Right, but the point is, the common "lowly user" is equally powerless in each case. They can't rewrite the code, they can't afford to hire someone else to rewrite the code. The issue is, which does what I want/need better fresh out of the box?
Now I'm not saying that won't be OpenOffice. It might be OpenOffice. But if it's not, it's going to be cheaper to buy Office than to pay developers to rewrite OpenOffice for you.
The most you can do in either case to get a change made is to submit feedback and hope for the best. Now I know Microsoft brings "lowly users" into their labs, studies how they use computers, ask for feedback, and use that research in their development. Is OpenOffice doing all that?
Great, but let's say I'm just a lowly "user". I'm not a developer and not the Israeli government. Now what? Dip into my personal savings, come up with a few hundred thousand dollars to pay a team of developers to make OpenOffice load quickly on my Mac? Or maybe just pay $80 for an iWork license?
I feel like I've had this exact argument before. It's not FUD. FOSS is great in many ways and I use it all the time. But the question was asked, "Why do people try FOSS and go back to proprietary software?"
At least part of the answer is that developers are often paying attention to their own needs (or to their employer's needs) and not necessarily everyday users' needs. To the extent FOSS has made progress in user adoption (and it's made quite a lot, actually), I think it's because you get people like Mark Shuttleworth, who has seems to have put some focus on making Linux prettier and more user-friendly (though I still can't get behind the orange/brown color scheme).
Now if you're a developer, you can very well take the stance that the program is serving your purposes and you don't care about users. Fine, then don't complain about everyone using proprietary alternatives rather than your software.
But if you were to ask how FOSS developers can attract and keep users, my advice to a lot of these projects would be, "Get better at soliciting and responding to feedback." You want to stop people from dropping OpenOffice and buying MS Office? Go ask a bunch of non-technical heavy Office users what they don't like about OpenOffice. You want to get more people to use the GIMP? Go talk to graphic designers ranging from "professional" to "amateur" and see what they have to say about the GIMP; take their responses seriously. If you want to know why people are still buying Soundforge instead of using Audacity for free, then find a way to hunt down some Soundforge customers.
I guarantee you that there are reasons other than FUD. But if you're some random individual person, it's generally going to be easier, cheaper, and less trouble to buy a proprietary alternative than to hire a team of programmers to build you the application you want.
This is an example where a community effort concentrates on solving the *technical* problem and forgets that there's a real, on the ground problem that needs to be solved as well, that may or may not be totally technical in nature.
Yeah, for a long time I've thought that part of the problem is (and sorry about this, I know it will rub some people the wrong way) that FOSS is being developed almost solely by developers. I'm sure that sounds silly, but there are a lot of problems that I think stem from this.
First, there's the expectation that if something breaks or something isn't working for you, you can just "fix it". Now this might mean anything from editing a configuration file to rewriting the code, which is far above a lot of people's heads. Plus, as you mention, sometimes it seems like developers focus on some technical aspect of the problem while ignoring the end-user aspect. It's great that ODF is an open format, but it doesn't really work as a universal file format if every program has a different implementation.
But I think there's also a subtler problem, one which, sorry, I'm probably going to do a bad job explaining but I hope you'll bear with me. The problem is that if you're a great brilliant technical developer, you're not going to even think about how to make your program simple. It's sort of a "not seeing the forrest for the trees" problem. You're going to be so smart about understanding all the complicated things your program does, and so well-versed at everything that can be done with your program, that you're not going to be able to understand what a new user will be thinking when he first approaches your program. You're just too close to the problem.
Now that probably still isn't clear, but have you ever tried to write out a complicated explanation, reread the explanation 50 times and had it make perfect sense to you? And what happens when you hand it off to someone else to proofread? They find a bunch of obvious typos and they come up with a bunch of questions (at least that's what happens to me). And then you suddenly realize that your mind was jumping over all the missing steps in your argument and all your typos because you had read it so many times and you knew what it was supposed to say. You weren't really even reading the explanation you wrote anymore, you were just replaying in your mind what you intended to write.
I think lots of technical things can be like this, and I feel like FOSS developers kind of get into this state where they're only seeing the program they meant to put out, and they're seeing how they're using their own software, but they have trouble coming at it fresh.
