If the marketroids decided tomorrow to call it something else, it would just happen. And marektroids are notorious for NOT understanding technology. An engineer would call it an "802.11a/b/g comm device". A geek would call it a "Wireless Net Phone" or some other crap. A suit would call it "My latest portable" while being the armchair tech. A clued in guy from the 50s (who I would probably relate to the best) would call it a "Portable Microwave Communicator". But a marektroid would come up with something very likely technically inaccurate with some connection to an already familiar device that also sounds "fun". So the word "phone" would have to stay or possibly be replaced by the every slightly more popular noun "Voip". "Cell" could be sacrificed". You'd have to have something about how fun or image enhancing it is, so words like "My", "Personal", "Power", "Real", "Enhanced" would be used. Or you could also signify fun and image enhancement with trendy names that start with 'i' or 'e' as of 2006. 'q' seems to be a classic as well. Or the ever popular made up name that sounds good but means nothing. Some examples"
Voia InterVoia Luxacomm HyperVoice qVantage Voip Services iqPhone My Power Voip QualVantage Power VoIP DilPhonics Voyaphone
Of course none of them have the power and capabilities of the greatest device in the known universe. The Interocitor. Take that you trendhumping monkeys.
I think the Book I read is Sleep Thieves by Stanley Coren. I read it back in the 90s. I was thinking closer to the early 90s than 1996, but 1996 actually seems about right. Mainly because I remember not having started to work in IT yet when I read the book and 1997 is when I started.
You underestimate the evilness of most businesses when it comes to having a competitive edge. If they stand to gain millions in exchange for amping up their workers on an expensive medication, they will do it. That's all I'm saying. We've seen it time and time again in other areas when business wants to win. They'll stop at nothing. Even killing innocent people. So what's the big deal about spending a fraction of huge possible wealth on the unethical use abuse of prescription meds?
First... what's RLS? Second, if you've got a disease that would cause you to fall asleep while driving, then by all means it's life threatening even if you only kill yourself. Where I think it's abuse is when someone's employer says, "here's nine days worth of work, I want it done in 36 hours. Straight hours. In other words you don't sleep until your done. You'll be supplied with the appropriate medication to cope". That's EXACTLY where we're headed based on this article.
Correction... They convert beer to water, salt and urea. Per Wikipedia:
Healthy urine is a clear aqueous solution, varying in colour from dark yellow to colourless depending on the dilution. The main constituents of urine are water, salts and urea. Urochrome is the pigment that gives urine its color. Urea is one of the three nitrogenous waste products. The other two are creatinine and uric acid. Urine also contains various inorganic ions, including sodium and chloride. Lighter urine color usually indicates higher water consumption.
Good points again. I'm definitely pro-contraception, and well... wisdom teeth are a pretty basic although traumatic procedure. (I bled for days after mine and the numbness and tingling in my tongue didn't go away for about five years) My original statement probably needs a little ammendment. My main point being that I don't buy into using drugs to work around the inconveniences of being alive. I even avoid medication when people try to put me on it. (It shows doesn't it?);P
Keep you v14rga ads off of Slashdot pleeze. Actually, you make a valid point. Fertility is in a different arena though. Not to mention that with a few exceptions, you can do a lot more regarding fertility with basic but difficult lifestyle changes. The drugs are simply the easy way out. I'm not saying that they're bad, but I don't put them in the same category as what's being discussed here.
...I predict that in the next ten years we'll have a new disorder: "Soft Drug Abuse". This will be the illegitimate use of prescription drugs that have mild effects on the user and don't necessarily interfere with their day-to-day lives, but are still addiction problems.
