Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Who said anything about malice? If I challenge and evaluate a job candidate's personality by asking a "trick" question, I'm not doing it because I hate the guy. I'm doing it because I want to know how he responds, because that's (believe it or not) important to how someone will perform their job. There's nothing adversarial about it; it's the whole point of interviewing rather than just passing out a standardized test and seeing who scores best on it.
Ask anyone off the street and they'll tell you that "computers are hard to use". The problem isn't the user interface, however, but the fact that it keeps changing. A huge number of people out there learn how to use computers by rote: they click this, select that, and double-click such-and-such to get something done. But nearly every major revision of MS Windows (and to a lesser extent MS Office) has changed these things. Win3x's Program Manager was replaced by Win9x's Start Menu. Win98's Network Neighborhood got renamed to WinME's My Network Places. Win9x's My Computer was moved from the desktop onto a WinXP Start menu that changes from one session to the next. Somewhere along the way, the menus started hiding options from people, making them harder to find. Now Microsoft's taking one of the few things that has remained fairly dependable over the years (predictable pull-down menus along the top of the window), and is now renaming them, hiding them, etc. Is is any wonder that people find this stuff baffling?
"Just because someone makes money does not mean someone else has to lose money."
The other side of the coin is equally important: just because someone loses money does not mean someone else has to make money. It's all imaginary. The stock market used to serve the purpose of helping would-be businessmen find people with the resources to help start their companies, but has morphed into a numbers game, a form of legal gambling to create phantom "wealth" for those who play the game well, producing nothing of actual value in the process. After all, when you buy a stock, the only businessman who clearly benefits from that is the broker. And when confidence in the market evaporates, the confidence scam ends and all that phantom wealth disappears with it. What a house of cards to build an economic system around.
Others have already pointed out the mind-expanding notion that men can have boyfriends, but I'd like to add that "42 Wallaby Way" is a fictional address from the aforementioned movie, not the restaurant we ate at. Rent "Finding Nemo" if you wish to understand the reference.
"Lesser women" is a contradiction in terms in this context: I'm a man.:)
I can only take credit for being willing to stick with Andy after his stroke. It's a long and ugly story, but following an argument with his custodial parent several years ago, they won't let me see him. To avoid making the story even longer and uglier and dragging the rest of the family into it, I've chosen not to fight it. The "up" side of his memory loss is that he doesn't realize that I haven't been 'round to see him in a long time.
"They did it once with Apple; they will do it again with Linux,"
This demonstrates an incredible lack of understanding about the history of Microsoft and Mac OS. MS Office for Mac is a package with a legacy that goes back all the way to the early days of the Mac. Back in the mid-80s, MS was just a software developer, willing to write apps for whatever platform people were using. MS Word was one of the early Mac-compatible word processors, and Excel was born on Mac OS. They've been around ever since, and have stayed in development all along. It's not as if MS ported Office 2000 to OS X; they (like every other developer of Mac apps) ported Office X from the Mac OS 9 version, both to continue supporting an installed base and because that was part of a deal Apple and Microsoft made.
None of that applies to the situation with Linux. (To say nothing of how very different the situation is with the Linux market's hostility to Microsoft and proprietary software in general, the availability of a viable alternative in OOo, and all the other reasons this isn't likely to happen.)
My boyfriend suffered a stroke which crippled his short-term memory. For example, one time when I was talking to Andy on the phone, he was distracted by something and put the phone down, and I had to yell to get his attention and remind him that I was still on the line. "Hi there! What's up?" Nonetheless, his therapists succeeded in teaching him some adaptive behaviors, and could still learn some new information with a lot of repetition (what year it is, where I was going to school, the fact that I'd moved). Furthermore, there are some kinds of learning which don't depend upon short-term memory; someone with no short-term memory may not remember why he avoids the place where he burned his hand on a hot pan, or why he prefers to be around one person but not another... but he does. For a good demonstration of short-term-memory deficiency, see "Finding Nemo"; Dory is a remarkably good example. I even used the "P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney" method (asking him to repeat it over and over) to get Andy to remember the name of the restaurant where we'd had dinner.
Re:Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual.
on
Computer Voodoo?
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· Score: 1
When I'm waiting for a computer to do something, I just spin the mouse pointer around to entertain myself. It may not help the machine work any better, but it helps pass the time.
