Before that I was working at eBay's customer service office. Most internal documents were circulated in (you guessed it) Word. And before that I was working as a technical writer on user manuals for a now-defunct Linux startup in the late '90s. Imagine my shock when I got hired there originally only to find that everyone outside of software development itself was using Windows boxen and... Word. Myself included, and the manuals (about Linux products) got produced just fine.
I spent much of the last two years as a managing editor in a books department. All of our authors submitted Word files. Our page and layout designers did everything in Word and our design meetings produced Word templates for pages with all design elements. Pages at every step of the process were in Word: submission, development, technical and review, line edit, copy edit, etc. The handoff to production was a formatted Word file + styles. For our most common trim size, the pages/castoffs even lined up exactly to our Word templates.
Before that I was a role editor (several roles including line and copy) and an author (several times over) at a major subsidiary to an NYC house with a good ten trade paperback imprints to its name. I never saw or received anything other than Word files. I tried to work with them using WordPerfect for a while and heard back from production through editorial that it was imperative if I wanted to keep contracting with them that I use Word, since their styles led directly to print output and I was mucking up the integrity of the styles with WordPerfect import/export and the documents were having to be rebuilt before the handoff.
That's my experience, take it or leave it. I have never worked in production, always in editorial. And it's always been all Word, all the time.
Go to any Windows publishing house (and this includes most of the major ones, a bunch of whom I've worked in or with). How do you make a PDF? Well, you start with a Word file and you run it through Acrobat. So making a PDF for such people involves... Word.
And yes, the book goes into Quark before going to press, but do the authors or editors work in Quark? Do the page designers even work in Quark? No, they all work in Word. It's the lonely guy at the end of the hall doing final layout that dumps everything into the formatter/publisher application just before it goes to press for a full run.
Until that point, all the way through most of writing, editing, and design, everything is in Word. Word gets used much more than I think people in IT realize. Word/Excel/Powerpoint are the bedrock of corporate America. Most small and medium size companies (and a few large ones, too) do all of their publications with Word, all of their PR with PowerPoint, and all of their databases as Excel sheets. That's just the way it is, like it or hate it. That's all people (all the way up through management) know.
Just try to get them to change... Or to let you bring something novel to the table. You'll be shown the door.
I'm one of those Linux users that buys software for Linux.
I bought ApplixWare. I bought WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. Both became orphanware. OpenOffice, meanwhile, continues to hum along and is not only compatible with new versions of Linux every time I install one, but actually comes as a part of each Linux OS I've installed for years now.
OpenOffice imports word formats with a reasonable degree of accuracy and I can still open and use files all the way back to when it was StarOffice 3.0. My Applix and WordPerfectOffice 2000 files, on the other hand, are not so easy to get back into.
Plus, I now have Office XP anytime I need it running through Crossover, though I prefer OpenOffice in most cases. There's just no reason for me to buy this stuff. I wish them luck in a pretty much taken care of market. It's like trying to sell a web browser for $69 at this point, I think.
OS9 was my home operating system when I was a teenager, on this very machine. My friends used to make fun of me because in my room at my parents house I had four VT100 terminals connected and I had it all set up with tsmon/login and gave them all accounts (I was the only one with a computer) so they could come over and do their homework. The printer I had was a giant DataSouth industrial printer that weighed about 100 pounds.
We'd be hanging around in a coffee shop and they'd say they needed to go to "the pentagon" (i.e. my room at my parents' place) to do some homework.
That OS was rock solid, had an awesome realtime scheduler that made multitasking smooth as hell (even on a 1Mhz 8-bit chip with five logged on users), and was beautifully modular, right down to the option to load or not load such major components as the random block file manager (RBF, sort of like the VFS layer) or the sequential character file manager (SCF, for streamed I/O like serial ports or monitors) dynamically.
I have nothing but fond memories and by the time I retired the system it had four floppy drives, two 80MB hard drives, four terminals, and ran a BBS in the background.
It's not up to the recipient, it's up to the recipient's service provider; most recipients have no idea what is or isn't happening to their email before they get it.
And we have lost a tremendous amount of functionality due to SPAM. There was a time not so long ago when I could send to a family member: email with an attached photo, email with an attached document, email sent from my own PC and handled with my own SMTP daemon, email that was only two or three lines long, etc.
Now all of these are likely to be rejected. Even plain text email sent with a large subscription SMTP server is now getting blocked by some friends and family members' service providers simply because the domain of the address (my personal web domain) is not whitelisted and this hits the SPAM score where it hurts. A phone call is great... unless you were hoping to do one of the many useful things you used to be able to accomplish by sending attachments (i.e. send an article you're working on to a friend to have them read it and mark it up with revisions before sending it back).
So I suppose your answer is that we should all get an @gmail.com account, have to use it via the Web interface to send plain-text only email with zero attachments that's at least five but no more than twenty sentences long and doesn't use the words "sex," "free," or "mortgage."
Fine, but don't pretend that email hasn't lost a significant amount of functionality due to SPAM or that these restrictions are being imposed democratically by the consensus of common users. Functionality has indeed been lost and the decisions are made by admins at major email providers trying to save costs and manage the tremendous problem that SPAM has become.
The proper solution isn't to filter more. The proper solution is the death penalty for SPAMmers. I'm quite serious. We execute far too many blue collar criminals in this world and not nearly enough white collar ones. SPAMmers should be first among these.
