I have a cousin who fits your description perfectly. He's a deadbeat, who has wept crocodile tears at everyone around him, stolen from his own parents, gotten religion, conned the Hell's Angels, all for a quick buck.
His older and younger brother are fantastic guys, pillars of the community. Somehow the middle one just...slipped.
Maybe it's genetics, and maybe it's FAS (something that wasn't diagnosed or even believed in, that far back). Doesn't much matter--he's digging his own grave, and his family won't help him with it.
There is nothing in Windows that is superior to Linux, except for the automation of the user interface. It is the single most unstable, unreliable, maintenance-consuming OS available today, bar none.
Linux takes second place on that podium, unfortunately. The closer it gets to mainstream, the less it has to accomplish, other than being "better than Windows." As a minimum, it does this well for most things.
OSX, BSD, VMS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, D/UX, IRIX, they're all better. Unfortunately, Linux is pandering to the lowest common denominator, plus 10%.
It's entirely possible. However, a lot of the cryptic bits are carefully invented shortcuts to shorten code, either syntactically or logically. "Programming Algorithms in Perl" has some good examples of this.
Basically, Perl offers the opportunity to write more condensed code than most other languages.
Honestly, it doesn't matter. The cart came before the horse in this case, but regardless of its acronymic meaning (or lack thereof) when it was created, Perl DOES now stand for Practical Extraction and Report Language. Just ask Larry Wall. Remeber that a "Backronym" (hate that word!) is a subtype of acronym.
"Any IT department that fears its users are learning too much is a goddamn shitty IT department. Seriously."
One hundred (100) percent (%) right.
Furthermore, you've already addressed the loophole in this:
"We just 'lay down the law' in terms of what users are allowed to install and uninstall and we never have to take away privileges from people that know what they're doing."
Once in a while, no matter what the group (and this gets much more frequent with less skilled users), someone figures they don't have to follow rules. Easy enough to deal with--shut them down.
Good IT departments will develop a clear and firm set of rules. Some will proactively enforce them with software (i.e. webfilters, quotas, purging MP3 and MPEG files, etc.) and some will rely on the professionalism of the employees to police themselves. The ones who enforce the rules (or worse--arbitrary and unwritten rules) vigorously out of fear are the useless ones.
General answer from IT: 1) Fine, but if you have problems, you're absolutely on your own. 2) If we have problems because of your system, we're going to get the CIO to shut you down so fast and hard, your head will spin.
Case in point: We had one application group decide that IT was busy enough, so they'd set up their own license server on one of their workstations. They had problems with it, they phoned IT, and IT said, "sorry, it's a workstation problem--go work on another machine" (there are several shared public machines on their floor). It's a server you say? Not in my eyes it's not--you've circumvented us, so don't count on us for help after that point. They were also not very happy when the scripted rebuild of workstations blew away their license server. Tough.
About a decade ago, I lived in the US (Southern California, to be specific). I said something about an Oriental friend to a coworker whose grandparents had been born in China and brought to the US when they were infants. He immediately got offended at the use of the term "Oriental," and said that I should use Asian-American. After I pointed out to him that the subject in question wasn't actually American, I asked him what was wrong with the term Oriental. To the best of my knowledge, Oriental has never generally been used detrimentally, but he insisted it was offensive. Somehow. For no reason that he could articulate. Even better, he refused to allow Russians, Ukrainians, Turks, Mongols, or Kazakhs to share in his use of the word Asian. Asian referred strictly to people from (or descended from) China, Japan, and Korea. No one else was allowed.
And this is someone who was born in California, whose parents were born in California, and whose grandparents were raised in California.
OK, ignoring all of my instinctive need for anti-Stupid_US_partisan_protectionist_lobby_group rhetoric, let me just make a simple point for the simple minds at the IIPA:
Camcorder copies of movies don't hurt sales! They don't hurt theatre sales, and they don't hurt video sales. That is, unless word gets out that the movie is CRAP.
Make good movies and quit worrying about having to force people to watch them.
Jason Ellis is a 'black activist.' As near as I can tell, that seems to consist of forcing race distinctions into an artificial world, no matter how little they belong there.
All good questions. His albums have sold modestly; the Juno-nominated one was in one of the 'other' categories (Best Aboriginal Album), so not huge sales. So as a result, Nelly Furtado gets the lion's share of this money (if any artists have ever gotten any--which I'm not sure has truly been established) and the musicians who are scraping by get nothing. Not a little bit, but NOTHING.
Then consider that while my brother is recording gigs, practices, jam sessions, etc., any copies of original music that they've burned to CDR, they have to pay a bloody levy to NELLY FURTADO!!!
