Yeah, just find fun stuff to read. When I was that age, I really got into the "kid genius" stories -- Brains Benton, Encyclopedia Brown, Danny Dunn. He's probably old enough for Hobbit, but probably not ready for LOTR yet. Possibly Lemony Snicket?
One VERY loose rule of thumb, with plenty of exceptions, is to look at the age of the protagonists. I've found that for the most part (have I thrown in enough weasel words yet?) that's the target audience. Obviously different kids mature at different rates and so on, but if nothing else it helps the reader identify more closely with the main character.
And extra mod points all around for everyone who says don't force. If you keep pushing, he's going to come to think of reading as a chore he has to endure just to please you, rather than an enjoyable pastime
Hours? Try days. My last several computers all had nvidia, and "it just works", right up to the last (GeForce 9600). My latest has an ATI HD and I still haven't been able to get the audio portion of the drivers working right. At least I finally got the right magic combination of drivers for 3D acceleration to work, but it was a gigantic pain. Maybe my experience would be different if I had bleeding-edge hardware, but I always save money by buying a year or two behind the curve so nvidia is all right by me.
Right? Or maybe that's just pop songs from the past twenty years....
I wish he had included the year of the song's release in his analysis. It would be interesting to see if chord preferences have changed much over the past 100+ years.
As a barbershop quartet singer, I tend to favor simple melodies that follow the circle of fifths fairly closely, because those are the songs it is easy to improvise harmony parts to go along with. That preference spills over into the type of music I listen to, not just sing... and it's the reason my dislike of an era's music increases with newer music. You just can't get four guys together crooning an a cappella arrangement of "Oops, I did it again" or "Umbrella".
Unless you're Big Daddy, I guess. That's a nifty group who cut a few albums in the 80s and 90s retrofitting contemporary hits into doo-wop and rockabilly styles. "Super Freak" is an awful, awful song unless it's done as a sweet ballad in Everly Brothers harmony...
Prepaid is the way to go. We use Tracfone; my wife estimates that it runs roughly $10 a month for the two of us. Of course, we only use the phones when we're not at home (where we use the VoIP that came with our ISP package) and we only use them for phone calls and text messaging. I hear horror stories about phone bills that run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars and I wonder... why would anyone put up with that crap?
Only they're about 40 years too late and way over budget. I made an automatic bed-making machine when I was a kid, out of the description in a Brains Benton kid detective book. Or maybe it was Danny Dunn. GIve me a break, it was 40 years ago. Anyhow, you hooked a string up to the top corners of your sheets/blankets/whatever and ran it through a pulley at the head of the bed, then left the loose ends at the foot of your bed. Get out of bed, pull on the strings, and they pull the attached sheet corners up just like in the video from TFA. I used that for years, along with a similarly designed string-and-pulley system for turning the bedroom light on and off without getting out of bed.
Which made me extremely proud of my daughter when she did the same thing around the same age... and she thought of it independently, without having read the idea in a book first. Good thing for her she got her mother's brains instead of mine.
Yes, fluxbox for me too. I don't need integrated bells and whistles; I need a low-overhead window manager from which I can launch apps as I need them. You don't even need to launch your favorite KDE/Gnome app from a terminal window if you put a link to it in ~/.fluxbox/menu.
I wish I hadn't already posted on this topic because I can't use up some mod points on your comments. I don't understand why the young earth / old earth / premillennial / postmillennial / whatever folks can't seem to rest until they have convinced everyone that their view is the only right one.
N.B. The following is directed at people who believe in God. If you do not, feel free to ignore this part because it hinges on a premise that you have already rejected. Cheers!
Did Jesus tell us, "The greatest commandment is to make sure every living creature accepts that the earth is 6,000 years old"? No. Point is, it just bloody doesn't *matter* that much alongside the whole "love your neighbor" bit. "But Lord," the apostles did NOT say, "When did we fail to convince you how the earth was created and life either created or evolved from that point on?" No, their focus was on feeding the hungry, supporting the poor, or if you want to get really crazy maybe even teaching other people how to avoid burning in hell.
