We're in THE FUTURE. It just doesn't feel like it, because it's fuckin' lame.
That's because instead of positive societal change (things like peace on earth, more effort put into space exploration and other positive things) we're getting the gadgets along with the old society (war for power and profit, space exploration only when it's useful for one-upping the other guy, profit being more important than anything else and all those things).
It doesn't feel like the future because we just got a bunch of half-assed implementations of the gadgets of the future and little else.
The vast majority of Windows users don't know linux EXISTS and they don't care about OS wars.
The vast majority of ANY_OS users don't know OTHER_OS EXISTS and they don't care about OS wars.
However, at any given time it does seem like fanboys of various companies/operating systems are more or less prominent in OS wars. For a while Linux users seemed to be the truly loud and smug ones, the ones who always popped up and embarrassed other Linux users by ranting about how evil Apple and Microsoft were. At other times it has been Apple fanboys who were the "bad boys". Currently I'd have to say that it's the Microsofties that I'm noticing the most, or rather the vaguely pro-MS and rabidly anti-Apple ones, it's not like in the late 90s when MS was on top and the MS fans smugly declared that all other operating systems were irrelevant and would disappear within a few years and everything would run NT by 2005 or so, now the ones who are pro-MS seem to only be so marginally, they mainly attack Apple and Apple users (for some reason often not only ignoring Linux but even praising Linux while admitting they've never used it themselves).
I just find it interesting that in a lot of discussions just being not anti-Apple (i.e. pointing out that some alarmist blog post about Apple is only half-right and seems to be deliberately distorting and exaggerating the admittedly on its own disturbing truth to get more pageviews) will get you flamed and downmodded to oblivion with flames that often reek of fanboyism while at the same time decrying your supposed fanboyism...
While I agree about the peak in terms of free time being in college I suspect it's not entirely true that you are the busiest in your late forties or your fifties. You certainly can be but if you are some kind of "specialist" (that is to say, you're not replaceable enough that they could kick you to the curb today and have some random guy off the street with the basic educational requirements met do your job at full capacity within a few days) you can probably free up time a lot more easily than younger people, even though that "seniority" in your job title might seem pointless since it doesn't really mean you get your own squad of minions, a bigger office or anything like that it does tend to help when you say you want to telecommute, or for people not constantly keeping track of you to make sure you're working at optimal efficiency (that is, you can take twenty minutes and browse slashdot or post on stackoverflow without some PHB hovering over you wondering why you're not working). At least from what I've seen with older IT guys and developers I've met (not to mention they almost always have extra vacation weeks and the company will put more effort into accommodating their wishes).
Also, there's the whole "one dollar for turning a screw, $9,999 for knowing what screw to turn" thing, while it's not true for a lot of companies there are still a lot where it is true, they know they've got a few senior guys they're afraid to lose and they know if they laid them off they'd just end up bringing them back in as contractors where they'd pay as much as before but for fewer hours (on paper).
How is the server going to force the client to change its address?
Most major (and properly configured) networks tend to ignore traffic from the wrong IP address on the wrong physical port (so if the DHCP server tells you that your lease expired and your new address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx then you just won't be able to use your old address anyway).
Why is Apple the "obvious example"? It used to be that people felt that way about Linux fanboys, these days I'd say Windows/MS fanboys are actually the worst, possibly because they tend to have the backing of all the "anti-fanboys" who run Windows and hate Linux/Apple (it's especially hilarious when they clearly have never even touched Linux or OS X yet rant angrily about how stupid, homosexual or brainwashed those who don't run Windows are, oh yeah and anyone who's not a Windows user is also extremely smug about it and always rubs it in everyone's face, or so I've been told over and over and over and over again).
That seems weird, the common way to do it is to have an ID imbedded in the message so that the receiving device can tell which messages are actually parts of the same longer message.
The biggest problem with this scheme is when a device receives only part of the message, all phones seem to handle this differently. Some show what they got after a while, others simply chuck it, others still will hang on to the data just in case a matching ID shows up later (which can lead to hilarity since the IDs are far from unique).
