You know, I spent much of this evening wondering to myself if its just me, or has everyone around me more or less just become more stupid as the years have gone on...After overhearing this conversation at a local PetsMart:
Dumb Lady: Oh my God! Oh my god, this fish is dying!
Clerk: Hm? The goldfish?
Dumb Lady: Whats wrong with your fish?
Clerk: Oh..That one. They're supposed to look like that.
Dumb Lady: With...with its head like that?
Clerk: Yeah.
Dumb Lady: What about those eyes? Thats not supposed to be like that..
Clerk: Yeah. Those goldfish are supposed...supposed to be like that. They're....genetically...not supposed to be like that, originally.
Dumb Lady: Huh?
Clerk: Thats the way they make em. Genetically...altered.
Dumb Lady: ARE YOU SERIOUS?!!?? (gasp)
Clerk: Yeah.
Dumb Lady: These fish are GENETICALLY ALTERED?????
Clerk: Well..they're not.....they're..just come like that.
Dumb Lady: Oh my god. Radiation. Oh..my god..thats...I guess that means they wont live very long. Like the sheep.
Clerk: Well, no, its just they're not as hearty as...the other goldfish.
Dumb Lady: I see.. wow. Look honey, they can do that now..to fish!
The "fish" the 40-something mother-of-two woman was referring to was one of those big googly-eyed goldfish that you can see in any pet store..Just normal goldfish that are bred to be decorative fishes. I would have said something, but it was already obvious this woman had absolutely no concept of something as simplistic as breeding animals... That,and I felt bad for the clerk who had to endure this woman's sub-roomtemp IQ. I just walked off and felt sorry for civilization.
Cheers,
God, Slashdot has gone completely insane.
on
Cable Without Cables
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Yeah, I hear a guy named Marconi is working on sending signals directly through air. if it works out, this could be the one thing that revolutionizes the telecommunications industry. Just imagine -- Pictures, sounds, voice.. transmitted through air at the speed of light!
Watching Slashdot run a story on basically what amounts to a radio antenna relay..Yeah, thats super, guys. Keep the late-breaking news coming... See, what bugs me is, his is neither news, nor anything that matters, since the technology has been around for the better part of a century.
Moderate me however you want. Moderation doesn't affect whether i'm right or not.
Killing off Jar Jar in Episode 3 would make the fans happy, as well as providing a pleasant "Mr. Hooper's gone" introduction for children to learn the realities of death.
Besides that, I (and others, no doubt..) would actually go see one if I knew Jar Jar was going to get snuffed out beforehand.
The Internet should not be "for everyone", much the same way as driving a car should not be legal for everyone.
Having been a SysAdmin for a number of years, I can tell you that the vast majority of Internet users are law-obiding, decent and considerate people. Then, of course, you have the 1% who want to take such a wonderful gift, and abuse it. They will abuse it for their own personal or financial game, or simply because they get off on making someone else on the other end of their "attack" miserable.
I propose that people should be required to carry a Computer License, which proves they are capable of using the Internet responsibly, in much the same way as you're required to carry a Drivers License to prove you know how to use a car responsibly.
To the vast majority of us, its no big deal. Having a Computer License is no more a threat to one's personal freedoms and rights to privacy as carrying a Drivers License is. For people who have demonstrated a clear-cut lack of understanding of the fundemental governing principles of behavior and usage, their license should be revoked, just as it is for people who have demonstrated a lack of understanding for the basic principles of behavior and usage for a car. While I wouldn't impose fines, and I would not create a police force to apply the law, I would leave it up to the individual ISP to decide how to best apply this for his or her system.
Its only after we do something like I've just described that the net can be cleaned up, and relatively free of abuse, garbage, and other miscellaneous mindbarf.
I'm surprised they aren't selling the watch for 99 cents when you buy a "Toshiba Home Finger Guillotine" and the "Sony(tm) Ultra-Small Prosthetic Index Finger" you'll need to utilize it.
I'll pass. Buying a touch-screen watch makes about as much sense as buying a NetCat. Its an invention that solves a problem that never existed to begin with.
