Well, without considering the teenagers who pirate one app, consider it the greatest app ever and never even understand that there are other apps available...
I was actually studying to be a game artist a few years back (at a school that had approx. 500 applicants per year and took in 30 or so students every year, several companies recruited people straight from the school without waiting for them to finish their degree. So no, this wasn't "Joe's garage and game development school").
In my experience most people who use Maya or 3dsmax tended to have at least dabbled with a few other pieces of 3D modelling, animation and rendering software but most ended up using Maya or 3dsmax simply because they were the most complete and user friendly (with "user friendly" not meaning "big easy-to-spot buttons to click" but rather "scriptable, extensible and with tons of keyboard shortcuts that you can customize") as well as having good 3rd party plugin support and good workflows. I myself switched between Maya and 3dsmax a lot back then while also toying with early versions of zbrush, trying out blender every few months to see if it had stopped being a pain in the ass (which I have been doing since the NaN days, it's definitely gotten better but I still don't see any really good reason for me to start using Blender beyond "it's free") and of course all the other minor more specialized apps like Rhino.
But hey, feel free to pretend that people who use 3dsmax and Maya "would not recognize Blender as a 3D modeling software if it was in front of them, being used.".
Well, I don't really code in PHP much but I have seen some interesting abuses of source control.
It is by no means limited to PHP developers, especially in a corporate environment. It's lovely when you are told to make daily commits at the end of every day so there's a fuckload of "Daily commit, no changes" comments. Or the ever classic "syncing with production" which means someone made changes to the production code and six months down the line they realized they forgot to commit so they just dump a wildly different codebase into the repository.
Or the countless "bugs fixed" messages that have changes to a dozen different files, have fun figuring out which bugs were fixed in that one...
The worst part is that when that's what the commit logs look like you tend to just give up yourself, no point in even trying when your useful commit comments drown in useless comments (including your own "daily commit, nothing new or changed").
That's strange, because I can't remember the week ever starting on Sundays. For at least the better part of the 20th century Saturday and Sunday were the weekend with Monday through Friday being the regular weekdays, Monday being the first day of the week and Sunday being the last.
But I'm sure there's some "jesus-y" explanation for why Sunday is the first day of the week, and I'm sure that some American will be happy to tell me about it (I know I've gotten such lectures before although I can't remember exactly why it was oh so important that the entire world bend to the will of a handful of post-messianic jews in North America when it came to this issue).
Right, the issue here is of course that if you're writing a random biz app for internal or external use chances are you'll want to use the date and time functions/classes that are supplied to you by the tools you use (or your boss will fire you for wasting time writing an implementation that doesn't require a vendor patch to function properly).
Not to mention legacy systems or systems that handle date and time information in such a way that any changes like this pretty much require manual intervention in order to make the data generated fit into reality.
Now consider that MS still hasn't understood how to properly handle ISO 8601 week numbering (used extensively in Europe) or the countless software development toolchains out there that to this day assume that Sunday is the first day of the week. Do you really want people to keep changing the rules for these things more often?
Yes, the 7610 was pretty old but I've had similar experiences with other more recent smartphones, it's just that it was the last "true smartphone" I had myself pre-iPhone and thus the only one with which I could actually remember the bizarre path to take just in order to launch the browser.
True, I did not have a stylus with my Symbian phone, it was menu driven. The model I was thinking about with regards to the procedure (except using the keys for navigation rather than a stylus) was the Nokia 7610 which was very much a Symbian phone. It was extremely clunky (and didn't have 3G support, only GPRS). I chose the route needed to visit a random website on that phone simply because in my mind it stands out as a great example of horrible UI design (the email client on it was similarly screwy with the added benefit of it attempting to download the full contents of all mailboxes when setting up an IMAP account on it). I'm not even going to go into the out of memory errors that would pop up when receiving a call if the phone had been on for too long...
In my mind the iPhone was still a revolution according to the following definition: "A sudden, vast change in a situation, a discipline, or the way of thinking and behaving.".
The iPhone forced other manufacturers to actually start caring about the user interface and the user experience. Previously it was mostly a competition of feature lists and replaceable phone shells.
Well, before the iPhone most people considered smartphones to be a pain in the ass when it came to the user interface. The only ones who disagreed were the rabid fanboys trying to explain why their new $700 smartphone was super user friendly by letting you access the browser by just using the special pen to tap "menu", then tap "internet", then tap "connections", then tap "<ProviderName> 3G", then tap "Yes, I want to connect", then tap "exit", then tap "Browser", then tap "Menu", then tap "Go to page", then tap "Enter address manually", then type in the url, then hit "Ok" and wait for three minutes while the dog-slow browser attempted to load the page. And yes, that's pretty much the procedure for using the web on my last Nokia (Symbian) phone. Oh, and once you're done you have to shut down the browser and once again head to "connections" to tell it to disconnect...
