When did kids *not* regard their elders as "clueless, hostile, and incompetent" - and when did their elders not feel likewise about them? Never.
Wrong. Not too many years ago (late 1800s), children grew up under the tutelage of their parents, and for the most part did not think their elders were "clueless".
The concept of "clueless" elders is a thouroghly modern idea, propogated by an edutainment industry devoted to selling Mars bars to kids. Watch Saturday morning cartoons and the commercials in between. Adults are regularly presented as boobs, idiots, and morons, while the kids are all beautiful people doing exciting things.
Most cultures all over the world have a tradition of respecting their elders. It is only a modern America that automatically thinks they are clueless.
If you're lucky enough to have a grandparent alive, do yourself a favor and spend a day with them. You'll be amazed at how much they DO know.
I've heard that this driving thing is pretty cool, and everybody agrees that a car is neccessary. Which car should I buy?
Not to be persnickity, but what constitutes a good laptop under $1000? Well, it depends on what you do! Amazingly enough...
For example, my main axe is a ThinkPad 760ED. It's about 5-6 years old, a P-133 with 48MB RAM, 4xCD, 12" 1024x768 TFT. Is it a kick-butt machine? Well, no... It runs Windowmaker, Emacs and Netscape 4.74 on FreeBSD 4 pretty good, though, and that covers everything I need a laptop to do.
When it was new, it was a $6K machine, now it goes for $150 or so on Ebay. It makes it a pretty good laptop for throw-away purposes (for example, if you're particularly hard on your laptops).
For others, Firewire, USB, etc may be important. You may need massive speed -- I dunno. However, if you don't spend a lot of time on the road, or need to take your machine with you when you go home, your laptop should generally be a generation or two behind your desktop as a general rule. Computers depreciate quickly, and laptops are fragile. You don't want a $4000 toy that spews sparks 2 days out of warranty. (at least, I don't -- others are different)
Wow, you missed the point entirely. They just keep whizzing over your head, huh?
Sacrificing *your* freedom and *your* liberty for *your* children is fine. However, you cross the line when you -- through support of politicians and/or legislation -- that remove somebody else's freedoms or liberty for unspecified and unknown children is wrong.
It is fundamentally the same as restricting the freedoms and liberty of blacks for the sake of white people.
No, I do not have children -- thank goodness. I'm not married yet. I do plan to have children, and will provide a good, moral, healthy home and family for them.
Ye gods, anytime someone claims to do something "For the children", you know we're in trouble.
Look, a child-worshipping culture is just as bad as one that worships nobility. You teach children, you educate children, you do not sacrifice freedom or liberty for children.
The celebrities were furious and said they had been misled. "I was approached to participate in a video which would be released to schools and young people to advise them on the dangers of the Internet and its misuse by pedophiles," Mr. Rapson told Radio 4. "We had to use gobbledygook language. They said that unless you used some of their terminology, young people wouldn't take it as credible."
An exemplary quote. In other words, Mr. Rapson, in a fit of "for the children", read something he did not understand or know anything about. The fact that he read it, no questions, based entirely on the claim that it was "for the children" ought to prove the satirist's case.
I'm not sure I understand -- who provides this "grid"? Are they built and maintained by IBM around the world? I don't think IBM would be thrilled to discover that Compaq is using the IBM grid to advance Compaq's bottom line. I like IBM, don't get me wrong -- but I doubt they're such humanitarians.
Is the "grid" made up of PCs on the Internet? First, most of those PCs are on dial-up connections, making things very complicated (and the PCs themselves not very useful). Second, who compensates the people who own the PCs? Is it strictly voluntary, like SETI@home? If so, how will anti-nuke activists prevent Los Alamos from running simulation calculations on their PowerMac?
I think the idea is fantastic, but I'd like a few more details..
You use a Sun because you want an architecture that will scale smoothly up to 64-way (I *guarantee* that will be faster than any single x86
machine).
Or if you want a machine that was designed and built by engineers, not by a 14-year-old in his basement (or the Dell equivalent thereof).
I'm not a huge fan of Solaris, but Sun hardware is good stuff. I think SGI hardware is better stuff, or used to be before SGI decided it would be fun to implode.
You buy Sun if you want scalability and reliability. You buy Intel if money is an issue.
Fair enough -- but if procmail is working as advertised and you route the data to the bit bucket, I don't see how you'd know how much you get in spam/forwarded viruses.
