Are you kidding me? Thousands of developers worldwide spontaneously volunteer millions of hours into a collective pot, the fruits of which eventually rival the biggest software companies on the planet. Sounds like a social movement to me.
Sounds like a bunch of guys without girlfriends to me.
Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer, as he noticed he could not pull up a ticker symbol for Linux on the NASDAQ or NYSE and concluded it could not be any sort of threat.
In other news CEO Steve Balmer also could not find the ticker symbol for "God" on the NASDAQ or NYSE and concluded it could not be any sort of threat. God thus spake and was quoted as saying He "wasn't impressed by Balmer's logic", and didn't consider Balmer a threat because He couldn't find the CEO meantioned anywhere in the Bible.
No, you were making the general statement that the GUI makes people understand less about the system. (but we all know what you really mean =) A GUI doesn't make a person understand less in a "cause and effect" sort of way, it's a correlation. Text interfaces tend to be much more terse, and thus require more learning about that respective topic, but this too is a correlation. (in theory you could just have comments that say "uncoment this" and don't explain why). The entire problem with GUIs is that they almost always go too far. They figure if they can hide one thing from you to make things "easier" then they might as well hide EVERYTHING from you.
"But we were talking about sysadmins, and the problem there is that a sysadmin's primary understanding of a system should not derive from the GUI, but that's what tends to happen with Windows"
That's a very good point. I think that also comes down to the individual in some ways. Some people just do a few things the same way in a GUI and expect it to work, but cannot fix it when it doesn't. But a person who is interested in it will probably learn more about something just because of their curiosity. I guess this is a lot like college where many can regurgitate what they read in a textbook, but can't apply it to real world situations. In the end it's up to the indivdual to learn and understand, not so much the interface with the system.
My favorite pastime, not, is sending detailed, brain-dead level emails to someone about how to unzip a particular file
You speak of Winzip yes? =P I deal with this one guy at work who is afraid of the "classic interface" and only uses the wizard. He has no idea where the files go, so he uses windows search to find them. Now that is proof of an inherently evil wizard!
I do actually like config files, but that depends on the config. Sendmail will probably scar you for life (maybe your wife and kids too). Yet it really annoys me when people badmouth Apache because they need to edit a config file. I mean it's all documented RIGHT THERE. No need to look most things up, it's right beside the option. You really can't get any better help than that.
Of course I'm sort of a hipocrite in many ways. I refuse to install a GUI on our Linux servers, but I will only use menuconfig when doing stuff with the kernel.
(I'm nitpicking here) Not neccesarily true. To me a GUI can make [some] things easier to get at. In some instances I use a GUI program, I click on some help thing and the help goes in depth to explain how something works. This is one of the big problems I have with various MS applications that have their help written by Captain Obvious that were surely created in a way to get the greatest ammount of people to exclain "No shit, this doesn't tell me anything!"
No it's generally the wizard that makes people stupid. This another fault with MS. How do I install it? use the wizard. It's broken, what do I do? Use a wizard. What the fuck is it doing? how should I know?.. MS wrote the wizard. How do I fix it? Couldn't tell you because I had to use a wizard to install it.
then in the end you have to open regedit anyway...
shift + click for one example (that's to save a link for those who don't know). Sometimes it comes up with in 2 seconds, sometimes it takes over 10 (or even more). While I fine with Mozilla's speed in most respects (on an Athlon 1.4Ghz) it still SEVERELY drags in some places.
No matter what their solution is, it's basically irrelivent. Where unix servers typically shine is in their flexibility, that is; a custom solution. At it's very best I highly doubt anything could even do the general tasks on a cookie cutter system (which I have yet to see). And if some stuff needs to be automated, why wasn't it automated before? Chances are if I do something repeatedly I eventually just write a script/program that automates it for me ANYWAY. And no system will ever watch for suspicous activity. "User so-and-so shouldn't be doing that." "That program doesn't seem to be behaving correctly." "The firewall seems to be getting a lot of probes lately." These are subjective things that rely on experience and judgment. And no system in the near future will emulate that.
