"I think that you are being overly generous. Steve Balmer was only called on to do something that an end user of his (consumer!) product would want to do."
That some idiot "wants to do" something is hardly a criterion for classifying something as the normal operation of a product. People "want to do" stupid things they're not qualified for every day. Some want to repair their TV and get zapped by a still charged capacitor. Some want to weld an acetylene tank to their roof while doing repairs there. Some want to run in a drag race with a solid rocket booster strapped to their car. Darwin Awards is full of people who thought that arc welding a grenade to a chain is normal consumer business. It doesn't automatically make it so.
It _is_ possible to operate a Windows PC for years without ever having to remove a single item of spyware. _That's_ the equivalent of driving a car. Or you can be an idiot and drive your car against the wall, or install Claria and everyhing else in sight on your Windows PC. Getting either your car or your PC back to good as new is already a repair job, not the day-to-day business of a normal consumer.
Basically the whole exercise isn't like expecting a BMW executive to be able to drive a BMW. It's more like asking a BMW executive to come fix your paint and tyres after you drove the car through a bed of roses. It's just not his job.
"A better analogy would be that you shouldn't expect an executive at a car manufacturer to be able to drive the company's cars. But of course you would."
Even then, I wouldn't. E.g.:
- most car manufacturers also make trucks (e.g., check out some of the big Mercedes Benz ones), cranes, bulldozers, etc. Acting like it's the exec's job to have a license to operate each of those is just stupid. A lot also make special F1 or rally models. I _don't_ expect them to be able to drive those either. E.g., I don't expect a Honda executive to be able to drive a McLarren-Honda in the F1 races. It's just not his job.
- I also don't expect Boeing executives to be able to fly a plane. Not even a small consumer one, like the Cessna. If he can, kudos to him, but if not, it wasn't his job to start with.
- I don't even expect a console maker to be a l33t console gamer. (And it's a consumer product, right?) Nintendo, for example, used to have someone at the helm who took _pride_ in never having played a video game. The guy used to spew such highly insulting stuff about the gamers, as that RPG fans are losers playing in the dark in their parents' basement. Yet it's the company which pwned the market in the NES and SNES days.
Etc.
Who cares? It's not their job to personally do those things, nor even to personally understand those things. His job is to hire someone who does. _The_ most important thing about management -- and often the difference between a good manager and a PHB -- is knowing when and how to delegate. You can't personally know everything and do everything.
Ballmer is a manager, not a computer guru. It's not his job to clean spyware off a computer. Whop-de-fucking-do. So someone is good at his job, not at yours. This just reeks of the kind of "only my job is important, and if you can't hack the registry with a hex editor, you're an idiot" arrogance that gives geeks a bad name.
Second, the mention of "Microsoft's top engineers" makes the whole thing look very fishy to me. I seriously doubt that MS actually got their top stars just to fix some guy's computer. That a bunch of top engineers would also be utterly unable to save a computer -- if nothing else, just backup all the important files and reinstall -- ranks up there with belief in Santa or the Tooth Fairy.
It's, again, the stuff crap elitism is made of: the belief that surely you're the smartest guy out there, and even MS with all their money couldn't hire someone smarter. And funnily enough, the less skilled one actually is, the more he loves to believe that kinda crap. People who once wrote a 5 line script, or once even managed to compile Linux... using someone else's script, love to pretend that verily, they're so cool that they could singlehandedly re-write XP _and_ Vista in a week and make it better than all those MS monkeys.
Basically even as MS bashing goes, this kind of fairy tale is a new low.
I've met people who used buzzwords they didn't understand to sound knowledgeable, and believe me, it wasn't the programmers. It was the occasional management or marketting guys who thought that they'd look like programming experts if they use those. They spend their whole day using bullshit buzzwords in meetings, that they start assuming that everyone else does the same.
Look, I don't use acronyms to sound cool. I use them because they're mean something _very_ precise that are backed by a whole tome saying what they mean, what they do, and what they don't do. They're not there because they sound cooler than another common word, but because it would take tens of thousands of words to specify the same thing with the same detail.
E.g., when I say TCP/IP, it's not just a funky way of saying "over the net". It also tells another engineer exactly what kind of a net, and how. You could print a tome with all the RFCs (basically, standards) it complies with, or at least doesn't interfere with. It tells you something about the kind of hardware and software you need too.
E.g., when I say it's an EJB application and uses SOAP over JMS for messaging and JAAS authentication over LDAP, it's not just for the sake of having some "enterprise" buzzwords. It tells you the exact software you need to run it, exactly what protocol you can talk to it over, what you'll store the user accounts in, and exactly what you need to change if you want those passwords stored in an Oracle database instead. E.g., it tells you that if you want to interface another app to it, a SOAP framework (e.g., Axis) might help. There are whole books that define each of those "buzzwords" in painstaking detail, and define exactly what they do, what they don't do, what they can connect to, what's optional, and what you probably shouldn't use if you don't want to be tied to a single vendor.
It's not even possible to say the same in plain English, or not without writing a whole bible-sized tome.
How would you say that? "Some modules that talk over the net"? Well, that's fine for a quick talk talk to the customer, and we all do it all the time too. But same as in law, it doesn't help you if you wrote a spec like that. What kind of modules? If you want to add your own, what exactly do you need to write? Over what net? IPX maybe? In what format is that talk? If next year the HR database guys want to ask for data from ours, in what format would they send their request and how? If next thing they want it changed to take the user passwords from the portal guys' DB2 database, exactly what has to be changed? Etc.
Well, it sounds about right about the price, but the problem IMHO goes deeper than just price.
E.g., Sony TFTs for a while didn't just cost twice as much as an Acer with the exact same panel, they also outright lied about the latency. Now the latency is fudged anyway, but there is an ISO standard about how to measure that fudged number, and everyone else aligned to that. It was the sum of the rise time _and_ the fall time. (And due to the fact that it only requires you to come within 10% of the target colour, even that sum was massively lower than the point where that asymptotic transition was close enough for a human eye in either direction.) Sony was the last to quote only one of the two as the latency, instead of their sum, making it sound as if they were twice as fast as the same panel in another manufacturer's display.
E.g., consumer products? How about Sony selling MP3 players that could _not_ actually play MP3. They converted an already lossy format to another lossy format, only this time Sony's proprietary one, and then played that. Yay for getting your 192 kbit/s encoded MP3s converted again to a shitty Sony format, in 64 kbit/s, no less. I.e., they had no qualms with ruining quality for the consumer to push their own proprietary format.
E.g., the PSP? Consumer product all right. I can't see any corporation declaring the PSP their new workstation or anything. Yet tell the people with more dead pixels on a PSP than on a computer monitor with 16 times the total pixels, that Sony cares about the consumer.
E.g., the infamous Sony rootkit? That was their music division that pushed that upon the consumers.
E.g., the heavy-handed customer-relations of SOE? You know, the ones that banned people for being tipped with duped in-game currency (as if you could even know that the money you got were duped), and then teleported the protesters into space? That seems like a consumer division to me. I can't really imagine a corporation declaring SWG or EQ2 as the corporate IM standard.
So, nope, I don't buy it that their consumer divisions are somehow still "the old Sony" that cares and all. (Assuming that an old Sony like that actually existed.) Sony as a whole seems to have developped a corporate culture of utter contempt for their customers. The customers are there to be shafted, cheated, abused, and told to get a second job already if they want a Sony product.
Don't get me wrong, I do own a PSP and a PS2, and I'll get a PS3 if it has good games anyway. But I have no illusion that some Sony division cares about me. And when I do get the next Sony product, I'll read the spec twice and do some research, because I can know that Sony _will_ try to fuck me up the ass. I'll bring a condom along too, just in case they manage to.
See, in the dark ages if you were born a psychopath and not of noble blood, the most you could look forward to was becoming a brigand or a serial killer and eventually swinging from the gallows. Not that exciting a prospect for either the psychopath or the victims. You can see why it was called the dark ages.
Nowadays, however, we live in more civilized times. Psychopaths can go for example into politics (what Jack is doing _is_ politics) or management, and keep themselves entertained for a lifetime trying to screw each other over in courtrooms, board meetings, media debates, or whatever else is apropriate. In some cases that even creates value for the rest of the society, e.g., for shareholders. E.g., firing the whole R&D department and setting the company on a 5 year course to bankruptcy invariably makes the share price rise. Investors love "cost saving measures", or at least have been conditioned like Pavlov's dog that that's when they must reach for the wallet.
What I'm getting at is that Jack is a psychopath. It doesn't mean "axe murderer" (or not necessarily), it just means a complete lack of empathy for others. Their care for others is really about the same as most people feel for an NPC: the other people are just there as unimportant playthings, nothing more. They can cheat them, manipulate them, even kill them if they can get away with it, whatever keeps them entertained. And they're damn good at manipulating and rationalizing anything that serves their purposes. (E.g., the most surrealistic I've read was one rationalizing that raping a child is a victimless crime and shouldn't be punished. _That_ kind of being able to rationalize _anything_.)
Same deal: they won't feel any kind of "oh man, I'm such an asshole for manipulating this nice guy into ruining his own life" reaction. So he can say anything with a straight face. Or whatever kind of a face is needed.
So, as I've saying, Jack is a psychopath. He'll do anything that fits his goals, including lie, cheat and manipulate people's fears. There are no two ways about it. Anyone who sees manipulating the fear of a mother that her kid might be on the next Columbine-style casualty list, as just means to build a political carreer or to get attention on TV, has got to be a psychopath.
Well, I sometimes wish those people knew that too. But, alas, everyone thinks they can comment about hardware architectures or software development just because they once installed an anti-virus on mom's computer, or got a shitty job reading a tech support script. I suppose that's what the GP post was saying with that quip: people whose only knowledge about memory is that they can change the RAM sticks in a corporate computer feel qualified to discuss the RSX's memory architecture.
To be fair, I don't think it is an "IT" problem as such, as rather just a certain "I'm the greatest genius, you're all ignorant peasants" kind of nerd. He just knows that he knows everything, and is fully qualified to talk in depth about GPU pipeline architectures and memory controllers. He does tech support for an ISP, so he obviously knows everything about anything even vaguely computer related. (Verily, there's nothing under the Sun that couldn't be fixed by a trip through their helldesk script. E.g., Sony should have defragged their hard drive, reset their DSL modem and checked their network cable.)
