Yeah, I must have missed a memo, because last I knew they thought the Milky Way was half again the size of Andromeda. Granted I haven't paid *close* attention, but I was totally unaware that the consensus had changed to the Milky Way being "the little sister in the local galaxy group".
I'm still not convinced that the distance-measuring methods astronomers swear by necessarily work correctly for extremely long distances. There's no way to experimentally confirm them, so we're working off of speculation built on speculation.
I tend to trust the nearby distances (out to a handful of parsecs) as being approximately correct, because the parallax method, based on basic trigonometry, is also used to measure shorter distances on Earth's surface, and it works pretty well there, so unless there's something _special_ about *not* being on the surface of a planet that would make it incorrect somehow, or something special about larger numbers that would mess it up, it's probably fine. On top of that, we also used the same method for measuring distances to objects such as Pluto, and then we sent spacecraft, and they were able to enter orbit as planned, send back pictures, and so on. These distances are not as large as some of the other ones we measure via parallax, so I suppose there could be a decreasing reliability with increasing distance (beyond the imprecision we know about, arising from the imprecision of our angle measurements), but on the whole I tend to trust the parallax method as being more or less verified and the distances it gives us more or less correct.
But once you get out past the limits of the precision of our ability to measure the angles, they have to resort to distance-determining methods that, to my knowledge, have never been experimentally tested. Red shift is a great example of this. How do we really know that objects whose spectra are shifted further toward red are necessarily proportionally farther away? Has this ever been tested? The theory sort of makes sense, but a lot of ideas sort of make sense until you attempt to confirm them and then end up being completely wrong. I'm not fully convinced that the astronomers *really* know what they're doing measuring distances at the galactic scale and larger, because there's no way (at our present level of technology, or for the forseeable future) to confirm any of the results.
> 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of > Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"
Maybe it's just me, but personally I would have considered Central Park to be an urban environment, not very much less crowded than a city street. It *certainly* doesn't qualify as a natural setting of any kind.
> The very existence of Mickey Mouse guarantees that nothing > will ever again enter the public domain in the good old USA.
What I don't understand is why Mickey Mouse *needs* copyright extensions. Mickey's image is the #1 trademark of the Disney corporation, arguably more strongly associated with them than even the word "Disney", but certainly more than any other visual logo. I would think anything that even sort-of resembles Mickey should be protected as a trademark, so wouldn't that prevent anyone from making unauthorized Mickey Mouse cartoons, even in the absence of copyright protection?
Okay, so somebody could distribute the extremely early Mickey cartoons as they stand, without modification. But is there really any significant monetary value in them (in that form) at this point anyway? I think all the real value is in the character himself, and the ability to use him in new material, and I would think trademark law would cover that.
Can someone explain this to me? I'm obviously missing something important...
> a stuck ALT or CTRL key can be hard to diagnose the first time.
Actually, I have an uncanny knack for recognizing a stuck key problem right off the bat when I hear the symptoms. People regularly ask me, "How did you *know*?" How am I supposed to answer that? "It just seemed obvious"?
What I find more disturbing is that so many people are afraid to try to move their computer, because they are concerned that they will not be able to get everything plugged back in correctly. If you *look* at the plugs on the back of a modern computer, you can quickly see that the only ones that are physically capable of being plugged into the wrong place are the keyboard and mouse, and they're color coded green and purple *and*, just in case you're colorblind, generally also have obvious keyboard and mouse icons stamped into the plate next to them. You don't have to be a computer expert to figure this out. You don't need any background knowledge. You don't have to understand that this cable carries video information and that one carries electrical power and so forth. All you have to do is *look* at the various connectors and see that they are all different. (Okay, so the USB ports all look the same, but in the overwhelming majority of cases nothing is plugged into them anyway, so even if you don't know that they're equivalent, there's no reason to believe you'd plug the wrong thing in the wrong place.) We give match-the-shapes puzzles, where the square thing has to go in the square hole and the octagonal one in the eight-sided hole and so forth, to preschool children, but many adults are afraid to proceed on this basis, worried that they will be unable to complete the puzzle.
Yeah, at one point I developed a habit of telling people that the thermonuclear destruction button was located inside the computer case, and they'd need a screwdriver to get to it. Most people laugh at this, because they sort of know that the computer can't *actually* blow up. But it's a nervous laugh, because they also sort of believe that it can at least be seriously dammaged.
> Six months of each will make you realize that there is a God, and his sense of humor sucks.
It's all Adam's fault. He *knew* he wasn't supposed to eat from that tree, but he couldn't say "no" to the woman, and everything went downhill after that.
