Most people in the modern world need a cellphone. It's stupid to not own one these days, landlines are becoming obsolete for younger people.
No, most people in the modern world find a cellphone to be a convenience, and have lost the ability to distinguish between a need and a want. This is particularly predominant among techies of various types (IT people, engineers, programmers, and so on). There are a quite a few places -- like where I live -- that cellphones just don't work. 10 feet out the back of the house and they work fine, but not at all inside the house. They also don't work in the building I work in. So really... how valuable is a cellphone to me?
your dream of a non invasive cellphone/connected world will not exist, go back to the 90's. AND TURN YOUR DAMN PHONE ON!
Why? I have no objection to other people having cellphones, I just don't choose to put myself in a position where people can get in touch with me at any hour for any reason. I do own a cellphone, and it does tend to travel with me (, so if people really need to reach me, they can leave me a message. Sure I've missed opportunities because of it, but I count it a fair trade.
You -- and everyone else -- are welcome to do as you will with your phones. If you want to leave yourself on-call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, fine. If you want a phone that's more of a palmtop computer than a phone, go for it. If you want a phone that you can use for playing games, thats actually kind of neat. But don't tell me I'm stupid for not feeling the need for one. Don't tell me landlines are obsolete. Neither one is true.
And when everyone I know who has a smartphone complains on a regular basis that it's crashed, and they can't make calls, I'm not convinced that their phones are better than mine.
Yeah... I don't mind the quality on my most recent phone (some cheapo samsung flip phone), and my first phone (an old Nokia brick) was better than my landline. The phone I had in between was terrible, though... random echoes, sound dropping in and out, intermittent static for no reason... I only put up with it because I didn't really use the phone very often.
Anyone who works in a technical or managerial capacity for a very large corporation will find themselves quite fired for that
Ain't my fault that people sign contracts they shouldn't. I've worked in IT for a couple of reasonably large companies, in one case as the sole IT support, and am now working for a university. One of the first questions I'm asked is always "would you be willing to be on call 24 hours a day," and my answer is always "No. I'll work my butt off for you during the day, and if there's an emergency and I'm reachable I'll come help, but I'm not going to put my life on hold while I work here." Some companies weren't willing to hire me, some respected the fact that I was going to state up front what I was and wasn't willing to do. Sounds to me like you don't hate your cell-phone, you hate your job, or at least the contract you signed.
My earlier phones had snake, though my current phone doesn't seem to have any (it's a Samsung of some sort on a pay-as-you-go plan. It cost me about $40 new, and I pay $100 a year for all the service I need or want). I don't think any of them had solitaire, though I could be wrong.
Really, though, my point was that he's not complaining that he doesn't like the phone: he's complaining that his phone isn't an adequate computer. Which, in my opinion, is really pretty silly.
... most of my phones haven't had an OS that you could play Galaga or Solitaire on. Or really do much more than make a phone call.
Is it possible that the reason he hates phones is that he keeps buying computers masquerading as phones, rather than phones?
Also... he comments that he's always hated phones because they interrupt while he's trying to work or read. I don't know about anyone else, but if I don't want to be interrupted, I turn off the phone. The ringer, if it's a land-line, or the whole thing, if it's a cell. People can leave me a message and I'll listen to it later.
Basically, I can understand not liking the sound quality, or the microphone quality, or the weight, or the fact that it doesn't work anywhere you want to use it (all problems I've had in the past), but really... the things he's complaining about are issues with how he's using it, not with the phones. Maybe, like me, he's someone who just shouldn't have a cell phone, or should buy a small cheap one for emergency use, and not pay a monthly fee for it.
Didn't you look at the pictures? That's not a hooker, that's a computer! (Gotta wonder about some of these/. types... though I suppose it could be a robot hooker...)
I was mostly thinking "make sure there aren't any pedestrians in the way" and "make sure that when it falls off the mountain, it doesn't land on anything important," but getting the passengers out would be valuable too.
