People learn the stuff they feel they need to know. I know almost nothing about the car I drive; I just use it to get from A to B. But in the early days of the automobile, that observation wouldn't have made sense: to get from A to B, you had to know how your car worked, because there was a pretty good chance it would break down en route. Of course, we still need some people who know how cars work, but unless that's your job or some kind of hobby, you don't need to be one of them.
Computers are similar. We've passed the stage when you need to know how they work in order to make them do something useful. Result: way more clueless people using them. And even among the technical types, increasingly reliable hardware means fewer of us need to know much about it. Just replace the appliance every few years, and you're fine. Most of the time.
Apart from the obvious social ills that come with locking down free speech, it creates some pretty obvious problems around efficiency, innovation, and investment. Can't have efficient markets without good feedback.
That being the case, nations that don't lock down free speech will have a competitive advantage in the marketplace. So we should be looking to promote free speech and the exchange of ideas, rather than trying to lock them down with DRM, copyright, patents,the Patriot Act, etc, as we appear to be so hell-bent on doing.
The only workaround I'm aware of for circumventing pop-up blocking in Firefox is via Flash, and you know you can download a Flash blocker extension, right?
YMMV, but I haven't seen a single pop-up since installing FlashBlock a couple of months ago. And in fact it's gone a long way to improving my browsing experience in general.
Not sure what he was claiming in 1990, but now he only claims to have used a manual typewriter through 1985: " Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something that hasn't been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life." http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/source.as p
Before the internet, people read books. If you got the book at the library, they had a record of everything you ever read.
Not true. Most libraries only have records of what you currently have checked out. They don't keep those records after the books are returned. The historical exceptions have tended to be totalitarian regimes like Stalinist Russia.
Fingerprinting library users is insanely over the top. If it was happening in my country, I'd be really worried.
a) Reference librarians, being generalists, will never know as much as a specialized researcher does about their topic area. Reference librarians tend to be most useful to undergrads or people starting to research outside their previous field of study.
b) Most physics profs, in my experience, view students the same way sysadmins view their users: as clueless idiots who ask a lot of dumb questions and get in the way of doing their real work (ie, in the profs' case, research)... dang, ad hominem attacks are easy!
c) Many libraries have a preservation role as well as an access role. The two roles, being antithetical in the case of physical objects (eg. books), tend to conflict. Most of the barriers that libraries put up around access comes from trying to balance the needs for access and preservation. It's likely that the reading rooms could allow greater freedom of access because their mandate didn't include long-term preservation, presumably because the library already had that covered. (The conflict goes away once everything shifts to digital, of course.)
Why is acting in self interest a duty to my nation?
If I through oversight or a misguided sense of generosity contribute more than my fair share of taxes, I may be a bit of a chump, but I can't see how that makes me a less dutiful citizen than someone who takes pains over their tax return. What sort of negative impact does contributing more than my fair share have on my country?
It's not for everyone, but a Master's in Library/Information Studies could lead to interesting things, eg. systems librarian at a university. The field desperately needs more professionals with IT experience/abilities, and there's a real opportunity to make a difference since we'll be working through the impact of new technologies for the foreseeable future.
Pay's not that great, but there's a decent amount of job security. Plenty of opportunities for advancement coming up as the boomers start to retire.
Ok, here's the deal... as a librarian myself, I kind of have a sense of how this filtering of which you speak is done. As someone else here has pointed out, most libraries aren't well funded enough to buy everything available, so they have to be selective. They tend to do this on the basis of what they think their users want. In the case of academic libraries, they look a lot at what courses are being taught at their institutions & what their faculty's areas of reasearch are. If more faculty members are studying Karl than old BF, well guess what.
Public libraries tend to be focussed a bit more on "popular" kinds of literature: best sellers, travel writing, cooking, etc. etc., again because that's what they think their users want (based on circulation stats and user surveys, among other things). There is also some idealism involved in building collections, which is why most libraries also collect materials that may not be as popular as the above but are considered to be important for historical, regional or topical reasons.
In the public realm there is some filtering done on the basis of perceived "community standards"; translate that as fear of bad press and funding cuts if they started collecting pr0n. Public libraries are limited in how far they can push the people who fund them.
