Did I? Hmmm well let's replace that generalization with it's equivalent:
"But an old woman doesn't need to do that; software installation and updating should be done all in one place for her."
Doesn't seem any better to me... replace "Grandma" with other "demographic generalization"'s like "women", "blacks", etc.. and it doesn't sound so good either. Sorry but your comment sounds like ageism to me. And it is made worse since it was both entirely gratuitous and unnecessary to your (apparently) intended point.
Well synaptic will show me a brief description of each package, will search based on text I supply - so if I don't remember the exact name of something, or if I'm just curious about what is out there, it will supply a list of possibilities, it will detail what files are installed etc. etc. And it does all this in a nice presentation format.
Does apt-get do that?
And most of all, once again I now have to spend yet more of my time figuring out Canonical's latest unnecessary change to something - instead of spending the time on what I'm really supposed to be doing...
I always update with 'sudo apt-get update' on the command line because I find it faster than Update Manager
I do that because, on my system, for some reason Update Manager stopped working and just went through the motions without ever installing anything. I do wonder how long it would have taken to come to my attention if update had been hidden in the Software Centre instead of being a GUI tool that I ran and easily observed failing. I'm not the only one who has experienced this and I didn't have time to waste figuring out what the problem was...
Months later it is still doing this...... hear that Ubuntu? That's the sound of another nail in your coffin as far as I'm concerned. Stop introducing new things and fix what's already there. When you're tending to that I'd also like the wireless on my laptop to run above 2Mbps (the 300Mbps it used to run at would be fine).
But Grandma doesn't need to do that; software installation and updating should be done all in one place for her.
Maybe Grandma would like to put aside doing final revisions to the thesis for her Ph.D. in Computing and spend a few minutes applying a birch rod to your backside - just to help you get over your blatant ageism.
IIRC: there was never a number displayed just the name - this was on two different phones (same line but not same base stations) so if there was fiddling going on to prevent the number showing it was happening outside our home, i.e. not a case of the phones not displaying information that was being provided (other callers showed name and number).
That is an excellent question. We kept getting calls where the caller-id changed form "California" to "Montana" to "Ohio" etc. Our bank had given our number to telemarketers. This seems like fraud to me since they are clearly avoiding giving out an actual identifiable company id that you could call screen but they are bypassing the "no caller-id provided" call screening. Periodically changing the state name is a further ploy to make it harder to call screen them.
To me that should all be counted as fraud but is it going to be? I doubt it. We took the only route available and complained to our bank. After several complaints they finally got us taken off the list.
Ahh but it is being made illegal! It is just happening very gradually.
For example in my city it is now illegal to smoke:
- inside any public space, including restaurants and bars
- within (IIRC) 30 feet of any doorway or window of a public space - in a city that covers pretty much most of the outside
- any workplace (it's now against work safety rules)
- and for the latest: it is now illegal to smoke in any park or beach (even though BBQ's are allowed and can be as smoky as you want and pollution spewing cars drive through the parks all the time
Long ago anti-smokers realized that making smoking outright illegal in one step would raise far too much resistance... so they have been incrementally restricting and restricting a perfectly legal activity making it harder and harder to do... and the cops do come and enforce these bans.
I'm a non-smoker but I have a little problem with this erosion of rights to engage in what is theoretically a perfectly legal activity.
I predict the next step will be to ban smoking anywhere there are children including in cars and in the home. Now this one I might actually see as reasonable.
The summary *could* mention that "an atom smasher" was the LHC at CERN... for some reason we need to know that the lab checking the data was Fermilab, that Fermilab has the Tevatron particle accelerator and that Fermilab is in Chicago but we don't need to know the name, location or equipment of the lab conducting the actual experiment.
Hint: It's ok to acknowledge that important stuff happens outside the US.
Hmmm touched a nerve there. My point was that professionals shouldn't be relying on social networking tools to disseminate important time critical information. As a back up, sure, fine. As primary means? No, I don't think so.
As soon as one reputable organization is informed, and perhaps attempts verification if that is possible, then I would suggest things like phones (and or phone trees), email mailing lists, SMS text messages, ICQ etc all organized so that professionals who want to be notified of certain events get notified in the most timely and secure (as in reliable and as in no practical joking) way possible...
