I know about people who know they have lots of viruses, but they refuse to install anti-virus because their system is so much compromised that no AV software can run on their system, and they do not want to reinstall because they don't have the CD (!)
And I know people who didn't even know what adware was until I explained to them why they kept getting pornographic popups. These were not stupid or lazy people, they just had lives outside their computers. Nor is Julie Amero. You might question the intelligence of the prosecutor who's trying to put her in prison, but he's certainly not lazy.
What is lazy is the geekish assumption that anybody who doesn't live and breathe technology is an idiot.
All the more reason not to mod jokes up as if they were serious comments. Good karma is supposed to help identify people who contribute to the discussion, not people who know lots of good jokes. Especially since Slashdotters differ on what constitutes a good joke.
Not that it matters one way or another. It's not that difficult for a non-troll to achieve good karma, and once you're there, there's really no point in thinking about karma at all. That's why you can no longer even find out exactly how many karma points you have.
Also, I imagine some people turn off or even reverse the "funny" bonus because they think a lot of them are lame. I'm sometimes tempted myself, though I probably won't. Treating jokes as serious posts removes that filter.
But really, if I say, "Sani-Flush makes an excellent dentifrice" and someone who doesn't know what Sani-Flush is mods me up as "Informative", you'd have to admit that they're pretty clueless.
Perhaps, but that doesn't seem to be the situation here.
If you can show me somebody who runs lynx just because it has a small footprint, then I'll admit that you're right.
You're right. A more apt analogy would be to equate people who don't protect their computer from hackers with people who drive while intoxicated or otherwise impaired.
The solution suggested above, in my opinion, doesn't go far enough. Infected computers should be knocked off the network in much the same way that drunk drivers are pulled over and arrested. Incompetence/Impairment is no excuse for improperly operating your computer/vehicle in a way that is a risk to others.
I don't have the patience to address the moral stupidty and hypocrisy of that argument. I'll just point out that if you make the Internet a geek-only zone, a lot of geeks are going to be unemployed.
I've actually used Macs. And you're right, the user interface idioms are a lot different. But I can usually figure out stuff like controlling sort order or repositioning the playback indicator — which I find a lot less obvious in iTunes.
So the particular mod awarded doesn't matter? Then let's just eliminate the fine distinctions and say "up" or "down".
But really, if I say, "Sani-Flush makes an excellent dentifrice" and someone who doesn't know what Sani-Flush is mods me up as "Informative", you'd have to admit that they're pretty clueless. Though maybe not as clueless as the person who's never heard the song and mods me down as "flamebait"!
The question isn't whether you do get punished for owning a Pinto, the question is whether you should. All the juries that have considered the issue have agreed that you shouldn't.
My criteria are usability, utility, and functionality.
Except that memory footprint is not unconnected with your criteria. Bloated software is slower to load, more complicated to use, and a pain to maintain. Worst of all, it tends to have lots of bugs caused by feature creep and conflict between its many modules.
Now, it's perfectly true that a good software team can produce a big application that's well planned so that these problems don't occur. But there aren't that many really good software teams out there, so you can usually see an inverse correlation between footprint and overall quality.
Of course, "tiny app" enthusiasts go beyond eliminating bloat; they're in love with the challenge of eliminating extra bytes just for its own sake. But even their work adds a lot utility, especially if you're the kind of user who prefers obscure command line idioms and considers GUIs too clumsy.
iTunes is high on that list for a similar reason. Set up a few "Smart Playlists", and music is automatically added or removed from my queue as necessary depending on playcount, on ranking, on genre, or new additions.
Well, yeah, if like this specific feature, and don't want to decide for yourself exactly what you're going to listen to, iTunes is nice. But the very design philosophy that suits you drives me up the wall.
I only run iTunes because I bought an iPod Shuffle for my mother. She's old and out of it, and needs an mp3 player that it isn't complicated to use. I just want to stuff her Shuffle with audio books and podcasts I know she'll enjoy. The way both iTunes and the Shuffle second-guess everything I do makes this absurdly complicated.
I guess it's really not fair to call iTunes "bloated". It doesn't actually have any features that aren't useful to its intended audience. It's just that many of those features have complex, undocumented subtleties that are welcomed by people who like the way they work but are a pain in the ass to those of us who just want the software to do what we tell it to.
Another good listing of smallish software is Portable Apps.
Firefox? Thunderbird? StarOffice???!!! Those are huge applications. Yes, there are some small apps there, but by and large, portable apps are just the usual bloatware reconfigured to run without being installed. They don't have to be frugal with memory, because multi-gigabyte thumb drives are cheap.
By "casual", I guess you mean "somebody who never uses a computer". Because iTunes' UI idioms are so idiosyncratic, anything you know about interacting with your computer is useless. The first time I used iTunes, I wanted to download some TV shows from the Apple store and play them. Took me a half hour to figure out how to control playback.
And my time and four bucks was wasted, because the version of Quicktime you need to run iTunes has audio sync issues on every computer I've tried to run it on.