This isn't just a cash grab, it's theft from the populace, giving to the record companies and their pets.
My brother is a full-time professional musician in Alberta, and has been now for about 20 years. It's not an easy job, but it's his love and his passion.
He's now been an artist on about six albums over the years, one of which was nominated for a Juno. Why, pray tell, has he not gotten a single bloody cent from this tariff?
If I didn't know better, I'd almost believe that the point of it isn't actually to reward the musicians! But of course, that's just crazy talk.
Fascinating stuff. This is pretty clearly evil and dangerous behaviour, at least from a cursory glance at the application. However, it
is
actually fairly innovative and unique. Now to the best of my knowledge, patents aren't supposed to be concerned with the morality of the application, but the originality and non-obviousness of it.
Microsoft should be hung out to dry for this, but from a patent aspect, it's valid.
Here's a quote from Richard Stallman: "It turns out that perhaps it's a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it's not too late and we're going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals."
Charming, I'm sure. Software wants to be free, and we'll bludgeon anyone who thinks otherwise.
Part of me agrees with that idea, although I'd be tempted to toss an Atari 800 at them, since that's what I grew up with.
But wait--why would we stop there? Why not give them a Commodore Pet? An Altair? A PDP-8? A bag of transistors? A bag of tubes?
For ages, people have lamented the loss of a degree of nitty-grittyness that existed in a previous generation of whatever the discussion is about, especially the last generation of hands-on gear and users. In aviation, it was the jet engine that made people idolize the WWII prop planes. In cars, the electronic ignition and injection systems closed the book on backyard engine rebuilding and tuning. (Even among the tuners, how common is it to find a timing light and a bottle of ether nowadays?) With computers, it was 'round about Windows95 that we lost the tinkering ability for the most part. Yeah, we've got Linux and Unix but even at that--look at Mac OSX, and you'll see the future of computing.
Kids in school now aren't going to grow up knowing about such things because they can't learn it and catch up all the way to the present-day, unless they develop it as a hobby (much like I have a friend who makes small Stirling engines) or spend two lifetimes to get to the point where they can program modern computers. This is a pity, because raw knowledge of things is absolutely fantastic, and usually the source of great innovation. At the same time, the current general state-of-the-art doesn't advance from basic principles--it advances from last week's state of the art, so they have to be brought up on current computer technology if they're going to advance things.
And yes, we'll lose some stuff along the way. Coding (in)efficiency will become orders of magnitude worse. Honestly, we need a GIGAHERTZ processor and 524288kB of RAM just to drive the OS in a computer running Vista? (not to mention the equivalent of roughly 22 thousand 5.25" Apple/Commodore/Atari floppy disks, or 200 million Hollerith cards!) But we can already do things that people didn't imagine computers for, and we're only starting.
The days of advertising as a source of information for products have been dead for somewhere just short of 20 years. I watch stuff I've taped off of TV over the years, and it was around the late 1980s that advertising eliminated product content from its messages, and replaced it with pure lust-inducing misdirection.
Ah yes. As opposed to a "crescent wrench" which consists of a rough-shaped billet and a sticker that says, "some assembly required." Yep, that's a great analogy.
Regardless, a crescent wrench is a very simple tool, and is easy to use. Complex tools require more effort. A torque wrench requires more knowledge and skill than a crescent wrench. A lathe is more difficult to use than a circular saw. A modern computer is many orders of magnitude more complex than any of them (strictly from the interface/usage aspect, ignoring the actual design and implementation), so much so that the analogy is false.
Computers as they stand right now will break and require support. Windows sucks and needs MS support. Linux sucks and needs support from wherever. Solaris sucks and needs support from Sun. HP-UX, AIX, VMS, OpenBSD, OS-9, MacOS, they ALL have the potential to behave badly, especially when 'good' is defined as consistent flawless behaviour for marginally trained users. They're insanely complex tools, and most are being wielded by people who barely know where the power switch is. (Hint: Give MacOS to 95% of the consumers out there, and see what the support calls are like).
Is Windows great? No, it's not. In fact, it's horrible--the worst commercial OS I've worked with, and that's saying a lot. However, Windows flaws don't automatically make Linux a panacea. Linux has its flaws (a lot of them, in fact), and this is the key point: its flaws may be less damning for professional computing, but are more visible to the end user.
Bob doesn't care about kernel design. Bob cares when the latest automatic patch to his computer makes the internet stop working. Bob is also not going to patch his computer AT ALL unless it's automatic. Microsoft has better autopatch tools, and their patch-compatibility is better than Linux. (As an aside, Solaris has really poor autopatch tools, but for over a decade has patch compatibility and backwards compatability that MS and Linux won't be able to reach without five years of focussed, dedicated effort.)
