What the hell did they do to the slashdot logo and title bars? Please tell me it doesn't always do this for mac articles and I just didn't notice.
I love it how, in every new Apple story on/., some people are still surprised at the cute Aqua-themed window widgets. How long since apple.slashdot.org launched? A month? How long can we keep this up?
Yes, Pxtl, they do this for all the Mac articles now, and you didn't notice.
Am I the only one whom this reminds of how Ender used to speak to Jane, the omnipotent AI computer, through an earplug? No one could hear him speaking, but at night his wife could see his lips moving quickly. There was even another character who had a speech impediment from neurological damage, for whom the impediment went away when he was speaking to Jane because it was easier to whisper for a smart earplug than to speak out loud.
<OT>
Looks like there's going to be an Ender's Game movie!
There's no real cost to innovating in music or art. It doesn't take ten years and three billion dollars to come up with a new melody. So there's little barrier to innovation in music. Anybody can do it, and many people do.
Au contraire, mon frere. Music, art, and software development all take time. And to adapt the common razz on Gnu/Linux, making music and art is free only if your time is worthless. Could Beethoven have produced the body of musical work that he did if he'd had to keep a day job as a banker?
Often, for large art projects, there is a team involved. Roy Lichtenstein had assistants paint all those big round pixels in his mural-sized comic-strip paintings. Last year I saw an exhibit by the artist Sandi Skoglund. One installation piece had a whole room-sized floor covered with thousands of blown eggshells, with a trail of footprints of broken shells through them. The walls were covered with hand-made 4" square paper tiles. That's when it struck me what a difference it makes when an artist gets some source of funding up front; no one with a day job could have done anything near that scale.
Of course there are plenty independent musicians and artists with day jobs. There are also plenty of volunteer Free Software developers with day jobs. But this is different from saying that either pursuit is cost-free.
I'm the new activist at the FSF. I want to come speak at your school or for your community group, G/LUG, any group of sympathetic people. Tonight I'm speaking at Loyola University of Chicago. I'll help you get a campus group up and running. I'll provide news and ideas for your existing activist group. Time is of the essence, since the SSSCA is being pushed inexorably towards being voted on in the Senate.
A big lie of computer security is that security improves as password complexity increases. In reality, users simply write down difficult passwords, leaving the system vulnerable. Security is better increased by designing for how people actually behave.
Sysadmins are fond of forcing users to use complex passwords. What happens then is that the user writes the password on a yellow adhesive note and sticks it on the monitor. Better to let the user use the first password that comes to mind, with possible gentle restrictions like no dictionary words, so that the user can hold the password in his or her head without writing it down -- or putting it in a "Passwords" file on the hard drive. How many theives really look up biographical information on computer users and find out all the names of their family members?
* To write the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program under the rules below.
* To show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way. * To stress C compilers with unusual code. * To illustrate some of the subtleties of the C language. * To provide a safe forum for poor C code.:-)
Kind of like Web Pages That Suck: Where you learn good Web design by looking at bad Web design.
Who here has been locked in jail or harassed or abused by AOL or the authorities because of what they typed into their netscape 6 search bar? Hm, nobody? Okay, nothing to see here. Move along.
Perhaps they don't harass you or jail you yet.
But -- and this is the absolutely salient point -- they could. (With apologies to Bill Bryson.)
Are you willing to trust AOL Time Warner with your browsing info? Are you that confident that they won't decide someday there is profit in, say tracking who searches for Newsweek and sends them junk mail trying to get you to switch to Time? What if you apply for a job at any of the many companies owned by AOL Time Warner, and they check the databases for people known to search Google for information on illegal drugs, or to make AOL-bashing comments on/.? Nothing to see her, eh?
My question is this: this piece is copyrighted by newsweek. Is it being printed *in* Newsweek?
I just ran to the store and bought this week's Newsweek. The article in question is printed on page 65. There's a big picture of Michael Greene, prez of NARAS, waggling his finger at the Grammys last week.
But what I want to know is, what does "Queegishly" mean?
Re:If you can't copy, it's not a computer
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
Copying is how computers work. Would somebody with some influence and a clue please tell them this?
There's somebody with some influence AND a clue? Who is he? She? And why haven't they stepped forward yet?
