I occasionally find myself wanting to say, like Miranda in Forbidden Planet, "I can see that was probably very clever, but I don't seem to understand it."
I read somewhere that studies found that inexperienced users are more comfortable starting applications by typing (part of) the name of the application, than they are searching for graphical icons in a nested hierarchy of menus. It makes sense: you probably already know you want Firefox, and with menus, you have to figure out where in the hierarchy Firefox will be.
The Ubuntu Unity interface all but forces you to launch most applications that way, and I found I quickly got used to it -- then noticed it's easier to launch applications in pretty much the same way in Windows 7 and Android, and even in OS X, where it's not quite so encouraged.
The difficulty lies in finding out the names of applications you have installed, or would like to have installed. I like Unity, but it's biggest shortcoming is that it's really difficult to find a proper list of installed applications. That's where the Windows Start Menu, and similar menu systems, is really helpful.
I used to find the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines for the menus surprisingly misguided, in this respect: you're not supposed to actually use the name of the application in the menu system, but rather list it by the intended use of the application. "Web Browser" is a silly way to label Firefox, and it makes things worse for less obvious applications. I had to resort to command-line tools to work out that the "Disk Usage Analyzer" that was crashing on start-up was actually named "baobab".
A lot of accredited institutions offer courses that are entirely online, including the community college where I've been taking courses, City College of San Francisco; those aren't free, but they're not terribly expensive.
Several institutions offer complete course materials online for free, most notably MIT. Unlike the courses at Stanford, those aren't active courses, however, so there's are no other students with whom to interact unless you go out and find some, no record of your participation, and no assessment.
There are many tutorials for most programming languages, and some computer science theory, available online.
Some public libraries offer free access to Safari Online, which includes hundreds of tech books, including books on programming.
I signed up for the course on databases, and I see that there are scheduled due dates for homework assignments and exams. This implies that there will be a record of successful completion. What's more, the requirements are more demanding than the online course I'm taking that will give me college credits from an accredited institution.
I know the college I attend has rules for testing to fulfill requirements in lieu of taking a course. I'm hoping that completing this course and demonstrating I know the material through a test will let me complete a certificate I've been working on.
Online education is rapidly becoming more widespread. Employers will have to start acknowledging that people who've taken online courses and can prove they know the material have a valid claim to skill.
I can see that sort of mismatch as a serious problem.
However, the Wikipedia article I reference was definitely discussing a difference in design philosophies between OOP and RDBMS, which I understood to be essentially that objects are understood to be both function and data structure, but databases are concerned only with data structures, which complicates moving data back and forth.
At some point, we really should start calling the bluff of businesses that claim they'll go away if we regulate them. I expect that we're better off without the few that actually will go away.
I'm no developer, and only a novice with programming and databases, so this may be a naive question.
I remember reading about Object-relational impedance mismatch. I thought, if object oriented programming is a poor fit, conceptually, with the relational database model, perhaps functional programming would be a better fit: the code leaves the management of state to the database, which is its specialty.
I'm fairly sure I have Aspberger's Syndrome, and from the accounts I've read of the condition, and what I have experienced, it isn't that aspies lack empathy, but that we have difficulty intuiting the feelings of others in the moment, in peronal interactions. There is a range of coping techniques; most commonly, aspies rely on intellectualizing to understand the feelings of others. This is less efficient, so aspies tend to have trouble interacting with more than one person at a time, get tired out quickly by social interactions, and so try to limit them, and so on.
However, someone with Aspberger's Syndrome is perfectly capable of reading at leisure an account of aberrant behavior and recognizing it for what it is.
What is clear, from reading the comments that express support for the manager, is that the supporters recognize the malignant cruelty. Whether the supporters have Aspberger's Syndrome or not, their responses suggest sociopathy, not Aspberger's Syndrome.
Among other things, UAC means that the executable can't proceed without human intervention, thus exposing the fact that an application is doing something. That makes it much harder for a virus or worm to do its business without detection.
Sure, it would be great if our dog could say, "Pardon me, but there are some men here moving the television set", but it helps just to have the dog barking. Now you know something is up.
I keep seeing people claim they prefer Chrome because it's faster. But every time I see benchmarks, the differences are negligible. My best guess is that something about the way Chrome draws the screen gives the impression that it's faster, even though overall it isn't.
Myself, I primarily use Firefox, mostly because the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit whose raison d'etre is to work towards the common good, and its history bears out that intention.
