99.9% uptime is 364+ days a year. When services like Comcast and Blackberry go down for 3-4 days every year, they have rightfully generated the level of news that is given to them. This costs businesses Millions and drops their annual performance to the 99% range. *THIS* is the range that consumers should be up in arms about. 99.9% is actually pretty good for anything that IS NOT A RISK TO HUMAN LIFE.
Now, if the performance dropped to 90%, the services would be down 3-4 days every MONTH and customers would get pissed off enough to laugh entire companies out of existence. Imagine if Windows Update occurred during the second Tuesday of every month and knocked out your company network until the following Monday? Linux would be adopted pretty damned quickly...
The government didn't always regulate phone companies. That started in 1984 when AT&T became too powerful. But AT&T became so powerful because it did a hell of an awesome thing with its network because it realized that better service equals more customers and more revenue. I recall hearing a story from a Bell Labs alum that they had a goal of handling annual peak call volumes on the busiest day of the year (Mother's Day). The day was worth $24 Million dollars in phone charges to them. They spent $5 Million on each of 2 different hardware architecture projects to get the system up and running to support the day. The monolithic centralized architecture failed, but distributed architecture (spreading the communications through 10-15 national "hubs" worked. The system was a success, and AT&T got to enjoy their lunch by servicing their customers the way a business ought to.
For data networks, their is simply too much clutter and competition to be able to reign in 99.999% rates of performance. We should be happy to get 99.9% from the mismatch of hardware running the routers and OSes which power the internet.
As a pretext, I agree with the benefits of openness and software freedom. The point of my response is to address where users who are not tech-geeks would prefer a closed solution.
I thought we owned all own phones like we do computers? Why can't we run our own software? Or develop software for them?
We can't run our own software because it hasn't been tested. If loading and executing applications on phones was trivial, you'd see text-message exploits that load ad-software onto your phone and then send copies of the exploited message to your entire contact list. I am speculating here, but the base Operating Systems running your phones are tested in their plain vanilla environments which would be fairly easy to hack with 3rd party development... and that is why you can't do it.
Can you imagine living in a world where you could not develop programs for your own computer?
Could you imagine living in a world where you could not manufacture a wrench or a hammer? Yes, you could. Because like wrenches and hammers, computers are tools for the majority of the population. Who cares how they are made, as long as they do the job?
As a software engineer, it is bad to be locked out from doing development. However, that is why organizations like FSF are competing with MSFT and Apple.
Seriously port firefox to andriod only. If enough developers switch to a platform that allows them to compete and run their own software the users will follow. I know many here hate Java but why can't we live in a world that is free?
I am not sure of details of Android, but I do know that it is from Google and that Google's applications are generally not "Open". They are "free" because they are ad-supported, which appeases the majority of the population, but the are not "free" as defined by all 4 rules of the FSF. I would rather see hardware that is truly "Open" be the basis for this development -- so that I can buy the raw components and fork the design for my own needs.
As far as locking onto any single platform... are you aware that the IBM-PC and a certain brand of OS software became successful because they supported a wide range of hardware platforms?
And as far as Java, I like Java. I've never really heard claims that people don't like it, so maybe you could enlighten me with a response.
Would you rather own a locked down phone or one where all the free apps on the internet run on? I would pick the latter.
I disagree with their pricing scheme for internet access. I would actually prefer a mobile device that is NETWORK AGNOSTIC before I even start talking about which Applications I can and cannot run (as an aside, I have a simple Verizon cell phone that does not have Bluetooth or WiFi... so Network Agnostic phones may actually be more ubiquitous than I know).
And for now, the only application that I need my phone to perform is "voice communication", and it does it satisfactorily. A bonus application would be "not dying after 20 minutes of talking", but that is standard for cheap 20 month old mobile batteries of any kind.
Consumers run WIndows over Linux and MacOSX because its where the apps are at. The phone companies are going to create the ultimate competitor if they are not careful and dictate to the rest of us what to use.
