I'd bet that more 'normal' people know who Beowulf is than computer geeks do.
I wouldn't bet too much were I you. If you compared, say, English majors and CompSci majors at the typical American university, the English majors just might win. However, if you took the university as a whole (i.e., including business, communications, nursing, leisure studies, etc.) I think you'd find that the geeks win. And if you took a random sampling of an urban population, you'd get a whole lot o' blank stares. Hell, you'd get a whole lot o' blank stares asking about Chaucer.
Not to knock em' but most geeks I know seem to ignore the fact that there are other fields of intellectual pursuit than their own.
My own experience is a bit different. I am a geek whose home is currently in the humanities, so I've seen both sides of the fence. The absolutely most arrogant insistance that there's nothing to be known outside of their own field, surprisingly enough, seems to come from literary criticism and similar types.
A more typical geek problem, in my experience, is assuming that their knowledge of ``soft'' fields is definitive. This is understandable in that you will find many more physicists able to converse on surrealist painting than you will find art historians able to converse on neutrino mass. However, the geek problem is sometimes mistaking an ability to make cocktail-party conversation with the ability to write and publish scholarly works. Where the general population knows squat about history, the geek typically knows much more -- sometimes just enough to be dangerous.
I've played Baldur's Gate, and it's pretty decent, but how much better is an actual D&D game?
You really can't compare computer games with roleplaying; they're two totally different experiences. It's sort of like comparing a book and a movie.
With the computer games, all you really have to do is kill things, get treasure, build up a character's level/skills/whatever. Some online games have interaction with other players, but the actual gameplay is very formulaic.
Roleplaying is about entering playing a role (no kidding! <grin>). You get inside the head of your character and respond to stimuli as him (or her). This doesn't mean faking a cheesy Renaissance Festival accent and saying `thee' and `sire' all the time; it's about interacting with an imagined world. Sometimes a game is plot-centered, sometimes it's character-centered. Either way, the mechanics of the game aren't the point, and neither (necessarily) is killing and looting. It's enjoying the experience of entering another person's mind for a little while. (And sometimes, of course, it's the joy of getting to thwack things with a big sword.)
That's not to say, by the way, that many people don't play D&D as Baldur's Gate with paper and dice, but when they do (IMO) they're missing the point.
For what it's worth, as an historian I find that my roleplaying experience is very useful in trying to understand historical figures on their own terms, rather than from my own perspective. That's not a benefit that can derive from playing a fantasy computer game.
It's not about the dice. It's not about the system, although choice of system will affect style -- e.g. players in the Middle Earth RPG system need to be extremely careful since healing's far harder to get than, say, AD&D-type systems.
The game system can't make the game, but it can break it. Once you reach a certain point (I've been RPGing off and on for about 20 years) the sheer gaminess of some systems (TSR et al.) gets in the way of the roleplaying. Players think in rules terms instead of roleplaying. A buddy of mine just tried to do a d20 campaign and gave it up for that reason. Now we're trying Harn because it seems to give the best ``think like your character and not according to the rules'' feel.
BTW, if you think MERP/RM healing is tough, try Harn. Getting wounded can mean dying of infection a week later. It really makes characters cautious about getting in frivolous fights.
On the other hand I have seen 'Linux users shouldn't use crappy win-modems. We won't support them, and you shouldn't use them. Go back to Windows if you want to use hardware you actually own, or buy a new modem for 3-4x the price you paid for your current one to get Linux support'.
Not trolling, just don't know -- does FreeBSD support winmodems? I always assumed not, because the issue of not having the specs to write drivers should be the same as for Linux. Your comment implies that they do, however; can you expand?
Why I am sitting on an updated Debian machine and I don't think I have seen an uptime of a month even once (in last year or so).
If by ``updated'' you mean Unstable (Sid), that's not shocking. It's called Unstable for a reason. (For those not familiar with Debian, that's the ``in development, don't use for real work'' version.) If you're running Woody (i.e., the currently-released stable version) kept up to date, then you need to check on your power supply if you can't get an uptime over one month. I've rebooted my main desktop box once (that I recall) since Woody was released (July 2002), and it gets used lots.
