"It is isolating. It is a lonely thing." In contrast, "libraries are places, a community thing."
What a CROCK. I don't know about you, but in my community, I'm allowed to talk to other people at a normal volume. Libraries, as a rule, are pretty spartan in terms of their level of social interaction. Even if you stay there to read your book, instead of taking it home with you -- libraries let you do that, you know -- you're still there to read a book, not chat with your neighbor. Especially not if she's doing research for her term paper and can't spare the time to converse. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against libraries. I was raised by librarians. But how can anyone say with a straight face that they're not just as "isolating" as the internet? (And at least on the internet, you *can* chat with others while you read.)
Anyway, the real issue is not the ability to socialize, but rather the freedom of information. And James Billington's opinion about how people shouldn't be able to choose to be isolated, or that "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence," is definitely not the issue. (Reverence? Is he suggesting we revere the book's physical presence, or its content? Because the latter will not change one iota by the book's being published in electronic format.) And make no mistake, the only reasons Billington gives in the TLJ article for never wanting to put books online are strictly born of personal beliefs.
I suspect that, despite Billington's reluctance to promote electronic media, people will continue to read books, and to use the internet, in preference to real human interaction. He's just making it less easy to do both at once. I guess it's up to Project Gutenberg.
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals." -- The Hacker Manifesto
Nobody at Clemson is doing anything illegal. And, by the admission of their own "vice provost for computing and information technology", there is probably no serious bandwidth concern here. Censorship is terrible enough as it is, but it's sad to see it used to help a company try to force people to remain its customers--and pay what is, if Clemson is anything like my school, a much higher price for its services than they would anywhere else.
On my campus, they used to sell both Coke and Pepsi, in the campus stores and all. There was no problem with this. Plenty of both products were sold. There were points of purchase littered across the campus. Then someone sold out to Pepsi, which I think is unfortunate, since I prefer Coke products, on the whole. Now you can't buy Coke anywhere. Is there a possible motivation for this decision other than money?
>> I didn't count on the joys of Windows 98 on our end and Windows NT on the ISP's end. The rebooting of his PC when it crashed for reasons unknown and unknowable, the weird FTP behavior, the braindead binding of IE to view JPEG files, the lack of a good standard tool for simple image manipulation...ah, such fun.
Um . . . welcome to the learning curve, my friend. I've had very similar problems in the course of trying to learn how to use Linux. Why does the backspace key not backspace sometimes? More than that, why do both backspace and delete fail to backspace sometimes? What's this ImageMagick program that loads without my having asked, and takes five minutes to do so? Why do some workstations run my.login when I login, while others don't? Why does DDD crash 70% of the time before I can even give it a command? I'm sure there's a good reason for all of these things, but to a new user, they just seem dumb.
In Windows' defense, you don't *have* to bind IE to JPEG images; it's just an option--one that's unset by default in a clean install--and you can modify or unset it manually.
Also, the original poster is correct: Microsoft, hated though it well deserves to be, can indeed take plenty credit for having propelled the computer/software industry to where it is today. The credit is not theirs alone, but there's something to be said for their having written an OS that "regular people" can easily learn, and putting it in so many homes.
Scott: Let me be one of the first to give you props for standing by your opinion, unpopular though it obviously was, and also for reading through most of a comment load that was, by my estimation, about three to five times the normal slashdot volume. And, for that matter, for starting such a great controversy.
Most of my opinions on the issue were enumerated in my earlier post, but one thing you touched on here that I didn't think of at the time is the issue of user manuals and the infamous acronym "RTFM". In this case I agree with you 100%. At the university helpdesk where I work, which provides support primarily to faculty members, it's more or less a tacit policy to withhold the manuals from the users -- and god only knows where they go once we throw them aside, because I can never find one when I need it. Besides, tech writers are notorious for being unable effectively to communicate their subject matter to a non-technical audience. UNIX manpages, in particular, are an especially poor source of information for people who don't already know how to use UNIX. The fact is, in many cases, reading the f---ing manual is not a viable option. If I never heard anyone utter the phrase ever again, I think I'd get along just fine. It's frequently just an excuse to get out of work, anyway. So, yeah: right on.
