Sarcasm aside, after the French government committed a war crime by bombing of the British registered Greenpeace vessel 'Rainbow Warrior' in New Zealand, killing one person on board, a UK consumer boycott of French wine had a significant affect on sales for several years - wine is a significant part of their export business.
It was nice to see how the British government responded to this act of war on a British vessel (i.e. ignored it, and probably had a party).
Compared to Photoshop or Word, Excel and Outlook are pretty bad product names, but at least neither of them are the type of word you don't want to explain to kids. I really have second thoughts recommending a program called Gimp to anyone, especially if they need to search for it on Google. While I don't think it affects usability one bit, it is symptomatic of an attitude that affects usability.
To quote someone from a recent training course I went on 'Learning by example is good, but sometimes it's better to learn by reading. For instance, if the sign says Alligator Infested Waters you're better off learning from other people's experience'. Personally, yes, I still buy lots of technical books, and find a lot that is useful in them, saving me time from hitting the same problem. I don't think there's been one I've finished, but I've certainly finished chapters on topics I was interested in and weak. I also use Google to do the same. Strange thing is a lot of people in my team turn to me to answer their queries. I think there may be a link.
Actually - I will say that I prefer to initially learn by example - i.e. if I was picking up a new language I'd code by example to get a feel for the tools - but once I get going, give me the big fat technical manual written by someone whose been through the pain and can warn you about some of the peculiarities.
10 years ago I reckon you could have said the same thing but with 30 as the ceiling - one simple reason is that there aren't a lot of older programmers (you meet the odd person with tales of programming ICL mainframes and PDP) - up until the big computing boom in the 80s it really was quite a specialist job - and the sort of job that paid well enough you could have retired early, especially if you'd notched up experience in the 70s then gone contracting or consultancy in the 80s. Even if they'd all gone into management, there's probably enough IT management jobs now to soak up every pre-1985 developer going - not to mention academic life.
(I don't think that IS where they've all gone though, I think a lot have quit for other fields. Again I think that's because a lot of people programming today started out as hobbyists. Those before weren't - they're less interested in 'computing'.
These days I actually see more developers in their 30s than 20s - i.e. throughout my career most developers have been about my age +/- 5 years.
Per - I think you have hit the nail on the head there.
We had a guy at our place who could never accept is a decision was made he didn't agree with and would keep bringing it up. I reality he probably won/lost as many arguments as the rest of us, and was probably right/wrong as much as the rest of us, but he could never accept when things didn't go his way. He got made redundant and before leaving had set up an email to let everyone know that we were all doomed because the company was getting rid of people like him . . . what an egotistical and patronizing idiot - to me it demonstrated the lack of respect he had towards the people he worked with - either that we were too stupid to understand the issues he raised, or were cowardly 'yes men' rather than just grown up enough to know you don't get your way every time.
It's just impossible to work anywhere if you've constantly got to have 100% agreement on every single issue. The only way that's going to happen is to work for yourself. State your concerns, state your disagreement with the decision made, and then move on to how best to make it work. Or if you disagree with it that much - i.e. management decide to move to.NET and you are an open source advocate - then leave. (In fact if you find yourself constantly in confrontation with management decisions then I think that's good general advice - you're not going to single-handedly save the company).
On a wider note, I think this is a problem many people have with democracy - while everyone gets to have a say, it's also about the will of the majority, not about everyone getting what they want.
Hmm - something tells me the Slashdot community might not be the best people to ask about software usability. Most of us are capable of quickly getting up to speed with quite unusable software, that we've become blind to the pain. We also may be deluding ourselves - I THINK I'm very productive using vi through a Unix terminal, but actually that's just the way I've been programming since the 80s - if I put the same effort into learning PFE as I did with vi, I may find it better, but I'm always judging anything new against years of experience on something else.
The problem is that usability, like anything else, needs clearly defined requirements - 'How usable is this site to the over-50s with little computer experience' - rather than a general problem, much as we would like it to be. Now that's not always easy with websites or applications, but at least they generally have a specific audience.