I mean, I'm not new to computers or system administration, but sometimes I open up a configuration file or read a new program's man page and think, "now what the hell is going on here?" Even in the same distribution, syntax and conventions flip around now and then. Accomplishing one simple and common thing might require changing multiple settings in multiple places, maybe even in different configuration files. The assumption is, I think, that you're not going to want to run a Linux server unless you're a genius who spends his whole day doing sysadmin work. And sysadmin stuff is one of the more well-travelled and refined areas of FOSS. What chance does something like GIMP have, where the developers might be such a different demographic than the potential users?
Honestly, I use various kinds of FOSS all the time, because it's often still easier for me than dealing with proprietary stuff, but I still see the problem. At work, on my Windows box, I'll often use Word instead of OpenOffice. Why? Just because OpenOffice takes a long-ass time to load up. Sure, there are also some formatting problems and I think OpenOffice is a bit uglier than word, but mostly it comes down to how long it takes to load the program and open a document.
So this is mostly just my opinion, but I think the solution (assuming you want t
Well I'd put the problem more generally as: people don't divide cleanly into "nice people who are always wrong" and "jerks who are always right". Jerks are often the people who *think* they're always right, but often are wrong quite a lot. "Nice people" are sometimes secretly jerks who think they're always right, and the niceness is just a form of condescension. But no one is right all the time, and a lot of times there really isn't even a "right answer" so much as "the best answer we can come up with right now."
A lot of it really ends up being a matter of degrees. Would I tolerate a little bit of assholishness for some real brilliance? Sure. But after a certain point, you can be too much of an asshole to be worth it. Along with everything else, being actually often means you *aren't* right. If you're causing interpersonal problems on a team, creating more work for everyone else, and making everyone else hate working with you, then you're kind of doing the wrong things.
Plus, there are enough people out there who are competent and at least decently nice. It's not really a choice you have to make all the time.
There's actually a bigger problem that's more subtle and complex: it's not clear we would even be able to build anything that we could genuinely call "intelligence" without first giving basic drives and emotions.
This is a strange thought for some people, specifically people who think that the intellect runs on its own with no interference from emotions and animal drives, but there's no indication that intelligence can emerge without those drives. Just think about how intelligence emerges in humans; it doesn't pop out of nowhere. We begin as creatures who are all drive and no intelligence, but with the potentiality to learn. Babies don't learn to speak because they're taught, and they don't learn to speak from simply being around speech. They learn to speak because it's a way for them to get what they want. It's often the case that their first words are things like "mommy" or "bottle", which are things the child wants. They learn that by making those sounds, they can get someone to come and give them want they want, and the process goes from there.
So if you don't want to program each of the responses that a program will give, you have to give it both the potential to learn and a drive to learn. Whatever drives you give it, it will only persue that drive. If you want to give it complex "intelligent" behavior, then you have to give it not only a complex set of drives, but the ability to make semi-arbitrary decisions based on incomplete information. In other words, you have to allow it to act from desire and behave emotionally. We'd just better watch out what kind of drives we give it.
As I mentioned, if it's solely about the cost, Microsoft is perfectly happy to make Windows cheap for educational users. Sometimes, even to the point where it's 'free' as in beer.
"Somestimes" eh? How many times do you think Ubuntu is "free" as in beer?
Plus, as I'm sure has been repeated to you many times, most of the cost in software is not licensing costs, but continuing operating costs. Ultimately, the cost issue is very minor.
So you're saying TCO for Linux is higher? Please, show me hard evidence of that by someone not funded by Microsoft. The cost issue may be very minor for you if you have money. If you're not so rich and taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans already, you might not like being asked to spend thousands more on software and textbooks which could very easily be free.
First, show me the numbers. Tell me how much it would cost a school to add Ubuntu support in addition to Windows and OSX, and give me the source of your numbers because I'm not going to take it on faith.
Second, if you have to choose on OS, I think that OS should be a free one. If you're rich enough to pay for Windows and Office, then go ahead and pay someone for support. Offer the free support to Ubuntu and OpenOffice, and lets drive the price of college down a little. Anyone who has a Windows machine and wants support can switch to Linux for free, after all, but Linux users can't switch to Windows for free.
Or maybe they have more important things to worry about than an ideological debate that, ultimately, nobody except zealots on either side actually care about?
It's not zealotry. I'm not a zealot. To me, this isn't even about "free" in the sense of ideology, but it's about making education "cheap" as in $$$. As a society, we should be using open source software in education and open source textbooks so that we can make education cheaper.
But sorry, I forgot that our schools aren't designed to educate ourselves. They're supposed to milk rich mommies and daddies who send their kids off to join frats, get drunk, and go to football games.