Luckily for me, my ISP is one of the best on the planet (Netdoor), and they've filtered out Sircam mail at their mail server. I got a couple of the mails on the first day in the wild, I've never seen another since. Didn't even have to touch my procmail files.
What First Amendment rights are lost by regulating protocols? Are your freedoms infringed by regulating which side of the road you drive on?
Wow, a stunning display of ignorance. The FCC regulations on radio and TV aren't just about protocols -- they dictate what they can and can't say, when they say it, whether a rebuttul should get equal time, and other blatently anti-First amendment restrictions. You, sir, are a fool.
But A Pattern Language is a good book for thinking in terms of "greater than the sum of the parts". It talks in terms of architecture, but it can apply in multiple fields. It's a tough one to slog through, and definitely not the first book for a programmer-in-training, but good to round off the top of that sharp CS peak you might get from a daily dose of Knuth.
Another, very very important book to add (and all geeks and nerds should buy and read) is Strunk & White's Elements of Style. Imperitive to learning how to write clearly and concisely, which is terribly important when it comes time to document.
Radio is very strictly regulated byt governmant agencies, as is telephony, television, satellite and
wireless (in almost every band.)
Hmm... at the cost of the First amendment, it might be added. Those profiteers you so despise may restrict what you see and/or say, but so will a Government, only the Government can back up their demands with force of arms, whereas those profiteers must sell you on taking away your libert (which, unfortunately, is quite easy to do. People will trade freedom for security at the drop of a hat. The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance, as the man said.)
All good points, but there are restrictions now on the "free" 'Net... why do you assume there will be on a commercial 'Net? Especially if the opportunity is now there for a group of like-minded people to buy bandwidth that allow all these things to occur, at the cost of $X/month for the network charges.
This isn't available now on the "free" 'Net, though it would be a pretty good idea.
Who's going to control it, assuming it's controlled? And more importantly... are their interests compatible with yours or mine?
Good question -- it's applicable _now_ to the "free" 'Net. Who controls it? ICANN? Network Solutions? The Almighty Government? Who knows? And more importantly, are these mystery people's interests compatible with yours or mine? Who can tell?
Why not a commercial Net? I'll give a few reasons why it might be desirable, and I encourage others to give reasons why it isn't desirable ("Corporations suck" isn't a reason).
The most interesting point made in the article is the "intelligent switches" that prioritize traffic. This can be a good thing -- no more bandwidth clogging Napter/Gnutella/KaZaA users preventing "important" traffic from getting through.
A "closed" Net (as opposed to the "open" Net that we have now) may be more resilient to hackers, crackers, and creeps who find it funny to DoS Yahoo. If a private network operator (here I'm assuming that the commercial Net won't be controlled by single interest, vis. AOL/TimeWarner/Qwest/WorldCom/Sprint/GlofaxMegatho rp, which is probably a stupid assumption) has to guarantee bandwidth for paying customers, they will be very interested in keeping such traffic under scrutiny and out of their network (and certainly keep it from passing into another network)
It helps with the Ghostbusters problem (i.e. "Who ya gonna call?"), if not totally eliminate it. You can yell and scream at UUNet all you want, but unless you're an SLA-customer, you're SOL
It may hasten the Holy Grail -- video on demand. I'm almost completely for it for just that reason...
It can encourage open protocols (if the commercial Nets can't speak with each other, they become islands) -- and it may keep a single entity (MS) from dictating what the network will carry through outside influence (control of the majority of OSes)
It's not perfect, and I can think of a few reasons where the above would not be true -- but there are good reasons to move the Net this direction. I'd be interested to see reasons why it wouldn't be good.
The other side is I have seen what happened to poor netscape. If netscape didn't die off I bet the internet would be a little bit different then
today. The internets innovation accerlated when netscape was in control. Netscape was develoiping its own api's and way of internet centric
programming.
Bad choice there -- If you'll recall the mid-90s, Netscape was running roughshod over every browser available at the time. Remember Netscape-specific tags? <BLINK> anyone?
Netscape was just as bad (if not worse) than Microsoft. When MS got their head and ass wired together and bought the Spyglass browser and turned it into IE, they were competing with Netscape. Netscape decided to implode through insane management decisions and unmaintainable growth, and got trounced technically. Boo hoo.
It was not that rascally Bill Gates who destroyed Netscape -- they managed quite nicely on their own, and the Open Standards of the Web were saved (for the moment). Now if Microsoft does the same thing, then they'll be in the wrong.
