematician turned to programming crappy web sites in PHP or VB.NET". I mean how many are paid to actually do _research_? Zero, huh?
You oppose interface patents, such as Microsoft's double-click? OK. How many usability experts do you have on your team? Heck, how many are on your company's payroll? For about 99% of companies: zero.
If you do have one, when was the last time he/she actually did any usability _research_? You know, get a group of grandmas and actually try various new kinds of interfaces on them. Never, huh? He/she just regurgitates other people's results from books, huh?
So what do we have here? An entire industry which spends _maybe_ 1% of its funds on research, but mostly goes about just copy-and-pasting other people's work. Even if from a book, but still straight copy-and-pasting.
And you still don't see the kind of problem that lack of software patents has created? Geesh.
Compare it to the chemical industry, another heavy-on-the-IP industry, and see how much do those research. A helluva lot more. You know why? Patents. Because they're allowed to actually have 20 years benefit from that research.
Without patents they too would probably be at a point where everyone brews penicilin and aspirin cheap, but not much else. Because noone researched much more than that, for lack of any financial incentive to research.
And the benefit for society as a whole would be? Even with patents everyone can still make aspirin cheap. Because patents expire in 20 years. And we can make a lot of other stuff cheap, because those patents expired too. On the whole we're actually ahead, because those patents encouraged research.
And, you know what? I'd very much like to see that happening to software too. Back to the MS patent, at least MS actually did some research concerning PDA interfaces, which is a helluva lot more than other people did.
Here's another idea for you: using the shell is the _program's_ responsibility. Passing unchecked parameters from untrusted sources to the shell, is the _program's_ security failure. Not the OS's.
It doesn't even have to do with Windows. The exact same issue existed on the server side, back in the days of web-sites with CGI programs in Perl. Not with a Windows shell, but with a Unix command-line shell.
Every single incompetent's first reaction was to just execute another program, with some unchecked parameters off a form on the command line. E.g., launch a command-line mailer to send the registration confirmation. Just concatenate together a command line out of those parameters, then give it to the shell. (Launching other small utilities is the Unix way, after all. Right?)
Guess what happened? People started noticing that you can do funny stuff to those web pages. E.g., include symbols like ">" or "<" in the input fields, and make it mail the list of names and passwords to you. (Yes, nowadays it's shaddowed. Mostly because of that exploit.) And/or turn it into a command line with more than one command.
It's not even limitted to shells. The exact same exploit is still coded by incompetent monkeys every day, in dealing with an SQL database. Every burger-flipper-hired-as-a-developper just has to write something like the following. (It's usin Oracle, btw, hence the quirk about using '%' as a wildcard.)
sqlCommand = "SELECT * FROM PRIVATE_DATA WHERE OWNER=" + userID + " AND SEARCH_FIELD LIKE '%" + userInputData + "%'"
And they display those records on the web page.
They check the userID all right. (Actually some idiots don't even check that.) But they don't check the userInputData, which comes straight from an input field on the web page.
Then someone types "' OR '%'='" in the input field, without the quotes. Let's say their userID is 666. That select just became:
SELECT * FROM PRIVATE_DATA WHERE OWNER=666 AND SEARCH_FIELD LIKE '%' OR '%'='%'
Oops. It's an OR TRUE, and it selects every single record in that table. Regardless of owner. Congrats, it's an exploit. An attacker can see everyone else's private data.
It's not Oracle's bug. It's a bug of the application which didn't bother checking or quoting that untrusted data.
That's it. You simply pass untrusted and unchecked parameters to _any_ shell, you have a vulnerability. And it's _yours_. It's not the OS's, it's not the shell's. It's yours.
Ah yes, yet another case of "if my program is crap, then it's _your_ problem. You should drop whatever you're doing and spend your free time debugging my code." Are you naturally this stupid, or do you have to work hard at it?
I don't know whatever gave you the idea that millions of people have nothing better to do than:
1. Learn programming,
2. Learn security,
3. Examine every single bloody line of source code in every program on their computer,
4. Roll their very own patched version of everything,
5. Work on merging their very own patches into every single new version. Then repeat from point 3 anyway.
You're proposing... what? That _everyone_ starts donating half their free time just to save you the bother of debugging your crap? That society as a whole starts spending billions of hours per year just in personalized patches for your bugs? Geesh. The mind boggles.
Let me give you a better idea: OSS is not an excuse to write crappy code. Crap code is crap code, regardless of whether it's OSS or not. Insecure code is insecure code. That's it.
Regardless of what the heck of a license it's under, a program is supposed to solve someone's problem. To _save_ them time, not to waste their time forcing everyone to review your code, patch it, and host their own fork that actually works.
Generally speaking, you're right that the customer isn't always right. But you also have to realize that there's a _huge_ difference between designing a custom solution for someone, and retail or even mass-manufacturing.
In your case, your job _is_ to inform the client what can be done, what cannot, and what could be done much cheaper and/or more reliable in another way. An ideal design process is made by _both_ you and the customer, since each side only knows half the story. You know the technical issues far better, of course, but the client knows his/her business processes far better. So, yes, the two sides need to communicate.
Including, yes, sometimes concluding that it just can't be done. Either it's not technically feasible, or not worth it, or whatever.
(Well, at least in an ideal world. In practice some PHBs will get pissed off if you don't just try to shaft the client as hard as you can. "Ooh, but no matter if it's just a small message board for 10 emplyees to toss ideas around. You _need_ all this huge architecture based on EJB, XML, XSLT, SOAP, distributed computing over a cluster of 10 Sun mainframes, assynchronous messaging protocols, and a dozen other fashionable buzzwords. It'll only cost 20 man-years to implement, and we'll give you the option to hire 2 full-time consultants to keep it working, at $1000 per hour.")
Retail is a bit of a different story. Noone's going to design a custom graphics card for you, no matter who you are. The only question is whether they sell it or not, and later whether you're allowed to return it or not.
And those are more matters of shop policy and, where applicable, consumer rights laws. The question isn't how to solve some custom problem of yours, but whether the shop can afford to deal with a couple million people wanting the same thing. (E.g., to cash in the rebate and return the item for the full price.)
E.g., the policy whether to never take back opened software has nothing to do with whether it solves your problem or not, but with whether the shop wants to deal with the millions of 13 year olds who'll install the game, apply a copy-protection crack, and then return it.
E.g., mail-in rebates have mostly to do with the idea that people come buy because of those, and then forget to mail them on time. If data mining can show that it does more harm to the shop's bottom line than good, then the economic decision will be to drop them.
E.g., currently in retail every marketer just "knows" that if you lower the price on one item, you get people physically in the shop, and they'll buy some other (overpriced) stuff too. So you actually make more money. It's just common sense. (Mind you, in the same way as back in Aristotle's time it was common sense that a brick 10 times heavier falls 10 times faster. Or that the Sun revolves around the Earth.) However if enough data mining can show that you lose more than you make with those -- e.g., because most people only buy those discounted items -- it will be dropped.
Again, note how nowhere in those examples did the customer's needs play any role at all. Noone goes out of their way to solve someone's custom problem as such, they just look at the big picture and its effects on the bottom line.
See, that's THE way to start towards making a site noone wants to use. Thinking about it as "art".
From my experience the ones thinking like that are graphics artists (a noble profession otherwise) which some PHB promoted directly to web designers. Not saying they couldn't learn to be proper web designers, I'm just saying: it's a different job. You have to _learn_ to do it.
So they think they're making art. They produce pages with:
- a megabyte of funky graphics. Bonus points if it's Flash. Or flashing.
- tiny fonts,
- piss-poor organization (it's apparently artistic to group content by any other criterion than what belongs together),
- piss-poor ideas taken from another medium, and inapplicable to reading stuff on a screen. (E.g., 2 or 3 columns are nice and fine in a newspaper, but in a PDF they just make me pointlessly scroll up and down. Artistic as it may look, it's a pain to use.)
- some utterly retarded navigation, which leaves the customer up a learning curve just to find the page they want (but hey, it's artistic.) Bonus points if it involves some mandatory use of JavaScript, not to simplify things (e.g., auto-totals on a form), but to force the user to do weird and unnatural perversions he didn't want. (E.g., mandatory gesture based navigation implemented in JavaScript.)
- colors that are a _pain_ to read (cyan on neon blue, and orange on orange-ish yellow are actual color schemes I've been force to implement. You guessed, by graphics artists.)