Well yeah, greed is a big part of it. When I was younger I was a skateboarder and a snowboarder, the markup on skateboards, snowboards and associated clothes and equipment was, at least at the time, amazing. A snowboard that would retail for $600 in the US would retail for the equivalent of $1200 in Sweden. So it's not just tech stuff, it's pretty much any "luxury item".
Implying people who buy Apple products are somehow dumber than people who buy products from other manufacturers.
Yeah, or people just aren't up to all the technical details of their phones. Hell, I'm willing to bet most people don't even know the model of their phone, as amazing as that may sound to a slashdot user...
The "apple dollar" is a well-known phenomena among swedish mac users although it has gotten a lot better than it used to be. I remember some guy posting on a forum a bunch of years back when a new version of one of their laptops came out about how he realized it was cheaper to just buy a cheap ticket to NYC, buy a laptop, spend a night in a hotel and then fly back than it was to buy it in Sweden, so he took a two day trip to the US to buy a laptop in order to save money.
Sure, some of it can be explained by sales tax and such but even when you removed that factor there was clearly a lot of markup, but as I stated, it's a lot better these days, at least for hardware, haven't really compared app store prices...
Your original statement was "[...], the BSOD died in 2000." which is blatantly untrue, it became less frequent and when it does appear MS have cleverly set things up so that many users won't notice it.
Well, it's not just the rarity, I've helped several friends fix "my computer just reboots every now and then when I leave a game running" issues that boiled down to flaky graphics drivers which caused a BSOD followed by a reboot. Since they weren't actually at the computer and only noticed it rebooting when it went "beep" on POST they just assumed "it just rebooted". What actually happened was the the graphics driver crapped out, the machine threw up a BSOD and then promptly rebooted.
It's actually kind of sneaky, gives the impression that the BSOD is rarer than it is (although it is still a lot rarer than back when everyone ran win9x).
You can still get a BSOD it's just that these days they are rarer than they were in the win9x days and when they do appear the default behavior is to flash the BSOD and then reboot, my current work laptop did this a few times before the manufacturer (Dell) released a few new drivers that I installed...
It works for geeks, too - have you never gotten excited over "carrier-grade networking equipment" or so?
I don't think I have ever seen any product marketed at "prosumers" with the description "carrier-grade". That said, there is definitely a tendency among geeks to want their home switch to be a 24-port rack-mountable layer 3 switch instead of some random unmanaged 8-port desk switch marketed at regular consumers. But this can't just be explained by the "geeks are just as big idiots as Joe Sixpack" argument.
If you're a professional who works with the "pro gear" every day and you also have an interest in the same things as a hobby there is a very real chance you want to have equipment at home which is, if not as good as the equipment you use at work, at least approaching the quality of feature-richness of the expensive gear you use at work.
In college I knew a chemical engineering major who was obsessive about chemistry the way many computer geeks are obsessive about computers and electronics and while his "home lab" wasn't on-par with the university's labs he still had thousands of dollars worth of lab equipment and chemical compounds that he had either scavenged and repaired or purchased with his own hard-earned money. By your logic he should've been using the pots and pans he had in his kitchen to not be an idiot...
I've always seen "Trekkie" used as a sort of catch-all for Star Trek fans while "Trekker" was a term I only heard people who took Star Trek way too seriously use about themselves.
Cassettes were huge in indie pop circles a 5-10 years ago because it was retro (about the same time that the kids started going on about "retro" NES games that they were too young to have played when they were new).
There are even some people who think VHS tapes have more "feeling" to them than DVDs, Blurays and digital downloads (you know, because of the low resolution, weird degradation artifacts and other shortcomings).
There's a reason call centers tend to be established in small college towns and similar places, lots of young people with a decent education but not a lot of jobs available. That's not to say there are no jobs, just that someone straight out of college can't exactly pick and choose, so it's easy for people to think "Oh, I'll just do tech support/customer service for a while until I find a real job..." and then end up working there for two or three years before they're so broken psychologically that they just have to quit (or get fired for using their brain or education to actual do their job).
All they know how to do is follow their troubleshooting script, they've likely never used or have even seen the product you're having trouble with.
