One angle on the story is that the early microcomputers
encouraged hacking by putting Basic right in people's faces, and
giving them an environment where you could use it to generate
some sort of graphical output. Weirdly enough, the tools to do
text-editing were nearly completely absent...
Of course now we've moved beyond those primitive days, and
instead of Basic everyone learns Javascript.
(Anyway, yeah there was a period there when I thought that a PC
with Wordstar and Turbo Pascal was my ideal development
environment. I reckoned without the flakiness of MS-DOS 2 system
calls, though, and kept getting the nagging feeling that Pascal
actually really sucked....)
You kids aren't going far enough back in time. The biggest
mystery in the history of microcomputers is how it is that IBM
went with a Microsoft deal rather than making the obvious move of
going with CP/M and Digital Research. Microsoft did languages,
and had no expertise with Operating Systems-- Gates cut a deal
with someone to buy an OS cheap-- and it later turned out to have
been a pirated fork of CP/M, Microsoft had to do a re-write
later. That got repackaged as MS-DOS, and that's where Gates got
the muscle to push Windows and Office and so on... arguing the technical
merits of Windows is pretty much besides the point.
This all explains the Microsoft business style-- they
lived in terror that someone else would do to them what they'd
done to IBM.
Why is there no outrage about David Brock spending $1 million per month on paid trolls for Clinton during the election?
Whenever I mention Brock on reddit's/r/politics, the post is
immediately moderated down. At a guess, someone is running some
bots to get this point to slide down the memory hole.
Actually, all software needs is a list of names of the design team, preferably with a ranking system you can use to prevent them from ever being hired somewhere else.
Software companies could probably make some money on the side by putting the designers in dunk tanks, and have people contribute money until it reaches the "dunk" threshold.
Advertiser-friendly. In fact that comes before user-friendly.
And asking a bunch of designers about this has fox/henhouse issues, I think.
(I know, let's do a user survey on the subject of javascript popup windows, and if it comes out thumbs-down, that means everyone will stop using them, right? )
If someone had an accident and you could not call an ambulance because you don't have a cellphone, and someone died as a result, how would it feel?
You know, I've been listening to the pro-cellphone pitch for many-a-year now, and I've heard about these terrible emergency scenarios many times, but what I actually see people doing with these "smart phones" is passing nightclub selfies around and playing games that make minesweeper look a fascinating, enlightening experience.
(Do you carry a full first-aid kit in your bag at all times? But how would you feel if you found someone bleeding to death and had no tourniquets and field dressings available?)
Mozilla has chosen to repeatedly screw over it's user base with gratuitous UI changes... now that it's user base is dwindling they've decided the solution is to do it again.
I wouldn't count on there being any meds to assist them with this condition, I'm afraid it's chronic.
It is a common misconception that Amish are anti-technology.
Yes, my understanding is they first appoint someone to explore the use of a technology and think about whether they should adopt it, and what the right way might be for them to use it.
Ideas that like that are completely alien to mainstream
consumerism, which is supposed to be all about individual
freedom, but ends up being ridiculously shallow and
short-sighted.
1) You personally not using technology is NOT resisting the
spread of it. It still spreads.
Correct. I personally don't carry a mobile phone of any sort
(strangely enough, I get by fine without one -- I
may very well be "estranged from normal society" but I probably
would be anyway). This does not prevent the obsession with these
gadgets from changing my life, however-- just to pick one, I have
to deal with linux software updates randomly changing software
interfaces over to some very silly features popular with phoney
people (like, everything buried under a hamburger icon, no
useable keyboard shortcuts, etc).
You can't resist the spread of technology. Even if you don't use it other people will, and this spreads it.
You have a point that individual resitance has limited
effectiveness at "reducing the spread", but I would stop short at
saying that there's no way to resist it. Occasionally,
people attempt organized boycotts, or public information
campaigns to discourage a type of technology-- admittedly this is
usually with limited success (the parking lot at the "Berkeley
Bowl" has plenty of SUVs-- and that's at the "Berkeley Bowl").
2) You can use the technology while refusing the stupid
abuses. For example, despite the moronic statement, in the
article you can have a phone and not answer it.
Yeah, okay, but expecting perfect self-discipline out of a human
being is a crazy trap in itself -- technologies bia human beings towards
behaving in certain ways. This is going to happen, and
pretending you can prevent it with "self-control" is not actually
realistic, however popular this attitude is in a certain kind of rhetoric...
I would even go
so far as to call people that insist on answering it fools.
A case in point.
... over time, people that are stupid enough to
answer the phone at the wrong time will get themselves killed
(car accidents for example).
And one method of preventing that from happening to you is to
recognize you have an addiction problem and stop carrying the
gadget with you. Or maybe stop owning one of the gadgets.
And this appears to be a very unpopular line of thought these
days, but if you're designing software that's inherently intended
to distract phone addicts (pokemon go comes to mind, but there's
plenty of examples), you share in responsibility for the
inevitable deaths that are going to occur because of this
distraction.