The lack of way to right-click using the trackpad, and the lack of a standard Delete key, were my main misgivings about Windows on Mac, and I figured Apple would fix that before final release of Boot Camp. We're buying laptops for all of our full-time faculty next month, and a bunch of the Windows-using folks have already requested MacBook Pros. Now if Apple can just add an Insert key somewhere...
While you're at it, please mention the pointlessness of the ScrollLock and Pause keys (they have almost never been used for anything), and demand that BIOSes ship with NumLock=on as the default (the arrow-key functions of the numeric keypad were rendered fully redundant almost two decades ago).
At least the scourge of the oversized Enter key (with an undersized Backspace key to make room for the VerticalBar/Backslash key) seems to have been mostly eradicated.
If you're going back to school, get a second degree (bachelor, master, associate, doctor... science, arts, fine arts... whatever) in whatever field you wish you'd gotten the first one in. If you're asking the question, you probably have some dissatisfaction with whatever you spent those first four years studying and where its gotten you. Now that you're not a drunken adolescent, you have a better sense of what you'd really like to be doing. Apply for whatever program of study you qualify for, in that field.
Several years ago when I was at a crossroads in my career, my parents suggested I go back to school. They were thinking I'd follow my BS in CS with an MS in CS. Instead I went for a BFA in Digital Media/Illustration. It hasn't been the road to riches, but I sure am happier with what I'm doing now than what I would have been doing if I'd just stayed in the job market or if I'd returned to the same educational track.
"Was Star Trek one of the first shows aired in color?"
No, color was gradually introduced over the course of the early 1960s, and most primetime shows had switched to color by the time Star Trek debuted. It was still a novelty in those days, and Trek's primary-colors palette was designed to take advantage of it, but it had plenty of "in living color" competition for the attention of viewers (well, as much competition as two other networks could offer). On the other hand, keep in mind that the majority of homes still had black and white TVs (meaning the only way many viewers could identify expendable security officers was by the darkness of their shirts). So I wouldn't pin much of its appeal on color.
Trek's novelty came mostly from new-to-TV special effects, its relatively serious approach to sci-fi (contrast with "Lost in Space"), and its flirtation with ideas in an era of "Gilligan's Island", "I Dream of Jeannie", and "Gunsmoke".
"Another interesting thing I noticed several years back is that something like half of the people hiking the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to Maine) are retirees in their late 60's or early 70's."
Yes, but how old were they when they started the trip?
But seriously, I've been to Isle Royale (a wilderness preserve in Lake Superior) a couple times, and was surprised by the number of over-60s visiting. Granted, most of them weren't out hiking the Minong Ridge, but they weren't just sitting around the dock area playing bridge, either. Gives this fortysomething fella some hope for staying active a little while longer.
Sounds like you and I got switched at birth (or something). Without much soul-searching, I got a comp sci degree after high school, but got bored with just bits and gigabytes, so I went to art school part-time and graduated with a second bachelor's degree in illustration/digital media at the ripe age of 39. Kind of blows to hell any chance of ever being the next "hot young talent", eh?
I won't shine sunshine up your skirt. There are people who'll look at your late-20s razor stubble and the hint of creases in your skin, and especially the resume that says "art school" and "film" on it, and figure that you're a flake who couldn't make it in Hollywood, and who's trying to get into "high tech" because the folks at the unemployment office keep telling him that's where the jobs are. There are probably potential employers who'd take your creative background as an advantage to them, but for others you might have to spin it as a youthful indiscretion, with your new career in technology being a mature and responsible choice where your ability to think outside the box can be put to productive use instead of wasted on silly little movies... etc.
If you're debating whether to go back to school now, consider: Which would you rather be in four years: a 29-year-old programming newbie trying to get a good entry-level job despite his age, or a 29-year-old art school grad with a dead-end job, wondering whether he should go back to school and worrying about the prospects of getting a good entry-level job at the age of 33?
And the global manufacturing economy? It's not powered by planes. It's powered by really big boats.
Those really big boats rely on the same class of diminishing and climate-affecting fuels, and the only practical alternative fuel turns them into floating nuclear weapons. Transporting manufactured goods between continents by galleon would be economically impractical.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask anyone off the street and they'll tell you that "computers are hard to use". The problem isn't the user interface, however, but the fact that it keeps changing. A huge number of people out there learn how to use computers by rote: they click this, select that, and double-click such-and-such to get something done. But nearly every major revision of MS Windows (and to a lesser extent MS Office) has changed these things. Win3x's Program Manager was replaced by Win9x's Start Menu. Win98's Network Neighborhood got renamed to WinME's My Network Places. Win9x's My Computer was moved from the desktop onto a WinXP Start menu that changes from one session to the next. Somewhere along the way, the menus started hiding options from people, making them harder to find. Now Microsoft's taking one of the few things that has remained fairly dependable over the years (predictable pull-down menus along the top of the window), and is now renaming them, hiding them, etc. Is is any wonder that people find this stuff baffling?
