There's a lot of prejudice today from the STEM crowd against disciplines in the social sciences and philosophy even though the math requirements are similarly rigorous.
It's just that the category of problems being approached by these groups aren't problems that scientists and engineers are familiar with: they exclude any notion of causality from the start and the correlative properties of any case are highly complex. Not to mention that they deal with black-box agents as objects that behave in unpredictable ways.
That doesn't mean that it's not useful to be able to find a correlation between (for example) not learning Algebra and financial success later in life. In fact, I don't suspect most STEM folks would find the prospect of a study like that to be inherently unscientific, so long as the claims were precise and well qualified and the methodology sound. They just forget that *that is social science* in practice. I see social-scientific arguments and data here on/. all the time, but also see lots of dismissal of the social scientists that produced much of our common knowledge about, say, the importance of STEM for economic success at the national level.
For those that didn't RTFA (which seems to be a lot of people here), he does actually advocate the teaching of algebra, just via a "backdoor" which amounts to applied Algebra in another subject.
Parsing his argument, the different between the two is probably the critique that he should have made: some people struggle not so much with the basic formal thinking skills involved in Algebra but with its notation, which is tremendously economical.
I think that there is something to the argument that we ought to consider teaching the thinking skills learned in Algebra in ways that don't require the particular notation that is commonly associated with it, so that people can gain formal and quantitative reasoning experience and skills even if they struggle mightily economical, significantly abstracted symbolic systems.
Right now, if they can't eventually grok the notation, they don't manage to gain the thinking skills, either, because we marry them.
I think there's a benefit to be had by wondering whether or not we could teach these skills in another way for those that can't do notation and ultimately fail it repeatedly and/or never get it down. At least then we might have more people with formal reasoning and analytical skills, whereas now the Algebra drop-outs or C-level passes have essentially neither thinking skills nor notation skills at all (and it's a lot of people).
Your response is exhibit A in why the Linux userbase on the desktop is slipping away.
I know my way around Linux. I wrote a bunch of books on it back in the day. I contributed patches, was active in a lot of areas of the "community" early on.
Do you know who wants to dick around with lots of Googling just to get their desktop and applications working the way they want? NOBODY.
Or, apparently, you.
The rest of us want it available to us in 30 seconds, without having to "learn something new." Longer than that is an epic fail. This is 2012. We are done "learning how to use a desktop computer." We just want to use what we already have learned to do to GET WORK DONE. Get with the program.
If someone makes a suggestion or a complaint, you have a UI and/or infrastructure problem for that user. PERIOD. If lots of users make suggestions and complaints, you have UI and/or infrastructure problem in general. PERIOD.
Oh wait, don't tell me: good riddance and Linux doesn't need users like me or the parent poster.
Works for me, Linux no longer has users like me. Enjoy your OS choice. The rest of us will enjoy ours. I suspect, however, that you'll find that a diminishing labor and testing pool does not do OS codebases much good over the long run.
I used and liked and was deeply invested in GNOME 2. And I was active in submitting bug reports, etc. (The same for KDE 3 before that, until they tossed it all for KDE 4).
If they had just fixed the bugs (or even if they hadn't) I'd still be using either KDE 3 or GNOME 2.
But tossing everything out, pressing rewind, and then starting over?
In 2010, I expected more from my computer system than "cool hacks are being pieced together to someday lead to a fully integrated desktop environment and maybe even an environment API!"
By 2000, ten years earlier, we were already well into the era of "if you want me to use it, it had better not be beta or experimental and bad for my workflow."
Full-on GUI experimentation and beta-level stability in a production desktop system is so 1991 it's laughable. I felt like I was back in the days of people circulating TWM patches.
The Linux community never quite pulled it together. It's not about Open Source. There are many other voluntaristic efforts that manage to organize, create by-laws, charters, etc., set and achieve goals, and so on.
Whatever the reason, it doesn't matter to me. I'm very satisfied with OS X and that, as they say, is that. Got a well-integrated, fast, stable, good-looking, highly usable UNIX desktop. That's all I ever wanted, from the beginning.
(I know that I'm not alone in this path. Many others have taken the same one over the last several years.)
All of the above are the reasons why *I* don't use Firefox, based on *my* experience. But I'm not in a position to choose browsers for anyone else like many here are, and I am a sample size of three (machines in the household, 2 OS X, 1 Win7, where we have these issues/opinions).
Like others here, I have many gigabytes of RAM, so I'm not too concerned with the memory usage issue. Firefox is also good on speed; that doesn't bug me.
But I stopped using Firefox back when I was last a Linux user (ca. 2009) and have continued to use alternatives (Chrome and Safari, most notably) on OS X because Firefox suffers from too many WTF? moments. Whatever you call them—bugs, the results of Firefox's architecture, I don't care—they make Firefox a non-starter for me. For example:
(1) When using Firefox on OS X all window updates sometimes suddenly stop. Nothing is clickable, nothing is scrollable. The way around this is to drag the window—even just one pixel. After that, refreshes will return. That's bad if you have data auto-refreshing on a Firefox window you're monitoring. And it's not an OS X bug because only Mozilla applications (Firefox, Thunderbird) display this issue, and have done for the last umpteen versions. (For the record, this happend both on my older Mac desktop and on my new unibody MBP.)
(2) The UI still sucks more than any other browser. Widgets and graphical elements misaligned from their active (i.e. clickable) zones, tearing and refresh issues for stateful widgets, etc. The point of the UI is to metaphorically embody what's going on in the code. Once the UI no longer reflects program state, you basically can't talk to your program.
(3) Crashes. Firefox remains the most crash-happy of the browsers. It does this at random. My last crash-followed-by-bug-reporting window was yesterday, when I fired up the latest version of FF for OS X to survey the meta titles of a bunch of pages rapidly. (My biggest complaint about Chrome is the absence of the meta title in the title bar.) About 10 minutes in, FF crashed. My uptime is measured in months right now, and I've had instances of Chrome up for that long. With FF I'm lucky if I get two days.
