"A corporation is not a human being, I'm not trying to hold it to an ethical standard, I just have no respect for that kind of business"
Corporations are held to be equivalent to human beings in the eyes of the law -- why can't we hold them to an ethical standard?
There are two corrupt entities at work here -- the government that did this (yay, American democracy) and the companies who have received this intelligence willingly (yay, capitalism). Moreover, consider that the companies, having received this intelligence, reward the politicians who administer government with huge campaign contributions.
IMO, anyone who really wants to see this stopped has a few things they really, really need to do:
Show your displeasure with the stranglehold big business has on us. Buy locally, even if it is more expensive (assuming you can afford it). We can't boycott large corporations -- they're too pervasive. We can make holes in their profitability, though.
Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.
Seriously re-evaluate the political parties and politicians most in bed with these people. That means considering casting your vote for third parties. Only kooks inhabit third parties? Consider that more reasonable candidates will come along if non-traditional parties seem more viable. (Besides, have you noticed how many kooks there are in the two major parties?)
The parties in power have shown that their contributors are more important to them than angry constituents, unless the angry constituents compose a voting block they can't neutralize with money. We can change that, but only by performing our duties as citizens to keep government honest.
"At least try and know what your talking about. One-click has to be enabled by the user, and is disabled by default."
At least try to refute the person you're flaming when your flaming him. That is to say, just because it's a user-enabled security hazard doesn't mean it isn't a security hazard.
phil (Not Philip Greenspun, BTW, since he's gotten some/. press recently)
"However, I think some of his advice is rather fascist, if you really look at it. I think he really downplays the importance of graphics on websites, which is the main reason why the web is popular in the first place. Sure, content is king, but surfers want to experience attractive websites."
Nielson's observations boil down to two axioms:
The longer your site takes to load, the greater the chance that someone's going to give up.
The more useful your site is to someone, the more likely they will come back.
Even on my cable modem or at work on a T1, I sometimes find myself switching/. to "lite" mode, just because the graphics take too long to load. Correspondingly, I put up with its daunting user interface (which works well, but requires a big learning curve), because it gives me satisfying content -- not because of pretty pictures.
Sure, users want to experience attractive websites, but it's much lower on the hierarchy of needs. If a pretty picture is keeping content from me (and is not, itself, the sought-after content), I'm going somewhere else.
"Nielsen's advice, while applicable to all web designers, tends to encourage to creation of look-alike e-commerce websites. The needs of a user buying stuff at E-Bay are different than a person checking out an online art gallery."
Remember that he is giving general advice; the most usable website for an amalgamated average of all users of the Web is probably a generic e-commerce site. (Since usability is directly proportional to profit for these sites, that's not surprising.)
Your point is well-taken, though -- different audiences will prefer different UI's, and sometimes the general rules don't apply. Ditto for different user tasks.
It would be instructive to see some field- and task-specific usability analyses on useit at some point.
"What the big sites have in common is that most of them got started on the web at an early stage."
Lots of entrepreneurs "got started on the web at an early stage" -- and aren't around today. The really big sites stuck around longer because they were more usable.
"The "big" sites maintain this advantage now through massive amounts of advertising. That's what big sites have in common these days. Yep, they all look like portals, but that's a fad thing, not a design consideration."
I actually don't like portals very much (I usually ignore 80% of the page once I can find the "search" blank), but that is just one page out of the site -- albeit a big one. Where e-commerce sites deliver is on their catalog and ordering pages. Making someone feel secure with your credit card number is no mean feat.
Advertising actually is something that counteracts usability to an extent. However, remember the old lesson of Maapo cereal -- advertising gets the first visit, but not all the rest.
Don't dis them for doing something we, as Free software advocates, have been asking companies to do -- namely giving mothballed products to everyone rather than hoarding them.
Even if NetBEUI isn't viable anymore, it has value as an Open Source application:
The code may be interesting and instructive for students.
There might be life left in the old bird that the original company doesn't see -- but someone poking around with the code might come up with something.
Parts of its implementation could be useful for other OSS projects. Synergy is one of the most important advantages of Free software.
Opening code that companies no longer value is more than just good PR -- it's a valuable practice, and it should be encouraged on general principal.
Your response is fair and pragmatic. But the original poster didn't bring up (and you don't address) the most disconcerting aspect of Real's recent business practice: their appropriation of personal information without individual permission.
Is Red Hat going to take steps to prevent this? How can we be assured that similar shenanigans won't occur in the future, assuming the product is going to remain closed-source?
I will be sorely disappointed in RH if these concerns simply go unanswered, and I certainly don't feel safe putting Real's binary on my system until the point has at least been addressed.
phil
Re:More to do with the definition of "Addict"
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LonelyNet
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· Score: 2
Your argument is thought out very well with good supporting evidence, however the point you only touched on, and actually is where the real problem lies, is the thin line that exists between addiction and obsession.
True. But my point is that people who attempt to make hay on this issue use the implicit "obsessive" connotation to scare everyone, then support it using statistics like "people spend more than five hours a week -- every week! -- on the Internet." That's hardly obsessive. But they can get away with calling it an addiction, which they do.
People do obsess [...] and in an effort to prevent it, or at least make it a controllable addiction, we need to study it and understand it.
A good point. But I'm sure you'll agree that this study demonstrates very little. The fellow I was replying to is a good example of how it misleads the casual reader into thinking that a natural -- even healthy -- phenomenon is a frightening crisis. The "addiction" rhetoric -- a common ploy nowadays -- is a willful attempt to exacerbate this.
A more interesting study (IMO) would correlate subjects' test scores on accepted psychological assessments of social adjustment to time spent online, and activities engaged in while online. Further refinements might account for the changing nature of "social adjustment" on the Internet. Rhetorical tactics like the usurpation of the word "addiction" do nothing to help us understand the weaknesses of current research and come up with improvements like this. They only generate alarm.
phil
More to do with the definition of "Addict"
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LonelyNet
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· Score: 5
"What pisses me off is that people think I am an Internet addict."