Most colleges would allow a linux installation but are unprepared to provide support to every possible linux variation and configuration
I don't think it's as simple as what the helpdesk will support or allow, but also what the classes will support in their instructions and expectations. For example, if you take a statistics course, will they expect you to have a spreadsheet program? Will they expect that program to be Excel? Will they offer instruction on how to use Excel, and if so will they also offer instructions for OpenOffice? Will they require you to use Excel add-ons that don't work with OpenOffice?
Even if they don't support every variation of Linux/BSD, it seems to me that colleges should try to support free software in order to ease the financial burden they place on students. College costs are outrageous already.
Unless she intends to pick a job in the future based on whether they use Linux, then whether the University supports it is probably a moot issue. It's like having cable TV, or private bathrooms, or a pool table in your particular dorm. Nice to have, but not essential.
I wouldn't think it's comparable to cable TV or pool tables at all. Pool tables are for fun. If my kid wants to play on a pool table, he can find a bar to go play. Supporting Linux and OpenOffice is a horse of a different color.
Here's the thing: education is very expensive already without making it more expensive unnecessarily. Why should students be forced to spend hundreds of dollars on software licensing when perfectly good alternatives are free? In my mind, supporting free software and developing open source textbooks should be among the goals of any modern university. That both of these things aren't prioritized tells me that these schools are run by people who are either corrupt or clueless. Well, or maybe just apathetic and not very good.
Another scenario is that files associated in Photoshop sent to you on your machine without Photoshop have to open in something compatible to view them, no?
I think in those circumstances, OSX is smart enough to figure it out. Like if I created a JPEG with Photoshop and associated the file with Photoshop, and then I sent it to you and you didn't have Photoshop, it would just use whatever your default JPEG viewer was.
If, for instance, you prefer one graphics program for editing.jpgs and a different one for viewing them you are now screwed. You can either set.jpgs to open in one, or the other...
Well not exactly. You can still have your default jpeg viewer be Preview, and still have only particular jpegs open in Photoshop. That's easy enough to accomplish. The difference is just that jpegs saved in Photoshop are not automatically associated with Photoshop regardless of the default that the user has set.
And it's not that I fail to recognize how it might be useful to have jpegs created in photoshop always open in Photoshop, automatically. It's just that I don't think it's a very sensible way to handle things. If I really want to use Photoshop most of the time, I can set that as my default jpeg viewer. If I have particular files that I'm opening all the time and want to open them in Photoshop, I can set that manually on a per-file basis. However, when I set a default viewing application for a particular file-type, it's nice for that decision to be honored by the OS.
I think I read from the article that there's a way to set it for all existing files, although I think it's a total PITA method.
Sure, but I don't want to continually set the proper application for a given file-type. I want to set one default, and have the OS respect that decision unless I manually set a different application for a particular document. I think that's the proper behavior.
The extra information was a stupid extra step. "Word document" is all the OS needs in order to figure out how to open it.
Well actually OSX still lets you set the proper application to open on a per-document basis, and it's kind of handy. AFAIK, what happens if you put a Word document on a computer that doesn't have word, but has OO.o, OSX will read the part that says, "open me in Word" and say, "Well I don't have Word but I have OO.o, so I'll open you in that instead." So there's no problem.
However, let's say you have both OpenOffice and Word installed on the same machine, and 9 times out of 10 you want to open your Word documents in OpenOffice, but you have that 1 document out of 10 that doesn't display properly in OpenOffice and you want to preserve the current layout. What's actually kind of nice IMO is that you can say, "I want my default to be to open all Word documents in OpenOffice, but I can set this one individual file to open in Word." And then the OS will open each document in the correct viewer when you double-click on it, automatically. It works great.
So what's being talked about here is that it has typically been set in the past so that, regardless of your default application, documents were set to open in whatever application you saved/created them in. So it's like lets say OpenOffice is my default application but I create a new document in Word. The old behavior is that document would automatically be set to open in Word when you double-click on it instead of OpenOffice, even though OpenOffice is your default application. It makes a certain amount of sense to do it that way, since you may have done layout work in Word that won't render properly in OpenOffice.
However, I personally want to set a default application for each file-type, and then only have them use a different application if I manually set them to do so.
Just to explain this, for me where I really think this is an issue is not text as much as graphics. I work with graphics and often enough, the application that created the graphics is Photoshop. However, I never want to actually open the file in Photoshop unless I actually want to edit it. Why open a JPEG in photoshop when it's going to take a full minute to load?
