Unskilled Users (not necessarily new!) like the new Padded Rails simplicity. I have advised a couple of such users now and they really do like things being as "Safari is the internet". They don't know what a web page address is. They just type words into the search bar until it (hopefully!) shows up.
So if companies would quit playing Proprietary Lockdown games, we really do need "Basic / Advanced" versions of a UI at the click of a button.
"Frankly, I think the base topic here, the argument for new languages over improvements to existing languages, is to make everyone equally -incompetent-."
Oh Cool. Harrison Bergeron's world has hit programming.
Just when you thought you knew how to program, let's make you learn Sapphire on MonoRail.
((Hey Slashdot, remember you were so proud of your new changes? Can you please have your "Experts" check the summaries now?))
Back on topic. Yes, this is huge (if it goes through, floating "trial balloons" is the new hotness.)
"Microsoft can remotely kill your apps and all your content?" What kind of grab is that?
This stuff is accelerating. "There there user, here's a lollipop. You didn't want your data anyway, because we don't like that you're writing something that makes us look bad. Look! It's a Blog Post! We'll kill your browser! No Internet for you!"
"The real cost of a book comes from people -- the author, editors, proof readers, cover artists, marketers, agents, researchers, people doing layouts, etc."
Good effort, but I feel we have an "Emperor's New Clothes" effect going on here.
Author: By definition the indispensible one.
Proof Readers: I'll skip that one, nothing that a spell check can't fix, and if the Author missed a "plot hole"... issue a "patch!" Editors: Cut this down by half. Take care of the Big Picture stuff and then do a major revision by the author for the Second Printing.
Cover Artists: Isn't there tons of Indie Artists out there on the web? Layouts: What layouts? It's text on a e-Reader. Let people fiddle with the fonts and stuff. It's a Feature not a Bug!
As for Marketing and Agenting, if we just fix the copyright law instead, people could form their own markets instead.
1. Who are you "PerlJedi (2406408) who works for Slashdot" and what is your expertise since you are a brand new hire?
2. I am noticing the quotes on "Expert". Either the people really will be experts, or else they'll be Astroturfing "Experts" in quotes. That is, unless your grammar just sux and you put gratuitous quotes which then accidentally totally flipped your meaning.
3. I bet no one cross-referenced which of these... "Experts" are currently also Slashdot users - I bet new ones in that ominous 2400000 range. As users they get Mod points? Who will be watching what they do with those?
4. Companies don't care about "being made a fool of" with the top 25% if the Astroturfing raises sales with the newer 75% userbase. Sure, some companies will provide a legit expert, but we're watching like a hawk. Slashdot has seen our comments on editorial quality. We've made fools of you for years. Not like it really helped. (Probably some, far from enough.)
Bonus: Since y'all want to make changes, get a grip and allow editing of posts. Do like other forums do and tag it "this post was modified...". Then we won't get 7 bad entries harping on spelling that totally derails the conversation. Put a time limit on it like 72 hours.
I'll go on a limb based on my own current experience.
I think just about all companies bigger than say seven people need two people split half IT and half "line functions".
Then when everything is humming, they can "just work". But when a cascade situation comes up, you do those Tier Levels. Level 1 does all the End User fallout. (Every computer needs to get that new utility installed, then all the printers quit working because of a 2 minute power outage (winter is coming), User 1 wants to know where their file is that they worked on for 3 hours. Oh look, it's in a temporary folder because it came straight from an email. etc.)
Then Tier 2 deals with all the system configs, there could be a software change coming, etc. That second pair of hands seems to be more than the sum of the hands in IT when managers want something fixed. I've done the Level 1 Helpdesk for a while now, with the second man more behind the scenes.
I'm starting to become annoyed at Firefox too, but I really like to "pick and pick well" on the tools I use. I just tried Opera now, and my gmail buttons got all bunched up. Yes, a couple clicks made them unbunch later, but still. On a small webpage I am working on, for a while it was perfect in FF and it broke in Opera. Just little things, hard to remember. So I keep going back to Firefox.
Opera's default search seems to be Bing - Microsoft. So what do we think about that?
I did my part to discourage the "chasing after $2" mentality.
Back in my early days as a temp, I got handed a garbage adding machine. "I know, temps aren't worth anything", but I disagree there, all employees should have the best cost-effective resources to be able to get real work done.