Well, you are. The problem lies not in the fact that you're an addict, but that people don't seem to realize what an addict is.
According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, to addict oneself to something is "to surrender (oneself) to something habitually or obsessively". An addict (the noun) is simply a "devotee".
People are addicted, in the strictest sense, to all kinds of things -- chocolate, the morning paper, stamp collecting, C programming.
The word, however, has a pernicious pejorative use as someone who devotes him/herself to something to the point of causing him/herself (or others) harm. This is convenient to people who are disturbed at what someone does -- they can label them an "addict" and suddenly that person loses the right to do what they are doing.
This mechanism is most evident in American attitudes toward drugs and drug addicts. (Many of whom do injure themselves and others for their addictions; many, however, do not.) However, the same thing is at work all over our society.
Some of the most effective members of society have been addicts -- some things can only be accomplished by obsessive devotion to a cause. Addiction, by definition. Ted Williams was addicted to hitting baseballs. Most of the people in public office -- heaven help us all -- are addicted to politics. (As opposed to fair government addicts, whom I would gladly elect.)
But it doesn't have to be an obsession. It can simply be a habit. I'm an email addict, by that definition; I check to see if there's something new all day, whenever I think about it. I'm not obsessed about it; it's just easy to check, and keeps me up-to-date on correspondence. So I've cultivated the habit. If I weren't addicted to email, a lot of people would be irritated that I didn't do something for them in a timely manner.
Next time someone calls you an "internet addict", ask them if they have a favorite TV show. Or if they enjoy their job. Or if they're married. Show me someone totally unaddicted to something, and I'll show you someone with no hobbies, no passionate attachments, no connections to anything -- someone, in short, with real problems.
A lot of the quest for knowledge is explicitly recognizing and analyzing the obvious. Memes may be intuitively obvious -- we've had enough "master politicians" and the like using them for centuries -- but to understand how they affect us, we need to state the obvious. Namely, that ideas infect us based primarily on our exposure to them, and rational thought is more a defense against bad ideas than a progenitor of good ones.
Why should we bother discussing this system of idea propogation? Because a lot of people are manipulating this system to control our actions and reactions. And because it shows the professions of journalism and public relations (like there's a difference, anymore) for what they are (a weapon moneyed interests use for controlling mass populations) rather than what they want us to think they are (a shining beacon of truth that's working to keep you informed -- an idea they've inundated us with for years after it lost even the semblance of truth).
You are quite right that the advertising community has had this down for a long time. For years, they've been talking about how to "position" an idea in an "overcommunicated" society. A meme is an idea that is spread like a disease. "Positioning" is infecting as many people as possible with a meme, and "overcommunication" is a euphemism for the toxic environment of spurious advocacy that they have created for us.
Personally, though, I think memes should be taken very seriously. Some of them are public health hazards, and the problem is, the progenitors of this pestilence seem to be in control of the health service. All that's left for us to do is protect ourselves against them as best we can -- and, when warranted, give them the same treatment we did smallpox.
phil
Doing it for the children, or for public decency, or whatever else you need to believe, and whatever "it" really is. And doing it with 99 and 44/100ths percent accuracy.
Your response is no less weighted: "The MPAA is making this out to be a piracy issue because to them it is a piracy issue." We know this is their public position, but it seems hard to put together even a compelling prima facie argument for this position. Digitally-distributed content (as CDs) have been around for a while, and the music companies are richer than ever. Ditto software, despite minimal copy protection. Why are movies different? The MPAA has yet to answer this question, even in a cursory way.
OTOH, the encryption system that is virtually useless for combatting all but the most unlikely piracy is very effective at controlling the market for players. And there are boatloads of compelling financial motives for the movie publishers to want control of a market besides content distribution. They have read the writing on the music industry's wall -- the business of packaging content physically for distribution and selling those units is going to be a lot less profitable in the coming years.
Assuming that the MPAA believes it's own position is assuming that the MPAA is stupid, which I'm not yet willing to do. It even further beggars belief to suggest that their system for "protecting against piracy," while pitifully ineffective at curbing piracy, is "accidentally" a cunningly effective system for controlling the DVD player market. It had to be by design.
So, it is "clear" that this is not "a piracy issue". The issue is where the rights of the consumers lie in using products they have purchased, and where the rights of the intellectual property owners end. You may argue that the poster's question is self-evident, or a waste of Mr. Johanssen's interview time, but it is not weighted. It is self-evident to anyone who reviews the facts.
As I'm sure everyone will agree, there are some absolutely gorgeous GUIs availabe for Linux and on the flip side, there are some absolutely horrendous ones. One of the problems that the Linux community will see as Linux becomes more popular with "regular" users is that there is no consistency between the different GUIs.
This speaks to something I've been saying to myself for a while -- Linux needs a User Interface Specification. To my knowledge, an authoritative document of this type doesn't exist.
I'm not talking about limiting flexibility -- long live customization! -- but applications' and operating environments' default UIs need to be consistent with other applications' and environments' defaults. Consistency is the Holy Grail of usability.
I'd love to see an article or interview on/. by Bruce Tognazzini, Jakob Nielson, Jared Spool or some other UI heavy hitters, explaining exactly what's wrong with the Linux's UI approach (from a the "average" user's standpoint) and why. (And I'd also like to see them participate in the ensuing discussion, quoting facts and figures as necessary. Hint, hint.:) If the Linux community could integrate the body of knowledge that exists on UI into their products the way they incorporate everything else, this OS would be unbeatable. Period.
And as to whether we even want "regular" users using Linux -- Hell, yes! The most ubiquitous OS is not just going to be what the mundanes use; it's something we will all have to work with, whether we like it or not. I would prefer to like it.:)
Saying of Windows that "everything is in the registry" is similar to saying of Unix, "everything is on the file system". Everything's in that one place, but it's a big, complicated place. (That is one of the central points of Unix, anyway -- that everything is a file.)
