Despite all the boring back-and-forth between the supporters and detractors of defining a new plural word meaning computer virii (as opposed to biological viruses) you have just made the first intelligent comment that wasn't annoyingly longwinded pedantry.
A 12V battery made from 8 1.5V AA dry cells is unlikely to do me any harm, even if it takes a fairly low resistance path through my body. The 12V lead acid battery in my car will give me a fairly hefty kick through the same path even though the resistance of my body hasn't changed.
Humans feel no noticeable shock from a 12VDC lead acid car battery. I handle fully charged ones reasonably frequently, occasionally with my hands wet or bleeding. If you dead short the terminals you make lots of hydrogen very fast, and under most circumstances you also create a welding arc, which are two things that do not co-exist well. But you can lay on the terminals with your naked body and nothing will happen.
This is the reason why it's a good idea to use a 1:1 isolating transformer when working on mains equipment - you can get seriously injured in the time it takes a fuse to blow, whereas the transformer will saturate and provides an absolute (and hopefully safe) limit to current flow.
120 VAC at 60 Hz will not injure a normal healthy human adult. Speaking from extensive experience and observation. But from the word mains I am suspecting you are a Briton, and while I don't think 240 VAC will seriously injure anyone from electric shock, it certainly hurts like the very dickens!
My own observation, based on subjective amounts of pain experienced through various kinds of inadvertently administered eletric shock, is that frequency matters. That 12VDC from your car battery becomes a whole different animal once it's been through an ignition coil, and the anode of a CRT will make you feel like your eyeballs are smoking. Perhaps 50Hz 240VAC is more injurious than 60Hz 240VAC... I hope not to find out.
I've twice tried to reply to the guy who offered the bash loop one-liner, pointing out that his code won't scale and offering alternative techniques.
Each time my post has showed up in the wrong place.
I give up. I dunno if the problem is my browser (FFox current stable) or with slashcode.
But anyway, I just thought you might wonder about the incoherent postings from me, and thought I'd offer an explanation. Since this post will probably end up appended to something about Natalie Portman dripping with hot grits, it's really just a symbolic gesture... but I tried.
I tried to reply to your post with a more robust one-liner, but I somehow stupidly missposted it.
Bash file globbing is something I try to avoid, personally, because it frequently fails in very large directories. It's fine for one-liners when you are reasonably sure you are not going to overrun the line length limitation.
Your comparison is not fair; ren-regexp is a script, the one-liner is just utility calls. Expose the code of ren-regexp if you want a fair typing contest.
Regardless, I was actually trying to comment on the other guy's bash loop (which doesn't scale) not on the ren-regexp perl script. I seem to have replied to the wrong post. D'OH!
I have no beef with someone making a script that makes their job more comfortable... especially if they write doco on it, that's true professionalism there! But it's more efficient for me in my job to use native tools rather than constantly porting a custom toolset from system to system. I create and erase various operating systems fairly often, and frequently sign on to other folks' systems just to set something up one time. Thus, for me, my way is less typing.
I was offering another way to do it, and not intending to denigrate anyone. Cool your jets.
I'd call it a useful, possibly appropriate one-liner. Not real elegant. But as you say, focus on the positive, and usefulness is the most important piece of elegance! Extreme scaleability is not always necessary for the task at hand.
That'll work as long as the number of files matching your pattern does not exceed the bash command buffer space, which is suprisingly small on many systems (often 1 or 2 K characters).
Using your own example of renaming a bunch of camera files, this is much more bulletproof, yet still without the fat footprint of perl:
$ ls MVCD-00050.JPG MVCD-00051.JPG $ls | sed -n 's/MCVD\(.*\)JPG/mv MCVD\1JPG vacation\1jpg/p' |bash $ ls Vacation-00050.jpg Vacation-00051.jpg
If you want to do an entire volume or portion of a directory tree, I guess you could use find like so:
$find . -type f | sed -n 's/\(.*\)MCVD\(.*\)JPG/mv \1MCVD\2JPG \1vacation\2jpg/p' |bash
Note I had to stuff a couple extra backreferences in there to account for the paths. You can configure the number of directories to descend with find's -maxdepth and -mindepth options, and the -type f will prevent renaming of directories and links or indeed anything other than a garden-variety file.