Hand in your geek card, quick. As a slashdot reader, you should definitely know better than to use Outlook. The most insecure mail program you should even *consider* using is Thunderbird, and that only because it's a Mozilla product. Pegasus or Eudora are better, but still a little too end-user-oriented to gain you any real geek points. Ideally you should be using something not just secure, but also inherently geeky, and either cli-based or embedded into or integrated with a text editor. Gnus is good, or you could get by with a combo Mutt/vim setup, with an aalib-based viewer for image attachments. Or for serious geek cred you could write your own mailreader, preferably in a pure-functional language.
> Consider it this way: your hourly rate is X. The person you are supporting has > an hourly rate of Y. Y is greater than X, or else they would never pay you.
That would seem to make sense, but it's not always the case. In the industry I currently work in, for instance, it is widely considered a foregone conclusion that an IT person, if you can afford to hire one, will necessarily make more money than most of your other employees.
However, I don't see what the big deal is about getting screenshots in a Word document. It's a de facto standard format that's easy to deal with, takes just one operation in OpenOffice to convert it to a (specialized) zipfile from which you can extract the images using standard tools. It's not something I'd complain about. On the contrary, if any of my users not only remembered *how* to take screenshots but also thought to *do* it when having a problem, and sent them to me, I think I'd faint.
> For me, being the reciever of the image, say I have to upload it to some ticket-system, > it takes me a LOT of extra steps extracting them from the Word-document
The way I count, it only takes one step more than extracting them from a zipfile. You're not actually trying to use Word to do it, are you? That would be a real pain, sure, but why would you do it that way? Just use OpenOffice to do a quick Save As to ODF, and voila, you've got yourself a zipfile. No big deal.
Now, if they were sending you screenshots in a Publisher document, *that* would be a pain.
Actually, there is law to back up the "reserve the right to refuse service" thing. If they ask you to leave, and you don't leave, you're generally considered to be trespassing, which I think is a misdemeanor criminal offense in most jurisdictions, at least in the US.
However, I'm not sure how breastfeeding-rights laws might interact with that. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure that breastfeeding would not automatically protect a woman from being asked to leave for other reasons (e.g., being loud and abusive and disruptive, which will get you kicked out of almost anywhere if you do enough of it). On the other hand, if there are laws specifically protecting breastfeeding, asking a woman to leave just because she's doing that could land the establishment in legal trouble -- a civil lawsuit at the very least. I'm sure there are bound to be cases where arguments can be made on each side of the thing.
> I'd like to see you use this argument if it was about a restaurant owner refusing to > serve a black guy. "I'm trying to run a private business and the last thing I need is > this black guy scaring the other customers away.". After all, it's private property, right?
There's a categorical difference between ethnicity, which is inherently congenital if not genetic, versus what you are currently *doing*, which is a behavior issue. Being black is the former. Breastfeeding is the latter.
Incidentally, the "feeding is necessary so bare breasts must be allowed" argument is bunk. There are innumerable ways to be relatively discreet with breastfeeding, even when you are in a public location, so that while people can tell you're feeding the kid, it's not a big public nipple display the whole time. This is what most breastfeeding women do anyway, on account of the fact that they have a sense of modesty. Covering up with a blanket is a common tactic, for instance.
The people who want to post explicit breastfeeding pics on their Facebook profile aren't doing it because they want to be able to feed the kid when it gets hungry. They're doing it because they want to show off the breast. I don't see why Facebook should be required to publish such photos if they don't want to. Showing off bare breasts isn't in line with their publication policy. Freedom of the press belongs, after all, to whoever owns the press.
> Interesting - that [Old English] appears to be closer to modern German... than modern English.
Yes, it is.
Modern English is a mixture of Greek, Latin, French, Middle English, and assorted other tidbits.
Middle English was a mixture of various languages, chiefly French, Old English, Gaelic, French, Latin, and French.
Old English was a mixture of Old German, Danish, Gaelic, Latin, Old Norse, and I'm not sure what all else.
If you look at it another way, the vocabulary of modern English is about 30% Greek, 30% Latin, 30% French, 5% Germanic, and 10% Other. (Neologisms are mostly built on Greek and/or Latin roots, but a few of them fall into the Other category, e.g., "cromulent". Foreign words from other languages are also included in that 5% Other. Oh, and the reason it adds up to 105% is because some French roots are also Latin roots with the same meaning, and the corresponding English words can be seen as coming from either or both. There are also a few cases of similar overlap between Latin and Greek, e.g., "duo".)
Now, granted, the 5% of our words that come from Germanic languages account for a disproportionately large percentage of word *occurances*, because the extremely common words like "from" and "of" and "have" are almost all of Germanic origin, as well as a high percentage of the more-common-than-average words like "man" and "throw" and "talk". Less common words mostly come from the other languages, though. "Scoliosis" and "sarcophagus" are from Greek. "Rendezvous" and "rouge" are from French. "Annual" and "pulchrous" are from Latin.
A lot of the basic grammar also comes from the Germanic side of things, but with significant influence from Latin, and a good deal of "drift" has occurred over the years.