What about my name? (Michael) It has been #1 or #2 since 1953! And yet, people always spell it incorrectly as Micheal.
What's worse is that I had a student last semester who really did spell it `Micheal'. It was unnerving, because I kept wanting to correct the spelling of his name when I marked his papers.
Disagreeing with Fox does not make a person right or wrong but it does mean they are either left or right of center (in the U.S.).
<shudder> That's upsetting, but unfortunately probably right. ``Centrist'' in U.S. political terms is really, really far right according to most of the rest of the world.
That Fox News can be considered ``mainstream''... Scary.
Our school is considering adding sftp to the student fileserver so that we can access files from home without risk of attack.
Considering adding SSH/SFTP? Oy. I thought it was bad that my university was still discussing the removal of FTP, rather than having done it already. I don't get it: Everyone knows telnet is bad and uses SSH instead, but for some reason insecure FTP lingers on.
Most of the answers here are missing the point. If all they're doing is downloading, then go with HTTP (KISS rule) if it's public or HTTPS if you need authentication. If you need to let people upload it's a different game -- then SSH/SFTP is the only way to go. It has the added advantage of not needing another server, just the standard sshd that the box will probably be running anyway. (I guess one might want anonymous FTP upload, but that's an incredibly uncommon need; you could probably do it with some PAM tricks and SSH though, too.)
The U.S. Commerical Code explicitly states that if you do not have the opportunity to inspect merchandise before purchase, you have the right under law to return the merchandise for a full refund
Can you provide a citation for this? I would like to familiarize myself further with this section of the code, as I was under the impression that in the U.S. federal law generally applied only to interstate commerce.
If that was meant to be french, it should have been "Libre" (for "Free"), or "Libéré" (for "freed"). And I'm ignoring "software".
A mod point, a mod point, my root partition for a mod point.
This is very important. There are many people (at least in the Anglophone world) who think that using any ``foreign'' words at all is pretentious. (I don't agree with them, but malheureusement my opinion was not solicited.) Now, when you use them, and use them wrongly, you really look terrible. When you claim to speak for Free Software, please take care.
I suspect the authors are mixing Spanish and French. ``Software libre'' is Spanish (there doesn't seem to be an indigenous term for software). If you spell, in French, how you pronounce ``libre'' in Spanish, you get, roughly, ``libré.'' There's no need for the accent in Spanish, though, and the word has no accent in French either. Simply ``software libre'' will work fine in a typical U.S. context where Spanish is more familiar than French.
I call bullshit. You cannot possibly download more than 1GB of work-related material per day. I'm waiting to be convinced otherwise.
I think he was referring to the VPN ban, not the bandwidth cap.
Nonetheless, I could easily bust such a cap if it is measured by peak rather than average use. All it takes is downloading a couple of ISOs in one day. If I needed to keep current on several Linux distros as part of my job, that would hardly be a rare thing.
I've turned off every single friggen "autoformat" feature I can find, but Word still wants to indent, autobullet and boldify the damn text after I hit return.
That is the problem, not that the extra features are available. The basic, most fundamental problem with Word is the ``I'm smarter than you'' attitude it takes, if I may indulge in a bit of anthropomorphism.
This is what kept me from ever using Word in my Windows days (I used WordPerfect, but it gradually picked up the worst features of Word, like all the Auto* stuff). Now I've been driven to good ol' fashioned LaTeX and vim, and I am much more productive than I ever was with MS Word or WP. What's more, I can do just about anything I need to except make a.DOC file.
That brings up another important point about ease of use: `Intuitive' interfaces are not necessarily the best. Sounds strange, doesn't it? But it's true. I think it's great when software provides icons for a new user to click on to do simple things. But it should also provide efficient ways (generally not involving the mouse in any way) for people who have to do things a hundred times a day. As much time as I spend editing text, learning that dd deletes a whole line or that gq{ reformats to the beginning of the paragraph is worth it. And there's no way a coherent menu or icon system would easily make the whole range of functions available to me that a few keystrokes in command mode do.