It's this weird American tendency (or maybe it just represents the true success of Big Brother that it is powerful enough to do these things without being detected) to believe that there's no possible way corporations or the government could be monitoring you (because that would be un-American). The more they're monitoring you, the more adamant most Americans become that this is clearly impossible in America. The more evidence for surveillance and civil rights violations, the more most Americans will bemoan the proliferation of "conspiracy theories" (instead of bemoaning the surveillance and civil rights violations).
Sure, bad things happens "in Communist China" or "in Soviet Russia" or "in Socialist Europe" but never, ever, squeaky-clean-cross-my-heart, ever "in Freedom and Democracy Capitalism." It's our own inverted version of the "Oliver Twist" mythology of the other that once existed behind the Eastern Bloc.
I'm not surprised that someone is shocked by this, but what I don't get is how Slashdotters are shocked by this? I mean? This is a technical site, right?
Listen: you have an embedded device that in its normal state is always on-network on a packet network. It has a limited range of connectivity, but this limitation is mitigated by having a large number of serialized access points that are geographically situated so as to make connectivity seamless. The embedded devices are reasonably computationally powerful (much moreso than PCs of a few years ago) and have a digital or soft-user-interface (including the power circuitry, which is not a physical full-throw SPST that connects or disconnects power, but is rather an input that runs through the embedded software). The software itself is secured and controlled by the network administration, and software and content can be "push" downloaded to the devices by the network.
From this description, all of the following seem technically obvious:
1 - You have no control over the software in your phone; the vendors and networks do.
2 - Since said software controls the power interface and user interface, you have no control over (or reason to trust as being consistent with your expectations) these interfaces either.
3 - Your phone could thus be easily set by the network to be "always on" without having any such indications in the user interface. The user interface could continue to give the appearance that you are controlling such functions as power and connectivity when in fact the phone is doing everything opposite from what you believe it is doing. There is no technical reason why a phone can't show "no signal" when it has "full signal" or a blank screen when the rest of it is still live, or that it is not transmitting or engaged in a call when actually it is transmitting.
4 - While on-network (and as we've already established, you as a mere user have no way of knowing with real certainty whether it is on network or off network, you have only your trust in the consistency with your expectations of the embedded software) it is a simple matter to observe at any moment to which access point a given user is connected. In fact, you should know that this is recorded already, or how should they know when you are "roaming" and when you are not. The side effect of this information's recording is that (even if we assume they don't automate triangulation with tower handoffs/multiple towers, which is a silly assumption) it is always known to within a few hundred feet exactly where a given phone is, since the network can clearly see to which tower it is connected.
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I mean... duh.
A cell phone is a bug. Period. Anyone who doesn't get this has clearly not been paying attention. There is absolutely no technical reason (and in some cases it's technically unavoidable) why your cell phone isn't right now:
- Reporting your position to the network, and thus, to anyone who has access to the network's database (e.g. government)
- Altered by software "pushes" from the network to seem off when it's still on, or to transmit whatever the mic pics up anytime you happen to be in a certain part of town between the hours of 7pm-10pm, or to transmit whatever the mic pics up for the 10 minutes after you call some specific number
- Sending your complete contacts list and recent and missed calls lists to the network provider (e.g. government)
I mean, come on, people. Technically this isn't even a question. Whether this actually happens or not is just a matter of policy ("Do we want to track location and bug people?") on the part of networks and the government, certainly not a matter of technology ("Can the equipment do it?")
Of course the equipment can do it.
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Thought experiment for the dubious.
Imagine that you have been assigned by work to carry a laptop with you at all times. This "GovCorp" laptop has a solid-state hard drive so that you can't tell if it's
I used Linux + a ThinkPad T23 and my suspends/resumes are on the order of 5 seconds. I have a friend with a brand spanking new Sony and Windows XP and her suspends/resumes take 30+ seconds and half the time her wireless doesn't come back up.
I don't know what it is about Windows that causes people to think it's more "user friendly" than Linux or Mac OS, but in my experience, Windows has a tendency to just _not work_ (or certainly not well) and people do what my friend does: shrug and say "that's just the way it is."
I'm using Firefox 2.0 (well, Swiftfox 2.0) since right after release and I've had:
1) Not a single crash 2) Not a single OOM condition 3) Great performance 4) Not obvious compatibility problems or renderfux
In short, the transition was seamless, the browser is faster than it used to be, all of my plugins and themes came across great... I wonder if maybe some in the tech community aren't making out the "horribleness of Firefox 2.0" to be a much bigger issue than it is. Frankly, I like it a lot, and it hasn't pushed me back to Konqueror yet (which all Firefox releases before 1.5 eventually did).
1. Try Fedora Core, my mother, sisters, and best friend have all been converted, and all installed it themselves, and all have digital cameras, printers, and scanners that work with it.
2. Ease of use isn't everything. In fact, it's 1% of everything at best. People here act as though a learning curve is the end of the world. It is, if your goal is market domination. That is NOT an FOSS goal. FOSS cares not one bit about market domination. It cares about powerful tools that can be made to do complex work that its authors need done. In this, XP (or any Windows flavor) doesn't hold a candle to Linux (or to Mac OS X for that matter, or any Unix-family OS).
