But for learning, it may not hurt to learn another system, even if the UI is rather different. Learning a UI (even a quirky one like Blender's) is generally much easier than learning how to do what you need to do. Once you know how to build a (ferinstance) truck in one such system, you should be able to do in in any of the others after spending a day or three learning the UI
The kind of logic presented here is the kind of logic that says that every programmer should learn exactly one language (and this is an opinion I've heard a few times), and especially avoid some of the non-mainstream languages just because their syntax is "icky and hard to learn". But syntax is the easy part of most languages (even when it is hard). Learning to program well is hard. Learning a language well is hard. Learning syntax is easy.
What is really being said here is "I'm devoted to this style of UI, so everyone should use this style of UI because then I'll never have to worry about learning something new."
Ah Improv. Best spreadsheet I ever used. Though there was this odd thing (advance? don't remember) that took improv one step further and did some great data modelling tasks, but I could only get an evaluation copy. And then it seemed to go away.
I wonder if the distribution of resources might look something a Pareto(/Zipf) distribution, in which case the first two would have a very large part of the resources and anything after three would get (given that number three is at 3.3%) very small resource allocations.
Somewhere in the mind of the internet that message was read and a continent wide chuckle went up.
Humans think they're intelligent. Have they looked at themselves lately?
More seriously, the possibility that the internet is already intelligent is quite a fun one and your question is interesting. Even if we did look carefully, how would we know if the internet is intelligent? Turing test? Why on earth should we think that would even be meaningful to such a completely different brand of intelligence?
The reason they do?
Because the applications they want, know, and love are windows based and people dont want to change just to make some geek happy.
That is certainly a major reason and not to be minimized. But if other OSs were available and purchased by more than a tiny minority, those applications would be available on the other OSs as well as on Windows. It's a kind of Catch-22.
But there are other significant reasons why people only run windows :
Windows and MS applications are taught everywhere (and often enough the instructors say that these are the only reasonable alternatives). This is one of the reasons for your reason. And Microsoft has often made it very difficult to do anything else (you may have to have a MS license for every machine in your school, even if it does not run Windows).
When you buy a computer from essentially every store and online dealer of any note, windows is bundled in automatically and finding alternatives is almost impossible (the subject of TFA)
Microsoft has used their market domination and some very sneaky (and clever) tactics to ensure that Microsoft applications are not going to work with standards and that other OSs will have trouble working with Microsoft "standards"
Microsoft has also built a software and licensing structure that strongly encourages (in many cases "compels") software developers that work with Microsoft products to only support and use Microsoft products.
The potential for focusing is rather worrying. Imagine that someone could incapacitate individuals in a crowd without any of the others feeling anything. You could shut up reporters in the White House press room and no one would believe that anything had happened. Do it strongly enough and you could permanently discourage anyone from reporting or questioning. Or in a protest, you could take out the loudest people and nobody would know that anything untoward had happened. Gotta give it to them, this is one of the neatest bits of political control invented. Time to invest. And hide.
You don't really think this will be made available to the people in general. It will be (quickly) classified as not a "gun" so not subject to the second amendment, and anyone possessing one will be happily treated to a bout of pain and jailed.
The only start up annoyance I have is the recovery options.
The recovery options drive me bonkers. I've managed to shut things down badly a few times (in various ways) and then had OO sit on startup for what seemed like a long time (but was probably only a few dozen seconds) recovering perfectly reasonable documents. The worst was when I actually used "mv" to put a document someplace else and OO basicly refused to start at all. It wasn't that hard to fix (find the right file in the oo info directory and delete it) but it was certainly annoying and could easily have made OO unusuable for a user less willing to poke around and delete files.
On a related note, how can I turn off that horrible splash window?
NY Times crosswords are great, but for sheer mind-bogglingly twisted word fun, the Atlantic Monthly crosswords take the cake. Sadly, they're now only available online (probably due to all those thieving photocopy machine users) and with a subscription to the print magazine.
Any bets that the restrictions will be in the packaging, so you'll have to buy the thing before you can see them, at which point the store will refuse to refund your money because you opened it?
I check Martin's "ice and fire update" page about every couple of weeks and it is still the page that was there back in February.
Though his blog does note the passing of Jordan with regret.
