It's a nice idea, but can you imagine how fast it would be abused?! "Hello, random router, I'm a... fire official... please let me route traffic through you." Heck, you could boostrap an entire fidonet-like service in any major city without spending a dime.
No, the bottom line is that, when you're inside what is essentially a faraday cage, you're screwed. You might have the radios figure this out and talk directly to eachother, but that's about as good as you're going to get. The only way around it that I can think of would be to drop a repeater in a doorway or blow down a wall.
That's no problem! All I really need it to do is allow all of those geeks out there to share those great Playboy articles with me over p2p networks! I'm tired of just getting the filler photography!;-)
The "don't be evil" thing is something that Google founders have said, but more interestingly it showed up in their S1 (check it out, Yahoo! for example, has links to the S1 on their finance page for GOOG), which limits their liability with respect to stockholders should that policy cause them to fail to make money. This, I will note, is unique in the business world. No one limits their exposure in this way, which is why you should typically be very afraid of public corporations. It's not that they are run by evil people (sometimes they are), but that they MUST behave in evil ways if push comes to shove, and that's the path to stockholder value. They are required to be exactly as evil as the law and their S1 allow them to be (and there's some debate on the law part).
That being said, I have a deep faith in one thing: Slashdot + The Register = faulty news. Sure, Google has a technology that lets them turn on a microphone. Good for them. I'll wait to see how they attempt to deploy it before getting upset.
I played about 10 or so times. Sometimes it seemed like it might be that the server was slow, but at other times, the person on the other end was clearly being dense.
For example, the two times I got a movie poster with text on it, I quickly typed "movie", "poster", the last names of the actors, the movie name. My partner, in both cases, passed. PASSED! WTF?! There is text on a movie poster and instead of either typing "movie" or "poster" or some of the text, one word at a time, you pass.
The one thing that got me at first (and I'm sure there are some folks annoyed with me for it) is that I was typing in all of the labels I could think of... and THEN hitting return. Google dutifully took this as one long label, and I never matched. Heh.
PS: To those playing, here's a hint: passing takes too long. Try to tough it out unless the image is REALLY confusing.
Wikipedia is, and will continue to be, a work in progress, a best effort by thousands of people to create an accurate, impartial and useful repository of human knowledge. As such it has succeeded in covering more topics, in more languages, than any other encyclopaedia.
But it necessarily contains errors, some placed there deliberately by writers with a specific agenda and others simply mistakes that have gone unnoticed.
No, Wikipedia isn't perfect, but taken on the whole, it's one of the best references on everything out there. Specific references on narrow topic are often better, but that's certainly to be expected.
What stuns me is that, even having a fairly bright cadre of programmers working on MediaWiki, the idea of a real, branching revision control system hasn't taken hold. It seems that the best way to deal with vandalism and inaccuracy in general would be to have all changes made on branches (individual branches for anonymous editors, and perhaps a unified dev branch for logged in, longer-term editors), and merging of branches could be another part of the editing process. MediaWiki needs to become a revision control system and document management system that supports a real, if distributed, editorial process.
Ah, but the problem is never "is there anyone in the party who is over/under-powered." It is typically that one or two people are significantly out of line. So, you scale opponents to... what? The one oddball? The rest of the party? How is the rest of the party going to feel if that one person is fairly effective (not out of line, just fairly effective) and the rest of them are useless?
As far as I know, you usually need asymmetric encryption to reasonably set up temporary symmetric encryption.
Yes and no. Let's step back and cover what is currently done:
Typically you generate a public/private key and give one out to the world (the "public" part, though in most systems that's an arbitrary distinction). The reason you do this is because it's "safe" to give out the public part (no one can decrypt your messages with it) and it gets around the horrible problems inherent in trying to move a key around that *can* decrypt your data (such as those used in symetric key systems). Now you could just stop there, and encrypt all of your data using the target's public key, but it turns out that that's fairly computationally expensive.
