more power - no, the server controls your data and you have to be the kind of person who knows what a web scraper is and how to write one to get it out without spending $BIGNUM hours.
reliability - depends on whether you're better at managing your local app than the bottleneck of you managing to always have a connection and them managing the app.
centralized support - whether that's good depends on how good support you can get. Your mom is going to prefer good support from you rather than mediocre support from "Robert" who works in Calcutta.
automated backup - if you delete a mail from your yahoo mail account, can you get it back? It's only really a guard against hardware failure, which I haven't seen on my computers except a single DVD burner (big deal, I lost only money and no data)
universal access - true.
As a company, you get:
more billing options - great, except consumers hate having to optimize depending on their changing usage scenarios.
control over your data - unless you consider your customers' data yours, I don't see how.
better security - you are running more potentially vulnerable applications than otherwise. How's that better security?
licensing - Blizzard seemed to fail (there are (or were) no-pay servers working well with the no-pay trial client), despite slashdot saying companies should go that route.
I'm not saying I hold the objective truth, just some counterpoints which seem to justify a deeper investigation.
And here's why: they interrupt you in what you're trying to do. If they surprise you, you feel less in control of your environment which is bad (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control). If they don't they're pointless because you'll already know in advance what your answer is going to be, so why can't you just tell the program what your answer is when you tell it to go do whatever made it interrupt and annoy you?
A better solution is the slide-down bar which you probably know from using firefox. Instead of being in your way, it steals a little screen real estate near the edge and uses a color to tell you "you might want to pay attention here" without being in the way of what you really want to look at. Something similar happens when gedit and evince encounter an error.
They're much better than pop-ups, in the cases where you have enough room for the text you need to display to the user.
But you-the-browser probably should tell the user "Your password will be sent to $OTHER_DOMAIN. This is likely to be a security problem", so use a slide-down bar for this.
Our legal system should provide facilities for party A to address grievances with party B, whether B is big and A is small, or vice versa. It shouldn't be the goal (as the verbiage seems to suggest) that the legal system should be rigged to favor the smaller party in a dispute.
The economics of the justice system (hiring one or more lawyers is damn expensive for Joe Public) favors the big players. To counterbalance that, we need to equally favor the small guys in some other way so that it all evens out.
The Business Software Alliance, which counts Adobe Systems and Microsoft as members, applauded Holder's nomination this week. "He's [...] open minded"
Let's see; by towing the party line he gets called open minded. I'd be interesting in finding out if he's open to the idea of coming up with a payment scheme that lets everyone make all the copies of published works in science and the useful arts they want, such that the sciences and the useful arts are still viable areas of profession.
I've found out that the danish telephone company 3 plays advertisement music when you call one of "their" phones (meaning the phone of someone getting their telephony services from 3).
The way I see this: you're a captive audience. Let's exploit the fact that you pretty much have to listen to whatever is coming your way if you want to make the phone call: let's shove some advertisement down your throat.
That's something I won't do to the people who know me and who I respect. So because of the phone company's branding effort, they've lost me as a potential customer.
So, geeks know how to download stuff via ftp, I assume. So parent is modded informative due to providing the information I elided. I assume that's because the moderator didn't know the information off-hand.
How on earth can you then expect a user to know it? If you don't, how do you think they'll look it up? With the mighty web browser called "telnet"?
Besides, how many of you can remember this information? How many of you took notes of it? When you need it, are you going to look up this slashdot post with telnet?
Such things are not unable to be detected, merely unlikely.
I recently saw on Ubuntu's brainstorm that Canonical doesn't have the in-house expertise to do involved things to the xorg X-server.
Suppose upstream puts in some nasty code that exploits a client side assumption about the interaction between blah-blah... who will find out? Do you read the source before you sudo make-sandwich apt-get install it?
I sure as hell don't. Would the Ubuntu devs? Okay, $DISTRO devs might. Would they find it? Remember, xorg is massive. Even just the X server/client interface is massive. Add to that the inter-client communications manual (not merely the EWMH additions). How many people have a good overview of how xorg really works? A hundred?
I'm not (yet) a free software maintainer, though, so I don't really know. But consider it. How many places does the evil code have to hide? How well can it be hidden? I think the answer might be uncomfortable. Sorry:)
[...] to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate.
Emphasis mine. The market is not free.
Copyright exists exactly to artificially reduce the amount of suppliers to one (or, only if that one supplier wants it so, more than one), such that the demand-side has to pay money to that one supplier.