That's why microlending strategies work so well - people can borrow very small quantities of money to kick-start their business and build up
the microeconomy.
You've hit on it -- check out the Grameen Bank. I believe it started in Bangledesh, and has done more for the Bangledeshi people than truckloads of foriegn aid.
Re: Marshall Plan, a somewhat decent example is _The Reconstruction of Western Europe_ by Alan Milward. He doesn't cover what *I* think is a reason (my earlier statement of a transfer of weath to industrialists -- that's my own theory), but he does argue that the Marshall Plan had a minimal effect. (didn't find the book at Amazon -- you may have to do some serious searching for it. I believe it was published in 1980? Early eighties, anyway).
Finally, you were in Somalia? Ye gods... In P.J. O'Rourke's book _All the Trouble in the World_, P.J. quoted a US serviceman who said, "Somalia? Give 'em better guns and training and seal the border". Somalia is screwed up on so many levels, I doubt anybody can point to one thing and cry "Culprit!". But I can imagine that the people were desperate for political and economic stability -- it's the one thing that government's good for: providing for a defense of a country's way of life and aiding a stable currency.
Granted, there is a certain degree of responsibility that we (meaning non-African countries) have because of what we did in the past. However, the problems Africa has now are caused largely by Africans -- poking our well-fed fingers into the pie won't help much, especially big block cash grants from places like the IMF or World Bank. Most of that money comes from countries like the US, and most of that money goes right back to the US in the form of consulting fees and equipment purchases and the like.
Your example of WWII is particularly good, because the Marshall Plan did exactly what the IMF/WorldBank does now -- transfer of wealth from taxpayers to $COUNTRY, back to US, into the pockets of industrialists and war profitteers. Granted, Europe got some buildings and highways rebuilt, but by and large it was a scheme to help those with government connections get a chunk of cash.
In addition, I'm unwilling to say that a Mbundu tribesman who hunts and/or grows food, lives in harmonic balance with the land is "uncivilized", or even "poor". They may only make $15/year, but their needs are met. What gives us the right to meddle with their lives?
If you give an African a hand-out, you're doing nothing for them other than teaching them to expect hand-outs...
Why is it we assume that Africans can't do these things themselves? Oh, I know, they're poor and black -- what unsubtle arrogance the helpful-left have.
Sounds to me that "humanitarian aid" is a way for "progressives" to be racists...
...and equally true is that Windows is (and has) a poorly designed interface. It's not the people using Windows that are stupid, it's the way Windows is designed.
I dunno -- I have a telnet app on my Palm that I can use to run emacs. Seems to me that's a real app... haven't connected to an Oracle instance, but I've managed a PostgreSQL DB with it.
The telnet app is only a double-handful of K too. However, trying to run emacs with a stylus is... well, pretty stupid.
You are arguing from the specific (you) to the general (everybody else). What you find stupid may not, in fact, be stupid at all.
However, my point still stands: a philosopher or Russian prof would not call those who don't understand their field of expertise stupid. You did.
While people drive cars everyday, they don't interact with the car beyond a simple interface -- an interface that they took classes to learn and years to perfect. Some secretary who can type 90 words a minute, who's had a computer with a mouse and icons and such foisted on her only sees the thing as an impediment to her abilities. To her, it is simply a fancier typewriter, albeit one that randomly erases work she's done when the app crashes, and has a jillion options she barely understands (and will never use) that are constantly hyped by a ridiculous talking paperclip.
Just once, I'd like to see a comp-sci nerd, instead of "Users are dumb", say "We don't program for our users, therefore we are poor programmers".
If you don't know what post-modern rationalism is, do philosophers assume you are dumb? Or do they attempt to explain it?
If you don't know Russian, do Russian professors mock you, or do they try to convince you to take a Russian class?
Computer nerds are the last bastion of unadulterated bigotry, doing whatever they can to encourage a new digital apartheid and engaging in the worst forms of de-humanization rhetoric.
I keep remembering the days back in the 80's when people had comodore 64s and 386s running DOS. No one ever complained about having to
type all the commands and edit.bat files etc (except MAC users:O). It was just when MS put out Windows and AOL came around that this
new breed of computer users came about. It was then that the term "computer illiterate" was coined.
Ahh, yes. The "good-old-days", when RAM was $500/KB, computers were hulking beasts, and nobody owned them. I'm sorry, I don't want to go back to that time. You can if you want -- I'll keep my whizzo hardware, thanks.