I've always preferred shopping on the windward side of the isle. The leeward side of the isle always seems to have higher prices.
"Just because someone makes money does not mean someone else has to lose money."
The other side of the coin is equally important: just because someone loses money does not mean someone else has to make money. It's all imaginary. The stock market used to serve the purpose of helping would-be businessmen find people with the resources to help start their companies, but has morphed into a numbers game, a form of legal gambling to create phantom "wealth" for those who play the game well, producing nothing of actual value in the process. After all, when you buy a stock, the only businessman who clearly benefits from that is the broker. And when confidence in the market evaporates, the confidence scam ends and all that phantom wealth disappears with it. What a house of cards to build an economic system around.
Others have already pointed out the mind-expanding notion that men can have boyfriends, but I'd like to add that "42 Wallaby Way" is a fictional address from the aforementioned movie, not the restaurant we ate at. Rent "Finding Nemo" if you wish to understand the reference.
Just to clear things up, for the record:
:)
"Lesser women" is a contradiction in terms in this context: I'm a man.
I can only take credit for being willing to stick with Andy after his stroke. It's a long and ugly story, but following an argument with his custodial parent several years ago, they won't let me see him. To avoid making the story even longer and uglier and dragging the rest of the family into it, I've chosen not to fight it. The "up" side of his memory loss is that he doesn't realize that I haven't been 'round to see him in a long time.
Congratulations: your hippocampus is intact; I probably told the same story the last time a discussion of memory and learning came up here.
:)
You're surprised by a dupe on Slashdot?
"They did it once with Apple; they will do it again with Linux,"
This demonstrates an incredible lack of understanding about the history of Microsoft and Mac OS. MS Office for Mac is a package with a legacy that goes back all the way to the early days of the Mac. Back in the mid-80s, MS was just a software developer, willing to write apps for whatever platform people were using. MS Word was one of the early Mac-compatible word processors, and Excel was born on Mac OS. They've been around ever since, and have stayed in development all along. It's not as if MS ported Office 2000 to OS X; they (like every other developer of Mac apps) ported Office X from the Mac OS 9 version, both to continue supporting an installed base and because that was part of a deal Apple and Microsoft made.
None of that applies to the situation with Linux. (To say nothing of how very different the situation is with the Linux market's hostility to Microsoft and proprietary software in general, the availability of a viable alternative in OOo, and all the other reasons this isn't likely to happen.)
My boyfriend suffered a stroke which crippled his short-term memory. For example, one time when I was talking to Andy on the phone, he was distracted by something and put the phone down, and I had to yell to get his attention and remind him that I was still on the line. "Hi there! What's up?" Nonetheless, his therapists succeeded in teaching him some adaptive behaviors, and could still learn some new information with a lot of repetition (what year it is, where I was going to school, the fact that I'd moved). Furthermore, there are some kinds of learning which don't depend upon short-term memory; someone with no short-term memory may not remember why he avoids the place where he burned his hand on a hot pan, or why he prefers to be around one person but not another... but he does. For a good demonstration of short-term-memory deficiency, see "Finding Nemo"; Dory is a remarkably good example. I even used the "P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney" method (asking him to repeat it over and over) to get Andy to remember the name of the restaurant where we'd had dinner.
When I'm waiting for a computer to do something, I just spin the mouse pointer around to entertain myself. It may not help the machine work any better, but it helps pass the time.
So apparently Orson Welles - even at his heaviest - was still too "lightweight" to be a real star.
Ironic.
The lack of way to right-click using the trackpad, and the lack of a standard Delete key, were my main misgivings about Windows on Mac, and I figured Apple would fix that before final release of Boot Camp. We're buying laptops for all of our full-time faculty next month, and a bunch of the Windows-using folks have already requested MacBook Pros. Now if Apple can just add an Insert key somewhere...
While you're at it, please mention the pointlessness of the ScrollLock and Pause keys (they have almost never been used for anything), and demand that BIOSes ship with NumLock=on as the default (the arrow-key functions of the numeric keypad were rendered fully redundant almost two decades ago).