If it's artificially interfering with a normal function of life and it's not involved in preventing a life threatening disease, it's just a bad idea. Myself, I only need four to six hours a night and I can function well. I actually natrually wake up after six hours even without an alarm clock. I've always been that way. If I really need to puch myself I can get by with two hours sleep. This is perfectly natural. Back in the 90s I read a book on sleep and it stated that most humans need the typical eight hours of sleep. It also revealed that in a few sleep studies where the subjects are kept from knowing the real time or seeing any cues (daylight), that they tended to sleep more on the order of 10 hours a night with their sleep cycle drifting an hour later each day (ie. they would go to sleep an hour later each day without realizing it). But, they did concede that every human is different and there indeed people who don't need much sleep and others who actualy need a lot more sleep than is culturally possible (13-15 hours a day) to be at their best. Sadly, humans are WAY too flexible in their traits which means that there is no "one size fits all" approach. In the case of this drug however, I'd say that it will be revealed eventually just how detrimental it's effects are while simultaneously being denied by the pharmaceutical companies that produce it.
Heh... to each their own. I actually prefer XP's native mode to classic mode as it's much more task oriented and totally obscures the file system. It's the only way that Windows makes sense (and I HATE Windows). Classic mode always seemed kind of backwards to me since it was always pretending to be something it wasn't: and OO desktop. Of course I'm an old Mac user from the Pre-OS X days and I liked knowing that the file I was clicking on was REALLY the file I was using. No shortcuts. No symlinks. Just pure order at it's best. And with self contained binaries with no DLLs or libs all over creation, My application installation was just dragging and dropping an icon. If I moved the application file, it still worked because outside of preference files, it was completely self contained. And preferences were always in one place too. Windows gets all of that wrong. *nix is only a little better in some ways, but improving all the time. By the way, I always meant to ask you... why GigsVT? Just curious about the why behind the UID.
...Hedy Lamar? She looks infintely hotter than the real geek girls on that paltry list and she was responsible for co-inventing Frequency-hopped spread spectrum technology used in WiFi today...
Hey, the girl might be fun for 15 minutes at a time about once a month as long as you have your weiner wrapped in five condoms held on with duct tape, but a geek or a friend to geeks? No way.
...I think OO.o could benefit from a better UI design rather than aping MS Office. The MS Office and OO.o UIs are too cluttered. I'd suggest something more collapsable and more sparingly reliant on just icons on the less used features. The other suggestion I'd make is to make the OO.o interface more "modal" in a way. As much as I hate 'vi' and it's modality, I think modes could be done right for Office apps. Again, you have all of the most common functionality available in the default mode with little or no space devoted to less popular features. Obviously this would require a study to rank the uasge of features. But there just aren't that many people who use "mail merge" on a daily basis unless they're in the business world. Maybe even having default "Home User" vs. "Business User" modes for OO.o would help. Just a few suggestions anyway. (Even though this is the wrong place for that)
Bush administration officials announced today that for national security, homeland security will be installing cameras in every American's underpants starting on 1 January 2007. The cameras are to protect America from the evils of sin and sex and to provide the senators and congressmen with easy access to protect the jewel of American society: the teen boy. This plan is part of a larger project that was spearheaded by the departed Donald Rumsfeld last year who departed amid criticisms that he encourage homosexual acts in Abu Grahib as a method of stress relief for the soldiers. His original "Operation Panty-cam" plan was discouraged due to concerns about the name and what it implied.
