You make a good point. All too often people respond to the point made by the person submitting a link to a story rather than the story itself. And then people respond to the responses to the contributors point and we're playing a game of telephone instead of commenting on the external story.
And I must admit I'm probably guilty of that myself.
In many things we do, driving being a notable example, we tend to move repetitive actions to "body memory" in order to reduce the cognitive load. It's strange driving someone else's car, isn't it, when all the controls are in different places and it "feels" different?
In Linux/Unix, our fingers tend to hold a lot of our knowledge. We don't want to have to waste foreground mental processes moving the cursor to the beginning of the line, after all. Whenever my husband sits down at my Linux box, he types a few commands, then mutters and switches my bash editor to VI-style from emacs-style.
If you're used to a visual environment, there's visual noise as well. We tend to stop seeing things that are familiar, so an unfamiliar visual set-up tends to take too much of our attention. This is true no matter what kind of OS it is.
But on Macs or PCs, it goes beyond that. To a large extent, it's a free vs commercial software issue. On any Linux box, chances are good the familiar apps are there whether or not the person whose box it is uses them. Even if he uses emacs, and it's sitting right there on the desktop, you can probably get to vi through a shell. But on a Mac or Windows box, you're not going to find WordPerfect if the owner is a Word user. Even worse is if you need to do some image processing (for example) and he or she isn't a graphics person; then you're not going to be able to do certain tasks at all.
In conclusion, you're going to have the cognitive noise problem with Nautilus, but probably not the much more wrenching problem of not being able to do certain things at all.
--meredith
--meredith
Makes me think about yesterday's discussion
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 5
The one about young men skipping college to go into techie jobs. Not that a broader education is necessarily a cure for tunnelvision, but perhaps if more geeks had studied history, political science, economics, etc., there would be a greater number of technical folks able to do more than flame.
One important question is how to bring some of this "News for Nerds" to the attention of the masses, in a way that they can understand. The vast majority of people are not technically savvy, yet making them understand that their rights are being eroded is essential to stopping and even reversing these dangerous and often ill-considered rulings.
And how many of them will know anything about philosophy, or psychology, or history, or any of the other things that a higher education can offer? College isn't just about job training, it's about expanding your mind and your knowledge, of discovering areas that you didn't know existed.
Most of the managers I've worked for, the good ones at any rate, preferred to hire software engineers who had degrees in subjects other than Computer Science, because they knew that they would bring a richer mix of experience and creativity to their work.
Excuse me? Writers like Tom Clancy, Stephen King and the like get paid the big bucks because they sell a lot. Readers are voting with their pocketbooks. If you don't like their books, don't buy them; if you do, buy their books or borrow them from the library, but don't steal the books.
> Has anyone considered what an extraordinary situation it
> is where government tax collectors are collecting taxes
> which are funneled straight to corporations?
Actually, the article says "The levies are paid by manufacturers to firms that specialize in collecting royalties on so-called ``intellectual property.'' They then pass these fees on to clients such as authors, music, film or software companies." Assuming this is accurate, I don't think it's fair to characterize it as money going straight to corporations.
I'm not advocating this plan as the way to ameliorate Intellectual Property theft, mind you, or whatever less loaded phrase could be used to describe writers' and artists' work. Having to pay a theft tax even though one hasn't stolen others work doesn't seem to be right. Perhaps in this digital age, there isn't a solution, but writers, artists, and other authors do have a right to be paid for their work and to not have it stolen.
Or is it Digital Convergance? If so, I'm not entirely sure I want to use a product from a company headed by somone who is semi-literate, judging by the myriad grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors in the letter.
With Debian, packages are definitely the way to go. Debian ensures that packages work together correctly, don't stomp on each others files and handles dependencies properly.
Installing from a tarball may give you a better idea of what's going where, but three months down the road are you going to remember that? A package database helps keep track of things for you, whether it be RPM or Debian.
Well, actually, when a radio station plays a piece of music, they pay royalties to the artist. Same with (physical) jukeboxes, I believe: royalties are paid for each time a song is played. The legal issue doesn't have to do with the medium, per se, but whether the artist (company, whatever) is compensated.
Microsoft is not a literal monopoly and the ruling didn't say that it was. Rather, Microsoft dominates the microcomputer market to the point that it can indulge in monopolistic behavior.
Every operating system is a competitor to Microsoft in some sense, but that doesn't mean that any given OS is going to be able to get more than a tiny market share.
Linux may kick Window's ass in many ways, but it certainly isn't kicking it economically or in market penetration
I'm not sure it's worth bothering replying to this, but... I'm a Mac user and, yes, you're right, I don't want to make everyone use the Mac. I believe in using the best tool for the job, and the Mac is a better choice than Windows for just about every non-techie I know. If he or she wanted to run a server, I'd recommend Linux.