And I'm going to quote this paragraph in full because I think
there's a fascinating amount of dodging and dancing around the
real issue:
3) The problem is not even the spread of technology, nor the
social change that it brings.
Certain technology makes certain
abuses less likely and certain abuses more likely.
The spread of
machinery helped eliminate slavery (by reducing the need for low
skilled work).
The spread of the internet made cyber-bullying far
more common.
But this changes.
Over time, new technology replaces
the old ones and often solves the old problems (while creating
new ones.)
In other words, having new tech DOES solve the
problems of old tech.
If you resist it long enough, it goes
away. Or better yet, YOU can solve the problem.
So, should we ignore the potential effects of a technology,
secure in the belief that further technological progress will
always solve any problems?
Allow me to suggest another possibility: at present, we have no
sensible method of evaluating what a new product is going to do
to us, and we end up swept along by the enthusiasm of faddish
people who can't even imagine a down-side to their latest
obessions (everyone likes it, it must be good! But what's bad
may be that everyone likes it. Then what?).
Might there not be a set of alternative social institutions we
could use to attempt to anticipate (and perhaps "regulate"?)
potential problems before we encounter them?
CEOs shouldn't vacation while their company is failing.
Yes, he should keep his nose to the grindstone until he comes up with a deranged vegetable juicer concept that will let his inverstors skim some cash off of rich fucks even crazier than they are.
If capitalism crashes down around us, it's going to be all Burning Man's fault.
Does it bother anyone else that ESR is the abbreviation for "extended support release"? Whenever I see something like this I think "No, no, why would you want to use esr's code?"
You're missing the point: if you're going to role out an entirely new UI, you shouldn't pretend it's the same piece of software. Give it a new name, and see if it wins converts, but leave the old project alone in the mean
time.
Big changes like this are effectively forks, and you shouldn't try to hide that from people by calling it an update.
Implementing a policy that ensures extensions are not tampered and are sourced by the actual dev is not "not caring about backwards compatibility".
Here's a thought: the addons pages could have a big lock icon stuck on the ones that mozilla can vouch for, and the others are "you're own your own".
But then of course, there's the still the problem of not breaking support for the old unsecured addons, doesn't it? Refusing to do that is what I'm calling lazy. There's a new bright-and-shiney out there, and chasing it without dumping the crap that was the last bright-and-shiney would take some serious thought and effort.
(Whenever they really want to fuck you over, the excuse is always "Security!". Once they say that you're supposed to salute and go away).
Slashdot Mirror
One angle on the story is that the early microcomputers encouraged hacking by putting Basic right in people's faces, and giving them an environment where you could use it to generate some sort of graphical output. Weirdly enough, the tools to do text-editing were nearly completely absent...
Of course now we've moved beyond those primitive days, and instead of Basic everyone learns Javascript.
(Anyway, yeah there was a period there when I thought that a PC with Wordstar and Turbo Pascal was my ideal development environment. I reckoned without the flakiness of MS-DOS 2 system calls, though, and kept getting the nagging feeling that Pascal actually really sucked....)
Or even simpler: never touch the damn things and let time take care of them.
You kids aren't going far enough back in time. The biggest mystery in the history of microcomputers is how it is that IBM went with a Microsoft deal rather than making the obvious move of going with CP/M and Digital Research. Microsoft did languages, and had no expertise with Operating Systems-- Gates cut a deal with someone to buy an OS cheap-- and it later turned out to have been a pirated fork of CP/M, Microsoft had to do a re-write later. That got repackaged as MS-DOS, and that's where Gates got the muscle to push Windows and Office and so on... arguing the technical merits of Windows is pretty much besides the point.
This all explains the Microsoft business style-- they lived in terror that someone else would do to them what they'd done to IBM.
Whenever I mention Brock on reddit's /r/politics, the post is
immediately moderated down. At a guess, someone is running some
bots to get this point to slide down the memory hole.
An idea whose time may have arrived, though personally I'm willing to start with dunk tanks and see if they learn better.
And you're well on the way to re-inventing the Wordstar design.
(By the way, anyone who thinks the kids-offa-my-lawn joke is still funny is clearly a geezer lost in the late-stages of senility.)
Actually, all software needs is a list of names of the design team, preferably with a ranking system you can use to prevent them from ever being hired somewhere else.
Software companies could probably make some money on the side by putting the designers in dunk tanks, and have people contribute money until it reaches the "dunk" threshold.
I think it's funny so many people here know what Windows 10 is like. (I know, I know, "I have to use it at work", right.)
Advertiser-friendly. In fact that comes before user-friendly.
And asking a bunch of designers about this has fox/henhouse issues, I think.
(I know, let's do a user survey on the subject of javascript popup windows, and if it comes out thumbs-down, that means everyone will stop using them, right? )
You know, I've been listening to the pro-cellphone pitch for many-a-year now, and I've heard about these terrible emergency scenarios many times, but what I actually see people doing with these "smart phones" is passing nightclub selfies around and playing games that make minesweeper look a fascinating, enlightening experience.