I can't believe they were willing to support it this long. IE6 is vintage 2001, which makes it over seven years old now. For a web browser, that's *ancient*.
I dropped primary support for IE6 back in 2005, when it was clearly far too old to consider current any more. This was right around the time that IE7 Beta became available, and I think I may have used that as an excuse, but honestly I almost certainly would have dropped primary IE6 support before very much longer whether there was an IE7 in the works or not. It was just too far out of date to continue supporting.
I mean, a similarly old Mozilla release would be 0.9.something. (I think 0.9.3 came out the same month as IE 6.0.) Everybody who's still regularly testing your site on pre-1.0 Mozilla releases, raise your hand. It's absurd. Frankly I'd be fairly surprised if anyone is still supporting Mozilla 1.5 at this point, and that's two years newer.
I do still support IE6 to the same extent I support any other obscure and/or ancient browser, i.e., I try to maintain a basic level navigability for all browsers, but I make no claims that it will look as good or work as well as it's designed to do on something more modern. The layout will probably be wrong in IE6, colors and other styles may be applied incorrectly, and features that rely on client-side scripting may not work properly; I don't test with it thoroughly or on a regular basis. This is the same level of support I give to things like Lynx, Navigator 4.08, NetPositive,...
And yeah, I'm probably going to relegate IE7 to that same status sometime in 2009, or early 2010 at the latest.
> set the system time back a few mins before the crash occured and see if your server crashes again
A hardware tech, a software tech, and their manager were driving to a conference, and the road was pretty mountainous. Just after they passed the highest point, the brakes suddenly gave out. As the car accelerated faster and faster, steering became more and more difficult, but fortunately there were no other cars on the road, and finally they reached the bottom.
When the car finally came to a stop, the hardware guy says, "Well, I guess we'd better pop open the hood and see if we can find the problem." The manager says, "No, I've got my cellphone right here, we'll just call for a tow." But the software guy says, "What are you guys talking about? We've got to get this car back to the top of the mountain and see we can get it to happen again!"
Actually, though, to be a proper experiment, you need to get ten thousand identical servers, set the clocks back on five thousand of them, and see if there's a statistically significant correlation between having the clock set back and crashing. Also, the guy who checks whether they've crashed or not isn't allowed to know which ones had the clock set back.
> i would never drive anywhere if everyone exibited the same lack of common sense on the road [as on computers].
Where do you live? I want to visit sometime and drive around, even if I don't really need to get anywhere, just for the sheer experience of driving in a place where people exhibit common sense on the road.
> Microsoft makes a decent keyboard but other than that, I don't use anything Microsoft on my own machines
Actually their mice are also decent, and some of their fonts are pretty good...
> One thing about Windows that I find to be a nuisance is that so many > non-critical messages will trigger system-modal dialog boxes.
Actually, these days most of them are only application-modal. It's still a problem, but system-modal dialogs (which I associate mainly with Windows 3.x) were even worse.
The problem isn't entirely unique to Windows. Web browsers, including the major open-source ones, were guilty of extreme overuse of application-modal dialog boxes for frequent non-critical and sometimes even inconsequential messages until fairly recently.
But yes, it does tend to be a particularly common annoyance on Windows systems. The fault lies mostly with the application vendors, but the paradigm that the OS and its documentation encourage are not entirely irrelevant.
Because years of experience with badly-designed software has trained them to do so. Software is always bugging them with messages they can't understand, usually in application-modal dialog boxes that *must* be clicked away in order to do *anything* further.
Web browsers have historically been extremely bad about this. Oh, I can't load the page you're looking for because I can't reach the DNS server, not that you know what that means. (Modern browsers use a non-modal error page for this, but just a few years ago it was a modal dialog.) Oh, no, if you send your search terms to AltaVista _unencrypted_, some evil villian might be able to read them! Are you really sure you want to do this? (There's no excuse for this message ever being displayed at all, modally or otherwise. It's pure unmitigated superfluous information overload.) Oh, say, the site you're visiting uses encryption, did you know that? (Ditto with the last one.) Oh, now you're visiting a site that _doesn't_ use encryption. (Ibid.) Ack, the certificate from _this_ https site expires in 2012, but your computer clock thinks it's 2069, probably because your CMOS battery is dead, and I can't be bothered to check a publicly available time source to determine whether this is even close to right. (This is _almost_ forgivable, but it is without question the leading cause of expired certificate warnings, and the whole idea of an expired certificate is completely incomprehensible to five nines of all users anyway.)
But it isn't _just_ web browsers. LOTS of software regularly hits the user in the face with needless modal dialog boxes containing technical information that the user cannot be expected to understand, and the only thing to do is click it away.