(4) Graphical appearance. It's damned hard to find a nice, professional FF theme that looks minimal. I just want something that has the same ethos as Chrome or Safari: simple widgets, no cruft, all of a cloth, that integrate well with the OS appearance. There are dozens of FF themes and "personalities" but all of them have that same "I'm OSS!" appearance that KDE also suffers from.
If Firefox were to stop sucking on these points, I'd give it another look regardless of memory use. But it's been a lot of releases since 2009 and though I keep the latest version of FF installed for cross-browser testing, I haven't seen any improvement on these points that would make me want to switch for my general browsing needs.
and if they're de-facto on Chrome (i.e. fewest obvious bugs, highest overall stability) then they're free to choose Chrome until Firefox becomes the browser with the highest number of fixes that EXIST now.
that this place is nuts. It's a teeming horde of right-wing extremists gone nuts. The neighbors start off hating you because you're from New York (and therefore a commie with no values) and pretty soon you're hearing about how non-Mormons are going to hell (which is apparently Earth in Mormon theology, so in a way we're already here—I just wonder what they're doing here), women shouldn't vote, gays and Mexicans (which includes anyone with dark skin, even if they're from, say, southeast Asia) should be rounded up and deported to an island, Mitt Romney is a left-wing socialist like Obama, people should be able to have as many weapons of any kind as they want and carry them anywhere they go (even on airplanes) and this will make the world safer for "our freedoms" and so on.
Young men in ties that they tell me are young Mormon priests routinely come by and vandalize our (apparently) non-Mormon house: knocking the mailbox off its post, tearing down plans and yard decor, etc. Adults either won't speak to us or drop by to offer us "lessons" and invite us to church—without ever asking the first thing about us or wanting to get to know us.
People here worship Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh like they're Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton.
It's a crazy place. As soon as my job responsibilities here are done (no more than a few years, hopefully) we're gonna get out and move back east. 'Cause this place is just too f'ed up.
Too much churn with KDE and GNOME and the distros.
At this point, I haven't had to modify or nurse along my desktop in three years, despite repeated OS upgrades.
Now I can't imagine going back to the semi-annual three-day fix-it-back-up-and-see-how-to-replace-what-was-"upgraded" hack-fest that was life with Linux. It didn't start out that way in 1993, but it sure got that way by 2009.
the work ethic, the subversion of conventional wisdom and norms, and the increasingly esoteric and complex lexicon of the specialist being incompatible with social life, ultimately leading to isolation, stilted interaction, and resultant mental illness (some of it a matter of social construction, some of it legitimate disability).
At least, that's my experience—it's not that bright people are "inherently" socially awkward so much as that their practices, habits, and knowledge are incompatible with the lives, thoughts, and communicative practices of virtually everyone else, leaving them to be lonely, without much of a reliable support system, and feeling tremendously misunderstood, perhaps even hated, as well as having to deal with the knowledge (which can be quite persuasive) that everyone *else* thinks they're crazy, and the total lack of cooperation and support that can come with this.
Yes, I know, the saying that U of C is "Where the squirrels are more aggressive (and better looking) than the women!" and all of the other T-Shirts, but I've not been to a more fun campus since.
Where else can you walk out across the quads at 4:00 a.m. on a major university campus after a night of hard research work and stumble into the middle of a medieval melee with swords and armor being carried out in a language that you don't understand, complete with torches? (Old English? High German? Didn't know, didn't speak it.)
Where else can you spend a weekend with fellow students driving around America like maniacs (driver's seat) while doing research through piles of travel guides and almanacs to find the random stuff on the scav list (passenger seats)?
Where else can you expect the barista at the campus coffee shop to know more about Sartre, Gadamer, and Hegel than the philosophy Ph.D. candidates and more about applied linear dynamics and combinatorics than the math majors?
Where else can you get drunk with the major authors of major monographs at a bar *under the campus* with an on-the-wagon bartender serving over a hundred beers and ridiculous prices ($2.00 a bottle for things that cost $12.00 a bottle int the store when I was there), and ultimately take them home crying on your shoulder after you've argued about the finer points of their research for several hours?
On the other hand, at its worst it's also a stuffy, pompous, judgmental, hyper-competitive place.
But I can say that if you thought it was boring or unfun, you just weren't trying. I had a blast at U of C, and that was as a stuffy old graduate student!
as a graduate student at U of C. It was madness. We hit 10+ states in a borrowed truck. There were drunkenness, nudity, minor violations of the law, vandalism to competing ivy-league campuses, elaborate ruses to move large crowds, a statue of elvis, and and any number of other things involved over (IIRC) just the course of a wild, no-sleep-possible weekend, and all in pursuit of items on the list (i.e. it wasn't just random debauchery, though the nature of the list started to make it feel that way).
It was one of the better (and more exhausting, and more risky) moments in my life. The sort of thing bound to make parents and administrators talk about the need for a ban, and the sort of thing that alums are likely to use to encourage their friends and family to attend U of C if they get the chance.
and much more often than was the case 10 years ago, it just plain doesn't work in one way or another—social, technical, legal, or otherwise—usually in non-predictable ways and instances.
Windows, for all its non-workiness, remains more predictable in the ways that it won't work, meaning that it's more realistic for production desktop use.
Mac OS is more predictable still, and has a smaller, simpler ecosystem.
I used Linux for 16 years and wrote six Linux books. Then I got tired of feeling as though my operating system was one of the focuses of my life. But if it wasn't a focus of my life, it didn't continue to work. So I switched to Mac OS, which is infinitely more boring and forgettable. And that, for me, turned out to be great, now that I am not just an adult but edging toward early codgerhood.
I want to do stuff with my computer. Not do stuff to my computer.
Different opinion than most on U.S. policy
on
In Nothing We Trust
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I have a different opinion than most of the posters here on the problem with the U.S. policy machine and electorate right now. I think it has to do with the ideology of unity, i.e. that we are the "United" States of America, that we are basically all the same, that we share interests and goals, that we are all in this together.
This is untrue, but here and elsewhere, I see no national awareness on the part of the political machine or the electorate that there is basically no unity and no way to achieve it. If we could all acknowledge that, there would be an understanding of the need for compromise.
