If you want users that are educated in the ways of any OS, you've got to WTFM. Write the ****** Manual.
Face it, unless you make it accessible to the just-outta-college temps and the middle-aged secretaries that I see in _my_ offices, you aren't going to gain desktops.
Man pages won't cut it. Giving them the source and telling 'em to figger it out won't cut it.
Lindows is doing at least one thing right: They're working on making the install procedure as painless as possible. When Linux installs as easy as Windows or Mac OS X, you'll be reducing a big barrier to adoption.
The real barrier coming up is finding ways to get otherwise intelligent people to understand the Unix world. I'm not going to recommend Linux to anyone non-geek co-worker until they don't have to learn crazyness like this:
I want to change the file permissions on this file so that noone can read, write or execute this file but me... Let see... 4 = read, 2 = write, 1 = execute. Therefore I have to chmod 0700
It's not sexy or cutting edge. It's also the weakest part of most projects I've seen.
In the early days of this century, Pool Halls were condemmed as polluting our youth with sin. Anyone remember the Music Man from High School?
In the 30s, it was "Jitterbugging", Swing Dancing, and seditious characters like Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong that were ruining America's youth.
Back in the 50s violent comic books (Like EC's "Tales of the Crypt Keeper") were blamed for "Juvenile Delinquency". A popular book "Seduction of the Innocent" by Frederic Wertham caused the creation of the Comics Code Authority which pretty much censored news stand comics for 30 years.
Back in the halcyon late 70s and 80s, similar claims were made about Video Game Arcades. XTC jokes aside, Pac Man didn't ruin American youth.
Same old denial. My kid isn't bad, it's that damn (fill in blank) that's making her bad. To paraphrase Ann Landers: Wake up. Smell it.
Unsolicited strategies for people who seek to use computers in government:
GIS is critical: The Galesburg, Illinois Fire Department used GIS to determine where to place a new fire house. They used GIS software to plot the locations of their existing and proposed firehouses. Then they calculated how far each truck could go in their goal response time. The shape of that coverage was placed on the map. It soon became evident that one of the proposed locations was ideal to maximize coverage. One 2' x 3' plot later, and they were ready for the City Council.
End Users Matter: If you decide to switch operating systems or programs, make sure the end users are trained. Nothing kills governmental productivity (an oxymoron under the best situations) faster than confusion. If the building department secretary is used to Word and you replace it with WordPerfect, you might find out too late that she uses Mail Merge to print out building permits.
Learn from Legacy Systems: Especially office workflow. Sometimes they work great. Often they don't. Regardless, there are always opportunities for improvement. In my old job I reduced the time to turn around permits from 2 months (on average) to 1 week. We did this by revising the decade-old application forms and tweaking the 7 year-old paradox database. Since the new forms were consistent with the database, data entry could be sourced to less skilled workers. The freed up person up kept track of permit issuance time and provided an initial layer of QC. This person kept tweaking the process to eliminate delays in processing. Result? Underutilized workers were given appropriate work. A trained worker was given less tedious work and more management opportunity. It didn't take a giant investment in a new DBMS, just common sense review of existing systems and processes.
Linux v. Windows: I see opportunity for reduction in software cost and licenses, but it has to be applied with care. Again, common sense should be used to identify offices where this could work. Work product often goes in electronic format to other agencies (CAD mostly). I've also seen spreadsheets (often used for timesheets, expense reports, purchase orders, and the like) and word processing documents (RTF aside, some agencies just can't do without Word). You might have better luck with agencies that have FEWER computers (fewer entrenched preferences) and agencies that have a high percentage of early adopters/geeks.
A fairly simple web application that allows a group to work on documentation together. Since it uses simple formatting rules, it's trivial to learn.
It's the simplest way I know to let a workgroup develop a document.
They have Wiki's that run on Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and PHP so it's easy to find one that you can modify to your heart's content.
Most of the advanced wiki's have all types of bells and whistles (Eg: version control, authenicated users). Some of the wiki's can dump everything from the Wiki database to static HTML or TXT for further processing (which is nice when you actually want to publish).
The Ship the Dolphins piloted in Startide Rising was the Seeker. Has a good application to SQL (which I've always pronounced Squeal, mostly for comedic effect).
Or you could name him after one of the crew (not verified complete):
The reason they're not aggressively marketing OS X is because it isn't ready for mainstream use.
