I would *love* to have a programmable watch. I'm a big fan of the Databank watches (it's the only way I'll remember anything) but I'm still using one of the fairly simple ones (Casio DBC-150) because the really cool ones have *terrible* design features. Like, you can store 400 numbers, but each one only gets a 6 character identifier. Or, it has 6 alarms, but no repeating countdown timer. I've found that watch makers have close to zero understanding of how people (or I, at least) want to use their products. Putting the capabilities into software means (hopefully) getting a watch that works the way I want it to.
I want my data to converge, but I think converging the devices themselves should only go so far. A Palm-mounted camera will never have the "look-through" that a traditional camera has, because the form factor is just too different. Ditto making your Pilot into a cell phone -- do you really think that would be comfortable to put against your ear? I'd love to have my Pilot data in my watch, but I'll be damned if I'm going to try to Graffiti it into such a small device. Even the Pilot is pretty bad for entering text compared to a keyboard. (And I'd *still* rather Graffiti than talk to the thing, so voice is not IMO a cure-all.)
I think the Pilot actually is the most instructive device here. Jeff Hawkins didn't think about expandability or extensibility or any of that cool geek stuff -- he walked around with slabs of wood and tried to figure out how to make a device that was physically comfortable for the task at hand. Convergence of physical devices spits on that whole concept, and I think the Pilot's success in the market points to the folly of that.
High prices mean less choice for the consumer, and are a big incentive for black markets (or
their equivilent -- in this case, free piracy).
I agree completely. The black market should be considered part of a capitalist system -- if your industry engenders a large black market, it should be considered a sign that there's something wrong with your business model (in this case, $15 for a predetermined set of music), rather than something wrong with your customers.
What's the problem with "solar system" vs "Solar system?" If you were a farmer on Mars, would you call the stuff you're plowing "mars" instead of "earth?"
Yes, it is my opinion. Are there any analogies that aren't?
I'm decrying knowledge without understanding. People can learn to operate computers by using the levers and knobs provided them, but I think this will always be a more tedious and error-prone endeavor if the operator doesn't understand the context of those knobs and buttons. This isn't even about GUI vs CLI -- it's about thinking that the GUI *is* the computer, or the CLI *is* the computer. The GUI provides a better example, though, because it's intentionally an analogy, so the problem of people taking the analogy as reality is more clear.
And I'm going to defend my history analogy, too. How would you even imagine such a thing as distorted "official" histories, if history had not provided so many examples? (Unless it's a staple of Britney Spears' music, maybe.) And all the people fighting their centuries-old conflicts are the last ones I'd point to as understanding history.
Mainly, though, I was reacting to the idea that knowing Unix is pointless. I'm not advocating that everyone be forced to learn it, but I don't know anyone whose experience with computers was not enhanced by it.
Why would it be ideal for everyone to have the detailed grounding in computers necessary to use a complex and powerful OS? Would it be a better world if everyone spent years learning enough about car mechanics to be able to strip down and rebuild an engine?
Okay, I've now had it with this analogy.
The level of understanding most people have of computers, translated into automotive terms, would not be enough to encompass ideas such as "cars are driven on the street," "tires are less effective when they're wet," and "things in your rearview mirror will look backwards." Most people's interaction with their computer is less like driving a car and more like shouting commands to a barely-competent, intellectually stunted chauffeur. It's not just that they can't rebuild their engine, they don't have *any* understanding of the machine other than that they can sit in it and be taken to the highlighted spots on the map.
My own analogy would be to history. Obviously it's not necessary in any immediate, practical sense to know the year of the Magna Carta or the Battle of Hastings. And I'm the first to admit that, in school, I thought it ludicrous that I should be expected to know such things. But you know what? There is *meaning* behind those minutiae. History gives you insight into how things work. Without that context, one's view of the contemporary world is massively impoverished. And it's the same for a person whose idea of computers is based on buttons and windows and talking paper clips.
See all that stuff in there, Homer? That's why your robot never worked.
