He is the same kind of species as the "butthurt patriot". Actually, I was wrong.... from his blog, it seems that helive in San Diego. I had guessed him as someone outside the US with "sneers at foreigners" syndrom. (these people live everywhere).
He seems to fall into that rare category of people who criticizes his own society. (these people also live everywhere, there are just fewer of them)
He is the same kind of species as the "butthurt patriot". They both make silly, simplistic statements that show they don't really understand the world at large; neither do they really care to. They prefer the caricature version that paints themselves and their own society as superior and anything that goes against this worldview is "propaganda". Remember folks, it is very easy to be critical and cynical of others. It is much harder to do that to yourself.
I'm an American that has lived in Europe for many years and this kind of thing pisses me off all the time. Americans who don't have a clue about Europe beyond FOX and stereotypes make broad brushed, dismissive comments about Europe; failing to understand Europe's history and why they are the way they are. Europeans are equally clueless about America, it's history and why the people are the way they are. Whenever I read about the US in Der Spiegel or The Guardian, the America I read about is not the place I know, but some strange construct seemingly created to make the readers feel smug and self satisfied.
Whenever people outside the monkey sphere come into discussion, all fairness goes out the window.
I got about 1/3 of the way through TFA, mentally tagged it as BS and came back to watch the fireforks. I never got to the quoted part and I missed the point of the article.
And this is indeed an interesting debate for me as I'm in an GPL'd code project that could be monetized with an optional web service./goes back to finish reading TFA with fresh eyes.
As I read your posts (parent and great grandparent), I recalled the old saying; the perfect is the enemy of the good. If you want to improve the performance and only want to fixate on raw performance, then the logical conclusion is not to stop with software, but to start customizing the hardware to fit your needs. Design your own motherboard. Design your old chips so that they do your tasks more efficiently, rather than bothering with cumbersome and slow general purpose CPUs.
* Aside from the time expenditure, it is a safe bet that you are not an expert at all of these things and you'll do at least some of them badly; imperiling your project.
* Aside from the inherent risk in working outside of your domain of expertise, each of those steps can increase the required time by one or more orders of magnitude; imperiling your project.
As for me, I studied Physics, not EE or comp sci. I know that there are many others who are better at hardware design than me and many others who can build better mechanisms than me for things like memory management. I can re-invent the wheel and spend all my time building memory managers, OR I can solve the problem at hand. Chances are, I don't have time to do both and in an era of $25/gb RAM I wonâ(TM)t lose any sleep over it either.
So TELL him that it is a stupid idea. These guys are mostly older than 50 and don't have the time to get a clue about anything tech related. (I know a German Bundestag member and she works unbelievable hours) The only interaction they themselves probably have with the net is their Blackberry. They will - by definition - be clueless about tech and require others to advise them. They can rely on lobbyists, but we all know where that goes. Another thing is that they use congressional hearings to educate themselves on the subject matter. Since it is always industry stars who get invited to these things, it is the same as having lobbyists.
You are presuming conspiracy where simple cluelessness will suffice. Later on, I'm sure the lobbyists who whispered in his ear about the sniffing for kiddie-porn will be happy to point out the problems of piracy - and how the infrastructure and laws can be used against the "evils of piracy".
The best defense against idiocy is to be politically active; support the EFF or something. They DO listen to grassroots activists who can make enough noise.
So a senator said something stupid about a subject outside of his domain of expertise. Every slashdotter, if elected to the senate, would say stupid things about SOMETHING. This is not a proposal for a law, or Iâ(TM)d be seeing it on my opencongress.org feed. Just kindly wite to the man and inform him that within a week of any such law coming into play, P2P programs would be randomizing the filenames.
IIRC - The last PISA study put Germany and the US next to each other in the math rankings - i.e. neither had any reason to brag.
Interestingly, this caused shock in Germany as Germans had regarded themselves as having one of the best education systems in the world. In the US, people are so used to the idea of having a shitty education system that it passed without notice.
The two dialects have diverged in different directions in the past couple of centuries and neither is correct". The inhabitants of Tangier Island, Virginia, supposedly speak with a dialect as close to Elizabethian English as exists anywhere in the world. If anybody can say that their English is true, it is these people.
I've got an RSS pull of Arringtonâ(TM)s blog. About every tenth article is worth more than a headline scan for me, but I can see where it has its place. Tech crunch is basically where start-ups pimp their stuff. Arrington writes glowing reviews of web2.0 thingees and his 50k or so readers run off to sign up. In short, if you just have to attach twitter to your mobile phone, then you probably read his blog. The thing is, blogs make good subject specific grapevines for niche markets. Arrington market is too small to be served by a traditional trade rag and his blog acts as a micro news bureau.