So I've set Preview to be the default application for viewing graphics, but still, any graphics I make in photoshop are set to open in Photoshop. If Snow Leopard is going to ignore that it was made in Photoshop and open it in Preview instead, as I've set the OS to do, that seems like a "bug fix" to me.
On the other hand, you could argue that Apple is protecting users from developers who say, "We know what's best for you. We're making it just work. Now just sit back and drink your kool aid."
If I want my text documents to open in BBEdit, I'll set them to open in BBEdit thankyouverymuch. I set my default for them to open in something else, and that's the way I want it.
A somewhat recent example of how copyright can hinder story creation is in the series "Star Trek - The Next Generation." In an early season they did an episode featuring Dr. Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories. Due to copyright issues they had to wait years before they could do a follow-up story featuring the character.
This is another problem with copyright-- that it doesn't just protect particular stories, but that it protects characters and settings and comes dangerously close sometimes to protecting ideas. Like not only could I not write my own story about Superman or Metropolis without getting sued, but I even have to be careful about writing about a very similar character. But then, of course, Superman himself was modeled on previous characters, since that's how writing works.
Part of the problem is that we conceptualize creativity badly. We think that the history of creative consists of people coming up with entirely new stories all the time. I'd say the history of writing consists mainly of people retelling the same stories over and over again, with new perspectives and different twists.
Yeah, I wasn't saying that they wouldn't/couldn't make money if copyright ceased to exist. It's just a valid sort of question to ask, "How do we expect them to make money? By what particular means does it make sense for writers/artists to make money in the modern age?" It may be that artists make a living the way they did in the Renaissance, or it may be that we can come up with something better.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Is that a myth because no one will steal your idea even if you don't protect it, or is it a myth because people will find a way to steal your idea anyway?
I think we can almost take it for granted that current copyright policy is damaging to our cultural development. How could it not be to have all our creative expression tied up and limited based on whether or not someone created something similar? However, whenever the whole issue gets raised, questions get quashed by talking about "the economy" and economic benefits bestowed on certain groups by copyright.
Those are certainly issues to think about. By what means would authors and songwriters make money if copyright ceased on exist, or even was much more limited? What happens to all the jobs created by the publishing industry, the music industry, and the movie industry? It's particularly a concern in the US because we don't manufacture very much anymore, and a lot of what we export are our ideas and creative works.
On the other hand, what almost no one talks about is the economic waste generated by all this. The broken window fallacy doesn't just apply to damage, but it applies to all money that need not be spent. How much money do businesses spend figuring out copyright issues, dealing with lawyers to protect copyrights or to defend against copyright lawsuits? How much more cheaply could Google do this indexing if the restrictions were eased? If movies and music and books were cheaper, then we would have the extra money in our pockets to spend on other things.
We keep hearing about how much money is "generated" by creative industries, and how big a portion of our economy they represent. The information is always offered as evidence that these industries need to be protected, because of the economic damage caused by loss of jobs and loss of profit. However, there's a flip-side to that coin. All that money they're making is coming from somewhere. I'm not claiming it's a zero-sum game because it's not that simple, but for all the billions of dollars these industries make, there's a question of how that money would be spent and where it would go if the government weren't actively protecting fat profit margins for these business models.
To be perfectly honest, most people don't really need a college eduction. The thing is, our society seems to make more and more people take college classes. When people have no real use for the classes, the natural outcome is degree mills and cheaper education.
I think another part of the problem is it turns the rest of education into "college preparation" instead of real education. Right now, I'm almost inclined to say we want everyone to go to college, but the reason for that being that education all the way up through high school isn't much of an education. We've lowered our standards so far that we consider the ideal high school kid one who behaves himself, and we don't give any kind of vocational training or responsibility until after college. And then we can't seem to decide whether college is vocational training or real education.
I really think we need to step back and reinvent out public education by asking, "What is it that we want people to learn, and what knowledge and skills do we want the least educated in our society to have." No, I don't think that's what we're doing now. I think we're pretty well running our education system on inertia alone. But once we get good at making sure everyone knows whatever we consider the "base minimum," we can split off those who *want* to pursue further education from those who would prefer vocational training for a good job that's useful to society.
Not everyone needs to go to college, but we're better off if everyone has a decent education. Ignorance isn't good for anyone.