I know of at least two different machines who gave the patient a lethal dose of radiation, in two different malfunction modes. Neither sounds like what you describe, so, scarily enough, yours would be the third.
Actually, if you look at those things, the real common theme was that they were designed or modified by people who _weren't_ real engineers. E.g.:
- a dam is built by a "self-taught engineer" who can't even get the foundations right
- a ship design is modified by a king who has no flippin' clue about ship design. He demanded changes like cutting extra portholes right above the water line, loading extra guns and other stuff, and so on. The final design was basically the king's, not the design of a real shipwright.
- a huge container for molasses is designed and its building supervised by a beancounter with _no_ engineering background whatsoever, and whose only concern was getting it built quickly and cheaply.
Etc. Sorry, you can't say "never trust the engineers" when, in fact, those mistakes were made by non-engineers.
Want another common theme? How about ignoring testing or warning signs that it's about to fall apart. E.g.:
- when the dam started to crack, the "self-taught engineer" just ignored it
- the molasses container was (A) never tested, e.g., by filling it with water, and (B) when a worker complained that it leaked heavily, the beancounter just covered the problem by having it painted brown.
- the Vasa, as other posters have noted, was in fact tested before being lanched, but noone had the courage to tell the king that his design doesn't work. In effect, again the warning signs existed, but were effectively ignored.
And the third thing is: don't think those are just historical trivia, because the exact same things happen nowadays with software. Everyone loves to spew the "colleges don't teach engineering" or "it's time programmers started acting like engineers", but some of the most catastrophic mistakes come from people who had _neither_ a CS or engineering college, _nor_ reasonable work experience or training to bring them up to par. I'm not even sneering (mainly) at the actual coders, because lot of those mistakes were from some manager or customer demanding/making some catastrophic change or imposing some impossible deadmark or policy. (Remember the Vasa and the king.)
E.g.,
- a financial institution restates its earnings by 1 _billion_ dollars, because some Excel spreadsheet programmed by a beancounter with _zero_ engineering or programming background... guess what? Mis-calculated by a whole billion dollars.
- a radiotherapy machine, using lead blocks to cover the parts of the patient that shouldn't be irradiated, had a problem using more than IIRC 4 lead blocks. So a doctor takes it upon himself to hack it to use non-rectangular blocks to the same end. The result: the program mis-calculates and some people are given a lethal dose of radiation.
And that's just the spectacular stuff. I'm sure almost everyone has their own stories where someone else's intervention had catastrophic results, even if in less spectacular ways.
So my brother buys himself a new house, and wants his DSL connection moved to the new place. (Well, deactivated from the old one and activated as a new one.) He's also some kind of a VIP customer at them, as we had found when he first moved in town.
(I have no idea how one gets to be a VIP customer at a telco. Maybe he and his wife having their mobile phones from that telco and both being addicted to the phone would explain it. But I digress.)
So he has a house number like, say, 42a. (The number is made up, I'm not gonna post someone's real address on the net.) He talks to them, gives them the address, has it read back to him, and they assure him that he'll have his DSL connection in the next couple of days. What with being a VIP customer and all.
A week goes by, you guessed, he has no signal. Calls tech support, goes through the whole "reset the modem", "check that the cable is plugged into the computer" (why? the modem shows no signal on the DSL line, not a missing connector to the computer?) and generally following an idiotic script that didn't even apply in his case. But it's soon obvious that the guy there just _can't_ think outside the script, so they follow it dutifully to the letter. Eventually they get escalated, someone eventually tells them that no, the DSL connection indeed isn't activated yet, but they'll do it in the next couple of days.
Some more days go by, another phone call, another "reset the modem", "check that the network cable if plugged in the computer" script to go through. Another assurance that it will be done in the next couple of days.
Lather, rinse, repeat, for a month and a half. (Guess that must be some kind of family constant.) Nicely, politely and sucking up. After the month and a half, he loses his patience, stops sucking up, and escalates it to hell and back.
Remember the house number? 42a? Well, some idiot had typed it in as 42s. It's right on the next key on the keyboard, after all. Which of course, doesn't even exist in a suburb of a small city. They don't build houses _that_ big in these parts anyway.
So again, for a whole freakin' month and a half none of the drones could tell him this simple info: the address in their computers just doesn't exist. No, they lied to him too, again and again. Not to mention the shameless waste of someone else's time to make them diagnose the modem and the computer cable, when they _knew_ they hadn't even activated the connection.
And if that's how they treat a VIP customer... I rest my case. Anyway, fat lot of good being nice did for him, eh?
Let me tell you a story about my ISP. So at one point I manage to mangle my password by using the change password form on their web site. Actually, I'd swear that it was the crap web site that mangled it, and thereafter neither the old one nor the new one worked. With or without capslock, etc. But ok, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was my fault.
So I call their tech support, am as nice as it gets (it's not that guy's fault anyway), follow the instructions so he can be sure that indeed I can't log in (can't he just reset my password anyway?), and dutifully recite to him all what software I'm using and how when he asks about that. (With the small hickup of him running out of pre-scripted answers when I tell him I'm using RASPPPOE on Windows 2000. Apparently his sheet only included that under XP.) He also asks for my invoice number to be sure it's really me. Remember that detail, it will be crucial in a jiffy. Since it's a daughter company of the telco here, I get the invoices combined, and he aggrees that the one on the telco's invoice is all he needs. I read it to him, he's satisfied with it.
Anyway, we have a nice civilized talk and he promises that he'll change my password right away and, as is their (idiotic) policy, I'll get the new one by post. Ok, so I'll be without net for couple of days, but I thank him kindly anyway.
Now let's think about it for a bit, before we delve deeper in this Lovecraftian madness:
- DSL is a P2P connection, so even if my password were to get to someone else, they can _only_ log on from my apartment. It's not like someone can trick them into giving them a password that'll work from somewhere else.
- the new password is sent by post to my home address, so they can freakin' know that _I_ am going to be the one receiving it anyway.
- my phone line is from the same telco and goes through the same exchange, so they could jolly well know that it was me who called, or at least it was from my phone.
A week goes by and I still don't have my flippin' password. By now I've dug out the old ISDN card and I'm using an expensive call-by-call account somewhere else to even read my emails.
So I call again, get someone else on the phone, read them the invoice number, they say "yep, I'm changing it now, you'll get it by post." A week later I call again. Then twice a week. Then every 2 days. The same freaking circus repeats every single time. Read them the invoice number, get told "yep, I'm changing it now, nothing happens." Eventually, after a month and a half, it becomes bloody obvious that they're lying shamelessly and they won't do anything.
So I'm annoyed, escalate it to hell and back, until eventually someone tells me what's the problem: my invoice number doesn't match the one in their database. Apparently when I moved they gave me a new invoice number, but here's the catch: the telco and their ISP department had given me different ones.
So for a whole bloody month and a half, the retarded tech support drones had just lied to me. None of them bothered telling me "oi, that number doesn't match." None of them bothered using their freaking brains, and figuring out that there are ways to authenticate me otherwise (e.g., tell me to come personally to one of their offices, if they're that paranoid, or call back to my home number to make sure it's me, or whatever) instead of following a script like a lobotomized robot.
That's what a month of being nice and polite and patient to lying idiots did for me. Yeah, it soo helped.
Let's say you have your super-duper captcha generator where no two are ever alike, and thus can't be indexed. Let's say I also want to crap-flood you with automated posts linking to my product, or just site I want brought forward on Google's index. Think you're safe?
Hell, let's use Slashdot as an example, since everyone has seen the captchas here.
It works like this: I'll set up a porn site all right. Gets people's interest easier than anything else. I promise some free porn, or heck, even some links to other thumbnail galleries, but make people go through a captcha each time. Except it's _your_ captcha. Consider the following sequence:
1. Random J Hornyguy wants to see the porn. He makes the request that'll give him the captcha page.
2. My server automatically makes a request for a message posting form on your site. (Think simulating clicking on a "Reply To This" link on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward.) Your server gives me the form, complete with session cookie, etc, which I store, and also a captcha. Ah-ha. Guess what I do with that captcha...
3. Random J Hornyguy finally gets his login page, complete with the captcha I just got at step 2. Which he mutters a bit about and finally fills in as plaintext and submits.
4. I now finally submit my post to your site, complete with the captcha text that Random J Hornyguy dutifully filled in for me.
5. If that doesn't go through, I'll make another request and politely ask Random J Hornyguy to try again. (I'm userfriendly, eh?) If it went through, I'll also let him see the porn. After all, I'll want him to come again later and do some more free work for me, so no use annoying the hell out of him. But if I'm an evil SOB and have an endless supply of suckers (e.g., a spamming or phishing operation reeling in the suckers), I might tell him that he typed wrong anyway, and see how many can I get him to solve before it dawns upon him that there's no reward and he can't ever get past the captcha.
Note that at no point this relied on you having a repeating set of images. My site just acted as a captcha proxy between yours and a human sucker, in real time.
Sure, it needs a bit more work coding it like that, but not much more. (I'd have to store the session, recognize links, simulate form responses, etc, anyway if I want to automatically crap-flood your site.) And it'll keep working no matter how you alter your captcha generator, as long as it's still readable at all by a human. And if I have enough users, I can add modules to automate that captcha proxying for several site: each user randomly gets to break the captcha for another site, so the crapflooding is more distributed instead of swamping one site solid.
Also note that a lot of sites, Slashdot included, only make you use the captcha once, when you create or log in a user. If you choose to get a permanent cookie, you can post thousands of posts without ever seeing a captcha again. So I don't have to rely on you reusing captchas, if I create a new user for each one my users solved for me and store the permanent cookie. Since each such user can post more than once before the site admins catch on to it and ban the user id, I can generate a lot more crapflood posts than I get users solving captchas for me.
