It's more like the average user is out of touch with the general use of a computer or a (complex?) OS.
Maybe I'm out of touch with the world, but it looks like the average computer user lacks a basic formation that was very common some time ago.
I remember my first classes about PC's in 1991 (ms-dos and stuff) and along me, were housewives, children, etc. they didn't have much of a trouble to understand some basic concepts and some (complex?) tasks like wiriting their own batch scripts. Today the average user I find strugles in the edge of understanding the concept of filesystem tree or directories.
A lot of progress has been made on interfaces and abstractions, but these abstractions have taken away the oportunity for the average user to understand what I still believe are basic concepts in operating ANY computer with ANY operating system or at least the most common ones.
Linux as any other unixes just happens to have a design and work phylosophy very close to these basic concepts, Should every OS evolve into a MAC OS? into a windows? just because average joe can't read? or use his computer as if it was his home stereo or his toaster? I don't think so.
Acctually I humbly believe that rmdyer has a very important point in his/her position, programming is in fact something that should be done with some grade of skill, or at least knowledge, Java has its virtues, (from my point of view) in the conceptual realm, it has this all kind of little nice details of the object oriented paradigm, and somehow manages do detach itself from the implementations of the system it will be running on. This is good for a programmer, as many people have pointed here it allows the programmer to concentrate and move it's techniques from one platform to another with relative ease, but this comes at a heavy cost. For all people that just don't get it: JAVA IS SLOW,
Either in start up, execution or the price we pay in memory footprint, trying to deny it, is just foolish. JAVA is good at least in a sense, but the fact is that we (as developers) keep a somehow anoying tendence to look away from the truth. Java as many other development platforms of these days are far from good performing, Ghz cpus, cheap memory give us the funny illusion that things run well.
But if any of you has some memory of what computing was 10 years ago, it's easy to see where are we going., today we have 20 to 30 times faster systems sitting in our desktops, with them we can develop, debug and even test these modern programs. But as I see it, these programs are not 20 to 30 times much more functional as we might expect from these systems, maybe my memories does not want to let go such days, but running a clearly slow program in a modern day computer should be a shame it means it needs 20 to 30 of those 10 years ago computers power to do what? 1.7 times what we did on one singe computer of that time? these are magic numbers I pulled out of my underwear, and I have no solid base to state what I'm stating, but if you give it a little thinking you will know it's not so far away from truth.
Large scale aplications of course are difficult to do on low level paradigms, but we better be careful and do not lose sight of what is the systems we are developing are intended for, because we might end up just programming those 'hello world' programs in java or.net. I'd not use these unless the size of the system at hand would require so. New platforms allow for larger scale development, but it'd be foolish to think it can replace good old programming for every programming task.
And yes, regular Bussiness manager does know little about speed or bytecode performance, all they see is the result, either it works or it doesn't for their needs, but why should we let such ignorance drive the direction that the thechnologies take? If we have good tools for a task we should use them and not jump in a bloated bandwagon just because market forces dictate so.
Again sorry for the crappy english.
I am in favor of plain text as a form to achieve simple and wide compatibility, but we are also aware of the limitations of ASCII encoding at least in the non-english languages. I think a wider coding system could be fine, I'm not fond of UNICODE, but I may suggest EUC as a good alternative, I believe there have been revisions to EUC enough to cover most symbols in language use of modern days.
Either alternative can be broad enough meesa thinks.
I do run a DOS-Win3.11 at home, I have an XP-Win98-RH7.0 box too, but I used the DOS box only til 2 years ago when I bought the new PC, for all I find useful, DOS-Win3.11 covered all of my needs, except for new software that needed the new MS api's I still use it, not as much as bfore.... but really ppl, the software won't stop working the way it worked 10 years ago just because it got old or someone said it's dead, such beliefs seem to be driven by the always "improving" technologies that to be better do not seem to be more efficient (I mean they eat tons of times more computing power to do almost the same tasks).
I find DOS to be very deffective and flawed, but it had an incredible ease of use, and does not swallow the amounts of CPU that (barely improved funcionality) new software takes.