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Right, but the point is, the common "lowly user" is equally powerless in each case. They can't rewrite the code, they can't afford to hire someone else to rewrite the code. The issue is, which does what I want/need better fresh out of the box?
Now I'm not saying that won't be OpenOffice. It might be OpenOffice. But if it's not, it's going to be cheaper to buy Office than to pay developers to rewrite OpenOffice for you.
The most you can do in either case to get a change made is to submit feedback and hope for the best. Now I know Microsoft brings "lowly users" into their labs, studies how they use computers, ask for feedback, and use that research in their development. Is OpenOffice doing all that?
You mean Larry King?
Great, but let's say I'm just a lowly "user". I'm not a developer and not the Israeli government. Now what? Dip into my personal savings, come up with a few hundred thousand dollars to pay a team of developers to make OpenOffice load quickly on my Mac? Or maybe just pay $80 for an iWork license?
I feel like I've had this exact argument before. It's not FUD. FOSS is great in many ways and I use it all the time. But the question was asked, "Why do people try FOSS and go back to proprietary software?"
At least part of the answer is that developers are often paying attention to their own needs (or to their employer's needs) and not necessarily everyday users' needs. To the extent FOSS has made progress in user adoption (and it's made quite a lot, actually), I think it's because you get people like Mark Shuttleworth, who has seems to have put some focus on making Linux prettier and more user-friendly (though I still can't get behind the orange/brown color scheme).
Now if you're a developer, you can very well take the stance that the program is serving your purposes and you don't care about users. Fine, then don't complain about everyone using proprietary alternatives rather than your software.
But if you were to ask how FOSS developers can attract and keep users, my advice to a lot of these projects would be, "Get better at soliciting and responding to feedback." You want to stop people from dropping OpenOffice and buying MS Office? Go ask a bunch of non-technical heavy Office users what they don't like about OpenOffice. You want to get more people to use the GIMP? Go talk to graphic designers ranging from "professional" to "amateur" and see what they have to say about the GIMP; take their responses seriously. If you want to know why people are still buying Soundforge instead of using Audacity for free, then find a way to hunt down some Soundforge customers.
I guarantee you that there are reasons other than FUD. But if you're some random individual person, it's generally going to be easier, cheaper, and less trouble to buy a proprietary alternative than to hire a team of programmers to build you the application you want.
You can never be locked in to a particular plaintext editor, no matter how closed it is.
Isn't that because the plaintext file format is "free"?
This is an example where a community effort concentrates on solving the *technical* problem and forgets that there's a real, on the ground problem that needs to be solved as well, that may or may not be totally technical in nature.
Yeah, for a long time I've thought that part of the problem is (and sorry about this, I know it will rub some people the wrong way) that FOSS is being developed almost solely by developers. I'm sure that sounds silly, but there are a lot of problems that I think stem from this.
First, there's the expectation that if something breaks or something isn't working for you, you can just "fix it". Now this might mean anything from editing a configuration file to rewriting the code, which is far above a lot of people's heads. Plus, as you mention, sometimes it seems like developers focus on some technical aspect of the problem while ignoring the end-user aspect. It's great that ODF is an open format, but it doesn't really work as a universal file format if every program has a different implementation.
But I think there's also a subtler problem, one which, sorry, I'm probably going to do a bad job explaining but I hope you'll bear with me. The problem is that if you're a great brilliant technical developer, you're not going to even think about how to make your program simple. It's sort of a "not seeing the forrest for the trees" problem. You're going to be so smart about understanding all the complicated things your program does, and so well-versed at everything that can be done with your program, that you're not going to be able to understand what a new user will be thinking when he first approaches your program. You're just too close to the problem.
Now that probably still isn't clear, but have you ever tried to write out a complicated explanation, reread the explanation 50 times and had it make perfect sense to you? And what happens when you hand it off to someone else to proofread? They find a bunch of obvious typos and they come up with a bunch of questions (at least that's what happens to me). And then you suddenly realize that your mind was jumping over all the missing steps in your argument and all your typos because you had read it so many times and you knew what it was supposed to say. You weren't really even reading the explanation you wrote anymore, you were just replaying in your mind what you intended to write.
I think lots of technical things can be like this, and I feel like FOSS developers kind of get into this state where they're only seeing the program they meant to put out, and they're seeing how they're using their own software, but they have trouble coming at it fresh.
