...by including the option to get to a CLI for those tasks that truly benefit from it.
Case in point: A bank that I know had an "archaic" computer system for their tellers to record transactions on -- each teller had a vt100 terminal and text menus to select from using a "hotkey" approach. The system wasn't pretty, but (after each new teller navigated the not-too-steep learning curve) the tellers had no trouble processing transactions at a decent pace....but then a salesdroid convinced the branch manager to go to a window-based solution because it was more modern and would (supposedly) improve ease of use and efficiency. It had the opposite effect -- not only did the tellers face the exact same learnign curve to navigate the (now graphical) menus, their hands were constantly leaving the keyboard to find their mice, click through the menus, then back to type in the desired data, then back to the mouse to change fields, etc. Their average time to complete a transaction nearly tripled as a result of "modernizing" their user interface, and they are thoroughly regretting the change.
The same holds true for the CLI for certain tasks, including almost all things related to system administration and maintenance. Ever tried to configure Apache under *nix, then compare to configuring IIS in Windows? The Apache config takes less time because all you have to do is pop into vi and edit a file -- it's a flat process that requires no navigation, leaving all the pertinent information in one easy to find and easy to edit place, versus digging through layers of menus to gain access to one click box buried under fifteen layers of menus...
In short, GUI and CLI both have their uses, and we'd all do well to consider which is appropriate for whatever task is at hand before we commit it to code and force our users into an inefficient way of doing things.
Ray Kurzweil writes an article about nanotech and downloading the human brain....
Sandia Labs gets into the nanotech business at about the same time....
Aha! The Gray aliens have taken over Ray's brain in order to use him to smooth the way for the (alien derived!) nanotech brain-control devices produced at Sandia Labs (a well known front for the Grays amongst Those-In-The-Know). I can just hear 'em warming up the anal probes now, those sneaky bastards.....;)
-- WhiskeyJack, wondering where his tinfoil hat is when he needs it....
The delay just gives the pirates more time to pillage the DVD market.... SW:TPM is already on sale in DVD form in Hong Kong and places East (I've seen a copy that a friend brought back with her from her last jaunt out that way).
Then again, Lucas probably isn't too badly concerned with profits lost to piracy; they'll be minimal due to how slowly the DVDs will trickle in to the US, and what few losses he'll incur will be dwarfed by the extra profits gained by releasing to VHS first -- impatient consumers will quickly gobble up the tapes, then repurchase the film when the official DVD is finally released.
So I have to ask the question: who is really the pirate here?
...but I couldn't get more than halfway through your article before your broad generalizations and flawed thinking overwhelmed me.
Take, for instance, the statement from your first paragraph:
These men are invariably smart and skilled, but almost unable to communicate civilly or tolerate disagreement or difference.
Do you have any idea how offensive this is? And how far off base? I've been online for over a decade, Katz, and would like to think that I've had wide exposure to the average white-male-techie netizen...and have come to the diametrically opposite conclusion on what these people are like. They (we?) are usually very well spoken and civil, quite open minded and willing to consider (in many case, they actively seek out) alternate viewpoints on even some of their most cherished ideals. The only things I've seen that are met almost universally with scorn from this group of people are displays of willful ignorance (such as the one perpetrated by this article) and intolerance. In short, they tend to seek viewpoints that challenge their own in hopes of expanding their knowledge and only take offense when someone with alternate views proves unwilling to hear them out or shows themself to be ignorant and unwilling to expand their horizons -- things that we should (as individuals and as a society) take offense at!
The people you label as hostile are merely guilty of treasuring knowledge and questing for it, with that quest often taking the form of spirited debate which those less inclined to the quest just might take for hostile intent. Is it a hostile act to challenge someone's beliefs to see how well they hold up when tested by logic? Only the close-minded would think so.
Of course, there are a few bad seeds out there who delight in tweeking people's noses and stirring up trouble, but they are very much a minority (though at times they might appear otherwise). You use/.'s own Natalie Portman poster as an example, passing him off as the norm for/. when these posts are sent by one or two individuals out of a readership of thousands? That's like labelling all Americans racist because twenty guys got together and burned a cross in Georgia. It's gross generalizations like these that cause racism to begin with; when people like you paint entire populations with one stroke of the brush, you perpetrate the same flawed thinking that has in the past led to atrocities such as racial lynchings in the American South, the gassing of Jews during WWII, and the holy wars against the Turks throughout the Middle Ages. It was generalizations such as yours, Katz, that paved the road for the hatred that fueled these past horrors, and the reason for my hostility toward you now. You should be ashamed, but I know you won't be (you seem to have too much in common with the ilk behind the NP posts -- you appear to get off on stirring controversy, albeit on a more cerebral level).
