That's an average, a mean of the rate of literacy of the population. I think what the original poster was alluding to was the fact that the graduates of various educational institutions have gotten dumber, relatively speaking, since the 1920s.
How could this be true, but with literacy *also* on the rise? Simple. More people have access to education nowadays, but that education is of lesser quality compared to the educations handed out during the early part of the 20th century.
Want proof? Pick up something published before, say, 1970, and read it. I'll wager that you'll find a higher standard of writing, geared towards a much more literate audience. I've got a small pile of old how-to books about everything from photography to housework, and all of them are written in much more articulate language than almost anything I've seen in a bookstore in the past decade.
Note: If you find problems with my writing, I apologize in advance, as I've been writing in pretty much nothing but Perl, C, and Japanese over the past few months, so my English has been suffering a bit.
This is sad but true. I'm also a Unix sysadmin, and when I send out my resume, I make it a point to offer it in more than one format -- usually Word97, PDF, OOo, and HTML. Never had a problem with this method.
What I'm surprised at, is that his CV can crash Word. I run OOo 1.4, and I've *never* had a problem with Word users being able to read my documents.
We know quite a bit more than 'almost nothing' about the fundamental nature of the Universe thank you, and while it is quite possible that we might surprise ourselves and find a way around the light-speed barrier, it's highly unlikely.
Your comparison with Newton is quite flawed; Newton bascically founded classical physics as we know it, and other than the work done by Greek mathmaticians, had basically no 'head start'. By contrast, the physicists of today have much more advanced tools, much broader knowledge and talent base, and about ten orders of magintude more in the way of experimental data. In short, while it is true Newton was a true genius, he is still quite far in the past as far as today's physics are concerned.
Every time I hear something like that, how your performance isn't 'fair' to the other students, I think about Atlas Shrugged. I'm not a Randroid by any measure, but she certainly had a good point about the looters and thieves.
Exactly. It gets worse in college as well; I'm a mathematics major, and have at least a small amount of talent for the subject, which is why I *chose* the major. I mean, I've been doing computer work all my life, work as a Unix sysadmin, and have been programming since I was a toddler.
Yet my formal math teacher feels that we, as students, need three pages' worth of homework every night, just to understand simple principles of formal mathematics. Yes, it's a core course, and yes, it is important, but for those of us who just 'get it', punishing us with an hour of homework a night is just insane. I mean, I'm *paying* for this, working my way through school, and it irritates me to no end that I'm spending time that I could be spending on other things that I don't understand as well (like kanji for my Japanese classes) on busywork.
I read Ender's Game. I tried to read some of the rest of Card's work, but to be honest, everything he has written except for Ender's Game is, to put it gently, pure and unadulterated crap.
On the flip side, check out Wizard's First Rile by Terry Goodkind if you haven't already. Richard, the protagonist, fits a lot of the geek stereotypes, but lives in a medieval setting. He isn't as strong as the brutes of the book in any way, but he is honest, hard-working, and above all, very intelligent, and it is his intelligence and drive that enable him to succeed. In addition, Richard is very fair to the people that he deals with; for example, Richard expresses not approving of homosexuality, he readily grants that it's each person's right to love the way they want to.
It is indeed perfectly reasonable to pay ENTERTAINERS for their work. It is not reasonable to pay some bloody cartel which fights tooth-and-claw against any form of distribution medium which they do not control and profit from. Personally, I don't buy CDs, because I think it is wrong for the ENTERTAINERS to get a few pennies out of the twenty dollars I spend to purchase an item that costs all of about five dollars to make and distribute.
The ENTERTAINERS, at least the ones that aren't owned or owned by major corporations, are thrilled about MP3s and BitTorrent. Why? Because they can finally make their work available to a wide audience in a way never before possible. The technology that exists now allowes authors, musicians, and producers to bring their work to the public, without the requirement of access to a multibillion-dollar private distribution network, because they've got a multibillion-dollar public distribution network -- the Internet.
ENTERTAINERS who produce quality in this marketplace are rewarded; look at the Ataris, for example. They put up not only MP3s of all their music, but also make the sheet music and gutair tabs available online FOR FREE, and they still sell CDs and T-shirts like mad. Only rather than the RIAA getting the profits, the band, the people ACTUALLY DOING THE ENTERTAINING, are making money.
