I really only have 2 problems with their mice. First, the fact that they don't have two separate buttons means that you can't click button1 and button2 at the same time. This isn't much of a problem until you do something like place a FPS where button2 is used for aiming and button1 for firing, and you need to press them at the same time.
My second problem is specifically with the magic mouse, which is that it lacks a 3rd button. I find that, because the 3rd button is usually mapped in web browsers to opening links in new tabs, I use the 3rd button more than the second in my day-to-day computer use.
If they were moving it to Tuesdays or Wednesdays, then it's possible they were moving it to make room for something else. The fact that they moved it to Friday means that they pretty much intend to kill it. Friday night is where TV shows go to die.
Actually they just buy the DVDs. They often get special deals, so the DVDs are cheaper than if they bought normal retail versions. Still, if you're going to count the licensing fees for streaming, then you should figure in the entire cost of DVDs and not just postage. How much does it cost to buy the DVDs, to warehouse them all over the country, to send them out and then sort them when they come back in? How often do they have to replace DVDs that are scratched, broken, or lost?
And then compare that cost with the cost of streaming. Not just bandwidth, but building datacenters and servers, providing tech support, etc. And then what else goes into the equation? Does Sony pay Netflix something to support the PS3? Or does Netflix pay Sony something to support their app? Or is there no money/licensing involved there?
Why? Games are active participatory interactive devices.
Via remote control, sure. If you're a gamer, you're very accustomed to watching a character, under your limited control, be very participatory. You passively sit while a game provides you with a task and guidance to complete that task. A big arrow or a dot on your map tells you where to go, and you guide your character there. You press some buttons and your character completes the task for you. Meanwhile you yourself are doing practically nothing.
If you actually go out into the world and interact with real people, and you complete real tasks, the contrast is stark.
Sitting in a pub laughing and chatting, or siting in a room alone laughing and chatting over the internet.. The only difference is the physical proximity.
And that physical proximity can make a significant psychological difference. I'm sure you like to think of yourself as a completely reasonable and logical person, but our psychology isn't very simple. Atheists will often find themselves speaking in hushed tones when visiting a church, for example. Interacting with people, seeing the subtlety of facial expressions, smelling their scents, even brushing shoulders with someone creates a different social experience then a simple voice chat.
If these are one's ONLY social interaction. Then yes. There is a problem. Atypical behavior usually is. But the game causing the problem.. Sorry.. I don't buy it. A symptom.. Certainly. If taken to excess, agreed 100%.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying that gaming itself is so horrible that nobody should do it. Drinking, for example, can be a problem. That's not to say that nobody should drink, but when someone has a drinking problem, the "drinking" part is more than just a symptom. Drinking alcohol itself has negative effects on the body. It's a depressant, and can itself create a physical addiction. Drinking can cause a number of physical problems, including liver damage. Some people can handle the negative consequences and meanwhile derive benefit from other effects of drinking, but drinking itself certainly does have negative effects.
So my claim is only that gaming also often has negative psychological effects. It has some positive psychological effects too, but that doesn't mean the negative effects don't exist.
Or the search for the next piece when making a jigsaw, or the obsessive search for words that fit in a crossword puzzle. Games are repetitive. It is part of their nature.
Yes, there are many activities which can be a bit compulsive. I would say something similar about someone who spends a large amount of time on a regular basis putting puzzles together-- it's a bit of a compulsive act. That doesn't mean it's not the case with video games.
However, some games do seem to ramp up the addictive effect. They have some kind of interactive element that rewards simple repetitive action. When you learn to knit or to play an instrument, you're developing a skill (arguably a useful one) which only pays off when something real is accomplished. Some of these games, however, basically give you points for clicking on things with your mouse. Neither the skill of clicking with your mouse, nor the points earned, have any further utility. It's a psychological trick. If you give people a running score of some kind, they'll tend to want to drive it up even if it means nothing.