Okay, we've got the geek quotient to do it -- we just need Andover.net to sponsor the project and a few folks out there to kick in some time. Let's put together our own competitor for the Battle Bot scene!
--WhiskeyJack, daydreaming of scimitar-wielding robotic penguins....:)
Okay, a breakup might hamper Microsoft's attempts to use Windows as leverage to dominate new markets (like the Web)...but only if there's a mechanism put in place to prevent collusion between the newly created companies. Without some kind of preventation measures in place, the split would be ineffectual at best.
That's the entire point of including the VHS tape...it shows that copying can be done far more economically by just hooking a DVD player to a VCR and hitting play versus using DeCSS to copy to other digital media. This strikes at the heart of the plaintiff's argument that DeCSS is a tool to further media piracy.
You'll find several attempts to replicate the "BlackLight Process" here. They all appear to have failed.
Also, in poking around I found that Dr. Mills (the man behind BlackLight Power) is a doctor of medicine and not a physicist.
So, is all this a con game? Quite likely, and apparently a successful one. The Wall Street Journal reports BLP has been receiving some not-insignificant investments.
There already is a vermin control device on the market very similar to what you describe. While it doesn't vacuum, it does a fair job washing dishes and cleaning up certain types of kitchen spills, and an excellent job of keeping the home vermin free. It's called a cat.
Additional attributes:
great at rearranging small household items.
excellent at string manipulation and multithreading.
partially solar/thermal powered.
low energy consumption "sleep" mode.
The aforementioned device does have a few drawbacks, though:
often drops into "sleep" mode without warning.
occasional noxious emissions.
bug in system sometimes causes device to dispose of vermin inappropriately (e.g. on your pillow).
On the whole, I'd say the benefits outweigh the detriments -- I know have four of my own.
Finally, someone who actually gets why I thought the story might interest folks on/.!
This guy, and everyone else out there like him are slowly changing society; when the functional implants finally get here, they'll be met with less resistance in part because of folks like this who have pushed back society's boundaries of what's "normal" and what's accepted.
Aspects of Gibson's world are on their way, and guys like this are pioneering the change. For better or worse.
No, Andover shouldn't post the IPs of the abusers -- that'd be too much like encouraging vigilanteism. What they should do is simply make the spammers' ISPs aware of their abuses, and chances are good the abusers will soon be gone.
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...by including the option to get to a CLI for those tasks that truly benefit from it.
Case in point: A bank that I know had an "archaic" computer system for their tellers to record transactions on -- each teller had a vt100 terminal and text menus to select from using a "hotkey" approach. The system wasn't pretty, but (after each new teller navigated the not-too-steep learning curve) the tellers had no trouble processing transactions at a decent pace....but then a salesdroid convinced the branch manager to go to a window-based solution because it was more modern and would (supposedly) improve ease of use and efficiency. It had the opposite effect -- not only did the tellers face the exact same learnign curve to navigate the (now graphical) menus, their hands were constantly leaving the keyboard to find their mice, click through the menus, then back to type in the desired data, then back to the mouse to change fields, etc. Their average time to complete a transaction nearly tripled as a result of "modernizing" their user interface, and they are thoroughly regretting the change.
The same holds true for the CLI for certain tasks, including almost all things related to system administration and maintenance. Ever tried to configure Apache under *nix, then compare to configuring IIS in Windows? The Apache config takes less time because all you have to do is pop into vi and edit a file -- it's a flat process that requires no navigation, leaving all the pertinent information in one easy to find and easy to edit place, versus digging through layers of menus to gain access to one click box buried under fifteen layers of menus...
In short, GUI and CLI both have their uses, and we'd all do well to consider which is appropriate for whatever task is at hand before we commit it to code and force our users into an inefficient way of doing things.
-- WhiskeyJack
(Sorry about the offtopic rant...)
Ray Kurzweil writes an article about nanotech and downloading the human brain....
Sandia Labs gets into the nanotech business at about the same time....
Aha! The Gray aliens have taken over Ray's brain in order to use him to smooth the way for the (alien derived!) nanotech brain-control devices produced at Sandia Labs (a well known front for the Grays amongst Those-In-The-Know). I can just hear 'em warming up the anal probes now, those sneaky bastards..... ;)
-- WhiskeyJack, wondering where his tinfoil hat is when he needs it....
The delay just gives the pirates more time to pillage the DVD market.... SW:TPM is already on sale in DVD form in Hong Kong and places East (I've seen a copy that a friend brought back with her from her last jaunt out that way).
Then again, Lucas probably isn't too badly concerned with profits lost to piracy; they'll be minimal due to how slowly the DVDs will trickle in to the US, and what few losses he'll incur will be dwarfed by the extra profits gained by releasing to VHS first -- impatient consumers will quickly gobble up the tapes, then repurchase the film when the official DVD is finally released.
