MSIE has been doing this for ages, and I never found it to be a problem, but rather more helpful than the old "404 Not found" messages we used to see.
So Verisign have found a portable way to slice Microsoft's little niche away, and gain some advertising. So what? You type junk into an URL and you expect a civilized answer?
Actually typing URLs is an anachronism in the linked reality of the web. C'mon, my home page is our local wiki, and all the sites I access frequently are bookmarked as little icons.
What, again, is the problem here, apart from the fact that Verisign is a hateable entity who seem destined to simply annoy everyone they deal with.
Let's try scaling this technology up the curve a little:
- 10-bit color (4096 colors) will become 16-bit and then 24-bit. - 5mm pixels will become 1mm and then 1/10thmm - the borders between the pages appear 1 pixel wide, and will thus vanish - cost of $8,000 will drop to $2,500, then $500.
It's a surprise that SCO's attack on Linux is funded my Microsoft? I've been boring myself saying this for at least 3 months. Damn, if I could find those old comments.
The scene: Microsoft is at war with Linux specifically, OSS generally, IBM implicitly, and the entire forward-looking IT community fundamenally.
The problem: no-one believes a word that Microsoft says, anymore. The phrase "convicted monopolist" just rings too true. OK, thinks Mr CIO, we'll buy their products, because we have no choice, but they are a bunch of liars, and the sooner we can switch to something cheaper and safer, the better for all of us.
The solution: launch a jihad through a shadow company. What better than Caldera, a failing Linux broker, who just happened to buy some Unix IP and is run by lawyers...
The plan: Caldera renames itself to SCO to give itself some more street cred, then launches a one-two attack, first on IBM to give it that "David vs. Goliath" street cred. Hey, maybe someone thinks the world still hates IBM. (Guys, that is so 1980's!) Next, bounce off that attack into a full-frontal assault on Linux, using the tried and proven OJ defense. "Yes, gentlemen and ladies, if Linus is from Sweden, then all your source must belong to us!!"
The press: it's a slow summer, and all this news is welcome. Hey, so are the little presents from those generous guys at SCO. Darl, we liked the trip to Malibu, yes sir!
Microsoft: discrete distance. If SCO explode, they don't want to be contaminated.
Darl's game: the hike in share value was an unexpected bonus, but hey, it's welcome. The real payoff is the parachute that Microsoft have prepared, a buy-out of SCO once/if they can win enough control over Linux. Imagine the scoop: Redmond buys Linux, a full fist up the backside for all those open source hackers. Wet dreams for the Redmond Boys, who have perhaps strayed into one goatse.cs too many.
The OSS Community: "they can't be that stupid, surely?" Answer: no, they can't. So go figure their evil plan.
Remember: this is happening in the USA, the country which has little stickers on hifi equipment saying "warning: not for internal consumption", the land of absolute truths, where a 12 year-old can be a cybercriminal, where laws are treated not as approximations but as holy documents. If, when, SCO win legal control over Linux, however bizarre the means and flimsy the justification, it will be an absolute win for Microsoft.
My surprise is that the Microsoft sponsorship actually came to light so soon. I'd have thought they would find some way to hide it more discretely. As for Sun, all I can say is someone got them right proper. Silly eejits, did you really have to bend to Darl's salestalk? You've truly gone and made a huge mistake there, it is the death of your business.
The health of the nation does not depend on immigration.
I believe it does, directly because migrants mean more young workers, more tax payers and indirectly because migrants tend to be more ambitious, creative, and innovative than established citizens.
Immigration is a result of a good place to live, not a cause.
Indeed, a country that succeeds economically may not be a nice place to live. But my thesis is that the two may coincide more and more, as migrants make concious choices based on the quality of life in the available countries.
N.B. Immigrants are different from refugees.
Few refugees actually ever return, and many refugees create de-facto migration routes for true economic migrants, since many countries allow immigration for family reunions. In Europe, for instance, true economic immigration is rarely possible, but the status of political refugees is achiveable for people with a certain ability (think: complex procedures, time and money). The result is the same.