The summary might have mentioned that the tweet resulted from: "It all began on May 31, when French amateur astronomer Amedee Riou detected...." etc.
So several amateurs detected a supernova before the pro's and the pro's heard about it by Twitter? Well that could be one story but as I recall Riou reported the suspected supernova directly to professional astronomers... if so then what exactly is the significance of the later tweet? That some astronomers have crappy official channels and had to find out something of interest form social media instead of being notified through proper/official/established channels? Seem like they should be a bit embarrassed to have to have found out about it by Twitter.
It's meaningless to ask if we have reached maximum sustainable population size unless you also specify what standard of living you are talking about. I can recall reading about 20 years ago that we had already passed the point where it was possible to give everyone on Earth the same standard of living as the average American.
But standard of living really is a proxy for resource consumption and not a very good one because as technology advances it can produce more from less. Eventually you reach a wall though. Pick a resource utilization number and multiply by population. Is it greater than the available resources? If yes then we have passed the sustainable population. OTOH divide available resources by population and you have the allowed resource utilization to maintain that population.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you treat resources as finite.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of growing technological capabilities.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of human nature.
I would wager that at this point copyright infringement lawsuits are being maintained as simple misdirection. Something to keep the opposition focussing its energy on the wrong target, or at least diverting significant portions of that energy to the wrong target. Meanwhile legislation is arriving which just makes the copyright owning companies able to do what they want in a much easier way. Magicians do it all the time.
Not sure what the point of the value of your parents' house 3 years ago is, or the price of the other two things. Your claim was general and was that the minimum wage in the 90's is equivalent to $20 and hour now.
You've now supplied that minimum wage was $5/hour. Your claim is that $5 then is $20 now or in the parlance of these things that $5 in 1990 is equal to 20 inflation adjusted 2011 dollars or equivalently that with inflation adjustment $20 now is the same as 5 1990 dollars.
That is a 400% change in about 20 years. That didn't' happen. Based on the US Consumer Price Index the change from 1991 to 2011 was 65% so you are off by a factor of about 7... thus my suggestion about your math courses... of course your math could be correct and simply founded on faulty premises.
BTW it's not really relevant since your claim was more general, but FWIW according to the US EIA the average price of regular gas in the US on Dec 3 1990 was $1.34 and on December 13 2010 it was $2.93 for an inflation of 218% not the >400% you are stating. Of course the price varied wildly during that period and from region to region so choosing gas price at any two points in space-time is probably not the best choice for a measure. There are similar problems with choosing tuition for a measure. But again you were making a generalization so specific measures are not relevant.
Ahhh I see... is there a reason why some say College and others say University- is it a regional sort of thing? I had thought that some institutions also gave "Associates Degrees" or is that just technical schools?
IIRC it isn't just Canada that distinguishes between College (2yr diploma) and University (4/5 yr degree + advanced degrees) although College has other meanings as well so it can be confusing.
I think your first statement is incorrect. Suppose the knowledge is at the college and at the public library - i.e. satisfying your non-exclusivity requirement. Now I can make the statement "College and the library are wastes of time." Which obviously can be anti-intellectual. You might quibble that I'm not allowed to reference the other source in my "College is..." statement but even then you can't say it is not anti-intellectual because you do not know the intent of the speaker and whether they are generally anti-intellectual.
Seems to me that "college is a waste of time" is an economic, not an anti-learning argument. Economically college can be a waste of time. How many English majors are out there making huge bucks
There is a significant difference between "college is a waste of time" and "college can be a waste of time."
In my own experience I disagreed with my profs - not infrequently and often vocally - and in only three cases did a prof make the mistake of trying to lower my grade for it. One I just laughed at because I couldn't have cared less and he just seemed sad and pathetic. The other two were ordered to change the grade (from below C to A) - it hurt their careers more than mine. And then there were profs at the other end of the spectrum who enjoyed an intelligent challenge/questioning of their position. I think either something else was going on or you are exaggerating that aspect of university.
