A very small part of My PhD looked at this (but with "collaborative textbooks" rather than wikis) -- see Chapter 4. Adding a very simple metadata-based navigation layer over the top of the wiki is pretty easy, clean (doesn't confuse users), and seems to do the trick. The wiki itself shows in an embedded frame. Of course, I had to go further and let students do difficult number theory proofs backed by machine reasoning systems within the book, but you won't have to solve that problem!
I'm (gradually) putting this fairly simple but useful part of the software into an online resource at www.theintelligentbook.com, though it's in my spare time and the system is down at the moment. I'll put my contact details back up there shortly in case the question-asker wants to discuss it technically.
This is nothing but dishonest mud-slinging. Please stop embarrassing yourself any further. You are clearly deeply ignorant and bigoted.
No, my comment was not; your reply however is, containing no actual content whatsoever but merely a personal attack. Next time you hear a professional scientist lament the shortcomings of many published papers and books (we scientists lament that fairly frequently, especially shortcomings in the experiments -- it is after all part of our job to scrutinise and criticise other scientists' papers) I suggest you listen, rather than responding with an unfounded libelous attack.
You wrote that "they believe it because they have deduced it to be true", which is nonsense. Very few actually "decude" anything. They merely feel that they shouldn't be because their religion, which they were born with, says so.
Wow, you've made a double whammy of mistakes here. First you've actually changed my statement. I said that's the simplest assumption for Occam's Razor in a psychology paper -- that is a bit different to saying the belief itself really is "true". Second you've made a patently absurd claim and provided no evidence for it. By your reckoning, my baby son was "born with" a religion and thus should be six months into cognitively practicing a religious viewpoint, even though he has yet to acquire significant language skills and spends almost no time in a religious environment. I would love to see your evidence for that!
That is not evidence for your position. Please stop being dishonest. Just because most people believe something, that doesn't make it true.
At no point have I been dishonest, this is yet another case of your resorting to an ad-hominem attack. What I presented, however informally, certainly is evidence that people generally can infer the mind-body problem for themselves even in the absence of a religious upbringing. Just because you'd rather have a different conclusion does not make the evidence go away.
Huh? No they don't. They form a hypothesis and test it. No assumptions needed. They say "this could be the way it is, let's see whether it is verified or falsified".
Sadly, not as often as you'd think. (It's just too hard to come up with a valid, powerful enough, and ethical experiment.) Rather, in this area, papers have been accepted and books published that have merely tried to say "I think this could be one way that believing in an afterlife might be advantageous, therefore belief in an afterlife must have evolved rather than been deduced." Weak experiments that don't actually go to the conclusions, but just to minor trivialities along the way (eg, showing there might be a tiny advantage for a person to believe in God in a very specific situation) are then used to throw off the hounds of the reviewers.
So your claim is that anyone who is religions has deduced it to be true themselves? Each and every one of them? Then how come people generally keep the religion their parents had?
Not quite -- I claimed that the simpler explanation is that most people infer for themselves that their existence is not purely mechanistic. As it happens, there is plenty of evidence to bear this out -- regardless of the rise or fall in popularity of specific religions, there's never been a point in history where belief in God, spirituality, or the supernatural has been in the minority. The "mind-body" problem is perhaps the most written about philosophical question there is, cropping up over and over again in countless different cultures. Indeed, it does not take long for even the children of devout atheists to ask their parents "where do I go after I die" or "where was I before I was born", suggesting they have already formed the opinion that their experience of existence and their physical form are not necessarily identical.
Because science is a tool, it is a method for finding out truth, and it can be, and should be, applied to religion just as any other subject, I don't know why more people don't look at it this way.
One of the few tenets that scientists do agree upon is that experimental observations should not be attributed to supernatural (non-pseudomechanistic) forces. That makes it a bit of an awkward tool for applying to religion. There are psychologists that have tried it, and have written vague attempts to "explain" why people 80% of the planet believe in God, but they always come across as a bit iffy because they always have to start from the assumption that their subjects are wrong. The (psychologically) simpler explanation "they believe it because they have deduced it to be true" gets rejected out of hand, and instead the psychologist finds himself having to put forward a complex and improbable alternative explanation on fairly flimsy evidence.
The main difference between science and religion is not that one is true and the other is false. It's that one is falsifiable and the other is not.