There is nothing wrong with Linux or FOSS. It's a brilliant success. The fact that some people are unable to take advantage of it does not make it any less so... and even that group is shrinking every day, thanks to the likes of Fedora Core, Ubuntu, etc. that are now as plug-and-play as XP ever was, and even moreso.
But that's an aside. The main point is: FOSS is more stable, more feature packed, more powerful, and free. Whether or not any one user as a test case is able to navigate it doesn't change these attributes.
The problem(s) are imagined by the professional problematizers.
I've been running Linux since 1993, alongside Windows until 2001. What we have now is a stable, fast, rapidly-evolving, feature-complete operating system that's more powerful than Windows or Mac OS and more widely compatible that anything else on the planet, all at no cost. Similar things can be said about Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.
There is nothing wrong here, FOSS has been a roaring success and continues to be one every day. The proof of the pudding, etc. It's the best game going in technology right now and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Of course if your baseline is "Any 'successful' software will have every feature and function you will ever need while at the same time staying lean and mean and user interface clean, and it will come with indemnity and warranty and a serious guarantee all while staying completely free," then yeah, FOSS falls short I suppose, but it's still a damn sight nearer than any other software development ecosystem.
What did you gain by leaving high school 2 years earlier? The fact that you didn't complete high school tells me one of two possible things: 1) You are (or were) a weak and/or lazy bastard who can't handle mundane but necessary tasks or 2) if you left high school early to go to university, then you are a very ambitious person.
You, too, miss the point. I wasn't weak. I wasn't lazy. I also didn't drop out in order to attend university, I just (as you said) got lucky. Clearly I'm not lazy or weak since my academic life has been a success since then and I've led a productive work life. I dropped out because being in that environment was intolerable. I would rather have died than remain. Several of my friends did die, two by their own hand and one as the result of in-school violence, not because any of them (including the killer) were lazy bastards, or because they were in desperate need of psychoanalysis. The high school I attended was a concentration camp. It was not so different from many others that I've seen since.
I am now well past 30. I was in high school only 1.5 years nearly two decades ago. I have lived in Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Chicago, and New York since then and have traveled extensively. I have worked a variety of jobs and have found myself in a few sticky situations. You're wrong about the rest of life being just as bad as high school. Nothing in my life since compares AT ALL, IN ANY WAY, to the evil that was the 1.5 years that I spent in a public urban high school, the terror that to which I was subject in having to deal with uniformed, gun-carrying police officers, bitter administrators, abusive teachers, etc. etc. etc. My public high school years remain by far the most horrific time in my life and the greatest concentration of crime, depravity, and disillusionment that I've ever seen, and I thank the stars quite often that I escaped that hell alive.
They might teach you to be humble. They may teach you that you in fact, do not know everything. In fact, you seem like a person who could use a great deal of humility.
It takes someone with a singularly large ego to make this sort of statement out loud. More to the point, the notion of a pedagogy of humility is something better left to totalitarian regimes than a dog-eat-dog capitalist culture that celebrates individuality and initiative as the means to success. Think about what you're suggesting when you say that it's a good thing to send all citizens in a society to a 4-year "bend them into submission and humility camp." What it breeds is a nation happy to be ruled (I do not choose that word arbitrarily) by the likes of George W. Bush.
No, and that's the sad thing--I do think that probably 40 out of 50 people drop out despite having the potential to go to university. You missed my point entirely:
NOT that people drop out IN ORDER to go to university,
BUT that people who COULD succeed in many other environments (including university) do drop out, not because they are lazy or stupid, but because the environment is a cross between prison and a warzone.
You're obviously from Nebraska or Kansas or something.
I was a high school drop out. I also have two bachelors degrees, a masters degree from the University of Chicago, and am currently working on a Ph.D. in New York. I'm no idiot.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a methodology. Teachers and administrators suffer from the same generation gap that childrens' parents do, only these are not the childrens' parents. They HATE THE KIDS in high schools in the U.S. Hate. Bile. Principals would shoot every one of the kids if they thought they could get away with it. They don't see any human value in them.
Meanwhile, the social order is not interested in what schools can help to create, but in what they can help us to avoid--crime being the most important among these. School is seen as a crime-prevention technique. Keep kids in the building and they aren't on the streets committing crime. Get them a 4-year and they're xx% less likely (depending on your area) to become criminals.
Ultimately this means two things: (1) institutions run like prisons to ensure that the kids are kept inside at all times, forced to attend, and socialized to be obedient above and beyond all else, and (2) a distinct lack in curriculum of any kind, since the intention is not to teach material but to embed "socially appropriate" habits (i.e. general obedience, lawfulness, silence and submissiveness) into students' routines and personalities.
I had a very high I.Q. and a very low tolerance for this kind of shit. I dropped out of high school because I couldn't take it and luckily someone in the community helped me to apply to (and get accepted to) a major state university at 15. Ever since then, I have done the same. Over the course of my adult life, whenever I've met a bright kid with a reasonable sense of responsibility that's ready to cry bitter tears over the SHITHOLE that is American public education, I talk to their parents and get them THE HELL out of the high school system and into the state university. It makes me feel good to see them succeed instead of be turned into gangstas, addicts, and self-cutters in the public school system.
So pull your head out of your ass and realize that there are MAJOR problems in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, New York, and just about every major city in the U.S. and maybe, just maybe, that's why people ask questions like this in the midst of putting every person under the age of 18 in this country simultaneously on Prozac and Ritalin before they step once again through the metal detector.