This gets me on a topic I've been struggling with for, well, years now. What's the best way to implement a CMS?
I was first weaned on StoryServer, and later Prism (CNet's internal version), and left that with the conviction that introducing code into a page is little better than putting page elements in code, and usually is worse. For anything of appreciable size, the code will vastly outweigh the HTML. So your pages are mostly code, unless you build your own wall between functionality and presentation. And even if you do, you're still working in an environment designed for display. (In the case of StoryServer, this means working in Tcl, which is an unholy mess for anything but trivial functionality. PHP looks a lot better as a language, though.)
Right now I'm playing with Python-based XML-DOM stuff, based on the model used by Enhydra. Basically, you have a designer make a page with sample content, then you tag the HTML tags, read the whole thing into XML, and your program modifies, clones, and rearranges the pieces of the page as content dictates. This seems very top-heavy to me right now, and it often doesn't work as cleanly as I might hope, but it does allow designers to work completely apart from programmers.
So I guess my point is toward those who say "but Go's stuff is 3 years old" and asking what, then, is the more modern paradigm.
But developers use them, too. If IE had a 'use strict' feature, and developers were encouraged to use it, I would be fine. But that would interfere with Microsoft's mission to use clueless developers to punish non-customers. So we get all these documents with things like missing closing table and form tags, stuff that looks fine in IE but will stymie any attempt to actually parse it.
The point that I'm trying to make is that if you truly believed that something was evil, you would do everything in your power to suppress that thing. I know that I would. Which means that we're generally agreed on what we should suppress: evil.
How do you get that? If I believed in evil, yes, I'd do anything I could to suppress it. But that doesn't mean I label as "evil" everything I want to suppress. I think that's basically what the other poster was objecting to.
It's all fine and good to say that people shouldn't use drugs, or play mind-dulling games, or have kids as teenagers, or any number of things. But when you start thinking of that as "evil" then, as you say, you'll do anything to combat it. This is the problem with the Drug War -- people are so polarized that they will simply stomp on anything (like Constitutional rights, for one) that stands in their way. IMO, that's the thing closest to "evil."
Umm, the Dark Ages? You know, when the Church ruled and people got burned alive and ideas required official approval and you were assigned a station in life at birth?
Really, this is just a little hysterical. It's like invoking the Holocaust when some schmuck calls you a name.
So why the divergence in the way these societies researched and used their knowledge? The only answer I can come up with is the question of religion.
This is an interesting point, but I notice you didn't follow the logical, non-PC extrapolation from this, which is that now the situation is reversed. Societies based on Judeo-Christian religions are open to new knowledge, while Islamic societies are closed.
In the end, religion can't be the determining factor. Every major religion has at times presided as the dominant force in a conservative, reactionary society, and at other times in the same geographic region it has been a part of an open, curious society. While it's true that religious zealotry is the hallmark of a closed society, I'm inclined to see it more as a symptom than the cause.
Currently computers force humans to act less like people and more like machines.
Besides eating, sleeping, walking and sex, I can't think of anything that's truly "acting like people." Even speech has to be learned.
I'm sure that you have filled out an application for a video store. When you are done with it, does the piece of paper jump up and scream out "You need to put a credit card number here, or I wont let you give me to the clerk"
No, but the clerk will say "I can't accept that." What's the difference? If your point is just the "rudeness" of it, try repeatedly giving a video store clerk an invalid application and see how long he's polite to you.
Soda Cans dont need names. Neither do term papers (I am writing a paper on gravitational mechanics, I shall call it "Newton").
This lost me in the article, too. How do you know what it is, if it doesn't have a name? Or are you positing the same kind of "automatic mental implant" that he seemed to be?
Besides, nobody is forcing you to name all your stuff and put it in a logical place. MS Office tries to put everything in "My Documents" and takes the first few words of a document as the filename if you don't specify one. On a Mac, you can put everything on the Desktop and let your applications call them "Untitled-1", "Untitled-2" and so on.