In order to speed up the process, you can just use the public key to encrypt a random, one-time session key that you use as the input to a (much faster) symmetric key algorithm such as IDEA, blowfish, twofish, DES, 3DES, etc. Now you have a fast communication path and, as long as the symmetric key system is believed to be at least as strong as the asymetric key system, you have not lost any security.
Now, if symetric key is so much faster, why don't we just use THAT? Well, we would, except that it's a pain to get the symetric key to the target without compromising it. You could, for example, send it via U.S. Post (slow, and not 100% reliable), send it over a private communication channel like a leased line (expensive, not secure), etc. There are other ways too. For example, you can NOT send the key, but have an out-of-band agreement as to how they are generated. For exaple, you might agree to use a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) wiht a particular seed on a particular date, generating a new key each day. That's not too bad for some purposes, by typically it's not strong enough for truly important information, as PRNGs tend to have their own flaws, and anyone who finds out what you're doing essentially has every key you'll ever use until you exchange a new seed.
What quantum encryption changes is this: it gives you a secure channel over which to communicate (usually at low bandwidth), so you can use it to move a key for symmetric key encryption, and then perform your encryption with that. If anyone evesdrops on the connection, you are guaranteed to know (because the data will be changed, and presumably you've built in appropriate checksums so that you will realize that you now have line noise), and you won't use that key (providing trivial denial of service, which is why this isn't good for non-physical communications).
Quantum computing essentially replaces asymetric key encryption for short, physical links in terms of providing a secure way to exchange symmetric keys. If it gets up to the point that high volumes of data can be moved through the quantum link (which the article is not describing), then you can just move a one-time pad through the link, and your encryption algorithm will be a simple xor.
Balance issues between classes are HARD. No one deinies this. Balance issues between dozens or hundreds of skills, advantages, power, abilities, items, and whatever all else is practically impossible. I've never seen a tabletop game where such issues are easily resolved (and I've played most), and video games only make the problem worse.
Now, what such systems give you is the flexibility to define a class the way you want to. I respect that, and that's why (until recently, for reasons of pragmatism) I ran exclusively GURPS, Hero System and other generic games that were not class-based. It's not that class-based games are useless, but they just can't adapt to a creative and motivated player's needs as easily.
In the wolrd of online gaming I think the problem is much harder. I played EQ for a long time, and I've watched other games develop. I'm horrified by the very idea of trying satisfy so many OCD-like 24/7 gamers who will break down and abuse even the balance in class-based systems.
The problem with most hybrid or just flat-out class/advantage/power-based systems in table-top or online roleplaying is that it is typically VERY easy to create a sub-optimal character. Even d20 (the system that underlies the current version of Dungeons & Dragons) suffers this problem to the extent that it has an advantage system (called feats) tacked on to its class-based system.
It usually ends up that you need to very carefully fine-tune a character in such systems so that you aren't painfully underpowered with respect to the content. In tabletop gaming this can be compensated for somewhat by the GM who can make roleplaying more impoirtant; give you appropriate gear and other advantages to offset your weakness; etc. However in online games, it gets MUCH harder to provide a quiality experience for players who don't optimize to death, and that kind of sucks.
In class-based systems, it's not as much of an issue. As long as each class has its role, and also stands on its own fairly well, there will always be bitching about game balance, but at least everyone will be able to play productively.
Most of Clarke's books for the last 20 years or so have been collaborations which seem like the product of ACC meeting with the junior author for a week, then the junior author writing up a novel based on the notes. Better than nothing, but I wish he'd chosen better writers to work with.
Fair criticism, and Richter 10 was one such book... or was supposed to be. Then the "junior" author in question died. So, ACC picked it back up, finished it (which apparently wasn't a lot of work, as he had been fairly far along) and published the result under both their names. It was sort of the reverse of the typical dead-author problem that Asimov and Heinlein had seen around the same time. I found it interesting enough to read the book, which I felt spent too long on the lead-in story to hook me with the real SF angle toward the end, but it still had all of the hallmarks of a Clarke story, and some fairly decent characterization.
Yeah, I think you're being overly restrictive in your interpretations of both articles. I don't see how I've disagreed with anything he said. Expounded on it, yes, but not disagreed.