(1) Everyone (administration, parents, teachers) hates--HATES--the kids. As in "this school would be fucking perfect if it wasn't for all these god damn high school students everywhere!"
(2) Public schools make no profit. Because only things that make a profit matter (Right, Slashdotters, open marketeers, yes, yes? Hmmmm?) they are a tremendously poor investment and have no money relative to just about anything else in the world.
(3) Nobody in the U.S. things education is necessary anyway anymore. Science is for the godless commies, and lack of knowledge won't hurt your career, you're owed a great career because you're American and white, no matter what your level of education. And if the world won't give it to you, you'll bomb the fucking world, not try to keep a bunch of kids in school or something.
--
Those are the problems with the American high school system.
they're pandering to an idiotic electorate that is excited by sensationalist news. They pass laws addressing email specifically probably in response to some news story or series of news stories on local media. They do it just so that in the next election cycle they can say "And I fought to protect your children from having to receive email solicitations from online predators!"
The electorate, of course, loves this kind of "skewering the latest boogeyman" by legislators and will vote early and often for those that pass the most specific, most draconian laws.
Good god there's a lot of Mac-hate here for some reason. I'm not a Mac user. I don't own a Mac right now. I'm a Linux guy with a Thinkpad. But I can't for the life of me see what all of this is based on. People are routinely calling Apple users cult members, elitist, arrogant, immature, unprofessional... Here you are calling Apple a terrible company... Why? I don't get it.
They make reasonably nice computers. Their commercials are amusing and simply make claims that are functional, like a Mac will talk to your digital camera when a Windows PC won't without first installing a driver (often true not just of Macs but, for example, Linux as well).
It's only in response to Apple that we get these weird posts with religious overtones and claims like Apple continually making "efforts to irritate outsiders" to its "tiny church."
Very strange. Methinks the Slashdotters do protest too much. If you all feel so insecure about not having Macs, then for gods sake, just go and buy them. And then, if you really want to be cool, put Linux on them.;-)
I have an ivy-league graduate degree and am working as an analyst, since you make the accusation. But I also don't normally advertise that fact (unless called a drop-out), don't walk around in designer suits, NOR do I call people "elitist" for dressing in casual clothing, having facial hair, or liking Macs.
I have to say I'm shocked at the comments that are coming from people here in response to this commercial. I mean, let's see what evidence we have about this character: he doesn't wear a suit (at least not at the moment); he seems to speak English and Japanese; he's fairly patient with an obnoxious PHB-type to his left; he likes Macs. That's about all we've got. But already he's an Elitist hippie mama's boy (see another response to my post) college drop-out that nobody likes. And meanwhile there's some sort of love-fest for the clearly incompetent, unjustifiably smug character wearing the suit.
I didn't imagine Slashdot was so populated with PHBs.
I found the PC guy to be too obnoxious, I just want to hit him. The Mac guy seems like a fairly average Joe, reasonably likable. I don't get it. Elitist? He's got his hands in his pockets and he's wearing jeans. How is that elitist?! Anyway, the guy in the tie is always the elitist, it's a rule of nature.
how blind companies and HR managers can sometimes be about this. I worked at a company that committed this sin. They would list radically deep skills and experience requirements from multiple fields for single positions, but the pay wasn't anything special, really just entry-level, and the location sucked.
Each time they would interview what amounted to entry-level candidates (the only ones interested at that pay level, naturally) for months and finally they'd get desperate and make a hire that didn't quite measure up to the extreme the standards they'd set for positions. Then, when it didn't work out and the hire either left or got let go, they wouldn't try to make the position more attractive to someone who was more qualified, they'd just re-list with the same salary and benefits package(s), only each new time they'd add even more required skills and experience, as though they just hadn't been stringent enough the first time.
Meanwhile, for those of us inside already, the workload just got bigger and bigger since we couldn't make any good hires and couldn't keep the ones we made. Needless to say I moved on after just over a year, once I realized that for the amount of work I was actually doing as the result of the (I realized) never-to-be-resolved staff shortage, I was also getting underpaid.
It's like HR thought that if they just kept asking for more, eventually they'd get it.
is this a platform-specific issue or set of issues?
I'm noticing that a lot of the complaining posts apparently appear to be from Mac users or Windows users. I myself am using 2.0 and have experienced no problems, but I'm using Linux (Fedora Core 5).
What platform to the majority of Firefox users develop on? I'm sure there's a pile of statistics from bug reporting that show the number of complaints by platform. I'm suddenly feeling that I'd be interested in seeing it. Anyone got a link to a nice chart or graph where this stuff is collected?
Okay, I'm using 2.0. And it's fine. As in, it hasn't crashed yet, it's nice and fast, it isn't eating all of the resources on my system, updates for the theme I use and all but one of the extensions were found automatically, and... it's fine.
So when I say it's fine, am I (according to you) committing a disservice by saying that my experience has been fine? Are only negative reports doing a "service" to Firefox, while positive reports should be silenced?
Help me out here.
P.S. I'm using 2.0, and it's fine. In fact, I like it a lot, in particular the forward/back speedup.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell you what, I'll even sweeten the deal.