If I had no such outlet, what would I do with my anger? Do you think suppression is a healthy way of dealing with it?
Maybe you'd find a healthy way of dealing with your anger which is neither suppression nor creating an outlet. It's a side topic, but there are some psychological studies which suggest that "venting" anger-- either through actions or speech-- does not diminish anger. "Externalizing" anger in that way actually increases anger m
For example if I eat like a pig and can't stop eating nobody would ever say, "oh no problem there." Or if you read, read, and read, and read to the point where you drone out reality everybody would say, "oh there is a problem."
Of course, when eating or reading are connected with these sorts of problems, we don't usually have political groups suggesting that we ban books and stop children from eating. We don't blame the food and the books for the behavior of over-use.
I do suspect that video games often have some negative psychological effects, but I don't think violence is one of them. I don't think violent games make you violent, but rather I suspect that all games, violent and otherwise, tend to encourage passivity and isolation. Even social games (e.g. MMO games) result in people sitting alone in a room, not interacting directly with other people. Instead they have control of an avatar which has interactions with other avatars, which I suspect leads to a specific kind of alienation.
Also, many games work by encouraging compulsive behavior. Whether you're talking about the stacking of blocks in Tetris or the grinding for stats in a RPG, there are many video game activities that you can't really enjoy without being a little addicted.
developed by a two-bit company that almost no consumer before Google's buy out had every heard of.
That's overstating it a little. Whether you were explicitly aware of On2 or not, you probably had some exposure to their work before Google bought them. Theora was based off of their VP3 codec, and VP6 was their default codec for Flash for a little while until H264 became ubiquitous. A few years ago, most people hadn't heard of H263, either, but it was in wide use.
No, developers shouldn't simply take a poll and do whatever most users want. The majority can be wrong. There's a reason why saying something was "designed by committee" is a bad thing.
Now I'm not saying developers should ignore the needs of their users or literally tell users to "fuck themselves". If developers want to earn/keep a user base, they need to address the needs of those users. Still, developers are going to need to use their own judgement. Following user requests blindly will cause disaster.
I don't know, do you really have a quote from one of the major Mozilla developers that says, "Fuck the users"? Something like that? Or are you just assuming that's their attitude because they aren't giving you what you want?
Developers can't give everyone what they want. They have to make decisions based on a lot of different issues. In this case, I'd assume Mozilla is trying to manage limited development resources and develop a clean and consistent UI across all platforms that can also seem native within each OS. Devoting their time toward allowing complete customization to everyone's preferences would preclude other improvements, and the result would probably be a mess.
It's the nature of these things that the developers have to make some kind of decisions. Some users won't like those decisions. If they're actually saying "fuck the users," then I'm surprised and disappointed. If they're just trying their best to make Firefox better and some people like the changes while others don't, that just seems normal to me.
Well yeah, I think a large part of the reason that Aliens still worked pretty well is that it sort of reintroduced mystery by changing the nature of the monster. Instead of having another lone alien creeping in the darkness, you have an overwhelming army of aliens backed by an alien queen. At the beginning of the movie, you're back to being uncertain of the nature of the danger you're facing.
You can't just do that ad infinitum for several sequels, though. Adding more aliens doesn't do much, since you've already seen an overwhelming force of them. Making them overwhelming-er doesn't really change the nature of the danger. You also can't just put a little twist on things by mutating the monster a little, since you're not substantially changing the nature of the danger. You still pretty much understand what the monster is.
But even with as good a job as Aliens did in changing the nature of the danger, it still couldn't really be a horror movie to the same degree. I'd argue that Aliens worked not only because it was moderately successful in changing the horror elements, but it also made up for the horror shortcomings by becoming more of an action/adventure movie than the original was.
I don't think it applies to other genres as much as it applies to horror movies, though. A lot of what makes a movie scary is mystery and uncertainty. A monster is never as scary as when you don't see it, don't know what it is, and you have no idea how to protect yourself. By the time you hit a sequel, it's all old hat. You know what the monster is, you've gotten a good look at it, and you've seen someone stop it. It may be interesting or fun, but it will never give you the same sene of dread.
