I did a little programming for fun as a kid, and I've taken a few courses on programming in the last few years. I've been trying to figure out what to try to work on, so I can know enough to contribute to some open source project. And it worries me that when I read discussions of software development and programming, I have little idea what anyone's talking about. In particular, while I understand all the words in what you wrote, and can follow the grammar perfectly well, I have almost no idea what you are talking about. It seems to me that what I've learned about programming has nothing to do with what software developers actually do, and I have no idea where the entry point actually is, except that I'm getting the impression it *isn't* in a university CS program.
I have been wondering this since I read RMS does not carry a cellphone. Do we need another creative visionary to come up with a completely unanticipated solution to this problem?
I used to think of RMS as an heroic visionary, but I've gradually lost respect for him. That quote from him, calling cell phones the perfect tool for a Stalin, was breathtakingly out of touch with reality.
Look at what has been going on in the Middle East, particularly Egypt. People organized mass demonstrations with mobile phones and Facebook, which is notorious for its complete lack of respect for individual privacy. Security forces could not contain a mass movement. This is not unprecedented. Popular revolts always follow lines of communication. The more such lines of communication there are, the stronger popular resistance can be, and the faster it can grow, move, and adapt. Police forces can never actually observe everyone -- the point of the panopticon concept is to give everyone the idea that they are being watched.
In a relatively repressive society, being part of a publicly dissenting minority can be dangerous, but it is necessary to accept that danger for there to be the beginning of a public resistance. In a relatively free society, where one is unlikely to have any real difficulty for dissent, there's no excuse.
All in all, RMS's reaction is completely backwards. The ubiquity of mobile phones expands human freedom, far more than the possibility of surveillance constrains it.
When I say there are implications that most haven't considered, I mean that there is a fundamental shift in social structure underway. What privacy means, and how it is valued, is rapidly changing. I would be more worried about corporate abuse of workers via mobile phone tracking, or misuse in (more or less apolitical) police work directed at individuals. These are problems, but not apocalyptic threats.
Finally, I think we have to bear in mind that historically, an enormous problem in industrialized societies, particularly that of the US, has been social atomization and alienation. We're seeing an enormously enthusiastic reversal of this.
If not that, then it may simply be that organizations err on the side of caution with data retention policies.
I don't think the real point here is that there's some abuse by mobile phone services, or that this was a secret. The point is that this is a new phenomenon, with implications most people haven't considered.
I'm pro-nuclear but i'm sick of this downplaying bullshit. Reactors that require actively powered safety systems ARE flawed.
I've generally been biased against nuclear power, but in the last year or so, I had been noticing that people whose opinion I respect, including veteran environmental activists, were suggesting that nuclear power was the best available option for meeting power needs without generating greenhouse gases. I had been meaning to read up on the subject; the little I had read suggested to me that there was good reason to believe that modern nuclear plants were significantly safer, and that modern techniques of fuel reprocessing much reduce the problems of fuel and waste. And I have to wonder how much of the fear of nuclear power is due the dramatic crises, which stand out more than the death by inches from pollution from coal-burning plants.
Two things worry me about the situation in Japan. First, that while there may be significantly safer designs for nuclear power plants, I have to wonder about the number of older, unsafe designs that are already in operation. Second, I have to worry that people (whom I generally think of as political allies) will overreact with opposition to nuclear power, making a rational debate more difficult -- and the obnoxious tendency of some to describe even detectable radiation leaks as harmless only makes this situation worse.
The last I checked, there were 4.6 billion mobile phone contracts. Most people in the world possess mobile phones. This means that almost anyone can talk to almost anyone else, instantly. This is of enormous, epochal importance.
While the resources for surveillance have increased, the amount of communication and mobility has increased more rapidly. The more people who have mobile phones, and the more they use them, the less effective surveillance can be. This means that the widespread adoption of mobile phones has meant a net gain in human freedom.
And that is exactly why everyone wants mobile phones.
Except Stallman, who made heroic contributions to the modern world, and yet doesn't understand that he achieved success.