Besides which Microsoft has shown us that if you dumb down administration enough, you tend to end up with more "not-so-skilled" administrators, than skilled professionals, who probably aren't quite good enough to keep everything running perfect, they're just good enough to keep everything hobbling along. If you find a very good Windows admin who really knows their stuff, they can probably replace around 10 people who just have a MSCE. With unix I'm sure that eventually this will may eventually happen too. But the question is wheither it will lead to MORE admins, or less.
In some respects it is more fun. When I go to work, I can almost throw a dart at a task list to see what I'm going to do today. But realisticly I just do what has to be done so I really never know what I'm going to do working for a smaller business, so my job never really becomes routine. Of course it's the helpdesk aspect of it that sucks. Like I have nothing better to do then spend 10 minutes explaining the difference between the delete key and the escape key.
Sort of like how I use a VCR as a hub right now. Too bad for me if I want to watch a DVD, Macrovision basically makes this impossible. So I suppose it is somewhat ironic that this technology that is supposed to prevent piracy and promote sales has essentially kept me from buying ANY* DVD's.
The moral of the story is: Don't worry about it, Hollywood will find some way to fuck you in the end.
* note that I still buy anime on DVD on a regular basis because most don't use Macrovision.
Anybody who says they can't see a difference is either not watching HDTV or a blind luddite!
The question for many such as myself isn't if it looks better, the question is do we care? I could care less if HDTV goes through tomorrow since I don't watch cable TV anyway. I use a TV for games, and watching DVDs (which look good enough me), and that's it. I'll replace my (analog only) TV with an HDTV when my old one burns out, not a minute before.
As a programmer, and someone who just likes to tinker with open source stuff in general THAT is what really bothers me. Eventually the US is going to end up so wrapped up in red tape from DRM bullshit that the entire world is going to pass us by. I imagine the only way you'll be able to use open source stuff at all will be to purchace your stuff from Sun.
rings are in fact fundamentally unstable. Eventually the rings around all the other planets (which is a LONG time by human standards) will eventually degrade and disapear. Which is sort of sad to think of Saturn without any rings.
definitely. I find it rather annoying when people e-mail me, and typically request something of me, but are apparently don't think I'm worth typing out entire words like 'you' and 'are'. And they seriously expect me to reply?
Interesting that they used a SCSI harddrive for testing. I noticed reading the FreeBSD documentation that they have problems with IDE drives because they tend to lie about what they're doing. Which brings up two questions. Do SCSI hard drives have this problem, and does Linux have similar problems with IDE drives?
Hell I'd sell them a remote camera strapped to some RC car from Radio shack, but that certainly wouldn't make it seem like a "high tech excavation". The robot is more about ratings than practicality.
I imagine it wouldn't be to hard to set up MySQL on a machine and then just make a CGI script to interact with it. Even better in that it's totally abstracted from the client machine, so she could read recipies no matter what type of computer she used.
Actually I was referring to gpg not Enigmail. While the enigmail installer works fine for me, installing gpg didn't go so smoothly. As someone who doesn't like everything stuffed on the root directory of their C drive, I found that gpg basically just did whatever it wanted to. And to CHANGE the options you have to manually enter keys into the registry. As much as I like manually dumping crap into the registry, I'd rather that they gave me an installer to do that much.
Couldn't have said it better myself. A "good Nu Metal" band is like an oxymoron. It's a phrase coined to describe the bland junk you see on MTV. Now days metal is so diverse that usually it's only described as "metal". The REAL talent in metal (as with all genres) is still out there, and always has been. It's just not released by major record labels. And I agree with knowing the lesser labels for focused consumers. Every time I turn a CD case around I see one of 5 different labels (and they aren't the BIG 5). I know my tastes, and when the major record labels report a loss, I'm sure I'm not even accounted into those figures since I only buy albums from small labels, because they're the only ones that release stuff I even want to listen to.
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Are you kidding me? Thousands of developers worldwide spontaneously volunteer millions of hours into a collective pot, the fruits of which eventually rival the biggest software companies on the planet. Sounds like a social movement to me.
Sounds like a bunch of guys without girlfriends to me.
(it's a joke people)
Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer, as he noticed he could not pull up a ticker symbol for Linux on the NASDAQ or NYSE and concluded it could not be any sort of threat.