There's nothing wrong with a piece of software requiring a bit of reading to use its advanced features. The key is making those features available to people who need them without making them jump through hoops (like digging through six menus which constantly rearrange themselves just to keep you on your toes) to get to them, while also keeping them out of the way of users who don't need them. The best way to do this is sometimes, shocking as it sounds, by having typed commands activate features.
(Anyone who hacks OOo to provide a vim-compatible command mode will be my hero, BTW.)
Should I bother to make a special version of my page for older browsers (Like NS4 and IE4) which have frankly awful CSS and DHTML support? Especicaly give how few people still use those two browsers.
Unfortunately, sometimes it's a director who refuses to give up NS4. Now, when you're a lowly webdev staffer and a director (your boss's boss) says `this design looks like excrement' are you going to tell him it's his own fault for using an old browser? Right or wrong, you need to make the big guys happy and sometimes that means working around NS4's ineptitude.
For a less extreme case, you can just use the media=all bug to hide CSS from NS4. The NS4 luddites will get a 1995-style all-default grey-background page, which will be completely useable. Everyone else gets your CSS.
Wow, you're really upset about this. So much bitterness. I'm sorry. The rest of us will enjoy our freedom; you needn't have any part of it if it offends you so much. May I recommend, by the way, the works of Joseph de Maistre? I suspect you might enjoy them.
Personally, I refuse to play. I will not purchase any software from any company that employs the services of collection agencies such as the BSA. Furthermore, I will do everything in my power to dissuade my clients from purchasing software from these companies.
So instead you choose to steal the software? Let me make sure I understand you correctly -- you try do dissuade your clients from `purchasing' software from them, but I seem to be getting the vibes that you're using it anyway...
Wouldn't it be cool if there were software he could use (and recommend to his clients) that didn't come with repressive licenses? What if someone put a license on software that gave you rights, instead of just extorting money from you?
Um, TurboTax IS proprietary software, so saying you have a desire to get rid of proprietary software but you won't do so until you can do so and run TurboTax is a contradiction.
Sorry, I could have been more clear. For myself, I will not use proprietary software; I can afford that luxury because I do not need access to TurboTax. For others (like accountants), I cannot even get them away from Windows, much less to a wholly Free system. If there were a Linux version of TurboTax, or if it worked under WINE, that would be a step in the right direction. I still wouldn't put TurboTax my own boxes (I don't need it!) but I could push migration away from Windows without "but I need TurboTax" being an immediate dealbreaker.
They're using XP Home. They plugged the camera into the port and _blam_ everything just _worked_. No fuss. Nothing....
Think it would be that easy with Linux?
There's no reason it shouldn't be that easy with Linux. I don't use a digital camera, so I can't comment on that. My only comparable experience has been scanning, and it was similar: Plug HPOJ into USB port, open gimp, choose `acquire' and bingo, I'm scanning. (Kudos to the hpoj crew, I might mention. They're ace.) This is Debian Woody, BTW.
In an ideal world, the government itself would be the ones publishing the files, and would also certify the more popular tax software to protect users from legal liability. But I'm probably dreaming.
A hypothetical government more interested in serving the best interests of the citizenry than in providing ways for a select minority to futher enrich itself would do this, enabling anyone to write tax-prep software. When you find such a government, please e-mail me information on its immigration and naturalization law.;)
Seriously, though, that's the sort of thing we might see if the Feds got behind OSS in a serious way, but don't look for the government to be the leader here, at least not under this administration. The demands of other businesses will have to drive it, not what's good for the general public.
but installing a new video card should not, under any circumstances, turn into an 8 hour battle with a configuration file, and unless your a hard core geek, that could happen very easily.
I think we geeks often forget just how non-geeky the general population is.
Installing a new video card? My God, that involves cracking open the case! Think about this: Many users are intimidated by the thought of figuring out the cables, and will pay someone to plug the blue cable into the blue port, the green cable into the green port, etc.