Any technical error information of this kind should *always* be appended to a logfile, so that it's accessible later; not doing so is bad programming. Also displaying it for the user to see is okay, and in some cases necessary, but an application-modal dialog is absolutely the WRONG way to do so.
> Now we need a new word for what "internet" used to mean.
We already have such terminology. Depending on exactly what you're getting at you can say things like "connectivity", "TCP/IP", "network infrastructure", or even something as direct as "Can you reach the router one hop directly upstream from you, on the other end of your T1 line?"
But, of course, end users don't think in such precise terms. They say "internet" and mean, you know, whatever it was they were trying to do just now, which may or may not actually involve the internet at all. Having a new word that is supposed to mean a certain thing won't change this; they'll misuse the new word, if they use it at all, just like the old words.
> I still can't get him to casually "cauliflower-Q" an app... You see why I keep buying him Macs tho? lol
Actually, I'd have been tempted to set him up with a command-line-only system (VMS maybe, or BSD) and manuals, just for a year or two. Nothing prepares a user to learn keyboard shortcuts like having used a CLI in the past.
Also...
> He just clicks the little X in the window and thinks that app is closed
I simply can't resist pointing out that on _anything_ other than a Mac, the app would indeed exit when the last window is closed. MS Windows, KDE, Gnome, DECWindows Motif, you name it, they all do what the user expects in this regard. The Mac behavior (on this particular issue) is bizarre and counterintuitive.
> you don't ask something stupid like, "is the printer on?" because it makes the person > feel stupid. You should ask them to turn it off then on again, and at that point they
At that point they will notice it was not turned on in the first place and... feel stupid.
You can also have them check the light on the printer, which has the added bonus of providing additional information. Solid green usually means the printer is waiting for you to print something. Blinking green usually means it's getting ready to print, and you should be patient. (This can take a while, especially for complex PDFs.) Other colors mean there's a problem physically with the printer (no paper, paper jam, out of toner, something; the details vary depending on the printer). No light generally means the user is going to feel stupid, although in theory it can potentially also indicate a problem with the power bar or outlet that the printer is plugged into.
Actually, though, the first thing I have them check is that there's paper in the drawer. If you want to try to soften this, I suppose you could have them take the paper out and put it back, or check that there are at least 20 sheets, but none of that is going to prevent them from feeling stupid if they were trying to print without paper.
> First of all, instead of watching the screen and listening to what I > was telling him, he was taking notes. Detailed notes.
This is fairly common, and is one of the main reasons the introductory computer courses I teach at the public library always come with detailed handouts. The students often come with notepads and pencils. I tell them at the very beginning (right after I ask them all whether they have a computer at home) that the handout contains the same information we're going to cover in the class. I usually make a joke out of it, along the lines of "I know none of you will need this, because you have perfect memories, but just in case you want to review..." This calls extra attention to the fact, which I've already stated, that the handouts contain the same information we're going to cover in the class. I do this because, yeah, otherwise some of them would try to take notes instead of paying attention.
> The GP suspected a virus before he suspected an upside-down mouse because he was giving some benefit of doubt;
No, he suspected a virus before he suspected an upside-down mouse because he has roughly the same level of intelligence as his parents, who were having the problem, and that's being charitable.
> It's not like the proper orientation of a mouse is some kind of rare obscure > knowledge that only the technically inclined could hope to understand.
Neither is restarting the computer, but it solves more than half of all computer problems. If you work with end users for a few minutes, you learn to check the obvious stuff first. If something won't print, the first things you have them check are that the printer has paper in it and that the light on the printer is green (not amber or red). If the screen is black, you have them check that the monitor is turned on. This isn't rocket science.
Going straight to "it must be a virus" an ID ten T error, period.
> I got an error on my screen > What message text was displayed? > I don't know, I clicked it away
Yeah, I've developed a standard line for that.
"In order to help you, I'm going to need the exact words of the error message, especially any technical-sounding parts that you didn't understand. Those are the parts that tell me what the problem is."
This only works with people who believe that they don't know much about computers and that you do. Fortunately, in my position (the computer guy at a small public library) this is almost always the case, so it works like a charm. Next time they see the message they write it down verbatim and bring it to me, or, even better, they come get me while it's still on the screen. (Of course they then forget about this and go back to "We had an error message earlier" the next time there's a problem, so I have to use my standard line repeatedly. But if I use it repeatedly it works repeatedly.)
If you're in a corporate server-admin situation or something and have to support users who believe they know more about their computers than you do, my line will probably not work. I guess in that case you might have to resort to BOFH tactics or something. ("Oh, didn't you get the email? Your section of the network is offline while the firewall inspector checks everything out. I'll send you another email when it's running again. The firewall inspection shouldn't take more than a couple of days, so hopefully you'll be back online in time to get a few hours of work done before the state auditor comes to do the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance check...")