This is of course done under some assumptions: that the one supplier did something valuable to society (or at least its customers), and that the supplier was in fact the one doing the work (or is reasonably fairly paying those who did it).
Some deeper assumptions are that there will be better music available for the public if performing and recording music is a viable profession and that the restrictions placed on the public are generally speaking worth it.
I think the first set of assumptions is easier to question than the second set. That said, I'd like to see some model whereby the music business can remain a viable, profitable business and once a work has been created, everyone with a copier (i.e. computer and network) can copy it as much as possible without musicians losing profit.
(And I'd like to see similar things for books and movies, and even stronger kinds of consumer freedoms with respect to software).
I seem to recall that RMS, in one of his talks, highlights an example where a company uses libreadline in a program, and when finding out that libreadline is released under the GPL (I think through the FSF pointing it out), the company decides to release their product under the GPL.
I know, [citation needed]. I apologize that I can't give it. The jury will disregard this post;-)
Remember that Richard is against software being copyrighted
Not quite exactly. What RMS opposes is the practice of not giving people freedom with respect to the software they run.
To your credit, it's true that copyright as it's typically applied is part of what RMS is against---but I suspect that he won't be happy if copyright was abolished tomorrow: we could all share our binary copies of Windows, but without source code freedoms 1 and 3 in effect don't exist. The freedoms are the crucial part (to him).
Whether the collective you agrees or not is up to you to decide; I'm just trying to present Richard's opinions and observations, as I understand them.
Slashdot Mirror
With friends like these, who needs enemies, eh? :P
Canadians
Personally, I'm looking forward to desktop file sharing and synchronization, as it will mean I can stop running all these FTP servers everywhere.
I'm sure they've released an RFC on it with an independent implementation for Linux. Right?
Oh. Count me out then...
Let's see
As a user you get:
As a company, you get:
I'm not saying I hold the objective truth, just some counterpoints which seem to justify a deeper investigation.
If browser makers simply gave pop-ups
No. No no no! Death to pop-ups.
And here's why: they interrupt you in what you're trying to do. If they surprise you, you feel less in control of your environment which is bad (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control). If they don't they're pointless because you'll already know in advance what your answer is going to be, so why can't you just tell the program what your answer is when you tell it to go do whatever made it interrupt and annoy you?
A better solution is the slide-down bar which you probably know from using firefox. Instead of being in your way, it steals a little screen real estate near the edge and uses a color to tell you "you might want to pay attention here" without being in the way of what you really want to look at. Something similar happens when gedit and evince encounter an error.
They're much better than pop-ups, in the cases where you have enough room for the text you need to display to the user.
But you-the-browser probably should tell the user "Your password will be sent to $OTHER_DOMAIN. This is likely to be a security problem", so use a slide-down bar for this.
uid6621> I know: I must be new here.
No, you just haven't figured out how the uid autoincrement works quite yet :p
In Soviet Russia, meme forgets you!
Our legal system should provide facilities for party A to address grievances with party B, whether B is big and A is small, or vice versa. It shouldn't be the goal (as the verbiage seems to suggest) that the legal system should be rigged to favor the smaller party in a dispute.
The economics of the justice system (hiring one or more lawyers is damn expensive for Joe Public) favors the big players. To counterbalance that, we need to equally favor the small guys in some other way so that it all evens out.
No. Lawyers are scum. La-la-la-la-la-can't-heeeaaar-you! ;-)
Living in Clearwater (and having the St. Pete Times as my newspaper), I assure you that they are NOT neutral in any sense of the word.
Then why do you ACK ACK ACKnowledge your parent? ;-)
Holder> "[piracy is theft]"
The Business Software Alliance, which counts Adobe Systems and Microsoft as members, applauded Holder's nomination this week. "He's [...] open minded"
Let's see; by towing the party line he gets called open minded. I'd be interesting in finding out if he's open to the idea of coming up with a payment scheme that lets everyone make all the copies of published works in science and the useful arts they want, such that the sciences and the useful arts are still viable areas of profession.
I've found out that the danish telephone company 3 plays advertisement music when you call one of "their" phones (meaning the phone of someone getting their telephony services from 3).
The way I see this: you're a captive audience. Let's exploit the fact that you pretty much have to listen to whatever is coming your way if you want to make the phone call: let's shove some advertisement down your throat.
That's something I won't do to the people who know me and who I respect. So because of the phone company's branding effort, they've lost me as a potential customer.
ftp [...]
cd [...]
get [...]