The most obvious case where refugees are not happy migrants is in case of wars and cross-border refugees. But even such refugees often become de-facto migrants, and often become important to their host nation, if allowed to integrate and not kept in isolated camps.
This made me think of an interesting aspect of globalization and migration.
Governments are starting to realize that the future health of their nations depend on encouraging immigration (in the case of coountries with ageing populations) and discouraging emmigration (in the case of countries losing their citizens).
A large part of the USA's economic and political strength comes from its attractiveness to migrants, especially skilled migrants. Compare the USA's Green Card programme with the immigration programmes offered by EU countries...
Now, Canada is to many migrants as attractive as the US, just slightly colder, maybe. It certainly has a reputation as being more hospitable for political refugees than most EU countries.
P2P is just one of many civil liberties, but if one takes the value of migration to a logical extreme, won't we see future governments actively competing for skilled migrants, offering better legal systems, more civil liberties, easier integration, etc. etc.
It's an optimistic viewpoint, but perhaps globalization will bring competition into governance in a way never seen before. Living in a country is, after all, a vote and an investment.
Just to be sure on this... if one of my own employees steals code and gives it to a client, it's not the clients' fault if he uses it, right?
Surely this is not a relevant discussion. As the first poster said, of course insider leaks are a big part of the (illicit) distribution process. That was also the case before P2P, for counterfeit rings.
The question is surely a commercial one: can the studios survive free exchange of their wares, and if so, how will they manage and profit from it, and if not, how will movies be made in the future. Cause one way or another, free media is the way it's going to be, legal or illegal.
Personally I like going to the movies, and I like high-quality DVDs, and I find P2P useful only for stuff that I simply can't buy, like Episodes of BTVS (sorry!) that are not yet on DVD. But as soon as they are, I go out and buy them.
The smart people will learn how to use P2P to their own advantage. I predict future hits along the lines of Blair Witch, low budget, unexpected, distributed exclusively by P2P before it hits the big screen...
True, 533Mhz should be enough, but somehow it's not, in the Crusoe version. Seriously: OOo just crawls so painfully it's unbearable, Mozilla takes 40 seconds to load (20 for the stripped-down Netscape 4.7), it's like working in treacle.
I have a Transmeta 533 in the form of a Sonic Blue frontpath surfpad.
It is a wonderful toy, but too slow for human consumption, modern software just craaawls, and it only works as a surfpad via a thin and tuned Netscape 4.7. OOo is painfully slow. MP3 playback worked OK.
The only use I can see for this kind of device, and I admit that it'd be enough for me, is for remote ssh administration of my servers with some music rocking in the headset.
ssh runs just dandy on a 533 Mhz Crusoe. Anything with pretty pictures does _not_.
Civilian airplanes are built by the same people who build military planes, and they use the same shielded wiring systems, able to sustain the knocks of high-altitude cosmic radiation.
Even fly-by-wire Airbuses are highly unlikely to be knocked out by anything a hand-held device can generate.
The real reason why cellphones are banned in flight is to save ground networks from being spammed by phones zipping from cell to cell a hundred times faster than ever foreseen. Not to protect the plane from disaster.
I don't believe the P2P companies are asking for compulsory licensing because they believe it is a good thing. I think they want it because then they can claim "we are seeking a legal alternative", knowing full well that although some kind of legalized P2P sharing is inevitable, it will take 5-10 years and the emergence of new media groups for it to happen, not some court ruling that "Hey, it's OK to download those trax now, d00ds!"
However, I agree with the other half of the article, which basically says "Google is God", something that has been obvious for several years. For many people, Google is the Internet, something AOL and MSN never managed to do with their fluff-filled "portals". Whatever new things come along, Google will be there, doing them better, leaner, faster,...
But it will be several dotcom lifetimes before Google will be the place to go to download no-longer-pirate tracks and movies. I don't think the P2P companies really have such a long horizon.
Dang, I must recheck my systems. No wonder I've been starved of Suzeware recently.
But seriously, your point is well taken. However, newsnet only serves porn to a select market, namely geeks, while there is a huge population of one-handed surfers out there who would not know a uuencoded jpeg if it hit them on the ass.