Before the iPhone the vast majority of mobile phones, "smart" or not, had user interfaces that seemed like they were designed by people who had no idea what a user interface is.
Well, stuff that is hard to find again is so for reason: it is not that good. or popular. those are not synonyms, but it works out like good indicator or worthiness.
They are indeed not synonyms. Especially when it comes to things that are no longer part of popular culture it is very possible that those who hold the rights to the original material don't consider it profitable to release it on DVD or Bluray and most pirates have no interest in releasing it either. It can still be quite good though.
Collections grow because or your mindset - if it is "expensive" to download file, you are unlikely to part with it easily. You just put your own pricetag on file (or link with file emotionally as downloading it again is going to be painfull). Such files just gather dust, seen once and then just considered too precious to delete without taking actual quality of content into account.
While I may not watch the same movies from the 1950s over and over again on a weekly basis I do tend to watch them again every now and then and it would suck to have to spend a week re-downloading it (or looking for an ancient VHS release so I can rip it in horrible quality).
You may find that these files "gather dust", I don't. In my experience the files I rarely re-watch are current TV shows, I might watch them twice at most before I end up deleting them (I only download new shows because I don't have a TV and even if I did I really don't want to wait for months before shows make it here to Sweden).
It is hard thing to do. I know, It is quite hard ot make yourself delete that mp3 for which you waited for week back in dialup years.
I don't really have any music I downloaded in the days of Napster or earlier because they were low-quality and often mislabeled or simply missing id3 tags.
I have no problem deleting stuff that's easy to find again, the problem is all that hard-to-find data. The movie you can't find a DVD or Bluray of and just finding a torrent with seeds took days of searching (not to mention downloading it at a blazing 50 kB/s from the one person seeding it). Removing data like that means that if you ever want to watch it again it will take you days or weeks of preparation.
The problem is that data like that adds up. At first it's just a couple of movies, after a while half the movies you have are movies like that.
I've tried forcing myself to use various schemes including relying completely on metadata and search. The last couple of years this is how I've ended up setting things up:
"Public" network storage
This is for data that should be accessible to the entire network at home. NFS mounted on all my machines, stored on ZFS volume on my file server.
Software/Applications - Application installers and ISOs.
Software/Games - Game installers and ISOs.
Video/compressed - Download directory.
Video/Movies - Hard links from Video/compressed, naming set to work with Plex (for looking up movie info from imdb).
Video/TV Shows - Hard links from Video/compressed, similar naming as for movies.
Music/Rips - Music I've ripped myself, organized by artist and album name.
Music/Downloads/Singles - Single songs downloaded, organized by genre.
Music/Downloads/Albums - Whole downloaded albums, organized by genre.
Private network storage
I use my home directory on the file server (also on the ZFS volume) for storing personal files and mirroring home directories from client machines in ~/Backup/homes/.
Local storage
On individual client machines I generally try to stick with whatever the operating system tries to make me use with an rsync script that syncs everything to the file server (automatically for desktops, run manually on portable machines).
This is what works for me. I would probably have stuck to the "just use metadata" approach if most user interfaces didn't seem to try and make it a major chore to edit and view metadata...
I suspect this is a case of a company trying to play the same games they play in meatspace. Basically is boils down to "follow the letter of the law, not the spirit" with a pinch of of bending the letter of the law every now and then under the assumption that their size and influence will make those upholding the law ignore their transgressions. Unfortunately for them that's not how the "laws" of the internet work...
My experience is that the Ubuntu forums rarely are much help since a lot of the advice that gets passed around there is cargo culture advice.
Basically, if you tell them "Hey, a system update borked my Xorg install and a bunch of other stuff in the following way:.... Has anyone else experienced this? Any tips on how to fix this?" you're likely to get "Open up Synaptic and click..." as a response by some twit who fails to understand that No Xorg => no GUI => no Synaptic.
Indeed. I ended up with Ubuntu on my netbook for a long while simply because when installing Debian the installer would mix up disklabels in various seemingly random ways while the Ubuntu installer actually managed to install grub on the SSD instead of the USB stick I was installing from (the Debian installer when told to install on "/dev/sdb" rather than "/dev/sda" of course borked the whole thing by configuring grub to attempt to load stuff from "/dev/sdb" which didn't exist when the USB stick wasn't attached).
Of course, I eventually solved that problem by setting up a PXE boot server and installing Debian that way, but just the fact that I had a choice between "mess around with the bootloader configuration", "boot over the network" or "just use Ubuntu" kind of highlights the issues with the install process for Debian. It's not a matter of shiny, it's a matter of making sure it doesn't outright break unless you go in and manually edit config files at the right point in the installation procedure.