The only folks using Mac OS X are developers building for the new OS, unix-geeks like me, and other early-adopter types.
Most people I know who use Macs won't switch until the major workhorse programs (flash, dreamweaver and photoshop) work native on OS X.
There's still a lot of room for improvement in Mac OS X. Some of the system software runs very sluggishly. But Mac OS X is improving with every minor release. 10.0.4 was much better than 10.0 and 10.1 is better still.
Fortunately, Apple realises this by improving System 9 as well. When they stop shipping System 9 as part of OS X, that's when you know that Mac OS X is ready for primetime.
The thing _I_ don't understand is why Apple isn't working harder on the "Mac OS X is unix" message. I'm running Apache, mySQL, emacs, the 3 P's (PHP, Perl, Python), bash, and (most importantly) nethack. Terminal is the almost the most used application (behind the browser) on my home machine.
Hey, I live at Foster, about 12 miles north of 49th Street, and today it reached 60.
Middle of february, now that's a different story.
Chicago is Heaven.
Inside the mind of government...
on
PDF Virus Spotted
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...it's very dark.
But seriously, here's my diatribe on government internet projects (from the trenches).
The main reason that government on-line projects suck is because they want to deliver their services on-line and they don't have the in-house talent to make it so. (How many webmasters YOU think are in the building department of a medium-sized city? The answer is: ZERO)
So, the well-intentioned civil servants hire computer consultants. Sometimes the consultants are teen-aged webmasters that work for peanuts and they positively rock! But sometimes governments hire consultants. Usually these projects have high ideals but are woefully underfunded. This means that the consultants, in order to come under budget, don't have time to effectively review the problem domain.
Do we know where this is going? Yep:
Lack of requirements analysis
Scope creep
Consultant tries to make the client happy, but forgets about the real 'customer' (the end user).
Use of chrome to dazzle the unsophisticated client
Delivery of weak goods
If the consultant is particularly unethical they will say (after the project is out of cash) that they're just working on a 'prototype' and that more money would be needed in order to deliver what was originally promised.
In a climate like that, it's a miracle that any of these Government projects get completed. Sometimes the client falls for it... Repeat until sickened... diatribe off...
No one will read this because I'm such a johnny come lately to this topic, but here's my top 5:
Code Complete taught me a _lot_ about programming. Plus, if it's in the library, you don't have to buy your own copy and pay Microsoft Press to read it (at least until corporate america repeals a library's lending provisions with the new DMCA).
The Pragmatic Programmer is a "Mentor in a Box" for those programmers who don't have any programmer friends IRL.
Think Unix is the first book that made Unix make total sense to me. Ever try learning Unix from _just_ the man pages?! Yikes.
An Introduction to Database Systems by C.J. Date. This book is genius.
Mastering Regular Expressions is another fine book. Enter with no knowledge and exit with a clear understanding of regex.
That british story made a point of converting their pounds to USD.
Obviously someone who cares about reaching a broad audience.
Wouldn't it be great if there were an XML-based web which could read the currency tag and the USD attribute and convert it into the user's home currency using XSL? The technology exists, all we need are the standards and the people to start using them.
I get it, it's spy code sent to your spymasters in Tajikistan. What's next I wonder?
BTW, Louis Armstrong died on July 6, 1971 at his home in Flushing Queens. I don't believe he and his last wife Lucielle had any children.
Interestingly enough, he celebrated his 71st birthday on the 4th of July two days earlier. However, Gary Giddings, noted jazz critic and author discovered that Louis was actually born in August 1901, which made him 70 when he died.
As Duke Ellington once said "Louis Armstrong was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way".
There's a parlor game from the beginning of the century (you know, where people had to meet in meatspace in order to have fun) where each person would write down a part of a story, fold the paper over, and pass it along.
I can't wait to read the/. article about on-line Mad-Libs:
"The process, using forms to query the user for parts of speech, uses PHP to insert the variables into a narrative. This provides for hilarious non-sequiters not possible in the pre-net era. Phrases such as "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" are common.
Hmm.... Maybe slashdot IS one giant Mad-Lib. There seems to be a lot of references to Penguins (which, along with Nuns, were my favorite "plural nouns").
Gesture navigation was a trick demonstrated in one of my favorite Hypercard books waaaay back in the FIRST Bush Administration, you know, the dark ages.