Because the developers said so, and like many other decisions, they couldn't care less what the users think
Or maybe they do care what users think, but not all users agree with you...?
If your complaint were simply, "I don't like the design," then I think I'd say, "fair enough." But you seem to be complaining that the developers are making design decisions about the project, as though it's somehow improper. Like they're supposed to just take a vote on everything, and literally design by committee? But it's not even that, it's more like you think the developers should cede their own tastes and judgement and do things the way you would personally like them to, and if they don't, then they're committing some abusive act.
Developers need to make decisions, and no, sometimes those decisions won't adhere exactly to your personal tastes. If you don't like the decisions, maybe you could get more involved? Or you could help to create a fork somehow? If all the users are really being alienated by these changes, then it should be possible to get a fork going. A lot of people didn't like it when Mozilla dropped the old suite, and so Seamonkey development has been going on this whole time.
Do you know why IT folks hate personal devices? It is because it isn't IT's. We cannot make rules over what you can or cannot do with your equipment. We can't tell you not to download spyware. We can't tell you not to let your teenage daughter install cute cursor packs. We can't make you buy decent (or any!) anti-virus or security software or force you to stay up-to-date with patches.
I agree that this is the problem. In short, we end up responsible for fixing it all no matter what.
You can say, "No, no! The employee will take responsibility for his own system!" But what happens when it's infected by a virus or somehow hacked because of improper precautions? Who's going to be responsible for fixing the problem? If the user can't save files anymore because every byte of their system is taken up with MP3s, who's going to have to clear off the hard drive? If a user getting paid $200/hour is not able to work for want of a $300 desktop computer, whose job will it be to resolve the issue?
Do you want the user to fix these problems? Good luck.
Or do you want me to fix all these problems? Then either let me control the situation, or else give me a huge staff to deal with the chaos that will ensue. The huge staff will cost you more than the money you'll save from not buying computers.
What if the reason you can afford gear better than your employer because your employer saves a bunch of money by not-upgrading gear that's working perfectly fine, and instead dumps that money into your salary?
Well I think Jelly is made of fruit juice but no actual fruit bits. If you put fruit bits in it (mashed up and whatnot), then it's jam. Marmalade is specifically jam of a citrus fruit, which generally includes the peel but I'm not sure it has to.
Yeah, I agree. It's strange to support "freedom" by diminishing choices.
By being so quick to take sides in these arguments, I think some people miss that this just *is* a problem. Everyone wants to say, "why don't we just do this?" and seem oblivious to the problems that might be caused. h264 is open, but it also has patent issues, but on the other hand it's widely used and widely supported. Flash isn't going away until content owners settle on some kind of DRM for HTML5 streaming. WebM is new, isn't widely supported yet, and may (or may not) have some patent issues down the line.
And what's a bit silly is that everyone wants to talk about this like it's a technical issue-- an issue of which format is "better". It's really a confluence of technical, legal, economic, and social issues, and I don't think it'll be wrapped up without some drastic changes in how we deal with content.
That's fair to a certain point, but ultimately you want to protect yourself as much as possible. An accountant can cook the books for a while before anyone notices, but that's why people have audits.
Well whether or not you want there to be a national ID per se, I do think we could do much better in identity verification. SSN should absolutely not be used as identity verification. Knowing my social security number and my mother's maiden name should not give you access to my bank account.
Well if they could make an Xbox360 cheaper by getting rid of the gaming components and focusing on video offerings (Hulu Plus, Netflix, etc), then maybe it would make enough additional sales to warrant development.
Fair enough, but if you really want to be able to modify your phone, be careful about which Android phone you get. Many are pretty locked-down, and having an open-source operating system doesn't necessarily mean that the device will be open.
