If it's a 6' 6" bloke weighing 300lbs I might think twice about being so appallingly patronising:) In general, I try to assume as little as possible. And the customers who know just enough to be really dangerous are the worst.
But none of that is an absolute distinction. If you type something totally ungrammatical, I may not understand you at all, or may misunderstand what you are trying to say. If I type something underspecified into Perl, it will try to guess what it means (the part of the compiler that does this is called the "guesser"), and sometimes it will get it wrong. Just like with a "natural" language. For example, if I call the 'split' function without specifying what is to be split, Perl will try to work out what to split from the context. If what it finds isn't of the right type, it will coerce the type and then try to split it. Sure, the process is deterministic, in theory, but you can quickly get into situations where it is very very hard to guess what Perl will do with one short line of code. So being good at "logic" doesn't necessarily help at all, whereas "intuition" might.
Nothing about the potential for natural language to be precise contradicts the fact that programming languages are non-natural.
I'd be interested to know exactly what the difference is between "natural" and "non-natural". Is the language people use to communicate on mobile phones natural, for example? Most modern languages have been "designed" in some way or another (English may be an exception, (mixing up English and French can be a criminal offence where I live, for example), and there is more to computer languages than what sort of binary they produce, or we'd all still be coding in assembler.
To take one obvious example, a good programmer uses meaningful variable and procedure names. Meaningful to whom? The compiler really doesn't care, so, if someone can write code that works with variables called VaR, vAR and VAr, what's the issue? The answer, of course, is that computer languages in any corporate setting are also a way of communicating between humans (programmers), and, as I said a while back, women are quite good at that aspect of the task.
a facility with natural language does with its lack of precision and clarity does not translate into the basis of a good programmer.
Ah, so someone who says
Just remember that [the computer] is trying to understand what you're saying, like any good listener does. [The computer] works pretty hard to keep up its end of the bargain. Just say what you mean, and [the computer] will usually get it.
is not going to get very far, and should have stuck to their original career of linguistics? Someone should tell Larry Wall, since the quote is from p5 of "Progamming Perl", 3E.;)
Natural language can be very precise - a fact on which our legal system depends - and last time I looked it was still impossible to demonstrate formally what most non-trivial programs do without running them - hardly a typical situation in the world of "hard" math. Programming has plenty of idioms, and there are plenty of arguments about style too - obfuscated code is bad, whether or not it can be shown to be formally equivalent to something readable, and usually even if it compiles better than the readable version.
In other words, I think you are making a false distinction.
My favourite "IT and gender" anecdote occurred shortly after we opened our cybercafe. My French colleague had just graduated in IT, and had a very... well, French... view of what women were for. One morning a platinum blonde dressed entirely in black walks through the door and asks what sort of computers we have. Colleague starts his "well the computers are those little boxes over there" speech, she says "no, what C compilers do you have available, and can I use telnet from here?" Sound of jaw hitting tiled floor... It turned out that she was studying IT in Paris. She pops in about once a year, and last time I saw her she was working for a bank in London. She says she has a lot of female colleagues there, but that there are very few women in French IT.
It is a well-established fact that women are generally better with (human) languages, and given that a lot of IT is not about advanced math but is about manipulating symbols you would therefore expect women to do rather well in those areas of IT. And of course a large part of any job and the main component of many support-based jobs is interpersonal skills, which is another area where women do well. In any case, the bell curves overlap a huge amount, so while your average woman may be slightly more or less gifted at some tasks than men, a lot of women will be better at the task than a lot of men, and vice versa.
I know plenty of women working in IT, and their spread along the competent-incompetent axis is pretty similar to the men I know. One of the best Un*x sys admins I know is a woman, who also happens to have a doctorate in math.
I'd suggest that the exodus, if it exists, has a lot more to do with issues such as working hours, and maybe with the limited novelty value of working with neanderthal male colleagues who can only rate to women on the basis of their genitals.
The focus on multiple cores arises from Moore's Law, which dictates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.
I don't think non-compliance with Moore's Law is a felony. It's an observation, not a statute. Moore's Law arises from the fact that transistor counts keep doubling, not the other way around.
