Men and women may be different, but I can still out-code and out-sysadmin most men and women on the planet (Recognizing that the slashdot crowd is not "most men and women"). My friends come to me for linux advice more often than I come to them. So don't use some kind of "innate difference" line to claim that the attitudes being discussed here are justified.
If anyone based their perception of ease of use on whether *I* can do it, well... I pity the fool.
Isn't firefox still alphaware, though? At least, that's how I interpret this:
"Firefox is a Technology Preview.
While this software may work well enough to be relied upon as your primary browser, we make no guarantees of its performance or stability in its pre-1.0 state and it should not be relied upon for mission- critical tasks. See the License Agreement for more information. "
I just assumed that they're working on shoring up the functionality before worrying about making sure that every option is gui-accessible.
(And there's a plugin or ten that lets you configure everything that gecko will let you configure.)
I've seen plenty of men, in a variety of shapes, pulling similar stunts.
A lot of times, what we perceive is shaped by what we expect to see. I know people who will *always* say, "wow, that woman in the volvo to the left is a horrible driver," without ever looking at the driver, who often as not is male.
For every woman putting on makeup during her morning commute, I've seen a guy eating soup with both hands while "driving." Cell phone abuse is gender-neutral; so is weaving, excessive speeding, and failure to recognize that AWD won't help you brake faster in the snow and ice.
I lived in the DC metro area for years... there are certain regions where not tailgating is simply not an option. At least, not if you ever want to get onto an exit ramp, switch lanes so that you can get to the left turn lane, etc.
You don't just take it out of the box and start pressing buttons
Thing is, that's exactly how most of us learned about computers -- one keypress or mouseclick at a time. It's not like people are born with special "geek" birthmarks on their foreheads to sort them out. Some people learn by exploring; some people just continue to cause damage to themselves and others.
If I tried this, half the newsletters and order info I *do* want to see would never make it to my mailbox.... Not to mention emails from non-techie friends who don't know how to disable html, or don't want to.
(Yes, you can apply your whitelist before applying the above filters, but you'd still miss messages from new addresses you haven't yet considered.)
I do contact the various offenders, but most of them seem uninterested in changing their ways, and the issue just isn't important enough to miss out on most of these services.
It's no surprise to me that F&SF was well-represented in this list. If you love *good* fantasy and science fiction, F&SF is for you. I've had a subscription on and off since freshman year of high school, and I'm currently in the process of completing my collection by ordering the back issues from my "off" times. You can subscribe here.
They publish an incredible spread of stories. Some to make you think; some to make you feel; some to make you laugh; some to immerse you completely in the world the author has created. I can't say enough good things about the magazine. Check it out.
Yes, but on the other hand, no one gives me weird looks when I watch a movie at home in my PJs. And there are no guards at the door to rough me up when I want to bring my own tasty treats instead of whatever they have at the ridiculously expensive concession stand.
We're willing, as you say, to give that $10 to go see a single movie; but we're not willing to give that $10 to education, public safety, or public health . ..even though $10 from each U.S. citizen -- one less movie a year for each of us -- would raise the annual salary of every firefighter in the United States by $10,000. Now there's a career in which people do risk life and health, and get paid poorly for doing so. We could easily change that; we choose not to. Those are our priorities. Pass the popcorn.
I wonder about this. If I were faced with a proposition that said, in plain English, "We will take ten more dollars from you at tax time and apply them directly to firefighter salaries," I would most likely say yes. But it's never worded like that. It's always some complicated verbiage about how some percentage -- not absolute amount -- of our taxes will got to some vague notion, like "community needs." And I, the suspicious taxpayer who's seen our tax dollars at work, have to wonder if the money will go to fire fighters, or if it will go to supporting some organization I may or may not agree with.
Over and over again, we have been taught to be suspicious of new taxes, because they almost always carry more pork than substance. It's not that I don't want to pay fire fighters, teachers, and various other groups more. It's that I have grave doubts that the money will ever land in their hands. Whereas the transaction involved in watching a movie, while partially distasteful, is pretty straightforward.
They're paid that much because the studios are willing to pay that much, and the studios are willing to pay that much because the filmgoing public is willing to pay what it pays. That's what our priorities are.
This is kind of misleading. Watching a movie costs less than $10 a person. So yes, our priorities are such that we are occasionally willing to pay somewhere around $5/hour for entertainment. That's not to say that any individual values acting talent in the millions.
That being said, there may be changes in the wind. My local theater upped its prices to something like $9 for evening shows; $7 for a matinee. SEVEN DOLLARS for a matinee! And for this, I get a lecture from an MPAA lackey, several minutes of commercials, and several minutes of trailers, some of which, I admit, may be interesting.