Also, I have seen several adult pass systems that sell in nightshops, and this is entirely, totally anonymous. Buy a token in a shop, use it to micropurchase. And AFAICS it's only for porn.
As usual, if you want a good preview of technological directions, the adult entertainment market is a great place to start.
My cousin gave me a recipe for making this from domestic materials... Salt has lots of sodium, and most brands of the toilet cleaner contain borate. Let me see... if I just mix a little of that with some garden fertiliser, then shake the whol >BOOOM
After smoking, drinking, driving, pollution, domestic violence, disease, war, invasion, drought, famine, and falling tree trunks.
Some relativity is perhaps in order. The most extreme effects of the GSM that I've seen are (a) a lowering of concentration while driving, which has surely caused many deaths by now, and (b) the total destruction of the planned social agenda. People simply live ad-hoc these days.
One only has to look at the Internet adult entertainment industry to see that micropayments are already a working solution.
People will pay for content if it's something they actually want. Micropayments using a prepaid scheme are much more attractive than conventional credit-card systems because they are (a) anonymous, (b) transferrable, and (c) cheap.
I think the discussion in the article is entirely skewed because the author looks only at conventional content, and even a cursory look at the Internet demonstrates that supply far outweighs demand: there is an almost inexhaustible supply of prose, music, humour, and news. Why would you register for such content, let alone pay for it?
Basic economics: make something people want, and can't get elsewhere, and they will come and pay for it.
Blaming the payments scheme for weak products that no-one wants is surely a mistake.
The article is spot-on, for specific kinds of content, but I think its conclusions are wrong.
Clearly no-one will pay even a dime for content that they can get elsewhere for free. It's true that the size of the payment is less important than its simple presence.
But there are other things we happily pay for, and micropayments are a basic necessity if we want to get those things digitised and available on-line.
In Belgium, where I am, people are using premium SMS messages for micropayments. It's incredibly inefficient: a Euro1.00 message returns at most 60% to the website owner. Yet this is becoming a more and more popular way of charging for access to dating sites and other web sites people are happy, eager even, to pay for.
Micropayments to reserve parking spaces, to place small ads, to search for appartments, to post a CV to a job site, to chat with remote friends, to get news on what's happening downtown, to vote for pop starts, to play games, to access porn,... the horizons are vast and limited today only by the complexity of linking the consumer's wallet and the vendor's account.
What's missing in the micropayment world are two things, AFAICS. One is government support to mandate norms and standards backed up with legislation and consumer/supplier protection. Two is support from the banking industry in the form of accessible implementations available to small vendors.
It's simply not as polished a product. In many ways it is far more polished. You may get used to an overburdened UI, but it's a tenet of design that the best UI features are the ones you don't see and don't have to work through. OOo wins this game hands-down, with a slim and yet totally complete UI. MSOffice simply adds on layer upon layer of grunk, without fixing basic issues like outline numbering which (after about 10 years of updates) still have the same bugs in.
I've used MSOffice since MSWord 5.0 in DOS, and when I switched to OOo a year or two ago, all I could feel was gentle relief as things started to work as I expected, and documents behaved "normally".
Since then, OOo is simply getting better each time. With the "Export to PDF" function, I create beautiful PDFs (and everything that we send to clients and suppliers is via PDF) with one button, and avoid yet one more nasty layer of Acrobat software (which I happily and gratefully uninstalled).
To say that OOo is, like many OSS products, unpolished and unrefined is simply false. OSS is in general significantly more polished than commercial software in ways that matter, and significantly less burdened by checklist features that no-one uses.
This is so obvious that I wonder how you can even repeat the troll.
This is the only remaining option if we are to retain some kind of sanity.
The IDP, a total voluntary boycotting of all and any news surrounding SCO, implemented in as many online journals and newssites as possible, extended to newsgroups, emails, and any other source of discussion.
SCO were kinda amusing when there was no other news this summer, but like a playground bully, they are feeding off all the attention they get, and so I vote for the IDP.
For a start, I'd be mighty grateful if there was a SCO topic for/. so that I could exclude these stories for a start. If I wanted to watch insane pseudolegalistic gibberish I'd live in the States and watch TV.