Amusingly, i'm not trying to start a flamewar here, but, i'm sure it will devolve into that anyway......
I think the reason why the review is "KDE-heavy" is because when it comes to GNOME, nothing major has really changed (functionally or asthetically) between the version that shipped with 7.2 and the version you see in 7.3..In other words, theres not really much to say that hasn't already been said.
The reason why KDE got so much coverage versus GNOME in this review is probably due to the fact that the changes between KDE 2.2.x and KDE 3.x are rather large. Theres no bias here on behalf of the reviewer. One desktop changed radically from 7.2 to 7.3, the other did not.
Moderate this post however you want. Just don't be a goddamn idiot and say "I like GNOME! KDE suxx!!! I'm going to mod this down!!" since this reply is neither pro-KDE or pro-GNOME.
"...the world would have access to a limitless power supply. The moon receives 13,000 terrawatts of power from the sun. Harnessing 1 percent of that energy, he calculates, could replace all fossil fuel power plants on Earth."
If we've got the same guy doing the calculating as we have doing the spell-checking, we're fucked. Besides, duh, it costs money to get something to the moon. Whats the rocket going to be powered by? Cash or rubberbands?
Sun: So..Lets uh.... lets go over our findings so far.
S6: Ok..Here's uh..here's what we've got so far. Between the uh..the six of us...uh, 1 of us has heard of Solaris for x86. That would be uh... 18% of the population."
Sun: Fantastic. 18%. Wow. Management is gonna love that. 18.. wow....18% of the... wow. The new "insanity first" initiative here at the company is going to get off to a...uh..to a really, really impressive start. You know, just uh...acting like Linux doesnt exist just wont cut it anymore. We need to be REALLY insane this quarter... We need to uhh...raise the bar on....you know, management says "we need more insanity" and we need to deliver. We cant be insane enough, if you ask me....So.. Lets not only act like Linux doesnt exist, but lets get really crazy. But lets keep it sane. Crazy, but sane. uhh..Ok. Can I have a graph of your figures? Y'know, uhh..something to show them..?"
S6: Uhh.. Sure, here you go. A graph that shows that 18% of us have heard of Solaris for x86."
Sun: Fantastic. Ok, before I..before I uh...hand in my reccomendation on going forward with Solaris 9 for x86, lets uh..lets recap. Ok. We need to be insane. We need 10% minimum.. So you're uh...you're saying we meet both, uh..exceed both. Right?
S6: Uhh..yeah. Yes, definately. We've got a final figure of 18%, and we're insane. Thats correct.
Sun: Great. Ok, one minor concern.. This line here, this graph is sort of..uh..flat.. Its just a flat line going..uh..across the page. Can we do anything with that to uh...make it..you know, more uh..positive?
S6: Here. Let me show you.. (papers ruffled)...When you show them the graph, hand it do them like this. See? At an angle. Like this.. One more time... got the graph, hand it to them like..........this....
Sun: You guys are incredible. Thanks so much. How about we uh....tenatively, 9 AM tomorrow? We'll go over our results. I..uh...yeah, 9 AM sounds good for me.
Why Intel is setting themselves up for this, I have no idea.;)
Cheers,
Maybe I just don't get it..
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Whats the purpose of dedicating even MORE space on my HD to yet another operating system, when dual-booting back into Windows for a while only costs about 45 seconds of my time?
I dont mean to take a squat on the WineX guys, but... Couldnt this energy be put to better use elsewhere?
The reason I download my music versus buy it is because..
o The last time I went, I couldn't find the CD I was looking for. However, they did have several hundred copies of a Britney Spears CD and pair of Reebok sneakers in a glass case.
o Their selection consisted almost entirely of rap, hip-hop, and other sonic diarrhea. My tastes in music extend a little further than incessant warbling up and down the scales and complaining to a drumbeat.
o They wanted to sell me candy, magazines, coffee, soda, biscotti, bottled water, bumper stickers, incense, candles, videocasettes, and DVDs of movies nobody wanted to see in the theaters to begin with. Not what I came in there for, an album.
o Even if I were to have found the CD I was looking for, I would have had to shell out nearly twice as much money as I would have 10 years ago FOR THE SAME CD. Apparently, it costs the shop alot of money to keep those Reebok sneakers in a glass case. Probably air-conditioned.
o The store expected me to give my money to a guy wearing lipstick wearing earrings. In his face.
o Some marketing bozo decided that putting anything other than rap and "best of" albums on the shelves was a good idea.
o I cant burn my own CDs at the shop, with the music I want on it, and nothing else.