Etc, etc, etc.
E.g., one actual idea that came from a graphics artist, and which we fought: he wanted the site squeezed in a non-resizeable 600x400 pixel window, without toolbars (i.e., also without a back button.) With wall to wall graphics. That was his artistic vision of a unique user experience.
He's also the guy who wanted the orange on light orange colours, btw. He also wanted a navigation scheme that involved a weird (if artistic) matrix that noone understood how to use. That idea fell after a multi-hour meeting with the investors, where he presented his unique vision. They couldn't understand how the heck that would work either. (And bear in mind that dot-com investors usually loved weirdness and promises of "unique user experiences.")
The other guys at the office called him "The Antichrist."
And especially during the dot-com fraud, the more clueless the PHB, the more he/she loved such ideas. Sites were created to be "unique user experiences". Except the more unique the site, the less users wanted to use it. Weird, no?
Basically you have to understand what the users want. They're not there to admire art, they're mostly there basically for the equivalent of reading a newspaper. (Except even there bear in mind that reading on a screen works best with other paragraph sizes than in a newspaper.)
They'll also tend to see the web as a whole, so to speak. Even though (or if) they understand concepts like "site", they actually like navigating seamlessly between them. They don't want to learn new skills that only apply to your site. They don't want to work hard to find the links. (Yay for links that only underline on mouse hover. Not.) Etc.
And the sooner you can wrap your mind around the idea that you're making a site for your users, and not for art, the better.
Basically it's exactly the other way around than you seem to think: all these studies are not some elitist promoting some pure art that noone wants to read, they're actually the exact opposite: studies on what actual people want to read. And it turns out that it's exactly the opposite of what many artists in ivory towers thought.
"First, consider the phone system. Until Ma Bell was broken up and local phone companies were encouraged to innovate to survive, and third-party manufacturers were allowed to make phone gizmos that could be freely connected to the POTS network, progress in that field was glacial. Caller ID, 3-way calling, cheap wireless phones, fax machines in a computer printer (hell, even just having MORE than one phone on your line)... Consider the point made."
The point about patents is made... how? Far as I know the monopoly in question had _nothing_ to do with patents, but merely with who owns the infrastructure. So you point is?
"NOW look at software. Compare the rate of progress of open systems (Linux, the Unices, Apache, Mozilla) with that of closed systems (Windows, IE, any number of others). The rate of improvement AND innovation in open efforts far exceeds closed efforts."
Actually, I see very little invention in that field. I just see a ton of Open Source people _copying_ what's been invented by someone else. Maybe doing a better implementation of it, but copying someone else's idea nevertheless. Hence the constant bullshit from the OSS camp about how software patents are some utter disaster.
Almost all I see touted as some smashing advantage of Mozilla and other OSS projects, comes from someone paid to come up with that idea in a closed source project.
E.g., gestures? That wasn't invented by either Opera or Mozilla. Both jumped on board after the (awful) game Black and White hyped it to hell and back. Which in turn got it from PDAs.
E.g., the window-in-a-window interface of Opera or Mozilla? Stolen verbatim from Microsoft, who introduced it waaay back in its Windows API and own programs.
Apache? Now you make me curious. What is the groundbreaking innovation there? Quality, yes, but innovation? Am I missing something? It's a plain old HTTP server which alows plugins. No more, no less. And the idea to run stuff as dynamically loaded modules, instead of spawning a CGI process, now that was implemented in closed source servers (e.g., Netscape's) long before it.
You mean maybe stuff like PHP? Now THAT started as a shameless rip-off of Microsoft's ASP. Believe it or not, that was the first attempt to put executable code in the HTML template. (Some of us still call it an anti-pattern, but hey... might as well give Microsoft the credit it deserves for popularizing bad habits.)
MySQL? An implementation of the relational database architecture, and the language to use it, both researched and developped by someone else. (Unsurprisingly, since again it's an example of stuff that's heavy on the maths, and not something which a regular coder can just suddenly come up with.)
Etc, etc, etc.
And I also notice that whenever it comes to these patents, I see lots of bogus "well, duh, that was obvious", but usually noone actually offering examples of prior art. If it was that obvious, and OSS invents everything long before the evil corporations... you should have plenty of prior art, no?
But again, rather than arguing until we're both blue in the face, why not just do what I've said? Prove it. And I don't mean "prove it" in the "I want more posts", but "prove it" as in: then go patent all that new stuff you OSS folks are discovering, and donate the patents to the public domain. That ought to keep the corporations off for good, no?
You basically say that OSS creates most of the inventions, while the corporations just sit on their collective butt. Good. Well, then you shouldn't have any problem getting the patents before them, right? Or at least the prior art? What's the problem, then?
Disclosure: I do _not_ own an iPod, and I'm _not_ an Apple fan.
Yet I think the iPod probably won on its own merits, not just marketting.
At one point, I actually went looking for an MP3 player. Let me tell you, the impression I was left with was that all the iPod competitors sucked. They sucked like an industrial vacuum cleaner. They sucked like an expensive hooker. That kind of suckage.
The hard drive based ones were larger than a brick. Most still are. (*Cough* Archos.) Looks like everyone just put the cheapest desktop HDD in there, and presumably half a car battery. The think which you'd need custom made pants if you wanted to put them in a pocket, and presumably a new set of suspenders too.
But were they at least cheaper, to justify carrying a huge brick around? Well, no. About half were only marginally cheaper. Definitely not the kind of price difference to justify carrying a brick around. The rest were actually _more_ expensive than the iPod. Sad but true.
Now I can understand going for a niche. Stuff like "we'll offer an inferior product, but far cheaper. For people who can't afford the original." Nothing wrong with that. Both AMD and Intel went for that market too. (The Celeron for example.)
But this was not the case. It was a big heavy brick and no price incentive to buy that one instead of an iPod. What the heck did their PHBs and marketroids think?
The other option were Flash based MP3 players/memory sticks. Except for a long time that meant 64 MB or 128 MB. The problem is: depending on the songs, 64 MB might even hold only 3 of my MP3 files. Or a maximum of 6. Hardly an improvement over the portable CD player I already had.
The iPod fit a nice convenience niche. It had as much capacity as the huge bricks everyone else was selling, but in a much more compact size. While larger than a memory stick player, it could still fit in a pocket just as well.
Then there were other convenience factors, like the fact that they have a display which can actually show a damn playlist. Others, like Creative, _still_ seem to think that a super-tiny two line by 16 characters (or so) display counts as all the screen space one would ever need.
In the end, I ended up sticking to a CD based player. (Hey, at least that one _is_ cheaper.) I also ended up with the idea that _if_ I were to buy a smaller player, and iPod would be it. Not because of Apple's hype, but because Apple's competition is only now starting to wake up and get its head out of its ass.
Here's a wild idea for you: a CS college, like any college, is supposed to prepare you to do actual useful work in the real world.
There are a bunch of things you'll discover when you get out of college. Not of all nice. Actually few of them nice. There's a reason why it's the job where, in spite of the good money and all, satisfaction is lower than among plumbers and shoe sales clerks.
Believe it or not, being a programmer isn't about having fun with the platform or tools of your choice. When you go out in the real world, you're going to have to make the programs that the client wants. On the platform of _their_ choice, and often even having the language, tools and frameworks thrust upon you by some management decision. In 9 cases out of 10 the wrong tools and frameworks.
You're also likely going to have to learn to function in a team. Aside from other considerations, that means being able to live with the architecture, OS, tools and frameworks that someone else in the team chose.
(You're also going to have to live with such specs as "All text must be in 7 pixel fonts, in dark cyan on neon blue". Or light orange on orange-ish yellow. No, honestly, I've actually had to make programs for those exact two corporate colour schemes.)
I.e., some day you'll be glad you have those Windows labs on your CV. It might just be what your customer wants you to write software for.
Horrible as you may find it. Personally I don't. But it still beats being unemployed.
That said, of course, I would question any CS college which has _only_ Windows on the menu. Wouldn't hurt at all to give you at least some minimal idea about other stuff too.
Just because somebody invented something, does not mean that he has supreme right over that thing. Do you think humanity will be where it is now with software patents ?
I'll paraphrase the same question right back at you: do you think medicine would be where it is today, if anyone was free to brew in a bathtub the formula you've spent half a billion to perfect? Why the heck would anyone invest in pharmaceutical research at all, if that was the case?