If you look at it this way, Windows has the same problem the Unices, but it has a way around it. (The difference is that Unix started with the problem, and MS retrofitted it in.:)
Documentation, as you imply, is important. Unix documentation, although not centrally organized, is all over the place; OTOH, there are many things about MS products you don't learn unless you take their courses or buy their resource kits. (Or someone who has shows you.)
If I were Bill or Steve, I would trade the dollars for the knowledgeable user base. No, wait. On second thought, if I were either of those two guys, I'd quit my job tomorrow, buy a bunch of secluded land, and build a palatial high-tech hermitage. Hey, wait....
That's Leon Lederman's own book on the Higgs, by way of physics since Democritus. As befits an excellent teacher, he's an excellent writer; I'm also a non-science type, and I thought he explained things very clearly, and also entertainingly. A great book on particle physics. (He also wrote it when it looked like the Superconducting Supercollider was going to get funding. Interesting to see what everyone was so excited about.:)
Also, particle physics is all over the web; I'll leave it to someone else to post URL's.
A lot of people poo-poo this way of looking at programming, so I'll go ahead and back you up. Programming is not necessarily artless; that's like saying you can't make art with a block of wood and a chainsaw, because you're just a woodcutter.
I'm not trying to elevate my status in the world; most of the programming I do has more in common with a real estate brochure or a greeting card. But the existence of those two items doesn't make any less of an art out of photography or poetry. (Perhaps they do cheapen it.)
Programming is an aesthetic experience, because using a computer is an aesthetic experience. Consider two text editors -- vi and pico. Largely the same featureset, but totally different implementations. If programming were simply a matter of solving the problem, why do both of these programs exist? Why hasn't the rationally better program simply won out?
Because some users prefer the aesthetics of pico, and some prefer the aesthetics of vi. The same thing repeats itself for countless applications. Why do we get so mad at Microsoft, if not for imposing their way of working on us by attempting to eliminate choices?
Therefore, we have to program with aesthetic considerations in mind, or else write software no one will use. We also make aesthetic decisions when deciding what programming paradigm to apply to a problem. As many people have pointed out before, you can pretty much accomplish anything procedurally that you can in OO. Despite apparently solid reasons for using one over the other, stuff like "code reuse" or "performance" are values, and choosing to do something in a particular way for their sake is making a value judgement that they are Good Things(tm) in this application. Why write Perl in C++? Why write Perl in C? Why write Perl??
I see the "programming-as-art" thing dismissed a lot around here, but honestly, nothing strikes me as more self-evident. And if you look at Sterling's article with that in mind, then maybe we are intelligentsia of a sort. It just seems we don't have the confidence to come and claim our title.
The Candidate Selector (and most people) seem to think that all issues lie on a 2-D continuum, with two extremes on each side and various kinds of wishy-washy in the middle. This doesn't reflect reality. Issues like gun control, free trade and foreign policy are complex -- distilling them into essentially two types of solutions limits us from exploring the whole host of possibilities.
I can't characterize my views on foreign policy (for instance) as "Isolationist" or "Interventionist" -- I think it's appropriate to "intervene" in some cases, and not to in others. And I think the type of intervention (or inaction) we consider is important, too. It isn't binary.
But it does make political campaigns easier to run, which is why it has persisted for so long. This is why I'm philosophically opposed to voting for the Big Two -- they have entrenched themselves in this mindset, and even if they put up a candidate I trust, I know the party, not the man, is what we're electing. And every plank in their platform is on one side or the other of this imaginary line.
I do think everyone should make their opinion known somehow -- vote for someone or something. In fact, I've been thinking we should organize a massive write-in campaign of "No Confidence". It might put a new perspective on the next candidate who claims he has a "mandate from the people" with a quarter or less of the American people behind him.:)
Why not use binary builds of the executable files digitally signed by the builders, and have the servers check the signatures against a trusted certifying authority?
Someone suggested this in the first article, and it still seems like a sensible solution. You can muck around in the source code all you want, even enhance it -- but when it comes time to play, the server enforces a standard set of binaries to play on.
If someone comes up with a serious gee-whiz enhancement, s/he releases the source, but also a binary patch to a "reputable" build. Hopefully, s/he also sends the patch (as source) to the project issuing the build, so it can be rolled into their project.
There are a few technical issues left open -- building a binary from which to divine a patch seems challenging, for instance. But pirates and trainer-builders have been doing this sort of thing for years.
Opening the source doesn't mean everyone gcc's their own copy of the game. Use this encryption thing we talk about so often on here, and only play using trusted binaries. It should solve things to everyone's satisfaction.
If you're gonna waste bandwidth, waste it creatively. My vote for favorite toy -- Sun Enterprise 3000.
Oh, come one. Everyone's gonna have an E6500 -- it's like Tickle Me Elmo. The 3k's cute. (And don't try to sell me an E10000, either. That's not a toy, young man.):)
phil
Why the Companies shouldn't decide these things
on
Cybernauts Awake!
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· Score: 2
Just some random musings....
I recommend anyone who hasn't go to the online site and browse the book. It's really raising a lot of interesting issues, and treating them from the standpoint you never hear. That is to say, it's not asking what's fair, but what's right.
Corporate email. Many people only have Internet access through their job, and from a fairness standpoint, they are using their employer's resources to access the Internet, so it is fair that the employer should be able to monitor (and perhaps log) that information.
But is it the right thing to do? Like I said, many people may not have Internet access any other way, and the activities offered on the Internet are so diverse that in much of it, it is not unreasonable to want a little privacy. Should the employers knowingly limit their employee's only access to this world?
Perhaps. Maybe some of the things the employee is looking at (like pornography) give them legitimate liability concerns, and may offend other employees. But what about my imaginary daughter's email from college? Or my credit card number, when ordering clothes online? And is it okay to monitor traffic so we can tell the difference between what's "okay" and what isn't?