A hobby of mine is MMO/MUDS/Persistent Worlds; specifically designing homebrew, community worlds. Therefore, I read a few MMO design related blogs. The community of bloggers that comments on virtual worlds design includes Damian Schubert, Raph Koster and a boatload of amateurs. These blogs sum up to essay form conversations between amateurs and professionals; the kind of thing that used to happen on the mud-dev mailing list.
I'm not certain that the bitching helps and I'd guess that it hurts actually. I've seen the linux threads on the bioware boards and they amount to "you suck for not doing linux", which does not endear you to the devs.
"A single-button default configuration forces the software designers to make better interfaces."
Better how exactly? "Better" is a slippery term. Is better == more usable? Is better == prettier? Is better == more powerful? Some of these things come at the expense of others.
I've been using right click context menus since the days of OS2 Warp and on many operating systems. On every one of those platforms, if I want information about something or know what options I have about something, I know that can reach for the right mouse button. When I use a Mac, I'm utterly helpless. I don't find Macs intuitive at all and usually flail around helplessly. I'm sure there is some equivalent functionality there somewhere, but it is not obvious to me. I'm usually relieved when I no longer have to use the Mac in question. Also, in usability testing that I've done, I've seen that often the users will try a context menu (if it makes sense in the situation) before they trying to drag/drop or look for buttons. I've seen users get annoyed at web apps that don't support right click.
Right clicking is also not inherently obvious, but it is a widely used UI convention. Jenifer Tidwell's excellent book, Designing Interfaces, mentions the value of conventions in that users already know how to use your interface. This is why most applications that do something similar work in broadly similar ways. If you depart from the conventions, you have to design for the fact that you'll have to teach your users how to use your software. I can't right click on a one button Mac, but the OS does not make it obvious to me how I should do the same thing. This reminds me a bit of the Open Source 3D editor Blender. Blender ignores the UI conventions of 3D editors such as 3DSMax, Maya and XSI. Supposedly, Blender's UI is "better" once you get the hang of it. I gave up trying to learn Blender in disgust when the tutorial video told me that I should learn all of the (unique to Blender) keyboard shutcuts because they were "better".
I never had any problem with pre-OSX Macs and enjoyed using them. My feeling with OSX was that design started to trump usability in Cupertino.
My grandfather was an accountant; and in a time before programmable calculators as well as computers, imagine that! Anyway, I don't know why an accountant would use Excel over accounting software, which many would not have at home.
Becasue Excel is the tool of choice for number crunchers. Accounting software is never up to Excel's standards when it comes to ad-hoc data analysis. There is a reason why most high end business intelligence software is Excel oriented.
If you travel between non-Schengen countries, then yes. Otherwise, the only indicator that you crossed a border may be a change in the language of the road signs, or at most a "welcome" sign like you see when crossing between US states or between Canadian provinces.
"And how exactly would you discipline 4 month-olds ? Tape their mouths shut ? Put a pillow on their face until they stop screaming ?"
errr.... You don't. You can't. And I did not say that. It is unreasonable to expect someone to discipline an infant. Even a toddler is iffy territory prior to the age of two. But I said "kids", not "infants and toddlers". You can reason with a four year old and impose rules like "ask to be excused before leaving the table", explain why this is important and stick to the rule.
Reasonably speaking, kids cooped up in a plane are prone to getting antsy. Reasonably speaking, parents are limited these days in the kind of discipline they can deliver in public out of a very real fear that the government would take their kids away due to abuse and for every person annoyed about their kids behavior, there are two ready to see child abuse. This puts parents in a between a rock and a hard place. Someone who dislikes kids is going to be easily perturned, which will stress the parents out, but they are limited in what they can do in such a situation. I don't let the kids order cola on transatlantic flights because of this.
Unreasonably speaking, parents get touchy about the saftey of their kids and tend not to see the humor. Dear anaonymous stranger on the internet, I'd not hesitate to end your life if you tried to harm my dids.
It does actually. I used to get stressed about making sure my kids behaved and did not bother anybody when we were on a plane. After the comments here, I think I'll get them fired up on cola just before boarding. If you are gonna be hated in any case, you might as well enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
He seems to fall into that rare category of people who criticizes his own society. (these people also live everywhere, there are just fewer of them)
Nevermind. Carry on.
and?
err... no...
He is the same kind of species as the "butthurt patriot". They both make silly, simplistic statements that show they don't really understand the world at large; neither do they really care to. They prefer the caricature version that paints themselves and their own society as superior and anything that goes against this worldview is "propaganda". Remember folks, it is very easy to be critical and cynical of others. It is much harder to do that to yourself.
