There's one thing wrong with that argument. Since the Library of Congress has such a vast collection, a person who wants to have access to the most information would do best to access the library stacks. But not everyone can afford to go to where the books are - so now, it is not discriminating against those who are not royalty or elites, but against those who simply don't have the funds.
LoC's primary mission is to make useful information available to Congress, which is most definitely within travel distance of the library. It's secondary mission is to preserve materials for the future. LoC is not a public library. Serving the public at large is quite low down on its list of priorities.
LoC's catalog is available online, and FWIW, they do a lot of high quality cataloguing work that is used by lots of smaller libraries that can't afford to do their own, so they do provide an important service to the public in that regard. You can search LoC's catalog and if you find something you want, go to your local library and, if it doesn't have it, you may be able to request it via interlibrary loan.
I don't know if LoC has open stacks or not, but I suspect they would be closed, meaning that even if you did make it down to Washington, you probably wouldn't be able to browse the shelves anyway.
>Open source is a great thing, and it is completely beneficial and acceptable. The only problem is, people who want to see all software free, or open source, do not see the big picture. How in God's name will people make a living? If your life or company is based on creating a program that performs a service, for one, I would much rather accept people's support by buying my product. It helps me continue my development, and live my life. If I spent my time developing a program and handed it out for free, what, would I have to have a job at McD to get by?
I think that you're confusing freely distributable software and source code with writing software without being paid to do so. The two are separate things and they can each coexist with one another as well as separately. You can write OSS on a volunteer basis, but you can also write it under contract or salary. Likewise, you can write closed source software either for money or for free. All four combinations are currently practiced, but you'll note that even if closed source software were to dissapear, there's still one option for making money writing OSS.
But let me ask you, how would you feel about the following propositions:
Neighbourhood watch programs are a bad thing. When people voluntarily agree to help protect one another's homes, it reduces the ability for private security firms to make money by offering home securitiy and monitoring services.
It is wrong for you to help your friend move. If everyone helped their friends move, it would surely put professional moving companies and the people who work for them out of business. The same goes for helping your friend paint his house, fix his car or install computer hardware. One of the reasons Red Hat loses so much money is that there are too many people willing to help their friends install and use Linux. Newsgroups like comp.os.linux.* take away from Red Hat's support business by allowing people to help each other for free. Surely this is a bad idea.
To oppose the free development and distribution of software by people who *want* to do this on the grounds that it interferes with the ability of someone who *wants* to get paid to do the same thing to do so is the same kind of argument.
I wouldn't worry though; I can't see the supply of people willing to write software on a volunteer basis outstripping the demand for software anytime soon. Universal open source or no, programmers will be able to find gainful employment writing software for some time to come.
>I am afraid of the US Federal government in my industry. I am cheering for Microsoft even though I am a Linux user who doesn't like Microsoft's licensing practices.
The government already is in the industry. Governments regulate (or "govern"); that's what they do. To say that government should not regulate people's affairs is to say that we should not have a government.
Remember that government intervention allowed Microsoft to achieve its current position. Could Microsoft have really done what it did without the benefit of copyright laws? If OEMs could have elected to simply make copies of DOS and Windows on their own and ship it with their PCs, could Microsoft have used licensing and pricing deals to discourge OEMs from making alternatives like PC-DOS or DR-DOS or OS/2 available to those who wanted it?
Not to try to debate the merits of copyright here, but the point is that the government does regulate the industry, and Microsoft's current monopoly position could not have come about without the powers granted to it and the restrictions placed upon others by the government. Now, the government needs to act to correct the imbalance caused by its meddling by placing suitable restrictions upon Microsoft and granting suitable powers to other.
The question of regulation by government is never one of 'yes or no' but rather always one of 'how much?'
MP3, Napster et. al. are examples of technology that are clearly beneficial. They enable the widespread dissemination of information and culture. They empower people to take control over how they acqure and enjoy music. They also threaten the current economic model of distributing music, but that is all they do -- they don't prevent artists from making a good living off of producing art.
There are a lot of creative people in marketing and sales, and if, tomorrow, copyright were abolished and MP3s and Napster fully legitimized, they would get to work right away at figuring out ways to make money within the framework of the new economic reality. But until then, they will sit on their hands or even actively resist change because they're perfectly happy with things just the way they are. Necessity and opportunity are the parents of invention; legitimize the technology and we'll quickly have people making money off of it.
The cornerstone of any economy is the consumer. Economies exist to satisfy the need of consumers to consume, not that of producers to produce and sell. While it is true that in order for consumers to consume anything, there must be producers producing things, and so we must provide incentive for people to produce, at the same time, we need to remember that the ultimate goal is to better the lot of the consumer. Here, we have a technology that can genuinely benefit consumers, and there's no reason why producers can't adapt. To hold it back simply because the producers do not want to adapt is entirely the wrong thing to do.
Jon, what happens if I were to take one of your books that you sell for money, that you make your living off of, and I copy it and redistribute it to tens of thousands of people so that they don't have to pay for it? What if I try to argue this by saying that your book is 'information' and you've released it and therefore it's freely available to everyone? What if I further try and argue my point by saying that people who get a copy of your book will be more likely to go out and buy one of your other books under your standard distribution model? Do you know what you'd do? You'd sue my ass. You'd prosecute me for criminal theft. Why? Because I have taken your intellectual property and distributed it without your permissions, effectively taking property that's yours and removing it from your control. That's stealing, Jon. Plain and simple, and it happens every day with MP3s.
Today, you can purchase books online through B&N, Fatbrain or that other site. You can often get books cheaper than you can at your local bookstore. At some point, book stores might be unable to operate profitably if Amazon et. al. take all of their business away. Have the online retailers then stolen the customers of the traditional booksellers? Have they done something morally wrong? After all, a lot of book store owners will be put out of business by this. If someone can own the rights to an idea, can't someone own the rights to sell to a customer? After all, attracting customers requires an investment of time, money, service and creativity. Isn't it unfair for someone to just walk into a market that was established through the hard work of someone else and capitalize on it by taking all of the original's customers away?
The answer to all of these questions, I hope you would agree, is no. Amazon et. al. would not have stolen anything, they would have simply obsoleted the business model of the traditional booksellers by providing consumers with a better, more economical way of obtaining the same thing.
Stealing implies the taking of another's property. But the notion of intellectual property is and always has been a kludge. If you take Jon's intellectual property, he still has it. It's just that now you have it too. What makes stealing wrong is not that it unfairly enriches the thief but that it unfairly taxes the victim. We all know that there is a big difference between taking a copy of a book and making a copy of a book in terms of its effects on the owner of that book.
When you do the latter, what you're really doing to Jon is what Amazon et. al. could do to traditional book retailers: make their business model obsolete. Maybe, without the benefit of copyright protection, Jon can't write books, publish them and then rely on selling copies of the book to make money. Maybe, if anyone can copy and distribute his works, he will need to find an alternative business model if he doesn't want to go out of business. Several have already been proposed by various individuals, and I'm sure that any creative entrepreneur with a talent for writing things that people want to read could figure out a way in a free market economy to make a viable business out of writing, with or without copyright protection. The bottom line is that creative people will somehow be able to make a living by producing creative works with or without copyright protection. It's just that with copyright laws, we artificially limit the number of people who may benefit from such an individual's work.
Naturally, those already established in the record, movie or publishing business have a vested interest in preserving the notion of intellectual property and the enforcement of laws that create an artificial scarcity of ideas and expressions. They already profit from the current system, and there is a danger that if the system were changed, someone else might figure out how to profit from the new rules before they old boys did.
My question: In your usability columns, you seem put a lot of stress on the importance of usability on e-commerce, which is really just one, relatively recent, aspect of the Web. You also advocate some things that seem to imply a regulated, centrally-controlled Internet. For example, you suggest that there should ultimately be a central password manager for the Internet to spare users the inconvenience of having to remember multiple userids and passwords. You also advocate making technical details like machine names and protocols fade into the background.