Also, am I the only one whose desk eventually overflows with stuff that was "just set down?" Or who has trouble finding the keys put in the drawer with everything else? Or who scrambles at tax time because all the relevant documents are sitting in various piles? I don't see much real difference between the virtual examples and real-life ones; once you're dealing with more than a couple things, you need to organize them or you'll be lost.
While I agree that there is surely discrimination and bias -- both conscious and unconscious -- in IT and (probably to an even greater extent) throughout our society -- this is the thing that really tanked the article for me. I didn't see a single reference from later than 1991, and most were from the mid-80s. (Extrapolating 1985 attitudes toward computers to today!?!? Please!) And a disturbing number were from the 70s and even the 60s.
You could point out that current PhD candidates grew up in these times, but the fact is that's water under the bridge. If you want to call our society and the IT industry sexist and discriminatory, you should use evidence that's somewhat current. As it is, nothing in this article comes close to erasing my very real experience of seeing companies scrambling to find anybody -- male, female, or other -- to fill their IT positions.
Damn, that was a real waste, then. Here I could have been seeing purple-fringed dragons circling Venus to the tune of Pink Floyd's _Echoes_, and instead my hallucination is a lame PC Expo piece with an error-spewing palmtop...
I saw an MSNBC piece on PC Expo yesterday morning. Standard useless fluff, but as the voiceover talked about how handhelds and wireless were the craze, yadda yadda, they had video clips of the products. The main one was of a palmtop (didn't catch the brand) obviously running WinCE. Just a couple seconds into the shot, after a few stylus taps on the screen, a window titled "FATAL APPLICATION ERROR" filled the screen, and the user spent the last several seconds of the clip pressing various places on the screen in an evident and futile attempt to close the error window. Priceless.
In that case, I can't believe this made it out the door. This kind of feature has been well-publicized wrt MS Word; it should occur to any reasonably knowledgable person that obscuring a piece of a document might not remove it from the document itself. It seems incredibly negligent of both the NYT and the CIA to not review the spec for their document to see whether the confidential information was actually redacted.
I still see a fair number of "free for personal, educational, or government use" licenses. I wonder whether some companies couldn't make more money with that, writing off the home market and pricing explicitly for business. MS and Adobe are pretty far in that direction already.
With apologies to RMS (and all the purists out there), I've reached the point of disagreeing with this. Namely, installing Solaris x86. Without the GNU tools, this platform was nearly useless for my purposes. No compiler, no gzip, and tools like make and tar that didn't work with anything I wanted to install. The local Solaris-head around here just showed me some stuff out of Solaris 8, and damn if there weren't GNU headers on a bunch of things. So I've made my own version of the acronym, Gnu's Now Unix.
I have been to both public and private schools. The private schools are so much better than the public that it isn't even funny.
I was also educated in both public and private schools, and I definitely did *not* see a major difference in the overall education.
What I *did* see, however, was that the things Slashdotters complain about (bullying and ostracism as the response to nonconformity) were *far* more prevalent and tolerated in the private school. This may have been the age group involved (4-8th grade private, HS public) but inasmuch as I was a "geek" I was much happier in the public school than the private. More hands-off administration, more opportunity to take advanced classes, and so on.
And not to be pedantic, but using words like "Algerbra" and "tax dectutable" doesn't exactly help your case.
I think you're missing the point. The question is, if you have to give your $50 to person A, who has $140 billion and donates $1 billion, or to person B, who has $10 million and donates $1 million, to whom would you rather give your money?
Slashdot Mirror
I would *love* to have a programmable watch. I'm a big fan of the Databank watches (it's the only way I'll remember anything) but I'm still using one of the fairly simple ones (Casio DBC-150) because the really cool ones have *terrible* design features. Like, you can store 400 numbers, but each one only gets a 6 character identifier. Or, it has 6 alarms, but no repeating countdown timer. I've found that watch makers have close to zero understanding of how people (or I, at least) want to use their products. Putting the capabilities into software means (hopefully) getting a watch that works the way I want it to.