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I must have missed a memo, because last I knew they thought the Milky Way was half again the size of Andromeda. Granted I haven't paid *close* attention, but I was totally unaware that the consensus had changed to the Milky Way being "the little sister in the local galaxy group".
I'm still not convinced that the distance-measuring methods astronomers swear by necessarily work correctly for extremely long distances. There's no way to experimentally confirm them, so we're working off of speculation built on speculation.
I tend to trust the nearby distances (out to a handful of parsecs) as being approximately correct, because the parallax method, based on basic trigonometry, is also used to measure shorter distances on Earth's surface, and it works pretty well there, so unless there's something _special_ about *not* being on the surface of a planet that would make it incorrect somehow, or something special about larger numbers that would mess it up, it's probably fine. On top of that, we also used the same method for measuring distances to objects such as Pluto, and then we sent spacecraft, and they were able to enter orbit as planned, send back pictures, and so on. These distances are not as large as some of the other ones we measure via parallax, so I suppose there could be a decreasing reliability with increasing distance (beyond the imprecision we know about, arising from the imprecision of our angle measurements), but on the whole I tend to trust the parallax method as being more or less verified and the distances it gives us more or less correct.
But once you get out past the limits of the precision of our ability to measure the angles, they have to resort to distance-determining methods that, to my knowledge, have never been experimentally tested. Red shift is a great example of this. How do we really know that objects whose spectra are shifted further toward red are necessarily proportionally farther away? Has this ever been tested? The theory sort of makes sense, but a lot of ideas sort of make sense until you attempt to confirm them and then end up being completely wrong. I'm not fully convinced that the astronomers *really* know what they're doing measuring distances at the galactic scale and larger, because there's no way (at our present level of technology, or for the forseeable future) to confirm any of the results.
> 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of
> Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"
Maybe it's just me, but personally I would have considered Central Park to be an urban environment, not very much less crowded than a city street. It *certainly* doesn't qualify as a natural setting of any kind.
> The very existence of Mickey Mouse guarantees that nothing
> will ever again enter the public domain in the good old USA.
What I don't understand is why Mickey Mouse *needs* copyright extensions. Mickey's image is the #1 trademark of the Disney corporation, arguably more strongly associated with them than even the word "Disney", but certainly more than any other visual logo. I would think anything that even sort-of resembles Mickey should be protected as a trademark, so wouldn't that prevent anyone from making unauthorized Mickey Mouse cartoons, even in the absence of copyright protection?
Okay, so somebody could distribute the extremely early Mickey cartoons as they stand, without modification. But is there really any significant monetary value in them (in that form) at this point anyway? I think all the real value is in the character himself, and the ability to use him in new material, and I would think trademark law would cover that.
Can someone explain this to me? I'm obviously missing something important...
> a stuck ALT or CTRL key can be hard to diagnose the first time.
Actually, I have an uncanny knack for recognizing a stuck key problem right off the bat when I hear the symptoms. People regularly ask me, "How did you *know*?" How am I supposed to answer that? "It just seemed obvious"?
What I find more disturbing is that so many people are afraid to try to move their computer, because they are concerned that they will not be able to get everything plugged back in correctly. If you *look* at the plugs on the back of a modern computer, you can quickly see that the only ones that are physically capable of being plugged into the wrong place are the keyboard and mouse, and they're color coded green and purple *and*, just in case you're colorblind, generally also have obvious keyboard and mouse icons stamped into the plate next to them. You don't have to be a computer expert to figure this out. You don't need any background knowledge. You don't have to understand that this cable carries video information and that one carries electrical power and so forth. All you have to do is *look* at the various connectors and see that they are all different. (Okay, so the USB ports all look the same, but in the overwhelming majority of cases nothing is plugged into them anyway, so even if you don't know that they're equivalent, there's no reason to believe you'd plug the wrong thing in the wrong place.) We give match-the-shapes puzzles, where the square thing has to go in the square hole and the octagonal one in the eight-sided hole and so forth, to preschool children, but many adults are afraid to proceed on this basis, worried that they will be unable to complete the puzzle.
Personally, I like chocolate envelopes better :-)
Yeah, at one point I developed a habit of telling people that the thermonuclear destruction button was located inside the computer case, and they'd need a screwdriver to get to it. Most people laugh at this, because they sort of know that the computer can't *actually* blow up. But it's a nervous laugh, because they also sort of believe that it can at least be seriously dammaged.
> Six months of each will make you realize that there is a God, and his sense of humor sucks.
It's all Adam's fault. He *knew* he wasn't supposed to eat from that tree, but he couldn't say "no" to the woman, and everything went downhill after that.