Personal information in the public domain. Is it really right to collect everything about me that's in the public domain, then give it to someone I don't know so they can try to sell me something? It's certainly legal, and even fair, inasmuch as that information, in fragmented form, is out there anyway. But is its collection and dissemination an act with moral or ethical overtones?
The crown jewel -- is intellectual property even a valid ethical concept? What about its current implementation? Think, for a moment, only about what is considered legal under our IP laws -- things like the eToys/eToy lawsuit mentioned here a while back, or the periodic extension of the time during which a copyright can be valid, which seems to happen every time a major corporation's grip on older IP threatens to expire. Is this really the way to treat ideas and concepts that all of society can benefit from?
Corporations are very often embroiled in the discussion of "fairness" (usually to make sure they are being treated fairly), but morality transcends this. In fact, it has largely been moral and ethical concerns that gave rise to Free Software -- just because I have the right to make my code non-free doesn't mean I should.
Corporations are not necessarily moral or ethical bodies. In fact, the overarching goal of publicly-traded companies -- to please the shareholders with maximum profits -- seems to conflict with morality and ethics on several levels.
However, as companies come online, they seem to be erecting barriers to entry -- barriers surmountable, generally, only by other companies. If they are allowed to succeed in this, the future of the Internet (IMO) will not be determined with moral considerations in mind, and those of us with moral concerns will have to do things the dirty old way we do now -- forcing corporations to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
These are just my thoughts, of course. But reading a document like the book being reviewed really points out to me what a golden opportunity we have to inject ethical considerations into the very way the Internet works. It would be a shame to waste it with inaction.
phil
History teaches no such lesson
on
Copyright!
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· Score: 1
...at least, not in the last 50 years.
As the article points out, the big corporates have been able, in practice, to make copyrights last as long as they want. They've been doing this for literally decades, and a system exists for perpetuating this process, and for silencing its critics (at least, the dangerous ones that seek legal action).
When an American is jailed, s/he often loses the right to vote (IANAL, so if someone could clarify this, please do); hence, s/he is no longer a constituent. For a politician with a strong "installed" constituency in groups not affected by this phenomenon, this is an enormous benefit -- potential naysayers are eliminated from the democratic process.
Given that political participation is higher among older age groups (most of which are ignorant of what software piracy is, let alone participate in it), it is safe to assume that a large percentage -- perhaps a majority -- of incumbents have more incentive to fill the jails with people who would either not vote, or vote against him. Hence the Drug war (which has similar demographics). Hence the defense of otherwise indefensible intellectual property laws. Hence a larger prison population per capita that many developing nations, and virtually all industrialized ones.
Of course, if the young in America were genuinely politically active, there might be politicians with their careers at stake over this. But we've forsaken them, so they'll forsake us. If there is no other incentive to elect people -- preferrably someone you believe in, no matter what their party affiliation or chance of winning -- let this be it.
phil
Re:There's nothing bad ?!
on
The Broken God
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· Score: 2
Reviews are inherently biased, however, and negative comments do not imply objectivity. It's quite the opposite, in some cases; reviewers with the idea that they absolutely must say something bad tend to bring up negative aspects of what they're reviewing that they would otherwise ignore, elevating tiny flaws to the level of serious concerns.
If someone honestly thinks there are not any flaws with a work that merit mentioning, I have no problem with them not mentioning it. I agree that nothing's perfect -- the existance of minor (in the reviewer's opinion) flaws is evidenced by the less-than-perfect rating.
Note that I haven't read the book. I probably will, though -- it sounds like an interesting plot.
Though your point is taken, this sort of thing could be eased if we abstracted logic away from language. To take your example, the relationship "If a, then b" could also be stated "a implies b", or a->b in the logic classes I took. So:
if (a>b) do_something()
could be:
(a>b)->do_something()
(Understanding, of course, that this syntax infringes horribly on existing conventions in, e.g., C and Perl. But you get the idea.)
Beyond symbolic logic and loop/flow-of-control constructs, programming is just nouns (variables/properties/objects) and verbs (functions/methods), right? What individuals choose to name variables and functions may be problematic (though no more so than having to understand "clever" code written in one's own language), but to internationalize standard functions, it seems like a single library could be created to substitute the names of built-in functions, variables and constants with something appropriate to a given language ("write()" becomes "ecrivez()", perhaps). The syntax is already abstract from a given language -- function([param1..., paramX]).
(Of course, even writing this, I can see problems -- how well would this work with non-alphabetic languages, for instance? It would also compound the work required for adding new libraries, if everyone also has to add translation modules for each supported language. Then again, you could release the libraries in your own -- maybe a few other -- languages, and let other developers with an itch to scratch add translation modules themselves. Oh yeah, and the language would be harder to learn for, say, English-speakers than an English-based language.)
I thought a tiny bit about how one would do this with Perl ("use French; direz 'Bonjour, le monde!';"), but while Perl is ideally suited in some ways, it is ideally unsuited in many, many others. Plus, my skill with other languages sucks, as the above example probably illustrates.:)
"You souldn't assume that there are only 2 browsers."
Good point -- but more precisely, we shouldn't have to make assumptions at all on how many browsers there are. That is, we should be able to write standards-compliant pages once, and have them formatted appropriately in each browser. Of the two largest browsers, Netscape is far the less compliant; it also lags behind Opera, and even Lynx. "Where is the standard definition of Java Script?"
http://www.ecma.ch/stand/ecma-262.htm -- ECMA is a European standards board; this is their standardized version of the core language, including the input of Netscape and Microsoft (IIRC) employees. Note that it standardizes the language, and not the object model the language manipulates.
The HTTP Document Object Model -- http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/ -- is the W3 standard for the object model, complete with recommendations for Javascript language bindings.