I mean, I'm not new to computers or system administration, but sometimes I open up a configuration file or read a new program's man page and think, "now what the hell is going on here?" Even in the same distribution, syntax and conventions flip around now and then. Accomplishing one simple and common thing might require changing multiple settings in multiple places, maybe even in different configuration files. The assumption is, I think, that you're not going to want to run a Linux server unless you're a genius who spends his whole day doing sysadmin work. And sysadmin stuff is one of the more well-travelled and refined areas of FOSS. What chance does something like GIMP have, where the developers might be such a different demographic than the potential users?
Honestly, I use various kinds of FOSS all the time, because it's often still easier for me than dealing with proprietary stuff, but I still see the problem. At work, on my Windows box, I'll often use Word instead of OpenOffice. Why? Just because OpenOffice takes a long-ass time to load up. Sure, there are also some formatting problems and I think OpenOffice is a bit uglier than word, but mostly it comes down to how long it takes to load the program and open a document.
So this is mostly just my opinion, but I think the solution (assuming you want t
Well I'd put the problem more generally as: people don't divide cleanly into "nice people who are always wrong" and "jerks who are always right". Jerks are often the people who *think* they're always right, but often are wrong quite a lot. "Nice people" are sometimes secretly jerks who think they're always right, and the niceness is just a form of condescension. But no one is right all the time, and a lot of times there really isn't even a "right answer" so much as "the best answer we can come up with right now."
A lot of it really ends up being a matter of degrees. Would I tolerate a little bit of assholishness for some real brilliance? Sure. But after a certain point, you can be too much of an asshole to be worth it. Along with everything else, being actually often means you *aren't* right. If you're causing interpersonal problems on a team, creating more work for everyone else, and making everyone else hate working with you, then you're kind of doing the wrong things.
Plus, there are enough people out there who are competent and at least decently nice. It's not really a choice you have to make all the time.
There's actually a bigger problem that's more subtle and complex: it's not clear we would even be able to build anything that we could genuinely call "intelligence" without first giving basic drives and emotions.
This is a strange thought for some people, specifically people who think that the intellect runs on its own with no interference from emotions and animal drives, but there's no indication that intelligence can emerge without those drives. Just think about how intelligence emerges in humans; it doesn't pop out of nowhere. We begin as creatures who are all drive and no intelligence, but with the potentiality to learn. Babies don't learn to speak because they're taught, and they don't learn to speak from simply being around speech. They learn to speak because it's a way for them to get what they want. It's often the case that their first words are things like "mommy" or "bottle", which are things the child wants. They learn that by making those sounds, they can get someone to come and give them want they want, and the process goes from there.
So if you don't want to program each of the responses that a program will give, you have to give it both the potential to learn and a drive to learn. Whatever drives you give it, it will only persue that drive. If you want to give it complex "intelligent" behavior, then you have to give it not only a complex set of drives, but the ability to make semi-arbitrary decisions based on incomplete information. In other words, you have to allow it to act from desire and behave emotionally. We'd just better watch out what kind of drives we give it.
As I mentioned, if it's solely about the cost, Microsoft is perfectly happy to make Windows cheap for educational users. Sometimes, even to the point where it's 'free' as in beer.
"Somestimes" eh? How many times do you think Ubuntu is "free" as in beer?
Plus, as I'm sure has been repeated to you many times, most of the cost in software is not licensing costs, but continuing operating costs. Ultimately, the cost issue is very minor.
So you're saying TCO for Linux is higher? Please, show me hard evidence of that by someone not funded by Microsoft. The cost issue may be very minor for you if you have money. If you're not so rich and taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans already, you might not like being asked to spend thousands more on software and textbooks which could very easily be free.
First, show me the numbers. Tell me how much it would cost a school to add Ubuntu support in addition to Windows and OSX, and give me the source of your numbers because I'm not going to take it on faith.
Second, if you have to choose on OS, I think that OS should be a free one. If you're rich enough to pay for Windows and Office, then go ahead and pay someone for support. Offer the free support to Ubuntu and OpenOffice, and lets drive the price of college down a little. Anyone who has a Windows machine and wants support can switch to Linux for free, after all, but Linux users can't switch to Windows for free.
Or maybe they have more important things to worry about than an ideological debate that, ultimately, nobody except zealots on either side actually care about?
It's not zealotry. I'm not a zealot. To me, this isn't even about "free" in the sense of ideology, but it's about making education "cheap" as in $$$. As a society, we should be using open source software in education and open source textbooks so that we can make education cheaper.
But sorry, I forgot that our schools aren't designed to educate ourselves. They're supposed to milk rich mommies and daddies who send their kids off to join frats, get drunk, and go to football games.
