Seems to me it's a little like the pot calling the kettle black. Yes, Jobs liked his closed-platform and saw computers and other gadgets as "appliances" to sell to people in closed boxes where you can't even change the battery. But he never said he was doing anything different, and he was very successful at it. In the end, his legacy will include his personal treatment of people, the "culture" he inspired, and the commoditization of computer-related technology.
The part RMS never seemed to understand is that not everyone views software as some kind of grail to protect. I do see his point, but most people don't, and if they did, most wouldn't care. It is a conspicuously self-centered and unyielding technologist's view of the universe.
And so I think it's a little silly to see a man who has contributed little more than his opinions to the world, maligning the reputation of a much more successful man. He may not be wrong, but who cares? Just one more opinion.
Let's get real. The fact of the matter is that nobody is breaking into your house and destroying your books.
Actually it is. You buy a book, download it, put it on your Kindle. In purchasing it, you took ownership of your copy. Then they break into your living room...er...Kindle and steal...er...delete your book. Is that not exactly what they are doing?
'I was more concerned for the person's life,' Sheriff Dale Williams said.
Bully for the cops, for a change! The guys who are supposed to protect and serve, who get such a bad rap in recent years, were trying to figure out how to pay a bill for a guy who was trying to off himself. Goddamit but that makes me feel good.
You're thinking of BTK. He sent some document or other to the police on a floppy disk (after asking THEM if there would be any way to trace it back to him). The document was written in MS-Word! They just had to pop up File->Document Properties and there was his name: Bob T. Killer (or whatever).
If it's a Word doc, you might consider going through it with a hex editor or doing an ascii dump on it, as your skills allow. New documents sometimes pick up information about the registered owner of the software, the computer, the date/time, etc. PDF files have such metadata as well.
Digital photos often contain EXIF information showing the model of camera, as well as the time and date the photo was taken. The whereabouts of the the owner of a camera of the same model listed might be quickly correlated to the time/date shown in the photos.
All this information is easily removed, but you should be careful to scrub the data itself, along with any devices used to transport it, while keeping your links to the source minimal.
Sorry for the late reply. I got involved with work and life and haven't been to Slashdot in a couple of weeks.
First off, you're welcome. But I think it's a little more organic than you make it out to be. It's not always about people choosing the simplest or cheapest solution, and for untrained ad hoc coders, coding style is an alien concept. That's not to put them down, though. Let me share a little more of what I referred to, since I was one of those inexperienced coders, once upon a time.
I was a Psych major in school and came to computers from the side. Back in the 80's, I had taken a Pascal course in college, and later on taught myself AppleBASIC on an Apple IIe. When that was too slow for what I wanted, I learned Assembly. A few years later I was working in a company that made PC software and someone gave me a copy of QuickBASIC, which compiled to EXE for DOS. I learned a variety of BASIC variants, including the many types of macro languages in Lotus and Microsoft products, as well as writing applications in dBase III. I also learned C, but since I wasn't a developer and was mostly writing tools for my own productivity, I often fell back on QB because the coding and debugging cycles were much shorter.
Eventually I found myself working in the Desktop IT department (the company was growing from a "startup" to a rather large company, and transfers were frequent) and was tapped to install Lotus Notes for the Prod Dev dept. Having also written product manuals and help files, I was fascinated by the notion of hypertext. My first "hypertext document" was a Windows help file, combining various departmental info, the company phone list, and a map of the facilities. The director of the Application IT department (that managed the Oracle apps) saw this and got me transferred to help create our first intranet. This was when the web was just going mainstream and some people were really trying to exploit it, while others thought it was just a toy.
I built a lot of discussion boards, phone directory searches, and departmental templates with my rudimentary HTML and Perl knowledge. Professional coders would have built a better product, but management didn't want the pros to take time away from their fancy retail products or their expensive Oracle applications, and no one yet saw the value of contracting a professional coder, so it was me and a couple of friends or nothing at all. Eventually I became quite a solid coder, and I continued to push for management to own some of the systems I had written that they were now relying on.
Well, you know it: it wasn't until after I left that they started to rewrite the intranet. Some would (and did) say that those early efforts were crap and they clearly had to be replaced. I would say that the company got a lot of value out of those early crap efforts, and it made it easier for them to design the cohesive back-end that they eventually went on to build. But here is ultimately the crux of the discussion. Management never owns anything until they need to. Then they come in with a "Calm down, the experts are here now with ALL the answers" attitude that belies the fact that they were forced to respond to something like the original coder leaving.
I've heard plenty of crap hurled at Perl, but when all is said and done, I've seen and worked on plenty of web apps written in ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, Oracle Apps, or Perl/CGI. Each was replaced by another at some point, and each time the villain was always made out to be the tool and not the tool user. The real cost/benefit analysis would examine utilizing all that working code as part of a rewrite, versus starting from scratch. Sometimes they will consider it. Usually not.