I can only speak for the two call centers I worked at right out of college (and the two teams I was on) but that's not always true. We knew the products and services we supported inside out, it was just that we often weren't allowed to fix problems (sometimes we were locked out of systems, other times it was just that they would check the logs to make sure people didn't make certain changes to connections).
When talking to others who have worked in tech support I've found that this is surprisingly often the case, they knew a lot more than they were allowed to let the customer know. The problem is of course that there's often no way around this, the guy knows he needs to keep his call times down and that the boss will be really pissed if he actually turns on interleave on your DSL connection, he must go through the script and then escalate it to a 3rd line tech who opens up the same tool the 1st line guy used and clicks the "interleave" checkbox. Have fun waiting two to three business days for that to happen...
The big problem with outsourced tech support tends to be that regardless of where it is situated they tend to get paid based on the number of calls they handle (at least for consumer services, for business products/services they tend to use better metrics). So they have no incentive in letting their employees fix problems (even if they can), just get customers off the line as quickly as possible.
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released in april 2005, 10.5 "Leopard" was released in october 2007. Your Macbook Pro would've shipped with 10.4.4 at the very least, especially since 10.4.4 was the first version of OS X released with support for Intel processors...
Also, a 3 year old Mac Pro should've shipped with 10.5 (since it was released almost four years ago).
And from what I've heard you can burn the 10.7 dmg to a DVD.
Ah, but v.90 was horribly slow. Yes, as far as modems went it was fast but it was still slow. My first DSL connection was a 512/800 kbps connection (yes, g.dmt with upstream uncapped), that's almost ten times the speed of a modem connection (not to mention that it had a lot less latency) and even at the time a regular ethernet network would be capable of at least 10 Mbps which in turn is 20 times the speed of the DSL connection.
So yes, 56k was slow (especially after 1996-1997 or so when a lot of content started showing up online that required a faster connection to really be usable).
Slashdot Mirror
We're in THE FUTURE. It just doesn't feel like it, because it's fuckin' lame.
That's because instead of positive societal change (things like peace on earth, more effort put into space exploration and other positive things) we're getting the gadgets along with the old society (war for power and profit, space exploration only when it's useful for one-upping the other guy, profit being more important than anything else and all those things).
It doesn't feel like the future because we just got a bunch of half-assed implementations of the gadgets of the future and little else.
The vast majority of Windows users don't know linux EXISTS and they don't care about OS wars.
The vast majority of ANY_OS users don't know OTHER_OS EXISTS and they don't care about OS wars.
However, at any given time it does seem like fanboys of various companies/operating systems are more or less prominent in OS wars. For a while Linux users seemed to be the truly loud and smug ones, the ones who always popped up and embarrassed other Linux users by ranting about how evil Apple and Microsoft were. At other times it has been Apple fanboys who were the "bad boys". Currently I'd have to say that it's the Microsofties that I'm noticing the most, or rather the vaguely pro-MS and rabidly anti-Apple ones, it's not like in the late 90s when MS was on top and the MS fans smugly declared that all other operating systems were irrelevant and would disappear within a few years and everything would run NT by 2005 or so, now the ones who are pro-MS seem to only be so marginally, they mainly attack Apple and Apple users (for some reason often not only ignoring Linux but even praising Linux while admitting they've never used it themselves).
I just find it interesting that in a lot of discussions just being not anti-Apple (i.e. pointing out that some alarmist blog post about Apple is only half-right and seems to be deliberately distorting and exaggerating the admittedly on its own disturbing truth to get more pageviews) will get you flamed and downmodded to oblivion with flames that often reek of fanboyism while at the same time decrying your supposed fanboyism...
While I agree about the peak in terms of free time being in college I suspect it's not entirely true that you are the busiest in your late forties or your fifties. You certainly can be but if you are some kind of "specialist" (that is to say, you're not replaceable enough that they could kick you to the curb today and have some random guy off the street with the basic educational requirements met do your job at full capacity within a few days) you can probably free up time a lot more easily than younger people, even though that "seniority" in your job title might seem pointless since it doesn't really mean you get your own squad of minions, a bigger office or anything like that it does tend to help when you say you want to telecommute, or for people not constantly keeping track of you to make sure you're working at optimal efficiency (that is, you can take twenty minutes and browse slashdot or post on stackoverflow without some PHB hovering over you wondering why you're not working). At least from what I've seen with older IT guys and developers I've met (not to mention they almost always have extra vacation weeks and the company will put more effort into accommodating their wishes).
