Oh great, yet another thing with the "My" prefix. It has to be my #1 pet peeve in all of computing. It seems to be some kind of conspiracy by marketing people to force us all to use baby-talk to do anything with a computer.
Part of what bothers me about this phenomenon is that the word "My" is so selfish. I think a lot of the problems we are seeing on the Internet come from this selfishness (spam, viruses). "My" is so vague and relative. Why not give "My Computer" a name so more than one person can talk about it. "My" is usually not accurate. Computers and other resources are frequently shared.
I can't even begin to understand what "MySQL" is supposed to mean.
It seems like I'm alone on this one though. Everyone acts like I'm crazy when I try to discuss this. Anyone else out there feel this way about the word "My"? Maybe we can form some type of support group.
True, when you are talking to other engineers or technical people, you can turn the ego off. But be sure to turn it back on if you are talking to someone wearing a tie, or you are at a job interview.
A lot of business people will regard you with suspicion if you are not overly confident about yourself. Although I prefer to undersell and overdeliver, sometimes nobody will give you the chance to do anything if you can't sell yourself at all.
I guess I will throw in my two cents while I'm at it...
I was much like you in many ways and it took me two years of college to get over it. This dicipline thing people are talking about here is a really good thing, but its hard to turn on overnight when you haven't had to use it before. You might even fuck up a few times before you really get the hang of it.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but the thing that really helped me become a diciplined student was a part-time job on campus. If you are just hanging out with your friends in the dorm all day, time loses its meaning and it is easy to never study. Work helps give you a framework to budget your time.
Thats fine for someone running Java at home in their free time, but if you are a company that needs to redistribute the JRE, the current source licence is only good to help you pinpoint the bug that is screwing you. You couldn't go ahead and fix it, because the licence doesn't permit you to redistribute the modified version.
That really removes the incentive for anyone outside to invest any time on their code.
The parent is modded funny, but I have to wonder, is this what the Linux community is coming to when the "power users" are using a File Open dialog to edit system files and relying heavily on gui tools to do system administration.
Looking further down, I see:
Ken Barber teaches Linux system administration at Lane Community College in Eugene, Ore.,
Now I'm really distrubed. I realize the value in making things easy for the home user, and I think that is where these types of tools fit naturally. But when system administrators and people who claim to be knowledgable about Linux start to rely on them and not know how things are really done, then I start to worry. I hope we are not just trying to cater to the same desires that make Windows the mess that it is.
Now would be the perfect time to start the class-action lawsuit. A great way to show potential investors the liability they are about to buy into and hopefully drive down the amount of money they are able to raise.
If you make Linux better than windows and keep it free, it will become more popular. Just remember that 95% of your audience doesn't give a shit about games, or how fast pieces of backend code work, or how revolutionary it will be for them to have a limitlessly configurable desktop. They're at work. They want to sell things, communicate with their customers, keep track of their finances, stay organized, and then turn the thing off and go home,
Am I the only one who thinks the cost of attracting the masses is greater than the benefit? If we have to dumb down and cripple what makes Linux great, what is the point?
The solution seems to be creating appliances (like Tivo) and a front ends (like KDE and Gnome) that are accessible to users and hide the complexities of using a computer. At the same time Linux would not be completely crippled for those of us who never use a file browser window.
I think you also underestimate the willingness of *some* regular people to learn about ways of taking the mindless drudgery out of their lives (witness the popularity of Visual Basic). If all these graphical tools are complement rather than compete with the traditional Unix ways, we would see more of this benefit.
I think the avarage office worker would rather be able to invest the time required to automate these tasks so they can go home and see their families. Wizzy graphics are overrated if you are stuck in the office at 7pm manually dragging and dropping files one by one. Seeing the flying paper somehow isn't as cool the 10000th time as is was the 1st.
I was forced to take a lot of comp sci theory classes that have never and will never be useful on the job. Some of that was interesting, some of it was there simply because the university had professors that knew it and did research on it and they didn't know what else to do with them. Instead of, say, 10% of my course load being required to be physics, they could have had me take even a single class involving databases, something many professional programmers will touch on nearly every day of their working lives.
I liked learning all the stuff from my computer science classes. I think the payoff from learning a lot of theory is more importaint than knowing how to use buzzword x or y. I find that when I am confronted with something I've never seen or used before, I find out that I actually know a lot about it already.
While I haven't used everything from my degree, I have been able to draw heavily on some of the think I learned. I also spend time reading research papers and implement some of the ideas I find in them.
