"He didn't say "making them user friendly" he said "trying to make them user friendly". Big difference."
Hey if you want to play that game with me, fine. You can't "make" a user friendly system without "trying". His point wasn't that some systems are user-friendly and non-frustrating. His point was that the very act of "trying" to make them user friendly was the cause of the frustration. His implication: you shouldn't even want a user-friendly system and if you use one and are frustrated you only have yourself to blame.
"Personally, I find some of the "features" of Windows (hiding extensions, blaming the user when the system crashes (Win98), etc.) to be very friendly."
Linux fans love Win9x almost as much as Linux because it's an excellent source of straw men. Stable versions of Windows have been available for over a decade but BSOD's are just too much fun to stop talking about.
"What I like about Linux over Windows is that Linux assumes that I know what I'm doing, doesn't talk down to me, and in general doesn't piss me off like Windows does."
Perhaps they'll add a "don't piss off Charles W. Griswold" feature to the next version of Windows.
"When I teach free computing courses to the community, I often teach that a lot of the frustrations that many of us have with computers are a result of trying to make them user friendly."
Sorry this sounds like double-speak to me. User-friendly systems were developed in response to the problems users had with the systems that preceeded them and largely solved those problems.
The majority of current computer users would simply not put up with a CLI as their primary interface.
It's ironic that he calls the idea of people working for nothing a myth but uses a myth to prove it:
"At top of the pyramid, you have these top 2% of developers that are 10 times -- in some cases 100 times -- more productive than the rest."
This is a very popular myth with rathy shaky evidence. Even the most modestly talented develper can write one line of code in 15 seconds. Who do you know that can write 100 lines of code in 15 seconds? Of course any meaningful measure of productivity would go beyond LOC, but that just weakens the case further since there are no established standards for comprehensive software productivity. We can't define productivity in any meaningful way, but we make broad claims about it anyway.
My joke is that 98% of developers believe that they are in the top 2%.
"And an army of Slashbots who have never accomplished anything think that they are experts on labour, too, even when thier sky-is-falling predictions contradict our fantastically cushy way of life."
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I'd stack my 20+ years of professional accomplishments against Graham's anytime. It's just my bank account that doesn't stack up.
So, is he proposing that the number of jobs offered is a function of the number of people who want one? So if everybody quit their jobs and took a vacation a maximum of 10% of those jobs would be offered because of his 10% rule?
A guy gets rich selling something to Yahoo for an absurd amount of money and he thinks it makes him an expert in labor.
"It also means that you can't be forced to work a certain number of hours."
Well, that's just as true if you're non-exempt. If you are hourly and you don't work the hours your employer wants, you won't get paid as much and you'll probably get fired. If you're exempt and don't work the hours your employer wants, you probably will be fired.
The bottom line is that if you don't keep your boss happy, you'll be fired. That's "mandatory" in my book.
"How else can you explain the fact that VIM/Emacs is still in heavy use today?"
The harder a program is to learn the less likely those who master it are willing to give it up. There's also an incentive to promote the program to others, thus reinforcing and extending the value of being a guru. This is a core UNIX cultural characteristic.
The real problem isn't the lack of support of obscure features, it's the lack of true file compatibilty.
As we learned in the early days of PC clones, 99% compatibility isn't really much better than 0% compatibility.
Compatiblity is a losing strategy for competing with MS Office anyway. You need to make a product so much better that people will drop Office to use it.
Too bad. You missed the suspense of waiting 3 years to find out if Darth was really Luke's father.
One of the coolest moments in Star Wars for me was going to see the original movie when it was re-released 2 years after TESB and seeing the surprise trailer for ROTJ. I don't think any trailer before or since has had the same impact.
Like the old song says, you can be self-employed and "work at nothing all day".
Great ideas aren't that easy to come by and they're not enough anyway. Neither is hard work and motivation. You also have to be a skillful salesman and/or very lucky to be self-employed your entire career.
"Intelligence was measured with standardized intelligence tests"
"But when intelligence is correlated with a biological reality such as brain volume, it becomes harder to argue that human intelligence can't be measured or that the scores do not reflect something meaningful"
So performance on IQ tests (which are not proven to reflect true intelligence) correlate with brain volume (which is also not proven to reflect true intelligence).
