Hate to break it to you man, you just sound crusty. I work in a two-man IT shop for an office with roughly a hundred machines and about a hundred remote machines. I learned about Windows, MacOS, and UNIX in my spare time as well. But I'm not struggling for time. I don't know how big your installation is, but using UNIX is about working smart, not working hard. It's a better lever.
Take a look at OpenBSD. Once you understand the UNIX philosophy, using it is a breeze. Combine a bells-and-whistles shell like bash with a terminal multiplexer like screen and you have a powerful and elegant user environment. And your investment in time will pay you back double.
We've replaced half of our servers at this point-- very little new hardware required. The new machines stay up longer, they require less maintenance, and they work the way you expect them to. They aren't susceptable to viruses. When they finish running nightly jobs, they email me reports, even if the programs aren't designed to do so because I have the control. Need new functionality with your app? Usually piping the output to some other built-in utility gets the job done. None of our users know the difference; they still use Outlook to check email, use file and print servers. What they don't know is that most of these services aren't running on a MS platform anymore. But MY job is a lot easier. And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
Obviously, I don't know what you spend your time doing, and if you say you don't have the time, then maybe you really don't. But I've heard this same argument before, from admins at my company who work in different offices, and you just sound just like them. They just can't be bothered. Too bad. I'm not working nearly as hard. Remember the Perl motto: "The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris."
A google-style ad system (like an on-air "mention") combined with a no-ads subscription service would be an acceptable compromise to me. I think it is important that Wikimedia isn't getting money from one large source, although if it did, a system like the CPB (obligatory Wikipedia link) would work reasonably well.
Anyhow, I gave. It wasn't much, but it was bigger than just $0.02 from the peanut gallery.
Usually engineers use compressors and limiters at the same time. I have a Dolby unit that has knobs for both and chains the processing together for the same signal.
Compressors/limiters are useful anytime you have either a signal that should be output at a constant volume (radio, for instance, because your source material of varying amplitude and also because people tend not to be able to discern wide swings in volume while in cars, etc), or whenever you need to correct for a poor signal (untrained singers, for instance). When people start out in radio, they tend to need compression to counter their timidity over hearing their own voices, but the quality of their speaking gets better over time and it usually becomes less important.
Compression can dramatically increase the quality of live performances, and I've used it whether or not the vocalists are classically trained. Some indie folks like to avoid compression because it introduces artefacts into a recording that often "color" it in a noticably processed way. But then again, it depends on the style of music-- indie rock is sometimes uncompressed to allow more subtlety, but electronic music (so-called "techno") is almost always heavily compressed; artifical sounds are OK. My impression, having worked in radio and studio production, is that compression is used more often than not. Bands often ask engineers not to use compression, but in my experience, studio engineers will tell a singer one thing and do another, and the recordings are better for it.
I find the arguments against compression to be a little facetious, at least among the analog tape lovers; tape colors the signal anyhow. Heck, recording is always a tradeoff: color the signal with tape or lose information going digital. Besides, in my experience, the real things to worry about in the studio aren't the compression-related artefacts-- it's how to best use mics with certain pickup patterns and how to eliminate noise in the signal chain.
Seriously. This is both a feat of bureaucracy and a kind of existential comedy. I've always dreaded that bureaucrats would pervert information technology in some astounding way...
And Seagate has a 5-year warranty on its Barracuda drives. Samsung has 3 year warranties on some of its drives as well. As far as I am aware, most other manufacturers have 1 year warranties. I think this speaks volumes about these drives, particularly WD drives, every one of which I've ever owned has failed before the warranty was up.
At work, we only buy Seagate SCSI and ATA drives. We've returned RAID arrays to Dell because they failed to provide us with the proper drives (they just love to slip WDs in there). This is another bit of anecdotal evidence, but I've never seen a Seagate fail here. The few that have failed have been some Fujitsus and the few WDs that come in laptops. We're talking around 300 machines here.
I don't have much experience with Maxtors except the one in my firewall that is still going strong after 7 years.
Sure, if you want to compare the top speed of two cars in first gear, that's a good way of doing it, otherwise your counterexample is bad.