As for "English majors" a friend of mine was in upper management at IBM and he told me that they often hired "arts" majors and then taught them what IBM wanted them to know about computers. The idea was that it was better to hire someone trained to communicate well and able to interact well with others and teach them technical info than it was to hire someone with technical knowledge and try to turn them into proficient communicators who could work well with others. Perhaps it's different these days.
Most places would hire someone with 5 years XP over some college kid with 1 year.
Really? Done a survey have you? How exactly do you know this?
Seems as if you're just pulling stuff out of your ass in order to justify denigrating college... which in turn seems like a pretty good example of the anti-intellectual attitude being discussed.
That is an excellent point and the so often heard "you don't have to know stuff you just have to know where to look it up" deserves to be on the list of blossoming anti-intellectual attitudes.
One of the most illuminating and probably most educational experiences I had was studying for comps during my doctorate. At that school it basically went like this: "OK, here is a list of 50 books covering several areas of computing (mostly at a Masters level). One year from now we are going to test you. Anything in the books is fair game." The areas were things like computational theory, linguistics, hardware, AI etc.
Now I kind of procrastinated about this reading... so as the year was coming to a close I was cramming 50 books worth of material into my brain. Now some people would say this was useless memorization but in fact there was an epiphany along the way in which it became clear just how all these seemingly unrelated disciplines were actually all facets of the same thing or at least related to each other in interesting ways, analogous to the way one NP complete problem can be transformed into another NP complete problem that looks completely unrelated to the first problem.
It would not have been possible to form those connections without having all that information simultaneously available to me, what you term "Live" information.
Unfortunately, this means a lot of people who have no business going to college -- who will neither gain anything from their time there, nor contribute to the intellectual pool of the community (or the world in general) -- wind up drinking their way through an extra 4 years of high school.
While I agree there are a lot of people who do not benefit from college it is often not possible to identify them until they have gone to college for a while. It is also the case that many people who drop out do so not because they aren't bright enough, not "intellectual" enough, but because they were unprepared. Where I am university and college are two different things.
A common occurrence is for a bright kid to go to university and fail out the 1st year. Why? Because nobody at U cares whether you do your homework, or are sick, or have problems at home, or are a procrastinator... they go from an environment where people care about them and actively supervise them to one where nobody gives a crap and they just aren't prepared for that. By the time they realize what is going on it is too late.
OTOH kids who go to college first and then transfer to university do much better as a whole - it is much gentler transition and they learn to cope. Then they do quite well at university.
And don't disparage time spent in the bar - I met some of the very brightest people I've ever met while hanging out in the bar... bad for my liver, good for my intellect and paradoxically bad for my brain cells.
Part of the problem with "people who shouldn't be there" being there is that their parents want them to go, or they can't think of anything else to do, or they want to do things that require a university education and they did well in high school but just aren't up to university... or they are away from home for the 1st time and not being supervised at all can't handle limitless sex, drugs and booze being on the shelf right beside the learning shelf.
As someone else pointed out the economic advice response itself could be seen as anti-intellectual itself since it assumes the primary point of University is to increase earning power.
I went to several schools, I got a few degrees and none of that time and effort was in order to increase my income (which was already quite healthy the entire time I was a student). On balance I think it was time well spent.
That aside, I think the "college is a waste of time" argument is frequently made using some combination/variation of arguments that have nothing to do with return on investment. Such as these:
I taught myself and I'm as good as anybody with a degree.
I taught myself and that practical experience is much more important than the useless stuff they teach in CS schools.
Certifications are a waste of time.
Getting a degree isn't even an accomplishment.
Why do employers keep emphasizing degrees when they are so pointless?
Employers don't care about degrees they want people with practical experience/knowledge.
And yes, I know some of those are mutually contradictory. Perhaps not surprisingly they're often made by people without the education they so disparage.
In any case I think the general question being asked is an interesting one - in fact I wouldn't limit it to geeks but would ask: is our culture becoming more anti-intellectual?