The RIAA and MPAA could play in this ballgame, if they were willing to just let people copy; they could still sell at the same price point, and would still make a boatload of cash off the people who are either serious fans, technically illiterate enough to grab the file off of BitTorrent, and people who just want The Theatre or The Concert experience. There is still tons of money to be made, probably more than they make now, if they just played nice with the community.
The problem is, they don't, and they won't. They have extended copyright to the force of patent law, and made it possible to OWN ideas as if they were property, at least in the 'States, and all so that they can control distribution. So that the MPAA and RIAA can guarantee that You Have Paid, and that You Aren't Stealing Their Art. Copyright was intended so that the author of a work could profit for a limited amount of time; it was never intended to turn art into a commercial industry, yet with the present limits on copyright, art can be nothing but a commercial industry.
Art does not come from industry. It comes from taking a pile of ideas, mixing them up, and pulling out something that is somehow new and rehashed at the same time. All of the great novels of the world, all of the great paintings, the great symphonies, every piece of art that has stunned mankind has come about only because people had free access to the ideas. All of art copies other art, and without this process, no new art is produced. The process is, in short, evolutionary, and evolution does not work in a system where the copying of ideas, known as variation in this analogy, does not happen.
The RIAA and MPAA want to own all of Art. They want it packaged, boxed, and unoffensive enough to sell at Wal-Mart. To do this, they must control all distribution, and prevent Those Who Have Not Paid and Those Who Are Not Authorized from being involved in Art as anything more than a passing pursuit. The cartels' quest for money comes at the expense of the ENTERTAINERS, the people producing the art in its myriad forms that we so enjoy, and to claim that this is somehow morally right is a perversion of logic of the highest order.
First, the math thing was more of a side-point, not a main point.
Second, you don't trap future development! The GPL mandates that source code must be made available. Licenses like the GPL specifically allow one to make modifications to the code as they wish, provided that any redistribution includes those changes. This encourages development!
What the GPL *does* do, is prevent other people, the freeloaders, from taking all that work, rebranding it, and selling it at a profit. It keeps the rights to the code squarely where they belong -- in the hands of the developers who funded the work and provided the labor, not in the hands of unscrupulous businessmen who are out to make a quick buck on the generousity of others.
Many programming applications *are* scientific, and eigenvectors are very useful when it comes to linear systems of differential equations, which are used extensively in engineering. (Note: I'm assuming you know this, of course, but that many other readers don't).
There is also a lot of programming which involves physics in some form or another, or at the very least differing rates of change -- multivariable calc is important for writing games, financial anaylsis tools, and more.
Yes, there are a lot of programs on the 'hello world' level, and equally many more that don't ever descend into the gritty world of math, but even so, the designers of these programs would do well to have a basic understanding of the math behind the tools they use. How, otherwise, can a coder know what 'going quadratic' means, and how to avoid it, in terms of a search algorithm? What about having an understanding of inductive logic, so that they can write routines iteratively, rather than recursively? Would you trust an encryption scheme designed by someone with no experience in number theory?
I will admit, I'm biased -- I'm a math-and-science guy, with an emphasis on math, but my original point stands. Namely, that without the requisite background knowledge in mathematics, writing good code on these big calculating machines we call 'computers' is nominally an accident. Ergo, a Good Programmer needs this skill, and is much more rare than Some Guy Who Took Visual Basic Once In Junior College.
One of the things for which I love BitTorrent is the ability to get movies and television programs not available in the 'States. I'm studying Japanese, and don't like most of the Japanese media that is available in the US, as it is marketed, by and large, for the otaku crowd. I mean, yeah, there's some good stuff in there, but most of it is crap.
Having access to BitTorrent means that I can download regular TV shows, dramas, historical programs, and recorded news broadcasts, all of which would be completely unavailable in the U.S. I can download anime that I like, but which isn't popular enough to make it into the U.S. market. These are all very effective study tools, and have helped me improve my listening comprehension markedly.
I'll second the other poster who said, 'Good thing you aren't a developer.' See, development takes work; lots of it, in fact. Writing a program doat does anything more than put 'Hello, world!' on the screen takes a measure of effort that you, as a non-developer, can't really comprehend.