Allowing a power user to tweak settings is like letting someone modify the engines of your test cars. You compare the two, but what's the value if neither of those test cases correspond to real-life examples? The value of testing two untweaked UIs is in simulating the same environment that a new user is going to get "out of the box".
The metric for testing a graphical UI is "usability". If changing settings is something that users want to do, they should change them themselves, and how easy this to do is should be a part of the evaluation of the product. "Efficiency" is different for everybody, and it has little to do with a UI design that is universally good. I'm a power user, and I'm pretty damn good at getting things done in the shell. In fact, I can't stand desktop icons, and I think they're generally a barrier to efficiency. Not only that, I prefer bash or ksh over sh, csh, etc. Should we remove desktop icons and mandate bash for the test cases because I think doing so is more "efficient"? Oh, that's right, this is a desktop usability study, not an efficiency study!
I don't know man. How can a guy (Doug Thompon) whose website tagline reads "Because nobody's life, liberty or property are safe while Congress is in session or the White House is occupied" have THREE informants at a private presidential meeting? That just defies belief.
I think the Bush administration has a complete disregard for civil liberties, and there's a lot of widely-reported information to back that up. But when you spread around drek like this... that just makes Bush's opponents look like a bunch of whackos. I can't even find another version of this story that isn't written by the same guy!
It would be one thing if users just lied, but occasionally, you get someone really screwy. There's this woman where I work... let's call her 'Julie'. Julie is in the habit of totally fucking her Mac up royally. But when I ask her some simple questions, you know, "What were you doing when the screen went blank?", "Did you spill anything on the computer before it started smoking?", etc, all I get are denials. "I swear, it was smoking when I came in," or "I never just press the power button to turn the computer off." I have several witnesses who swear that she does just this very thing, every day. She'll go to such lengths (elaborate lies) to prove that what she says is true, that I can only conclude one thing: she actually believes what she's saying. Julie is crazy.
Anyhow, she came to me one day saying that her mouse was "jumping around like crazy". "Like crazy?" I thought. "I know someone like that..." So after, er, brushing her off a few times (I mean, what are the chances this is a real problem?), I decided to walk down to her office to see what she meant. Indeed, every now and then, the mouse cursor would leap wildly across the screen for no reason. After plugging and unplugging, and even testing all the peripherals on a different machine, I discovered two constants in the equation: wireless mouse and big ass monitor. A quick search on Google revealed that interference between wireless mice and other things, like monitors, is pretty common.
To wrap it up, I lied and claimed that I couldn't reproduce the problem. It was a real BOFH moment, I know, but it barely makes up for all the shit Julie's pulled over the years.
I suspect that the battle over Wikipedia is really a debate over the future of cognitive authority in general. All of the publishing industry has a vested interest in making sure that they stay authoritative. This is combined with the fact that many publishers (disclaimer: I work for a publisher) gear the material around what's marketable. This practice is so entrenched in publishing now, I don't think publishers even see what's wrong with it. I think in a battle between truth and money, money wins.
Wikipedia may have some unique challenges, but at least they are free from this problem.
Care to prove that it is? Freedom to buy stuff, maybe. I'm not so sure about the others. Where did the DMCA come from again? Oh yeah... it's the record cartels freaking out about what happens in the free market when you engage in price fixing.
"Like every other innovator of modern times, [Darwin] had to combat the authority of Aristotle. Aristotle, it should be said, has been one of the great misfortunes of the human race."
Awesome. Thanks for the info on PCM VHS stuff. I'll forward it on. This guy says that money is no object. Apparently I'm not getting paid enough around here!
I agree, property is all about physical objects. But we're not talking about property, we're talking about copyright. Are you saying that a monopoly on distribution can only apply to physical objects? Even if that's a tenet of anarchocapitalism (which I'm admittedly not familiar with), it seems to be wrong: we currently allow a monopoly on distribution of copyrighted works in a completely non-physical domain. iTMS is a good example of this.