Instead, over and over again I see people assuming that their understanding of what is wrong is shared by virtually everyone, and that if virtually everyone knows what's wrong but it hasn't been fixed yet, it must be because of those "other" people that are in the minority but that are somehow pulling the strings in "today's America" and are somehow corrupt/oppressive/dangerous/evil.
Just in this discussion I see people saying that the problem is obviously:
Franklin Delanor Roosevelt The Welfare State Religion The end of religion The pill The wrong understanding of God Selfish banks Selfish politicians Selfish media Poor public education Global overpopulation Technological malaise Money Bureaucracy Liberals Conservatives Libertarians An active sense of entitlement An overly passive population Centralized government The absence of an external threat Feudalism Lawyers Cynicism Capitalism The decline of the family The decline of values Consumerism and so on.
And each presents the argument as if it's authoritative. And many seem to imply that there is some kind of majority involved ("More and more countries..." "The American public..." "we this..." "we that...")
The framing in terms of "we" or in phrases that imply a majority place everyone that disagrees outside of a presumed collective. I see this on both sides of the political aisle right now. In 2011 I lived both in New York City (very liberal) and in Utah (very conservative) and both populations have the same certainty, with a different focus.
For the New Yorkers in lower Manhattan, it's obvious that America has had it with a tiny minority of crazy conservatives trying to destroy the nation, and if Obama doesn't win the next election, it's because this minority has stolen it from the American people. For the Utahns, it's obvious that America has had it with a tiny minority of crazy socialists trying to turn America into the Soviet Union with Islamist tendencies, and if Obama wins the next election, it's because this minority has stolen it from the American people.
Both refer to American values and American history constantly, but totally different versions of these.
There is limited or no understanding that monotheism and polytheism and atheism are all American values, that black slaves and white colonialists and native tribes are all "founding members" of our present society in some way, that the populace includes sizable blocks of both highly conservative pro-life, pro-national religion, anti-feminist, anti-immigrant libertarians and highly socially liberal pro-choice, pro-secularism, pro-feminist pro-immigration social democrats, and everything in between.
Somehow the "melting pot narrative" has broken down and the Utahns imagine that "most Americans" drive a truck, own horses, have a rifle under their seat, and are married with children and mom staying at home while dad plays provider, while the lower Manhattanites know that "most Americans" take public transportation, are more and more concerned with global warming and local green economies, are down on cars and big oil and guns, and are living in "alternative" family situations to that "traditional narrative that was never representative anyway."
When told about the other side by me, people in both groups had the tendency to say about the other that "those people just c
Not a fanboy and never made the claim that everyone wants the same things I do. But if you want to seriously dispute that the iPhone singlehandedly revolutionized the mobile device market, I don't think I need to say anything in response; the argument speaks for itself.
Hardly, but your typical Apple hate has made you think that it is. I didn't mention Mac OS X. Obviously Mac OS X would be horrible on a mobile device—but nobody ever tried it. There *were* mobile devices, however, with Linux desktops running on them. I know, I had one—a Sharp Zaurus. There were mobile devices with Windows desktops running on them.
There was never an iPhone with either Linux or Windows or Palm running on them. My point was to make the argument that it's not the iPhone hardware that makes iPhone special, but rather the software. My way of illustrating that point was to imagine the iPhone with Linux on it. But you can just as easily imagine it with Windows CE or Palm OS. You could also imagine it with Mac OS X, but that would be in the realm of the hypothetical and subject to discussion, while we know that Linux, Windows CE, and Palm OS on mobile devices all sucked rocks.
You can argue that they were great productivity devices, but to suggest that you could actually get more real work done on one of them than on an iPhone is completely wrongheaded. And Android is in the same neighborhood as iPhone—so yes, Android on an iPhone would be light years ahead of any of those other systems on an iPhone. But let's not forget that iPhone created the market and the model that Android has followed, and that the story itself is about iPhone, so bringing in Android and Mac OS X are really more about you making digressions.
I was talking about iPhone in comparison to previous smart mobile device platforms, period.
about iPhone/Android (but especially iPhone). As a thought experiment, take an iPhone 4S and stick Linux+GNOME 3 on it. Could totally be done in theory. Would render the device crap. Who would want/use it that way? It would be pointless, just a hack-because-I-can device, even if it had a full working carrier-connected TCP/IP stack. Same thing with getting, say, Windows Phone 6 onto it, even though it would be blindingly fast and have tons of capacity.
iOS is what makes the iPhone, more than anything else. You could take the iPhone, replace the capacitive touchscreen with a resistive one and pair it up with a horrific plastic stylus of the Palm sort, cut the processor speed in half and the memory capacity by an order of magnitude, and you'd still have a great device that was competitive in the marketplace for many users and that would have run circles around WinCE and Palm in 2006.
The fact that Apple also went for capacitive, pen-free, fast processor, and decent chunk of memory was more about the user experience than it was about hardware specs and expanded "capabilities," and it's that fabulous user experience got die-hard Palm people like me into AT&T stores when the iPhone launched going "Holy shit, this is like visiting the future!"
You need a critical mass of the public on a global network, and you need a suitable UI. The latter is really Apple's innovation with the iPhone/iTouch/iPad. By the mid-to-late '90 we had wireless devices with touchscreens that fit into pockets, but they were all heavily textual (even though they had icons and graphics) in the way that they operated and they were also all reliant on a desktop metaphor of some kind. Apple's Newton, if you look at the UI, was the closest thing we had to a truly mobile UI, and while it was way ahead of its time and even has some things I'd kill to have back on an iPhone today, it was also still all about office metaphors: sheets of paper, sliding drawers, envelopes and trash cans, and so on.
Even those that want to make fun of Newton basically have to admit that in terms of practical usability when walking (i.e. in motion, outdoors) down the street, there's a world of difference in usability between a connected Palm or Windows PocketPC device from the pre-iPhone era and an iDevice. That's Apple's big contribution, what Microsoft did absolutely incorrectly. After all, the basically *had* an iPhone (so did Palm) by the early '00s. There's no technical reason that Windows phones couldn't have been made similar to iDevices in their usability, especially with high end models having faster processors and more memory capability; it's just about UI/UX design. Apple does it. Microsoft did it once a long time ago (partially) and has ignored it since, until Metro—which is much less about some radical improvement in Microsoft-running device hardware as it is about the first real UI/UX design Microsoft has attempted in years, directly in response to iPhone.