I was in the courtroom. I was very impressed with Judge Patti Saris and the way she handled the cas e. She was the kind of tough-as-nails, heart-of-gold Boston lady I've learned to admire in my years here; and she brought a plain common-sense attitude to the case that no geek could have brought.
Clearly she didn't know or care that this is considered the big "test case" for this culturally iconic GPL. To her, this was just another license and copyright case. The question of whether the GPL is "valid" never came up; it was assumed to be as valid as any license. She knew, probably from the 200 pages of briefs she complained loudly about having had to read, a bit of the history and significance of the FS/OSS movements (when the MySQL lawyer began a diatribe about the importance of keeping software free, she interjected, "Yeah, yeah, I know, it's like a religious movement, it's Open Source!")
It was just as clear that she knew nothing about software and made no bones about it. She started out pronouncing the product in question "Mice Quill". (And then she has to deal with the plaintiff calling it "My Ess Cue Ell" and the defendant calling it "My Sequel"!) And, as has been remarked, when the MySQL lawyer used the phrase "single executable file," she interrupted and demanded that he clarify, "Is that like, when I click the icon for Microsoft Word Perfect, just one window comes up?"
However, like any good judge or lawyer, she was focused on avoiding time-consuming litigation with expert testimony and the like. She saw past all the technical arguments and FS/OSS crusading and recognized this case for what it was: a business relationship gone bad. She stopped in the middle of NuSphere's testimony and asked if the two businesses wanted to work together again. Both sides were taken way aback, there formed these two little clusters of suits as the lawyers and the company reps conferred; each lawyer in turn blustered for a minute about his client's demands and then said yes, they'd love to. (Significantly, this is where the judge got NuSphere to promise to take the EULA off their product.) Judge Saris then got her bailiff to get on the phone and find them a qualified arbitrator *right away* and offered them her courtroom for the rest of the afternoon. In essence, "Will you kids please just get a room and figure this out!"
It was a bit disturbing that she was so reluctant to see irreparable harm in letting a company abuse the GPL like NuSphere did and get away with it. I think that was mainly her wanting to avoid a long trial unless it proved essential, and making NuSphere quit using MySql would basically shut down NuSphere, and would thus require a long fierce court battle.
It is important that even cases like this, dealing with highly technical matters, be judged in a regular court by regular legal types with no prior knowledge of the field. Just like a case between a bricklayer and her construction company, or a musician and his record label. Because they need to be judged based on regular law, in proceedings comprehensible to an intelligent but uninformed outsider. If the judge had known the difference between static and dynamic linking, she would have been an industry insider and would have already had a bias one way or the other.
Dave Eggers. Dave Eggers. Author of 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius'. Founder of the late lamented Might magazine, and currently publisher of McSweeney's, the literary mag and the website. (/.ers might be interested to know that They Might Be Giants recorded the soundtrack to the latest edition of McSweeney's. Yes, a musical soundtrack to a literary magazine. Believe it. The guy's a genius.)
Eggers' literary collaborators that will also make the cut:
* David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) -- A post-postmodern masterwork.
* Zadie Smith (White Teeth) -- A cross-cultural, multi-generational comic epic.
Now, with the recent threat of getting anthrax through the mail, will congressmen actually read their mail? We already know that they don't actually read email. So, now that snail mail may no longer be acknowledged, is there any way to communicate the people's wishes to congressmen?
It's amazing how thoroughly biased most English speakers are towards the Abrahamic religions, and how thoroughly clueless they are about this bias.
Folks, theism -- meaning belief in a single all-powerful being that is separate from the earth, yada yada -- is a cultural peculiarity of the Semitic peoples of the Levant, whose rise was documented in the books we call the "Old Testament" or Torah, and which happens to have been exported to some other cultures (like ours). Most religions are not theistic!
Ask a Buddhist if he believes in God. Likely the answer will be something like "what on earth are you talking about?" Hindus and many others are polytheistic, which has a whole different set of philosophical interpretations which are not even conceived of in peoples "does God really exist" navel-gazing QED-spouting pontificating. Indigenous religions tend to be animist or pantheist.
There are many many different ways of conceptualizing the spiritual aspect of the world other than theism. RELIGION DOES NOT EQUAL BELIEF IN GOD.
It disturbs ME greatly to see so many people using this twisted logic that the terrorists are "irrational" and that therefore any attempt to look at the global political conditions that give rise to this kind of terror is futile, or worse, calling it "appeasement." In fact, this evil has direct, rational causes.