It's looking more and more like the right financial choice for movie enthusiasts is to buy a high-quality entertainment system and rent the DVD. Rental is cheaper than a movie ticket, you only have to pay for one DVD no matter how many people are watching, you don't (YMMV) have to deal with trailers and whatnot, and you can pause it when you have to pee. Besides, it enhances non-movie experiences, like console gaming, too.
EQ is a big game, but will EQ players ever be willing to put in that much time building up a new character from scratch?
I played EQ for several years. I spent more time playing EQ than I did at my full-time job. Eventually, the game burns you out.
Every now and then, I think back to my character and imagine it would be fun to play again. But I would never want to put that kind of time into building her up again. When I quit, over a year ago, I had more than 150 days played, and most of the people in my guild had vastly more than that. A lot of it was fun at the time, but if I'd known at the beginning that I was going to spend that much time wired into a game, I never would have installed the game in the first place.
I spent a few months working on DI. I wouldn't call my contributions critical or anything, but I have a few lines of code here and there... mostly in the unit tests, though.
As a former student with little-to-no income, I can promise you that this group has *no* trouble getting credit cards. Banks *love* students, who will run up massive amounts of debt in no time at all, then pay the minimums on their maxed-out cards for years.
Not every student falls into this trap, of course, but the banks seem to be making enough money on this pattern to keep mailing those applications.
Re:With PHP5, why not use Perl?
on
Core PHP Programming
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I disagree. Coldfusion is the kind of thing a non-programmer can learn quickly.
PHP has always looked too much like shell scripting or C to be friendly to non-programmers. I love PHP precisely because it is extremely easy for a *programmer* to pick up, but has a lot of functionality with which you can improve your naive first implementation.
My first PHP programs involved lots of calls to external apps, particularly grep and find. That ability allowed me, as a unix-tool-using programmer, to quickly hack together PHP that I could later improve. But I can't imagine picking up PHP as a non-programmer and having the first clue how to use it.
Well, in the end, generalities are less important than specifics.
I hated dolls as a kid. Believe me, I was given plenty of dolls, but they weren't interesting. I did play with Barbies. Thinking about it now, I suspect the difference is that baby dolls are a caretaker thing, whereas Barbies are more of an "acting out scenarios" kind of thing.
I was never a frills-n-dresses-n-dolls sort, but I really don't see why the one would prevent the other. Why couldn't a little girl like dolls and legos, all at the same time? For that matter, why couldn't a little boy?
Oh, sorry, they're called "action figures." My bad.
Excel is closed-source. If you're doing math where the results matter, and if they don't document their algorithms, how can you possibly verify that they're doing the right things to your data?
Just seems to me that, if you're in the business of producing accurate numbers, having blind faith in your tool's algorithmic accuracy is just a wee bit naive.
Now, on the other hand, if all that matters is agreement, not accuracy... by all means, use Excel! Probably best to make sure it's the same version, though...
I am not embarrassed about what's in my fridge, but I still don't invite people to take a peek. I'm not embarrassed about what's in my palm pilot, but I still don't post it on the web.
The question isn't, "Do I have something to hide?" The question is, "Why should I allow you to go on a fishing expedition through my private life when you have no admissable cause to suggest that I'm doing anything illegal?"
Agreed, but sometimes changing the source code is the best way to get what you need done. And when it comes to bug fixes, it's unlikely that third-party developers will be able to code them without access to the source.
I never said that only free software gets itches scratched, nor did I say anything about people making or not making a profit.
I'm saying that opening the source to an application makes it easier for someone with an itch to scratch to add functionality to that application. Sure, a closed application can have hooks for plug-ins, but then you have to stick to the types of functionality that the designers had in mind, and you're not likely to be able to fix bugs that way, although you may be able to work around them.
Anyway, "usable" is in the eye of the beholder. GUI is kind of broad, but there are plenty of opensource window managers that I find usable, as well as Gnome and KDE. Are you talking about a particular app? A set of widgets? A window manager? I'd argue that open source has plenty of usable examples of all of these things.
Having Free code isn't just about *me* being able to hack the code. It's also about knowing that, even if I can't write the patch to scratch my particular itch, someone else can, and in all likelihood is already doing so.
Free-as-in-liberty software impacts everyone, not just l33t hackers.
Slashdot Mirror
Men and women may be different, but I can still out-code and out-sysadmin most men and women on the planet (Recognizing that the slashdot crowd is not "most men and women"). My friends come to me for linux advice more often than I come to them. So don't use some kind of "innate difference" line to claim that the attitudes being discussed here are justified.