While the Macbook Pro and Mac OS X are fairly open and interoperable still (way ahead of the opacity of Windows, and much more able to operate/exchange with a wide variety of other systems without costly/proprietary software from Microsoft or other vendors), I very much wish that the iPhone and the iPad were a little more open.
ON the other hand, having tried both Android phones and Android tablets in the years since 2009, I stick with iDevices despite the relative closedness of the platform because the user experience is so much better. I am more productive on iDevices and I am much more willing to trust my data to them because they seem much more stable/predictable.
And yes, at this point in my life, I am a user, not a developer. I count on being able to use them, and I don't care in any practical way whether I have the access to "fix" or "improve" it myself, because the chances of my actually taking the time to do that are absolutely nil. The openness question is a nice ideological debate point and I'm not entirely on Apple's side there, but I have everyday concerns that are practical and are far more important to me than openness/closedness.
There may be a point at which openness/closedness becomes an issue that drives me to make other choices, become an activist, whatever. But we're definitely not there yet. I'm still at the point where I'm willing to buy. I've spent far more on Apple hardware and software in three years than I did in a decade of Linux and previous mobile phone use. Yes, seen from one point of view that's because Apple stuff is more expensive, but seen from my perspective it's because the results that I get using this platform in terms of productivity and reliability absolutely justify the cost.
I can't say that I ever made a Linux hardware or software purchase with which I was totally satisfied. There was always an issue, or multiple issues. In fact, I still have a CD case that has Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, Corel Draw for Linux, Applix Office for Linux, Win4Lin, VMWare, Crossover Office, and a bunch of Loki games in it, apart from a few things I'm no doubt forgetting—I know there are some more commercial productivity packages that I bought over the years in good faith. None of them work on Linux today. Most of them stopped starting at all on Linux within just a couple releases, and most never even worked properly at all even when they were new. The Corel offerings, for example, shipped with a bug that killed your document after 30 minutes or so because a counter somewhere used for autosaves hadn't been coded correctly, causing autosaves of office documents to eventually go off the beam and silently destroy your work—and to add insult to injury, they never fixed the bug, and the entire suite wouldn't even start on Linux by 2002, a year and a half after purchase, with no updates released to address this, meaning I paid $300 for an office product that I never once got a chance to productively use. Yes there were open alternatives like OpenOffice.org, but they continually had problems with basic stuff like font rendering, and then you were downloading source, setting options, creating build environments and running 2-3 day builds just to try to get something to print right again after the latest update. And I was no n00b—I wrote six books on Linux in the '90s and early '00s and before I switched to Linux in '93 I had been a longtime SunOS user, since the early Sun3 boxen.
Point of anecdote: openness only gets you so far, and I supported that market heavily, with very limited rewards. That's what eventually made it so tantalizing for me to consider switching to Mac. When someone decides they need to be productive and then they experience an option in which they can just "set it and forget it" (which is what the Apple products have been for me), you'd better have something more than *just* openness on offer.
You say yourself that there was no market because they sucked.
Make things that don't suck, and the market emerges.
Look, I get tired of the mindlessness of the Apple critics.
I was a smartphone user for years and held off for two years on getting an iPhone once iPhone was released because I was sure that it couldn't be that much better, that it was all hype. After all, I already HAD a smartphone that I was completely satisfied with (a high-end Treo).
Boy did I feel stupid when I finally got my first iPhone (a 3GS, some months after it had been released). I realized that I had been walking around using a Treo when I could have been about 10x as functional and connected on the go using an iPhone, which was a device in a completely different *universe* if you actually wanted to get stuff done with your phone.
Listen, everyone *knew* there was no market for tablets before iPad. That was exactly the critique and it was spot-on. But Apple executed so well (and at half the price that people had imagined) that they CREATED a market out of whole cloth. Hell, half the people on Slashdot still argue that the iPad market is non-existent and will dry up just as soon as people "wake up" and realize that the device they're using is... I don't remember how the argument goes, exactly. Useless? Overpriced? Stupid? Whatever. I dont' care. The market didn't exist until iPad.
Listen, in 2007 I was a hardcore Linux user. Slackware 2, 3 -> Red Hat 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 -> Fedora 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I walked around with a Treo. I was one of the few tablet users with a Toshiba Portege m200, an upgrade from the separate Thinkpad T-series and Vadem Clio tablet team I'd used previous to that.
In 2009 I finally grudgingly tried an iPhone and a day later had one of my own. By 2010 I was all Apple with an iPhone, an iPad, and a Macbook Pro. It's not because I'm an apple fanboy. I *was* a Linux fanboy and an irrational Apple critic, and I realize that only in retrospect.
Maybe you don't like Apple products, but to question whether or not they created the market for capacitive touch low-button smartphones or capacitive touch tablets that run a mobile OS? That makes you sound like an irrational Apple critic of the same sort that I was.
Apple makes fabulous stuff. They are *not* the Apple of 1997, but most Slashdot Apple critics don't realize that because they're steadfastly trying to convince themselves either that (1) Apple is incompetent at everything but marketing (despite a decade and a half of growth) or (2) Apple is the second coming of Microsoft (who was never, ever as creative or innovative on their very best day).
buy a consumer product. If you want to make an investment, make an investment.
Kickstarter is not a store, nor is it a brokerage. It is a place to donate and support things you'd like to see happen. Don't send any money their way if you're hoping for some sort of guaranteed return. It's a kind of participation, activism, or expression, not a kind of transaction.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of prejudice today from the STEM crowd against disciplines in the social sciences and philosophy even though the math requirements are similarly rigorous.
It's just that the category of problems being approached by these groups aren't problems that scientists and engineers are familiar with: they exclude any notion of causality from the start and the correlative properties of any case are highly complex. Not to mention that they deal with black-box agents as objects that behave in unpredictable ways.