(Or maybe I won't crapflood some message board, but generate ids to free mail accounts and send spam from that. Again, that escalates quite nicely. As long as you don't require a captcha for every single bloody email a legit user sends, I can send thousands of emails per captcha solved by some Random J Hornyguy. And when that user gets banned, some other Random J Hornyguy will solve the next captcha for me.)
So, to wrap this long rant up, TFA just made me go "didn't it ever occur to these people that they're doing a brilliant technical solution, but it solves the _wrong_ problem?" It's such a tunnel view of the problem, it ranks up with MPAA's being surprised that people tell their friend whether a movie was good or bad. It's the typical "idiot savant"
The more cruel reality is that the uneducated are never just content to admit that they don't know something.
E.g., ID/creationism are a direct result of people not understanding evolution. E.g., forget the dot-com bubble: every day around you, people are scammed and whipped up into frenzies by politicians or lobby groups because they have no clue about real economics. Read some day about keynesian economics and you'll see that some things that politicians condemn or promise during every single election, and never actually fix thereafter, just can't be fixed. Those are just the way the economy works. Yet the vast majority of voters are manipulated by the same falsehoods again and again and again.
Or look around you on Slashdot, and see the plethora of falsehoods passing for economic "theories", based by some over-simplification or on idealizing some failed economic system (and I don't just mean communism, but also unrestricted 19'th century style capitalism, which _did_ fail by causing the great depression), by people who just don't have even the faintest clue what they're talking about.
That's problem 1: People who can't understand actual science, _will_ find refuge in some fairy tale instead. And hold that for absolute truth instead.
The same goes for "soft sciences", too, btw. Those who don't understand other cultures or nations, for example, are the first to weave horrible fairy tales about them.
And problem 2: There'll always be a snake oil vendor ready to sell them some convenient fairy tale. And some times the price to pay is being dragged into some war or other catastrophic course of action. Or just to build a nice road towards dictatorship on those fairy tales. So growing whole generations of ignorants can bite us all in the ass sooner than we think.
And maybe the most important, problem 3: if you think they don't affect those doing actual science, you're sorely mistaken. There seems to be an increasingly vehement offensive of the ignorant and the stupid against any kind of science. The media already presents any kind of science as nothing but a bunch of controversies where your guess is as good as that of those bickering beardies in lab coats, and any Jane Doe's or Jack Conartist's home-brewn "theory" is just as good as that of a real scientist. In fact, for most publications, that kind of disparraging attitude is the official one and disguised as "impartiality": as long as they have two conflicting points of view (no matter how ridiculous one or both may be), it's scientific enough.
We're growing whole generations who believe with all their hearts that "science" is just some club of beardies in lab-coats taking wild guesses, and some academic structure on top of it just enforcing an arbitrary dogma. E.g., just busy trying to suppress all those miracle cures and miracle detergents and miracle audiophile power cables, just to protect their arbitrary dogma. And that any Tom, Dick and Harry can take just as good (or even better) a guess about anything, from chemistry, to evolution, to global warming, to nuclear power, to medicine, to astrophysics, to anthropology, to god knows what else.
Think they're harmless? A lot of them will be the next politician that decides the next school budget, or R&D subsidy, or the ones who vote for that politician. Or the manager that decides a company's R&D budget. Or the journalist wipping equally ignorant people into a frenzy pro or against some research they don't even understand.
I still remember hauling a new US Robotics modem in my luggage when I was in college. Can't say I remember why, but there you go, I'm hauling a modem through the airport. Now those modems back then weren't the kind of funky plastic boxes you get nowadays. This particular one was a sleek black steel box with LEDs and a switch.
Let's just say that not only I got pulled to the side and asked to explain what that thing is. Then I hauled by the police to some machine that, as far as I can guess, was a sorta giant vaccuum cleaner supposed to "smell" explosives. Scared me silly first, because the way it was mounted and the way it sounded, it looked uncannily like one of those vertical drills. I thought they were going to drill a hole in my new modem.
And if by now you're just about ready to start lamenting the US ignorance and post-9/11 terrorism paranoia... this was Germany, several years before 9/11.
"I don't think that being proficient in computer sciences will raise any government eyebrows unless you're doing something truly illegal."
With the paranoia about evil hackers, and encryption having been already used as "proof of criminal intent" to convict someone, you never know how long that'll last.
And witch hunts for computer geeks have already happened, e.g., in the wake of Columbine and the like. Suddenly every introverted nerd in some schools, or god forbid self-confessed computer gamer, was dragged before the principal or in some cases before the police. I knew someone from the USA who allegedly had major problems getting hired in his home town, and thus had to move, because that stigma never quite went away. Once he had been labelled as probably the next guy who'll shoot the school up, that small town never let go of that notion.
And let's not forget that witch hunts usually target the unpopular members of the community, rather than the real witches/terrorists/etc. I'd wager that out of the about 2 million victims of the inquisition, at least a million were burned just because they were the unsocial ones that didn't fit the group. Or worse yet, told some community leader to fuck off.
Nerds can make really unpopular neighbours. They're the ones who'd rather sit at a computer and do god knows what nefarious things than take part in the community gossip games. Even if not nefarious, at least they're "addicts" or whatever veiled insult.
So if you think the next witch hunt can't target IT nerds, think again.
As the saying goes, "if you're one in a million, there are 6000 just like you." What does that mean? That probabilities can be funny like that when they involve hideously large numbers of people.
When you say:
"Sure, some of them are a bit contrived, and wouldn't happen that often"
I'll say in a country of hundreds of millions of people, it will happpen hundreds of times per day.
If, say, only 1 in 1000 citizens have relatives overseas, and there's only 1 in 1000 chance in a given day they'll get called about a signifficant family event (grandma died, cousin It got married, etc), then you have exactly the one-in-a-million scenario. It'll happen hundreds of times a day.
And note that the probabilities in the example above were chosen ridiculously low. Family events happening only once every 1000 days, means once in 3 years. In most families _something_ or another happens a lot more often than that.
Sony has this funny little thing called Station Access, which gives you access to pretty much all SOE games. If you want to play two SOE games (e.g., EQ2 and Planetside), you're marginally cheaper off buying a Station Access. If just want the extras in one game (e.g., extra character slots and some other advantages in EQ2), they're often _only_ available as Station Access.
Once a game has been activated under Station Access, there's no way to say "nope, I don't want to play this one any more" as long as you keep your Station Access. E.g., once I activated SWG under that payment plan, no matter how much I find SWG a steaming pile of shit and an example of how _not_ to design a game, I can't unsubscribe it. On the upside, it doesn't cost anything extra to leave it there.
On the downside, I too get counted in such "look how many players we have" statistics.
"In your short example about using the computer too much and saying that your mom could not use it on a certain day, it is too shallow of a lie, which is probably what brought your gf at the time to your mom, asking about the rule. Gee, this seems odd, no computer on tuesday."
You have a point, no doubt, but you've got one detail wrong. It wasn't my GF that called mom. It was mom that took the initiative to call the GF and tell her "that's not true. Of course you're welcome to come and play on our computer." And didn't even inform me about it, but just let me deal with the resulting fallout.
I could easily forgive and forget if the GF had called there. Sure, I can't ask someone to actively lie for me or anything. But as it is... Sorry, no way I want to slice that, that kind of intervention in my private life is inexcusable.
And yeah, technically I don't miss that particular relationship as such, since it had gotten to the point where she was only interested in escaping into a virtual world on my computer. (Another victim seeking refuge, I might add.) I would have, and eventually did, terminate that relationship anyway. The motherly intervention just precipitated the (by then obvious) inevitable.
But I find it utterly offensive that someone would take it upon themselves to do something like that. Regardless of what mom's intention was there, either to precipitate the fallout or genuinely encouraging that GF to play on the computer (as I've mentioned, mom was a Lawful Good kinda paladin, and way too eager to do the kind thing in the dumb situation), it was stuff that just wasn't her business.
And as I've said that was just one instance of something that repeated every day. My dear parents took it upon them to actively inform everyone of every bloody thing I've ever did. Most benign (but still an irritating invasion of privacy), some outright stupid that I would have rather kept for myself, and some bloody intimate stuff that just I can't see any half-way sane person mentioning in casual conversation. Much less telling everyone within 5 miles about it.
Can I live with that now? Obviously, I'd say. I'm not going to roll over and die over something that happened 20 years ago. Did it push me to seek refuge in the computer at the time? You bet. That's all I was really saying.
1. I'm not a Mac fanboy, and I too find most of these "omg, it has lights and windows" cases butt-ugly. You don't have to be a Mac fanboy to have good taste, you know.
I mean, seriously, a window to show... what? An interior with a blue mainboard with yellow slots, a red heatsink (copper), green, black, and blue PCI cards, and cables in all colours known to man. (And some which I suspect would need another species to properly appreciate.) All bathed in some blue cathode glow, with red and green led fans, and cables glowing in various other colours for good measure.
It's supposed to be pretty... how? It looks like a terrorist attack on a paint factory, or clown after a tragic accident involving 5 buckets of paint.
2. What gets my goat is that most of them are _only_ supposed to look funky, but actually have piss-poor airflow or sound dampening.
E.g., I remember the worst offender, my old Xaser 3 case. It featured such idiocies as having 2 nosiy fans on the front, _but_ restricting both their intake _and_ exhaust to the point where maybe 5% of the nominal airflow actually cooled the hard drives or even made its way inside the case. Or side fans which (A) sucked against the side panel, so they had both restricted intake _and_ made the panel vibrate and hum, and (B) did more harm to the airflow inside the case than help. It needed 7 (SEVEN!) fans to actually do a poorer job than my current Lian Li does with just one exhaust fan at 1500 RPM, plus the PSU fan.
3. Lian Li makes good cases, but please. No need to go into the "Apple invented everything" routine. They made some of those cases long before the G5 even existed.
"I am not a programmer, (electrical engineer) but from everything I've ever read about programming and codes, it is not possible to do this for really complicated programs or it takes even more effort than just testing it at runtime."
It costs _hideously_ more effort and money than just testing it at runtime. On the other hand runtime testing can only reveal the presence of bugs, not their absence. Proving the program correct can prove their absence.