I don't understand what you mean when you say that a "monopoly encourages manipulation of the power that forces that monopoly". Let me try to paraphrase-- you're saying that a monopoly is equivalent to economic/political power, and that those who have accumulated that power will try to manipulate the law to make it more favorable to those who have already accumulated power. Is this correct? If so, I think this is true, but not limited to monopolies. I believe that the power-hungry will always try to change the law to make it more favorable to themselves. Whether this makes monopolies bad unto themselves... I haven't formed an opinion yet...
A.xxx domain will only make filtering easier. This should please everyone. Do religious conservatives actually think that they can prevent pornography from happening on the Internet? If so, they need to wake up!
I think that we should go a step further and require that pornographic websites use.xxx only. This works for everybody. If you're looking for porn, it's easy to find. If you object to porn, it's easy to block.
I once expressed this opinion on/. before, and an operator of a pornsite said that this would kill his industry. Sorry, man, that's just absurd. I suspect that there's more regulation on porn now than there was 50 years ago, and we're definitely in the midst of booming economy for porn.
Anti-porn advocates need to realize that porn is not going away. Porn purveyors need to realize, likewise, that many people find porn to be extremely objectionable. We need to find a happy medium. I think.xxx is a step in the right direction.
We also see that the term "intellectual property" has skewed the original intent of copyright. Works are not analogous to property, but when you call them property it becomes easy to mistakenly think that the same crimes apply too, i.e., theft and vandalism. Copyright crime is copyright infringement.
Copyright is a privilege that is extended to the creator of a work as an incentive to release those works into the public. The holder of the copyright is granted an exclusive monopoly on distribution for a time. This is a fair incentive, IMHO, so long as the work eventually reverts to the public domain. The current term of copyright is absurd, but unfortunately it is within the law (even if it doesn't adhere to the spirit of the law).
I'm not so sure that anarchocapitalism applies here, since we're not talking about a physical object. But I agree on your main point-- copyright doesn't need to be the main vehicle for profit. Obviously, this is something that people in IT a realizing about now; look at all the people out there making money on permissive copyrights! Amazing.
As a side note, someone came to me yesterday asking how to move raw PCM data recorded on VHS tape (44.03 kHz) to a computer. Apparently, he has amassed a large collection ("hundreds") of Grateful Dead bootlegs in digital format. He was wondering if he could transfer them digitally to his hard disk-- I really had no idea. Anyone ever heard of this before? He said that bootleggers used to show up with all kinds of crazy recording equipment.
After spending multiple hours mucking with different (poorly documented) configuration formats, multiple different daemons, mucking with the DB - it's really clear that Linux just isn't there. Exchange is easier to install, easier to configure, and easier to manage.
This is completely true. After evaluating all of our groupware options where I work, the only criteria that we found Outlook/Exchange didn't support is "don't use Outlook/Exchange". I'd love better integration with Apple Mail for our Mac users, but Outlook 2k1 and Entourage work just fine, and Apple Mail works well enough for the users who can do without calendar functions.
Anyway, email is the easy part. Shared calendars, public folders, directory services integration, plus support for multiple protocols work very well in Exchange! When Thunderbird/Sunbird supports delegates and tie-in with authentication services like AD or Kerberos, then we'll think about switching.
Exchange is the only reason we even have an AD domain here! Everything else runs on OpenBSD and Xserves. You can hate Microsoft all you want, but Exchange simply gets the job done. An OSS alternative will need to do all of the above and integrate with Exchange if they want us to switch over.
Why, so you can enjoy the look of sheer panic on his face? Dude, have you ever booted into Knoppix? It's like a hacker's wet dream. If you want a user with a computer phobia (that's what it sounds like to me) to switch to linux, you've gotta give them something somewhat familiar. The Ubuntu LiveCD might be a better place to start.
I say leave him with Windows, if that's what he's most comfortable in. Personally, I would do my best to lock down his machine other ways-- forget about automatic updates; unless they're being performed by someone who knows what's going on, they WILL cause problems.
GP: Firefox's interface is too hard to navigate?? IMHO, FF has the most intuitive interface I've seen since System 7.
They may feed starving people, but when those people are being massacred, they look the other way. In my opinion, the UN has proved not only to be incompetent, it's proved to be dangerous. It seems to bring out the worst in its member countries.