The right way to combat mediocrity is with quality, not with blind devotion or fanaticism. IMHO.
I understand that unstable has been rather out of date because everyone was focusing on getting Potato out. Now that it's released, I imagine unstable will get closer to the "latest", making your heart pit-a-pat a bit more.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn humans! They're nothing but trouble. Someone should get them away from computers.
--meredith
You make a good point. All too often people respond to the point made by the person submitting a link to a story rather than the story itself. And then people respond to the responses to the contributors point and we're playing a game of telephone instead of commenting on the external story.
And I must admit I'm probably guilty of that myself.
--meredith
--meredith
In many things we do, driving being a notable example, we tend to move repetitive actions to "body memory" in order to reduce the cognitive load. It's strange driving someone else's car, isn't it, when all the controls are in different places and it "feels" different?
In Linux/Unix, our fingers tend to hold a lot of our knowledge. We don't want to have to waste foreground mental processes moving the cursor to the beginning of the line, after all. Whenever my husband sits down at my Linux box, he types a few commands, then mutters and switches my bash editor to VI-style from emacs-style.
If you're used to a visual environment, there's visual noise as well. We tend to stop seeing things that are familiar, so an unfamiliar visual set-up tends to take too much of our attention. This is true no matter what kind of OS it is.
But on Macs or PCs, it goes beyond that. To a large extent, it's a free vs commercial software issue. On any Linux box, chances are good the familiar apps are there whether or not the person whose box it is uses them. Even if he uses emacs, and it's sitting right there on the desktop, you can probably get to vi through a shell. But on a Mac or Windows box, you're not going to find WordPerfect if the owner is a Word user. Even worse is if you need to do some image processing (for example) and he or she isn't a graphics person; then you're not going to be able to do certain tasks at all.
In conclusion, you're going to have the cognitive noise problem with Nautilus, but probably not the much more wrenching problem of not being able to do certain things at all.
--meredith
--meredith
The one about young men skipping college to go into techie jobs. Not that a broader education is necessarily a cure for tunnelvision, but perhaps if more geeks had studied history, political science, economics, etc., there would be a greater number of technical folks able to do more than flame.
One important question is how to bring some of this "News for Nerds" to the attention of the masses, in a way that they can understand. The vast majority of people are not technically savvy, yet making them understand that their rights are being eroded is essential to stopping and even reversing these dangerous and often ill-considered rulings.
--meredith
--meredith
And how many of them will know anything about philosophy, or psychology, or history, or any of the other things that a higher education can offer? College isn't just about job training, it's about expanding your mind and your knowledge, of discovering areas that you didn't know existed.
Most of the managers I've worked for, the good ones at any rate, preferred to hire software engineers who had degrees in subjects other than Computer Science, because they knew that they would bring a richer mix of experience and creativity to their work.
Excuse me? Writers like Tom Clancy, Stephen King and the like get paid the big bucks because they sell a lot. Readers are voting with their pocketbooks. If you don't like their books, don't buy them; if you do, buy their books or borrow them from the library, but don't steal the books.
> Has anyone considered what an extraordinary situation it > is where government tax collectors are collecting taxes > which are funneled straight to corporations? Actually, the article says "The levies are paid by manufacturers to firms that specialize in collecting royalties on so-called ``intellectual property.'' They then pass these fees on to clients such as authors, music, film or software companies." Assuming this is accurate, I don't think it's fair to characterize it as money going straight to corporations. I'm not advocating this plan as the way to ameliorate Intellectual Property theft, mind you, or whatever less loaded phrase could be used to describe writers' and artists' work. Having to pay a theft tax even though one hasn't stolen others work doesn't seem to be right. Perhaps in this digital age, there isn't a solution, but writers, artists, and other authors do have a right to be paid for their work and to not have it stolen.
Or is it Digital Convergance? If so, I'm not entirely sure I want to use a product from a company headed by somone who is semi-literate, judging by the myriad grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors in the letter.
With Debian, packages are definitely the way to go. Debian ensures that packages work together correctly, don't stomp on each others files and handles dependencies properly. Installing from a tarball may give you a better idea of what's going where, but three months down the road are you going to remember that? A package database helps keep track of things for you, whether it be RPM or Debian.
Well, actually, when a radio station plays a piece of music, they pay royalties to the artist. Same with (physical) jukeboxes, I believe: royalties are paid for each time a song is played. The legal issue doesn't have to do with the medium, per se, but whether the artist (company, whatever) is compensated.
Linux may kick Window's ass in many ways, but it certainly isn't kicking it economically or in market penetration
--meredith
The right way to combat mediocrity is with quality, not with blind devotion or fanaticism. IMHO.
--meredith
I understand that unstable has been rather out of date because everyone was focusing on getting Potato out. Now that it's released, I imagine unstable will get closer to the "latest", making your heart pit-a-pat a bit more.