It's just lack of accountability. There is no reason why "complex Web software" can't be brought to release. It's a managerial mistake or a fault in communications if your product remains "in beta" for years. What Google says in the article about "major changes" expected is utter crap. Linux is expected to have major changes in the future too. But they would simply go into future versions.
It's irresponsible to force all your customers to be testers. If you want to release often, offer test builds or a separate beta server, let the majority of the customers (who have never written a bug-report or feature request and never will) use a stable version.
And if you have a stable version with infrequent changes, there is no justifiable reason to call it beta.
Remind me to piss on the Eiffel tower at night the next time I am in Paris. That would show the tiny bit of contempt I have for sick fucks who try to copyright stuff. And I would call the act of pissing on the tower an artistic performance, so that would probably allow me to copyright the whole Paris.
The symbols of St. Petersburg (Russia) were trademarked before the 300-year anniversary. They include the Peter the Great monument, the ship on the Admiralty spire and the angel on the spire of the Peter and Paul cathedral. Apparently, the city government hoped to reap huge financial rewards from doing that, but it seems nobody actually gave a shit about those trademarks.:-) At least in Russia the strictness and stupidity of the laws is always compensated with the leniency in their enforcement.:)
If you make photos of this crappy shit and post them online, you are creating free publicity for those morons. If you boycott the park and that monstrous contraption, you are playing along with those who would probably claim copyright on sunshine and the air in the park.
The only decent solution that doesn't make me want to puke is to blow up that sculpture or whatever it is or creatively modify it (add a penis or write the word "FUCK" over it in large letters with insoluble paint). People, stand up for your rights, protect the public domain, so no to fucktards!
All the posts here seem to ignore a very simple fact. Microsoft Office is a great product, clearly superior to open source alternatives.
I have OpenOffice and AbiWord installed on my machine and I tried other suites in the past (602, etc.) and Microsoft Office is still the best. It is faster, it has less bugs, it is more stable, it look better, it is more compatible, it has more powerful features (to say nothing about the powerful VBA support). I do admit that it has some badly designed dialogs and a number of annoying bugs, as well as being susceptible to gradual "file corruption" over long time. But overall it is a better product than anything else out there.
Of course, the OSS products are free and Free, that's a definite plus. And for a large organisation they may be good enough. But for a power-user nothing can replace Word on a Windows desktop (unless you need something like PageMaker or are willing to suffer using TeX). Similarly, Excel is THE spreadsheet and Powerpoint is THE presentation software.
And in my personal opinion, this will not change as long as open source developers would be content with cloning Microsoft products instead of trying something new and innovative. There can be no better Word than Word itself.
Neither is protecting the environment (pardon me for calling suburban desert "environment").
However, scientific and technological development are the bottom line. If we can learn something and if it's cool, it should be done, and damn the torpedoes.
You don't need sci-fi for that. Check out Democracy or Despotism by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films. It really helps to realise where do people live now...
If someone wanted to help PG with lotsa dinero and free hosting, they should instead help Lib.Ru. In Russia all works created before 1973 are in public domain, so if you want to create a worldwide repository of valuable creative works, it makes sense to do it in a country with somewhat sensible copyright term lengths.
This is a bad idea. Wikipedia is so full of convoluted articles it isn't even funny. Don't get me wrong, there's some good information there, but a lot of articles have information in them that makes you go "WTF!"
As opposed to WWW and Usenet archives already indexed/hosted by Google?
Most people are not complete animals and can keep their composure during a lap dance by the member of opposite sex if they need it. Think about it, if you discreetly look at some porn pics during a business meeting, will you automatically unzip your pants and start jerking off or can you pretend you are listening to the presentation? You probably can.
A lap dance by the member of your sex, on the other hand, is distracting, because it is uncomfortable, shameful and embarassing (to most people).
Check out Overcoming Procrastination by Steve Pavlina. It's a nice article (the guy is a shareware developer-turned-motivational speaker) and it gives a very simple solution, which can be surprisingly effective. Set a timer and just work 30 minutes on the task. Work on any aspect of it, do whatever you can/like/want, but work on this task. After 30 minutes go eat a cookie. Repeat. Do it 10 times and you've just spent 5 hours on the task, which was probably enough to do a lot of progress.