The bottom line is that Linux is a better-designed OS than Windows, but (a) still ain't perfect, and (b) doesn't serve the needs of most average users as well. The tool for them isn't actually the computer or the OS, or even the web browser: It's the web page. Until you accept that degree of abstraction, your view of computing is going to be continually frustrated by reality.
Congratulations on the stupidest post of the day, despite a good subject line.
Most people don't want computers to be fun, they don't want to put random things onto them, and they don't want to prove other people wrong about their computer abilities. Computers are just the tool they use to do the things they want, and Linux is not the best choice for most people.
"Information collected is anonymous, and no personal statistics are retained." How many times have we heard that? How happy does it make you feel?
Sure, they can't find out that you, Willy Loman, record and re-watch the feminine hygiene commercials several times over. However, they do know through that lovely anonymous information, just how they can appeal better to different demographics and hone their pitches accordingly. This seems fairly harmless until you consider that the primary purpose of advertising is no longer to inform people of a product or its features. The primary purpose of advertising is to convince people to buy something they don't want, and more information will allow them to do this better all the time. Do you think you're too smart for them, that you don't buy stuff from ads but actually research things instead? You're the target they're after--YOU are the person they want to sell crap to, and the thing that made you watch a commercial during the Superbowl or Battlestar Galactica is the same thing that will eventually sell you tooth whiteners or "anti-bacterial" soap.
In short, just because it's anonymous collective information doesn't mean that it's not being used for nefarious purposes.
Personally, yes I do. Companies who bully their way into tax breaks and get away with it because 'it helps more than it hurts' are dirty companies. Of course, that's every company bigger than five stores in a chain.
Unrestricted capitalism is eventually a horrible idea. Always.
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a) That shouldn't have to matter to him.
b) That is why Wikipedia is a cute experiment that has outgrown its lifespan.
And you win...
Runner up for best comment of this thread! Congratulations!
Seriously, that was pretty good. And I'm old enough to remember why it's funny.
Absolutely BRILLIANT bloody response! Best thing I've read on /. in weeks, if not months or years!
Thanks, I needed that.
I know a lot of teachers.
The good ones wish that parents would be forced to pass a test before becoming pregnant.
The bad ones wish the kids had never been born.
You seem to fall in the latter category.
Point well written, and (hopefully) well taken.
I have a cousin who fits your description perfectly. He's a deadbeat, who has wept crocodile tears at everyone around him, stolen from his own parents, gotten religion, conned the Hell's Angels, all for a quick buck.
His older and younger brother are fantastic guys, pillars of the community. Somehow the middle one just...slipped.
Maybe it's genetics, and maybe it's FAS (something that wasn't diagnosed or even believed in, that far back). Doesn't much matter--he's digging his own grave, and his family won't help him with it.
There is nothing in Windows that is superior to Linux, except for the automation of the user interface. It is the single most unstable, unreliable, maintenance-consuming OS available today, bar none.
Linux takes second place on that podium, unfortunately. The closer it gets to mainstream, the less it has to accomplish, other than being "better than Windows." As a minimum, it does this well for most things.
OSX, BSD, VMS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, D/UX, IRIX, they're all better. Unfortunately, Linux is pandering to the lowest common denominator, plus 10%.
It's entirely possible. However, a lot of the cryptic bits are carefully invented shortcuts to shorten code, either syntactically or logically. "Programming Algorithms in Perl" has some good examples of this.
Basically, Perl offers the opportunity to write more condensed code than most other languages.
Honestly, it doesn't matter. The cart came before the horse in this case, but regardless of its acronymic meaning (or lack thereof) when it was created, Perl DOES now stand for Practical Extraction and Report Language. Just ask Larry Wall.
Remeber that a "Backronym" (hate that word!) is a subtype of acronym.
"Any IT department that fears its users are learning too much is a goddamn shitty IT department. Seriously."
One hundred (100) percent (%) right.
Furthermore, you've already addressed the loophole in this:
"We just 'lay down the law' in terms of what users are allowed to install and uninstall and we never have to take away privileges from people that know what they're doing."
Once in a while, no matter what the group (and this gets much more frequent with less skilled users), someone figures they don't have to follow rules. Easy enough to deal with--shut them down.
Good IT departments will develop a clear and firm set of rules. Some will proactively enforce them with software (i.e. webfilters, quotas, purging MP3 and MPEG files, etc.) and some will rely on the professionalism of the employees to police themselves. The ones who enforce the rules (or worse--arbitrary and unwritten rules) vigorously out of fear are the useless ones.