I think you're right, but the reasons have nothing to do with Perl. When the web first got popular in the early 90's, there were no frameworks to develop applications in. You could write a CGI application in Perl, Tcl, C, or something else, but it was hard. With a variety of libraries, culminaiting in CGI.pm, a LOT of people suddenly had a tool with which to create CGI apps quickly and relatively cleanly.
But IT management (in my experience) typically viewed the web with suspicion because a) they didn't understand it, and that meant b) it could be a threat because typical IT directors and VP's are constantly trying to justify bringing in some huge backend system to unite the web with business databases, email, process management, etc, to the tune of millions of dollars.
As a result of management's foot-dragging and distancing themselves from the web, a lot of early web applications were skunkwork projects that became official after their usefulness was seen by said management. But they typically were not overseen by anyone who might enforce best practices, and so you were entirely at the mercy of the coding skills (or lack thereof) of the developer.
Perl came along at just the right time to make a lot of barely competent "coders" successful. Had Python or Java or anything else found that niche first, we'd be having this exact same discussion, but with another language being the "legacy".
Nobody can tell you what's right for you, but here's one more story to consider.
After 15 years in software companies, about half in IT positions, I got laid off in 2001. I'd done software development, project management, network installation/admin, tech writing, and started off in tech support in the late 80's. While I was looking for another job I also took classes and talked to people and tried to decide "what to do with my life". I really liked most of my jobs, but the quality of management was extremely random and a great position could suddenly become a living hell because some bozo with parent issues got a promotion and wanted to prove he's in charge (like there was a question about it). I'm sure that's happened to many, but I lost my tolerance for it and started really reconsidering my options while jobless.
Anyway, a friend of a friend suggested I meet with his son, who had left a telecom training position and was doing well in real estate appraising. It sounded good and after some classes I started as an apprentice appraiser. Up until a couple of years ago, I thought it was a good change. Despite the long hours and initial pay cut, I was working for myself and could choose when to work those long hours. But the housing market downturn has me thinking about switching again. Commercial appraisals? I've continued to program, but is there a way back to IT for me? Exotic transvestite fan dancer (probably a long shot)? I've got a family and I'm in my mid-40's and I really don't relish having to make this decision again. But most of my clients have gone out of business and it's not like I can make much less than I do now.
I guess my point is that in my life, I've often found that simply the act of looking and trying things will usually lead you to something, and it won't be what you were seeking about as often as it will be. I was afraid of change, losing my cushy salary, and being on the bottom of a new totem pole. Then I got laid off right when things were worst for a jack-of-all-trades like me and I didn't have the option of thinking anymore. But I stumbled on something totally unexpected and was happy with it for a while. Nothing lasts forever.
You know, I think it's important to keep in mind that the "Star Trek" conception of evolution (everything gets smarter and given enough time, even slugs will "evolve" intelligence) isn't quite the case. It's all about adapting to the current environment, which could mean developing social behaviors, or it could just mean developing horns instead of ears (or something...).
Humans continue to get more clever, but it's not clear to me they're getting any smarter (though they definitely are getting better at putting "beliefs" before facts, and attempting to eliminate anyone who says differently). Ever think about what a real space alien would see/experience if they came to Earth for a visit? It's not very impressive...
I don't hate them. My first experience with a computer was actually with programmable calculators in college. Between college and the first couple of years afterward, I had used an IBM 360 via terminal, Apple II/II+/IIe's, early IBM clones (remember when they were clones?), and some form of Unix via dialup.
Take MS-Word for a thread. I had to use DOS 3.x for work and I thought Word for DOS 3.0 was the coolest thing ever. Way better than WordStar (remember Ctrl-K Ctrl-B?) and early WordPerfect (remember.codes?). Anyway, the shine started to tarnish when Word for Windows 1.0 was a complete dud, but WfW 2.0 was pretty cool and I wrote lots of macros in WordBasic when I was a tech writer. But the next upgrade, oddly to WfW 6.0, not only shuffled all the menus around so I couldn't find anything, but also switched to Visual Basic for Applications, which was not compatible with the old WordBasic. Because my whole company upgraded, a couple of years worth of macros suddenly became useless until I could figure out how to rewrite them. They did the same thing with Office 95 -- only slight changes to VBA, but in moving all the menus around, the macros no longer worked until I could edit them to find the menu items in their new locations. By that time I had started to use other products to get things done.
So, in a nutshell, they have some great stuff...that they mess with constantly. They seem to focus on the newbie, clueless user, and have often forgotten their best users when they make *improvements* to their products. Maybe it's the constant pressure to create something worth upgrading to that drives them, but instead of perfecting something, they end up turning it inside out and calling it a major improvement. Take the XP interface. I have to use Windows for work and I just do my best to master it and bring tools to it that will make my day as productive as possible. I tried to get used to the new XP interface, but after a week of not being able to find anything, I changed it to the Classic interface, played with TweakUI, installed Cygwin so I could do as much as possible from the shell window, and added a virtual desktop.