Both examples skip files that don't fit the pattern MCVD(something)JPG silently. In the example with find, the regex should be tightened up to prevent matches on \dir\dir\MCVD\dir\dir\GLOP.JPG patterns but I will leave that as an exercise for the next poster (I'm too lazy to figure out the regex, no doubt something with [^\/] in it).
All this could be done with gawk instead of sed, but sed is probably the fastest way to get around the command line buffer size limitation. A gawk one-liner to do this would be a lot more comprehensible than the gobbleydegook that is sed and/or perl, but probably also a lot longer.
There are also some little-known string substitution operaters in the bash shell, so you could do the whole thing without calling anything but "bash" and "mv" if you really wanted to get clever.
In the same sense that cars are based on horse-drawn carriages, certainly.
But OSX has as least as much Mach lineage as it has BSD. It's often characterized as a bloated train wreck of an OS, but Apple has been able to get decent performance by controlling the hardware platform (they don't have to attempt to optimize for everything on the market, they can focus on being really good on optimal equipment).
Mac zealots, of course, would rather say "it's based on mature, polished BSD" or "it's based on the highly evolved Mach microkernel" rather than making a halfway statement like "the OS X kernel may be lacking in polish and efficiency but it has a rich collection of APIs and excellent graphical interface optimization".
Simply put I myself grew up on the internet, having it alone in my room. Discovered all sorts of things including yes porn and I did not grow up to become a murder or sex offender or anything of the link. So if it was ok for me, why wouldn't it be ok for my kids? Or even your kids?
I hope you won't be too insulted, but by my standards you aren't "grown up" yet. My grandfather was born in the 19th century, my parents remember WWII rationing rather clearly, and I was writing code when Metcalfe invented Ethernet. Everything's relative (except the speed of light in a vacuum).
P.S. I'm looking for something deeper here than just "Well I'm not you, so I'd do things differently.."
I understand, but really that's the only answer I've got. I've got the economic resources to raise my kids the best way I know how, and that's going to be shaped by my own unique view of "the meaning of life". In my opinion, humans are born with pretty much the same basic programming as a wolf cub, and have to be additionally programmed by education and life experience to be anything more than a clawless pack predator. If you have the good fortune to have your semi-random experiences and your (hopefully) non-random education give you the ability to be self-programming, you can become an enlightened being, which optimizes your chances to be happy and prosperous.
Incidentally, I don't have any problem with porn per se, and I don't want my children to grow up with the sick (and typically American) mental attitude that sees nudity as more inherently objectionable than murder, but I strongly disapprove of violent porn. You might find it interesting to know that I monitor and restrict my children's access to TV far more aggressively than I restrict their Internet access.
Why do so many geeks think the answer to any data organization problem is poorly coupled metadata?
It's like the people who think buying Microsoft Money will make their checkbook balance, when the real problem is they haven't made time each month to balance their checkbook.
Incidentally, I have at least that many books and I never have any trouble finding anything - and I never have to update a database - because I use exactly the system you've described.
Since the OP wasn't a customer of mine, I had the luxury of assuming the worst of him;).
Couple of anecdotes:
Nice old gentleman is the mail clerk at a prestigious research institute. He is great at his job, because he can correctly route unreturnable packages addressed to people who have been dead 50 years, and he knows everybody that works there by name. He has no plans to retire, ever, and I personally support that attitude. I found him one day quite literally close to tears (and this guy is no pantywaist) because his package scale had been replaced with a computerised franking and weighing machine and he was incapable of operating it. He'd been through the manual cover to cover, and clearly understood everything in it, and he'd spent hours on the phone with support who were completely unable to help him. Once I showed him that you had to press return after entering a command (something that was so obvious, so well known, that nobody bothered to tell him, and it was not in the manual 'cause I checked) he was fine. More than a decade later he's still willing to help me out any time I ask.
