First off, "privacy geek" isn't a neologism. To get one of those, you have to invent a completely new word or at least use an old word or phrase in a completely new way. There's nothing new about "privacy" or "geek" and there's nothing particular special about using the two words together.
(One reason I stopped contributing to Wikipedia: members of that community love to use the word "neologism" but obviously have no idea what it actually means.)
Anyway, geekhood is hardly fringe. A geek is just somebody who has an unusual interest in technology. Geeks constitute a special community with their own interests, priorities and jargon, but the same can be said for Freemasons, Realtors, and NASCAR enthusiasts — none of whom count as "fringe".
Besides, a "privacy geek" isn't just somebody who cares about privacy, any more than anybody who uses a computer is a "computer geek".
I was wondering how long it would take somebody to ask this question. (Two minutes after the story was posted, big suprise.) The answer is that economics is irrelevent.
Every time we get a story of the form "I hacked A to run on B" or "I hacked C to do E", somebody always asks whether it wouldn't be more cost effective to buy something off-the-shelf. The answer is almost always "yes". Even if the hacker is saving money on hardware, he's expending a lot of his well-paid time. But that just doesn't matter.
A good hack is pretty much an end in itself. It might satisfy the hacker's curiousity, or improve his professional skills. Or it might add some minor functionality that the hacker's geeky priorities can't live without. But these are all secondary goals. The big goal is a sense of accomplishment, of having done something special. Asking a hacker why he doesn't just buy an off-the-shelf solution is like asking a Marathon running why he doesn't just call a cab.
I use Vi -- and I still need a mouse. Text files don't exist in a vacuum. You need to compile them, feed them to a scripting engine, cut and paste them to other programs.
Of course, if you're really clever, you can do everything in Vi and the command line and not use your GUI at all. But I prefer not to spend half my life learning obscure commands and keystroke sequences.
Stop and think for once. Not everybody uses an alarm clock to get to work on time. You might want to wake up early and work on some personal stuff before you head out the door -- but not if you really need to sleep in. Or it might be your day off, and you're one of those people who will waste half the day sleeping, even though you don't need to.
As always, you're ignorant of the issues. Cities can be laid out so that train stations are accessible -- as the were before cars were invented. And trains are only expensive in countries that have half-assed commitment to them. The TGV system in France is relatively cheap -- and operates without taxpayer subsidy.
I find that it forces me to place my mouse too far away and I would prefer a more compact keyboard.
Your "preference" is good ergonomics — reaching over, the way most mouse users do, helps screw up your wrist.
But yeah, it is stupid that the standard keyboard contains a numeric keypad. Only useful for people who have to enter a lot of numbers. Which I'm sure there are, but 95% of us don't.
I use a Goldtouch keyboard. Which not only uses less space, but is split down the middle to allow you to position your hands naturally. Right now, I'm using one on a tiny keyboard shelf that would barely have room for a 103 keyboard, but has plenty of room for both a Goldtouch and a mouse.
Not sure which compact keyboards you're complaining about that have unnatural cursor keys. There are some, but most are good enough, including the Goldtouch.
I laughed when I read the part of about "rushed to market". That's a stock phrase that just doesn't apply to Google products. They can't "rush to market" because they pay zero attention to the market. They only have one profitable product (AdSense), but that product is so profitable that nobody has to pay attention to "the market". So they just keep inventing Cool Stuff, and pushing it out. That's why new features keep appearing on Google.com with no advance notice.
Right now, you're saying, "What's wrong with that?" Well, if all you want is hacker toys, nothing. But some us get a little impatient that Google products stay "Beta" for years, and never get their rough edges polished off.
Take Google maps. Yeah, it's a great app. I always try it first for directions. Sometimes I just sit and play with it, it's so cool. But it's how many years now and it's still "Beta". And even though Yahoo Maps is much less fun to work with, I still go back to it sometimes, because Google maps still doesn't memorize addresses for you or plug in Yellow Pages entries.
With Google, "Beta" doesn't mean "This is a preliminary version." It means "Here's as much of the product as we feel like working on. We won't bother with all the boring stuff that makes a mature application, because just thought of some other Really Cool Stuff we'd rather be working on."
I just started a contract for a company that I previously contracted for eight years ago. They're seeing hard times, and they're leaning heavily on telecommuting to cut costs. This saves them money on facilities, plus there are a lot of people who will gladly take a cut in pay to live in Bali — or at least Bangor.
But for me it sucks.
I'm a tech writer, which means I spend a lot of time milking information from development engineers. Last time I worked for this company, I seldom could get engineers to answer my email -- they had too much shit in the fire, and responding to a tech writer didn't have any priority. No problem: I just wandered by their offices, asked them a few questions, and left. Much less time consuming for both of us than compusing a lot of emails.
Can't do that any more. Half the engineers I need to communicate with don't work on site. Some I can telephone. But not the ones that live on the other side of the planet! And the ones who do work on site seem to spend all day in teleconferences with the ones who don't, so I can't corner them either.