Very good authors have their own names on their books, not a famous corpse's.
No, very good authors have their own names on their books, though in some cases, a corpse's name may also grace the cover when said corpse worked on the book. Observe:
And if you're really digging into the history, such VGAs have existed before. Arthur C. Clarke is, for example, on that list, having co-written Richter 10 with the person that he initially farmed the idea out to, but who died before completing it.
To boot, there are many who would argue that Spider Robinson (on the merits of the books that are purely his) is a better writter than Heinlein. I'm not sure if I'm one of them or not, as I enjoy both authors for different reasons.
One point that perhaps is not known by the general public is that Gnutella is going to have a Distributed Hash Table soon. Something that BT has for some time now, but the addition of a DHT to Gnutella will make magnet URIs finally work right.
That would be more clearly stated as, "critical mass of servents that support DHTs will be reached soon," as (as I understand it), the standard already allows for it, but implementations have been slow.
The question is then: will it be faster to locate a torrent file or get your hands on a magnet URI that can be fed to any serious Gnutella servent to start a download?
I'm not so sure that's even important. Even with fairly poor magnet support, Gnutella's primary feature is that old, less popular files, tend to exist in their entirety.
I could be wrong in my evaluation, here, but my stab at the reasons for this are:
1) Gnutella clients aren't typically launched in a "download this file" mode, it is launched in a "browser" mode, often leading to longer share times.
2) Gnutella downloads larger chunk sizes, leading to more complete coverage of files over the long haul.
The biggest problem with Gnutella now is spam, and for that, I can certainly agree that magnet URLs with DHTs will substantially improve the situation.
However, I have a substantial problem with the way DHTs are implemented, and I *think* that they will be easy to compromise in the general case for those willing to spend enough money on polluting the network (I could probably do it for under $1,000,000 if I'm right, and if I can do it, I'm sure the media companies will be able to).
Still, if the goal is to verify that an OS distribution or other legitimate file hasn't been tampered with, I think it should be sufficient (as pollution of such files would only result in unusable results, not the ability to inject malicious content).
"What happened to the other guy's post being 100% correct?"
Someone is mis-reading here. I'm simply not seeing how I disagreed with the OP.
He pointed out that the abstract metaphor is what leads to GUIs which users can't understand.
I think too many people read into that that he was suggesting that anything that involved a text-mode CLI was somehow impervious to such abstraction. That's not what he said, and that's not what he later reiterated.
Abstracting disk blocks into "files" and "directories" was a big step in terms of metaphorical abstraction, and I think that's still the stage we're at, in terms of digesting the metaphor. The Web (at least the HTTP-based part of the Web) further abstracted those into "pages" and "sites"... I don't think we've yet digested that shift and how it will ultimately impact the use of systems. GUIs or CLIs or any other abstraction that seeks to hide further details from users is on weak foundations, and is probably doing the user more harm than good.
I could further go into the abstractions around other parts of the hardware, but the story doesn't much change. The point is that the users should understand enough of the system that they use so that they don't make their own lives more difficult.
First off, the post you quote is 100% correct. Hiding the system from the user is a mistake.
Second, you're wrong, that statement is not a defense of the CLI (the CLI does just fine defending itself, thank you), it is a defense of not abstracting away what matters to the user, and until the operation of the system doesn't matter to the user, hiding its functioning is a mistake.
The part that I think is most cogent is the observation that even the simplest metaphor (and I won't even use the word GUI there, because it's not limited to GUIs) requires training to use correctly (self-teaching through trial-and-error is not training-free). This SHOULD suggest to us that we can and should take the time to explain to the user what is really going on. The worst case scenario is when abstracted user interfaces become the terminology through which a user must wade to explain their problem to someone who DOES understand the technology. I dispise hearing from people who say that they had a GPF, blue screen, guru meditation error, happy wizzy frobnitzer or any other kind of high-level error. I want to hear what your problem IS, not the 100th-removed consequence of your problem. If you understood that that text on the blue screen was state information, or you understood that that python backtrace is the calling frame, then you could speak coherently about what you were seeing.