Something like 90% of end users are running behind nat already. (Ok, I pulled that 90% figure right out of my ass, but you get the point).
If you are talking about consumer NAT routers, that's not the same thing as NAT on the ISP level, that will cause a lot more issues.
Its not the way the net was designed to work, but we've been using it that way since dirt.
Strange, I barely remember NAT being around until the 2000s. Hell, when I was still in college about ten years ago (oh how time flies) the university actually had entire computer labs set up with globally routable adresses and ran all traffic through a firewall that only allowed ssh and a few other things in from outside the university network while other machines on campus or on the student-run network for student apartments (which connected to the internet through the university's internet connection but wasn't administered at all by university staff) had pretty much full access without resorting to private addresses, wonky VPN setups or anything like that.
Putting something in print is "publishing" it and thus you extend that to "putting something on Facebook is publishing because it uses text and it is observable by the public". This is IMO false. A status update on Facebook isn't publishing, at least not in the same way that putting an ad in the paper or writing a newspaper article is publishing, nor is it like writing a lengthy blog post. It is more like saying something in public, only you are doing it with text.
Also, where you live it might be legal to randomly fire people (I know certain US states think it's perfectly reasonable to allow companies to fire you for no reason at all), in a lot of places someone writing something bad about their employer in the paper might be likely to end up with them fired, if the bad things claimed in the paper are false, if they are correct it is more likely that the employer will be afraid to fire the employee because they know the employee will be back with a union-paid lawyer to discuss the unlawful firing of an employee. There are plenty of laws protecting whistleblowers.
I suppose I could technically wait for months until the shows air here in Sweden (because the producers of the content don't want to upset the swedish TV channels by allowing online distribution through the iTunes store or similar venues) but then there's the issue of me not having a TV.
I am willing to pay for TV shows but I can't unless you count "wait for months and then watch a version with commercials at a predetermined time on a device I don't own" as paying.
As a follow-up to the "most bouncers are ok guys" bit. Yeah, I think that's possible but here in Sweden we have had a lot of issues with bouncers who have been shown to have ties to organized crime or otherwise have a checkered past to say the least. Basically a lot of people who aren't really fit to have the authority they have end up in that line of work because the basic requirements are basically "look intimidating and be able to subdue just about anyone".
And as I stated in my original post, it's pretty much standard practice for bouncers here to lie about what happened using their authority and colleagues to turn it from being just two differing statements to "these two upstanding authority figures entrusted by the police to blablabla.. claim that the defendant threw the first punch and they only used the minimum force necessary while the defendant claim he just asked why the unwritten dress code only applied to him when he suddenly got tackled to the ground and beaten". While the "offender" is sitting in police custody the bouncers are talking about what "really" happedn ("You saw him hit me first, right?"). Like I stated before, this has been captured with hidden cameras (how one thing happens and they claim something else happened).
That's not saying they all do that, or even that the majority do it, just that there's a large number of bouncers with a seriously bad attitude (I've also met some very nice ones but overall there are a lot of dicks).
Bouncers may not be the most intelligent people in the world, but on average they know their jobs far better than you. They have far more experience than you. They are breaking up fights every weekend.
Breaking up fights is their job, yes. No argument from me there.
The bouncers actions are pretty well aligned with the management of the club. They want to keep the club as near capacity as possible. When the club is fairly empty, they'll be a lot less fussy about who they let in that if it's full. It's easier to get in a club earlier than late.
Legal issue: That's not how bouncers ("ordningsvakter") here in Sweden are supposed to work. In fact, they're only supposed to be there to maintain order. They're not employees of the club/bar, they're paid per hour and basically work as contractors hired by the clubs/bars because the police demand the club/bar have n bouncers present (based on the size of the establishment, how often there are fights there, etc.)
They don't want trouble. And they'll assess you on that basis. You don't understand the reason that the girl that was drunker than you was let in. But it's perfectly obvious. She's less likely to start a fight than a guy. If you're on your own or in a small mixed party you're far more likely to get in than a group of males.
I love how you skipped my other examples and just went with the easy-to-refute one.
Also, I've seen "tricks" as disgusting as having two bouncers checking IDs and them deliberately splitting a mixed party into mostly-males and mostly-females, rushing the females past the ID check without even checking IDs and then immediately afterwards telling the male members of the group that the bar is "full"...
Then there's dress code. Which can be about serving a particular niche. Or can be about preferring people who are more likely to spend more money on drinks. For sure a club which can attract an affluent crowd don't want to put them off by having scruffy looking people in. Bit it can work the other way too, a club catering to a "cool" crowd of one sort or another may refuse entry to people in business suits.
Once again, not their job to care about dress code, that's something club/bar employees should handle. And most places I go to aren't exactly upscale establishment, more regular bars and clubs for regular people that will let "anyone" in (but occasionally the bouncers will go on a power trip and tell someone they can't come in for no good reason).