While that's the distinction that is commonly latched on to today, as if it were always the golden definition of what science is, it's only since around the early 1900s that definition has been popular. Indeed a great many aspects of science are only "potentially falsifiable" (as in "we don't know how you could devise an independent test for this now, but we hope someday someone will"). A vague and fuzzily explained example (that might even be out of date): Dark matter was inferred from a discrepancy in the mass of visible matter and the motions of distant galaxies. But because it's "dark matter" it would be extraordinarily hard to falsify the theory that the mass discrepancy is due to dark otherwise-undetectable matter: "not detecting the matter by any other means" is insufficient -- it's dark, so of course you can't detect it. So you are left still just repeating the original technique that led to the inference (comparing galaxy motions to what you'd expect) rather than having a genuinely independent test that could falsify the theory.
Ironic twist: of course, the invisible teapot in space "but honest it's there" was supposed to be a rhetorical attack on religion; little did we expect physicists to claim that 70% of the galaxy is made of invisible teapots, honest guv.
Only on Slashdot would a cheap sarcastic insult be modded "+5 insightful" just because it happens to insult people Slashdot doesn't like. Slashdot has turned into a Skinner box, with a bunch of posters mindlessly pecking the "insult religion" button because they get a nice juicy "+5 insightful" seed for their efforts so much more easily that way than through expressing any genuine thought of their own. Group-think from a group who, to top it all off, think they are "freethinkers" for toeing the party line. (And yes, I have karma to burn.)
I'm 19, and Dawkins has been an enormous influence on me. A few years back he was one of figures that helped me jetisson religion, and ever since I've had a greater curiousity about science.
While Dawkins is a "famous" "scientist", his fame is not mostly for his science, but rather for his vehement anti-religion stance, and his popular-press non-peer-reviewed (and in my opinion startlingly unrigorous and intellectually sloppy) books bagging religion and spirituality.
As a practicing research scientist I would actually go so far as to say that Dawkins gives a bad impression of science -- as a career where it's acceptable to be bigoted and systematically unpleasant to people. And that unfortunately plays into what is perhaps the biggest barrier to the recruitment of new scientists: not "Is science valuable?" but "Do I really want to spend forty years of my life working in an environment like that?"
Even Dawkins's job title "Professor of the Public Understanding of Science" is an anomaly that gives a false impresson. Most professorships are named after what the professor researches, whereas Dawkins does comparatively little research into how the public understands science, and instead spends a great deal of time pontificating on what their understanding of science must be in order to be acceptable to him.
Another trick is to take a sentence or song lyric and use only the first character from each word, but then tack on some numbers and special characters. For instance using the sentence above, generate a password that looks like this:
Iaptuusap&+0
If you chose a sentence or lyric that has meaning for you, you probably don't need to write it down at all
Another trick is to punch the password-rule-setting administrator in the mouth, and use however you'd write down his yelp of pain (eg, "Yeearrgh"), appended with the number of his teeth you dislodged. The sheer satisfaction guarantees you'll never forget that password.
When the general public think about searching the Internet they think of Google, even the phrase 'Google it' is fairly common. I wonder what the success rate is for this strategy?
It's not foolproof. In the UK, "hoovering" is a synonym for vacuum cleaning, but Hoover no longer dominate the vacuum cleaner market.
uk. I don't like doing video. Text is more efficient and searchable. Bad Obama.
Text is also more efficient to astroturf with. If a lobbyist wants to make ten thousand text comments, all looking as though they came from different concerned citizens and with slightly different wording, that's easy and cheap. If he wants to make ten thousand video responses, he at least needs to find ten thousand different people to speak the words, otherwise it'll be a tad obvious that there are duplicates.
It is very possible to make good and usable FLOSS software - you just need a project leader who knows about usability. I find that reading and understanding Gnome HIG is a great first step.
Anyone else find it ironic that in an article about how open source software usability sucks, the recommended reading is an open source software's usability guide?
There is at least one endemic incentive-based reason why open source software usability sucks. A great many open source software projects rely enormously on corporate contributions, often where the company wants to use the software internally. If the code doesn't work, the company needs it fixed. So it gets fixed. If the code works, but it looks a bit ugly, it's not like they're selling it for profit anyway. So those resources get allocated to areas that more directly affect revenue and expenses. It's the same reason there are few beautiful interfaces for time sheet applications. No doubt there are other reasons, but that's one.
Those companies making significant profits could be asked to contribute to a central pool, a non profit or mutual benefit co. - that hires small teams to make useful open source tools more polished, secure, and user friendly.
I suspect most open source foundations already are politely asking those companies. And in the open source world, since we can do little more than politely ask, I suspect we've got all we're getting.
There are already good solutions to this problem: it is called revision control and the Subversion system is a high-quality open source solution to most common version control / sharing scenarios. Visual Source Safe wishes that it could be as good as Subversion, but the open source crowd beat them to it.