Instead we treat everyone like morons because SOMEONE among them is bound to be.
When attempting this in the middle of an otherwise wealthy and well organized country, there are a VERY different set of problems to be faced. Essentially, Detroit is a city that had no particular reason to BE a city of its size in the modern day, other than the centralization of one particular industry. When that industry left, the city had nothing to fall back on.
In Africa, there is a lack of a high tech presense, and it's pretty clear that it's coming. The question is: how will it get started, when so few have access to technology. That's the goal of the $100 laptop project.
The more Bittorrent adds features, the more it becomes like gnutella. Fortunately, I have been able to just use Gnutella for the last couple of years;-)
Bittorrent is great for very large, very popular files, but when you start dealing with small or unpopular files, I've never found an example where BT got me what I needed faster. Searching Gnutella takes longer than searching for a torrent on the Web, of course, but in the end, download times on very large files that aren't well seeded is radically different, mostly because of the larger chunk size and contingous second-block fetch in Gnutella.
True? Not exactly. Trust is too strong a term to use.
We welcome you to make changes to Wikipedia, just like the rest of the world. We do this in order to gain access to knowledge that no one body of editors has ever had, and to document the breadth of human experience.
Does this mean that we trust that what you type is either true or encyclopedic? No, we do not, but that trust can be built up or destroyed over time, and is a rather self-regulating process ("self" regulating in the sense that some fraction of contributors feel more comfortable contributing their time to police such problems).
I know you were joking, but there are high hopes that the $100 laptop poject will lead to an overall increase in the standard of living in these countries by creating the possibility of a high-tech middle class. This doesn't happen over night, but access to tools as an essential first step. Peace comes with prosperity. Food comes increased national wealth. All of these things require a strong economy and today that means high-tech.
The only thing high-tech workforces won't be able to fix alone is the problem of civil rights, but access to technology will HELP even there, as ideas about civil rights are stagnant in most of the African continent right now.
Actually, I'm thrilled with the idea. I think karma should be directly related to your available bandwidth (for all services, not just port 80 to Slashdot).
This would be great, but we'll need some UI changes. First off, you want to list karma score in Mb/s. Also, it would be nice to have a "+1 pity" moderation option for those who can no longer read their mail....
I think you are missing the point here. It's not "fun" but the restriction of socialization. Socialization is something that parents MUST allow their children to do, or they fail to develop essential social skills that they will need later in life.
If parents road-block that socialization, then yes, they are injuring their child. The child can recover, but it's a real hurdle. Now, in most environments, removing a phone (cell or otherwise) won't cripple a social life. On the other hand, there are certainly some where it would. I would think that in order to truly call it abuse, even in those situations, you would have to be able to demonstrate that it was part of a partern of isolating the child from social contact.
There are degrees of child abuse, and one of those is somehwhat subtle. If you don't allow your child to socialize with other children, I consider that a subtle form of child abuse. The question is: are you depriving your teenage girl of socialization by removing her cell phone? In SOME situations, the answer would be yes, but those are limited. Certainly in a city environment, that would not be the case.
Also, if you're talking about removing a cell phone and providing a land-line, then that's perfectly reasonable (though no teenager is going to see it that way). I'm talking about removing access to a cell phone and NOT providing other means of communication.
Of course, even the worst-case scenario doesn't compare on the same order of magnitude with physical abuse, neglect or trauma-inducing phsychological abuse. That doesn't make it a good thing, either.
A friend of mine went to one of these MS love-ins (his company was invited). It was uneventful, and MS had them down to a science. The only thing that really shocked him was that at one point, they offered them a tray of fruit, and there was a pomegranate there. Now, there's no practical reason to put out a pomegranate as snack food. it's messy, sticky, and can take a LONG time to pick apart.
Website (one word) was not an every-day word at the time. In fact, even in the technical lingo, "Web site" (two words) was just a variant of "FTP site" which had been used for years, and not a stand-alone word.
Slashdot: News for people who were too stoned or too young to remember the mid-90s.