They'll be judging on these and many other criteria. What may appear to you as a punter to be refused entry "for no reason", actually does usually have perfectly rational reason behind it.
So explain why a friend of mine who was wasted, staggering around, dressed like a bum, yelling and hollering was let in and then I, who was sober and not acting like an ass, was told I was "too drunk"...
I'm too old to want to go to clubs any more, but in my time I got refused at clubs when I wasn't expecting to go to one, and so wasn't dressed appropriately. I was never refused when I knew I was going and so was dressed appropriately and was in mixed company.
I've been denied access to a bar with the vague "Your friend behaved badly here." excuse. In fact, that's how I was told I was persona non grata at that bar. Now, after asking around it turns out a few other of my friends have been told similar stories at that club. The problem? That place is pretty damn rowdy, the kind of place where dancing on the tables is often tolerated, and the worst thing I can think of anyone I know having done is one friend yelling to another friend from the second floor balcony down to another friend who was leaving (yelling being pretty much required due to the noise level in that place on a regular weekend night). Now, why I would be denied access for that reason is beyond me.
Not every bouncer is an ass but your position seems to be that they're all nice guys just doing their jobs, it's not that simple either.
Is the bouncer thing more common outside of the US, in the EU and Oz or something?
Here in Sweden it's pretty common that bars have a couple of guys who are basically police-licensed security guards (very basic training, have a badge, carry batons) at the door, they'll check your ID and tell you to go away if you're too drunk (I believe from a strictly theoretical POV it's not up to them to turn you away if you're too drunk but they just say the bartender told them to throw you out). They're pretty infamous for causing more violence than they prevent, at least at the door since they have a tendency to turn people away just because they feel like it (there have been examples where hidden cameras have caught them doing things like what I mentioned in my previous post, turning people away for being "too drunk" when they were clearly sober, not letting the "wrong" kind of people in or simply assaulting people who wanted to know why they couldn't come in and then claiming that they were the ones who were assaulted).
The biggest problem with a system like this is actually in erroneous bannings.
I have seen way too many times how the bouncers at a bar or club have thrown people out or simply not allowed them entry for no reason at all. Not to mention that trying to have a polite conversation with them can very well result in you being tackled to the ground and getting arrested for "assaulting" the bouncer (with his buddy of course telling the cops he saw the whole thing).
I have myself on several occasions been told I wasn't allowed in because I was "too drunk" even though I had only consumed one or two beers, one time a friend of mine was allowed in seconds before me and he was so drunk he could barely stand up (not to mention that clothing-wise he looked like a mess with torn and dirty clothes). With a system like this I have no doubt that some bouncer somewhere would've put me on the list for trying to figure out why he thought I was drunk when the girl in front of me in the line who smelled like vodka and vomit wasn't. And good luck getting off the list once you're on it...
What if plumbing was as reliable as the average home computer? I get virus definition updates from my doctor at most once a year, yet my computer's anti-virus software updates daily.
Well, that's not really my fault now, is it?
Maybe the tech geeks who help out family and friends spend so much time on it because, rather than an issue of demanding acquaintances, the help being given just isn't that helpful.
Oh, I should've mentioned that I've stopped giving friends and family tech help with the excuse that I mostly do server-side software development (thus implying that I have no idea how desktop computers work, I'm amazed it works on most people).
I used to be a bitter geek like so many folks here. Then I realized, when I bought my first house I got help from family who work in Real Estate. I get advice from family who work in the financial industry. I get help from CPAs and lawyers and all sorts of folks who know stuff I don't know.
I'm not bitter. If you weren't implying I was then perhaps you should've answered another post?
Also, I've never had any need to get "pro" help from friends and family with the exception of my father on a couple of occasions but even then it's either been "help me lift this" or "so do you think it makes sense to weld this part to this other part?", not exactly hours of his time...
It turns out, I also know stuff those people don't know. That does not make me a precious snowflake.
Get over yourself. You're not that important to the world.
Speaking of bitter, you sound like a teenager who just read/watched Fight Club for the first time...
The problem with the "a little over 3.5 hours of your time" is that it's not just once that this happens. And a lot of people who ask for help seem to think that I (and other geeks) should be thankful for the chance to revive their aging desktop.
With most other fields, from what I've seen at least, there's an expectation of quid pro quo. If your electrician friend helps you with your wiring then you help him with something else (or pay him under the table).
As for equipment costs, if your friends know you have a lot of computer and electronics gear lying about at home then they seem to assume that you'll have a free spare DVD-ROM drive or power supply for them. After all, you have so much of it.
Also, I don't think I've ever seen/heard anyone I know in medical professions get similar treatments as the one you describe, the closest I've seen has been when they themselves decide to start talking about their jobs at parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, without considering the teenagers who pirate one app, consider it the greatest app ever and never even understand that there are other apps available...