The simple fact is, they don't need our business. We're one small university, and all the major corporations are going to be buying from the same companies.
And really... why should we care? I'll use open source software where I usefully can, but I'm not a zealot. If they want to keep their software closed, I have no problem with it. Their support is excellent, and by the time they stop supporting the software, the hardware is generally failing anyway. That's the real limitation we see, is the lifespan of the hardware. They've even mostly stopped using proprietary interfaces (which I've called to thank them for every time someone has bought a new machine!) and have gone to communication over ethernet, rather than one of the custom ISA cards they used to use. If they go open, that's great, but it won't change anything in our ability to use the equipment or do what we want with it.
It doesn't have to be proprietary: as I said in my initial post, we don't need the software to be proprietary, but we need the software, and it is proprietary.
And frankly, since they give the software away when you buy the instrument, and the next gen instrument generally isn't compatible with the old software (the software is basically the drivers, control interface, and analysis tools in a single binary), I don't see where it would benefit anyone for it to be open sourced. I'm not saying it would hurt the company, mind you, but it certainly wouldn't benefit us. We've got 20+ year old instruments that are still being supported, with patches to let them run in WinXP (not 7, yet, but I'm sure that will come), so I'm not real concerned about them dropping support. The research equipment business is weird, and pretty much entirely non-standard as business goes.
Also... If the University made a rule that all hardware had to have open source software to control it, all our research faculty would leave. It's hard to do research without instruments.
While we don't need all software (or any software) to be proprietary, there is software that is proprietary that we need.
For instance, I work with a number of chemistry and biology labs, and all the software that runs their lab equipment is proprietary. Sure, someone could sit down and write a piece of software to run that GCMS, HPLC, or gel scanner, but why should they? The software comes free with the hardware, and NO ONE is going to start giving those away.
True. And it's hardly a forgone conclusion that anyone she would ever meet would be involved in analyzing the data from NetFlix. Yes, there's an 87% success rate (according to the article), but how many people are actually doing that analysis? And how likely is it that they would publish the results in her town? Or than anyone in her town would READ the results if they were there?
Drawing attention to herself just ensures that anyone who does look will try to figure out who she is.
If she's consciously made that decision, fine -- more power to her! But I still find the concept entertaining, and a little bit puzzling.
But if I get used to it, it will stop being so funny!
Honestly, I find the whole concept amusing. "You made it theoretically possible for some small number of people I don't know and will probably never meet to find out something about me I'd rather keep private. Therefore, I will do something much more likely to make that public among LOTS of people! THAT will show you!"
anyone filling a Jane/John Doe lawsuit has to expect their name would eventually become public information.
Exactly. So she's just come out on her own... in order to sue someone for the potential that someone going through their data MIGHT be able to figure out that she's a lesbian.
My point is still the same... she's given up on her privacy in order to sue someone for a potential (but not yet real) breach of privacy.
... this woman is a closeted lesbian. She came to the realization that, if someone hypothetical person were to come along and get into the NetFlix user data system, he could find out she's a lesbian. In order to protect herself from being potentially exposed, she decided to join a high-profile national lawsuit, charging that they had created a potential for people to find out her sexual preferences. How many days do you think it'll be before her picture is all over the web, sitting right next to the headline "formerly closeted lesbian pulled out of closet by attaching her name and face to a privacy lawsuit"?
I suspect that, in large part, it's an issue with the display. My understanding is that you can't change anything on an electronic ink display without redrawing the whole screen, which takes long enough to be visible. (My understanding may, of course, now be outdated... I haven't looked carefully at how these things work in a year or so...) Ever worked on an old enough computer that the entire screen flashes when you press a key on the keyboard? It loses its appeal pretty quickly.
And if you replace it with an LCD, well... there goes your days of battery life. Certainly it would open up the option of, say, viewing documentation online with it, which would be nice, but it probably wouldn't work very well as an all-purpose computer.