Given the starting premise that I accept an omnipotent, omniscient being then it follows that I must accept the *possibility* that such a being could, if he wished, create an entire universe out of nothing in six 24-hour periods and populate it with artifacts that appear to be much, much older. If he wanted. I also accept that it's possible for such a being to spend billions of years carefully placing each proton in its appointed path and giving nudges here and there to ensure that the Rube Goldberg device we call a universe clanks along in exactly the right way to produce life here (and possibly elsewhere). Who am I to argue the implementation details with a being who can do all that? What I do know for sure is that I was given two basic instructions, both of which start with the word "love", and I have enough trouble even TRYING to manage that much without getting bogged down in arguments about what happened more than a few days ago, much less thousands or billions of years.
I do not know of any church that adopts new translations as they release; the vast majority of Christian churches adopt one translation and stick with it for years and years.
How many churches have you surveyed concerning their bible policies? I have attended four different evangelical Christian churches in a conservative, rural area over the past 15 years, each one a different flavor, and none of them endorsed any specific translation. Even in a smaller study group of less than 10 people, we might see three or four (including one in Chinese) different flavors pop up. The church doesn't buy bibles in bulk; they just accumulate whatever people feel like donating so even those specifically supplied by the church to visitors in the pews are a variety of translations.
And as long as I'm addressing your odd perceptions of what Christians are expected to do, I've never been anywhere that we were expected to memorize specific passages. As digitig (below) replied, we're encouraged to be familiar with the text as much as possible, but again that's just a general suggestion, not concerning any one passage and certainly not "word for word". Heck, the pastor of our current church freely admits he can't memorize to save his soul and always has to look up the parts he wants to use to illustrate a point. He and a friend from a previous church said the important thing in reading scripture on our own is so we can catch them making any statements contradictory to what God said. Indeed, it's the folks who are more literate about Christian theology and doctrine who aren't suckered in by the likes of Harold Camping and Fred Phelps*. Those folks can say "What part of 'love' do you not understand?" and "no one knows the day or the hours..."
* No, I'm not going down the No True Christian path. Going strictly by what the Christian bible says, a Christian is one who has accepted Jesus as the resurrected son of God -- no more, no less. It doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter what you SAY you believe, it doesn't matter what church you do or don't go to; it's just an agreement between you and God. So I'm not saying "No true Christian would advocate killing homosexuals" or "No true Christian would claim to know the exact date of the end of the world". I don't have a clue what those people really believe -- like I say, it's between them and God (although if God is open to suggestions on how to deal with them, I've got a little list...) Sadly, a world of atrocities have been committed by people who at least claim to be Christian... but I digress.
That won't stop the captcha-mirrors who will grab a captcha, farm it out to idiots logging in for "free" prizes, and feed the idiots' answer back to the captcha. You can make it totally impossible for an AI to figure it out, but they'll still get through this way.
I really don't think you can make a generalization about whether any type of music, even classical, helps or hinders concentration. I'm a musical person -- I've been singing in choirs and barbershop groups almost my entire life -- so I pay *very* close attention to music. I can't help it; even if it's music I can't stand I am compelled to listen closely to the melody (if there is any) and lyrics (if there are any). So for me, any type of background music overrides my ability to concentrate on anything else.
Instead, I listen to music to help ease the boredom of mindless physical work, like my daily walks for exercise or the rare occasion I get out of my chair and do yardwork, etc. Then it doesn't matter that I put my body on autopilot while my brain focuses on the music; in fact it helps because the time goes by so much faster.
There's that old joke about why is it we turn down the radio when we're looking for an unfamiliar street -- it's precisely *because* the music is a distraction. In the same way, whenever I have tried to enjoy my music while I'm working I lose focus and frequently forget where I left off. My attention span is fragile enough without the additional burden of a shiny audible toy.
Which brings me to a refutation of TFS: When I do use headphones, it's not because I am protecting myself from the rest of the world. Rather, it's because I am protecting the rest of the world from me. It's an unwritten social contract: You don't make me listen to that obnoxious rap, and I won't make you listen to the Side Street Ramblers belting out "Bye Bye Blackbird" with a tenor who can shatter the windows in your car.