Rather that waste several minutes every hour all week coddling the nearly-broken adding machine, I decided to make a point. I brought in one. It worked. It was also an electro-mechanical brown beast from the early 80's (I think!) that weighed some twelve pounds. I proceeded to get back to my work.
About a week later a sensible adding machine duly appeared on my desk and the junky one vanished.
"If we warn the past about an event like 9/11, and they actually DO something about it, what happens then? Would the American government spin it even further out of proportion, claiming the attacks would have used nukes and biological weapons? There's no way of knowing for certain.
We know what we have: A world that is worse off than before, yes, but not on the brink of having the planet destroyed. With the possibility that we could make things a lot worse and start World War III, is is really sensible to send messages back in time?"
I'm not so sure it's diminishing returns. Let me try a counter argument from some new academic fields.
What Microsoft taught us (which indirectly led to the Gates Borg icon) is that a single locked in vendor of a type of service will remain the front runner for a very long time. Yes I was young, but I was still laughing at Windows as late as 3.11 as inferior to the Mac OS, which would have been about 1994. But by 1998 for the first repairs to daily Blue Screens and then 2001 for Windows XP (with subsequent service packs) Microsoft sealed the Meta-Game of computing as we know it for... sorta forever.
Now in the Social realm, AOL almost had it, MySpace was interesting for a couple of years, but Facebook seems to have landed the Big Gun connections to really scare the Social industry. They're on track to being the Microsoft of Social.
So wrapping up, it's race between Bubble effect and Meta-Game leading lock down that will last for decades.
Okay, let's thrash out the realm of Digital Products a bit more.
I also agree that the *costs* don't change, it's the *revenue* side that's the problem.
Producing digital products, including both music&movies and software, sinks all 100% of the costs up front. Then the producer is stuck trying to recover those costs. Previously, every issued copy was a sale, let's say 10% slippage from favors to friends, etc. So rephrasing the line above, "a digital product comes closer to breaking even and then making a profit the more people use it."
Now we get to you and your 200. Your mistake above was that we start with you at the beginning of your purchase cycle. You know about my game, you have 200 to spend... and you decide that my game is not worth spending it on to you. However, you still want to play it. (Since it's the "zero" that does strange things to lots of equation, let's say it's "worth a penny" that you dig up off the floor of your car.) You're now essentially walking up to me with the following theoretical conversation:
"Hi. I want to play your game. How much?" "Hi. My price is $20." "Hmm. Nah, I don't want to pay that." "Okay. Have a nice day." "No, I'm going to play it anyway. I copied my friend's CD." "So when do I get my $20?" "I dunno, I don't care. I'll tell a couple buddies, maybe they will buy a copy. I'm going to go play now, bye."
I'm pretty sure every downloader doesn't really think they have fully satisfied the requirements for their digital item. It's a gut level reaction to these upfront cost vs duplication cost changing equations. Admit it, there's a bit of "rebellious excitement" going on. Paying is "boring". Harnessing technology to copy it for free is "fun". So since we're still in thought experiment land, I'll send Security over to you and demand that you either pay me my $20 or delete "your" copy of the game.
Accounting and Game Theory have half solved this puzzle 40 years ago. It's a deliberate psychological refusal to allocate the Sunk Costs to make the digital item. You made your copy, so you purposely stop caring where my revenue comes from. It's not your right to make me "hope that if enough people copy the game to make it go viral, someone eventually will actually pay the real price for it". That *is* the modern emerging strategy, but you shouldn't be forcing me to delay my revenue at your whim.
This is the rough internal dialogue occurring in the minds of each and every downloader. "I've ripped my copy, I'm done. Your rent is not my problem". The last missing part is for you to provide me with something of *guaranteed* equal value to my purchase price, like a signature on a petition backed by someone who says "for every signature on this petition I'll grant the producer his purchase price in your name as a creative subsidy". By not providing that alternate value, THAT is the unstated implicit lost value caused by digital copying.
This is essentially the last word on the copyright dilemma at this time. It will occur with every digital item, times every downloader, forever until we get Non-Purchase methods of giving value back to the producers.
He says that computer programs provide a *type* of understanding that was not previously possible because it would take an entire man's life to do the calculations.
A key idea in New Kind of Science is (paraphrased) "Computational Complexity". For special initial settings in the environment, if you keep iterating results *on top of each other* you get patterns of complexity far beyond the initial starting block. For the most obvious example, a "fairly small genome" produces billions of unique people because each day's experience layers on yesterday.
