EULAs and Terms of Service are, in my opinion, widely abused. "We're not responsible if we destroy your computer, you can't object if our product doesn't work, and we can change our terms of service anytime without telling you and there's nothing you can do about it."
"Agreements" like that - which are mandatory to use most software and a lot of other services these days - are a mockery of real trust-based business relationships. Not to mention that their length and complexity makes them incomprehensible, or at least annoying to slog through. Most people don't even know what they've agreed to, and even though people *should* read them before clicking "yes," I think companies purposefully make them too long to bother with.
Unless I'm feeling combative, I usually just assume I'm getting shortchanged, sigh, and click "I agree."
20 years from now, your wife can't stand you anymore. She spends 24 hours a day bitching at you for what a lazy lard-ass you are, and how you never give her flowers.
I'm not worried about this, because I didn't just marry on a whim. I know my wife extremely well, and I have seen her be consistently loving towards people who are hateful to her. We are both committed to this kind of attitude. To imagine that she's going to spontaneously turn into a different person would, to me, be a very cynical thing to do, and probably just an excuse for selfish behavior.
The bottom line is that I trust her. If you don't trust someone, you sure as heck shouldn't marry them.
The kids are out of the house and they don't visit you because of the bitter, nagging sons of bitches you've become, so all you have to kill is time and each other.
People do not simply transform from healthy and loving to hateful and miserable without making a lot of bad decisions. Contrary to what you see in movies, I truly do not think that "falling in love" and "staying in love" are things that just happen to you without your control.
Commitment schmommitment. You have to *want* to be in the relationship, there's no Duty or force involved if it's a good one.
I disagree. When I become a father, I will take care of my children both because I love them and because it's my duty. On days when I don't feel very loving towards them, Duty will keep me doing what's right. And of course the feelings of love will return later. Marriage is no different. Take away the sense of duty, and when things get bad, you give up. You never know the depth of a long-term relationship, because even good relationships are imperfect, and you have no commitment to get you through to the other side of difficulty.
...but I will not be lured into the naive and stupidly romantic gesture of telling everyone this will be "forever".
Relationships are not easy. I think it's precisely the fact that I'm determined to stay married that will enable me to do so. If I said "I'm not making any promises," that would create insecurity for both of us ("Did I make him mad? Does he want to leave?"), thereby making it more likely that we'd fight and give up.
Genuine commitment is a self-fulfilling prophecy - and so is the lack thereof.
I can't believe the civilization as advanced as ours is full of people who can't even program a computer. It's just odd.
It's just the opposite - the more advanced we get, the more specialized our jobs become. If you live in a tribe in the jungle, you might know everything your civilization knows. If you live in a space age civ, you can't possibly.
Can you make your own clothes? Grow your own food? Build a telephone? Diagnose your own illnesses? Design your own car? Draft your own legislation? For everything you answer "yes," there are a hundred other jobs you can't do for yourself because there isn't time in one life to learn it all.
My med-school-student fiance will never know how to program a computer, and doesn't care to. But you'll be glad she hasn't wasted her time on that if she's your doctor someday.
So they've got millions of dollars and X budget... for them to come up with boring ways -- because they've been at it for so long -- to what they call "market" it.
Oh yes, "marketing." Such a useless function when you're already a musical legend who has been thoroughly marketed for decades.
Your post was freaking awesome. Lots of great new info for me. I copied and pasted it to a file so I can reference it later, if, for example, I need something like Scribus (right now I don't).
I do think that Paint.net deserves more mention. I use it and love it. But I really thank you for all the other great information.
I just switched to Paint.net from Photoshop. (I was running a very old version of Photoshop.) So far I am ecstatic - the only feature that I've found missing is the ability to export slices.
Paint.net lets me work in layers and do most of the things I'd do with Photoshop. Many of the keyboard shortcuts are the same - ctl+/- to zoom, etc.
I had tried GIMP before and hated it, and figured there wasn't a good free image editor out there. Paint.net changed my mind. I like it so much that I'll probably chip in a few bucks to support it. I highly recommend it.
I would love to see someone add a parallel to Illustrator and create a parallel that is to the Adobe suite what OpenOffice is to the Microsoft Office Suite.
You seem to be pretty articulate. If you don't need much money (at ALL) and enjoy writing, why not try doing a column or some articles for the local paper?
For example, you could write about new stuff in business technology. Or if you like the arts, write about local music, theater, art museums, etc. I have done a lot of this, and my experience is that newspapers always need more content, these organizations always want more coverage, and there usually isn't enough news staff to handle it. (Because newspapers are poor.)