It sometimes seems as though you at least tacitly support the idea of 'taming' the Internet and abolishing the freedom, self-regulation and technology that is laid bare for all to see and to understand if they choose to, handing over control to centalized authorities, presumably government and/or big business. I'd be interested in knowing explicitly how you see the network and how, if at all, to reconcile usability issues with the freedom, decentralization and technical transparency that are such important parts of the Internet to many of us.
Controlling the format is the essential thing, because technology like MP3 and the Internet allows artists to market directly to consumers. Suddenly, the recording industry becomes a middleman that offers no value-added service except to increase the price by a factor of five or ten. The real danger with MP3 is not piracy, but that people will start paying artists directly for MP3 recordings.
I think that the use of the term piracy is incredibly hyporcitical, since it is the organizations like the RIAA and MPAA who are the pirates: they control the choke points on the trade routes, and so can exact a toll from caravans passing through. They're really afraid that a new route of getting goods from producers to consumers will open up, one that they can't sit on at some stragegic point to plunder all that passes through.
The argument that piracy will cause industry X to collapse because if everything can be pirated, nobody will pay for anything and the industry will go broke is getting tired. In a free market, capitalist society, any time you have a group of people willing to pay for something and another group of people willing to produce that thing, someone will find a way to exchange money for goods and services, with or without copyright, CSS or outlawed file formats. It may require a totally new business model, and that's what scares the RIAA: that someone else will figure out that model before they do.
There are two kinds of standards: official and consensual (or de facto). To create an official standard GUI for Linux would be near-impossible, because nobody has the authority to dictate what standards must be followed. If Linus doesn't like something, it may not make it into the official kernel, but nobody can be stopped from producing their own GUI.
To create a de facto standard GUI, all you need to do is create a GUI that everyone wants to use. So, standardizing the Linux GUI in this way is easy: just create a GUI that is all things to all people, and *poof* it becomes the de facto standard.
If you think that it's not possible to create a perfect GUI that is all things to all people, then you must abandon all hope of creating a standardized interface. Fortunately, the whole notion is silly anyway; there is absolutely no reason that a myriad of interfaces cannot exist. Just because many exist does not mean that a business cannot internally standardize on one, or that every Linux user must know how to use every single one!
>At the end of the day, if its readable with the browser; thats all it ever needed to be - is there any real need to go nit-picking?
That depends on whether you think that HTML is a piss-poor page layout and description language for Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer or whether its a simple but fairly decent structural markup language.
Yes, it's true that almost every Web site uses a debased and twisted form of HTML that emerged as a result of the browser wars, and yes, probably more than 99.9% of HTML documents fail to validate against any W3C DTD, but that doesn't mean that the practice should be encouraged. It is possible to do lots of interesting and useful things with well-structured HTML documents, and though most indexers, user agents and Web servers don't do most of these things, there's no reason to simply give up on well-structured HTML; on the contrary, if enough HTML was done right by people who understand what they're doing, maybe the tools to support some of these capabilities would become more widespread.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could search Google or AltaVista and return not just the title of a document, but a structured outline of its content as well (and then be able to retrieve only the section of the document that you want instead of having to retrieve the whole thing and pick through it)? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to search for keywords that appear only in titles and headings rather than picking up random words in the body? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have your browser read a big HTML document and then auto-generate a hyperlinked table of contents for that document, as well as a table of tables, charts, figures and images (all labelled, no less)? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take a huge HTML document (say an entire book) and automatically split it into, say, chapters based on the structure of the document? Wouldn't it be nice to display a list of all the hyperlinks in a document that lead to other documents without having a list that reads "click here, click here, click here"?
All of these things and a whole lot more are possible with well-structured documents, but with HTML used the way it is, all you can do with it is look at it, and usually only if you have a pair of good eyes and a graphical browser. If you're blind or are trying to access the Web through a text terminal, cell phone or Palm Pilot, you find that you are effectively cut off from a lot of the Web because HTML has been used as a Netscape/IE page description language, resulting in information that is otherwise unusable.
Is it just me that thinks that the show has been in steady decline for about four years? When I look at the episodes that are still funny, no matter how many times I watch them, they're mostly from the 5th season (the exceptions being the Stonecutters from season 6, the X-Files from season 7, which are my all-time favourite episodes). The Simpsons seemed to get steadily better until season 5 and then started to taper off afterwards. IIRC, the 5th season was the one with episodes such as the one where Homer goes into space, Homer goes to college ("We played Dungeons & Dragons for three hours--and then I was slain by an elf:-("), Germans buy the nuclear plant, Mr. Burns builds the casino, Bart becomes Mr. Burns's heir, Homer goes a month without beer, and Homer and Mindy nearly have an affair.
Sure, there have been some gems ever since, but in the past two or three years I've seen several episodes where I hardly smiled at all, let alone laughed, whereas five years ago, almost every episode was really, really funny, and it was the little touches, especially the endless references to scenes from movies from the Wizard of Oz ("We'll see about that! Fly my pretties! Fly!... Continue the research.") to Rain Man ("Do the card counting thing!") that really made them work.
Unfortunately, this is what monopoly power is all about. We see it with Microsoft, the MPAA and everyone else. In these cases, we're effectively forced to make the choice between supporting an industry we feel is corrupt or doing without an important product, service or commodity.
Boycott doesn't work well against a monopoly or against an industry where a certain unethical or disagreeable practice is pervasive. Yes, we can all choose to forego music and movies in protest, but that's really not the right solution.
There is a limit to what popular action can accomplish in the face of monopolies or deeply entrenched industry-wide practices. We can complain about them to let the powers that be know we don't like what they're doing, and we can encourage people to develop alternatives to offer a competing product. This is precisely what happened with Linux; it has grown the way it has in part because of the encouragement from a significant segment of the public for someone to develop an alternative that doesn't behave like everyone else. Simply boycotting Microsoft would have been impossible, since for most users there wasn't (and still isn't for many) a viable alternative to buying Microsoft products other than to simply eschew computing entirely.
The fight against the MPAA and its Anti-DeCSS activity is best fought in the courts and in the legislatures. It's a problem of an abuse of power, and we should use the proper mechanisms to defeat that abuse. Boycott Amazon; you can always go elsewhere and get the exact same books from a more responsible vendor. But trying to boycott the MPAA is fighting a lost cause, unless a _lot_ of people are willing to make what is effectively a major sacrifice, even if it doesn't sound like it.
When setting a fair value for a domain name that you want to sell, perhaps the question to ask is "how much value have I added to the domain name since I acquired it?" This will typically be about $0.
The main problem I have with profiting from the sale of domain names, regardless of how they were acquired, is that the seller is essentially benefitting from confiscating a publically available resource and selling it on the market once its scarcity has caused its value to jump. It's like bottling air or encrypting DVD movies; one earns profits not by helping but by hindering society at large.
I don't think that domain names should be viewed as privately ownable commodities that can be traded. I also don't think it's correct to refer to them as Internet real estate; they're more akin to civic addresses: attached to real property but not real property in and of themselves. Having an address isn't the same as having a parcel of land. Real estate on the Internet is measured in bytes.
As much as I don't like the domain registration system we have in Canada for.ca domains, I must admit it does have at least some advantages over the open registry of the generic TLDs. Here, in order to qualify for a.ca domain, you have to be a federally incorporated organization, and the domain name must be your corporation's name or an abbreviation thereof. That makes it pretty hard to squat, and it also reduces the value of domains to others since the domain names you're allowed to have are limited.