Yes, you could argue until you're blue in the face about how that would be good. You could buy cheaper medicine, for example. But then noone would invest in producing _new_ medicine. Good luck if your disease doesn't go away with just penicilin and/or aspirin, because in your ideal world noone invented anything newer than that. You're gonna die, but hey, surely that's a small price to pay to keep those greedy corporations from patenting obvious chemical formulas.
You see, the point of patents is to stimulate research. Yes, you pay for it by having a 20 year interval in which someone gets to collect royalties for their investment. But the benefit in the long run is that you actually get research.
Well, see, same thing with software. Do I think we'd be better off, if anyone started patenting software algorithms since 1950? Damn right. We'd have had more people actually paying from research, instead of just hordes of people copy-and-pasting the same code over and over again. (Algorithms copied from a book via memory, for all practical purposes I'll consider to be copied-and-pasted.)
Except what almost every programmer comes up with, involves using the standard PRNG in their C/Java/Pascal/BASIC/whatever's standard library. Which usually gives you a whole of 32 bit key. (The PRNG "seed".) Maybe 64 bit. No matter how you combine that random stream with the input stream, even the most primitive brute force attack can finish going through 2 billion combinations in mere seconds on today's computers.
But that was just one example.
Other "secure cryptographic algorithms" I've seen people come up with, involved something even simpler, like just XORing a password (repeated ad infinitum to get an endless stream) to the input stream. Now that, by itself, is bad enough, but... some even did this over a fixed file header (bonus points if said header is padded with zeroes.) Just so you wouldn't even have to do any work at all to retrieve that password.
In truly silly cases, you might not even have a password, but some 4 digit PIN as protection. (Believe it or not, I've actually tried a diary program where the password protection was a 4 digit PIN.) Whoppee. A whole 10,000 combinations to try. Surely noone will crack that. Ever.
A truly pathetic case didn't even actually encrypth the file, but just appended the mangled password to the front, and checked it in their program to see if they should allow you to open the file in it. Surely noone will get through _that_ protection. Except if you were willing to use a hex viewer instead of their program, that is.
That's just a small sample of what people actually produce when they get into the mind that "bah, cryptography is trivial and obvious."
And I'm not even talking about some lone coder hacking some quick protection into a freeware utility, in his free time. Stuff like that actually appeared in commercial programs or expensive custom solutions.
Since we're here among Microsoft haters, the "password protection" they had in older Office documents could be cracked in milliseconds. One company selling utilities to recover your password after you forgot it, actually went on record saying that they had to build a delay into their program so it would at least look like it's working hard at it.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you're so busy you can't dedicate one daily hour to a game, you shouldn't even try playing adventures."
Sadly adventure games are not the only ones who waste my time. The other canonic example are MMORPGs, but even those are just one genre among many that waste my time.
E.g.,
- Mandatory tutorials. You can find them in every single genre. (Don't get me wrong: _Optional_ tutorials rule. Hour-long mandatory tutorials suck.)
- Idiotic save restrictions to make a short game look longer, by forcing me to replay each map again and again and again. Again, it's not only about arcades or adventures: you can find that idiocy in every single genre, including FPS.
E.g., the one that rilled me the most was Hitman. That was one shameless waste of my time. (And they lost me as a customer for good.)
E.g., one console RPG at one point made me play for 10 hours straight before it gave me a save point. Roll it around in your head: TEN HOURS. I mean, geesh. Thank god it was Sunday, but even then it's _not_ funny.
- Yes, idiotic overuse of cut scene and animations.
Your FFX example is right on: I've tried to play the game three times so far, and invariably I get bored out of my skull of getting a 5 minute cut scene every 1 minute of playing. It's not a game, it's a bleeding tech-demo.
- Stupid illogical puzzles where you don't get enough data and feedback to actually solve a problem. You just have to spend hours trying every single button and lever combination, until one mysteriously works. That's not a mental exercise (as a puzzle should be), that's not a challenge, it's just a stupid waste of time. Again, that's being abused in all genres.
"If you want that, just try the lowest difficulty level and for many games you're set."
The lowest difficulty level in most games is _not_ easy enough for a casual gamer. Not everyone is a die-hard CS player, who instinctively circle-strafes, bunny-hops and headshots 9 times out of 10.
So, no, just making enemies kill you in 3 hits instead of 2, does _not_ count as a low enough difficulty for a casual gamer. Making bosses need 100 direct rocket hits to die, instead of 150, doesn't either.
But the biggest idiocy are games which attempt to basically _punish_ you for playing on a low difficulty. E.g., most adventure games give you half the xp if you're playing on a lower difficulty level.
The problem? Your character slowly falls behind, to the point where your "turn undead" spells don't turn anyone, and your sword swings never connect, and your healing spells don't even heal the damage an enemy does in one hit. The game actually becomes _more_ difficult for the poor buggers who explicitly requested a _lower_ difficulty. Idiotic game design at its finest.
Basically: the lowest difficult level in a game should basically be (demi)"god mode". It should be low enough that any non-gamer grandma off the street can beat the game. Low enough that a paraplegic on drugs can finish it. For everyone else, hey, they can choose a higher difficulty.
Serious Sam got that right. Most others did not.
"Trial and error is just fine."
Trial and error is _not_ fine in most games. In arcades, maybe. But what does it really bring to further the story in an RPG or FPS? Other than boredom and repetition, nothing.
"Best games for busy people are multiplayer games with short rounds. I don't really need the latest and greatest. There are many oldies that never get really old. Tekken 3 for instance allows for several rounds in 30 minutes. SNES Mario Kart, or N64 Diddy Kong Racing in multiplayer mode are also great options if you have someone around. You can also look for adversaries online: Bomberman Online for DC is just great, so is soldat for PC (give it a download). Crazy Taxi or Jet Set Radio allow for short sessions. Short deadmatches of your FPS of choice are also very adequate."
No offense, but here you're overstepping your prerogatives by a
The real long term investment is research and inventing new things. A ton of monkeys re-implementing the stone wheel doesn't produce any progress. Sure, you have cheap wheels, but you're still in the stone age.
If you have electric lighting today, it's because someone researched a way to produce electricity and a way to produce lightbulbs. And had a business plan to recoup investment and make money from that research.
If you can talk to people over the phone, is because a lot of people along the way had a commercial interest to invent the phone and a lot of improvements to it. And, yes, it involved one helluva lot of patents.
If you can drive a car or ride a bus, blimey, it's because someone had the financial incentive to invest in research. Again, it involved patents.
If you can ride the train, and it's quite a bit faster than the early 10mph engines, it's again because someone had the financial incentive to develop better ones. And yes, it did involve securing a market to recoup the investment. When not by patents, by other kinds of deals.
Or go look up the kind of infant mortality they had in the middle ages, or even as late as last century. If nowadays you didn't die in the first years after birth, it's because of all the doctors and pharmaceuticals companies who had good money to gain from keeping people alive. Yes, that involved patents too.
Etc.
So in the long run, all the armies of monkeys copying someone else's work aren't producing jack squat to help progress. If that's your ideal society, one where everyone reimplements the wheel and no funding ever goes into research, go join the Amish already.
And let me give you another thought to chew on: the real _waste_ is in the re-implementation. Do we need 100,000 different re-implementations of a simple e-commerce web site? Not really. One would be enough. Hundreds of billions yearly are _wasted_ on reimplementing the same things, again and again, the only difference being a new crop of bugs.
It's not a benefit to society, it's a _drain_ of useful resources. Those hundreds of billions would be better invested in either creating something new for a change, or just building a few new factories. Wasting them on reimplementing the same tired crap is _not_ a benefit.
So for all I care, even one company took monopoly of one thing... GOOD! Finally! Let them implement it only once and sell it. Maybe then the rest of us can move to better stuff. Or maybe then someone will invest in research, instead of just copy-and-pasting other people's work.
(And no, if anyone wants to come with stuff like "but people invent things without commercial incentive too! Benjamin Franklin flew a kite to discover electricity!"... I admire your idealism, but you don't know much history, do you?
Did Benjy also invent a way to produce that electricity on an industrial scale? Any means for distribution? Did he also invent any devices that use it? Etc. Well, blimey, nope. The actual useful stuff came from people who wanted to make money out of it, not from lone visionaries flying kites.)
I have an 120 GB and a 60 GB, both 7200 RPM, in my current computer. They work like a charm so far, and the noise is _much_ lower than the IBM and WD drives I had before.
