Heh. I'm 50, and I picked up using "big iron" for PCs from my boss, who has 10 years on me. Of course, back then the 386es we used were the size of a suitcase and weight 100 pounds, so compared to today's desktop boxes they were indeed big iron...
Jobs (and Apple generally) don't really do 'innovative', in the sense that nearly everything they produced had some sort of less-well-refined immediate antecedent elsewhere, or was purchased, or or the like.
When Woz drove the product development, that wasn't the case. The Apple of early Woz era years was wildly innovative. If TFA had said "Steve Wozniak" instead of "Steve Jobs" he could have made his point a lot better -- Despite the fact that his technical brilliance gave Jobs something to sell and grow the business, he didn't really fit in to corporate culture once Apple became the very thing they loathed.
I'll grant that a nickel's worth isn't enough to hang him over... but what we're up against here is the tragedy of the commons. One person doing it has little to no impact on the scheme of things, but once people decide it's OK for him to do it, why not me too? And my neighbor. And the 600 other people in the immediate vicinity. You can't let him get away with it and then run us off, that's discrimination!
This isn't about stopping that one guy from helping himself to a nickel's worth of electricity. It's about setting a precedent before it gets out of hand. I'm normally as anti-authority, anti-government as they come* but I can see the need to stop this early.
*And with that comment out in the open, I'd like to wish cheery holiday greetings to my fans at the NSA
power users, developers and gamers: so the majority of users then? I think most people play games occasionally.
I think by "gamers" the GP means "people for whom games are important enough to spend extra money on performance gear.", not "people who play Candy Crush Saga and Farmville".
Yup, gamers. My son was all about the portability of a laptop, but he finally gave up and went back to big iron because the desktop box was easier to upgrade and repair, had more RAM and HD capacity, and (most important to him) far better framerates on his FPS games.
I keep a laptop in a travel bag for the rare occasion I need to compute on the move, but all my important work is on the desktop box. I'll give it up when they pry the GeForce card from my cold, dead hands...
I'm amused by your use of the word "traditional" to describe online dating services. From my point of view, that's still newfangled. Get off my lawn!
My wife and I were actually one of the first online romances. Back in the days of 300bps dialup, there was a service in Houston that had a bunch of phone lines running into multiple modems on a single computer, so a smallish group (probably 16; I don't remember) of people could chat together. One of the oldies radio stations advertised it, so I plugged the phone number into my Hayes terminal program and met a few people including a lady type person (yes, a GIRL who owned a computer... even though it was just a TRS-80). Within three days of chatting we had started to discuss how many children we would like in our hypothetical family, and we had already started seriously considering marriage before we ever met in person. We married five weeks after we met online.
That's what is missing from these algorithms. What about those who are attracted by some other factor than physical appearance? What attracted me and Mrs. Esophagus was our shared values and interests. Which is good, since I was rail-thin, covered in zits, and, like any good computer geek, only heard of personal hygiene as a long-forgotten myth from distant lands.
As for "how do we even know these profiles are real?" -- limit yourself to people you can meet in person, which may mean restricting your search to people within your own city or less than {x} miles away. Don't commit time, money, or yourself until you have both had a chance to do a little snooping by way of facebook pages, google searches, whatever. Hint: If the facebook page appeared only after you make contact, you are right to be suspicious.
Rather than "void of capital letters", the stuff I see that surprises me makes excessive use of capital letters. Not shouting, which I can almost understand, but capitalizing random Words in the Middle of sentences. It's mostly nouns with adjectives trailing a Close second place.
From the context I suppose you can infer that the author considers those specific words more important than others and therefore deserving of special attention. They are usually found in lengthy, paranoid rants or sentimental glurge and of course always accompanied by the instruction to pass it on / repost unless you hate puppies, God, and America.
This would seem to indicate that it's a personal bias, and not some kind of technical requirement.
We were defending pro se in a civil suit -- couldn't afford a lawyer -- and got the decision against us overturned because the judge made remarks like "Since you can't be bothered getting a real lawyer..." Even better, the judge was a golfing buddy with the plaintiff's attorney, and they made no attempt to disguise their familiarity and friendship during the pretrial hearing. No surprise he ruled against us on the spot with a summary judgement, never bothered to look at our defense brief.
Still had to go through it all again with a new judge, but at least the jerkass decision didn't stick.
And even if they do use central heating, it's going to be electric (re: your comment about no gas infrastructure) which is likely powered by... burning coal? Yeah, that's much better.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don't get any kind of respect in management. Because that's what they see in us: The computerized equivalent of plumbers and bricklayers. The fact that they couldn't wrap their feeble minds around a tenth of what we have to understand intimately doesn't matter.