At this point in my increasing age, I think it's a waste of time to hate anything. I just change it until I like it.
Couple of things I thought I'd share. First, I've seen several of these articles, and I've also used modafinil on and off for almost three years. Sleep-free is an exaggeration. It can make a significant difference, but it does have side-effects (mostly headache and nausea) and it's not like your performance is quite normal, though it depends on what you're doing.
For example, I've found that when I'm trapped at my desk and have to pull an all-nighter, it just doesn't keep me up all night. I think it's because of the lack of general physical movement. For all night sessions, I find working as late as I can (1am or 2am, usually), followed by 2-4 hours of sleep, gives me far more energy for the task than trying to get by with caffeine alone. And I'm far more productive than trying to push through without sleep at all. But your reasoning will get fuzzy, your memory will play tricks on you, and you can get kind of distracted after a while. The longest I stayed up with it was 38 hours straight. At the end of that time, I knew I was in a pretty bad place. I had a glass of wine, faded fast, and hopped into bed. I woke after 5 1/2 hours fairly refreshed. I was kind of out of it the next day, and I wouldn't want to make any important decisions or presentations in that state, but it wasn't bad.
Recently, we decided to remodel the kitchen. We were running behind schedule (who doesn't), I was burning the candle at both ends because of work, and I needed to get part of the plumbing done to get the cabinets in place for the Corian people who were coming in two days. I used a half dose around dinner time and kept going with good energy until 3am. At that point I could have taken more and kept going, but I slept and finished the next night. An important point to note is that Modafinil/Provigil can stave off the urge to sleep, but cannot eliminate the need to sleep.
When I was young and stupid, I would indulge in a variety of drugs for no particular reason. Meth (and I presume the somewhat more legal varieties of amphetamine) are good for focus and staying awake, but along with not eliminating the need for sleep, they also make subtle changes to your brain chemistry. My brother got hooked on meth, took it all the time, thought he was real cool. Then he started talking about "the mob" wanting to kill him, and how every dark sedan he'd see on the road was the FBI keeping an eye on him. When I, my other brother, and some of his friends tried to convince him to get off the drugs, he thought it was some kind of plot. He finally got sent home on a forced vacation and laid off the drugs for a while. It was about 2 weeks before he started questioning his delusions.
It may sound like a joke, but amphetamine psychosis due to chronic use really isn't. It wears off after a couple of weeks, but while you're in it, you're particular form of crazy (my brother became obviously and overtly paranoid) will be absolutely indistinguishable from the real thing (that is, organic and not going away).
Anyway (sorry if I got off-topic), Modafinil definitely does not have these side effects. And it won't leave you burned out or sleeping 24 hours, but prolonged lack of sleep definitely is not good for your brain and you will find yourself misplacing IQ points after a while.
I was a software developer for 15 years. Now I'm a real estate appraiser and much happier for it. Part of it was I'm not so young anymore and my hands are really tired. Part of it was a succession of stupid PHB's in a succession of companies where they were sure nothing mattered as long as they hung on until they got to go public. Part of it was I just didn't care about the latest tools/language/technique/etc, since I'd have to learn it all over again anyway. I got laid off five years ago, during the big bust, and while I was looking for work, I talked to people who had different types of careers and decided to take the opportunity to change the scenery.
My point: Reeeaaalllly look at what will make you happy now and in a few years. You can't predict the future, but it's something to keep in mind while navigating your way there.
Multi-line regular expressions are built into Perl. I hope you enjoyed bashing Perl, but you should know that you minimal knowledge of it exposes you for the poseur you are.
The dominant human social model is based around the individual "my stuff/your stuff" mechanism, which extends to the social model of "us/them", where *we* protect *our stuff* from *them*, and occasionally go take *their stuff* when we think we can get away with it. Laws and society extend from the consequences of that model. To wit, we had to find a way to protect *our stuff* from various *thems* without killing each other all the time.
So let's say someone creates/evolves/pretends to be an intelligence-amplified new human. Now what is this singularitized human supposed to be able to do? From the description, it sounds like you have a permanent internet connection in your head, and many better eyes. I dunno. Whatever. You're smarter, faster, all-knowing, blah, blah, blah. So the fuck what? I mean really. Are you going to do party tricks? "Hey everybody, want to see me look up stuff on Wikipedia while pouring drinks? I can also track down your lost loved ones for $14.95. Really! No, really! Anyone? Anyone?"
Probably you'll end up being used by your employer or political groups or the government for your advanced abilities to...whatever it is that's going to "replace humans as the dominating force in science and technology, rendering human-specific social models obsolete." But in the beginning, you'll be somebody's bitch.
