A well trained pilot would know when to trust the computers and when not to. They would also know how to maneuver and react in situations. It's like the pilot that landed his plane in the river after losing an engine to birds. I don't think a computer would have taken that option and not only would it have been likely that all the passengers would have been killed, but bystanders as the planes computer attempted to correct and eventually goes down in a populated street.
This comment looks sensible on the face of it, but I have to disagree with you. I have a pilot license and am familiar with the process of flying. I've never flown a fly-by-wire aircraft, but I've automated a radio broadcast desk - which might not look like it's relevant, but it taught me that "knowing when to trust the computer" is not an obvious state, not in a radio station and I seriously doubt in a cockpit.
For me the final "aha moment" came when the computer was attempting to tell me something useful, but because I was concentrating on a completely different aspect of interacting with it, I completely missed the information. In my case it caused a few seconds of dead air on a radio station, nothing life threatening, but not human obvious either.
The challenge is not "when to trust a computer and when not to" - the challenge is "how do you get the information that the computer is using to the human in such a way that they can manage that input stream in a timely fashion. Stick shakers are an example of making use of an extra input channel.
Accidents in planes are rarely just one thing going wrong, they generally are a whole string of things. A computer in the mix just exacerbates the issue.
An internet filter such as Senator Conroy is proposing is at best a misguided attempt to provide a safe environment for children and at worst a totalitarian tool to placate the population.
The internet is a social tool that will continue to grow in its scope and penetration. As the internet evolves from the teenager that it is, filtering will become less and less effective - despite developers best efforts, just look at how SPAM filters have failed to meet the raising tide since 1993.
A better use of the proposed funds is to provide education to the population about how to deal with inappropriate content, rather than attempt to construct a centralised solution for a decentralised problem.
Predicting the demise of any particular technology is a 50%/50% game. Either you're right, or you're not. Articles like this are not actually adding signal to any particular discussion, they're just adding more noise.
Perhaps it's a sign of the times - I suspect not - but why can we not discuss things that actually matter, things that provide an insight into how we can "do the next good thing", as opposed to knocking down a process that has been developed, released and is widely used.
In Australia, the idea of leaving everything behind is called a Sea Change. Of late, there is a growing group of people who leave the city to live in the bush to enjoy a simpler life, that is being referred to as a Tree Change.
I have been in IT for over 26 years. Six or so years ago a health event happened in our household that made us re-evaluate what was important in life. As a result, my wife and I hit the road. We've now been travelling around Australia for over four years.
At the time, I had just started my own IT business and needed a way to continue to service my clients, so I found a way to have broadband, by carrying a satellite dish with us. The initial dish was supposed to be 2.4m wide, so I needed a truck to get it around the country, so I got myself a Heavy Rigid Truck license.
We found accommodation on the road by way of a house sitting organisation. As a result we were introduced to many communities and living environments. From great to pretty bad. Some communities welcomed us with open arms and others were completely indifferent to our arrival.
I spent time fixing computers for farmers who were short-staffed, so I got onto a tractor, forklift or into a truck and did what needed to be done. I found the physical work extremely rewarding. It gave me opportunity to explore other aspects of my life. One day I found myself sitting in a big truck, loaded with hay bales, singing at the top of my lungs whilst sweating like a pig on a 40 degree Celsius day inside the cab. It was absolutely wonderful and that night I slept like a baby.
Over the years I have found IT both rewarding and infuriating, sometimes at the same time. I find that challenging myself, by leaving a permanent position, starting my own show, talking to people, learning different skills and taking life as it comes a lot less stressful.
I would be lying if I said there was no stress, but these days its about servicing the vehicle, or wondering where the next exciting thing is coming from. No longer do I worry to any great extent about receiving a call at 2am to fix some or other "essential" service. My evaluation of "essential" has changed dramatically.
At present I'm staying in a city, Perth (WA), the place where we originally departed from, in a rented house while my wife and I work to save some pennies to deck out a caravan, so we can go onto the next phase of our nomadic existence, whatever that turns out to be.
My standard phrase is: "The software I'm installing to resolve your problems today is free, not because it's dodgy, but because the makers of the software believe that this should be free. They derive their income from other sources."
Built by the University of Western Australia and also used by Curtin University, there are completely automagic systems in use.