That misses why Google Docs was actually popular. If two people edit the same document at once, using a revision control scheme, then there's a significant potential of a merge conflict or of a nasty "someone else has the lock on this document" message, both of which are a usability nightmare if your users are non-technical -- the user is stopped in their tracks, gives up, and goes away. Google Docs does use a revision control method behind the scenes (google-diff-match-patch), but because the commits and updates are happening automatically every 30 seconds, the changes are kept very small and the chance of a merge conflict is very much lower. To show just how simple it is technically, Docwit is a very small hobby open source project that ties TinyMCE to google-diff-match-patch to do the same thing, but because you can run your own server you don't have to give Google your data.
Google Wave essentially just goes "Hmm, why don't we shrink the update period even further, and (like SubEthaEdit, and also quite like a few other projects that have involved working on XML documents remotely) send operational changes when they happen rather than polling every 30 seconds?". The change size gets even smaller, and with it the chances of having to show a user a "merge conflict" or "lock conflict" scary box are also reduced.
You see, it turns out not many people use Google Docs for "proper" documents (of the corporate kind) but a heck of a lot use it for collaborative note taking, as a cheap-and-easy wiki, and for lots of other "low-fuss" tasks.
I started mine to let my family know how I was doing in Iraq and posted once in a while to let them know I was OK. Now I post various updates to my life, book reviews, or anything else I feel like. Surprisingly, some people in my and my wife's family actively read and await the next post.
I suspect most (non-autospam) blogs were actually for this purpose: not for "shouting to the world", but more like Christmas letters -- letting those who we care about but don't have time to call keep up with how we are and what we're doing. Trouble is, RSS and Atom never really took off for non-techy users. So just as the bloggers find they don't have time to call every old friend, so also the old friends don't have time to visit every one of their friends' blogs regularly. If aggregators had been a bit more usable and easy for non-technical people to understand, it would have worked. And, frankly, that's the way Facebook seems to get used: the home page is an aggregation of all your friends' short news excerpts. Facebook accounts don't seem to go abandoned so quickly.
At work on Friday I mistyped a URL and it brought me to Bing. I didn't know what it was and assumed it was a re-routed parked domain or something - I didn't bother looking at it since I didn't recognize it. So my first impression of the site, thanks to the redirect, was that it was an annoying ad site.
Same happened to me -- I was after bong.com, my finger slipped when typing the first 'o' and I get mysteriously redirected to this Microsoft search engine. I think it's a scam.
This is just like with a car, or some other item, where the original manufacturer gets a kickback every time it is resold because -- hey, wait, they don't get anything from it because that's a stupid idea! The original manufacturer has already sold it and given up any future interest in it for a fair price!
It depends on what class of good you try to categorise it as. For instance, actors under union deals do get a kickback every time their program is repeated [legal stoushes about online delivery aside for the mo], and are not seen to have "given up any future interest in their performance" when they were originally paid for it.
had done this also? Would they have managed to get their way, one is forced to wonder? Would GM be thriving if they had a cut of every used car sale? Who the F--- do these publishers think they are anyway?!
You have to understand the political perspective. Cars are bought by "hard-working families" and it would be wrong to disadvantage them by preventing them from being able to sell their old cars on. Games are bought by "criminally-minded juveniles who must be kept in check" and allowing them to sell them on would just encourage their illegal online activities... It sounds corny and cynical (and I'm one of the hard-working family class so perhaps I should just keep quiet about this) but the political connotations are rather different depending on what product you are talking about, and that has a big effect on what legislation gets passed.
Of course, that's a fairly recent change in the law (1990, IIRC), and not a good one.
Why shouldn't it be legal to rent those things? It was asserted that it was because people would rent them, then unlawfully make a copy to avoid buying one. However, events have shown that 1) That's not a serious problem, given that movies are rented and are thus susceptible to this sort of piracy, yet rental-related piracy hasn't noticeably harmed the movie industry
Well, there is a difference in timescale that makes movies less comparable. Pirating a movie is not worthwhile if the renter has got it for a day but it only takes 2 hours to watch. Pirating a game might be more worthwhile, if playing it through takes a few days (and a player might have only a rough idea of how long it will take to complete) but the player has only rented it for one day.
That, of course, is not an argument about what should be legal, but it does relate to whether movie business models can be applied to games or not.
Courts here in the US have already affirmed the rights of a user to re-sell software, despite licensing agreements.
