Exactly. Why do people feel entitled to "free" content that other people have invested significant amounts of time and money in creating?
I suspect a large part of this is a "stick it to the man" mentality. The big companies are stubbornly refusing to move away from distribution methods that don't satisfy modern consumers, and so many consumers have turned to piracy out of frustration and protest.
The music industry is reaching a point that works for most of us. They are reluctantly moving away from DRM and provide samples for most of the music they try to sell online, meaning we don't buy blind any more. We don't get forced to purchase whole albums for two good songs. The only real issue I've seen with digital music sales lately is proprietary music formats and the quality of the sound.
The reaction I get from a lot of the people who still download a lot of music from TPB and other places is "$1 is too much for a song!" So what? I think $80,000 is too much for a car, which is why I don't own aa $80,000 car. Not liking the price is NOT justification for taking it anyway.
Without the risk of real injury, drivers would be a lot less inclined to be careful. Every race would likely devolve into a big wreck. Despite what many think, NASCAR isn't about the wrecks and most people watching it aren't looking to see a big pileup every week.
My network admin loves to watch NASCAR and it's all about the nuance of the race for him. I've heard enough accounts of Jeff Gordon's wins (and losses) that I understand what it's about.
I guess I'm going to have to spell this out: not a single reply to my post actually answered my question, yet it seems a consensus to berate me for daring to question the purpose of ANY scientific endeavor and to then turn my honest question about one into an unstated attack on all. Nevermind what I said, assume what you want.
You especially sounded like a fundamentalist, attacking anyone who dares question the "truth".
So let's look at what you said:
"How does it matter that people don't understand what basic researchers do, you blithering twit? What matters is that basic researchers understand what they do, which helps them continuously go forward in their research."
So basically I should shut up and never question what the smart people do because they clearly know what they're doing? Hey, let's apply that to politics: what matters is the politicians understand what they do. The rest of us shouldn't care.
While it's not within my power (nor should it be) to prevent a researcher from studying the color of grass blades on opposing sides of a fence, it IS perfectly reasonable for me to ask whether this is a good use of that researcher's talent and resources. I'm well within my rights to ask whether he might find something more productive to do with his time.
"Then, engineers pick up what these researchers produced, to make useful stuff out of them. Basic transistors get turned into electronic chips, a new source of energy turns into a new kind of power plant, and so on. Then more engineers pick up where their peers left off, electronic chips become calculators, computers, iPods, while they put that new source of energy all over the power grid, into submarines, space stations and even your car."
The first production transistor had an application. They didn't just make transistors and say "okay, now what do we do with these?" The research that produced it had a clear purpose and goal. Very little research, in fact, goes on that doesn't have an application in mind when it is begun.
Yes! How DARE I question the purpose of ANY research! Trot out some examples of research that have benefited us and use that as a straw man with which to berate me for daring to call this a possible waste of resources!
What part of "I love science and think it's hugely important and beneficial" is so hard for people to understand?
I'm asking what the point and possible benefit is in THIS project. I, and the vast majority of the world with me, truly don't get it. Why the strawmen?
(and for whoever modded me troll: you're an idiot)
99.9% of the population answers all modern physics questions with a question: "What the hell are you talking about?"
Someone convince me all this is a worthwhile expense of resources and that it will do more than prove one professor is smarter than another professor. Because right now I'm seriously concerned that a LOT of time, brainpower, and natural resources are being invested in something that has no value other than knowledge.
(disclaimer: I love science and think it's hugely important and beneficial, but there are times I wonder if the lengths to which physicists go to answer their Next Big Question aren't excessive given all the other things their talents could be applied to)
I think the community needs to be saying a HUGE thanks to these guys for showing the industry how to bow out gracefully and give closure to customers. Too often they simply abandon communities to wither and die; it's wonderful to see a company recognize when a game can't support itself in the long term and give the users a positive experience as they end it.
I've worked in IT for a school district for four years. We use Linux on a couple of servers and for Telnet servers, but that is all we've been willing to use. We use open-source where we can, but we recently dropped OOo because of its deficiencies compared to MSO.