Okay, that's my three cents. Again, thanks for the brain food.
>> "But Scott, I work tech support and we constantly get calls from complete idiots." They're not idiots, they just don't understand how a computer works internally. <<
No, Scott, they are idiots. Adults who can't tell left from right, who can have a single phrase repeated to them five times and still forget it a minute later, who can't recognize patterns they've seen repeated a hundred times, who wonder (and I'm not making any of this up) why smoke pours out of their machines when they force plugs or connectors into incongruent sockets, are idiots. No one gets out of kindergarten without understanding that the circular peg can't fit in the square hole.
I recognize that the reason it's me answering the phone, and not them, is that I get excited about computers and technology, and I want to learn how it all works, and they don't. I understand that computers aren't for everyone, and that people who don't care as much as me shouldn't be expected to learn as much as I have. I'm more than happy to help out a polite user with a shred of intelligence who simply can't figure out how to work what is, I admit, a very confusing interface (no matter what OS you use). I get plenty of users like that every day, and I'm always glad when I do. I talk them through their problem, sometimes I shoot the breeze with them for a minute or two, I offer general advice in case their problem recurs, and when I'm done I always feel good about having, in some small way, made a contribution to society.
But, as anyone who works in customer support of any kind will tell you, there are a lot of idiots out there, and a lot of rude people with unrealistic expectations. And if I'm less likely to get upset about those people because I can read a few comic strips that sympathize with my situation -- comic strips that the idiots in question will never read anyway, because they don't find them funny -- well, then that's a great thing. Tech support people put up with a hell of a lot, including the idiots -- do you think, Scott, that we laugh at them while they're still on the phone? that we'd be able to keep our jobs if we did? -- and if a couple of relatively harmless comic strips are what we get in exchange for having to deal with callers who (a) won't accord us the basic human respect & decency that everyone deserves, and (b) won't take a few seconds to step back and think of any possible alternate solutions to a problem before they rush to call us, well, I'm sorry, but I don't see what the big deal is. Their inability or unwillingness to exercise their own brains is their problem, not ours. There's help for it, but that's a different phone number. And, to be quite honest, I don't think that we, as a society, should tolerate or enable people who won't think for themselves. That's irresponsible behavior, and it only makes life harder for everyone else.
In any case, the analogy:
>> a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read. <<
. . . is an inaccurate one. We're not there to teach; if we were, we'd have to have the appropriate certification before being hired. We're merely damage control, there to provide quick fixes for relatively small problems. I'm all for teaching people who are willing to learn -- I know full well that none of us were born knowing the slightest thing about how to use a computer, and I also realize that the better I educate a user, the less likely they are to need to call me back -- and I do what I can in that capacity, but unfortunately it's really not something I can spend a lot of time on if there are others waiting to be helped.
I do hate people who mock newbies, partly because, lord knows, I've been a newbie many, many times in my life, and I will be many, many times again before I die. But there's an important distinction to be made between those who haven't learned yet and those who refuse to learn. And believe you me, I'm definitely not getting paid enough to save the latter category from themselves.
>> To recap, the real lessons of the Quake cheats are (a) never trust a client program to be honest,
. . . which is good advice whether your source is open or closed . ..
>> (b) you can't have real security if you trade it away to get performance,
. . . which is logically equivalent to saying "you can't have real security if you give up your real security". ..
>> (c) real security comes not from obscurity but from minimum disclosure,
. . . and minimum disclosure is itself a type of obscurity. The information that the server knows but refrains from disclosing to the client is what's obscure, and it may be hard to get that information, but not impossible. For example, the client might lie about where the player is, send projections of where the player could be to scout ahead, pretend not to have received packets while still showing the player the information contained therein . . . etc.; you get the idea.