Both systems suck, but maybe there's a compromise between the two that can be found. I like the idea that anyone can have a domain name who wants one, but I also like the idea that domain names are treated as a common resource and that steps are taken to make sure that profiteers don't try to commandeer a public resource for their private benefit at the expense of other members of the public.
Because there are thousands of technologies that have changed peoples' lives significantly, and it's impossible to really evaluate which ones were most significant, because any evaluation must be done in the context in which they exist, which is interacting with other technologies.
But my votes go for the TV remote control and electronic mail, which have together bread a geniration of people with bad speling adn grammer and appallingly short uh, inability to focus on, um, things for you know, to pay attention to stuff and be, like able to express themselves you know, eloquently n'stuff.
These are differences, but are they really that important? I don't buy the analog v. digital argument; anyone who could stand to watch a firsthand VHS copy of a movie would surely settle for an analog copy of a DVD. The quality would be just as good. Even a DVD->analog->DVD copy still probably produces better picture quality than the average TV set is capable of reproducing. Furthermore, the number of people who spend their lives watching the same movies over and over again can't be that large. I think that, by and large, people will still just rent a DVD movie when they want to watch it, and maybe if it is convenient make copies of a few of them, but not enough to actually damage the industry.
I think that the real reason that the industry doesn't like the idea of copying is that it helps keep prices in check. When VHS movies first started to appear for sale in the late 70s or early 80s, I seem to recall that they cost $40 or even $60 or more per copy. I also seem to recall that private copying of rented tapes was much more common back then. Now that the average price is $19.99, it's more convenient to just buy the movies you like, unless you are one of the few who has a major movie fetish and has to own lots and lots of tapes/discs. But I can't see this class of people having that much of an impact on the industry as a whole.
The problem with points 1 and 2 is that they impose restrictions on third parties as a remedy for dealing with Microsoft's illegal actions. The third party vendors are likely to protest that they aren't the ones under investigation and they certainly haven't been found guilty of anything. And their lawyers will probably point out that there are no legal grounds to take action against them. It also creates the problem that if there happens to be only one OS available that runs on a particular machine, it cannot be released. Also, for some time, most PC hardware manufacturers and resellers have made drivers/offered options for two OSes: Win9x and WinNT.
The additional problem with the third and fourth points is that it is difficult to tell whether a protocol has been implemented according to its specification, especially if it's closed source. It might be possible to test to see if everything works as published, but it would be hard to test for an unpublished iterface, and these are allegedly what gives Microsoft its edge -- secret Windows syscalls. Even if they are discovered, it's hard to prove that these are actually intentionally hidden interfaces. The manufacturer could, possibly validly, claim a number of explanations, such as the interface was written but never tested and so wasn't documented as an official feature (very common in the real world, as I understand it), the interface was partly written but is not yet complete in the current release and so is not documented, or the interface is completely unintentional, was never in the specification, and any functionality that can be derived from it is completely accidental. Don't forget that Microsoft claims that its APIs _are_ fully documented and disclosed. Should there be an API police -- a government body that obtains the source to every software program released and tests it against a set of published specifications? Would this include small projects written by one person and released under the GPL? And what would be the legal consequences of making a mistake?
I suspect it's true that most users won't read the documentation, but it's also true that these same users are incessantly told about how easy computers are to use; that all you have to do is click a button and *poof* you're surfing the Net. People are actively discouraged from approaching computers as though they are complex, sophisticated machines and are encouraged to see them as seamless and so easy "even an adult can use them."
At the same time, the documentation that does manage to ship with consumer-type computers and software is becoming increasingly small, vapid and oriented towards post-purchase marketing of the software. I remember when each of M$ Word, Excel and Power Point (and when it comes to these kinds of users, wer are basically talking about Microsoft) each came with 500 or so page manuals that contained actual useful technical information. Office 95 shipped with a little 300 or so page book that covered all three and was more focused on telling you how easy it was to do all of these great things than it was explaining how the software worked. I did a spot check and found that the word "easy", "easily", or "simple" appeared at least once on the majority of the pages, and the whole thing seemed geared to try to tell you how fortunate you were to have purchased such a fine product than to tell you how to use the thing.
Of course, what happens next is that the poor user tries to use the software and quickly finds that it isn't so easy; it does unexpected things and doesn't seem to want to do what the user thinks it should be able to do. Or rather, it's easy to a point, but when the user tries to do something even moderately spohisticated, the ease with which a file can be opened or a poorly-typeset Word document can be pounded out is replaced by a complexity that wasn't mentioned in the brochure. But since everyone else says that computers are so easy, the most logical conclusion for the user is that s/he is a dummy or just doesn't get computers.
Not that I have infinite sympathy or patience for people who refuse to learn, (and I still like userfriendly), but I think its important to acknowledge that people are being misled if not outright lied to about the machines they're buying.
Just a note, you have to be careful when dealing with numbers in ancient and medieval history. Historians of the time were not as concerned with getting the facts right as historians are today. To them, good storytelling and capturing the essence of the moment were more important than dull but accurate statistics.
For example, a professor I once took a Crusades course with suggested that any medieval descriptions of the sizes of armies should be divided by at least ten in order to estimate their real size.
I won't say that there is no way the Persian army could have numbered 2M but think of the logistics required to transport 2 million soldiers along with horses and, most importantly, food. Remember that Athens at the time might have had a population of only 50 000-100 000; it's unlikely that in those times, even a large city, let alone the hills of northern Greece or Turkey could have supported a foraging army of that size.
Furthermore, the task of organizing two million men into a fighting force with only the most primitive of communications (once set in motion, a the phalanx units of the day were uncontrollable, but even arranging two million men into a square would take a lot of work!) or of taking that many people away from the farms without causing mass starvation makes an army of that size unlikely.
I'd believe the Spartans were outnumbered 10:1, maybe even 50:1, but 500:1 sounds pretty dubious.
Ultimately, Web-wide searching will fail, and not just because of database-driven Web sites. There are a number of reasons why:
The Web is too big and it may be growing faster than new search technologies can be developed to keep up with it. Last I heard, even the largest index had only catalogued about 20% or so of existing sites, and about 25% of the Web was unindexed by any engine.
The Web is too diverse in terms of subject matter. There exist bibliographic databases containing hundreds of thousands or even millions of citations on a topic as narrow as AIDS; Web search engines index every subject imaginable. This means that keywords that have meaning in multiple subject areas lose a lot of their value.
Most Web pages are noise. They aren't properly marked up to denote their structure, so an indexing program can't differentiate the main headings from body text, so a term mentioned in passing is given as much weight as a term in the main heading of the document. Also, most authors fail to include any meta information, let alone adhere to a common standard like Dublin core.
Most documents aren't static anyway. They appear, dissapear and change. Few people use the robots exclusion protocol to identify these. Also, many if not most documents on the Web are navigational documents; indexers don't really differentiate between navigational pages and content-bearing pages. Sometimes, you want to find someone's Web site and other times you want to find a specific piece of information or the location of a resource like "today's headlines", but in a search engine, they're all intermixed.
Many useful resources are in a format like Adobe PDF or JPEG that are not keyword indexable. To some extent, replacing these formats with XML will solve this problem, but only if XML is widely adopted and properly used.
Attempts to index the Web can best be described as an attempt to index and catalogue the largest, most diverse and most frequently-changing collection of documents, which adhere to no common standards of self-identification or description whatsoever, by people who generally have no training or experience in cataloguing or indexing for people who generally have no training or experience in database searching, and hoping that somehow, everything will work out.
That it has worked this well up to now is a testament to the creativity and ingenuity of the developers of indexing and search engine technology. Still, when compared to a professionally-organized database like a library catalogue or bibliographic subject database, the Web's search facilities are incredibly primitive and while it's easy enough to find a known item, it's basically impossible to do an extensive subject search or even to find a few of the most relevant resources on a particular topic without already knowing what those resources are.
