It seems naive to belong to 5% of the computer world and not have any idea how the other 95% works.
I'm not defending the value of Windows typing mechanism, either, I think its archaic. I'd prefer a file(1) type checking mechanism built into whatever passed for the operating system's Finder interface so that file type could be determined by the signature of the data itself.
New applications with "unknown" file signatures could expand the system database of knowns signatures. The Finder interface could offer a mechanism to associate found types with applications and a way to change those associations or override the association between a found signature and a specific file type.
...when you consider that most unix installations have nothing to do with "use" in the sense of personal computer interactive operation. They're used for DB, web and other transactional and client/server computing as well as providing the operational guidance for other non-computer based interaction systems (traffic lights). By this standard, a non-trivial percentage of the world may be a "unix user" in some fashion or other.
I'd also add that commercial UNIX licenses are far different from end-user personal computer licenses. A single commerical UNIX installation may have a many hundreds or thousands of user licenses attached to it. Is one installation with a 1000 client licenses a single sale or 1001 sales? A better sales comparison would add up processor and client licenses together or use dollars spent.
Either way, Apple is only trying to mislead their way out of last place in the computer industry.
What exactly do you mean by getting much out of their computer ? Is it grokking a lousy paradigm that happens to be the most common or knowing how it works inside, like a car engine ?
Obviously there is more to your car than knowing how to turn the key and steering wheel and push on the gas and brakes, even if you don't work on your own engine. There's making sure your tires have air, knowing how much you can load/tow with it, and so on.
Likewise, getting more out of a computer doesn't require being able to program it. The example I gave here is something I've experienced more than once in a business environment. I'd expect appliance-like ignorance of operation from granny sending email, but shouldn't an office worker be expected to know a little more in order to do their job effectively? There are obvious questions about lost opportunities for enhanced productivity when a user isn't capable of getting beyond point-and-click.
The apocryphal if not true intent of Jobs was to make the Macintosh a computer appliance. The reality is that it isn't one by a long shot, and someone using it to get a task done on a daily basis should reasonably be expected to know more about how to make it accomplish their tasks.
The argument I'd make is that certain Macintosh features like filetyping and creator typing which are hidden from the user also inhibit the user from understanding essential aspects of how their computer works, eg "Why won't my computer open my file as expected?"
It's not about being a geek OR an expert, it's about being functional.
Anyone who has ever tried to educated someone on how to use a computer for the first time knows that file extension can be confusing!
Anyone who has ever had to work with a Mac user knows how confused they get by files with an extension (eg,.DOC) but with no creator and filetype information. They flail on the mouse button and then tell you that your document is damaged or that they can't open your TeachText document and oh by the way why did you do that spreadsheet in TeachText anyway? They simply cannot understand the idea of opening the application and then opening the document.
Now I know that this can be interpreted as a virtue of the Mac OS because it's allowing you to focus on your "job" and not on your "computer", and maybe it is. But it also strikes me as a little self-defeating because the user doesn't ever get beyond the flail-on-the-mouse stage, which sounds to me like they're not getting much out of their computer.
It's fairly easy to scan a hard copy when you have a scanner. When you don't have a scanner, you have some issues.
There will be a paper world that needs to be bridged. E-docs are great when everyone's in the electronic world, but once a doc jumps outside that world it gets kind of awkward.
If they have been running UNIX and thin clients all along, what's really new? That they gave up their existing thin clients and switched to Linux-based thin clients? Sure it's "new" but not new in the sense that they were a pure Windows shop before.
While some of these companies seem to have gone overboard on items of little legitimate business value, I wonder if stuff like the Aereon maybe doesn't represent an attempt to move to a new work paradigm, ie, don't stuff your employees into the cheapest furniture you can find. Give them comfortable, pleasant surroundings and they'll be more productive. I'm wondering if there weren't at least a couple of "new economy" principals who thought "new economy, new work paradigm" etc etc.