Sources: Before 1995, the word "website" was used less than 300 times on USENET. During the same time, the term "web site" was used over 5000 times. If you prowl through those uses of "web site" you will see that almost all of them are people who were talking about, but didn't quite understand the technology. I don't think the USPTO generally accepts infrequent mis-use or mis-spellings when considering a trademark.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a nice idea, but can you imagine how fast it would be abused?! "Hello, random router, I'm a ... fire official ... please let me route traffic through you." Heck, you could boostrap an entire fidonet-like service in any major city without spending a dime.
No, the bottom line is that, when you're inside what is essentially a faraday cage, you're screwed. You might have the radios figure this out and talk directly to eachother, but that's about as good as you're going to get. The only way around it that I can think of would be to drop a repeater in a doorway or blow down a wall.
That's no problem! All I really need it to do is allow all of those geeks out there to share those great Playboy articles with me over p2p networks! I'm tired of just getting the filler photography! ;-)
The "don't be evil" thing is something that Google founders have said, but more interestingly it showed up in their S1 (check it out, Yahoo! for example, has links to the S1 on their finance page for GOOG), which limits their liability with respect to stockholders should that policy cause them to fail to make money. This, I will note, is unique in the business world. No one limits their exposure in this way, which is why you should typically be very afraid of public corporations. It's not that they are run by evil people (sometimes they are), but that they MUST behave in evil ways if push comes to shove, and that's the path to stockholder value. They are required to be exactly as evil as the law and their S1 allow them to be (and there's some debate on the law part).
That being said, I have a deep faith in one thing: Slashdot + The Register = faulty news. Sure, Google has a technology that lets them turn on a microphone. Good for them. I'll wait to see how they attempt to deploy it before getting upset.
It's got one problem: stupid users.
I played about 10 or so times. Sometimes it seemed like it might be that the server was slow, but at other times, the person on the other end was clearly being dense.
For example, the two times I got a movie poster with text on it, I quickly typed "movie", "poster", the last names of the actors, the movie name. My partner, in both cases, passed. PASSED! WTF?! There is text on a movie poster and instead of either typing "movie" or "poster" or some of the text, one word at a time, you pass.
The one thing that got me at first (and I'm sure there are some folks annoyed with me for it) is that I was typing in all of the labels I could think of... and THEN hitting return. Google dutifully took this as one long label, and I never matched. Heh.
PS: To those playing, here's a hint: passing takes too long. Try to tough it out unless the image is REALLY confusing.
No, Wikipedia isn't perfect, but taken on the whole, it's one of the best references on everything out there. Specific references on narrow topic are often better, but that's certainly to be expected.
What stuns me is that, even having a fairly bright cadre of programmers working on MediaWiki, the idea of a real, branching revision control system hasn't taken hold. It seems that the best way to deal with vandalism and inaccuracy in general would be to have all changes made on branches (individual branches for anonymous editors, and perhaps a unified dev branch for logged in, longer-term editors), and merging of branches could be another part of the editing process. MediaWiki needs to become a revision control system and document management system that supports a real, if distributed, editorial process.
Ah, but the problem is never "is there anyone in the party who is over/under-powered." It is typically that one or two people are significantly out of line. So, you scale opponents to... what? The one oddball? The rest of the party? How is the rest of the party going to feel if that one person is fairly effective (not out of line, just fairly effective) and the rest of them are useless?
Yes and no. Let's step back and cover what is currently done:
Typically you generate a public/private key and give one out to the world (the "public" part, though in most systems that's an arbitrary distinction). The reason you do this is because it's "safe" to give out the public part (no one can decrypt your messages with it) and it gets around the horrible problems inherent in trying to move a key around that *can* decrypt your data (such as those used in symetric key systems). Now you could just stop there, and encrypt all of your data using the target's public key, but it turns out that that's fairly computationally expensive.
In order to speed up the process, you can just use the public key to encrypt a random, one-time session key that you use as the input to a (much faster) symmetric key algorithm such as IDEA, blowfish, twofish, DES, 3DES, etc. Now you have a fast communication path and, as long as the symmetric key system is believed to be at least as strong as the asymetric key system, you have not lost any security.