I was actually studying to be a game artist a few years back (at a school that had approx. 500 applicants per year and took in 30 or so students every year, several companies recruited people straight from the school without waiting for them to finish their degree. So no, this wasn't "Joe's garage and game development school").
In my experience most people who use Maya or 3dsmax tended to have at least dabbled with a few other pieces of 3D modelling, animation and rendering software but most ended up using Maya or 3dsmax simply because they were the most complete and user friendly (with "user friendly" not meaning "big easy-to-spot buttons to click" but rather "scriptable, extensible and with tons of keyboard shortcuts that you can customize") as well as having good 3rd party plugin support and good workflows. I myself switched between Maya and 3dsmax a lot back then while also toying with early versions of zbrush, trying out blender every few months to see if it had stopped being a pain in the ass (which I have been doing since the NaN days, it's definitely gotten better but I still don't see any really good reason for me to start using Blender beyond "it's free") and of course all the other minor more specialized apps like Rhino.
But hey, feel free to pretend that people who use 3dsmax and Maya "would not recognize Blender as a 3D modeling software if it was in front of them, being used.".
Well, I don't really code in PHP much but I have seen some interesting abuses of source control.
It is by no means limited to PHP developers, especially in a corporate environment. It's lovely when you are told to make daily commits at the end of every day so there's a fuckload of "Daily commit, no changes" comments. Or the ever classic "syncing with production" which means someone made changes to the production code and six months down the line they realized they forgot to commit so they just dump a wildly different codebase into the repository.
Or the countless "bugs fixed" messages that have changes to a dozen different files, have fun figuring out which bugs were fixed in that one...
The worst part is that when that's what the commit logs look like you tend to just give up yourself, no point in even trying when your useful commit comments drown in useless comments (including your own "daily commit, nothing new or changed").
That's strange, because I can't remember the week ever starting on Sundays. For at least the better part of the 20th century Saturday and Sunday were the weekend with Monday through Friday being the regular weekdays, Monday being the first day of the week and Sunday being the last.
But I'm sure there's some "jesus-y" explanation for why Sunday is the first day of the week, and I'm sure that some American will be happy to tell me about it (I know I've gotten such lectures before although I can't remember exactly why it was oh so important that the entire world bend to the will of a handful of post-messianic jews in North America when it came to this issue).
Right, the issue here is of course that if you're writing a random biz app for internal or external use chances are you'll want to use the date and time functions/classes that are supplied to you by the tools you use (or your boss will fire you for wasting time writing an implementation that doesn't require a vendor patch to function properly).
Not to mention legacy systems or systems that handle date and time information in such a way that any changes like this pretty much require manual intervention in order to make the data generated fit into reality.
Now consider that MS still hasn't understood how to properly handle ISO 8601 week numbering (used extensively in Europe) or the countless software development toolchains out there that to this day assume that Sunday is the first day of the week. Do you really want people to keep changing the rules for these things more often?
However, this can be vetoed by the Scottish Parliment. I hope it does, or else we'll be having dawn at 9am during winter.
Yeah, that does sound a bit early. That was what you meant, right?
Yes, the 7610 was pretty old but I've had similar experiences with other more recent smartphones, it's just that it was the last "true smartphone" I had myself pre-iPhone and thus the only one with which I could actually remember the bizarre path to take just in order to launch the browser.
True, I did not have a stylus with my Symbian phone, it was menu driven. The model I was thinking about with regards to the procedure (except using the keys for navigation rather than a stylus) was the Nokia 7610 which was very much a Symbian phone. It was extremely clunky (and didn't have 3G support, only GPRS). I chose the route needed to visit a random website on that phone simply because in my mind it stands out as a great example of horrible UI design (the email client on it was similarly screwy with the added benefit of it attempting to download the full contents of all mailboxes when setting up an IMAP account on it). I'm not even going to go into the out of memory errors that would pop up when receiving a call if the phone had been on for too long...
In my mind the iPhone was still a revolution according to the following definition: "A sudden, vast change in a situation, a discipline, or the way of thinking and behaving.".
The iPhone forced other manufacturers to actually start caring about the user interface and the user experience. Previously it was mostly a competition of feature lists and replaceable phone shells.
Well, before the iPhone most people considered smartphones to be a pain in the ass when it came to the user interface. The only ones who disagreed were the rabid fanboys trying to explain why their new $700 smartphone was super user friendly by letting you access the browser by just using the special pen to tap "menu", then tap "internet", then tap "connections", then tap "<ProviderName> 3G", then tap "Yes, I want to connect", then tap "exit", then tap "Browser", then tap "Menu", then tap "Go to page", then tap "Enter address manually", then type in the url, then hit "Ok" and wait for three minutes while the dog-slow browser attempted to load the page. And yes, that's pretty much the procedure for using the web on my last Nokia (Symbian) phone. Oh, and once you're done you have to shut down the browser and once again head to "connections" to tell it to disconnect...