I'm not sure that there's as much of a taboo against discussing pedophilia as much as there is a taboo against participating in it. I think most societies are in broad agreement that sexual contact between adults and children is hurtful to both parties at best and can leave long-lasting scars on all parties involved. At worst, its an example of predatory behavior by adults against weaker, inexperienced and immature children.
So when you say there's a taboo against discussing pedophilia, I think most people would respond "What's there to discuss?" I doubt there's any room at all for change in attitudes without endorsing what is tanatamount to child abuse.
I think the only space for any exploration is "When does mature sexuality begin?" and there's probably sincere people who think that in the special, unique contexts an adult-sexually mature teen relationship is possible. But beyond that sphere, there's little moral or practical room for movement on the issue of pedophilia, which is why people get cranky when you talk about it.
Paypal is an example of the social concept of the representation of money. The value of your Paypal account is demoninated in real hard currency and is convertable on demand into the object (currency or coins) in which it is denominated in. Money is in itself a medium of exchange, and that's what gives in intrinsic value beyond the intrinsic value of any other item of commerce.
The HammerOfThor+35 isn't just something of varying social value (Diablo players vs. non-Diablo players) or even of varying market value among people with whom its significant, it can't be used to buy something else. It's not a medium of exchange; the value of other things in Diablo or outside of Diablo is not measured in terms of HammerOfThors and the intrinsic value that it has is relative to what can be done with it.
I don't know. Would it be weird if you reported on a Paypal bug which resulted in some payments getting lost ?
The significant distinction being that Paypal payments are just another shape for money. You can convert them on demand into cash. Gaming items are not demand convertable into cash, they have to go through an extra step.
You hit the nail on the head. Africa's cultural problem is that Africa's had about 200 years or less to accomplish the social evolution that European countries had 1000 years to do. This is with the generous assumption that Europe in 1000 AD was as socially and technologically sophisticated as Africa was circa 1800, which may be dubious at best for sub-Saharan Africa.
The FBI probably has a copy of every cracking/security gizmo out there. They're in the security business, they get them primarily to know how they work and what their "adversaries" have and can get and can do.
For the time/space functionality of offsites, why not just have three storage units: primary, offsite mirror, and the backup/copy one. When the backup/copy is done, pull out the disks. Send them to the vault, and insert another set of disks.
We've been looking at re-doing our storage, and the ability to do backups transparently to disk is quite compelling.
Offsite mirroring? Most of the big storage systems like EMC or Xiotech can be mirrored to another unit somewhere else, and most can do hot copies of existing data sets, which can then be dump to tape at some drone's leisure.
It's not an inexpensive solution, and it presumes you have a facility someplace offsite to mirror to. Storing 1TB is easy, managing 1TB isn't.
RTFM is important no matter what operating system you're using, but in the case of Linux TFM, when it exists enough in one place to be called a manual at all, is often poorly written, out of date, and so on that even if you read it and understand it it doesn't help.
I think that RTFM often really means "spend 200 hours fucking with it, you'll figure it out" or "My status is enhanced by not telling you how to do it" or "I've helped people before, but 4/5ths of the people I've helped before are just not sophisticated enough to grasp the details of actually running Linux and I'm out of patience".
I think the latter comment about end-user sophistication is probably true. Newer distros are often simple to use on common hardware, but getting limited-support devices to work or something other than dedicated-ethernet-IP networking is *not* a trivial accomplishment for a lot of people. Most people who don't do computers/networking for a living are trying to accomplish some other goal: web browsing, online gaming, shopping, email, graphics, and all the things that these tasks accomplish. They're not looking to gain a sideline CompSci degree.
So when someone gets slammed for not RTFM, deservedly or not, they give on Linux. Maybe they should, but its certainly not always their fault.
Not only was Napster great for getting music that isn't currently in print, it was great for getting music that never was or will be in print.
A lot of live or studio outtake stuff will never make it into print, due to either artist reluctance, contract BS, or other legal impediments.
Sure, much of it is "available" if you want to spend a lot of time and money BSing around on the trading circuit, but it was nice to be able to get a song here or there.
Interesting commentary on whether the speed laws are broken if 90% of people are speeding.