Also, doubling the number of transistors in any way possible doesn't necessarily translate into double the power for any given application. In this case, multiple cores are good news for multi-threaded or forking server apps, but rather less interesting for a lot of desktop apps. Intel obviously has a vested interest in pushing ever larger die sizes, because it does large dies better than anyone else. Whether this will always be in the interests of the rest of the industry, let alone the end user, is less obvious.
And could it be, shock horror, that they ditched the Linux version because, gasp, it didn't sell very well, and that maybe this was because, swoon, Linux in 2001 wasn't that great a choice for running a multimedia system? If they had axed a top-selling product, there might be a story here. As it is, the story appears to be "there are some arguments in favour of using other operating systems". Which I suppose might count as news to some people here, but probably not to the world at large.
the A768i might be the thing for business users as it excels in the phone/messaging category
Because no other equipment competes for this niche? Or is it because obviously the only acceptable solution is a Linux solution, and if this is the only Linux option in the niche it's therefore what everyone should be using? I like Linux, use it almost exclusively, but I can't say I'd go for a Linux PDA or phone if, say, a Symbian alternative had better features.
It really isn't Word. I use it in our cybercafe, and we have endless compatibility problems, plus the delightful feature whereby saving an OO document as a.doc and loading it straight back into OO often adds spurious bulletpoints everywhere. The PDF exporter prints the footers in the middle of pages... As a way of opening the occasional Word document or typing a letter, it's fine, but anyone who says it's a drop-in replacement for Word is not using many of the Word features.
Wasn't it Linus who said that the open source model works better for OSs than for WPs?
I can't decide how ironic that post is intended to be, but what I'm getting from all the responses is that Linux for PPC is an aid to recycling old Macs, or maybe getting a cheap and small laptop, and that it has no pretensions of filling any mainstream niche. And why not (hey, I'm still using an Acorn for my DTP!), but I do wonder what this means for drivers, libraries and so on. Does, say, Xine work?
I have to say I'm also struggling to work out what niche Linux for OS X machines fills. If you want Linux, there's cheaper hardware to run it on, and I'd expect more of the exotic stuff to work properly. If you want a Mac experience, Linux probably isn't going to deliver. If you want un*x plus cuddly Mac interface, I thought that was the whole point of OS X....
Well, yes, but, by memory, it was a $500,000 project (tucked in the space between a few commercial payloads). If it went down after 3 days, I'm sure there would have been a few drunk electronic engineers in the student union, and maybe there might have been questions about funding the next shoebox-satellite, but it wasn't going to leave half a continent without telephones or punch a hole in the CIA's spy network, let alone kill any astronauts (which is where we came in).
I remember seeing a documentary about space technology about the time the USA and USSR linked up. Apparently much of the life support system in the Russian vehicles ran on a pin wheel like a kids music box. There was much mirth about this, but, despite or maybe because of my programming credentials, I far prefer the idea of fixing the mechanical version if my life depended on it.
Also, it takes a long time to get electronic components approved for use in space, which is why the stuff in satellites is usually way behind what sits on your average desk. The university I attended designed and launched a series of very cheap satellites, which, apparently, ran some of the most advanced computing equipment in orbit, simply because it didn't matter too much if it blew up after 3 days.
We have been running a cybercafe in France using LTSP for three years now. At one point we ran Windows 2000 Terminal Server over LTSP to see how users reacted.
The main complaint about LTSP is that Mozilla/OO doesn't let people do everything they want to do. They can't download exes from a chat site and install it. Some Word files don't open (my impression is that OO is going backwards in this respect). Right now, a CSS problem with Yahoo makes reading mail using Mozilla almost impossible (although Firefox works), and so on.
The real problems are actually quite infrequent, but, because it's not Windows, the users blame any problems due to the site they are using or their own unrealistic expectations on our system. I'm currently travelling, and tried a cybercafe in a London train station yesterday, and was amused to find that our system runs Flash better then theirs, for example, but most of our clients would never believe this.
Another issue is file access. We don't allow local floppy acces, so everything has to go via the server. USB keys are another source of frustration. Of course whether you would want people putting media into your Windows machines is another question entirely, but the users don't tend to see it tha way.
