2) Considering how most people seem to enjoy the concept of a nanny-state where their government will protect its citizens from "the bad people" (which may be Communists, terrorists, Socialists, homosexuals, hippies, pedophiles, athiests, intellectuals, liberals, etc), I'm pretty sure many people would enjoy living in a totalitarian regime that protects everone from being offended or shocked. Those who would not enjoy such a fate would likely be branded one of "the bad people".
That's a little one-sided. Let's also add:
conservatives, neocons, Christians, et cetera.
There are just as many people out there who would like laws that silence those groups from expressing their potentially offensive opinions.
This makes a little more sense, but sounds absurdly complicated.
I'd have no problem with a service provider paying for *me* to have a better connection specifically for their service. Then they are purchasing extra bandwidth *for me* from my ISP.
It's the business of my ISP wanting money from them to deliver at speeds *I* paid for, or the middle man wanting money from anyone but the ISPs connecting to them that troubles me.
Sprint should be billing Verizon or AOL, not me or Google. Then the ISPs can pass that cost on to their consumers as they see fit.
I don't expect the middle man to absorb the cost of moving my data, but I shouldn't have to pay everyone whose equipment might touch my data when I have little or no control over where it goes. Let the ISPs sort out bandwidth issues like that.
I pay my ISP to provide me with a connection to the internet.
Google pays their ISP to provide them with a connection to the internet.
Why exactly should either ISP be allowed to charge extra for me to connect to Google?
Look at it this way: If I pay for a 3 Mb connection and Google can deliver a 3 Mb downstream, I expect my ISP to allow that. Otherwise, I am NOT getting what I pay for. So basically what a number of ISPs want to do is promise their customers a connection which they will not deliver unless a given website *also* pays for their customers to get that connection.
The governments and corporations of the United States and Japan thank you for your valiant efforts as a consumer whore, and would like to present you with this plaque.
That'll be $10 for the plaque, please.
That's nice, so does my WinXP box. It's poorly-written applications that crash 99% of the time, NOT the OS.
2) You can make amazing stuff.
You can do the same with a PC. The problem is that Microsoft can't bundle all that nifty stuff with their OS without getting sued, and OEMs aren't bundling it.
3) Design that turns heads.
The first iMac looked like crap. The desk lamp model wasn't much better. The current iMac *does* look better than a comparably-priced PC, but looks are low on my list of important factors.
4) 114,000 Viruses? Not on a Mac.
Nope. For some reason, the people who write viruses have chosen to write them for the 90+% of PCs on the internet that run some version of Windows. Go figure.
How many of those 114,000 have infected my PC? None.
5) Next Year's OS today.
Umm...this makes no sense. Wouldn't that make it this year's? Yay for marketing crap.
6) The latest Intel chips.
Oh well let me just put down my PC with the latest Intel chip and...oh, wait.
7,8, 9, 10, 11, 12)
Again, MS would probably get sued if they bundled such software.
13. No hunting for drivers.
PCs are capable of doing the exact same thing. Of course, there are more devices of a larger variety available for the PC, so drivers are a little harder to package.
The drumset is a confusing prize. What they should do is give away a drummer, bands never seem to be able to keep those. Drumsets are a dime a dozen, though.
I'm not sure why this was modded redundant. I too am surprised that Apache wasn't the leading secure server. I'd find it interesting to know just how many people didn't realize that MS held as much share in this particular category as they do.
Yes, parents are the single greatest influence on a child's life. Yes parents have a lot of control. No, that doesn't change the fact that as things are today, kids are being sold things by complete strangers that their parents would rightfully object to.
We have to realize that we are in part responsible for other peoples' children. We're not responsible for raising them or feeding them or teaching them right from wrong, but we are responsible for not undermining those exact things being done by their parents. Right now we're a nation of enablers.
You've spoken as a parent with out of control children.
Nope, he's quite under control, thanks.
It's not my kid who's out of control. It was me. Despite the best efforts of my parents, I was quite the accomplished criminal by the time I was 17...largely because of some peers and a handful of adults, and just generally growing up in the culture we live in today. I know how quickly the best-intentioned parents can lose control of their child, and it's time the rest of us recognized that we play a part in that child's education whether we want to or not.
Yeah, because if only they'd do it "voluntarily" then you can pretend that you're not forcing them to.