My own team is just as bad. My manager telecomutes from across the country, as do two of the writers I work most closely with. We have weekly staff meeting by teleconference, which have to occur early in the morning to accomodate a couple of folks in Europe. There are a couple of new hires that don't attend at all because they live even further east.
We have technical and planning screwups because it's so difficult to communicate. Plus communicating up and down the food chain is damned difficult, since my boss never has face time with me or her boss. I could go around my manager, but that's not smart unless your boss happens to be a total idiot. And for once, I have a boss who's actually pretty sharp.
I shouldn't complain. I get paid well, and people respect my work and my concerns. It's just that all these low-bandwidth channels degrade the quality of my work, and that hurts my professional pride.
Oh yeah, here's the ironic part. I'd like to move closer to my family, help my sisters look after our aging mother. And I might have a chance to go permanent with this company. Which would give me a chance to work from home...
That was not an attack, ad hominem or otherwise. That was an attempt to make you see how you look when you try to impose your pet obsessions on your friends — assuming you still have any!
Still, it's not so much heart-wrenching or moving as it is just irritating when it happens over the course of ten minutes..
Or 10 pages. Lots of bad writers do that. I think it's because the only thing they remember from Creative Writing 101 is "Make your characters believable!"
I suspect that Bluetooth is the main reason this device is doing better than a lot of people expected (including me). The last time we were discussing it, I criticized the 770 because running the WiFi for only 4 hours is enough to exhaust the battery. What use is an internet tablet that can only stay online for 4 hours? Someone responded to me saying that they had been online on their 770 all day -- Bluetooth drains the battery a lot less than WiFi.
I don't think speed is that big an issue. You don't use something like this for browsing graphics intensive sites. You use it for reading email and catching up on the news. The catch is you really need both good support for Bluetooth and cheap cell networking. Both are issues in the U.S., because many providers cripple Bluetooth and use connection-based data networking. The latter can be really expensive, because you end up paying by the connection/minute, so the money clock is ticking all the time you're online. Connectionless networks (GSM/GPRS) are less scary, because you only pay for the data your actually send and receive, regardless of how long you're online.
I'm glad to be proven wrong about this gizmo. Glad because somebody's finally demonstrated that there's a market for web tablets. And glad because there's finally serious Bluetooth gadget that isn't a headset!
You meet an important character, one who has traits and characteristics--not a throwaway--and two scenes later they're dead.
Perhaps somebody is imitating Larry McMurty, who for the last couple of decades seems to have made a speciality of epic stories set in the West. (The real West, not the pulp/Hollywood west, so you can't call his books "westerns".) I was a fan for a long time. Then I was in volume 4 of his latest epic, The Berrybender Narratives and I realized he had spent a couple thousand pages building up dozens of interesting characters, just so he could kill them off in various gruesome and/or depressing ways. And he's been doing it compulsively for over 25 years now! Kind of destroyed my enjoyment of his fiction. A shame, because, obsessions aside, he's one of our best living writers.
Charles Lindbergh summed it up nearly 70 years ago, when he saw the Zeps trying to make a go of it. If speed is more important than cost, you travel/ship by airplane. If cost is more important, you go by surface vehicles. There's no economic place for something that's in between.
Slashdot Mirror
(One reason I stopped contributing to Wikipedia: members of that community love to use the word "neologism" but obviously have no idea what it actually means.)
Anyway, geekhood is hardly fringe. A geek is just somebody who has an unusual interest in technology. Geeks constitute a special community with their own interests, priorities and jargon, but the same can be said for Freemasons, Realtors, and NASCAR enthusiasts — none of whom count as "fringe".
Besides, a "privacy geek" isn't just somebody who cares about privacy, any more than anybody who uses a computer is a "computer geek".
You're letting your contempt for Windows motivate a totally illogical response. Hacking poorly designed software is more of a challenge.
Rats, I forgot to copyright it!
Every time we get a story of the form "I hacked A to run on B" or "I hacked C to do E", somebody always asks whether it wouldn't be more cost effective to buy something off-the-shelf. The answer is almost always "yes". Even if the hacker is saving money on hardware, he's expending a lot of his well-paid time. But that just doesn't matter.
A good hack is pretty much an end in itself. It might satisfy the hacker's curiousity, or improve his professional skills. Or it might add some minor functionality that the hacker's geeky priorities can't live without. But these are all secondary goals. The big goal is a sense of accomplishment, of having done something special. Asking a hacker why he doesn't just buy an off-the-shelf solution is like asking a Marathon running why he doesn't just call a cab.
Jeez, you are a self righteous little idiot. Go back and read the story, then tell me which one of us is off topic. Hint: search for the word "mouse".
Of course, if you're really clever, you can do everything in Vi and the command line and not use your GUI at all. But I prefer not to spend half my life learning obscure commands and keystroke sequences.
Well, if want everybody to know that you think that they're a bunch of turds, than I agree, tact is useless.