If investment decisions are better made by computer program than by human investors, what justification is left for private ownership of capital? And what's the argument against planned economics?
Can we have another look at the idea of democratically deciding upon our social priorities?
Keeping up with security patches is a major concern. Part of the reason Canonical has been considering a more rapid release cycle is the need to keep pace with security patches for Web browsers.
Because all the other major industrial powers had been crushed in the war, giving US-based industries an unparalleled opportunity for expansion and near complete control of global markets.
Also, social spending soared after World War II. There was less wealth going to war, and more to infrastructure improvements and individual consumption. That's the opposite of austerity.
I'm astonished at how absolutely backwards the pro-Bitcoin people are getting this.
Deflation benefits creditors; inflation benefits creditors. Deflation benefits those who can afford to sit on their wealth, not those who receive little more than they consume. This is pretty basic economics.
I've been self-hosting my personal email for the last 3 years and have found it to be almost as pain free as a hosted account. The only issues I've run into is that on a couple of occasions the IP address block containing the IP address of my server would get blacklisted and I would have to go through the procedure of getting my IP address whitelisted. On one occasion an automatic software update failed to bring postfix back up, so I had to start it manually. That's it.
It was actually the comments about blacklisting that most concerned me. The basics of configuring postfix, Squirrelmail, etc., seem straightforward enough; the comments on the difficulty of spam filtering varied, but it sounded like it would be manageable. But I'd have a hard time convincing my family to dump Gmail for our own email server, if that means their email doesn't go through reliably.
I manage to do fine without facebook or G+. There's mail, IM, telephone... I don't have to log in to some site to +1 the birth of a baby, I just get a text message. I manage to meet my quota of bbq's every year just fine, and somehow manage to be able to join in on parties and go out for drinks. Somehow I seem to be able to coordinate my life perfectly fine without the help of a third party mining my attendance to events for whatever "benign" purpose they see fit.
I had signed up for Google+ as a concession to family members who had been complaining about my not using Facebook. (It doesn't seem to have satisfied anyone.) Recently, I was at a housewarming party hosted by my brother and his wife; all the invitations were sent out over Facebook. My older stepson spends hours each day using Facebook, mostly exchanging messages with his peers; however, I found out that several of my relatives exchange messages with him frequently.
That's all anecdotal, of course, but it squares with the accounts I hear elsewhere, that social networking -- specifically Facebook -- are widely considered social necessities.
There's all this talk about these social networks like they're reshaping societies as we know them, pointing towards the revolutions in Egypt, etc. Truth be told, if social networks didn't exist, these revolts would've happened over a different medium. Social networks just sped up the process a little, but they weren't the cause. The cause was poverty, unemployment and a lack of freedom, but it's nice marketing to sugarcoat it like Facebook and Twitter should take the credit after all. Crank that stock up a little more, this web-bubble needs more money before it can burst.
Of course you're right about the underlying causes of social unrest -- and tech magnates have been a little too eager to claim credit, and you're right about their motives as well. However, technology actually does matter. States and traditional authorities tend to move slowly, but with enormous force; mass movements rely on speed and agility, and social networking tools and mobile phones facilitate that.
Years ago, and in the relatively early days of Facebook, I was politically active and working on, among other things, immigrant rights in California. A law was in the works to prohibit undocumented immigrants from receiving government services, such as public education for their children. I happened to be in a large suburban town for an appointment with a doctor, when I literally walked right in to a mass demonstration I hadn't heard about, by thousands of high school students. It turned out that a locally popular radio station DJ had said that students should walk out of schools in protest of the new law, on the model of a civil rights protest for Latino rights that happened in LA in the 60s. Some students took up the idea, and organized the whole thing in the space of a few days, through Facebook.
My sense is that since technology amplifies individual effort, the utility of new technology to facilitate resistance tends to exceed the utility of new technology to suppress resistance. That's not a simple inevitability, of course, and that's exactly why I think there's a point to challenging Google's policies -- or Facebook's, for that matter.
One of the reasons that socialists traditionally looked to the working class is that they worked as teams in enormous centralized workplaces, where they could potentially coordinate their actions democratically and on a large scale. There was a trend towards increasing concentration of workers in workplaces for several generations, but that trend has reversed, at least in my experience; factories and workplaces tend to be smaller, and production is more dispersed. A countervailing trend is towards increasing speed and sophistication of communication, and I think that to achieve a more democratic and egalitarian society, it is critical to understand and develop the potential of this.