And there are ways to sorta manage the cost too, if you couple that with good design. E.g., micro-kernel OS's can prove just the micro-kernel correct, and run everything else at a privilege level that can't do much harm. E.g., you can't have the mouse driver or anti-virus crashing and thrashing the disk cache in one of those because (A) it doesn't run with that kind of privileges, and (B) the micro-kernel can summarily "execute" a mis-behaving driver and reload it. E.g., if the mouse driver got stuck in a loop or tried accessing memory outside its allocated heap or stack, it can be terminated and reloaded without the user even noticing it.
"A major reason the software industry at large is not regulated, such as aircraft or automobiles for example, is that the consequences failure in the vast majority of cases doesn't endanger human life or large property value."
Unfortunately that's less and less true. You read about more and more cases where:
- a military ship was dead in the water because its computers BSOD-ed. If it was during a war, that could have cost lives _and_ billions of dollars very easily.
- a quick hack in the software for an X-Ray machine for radiotherapy mis-calculated and gave someone a lethal dose of radiation. (I actually know two such cases, with different malfunction modes that caused that.)
- A major financial institution announces they have to restate their earnings by one _billion_ dollars, because an Excel spreadsheet programmed by a non-programmer accountant mis-calculated off by a billion dollars.
Etc. And that's not even counting such cases where millions of home computers, each doing nothing critical or of financial important, can be shanghaied into an army of zombies that will take a company offline for days. Or if they are backed by redundant servers a la Akamai, the bill for all those gigabytes per second can put a small or medium company out of business.
1. Design a program defensively. E.g., if you make a habit of checking your parameters and border conditions every single time, instead of coding some clever speed optimizations, you'll have a lot less bugs. Sure, you may be sure _now_ that you'll only call that method with the right parameters (e.g., never with a null pointer), but you'll never know what someone else does with it 6 months for now.
2. Use test cases and really check their coverage. (I.e., be sure that each reasonable branch in the program is taken at least once.) While they can't 100% prevent you from coding bugs right now, they _can_ prevent you from doing a change 6 months from now that breaks something else.
3. Prove the program (or its modules) mathematically correct. E.g., you don't just have to rely on testers finding out that your clever sort function is broken on some weird case, you can mathematically prove that and what the border conditions are.
Unfortunately, yeah, they all require more man-hours and budget. Especially proving it correct can cost a _lot_ more than just letting loose an army of underpaid (or even unpaid) testers on it. Good luck being competitive in the market if you're the guy doing that, and the counter-offer comes from someone hacking together some untested PHP or ASP site with the cheapest guys they could possibly hire.
(Nothing against PHP or ASP. They just have the dubious honour of being thought of as the ultimately easy frameworks that you can just give to a completely untrained guy off the street and have them learn it on the job. Too bad they won't learn good engineering practices or security practices from that exercise, though. It's like giving someone a super-user-friendly drawing program and expecting them to become an architect by just using it. It might eventually happen, but it'll take _years_, if ever, for them to rediscover stuff by trial and error that someone else had a formal education in.)
Given what Oracle's problem _is_, probably what they _really_ want isn't regulation of the "you must prove that your software passes this and that criteria to be allowed to sell it." (Which would also raise entry barriers for competitors.) I mean, really, if you were a company which takes five fucking _years_ to bother patching a security hole, and even then only when an exploit was widely publicized, you're not going to ask for a regulation that'll ask you to pull the product off the market until you fix it.
The kind of regulation they want is more like "you're an evil irresponsible hacker and going to jail if you disclose bugs in someone else's product." Yes, it's security by obscurity. But that way Oracle can happily spew bullshit about being secure and unbreakable, and never have to fix any bugs.
Basically Oracle doesn't give a shit if Corporation X's database is riddled with bugs and exploits. They just don't want the PHB's at Corporation X to know about it.
If it also results in some entry barrier, all the better, but that's not the main goal.
Let's put it like this. Logic is good and fine as long as both parties involved start from the same axioms. Otherwise you can argue until you're blue in the face that "X => Y", if that person doesn't acknowledge X as obviously true, that whole implication is devoid of any meaning.
And unlike science, where you can measure X accurately, in terms of inter-personal relations and human feelings, all "axioms" are more of a matter of education, goals, social convention, etc. Two people can be perfectly logical, yet arrive at wildly different conclusions.
What does this mean in this case. Well, mom is/was:
A) An Asperger's case, and not even a pretty one. She often can't even tell the difference between being screamed at or not. And you should see it when she thinks she was all subtle and diplomatic, and doesn't even realize that she shocked or upset everyone in the room. She's even had problems at work, because while she was a brilliant programmer if you ask any of her ex-bosses, she had trouble understanding the subtle human interactions at play there.
So trying to explain to someone like that the need for subtlety and discretion in inter-personal relations, is like trying to row up shit waterfall without a paddle.
And the next points are largely just consequences of this one.
B) Like many such nerds, lived by some idealized extreme notions, in her case a sorta D&D "lawful good" code of priniciples that would put Piffany from Nodwick comics to shame. It bit not only us kids in the ass, but her too. (And like many such nerds, seeing any shades as black and white, now she's flipped to the opposite "everyone is evil and I should have been a psychopatic bitch too.")
At any rate, trying to explain why I need to lie to my friends every now and then, again went against _her_ axioms. "Well, just tell them the truth. That you don't want to play with them today." Thanks mom, now why didn't _I_ ever think of that.
C) More importantly, a victim seeking refuge too. Mind you, mostly a victim of her own inability to deal with society and most of the time with dad or other relatives either. Except while the Koreans in this article find their refuge in having some level 60 warrior in an MMO, she had me and my brother. We were her MMO characters, so to speak. We were going to get to level 60, have an epic mount, and be her grand achievement, so to speak. Even if we had to grind and farm our way there, so to speak.
So just like in the aforementioned MMOs, just talking an addict into abandoning their characters and stopping talking about their latest instance raid... is a tad harder than you'd think. Just logic, of the "here are reasons X, Y and Z why you should deal with RL instead of seeking shelter in a game" kind, will at most make them feel rotten and give them even more reason to seek refuge.
And that's just one parent.
And here's another thing: I actually loved them. I didn't _really_ want to hurt mom, I just wanted her to just shut up about me, just for once.
So if standing up for yourself worked for you, well, I'm glad for you. Honestly. It didn't for me.
"The damage doesn't just cease to exist once you leave home either."
Amen. How true that is.
I still pretty much have to roll for will power (to use a bad D&D metaphor) to start doing anything. Somewhere in the back of my head there's this circuit going "you know, mom wouldn't approve my doing it, or doing it like this" for just about anything. While I _do_ overcome that, yeah, it never ceased to exist.
I tried. Believe me, I tried. There was no standing up, no tantrum, no whatever that could get mom to shut the fuck up about me just for once. Au contraire, then she'd go and tell everyone about that tantrum too. Standing up to her to at least keep the fuck out of my love life... well, let's just say lasted just until the next girlfriend, where the motherly intervention repeated verbatim.
Just about the only point where I managed to finally have some peace was when I finally finished university and moved to a flat of my own. Not that it stopped mom from trying to continue to rule my life. She still does and I'm in the mid-30's. The notion that she could jolly well mind her own business and live her own life, just doesn't compute. Telling her that is like telling someone to walk on the ceiling: she can't even imagine how that's possible. What's different is that now I can hang up the phone.
So, please. It's easy to dish out some advice like "you should have had the guts and stood up for yourself" or "if you wanted privacy, you should have got privacy." But that's the kind of self-centered assuming everyone's an idiot and only you know the obvious, that misses the point by a mile.
In other words, ok, if you're at giving me retroactive advice, what do _you_ propose that I should have done there? "Have some guts and stand up to them" is good and fine, but it didn't work. What next? Should I have run away from home and joined some gang, or something? Because that would have been just about the only thing that could have solved the problem.
Would _that_ have been better than finding refuge in the computer? Hardly, if you ask me.
I quickly switched to living inside the computer instead of "going outside" once my parents got one. I've already said why in another post, short version: escaping an awful reality.
Mind you, back then it wasn't too hard to program your own game, so most of that time was spent programming rather than just gaming. When you looked at a game that could run in 1K RAM on a ZX-81 or later in 16K RAM on a ZX Spectrum, even having the most rudimentary ideas of BASIC could lead one to think "I can do my own, and add this and that idea of my own." And from there that led to learning Assembly, Pascal and then Prolog, rediscovering formal logic long before having a course in it.
But that's not all in the past. With Python and other script languages gaining traction in games (as opposed to needing to write C++ code using an awful API, if even that's available) it's increasingly feasible again to guide a kid's creativity that-a-way instead of just having them push buttons in someone else's game. It would be pretty trivial to get a kid to make small changes in a game like, say, "The Fall: Last Days Of Gaia", if you took the time to guide them that way.
Virtually any gamer has their ideas as to how a game could be better, more balanced, or just what kind of undeserved advantage they should have in that game. Show a kid how to actually implement those changes, and you may find them a lot more interested and receptive than you'd think.
Or maybe they're more the artistic, creative kind than the analytical programmer type? No problem. Guide them towards making skins or levels for a mod. Not only it gives them a "real world" skill they can earn a living with later, but also some hard proof of that skill when they later seek employment.
At any rate, I spent a lot of time on the computer, I played games too, and I still play plenty of games in my free time.
Where that lead is that I'm currently paid damn well developping buzzword-driven enterprise software at a large corporation. My business card says "consultant", though it's been so permanent an employment it's more like an overpaid "contractor". My boss would say I'm very efficient and effective in the workplace. So would my previous boss, and the one before him. I've had no complaints about my work in a really long time.
So can one be effective in the workplace if they love computers instead of going outside? Damn right, if that job involves computers.
In fact, I'll say that if someone is the kind of total extrovert that spent all their waking time outside with their friends, they're going to find a computer-related job _extremely_ boring. I see people every day who just have to wander off every 15 to 30 minutes to find someone to talk to, and they're anything but effective as a result. And eventually they quit, one way or another. E.g., the most talkative of the lot, the guy who could talk for half an hour _after_ the other had outright left the room... well, he stuck around for about 3 months before he found a job as a teacher instead.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think that you are being overly generous. Steve Balmer was only called on to do something that an end user of his (consumer!) product would want to do."