I agree with everything you say, but I think we need to push a little harder to get people to use public transportation. Take, for example, my commute into Boston. The public transit system here is [mostly] excellent. I live about 7 miles from the city center. Since parking is rather expensive, and I'd rather not have to deal with the stress of driving anyway, I just take the bus. The bus travels down the carpool lane on one of our major highways.
In order to travel down this lane, you only need to meet one requirement: more than one passenger. And yet, every day, as I'm flying down the carpool lane, I see frustrated people (OK, some aren't frustrated, they're reading the paper) in the other lanes, at a total standstill.
A friend of mine, who lives a few miles from me and who drives to work in Boston (only a few blocks from where I work), refuses to ride public transportation because she thinks it is "dangerous" and "inconvenient". She's been in several fender benders over the past year, and routinely waits an hour or more to get in and out of the city. My commute usually takes 20-25 minutes. Her commute would be essentially the same as mine were she to use public transportation.
It seems to me that the economic (and other) incentives are already there for commuters to use public transportation. What is stopping people? Is my friend representative?
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Take a look at OpenBSD. Once you understand the UNIX philosophy, using it is a breeze. Combine a bells-and-whistles shell like bash with a terminal multiplexer like screen and you have a powerful and elegant user environment. And your investment in time will pay you back double.
We've replaced half of our servers at this point-- very little new hardware required. The new machines stay up longer, they require less maintenance, and they work the way you expect them to. They aren't susceptable to viruses. When they finish running nightly jobs, they email me reports, even if the programs aren't designed to do so because I have the control. Need new functionality with your app? Usually piping the output to some other built-in utility gets the job done. None of our users know the difference; they still use Outlook to check email, use file and print servers. What they don't know is that most of these services aren't running on a MS platform anymore. But MY job is a lot easier. And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
Obviously, I don't know what you spend your time doing, and if you say you don't have the time, then maybe you really don't. But I've heard this same argument before, from admins at my company who work in different offices, and you just sound just like them. They just can't be bothered. Too bad. I'm not working nearly as hard. Remember the Perl motto: "The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris."
Anyhow, I gave. It wasn't much, but it was bigger than just $0.02 from the peanut gallery.
Compressors/limiters are useful anytime you have either a signal that should be output at a constant volume (radio, for instance, because your source material of varying amplitude and also because people tend not to be able to discern wide swings in volume while in cars, etc), or whenever you need to correct for a poor signal (untrained singers, for instance). When people start out in radio, they tend to need compression to counter their timidity over hearing their own voices, but the quality of their speaking gets better over time and it usually becomes less important.
Compression can dramatically increase the quality of live performances, and I've used it whether or not the vocalists are classically trained. Some indie folks like to avoid compression because it introduces artefacts into a recording that often "color" it in a noticably processed way. But then again, it depends on the style of music-- indie rock is sometimes uncompressed to allow more subtlety, but electronic music (so-called "techno") is almost always heavily compressed; artifical sounds are OK. My impression, having worked in radio and studio production, is that compression is used more often than not. Bands often ask engineers not to use compression, but in my experience, studio engineers will tell a singer one thing and do another, and the recordings are better for it.
I find the arguments against compression to be a little facetious, at least among the analog tape lovers; tape colors the signal anyhow. Heck, recording is always a tradeoff: color the signal with tape or lose information going digital. Besides, in my experience, the real things to worry about in the studio aren't the compression-related artefacts-- it's how to best use mics with certain pickup patterns and how to eliminate noise in the signal chain.
Seriously. This is both a feat of bureaucracy and a kind of existential comedy. I've always dreaded that bureaucrats would pervert information technology in some astounding way...
http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=w ashfile-english&y=2004&m=April&x=20040420175008dms lahrellek3.475589e-02&t=xarchives/xarchitem.html
At work, we only buy Seagate SCSI and ATA drives. We've returned RAID arrays to Dell because they failed to provide us with the proper drives (they just love to slip WDs in there). This is another bit of anecdotal evidence, but I've never seen a Seagate fail here. The few that have failed have been some Fujitsus and the few WDs that come in laptops. We're talking around 300 machines here.