The desktop, on the other hand, is the most generic part of the system, and needs to work well for all categories of users, which is an incredibly hard thing to get right. You have to remember that most basic users never change a single preference or setting ever, while advanced users will. But they will object to anything that is simple out of the box.
We do indeed have A good and open thing going on, but what we need is lots of good and open things going on - whether they're based on the Mozilla codebase, or KHTML / Webkit or something else. We also need closed source browsers like OmniWeb.
It was the desire for 'only one operating system, only one word processor, only one spreadsheet' rather than separate standards and programs that got the world into this mess in the first place. Let's not become the enemy in pushing for one solution.
Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
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Google to Buy Opera?
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How about the fact that they're actually pushing out the Sun JVM with the Google toolbar - doesn't that do much of the O/S abstraction and is more application centered than any extended browser.
The question is whether subscription TV-on-demand / paid download will generate enough cash to fund shows.
I suspect in some cases it certainly will (i.e. shows with large loyal cult audiences that already do well on DVD sales) - and it already does in some adult markets, although the costs are far lower there - but I think overall people still aren't ready to really pay the price for what they say they want.
'I want the quality of a major TV series, no adverts, but to pay the same price as advertising subsidised programming'. It's only been people's desire to have something 'for nothing' that allowed advertising led TV to become as dominant as it is.
The parent news story also shows the dangerous side-effects - rather than it just being adverts on local TV, there's a risk of shows going the way of the film industry, and going product placement mad. I'm not convinced that's all the fault of TiVO, so much as changing relationships with the content producers - presumably they once saw a business in selling 'unbranded' programming to networks who would then make money selling adverts, now they'd rather take the advertising revenue themselves, especially as the line between networks, content producers and product producers has become blurred.
Certainly not with a name like that anyway (what a stupid idea for a program that would be very useful in schools), but I picked it as an example because I think in terms of functionality it's getting increasingly close to Photoshop (and most people I know who have a digital camera, have at least a pirate copy of Photoshop, even if they only use it to remove red-eye). It is picking up an increasing amount of press attention, even in PC magazines, because it now does most of what most people need.
I'm intrigued as to what happens when it becomes feature equivalent - currently, as with OpenOffice - a large part of the product and project spec is defined by matching the feature set of an existing program. I don't think this is unique to FOSS or even software - the commercial world is rife with 'me too' products, that far outnumber the innovative ones. FOSS can also be innovative, but I'm interested to see if a 'me too' project can become an innovative one - or will the developers go 'right, job done, let's all go finish off Inkscape'?
Although you do touch on something when you say that a browser is part of a basic computer system - the FOSS projects that are innovative tend to be the one driven by the needs of developers or sys admins who can code - there's good odds that at least one person frustrated by a missing or buggy feature has the capability to fix it. Projects like GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, etc are somewhat different in that you're generally dealing with skilled developers with amateur interest in graphics tools, or artists with hobbyist programming skills (or more rarely, developers motivated to work on a project just to contribute something).
Or 'I can make that at home' syndrome. The interesting thing is what happens when the FOSS apps become equivalent with the applications that have inspired them - how does development proceed from there?
Firefox is certainly a positive sign - it's evolved faster than IE, but then MS have always had a vested interest in not putting too much functionality into the browser. On the other hand, Firefox has full-time staff, and of course there are Opera and Apple also moving the market along.
I've no idea how it will go - I think GIMP will be next. The question is whether it will slow or speed up innovation. I know what the dogma says, but then it's also true that it can't be a good thing for a top notch programmer to have to spend half their day earning money doing something other than programming - and we all know that you can't replace one visionary with 20 average programmers.
The rest may come true, but I don't see the mass adoption of the $100 laptop, purely on the grounds that people could already save money by buying lower-powered older technology, or second hand - but they don't.