Hypertalk was a major influence on JavaScript.
Gestures are nice, but they're only useful in a very few circumstances. Too many gestures make it possible that uninitiated users could do them by accident. I can think of only two areas where I'd like to use gestures with links:
Gee, is it brutal and inhuman to lose servicemen in space exploration? If that's the case, the US has the lead there. Although, theonomist might say that Virgil Ivan Grissom had it coming, because we all know he was a red.
"[TBL] should push to get rid of the requirements for XHTML to be properly nested, well-formed, and closed. It may seem like a good idea to us coders, but a bad idea to people who find HTML confusing enough already."
How hard is it to balance parentheses, brackets, and braces? Sure people make a lot of misteaks [sic], but I think the promise of XHTML is worth the extra closing tags.
Anyway, this is a moot point. The majority of novice coders are going to use HTML-authoring software. Those can be made to create well-formed and valid code. The next group of inexperienced HTML coders will use a text editor, and most of the good ones have syntax coloring.
I don't think XHTML is all that hard to learn compared to old-style HTML, it's just changing the bad habits of the user who won't RTFM.
So is your proposal that we throw out XHTML because we want to save the doofi that use have bad habits and use M$ Notepad? Are we embracing and extending for them now? I didn't get the memo.;-)
I searched "Paris France Auto Repair" in Google and found the following address:
Garage Carlos
9-11 Rue Riquet - 75019 Paris
+(33) 1 46 07 03 48
You're Welcome.
Next question??
At some point, high-end games are entertainment, not tools. I suppose that high-end games will be like films and continue to be developed closed-sourced. However, I'm sure somehow, someday we will be able to 'edit your own version of bladerunner' (let's wait until Ridley Scott GPL's the film stock, we've got enough trouble with the MPAA as it is...)
However, there are some gaming platforms which encourage (eg: the recently GPL'd Marathon) the creation and distribution of 'levels'. Also, the Inform compiler (which descends from Zork (which predates the FSF!)) allows for open-source development of interactive fiction games. Granted, text-based adventures aren't the high-end 3D shoot'em ups currently in vogue.
I suppose the major reason that people work on FS/OS projects is to 'build a better toolbox'. As long as the gaming industry pumps out reasonably-priced quality entertainment, it isn't worth the trouble/work to 'roll your own'.
In fact, that might just be the reason that MP3's are such a phenomenon. The recording industry is moribund (as far as variety and quality). The phrase 'reasonably-priced quality entertainment' disapeared with the 45 rpm record. MP3's are the new 45's and Napster beat the RIAA to the internet distribution channel.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want users that are educated in the ways of any OS, you've got to WTFM. Write the ****** Manual.
Face it, unless you make it accessible to the just-outta-college temps and the middle-aged secretaries that I see in _my_ offices, you aren't going to gain desktops.
Man pages won't cut it. Giving them the source and telling 'em to figger it out won't cut it.
Lindows is doing at least one thing right: They're working on making the install procedure as painless as possible. When Linux installs as easy as Windows or Mac OS X, you'll be reducing a big barrier to adoption.
The real barrier coming up is finding ways to get otherwise intelligent people to understand the Unix world. I'm not going to recommend Linux to anyone non-geek co-worker until they don't have to learn crazyness like this:
I want to change the file permissions on this file so that noone can read, write or execute this file but me... Let see... 4 = read, 2 = write, 1 = execute. Therefore I have to chmod 0700
It's not sexy or cutting edge. It's also the weakest part of most projects I've seen.
In the early days of this century, Pool Halls were condemmed as polluting our youth with sin. Anyone remember the Music Man from High School?
In the 30s, it was "Jitterbugging", Swing Dancing, and seditious characters like Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong that were ruining America's youth.
Back in the 50s violent comic books (Like EC's "Tales of the Crypt Keeper") were blamed for "Juvenile Delinquency". A popular book "Seduction of the Innocent" by Frederic Wertham caused the creation of the Comics Code Authority which pretty much censored news stand comics for 30 years.
Back in the halcyon late 70s and 80s, similar claims were made about Video Game Arcades. XTC jokes aside, Pac Man didn't ruin American youth.
Same old denial. My kid isn't bad, it's that damn (fill in blank) that's making her bad. To paraphrase Ann Landers: Wake up. Smell it.