Before the iPhone the vast majority of mobile phones, "smart" or not, had user interfaces that seemed like they were designed by people who had no idea what a user interface is.
Firearms, on the other hand, depend upon other things.
Like... the element of surprise? Now, how could a rapist or a robber possibly have that?
If I could I would remind the speaker than in the long run, there is no survival, no matter how many worlds we infest.
Oh really? Are you entirely sure of that?
And of course, a sci-fi reference...
Well, stuff that is hard to find again is so for reason: it is not that good. or popular. those are not synonyms, but it works out like good indicator or worthiness.
They are indeed not synonyms. Especially when it comes to things that are no longer part of popular culture it is very possible that those who hold the rights to the original material don't consider it profitable to release it on DVD or Bluray and most pirates have no interest in releasing it either. It can still be quite good though.
Collections grow because or your mindset - if it is "expensive" to download file, you are unlikely to part with it easily. You just put your own pricetag on file (or link with file emotionally as downloading it again is going to be painfull). Such files just gather dust, seen once and then just considered too precious to delete without taking actual quality of content into account.
While I may not watch the same movies from the 1950s over and over again on a weekly basis I do tend to watch them again every now and then and it would suck to have to spend a week re-downloading it (or looking for an ancient VHS release so I can rip it in horrible quality).
You may find that these files "gather dust", I don't. In my experience the files I rarely re-watch are current TV shows, I might watch them twice at most before I end up deleting them (I only download new shows because I don't have a TV and even if I did I really don't want to wait for months before shows make it here to Sweden).
It is hard thing to do. I know, It is quite hard ot make yourself delete that mp3 for which you waited for week back in dialup years.
I don't really have any music I downloaded in the days of Napster or earlier because they were low-quality and often mislabeled or simply missing id3 tags.
I have no problem deleting stuff that's easy to find again, the problem is all that hard-to-find data. The movie you can't find a DVD or Bluray of and just finding a torrent with seeds took days of searching (not to mention downloading it at a blazing 50 kB/s from the one person seeding it). Removing data like that means that if you ever want to watch it again it will take you days or weeks of preparation.
The problem is that data like that adds up. At first it's just a couple of movies, after a while half the movies you have are movies like that.
I've tried forcing myself to use various schemes including relying completely on metadata and search. The last couple of years this is how I've ended up setting things up:
"Public" network storage
This is for data that should be accessible to the entire network at home. NFS mounted on all my machines, stored on ZFS volume on my file server.
Private network storage
I use my home directory on the file server (also on the ZFS volume) for storing personal files and mirroring home directories from client machines in ~/Backup/homes/.
Local storage
On individual client machines I generally try to stick with whatever the operating system tries to make me use with an rsync script that syncs everything to the file server (automatically for desktops, run manually on portable machines).
This is what works for me. I would probably have stuck to the "just use metadata" approach if most user interfaces didn't seem to try and make it a major chore to edit and view metadata...
I suspect this is a case of a company trying to play the same games they play in meatspace. Basically is boils down to "follow the letter of the law, not the spirit" with a pinch of of bending the letter of the law every now and then under the assumption that their size and influence will make those upholding the law ignore their transgressions. Unfortunately for them that's not how the "laws" of the internet work...
My experience is that the Ubuntu forums rarely are much help since a lot of the advice that gets passed around there is cargo culture advice.
Basically, if you tell them "Hey, a system update borked my Xorg install and a bunch of other stuff in the following way: .... Has anyone else experienced this? Any tips on how to fix this?" you're likely to get "Open up Synaptic and click..." as a response by some twit who fails to understand that No Xorg => no GUI => no Synaptic.
Indeed. I ended up with Ubuntu on my netbook for a long while simply because when installing Debian the installer would mix up disklabels in various seemingly random ways while the Ubuntu installer actually managed to install grub on the SSD instead of the USB stick I was installing from (the Debian installer when told to install on "/dev/sdb" rather than "/dev/sda" of course borked the whole thing by configuring grub to attempt to load stuff from "/dev/sdb" which didn't exist when the USB stick wasn't attached).
Of course, I eventually solved that problem by setting up a PXE boot server and installing Debian that way, but just the fact that I had a choice between "mess around with the bootloader configuration", "boot over the network" or "just use Ubuntu" kind of highlights the issues with the install process for Debian. It's not a matter of shiny, it's a matter of making sure it doesn't outright break unless you go in and manually edit config files at the right point in the installation procedure.
Something like 90% of end users are running behind nat already. (Ok, I pulled that 90% figure right out of my ass, but you get the point).