I never thought I'd even be remotely close to agreeing with that lying sack of shit. Don't get me wrong peoples. I love the machine. I am plugged into them about 80% of the day in one fashion or another. But this is ONLY when I'm doing something that relates:
1. Watching TV (Seeing as I do it with a Linux based PVR, I'm plugged into a computer to watch TV any time that I have time to do so) I do so on a very nice widescreen 37" LCD monitor, so it's not the shitty PC experience. It rivals standard television. 2. Posting on Slashdot 3. Doing serious research on the web 4. Doing silly research on the web 5. Watching YouTube 6. Reading electronic books 7. Creating original music 8. Editing original video (I produce TV ad parodies for fun) 9. Talking on the phone with my Bluetooth set 10. Compiling software in Linux for whatever my current pet project is 11. Downloading music from eMusic.com or ripping CDs I ordered from Amazon 12. Transferring music to my Rio Karma 13. Helping friends and family with various computer issues 14. Designing custom circuitry and assembling it for custom modifications and devices 15. Editing photos that I've taken with my digital camera 16. Taking photos in various settings with my digital camera (outdoor, nature, family, vacation, etc...) 17. Watching DVDs (I've never once bought a dedicated DVD player. I've always used computers) 18. Playing the occasional game or listening to a song on the computer itself
That's just a smidgin of what I do with electronic technology. You'll notice that office functions are missing. This is because I have no need for an Office suite in my day-to-day life. Even at work I never write things, waste time graphing worthless information, or do stupid presentations (which typically indicates the presenter has nothing to say). But, I spend every free minute I've got (when I'm not working and when everyone else I know is not asleep) spending time with the people who matter: wife, daughter, extended family and close friends. So I'd say Mr. O'Reilly has it right as long as we're talking people who are anti-social. Some "geeks" are like that. But not all. Of course, I would say I'm not a geek since I tend to dislike a lot of what geeks are actively into...
The way I see it is this. The crowd of idiotic morons who say, "One hundred years? Hah! I won't be around so it may as well not be true", aren't going to change their fucked up way of thinking unless they get a bullet through the skull (ie. they stop thinking which they probably did a long time ago anyway). The other group of people who say, "Well it MAY be happening, but we can't know for sure until all the data is in (sometime after I'm long dead and gone) and besides, if we put all these regulations on business, it's just going to hurt you with higher prices (as if companies have the right to make the customer pay for the cost of being in business), well they aren't going to change their minds either unless a post-natal abortion is implemented. The people who say, "OMG OMG teh sky is falling!!!", they aren't a lot of help either because they make the more reasonable folks who believe in climate change look bad (you folks should really calm down so we can approach things rationally). Finally. It's already too late to do a hell of a lot to fix things. The best you can hope for is that *IF* people wake up, we can save a portion of what the planet is like today. Then maybe in a few centuries the damage will reverse as natural systems repair things. But, at the rate we're going I'm happy enough to know that a massive die off is coming soon and I'll be the first in line to take a few idiots down. That is all.
Oh I agree with you as that's been my experience as well. But where I haven't changed is my desire to still reach out to the janitors who could become Macromedia producers. The problem right now is that we don't address their needs or potential and therefore create a market that supports just getting by rather than doing the best possible. This is one of the reasons MS is so successful. They count on people wanting to only do enough to get by and not strive for perfection instead. I can't work like that. I MUST strive for perfection unattainable though it may be, because along the journey I find things that are above the realm of average. I believe that we should encourage everyone and anyone to strive for that.
...between "Doing it right" vs. "Doing just enough". I think Microsoft's "mindshare" in the software world is definitely doing well and they have little to worry about where the majority of the computing public is concerned. The typical person just wants to use a computer and be told that they are good at it. In reality, they might be good at applications, but they don't have an inkling how to use a computer. That works well for Microsoft as it means that they don't need to be "the best" in terms of well... anything. They just have to be good enough to appeal to the average user. From a technical perspective, even the average user is aware of how low grade Microsoft products are. But, those same low grade tools that are poorly designed and applied allow said user to "do stuff" that they couldn't do on other, better designed platforms (Linux and the BSDs for example).
The fact is that most people drive shitty cars day in and day out. Econoboxes abound. Even if the person is knowledgable enough to know that they could have a better driving experience in another car, many of them can't afford the cars financially. The same with the software world. The "expense" of moving to a better designed, more well thought out platform like *nix, is simply too high for most users. Sure, distros like Ubuntu have lowered the bar considerably so that the experience is a lot closer to Mac OS X than Windows, but you've still got to deal with the fact that data migration is no small task for these sorts of users. They don't honestly understand that a file icon is really a graphical representation of a file. They don't know that a file at the filesystem level is really a notation in a file system lookup table or DB that points to locations on the hard drive that have been marked by the filesystem in some fashion. They don't know that their precious photos of their dog Woofie are bits represented by magnetic impulses on what is essentially a set of spinning phonograph records. And of course the mantra, "they don't care nor should they" usually arises at this point. That's where the "doing it right" part comes in.