At least the scourge of the oversized Enter key (with an undersized Backspace key to make room for the VerticalBar/Backslash key) seems to have been mostly eradicated.
Um... a double-density, double-sided 5.25" floppy holds only 360KB.
If you're going back to school, get a second degree (bachelor, master, associate, doctor... science, arts, fine arts... whatever) in whatever field you wish you'd gotten the first one in. If you're asking the question, you probably have some dissatisfaction with whatever you spent those first four years studying and where its gotten you. Now that you're not a drunken adolescent, you have a better sense of what you'd really like to be doing. Apply for whatever program of study you qualify for, in that field.
Several years ago when I was at a crossroads in my career, my parents suggested I go back to school. They were thinking I'd follow my BS in CS with an MS in CS. Instead I went for a BFA in Digital Media/Illustration. It hasn't been the road to riches, but I sure am happier with what I'm doing now than what I would have been doing if I'd just stayed in the job market or if I'd returned to the same educational track.
Bring duct tape. Plenty of duct tape.
I'm especially looking forward to DirectX11, which will reportedly be based on the XFree86 4.4 implementation of X11 (under a new license, of course).
"Was Star Trek one of the first shows aired in color?"
No, color was gradually introduced over the course of the early 1960s, and most primetime shows had switched to color by the time Star Trek debuted. It was still a novelty in those days, and Trek's primary-colors palette was designed to take advantage of it, but it had plenty of "in living color" competition for the attention of viewers (well, as much competition as two other networks could offer). On the other hand, keep in mind that the majority of homes still had black and white TVs (meaning the only way many viewers could identify expendable security officers was by the darkness of their shirts). So I wouldn't pin much of its appeal on color.
Trek's novelty came mostly from new-to-TV special effects, its relatively serious approach to sci-fi (contrast with "Lost in Space"), and its flirtation with ideas in an era of "Gilligan's Island", "I Dream of Jeannie", and "Gunsmoke".
As a matter of fact, a good deal of the FX rendering for Star Trek: Nemesis was done on boxes running Linux.
:)
And yes, there were "Linux is ready for the Enterprise" jokes made at the time.
"If you are a true Trekkie, don't click on the link, as this is certainly going to offend you..."
Offend?
{raised eyebrow}
To be offended by an attempt at humor would not be logical.
"More economical than a car" is damning with faint praise.
P.S. If you don't want to be modded "troll", stop trolling and calling people "idiot", Mister Pot.
"Another interesting thing I noticed several years back is that something like half of the people hiking the Appalachian Trail (Georgia to Maine) are retirees in their late 60's or early 70's."
Yes, but how old were they when they started the trip?
But seriously, I've been to Isle Royale (a wilderness preserve in Lake Superior) a couple times, and was surprised by the number of over-60s visiting. Granted, most of them weren't out hiking the Minong Ridge, but they weren't just sitting around the dock area playing bridge, either. Gives this fortysomething fella some hope for staying active a little while longer.
Sounds like you and I got switched at birth (or something). Without much soul-searching, I got a comp sci degree after high school, but got bored with just bits and gigabytes, so I went to art school part-time and graduated with a second bachelor's degree in illustration/digital media at the ripe age of 39. Kind of blows to hell any chance of ever being the next "hot young talent", eh?
I won't shine sunshine up your skirt. There are people who'll look at your late-20s razor stubble and the hint of creases in your skin, and especially the resume that says "art school" and "film" on it, and figure that you're a flake who couldn't make it in Hollywood, and who's trying to get into "high tech" because the folks at the unemployment office keep telling him that's where the jobs are. There are probably potential employers who'd take your creative background as an advantage to them, but for others you might have to spin it as a youthful indiscretion, with your new career in technology being a mature and responsible choice where your ability to think outside the box can be put to productive use instead of wasted on silly little movies... etc.
If you're debating whether to go back to school now, consider: Which would you rather be in four years: a 29-year-old programming newbie trying to get a good entry-level job despite his age, or a 29-year-old art school grad with a dead-end job, wondering whether he should go back to school and worrying about the prospects of getting a good entry-level job at the age of 33?
Carpe Noctem! (translation: "fish night")
And the global manufacturing economy? It's not powered by planes. It's powered by really big boats.
Those really big boats rely on the same class of diminishing and climate-affecting fuels, and the only practical alternative fuel turns them into floating nuclear weapons. Transporting manufactured goods between continents by galleon would be economically impractical.