I think a lot of us in the US (and not just kids) could use that kind of experience.
If you really think that, there's an easy way to get that experience: enlist, serve, spend some time doing something for your country instead of whining about what it should be doing for you.
Make it easy for your users to report real problems to your developers.
Many years ago, I did tech support for a small startup that used a proprietary database (btrieve, I think) as part of its back end. The developer who wrote that part would have the program show the user the exact error message returned if the database had a problem. Alas, not only didn't the messages make any sense to the users, they didn't make sense to me, either, and I wasn't given any access to the documentation, meaning that unless the developer came down from his ivory tower, they were useless. Not only that, he refused to modify his code so that we had an idea which file was causing the error. This is just one of the reasons that the company folded.
... you're going to have a lot of folks in the army who don't have an education much past that...
I don't know what the requirements are for enlistment now, but I do know that back when I was in the Navy ('Nam era) it was pretty much a given that everybody in the Navy had at least graduated from High School. Of course, back then, the Navy had the highest mental standards (and the Marines the lowest, although they did have the highest physical standard) and I don't know what the Army required. Now that there's no draft, I wouldn't be surprised to find that all branches required either a High School Diploma or GED. You might want to revise your image of soldiers as ignorant, functionally-illiterate thugs.
... there are something like 17 different representations of strings depending on which engineer/department wrote the code!
That can't possibly be a good thing. What's worse is, there's no reason to think that any of the code checks to see which type of string it's been passed instead of just assuming that it's been sent the One True String.
...why does GNU's documentation still only document the differences?
I'm only guessing here, but it seems reasonable that much of that was written back in the early days when most people using Linux had migrated from one or another form of Unix and all the users needed was a list of differences. Then, of course, other people copied that form of "documentation" under the impression that this was what was expected of them.
Huge dinosaurs disappeared, for the same reason huge battleships did.
Wrong. Battleships were so big because they needed to be to carry what was then the most effective weapon available: high-caliber, long-range gunnery. By the end of WWII they had been rendered obsolete by the development of effective naval aviation, carried on aircraft carriers that are even bigger than battleships were.
How? Even if the border patrol blocked the entrances on the US side, the owners could always provide a door on the Canadian side and there's no real way to stop people from going into Canada and using them. And, as the tavern was a Canadian business, American LEOs wouldn't have had any jurisdiction as long as the sales were made on the Canadian side of the building.
I've had to clean up my desktop after an upgrade didn't finish properly and I only had a CLI to work with. Knowing how to use at least one non-GUI text editor and having that editor installed already was a life saver because without it I couldn't have gotten the network up again and without that, I couldn't have installed an editor. Remote admin is one good reason to know how to work without a GUI, but it's not the only one.
I've been using nano, or as I like to call it, "Mork's editor," for a number of years when I've needed (or wanted) to do text editing in a CLI environment under Linux and I've never had a bit of trouble with it, even with line endings. You just have to remember that in some places, such as/etc/fstab, you need to make sure there's a/n at the end of every line, including the last one. Of course, my bashrc includes alias nano='nano -w -m' which may well explain why I've had such good luck with it.
I remember reading that back during Prohibition, there was a tavern that was built right over the US/Canadian border with the bar stools in the US and the bar itself in Canada. That way, if/when US law enforcement came in, all the customers needed to do was put down their glasses and lean back and there was nothing that could be done about it.
In my case, Glypizide, Metformin (pills) and Lantus (injected) was doing a good job. However, there was always the possibility that mealtime insulin (instead of Glypizide) could be better. Alas, it wasn't, but at least none of the problems were catastrophic, and now I know.
I'm not sure how well it worked for her, but I'm glad that my trial's over and I'm back on my old treatment. Not only did I find myself obsessing over how much and when I was eating, I had vastly more hypoglycemic episodes than normal. (Of course, at least half of them had no symptoms other than a low reading, so I can't be sure.) I know that mealtime insulin works for many people; now I know that I'm not one of them.