Is your argument targeted at consumers or developers? Are you considering the benefits to vendors or users? Hell... if it were easy, the F/OSS development community would deploy a nationwide WiMax network and offer a line of cellular products with all the bells and whistles for $0.00 a month with "Donate to support the F/OSS Communications Network" links (kinda like Wikipedia). Unfortunately, it costs lots of money to do this, and so the phone companies get to keep their duopoly... and they get to protect their cheap OS's by not letting you run your software on them, and they get to keep their users for at least the next two years because we are locked in with contracts.
Tell your tightwad boss to pick someone more suited to the task - Even the weenies in Marketing can probably do the task better than an engineer (unless you just happen to have a background in technical writing, but it sounds like that doesn't fit into your job description/requirements).
When geeks design a Style Guide, it looks like this. Simple, elegant, uncluttered.
When the weenies in Marketing design a Style Guide, the audience ends up trying to punch a psychedelic virtual monkey. Please don't suggest anything that would put marketing personnel in a position to produce anything that will guide me, thankyouverymuch.
If you are looking for a book to teach you UI design, you are misguided. If you are looking for a Creative Commons and/or Open approach to UI design, register a domain called "Principles of UI Design" and launch a Wiki on it, then license it with the license you desire (but I would recommend CC0).
If all goes well, this thread will serve as a good starting point for getting ideas/content to populate your new Wiki with.
If this were a car manufacturer or a drug manufacturer, you would see the same thing. So why should Microsoft be any different?
Please do not compare a computer crash to a car crash or a drug that has dangerous side-effects. There are obvious reasons why cars and drugs are recalled and your commercial operating system isn't.
Here is a quote from near the top of the Exxon Global Warming propaganda page:
On June 13, USA Today declared, "The debate's over: Globe is Warming." In support of its claim, the newspaper cited the positions of some left-leaning religious groups, some corporations who will reap a financial windfall from a switch to alternative fuel sources, and some politicians.
I am not going to bother "fact checking", but rather assume the date, the source, and the headline are factual. The rest of the post on the Exxon page is biased nonsense that conveniently leaves out all salient details about who the newspaper is citing. Were the left-leaning religious groups the Catholics? The Klu Klux Klan? Perhaps Greenpeace? Were the alternative energy corporations Exxon-Mobil? SolarTech? General Electric?
It seems to me that the propaganda page which this thread's flamewar is based around is simple garbage and nobody anywhere has added anything meaningful to credit or discredit the global warming debate (except the guy who pointed out the the source in question is an Exxon funded page).
Thus, I because of the lack on information and the absence of facts on the source page, I declare that it is nothing but somebody's uneducated propaganda and you should ignore its opinions.
Just have website that have bad content set the "evil bit".
Or another suggestion, consider what is actually trying to be accomplished by regulating the contents of the internet and legislate based on that. If they want to censor it, it is a clear violation of the First Amendment, and they can go fuck themselves. If they would rather control the internet to limit what the children have access to for educational purposes, I would suggest creating an educational internet White List and blocking everything else. If they published there white list and gave citizens some kind of control over what is added/removed, I would say it is a reasonable measure to control what children can see. Even this is foolish though, because of content on sites like YouTube and Wikipedia that will obviously be deemed "explicit" by some parents.
In any case, I would urge Utah to stop being foolish and be better parents instead of depending on the government to parent for them.
Your long-winded version is correct, but mine makes a better slogan. And I am not sure what "infinite wealth" is.
My aim for the ultimate economy would be where automated machines do all the jobs that humans don't want to do, so that we are freed up to do the ones we enjoy. The way it is now, I think there are a ton of people working jobs that they don't enjoy simply to "earn a living". It would be better for those people to go back to school and further their education. Also, a critical point would include choosing our own hours based on our own needs and the needs of our peers. If scarcity of goods and services really was available, then there wouldn't be any more need to earn a paycheck anyway because the price of everything would approach $0, making employment effectively optional (but there is the trouble of that pesky "time" resource, so people would have to do something to avoid from going crazy).
Awesome post. Well put. I couldn't have stated it better myself.