This conclusion that scientists are converging on "some objective truth" seems premature. If it's getting harder to make new discoveries, that would only indicate that we're reaching the limits of our possible knowledge and understanding. That the limits of our understanding will be "objective truth" should not be taken for granted.
I don't think science is about achieving an "objective" understanding anyway. I'd sooner say that the purpose is to create an effective understanding that enables us to do things. The way an engineer designs a machine, a scientist designs a model of phenomenon.
It depends on the software you're using. I've had problems with major software packages Windows or Adobe Creative Suite, but they're usually more rare and they're usually resolved more easily. Where I've seen more problems is in more specialty professional software. You know, the sort of stuff that you'd never use if you weren't a professional engineer doing something a consumer wouldn't do. That stuff is the worst.
But yeah, I've had problems with major software packages. Part of the problem is that I've always treated systems like they were interchangeable. If someone's computer is having problems, I'll yank the hard drive and put it into another system; if the hardware is different, I'll install the drivers. Obviously this is going to run afoul of activation sometimes. I also make heavy use of imaging.
Yeah, you can say, "Well don't do that! Or if you're going to do that, you can make a bunch of adjustments that will make it less likely to set off the DRM..." Really, though, it shouldn't be a problem. More specifically, I don't think it should be *my* problem, since it's not a problem without "activation".
As a result, I've stuck with Windows XP and Adobe CS2, and I'm going to continue staying with those versions. I would upgrade to the latest versions of each of these programs if I didn't fear activation complications.
My network at work is mostly Windows machines (a couple Macs and a couple Linux machines). I use Windows XP volume licensing. I won't be upgrading because of activation. Like I said, anecdotally, it's costing some sales.
Honestly, even as an administrator, I often like GUIs. If you have a list of check-boxes, drop-boxes, and radio-buttons, it's very easy to quickly assess what options are available and what their current states are, and then change their states from the same view. There may be some tools and services where I'm already very familiar with all the possible options, but I don't know everything.
That said, of course CLIs are still vital. I can live with a good CLI and no GUI. The other way around causes problems as soon as I want to script anything.
God, I really don't know how developers get away with "activation". I have had so many fricken problems with activation over the years that I basically won't buy or install software that requires it. So first, right there, it's costing sales. Of course I can't say for sure that it costs more sales than it creates, but I can tell you anecdotally that multiple companies have lost sales to me because of their activation policies.
Second, in a strange way it's actually encouraged piracy to some degree. At my last company, I had a bunch of programs that required activation and were really finicky about deactivation and activation on a new computer. Uninstalling from one computer and reinstalling on another usually required a 45 minute phonecall to the developer. Worse, with one of the applications, the developer refused to support that version of the software anymore. If we wanted to move the licenses, we'd have to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade to the most recent version, which also required updating other expensive software (it was a plugin).
Luckily, most of the software that required activation didn't do a good job of detecting when you moved the hard drive into a new machine. Since I couldn't uninstall or reinstall that software when I needed to, my solution was to create a single image with the remaining activations that I had, and then use that image as a standard desktop image. So yeah, I had a bunch more installs than I had licenses. I wouldn't have done it if not for the activation scheme, and I don't think it mattered (morally) since we always had fewer people using the software than we owned licenses for it.
So yeah, I totally agree with your #11, but I would probably put it at #1. No software activation.
Well a couple of things. First, Windows' success created a software monoculture. Forgetting any particular security problems in Windows itself, monoculture is bad for security. If everyone is running the same software, then any security vulnerabilities that software has is shared by everyone. This means that virus authors can write a single virus to attack everyone, and viruses will spread better because everyone is vulnerable. Like a real virus, it won't spread very well it a large portion of the population is immune.
But also it's true that Windows used to be a very vulnerable operating system. The old Windows 9x versions were not really concerned with security at all. The Windows NT versions were better, but it wasn't until Windows Vista that Microsoft really started focusing on security as a serious issue.