Name another group of the population willing to be guinea pigs for experimental medication?
People with chronic conditions that might be helped by it. My sister has MS and was part of a clinical study of a new treatment. I have Type II diabetes and just finished a clinical trial of a new form of mealtime insulin. Neither of us is homeless, destitute or mentally ill.
I didn't say you shouldn't be able to be paid in vacation days or in insurance or in gallons of milk. All I am saying is that you should be able to make those choices for yourself and not have government dictate to you how to get paid.
Agreed. However, the whole point of my post was not just to show that there's more to your compensation than just what you see on your paycheck but to give an example of how such alternate forms of payment can be worth much more than most people think.
You want to get medical insurance through your employer then your hourly rate is going to be lower, same with any tax.
Back in the '50s my father voted in favor of a proposal by his union to accept medical benefits instead of a raise in the hourly rate. Years later, he told me he considered it one of the best decisions he ever made.
It's important to note that when speaking about infinity don't fall into the fallacy of treating it as a value.
Even trained mathematicians can fall into that trap. In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker made the mistake of talking about a mountain that was "more than infinitely tall," which is nothing more than gibberish. I don't recommend that book to anybody, and this is just one of the many reasons I was disappointed by it.
My point is that all of those emails I get about accounts I don't have is a counter-example to the claim that spear-phishing is carefully crafted to look real.
The spam from your bank doesn't normally address you by name...
Actually, much of the spam/phishing email I get claiming to be from my bank has my name in the subject. I'm rather glad it does because I never get any real email from my bank that does this, so seeing my name there is a dead giveaway.
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I think a lot of us in the US (and not just kids) could use that kind of experience.
If you really think that, there's an easy way to get that experience: enlist, serve, spend some time doing something for your country instead of whining about what it should be doing for you.
Make it easy for your users to report real problems to your developers.
Many years ago, I did tech support for a small startup that used a proprietary database (btrieve, I think) as part of its back end. The developer who wrote that part would have the program show the user the exact error message returned if the database had a problem. Alas, not only didn't the messages make any sense to the users, they didn't make sense to me, either, and I wasn't given any access to the documentation, meaning that unless the developer came down from his ivory tower, they were useless. Not only that, he refused to modify his code so that we had an idea which file was causing the error. This is just one of the reasons that the company folded.
... you're going to have a lot of folks in the army who don't have an education much past that...
I don't know what the requirements are for enlistment now, but I do know that back when I was in the Navy ('Nam era) it was pretty much a given that everybody in the Navy had at least graduated from High School. Of course, back then, the Navy had the highest mental standards (and the Marines the lowest, although they did have the highest physical standard) and I don't know what the Army required. Now that there's no draft, I wouldn't be surprised to find that all branches required either a High School Diploma or GED. You might want to revise your image of soldiers as ignorant, functionally-illiterate thugs.
... there are something like 17 different representations of strings depending on which engineer/department wrote the code!
That can't possibly be a good thing. What's worse is, there's no reason to think that any of the code checks to see which type of string it's been passed instead of just assuming that it's been sent the One True String.
Either way, you need to be savvier than your average Windows user.
That's not exactly setting the bar very high, is it?
Batman no; Spiderman maybe. I can remember at least once he was out in LA introducing himself as "your friendly coast-to-coast Spiderman."
He's quite right, as you can see here.
...why does GNU's documentation still only document the differences?
I'm only guessing here, but it seems reasonable that much of that was written back in the early days when most people using Linux had migrated from one or another form of Unix and all the users needed was a list of differences. Then, of course, other people copied that form of "documentation" under the impression that this was what was expected of them.
Linux has won. Most Linux users have never used a traditional Unix, and most never will.
You say that as though you think it's a bad thing. Think of it as evolution in action.
Huge dinosaurs disappeared, for the same reason huge battleships did.