Finally, the system occasionally grinds to a halt because one user is running a badly behaved Java applet or something - Yahoo billiards is a typical example. We now have a biprocessor server, which helps, and if I'm in I renice the offending process, but it's still not ideal. Local apps would help, although it increases the spec of your terminals somewhat.
In the light of all this, we thought that W2K would be a highly popular move. But the general reaction was that it was more like linux than linux, because we tied down all the security settings. People still couldn't install exes, still couldn't dump files all over the place, still moaned when we didn't have the right version of the particular piece of software they wanted, and so on. The one thing that was a clear improvement was Word over OO, but on balance we decided to stick with Linux.
This has almost nothing to do with the elegance or otherwise of the OS and almost everything to do with the user base. Linux distros have got bigger, technically more complex, and, I would suggest, simpler to use, partly because of better GUIs and so on, but, mainly, because more stuff just works. Windows is, well, Windows, but if you want to get the digital camera in your shopping basket to work with your computer, it's about as easy as it gets, because there's a driver for it. My RISC OS machine was astoundingly simple to use, but since it just can't do most of what I need to do in 2004 it counts as "complicated" wrt real-world tasks. On that basis, any new OS with zippo support from manufacturers and large software companies is likely to be complicated for Joe Public.
Finish last line of code 30 minutes before deadline
Set email autoresponder to pick a helpdesk response from:
You probably have a virus, please reinstall Windows
This is a known problem with the latest Windows Update, please reinstall Windows
The software will only crash if you have been downloading porn on work time, please leave your extension number if you wish us to investigate your hard disc in detail
Send memo to line manager explaining that there is currently no technical documentation for the project, but that this shouldn't be a problem as long as the current team remains intact. Copy to personnel
The only way they'll stop this kind of activity is if they lose customers by doing it.
Except that the chances are that the other companies will soon follow suit. If they don't, they'll end up providing more bandwidth per customer than Comcast, which gives Comcast a competitive advantage. I run a small WISP and I do everything I can to hand customers who want to run P2P and so on to my competitors. And I saw an interview with the CEO of France Télécom a couple of months ago in which he more or less begged the government to give him an excuse to do the same as me.
Absolutely. RH9 was not a great release - a sort of bug fix for RH8, and the only distro I have ever had which regularly kernel panics when mounting floppy discs.
I spent a week trying to install Gentoo - very clever I'm sure, but when gcc said it was not configured to compile c I decided enough was enough. Fedora looked like RH9 in mourning, but up2date was so slow that going flat out it would never have kept up with the security patches.
Forked out my $419 for Enterprise ES, installed it, patched it, found rpms for all the non-standard stuff I wanted, and everything worked. It's the most I've ever paid for a software product, but if I count my time at anything like a commercial rate it looks like a bargain to me, especially if I can avoid having to do a fresh install until 2009.
I think the logo is maybe less important in establishing OO as an alternative to MS Office than getting OO to work properly.
My latest discovery (after half a day of headbanging) is that the spreadsheet always splits CSV on commas, even within quotes, even if you specify tabs, with the result that it is pretty much impossible to import any data set that includes commas. That's a "first week of programming" sort of cock up. (Took me half a day to track down because I was sure the problem had to be with the CSV files I was generating, because no office package could be that bad...)
The raw data for this project has been provided as Word documents, which OO can open, it's just that it fails to display half the data (something of a drawback with a questionnaire).
Talked to one of the PC shops about OO. They decided to try it for their accounts. It worked fine for a while, then corrupted their files, and they ended up sending all their accounts off to someone on the other side of the world who seemed like an honest guy in a chat room. Fortunately he managed to get the data back, they migrated to MS Office and have had no problems since.
OO is the best office suite for Linux at present, but it's still pretty bad. I'm hoping that Corel get WP10 right.
I've met a few people who think that OO is great considering its free. I haven't met anyone who thinks it's actually easier to use or more reliable than MS Office, except for people on/. who, when pushed, only use it for typing one-page memos.
But we have a fairly transparent voting process compared to most countries
I would have thought that "being able to demonstrate who won" was one of the more fundamental aspects of transparency.