The rant was concerning a security problem -- specifically, an unprincipled and careless user installed a lot of dodgy software, got burned, and took the techie's help for granted. The user's behavior is consistent: it's clear she doesn't think about the welfare of others or the consequences of her actions, so it's no surprise that she's ungrateful for the techie's help, and doesn't appreciate the amount of work involved.
I love helping friends and family with computer problems -- but the problems I get are requests for help in installing a hard drive, configuring a printer, or figuring out how to use some software. I usually get generous thanks for helping them.
The author of the rant needs to deal with his real problem: he has lousy friends. That the immediate problems were computer problem is incidental.
That's more to the point than most of the criticisms I've read.
Fortunately, Android tablets are starting to come out, and Canonical clearly has mobile computing very much in mind in development for Ubuntu. Hopefully, FLOSS approaches to tablet computing will overtake Apple, and with it will come renewed interest in the various free textbook initiatives.
I'm pretty impressed by Android. It's running on the Linux kernel.
In a broader sense, though, you're right: there's a lot of technical conservatism on Slashdot. Cloud computing, tablet computers, and smartphones seem to be treated dismissively, despite their quickly having become vital sectors in IT, and important to the daily lives of everyone I know.
There's logic to the use of the "troll" metaphor. A rant is not trolling. Angry disagreement is not trolling. Deliberate attempts to disrupt an online forum are trolling. A responsible forum moderator has the responsibility to identify trolls and deal with them firmly, decisively, and as quickly as possible.
The most common form of trolling I have seen is a bigoted comment, often "justified" with insane troll logic. Arguing with such logic is useless, and so is trying to dissuade the commenter from bigotry.
Most importantly, the effect of such a troll is to silence or drive off members of an online community. Remember that in general, only a minority of participants in an online forum are active participants. If members of a group that has a history of victimization by bigotry see bigots going unchallenged or weakly challenged, they're likely to be discouraged from participation. Active participants will become passive, and passive participants will depart. This can kill an online community, and doing so is often a troll's intent. It is a moderator's responsibility to nurture an online community; therefore it is a moderator's responsibility to deal with trolls firmly.
A troll is not interested in having a reasoned discussion, and when offered reasonable arguments, will continue or escalate the trolling. This amplifies the effect of the trolling, and leads to a forum thread being dominated by the argument around the troll: this is the reason why the conventional advice is to refrain from feeding the troll. That's not enough, however: trolls must be eliminated.
There are two options for dealing with trolls: banning them, and humiliating them. Banning is the straightforward option, and usually the best choice, as it's the cleanest break. Humiliation is more chancy, but it has a few advantages: it makes it clear that a troll has been confronted, and in some cases, may more effectively demoralize a troll than simple banning. (One technique I've seen is "disemvowelling", in which all the vowels are deleted from a troll's comments. This makes it clear that action has been taken, and the troll's comments can be ignored, or can be puzzled out, if a regular participant wants to figure out what is going on.)
I completely agree. The linked article is misdirected -- and in fact, many people try to deal with trolls in the way the article recommends, and it almost always fails. Trolls must be dealt with firmly and decisively. There is such a thing as malice, and you don't engage with malice. You have two options, really: ban the troll, or humiliate the troll, and banning is usually the better option, as it's usually the quickest and cleanest way to put a stop to a troll.
Frequently, trolling is an attack on members of groups that have a long history as victims of bigotry. Bigoted trolls tend to silence or drive off members of those groups -- which is likely their intention. In general, only a minority of participants in an online forum are actively participating, and a good moderator should be encouraging passive participants to step forward. A troll has the opposite effect: a troll discourages active participants, and drives out passive participants. It's a responsibility of a moderator to prevent this from happening.
It's also important to realize that when several trolls appear at once, it may be a deliberate and organized effort to shut down or take over an online forum. I've seen white supremacists do this a few times, for instance, and it is unsettling to watch well-meaning forum participants trying to reason with people who have absolutely no interest in being reasonable.