This is my first job, so I don't have anything to compare it to. But hopefully I can keep finding positions where I can keep challenging myself.
I am usually a very down and pessimistic person, but after sitting around doing nothing for 2 years after I graduated, I am the happiest I have ever been. Every day, I feel like I have accomplished something I don't mean accomplished in the "buy buy sell sell" kind of way, more along the personal journey of discovery way. And if you knew my personality, you would realize that me saying something that corny is pretty remarkable.
I have heard of many programmers who did nothing but program printer drivers for the last 20 years get laid off and find out they don't know anything anymore. I hope in 20 years to know substantially more about computer science than I did when I graduated.
Free-trade is all well and good, as long as you are not personally bearing any of costs of being economically optimal.
It's really easy to sit in an economics class and think about people as a group and not individuals. Doing so trivilizes the amount of pain people feel due to economic forces.
I don't think its a matter of US vs. India. In the past, it was easy for a programmer to think of the factory worker as someone who should just accept his fate and move on. At least now the programmer knows exactly what that means.
The idea of free speech is that people who you do not agree with have the right to express their views.
It is interesting that we have come to a time where corporations (legally equivilant to humans, but with out any of the responsibilities) have more free speech rights than people (remember, money is legally equivalent to speech, but without any of the responsibilies).
So, non-taxpaying legal person entities have the right to use their free speech to help elect our leaders.
Translation...
Corporations are allowed to use money to install a figurehead to help further disempower and enslave regular people.
Remember the great promise of the internet is that any regular person can put their silly ideas up for other regular people to read (like i'm doing now). Just wait until the free-marketers allow one company to own every switch between you and anyone else, then we will see.
I guess this seems a little off topic, but I guess what really bothers me is when corporate entities cry that their free speech is being impeded upon, especially when they use that power to silence real flesh and blood human-beings.
The thing about programming is that you have to have the appropriate level of fluency (in relation to what you are looking at) to appreciate the elegance of a particular design. So amongst programmers, it is an art, but there is no way for the general public to appreciate programming as art.
What happens when you have an office full of Slashdot readers behind a NAT? I thought for a minute that I might be less distracted at work if I was not constantly checking the Slashdot page, but after seeing the limitation on use, I realized that RSS just wouldn't be practical.
I wonder what it means in the FAQ about "pounding our servers". I don't understand how serving RSS is more stressful than serving the main page. The actual content of that page is generated periodically and then the static version is sent out?
This brings me around again to the notion of licensing software developers and then making them accountable for the usability of the product.
In the beginning, do you think it was easy to get the first Linux kernel version, find something to bootstrap it off of and somehow create a functioning system?
Should we have held Linus accountable for this?
Would we have been a lot better off if the police hauled Linus off for being an "unlicenced software developer"?
Would we have been better of if Linus stopped at version 0.01 so he could design an installer, a window system, and write accessible documentation?
Other people who were better at these things pitched in. Thats the whole idea behind Free software. Thats how we got to where we are today.
I took a few financial accounging classes during the bubble, and had a professor who spent a lot of class time trying to rationalize high valuations. There was always some reason why the rules didn't apply to the dot-coms.
The problem was that even though to a reasonable person, the whole dot-com thing seemed like a giant ponzi scheme, nobody was willing to admit they didn't get it, because that would show how unhip they were.
The other problem is that studying the financial statements is a waste of time when companies are actively trying to defraud the investing public.
I agree that standards are a good investment, but shouldn't be too hastily created. It is a good thing to have several groups going in their own direction for a while. We will learn a lot more about the problem and see what ideas work and what ideas don't.
It is hard to know these things a priori. The cost of a standard that is created before the problem is solved, is that 10 years later everyone is locked into some not-so-good decisions that just needed more time.
It seems like the most damning evidence and contradictions about SCO comes from their own website. Perhaps this is why they want to appear to be DOS'd.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh great, yet another thing with the "My" prefix. It has to be my #1 pet peeve in all of computing. It seems to be some kind of conspiracy by marketing people to force us all to use baby-talk to do anything with a computer.
Part of what bothers me about this phenomenon is that the word "My" is so selfish. I think a lot of the problems we are seeing on the Internet come from this selfishness (spam, viruses). "My" is so vague and relative. Why not give "My Computer" a name so more than one person can talk about it. "My" is usually not accurate. Computers and other resources are frequently shared.