The United States has been killing innocent Arabs for years. Look at the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Iraqi children that have died for lack of proper health care under US sanctions. Look at all the thousands of civilians that have died in our bombings in Afghanistan and East Africa in our futile attempts to take out bin Laden. Look, finally, at all the murders, tortures, and atrocities committed every year by Israel, with the full support of the United States people, government and press. Under these circumstances it is almost inevitable that a psycho like bin Laden would get plenty of volunteers.
There is a precedent. The Treaty of Versailles, at the end of WWI, punished the Germans so heavily for their war crimes that their economy was sent back to the Bronze Age. The despair in that nation under that punishment led them to follow a maniac like Hitler. We learned our lesson. After WWII, instead of punishing the people for the crimes of its government that THE PEOPLE SUPPORTED (and has there ever been a bigger crime? No, there hasn't), the victorious US helped W. Germany (and Japan) to get back on its feet and establish a democratic government. It worked. Should we call that "appeasement" of German Nazi sympathizers, and Japanese aggressors? No. It was a necessary step for a peaceful world, and it worked.
What should we do? First, we should find the terrorist organization and eliminate it. Not by indiscriminate carpet bombing of Afghanistan, but by finding the crooks and wiping them out. (Big difference. The first way, the crooks get away, lots of innocents die, the crooks get PLENTY of new volunteers, and we lose the moral upper hand.) Then (maybe meanwhile), we look again at our Middle East policy and eliminate the blatant harassment of Arabs and Muslims that I hinted at above. No, it's not easy, but it's necessary. Not to "appease" the terrorists, but because it's morally imperative!
Summary:
What part of "IT'S WRONG TO SYSTEMATICALLY KILL, STARVE, AND HARASS A PEOPLE BECAUSE OF THEIR ETHNICITY" don't you understand?
Hey, Braintrust, I can't reply to you personally, but THANK YOU for this touching note of encouragement. I get weepy every time I read this. I've forwarded a link to your comment to dozens of friends and family; my stepmother, who is a therapist, has hung it in her waiting room. This huge national sucker-punch is really discouraging; no one here knows exactly how to move through it; and it helps immensely to know that people believe in us. Thanks.
Lawyers are the closest thing we have to a conscience in this country; without them, big government and big corporations would run roughshod over us. Unlike journalists, lawyers are held to a code of ethics and when they violate it, they can lose their butts.
While of course many of today's problems are caused by profligate lawyering, it is true that many lawyers get into the field with an honest intention to right society's wrongs. I love a good lawyer joke as much as anyone, but let's remember that they're human beings. Gandhi was a lawyer.
We're rallying in Boston on Thursday the 30th, the day of the arraignment. The protest is happening in Copley Square in front of the Boston Public Library, at noon. We're hoping for our biggest turnout since the first protest right after Dmitry's arrest. For more information see boston.freesklyarov.org.
I have to assume you have not done a lot of tech support. I spent the better part of the last 3 years doing various kinds of end-user support. You know what, 90% of my calls were users who were idiots. Users who would lie to me. Here's an example -
"hi my modem doesn't work"
"have you changed any settings"
"no"
I proceed to have them check the properties of their dialup to find, shocker, changes have been made.
The customer is not always 'right' dude. That does not excuse being rude or unhelpful to them but anyone who assumes the end-user is right or even telling the truth while providing support is going to waste 90% of their time.
Sorry, but one customer's inability to keep track of abstruse, opaque sets of "settings" on his computer does not make him an idiot. It also does not make the problem his fault. Somehow that software allowed him to change something important without knowing what he'd done. It's the software's fault.
Hell, I'm no slacker, but sometimes I get surprised when I look up my connection settings. That's mostly because Mindspring/Earthlink's software sometimes tries to "fix" things for me. I know enough to fix things back the way I want it, but not all computer users have the time to figure these quirks out for EVERY piece of software they use.
That's why tech companies should provide their own tech support, and use feedback from the support crew to find out what parts of the products people just aren't figuring out.
I repeat: if your customer can't figure out your product, unless your product is made explicitly for a technical audience, and unless the customer (NOT "end-user") threw their box out the window or hooked it up to jumper cables or something, it's not the customer's fault, it's product design.