After some frustrating searches for backup software packages for either Windows or Linux -- the Windows packages were buggy, and the Linux packages were either too complex or too simple -- I finally decided to write a bash shell script to handle it.
Also, drilling a deep hole in an office wall is non-trivial. Even assuming that the building owner allows it (which, in commercial leases, they usually do) you don't know what's behind the wall without checking.
We may hope the kid learned an important lesson about the working world: bosses will ask you to perform tasks for which you do not have training, for which you do not have the proper equipment, which may be dangerous, which are not part of your job description, which your contract prohibits you from performing, or which are otherwise unethical or illegal. You should refuse to perform such tasks; there are worse fates than unemployment.
I'm an IT worker, and aside from informal experience, most of my training was in two years of vocational courses at a community college. I used to have a roommate, who spent about the same amount of time in school, studying in a program to become an apprentice plasterer. I looked through some of his textbooks -- at the time I was surprised at the complexity of the information. I'd say it was equivalent to the complexity and detail of computer networking. People in the building trades need to know in considerable detail how buildings are constructed, and what their peers in other specialties in the building trades are doing.
I've also known engineers who started out in the skilled trades -- in particular, my father and grandfather.
On the whole, I think it's quite accurate to describe much of IT work as skilled trade work, equivalent to other skilled trades.
The default distribution comes with alternative desktop themes, including the default desktop themes from previous major distributions, so you don't even have to do any extra downloading. Changing to a theme that has the prior button arrangement is trivially easy. The people complaining about the new themes have no legitimate complaint.
Did you actually type "http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/02/20/1817259/Chrome-May-Drop-the-URL-Bar" to get to this page?
Or, did you type "slashdot.org" and follow links? Or click on a bookmark?
URLs are technical information. The advantage of human-readable URLs over IP addresses has faded considerably -- they're only nominally "human readable" once you get past the top level page.
Does it bother you that most workstations don't display their MAC addresses?
Bookmark managers started it, but the URL was still important enough. Whoever created cellphone address books mainstreamed the little brain damage of never wanting to memorize contact information
What's the value of memorizing contact information? Contact information is useful only as an intermediate step; it's obviously "technical," and not intrinsically meaningful.
No one wants to call 1-234-567-8910. Someone wants to talk to their friend. The phone number just gets in the way.
Likewise, nobody wants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, they want to look up something on Wikipedia. It's long been notorious that "www" and "com" or "org" or "net" are effectively meaningless noise.
Most people use email, not just Facebook
on
The Death of BCC
·
· Score: 2
The point of the blog post seems to be that since Facebook doesn't offer BCC, people aren't using BCC anymore. It makes the rather bizarre assumption that Facebook has supplanted email. That's simply not true, as a glance at anyone's email inbox will reveal. In fact, it's a laughable presumption.
If you leave your terminal unlocked with a root shell open, it's your fault when someone hacks it.
True.
Sudo caches the fact that you've typed your password, and anyone who knows to type 'rm -rf *' in a root shell probably knows to type 'sudo rm -rf *' as well. The only thing sudo prevents is people who don't know what they're doing from doing something bad by accident, and people who do know what they're doing from doing something important quickly...
You can adjust the duration of the password caching in/etc/sudoers. The default is fifteen minutes -- I prefer a duration of two or three minutes, which is long enough to two a couple of commands in a row. If I actually need more than that, then I'd use sudo -i, but I rarely find that useful.
On my system at home, I do a lot at the command line that does *not* require escalated privileges. So, I don't use "sudo" on autopilot.
One thing I don't like about the way boxes are set up where I work is that most of them only allow logins by root -- I can see the convenience factor, but it grates on my nerves that I must execute commands that don't require root privileges as root.