You don't have to be an expert. I don't know jack about art, but our local art museum has loved my coverage of them because I just went, looked at everything, called the artists who did things I liked, and asked them about what they did - why, how, etc. (I didn't do reviews per se, more like previews of opening exhibits, concerts, etc.) It's just fun conversation. Write it all up in an article and there you go.
Like I said, this pays pennies, but if you've done well in IT and don't need the money, it might be a fun way to discover things in your community.
"...it has been a nice way to track down "that song" that you heard on the radio by just typing a few of the lyrics you heard into Google."
I do this all the time, and I disover new music that way. I certainly wouldn't pay to do it though - after all, I'm just deciding whether I like something enough to explore further. It's like this - hear it on the radio, search on Google, read lyrics of a few songs to get a feel for the band, maybe download a song or two (or listen to clips on Amazon), and if I'm still interested, buy something.
If I really enjoy music, a large part of that is because I like the lyrics. But I doubt I'd pay someone else to try out their product. You know, in some businesses, they pay YOU to try out the product.
As a musician, I put my lyrics up on my site for free so people can spend more time and thought on my songs, and perhaps be drawn to my site through search. Seems kinda obvious that this is a good thing for everyone.
The only plus I see to the Gracenote system is that "official" lyrics should be accurate. Personally I'd like to get them packaged with a download, so that if I'm listening to a song I can click and get the lyrics to come up with a bouncing ball on where I am in the song. Seems like that would be easy to program and add next to nothing to file size.
Advertisers love to target their products to people who are interested. MySpace is a business where every customer tells you their demographic data and all the stuff they are interested in. They also use it to share their interests with their friends. What could be more ideal from a business perspective?
The article says MySpace doesn't make much money. Maybe that's because, despite having so much data, they show HORRIBLY targeted ads. I regularly get ads that offend/disgust/annoy me. Firefox's Adblock seems ineffective for this.
I'd have more fun using MySpace if their ad targeting was better, and who knows, I might buy something. I hope Google or somebody can get the situation turned around.
If you're not interested, that's ok. There are people on Slashdot who are interested in Christian music, because some of them have contacted me before. And as I try to indicated with the sig, what I'm doing, hopefully, appeals to the mind as well as the heart - it's not the fluffy junk that I often hear on the radio and, like you, am turned off by. I like hymns precisely because of their lyrical depth, which is what I'm shooting for.
As to whether I should promote my music as Christian... well, that's what it is. Truth in advertising is a good thing, I think.
I sell CDs through CDBaby, which gives me digital distribution through iTunes and other services. If you buy one of my tracks on iTunes (the store that pays me the most), I make between 59.1 and 63.7 cents, depending on the track. I'm not sure why one track pays more than another, but I notice that my best-selling track pays 63.7 cents. A full album download on iTunes gets me $6.37, after CDBaby takes their flat 9 percent cut.
That's not much different from what I get from my physical sales, but that's by choice. The deal with CDBaby is, I set my price as I wish, then they tack on their own $4 overhead. So I said I wanted $6.50 per CD, and my CD sells for $10.50.
Online sales also allow for tiny sales - if you stream my song on one of many services, for example, I might get a fraction of a cent or as much as four cents.
At any rate, for me, digital sale prices are merely out of my control - iTunes will charge what it wants, take a certain cut, let CDBaby take a certain cut, and I'll get the rest. On my physical sales, I can decide how much I want per CD, assuming I can find customers at the price I set.
I guess a lapdance would be expensive. Where do they find people small enough for that? They probably have to fly them in from tiny islands in the Pacific.
I use Windows 98 and Firefox. My current computer is one a friend and I built a few years ago in college and Win 98 was the operating system we had on disk. So far I've had no reason to change, though it's getting harder to find compatible software.
I don't use Firefox mainly for technical reasons but because I liked it when I saw it. Tabbed browsing is second-nature now, and I like the plugins.
I'm in no hurry to upgrade because I hear that each newer version of Windows is larger and more sluggish, and I've seen that XP is more childproofed (we're not showing you file extensions because you could hurt yourself with them! Please don't mess with the contents of your C: drive!) than 98, which is annoying. But I'll probably upgrade by default when I buy a laptop.
The link they give from the Google blog lets you send a letter to your various representatives by just filling in your info and clicking send one time. If lots of us do that, we could employ the "slashdot effect" for political persuasion.
Will it work? I don't know. Sure beats moaning about it to people who can't vote on the bill.
If we could rid ourselves of silly arbitrary superstitions great advancements in science will follow.