It's a bit like cars - most people never use their potential most of the time (they certainly can't legally drive at top speed, and rarely need 4WD in the city) - but they'll buy something far beyond their actual needs.
There's also the question of whether we want to replace the dominance of one ecosystem with another - and that doesn't just mean different distros, or even BSD - much as I like Unix derived systems, it would be a concern if there were no alternatives (i.e BEOS) to drive things along by offering a different perspective.
a) With the first part you're more likely to install an existing solution than develop from scratch, but the point about firewalls is very interesting - I know a lot of businesses try and lock down their users and prevent access to webmail - now I can't imagine they will be too happy with software that can bypass their control. I can't really think of any issue on the client-side, at least until we get to the idea of running a background process across on the client browser across multiple pages.
b & c) Yes, that's what I think customers like. No updates to download. No plug-ins (except maybe Flash). No Active-X warnings popping up and scaring people who've never heard of it. And no need to buy an upgrade. I've no doubt at all the customers love web apps, and it's the customers that are driving it.
c) You'd like to think so, but it seems to take far too much effort to do so. I don't think writing code that checks for the browser version and then executes different commands on different browsers to do the same task is really efficient development, or truly platform independent. And if you're going to do anything that is too much like a client app - i.e. something that allows a user to manipulate an image hosted on a client site - then you do need to start worrying about what browser they're using. And once more processing gets moved to the browser (i.e. when people start making heavy use of canvas) then you'll need to start worrying about the capabilities of their machines.
What's both good and bad is that this is being driven largely by users - we're getting what we wanted with Java (a cross-platform environment for deploying applications) but unfortunately we're getting it as a collection of technologies that were designed for a different purpose.
Then again, that pretty much reflects the history of computing!
It seems to me to be more about 'zero-installation' applications - it's about doing all the stuff that Java applets could have done, in the browser itself (so if Microsoft had backed Java properly from the off, rather than pushing ActiveX, we might have been there already).
It's stuff you could do by writing a client program people could use - people criticize the limitations of the browser and HTML, but it was never intended to be the only client program a user would use to connect to the Internet - it's just that it's become one.
So rather than using proper programming languages and tools that actually easily support GUI client development, we're hacking the browser to support things it wasn't originally 'meant' to do (or at least, expected to do through plug-ins).
It's more that clients are ceasing to be Browsers, and instead become, well, clients.
It's evident that users
a) want a 'desktop' experience
b) like 'zero-install/update'
What we need is a cross-platform O/S independent language, where we could easily deploy applications over the web rather than running them in the browser - seeing as they'd have to be small applications, we could call then Applets.
JavaScript, jScript and ActionScript are all variations on the ECMAScript standard. Everyone else - including Flash - is moving towards compliance with the ECMAScript standards - I don't know about MS intentions, but I'm not hopeful - they'll only do it if the market forces them - i.e. when people start producing web sites that only work properly on standards compliant browsers.
Which of course will never happen (if businesses are willing to 'waste' time duplicating code for the 10% NOT using IE, they will do the same to cater for even a 10% IE usage).
Yes, that struck me later - it's only the non-transferability of files that would allow such a market.
That's something that isn't an issue for people this early in the market, but a few years down the line people are going to want to be able to sell some of their files to buy the rights to others.
(Copyright law generally backs the right of transfer - hence the growing market for 2nd hand licenses of business software).
Having read the article it makes the same classic mistake of ignoring the production cost, and concentrating purely on the physical item/distribution costs - which is as you say the same in software markets - the more something sells, the lower the production cost per unit - which is really what you'd expect with music - the more ubiquitous the cheaper it gets, niche art music costing more (like bespoke tailoring or software costing more than mass produced).
What's also daft is the idea that someone logs on, sees Eminem is $5 so then decides they'll buy Coltrane for 25c instead - like people do that now.
But only to the extent that it makes economic sense to produce the 'official' file - if you're going to make a loss, you give up. There comes a point where you're better off targeting the customers who can afford to pay (and will) and not bothering with devaluing yourself to the level of someone who doesn't want to pay.