Digital data is to the point where it "can be thought of as free and used like it". I agree with bands giving music away and making money on merch and shows.
I believe writers should give away their words, and then accept post-transaction donations from customers who enjoyed them. I am a little disappointed, in fact, that the article does not link to a Free version of the book in question... a Wired article of "a significant portion of it" is not the same.
I donated. I am perfectly happy with Larry using the money for fund his Change Congress initiative. I agree with the goals of the movement that aim to end abusive pork-fat career politicians. If he channels energy and research into exposing the cretins from the pure souls, I would feel like my donation was money well spent. If he can convince the major political parties not to endorse bad politicians in the first place, that would be even better.
Best yet, if Change Congress could launch a political party to compete with real values against big government "give our money to the poor" Democrats and small government "give our money to the rich" Republicans... then I would be over-joyed.
As it is, neither party really has the right combination of values and opinions to truly suit the needs of the average middle-class American who doesn't have enough saved up for retirement and is a driven everyday to make their living expenses. This majority of the country doesn't need a Republican or a Democrat... they need something better than both.
The only thing we can do is teach the scientific method - in schools, at home, in conversations. It's the only weapon we've got, however small.
I mean this in a respectful tone that is endeared to science and the pursuit of knowledge, but fuck the method. Not that is hasn't been used to unearth some might useful information that has benefited the human race, but there is better science than the scientific method and it is hard for students to understand the process of discovery when repeated trial and error is often boring.
And the goals of science are fairly well understood in this day and age as well. NASA wants to get to Mars by the time today's five year olds are in industry. Other groups want to understand how the brain-mind work. Tons of groups want to replace oil as the main source of energy in the world. And I think they are still chasing a cure for Cancer and HIV/AIDS. These aren't "Gee whiz, let's design an experiment and test it" problems. These are highly theoretical and complex problems that require a HUGE amount of understanding to tackle. And the fact is that testing these things in realistic environments is actually pretty challenging, and simulations or substitutions are required. An it still might be (a) hypothesize, (b) design, (c) experiment, (d) analyze, (e) conclude... but on a much larger scale where (b) design takes up 95% of the cycle. And really, the high school experiments never seemed to capture that for me.
But how to you start to explain the difference between a priori and a posteriori without people rolling their eyes and walking off?
I rolled my eyes, and then went to look it up on Wiki....
One rough and oversimplified explanation is that a priori knowledge is independent of experience, while a posteriori knowledge is dependent on experience. In other words, statements that are a priori true are tautologies.
I remember hearing about a study where people rated one of two identical breakfast cereals as tasting better, simply because it came in a more attractive box. We are not as objective as we like to think.
Yeah, I agree that packaging matters. So much so, in fact, that knockoff brands tend to use packing similar to the brand they are imitating. I would say a real renegade would buy his breakfast in the bag instead of the box that the overpriced General Mills or Post stuff comes in. That said, I like Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios because of its taste and it usually has a more reasonable price than most other stuff (about $0.25 per bowl of cereal). And everytime I buy knockoff brand Cheerios, I am disappointed on taste.
And if you can find the marketing pro that realized you can dress up $0.20 of ground coffee beans and a $0.02 cardboard or Styrofoam cup and charge $2.00 for it, let me know. And that's part of the problem... consumers don't think of the raw materials that are used to make the products they buy. There are tons of things where markups make doing-it-yourself a better option. Take software for instance, it costs $0 to copy and Microsoft charges $800 for Windows Vista Ultimate without batting an eye.
You aren't alone... there are LOTS of people who would prefer a world without advertising. Sirius and XM Satellite Radio made an entire business around the idea that you would pay more to listen to music without advertising. They've got 14 or 15 Million customers paying $13 a month. And that's only a small percentage of the number of people who find value in an adless world.
Tivo and other Digital Recording devices adopt a similar concept for TV (except for during the Super Bowl, when ads ARE the main attraction).