I came to realise recently how horrible it is to be a perfectionist. I can at least feel happy that I don't hate myself for not being 100% perfect, but because of it I dropped out of a M.Sc. program - I just couldn't force myself to do crappy projects, to go to exams not knowing the subject perfectly, etc. So I didn't go to exams and didn't finish the projects. Meanwhile, the rest of the group (95% of whom were much less capable than I was) didn't have any problem going to the exam and trying to fake knowing the subject and making some crap that often passed for a project.
It can be really sad. I can be really productive as a perfectionist, but not all tasks/projects are equally suitable. There are many things I just can't force myself to work on.
Absolutely. In fact, criminals already use encryption, anonymizing tools and the like. When I am posting on Slashdot, I don't care if it's in the open. But when I am discussing the terms of arm shipment with Irish terrorists or cocain prices with my Columbian partner, I always use encryption.
You see, the biggest problem with wide adoption of PGP and similar technologies is that before initiating a contact with, say, a pretty girl who posted a personal ad on a matchmaking site, I need first to explain her why it is necessary, how to set everything up and agree on a method to exchange public keys. More likely than not she would reply with something along the lines of "Thanks for the suggestion. Don't e-mail me, I will get back to you, when I set it up.":)
With my partners in crime^H^H^H^H^Hbusiness, I have a very compelling argument why encryption is necessary and they have the resources to set everything up. Of course, there are incompetent criminals, just like there are incompetent NSA agents, but those tend to get arrested and be replaced with more fit ones.
Like what? And what can we not do remotely? Why send astronauts there is what I am asking.
Example - the Huygens probe landed on something. Now the scientists wanted to find out what it was, but since it was just a robotic probe, there wasn't a simple way even to find out whether it landed on something solid, liquid or gooey. If we had a human there, it would take him/her all of the 15 seconds to poke the "ground" with a stick and announce the result.
However, I do agree that sending humans to Mars is quite questionable in financial regard, actually much more so than sending a human team up there to fix Hubble.
They speak Indian English, of which an average European/American can understand probably 50%... on a good day... when speaking face to face. And the question wasn't why corporations don't care about employees - it was why they don't care about customers.
ACDSee 3.0 starts on my computer (P4 1.6, 512, HDD 5400) in 1 second. ACDSee 7 takes more than 6 times that. With other programs it varies, but usually good applications not take more than 1 second (including MS Office ones, even though their faststart or whatever it's called is disabled). Even eMule starts in under 5 seconds and it needs to do a lot of file activity. Some apps are big time offenders, though. Ulead PhotoImpact takes its time, with more than 30 seconds required to start up (at some point it nearly freezes the whole computer and waits for something about 10 seconds).
The CPU utilization is rarely above a few percent. But the real problem is that Windows 2000 doesn't boost the foreground application sufficiently, so if some CPU hungry application decides to eat all it can, the front application can suffer. Sloppy coding can cause problems, though. For example, when Opera gets a few messages, it heavily accesses the disk, apparently doing indexing, but it may slow down other windows.
I would say that most people can enjoy really fast and responsive computing 99.9% of the time, as long as they keep their computer clean from malware and avoid poorly coded applications. No matter how many programs you run on a modern computer, it can stay responsive if you chose these programs wisely.
It is, in my view, inevitable that no matter what your starting conditions are, the socio-economic progress will lead to convergence of all systems to communism, a more advanced one than traditional capitalism or (horror!) information society.
Many people still don't realise it, but our world is changing. And it doesn't take a genius to understand where we are going. Combine MIT's 'Fab Labs' (not the implementation, the idea), nanotechnology and sharing and you get sharing for physical goods. Add to that AI and robotics and you don't even need to share, because everyone basically has everything he needs. Which is, in very simple terms, what communism is about.