Gimme an I, gimme a D, gimme a P, whatcha got? Internet Death Penalty, peace and quiet. Yeah...
Big difference: the WinXP features are glued onto a model that I already find useless. In some respects it makes sense to "clean up" an over-complex hierarchical organization, but my idea is to avoid it entirely.
The GUI I'm thinking of is actually very simple. OK, I'm going to continue this in my journal.
If I had a free week and some skill with any graphics library, I'd hack it together.
Imagine your desktop, piled with lots of random documents. Each document is a URL referring to a resource somewhere on the net, most of them local to you, some on your LAN, others on the Internet.
When you create a new resource, the cluttertop simply throws a new icon somewhere on top of a pile. You can move it around as you like, especially in 3D space (closer, further from you).
When you look at the space closest to you, you see concentric piles of the stuff you need to use the most.
Let's see:
- pile of stuff for my customers
- pile of interesting web sites,/. near the top
- pile that is all my 'interesting' incoming email, filtered by my personal agents
- pile that holds all the digital photos I promised my wife I'd check through and get printed
- etc.
I guess something like three or four piles up front, with dozens of older ones receding into the infinite background space.
Perhaps I can switch desktops occasionally. I might start a desktop per project, cool. Like a cat, I like to make a mess in one place for a whole, then find a new, clean one to start over again.
This is the way my creative process works: the formal filing that hierarchical systems impose is no good at all, I need to throw down my junk and let time and energy filter the good stuff out.
Ah, I'm going to have to sponsor a starving developer somewhere... It may mean selling one of my Porsches, but hey, the era of dot-com excesses is over anyhow, they tell me.
I have this secret design (oops, posted it to Slashdot, now it can't be patented anymore) for a new workspace design, which depends on a 3D display.
Basically you throw down objects you're working on, into concentric piles. The most important stuff stays 'hot', near you, while stuff you use less often gets gradually pushed further and further back.
To open a document or web site you just click it, and it becomes 'hot' again. There's a little text box I can type keywords in, to find matching documents.
That's about it. Replaces the hierarchical file system with something much closer to the way I work (and AFAIK, many creative people work).
A computer, bio or not, is a system that takes input, performs specific and predictable calculation, and produces output.
An artist, DJ or otherwise, is a person who through talent and skill creates deliberate and specific sensory effects that stimulate the audience in interesting ways.
What we have here is neither art not science, and the article sounds like something from April 1st. Allow me to translate the text again: A bus driver and part-time juggler in Milton Keynes whose research is in the area of communication through flaming torches, serendipitously created an 'golden pussycat' when he spilled beer on his shirt and left it over night. The resulting fungus that formed distorted the shape of the shirt in interesting and meaningful ways. Here's some of his research, and some t-shirt samples which include opinions of psychotics of the distorted garments."
"Interesting and meaningful" to whom exactly?
Especially Americans who whorked for SCO
on
No Americans Need Apply
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Seriously: typical wage for Indian IT graduate: $200/month. Equivalent for US graduate: 10--20 times more.
It is almost redundant to say that Indian firms won't be hiring many Americans.
Curiously, my little firm is now subcontracting for Indian firms, so perhaps the rules can be bent a little for genius Belgians. C'est genial!
Hey, my company has new hiring policies which I'll gladly debate on/., the publicity will be cool:
- no-ex SCO employees (POSIX hiring standard)
- no-ex Microsoft employees (non-SCO compatible)
- no-one with a Slashdot karma less than "Excellent"
- no-one who has a personal website (so tacky)
This could start a new fashion in transparent discrimination!
Seriously: the whole idea that you can hire or select people based on such criteria is nonsense and bullshit, but excellent marketing from Damage Studios, who until today were an unknown company working on an unknown game. Today, they have gracefully leapt onto the SCO bandwaggon, and gotten a Slashdot headline. EXCELLENT MARKETING!!
Slashdot Mirror
MSIE has been doing this for ages, and I never found it to be a problem, but rather more helpful than the old "404 Not found" messages we used to see.