As far as your own abilities to "research different products that are out there", how much of your research depends on passive advertising that you get because you don't even realize? Sure, products like the iPhone that come from proven technology companies get their name in the news so the ads aren't even needed... but if you were in the market for a device that did what the iPhone does, there are other options out there and it isn't easy to conduct the research because it is a complex, fluid, dynamic, ever-changing market.
The purchases that I tend to "research" aren't even advertised, though. They are specialty items that have informed customers. I got a bike last year (from Trek) and a HD camcorder two years ago (from Sony). Both cost over $1,000 and were "big" purchases for me. Both I am very happy with. Neither of them have I really seen advertised for at all.
Things like Adwords is a large toilet that we used to flush money down.
You are the marketing department... it is your job to flush money down the toilet. The best ads are word-of-mouth from trusted friends, anyway. A billboard (either the stationary kind or the kind on the back of a truck), newspaper/magazine spread, TV/Radio commercial, or internet ad can ONLY hope not to annoy me enough to decide never to buy the product.
The problem with the whole advertising system though is that it comes from a completely biased source, and I would rather get an opinion from an unbiased source (i.e. a friend). Find a way to not be biased towards the products you are selling, and we can talk.
Linus Torvalds originally developed the Linux kernel as a hobby OS for the Intel 80386 CPU, incorporating elements from MINIX, although with entirely new code.[12] Initially Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server where the kernel was first hosted for downloading, named Torvalds' directory linux.
Of course, nothing on Wikipedia should be taken as fact unless it can be backed up with supporting references, but that's how it goes.
I submit that the man's overall historical impact may rank with Gutenberg
I see your point, but I think there is a difference between inventing the printing press and preserving freedom and innovation through shared software. I would rather compare RMS to the guy who broke the stonemasons iron-grip on the masonry profession, if such a guy existed. I would also submit that RMS's victories only currently encompass 10% of there potential, seeing as how proprietary methods are still the dominant market force by even the lesser biased sources.
Yeah, the printing press was good, but imagine a world where masonry had not been a closely guarded secret. Take a look at churches and cathedrals built in Europe hundreds of years ago, and imagine having the blueprints for that stuff during the age of colonization. That beauty is what RMS is preserving 200 years into the future. When we start to colonized different planets, their networks will be running apache webservers and we'll be able to communication with them through the Intergalacticnet.
The printing press let artisans churn out massive amounts of printed materials, which helped the masses to get information, and I would compare Gutenberg to the guys who invented the internet. RMS is in a class of his own, because nobody dared to go against the stone masons and preserve the freedom of important information during that era.
Yes, but *this* attention monger has political influence with his lies and exaggeration. If he didn't have any ears in Congress listening to him, we could safely ignore his idiocy.
There is also any underlaying problem with a Criminal Justice system that would allow the bile that Thompson spews to be heard by the courts (and opportunities for reforms in the courts is always newsworthy). If he acted rationally and backed his opinions up with quantitative studies that violence in video games is bad... then fine. However, he uses convenience statistics and bases his cases around his stupid theory that virtual violence leads to real violence.
Copyright violation is not theft. Period, and end of story. There is no semantical issue here, its simply not true.
Now, that said it may ( or may not ) be a civil offense, and even may become a criminal offense if the IP industry gets it way, but its not by definition theft nor will it ever be.
This post helped me think of a new analogy. Yay, analogies!
Copyright law is like a marriage. Some marriages (not many) are open, and each partner can exchange their data however they would like. This would be GPL, BSD, and Creative Commons (with varying sub-analogies that I would rather not go into). Most marriages are closed. While in a closed marriage, one partner can decide they want something on the side. That's infringement. It violates the (marriage) right of their spouse. And the solutions are (a) discuss it like rationale human beings and make it work, or (b) go to court and get divorced.
So, until you want the industries who control the content that was created by artists who still live in the "closed marriage" mindset to bring you to court.... don't "infringe" on their women.
Not in a long time, but Civ II used to be an EXCELLENT way to kill a weekend a decade ago. I wish I could get a copy of exactly the same game that will run on my Ubuntu laptop, and play again. I know there FreeCiv, but it isn't the same. And Duke Nukem 3D, I wish they would publish that again.