That doesn't mean that it's not useful to be able to find a correlation between (for example) not learning Algebra and financial success later in life. In fact, I don't suspect most STEM folks would find the prospect of a study like that to be inherently unscientific, so long as the claims were precise and well qualified and the methodology sound. They just forget that *that is social science* in practice. I see social-scientific arguments and data here on /. all the time, but also see lots of dismissal of the social scientists that produced much of our common knowledge about, say, the importance of STEM for economic success at the national level.
For those that didn't RTFA (which seems to be a lot of people here), he does actually advocate the teaching of algebra, just via a "backdoor" which amounts to applied Algebra in another subject.
Parsing his argument, the different between the two is probably the critique that he should have made: some people struggle not so much with the basic formal thinking skills involved in Algebra but with its notation, which is tremendously economical.
I think that there is something to the argument that we ought to consider teaching the thinking skills learned in Algebra in ways that don't require the particular notation that is commonly associated with it, so that people can gain formal and quantitative reasoning experience and skills even if they struggle mightily economical, significantly abstracted symbolic systems.
Right now, if they can't eventually grok the notation, they don't manage to gain the thinking skills, either, because we marry them.
I think there's a benefit to be had by wondering whether or not we could teach these skills in another way for those that can't do notation and ultimately fail it repeatedly and/or never get it down. At least then we might have more people with formal reasoning and analytical skills, whereas now the Algebra drop-outs or C-level passes have essentially neither thinking skills nor notation skills at all (and it's a lot of people).
Not workbench, not laboratory, not supercomputer.
Apple is not trying to be all things to all people (read: current GNOME issues), but has rather done a very small number of things almost perfectly.
Make it easier. Period.
Your response is exhibit A in why the Linux userbase on the desktop is slipping away.
I know my way around Linux. I wrote a bunch of books on it back in the day. I contributed patches, was active in a lot of areas of the "community" early on.
Do you know who wants to dick around with lots of Googling just to get their desktop and applications working the way they want? NOBODY.
Or, apparently, you.
The rest of us want it available to us in 30 seconds, without having to "learn something new." Longer than that is an epic fail. This is 2012. We are done "learning how to use a desktop computer." We just want to use what we already have learned to do to GET WORK DONE. Get with the program.
If someone makes a suggestion or a complaint, you have a UI and/or infrastructure problem for that user. PERIOD. If lots of users make suggestions and complaints, you have UI and/or infrastructure problem in general. PERIOD.
Oh wait, don't tell me: good riddance and Linux doesn't need users like me or the parent poster.
Works for me, Linux no longer has users like me. Enjoy your OS choice. The rest of us will enjoy ours. I suspect, however, that you'll find that a diminishing labor and testing pool does not do OS codebases much good over the long run.
Got a well-integrated, fast, stable, good-looking, highly usable, damned near bug-free UNIX desktop in OS X.
Take that, GNOME and KDE.
I used and liked and was deeply invested in GNOME 2. And I was active in submitting bug reports, etc. (The same for KDE 3 before that, until they tossed it all for KDE 4).
If they had just fixed the bugs (or even if they hadn't) I'd still be using either KDE 3 or GNOME 2.
But tossing everything out, pressing rewind, and then starting over?
In 2010, I expected more from my computer system than "cool hacks are being pieced together to someday lead to a fully integrated desktop environment and maybe even an environment API!"
By 2000, ten years earlier, we were already well into the era of "if you want me to use it, it had better not be beta or experimental and bad for my workflow."
Full-on GUI experimentation and beta-level stability in a production desktop system is so 1991 it's laughable. I felt like I was back in the days of people circulating TWM patches.
Was chased to OS X by GNOME 3.
No intention to go back, ever.
That after switching to Linux from SunOS in 1993.
The Linux community never quite pulled it together. It's not about Open Source. There are many other voluntaristic efforts that manage to organize, create by-laws, charters, etc., set and achieve goals, and so on.
Whatever the reason, it doesn't matter to me. I'm very satisfied with OS X and that, as they say, is that. Got a well-integrated, fast, stable, good-looking, highly usable UNIX desktop. That's all I ever wanted, from the beginning.
(I know that I'm not alone in this path. Many others have taken the same one over the last several years.)
Sure, if you'd rather I foreground that, I will:
All of the above are the reasons why *I* don't use Firefox, based on *my* experience. But I'm not in a position to choose browsers for anyone else like many here are, and I am a sample size of three (machines in the household, 2 OS X, 1 Win7, where we have these issues/opinions).
Like others here, I have many gigabytes of RAM, so I'm not too concerned with the memory usage issue. Firefox is also good on speed; that doesn't bug me.
But I stopped using Firefox back when I was last a Linux user (ca. 2009) and have continued to use alternatives (Chrome and Safari, most notably) on OS X because Firefox suffers from too many WTF? moments. Whatever you call them—bugs, the results of Firefox's architecture, I don't care—they make Firefox a non-starter for me. For example:
(1) When using Firefox on OS X all window updates sometimes suddenly stop. Nothing is clickable, nothing is scrollable. The way around this is to drag the window—even just one pixel. After that, refreshes will return. That's bad if you have data auto-refreshing on a Firefox window you're monitoring. And it's not an OS X bug because only Mozilla applications (Firefox, Thunderbird) display this issue, and have done for the last umpteen versions. (For the record, this happend both on my older Mac desktop and on my new unibody MBP.)
(2) The UI still sucks more than any other browser. Widgets and graphical elements misaligned from their active (i.e. clickable) zones, tearing and refresh issues for stateful widgets, etc. The point of the UI is to metaphorically embody what's going on in the code. Once the UI no longer reflects program state, you basically can't talk to your program.
(3) Crashes. Firefox remains the most crash-happy of the browsers. It does this at random. My last crash-followed-by-bug-reporting window was yesterday, when I fired up the latest version of FF for OS X to survey the meta titles of a bunch of pages rapidly. (My biggest complaint about Chrome is the absence of the meta title in the title bar.) About 10 minutes in, FF crashed. My uptime is measured in months right now, and I've had instances of Chrome up for that long. With FF I'm lucky if I get two days.