Yes, if only scientists could be free to walk under ladders and break mirrors, their experiments would be much easier to carry out.
Oh, wait, by "silly superstitions," you meant ideas like "life is sacred because God created it." Ideas accepted and elaborated by great minds throughout the centuries, which you so easily dismiss.
Even without considering whether those "superstitions" are based on truth, I think it's clear that a world where straight logic ruled would be unpleasant. Logic might suggest you should experiment on the homeless for the good of "productive" members of society. Logic might say you should kill those with genetic diseases to clean the gene pool. And that's assuming that you even WANT to work for the good of society - a rather vague, moral idea in itself.
I can't prove the sanctity of life in a lab, but I'd hate to live in a world where that "superstition" was thrown out the window. Progress indeed. But toward what?
Not that anyone will read this now, but I really wish phones would have sensible features. Like:
--An "I'm sleeping but press one to ring and wake me up for an emergency" mode
--Standard ability to "beam" all contact information from one phone to another instead of having to enter it by hand. All phones should have this.
--If I'm going to have the internet on my phone, why not an internet PHONEBOOK? Hello?
--How about automatic online backup of my phone book info? Two times now I've had my phone die and lost all my contacts, when my internet-equipped phone could have just uploaded a tiny CSV file of my info to a server and saved it for me.
In short, a high-tech phone should do what a good secretary would do: make calls, defer calls, take messages, look up and keep contact information, and generally save me a lot of hassle.
I don't need a phone that works as a camera, plays movies, or has games. I don't even need a color screen. I already have a computer; I just want a really smart phone.
These simplified features would save battery power and of course, make for a cheaper phone. Which is why cell carriers aren't interested.:(
Is it possible to get a third-party phone? Does anybody makes something like I'm describing??
Misdirection and cheap shots under the auspices of "quickest kill" led to its current incarnation.
Your mention of cheap shots reminds me of a book a friend of mine has (he is into martial arts). I think it's called "How to be Invisible," and by his description, all of the ways listed involve blinding your opponent - throw sand in his eyes, spit in his eyes, pull something over his head, etc. The last way listed in the book is, I think, just a cartoon where a guy meditates and disappears.
But yeah, basically, the cheap shots are what do it for you.
Of course accuracy is a problem with lasers. That's why on G.I. Joe, there would be a hailstorm of laser beams flying everywhere, but nobody would get hit. Luckily, when planes were shot down, the pilots were able to parachute to safety. I guess powerful lasers don't hurt people, just machines.
Slashdot Mirror
EULAs and Terms of Service are, in my opinion, widely abused. "We're not responsible if we destroy your computer, you can't object if our product doesn't work, and we can change our terms of service anytime without telling you and there's nothing you can do about it."
"Agreements" like that - which are mandatory to use most software and a lot of other services these days - are a mockery of real trust-based business relationships. Not to mention that their length and complexity makes them incomprehensible, or at least annoying to slog through. Most people don't even know what they've agreed to, and even though people *should* read them before clicking "yes," I think companies purposefully make them too long to bother with.
Unless I'm feeling combative, I usually just assume I'm getting shortchanged, sigh, and click "I agree."
20 years from now, your wife can't stand you anymore. She spends 24 hours a day bitching at you for what a lazy lard-ass you are, and how you never give her flowers.
I'm not worried about this, because I didn't just marry on a whim. I know my wife extremely well, and I have seen her be consistently loving towards people who are hateful to her. We are both committed to this kind of attitude. To imagine that she's going to spontaneously turn into a different person would, to me, be a very cynical thing to do, and probably just an excuse for selfish behavior.
The bottom line is that I trust her. If you don't trust someone, you sure as heck shouldn't marry them.
The kids are out of the house and they don't visit you because of the bitter, nagging sons of bitches you've become, so all you have to kill is time and each other.
People do not simply transform from healthy and loving to hateful and miserable without making a lot of bad decisions. Contrary to what you see in movies, I truly do not think that "falling in love" and "staying in love" are things that just happen to you without your control.
Commitment schmommitment. You have to *want* to be in the relationship, there's no Duty or force involved if it's a good one.
I disagree. When I become a father, I will take care of my children both because I love them and because it's my duty. On days when I don't feel very loving towards them, Duty will keep me doing what's right. And of course the feelings of love will return later. Marriage is no different. Take away the sense of duty, and when things get bad, you give up. You never know the depth of a long-term relationship, because even good relationships are imperfect, and you have no commitment to get you through to the other side of difficulty.
...but I will not be lured into the naive and stupidly romantic gesture of telling everyone this will be "forever".