So Verisign have found a portable way to slice Microsoft's little niche away, and gain some advertising. So what? You type junk into an URL and you expect a civilized answer?
Actually typing URLs is an anachronism in the linked reality of the web. C'mon, my home page is our local wiki, and all the sites I access frequently are bookmarked as little icons.
What, again, is the problem here, apart from the fact that Verisign is a hateable entity who seem destined to simply annoy everyone they deal with.
Let's try scaling this technology up the curve a little:
- 10-bit color (4096 colors) will become 16-bit and then 24-bit.
- 5mm pixels will become 1mm and then 1/10thmm
- the borders between the pages appear 1 pixel wide, and will thus vanish
- cost of $8,000 will drop to $2,500, then $500.
Yes, looks good!
It's a surprise that SCO's attack on Linux is funded my Microsoft? I've been boring myself saying this for at least 3 months. Damn, if I could find those old comments.
The scene: Microsoft is at war with Linux specifically, OSS generally, IBM implicitly, and the entire forward-looking IT community fundamenally.
The problem: no-one believes a word that Microsoft says, anymore. The phrase "convicted monopolist" just rings too true. OK, thinks Mr CIO, we'll buy their products, because we have no choice, but they are a bunch of liars, and the sooner we can switch to something cheaper and safer, the better for all of us.
The solution: launch a jihad through a shadow company. What better than Caldera, a failing Linux broker, who just happened to buy some Unix IP and is run by lawyers...
The plan: Caldera renames itself to SCO to give itself some more street cred, then launches a one-two attack, first on IBM to give it that "David vs. Goliath" street cred. Hey, maybe someone thinks the world still hates IBM. (Guys, that is so 1980's!) Next, bounce off that attack into a full-frontal assault on Linux, using the tried and proven OJ defense. "Yes, gentlemen and ladies, if Linus is from Sweden, then all your source must belong to us!!"
The press: it's a slow summer, and all this news is welcome. Hey, so are the little presents from those generous guys at SCO. Darl, we liked the trip to Malibu, yes sir!
Microsoft: discrete distance. If SCO explode, they don't want to be contaminated.
Darl's game: the hike in share value was an unexpected bonus, but hey, it's welcome. The real payoff is the parachute that Microsoft have prepared, a buy-out of SCO once/if they can win enough control over Linux. Imagine the scoop: Redmond buys Linux, a full fist up the backside for all those open source hackers. Wet dreams for the Redmond Boys, who have perhaps strayed into one goatse.cs too many.
The OSS Community: "they can't be that stupid, surely?" Answer: no, they can't. So go figure their evil plan.
Remember: this is happening in the USA, the country which has little stickers on hifi equipment saying "warning: not for internal consumption", the land of absolute truths, where a 12 year-old can be a cybercriminal, where laws are treated not as approximations but as holy documents. If, when, SCO win legal control over Linux, however bizarre the means and flimsy the justification, it will be an absolute win for Microsoft.
My surprise is that the Microsoft sponsorship actually came to light so soon. I'd have thought they would find some way to hide it more discretely. As for Sun, all I can say is someone got them right proper. Silly eejits, did you really have to bend to Darl's salestalk? You've truly gone and made a huge mistake there, it is the death of your business.
The health of the nation does not depend on immigration.
I believe it does, directly because migrants mean more young workers, more tax payers and indirectly because migrants tend to be more ambitious, creative, and innovative than established citizens.
Immigration is a result of a good place to live, not a cause.
Indeed, a country that succeeds economically may not be a nice place to live. But my thesis is that the two may coincide more and more, as migrants make concious choices based on the quality of life in the available countries.
N.B. Immigrants are different from refugees.
Few refugees actually ever return, and many refugees create de-facto migration routes for true economic migrants, since many countries allow immigration for family reunions. In Europe, for instance, true economic immigration is rarely possible, but the status of political refugees is achiveable for people with a certain ability (think: complex procedures, time and money). The result is the same.
The most obvious case where refugees are not happy migrants is in case of wars and cross-border refugees. But even such refugees often become de-facto migrants, and often become important to their host nation, if allowed to integrate and not kept in isolated camps.