Err...no, what I'm saying is that it'd be nice if this had never become an issue because 99% of retailers carded on M+ games. As in, no one ever talked about legislating it because it was already being done by responsible businesses.
The problem is it is not just a ban on sale to M+ games to minors, that would be illegal. The government cannot enforce a private orginazations ratings, they must come up with there own standards.
So make the ESRB a contractor hired to set video game ratings. That would give the organization some added income so they could better screen games, in exchange for accountability (which isn't a bad thing). They just aren't willing to think around problems like that.
Also, is it easier for 13 year olds to get ciggarettes or M rated games? I bet it's the ciggarettes.
Probably because most kids get cigarettes (at first) from their smoking parents. A random 13-year-old can't just walk into a store and buy smokes...it's nearly impossible to find even a random clerk who will sell to kids. It's too much of a risk.
I won't argue that there are a lot of parents out there looking for something or someone to take over as much as possible so they can go about their business and not worry about their kids. I'd just as soon those people were sterilized and possibly lobotomized. It'd save us all a lot of grief.
But every time game ratings and the legislation relating to it comes up, some witty guy feels the need to say "they just want the government to do their jobs". That's simply not the case for a lot of parents. The FTC has found that M-rated games aren't being effectively restricted, and that young teens find them easy to buy directly from retailers. The study referenced in TFA demonstrates that the ESRB is not always fully evaluating game content, making it harder for parents to make informed decisions prior to purchasing games. So parents are seeing their kids coming home with games with subjects far beyond the kids' level of maturity, and even buying games only to find out that it contains unlisted content that they object to.
What a lot of parents are asking for is simply for it to be easier for them to do their jobs. In ten or twelve years when my kid is old enough to walk around a store without my immediate supervision, it would be a great help to me if he couldn't walk up to a counter and buy Wild Things 5 and GTA:Moscow without me knowing about it. Not because I object to those particular titles but because I, as his parent, want to be able to "filter" what he does and does not buy according to what I think is appropriate for his age, intellect, and emotional maturity. It'd be lovely if the retailers would enforce ESRB ratings voluntarily, but right now something like 1/3 aren't doing that. That's why so many people are pushing for the so-called "bans" that are just age restrictions on sales of M+ rated video games.
Excuse me, Mr. Citizen? Would you mind not giving my child ready access to content he is not emotionally mature enough to handle? Thanks, I appreciate it.
The old saying "it takes a village to raise a child" bears repeating here. I'm not saying that it's anyone's job but the parents to raise a child, but you have to be clueless to think that we as a society have no influence on children. It's hard for a parent to raise their children when they've got hundreds of idiots standing on the sidelines second-guessing all their decisions and waiting til they turn their backs so they can undermine their parenting.
Aside from the whole "you must always carry your ID", I love the idea of a single unified ID card. In my wallet, I have:
Driver's license Social Security card Health insurance card My toddler son's health insurance card (he's on my wife's plan) Dental insurance card Vision insurance card Four membership cards for various stores
The first two could easily be combined into a single card. It wouldn't take much for an embedded chip to contain all my personal insurance information.
As for the membership cards, I think it would be a good feature for an ID to have a way to store such information in a way that one party could not access information stored by others.
As do I. I like Linux. I don't like the fact that documentation is spread out over several websites, is often incomplete, and the community tends toward snobbery because they have experienced too many "just tell me how to do everything" newbies to take the time to sort out the willing learners from the idiots.
Linux needs a more cohesive system of documentation that doesn't refer you to websites every third sentence. If I can't get OS help from the OS itself, I'm frustrated from the start. What Linux would really benefit from is a tutorial distro designed to walk people through a few hours of Linux basics and help them learn to use the OS so that they can competently install and operate the distro of their choice from the start. I know I'd use something like that.
First, musicians found out they could make money by making music. So they made it their careers. That was a good thing; it led to higher-quality music as they could focus on their art.
Then musicians got managers. Their managers took a portion of their profits in return for helping them make a greater profit. the managers, not being artists themselves, sought to maximize profits to increase their own income. Thus was born marketing of music. It got the musician more listeners, so they didn't mind the commercialization, as their art was reaching more people.