Long ago I was involved in setting up WAN connections to large hospitals. Most of them were still using proprietary networking technologies such as VINES, SNA, or IPX. I opened every conversation with hospital IT directors "Are you connected to the Internet?" and if they said anything other than "Yes" I immediately said "Would you like to be? I can show your staff everything they need to know, no charge." This worked *great* because they were all being bombarded with requests for Internet email from the doctors, and were for the most part absolutely clueless about TCP/IP (and often defensive about it) so I could put myself in a position where I was of value to them while simultaneously getting my WAN connectivity using cheap scaleable open protocols instead of expensive vendor-locked techniques. The interesting thing was, the less the hospital staff knew, the better off they were - because they had less to unlearn. My cow-orkers might roll their eyes and complain about ignorant people who ought to know better, but I used to just love it when the highly paid professional networking guys at a hospital said "what is SMTP?" because that meant I was going to be their best friend forever!
I may look into getting some Mini-ITX boxes with monitors for the kids' rooms and load Ubuntu on them - voila, web surfing and email that I can control and monitor, and Myth frontend machines for them to watch shows on, which I can also monitor.
I tried putting PCs in their rooms, and ended up taking them back out again when I moved into our current home.
Now I have a long benchtop across one wall of the den, which I can easily see from kitchen, den, or dining room (the places my spouse and I spend most of our time at home), with a couple of computers and a printer on it.
One of the computers is a laptop with a docking station (they used to both be, but laptop video isn't burly enough for my son's games) so the computer can be removed and taken somewhere quieter for typing up homework or whatever. BUT the network connection is to the dock, so no hiding in the room for hours experimenting with the Internet without parental knowledge! The wife and I have wireless-enabled laptops for work, and I have a wireless AP I can turn on, but we rarely use them in the house.
See, when the kids are on the Internet, if they are in a communal family area they are still interacting with the family, and they can have a fundamentally more educational interaction with the networked world. I pass through, busy with other things, and if I see something on-screen that I'm not sure about, or that I disaprove of, I can stop and have a conversation with the kids about why I have a problem with that image or connection, and give them a more useful experience and better guidance than I can by reviewing logs later or simply blocking things.
It's better for kids to know why you feel the way you do about things, and it's easier to guide their on-line experience, when you are real-time evaluating that experience as frequently as possible. It also puts you in a default role of mentor rather than as controller or prohibitor. You can deviate from that default model if you feel you must, obviously.
You will need to work with the architecture of your house, your computer equipment, and your family life, but I strongly recommend not putting PCs in the kids rooms. I tried it, and (for my family at least) having computer use out in the open was a better idea.
If your grandfather didn't know what a flush toilet was, would you think it was good customer service if he hired a plumber to modernise his house, and the plumber treated him like a moron for not knowing? That plumber wouldn't get any repeat business from your grandfather, would he? Who is the real fool?
As Asok said to Dogbert, "You could have fixed my problem in the time it took to belittle me". It doesn't matter how commonplace the information is, the point is the paying customer didn't know it. So you explain, and the customers love you, everyones' life is enriched, and you laugh all the way to the bank... while the guy who makes his customers feel stupid grows an ulcer in his dead-end Hell Desk job.
The entire point of introducing those words into the conversation is so that you can explain them.
See, if I use a word you don't understand, but I don't make it seem like you are a complete moron for not understanding it, you can ask about it without being intimidated or feeling foolish.
Then I can convert a client from an uneducated boob to an appreciative ally who will engender repeat business.
It's impossible for a client to know all the words I know. If they knew everything I do, they wouldn't need me.
Where do people get this totally insane idea that the wealthy cannot protect themselves and therefore need the protection of government? How do you think they got wealthy? (hint: it wasn't by being pushovers.)
Your comments about "giving away wealth to the third world" show you haven't a clue what socialism actually is (hint: you are talking about pure communism on a global scale, not socialism on a national scale).