From Curtin's site: A lecturer walks into their next lecture, turns the microphone on and delivers a lecture. An hour or so later, without any human intervention, an appropriately titled link automatically appears on the web page of that unit adding the just finished lecture to the list of all the lecture recordings for that unit.
A google image search finds this as a photo of Marissa celebrating her 30th birthday. She's got to be a geek if she stands up in front of people like this - if not a geek, a fellow dag:-)
You state that "Linux has prooven itself (time and time again), for over 5 years in our company". Perhaps you need to amplify that. For example, if it's providing email services find out how many emails Linux handled, or how much data it routed, or how much down-time there was, or how many server patches were needed, or how many reboots were required.
You need to communicate what it is that Linux does already and how it stacks up.
For all I know your pay-roll file server is a Linux box and a statement that reads like: "Well for one, you got paid yesterday because the Linux server was doing what it's supposed to do."
I should point out that you should not lie and make up stuff because it will come and bite you.
I suppose "could" is the right word. I suspect that many will even buy this rubbish, thanks to the effervescent sales pitch made by the local computer shop or supermarket.
A company that writes software that cannot uninstall itself, needs more privileges than an Administrator account on XP, needs you to download three files just to remove itself and stops your actual email from being downloaded, yeah, that's something the common computer user could buy.
I've now spent countless man hours removing this crap from client machines after they were told that they needed it. For me, AVG, SpyBot S&D and AdAware seems to work just fine and the computer still responds without the need to install Ghost, Live Update, Live Register, and 27 other little programmes.
To top it off, it doesn't even actually work. That is, stop infections.
Walking into the Computer Lab in my high school introduced me to computing. A whole room with Apple ][ computers with "big kids" writing software. My first computing question was "Doesn't that blinking thing {the cursor} irritate you?", that day I went on to debug Pacman movement code that the guy was writing - to my eye it didn't look symmetrical, and it wasn't - you know, up, down, left, right and getting all the +/- correct.
I went on to read every book in my local library to learn some software development skills. A friend of mine had a dad who worked at ESA and he would bring home an HP 87 on the weekend. We were hooked.
Then I convinced my mother to provide me with an interest free loan to buy my own computer, a Commodore Vic 20.
I remember typing in a big-screen clock program about six times, because the cassette recorder wasn't in stock and you lost what you did when you turned it off.
I went on TV and won a Disk Drive for my Vic and that opened up a whole new universe. I participated in computing contests and using a transfer cable that I built to get data from an Apple ][ to a Commodore 64, I transferred HGR graphics of the Mona-Lisa and some chips to the Vic where I displayed them on screen, using the 6502 stack as swap because I didn't have enough RAM to move images in any other way, than swap an image, a byte at a time.
Around 1985 I bought a Mac 512ED and started writing software in Pascal.
I went on to break the world record endurance computing, then moved to the other side of the world and started building web-sites, seems my 3.5Kb RAM days are still standing me in good stead.
I still often wonder if being frugal with memory as a development methodology makes me a better and more productive developer than kids who grew up with 1Gb of RAM, let alone a 10Mb HDD or a 172Kb FDD:)
If only their existed somewhere a company that excelled at search technology with the gumption to take on a project as large as OCRing such an immense Public Domain repository. *cough* google *cough*
Hmm, I cannot actually believe that I must confess that I didn't actually think of that./me smacks forehead.
Well, it is possible that this idea would actually result in a digital collection of documents that were usable, but if it goes the way I've noted too many other digitisation efforts seem to go, then the result will be a stack of PDF documents that are no more than scanned images of pages with no OCR, thus no actual use.
Of course it is possible that some bright spark will come along and run an OCR process over the standard scans that many document scanning systems seem to produce.
From a PHB perspective, a PDF is universal, never mind the difference between an image and text which might actually make the collection useful.
I think your idea has great merit, but I must confess that I think your idea will be buried in politics and name calling.
Allow me to elaborate a little. I'm a debian user, have been for a number of years. I'm also a software developer with 24 years of experience and I run my own company. I use my workstation to get my job done and I report bugs as diligently as I am able to as they arise from time-to-time. On occasion I attempt to use IRC to ask questions in #debian and in the past I've offered my services to the debian community.
In this context I've found that there are a few "loud" people within the debian community, those who are quick to dismiss those who are not a developer and "thus" have no visible track record. Members of the general community might perceive those "loud" people as representative of the debian developer community.