"Good grief... when did social justice require freedom for printing presses? It never has been before." -- Someone not enthusiastic about the proposed Bill of Rights in 1788.
I'm seeing a lot of comments that if people don't like Google's policies, they shouldn't use Google. However, with Google's domination over Internet searching and over public email, it takes a fair amount of work to avoid using Google. And given the degree of social influence Google has attained, it really seems that the proper thing to do about a problem with Google's policies is to confront Google about it, not just run away and hide.
There was an email bulletin from the Free Software Foundation, complaining that 50% of their subscribers used Gmail. Outside work, almost all the personal email addresses I see in use are @gmail.com. On Slashdot, I'm used to frequent criticisms of Google, lauding of do-it-yourself system configuration, and lots of nerd rage whenever "cloud computing" comes up, so I found the reaction to Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives? astonishing, in that most of the responses were that the poster should stick with Google Apps for mail hosting, because self-hosting was too difficult. (I had been suggesting to my partner that I thought we should consider running our own mail server on our own Linux box, so I was reading that thread closely. I wouldn't have expected the Slashdot crowd to talk me out of it, but they did.)
At first, I liked the looks of Google+, because it seemed to show more planning to meet privacy concerns; however, the "real names" policy is a serious problem. If anybody's in a position to effectively challenge Facebook, a service I loathe, it's Google.
Some people throw around the claim that social networking services are not a necessity. The problem is, the definition of "necessity" is a social construction, human existence is social existence, and with social networking services, you're talking about the deliberate construction of a forum for constructing society. Opting out means a significant withdrawal from contemporary social life, especially for youth -- and this is a global pattern. It's more important when one looks at political developments around the world, of which Google is distinctly aware.
Opting out of Google services and ignoring the problem is not an effective response.
It's not so different at my job, where the staff is all but begging management for work to do, and yet they're hiring more people to sit around, just in case something happens, in order to fulfill contractual obligations. Most of us have textbooks and the like at our workstations, and spend half our shifts in self-study or reading tech news sites.
I do more work on my days off than I do at work.
The two jobs I've ever had which required the most labor were a job printing blueprints, and a job serving bagel sandwiches and coffee. Most of the blueprints were duplicates which were required for legal reasons: each one hundreds of sheets of 42"x30" paper, and which no one will ever read. The bagel job serviced an immediate need -- but then, it's a need created by a hurry-up-and-wait culture, in which people are rushing to get to jobs that serve little or no useful function.
After a few centuries of organizing societies around maximizing production, we have very high productivity -- so much so that there's actually very little work that needs to be done. But our global civilization seems unable to cope with that.
Just the actual farmers. I may have misunderstood what point you were making.
On the one hand, you'll occasionally see people worried about 100% automation and 100% unemployment, and less absurd variants. No, that's not going to happen, for all sorts of reasons. If you were countering that sort of argument, then I agree.
On the other hand, I've heard people argue that industrial production essentially hasn't changed in the last century, except that there's more of it now. I used to be part of a group of Marxists, who would frequently argue that. Eventually it occurred to me that I was the only person in the group, at least locally, who had ever worked in a factory, or for that matter had even seen the inside of one, and I was the only person in the group who had a wage job tending machines that cranked out material products (and technically, the production was a service; the products weren't even commodities, in the Marxist sense).
My father was an engineering contractor, and his specialty was bulk food handling systems. I was occasionally brought along on his jobs, and as a young adult, worked for him a few times. As his career progressed, he was less involved in designing the plumbing and machinery, and more involved in programming programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that operated the machinery. I remember, for instance, working in a soda bottling plant, which was a major regional distribution point. The scale of the rows and columns of unfilled aluminum cans and plastic bottles was colossal. And, there were perhaps twenty people working in the plant, half of them managers or clerical staff, and all in late middle age. The floor workers were mostly highly skilled mechanics, or forklift operators.
The Marxist group I used to be a part of was perpetually arguing against the notion of a "service economy", whereas my experience made it obvious that it really was the case that the ratio of service workers to industrial workers was increasing, and that automation -- software being an important aspect of it -- meant smaller factories with fewer workers.
Slashdot Mirror
I occasionally find myself wanting to say, like Miranda in Forbidden Planet, "I can see that was probably very clever,
but I don't seem to understand it."