General answer from IT: 1) Fine, but if you have problems, you're absolutely on your own. 2) If we have problems because of your system, we're going to get the CIO to shut you down so fast and hard, your head will spin.
Case in point: We had one application group decide that IT was busy enough, so they'd set up their own license server on one of their workstations. They had problems with it, they phoned IT, and IT said, "sorry, it's a workstation problem--go work on another machine" (there are several shared public machines on their floor). It's a server you say? Not in my eyes it's not--you've circumvented us, so don't count on us for help after that point.
They were also not very happy when the scripted rebuild of workstations blew away their license server. Tough.
Funny story that your post brings to mind.
About a decade ago, I lived in the US (Southern California, to be specific). I said something about an Oriental friend to a coworker whose grandparents had been born in China and brought to the US when they were infants. He immediately got offended at the use of the term "Oriental," and said that I should use Asian-American. After I pointed out to him that the subject in question wasn't actually American, I asked him what was wrong with the term Oriental. To the best of my knowledge, Oriental has never generally been used detrimentally, but he insisted it was offensive. Somehow. For no reason that he could articulate.
Even better, he refused to allow Russians, Ukrainians, Turks, Mongols, or Kazakhs to share in his use of the word Asian. Asian referred strictly to people from (or descended from) China, Japan, and Korea. No one else was allowed.
And this is someone who was born in California, whose parents were born in California, and whose grandparents were raised in California.
Sigh.
OK, ignoring all of my instinctive need for anti-Stupid_US_partisan_protectionist_lobby_group rhetoric, let me just make a simple point for the simple minds at the IIPA:
Camcorder copies of movies don't hurt sales! They don't hurt theatre sales, and they don't hurt video sales. That is, unless word gets out that the movie is CRAP.
Make good movies and quit worrying about having to force people to watch them.
I was going to mod your comment up, but I ran out of points a few minutes ago.
However, I do have a screwdriver I can lend to the cause.
Jason Ellis is a 'black activist.' As near as I can tell, that seems to consist of forcing race distinctions into an artificial world, no matter how little they belong there.
All good questions. His albums have sold modestly; the Juno-nominated one was in one of the 'other' categories (Best Aboriginal Album), so not huge sales. So as a result, Nelly Furtado gets the lion's share of this money (if any artists have ever gotten any--which I'm not sure has truly been established) and the musicians who are scraping by get nothing. Not a little bit, but NOTHING.
Then consider that while my brother is recording gigs, practices, jam sessions, etc., any copies of original music that they've burned to CDR, they have to pay a bloody levy to NELLY FURTADO!!!
This isn't just a cash grab, it's theft from the populace, giving to the record companies and their pets.
My brother is a full-time professional musician in Alberta, and has been now for about 20 years. It's not an easy job, but it's his love and his passion.
He's now been an artist on about six albums over the years, one of which was nominated for a Juno. Why, pray tell, has he not gotten a single bloody cent from this tariff?
If I didn't know better, I'd almost believe that the point of it isn't actually to reward the musicians! But of course, that's just crazy talk.
Me too, actually. I don't quite know what I did wrong in my formatting, but I clearly didn't bother previewing.
It was a mistake, but an amusing one.
- is
actually fairly innovative and unique. Now to the best of my knowledge, patents aren't supposed to be concerned with the morality of the application, but the originality and non-obviousness of it.Microsoft should be hung out to dry for this, but from a patent aspect, it's valid.
Here's a quote from Richard Stallman: "It turns out that perhaps it's a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it's not too late and we're going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals."
Charming, I'm sure. Software wants to be free, and we'll bludgeon anyone who thinks otherwise.
Part of me agrees with that idea, although I'd be tempted to toss an Atari 800 at them, since that's what I grew up with.
But wait--why would we stop there? Why not give them a Commodore Pet? An Altair? A PDP-8? A bag of transistors? A bag of tubes?
For ages, people have lamented the loss of a degree of nitty-grittyness that existed in a previous generation of whatever the discussion is about, especially the last generation of hands-on gear and users. In aviation, it was the jet engine that made people idolize the WWII prop planes. In cars, the electronic ignition and injection systems closed the book on backyard engine rebuilding and tuning. (Even among the tuners, how common is it to find a timing light and a bottle of ether nowadays?) With computers, it was 'round about Windows95 that we lost the tinkering ability for the most part. Yeah, we've got Linux and Unix but even at that--look at Mac OSX, and you'll see the future of computing.