Perhaps the reason that the perception exists that the debian community is hard to communicate with is because it appears that to become a debian developer requires a lot of passion, persistence and patience. Once you are a debian developer, there may be a sense of achievement and some form of separation, in that there is differentiation between a developer and the rest of the community.
I'm not talking about the process of becoming a developer, I'm talking about how it makes you feel after you've done it.
I'm struggling a little to get my point across, because I don't want this to turn into a moan about debian because/. has already well and truly taken care of that part of the discussion.
What I'm talking about it that debian developers appear to me to require a strong personality, just to become a developer in the first place, that as a result, debian itself looses out.
So, after many words, getting back to what I started with, politics and name calling. I think that we as debian users need to find a way to allow more cohesion between the various members of the community and then ideas such as yours can and will be embraced and encouraged.
I've now re-read this numerous times and I'm still not sure that I've got my point across, but feel free to email me direct to discuss this further.
I am using a mobile 2-way satellite dish, have locally setup an Asterisk box using IAX2 trunking talking to two CISCO ATA186 (as a trial), to run in and out-bound calls.
I was going to go down that track in my post, but then I wasn't sure if I would be happy or confident to state that going after file swappers is a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are legitimate uses for swapping files. There are also other uses. Do I think it is unfair that record companies haven't yet figured out that their distribution methods are becoming obsolete, sure. Do I think it is legal to share my record collection with you and everyone else on the planet, I don't know.
if there is now a way that this can be used to stop these kinds of lawsuits althogether, in that it shows that the whole concept of going after file swappers in this way is bogus.
Slashdot Mirror
A well trained pilot would know when to trust the computers and when not to. They would also know how to maneuver and react in situations. It's like the pilot that landed his plane in the river after losing an engine to birds. I don't think a computer would have taken that option and not only would it have been likely that all the passengers would have been killed, but bystanders as the planes computer attempted to correct and eventually goes down in a populated street.
This comment looks sensible on the face of it, but I have to disagree with you. I have a pilot license and am familiar with the process of flying. I've never flown a fly-by-wire aircraft, but I've automated a radio broadcast desk - which might not look like it's relevant, but it taught me that "knowing when to trust the computer" is not an obvious state, not in a radio station and I seriously doubt in a cockpit.
For me the final "aha moment" came when the computer was attempting to tell me something useful, but because I was concentrating on a completely different aspect of interacting with it, I completely missed the information. In my case it caused a few seconds of dead air on a radio station, nothing life threatening, but not human obvious either.
The challenge is not "when to trust a computer and when not to" - the challenge is "how do you get the information that the computer is using to the human in such a way that they can manage that input stream in a timely fashion. Stick shakers are an example of making use of an extra input channel.
Accidents in planes are rarely just one thing going wrong, they generally are a whole string of things. A computer in the mix just exacerbates the issue.
An internet filter such as Senator Conroy is proposing is at best a misguided attempt to provide a safe environment for children and at worst a totalitarian tool to placate the population.
The internet is a social tool that will continue to grow in its scope and penetration. As the internet evolves from the teenager that it is, filtering will become less and less effective - despite developers best efforts, just look at how SPAM filters have failed to meet the raising tide since 1993.
A better use of the proposed funds is to provide education to the population about how to deal with inappropriate content, rather than attempt to construct a centralised solution for a decentralised problem.
Predicting the demise of any particular technology is a 50%/50% game. Either you're right, or you're not. Articles like this are not actually adding signal to any particular discussion, they're just adding more noise.
Perhaps it's a sign of the times - I suspect not - but why can we not discuss things that actually matter, things that provide an insight into how we can "do the next good thing", as opposed to knocking down a process that has been developed, released and is widely used.
In Australia, the idea of leaving everything behind is called a Sea Change. Of late, there is a growing group of people who leave the city to live in the bush to enjoy a simpler life, that is being referred to as a Tree Change.
I have been in IT for over 26 years. Six or so years ago a health event happened in our household that made us re-evaluate what was important in life. As a result, my wife and I hit the road. We've now been travelling around Australia for over four years.
At the time, I had just started my own IT business and needed a way to continue to service my clients, so I found a way to have broadband, by carrying a satellite dish with us. The initial dish was supposed to be 2.4m wide, so I needed a truck to get it around the country, so I got myself a Heavy Rigid Truck license.