Eventually some manager thought it would be a good idea to make a business of distributing recorded music. Again the musician's income was spread out, requiring greater revenue for the musician to make the same amount of money. Another layer of non-musicians was added to the mix. The art got watered down as it became more and more a business.
Today, the record labels control the market. They create musicians; find a blonde who can dance and barely sing and they'll make her into the next one-hit-wonder. They mass-produce formulaic lyrics and music, choreograph elaborate stage performances, and call their latest corporate rubber stamp an artist.
The internet scares them so much because it strips away their control. In the past forty years, they have developed a system by which they determine a song's popularity before it is through recording. They set the radio play. They decide how many albums will be produced. They produce and distribute the marketing material. From the first time you read an article about a new "artist" to the first time you hear them on the radio to when you walk in the store and pick up a CD off the big cardboard display by the front door, the labels have controlled everything you read, heard, and saw. Digital distribution--legal or otherwise--makes it possible for people to sample songs outside the top 40 stations.
Has file sharing cost them record sales? Probably. But that's not the problem; the radio cost them record sales. Television cost them record sales. Anything that distracts people from music will reduce the sale of records. The problem here is they can no longer predict the market as accurately as they once could. This translates into more money being spent on marketing and research and a greater risk being placed on any given project. In other words, even if they didn't lose a single record sale to file sharing, they'd still lose profit...and they don't like that.
I got snubbed by some of the Linux zealots recently. I was having trouble installing a program on Ubuntu. I'd read a fair bit of documentation (forgive me, but I'm inclined to think that one shouldn't be required to read hundreds of pages of documentation to _start_ using an OS). I tried using apt-get to install the package, and the software (an older version) didn't work right. So I downloaded the newest version and was having trouble getting it to work.
On a side note, the only place I've seen on Ubuntu's site concerning installing without apt-get is in the Wiki. When I search "install software" (which is most likely what a total noob would try) it's the twelfth result, titled "compiling software".
Back to my particular problem: I downloaded the new version and started the install routine. Uh oh, configure reports a dependency problem. Only I don't know that, because it's not very clear...so I post the problem. I'm told to RTFM. I reply that I've been RTFM and that I've searched Ubuntu and Google, without any luck. Someone else tells me what I need to fix the dependency problem. So I download that, start to install it, and...dependency problem. Oookay.
I search for this package myself, and find nothing. I post it, someone calls me a noob (quite helpful) and two days later someone comes along who knows where to find the obscure package. I start to install it, and...guess what? It wants something else. So I just jump straight to the forums thinking I've missed something crucial and am told I should just use some other software.
I think I will. Windows. Sad thing is, I was hoping to get Linux working with a specific application to pitch it to the school district I work for. That would have put a hundred high school students a year on Linux, but because of dependency bullshit and useless posters, we'll just stick with Windows. We sure don't want to get stuck not knowing something and have no way of finding it out.
At my house, I've decided not to waste my time with getting Linux on my desktop. It will continue to run my router and file server and has recently been installed on an old laptop that is used for internet surfing, but any system that runs a variety of applications will remain Windows since Linux has been too much of a headache.
It's that attitude right there that runs people off. You assume that because someone is having trouble finding an answer that they refuse to do anything for themselves. That's what will continue to marginalize Linux as a gimmick desktop OS.
It is not snobbish and snubbish to tell someone to RTFM. It is snobbish and snubbish to tell someone to RTFM without telling where to RTFM.
"RTFM" is still a response which turns off users and sends them back to Windows. I'm very much a Linux newbie myself, but when someone asks a simple question that I can answer and know where to find it in the documentation, I give them both.
Someone asks how to get a directory listing in the command line. You could:
a) tell them to RTFM
b) copy and paste the entire FM so they don't have to do any work
c) Tell them that the command is "ls", and then tell them where to look for more information on switches and such.
Option A shrinks the Linux user base. Option B does not encourage the poster to learn how to find answers for themselves. Option C gives them a quick answer to their question and tells them where to find more information.
Slashdot Mirror
2) Considering how most people seem to enjoy the concept of a nanny-state where their government will protect its citizens from "the bad people" (which may be Communists, terrorists, Socialists, homosexuals, hippies, pedophiles, athiests, intellectuals, liberals, etc), I'm pretty sure many people would enjoy living in a totalitarian regime that protects everone from being offended or shocked. Those who would not enjoy such a fate would likely be branded one of "the bad people".