> I use Outlook
Hand in your geek card, quick. As a slashdot reader, you should definitely know better than to use Outlook. The most insecure mail program you should even *consider* using is Thunderbird, and that only because it's a Mozilla product. Pegasus or Eudora are better, but still a little too end-user-oriented to gain you any real geek points. Ideally you should be using something not just secure, but also inherently geeky, and either cli-based or embedded into or integrated with a text editor. Gnus is good, or you could get by with a combo Mutt/vim setup, with an aalib-based viewer for image attachments. Or for serious geek cred you could write your own mailreader, preferably in a pure-functional language.
> Consider it this way: your hourly rate is X. The person you are supporting has
> an hourly rate of Y. Y is greater than X, or else they would never pay you.
That would seem to make sense, but it's not always the case. In the industry I currently work in, for instance, it is widely considered a foregone conclusion that an IT person, if you can afford to hire one, will necessarily make more money than most of your other employees.
However, I don't see what the big deal is about getting screenshots in a Word document. It's a de facto standard format that's easy to deal with, takes just one operation in OpenOffice to convert it to a (specialized) zipfile from which you can extract the images using standard tools. It's not something I'd complain about. On the contrary, if any of my users not only remembered *how* to take screenshots but also thought to *do* it when having a problem, and sent them to me, I think I'd faint.
> For me, being the reciever of the image, say I have to upload it to some ticket-system,
> it takes me a LOT of extra steps extracting them from the Word-document
The way I count, it only takes one step more than extracting them from a zipfile. You're not actually trying to use Word to do it, are you? That would be a real pain, sure, but why would you do it that way? Just use OpenOffice to do a quick Save As to ODF, and voila, you've got yourself a zipfile. No big deal.
Now, if they were sending you screenshots in a Publisher document, *that* would be a pain.
Actually, there is law to back up the "reserve the right to refuse service" thing. If they ask you to leave, and you don't leave, you're generally considered to be trespassing, which I think is a misdemeanor criminal offense in most jurisdictions, at least in the US.
However, I'm not sure how breastfeeding-rights laws might interact with that. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure that breastfeeding would not automatically protect a woman from being asked to leave for other reasons (e.g., being loud and abusive and disruptive, which will get you kicked out of almost anywhere if you do enough of it). On the other hand, if there are laws specifically protecting breastfeeding, asking a woman to leave just because she's doing that could land the establishment in legal trouble -- a civil lawsuit at the very least. I'm sure there are bound to be cases where arguments can be made on each side of the thing.
IANAL,ATINLA.
> I'd like to see you use this argument if it was about a restaurant owner refusing to
> serve a black guy. "I'm trying to run a private business and the last thing I need is
> this black guy scaring the other customers away.". After all, it's private property, right?
There's a categorical difference between ethnicity, which is inherently congenital if not genetic, versus what you are currently *doing*, which is a behavior issue. Being black is the former. Breastfeeding is the latter.
Incidentally, the "feeding is necessary so bare breasts must be allowed" argument is bunk. There are innumerable ways to be relatively discreet with breastfeeding, even when you are in a public location, so that while people can tell you're feeding the kid, it's not a big public nipple display the whole time. This is what most breastfeeding women do anyway, on account of the fact that they have a sense of modesty. Covering up with a blanket is a common tactic, for instance.
The people who want to post explicit breastfeeding pics on their Facebook profile aren't doing it because they want to be able to feed the kid when it gets hungry. They're doing it because they want to show off the breast. I don't see why Facebook should be required to publish such photos if they don't want to. Showing off bare breasts isn't in line with their publication policy. Freedom of the press belongs, after all, to whoever owns the press.
> Interesting - that [Old English] appears to be closer to modern German... than modern English.
Yes, it is.
Modern English is a mixture of Greek, Latin, French, Middle English, and assorted other tidbits.
Middle English was a mixture of various languages, chiefly French, Old English, Gaelic, French, Latin, and French.
Old English was a mixture of Old German, Danish, Gaelic, Latin, Old Norse, and I'm not sure what all else.
If you look at it another way, the vocabulary of modern English is about 30% Greek, 30% Latin, 30% French, 5% Germanic, and 10% Other. (Neologisms are mostly built on Greek and/or Latin roots, but a few of them fall into the Other category, e.g., "cromulent". Foreign words from other languages are also included in that 5% Other. Oh, and the reason it adds up to 105% is because some French roots are also Latin roots with the same meaning, and the corresponding English words can be seen as coming from either or both. There are also a few cases of similar overlap between Latin and Greek, e.g., "duo".)
Now, granted, the 5% of our words that come from Germanic languages account for a disproportionately large percentage of word *occurances*, because the extremely common words like "from" and "of" and "have" are almost all of Germanic origin, as well as a high percentage of the more-common-than-average words like "man" and "throw" and "talk". Less common words mostly come from the other languages, though. "Scoliosis" and "sarcophagus" are from Greek. "Rendezvous" and "rouge" are from French. "Annual" and "pulchrous" are from Latin.