How are these African ISP's being "fleeced" when they're simply being asked to pay what everyone else is paying already? What entitled them to special treatment in the first place?
Ever noticed that the people who bitch the loudest about pollution drive around in 40 year old VW buses that leak, belch, and spew exponentially more toxins than a guy behind the wheel of a modern automobile?
Call me crazy, but, isn't 3/4ths of the Earth's surface covered with stuff that can be easilly converted to clean-burning hydrogen and oxygen?;)
I definitely think the big H is the way to go. Petroleum is a stinky industrial-age relic that costs too much money to purify into something useful. To make matters worse, its non-renewable, and synthetic replacements are too expensive to produce.
Solar --> Electical --> Decomposition of seawater --> Hydrogen. Whats so hard about it?
...Otherwise, the Linux community's proposed "improvement" to Mickeysoft's infamous Start button would have been an even MORE non-intuitive looking, oddly situated stone footprint.
IMHO, what allowed KDE to win the desktop war was the fact that its developers actually listened to what their users told them. Their design choices were dictated from the demands of people below, instead of by ego-driven edicts delivered from the people above. Good ideas are never delivered by edict..only unrealistic expectations that will never be filled.
The premise is false. Anyone can learn new skills, especailly in the computer realm.
Sure. Anyone can learn new skills. But they'll never be as skilled or as technically proficient as someone who has dedicated the majority of their focus to the same pursuit. This is particularly true in Unix. Personally, i've been doing Unix for about a decade. Ten years straight. By your logic, anyone who takes an Intro to Unix course at a community college has an equivalent pool of knowledge. If anything is patently false, its your assertion that dedicated pursuits of knowledge are pointless. Instead of true professionals, you'll have a group of people who have an equally poor knowledge of everything.
I write kernel level code for Windows from time to time. I customize and develop drivers as needed. I muck about with all the same things that even the most ardent Unix guru deals with.
Then you realize that you are in an incredibly small minority of Win32 "professionals". Surely you aren't claiming that having a deep knowledge of Unix is equivalent to a deep knowledge of Win32..(!)
Here we go again with the "Unix people are better because they can handle source". That wasn't what I was saying at all. I was merely pointing out that the availability of source adds an extra layer of complexity that Win32 are completely sheilded from. What is a requirement for our discipline is an exotic, far-flung side issue for your discipline.
Somehow you seem to think that if we don't all choose to be BOFH we are useless, an unneeded appendage.Quite the contrary. The world needs both Win32 and Unix. I just prefer that the two not mix..I'd no sooner put a Win32 user behind the wheel of a supercomputer than I would put rollerskates on a horse.
In my opinion, the idea of getting Microsoft junkies to sit down and understand Unix is beyond your typical Microsoft junkie's ability. I'm not trying to sound condescending in that, either. I just think that theres a point where someone gets so entrenched in one way of doing, and one way of thinking, that they lose the ability to "switch gears" and pick up something fundementally different. I'll give you two examples:
There was a guy I worked with named Brad. Brad was an ardent Windows guy. He knew nothing about any other OS'es other than Win32, other than their names. In his mind, Win32 was the pinnacle of operating systems because it simplified complex tasks down to a predictable series of point-and-click operations, and like most Win32 gurus, he had absolutely no idea how anything worked under the hood. He had no idea what a kernel was. Infact, anything below the driver level was completely black box to him. In summary, Brad, even though he knows his stuff, is completely oblivious to the merits and drawbacks of his own platform, because to pursue Win32 know-how as a career path assumes that you enjoy remaining ignorant about certain aspects of the machines youre running. It resembles something more of a religious belief than it does a philosophical belief.