Hey, it saved the Space Shuttle. What has Bush done for us lately?
I want my data to converge, but I think converging the devices themselves should only go so far. A Palm-mounted camera will never have the "look-through" that a traditional camera has, because the form factor is just too different. Ditto making your Pilot into a cell phone -- do you really think that would be comfortable to put against your ear? I'd love to have my Pilot data in my watch, but I'll be damned if I'm going to try to Graffiti it into such a small device. Even the Pilot is pretty bad for entering text compared to a keyboard. (And I'd *still* rather Graffiti than talk to the thing, so voice is not IMO a cure-all.)
I think the Pilot actually is the most instructive device here. Jeff Hawkins didn't think about expandability or extensibility or any of that cool geek stuff -- he walked around with slabs of wood and tried to figure out how to make a device that was physically comfortable for the task at hand. Convergence of physical devices spits on that whole concept, and I think the Pilot's success in the market points to the folly of that.
High prices mean less choice for the consumer, and are a big incentive for black markets (or their equivilent -- in this case, free piracy).
I agree completely. The black market should be considered part of a capitalist system -- if your industry engenders a large black market, it should be considered a sign that there's something wrong with your business model (in this case, $15 for a predetermined set of music), rather than something wrong with your customers.
What's the problem with "solar system" vs "Solar system?" If you were a farmer on Mars, would you call the stuff you're plowing "mars" instead of "earth?"
Yes, it is my opinion. Are there any analogies that aren't?
I'm decrying knowledge without understanding. People can learn to operate computers by using the levers and knobs provided them, but I think this will always be a more tedious and error-prone endeavor if the operator doesn't understand the context of those knobs and buttons. This isn't even about GUI vs CLI -- it's about thinking that the GUI *is* the computer, or the CLI *is* the computer. The GUI provides a better example, though, because it's intentionally an analogy, so the problem of people taking the analogy as reality is more clear.
And I'm going to defend my history analogy, too. How would you even imagine such a thing as distorted "official" histories, if history had not provided so many examples? (Unless it's a staple of Britney Spears' music, maybe.) And all the people fighting their centuries-old conflicts are the last ones I'd point to as understanding history.
Mainly, though, I was reacting to the idea that knowing Unix is pointless. I'm not advocating that everyone be forced to learn it, but I don't know anyone whose experience with computers was not enhanced by it.
Why would it be ideal for everyone to have the detailed grounding in computers necessary to use a complex and powerful OS? Would it be a better world if everyone spent years learning enough about car mechanics to be able to strip down and rebuild an engine?
Okay, I've now had it with this analogy.
The level of understanding most people have of computers, translated into automotive terms, would not be enough to encompass ideas such as "cars are driven on the street," "tires are less effective when they're wet," and "things in your rearview mirror will look backwards." Most people's interaction with their computer is less like driving a car and more like shouting commands to a barely-competent, intellectually stunted chauffeur. It's not just that they can't rebuild their engine, they don't have *any* understanding of the machine other than that they can sit in it and be taken to the highlighted spots on the map.
My own analogy would be to history. Obviously it's not necessary in any immediate, practical sense to know the year of the Magna Carta or the Battle of Hastings. And I'm the first to admit that, in school, I thought it ludicrous that I should be expected to know such things. But you know what? There is *meaning* behind those minutiae. History gives you insight into how things work. Without that context, one's view of the contemporary world is massively impoverished. And it's the same for a person whose idea of computers is based on buttons and windows and talking paper clips.
See all that stuff in there, Homer? That's why your robot never worked.
This gets me on a topic I've been struggling with for, well, years now. What's the best way to implement a CMS?
I was first weaned on StoryServer, and later Prism (CNet's internal version), and left that with the conviction that introducing code into a page is little better than putting page elements in code, and usually is worse. For anything of appreciable size, the code will vastly outweigh the HTML. So your pages are mostly code, unless you build your own wall between functionality and presentation. And even if you do, you're still working in an environment designed for display. (In the case of StoryServer, this means working in Tcl, which is an unholy mess for anything but trivial functionality. PHP looks a lot better as a language, though.)