I also have a 20 GB Seagate drive from 1999 or thereabout, also 7200 RPM, and it still works like a charm, if in a different computer. Seems to me like Seagate could have afforded a 5 year warranty on that already.
By contrast, in the meantime I had two IBMs and a WD that crapped and lost all data. Admittedly, in an overheating case that originally wasn't designed to have any fans. (In 1999 case fans weren't the norm.) Still, can't help noticing that the Seagate drive had no problems whatsoever in the same case.
Well, portage isn't a bad idea, but IMHO Gentoo could really use a decent installer. Dunno, maybe one which:
- can bloody remember the settings so it only needs to ask once. (As opposed to making me configure the ADSL settings _again_ after the compile.)
- present choices as civilized check-boxes or radio-buttons, instead of making me switch back and forth to a crappy text-based browser to read what to type next to just get a cron daemon installed.
- for that matter, if someone already went through the bother of typing what those options do, copy that to a small help next to the radio buttons. Again, to save me the stupidity of switching back and forth to a text-based browser.
Yes, people are greedy. Yes, those corporations want to make money. Never said otherwise. But the funny thing is: somehow that's what keeps capitalism working.
For better or worse, models which take humans as they are (i.e., yes, greedy) work better than idealistic utopias. "Well, if everyone played nice and gave everything away for free..." models are stupid. It just won't happen.
It's like arguing that CPUs are inherently evil on account of "but they need electricity!" Tough luck. That's how they work, and that's that. No matter how much you whine about it, you'll still need a PSU.
Same with humans. They're greedy. That's what makes society work. That's that. Deal with it.
And that's what fuelled progress so far. Pretty much every research made in the last 8000 years, was made because someone thought (A) they could make a ton of money with it, or (B) kill someone with it. The car you drive, the train or plane you ride, the computer you write this stuff on, the medicine which may one day save your life... they're all the product of human greed.
That's evil... how? Would you rather live like the Bushmen instead?
Yes, ideal sharing-and-caring tribal societies existed. E.g., the Bushmen. Wonderful culture, except... they're still in the stone age, because noone ever tried to get ahead. While the greed motivated world invented tons of stuff to shaft each other with.
That's your ideal world free of greed and patented research? Well, go join one of those tribes. Just look up their average life expectancy first. Chances are good you'd be already dead if you were actually born there. Chances also are that your first children will die in their first years of life. That's what life is in those non-evil societies.
However, you can't have your cake and eat it. You can't have all the benefits of greed, _and_ a world free of greed. An already greedy society can't go back to that point. Ever. You can't uninvent greed once it's entered the system. Consider it either good or evil if it makes you feel any better, but it's just the way Real Life _is_. Deal with it.
"If that guy has found difficult to "look under the hood", than he cannot understand other meaning of "free" - ability to fix, to improve etc. He is already deprived of this ability."
And if you can't understand that people have better things to do with their time than "look under the hood" for all the hundreds of packages on their system, then, well, you're lacking any understanding of what the end user wants.
The point is that I've looked under the hood of some projects, but typically _don't_ _want_ to. Other users actually less so.
A program is supposed to be a tool, and save me time. If on the average using a hypothetical word-processor cost me more time than using a typewriter, I'd use the typewriter. Code and technology in general is a _means_, not an end. It's that simple.
That _includes_ the hidden time costs of looking under the hood to fix bugs, or (my Linux favourite) track down and recompile half the libraries on the system just to get the damn thing compiled and running. If at every release I'm supposed to lose weeks just comparing code, merging my own changes, and fixing new problems in a hypothetical OSS word-processor, then that word-processor is _useless_. It's not only a worse proposition than going and buying MS Word, it's actually a worse proposition than going back to a low-tech typewriter.
Your average company is an even worse customer. They may look to Linux for the perceived cost advantages, but rest assured that they do _not_ want to pay a team that looks under the hood and fixes stuff. People are more expensive than Windows licenses. Paying a team to open the hood of all those packages and fix things is far more expensive than just getting a packaged closed solution from Microsoft, Sun, IBM, or whoever.
I.e., if the best business proposition you can come up with is "so shut the fsck up and fix it yourself", you've just lost the whole corporate market in one fell swoop. _And_ 99% of the home users.
Somewhat unrelated, IMHO all that list could be more or less seen as consequences of the one primordial problem: "scratching an itch." Too often the itch is "I wanna tinker with code", not "I want a program which does this and that just right." At which point the program's _only_ "advantage" is that someone else can tinker with it too.
Entirely too many OSS projects fall precisely into that category. They're there because someone had a vision of a better tool, but because they liked typing code. And the result shows it.
And retorts like "so fix it yourself" or "but it's good because you can look under the hood", are just symptoms of it. That person doesn't actually even start to understand the _user's_ itch.
Believe it or not, your inflated standard of living is _based_ on reaping the benefits of low cost work in other countries.
America has barely a few percent of the world's population, but consumes more than a half of the world's resources. That's where that standard high of living comes from.
Again, this means relying on low wages in other countries, all the way along the chain.
You get cheap raw materials (e.g., oil) because the people digging/pumping it out in those countries are paid barely enough not to starve. You get cheap shoes, clothes, CPUs, etc, because some people from other countries can be crammed in cheap sweatshops and overworked for ridiculously low wages.
And if you think you can build your own Chinese Wall, and become an isolationist nation, I have news for you. Bad news. Then you _won't_ keep that standard of living.
You may keep your job and your current wage, but suddenly everything will cost at least twice as much. I.e., effectively you've taken one big wage cut anyway: you can buy a lot less crap out of that wage.
You may look at how much of the world's oil did the USA produce before WW2, and how much it produces now. Right. Now all y'all driving SUVs and sports cars are doing it on imported oil. Why? Because if you paid to pump your own out, you'd start thinking more along the lines of "let's carpool" than "let's buy a SUV". That's life quality on cheap imported work for you.
Actually, let me rephrase that: you probably still _won't_ keep your high paid IT or marketting or management job anyway. You know why? Because all those white collar jobs are the result of an economy of abbundance. You have all the peons in Africa, South America, Asia, etc, doing the low level jobs, so you're mostly dealing with how to sell all that crap. Hence the massive advertising spending and all the jobs in marketting, research, legal, even services, etc.
It's all basically just society's way of dealing with a massive surpluss, and basically a chronic lack of need for manufacturing jobs. People get shifted into other jobs which don't directly produce anything tangible.
Now take away the surplus out of that economy, and you'll find yourself back to 1900 indeed. When you _need_ to dig out 100% of your ore needs yourself, _and_ pump (or synthetise) your own oil, _and_ manufacture shoes locally for everyone, and clothes, and cars, and everything... that all takes manpower.
Suddenly your problem is having people to sew clothes, not white collar marketeers to sell them. The supply and demand ratio got turned exactly on its head. Guess which jobs will be the first to get reduced within half a decade of isolationism?
I.e., if you want to try isolationism, be my guest. But if you think that'll keep your inflated living standard, you might be in for a very nasty surprise.
In the unlikely case that you haven't figured the standard slashdotter codex by now, it goes somewhat like this:
/. whiner should never have to pay for anything. Yeah, verily, the pharmaceuticals corporations should just donate medicine for free to everyone.)
/. it's _fashionable_ to be a misfit.
- Any form of corporation is pure evil. (Unless they're currently fighting Microsoft or SCO, that is.)
- That goes double for corporations which actually invest in research, and need patents to protect their investment. (Here's a thought for all the anti-IP zealots: no company would invest hundreds of millions in researching a new drug, if after that everyone could legally brew the same thing in a bathtub and drive down costs to the point where you can't recoup the research costs.)
- Paying for anything is evil. (Whether it's patent license fees, music, movies, or medicine, the ISO-standard
- Governments are inherently evil (and sometimes controlled by every single conspiracy ever invented.)
- Any kind of hierarchy or authority is bad, for that matter. (Gee, life would be so much easier without these pesky bosses telling me what the client wants. I know the client would be happier if they got a flight sim, not a B2B web site.)
- Anything can be explained by a good conspiracy theory. (E.g., if some disease can't be cured yet, then every single medic, pharmacist and pharma company is part of a conspiracy to not invent a cure.)
