If you really want to fix the system you would take away some of the rights afforded to corporations. Corporations have only financial interests in mind, nothing social or moral. Our representatives are supposed to be just that: ours, not the corporations. Even if corporations may have our financial interests in mind (third to their executives first and their stockholders second) they clearly do not represent the people, nor are they people in themselves.
Campaigns should only be able to be financed by individuals and non-profit groups. It should also be a criminal act to release the identities of contributors except under subpoena or to an oversight committee. This would help to prevent strong-arming. If this were the case then the social and moral aspects of society will start to become more important to our representatives, and they would truly start representing the people they serve.
We would still need laws to govern this, and laws to prevent only the wealthy and powerful to be heard. We wouldn't have to worry as much about repressing speech, though, because it would be much more likely that it was the view of an individual being expressed.
First, I want to say that I've worked at a hotel (night auditor/clerk). We had a VingCard system when I was there and at no point did any personal information hit these cards. I know people who work at hotels with slightly more advanced systems, and none of them store any personal information. They just store the room and duration.
I won't say that such cards with personal information don't exist. I will say that they aren't the norm. Let's look at this from a realistic standpoint though:
If your hotel doesn't allow you to use your card to charge things to your account then you probably have nothing to worry about. Why would they include any personal information if you can't use that card for anything but entry to the building and your room?
Even if your hotel does allow this, what benefit do they gain from having your information (more than your room) on the card? Obviously the payment system must be hooked into the registry somehow, so why wouldn't they just store the room number/unique id to make the link? Wouldn't it be MORE work for them to link it back if they use your information instead of theirs?
Let us say that these cards are in a lot of places, why are we worried about them when folios are normally plain text and stored in paper format somewhere on the premises? You don't know what happens to these records. Normally they just get locked in a storage closet for a while until they get thrown out.
I hope you don't ever buy anything online. I'd venture to guess that it's much more common for poor security practices to be used on billing databases for e-comm than it is for hotels to embed your billing info on your keycard. For that matter, if you have a CC you probably use it all over the place. The receipts are normally poorly handled and not very secure. Point being that your CC information is rarely secure, and that includes places that also get your address.
This seems like much ado about nothing. It's a fairly low risk scenario when compared to all the other ways to get at this information. Who's going to sit around at these hotels and swipe cards looking for embedded information? If they did, don't you think the CC companies would eventually catch onto how it was happening, or at least that it was just a few hotels?
I'd ask how my information was being shared if they said that I could use my keycard to pay for things. If there's nothing like that, I wouldn't worry about it. Depending on the situation, I might keep the card. Normally I just turn it into the clerk, who has access to all the information on it anyway.
If you do keep your card, perhaps you should consider keeping it under your tinfoil hat.
I was specifically speaking of their developer tools, the word "software" in front of developer is implied. Sorry for any confusion there.
Their office suite is a different situation, working towards a different goal. It started out simple and effective, but became bloated and more difficult to use. They did that so they wouldn't have to force out little niche features that people had learned to exploit so they'd think they had found a better way to do things. They turned a simple thing difficult.
With VS they started out fairly bloated, trying to make a difficult thing simple. They seem to have done an okay job at this, but to the extent that it has diminished the value of the people who use it.
The interesting parallel here is that they both achieve the same goal: Make the Microsoft product the perceived value. By making the simple task of word processing more complicated then they've increased the value of knowing how to use their products. Since their products had become the de facto standard before much of the current complexity was introduced then finding people who were well versed in using them became a must. Think about it, when did people start putting "MS Word" on their resume? Of course, a simpler solution would mean more value to the software, but it wouldn't be seen as such because they've already invested in advanced knowledge of MS products and continuing down the same path always seems easier.
Just because Google is another search engine and huge corporation doesn't make them evil. For that matter, I wouldn't even call Yahoo! evil, they're just more interested in the bottom line.
In Google's defense I can say that I've never experienced a pop-up from any of their sites. I've never had to actively work to not install their software. Their software has never done anything more than what I've asked it to do on my machines. With that said, I don't use their desktop search because it requires me to be an administrator and I'm not sure if I really want everything indexed that way.