In France, where I am not eligible to vote in national elections, I can sit all day watching people put their tickets into a transparent box and spend all night watching people count them. I believe that the system is essentially the same in the UK. Which country are you comparing your system with? Zimbabwe?
Slashdot Mirror
If it's a 6' 6" bloke weighing 300lbs I might think twice about being so appallingly patronising :) In general, I try to assume as little as possible. And the customers who know just enough to be really dangerous are the worst.
But none of that is an absolute distinction. If you type something totally ungrammatical, I may not understand you at all, or may misunderstand what you are trying to say. If I type something underspecified into Perl, it will try to guess what it means (the part of the compiler that does this is called the "guesser"), and sometimes it will get it wrong. Just like with a "natural" language. For example, if I call the 'split' function without specifying what is to be split, Perl will try to work out what to split from the context. If what it finds isn't of the right type, it will coerce the type and then try to split it. Sure, the process is deterministic, in theory, but you can quickly get into situations where it is very very hard to guess what Perl will do with one short line of code. So being good at "logic" doesn't necessarily help at all, whereas "intuition" might.
Nothing about the potential for natural language to be precise contradicts the fact that programming languages are non-natural.
I'd be interested to know exactly what the difference is between "natural" and "non-natural". Is the language people use to communicate on mobile phones natural, for example? Most modern languages have been "designed" in some way or another (English may be an exception, (mixing up English and French can be a criminal offence where I live, for example), and there is more to computer languages than what sort of binary they produce, or we'd all still be coding in assembler.
To take one obvious example, a good programmer uses meaningful variable and procedure names. Meaningful to whom? The compiler really doesn't care, so, if someone can write code that works with variables called VaR, vAR and VAr, what's the issue? The answer, of course, is that computer languages in any corporate setting are also a way of communicating between humans (programmers), and, as I said a while back, women are quite good at that aspect of the task.
a facility with natural language does with its lack of precision and clarity does not translate into the basis of a good programmer.
Ah, so someone who says
is not going to get very far, and should have stuck to their original career of linguistics? Someone should tell Larry Wall, since the quote is from p5 of "Progamming Perl", 3E. ;)
Natural language can be very precise - a fact on which our legal system depends - and last time I looked it was still impossible to demonstrate formally what most non-trivial programs do without running them - hardly a typical situation in the world of "hard" math. Programming has plenty of idioms, and there are plenty of arguments about style too - obfuscated code is bad, whether or not it can be shown to be formally equivalent to something readable, and usually even if it compiles better than the readable version.
In other words, I think you are making a false distinction.
My favourite "IT and gender" anecdote occurred shortly after we opened our cybercafe. My French colleague had just graduated in IT, and had a very... well, French... view of what women were for. One morning a platinum blonde dressed entirely in black walks through the door and asks what sort of computers we have. Colleague starts his "well the computers are those little boxes over there" speech, she says "no, what C compilers do you have available, and can I use telnet from here?" Sound of jaw hitting tiled floor... It turned out that she was studying IT in Paris. She pops in about once a year, and last time I saw her she was working for a bank in London. She says she has a lot of female colleagues there, but that there are very few women in French IT.
I assume this is a troll, but, anyway...
It is a well-established fact that women are generally better with (human) languages, and given that a lot of IT is not about advanced math but is about manipulating symbols you would therefore expect women to do rather well in those areas of IT. And of course a large part of any job and the main component of many support-based jobs is interpersonal skills, which is another area where women do well. In any case, the bell curves overlap a huge amount, so while your average woman may be slightly more or less gifted at some tasks than men, a lot of women will be better at the task than a lot of men, and vice versa.
I know plenty of women working in IT, and their spread along the competent-incompetent axis is pretty similar to the men I know. One of the best Un*x sys admins I know is a woman, who also happens to have a doctorate in math.
I'd suggest that the exodus, if it exists, has a lot more to do with issues such as working hours, and maybe with the limited novelty value of working with neanderthal male colleagues who can only rate to women on the basis of their genitals.
What are your reasons for running the old standby suite over the Firefox/Thunderbird combo?
Because I can patch it from Redhat Network
The focus on multiple cores arises from Moore's Law, which dictates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.