Steam still manages to technically remove that right. So what's to stop any publisher from doing the same? ("Your activation key is tied to your account; to transfer it to someone else can only be done once, requires the original receipt, and involves punitive delays and fees [at a level we deem sufficient to ensure nobody ever sells a game second hand]").
Ideally, though, games (both new and used) would be cheaper.
Theoretically, competition ensures that they are. Some time after release, the publisher has to start reducing prices because people who've got bored with the game and are selling it second hand are now competing with them for sales. Systems such as Steam remove this, and (if these systems managed to achieve market dominance) would economically allow a game to be charged full price for much longer.
An explosion of discontent is unlikely in China because the 20 years since Tiananmen have been dominated by incredible economic growth. It is hard to complain when your walette is getting fat. I realize the global economic downturn hit China somewhat, but it certainly didn't roll them back 20 years. (Not that this is specific to China; Americans never minded the Iraq war enough to do anything about it, even after they learned it was a sham, it was high gas prices and finally the economic collapse that made people revile the Bush presidency.) One implication of this is that the notion of political liberalization as a necessary byproduct of capitalism is not yet dead. The next time China's growth slows or reverses for a sustained period, then we will see if its new middle class has power to go with their wealth.
Unfortunately, I think you are wrong and that the West basically missed its opportunity to promote reform in China 30 years ago or more. One of the most effective ways of promoting liberalisation in formerly restrictive regimes has been the EU -- a large trigger for the democratisation of Eastern Europe was access to the EU free market, and pots of money. Not to belittle the Cold War, but a big factor in the Berlin Wall falling was poor East Germans knowing the West Germans were doing it much better and that the only way to join in the wealth was to liberalise. Since then, eastern European countries have been falling over backwards to reform themselves and get themselves on that EU gravy train. Hardly surprising -- the same trick worked just as efficiently way back in the 70s with Spain. With China, meanwhile, we've effectively let them join in the riches without any hint of reform -- the EU and US has happily outsourced all its production to China without much regard to reform or political, religious, or personal freedom. We no longer have a juicy economic carrot to wave in front of them, because we've long since given it to them. They can't get "better access to our markets" because they've pretty much already got complete access to our markets.
You don't know overseas Chinese until you've been blasted with the evils of the US media industry (substitute publishing, indymedia, ad nos.). I have been in the overseas community since I met the lady who became my wife a decade ago. Since then, every Chinese person I brought the subject up with was unaware that North Korea invaded South Korea. None knew how many Chinese died in the war. One out of many knew that China fought the UN in the Korean War. Overseas Chinese do not know that China invaded Tibet. Many were unaware that China fought a war with India. Most did know of the Sino-Vietnam War, but did not know China lost. Many were also aware that China fought a low intensity war against the USSR for a decade.
All educated Chinese I have met, who should through their "education" know better regarding their government and its actions, are deliberately ignorant of recent history.
There is a dilemma that means educating the overseas students is never likely to be sufficient. If you tell an ex-pat how rotten you think their government is, they will probably defend it even if they would normally criticise it at home. A less sensitive example: there are very few Brits who are imperialist or who think non-democratic colonialism is a good thing; tell them how terrible you think the British Empire was, though, and they will defend it as being historically much more just and self-correcting than any of the other empires of the era. They don't really see it as you criticising a system, but see it as you belittling their people. So if you tell overseas Chinese students how bad the Chinese government is, depending on how you put it, they might not thank you for it. And they are unlikely to pass on your criticisms back home. Actually, for China it is worse than that: many Chinese students overseas are asked to monitor other Chinese students, to make sure they don't hang out with the wrong crowd, etc. So, even if a student is open to your criticism of his country, it can be personally a bit risky for him to hang out with groups that openly and vehemently criticise the government. The upshot is that it has to be handled sensitively, and it's unlikely we'll make much real progress until it is possible for Chinese people to criticise their government more openly at home, rather than abroad.
Actually no. The *only* difference between a religion and a cult is prominence/influence and/or state recognition as a 'religion'.
You are incorrect, no matter how many asterisks you try to reinforce your statement with. The usual test to distinguish between a religion and a cult (eg, the test used to regulate religious recruitment on campus where I am) is farily straightforward, and is not at all about numbers, nor beliefs, nor state recognition: it is about behaviour. Specifically, if an organisation as a matter of course pressures new members to sever links with family and friends who are not members, then it is classed as a cult; if it does not, it is not. Being a "cult" is about disassociating from society; it is not about what you believe happens to your consciousness when you die.