If things were done right in our society regarding computer technology, EVERYONE would be given basic education on the most important tools of our society so that they could deal with whatever life throws them. And that education would NOT have a heavy focus on history, but on on the actual theory behind how the technology works. For the time being we'll just limit the scope to computers and software. The basic concepts of files and directories and how they are stored on disk should be common knowledge. Boring, yes. But essential to understanding what's happening on your computer. Once the basics of a typical filesystem are understood, it would then be essential to explain how manipulation of those files occurs (copying, moving, deleting, etc...). The same applies to memory, CPU (not the box, the chip) and basic I/O. Again, all very boring stuff and lots of people are likely to tune out. But not as many as you would think... EVERYONE has tuned out in school before, but many of you have experienced the situation later in life where something that you didn't care about in school was still rattling around in that empty head and wound up being relevant. The same would happen here only more often considering how pervasive computers are today.
Finally, once you get up to the GUI level of instruction, you begin to stress the importance of abstraction since that's all the GUI really is. There are some people who are going to have a hard time with this apparently since the last time I studied this I read that only 30% of the test base of college students could understand up to seven levels of abstaction. (I don't have a link and don't remember where I read those numbers, if anyone else remembers the study as it was featured here on Slashdot, please post the link) The reason I suggest this is that in today's educational environment the majority of students who COULD understand abstraction, and
Slashdot Mirror
If the marketroids decided tomorrow to call it something else, it would just happen. And marektroids are notorious for NOT understanding technology. An engineer would call it an "802.11a/b/g comm device". A geek would call it a "Wireless Net Phone" or some other crap. A suit would call it "My latest portable" while being the armchair tech. A clued in guy from the 50s (who I would probably relate to the best) would call it a "Portable Microwave Communicator". But a marektroid would come up with something very likely technically inaccurate with some connection to an already familiar device that also sounds "fun". So the word "phone" would have to stay or possibly be replaced by the every slightly more popular noun "Voip". "Cell" could be sacrificed". You'd have to have something about how fun or image enhancing it is, so words like "My", "Personal", "Power", "Real", "Enhanced" would be used. Or you could also signify fun and image enhancement with trendy names that start with 'i' or 'e' as of 2006. 'q' seems to be a classic as well. Or the ever popular made up name that sounds good but means nothing. Some examples"
Voia
InterVoia
Luxacomm
HyperVoice
qVantage Voip Services
iqPhone
My Power Voip
QualVantage Power VoIP
DilPhonics Voyaphone
Of course none of them have the power and capabilities of the greatest device in the known universe. The Interocitor. Take that you trendhumping monkeys.
Mods. The humorous parent comment is not properly moderated. Please fix. Thanks.
I think the Book I read is Sleep Thieves by Stanley Coren. I read it back in the 90s. I was thinking closer to the early 90s than 1996, but 1996 actually seems about right. Mainly because I remember not having started to work in IT yet when I read the book and 1997 is when I started.
You underestimate the evilness of most businesses when it comes to having a competitive edge. If they stand to gain millions in exchange for amping up their workers on an expensive medication, they will do it. That's all I'm saying. We've seen it time and time again in other areas when business wants to win. They'll stop at nothing. Even killing innocent people. So what's the big deal about spending a fraction of huge possible wealth on the unethical use abuse of prescription meds?
First... what's RLS? Second, if you've got a disease that would cause you to fall asleep while driving, then by all means it's life threatening even if you only kill yourself. Where I think it's abuse is when someone's employer says, "here's nine days worth of work, I want it done in 36 hours. Straight hours. In other words you don't sleep until your done. You'll be supplied with the appropriate medication to cope". That's EXACTLY where we're headed based on this article.