If you are talking about consumer NAT routers, that's not the same thing as NAT on the ISP level, that will cause a lot more issues.
Its not the way the net was designed to work, but we've been using it that way since dirt.
Strange, I barely remember NAT being around until the 2000s. Hell, when I was still in college about ten years ago (oh how time flies) the university actually had entire computer labs set up with globally routable adresses and ran all traffic through a firewall that only allowed ssh and a few other things in from outside the university network while other machines on campus or on the student-run network for student apartments (which connected to the internet through the university's internet connection but wasn't administered at all by university staff) had pretty much full access without resorting to private addresses, wonky VPN setups or anything like that.
I think you are wrong.
Putting something in print is "publishing" it and thus you extend that to "putting something on Facebook is publishing because it uses text and it is observable by the public". This is IMO false. A status update on Facebook isn't publishing, at least not in the same way that putting an ad in the paper or writing a newspaper article is publishing, nor is it like writing a lengthy blog post. It is more like saying something in public, only you are doing it with text.
Also, where you live it might be legal to randomly fire people (I know certain US states think it's perfectly reasonable to allow companies to fire you for no reason at all), in a lot of places someone writing something bad about their employer in the paper might be likely to end up with them fired, if the bad things claimed in the paper are false, if they are correct it is more likely that the employer will be afraid to fire the employee because they know the employee will be back with a union-paid lawyer to discuss the unlawful firing of an employee. There are plenty of laws protecting whistleblowers.
I'd pay for it if I could.
That's my main argument for TV shows.
I suppose I could technically wait for months until the shows air here in Sweden (because the producers of the content don't want to upset the swedish TV channels by allowing online distribution through the iTunes store or similar venues) but then there's the issue of me not having a TV.
I am willing to pay for TV shows but I can't unless you count "wait for months and then watch a version with commercials at a predetermined time on a device I don't own" as paying.
As a follow-up to the "most bouncers are ok guys" bit. Yeah, I think that's possible but here in Sweden we have had a lot of issues with bouncers who have been shown to have ties to organized crime or otherwise have a checkered past to say the least. Basically a lot of people who aren't really fit to have the authority they have end up in that line of work because the basic requirements are basically "look intimidating and be able to subdue just about anyone".
And as I stated in my original post, it's pretty much standard practice for bouncers here to lie about what happened using their authority and colleagues to turn it from being just two differing statements to "these two upstanding authority figures entrusted by the police to blablabla.. claim that the defendant threw the first punch and they only used the minimum force necessary while the defendant claim he just asked why the unwritten dress code only applied to him when he suddenly got tackled to the ground and beaten". While the "offender" is sitting in police custody the bouncers are talking about what "really" happedn ("You saw him hit me first, right?"). Like I stated before, this has been captured with hidden cameras (how one thing happens and they claim something else happened).
That's not saying they all do that, or even that the majority do it, just that there's a large number of bouncers with a seriously bad attitude (I've also met some very nice ones but overall there are a lot of dicks).
Bouncers may not be the most intelligent people in the world, but on average they know their jobs far better than you. They have far more experience than you. They are breaking up fights every weekend.
Breaking up fights is their job, yes. No argument from me there.
The bouncers actions are pretty well aligned with the management of the club. They want to keep the club as near capacity as possible. When the club is fairly empty, they'll be a lot less fussy about who they let in that if it's full. It's easier to get in a club earlier than late.
Legal issue: That's not how bouncers ("ordningsvakter") here in Sweden are supposed to work. In fact, they're only supposed to be there to maintain order. They're not employees of the club/bar, they're paid per hour and basically work as contractors hired by the clubs/bars because the police demand the club/bar have n bouncers present (based on the size of the establishment, how often there are fights there, etc.)
They don't want trouble. And they'll assess you on that basis. You don't understand the reason that the girl that was drunker than you was let in. But it's perfectly obvious. She's less likely to start a fight than a guy. If you're on your own or in a small mixed party you're far more likely to get in than a group of males.
I love how you skipped my other examples and just went with the easy-to-refute one.
Also, I've seen "tricks" as disgusting as having two bouncers checking IDs and them deliberately splitting a mixed party into mostly-males and mostly-females, rushing the females past the ID check without even checking IDs and then immediately afterwards telling the male members of the group that the bar is "full"...
Then there's dress code. Which can be about serving a particular niche. Or can be about preferring people who are more likely to spend more money on drinks. For sure a club which can attract an affluent crowd don't want to put them off by having scruffy looking people in. Bit it can work the other way too, a club catering to a "cool" crowd of one sort or another may refuse entry to people in business suits.
Once again, not their job to care about dress code, that's something club/bar employees should handle. And most places I go to aren't exactly upscale establishment, more regular bars and clubs for regular people that will let "anyone" in (but occasionally the bouncers will go on a power trip and tell someone they can't come in for no good reason).