I agree that it would be nice if X weren't such a PITA to configure. However, that's really not the issue if you're talking about Mom and Dad. (Forget Grandma, she's happy with her adding machine and writes letters by hand.) Their hardware won't change until they get a new box. If the system comes preconfigured, they will use it and not muck with the settings. But until they can get the box delivered with Linux installed, and trust that it will work without fiddling, they won't use it. There's the rub.
Then what are all those tons of "studies" lately that conclude that Linux TCO is just as high or higher than Windows?
For example? Can you cite a truly third-party study (i.e., not financed, underwritten, or bought by MS or its affiliates) that has reached such a conclusion? I'm not arguing that such a thing doesn't exist. I just haven't ever seen one and would like to educate myself.
Slashdot Mirror
scripsit jericho4.0:
I wouldn't bet too much were I you. If you compared, say, English majors and CompSci majors at the typical American university, the English majors just might win. However, if you took the university as a whole (i.e., including business, communications, nursing, leisure studies, etc.) I think you'd find that the geeks win. And if you took a random sampling of an urban population, you'd get a whole lot o' blank stares. Hell, you'd get a whole lot o' blank stares asking about Chaucer.
My own experience is a bit different. I am a geek whose home is currently in the humanities, so I've seen both sides of the fence. The absolutely most arrogant insistance that there's nothing to be known outside of their own field, surprisingly enough, seems to come from literary criticism and similar types.
A more typical geek problem, in my experience, is assuming that their knowledge of ``soft'' fields is definitive. This is understandable in that you will find many more physicists able to converse on surrealist painting than you will find art historians able to converse on neutrino mass. However, the geek problem is sometimes mistaking an ability to make cocktail-party conversation with the ability to write and publish scholarly works. Where the general population knows squat about history, the geek typically knows much more -- sometimes just enough to be dangerous.
scripsit ndnet:
You really can't compare computer games with roleplaying; they're two totally different experiences. It's sort of like comparing a book and a movie.
With the computer games, all you really have to do is kill things, get treasure, build up a character's level/skills/whatever. Some online games have interaction with other players, but the actual gameplay is very formulaic.
Roleplaying is about entering playing a role (no kidding! <grin>). You get inside the head of your character and respond to stimuli as him (or her). This doesn't mean faking a cheesy Renaissance Festival accent and saying `thee' and `sire' all the time; it's about interacting with an imagined world. Sometimes a game is plot-centered, sometimes it's character-centered. Either way, the mechanics of the game aren't the point, and neither (necessarily) is killing and looting. It's enjoying the experience of entering another person's mind for a little while. (And sometimes, of course, it's the joy of getting to thwack things with a big sword.)
That's not to say, by the way, that many people don't play D&D as Baldur's Gate with paper and dice, but when they do (IMO) they're missing the point.
For what it's worth, as an historian I find that my roleplaying experience is very useful in trying to understand historical figures on their own terms, rather than from my own perspective. That's not a benefit that can derive from playing a fantasy computer game.
scripsit Stonehand:
The game system can't make the game, but it can break it. Once you reach a certain point (I've been RPGing off and on for about 20 years) the sheer gaminess of some systems (TSR et al.) gets in the way of the roleplaying. Players think in rules terms instead of roleplaying. A buddy of mine just tried to do a d20 campaign and gave it up for that reason. Now we're trying Harn because it seems to give the best ``think like your character and not according to the rules'' feel.
BTW, if you think MERP/RM healing is tough, try Harn. Getting wounded can mean dying of infection a week later. It really makes characters cautious about getting in frivolous fights.
scripsit TheRaven64:
Not trolling, just don't know -- does FreeBSD support winmodems? I always assumed not, because the issue of not having the specs to write drivers should be the same as for Linux. Your comment implies that they do, however; can you expand?
scripsit Mitreya:
If by ``updated'' you mean Unstable (Sid), that's not shocking. It's called Unstable for a reason. (For those not familiar with Debian, that's the ``in development, don't use for real work'' version.) If you're running Woody (i.e., the currently-released stable version) kept up to date, then you need to check on your power supply if you can't get an uptime over one month. I've rebooted my main desktop box once (that I recall) since Woody was released (July 2002), and it gets used lots.