My original point was not that this is definitely down to the users. It was simply that at the moment experience tells me that the fault probably lies with the user, not the hardware.
What, they had all been overclocking their processors? They had all dropped their computer from buildings? What had they all done that so clearly made the problem with the product THEIR fault?
Dude, the customer is always right.
If customers cannot successfully use your product "correctly," it's your fault, not theirs.
This is the great flaw of the computer industry: this arrogant stance toward the customer. Developers expect customers to have the skill and knowledge of developers. They discuss their customers dismissively as "end users" and call them "idiots" if the products are too stupidly designed to figure out how to use. That's on the rare occasion when they think about their customers at all.
No other industry blames their customers for problems with their products like this. If a product isn't usable, it is useless.
A crisis such as this one is an important test case for Slashdot as an organizing medium for the tech community. In this instance, Slashdot has completely failed.
That's really not fair. The only way I knew about this story at all, days before I saw or heard it in any of the mainstream media sources I pay attention to, was by reading it on Slashdot. How did I find out about the burgeoning free-Dmitry protest movement? Slashdot. There I found a link to boycottadobe.com, and from there I got on the free-sklyarov mailing list, and hooked up w/ the Scott and the Boston protest scene. Next thing I know, I'm standing on a brick garden bed with my guitar leading a crowd in singing "Dmitry and the DMCA." This has been my first real contact w/ the hacker-YRO-activism community, and the catalyst was Slashdot.
So, there could have been more frequent news articles; but really, how often does/. post DAILY articles on one topic?
It's a news & discussion site, not a community organizing medium. Read about it on Slashdot, then discuss it on your own bandwidth. It worked this time.
User-friendliness, computer literacy, ease-of-use etc. are all just in your heads. They are marketing tacticts used by companies to sell computers. If Suzan Smith wanted to send e-mail and surf the net and all that was available to her was UNIX she would still buy that computer and she wouldn't complain about it being too hard to use because it realy isn't too hard.
The more "easy" you make computers to the more ignorant the users will be and the more "harder" using a computer will seem. Because the more about a computer you hide the more complex a computer seems to it's user.
Can anyone bring me one such person who likes Linux?
I can give you two. My two younger cousins only use their computer for sending e-mail, surfing the web etc. They both run Linux. They don't know all the shell commands, or how to program in PERL. They just know how to use WindowMaker to start up xmms, Galeon, Nautilus etc. They asked me to install Linux for them after Windows became unusable and we had to do a re-install for the X time that month.
Bravo. I think it would be a great thing to introduce more diversity into the ecosystem of consumer desktop oh-esses. And especially for more folks to be using noncommercial systems. And raising the total computer literacy of the populace is a good thing.
However, I disagree w/ your point that "user-friendliness... [is] all in your heads". The more total information someone needs to learn in order to use a new technology, the fewer people will sign on. And interfacing with a computer on the computer's terms (like you do in GUI-less UNIX) is a very esoteric skill that requires abstruse ways of thinking that do not come naturally to most people.
Many will say "Good; let Grandma stick to her parcheesi game and leave the computers to the pros w/ sk1llz." Here too I disagree. Getting more people online is a Good Thing; therefore making computers more inclusive is a Good Thing.
Years ago I fell completely out of touch w/ my best friend from college. After missing her for too long I resolved to look her up. It took quite a bit of googling (she has a very common name) but finally I found an email addy that was definitly hers. Now we're back in touch. She was an art major (preferring analog media like paint) & never had much to do with computers. But because of the explosion in the 90's of inexpensive, usable computers, and usable internet software, she, like everyone else these days, has an email addy. If everyone had to use bare UNIX, I doubt that would have happened.
And yes, we put up w/ crap from less clueful new Internet users, like my other friend who's constantly sending chain letters and jokes to her entire address book including her senators in Washington, but it's worth it IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
I love it how, in every new Apple story on /., some people are still surprised at the cute Aqua-themed window widgets. How long since apple.slashdot.org launched? A month? How long can we keep this up?
Yes, Pxtl, they do this for all the Mac articles now, and you didn't notice.
<OT>
Looks like there's going to be an Ender's Game movie!
</OT>
Au contraire, mon frere. Music, art, and software development all take time. And to adapt the common razz on Gnu/Linux, making music and art is free only if your time is worthless. Could Beethoven have produced the body of musical work that he did if he'd had to keep a day job as a banker?