Eventually, we're going to have to rethink how we index the Web, and this will involve making decisions about breaking the Web into manageable pieces and deciding exactly what kinds of things we want to catalogue/index in the first place.
>Now, if you disagree with the *LAW* of patents (duration of coverage, scope, etc) Then don't complain/boycott Amazon.
A boycott is not a method of law enforcement; it is a tool used by people to demonstrate their objection to actions undertaken by an organization. If Amazon is to be boycotted, it is because what they are doing is perceived to be unethical, not illegal. The law need not and ought not be the only means of regulating the behaviour of either private or corporate citizens.
The law probably does need to be changed as well. One change that might have the desired effect is to make it an offence to file for frivolrous or clearly untenable patents or for patents on things which the applicant knows or ought to know are not original art. The penalty for abusing the patent system in this way should be both a fine and a prohibition from filing any further patent claims for a certain period of time (perhaps increasing in duration with each conviction).
In the meantime, it is perfectly fine to let a business know that what it is doing may be legal but nonetheless falls outside the realm of acceptable corporate behaviour, and so will be censured.
Are you certain about this? Does this mean that the same 16-year old can walk into CompUSA, buy a copy of Windows and isn't bound by the EULA, so he can make and sell as many copies as he wants, since Microsoft didn't bother to check whether he was able to enter into a contract?
There's something about that that doesn't sound right, but if it's true, there's a pretty lucrative career for anyone under 18?
It is more likely that, since GPLed software is copyrighted, nobody is allowed to copy it unless they do so under license. If someone cannot agree to the GPL because of his age, he cannot copy or derive works from the software. But I think someone already mentioned that.
But according to their graphs for Web and File server tests, Linux would saturate both a 10mbps and a 100mbps connection before NT4, and at 120 clients, it's still a long way from falling below the 100mbps saturation point, except when running as a file server with a single processor.
So all questions of cost, reliability and configurability aside, the test results seem to show Linux having better throughput than NT under light loads and equivalent throughput under heavier loads for anyone with a normal network connection.
Didn't c't already come to this conclusion months ago?
I disagree with your final statement. I don't think that I should, for example, have to choose between giving my doctor medical information about myself and accepting that that information could well end up as tomorrow's headline and not providing this information at all, thus making public knowledge of any medical condition I may have a potential consequence of seeking treatment. I think it's perfectly reasonable to disclose this information to my doctor on condition that he agrees not to retransmit that information to other parties. There is all kinds of information that really ought to remain confidential and which parties should be prohibited from disclosing as they see fit.
You might say that there's a qualitative difference between personal and non-personal information, but the distinction isn't really all that clear, and much depends on the individual's views and motivations.
When it comes to things like software, I'm a strong supporter of openness, and one of the reasons I choose Free Software is because it is based on the notion that this knowledge ought to be shared freely for the benefit of everyone. But I'm also a big supporter of individual privacy rights, which includes the stipulation that people are obligated to not share certain information with others.
There is some information that I think ethically ought to be shared with the world. There is other information that I think should be protected and disclosed only to select parties with assurances of confidence. There's also a whole grey area in between, and I'm not sure that I want anyone trying to get rid of the grey part and make it a black and white affair.
Information is a commodity. It is not free to produce. Considerable effort goes into researching, analyzing and synthesizing information into useful knowledge. Entire classes of people make all or part of their living by doing this. For example, doctors, lawyers and teachers. If we could not charge a fee for the production and dissemination of information, these professions would be unviable, yet they are essential and many information-producing professions are regarded quite highly in society.
There's also the "free" as in "Free Software" meaning, which is that information should not be proprietary. This would also be a mistake. There is lots of information that you have that you probably want to keep proprietary. I won't publish information about my finanical or medical status, my social insurance or credit card numbers and so forth, because, as you say, knowledge is power, and it's not the sort of power I want others to have. When I do disclose this information, I retain proprietary rights to much of it -- anyone who receives such information is under obligation not to use or transfer that information except under the terms that have been agreed to.
There's the final question about whether information can be patented. This would allow you to make information pubically available and still restrict its use or transfer. This makes patents very powerful and potentially destructive, and it's why the scope of what can be patented should be very carefully examined (IMHO, the patents being granted on software, for example, greatly overreach the scope of what patents should cover). If you could patent a medical or legal opinion or historical interpretation, that would have grave negative consequences for society, but to my knowledge, this doesn't really happen anywhere.
My personal view is that there is a lot of information that ought to be made public because it benefits everyone. The net benefit of releasing information is often greater than the benefit of controlling it, but then again, there is a lot of information that should be controlled as well. It would be nice if information producers worked for free, but since food producers don't, information producers can't either.
I really don't see how this is a good idea. I think that the effort could have been better spent at developing a more efficient way to display information and reducing the amount of unecessary clutter that plagues a lot of current designs. We need a way to get rid of the supurfluous controls and displays, not make them blink on and off with alarming frequency.
Instead, we get even MORE things changing on screen than ever before. For the same reason that animated banner ads distract and irritate (O when will Netscape allow you to disable animations? That's one IE5 feature I really did appreciate), the idea that every time I take my hand off the mouse, my display will change and force me to reorient myself, or at the very least, draw my attention away from the text or other item of interest and towards the vanishing/reappearring toolbar bothers me. That's a very distracting way to work. Animated menus are bad enough; a good display should remain as static as possible. Movement is both distracting and hard on the eyes, and an ever-changing display is much harder to learn and become comfortable with than one where the same information is always displayed and displayed in the same places.
Worse, the availability of this kind of feature is liable to encourage people to create even more cluttered and poorly-designed user interfaces, as though they aren't already bad enough. It will be one more excuse to add yet another row of coolbar buttons. At least it will encourage people to keep their hands off the mouse and learn how to use that other thingy that sits next to it with all those letters and numbers.
To me, this seems at best like a kludge to compensate for bad design, and at worse a gimmick that will promote even worse design.
Re:Gartner amazes me with correctness, for once
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Gartner Slams Linux
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I hate to risk coming across as an uncritical "Linux can do everything better than Windows"-type person, but I think it would also be wrong to uncritically accept truisms about the weaknesses of Linux that really should be subjected to more critical analysis.
There is no Microsoft Office for Linux. And I would be willing to say that Linux probably does not, right now, offer all of the features that business users have access to *and find genuinely useful* in a Windows environment. However, I would be willing to bet that Linux has enough tools that the typical business user could use Linux and be able to do everything they wanted to do.
The relative lack of choice in productivity applications is unimportant, because most business users do not get a choice anyway. Here I use Office 97 and I hate it (I'd vastly prefer Office 95, for example, not to mention a number of non-M$ alternatives) but I don't get a choice. Everyone here uses Office 97 because someone with more power than me has decided that that's what we use. All that you need to make a viable office desktop system is a single complete, useable suite of productivity applications. For most users, Linux can already provide this, or at least can almost provide this.
The "lack of standards" is also a red herring. Linux has excellent standards support where it counts -- in data formats. Linux applications have solid support for almost every important file format. The only exceptions are some of the proprietary Microsoft formats, for which support is a little spotty. As for the differences between Red Hat and SuSE or KDE and GNOME, any particular organization only needs to get one configuration up and running. Once again, the question is whether you can get *a* complete, working system up and running. If you can, it doesn't matter how different it is from some other organization's setup, as long as you can exchange data.
Linux is also a complex system--this is true. The average user is not going to be able to set up and administer Linux effectively on their own. A lot of background knowledge is required to administer a Linux system. Probably far more than is needed to keep Windows going. For a home user, particularly one who must contend with installing Linux himself, this is an important issue. Most home users need computers that are above all else simple and easy to master (too bad they're stuck with Windows, but Linux would be even worse for most of them). For a business with an IS department whose job it is to understand, install, troubleshhot and administer complex systems, the issue ought to be unimportant. An IS department with a collective clue could set up a Unix-based desktop system that was easy to use. Here, in fact, Linux provides greater stability than Windows because Linux can be configured to give the user as much control over their work environment as needed but still be restricted so that the user cannot screw up the system on their own, as is not infrequently done to Windows machines. It is easier to centrally managae a network of Linux machines -- especially if major applications can be centrally stored and maintained.