That's pretty much covered in the last paragraph: "The three points are almost certainly connected, and we may or may not have a perfectly clear understanding of how." The fact is, we can't run experiments on the entire atmosphere. We can model it, we can make predictions, and we can come up with some reasonable guesses, but we may figure out later we were wrong. His point was that we don't know for certain that human activity is the sole cause of climate change, but it doesn't matter -- pumping toxins into the air is still a dangerous thing to do, and we should stop. If that happens to keep the climate at a temperature that benefits us, and we can prove it, then that will answer the question of which models were correct.
Climategate only proves that the conservolibertarians are capable of manufacturing controversies out of nothing. There is no difference between "Climategate" and the "War on Christmas" or the supposed conspiracy run by "Darwinist evilutionists".
There is a difference, actually. There are a few (very few) respectable scientists who aren't convinced by the data, or at least argue that the results will be milder than the majority are predicting. They aren't big names, and they're not the ones going to the newspapers, but they're out there. I was in a class with one of them, although I can't remember his name, a few years ago. His take was essentially this:
1) We know the climate is changing, 2) We know humanity is releasing greenhouse gases, 3) We also know that the climate has cycled through hot and cold periods as far back as we can find data.
The three points are almost certainly connected, and we may or may not have a perfectly clear understanding of how. The important thing is that the greenhouse gases are mostly also bad for other reasons, so we ought to start limiting their production. Eventually we may be able to prove that they are or are not driving climate change.
I use facebook. When someone who isn't one of my friends looks at my profile, they see: 1) My name. Why else would they be looking at my profile? 2) My user photo. This isn't actually me, so I don't care. I didn't want my face up there, so I didn't put a picture of myself in. 3) My website -- actually just my flickr page, since I don't care if people find it. It's not like it has any more information about me. 4) My education and work listings. Again.. I left those up on the grounds that it would make it easier for people to find me, and I don't care if people see them.
So... where's the risk in those? No one can see my current address, because I don't see a need for it. If someone wants to know where I live, they can ask me. If someone wants to know my IM name, they can ask. It's not hard... they can still send me a message, even without declaring themselves my friend. Sure, if I'd filled out every piece of information and it was being shared, I'd be upset. But really... you don't have to fill any of it out that you don't want to, and anything you fill out on a site like FB should be considered to be public anyway.
I'm a sysadmin, and have been for about 6 years. I manage a mix of Linux, Windows, and Mac machines, with few DOS boxes and a couple running some version of Solaris on them. In general, there's no good documentation included for the problems we have with any OS.
Since this thread is supposed to be about linux, I'll mostly stick with that. I go straight to google for almost everything, at least the first time. Why? Because the man pages are mostly illegible. There's actually too much information to be useful when I'm trying to figure out how something works. If it's one of the few that has meaningful examples with explanations, fine. Otherwise, I'll go back to explanations written in english. And if I don't even know what command I need, forget it -- there's no way man pages are going to help. And lets not even get started with man pages that tell me to refer to the info page...
So when are man pages useful, in my opinion? When I already know the command, and just need to be reminded which flag to use. Basically that's the only time I use them... the rest of the time, it's easier (and frequently quicker) to look it up using google.
Now... I also do some programming, though I'm not very good at it. I document everything. The last thing I wrote came out to about 500 lines of code, and about 50 pages of documentation, including design decisions, details on the database backend I used, SQL layouts, installation and setup, lists of things that still needed fixing (which have been updated as I fixed things), and a beginners guide. I also built argument listings into the script, so using a -h flag would tell you what you needed. Once we started using it, everyone just came to me and asked questions, and I think I'm still the only one who ever read the documentation. So I can sympathize with not wanting to bother -- if no one is going to read it, what's the point? Still, I'd like to see more.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes. There is that, and I shouldn't stand in his way.
Most people in the modern world need a cellphone. It's stupid to not own one these days, landlines are becoming obsolete for younger people.