The applications being used at universities and in the workplace are predominately NOT open-source. We're teaching Adobe CS and MSO. Those aren't available on Linux.
I'd love to make Linux and open-source alternatives available to students and if they'll ever approve the stipend to pay me to take over the technology students' association I will probably start teaching interested students about it, but we don't have the resources to offer both, and it would be a disservice to the students to use open-source applications they might never see in the real world.
I see hardly anything older than about 15 years. Where are the console games that shaped console gaming? Where are the 2600 and ColecoVision games and make console gaming relevant in the first place?
And why limit it to consoles? PC games like Doom, Command & Conquer, and X-COM defined whole genres fifteen years ago.
Instead we have button mashers like Guitar Hero. Yeah, that's influential. Not trendy look-we-have-a-new-controller at all.
Windows usually works quite well if it's shipped on the PC, as is the case here.
Read the comments here: Linux experience has been hit-and-miss using it on Eee. When people say "it was great, I just had to fix _______" and "It only takes xx additional packages to make it work right" that means that out-of-the-box performance shouldn't be expected.
commentary: I'm always amazed by topics like this because they demonstrate some shortcomings in Linux that make it unsuitable for people looking for EASY solutions, and yet the give-me-linux-or-give-me-death crowd acts like such things don't happen any more. Can't we just accept that Linux still isn't ready for everyone and get on with life?
Wrong. They are not allowed to "handle the kids". Parents like you make it impossible to do so by teaching their children that it's okay to violate school rules. Any time a teacher does anything, parents run crying to principals and superintendents and school boards and lawyers until the teacher is overruled by someone who just doesn't want to deal with the shit. Schools are powerless when it comes to dealing with kids because of lawyer-happy parents JUST LIKE YOU, so they've resorted to bringing in police to deal with discipline problems.
Around here, it's in the school handbook that USE OF A CELL PHONE GETS THE PHONE CONFISCATED. Period. Any involved parent should be aware of this, as any involved parent would make it a point to know the rules. You know, maybe if your kids would follow the rules in the first place, they wouldn't need to refuse to give up their phone.
Maybe, just maybe, if parents would support the people who work for a penance trying to educate 20+ kids at a time while putting up with the politics of a school board and the pettiness of a hundred different families and the person issues of a hundred different kids, maybe we wouldn't have these discipline problems in schools. Maybe if parents would stop believing whatever their kids say as the gospel truth, maybe if they would assist in dealing with their kids' behavior at school, maybe if they would just attempt to participate in their child's education, schools would work the way they used to.
But sadly, no. Parents are going to continue expecting teachers to coddle their kids, make them feel good about themselves, make exceptions for everyone, and then wonder why our nation's children are increasingly ignorant of the world around them and point the finger at the schools they refuse to support. But hey, that's the school's job, right? Why should parents have to do anything to educate their child?
It's been done in the states for at least a decade. Toll tags and such are commonplace in the metro areas, and now there's even talk of turning some of our interstates into toll roads.
I vehemently oppose the idea of toll roads on those "major artery" roads that connect our nation. It's one thing to add a toll road in an urban area where there are plenty of alternate paths, but placing an arbitrary price on traveling from one place to another is essentially restricting the right of travel. Our government should not be in the business of making it more expensive for me to go see my family 100 miles away.
My question is, what don't I get in notepad that I would use in vi or emacs? I've used them both, and simply don't see a need in what I do for their advanced features.
That's really what it comes down to. A lot of Linux advocates say "but it's got and Windows doesn't!" But the truth is, that feature is only relevant to a small segment of the population, and maybe doesn't have to be integral to the OS.
If Microsoft includes niche features that most of us have no use for, it's bloatware. If Linux does it, it's...good?
The OpenXML (or whatever it's called) format was supposed to introduce an open standard that should have made it easier for OOo and others to render MS documents correctly. I suspect the problem is when you take an older document out of Word 97/2000/XP/2003, edit it, and save it using Word 2007.