Now, if symetric key is so much faster, why don't we just use THAT? Well, we would, except that it's a pain to get the symetric key to the target without compromising it. You could, for example, send it via U.S. Post (slow, and not 100% reliable), send it over a private communication channel like a leased line (expensive, not secure), etc. There are other ways too. For example, you can NOT send the key, but have an out-of-band agreement as to how they are generated. For exaple, you might agree to use a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) wiht a particular seed on a particular date, generating a new key each day. That's not too bad for some purposes, by typically it's not strong enough for truly important information, as PRNGs tend to have their own flaws, and anyone who finds out what you're doing essentially has every key you'll ever use until you exchange a new seed.
What quantum encryption changes is this: it gives you a secure channel over which to communicate (usually at low bandwidth), so you can use it to move a key for symmetric key encryption, and then perform your encryption with that. If anyone evesdrops on the connection, you are guaranteed to know (because the data will be changed, and presumably you've built in appropriate checksums so that you will realize that you now have line noise), and you won't use that key (providing trivial denial of service, which is why this isn't good for non-physical communications).
Quantum computing essentially replaces asymetric key encryption for short, physical links in terms of providing a secure way to exchange symmetric keys. If it gets up to the point that high volumes of data can be moved through the quantum link (which the article is not describing), then you can just move a one-time pad through the link, and your encryption algorithm will be a simple xor.
Balance issues between classes are HARD. No one deinies this. Balance issues between dozens or hundreds of skills, advantages, power, abilities, items, and whatever all else is practically impossible. I've never seen a tabletop game where such issues are easily resolved (and I've played most), and video games only make the problem worse.
Now, what such systems give you is the flexibility to define a class the way you want to. I respect that, and that's why (until recently, for reasons of pragmatism) I ran exclusively GURPS, Hero System and other generic games that were not class-based. It's not that class-based games are useless, but they just can't adapt to a creative and motivated player's needs as easily.
In the wolrd of online gaming I think the problem is much harder. I played EQ for a long time, and I've watched other games develop. I'm horrified by the very idea of trying satisfy so many OCD-like 24/7 gamers who will break down and abuse even the balance in class-based systems.
The problem with most hybrid or just flat-out class/advantage/power-based systems in table-top or online roleplaying is that it is typically VERY easy to create a sub-optimal character. Even d20 (the system that underlies the current version of Dungeons & Dragons) suffers this problem to the extent that it has an advantage system (called feats) tacked on to its class-based system.
It usually ends up that you need to very carefully fine-tune a character in such systems so that you aren't painfully underpowered with respect to the content. In tabletop gaming this can be compensated for somewhat by the GM who can make roleplaying more impoirtant; give you appropriate gear and other advantages to offset your weakness; etc. However in online games, it gets MUCH harder to provide a quiality experience for players who don't optimize to death, and that kind of sucks.
In class-based systems, it's not as much of an issue. As long as each class has its role, and also stands on its own fairly well, there will always be bitching about game balance, but at least everyone will be able to play productively.
Fair criticism, and Richter 10 was one such book... or was supposed to be. Then the "junior" author in question died. So, ACC picked it back up, finished it (which apparently wasn't a lot of work, as he had been fairly far along) and published the result under both their names. It was sort of the reverse of the typical dead-author problem that Asimov and Heinlein had seen around the same time. I found it interesting enough to read the book, which I felt spent too long on the lead-in story to hook me with the real SF angle toward the end, but it still had all of the hallmarks of a Clarke story, and some fairly decent characterization.
Yeah, I think you're being overly restrictive in your interpretations of both articles. I don't see how I've disagreed with anything he said. Expounded on it, yes, but not disagreed.
No, very good authors have their own names on their books, though in some cases, a corpse's name may also grace the cover when said corpse worked on the book. Observe:
http://variablestarbook.com/images/variable-star.
And if you're really digging into the history, such VGAs have existed before. Arthur C. Clarke is, for example, on that list, having co-written Richter 10 with the person that he initially farmed the idea out to, but who died before completing it.