Unsolicited strategies for people who seek to use computers in government:
Anyhow, that's just a couple of ideas.
Alan Kay, Smalltalker and Squeaker extraordinaire, was the inspiration for the main character in TRON.
Alan and one of writers of Tron (Bonnie MacBird) were subsequently married.
Am I the only one who thinks tron should be a program to typeset man pages?
(tron:troff::less:more)
Try a Wiki.
A fairly simple web application that allows a group to work on documentation together. Since it uses simple formatting rules, it's trivial to learn.
It's the simplest way I know to let a workgroup develop a document.
They have Wiki's that run on Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and PHP so it's easy to find one that you can modify to your heart's content.
Most of the advanced wiki's have all types of bells and whistles (Eg: version control, authenicated users). Some of the wiki's can dump everything from the Wiki database to static HTML or TXT for further processing (which is nice when you actually want to publish).
The Ship the Dolphins piloted in Startide Rising was the Seeker. Has a good application to SQL (which I've always pronounced Squeal, mostly for comedic effect).
Or you could name him after one of the crew (not verified complete):
Creideiki
Lucky Kaa
Brookida
Chuchki (too close to Chucky.... brrr)
Karkaett
Makanee
Tsh't
Hikahi
Yachapa-Jean
Takkata-Jim
Akeakemai
Akki
Bulla-jo
Chissis
Hakukka-jo
Haoke
Heurka-pete
Hiss-kaa
Hist-t
Jecajeca
Keepiru
Karacha-jeff
K'Hith
K'tha-jon
Moki
Mopol
Olachan
Olelo
Peepoe
Phip-pit
Ph'Tow
Sah'ot
Satima
Sawtoot
Sreekah-pol
Ssassia
Ssattatta
Sup-peh
Sus'ta
S'tat
S'thata
Tkett
Wattaceti
Zaa'pht
Zhaki
The reason they're not aggressively marketing OS X is because it isn't ready for mainstream use.
The only folks using Mac OS X are developers building for the new OS, unix-geeks like me, and other early-adopter types.
Most people I know who use Macs won't switch until the major workhorse programs (flash, dreamweaver and photoshop) work native on OS X.
There's still a lot of room for improvement in Mac OS X. Some of the system software runs very sluggishly. But Mac OS X is improving with every minor release. 10.0.4 was much better than 10.0 and 10.1 is better still.
Fortunately, Apple realises this by improving System 9 as well. When they stop shipping System 9 as part of OS X, that's when you know that Mac OS X is ready for primetime.
The thing _I_ don't understand is why Apple isn't working harder on the "Mac OS X is unix" message. I'm running Apache, mySQL, emacs, the 3 P's (PHP, Perl, Python), bash, and (most importantly) nethack. Terminal is the almost the most used application (behind the browser) on my home machine.
Hey, I live at Foster, about 12 miles north of 49th Street, and today it reached 60.
Middle of february, now that's a different story.
Chicago is Heaven.
...it's very dark.
But seriously, here's my diatribe on government internet projects (from the trenches).
The main reason that government on-line projects suck is because they want to deliver their services on-line and they don't have the in-house talent to make it so. (How many webmasters YOU think are in the building department of a medium-sized city? The answer is: ZERO)
So, the well-intentioned civil servants hire computer consultants. Sometimes the consultants are teen-aged webmasters that work for peanuts and they positively rock! But sometimes governments hire consultants. Usually these projects have high ideals but are woefully underfunded. This means that the consultants, in order to come under budget, don't have time to effectively review the problem domain.
Do we know where this is going? Yep:
If the consultant is particularly unethical they will say (after the project is out of cash) that they're just working on a 'prototype' and that more money would be needed in order to deliver what was originally promised.
In a climate like that, it's a miracle that any of these Government projects get completed. Sometimes the client falls for it... Repeat until sickened... diatribe off...
No one will read this because I'm such a johnny come lately to this topic, but here's my top 5:
Code Complete taught me a _lot_ about programming. Plus, if it's in the library, you don't have to buy your own copy and pay Microsoft Press to read it (at least until corporate america repeals a library's lending provisions with the new DMCA).
The Pragmatic Programmer is a "Mentor in a Box" for those programmers who don't have any programmer friends IRL.