(note: I don't pay for software, I don't pirate software, and I recall buying copies and then losing the discs for Windows versions of those games 10 years ago).
Slashdot Mirror
99.9% uptime is 364+ days a year. When services like Comcast and Blackberry go down for 3-4 days every year, they have rightfully generated the level of news that is given to them. This costs businesses Millions and drops their annual performance to the 99% range. *THIS* is the range that consumers should be up in arms about. 99.9% is actually pretty good for anything that IS NOT A RISK TO HUMAN LIFE.
Now, if the performance dropped to 90%, the services would be down 3-4 days every MONTH and customers would get pissed off enough to laugh entire companies out of existence. Imagine if Windows Update occurred during the second Tuesday of every month and knocked out your company network until the following Monday? Linux would be adopted pretty damned quickly...
The government didn't always regulate phone companies. That started in 1984 when AT&T became too powerful. But AT&T became so powerful because it did a hell of an awesome thing with its network because it realized that better service equals more customers and more revenue. I recall hearing a story from a Bell Labs alum that they had a goal of handling annual peak call volumes on the busiest day of the year (Mother's Day). The day was worth $24 Million dollars in phone charges to them. They spent $5 Million on each of 2 different hardware architecture projects to get the system up and running to support the day. The monolithic centralized architecture failed, but distributed architecture (spreading the communications through 10-15 national "hubs" worked. The system was a success, and AT&T got to enjoy their lunch by servicing their customers the way a business ought to.
For data networks, their is simply too much clutter and competition to be able to reign in 99.999% rates of performance. We should be happy to get 99.9% from the mismatch of hardware running the routers and OSes which power the internet.
As a pretext, I agree with the benefits of openness and software freedom. The point of my response is to address where users who are not tech-geeks would prefer a closed solution.
I thought we owned all own phones like we do computers? Why can't we run our own software? Or develop software for them?We can't run our own software because it hasn't been tested. If loading and executing applications on phones was trivial, you'd see text-message exploits that load ad-software onto your phone and then send copies of the exploited message to your entire contact list. I am speculating here, but the base Operating Systems running your phones are tested in their plain vanilla environments which would be fairly easy to hack with 3rd party development... and that is why you can't do it.
Can you imagine living in a world where you could not develop programs for your own computer?Could you imagine living in a world where you could not manufacture a wrench or a hammer? Yes, you could. Because like wrenches and hammers, computers are tools for the majority of the population. Who cares how they are made, as long as they do the job?
As a software engineer, it is bad to be locked out from doing development. However, that is why organizations like FSF are competing with MSFT and Apple.
Seriously port firefox to andriod only. If enough developers switch to a platform that allows them to compete and run their own software the users will follow. I know many here hate Java but why can't we live in a world that is free?I am not sure of details of Android, but I do know that it is from Google and that Google's applications are generally not "Open". They are "free" because they are ad-supported, which appeases the majority of the population, but the are not "free" as defined by all 4 rules of the FSF. I would rather see hardware that is truly "Open" be the basis for this development -- so that I can buy the raw components and fork the design for my own needs.
As far as locking onto any single platform... are you aware that the IBM-PC and a certain brand of OS software became successful because they supported a wide range of hardware platforms?
And as far as Java, I like Java. I've never really heard claims that people don't like it, so maybe you could enlighten me with a response.
Would you rather own a locked down phone or one where all the free apps on the internet run on? I would pick the latter.I disagree with their pricing scheme for internet access. I would actually prefer a mobile device that is NETWORK AGNOSTIC before I even start talking about which Applications I can and cannot run (as an aside, I have a simple Verizon cell phone that does not have Bluetooth or WiFi... so Network Agnostic phones may actually be more ubiquitous than I know).
And for now, the only application that I need my phone to perform is "voice communication", and it does it satisfactorily. A bonus application would be "not dying after 20 minutes of talking", but that is standard for cheap 20 month old mobile batteries of any kind.