Relationships are not easy. I think it's precisely the fact that I'm determined to stay married that will enable me to do so. If I said "I'm not making any promises," that would create insecurity for both of us ("Did I make him mad? Does he want to leave?"), thereby making it more likely that we'd fight and give up.
Genuine commitment is a self-fulfilling prophecy - and so is the lack thereof.
MOD PARENT UP! Funny.
I can't believe the civilization as advanced as ours is full of people who can't even program a computer. It's just odd.
It's just the opposite - the more advanced we get, the more specialized our jobs become. If you live in a tribe in the jungle, you might know everything your civilization knows. If you live in a space age civ, you can't possibly.
Can you make your own clothes? Grow your own food? Build a telephone? Diagnose your own illnesses? Design your own car? Draft your own legislation? For everything you answer "yes," there are a hundred other jobs you can't do for yourself because there isn't time in one life to learn it all.
My med-school-student fiance will never know how to program a computer, and doesn't care to. But you'll be glad she hasn't wasted her time on that if she's your doctor someday.
..but how can they make sure the new kilogram weighs a kilogram? :)
So they've got millions of dollars and X budget... for them to come up with boring ways -- because they've been at it for so long -- to what they call "market" it.
Oh yes, "marketing." Such a useless function when you're already a musical legend who has been thoroughly marketed for decades.
Your post was freaking awesome. Lots of great new info for me. I copied and pasted it to a file so I can reference it later, if, for example, I need something like Scribus (right now I don't).
I do think that Paint.net deserves more mention. I use it and love it. But I really thank you for all the other great information.
Did I say thank you enough yet?
I just switched to Paint.net from Photoshop. (I was running a very old version of Photoshop.) So far I am ecstatic - the only feature that I've found missing is the ability to export slices.
Paint.net lets me work in layers and do most of the things I'd do with Photoshop. Many of the keyboard shortcuts are the same - ctl+/- to zoom, etc.
I had tried GIMP before and hated it, and figured there wasn't a good free image editor out there. Paint.net changed my mind. I like it so much that I'll probably chip in a few bucks to support it. I highly recommend it.
I would love to see someone add a parallel to Illustrator and create a parallel that is to the Adobe suite what OpenOffice is to the Microsoft Office Suite.
You seem to be pretty articulate. If you don't need much money (at ALL) and enjoy writing, why not try doing a column or some articles for the local paper? For example, you could write about new stuff in business technology. Or if you like the arts, write about local music, theater, art museums, etc. I have done a lot of this, and my experience is that newspapers always need more content, these organizations always want more coverage, and there usually isn't enough news staff to handle it. (Because newspapers are poor.) You don't have to be an expert. I don't know jack about art, but our local art museum has loved my coverage of them because I just went, looked at everything, called the artists who did things I liked, and asked them about what they did - why, how, etc. (I didn't do reviews per se, more like previews of opening exhibits, concerts, etc.) It's just fun conversation. Write it all up in an article and there you go. Like I said, this pays pennies, but if you've done well in IT and don't need the money, it might be a fun way to discover things in your community.
I do this all the time, and I disover new music that way. I certainly wouldn't pay to do it though - after all, I'm just deciding whether I like something enough to explore further. It's like this - hear it on the radio, search on Google, read lyrics of a few songs to get a feel for the band, maybe download a song or two (or listen to clips on Amazon), and if I'm still interested, buy something.
If I really enjoy music, a large part of that is because I like the lyrics. But I doubt I'd pay someone else to try out their product. You know, in some businesses, they pay YOU to try out the product.
As a musician, I put my lyrics up on my site for free so people can spend more time and thought on my songs, and perhaps be drawn to my site through search. Seems kinda obvious that this is a good thing for everyone.
The only plus I see to the Gracenote system is that "official" lyrics should be accurate. Personally I'd like to get them packaged with a download, so that if I'm listening to a song I can click and get the lyrics to come up with a bouncing ball on where I am in the song. Seems like that would be easy to program and add next to nothing to file size.
Wow. I sure hope not.
Well, dang.
:)
I know that this story is out of the spotlight now, but I just want to say that I would mod your comment informative.
Advertisers love to target their products to people who are interested. MySpace is a business where every customer tells you their demographic data and all the stuff they are interested in. They also use it to share their interests with their friends. What could be more ideal from a business perspective?
The article says MySpace doesn't make much money. Maybe that's because, despite having so much data, they show HORRIBLY targeted ads. I regularly get ads that offend/disgust/annoy me. Firefox's Adblock seems ineffective for this.