This made me think of an interesting aspect of globalization and migration.
Governments are starting to realize that the future health of their nations depend on encouraging immigration (in the case of coountries with ageing populations) and discouraging emmigration (in the case of countries losing their citizens).
A large part of the USA's economic and political strength comes from its attractiveness to migrants, especially skilled migrants. Compare the USA's Green Card programme with the immigration programmes offered by EU countries...
Now, Canada is to many migrants as attractive as the US, just slightly colder, maybe. It certainly has a reputation as being more hospitable for political refugees than most EU countries.
P2P is just one of many civil liberties, but if one takes the value of migration to a logical extreme, won't we see future governments actively competing for skilled migrants, offering better legal systems, more civil liberties, easier integration, etc. etc.
It's an optimistic viewpoint, but perhaps globalization will bring competition into governance in a way never seen before. Living in a country is, after all, a vote and an investment.
Just to be sure on this... if one of my own employees steals code and gives it to a client, it's not the clients' fault if he uses it, right?
Surely this is not a relevant discussion. As the first poster said, of course insider leaks are a big part of the (illicit) distribution process. That was also the case before P2P, for counterfeit rings.
The question is surely a commercial one: can the studios survive free exchange of their wares, and if so, how will they manage and profit from it, and if not, how will movies be made in the future. Cause one way or another, free media is the way it's going to be, legal or illegal.
Personally I like going to the movies, and I like high-quality DVDs, and I find P2P useful only for stuff that I simply can't buy, like Episodes of BTVS (sorry!) that are not yet on DVD. But as soon as they are, I go out and buy them.
The smart people will learn how to use P2P to their own advantage. I predict future hits along the lines of Blair Witch, low budget, unexpected, distributed exclusively by P2P before it hits the big screen...
True, 533Mhz should be enough, but somehow it's not, in the Crusoe version. Seriously: OOo just crawls so painfully it's unbearable, Mozilla takes 40 seconds to load (20 for the stripped-down Netscape 4.7), it's like working in treacle.
I have a Transmeta 533 in the form of a Sonic Blue frontpath surfpad.
It is a wonderful toy, but too slow for human consumption, modern software just craaawls, and it only works as a surfpad via a thin and tuned Netscape 4.7. OOo is painfully slow. MP3 playback worked OK.
The only use I can see for this kind of device, and I admit that it'd be enough for me, is for remote ssh administration of my servers with some music rocking in the headset.
ssh runs just dandy on a 533 Mhz Crusoe. Anything with pretty pictures does _not_.
Civilian airplanes are built by the same people who build military planes, and they use the same shielded wiring systems, able to sustain the knocks of high-altitude cosmic radiation.
Even fly-by-wire Airbuses are highly unlikely to be knocked out by anything a hand-held device can generate.
The real reason why cellphones are banned in flight is to save ground networks from being spammed by phones zipping from cell to cell a hundred times faster than ever foreseen. Not to protect the plane from disaster.
I don't believe the P2P companies are asking for compulsory licensing because they believe it is a good thing. I think they want it because then they can claim "we are seeking a legal alternative", knowing full well that although some kind of legalized P2P sharing is inevitable, it will take 5-10 years and the emergence of new media groups for it to happen, not some court ruling that "Hey, it's OK to download those trax now, d00ds!"
However, I agree with the other half of the article, which basically says "Google is God", something that has been obvious for several years. For many people, Google is the Internet, something AOL and MSN never managed to do with their fluff-filled "portals". Whatever new things come along, Google will be there, doing them better, leaner, faster,...
But it will be several dotcom lifetimes before Google will be the place to go to download no-longer-pirate tracks and movies. I don't think the P2P companies really have such a long horizon.
I was just trying to pretent I had not kept up with the times... ROTFL
Well, the only one I ever read. My parents had it when I was a toddler, but I think it's as relevant today as it was in the 1960's.
On the Track of Unknown Animals by Bernard Heuvelmans.
Dang, I must recheck my systems. No wonder I've been starved of Suzeware recently.