I read somewhere that studies found that inexperienced users are more comfortable starting applications by typing (part of) the name of the application, than they are searching for graphical icons in a nested hierarchy of menus. It makes sense: you probably already know you want Firefox, and with menus, you have to figure out where in the hierarchy Firefox will be.
The Ubuntu Unity interface all but forces you to launch most applications that way, and I found I quickly got used to it -- then noticed it's easier to launch applications in pretty much the same way in Windows 7 and Android, and even in OS X, where it's not quite so encouraged.
The difficulty lies in finding out the names of applications you have installed, or would like to have installed. I like Unity, but it's biggest shortcoming is that it's really difficult to find a proper list of installed applications. That's where the Windows Start Menu, and similar menu systems, is really helpful.
I used to find the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines for the menus surprisingly misguided, in this respect: you're not supposed to actually use the name of the application in the menu system, but rather list it by the intended use of the application. "Web Browser" is a silly way to label Firefox, and it makes things worse for less obvious applications. I had to resort to command-line tools to work out that the "Disk Usage Analyzer" that was crashing on start-up was actually named "baobab".
A lot of accredited institutions offer courses that are entirely online, including the community college where I've been taking courses, City College of San Francisco; those aren't free, but they're not terribly expensive.
Several institutions offer complete course materials online for free, most notably MIT. Unlike the courses at Stanford, those aren't active courses, however, so there's are no other students with whom to interact unless you go out and find some, no record of your participation, and no assessment.
There are many tutorials for most programming languages, and some computer science theory, available online.
Some public libraries offer free access to Safari Online, which includes hundreds of tech books, including books on programming.
I signed up for the course on databases, and I see that there are scheduled due dates for homework assignments and exams. This implies that there will be a record of successful completion. What's more, the requirements are more demanding than the online course I'm taking that will give me college credits from an accredited institution.
I know the college I attend has rules for testing to fulfill requirements in lieu of taking a course. I'm hoping that completing this course and demonstrating I know the material through a test will let me complete a certificate I've been working on.
Online education is rapidly becoming more widespread. Employers will have to start acknowledging that people who've taken online courses and can prove they know the material have a valid claim to skill.
I can see that sort of mismatch as a serious problem.
However, the Wikipedia article I reference was definitely discussing a difference in design philosophies between OOP and RDBMS, which I understood to be essentially that objects are understood to be both function and data structure, but databases are concerned only with data structures, which complicates moving data back and forth.
Indeed.
At some point, we really should start calling the bluff of businesses that claim they'll go away if we regulate them. I expect that we're better off without the few that actually will go away.
I'm no developer, and only a novice with programming and databases, so this may be a naive question.
I remember reading about Object-relational impedance mismatch. I thought, if object oriented programming is a poor fit, conceptually, with the relational database model, perhaps functional programming would be a better fit: the code leaves the management of state to the database, which is its specialty.
Does that make any sense?
I'm fairly sure I have Aspberger's Syndrome, and from the accounts I've read of the condition, and what I have experienced, it isn't that aspies lack empathy, but that we have difficulty intuiting the feelings of others in the moment, in peronal interactions. There is a range of coping techniques; most commonly, aspies rely on intellectualizing to understand the feelings of others. This is less efficient, so aspies tend to have trouble interacting with more than one person at a time, get tired out quickly by social interactions, and so try to limit them, and so on.
However, someone with Aspberger's Syndrome is perfectly capable of reading at leisure an account of aberrant behavior and recognizing it for what it is.
What is clear, from reading the comments that express support for the manager, is that the supporters recognize the malignant cruelty. Whether the supporters have Aspberger's Syndrome or not, their responses suggest sociopathy, not Aspberger's Syndrome.
Among other things, UAC means that the executable can't proceed without human intervention, thus exposing the fact that an application is doing something. That makes it much harder for a virus or worm to do its business without detection.
Sure, it would be great if our dog could say, "Pardon me, but there are some men here moving the television set", but it helps just to have the dog barking. Now you know something is up.
I keep seeing people claim they prefer Chrome because it's faster. But every time I see benchmarks, the differences are negligible. My best guess is that something about the way Chrome draws the screen gives the impression that it's faster, even though overall it isn't.
Myself, I primarily use Firefox, mostly because the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit whose raison d'etre is to work towards the common good, and its history bears out that intention.
If investment decisions are better made by computer program than by human investors, what justification is left for private ownership of capital? And what's the argument against planned economics?
Can we have another look at the idea of democratically deciding upon our social priorities?