Of course I'm quite old fashioned and not very fond of change, I ven find the Win3x GUI to have better design than that of win9x or XP, so I might be worng.
DOS will only die for me the day I can't get hardware to run it on.
Yes, indeed hosting and bandwith are very different things, and yes, the infamous 'bandwidth hogs' get to pay the same as the regular joe that just want to read his e-mail or browse 3 or 4 pages a day, BUT THEN WHY WOULD THIS REGULAR JOE WANT TO PAY FOR A BROAD BAND SERVICE? to attain a burst of 100kb/s or so during scarce 5 minutes a day?
He might as well do, as you said in your example and get a dial up access.
When I went to hire the cablemodem line I got to pay some more than the dial up access I had before, but I did it expecting to take advantage of the service offered to me and the so called "permanent connection" feature to YES: be a hog and download everything I want ant the time of the day I want, if the cable companny does not want this to happen they might as well start a scheduled charging policy and charge me by: "well you get to pay $$$$bucks for access on this month from hour ##:## to ##:##".
So it's not like the 'bandwidth hogs' are taking away the bandwidth of the regular user, as unreasonable as it might sound the cable ISP should offer a service they are capable of maintaining to as many users they can support, not more.
I agree that the proof is not clear on Mr. Paine's article, nor we know his agenda (should he have one, almost everybody does), but I like the internet the way works today, there is room for improvement, but I'm not willing to give any room to make it worse.
Quite right about that, but when considering other nation's rights at play in regulating the internet, a frightening idea comes to my mind (along the US' history of foreign policy and their no intervention phylosophy) where embargos, and some more subtle ways of convinving "allied" nations to enforce equivalent regulations all over the "free world" could be our every day's bread.....yuck!
So it may prove wise to consider further on the consecuences of this on other countries than the US.
I most certainly used to buy ton's of CD's, since I got acces to p2p I buy less, but I still have the desire to buy CD's that I REALY want no matter if I already have downloaded those songs, if I like it I'll buy it. There is then the point that some off circulation works can only be found on the net (or at least easier), what am I supposed to do whith those copyrighted works? never listen to them? hell no
I'll download them and spread them like there is no tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm out of touch with the world, but it looks like the average computer user lacks a basic formation that was very common some time ago.
I remember my first classes about PC's in 1991 (ms-dos and stuff) and along me, were housewives, children, etc. they didn't have much of a trouble to understand some basic concepts and some (complex?) tasks like wiriting their own batch scripts. Today the average user I find strugles in the edge of understanding the concept of filesystem tree or directories.
A lot of progress has been made on interfaces and abstractions, but these abstractions have taken away the oportunity for the average user to understand what I still believe are basic concepts in operating ANY computer with ANY operating system or at least the most common ones.
Linux as any other unixes just happens to have a design and work phylosophy very close to these basic concepts, Should every OS evolve into a MAC OS? into a windows? just because average joe can't read? or use his computer as if it was his home stereo or his toaster? I don't think so.
Acctually I humbly believe that rmdyer has a very important point in his/her position, programming is in fact something that should be done with some grade of skill, or at least knowledge, Java has its virtues, (from my point of view) in the conceptual realm, it has this all kind of little nice details of the object oriented paradigm, and somehow manages do detach itself from the implementations of the system it will be running on. This is good for a programmer, as many people have pointed here it allows the programmer to concentrate and move it's techniques from one platform to another with relative ease, but this comes at a heavy cost. For all people that just don't get it: JAVA IS SLOW, Either in start up, execution or the price we pay in memory footprint, trying to deny it, is just foolish. JAVA is good at least in a sense, but the fact is that we (as developers) keep a somehow anoying tendence to look away from the truth. Java as many other development platforms of these days are far from good performing, Ghz cpus, cheap memory give us the funny illusion that things run well. But if any of you has some memory of what computing was 10 years ago, it's easy to see where are we going., today we have 20 to 30 times faster systems sitting in our desktops, with them we can develop, debug and even test these modern programs. But as I see it, these programs are not 20 to 30 times much more functional as we might expect from these systems, maybe my memories does not want to let go such days, but running a clearly slow program in a modern day computer should be a shame it means it needs 20 to 30 of those 10 years ago computers power to do what? 1.7 times what we did on one singe computer of that time? these are magic numbers I pulled out of my underwear, and I have no solid base to state what I'm stating, but if you give it a little thinking you will know it's not so far away from truth. Large scale aplications of course are difficult to do on low level paradigms, but we better be careful and do not lose sight of what is the systems we are developing are intended for, because we might end up just programming those 'hello world' programs in java or .net. I'd not use these unless the size of the system at hand would require so. New platforms allow for larger scale development, but it'd be foolish to think it can replace good old programming for every programming task.