And conversely, they have no clue what obstacles we face or why we claim our jobs are difficult. "So, yeah, can you also have it map each email address to the sender's DNA and use the link to record their conversations at home and send them to me sorted by topic? I'll need that by Thursday, or if you can get to it earlier that would be even better. I realize this was just intended to generate order confirmation emails, but it could be so much more if you'd only be willing to put some thought into it!"
Where do they think the power comes from? Those magic wall sockets most likely are connected to coal burning plants.
This. With apologies to Heinlein, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Zero-Emission Lunch. Your state can switch from coal to all-solar? Great! Good luck on finding zero-emission sources for the components, all of which I'm sure are made from renewable resources. Ditto for wind, and that's our LEAST problematic alternative energy source.
I would dearly love to get the planet, or at least the major consumers, off nonrenewable, polluting energy sources... but we don't have the magic bullet yet. Nothing even comes close to meeting the needs of a major city (by which I arbitrarily choose to mean > 1 million people), much less an entire state or country.
So, they could accurately differentiate the emotions conveyed by "I love you" vs. "I would love to wring your neck"? And can they detect sarcasm? Oh, that's a real useful invention...
TFS (and, if I were to read it, I suppose TFA) make it sound like there's a one-size-fits-all global identity model for all websites. If HuffPo or Facebook or even gmail decide to eliminate trolls by requiring proof of real identity, then it must follow that SecretKinkySex.com must also do the same.
No.
I actually agree that mainstream news sites have good reason for reducing anonymity for exactly the reasons stated -- to eliminate, or at least reduce to a manageable level, trolls. They could even argue that it is in their best interests to do so.
Sites where just your presence on the site may cause irreparable damage to your personal life, your job, etc. -- not so much. It is in THEIR best interests to provide anonymity to the best of their ability.
So, yeah. If you are willing to have your name associated with your inflammatory posts, give your real name to the sites that require it. If not, avoid those sites and stick with places that allow anonimity; they will always do so or they will go out of business (even if "business" is just selling ad space). Problem solved.
Remembering three English words is only useful if there was some descriptive value to the words tying them uniquely to that place. So you tell me to meet you at foo.bar.baz. Where the hell is that? How do I get there from plugh.plover.frobozz?
Well, that's not always the case.. And when hindsight reveals that a killer had joked or made facebook posts or otherwise gave warning signs about the destruction to come, and police write it off as just some kid harmlessly blowing off steam, the public invariably crucifies them for failing to follow up on the warning signs.
So... they're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Yes, in retrospect it's easy to see which ones really were just harmless sarcastic jokes and which ones were obvious warning signs, because we know how the story turned out.
Was the jail sentence an overreaction? Perhaps. By the time they got to that point they had probably sorted out whether he had a real problem or if he was just sarcastically responding to someone else's comment. But in a world where school shootings are entirely too common and too real, he's got to learn that you can't say stuff like that and not have any consequences. This isn't punishment for a crime he didn't commit; this is ensuring that he doesn't create panic and waste police time with more idiotic statements in the future.
I'm not saying that they did the right thing. I'm just saying, it isn't so black-and-white. They can be too slow to respond and risk finding out the hard way that those "jokes" were a cry for help, or they can be too quick to respond and crack down on somebody for making an innocent, if tasteless, comment. I'm sure glad I never have to make that decision!
Seriously? Why on earth would anybody consider those an intrinsic part of the operating system? If I want to access mail from my computer, I either pull up an application that handles mail (for POP3) or a web browser. If I want to play or edit or do whatever with music, I install an application designed to do those things.
How about if my operating system just sticks to the job of system operations?
It was going to take me way too long to accomplish this (while going stir-crazy on nothing but math), so I ended up switching to the MIS path, which didn't have the absurd math requirement.
This. My state U had two different paths to a CS degree, BSc and BBA. The former required calculus, which I tried three times and failed three times before I realized it just wasn't going to happen*. Switched to the BBA which required a couple of accounting and marketing courses I never used, but at least I was able to get that piece of paper saying I know how to write computer programs.
Sadly, they were still pushing COBOL as the pinnacle of software development and by the time I was out looking for a job, it was all PCs.
* It may have turned out differently if I actually read the lessons and did the homework and stayed awake in class, but at 19 I was an idiot.
Similar story, except that the TRS-80 I used was the local Radio Shack's in-store demonstrator.