To boot, there are many who would argue that Spider Robinson (on the merits of the books that are purely his) is a better writter than Heinlein. I'm not sure if I'm one of them or not, as I enjoy both authors for different reasons.
That would be more clearly stated as, "critical mass of servents that support DHTs will be reached soon," as (as I understand it), the standard already allows for it, but implementations have been slow.
I'm not so sure that's even important. Even with fairly poor magnet support, Gnutella's primary feature is that old, less popular files, tend to exist in their entirety.
I could be wrong in my evaluation, here, but my stab at the reasons for this are:
1) Gnutella clients aren't typically launched in a "download this file" mode, it is launched in a "browser" mode, often leading to longer share times.
2) Gnutella downloads larger chunk sizes, leading to more complete coverage of files over the long haul.
The biggest problem with Gnutella now is spam, and for that, I can certainly agree that magnet URLs with DHTs will substantially improve the situation.
However, I have a substantial problem with the way DHTs are implemented, and I *think* that they will be easy to compromise in the general case for those willing to spend enough money on polluting the network (I could probably do it for under $1,000,000 if I'm right, and if I can do it, I'm sure the media companies will be able to).
Still, if the goal is to verify that an OS distribution or other legitimate file hasn't been tampered with, I think it should be sufficient (as pollution of such files would only result in unusable results, not the ability to inject malicious content).
Someone is mis-reading here. I'm simply not seeing how I disagreed with the OP.
He pointed out that the abstract metaphor is what leads to GUIs which users can't understand.
I think too many people read into that that he was suggesting that anything that involved a text-mode CLI was somehow impervious to such abstraction. That's not what he said, and that's not what he later reiterated.
Abstracting disk blocks into "files" and "directories" was a big step in terms of metaphorical abstraction, and I think that's still the stage we're at, in terms of digesting the metaphor. The Web (at least the HTTP-based part of the Web) further abstracted those into "pages" and "sites"... I don't think we've yet digested that shift and how it will ultimately impact the use of systems. GUIs or CLIs or any other abstraction that seeks to hide further details from users is on weak foundations, and is probably doing the user more harm than good.
I could further go into the abstractions around other parts of the hardware, but the story doesn't much change. The point is that the users should understand enough of the system that they use so that they don't make their own lives more difficult.
First off, the post you quote is 100% correct. Hiding the system from the user is a mistake.
Second, you're wrong, that statement is not a defense of the CLI (the CLI does just fine defending itself, thank you), it is a defense of not abstracting away what matters to the user, and until the operation of the system doesn't matter to the user, hiding its functioning is a mistake.
The part that I think is most cogent is the observation that even the simplest metaphor (and I won't even use the word GUI there, because it's not limited to GUIs) requires training to use correctly (self-teaching through trial-and-error is not training-free). This SHOULD suggest to us that we can and should take the time to explain to the user what is really going on. The worst case scenario is when abstracted user interfaces become the terminology through which a user must wade to explain their problem to someone who DOES understand the technology. I dispise hearing from people who say that they had a GPF, blue screen, guru meditation error, happy wizzy frobnitzer or any other kind of high-level error. I want to hear what your problem IS, not the 100th-removed consequence of your problem. If you understood that that text on the blue screen was state information, or you understood that that python backtrace is the calling frame, then you could speak coherently about what you were seeing.
Instead we treat everyone like morons because SOMEONE among them is bound to be.
When attempting this in the middle of an otherwise wealthy and well organized country, there are a VERY different set of problems to be faced. Essentially, Detroit is a city that had no particular reason to BE a city of its size in the modern day, other than the centralization of one particular industry. When that industry left, the city had nothing to fall back on.
In Africa, there is a lack of a high tech presense, and it's pretty clear that it's coming. The question is: how will it get started, when so few have access to technology. That's the goal of the $100 laptop project.