Sorry to be blunt, but you're being misleading.
scripsit cramus:
That's funny. It really is.
scripsit gosand:
What's worse is that I had a student last semester who really did spell it `Micheal'. It was unnerving, because I kept wanting to correct the spelling of his name when I marked his papers.
scripsit an AC:
<shudder> That's upsetting, but unfortunately probably right. ``Centrist'' in U.S. political terms is really, really far right according to most of the rest of the world.
That Fox News can be considered ``mainstream''... Scary.
Erm, OK I'll paraphrase then ;)
NineNine: I hope that users in developed countries are all using NTFS by this point in time.
/me: except for those who are using ext[23].
scripsit Devil's BSD:
Considering adding SSH/SFTP? Oy. I thought it was bad that my university was still discussing the removal of FTP, rather than having done it already. I don't get it: Everyone knows telnet is bad and uses SSH instead, but for some reason insecure FTP lingers on.
Most of the answers here are missing the point. If all they're doing is downloading, then go with HTTP (KISS rule) if it's public or HTTPS if you need authentication. If you need to let people upload it's a different game -- then SSH/SFTP is the only way to go. It has the added advantage of not needing another server, just the standard sshd that the box will probably be running anyway. (I guess one might want anonymous FTP upload, but that's an incredibly uncommon need; you could probably do it with some PAM tricks and SSH though, too.)
scripsit Wylfing:
Can you provide a citation for this? I would like to familiarize myself further with this section of the code, as I was under the impression that in the U.S. federal law generally applied only to interstate commerce.
scripsit MouseR:
A mod point, a mod point, my root partition for a mod point.
This is very important. There are many people (at least in the Anglophone world) who think that using any ``foreign'' words at all is pretentious. (I don't agree with them, but malheureusement my opinion was not solicited.) Now, when you use them, and use them wrongly, you really look terrible. When you claim to speak for Free Software, please take care.
I suspect the authors are mixing Spanish and French. ``Software libre'' is Spanish (there doesn't seem to be an indigenous term for software). If you spell, in French, how you pronounce ``libre'' in Spanish, you get, roughly, ``libré.'' There's no need for the accent in Spanish, though, and the word has no accent in French either. Simply ``software libre'' will work fine in a typical U.S. context where Spanish is more familiar than French.
scripsit Wakko Warner:
I think he was referring to the VPN ban, not the bandwidth cap.
Nonetheless, I could easily bust such a cap if it is measured by peak rather than average use. All it takes is downloading a couple of ISOs in one day. If I needed to keep current on several Linux distros as part of my job, that would hardly be a rare thing.
scripsit stefanlasiewski:
That is the problem, not that the extra features are available. The basic, most fundamental problem with Word is the ``I'm smarter than you'' attitude it takes, if I may indulge in a bit of anthropomorphism.
This is what kept me from ever using Word in my Windows days (I used WordPerfect, but it gradually picked up the worst features of Word, like all the Auto* stuff). Now I've been driven to good ol' fashioned LaTeX and vim, and I am much more productive than I ever was with MS Word or WP. What's more, I can do just about anything I need to except make a .DOC file.
That brings up another important point about ease of use: `Intuitive' interfaces are not necessarily the best. Sounds strange, doesn't it? But it's true. I think it's great when software provides icons for a new user to click on to do simple things. But it should also provide efficient ways (generally not involving the mouse in any way) for people who have to do things a hundred times a day. As much time as I spend editing text, learning that dd deletes a whole line or that gq{ reformats to the beginning of the paragraph is worth it. And there's no way a coherent menu or icon system would easily make the whole range of functions available to me that a few keystrokes in command mode do.
There's nothing wrong with a piece of software requiring a bit of reading to use its advanced features. The key is making those features available to people who need them without making them jump through hoops (like digging through six menus which constantly rearrange themselves just to keep you on your toes) to get to them, while also keeping them out of the way of users who don't need them. The best way to do this is sometimes, shocking as it sounds, by having typed commands activate features.