They are marketing tacticts used by companies to sell
computers. If Suzan Smith wanted to send e-mail and surf the net and all that was available to her was UNIX she would still buy that computer
and she wouldn't complain about it being too hard to use because it realy isn't too hard.
A command line can be entirely as easy to use as a GUI! You have fallen for the biggest lie ever created in the computer industry -- "If's it's got windows, a mouse, and buttons, it's easy to use!" This is a fundamental blockage in the brains of the *nix community, and until they clear it out, *nixes will forever be relegated to the nerd ghetto.
It isn't windows and mouses and buttons that make a computer easy to use; it's the careful, reasoned, well-thought-out interface between man and machine, the tasks the man wants the machine to do, and the facilitation of those tasks.
There are a few hard-and-fast rules (Read Tog for more on that), but mostly it's about designing for people, not machines. A fundamental example: the computer's filesystem is built heirarchal, and that works for a computer. It thinks that way. Humans (by which I mean non-programmers) don't think that way. They think in amorphous, nebulous, loosely grouped items that apply to projects, tasks, or goals.
We've built the computer to act like a file cabinet, forgetting that a file cabinet is a poor solution to a problem, not the best that could be done with the available technology. Rather than make the computer a *better* file cabinet, we've slavishly copied it, and as a result, we have computers that are hard to use on the most basic level: the file manager.
The more "easy" you make computers to the more ignorant the users will be and the more "harder" using a computer will seem. Because the
more about a computer you hide the more complex a computer seems to it's user.
That is patently ridiculous. All complicated devices become simpler over time -- we don't become dumber, we become more productive with fewer resources and do things faster than before. You see the computer as an end in itself, whereas most people see it as a time-saving device (a better, faster typewriter, basically) and think no further than that. I don't accuse you, neccessarily, it's natural for a computer professional to dispair over the sad state of the users. It's probably a similar feeling your mechanic might have if you are one of those people who go 4-5K miles between oil changes -- "What's wrong with him? Doesn't he know he's KILLING his car?!?"
Not neccessarily. An ISP can provide a fast wireless connection on the cheap to a fat pipe that they pay for. For example, an ISP buys a DS3 pipe and provides 802.11b access at $25-35 month. Now they can be as big as a DSL provider (speed wise), without the same infrastructure cost.
On a smaller scale, a T1 shared among 30-80 homes is pretty cheap, and thus a small-town in the boondocks can allow faster internet connections without waiting for Ma Bell to truck DSL out there.
A lot -- it's a really weenie way of coming up with a story. I love(d) ST:Voyager, because what else could be better? True "going where no one has gone before"! Bizarre space-born phenomena! Aliens with weird heads and perky breasts! How intrinsically easy and interesting to write for!
And what do we get? Well, mostly the above, but Voyager had it's share of "holodeck" episodes, which made me gibbering mad. I mean, jeez louise, they're in the Delta quadrant! And you're gonna give me an entire "Captain Proton" episode???
ST:TNG used a couple of crutches -- holodeck episodes and Data episodes. The Data ones weren't too bad, but an entire hour going on and on about Data's quest for humanity was just too much. Leave that for asides and sub-plots.
The new Bakula ST should be good -- no holodeck, for starters... A sort-of Horatio-Hornblower-in-space. And, thank God, the Klingons will be enemies of the Federation again, and also show them at the height of the Empire! W00t!
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Not too many years ago (late 1800s), children grew up under the tutelage of their parents, and for the most part did not think their elders were "clueless".
The concept of "clueless" elders is a thouroghly modern idea, propogated by an edutainment industry devoted to selling Mars bars to kids. Watch Saturday morning cartoons and the commercials in between. Adults are regularly presented as boobs, idiots, and morons, while the kids are all beautiful people doing exciting things.
Most cultures all over the world have a tradition of respecting their elders. It is only a modern America that automatically thinks they are clueless.
If you're lucky enough to have a grandparent alive, do yourself a favor and spend a day with them. You'll be amazed at how much they DO know.
I've heard that this driving thing is pretty cool, and everybody agrees that a car is neccessary. Which car should I buy?
Not to be persnickity, but what constitutes a good laptop under $1000? Well, it depends on what you do! Amazingly enough...