>> and most importantly (d) only open source can force designers to use provably secure methods.
IMO, the real problem lies with a patenting authority that allows people to patent ideas (which is essentially what an algorithm is). It's one thing to patent a specific and clearly distinguishable implementation of an idea, but quite another to say that so-and-so has the only right to an idea just because he got it through the patenting process before everyone else. I'm sure all of us have had some fantastic revelations that we later discovered were already passé. Me, I thought up solipsism and the radio LAN, then found out that someone else had beaten me to it, but does that make those ideas any less mine? Should I have any less right to pursue them to their conclusions because I was born later than someone else who also thought of them?
>> (Any computer game at which computers are better than most humans has analogous cheats, some of which aren't even detectable in principle. Carmack observes "correspondence chess has been subverted from its original intent by players using computers." This isn't something security design can fix.) << This comment touches on what's really the most important thing to think about in playing games online or off, which is, do you trust your opponents? People cheat at Quake and at correspondence chess the same way they cheat at poker. Coding an aim bot is no different than hiding an ace up your sleeve, and when you play against dishonest opponents, you should expect either. The ultimate solution is not to try to force players not to cheat, but simply for honest players not to play against cheaters. Then the cheaters can play against the other cheaters, and see how they like it.
It's true, manual intervention should be possible. But it should not be necessary. If Windows is smart enough to be able to set up a monitor, and make it look passable, if not good, on the first try, then Linux should be able to as well--in fact, it needs to, if it wants to be competitive. No Windows user is going to leave their pretty, easy-to-use GUI for an OS whose GUI they can't even get to work. And make no mistake--neither I nor any of my Computer Science major friends have ever gotten X to work even passably on the first try. The original poster is right: this should not be an issue in a modern OS. It should be an option.
When I first heard about the Open Internet Message Protocol (OIMP), I thought this was what it was supposed to do--unify the several diverse messaging standards available on the internet. But looking at it's website, I'm not sure much of anything is going to come out of it. Anyone know more...?
Slashdot Mirror
"It is isolating. It is a lonely thing." In contrast, "libraries are places, a community thing."
What a CROCK. I don't know about you, but in my community, I'm allowed to talk to other people at a normal volume. Libraries, as a rule, are pretty spartan in terms of their level of social interaction. Even if you stay there to read your book, instead of taking it home with you -- libraries let you do that, you know -- you're still there to read a book, not chat with your neighbor. Especially not if she's doing research for her term paper and can't spare the time to converse. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against libraries. I was raised by librarians. But how can anyone say with a straight face that they're not just as "isolating" as the internet? (And at least on the internet, you *can* chat with others while you read.)
Anyway, the real issue is not the ability to socialize, but rather the freedom of information. And James Billington's opinion about how people shouldn't be able to choose to be isolated, or that "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence," is definitely not the issue. (Reverence? Is he suggesting we revere the book's physical presence, or its content? Because the latter will not change one iota by the book's being published in electronic format.) And make no mistake, the only reasons Billington gives in the TLJ article for never wanting to put books online are strictly born of personal beliefs.
I suspect that, despite Billington's reluctance to promote electronic media, people will continue to read books, and to use the internet, in preference to real human interaction. He's just making it less easy to do both at once. I guess it's up to Project Gutenberg.
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals." -- The Hacker Manifesto
Nobody at Clemson is doing anything illegal. And, by the admission of their own "vice provost for computing and information technology", there is probably no serious bandwidth concern here. Censorship is terrible enough as it is, but it's sad to see it used to help a company try to force people to remain its customers--and pay what is, if Clemson is anything like my school, a much higher price for its services than they would anywhere else.
On my campus, they used to sell both Coke and Pepsi, in the campus stores and all. There was no problem with this. Plenty of both products were sold. There were points of purchase littered across the campus. Then someone sold out to Pepsi, which I think is unfortunate, since I prefer Coke products, on the whole. Now you can't buy Coke anywhere. Is there a possible motivation for this decision other than money?
Free Beer!