Often, for large art projects, there is a team involved. Roy Lichtenstein had assistants paint all those big round pixels in his mural-sized comic-strip paintings. Last year I saw an exhibit by the artist Sandi Skoglund. One installation piece had a whole room-sized floor covered with thousands of blown eggshells, with a trail of footprints of broken shells through them. The walls were covered with hand-made 4" square paper tiles. That's when it struck me what a difference it makes when an artist gets some source of funding up front; no one with a day job could have done anything near that scale.
Of course there are plenty independent musicians and artists with day jobs. There are also plenty of volunteer Free Software developers with day jobs. But this is different from saying that either pursuit is cost-free.
See this book. The handwritten note has not died, and it shows a level of attention to the recipient that is rarely seen these days.
Ack! My site's been slashdotted.
I'm the new activist at the FSF. I want to come speak at your school or for your community group, G/LUG, any group of sympathetic people. Tonight I'm speaking at Loyola University of Chicago. I'll help you get a campus group up and running. I'll provide news and ideas for your existing activist group. Time is of the essence, since the SSSCA is being pushed inexorably towards being voted on in the Senate.
When it gets back up, the website is http://digitalspeech.org; you can put yourself on the activists' mailing list, or you can just email me.
Let's get together and get our freedom back!
J
From Jakob Neilsen's UseIt column on usability and the Internet, comes this column on Security and Human Factors. His summary:
Sysadmins are fond of forcing users to use complex passwords. What happens then is that the user writes the password on a yellow adhesive note and sticks it on the monitor. Better to let the user use the first password that comes to mind, with possible gentle restrictions like no dictionary words, so that the user can hold the password in his or her head without writing it down -- or putting it in a "Passwords" file on the hard drive. How many theives really look up biographical information on computer users and find out all the names of their family members?
They are cool, not clueless. Vince Flanders of webpagesthatsuck.com related how he (or an acquaintance) emailed them, in essence,
"Um, Mr. Morrison & Foerster, are you aware your URL, mofo.com, is, well, kindof obscene?"
Their PR person replied, basically, "Yes, we're aware of that. We're cultivating an image of a firm you don't want to mess with."
Given that, I will heed their advice and not mess with them. :)
Kind of like Web Pages That Suck: Where you learn good Web design by looking at bad Web design.
Perhaps they don't harass you or jail you yet.
But -- and this is the absolutely salient point -- they could. (With apologies to Bill Bryson.)
Are you willing to trust AOL Time Warner with your browsing info? Are you that confident that they won't decide someday there is profit in, say tracking who searches for Newsweek and sends them junk mail trying to get you to switch to Time? What if you apply for a job at any of the many companies owned by AOL Time Warner, and they check the databases for people known to search Google for information on illegal drugs, or to make AOL-bashing comments on /.? Nothing to see her, eh?
I just ran to the store and bought this week's Newsweek. The article in question is printed on page 65. There's a big picture of Michael Greene, prez of NARAS, waggling his finger at the Grammys last week.
But what I want to know is, what does "Queegishly" mean?
There's somebody with some influence AND a clue? Who is he? She? And why haven't they stepped forward yet?
Clearly she didn't know or care that this is considered the big "test case" for this culturally iconic GPL. To her, this was just another license and copyright case. The question of whether the GPL is "valid" never came up; it was assumed to be as valid as any license. She knew, probably from the 200 pages of briefs she complained loudly about having had to read, a bit of the history and significance of the FS/OSS movements (when the MySQL lawyer began a diatribe about the importance of keeping software free, she interjected, "Yeah, yeah, I know, it's like a religious movement, it's Open Source!")
It was just as clear that she knew nothing about software and made no bones about it. She started out pronouncing the product in question "Mice Quill". (And then she has to deal with the plaintiff calling it "My Ess Cue Ell" and the defendant calling it "My Sequel"!) And, as has been remarked, when the MySQL lawyer used the phrase "single executable file," she interrupted and demanded that he clarify, "Is that like, when I click the icon for Microsoft Word Perfect, just one window comes up?"