Most colleges would allow a linux installation but are unprepared to provide support to every possible linux variation and configuration
I don't think it's as simple as what the helpdesk will support or allow, but also what the classes will support in their instructions and expectations. For example, if you take a statistics course, will they expect you to have a spreadsheet program? Will they expect that program to be Excel? Will they offer instruction on how to use Excel, and if so will they also offer instructions for OpenOffice? Will they require you to use Excel add-ons that don't work with OpenOffice?
Even if they don't support every variation of Linux/BSD, it seems to me that colleges should try to support free software in order to ease the financial burden they place on students. College costs are outrageous already.
Unless she intends to pick a job in the future based on whether they use Linux, then whether the University supports it is probably a moot issue. It's like having cable TV, or private bathrooms, or a pool table in your particular dorm. Nice to have, but not essential.
I wouldn't think it's comparable to cable TV or pool tables at all. Pool tables are for fun. If my kid wants to play on a pool table, he can find a bar to go play. Supporting Linux and OpenOffice is a horse of a different color.
Here's the thing: education is very expensive already without making it more expensive unnecessarily. Why should students be forced to spend hundreds of dollars on software licensing when perfectly good alternatives are free? In my mind, supporting free software and developing open source textbooks should be among the goals of any modern university. That both of these things aren't prioritized tells me that these schools are run by people who are either corrupt or clueless. Well, or maybe just apathetic and not very good.
Another scenario is that files associated in Photoshop sent to you on your machine without Photoshop have to open in something compatible to view them, no?
I think in those circumstances, OSX is smart enough to figure it out. Like if I created a JPEG with Photoshop and associated the file with Photoshop, and then I sent it to you and you didn't have Photoshop, it would just use whatever your default JPEG viewer was.
If, for instance, you prefer one graphics program for editing .jpgs and a different one for viewing them you are now screwed. You can either set .jpgs to open in one, or the other...
Well not exactly. You can still have your default jpeg viewer be Preview, and still have only particular jpegs open in Photoshop. That's easy enough to accomplish. The difference is just that jpegs saved in Photoshop are not automatically associated with Photoshop regardless of the default that the user has set.
And it's not that I fail to recognize how it might be useful to have jpegs created in photoshop always open in Photoshop, automatically. It's just that I don't think it's a very sensible way to handle things. If I really want to use Photoshop most of the time, I can set that as my default jpeg viewer. If I have particular files that I'm opening all the time and want to open them in Photoshop, I can set that manually on a per-file basis. However, when I set a default viewing application for a particular file-type, it's nice for that decision to be honored by the OS.
I think I read from the article that there's a way to set it for all existing files, although I think it's a total PITA method.
Sure, but I don't want to continually set the proper application for a given file-type. I want to set one default, and have the OS respect that decision unless I manually set a different application for a particular document. I think that's the proper behavior.
The extra information was a stupid extra step. "Word document" is all the OS needs in order to figure out how to open it.
Well actually OSX still lets you set the proper application to open on a per-document basis, and it's kind of handy. AFAIK, what happens if you put a Word document on a computer that doesn't have word, but has OO.o, OSX will read the part that says, "open me in Word" and say, "Well I don't have Word but I have OO.o, so I'll open you in that instead." So there's no problem.
However, let's say you have both OpenOffice and Word installed on the same machine, and 9 times out of 10 you want to open your Word documents in OpenOffice, but you have that 1 document out of 10 that doesn't display properly in OpenOffice and you want to preserve the current layout. What's actually kind of nice IMO is that you can say, "I want my default to be to open all Word documents in OpenOffice, but I can set this one individual file to open in Word." And then the OS will open each document in the correct viewer when you double-click on it, automatically. It works great.
So what's being talked about here is that it has typically been set in the past so that, regardless of your default application, documents were set to open in whatever application you saved/created them in. So it's like lets say OpenOffice is my default application but I create a new document in Word. The old behavior is that document would automatically be set to open in Word when you double-click on it instead of OpenOffice, even though OpenOffice is your default application. It makes a certain amount of sense to do it that way, since you may have done layout work in Word that won't render properly in OpenOffice.
However, I personally want to set a default application for each file-type, and then only have them use a different application if I manually set them to do so.
Just to explain this, for me where I really think this is an issue is not text as much as graphics. I work with graphics and often enough, the application that created the graphics is Photoshop. However, I never want to actually open the file in Photoshop unless I actually want to edit it. Why open a JPEG in photoshop when it's going to take a full minute to load?