Slashdot Mirror
A very small part of My PhD looked at this (but with "collaborative textbooks" rather than wikis) -- see Chapter 4. Adding a very simple metadata-based navigation layer over the top of the wiki is pretty easy, clean (doesn't confuse users), and seems to do the trick. The wiki itself shows in an embedded frame. Of course, I had to go further and let students do difficult number theory proofs backed by machine reasoning systems within the book, but you won't have to solve that problem!
I'm (gradually) putting this fairly simple but useful part of the software into an online resource at www.theintelligentbook.com, though it's in my spare time and the system is down at the moment. I'll put my contact details back up there shortly in case the question-asker wants to discuss it technically.
This is nothing but dishonest mud-slinging. Please stop embarrassing yourself any further. You are clearly deeply ignorant and bigoted.
No, my comment was not; your reply however is, containing no actual content whatsoever but merely a personal attack. Next time you hear a professional scientist lament the shortcomings of many published papers and books (we scientists lament that fairly frequently, especially shortcomings in the experiments -- it is after all part of our job to scrutinise and criticise other scientists' papers) I suggest you listen, rather than responding with an unfounded libelous attack.
You wrote that "they believe it because they have deduced it to be true", which is nonsense. Very few actually "decude" anything. They merely feel that they shouldn't be because their religion, which they were born with, says so.
Wow, you've made a double whammy of mistakes here. First you've actually changed my statement. I said that's the simplest assumption for Occam's Razor in a psychology paper -- that is a bit different to saying the belief itself really is "true". Second you've made a patently absurd claim and provided no evidence for it. By your reckoning, my baby son was "born with" a religion and thus should be six months into cognitively practicing a religious viewpoint, even though he has yet to acquire significant language skills and spends almost no time in a religious environment. I would love to see your evidence for that!
That is not evidence for your position. Please stop being dishonest. Just because most people believe something, that doesn't make it true.
At no point have I been dishonest, this is yet another case of your resorting to an ad-hominem attack. What I presented, however informally, certainly is evidence that people generally can infer the mind-body problem for themselves even in the absence of a religious upbringing. Just because you'd rather have a different conclusion does not make the evidence go away.
Huh? No they don't. They form a hypothesis and test it. No assumptions needed. They say "this could be the way it is, let's see whether it is verified or falsified".
Sadly, not as often as you'd think. (It's just too hard to come up with a valid, powerful enough, and ethical experiment.) Rather, in this area, papers have been accepted and books published that have merely tried to say "I think this could be one way that believing in an afterlife might be advantageous, therefore belief in an afterlife must have evolved rather than been deduced." Weak experiments that don't actually go to the conclusions, but just to minor trivialities along the way (eg, showing there might be a tiny advantage for a person to believe in God in a very specific situation) are then used to throw off the hounds of the reviewers.
So your claim is that anyone who is religions has deduced it to be true themselves? Each and every one of them? Then how come people generally keep the religion their parents had?
Not quite -- I claimed that the simpler explanation is that most people infer for themselves that their existence is not purely mechanistic. As it happens, there is plenty of evidence to bear this out -- regardless of the rise or fall in popularity of specific religions, there's never been a point in history where belief in God, spirituality, or the supernatural has been in the minority. The "mind-body" problem is perhaps the most written about philosophical question there is, cropping up over and over again in countless different cultures. Indeed, it does not take long for even the children of devout atheists to ask their parents "where do I go after I die" or "where was I before I was born", suggesting they have already formed the opinion that their experience of existence and their physical form are not necessarily identical.
Because science is a tool, it is a method for finding out truth, and it can be, and should be, applied to religion just as any other subject, I don't know why more people don't look at it this way.
One of the few tenets that scientists do agree upon is that experimental observations should not be attributed to supernatural (non-pseudomechanistic) forces. That makes it a bit of an awkward tool for applying to religion. There are psychologists that have tried it, and have written vague attempts to "explain" why people 80% of the planet believe in God, but they always come across as a bit iffy because they always have to start from the assumption that their subjects are wrong. The (psychologically) simpler explanation "they believe it because they have deduced it to be true" gets rejected out of hand, and instead the psychologist finds himself having to put forward a complex and improbable alternative explanation on fairly flimsy evidence.
The main difference between science and religion is not that one is true and the other is false. It's that one is falsifiable and the other is not.
While that's the distinction that is commonly latched on to today, as if it were always the golden definition of what science is, it's only since around the early 1900s that definition has been popular. Indeed a great many aspects of science are only "potentially falsifiable" (as in "we don't know how you could devise an independent test for this now, but we hope someday someone will"). A vague and fuzzily explained example (that might even be out of date): Dark matter was inferred from a discrepancy in the mass of visible matter and the motions of distant galaxies. But because it's "dark matter" it would be extraordinarily hard to falsify the theory that the mass discrepancy is due to dark otherwise-undetectable matter: "not detecting the matter by any other means" is insufficient -- it's dark, so of course you can't detect it. So you are left still just repeating the original technique that led to the inference (comparing galaxy motions to what you'd expect) rather than having a genuinely independent test that could falsify the theory.