In other news CEO Steve Balmer also could not find the ticker symbol for "God" on the NASDAQ or NYSE and concluded it could not be any sort of threat. God thus spake and was quoted as saying He "wasn't impressed by Balmer's logic", and didn't consider Balmer a threat because He couldn't find the CEO meantioned anywhere in the Bible.
I'm not saying GUI's are never useful
No, you were making the general statement that the GUI makes people understand less about the system. (but we all know what you really mean =) A GUI doesn't make a person understand less in a "cause and effect" sort of way, it's a correlation. Text interfaces tend to be much more terse, and thus require more learning about that respective topic, but this too is a correlation. (in theory you could just have comments that say "uncoment this" and don't explain why). The entire problem with GUIs is that they almost always go too far. They figure if they can hide one thing from you to make things "easier" then they might as well hide EVERYTHING from you.
"But we were talking about sysadmins, and the problem there is that a sysadmin's primary understanding of a system should not derive from the GUI, but that's what tends to happen with Windows"
That's a very good point. I think that also comes down to the individual in some ways. Some people just do a few things the same way in a GUI and expect it to work, but cannot fix it when it doesn't. But a person who is interested in it will probably learn more about something just because of their curiosity. I guess this is a lot like college where many can regurgitate what they read in a textbook, but can't apply it to real world situations. In the end it's up to the indivdual to learn and understand, not so much the interface with the system.
My favorite pastime, not, is sending detailed, brain-dead level emails to someone about how to unzip a particular file
You speak of Winzip yes? =P I deal with this one guy at work who is afraid of the "classic interface" and only uses the wizard. He has no idea where the files go, so he uses windows search to find them. Now that is proof of an inherently evil wizard!
I do actually like config files, but that depends on the config. Sendmail will probably scar you for life (maybe your wife and kids too). Yet it really annoys me when people badmouth Apache because they need to edit a config file. I mean it's all documented RIGHT THERE. No need to look most things up, it's right beside the option. You really can't get any better help than that.
Of course I'm sort of a hipocrite in many ways. I refuse to install a GUI on our Linux servers, but I will only use menuconfig when doing stuff with the kernel.
I think Real Audio has been it's own biggest threat for a while now. That and the fact that the thing that plays them is a total joke.
The GUI makes people dumb
(I'm nitpicking here)
Not neccesarily true. To me a GUI can make [some] things easier to get at. In some instances I use a GUI program, I click on some help thing and the help goes in depth to explain how something works. This is one of the big problems I have with various MS applications that have their help written by Captain Obvious that were surely created in a way to get the greatest ammount of people to exclain "No shit, this doesn't tell me anything!"
No it's generally the wizard that makes people stupid. This another fault with MS. How do I install it? use the wizard. It's broken, what do I do? Use a wizard. What the fuck is it doing? how should I know?.. MS wrote the wizard. How do I fix it? Couldn't tell you because I had to use a wizard to install it.
then in the end you have to open regedit anyway...
No, he was waiting to charge for the upgrade.
Slow at what?
shift + click for one example (that's to save a link for those who don't know). Sometimes it comes up with in 2 seconds, sometimes it takes over 10 (or even more). While I fine with Mozilla's speed in most respects (on an Athlon 1.4Ghz) it still SEVERELY drags in some places.
No matter what their solution is, it's basically irrelivent. Where unix servers typically shine is in their flexibility, that is; a custom solution. At it's very best I highly doubt anything could even do the general tasks on a cookie cutter system (which I have yet to see). And if some stuff needs to be automated, why wasn't it automated before? Chances are if I do something repeatedly I eventually just write a script/program that automates it for me ANYWAY. And no system will ever watch for suspicous activity.
"User so-and-so shouldn't be doing that."
"That program doesn't seem to be behaving correctly."
"The firewall seems to be getting a lot of probes lately."
These are subjective things that rely on experience and judgment. And no system in the near future will emulate that.
Besides which Microsoft has shown us that if you dumb down administration enough, you tend to end up with more "not-so-skilled" administrators, than skilled professionals, who probably aren't quite good enough to keep everything running perfect, they're just good enough to keep everything hobbling along. If you find a very good Windows admin who really knows their stuff, they can probably replace around 10 people who just have a MSCE. With unix I'm sure that eventually this will may eventually happen too. But the question is wheither it will lead to MORE admins, or less.