The problem is that the "designers" have often only learned flash, as they consider themselves "designers" and not "programmers" (who should know more than one language, programming techniques, how to debug and...). They only want to "design" - pick their favorite fonts, make fancy navigation structures that look cool. They usually consider programming a bit icky and "right brain"
(or is it "left brain"?) and somehow beneath them. Sadly, for many this attitude is taught to them in college (sometimes even by people in CS programs). Naturally, this is not true of all "designers" and the best either work hard to figure out how to do things well, or realize their limitations and use good programmers to help them.
I've long speculated that the internet and all its attached computers (and other peripherals) is on its way to becoming "sentient" in some (hard to define) way. One question that may be worth pondering ("I think so brain....") is how we could recognize it if such sentience (or even "intelligence") was sufficiently different than our own. Or is the definition of intelligence inherently matched to human intelligence (as in the Turing test)?
Should this happen, it is likely that humans will be an essential part of the process - doing maintenance, building new parts..... So, it is quite likely that such a machine would take a while to realize that there are humans that make up a part of it (how long did it take to find and understand mitochondria?), and then (with luck) it would realize that treating us well is in its own best interest (we don't after all go around slaughtering our mitochondria, or even (except perhaps inadvertently) meddling with them).
At one point, mumblety-mumblety years ago when PBS was running Dr Who, I taped each episode and watched them while exercising. I believe I saw every episode that PBS broadcast, ranging from (the available) Hartnell episodes to McCoy. It took rather a while. (And yes, I enjoyed them and no, I'd not even think about doing it again.) I've since seen (but less comprehensively) many of the episodes produced since. (I didn't enjoy the Eccleston series as much as some of the others, but rather I'm looking forward to the Tennant ones from the promos I've seen.) I do wonder if your "every single episode" translates to what I'd think of as "every single episode".
Hasn't the network itself become a part of most developed nations critical infrastructure? With tens of millions of computers flooding the network with packets, surely switches could be overloaded that carry "more important" traffic.
Even without granting that possibility, imagine a Bad Bunch Of Folks using those machines to generate email, IM traffic and similar stuff that says that the country is under attack (or that plague is spreading or...). Much might be caught by spam filters, but it might not take much to get through to get people on the phone to friends/relatives to spread the rumour. With (as another poster suggested) hilarious consequences. This doesn't have to be even warfare - perhaps the mechanism could (just) be used to cause a serious drop in the stock market. Or a rise in (say) pharmaceutical stock prices.
the L release should be Llama. Lovable Llama....
A llama in a leisure suit.
A post that somehow makes this poem from Ogden Nash inevitable, but perhaps this is a good reason to imagine the lovable llama in pajamas (risking a possible salacious interpretation):
The one-l lama, He's a priest. The two-l llama, He's a beast. And I will bet A silk pajama There isn't any Three-l lllama.*
*The author's attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as a three-alarmer. Pooh.
The latest "Computing Surveys" has an article on Image watermarking, and while most of the methods won't apply to audio or video, the technology is interesting and the article well worth a read.
It is not just a question of "use" but of the amount of damage a vehicle does to the road.
Studded tires are a good example - on a local interstate (eastern Washington state), the ruts from the studded tires are deep enough in the road surface that it seriously changes the way the car handles.
But more interestingly, I heard (some time ago) that damage goes up with the number of miles traveled, the square of the speed and the fourth power (!) of the weight. Which, if true, (I've not been able to verify this) would mean that a truck weighing 10 times my car (low for most loaded trucks), driving the same speed as me and the same distance, should be spending $10,000 (10^4) on highway maintenance for every $1 I spend. Let's be simple and suppose that I put $100 into road maintenance per year - then that truck should be putting $1,000,000 per year into the same fund. Better estimates (trucks driving 50 hours a week, many are rather heavier, most travel mostly at higher speeds than I do around town) put that ratio up into the hundreds of thousands and the estimated cost rather higher. The chances though that anyone is going to remove this (rather serious) invisible subsidy are, well, less than infinitesimal.
When your shop will have spent lots of money to convert from your current set-up to whatever they want and you wind up with more problems to boot, THEN they might start looking for solutions and be more open to something other than.NET
Or more likely, they'll say something like "The last time we migrated (from LAMP to.NET) it cost us a pile of money and we got crap, so doing it again will cost us another pile of money and we'll get crap. So, who should we blame for this mess?"
But (and IANAL so this may not be all entirely the case), what will stop the cops/opposing parties from saying that there is important data on the disk and asking you for the key. Then, if you refuse, they can get the court to require you to provide the key and you'll be held in contempt (and in jail) until you do just that. Of course, if you've encrypted random data, or if you have a TrueCrypt hidden partition, that may make for a long stay.