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I really only have 2 problems with their mice. First, the fact that they don't have two separate buttons means that you can't click button1 and button2 at the same time. This isn't much of a problem until you do something like place a FPS where button2 is used for aiming and button1 for firing, and you need to press them at the same time.
My second problem is specifically with the magic mouse, which is that it lacks a 3rd button. I find that, because the 3rd button is usually mapped in web browsers to opening links in new tabs, I use the 3rd button more than the second in my day-to-day computer use.
If they were moving it to Tuesdays or Wednesdays, then it's possible they were moving it to make room for something else. The fact that they moved it to Friday means that they pretty much intend to kill it. Friday night is where TV shows go to die.
Actually they just buy the DVDs. They often get special deals, so the DVDs are cheaper than if they bought normal retail versions. Still, if you're going to count the licensing fees for streaming, then you should figure in the entire cost of DVDs and not just postage. How much does it cost to buy the DVDs, to warehouse them all over the country, to send them out and then sort them when they come back in? How often do they have to replace DVDs that are scratched, broken, or lost?
And then compare that cost with the cost of streaming. Not just bandwidth, but building datacenters and servers, providing tech support, etc. And then what else goes into the equation? Does Sony pay Netflix something to support the PS3? Or does Netflix pay Sony something to support their app? Or is there no money/licensing involved there?
Why? Games are active participatory interactive devices.
Via remote control, sure. If you're a gamer, you're very accustomed to watching a character, under your limited control, be very participatory. You passively sit while a game provides you with a task and guidance to complete that task. A big arrow or a dot on your map tells you where to go, and you guide your character there. You press some buttons and your character completes the task for you. Meanwhile you yourself are doing practically nothing.
If you actually go out into the world and interact with real people, and you complete real tasks, the contrast is stark.
Sitting in a pub laughing and chatting, or siting in a room alone laughing and chatting over the internet.. The only difference is the physical proximity.
And that physical proximity can make a significant psychological difference. I'm sure you like to think of yourself as a completely reasonable and logical person, but our psychology isn't very simple. Atheists will often find themselves speaking in hushed tones when visiting a church, for example. Interacting with people, seeing the subtlety of facial expressions, smelling their scents, even brushing shoulders with someone creates a different social experience then a simple voice chat.
If these are one's ONLY social interaction. Then yes. There is a problem. Atypical behavior usually is. But the game causing the problem.. Sorry.. I don't buy it. A symptom.. Certainly. If taken to excess, agreed 100%.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying that gaming itself is so horrible that nobody should do it. Drinking, for example, can be a problem. That's not to say that nobody should drink, but when someone has a drinking problem, the "drinking" part is more than just a symptom. Drinking alcohol itself has negative effects on the body. It's a depressant, and can itself create a physical addiction. Drinking can cause a number of physical problems, including liver damage. Some people can handle the negative consequences and meanwhile derive benefit from other effects of drinking, but drinking itself certainly does have negative effects.
So my claim is only that gaming also often has negative psychological effects. It has some positive psychological effects too, but that doesn't mean the negative effects don't exist.
Or the search for the next piece when making a jigsaw, or the obsessive search for words that fit in a crossword puzzle. Games are repetitive. It is part of their nature.
Yes, there are many activities which can be a bit compulsive. I would say something similar about someone who spends a large amount of time on a regular basis putting puzzles together-- it's a bit of a compulsive act. That doesn't mean it's not the case with video games.
However, some games do seem to ramp up the addictive effect. They have some kind of interactive element that rewards simple repetitive action. When you learn to knit or to play an instrument, you're developing a skill (arguably a useful one) which only pays off when something real is accomplished. Some of these games, however, basically give you points for clicking on things with your mouse. Neither the skill of clicking with your mouse, nor the points earned, have any further utility. It's a psychological trick. If you give people a running score of some kind, they'll tend to want to drive it up even if it means nothing.
If I had no such outlet, what would I do with my anger? Do you think suppression is a healthy way of dealing with it?