Another key idea is that this resulting complexity can't be shortcutted - there's no single equation (yet!?) that just spits out the pattern, not universally. So the only way to get that output is to do the crunching.
So it does have all kinds of uses - evolution being also among the obvious - you don't get elephants without first having amoebas.
There's two time periods: Pre 1995 and 1995-2012 (to go all Mayan about it.)
Pre 1995 chess was about Localism and learning to be a medium fish in small ponds where everyone had the informants and ECO and 12 books, but you could get snookered by a good over the board response you just never saw coming.
1995-2012 chess is about information research, computer pre-checking your repetoire. Sure, it will hasten the decline of chess but come on, it's been in the top 5 durable games ever. That information analysis is a very useful skill, as is managing trees of decision logic.
Actually, the Force of Ad Hominem is strong with those types too. "I know you know I know you know" you are lying, but they're fast at an "Animalistic" response and it works in Media formats. "You couldn't defend the personal attack, therefore your credibility is down, therefore I must be right."
It's the whole Jocks vs Nerds thing from high school.
Slashdot Mirror
We're back to this discussion again.
Unskilled Users (not necessarily new!) like the new Padded Rails simplicity. I have advised a couple of such users now and they really do like things being as "Safari is the internet". They don't know what a web page address is. They just type words into the search bar until it (hopefully!) shows up.
So if companies would quit playing Proprietary Lockdown games, we really do need "Basic / Advanced" versions of a UI at the click of a button.
"Frankly, I think the base topic here, the argument for new languages over improvements to existing languages, is to make everyone equally -incompetent-."
Oh Cool. Harrison Bergeron's world has hit programming.
Just when you thought you knew how to program, let's make you learn Sapphire on MonoRail.
((Hey Slashdot, remember you were so proud of your new changes? Can you please have your "Experts" check the summaries now?))
Back on topic. Yes, this is huge (if it goes through, floating "trial balloons" is the new hotness.)
"Microsoft can remotely kill your apps and all your content?" What kind of grab is that?
This stuff is accelerating. "There there user, here's a lollipop. You didn't want your data anyway, because we don't like that you're writing something that makes us look bad. Look! It's a Blog Post! We'll kill your browser! No Internet for you!"
I saw the story about Sponsored stuff, but the "loudness" shocked me a little.
At least you can Ad-Block the logos. (... for now!)
I'm kinda dreading the eventual push to have every story Sponsored though.
"The real cost of a book comes from people -- the author, editors, proof readers, cover artists, marketers, agents, researchers, people doing layouts, etc."
Good effort, but I feel we have an "Emperor's New Clothes" effect going on here.
Author: By definition the indispensible one.
Proof Readers: I'll skip that one, nothing that a spell check can't fix, and if the Author missed a "plot hole" ... issue a "patch!"
Editors: Cut this down by half. Take care of the Big Picture stuff and then do a major revision by the author for the Second Printing.
Cover Artists: Isn't there tons of Indie Artists out there on the web?
Layouts: What layouts? It's text on a e-Reader. Let people fiddle with the fonts and stuff. It's a Feature not a Bug!
As for Marketing and Agenting, if we just fix the copyright law instead, people could form their own markets instead.
How was Slashdot Lost?
They needs to way intain PR, who klilled the storeis becauys theiy coludsnt frhgit back!
It was on the news this morning, a community in awe, at how bad a change was contemplated!
No Babbies were harmed in this post.
Okay, time to cash in some of my karma.
1. Who are you "PerlJedi (2406408) who works for Slashdot" and what is your expertise since you are a brand new hire?
2. I am noticing the quotes on "Expert". Either the people really will be experts, or else they'll be Astroturfing "Experts" in quotes. That is, unless your grammar just sux and you put gratuitous quotes which then accidentally totally flipped your meaning.
3. I bet no one cross-referenced which of these ... "Experts" are currently also Slashdot users - I bet new ones in that ominous 2400000 range. As users they get Mod points? Who will be watching what they do with those?
4. Companies don't care about "being made a fool of" with the top 25% if the Astroturfing raises sales with the newer 75% userbase. Sure, some companies will provide a legit expert, but we're watching like a hawk. Slashdot has seen our comments on editorial quality. We've made fools of you for years. Not like it really helped. (Probably some, far from enough.)