I don't think non-compliance with Moore's Law is a felony. It's an observation, not a statute. Moore's Law arises from the fact that transistor counts keep doubling, not the other way around.
Also, doubling the number of transistors in any way possible doesn't necessarily translate into double the power for any given application. In this case, multiple cores are good news for multi-threaded or forking server apps, but rather less interesting for a lot of desktop apps. Intel obviously has a vested interest in pushing ever larger die sizes, because it does large dies better than anyone else. Whether this will always be in the interests of the rest of the industry, let alone the end user, is less obvious.
And could it be, shock horror, that they ditched the Linux version because, gasp, it didn't sell very well, and that maybe this was because, swoon, Linux in 2001 wasn't that great a choice for running a multimedia system? If they had axed a top-selling product, there might be a story here. As it is, the story appears to be "there are some arguments in favour of using other operating systems". Which I suppose might count as news to some people here, but probably not to the world at large.
the A768i might be the thing for business users as it excels in the phone/messaging category
Because no other equipment competes for this niche? Or is it because obviously the only acceptable solution is a Linux solution, and if this is the only Linux option in the niche it's therefore what everyone should be using? I like Linux, use it almost exclusively, but I can't say I'd go for a Linux PDA or phone if, say, a Symbian alternative had better features.
It really isn't Word. I use it in our cybercafe, and we have endless compatibility problems, plus the delightful feature whereby saving an OO document as a .doc and loading it straight back into OO often adds spurious bulletpoints everywhere. The PDF exporter prints the footers in the middle of pages... As a way of opening the occasional Word document or typing a letter, it's fine, but anyone who says it's a drop-in replacement for Word is not using many of the Word features.
Wasn't it Linus who said that the open source model works better for OSs than for WPs?
I can't decide how ironic that post is intended to be, but what I'm getting from all the responses is that Linux for PPC is an aid to recycling old Macs, or maybe getting a cheap and small laptop, and that it has no pretensions of filling any mainstream niche. And why not (hey, I'm still using an Acorn for my DTP!), but I do wonder what this means for drivers, libraries and so on. Does, say, Xine work?
I have to say I'm also struggling to work out what niche Linux for OS X machines fills. If you want Linux, there's cheaper hardware to run it on, and I'd expect more of the exotic stuff to work properly. If you want a Mac experience, Linux probably isn't going to deliver. If you want un*x plus cuddly Mac interface, I thought that was the whole point of OS X....
Well, yes, but, by memory, it was a $500,000 project (tucked in the space between a few commercial payloads). If it went down after 3 days, I'm sure there would have been a few drunk electronic engineers in the student union, and maybe there might have been questions about funding the next shoebox-satellite, but it wasn't going to leave half a continent without telephones or punch a hole in the CIA's spy network, let alone kill any astronauts (which is where we came in).
I remember seeing a documentary about space technology about the time the USA and USSR linked up. Apparently much of the life support system in the Russian vehicles ran on a pin wheel like a kids music box. There was much mirth about this, but, despite or maybe because of my programming credentials, I far prefer the idea of fixing the mechanical version if my life depended on it.
Also, it takes a long time to get electronic components approved for use in space, which is why the stuff in satellites is usually way behind what sits on your average desk. The university I attended designed and launched a series of very cheap satellites, which, apparently, ran some of the most advanced computing equipment in orbit, simply because it didn't matter too much if it blew up after 3 days.
So I can take .cn out of my filter and replace it with .com and all my troubles will be over? Oh, wait...
"And now you can drive your avatar by typing XML!"
We have been running a cybercafe in France using LTSP for three years now. At one point we ran Windows 2000 Terminal Server over LTSP to see how users reacted.
The main complaint about LTSP is that Mozilla/OO doesn't let people do everything they want to do. They can't download exes from a chat site and install it. Some Word files don't open (my impression is that OO is going backwards in this respect). Right now, a CSS problem with Yahoo makes reading mail using Mozilla almost impossible (although Firefox works), and so on.
The real problems are actually quite infrequent, but, because it's not Windows, the users blame any problems due to the site they are using or their own unrealistic expectations on our system. I'm currently travelling, and tried a cybercafe in a London train station yesterday, and was amused to find that our system runs Flash better then theirs, for example, but most of our clients would never believe this.