Ironic twist: of course, the invisible teapot in space "but honest it's there" was supposed to be a rhetorical attack on religion; little did we expect physicists to claim that 70% of the galaxy is made of invisible teapots, honest guv.
and there are those who think.
Only on Slashdot would a cheap sarcastic insult be modded "+5 insightful" just because it happens to insult people Slashdot doesn't like. Slashdot has turned into a Skinner box, with a bunch of posters mindlessly pecking the "insult religion" button because they get a nice juicy "+5 insightful" seed for their efforts so much more easily that way than through expressing any genuine thought of their own. Group-think from a group who, to top it all off, think they are "freethinkers" for toeing the party line. (And yes, I have karma to burn.)
I'm 19, and Dawkins has been an enormous influence on me. A few years back he was one of figures that helped me jetisson religion, and ever since I've had a greater curiousity about science.
While Dawkins is a "famous" "scientist", his fame is not mostly for his science, but rather for his vehement anti-religion stance, and his popular-press non-peer-reviewed (and in my opinion startlingly unrigorous and intellectually sloppy) books bagging religion and spirituality.
As a practicing research scientist I would actually go so far as to say that Dawkins gives a bad impression of science -- as a career where it's acceptable to be bigoted and systematically unpleasant to people. And that unfortunately plays into what is perhaps the biggest barrier to the recruitment of new scientists: not "Is science valuable?" but "Do I really want to spend forty years of my life working in an environment like that?"
Even Dawkins's job title "Professor of the Public Understanding of Science" is an anomaly that gives a false impresson. Most professorships are named after what the professor researches, whereas Dawkins does comparatively little research into how the public understands science, and instead spends a great deal of time pontificating on what their understanding of science must be in order to be acceptable to him.
Another trick is to take a sentence or song lyric and use only the first character from each word, but then tack on some numbers and special characters. For instance using the sentence above, generate a password that looks like this:
Iaptuusap&+0
If you chose a sentence or lyric that has meaning for you, you probably don't need to write it down at all
Another trick is to punch the password-rule-setting administrator in the mouth, and use however you'd write down his yelp of pain (eg, "Yeearrgh"), appended with the number of his teeth you dislodged. The sheer satisfaction guarantees you'll never forget that password.
When the general public think about searching the Internet they think of Google, even the phrase 'Google it' is fairly common. I wonder what the success rate is for this strategy?
It's not foolproof. In the UK, "hoovering" is a synonym for vacuum cleaning, but Hoover no longer dominate the vacuum cleaner market.
uk. I don't like doing video. Text is more efficient and searchable. Bad Obama.
Text is also more efficient to astroturf with. If a lobbyist wants to make ten thousand text comments, all looking as though they came from different concerned citizens and with slightly different wording, that's easy and cheap. If he wants to make ten thousand video responses, he at least needs to find ten thousand different people to speak the words, otherwise it'll be a tad obvious that there are duplicates.
It is very possible to make good and usable FLOSS software - you just need a project leader who knows about usability. I find that reading and understanding Gnome HIG is a great first step.
Anyone else find it ironic that in an article about how open source software usability sucks, the recommended reading is an open source software's usability guide?
There is at least one endemic incentive-based reason why open source software usability sucks. A great many open source software projects rely enormously on corporate contributions, often where the company wants to use the software internally. If the code doesn't work, the company needs it fixed. So it gets fixed. If the code works, but it looks a bit ugly, it's not like they're selling it for profit anyway. So those resources get allocated to areas that more directly affect revenue and expenses. It's the same reason there are few beautiful interfaces for time sheet applications. No doubt there are other reasons, but that's one.
Those companies making significant profits could be asked to contribute to a central pool, a non profit or mutual benefit co. - that hires small teams to make useful open source tools more polished, secure, and user friendly.
I suspect most open source foundations already are politely asking those companies. And in the open source world, since we can do little more than politely ask, I suspect we've got all we're getting.
There are already good solutions to this problem: it is called revision control and the Subversion system is a high-quality open source solution to most common version control / sharing scenarios. Visual Source Safe wishes that it could be as good as Subversion, but the open source crowd beat them to it.