In about 5-10 years it will be possible to have personal manufacturing plants - first for some limited classes of products, then for pretty much everything. That would bring sharing of designs, often "illegal", but always beneficial to people. It is likely to be combined with open source leading to even more efficiency and choice.
Then in about 15-20 years robots will become a very significant part of the workforce, with construction robots, transportation robots, loading/unloading and various other robots. Not sure how it will work out, but clearly this will lead to 1) greater wealth for some and 2) demand to do something so that even the unemployed people could share the wealth. It might be possible that robots could be produced using personal manufacturing plants, in that case the capitalist economy will quickly collapse, as capital (robots) will become in a sense free (there still be energy and resources issues). That might be when the new communism, finally succeeds.
Finally, in 20-30 years nanotechnology will succeed in producing its Holy Grail - the universal assembler. This would bring sharing to its ultimate triumph, as information would finally be the only thing of value and at the same time the information will finish becoming free, in the process freeing us, the humans. This will also end the short communist era, as we humans quickly become self-sufficient. That would be the culmination of the new communism, which will then gradually disappear, as humans move into posthuman state.
In 2030 our current debates about sharing and whether it's stealing or not will probably seem rather funny.
You mean like if your electricity needs are constant, you build your power plant? And if you need bottled water in your office every day, you drill a well?
What happened to doing your own business and letting professionals handle the rest? It's not like Sun expects us to pay through the nose for the processing power. They'd like to cover costs and have a decent margin, but probably nothing unreasonable.
There aren't likely to be any overheads in running your problems on a remote computer. For most tasks you won't need a lot of bandwidth (i.e. not multi-terabit links), so if you need a cluster you might as well let the professionals build and administer it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just lack of accountability. There is no reason why "complex Web software" can't be brought to release. It's a managerial mistake or a fault in communications if your product remains "in beta" for years. What Google says in the article about "major changes" expected is utter crap. Linux is expected to have major changes in the future too. But they would simply go into future versions.
It's irresponsible to force all your customers to be testers. If you want to release often, offer test builds or a separate beta server, let the majority of the customers (who have never written a bug-report or feature request and never will) use a stable version.
And if you have a stable version with infrequent changes, there is no justifiable reason to call it beta.
At least MS Office has grammar check, as opposed to OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and the rest of sorry open source office suites.
And your grammar in your post is not perfect either.
Remind me to piss on the Eiffel tower at night the next time I am in Paris. That would show the tiny bit of contempt I have for sick fucks who try to copyright stuff. And I would call the act of pissing on the tower an artistic performance, so that would probably allow me to copyright the whole Paris.
The symbols of St. Petersburg (Russia) were trademarked before the 300-year anniversary. They include the Peter the Great monument, the ship on the Admiralty spire and the angel on the spire of the Peter and Paul cathedral. Apparently, the city government hoped to reap huge financial rewards from doing that, but it seems nobody actually gave a shit about those trademarks. :-) At least in Russia the strictness and stupidity of the laws is always compensated with the leniency in their enforcement. :)
If you make photos of this crappy shit and post them online, you are creating free publicity for those morons. If you boycott the park and that monstrous contraption, you are playing along with those who would probably claim copyright on sunshine and the air in the park.
The only decent solution that doesn't make me want to puke is to blow up that sculpture or whatever it is or creatively modify it (add a penis or write the word "FUCK" over it in large letters with insoluble paint). People, stand up for your rights, protect the public domain, so no to fucktards!
All the posts here seem to ignore a very simple fact. Microsoft Office is a great product, clearly superior to open source alternatives.
I have OpenOffice and AbiWord installed on my machine and I tried other suites in the past (602, etc.) and Microsoft Office is still the best. It is faster, it has less bugs, it is more stable, it look better, it is more compatible, it has more powerful features (to say nothing about the powerful VBA support). I do admit that it has some badly designed dialogs and a number of annoying bugs, as well as being susceptible to gradual "file corruption" over long time. But overall it is a better product than anything else out there.
Of course, the OSS products are free and Free, that's a definite plus. And for a large organisation they may be good enough. But for a power-user nothing can replace Word on a Windows desktop (unless you need something like PageMaker or are willing to suffer using TeX). Similarly, Excel is THE spreadsheet and Powerpoint is THE presentation software.