That's a little one-sided. Let's also add:
conservatives, neocons, Christians, et cetera.
There are just as many people out there who would like laws that silence those groups from expressing their potentially offensive opinions.
Oh...and pedophiles are bad people.
This makes a little more sense, but sounds absurdly complicated.
I'd have no problem with a service provider paying for *me* to have a better connection specifically for their service. Then they are purchasing extra bandwidth *for me* from my ISP.
It's the business of my ISP wanting money from them to deliver at speeds *I* paid for, or the middle man wanting money from anyone but the ISPs connecting to them that troubles me.
Sprint should be billing Verizon or AOL, not me or Google. Then the ISPs can pass that cost on to their consumers as they see fit.
I don't expect the middle man to absorb the cost of moving my data, but I shouldn't have to pay everyone whose equipment might touch my data when I have little or no control over where it goes. Let the ISPs sort out bandwidth issues like that.
I pay my ISP to provide me with a connection to the internet.
Google pays their ISP to provide them with a connection to the internet.
Why exactly should either ISP be allowed to charge extra for me to connect to Google?
Look at it this way: If I pay for a 3 Mb connection and Google can deliver a 3 Mb downstream, I expect my ISP to allow that. Otherwise, I am NOT getting what I pay for. So basically what a number of ISPs want to do is promise their customers a connection which they will not deliver unless a given website *also* pays for their customers to get that connection.
Whores let people screw them in exchange for something, usually (but not always) money...see where I'm going with this?
The governments and corporations of the United States and Japan thank you for your valiant efforts as a consumer whore, and would like to present you with this plaque. That'll be $10 for the plaque, please.
Apple says:
1) It just works.
That's nice, so does my WinXP box. It's poorly-written applications that crash 99% of the time, NOT the OS.
2) You can make amazing stuff.
You can do the same with a PC. The problem is that Microsoft can't bundle all that nifty stuff with their OS without getting sued, and OEMs aren't bundling it.
3) Design that turns heads.
The first iMac looked like crap. The desk lamp model wasn't much better. The current iMac *does* look better than a comparably-priced PC, but looks are low on my list of important factors.
4) 114,000 Viruses? Not on a Mac.
Nope. For some reason, the people who write viruses have chosen to write them for the 90+% of PCs on the internet that run some version of Windows. Go figure.
How many of those 114,000 have infected my PC? None.
5) Next Year's OS today.
Umm...this makes no sense. Wouldn't that make it this year's? Yay for marketing crap.
6) The latest Intel chips.
Oh well let me just put down my PC with the latest Intel chip and...oh, wait.
7,8, 9, 10, 11, 12)
Again, MS would probably get sued if they bundled such software.
13. No hunting for drivers.
PCs are capable of doing the exact same thing. Of course, there are more devices of a larger variety available for the PC, so drivers are a little harder to package.
14. Awesome out of the box.
The same could be said about any well-made PC.
The drumset is a confusing prize. What they should do is give away a drummer, bands never seem to be able to keep those. Drumsets are a dime a dozen, though.
I'm not sure why this was modded redundant. I too am surprised that Apache wasn't the leading secure server. I'd find it interesting to know just how many people didn't realize that MS held as much share in this particular category as they do.
Yes, parents are the single greatest influence on a child's life. Yes parents have a lot of control. No, that doesn't change the fact that as things are today, kids are being sold things by complete strangers that their parents would rightfully object to.
We have to realize that we are in part responsible for other peoples' children. We're not responsible for raising them or feeding them or teaching them right from wrong, but we are responsible for not undermining those exact things being done by their parents. Right now we're a nation of enablers.
You've spoken as a parent with out of control children.
Nope, he's quite under control, thanks.
It's not my kid who's out of control. It was me. Despite the best efforts of my parents, I was quite the accomplished criminal by the time I was 17...largely because of some peers and a handful of adults, and just generally growing up in the culture we live in today. I know how quickly the best-intentioned parents can lose control of their child, and it's time the rest of us recognized that we play a part in that child's education whether we want to or not.
Yeah, because if only they'd do it "voluntarily" then you can pretend that you're not forcing them to.
Err...no, what I'm saying is that it'd be nice if this had never become an issue because 99% of retailers carded on M+ games. As in, no one ever talked about legislating it because it was already being done by responsible businesses.