For example, my main axe is a ThinkPad 760ED. It's about 5-6 years old, a P-133 with 48MB RAM, 4xCD, 12" 1024x768 TFT. Is it a kick-butt machine? Well, no... It runs Windowmaker, Emacs and Netscape 4.74 on FreeBSD 4 pretty good, though, and that covers everything I need a laptop to do.
When it was new, it was a $6K machine, now it goes for $150 or so on Ebay. It makes it a pretty good laptop for throw-away purposes (for example, if you're particularly hard on your laptops).
For others, Firewire, USB, etc may be important. You may need massive speed -- I dunno. However, if you don't spend a lot of time on the road, or need to take your machine with you when you go home, your laptop should generally be a generation or two behind your desktop as a general rule. Computers depreciate quickly, and laptops are fragile. You don't want a $4000 toy that spews sparks 2 days out of warranty. (at least, I don't -- others are different)
Wow, you missed the point entirely. They just keep whizzing over your head, huh?
Sacrificing *your* freedom and *your* liberty for *your* children is fine. However, you cross the line when you -- through support of politicians and/or legislation -- that remove somebody else's freedoms or liberty for unspecified and unknown children is wrong.
It is fundamentally the same as restricting the freedoms and liberty of blacks for the sake of white people.
No, I do not have children -- thank goodness. I'm not married yet. I do plan to have children, and will provide a good, moral, healthy home and family for them.
Ye gods, anytime someone claims to do something "For the children", you know we're in trouble.
Look, a child-worshipping culture is just as bad as one that worships nobility. You teach children, you educate children, you do not sacrifice freedom or liberty for children.
An exemplary quote. In other words, Mr. Rapson, in a fit of "for the children", read something he did not understand or know anything about. The fact that he read it, no questions, based entirely on the claim that it was "for the children" ought to prove the satirist's case.
I'm not sure I understand -- who provides this "grid"? Are they built and maintained by IBM around the world? I don't think IBM would be thrilled to discover that Compaq is using the IBM grid to advance Compaq's bottom line. I like IBM, don't get me wrong -- but I doubt they're such humanitarians.
Is the "grid" made up of PCs on the Internet? First, most of those PCs are on dial-up connections, making things very complicated (and the PCs themselves not very useful). Second, who compensates the people who own the PCs? Is it strictly voluntary, like SETI@home? If so, how will anti-nuke activists prevent Los Alamos from running simulation calculations on their PowerMac?
I think the idea is fantastic, but I'd like a few more details..
Or if you want a machine that was designed and built by engineers, not by a 14-year-old in his basement (or the Dell equivalent thereof).
I'm not a huge fan of Solaris, but Sun hardware is good stuff. I think SGI hardware is better stuff, or used to be before SGI decided it would be fun to implode.
You buy Sun if you want scalability and reliability. You buy Intel if money is an issue.
Who checks logfiles? :)
You're absolutely right... didn't think about that.
Fair enough -- but if procmail is working as advertised and you route the data to the bit bucket, I don't see how you'd know how much you get in spam/forwarded viruses.
Luckily for me, my ISP is one of the best on the planet (Netdoor), and they've filtered out Sircam mail at their mail server. I got a couple of the mails on the first day in the wild, I've never seen another since. Didn't even have to touch my procmail files.
Wow, a stunning display of ignorance. The FCC regulations on radio and TV aren't just about protocols -- they dictate what they can and can't say, when they say it, whether a rebuttul should get equal time, and other blatently anti-First amendment restrictions. You, sir, are a fool.
You oughta be glad you don't get paid for your procmail skills.
But A Pattern Language is a good book for thinking in terms of "greater than the sum of the parts". It talks in terms of architecture, but it can apply in multiple fields. It's a tough one to slog through, and definitely not the first book for a programmer-in-training, but good to round off the top of that sharp CS peak you might get from a daily dose of Knuth.
Another, very very important book to add (and all geeks and nerds should buy and read) is Strunk & White's Elements of Style. Imperitive to learning how to write clearly and concisely, which is terribly important when it comes time to document.
Hmm... at the cost of the First amendment, it might be added. Those profiteers you so despise may restrict what you see and/or say, but so will a Government, only the Government can back up their demands with force of arms, whereas those profiteers must sell you on taking away your libert (which, unfortunately, is quite easy to do. People will trade freedom for security at the drop of a hat. The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance, as the man said.)
All good points, but there are restrictions now on the "free" 'Net... why do you assume there will be on a commercial 'Net? Especially if the opportunity is now there for a group of like-minded people to buy bandwidth that allow all these things to occur, at the cost of $X/month for the network charges.