The idea that librarians as professionals have some kind of stake in imposing particular filters on the information we supply is just plain absurd. What do I care what you read? However it could be argued that the existence of public and academic libraries promotes the idea that access to a wide range of often conflicting ideas is a good thing; I wouldn't argue with you there.
Finally, I'd just like to say that many librarians don't agree with Michael Gorman's POV. We write blogs, we read slashdot... you know, the usual. I think blogs are a huge win for DIY participatory culture myself. Michael Gorman often plays the curmudgeon in order to provoke discussion, which apparently he has succeeded in doing yet again.
So... the folks over at ACM Queue didn't have actual knowledge of a programming language?
Re:great ....but there still a long road ahead
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 1
Riiight... and as we all know, no married person has ever got AIDS from an infected partner.
See the thing is, not only do you have to have "will power over biological functions," you also have to have a trustworthy partner. And maybe you do, maybe you don't, but you can never know for absolute certain.
And wow, your claim to feel "sorry" side-by-side with your cavalier dismissal of the problem (not to mention the finger-pointing at the parents) ought to be a big help to those afflicted with a deadly disease! Thanks for the insight!
... and the traditional news sources (CNN, New York Times, et al) give us the unbiased "truth?".. if you believe that, you might want to go back and reread Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.
Chomsky clearly demonstrated that the standard criticism of Moore ("his facts are mostly right but he uses them to lead his audience to erroneous conclusions") applies equally to every mainstream news source. Moore's work is valuable not because it's "true" in some absolute sense, but because it presents a credible alternative to the biases of the mainstream media.
I think I see what you're saying, but "What if..." in its most basic form can be applied to just about any story. (Which is why some of your examples are fantasy, not sf:) ).
And the "What if.." formula doesn't really work all that well when applied to a lot of sf, in the sense that it doesn't really tell you much about the story. I suppose you could say Clarke's "Cold Equations" was something like "What if someone stowed away on a rocketship where there wasn't enough air for them to last the journey?"... but that just describes the plot, it doesn't get to the point of the story at all.
For my part, I'd have to say that sf is fiction that explores the narrative possibilities opened up by extrapolated advances in science and technology. Hard sf insists that the sci/tech presented in the story not contradict the what is known about science at the time the story was written. So yeah, basically science fiction is fiction with science...
Actually, a whole bunch of corporations give away at least some of their stuff for free, including IBM (eg Eclipse), the Apache consortium, the folks that make MySQL, to name three of many. Open source gives me way more software than my individual contributions would buy if I was trading my hours for money. As long as it's a net gain for me, why would I care whether there are also a lot of freeloaders out there?
And here's a question: what's the ethical difference between an individual who uses open souce software but doesn't contribute anything back, and a freeloading corporation?
Sorry to be so on-topic, but does anyone have a take on how this book compares to George Schlossnagle's Advanced PHP Programming, which appears to cover a lot of the same ground?
Gosh, if only I'd known before how bad things were up here, I could have sent my father down your way for his recent surgery.
Of course, it would have cost him his life's savings, but I'm sure it would have been worth it. Instead he had to contend with our Canadian health care system, which in his case meant receiving the services of a top-notch surgeon and recovering in an ultramodern facility with excellent care. Despite all that, I'm pleased to report he's doing great now. I guess he was lucky.
And hey thanks, it's sure nice to know where I can go for cheap MRIs. I'll bet you all down there get that done once or twice a year, just for fun?
OK, I'll feed you. What do you mean? The physical space or the idea? Not that it matters much.
Libraries as physical space: Lots of information, especially books, are not available in digital format and may never be. Even if they were, digital isn't the preferred format for lots of people. Maybe someday this won't be the case, but that's not the point: Right now, communities still need a place to store physical media.
Libraries as idea: Basically, a library is a bunch of people pooling their money to build a collection of information much greater than any of them could amass individually. Doesn't matter what format the information takes. The only thing that could kill the library as idea is for all (or almost all) the information anyone could want to be available and easy to access for free. That hasn't happened yet either, and it's not likely to happen for a looong time, if ever.