(4) Graphical appearance. It's damned hard to find a nice, professional FF theme that looks minimal. I just want something that has the same ethos as Chrome or Safari: simple widgets, no cruft, all of a cloth, that integrate well with the OS appearance. There are dozens of FF themes and "personalities" but all of them have that same "I'm OSS!" appearance that KDE also suffers from.
If Firefox were to stop sucking on these points, I'd give it another look regardless of memory use. But it's been a lot of releases since 2009 and though I keep the latest version of FF installed for cross-browser testing, I haven't seen any improvement on these points that would make me want to switch for my general browsing needs.
and if they're de-facto on Chrome (i.e. fewest obvious bugs, highest overall stability) then they're free to choose Chrome until Firefox becomes the browser with the highest number of fixes that EXIST now.
that this place is nuts. It's a teeming horde of right-wing extremists gone nuts. The neighbors start off hating you because you're from New York (and therefore a commie with no values) and pretty soon you're hearing about how non-Mormons are going to hell (which is apparently Earth in Mormon theology, so in a way we're already here—I just wonder what they're doing here), women shouldn't vote, gays and Mexicans (which includes anyone with dark skin, even if they're from, say, southeast Asia) should be rounded up and deported to an island, Mitt Romney is a left-wing socialist like Obama, people should be able to have as many weapons of any kind as they want and carry them anywhere they go (even on airplanes) and this will make the world safer for "our freedoms" and so on.
Young men in ties that they tell me are young Mormon priests routinely come by and vandalize our (apparently) non-Mormon house: knocking the mailbox off its post, tearing down plans and yard decor, etc. Adults either won't speak to us or drop by to offer us "lessons" and invite us to church—without ever asking the first thing about us or wanting to get to know us.
People here worship Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh like they're Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton.
It's a crazy place. As soon as my job responsibilities here are done (no more than a few years, hopefully) we're gonna get out and move back east. 'Cause this place is just too f'ed up.
as modern KDE and GNOME installations, I salute your exceptional patience!
Double points if you have Andrew running as well.
Too much churn with KDE and GNOME and the distros.
At this point, I haven't had to modify or nurse along my desktop in three years, despite repeated OS upgrades.
Now I can't imagine going back to the semi-annual three-day fix-it-back-up-and-see-how-to-replace-what-was-"upgraded" hack-fest that was life with Linux. It didn't start out that way in 1993, but it sure got that way by 2009.
the work ethic, the subversion of conventional wisdom and norms, and the increasingly esoteric and complex lexicon of the specialist being incompatible with social life, ultimately leading to isolation, stilted interaction, and resultant mental illness (some of it a matter of social construction, some of it legitimate disability).
At least, that's my experience—it's not that bright people are "inherently" socially awkward so much as that their practices, habits, and knowledge are incompatible with the lives, thoughts, and communicative practices of virtually everyone else, leaving them to be lonely, without much of a reliable support system, and feeling tremendously misunderstood, perhaps even hated, as well as having to deal with the knowledge (which can be quite persuasive) that everyone *else* thinks they're crazy, and the total lack of cooperation and support that can come with this.
Yes, I know, the saying that U of C is "Where the squirrels are more aggressive (and better looking) than the women!" and all of the other T-Shirts, but I've not been to a more fun campus since.
Where else can you walk out across the quads at 4:00 a.m. on a major university campus after a night of hard research work and stumble into the middle of a medieval melee with swords and armor being carried out in a language that you don't understand, complete with torches? (Old English? High German? Didn't know, didn't speak it.)
Where else can you spend a weekend with fellow students driving around America like maniacs (driver's seat) while doing research through piles of travel guides and almanacs to find the random stuff on the scav list (passenger seats)?
Where else can you expect the barista at the campus coffee shop to know more about Sartre, Gadamer, and Hegel than the philosophy Ph.D. candidates and more about applied linear dynamics and combinatorics than the math majors?
Where else can you get drunk with the major authors of major monographs at a bar *under the campus* with an on-the-wagon bartender serving over a hundred beers and ridiculous prices ($2.00 a bottle for things that cost $12.00 a bottle int the store when I was there), and ultimately take them home crying on your shoulder after you've argued about the finer points of their research for several hours?
On the other hand, at its worst it's also a stuffy, pompous, judgmental, hyper-competitive place.
But I can say that if you thought it was boring or unfun, you just weren't trying. I had a blast at U of C, and that was as a stuffy old graduate student!
as a graduate student at U of C. It was madness. We hit 10+ states in a borrowed truck. There were drunkenness, nudity, minor violations of the law, vandalism to competing ivy-league campuses, elaborate ruses to move large crowds, a statue of elvis, and and any number of other things involved over (IIRC) just the course of a wild, no-sleep-possible weekend, and all in pursuit of items on the list (i.e. it wasn't just random debauchery, though the nature of the list started to make it feel that way).
It was one of the better (and more exhausting, and more risky) moments in my life. The sort of thing bound to make parents and administrators talk about the need for a ban, and the sort of thing that alums are likely to use to encourage their friends and family to attend U of C if they get the chance.
and much more often than was the case 10 years ago, it just plain doesn't work in one way or another—social, technical, legal, or otherwise—usually in non-predictable ways and instances.
Windows, for all its non-workiness, remains more predictable in the ways that it won't work, meaning that it's more realistic for production desktop use.
Mac OS is more predictable still, and has a smaller, simpler ecosystem.
I used Linux for 16 years and wrote six Linux books. Then I got tired of feeling as though my operating system was one of the focuses of my life. But if it wasn't a focus of my life, it didn't continue to work. So I switched to Mac OS, which is infinitely more boring and forgettable. And that, for me, turned out to be great, now that I am not just an adult but edging toward early codgerhood.
I want to do stuff with my computer. Not do stuff to my computer.
I have a different opinion than most of the posters here on the problem with the U.S. policy machine and electorate right now. I think it has to do with the ideology of unity, i.e. that we are the "United" States of America, that we are basically all the same, that we share interests and goals, that we are all in this together.