Maybe you'd find a healthy way of dealing with your anger which is neither suppression nor creating an outlet. It's a side topic, but there are some psychological studies which suggest that "venting" anger-- either through actions or speech-- does not diminish anger. "Externalizing" anger in that way actually increases anger m
For example if I eat like a pig and can't stop eating nobody would ever say, "oh no problem there." Or if you read, read, and read, and read to the point where you drone out reality everybody would say, "oh there is a problem."
Of course, when eating or reading are connected with these sorts of problems, we don't usually have political groups suggesting that we ban books and stop children from eating. We don't blame the food and the books for the behavior of over-use.
I do suspect that video games often have some negative psychological effects, but I don't think violence is one of them. I don't think violent games make you violent, but rather I suspect that all games, violent and otherwise, tend to encourage passivity and isolation. Even social games (e.g. MMO games) result in people sitting alone in a room, not interacting directly with other people. Instead they have control of an avatar which has interactions with other avatars, which I suspect leads to a specific kind of alienation.
Also, many games work by encouraging compulsive behavior. Whether you're talking about the stacking of blocks in Tetris or the grinding for stats in a RPG, there are many video game activities that you can't really enjoy without being a little addicted.
developed by a two-bit company that almost no consumer before Google's buy out had every heard of.
That's overstating it a little. Whether you were explicitly aware of On2 or not, you probably had some exposure to their work before Google bought them. Theora was based off of their VP3 codec, and VP6 was their default codec for Flash for a little while until H264 became ubiquitous. A few years ago, most people hadn't heard of H263, either, but it was in wide use.
No, developers shouldn't simply take a poll and do whatever most users want. The majority can be wrong. There's a reason why saying something was "designed by committee" is a bad thing.
Now I'm not saying developers should ignore the needs of their users or literally tell users to "fuck themselves". If developers want to earn/keep a user base, they need to address the needs of those users. Still, developers are going to need to use their own judgement. Following user requests blindly will cause disaster.
I don't know, do you really have a quote from one of the major Mozilla developers that says, "Fuck the users"? Something like that? Or are you just assuming that's their attitude because they aren't giving you what you want?
Developers can't give everyone what they want. They have to make decisions based on a lot of different issues. In this case, I'd assume Mozilla is trying to manage limited development resources and develop a clean and consistent UI across all platforms that can also seem native within each OS. Devoting their time toward allowing complete customization to everyone's preferences would preclude other improvements, and the result would probably be a mess.
It's the nature of these things that the developers have to make some kind of decisions. Some users won't like those decisions. If they're actually saying "fuck the users," then I'm surprised and disappointed. If they're just trying their best to make Firefox better and some people like the changes while others don't, that just seems normal to me.
Well yeah, I think a large part of the reason that Aliens still worked pretty well is that it sort of reintroduced mystery by changing the nature of the monster. Instead of having another lone alien creeping in the darkness, you have an overwhelming army of aliens backed by an alien queen. At the beginning of the movie, you're back to being uncertain of the nature of the danger you're facing.
You can't just do that ad infinitum for several sequels, though. Adding more aliens doesn't do much, since you've already seen an overwhelming force of them. Making them overwhelming-er doesn't really change the nature of the danger. You also can't just put a little twist on things by mutating the monster a little, since you're not substantially changing the nature of the danger. You still pretty much understand what the monster is.
But even with as good a job as Aliens did in changing the nature of the danger, it still couldn't really be a horror movie to the same degree. I'd argue that Aliens worked not only because it was moderately successful in changing the horror elements, but it also made up for the horror shortcomings by becoming more of an action/adventure movie than the original was.
I don't think it applies to other genres as much as it applies to horror movies, though. A lot of what makes a movie scary is mystery and uncertainty. A monster is never as scary as when you don't see it, don't know what it is, and you have no idea how to protect yourself. By the time you hit a sequel, it's all old hat. You know what the monster is, you've gotten a good look at it, and you've seen someone stop it. It may be interesting or fun, but it will never give you the same sene of dread.