But oh hey, this is the new evolutionary step in human development. You've got destiny on your side, baby! We're taking over the world! And most humans won't even notice, except for the few that want to be the first to welcome their new plugged-in overlords. All that military arsenal, all those guns, all those religious leaders frothing up the ignorant masses about how the most important thing in the world is stopping gays from marrying, all the street gangs defending their turf, all the greedy politicians and businesspersons in the world whose entire conception of science hinges on whether it will make them money or give them power, all the irrational emotions and instincts that really drive the world? None of that will matter, because you can look stuff up while driving, or whatever a converged human-technology hybrid is supposed to be able to do.
There is the little matter that when a new kind of human wants to replace an existing kind of human, it might be considered war at best, and genocide at worst, but hey, you're special. And most likely your last words will be "Hey, get away from that cable modem! I mean it! Don't make me get out of my Herman Miller Airon chair and come over there and yell at you. Hey! Come back here! Bring that back! Oh man. I was leasing that modem."
...I'm surprised it took this long. After throwing over their own OS for NT workstations and losing the high-end specialty graphics market, they veered into supercomputers and bought Cray, which didn't help either company, and they haven't done anything interesting in years. RIP SGI
...and organize your books. I assume you are at least somewhat familiar with the books you own. In other words, you're not looking for books in a bookstore or an actual library. You're organizing your own books, that you actually put someplace, right?
Okay, now consider the time it would talk to learn or create a database (not a big deal really). Then consider the time to enter the info for each book into it. Sure, the author and title, but what about subject? Ooooh, you're halfway through and realize you need to recategorize 200 books because you too specific or not specific enough. Do you want to include a summary? That will take forever. Maybe you need some speech-to-text software. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 is really cool. Spend a couple of hours getting it used to your speech pattern, and you're off and running. Of course you'll still have to check for errors.
Okay, you've spent a month of your life organizing this beast. Now you can look up books and actually locate them. Are you going to remember to put in new books? If you ever get rid of any books, are you going to delete them.
And here's one to ponder: If you're so lazy and disorganized that you can't spend a Saturday afternoon rearranging books by general subject so you're only looking at 2 or 3 shelves to find a useful book, when you do find a book you're looking for and have had it out for a week, are you really going to look up where it came from and put it back? Of course not. You're going to throw it into the first free space you find, just like you did with all the other books in the first place.
But if you must, you must. I actually did this 20 years ago. I moved away for college and stuck around for a couple of years afterward before moving back home for a while. I had like 15 boxes of books which went straight into a storage locker. My mom had bought an Apple IIe with AppleWorks, and after playing around with that a little bit, I decided to make a database so I could locate the books in the boxes in minimal time. It worked great. Funny thing though. After logging each book, I had a pretty good memory of where each one was, and I didn't get much use out of the database.
When I got my own place and put all the books back on proper shelves, I didn't go so far as to sort by author, but I'm a clumper (organize by piles) and just loosely grouped like books together. Still works to this day, with roughly 2200 books. I've got the web shelf, the programming shelves, the language shelf (dictionary, thesaurus, etc), the foreign shelves (Spanish and French books, travel books), the fiction shelves, etc. Having organized them myself, I know just where to look. But if I just put books wherever without any organization, I'd be as lost as you.
My two cents.
Cheers!
Re:Logical Chess move by move
on
Chess for Kids?
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· Score: 1
Apertures = Openings. My guess is that the poster is not a native English speaker. I made the same kind of mistakes when I lived in France.
Comes from Florida, anyway. According to my home-grown spam catcher -- for my personal email -- I've received 3455 spams in the past month from the IP range 69.60.96.0 - 69.60.127.255, currently owned by
OrgName: Infolink Information Services Inc. OrgID: IIS-129 Address: 2400 E Las Olas Blvd. City: Fort Lauderdale StateProv: FL PostalCode: 33301 Country: US
This is just the pile I can catch by IP. I've got many others that are caught via Message-Id, subject line, or something else that, if examined, turn out to come from Florida.
> I have been a Windows administrator ever since I got into the tech industry.
> I have no working experience with any other OS [besides Windows] except for
> those from Apple.
Poor grammar, perhaps, but I think you misread it.
Agreed. I've seen plenty of instances on Google where it will return several hundred results on a very specific search and if you don't quote the phrase ("red bull" vs. "red" and "bull"), you'll start getting results that only have one of the words after the first page or two. Without some qualification of the relevancy of the results, the study is meaningless.
Come to think of it, about 10 years ago I was asked to evaluate a search engine for an intranet. The engine was hyped as being able to distinguish relationships between data (the example they gave us was an indexing of Civil War data involving family members, from which you could ask it "Who was X's father?" and it could tell you). It would have cost $10,000, plus its own server, since it brought the Sun Sparc Server the intranet sat on to its knees with each query.