Before that I was working at eBay's customer service office. Most internal documents were circulated in (you guessed it) Word. And before that I was working as a technical writer on user manuals for a now-defunct Linux startup in the late '90s. Imagine my shock when I got hired there originally only to find that everyone outside of software development itself was using Windows boxen and... Word. Myself included, and the manuals (about Linux products) got produced just fine.
Disbelieve it if you want.
I spent much of the last two years as a managing editor in a books department. All of our authors submitted Word files. Our page and layout designers did everything in Word and our design meetings produced Word templates for pages with all design elements. Pages at every step of the process were in Word: submission, development, technical and review, line edit, copy edit, etc. The handoff to production was a formatted Word file + styles. For our most common trim size, the pages/castoffs even lined up exactly to our Word templates.
Before that I was a role editor (several roles including line and copy) and an author (several times over) at a major subsidiary to an NYC house with a good ten trade paperback imprints to its name. I never saw or received anything other than Word files. I tried to work with them using WordPerfect for a while and heard back from production through editorial that it was imperative if I wanted to keep contracting with them that I use Word, since their styles led directly to print output and I was mucking up the integrity of the styles with WordPerfect import/export and the documents were having to be rebuilt before the handoff.
That's my experience, take it or leave it. I have never worked in production, always in editorial. And it's always been all Word, all the time.
Go to any Windows publishing house (and this includes most of the major ones, a bunch of whom I've worked in or with). How do you make a PDF? Well, you start with a Word file and you run it through Acrobat. So making a PDF for such people involves... Word.
And yes, the book goes into Quark before going to press, but do the authors or editors work in Quark? Do the page designers even work in Quark? No, they all work in Word. It's the lonely guy at the end of the hall doing final layout that dumps everything into the formatter/publisher application just before it goes to press for a full run.
Until that point, all the way through most of writing, editing, and design, everything is in Word. Word gets used much more than I think people in IT realize. Word/Excel/Powerpoint are the bedrock of corporate America. Most small and medium size companies (and a few large ones, too) do all of their publications with Word, all of their PR with PowerPoint, and all of their databases as Excel sheets. That's just the way it is, like it or hate it. That's all people (all the way up through management) know.
Just try to get them to change... Or to let you bring something novel to the table. You'll be shown the door.
I'm one of those Linux users that buys software for Linux.
I bought ApplixWare. I bought WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. Both became orphanware. OpenOffice, meanwhile, continues to hum along and is not only compatible with new versions of Linux every time I install one, but actually comes as a part of each Linux OS I've installed for years now.
OpenOffice imports word formats with a reasonable degree of accuracy and I can still open and use files all the way back to when it was StarOffice 3.0. My Applix and WordPerfectOffice 2000 files, on the other hand, are not so easy to get back into.
Plus, I now have Office XP anytime I need it running through Crossover, though I prefer OpenOffice in most cases. There's just no reason for me to buy this stuff. I wish them luck in a pretty much taken care of market. It's like trying to sell a web browser for $69 at this point, I think.
By "Marilyn Manson" I think you mean "Dick Cheney."
OS9 was my home operating system when I was a teenager, on this very machine. My friends used to make fun of me because in my room at my parents house I had four VT100 terminals connected and I had it all set up with tsmon/login and gave them all accounts (I was the only one with a computer) so they could come over and do their homework. The printer I had was a giant DataSouth industrial printer that weighed about 100 pounds.
We'd be hanging around in a coffee shop and they'd say they needed to go to "the pentagon" (i.e. my room at my parents' place) to do some homework.
That OS was rock solid, had an awesome realtime scheduler that made multitasking smooth as hell (even on a 1Mhz 8-bit chip with five logged on users), and was beautifully modular, right down to the option to load or not load such major components as the random block file manager (RBF, sort of like the VFS layer) or the sequential character file manager (SCF, for streamed I/O like serial ports or monitors) dynamically.
I have nothing but fond memories and by the time I retired the system it had four floppy drives, two 80MB hard drives, four terminals, and ran a BBS in the background.
It's not up to the recipient, it's up to the recipient's service provider; most recipients have no idea what is or isn't happening to their email before they get it.
And we have lost a tremendous amount of functionality due to SPAM. There was a time not so long ago when I could send to a family member: email with an attached photo, email with an attached document, email sent from my own PC and handled with my own SMTP daemon, email that was only two or three lines long, etc.
Now all of these are likely to be rejected. Even plain text email sent with a large subscription SMTP server is now getting blocked by some friends and family members' service providers simply because the domain of the address (my personal web domain) is not whitelisted and this hits the SPAM score where it hurts. A phone call is great... unless you were hoping to do one of the many useful things you used to be able to accomplish by sending attachments (i.e. send an article you're working on to a friend to have them read it and mark it up with revisions before sending it back).
So I suppose your answer is that we should all get an @gmail.com account, have to use it via the Web interface to send plain-text only email with zero attachments that's at least five but no more than twenty sentences long and doesn't use the words "sex," "free," or "mortgage."
Fine, but don't pretend that email hasn't lost a significant amount of functionality due to SPAM or that these restrictions are being imposed democratically by the consensus of common users. Functionality has indeed been lost and the decisions are made by admins at major email providers trying to save costs and manage the tremendous problem that SPAM has become.
The proper solution isn't to filter more. The proper solution is the death penalty for SPAMmers. I'm quite serious. We execute far too many blue collar criminals in this world and not nearly enough white collar ones. SPAMmers should be first among these.