Wrong. Battleships were so big because they needed to be to carry what was then the most effective weapon available: high-caliber, long-range gunnery. By the end of WWII they had been rendered obsolete by the development of effective naval aviation, carried on aircraft carriers that are even bigger than battleships were.
How? Even if the border patrol blocked the entrances on the US side, the owners could always provide a door on the Canadian side and there's no real way to stop people from going into Canada and using them. And, as the tavern was a Canadian business, American LEOs wouldn't have had any jurisdiction as long as the sales were made on the Canadian side of the building.
I've had to clean up my desktop after an upgrade didn't finish properly and I only had a CLI to work with. Knowing how to use at least one non-GUI text editor and having that editor installed already was a life saver because without it I couldn't have gotten the network up again and without that, I couldn't have installed an editor. Remote admin is one good reason to know how to work without a GUI, but it's not the only one.
I've been using nano, or as I like to call it, "Mork's editor," for a number of years when I've needed (or wanted) to do text editing in a CLI environment under Linux and I've never had a bit of trouble with it, even with line endings. You just have to remember that in some places, such as /etc/fstab, you need to make sure there's a /n at the end of every line, including the last one. Of course, my bashrc includes alias nano='nano -w -m' which may well explain why I've had such good luck with it.
I remember reading that back during Prohibition, there was a tavern that was built right over the US/Canadian border with the bar stools in the US and the bar itself in Canada. That way, if/when US law enforcement came in, all the customers needed to do was put down their glasses and lean back and there was nothing that could be done about it.
... And don't have other options.
In my case, Glypizide, Metformin (pills) and Lantus (injected) was doing a good job. However, there was always the possibility that mealtime insulin (instead of Glypizide) could be better. Alas, it wasn't, but at least none of the problems were catastrophic, and now I know.
I'm not sure how well it worked for her, but I'm glad that my trial's over and I'm back on my old treatment. Not only did I find myself obsessing over how much and when I was eating, I had vastly more hypoglycemic episodes than normal. (Of course, at least half of them had no symptoms other than a low reading, so I can't be sure.) I know that mealtime insulin works for many people; now I know that I'm not one of them.
Shrug! Even if I were part of the control, I'd still be doing something to help.
Name another group of the population willing to be guinea pigs for experimental medication?
People with chronic conditions that might be helped by it. My sister has MS and was part of a clinical study of a new treatment. I have Type II diabetes and just finished a clinical trial of a new form of mealtime insulin. Neither of us is homeless, destitute or mentally ill.
Let's not forget the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that collapsed in November, 1940 during high winds.
I didn't say you shouldn't be able to be paid in vacation days or in insurance or in gallons of milk. All I am saying is that you should be able to make those choices for yourself and not have government dictate to you how to get paid.
Agreed. However, the whole point of my post was not just to show that there's more to your compensation than just what you see on your paycheck but to give an example of how such alternate forms of payment can be worth much more than most people think.
You want to get medical insurance through your employer then your hourly rate is going to be lower, same with any tax.
Back in the '50s my father voted in favor of a proposal by his union to accept medical benefits instead of a raise in the hourly rate. Years later, he told me he considered it one of the best decisions he ever made.
Now that we have the Magic Helmet, is somebody going to develop the spear that's supposed to go with it?
It's important to note that when speaking about infinity don't fall into the fallacy of treating it as a value.
Even trained mathematicians can fall into that trap. In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker made the mistake of talking about a mountain that was "more than infinitely tall," which is nothing more than gibberish. I don't recommend that book to anybody, and this is just one of the many reasons I was disappointed by it.
My point is that all of those emails I get about accounts I don't have is a counter-example to the claim that spear-phishing is carefully crafted to look real.
The spam from your bank doesn't normally address you by name...
Actually, much of the spam/phishing email I get claiming to be from my bank has my name in the subject. I'm rather glad it does because I never get any real email from my bank that does this, so seeing my name there is a dead giveaway.