That's why I will never install Ubuntu or Fedora or any of the preconfigured distros. Arch Linux installs just the bare minimum needed to have a working (non-gui) OS, and then I can pick and choose just the packages I actually want to use. The package manager takes care of any dependencies, but it also doesn't install irrelevant crap.
That said, I could never expect my technophobic friends and family to do any of that. They get confused finding the command prompt (or knowing why they would ever want to use it) on a new Windows install. I used to be one of those annoyingly strident Linux fanboys smugly saying "To fix your computer, just install Linux" but that was before 10 years of playing tech support to the two or three who listened to me. Now I still preach the wonders of Linux, but with a lengthy disclaimer making it clear what it will NOT do that they expect it to do just like Windows.
we are moving all the social needs that we used to do face-to-face onto the computer and this trend has just begun.
Did I just imagine the social groups that built up around dialup BBSes (which is how I met my wife), Usenet, even MUDs and web forums before Facebook ever came along? People were griping that computers were eroding the value of face-to-face communication almost from the first email that was sent out.
I'll certainly agree that Facebook has accelerated that trend, but it's a trend that began 30 years ago.
I don't put anything on Facebook that I wouldn't say in public, even though I have all my private data limited to friends I personally know (unlike some FB users, I don't "friend" any random passerby who sends a friend request, or friends-of-friends, etc.) So if that worries you, don't do it... but I am aware of the cost of having a "free" way to keep in touch with friends and relatives all over the world, and I'm willing to pay that cost.
1) Because FB doesn't push your content onto people who don't want to read it
B) Because if you want to quickly notify 200 people of some major news ("After searching for the last three years, I finally got a job! The only drawback is I have to learn how to say 'Do you want fries with that?' in Swahili.") sending 200 emails isn't the most efficient way to get the information out.
The problem is that Facebook is optimized for narcissistic _self_-promotion through _telling_ your echo chamber how great you are, not for _showing_ others your status even through the usual consumption displays that are required to promote _others_.
How did this off-topic flamebait get modded insightful? Yes, Facebook is full of people who think the world wants to know what they had for lunch and how great they are. It's also full of people who don't know any other way to have a social life (not like those of us who read and comment on Slashdot all the time). And it's full of people who just like sharing good news and bad with their friends and family in a way that makes it easy to share with all of them quickly, and find out in a few minutes how all of them are doing when you don't have time for 150 phone calls a day.
Either the parent poster has never actually seen Facebook and is just parroting the trash talk that the smug digirati like to spout, or (s)he only has friends who post shallow, narcissistic crap. As for me, when I see a close friend announce the birth of a new baby or mourn the loss of a loved one to cancer, my first thought isn't "Yeah, you narcissist, you're really getting off on all the attention you get telling us how great you are". No, I share in that friend's joy and sorrows because that's what friends do.
I hate Facebook, I really do -- for the privacy violations, for the constant flood of ads, for the pointless so-called "games" that are just revenue boosters with no creative content whatsoever -- but I also see it for what it is, and I know how to use it to meet my needs (keeping up with friends and family on a large scale) without giving my life over to the less pleasant aspects of it.
I'm aware that the "off" switch is there for a reason, and forcing it to stay inactive is probably going to have some nasty side effects. Am I correct in this?
If I had mod points I'd bump you up because that's exactly what i was going to say; instead I'll just post what is really just a cleverly worded "me too" by way of supporting you.
OK, I give up. What am I seeing here that should fill me with outrage? The fact that the web server knows someone visited the site and clicked repeatedly on a nonfunctional button? Sure, they have an IP address to go with that (unless you use an anonymizer), but there are so many more blatant abuses of my privacy that stuff like this doesn't even move the needle on my outrage-o-meter.
I also fail to see the connection with Google here. Any idiot can include an onkeydown event trap in their script. Heck, I can do that and I'm exceptionally stupid.
I do wonder about the scalability of such an enterprise, though. Assume 10-20 clicks per visit, plus a few dozen keystrokes if they start and/or complete a form... add to that the need to tie every keystroke and click to an IP address, and pretty soon you're talking about serious storage when your daily hit count is in the millions.