Whether or not Linux is the best choice, or even a good choice as a desktop system for very many organizations, I really don't know. But I do think that the notion that Linux cannot be usefully and successfully deployed in such a situation has more to do with peoples' attitudes and misconceptions than it does with the actual capabilities of the OS and its available applications.
FWIW, the very first OS I used in a business setting was UNIX, in 1992. (I don't know what flavour--I didn't even consciously realize what OS I was using--but we were using DEC Stations with huge B&W monitors and running what I now realize was X). At the time, I knew nothing about Unix and little about computers. To me, X looked basically like a Mac, and I had as little trouble as the rest of the office in using the systems. And, FWIW, things like file sharing seemed a whole lot easier on those UNIX workstations than they do on our Win95/Novell network today.
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There's one thing wrong with that argument. Since the Library of Congress has such a vast collection, a person who wants to have access to the most information would do best to access the library stacks. But not everyone can afford to go to where the books are - so now, it is not discriminating against those who are not royalty or elites, but against those who simply don't have the funds.
True, but you might want to read the library's mission statement.
LoC's primary mission is to make useful information available to Congress, which is most definitely within travel distance of the library. It's secondary mission is to preserve materials for the future. LoC is not a public library. Serving the public at large is quite low down on its list of priorities.
LoC's catalog is available online, and FWIW, they do a lot of high quality cataloguing work that is used by lots of smaller libraries that can't afford to do their own, so they do provide an important service to the public in that regard. You can search LoC's catalog and if you find something you want, go to your local library and, if it doesn't have it, you may be able to request it via interlibrary loan.
I don't know if LoC has open stacks or not, but I suspect they would be closed, meaning that even if you did make it down to Washington, you probably wouldn't be able to browse the shelves anyway.
>Open source is a great thing, and it is completely beneficial and acceptable. The only problem is,
people who want to see all software free, or open source, do not see the big picture. How in God's
name will people make a living? If your life or company is based on creating a program that performs
a service, for one, I would much rather accept people's support by buying my product. It helps me
continue my development, and live my life. If I spent my time developing a program and handed it out
for free, what, would I have to have a job at McD to get by?
I think that you're confusing freely distributable software and source code with writing software without being paid to do so. The two are separate things and they can each coexist with one another as well as separately. You can write OSS on a volunteer basis, but you can also write it under contract or salary. Likewise, you can write closed source software either for money or for free. All four combinations are currently practiced, but you'll note that even if closed source software were to dissapear, there's still one option for making money writing OSS.
But let me ask you, how would you feel about the following propositions:
Neighbourhood watch programs are a bad thing. When people voluntarily agree to help protect one another's homes, it reduces the ability for private security firms to make money by offering home securitiy and monitoring services.
It is wrong for you to help your friend move. If everyone helped their friends move, it would surely put professional moving companies and the people who work for them out of business. The same goes for helping your friend paint his house, fix his car or install computer hardware. One of the reasons Red Hat loses so much money is that there are too many people willing to help their friends install and use Linux. Newsgroups like comp.os.linux.* take away from Red Hat's support business by allowing people to help each other for free. Surely this is a bad idea.
To oppose the free development and distribution of software by people who *want* to do this on the grounds that it interferes with the ability of someone who *wants* to get paid to do the same thing to do so is the same kind of argument.
I wouldn't worry though; I can't see the supply of people willing to write software on a volunteer basis outstripping the demand for software anytime soon. Universal open source or no, programmers will be able to find gainful employment writing software for some time to come.
>I am afraid of the US Federal government in my industry. I am cheering for Microsoft even though I am a Linux user who doesn't like Microsoft's licensing practices.
The government already is in the industry. Governments regulate (or "govern"); that's what they do. To say that government should not regulate people's affairs is to say that we should not have a government.
Remember that government intervention allowed Microsoft to achieve its current position. Could Microsoft have really done what it did without the benefit of copyright laws? If OEMs could have elected to simply make copies of DOS and Windows on their own and ship it with their PCs, could Microsoft have used licensing and pricing deals to discourge OEMs from making alternatives like PC-DOS or DR-DOS or OS/2 available to those who wanted it?
Not to try to debate the merits of copyright here, but the point is that the government does regulate the industry, and Microsoft's current monopoly position could not have come about without the powers granted to it and the restrictions placed upon others by the government. Now, the government needs to act to correct the imbalance caused by its meddling by placing suitable restrictions upon Microsoft and granting suitable powers to other.
The question of regulation by government is never one of 'yes or no' but rather always one of 'how much?'
MP3, Napster et. al. are examples of technology that are clearly beneficial. They enable the widespread dissemination of information and culture. They empower people to take control over how they acqure and enjoy music. They also threaten the current economic model of distributing music, but that is all they do -- they don't prevent artists from making a good living off of producing art.
There are a lot of creative people in marketing and sales, and if, tomorrow, copyright were abolished and MP3s and Napster fully legitimized, they would get to work right away at figuring out ways to make money within the framework of the new economic reality. But until then, they will sit on their hands or even actively resist change because they're perfectly happy with things just the way they are. Necessity and opportunity are the parents of invention; legitimize the technology and we'll quickly have people making money off of it.
The cornerstone of any economy is the consumer. Economies exist to satisfy the need of consumers to consume, not that of producers to produce and sell. While it is true that in order for consumers to consume anything, there must be producers producing things, and so we must provide incentive for people to produce, at the same time, we need to remember that the ultimate goal is to better the lot of the consumer. Here, we have a technology that can genuinely benefit consumers, and there's no reason why producers can't adapt. To hold it back simply because the producers do not want to adapt is entirely the wrong thing to do.
Today, you can purchase books online through B&N, Fatbrain or that other site. You can often get books cheaper than you can at your local bookstore. At some point, book stores might be unable to operate profitably if Amazon et. al. take all of their business away. Have the online retailers then stolen the customers of the traditional booksellers? Have they done something morally wrong? After all, a lot of book store owners will be put out of business by this. If someone can own the rights to an idea, can't someone own the rights to sell to a customer? After all, attracting customers requires an investment of time, money, service and creativity. Isn't it unfair for someone to just walk into a market that was established through the hard work of someone else and capitalize on it by taking all of the original's customers away?
The answer to all of these questions, I hope you would agree, is no. Amazon et. al. would not have stolen anything, they would have simply obsoleted the business model of the traditional booksellers by providing consumers with a better, more economical way of obtaining the same thing.
Stealing implies the taking of another's property. But the notion of intellectual property is and always has been a kludge. If you take Jon's intellectual property, he still has it. It's just that now you have it too. What makes stealing wrong is not that it unfairly enriches the thief but that it unfairly taxes the victim. We all know that there is a big difference between taking a copy of a book and making a copy of a book in terms of its effects on the owner of that book.
When you do the latter, what you're really doing to Jon is what Amazon et. al. could do to traditional book retailers: make their business model obsolete. Maybe, without the benefit of copyright protection, Jon can't write books, publish them and then rely on selling copies of the book to make money. Maybe, if anyone can copy and distribute his works, he will need to find an alternative business model if he doesn't want to go out of business. Several have already been proposed by various individuals, and I'm sure that any creative entrepreneur with a talent for writing things that people want to read could figure out a way in a free market economy to make a viable business out of writing, with or without copyright protection. The bottom line is that creative people will somehow be able to make a living by producing creative works with or without copyright protection. It's just that with copyright laws, we artificially limit the number of people who may benefit from such an individual's work.