You need to read more history! Start with the Spartans and the Helots, compare and contrast with Athenian democracy. Figure out why slavery is perfectly OK under capitalism, and why elimination of slavery is a socialist ideal. Eventually you might find out the differences between socialism, pure communism, politburo communism, and dictatorship. Then you might be sufficently prepared to consider market socialism, or social democracy. Once you get those under your belt you can move on to trying to understand the Democratic Republic (which is what the United States still is, for the moment at least) and how government-regulated capitalism can accomplish socialist goals (like social mobility, elimination of racism and slavery, public education, public fire departments, etc. etc. etc.) and create wealth at the same time.
That way, the FBI can always know where they are all the time. It'll be cool!
It'll work great, too, as long as the tracking database and controls aren't operated by a nebulous coalition of third-party bureaucracies with a history of bad security and demonstrated lack of interest in efficient co-operative communication... Oh, wait.
I simply boggled at the first guys response when I asked for his email address:
"3657 Washington Roa..." "No, your Email address." "3657 Wash..." "EEEEEEEEEEEE Mail address!" "What do you mean?" "What do you mean what do I mean? What is your email address?" "I don't know what that is"
He DOESNT KNOW WHAT THAT IS!!! That's like saying you don't know what a road is.
No, that's saying you are an ivory-tower technogeek who can't communicate without technobabble. Stop trying to be BadAnalogyGuy.
At what point did you figure out that repeating yourself louder only displayed your lack of fluency in your native tongue? Oh, wait... you apparently never figured that out.
Someone actually competent to speak to customers might have said (reassuring tone) "OK, I've already got your postal address, what I need is an electronic mail address that can recieve electronic mail from the Internet. If your company doesn't have an e-mail system that connects to the Internet, we're going to have to engineer a solution that will connect to your internal mail system, or set up webmail accounts for you that can be checked with a web browser". Then you could go on to explain why this is necessary within the framework of your application, since obviously you are talking to someone who hasn't been brought up to speed by anyone else at either company.
You might actually get something called repeat business if you don't belittle your customers and make them think you are an arrogant technocrat.
You might even find a useful ally within the customer's management hierarchy if you can provide sorely needed information without coming across like a condescending prick.
The conservatives in this country are more progressive than the liberals.
That's why they are in favor of torture and slavery - new ideas for a new world!!
socialism is an idea from FDRs time and does not apply anymore. The whole concept of a socialist society just will not work anymore and cannot work.
Um, the USA is a socialist society, if you use the definitions from FDR's time; for example we have a public education system, tax-funded fire departments, eight-hour work days, and a huge laundry list of other Socialist Party platform planks from FDR's time.
Ultimately, within out lifetime all social programs will be gone, and all this talk about socialism and communism will be like talking about ancient history, because these systems are ancient and not efficient enough.
'Efficient enough' for what? I'm no big fan of communism, but I don't see anything inefficient about tax-funding for fire prevention.
Shades of OpenBSD. "By default there are no vulnerabilities" - but in the Real World [TM] systems require configuration, and that process will introduce vulnerabilities if the human being involved in configuration is an idiot or insufficiently skilled.
That's why I have all my systems configured by CHUCK NORRIS.
No, just kidding. Anyway, no DNS system works without configuration, and a properly configured system is immune to this problem regardless of whether you run Vixie's code or Bernstein's.
Fine. You can be another 'Unabomber' (*) and hand craft a rudimentary 'land mine' from stuff you get at the grocer's.
No, thanks anyway. I have other stuff to do.
That is a far cry from crates of sophisticated modern land mines being available at CostCo.
I don't consider the ingredients of something being for sale to be a "far cry" from a finished article being for sale. Trust me, I used to work for a company that made state-of-the art munitions for the US Armed Forces, and military land mines aren't significantly different from what a gifted amateur can whip up on a weekend.