IE purports total adherence to the HTML DOM, I believe, though I haven't used the interface, as such, to know one way or another. I do know it is more complete than Netscape's. Both browsers' javascript is, I believe, ECMA-262-compliant.
He said to start timing when you select "Yes" -- I'm assuming that's when you select "OK" or whatever from the shutdown dialog, not when you select the OS after the BIOS/Hardware initialization. So that includes BIOS and hardware, a non-OS-specific slowdown. I start my HP Netserver LC with 2 slow-to-detect SCSI controllers, it takes a while, no matter which OS I'm running.
Of course, the point is apparently poking fun at something people have to do all the time, not specifically MS-bashing. In that context, I suppose it makes sense for that pain to mean something.:)
"Paranoid direct-marketing reasons shouldn't be used as a reason to break perfectly acceptable behaviour in a browser..."
I don't think you sufficiently established that this is really "perfectly acceptable":
"Cookies are damned convenient...for example, if you're trying to implement a link exchange or some other similar system where knowing how many times your 'message' has been seen is important..."
In short, in collecting behavioral info in banner ads. I just can't see any case where collecting data apart from the page is useful, except where the content of the image is itself divorced from the page. The only example I can think of for this is banner ad tracking.
Not that this, in and of itself, shouldn't be allowed, but there should be limits on the amount of information these companies should own or, for that matter, have access to. No matter how easy collecting details of my life is, that kind of behavior constitutes an invasion of privacy, a right implied by the Constitution.
To me, collecting excessive information on my habits is akin to stalking, and is one of the few places where government should be regulating the Internet. Except that software patent issues and recent legislation show a government neither sufficiently competent nor inclined to be responsible stewards of the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
"A corporation is not a human being, I'm not trying to hold it to an ethical standard, I just have no respect for that kind of business"
Corporations are held to be equivalent to human beings in the eyes of the law -- why can't we hold them to an ethical standard?
There are two corrupt entities at work here -- the government that did this (yay, American democracy) and the companies who have received this intelligence willingly (yay, capitalism). Moreover, consider that the companies, having received this intelligence, reward the politicians who administer government with huge campaign contributions.
IMO, anyone who really wants to see this stopped has a few things they really, really need to do:
The parties in power have shown that their contributors are more important to them than angry constituents, unless the angry constituents compose a voting block they can't neutralize with money. We can change that, but only by performing our duties as citizens to keep government honest.
phil
At least try to refute the person you're flaming when your flaming him. That is to say, just because it's a user-enabled security hazard doesn't mean it isn't a security hazard.
phil /. press recently)
(Not Philip Greenspun, BTW, since he's gotten some
Nielson's observations boil down to two axioms:
- The longer your site takes to load, the greater the chance that someone's going to give up.
- The more useful your site is to someone, the more likely they will come back.
Even on my cable modem or at work on a T1, I sometimes find myself switchingSure, users want to experience attractive websites, but it's much lower on the hierarchy of needs. If a pretty picture is keeping content from me (and is not, itself, the sought-after content), I'm going somewhere else.
"Nielsen's advice, while applicable to all web designers, tends to encourage to creation of look-alike e-commerce websites. The needs of a user buying stuff at E-Bay are different than a person checking out an online art gallery."
Remember that he is giving general advice; the most usable website for an amalgamated average of all users of the Web is probably a generic e-commerce site. (Since usability is directly proportional to profit for these sites, that's not surprising.)
Your point is well-taken, though -- different audiences will prefer different UI's, and sometimes the general rules don't apply. Ditto for different user tasks.
It would be instructive to see some field- and task-specific usability analyses on useit at some point.
"What the big sites have in common is that most of them got started on the web at an early stage."
Lots of entrepreneurs "got started on the web at an early stage" -- and aren't around today. The really big sites stuck around longer because they were more usable.
"The "big" sites maintain this advantage now through massive amounts of advertising. That's what big sites have in common these days. Yep, they all look like portals, but that's a fad thing, not a design consideration."
I actually don't like portals very much (I usually ignore 80% of the page once I can find the "search" blank), but that is just one page out of the site -- albeit a big one. Where e-commerce sites deliver is on their catalog and ordering pages. Making someone feel secure with your credit card number is no mean feat.
Advertising actually is something that counteracts usability to an extent. However, remember the old lesson of Maapo cereal -- advertising gets the first visit, but not all the rest.
phil
Don't dis them for doing something we, as Free software advocates, have been asking companies to do -- namely giving mothballed products to everyone rather than hoarding them.
Even if NetBEUI isn't viable anymore, it has value as an Open Source application:
Opening code that companies no longer value is more than just good PR -- it's a valuable practice, and it should be encouraged on general principal.
phil
Your response is fair and pragmatic. But the original poster didn't bring up (and you don't address) the most disconcerting aspect of Real's recent business practice: their appropriation of personal information without individual permission.
Is Red Hat going to take steps to prevent this? How can we be assured that similar shenanigans won't occur in the future, assuming the product is going to remain closed-source?
I will be sorely disappointed in RH if these concerns simply go unanswered, and I certainly don't feel safe putting Real's binary on my system until the point has at least been addressed.
phil
True. But my point is that people who attempt to make hay on this issue use the implicit "obsessive" connotation to scare everyone, then support it using statistics like "people spend more than five hours a week -- every week! -- on the Internet." That's hardly obsessive. But they can get away with calling it an addiction, which they do.
People do obsess [...] and in an effort to prevent it, or at least make it a controllable addiction, we need to study it and understand it.
A good point. But I'm sure you'll agree that this study demonstrates very little. The fellow I was replying to is a good example of how it misleads the casual reader into thinking that a natural -- even healthy -- phenomenon is a frightening crisis. The "addiction" rhetoric -- a common ploy nowadays -- is a willful attempt to exacerbate this.