See, writing programs, especially *good* programs, isn't easy. It takes skill, patience, and experience, as well as a certain type of mind that isn't very common. And, before you tell me that even your seventy-two year old mother knows how to program, ask yourself this -- does she know what an eigenvector is? How about maxtrix transforms? Relational algebra? Multivariable calculus?
Why are these important? Because programming requires a high level of mathematical ability, at least if you want to have any understanding of why you are writing code a certain way.
So, all of this together makes a programmer, and people who do this sort of thing pour hours into their work. This is something they have created, and honestly, they should, and do, have the final word over what happens to their works. Some people are generous enough to release their works under a license like the GPL, which enables anyone else to use the program which the programmer has created, but with the caveat that the program can't be stolen and sold.
As a programmer, I'm happy the GPL exists, because there are a lot of ideas I've had for 'open-source' programs, and while I am happy to write them, I don't want to spend months coding, just so that some asshat can try to charge money for something I, as the creator of that thing, have released for free.
Finally, information doesn't 'want' anything -- it's an intangible concept, like 'santa claus' or 'income tax reform'. People want information to be free, and while that's all and good, there are far too many people demanding free information, and far too few people willing to work to provide it.
Right, it won't get through Parliament, but that's not the issue -- invasion of privacy *is* an issue. What do the people get out of this? Nothing, because criminals can use GnuPG as well. Why add yet more government without giving the people additional services?
Right, the US has sales, liquor, and tobacco taxes as well. Liquor taxes are LOWER in the UK, though, which makes a night at the pub affordable, compared to the States.
So, your 'hypothetical' $40K a year employee in the U.S. would be losing about 30% of his income to federal and state taxes, plus sales taxes on the remainder (going with your method of calculation here), bringing the total tax burden to a par with the British system. Except the American has to pay for his own health insurance, from a private company, who will provide much shittier service, almost guaranteed.
Oh, and the American doesn't get public transit, either.
This is the best advice I've seen so far on this article, and is how I learned to handle rollouts when I first started admining -- I know you're not my former boss, but it's nice to see other people in the industry following the same method, because it bloody works.
I'd add on to number two that designing and printing a 'changes' manual is essential for any major rollout; when I deployed a customer support-tracking system for the first time, I set up a little twenty-minute 'training session' in one of the conference rooms, and spent two or three extra hours writing up a short manual, complete with screenshots, covering basic functionality.
Almost every user did with the manual what they wouldn't do with a mass-email -- they read it, and pretty much everyone came to the 'training sessions' (I had to add in two more to cover the demand) to ask questions, and all of this *before* the actual rollout. We also set up a 'beta' demonstration system for people to play on, with notices plastered all over the place that the thing was beta, and that it was going bye-bye.
Those two things helped immeasurably, and while there were still bugs to be ironed out, all the users were very patient about letting us get the thing working, because we took the time to tell them what was going on.
It gets worse when the languages are even more distant; I speak a fair amount of German, and while I could see things like the above causing problems, there are ways around it. In the above case, one could just use the English word 'therapist'. Most Germans today speak English either passably or fluently, thanks to a good education system, and it wouldn't be hard to add in a tidbit about whomever wrote 'therapist' speaking English or whatnot -- thus preserving the wordplay, even though it wouldn't work well across linguistic boundaries.
At the moment, however, I'm about two years' deep into studying Japanese, and *that* is a language that presents some serious translation difficulties. There's a lot of 'stock phrases' in Japanese that you have to know, and a lot of these are tied to historical stories. The politness levels don't have any direct translation.
What's worse, is that the omission of details which are 'obvious' causes hell for any machine translation -- Japanese speakers and writers often drop the subject out of the sentence completely if it's obvious by context, which is sometimes non-obvious, even to a human being -- not that I'm cho-jouzu or anything, but I still get lost sometimes when my girlfriend omits the subject, and I'm wondering who or what the hell she is talking about. Like the time we had a mutual friend with an upcoming birthday, but she didn't mention the 'mutual friend' part, and I was wondering why she was adding an extra birthday into the year for herself, or if I had forgotten it...