The point of my post was that laws don't make reality; we can make laws forbidding the sale of advanced weaponry if we want, and send people to jail if they make their own, but it's too late to prevent people from learning how to make weapons of mass destruction. The government can't kill or imprison us all fast enough, the knowledge has already been released and a massive campaign of eliminating educated people will simply make it more likely that someone will use their knowledge!
(* You can also, of course, go to prison for a long time.)
No thanks, like I said I've got other stuff to do.
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't! - Shakespeare, The Tempest
I'm guessing that the reason we still use human operators is because nobody's come up with a solution to the "AK-toting cow" problem.
It works like this: The US Gubbmint is all overjoyed 'cause robot soldiers will do all kinds of stuff that would psychologically damage normal Americans, and you don't have to re-integrate robots into normal society afterwards.
But, after you release the robotic hounds, it'll only take about ten nanoseconds for the local equivalent of Viet Cong to figure out that they can make a whole bunch of AK-47 stencils (you fold 'em in half for safe carrying) and stencil "destroy this" on whatever they want.
So, the mayor's car gets an AK-47, the local CIA listening post gets a few dozen, etc. etc. and the robots blow the living shit out of them. You can use black spray paint at night and the robots won't see 'em until morning, or you can use various solutions that are invisible under most circumstances but will show up in IR, or when light is reflecting off the surface, or whatever.
A few days later, Fat Tony, the local "legitimate businessman", realises that he can have his "associates" spray paint AKs on his competitors' cattle herd and then phone in an anonymous tip to the local American occupation force about guerillas hiding in the competing stockyard. Then the Baptists figure out they can spraypaint AKs on the Buddhist temple, or whatever.
Obviously, the Armed Forces don't want the local outlaws calling the shots, regardless of whether the locals are political, religious or economic outlaws.
Solve that problem and you'll make a world where Abu Ghraib and Bagram will seem like the good ol' days.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite all the boring back-and-forth between the supporters and detractors of defining a new plural word meaning computer virii (as opposed to biological viruses) you have just made the first intelligent comment that wasn't annoyingly longwinded pedantry.
And furthermore.... oh, shit!
My own observation, based on subjective amounts of pain experienced through various kinds of inadvertently administered eletric shock, is that frequency matters. That 12VDC from your car battery becomes a whole different animal once it's been through an ignition coil, and the anode of a CRT will make you feel like your eyeballs are smoking. Perhaps 50Hz 240VAC is more injurious than 60Hz 240VAC... I hope not to find out.
I've twice tried to reply to the guy who offered the bash loop one-liner, pointing out that his code won't scale and offering alternative techniques.
Each time my post has showed up in the wrong place.
I give up. I dunno if the problem is my browser (FFox current stable) or with slashcode.
But anyway, I just thought you might wonder about the incoherent postings from me, and thought I'd offer an explanation. Since this post will probably end up appended to something about Natalie Portman dripping with hot grits, it's really just a symbolic gesture... but I tried.
I tried to reply to your post with a more robust one-liner, but I somehow stupidly missposted it.
Bash file globbing is something I try to avoid, personally, because it frequently fails in very large directories. It's fine for one-liners when you are reasonably sure you are not going to overrun the line length limitation.
Your comparison is not fair; ren-regexp is a script, the one-liner is just utility calls. Expose the code of ren-regexp if you want a fair typing contest.
Regardless, I was actually trying to comment on the other guy's bash loop (which doesn't scale) not on the ren-regexp perl script. I seem to have replied to the wrong post. D'OH!
I have no beef with someone making a script that makes their job more comfortable... especially if they write doco on it, that's true professionalism there! But it's more efficient for me in my job to use native tools rather than constantly porting a custom toolset from system to system. I create and erase various operating systems fairly often, and frequently sign on to other folks' systems just to set something up one time. Thus, for me, my way is less typing.
I was offering another way to do it, and not intending to denigrate anyone. Cool your jets.
I'd call it a useful, possibly appropriate one-liner. Not real elegant. But as you say, focus on the positive, and usefulness is the most important piece of elegance! Extreme scaleability is not always necessary for the task at hand.