MS, being the lazy bunch they can be, built in quite a few components of OXML that basically just say "do it like Word 97 did". It makes it easy for porting old documents over to the new format...rather than trying to translate proprietary behavior into an open standard, they can cheat their way around it by building that same proprietary code into the new Word.
MS doesn't have to try to take over. They dominate the office suite market by a VAST majority. Even as they lose OS share, I'm not seeing any attempts whatsoever to move away from their document formats.
From what I'm told by friends participating in the beta, it WILL have a decent text editor. For that matter, I use XP's notepad sometimes several hours a day and find it sufficient for nearly everything.
As for a web server or compilers...should we expect a desktop OS to fill every niche right out of the box? How many people buy a desktop thinking "I can't wait to set up that web page!"
Perhaps you're finding that XP isn't sufficient out of the box for your specific needs. My point is that can be said about any Linux distro by the majority of PC users.
Openoffice == different name, it must be a Whole New System! Office 2007 == Oh, it's just another office, what could be different?
As I said, OOo Writer doesn't always properly render.docx files, and Word is the format of choice for...well, most everyone. Calc is horrible compared to Excel, and Impress lacks some key features of PowerPoint that I see used every day.
Base lacks a lot of the polish of Access; even though it appears to have most of the same features (it might even be a more robust system for those who know how to use it), those of us who don't use it heavily need the polish and eye candy that Access provides to fill in the blanks in our knowledge.
Office 2007 is a HUGE change from 2003 and I've had to do a lot of hand-holding with it myself, but the features are all still there. It's learning a new interface, not a whole new way of doing things.
Linux is just as easy, if not easier to use than windows.
Right up until you want to install a wireless card not natively supported by the distro you're using.
Or the package you're installing doesn't work and drops a cryptic message that turns out to be a dependency problem. I've learned the special place that is dependency hell: I've had to actually compile SIX packages to work my way up to making a single one work. One of them I had to look for thirty minutes before I found it, and I have a reputation at work for being able to find things the rest of the IT staff can't.
Now of course things don't always work in Windows, but it's nowhere near as confusing and convoluted as when it happens in Linux.
Your example is just absurd. If you think pointing and clicking is what defines ease-of-use in an OS, you've never experienced the problems I have in both of them.
In windows you have to google-hunt a program, pray it's clean, download, scan, install. In linux you open the package manager, select it and click "apply".
On Windows XP, I haven't seen a BSOD in years on my personal system. At work, nearly all of them stem from hardware problems, usually a flaky power supply. The ONLY times I reinstall Windows is due to hardware changes; while I can make Windows tolerate significant changes, I prefer not to as the changes in the drivers can wreak havoc.
Of course, my experience with Linux has been the same: you really don't want to try to drop a whole new build without recompiling.
Loading MS Word? Just use OpenOffice because it's compatible with those document formats.
No, it's not. Half the.docx stuff I receive formats incorrectly in OO.o.
I'm all for Ubuntu and OOo and all the rest--and I use them myself almost as much as I use MS products--but let's be honest: the vast majority of users simply don't have the time or determination to learn a new OS, productivity suite, and how to deal with a host of new quirks, bugs, and features.
I find these benchmarks a little disingenuous anyway; having used Ubuntu for years, it does not have NEAR the functionality of Windows 7 without heavy tweaking. Windows, for all its problems, delivers click-it-and-it-works better than anyone else. MS isn't top dog because they made a deal with satan, it's because they made their operating system the most idiot-friendly.
Or, do. I would LOVE if every service provider gave me a place to voice my opinion on how they can improve their service without me having to have the expertise to actually execute the idea.
An idea is just that: an idea. It's not a product, it's not a service, it's not even the result of a great deal of work. There are a lot of things I'd like to see companies do that I can't begin to make money off of, but I think they could and I would benefit from them. I don't care if they profit off my ideas, my gain is that they are doing what I want.
Leave it to Slashdot users to find a way to negatively spin it when a company goes to great lengths to give their consumers a voice.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Why do people feel entitled to "free" content that other people have invested significant amounts of time and money in creating?