I'd have more fun using MySpace if their ad targeting was better, and who knows, I might buy something. I hope Google or somebody can get the situation turned around.
As to whether I should promote my music as Christian... well, that's what it is. Truth in advertising is a good thing, I think.
Here's my experience as an indie artist.
I sell CDs through CDBaby, which gives me digital distribution through iTunes and other services. If you buy one of my tracks on iTunes (the store that pays me the most), I make between 59.1 and 63.7 cents, depending on the track. I'm not sure why one track pays more than another, but I notice that my best-selling track pays 63.7 cents. A full album download on iTunes gets me $6.37, after CDBaby takes their flat 9 percent cut.
That's not much different from what I get from my physical sales, but that's by choice. The deal with CDBaby is, I set my price as I wish, then they tack on their own $4 overhead. So I said I wanted $6.50 per CD, and my CD sells for $10.50.
Online sales also allow for tiny sales - if you stream my song on one of many services, for example, I might get a fraction of a cent or as much as four cents.
At any rate, for me, digital sale prices are merely out of my control - iTunes will charge what it wants, take a certain cut, let CDBaby take a certain cut, and I'll get the rest. On my physical sales, I can decide how much I want per CD, assuming I can find customers at the price I set.
[salesplug] If anybody wants to check me out on CDBaby, I'm at http://www.cdbaby.com/nathanlong [/salesplug]
I guess a lapdance would be expensive. Where do they find people small enough for that? They probably have to fly them in from tiny islands in the Pacific.
I use Windows 98 and Firefox. My current computer is one a friend and I built a few years ago in college and Win 98 was the operating system we had on disk. So far I've had no reason to change, though it's getting harder to find compatible software.
I don't use Firefox mainly for technical reasons but because I liked it when I saw it. Tabbed browsing is second-nature now, and I like the plugins.
I'm in no hurry to upgrade because I hear that each newer version of Windows is larger and more sluggish, and I've seen that XP is more childproofed (we're not showing you file extensions because you could hurt yourself with them! Please don't mess with the contents of your C: drive!) than 98, which is annoying. But I'll probably upgrade by default when I buy a laptop.
...sandwiches are still more popular than laptops.
Will it work? I don't know. Sure beats moaning about it to people who can't vote on the bill.
...perhaps a duel would be more appropriate.
Yes, if only scientists could be free to walk under ladders and break mirrors, their experiments would be much easier to carry out.
Oh, wait, by "silly superstitions," you meant ideas like "life is sacred because God created it." Ideas accepted and elaborated by great minds throughout the centuries, which you so easily dismiss.
Even without considering whether those "superstitions" are based on truth, I think it's clear that a world where straight logic ruled would be unpleasant. Logic might suggest you should experiment on the homeless for the good of "productive" members of society. Logic might say you should kill those with genetic diseases to clean the gene pool. And that's assuming that you even WANT to work for the good of society - a rather vague, moral idea in itself.
I can't prove the sanctity of life in a lab, but I'd hate to live in a world where that "superstition" was thrown out the window. Progress indeed. But toward what?
--An "I'm sleeping but press one to ring and wake me up for an emergency" mode
--Standard ability to "beam" all contact information from one phone to another instead of having to enter it by hand. All phones should have this.
--If I'm going to have the internet on my phone, why not an internet PHONEBOOK? Hello?
--How about automatic online backup of my phone book info? Two times now I've had my phone die and lost all my contacts, when my internet-equipped phone could have just uploaded a tiny CSV file of my info to a server and saved it for me.
In short, a high-tech phone should do what a good secretary would do: make calls, defer calls, take messages, look up and keep contact information, and generally save me a lot of hassle.
I don't need a phone that works as a camera, plays movies, or has games. I don't even need a color screen. I already have a computer; I just want a really smart phone.
These simplified features would save battery power and of course, make for a cheaper phone. Which is why cell carriers aren't interested. :(
Is it possible to get a third-party phone? Does anybody makes something like I'm describing??
Your mention of cheap shots reminds me of a book a friend of mine has (he is into martial arts). I think it's called "How to be Invisible," and by his description, all of the ways listed involve blinding your opponent - throw sand in his eyes, spit in his eyes, pull something over his head, etc. The last way listed in the book is, I think, just a cartoon where a guy meditates and disappears.
But yeah, basically, the cheap shots are what do it for you.
Of course accuracy is a problem with lasers. That's why on G.I. Joe, there would be a hailstorm of laser beams flying everywhere, but nobody would get hit. Luckily, when planes were shot down, the pilots were able to parachute to safety. I guess powerful lasers don't hurt people, just machines.