In Yahoo!'s defense, well, it's a little tougher. I can say that they are one of the best free (as in beer, with advertising) community sites. They have a great mix of services that range from poor to excellent, but most are somewhere in between. It's great to have a single sign-on for all of that, and you can depend on them to be there. Thing is, they depend much less than Google on finding innovative ways to make money without annoying users. They depend on more traditional net-marketing, which has evolved into a battle to get in the user's face as often and bluntly as possible. They can't just up and change now, if they do people will cry foul that they're copying Google. Their investors look at their bottom line and so long as it turns a profit then it won't change.
MSN is a whole 'nother monster. They don't have to be as intrusive because they're much less worried about turning a profit and much more worried about maintaining Microsoft's dominance. MS puts a lot of value on being the only company in the software business, and MSN is a key part of that strategy. Unfortunately, MSN never has been able to outdo Yahoo! or Google, and rarely even AOL.
Arguably, yeah. I think they made huge strides when they made VS.Net. In fact, the upcoming dev tools might be the best on the market. That doesn't really make the solutions they're intended to design much better. I guess I have to give MS a lot of credit for the advancement in their products recently.
That still doesn't change the goals of those products, that is to typically be used to implement half-ass solutions. Obviously nothing being said here is any less arguable than for someone to say that these really are the best tools and MS can't help how they're used. That opinion is fine, I can only retort that history will show that they took every action to ensure that the path I previously laid out (that of expensive MS software replacing skilled developers) happens.
I think that the point is really this: Microsoft likes to make technologies that do 75% as well as the next but take 50% of the training to think you understand them. That entry point is the key and the quality level is the punch. If you keep your entry point down the managers will believe they're dealing with better ROI (their term, not mine) and they are more likely to look at the solution. If they see that the quality is at least at 75% of other solutions then they'll believe that they can engineer around that. The problem is that tend to hire employees who are willing to work for cheap because they don't have the expertise to better design their solutions.
This all means that Microsoft can put together a case study of companies that manage to get lucky and make this all work then represent that as the norm. They then put together a survey that says that other implementations have a higher TCO (again, their term, not mine) due largely to higher salaries. Then the real motivation is made clear: They don't care about the quality of software that is developed, they care that managers see a better value in paying them instead of paying higher wages for more skilled employees.
Making things easier for the developer to become the designer is the next logical step. This means you buy more of their software with the thinking that you don't have to hire another skilled worker.
We don't need to crush Microsoft, we just need Linux to become enough of a player that companies are forced to support it.
Almost.. More than supporting Linux we just need to make people realize the value of open standards. If you support open standards then the choice of OS, office suite, IM, etc becomes a personal one. Right now it's, "I have to use Windows to use MS Office because otherwise I can't make PPT files." I know there's work-arounds, but your average user doesn't. The more people use Linux, Mac, and OO.o the more awareness that MS isn't the only player there is and normal people start to appreciate standards, even if just a little.
They do, you just have to wait. Go take a look on the net, you can find P4s with respectable amounts of power for $40-$60, they're just a generation or two old.
If you're paying out the ass for your processor then you're falling into the latest and greatest trap. Intel banks on these people the same way that the graphics industry does. They're going to sell their processors for the highest price that they think consumers will pay, and they'll cycle them down to continue the perception that the next processor that is 0.5% faster is worth 25% more. Wash, rinse, repeat.
If you want to blame anyone for this, don't blame the soul-less corporation. Blame the consumers that keep the pricing model alive. In the end, the low costs are only passed on to two groups: the patient consumers, and the Dell customers.
Ohh yeah, that price didn't take r&d into account. But you don't need me to tell you that, someone already has. So blah blah and whatnot.
Re:I'm not an expert...
on
Office 12 Exposed
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Don't fault them for trying to better their UI. When you use it and it doesn't work for you, then seek alternatives. If it doesn't work for most people, they'll switch back, but you'll be able to fault them then.