However, like any good judge or lawyer, she was focused on avoiding time-consuming litigation with expert testimony and the like. She saw past all the technical arguments and FS/OSS crusading and recognized this case for what it was: a business relationship gone bad. She stopped in the middle of NuSphere's testimony and asked if the two businesses wanted to work together again. Both sides were taken way aback, there formed these two little clusters of suits as the lawyers and the company reps conferred; each lawyer in turn blustered for a minute about his client's demands and then said yes, they'd love to. (Significantly, this is where the judge got NuSphere to promise to take the EULA off their product.) Judge Saris then got her bailiff to get on the phone and find them a qualified arbitrator *right away* and offered them her courtroom for the rest of the afternoon. In essence, "Will you kids please just get a room and figure this out!"
It was a bit disturbing that she was so reluctant to see irreparable harm in letting a company abuse the GPL like NuSphere did and get away with it. I think that was mainly her wanting to avoid a long trial unless it proved essential, and making NuSphere quit using MySql would basically shut down NuSphere, and would thus require a long fierce court battle.
It is important that even cases like this, dealing with highly technical matters, be judged in a regular court by regular legal types with no prior knowledge of the field. Just like a case between a bricklayer and her construction company, or a musician and his record label. Because they need to be judged based on regular law, in proceedings comprehensible to an intelligent but uninformed outsider. If the judge had known the difference between static and dynamic linking, she would have been an industry insider and would have already had a bias one way or the other.
Eggers' literary collaborators that will also make the cut:
* David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) -- A post-postmodern masterwork.
* Zadie Smith (White Teeth) -- A cross-cultural, multi-generational comic epic.
Folks, theism -- meaning belief in a single all-powerful being that is separate from the earth, yada yada -- is a cultural peculiarity of the Semitic peoples of the Levant, whose rise was documented in the books we call the "Old Testament" or Torah, and which happens to have been exported to some other cultures (like ours). Most religions are not theistic!
Ask a Buddhist if he believes in God. Likely the answer will be something like "what on earth are you talking about?" Hindus and many others are polytheistic, which has a whole different set of philosophical interpretations which are not even conceived of in peoples "does God really exist" navel-gazing QED-spouting pontificating. Indigenous religions tend to be animist or pantheist.
There are many many different ways of conceptualizing the spiritual aspect of the world other than theism. RELIGION DOES NOT EQUAL BELIEF IN GOD.
It disturbs ME greatly to see so many people using this twisted logic that the terrorists are "irrational" and that therefore any attempt to look at the global political conditions that give rise to this kind of terror is futile, or worse, calling it "appeasement." In fact, this evil has direct, rational causes.
The United States has been killing innocent Arabs for years. Look at the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Iraqi children that have died for lack of proper health care under US sanctions. Look at all the thousands of civilians that have died in our bombings in Afghanistan and East Africa in our futile attempts to take out bin Laden. Look, finally, at all the murders, tortures, and atrocities committed every year by Israel, with the full support of the United States people, government and press. Under these circumstances it is almost inevitable that a psycho like bin Laden would get plenty of volunteers.
There is a precedent. The Treaty of Versailles, at the end of WWI, punished the Germans so heavily for their war crimes that their economy was sent back to the Bronze Age. The despair in that nation under that punishment led them to follow a maniac like Hitler. We learned our lesson. After WWII, instead of punishing the people for the crimes of its government that THE PEOPLE SUPPORTED (and has there ever been a bigger crime? No, there hasn't), the victorious US helped W. Germany (and Japan) to get back on its feet and establish a democratic government. It worked. Should we call that "appeasement" of German Nazi sympathizers, and Japanese aggressors? No. It was a necessary step for a peaceful world, and it worked.
What should we do? First, we should find the terrorist organization and eliminate it. Not by indiscriminate carpet bombing of Afghanistan, but by finding the crooks and wiping them out. (Big difference. The first way, the crooks get away, lots of innocents die, the crooks get PLENTY of new volunteers, and we lose the moral upper hand.) Then (maybe meanwhile), we look again at our Middle East policy and eliminate the blatant harassment of Arabs and Muslims that I hinted at above. No, it's not easy, but it's necessary. Not to "appease" the terrorists, but because it's morally imperative!
Summary:
What part of "IT'S WRONG TO SYSTEMATICALLY KILL, STARVE, AND HARASS A PEOPLE BECAUSE OF THEIR ETHNICITY" don't you understand?