He is attempting to prove two things at once without any known standard.
No stats, just an educated guess. You don't really think Eclipse is the top IDE used for developing Windows apps or OS X apps do you?
Are you sure that even 50% of Unix or Linux developers use it?
I think if you make your own honest estimate of Eclipse use in each category it won't add up to 49% or greater.
That doesn't mean it's no good or that it's use won't grow. I'm just challenging your claim that anyone who is a software developer counts it among their most useful tools.
I think you're confused. It was Obi-Wan who told Luke that Vader killed his father, not Yoda.
Then there were problems like Episode 5 where Obi-Wan tells Luke that Yoda was "the Jedi Master who taught me". Its possible that Yoda taught Obi-Wan a little as a child, but the clear implication is that Yoda was Obi-Wan's master. Or is this just another example of Obi-Wan's compulsive lying.
Remember that Lucas as the writer was in full control of Luke's questions. So Star Wars could have been easily written in such a way that Obi-Wan could have witheld information on Luke's father without actually lying to him.
If you look at the entire scene where Obi-Wan talks about Luke's father, Obi-Wan lies a lot more than he needs to:
Luke's uncle didn't have any reason to think Anakin ever followed Obi-Wan on any "damned fool adventure".
The lightsaber he gave Luke wasn't his father's (where did Obi-Wan get it) and Anakin obviously didn't want him to have it when he was old enough (since he didn't know Luke existed).
Why did they hide Luke on his father's home planet and let him keep Anakin's last name?
If you look at all the evidence in Star Wars, you can make a much better case for Luke not being Darth's son.
One final point. Lucas has stated that one of the difficult moments in filming Star Wars was telling Alec Guiness that he was going to be killed in the middle of the movie. If Lucas was changing major plot points of Star Wars while shooting it, is it really likely that he had the plot of all 9 (I mean 6) movies worked out in advance?
I guess you didn't see Star Wars in the theatre in it's orginal release. It wasn't orginally called Episode 4.
After Star Wars was successful Lucas started talking about the 9 movies. Later he claimed he never said that and that there was always going to be 6. Of course, his denial came many years later, not when the interview was first published.
"My understanding is that he *did* write all six episodes in advance, long before the filming of ep IV."
I'm sure that Lucas would like everyone to believe that, but I don't. Perhaps he can rationalize his lie the same way Obi-Wan did: It's true from "a certain point of view".
The fact is that there's no good reason why Obi-Wan had to lie to Luke other than the fact that Lucas had no idea that Darth was Luke's father.
I mostly disagree with what you say, but one thing that has changed a lot are the fans who saw the orginal trilogy when they were children.
I was in college when I saw it and squirmed a little while the Ewoks were on the screen, but overall I liked the movies a lot.
It's only natural that when the kids grow up their tolerance for cuteness is reduced.
The problem with the second trilogy is that Lucas had to be consistent with the first (although in many ways he failed to do anyway).
Having Darth turn out to be Luke's father rather than his murderer was great for TESB, but doomed Episodes I-III to be a major downer.
Had the truth been as Obi-wan had orginally told Luke, it would have made a better prequal in my opinion. I would much rather have watched a movie about Darth's betryal of Luke's father.
After all it's not as if he really thought the whole six movie plot out in advance.
Look at the lame attempt to escape from the corner he painted himself in when he had Darth built C3PO. Wiping C3PO's memory indeed. He should have wiped our memories instead. That would have solved all his consistency problems.
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"He didn't say "making them user friendly" he said "trying to make them user friendly". Big difference."
Hey if you want to play that game with me, fine. You can't "make" a user friendly system without "trying". His point wasn't that some systems are user-friendly and non-frustrating. His point was that the very act of "trying" to make them user friendly was the cause of the frustration. His implication: you shouldn't even want a user-friendly system and if you use one and are frustrated you only have yourself to blame.
"Personally, I find some of the "features" of Windows (hiding extensions, blaming the user when the system crashes (Win98), etc.) to be very friendly."