I think the point is that selling dumb terminals that just connect up to the Uebernet(tm) for 'content' would be profitable, it would be about as difficult as supporting a telephone. If a unit breaks, replace it; if not, the problem has to be either in the network itself, or on the server-side, where competent people can poke-at-and-fix-it.
This isn't like supporting a desktop system, where you have to guide an incompetent goatfscker, I mean paying customer, through fixing the mail settings they so lovingly screwed up. This is a locked-down system, where the customer can only use and access Safe Things. All the nasty bits that underpin Safe Things will be safely out of their reach, but in full view of the BOFHen back at the central office.
Otherwise known as, The Way It Should Be.
PCs, however, won't go away, because there are far too many hackers who just want their own equipment to play with, as well as companies who need higher-powered equipment for power users (programmers and the like).
Um, I don't see why one distribution would be any 'faster' than another, for the most part; they all run essentially the same code, and per-processor optimizations don't make any real-world difference (i.e., Gentoo). The only real difference might be in boot-up time, because Debian tends to be pretty minimalistic when it comes to the 'base' distribution required for installation, but this is quite tunable in RedHat, SuSE/Novell, Slackware, etc.
I use Debian more because it's designed, or has the appearance of being designed, by-and-for system administators. It's a System-V workalike, which is great for admins dealing with Solaris or AIX[1] in addition to Linux. Nothing compares to APT at all, and the DEB package format is highly superior to RPM -- no stupid per-file dependencies, and a text-backended DB in case you manage to corrupt it somehow. Config files have sane locations under/etc, local custom package distribution is a cinch, and the 'never-upgrade-only-update' mentality saves me a ton of work.
But faster? Probably not.
[1] Well, some parts of AIX, the rest is IBM's gift to admins from the deepest bowels of hell...
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That's an average, a mean of the rate of literacy of the population. I think what the original poster was alluding to was the fact that the graduates of various educational institutions have gotten dumber, relatively speaking, since the 1920s.
How could this be true, but with literacy *also* on the rise? Simple. More people have access to education nowadays, but that education is of lesser quality compared to the educations handed out during the early part of the 20th century.
Want proof? Pick up something published before, say, 1970, and read it. I'll wager that you'll find a higher standard of writing, geared towards a much more literate audience. I've got a small pile of old how-to books about everything from photography to housework, and all of them are written in much more articulate language than almost anything I've seen in a bookstore in the past decade.
Note: If you find problems with my writing, I apologize in advance, as I've been writing in pretty much nothing but Perl, C, and Japanese over the past few months, so my English has been suffering a bit.
Fantastic post! I certainly learned a bit more about the mechanics of the virus.
This is sad but true. I'm also a Unix sysadmin, and when I send out my resume, I make it a point to offer it in more than one format -- usually Word97, PDF, OOo, and HTML. Never had a problem with this method.
What I'm surprised at, is that his CV can crash Word. I run OOo 1.4, and I've *never* had a problem with Word users being able to read my documents.
We know quite a bit more than 'almost nothing' about the fundamental nature of the Universe thank you, and while it is quite possible that we might surprise ourselves and find a way around the light-speed barrier, it's highly unlikely.
Your comparison with Newton is quite flawed; Newton bascically founded classical physics as we know it, and other than the work done by Greek mathmaticians, had basically no 'head start'. By contrast, the physicists of today have much more advanced tools, much broader knowledge and talent base, and about ten orders of magintude more in the way of experimental data. In short, while it is true Newton was a true genius, he is still quite far in the past as far as today's physics are concerned.
These are available in Japan. You rent a DVD and a viewing room with a nice theatre setup, comfortable couches, etc, and watch the movie.
You mean that 'hostile takeover' thing won't work?!?
Being able to quickly add simple fractions in your head: Very Important.
Being able to hand-calculate logarithms: Not So Important.
Every time I hear something like that, how your performance isn't 'fair' to the other students, I think about Atlas Shrugged. I'm not a Randroid by any measure, but she certainly had a good point about the looters and thieves.
Exactly. It gets worse in college as well; I'm a mathematics major, and have at least a small amount of talent for the subject, which is why I *chose* the major. I mean, I've been doing computer work all my life, work as a Unix sysadmin, and have been programming since I was a toddler.