I suspect a large part of this is a "stick it to the man" mentality. The big companies are stubbornly refusing to move away from distribution methods that don't satisfy modern consumers, and so many consumers have turned to piracy out of frustration and protest.
The music industry is reaching a point that works for most of us. They are reluctantly moving away from DRM and provide samples for most of the music they try to sell online, meaning we don't buy blind any more. We don't get forced to purchase whole albums for two good songs. The only real issue I've seen with digital music sales lately is proprietary music formats and the quality of the sound.
The reaction I get from a lot of the people who still download a lot of music from TPB and other places is "$1 is too much for a song!" So what? I think $80,000 is too much for a car, which is why I don't own aa $80,000 car. Not liking the price is NOT justification for taking it anyway.
Without the risk of real injury, drivers would be a lot less inclined to be careful. Every race would likely devolve into a big wreck. Despite what many think, NASCAR isn't about the wrecks and most people watching it aren't looking to see a big pileup every week.
My network admin loves to watch NASCAR and it's all about the nuance of the race for him. I've heard enough accounts of Jeff Gordon's wins (and losses) that I understand what it's about.
I guess I'm going to have to spell this out: not a single reply to my post actually answered my question, yet it seems a consensus to berate me for daring to question the purpose of ANY scientific endeavor and to then turn my honest question about one into an unstated attack on all. Nevermind what I said, assume what you want.
You especially sounded like a fundamentalist, attacking anyone who dares question the "truth".
So let's look at what you said:
"How does it matter that people don't understand what basic researchers do, you blithering twit? What matters is that basic researchers understand what they do, which helps them continuously go forward in their research."
So basically I should shut up and never question what the smart people do because they clearly know what they're doing? Hey, let's apply that to politics: what matters is the politicians understand what they do. The rest of us shouldn't care.
While it's not within my power (nor should it be) to prevent a researcher from studying the color of grass blades on opposing sides of a fence, it IS perfectly reasonable for me to ask whether this is a good use of that researcher's talent and resources. I'm well within my rights to ask whether he might find something more productive to do with his time.
"Then, engineers pick up what these researchers produced, to make useful stuff out of them. Basic transistors get turned into electronic chips, a new source of energy turns into a new kind of power plant, and so on. Then more engineers pick up where their peers left off, electronic chips become calculators, computers, iPods, while they put that new source of energy all over the power grid, into submarines, space stations and even your car."
The first production transistor had an application. They didn't just make transistors and say "okay, now what do we do with these?" The research that produced it had a clear purpose and goal. Very little research, in fact, goes on that doesn't have an application in mind when it is begun.
Yes! How DARE I question the purpose of ANY research! Trot out some examples of research that have benefited us and use that as a straw man with which to berate me for daring to call this a possible waste of resources!
TOLERATE NO BLASPHEMY!
What part of "I love science and think it's hugely important and beneficial" is so hard for people to understand?
I'm asking what the point and possible benefit is in THIS project. I, and the vast majority of the world with me, truly don't get it. Why the strawmen?
(and for whoever modded me troll: you're an idiot)
99.9% of the population answers all modern physics questions with a question: "What the hell are you talking about?"
Someone convince me all this is a worthwhile expense of resources and that it will do more than prove one professor is smarter than another professor. Because right now I'm seriously concerned that a LOT of time, brainpower, and natural resources are being invested in something that has no value other than knowledge.
(disclaimer: I love science and think it's hugely important and beneficial, but there are times I wonder if the lengths to which physicists go to answer their Next Big Question aren't excessive given all the other things their talents could be applied to)
I think the community needs to be saying a HUGE thanks to these guys for showing the industry how to bow out gracefully and give closure to customers. Too often they simply abandon communities to wither and die; it's wonderful to see a company recognize when a game can't support itself in the long term and give the users a positive experience as they end it.
Yes, I have. It's a reflex/rote memorization game. It's all about pressing the right button at the right time. That's a button masher.
It's a DDR pad for the fingers.