A more interesting study (IMO) would correlate subjects' test scores on accepted psychological assessments of social adjustment to time spent online, and activities engaged in while online. Further refinements might account for the changing nature of "social adjustment" on the Internet. Rhetorical tactics like the usurpation of the word "addiction" do nothing to help us understand the weaknesses of current research and come up with improvements like this. They only generate alarm.
phil
Well, you are. The problem lies not in the fact that you're an addict, but that people don't seem to realize what an addict is.
According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, to addict oneself to something is "to surrender (oneself) to something habitually or obsessively". An addict (the noun) is simply a "devotee".
People are addicted, in the strictest sense, to all kinds of things -- chocolate, the morning paper, stamp collecting, C programming.
The word, however, has a pernicious pejorative use as someone who devotes him/herself to something to the point of causing him/herself (or others) harm. This is convenient to people who are disturbed at what someone does -- they can label them an "addict" and suddenly that person loses the right to do what they are doing.
This mechanism is most evident in American attitudes toward drugs and drug addicts. (Many of whom do injure themselves and others for their addictions; many, however, do not.) However, the same thing is at work all over our society.
Some of the most effective members of society have been addicts -- some things can only be accomplished by obsessive devotion to a cause. Addiction, by definition. Ted Williams was addicted to hitting baseballs. Most of the people in public office -- heaven help us all -- are addicted to politics. (As opposed to fair government addicts, whom I would gladly elect.)
But it doesn't have to be an obsession. It can simply be a habit. I'm an email addict, by that definition; I check to see if there's something new all day, whenever I think about it. I'm not obsessed about it; it's just easy to check, and keeps me up-to-date on correspondence. So I've cultivated the habit. If I weren't addicted to email, a lot of people would be irritated that I didn't do something for them in a timely manner.
Next time someone calls you an "internet addict", ask them if they have a favorite TV show. Or if they enjoy their job. Or if they're married. Show me someone totally unaddicted to something, and I'll show you someone with no hobbies, no passionate attachments, no connections to anything -- someone, in short, with real problems.
phil
A lot of the quest for knowledge is explicitly recognizing and analyzing the obvious. Memes may be intuitively obvious -- we've had enough "master politicians" and the like using them for centuries -- but to understand how they affect us, we need to state the obvious. Namely, that ideas infect us based primarily on our exposure to them, and rational thought is more a defense against bad ideas than a progenitor of good ones.
Why should we bother discussing this system of idea propogation? Because a lot of people are manipulating this system to control our actions and reactions. And because it shows the professions of journalism and public relations (like there's a difference, anymore) for what they are (a weapon moneyed interests use for controlling mass populations) rather than what they want us to think they are (a shining beacon of truth that's working to keep you informed -- an idea they've inundated us with for years after it lost even the semblance of truth).
You are quite right that the advertising community has had this down for a long time. For years, they've been talking about how to "position" an idea in an "overcommunicated" society. A meme is an idea that is spread like a disease. "Positioning" is infecting as many people as possible with a meme, and "overcommunication" is a euphemism for the toxic environment of spurious advocacy that they have created for us.
Personally, though, I think memes should be taken very seriously. Some of them are public health hazards, and the problem is, the progenitors of this pestilence seem to be in control of the health service. All that's left for us to do is protect ourselves against them as best we can -- and, when warranted, give them the same treatment we did smallpox.
phil
Doing it for the children, or for public decency, or whatever else you need to believe, and whatever "it" really is. And doing it with 99 and 44/100ths percent accuracy.Your response is no less weighted: "The MPAA is making this out to be a piracy issue because to them it is a piracy issue." We know this is their public position, but it seems hard to put together even a compelling prima facie argument for this position. Digitally-distributed content (as CDs) have been around for a while, and the music companies are richer than ever. Ditto software, despite minimal copy protection. Why are movies different? The MPAA has yet to answer this question, even in a cursory way.
OTOH, the encryption system that is virtually useless for combatting all but the most unlikely piracy is very effective at controlling the market for players. And there are boatloads of compelling financial motives for the movie publishers to want control of a market besides content distribution. They have read the writing on the music industry's wall -- the business of packaging content physically for distribution and selling those units is going to be a lot less profitable in the coming years.
Assuming that the MPAA believes it's own position is assuming that the MPAA is stupid, which I'm not yet willing to do. It even further beggars belief to suggest that their system for "protecting against piracy," while pitifully ineffective at curbing piracy, is "accidentally" a cunningly effective system for controlling the DVD player market. It had to be by design.
So, it is "clear" that this is not "a piracy issue". The issue is where the rights of the consumers lie in using products they have purchased, and where the rights of the intellectual property owners end. You may argue that the poster's question is self-evident, or a waste of Mr. Johanssen's interview time, but it is not weighted. It is self-evident to anyone who reviews the facts.
phil
As I'm sure everyone will agree, there are some absolutely gorgeous GUIs availabe for Linux and on the flip side, there are some absolutely horrendous ones. One of the problems that the Linux community will see as Linux becomes more popular with "regular" users is that there is no consistency between the different GUIs.
This speaks to something I've been saying to myself for a while -- Linux needs a User Interface Specification. To my knowledge, an authoritative document of this type doesn't exist.
I'm not talking about limiting flexibility -- long live customization! -- but applications' and operating environments' default UIs need to be consistent with other applications' and environments' defaults. Consistency is the Holy Grail of usability.
I'd love to see an article or interview on /. by Bruce Tognazzini, Jakob Nielson, Jared Spool or some other UI heavy hitters, explaining exactly what's wrong with the Linux's UI approach (from a the "average" user's standpoint) and why. (And I'd also like to see them participate in the ensuing discussion, quoting facts and figures as necessary. Hint, hint. :) If the Linux community could integrate the body of knowledge that exists on UI into their products the way they incorporate everything else, this OS would be unbeatable. Period.