We found accommodation on the road by way of a house sitting organisation. As a result we were introduced to many communities and living environments. From great to pretty bad. Some communities welcomed us with open arms and others were completely indifferent to our arrival.
I spent time fixing computers for farmers who were short-staffed, so I got onto a tractor, forklift or into a truck and did what needed to be done. I found the physical work extremely rewarding. It gave me opportunity to explore other aspects of my life. One day I found myself sitting in a big truck, loaded with hay bales, singing at the top of my lungs whilst sweating like a pig on a 40 degree Celsius day inside the cab. It was absolutely wonderful and that night I slept like a baby.
Over the years I have found IT both rewarding and infuriating, sometimes at the same time. I find that challenging myself, by leaving a permanent position, starting my own show, talking to people, learning different skills and taking life as it comes a lot less stressful.
I would be lying if I said there was no stress, but these days its about servicing the vehicle, or wondering where the next exciting thing is coming from. No longer do I worry to any great extent about receiving a call at 2am to fix some or other "essential" service. My evaluation of "essential" has changed dramatically.
At present I'm staying in a city, Perth (WA), the place where we originally departed from, in a rented house while my wife and I work to save some pennies to deck out a caravan, so we can go onto the next phase of our nomadic existence, whatever that turns out to be.
To get some sense of the scale of our trip thus far, I have a map on-line here: http://itmaze.com.au/locations/
Hmm,
My standard phrase is: "The software I'm installing to resolve your problems today is free, not because it's dodgy, but because the makers of the software believe that this should be free. They derive their income from other sources."
Built by the University of Western Australia and also used by Curtin University, there are completely automagic systems in use.
From Curtin's site:
A lecturer walks into their next lecture, turns the microphone on and delivers a lecture. An hour or so later, without any human intervention, an appropriately titled link automatically appears on the web page of that unit adding the just finished lecture to the list of all the lecture recordings for that unit.
Links
http://www.lectopia-service.uwa.edu.au/about
http://www.lectopia.uwa.edu.au/history.lasso
http://ilectures.curtin.edu.au/information/
A google image search finds this as a photo of Marissa celebrating her 30th birthday. She's got to be a geek if she stands up in front of people like this - if not a geek, a fellow dag :-)
http://www.undergoos.com/marissa_speech.jpg
You state that "Linux has prooven itself (time and time again), for over 5 years in our company". Perhaps you need to amplify that. For example, if it's providing email services find out how many emails Linux handled, or how much data it routed, or how much down-time there was, or how many server patches were needed, or how many reboots were required.
You need to communicate what it is that Linux does already and how it stacks up.
For all I know your pay-roll file server is a Linux box and a statement that reads like: "Well for one, you got paid yesterday because the Linux server was doing what it's supposed to do."
I should point out that you should not lie and make up stuff because it will come and bite you.
I suppose "could" is the right word. I suspect that many will even buy this rubbish, thanks to the effervescent sales pitch made by the local computer shop or supermarket.
A company that writes software that cannot uninstall itself, needs more privileges than an Administrator account on XP, needs you to download three files just to remove itself and stops your actual email from being downloaded, yeah, that's something the common computer user could buy.
I've now spent countless man hours removing this crap from client machines after they were told that they needed it. For me, AVG, SpyBot S&D and AdAware seems to work just fine and the computer still responds without the need to install Ghost, Live Update, Live Register, and 27 other little programmes.
To top it off, it doesn't even actually work. That is, stop infections.
Hmm, "could" indeed.
Perhaps I should buy shares...
No they don't they already have google maps:
http://www.wsc.org.au/2005/on.the.road/map/
While I admire your reply, you're missing one thing. If there is limited or no mobile phone coverage where you are, this won't work.
\
Walking into the Computer Lab in my high school introduced me to computing. A whole room with Apple ][ computers with "big kids" writing software. My first computing question was "Doesn't that blinking thing {the cursor} irritate you?", that day I went on to debug Pacman movement code that the guy was writing - to my eye it didn't look symmetrical, and it wasn't - you know, up, down, left, right and getting all the +/- correct.
:)
I went on to read every book in my local library to learn some software development skills. A friend of mine had a dad who worked at ESA and he would bring home an HP 87 on the weekend. We were hooked.
Then I convinced my mother to provide me with an interest free loan to buy my own computer, a Commodore Vic 20.