The problem is it is not just a ban on sale to M+ games to minors, that would be illegal. The government cannot enforce a private orginazations ratings, they must come up with there own standards.
So make the ESRB a contractor hired to set video game ratings. That would give the organization some added income so they could better screen games, in exchange for accountability (which isn't a bad thing). They just aren't willing to think around problems like that.
Also, is it easier for 13 year olds to get ciggarettes or M rated games?
I bet it's the ciggarettes.
Probably because most kids get cigarettes (at first) from their smoking parents. A random 13-year-old can't just walk into a store and buy smokes...it's nearly impossible to find even a random clerk who will sell to kids. It's too much of a risk.
Spoken like someone who is not a parent.
And like someone who didn't read the rest of my post.
I won't argue that there are a lot of parents out there looking for something or someone to take over as much as possible so they can go about their business and not worry about their kids. I'd just as soon those people were sterilized and possibly lobotomized. It'd save us all a lot of grief.
But every time game ratings and the legislation relating to it comes up, some witty guy feels the need to say "they just want the government to do their jobs". That's simply not the case for a lot of parents. The FTC has found that M-rated games aren't being effectively restricted, and that young teens find them easy to buy directly from retailers. The study referenced in TFA demonstrates that the ESRB is not always fully evaluating game content, making it harder for parents to make informed decisions prior to purchasing games. So parents are seeing their kids coming home with games with subjects far beyond the kids' level of maturity, and even buying games only to find out that it contains unlisted content that they object to.
What a lot of parents are asking for is simply for it to be easier for them to do their jobs. In ten or twelve years when my kid is old enough to walk around a store without my immediate supervision, it would be a great help to me if he couldn't walk up to a counter and buy Wild Things 5 and GTA:Moscow without me knowing about it. Not because I object to those particular titles but because I, as his parent, want to be able to "filter" what he does and does not buy according to what I think is appropriate for his age, intellect, and emotional maturity. It'd be lovely if the retailers would enforce ESRB ratings voluntarily, but right now something like 1/3 aren't doing that. That's why so many people are pushing for the so-called "bans" that are just age restrictions on sales of M+ rated video games.
Excuse me, Mr. Citizen? Would you mind not giving my child ready access to content he is not emotionally mature enough to handle? Thanks, I appreciate it.
The old saying "it takes a village to raise a child" bears repeating here. I'm not saying that it's anyone's job but the parents to raise a child, but you have to be clueless to think that we as a society have no influence on children. It's hard for a parent to raise their children when they've got hundreds of idiots standing on the sidelines second-guessing all their decisions and waiting til they turn their backs so they can undermine their parenting.
The Yellow River is one of the major rivers in China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_River
Aside from the whole "you must always carry your ID", I love the idea of a single unified ID card. In my wallet, I have:
Driver's license
Social Security card
Health insurance card
My toddler son's health insurance card (he's on my wife's plan)
Dental insurance card
Vision insurance card
Four membership cards for various stores
The first two could easily be combined into a single card. It wouldn't take much for an embedded chip to contain all my personal insurance information.
As for the membership cards, I think it would be a good feature for an ID to have a way to store such information in a way that one party could not access information stored by others.
I'm going on 4.5 years without a virus on my XP system. Your buddies are just clueless.
I say keep Linux as it is.
As do I. I like Linux. I don't like the fact that documentation is spread out over several websites, is often incomplete, and the community tends toward snobbery because they have experienced too many "just tell me how to do everything" newbies to take the time to sort out the willing learners from the idiots.
Linux needs a more cohesive system of documentation that doesn't refer you to websites every third sentence. If I can't get OS help from the OS itself, I'm frustrated from the start. What Linux would really benefit from is a tutorial distro designed to walk people through a few hours of Linux basics and help them learn to use the OS so that they can competently install and operate the distro of their choice from the start. I know I'd use something like that.
First, musicians found out they could make money by making music. So they made it their careers. That was a good thing; it led to higher-quality music as they could focus on their art.
Then musicians got managers. Their managers took a portion of their profits in return for helping them make a greater profit. the managers, not being artists themselves, sought to maximize profits to increase their own income. Thus was born marketing of music. It got the musician more listeners, so they didn't mind the commercialization, as their art was reaching more people.