Because the developers said so, and like many other decisions, they couldn't care less what the users think
Or maybe they do care what users think, but not all users agree with you...?
If your complaint were simply, "I don't like the design," then I think I'd say, "fair enough." But you seem to be complaining that the developers are making design decisions about the project, as though it's somehow improper. Like they're supposed to just take a vote on everything, and literally design by committee? But it's not even that, it's more like you think the developers should cede their own tastes and judgement and do things the way you would personally like them to, and if they don't, then they're committing some abusive act.
Developers need to make decisions, and no, sometimes those decisions won't adhere exactly to your personal tastes. If you don't like the decisions, maybe you could get more involved? Or you could help to create a fork somehow? If all the users are really being alienated by these changes, then it should be possible to get a fork going. A lot of people didn't like it when Mozilla dropped the old suite, and so Seamonkey development has been going on this whole time.
Do you know why IT folks hate personal devices? It is because it isn't IT's. We cannot make rules over what you can or cannot do with your equipment. We can't tell you not to download spyware. We can't tell you not to let your teenage daughter install cute cursor packs. We can't make you buy decent (or any!) anti-virus or security software or force you to stay up-to-date with patches.
I agree that this is the problem. In short, we end up responsible for fixing it all no matter what.
You can say, "No, no! The employee will take responsibility for his own system!" But what happens when it's infected by a virus or somehow hacked because of improper precautions? Who's going to be responsible for fixing the problem? If the user can't save files anymore because every byte of their system is taken up with MP3s, who's going to have to clear off the hard drive? If a user getting paid $200/hour is not able to work for want of a $300 desktop computer, whose job will it be to resolve the issue?
Do you want the user to fix these problems? Good luck.
Or do you want me to fix all these problems? Then either let me control the situation, or else give me a huge staff to deal with the chaos that will ensue. The huge staff will cost you more than the money you'll save from not buying computers.
What if the reason you can afford gear better than your employer because your employer saves a bunch of money by not-upgrading gear that's working perfectly fine, and instead dumps that money into your salary?
Still need to get a better employer?
Well I think Jelly is made of fruit juice but no actual fruit bits. If you put fruit bits in it (mashed up and whatnot), then it's jam. Marmalade is specifically jam of a citrus fruit, which generally includes the peel but I'm not sure it has to.
Yeah, I agree. It's strange to support "freedom" by diminishing choices.
By being so quick to take sides in these arguments, I think some people miss that this just *is* a problem. Everyone wants to say, "why don't we just do this?" and seem oblivious to the problems that might be caused. h264 is open, but it also has patent issues, but on the other hand it's widely used and widely supported. Flash isn't going away until content owners settle on some kind of DRM for HTML5 streaming. WebM is new, isn't widely supported yet, and may (or may not) have some patent issues down the line.
And what's a bit silly is that everyone wants to talk about this like it's a technical issue-- an issue of which format is "better". It's really a confluence of technical, legal, economic, and social issues, and I don't think it'll be wrapped up without some drastic changes in how we deal with content.
That's fair to a certain point, but ultimately you want to protect yourself as much as possible. An accountant can cook the books for a while before anyone notices, but that's why people have audits.
Well whether or not you want there to be a national ID per se, I do think we could do much better in identity verification. SSN should absolutely not be used as identity verification. Knowing my social security number and my mother's maiden name should not give you access to my bank account.
Well if they could make an Xbox360 cheaper by getting rid of the gaming components and focusing on video offerings (Hulu Plus, Netflix, etc), then maybe it would make enough additional sales to warrant development.
Fair enough, but if you really want to be able to modify your phone, be careful about which Android phone you get. Many are pretty locked-down, and having an open-source operating system doesn't necessarily mean that the device will be open.