So I've set Preview to be the default application for viewing graphics, but still, any graphics I make in photoshop are set to open in Photoshop. If Snow Leopard is going to ignore that it was made in Photoshop and open it in Preview instead, as I've set the OS to do, that seems like a "bug fix" to me.
On the other hand, you could argue that Apple is protecting users from developers who say, "We know what's best for you. We're making it just work. Now just sit back and drink your kool aid."
If I want my text documents to open in BBEdit, I'll set them to open in BBEdit thankyouverymuch. I set my default for them to open in something else, and that's the way I want it.
A somewhat recent example of how copyright can hinder story creation is in the series "Star Trek - The Next Generation." In an early season they did an episode featuring Dr. Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories. Due to copyright issues they had to wait years before they could do a follow-up story featuring the character.
This is another problem with copyright-- that it doesn't just protect particular stories, but that it protects characters and settings and comes dangerously close sometimes to protecting ideas. Like not only could I not write my own story about Superman or Metropolis without getting sued, but I even have to be careful about writing about a very similar character. But then, of course, Superman himself was modeled on previous characters, since that's how writing works.
Part of the problem is that we conceptualize creativity badly. We think that the history of creative consists of people coming up with entirely new stories all the time. I'd say the history of writing consists mainly of people retelling the same stories over and over again, with new perspectives and different twists.
Yeah, I wasn't saying that they wouldn't/couldn't make money if copyright ceased to exist. It's just a valid sort of question to ask, "How do we expect them to make money? By what particular means does it make sense for writers/artists to make money in the modern age?" It may be that artists make a living the way they did in the Renaissance, or it may be that we can come up with something better.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Is that a myth because no one will steal your idea even if you don't protect it, or is it a myth because people will find a way to steal your idea anyway?
I think we can almost take it for granted that current copyright policy is damaging to our cultural development. How could it not be to have all our creative expression tied up and limited based on whether or not someone created something similar? However, whenever the whole issue gets raised, questions get quashed by talking about "the economy" and economic benefits bestowed on certain groups by copyright.
Those are certainly issues to think about. By what means would authors and songwriters make money if copyright ceased on exist, or even was much more limited? What happens to all the jobs created by the publishing industry, the music industry, and the movie industry? It's particularly a concern in the US because we don't manufacture very much anymore, and a lot of what we export are our ideas and creative works.
On the other hand, what almost no one talks about is the economic waste generated by all this. The broken window fallacy doesn't just apply to damage, but it applies to all money that need not be spent. How much money do businesses spend figuring out copyright issues, dealing with lawyers to protect copyrights or to defend against copyright lawsuits? How much more cheaply could Google do this indexing if the restrictions were eased? If movies and music and books were cheaper, then we would have the extra money in our pockets to spend on other things.
We keep hearing about how much money is "generated" by creative industries, and how big a portion of our economy they represent. The information is always offered as evidence that these industries need to be protected, because of the economic damage caused by loss of jobs and loss of profit. However, there's a flip-side to that coin. All that money they're making is coming from somewhere. I'm not claiming it's a zero-sum game because it's not that simple, but for all the billions of dollars these industries make, there's a question of how that money would be spent and where it would go if the government weren't actively protecting fat profit margins for these business models.
There are also USB to serial converters.
That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.
To be perfectly honest, most people don't really need a college eduction. The thing is, our society seems to make more and more people take college classes. When people have no real use for the classes, the natural outcome is degree mills and cheaper education.
I think another part of the problem is it turns the rest of education into "college preparation" instead of real education. Right now, I'm almost inclined to say we want everyone to go to college, but the reason for that being that education all the way up through high school isn't much of an education. We've lowered our standards so far that we consider the ideal high school kid one who behaves himself, and we don't give any kind of vocational training or responsibility until after college. And then we can't seem to decide whether college is vocational training or real education.
I really think we need to step back and reinvent out public education by asking, "What is it that we want people to learn, and what knowledge and skills do we want the least educated in our society to have." No, I don't think that's what we're doing now. I think we're pretty well running our education system on inertia alone. But once we get good at making sure everyone knows whatever we consider the "base minimum," we can split off those who *want* to pursue further education from those who would prefer vocational training for a good job that's useful to society.
Not everyone needs to go to college, but we're better off if everyone has a decent education. Ignorance isn't good for anyone.