Plenty of industries have gone that way (unable to compete with a technology delivering cheaper but not necessarily better goods - see also food).
Well that was almost what the people advocating the.xxx domain were arguing for. A nice simple and voluntary solution to cleaning up the web -no more 'surprise' results for your Google searches.
There are two groups opposing the solution : 1) Those with an ideological opposition to pr0n, who not want to see it legitimized (Christian Right, Feminist left). There's a lot of valid arguments around the lines of exploitation and coercion but I think they do need separating from the censorship angle. 2) The anti-censorship / libertarian lobby, who see it as a restriction on freedom of speech, although how you're free to speak with someone's . . . I think I'll leave it there. The objection there is that this would be a first step to closing off parts of the web - how long before people with anti-government views would be offered their own domain, that minors would not have access to. Then we'd better say that evolution can only be discussed on.sci so that public libraries, parents and businesses can keep out unwanted views.
The second group also have a strong objection to the idea of a government agency overseeing such a domain, for the reasons outlined by others here (where does 'art' end, what about acts that are illegal in some states or the US in general?) - and personally I'm quite fed up with the US government trying to extend it's laws and moral values to other SOVEREIGN states (i.e. extraditing non-US based programmers for infringing a US law).
The original proposal was for a voluntary domain, which should work it itself - if consumers are going there, the businesses will follow, if the businesses are there, the customers know where to go. It didn't work on Usenet, but then Usenet was rarely commercial, wheras these websites usually are.
True, but interaction isn't necessarily BETTER than receiving (nor is receiving always passive).
Reading Tolstoy or playing Tiddlywinks - playing D&D or watching 'Once Upon a Time in the West'. Watching a documentary about some part of the world you know nothing about, or repeating yourself on some forum somewhere. Or even watching Futurama rather than playing Grand Theft Auto.
Imagine if television was absolutely brilliant - unmissable content on every channel, never to be repeated. What hell that would be . . .
Bingo on the last statement (or rather penultimate) - pressure to deliver quickly and tools that appear to offer lower costs (those VS/.NET developers are 'cheaper' on average).
For the record, I'm not against IDEs for GUI development (and even non-GUI development). I've written enough code generating tools to know how much time code generation saves - but you really hit the nail on the head when you say 'learn how it all works' - understand what's getting built.
I was just making a sarcastic point about a seeming decline in programming skills having a similar timescale to declining Lego.
Like many here, I'd say I did the same - used to build any space-ship seen on TV in a somewhat square form. Even out of red house bricks if necessary (grey being rarer than it was before space lego). If you wanted a model, you'd get an Airfix kit instead - but they had far less appeal to me. I don't know how long I'd play with my Lego creations before pulling them apart into something else, but it felt more like drawing, than gluing and painting plastic. Modeling was more about make model, display model - you didn't even play with it after. I think that attracts a different personality type.
Of course I think one thing that's really hit Lego has been computer games - the feeling I'd get playing the early versions of Sim City or Civ was pretty much the same as I'd get from covering the entire floor area with a Lego city. And like Lego the fun has been driven out of those games as they've got closer to reality in their graphics.
Does the decline of Lego explain the rise of Visual Studio? Just click the components into place and there - you've made a program. Will be have.NET Harry Potter edition?
I understand there is some conceptual variation between the UK and US model around this point - that the UK one concerns the moral right of the author (and his family) as the fundamental owner of a work. I don't understand how the US one differs in that respect.
But yes, it's a main reason why I don't copyright is a bad thing - for art - prior to the invention of laws that allowed authors to profit from their works, most authors were of the wealthy classes (i.e. they had the leisure time to dedicate to cultural pursuits) - only after copyright do you see the rise of the popular novelist.