I can tell you that for as long as I've been around there has always been a certain type of person who automatically distrusts anyone they perceive as being smarter than are they. My impression is that a larger and larger portion of the population is composed of people with that attitude. Perhaps because they are so routinely lied to by the very people they are supposed to be able to trust... but I think there is more to it than that and the end result is a flourishing anti-intellectualism.
The problem you are having understanding the text rests in your assumption that it is written in English. It is not, it is written in Lawyerish. You just need a Lawyerish to English translator.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I? Hmmm well let's replace that generalization with it's equivalent: "But an old woman doesn't need to do that; software installation and updating should be done all in one place for her."
Doesn't seem any better to me... replace "Grandma" with other "demographic generalization"'s like "women", "blacks", etc.. and it doesn't sound so good either. Sorry but your comment sounds like ageism to me. And it is made worse since it was both entirely gratuitous and unnecessary to your (apparently) intended point.
Well synaptic will show me a brief description of each package, will search based on text I supply - so if I don't remember the exact name of something, or if I'm just curious about what is out there, it will supply a list of possibilities, it will detail what files are installed etc. etc. And it does all this in a nice presentation format.
Does apt-get do that?
And most of all, once again I now have to spend yet more of my time figuring out Canonical's latest unnecessary change to something - instead of spending the time on what I'm really supposed to be doing...
I do that because, on my system, for some reason Update Manager stopped working and just went through the motions without ever installing anything. I do wonder how long it would have taken to come to my attention if update had been hidden in the Software Centre instead of being a GUI tool that I ran and easily observed failing. I'm not the only one who has experienced this and I didn't have time to waste figuring out what the problem was...
Months later it is still doing this... ... hear that Ubuntu? That's the sound of another nail in your coffin as far as I'm concerned. Stop introducing new things and fix what's already there. When you're tending to that I'd also like the wireless on my laptop to run above 2Mbps (the 300Mbps it used to run at would be fine).
Maybe Grandma would like to put aside doing final revisions to the thesis for her Ph.D. in Computing and spend a few minutes applying a birch rod to your backside - just to help you get over your blatant ageism.
IIRC: there was never a number displayed just the name - this was on two different phones (same line but not same base stations) so if there was fiddling going on to prevent the number showing it was happening outside our home, i.e. not a case of the phones not displaying information that was being provided (other callers showed name and number).
Heavy, man.
That is an excellent question. We kept getting calls where the caller-id changed form "California" to "Montana" to "Ohio" etc. Our bank had given our number to telemarketers. This seems like fraud to me since they are clearly avoiding giving out an actual identifiable company id that you could call screen but they are bypassing the "no caller-id provided" call screening. Periodically changing the state name is a further ploy to make it harder to call screen them.
To me that should all be counted as fraud but is it going to be? I doubt it. We took the only route available and complained to our bank. After several complaints they finally got us taken off the list.
For example in my city it is now illegal to smoke:
Long ago anti-smokers realized that making smoking outright illegal in one step would raise far too much resistance... so they have been incrementally restricting and restricting a perfectly legal activity making it harder and harder to do... and the cops do come and enforce these bans.
I'm a non-smoker but I have a little problem with this erosion of rights to engage in what is theoretically a perfectly legal activity.
I predict the next step will be to ban smoking anywhere there are children including in cars and in the home. Now this one I might actually see as reasonable.
The summary *could* mention that "an atom smasher" was the LHC at CERN... for some reason we need to know that the lab checking the data was Fermilab, that Fermilab has the Tevatron particle accelerator and that Fermilab is in Chicago but we don't need to know the name, location or equipment of the lab conducting the actual experiment.
Hint: It's ok to acknowledge that important stuff happens outside the US.
ok obviously you are looking for a fight; sorry I'm not looking for one. One correction - I never said Twitter shouldn't be allowed.
You are entitled to your opinion as I am to mine.
Hmmm touched a nerve there. My point was that professionals shouldn't be relying on social networking tools to disseminate important time critical information. As a back up, sure, fine. As primary means? No, I don't think so.
As soon as one reputable organization is informed, and perhaps attempts verification if that is possible, then I would suggest things like phones (and or phone trees), email mailing lists, SMS text messages, ICQ etc all organized so that professionals who want to be notified of certain events get notified in the most timely and secure (as in reliable and as in no practical joking) way possible...