The more Bittorrent adds features, the more it becomes like gnutella. Fortunately, I have been able to just use Gnutella for the last couple of years ;-)
Bittorrent is great for very large, very popular files, but when you start dealing with small or unpopular files, I've never found an example where BT got me what I needed faster. Searching Gnutella takes longer than searching for a torrent on the Web, of course, but in the end, download times on very large files that aren't well seeded is radically different, mostly because of the larger chunk size and contingous second-block fetch in Gnutella.
True? Not exactly. Trust is too strong a term to use.
We welcome you to make changes to Wikipedia, just like the rest of the world. We do this in order to gain access to knowledge that no one body of editors has ever had, and to document the breadth of human experience.
Does this mean that we trust that what you type is either true or encyclopedic? No, we do not, but that trust can be built up or destroyed over time, and is a rather self-regulating process ("self" regulating in the sense that some fraction of contributors feel more comfortable contributing their time to police such problems).
I know you were joking, but there are high hopes that the $100 laptop poject will lead to an overall increase in the standard of living in these countries by creating the possibility of a high-tech middle class. This doesn't happen over night, but access to tools as an essential first step. Peace comes with prosperity. Food comes increased national wealth. All of these things require a strong economy and today that means high-tech.
The only thing high-tech workforces won't be able to fix alone is the problem of civil rights, but access to technology will HELP even there, as ideas about civil rights are stagnant in most of the African continent right now.
Actually, I'm thrilled with the idea. I think karma should be directly related to your available bandwidth (for all services, not just port 80 to Slashdot).
This would be great, but we'll need some UI changes. First off, you want to list karma score in Mb/s. Also, it would be nice to have a "+1 pity" moderation option for those who can no longer read their mail....
The only mnemonic that I can ever manage to remember for the planets is:
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
And, did anyone ever really think of Pluto as a planet?! At best, it's a comet that doesn't enter the inner solar system.
I think you are missing the point here. It's not "fun" but the restriction of socialization. Socialization is something that parents MUST allow their children to do, or they fail to develop essential social skills that they will need later in life.
If parents road-block that socialization, then yes, they are injuring their child. The child can recover, but it's a real hurdle. Now, in most environments, removing a phone (cell or otherwise) won't cripple a social life. On the other hand, there are certainly some where it would. I would think that in order to truly call it abuse, even in those situations, you would have to be able to demonstrate that it was part of a partern of isolating the child from social contact.
There are degrees of child abuse, and one of those is somehwhat subtle. If you don't allow your child to socialize with other children, I consider that a subtle form of child abuse. The question is: are you depriving your teenage girl of socialization by removing her cell phone? In SOME situations, the answer would be yes, but those are limited. Certainly in a city environment, that would not be the case.
Also, if you're talking about removing a cell phone and providing a land-line, then that's perfectly reasonable (though no teenager is going to see it that way). I'm talking about removing access to a cell phone and NOT providing other means of communication.
Of course, even the worst-case scenario doesn't compare on the same order of magnitude with physical abuse, neglect or trauma-inducing phsychological abuse. That doesn't make it a good thing, either.
A friend of mine went to one of these MS love-ins (his company was invited). It was uneventful, and MS had them down to a science. The only thing that really shocked him was that at one point, they offered them a tray of fruit, and there was a pomegranate there. Now, there's no practical reason to put out a pomegranate as snack food. it's messy, sticky, and can take a LONG time to pick apart.
However, mythologically, there's rather heavy symbolism in the offering of a pomegranate to visitors... it just made him wonder. Needless to say, he did not eat it.
Website (one word) was not an every-day word at the time. In fact, even in the technical lingo, "Web site" (two words) was just a variant of "FTP site" which had been used for years, and not a stand-alone word.
Slashdot: News for people who were too stoned or too young to remember the mid-90s.
Sources: Before 1995, the word "website" was used less than 300 times on USENET. During the same time, the term "web site" was used over 5000 times. If you prowl through those uses of "web site" you will see that almost all of them are people who were talking about, but didn't quite understand the technology. I don't think the USPTO generally accepts infrequent mis-use or mis-spellings when considering a trademark.
In fact, there were even more people saying "world wide web site" before 2005.