This is untrue, but here and elsewhere, I see no national awareness on the part of the political machine or the electorate that there is basically no unity and no way to achieve it. If we could all acknowledge that, there would be an understanding of the need for compromise.
Instead, over and over again I see people assuming that their understanding of what is wrong is shared by virtually everyone, and that if virtually everyone knows what's wrong but it hasn't been fixed yet, it must be because of those "other" people that are in the minority but that are somehow pulling the strings in "today's America" and are somehow corrupt/oppressive/dangerous/evil.
Just in this discussion I see people saying that the problem is obviously:
Franklin Delanor Roosevelt
The Welfare State
Religion
The end of religion
The pill
The wrong understanding of God
Selfish banks
Selfish politicians
Selfish media
Poor public education
Global overpopulation
Technological malaise
Money
Bureaucracy
Liberals
Conservatives
Libertarians
An active sense of entitlement
An overly passive population
Centralized government
The absence of an external threat
Feudalism
Lawyers
Cynicism
Capitalism
The decline of the family
The decline of values
Consumerism
and so on.
And each presents the argument as if it's authoritative. And many seem to imply that there is some kind of majority involved ("More and more countries..." "The American public..." "we this..." "we that...")
The framing in terms of "we" or in phrases that imply a majority place everyone that disagrees outside of a presumed collective. I see this on both sides of the political aisle right now. In 2011 I lived both in New York City (very liberal) and in Utah (very conservative) and both populations have the same certainty, with a different focus.
For the New Yorkers in lower Manhattan, it's obvious that America has had it with a tiny minority of crazy conservatives trying to destroy the nation, and if Obama doesn't win the next election, it's because this minority has stolen it from the American people. For the Utahns, it's obvious that America has had it with a tiny minority of crazy socialists trying to turn America into the Soviet Union with Islamist tendencies, and if Obama wins the next election, it's because this minority has stolen it from the American people.
Both refer to American values and American history constantly, but totally different versions of these.
There is limited or no understanding that monotheism and polytheism and atheism are all American values, that black slaves and white colonialists and native tribes are all "founding members" of our present society in some way, that the populace includes sizable blocks of both highly conservative pro-life, pro-national religion, anti-feminist, anti-immigrant libertarians and highly socially liberal pro-choice, pro-secularism, pro-feminist pro-immigration social democrats, and everything in between.
Somehow the "melting pot narrative" has broken down and the Utahns imagine that "most Americans" drive a truck, own horses, have a rifle under their seat, and are married with children and mom staying at home while dad plays provider, while the lower Manhattanites know that "most Americans" take public transportation, are more and more concerned with global warming and local green economies, are down on cars and big oil and guns, and are living in "alternative" family situations to that "traditional narrative that was never representative anyway."
When told about the other side by me, people in both groups had the tendency to say about the other that "those people just c
Not a fanboy and never made the claim that everyone wants the same things I do. But if you want to seriously dispute that the iPhone singlehandedly revolutionized the mobile device market, I don't think I need to say anything in response; the argument speaks for itself.
Hardly, but your typical Apple hate has made you think that it is. I didn't mention Mac OS X. Obviously Mac OS X would be horrible on a mobile device—but nobody ever tried it. There *were* mobile devices, however, with Linux desktops running on them. I know, I had one—a Sharp Zaurus. There were mobile devices with Windows desktops running on them.
There was never an iPhone with either Linux or Windows or Palm running on them. My point was to make the argument that it's not the iPhone hardware that makes iPhone special, but rather the software. My way of illustrating that point was to imagine the iPhone with Linux on it. But you can just as easily imagine it with Windows CE or Palm OS. You could also imagine it with Mac OS X, but that would be in the realm of the hypothetical and subject to discussion, while we know that Linux, Windows CE, and Palm OS on mobile devices all sucked rocks.
You can argue that they were great productivity devices, but to suggest that you could actually get more real work done on one of them than on an iPhone is completely wrongheaded. And Android is in the same neighborhood as iPhone—so yes, Android on an iPhone would be light years ahead of any of those other systems on an iPhone. But let's not forget that iPhone created the market and the model that Android has followed, and that the story itself is about iPhone, so bringing in Android and Mac OS X are really more about you making digressions.
I was talking about iPhone in comparison to previous smart mobile device platforms, period.
about iPhone/Android (but especially iPhone). As a thought experiment, take an iPhone 4S and stick Linux+GNOME 3 on it. Could totally be done in theory. Would render the device crap. Who would want/use it that way? It would be pointless, just a hack-because-I-can device, even if it had a full working carrier-connected TCP/IP stack. Same thing with getting, say, Windows Phone 6 onto it, even though it would be blindingly fast and have tons of capacity.
iOS is what makes the iPhone, more than anything else. You could take the iPhone, replace the capacitive touchscreen with a resistive one and pair it up with a horrific plastic stylus of the Palm sort, cut the processor speed in half and the memory capacity by an order of magnitude, and you'd still have a great device that was competitive in the marketplace for many users and that would have run circles around WinCE and Palm in 2006.
The fact that Apple also went for capacitive, pen-free, fast processor, and decent chunk of memory was more about the user experience than it was about hardware specs and expanded "capabilities," and it's that fabulous user experience got die-hard Palm people like me into AT&T stores when the iPhone launched going "Holy shit, this is like visiting the future!"
You need a critical mass of the public on a global network, and you need a suitable UI. The latter is really Apple's innovation with the iPhone/iTouch/iPad. By the mid-to-late '90 we had wireless devices with touchscreens that fit into pockets, but they were all heavily textual (even though they had icons and graphics) in the way that they operated and they were also all reliant on a desktop metaphor of some kind. Apple's Newton, if you look at the UI, was the closest thing we had to a truly mobile UI, and while it was way ahead of its time and even has some things I'd kill to have back on an iPhone today, it was also still all about office metaphors: sheets of paper, sliding drawers, envelopes and trash cans, and so on.