I remember typing in a big-screen clock program about six times, because the cassette recorder wasn't in stock and you lost what you did when you turned it off.
I went on TV and won a Disk Drive for my Vic and that opened up a whole new universe. I participated in computing contests and using a transfer cable that I built to get data from an Apple ][ to a Commodore 64, I transferred HGR graphics of the Mona-Lisa and some chips to the Vic where I displayed them on screen, using the 6502 stack as swap because I didn't have enough RAM to move images in any other way, than swap an image, a byte at a time.
Around 1985 I bought a Mac 512ED and started writing software in Pascal.
I went on to break the world record endurance computing, then moved to the other side of the world and started building web-sites, seems my 3.5Kb RAM days are still standing me in good stead.
I still often wonder if being frugal with memory as a development methodology makes me a better and more productive developer than kids who grew up with 1Gb of RAM, let alone a 10Mb HDD or a 172Kb FDD
I always thought so, but now I've got proof.
:]
[If you don't know what I'm talking about, zoom in
You've missed a word there, "American" lives. It killed around 140 thousand Japanese civilian lives.
Perhaps one day the US will understand that the world we live in, hatred, war and violence included, is one of their making.
You're not the World's Police Force, nor do you have the sensitivity to become it.
Hmm, I cannot actually believe that I must confess that I didn't actually think of that.
...smelly and useless.
Well, it is possible that this idea would actually result in a digital collection of documents that were usable, but if it goes the way I've noted too many other digitisation efforts seem to go, then the result will be a stack of PDF documents that are no more than scanned images of pages with no OCR, thus no actual use.
Of course it is possible that some bright spark will come along and run an OCR process over the standard scans that many document scanning systems seem to produce.
From a PHB perspective, a PDF is universal, never mind the difference between an image and text which might actually make the collection useful.
Since when do computers do what you mean?
Jeff,
/. has already well and truly taken care of that part of the discussion.
I think your idea has great merit, but I must confess that I think your idea will be buried in politics and name calling.
Allow me to elaborate a little. I'm a debian user, have been for a number of years. I'm also a software developer with 24 years of experience and I run my own company. I use my workstation to get my job done and I report bugs as diligently as I am able to as they arise from time-to-time. On occasion I attempt to use IRC to ask questions in #debian and in the past I've offered my services to the debian community.
In this context I've found that there are a few "loud" people within the debian community, those who are quick to dismiss those who are not a developer and "thus" have no visible track record. Members of the general community might perceive those "loud" people as representative of the debian developer community.
Perhaps the reason that the perception exists that the debian community is hard to communicate with is because it appears that to become a debian developer requires a lot of passion, persistence and patience. Once you are a debian developer, there may be a sense of achievement and some form of separation, in that there is differentiation between a developer and the rest of the community.
I'm not talking about the process of becoming a developer, I'm talking about how it makes you feel after you've done it.
I'm struggling a little to get my point across, because I don't want this to turn into a moan about debian because
What I'm talking about it that debian developers appear to me to require a strong personality, just to become a developer in the first place, that as a result, debian itself looses out.
So, after many words, getting back to what I started with, politics and name calling. I think that we as debian users need to find a way to allow more cohesion between the various members of the community and then ideas such as yours can and will be embraced and encouraged.
I've now re-read this numerous times and I'm still not sure that I've got my point across, but feel free to email me direct to discuss this further.
...runs from Darwin to Adelaide over 3000km in the Australian Outback. http://www.wsc.org.au/
Just sent you an email.
Onno - Nootje - Nut ..., who are you?
Would that be Aackosoft in Leiden by any chance?
Do you terminate in Australia?
I am using a mobile 2-way satellite dish, have locally setup an Asterisk box using IAX2 trunking talking to two CISCO ATA186 (as a trial), to run in and out-bound calls.
I'm looking for termination.
I was going to go down that track in my post, but then I wasn't sure if I would be happy or confident to state that going after file swappers is a bad thing.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are legitimate uses for swapping files. There are also other uses.
Do I think it is unfair that record companies haven't yet figured out that their distribution methods are becoming obsolete, sure.
Do I think it is legal to share my record collection with you and everyone else on the planet, I don't know.
if there is now a way that this can be used to stop these kinds of lawsuits althogether, in that it shows that the whole concept of going after file swappers in this way is bogus.