I'd guess it'd depend on how you defined speeding. Is going 35 in a 30 zone speeding, or just people trying to stay close to an otherwise inaccurate speedo (my '99 Honda Accord V6 is at least 5MPH slower than indicated)?
Maybe the idea is to post speed limits, but don't enforce them with tickets, enforce them with jail fines if you cause an accident linked to speeding.
I would think that for performance and reliability reasons, a system like this would be using a Xiotech or EMC fiber-channel storage system that was hot-mirrored to another storage system somewhere else in the country, preferrably to another data center in another part of the world connected to another part of the Internet.
I don't doubt that there are high-quality non-degreed coders out there, and you're probably right that being self-taught indicates a much higher level of motivation. My degree is in Political Science, and I've done pretty well in Network Management largely because I'm not formally trained in the subject and I'm internally motivated to do well and learn.
The larger problem I have is that many of these people are pretty rough when it comes to larger skills that a degreed person might have, be they people social skills, writing ability or other kinds of skills that can make a person be more than just a coder.
The previous post was about non-degreed people making astronomical salaries, and that can't last forever. When managers have to start laying people off -- when you have to cut heads, why would you keep a non-degreed programmer when you have an equally skilled one with a degree? And the degree may also help tip the balance in new job openings.
When the job pool for programmers is so empty that you have to take whatever you can get, the degree matters a lot less, but those times are changing.
Non-degreed tech people making $100k is a historical fluke, I'd imagine that the economic downturn will put a lot of those people out of work and lower the overall salary those jobs get paid.
Slashdot Mirror
No end user can access their mail with Sendmail, it's a mail transfer agent for relaying mail, intra or inter-node.
Mail access means reading the end-user spool through the usual MUAs and support daemons: Pine, Elm, mail(1), imapd, pop, etc.
End users do use sendmail to relay mail, but they can't access their own mail that way.
It seems naive to belong to 5% of the computer world and not have any idea how the other 95% works.
I'm not defending the value of Windows typing mechanism, either, I think its archaic. I'd prefer a file(1) type checking mechanism built into whatever passed for the operating system's Finder interface so that file type could be determined by the signature of the data itself.
New applications with "unknown" file signatures could expand the system database of knowns signatures. The Finder interface could offer a mechanism to associate found types with applications and a way to change those associations or override the association between a found signature and a specific file type.
What a great metaphor! Lamborghinis are overpriced, unreliable sports cars for rich assholes who have money to burn on image.
...when you consider that most unix installations have nothing to do with "use" in the sense of personal computer interactive operation. They're used for DB, web and other transactional and client/server computing as well as providing the operational guidance for other non-computer based interaction systems (traffic lights). By this standard, a non-trivial percentage of the world may be a "unix user" in some fashion or other.
I'd also add that commercial UNIX licenses are far different from end-user personal computer licenses. A single commerical UNIX installation may have a many hundreds or thousands of user licenses attached to it. Is one installation with a 1000 client licenses a single sale or 1001 sales? A better sales comparison would add up processor and client licenses together or use dollars spent.
Either way, Apple is only trying to mislead their way out of last place in the computer industry.
What exactly do you mean by getting much out of their computer ? Is it grokking a lousy paradigm that happens to be the most common or knowing how it works inside, like a car engine ?
Obviously there is more to your car than knowing how to turn the key and steering wheel and push on the gas and brakes, even if you don't work on your own engine. There's making sure your tires have air, knowing how much you can load/tow with it, and so on.
Likewise, getting more out of a computer doesn't require being able to program it. The example I gave here is something I've experienced more than once in a business environment. I'd expect appliance-like ignorance of operation from granny sending email, but shouldn't an office worker be expected to know a little more in order to do their job effectively? There are obvious questions about lost opportunities for enhanced productivity when a user isn't capable of getting beyond point-and-click.
The apocryphal if not true intent of Jobs was to make the Macintosh a computer appliance. The reality is that it isn't one by a long shot, and someone using it to get a task done on a daily basis should reasonably be expected to know more about how to make it accomplish their tasks.