Sounds like my story, idontgno. I picked up a copy of Ahl's "BASIC Computer Games" at the library and entered them all into the TRS-80 demo model at the mall's Radio Shack over the course of a summer. When they started throwing me out there, I hung around Foley's where they had that IMSAI alongside the original Commodore PET, which is the one I eventually bought.
The sales dude at Foley's was always my best programming teacher. I'd go in and he'd show me some cool hack he had figured out and say "I bet you can't do THIS"... so I played around with the program until I figured out how he did whatever it was.
Re:multiple social providers on the desktop
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Firefox 21 Arrives
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· Score: 1
Yup, exactly. {grumble, grumble} so why does yours get +4 insightful and mine was modded down as a troll? Oh, you fickle moderators... I wan't trolling; I was seriously expressing concerns that Firefox is no longer just trying to be the best browser but has become encumbered with a ton of cruft like "social provider" nonsense.
multiple social providers on the desktop
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Firefox 21 Arrives
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· Score: -1, Troll
Remember when Firefox used to be a web browser? I liked it when it was a web browser.
As the family IT guy, most of what I do is fix the damage done by free games. My cousins teenage kids seem to ruin their laptops by installing hundreds of adware programs on their computers which eventually destroy it. Perhaps this would end this trend of destruction.
I am *so* stealing that warning. It's a far more concise explanation than I have been trying to convey to friends and relatives for nigh-on 25 years without success. I tell them over and over, TANSTAAFL, and they say "But it's free! It says so!" And don't even get me started about my son, now 21, who still hasn't made the connection between all the pirated games he downloads (or is that "gamez he downloadz"?) and the rampant viruses constantly breaking his system.
It's not necessarily friends directly posting crap on your page. A lot of fraud/spam on Facebook comes from these pages set up specifically to attract followers so the page can be sold for huge advertising bucks. They'll post exploitative pictures of injured animals, maimed soldiers, etc. with captions like "1 SHARE = 1 RESPECT". No matter how often I've warned my friends against forwarding this stuff, they'll do exactly what they are told because they don't want to be accused of not caring about puppies or war heroes or orphans or Jesus or whatever.
The end result is, no matter how hard I try to avoid it and how careful I am to restrict my account only to friends and colleagues I personally know, I still get spam from these phony accounts plastered all over my news feed.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. I'm 50, and I picked up using "big iron" for PCs from my boss, who has 10 years on me. Of course, back then the 386es we used were the size of a suitcase and weight 100 pounds, so compared to today's desktop boxes they were indeed big iron...
We're all being monitored and controlled by the military-industrial-entertainment complex!
Jobs (and Apple generally) don't really do 'innovative', in the sense that nearly everything they produced had some sort of less-well-refined immediate antecedent elsewhere, or was purchased, or or the like.
When Woz drove the product development, that wasn't the case. The Apple of early Woz era years was wildly innovative. If TFA had said "Steve Wozniak" instead of "Steve Jobs" he could have made his point a lot better -- Despite the fact that his technical brilliance gave Jobs something to sell and grow the business, he didn't really fit in to corporate culture once Apple became the very thing they loathed.
As a conservative-leaning, bible-thumping Southern Baptist, I find TFA and your (probably deliberate troll) response hilarious.
I'll grant that a nickel's worth isn't enough to hang him over... but what we're up against here is the tragedy of the commons. One person doing it has little to no impact on the scheme of things, but once people decide it's OK for him to do it, why not me too? And my neighbor. And the 600 other people in the immediate vicinity. You can't let him get away with it and then run us off, that's discrimination!
This isn't about stopping that one guy from helping himself to a nickel's worth of electricity. It's about setting a precedent before it gets out of hand. I'm normally as anti-authority, anti-government as they come* but I can see the need to stop this early.
*And with that comment out in the open, I'd like to wish cheery holiday greetings to my fans at the NSA
power users, developers and gamers: so the majority of users then? I think most people play games occasionally.
I think by "gamers" the GP means "people for whom games are important enough to spend extra money on performance gear.", not "people who play Candy Crush Saga and Farmville".
Yup, gamers. My son was all about the portability of a laptop, but he finally gave up and went back to big iron because the desktop box was easier to upgrade and repair, had more RAM and HD capacity, and (most important to him) far better framerates on his FPS games.
I keep a laptop in a travel bag for the rare occasion I need to compute on the move, but all my important work is on the desktop box. I'll give it up when they pry the GeForce card from my cold, dead hands...
I'm amused by your use of the word "traditional" to describe online dating services. From my point of view, that's still newfangled. Get off my lawn!