Naturally, those already established in the record, movie or publishing business have a vested interest in preserving the notion of intellectual property and the enforcement of laws that create an artificial scarcity of ideas and expressions. They already profit from the current system, and there is a danger that if the system were changed, someone else might figure out how to profit from the new rules before they old boys did.
It sometimes seems as though you at least tacitly support the idea of 'taming' the Internet and abolishing the freedom, self-regulation and technology that is laid bare for all to see and to understand if they choose to, handing over control to centalized authorities, presumably government and/or big business. I'd be interested in knowing explicitly how you see the network and how, if at all, to reconcile usability issues with the freedom, decentralization and technical transparency that are such important parts of the Internet to many of us.
Controlling the format is the essential thing, because technology like MP3 and the Internet allows artists to market directly to consumers. Suddenly, the recording industry becomes a middleman that offers no value-added service except to increase the price by a factor of five or ten. The real danger with MP3 is not piracy, but that people will start paying artists directly for MP3 recordings.
I think that the use of the term piracy is incredibly hyporcitical, since it is the organizations like the RIAA and MPAA who are the pirates: they control the choke points on the trade routes, and so can exact a toll from caravans passing through. They're really afraid that a new route of getting goods from producers to consumers will open up, one that they can't sit on at some stragegic point to plunder all that passes through.
The argument that piracy will cause industry X to collapse because if everything can be pirated, nobody will pay for anything and the industry will go broke is getting tired. In a free market, capitalist society, any time you have a group of people willing to pay for something and another group of people willing to produce that thing, someone will find a way to exchange money for goods and services, with or without copyright, CSS or outlawed file formats. It may require a totally new business model, and that's what scares the RIAA: that someone else will figure out that model before they do.
There are two kinds of standards: official and consensual (or de facto). To create an official standard GUI for Linux would be near-impossible, because nobody has the authority to dictate what standards must be followed. If Linus doesn't like something, it may not make it into the official kernel, but nobody can be stopped from producing their own GUI.
To create a de facto standard GUI, all you need to do is create a GUI that everyone wants to use. So, standardizing the Linux GUI in this way is easy: just create a GUI that is all things to all people, and *poof* it becomes the de facto standard.
If you think that it's not possible to create a perfect GUI that is all things to all people, then you must abandon all hope of creating a standardized interface. Fortunately, the whole notion is silly anyway; there is absolutely no reason that a myriad of interfaces cannot exist. Just because many exist does not mean that a business cannot internally standardize on one, or that every Linux user must know how to use every single one!
>At the end of the day, if its readable with the browser; thats all it ever needed to be - is there any real need to go nit-picking?
That depends on whether you think that HTML is a piss-poor page layout and description language for Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer or whether its a simple but fairly decent structural markup language.
Yes, it's true that almost every Web site uses a debased and twisted form of HTML that emerged as a result of the browser wars, and yes, probably more than 99.9% of HTML documents fail to validate against any W3C DTD, but that doesn't mean that the practice should be encouraged. It is possible to do lots of interesting and useful things with well-structured HTML documents, and though most indexers, user agents and Web servers don't do most of these things, there's no reason to simply give up on well-structured HTML; on the contrary, if enough HTML was done right by people who understand what they're doing, maybe the tools to support some of these capabilities would become more widespread.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could search Google or AltaVista and return not just the title of a document, but a structured outline of its content as well (and then be able to retrieve only the section of the document that you want instead of having to retrieve the whole thing and pick through it)? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to search for keywords that appear only in titles and headings rather than picking up random words in the body? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have your browser read a big HTML document and then auto-generate a hyperlinked table of contents for that document, as well as a table of tables, charts, figures and images (all labelled, no less)? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take a huge HTML document (say an entire book) and automatically split it into, say, chapters based on the structure of the document? Wouldn't it be nice to display a list of all the hyperlinks in a document that lead to other documents without having a list that reads "click here, click here, click here"?
All of these things and a whole lot more are possible with well-structured documents, but with HTML used the way it is, all you can do with it is look at it, and usually only if you have a pair of good eyes and a graphical browser. If you're blind or are trying to access the Web through a text terminal, cell phone or Palm Pilot, you find that you are effectively cut off from a lot of the Web because HTML has been used as a Netscape/IE page description language, resulting in information that is otherwise unusable.
Is it just me that thinks that the show has been in steady decline for about four years? When I look at the episodes that are still funny, no matter how many times I watch them, they're mostly from the 5th season (the exceptions being the Stonecutters from season 6, the X-Files from season 7, which are my all-time favourite episodes). The Simpsons seemed to get steadily better until season 5 and then started to taper off afterwards. IIRC, the 5th season was the one with episodes such as the one where Homer goes into space, Homer goes to college ("We played Dungeons & Dragons for three hours--and then I was slain by an elf :-("), Germans buy the nuclear plant, Mr. Burns builds the casino, Bart becomes Mr. Burns's heir, Homer goes a month without beer, and Homer and Mindy nearly have an affair.
Sure, there have been some gems ever since, but in the past two or three years I've seen several episodes where I hardly smiled at all, let alone laughed, whereas five years ago, almost every episode was really, really funny, and it was the little touches, especially the endless references to scenes from movies from the Wizard of Oz ("We'll see about that! Fly my pretties! Fly!... Continue the research.") to Rain Man ("Do the card counting thing!") that really made them work.
Unfortunately, this is what monopoly power is all about. We see it with Microsoft, the MPAA and everyone else. In these cases, we're effectively forced to make the choice between supporting an industry we feel is corrupt or doing without an important product, service or commodity.
Boycott doesn't work well against a monopoly or against an industry where a certain unethical or disagreeable practice is pervasive. Yes, we can all choose to forego music and movies in protest, but that's really not the right solution.
There is a limit to what popular action can accomplish in the face of monopolies or deeply entrenched industry-wide practices. We can complain about them to let the powers that be know we don't like what they're doing, and we can encourage people to develop alternatives to offer a competing product. This is precisely what happened with Linux; it has grown the way it has in part because of the encouragement from a significant segment of the public for someone to develop an alternative that doesn't behave like everyone else. Simply boycotting Microsoft would have been impossible, since for most users there wasn't (and still isn't for many) a viable alternative to buying Microsoft products other than to simply eschew computing entirely.
The fight against the MPAA and its Anti-DeCSS activity is best fought in the courts and in the legislatures. It's a problem of an abuse of power, and we should use the proper mechanisms to defeat that abuse. Boycott Amazon; you can always go elsewhere and get the exact same books from a more responsible vendor. But trying to boycott the MPAA is fighting a lost cause, unless a _lot_ of people are willing to make what is effectively a major sacrifice, even if it doesn't sound like it.
When setting a fair value for a domain name that you want to sell, perhaps the question to ask is "how much value have I added to the domain name since I acquired it?" This will typically be about $0.
.ca domains, I must admit it does have at least some advantages over the open registry of the generic TLDs. Here, in order to qualify for a .ca domain, you have to be a federally incorporated organization, and the domain name must be your corporation's name or an abbreviation thereof. That makes it pretty hard to squat, and it also reduces the value of domains to others since the domain names you're allowed to have are limited.
The main problem I have with profiting from the sale of domain names, regardless of how they were acquired, is that the seller is essentially benefitting from confiscating a publically available resource and selling it on the market once its scarcity has caused its value to jump. It's like bottling air or encrypting DVD movies; one earns profits not by helping but by hindering society at large.
I don't think that domain names should be viewed as privately ownable commodities that can be traded. I also don't think it's correct to refer to them as Internet real estate; they're more akin to civic addresses: attached to real property but not real property in and of themselves. Having an address isn't the same as having a parcel of land. Real estate on the Internet is measured in bytes.