Kids in school now aren't going to grow up knowing about such things because they can't learn it and catch up all the way to the present-day, unless they develop it as a hobby (much like I have a friend who makes small Stirling engines) or spend two lifetimes to get to the point where they can program modern computers. This is a pity, because raw knowledge of things is absolutely fantastic, and usually the source of great innovation. At the same time, the current general state-of-the-art doesn't advance from basic principles--it advances from last week's state of the art, so they have to be brought up on current computer technology if they're going to advance things.
And yes, we'll lose some stuff along the way. Coding (in)efficiency will become orders of magnitude worse. Honestly, we need a GIGAHERTZ processor and 524288kB of RAM just to drive the OS in a computer running Vista? (not to mention the equivalent of roughly 22 thousand 5.25" Apple/Commodore/Atari floppy disks, or 200 million Hollerith cards!) But we can already do things that people didn't imagine computers for, and we're only starting.
Not much I can say, other than that I disagree.
The days of advertising as a source of information for products have been dead for somewhere just short of 20 years. I watch stuff I've taped off of TV over the years, and it was around the late 1980s that advertising eliminated product content from its messages, and replaced it with pure lust-inducing misdirection.
Ah yes. As opposed to a "crescent wrench" which consists of a rough-shaped billet and a sticker that says, "some assembly required." Yep, that's a great analogy.
Regardless, a crescent wrench is a very simple tool, and is easy to use. Complex tools require more effort. A torque wrench requires more knowledge and skill than a crescent wrench. A lathe is more difficult to use than a circular saw. A modern computer is many orders of magnitude more complex than any of them (strictly from the interface/usage aspect, ignoring the actual design and implementation), so much so that the analogy is false.
Computers as they stand right now will break and require support. Windows sucks and needs MS support. Linux sucks and needs support from wherever. Solaris sucks and needs support from Sun. HP-UX, AIX, VMS, OpenBSD, OS-9, MacOS, they ALL have the potential to behave badly, especially when 'good' is defined as consistent flawless behaviour for marginally trained users. They're insanely complex tools, and most are being wielded by people who barely know where the power switch is. (Hint: Give MacOS to 95% of the consumers out there, and see what the support calls are like).
Is Windows great? No, it's not. In fact, it's horrible--the worst commercial OS I've worked with, and that's saying a lot. However, Windows flaws don't automatically make Linux a panacea. Linux has its flaws (a lot of them, in fact), and this is the key point: its flaws may be less damning for professional computing, but are more visible to the end user.
Bob doesn't care about kernel design. Bob cares when the latest automatic patch to his computer makes the internet stop working. Bob is also not going to patch his computer AT ALL unless it's automatic. Microsoft has better autopatch tools, and their patch-compatibility is better than Linux. (As an aside, Solaris has really poor autopatch tools, but for over a decade has patch compatibility and backwards compatability that MS and Linux won't be able to reach without five years of focussed, dedicated effort.)
The bottom line is that Linux is a better-designed OS than Windows, but (a) still ain't perfect, and (b) doesn't serve the needs of most average users as well. The tool for them isn't actually the computer or the OS, or even the web browser: It's the web page. Until you accept that degree of abstraction, your view of computing is going to be continually frustrated by reality.
Congratulations on the stupidest post of the day, despite a good subject line.
Most people don't want computers to be fun, they don't want to put random things onto them, and they don't want to prove other people wrong about their computer abilities. Computers are just the tool they use to do the things they want, and Linux is not the best choice for most people.
"Information collected is anonymous, and no personal statistics are retained." How many times have we heard that? How happy does it make you feel?
Sure, they can't find out that you, Willy Loman, record and re-watch the feminine hygiene commercials several times over. However, they do know through that lovely anonymous information, just how they can appeal better to different demographics and hone their pitches accordingly. This seems fairly harmless until you consider that the primary purpose of advertising is no longer to inform people of a product or its features. The primary purpose of advertising is to convince people to buy something they don't want, and more information will allow them to do this better all the time. Do you think you're too smart for them, that you don't buy stuff from ads but actually research things instead? You're the target they're after--YOU are the person they want to sell crap to, and the thing that made you watch a commercial during the Superbowl or Battlestar Galactica is the same thing that will eventually sell you tooth whiteners or "anti-bacterial" soap.
In short, just because it's anonymous collective information doesn't mean that it's not being used for nefarious purposes.
Personally, yes I do. Companies who bully their way into tax breaks and get away with it because 'it helps more than it hurts' are dirty companies. Of course, that's every company bigger than five stores in a chain.
Unrestricted capitalism is eventually a horrible idea. Always.