The problems seem to come in transferring 'ownership' of IP (rather than the right to publish)
Slashdot Mirror
Sarcasm aside, after the French government committed a war crime by bombing of the British registered Greenpeace vessel 'Rainbow Warrior' in New Zealand, killing one person on board, a UK consumer boycott of French wine had a significant affect on sales for several years - wine is a significant part of their export business. It was nice to see how the British government responded to this act of war on a British vessel (i.e. ignored it, and probably had a party).
Compared to Photoshop or Word, Excel and Outlook are pretty bad product names, but at least neither of them are the type of word you don't want to explain to kids. I really have second thoughts recommending a program called Gimp to anyone, especially if they need to search for it on Google. While I don't think it affects usability one bit, it is symptomatic of an attitude that affects usability.
To quote someone from a recent training course I went on 'Learning by example is good, but sometimes it's better to learn by reading. For instance, if the sign says Alligator Infested Waters you're better off learning from other people's experience'. Personally, yes, I still buy lots of technical books, and find a lot that is useful in them, saving me time from hitting the same problem. I don't think there's been one I've finished, but I've certainly finished chapters on topics I was interested in and weak.
I also use Google to do the same. Strange thing is a lot of people in my team turn to me to answer their queries.
I think there may be a link.
Actually - I will say that I prefer to initially learn by example - i.e. if I was picking up a new language I'd code by example to get a feel for the tools - but once I get going, give me the big fat technical manual written by someone whose been through the pain and can warn you about some of the peculiarities.
10 years ago I reckon you could have said the same thing but with 30 as the ceiling - one simple reason is that there aren't a lot of older programmers (you meet the odd person with tales of programming ICL mainframes and PDP) - up until the big computing boom in the 80s it really was quite a specialist job - and the sort of job that paid well enough you could have retired early, especially if you'd notched up experience in the 70s then gone contracting or consultancy in the 80s.
Even if they'd all gone into management, there's probably enough IT management jobs now to soak up every pre-1985 developer going - not to mention academic life.
(I don't think that IS where they've all gone though, I think a lot have quit for other fields. Again I think that's because a lot of people programming today started out as hobbyists. Those before weren't - they're less interested in 'computing'.
These days I actually see more developers in their 30s than 20s - i.e. throughout my career most developers have been about my age +/- 5 years.
Per - I think you have hit the nail on the head there.
.NET and you are an open source advocate - then leave. (In fact if you find yourself constantly in confrontation with management decisions then I think that's good general advice - you're not going to single-handedly save the company).
We had a guy at our place who could never accept is a decision was made he didn't agree with and would keep bringing it up. I reality he probably won/lost as many arguments as the rest of us, and was probably right/wrong as much as the rest of us, but he could never accept when things didn't go his way. He got made redundant and before leaving had set up an email to let everyone know that we were all doomed because the company was getting rid of people like him . . . what an egotistical and patronizing idiot - to me it demonstrated the lack of respect he had towards the people he worked with - either that we were too stupid to understand the issues he raised, or were cowardly 'yes men' rather than just grown up enough to know you don't get your way every time.
It's just impossible to work anywhere if you've constantly got to have 100% agreement on every single issue. The only way that's going to happen is to work for yourself. State your concerns, state your disagreement with the decision made, and then move on to how best to make it work. Or if you disagree with it that much - i.e. management decide to move to
On a wider note, I think this is a problem many people have with democracy - while everyone gets to have a say, it's also about the will of the majority, not about everyone getting what they want.
Hmm - something tells me the Slashdot community might not be the best people to ask about software usability.
Most of us are capable of quickly getting up to speed with quite unusable software, that we've become blind to the pain.
We also may be deluding ourselves - I THINK I'm very productive using vi through a Unix terminal, but actually that's just the way I've been programming since the 80s - if I put the same effort into learning PFE as I did with vi, I may find it better, but I'm always judging anything new against years of experience on something else.
The problem is that usability, like anything else, needs clearly defined requirements - 'How usable is this site to the over-50s with little computer experience' - rather than a general problem, much as we would like it to be. Now that's not always easy with websites or applications, but at least they generally have a specific audience.