>> I didn't count on the joys of Windows 98 on our end and Windows NT on the ISP's end. The rebooting of his PC when it crashed for reasons unknown and unknowable, the weird FTP behavior, the braindead binding of IE to view JPEG files, the lack of a good standard tool for simple image manipulation...ah, such fun.
Um . . . welcome to the learning curve, my friend. I've had very similar problems in the course of trying to learn how to use Linux. Why does the backspace key not backspace sometimes? More than that, why do both backspace and delete fail to backspace sometimes? What's this ImageMagick program that loads without my having asked, and takes five minutes to do so? Why do some workstations run my .login when I login, while others don't? Why does DDD crash 70% of the time before I can even give it a command? I'm sure there's a good reason for all of these things, but to a new user, they just seem dumb.
In Windows' defense, you don't *have* to bind IE to JPEG images; it's just an option--one that's unset by default in a clean install--and you can modify or unset it manually.
Also, the original poster is correct: Microsoft, hated though it well deserves to be, can indeed take plenty credit for having propelled the computer/software industry to where it is today. The credit is not theirs alone, but there's something to be said for their having written an OS that "regular people" can easily learn, and putting it in so many homes.
Scott: Let me be one of the first to give you props for standing by your opinion, unpopular though it obviously was, and also for reading through most of a comment load that was, by my estimation, about three to five times the normal slashdot volume. And, for that matter, for starting such a great controversy.
Most of my opinions on the issue were enumerated in my earlier post, but one thing you touched on here that I didn't think of at the time is the issue of user manuals and the infamous acronym "RTFM". In this case I agree with you 100%. At the university helpdesk where I work, which provides support primarily to faculty members, it's more or less a tacit policy to withhold the manuals from the users -- and god only knows where they go once we throw them aside, because I can never find one when I need it. Besides, tech writers are notorious for being unable effectively to communicate their subject matter to a non-technical audience. UNIX manpages, in particular, are an especially poor source of information for people who don't already know how to use UNIX. The fact is, in many cases, reading the f---ing manual is not a viable option. If I never heard anyone utter the phrase ever again, I think I'd get along just fine. It's frequently just an excuse to get out of work, anyway. So, yeah: right on.
Okay, that's my three cents. Again, thanks for the brain food.
>> "But Scott, I work tech support and we constantly get calls from complete idiots." They're not idiots, they just don't understand how a computer works internally. <<
No, Scott, they are idiots. Adults who can't tell left from right, who can have a single phrase repeated to them five times and still forget it a minute later, who can't recognize patterns they've seen repeated a hundred times, who wonder (and I'm not making any of this up) why smoke pours out of their machines when they force plugs or connectors into incongruent sockets, are idiots. No one gets out of kindergarten without understanding that the circular peg can't fit in the square hole.
I recognize that the reason it's me answering the phone, and not them, is that I get excited about computers and technology, and I want to learn how it all works, and they don't. I understand that computers aren't for everyone, and that people who don't care as much as me shouldn't be expected to learn as much as I have. I'm more than happy to help out a polite user with a shred of intelligence who simply can't figure out how to work what is, I admit, a very confusing interface (no matter what OS you use). I get plenty of users like that every day, and I'm always glad when I do. I talk them through their problem, sometimes I shoot the breeze with them for a minute or two, I offer general advice in case their problem recurs, and when I'm done I always feel good about having, in some small way, made a contribution to society.
But, as anyone who works in customer support of any kind will tell you, there are a lot of idiots out there, and a lot of rude people with unrealistic expectations. And if I'm less likely to get upset about those people because I can read a few comic strips that sympathize with my situation -- comic strips that the idiots in question will never read anyway, because they don't find them funny -- well, then that's a great thing. Tech support people put up with a hell of a lot, including the idiots -- do you think, Scott, that we laugh at them while they're still on the phone? that we'd be able to keep our jobs if we did? -- and if a couple of relatively harmless comic strips are what we get in exchange for having to deal with callers who (a) won't accord us the basic human respect & decency that everyone deserves, and (b) won't take a few seconds to step back and think of any possible alternate solutions to a problem before they rush to call us, well, I'm sorry, but I don't see what the big deal is. Their inability or unwillingness to exercise their own brains is their problem, not ours. There's help for it, but that's a different phone number. And, to be quite honest, I don't think that we, as a society, should tolerate or enable people who won't think for themselves. That's irresponsible behavior, and it only makes life harder for everyone else.