And yes, regular Bussiness manager does know little about speed or bytecode performance, all they see is the result, either it works or it doesn't for their needs, but why should we let such ignorance drive the direction that the thechnologies take? If we have good tools for a task we should use them and not jump in a bloated bandwagon just because market forces dictate so.
Again sorry for the crappy english.
I am in favor of plain text as a form to achieve simple and wide compatibility, but we are also aware of the limitations of ASCII encoding at least in the non-english languages. I think a wider coding system could be fine, I'm not fond of UNICODE, but I may suggest EUC as a good alternative, I believe there have been revisions to EUC enough to cover most symbols in language use of modern days.
Either alternative can be broad enough meesa thinks.
I do run a DOS-Win3.11 at home, I have an XP-Win98-RH7.0 box too, but I used the DOS box only til 2 years ago when I bought the new PC, for all I find useful, DOS-Win3.11 covered all of my needs, except for new software that needed the new MS api's I still use it, not as much as bfore.... but really ppl, the software won't stop working the way it worked 10 years ago just because it got old or someone said it's dead, such beliefs seem to be driven by the always "improving" technologies that to be better do not seem to be more efficient (I mean they eat tons of times more computing power to do almost the same tasks). I find DOS to be very deffective and flawed, but it had an incredible ease of use, and does not swallow the amounts of CPU that (barely improved funcionality) new software takes. Of course I'm quite old fashioned and not very fond of change, I ven find the Win3x GUI to have better design than that of win9x or XP, so I might be worng. DOS will only die for me the day I can't get hardware to run it on.
Yes, indeed hosting and bandwith are very different things, and yes, the infamous 'bandwidth hogs' get to pay the same as the regular joe that just want to read his e-mail or browse 3 or 4 pages a day, BUT THEN WHY WOULD THIS REGULAR JOE WANT TO PAY FOR A BROAD BAND SERVICE? to attain a burst of 100kb/s or so during scarce 5 minutes a day?
He might as well do, as you said in your example and get a dial up access.
When I went to hire the cablemodem line I got to pay some more than the dial up access I had before, but I did it expecting to take advantage of the service offered to me and the so called "permanent connection" feature to YES: be a hog and download everything I want ant the time of the day I want, if the cable companny does not want this to happen they might as well start a scheduled charging policy and charge me by: "well you get to pay $$$$bucks for access on this month from hour ##:## to ##:##".
So it's not like the 'bandwidth hogs' are taking away the bandwidth of the regular user, as unreasonable as it might sound the cable ISP should offer a service they are capable of maintaining to as many users they can support, not more.
I agree that the proof is not clear on Mr. Paine's article, nor we know his agenda (should he have one, almost everybody does), but I like the internet the way works today, there is room for improvement, but I'm not willing to give any room to make it worse.
Quite right about that, but when considering other nation's rights at play in regulating the internet, a frightening idea comes to my mind (along the US' history of foreign policy and their no intervention phylosophy) where embargos, and some more subtle ways of convinving "allied" nations to enforce equivalent regulations all over the "free world" could be our every day's bread.....yuck!
So it may prove wise to consider further on the consecuences of this on other countries than the US.
I most certainly used to buy ton's of CD's, since I got acces to p2p I buy less, but I still have the desire to buy CD's that I REALY want no matter if I already have downloaded those songs, if I like it I'll buy it.
There is then the point that some off circulation works can only be found on the net (or at least easier), what am I supposed to do whith those copyrighted works? never listen to them? hell no
I'll download them and spread them like there is no tomorrow.