Eventually some manager thought it would be a good idea to make a business of distributing recorded music. Again the musician's income was spread out, requiring greater revenue for the musician to make the same amount of money. Another layer of non-musicians was added to the mix. The art got watered down as it became more and more a business.
Today, the record labels control the market. They create musicians; find a blonde who can dance and barely sing and they'll make her into the next one-hit-wonder. They mass-produce formulaic lyrics and music, choreograph elaborate stage performances, and call their latest corporate rubber stamp an artist.
The internet scares them so much because it strips away their control. In the past forty years, they have developed a system by which they determine a song's popularity before it is through recording. They set the radio play. They decide how many albums will be produced. They produce and distribute the marketing material. From the first time you read an article about a new "artist" to the first time you hear them on the radio to when you walk in the store and pick up a CD off the big cardboard display by the front door, the labels have controlled everything you read, heard, and saw. Digital distribution--legal or otherwise--makes it possible for people to sample songs outside the top 40 stations.
Has file sharing cost them record sales? Probably. But that's not the problem; the radio cost them record sales. Television cost them record sales. Anything that distracts people from music will reduce the sale of records. The problem here is they can no longer predict the market as accurately as they once could. This translates into more money being spent on marketing and research and a greater risk being placed on any given project. In other words, even if they didn't lose a single record sale to file sharing, they'd still lose profit...and they don't like that.
That makes more sense. The copy/paste press release in TFA was rather vague.
I guess I've just never seen a need for such a product; I didn't know there was a market for it.
I got snubbed by some of the Linux zealots recently. I was having trouble installing a program on Ubuntu. I'd read a fair bit of documentation (forgive me, but I'm inclined to think that one shouldn't be required to read hundreds of pages of documentation to _start_ using an OS). I tried using apt-get to install the package, and the software (an older version) didn't work right. So I downloaded the newest version and was having trouble getting it to work.
On a side note, the only place I've seen on Ubuntu's site concerning installing without apt-get is in the Wiki. When I search "install software" (which is most likely what a total noob would try) it's the twelfth result, titled "compiling software".
Back to my particular problem: I downloaded the new version and started the install routine. Uh oh, configure reports a dependency problem. Only I don't know that, because it's not very clear...so I post the problem. I'm told to RTFM. I reply that I've been RTFM and that I've searched Ubuntu and Google, without any luck. Someone else tells me what I need to fix the dependency problem. So I download that, start to install it, and...dependency problem. Oookay.
I search for this package myself, and find nothing. I post it, someone calls me a noob (quite helpful) and two days later someone comes along who knows where to find the obscure package. I start to install it, and...guess what? It wants something else. So I just jump straight to the forums thinking I've missed something crucial and am told I should just use some other software.
I think I will. Windows. Sad thing is, I was hoping to get Linux working with a specific application to pitch it to the school district I work for. That would have put a hundred high school students a year on Linux, but because of dependency bullshit and useless posters, we'll just stick with Windows. We sure don't want to get stuck not knowing something and have no way of finding it out.
At my house, I've decided not to waste my time with getting Linux on my desktop. It will continue to run my router and file server and has recently been installed on an old laptop that is used for internet surfing, but any system that runs a variety of applications will remain Windows since Linux has been too much of a headache.
It's that attitude right there that runs people off. You assume that because someone is having trouble finding an answer that they refuse to do anything for themselves. That's what will continue to marginalize Linux as a gimmick desktop OS.
...but this sounds like a bloated, laggy protocol.
What's wrong with TCP/IP and DHCP?
It is not snobbish and snubbish to tell someone to RTFM. It is snobbish and snubbish to tell someone to RTFM without telling where to RTFM.
"RTFM" is still a response which turns off users and sends them back to Windows. I'm very much a Linux newbie myself, but when someone asks a simple question that I can answer and know where to find it in the documentation, I give them both.
Someone asks how to get a directory listing in the command line. You could:
a) tell them to RTFM
b) copy and paste the entire FM so they don't have to do any work
c) Tell them that the command is "ls", and then tell them where to look for more information on switches and such.
Option A shrinks the Linux user base. Option B does not encourage the poster to learn how to find answers for themselves. Option C gives them a quick answer to their question and tells them where to find more information.