That misses why Google Docs was actually popular. If two people edit the same document at once, using a revision control scheme, then there's a significant potential of a merge conflict or of a nasty "someone else has the lock on this document" message, both of which are a usability nightmare if your users are non-technical -- the user is stopped in their tracks, gives up, and goes away. Google Docs does use a revision control method behind the scenes (google-diff-match-patch), but because the commits and updates are happening automatically every 30 seconds, the changes are kept very small and the chance of a merge conflict is very much lower. To show just how simple it is technically, Docwit is a very small hobby open source project that ties TinyMCE to google-diff-match-patch to do the same thing, but because you can run your own server you don't have to give Google your data.
Google Wave essentially just goes "Hmm, why don't we shrink the update period even further, and (like SubEthaEdit, and also quite like a few other projects that have involved working on XML documents remotely) send operational changes when they happen rather than polling every 30 seconds?". The change size gets even smaller, and with it the chances of having to show a user a "merge conflict" or "lock conflict" scary box are also reduced.
You see, it turns out not many people use Google Docs for "proper" documents (of the corporate kind) but a heck of a lot use it for collaborative note taking, as a cheap-and-easy wiki, and for lots of other "low-fuss" tasks.
I'm calling BS. Any real stoner would have bong.com bookmarked, twice.
Stoner? My goodness no! Why, I was merely looking for the international campanology conference!
I started mine to let my family know how I was doing in Iraq and posted once in a while to let them know I was OK. Now I post various updates to my life, book reviews, or anything else I feel like. Surprisingly, some people in my and my wife's family actively read and await the next post.
I suspect most (non-autospam) blogs were actually for this purpose: not for "shouting to the world", but more like Christmas letters -- letting those who we care about but don't have time to call keep up with how we are and what we're doing. Trouble is, RSS and Atom never really took off for non-techy users. So just as the bloggers find they don't have time to call every old friend, so also the old friends don't have time to visit every one of their friends' blogs regularly. If aggregators had been a bit more usable and easy for non-technical people to understand, it would have worked. And, frankly, that's the way Facebook seems to get used: the home page is an aggregation of all your friends' short news excerpts. Facebook accounts don't seem to go abandoned so quickly.
Bing Is Not Google
Just wait until their version of the search appliance comes out. It really would be the machine that goes bing.
At work on Friday I mistyped a URL and it brought me to Bing. I didn't know what it was and assumed it was a re-routed parked domain or something - I didn't bother looking at it since I didn't recognize it. So my first impression of the site, thanks to the redirect, was that it was an annoying ad site.
Same happened to me -- I was after bong.com, my finger slipped when typing the first 'o' and I get mysteriously redirected to this Microsoft search engine. I think it's a scam.
This is just like with a car, or some other item, where the original manufacturer gets a kickback every time it is resold because -- hey, wait, they don't get anything from it because that's a stupid idea! The original manufacturer has already sold it and given up any future interest in it for a fair price!
It depends on what class of good you try to categorise it as. For instance, actors under union deals do get a kickback every time their program is repeated [legal stoushes about online delivery aside for the mo], and are not seen to have "given up any future interest in their performance" when they were originally paid for it.
had done this also? Would they have managed to get their way, one is forced to wonder? Would GM be thriving if they had a cut of every used car sale? Who the F--- do these publishers think they are anyway?!
You have to understand the political perspective. Cars are bought by "hard-working families" and it would be wrong to disadvantage them by preventing them from being able to sell their old cars on. Games are bought by "criminally-minded juveniles who must be kept in check" and allowing them to sell them on would just encourage their illegal online activities... It sounds corny and cynical (and I'm one of the hard-working family class so perhaps I should just keep quiet about this) but the political connotations are rather different depending on what product you are talking about, and that has a big effect on what legislation gets passed.
Of course, that's a fairly recent change in the law (1990, IIRC), and not a good one.
Why shouldn't it be legal to rent those things? It was asserted that it was because people would rent them, then unlawfully make a copy to avoid buying one. However, events have shown that 1) That's not a serious problem, given that movies are rented and are thus susceptible to this sort of piracy, yet rental-related piracy hasn't noticeably harmed the movie industry
Well, there is a difference in timescale that makes movies less comparable. Pirating a movie is not worthwhile if the renter has got it for a day but it only takes 2 hours to watch. Pirating a game might be more worthwhile, if playing it through takes a few days (and a player might have only a rough idea of how long it will take to complete) but the player has only rented it for one day.
That, of course, is not an argument about what should be legal, but it does relate to whether movie business models can be applied to games or not.
Courts here in the US have already affirmed the rights of a user to re-sell software, despite licensing agreements.