I don't have much experience with Maxtors except the one in my firewall that is still going strong after 7 years.
Allowing a power user to tweak settings is like letting someone modify the engines of your test cars. You compare the two, but what's the value if neither of those test cases correspond to real-life examples? The value of testing two untweaked UIs is in simulating the same environment that a new user is going to get "out of the box".
The metric for testing a graphical UI is "usability". If changing settings is something that users want to do, they should change them themselves, and how easy this to do is should be a part of the evaluation of the product. "Efficiency" is different for everybody, and it has little to do with a UI design that is universally good. I'm a power user, and I'm pretty damn good at getting things done in the shell. In fact, I can't stand desktop icons, and I think they're generally a barrier to efficiency. Not only that, I prefer bash or ksh over sh, csh, etc. Should we remove desktop icons and mandate bash for the test cases because I think doing so is more "efficient"? Oh, that's right, this is a desktop usability study, not an efficiency study!
Doesn't that... oh... defeat the purpose of a usability study?
I think the Bush administration has a complete disregard for civil liberties, and there's a lot of widely-reported information to back that up. But when you spread around drek like this... that just makes Bush's opponents look like a bunch of whackos. I can't even find another version of this story that isn't written by the same guy!
It would be one thing if users just lied, but occasionally, you get someone really screwy. There's this woman where I work... let's call her 'Julie'. Julie is in the habit of totally fucking her Mac up royally. But when I ask her some simple questions, you know, "What were you doing when the screen went blank?", "Did you spill anything on the computer before it started smoking?", etc, all I get are denials. "I swear, it was smoking when I came in," or "I never just press the power button to turn the computer off." I have several witnesses who swear that she does just this very thing, every day. She'll go to such lengths (elaborate lies) to prove that what she says is true, that I can only conclude one thing: she actually believes what she's saying. Julie is crazy.
Anyhow, she came to me one day saying that her mouse was "jumping around like crazy". "Like crazy?" I thought. "I know someone like that..." So after, er, brushing her off a few times (I mean, what are the chances this is a real problem?), I decided to walk down to her office to see what she meant. Indeed, every now and then, the mouse cursor would leap wildly across the screen for no reason. After plugging and unplugging, and even testing all the peripherals on a different machine, I discovered two constants in the equation: wireless mouse and big ass monitor. A quick search on Google revealed that interference between wireless mice and other things, like monitors, is pretty common.
To wrap it up, I lied and claimed that I couldn't reproduce the problem. It was a real BOFH moment, I know, but it barely makes up for all the shit Julie's pulled over the years.
I suspect that the battle over Wikipedia is really a debate over the future of cognitive authority in general. All of the publishing industry has a vested interest in making sure that they stay authoritative. This is combined with the fact that many publishers (disclaimer: I work for a publisher) gear the material around what's marketable. This practice is so entrenched in publishing now, I don't think publishers even see what's wrong with it. I think in a battle between truth and money, money wins.
Wikipedia may have some unique challenges, but at least they are free from this problem.
Are you kidding? Maybe you have a different meaning for 'support' than I do.
Care to prove that it is? Freedom to buy stuff, maybe. I'm not so sure about the others. Where did the DMCA come from again? Oh yeah... it's the record cartels freaking out about what happens in the free market when you engage in price fixing.
If Microsoft is trying to influence legislation in India, thus making the market more favorable to itself, how is that a "free market"?
And like the original article, it points out some real problems.
"Like every other innovator of modern times, [Darwin] had to combat the authority of Aristotle. Aristotle, it should be said, has been one of the great misfortunes of the human race."
-- Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook
You can start by seeing how often people use gets(), strcpy(), strcat(), etc... Look for all the fun little common mistakes that people make.
I agree, property is all about physical objects. But we're not talking about property, we're talking about copyright. Are you saying that a monopoly on distribution can only apply to physical objects? Even if that's a tenet of anarchocapitalism (which I'm admittedly not familiar with), it seems to be wrong: we currently allow a monopoly on distribution of copyrighted works in a completely non-physical domain. iTMS is a good example of this.