Unix, in its form and in its structure, is the polar opposite of Win32 in regard to how you approach it. You're not only encouraged to grab a shovel and dig deep into the platform, you're required to do so if you expect to gain mastery over it. That being said, Win32 users are unaware of this process. They think in surface-layer terms, whereas Unix people know their systems from the ground up.
What makes matters worse, is Linux, and the idea that the whole damn platform can be looked at, dissected and understood down to the source. While this is an advantage to a Unix guy (since we are used to doing such things) , it presents an insurmountable task to a Win32 user, who's concept of computing often does not extend below the GUI.
Here's another anecdote that illustrates the point i'm trying to make: Where I worked, a bunch of Win32 users were given the task of conducting performance evaluation and testing of RAID arrays under AIX. I appeared to be the only guy in there who had anything more than a extremely cursory knowledge of Unix. After a day or two, I began to wonder why all of the AIX hosts were being rebooted so often. I had a look at all the machines and their uptimes, and discovered that these boxes were being rebooted about once a day. I asked why. They looked like deer caught in the headlights....It turns out that whenever they were trying to remedy a config-related issue, their first instinct was to reboot the damn machine to fix it. To explain the concept of "uptime" would have been futile. To explain the notion that "rebooting is not how you fix a problem in Unix.".
In short, they just plain don't get it, and its doubtful they ever will.
...More grainy porn featuring ugly nerds humping their bovine "webmistresses"....Yeesh. At $1.39 a gallon, i've got better things to do with a tank of gas than to drive around looking for things I don't really want to see.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I spent much of this evening wondering to myself if its just me, or has everyone around me more or less just become more stupid as the years have gone on...After overhearing this conversation at a local PetsMart:
Dumb Lady: Oh my God! Oh my god, this fish is dying!
Clerk: Hm? The goldfish?
Dumb Lady: Whats wrong with your fish?
Clerk: Oh..That one. They're supposed to look like that.
Dumb Lady: With...with its head like that?
Clerk: Yeah.
Dumb Lady: What about those eyes? Thats not supposed to be like that..
Clerk: Yeah. Those goldfish are supposed...supposed to be like that. They're....genetically...not supposed to be like that, originally.
Dumb Lady: Huh?
Clerk: Thats the way they make em. Genetically...altered.
Dumb Lady: ARE YOU SERIOUS?!!?? (gasp)
Clerk: Yeah.
Dumb Lady: These fish are GENETICALLY ALTERED?????
Clerk: Well..they're not.....they're..just come like that.
Dumb Lady: Oh my god. Radiation. Oh..my god..thats...I guess that means they wont live very long. Like the sheep.
Clerk: Well, no, its just they're not as hearty as...the other goldfish.
Dumb Lady: I see.. wow. Look honey, they can do that now..to fish!
The "fish" the 40-something mother-of-two woman was referring to was one of those big googly-eyed goldfish that you can see in any pet store..Just normal goldfish that are bred to be decorative fishes. I would have said something, but it was already obvious this woman had absolutely no concept of something as simplistic as breeding animals... That,and I felt bad for the clerk who had to endure this woman's sub-roomtemp IQ. I just walked off and felt sorry for civilization.
Cheers,
Yeah, I hear a guy named Marconi is working on sending signals directly through air. if it works out, this could be the one thing that revolutionizes the telecommunications industry. Just imagine -- Pictures, sounds, voice.. transmitted through air at the speed of light!
Watching Slashdot run a story on basically what amounts to a radio antenna relay..Yeah, thats super, guys. Keep the late-breaking news coming... See, what bugs me is, his is neither news, nor anything that matters, since the technology has been around for the better part of a century.
Moderate me however you want. Moderation doesn't affect whether i'm right or not.
Come on.... I've been using Kermit in Unix for close to a decade now.
Cheers,
Looks like 100% of the link mentioned in this article decayed in a little under 5 minutes!
Cheers,
Does "Sharp Zaurus" sound like something a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger would have?