The desktop, on the other hand, is the most generic part of the system, and needs to work well for all categories of users, which is an incredibly hard thing to get right. You have to remember that most basic users never change a single preference or setting ever, while advanced users will. But they will object to anything that is simple out of the box.
We do indeed have A good and open thing going on, but what we need is lots of good and open things going on - whether they're based on the Mozilla codebase, or KHTML / Webkit or something else. We also need closed source browsers like OmniWeb.
It was the desire for 'only one operating system, only one word processor, only one spreadsheet' rather than separate standards and programs that got the world into this mess in the first place. Let's not become the enemy in pushing for one solution.
How about the fact that they're actually pushing out the Sun JVM with the Google toolbar - doesn't that do much of the O/S abstraction and is more application centered than any extended browser.
The question is whether subscription TV-on-demand / paid download will generate enough cash to fund shows.
I suspect in some cases it certainly will (i.e. shows with large loyal cult audiences that already do well on DVD sales) - and it already does in some adult markets, although the costs are far lower there - but I think overall people still aren't ready to really pay the price for what they say they want.
'I want the quality of a major TV series, no adverts, but to pay the same price as advertising subsidised programming'. It's only been people's desire to have something 'for nothing' that allowed advertising led TV to become as dominant as it is.
The parent news story also shows the dangerous side-effects - rather than it just being adverts on local TV, there's a risk of shows going the way of the film industry, and going product placement mad. I'm not convinced that's all the fault of TiVO, so much as changing relationships with the content producers - presumably they once saw a business in selling 'unbranded' programming to networks who would then make money selling adverts, now they'd rather take the advertising revenue themselves, especially as the line between networks, content producers and product producers has become blurred.
Certainly not with a name like that anyway (what a stupid idea for a program that would be very useful in schools), but I picked it as an example because I think in terms of functionality it's getting increasingly close to Photoshop (and most people I know who have a digital camera, have at least a pirate copy of Photoshop, even if they only use it to remove red-eye). It is picking up an increasing amount of press attention, even in PC magazines, because it now does most of what most people need.
I'm intrigued as to what happens when it becomes feature equivalent - currently, as with OpenOffice - a large part of the product and project spec is defined by matching the feature set of an existing program. I don't think this is unique to FOSS or even software - the commercial world is rife with 'me too' products, that far outnumber the innovative ones. FOSS can also be innovative, but I'm interested to see if a 'me too' project can become an innovative one - or will the developers go 'right, job done, let's all go finish off Inkscape'?
Although you do touch on something when you say that a browser is part of a basic computer system - the FOSS projects that are innovative tend to be the one driven by the needs of developers or sys admins who can code - there's good odds that at least one person frustrated by a missing or buggy feature has the capability to fix it. Projects like GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, etc are somewhat different in that you're generally dealing with skilled developers with amateur interest in graphics tools, or artists with hobbyist programming skills (or more rarely, developers motivated to work on a project just to contribute something).
Or 'I can make that at home' syndrome. The interesting thing is what happens when the FOSS apps become equivalent with the applications that have inspired them - how does development proceed from there?
Firefox is certainly a positive sign - it's evolved faster than IE, but then MS have always had a vested interest in not putting too much functionality into the browser. On the other hand, Firefox has full-time staff, and of course there are Opera and Apple also moving the market along.
I've no idea how it will go - I think GIMP will be next. The question is whether it will slow or speed up innovation. I know what the dogma says, but then it's also true that it can't be a good thing for a top notch programmer to have to spend half their day earning money doing something other than programming - and we all know that you can't replace one visionary with 20 average programmers.
The rest may come true, but I don't see the mass adoption of the $100 laptop, purely on the grounds that people could already save money by buying lower-powered older technology, or second hand - but they don't.