I don't understand what you mean when you say that a "monopoly encourages manipulation of the power that forces that monopoly". Let me try to paraphrase-- you're saying that a monopoly is equivalent to economic/political power, and that those who have accumulated that power will try to manipulate the law to make it more favorable to those who have already accumulated power. Is this correct? If so, I think this is true, but not limited to monopolies. I believe that the power-hungry will always try to change the law to make it more favorable to themselves. Whether this makes monopolies bad unto themselves... I haven't formed an opinion yet...
I think that we should go a step further and require that pornographic websites use .xxx only. This works for everybody. If you're looking for porn, it's easy to find. If you object to porn, it's easy to block.
I once expressed this opinion on /. before, and an operator of a pornsite said that this would kill his industry. Sorry, man, that's just absurd. I suspect that there's more regulation on porn now than there was 50 years ago, and we're definitely in the midst of booming economy for porn.
Anti-porn advocates need to realize that porn is not going away. Porn purveyors need to realize, likewise, that many people find porn to be extremely objectionable. We need to find a happy medium. I think .xxx is a step in the right direction.
Copyright is a privilege that is extended to the creator of a work as an incentive to release those works into the public. The holder of the copyright is granted an exclusive monopoly on distribution for a time. This is a fair incentive, IMHO, so long as the work eventually reverts to the public domain. The current term of copyright is absurd, but unfortunately it is within the law (even if it doesn't adhere to the spirit of the law).
I'm not so sure that anarchocapitalism applies here, since we're not talking about a physical object. But I agree on your main point-- copyright doesn't need to be the main vehicle for profit. Obviously, this is something that people in IT a realizing about now; look at all the people out there making money on permissive copyrights! Amazing.
As a side note, someone came to me yesterday asking how to move raw PCM data recorded on VHS tape (44.03 kHz) to a computer. Apparently, he has amassed a large collection ("hundreds") of Grateful Dead bootlegs in digital format. He was wondering if he could transfer them digitally to his hard disk-- I really had no idea. Anyone ever heard of this before? He said that bootleggers used to show up with all kinds of crazy recording equipment.
This is completely true. After evaluating all of our groupware options where I work, the only criteria that we found Outlook/Exchange didn't support is "don't use Outlook/Exchange". I'd love better integration with Apple Mail for our Mac users, but Outlook 2k1 and Entourage work just fine, and Apple Mail works well enough for the users who can do without calendar functions.
Anyway, email is the easy part. Shared calendars, public folders, directory services integration, plus support for multiple protocols work very well in Exchange! When Thunderbird/Sunbird supports delegates and tie-in with authentication services like AD or Kerberos, then we'll think about switching.
Exchange is the only reason we even have an AD domain here! Everything else runs on OpenBSD and Xserves. You can hate Microsoft all you want, but Exchange simply gets the job done. An OSS alternative will need to do all of the above and integrate with Exchange if they want us to switch over.
I'm waiting for gopher to come back in style, man.
I say leave him with Windows, if that's what he's most comfortable in. Personally, I would do my best to lock down his machine other ways-- forget about automatic updates; unless they're being performed by someone who knows what's going on, they WILL cause problems.
GP: Firefox's interface is too hard to navigate?? IMHO, FF has the most intuitive interface I've seen since System 7.
They may feed starving people, but when those people are being massacred, they look the other way. In my opinion, the UN has proved not only to be incompetent, it's proved to be dangerous. It seems to bring out the worst in its member countries.
In order to travel down this lane, you only need to meet one requirement: more than one passenger. And yet, every day, as I'm flying down the carpool lane, I see frustrated people (OK, some aren't frustrated, they're reading the paper) in the other lanes, at a total standstill.
A friend of mine, who lives a few miles from me and who drives to work in Boston (only a few blocks from where I work), refuses to ride public transportation because she thinks it is "dangerous" and "inconvenient". She's been in several fender benders over the past year, and routinely waits an hour or more to get in and out of the city. My commute usually takes 20-25 minutes. Her commute would be essentially the same as mine were she to use public transportation.
It seems to me that the economic (and other) incentives are already there for commuters to use public transportation. What is stopping people? Is my friend representative?