A lot of the basic grammar also comes from the Germanic side of things, but with significant influence from Latin, and a good deal of "drift" has occurred over the years.
I can't believe they were willing to support it this long. IE6 is vintage 2001, which makes it over seven years old now. For a web browser, that's *ancient*.
...
I dropped primary support for IE6 back in 2005, when it was clearly far too old to consider current any more. This was right around the time that IE7 Beta became available, and I think I may have used that as an excuse, but honestly I almost certainly would have dropped primary IE6 support before very much longer whether there was an IE7 in the works or not. It was just too far out of date to continue supporting.
I mean, a similarly old Mozilla release would be 0.9.something. (I think 0.9.3 came out the same month as IE 6.0.) Everybody who's still regularly testing your site on pre-1.0 Mozilla releases, raise your hand. It's absurd. Frankly I'd be fairly surprised if anyone is still supporting Mozilla 1.5 at this point, and that's two years newer.
I do still support IE6 to the same extent I support any other obscure and/or ancient browser, i.e., I try to maintain a basic level navigability for all browsers, but I make no claims that it will look as good or work as well as it's designed to do on something more modern. The layout will probably be wrong in IE6, colors and other styles may be applied incorrectly, and features that rely on client-side scripting may not work properly; I don't test with it thoroughly or on a regular basis. This is the same level of support I give to things like Lynx, Navigator 4.08, NetPositive,
And yeah, I'm probably going to relegate IE7 to that same status sometime in 2009, or early 2010 at the latest.
> set the system time back a few mins before the crash occured and see if your server crashes again
A hardware tech, a software tech, and their manager were driving to a conference, and the road was pretty mountainous. Just after they passed the highest point, the brakes suddenly gave out. As the car accelerated faster and faster, steering became more and more difficult, but fortunately there were no other cars on the road, and finally they reached the bottom.
When the car finally came to a stop, the hardware guy says, "Well, I guess we'd better pop open the hood and see if we can find the problem." The manager says, "No, I've got my cellphone right here, we'll just call for a tow." But the software guy says, "What are you guys talking about? We've got to get this car back to the top of the mountain and see we can get it to happen again!"
Actually, though, to be a proper experiment, you need to get ten thousand identical servers, set the clocks back on five thousand of them, and see if there's a statistically significant correlation between having the clock set back and crashing. Also, the guy who checks whether they've crashed or not isn't allowed to know which ones had the clock set back.
> i would never drive anywhere if everyone exibited the same lack of common sense on the road [as on computers].
Where do you live? I want to visit sometime and drive around, even if I don't really need to get anywhere, just for the sheer experience of driving in a place where people exhibit common sense on the road.
> Microsoft makes a decent keyboard but other than that, I don't use anything Microsoft on my own machines
Actually their mice are also decent, and some of their fonts are pretty good...
> One thing about Windows that I find to be a nuisance is that so many
> non-critical messages will trigger system-modal dialog boxes.
Actually, these days most of them are only application-modal. It's still a problem, but system-modal dialogs (which I associate mainly with Windows 3.x) were even worse.
The problem isn't entirely unique to Windows. Web browsers, including the major open-source ones, were guilty of extreme overuse of application-modal dialog boxes for frequent non-critical and sometimes even inconsequential messages until fairly recently.
But yes, it does tend to be a particularly common annoyance on Windows systems. The fault lies mostly with the application vendors, but the paradigm that the OS and its documentation encourage are not entirely irrelevant.
> Why do people just click away all messages
Because years of experience with badly-designed software has trained them to do so. Software is always bugging them with messages they can't understand, usually in application-modal dialog boxes that *must* be clicked away in order to do *anything* further.
Web browsers have historically been extremely bad about this. Oh, I can't load the page you're looking for because I can't reach the DNS server, not that you know what that means. (Modern browsers use a non-modal error page for this, but just a few years ago it was a modal dialog.) Oh, no, if you send your search terms to AltaVista _unencrypted_, some evil villian might be able to read them! Are you really sure you want to do this? (There's no excuse for this message ever being displayed at all, modally or otherwise. It's pure unmitigated superfluous information overload.) Oh, say, the site you're visiting uses encryption, did you know that? (Ditto with the last one.) Oh, now you're visiting a site that _doesn't_ use encryption. (Ibid.) Ack, the certificate from _this_ https site expires in 2012, but your computer clock thinks it's 2069, probably because your CMOS battery is dead, and I can't be bothered to check a publicly available time source to determine whether this is even close to right. (This is _almost_ forgivable, but it is without question the leading cause of expired certificate warnings, and the whole idea of an expired certificate is completely incomprehensible to five nines of all users anyway.)
But it isn't _just_ web browsers. LOTS of software regularly hits the user in the face with needless modal dialog boxes containing technical information that the user cannot be expected to understand, and the only thing to do is click it away.