Sad thing is, I don't even think that we simply have a population of mentally-deranged social-misfits. My theory is that, well, we basically have what another site called the SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim) syndrome. On
"If people could not patent obvious ideas that had already been implemented by other people they would be less of a problem. In this world though, the patent office would just give them all those patents, as the USPTO has, and give a horde of lawyers an excuse to sue you at any time. Even with specific compression algorithms they give the patent for the same algorithm to multiple people (e.g. Unisys and IBM for LZW) because they don't check them."
/. and EFF whining. Real world is a bit more relaxed. Precisely because everyone wants some of someone else's patents, there are a ton of cross-licensing deals. (Basically, I'll give you mine if you give me yours.)
Look, I'm not saying that the patents process is perfect. God knows there are tons of ludicrious patents, or yes, duplicate patents, and 99% of those don't even have anything to do with software.
But the solution IMHO is to fix it, not to throw it all away just because it's not 100% perfect. Cars aren't 100% perfect either, yet you probably still use one. Computers aren't anywhere _near_ perfect, but you still use them. Software, heck, honestly speaking after a day with WebSphere... it's mostly a fscking disaster, but people still use it.
Why? Because the benefits outweigh the problems.
Same with patents. There's a ton of research which wouldn't happen without patents. Go look up the costs to develop and test a new drug sometime. Without patents, the whole pharmaceuticals industry would probably be 50 years back in time.
"Being a coder I see the threat of being sued for bogus patents (on "ones and zeros", or using RAM to hold the contents of a video screen, or using the internet, etc.) as being worse that the hypothetical payoff for devising something worth patenting."
Here's a novel idea for you: so research and have some patents of your own. That's another neat side-effect of patents: everyone tries to have their own portfolio of nukes. Which means: more incentive to research.
You know what? I'll be damned if that doesn't sound _good_ to me.
And the much bemoaned "stopping progress" effects mostly only exist in
E.g., you probably like your new graphics card, whatever it may be. ATI, NVidia, Matrox, whatever. Well, whatever it may be, it contains technology licensed from the competition. DirectX texture compression is licensed from S3, for example.
You didn't see patents slowing those down, did you?
E.g., a lot of the technology in your CPU, motherboard, etc, whatever brand it may be, is licensed from someone else. If you have a TFT display, almost everything in those is patented too. Didn't seem to stop progress in those areas, did it?
Even with software, for example the price charged by Unisys for LZW was mostly symbolic. Definitely cheaper than trying to _invent_ your own compression algorithm. (Try it.) _And_ it had the neat side-effect that it stimulated people to research other formats: e.g., PNG.
You know, that might actually be a good thing.
...)
A. Too often I've been trapped behind fuckwits^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H non-technical persons blocking the only two clerks in a store with endless conversations that don't even make any sense. Especially during holiday shopping seasons, I swear they breed like rabbits.
E.g., I swear to god I'm not making this up, someone in front of me spent an hour debating with the clerk whether she wants her new computer without a power supply or without a CD-ROM drive. Apparently she had a hard limit on how much money she wanted to spend, and by jingo, she was going to get it at that cost even if she can't start it.
E.g., in the same day the other clerk was busy with a stupid conversation like this:
Customer, with a boxed ProductX: "Why do you charge so much for this? At the other shop I've seen this 50 Euros cheaper."
Clerk: "The same product?"
Customer: "No, it was ProductY from a whole other manufacturer, but it still does the same thing doesn't it?"
Clerk: "No, it doesn't. You can't do <insert list of stuff> with ProductY."
Customer: "Yeah, but it's cheaper."
Clerk: "Well, you know better what you need it for. If what ProductY does is enough for you, sure, buy ProductY instead."
Customer: "Yeah, but I want this one. Why can't I get it for the same price?"
Clerk: "Because it's a more expensive model."
Customer: "But it does the same thing."
Clerk: "Again, it doesn't."
Customer: "But I really want this one, but I can only pay as much as ProductY costs."
Clerk: "I'm sorry, then. If you can't afford ProductX, then yeah, you'll probably have to buy ProductY instead."
Customer: "But why can't I buy ProductX for the same money?"
(... at which point it continued in a loop, like a broken record for another hour
After one hour I got fed up and left the shop. Other people left earlier. Those two people basically cost the shop a bunch of money in lost revenue.
B. To be entirely fair, entirely too often the fuckwit is on the other side of the counter. It's the clerk. Either a really non-technical person, or a dishonest one just trying to make a sale.
On one occasion I was behind some old guy who explicitly only wanted a cheap computer to surf the web, send emails and write the occasional document in Word. He explicitly said that he never plays games, encode DVDs or whatever. The clerk talked him into buying an uber-gaming machine, with the most expensive CPU available, the most expensive 3D graphics card, enough RAM for a small corporate server, etc. ("Yeah, you really need a powerful video card if you want to do graphics stuff. E.g., open your kids' photos that they sent you per email.")
So, dunno, it seems to me that _if_ someone could make a machine that can _really_ replace a clerk, it would be a win-win. Let the people from point A talk to a machine for hours instead of jamming the whole shop and preventing any sales. And keep the rest of the customers safe from the kind of clerks from point B.
There are job ads for mathematicians in financial companies in the City of London. I guess they just don't publish the source code to their stock analysis programs on the internet.
Which is exactly the other point that patents were supposed to solve: encouraging people to _publish_ their research. The deal is "ok, you get 20 years monopoly on this idea, but after that _everyone_ gets to use it for free."
Whereas what happened in most programming outfits instead? _If_ anyone actually had a stroke of genius and invented something revolutionary (in spite of receiving exactly zero funding or time for that), it's buried 6 ft under in closed-source code, behind a wall of NDAs.
Any brilliant ideas that may have been coded in, say, 1984, would have been public domain by now, if they were patented. As it is, they're probably indented 6 ft under and covered with dirt, in some COBOL program that noone even understands any more. Or in some huge PDP-11 assembly program that noone can even read any more.
And even if the original author wanted to divulge the secret after all these years, or reimplement it somewhere else, chances are they'd get their pants sued off for NDA breach by the original company.
Which is another point why I'm looking forward to software patents. I wish people would give me a break with the stupid NDAs and non-compete clauses already. If it's that great an idea, go patent it, don't make me sign a stupidity that forbids me from even selling soap for two years after I quit the job.
(Yes, one non-compete and non-disclosure contract someone wanted me to sign, actually forbade me from ever competing not only with that company, but also with their partners, and their partners' partners, and everyone who every came in contact with those. Taken literally, I probably would have even been forbidden from blogging because that would be competing with some clients' client's news site or newspaper.)
And for what? Especially during the dot-com fraud noone actually had a new idea. Most had the same idiotic "ooh, we'll make a site with bright colours, lots of flash, and 1 MB rollover graphics per page, and no business plan" idea. And everyone thought they surely were the first one to ever think of that... even those who "had that idea" after reading about the inflated IPO of some company who already tried that business plan. And then went bust.
Yet they made you sign tome sized NDAs and non-compete contracts, to protect that preciousss idea. Gimme a break.
Let them go to the patent office instead. In 99% of the cases they'll just get told that someone patented that idea already, or just got overturned. (Plenty of prior art of flashy web sites that failed.) And if the remaining 1% are of any actual use, well, at least they'll be in the public domain after 20 years.
Darnok, I'm in Europe too, and let me tell you I'm looking forward to software patents.
You're probably working for some European software outfit or IT department, if you're worried about this, so let me ask you:
- How many people in your company are paid to _research_ new algoritms? How many of them are _mathematicians_. (And not maths guys who learned VB and are coding crappy web sites. Mathematicians hired as exactly that.)
Chances are: zero out of zero. Just like in every company I've worked for.
- How many usability experts does your company employ? When was the last time they actually did any _research_?
Let me tell you that only at the present job we even have a usability expert at all. That is, a programmer who's read a couple of usability books, and she's just regurgitating what she's read. Never actually did any research, probably because the boss would never pay for that.
- When was the last time your company actually had a research project? _Any_ research project. No, honestly. Did you guys _ever_ try discovering anything, as opposed to copy-and-pasting other people's work? (Even if from books, it's still copy-and-pasting someone else's algorithms and "patterns". No offense intended, that's what my job involves too.)
Let me tell you, here we _almost_ had one, but even that was conditioned on the German government's being willing to subsidize it. When they weren't, the boss simply nuked the project and dismantled the team.
Etc.