My wife and I were actually one of the first online romances. Back in the days of 300bps dialup, there was a service in Houston that had a bunch of phone lines running into multiple modems on a single computer, so a smallish group (probably 16; I don't remember) of people could chat together. One of the oldies radio stations advertised it, so I plugged the phone number into my Hayes terminal program and met a few people including a lady type person (yes, a GIRL who owned a computer... even though it was just a TRS-80). Within three days of chatting we had started to discuss how many children we would like in our hypothetical family, and we had already started seriously considering marriage before we ever met in person. We married five weeks after we met online.
That's what is missing from these algorithms. What about those who are attracted by some other factor than physical appearance? What attracted me and Mrs. Esophagus was our shared values and interests. Which is good, since I was rail-thin, covered in zits, and, like any good computer geek, only heard of personal hygiene as a long-forgotten myth from distant lands.
As for "how do we even know these profiles are real?" -- limit yourself to people you can meet in person, which may mean restricting your search to people within your own city or less than {x} miles away. Don't commit time, money, or yourself until you have both had a chance to do a little snooping by way of facebook pages, google searches, whatever. Hint: If the facebook page appeared only after you make contact, you are right to be suspicious.
Rather than "void of capital letters", the stuff I see that surprises me makes excessive use of capital letters. Not shouting, which I can almost understand, but capitalizing random Words in the Middle of sentences. It's mostly nouns with adjectives trailing a Close second place.
From the context I suppose you can infer that the author considers those specific words more important than others and therefore deserving of special attention. They are usually found in lengthy, paranoid rants or sentimental glurge and of course always accompanied by the instruction to pass it on / repost unless you hate puppies, God, and America.
This would seem to indicate that it's a personal bias, and not some kind of technical requirement.
We were defending pro se in a civil suit -- couldn't afford a lawyer -- and got the decision against us overturned because the judge made remarks like "Since you can't be bothered getting a real lawyer..." Even better, the judge was a golfing buddy with the plaintiff's attorney, and they made no attempt to disguise their familiarity and friendship during the pretrial hearing. No surprise he ruled against us on the spot with a summary judgement, never bothered to look at our defense brief.
Still had to go through it all again with a new judge, but at least the jerkass decision didn't stick.
And even if they do use central heating, it's going to be electric (re: your comment about no gas infrastructure) which is likely powered by... burning coal? Yeah, that's much better.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don't get any kind of respect in management. Because that's what they see in us: The computerized equivalent of plumbers and bricklayers. The fact that they couldn't wrap their feeble minds around a tenth of what we have to understand intimately doesn't matter.
And conversely, they have no clue what obstacles we face or why we claim our jobs are difficult. "So, yeah, can you also have it map each email address to the sender's DNA and use the link to record their conversations at home and send them to me sorted by topic? I'll need that by Thursday, or if you can get to it earlier that would be even better. I realize this was just intended to generate order confirmation emails, but it could be so much more if you'd only be willing to put some thought into it!"
Where do they think the power comes from? Those magic wall sockets most likely are connected to coal burning plants.
This. With apologies to Heinlein, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Zero-Emission Lunch. Your state can switch from coal to all-solar? Great! Good luck on finding zero-emission sources for the components, all of which I'm sure are made from renewable resources. Ditto for wind, and that's our LEAST problematic alternative energy source.
I would dearly love to get the planet, or at least the major consumers, off nonrenewable, polluting energy sources... but we don't have the magic bullet yet. Nothing even comes close to meeting the needs of a major city (by which I arbitrarily choose to mean > 1 million people), much less an entire state or country.
So, they could accurately differentiate the emotions conveyed by "I love you" vs. "I would love to wring your neck"? And can they detect sarcasm? Oh, that's a real useful invention...
^This.
TFS (and, if I were to read it, I suppose TFA) make it sound like there's a one-size-fits-all global identity model for all websites. If HuffPo or Facebook or even gmail decide to eliminate trolls by requiring proof of real identity, then it must follow that SecretKinkySex.com must also do the same.
No.
I actually agree that mainstream news sites have good reason for reducing anonymity for exactly the reasons stated -- to eliminate, or at least reduce to a manageable level, trolls. They could even argue that it is in their best interests to do so.
Sites where just your presence on the site may cause irreparable damage to your personal life, your job, etc. -- not so much. It is in THEIR best interests to provide anonymity to the best of their ability.
So, yeah. If you are willing to have your name associated with your inflammatory posts, give your real name to the sites that require it. If not, avoid those sites and stick with places that allow anonimity; they will always do so or they will go out of business (even if "business" is just selling ad space). Problem solved.