Yet my formal math teacher feels that we, as students, need three pages' worth of homework every night, just to understand simple principles of formal mathematics. Yes, it's a core course, and yes, it is important, but for those of us who just 'get it', punishing us with an hour of homework a night is just insane. I mean, I'm *paying* for this, working my way through school, and it irritates me to no end that I'm spending time that I could be spending on other things that I don't understand as well (like kanji for my Japanese classes) on busywork.
No, but because of it's bendability, it can actually dodge incomming plains.
What, we're worried now about people crashing Oklahoma into buildings as an act of terrorism?
Thank you.
I read Ender's Game. I tried to read some of the rest of Card's work, but to be honest, everything he has written except for Ender's Game is, to put it gently, pure and unadulterated crap.
On the flip side, check out Wizard's First Rile by Terry Goodkind if you haven't already. Richard, the protagonist, fits a lot of the geek stereotypes, but lives in a medieval setting. He isn't as strong as the brutes of the book in any way, but he is honest, hard-working, and above all, very intelligent, and it is his intelligence and drive that enable him to succeed. In addition, Richard is very fair to the people that he deals with; for example, Richard expresses not approving of homosexuality, he readily grants that it's each person's right to love the way they want to.
You, dear sir, are a complete idiot.
It is indeed perfectly reasonable to pay ENTERTAINERS for their work. It is not reasonable to pay some bloody cartel which fights tooth-and-claw against any form of distribution medium which they do not control and profit from. Personally, I don't buy CDs, because I think it is wrong for the ENTERTAINERS to get a few pennies out of the twenty dollars I spend to purchase an item that costs all of about five dollars to make and distribute.
The ENTERTAINERS, at least the ones that aren't owned or owned by major corporations, are thrilled about MP3s and BitTorrent. Why? Because they can finally make their work available to a wide audience in a way never before possible. The technology that exists now allowes authors, musicians, and producers to bring their work to the public, without the requirement of access to a multibillion-dollar private distribution network, because they've got a multibillion-dollar public distribution network -- the Internet.
ENTERTAINERS who produce quality in this marketplace are rewarded; look at the Ataris, for example. They put up not only MP3s of all their music, but also make the sheet music and gutair tabs available online FOR FREE, and they still sell CDs and T-shirts like mad. Only rather than the RIAA getting the profits, the band, the people ACTUALLY DOING THE ENTERTAINING, are making money.
The RIAA and MPAA could play in this ballgame, if they were willing to just let people copy; they could still sell at the same price point, and would still make a boatload of cash off the people who are either serious fans, technically illiterate enough to grab the file off of BitTorrent, and people who just want The Theatre or The Concert experience. There is still tons of money to be made, probably more than they make now, if they just played nice with the community.
The problem is, they don't, and they won't. They have extended copyright to the force of patent law, and made it possible to OWN ideas as if they were property, at least in the 'States, and all so that they can control distribution. So that the MPAA and RIAA can guarantee that You Have Paid, and that You Aren't Stealing Their Art. Copyright was intended so that the author of a work could profit for a limited amount of time; it was never intended to turn art into a commercial industry, yet with the present limits on copyright, art can be nothing but a commercial industry.
Art does not come from industry. It comes from taking a pile of ideas, mixing them up, and pulling out something that is somehow new and rehashed at the same time. All of the great novels of the world, all of the great paintings, the great symphonies, every piece of art that has stunned mankind has come about only because people had free access to the ideas. All of art copies other art, and without this process, no new art is produced. The process is, in short, evolutionary, and evolution does not work in a system where the copying of ideas, known as variation in this analogy, does not happen.
The RIAA and MPAA want to own all of Art. They want it packaged, boxed, and unoffensive enough to sell at Wal-Mart. To do this, they must control all distribution, and prevent Those Who Have Not Paid and Those Who Are Not Authorized from being involved in Art as anything more than a passing pursuit. The cartels' quest for money comes at the expense of the ENTERTAINERS, the people producing the art in its myriad forms that we so enjoy, and to claim that this is somehow morally right is a perversion of logic of the highest order.
First, the math thing was more of a side-point, not a main point.
Second, you don't trap future development! The GPL mandates that source code must be made available. Licenses like the GPL specifically allow one to make modifications to the code as they wish, provided that any redistribution includes those changes. This encourages development!