Any technical error information of this kind should *always* be appended to a logfile, so that it's accessible later; not doing so is bad programming. Also displaying it for the user to see is okay, and in some cases necessary, but an application-modal dialog is absolutely the WRONG way to do so.
> Now we need a new word for what "internet" used to mean.
We already have such terminology. Depending on exactly what you're getting at you can say things like "connectivity", "TCP/IP", "network infrastructure", or even something as direct as "Can you reach the router one hop directly upstream from you, on the other end of your T1 line?"
But, of course, end users don't think in such precise terms. They say "internet" and mean, you know, whatever it was they were trying to do just now, which may or may not actually involve the internet at all. Having a new word that is supposed to mean a certain thing won't change this; they'll misuse the new word, if they use it at all, just like the old words.
> I still can't get him to casually "cauliflower-Q" an app... You see why I keep buying him Macs tho? lol
Actually, I'd have been tempted to set him up with a command-line-only system (VMS maybe, or BSD) and manuals, just for a year or two. Nothing prepares a user to learn keyboard shortcuts like having used a CLI in the past.
Also...
> He just clicks the little X in the window and thinks that app is closed
I simply can't resist pointing out that on _anything_ other than a Mac, the app would indeed exit when the last window is closed. MS Windows, KDE, Gnome, DECWindows Motif, you name it, they all do what the user expects in this regard. The Mac behavior (on this particular issue) is bizarre and counterintuitive.
> you don't ask something stupid like, "is the printer on?" because it makes the person
> feel stupid. You should ask them to turn it off then on again, and at that point they
At that point they will notice it was not turned on in the first place and... feel stupid.
You can also have them check the light on the printer, which has the added bonus of providing additional information. Solid green usually means the printer is waiting for you to print something. Blinking green usually means it's getting ready to print, and you should be patient. (This can take a while, especially for complex PDFs.) Other colors mean there's a problem physically with the printer (no paper, paper jam, out of toner, something; the details vary depending on the printer). No light generally means the user is going to feel stupid, although in theory it can potentially also indicate a problem with the power bar or outlet that the printer is plugged into.
Actually, though, the first thing I have them check is that there's paper in the drawer. If you want to try to soften this, I suppose you could have them take the paper out and put it back, or check that there are at least 20 sheets, but none of that is going to prevent them from feeling stupid if they were trying to print without paper.
> First of all, instead of watching the screen and listening to what I
> was telling him, he was taking notes. Detailed notes.
This is fairly common, and is one of the main reasons the introductory computer courses I teach at the public library always come with detailed handouts. The students often come with notepads and pencils. I tell them at the very beginning (right after I ask them all whether they have a computer at home) that the handout contains the same information we're going to cover in the class. I usually make a joke out of it, along the lines of "I know none of you will need this, because you have perfect memories, but just in case you want to review..." This calls extra attention to the fact, which I've already stated, that the handouts contain the same information we're going to cover in the class. I do this because, yeah, otherwise some of them would try to take notes instead of paying attention.
> The GP suspected a virus before he suspected an upside-down mouse because he was giving some benefit of doubt;
No, he suspected a virus before he suspected an upside-down mouse because he has roughly the same level of intelligence as his parents, who were having the problem, and that's being charitable.
> It's not like the proper orientation of a mouse is some kind of rare obscure
> knowledge that only the technically inclined could hope to understand.
Neither is restarting the computer, but it solves more than half of all computer problems. If you work with end users for a few minutes, you learn to check the obvious stuff first. If something won't print, the first things you have them check are that the printer has paper in it and that the light on the printer is green (not amber or red). If the screen is black, you have them check that the monitor is turned on. This isn't rocket science.
Going straight to "it must be a virus" an ID ten T error, period.
> I got an error on my screen
> What message text was displayed?
> I don't know, I clicked it away
Yeah, I've developed a standard line for that.
"In order to help you, I'm going to need the exact words of the error message, especially any technical-sounding parts that you didn't understand. Those are the parts that tell me what the problem is."
This only works with people who believe that they don't know much about computers and that you do. Fortunately, in my position (the computer guy at a small public library) this is almost always the case, so it works like a charm. Next time they see the message they write it down verbatim and bring it to me, or, even better, they come get me while it's still on the screen. (Of course they then forget about this and go back to "We had an error message earlier" the next time there's a problem, so I have to use my standard line repeatedly. But if I use it repeatedly it works repeatedly.)
If you're in a corporate server-admin situation or something and have to support users who believe they know more about their computers than you do, my line will probably not work. I guess in that case you might have to resort to BOFH tactics or something. ("Oh, didn't you get the email? Your section of the network is offline while the firewall inspector checks everything out. I'll send you another email when it's running again. The firewall inspection shouldn't take more than a couple of days, so hopefully you'll be back online in time to get a few hours of work done before the state auditor comes to do the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance check...")