It's this weird American tendency (or maybe it just represents the true success of Big Brother that it is powerful enough to do these things without being detected) to believe that there's no possible way corporations or the government could be monitoring you (because that would be un-American). The more they're monitoring you, the more adamant most Americans become that this is clearly impossible in America. The more evidence for surveillance and civil rights violations, the more most Americans will bemoan the proliferation of "conspiracy theories" (instead of bemoaning the surveillance and civil rights violations).
Sure, bad things happens "in Communist China" or "in Soviet Russia" or "in Socialist Europe" but never, ever, squeaky-clean-cross-my-heart, ever "in Freedom and Democracy Capitalism." It's our own inverted version of the "Oliver Twist" mythology of the other that once existed behind the Eastern Bloc.
I'm not surprised that someone is shocked by this, but what I don't get is how Slashdotters are shocked by this? I mean? This is a technical site, right?
Listen: you have an embedded device that in its normal state is always on-network on a packet network. It has a limited range of connectivity, but this limitation is mitigated by having a large number of serialized access points that are geographically situated so as to make connectivity seamless. The embedded devices are reasonably computationally powerful (much moreso than PCs of a few years ago) and have a digital or soft-user-interface (including the power circuitry, which is not a physical full-throw SPST that connects or disconnects power, but is rather an input that runs through the embedded software). The software itself is secured and controlled by the network administration, and software and content can be "push" downloaded to the devices by the network.
From this description, all of the following seem technically obvious:
1 - You have no control over the software in your phone; the vendors and networks do.
2 - Since said software controls the power interface and user interface, you have no control over (or reason to trust as being consistent with your expectations) these interfaces either.
3 - Your phone could thus be easily set by the network to be "always on" without having any such indications in the user interface. The user interface could continue to give the appearance that you are controlling such functions as power and connectivity when in fact the phone is doing everything opposite from what you believe it is doing. There is no technical reason why a phone can't show "no signal" when it has "full signal" or a blank screen when the rest of it is still live, or that it is not transmitting or engaged in a call when actually it is transmitting.
4 - While on-network (and as we've already established, you as a mere user have no way of knowing with real certainty whether it is on network or off network, you have only your trust in the consistency with your expectations of the embedded software) it is a simple matter to observe at any moment to which access point a given user is connected. In fact, you should know that this is recorded already, or how should they know when you are "roaming" and when you are not. The side effect of this information's recording is that (even if we assume they don't automate triangulation with tower handoffs/multiple towers, which is a silly assumption) it is always known to within a few hundred feet exactly where a given phone is, since the network can clearly see to which tower it is connected.
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I mean... duh.
A cell phone is a bug. Period. Anyone who doesn't get this has clearly not been paying attention. There is absolutely no technical reason (and in some cases it's technically unavoidable) why your cell phone isn't right now:
- Reporting your position to the network, and thus, to anyone who has access to the network's database (e.g. government)
- Altered by software "pushes" from the network to seem off when it's still on, or to transmit whatever the mic pics up anytime you happen to be in a certain part of town between the hours of 7pm-10pm, or to transmit whatever the mic pics up for the 10 minutes after you call some specific number
- Sending your complete contacts list and recent and missed calls lists to the network provider (e.g. government)
I mean, come on, people. Technically this isn't even a question. Whether this actually happens or not is just a matter of policy ("Do we want to track location and bug people?") on the part of networks and the government, certainly not a matter of technology ("Can the equipment do it?")
Of course the equipment can do it.
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Thought experiment for the dubious.
Imagine that you have been assigned by work to carry a laptop with you at all times. This "GovCorp" laptop has a solid-state hard drive so that you can't tell if it's
I used Linux + a ThinkPad T23 and my suspends/resumes are on the order of 5 seconds. I have a friend with a brand spanking new Sony and Windows XP and her suspends/resumes take 30+ seconds and half the time her wireless doesn't come back up.
I don't know what it is about Windows that causes people to think it's more "user friendly" than Linux or Mac OS, but in my experience, Windows has a tendency to just _not work_ (or certainly not well) and people do what my friend does: shrug and say "that's just the way it is."
I couldn't live with it.
I'm using Firefox 2.0 (well, Swiftfox 2.0) since right after release and I've had:
1) Not a single crash
2) Not a single OOM condition
3) Great performance
4) Not obvious compatibility problems or renderfux
In short, the transition was seamless, the browser is faster than it used to be, all of my plugins and themes came across great... I wonder if maybe some in the tech community aren't making out the "horribleness of Firefox 2.0" to be a much bigger issue than it is. Frankly, I like it a lot, and it hasn't pushed me back to Konqueror yet (which all Firefox releases before 1.5 eventually did).
1. Try Fedora Core, my mother, sisters, and best friend have all been converted, and all installed it themselves, and all have digital cameras, printers, and scanners that work with it.
2. Ease of use isn't everything. In fact, it's 1% of everything at best. People here act as though a learning curve is the end of the world. It is, if your goal is market domination. That is NOT an FOSS goal. FOSS cares not one bit about market domination. It cares about powerful tools that can be made to do complex work that its authors need done. In this, XP (or any Windows flavor) doesn't hold a candle to Linux (or to Mac OS X for that matter, or any Unix-family OS).