By which I mean, the only people likely to actually use "grep" at the command line are those who have the option to use elevated privileges, which is part of the reason why there's a point to telling people to remember not to use escalated privileges unnecessarily.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a little programming for fun as a kid, and I've taken a few courses on programming in the last few years. I've been trying to figure out what to try to work on, so I can know enough to contribute to some open source project. And it worries me that when I read discussions of software development and programming, I have little idea what anyone's talking about. In particular, while I understand all the words in what you wrote, and can follow the grammar perfectly well, I have almost no idea what you are talking about. It seems to me that what I've learned about programming has nothing to do with what software developers actually do, and I have no idea where the entry point actually is, except that I'm getting the impression it *isn't* in a university CS program.
I have been wondering this since I read RMS does not carry a cellphone. Do we need another creative visionary to come up with a completely unanticipated solution to this problem?
I used to think of RMS as an heroic visionary, but I've gradually lost respect for him. That quote from him, calling cell phones the perfect tool for a Stalin, was breathtakingly out of touch with reality.
Look at what has been going on in the Middle East, particularly Egypt. People organized mass demonstrations with mobile phones and Facebook, which is notorious for its complete lack of respect for individual privacy. Security forces could not contain a mass movement. This is not unprecedented. Popular revolts always follow lines of communication. The more such lines of communication there are, the stronger popular resistance can be, and the faster it can grow, move, and adapt. Police forces can never actually observe everyone -- the point of the panopticon concept is to give everyone the idea that they are being watched.
In a relatively repressive society, being part of a publicly dissenting minority can be dangerous, but it is necessary to accept that danger for there to be the beginning of a public resistance. In a relatively free society, where one is unlikely to have any real difficulty for dissent, there's no excuse.
All in all, RMS's reaction is completely backwards. The ubiquity of mobile phones expands human freedom, far more than the possibility of surveillance constrains it.
When I say there are implications that most haven't considered, I mean that there is a fundamental shift in social structure underway. What privacy means, and how it is valued, is rapidly changing. I would be more worried about corporate abuse of workers via mobile phone tracking, or misuse in (more or less apolitical) police work directed at individuals. These are problems, but not apocalyptic threats.
Finally, I think we have to bear in mind that historically, an enormous problem in industrialized societies, particularly that of the US, has been social atomization and alienation. We're seeing an enormously enthusiastic reversal of this.
If not that, then it may simply be that organizations err on the side of caution with data retention policies.
I don't think the real point here is that there's some abuse by mobile phone services, or that this was a secret. The point is that this is a new phenomenon, with implications most people haven't considered.
See Jamendo. Almost 300,000 tracks, under Creative Commons licensing, and it's your choice whether to donate.
I'm pro-nuclear but i'm sick of this downplaying bullshit. Reactors that require actively powered safety systems ARE flawed.
I've generally been biased against nuclear power, but in the last year or so, I had been noticing that people whose opinion I respect, including veteran environmental activists, were suggesting that nuclear power was the best available option for meeting power needs without generating greenhouse gases. I had been meaning to read up on the subject; the little I had read suggested to me that there was good reason to believe that modern nuclear plants were significantly safer, and that modern techniques of fuel reprocessing much reduce the problems of fuel and waste. And I have to wonder how much of the fear of nuclear power is due the dramatic crises, which stand out more than the death by inches from pollution from coal-burning plants.
Two things worry me about the situation in Japan. First, that while there may be significantly safer designs for nuclear power plants, I have to wonder about the number of older, unsafe designs that are already in operation. Second, I have to worry that people (whom I generally think of as political allies) will overreact with opposition to nuclear power, making a rational debate more difficult -- and the obnoxious tendency of some to describe even detectable radiation leaks as harmless only makes this situation worse.
The last I checked, there were 4.6 billion mobile phone contracts. Most people in the world possess mobile phones. This means that almost anyone can talk to almost anyone else, instantly. This is of enormous, epochal importance.
While the resources for surveillance have increased, the amount of communication and mobility has increased more rapidly. The more people who have mobile phones, and the more they use them, the less effective surveillance can be. This means that the widespread adoption of mobile phones has meant a net gain in human freedom.
And that is exactly why everyone wants mobile phones.
Except Stallman, who made heroic contributions to the modern world, and yet doesn't understand that he achieved success.