That some idiot "wants to do" something is hardly a criterion for classifying something as the normal operation of a product. People "want to do" stupid things they're not qualified for every day. Some want to repair their TV and get zapped by a still charged capacitor. Some want to weld an acetylene tank to their roof while doing repairs there. Some want to run in a drag race with a solid rocket booster strapped to their car. Darwin Awards is full of people who thought that arc welding a grenade to a chain is normal consumer business. It doesn't automatically make it so.
It _is_ possible to operate a Windows PC for years without ever having to remove a single item of spyware. _That's_ the equivalent of driving a car. Or you can be an idiot and drive your car against the wall, or install Claria and everyhing else in sight on your Windows PC. Getting either your car or your PC back to good as new is already a repair job, not the day-to-day business of a normal consumer.
Basically the whole exercise isn't like expecting a BMW executive to be able to drive a BMW. It's more like asking a BMW executive to come fix your paint and tyres after you drove the car through a bed of roses. It's just not his job.
"A better analogy would be that you shouldn't expect an executive at a car manufacturer to be able to drive the company's cars. But of course you would."
Even then, I wouldn't. E.g.:
- most car manufacturers also make trucks (e.g., check out some of the big Mercedes Benz ones), cranes, bulldozers, etc. Acting like it's the exec's job to have a license to operate each of those is just stupid. A lot also make special F1 or rally models. I _don't_ expect them to be able to drive those either. E.g., I don't expect a Honda executive to be able to drive a McLarren-Honda in the F1 races. It's just not his job.
- I also don't expect Boeing executives to be able to fly a plane. Not even a small consumer one, like the Cessna. If he can, kudos to him, but if not, it wasn't his job to start with.
- I don't even expect a console maker to be a l33t console gamer. (And it's a consumer product, right?) Nintendo, for example, used to have someone at the helm who took _pride_ in never having played a video game. The guy used to spew such highly insulting stuff about the gamers, as that RPG fans are losers playing in the dark in their parents' basement. Yet it's the company which pwned the market in the NES and SNES days.
Etc.
Who cares? It's not their job to personally do those things, nor even to personally understand those things. His job is to hire someone who does. _The_ most important thing about management -- and often the difference between a good manager and a PHB -- is knowing when and how to delegate. You can't personally know everything and do everything.
Ballmer is a manager, not a computer guru. It's not his job to clean spyware off a computer. Whop-de-fucking-do. So someone is good at his job, not at yours. This just reeks of the kind of "only my job is important, and if you can't hack the registry with a hex editor, you're an idiot" arrogance that gives geeks a bad name.
Second, the mention of "Microsoft's top engineers" makes the whole thing look very fishy to me. I seriously doubt that MS actually got their top stars just to fix some guy's computer. That a bunch of top engineers would also be utterly unable to save a computer -- if nothing else, just backup all the important files and reinstall -- ranks up there with belief in Santa or the Tooth Fairy.
It's, again, the stuff crap elitism is made of: the belief that surely you're the smartest guy out there, and even MS with all their money couldn't hire someone smarter. And funnily enough, the less skilled one actually is, the more he loves to believe that kinda crap. People who once wrote a 5 line script, or once even managed to compile Linux... using someone else's script, love to pretend that verily, they're so cool that they could singlehandedly re-write XP _and_ Vista in a week and make it better than all those MS monkeys.
Basically even as MS bashing goes, this kind of fairy tale is a new low.
I've met people who used buzzwords they didn't understand to sound knowledgeable, and believe me, it wasn't the programmers. It was the occasional management or marketting guys who thought that they'd look like programming experts if they use those. They spend their whole day using bullshit buzzwords in meetings, that they start assuming that everyone else does the same.
Look, I don't use acronyms to sound cool. I use them because they're mean something _very_ precise that are backed by a whole tome saying what they mean, what they do, and what they don't do. They're not there because they sound cooler than another common word, but because it would take tens of thousands of words to specify the same thing with the same detail.
E.g., when I say TCP/IP, it's not just a funky way of saying "over the net". It also tells another engineer exactly what kind of a net, and how. You could print a tome with all the RFCs (basically, standards) it complies with, or at least doesn't interfere with. It tells you something about the kind of hardware and software you need too.
E.g., when I say it's an EJB application and uses SOAP over JMS for messaging and JAAS authentication over LDAP, it's not just for the sake of having some "enterprise" buzzwords. It tells you the exact software you need to run it, exactly what protocol you can talk to it over, what you'll store the user accounts in, and exactly what you need to change if you want those passwords stored in an Oracle database instead. E.g., it tells you that if you want to interface another app to it, a SOAP framework (e.g., Axis) might help. There are whole books that define each of those "buzzwords" in painstaking detail, and define exactly what they do, what they don't do, what they can connect to, what's optional, and what you probably shouldn't use if you don't want to be tied to a single vendor.
It's not even possible to say the same in plain English, or not without writing a whole bible-sized tome.
How would you say that? "Some modules that talk over the net"? Well, that's fine for a quick talk talk to the customer, and we all do it all the time too. But same as in law, it doesn't help you if you wrote a spec like that. What kind of modules? If you want to add your own, what exactly do you need to write? Over what net? IPX maybe? In what format is that talk? If next year the HR database guys want to ask for data from ours, in what format would they send their request and how? If next thing they want it changed to take the user passwords from the portal guys' DB2 database, exactly what has to be changed? Etc.
Well, it sounds about right about the price, but the problem IMHO goes deeper than just price.
E.g., Sony TFTs for a while didn't just cost twice as much as an Acer with the exact same panel, they also outright lied about the latency. Now the latency is fudged anyway, but there is an ISO standard about how to measure that fudged number, and everyone else aligned to that. It was the sum of the rise time _and_ the fall time. (And due to the fact that it only requires you to come within 10% of the target colour, even that sum was massively lower than the point where that asymptotic transition was close enough for a human eye in either direction.) Sony was the last to quote only one of the two as the latency, instead of their sum, making it sound as if they were twice as fast as the same panel in another manufacturer's display.
E.g., consumer products? How about Sony selling MP3 players that could _not_ actually play MP3. They converted an already lossy format to another lossy format, only this time Sony's proprietary one, and then played that. Yay for getting your 192 kbit/s encoded MP3s converted again to a shitty Sony format, in 64 kbit/s, no less. I.e., they had no qualms with ruining quality for the consumer to push their own proprietary format.
E.g., the PSP? Consumer product all right. I can't see any corporation declaring the PSP their new workstation or anything. Yet tell the people with more dead pixels on a PSP than on a computer monitor with 16 times the total pixels, that Sony cares about the consumer.
E.g., the infamous Sony rootkit? That was their music division that pushed that upon the consumers.
E.g., the heavy-handed customer-relations of SOE? You know, the ones that banned people for being tipped with duped in-game currency (as if you could even know that the money you got were duped), and then teleported the protesters into space? That seems like a consumer division to me. I can't really imagine a corporation declaring SWG or EQ2 as the corporate IM standard.
So, nope, I don't buy it that their consumer divisions are somehow still "the old Sony" that cares and all. (Assuming that an old Sony like that actually existed.) Sony as a whole seems to have developped a corporate culture of utter contempt for their customers. The customers are there to be shafted, cheated, abused, and told to get a second job already if they want a Sony product.
Don't get me wrong, I do own a PSP and a PS2, and I'll get a PS3 if it has good games anyway. But I have no illusion that some Sony division cares about me. And when I do get the next Sony product, I'll read the spec twice and do some research, because I can know that Sony _will_ try to fuck me up the ass. I'll bring a condom along too, just in case they manage to.
See, in the dark ages if you were born a psychopath and not of noble blood, the most you could look forward to was becoming a brigand or a serial killer and eventually swinging from the gallows. Not that exciting a prospect for either the psychopath or the victims. You can see why it was called the dark ages.
Nowadays, however, we live in more civilized times. Psychopaths can go for example into politics (what Jack is doing _is_ politics) or management, and keep themselves entertained for a lifetime trying to screw each other over in courtrooms, board meetings, media debates, or whatever else is apropriate. In some cases that even creates value for the rest of the society, e.g., for shareholders. E.g., firing the whole R&D department and setting the company on a 5 year course to bankruptcy invariably makes the share price rise. Investors love "cost saving measures", or at least have been conditioned like Pavlov's dog that that's when they must reach for the wallet.
What I'm getting at is that Jack is a psychopath. It doesn't mean "axe murderer" (or not necessarily), it just means a complete lack of empathy for others. Their care for others is really about the same as most people feel for an NPC: the other people are just there as unimportant playthings, nothing more. They can cheat them, manipulate them, even kill them if they can get away with it, whatever keeps them entertained. And they're damn good at manipulating and rationalizing anything that serves their purposes. (E.g., the most surrealistic I've read was one rationalizing that raping a child is a victimless crime and shouldn't be punished. _That_ kind of being able to rationalize _anything_.)
Same deal: they won't feel any kind of "oh man, I'm such an asshole for manipulating this nice guy into ruining his own life" reaction. So he can say anything with a straight face. Or whatever kind of a face is needed.
So, as I've saying, Jack is a psychopath. He'll do anything that fits his goals, including lie, cheat and manipulate people's fears. There are no two ways about it. Anyone who sees manipulating the fear of a mother that her kid might be on the next Columbine-style casualty list, as just means to build a political carreer or to get attention on TV, has got to be a psychopath.
Well, I sometimes wish those people knew that too. But, alas, everyone thinks they can comment about hardware architectures or software development just because they once installed an anti-virus on mom's computer, or got a shitty job reading a tech support script. I suppose that's what the GP post was saying with that quip: people whose only knowledge about memory is that they can change the RAM sticks in a corporate computer feel qualified to discuss the RSX's memory architecture.
To be fair, I don't think it is an "IT" problem as such, as rather just a certain "I'm the greatest genius, you're all ignorant peasants" kind of nerd. He just knows that he knows everything, and is fully qualified to talk in depth about GPU pipeline architectures and memory controllers. He does tech support for an ISP, so he obviously knows everything about anything even vaguely computer related. (Verily, there's nothing under the Sun that couldn't be fixed by a trip through their helldesk script. E.g., Sony should have defragged their hard drive, reset their DSL modem and checked their network cable.)