Keeping up with security patches is a major concern. Part of the reason Canonical has been considering a more rapid release cycle is the need to keep pace with security patches for Web browsers.
Because all the other major industrial powers had been crushed in the war, giving US-based industries an unparalleled opportunity for expansion and near complete control of global markets.
Also, social spending soared after World War II. There was less wealth going to war, and more to infrastructure improvements and individual consumption. That's the opposite of austerity.
Deflation benefits creditors; inflation benefits debtors.
I'm astonished at how absolutely backwards the pro-Bitcoin people are getting this.
Deflation benefits creditors; inflation benefits creditors. Deflation benefits those who can afford to sit on their wealth, not those who receive little more than they consume. This is pretty basic economics.
See the Cross of Gold speech by William Jennings Bryan. Deflationary currencies facilitate concentration of wealth in fewer pockets.
Including the point-blank firing of weapons into the heads of toddlers.
I'm guessing you meant this:
WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says
Bradley Manning did the right thing.
I've been self-hosting my personal email for the last 3 years and have found it to be almost as pain free as a hosted account. The only issues I've run into is that on a couple of occasions the IP address block containing the IP address of my server would get blacklisted and I would have to go through the procedure of getting my IP address whitelisted. On one occasion an automatic software update failed to bring postfix back up, so I had to start it manually. That's it.
It was actually the comments about blacklisting that most concerned me. The basics of configuring postfix, Squirrelmail, etc., seem straightforward enough; the comments on the difficulty of spam filtering varied, but it sounded like it would be manageable. But I'd have a hard time convincing my family to dump Gmail for our own email server, if that means their email doesn't go through reliably.
I manage to do fine without facebook or G+. There's mail, IM, telephone... I don't have to log in to some site to +1 the birth of a baby, I just get a text message. I manage to meet my quota of bbq's every year just fine, and somehow manage to be able to join in on parties and go out for drinks. Somehow I seem to be able to coordinate my life perfectly fine without the help of a third party mining my attendance to events for whatever "benign" purpose they see fit.
I had signed up for Google+ as a concession to family members who had been complaining about my not using Facebook. (It doesn't seem to have satisfied anyone.) Recently, I was at a housewarming party hosted by my brother and his wife; all the invitations were sent out over Facebook. My older stepson spends hours each day using Facebook, mostly exchanging messages with his peers; however, I found out that several of my relatives exchange messages with him frequently.
That's all anecdotal, of course, but it squares with the accounts I hear elsewhere, that social networking -- specifically Facebook -- are widely considered social necessities.
There's all this talk about these social networks like they're reshaping societies as we know them, pointing towards the revolutions in Egypt, etc. Truth be told, if social networks didn't exist, these revolts would've happened over a different medium. Social networks just sped up the process a little, but they weren't the cause. The cause was poverty, unemployment and a lack of freedom, but it's nice marketing to sugarcoat it like Facebook and Twitter should take the credit after all. Crank that stock up a little more, this web-bubble needs more money before it can burst.
Of course you're right about the underlying causes of social unrest -- and tech magnates have been a little too eager to claim credit, and you're right about their motives as well. However, technology actually does matter. States and traditional authorities tend to move slowly, but with enormous force; mass movements rely on speed and agility, and social networking tools and mobile phones facilitate that.
Years ago, and in the relatively early days of Facebook, I was politically active and working on, among other things, immigrant rights in California. A law was in the works to prohibit undocumented immigrants from receiving government services, such as public education for their children. I happened to be in a large suburban town for an appointment with a doctor, when I literally walked right in to a mass demonstration I hadn't heard about, by thousands of high school students. It turned out that a locally popular radio station DJ had said that students should walk out of schools in protest of the new law, on the model of a civil rights protest for Latino rights that happened in LA in the 60s. Some students took up the idea, and organized the whole thing in the space of a few days, through Facebook.
My sense is that since technology amplifies individual effort, the utility of new technology to facilitate resistance tends to exceed the utility of new technology to suppress resistance. That's not a simple inevitability, of course, and that's exactly why I think there's a point to challenging Google's policies -- or Facebook's, for that matter.
One of the reasons that socialists traditionally looked to the working class is that they worked as teams in enormous centralized workplaces, where they could potentially coordinate their actions democratically and on a large scale. There was a trend towards increasing concentration of workers in workplaces for several generations, but that trend has reversed, at least in my experience; factories and workplaces tend to be smaller, and production is more dispersed. A countervailing trend is towards increasing speed and sophistication of communication, and I think that to achieve a more democratic and egalitarian society, it is critical to understand and develop the potential of this.