... I pity the fool.
If anyone based their perception of ease of use on whether *I* can do it, well
Isn't firefox still alphaware, though? At least, that's how I interpret this:
"Firefox is a Technology Preview.
While this software may work well enough to be relied upon as your primary browser, we make no guarantees of its performance or stability in its pre-1.0 state and it should not be relied upon for mission- critical tasks. See the License Agreement for more information. "
I just assumed that they're working on shoring up the functionality before worrying about making sure that every option is gui-accessible.
(And there's a plugin or ten that lets you configure everything that gecko will let you configure.)
How is that situation any different from the situation in which a product is no longer supported or a commercial company goes out of business?
I've seen plenty of men, in a variety of shapes, pulling similar stunts.
A lot of times, what we perceive is shaped by what we expect to see. I know people who will *always* say, "wow, that woman in the volvo to the left is a horrible driver," without ever looking at the driver, who often as not is male.
For every woman putting on makeup during her morning commute, I've seen a guy eating soup with both hands while "driving." Cell phone abuse is gender-neutral; so is weaving, excessive speeding, and failure to recognize that AWD won't help you brake faster in the snow and ice.
Definitely 5'1" women only. I mean, if you're a 5'1" male, these issues clearly don't apply.
I dub thee sir troll. I think you had a point somewhere about oversized vehicles, but I had trouble identifying it in between the sexist crap.
I lived in the DC metro area for years ... there are certain regions where not tailgating is simply not an option. At least, not if you ever want to get onto an exit ramp, switch lanes so that you can get to the left turn lane, etc.
Thing is, that's exactly how most of us learned about computers -- one keypress or mouseclick at a time. It's not like people are born with special "geek" birthmarks on their foreheads to sort them out. Some people learn by exploring; some people just continue to cause damage to themselves and others.
If I tried this, half the newsletters and order info I *do* want to see would never make it to my mailbox .... Not to mention emails from non-techie friends who don't know how to disable html, or don't want to.
(Yes, you can apply your whitelist before applying the above filters, but you'd still miss messages from new addresses you haven't yet considered.)
I do contact the various offenders, but most of them seem uninterested in changing their ways, and the issue just isn't important enough to miss out on most of these services.
It's no surprise to me that F&SF was well-represented in this list. If you love *good* fantasy and science fiction, F&SF is for you. I've had a subscription on and off since freshman year of high school, and I'm currently in the process of completing my collection by ordering the back issues from my "off" times. You can subscribe here.
They publish an incredible spread of stories. Some to make you think; some to make you feel; some to make you laugh; some to immerse you completely in the world the author has created. I can't say enough good things about the magazine. Check it out.
Yes, but on the other hand, no one gives me weird looks when I watch a movie at home in my PJs. And there are no guards at the door to rough me up when I want to bring my own tasty treats instead of whatever they have at the ridiculously expensive concession stand.
We're willing, as you say, to give that $10 to go see a single movie; but we're not willing to give that $10 to education, public safety, or public health . . .even though $10 from each U.S. citizen -- one less movie a year for each of us -- would raise the annual salary of every firefighter in the United States by $10,000. Now there's a career in which people do risk life and health, and get paid poorly for doing so. We could easily change that; we choose not to. Those are our priorities. Pass the popcorn.
I wonder about this. If I were faced with a proposition that said, in plain English, "We will take ten more dollars from you at tax time and apply them directly to firefighter salaries," I would most likely say yes. But it's never worded like that. It's always some complicated verbiage about how some percentage -- not absolute amount -- of our taxes will got to some vague notion, like "community needs." And I, the suspicious taxpayer who's seen our tax dollars at work, have to wonder if the money will go to fire fighters, or if it will go to supporting some organization I may or may not agree with.
Over and over again, we have been taught to be suspicious of new taxes, because they almost always carry more pork than substance. It's not that I don't want to pay fire fighters, teachers, and various other groups more. It's that I have grave doubts that the money will ever land in their hands. Whereas the transaction involved in watching a movie, while partially distasteful, is pretty straightforward.
They're paid that much because the studios are willing to pay that much, and the studios are willing to pay that much because the filmgoing public is willing to pay what it pays. That's what our priorities are.
This is kind of misleading. Watching a movie costs less than $10 a person. So yes, our priorities are such that we are occasionally willing to pay somewhere around $5/hour for entertainment. That's not to say that any individual values acting talent in the millions.
That being said, there may be changes in the wind. My local theater upped its prices to something like $9 for evening shows; $7 for a matinee. SEVEN DOLLARS for a matinee! And for this, I get a lecture from an MPAA lackey, several minutes of commercials, and several minutes of trailers, some of which, I admit, may be interesting.