The argument I'd make is that certain Macintosh features like filetyping and creator typing which are hidden from the user also inhibit the user from understanding essential aspects of how their computer works, eg "Why won't my computer open my file as expected?"
It's not about being a geek OR an expert, it's about being functional.
Anyone who has ever tried to educated someone on how to use a computer for the first time knows that file extension can be confusing!
.DOC) but with no creator and filetype information. They flail on the mouse button and then tell you that your document is damaged or that they can't open your TeachText document and oh by the way why did you do that spreadsheet in TeachText anyway? They simply cannot understand the idea of opening the application and then opening the document.
Anyone who has ever had to work with a Mac user knows how confused they get by files with an extension (eg,
Now I know that this can be interpreted as a virtue of the Mac OS because it's allowing you to focus on your "job" and not on your "computer", and maybe it is. But it also strikes me as a little self-defeating because the user doesn't ever get beyond the flail-on-the-mouse stage, which sounds to me like they're not getting much out of their computer.
But if you had fun doing it, it's like someone gave you $1200 for having a good time.
Hopefully that will improve spelling
And lead to a greater use of punctuation by posters.
It's fairly easy to scan a hard copy when you have a scanner. When you don't have a scanner, you have some issues.
There will be a paper world that needs to be bridged. E-docs are great when everyone's in the electronic world, but once a doc jumps outside that world it gets kind of awkward.
If they have been running UNIX and thin clients all along, what's really new? That they gave up their existing thin clients and switched to Linux-based thin clients? Sure it's "new" but not new in the sense that they were a pure Windows shop before.
While some of these companies seem to have gone overboard on items of little legitimate business value, I wonder if stuff like the Aereon maybe doesn't represent an attempt to move to a new work paradigm, ie, don't stuff your employees into the cheapest furniture you can find. Give them comfortable, pleasant surroundings and they'll be more productive. I'm wondering if there weren't at least a couple of "new economy" principals who thought "new economy, new work paradigm" etc etc.
I'm not sure that there's as much of a taboo against discussing pedophilia as much as there is a taboo against participating in it. I think most societies are in broad agreement that sexual contact between adults and children is hurtful to both parties at best and can leave long-lasting scars on all parties involved. At worst, its an example of predatory behavior by adults against weaker, inexperienced and immature children.
So when you say there's a taboo against discussing pedophilia, I think most people would respond "What's there to discuss?" I doubt there's any room at all for change in attitudes without endorsing what is tanatamount to child abuse.
I think the only space for any exploration is "When does mature sexuality begin?" and there's probably sincere people who think that in the special, unique contexts an adult-sexually mature teen relationship is possible. But beyond that sphere, there's little moral or practical room for movement on the issue of pedophilia, which is why people get cranky when you talk about it.
Paypal is an example of the social concept of the representation of money. The value of your Paypal account is demoninated in real hard currency and is convertable on demand into the object (currency or coins) in which it is denominated in. Money is in itself a medium of exchange, and that's what gives in intrinsic value beyond the intrinsic value of any other item of commerce.
The HammerOfThor+35 isn't just something of varying social value (Diablo players vs. non-Diablo players) or even of varying market value among people with whom its significant, it can't be used to buy something else. It's not a medium of exchange; the value of other things in Diablo or outside of Diablo is not measured in terms of HammerOfThors and the intrinsic value that it has is relative to what can be done with it.
I don't know. Would it be weird if you reported on a Paypal bug which resulted in some payments getting lost ?
The significant distinction being that Paypal payments are just another shape for money. You can convert them on demand into cash. Gaming items are not demand convertable into cash, they have to go through an extra step.
Africa's biggest problem is cultural
You hit the nail on the head. Africa's cultural problem is that Africa's had about 200 years or less to accomplish the social evolution that European countries had 1000 years to do. This is with the generous assumption that Europe in 1000 AD was as socially and technologically sophisticated as Africa was circa 1800, which may be dubious at best for sub-Saharan Africa.