In any case, the analogy:
>> a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read. <<
. . . is an inaccurate one. We're not there to teach; if we were, we'd have to have the appropriate certification before being hired. We're merely damage control, there to provide quick fixes for relatively small problems. I'm all for teaching people who are willing to learn -- I know full well that none of us were born knowing the slightest thing about how to use a computer, and I also realize that the better I educate a user, the less likely they are to need to call me back -- and I do what I can in that capacity, but unfortunately it's really not something I can spend a lot of time on if there are others waiting to be helped.
I do hate people who mock newbies, partly because, lord knows, I've been a newbie many, many times in my life, and I will be many, many times again before I die. But there's an important distinction to be made between those who haven't learned yet and those who refuse to learn. And believe you me, I'm definitely not getting paid enough to save the latter category from themselves.
>> To recap, the real lessons of the Quake cheats are (a) never trust a client program to be honest,
. . . which is good advice whether your source is open or closed . . .
>> (b) you can't have real security if you trade it away to get performance,
. . . which is logically equivalent to saying "you can't have real security if you give up your real security". . .
>> (c) real security comes not from obscurity but from minimum disclosure,
. . . and minimum disclosure is itself a type of obscurity. The information that the server knows but refrains from disclosing to the client is what's obscure, and it may be hard to get that information, but not impossible. For example, the client might lie about where the player is, send projections of where the player could be to scout ahead, pretend not to have received packets while still showing the player the information contained therein . . . etc.; you get the idea.
>> and most importantly (d) only open source can force designers to use provably secure methods.
Agreed.
IMO, the real problem lies with a patenting authority that allows people to patent ideas (which is essentially what an algorithm is). It's one thing to patent a specific and clearly distinguishable implementation of an idea, but quite another to say that so-and-so has the only right to an idea just because he got it through the patenting process before everyone else. I'm sure all of us have had some fantastic revelations that we later discovered were already passé. Me, I thought up solipsism and the radio LAN, then found out that someone else had beaten me to it, but does that make those ideas any less mine? Should I have any less right to pursue them to their conclusions because I was born later than someone else who also thought of them?
>> (Any computer game at which computers are better than most humans has analogous cheats, some of which aren't even detectable in principle. Carmack observes "correspondence chess has been subverted from its original intent by players using computers." This isn't something security design can fix.) << This comment touches on what's really the most important thing to think about in playing games online or off, which is, do you trust your opponents? People cheat at Quake and at correspondence chess the same way they cheat at poker. Coding an aim bot is no different than hiding an ace up your sleeve, and when you play against dishonest opponents, you should expect either. The ultimate solution is not to try to force players not to cheat, but simply for honest players not to play against cheaters. Then the cheaters can play against the other cheaters, and see how they like it.
It's true, manual intervention should be possible. But it should not be necessary. If Windows is smart enough to be able to set up a monitor, and make it look passable, if not good, on the first try, then Linux should be able to as well--in fact, it needs to, if it wants to be competitive. No Windows user is going to leave their pretty, easy-to-use GUI for an OS whose GUI they can't even get to work. And make no mistake--neither I nor any of my Computer Science major friends have ever gotten X to work even passably on the first try. The original poster is right: this should not be an issue in a modern OS. It should be an option.
When I first heard about the Open Internet Message Protocol (OIMP), I thought this was what it was supposed to do--unify the several diverse messaging standards available on the internet. But looking at it's website, I'm not sure much of anything is going to come out of it. Anyone know more...?