Cheers,
Killing off Jar Jar in Episode 3 would make the fans happy, as well as providing a pleasant "Mr. Hooper's gone" introduction for children to learn the realities of death.
Besides that, I (and others, no doubt..) would actually go see one if I knew Jar Jar was going to get snuffed out beforehand.
My $0.02,
Duah, i'ts early. I just woke up. 1,$s/game/gain.
Since it's an RFC, here's my C..
The Internet should not be "for everyone", much the same way as driving a car should not be legal for everyone.
Having been a SysAdmin for a number of years, I can tell you that the vast majority of Internet users are law-obiding, decent and considerate people. Then, of course, you have the 1% who want to take such a wonderful gift, and abuse it. They will abuse it for their own personal or financial game, or simply because they get off on making someone else on the other end of their "attack" miserable.
I propose that people should be required to carry a Computer License, which proves they are capable of using the Internet responsibly, in much the same way as you're required to carry a Drivers License to prove you know how to use a car responsibly.
To the vast majority of us, its no big deal. Having a Computer License is no more a threat to one's personal freedoms and rights to privacy as carrying a Drivers License is. For people who have demonstrated a clear-cut lack of understanding of the fundemental governing principles of behavior and usage, their license should be revoked, just as it is for people who have demonstrated a lack of understanding for the basic principles of behavior and usage for a car. While I wouldn't impose fines, and I would not create a police force to apply the law, I would leave it up to the individual ISP to decide how to best apply this for his or her system.
Its only after we do something like I've just described that the net can be cleaned up, and relatively free of abuse, garbage, and other miscellaneous mindbarf.
Cheers,
...I'd be able to assassinate Brother Jed.
Cheers,
A touchscreen...watch..
I'm surprised they aren't selling the watch for 99 cents when you buy a "Toshiba Home Finger Guillotine" and the "Sony(tm) Ultra-Small Prosthetic Index Finger" you'll need to utilize it.
I'll pass. Buying a touch-screen watch makes about as much sense as buying a NetCat. Its an invention that solves a problem that never existed to begin with.
Cheers,
Amusingly, i'm not trying to start a flamewar here, but, i'm sure it will devolve into that anyway......
I think the reason why the review is "KDE-heavy" is because when it comes to GNOME, nothing major has really changed (functionally or asthetically) between the version that shipped with 7.2 and the version you see in 7.3..In other words, theres not really much to say that hasn't already been said.
The reason why KDE got so much coverage versus GNOME in this review is probably due to the fact that the changes between KDE 2.2.x and KDE 3.x are rather large. Theres no bias here on behalf of the reviewer. One desktop changed radically from 7.2 to 7.3, the other did not.
Moderate this post however you want. Just don't be a goddamn idiot and say "I like GNOME! KDE suxx!!! I'm going to mod this down!!" since this reply is neither pro-KDE or pro-GNOME.
"...the world would have access to a limitless power supply. The moon receives 13,000 terrawatts of power from the sun. Harnessing 1 percent of that energy, he calculates, could replace all fossil fuel power plants on Earth."
If we've got the same guy doing the calculating as we have doing the spell-checking, we're fucked. Besides, duh, it costs money to get something to the moon. Whats the rocket going to be powered by? Cash or rubberbands?
Cheers,
Sun: So..Lets uh.... lets go over our findings so far.
S6: Ok..Here's uh..here's what we've got so far. Between the uh..the six of us...uh, 1 of us has heard of Solaris for x86. That would be uh... 18% of the population."
Sun: Fantastic. 18%. Wow. Management is gonna love that. 18.. wow....18% of the... wow. The new "insanity first" initiative here at the company is going to get off to a...uh..to a really, really impressive start. You know, just uh...acting like Linux doesnt exist just wont cut it anymore. We need to be REALLY insane this quarter... We need to uhh...raise the bar on....you know, management says "we need more insanity" and we need to deliver. We cant be insane enough, if you ask me....So.. Lets not only act like Linux doesnt exist, but lets get really crazy. But lets keep it sane. Crazy, but sane. uhh..Ok. Can I have a graph of your figures? Y'know, uhh..something to show them..?"