Right now I'm playing with Python-based XML-DOM stuff, based on the model used by Enhydra. Basically, you have a designer make a page with sample content, then you tag the HTML tags, read the whole thing into XML, and your program modifies, clones, and rearranges the pieces of the page as content dictates. This seems very top-heavy to me right now, and it often doesn't work as cleanly as I might hope, but it does allow designers to work completely apart from programmers.
So I guess my point is toward those who say "but Go's stuff is 3 years old" and asking what, then, is the more modern paradigm.
Browsers are for users, not for developers.
But developers use them, too. If IE had a 'use strict' feature, and developers were encouraged to use it, I would be fine. But that would interfere with Microsoft's mission to use clueless developers to punish non-customers. So we get all these documents with things like missing closing table and form tags, stuff that looks fine in IE but will stymie any attempt to actually parse it.
The point that I'm trying to make is that if you truly believed that something was evil, you would do everything in your power to suppress that thing. I know that I would. Which means that we're generally agreed on what we should suppress: evil.
How do you get that? If I believed in evil, yes, I'd do anything I could to suppress it. But that doesn't mean I label as "evil" everything I want to suppress. I think that's basically what the other poster was objecting to.
It's all fine and good to say that people shouldn't use drugs, or play mind-dulling games, or have kids as teenagers, or any number of things. But when you start thinking of that as "evil" then, as you say, you'll do anything to combat it. This is the problem with the Drug War -- people are so polarized that they will simply stomp on anything (like Constitutional rights, for one) that stands in their way. IMO, that's the thing closest to "evil."
If this isn't a Dark Ages, what is?
Umm, the Dark Ages? You know, when the Church ruled and people got burned alive and ideas required official approval and you were assigned a station in life at birth?
Really, this is just a little hysterical. It's like invoking the Holocaust when some schmuck calls you a name.
So why the divergence in the way these societies researched and used their knowledge? The only answer I can come up with is the question of religion.
This is an interesting point, but I notice you didn't follow the logical, non-PC extrapolation from this, which is that now the situation is reversed. Societies based on Judeo-Christian religions are open to new knowledge, while Islamic societies are closed.
In the end, religion can't be the determining factor. Every major religion has at times presided as the dominant force in a conservative, reactionary society, and at other times in the same geographic region it has been a part of an open, curious society. While it's true that religious zealotry is the hallmark of a closed society, I'm inclined to see it more as a symptom than the cause.
I agree that there's room for improvement, but...
Currently computers force humans to act less like people and more like machines.
Besides eating, sleeping, walking and sex, I can't think of anything that's truly "acting like people." Even speech has to be learned.
I'm sure that you have filled out an application for a video store. When you are done with it, does the piece of paper jump up and scream out "You need to put a credit card number here, or I wont let you give me to the clerk"
No, but the clerk will say "I can't accept that." What's the difference? If your point is just the "rudeness" of it, try repeatedly giving a video store clerk an invalid application and see how long he's polite to you.
Soda Cans dont need names. Neither do term papers (I am writing a paper on gravitational mechanics, I shall call it "Newton").
This lost me in the article, too. How do you know what it is, if it doesn't have a name? Or are you positing the same kind of "automatic mental implant" that he seemed to be?
Besides, nobody is forcing you to name all your stuff and put it in a logical place. MS Office tries to put everything in "My Documents" and takes the first few words of a document as the filename if you don't specify one. On a Mac, you can put everything on the Desktop and let your applications call them "Untitled-1", "Untitled-2" and so on.
Also, am I the only one whose desk eventually overflows with stuff that was "just set down?" Or who has trouble finding the keys put in the drawer with everything else? Or who scrambles at tax time because all the relevant documents are sitting in various piles? I don't see much real difference between the virtual examples and real-life ones; once you're dealing with more than a couple things, you need to organize them or you'll be lost.