Also, there's the whole "one dollar for turning a screw, $9,999 for knowing what screw to turn" thing, while it's not true for a lot of companies there are still a lot where it is true, they know they've got a few senior guys they're afraid to lose and they know if they laid them off they'd just end up bringing them back in as contractors where they'd pay as much as before but for fewer hours (on paper).
Why would Apple contribute to the Linux kernel? They're using a fork of Mach called XNU for OS X and iOS...
How is the server going to force the client to change its address?
Most major (and properly configured) networks tend to ignore traffic from the wrong IP address on the wrong physical port (so if the DHCP server tells you that your lease expired and your new address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx then you just won't be able to use your old address anyway).
In what way did I prove your point?
Why is Apple the "obvious example"? It used to be that people felt that way about Linux fanboys, these days I'd say Windows/MS fanboys are actually the worst, possibly because they tend to have the backing of all the "anti-fanboys" who run Windows and hate Linux/Apple (it's especially hilarious when they clearly have never even touched Linux or OS X yet rant angrily about how stupid, homosexual or brainwashed those who don't run Windows are, oh yeah and anyone who's not a Windows user is also extremely smug about it and always rubs it in everyone's face, or so I've been told over and over and over and over again).
That seems weird, the common way to do it is to have an ID imbedded in the message so that the receiving device can tell which messages are actually parts of the same longer message.
The biggest problem with this scheme is when a device receives only part of the message, all phones seem to handle this differently. Some show what they got after a while, others simply chuck it, others still will hang on to the data just in case a matching ID shows up later (which can lead to hilarity since the IDs are far from unique).
How did Manning's leak in any way result in that happening?
Well yeah, greed is a big part of it. When I was younger I was a skateboarder and a snowboarder, the markup on skateboards, snowboards and associated clothes and equipment was, at least at the time, amazing. A snowboard that would retail for $600 in the US would retail for the equivalent of $1200 in Sweden. So it's not just tech stuff, it's pretty much any "luxury item".
Implying people who buy Apple products are somehow dumber than people who buy products from other manufacturers.
Yeah, or people just aren't up to all the technical details of their phones. Hell, I'm willing to bet most people don't even know the model of their phone, as amazing as that may sound to a slashdot user...
The "apple dollar" is a well-known phenomena among swedish mac users although it has gotten a lot better than it used to be. I remember some guy posting on a forum a bunch of years back when a new version of one of their laptops came out about how he realized it was cheaper to just buy a cheap ticket to NYC, buy a laptop, spend a night in a hotel and then fly back than it was to buy it in Sweden, so he took a two day trip to the US to buy a laptop in order to save money.
Sure, some of it can be explained by sales tax and such but even when you removed that factor there was clearly a lot of markup, but as I stated, it's a lot better these days, at least for hardware, haven't really compared app store prices...
Your original statement was "[...], the BSOD died in 2000." which is blatantly untrue, it became less frequent and when it does appear MS have cleverly set things up so that many users won't notice it.
Well, it's not just the rarity, I've helped several friends fix "my computer just reboots every now and then when I leave a game running" issues that boiled down to flaky graphics drivers which caused a BSOD followed by a reboot. Since they weren't actually at the computer and only noticed it rebooting when it went "beep" on POST they just assumed "it just rebooted". What actually happened was the the graphics driver crapped out, the machine threw up a BSOD and then promptly rebooted.
It's actually kind of sneaky, gives the impression that the BSOD is rarer than it is (although it is still a lot rarer than back when everyone ran win9x).
That's just not true.
You can still get a BSOD it's just that these days they are rarer than they were in the win9x days and when they do appear the default behavior is to flash the BSOD and then reboot, my current work laptop did this a few times before the manufacturer (Dell) released a few new drivers that I installed...
It works for geeks, too - have you never gotten excited over "carrier-grade networking equipment" or so?