No, most people in the modern world find a cellphone to be a convenience, and have lost the ability to distinguish between a need and a want. This is particularly predominant among techies of various types (IT people, engineers, programmers, and so on). There are a quite a few places -- like where I live -- that cellphones just don't work. 10 feet out the back of the house and they work fine, but not at all inside the house. They also don't work in the building I work in. So really... how valuable is a cellphone to me?
your dream of a non invasive cellphone/connected world will not exist, go back to the 90's. AND TURN YOUR DAMN PHONE ON!
Why? I have no objection to other people having cellphones, I just don't choose to put myself in a position where people can get in touch with me at any hour for any reason. I do own a cellphone, and it does tend to travel with me (, so if people really need to reach me, they can leave me a message. Sure I've missed opportunities because of it, but I count it a fair trade.
You -- and everyone else -- are welcome to do as you will with your phones. If you want to leave yourself on-call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, fine. If you want a phone that's more of a palmtop computer than a phone, go for it. If you want a phone that you can use for playing games, thats actually kind of neat. But don't tell me I'm stupid for not feeling the need for one. Don't tell me landlines are obsolete. Neither one is true.
And when everyone I know who has a smartphone complains on a regular basis that it's crashed, and they can't make calls, I'm not convinced that their phones are better than mine.
Yeah... I don't mind the quality on my most recent phone (some cheapo samsung flip phone), and my first phone (an old Nokia brick) was better than my landline. The phone I had in between was terrible, though... random echoes, sound dropping in and out, intermittent static for no reason... I only put up with it because I didn't really use the phone very often.
Anyone who works in a technical or managerial capacity for a very large corporation will find themselves quite fired for that
Ain't my fault that people sign contracts they shouldn't. I've worked in IT for a couple of reasonably large companies, in one case as the sole IT support, and am now working for a university. One of the first questions I'm asked is always "would you be willing to be on call 24 hours a day," and my answer is always "No. I'll work my butt off for you during the day, and if there's an emergency and I'm reachable I'll come help, but I'm not going to put my life on hold while I work here." Some companies weren't willing to hire me, some respected the fact that I was going to state up front what I was and wasn't willing to do. Sounds to me like you don't hate your cell-phone, you hate your job, or at least the contract you signed.
My earlier phones had snake, though my current phone doesn't seem to have any (it's a Samsung of some sort on a pay-as-you-go plan. It cost me about $40 new, and I pay $100 a year for all the service I need or want). I don't think any of them had solitaire, though I could be wrong.
Really, though, my point was that he's not complaining that he doesn't like the phone: he's complaining that his phone isn't an adequate computer. Which, in my opinion, is really pretty silly.
... most of my phones haven't had an OS that you could play Galaga or Solitaire on. Or really do much more than make a phone call.
Is it possible that the reason he hates phones is that he keeps buying computers masquerading as phones, rather than phones?
Also... he comments that he's always hated phones because they interrupt while he's trying to work or read. I don't know about anyone else, but if I don't want to be interrupted, I turn off the phone. The ringer, if it's a land-line, or the whole thing, if it's a cell. People can leave me a message and I'll listen to it later.
Basically, I can understand not liking the sound quality, or the microphone quality, or the weight, or the fact that it doesn't work anywhere you want to use it (all problems I've had in the past), but really... the things he's complaining about are issues with how he's using it, not with the phones. Maybe, like me, he's someone who just shouldn't have a cell phone, or should buy a small cheap one for emergency use, and not pay a monthly fee for it.
Didn't you look at the pictures? That's not a hooker, that's a computer! (Gotta wonder about some of these /. types... though I suppose it could be a robot hooker...)
I was mostly thinking "make sure there aren't any pedestrians in the way" and "make sure that when it falls off the mountain, it doesn't land on anything important," but getting the passengers out would be valuable too.
Easy. Watching it succeed will be more astonishing.
Watching it fail will be more entertaining (assuming some safety precautions preventing anyone from being killed).
Brilliant.
The simple fact is, they don't need our business. We're one small university, and all the major corporations are going to be buying from the same companies.