Doubleplusungood! A smartphone / pad / whatever has a completely different input framework and completely different surface area to display stuff on; it's absolutely stupid to try to make stuff that works in that environment also work on a desktop where you have full keyboard and mouse input, and comparative miles of real estate for the display.
On the other hand, I'd be thrilled if they would at least synchronize the layouts of their various desktop versions. On Linux, preferences is under the Edit menu; on Windows, it's under Tools. Do they think there's no overlap between users of the two OSes so nobody will ever be troubled by the rearrangement?
Exactly. Just the same as oppressive dress codes and micromanagement of our time logging at your typical office, those rules are in place because some jerkass had to take advantage of the lax rules to the point that the bosses *had* to put a stop to it. And the rule has to be enforced equally for all employees or you are in line for a discrimination suit.
That moron who took a two hour lunch along with three 30-minute smoke breaks, or the one who showed up to a meeting with bankers in cutoffs and flip-flops, or the returning vet who just had to wave around that captured Afghani assault rifle (with a fully loaded clip)... they're the ones responsible for more oppressive rules, not the top brass.
People already know what to do in case of a crime, why bother with police?
No, they don't. Most people would panic, shoot randomly, get shot, and/or violate all of the "alleged" criminal's civil rights. And most of the time, during the course of most crimes, people don't happen to be in the right place at the right time or have the authority to do anything about it if they are. Police do have that authority, and devote their full working hours to investigating (and occasionally stopping in the act) crime. In addition, any random crime is going to take place in an uncontrolled environment where stopping the criminal may lead to more collateral damage than just letting him/her get away. If we leave it to the general public to do what they "know" to do in case of a crime, we end up with 700 million George Zimmermans running loose.
A hijacking is a special circumstance. At the moment a passenger announces his intention to blow up the plane (and possibly crash it into thousands of people along the way), you no longer need to worry about social niceties like civil rights and proper police procedure -- the survival of the passengers depends on one thing only, STOP THAT HIJACKER. And thanks to the heroics of UA Flight 93, people do know what to do. Finally, unlike city streets, the body of an airplane may or may not have police (air marshall) on board so it's not like you can call 911 for help.
Suggesting that the dissolution of TSA is a call for the dissolution of law enforcement is a false equivalent, because what we're trying to establish here is that TSA is notlaw enforcement.
Apart from that, your rebuttal makes perfect sense.
I worked for a company where the phrase "is no longer with the Company" was so common
At one company where I worked, it was common knowledge that the phrase "effective immediately" was HR code for "he was fired", and "we wish (him|her) well in (his|her) future endeavors" was HR code for "he quit".
Forget buying a third party app for a better interface; there's plenty of FOSS out there. I installed bblean on my laptop so the Windows7 desktop looks and feels exactly like my Linux desktop which runs fluxbox (a latter-day blackbox). So check out bb4win (bblean), litestep, emerge or just search on those three terms combined to find articles comparing the various desktop alternatives.
My company has been making accounting/management software for a specialized market niche for over 20 years; now it's all cloud of course but originally it was developed on, and for, x86 PCs running MSDOS only. No GUI, no Windows, no networking [insert "get off my lawn" remarks here]...
The point of all this is, it's 16-bit software and some of our longtime customers are reluctant to embrace the 21st century. WE STILL ALLOW THEM TO USE this ancient program that has not changed at all in over 10 years, although we make it clear that we can't really support them if anything breaks. So far the only thing that has broken is 64-bit versions of Windows don't let you run 16-bit software. Just this week I had to tell a customer to go to a pawn shop or ebay or something and find an older computer he can install XP on rather than try to run the old program on his shiny new desktop system he got to make everything faster.
I did try suggesting he create a VM on the new computer rather than get a whole new computer, but he had no idea what I was talking about and I unfortunately didn't have the time it would take to teach him.