Consumers run WIndows over Linux and MacOSX because its where the apps are at. The phone companies are going to create the ultimate competitor if they are not careful and dictate to the rest of us what to use.Is your argument targeted at consumers or developers? Are you considering the benefits to vendors or users? Hell... if it were easy, the F/OSS development community would deploy a nationwide WiMax network and offer a line of cellular products with all the bells and whistles for $0.00 a month with "Donate to support the F/OSS Communications Network" links (kinda like Wikipedia). Unfortunately, it costs lots of money to do this, and so the phone companies get to keep their duopoly... and they get to protect their cheap OS's by not letting you run your software on them, and they get to keep their users for at least the next two years because we are locked in with contracts.
Are you suggesting burning the land and boiling the sea are also in MSFTs plans?
When geeks design a Style Guide, it looks like this. Simple, elegant, uncluttered.
When the weenies in Marketing design a Style Guide, the audience ends up trying to punch a psychedelic virtual monkey. Please don't suggest anything that would put marketing personnel in a position to produce anything that will guide me, thankyouverymuch.
I have no mod points, but Derek gave the best answers to the questions of the GP.
Know the author Ed Tufte.
Know what HCI stands for.
Know your audience and let them evaluate Throwaway Prototypes.
If you are looking for a book to teach you UI design, you are misguided. If you are looking for a Creative Commons and/or Open approach to UI design, register a domain called "Principles of UI Design" and launch a Wiki on it, then license it with the license you desire (but I would recommend CC0).
If all goes well, this thread will serve as a good starting point for getting ideas/content to populate your new Wiki with.
Please do not compare a computer crash to a car crash or a drug that has dangerous side-effects. There are obvious reasons why cars and drugs are recalled and your commercial operating system isn't.
Try Ubuntu.
Here is a quote from near the top of the Exxon Global Warming propaganda page:
On June 13, USA Today declared, "The debate's over: Globe is Warming." In support of its claim, the newspaper cited the positions of some left-leaning religious groups, some corporations who will reap a financial windfall from a switch to alternative fuel sources, and some politicians.I am not going to bother "fact checking", but rather assume the date, the source, and the headline are factual. The rest of the post on the Exxon page is biased nonsense that conveniently leaves out all salient details about who the newspaper is citing. Were the left-leaning religious groups the Catholics? The Klu Klux Klan? Perhaps Greenpeace? Were the alternative energy corporations Exxon-Mobil? SolarTech? General Electric?
It seems to me that the propaganda page which this thread's flamewar is based around is simple garbage and nobody anywhere has added anything meaningful to credit or discredit the global warming debate (except the guy who pointed out the the source in question is an Exxon funded page).
Thus, I because of the lack on information and the absence of facts on the source page, I declare that it is nothing but somebody's uneducated propaganda and you should ignore its opinions.
Just have website that have bad content set the "evil bit".
Or another suggestion, consider what is actually trying to be accomplished by regulating the contents of the internet and legislate based on that. If they want to censor it, it is a clear violation of the First Amendment, and they can go fuck themselves. If they would rather control the internet to limit what the children have access to for educational purposes, I would suggest creating an educational internet White List and blocking everything else. If they published there white list and gave citizens some kind of control over what is added/removed, I would say it is a reasonable measure to control what children can see. Even this is foolish though, because of content on sites like YouTube and Wikipedia that will obviously be deemed "explicit" by some parents.
In any case, I would urge Utah to stop being foolish and be better parents instead of depending on the government to parent for them.
to eliminate scarcity.
Your long-winded version is correct, but mine makes a better slogan. And I am not sure what "infinite wealth" is.
My aim for the ultimate economy would be where automated machines do all the jobs that humans don't want to do, so that we are freed up to do the ones we enjoy. The way it is now, I think there are a ton of people working jobs that they don't enjoy simply to "earn a living". It would be better for those people to go back to school and further their education. Also, a critical point would include choosing our own hours based on our own needs and the needs of our peers. If scarcity of goods and services really was available, then there wouldn't be any more need to earn a paycheck anyway because the price of everything would approach $0, making employment effectively optional (but there is the trouble of that pesky "time" resource, so people would have to do something to avoid from going crazy).