It's a bit like cars - most people never use their potential most of the time (they certainly can't legally drive at top speed, and rarely need 4WD in the city) - but they'll buy something far beyond their actual needs.
There's also the question of whether we want to replace the dominance of one ecosystem with another - and that doesn't just mean different distros, or even BSD - much as I like Unix derived systems, it would be a concern if there were no alternatives (i.e BEOS) to drive things along by offering a different perspective.
a) With the first part you're more likely to install an existing solution than develop from scratch, but the point about firewalls is very interesting - I know a lot of businesses try and lock down their users and prevent access to webmail - now I can't imagine they will be too happy with software that can bypass their control. I can't really think of any issue on the client-side, at least until we get to the idea of running a background process across on the client browser across multiple pages.
b & c) Yes, that's what I think customers like. No updates to download. No plug-ins (except maybe Flash). No Active-X warnings popping up and scaring people who've never heard of it. And no need to buy an upgrade. I've no doubt at all the customers love web apps, and it's the customers that are driving it.
c) You'd like to think so, but it seems to take far too much effort to do so. I don't think writing code that checks for the browser version and then executes different commands on different browsers to do the same task is really efficient development, or truly platform independent. And if you're going to do anything that is too much like a client app - i.e. something that allows a user to manipulate an image hosted on a client site - then you do need to start worrying about what browser they're using. And once more processing gets moved to the browser (i.e. when people start making heavy use of canvas) then you'll need to start worrying about the capabilities of their machines.
What's both good and bad is that this is being driven largely by users - we're getting what we wanted with Java (a cross-platform environment for deploying applications) but unfortunately we're getting it as a collection of technologies that were designed for a different purpose.
Then again, that pretty much reflects the history of computing!
It seems to me to be more about 'zero-installation' applications - it's about doing all the stuff that Java applets could have done, in the browser itself (so if Microsoft had backed Java properly from the off, rather than pushing ActiveX, we might have been there already).
It's stuff you could do by writing a client program people could use - people criticize the limitations of the browser and HTML, but it was never intended to be the only client program a user would use to connect to the Internet - it's just that it's become one.
So rather than using proper programming languages and tools that actually easily support GUI client development, we're hacking the browser to support things it wasn't originally 'meant' to do (or at least, expected to do through plug-ins).
It's more that clients are ceasing to be Browsers, and instead become, well, clients. It's evident that users a) want a 'desktop' experience b) like 'zero-install/update' What we need is a cross-platform O/S independent language, where we could easily deploy applications over the web rather than running them in the browser - seeing as they'd have to be small applications, we could call then Applets.
JavaScript, jScript and ActionScript are all variations on the ECMAScript standard. Everyone else - including Flash - is moving towards compliance with the ECMAScript standards - I don't know about MS intentions, but I'm not hopeful - they'll only do it if the market forces them - i.e. when people start producing web sites that only work properly on standards compliant browsers.
Which of course will never happen (if businesses are willing to 'waste' time duplicating code for the 10% NOT using IE, they will do the same to cater for even a 10% IE usage).
My experience of Australians suggest that most of the male population would opt-in pretty sharpish anyway.
Yes, that struck me later - it's only the non-transferability of files that would allow such a market.
That's something that isn't an issue for people this early in the market, but a few years down the line people are going to want to be able to sell some of their files to buy the rights to others.
(Copyright law generally backs the right of transfer - hence the growing market for 2nd hand licenses of business software).
Having read the article it makes the same classic mistake of ignoring the production cost, and concentrating purely on the physical item/distribution costs - which is as you say the same in software markets - the more something sells, the lower the production cost per unit - which is really what you'd expect with music - the more ubiquitous the cheaper it gets, niche art music costing more (like bespoke tailoring or software costing more than mass produced).
What's also daft is the idea that someone logs on, sees Eminem is $5 so then decides they'll buy Coltrane for 25c instead - like people do that now.
