If you are really serious about taking a stand on this bill, then the most impact will achieved by going to the source of it, not Congress... unless you have more to offer Congress' incumbents and the nation's economy than the industry source does.
They are a very important constituent.
If a large number of consumers stopped purchasing a certain entertainment company's products for one day, would it have a noticeable impact on their revenues? How about a week? A month?
The industry claims it's losing business to pirates. While it's probably true to some extent, it is speculative and nearly impossible to measure accurately. How many of the consumers of pirated content were never consumers of paid content to begin with?
The products this industry sells are not life necessities.
In summary, a branded entertainment "hunger strike" by actual existing, paid customers. This would cause real loss.
And, if it's a noticeable loss, it would send a very strong message.
Today's 0.5% is tomorrows 95.5%. It just takes time.
It is the so-called power users who lead the way for everyone else.
Doing away with a traditional boolean operator for the sake of marketing (of a copycat "social network" website no less) is not the sign of a company with a clear, intelligent vision.
Actually, usage of the + operator has been in steady decline for years. With Altavista you had to use + to require a word. When I started at Google, many many more queries had tons of pluses.
Google's demographic was much more tech-savvy in the early years, but as we've struck partnerships with companies like AOL, the population of people searching on Google has become broader. I don't believe that 95.5% of users will be searching with + or double-quotes any time soon. But for the power users like people on HN, they now have an extra option that allows better slicing/dicing of search results.
I don't think there is any motivation for people at large to become more "tech-savvy". It's rather the case of machines becoming more human-savvy.. and I don't really see anything wrong with that.
Machines becoming more human-savvy is a slow and difficult process.
And people are generally impatient. They want things to work. Sooner rather than later. They want immediate results.
Whereas if someone has the interest, I can teach them a few tricks and make them incrementally more "tech-savvy" in a few minutes. They will see the results immediately.
The more "technical" life becomes, the more it stands to reason that more people will have an interest in becoming at least a little more "tech-savvy".
I definitely agree with you that it's probably faster to teach a single individual with a mild interest in becoming more techie than, for example, change an industry standard for search engines. But I'm talking about entire populations of humans and machines.
Changing an entire population of computer software/hardware is a far easier and faster process than changing the entire population of humans. We're much more stubborn creatures than we'd like to believe, plus we also have a longer lifespan thus making any dramatic cultural changes (techie or otherwise) a more or less generational thing. On the other hand, just look at how fast something like cell phones or the internet is changing on what now seems like a monthly basis.
People will always do the same things they've always enjoyed doing: eat at restaurants, socialize with friends, play games, listen to music... but in what way technology is involved with those activities will only be affected by how fast the technology can change to become more human-friendly, not the other way around.
But here has Google has really made anything more human-friendly? They've simply removed a standard boolean operator in database search syntaxes because they noticed people were not using it (did people even know it existed?), or using it incorrectly. Does this make search more human-friendly somehow?
It certainly makes easy-to-type, using known standard operators, boolean searches more troublesome.
And the reason they have removed this operator?
Marketing. For something having nothing to do with search.
Oh I wasn't really commenting on Google's decision and whether it was right or wrong. Like you said before: "Time will tell". I was just offering an alternate view to your expressed optimism that Google's demographic (aka everybody) is becoming more tech savvy.
So if I compile a busybox-like crunched binary with a variety of "do one thing well" UNIX utilities, including sh itself, and then I write a shell function that only calls this single binary it its various incantations and uses pipes and temporary files residing on tmpfs or mfs (instead of reading entire files into memory the way perl does), and this binary used like this can do all that Perl can do, why should I use Perl?
So, if I can build a wagon with a lawnmower engine from parts, and it is able to putter down the street (barely) faster than I can walk, why should I use a car?
That's my question.
I'm a sysadmin. I have been for years. My coworker calls me "the encyclopaedia of Linux", because I know all the command line tools, their functions and features, and how to tie them together. I write one-liners that are 5 lines long. And I like it. I love the Unix philosophy and design and tools.