What the GPL *does* do, is prevent other people, the freeloaders, from taking all that work, rebranding it, and selling it at a profit. It keeps the rights to the code squarely where they belong -- in the hands of the developers who funded the work and provided the labor, not in the hands of unscrupulous businessmen who are out to make a quick buck on the generousity of others.
Many programming applications *are* scientific, and eigenvectors are very useful when it comes to linear systems of differential equations, which are used extensively in engineering. (Note: I'm assuming you know this, of course, but that many other readers don't).
There is also a lot of programming which involves physics in some form or another, or at the very least differing rates of change -- multivariable calc is important for writing games, financial anaylsis tools, and more.
Yes, there are a lot of programs on the 'hello world' level, and equally many more that don't ever descend into the gritty world of math, but even so, the designers of these programs would do well to have a basic understanding of the math behind the tools they use. How, otherwise, can a coder know what 'going quadratic' means, and how to avoid it, in terms of a search algorithm? What about having an understanding of inductive logic, so that they can write routines iteratively, rather than recursively? Would you trust an encryption scheme designed by someone with no experience in number theory?
I will admit, I'm biased -- I'm a math-and-science guy, with an emphasis on math, but my original point stands. Namely, that without the requisite background knowledge in mathematics, writing good code on these big calculating machines we call 'computers' is nominally an accident. Ergo, a Good Programmer needs this skill, and is much more rare than Some Guy Who Took Visual Basic Once In Junior College.
One of the things for which I love BitTorrent is the ability to get movies and television programs not available in the 'States. I'm studying Japanese, and don't like most of the Japanese media that is available in the US, as it is marketed, by and large, for the otaku crowd. I mean, yeah, there's some good stuff in there, but most of it is crap.
Having access to BitTorrent means that I can download regular TV shows, dramas, historical programs, and recorded news broadcasts, all of which would be completely unavailable in the U.S. I can download anime that I like, but which isn't popular enough to make it into the U.S. market. These are all very effective study tools, and have helped me improve my listening comprehension markedly.
I'll second the other poster who said, 'Good thing you aren't a developer.' See, development takes work; lots of it, in fact. Writing a program doat does anything more than put 'Hello, world!' on the screen takes a measure of effort that you, as a non-developer, can't really comprehend.
See, writing programs, especially *good* programs, isn't easy. It takes skill, patience, and experience, as well as a certain type of mind that isn't very common. And, before you tell me that even your seventy-two year old mother knows how to program, ask yourself this -- does she know what an eigenvector is? How about maxtrix transforms? Relational algebra? Multivariable calculus?
Why are these important? Because programming requires a high level of mathematical ability, at least if you want to have any understanding of why you are writing code a certain way.
So, all of this together makes a programmer, and people who do this sort of thing pour hours into their work. This is something they have created, and honestly, they should, and do, have the final word over what happens to their works. Some people are generous enough to release their works under a license like the GPL, which enables anyone else to use the program which the programmer has created, but with the caveat that the program can't be stolen and sold.
As a programmer, I'm happy the GPL exists, because there are a lot of ideas I've had for 'open-source' programs, and while I am happy to write them, I don't want to spend months coding, just so that some asshat can try to charge money for something I, as the creator of that thing, have released for free.
Finally, information doesn't 'want' anything -- it's an intangible concept, like 'santa claus' or 'income tax reform'. People want information to be free, and while that's all and good, there are far too many people demanding free information, and far too few people willing to work to provide it.
Right, it won't get through Parliament, but that's not the issue -- invasion of privacy *is* an issue. What do the people get out of this? Nothing, because criminals can use GnuPG as well. Why add yet more government without giving the people additional services?
Right, the US has sales, liquor, and tobacco taxes as well. Liquor taxes are LOWER in the UK, though, which makes a night at the pub affordable, compared to the States.
So, your 'hypothetical' $40K a year employee in the U.S. would be losing about 30% of his income to federal and state taxes, plus sales taxes on the remainder (going with your method of calculation here), bringing the total tax burden to a par with the British system. Except the American has to pay for his own health insurance, from a private company, who will provide much shittier service, almost guaranteed.
Oh, and the American doesn't get public transit, either.