But back to usability: as I see it, UI designers pay too damn much attention to looking kewl and providing skinability. (Especially multimedia software, a trend that seems to have been started by Winamp.) The original idea behind GUIs was to provide a consistent user interface so people wouldn't have to learn all the interaction idioms from scratch every time they start using new software. I guess "usability standards compliance" is not terribly interesting to creative types.
I've become a big fan of the GOM media player. Not only is it lightweight, but it's a lot smarter about dealing with codecs than any other player. Even plays Real formats.
I used to like the VLC player, but it seems to have gotten buggy over the years. Locks up, screws up my system so I have to reboot, and always seems to get video colors wrong.
Though it's hardly the most powerful graphics program, Irfanview is the only one I use about 99% of the time. It's simple, as does all the basic graphic file manipulation. Doesn't do serious editing, but it's nice to be able to easily browse a directory, convert formats, or crop a photo, without waiting for GIMP or Photoshop to finish loading.
IZArc probably doesn't rate as "lightweight", since it has an absurd number of features. (Reads every archive format I know of, including RPM and ISO!) But it's a classic of "just works" software design. And what is lightweight is the program's elegant user interface and Windows shell integration.
OK, you deserved the upmods, but the moderators don't seem to grasp that you're making a joke. Same thing with the guy just after you who made the same joke about lynx. I'll say it one more time: the current moderator pool is full of clueless dweebs. Rob, bring back the old system!
What's really fun is reading your email by telnetting to port 110.
I actually used to do this a lot when I was working for a certain ISP that had very flaky homebrew mail software. Mailboxes were getting corrupted all the time. The only way to fix them was to telnet in and fiddle. Or just copy/dev/null over the mailbox file, though customers tended to frown on that for some reason.
Requiring somebody to pass a test before they operate a vehicle is hardly the same as sabotaging somebody's computer. What would be similar is requiring network computer owners to be licensed. But somehow I don't see that happening.
I would like to punish them for being naive and oblivious about the fact that a PC attached to a network is a complex responsibility.
So nobody but a geek should be allowed to have a networked computer? Not only is that morally absurd (punishing people for owning infestable technology is like punishing Pinto owners for buying a car that tends to explode), it would destroy the online economy. Off which more than a few of us make our livings.
If you want to start regulating who and what can or cannot connect to the Internet (you can't, it's not politically feasible to introduce such a rule, or practical to enforce it; but let's say you can) then you should ban all PCs from the Internet. People would only be allowed to access the Internet via network appliances like the Foleo, which are relatively resistant to malware because they don't support on-the-fly software installation.
Right now, you're sputtering and saying something that begins with "Why should I have to give up...." Well dude, you just made a proposal that would have a lot of other people making similar protests. It's a lot easier to play social engineer when only other people are affected by your proposals.
...if they pose a nuisance/danger online by letting their computers be compromised then they should face "punishment" by "fining" them part of their CPU power.
In other words, you want to punish people for not being geeks.
That sort of self-righteous bullshit is exactly how criminals rationalize their own misdeeds — such as botnets.
Customers don't "play the rebate game". Customers mostly loathe rebates. Rebates are about lowering the perceived price of the product. Whenever I see an advertised price and then see the magic words "(after rebate)", I have to remind myself that I can't count on actually getting the rebate (especially since I'll probably forget to fill out the form and send it in), but there's still that moment when I'm associating the bogus price with the product. This psychology is all the more interesting because I haven't applied for a rebate in years. Planting that bogus price in our consciousness is the whole point of the system.
This is so clearly fraud that the MD attorney general should have completed the arrest warrant for key members of Vastech's management by tomorrow morning.
That's nice. Be sure to thank him for me. But Vastech's a really tiny company, so they're probably incorporated in-state (California). Assuming they're incorporated at all.
When I had an HGC system, I could not abide those green and amber monitors. I actually spent $40 extra for a white screen monitor.
Then again, I had a green composite monitor that went with my Apple IIe. One day, my TV was broken, and there was a show on my VCR I really wanted to see. So I hooked the VCR up to the Apple monitor. Very weird experience.
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What is lazy is the geekish assumption that anybody who doesn't live and breathe technology is an idiot.
Not that it matters one way or another. It's not that difficult for a non-troll to achieve good karma, and once you're there, there's really no point in thinking about karma at all. That's why you can no longer even find out exactly how many karma points you have.
Also, I imagine some people turn off or even reverse the "funny" bonus because they think a lot of them are lame. I'm sometimes tempted myself, though I probably won't. Treating jokes as serious posts removes that filter.If you can show me somebody who runs lynx just because it has a small footprint, then I'll admit that you're right.
My God, and to think I've been wasting 57K all these years! Thank you! Now I can downgrade from an 8088 back to a Z80!
I think running Windows is usually considered a sign of that you're not a geek. Just as dismissing people as "stupid" is a strong sign that you are!
I've actually used Macs. And you're right, the user interface idioms are a lot different. But I can usually figure out stuff like controlling sort order or repositioning the playback indicator — which I find a lot less obvious in iTunes.
So the particular mod awarded doesn't matter? Then let's just eliminate the fine distinctions and say "up" or "down".
But really, if I say, "Sani-Flush makes an excellent dentifrice" and someone who doesn't know what Sani-Flush is mods me up as "Informative", you'd have to admit that they're pretty clueless. Though maybe not as clueless as the person who's never heard the song and mods me down as "flamebait"!