Up to that point, we had been using a local search we got from some folks we knew at Excite.com (remember them?) that consisted of a binary and a Perl script. When we compared results, the fancy engine often gave us only 2 or 3 results, finding the exact page we were looking for. In this case, fewer results were considered better. The little Excite local engine would give us a couple of dozen results, but the correct page was always in the first 5 links.
For the cost and hassle, the "better" engine wasn't worth it and we passed. But I really think you have to define what "better" means before doing a study like this. Google's "more results" could just be more noise, not more information.
You mentioned old radio shows. I've recently gotten into them and discovered that they are quite easy to find, and some of them are a lot of fun. There are many sources, but my two main sources are Bobby's Digital OTR and RUSC.com. The first one sells CD's of shows (20 hours of listening time on average) for $5-7. You can get a whole series, or one of the Misc disks.
For $7.50/month, RUSC lets you browse many, many series and listen or download as you like. He doesn't post whole collections and he throttles back the downloads, but there's so much to check out it doesn't matter. And if you want a whole series, head on over to Bobby's.
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Seems to me it's a little like the pot calling the kettle black. Yes, Jobs liked his closed-platform and saw computers and other gadgets as "appliances" to sell to people in closed boxes where you can't even change the battery. But he never said he was doing anything different, and he was very successful at it. In the end, his legacy will include his personal treatment of people, the "culture" he inspired, and the commoditization of computer-related technology.
The part RMS never seemed to understand is that not everyone views software as some kind of grail to protect. I do see his point, but most people don't, and if they did, most wouldn't care. It is a conspicuously self-centered and unyielding technologist's view of the universe.
And so I think it's a little silly to see a man who has contributed little more than his opinions to the world, maligning the reputation of a much more successful man. He may not be wrong, but who cares? Just one more opinion.
No, there was no damage. He just locked out the administrative functions for a while.
Actually it is. You buy a book, download it, put it on your Kindle. In purchasing it, you took ownership of your copy. Then they break into your living room...er...Kindle and steal...er...delete your book. Is that not exactly what they are doing?
'I was more concerned for the person's life,' Sheriff Dale Williams said.
Bully for the cops, for a change! The guys who are supposed to protect and serve, who get such a bad rap in recent years, were trying to figure out how to pay a bill for a guy who was trying to off himself. Goddamit but that makes me feel good.
You're thinking of BTK. He sent some document or other to the police on a floppy disk (after asking THEM if there would be any way to trace it back to him). The document was written in MS-Word! They just had to pop up File->Document Properties and there was his name: Bob T. Killer (or whatever).
If it's a Word doc, you might consider going through it with a hex editor or doing an ascii dump on it, as your skills allow. New documents sometimes pick up information about the registered owner of the software, the computer, the date/time, etc. PDF files have such metadata as well.
Digital photos often contain EXIF information showing the model of camera, as well as the time and date the photo was taken. The whereabouts of the the owner of a camera of the same model listed might be quickly correlated to the time/date shown in the photos.
All this information is easily removed, but you should be careful to scrub the data itself, along with any devices used to transport it, while keeping your links to the source minimal.
Cheers!
Sorry for the late reply. I got involved with work and life and haven't been to Slashdot in a couple of weeks.
First off, you're welcome. But I think it's a little more organic than you make it out to be. It's not always about people choosing the simplest or cheapest solution, and for untrained ad hoc coders, coding style is an alien concept. That's not to put them down, though. Let me share a little more of what I referred to, since I was one of those inexperienced coders, once upon a time.
I was a Psych major in school and came to computers from the side. Back in the 80's, I had taken a Pascal course in college, and later on taught myself AppleBASIC on an Apple IIe. When that was too slow for what I wanted, I learned Assembly. A few years later I was working in a company that made PC software and someone gave me a copy of QuickBASIC, which compiled to EXE for DOS. I learned a variety of BASIC variants, including the many types of macro languages in Lotus and Microsoft products, as well as writing applications in dBase III. I also learned C, but since I wasn't a developer and was mostly writing tools for my own productivity, I often fell back on QB because the coding and debugging cycles were much shorter.
Eventually I found myself working in the Desktop IT department (the company was growing from a "startup" to a rather large company, and transfers were frequent) and was tapped to install Lotus Notes for the Prod Dev dept. Having also written product manuals and help files, I was fascinated by the notion of hypertext. My first "hypertext document" was a Windows help file, combining various departmental info, the company phone list, and a map of the facilities. The director of the Application IT department (that managed the Oracle apps) saw this and got me transferred to help create our first intranet. This was when the web was just going mainstream and some people were really trying to exploit it, while others thought it was just a toy.
I built a lot of discussion boards, phone directory searches, and departmental templates with my rudimentary HTML and Perl knowledge. Professional coders would have built a better product, but management didn't want the pros to take time away from their fancy retail products or their expensive Oracle applications, and no one yet saw the value of contracting a professional coder, so it was me and a couple of friends or nothing at all. Eventually I became quite a solid coder, and I continued to push for management to own some of the systems I had written that they were now relying on.