Bonus: Since y'all want to make changes, get a grip and allow editing of posts. Do like other forums do and tag it "this post was modified ...". Then we won't get 7 bad entries harping on spelling that totally derails the conversation. Put a time limit on it like 72 hours.
Nope. Not legally that I know of. But that's the problem of content today, right?
Tell ya what - anyone else who posts a legal example non-US service I'll add it to my notes. Otherwise that was all I could do.
That's actually a complicated problem because different groups "argue" over the inefficiency of diversity, often called incompatibility.
Echoing a poster above, Jan 12? Really? 40 days (ish) is good enough for a fix?
That's just corporate laziness.
I'll go on a limb based on my own current experience.
I think just about all companies bigger than say seven people need two people split half IT and half "line functions".
Then when everything is humming, they can "just work". But when a cascade situation comes up, you do those Tier Levels. Level 1 does all the End User fallout. (Every computer needs to get that new utility installed, then all the printers quit working because of a 2 minute power outage (winter is coming), User 1 wants to know where their file is that they worked on for 3 hours. Oh look, it's in a temporary folder because it came straight from an email. etc.)
Then Tier 2 deals with all the system configs, there could be a software change coming, etc. That second pair of hands seems to be more than the sum of the hands in IT when managers want something fixed. I've done the Level 1 Helpdesk for a while now, with the second man more behind the scenes.
I'm starting to become annoyed at Firefox too, but I really like to "pick and pick well" on the tools I use. I just tried Opera now, and my gmail buttons got all bunched up. Yes, a couple clicks made them unbunch later, but still. On a small webpage I am working on, for a while it was perfect in FF and it broke in Opera. Just little things, hard to remember. So I keep going back to Firefox.
Opera's default search seems to be Bing - Microsoft. So what do we think about that?
I did my part to discourage the "chasing after $2" mentality.
Back in my early days as a temp, I got handed a garbage adding machine. "I know, temps aren't worth anything", but I disagree there, all employees should have the best cost-effective resources to be able to get real work done.
Rather that waste several minutes every hour all week coddling the nearly-broken adding machine, I decided to make a point. I brought in one. It worked. It was also an electro-mechanical brown beast from the early 80's (I think!) that weighed some twelve pounds. I proceeded to get back to my work.
About a week later a sensible adding machine duly appeared on my desk and the junky one vanished.
"If we warn the past about an event like 9/11, and they actually DO something about it, what happens then? Would the American government spin it even further out of proportion, claiming the attacks would have used nukes and biological weapons? There's no way of knowing for certain.
We know what we have: A world that is worse off than before, yes, but not on the brink of having the planet destroyed. With the possibility that we could make things a lot worse and start World War III, is is really sensible to send messages back in time?"
Family Guy did that exact plot.
Here is the Hulu Link. Your Country May Vary.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/299685/family-guy-back-to-the-pilot#s-p1-so-i0
bleh sorry I didn't proofread, I scrambled my point
"to avoid and not to fall into the pitfalls".
On the other hand, without *any* help from CGI, you have to be really good not to avoid all the pitfalls that the old school techniques fell into.
I think a good approach is a blend, use sets and that old tech just to get the natural basics etc, then CGI on top of it.
I'm not so sure it's diminishing returns. Let me try a counter argument from some new academic fields.
What Microsoft taught us (which indirectly led to the Gates Borg icon) is that a single locked in vendor of a type of service will remain the front runner for a very long time. Yes I was young, but I was still laughing at Windows as late as 3.11 as inferior to the Mac OS, which would have been about 1994. But by 1998 for the first repairs to daily Blue Screens and then 2001 for Windows XP (with subsequent service packs) Microsoft sealed the Meta-Game of computing as we know it for ... sorta forever.
Now in the Social realm, AOL almost had it, MySpace was interesting for a couple of years, but Facebook seems to have landed the Big Gun connections to really scare the Social industry. They're on track to being the Microsoft of Social.
So wrapping up, it's race between Bubble effect and Meta-Game leading lock down that will last for decades.
Come on gang, this is pretty cool.
To re-adapt the tech that picks up Nigerian Scams and send it to pick up HIV strains is pretty neat. I sure as **** didn't see that app.
Okay, let's thrash out the realm of Digital Products a bit more.
I also agree that the *costs* don't change, it's the *revenue* side that's the problem.