As much as I don't like the domain registration system we have in Canada for
Both systems suck, but maybe there's a compromise between the two that can be found. I like the idea that anyone can have a domain name who wants one, but I also like the idea that domain names are treated as a common resource and that steps are taken to make sure that profiteers don't try to commandeer a public resource for their private benefit at the expense of other members of the public.
Because there are thousands of technologies that have changed peoples' lives significantly, and it's impossible to really evaluate which ones were most significant, because any evaluation must be done in the context in which they exist, which is interacting with other technologies.
But my votes go for the TV remote control and electronic mail, which have together bread a geniration of people with bad speling adn grammer and appallingly short uh, inability to focus on, um, things for you know, to pay attention to stuff and be, like able to express themselves you know, eloquently n'stuff.
These are differences, but are they really that important? I don't buy the analog v. digital argument; anyone who could stand to watch a firsthand VHS copy of a movie would surely settle for an analog copy of a DVD. The quality would be just as good. Even a DVD->analog->DVD copy still probably produces better picture quality than the average TV set is capable of reproducing. Furthermore, the number of people who spend their lives watching the same movies over and over again can't be that large. I think that, by and large, people will still just rent a DVD movie when they want to watch it, and maybe if it is convenient make copies of a few of them, but not enough to actually damage the industry.
I think that the real reason that the industry doesn't like the idea of copying is that it helps keep prices in check. When VHS movies first started to appear for sale in the late 70s or early 80s, I seem to recall that they cost $40 or even $60 or more per copy. I also seem to recall that private copying of rented tapes was much more common back then. Now that the average price is $19.99, it's more convenient to just buy the movies you like, unless you are one of the few who has a major movie fetish and has to own lots and lots of tapes/discs. But I can't see this class of people having that much of an impact on the industry as a whole.
The problem with points 1 and 2 is that they impose restrictions on third parties as a remedy for dealing with Microsoft's illegal actions. The third party vendors are likely to protest that they aren't the ones under investigation and they certainly haven't been found guilty of anything. And their lawyers will probably point out that there are no legal grounds to take action against them. It also creates the problem that if there happens to be only one OS available that runs on a particular machine, it cannot be released. Also, for some time, most PC hardware manufacturers and resellers have made drivers/offered options for two OSes: Win9x and WinNT.
The additional problem with the third and fourth points is that it is difficult to tell whether a protocol has been implemented according to its specification, especially if it's closed source. It might be possible to test to see if everything works as published, but it would be hard to test for an unpublished iterface, and these are allegedly what gives Microsoft its edge -- secret Windows syscalls. Even if they are discovered, it's hard to prove that these are actually intentionally hidden interfaces. The manufacturer could, possibly validly, claim a number of explanations, such as the interface was written but never tested and so wasn't documented as an official feature (very common in the real world, as I understand it), the interface was partly written but is not yet complete in the current release and so is not documented, or the interface is completely unintentional, was never in the specification, and any functionality that can be derived from it is completely accidental. Don't forget that Microsoft claims that its APIs _are_ fully documented and disclosed. Should there be an API police -- a government body that obtains the source to every software program released and tests it against a set of published specifications? Would this include small projects written by one person and released under the GPL? And what would be the legal consequences of making a mistake?
I suspect it's true that most users won't read the documentation, but it's also true that these same users are incessantly told about how easy computers are to use; that all you have to do is click a button and *poof* you're surfing the Net. People are actively discouraged from approaching computers as though they are complex, sophisticated machines and are encouraged to see them as seamless and so easy "even an adult can use them."
At the same time, the documentation that does manage to ship with consumer-type computers and software is becoming increasingly small, vapid and oriented towards post-purchase marketing of the software. I remember when each of M$ Word, Excel and Power Point (and when it comes to these kinds of users, wer are basically talking about Microsoft) each came with 500 or so page manuals that contained actual useful technical information. Office 95 shipped with a little 300 or so page book that covered all three and was more focused on telling you how easy it was to do all of these great things than it was explaining how the software worked. I did a spot check and found that the word "easy", "easily", or "simple" appeared at least once on the majority of the pages, and the whole thing seemed geared to try to tell you how fortunate you were to have purchased such a fine product than to tell you how to use the thing.
Of course, what happens next is that the poor user tries to use the software and quickly finds that it isn't so easy; it does unexpected things and doesn't seem to want to do what the user thinks it should be able to do. Or rather, it's easy to a point, but when the user tries to do something even moderately spohisticated, the ease with which a file can be opened or a poorly-typeset Word document can be pounded out is replaced by a complexity that wasn't mentioned in the brochure. But since everyone else says that computers are so easy, the most logical conclusion for the user is that s/he is a dummy or just doesn't get computers.
Not that I have infinite sympathy or patience for people who refuse to learn, (and I still like userfriendly), but I think its important to acknowledge that people are being misled if not outright lied to about the machines they're buying.
Just a note, you have to be careful when dealing with numbers in ancient and medieval history. Historians of the time were not as concerned with getting the facts right as historians are today. To them, good storytelling and capturing the essence of the moment were more important than dull but accurate statistics.
For example, a professor I once took a Crusades course with suggested that any medieval descriptions of the sizes of armies should be divided by at least ten in order to estimate their real size.
I won't say that there is no way the Persian army could have numbered 2M but think of the logistics required to transport 2 million soldiers along with horses and, most importantly, food. Remember that Athens at the time might have had a population of only 50 000-100 000; it's unlikely that in those times, even a large city, let alone the hills of northern Greece or Turkey could have supported a foraging army of that size.
Furthermore, the task of organizing two million men into a fighting force with only the most primitive of communications (once set in motion, a the phalanx units of the day were uncontrollable, but even arranging two million men into a square would take a lot of work!) or of taking that many people away from the farms without causing mass starvation makes an army of that size unlikely.
I'd believe the Spartans were outnumbered 10:1, maybe even 50:1, but 500:1 sounds pretty dubious.
Ultimately, Web-wide searching will fail, and not just because of database-driven Web sites. There are a number of reasons why:
Attempts to index the Web can best be described as an attempt to index and catalogue the largest, most diverse and most frequently-changing collection of documents, which adhere to no common standards of self-identification or description whatsoever, by people who generally have no training or experience in cataloguing or indexing for people who generally have no training or experience in database searching, and hoping that somehow, everything will work out.
That it has worked this well up to now is a testament to the creativity and ingenuity of the developers of indexing and search engine technology. Still, when compared to a professionally-organized database like a library catalogue or bibliographic subject database, the Web's search facilities are incredibly primitive and while it's easy enough to find a known item, it's basically impossible to do an extensive subject search or even to find a few of the most relevant resources on a particular topic without already knowing what those resources are.
Eventually, we're going to have to rethink how we index the Web, and this will involve making decisions about breaking the Web into manageable pieces and deciding exactly what kinds of things we want to catalogue/index in the first place.
>Now, if you disagree with the *LAW* of patents (duration of coverage, scope, etc) Then don't complain/boycott Amazon.
A boycott is not a method of law enforcement; it is a tool used by people to demonstrate their objection to actions undertaken by an organization. If Amazon is to be boycotted, it is because what they are doing is perceived to be unethical, not illegal. The law need not and ought not be the only means of regulating the behaviour of either private or corporate citizens.
The law probably does need to be changed as well. One change that might have the desired effect is to make it an offence to file for frivolrous or clearly untenable patents or for patents on things which the applicant knows or ought to know are not original art. The penalty for abusing the patent system in this way should be both a fine and a prohibition from filing any further patent claims for a certain period of time (perhaps increasing in duration with each conviction).
In the meantime, it is perfectly fine to let a business know that what it is doing may be legal but nonetheless falls outside the realm of acceptable corporate behaviour, and so will be censured.