The rant was concerning a security problem -- specifically, an unprincipled and careless user installed a lot of dodgy software, got burned, and took the techie's help for granted. The user's behavior is consistent: it's clear she doesn't think about the welfare of others or the consequences of her actions, so it's no surprise that she's ungrateful for the techie's help, and doesn't appreciate the amount of work involved.
I love helping friends and family with computer problems -- but the problems I get are requests for help in installing a hard drive, configuring a printer, or figuring out how to use some software. I usually get generous thanks for helping them.
The author of the rant needs to deal with his real problem: he has lousy friends. That the immediate problems were computer problem is incidental.
Those aren't trolls. Those are people who disagree with you.
That's more to the point than most of the criticisms I've read.
Fortunately, Android tablets are starting to come out, and Canonical clearly has mobile computing very much in mind in development for Ubuntu. Hopefully, FLOSS approaches to tablet computing will overtake Apple, and with it will come renewed interest in the various free textbook initiatives.
I'm pretty impressed by Android. It's running on the Linux kernel.
In a broader sense, though, you're right: there's a lot of technical conservatism on Slashdot. Cloud computing, tablet computers, and smartphones seem to be treated dismissively, despite their quickly having become vital sectors in IT, and important to the daily lives of everyone I know.
There's logic to the use of the "troll" metaphor. A rant is not trolling. Angry disagreement is not trolling. Deliberate attempts to disrupt an online forum are trolling. A responsible forum moderator has the responsibility to identify trolls and deal with them firmly, decisively, and as quickly as possible.
The most common form of trolling I have seen is a bigoted comment, often "justified" with insane troll logic. Arguing with such logic is useless, and so is trying to dissuade the commenter from bigotry.
Most importantly, the effect of such a troll is to silence or drive off members of an online community. Remember that in general, only a minority of participants in an online forum are active participants. If members of a group that has a history of victimization by bigotry see bigots going unchallenged or weakly challenged, they're likely to be discouraged from participation. Active participants will become passive, and passive participants will depart. This can kill an online community, and doing so is often a troll's intent. It is a moderator's responsibility to nurture an online community; therefore it is a moderator's responsibility to deal with trolls firmly.
A troll is not interested in having a reasoned discussion, and when offered reasonable arguments, will continue or escalate the trolling. This amplifies the effect of the trolling, and leads to a forum thread being dominated by the argument around the troll: this is the reason why the conventional advice is to refrain from feeding the troll. That's not enough, however: trolls must be eliminated.
There are two options for dealing with trolls: banning them, and humiliating them. Banning is the straightforward option, and usually the best choice, as it's the cleanest break. Humiliation is more chancy, but it has a few advantages: it makes it clear that a troll has been confronted, and in some cases, may more effectively demoralize a troll than simple banning. (One technique I've seen is "disemvowelling", in which all the vowels are deleted from a troll's comments. This makes it clear that action has been taken, and the troll's comments can be ignored, or can be puzzled out, if a regular participant wants to figure out what is going on.)
I completely agree. The linked article is misdirected -- and in fact, many people try to deal with trolls in the way the article recommends, and it almost always fails. Trolls must be dealt with firmly and decisively. There is such a thing as malice, and you don't engage with malice. You have two options, really: ban the troll, or humiliate the troll, and banning is usually the better option, as it's usually the quickest and cleanest way to put a stop to a troll.
Frequently, trolling is an attack on members of groups that have a long history as victims of bigotry. Bigoted trolls tend to silence or drive off members of those groups -- which is likely their intention. In general, only a minority of participants in an online forum are actively participating, and a good moderator should be encouraging passive participants to step forward. A troll has the opposite effect: a troll discourages active participants, and drives out passive participants. It's a responsibility of a moderator to prevent this from happening.
It's also important to realize that when several trolls appear at once, it may be a deliberate and organized effort to shut down or take over an online forum. I've seen white supremacists do this a few times, for instance, and it is unsettling to watch well-meaning forum participants trying to reason with people who have absolutely no interest in being reasonable.