And as to whether we even want "regular" users using Linux -- Hell, yes! The most ubiquitous OS is not just going to be what the mundanes use; it's something we will all have to work with, whether we like it or not. I would prefer to like it. :)
phil
I should point out that, as of this writing, this message was moderated "3: Insightful".
Guess the monkeys threw you a bone, eh?
phil
If you look at it this way, Windows has the same problem the Unices, but it has a way around it. (The difference is that Unix started with the problem, and MS retrofitted it in. :)
Documentation, as you imply, is important. Unix documentation, although not centrally organized, is all over the place; OTOH, there are many things about MS products you don't learn unless you take their courses or buy their resource kits. (Or someone who has shows you.)
If I were Bill or Steve, I would trade the dollars for the knowledgeable user base. No, wait. On second thought, if I were either of those two guys, I'd quit my job tomorrow, buy a bunch of secluded land, and build a palatial high-tech hermitage. Hey, wait....
phil
That's Leon Lederman's own book on the Higgs, by way of physics since Democritus. As befits an excellent teacher, he's an excellent writer; I'm also a non-science type, and I thought he explained things very clearly, and also entertainingly. A great book on particle physics. (He also wrote it when it looked like the Superconducting Supercollider was going to get funding. Interesting to see what everyone was so excited about. :)
Also, particle physics is all over the web; I'll leave it to someone else to post URL's.
phil
Certainly Newton was come and gone, though I don't know if their handwriting recognition resembles Palm's or Unistroke in any way.
So it would seem that 3Com can claim prior art. What am I missing?
I'm not trying to elevate my status in the world; most of the programming I do has more in common with a real estate brochure or a greeting card. But the existence of those two items doesn't make any less of an art out of photography or poetry. (Perhaps they do cheapen it.)
Programming is an aesthetic experience, because using a computer is an aesthetic experience. Consider two text editors -- vi and pico. Largely the same featureset, but totally different implementations. If programming were simply a matter of solving the problem, why do both of these programs exist? Why hasn't the rationally better program simply won out?
Because some users prefer the aesthetics of pico, and some prefer the aesthetics of vi. The same thing repeats itself for countless applications. Why do we get so mad at Microsoft, if not for imposing their way of working on us by attempting to eliminate choices?
Therefore, we have to program with aesthetic considerations in mind, or else write software no one will use. We also make aesthetic decisions when deciding what programming paradigm to apply to a problem. As many people have pointed out before, you can pretty much accomplish anything procedurally that you can in OO. Despite apparently solid reasons for using one over the other, stuff like "code reuse" or "performance" are values, and choosing to do something in a particular way for their sake is making a value judgement that they are Good Things(tm) in this application. Why write Perl in C++? Why write Perl in C? Why write Perl??
Sure, there are tedious aspects, like debugging. There are also tedious aspects to building a mosaic, or painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
I see the "programming-as-art" thing dismissed a lot around here, but honestly, nothing strikes me as more self-evident. And if you look at Sterling's article with that in mind, then maybe we are intelligentsia of a sort. It just seems we don't have the confidence to come and claim our title.
phil
I can't characterize my views on foreign policy (for instance) as "Isolationist" or "Interventionist" -- I think it's appropriate to "intervene" in some cases, and not to in others. And I think the type of intervention (or inaction) we consider is important, too. It isn't binary.
But it does make political campaigns easier to run, which is why it has persisted for so long. This is why I'm philosophically opposed to voting for the Big Two -- they have entrenched themselves in this mindset, and even if they put up a candidate I trust, I know the party, not the man, is what we're electing. And every plank in their platform is on one side or the other of this imaginary line.
I do think everyone should make their opinion known somehow -- vote for someone or something. In fact, I've been thinking we should organize a massive write-in campaign of "No Confidence". It might put a new perspective on the next candidate who claims he has a "mandate from the people" with a quarter or less of the American people behind him. :)
phil
Why not use binary builds of the executable files digitally signed by the builders, and have the servers check the signatures against a trusted certifying authority?
Someone suggested this in the first article, and it still seems like a sensible solution. You can muck around in the source code all you want, even enhance it -- but when it comes time to play, the server enforces a standard set of binaries to play on.
If someone comes up with a serious gee-whiz enhancement, s/he releases the source, but also a binary patch to a "reputable" build. Hopefully, s/he also sends the patch (as source) to the project issuing the build, so it can be rolled into their project.
There are a few technical issues left open -- building a binary from which to divine a patch seems challenging, for instance. But pirates and trainer-builders have been doing this sort of thing for years.
Opening the source doesn't mean everyone gcc's their own copy of the game. Use this encryption thing we talk about so often on here, and only play using trusted binaries. It should solve things to everyone's satisfaction.
phil
If you're gonna waste bandwidth, waste it creatively. My vote for favorite toy -- Sun Enterprise 3000.
Oh, come one. Everyone's gonna have an E6500 -- it's like Tickle Me Elmo. The 3k's cute. (And don't try to sell me an E10000, either. That's not a toy, young man.) :)
phil
Just some random musings....
I recommend anyone who hasn't go to the online site and browse the book. It's really raising a lot of interesting issues, and treating them from the standpoint you never hear. That is to say, it's not asking what's fair, but what's right.
But is it the right thing to do? Like I said, many people may not have Internet access any other way, and the activities offered on the Internet are so diverse that in much of it, it is not unreasonable to want a little privacy. Should the employers knowingly limit their employee's only access to this world?
Perhaps. Maybe some of the things the employee is looking at (like pornography) give them legitimate liability concerns, and may offend other employees. But what about my imaginary daughter's email from college? Or my credit card number, when ordering clothes online? And is it okay to monitor traffic so we can tell the difference between what's "okay" and what isn't?
Corporations are very often embroiled in the discussion of "fairness" (usually to make sure they are being treated fairly), but morality transcends this. In fact, it has largely been moral and ethical concerns that gave rise to Free Software -- just because I have the right to make my code non-free doesn't mean I should.