Correction... They convert beer to water, salt and urea. Per Wikipedia:
Healthy urine is a clear aqueous solution, varying in colour from dark yellow to colourless depending on the dilution. The main constituents of urine are water, salts and urea. Urochrome is the pigment that gives urine its color. Urea is one of the three nitrogenous waste products. The other two are creatinine and uric acid. Urine also contains various inorganic ions, including sodium and chloride. Lighter urine color usually indicates higher water consumption.
Lead-asbestos condoms my friend... Lead-asbestos...
..converts salsa to crap. That is all.
...than when you have more choices in sexual partners. To that end, use Linux. That is all.
Good points again. I'm definitely pro-contraception, and well... wisdom teeth are a pretty basic although traumatic procedure. (I bled for days after mine and the numbness and tingling in my tongue didn't go away for about five years) My original statement probably needs a little ammendment. My main point being that I don't buy into using drugs to work around the inconveniences of being alive. I even avoid medication when people try to put me on it. (It shows doesn't it?) ;P
Keep you v14rga ads off of Slashdot pleeze. Actually, you make a valid point. Fertility is in a different arena though. Not to mention that with a few exceptions, you can do a lot more regarding fertility with basic but difficult lifestyle changes. The drugs are simply the easy way out. I'm not saying that they're bad, but I don't put them in the same category as what's being discussed here.
...I predict that in the next ten years we'll have a new disorder: "Soft Drug Abuse". This will be the illegitimate use of prescription drugs that have mild effects on the user and don't necessarily interfere with their day-to-day lives, but are still addiction problems.
If it's artificially interfering with a normal function of life and it's not involved in preventing a life threatening disease, it's just a bad idea. Myself, I only need four to six hours a night and I can function well. I actually natrually wake up after six hours even without an alarm clock. I've always been that way. If I really need to puch myself I can get by with two hours sleep. This is perfectly natural. Back in the 90s I read a book on sleep and it stated that most humans need the typical eight hours of sleep. It also revealed that in a few sleep studies where the subjects are kept from knowing the real time or seeing any cues (daylight), that they tended to sleep more on the order of 10 hours a night with their sleep cycle drifting an hour later each day (ie. they would go to sleep an hour later each day without realizing it). But, they did concede that every human is different and there indeed people who don't need much sleep and others who actualy need a lot more sleep than is culturally possible (13-15 hours a day) to be at their best. Sadly, humans are WAY too flexible in their traits which means that there is no "one size fits all" approach. In the case of this drug however, I'd say that it will be revealed eventually just how detrimental it's effects are while simultaneously being denied by the pharmaceutical companies that produce it.
Heh... to each their own. I actually prefer XP's native mode to classic mode as it's much more task oriented and totally obscures the file system. It's the only way that Windows makes sense (and I HATE Windows). Classic mode always seemed kind of backwards to me since it was always pretending to be something it wasn't: and OO desktop. Of course I'm an old Mac user from the Pre-OS X days and I liked knowing that the file I was clicking on was REALLY the file I was using. No shortcuts. No symlinks. Just pure order at it's best. And with self contained binaries with no DLLs or libs all over creation, My application installation was just dragging and dropping an icon. If I moved the application file, it still worked because outside of preference files, it was completely self contained. And preferences were always in one place too. Windows gets all of that wrong. *nix is only a little better in some ways, but improving all the time. By the way, I always meant to ask you... why GigsVT? Just curious about the why behind the UID.
...Hedy Lamar? She looks infintely hotter than the real geek girls on that paltry list and she was responsible for co-inventing Frequency-hopped spread spectrum technology used in WiFi today...
Hey, the girl might be fun for 15 minutes at a time about once a month as long as you have your weiner wrapped in five condoms held on with duct tape, but a geek or a friend to geeks? No way.
YEAH YEAH YEAH BABAY!!!!!