And really... why should we care? I'll use open source software where I usefully can, but I'm not a zealot. If they want to keep their software closed, I have no problem with it. Their support is excellent, and by the time they stop supporting the software, the hardware is generally failing anyway. That's the real limitation we see, is the lifespan of the hardware. They've even mostly stopped using proprietary interfaces (which I've called to thank them for every time someone has bought a new machine!) and have gone to communication over ethernet, rather than one of the custom ISA cards they used to use. If they go open, that's great, but it won't change anything in our ability to use the equipment or do what we want with it.
It doesn't have to be proprietary: as I said in my initial post, we don't need the software to be proprietary, but we need the software, and it is proprietary.
And frankly, since they give the software away when you buy the instrument, and the next gen instrument generally isn't compatible with the old software (the software is basically the drivers, control interface, and analysis tools in a single binary), I don't see where it would benefit anyone for it to be open sourced. I'm not saying it would hurt the company, mind you, but it certainly wouldn't benefit us. We've got 20+ year old instruments that are still being supported, with patches to let them run in WinXP (not 7, yet, but I'm sure that will come), so I'm not real concerned about them dropping support. The research equipment business is weird, and pretty much entirely non-standard as business goes.
Also... If the University made a rule that all hardware had to have open source software to control it, all our research faculty would leave. It's hard to do research without instruments.
While we don't need all software (or any software) to be proprietary, there is software that is proprietary that we need.
For instance, I work with a number of chemistry and biology labs, and all the software that runs their lab equipment is proprietary. Sure, someone could sit down and write a piece of software to run that GCMS, HPLC, or gel scanner, but why should they? The software comes free with the hardware, and NO ONE is going to start giving those away.
True. And it's hardly a forgone conclusion that anyone she would ever meet would be involved in analyzing the data from NetFlix. Yes, there's an 87% success rate (according to the article), but how many people are actually doing that analysis? And how likely is it that they would publish the results in her town? Or than anyone in her town would READ the results if they were there?
Drawing attention to herself just ensures that anyone who does look will try to figure out who she is.
If she's consciously made that decision, fine -- more power to her! But I still find the concept entertaining, and a little bit puzzling.
But if I get used to it, it will stop being so funny!
Honestly, I find the whole concept amusing. "You made it theoretically possible for some small number of people I don't know and will probably never meet to find out something about me I'd rather keep private. Therefore, I will do something much more likely to make that public among LOTS of people! THAT will show you!"
anyone filling a Jane/John Doe lawsuit has to expect their name would eventually become public information.
Exactly. So she's just come out on her own... in order to sue someone for the potential that someone going through their data MIGHT be able to figure out that she's a lesbian.
My point is still the same... she's given up on her privacy in order to sue someone for a potential (but not yet real) breach of privacy.
Right. And of course the real names of people who file anonymously NEVER get out.
... this woman is a closeted lesbian. She came to the realization that, if someone hypothetical person were to come along and get into the NetFlix user data system, he could find out she's a lesbian. In order to protect herself from being potentially exposed, she decided to join a high-profile national lawsuit, charging that they had created a potential for people to find out her sexual preferences. How many days do you think it'll be before her picture is all over the web, sitting right next to the headline "formerly closeted lesbian pulled out of closet by attaching her name and face to a privacy lawsuit"?
I suspect that, in large part, it's an issue with the display. My understanding is that you can't change anything on an electronic ink display without redrawing the whole screen, which takes long enough to be visible. (My understanding may, of course, now be outdated... I haven't looked carefully at how these things work in a year or so...) Ever worked on an old enough computer that the entire screen flashes when you press a key on the keyboard? It loses its appeal pretty quickly.
And if you replace it with an LCD, well... there goes your days of battery life. Certainly it would open up the option of, say, viewing documentation online with it, which would be nice, but it probably wouldn't work very well as an all-purpose computer.
Why? Isn't that kind of the point of FB?