Think Unix is the first book that made Unix make total sense to me. Ever try learning Unix from _just_ the man pages?! Yikes.
An Introduction to Database Systems by C.J. Date. This book is genius.
Mastering Regular Expressions is another fine book. Enter with no knowledge and exit with a clear understanding of regex.
That british story made a point of converting their pounds to USD.
Obviously someone who cares about reaching a broad audience.
Wouldn't it be great if there were an XML-based web which could read the currency tag and the USD attribute and convert it into the user's home currency using XSL? The technology exists, all we need are the standards and the people to start using them.
Oh well, just another pipe dream
I get it, it's spy code sent to your spymasters in Tajikistan. What's next I wonder?
BTW, Louis Armstrong died on July 6, 1971 at his home in Flushing Queens. I don't believe he and his last wife Lucielle had any children.
Interestingly enough, he celebrated his 71st birthday on the 4th of July two days earlier. However, Gary Giddings, noted jazz critic and author discovered that Louis was actually born in August 1901, which made him 70 when he died.
As Duke Ellington once said "Louis Armstrong was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way".
There's a parlor game from the beginning of the century (you know, where people had to meet in meatspace in order to have fun) where each person would write down a part of a story, fold the paper over, and pass it along.
I can't wait to read the /. article about on-line Mad-Libs:
"The process, using forms to query the user for parts of speech, uses PHP to insert the variables into a narrative. This provides for hilarious non-sequiters not possible in the pre-net era. Phrases such as "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" are common.
Hmm.... Maybe slashdot IS one giant Mad-Lib. There seems to be a lot of references to Penguins (which, along with Nuns, were my favorite "plural nouns").
That way, when it happens, you will be able to prove your prediction?
Gesture navigation was a trick demonstrated in one of my favorite Hypercard books waaaay back in the FIRST Bush Administration, you know, the dark ages.
Hypertalk was a major influence on JavaScript.
Gestures are nice, but they're only useful in a very few circumstances. Too many gestures make it possible that uninitiated users could do them by accident. I can think of only two areas where I'd like to use gestures with links:
Gee, is it brutal and inhuman to lose servicemen in space exploration? If that's the case, the US has the lead there. Although, theonomist might say that Virgil Ivan Grissom had it coming, because we all know he was a red.
Who mods up this flamebaiter?
How hard is it to balance parentheses, brackets, and braces? Sure people make a lot of misteaks [sic], but I think the promise of XHTML is worth the extra closing tags.
Anyway, this is a moot point. The majority of novice coders are going to use HTML-authoring software. Those can be made to create well-formed and valid code. The next group of inexperienced HTML coders will use a text editor, and most of the good ones have syntax coloring.
I don't think XHTML is all that hard to learn compared to old-style HTML, it's just changing the bad habits of the user who won't RTFM.
So is your proposal that we throw out XHTML because we want to save the doofi that use have bad habits and use M$ Notepad? Are we embracing and extending for them now? I didn't get the memo. ;-)
Your http://www.hotgrits.com/natalie1.html link is dead...
I searched "Paris France Auto Repair" in Google and found the following address: Garage Carlos 9-11 Rue Riquet - 75019 Paris +(33) 1 46 07 03 48 You're Welcome. Next question??
At some point, high-end games are entertainment, not tools. I suppose that high-end games will be like films and continue to be developed closed-sourced. However, I'm sure somehow, someday we will be able to 'edit your own version of bladerunner' (let's wait until Ridley Scott GPL's the film stock, we've got enough trouble with the MPAA as it is...)
However, there are some gaming platforms which encourage (eg: the recently GPL'd Marathon) the creation and distribution of 'levels'. Also, the Inform compiler (which descends from Zork (which predates the FSF!)) allows for open-source development of interactive fiction games. Granted, text-based adventures aren't the high-end 3D shoot'em ups currently in vogue.
I suppose the major reason that people work on FS/OS projects is to 'build a better toolbox'. As long as the gaming industry pumps out reasonably-priced quality entertainment, it isn't worth the trouble/work to 'roll your own'.
In fact, that might just be the reason that MP3's are such a phenomenon. The recording industry is moribund (as far as variety and quality). The phrase 'reasonably-priced quality entertainment' disapeared with the 45 rpm record. MP3's are the new 45's and Napster beat the RIAA to the internet distribution channel.