This isn't available now on the "free" 'Net, though it would be a pretty good idea.
Who's going to control it, assuming it's controlled? And more importantly... are their interests compatible with yours or mine?
Good question -- it's applicable _now_ to the "free" 'Net. Who controls it? ICANN? Network Solutions? The Almighty Government? Who knows? And more importantly, are these mystery people's interests compatible with yours or mine? Who can tell?
Why not a commercial Net? I'll give a few reasons why it might be desirable, and I encourage others to give reasons why it isn't desirable ("Corporations suck" isn't a reason).
It's not perfect, and I can think of a few reasons where the above would not be true -- but there are good reasons to move the Net this direction. I'd be interested to see reasons why it wouldn't be good.
Bad choice there -- If you'll recall the mid-90s, Netscape was running roughshod over every browser available at the time. Remember Netscape-specific tags? <BLINK> anyone?
Netscape was just as bad (if not worse) than Microsoft. When MS got their head and ass wired together and bought the Spyglass browser and turned it into IE, they were competing with Netscape. Netscape decided to implode through insane management decisions and unmaintainable growth, and got trounced technically. Boo hoo. It was not that rascally Bill Gates who destroyed Netscape -- they managed quite nicely on their own, and the Open Standards of the Web were saved (for the moment). Now if Microsoft does the same thing, then they'll be in the wrong.
You've hit on it -- check out the Grameen Bank. I believe it started in Bangledesh, and has done more for the Bangledeshi people than truckloads of foriegn aid.
Re: Marshall Plan, a somewhat decent example is _The Reconstruction of Western Europe_ by Alan Milward. He doesn't cover what *I* think is a reason (my earlier statement of a transfer of weath to industrialists -- that's my own theory), but he does argue that the Marshall Plan had a minimal effect. (didn't find the book at Amazon -- you may have to do some serious searching for it. I believe it was published in 1980? Early eighties, anyway).
Finally, you were in Somalia? Ye gods... In P.J. O'Rourke's book _All the Trouble in the World_, P.J. quoted a US serviceman who said, "Somalia? Give 'em better guns and training and seal the border". Somalia is screwed up on so many levels, I doubt anybody can point to one thing and cry "Culprit!". But I can imagine that the people were desperate for political and economic stability -- it's the one thing that government's good for: providing for a defense of a country's way of life and aiding a stable currency.
Granted, there is a certain degree of responsibility that we (meaning non-African countries) have because of what we did in the past. However, the problems Africa has now are caused largely by Africans -- poking our well-fed fingers into the pie won't help much, especially big block cash grants from places like the IMF or World Bank. Most of that money comes from countries like the US, and most of that money goes right back to the US in the form of consulting fees and equipment purchases and the like.
Your example of WWII is particularly good, because the Marshall Plan did exactly what the IMF/WorldBank does now -- transfer of wealth from taxpayers to $COUNTRY, back to US, into the pockets of industrialists and war profitteers. Granted, Europe got some buildings and highways rebuilt, but by and large it was a scheme to help those with government connections get a chunk of cash.
In addition, I'm unwilling to say that a Mbundu tribesman who hunts and/or grows food, lives in harmonic balance with the land is "uncivilized", or even "poor". They may only make $15/year, but their needs are met. What gives us the right to meddle with their lives?
If you give an African a hand-out, you're doing nothing for them other than teaching them to expect hand-outs...
Why is it we assume that Africans can't do these things themselves? Oh, I know, they're poor and black -- what unsubtle arrogance the helpful-left have.
Sounds to me that "humanitarian aid" is a way for "progressives" to be racists...
...and equally true is that Windows is (and has) a poorly designed interface. It's not the people using Windows that are stupid, it's the way Windows is designed.
I dunno -- I have a telnet app on my Palm that I can use to run emacs. Seems to me that's a real app... haven't connected to an Oracle instance, but I've managed a PostgreSQL DB with it.
The telnet app is only a double-handful of K too. However, trying to run emacs with a stylus is... well, pretty stupid.
You are arguing from the specific (you) to the general (everybody else). What you find stupid may not, in fact, be stupid at all.
However, my point still stands: a philosopher or Russian prof would not call those who don't understand their field of expertise stupid. You did.