This. When I started shopping for a PC in 1978, the choices were: Apple ][+, TRS-80, and Commodore PET. After playing with all three for several weeks ("Kid, if I see you come in my store again without buying anything I'm gonna call the police!") I picked the PET because it was so cool to be able to do "graphics" simply as printable extended ASCII characters, and animate them with PEEK and POKE directly into video RAM. I couldn't understand why people thought that stupid Apple was such hot stuff.
Of course years later when it was all IBM (and clones) I became a major Apple fanboy... or at least a Woz fanboy. Still can't stand the Mac, and I pedantically correct anyone who calls that piece of garbage an "Apple computer".
4 KB of RAM and a 20x40 ASCII display should be enough for anyone!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, just find fun stuff to read. When I was that age, I really got into the "kid genius" stories -- Brains Benton, Encyclopedia Brown, Danny Dunn. He's probably old enough for Hobbit, but probably not ready for LOTR yet. Possibly Lemony Snicket?
One VERY loose rule of thumb, with plenty of exceptions, is to look at the age of the protagonists. I've found that for the most part (have I thrown in enough weasel words yet?) that's the target audience. Obviously different kids mature at different rates and so on, but if nothing else it helps the reader identify more closely with the main character.
And extra mod points all around for everyone who says don't force. If you keep pushing, he's going to come to think of reading as a chore he has to endure just to please you, rather than an enjoyable pastime
Hours? Try days. My last several computers all had nvidia, and "it just works", right up to the last (GeForce 9600). My latest has an ATI HD and I still haven't been able to get the audio portion of the drivers working right. At least I finally got the right magic combination of drivers for 3D acceleration to work, but it was a gigantic pain. Maybe my experience would be different if I had bleeding-edge hardware, but I always save money by buying a year or two behind the curve so nvidia is all right by me.
Right? Or maybe that's just pop songs from the past twenty years....
I wish he had included the year of the song's release in his analysis. It would be interesting to see if chord preferences have changed much over the past 100+ years.
As a barbershop quartet singer, I tend to favor simple melodies that follow the circle of fifths fairly closely, because those are the songs it is easy to improvise harmony parts to go along with. That preference spills over into the type of music I listen to, not just sing... and it's the reason my dislike of an era's music increases with newer music. You just can't get four guys together crooning an a cappella arrangement of "Oops, I did it again" or "Umbrella".
Unless you're Big Daddy, I guess. That's a nifty group who cut a few albums in the 80s and 90s retrofitting contemporary hits into doo-wop and rockabilly styles. "Super Freak" is an awful, awful song unless it's done as a sweet ballad in Everly Brothers harmony...
Prepaid is the way to go. We use Tracfone; my wife estimates that it runs roughly $10 a month for the two of us. Of course, we only use the phones when we're not at home (where we use the VoIP that came with our ISP package) and we only use them for phone calls and text messaging. I hear horror stories about phone bills that run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars and I wonder... why would anyone put up with that crap?
Only they're about 40 years too late and way over budget. I made an automatic bed-making machine when I was a kid, out of the description in a Brains Benton kid detective book. Or maybe it was Danny Dunn. GIve me a break, it was 40 years ago. Anyhow, you hooked a string up to the top corners of your sheets/blankets/whatever and ran it through a pulley at the head of the bed, then left the loose ends at the foot of your bed. Get out of bed, pull on the strings, and they pull the attached sheet corners up just like in the video from TFA. I used that for years, along with a similarly designed string-and-pulley system for turning the bedroom light on and off without getting out of bed.
Which made me extremely proud of my daughter when she did the same thing around the same age... and she thought of it independently, without having read the idea in a book first. Good thing for her she got her mother's brains instead of mine.
Yes, fluxbox for me too. I don't need integrated bells and whistles; I need a low-overhead window manager from which I can launch apps as I need them. You don't even need to launch your favorite KDE/Gnome app from a terminal window if you put a link to it in ~/.fluxbox/menu.
I wish I hadn't already posted on this topic because I can't use up some mod points on your comments. I don't understand why the young earth / old earth / premillennial / postmillennial / whatever folks can't seem to rest until they have convinced everyone that their view is the only right one.