Do remember that their office suite competes in a market that sees little innovation, because little is needed. This means that in order to maintain dominance they must either provide a technically superior product, provide a better user interface, or lock down file formats. Technical superiority is debatable, they may or may not do that already. Locking down file formats is what we DON'T want them to do. That leaves UI for competition. If they don't change it up enough then products like WordPerfect or OpenOffice.org will catch up with them in the UI and make it so that they have to compete via the other methods. Since technical superiority will probably always be debatable, it leads them back to locking down file formats... and we still don't want that.
Anyhow, if anyone can rewrite the rules of UI and get away with it, it's the people with most of the market share. They happen to be it.
I've thought about this before (as I'm sure many others have). I came to the conclusion that it's wrong in a couple of different ways:
We must be consistent when we say software patents are bad. If we accept them by trying to enforce them then we are sending a message that they should be enforced against us. This means that we're, to a degree, accepting the one click patent and others. Free software advocates accept this as well, because they know that the measures they use to keep software Free rely on copyright.
Patent law is not copyright law, and copyright is fairly universally accepted as applying to code. Free software advocates accept this as well, because they know that the measures they use to keep software Free rely on copyright. Patents must be obtained and this costs money, few companies would be willing to patent ideas put into free software anyhow. What they're doing now isn't quite the same, they're simply saying that they won't sue Free software developers for using their patents, and typically those are patents that aren't making them any money anyhow.
If you publish it correctly then your prior work invalidates future patents. Why patent something when you'll have documented evidence of prior works? You're fronting money to try to avoid a lawsuit that shouldn't happen. If it's going to happen then you haven't saved yourself anything because they'll just try to invalidate the patent or license, or they'll claim that they had prior works of their own preceding yours.
You run the risk of turning the GPL into an unenforceable license The GPL is already questioned by some. We generally laugh these people away. However, the first time someone sues a software company that they must either release something as open source or be found guilty of patent infringement then the reasonability of the license will probably come into question. A couple bad judges and you may invalidate the license on a lot of works. If nothing else, the patent aspect may be found useless because it will probably be difficult or impossible to show that you actually incurred damages for software that is Free for all to use.
It's not that it's a bad idea. The problem is that it doesn't send a clear message and it just wouldn't work as well. It would be better to send the message that if you release software under the GPL you renounce the patent liability to those who make derivative works from that code. This doesn't force people to release their code, but it ensure that they are either working on a derivative (which would obviously have to be GPL), have a license from the patent holder, or are infringing if they use the patented process. This also deals with patents without supporting them in any way, and could even be combined with words that strongly state the framers' views on patents.
If programmatic translation continues to improve then this could really be something huge. Imagine a huge database with creative works from every culture in whatever language, available to anyone who desires in their native tongue.
I think Dr. Lessig overlooked copylefts as a viable alternative to public domain.
Yeah, especially when he helped create the CC:SA license.:P
Actually, this was a very short and broadly termed article that I think was hardly newsworthy. You can generally learn more just reading his blog entries.
Lessig himself teaches that, since the failing of Eldred, public domain will die due to lobbying and retroactive term extensions. That's not an anti-piracy measure, it's just big companies controlling congress.
That was more of a joke than anything else. Another poster has given a more reasonable answer as to why Grub does this. I think they were just trying to do what they think is right, instead of what "standard" pratice is. I mean, no one is asking why Linux doesn't switch to the more widely used (by installation count) C for first drive/partition, D for second, E for third. In part because that's not really the way things should work and in part because that would be ridiculous.
..because programmers know a proper array starts at 0.
I'd never dealt with grub until the first time I installed gentoo. I didn't think it was the overwhelming, especially when following the intstructions in the gentoo installation guide. Didn't have much trouble with windows loading either, except the time I tried installing windows on the slave drive. Keep windows in a primary partition on your master drive and it's no big deal. Lilo works too, so it's just a preference thing I guess.
Of course the case is bullshit. My point was that there is still a case to be tried.
Besides, I'm not saying that (Perfect 10 v Google) == (RIAA v Napster). I was just saying that the logic to dismiss this case is eerily familiar to the logic once used to try and defend Napster.