Well, you know it: it wasn't until after I left that they started to rewrite the intranet. Some would (and did) say that those early efforts were crap and they clearly had to be replaced. I would say that the company got a lot of value out of those early crap efforts, and it made it easier for them to design the cohesive back-end that they eventually went on to build. But here is ultimately the crux of the discussion. Management never owns anything until they need to. Then they come in with a "Calm down, the experts are here now with ALL the answers" attitude that belies the fact that they were forced to respond to something like the original coder leaving.
I've heard plenty of crap hurled at Perl, but when all is said and done, I've seen and worked on plenty of web apps written in ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, Oracle Apps, or Perl/CGI. Each was replaced by another at some point, and each time the villain was always made out to be the tool and not the tool user. The real cost/benefit analysis would examine utilizing all that working code as part of a rewrite, versus starting from scratch. Sometimes they will consider it. Usually not.
C'est normal. C'est la vie.
Cheers!
I think you're right, but the reasons have nothing to do with Perl. When the web first got popular in the early 90's, there were no frameworks to develop applications in. You could write a CGI application in Perl, Tcl, C, or something else, but it was hard. With a variety of libraries, culminaiting in CGI.pm, a LOT of people suddenly had a tool with which to create CGI apps quickly and relatively cleanly.
But IT management (in my experience) typically viewed the web with suspicion because a) they didn't understand it, and that meant b) it could be a threat because typical IT directors and VP's are constantly trying to justify bringing in some huge backend system to unite the web with business databases, email, process management, etc, to the tune of millions of dollars.
As a result of management's foot-dragging and distancing themselves from the web, a lot of early web applications were skunkwork projects that became official after their usefulness was seen by said management. But they typically were not overseen by anyone who might enforce best practices, and so you were entirely at the mercy of the coding skills (or lack thereof) of the developer.
Perl came along at just the right time to make a lot of barely competent "coders" successful. Had Python or Java or anything else found that niche first, we'd be having this exact same discussion, but with another language being the "legacy".
Nobody can tell you what's right for you, but here's one more story to consider.
After 15 years in software companies, about half in IT positions, I got laid off in 2001. I'd done software development, project management, network installation/admin, tech writing, and started off in tech support in the late 80's. While I was looking for another job I also took classes and talked to people and tried to decide "what to do with my life". I really liked most of my jobs, but the quality of management was extremely random and a great position could suddenly become a living hell because some bozo with parent issues got a promotion and wanted to prove he's in charge (like there was a question about it). I'm sure that's happened to many, but I lost my tolerance for it and started really reconsidering my options while jobless.
Anyway, a friend of a friend suggested I meet with his son, who had left a telecom training position and was doing well in real estate appraising. It sounded good and after some classes I started as an apprentice appraiser. Up until a couple of years ago, I thought it was a good change. Despite the long hours and initial pay cut, I was working for myself and could choose when to work those long hours. But the housing market downturn has me thinking about switching again. Commercial appraisals? I've continued to program, but is there a way back to IT for me? Exotic transvestite fan dancer (probably a long shot)? I've got a family and I'm in my mid-40's and I really don't relish having to make this decision again. But most of my clients have gone out of business and it's not like I can make much less than I do now.
I guess my point is that in my life, I've often found that simply the act of looking and trying things will usually lead you to something, and it won't be what you were seeking about as often as it will be. I was afraid of change, losing my cushy salary, and being on the bottom of a new totem pole. Then I got laid off right when things were worst for a jack-of-all-trades like me and I didn't have the option of thinking anymore. But I stumbled on something totally unexpected and was happy with it for a while. Nothing lasts forever.
Insert requisite reference to fear of fear here.
Uh...Slashdot just rewrote its interface and much of its code base a few months ago. Not exactly legacy.
You know, I think it's important to keep in mind that the "Star Trek" conception of evolution (everything gets smarter and given enough time, even slugs will "evolve" intelligence) isn't quite the case. It's all about adapting to the current environment, which could mean developing social behaviors, or it could just mean developing horns instead of ears (or something...).
Humans continue to get more clever, but it's not clear to me they're getting any smarter (though they definitely are getting better at putting "beliefs" before facts, and attempting to eliminate anyone who says differently). Ever think about what a real space alien would see/experience if they came to Earth for a visit? It's not very impressive...
You've obviously never read a Victorian novel.
I don't hate them. My first experience with a computer was actually with programmable calculators in college. Between college and the first couple of years afterward, I had used an IBM 360 via terminal, Apple II/II+/IIe's, early IBM clones (remember when they were clones?), and some form of Unix via dialup.