I know of at least two different machines who gave the patient a lethal dose of radiation, in two different malfunction modes. Neither sounds like what you describe, so, scarily enough, yours would be the third.
Actually, if you look at those things, the real common theme was that they were designed or modified by people who _weren't_ real engineers. E.g.:
- a dam is built by a "self-taught engineer" who can't even get the foundations right
- a ship design is modified by a king who has no flippin' clue about ship design. He demanded changes like cutting extra portholes right above the water line, loading extra guns and other stuff, and so on. The final design was basically the king's, not the design of a real shipwright.
- a huge container for molasses is designed and its building supervised by a beancounter with _no_ engineering background whatsoever, and whose only concern was getting it built quickly and cheaply.
Etc. Sorry, you can't say "never trust the engineers" when, in fact, those mistakes were made by non-engineers.
Want another common theme? How about ignoring testing or warning signs that it's about to fall apart. E.g.:
- when the dam started to crack, the "self-taught engineer" just ignored it
- the molasses container was (A) never tested, e.g., by filling it with water, and (B) when a worker complained that it leaked heavily, the beancounter just covered the problem by having it painted brown.
- the Vasa, as other posters have noted, was in fact tested before being lanched, but noone had the courage to tell the king that his design doesn't work. In effect, again the warning signs existed, but were effectively ignored.
And the third thing is: don't think those are just historical trivia, because the exact same things happen nowadays with software. Everyone loves to spew the "colleges don't teach engineering" or "it's time programmers started acting like engineers", but some of the most catastrophic mistakes come from people who had _neither_ a CS or engineering college, _nor_ reasonable work experience or training to bring them up to par. I'm not even sneering (mainly) at the actual coders, because lot of those mistakes were from some manager or customer demanding/making some catastrophic change or imposing some impossible deadmark or policy. (Remember the Vasa and the king.)
E.g.,
- a financial institution restates its earnings by 1 _billion_ dollars, because some Excel spreadsheet programmed by a beancounter with _zero_ engineering or programming background... guess what? Mis-calculated by a whole billion dollars.
- a radiotherapy machine, using lead blocks to cover the parts of the patient that shouldn't be irradiated, had a problem using more than IIRC 4 lead blocks. So a doctor takes it upon himself to hack it to use non-rectangular blocks to the same end. The result: the program mis-calculates and some people are given a lethal dose of radiation.
And that's just the spectacular stuff. I'm sure almost everyone has their own stories where someone else's intervention had catastrophic results, even if in less spectacular ways.
So my brother buys himself a new house, and wants his DSL connection moved to the new place. (Well, deactivated from the old one and activated as a new one.) He's also some kind of a VIP customer at them, as we had found when he first moved in town.
(I have no idea how one gets to be a VIP customer at a telco. Maybe he and his wife having their mobile phones from that telco and both being addicted to the phone would explain it. But I digress.)
So he has a house number like, say, 42a. (The number is made up, I'm not gonna post someone's real address on the net.) He talks to them, gives them the address, has it read back to him, and they assure him that he'll have his DSL connection in the next couple of days. What with being a VIP customer and all.
A week goes by, you guessed, he has no signal. Calls tech support, goes through the whole "reset the modem", "check that the cable is plugged into the computer" (why? the modem shows no signal on the DSL line, not a missing connector to the computer?) and generally following an idiotic script that didn't even apply in his case. But it's soon obvious that the guy there just _can't_ think outside the script, so they follow it dutifully to the letter. Eventually they get escalated, someone eventually tells them that no, the DSL connection indeed isn't activated yet, but they'll do it in the next couple of days.
Some more days go by, another phone call, another "reset the modem", "check that the network cable if plugged in the computer" script to go through. Another assurance that it will be done in the next couple of days.
Lather, rinse, repeat, for a month and a half. (Guess that must be some kind of family constant.) Nicely, politely and sucking up. After the month and a half, he loses his patience, stops sucking up, and escalates it to hell and back.
Remember the house number? 42a? Well, some idiot had typed it in as 42s. It's right on the next key on the keyboard, after all. Which of course, doesn't even exist in a suburb of a small city. They don't build houses _that_ big in these parts anyway.
So again, for a whole freakin' month and a half none of the drones could tell him this simple info: the address in their computers just doesn't exist. No, they lied to him too, again and again. Not to mention the shameless waste of someone else's time to make them diagnose the modem and the computer cable, when they _knew_ they hadn't even activated the connection.
And if that's how they treat a VIP customer... I rest my case. Anyway, fat lot of good being nice did for him, eh?
Let me tell you a story about my ISP. So at one point I manage to mangle my password by using the change password form on their web site. Actually, I'd swear that it was the crap web site that mangled it, and thereafter neither the old one nor the new one worked. With or without capslock, etc. But ok, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was my fault.
So I call their tech support, am as nice as it gets (it's not that guy's fault anyway), follow the instructions so he can be sure that indeed I can't log in (can't he just reset my password anyway?), and dutifully recite to him all what software I'm using and how when he asks about that. (With the small hickup of him running out of pre-scripted answers when I tell him I'm using RASPPPOE on Windows 2000. Apparently his sheet only included that under XP.) He also asks for my invoice number to be sure it's really me. Remember that detail, it will be crucial in a jiffy. Since it's a daughter company of the telco here, I get the invoices combined, and he aggrees that the one on the telco's invoice is all he needs. I read it to him, he's satisfied with it.
Anyway, we have a nice civilized talk and he promises that he'll change my password right away and, as is their (idiotic) policy, I'll get the new one by post. Ok, so I'll be without net for couple of days, but I thank him kindly anyway.
Now let's think about it for a bit, before we delve deeper in this Lovecraftian madness:
- DSL is a P2P connection, so even if my password were to get to someone else, they can _only_ log on from my apartment. It's not like someone can trick them into giving them a password that'll work from somewhere else.
- the new password is sent by post to my home address, so they can freakin' know that _I_ am going to be the one receiving it anyway.
- my phone line is from the same telco and goes through the same exchange, so they could jolly well know that it was me who called, or at least it was from my phone.
A week goes by and I still don't have my flippin' password. By now I've dug out the old ISDN card and I'm using an expensive call-by-call account somewhere else to even read my emails.
So I call again, get someone else on the phone, read them the invoice number, they say "yep, I'm changing it now, you'll get it by post." A week later I call again. Then twice a week. Then every 2 days. The same freaking circus repeats every single time. Read them the invoice number, get told "yep, I'm changing it now, nothing happens." Eventually, after a month and a half, it becomes bloody obvious that they're lying shamelessly and they won't do anything.
So I'm annoyed, escalate it to hell and back, until eventually someone tells me what's the problem: my invoice number doesn't match the one in their database. Apparently when I moved they gave me a new invoice number, but here's the catch: the telco and their ISP department had given me different ones.
So for a whole bloody month and a half, the retarded tech support drones had just lied to me. None of them bothered telling me "oi, that number doesn't match." None of them bothered using their freaking brains, and figuring out that there are ways to authenticate me otherwise (e.g., tell me to come personally to one of their offices, if they're that paranoid, or call back to my home number to make sure it's me, or whatever) instead of following a script like a lobotomized robot.
That's what a month of being nice and polite and patient to lying idiots did for me. Yeah, it soo helped.
Let's say you have your super-duper captcha generator where no two are ever alike, and thus can't be indexed. Let's say I also want to crap-flood you with automated posts linking to my product, or just site I want brought forward on Google's index. Think you're safe?
Hell, let's use Slashdot as an example, since everyone has seen the captchas here.
It works like this: I'll set up a porn site all right. Gets people's interest easier than anything else. I promise some free porn, or heck, even some links to other thumbnail galleries, but make people go through a captcha each time. Except it's _your_ captcha. Consider the following sequence:
1. Random J Hornyguy wants to see the porn. He makes the request that'll give him the captcha page.
2. My server automatically makes a request for a message posting form on your site. (Think simulating clicking on a "Reply To This" link on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward.) Your server gives me the form, complete with session cookie, etc, which I store, and also a captcha. Ah-ha. Guess what I do with that captcha...
3. Random J Hornyguy finally gets his login page, complete with the captcha I just got at step 2. Which he mutters a bit about and finally fills in as plaintext and submits.
4. I now finally submit my post to your site, complete with the captcha text that Random J Hornyguy dutifully filled in for me.
5. If that doesn't go through, I'll make another request and politely ask Random J Hornyguy to try again. (I'm userfriendly, eh?) If it went through, I'll also let him see the porn. After all, I'll want him to come again later and do some more free work for me, so no use annoying the hell out of him. But if I'm an evil SOB and have an endless supply of suckers (e.g., a spamming or phishing operation reeling in the suckers), I might tell him that he typed wrong anyway, and see how many can I get him to solve before it dawns upon him that there's no reward and he can't ever get past the captcha.
Note that at no point this relied on you having a repeating set of images. My site just acted as a captcha proxy between yours and a human sucker, in real time.
Sure, it needs a bit more work coding it like that, but not much more. (I'd have to store the session, recognize links, simulate form responses, etc, anyway if I want to automatically crap-flood your site.) And it'll keep working no matter how you alter your captcha generator, as long as it's still readable at all by a human. And if I have enough users, I can add modules to automate that captcha proxying for several site: each user randomly gets to break the captcha for another site, so the crapflooding is more distributed instead of swamping one site solid.
Also note that a lot of sites, Slashdot included, only make you use the captcha once, when you create or log in a user. If you choose to get a permanent cookie, you can post thousands of posts without ever seeing a captcha again. So I don't have to rely on you reusing captchas, if I create a new user for each one my users solved for me and store the permanent cookie. Since each such user can post more than once before the site admins catch on to it and ban the user id, I can generate a lot more crapflood posts than I get users solving captchas for me.
(Or maybe I won't crapflood some message board, but generate ids to free mail accounts and send spam from that. Again, that escalates quite nicely. As long as you don't require a captcha for every single bloody email a legit user sends, I can send thousands of emails per captcha solved by some Random J Hornyguy. And when that user gets banned, some other Random J Hornyguy will solve the next captcha for me.)