But seriously, your point is well taken. However, newsnet only serves porn to a select market, namely geeks, while there is a huge population of one-handed surfers out there who would not know a uuencoded jpeg if it hit them on the ass.
Also, I have seen several adult pass systems that sell in nightshops, and this is entirely, totally anonymous. Buy a token in a shop, use it to micropurchase. And AFAICS it's only for porn.
As usual, if you want a good preview of technological directions, the adult entertainment market is a great place to start.
Just wish it was tax deductable...
My cousin gave me a recipe for making this from domestic materials... Salt has lots of sodium, and most brands of the toilet cleaner contain borate. Let me see... if I just mix a little of that with some garden fertiliser, then shake the whol >BOOOM
After smoking, drinking, driving, pollution, domestic violence, disease, war, invasion, drought, famine, and falling tree trunks.
Some relativity is perhaps in order. The most extreme effects of the GSM that I've seen are (a) a lowering of concentration while driving, which has surely caused many deaths by now, and (b) the total destruction of the planned social agenda. People simply live ad-hoc these days.
One only has to look at the Internet adult entertainment industry to see that micropayments are already a working solution.
People will pay for content if it's something they actually want. Micropayments using a prepaid scheme are much more attractive than conventional credit-card systems because they are (a) anonymous, (b) transferrable, and (c) cheap.
I think the discussion in the article is entirely skewed because the author looks only at conventional content, and even a cursory look at the Internet demonstrates that supply far outweighs demand: there is an almost inexhaustible supply of prose, music, humour, and news. Why would you register for such content, let alone pay for it?
Basic economics: make something people want, and can't get elsewhere, and they will come and pay for it.
Blaming the payments scheme for weak products that no-one wants is surely a mistake.
The article is spot-on, for specific kinds of content, but I think its conclusions are wrong.
Clearly no-one will pay even a dime for content that they can get elsewhere for free. It's true that the size of the payment is less important than its simple presence.
But there are other things we happily pay for, and micropayments are a basic necessity if we want to get those things digitised and available on-line.
In Belgium, where I am, people are using premium SMS messages for micropayments. It's incredibly inefficient: a Euro1.00 message returns at most 60% to the website owner. Yet this is becoming a more and more popular way of charging for access to dating sites and other web sites people are happy, eager even, to pay for.
Micropayments to reserve parking spaces, to place small ads, to search for appartments, to post a CV to a job site, to chat with remote friends, to get news on what's happening downtown, to vote for pop starts, to play games, to access porn,... the horizons are vast and limited today only by the complexity of linking the consumer's wallet and the vendor's account.
What's missing in the micropayment world are two things, AFAICS. One is government support to mandate norms and standards backed up with legislation and consumer/supplier protection. Two is support from the banking industry in the form of accessible implementations available to small vendors.
It's simply not as polished a product.
In many ways it is far more polished. You may get used to an overburdened UI, but it's a tenet of design that the best UI features are the ones you don't see and don't have to work through. OOo wins this game hands-down, with a slim and yet totally complete UI. MSOffice simply adds on layer upon layer of grunk, without fixing basic issues like outline numbering which (after about 10 years of updates) still have the same bugs in.
I've used MSOffice since MSWord 5.0 in DOS, and when I switched to OOo a year or two ago, all I could feel was gentle relief as things started to work as I expected, and documents behaved "normally".
Since then, OOo is simply getting better each time. With the "Export to PDF" function, I create beautiful PDFs (and everything that we send to clients and suppliers is via PDF) with one button, and avoid yet one more nasty layer of Acrobat software (which I happily and gratefully uninstalled).
To say that OOo is, like many OSS products, unpolished and unrefined is simply false. OSS is in general significantly more polished than commercial software in ways that matter, and significantly less burdened by checklist features that no-one uses.
This is so obvious that I wonder how you can even repeat the troll.
This is the only remaining option if we are to retain some kind of sanity.
/. so that I could exclude these stories for a start. If I wanted to watch insane pseudolegalistic gibberish I'd live in the States and watch TV.
The IDP, a total voluntary boycotting of all and any news surrounding SCO, implemented in as many online journals and newssites as possible, extended to newsgroups, emails, and any other source of discussion.