And in my personal opinion, this will not change as long as open source developers would be content with cloning Microsoft products instead of trying something new and innovative. There can be no better Word than Word itself.
Profit is not the bottom line in the real world.
Neither is protecting the environment (pardon me for calling suburban desert "environment").
However, scientific and technological development are the bottom line. If we can learn something and if it's cool, it should be done, and damn the torpedoes.
You don't need sci-fi for that. Check out Democracy or Despotism by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films. It really helps to realise where do people live now...
Wrong examples. All your situations are when you combine innocent actions to get a dangerous and illegal result.
The example with iPod is when you combine several innocent actions to get an innocent and legal result, but it's illegal because of a technicality.
If someone wanted to help PG with lotsa dinero and free hosting, they should instead help Lib.Ru. In Russia all works created before 1973 are in public domain, so if you want to create a worldwide repository of valuable creative works, it makes sense to do it in a country with somewhat sensible copyright term lengths.
This is a bad idea. Wikipedia is so full of convoluted articles it isn't even funny. Don't get me wrong, there's some good information there, but a lot of articles have information in them that makes you go "WTF!"
As opposed to WWW and Usenet archives already indexed/hosted by Google?
You are really confused.
1) Wikipedia is NOT public domain.
2) Wikipedia is GFDL.
Problem solved.
Sadly, you don't realise the perversion of the laws in your country. It seems that Google can even be legally forced to act in a way the shareholders (including minority shareholders) consider beneficial.
Most people are not complete animals and can keep their composure during a lap dance by the member of opposite sex if they need it. Think about it, if you discreetly look at some porn pics during a business meeting, will you automatically unzip your pants and start jerking off or can you pretend you are listening to the presentation? You probably can.
A lap dance by the member of your sex, on the other hand, is distracting, because it is uncomfortable, shameful and embarassing (to most people).
Check out Overcoming Procrastination by Steve Pavlina. It's a nice article (the guy is a shareware developer-turned-motivational speaker) and it gives a very simple solution, which can be surprisingly effective. Set a timer and just work 30 minutes on the task. Work on any aspect of it, do whatever you can/like/want, but work on this task. After 30 minutes go eat a cookie. Repeat. Do it 10 times and you've just spent 5 hours on the task, which was probably enough to do a lot of progress.
I came to realise recently how horrible it is to be a perfectionist. I can at least feel happy that I don't hate myself for not being 100% perfect, but because of it I dropped out of a M.Sc. program - I just couldn't force myself to do crappy projects, to go to exams not knowing the subject perfectly, etc. So I didn't go to exams and didn't finish the projects. Meanwhile, the rest of the group (95% of whom were much less capable than I was) didn't have any problem going to the exam and trying to fake knowing the subject and making some crap that often passed for a project.
It can be really sad. I can be really productive as a perfectionist, but not all tasks/projects are equally suitable. There are many things I just can't force myself to work on.
Perhaps you can sue them for violating the laws of probability theory?
Absolutely. In fact, criminals already use encryption, anonymizing tools and the like. When I am posting on Slashdot, I don't care if it's in the open. But when I am discussing the terms of arm shipment with Irish terrorists or cocain prices with my Columbian partner, I always use encryption.
:)
You see, the biggest problem with wide adoption of PGP and similar technologies is that before initiating a contact with, say, a pretty girl who posted a personal ad on a matchmaking site, I need first to explain her why it is necessary, how to set everything up and agree on a method to exchange public keys. More likely than not she would reply with something along the lines of "Thanks for the suggestion. Don't e-mail me, I will get back to you, when I set it up."
With my partners in crime^H^H^H^H^Hbusiness, I have a very compelling argument why encryption is necessary and they have the resources to set everything up. Of course, there are incompetent criminals, just like there are incompetent NSA agents, but those tend to get arrested and be replaced with more fit ones.
The main reason is that those who object usually are morons.
Great link, thanks a lot!