(parent gets modded +1 informative)
So, geeks know how to download stuff via ftp, I assume. So parent is modded informative due to providing the information I elided. I assume that's because the moderator didn't know the information off-hand.
How on earth can you then expect a user to know it? If you don't, how do you think they'll look it up? With the mighty web browser called "telnet"?
Besides, how many of you can remember this information? How many of you took notes of it? When you need it, are you going to look up this slashdot post with telnet?
Something is not right here...
You're forgetting
4.99) No ???
Such things are not unable to be detected, merely unlikely.
I recently saw on Ubuntu's brainstorm that Canonical doesn't have the in-house expertise to do involved things to the xorg X-server.
Suppose upstream puts in some nasty code that exploits a client side assumption about the interaction between blah-blah... who will find out? Do you read the source before you sudo make-sandwich apt-get install it?
I sure as hell don't. Would the Ubuntu devs? Okay, $DISTRO devs might. Would they find it? Remember, xorg is massive. Even just the X server/client interface is massive. Add to that the inter-client communications manual (not merely the EWMH additions). How many people have a good overview of how xorg really works? A hundred?
I'm not (yet) a free software maintainer, though, so I don't really know. But consider it. How many places does the evil code have to hide? How well can it be hidden? I think the answer might be uncomfortable. Sorry :)
Why would slashdot be interested in the competency of the prosecution?
Slashdot wants TPB to win so we don't have to switch over and use isohunt instead ;-)
it'll mean that the U.S. is the more liberal country and I don't think Sweden can live with that.
Repeating back what I've heard here on slashdot, Sweden is pretty big on the socialist (scary!) welfare (more scary!) state.
I don't think they'd mind if the U.S. is considered more right-wing. I mean liberal.
Oh well, at least I didn't contradict myself, seeing how I'm outside the U.S. ;-)
(tongue-in-cheek-'ly-pointing-out-the-obvious-'ly yours...)
Lots of things could be at fault, and to call DRACONIAN DRM on it is a bit hasty.
We're not above that on /. ;-)
We only know that pure Open Source will never be able to hide those things.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest
So this will turn your fearful memories into hilarious ones?
Just wait when it goes off-patent. You'll see knock-offs like propanorofl, propanolmao, propanolulz and propanocheezburgar.
I think
3. Increase price by 30%
covers it.
[...] to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate.
Emphasis mine. The market is not free.
Copyright exists exactly to artificially reduce the amount of suppliers to one (or, only if that one supplier wants it so, more than one), such that the demand-side has to pay money to that one supplier.
This is of course done under some assumptions: that the one supplier did something valuable to society (or at least its customers), and that the supplier was in fact the one doing the work (or is reasonably fairly paying those who did it).
Some deeper assumptions are that there will be better music available for the public if performing and recording music is a viable profession and that the restrictions placed on the public are generally speaking worth it.
I think the first set of assumptions is easier to question than the second set. That said, I'd like to see some model whereby the music business can remain a viable, profitable business and once a work has been created, everyone with a copier (i.e. computer and network) can copy it as much as possible without musicians losing profit.
(And I'd like to see similar things for books and movies, and even stronger kinds of consumer freedoms with respect to software).
</ramble>
I seem to recall that RMS, in one of his talks, highlights an example where a company uses libreadline in a program, and when finding out that libreadline is released under the GPL (I think through the FSF pointing it out), the company decides to release their product under the GPL.
I know, [citation needed]. I apologize that I can't give it. The jury will disregard this post ;-)
Remember that Richard is against software being copyrighted
Not quite exactly. What RMS opposes is the practice of not giving people freedom with respect to the software they run.
To your credit, it's true that copyright as it's typically applied is part of what RMS is against---but I suspect that he won't be happy if copyright was abolished tomorrow: we could all share our binary copies of Windows, but without source code freedoms 1 and 3 in effect don't exist. The freedoms are the crucial part (to him).
Whether the collective you agrees or not is up to you to decide; I'm just trying to present Richard's opinions and observations, as I understand them.
You do realize we already pay a tax for bandwidth. Look at your internet bill.
Really? Because I thought it all just went to the ISP, which used it to upgrade their infrastructure^W^W^W hand out golden parachutes.
including that picture of you at the beach with your shirt off when you were 17...
I don't think _anyone_ at /. has to worry about that.
Oh, I don't know about that. There are some /very/ disturbing fetishes out there . . .
You completely missed the point.
Beach != mom's basement.