S6: Uhh.. Sure, here you go. A graph that shows that 18% of us have heard of Solaris for x86."
Sun: Fantastic. Ok, before I..before I uh...hand in my reccomendation on going forward with Solaris 9 for x86, lets uh..lets recap. Ok. We need to be insane. We need 10% minimum.. So you're uh...you're saying we meet both, uh..exceed both. Right?
S6: Uhh..yeah. Yes, definately. We've got a final figure of 18%, and we're insane. Thats correct.
Sun: Great. Ok, one minor concern.. This line here, this graph is sort of..uh..flat.. Its just a flat line going..uh..across the page. Can we do anything with that to uh...make it..you know, more uh..positive?
S6: Here. Let me show you.. (papers ruffled)
Sun: You guys are incredible. Thanks so much. How about we uh....tenatively, 9 AM tomorrow? We'll go over our results. I..uh...yeah, 9 AM sounds good for me.
S6: Ok. 5PM? Sounds good. 3PM. Gotcha.
Sun: Gotcha. 11:21 AM. See you then, gang.
Cheers,
Why Intel is setting themselves up for this, I have no idea.
Cheers,
Whats the purpose of dedicating even MORE space on my HD to yet another operating system, when dual-booting back into Windows for a while only costs about 45 seconds of my time?
I dont mean to take a squat on the WineX guys, but... Couldnt this energy be put to better use elsewhere?
Cheers,
What is this, Yahoo Internet Life?
USE GOOGLE. Not "Ask Slashdot".
Here, have some search keywords: ISBN, Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress, Amazon.com.
Cheers,
The reason I download my music versus buy it is because..
o The last time I went, I couldn't find the CD I was looking for. However, they did have several hundred copies of a Britney Spears CD and pair of Reebok sneakers in a glass case.
o Their selection consisted almost entirely of rap, hip-hop, and other sonic diarrhea. My tastes in music extend a little further than incessant warbling up and down the scales and complaining to a drumbeat.
o They wanted to sell me candy, magazines, coffee, soda, biscotti, bottled water, bumper stickers, incense, candles, videocasettes, and DVDs of movies nobody wanted to see in the theaters to begin with. Not what I came in there for, an album.
o Even if I were to have found the CD I was looking for, I would have had to shell out nearly twice as much money as I would have 10 years ago FOR THE SAME CD. Apparently, it costs the shop alot of money to keep those Reebok sneakers in a glass case. Probably air-conditioned.
o The store expected me to give my money to a guy wearing lipstick wearing earrings. In his face.
o Some marketing bozo decided that putting anything other than rap and "best of" albums on the shelves was a good idea.
o I cant burn my own CDs at the shop, with the music I want on it, and nothing else.
Need I go on?
Cheers,
How on earth did this get moderated as a troll?
At the risk of sounding politically incorrect...
How are these African ISP's being "fleeced" when they're simply being asked to pay what everyone else is paying already? What entitled them to special treatment in the first place?
Cheers,
Ever noticed that the people who bitch the loudest about pollution drive around in 40 year old VW buses that leak, belch, and spew exponentially more toxins than a guy behind the wheel of a modern automobile?
Cheers,
Call me crazy, but, isn't 3/4ths of the Earth's surface covered with stuff that can be easilly converted to clean-burning hydrogen and oxygen?
I definitely think the big H is the way to go. Petroleum is a stinky industrial-age relic that costs too much money to purify into something useful. To make matters worse, its non-renewable, and synthetic replacements are too expensive to produce.
Solar --> Electical --> Decomposition of seawater --> Hydrogen. Whats so hard about it?
Cheers,
...Otherwise, the Linux community's proposed "improvement" to Mickeysoft's infamous Start button would have been an even MORE non-intuitive looking, oddly situated stone footprint.
IMHO, what allowed KDE to win the desktop war was the fact that its developers actually listened to what their users told them. Their design choices were dictated from the demands of people below, instead of by ego-driven edicts delivered from the people above. Good ideas are never delivered by edict..only unrealistic expectations that will never be filled.