Like what? And what can we not do remotely? Why send astronauts there is what I am asking.
Example - the Huygens probe landed on something. Now the scientists wanted to find out what it was, but since it was just a robotic probe, there wasn't a simple way even to find out whether it landed on something solid, liquid or gooey. If we had a human there, it would take him/her all of the 15 seconds to poke the "ground" with a stick and announce the result.
However, I do agree that sending humans to Mars is quite questionable in financial regard, actually much more so than sending a human team up there to fix Hubble.
They speak Indian English, of which an average European/American can understand probably 50%... on a good day... when speaking face to face. And the question wasn't why corporations don't care about employees - it was why they don't care about customers.
Task manager can report anything. View/Select Columns. It can report RAM usage, VM usage, peak memory usage, etc.
ACDSee 3.0 starts on my computer (P4 1.6, 512, HDD 5400) in 1 second. ACDSee 7 takes more than 6 times that. With other programs it varies, but usually good applications not take more than 1 second (including MS Office ones, even though their faststart or whatever it's called is disabled). Even eMule starts in under 5 seconds and it needs to do a lot of file activity. Some apps are big time offenders, though. Ulead PhotoImpact takes its time, with more than 30 seconds required to start up (at some point it nearly freezes the whole computer and waits for something about 10 seconds).
The CPU utilization is rarely above a few percent. But the real problem is that Windows 2000 doesn't boost the foreground application sufficiently, so if some CPU hungry application decides to eat all it can, the front application can suffer. Sloppy coding can cause problems, though. For example, when Opera gets a few messages, it heavily accesses the disk, apparently doing indexing, but it may slow down other windows.
I would say that most people can enjoy really fast and responsive computing 99.9% of the time, as long as they keep their computer clean from malware and avoid poorly coded applications. No matter how many programs you run on a modern computer, it can stay responsive if you chose these programs wisely.
It is, in my view, inevitable that no matter what your starting conditions are, the socio-economic progress will lead to convergence of all systems to communism, a more advanced one than traditional capitalism or (horror!) information society.
Many people still don't realise it, but our world is changing. And it doesn't take a genius to understand where we are going. Combine MIT's 'Fab Labs' (not the implementation, the idea), nanotechnology and sharing and you get sharing for physical goods. Add to that AI and robotics and you don't even need to share, because everyone basically has everything he needs. Which is, in very simple terms, what communism is about.
In about 5-10 years it will be possible to have personal manufacturing plants - first for some limited classes of products, then for pretty much everything. That would bring sharing of designs, often "illegal", but always beneficial to people. It is likely to be combined with open source leading to even more efficiency and choice.
Then in about 15-20 years robots will become a very significant part of the workforce, with construction robots, transportation robots, loading/unloading and various other robots. Not sure how it will work out, but clearly this will lead to 1) greater wealth for some and 2) demand to do something so that even the unemployed people could share the wealth. It might be possible that robots could be produced using personal manufacturing plants, in that case the capitalist economy will quickly collapse, as capital (robots) will become in a sense free (there still be energy and resources issues). That might be when the new communism, finally succeeds.
Finally, in 20-30 years nanotechnology will succeed in producing its Holy Grail - the universal assembler. This would bring sharing to its ultimate triumph, as information would finally be the only thing of value and at the same time the information will finish becoming free, in the process freeing us, the humans. This will also end the short communist era, as we humans quickly become self-sufficient. That would be the culmination of the new communism, which will then gradually disappear, as humans move into posthuman state.
In 2030 our current debates about sharing and whether it's stealing or not will probably seem rather funny.
you'll be better off building your own grid
You mean like if your electricity needs are constant, you build your power plant? And if you need bottled water in your office every day, you drill a well?
What happened to doing your own business and letting professionals handle the rest? It's not like Sun expects us to pay through the nose for the processing power. They'd like to cover costs and have a decent margin, but probably nothing unreasonable.
There aren't likely to be any overheads in running your problems on a remote computer. For most tasks you won't need a lot of bandwidth (i.e. not multi-terabit links), so if you need a cluster you might as well let the professionals build and administer it.