Re:Depends on your philosophy, doesn't it
on
Apple Revises eMac
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmm. Options. Well let's see.
Multiple button mouse. Yep, these exist for Macs. That option is available.
Virtual desktops. Not in Aqua, although you can kind of simulate it by creating multiple users & doing fast user switching. But I agree, that's not really the same thing. Or you can run X11 in fullscreen mode & have as many X desktops as you want... gee, kind of like Linux in that respect. So I guess that option is available too.
And yep, Mail.app doesn't do TLS... why not set up mutt & procmail?
In general you appear to be describing pre-OS X versions of Apple's OS. It's just plain silly to imply that OS X is only useful if you want "listen to music, surf, do some email, and chat"... You're just trolling, right?
Actually, lots of good documentation exists for open source software. Lots of it is free (eg. php.net) but lots of it you have to pay for; it comes in the form of books from O'Reilly, SAMS & many others.
This isn't that different from the closed source world... if the included documentation was so great, presumably the "Missing Manual" series and all those "Dummies" books wouldn't sell quite so well.
Good documentation is no fun to write. It's great if it's free, but it's reasonable to expect to pay for some of it.
Maybe the next step for Linux is the corporate desktop space, not the consumer desktop. Makes sense; most corporate users only need a small number of applications (web, email and an office suite pretty much do it for me.) For a lot of CIOs, the fact that many consumer apps (eg games) aren't available for Linux might actually be a good thing...
Then of course once Linux is fully entrenched in the corporate workplace, people will start to want Linux in their homes, because it will be what they're used to.
I've enjoyed just about all of Stephenson's novels; Cryptonomicon was a personal favourite and the best creative expression of the late 90s geek zeitgeist that I think we're likely to get.
But ah, then we come to Quicksilver. Parts were entertaining, but it didn't hang together, and as others have pointed out there's a lot of filler between the good bits. From my perspective, too much work for too little reward.
The problem for me is not the number of digressions and asides; the problem is the digressions in Quicksilver are mostly not that interesting.
I get the sense that Stephenson is a little too hemmed in by history; his imagination is weighed down by the need to at least marginally respect period detail (though he doesn't mind bending it on occasion).
And maybe it's because his most interesting writing focusses on technology, and there wasn't as much of that back then. In Quicksilver he focusses much more on character and plot, which aren't his strong points as a writer.
Not in the online edition ...
on
Linux in Canada
·
· Score: 2, Informative
... but in the print: a full page infomercial from M$ consisting entirely of:
a) Anecdotes about random Canadian companies that still prefer Microsoft products.
b) a big TCO diagram pulled from an IDC study "conducted for Microsoft."
Clever Microsoft, focussing on their core business market: CIOs with no critical thinking skills...
Problem is mindshare and blame-avoidance
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Consider this: you're a middle-management type and you have this project. You choose to go with a non-MS technology that the other folks in management regard as flaky.
The project fails: you get blamed for choosing perceived "flaky" technology, even if that wasn't the cause of the failure.
Say you choose MS instead. The project fails, but in this case you avoid blame because you did it "by the book" (literally), even if the technology in this case did cause the failure.
If the project succeeds, it's probably OK either way... although some of your colleagues still might look at you funny if you chose the weirdo "free" stuff. You might score points with upper management for saving some costs on licensing fees, but then again, they just might not care.
As a middle-manager, it's very likely you're more interested in avoiding blame than in taking risks that could get you fired. Until general attitudes toward MS change (which is happening), middle management isn't going to be a lot of help.
a) The criteria for whether or not something is an "art" used to depend on whether or not it belonged to one of the disciplines conventionally designated as such: poetry, painting, architecture, sculpture, etc. But over the course of the last century the definition of art expanded to include (at least potentially) any activity or artifact reflecting a significant level of creativity.
Under the older definition, programming is definitely not an art. Under the newer definition, some instances of programming probably are.
b) Under the newer definition, some instances of carpentry are also art. (Sadly, my house probably isn't one of them.)... So to bring this home: if we apply the newer definition, your prof was probably right for about 99% of possible cases. Of course, your prof would also have been equally right had he applied the same argument to poets and painters. Real creativity is pretty rare. But even so, it's impossible to rule out programming (or poetry and painting) as a potential art form.