This conclusion that scientists are converging on "some objective truth" seems premature. If it's getting harder to make new discoveries, that would only indicate that we're reaching the limits of our possible knowledge and understanding. That the limits of our understanding will be "objective truth" should not be taken for granted.
I don't think science is about achieving an "objective" understanding anyway. I'd sooner say that the purpose is to create an effective understanding that enables us to do things. The way an engineer designs a machine, a scientist designs a model of phenomenon.
It depends on the software you're using. I've had problems with major software packages Windows or Adobe Creative Suite, but they're usually more rare and they're usually resolved more easily. Where I've seen more problems is in more specialty professional software. You know, the sort of stuff that you'd never use if you weren't a professional engineer doing something a consumer wouldn't do. That stuff is the worst.
But yeah, I've had problems with major software packages. Part of the problem is that I've always treated systems like they were interchangeable. If someone's computer is having problems, I'll yank the hard drive and put it into another system; if the hardware is different, I'll install the drivers. Obviously this is going to run afoul of activation sometimes. I also make heavy use of imaging.
Yeah, you can say, "Well don't do that! Or if you're going to do that, you can make a bunch of adjustments that will make it less likely to set off the DRM..." Really, though, it shouldn't be a problem. More specifically, I don't think it should be *my* problem, since it's not a problem without "activation".
As a result, I've stuck with Windows XP and Adobe CS2, and I'm going to continue staying with those versions. I would upgrade to the latest versions of each of these programs if I didn't fear activation complications.
My network at work is mostly Windows machines (a couple Macs and a couple Linux machines). I use Windows XP volume licensing. I won't be upgrading because of activation. Like I said, anecdotally, it's costing some sales.
Honestly, even as an administrator, I often like GUIs. If you have a list of check-boxes, drop-boxes, and radio-buttons, it's very easy to quickly assess what options are available and what their current states are, and then change their states from the same view. There may be some tools and services where I'm already very familiar with all the possible options, but I don't know everything.
That said, of course CLIs are still vital. I can live with a good CLI and no GUI. The other way around causes problems as soon as I want to script anything.
#11: NO DRM, dammit!
God, I really don't know how developers get away with "activation". I have had so many fricken problems with activation over the years that I basically won't buy or install software that requires it. So first, right there, it's costing sales. Of course I can't say for sure that it costs more sales than it creates, but I can tell you anecdotally that multiple companies have lost sales to me because of their activation policies.
Second, in a strange way it's actually encouraged piracy to some degree. At my last company, I had a bunch of programs that required activation and were really finicky about deactivation and activation on a new computer. Uninstalling from one computer and reinstalling on another usually required a 45 minute phonecall to the developer. Worse, with one of the applications, the developer refused to support that version of the software anymore. If we wanted to move the licenses, we'd have to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade to the most recent version, which also required updating other expensive software (it was a plugin).
Luckily, most of the software that required activation didn't do a good job of detecting when you moved the hard drive into a new machine. Since I couldn't uninstall or reinstall that software when I needed to, my solution was to create a single image with the remaining activations that I had, and then use that image as a standard desktop image. So yeah, I had a bunch more installs than I had licenses. I wouldn't have done it if not for the activation scheme, and I don't think it mattered (morally) since we always had fewer people using the software than we owned licenses for it.
So yeah, I totally agree with your #11, but I would probably put it at #1. No software activation.
Well a couple of things. First, Windows' success created a software monoculture. Forgetting any particular security problems in Windows itself, monoculture is bad for security. If everyone is running the same software, then any security vulnerabilities that software has is shared by everyone. This means that virus authors can write a single virus to attack everyone, and viruses will spread better because everyone is vulnerable. Like a real virus, it won't spread very well it a large portion of the population is immune.
But also it's true that Windows used to be a very vulnerable operating system. The old Windows 9x versions were not really concerned with security at all. The Windows NT versions were better, but it wasn't until Windows Vista that Microsoft really started focusing on security as a serious issue.