So, to wrap this long rant up, TFA just made me go "didn't it ever occur to these people that they're doing a brilliant technical solution, but it solves the _wrong_ problem?" It's such a tunnel view of the problem, it ranks up with MPAA's being surprised that people tell their friend whether a movie was good or bad. It's the typical "idiot savant"
The more cruel reality is that the uneducated are never just content to admit that they don't know something.
E.g., ID/creationism are a direct result of people not understanding evolution. E.g., forget the dot-com bubble: every day around you, people are scammed and whipped up into frenzies by politicians or lobby groups because they have no clue about real economics. Read some day about keynesian economics and you'll see that some things that politicians condemn or promise during every single election, and never actually fix thereafter, just can't be fixed. Those are just the way the economy works. Yet the vast majority of voters are manipulated by the same falsehoods again and again and again.
Or look around you on Slashdot, and see the plethora of falsehoods passing for economic "theories", based by some over-simplification or on idealizing some failed economic system (and I don't just mean communism, but also unrestricted 19'th century style capitalism, which _did_ fail by causing the great depression), by people who just don't have even the faintest clue what they're talking about.
That's problem 1: People who can't understand actual science, _will_ find refuge in some fairy tale instead. And hold that for absolute truth instead.
The same goes for "soft sciences", too, btw. Those who don't understand other cultures or nations, for example, are the first to weave horrible fairy tales about them.
And problem 2: There'll always be a snake oil vendor ready to sell them some convenient fairy tale. And some times the price to pay is being dragged into some war or other catastrophic course of action. Or just to build a nice road towards dictatorship on those fairy tales. So growing whole generations of ignorants can bite us all in the ass sooner than we think.
And maybe the most important, problem 3: if you think they don't affect those doing actual science, you're sorely mistaken. There seems to be an increasingly vehement offensive of the ignorant and the stupid against any kind of science. The media already presents any kind of science as nothing but a bunch of controversies where your guess is as good as that of those bickering beardies in lab coats, and any Jane Doe's or Jack Conartist's home-brewn "theory" is just as good as that of a real scientist. In fact, for most publications, that kind of disparraging attitude is the official one and disguised as "impartiality": as long as they have two conflicting points of view (no matter how ridiculous one or both may be), it's scientific enough.
We're growing whole generations who believe with all their hearts that "science" is just some club of beardies in lab-coats taking wild guesses, and some academic structure on top of it just enforcing an arbitrary dogma. E.g., just busy trying to suppress all those miracle cures and miracle detergents and miracle audiophile power cables, just to protect their arbitrary dogma. And that any Tom, Dick and Harry can take just as good (or even better) a guess about anything, from chemistry, to evolution, to global warming, to nuclear power, to medicine, to astrophysics, to anthropology, to god knows what else.
Think they're harmless? A lot of them will be the next politician that decides the next school budget, or R&D subsidy, or the ones who vote for that politician. Or the manager that decides a company's R&D budget. Or the journalist wipping equally ignorant people into a frenzy pro or against some research they don't even understand.
I'd start worrying now and avoid the rush later.
I still remember hauling a new US Robotics modem in my luggage when I was in college. Can't say I remember why, but there you go, I'm hauling a modem through the airport. Now those modems back then weren't the kind of funky plastic boxes you get nowadays. This particular one was a sleek black steel box with LEDs and a switch.
Let's just say that not only I got pulled to the side and asked to explain what that thing is. Then I hauled by the police to some machine that, as far as I can guess, was a sorta giant vaccuum cleaner supposed to "smell" explosives. Scared me silly first, because the way it was mounted and the way it sounded, it looked uncannily like one of those vertical drills. I thought they were going to drill a hole in my new modem.
And if by now you're just about ready to start lamenting the US ignorance and post-9/11 terrorism paranoia... this was Germany, several years before 9/11.
"I don't think that being proficient in computer sciences will raise any government eyebrows unless you're doing something truly illegal."
With the paranoia about evil hackers, and encryption having been already used as "proof of criminal intent" to convict someone, you never know how long that'll last.
And witch hunts for computer geeks have already happened, e.g., in the wake of Columbine and the like. Suddenly every introverted nerd in some schools, or god forbid self-confessed computer gamer, was dragged before the principal or in some cases before the police. I knew someone from the USA who allegedly had major problems getting hired in his home town, and thus had to move, because that stigma never quite went away. Once he had been labelled as probably the next guy who'll shoot the school up, that small town never let go of that notion.
And let's not forget that witch hunts usually target the unpopular members of the community, rather than the real witches/terrorists/etc. I'd wager that out of the about 2 million victims of the inquisition, at least a million were burned just because they were the unsocial ones that didn't fit the group. Or worse yet, told some community leader to fuck off.
Nerds can make really unpopular neighbours. They're the ones who'd rather sit at a computer and do god knows what nefarious things than take part in the community gossip games. Even if not nefarious, at least they're "addicts" or whatever veiled insult.
So if you think the next witch hunt can't target IT nerds, think again.
As the saying goes, "if you're one in a million, there are 6000 just like you." What does that mean? That probabilities can be funny like that when they involve hideously large numbers of people.
When you say:
"Sure, some of them are a bit contrived, and wouldn't happen that often"
I'll say in a country of hundreds of millions of people, it will happpen hundreds of times per day.
If, say, only 1 in 1000 citizens have relatives overseas, and there's only 1 in 1000 chance in a given day they'll get called about a signifficant family event (grandma died, cousin It got married, etc), then you have exactly the one-in-a-million scenario. It'll happen hundreds of times a day.
And note that the probabilities in the example above were chosen ridiculously low. Family events happening only once every 1000 days, means once in 3 years. In most families _something_ or another happens a lot more often than that.
Sony has this funny little thing called Station Access, which gives you access to pretty much all SOE games. If you want to play two SOE games (e.g., EQ2 and Planetside), you're marginally cheaper off buying a Station Access. If just want the extras in one game (e.g., extra character slots and some other advantages in EQ2), they're often _only_ available as Station Access.
Once a game has been activated under Station Access, there's no way to say "nope, I don't want to play this one any more" as long as you keep your Station Access. E.g., once I activated SWG under that payment plan, no matter how much I find SWG a steaming pile of shit and an example of how _not_ to design a game, I can't unsubscribe it. On the upside, it doesn't cost anything extra to leave it there.
On the downside, I too get counted in such "look how many players we have" statistics.
"In your short example about using the computer too much and saying that your mom could not use it on a certain day, it is too shallow of a lie, which is probably what brought your gf at the time to your mom, asking about the rule. Gee, this seems odd, no computer on tuesday."
You have a point, no doubt, but you've got one detail wrong. It wasn't my GF that called mom. It was mom that took the initiative to call the GF and tell her "that's not true. Of course you're welcome to come and play on our computer." And didn't even inform me about it, but just let me deal with the resulting fallout.
I could easily forgive and forget if the GF had called there. Sure, I can't ask someone to actively lie for me or anything. But as it is... Sorry, no way I want to slice that, that kind of intervention in my private life is inexcusable.
And yeah, technically I don't miss that particular relationship as such, since it had gotten to the point where she was only interested in escaping into a virtual world on my computer. (Another victim seeking refuge, I might add.) I would have, and eventually did, terminate that relationship anyway. The motherly intervention just precipitated the (by then obvious) inevitable.
But I find it utterly offensive that someone would take it upon themselves to do something like that. Regardless of what mom's intention was there, either to precipitate the fallout or genuinely encouraging that GF to play on the computer (as I've mentioned, mom was a Lawful Good kinda paladin, and way too eager to do the kind thing in the dumb situation), it was stuff that just wasn't her business.
And as I've said that was just one instance of something that repeated every day. My dear parents took it upon them to actively inform everyone of every bloody thing I've ever did. Most benign (but still an irritating invasion of privacy), some outright stupid that I would have rather kept for myself, and some bloody intimate stuff that just I can't see any half-way sane person mentioning in casual conversation. Much less telling everyone within 5 miles about it.
Can I live with that now? Obviously, I'd say. I'm not going to roll over and die over something that happened 20 years ago. Did it push me to seek refuge in the computer at the time? You bet. That's all I was really saying.
1. I'm not a Mac fanboy, and I too find most of these "omg, it has lights and windows" cases butt-ugly. You don't have to be a Mac fanboy to have good taste, you know.
I mean, seriously, a window to show... what? An interior with a blue mainboard with yellow slots, a red heatsink (copper), green, black, and blue PCI cards, and cables in all colours known to man. (And some which I suspect would need another species to properly appreciate.) All bathed in some blue cathode glow, with red and green led fans, and cables glowing in various other colours for good measure.
It's supposed to be pretty... how? It looks like a terrorist attack on a paint factory, or clown after a tragic accident involving 5 buckets of paint.
2. What gets my goat is that most of them are _only_ supposed to look funky, but actually have piss-poor airflow or sound dampening.
E.g., I remember the worst offender, my old Xaser 3 case. It featured such idiocies as having 2 nosiy fans on the front, _but_ restricting both their intake _and_ exhaust to the point where maybe 5% of the nominal airflow actually cooled the hard drives or even made its way inside the case. Or side fans which (A) sucked against the side panel, so they had both restricted intake _and_ made the panel vibrate and hum, and (B) did more harm to the airflow inside the case than help. It needed 7 (SEVEN!) fans to actually do a poorer job than my current Lian Li does with just one exhaust fan at 1500 RPM, plus the PSU fan.
3. Lian Li makes good cases, but please. No need to go into the "Apple invented everything" routine. They made some of those cases long before the G5 even existed.
"I am not a programmer, (electrical engineer) but from everything I've ever read about programming and codes, it is not possible to do this for really complicated programs or it takes even more effort than just testing it at runtime."
It costs _hideously_ more effort and money than just testing it at runtime. On the other hand runtime testing can only reveal the presence of bugs, not their absence. Proving the program correct can prove their absence.