Slashdot Mirror
People learn the stuff they feel they need to know. I know almost nothing about the car I drive; I just use it to get from A to B. But in the early days of the automobile, that observation wouldn't have made sense: to get from A to B, you had to know how your car worked, because there was a pretty good chance it would break down en route. Of course, we still need some people who know how cars work, but unless that's your job or some kind of hobby, you don't need to be one of them.
Computers are similar. We've passed the stage when you need to know how they work in order to make them do something useful. Result: way more clueless people using them. And even among the technical types, increasingly reliable hardware means fewer of us need to know much about it. Just replace the appliance every few years, and you're fine. Most of the time.
Apart from the obvious social ills that come with locking down free speech, it creates some pretty obvious problems around efficiency, innovation, and investment. Can't have efficient markets without good feedback.
That being the case, nations that don't lock down free speech will have a competitive advantage in the marketplace. So we should be looking to promote free speech and the exchange of ideas, rather than trying to lock them down with DRM, copyright, patents,the Patriot Act, etc, as we appear to be so hell-bent on doing.
The only workaround I'm aware of for circumventing pop-up blocking in Firefox is via Flash, and you know you can download a Flash blocker extension, right?
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
YMMV, but I haven't seen a single pop-up since installing FlashBlock a couple of months ago. And in fact it's gone a long way to improving my browsing experience in general.
Not sure what he was claiming in 1990, but now he only claims to have used a manual typewriter through 1985:s p
" Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something that hasn't been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life."
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/source.a
Not true. Most libraries only have records of what you currently have checked out. They don't keep those records after the books are returned. The historical exceptions have tended to be totalitarian regimes like Stalinist Russia.
Fingerprinting library users is insanely over the top. If it was happening in my country, I'd be really worried.
a) Reference librarians, being generalists, will never know as much as a specialized researcher does about their topic area. Reference librarians tend to be most useful to undergrads or people starting to research outside their previous field of study.
... dang, ad hominem attacks are easy!
b) Most physics profs, in my experience, view students the same way sysadmins view their users: as clueless idiots who ask a lot of dumb questions and get in the way of doing their real work (ie, in the profs' case, research)
c) Many libraries have a preservation role as well as an access role. The two roles, being antithetical in the case of physical objects (eg. books), tend to conflict. Most of the barriers that libraries put up around access comes from trying to balance the needs for access and preservation. It's likely that the reading rooms could allow greater freedom of access because their mandate didn't include long-term preservation, presumably because the library already had that covered. (The conflict goes away once everything shifts to digital, of course.)
Well, yeah, I thought they might give me a raise, given that they pay my salary.
And as long as the raise equals the amount of my overcontribution, everybody wins!
Why is acting in self interest a duty to my nation?
If I through oversight or a misguided sense of generosity contribute more than my fair share of taxes, I may be a bit of a chump, but I can't see how that makes me a less dutiful citizen than someone who takes pains over their tax return. What sort of negative impact does contributing more than my fair share have on my country?
It's not for everyone, but a Master's in Library/Information Studies could lead to interesting things, eg. systems librarian at a university. The field desperately needs more professionals with IT experience/abilities, and there's a real opportunity to make a difference since we'll be working through the impact of new technologies for the foreseeable future.
Pay's not that great, but there's a decent amount of job security. Plenty of opportunities for advancement coming up as the boomers start to retire.
Ok, here's the deal ... as a librarian myself, I kind of have a sense of how this filtering of which you speak is done. As someone else here has pointed out, most libraries aren't well funded enough to buy everything available, so they have to be selective. They tend to do this on the basis of what they think their users want. In the case of academic libraries, they look a lot at what courses are being taught at their institutions & what their faculty's areas of reasearch are. If more faculty members are studying Karl than old BF, well guess what.
... you know, the usual. I think blogs are a huge win for DIY participatory culture myself. Michael Gorman often plays the curmudgeon in order to provoke discussion, which apparently he has succeeded in doing yet again.