The FBI probably has a copy of every cracking/security gizmo out there. They're in the security business, they get them primarily to know how they work and what their "adversaries" have and can get and can do.
If this is a surprise to anyone, I'm surprised...
For the time/space functionality of offsites, why not just have three storage units: primary, offsite mirror, and the backup/copy one. When the backup/copy is done, pull out the disks. Send them to the vault, and insert another set of disks.
We've been looking at re-doing our storage, and the ability to do backups transparently to disk is quite compelling.
Offsite mirroring? Most of the big storage systems like EMC or Xiotech can be mirrored to another unit somewhere else, and most can do hot copies of existing data sets, which can then be dump to tape at some drone's leisure.
It's not an inexpensive solution, and it presumes you have a facility someplace offsite to mirror to. Storing 1TB is easy, managing 1TB isn't.
RTFM is important no matter what operating system you're using, but in the case of Linux TFM, when it exists enough in one place to be called a manual at all, is often poorly written, out of date, and so on that even if you read it and understand it it doesn't help.
I think that RTFM often really means "spend 200 hours fucking with it, you'll figure it out" or "My status is enhanced by not telling you how to do it" or "I've helped people before, but 4/5ths of the people I've helped before are just not sophisticated enough to grasp the details of actually running Linux and I'm out of patience".
I think the latter comment about end-user sophistication is probably true. Newer distros are often simple to use on common hardware, but getting limited-support devices to work or something other than dedicated-ethernet-IP networking is *not* a trivial accomplishment for a lot of people. Most people who don't do computers/networking for a living are trying to accomplish some other goal: web browsing, online gaming, shopping, email, graphics, and all the things that these tasks accomplish. They're not looking to gain a sideline CompSci degree.
So when someone gets slammed for not RTFM, deservedly or not, they give on Linux. Maybe they should, but its certainly not always their fault.
Not only was Napster great for getting music that isn't currently in print, it was great for getting music that never was or will be in print.
A lot of live or studio outtake stuff will never make it into print, due to either artist reluctance, contract BS, or other legal impediments. Sure, much of it is "available" if you want to spend a lot of time and money BSing around on the trading circuit, but it was nice to be able to get a song here or there.
That'd be a great challenge -- who could outdo who and still stay within the "rules" of baseball, and maybe the limits of human ability/perception.
It'd be interesting to know if a really good pitcher is always better than a really good batter, or vice-versa.
Interesting commentary on whether the speed laws are broken if 90% of people are speeding.
I'd guess it'd depend on how you defined speeding. Is going 35 in a 30 zone speeding, or just people trying to stay close to an otherwise inaccurate speedo (my '99 Honda Accord V6 is at least 5MPH slower than indicated)?
Maybe the idea is to post speed limits, but don't enforce them with tickets, enforce them with jail fines if you cause an accident linked to speeding.
I would think that for performance and reliability reasons, a system like this would be using a Xiotech or EMC fiber-channel storage system that was hot-mirrored to another storage system somewhere else in the country, preferrably to another data center in another part of the world connected to another part of the Internet.
I don't doubt that there are high-quality non-degreed coders out there, and you're probably right that being self-taught indicates a much higher level of motivation. My degree is in Political Science, and I've done pretty well in Network Management largely because I'm not formally trained in the subject and I'm internally motivated to do well and learn.
The larger problem I have is that many of these people are pretty rough when it comes to larger skills that a degreed person might have, be they people social skills, writing ability or other kinds of skills that can make a person be more than just a coder.
The previous post was about non-degreed people making astronomical salaries, and that can't last forever. When managers have to start laying people off -- when you have to cut heads, why would you keep a non-degreed programmer when you have an equally skilled one with a degree? And the degree may also help tip the balance in new job openings.
When the job pool for programmers is so empty that you have to take whatever you can get, the degree matters a lot less, but those times are changing.
Non-degreed tech people making $100k is a historical fluke, I'd imagine that the economic downturn will put a lot of those people out of work and lower the overall salary those jobs get paid.