It's looking more and more like the right financial choice for movie enthusiasts is to buy a high-quality entertainment system and rent the DVD. Rental is cheaper than a movie ticket, you only have to pay for one DVD no matter how many people are watching, you don't (YMMV) have to deal with trailers and whatnot, and you can pause it when you have to pee. Besides, it enhances non-movie experiences, like console gaming, too.
EQ is a big game, but will EQ players ever be willing to put in that much time building up a new character from scratch?
I played EQ for several years. I spent more time playing EQ than I did at my full-time job. Eventually, the game burns you out.
Every now and then, I think back to my character and imagine it would be fun to play again. But I would never want to put that kind of time into building her up again. When I quit, over a year ago, I had more than 150 days played, and most of the people in my guild had vastly more than that. A lot of it was fun at the time, but if I'd known at the beginning that I was going to spend that much time wired into a game, I never would have installed the game in the first place.
Heh, now I'm curious.
... mostly in the unit tests, though.
I spent a few months working on DI. I wouldn't call my contributions critical or anything, but I have a few lines of code here and there
Neat! The project I'm working on (Kepler) made slashdot!
As a former student with little-to-no income, I can promise you that this group has *no* trouble getting credit cards. Banks *love* students, who will run up massive amounts of debt in no time at all, then pay the minimums on their maxed-out cards for years.
Not every student falls into this trap, of course, but the banks seem to be making enough money on this pattern to keep mailing those applications.
I disagree. Coldfusion is the kind of thing a non-programmer can learn quickly.
PHP has always looked too much like shell scripting or C to be friendly to non-programmers. I love PHP precisely because it is extremely easy for a *programmer* to pick up, but has a lot of functionality with which you can improve your naive first implementation.
My first PHP programs involved lots of calls to external apps, particularly grep and find. That ability allowed me, as a unix-tool-using programmer, to quickly hack together PHP that I could later improve. But I can't imagine picking up PHP as a non-programmer and having the first clue how to use it.
Well, in the end, generalities are less important than specifics.
I hated dolls as a kid. Believe me, I was given plenty of dolls, but they weren't interesting. I did play with Barbies. Thinking about it now, I suspect the difference is that baby dolls are a caretaker thing, whereas Barbies are more of an "acting out scenarios" kind of thing.
I was wondering that, too.
I was never a frills-n-dresses-n-dolls sort, but I really don't see why the one would prevent the other. Why couldn't a little girl like dolls and legos, all at the same time? For that matter, why couldn't a little boy?
Oh, sorry, they're called "action figures." My bad.
But what if the people at the dork website are willing to spend a lot more money on Legos than are the parents of small children?
Excel is closed-source. If you're doing math where the results matter, and if they don't document their algorithms, how can you possibly verify that they're doing the right things to your data?
... by all means, use Excel! Probably best to make sure it's the same version, though ...
Just seems to me that, if you're in the business of producing accurate numbers, having blind faith in your tool's algorithmic accuracy is just a wee bit naive.
Now, on the other hand, if all that matters is agreement, not accuracy
It's not a matter of having something to hide.
I am not embarrassed about what's in my fridge, but I still don't invite people to take a peek. I'm not embarrassed about what's in my palm pilot, but I still don't post it on the web.
The question isn't, "Do I have something to hide?" The question is, "Why should I allow you to go on a fishing expedition through my private life when you have no admissable cause to suggest that I'm doing anything illegal?"
Agreed, but sometimes changing the source code is the best way to get what you need done. And when it comes to bug fixes, it's unlikely that third-party developers will be able to code them without access to the source.
I'm confused by your answer.
I never said that only free software gets itches scratched, nor did I say anything about people making or not making a profit.
I'm saying that opening the source to an application makes it easier for someone with an itch to scratch to add functionality to that application. Sure, a closed application can have hooks for plug-ins, but then you have to stick to the types of functionality that the designers had in mind, and you're not likely to be able to fix bugs that way, although you may be able to work around them.
Anyway, "usable" is in the eye of the beholder. GUI is kind of broad, but there are plenty of opensource window managers that I find usable, as well as Gnome and KDE. Are you talking about a particular app? A set of widgets? A window manager? I'd argue that open source has plenty of usable examples of all of these things.
Having Free code isn't just about *me* being able to hack the code. It's also about knowing that, even if I can't write the patch to scratch my particular itch, someone else can, and in all likelihood is already doing so.
Free-as-in-liberty software impacts everyone, not just l33t hackers.