N.B. The following is directed at people who believe in God. If you do not, feel free to ignore this part because it hinges on a premise that you have already rejected. Cheers!
Did Jesus tell us, "The greatest commandment is to make sure every living creature accepts that the earth is 6,000 years old"? No. Point is, it just bloody doesn't *matter* that much alongside the whole "love your neighbor" bit. "But Lord," the apostles did NOT say, "When did we fail to convince you how the earth was created and life either created or evolved from that point on?" No, their focus was on feeding the hungry, supporting the poor, or if you want to get really crazy maybe even teaching other people how to avoid burning in hell.
Given the starting premise that I accept an omnipotent, omniscient being then it follows that I must accept the *possibility* that such a being could, if he wished, create an entire universe out of nothing in six 24-hour periods and populate it with artifacts that appear to be much, much older. If he wanted. I also accept that it's possible for such a being to spend billions of years carefully placing each proton in its appointed path and giving nudges here and there to ensure that the Rube Goldberg device we call a universe clanks along in exactly the right way to produce life here (and possibly elsewhere). Who am I to argue the implementation details with a being who can do all that? What I do know for sure is that I was given two basic instructions, both of which start with the word "love", and I have enough trouble even TRYING to manage that much without getting bogged down in arguments about what happened more than a few days ago, much less thousands or billions of years.
I do not know of any church that adopts new translations as they release; the vast majority of Christian churches adopt one translation and stick with it for years and years.
How many churches have you surveyed concerning their bible policies? I have attended four different evangelical Christian churches in a conservative, rural area over the past 15 years, each one a different flavor, and none of them endorsed any specific translation. Even in a smaller study group of less than 10 people, we might see three or four (including one in Chinese) different flavors pop up. The church doesn't buy bibles in bulk; they just accumulate whatever people feel like donating so even those specifically supplied by the church to visitors in the pews are a variety of translations.
And as long as I'm addressing your odd perceptions of what Christians are expected to do, I've never been anywhere that we were expected to memorize specific passages. As digitig (below) replied, we're encouraged to be familiar with the text as much as possible, but again that's just a general suggestion, not concerning any one passage and certainly not "word for word". Heck, the pastor of our current church freely admits he can't memorize to save his soul and always has to look up the parts he wants to use to illustrate a point. He and a friend from a previous church said the important thing in reading scripture on our own is so we can catch them making any statements contradictory to what God said. Indeed, it's the folks who are more literate about Christian theology and doctrine who aren't suckered in by the likes of Harold Camping and Fred Phelps*. Those folks can say "What part of 'love' do you not understand?" and "no one knows the day or the hours..."
* No, I'm not going down the No True Christian path. Going strictly by what the Christian bible says, a Christian is one who has accepted Jesus as the resurrected son of God -- no more, no less. It doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter what you SAY you believe, it doesn't matter what church you do or don't go to; it's just an agreement between you and God. So I'm not saying "No true Christian would advocate killing homosexuals" or "No true Christian would claim to know the exact date of the end of the world". I don't have a clue what those people really believe -- like I say, it's between them and God (although if God is open to suggestions on how to deal with them, I've got a little list...) Sadly, a world of atrocities have been committed by people who at least claim to be Christian... but I digress.
That won't stop the captcha-mirrors who will grab a captcha, farm it out to idiots logging in for "free" prizes, and feed the idiots' answer back to the captcha. You can make it totally impossible for an AI to figure it out, but they'll still get through this way.
I really don't think you can make a generalization about whether any type of music, even classical, helps or hinders concentration. I'm a musical person -- I've been singing in choirs and barbershop groups almost my entire life -- so I pay *very* close attention to music. I can't help it; even if it's music I can't stand I am compelled to listen closely to the melody (if there is any) and lyrics (if there are any). So for me, any type of background music overrides my ability to concentrate on anything else.
Instead, I listen to music to help ease the boredom of mindless physical work, like my daily walks for exercise or the rare occasion I get out of my chair and do yardwork, etc. Then it doesn't matter that I put my body on autopilot while my brain focuses on the music; in fact it helps because the time goes by so much faster.