The funny thing is that you even say:
"In fact, granting ridiculous patents to US companies is quite a viable way of shoring up the US economy in the future; it must be nice to know that US companies can ensure a flow of patent licence cash into the US whenever they see fit to do so. Fixing the US patent system could ultimately cost US citizens a lot of money"
But you fail to see that you've just illustrated why lack of patents was a problem for Europe. Those guys in the US researched, while we just sat around and copied each other's code.
It's not that Europe doesn't have intelligent or capable people. I'm sure that per thousand people we have exactly as many smart people as the US does. (And viceversa.)
Europe has a lot of research and _patents_ for pharmaceuticals, cars, electronics, etc. But it has virtually no software research whatsoever. Did you ever wonder: why? Because without patents here the "smart" choice was to not bother paying for any software research.
That's the problem with lack of patents. The viability of any research becomes measured in "how much profit we can make out of this in 1 month, after which everyone else copies our idea?" Which usually means it's not worth even trying.
And the sooner this aberrant situation gets buried, the more cheerfully I'll dance on its grave.
As far as I know (or "the way I heard that legend") the problem QWERTY "solved" wasn't that of speed. It was one of physical proximity. If you haven't owned one of those old purely-mechanical typewriters, basically:
:)
1. The mechanism was basically based on thin metal levers, with a key at one end and a small metal hammer with an embossed letter on it at the other end. You pressed the key, the little hammer was pushed towards the paper. (You had to actually hit the keys pretty hard, too, especially when you wanted 2 carbon copies.)
2. Because it was a mechanical contraption, rather than wires, the whole mechanism was arranged in the only way that was easy to make and robust to operate: with as little overlap as possible. I.e., for keys that were physically near each other (e.g., A and Q, or A and S), the hammers would also be near each other.
3. Unfortunately, due to the very construction, the closer two hammers were, the easier it was to jam the typewriter if you pressed both at the same time. E.g., if you pressed Q and W at the same time, the machine would pretty much always jam, whereas pressing Q and P at the same time would almost never jam.
So the problem was basically not how fast you typed, but whether you pressed two adjacent keys at the same time. E.g., if you typed "assassin", and starting pressing the S before the A was released, or viceversa, you'd have a good probability to jam the thing.
I.e., again, QWERTY was not supposed to slow people down, per se, but rather simply to reduce the probability that two consecutively used hammers would be phyisically near each other. That was the problem: the hammers, not the keys, not the typist speed as such. However, due to the purely mechanical (and somewhat primitive) relationship between keys and hammers, the easiest way to solve that was to rearrange the keys too.
Think "side-effect", rather than "goal."
The "goal" for the key layout itself was actually the opposite: to convince that time's PHBs that the new layout _doesn't_ slow people down too much. Or at least less than stopping to unjam the typewriter did.
Hence the "QWERTYUIOP" row. The rigged tech demo involved was basically "look! I can type TYPEWRITER quickly! It must be an optimal layout!" So all the keys in that word had to be on the same row. Even at the expense of being less effective at preventing jams.
Just, you know, in case you thought idiotic technical decisions being taken by complete incompetents required computers. There you go. A business decision, which was sold based on a rigged and non-representative tech demo. And we're still stuck with it
And a fake Rolex is ground-breaking research... how? Did they invent a whole new kind of watch? Did they invent a groundbreaking new manufacturing process? Anything? _What_ brand new new research was spawned by that copying?
I.e., you, my friend, have no fscking clue what inventing stuff even means.
And are Rolex watches even patented? No, seriously. Even if there originally was any patent regarding those, it would have expired a long time ago. AFAIK those counterfeit watches were a _trademark_ infringement, _not_ a patent infringement.
Again, _patents_ expire in 20 years. _Trademarks_ never do, if properly defended.
I.e., as far as _patents_ are concerned, you could jolly well make an identical watch and sell it. As long as you don't also infringe on a _trademark_, go ahead. You won't see a lawyer nastygram for that.
Do you even know the difference between a patent and a trademark? No, seriously.
" Imagine if someone had patented conjunctions..."
I'll call bullshit on that fallacy too. Yeah, yeah, I keep hearing such heart-warming appeals to strong feelings as "but what if someone pattented sex?" Or "but what if someone patented making food, and you had to go to bed hungry?"
(Believe it or not, I didn't pull those out of the hat. They come almost verbatim from the homepage of someone whose programming work I still respect A LOT. His views on patents, well, let's just say I respect a whole lot less.)
The problem with that fallacy is two-fold:
1. Prior art. Noone could actually patent conjunctions, sex or food, because they bloody exist already. Or would get that patent overturned in a jiffy.
2. Patents expire. If someone actually invested enough time and research to invent a brand new grammatical structure, or a brand new way to have sex, or a brand new way of cooking food... and it's so useful and revolutionary that everyone wants to use it right now... what's the problem with letting patenting it?
It would mean that patents actually worked: they gave someone incentive to research something new. And in 20 years, which is a ridiculously short time on a history scale, we get it in the public domain.
Whereas without that, we probably wouldn't have got that thing researched at all.
I.e., between:
A. we get some new useful invention, but get to wait 20 years before it's public domain, and
B. we _might_ get it in 100 years or not at all, ever, because it wasn't economical for anyone to pay for that research...
which would you choose?
I'll choose A any time.
If your ideal world is more like B, may I suggest you go join the Amish or some other such fine group? Just pretend you're in an alternate universe where patents never existed, and not much new ever got invented.
AGAIN: the MS patent is strictly for a new way to control a PDA device. It is _not_ about mouse double-clicks or whatnot. So please spare me the inflamatory "Microsoft patented the double-click!" bullshit.
Here's an idea for all you "all software/interface patents are bad/obvious" or "waah! but they're threatening small companies" folks:
Maybe you actually work for one of those threatened small companies or OSS projects. How much _research_ does your company do? Chances are it's _zero_. Nada. Nil. Zilch.
How many mathematicians researching new algorithms does your company pay? No, I don't mean "mathematician turned to programming crappy web sites in PHP or VB.NET". I mean how many are paid to actually do _research_? Zero, huh?
You oppose interface patents, such as Microsoft's double-click? OK. How many usability experts do you have on your team? Heck, how many are on your company's payroll? For about 99% of companies: zero.
If you do have one, when was the last time he/she actually did any usability _research_? You know, get a group of grandmas and actually try various new kinds of interfaces on them. Never, huh? He/she just regurgitates other people's results from books, huh?
So what do we have here? An entire industry which spends _maybe_ 1% of its funds on research, but mostly goes about just copy-and-pasting other people's work. Even if from a book, but still straight copy-and-pasting.
And you still don't see the kind of problem that lack of software patents has created? Geesh.
Compare it to the chemical industry, another heavy-on-the-IP industry, and see how much do those research. A helluva lot more. You know why? Patents. Because they're allowed to actually have 20 years benefit from that research.
Without patents they too would probably be at a point where everyone brews penicilin and aspirin cheap, but not much else. Because noone researched much more than that, for lack of any financial incentive to research.
And the benefit for society as a whole would be? Even with patents everyone can still make aspirin cheap. Because patents expire in 20 years. And we can make a lot of other stuff cheap, because those patents expired too. On the whole we're actually ahead, because those patents encouraged research.
And, you know what? I'd very much like to see that happening to software too. Back to the MS patent, at least MS actually did some research concerning PDA interfaces, which is a helluva lot more than other people did.
Here's another idea for you: using the shell is the _program's_ responsibility. Passing unchecked parameters from untrusted sources to the shell, is the _program's_ security failure. Not the OS's.
It doesn't even have to do with Windows. The exact same issue existed on the server side, back in the days of web-sites with CGI programs in Perl. Not with a Windows shell, but with a Unix command-line shell.
Every single incompetent's first reaction was to just execute another program, with some unchecked parameters off a form on the command line. E.g., launch a command-line mailer to send the registration confirmation. Just concatenate together a command line out of those parameters, then give it to the shell. (Launching other small utilities is the Unix way, after all. Right?)
Guess what happened? People started noticing that you can do funny stuff to those web pages. E.g., include symbols like ">" or "<" in the input fields, and make it mail the list of names and passwords to you. (Yes, nowadays it's shaddowed. Mostly because of that exploit.) And/or turn it into a command line with more than one command.