There is nothing wrong with Linux or FOSS. It's a brilliant success. The fact that some people are unable to take advantage of it does not make it any less so... and even that group is shrinking every day, thanks to the likes of Fedora Core, Ubuntu, etc. that are now as plug-and-play as XP ever was, and even moreso.
But that's an aside. The main point is: FOSS is more stable, more feature packed, more powerful, and free. Whether or not any one user as a test case is able to navigate it doesn't change these attributes.
The problem(s) are imagined by the professional problematizers.
I've been running Linux since 1993, alongside Windows until 2001. What we have now is a stable, fast, rapidly-evolving, feature-complete operating system that's more powerful than Windows or Mac OS and more widely compatible that anything else on the planet, all at no cost. Similar things can be said about Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.
There is nothing wrong here, FOSS has been a roaring success and continues to be one every day. The proof of the pudding, etc. It's the best game going in technology right now and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Of course if your baseline is "Any 'successful' software will have every feature and function you will ever need while at the same time staying lean and mean and user interface clean, and it will come with indemnity and warranty and a serious guarantee all while staying completely free," then yeah, FOSS falls short I suppose, but it's still a damn sight nearer than any other software development ecosystem.
What did you gain by leaving high school 2 years earlier? The fact that you didn't complete high school tells me one of two possible things: 1) You are (or were) a weak and/or lazy bastard who can't handle mundane but necessary tasks or 2) if you left high school early to go to university, then you are a very ambitious person.
You, too, miss the point. I wasn't weak. I wasn't lazy. I also didn't drop out in order to attend university, I just (as you said) got lucky. Clearly I'm not lazy or weak since my academic life has been a success since then and I've led a productive work life. I dropped out because being in that environment was intolerable. I would rather have died than remain. Several of my friends did die, two by their own hand and one as the result of in-school violence, not because any of them (including the killer) were lazy bastards, or because they were in desperate need of psychoanalysis. The high school I attended was a concentration camp. It was not so different from many others that I've seen since.
I am now well past 30. I was in high school only 1.5 years nearly two decades ago. I have lived in Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Chicago, and New York since then and have traveled extensively. I have worked a variety of jobs and have found myself in a few sticky situations. You're wrong about the rest of life being just as bad as high school. Nothing in my life since compares AT ALL, IN ANY WAY, to the evil that was the 1.5 years that I spent in a public urban high school, the terror that to which I was subject in having to deal with uniformed, gun-carrying police officers, bitter administrators, abusive teachers, etc. etc. etc. My public high school years remain by far the most horrific time in my life and the greatest concentration of crime, depravity, and disillusionment that I've ever seen, and I thank the stars quite often that I escaped that hell alive.
They might teach you to be humble. They may teach you that you in fact, do not know everything. In fact, you seem like a person who could use a great deal of humility.
It takes someone with a singularly large ego to make this sort of statement out loud. More to the point, the notion of a pedagogy of humility is something better left to totalitarian regimes than a dog-eat-dog capitalist culture that celebrates individuality and initiative as the means to success. Think about what you're suggesting when you say that it's a good thing to send all citizens in a society to a 4-year "bend them into submission and humility camp." What it breeds is a nation happy to be ruled (I do not choose that word arbitrarily) by the likes of George W. Bush.
No, and that's the sad thing--I do think that probably 40 out of 50 people drop out despite having the potential to go to university. You missed my point entirely:
NOT that people drop out IN ORDER to go to university,
BUT that people who COULD succeed in many other environments (including university) do drop out, not because they are lazy or stupid, but because the environment is a cross between prison and a warzone.
You're obviously from Nebraska or Kansas or something.
I was a high school drop out. I also have two bachelors degrees, a masters degree from the University of Chicago, and am currently working on a Ph.D. in New York. I'm no idiot.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a methodology. Teachers and administrators suffer from the same generation gap that childrens' parents do, only these are not the childrens' parents. They HATE THE KIDS in high schools in the U.S. Hate. Bile. Principals would shoot every one of the kids if they thought they could get away with it. They don't see any human value in them.
Meanwhile, the social order is not interested in what schools can help to create, but in what they can help us to avoid--crime being the most important among these. School is seen as a crime-prevention technique. Keep kids in the building and they aren't on the streets committing crime. Get them a 4-year and they're xx% less likely (depending on your area) to become criminals.
Ultimately this means two things: (1) institutions run like prisons to ensure that the kids are kept inside at all times, forced to attend, and socialized to be obedient above and beyond all else, and (2) a distinct lack in curriculum of any kind, since the intention is not to teach material but to embed "socially appropriate" habits (i.e. general obedience, lawfulness, silence and submissiveness) into students' routines and personalities.
I had a very high I.Q. and a very low tolerance for this kind of shit. I dropped out of high school because I couldn't take it and luckily someone in the community helped me to apply to (and get accepted to) a major state university at 15. Ever since then, I have done the same. Over the course of my adult life, whenever I've met a bright kid with a reasonable sense of responsibility that's ready to cry bitter tears over the SHITHOLE that is American public education, I talk to their parents and get them THE HELL out of the high school system and into the state university. It makes me feel good to see them succeed instead of be turned into gangstas, addicts, and self-cutters in the public school system.