But, that doesn't make it a perfect fit for anything. Shell scripts are very limited and painful for a lot of things. When I'm writing something I expect to be 50 lines or less, shell scripts and *nix utilities will usually (not always, but usually) get the job done (especially if you include sed/awk in there). For anything more than that, I break out Perl and I never regret it.
Complicated logic, non-trivial data structures, multiple chains of processing, these are things that just don't do well with shell scripts and tools. It's also a lot cleaner and simpler using a real data structure, instead of forcing everything into pipes and temporary files.
Note: Your comment of "instead of reading entire files into memory the way perl does" shows your ignorance. Perl is an immensely flexible tool, and it gives you the ability to process files line-by-line, stream-style, or by reading the entire file into memory. Both methods are trivial, and having the choice means you can use whichever method is appropriate for the task at hand (your comment suggests that reading the whole file is somehow "wrong", but for many tasks it's a faster and cleaner method).
The hard part I guess is learning to do things with the shell and UNIX utilities instead of Perl. And simplifying what you do and how you do it.
If you choose to do complex things and do them in complex ways, or you can only see complex solutions where simple solutions exist, I guess a module-powered scripting language like Perl becomes irresistable and using the UNIX base utilities becomes a prohibitively painful exercise.
I want to learn Perl. But I just cannot find the motivation because I never need more than what UNIX gives me.
> If you choose to do complex things and do them in complex ways, or you can only see complex solutions where simple solutions exist, I guess a module-powered scripting language like Perl becomes irresistable and using the UNIX base utilities becomes a prohibitively painful exercise.
Here again, your ignorance is showing, and you are projecting your own limitation onto others. You suggest that someone who uses Perl feels the need to use it everywhere, that it's more complex than shell tools, and that Perl somehow becomes a crack-like addiction, forcing you to never use command line tools again.
That's just plain silly. There are tons of people who make heavy use Unix tools and Perl. This isn't an either-or situation like you seem to be pushing. They're all just tools for solving problems. The smart thing is to recognize when each tool is appropriate, and then use them properly.
For example, the other day I was working with a log file. Initially, I was beating on it with command line tools: find, grep, cut, sed, sort, uniq, wc, etc. Eventually, I got what I needed out of it, but knew I was going to need something more to present to my team, so I pulled out awk, and I wrote a little script to extract the data and generate a simple report. A few days later, management saw the report, and liked it. But, they wanted some additional features added, and some changes to the processing. I could have hacked what they wanted into the awk script, but the processing had gotten complex enough that I knew I was better off making the jump to Perl. So, I rewrote it in Perl, and got everything they wanted. Additionally, it had the flexibility with Perl that the next two feature requests that management made were implemented in just a few minutes each.
Also, in case you weren't aware of it, Perl integrates and happily makes use of external commands. If there's a tool out there that will do some heavy lifting for you, Perl makes it trivial to call out to that command (just like backticks or $(/bin/foo) in bash).
If you really want to do complex scripting with Unix tools, then you're either limiting yourself to pretty trivial work, or you're making things a lot harder on yourself than they need to be. Perl was created for a reason, and it's a good one. Small scripts or glue to tie things together, use a shell script and Unix tools. Complex scripts, use a real scripting language, make things easier on yourself, and get more work done in a faster, better way.
I write small, simple shell functions using a single busybox-like binary that do the same things as Perl modules. I store the shell functions in a local repository and load/unload them as needed. I make "programs" by combining different functions.
A comment like Joe's really surprises me. Time and again I see brilliant coders who for whatever reason cannot see the path to making their own live USB/SD sticks.
But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion.
Sell hardware that has no bundled OS.
Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks).
Or users can create their own OS memsticks.
Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the value they place on their design team and design patents, and where they derive the lion's share of their revenue.
If I could buy Apple hardware without it being tied to Apple's OS's, I would be willing to pay Apple hardware prices more frequently.
I've read all of Joe's comments in this thread, and I'm not really surprised. He is either a troll (and not a very successful one if he is), or, more likely, a bigot who believes that the any software worth running costs >$100 (office, photoshop).
Unfortunately, he represents a non-negligible majority of users out there. But I care not discussing anything with him and his like on HN. I've got better use for my time.
Maybe he works for a company that sells software priced at over $100?