That'll work as long as the number of files matching your pattern does not exceed the bash command buffer space, which is suprisingly small on many systems (often 1 or 2 K characters).
Using your own example of renaming a bunch of camera files, this is much more bulletproof, yet still without the fat footprint of perl:
$ ls
MVCD-00050.JPG MVCD-00051.JPG
$ls | sed -n 's/MCVD\(.*\)JPG/mv MCVD\1JPG vacation\1jpg/p' |bash
$ ls
Vacation-00050.jpg Vacation-00051.jpg
If you want to do an entire volume or portion of a directory tree, I guess you could use find like so:
$find . -type f | sed -n 's/\(.*\)MCVD\(.*\)JPG/mv \1MCVD\2JPG \1vacation\2jpg/p' |bash
Note I had to stuff a couple extra backreferences in there to account for the paths. You can configure the number of directories to descend with find's -maxdepth and -mindepth options, and the -type f will prevent renaming of directories and links or indeed anything other than a garden-variety file.
Both examples skip files that don't fit the pattern MCVD(something)JPG silently. In the example with find, the regex should be tightened up to prevent matches on \dir\dir\MCVD\dir\dir\GLOP.JPG patterns but I will leave that as an exercise for the next poster (I'm too lazy to figure out the regex, no doubt something with [^\/] in it).
All this could be done with gawk instead of sed, but sed is probably the fastest way to get around the command line buffer size limitation. A gawk one-liner to do this would be a lot more comprehensible than the gobbleydegook that is sed and/or perl, but probably also a lot longer.
There are also some little-known string substitution operaters in the bash shell, so you could do the whole thing without calling anything but "bash" and "mv" if you really wanted to get clever.
But OSX has as least as much Mach lineage as it has BSD. It's often characterized as a bloated train wreck of an OS, but Apple has been able to get decent performance by controlling the hardware platform (they don't have to attempt to optimize for everything on the market, they can focus on being really good on optimal equipment).
Start reading here to learn more.
Mac zealots, of course, would rather say "it's based on mature, polished BSD" or "it's based on the highly evolved Mach microkernel" rather than making a halfway statement like "the OS X kernel may be lacking in polish and efficiency but it has a rich collection of APIs and excellent graphical interface optimization".
Incidentally, I don't have any problem with porn per se, and I don't want my children to grow up with the sick (and typically American) mental attitude that sees nudity as more inherently objectionable than murder, but I strongly disapprove of violent porn. You might find it interesting to know that I monitor and restrict my children's access to TV far more aggressively than I restrict their Internet access.
Why do so many geeks think the answer to any data organization problem is poorly coupled metadata?
It's like the people who think buying Microsoft Money will make their checkbook balance, when the real problem is they haven't made time each month to balance their checkbook.
Incidentally, I have at least that many books and I never have any trouble finding anything - and I never have to update a database - because I use exactly the system you've described.
Since the OP wasn't a customer of mine, I had the luxury of assuming the worst of him ;).
Couple of anecdotes:
Nice old gentleman is the mail clerk at a prestigious research institute. He is great at his job, because he can correctly route unreturnable packages addressed to people who have been dead 50 years, and he knows everybody that works there by name. He has no plans to retire, ever, and I personally support that attitude. I found him one day quite literally close to tears (and this guy is no pantywaist) because his package scale had been replaced with a computerised franking and weighing machine and he was incapable of operating it. He'd been through the manual cover to cover, and clearly understood everything in it, and he'd spent hours on the phone with support who were completely unable to help him. Once I showed him that you had to press return after entering a command (something that was so obvious, so well known, that nobody bothered to tell him, and it was not in the manual 'cause I checked) he was fine. More than a decade later he's still willing to help me out any time I ask.