It's not even limitted to shells. The exact same exploit is still coded by incompetent monkeys every day, in dealing with an SQL database. Every burger-flipper-hired-as-a-developper just has to write something like the following. (It's usin Oracle, btw, hence the quirk about using '%' as a wildcard.)
sqlCommand = "SELECT * FROM PRIVATE_DATA WHERE OWNER=" + userID + " AND SEARCH_FIELD LIKE '%" + userInputData + "%'"
And they display those records on the web page.
They check the userID all right. (Actually some idiots don't even check that.) But they don't check the userInputData, which comes straight from an input field on the web page.
Then someone types "' OR '%'='" in the input field, without the quotes. Let's say their userID is 666. That select just became:
SELECT * FROM PRIVATE_DATA WHERE OWNER=666 AND SEARCH_FIELD LIKE '%' OR '%'='%'
Oops. It's an OR TRUE, and it selects every single record in that table. Regardless of owner. Congrats, it's an exploit. An attacker can see everyone else's private data.
It's not Oracle's bug. It's a bug of the application which didn't bother checking or quoting that untrusted data.
That's it. You simply pass untrusted and unchecked parameters to _any_ shell, you have a vulnerability. And it's _yours_. It's not the OS's, it's not the shell's. It's yours.
Ah yes, yet another case of "if my program is crap, then it's _your_ problem. You should drop whatever you're doing and spend your free time debugging my code." Are you naturally this stupid, or do you have to work hard at it?
I don't know whatever gave you the idea that millions of people have nothing better to do than:
1. Learn programming,
2. Learn security,
3. Examine every single bloody line of source code in every program on their computer,
4. Roll their very own patched version of everything,
5. Work on merging their very own patches into every single new version. Then repeat from point 3 anyway.
You're proposing... what? That _everyone_ starts donating half their free time just to save you the bother of debugging your crap? That society as a whole starts spending billions of hours per year just in personalized patches for your bugs? Geesh. The mind boggles.
Let me give you a better idea: OSS is not an excuse to write crappy code. Crap code is crap code, regardless of whether it's OSS or not. Insecure code is insecure code. That's it.
Regardless of what the heck of a license it's under, a program is supposed to solve someone's problem. To _save_ them time, not to waste their time forcing everyone to review your code, patch it, and host their own fork that actually works.
My time is too valuable for that crap.
Generally speaking, you're right that the customer isn't always right. But you also have to realize that there's a _huge_ difference between designing a custom solution for someone, and retail or even mass-manufacturing.
In your case, your job _is_ to inform the client what can be done, what cannot, and what could be done much cheaper and/or more reliable in another way. An ideal design process is made by _both_ you and the customer, since each side only knows half the story. You know the technical issues far better, of course, but the client knows his/her business processes far better. So, yes, the two sides need to communicate.
Including, yes, sometimes concluding that it just can't be done. Either it's not technically feasible, or not worth it, or whatever.
(Well, at least in an ideal world. In practice some PHBs will get pissed off if you don't just try to shaft the client as hard as you can. "Ooh, but no matter if it's just a small message board for 10 emplyees to toss ideas around. You _need_ all this huge architecture based on EJB, XML, XSLT, SOAP, distributed computing over a cluster of 10 Sun mainframes, assynchronous messaging protocols, and a dozen other fashionable buzzwords. It'll only cost 20 man-years to implement, and we'll give you the option to hire 2 full-time consultants to keep it working, at $1000 per hour.")
Retail is a bit of a different story. Noone's going to design a custom graphics card for you, no matter who you are. The only question is whether they sell it or not, and later whether you're allowed to return it or not.
And those are more matters of shop policy and, where applicable, consumer rights laws. The question isn't how to solve some custom problem of yours, but whether the shop can afford to deal with a couple million people wanting the same thing. (E.g., to cash in the rebate and return the item for the full price.)
E.g., the policy whether to never take back opened software has nothing to do with whether it solves your problem or not, but with whether the shop wants to deal with the millions of 13 year olds who'll install the game, apply a copy-protection crack, and then return it.
E.g., mail-in rebates have mostly to do with the idea that people come buy because of those, and then forget to mail them on time. If data mining can show that it does more harm to the shop's bottom line than good, then the economic decision will be to drop them.
E.g., currently in retail every marketer just "knows" that if you lower the price on one item, you get people physically in the shop, and they'll buy some other (overpriced) stuff too. So you actually make more money. It's just common sense. (Mind you, in the same way as back in Aristotle's time it was common sense that a brick 10 times heavier falls 10 times faster. Or that the Sun revolves around the Earth.) However if enough data mining can show that you lose more than you make with those -- e.g., because most people only buy those discounted items -- it will be dropped.
Again, note how nowhere in those examples did the customer's needs play any role at all. Noone goes out of their way to solve someone's custom problem as such, they just look at the big picture and its effects on the bottom line.
See, that's THE way to start towards making a site noone wants to use. Thinking about it as "art".
From my experience the ones thinking like that are graphics artists (a noble profession otherwise) which some PHB promoted directly to web designers. Not saying they couldn't learn to be proper web designers, I'm just saying: it's a different job. You have to _learn_ to do it.
So they think they're making art. They produce pages with:
- a megabyte of funky graphics. Bonus points if it's Flash. Or flashing.
- tiny fonts,
- piss-poor organization (it's apparently artistic to group content by any other criterion than what belongs together),
- piss-poor ideas taken from another medium, and inapplicable to reading stuff on a screen. (E.g., 2 or 3 columns are nice and fine in a newspaper, but in a PDF they just make me pointlessly scroll up and down. Artistic as it may look, it's a pain to use.)
- some utterly retarded navigation, which leaves the customer up a learning curve just to find the page they want (but hey, it's artistic.) Bonus points if it involves some mandatory use of JavaScript, not to simplify things (e.g., auto-totals on a form), but to force the user to do weird and unnatural perversions he didn't want. (E.g., mandatory gesture based navigation implemented in JavaScript.)
- colors that are a _pain_ to read (cyan on neon blue, and orange on orange-ish yellow are actual color schemes I've been force to implement. You guessed, by graphics artists.)
Etc, etc, etc.
E.g., one actual idea that came from a graphics artist, and which we fought: he wanted the site squeezed in a non-resizeable 600x400 pixel window, without toolbars (i.e., also without a back button.) With wall to wall graphics. That was his artistic vision of a unique user experience.
He's also the guy who wanted the orange on light orange colours, btw. He also wanted a navigation scheme that involved a weird (if artistic) matrix that noone understood how to use. That idea fell after a multi-hour meeting with the investors, where he presented his unique vision. They couldn't understand how the heck that would work either. (And bear in mind that dot-com investors usually loved weirdness and promises of "unique user experiences.")
The other guys at the office called him "The Antichrist."
And especially during the dot-com fraud, the more clueless the PHB, the more he/she loved such ideas. Sites were created to be "unique user experiences". Except the more unique the site, the less users wanted to use it. Weird, no?
Basically you have to understand what the users want. They're not there to admire art, they're mostly there basically for the equivalent of reading a newspaper. (Except even there bear in mind that reading on a screen works best with other paragraph sizes than in a newspaper.)
They'll also tend to see the web as a whole, so to speak. Even though (or if) they understand concepts like "site", they actually like navigating seamlessly between them. They don't want to learn new skills that only apply to your site. They don't want to work hard to find the links. (Yay for links that only underline on mouse hover. Not.) Etc.
And the sooner you can wrap your mind around the idea that you're making a site for your users, and not for art, the better.
Basically it's exactly the other way around than you seem to think: all these studies are not some elitist promoting some pure art that noone wants to read, they're actually the exact opposite: studies on what actual people want to read. And it turns out that it's exactly the opposite of what many artists in ivory towers thought.
"First, consider the phone system. Until Ma Bell was broken up and local phone companies were encouraged to innovate to survive, and third-party manufacturers were allowed to make phone gizmos that could be freely connected to the POTS network, progress in that field was glacial. Caller ID, 3-way calling, cheap wireless phones, fax machines in a computer printer (hell, even just having MORE than one phone on your line)... Consider the point made."
The point about patents is made... how? Far as I know the monopoly in question had _nothing_ to do with patents, but merely with who owns the infrastructure. So you point is?
"NOW look at software. Compare the rate of progress of open systems (Linux, the Unices, Apache, Mozilla) with that of closed systems (Windows, IE, any number of others). The rate of improvement AND innovation in open efforts far exceeds closed efforts."