There's that old joke about why is it we turn down the radio when we're looking for an unfamiliar street -- it's precisely *because* the music is a distraction. In the same way, whenever I have tried to enjoy my music while I'm working I lose focus and frequently forget where I left off. My attention span is fragile enough without the additional burden of a shiny audible toy.
Which brings me to a refutation of TFS: When I do use headphones, it's not because I am protecting myself from the rest of the world. Rather, it's because I am protecting the rest of the world from me. It's an unwritten social contract: You don't make me listen to that obnoxious rap, and I won't make you listen to the Side Street Ramblers belting out "Bye Bye Blackbird" with a tenor who can shatter the windows in your car.
That's why I will never install Ubuntu or Fedora or any of the preconfigured distros. Arch Linux installs just the bare minimum needed to have a working (non-gui) OS, and then I can pick and choose just the packages I actually want to use. The package manager takes care of any dependencies, but it also doesn't install irrelevant crap.
That said, I could never expect my technophobic friends and family to do any of that. They get confused finding the command prompt (or knowing why they would ever want to use it) on a new Windows install. I used to be one of those annoyingly strident Linux fanboys smugly saying "To fix your computer, just install Linux" but that was before 10 years of playing tech support to the two or three who listened to me. Now I still preach the wonders of Linux, but with a lengthy disclaimer making it clear what it will NOT do that they expect it to do just like Windows.
we are moving all the social needs that we used to do face-to-face onto the computer and this trend has just begun.
Did I just imagine the social groups that built up around dialup BBSes (which is how I met my wife), Usenet, even MUDs and web forums before Facebook ever came along? People were griping that computers were eroding the value of face-to-face communication almost from the first email that was sent out.
I'll certainly agree that Facebook has accelerated that trend, but it's a trend that began 30 years ago.
I don't put anything on Facebook that I wouldn't say in public, even though I have all my private data limited to friends I personally know (unlike some FB users, I don't "friend" any random passerby who sends a friend request, or friends-of-friends, etc.) So if that worries you, don't do it... but I am aware of the cost of having a "free" way to keep in touch with friends and relatives all over the world, and I'm willing to pay that cost.
1) Because FB doesn't push your content onto people who don't want to read it
B) Because if you want to quickly notify 200 people of some major news ("After searching for the last three years, I finally got a job! The only drawback is I have to learn how to say 'Do you want fries with that?' in Swahili.") sending 200 emails isn't the most efficient way to get the information out.
The problem is that Facebook is optimized for narcissistic _self_-promotion through _telling_ your echo chamber how great you are, not for _showing_ others your status even through the usual consumption displays that are required to promote _others_.
How did this off-topic flamebait get modded insightful? Yes, Facebook is full of people who think the world wants to know what they had for lunch and how great they are. It's also full of people who don't know any other way to have a social life (not like those of us who read and comment on Slashdot all the time). And it's full of people who just like sharing good news and bad with their friends and family in a way that makes it easy to share with all of them quickly, and find out in a few minutes how all of them are doing when you don't have time for 150 phone calls a day.
Either the parent poster has never actually seen Facebook and is just parroting the trash talk that the smug digirati like to spout, or (s)he only has friends who post shallow, narcissistic crap. As for me, when I see a close friend announce the birth of a new baby or mourn the loss of a loved one to cancer, my first thought isn't "Yeah, you narcissist, you're really getting off on all the attention you get telling us how great you are". No, I share in that friend's joy and sorrows because that's what friends do.
I hate Facebook, I really do -- for the privacy violations, for the constant flood of ads, for the pointless so-called "games" that are just revenue boosters with no creative content whatsoever -- but I also see it for what it is, and I know how to use it to meet my needs (keeping up with friends and family on a large scale) without giving my life over to the less pleasant aspects of it.
I'm aware that the "off" switch is there for a reason, and forcing it to stay inactive is probably going to have some nasty side effects. Am I correct in this?
If I had mod points I'd bump you up because that's exactly what i was going to say; instead I'll just post what is really just a cleverly worded "me too" by way of supporting you.