So I have to ask the question: who is really the pirate here?
-- WhiskeyJack
...to every physical mailbox in the US? Isn't that a tetch like trying to fit jet engines on the Wright Flier?
...but I couldn't get more than halfway through your article before your broad generalizations and flawed thinking overwhelmed me.
Take, for instance, the statement from your first paragraph:
Do you have any idea how offensive this is? And how far off base? I've been online for over a decade, Katz, and would like to think that I've had wide exposure to the average white-male-techie netizen...and have come to the diametrically opposite conclusion on what these people are like. They (we?) are usually very well spoken and civil, quite open minded and willing to consider (in many case, they actively seek out) alternate viewpoints on even some of their most cherished ideals. The only things I've seen that are met almost universally with scorn from this group of people are displays of willful ignorance (such as the one perpetrated by this article) and intolerance. In short, they tend to seek viewpoints that challenge their own in hopes of expanding their knowledge and only take offense when someone with alternate views proves unwilling to hear them out or shows themself to be ignorant and unwilling to expand their horizons -- things that we should (as individuals and as a society) take offense at!The people you label as hostile are merely guilty of treasuring knowledge and questing for it, with that quest often taking the form of spirited debate which those less inclined to the quest just might take for hostile intent. Is it a hostile act to challenge someone's beliefs to see how well they hold up when tested by logic? Only the close-minded would think so.
Of course, there are a few bad seeds out there who delight in tweeking people's noses and stirring up trouble, but they are very much a minority (though at times they might appear otherwise). You use /.'s own Natalie Portman poster as an example, passing him off as the norm for /. when these posts are sent by one or two individuals out of a readership of thousands? That's like labelling all Americans racist because twenty guys got together and burned a cross in Georgia. It's gross generalizations like these that cause racism to begin with; when people like you paint entire populations with one stroke of the brush, you perpetrate the same flawed thinking that has in the past led to atrocities such as racial lynchings in the American South, the gassing of Jews during WWII, and the holy wars against the Turks throughout the Middle Ages. It was generalizations such as yours, Katz, that paved the road for the hatred that fueled these past horrors, and the reason for my hostility toward you now. You should be ashamed, but I know you won't be (you seem to have too much in common with the ilk behind the NP posts -- you appear to get off on stirring controversy, albeit on a more cerebral level).
Seek enlightenment, Katz. You need it.
-- WhiskeyJack
Okay, we've got the geek quotient to do it -- we just need Andover.net to sponsor the project and a few folks out there to kick in some time. Let's put together our own competitor for the Battle Bot scene!
--WhiskeyJack, daydreaming of scimitar-wielding robotic penguins.... :)
Okay, a breakup might hamper Microsoft's attempts to use Windows as leverage to dominate new markets (like the Web)...but only if there's a mechanism put in place to prevent collusion between the newly created companies. Without some kind of preventation measures in place, the split would be ineffectual at best.
-- WhiskeyJack
That's the entire point of including the VHS tape...it shows that copying can be done far more economically by just hooking a DVD player to a VCR and hitting play versus using DeCSS to copy to other digital media. This strikes at the heart of the plaintiff's argument that DeCSS is a tool to further media piracy.
-- WhiskeyJack
You'll find several attempts to replicate the "BlackLight Process" here. They all appear to have failed.
Also, in poking around I found that Dr. Mills (the man behind BlackLight Power) is a doctor of medicine and not a physicist.
So, is all this a con game? Quite likely, and apparently a successful one. The Wall Street Journal reports BLP has been receiving some not-insignificant investments.
-- WhiskeyJack
There already is a vermin control device on the market very similar to what you describe. While it doesn't vacuum, it does a fair job washing dishes and cleaning up certain types of kitchen spills, and an excellent job of keeping the home vermin free. It's called a cat.
Additional attributes:
The aforementioned device does have a few drawbacks, though:
On the whole, I'd say the benefits outweigh the detriments -- I know have four of my own.
-- WhiskeyJack
Finally, someone who actually gets why I thought the story might interest folks on /.!
This guy, and everyone else out there like him are slowly changing society; when the functional implants finally get here, they'll be met with less resistance in part because of folks like this who have pushed back society's boundaries of what's "normal" and what's accepted.
Aspects of Gibson's world are on their way, and guys like this are pioneering the change. For better or worse.
-- WhiskeyJack
No, Andover shouldn't post the IPs of the abusers -- that'd be too much like encouraging vigilanteism. What they should do is simply make the spammers' ISPs aware of their abuses, and chances are good the abusers will soon be gone.
-- WhiskeyJack