Stop and think for once. Not everybody uses an alarm clock to get to work on time. You might want to wake up early and work on some personal stuff before you head out the door -- but not if you really need to sleep in. Or it might be your day off, and you're one of those people who will waste half the day sleeping, even though you don't need to.
As always, you're ignorant of the issues. Cities can be laid out so that train stations are accessible -- as the were before cars were invented. And trains are only expensive in countries that have half-assed commitment to them. The TGV system in France is relatively cheap -- and operates without taxpayer subsidy.
So? Internet access is easier to find than a newsrack in some places.
But yeah, it is stupid that the standard keyboard contains a numeric keypad. Only useful for people who have to enter a lot of numbers. Which I'm sure there are, but 95% of us don't.
I use a Goldtouch keyboard. Which not only uses less space, but is split down the middle to allow you to position your hands naturally. Right now, I'm using one on a tiny keyboard shelf that would barely have room for a 103 keyboard, but has plenty of room for both a Goldtouch and a mouse.
Not sure which compact keyboards you're complaining about that have unnatural cursor keys. There are some, but most are good enough, including the Goldtouch.
I laughed when I read the part of about "rushed to market". That's a stock phrase that just doesn't apply to Google products. They can't "rush to market" because they pay zero attention to the market. They only have one profitable product (AdSense), but that product is so profitable that nobody has to pay attention to "the market". So they just keep inventing Cool Stuff, and pushing it out. That's why new features keep appearing on Google.com with no advance notice.
Right now, you're saying, "What's wrong with that?" Well, if all you want is hacker toys, nothing. But some us get a little impatient that Google products stay "Beta" for years, and never get their rough edges polished off.
Take Google maps. Yeah, it's a great app. I always try it first for directions. Sometimes I just sit and play with it, it's so cool. But it's how many years now and it's still "Beta". And even though Yahoo Maps is much less fun to work with, I still go back to it sometimes, because Google maps still doesn't memorize addresses for you or plug in Yellow Pages entries.
With Google, "Beta" doesn't mean "This is a preliminary version." It means "Here's as much of the product as we feel like working on. We won't bother with all the boring stuff that makes a mature application, because just thought of some other Really Cool Stuff we'd rather be working on."
But for me it sucks.
I'm a tech writer, which means I spend a lot of time milking information from development engineers. Last time I worked for this company, I seldom could get engineers to answer my email -- they had too much shit in the fire, and responding to a tech writer didn't have any priority. No problem: I just wandered by their offices, asked them a few questions, and left. Much less time consuming for both of us than compusing a lot of emails.
Can't do that any more. Half the engineers I need to communicate with don't work on site. Some I can telephone. But not the ones that live on the other side of the planet! And the ones who do work on site seem to spend all day in teleconferences with the ones who don't, so I can't corner them either.
My own team is just as bad. My manager telecomutes from across the country, as do two of the writers I work most closely with. We have weekly staff meeting by teleconference, which have to occur early in the morning to accomodate a couple of folks in Europe. There are a couple of new hires that don't attend at all because they live even further east.
We have technical and planning screwups because it's so difficult to communicate. Plus communicating up and down the food chain is damned difficult, since my boss never has face time with me or her boss. I could go around my manager, but that's not smart unless your boss happens to be a total idiot. And for once, I have a boss who's actually pretty sharp.
I shouldn't complain. I get paid well, and people respect my work and my concerns. It's just that all these low-bandwidth channels degrade the quality of my work, and that hurts my professional pride.
Oh yeah, here's the ironic part. I'd like to move closer to my family, help my sisters look after our aging mother. And I might have a chance to go permanent with this company. Which would give me a chance to work from home...
That was not an attack, ad hominem or otherwise. That was an attempt to make you see how you look when you try to impose your pet obsessions on your friends — assuming you still have any!
I'll bet you're really fun at parties.
Well, sure, that's a legitimate form of social protest. But don't expect everybody you exchange email with to join your protest.
Dude, learn to read. He was trying to hire IT people.
I don't think speed is that big an issue. You don't use something like this for browsing graphics intensive sites. You use it for reading email and catching up on the news. The catch is you really need both good support for Bluetooth and cheap cell networking. Both are issues in the U.S., because many providers cripple Bluetooth and use connection-based data networking. The latter can be really expensive, because you end up paying by the connection/minute, so the money clock is ticking all the time you're online. Connectionless networks (GSM/GPRS) are less scary, because you only pay for the data your actually send and receive, regardless of how long you're online.
I'm glad to be proven wrong about this gizmo. Glad because somebody's finally demonstrated that there's a market for web tablets. And glad because there's finally serious Bluetooth gadget that isn't a headset!
Yeah, there's nothing lamer than a compulsive whiner.
Charles Lindbergh summed it up nearly 70 years ago, when he saw the Zeps trying to make a go of it. If speed is more important than cost, you travel/ship by airplane. If cost is more important, you go by surface vehicles. There's no economic place for something that's in between.
Bunch of bleeding heart liberals, coddling the criminals!
You're from the U.K., right? Not a country known for its tidy, law-abiding citizens.