Awesome post. Well put. I couldn't have stated it better myself.
Digital data is to the point where it "can be thought of as free and used like it". I agree with bands giving music away and making money on merch and shows.
I believe writers should give away their words, and then accept post-transaction donations from customers who enjoyed them. I am a little disappointed, in fact, that the article does not link to a Free version of the book in question... a Wired article of "a significant portion of it" is not the same.
I donated. I am perfectly happy with Larry using the money for fund his Change Congress initiative. I agree with the goals of the movement that aim to end abusive pork-fat career politicians. If he channels energy and research into exposing the cretins from the pure souls, I would feel like my donation was money well spent. If he can convince the major political parties not to endorse bad politicians in the first place, that would be even better.
Best yet, if Change Congress could launch a political party to compete with real values against big government "give our money to the poor" Democrats and small government "give our money to the rich" Republicans... then I would be over-joyed.
As it is, neither party really has the right combination of values and opinions to truly suit the needs of the average middle-class American who doesn't have enough saved up for retirement and is a driven everyday to make their living expenses. This majority of the country doesn't need a Republican or a Democrat... they need something better than both.
I mean this in a respectful tone that is endeared to science and the pursuit of knowledge, but fuck the method. Not that is hasn't been used to unearth some might useful information that has benefited the human race, but there is better science than the scientific method and it is hard for students to understand the process of discovery when repeated trial and error is often boring.
And the goals of science are fairly well understood in this day and age as well. NASA wants to get to Mars by the time today's five year olds are in industry. Other groups want to understand how the brain-mind work. Tons of groups want to replace oil as the main source of energy in the world. And I think they are still chasing a cure for Cancer and HIV/AIDS. These aren't "Gee whiz, let's design an experiment and test it" problems. These are highly theoretical and complex problems that require a HUGE amount of understanding to tackle. And the fact is that testing these things in realistic environments is actually pretty challenging, and simulations or substitutions are required. An it still might be (a) hypothesize, (b) design, (c) experiment, (d) analyze, (e) conclude... but on a much larger scale where (b) design takes up 95% of the cycle. And really, the high school experiments never seemed to capture that for me.
I rolled my eyes, and then went to look it up on Wiki....
One rough and oversimplified explanation is that a priori knowledge is independent of experience, while a posteriori knowledge is dependent on experience. In other words, statements that are a priori true are tautologies.Yeah, I agree that packaging matters. So much so, in fact, that knockoff brands tend to use packing similar to the brand they are imitating. I would say a real renegade would buy his breakfast in the bag instead of the box that the overpriced General Mills or Post stuff comes in. That said, I like Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios because of its taste and it usually has a more reasonable price than most other stuff (about $0.25 per bowl of cereal). And everytime I buy knockoff brand Cheerios, I am disappointed on taste.
And if you can find the marketing pro that realized you can dress up $0.20 of ground coffee beans and a $0.02 cardboard or Styrofoam cup and charge $2.00 for it, let me know. And that's part of the problem... consumers don't think of the raw materials that are used to make the products they buy. There are tons of things where markups make doing-it-yourself a better option. Take software for instance, it costs $0 to copy and Microsoft charges $800 for Windows Vista Ultimate without batting an eye.
You aren't alone... there are LOTS of people who would prefer a world without advertising. Sirius and XM Satellite Radio made an entire business around the idea that you would pay more to listen to music without advertising. They've got 14 or 15 Million customers paying $13 a month. And that's only a small percentage of the number of people who find value in an adless world.
Tivo and other Digital Recording devices adopt a similar concept for TV (except for during the Super Bowl, when ads ARE the main attraction).
As far as your own abilities to "research different products that are out there", how much of your research depends on passive advertising that you get because you don't even realize? Sure, products like the iPhone that come from proven technology companies get their name in the news so the ads aren't even needed... but if you were in the market for a device that did what the iPhone does, there are other options out there and it isn't easy to conduct the research because it is a complex, fluid, dynamic, ever-changing market.