The summary might have mentioned that the tweet resulted from: "It all began on May 31, when French amateur astronomer Amedee Riou detected...." etc.
So several amateurs detected a supernova before the pro's and the pro's heard about it by Twitter? Well that could be one story but as I recall Riou reported the suspected supernova directly to professional astronomers... if so then what exactly is the significance of the later tweet? That some astronomers have crappy official channels and had to find out something of interest form social media instead of being notified through proper/official/established channels? Seem like they should be a bit embarrassed to have to have found out about it by Twitter.
It's meaningless to ask if we have reached maximum sustainable population size unless you also specify what standard of living you are talking about. I can recall reading about 20 years ago that we had already passed the point where it was possible to give everyone on Earth the same standard of living as the average American.
But standard of living really is a proxy for resource consumption and not a very good one because as technology advances it can produce more from less. Eventually you reach a wall though. Pick a resource utilization number and multiply by population. Is it greater than the available resources? If yes then we have passed the sustainable population. OTOH divide available resources by population and you have the allowed resource utilization to maintain that population.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you treat resources as finite.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of growing technological capabilities.
Of course that all becomes more complicated when you try to factor in the effects of human nature.
I would wager that at this point copyright infringement lawsuits are being maintained as simple misdirection. Something to keep the opposition focussing its energy on the wrong target, or at least diverting significant portions of that energy to the wrong target. Meanwhile legislation is arriving which just makes the copyright owning companies able to do what they want in a much easier way. Magicians do it all the time.
Ummm polygons are faster than what? Spheres? NURBs?
Perhaps you meant scanline/raster rendering is faster than ray tracing? Both use polygons though...
Not sure what the point of the value of your parents' house 3 years ago is, or the price of the other two things. Your claim was general and was that the minimum wage in the 90's is equivalent to $20 and hour now.
You've now supplied that minimum wage was $5/hour. Your claim is that $5 then is $20 now or in the parlance of these things that $5 in 1990 is equal to 20 inflation adjusted 2011 dollars or equivalently that with inflation adjustment $20 now is the same as 5 1990 dollars.
That is a 400% change in about 20 years. That didn't' happen. Based on the US Consumer Price Index the change from 1991 to 2011 was 65% so you are off by a factor of about 7... thus my suggestion about your math courses... of course your math could be correct and simply founded on faulty premises.
BTW it's not really relevant since your claim was more general, but FWIW according to the US EIA the average price of regular gas in the US on Dec 3 1990 was $1.34 and on December 13 2010 it was $2.93 for an inflation of 218% not the >400% you are stating. Of course the price varied wildly during that period and from region to region so choosing gas price at any two points in space-time is probably not the best choice for a measure. There are similar problems with choosing tuition for a measure. But again you were making a generalization so specific measures are not relevant.
Ahhh I see... is there a reason why some say College and others say University- is it a regional sort of thing? I had thought that some institutions also gave "Associates Degrees" or is that just technical schools?
IIRC it isn't just Canada that distinguishes between College (2yr diploma) and University (4/5 yr degree + advanced degrees) although College has other meanings as well so it can be confusing.
I can't resist asking why you think that might be the case?
I think your first statement is incorrect. Suppose the knowledge is at the college and at the public library - i.e. satisfying your non-exclusivity requirement. Now I can make the statement "College and the library are wastes of time." Which obviously can be anti-intellectual. You might quibble that I'm not allowed to reference the other source in my "College is..." statement but even then you can't say it is not anti-intellectual because you do not know the intent of the speaker and whether they are generally anti-intellectual.
There is a significant difference between "college is a waste of time" and "college can be a waste of time."
In my own experience I disagreed with my profs - not infrequently and often vocally - and in only three cases did a prof make the mistake of trying to lower my grade for it. One I just laughed at because I couldn't have cared less and he just seemed sad and pathetic. The other two were ordered to change the grade (from below C to A) - it hurt their careers more than mine. And then there were profs at the other end of the spectrum who enjoyed an intelligent challenge/questioning of their position. I think either something else was going on or you are exaggerating that aspect of university.