I can't even begin to understand what "MySQL" is supposed to mean.
It seems like I'm alone on this one though. Everyone acts like I'm crazy when I try to discuss this. Anyone else out there feel this way about the word "My"? Maybe we can form some type of support group.
I'm using Debian, so I guess I will see how good it is in a few weeks ;^)
It would be nice if we could make objects we find in real life more like what we find in a computer.
True, when you are talking to other engineers or technical people, you can turn the ego off. But be sure to turn it back on if you are talking to someone wearing a tie, or you are at a job interview.
A lot of business people will regard you with suspicion if you are not overly confident about yourself. Although I prefer to undersell and overdeliver, sometimes nobody will give you the chance to do anything if you can't sell yourself at all.
I guess I will throw in my two cents while I'm at it...
I was much like you in many ways and it took me two years of college to get over it. This dicipline thing people are talking about here is a really good thing, but its hard to turn on overnight when you haven't had to use it before. You might even fuck up a few times before you really get the hang of it.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but the thing that really helped me become a diciplined student was a part-time job on campus. If you are just hanging out with your friends in the dorm all day, time loses its meaning and it is easy to never study. Work helps give you a framework to budget your time.
From the fortune file:
First law of debate:
Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.
Thats fine for someone running Java at home in their free time, but if you are a company that needs to redistribute the JRE, the current source licence is only good to help you pinpoint the bug that is screwing you. You couldn't go ahead and fix it, because the licence doesn't permit you to redistribute the modified version.
That really removes the incentive for anyone outside to invest any time on their code.
The parent is modded funny, but I have to wonder, is this what the Linux community is coming to when the "power users" are using a File Open dialog to edit system files and relying heavily on gui tools to do system administration.
Looking further down, I see:
Ken Barber teaches Linux system administration at Lane Community College in Eugene, Ore.,
Now I'm really distrubed. I realize the value in making things easy for the home user, and I think that is where these types of tools fit naturally. But when system administrators and people who claim to be knowledgable about Linux start to rely on them and not know how things are really done, then I start to worry. I hope we are not just trying to cater to the same desires that make Windows the mess that it is.
You use the mouse? I'd rather have cooling for my foot peddles.
I like the idea of a cool stream of air blowing up my pants...Oops, did I say that out loud.
Imagine you just kept the reel to reel recording. At some point it will be hard to track down a reel to reel player and you will be screwed.
Now would be the perfect time to start the class-action lawsuit. A great way to show potential investors the liability they are about to buy into and hopefully drive down the amount of money they are able to raise.
If you make Linux better than windows and keep it free, it will become more popular. Just remember that 95% of your audience doesn't give a shit about games, or how fast pieces of backend code work, or how revolutionary it will be for them to have a limitlessly configurable desktop. They're at work. They want to sell things, communicate with their customers, keep track of their finances, stay organized, and then turn the thing off and go home,
Am I the only one who thinks the cost of attracting the masses is greater than the benefit? If we have to dumb down and cripple what makes Linux great, what is the point?
The solution seems to be creating appliances (like Tivo) and a front ends (like KDE and Gnome) that are accessible to users and hide the complexities of using a computer. At the same time Linux would not be completely crippled for those of us who never use a file browser window.
I think you also underestimate the willingness of *some* regular people to learn about ways of taking the mindless drudgery out of their lives (witness the popularity of Visual Basic). If all these graphical tools are complement rather than compete with the traditional Unix ways, we would see more of this benefit.
I think the avarage office worker would rather be able to invest the time required to automate these tasks so they can go home and see their families. Wizzy graphics are overrated if you are stuck in the office at 7pm manually dragging and dropping files one by one. Seeing the flying paper somehow isn't as cool the 10000th time as is was the 1st.
I like your idea. Can we call it a Guild though. We like to think of ourselves as artists ;)
I was forced to take a lot of comp sci theory classes that have never and will never be useful on the job. Some of that was interesting, some of it was there simply because the university had professors that knew it and did research on it and they didn't know what else to do with them. Instead of, say, 10% of my course load being required to be physics, they could have had me take even a single class involving databases, something many professional programmers will touch on nearly every day of their working lives.
I liked learning all the stuff from my computer science classes. I think the payoff from learning a lot of theory is more importaint than knowing how to use buzzword x or y. I find that when I am confronted with something I've never seen or used before, I find out that I actually know a lot about it already.