Facebook also has a "real names" policy.
"Good grief... when did social justice require freedom for printing presses? It never has been before."
-- Someone not enthusiastic about the proposed Bill of Rights in 1788.
I forgot to add the link to the other thread I referred to:
Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives?
I'm seeing a lot of comments that if people don't like Google's policies, they shouldn't use Google. However, with Google's domination over Internet searching and over public email, it takes a fair amount of work to avoid using Google. And given the degree of social influence Google has attained, it really seems that the proper thing to do about a problem with Google's policies is to confront Google about it, not just run away and hide.
There was an email bulletin from the Free Software Foundation, complaining that 50% of their subscribers used Gmail. Outside work, almost all the personal email addresses I see in use are @gmail.com. On Slashdot, I'm used to frequent criticisms of Google, lauding of do-it-yourself system configuration, and lots of nerd rage whenever "cloud computing" comes up, so I found the reaction to Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives? astonishing, in that most of the responses were that the poster should stick with Google Apps for mail hosting, because self-hosting was too difficult. (I had been suggesting to my partner that I thought we should consider running our own mail server on our own Linux box, so I was reading that thread closely. I wouldn't have expected the Slashdot crowd to talk me out of it, but they did.)
At first, I liked the looks of Google+, because it seemed to show more planning to meet privacy concerns; however, the "real names" policy is a serious problem. If anybody's in a position to effectively challenge Facebook, a service I loathe, it's Google.
Some people throw around the claim that social networking services are not a necessity. The problem is, the definition of "necessity" is a social construction, human existence is social existence, and with social networking services, you're talking about the deliberate construction of a forum for constructing society. Opting out means a significant withdrawal from contemporary social life, especially for youth -- and this is a global pattern. It's more important when one looks at political developments around the world, of which Google is distinctly aware.
Opting out of Google services and ignoring the problem is not an effective response.
It's not so different at my job, where the staff is all but begging management for work to do, and yet they're hiring more people to sit around, just in case something happens, in order to fulfill contractual obligations. Most of us have textbooks and the like at our workstations, and spend half our shifts in self-study or reading tech news sites.
I do more work on my days off than I do at work.
The two jobs I've ever had which required the most labor were a job printing blueprints, and a job serving bagel sandwiches and coffee. Most of the blueprints were duplicates which were required for legal reasons: each one hundreds of sheets of 42"x30" paper, and which no one will ever read. The bagel job serviced an immediate need -- but then, it's a need created by a hurry-up-and-wait culture, in which people are rushing to get to jobs that serve little or no useful function.
After a few centuries of organizing societies around maximizing production, we have very high productivity -- so much so that there's actually very little work that needs to be done. But our global civilization seems unable to cope with that.
Just the actual farmers. I may have misunderstood what point you were making.
On the one hand, you'll occasionally see people worried about 100% automation and 100% unemployment, and less absurd variants. No, that's not going to happen, for all sorts of reasons. If you were countering that sort of argument, then I agree.
On the other hand, I've heard people argue that industrial production essentially hasn't changed in the last century, except that there's more of it now. I used to be part of a group of Marxists, who would frequently argue that. Eventually it occurred to me that I was the only person in the group, at least locally, who had ever worked in a factory, or for that matter had even seen the inside of one, and I was the only person in the group who had a wage job tending machines that cranked out material products (and technically, the production was a service; the products weren't even commodities, in the Marxist sense).
My father was an engineering contractor, and his specialty was bulk food handling systems. I was occasionally brought along on his jobs, and as a young adult, worked for him a few times. As his career progressed, he was less involved in designing the plumbing and machinery, and more involved in programming programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that operated the machinery. I remember, for instance, working in a soda bottling plant, which was a major regional distribution point. The scale of the rows and columns of unfilled aluminum cans and plastic bottles was colossal. And, there were perhaps twenty people working in the plant, half of them managers or clerical staff, and all in late middle age. The floor workers were mostly highly skilled mechanics, or forklift operators.
The Marxist group I used to be a part of was perpetually arguing against the notion of a "service economy", whereas my experience made it obvious that it really was the case that the ratio of service workers to industrial workers was increasing, and that automation -- software being an important aspect of it -- meant smaller factories with fewer workers.