Public libraries tend to be focussed a bit more on "popular" kinds of literature: best sellers, travel writing, cooking, etc. etc., again because that's what they think their users want (based on circulation stats and user surveys, among other things). There is also some idealism involved in building collections, which is why most libraries also collect materials that may not be as popular as the above but are considered to be important for historical, regional or topical reasons.
In the public realm there is some filtering done on the basis of perceived "community standards"; translate that as fear of bad press and funding cuts if they started collecting pr0n. Public libraries are limited in how far they can push the people who fund them.
The idea that librarians as professionals have some kind of stake in imposing particular filters on the information we supply is just plain absurd. What do I care what you read? However it could be argued that the existence of public and academic libraries promotes the idea that access to a wide range of often conflicting ideas is a good thing; I wouldn't argue with you there.
Finally, I'd just like to say that many librarians don't agree with Michael Gorman's POV. We write blogs, we read slashdot
So ... the folks over at ACM Queue didn't have actual knowledge of a programming language?
Riiight ... and as we all know, no married person has ever got AIDS from an infected partner.
See the thing is, not only do you have to have "will power over biological functions," you also have to have a trustworthy partner. And maybe you do, maybe you don't, but you can never know for absolute certain.
And wow, your claim to feel "sorry" side-by-side with your cavalier dismissal of the problem (not to mention the finger-pointing at the parents) ought to be a big help to those afflicted with a deadly disease! Thanks for the insight!
Chomsky clearly demonstrated that the standard criticism of Moore ("his facts are mostly right but he uses them to lead his audience to erroneous conclusions") applies equally to every mainstream news source. Moore's work is valuable not because it's "true" in some absolute sense, but because it presents a credible alternative to the biases of the mainstream media.
I think I see what you're saying, but "What if ..." in its most basic form can be applied to just about any story. (Which is why some of your examples are fantasy, not sf :) ).
.." formula doesn't really work all that well when applied to a lot of sf, in the sense that it doesn't really tell you much about the story. I suppose you could say Clarke's "Cold Equations" was something like "What if someone stowed away on a rocketship where there wasn't enough air for them to last the journey?" ... but that just describes the plot, it doesn't get to the point of the story at all.
...
And the "What if
For my part, I'd have to say that sf is fiction that explores the narrative possibilities opened up by extrapolated advances in science and technology. Hard sf insists that the sci/tech presented in the story not contradict the what is known about science at the time the story was written. So yeah, basically science fiction is fiction with science
Actually, a whole bunch of corporations give away at least some of their stuff for free, including IBM (eg Eclipse), the Apache consortium, the folks that make MySQL, to name three of many. Open source gives me way more software than my individual contributions would buy if I was trading my hours for money. As long as it's a net gain for me, why would I care whether there are also a lot of freeloaders out there?
And here's a question: what's the ethical difference between an individual who uses open souce software but doesn't contribute anything back, and a freeloading corporation?
Sorry to be so on-topic, but does anyone have a take on how this book compares to George Schlossnagle's Advanced PHP Programming, which appears to cover a lot of the same ground?
Gosh, if only I'd known before how bad things were up here, I could have sent my father down your way for his recent surgery.
Of course, it would have cost him his life's savings, but I'm sure it would have been worth it. Instead he had to contend with our Canadian health care system, which in his case meant receiving the services of a top-notch surgeon and recovering in an ultramodern facility with excellent care. Despite all that, I'm pleased to report he's doing great now. I guess he was lucky.
And hey thanks, it's sure nice to know where I can go for cheap MRIs. I'll bet you all down there get that done once or twice a year, just for fun?
Libraries are dead...
OK, I'll feed you. What do you mean? The physical space or the idea? Not that it matters much.
Libraries as physical space: Lots of information, especially books, are not available in digital format and may never be. Even if they were, digital isn't the preferred format for lots of people. Maybe someday this won't be the case, but that's not the point: Right now, communities still need a place to store physical media.
Libraries as idea: Basically, a library is a bunch of people pooling their money to build a collection of information much greater than any of them could amass individually. Doesn't matter what format the information takes. The only thing that could kill the library as idea is for all (or almost all) the information anyone could want to be available and easy to access for free. That hasn't happened yet either, and it's not likely to happen for a looong time, if ever.