Linux fans love Win9x almost as much as Linux because it's an excellent source of straw men. Stable versions of Windows have been available for over a decade but BSOD's are just too much fun to stop talking about.
"What I like about Linux over Windows is that Linux assumes that I know what I'm doing, doesn't talk down to me, and in general doesn't piss me off like Windows does."
Perhaps they'll add a "don't piss off Charles W. Griswold" feature to the next version of Windows.
"When I teach free computing courses to the community, I often teach that a lot of the frustrations that many of us have with computers are a result of trying to make them user friendly."
Sorry this sounds like double-speak to me. User-friendly systems were developed in response to the problems users had with the systems that preceeded them and largely solved those problems.
The majority of current computer users would simply not put up with a CLI as their primary interface.
It's ironic that he calls the idea of people working for nothing a myth but uses a myth to prove it:
"At top of the pyramid, you have these top 2% of developers that are 10 times -- in some cases 100 times -- more productive than the rest."
This is a very popular myth with rathy shaky evidence. Even the most modestly talented develper can write one line of code in 15 seconds. Who do you know that can write 100 lines of code in 15 seconds? Of course any meaningful measure of productivity would go beyond LOC, but that just weakens the case further since there are no established standards for comprehensive software productivity. We can't define productivity in any meaningful way, but we make broad claims about it anyway.
My joke is that 98% of developers believe that they are in the top 2%.
"And an army of Slashbots who have never accomplished anything think that they are experts on labour, too, even when thier sky-is-falling predictions contradict our fantastically cushy way of life."
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I'd stack my 20+ years of professional accomplishments against Graham's anytime. It's just my bank account that doesn't stack up.
So, is he proposing that the number of jobs offered is a function of the number of people who want one? So if everybody quit their jobs and took a vacation a maximum of 10% of those jobs would be offered because of his 10% rule?
A guy gets rich selling something to Yahoo for an absurd amount of money and he thinks it makes him an expert in labor.
"Not to mention the recent trend (last 5 years or so) of mandatory overtime"
This has been standard practice for at least 20 years, if not longer.
"It also means that you can't be forced to work a certain number of hours."
Well, that's just as true if you're non-exempt. If you are hourly and you don't work the hours your employer wants, you won't get paid as much and you'll probably get fired. If you're exempt and don't work the hours your employer wants, you probably will be fired.
The bottom line is that if you don't keep your boss happy, you'll be fired. That's "mandatory" in my book.
"How else can you explain the fact that VIM/Emacs is still in heavy use today?"
The harder a program is to learn the less likely those who master it are willing to give it up. There's also an incentive to promote the program to others, thus reinforcing and extending the value of being a guru. This is a core UNIX cultural characteristic.
Well, if IBM was really so pro F/OSS they wouldn't have agreed to this part of the settlement.
This just proves that IBM is planning to use MS products for many years to come.
"I dare you to name a single Microsoft project that isn't ultimately copied from something a PHD or scientist dreamed up."
Given that the vast majority of tech ideas and implementations weren't dreamed up by either PHD's or scientists, it shouldn't be too hard.
The real problem isn't the lack of support of obscure features, it's the lack of true file compatibilty.
As we learned in the early days of PC clones, 99% compatibility isn't really much better than 0% compatibility.
Compatiblity is a losing strategy for competing with MS Office anyway. You need to make a product so much better that people will drop Office to use it.
Too bad. You missed the suspense of waiting 3 years to find out if Darth was really Luke's father.
One of the coolest moments in Star Wars for me was going to see the original movie when it was re-released 2 years after TESB and seeing the surprise trailer for ROTJ. I don't think any trailer before or since has had the same impact.
More like "WE GOT ATTACKED? ATTACK SOMEBODY, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO! WHERE'S MY DOG, I WANT TO KICK IT!
nonsense words to fool the lame lameness filter:
sdfsd dsfsdfds sdfsdfds sdfsdfs sdfsdfsd sdfsdf
sdfdsfsdf sdfsdfsdf sdfsdfsdf sdfsdfs
Like the old song says, you can be self-employed and "work at nothing all day".
Great ideas aren't that easy to come by and they're not enough anyway. Neither is hard work and motivation. You also have to be a skillful salesman and/or very lucky to be self-employed your entire career.