Take MS-Word for a thread. I had to use DOS 3.x for work and I thought Word for DOS 3.0 was the coolest thing ever. Way better than WordStar (remember Ctrl-K Ctrl-B?) and early WordPerfect (remember .codes?). Anyway, the shine started to tarnish when Word for Windows 1.0 was a complete dud, but WfW 2.0 was pretty cool and I wrote lots of macros in WordBasic when I was a tech writer. But the next upgrade, oddly to WfW 6.0, not only shuffled all the menus around so I couldn't find anything, but also switched to Visual Basic for Applications, which was not compatible with the old WordBasic. Because my whole company upgraded, a couple of years worth of macros suddenly became useless until I could figure out how to rewrite them. They did the same thing with Office 95 -- only slight changes to VBA, but in moving all the menus around, the macros no longer worked until I could edit them to find the menu items in their new locations. By that time I had started to use other products to get things done.
So, in a nutshell, they have some great stuff...that they mess with constantly. They seem to focus on the newbie, clueless user, and have often forgotten their best users when they make *improvements* to their products. Maybe it's the constant pressure to create something worth upgrading to that drives them, but instead of perfecting something, they end up turning it inside out and calling it a major improvement. Take the XP interface. I have to use Windows for work and I just do my best to master it and bring tools to it that will make my day as productive as possible. I tried to get used to the new XP interface, but after a week of not being able to find anything, I changed it to the Classic interface, played with TweakUI, installed Cygwin so I could do as much as possible from the shell window, and added a virtual desktop.
At this point in my increasing age, I think it's a waste of time to hate anything. I just change it until I like it.
Cheers!
marmot
For example, I've found that when I'm trapped at my desk and have to pull an all-nighter, it just doesn't keep me up all night. I think it's because of the lack of general physical movement. For all night sessions, I find working as late as I can (1am or 2am, usually), followed by 2-4 hours of sleep, gives me far more energy for the task than trying to get by with caffeine alone. And I'm far more productive than trying to push through without sleep at all. But your reasoning will get fuzzy, your memory will play tricks on you, and you can get kind of distracted after a while. The longest I stayed up with it was 38 hours straight. At the end of that time, I knew I was in a pretty bad place. I had a glass of wine, faded fast, and hopped into bed. I woke after 5 1/2 hours fairly refreshed. I was kind of out of it the next day, and I wouldn't want to make any important decisions or presentations in that state, but it wasn't bad.
Recently, we decided to remodel the kitchen. We were running behind schedule (who doesn't), I was burning the candle at both ends because of work, and I needed to get part of the plumbing done to get the cabinets in place for the Corian people who were coming in two days. I used a half dose around dinner time and kept going with good energy until 3am. At that point I could have taken more and kept going, but I slept and finished the next night. An important point to note is that Modafinil/Provigil can stave off the urge to sleep, but cannot eliminate the need to sleep.
When I was young and stupid, I would indulge in a variety of drugs for no particular reason. Meth (and I presume the somewhat more legal varieties of amphetamine) are good for focus and staying awake, but along with not eliminating the need for sleep, they also make subtle changes to your brain chemistry. My brother got hooked on meth, took it all the time, thought he was real cool. Then he started talking about "the mob" wanting to kill him, and how every dark sedan he'd see on the road was the FBI keeping an eye on him. When I, my other brother, and some of his friends tried to convince him to get off the drugs, he thought it was some kind of plot. He finally got sent home on a forced vacation and laid off the drugs for a while. It was about 2 weeks before he started questioning his delusions.
It may sound like a joke, but amphetamine psychosis due to chronic use really isn't. It wears off after a couple of weeks, but while you're in it, you're particular form of crazy (my brother became obviously and overtly paranoid) will be absolutely indistinguishable from the real thing (that is, organic and not going away).
Anyway (sorry if I got off-topic), Modafinil definitely does not have these side effects. And it won't leave you burned out or sleeping 24 hours, but prolonged lack of sleep definitely is not good for your brain and you will find yourself misplacing IQ points after a while.
--marmot
My point: Reeeaaalllly look at what will make you happy now and in a few years. You can't predict the future, but it's something to keep in mind while navigating your way there.
--marmot
Multi-line regular expressions are built into Perl. I hope you enjoyed bashing Perl, but you should know that you minimal knowledge of it exposes you for the poseur you are.
The dominant human social model is based around the individual "my stuff/your stuff" mechanism, which extends to the social model of "us/them", where *we* protect *our stuff* from *them*, and occasionally go take *their stuff* when we think we can get away with it. Laws and society extend from the consequences of that model. To wit, we had to find a way to protect *our stuff* from various *thems* without killing each other all the time.
So let's say someone creates/evolves/pretends to be an intelligence-amplified new human. Now what is this singularitized human supposed to be able to do? From the description, it sounds like you have a permanent internet connection in your head, and many better eyes. I dunno. Whatever. You're smarter, faster, all-knowing, blah, blah, blah. So the fuck what? I mean really. Are you going to do party tricks? "Hey everybody, want to see me look up stuff on Wikipedia while pouring drinks? I can also track down your lost loved ones for $14.95. Really! No, really! Anyone? Anyone?"