I'm an American that has lived in Europe for many years and this kind of thing pisses me off all the time. Americans who don't have a clue about Europe beyond FOX and stereotypes make broad brushed, dismissive comments about Europe; failing to understand Europe's history and why they are the way they are. Europeans are equally clueless about America, it's history and why the people are the way they are. Whenever I read about the US in Der Spiegel or The Guardian, the America I read about is not the place I know, but some strange construct seemingly created to make the readers feel smug and self satisfied.
Whenever people outside the monkey sphere come into discussion, all fairness goes out the window.
Thank You.
/goes back to finish reading TFA with fresh eyes.
I got about 1/3 of the way through TFA, mentally tagged it as BS and came back to watch the fireforks. I never got to the quoted part and I missed the point of the article.
And this is indeed an interesting debate for me as I'm in an GPL'd code project that could be monetized with an optional web service.
As I read your posts (parent and great grandparent), I recalled the old saying; the perfect is the enemy of the good. If you want to improve the performance and only want to fixate on raw performance, then the logical conclusion is not to stop with software, but to start customizing the hardware to fit your needs. Design your own motherboard. Design your old chips so that they do your tasks more efficiently, rather than bothering with cumbersome and slow general purpose CPUs.
* Aside from the time expenditure, it is a safe bet that you are not an expert at all of these things and you'll do at least some of them badly; imperiling your project.
* Aside from the inherent risk in working outside of your domain of expertise, each of those steps can increase the required time by one or more orders of magnitude; imperiling your project.
As for me, I studied Physics, not EE or comp sci. I know that there are many others who are better at hardware design than me and many others who can build better mechanisms than me for things like memory management. I can re-invent the wheel and spend all my time building memory managers, OR I can solve the problem at hand. Chances are, I don't have time to do both and in an era of $25/gb RAM I wonâ(TM)t lose any sleep over it either.
So TELL him that it is a stupid idea. These guys are mostly older than 50 and don't have the time to get a clue about anything tech related. (I know a German Bundestag member and she works unbelievable hours) The only interaction they themselves probably have with the net is their Blackberry. They will - by definition - be clueless about tech and require others to advise them. They can rely on lobbyists, but we all know where that goes. Another thing is that they use congressional hearings to educate themselves on the subject matter. Since it is always industry stars who get invited to these things, it is the same as having lobbyists.
You are presuming conspiracy where simple cluelessness will suffice. Later on, I'm sure the lobbyists who whispered in his ear about the sniffing for kiddie-porn will be happy to point out the problems of piracy - and how the infrastructure and laws can be used against the "evils of piracy".
The best defense against idiocy is to be politically active; support the EFF or something. They DO listen to grassroots activists who can make enough noise.
So a senator said something stupid about a subject outside of his domain of expertise. Every slashdotter, if elected to the senate, would say stupid things about SOMETHING. This is not a proposal for a law, or Iâ(TM)d be seeing it on my opencongress.org feed. Just kindly wite to the man and inform him that within a week of any such law coming into play, P2P programs would be randomizing the filenames.
IIRC - The last PISA study put Germany and the US next to each other in the math rankings - i.e. neither had any reason to brag.
Interestingly, this caused shock in Germany as Germans had regarded themselves as having one of the best education systems in the world. In the US, people are so used to the idea of having a shitty education system that it passed without notice.
Helpfully, the abstract has a link that you can email the lawyer with. :P
From TFA - "Bank accounts were the most commonly advertised item for sale on underground economy servers known to Symantec"
I'm curious as to where this data came from. Is it public record from court cases? Or does Symantec know more than the cops?
The two dialects have diverged in different directions in the past couple of centuries and neither is correct". The inhabitants of Tangier Island, Virginia, supposedly speak with a dialect as close to Elizabethian English as exists anywhere in the world. If anybody can say that their English is true, it is these people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E
geez... that formatting got messed up. Considering that I can't just post blind anymore, I should catch these things... /sigh
I've got an RSS pull of Arringtonâ(TM)s blog. About every tenth article is worth more than a headline scan for me, but I can see where it has its place. Tech crunch is basically where start-ups pimp their stuff. Arrington writes glowing reviews of web2.0 thingees and his 50k or so readers run off to sign up. In short, if you just have to attach twitter to your mobile phone, then you probably read his blog. The thing is, blogs make good subject specific grapevines for niche markets. Arrington market is too small to be served by a traditional trade rag and his blog acts as a micro news bureau.