"Intelligence was measured with standardized intelligence tests"
"But when intelligence is correlated with a biological reality such as brain volume, it becomes harder to argue that human intelligence can't be measured or that the scores do not reflect something meaningful"
So performance on IQ tests (which are not proven to reflect true intelligence) correlate with brain volume (which is also not proven to reflect true intelligence).
He is attempting to prove two things at once without any known standard.
I missed that. Did he appear to keep it?
No stats, just an educated guess. You don't really think Eclipse is the top IDE used for developing Windows apps or OS X apps do you?
Are you sure that even 50% of Unix or Linux developers use it?
I think if you make your own honest estimate of Eclipse use in each category it won't add up to 49% or greater.
That doesn't mean it's no good or that it's use won't grow. I'm just challenging your claim that anyone who is a software developer counts it among their most useful tools.
I think you're confused. It was Obi-Wan who told Luke that Vader killed his father, not Yoda.
Then there were problems like Episode 5 where Obi-Wan tells Luke that Yoda was "the Jedi Master who taught me". Its possible that Yoda taught Obi-Wan a little as a child, but the clear implication is that Yoda was Obi-Wan's master. Or is this just another example of Obi-Wan's compulsive lying.
But I think he was more likely to remember who created him than understand the soap opera details of the twin's birth. Does C3PO even understand sex?
In any case, there wasn't any good reason for him to be present at the birth anyway except to justify the memory wipe.
Remember that Lucas as the writer was in full control of Luke's questions. So Star Wars could have been easily written in such a way that Obi-Wan could have witheld information on Luke's father without actually lying to him.
If you look at the entire scene where Obi-Wan talks about Luke's father, Obi-Wan lies a lot more than he needs to:
Luke's uncle didn't have any reason to think Anakin ever followed Obi-Wan on any "damned fool adventure".
The lightsaber he gave Luke wasn't his father's (where did Obi-Wan get it) and Anakin obviously didn't want him to have it when he was old enough (since he didn't know Luke existed).
Why did they hide Luke on his father's home planet and let him keep Anakin's last name?
If you look at all the evidence in Star Wars, you can make a much better case for Luke not being Darth's son.
One final point. Lucas has stated that one of the difficult moments in filming Star Wars was telling Alec Guiness that he was going to be killed in the middle of the movie. If Lucas was changing major plot points of Star Wars while shooting it, is it really likely that he had the plot of all 9 (I mean 6) movies worked out in advance?
I guess you didn't see Star Wars in the theatre in it's orginal release. It wasn't orginally called Episode 4.
After Star Wars was successful Lucas started talking about the 9 movies. Later he claimed he never said that and that there was always going to be 6. Of course, his denial came many years later, not when the interview was first published.
"My understanding is that he *did* write all six episodes in advance, long before the filming of ep IV."
I'm sure that Lucas would like everyone to believe that, but I don't. Perhaps he can rationalize his lie the same way Obi-Wan did: It's true from "a certain point of view".
The fact is that there's no good reason why Obi-Wan had to lie to Luke other than the fact that Lucas had no idea that Darth was Luke's father.
I mostly disagree with what you say, but one thing that has changed a lot are the fans who saw the orginal trilogy when they were children.
I was in college when I saw it and squirmed a little while the Ewoks were on the screen, but overall I liked the movies a lot.
It's only natural that when the kids grow up their tolerance for cuteness is reduced.
The problem with the second trilogy is that Lucas had to be consistent with the first (although in many ways he failed to do anyway).
Having Darth turn out to be Luke's father rather than his murderer was great for TESB, but doomed Episodes I-III to be a major downer.
Had the truth been as Obi-wan had orginally told Luke, it would have made a better prequal in my opinion. I would much rather have watched a movie about Darth's betryal of Luke's father.
After all it's not as if he really thought the whole six movie plot out in advance.
Look at the lame attempt to escape from the corner he painted himself in when he had Darth built C3PO. Wiping C3PO's memory indeed. He should have wiped our memories instead. That would have solved all his consistency problems.
Don't forget the awful direction. Perhaps Hayden's best work ended up on the cutting room floor.