But only to the extent that it makes economic sense to produce the 'official' file - if you're going to make a loss, you give up. There comes a point where you're better off targeting the customers who can afford to pay (and will) and not bothering with devaluing yourself to the level of someone who doesn't want to pay.
Plenty of industries have gone that way (unable to compete with a technology delivering cheaper but not necessarily better goods - see also food).
Well that was almost what the people advocating the .xxx domain were arguing for. A nice simple and voluntary solution to cleaning up the web -no more 'surprise' results for your Google searches.
.sci so that public libraries, parents and businesses can keep out unwanted views.
There are two groups opposing the solution :
1) Those with an ideological opposition to pr0n, who not want to see it legitimized (Christian Right, Feminist left). There's a lot of valid arguments around the lines of exploitation and coercion but I think they do need separating from the censorship angle.
2) The anti-censorship / libertarian lobby, who see it as a restriction on freedom of speech, although how you're free to speak with someone's . . . I think I'll leave it there. The objection there is that this would be a first step to closing off parts of the web - how long before people with anti-government views would be offered their own domain, that minors would not have access to. Then we'd better say that evolution can only be discussed on
The second group also have a strong objection to the idea of a government agency overseeing such a domain, for the reasons outlined by others here (where does 'art' end, what about acts that are illegal in some states or the US in general?) - and personally I'm quite fed up with the US government trying to extend it's laws and moral values to other SOVEREIGN states (i.e. extraditing non-US based programmers for infringing a US law).
The original proposal was for a voluntary domain, which should work it itself - if consumers are going there, the businesses will follow, if the businesses are there, the customers know where to go. It didn't work on Usenet, but then Usenet was rarely commercial, wheras these websites usually are.
True, but interaction isn't necessarily BETTER than receiving (nor is receiving always passive).
Reading Tolstoy or playing Tiddlywinks - playing D&D or watching 'Once Upon a Time in the West'. Watching a documentary about some part of the world you know nothing about, or repeating yourself on some forum somewhere. Or even watching Futurama rather than playing Grand Theft Auto.
Imagine if television was absolutely brilliant - unmissable content on every channel, never to be repeated. What hell that would be . . .
Bingo on the last statement (or rather penultimate) - pressure to deliver quickly and tools that appear to offer lower costs (those VS/.NET developers are 'cheaper' on average).
For the record, I'm not against IDEs for GUI development (and even non-GUI development). I've written enough code generating tools to know how much time code generation saves - but you really hit the nail on the head when you say 'learn how it all works' - understand what's getting built.
I was just making a sarcastic point about a seeming decline in programming skills having a similar timescale to declining Lego.
Like many here, I'd say I did the same - used to build any space-ship seen on TV in a somewhat square form. Even out of red house bricks if necessary (grey being rarer than it was before space lego). If you wanted a model, you'd get an Airfix kit instead - but they had far less appeal to me. I don't know how long I'd play with my Lego creations before pulling them apart into something else, but it felt more like drawing, than gluing and painting plastic. Modeling was more about make model, display model - you didn't even play with it after. I think that attracts a different personality type.
.NET Harry Potter edition?
Of course I think one thing that's really hit Lego has been computer games - the feeling I'd get playing the early versions of Sim City or Civ was pretty much the same as I'd get from covering the entire floor area with a Lego city. And like Lego the fun has been driven out of those games as they've got closer to reality in their graphics.
Does the decline of Lego explain the rise of Visual Studio? Just click the components into place and there - you've made a program. Will be have
I understand there is some conceptual variation between the UK and US model around this point - that the UK one concerns the moral right of the author (and his family) as the fundamental owner of a work. I don't understand how the US one differs in that respect.
But yes, it's a main reason why I don't copyright is a bad thing - for art - prior to the invention of laws that allowed authors to profit from their works, most authors were of the wealthy classes (i.e. they had the leisure time to dedicate to cultural pursuits) - only after copyright do you see the rise of the popular novelist.
The problems seem to come in transferring 'ownership' of IP (rather than the right to publish)