A hobby of mine is MMO/MUDS/Persistent Worlds; specifically designing homebrew, community worlds. Therefore, I read a few MMO design related blogs. The community of bloggers that comments on virtual worlds design includes Damian Schubert, Raph Koster and a boatload of amateurs. These blogs sum up to essay form conversations between amateurs and professionals; the kind of thing that used to happen on the mud-dev mailing list.
I'm not certain that the bitching helps and I'd guess that it hurts actually. I've seen the linux threads on the bioware boards and they amount to "you suck for not doing linux", which does not endear you to the devs.
I've seen threads on game developer boards with the theme "why are linux users such assholes?". (e.g. http://www.mmoworkshop.com/trac/mom/phpbb?page=viewtopic.php&t=1165&highlight=linux)
there ya go...
Write up a ten slide marketing spin, grab the VC and get yourself bought out by Google while Web 2.0 is still the meme du jour!
Thanks! You have saved me much pain the next time I have to use office Mac.
"A single-button default configuration forces the software designers to make better interfaces."
Better how exactly? "Better" is a slippery term. Is better == more usable? Is better == prettier? Is better == more powerful? Some of these things come at the expense of others.
I've been using right click context menus since the days of OS2 Warp and on many operating systems. On every one of those platforms, if I want information about something or know what options I have about something, I know that can reach for the right mouse button. When I use a Mac, I'm utterly helpless. I don't find Macs intuitive at all and usually flail around helplessly. I'm sure there is some equivalent functionality there somewhere, but it is not obvious to me. I'm usually relieved when I no longer have to use the Mac in question. Also, in usability testing that I've done, I've seen that often the users will try a context menu (if it makes sense in the situation) before they trying to drag/drop or look for buttons. I've seen users get annoyed at web apps that don't support right click.
Right clicking is also not inherently obvious, but it is a widely used UI convention. Jenifer Tidwell's excellent book, Designing Interfaces, mentions the value of conventions in that users already know how to use your interface. This is why most applications that do something similar work in broadly similar ways. If you depart from the conventions, you have to design for the fact that you'll have to teach your users how to use your software. I can't right click on a one button Mac, but the OS does not make it obvious to me how I should do the same thing. This reminds me a bit of the Open Source 3D editor Blender. Blender ignores the UI conventions of 3D editors such as 3DSMax, Maya and XSI. Supposedly, Blender's UI is "better" once you get the hang of it. I gave up trying to learn Blender in disgust when the tutorial video told me that I should learn all of the (unique to Blender) keyboard shutcuts because they were "better".
I never had any problem with pre-OSX Macs and enjoyed using them. My feeling with OSX was that design started to trump usability in Cupertino.
My grandfather was an accountant; and in a time before programmable calculators as well as computers, imagine that! Anyway, I don't know why an accountant would use Excel over accounting software, which many would not have at home.
Becasue Excel is the tool of choice for number crunchers. Accounting software is never up to Excel's standards when it comes to ad-hoc data analysis. There is a reason why most high end business intelligence software is Excel oriented.
Well thought out and insghtful post. If I had mod points today, I'd mod you up.
but...
"Nobody, for some reason, can admit that BOTH are wrong,"
I have one word for an answer as to why... MonkeySpheres ( URL=http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html )
His point was valid however.
If you travel between non-Schengen countries, then yes. Otherwise, the only indicator that you crossed a border may be a change in the language of the road signs, or at most a "welcome" sign like you see when crossing between US states or between Canadian provinces.
"And how exactly would you discipline 4 month-olds ? Tape their mouths shut ? Put a pillow on their face until they stop screaming ?"
errr.... You don't. You can't. And I did not say that. It is unreasonable to expect someone to discipline an infant. Even a toddler is iffy territory prior to the age of two. But I said "kids", not "infants and toddlers". You can reason with a four year old and impose rules like "ask to be excused before leaving the table", explain why this is important and stick to the rule.
Reasonably speaking, kids cooped up in a plane are prone to getting antsy. Reasonably speaking, parents are limited these days in the kind of discipline they can deliver in public out of a very real fear that the government would take their kids away due to abuse and for every person annoyed about their kids behavior, there are two ready to see child abuse. This puts parents in a between a rock and a hard place. Someone who dislikes kids is going to be easily perturned, which will stress the parents out, but they are limited in what they can do in such a situation. I don't let the kids order cola on transatlantic flights because of this.
Unreasonably speaking, parents get touchy about the saftey of their kids and tend not to see the humor. Dear anaonymous stranger on the internet, I'd not hesitate to end your life if you tried to harm my dids.
It does actually. I used to get stressed about making sure my kids behaved and did not bother anybody when we were on a plane. After the comments here, I think I'll get them fired up on cola just before boarding. If you are gonna be hated in any case, you might as well enjoy it.