...I think OO.o could benefit from a better UI design rather than aping MS Office. The MS Office and OO.o UIs are too cluttered. I'd suggest something more collapsable and more sparingly reliant on just icons on the less used features. The other suggestion I'd make is to make the OO.o interface more "modal" in a way. As much as I hate 'vi' and it's modality, I think modes could be done right for Office apps. Again, you have all of the most common functionality available in the default mode with little or no space devoted to less popular features. Obviously this would require a study to rank the uasge of features. But there just aren't that many people who use "mail merge" on a daily basis unless they're in the business world. Maybe even having default "Home User" vs. "Business User" modes for OO.o would help. Just a few suggestions anyway. (Even though this is the wrong place for that)
Bush administration officials announced today that for national security, homeland security will be installing cameras in every American's underpants starting on 1 January 2007. The cameras are to protect America from the evils of sin and sex and to provide the senators and congressmen with easy access to protect the jewel of American society: the teen boy. This plan is part of a larger project that was spearheaded by the departed Donald Rumsfeld last year who departed amid criticisms that he encourage homosexual acts in Abu Grahib as a method of stress relief for the soldiers. His original "Operation Panty-cam" plan was discouraged due to concerns about the name and what it implied.
I never thought I'd even be remotely close to agreeing with that lying sack of shit. Don't get me wrong peoples. I love the machine. I am plugged into them about 80% of the day in one fashion or another. But this is ONLY when I'm doing something that relates:
1. Watching TV (Seeing as I do it with a Linux based PVR, I'm plugged into a computer to watch TV any time that I have time to do so) I do so on a very nice widescreen 37" LCD monitor, so it's not the shitty PC experience. It rivals standard television.
2. Posting on Slashdot
3. Doing serious research on the web
4. Doing silly research on the web
5. Watching YouTube
6. Reading electronic books
7. Creating original music
8. Editing original video (I produce TV ad parodies for fun)
9. Talking on the phone with my Bluetooth set
10. Compiling software in Linux for whatever my current pet project is
11. Downloading music from eMusic.com or ripping CDs I ordered from Amazon
12. Transferring music to my Rio Karma
13. Helping friends and family with various computer issues
14. Designing custom circuitry and assembling it for custom modifications and devices
15. Editing photos that I've taken with my digital camera
16. Taking photos in various settings with my digital camera (outdoor, nature, family, vacation, etc...)
17. Watching DVDs (I've never once bought a dedicated DVD player. I've always used computers)
18. Playing the occasional game or listening to a song on the computer itself
That's just a smidgin of what I do with electronic technology. You'll notice that office functions are missing. This is because I have no need for an Office suite in my day-to-day life. Even at work I never write things, waste time graphing worthless information, or do stupid presentations (which typically indicates the presenter has nothing to say). But, I spend every free minute I've got (when I'm not working and when everyone else I know is not asleep) spending time with the people who matter: wife, daughter, extended family and close friends. So I'd say Mr. O'Reilly has it right as long as we're talking people who are anti-social. Some "geeks" are like that. But not all. Of course, I would say I'm not a geek since I tend to dislike a lot of what geeks are actively into...
The way I see it is this. The crowd of idiotic morons who say, "One hundred years? Hah! I won't be around so it may as well not be true", aren't going to change their fucked up way of thinking unless they get a bullet through the skull (ie. they stop thinking which they probably did a long time ago anyway). The other group of people who say, "Well it MAY be happening, but we can't know for sure until all the data is in (sometime after I'm long dead and gone) and besides, if we put all these regulations on business, it's just going to hurt you with higher prices (as if companies have the right to make the customer pay for the cost of being in business), well they aren't going to change their minds either unless a post-natal abortion is implemented. The people who say, "OMG OMG teh sky is falling!!!", they aren't a lot of help either because they make the more reasonable folks who believe in climate change look bad (you folks should really calm down so we can approach things rationally). Finally. It's already too late to do a hell of a lot to fix things. The best you can hope for is that *IF* people wake up, we can save a portion of what the planet is like today. Then maybe in a few centuries the damage will reverse as natural systems repair things. But, at the rate we're going I'm happy enough to know that a massive die off is coming soon and I'll be the first in line to take a few idiots down. That is all.