They'll be judging on these and many other criteria. What may appear to you as a punter to be refused entry "for no reason", actually does usually have perfectly rational reason behind it.
So explain why a friend of mine who was wasted, staggering around, dressed like a bum, yelling and hollering was let in and then I, who was sober and not acting like an ass, was told I was "too drunk"...
I'm too old to want to go to clubs any more, but in my time I got refused at clubs when I wasn't expecting to go to one, and so wasn't dressed appropriately. I was never refused when I knew I was going and so was dressed appropriately and was in mixed company.
I've been denied access to a bar with the vague "Your friend behaved badly here." excuse. In fact, that's how I was told I was persona non grata at that bar. Now, after asking around it turns out a few other of my friends have been told similar stories at that club. The problem? That place is pretty damn rowdy, the kind of place where dancing on the tables is often tolerated, and the worst thing I can think of anyone I know having done is one friend yelling to another friend from the second floor balcony down to another friend who was leaving (yelling being pretty much required due to the noise level in that place on a regular weekend night). Now, why I would be denied access for that reason is beyond me.
Not every bouncer is an ass but your position seems to be that they're all nice guys just doing their jobs, it's not that simple either.
Is the bouncer thing more common outside of the US, in the EU and Oz or something?
Here in Sweden it's pretty common that bars have a couple of guys who are basically police-licensed security guards (very basic training, have a badge, carry batons) at the door, they'll check your ID and tell you to go away if you're too drunk (I believe from a strictly theoretical POV it's not up to them to turn you away if you're too drunk but they just say the bartender told them to throw you out). They're pretty infamous for causing more violence than they prevent, at least at the door since they have a tendency to turn people away just because they feel like it (there have been examples where hidden cameras have caught them doing things like what I mentioned in my previous post, turning people away for being "too drunk" when they were clearly sober, not letting the "wrong" kind of people in or simply assaulting people who wanted to know why they couldn't come in and then claiming that they were the ones who were assaulted).
The biggest problem with a system like this is actually in erroneous bannings.
I have seen way too many times how the bouncers at a bar or club have thrown people out or simply not allowed them entry for no reason at all. Not to mention that trying to have a polite conversation with them can very well result in you being tackled to the ground and getting arrested for "assaulting" the bouncer (with his buddy of course telling the cops he saw the whole thing).
I have myself on several occasions been told I wasn't allowed in because I was "too drunk" even though I had only consumed one or two beers, one time a friend of mine was allowed in seconds before me and he was so drunk he could barely stand up (not to mention that clothing-wise he looked like a mess with torn and dirty clothes). With a system like this I have no doubt that some bouncer somewhere would've put me on the list for trying to figure out why he thought I was drunk when the girl in front of me in the line who smelled like vodka and vomit wasn't. And good luck getting off the list once you're on it...
What if plumbing was as reliable as the average home computer? I get virus definition updates from my doctor at most once a year, yet my computer's anti-virus software updates daily.
Well, that's not really my fault now, is it?
Maybe the tech geeks who help out family and friends spend so much time on it because, rather than an issue of demanding acquaintances, the help being given just isn't that helpful.
Oh, I should've mentioned that I've stopped giving friends and family tech help with the excuse that I mostly do server-side software development (thus implying that I have no idea how desktop computers work, I'm amazed it works on most people).
I used to be a bitter geek like so many folks here. Then I realized, when I bought my first house I got help from family who work in Real Estate. I get advice from family who work in the financial industry. I get help from CPAs and lawyers and all sorts of folks who know stuff I don't know.
I'm not bitter. If you weren't implying I was then perhaps you should've answered another post?
Also, I've never had any need to get "pro" help from friends and family with the exception of my father on a couple of occasions but even then it's either been "help me lift this" or "so do you think it makes sense to weld this part to this other part?", not exactly hours of his time...
It turns out, I also know stuff those people don't know. That does not make me a precious snowflake. Get over yourself. You're not that important to the world.
Speaking of bitter, you sound like a teenager who just read/watched Fight Club for the first time...
The problem with the "a little over 3.5 hours of your time" is that it's not just once that this happens. And a lot of people who ask for help seem to think that I (and other geeks) should be thankful for the chance to revive their aging desktop.
With most other fields, from what I've seen at least, there's an expectation of quid pro quo. If your electrician friend helps you with your wiring then you help him with something else (or pay him under the table).
As for equipment costs, if your friends know you have a lot of computer and electronics gear lying about at home then they seem to assume that you'll have a free spare DVD-ROM drive or power supply for them. After all, you have so much of it.
Also, I don't think I've ever seen/heard anyone I know in medical professions get similar treatments as the one you describe, the closest I've seen has been when they themselves decide to start talking about their jobs at parties.