Beyond other things, I think that Perfect 10 isn't trying to say that Google's service is illegal so much as they're trying to say that Google, when their service is used for illegal purposes, is liable for damages. This changes the entire scope of the discussion and ignores a lot of the issues surrounding the substantial noninfringing uses,
I agree. I disagree that this is an open and shut case for Google, though. Google will still have to prove that their image service has substantial non-infringing uses. Just that they'll have to prove that means that the case won't simply be thrown out of court. All it takes is a stupid judge that's sympathetic to the copyright industry and Google could lose.
It's all context, and his reasoning for why the case was nothing to worry about was just too close to a description of the napster case.
Well, the quoted text just reminded me of the napster case. However, you can see where that same line of thinking was used against Kazaa and Groskter who didn't do the copying. Also, what of the college students who were sued for billions? They simply created indexing services for windows shares.
Where do you think you download the previews from when you search images.google.com? Google serves them up. I'm sure that's fair use, but the argument that it's infringement could easily be made.
Has it not also been found that if you link to an infringing site that you're committing contributory infringement?
Ten years ago I would've agreed with the thinking that Google is a clear winner in this case without so much as an argument made, now I don't think that's the case. Google still has a good chance of winning, but I doubt it'll go that far.
Strangely enough, these people are suing google for the actions of others. They are suing google because google's webcrawler doesn't automatically block sites containing their copyrighted works. They're basically saying it's Google's job to police the entire web to enforce their copyrights.
Replace Google with Napster and Perfect 10 with the RIAA. Is this really such an open and shut case in favor of Google?
Slashdot Mirror
Campaigns should only be able to be financed by individuals and non-profit groups. It should also be a criminal act to release the identities of contributors except under subpoena or to an oversight committee. This would help to prevent strong-arming. If this were the case then the social and moral aspects of society will start to become more important to our representatives, and they would truly start representing the people they serve.
We would still need laws to govern this, and laws to prevent only the wealthy and powerful to be heard. We wouldn't have to worry as much about repressing speech, though, because it would be much more likely that it was the view of an individual being expressed.
First, I want to say that I've worked at a hotel (night auditor/clerk). We had a VingCard system when I was there and at no point did any personal information hit these cards. I know people who work at hotels with slightly more advanced systems, and none of them store any personal information. They just store the room and duration.
I won't say that such cards with personal information don't exist. I will say that they aren't the norm. Let's look at this from a realistic standpoint though:
This seems like much ado about nothing. It's a fairly low risk scenario when compared to all the other ways to get at this information. Who's going to sit around at these hotels and swipe cards looking for embedded information? If they did, don't you think the CC companies would eventually catch onto how it was happening, or at least that it was just a few hotels?
I'd ask how my information was being shared if they said that I could use my keycard to pay for things. If there's nothing like that, I wouldn't worry about it. Depending on the situation, I might keep the card. Normally I just turn it into the clerk, who has access to all the information on it anyway.
If you do keep your card, perhaps you should consider keeping it under your tinfoil hat.
They don't need to port talk (the app is nothing special), they just need to release the code for the speach part. The IM part is just xmpp (jabber).
Their office suite is a different situation, working towards a different goal. It started out simple and effective, but became bloated and more difficult to use. They did that so they wouldn't have to force out little niche features that people had learned to exploit so they'd think they had found a better way to do things. They turned a simple thing difficult.
With VS they started out fairly bloated, trying to make a difficult thing simple. They seem to have done an okay job at this, but to the extent that it has diminished the value of the people who use it.
The interesting parallel here is that they both achieve the same goal: Make the Microsoft product the perceived value. By making the simple task of word processing more complicated then they've increased the value of knowing how to use their products. Since their products had become the de facto standard before much of the current complexity was introduced then finding people who were well versed in using them became a must. Think about it, when did people start putting "MS Word" on their resume? Of course, a simpler solution would mean more value to the software, but it wouldn't be seen as such because they've already invested in advanced knowledge of MS products and continuing down the same path always seems easier.