Even those that want to make fun of Newton basically have to admit that in terms of practical usability when walking (i.e. in motion, outdoors) down the street, there's a world of difference in usability between a connected Palm or Windows PocketPC device from the pre-iPhone era and an iDevice. That's Apple's big contribution, what Microsoft did absolutely incorrectly. After all, the basically *had* an iPhone (so did Palm) by the early '00s. There's no technical reason that Windows phones couldn't have been made similar to iDevices in their usability, especially with high end models having faster processors and more memory capability; it's just about UI/UX design. Apple does it. Microsoft did it once a long time ago (partially) and has ignored it since, until Metro—which is much less about some radical improvement in Microsoft-running device hardware as it is about the first real UI/UX design Microsoft has attempted in years, directly in response to iPhone.
While the Macbook Pro and Mac OS X are fairly open and interoperable still (way ahead of the opacity of Windows, and much more able to operate/exchange with a wide variety of other systems without costly/proprietary software from Microsoft or other vendors), I very much wish that the iPhone and the iPad were a little more open.
ON the other hand, having tried both Android phones and Android tablets in the years since 2009, I stick with iDevices despite the relative closedness of the platform because the user experience is so much better. I am more productive on iDevices and I am much more willing to trust my data to them because they seem much more stable/predictable.
And yes, at this point in my life, I am a user, not a developer. I count on being able to use them, and I don't care in any practical way whether I have the access to "fix" or "improve" it myself, because the chances of my actually taking the time to do that are absolutely nil. The openness question is a nice ideological debate point and I'm not entirely on Apple's side there, but I have everyday concerns that are practical and are far more important to me than openness/closedness.
There may be a point at which openness/closedness becomes an issue that drives me to make other choices, become an activist, whatever. But we're definitely not there yet. I'm still at the point where I'm willing to buy. I've spent far more on Apple hardware and software in three years than I did in a decade of Linux and previous mobile phone use. Yes, seen from one point of view that's because Apple stuff is more expensive, but seen from my perspective it's because the results that I get using this platform in terms of productivity and reliability absolutely justify the cost.
I can't say that I ever made a Linux hardware or software purchase with which I was totally satisfied. There was always an issue, or multiple issues. In fact, I still have a CD case that has Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, Corel Draw for Linux, Applix Office for Linux, Win4Lin, VMWare, Crossover Office, and a bunch of Loki games in it, apart from a few things I'm no doubt forgetting—I know there are some more commercial productivity packages that I bought over the years in good faith. None of them work on Linux today. Most of them stopped starting at all on Linux within just a couple releases, and most never even worked properly at all even when they were new. The Corel offerings, for example, shipped with a bug that killed your document after 30 minutes or so because a counter somewhere used for autosaves hadn't been coded correctly, causing autosaves of office documents to eventually go off the beam and silently destroy your work—and to add insult to injury, they never fixed the bug, and the entire suite wouldn't even start on Linux by 2002, a year and a half after purchase, with no updates released to address this, meaning I paid $300 for an office product that I never once got a chance to productively use. Yes there were open alternatives like OpenOffice.org, but they continually had problems with basic stuff like font rendering, and then you were downloading source, setting options, creating build environments and running 2-3 day builds just to try to get something to print right again after the latest update. And I was no n00b—I wrote six books on Linux in the '90s and early '00s and before I switched to Linux in '93 I had been a longtime SunOS user, since the early Sun3 boxen.
Point of anecdote: openness only gets you so far, and I supported that market heavily, with very limited rewards. That's what eventually made it so tantalizing for me to consider switching to Mac. When someone decides they need to be productive and then they experience an option in which they can just "set it and forget it" (which is what the Apple products have been for me), you'd better have something more than *just* openness on offer.
You say yourself that there was no market because they sucked.
Make things that don't suck, and the market emerges.
Look, I get tired of the mindlessness of the Apple critics.
I was a smartphone user for years and held off for two years on getting an iPhone once iPhone was released because I was sure that it couldn't be that much better, that it was all hype. After all, I already HAD a smartphone that I was completely satisfied with (a high-end Treo).
Boy did I feel stupid when I finally got my first iPhone (a 3GS, some months after it had been released). I realized that I had been walking around using a Treo when I could have been about 10x as functional and connected on the go using an iPhone, which was a device in a completely different *universe* if you actually wanted to get stuff done with your phone.
Listen, everyone *knew* there was no market for tablets before iPad. That was exactly the critique and it was spot-on. But Apple executed so well (and at half the price that people had imagined) that they CREATED a market out of whole cloth. Hell, half the people on Slashdot still argue that the iPad market is non-existent and will dry up just as soon as people "wake up" and realize that the device they're using is... I don't remember how the argument goes, exactly. Useless? Overpriced? Stupid? Whatever. I dont' care. The market didn't exist until iPad.
Listen, in 2007 I was a hardcore Linux user. Slackware 2, 3 -> Red Hat 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 -> Fedora 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I walked around with a Treo. I was one of the few tablet users with a Toshiba Portege m200, an upgrade from the separate Thinkpad T-series and Vadem Clio tablet team I'd used previous to that.
In 2009 I finally grudgingly tried an iPhone and a day later had one of my own. By 2010 I was all Apple with an iPhone, an iPad, and a Macbook Pro. It's not because I'm an apple fanboy. I *was* a Linux fanboy and an irrational Apple critic, and I realize that only in retrospect.
Maybe you don't like Apple products, but to question whether or not they created the market for capacitive touch low-button smartphones or capacitive touch tablets that run a mobile OS? That makes you sound like an irrational Apple critic of the same sort that I was.
Apple makes fabulous stuff. They are *not* the Apple of 1997, but most Slashdot Apple critics don't realize that because they're steadfastly trying to convince themselves either that (1) Apple is incompetent at everything but marketing (despite a decade and a half of growth) or (2) Apple is the second coming of Microsoft (who was never, ever as creative or innovative on their very best day).
buy a consumer product. If you want to make an investment, make an investment.
Kickstarter is not a store, nor is it a brokerage. It is a place to donate and support things you'd like to see happen. Don't send any money their way if you're hoping for some sort of guaranteed return. It's a kind of participation, activism, or expression, not a kind of transaction.