Another issue is file access. We don't allow local floppy acces, so everything has to go via the server. USB keys are another source of frustration. Of course whether you would want people putting media into your Windows machines is another question entirely, but the users don't tend to see it tha way.
Finally, the system occasionally grinds to a halt because one user is running a badly behaved Java applet or something - Yahoo billiards is a typical example. We now have a biprocessor server, which helps, and if I'm in I renice the offending process, but it's still not ideal. Local apps would help, although it increases the spec of your terminals somewhat.
In the light of all this, we thought that W2K would be a highly popular move. But the general reaction was that it was more like linux than linux, because we tied down all the security settings. People still couldn't install exes, still couldn't dump files all over the place, still moaned when we didn't have the right version of the particular piece of software they wanted, and so on. The one thing that was a clear improvement was Word over OO, but on balance we decided to stick with Linux.
This has almost nothing to do with the elegance or otherwise of the OS and almost everything to do with the user base. Linux distros have got bigger, technically more complex, and, I would suggest, simpler to use, partly because of better GUIs and so on, but, mainly, because more stuff just works. Windows is, well, Windows, but if you want to get the digital camera in your shopping basket to work with your computer, it's about as easy as it gets, because there's a driver for it. My RISC OS machine was astoundingly simple to use, but since it just can't do most of what I need to do in 2004 it counts as "complicated" wrt real-world tasks. On that basis, any new OS with zippo support from manufacturers and large software companies is likely to be complicated for Joe Public.
The only way they'll stop this kind of activity is if they lose customers by doing it.
Except that the chances are that the other companies will soon follow suit. If they don't, they'll end up providing more bandwidth per customer than Comcast, which gives Comcast a competitive advantage. I run a small WISP and I do everything I can to hand customers who want to run P2P and so on to my competitors. And I saw an interview with the CEO of France Télécom a couple of months ago in which he more or less begged the government to give him an excuse to do the same as me.
Absolutely. RH9 was not a great release - a sort of bug fix for RH8, and the only distro I have ever had which regularly kernel panics when mounting floppy discs.
I spent a week trying to install Gentoo - very clever I'm sure, but when gcc said it was not configured to compile c I decided enough was enough. Fedora looked like RH9 in mourning, but up2date was so slow that going flat out it would never have kept up with the security patches.
Forked out my $419 for Enterprise ES, installed it, patched it, found rpms for all the non-standard stuff I wanted, and everything worked. It's the most I've ever paid for a software product, but if I count my time at anything like a commercial rate it looks like a bargain to me, especially if I can avoid having to do a fresh install until 2009.
I think the logo is maybe less important in establishing OO as an alternative to MS Office than getting OO to work properly.
/. who, when pushed, only use it for typing one-page memos.
My latest discovery (after half a day of headbanging) is that the spreadsheet always splits CSV on commas, even within quotes, even if you specify tabs, with the result that it is pretty much impossible to import any data set that includes commas. That's a "first week of programming" sort of cock up. (Took me half a day to track down because I was sure the problem had to be with the CSV files I was generating, because no office package could be that bad...)
The raw data for this project has been provided as Word documents, which OO can open, it's just that it fails to display half the data (something of a drawback with a questionnaire).
Talked to one of the PC shops about OO. They decided to try it for their accounts. It worked fine for a while, then corrupted their files, and they ended up sending all their accounts off to someone on the other side of the world who seemed like an honest guy in a chat room. Fortunately he managed to get the data back, they migrated to MS Office and have had no problems since.
OO is the best office suite for Linux at present, but it's still pretty bad. I'm hoping that Corel get WP10 right.
I've met a few people who think that OO is great considering its free. I haven't met anyone who thinks it's actually easier to use or more reliable than MS Office, except for people on
But we have a fairly transparent voting process compared to most countries
I would have thought that "being able to demonstrate who won" was one of the more fundamental aspects of transparency.
In France, where I am not eligible to vote in national elections, I can sit all day watching people put their tickets into a transparent box and spend all night watching people count them. I believe that the system is essentially the same in the UK. Which country are you comparing your system with? Zimbabwe?
Would it be useful to have UN observers to ensure free and fair elections?