So pull your head out of your ass and realize that there are MAJOR problems in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, New York, and just about every major city in the U.S. and maybe, just maybe, that's why people ask questions like this in the midst of putting every person under the age of 18 in this country simultaneously on Prozac and Ritalin before they step once again through the metal detector.
(1) Everyone (administration, parents, teachers) hates--HATES--the kids. As in "this school would be fucking perfect if it wasn't for all these god damn high school students everywhere!"
(2) Public schools make no profit. Because only things that make a profit matter (Right, Slashdotters, open marketeers, yes, yes? Hmmmm?) they are a tremendously poor investment and have no money relative to just about anything else in the world.
(3) Nobody in the U.S. things education is necessary anyway anymore. Science is for the godless commies, and lack of knowledge won't hurt your career, you're owed a great career because you're American and white, no matter what your level of education. And if the world won't give it to you, you'll bomb the fucking world, not try to keep a bunch of kids in school or something.
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Those are the problems with the American high school system.
they're pandering to an idiotic electorate that is excited by sensationalist news. They pass laws addressing email specifically probably in response to some news story or series of news stories on local media. They do it just so that in the next election cycle they can say "And I fought to protect your children from having to receive email solicitations from online predators!"
The electorate, of course, loves this kind of "skewering the latest boogeyman" by legislators and will vote early and often for those that pass the most specific, most draconian laws.
Good god there's a lot of Mac-hate here for some reason. I'm not a Mac user. I don't own a Mac right now. I'm a Linux guy with a Thinkpad. But I can't for the life of me see what all of this is based on. People are routinely calling Apple users cult members, elitist, arrogant, immature, unprofessional... Here you are calling Apple a terrible company... Why? I don't get it.
;-)
They make reasonably nice computers. Their commercials are amusing and simply make claims that are functional, like a Mac will talk to your digital camera when a Windows PC won't without first installing a driver (often true not just of Macs but, for example, Linux as well).
It's only in response to Apple that we get these weird posts with religious overtones and claims like Apple continually making "efforts to irritate outsiders" to its "tiny church."
Very strange. Methinks the Slashdotters do protest too much. If you all feel so insecure about not having Macs, then for gods sake, just go and buy them. And then, if you really want to be cool, put Linux on them.
I have an ivy-league graduate degree and am working as an analyst, since you make the accusation. But I also don't normally advertise that fact (unless called a drop-out), don't walk around in designer suits, NOR do I call people "elitist" for dressing in casual clothing, having facial hair, or liking Macs.
I have to say I'm shocked at the comments that are coming from people here in response to this commercial. I mean, let's see what evidence we have about this character: he doesn't wear a suit (at least not at the moment); he seems to speak English and Japanese; he's fairly patient with an obnoxious PHB-type to his left; he likes Macs. That's about all we've got. But already he's an Elitist hippie mama's boy (see another response to my post) college drop-out that nobody likes. And meanwhile there's some sort of love-fest for the clearly incompetent, unjustifiably smug character wearing the suit.
I didn't imagine Slashdot was so populated with PHBs.
So jeans + sweatshirt = hippie? It's clearly not we jeans-wearing people that have a problem with elitism...
I found the PC guy to be too obnoxious, I just want to hit him. The Mac guy seems like a fairly average Joe, reasonably likable. I don't get it. Elitist? He's got his hands in his pockets and he's wearing jeans. How is that elitist?! Anyway, the guy in the tie is always the elitist, it's a rule of nature.
how blind companies and HR managers can sometimes be about this. I worked at a company that committed this sin. They would list radically deep skills and experience requirements from multiple fields for single positions, but the pay wasn't anything special, really just entry-level, and the location sucked.
Each time they would interview what amounted to entry-level candidates (the only ones interested at that pay level, naturally) for months and finally they'd get desperate and make a hire that didn't quite measure up to the extreme the standards they'd set for positions. Then, when it didn't work out and the hire either left or got let go, they wouldn't try to make the position more attractive to someone who was more qualified, they'd just re-list with the same salary and benefits package(s), only each new time they'd add even more required skills and experience, as though they just hadn't been stringent enough the first time.
Meanwhile, for those of us inside already, the workload just got bigger and bigger since we couldn't make any good hires and couldn't keep the ones we made. Needless to say I moved on after just over a year, once I realized that for the amount of work I was actually doing as the result of the (I realized) never-to-be-resolved staff shortage, I was also getting underpaid.
It's like HR thought that if they just kept asking for more, eventually they'd get it.
is this a platform-specific issue or set of issues?
I'm noticing that a lot of the complaining posts apparently appear to be from Mac users or Windows users. I myself am using 2.0 and have experienced no problems, but I'm using Linux (Fedora Core 5).
What platform to the majority of Firefox users develop on? I'm sure there's a pile of statistics from bug reporting that show the number of complaints by platform. I'm suddenly feeling that I'd be interested in seeing it. Anyone got a link to a nice chart or graph where this stuff is collected?
Okay, I'm using 2.0. And it's fine. As in, it hasn't crashed yet, it's nice and fast, it isn't eating all of the resources on my system, updates for the theme I use and all but one of the extensions were found automatically, and... it's fine.
So when I say it's fine, am I (according to you) committing a disservice by saying that my experience has been fine? Are only negative reports doing a "service" to Firefox, while positive reports should be silenced?
Help me out here.
P.S. I'm using 2.0, and it's fine. In fact, I like it a lot, in particular the forward/back speedup.