I've worked in IT for a school district for four years. We use Linux on a couple of servers and for Telnet servers, but that is all we've been willing to use. We use open-source where we can, but we recently dropped OOo because of its deficiencies compared to MSO.
The applications being used at universities and in the workplace are predominately NOT open-source. We're teaching Adobe CS and MSO. Those aren't available on Linux.
I'd love to make Linux and open-source alternatives available to students and if they'll ever approve the stipend to pay me to take over the technology students' association I will probably start teaching interested students about it, but we don't have the resources to offer both, and it would be a disservice to the students to use open-source applications they might never see in the real world.
I see hardly anything older than about 15 years. Where are the console games that shaped console gaming? Where are the 2600 and ColecoVision games and make console gaming relevant in the first place?
And why limit it to consoles? PC games like Doom, Command & Conquer, and X-COM defined whole genres fifteen years ago.
Instead we have button mashers like Guitar Hero. Yeah, that's influential. Not trendy look-we-have-a-new-controller at all.
Windows usually works quite well if it's shipped on the PC, as is the case here.
Read the comments here: Linux experience has been hit-and-miss using it on Eee. When people say "it was great, I just had to fix _______" and "It only takes xx additional packages to make it work right" that means that out-of-the-box performance shouldn't be expected.
commentary: I'm always amazed by topics like this because they demonstrate some shortcomings in Linux that make it unsuitable for people looking for EASY solutions, and yet the give-me-linux-or-give-me-death crowd acts like such things don't happen any more. Can't we just accept that Linux still isn't ready for everyone and get on with life?
end soapbox.
I knew that felt wrong, but the word escaped me. Thanks for the correction.
I also wrote "person problems" instead of "personal problems".
Wrong. They are not allowed to "handle the kids". Parents like you make it impossible to do so by teaching their children that it's okay to violate school rules. Any time a teacher does anything, parents run crying to principals and superintendents and school boards and lawyers until the teacher is overruled by someone who just doesn't want to deal with the shit. Schools are powerless when it comes to dealing with kids because of lawyer-happy parents JUST LIKE YOU, so they've resorted to bringing in police to deal with discipline problems.
Around here, it's in the school handbook that USE OF A CELL PHONE GETS THE PHONE CONFISCATED. Period. Any involved parent should be aware of this, as any involved parent would make it a point to know the rules. You know, maybe if your kids would follow the rules in the first place, they wouldn't need to refuse to give up their phone.
Maybe, just maybe, if parents would support the people who work for a penance trying to educate 20+ kids at a time while putting up with the politics of a school board and the pettiness of a hundred different families and the person issues of a hundred different kids, maybe we wouldn't have these discipline problems in schools. Maybe if parents would stop believing whatever their kids say as the gospel truth, maybe if they would assist in dealing with their kids' behavior at school, maybe if they would just attempt to participate in their child's education, schools would work the way they used to.
But sadly, no. Parents are going to continue expecting teachers to coddle their kids, make them feel good about themselves, make exceptions for everyone, and then wonder why our nation's children are increasingly ignorant of the world around them and point the finger at the schools they refuse to support. But hey, that's the school's job, right? Why should parents have to do anything to educate their child?
It's been done in the states for at least a decade. Toll tags and such are commonplace in the metro areas, and now there's even talk of turning some of our interstates into toll roads.
I vehemently oppose the idea of toll roads on those "major artery" roads that connect our nation. It's one thing to add a toll road in an urban area where there are plenty of alternate paths, but placing an arbitrary price on traveling from one place to another is essentially restricting the right of travel. Our government should not be in the business of making it more expensive for me to go see my family 100 miles away.
My question is, what don't I get in notepad that I would use in vi or emacs? I've used them both, and simply don't see a need in what I do for their advanced features.
That's really what it comes down to. A lot of Linux advocates say "but it's got and Windows doesn't!" But the truth is, that feature is only relevant to a small segment of the population, and maybe doesn't have to be integral to the OS.
If Microsoft includes niche features that most of us have no use for, it's bloatware. If Linux does it, it's...good?