(Do you carry a full first-aid kit in your bag at all times? But how would you feel if you found someone bleeding to death and had no tourniquets and field dressings available?)
Mozilla has chosen to repeatedly screw over it's user base with gratuitous UI changes... now that it's user base is dwindling they've decided the solution is to do it again.
I wouldn't count on there being any meds to assist them with this condition, I'm afraid it's chronic.
And before adopting a new consumer toy, we know that it's not going to be as big a problem as heroin, because...
And how are your experiments with heroin use going?
I understand that if you just exercise moderation, occasional heroin use is no big deal.
Yes, my understanding is they first appoint someone to explore the use of a technology and think about whether they should adopt it, and what the right way might be for them to use it.
Ideas that like that are completely alien to mainstream consumerism, which is supposed to be all about individual freedom, but ends up being ridiculously shallow and short-sighted.
gurps_npc wrote:
Correct. I personally don't carry a mobile phone of any sort (strangely enough, I get by fine without one -- I may very well be "estranged from normal society" but I probably would be anyway). This does not prevent the obsession with these gadgets from changing my life, however-- just to pick one, I have to deal with linux software updates randomly changing software interfaces over to some very silly features popular with phoney people (like, everything buried under a hamburger icon, no useable keyboard shortcuts, etc).
You have a point that individual resitance has limited effectiveness at "reducing the spread", but I would stop short at saying that there's no way to resist it. Occasionally, people attempt organized boycotts, or public information campaigns to discourage a type of technology-- admittedly this is usually with limited success (the parking lot at the "Berkeley Bowl" has plenty of SUVs-- and that's at the "Berkeley Bowl").
Yeah, okay, but expecting perfect self-discipline out of a human being is a crazy trap in itself -- technologies bia human beings towards behaving in certain ways. This is going to happen, and pretending you can prevent it with "self-control" is not actually realistic, however popular this attitude is in a certain kind of rhetoric...
A case in point.
And one method of preventing that from happening to you is to recognize you have an addiction problem and stop carrying the gadget with you. Or maybe stop owning one of the gadgets.
And this appears to be a very unpopular line of thought these days, but if you're designing software that's inherently intended to distract phone addicts (pokemon go comes to mind, but there's plenty of examples), you share in responsibility for the inevitable deaths that are going to occur because of this distraction.
And I'm going to quote this paragraph in full because I think there's a fascinating amount of dodging and dancing around the real issue:
So, should we ignore the potential effects of a technology, secure in the belief that further technological progress will always solve any problems?
Allow me to suggest another possibility: at present, we have no sensible method of evaluating what a new product is going to do to us, and we end up swept along by the enthusiasm of faddish people who can't even imagine a down-side to their latest obessions (everyone likes it, it must be good! But what's bad may be that everyone likes it. Then what?).
Might there not be a set of alternative social institutions we could use to attempt to anticipate (and perhaps "regulate"?) potential problems before we encounter them?
I'm not particularly. If they want to keep control of their stuff, they can keep it off of our internet.
After the advertising apocalypse arrives, the net will only get better.
Baron_Yam wrote:
Yes, he should keep his nose to the grindstone until he comes up with a deranged vegetable juicer concept that will let his inverstors skim some cash off of rich fucks even crazier than they are.
If capitalism crashes down around us, it's going to be all Burning Man's fault.
No good, nothing gets plya dust off. When the water dries you realize it just dissolved temporarily, but it's still there.
Oh what the hell, mod this AC up. Off-topic rants about Mozilla are always in order.
You're a little confused about what burning man is about, methinks.
But in any case, some of the gate goes to fund the weird ass art projects, and it's a rare year that some of those aren't pretty amazing.
Some of the gate also goes toward the staff who have the problem of keeping the BLM happy, or at least not too angry.
There are lots of reasons to skip Burning Man, but the ticket price is the least of it.
Eh, people have been talking about how Burning Man is Over Now within a few years since it started.
Of course, that doesn't mean that it isn't over.
Or that it's even started yet.
At your average start-up, you'd much rather have the CEO doing drugs in the desert rather than in the corner office.
If investors want the startup employees chained to their desks until the "Profit!" stage, they should write that into the agreements up front.
Does it bother anyone else that ESR is the abbreviation for "extended support release"? Whenever I see something like this I think "No, no, why would you want to use esr's code?"
You're missing the point: if you're going to role out an entirely new UI, you shouldn't pretend it's the same piece of software. Give it a new name, and see if it wins converts, but leave the old project alone in the mean time.
Big changes like this are effectively forks, and you shouldn't try to hide that from people by calling it an update.
Here's a thought: the addons pages could have a big lock icon stuck on the ones that mozilla can vouch for, and the others are "you're own your own".
But then of course, there's the still the problem of not breaking support for the old unsecured addons, doesn't it? Refusing to do that is what I'm calling lazy. There's a new bright-and-shiney out there, and chasing it without dumping the crap that was the last bright-and-shiney would take some serious thought and effort.
(Whenever they really want to fuck you over, the excuse is always "Security!". Once they say that you're supposed to salute and go away).