I've long felt that one of the strong points of wikipedia is just that - the odd articles about things that are "not notable" or otherwise disparaged. For example (there are others, but this one is apropos, somehow), I remember (I think) a long and detailed page on "slashdot trolls" which seems to have disappeared. Perhaps it was "not notable", but there are a variety of internet/web trolling phenonema and they're not all the same, so someone interested in communication online may have just lost a very nice place to find things.
But then again, perhaps it was taking up too much space in the database.
Slashdot Mirror
The good news is that that will get better for you in the next few years.
The bad news is that it will eventually get worse again.
But for learning, it may not hurt to learn another system, even if the UI is rather different. Learning a UI (even a quirky one like Blender's) is generally much easier than learning how to do what you need to do. Once you know how to build a (ferinstance) truck in one such system, you should be able to do in in any of the others after spending a day or three learning the UI
The kind of logic presented here is the kind of logic that says that every programmer should learn exactly one language (and this is an opinion I've heard a few times), and especially avoid some of the non-mainstream languages just because their syntax is "icky and hard to learn". But syntax is the easy part of most languages (even when it is hard). Learning to program well is hard. Learning a language well is hard. Learning syntax is easy.
What is really being said here is "I'm devoted to this style of UI, so everyone should use this style of UI because then I'll never have to worry about learning something new."
Ah Improv. Best spreadsheet I ever used. Though there was this odd thing (advance? don't remember) that took improv one step further and did some great data modelling tasks, but I could only get an evaluation copy. And then it seemed to go away.
I wonder if the distribution of resources might look something a Pareto(/Zipf) distribution, in which case the first two would have a very large part of the resources and anything after three would get (given that number three is at 3.3%) very small resource allocations.
Somewhere in the mind of the internet that message was read and a continent wide chuckle went up.
Humans think they're intelligent. Have they looked at themselves lately?
More seriously, the possibility that the internet is already intelligent is quite a fun one and your question is interesting. Even if we did look carefully, how would we know if the internet is intelligent? Turing test? Why on earth should we think that would even be meaningful to such a completely different brand of intelligence?
That is certainly a major reason and not to be minimized. But if other OSs were available and purchased by more than a tiny minority, those applications would be available on the other OSs as well as on Windows. It's a kind of Catch-22.
But there are other significant reasons why people only run windows :
I hope someone there read Stephen Fry's recent blog on phones and is taking it all to heart.
The potential for focusing is rather worrying. Imagine that someone could incapacitate individuals in a crowd without any of the others feeling anything. You could shut up reporters in the White House press room and no one would believe that anything had happened. Do it strongly enough and you could permanently discourage anyone from reporting or questioning. Or in a protest, you could take out the loudest people and nobody would know that anything untoward had happened. Gotta give it to them, this is one of the neatest bits of political control invented. Time to invest. And hide.
You don't really think this will be made available to the people in general. It will be (quickly) classified as not a "gun" so not subject to the second amendment, and anyone possessing one will be happily treated to a bout of pain and jailed.
The recovery options drive me bonkers. I've managed to shut things down badly a few times (in various ways) and then had OO sit on startup for what seemed like a long time (but was probably only a few dozen seconds) recovering perfectly reasonable documents. The worst was when I actually used "mv" to put a document someplace else and OO basicly refused to start at all. It wasn't that hard to fix (find the right file in the oo info directory and delete it) but it was certainly annoying and could easily have made OO unusuable for a user less willing to poke around and delete files.
On a related note, how can I turn off that horrible splash window?
NY Times crosswords are great, but for sheer mind-bogglingly twisted word fun, the Atlantic Monthly crosswords take the cake. Sadly, they're now only available online (probably due to all those thieving photocopy machine users) and with a subscription to the print magazine.
Any bets that the restrictions will be in the packaging, so you'll have to buy the thing before you can see them, at which point the store will refuse to refund your money because you opened it?
Don't say that. Don't even hint at such things.
I check Martin's "ice and fire update" page about every couple of weeks and it is still the page that was there back in February. Though his blog does note the passing of Jordan with regret.
The problem is that the "designers" have often only learned flash, as they consider themselves "designers" and not "programmers" (who should know more than one language, programming techniques, how to debug and ...). They only want to "design" - pick their favorite fonts, make fancy navigation structures that look cool. They usually consider programming a bit icky and "right brain"
(or is it "left brain"?) and somehow beneath them. Sadly, for many this attitude is taught to them in college (sometimes even by people in CS programs). Naturally, this is not true of all "designers" and the best either work hard to figure out how to do things well, or realize their limitations and use good programmers to help them.