Remembering three English words is only useful if there was some descriptive value to the words tying them uniquely to that place. So you tell me to meet you at foo.bar.baz. Where the hell is that? How do I get there from plugh.plover.frobozz?
Well, that's not always the case.. And when hindsight reveals that a killer had joked or made facebook posts or otherwise gave warning signs about the destruction to come, and police write it off as just some kid harmlessly blowing off steam, the public invariably crucifies them for failing to follow up on the warning signs.
So... they're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Yes, in retrospect it's easy to see which ones really were just harmless sarcastic jokes and which ones were obvious warning signs, because we know how the story turned out.
Was the jail sentence an overreaction? Perhaps. By the time they got to that point they had probably sorted out whether he had a real problem or if he was just sarcastically responding to someone else's comment. But in a world where school shootings are entirely too common and too real, he's got to learn that you can't say stuff like that and not have any consequences. This isn't punishment for a crime he didn't commit; this is ensuring that he doesn't create panic and waste police time with more idiotic statements in the future.
I'm not saying that they did the right thing. I'm just saying, it isn't so black-and-white. They can be too slow to respond and risk finding out the hard way that those "jokes" were a cry for help, or they can be too quick to respond and crack down on somebody for making an innocent, if tasteless, comment. I'm sure glad I never have to make that decision!
Seriously? Why on earth would anybody consider those an intrinsic part of the operating system? If I want to access mail from my computer, I either pull up an application that handles mail (for POP3) or a web browser. If I want to play or edit or do whatever with music, I install an application designed to do those things.
How about if my operating system just sticks to the job of system operations?
"Forward by Steve Wozniak... " "Steve Wozniak (who wrote the forward to the book)..."
Were all editors killed in the cultural revolution? Forward is a direction. Foreword is a word that comes before other words.
It was going to take me way too long to accomplish this (while going stir-crazy on nothing but math), so I ended up switching to the MIS path, which didn't have the absurd math requirement.
This. My state U had two different paths to a CS degree, BSc and BBA. The former required calculus, which I tried three times and failed three times before I realized it just wasn't going to happen*. Switched to the BBA which required a couple of accounting and marketing courses I never used, but at least I was able to get that piece of paper saying I know how to write computer programs.
Sadly, they were still pushing COBOL as the pinnacle of software development and by the time I was out looking for a job, it was all PCs.
* It may have turned out differently if I actually read the lessons and did the homework and stayed awake in class, but at 19 I was an idiot.
Similar story, except that the TRS-80 I used was the local Radio Shack's in-store demonstrator.
Sounds like my story, idontgno. I picked up a copy of Ahl's "BASIC Computer Games" at the library and entered them all into the TRS-80 demo model at the mall's Radio Shack over the course of a summer. When they started throwing me out there, I hung around Foley's where they had that IMSAI alongside the original Commodore PET, which is the one I eventually bought.
The sales dude at Foley's was always my best programming teacher. I'd go in and he'd show me some cool hack he had figured out and say "I bet you can't do THIS"... so I played around with the program until I figured out how he did whatever it was.
Yup, exactly. {grumble, grumble} so why does yours get +4 insightful and mine was modded down as a troll? Oh, you fickle moderators... I wan't trolling; I was seriously expressing concerns that Firefox is no longer just trying to be the best browser but has become encumbered with a ton of cruft like "social provider" nonsense.
Remember when Firefox used to be a web browser? I liked it when it was a web browser.
As the family IT guy, most of what I do is fix the damage done by free games. My cousins teenage kids seem to ruin their laptops by installing hundreds of adware programs on their computers which eventually destroy it. Perhaps this would end this trend of destruction.
I am *so* stealing that warning. It's a far more concise explanation than I have been trying to convey to friends and relatives for nigh-on 25 years without success. I tell them over and over, TANSTAAFL, and they say "But it's free! It says so!" And don't even get me started about my son, now 21, who still hasn't made the connection between all the pirated games he downloads (or is that "gamez he downloadz"?) and the rampant viruses constantly breaking his system.
It's not necessarily friends directly posting crap on your page. A lot of fraud/spam on Facebook comes from these pages set up specifically to attract followers so the page can be sold for huge advertising bucks. They'll post exploitative pictures of injured animals, maimed soldiers, etc. with captions like "1 SHARE = 1 RESPECT". No matter how often I've warned my friends against forwarding this stuff, they'll do exactly what they are told because they don't want to be accused of not caring about puppies or war heroes or orphans or Jesus or whatever.
The end result is, no matter how hard I try to avoid it and how careful I am to restrict my account only to friends and colleagues I personally know, I still get spam from these phony accounts plastered all over my news feed.