Whoosh.
After some frustrating searches for backup software packages for either Windows or Linux -- the Windows packages were buggy, and the Linux packages were either too complex or too simple -- I finally decided to write a bash shell script to handle it.
I doubt most people *ever* back up anything.
Also, drilling a deep hole in an office wall is non-trivial. Even assuming that the building owner allows it (which, in commercial leases, they usually do) you don't know what's behind the wall without checking.
We may hope the kid learned an important lesson about the working world: bosses will ask you to perform tasks for which you do not have training, for which you do not have the proper equipment, which may be dangerous, which are not part of your job description, which your contract prohibits you from performing, or which are otherwise unethical or illegal. You should refuse to perform such tasks; there are worse fates than unemployment.
I'm an IT worker, and aside from informal experience, most of my training was in two years of vocational courses at a community college. I used to have a roommate, who spent about the same amount of time in school, studying in a program to become an apprentice plasterer. I looked through some of his textbooks -- at the time I was surprised at the complexity of the information. I'd say it was equivalent to the complexity and detail of computer networking. People in the building trades need to know in considerable detail how buildings are constructed, and what their peers in other specialties in the building trades are doing.
I've also known engineers who started out in the skilled trades -- in particular, my father and grandfather.
On the whole, I think it's quite accurate to describe much of IT work as skilled trade work, equivalent to other skilled trades.
The default distribution comes with alternative desktop themes, including the default desktop themes from previous major distributions, so you don't even have to do any extra downloading. Changing to a theme that has the prior button arrangement is trivially easy. The people complaining about the new themes have no legitimate complaint.
Did you actually type "http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/02/20/1817259/Chrome-May-Drop-the-URL-Bar" to get to this page?
Or, did you type "slashdot.org" and follow links? Or click on a bookmark?
URLs are technical information. The advantage of human-readable URLs over IP addresses has faded considerably -- they're only nominally "human readable" once you get past the top level page.
Does it bother you that most workstations don't display their MAC addresses?
Bookmark managers started it, but the URL was still important enough. Whoever created cellphone address books mainstreamed the little brain damage of never wanting to memorize contact information
What's the value of memorizing contact information? Contact information is useful only as an intermediate step; it's obviously "technical," and not intrinsically meaningful.
No one wants to call 1-234-567-8910. Someone wants to talk to their friend. The phone number just gets in the way.
Likewise, nobody wants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, they want to look up something on Wikipedia. It's long been notorious that "www" and "com" or "org" or "net" are effectively meaningless noise.
The point of the blog post seems to be that since Facebook doesn't offer BCC, people aren't using BCC anymore. It makes the rather bizarre assumption that Facebook has supplanted email. That's simply not true, as a glance at anyone's email inbox will reveal. In fact, it's a laughable presumption.
If you leave your terminal unlocked with a root shell open, it's your fault when someone hacks it.
True.
Sudo caches the fact that you've typed your password, and anyone who knows to type 'rm -rf *' in a root shell probably knows to type 'sudo rm -rf *' as well. The only thing sudo prevents is people who don't know what they're doing from doing something bad by accident, and people who do know what they're doing from doing something important quickly...
You can adjust the duration of the password caching in /etc/sudoers. The default is fifteen minutes -- I prefer a duration of two or three minutes, which is long enough to two a couple of commands in a row. If I actually need more than that, then I'd use sudo -i, but I rarely find that useful.
I use "screen" where I can. The trouble is, the hosts I'm talking about don't have any regular user accounts.
Doh!
On my system at home, I do a lot at the command line that does *not* require escalated privileges. So, I don't use "sudo" on autopilot.
One thing I don't like about the way boxes are set up where I work is that most of them only allow logins by root -- I can see the convenience factor, but it grates on my nerves that I must execute commands that don't require root privileges as root.
By which I mean, the only people likely to actually use "grep" at the command line are those who have the option to use elevated privileges, which is part of the reason why there's a point to telling people to remember not to use escalated privileges unnecessarily.