Hmmm... I think I've heard of that once or twice. I guess it doesn't affect me since I use an OS free of restrictions: Linux. Ballmer can bite me.
Oh I agree with you as that's been my experience as well. But where I haven't changed is my desire to still reach out to the janitors who could become Macromedia producers. The problem right now is that we don't address their needs or potential and therefore create a market that supports just getting by rather than doing the best possible. This is one of the reasons MS is so successful. They count on people wanting to only do enough to get by and not strive for perfection instead. I can't work like that. I MUST strive for perfection unattainable though it may be, because along the journey I find things that are above the realm of average. I believe that we should encourage everyone and anyone to strive for that.
Ever seen "Being John Malkovich"? Well... that's kinda creepy for me. Get out of my head! Shoo! Shoo!!! :>
...between "Doing it right" vs. "Doing just enough". I think Microsoft's "mindshare" in the software world is definitely doing well and they have little to worry about where the majority of the computing public is concerned. The typical person just wants to use a computer and be told that they are good at it. In reality, they might be good at applications, but they don't have an inkling how to use a computer. That works well for Microsoft as it means that they don't need to be "the best" in terms of well... anything. They just have to be good enough to appeal to the average user. From a technical perspective, even the average user is aware of how low grade Microsoft products are. But, those same low grade tools that are poorly designed and applied allow said user to "do stuff" that they couldn't do on other, better designed platforms (Linux and the BSDs for example).
The fact is that most people drive shitty cars day in and day out. Econoboxes abound. Even if the person is knowledgable enough to know that they could have a better driving experience in another car, many of them can't afford the cars financially. The same with the software world. The "expense" of moving to a better designed, more well thought out platform like *nix, is simply too high for most users. Sure, distros like Ubuntu have lowered the bar considerably so that the experience is a lot closer to Mac OS X than Windows, but you've still got to deal with the fact that data migration is no small task for these sorts of users. They don't honestly understand that a file icon is really a graphical representation of a file. They don't know that a file at the filesystem level is really a notation in a file system lookup table or DB that points to locations on the hard drive that have been marked by the filesystem in some fashion. They don't know that their precious photos of their dog Woofie are bits represented by magnetic impulses on what is essentially a set of spinning phonograph records. And of course the mantra, "they don't care nor should they" usually arises at this point. That's where the "doing it right" part comes in.
If things were done right in our society regarding computer technology, EVERYONE would be given basic education on the most important tools of our society so that they could deal with whatever life throws them. And that education would NOT have a heavy focus on history, but on on the actual theory behind how the technology works. For the time being we'll just limit the scope to computers and software. The basic concepts of files and directories and how they are stored on disk should be common knowledge. Boring, yes. But essential to understanding what's happening on your computer. Once the basics of a typical filesystem are understood, it would then be essential to explain how manipulation of those files occurs (copying, moving, deleting, etc...). The same applies to memory, CPU (not the box, the chip) and basic I/O. Again, all very boring stuff and lots of people are likely to tune out. But not as many as you would think... EVERYONE has tuned out in school before, but many of you have experienced the situation later in life where something that you didn't care about in school was still rattling around in that empty head and wound up being relevant. The same would happen here only more often considering how pervasive computers are today.
Finally, once you get up to the GUI level of instruction, you begin to stress the importance of abstraction since that's all the GUI really is. There are some people who are going to have a hard time with this apparently since the last time I studied this I read that only 30% of the test base of college students could understand up to seven levels of abstaction. (I don't have a link and don't remember where I read those numbers, if anyone else remembers the study as it was featured here on Slashdot, please post the link) The reason I suggest this is that in today's educational environment the majority of students who COULD understand abstraction, and