Corporations are not necessarily moral or ethical bodies. In fact, the overarching goal of publicly-traded companies -- to please the shareholders with maximum profits -- seems to conflict with morality and ethics on several levels.
However, as companies come online, they seem to be erecting barriers to entry -- barriers surmountable, generally, only by other companies. If they are allowed to succeed in this, the future of the Internet (IMO) will not be determined with moral considerations in mind, and those of us with moral concerns will have to do things the dirty old way we do now -- forcing corporations to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
These are just my thoughts, of course. But reading a document like the book being reviewed really points out to me what a golden opportunity we have to inject ethical considerations into the very way the Internet works. It would be a shame to waste it with inaction.
phil
As the article points out, the big corporates have been able, in practice, to make copyrights last as long as they want. They've been doing this for literally decades, and a system exists for perpetuating this process, and for silencing its critics (at least, the dangerous ones that seek legal action).
When an American is jailed, s/he often loses the right to vote (IANAL, so if someone could clarify this, please do); hence, s/he is no longer a constituent. For a politician with a strong "installed" constituency in groups not affected by this phenomenon, this is an enormous benefit -- potential naysayers are eliminated from the democratic process.
Given that political participation is higher among older age groups (most of which are ignorant of what software piracy is, let alone participate in it), it is safe to assume that a large percentage -- perhaps a majority -- of incumbents have more incentive to fill the jails with people who would either not vote, or vote against him. Hence the Drug war (which has similar demographics). Hence the defense of otherwise indefensible intellectual property laws. Hence a larger prison population per capita that many developing nations, and virtually all industrialized ones.
Of course, if the young in America were genuinely politically active, there might be politicians with their careers at stake over this. But we've forsaken them, so they'll forsake us. If there is no other incentive to elect people -- preferrably someone you believe in, no matter what their party affiliation or chance of winning -- let this be it.
phil
Reviews are inherently biased, however, and negative comments do not imply objectivity. It's quite the opposite, in some cases; reviewers with the idea that they absolutely must say something bad tend to bring up negative aspects of what they're reviewing that they would otherwise ignore, elevating tiny flaws to the level of serious concerns.
If someone honestly thinks there are not any flaws with a work that merit mentioning, I have no problem with them not mentioning it. I agree that nothing's perfect -- the existance of minor (in the reviewer's opinion) flaws is evidenced by the less-than-perfect rating.
Note that I haven't read the book. I probably will, though -- it sounds like an interesting plot.
phil
Beyond symbolic logic and loop/flow-of-control constructs, programming is just nouns (variables/properties/objects) and verbs (functions/methods), right? What individuals choose to name variables and functions may be problematic (though no more so than having to understand "clever" code written in one's own language), but to internationalize standard functions, it seems like a single library could be created to substitute the names of built-in functions, variables and constants with something appropriate to a given language ("write()" becomes "ecrivez()", perhaps). The syntax is already abstract from a given language -- function([param1..., paramX]).
(Of course, even writing this, I can see problems -- how well would this work with non-alphabetic languages, for instance? It would also compound the work required for adding new libraries, if everyone also has to add translation modules for each supported language. Then again, you could release the libraries in your own -- maybe a few other -- languages, and let other developers with an itch to scratch add translation modules themselves. Oh yeah, and the language would be harder to learn for, say, English-speakers than an English-based language.)
I thought a tiny bit about how one would do this with Perl ("use French; direz 'Bonjour, le monde!';"), but while Perl is ideally suited in some ways, it is ideally unsuited in many, many others. Plus, my skill with other languages sucks, as the above example probably illustrates. :)
phil
"You souldn't assume that there are only 2 browsers."
Good point -- but more precisely, we shouldn't have to make assumptions at all on how many browsers there are. That is, we should be able to write standards-compliant pages once, and have them formatted appropriately in each browser. Of the two largest browsers, Netscape is far the less compliant; it also lags behind Opera, and even Lynx. "Where is the standard definition of Java Script?"
http://www.ecma.ch/stand/ecma-262.htm -- ECMA is a European standards board; this is their standardized version of the core language, including the input of Netscape and Microsoft (IIRC) employees. Note that it standardizes the language, and not the object model the language manipulates.
The HTTP Document Object Model -- http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/ -- is the W3 standard for the object model, complete with recommendations for Javascript language bindings.
IE purports total adherence to the HTML DOM, I believe, though I haven't used the interface, as such, to know one way or another. I do know it is more complete than Netscape's. Both browsers' javascript is, I believe, ECMA-262-compliant.
phil
He said to start timing when you select "Yes" -- I'm assuming that's when you select "OK" or whatever from the shutdown dialog, not when you select the OS after the BIOS/Hardware initialization. So that includes BIOS and hardware, a non-OS-specific slowdown. I start my HP Netserver LC with 2 slow-to-detect SCSI controllers, it takes a while, no matter which OS I'm running.
Of course, the point is apparently poking fun at something people have to do all the time, not specifically MS-bashing. In that context, I suppose it makes sense for that pain to mean something. :)
phil
I don't think you sufficiently established that this is really "perfectly acceptable":
"Cookies are damned convenient...for example, if you're trying to implement a link exchange or some other similar system where knowing how many times your 'message' has been seen is important..."
In short, in collecting behavioral info in banner ads. I just can't see any case where collecting data apart from the page is useful, except where the content of the image is itself divorced from the page. The only example I can think of for this is banner ad tracking.
Not that this, in and of itself, shouldn't be allowed, but there should be limits on the amount of information these companies should own or, for that matter, have access to. No matter how easy collecting details of my life is, that kind of behavior constitutes an invasion of privacy, a right implied by the Constitution.
To me, collecting excessive information on my habits is akin to stalking, and is one of the few places where government should be regulating the Internet. Except that software patent issues and recent legislation show a government neither sufficiently competent nor inclined to be responsible stewards of the Internet.
But that's another thread.... :)
phil