(Anyone who hacks OOo to provide a vim-compatible command mode will be my hero, BTW.)
Fembot wrote:
Unfortunately, sometimes it's a director who refuses to give up NS4. Now, when you're a lowly webdev staffer and a director (your boss's boss) says `this design looks like excrement' are you going to tell him it's his own fault for using an old browser? Right or wrong, you need to make the big guys happy and sometimes that means working around NS4's ineptitude.
For a less extreme case, you can just use the media=all bug to hide CSS from NS4. The NS4 luddites will get a 1995-style all-default grey-background page, which will be completely useable. Everyone else gets your CSS.
scripsit EverDense:
Not to be difficult, but BSA == "Birmingham Small Arms". Last I checked, Birmingham was in England, not Japan.
scripsit cscx, inter alia:
Wow, you're really upset about this. So much bitterness. I'm sorry. The rest of us will enjoy our freedom; you needn't have any part of it if it offends you so much. May I recommend, by the way, the works of Joseph de Maistre? I suspect you might enjoy them.
Busted. I'm actually a commie. Mea culpa.
scripsit danheskett:
Charging $129 for OS X isn't extortion; sending someone a letter demanding money or you'll sue them is.
scripsit cscx:
Wouldn't it be cool if there were software he could use (and recommend to his clients) that didn't come with repressive licenses? What if someone put a license on software that gave you rights, instead of just extorting money from you?
scripsit spitzak:
Sorry, I could have been more clear. For myself, I will not use proprietary software; I can afford that luxury because I do not need access to TurboTax. For others (like accountants), I cannot even get them away from Windows, much less to a wholly Free system. If there were a Linux version of TurboTax, or if it worked under WINE, that would be a step in the right direction. I still wouldn't put TurboTax my own boxes (I don't need it!) but I could push migration away from Windows without "but I need TurboTax" being an immediate dealbreaker.
Scripsit SnowDog_2112:
There's no reason it shouldn't be that easy with Linux. I don't use a digital camera, so I can't comment on that. My only comparable experience has been scanning, and it was similar: Plug HPOJ into USB port, open gimp, choose `acquire' and bingo, I'm scanning. (Kudos to the hpoj crew, I might mention. They're ace.) This is Debian Woody, BTW.
scripsit An Onerous Coward:
A hypothetical government more interested in serving the best interests of the citizenry than in providing ways for a select minority to futher enrich itself would do this, enabling anyone to write tax-prep software. When you find such a government, please e-mail me information on its immigration and naturalization law. ;)
Seriously, though, that's the sort of thing we might see if the Feds got behind OSS in a serious way, but don't look for the government to be the leader here, at least not under this administration. The demands of other businesses will have to drive it, not what's good for the general public.
In response to my request for non-MS studies showing higher TCO for Linux, FooBarWidget posted:
From the Gamegrabber one:
From the Newsfactor one (very first sentence in fact):
The Dutch articles refer to the IDC study, which was, according to Gamegrabber, funded by MS.
Thank you for playing.
scripsit hbean:
I think we geeks often forget just how non-geeky the general population is.
Installing a new video card? My God, that involves cracking open the case! Think about this: Many users are intimidated by the thought of figuring out the cables, and will pay someone to plug the blue cable into the blue port, the green cable into the green port, etc.
I agree that it would be nice if X weren't such a PITA to configure. However, that's really not the issue if you're talking about Mom and Dad. (Forget Grandma, she's happy with her adding machine and writes letters by hand.) Their hardware won't change until they get a new box. If the system comes preconfigured, they will use it and not muck with the settings. But until they can get the box delivered with Linux installed, and trust that it will work without fiddling, they won't use it. There's the rub.
scripsit FooBarWidget:
For example? Can you cite a truly third-party study (i.e., not financed, underwritten, or bought by MS or its affiliates) that has reached such a conclusion? I'm not arguing that such a thing doesn't exist. I just haven't ever seen one and would like to educate myself.