The purchases that I tend to "research" aren't even advertised, though. They are specialty items that have informed customers. I got a bike last year (from Trek) and a HD camcorder two years ago (from Sony). Both cost over $1,000 and were "big" purchases for me. Both I am very happy with. Neither of them have I really seen advertised for at all.
You are the marketing department... it is your job to flush money down the toilet. The best ads are word-of-mouth from trusted friends, anyway. A billboard (either the stationary kind or the kind on the back of a truck), newspaper/magazine spread, TV/Radio commercial, or internet ad can ONLY hope not to annoy me enough to decide never to buy the product.
The problem with the whole advertising system though is that it comes from a completely biased source, and I would rather get an opinion from an unbiased source (i.e. a friend). Find a way to not be biased towards the products you are selling, and we can talk.
when in doubt, Wikipedia!
Linus Torvalds originally developed the Linux kernel as a hobby OS for the Intel 80386 CPU, incorporating elements from MINIX, although with entirely new code.[12] Initially Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server where the kernel was first hosted for downloading, named Torvalds' directory linux.Of course, nothing on Wikipedia should be taken as fact unless it can be backed up with supporting references, but that's how it goes.
No, your analogy was good. I was being pedantic, and trying to improve on it a little bit.
I see your point, but I think there is a difference between inventing the printing press and preserving freedom and innovation through shared software. I would rather compare RMS to the guy who broke the stonemasons iron-grip on the masonry profession, if such a guy existed. I would also submit that RMS's victories only currently encompass 10% of there potential, seeing as how proprietary methods are still the dominant market force by even the lesser biased sources.
Yeah, the printing press was good, but imagine a world where masonry had not been a closely guarded secret. Take a look at churches and cathedrals built in Europe hundreds of years ago, and imagine having the blueprints for that stuff during the age of colonization. That beauty is what RMS is preserving 200 years into the future. When we start to colonized different planets, their networks will be running apache webservers and we'll be able to communication with them through the Intergalacticnet.
The printing press let artisans churn out massive amounts of printed materials, which helped the masses to get information, and I would compare Gutenberg to the guys who invented the internet. RMS is in a class of his own, because nobody dared to go against the stone masons and preserve the freedom of important information during that era.
In a row?
Yes, but *this* attention monger has political influence with his lies and exaggeration. If he didn't have any ears in Congress listening to him, we could safely ignore his idiocy.
There is also any underlaying problem with a Criminal Justice system that would allow the bile that Thompson spews to be heard by the courts (and opportunities for reforms in the courts is always newsworthy). If he acted rationally and backed his opinions up with quantitative studies that violence in video games is bad... then fine. However, he uses convenience statistics and bases his cases around his stupid theory that virtual violence leads to real violence.
Now, that said it may ( or may not ) be a civil offense, and even may become a criminal offense if the IP industry gets it way, but its not by definition theft nor will it ever be.
This post helped me think of a new analogy. Yay, analogies!
Copyright law is like a marriage. Some marriages (not many) are open, and each partner can exchange their data however they would like. This would be GPL, BSD, and Creative Commons (with varying sub-analogies that I would rather not go into). Most marriages are closed. While in a closed marriage, one partner can decide they want something on the side. That's infringement. It violates the (marriage) right of their spouse. And the solutions are (a) discuss it like rationale human beings and make it work, or (b) go to court and get divorced.
So, until you want the industries who control the content that was created by artists who still live in the "closed marriage" mindset to bring you to court.... don't "infringe" on their women.
Not in a long time, but Civ II used to be an EXCELLENT way to kill a weekend a decade ago. I wish I could get a copy of exactly the same game that will run on my Ubuntu laptop, and play again. I know there FreeCiv, but it isn't the same. And Duke Nukem 3D, I wish they would publish that again.
(note: I don't pay for software, I don't pirate software, and I recall buying copies and then losing the discs for Windows versions of those games 10 years ago).