Long ago I was involved in setting up WAN connections to large hospitals. Most of them were still using proprietary networking technologies such as VINES, SNA, or IPX. I opened every conversation with hospital IT directors "Are you connected to the Internet?" and if they said anything other than "Yes" I immediately said "Would you like to be? I can show your staff everything they need to know, no charge." This worked *great* because they were all being bombarded with requests for Internet email from the doctors, and were for the most part absolutely clueless about TCP/IP (and often defensive about it) so I could put myself in a position where I was of value to them while simultaneously getting my WAN connectivity using cheap scaleable open protocols instead of expensive vendor-locked techniques. The interesting thing was, the less the hospital staff knew, the better off they were - because they had less to unlearn. My cow-orkers might roll their eyes and complain about ignorant people who ought to know better, but I used to just love it when the highly paid professional networking guys at a hospital said "what is SMTP?" because that meant I was going to be their best friend forever!
Now I have a long benchtop across one wall of the den, which I can easily see from kitchen, den, or dining room (the places my spouse and I spend most of our time at home), with a couple of computers and a printer on it.
One of the computers is a laptop with a docking station (they used to both be, but laptop video isn't burly enough for my son's games) so the computer can be removed and taken somewhere quieter for typing up homework or whatever. BUT the network connection is to the dock, so no hiding in the room for hours experimenting with the Internet without parental knowledge! The wife and I have wireless-enabled laptops for work, and I have a wireless AP I can turn on, but we rarely use them in the house.
See, when the kids are on the Internet, if they are in a communal family area they are still interacting with the family, and they can have a fundamentally more educational interaction with the networked world. I pass through, busy with other things, and if I see something on-screen that I'm not sure about, or that I disaprove of, I can stop and have a conversation with the kids about why I have a problem with that image or connection, and give them a more useful experience and better guidance than I can by reviewing logs later or simply blocking things.
It's better for kids to know why you feel the way you do about things, and it's easier to guide their on-line experience, when you are real-time evaluating that experience as frequently as possible. It also puts you in a default role of mentor rather than as controller or prohibitor. You can deviate from that default model if you feel you must, obviously.
You will need to work with the architecture of your house, your computer equipment, and your family life, but I strongly recommend not putting PCs in the kids rooms. I tried it, and (for my family at least) having computer use out in the open was a better idea.
You're correct, but you're missing the point.
If your grandfather didn't know what a flush toilet was, would you think it was good customer service if he hired a plumber to modernise his house, and the plumber treated him like a moron for not knowing? That plumber wouldn't get any repeat business from your grandfather, would he? Who is the real fool?
As Asok said to Dogbert, "You could have fixed my problem in the time it took to belittle me". It doesn't matter how commonplace the information is, the point is the paying customer didn't know it. So you explain, and the customers love you, everyones' life is enriched, and you laugh all the way to the bank... while the guy who makes his customers feel stupid grows an ulcer in his dead-end Hell Desk job.
Definitely time to go home.
The entire point of introducing those words into the conversation is so that you can explain them.
See, if I use a word you don't understand, but I don't make it seem like you are a complete moron for not understanding it, you can ask about it without being intimidated or feeling foolish.
Then I can convert a client from an uneducated boob to an appreciative ally who will engender repeat business.
It's impossible for a client to know all the words I know. If they knew everything I do, they wouldn't need me.
Your analogy is excellent, and your point of view is reasonable, but.... how exactly does that make it OK to be rude to a customer on the phone?
They don't know something so it's OK to make them feel ignorant? That makes the end-users love you, oh yeah.
should be to provide the slashdot masses with a good laugh. I haven't been having any luck shopping enlightenment.
Did you get the part where I mocked the guy for mocking his clients? I thought that was particularly funny myself.
Where do people get this totally insane idea that the wealthy cannot protect themselves and therefore need the protection of government? How do you think they got wealthy? (hint: it wasn't by being pushovers.)
Your comments about "giving away wealth to the third world" show you haven't a clue what socialism actually is (hint: you are talking about pure communism on a global scale, not socialism on a national scale).