As for "English majors" a friend of mine was in upper management at IBM and he told me that they often hired "arts" majors and then taught them what IBM wanted them to know about computers. The idea was that it was better to hire someone trained to communicate well and able to interact well with others and teach them technical info than it was to hire someone with technical knowledge and try to turn them into proficient communicators who could work well with others. Perhaps it's different these days.
Really? Done a survey have you? How exactly do you know this?
Seems as if you're just pulling stuff out of your ass in order to justify denigrating college... which in turn seems like a pretty good example of the anti-intellectual attitude being discussed.
Unless, where you were, minimum wage was >$10/hr in the early 90's you might want to ask for a refund on your math courses.
That is an excellent point and the so often heard "you don't have to know stuff you just have to know where to look it up" deserves to be on the list of blossoming anti-intellectual attitudes.
One of the most illuminating and probably most educational experiences I had was studying for comps during my doctorate. At that school it basically went like this: "OK, here is a list of 50 books covering several areas of computing (mostly at a Masters level). One year from now we are going to test you. Anything in the books is fair game." The areas were things like computational theory, linguistics, hardware, AI etc.
Now I kind of procrastinated about this reading... so as the year was coming to a close I was cramming 50 books worth of material into my brain. Now some people would say this was useless memorization but in fact there was an epiphany along the way in which it became clear just how all these seemingly unrelated disciplines were actually all facets of the same thing or at least related to each other in interesting ways, analogous to the way one NP complete problem can be transformed into another NP complete problem that looks completely unrelated to the first problem.
It would not have been possible to form those connections without having all that information simultaneously available to me, what you term "Live" information.
While I agree there are a lot of people who do not benefit from college it is often not possible to identify them until they have gone to college for a while. It is also the case that many people who drop out do so not because they aren't bright enough, not "intellectual" enough, but because they were unprepared. Where I am university and college are two different things.
A common occurrence is for a bright kid to go to university and fail out the 1st year. Why? Because nobody at U cares whether you do your homework, or are sick, or have problems at home, or are a procrastinator... they go from an environment where people care about them and actively supervise them to one where nobody gives a crap and they just aren't prepared for that. By the time they realize what is going on it is too late.
OTOH kids who go to college first and then transfer to university do much better as a whole - it is much gentler transition and they learn to cope. Then they do quite well at university.
And don't disparage time spent in the bar - I met some of the very brightest people I've ever met while hanging out in the bar... bad for my liver, good for my intellect and paradoxically bad for my brain cells.
Part of the problem with "people who shouldn't be there" being there is that their parents want them to go, or they can't think of anything else to do, or they want to do things that require a university education and they did well in high school but just aren't up to university... or they are away from home for the 1st time and not being supervised at all can't handle limitless sex, drugs and booze being on the shelf right beside the learning shelf.
As someone else pointed out the economic advice response itself could be seen as anti-intellectual itself since it assumes the primary point of University is to increase earning power.
I went to several schools, I got a few degrees and none of that time and effort was in order to increase my income (which was already quite healthy the entire time I was a student). On balance I think it was time well spent.
That aside, I think the "college is a waste of time" argument is frequently made using some combination/variation of arguments that have nothing to do with return on investment. Such as these:
And yes, I know some of those are mutually contradictory. Perhaps not surprisingly they're often made by people without the education they so disparage.
In any case I think the general question being asked is an interesting one - in fact I wouldn't limit it to geeks but would ask: is our culture becoming more anti-intellectual?
I can tell you that for as long as I've been around there has always been a certain type of person who automatically distrusts anyone they perceive as being smarter than are they. My impression is that a larger and larger portion of the population is composed of people with that attitude. Perhaps because they are so routinely lied to by the very people they are supposed to be able to trust... but I think there is more to it than that and the end result is a flourishing anti-intellectualism.
Back in the 60's and 70's John Brunner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brunner_(novelist) predicted all sorts of things which seem to have come to pass... unfortunately that includes "Reality TV".
The problem you are having understanding the text rests in your assumption that it is written in English. It is not, it is written in Lawyerish. You just need a Lawyerish to English translator.