Producing digital products, including both music&movies and software, sinks all 100% of the costs up front. Then the producer is stuck trying to recover those costs. Previously, every issued copy was a sale, let's say 10% slippage from favors to friends, etc. So rephrasing the line above, "a digital product comes closer to breaking even and then making a profit the more people use it."
Now we get to you and your 200. Your mistake above was that we start with you at the beginning of your purchase cycle. You know about my game, you have 200 to spend... and you decide that my game is not worth spending it on to you. However, you still want to play it. (Since it's the "zero" that does strange things to lots of equation, let's say it's "worth a penny" that you dig up off the floor of your car.) You're now essentially walking up to me with the following theoretical conversation:
"Hi. I want to play your game. How much?"
"Hi. My price is $20."
"Hmm. Nah, I don't want to pay that."
"Okay. Have a nice day."
"No, I'm going to play it anyway. I copied my friend's CD."
"So when do I get my $20?"
"I dunno, I don't care. I'll tell a couple buddies, maybe they will buy a copy. I'm going to go play now, bye."
I'm pretty sure every downloader doesn't really think they have fully satisfied the requirements for their digital item. It's a gut level reaction to these upfront cost vs duplication cost changing equations. Admit it, there's a bit of "rebellious excitement" going on. Paying is "boring". Harnessing technology to copy it for free is "fun". So since we're still in thought experiment land, I'll send Security over to you and demand that you either pay me my $20 or delete "your" copy of the game.
Accounting and Game Theory have half solved this puzzle 40 years ago. It's a deliberate psychological refusal to allocate the Sunk Costs to make the digital item. You made your copy, so you purposely stop caring where my revenue comes from. It's not your right to make me "hope that if enough people copy the game to make it go viral, someone eventually will actually pay the real price for it". That *is* the modern emerging strategy, but you shouldn't be forcing me to delay my revenue at your whim.
This is the rough internal dialogue occurring in the minds of each and every downloader. "I've ripped my copy, I'm done. Your rent is not my problem". The last missing part is for you to provide me with something of *guaranteed* equal value to my purchase price, like a signature on a petition backed by someone who says "for every signature on this petition I'll grant the producer his purchase price in your name as a creative subsidy". By not providing that alternate value, THAT is the unstated implicit lost value caused by digital copying.
This is essentially the last word on the copyright dilemma at this time. It will occur with every digital item, times every downloader, forever until we get Non-Purchase methods of giving value back to the producers.
Previous topics included that the abilities gained were worth far more than $50,000.
So was this a fancy Job Application?
I FP'ed my answer before you posted your question! : )
See "Nice Concept, Needs Support".
I saw the DMCA thing too, and I thought like you did, then I changed my mind.
Now that my FP is in, I am going to look for the ACTA treaty, if I can find it on the site.
It is a nice concept, linking the various laws etc that we know bits about.
However it needs more countries.
Based on Slashdot entries, France and Australia are notable missing entries.
He says that computer programs provide a *type* of understanding that was not previously possible because it would take an entire man's life to do the calculations.
A key idea in New Kind of Science is (paraphrased) "Computational Complexity". For special initial settings in the environment, if you keep iterating results *on top of each other* you get patterns of complexity far beyond the initial starting block. For the most obvious example, a "fairly small genome" produces billions of unique people because each day's experience layers on yesterday.
Another key idea is that this resulting complexity can't be shortcutted - there's no single equation (yet!?) that just spits out the pattern, not universally. So the only way to get that output is to do the crunching.
So it does have all kinds of uses - evolution being also among the obvious - you don't get elephants without first having amoebas.
I disagree here about Chess.
There's two time periods: Pre 1995 and 1995-2012 (to go all Mayan about it.)
Pre 1995 chess was about Localism and learning to be a medium fish in small ponds where everyone had the informants and ECO and 12 books, but you could get snookered by a good over the board response you just never saw coming.
1995-2012 chess is about information research, computer pre-checking your repetoire. Sure, it will hasten the decline of chess but come on, it's been in the top 5 durable games ever. That information analysis is a very useful skill, as is managing trees of decision logic.
Actually, the Force of Ad Hominem is strong with those types too. "I know you know I know you know" you are lying, but they're fast at an "Animalistic" response and it works in Media formats. "You couldn't defend the personal attack, therefore your credibility is down, therefore I must be right."
It's the whole Jocks vs Nerds thing from high school.
Oh neat.
Two of the most privacy-destroying forces joined together!