Actually, I see very little invention in that field. I just see a ton of Open Source people _copying_ what's been invented by someone else. Maybe doing a better implementation of it, but copying someone else's idea nevertheless. Hence the constant bullshit from the OSS camp about how software patents are some utter disaster.
Almost all I see touted as some smashing advantage of Mozilla and other OSS projects, comes from someone paid to come up with that idea in a closed source project.
E.g., gestures? That wasn't invented by either Opera or Mozilla. Both jumped on board after the (awful) game Black and White hyped it to hell and back. Which in turn got it from PDAs.
E.g., the window-in-a-window interface of Opera or Mozilla? Stolen verbatim from Microsoft, who introduced it waaay back in its Windows API and own programs.
Apache? Now you make me curious. What is the groundbreaking innovation there? Quality, yes, but innovation? Am I missing something? It's a plain old HTTP server which alows plugins. No more, no less. And the idea to run stuff as dynamically loaded modules, instead of spawning a CGI process, now that was implemented in closed source servers (e.g., Netscape's) long before it.
You mean maybe stuff like PHP? Now THAT started as a shameless rip-off of Microsoft's ASP. Believe it or not, that was the first attempt to put executable code in the HTML template. (Some of us still call it an anti-pattern, but hey... might as well give Microsoft the credit it deserves for popularizing bad habits.)
MySQL? An implementation of the relational database architecture, and the language to use it, both researched and developped by someone else. (Unsurprisingly, since again it's an example of stuff that's heavy on the maths, and not something which a regular coder can just suddenly come up with.)
Etc, etc, etc.
And I also notice that whenever it comes to these patents, I see lots of bogus "well, duh, that was obvious", but usually noone actually offering examples of prior art. If it was that obvious, and OSS invents everything long before the evil corporations... you should have plenty of prior art, no?
But again, rather than arguing until we're both blue in the face, why not just do what I've said? Prove it. And I don't mean "prove it" in the "I want more posts", but "prove it" as in: then go patent all that new stuff you OSS folks are discovering, and donate the patents to the public domain. That ought to keep the corporations off for good, no?
You basically say that OSS creates most of the inventions, while the corporations just sit on their collective butt. Good. Well, then you shouldn't have any problem getting the patents before them, right? Or at least the prior art? What's the problem, then?
Disclosure: I do _not_ own an iPod, and I'm _not_ an Apple fan.
Yet I think the iPod probably won on its own merits, not just marketting.
At one point, I actually went looking for an MP3 player. Let me tell you, the impression I was left with was that all the iPod competitors sucked. They sucked like an industrial vacuum cleaner. They sucked like an expensive hooker. That kind of suckage.
The hard drive based ones were larger than a brick. Most still are. (*Cough* Archos.) Looks like everyone just put the cheapest desktop HDD in there, and presumably half a car battery. The think which you'd need custom made pants if you wanted to put them in a pocket, and presumably a new set of suspenders too.
But were they at least cheaper, to justify carrying a huge brick around? Well, no. About half were only marginally cheaper. Definitely not the kind of price difference to justify carrying a brick around. The rest were actually _more_ expensive than the iPod. Sad but true.
Now I can understand going for a niche. Stuff like "we'll offer an inferior product, but far cheaper. For people who can't afford the original." Nothing wrong with that. Both AMD and Intel went for that market too. (The Celeron for example.)
But this was not the case. It was a big heavy brick and no price incentive to buy that one instead of an iPod. What the heck did their PHBs and marketroids think?
The other option were Flash based MP3 players/memory sticks. Except for a long time that meant 64 MB or 128 MB. The problem is: depending on the songs, 64 MB might even hold only 3 of my MP3 files. Or a maximum of 6. Hardly an improvement over the portable CD player I already had.
The iPod fit a nice convenience niche. It had as much capacity as the huge bricks everyone else was selling, but in a much more compact size. While larger than a memory stick player, it could still fit in a pocket just as well.
Then there were other convenience factors, like the fact that they have a display which can actually show a damn playlist. Others, like Creative, _still_ seem to think that a super-tiny two line by 16 characters (or so) display counts as all the screen space one would ever need.
In the end, I ended up sticking to a CD based player. (Hey, at least that one _is_ cheaper.) I also ended up with the idea that _if_ I were to buy a smaller player, and iPod would be it. Not because of Apple's hype, but because Apple's competition is only now starting to wake up and get its head out of its ass.
Here's a wild idea for you: a CS college, like any college, is supposed to prepare you to do actual useful work in the real world.
There are a bunch of things you'll discover when you get out of college. Not of all nice. Actually few of them nice. There's a reason why it's the job where, in spite of the good money and all, satisfaction is lower than among plumbers and shoe sales clerks.
Believe it or not, being a programmer isn't about having fun with the platform or tools of your choice. When you go out in the real world, you're going to have to make the programs that the client wants. On the platform of _their_ choice, and often even having the language, tools and frameworks thrust upon you by some management decision. In 9 cases out of 10 the wrong tools and frameworks.
You're also likely going to have to learn to function in a team. Aside from other considerations, that means being able to live with the architecture, OS, tools and frameworks that someone else in the team chose.
(You're also going to have to live with such specs as "All text must be in 7 pixel fonts, in dark cyan on neon blue". Or light orange on orange-ish yellow. No, honestly, I've actually had to make programs for those exact two corporate colour schemes.)
I.e., some day you'll be glad you have those Windows labs on your CV. It might just be what your customer wants you to write software for.
Horrible as you may find it. Personally I don't. But it still beats being unemployed.
That said, of course, I would question any CS college which has _only_ Windows on the menu. Wouldn't hurt at all to give you at least some minimal idea about other stuff too.
Just because somebody invented something, does not mean that he has supreme right over that thing. Do you think humanity will be where it is now with software patents ?
I'll paraphrase the same question right back at you: do you think medicine would be where it is today, if anyone was free to brew in a bathtub the formula you've spent half a billion to perfect? Why the heck would anyone invest in pharmaceutical research at all, if that was the case?
Yes, you could argue until you're blue in the face about how that would be good. You could buy cheaper medicine, for example. But then noone would invest in producing _new_ medicine. Good luck if your disease doesn't go away with just penicilin and/or aspirin, because in your ideal world noone invented anything newer than that. You're gonna die, but hey, surely that's a small price to pay to keep those greedy corporations from patenting obvious chemical formulas.
You see, the point of patents is to stimulate research. Yes, you pay for it by having a 20 year interval in which someone gets to collect royalties for their investment. But the benefit in the long run is that you actually get research.
Well, see, same thing with software. Do I think we'd be better off, if anyone started patenting software algorithms since 1950? Damn right. We'd have had more people actually paying from research, instead of just hordes of people copy-and-pasting the same code over and over again. (Algorithms copied from a book via memory, for all practical purposes I'll consider to be copied-and-pasted.)
Except what almost every programmer comes up with, involves using the standard PRNG in their C/Java/Pascal/BASIC/whatever's standard library. Which usually gives you a whole of 32 bit key. (The PRNG "seed".) Maybe 64 bit. No matter how you combine that random stream with the input stream, even the most primitive brute force attack can finish going through 2 billion combinations in mere seconds on today's computers.
But that was just one example.
Other "secure cryptographic algorithms" I've seen people come up with, involved something even simpler, like just XORing a password (repeated ad infinitum to get an endless stream) to the input stream. Now that, by itself, is bad enough, but... some even did this over a fixed file header (bonus points if said header is padded with zeroes.) Just so you wouldn't even have to do any work at all to retrieve that password.
In truly silly cases, you might not even have a password, but some 4 digit PIN as protection. (Believe it or not, I've actually tried a diary program where the password protection was a 4 digit PIN.) Whoppee. A whole 10,000 combinations to try. Surely noone will crack that. Ever.
A truly pathetic case didn't even actually encrypth the file, but just appended the mangled password to the front, and checked it in their program to see if they should allow you to open the file in it. Surely noone will get through _that_ protection. Except if you were willing to use a hex viewer instead of their program, that is.
That's just a small sample of what people actually produce when they get into the mind that "bah, cryptography is trivial and obvious."
And I'm not even talking about some lone coder hacking some quick protection into a freeware utility, in his free time. Stuff like that actually appeared in commercial programs or expensive custom solutions.
Since we're here among Microsoft haters, the "password protection" they had in older Office documents could be cracked in milliseconds. One company selling utilities to recover your password after you forgot it, actually went on record saying that they had to build a delay into their program so it would at least look like it's working hard at it.