I'm sure most buisnesses will keep that in mind when they wait on the phone on hold for over an hour when their critical server takes a digger.
In some respects it is more fun. When I go to work, I can almost throw a dart at a task list to see what I'm going to do today. But realisticly I just do what has to be done so I really never know what I'm going to do working for a smaller business, so my job never really becomes routine. Of course it's the helpdesk aspect of it that sucks. Like I have nothing better to do then spend 10 minutes explaining the difference between the delete key and the escape key.
I think this quote says it all:
"She was gullible -- gullible and had access to $2.1 million"
Scary enough combination anywhere.
Colleges will still have a role
chicks and beer just doesn't work so well without a college to use for an excuse.
3. You could use a DVD to do the same job.
Sort of like how I use a VCR as a hub right now. Too bad for me if I want to watch a DVD, Macrovision basically makes this impossible. So I suppose it is somewhat ironic that this technology that is supposed to prevent piracy and promote sales has essentially kept me from buying ANY* DVD's.
The moral of the story is: Don't worry about it, Hollywood will find some way to fuck you in the end.
* note that I still buy anime on DVD on a regular basis because most don't use Macrovision.
Anybody who says they can't see a difference is either not watching HDTV or a blind luddite!
The question for many such as myself isn't if it looks better, the question is do we care? I could care less if HDTV goes through tomorrow since I don't watch cable TV anyway. I use a TV for games, and watching DVDs (which look good enough me), and that's it. I'll replace my (analog only) TV with an HDTV when my old one burns out, not a minute before.
Actually not grazing shots, but shrapnel from explosions.
and only in USA.
As a programmer, and someone who just likes to tinker with open source stuff in general THAT is what really bothers me. Eventually the US is going to end up so wrapped up in red tape from DRM bullshit that the entire world is going to pass us by. I imagine the only way you'll be able to use open source stuff at all will be to purchace your stuff from Sun.
rings are in fact fundamentally unstable. Eventually the rings around all the other planets (which is a LONG time by human standards) will eventually degrade and disapear. Which is sort of sad to think of Saturn without any rings.
definitely.
I find it rather annoying when people e-mail me, and typically request something of me, but are apparently don't think I'm worth typing out entire words like 'you' and 'are'. And they seriously expect me to reply?
why would the NYT suddenly write an editorial like this?
Maybe NYT is taking a hint from 3rd world nations and figure they can get extra "funding" from Microsoft by suddenly supporting Linux
Interesting that they used a SCSI harddrive for testing. I noticed reading the FreeBSD documentation that they have problems with IDE drives because they tend to lie about what they're doing. Which brings up two questions. Do SCSI hard drives have this problem, and does Linux have similar problems with IDE drives?
Purchased from NASA's used robot depo?
Hell I'd sell them a remote camera strapped to some RC car from Radio shack, but that certainly wouldn't make it seem like a "high tech excavation". The robot is more about ratings than practicality.
I imagine it wouldn't be to hard to set up MySQL on a machine and then just make a CGI script to interact with it. Even better in that it's totally abstracted from the client machine, so she could read recipies no matter what type of computer she used.
like the code? get the t-shirt
Actually I was referring to gpg not Enigmail. While the enigmail installer works fine for me, installing gpg didn't go so smoothly. As someone who doesn't like everything stuffed on the root directory of their C drive, I found that gpg basically just did whatever it wanted to. And to CHANGE the options you have to manually enter keys into the registry. As much as I like manually dumping crap into the registry, I'd rather that they gave me an installer to do that much.
Couldn't have said it better myself. A "good Nu Metal" band is like an oxymoron. It's a phrase coined to describe the bland junk you see on MTV. Now days metal is so diverse that usually it's only described as "metal". The REAL talent in metal (as with all genres) is still out there, and always has been. It's just not released by major record labels. And I agree with knowing the lesser labels for focused consumers. Every time I turn a CD case around I see one of 5 different labels (and they aren't the BIG 5). I know my tastes, and when the major record labels report a loss, I'm sure I'm not even accounted into those figures since I only buy albums from small labels, because they're the only ones that release stuff I even want to listen to.