"The important challenge in computing today is to spend computing power, not horde it."
I love it when people use the wrong homonym to make a point that's obvious to the point of nonsense.
Damn, should have read the intro more carefully.
My question, then, is why such a stale article was referenced. I mean, nine years is really quite a long time. In IT, it's even longer.
This is the year 2000. It isn't 1950.
While I agree that there is surely discrimination and bias -- both conscious and unconscious -- in IT and (probably to an even greater extent) throughout our society -- this is the thing that really tanked the article for me. I didn't see a single reference from later than 1991, and most were from the mid-80s. (Extrapolating 1985 attitudes toward computers to today!?!? Please!) And a disturbing number were from the 70s and even the 60s.
You could point out that current PhD candidates grew up in these times, but the fact is that's water under the bridge. If you want to call our society and the IT industry sexist and discriminatory, you should use evidence that's somewhat current. As it is, nothing in this article comes close to erasing my very real experience of seeing companies scrambling to find anybody -- male, female, or other -- to fill their IT positions.
Oh, obviously I was hallucinating.
Damn, that was a real waste, then. Here I could have been seeing purple-fringed dragons circling Venus to the tune of Pink Floyd's _Echoes_, and instead my hallucination is a lame PC Expo piece with an error-spewing palmtop...
I saw an MSNBC piece on PC Expo yesterday morning. Standard useless fluff, but as the voiceover talked about how handhelds and wireless were the craze, yadda yadda, they had video clips of the products. The main one was of a palmtop (didn't catch the brand) obviously running WinCE. Just a couple seconds into the shot, after a few stylus taps on the screen, a window titled "FATAL APPLICATION ERROR" filled the screen, and the user spent the last several seconds of the clip pressing various places on the screen in an evident and futile attempt to close the error window. Priceless.
In that case, I can't believe this made it out the door. This kind of feature has been well-publicized wrt MS Word; it should occur to any reasonably knowledgable person that obscuring a piece of a document might not remove it from the document itself. It seems incredibly negligent of both the NYT and the CIA to not review the spec for their document to see whether the confidential information was actually redacted.
I still see a fair number of "free for personal, educational, or government use" licenses. I wonder whether some companies couldn't make more money with that, writing off the home market and pricing explicitly for business. MS and Adobe are pretty far in that direction already.
These shots are much better than the ones referenced in the main article.
I especially like the zooming in and out on icons and displaying more or less information.
Well, I've started working with Enhydra. I almost surely wouldn't have given them a thought if I hadn't seen their banner ads on /.
But then again, Enhydra's ads did describe their product.
Gnu's Not Unix
With apologies to RMS (and all the purists out there), I've reached the point of disagreeing with this. Namely, installing Solaris x86. Without the GNU tools, this platform was nearly useless for my purposes. No compiler, no gzip, and tools like make and tar that didn't work with anything I wanted to install. The local Solaris-head around here just showed me some stuff out of Solaris 8, and damn if there weren't GNU headers on a bunch of things. So I've made my own version of the acronym, Gnu's Now Unix.
I have been to both public and private schools. The private schools are so much better than the public that it isn't even funny.
I was also educated in both public and private schools, and I definitely did *not* see a major difference in the overall education.
What I *did* see, however, was that the things Slashdotters complain about (bullying and ostracism as the response to nonconformity) were *far* more prevalent and tolerated in the private school. This may have been the age group involved (4-8th grade private, HS public) but inasmuch as I was a "geek" I was much happier in the public school than the private. More hands-off administration, more opportunity to take advanced classes, and so on.
And not to be pedantic, but using words like "Algerbra" and "tax dectutable" doesn't exactly help your case.
I think you're missing the point. The question is, if you have to give your $50 to person A, who has $140 billion and donates $1 billion, or to person B, who has $10 million and donates $1 million, to whom would you rather give your money?