Hmm. Options. Well let's see.
... gee, kind of like Linux in that respect. So I guess that option is available too.
... why not set up mutt & procmail?
... You're just trolling, right?
Multiple button mouse. Yep, these exist for Macs. That option is available.
Virtual desktops. Not in Aqua, although you can kind of simulate it by creating multiple users & doing fast user switching. But I agree, that's not really the same thing. Or you can run X11 in fullscreen mode & have as many X desktops as you want
And yep, Mail.app doesn't do TLS
In general you appear to be describing pre-OS X versions of Apple's OS. It's just plain silly to imply that OS X is only useful if you want "listen to music, surf, do some email, and chat"
Actually, lots of good documentation exists for open source software. Lots of it is free (eg. php.net) but lots of it you have to pay for; it comes in the form of books from O'Reilly, SAMS & many others.
... if the included documentation was so great, presumably the "Missing Manual" series and all those "Dummies" books wouldn't sell quite so well.
This isn't that different from the closed source world
Good documentation is no fun to write. It's great if it's free, but it's reasonable to expect to pay for some of it.
Maybe the next step for Linux is the corporate desktop space, not the consumer desktop. Makes sense; most corporate users only need a small number of applications (web, email and an office suite pretty much do it for me.) For a lot of CIOs, the fact that many consumer apps (eg games) aren't available for Linux might actually be a good thing ...
Then of course once Linux is fully entrenched in the corporate workplace, people will start to want Linux in their homes, because it will be what they're used to.
I've enjoyed just about all of Stephenson's novels; Cryptonomicon was a personal favourite and the best creative expression of the late 90s geek zeitgeist that I think we're likely to get.
But ah, then we come to Quicksilver. Parts were entertaining, but it didn't hang together, and as others have pointed out there's a lot of filler between the good bits. From my perspective, too much work for too little reward.
The problem for me is not the number of digressions and asides; the problem is the digressions in Quicksilver are mostly not that interesting.
I get the sense that Stephenson is a little too hemmed in by history; his imagination is weighed down by the need to at least marginally respect period detail (though he doesn't mind bending it on occasion).
And maybe it's because his most interesting writing focusses on technology, and there wasn't as much of that back then. In Quicksilver he focusses much more on character and plot, which aren't his strong points as a writer.
... but in the print: a full page infomercial from M$ consisting entirely of:
...
a) Anecdotes about random Canadian companies that still prefer Microsoft products.
b) a big TCO diagram pulled from an IDC study "conducted for Microsoft."
Clever Microsoft, focussing on their core business market:
CIOs with no critical thinking skills
The project fails: you get blamed for choosing perceived "flaky" technology, even if that wasn't the cause of the failure.
Say you choose MS instead. The project fails, but in this case you avoid blame because you did it "by the book" (literally), even if the technology in this case did cause the failure.
If the project succeeds, it's probably OK either way ... although some of your colleagues still might look at you funny if you chose the weirdo "free" stuff. You might score points with upper management for saving some costs on licensing fees, but then again, they just might not care.
As a middle-manager, it's very likely you're more interested in avoiding blame than in taking risks that could get you fired. Until general attitudes toward MS change (which is happening), middle management isn't going to be a lot of help.
Couple of points:
... So to bring this home: if we apply the newer definition, your prof was probably right for about 99% of possible cases. Of course, your prof would also have been equally right had he applied the same argument to poets and painters. Real creativity is pretty rare. But even so, it's impossible to rule out programming (or poetry and painting) as a potential art form.
a) The criteria for whether or not something is an "art" used to depend on whether or not it belonged to one of the disciplines conventionally designated as such: poetry, painting, architecture, sculpture, etc. But over the course of the last century the definition of art expanded to include (at least potentially) any activity or artifact reflecting a significant level of creativity.
Under the older definition, programming is definitely not an art. Under the newer definition, some instances of programming probably are.
b) Under the newer definition, some instances of carpentry are also art. (Sadly, my house probably isn't one of them.)