And there are ways to sorta manage the cost too, if you couple that with good design. E.g., micro-kernel OS's can prove just the micro-kernel correct, and run everything else at a privilege level that can't do much harm. E.g., you can't have the mouse driver or anti-virus crashing and thrashing the disk cache in one of those because (A) it doesn't run with that kind of privileges, and (B) the micro-kernel can summarily "execute" a mis-behaving driver and reload it. E.g., if the mouse driver got stuck in a loop or tried accessing memory outside its allocated heap or stack, it can be terminated and reloaded without the user even noticing it.
"A major reason the software industry at large is not regulated, such as aircraft or automobiles for example, is that the consequences failure in the vast majority of cases doesn't endanger human life or large property value."
Unfortunately that's less and less true. You read about more and more cases where:
- a military ship was dead in the water because its computers BSOD-ed. If it was during a war, that could have cost lives _and_ billions of dollars very easily.
- a quick hack in the software for an X-Ray machine for radiotherapy mis-calculated and gave someone a lethal dose of radiation. (I actually know two such cases, with different malfunction modes that caused that.)
- A major financial institution announces they have to restate their earnings by one _billion_ dollars, because an Excel spreadsheet programmed by a non-programmer accountant mis-calculated off by a billion dollars.
Etc. And that's not even counting such cases where millions of home computers, each doing nothing critical or of financial important, can be shanghaied into an army of zombies that will take a company offline for days. Or if they are backed by redundant servers a la Akamai, the bill for all those gigabytes per second can put a small or medium company out of business.
There _are_ ways to:
1. Design a program defensively. E.g., if you make a habit of checking your parameters and border conditions every single time, instead of coding some clever speed optimizations, you'll have a lot less bugs. Sure, you may be sure _now_ that you'll only call that method with the right parameters (e.g., never with a null pointer), but you'll never know what someone else does with it 6 months for now.
2. Use test cases and really check their coverage. (I.e., be sure that each reasonable branch in the program is taken at least once.) While they can't 100% prevent you from coding bugs right now, they _can_ prevent you from doing a change 6 months from now that breaks something else.
3. Prove the program (or its modules) mathematically correct. E.g., you don't just have to rely on testers finding out that your clever sort function is broken on some weird case, you can mathematically prove that and what the border conditions are.
Unfortunately, yeah, they all require more man-hours and budget. Especially proving it correct can cost a _lot_ more than just letting loose an army of underpaid (or even unpaid) testers on it. Good luck being competitive in the market if you're the guy doing that, and the counter-offer comes from someone hacking together some untested PHP or ASP site with the cheapest guys they could possibly hire.
(Nothing against PHP or ASP. They just have the dubious honour of being thought of as the ultimately easy frameworks that you can just give to a completely untrained guy off the street and have them learn it on the job. Too bad they won't learn good engineering practices or security practices from that exercise, though. It's like giving someone a super-user-friendly drawing program and expecting them to become an architect by just using it. It might eventually happen, but it'll take _years_, if ever, for them to rediscover stuff by trial and error that someone else had a formal education in.)
Given what Oracle's problem _is_, probably what they _really_ want isn't regulation of the "you must prove that your software passes this and that criteria to be allowed to sell it." (Which would also raise entry barriers for competitors.) I mean, really, if you were a company which takes five fucking _years_ to bother patching a security hole, and even then only when an exploit was widely publicized, you're not going to ask for a regulation that'll ask you to pull the product off the market until you fix it.
The kind of regulation they want is more like "you're an evil irresponsible hacker and going to jail if you disclose bugs in someone else's product." Yes, it's security by obscurity. But that way Oracle can happily spew bullshit about being secure and unbreakable, and never have to fix any bugs.
Basically Oracle doesn't give a shit if Corporation X's database is riddled with bugs and exploits. They just don't want the PHB's at Corporation X to know about it.
If it also results in some entry barrier, all the better, but that's not the main goal.
Let's put it like this. Logic is good and fine as long as both parties involved start from the same axioms. Otherwise you can argue until you're blue in the face that "X => Y", if that person doesn't acknowledge X as obviously true, that whole implication is devoid of any meaning.
And unlike science, where you can measure X accurately, in terms of inter-personal relations and human feelings, all "axioms" are more of a matter of education, goals, social convention, etc. Two people can be perfectly logical, yet arrive at wildly different conclusions.
What does this mean in this case. Well, mom is/was:
A) An Asperger's case, and not even a pretty one. She often can't even tell the difference between being screamed at or not. And you should see it when she thinks she was all subtle and diplomatic, and doesn't even realize that she shocked or upset everyone in the room. She's even had problems at work, because while she was a brilliant programmer if you ask any of her ex-bosses, she had trouble understanding the subtle human interactions at play there.
So trying to explain to someone like that the need for subtlety and discretion in inter-personal relations, is like trying to row up shit waterfall without a paddle.
And the next points are largely just consequences of this one.
B) Like many such nerds, lived by some idealized extreme notions, in her case a sorta D&D "lawful good" code of priniciples that would put Piffany from Nodwick comics to shame. It bit not only us kids in the ass, but her too. (And like many such nerds, seeing any shades as black and white, now she's flipped to the opposite "everyone is evil and I should have been a psychopatic bitch too.")
At any rate, trying to explain why I need to lie to my friends every now and then, again went against _her_ axioms. "Well, just tell them the truth. That you don't want to play with them today." Thanks mom, now why didn't _I_ ever think of that.
C) More importantly, a victim seeking refuge too. Mind you, mostly a victim of her own inability to deal with society and most of the time with dad or other relatives either. Except while the Koreans in this article find their refuge in having some level 60 warrior in an MMO, she had me and my brother. We were her MMO characters, so to speak. We were going to get to level 60, have an epic mount, and be her grand achievement, so to speak. Even if we had to grind and farm our way there, so to speak.
So just like in the aforementioned MMOs, just talking an addict into abandoning their characters and stopping talking about their latest instance raid... is a tad harder than you'd think. Just logic, of the "here are reasons X, Y and Z why you should deal with RL instead of seeking shelter in a game" kind, will at most make them feel rotten and give them even more reason to seek refuge.
And that's just one parent.
And here's another thing: I actually loved them. I didn't _really_ want to hurt mom, I just wanted her to just shut up about me, just for once.
So if standing up for yourself worked for you, well, I'm glad for you. Honestly. It didn't for me.
"The damage doesn't just cease to exist once you leave home either."
Amen. How true that is.
I still pretty much have to roll for will power (to use a bad D&D metaphor) to start doing anything. Somewhere in the back of my head there's this circuit going "you know, mom wouldn't approve my doing it, or doing it like this" for just about anything. While I _do_ overcome that, yeah, it never ceased to exist.
I tried. Believe me, I tried. There was no standing up, no tantrum, no whatever that could get mom to shut the fuck up about me just for once. Au contraire, then she'd go and tell everyone about that tantrum too. Standing up to her to at least keep the fuck out of my love life... well, let's just say lasted just until the next girlfriend, where the motherly intervention repeated verbatim.
Just about the only point where I managed to finally have some peace was when I finally finished university and moved to a flat of my own. Not that it stopped mom from trying to continue to rule my life. She still does and I'm in the mid-30's. The notion that she could jolly well mind her own business and live her own life, just doesn't compute. Telling her that is like telling someone to walk on the ceiling: she can't even imagine how that's possible. What's different is that now I can hang up the phone.
So, please. It's easy to dish out some advice like "you should have had the guts and stood up for yourself" or "if you wanted privacy, you should have got privacy." But that's the kind of self-centered assuming everyone's an idiot and only you know the obvious, that misses the point by a mile.
In other words, ok, if you're at giving me retroactive advice, what do _you_ propose that I should have done there? "Have some guts and stand up to them" is good and fine, but it didn't work. What next? Should I have run away from home and joined some gang, or something? Because that would have been just about the only thing that could have solved the problem.
Would _that_ have been better than finding refuge in the computer? Hardly, if you ask me.
I quickly switched to living inside the computer instead of "going outside" once my parents got one. I've already said why in another post, short version: escaping an awful reality.
Mind you, back then it wasn't too hard to program your own game, so most of that time was spent programming rather than just gaming. When you looked at a game that could run in 1K RAM on a ZX-81 or later in 16K RAM on a ZX Spectrum, even having the most rudimentary ideas of BASIC could lead one to think "I can do my own, and add this and that idea of my own." And from there that led to learning Assembly, Pascal and then Prolog, rediscovering formal logic long before having a course in it.
But that's not all in the past. With Python and other script languages gaining traction in games (as opposed to needing to write C++ code using an awful API, if even that's available) it's increasingly feasible again to guide a kid's creativity that-a-way instead of just having them push buttons in someone else's game. It would be pretty trivial to get a kid to make small changes in a game like, say, "The Fall: Last Days Of Gaia", if you took the time to guide them that way.
Virtually any gamer has their ideas as to how a game could be better, more balanced, or just what kind of undeserved advantage they should have in that game. Show a kid how to actually implement those changes, and you may find them a lot more interested and receptive than you'd think.
Or maybe they're more the artistic, creative kind than the analytical programmer type? No problem. Guide them towards making skins or levels for a mod. Not only it gives them a "real world" skill they can earn a living with later, but also some hard proof of that skill when they later seek employment.
At any rate, I spent a lot of time on the computer, I played games too, and I still play plenty of games in my free time.
Where that lead is that I'm currently paid damn well developping buzzword-driven enterprise software at a large corporation. My business card says "consultant", though it's been so permanent an employment it's more like an overpaid "contractor". My boss would say I'm very efficient and effective in the workplace. So would my previous boss, and the one before him. I've had no complaints about my work in a really long time.
So can one be effective in the workplace if they love computers instead of going outside? Damn right, if that job involves computers.
In fact, I'll say that if someone is the kind of total extrovert that spent all their waking time outside with their friends, they're going to find a computer-related job _extremely_ boring. I see people every day who just have to wander off every 15 to 30 minutes to find someone to talk to, and they're anything but effective as a result. And eventually they quit, one way or another. E.g., the most talkative of the lot, the guy who could talk for half an hour _after_ the other had outright left the room... well, he stuck around for about 3 months before he found a job as a teacher instead.