I've long speculated that the internet and all its attached computers (and other peripherals) is on its way to becoming "sentient" in some (hard to define) way. One question that may be worth pondering ("I think so brain....") is how we could recognize it if such sentience (or even "intelligence") was sufficiently different than our own. Or is the definition of intelligence inherently matched to human intelligence (as in the Turing test)?
Should this happen, it is likely that humans will be an essential part of the process - doing maintenance, building new parts..... So, it is quite likely that such a machine would take a while to realize that there are humans that make up a part of it (how long did it take to find and understand mitochondria?), and then (with luck) it would realize that treating us well is in its own best interest (we don't after all go around slaughtering our mitochondria, or even (except perhaps inadvertently) meddling with them).
At one point, mumblety-mumblety years ago when PBS was running Dr Who, I taped each episode and watched them while exercising. I believe I saw every episode that PBS broadcast, ranging from (the available) Hartnell episodes to McCoy. It took rather a while. (And yes, I enjoyed them and no, I'd not even think about doing it again.) I've since seen (but less comprehensively) many of the episodes produced since. (I didn't enjoy the Eccleston series as much as some of the others, but rather I'm looking forward to the Tennant ones from the promos I've seen.) I do wonder if your "every single episode" translates to what I'd think of as "every single episode".
Hasn't the network itself become a part of most developed nations critical infrastructure? With tens of millions of computers flooding the network with packets, surely switches could be overloaded that carry "more important" traffic.
Even without granting that possibility, imagine a Bad Bunch Of Folks using those machines to generate email, IM traffic and similar stuff that says that the country is under attack (or that plague is spreading or ...). Much might be caught by spam filters, but it might not take much to get through to get people on the phone to friends/relatives to spread the rumour. With (as another poster suggested) hilarious consequences. This doesn't have to be even warfare - perhaps the mechanism could (just) be used to cause a serious drop in the stock market. Or a rise in (say) pharmaceutical stock prices.
The latest "Computing Surveys" has an article on Image watermarking, and while most of the methods won't apply to audio or video, the technology is interesting and the article well worth a read.
It is not just a question of "use" but of the amount of damage a vehicle does to the road.
Studded tires are a good example - on a local interstate (eastern Washington state), the ruts from the studded tires are deep enough in the road surface that it seriously changes the way the car handles.
But more interestingly, I heard (some time ago) that damage goes up with the number of miles traveled, the square of the speed and the fourth power (!) of the weight. Which, if true, (I've not been able to verify this) would mean that a truck weighing 10 times my car (low for most loaded trucks), driving the same speed as me and the same distance, should be spending $10,000 (10^4) on highway maintenance for every $1 I spend. Let's be simple and suppose that I put $100 into road maintenance per year - then that truck should be putting $1,000,000 per year into the same fund. Better estimates (trucks driving 50 hours a week, many are rather heavier, most travel mostly at higher speeds than I do around town) put that ratio up into the hundreds of thousands and the estimated cost rather higher. The chances though that anyone is going to remove this (rather serious) invisible subsidy are, well, less than infinitesimal.
Not much to choose from, (though if it were only "Nukes ML", sigh), but the first has a bit of an edge.
Or more likely, they'll say something like "The last time we migrated (from LAMP to .NET) it cost us a pile of money and we got crap, so doing it again will cost us another pile of money and we'll get crap. So, who should we blame for this mess?"
But (and IANAL so this may not be all entirely the case), what will stop the cops/opposing parties from saying that there is important data on the disk and asking you for the key. Then, if you refuse, they can get the court to require you to provide the key and you'll be held in contempt (and in jail) until you do just that. Of course, if you've encrypted random data, or if you have a TrueCrypt hidden partition, that may make for a long stay.
I've long felt that one of the strong points of wikipedia is just that - the odd articles about things that are "not notable" or otherwise disparaged. For example (there are others, but this one is apropos, somehow), I remember (I think) a long and detailed page on "slashdot trolls" which seems to have disappeared. Perhaps it was "not notable", but there are a variety of internet/web trolling phenonema and they're not all the same, so someone interested in communication online may have just lost a very nice place to find things.
But then again, perhaps it was taking up too much space in the database.
But, evidently, we do just that. Still, fucking great comment.