I have no doubt such companies have employees, or contractors, who not only monitor message boards on behalf of the company, but who post comments on them in a deliberate attempt to influence discussions in ways favorable to the company's interests. Whether they are effective is another question. But they are trying.
Younger readers should be aware of this as they are the ones being targetted.
Perhaps it's not that a majority of users are convinced price equates to quality control so much as a majority are aggressively manipulated in terms of what information about software they are exposed to.
It's actually pretty easy to do. I've seen several Windows, several BSDs and linuxes as well as some open-solaris derivative on x86 Macs.
The PowerPC macs are a bit less well supported just because there are fewer distros for PowerPC, but on the other hand, since apple's pretty much abandoned them, going with linux or a BSD has its own advantages
_I was not aware it's "easy" to run other OS's on Apple hardware. Knowing Apple, I'm still not sure I believe it._
I run linux (arch now, but once ubuntu) on a MacBook5,4. It's somewhat harder to get set up if you want to dual boot (the dual partitioning scheme is finicky, and although linux doesn't need it, OS X forces you to use it if there's a foreign OS, ugh..). See http://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook .
Only one proprietary driver (for wireless) is needed - the rest Just Works. (And flash plays smoother than on OS X :P )
One thing that could be easier is booting MacBook Pro from USB stick. A Unetbootin that works on Mac, and builds usb sticks bootable on Macs, would be good.
My preference is to use only the bootloader for the OS I'm booting, as opposed to a "boot manager" that presents a menu of OS's. I avoid using chaining techniques the way something like GRUB does. And I don't use MBR's if I don't have to. Disklabels alone will suffice. So the stick contains only an OS-specific bootloader and the OS, usually just a kernel with embedded ramdisk or a loadable kernel module containing a filesystem and userland. I keep it very simple.
This works well for me with PC's. Would this work with today's x86 Macs?
I installed Windows as dual boot on a friends Mac.
It's far easier than installing it on a windows PC.
Put in the windows disk and follow the Apple instructions - it includes all the drivers and even gave advice about sharing files
.
Joe here - I am unaware that USB/SD sticks are fast enough to run as my system drive. Ok, cool. I haven't used a stick in years (ever since this new thing called the Internet showed up).
Yes, agree with Mr Binary - in a perfect world, computer hardware and software are completely divorced. The hotel wouldn't worry about viruses, because there would be no storage on their computer at all - I provide that with my stick. All I need is a 'kiosk computer', hardware that I can repurpose.
If what you're using works for you there's little reason to switch. I have had certain consraints in how I use computers that motivated me to explore different alternatives that "do more with less". But as users demand smaller devices and more portability I'm beginning to wonder if these "unconventional" alternatives are not generally useful for others besides me.
Not only do I divorce the OS from the hardware, but I separate the OS from my personal data. Unless I have both wholly residing in RAM (which I find generally faster than HDD or USB/SD), they are not on the same media. As much as possible I try to make the OS read-only and the media used for data (e.g. RAM for short-term data storage or HDD for long-term data storage) read-write. Perhaps there are parallels to certain object file formats and their separation of code and data.
I've also thought a lot about and experimented with the use of separate, simplified, fast-booting OS's for different purposes. I am forced to use different OS's to perform certain tasks. But the popular all-purpose OS's are huge and often I only need a small fraction of their functionality.
What if we did not think in all or nothing terms about OS functionality? What if some OS's were small and only limited-purpose?
Rebooting is the slow step. But these limited-purpose OS's, being small and simple, can be very robust and responsive once booted.
The smaller the kernel and userland, the more RAM I have for storage.
They are a very important constituent.
If a large number of consumers stopped purchasing a certain entertainment company's products for one day, would it have a noticeable impact on their revenues? How about a week? A month?
The industry claims it's losing business to pirates. While it's probably true to some extent, it is speculative and nearly impossible to measure accurately. How many of the consumers of pirated content were never consumers of paid content to begin with?
The products this industry sells are not life necessities.
In summary, a branded entertainment "hunger strike" by actual existing, paid customers. This would cause real loss. And, if it's a noticeable loss, it would send a very strong message.
Good luck.