This is the best advice I've seen so far on this article, and is how I learned to handle rollouts when I first started admining -- I know you're not my former boss, but it's nice to see other people in the industry following the same method, because it bloody works.
I'd add on to number two that designing and printing a 'changes' manual is essential for any major rollout; when I deployed a customer support-tracking system for the first time, I set up a little twenty-minute 'training session' in one of the conference rooms, and spent two or three extra hours writing up a short manual, complete with screenshots, covering basic functionality.
Almost every user did with the manual what they wouldn't do with a mass-email -- they read it, and pretty much everyone came to the 'training sessions' (I had to add in two more to cover the demand) to ask questions, and all of this *before* the actual rollout. We also set up a 'beta' demonstration system for people to play on, with notices plastered all over the place that the thing was beta, and that it was going bye-bye.
Those two things helped immeasurably, and while there were still bugs to be ironed out, all the users were very patient about letting us get the thing working, because we took the time to tell them what was going on.
Often these life lessons make consultants rich and they hold them close to the vest. Hiring one for a few hours can often give you valuable insights.
I take it you're a consultant, then?
It gets worse when the languages are even more distant; I speak a fair amount of German, and while I could see things like the above causing problems, there are ways around it. In the above case, one could just use the English word 'therapist'. Most Germans today speak English either passably or fluently, thanks to a good education system, and it wouldn't be hard to add in a tidbit about whomever wrote 'therapist' speaking English or whatnot -- thus preserving the wordplay, even though it wouldn't work well across linguistic boundaries.
At the moment, however, I'm about two years' deep into studying Japanese, and *that* is a language that presents some serious translation difficulties. There's a lot of 'stock phrases' in Japanese that you have to know, and a lot of these are tied to historical stories. The politness levels don't have any direct translation.
What's worse, is that the omission of details which are 'obvious' causes hell for any machine translation -- Japanese speakers and writers often drop the subject out of the sentence completely if it's obvious by context, which is sometimes non-obvious, even to a human being -- not that I'm cho-jouzu or anything, but I still get lost sometimes when my girlfriend omits the subject, and I'm wondering who or what the hell she is talking about. Like the time we had a mutual friend with an upcoming birthday, but she didn't mention the 'mutual friend' part, and I was wondering why she was adding an extra birthday into the year for herself, or if I had forgotten it...
No, see, that's Germany. Only in Soviet Russia did patents sue you.
these are not the most real.
Have you bloody *seen* the other two movies?
I think the point is that selling dumb terminals that just connect up to the Uebernet(tm) for 'content' would be profitable, it would be about as difficult as supporting a telephone. If a unit breaks, replace it; if not, the problem has to be either in the network itself, or on the server-side, where competent people can poke-at-and-fix-it.
This isn't like supporting a desktop system, where you have to guide an incompetent goatfscker, I mean paying customer, through fixing the mail settings they so lovingly screwed up. This is a locked-down system, where the customer can only use and access Safe Things. All the nasty bits that underpin Safe Things will be safely out of their reach, but in full view of the BOFHen back at the central office.
Otherwise known as, The Way It Should Be.
PCs, however, won't go away, because there are far too many hackers who just want their own equipment to play with, as well as companies who need higher-powered equipment for power users (programmers and the like).
Um, I don't see why one distribution would be any 'faster' than another, for the most part; they all run essentially the same code, and per-processor optimizations don't make any real-world difference (i.e., Gentoo). The only real difference might be in boot-up time, because Debian tends to be pretty minimalistic when it comes to the 'base' distribution required for installation, but this is quite tunable in RedHat, SuSE/Novell, Slackware, etc.
/etc, local custom package distribution is a cinch, and the 'never-upgrade-only-update' mentality saves me a ton of work.
I use Debian more because it's designed, or has the appearance of being designed, by-and-for system administators. It's a System-V workalike, which is great for admins dealing with Solaris or AIX[1] in addition to Linux. Nothing compares to APT at all, and the DEB package format is highly superior to RPM -- no stupid per-file dependencies, and a text-backended DB in case you manage to corrupt it somehow. Config files have sane locations under
But faster? Probably not.
[1] Well, some parts of AIX, the rest is IBM's gift to admins from the deepest bowels of hell...