I don't think I have ever seen any product marketed at "prosumers" with the description "carrier-grade". That said, there is definitely a tendency among geeks to want their home switch to be a 24-port rack-mountable layer 3 switch instead of some random unmanaged 8-port desk switch marketed at regular consumers. But this can't just be explained by the "geeks are just as big idiots as Joe Sixpack" argument.
If you're a professional who works with the "pro gear" every day and you also have an interest in the same things as a hobby there is a very real chance you want to have equipment at home which is, if not as good as the equipment you use at work, at least approaching the quality of feature-richness of the expensive gear you use at work.
In college I knew a chemical engineering major who was obsessive about chemistry the way many computer geeks are obsessive about computers and electronics and while his "home lab" wasn't on-par with the university's labs he still had thousands of dollars worth of lab equipment and chemical compounds that he had either scavenged and repaired or purchased with his own hard-earned money. By your logic he should've been using the pots and pans he had in his kitchen to not be an idiot...
I've always seen "Trekkie" used as a sort of catch-all for Star Trek fans while "Trekker" was a term I only heard people who took Star Trek way too seriously use about themselves.
Cassettes were huge in indie pop circles a 5-10 years ago because it was retro (about the same time that the kids started going on about "retro" NES games that they were too young to have played when they were new).
There are even some people who think VHS tapes have more "feeling" to them than DVDs, Blurays and digital downloads (you know, because of the low resolution, weird degradation artifacts and other shortcomings).
There's a reason call centers tend to be established in small college towns and similar places, lots of young people with a decent education but not a lot of jobs available. That's not to say there are no jobs, just that someone straight out of college can't exactly pick and choose, so it's easy for people to think "Oh, I'll just do tech support/customer service for a while until I find a real job..." and then end up working there for two or three years before they're so broken psychologically that they just have to quit (or get fired for using their brain or education to actual do their job).
All they know how to do is follow their troubleshooting script, they've likely never used or have even seen the product you're having trouble with.
I can only speak for the two call centers I worked at right out of college (and the two teams I was on) but that's not always true. We knew the products and services we supported inside out, it was just that we often weren't allowed to fix problems (sometimes we were locked out of systems, other times it was just that they would check the logs to make sure people didn't make certain changes to connections).
When talking to others who have worked in tech support I've found that this is surprisingly often the case, they knew a lot more than they were allowed to let the customer know. The problem is of course that there's often no way around this, the guy knows he needs to keep his call times down and that the boss will be really pissed if he actually turns on interleave on your DSL connection, he must go through the script and then escalate it to a 3rd line tech who opens up the same tool the 1st line guy used and clicks the "interleave" checkbox. Have fun waiting two to three business days for that to happen...
The big problem with outsourced tech support tends to be that regardless of where it is situated they tend to get paid based on the number of calls they handle (at least for consumer services, for business products/services they tend to use better metrics). So they have no incentive in letting their employees fix problems (even if they can), just get customers off the line as quickly as possible.
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released in april 2005, 10.5 "Leopard" was released in october 2007. Your Macbook Pro would've shipped with 10.4.4 at the very least, especially since 10.4.4 was the first version of OS X released with support for Intel processors...
Also, a 3 year old Mac Pro should've shipped with 10.5 (since it was released almost four years ago).
And from what I've heard you can burn the 10.7 dmg to a DVD.
And yes, I know v.90 didn't show up until 1999 or whatever but 56k first showed up but there were 56k modems before that...
Ah, but v.90 was horribly slow. Yes, as far as modems went it was fast but it was still slow. My first DSL connection was a 512/800 kbps connection (yes, g.dmt with upstream uncapped), that's almost ten times the speed of a modem connection (not to mention that it had a lot less latency) and even at the time a regular ethernet network would be capable of at least 10 Mbps which in turn is 20 times the speed of the DSL connection.
So yes, 56k was slow (especially after 1996-1997 or so when a lot of content started showing up online that required a faster connection to really be usable).
If you're going to play that game then may I suggest you stop using the web? Y'know, seeing as how it was created by godless commie yurpans...
Go back to Gopher and usenet, please.