In Google's defense I can say that I've never experienced a pop-up from any of their sites. I've never had to actively work to not install their software. Their software has never done anything more than what I've asked it to do on my machines. With that said, I don't use their desktop search because it requires me to be an administrator and I'm not sure if I really want everything indexed that way.
In Yahoo!'s defense, well, it's a little tougher. I can say that they are one of the best free (as in beer, with advertising) community sites. They have a great mix of services that range from poor to excellent, but most are somewhere in between. It's great to have a single sign-on for all of that, and you can depend on them to be there. Thing is, they depend much less than Google on finding innovative ways to make money without annoying users. They depend on more traditional net-marketing, which has evolved into a battle to get in the user's face as often and bluntly as possible. They can't just up and change now, if they do people will cry foul that they're copying Google. Their investors look at their bottom line and so long as it turns a profit then it won't change.
MSN is a whole 'nother monster. They don't have to be as intrusive because they're much less worried about turning a profit and much more worried about maintaining Microsoft's dominance. MS puts a lot of value on being the only company in the software business, and MSN is a key part of that strategy. Unfortunately, MSN never has been able to outdo Yahoo! or Google, and rarely even AOL.
That still doesn't change the goals of those products, that is to typically be used to implement half-ass solutions. Obviously nothing being said here is any less arguable than for someone to say that these really are the best tools and MS can't help how they're used. That opinion is fine, I can only retort that history will show that they took every action to ensure that the path I previously laid out (that of expensive MS software replacing skilled developers) happens.
This all means that Microsoft can put together a case study of companies that manage to get lucky and make this all work then represent that as the norm. They then put together a survey that says that other implementations have a higher TCO (again, their term, not mine) due largely to higher salaries. Then the real motivation is made clear: They don't care about the quality of software that is developed, they care that managers see a better value in paying them instead of paying higher wages for more skilled employees.
Making things easier for the developer to become the designer is the next logical step. This means you buy more of their software with the thinking that you don't have to hire another skilled worker.
Almost.. More than supporting Linux we just need to make people realize the value of open standards. If you support open standards then the choice of OS, office suite, IM, etc becomes a personal one. Right now it's, "I have to use Windows to use MS Office because otherwise I can't make PPT files." I know there's work-arounds, but your average user doesn't. The more people use Linux, Mac, and OO.o the more awareness that MS isn't the only player there is and normal people start to appreciate standards, even if just a little.
Probably something like Mike the Headless Chicken.
If you're paying out the ass for your processor then you're falling into the latest and greatest trap. Intel banks on these people the same way that the graphics industry does. They're going to sell their processors for the highest price that they think consumers will pay, and they'll cycle them down to continue the perception that the next processor that is 0.5% faster is worth 25% more. Wash, rinse, repeat.
If you want to blame anyone for this, don't blame the soul-less corporation. Blame the consumers that keep the pricing model alive. In the end, the low costs are only passed on to two groups: the patient consumers, and the Dell customers.
Ohh yeah, that price didn't take r&d into account. But you don't need me to tell you that, someone already has. So blah blah and whatnot.
Do remember that their office suite competes in a market that sees little innovation, because little is needed. This means that in order to maintain dominance they must either provide a technically superior product, provide a better user interface, or lock down file formats. Technical superiority is debatable, they may or may not do that already. Locking down file formats is what we DON'T want them to do. That leaves UI for competition. If they don't change it up enough then products like WordPerfect or OpenOffice.org will catch up with them in the UI and make it so that they have to compete via the other methods. Since technical superiority will probably always be debatable, it leads them back to locking down file formats... and we still don't want that.
Anyhow, if anyone can rewrite the rules of UI and get away with it, it's the people with most of the market share. They happen to be it.
Would those be the ones who don't use preview and proofread their posts?
- We must be consistent when we say software patents are bad.
- Patent law is not copyright law, and copyright is fairly universally accepted as applying to code.
- If you publish it correctly then your prior work invalidates future patents.