You need to read more history! Start with the Spartans and the Helots, compare and contrast with Athenian democracy. Figure out why slavery is perfectly OK under capitalism, and why elimination of slavery is a socialist ideal. Eventually you might find out the differences between socialism, pure communism, politburo communism, and dictatorship. Then you might be sufficently prepared to consider market socialism, or social democracy. Once you get those under your belt you can move on to trying to understand the Democratic Republic (which is what the United States still is, for the moment at least) and how government-regulated capitalism can accomplish socialist goals (like social mobility, elimination of racism and slavery, public education, public fire departments, etc. etc. etc.) and create wealth at the same time.
Define "rich" and "poor" first; then I will tell you the choice I've already made.
That way, the FBI can always know where they are all the time. It'll be cool!
It'll work great, too, as long as the tracking database and controls aren't operated by a nebulous coalition of third-party bureaucracies with a history of bad security and demonstrated lack of interest in efficient co-operative communication... Oh, wait.
Never mind!
At what point did you figure out that repeating yourself louder only displayed your lack of fluency in your native tongue? Oh, wait... you apparently never figured that out.
Someone actually competent to speak to customers might have said (reassuring tone) "OK, I've already got your postal address, what I need is an electronic mail address that can recieve electronic mail from the Internet. If your company doesn't have an e-mail system that connects to the Internet, we're going to have to engineer a solution that will connect to your internal mail system, or set up webmail accounts for you that can be checked with a web browser". Then you could go on to explain why this is necessary within the framework of your application, since obviously you are talking to someone who hasn't been brought up to speed by anyone else at either company.
You might actually get something called repeat business if you don't belittle your customers and make them think you are an arrogant technocrat.
You might even find a useful ally within the customer's management hierarchy if you can provide sorely needed information without coming across like a condescending prick.
Shades of OpenBSD. "By default there are no vulnerabilities" - but in the Real World [TM] systems require configuration, and that process will introduce vulnerabilities if the human being involved in configuration is an idiot or insufficiently skilled.
That's why I have all my systems configured by CHUCK NORRIS.
No, just kidding. Anyway, no DNS system works without configuration, and a properly configured system is immune to this problem regardless of whether you run Vixie's code or Bernstein's.
The point of my post was that laws don't make reality; we can make laws forbidding the sale of advanced weaponry if we want, and send people to jail if they make their own, but it's too late to prevent people from learning how to make weapons of mass destruction. The government can't kill or imprison us all fast enough, the knowledge has already been released and a massive campaign of eliminating educated people will simply make it more likely that someone will use their knowledge! No thanks, like I said I've got other stuff to do.
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't! - Shakespeare, The Tempest
I'm guessing that the reason we still use human operators is because nobody's come up with a solution to the "AK-toting cow" problem.
It works like this: The US Gubbmint is all overjoyed 'cause robot soldiers will do all kinds of stuff that would psychologically damage normal Americans, and you don't have to re-integrate robots into normal society afterwards.
But, after you release the robotic hounds, it'll only take about ten nanoseconds for the local equivalent of Viet Cong to figure out that they can make a whole bunch of AK-47 stencils (you fold 'em in half for safe carrying) and stencil "destroy this" on whatever they want.
So, the mayor's car gets an AK-47, the local CIA listening post gets a few dozen, etc. etc. and the robots blow the living shit out of them. You can use black spray paint at night and the robots won't see 'em until morning, or you can use various solutions that are invisible under most circumstances but will show up in IR, or when light is reflecting off the surface, or whatever.
A few days later, Fat Tony, the local "legitimate businessman", realises that he can have his "associates" spray paint AKs on his competitors' cattle herd and then phone in an anonymous tip to the local American occupation force about guerillas hiding in the competing stockyard. Then the Baptists figure out they can spraypaint AKs on the Buddhist temple, or whatever.
Obviously, the Armed Forces don't want the local outlaws calling the shots, regardless of whether the locals are political, religious or economic outlaws.
Solve that problem and you'll make a world where Abu Ghraib and Bagram will seem like the good ol' days.