J
J
This is Garrison Keillor's view on lawyers:
This is from his final "Ask Mr. Blue" column on Salon.com.
While of course many of today's problems are caused by profligate lawyering, it is true that many lawyers get into the field with an honest intention to right society's wrongs. I love a good lawyer joke as much as anyone, but let's remember that they're human beings. Gandhi was a lawyer.
We're rallying in Boston on Thursday the 30th, the day of the arraignment. The protest is happening in Copley Square in front of the Boston Public Library, at noon. We're hoping for our biggest turnout since the first protest right after Dmitry's arrest. For more information see boston.freesklyarov.org.
Sorry, but one customer's inability to keep track of abstruse, opaque sets of "settings" on his computer does not make him an idiot. It also does not make the problem his fault. Somehow that software allowed him to change something important without knowing what he'd done. It's the software's fault.
Hell, I'm no slacker, but sometimes I get surprised when I look up my connection settings. That's mostly because Mindspring/Earthlink's software sometimes tries to "fix" things for me. I know enough to fix things back the way I want it, but not all computer users have the time to figure these quirks out for EVERY piece of software they use.
That's why tech companies should provide their own tech support, and use feedback from the support crew to find out what parts of the products people just aren't figuring out.
I repeat: if your customer can't figure out your product, unless your product is made explicitly for a technical audience, and unless the customer (NOT "end-user") threw their box out the window or hooked it up to jumper cables or something, it's not the customer's fault, it's product design.
What, they had all been overclocking their processors? They had all dropped their computer from buildings? What had they all done that so clearly made the problem with the product THEIR fault?
Dude, the customer is always right.
If customers cannot successfully use your product "correctly," it's your fault, not theirs.
This is the great flaw of the computer industry: this arrogant stance toward the customer. Developers expect customers to have the skill and knowledge of developers. They discuss their customers dismissively as "end users" and call them "idiots" if the products are too stupidly designed to figure out how to use. That's on the rare occasion when they think about their customers at all.
No other industry blames their customers for problems with their products like this. If a product isn't usable, it is useless.
Here's photos, photos, and more photos.
That's really not fair. The only way I knew about this story at all, days before I saw or heard it in any of the mainstream media sources I pay attention to, was by reading it on Slashdot. How did I find out about the burgeoning free-Dmitry protest movement? Slashdot. There I found a link to boycottadobe.com, and from there I got on the free-sklyarov mailing list, and hooked up w/ the Scott and the Boston protest scene. Next thing I know, I'm standing on a brick garden bed with my guitar leading a crowd in singing "Dmitry and the DMCA." This has been my first real contact w/ the hacker-YRO-activism community, and the catalyst was Slashdot.
So, there could have been more frequent news articles; but really, how often does /. post DAILY articles on one topic?
It's a news & discussion site, not a community organizing medium. Read about it on Slashdot, then discuss it on your own bandwidth. It worked this time.
Another fucking way for [us] educated white guys to vote. Just what we need!
Bravo. I think it would be a great thing to introduce more diversity into the ecosystem of consumer desktop oh-esses. And especially for more folks to be using noncommercial systems. And raising the total computer literacy of the populace is a good thing.
However, I disagree w/ your point that "user-friendliness ... [is] all in your heads". The more total information someone needs to learn in order to use a new technology, the fewer people will sign on. And interfacing with a computer on the computer's terms (like you do in GUI-less UNIX) is a very esoteric skill that requires abstruse ways of thinking that do not come naturally to most people.
Many will say "Good; let Grandma stick to her parcheesi game and leave the computers to the pros w/ sk1llz." Here too I disagree. Getting more people online is a Good Thing; therefore making computers more inclusive is a Good Thing.
Years ago I fell completely out of touch w/ my best friend from college. After missing her for too long I resolved to look her up. It took quite a bit of googling (she has a very common name) but finally I found an email addy that was definitly hers. Now we're back in touch. She was an art major (preferring analog media like paint) & never had much to do with computers. But because of the explosion in the 90's of inexpensive, usable computers, and usable internet software, she, like everyone else these days, has an email addy. If everyone had to use bare UNIX, I doubt that would have happened.
And yes, we put up w/ crap from less clueful new Internet users, like my other friend who's constantly sending chain letters and jokes to her entire address book including her senators in Washington, but it's worth it IMHO.