While I haven't used everything from my degree, I have been able to draw heavily on some of the think I learned. I also spend time reading research papers and implement some of the ideas I find in them.
This is my first job, so I don't have anything to compare it to. But hopefully I can keep finding positions where I can keep challenging myself.
I am usually a very down and pessimistic person, but after sitting around doing nothing for 2 years after I graduated, I am the happiest I have ever been. Every day, I feel like I have accomplished something I don't mean accomplished in the "buy buy sell sell" kind of way, more along the personal journey of discovery way. And if you knew my personality, you would realize that me saying something that corny is pretty remarkable.
I have heard of many programmers who did nothing but program printer drivers for the last 20 years get laid off and find out they don't know anything anymore. I hope in 20 years to know substantially more about computer science than I did when I graduated.
Its sad that for Wall Street types nothing is worth doing unless it fits in some shiny consumer dildo.
No, I think it is more like this:
Free-trade is all well and good, as long as you are not personally bearing any of costs of being economically optimal.
It's really easy to sit in an economics class and think about people as a group and not individuals. Doing so trivilizes the amount of pain people feel due to economic forces.
I don't think its a matter of US vs. India. In the past, it was easy for a programmer to think of the factory worker as someone who should just accept his fate and move on. At least now the programmer knows exactly what that means.
Nobody remotely knowledgeable about computers would ever believe this, and nobody who knows nothing about computers would possibly attempt to do this.
;^)
Oh, you must be referring to the types who read Slashdot
Most Debian users would not like to pollute their systems with a converted RPM. I would much rather install non-Debian packages by hand.
The idea of free speech is that people who you do not agree with have the right to express their views.
It is interesting that we have come to a time where corporations (legally equivilant to humans, but with out any of the responsibilities) have more free speech rights than people (remember, money is legally equivalent to speech, but without any of the responsibilies).
So, non-taxpaying legal person entities have the right to use their free speech to help elect our leaders.
Translation...
Corporations are allowed to use money to install a figurehead to help further disempower and enslave regular people.
Remember the great promise of the internet is that any regular person can put their silly ideas up for other regular people to read (like i'm doing now). Just wait until the free-marketers allow one company to own every switch between you and anyone else, then we will see.
I guess this seems a little off topic, but I guess what really bothers me is when corporate entities cry that their free speech is being impeded upon, especially when they use that power to silence real flesh and blood human-beings.
The thing about programming is that you have to have the appropriate level of fluency (in relation to what you are looking at) to appreciate the elegance of a particular design. So amongst programmers, it is an art, but there is no way for the general public to appreciate programming as art.
What happens when you have an office full of Slashdot readers behind a NAT? I thought for a minute that I might be less distracted at work if I was not constantly checking the Slashdot page, but after seeing the limitation on use, I realized that RSS just wouldn't be practical.
I wonder what it means in the FAQ about "pounding our servers". I don't understand how serving RSS is more stressful than serving the main page. The actual content of that page is generated periodically and then the static version is sent out?
This brings me around again to the notion of licensing software developers and then making them accountable for the usability of the product.
In the beginning, do you think it was easy to get the first Linux kernel version, find something to bootstrap it off of and somehow create a functioning system?
Should we have held Linus accountable for this?
Would we have been a lot better off if the police hauled Linus off for being an "unlicenced software developer"?
Would we have been better of if Linus stopped at version 0.01 so he could design an installer, a window system, and write accessible documentation?
Other people who were better at these things pitched in. Thats the whole idea behind Free software. Thats how we got to where we are today.
I took a few financial accounging classes during the bubble, and had a professor who spent a lot of class time trying to rationalize high valuations. There was always some reason why the rules didn't apply to the dot-coms.
The problem was that even though to a reasonable person, the whole dot-com thing seemed like a giant ponzi scheme, nobody was willing to admit they didn't get it, because that would show how unhip they were.
The other problem is that studying the financial statements is a waste of time when companies are actively trying to defraud the investing public.
I agree that standards are a good investment, but shouldn't be too hastily created. It is a good thing to have several groups going in their own direction for a while. We will learn a lot more about the problem and see what ideas work and what ideas don't.
It is hard to know these things a priori. The cost of a standard that is created before the problem is solved, is that 10 years later everyone is locked into some not-so-good decisions that just needed more time.
Sadly, to the rest of the world, Americans are the terrorists.
It seems like the most damning evidence and contradictions about SCO comes from their own website. Perhaps this is why they want to appear to be DOS'd.