The question isn't whether you do get punished for owning a Pinto, the question is whether you should. All the juries that have considered the issue have agreed that you shouldn't.
Now, it's perfectly true that a good software team can produce a big application that's well planned so that these problems don't occur. But there aren't that many really good software teams out there, so you can usually see an inverse correlation between footprint and overall quality.
Of course, "tiny app" enthusiasts go beyond eliminating bloat; they're in love with the challenge of eliminating extra bytes just for its own sake. But even their work adds a lot utility, especially if you're the kind of user who prefers obscure command line idioms and considers GUIs too clumsy.Well, yeah, if like this specific feature, and don't want to decide for yourself exactly what you're going to listen to, iTunes is nice. But the very design philosophy that suits you drives me up the wall.
I only run iTunes because I bought an iPod Shuffle for my mother. She's old and out of it, and needs an mp3 player that it isn't complicated to use. I just want to stuff her Shuffle with audio books and podcasts I know she'll enjoy. The way both iTunes and the Shuffle second-guess everything I do makes this absurdly complicated.
I guess it's really not fair to call iTunes "bloated". It doesn't actually have any features that aren't useful to its intended audience. It's just that many of those features have complex, undocumented subtleties that are welcomed by people who like the way they work but are a pain in the ass to those of us who just want the software to do what we tell it to.
Pity Homer Simpson didn't know about yes.
By "casual", I guess you mean "somebody who never uses a computer". Because iTunes' UI idioms are so idiosyncratic, anything you know about interacting with your computer is useless. The first time I used iTunes, I wanted to download some TV shows from the Apple store and play them. Took me a half hour to figure out how to control playback.
And my time and four bucks was wasted, because the version of Quicktime you need to run iTunes has audio sync issues on every computer I've tried to run it on.
But back to usability: as I see it, UI designers pay too damn much attention to looking kewl and providing skinability. (Especially multimedia software, a trend that seems to have been started by Winamp.) The original idea behind GUIs was to provide a consistent user interface so people wouldn't have to learn all the interaction idioms from scratch every time they start using new software. I guess "usability standards compliance" is not terribly interesting to creative types.
I've become a big fan of the GOM media player. Not only is it lightweight, but it's a lot smarter about dealing with codecs than any other player. Even plays Real formats.
I used to like the VLC player, but it seems to have gotten buggy over the years. Locks up, screws up my system so I have to reboot, and always seems to get video colors wrong.
Though it's hardly the most powerful graphics program, Irfanview is the only one I use about 99% of the time. It's simple, as does all the basic graphic file manipulation. Doesn't do serious editing, but it's nice to be able to easily browse a directory, convert formats, or crop a photo, without waiting for GIMP or Photoshop to finish loading.
IZArc probably doesn't rate as "lightweight", since it has an absurd number of features. (Reads every archive format I know of, including RPM and ISO!) But it's a classic of "just works" software design. And what is lightweight is the program's elegant user interface and Windows shell integration.
OK, you deserved the upmods, but the moderators don't seem to grasp that you're making a joke. Same thing with the guy just after you who made the same joke about lynx. I'll say it one more time: the current moderator pool is full of clueless dweebs. Rob, bring back the old system!
What's really fun is reading your email by telnetting to port 110.
/dev/null over the mailbox file, though customers tended to frown on that for some reason.
I actually used to do this a lot when I was working for a certain ISP that had very flaky homebrew mail software. Mailboxes were getting corrupted all the time. The only way to fix them was to telnet in and fiddle. Or just copy
Requiring somebody to pass a test before they operate a vehicle is hardly the same as sabotaging somebody's computer. What would be similar is requiring network computer owners to be licensed. But somehow I don't see that happening.
If you want to start regulating who and what can or cannot connect to the Internet (you can't, it's not politically feasible to introduce such a rule, or practical to enforce it; but let's say you can) then you should ban all PCs from the Internet. People would only be allowed to access the Internet via network appliances like the Foleo, which are relatively resistant to malware because they don't support on-the-fly software installation.
Right now, you're sputtering and saying something that begins with "Why should I have to give up
That sort of self-righteous bullshit is exactly how criminals rationalize their own misdeeds — such as botnets.
So, we're having different conversations on the same thread. I was here first, so I get to call "offtopic".
Customers don't "play the rebate game". Customers mostly loathe rebates. Rebates are about lowering the perceived price of the product. Whenever I see an advertised price and then see the magic words "(after rebate)", I have to remind myself that I can't count on actually getting the rebate (especially since I'll probably forget to fill out the form and send it in), but there's still that moment when I'm associating the bogus price with the product. This psychology is all the more interesting because I haven't applied for a rebate in years. Planting that bogus price in our consciousness is the whole point of the system.
When I had an HGC system, I could not abide those green and amber monitors. I actually spent $40 extra for a white screen monitor.
Then again, I had a green composite monitor that went with my Apple IIe. One day, my TV was broken, and there was a show on my VCR I really wanted to see. So I hooked the VCR up to the Apple monitor. Very weird experience.