And if it really bothers you, the AC was right -- click on the pencil icon, and you can tell it not to show your friends in your profile.
That's pretty much covered in the last paragraph: "The three points are almost certainly connected, and we may or may not have a perfectly clear understanding of how." The fact is, we can't run experiments on the entire atmosphere. We can model it, we can make predictions, and we can come up with some reasonable guesses, but we may figure out later we were wrong. His point was that we don't know for certain that human activity is the sole cause of climate change, but it doesn't matter -- pumping toxins into the air is still a dangerous thing to do, and we should stop. If that happens to keep the climate at a temperature that benefits us, and we can prove it, then that will answer the question of which models were correct.
Or the people who made the decisions were managers, and the scientists weren't told until too late....
Climategate only proves that the conservolibertarians are capable of manufacturing controversies out of nothing. There is no difference between "Climategate" and the "War on Christmas" or the supposed conspiracy run by "Darwinist evilutionists".
There is a difference, actually. There are a few (very few) respectable scientists who aren't convinced by the data, or at least argue that the results will be milder than the majority are predicting. They aren't big names, and they're not the ones going to the newspapers, but they're out there. I was in a class with one of them, although I can't remember his name, a few years ago. His take was essentially this:
1) We know the climate is changing,
2) We know humanity is releasing greenhouse gases,
3) We also know that the climate has cycled through hot and cold periods as far back as we can find data.
The three points are almost certainly connected, and we may or may not have a perfectly clear understanding of how. The important thing is that the greenhouse gases are mostly also bad for other reasons, so we ought to start limiting their production. Eventually we may be able to prove that they are or are not driving climate change.
I use facebook. When someone who isn't one of my friends looks at my profile, they see:
1) My name. Why else would they be looking at my profile?
2) My user photo. This isn't actually me, so I don't care. I didn't want my face up there, so I didn't put a picture of myself in.
3) My website -- actually just my flickr page, since I don't care if people find it. It's not like it has any more information about me.
4) My education and work listings. Again.. I left those up on the grounds that it would make it easier for people to find me, and I don't care if people see them.
So... where's the risk in those? No one can see my current address, because I don't see a need for it. If someone wants to know where I live, they can ask me. If someone wants to know my IM name, they can ask. It's not hard... they can still send me a message, even without declaring themselves my friend. Sure, if I'd filled out every piece of information and it was being shared, I'd be upset. But really... you don't have to fill any of it out that you don't want to, and anything you fill out on a site like FB should be considered to be public anyway.
I'm a sysadmin, and have been for about 6 years. I manage a mix of Linux, Windows, and Mac machines, with few DOS boxes and a couple running some version of Solaris on them. In general, there's no good documentation included for the problems we have with any OS.
Since this thread is supposed to be about linux, I'll mostly stick with that. I go straight to google for almost everything, at least the first time. Why? Because the man pages are mostly illegible. There's actually too much information to be useful when I'm trying to figure out how something works. If it's one of the few that has meaningful examples with explanations, fine. Otherwise, I'll go back to explanations written in english. And if I don't even know what command I need, forget it -- there's no way man pages are going to help. And lets not even get started with man pages that tell me to refer to the info page...
So when are man pages useful, in my opinion? When I already know the command, and just need to be reminded which flag to use. Basically that's the only time I use them... the rest of the time, it's easier (and frequently quicker) to look it up using google.
Now... I also do some programming, though I'm not very good at it. I document everything. The last thing I wrote came out to about 500 lines of code, and about 50 pages of documentation, including design decisions, details on the database backend I used, SQL layouts, installation and setup, lists of things that still needed fixing (which have been updated as I fixed things), and a beginners guide. I also built argument listings into the script, so using a -h flag would tell you what you needed. Once we started using it, everyone just came to me and asked questions, and I think I'm still the only one who ever read the documentation. So I can sympathize with not wanting to bother -- if no one is going to read it, what's the point? Still, I'd like to see more.