Steam still manages to technically remove that right. So what's to stop any publisher from doing the same? ("Your activation key is tied to your account; to transfer it to someone else can only be done once, requires the original receipt, and involves punitive delays and fees [at a level we deem sufficient to ensure nobody ever sells a game second hand]").
Ideally, though, games (both new and used) would be cheaper.
Theoretically, competition ensures that they are. Some time after release, the publisher has to start reducing prices because people who've got bored with the game and are selling it second hand are now competing with them for sales. Systems such as Steam remove this, and (if these systems managed to achieve market dominance) would economically allow a game to be charged full price for much longer.
An explosion of discontent is unlikely in China because the 20 years since Tiananmen have been dominated by incredible economic growth. It is hard to complain when your walette is getting fat. I realize the global economic downturn hit China somewhat, but it certainly didn't roll them back 20 years. (Not that this is specific to China; Americans never minded the Iraq war enough to do anything about it, even after they learned it was a sham, it was high gas prices and finally the economic collapse that made people revile the Bush presidency.) One implication of this is that the notion of political liberalization as a necessary byproduct of capitalism is not yet dead. The next time China's growth slows or reverses for a sustained period, then we will see if its new middle class has power to go with their wealth.
Unfortunately, I think you are wrong and that the West basically missed its opportunity to promote reform in China 30 years ago or more. One of the most effective ways of promoting liberalisation in formerly restrictive regimes has been the EU -- a large trigger for the democratisation of Eastern Europe was access to the EU free market, and pots of money. Not to belittle the Cold War, but a big factor in the Berlin Wall falling was poor East Germans knowing the West Germans were doing it much better and that the only way to join in the wealth was to liberalise. Since then, eastern European countries have been falling over backwards to reform themselves and get themselves on that EU gravy train. Hardly surprising -- the same trick worked just as efficiently way back in the 70s with Spain. With China, meanwhile, we've effectively let them join in the riches without any hint of reform -- the EU and US has happily outsourced all its production to China without much regard to reform or political, religious, or personal freedom. We no longer have a juicy economic carrot to wave in front of them, because we've long since given it to them. They can't get "better access to our markets" because they've pretty much already got complete access to our markets.
You don't know overseas Chinese until you've been blasted with the evils of the US media industry (substitute publishing, indymedia, ad nos.). I have been in the overseas community since I met the lady who became my wife a decade ago. Since then, every Chinese person I brought the subject up with was unaware that North Korea invaded South Korea. None knew how many Chinese died in the war. One out of many knew that China fought the UN in the Korean War. Overseas Chinese do not know that China invaded Tibet. Many were unaware that China fought a war with India. Most did know of the Sino-Vietnam War, but did not know China lost. Many were also aware that China fought a low intensity war against the USSR for a decade. All educated Chinese I have met, who should through their "education" know better regarding their government and its actions, are deliberately ignorant of recent history.
There is a dilemma that means educating the overseas students is never likely to be sufficient. If you tell an ex-pat how rotten you think their government is, they will probably defend it even if they would normally criticise it at home. A less sensitive example: there are very few Brits who are imperialist or who think non-democratic colonialism is a good thing; tell them how terrible you think the British Empire was, though, and they will defend it as being historically much more just and self-correcting than any of the other empires of the era. They don't really see it as you criticising a system, but see it as you belittling their people. So if you tell overseas Chinese students how bad the Chinese government is, depending on how you put it, they might not thank you for it. And they are unlikely to pass on your criticisms back home. Actually, for China it is worse than that: many Chinese students overseas are asked to monitor other Chinese students, to make sure they don't hang out with the wrong crowd, etc. So, even if a student is open to your criticism of his country, it can be personally a bit risky for him to hang out with groups that openly and vehemently criticise the government. The upshot is that it has to be handled sensitively, and it's unlikely we'll make much real progress until it is possible for Chinese people to criticise their government more openly at home, rather than abroad.
Actually no. The *only* difference between a religion and a cult is prominence/influence and/or state recognition as a 'religion'.
You are incorrect, no matter how many asterisks you try to reinforce your statement with. The usual test to distinguish between a religion and a cult (eg, the test used to regulate religious recruitment on campus where I am) is farily straightforward, and is not at all about numbers, nor beliefs, nor state recognition: it is about behaviour. Specifically, if an organisation as a matter of course pressures new members to sever links with family and friends who are not members, then it is classed as a cult; if it does not, it is not. Being a "cult" is about disassociating from society; it is not about what you believe happens to your consciousness when you die.
On the downside, whitewashed walls look butt ugly.
I disagree