Probably you'll end up being used by your employer or political groups or the government for your advanced abilities to...whatever it is that's going to "replace humans as the dominating force in science and technology, rendering human-specific social models obsolete." But in the beginning, you'll be somebody's bitch.
But oh hey, this is the new evolutionary step in human development. You've got destiny on your side, baby! We're taking over the world! And most humans won't even notice, except for the few that want to be the first to welcome their new plugged-in overlords. All that military arsenal, all those guns, all those religious leaders frothing up the ignorant masses about how the most important thing in the world is stopping gays from marrying, all the street gangs defending their turf, all the greedy politicians and businesspersons in the world whose entire conception of science hinges on whether it will make them money or give them power, all the irrational emotions and instincts that really drive the world? None of that will matter, because you can look stuff up while driving, or whatever a converged human-technology hybrid is supposed to be able to do.
There is the little matter that when a new kind of human wants to replace an existing kind of human, it might be considered war at best, and genocide at worst, but hey, you're special. And most likely your last words will be "Hey, get away from that cable modem! I mean it! Don't make me get out of my Herman Miller Airon chair and come over there and yell at you. Hey! Come back here! Bring that back! Oh man. I was leasing that modem."
...I'm surprised it took this long. After throwing over their own OS for NT workstations and losing the high-end specialty graphics market, they veered into supercomputers and bought Cray, which didn't help either company, and they haven't done anything interesting in years. RIP SGI
Sadly, my first reaction to reading that was "Really??? I must get that."
Okay, now consider the time it would talk to learn or create a database (not a big deal really). Then consider the time to enter the info for each book into it. Sure, the author and title, but what about subject? Ooooh, you're halfway through and realize you need to recategorize 200 books because you too specific or not specific enough. Do you want to include a summary? That will take forever. Maybe you need some speech-to-text software. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 is really cool. Spend a couple of hours getting it used to your speech pattern, and you're off and running. Of course you'll still have to check for errors.
Okay, you've spent a month of your life organizing this beast. Now you can look up books and actually locate them. Are you going to remember to put in new books? If you ever get rid of any books, are you going to delete them.
And here's one to ponder: If you're so lazy and disorganized that you can't spend a Saturday afternoon rearranging books by general subject so you're only looking at 2 or 3 shelves to find a useful book, when you do find a book you're looking for and have had it out for a week, are you really going to look up where it came from and put it back? Of course not. You're going to throw it into the first free space you find, just like you did with all the other books in the first place.
But if you must, you must. I actually did this 20 years ago. I moved away for college and stuck around for a couple of years afterward before moving back home for a while. I had like 15 boxes of books which went straight into a storage locker. My mom had bought an Apple IIe with AppleWorks, and after playing around with that a little bit, I decided to make a database so I could locate the books in the boxes in minimal time. It worked great. Funny thing though. After logging each book, I had a pretty good memory of where each one was, and I didn't get much use out of the database.
When I got my own place and put all the books back on proper shelves, I didn't go so far as to sort by author, but I'm a clumper (organize by piles) and just loosely grouped like books together. Still works to this day, with roughly 2200 books. I've got the web shelf, the programming shelves, the language shelf (dictionary, thesaurus, etc), the foreign shelves (Spanish and French books, travel books), the fiction shelves, etc. Having organized them myself, I know just where to look. But if I just put books wherever without any organization, I'd be as lost as you.
My two cents.
Cheers!
Apertures = Openings. My guess is that the poster is not a native English speaker. I made the same kind of mistakes when I lived in France.
> I have no working experience with any other OS [besides Windows] except for
> those from Apple.
Poor grammar, perhaps, but I think you misread it.
Come to think of it, about 10 years ago I was asked to evaluate a search engine for an intranet. The engine was hyped as being able to distinguish relationships between data (the example they gave us was an indexing of Civil War data involving family members, from which you could ask it "Who was X's father?" and it could tell you). It would have cost $10,000, plus its own server, since it brought the Sun Sparc Server the intranet sat on to its knees with each query.
Up to that point, we had been using a local search we got from some folks we knew at Excite.com (remember them?) that consisted of a binary and a Perl script. When we compared results, the fancy engine often gave us only 2 or 3 results, finding the exact page we were looking for. In this case, fewer results were considered better. The little Excite local engine would give us a couple of dozen results, but the correct page was always in the first 5 links.
For the cost and hassle, the "better" engine wasn't worth it and we passed. But I really think you have to define what "better" means before doing a study like this. Google's "more results" could just be more noise, not more information.
For $7.50/month, RUSC lets you browse many, many series and listen or download as you like. He doesn't post whole collections and he throttles back the downloads, but there's so much to check out it doesn't matter. And if you want a whole series, head on over to Bobby's.
And remember -- the Shadow knows!