Cheers,
The premise is false. Anyone can learn new skills, especailly in the computer realm.
Sure. Anyone can learn new skills. But they'll never be as skilled or as technically proficient as someone who has dedicated the majority of their focus to the same pursuit. This is particularly true in Unix. Personally, i've been doing Unix for about a decade. Ten years straight. By your logic, anyone who takes an Intro to Unix course at a community college has an equivalent pool of knowledge. If anything is patently false, its your assertion that dedicated pursuits of knowledge are pointless. Instead of true professionals, you'll have a group of people who have an equally poor knowledge of everything.
I write kernel level code for Windows from time to time. I customize and develop drivers as needed. I muck about with all the same things that even the most ardent Unix guru deals with.
Then you realize that you are in an incredibly small minority of Win32 "professionals". Surely you aren't claiming that having a deep knowledge of Unix is equivalent to a deep knowledge of Win32..(!)
Here we go again with the "Unix people are better because they can handle source". That wasn't what I was saying at all. I was merely pointing out that the availability of source adds an extra layer of complexity that Win32 are completely sheilded from. What is a requirement for our discipline is an exotic, far-flung side issue for your discipline.
Somehow you seem to think that if we don't all choose to be BOFH we are useless, an unneeded appendage. Quite the contrary. The world needs both Win32 and Unix. I just prefer that the two not mix..I'd no sooner put a Win32 user behind the wheel of a supercomputer than I would put rollerskates on a horse.
Cheers, and speaking of rollerskates......
In my opinion, the idea of getting Microsoft junkies to sit down and understand Unix is beyond your typical Microsoft junkie's ability. I'm not trying to sound condescending in that, either. I just think that theres a point where someone gets so entrenched in one way of doing, and one way of thinking, that they lose the ability to "switch gears" and pick up something fundementally different. I'll give you two examples:
There was a guy I worked with named Brad. Brad was an ardent Windows guy. He knew nothing about any other OS'es other than Win32, other than their names. In his mind, Win32 was the pinnacle of operating systems because it simplified complex tasks down to a predictable series of point-and-click operations, and like most Win32 gurus, he had absolutely no idea how anything worked under the hood. He had no idea what a kernel was. Infact, anything below the driver level was completely black box to him. In summary, Brad, even though he knows his stuff, is completely oblivious to the merits and drawbacks of his own platform, because to pursue Win32 know-how as a career path assumes that you enjoy remaining ignorant about certain aspects of the machines youre running. It resembles something more of a religious belief than it does a philosophical belief.
Unix, in its form and in its structure, is the polar opposite of Win32 in regard to how you approach it. You're not only encouraged to grab a shovel and dig deep into the platform, you're required to do so if you expect to gain mastery over it. That being said, Win32 users are unaware of this process. They think in surface-layer terms, whereas Unix people know their systems from the ground up.
What makes matters worse, is Linux, and the idea that the whole damn platform can be looked at, dissected and understood down to the source. While this is an advantage to a Unix guy (since we are used to doing such things) , it presents an insurmountable task to a Win32 user, who's concept of computing often does not extend below the GUI.
Here's another anecdote that illustrates the point i'm trying to make: Where I worked, a bunch of Win32 users were given the task of conducting performance evaluation and testing of RAID arrays under AIX. I appeared to be the only guy in there who had anything more than a extremely cursory knowledge of Unix. After a day or two, I began to wonder why all of the AIX hosts were being rebooted so often. I had a look at all the machines and their uptimes, and discovered that these boxes were being rebooted about once a day. I asked why. They looked like deer caught in the headlights....It turns out that whenever they were trying to remedy a config-related issue, their first instinct was to reboot the damn machine to fix it. To explain the concept of "uptime" would have been futile. To explain the notion that "rebooting is not how you fix a problem in Unix.".
In short, they just plain don't get it, and its doubtful they ever will.
Cheers,
...More grainy porn featuring ugly nerds humping their bovine "webmistresses"....Yeesh. At $1.39 a gallon, i've got better things to do with a tank of gas than to drive around looking for things I don't really want to see.
Cheers,