SCO were kinda amusing when there was no other news this summer, but like a playground bully, they are feeding off all the attention they get, and so I vote for the IDP.
For a start, I'd be mighty grateful if there was a SCO topic for
Gimme an I, gimme a D, gimme a P, whatcha got? Internet Death Penalty, peace and quiet. Yeah...
Big difference: the WinXP features are glued onto a model that I already find useless. In some respects it makes sense to "clean up" an over-complex hierarchical organization, but my idea is to avoid it entirely.
The GUI I'm thinking of is actually very simple. OK, I'm going to continue this in my journal.
Yes, pretty much.
/. near the top
If I had a free week and some skill with any graphics library, I'd hack it together.
Imagine your desktop, piled with lots of random documents. Each document is a URL referring to a resource somewhere on the net, most of them local to you, some on your LAN, others on the Internet.
When you create a new resource, the cluttertop simply throws a new icon somewhere on top of a pile. You can move it around as you like, especially in 3D space (closer, further from you).
When you look at the space closest to you, you see concentric piles of the stuff you need to use the most.
Let's see:
- pile of stuff for my customers
- pile of interesting web sites,
- pile that is all my 'interesting' incoming email, filtered by my personal agents
- pile that holds all the digital photos I promised my wife I'd check through and get printed
- etc.
I guess something like three or four piles up front, with dozens of older ones receding into the infinite background space.
Perhaps I can switch desktops occasionally. I might start a desktop per project, cool. Like a cat, I like to make a mess in one place for a whole, then find a new, clean one to start over again.
This is the way my creative process works: the formal filing that hierarchical systems impose is no good at all, I need to throw down my junk and let time and energy filter the good stuff out.
Ah, I'm going to have to sponsor a starving developer somewhere... It may mean selling one of my Porsches, but hey, the era of dot-com excesses is over anyhow, they tell me.
I have this secret design (oops, posted it to Slashdot, now it can't be patented anymore) for a new workspace design, which depends on a 3D display.
Basically you throw down objects you're working on, into concentric piles. The most important stuff stays 'hot', near you, while stuff you use less often gets gradually pushed further and further back.
To open a document or web site you just click it, and it becomes 'hot' again. There's a little text box I can type keywords in, to find matching documents.
That's about it. Replaces the hierarchical file system with something much closer to the way I work (and AFAIK, many creative people work).
A computer, bio or not, is a system that takes input, performs specific and predictable calculation, and produces output.
An artist, DJ or otherwise, is a person who through talent and skill creates deliberate and specific sensory effects that stimulate the audience in interesting ways.
What we have here is neither art not science, and the article sounds like something from April 1st. Allow me to translate the text again:
A bus driver and part-time juggler in Milton Keynes whose research is in the area of communication through flaming torches, serendipitously created an 'golden pussycat' when he spilled beer on his shirt and left it over night. The resulting fungus that formed distorted the shape of the shirt in interesting and meaningful ways. Here's some of his research, and some t-shirt samples which include opinions of psychotics of the distorted garments."
"Interesting and meaningful" to whom exactly?
Seriously: typical wage for Indian IT graduate: $200/month. Equivalent for US graduate: 10--20 times more.
It is almost redundant to say that Indian firms won't be hiring many Americans.
Curiously, my little firm is now subcontracting for Indian firms, so perhaps the rules can be bent a little for genius Belgians. C'est genial!
Hey, my company has new hiring policies which I'll gladly debate on /., the publicity will be cool:
- no-ex SCO employees (POSIX hiring standard)
- no-ex Microsoft employees (non-SCO compatible)
- no-one with a Slashdot karma less than "Excellent"
- no-one who has a personal website (so tacky)
This could start a new fashion in transparent discrimination!
Seriously: the whole idea that you can hire or select people based on such criteria is nonsense and bullshit, but excellent marketing from Damage Studios, who until today were an unknown company working on an unknown game. Today, they have gracefully leapt onto the SCO bandwaggon, and gotten a Slashdot headline. EXCELLENT MARKETING!!
Jeez.