While people drive cars everyday, they don't interact with the car beyond a simple interface -- an interface that they took classes to learn and years to perfect. Some secretary who can type 90 words a minute, who's had a computer with a mouse and icons and such foisted on her only sees the thing as an impediment to her abilities. To her, it is simply a fancier typewriter, albeit one that randomly erases work she's done when the app crashes, and has a jillion options she barely understands (and will never use) that are constantly hyped by a ridiculous talking paperclip.
Just once, I'd like to see a comp-sci nerd, instead of "Users are dumb", say "We don't program for our users, therefore we are poor programmers".
Interesting attitude...
If you don't know what post-modern rationalism is, do philosophers assume you are dumb? Or do they attempt to explain it?
If you don't know Russian, do Russian professors mock you, or do they try to convince you to take a Russian class?
Computer nerds are the last bastion of unadulterated bigotry, doing whatever they can to encourage a new digital apartheid and engaging in the worst forms of de-humanization rhetoric.
Ahh, yes. The "good-old-days", when RAM was $500/KB, computers were hulking beasts, and nobody owned them. I'm sorry, I don't want to go back to that time. You can if you want -- I'll keep my whizzo hardware, thanks.
They are marketing tacticts used by companies to sell computers. If Suzan Smith wanted to send e-mail and surf the net and all that was available to her was UNIX she would still buy that computer and she wouldn't complain about it being too hard to use because it realy isn't too hard.
A command line can be entirely as easy to use as a GUI! You have fallen for the biggest lie ever created in the computer industry -- "If's it's got windows, a mouse, and buttons, it's easy to use!" This is a fundamental blockage in the brains of the *nix community, and until they clear it out, *nixes will forever be relegated to the nerd ghetto.
It isn't windows and mouses and buttons that make a computer easy to use; it's the careful, reasoned, well-thought-out interface between man and machine, the tasks the man wants the machine to do, and the facilitation of those tasks.
There are a few hard-and-fast rules (Read Tog for more on that), but mostly it's about designing for people, not machines. A fundamental example: the computer's filesystem is built heirarchal, and that works for a computer. It thinks that way. Humans (by which I mean non-programmers) don't think that way. They think in amorphous, nebulous, loosely grouped items that apply to projects, tasks, or goals.
We've built the computer to act like a file cabinet, forgetting that a file cabinet is a poor solution to a problem, not the best that could be done with the available technology. Rather than make the computer a *better* file cabinet, we've slavishly copied it, and as a result, we have computers that are hard to use on the most basic level: the file manager.
The more "easy" you make computers to the more ignorant the users will be and the more "harder" using a computer will seem. Because the more about a computer you hide the more complex a computer seems to it's user.
That is patently ridiculous. All complicated devices become simpler over time -- we don't become dumber, we become more productive with fewer resources and do things faster than before. You see the computer as an end in itself, whereas most people see it as a time-saving device (a better, faster typewriter, basically) and think no further than that. I don't accuse you, neccessarily, it's natural for a computer professional to dispair over the sad state of the users. It's probably a similar feeling your mechanic might have if you are one of those people who go 4-5K miles between oil changes -- "What's wrong with him? Doesn't he know he's KILLING his car?!?"
Not neccessarily. An ISP can provide a fast wireless connection on the cheap to a fat pipe that they pay for. For example, an ISP buys a DS3 pipe and provides 802.11b access at $25-35 month. Now they can be as big as a DSL provider (speed wise), without the same infrastructure cost.
On a smaller scale, a T1 shared among 30-80 homes is pretty cheap, and thus a small-town in the boondocks can allow faster internet connections without waiting for Ma Bell to truck DSL out there.
A lot -- it's a really weenie way of coming up with a story. I love(d) ST:Voyager, because what else could be better? True "going where no one has gone before"! Bizarre space-born phenomena! Aliens with weird heads and perky breasts! How intrinsically easy and interesting to write for!
And what do we get? Well, mostly the above, but Voyager had it's share of "holodeck" episodes, which made me gibbering mad. I mean, jeez louise, they're in the Delta quadrant! And you're gonna give me an entire "Captain Proton" episode???
ST:TNG used a couple of crutches -- holodeck episodes and Data episodes. The Data ones weren't too bad, but an entire hour going on and on about Data's quest for humanity was just too much. Leave that for asides and sub-plots.
The new Bakula ST should be good -- no holodeck, for starters... A sort-of Horatio-Hornblower-in-space. And, thank God, the Klingons will be enemies of the Federation again, and also show them at the height of the Empire! W00t!