The OpenXML (or whatever it's called) format was supposed to introduce an open standard that should have made it easier for OOo and others to render MS documents correctly. I suspect the problem is when you take an older document out of Word 97/2000/XP/2003, edit it, and save it using Word 2007.
MS, being the lazy bunch they can be, built in quite a few components of OXML that basically just say "do it like Word 97 did". It makes it easy for porting old documents over to the new format...rather than trying to translate proprietary behavior into an open standard, they can cheat their way around it by building that same proprietary code into the new Word.
MS doesn't have to try to take over. They dominate the office suite market by a VAST majority. Even as they lose OS share, I'm not seeing any attempts whatsoever to move away from their document formats.
From what I'm told by friends participating in the beta, it WILL have a decent text editor. For that matter, I use XP's notepad sometimes several hours a day and find it sufficient for nearly everything.
As for a web server or compilers...should we expect a desktop OS to fill every niche right out of the box? How many people buy a desktop thinking "I can't wait to set up that web page!"
Perhaps you're finding that XP isn't sufficient out of the box for your specific needs. My point is that can be said about any Linux distro by the majority of PC users.
As I said, OOo Writer doesn't always properly render .docx files, and Word is the format of choice for...well, most everyone. Calc is horrible compared to Excel, and Impress lacks some key features of PowerPoint that I see used every day.
Base lacks a lot of the polish of Access; even though it appears to have most of the same features (it might even be a more robust system for those who know how to use it), those of us who don't use it heavily need the polish and eye candy that Access provides to fill in the blanks in our knowledge.
Office 2007 is a HUGE change from 2003 and I've had to do a lot of hand-holding with it myself, but the features are all still there. It's learning a new interface, not a whole new way of doing things.
Right up until you want to install a wireless card not natively supported by the distro you're using.
Or the package you're installing doesn't work and drops a cryptic message that turns out to be a dependency problem. I've learned the special place that is dependency hell: I've had to actually compile SIX packages to work my way up to making a single one work. One of them I had to look for thirty minutes before I found it, and I have a reputation at work for being able to find things the rest of the IT staff can't.
Now of course things don't always work in Windows, but it's nowhere near as confusing and convoluted as when it happens in Linux.
Your example is just absurd. If you think pointing and clicking is what defines ease-of-use in an OS, you've never experienced the problems I have in both of them.
Where is Linuxtopia, and how do I move there?
On Windows XP, I haven't seen a BSOD in years on my personal system. At work, nearly all of them stem from hardware problems, usually a flaky power supply. The ONLY times I reinstall Windows is due to hardware changes; while I can make Windows tolerate significant changes, I prefer not to as the changes in the drivers can wreak havoc.
Of course, my experience with Linux has been the same: you really don't want to try to drop a whole new build without recompiling.
No, it's not. Half the .docx stuff I receive formats incorrectly in OO.o.
I'm all for Ubuntu and OOo and all the rest--and I use them myself almost as much as I use MS products--but let's be honest: the vast majority of users simply don't have the time or determination to learn a new OS, productivity suite, and how to deal with a host of new quirks, bugs, and features.
I find these benchmarks a little disingenuous anyway; having used Ubuntu for years, it does not have NEAR the functionality of Windows 7 without heavy tweaking. Windows, for all its problems, delivers click-it-and-it-works better than anyone else. MS isn't top dog because they made a deal with satan, it's because they made their operating system the most idiot-friendly.
Hell is a 5-star hotel, but they're overbooked and you have to share the room with a whiny, celibate Paris Hilton.
...so were the Americas.
Or, do. I would LOVE if every service provider gave me a place to voice my opinion on how they can improve their service without me having to have the expertise to actually execute the idea.
An idea is just that: an idea. It's not a product, it's not a service, it's not even the result of a great deal of work. There are a lot of things I'd like to see companies do that I can't begin to make money off of, but I think they could and I would benefit from them. I don't care if they profit off my ideas, my gain is that they are doing what I want.
Leave it to Slashdot users to find a way to negatively spin it when a company goes to great lengths to give their consumers a voice.
Swords for EVERYONE!