- You run the risk of turning the GPL into an unenforceable license
It's not that it's a bad idea. The problem is that it doesn't send a clear message and it just wouldn't work as well. It would be better to send the message that if you release software under the GPL you renounce the patent liability to those who make derivative works from that code. This doesn't force people to release their code, but it ensure that they are either working on a derivative (which would obviously have to be GPL), have a license from the patent holder, or are infringing if they use the patented process. This also deals with patents without supporting them in any way, and could even be combined with words that strongly state the framers' views on patents.If we accept them by trying to enforce them then we are sending a message that they should be enforced against us. This means that we're, to a degree, accepting the one click patent and others. Free software advocates accept this as well, because they know that the measures they use to keep software Free rely on copyright.
Free software advocates accept this as well, because they know that the measures they use to keep software Free rely on copyright. Patents must be obtained and this costs money, few companies would be willing to patent ideas put into free software anyhow. What they're doing now isn't quite the same, they're simply saying that they won't sue Free software developers for using their patents, and typically those are patents that aren't making them any money anyhow.
Why patent something when you'll have documented evidence of prior works? You're fronting money to try to avoid a lawsuit that shouldn't happen. If it's going to happen then you haven't saved yourself anything because they'll just try to invalidate the patent or license, or they'll claim that they had prior works of their own preceding yours.
The GPL is already questioned by some. We generally laugh these people away. However, the first time someone sues a software company that they must either release something as open source or be found guilty of patent infringement then the reasonability of the license will probably come into question. A couple bad judges and you may invalidate the license on a lot of works. If nothing else, the patent aspect may be found useless because it will probably be difficult or impossible to show that you actually incurred damages for software that is Free for all to use.
Ohh shit! Run /. run!
If programmatic translation continues to improve then this could really be something huge. Imagine a huge database with creative works from every culture in whatever language, available to anyone who desires in their native tongue.
Congratulations, you have a new sig.
Yeah, especially when he helped create the CC:SA license. :P
Actually, this was a very short and broadly termed article that I think was hardly newsworthy. You can generally learn more just reading his blog entries.
Lessig himself teaches that, since the failing of Eldred, public domain will die due to lobbying and retroactive term extensions. That's not an anti-piracy measure, it's just big companies controlling congress.
That was more of a joke than anything else. Another poster has given a more reasonable answer as to why Grub does this. I think they were just trying to do what they think is right, instead of what "standard" pratice is. I mean, no one is asking why Linux doesn't switch to the more widely used (by installation count) C for first drive/partition, D for second, E for third. In part because that's not really the way things should work and in part because that would be ridiculous.
This I know. However, I've had problems doing that. I was speaking from personal experience.
I'd never dealt with grub until the first time I installed gentoo. I didn't think it was the overwhelming, especially when following the intstructions in the gentoo installation guide. Didn't have much trouble with windows loading either, except the time I tried installing windows on the slave drive. Keep windows in a primary partition on your master drive and it's no big deal. Lilo works too, so it's just a preference thing I guess.
Besides, I'm not saying that (Perfect 10 v Google) == (RIAA v Napster). I was just saying that the logic to dismiss this case is eerily familiar to the logic once used to try and defend Napster.
Beyond other things, I think that Perfect 10 isn't trying to say that Google's service is illegal so much as they're trying to say that Google, when their service is used for illegal purposes, is liable for damages. This changes the entire scope of the discussion and ignores a lot of the issues surrounding the substantial noninfringing uses,
It's all context, and his reasoning for why the case was nothing to worry about was just too close to a description of the napster case.
Where do you think you download the previews from when you search images.google.com? Google serves them up. I'm sure that's fair use, but the argument that it's infringement could easily be made.
Has it not also been found that if you link to an infringing site that you're committing contributory infringement?
Ten years ago I would've agreed with the thinking that Google is a clear winner in this case without so much as an argument made, now I don't think that's the case. Google still has a good chance of winning, but I doubt it'll go that far.
Replace Google with Napster and Perfect 10 with the RIAA. Is this really such an open and shut case in favor of Google?