Are you certain about this? Does this mean that the same 16-year old can walk into CompUSA, buy a copy of Windows and isn't bound by the EULA, so he can make and sell as many copies as he wants, since Microsoft didn't bother to check whether he was able to enter into a contract?
There's something about that that doesn't sound right, but if it's true, there's a pretty lucrative career for anyone under 18?
It is more likely that, since GPLed software is copyrighted, nobody is allowed to copy it unless they do so under license. If someone cannot agree to the GPL because of his age, he cannot copy or derive works from the software. But I think someone already mentioned that.
But according to their graphs for Web and File server tests, Linux would saturate both a 10mbps and a 100mbps connection before NT4, and at 120 clients, it's still a long way from falling below the 100mbps saturation point, except when running as a file server with a single processor.
So all questions of cost, reliability and configurability aside, the test results seem to show Linux having better throughput than NT under light loads and equivalent throughput under heavier loads for anyone with a normal network connection.
Didn't c't already come to this conclusion months ago?
I disagree with your final statement. I don't think that I should, for example, have to choose between giving my doctor medical information about myself and accepting that that information could well end up as tomorrow's headline and not providing this information at all, thus making public knowledge of any medical condition I may have a potential consequence of seeking treatment. I think it's perfectly reasonable to disclose this information to my doctor on condition that he agrees not to retransmit that information to other parties. There is all kinds of information that really ought to remain confidential and which parties should be prohibited from disclosing as they see fit.
You might say that there's a qualitative difference between personal and non-personal information, but the distinction isn't really all that clear, and much depends on the individual's views and motivations.
When it comes to things like software, I'm a strong supporter of openness, and one of the reasons I choose Free Software is because it is based on the notion that this knowledge ought to be shared freely for the benefit of everyone. But I'm also a big supporter of individual privacy rights, which includes the stipulation that people are obligated to not share certain information with others.
There is some information that I think ethically ought to be shared with the world. There is other information that I think should be protected and disclosed only to select parties with assurances of confidence. There's also a whole grey area in between, and I'm not sure that I want anyone trying to get rid of the grey part and make it a black and white affair.
Information is a commodity. It is not free to produce. Considerable effort goes into researching, analyzing and synthesizing information into useful knowledge. Entire classes of people make all or part of their living by doing this. For example, doctors, lawyers and teachers. If we could not charge a fee for the production and dissemination of information, these professions would be unviable, yet they are essential and many information-producing professions are regarded quite highly in society.
There's also the "free" as in "Free Software" meaning, which is that information should not be proprietary. This would also be a mistake. There is lots of information that you have that you probably want to keep proprietary. I won't publish information about my finanical or medical status, my social insurance or credit card numbers and so forth, because, as you say, knowledge is power, and it's not the sort of power I want others to have. When I do disclose this information, I retain proprietary rights to much of it -- anyone who receives such information is under obligation not to use or transfer that information except under the terms that have been agreed to.
There's the final question about whether information can be patented. This would allow you to make information pubically available and still restrict its use or transfer. This makes patents very powerful and potentially destructive, and it's why the scope of what can be patented should be very carefully examined (IMHO, the patents being granted on software, for example, greatly overreach the scope of what patents should cover). If you could patent a medical or legal opinion or historical interpretation, that would have grave negative consequences for society, but to my knowledge, this doesn't really happen anywhere.
My personal view is that there is a lot of information that ought to be made public because it benefits everyone. The net benefit of releasing information is often greater than the benefit of controlling it, but then again, there is a lot of information that should be controlled as well. It would be nice if information producers worked for free, but since food producers don't, information producers can't either.
I really don't see how this is a good idea. I think that the effort could have been better spent at developing a more efficient way to display information and reducing the amount of unecessary clutter that plagues a lot of current designs. We need a way to get rid of the supurfluous controls and displays, not make them blink on and off with alarming frequency.
Instead, we get even MORE things changing on screen than ever before. For the same reason that animated banner ads distract and irritate (O when will Netscape allow you to disable animations? That's one IE5 feature I really did appreciate), the idea that every time I take my hand off the mouse, my display will change and force me to reorient myself, or at the very least, draw my attention away from the text or other item of interest and towards the vanishing/reappearring toolbar bothers me. That's a very distracting way to work. Animated menus are bad enough; a good display should remain as static as possible. Movement is both distracting and hard on the eyes, and an ever-changing display is much harder to learn and become comfortable with than one where the same information is always displayed and displayed in the same places.
Worse, the availability of this kind of feature is liable to encourage people to create even more cluttered and poorly-designed user interfaces, as though they aren't already bad enough. It will be one more excuse to add yet another row of coolbar buttons. At least it will encourage people to keep their hands off the mouse and learn how to use that other thingy that sits next to it with all those letters and numbers.
To me, this seems at best like a kludge to compensate for bad design, and at worse a gimmick that will promote even worse design.
I hate to risk coming across as an uncritical "Linux can do everything better than Windows"-type person, but I think it would also be wrong to uncritically accept truisms about the weaknesses of Linux that really should be subjected to more critical analysis.
There is no Microsoft Office for Linux. And I would be willing to say that Linux probably does not, right now, offer all of the features that business users have access to *and find genuinely useful* in a Windows environment. However, I would be willing to bet that Linux has enough tools that the typical business user could use Linux and be able to do everything they wanted to do.
The relative lack of choice in productivity applications is unimportant, because most business users do not get a choice anyway. Here I use Office 97 and I hate it (I'd vastly prefer Office 95, for example, not to mention a number of non-M$ alternatives) but I don't get a choice. Everyone here uses Office 97 because someone with more power than me has decided that that's what we use. All that you need to make a viable office desktop system is a single complete, useable suite of productivity applications. For most users, Linux can already provide this, or at least can almost provide this.
The "lack of standards" is also a red herring. Linux has excellent standards support where it counts -- in data formats. Linux applications have solid support for almost every important file format. The only exceptions are some of the proprietary Microsoft formats, for which support is a little spotty. As for the differences between Red Hat and SuSE or KDE and GNOME, any particular organization only needs to get one configuration up and running. Once again, the question is whether you can get *a* complete, working system up and running. If you can, it doesn't matter how different it is from some other organization's setup, as long as you can exchange data.
Linux is also a complex system--this is true. The average user is not going to be able to set up and administer Linux effectively on their own. A lot of background knowledge is required to administer a Linux system. Probably far more than is needed to keep Windows going. For a home user, particularly one who must contend with installing Linux himself, this is an important issue. Most home users need computers that are above all else simple and easy to master (too bad they're stuck with Windows, but Linux would be even worse for most of them). For a business with an IS department whose job it is to understand, install, troubleshhot and administer complex systems, the issue ought to be unimportant. An IS department with a collective clue could set up a Unix-based desktop system that was easy to use. Here, in fact, Linux provides greater stability than Windows because Linux can be configured to give the user as much control over their work environment as needed but still be restricted so that the user cannot screw up the system on their own, as is not infrequently done to Windows machines. It is easier to centrally managae a network of Linux machines -- especially if major applications can be centrally stored and maintained.
Whether or not Linux is the best choice, or even a good choice as a desktop system for very many organizations, I really don't know. But I do think that the notion that Linux cannot be usefully and successfully deployed in such a situation has more to do with peoples' attitudes and misconceptions than it does with the actual capabilities of the OS and its available applications.
FWIW, the very first OS I used in a business setting was UNIX, in 1992. (I don't know what flavour--I didn't even consciously realize what OS I was using--but we were using DEC Stations with huge B&W monitors and running what I now realize was X). At the time, I knew nothing about Unix and little about computers. To me, X looked basically like a Mac, and I had as little trouble as the rest of the office in using the systems. And, FWIW, things like file sharing seemed a whole lot easier on those UNIX workstations than they do on our Win95/Novell network today.