OK, I give up. What am I seeing here that should fill me with outrage? The fact that the web server knows someone visited the site and clicked repeatedly on a nonfunctional button? Sure, they have an IP address to go with that (unless you use an anonymizer), but there are so many more blatant abuses of my privacy that stuff like this doesn't even move the needle on my outrage-o-meter.
I also fail to see the connection with Google here. Any idiot can include an onkeydown event trap in their script. Heck, I can do that and I'm exceptionally stupid.
I do wonder about the scalability of such an enterprise, though. Assume 10-20 clicks per visit, plus a few dozen keystrokes if they start and/or complete a form... add to that the need to tie every keystroke and click to an IP address, and pretty soon you're talking about serious storage when your daily hit count is in the millions.
Doubleplusungood! A smartphone / pad / whatever has a completely different input framework and completely different surface area to display stuff on; it's absolutely stupid to try to make stuff that works in that environment also work on a desktop where you have full keyboard and mouse input, and comparative miles of real estate for the display.
On the other hand, I'd be thrilled if they would at least synchronize the layouts of their various desktop versions. On Linux, preferences is under the Edit menu; on Windows, it's under Tools. Do they think there's no overlap between users of the two OSes so nobody will ever be troubled by the rearrangement?
Exactly. Just the same as oppressive dress codes and micromanagement of our time logging at your typical office, those rules are in place because some jerkass had to take advantage of the lax rules to the point that the bosses *had* to put a stop to it. And the rule has to be enforced equally for all employees or you are in line for a discrimination suit.
That moron who took a two hour lunch along with three 30-minute smoke breaks, or the one who showed up to a meeting with bankers in cutoffs and flip-flops, or the returning vet who just had to wave around that captured Afghani assault rifle (with a fully loaded clip)... they're the ones responsible for more oppressive rules, not the top brass.
People already know what to do in case of a crime, why bother with police?
No, they don't. Most people would panic, shoot randomly, get shot, and/or violate all of the "alleged" criminal's civil rights. And most of the time, during the course of most crimes, people don't happen to be in the right place at the right time or have the authority to do anything about it if they are. Police do have that authority, and devote their full working hours to investigating (and occasionally stopping in the act) crime. In addition, any random crime is going to take place in an uncontrolled environment where stopping the criminal may lead to more collateral damage than just letting him/her get away. If we leave it to the general public to do what they "know" to do in case of a crime, we end up with 700 million George Zimmermans running loose.
A hijacking is a special circumstance. At the moment a passenger announces his intention to blow up the plane (and possibly crash it into thousands of people along the way), you no longer need to worry about social niceties like civil rights and proper police procedure -- the survival of the passengers depends on one thing only, STOP THAT HIJACKER. And thanks to the heroics of UA Flight 93, people do know what to do. Finally, unlike city streets, the body of an airplane may or may not have police (air marshall) on board so it's not like you can call 911 for help.
Suggesting that the dissolution of TSA is a call for the dissolution of law enforcement is a false equivalent, because what we're trying to establish here is that TSA is notlaw enforcement.
Apart from that, your rebuttal makes perfect sense.
I worked for a company where the phrase "is no longer with the Company" was so common
At one company where I worked, it was common knowledge that the phrase "effective immediately" was HR code for "he was fired", and "we wish (him|her) well in (his|her) future endeavors" was HR code for "he quit".
That would be these reassuring fellas: Just repeat to yourself, Everything is going to be all right [tm]...
Forget buying a third party app for a better interface; there's plenty of FOSS out there. I installed bblean on my laptop so the Windows7 desktop looks and feels exactly like my Linux desktop which runs fluxbox (a latter-day blackbox). So check out bb4win (bblean), litestep, emerge or just search on those three terms combined to find articles comparing the various desktop alternatives.
My company has been making accounting/management software for a specialized market niche for over 20 years; now it's all cloud of course but originally it was developed on, and for, x86 PCs running MSDOS only. No GUI, no Windows, no networking [insert "get off my lawn" remarks here]...
The point of all this is, it's 16-bit software and some of our longtime customers are reluctant to embrace the 21st century. WE STILL ALLOW THEM TO USE this ancient program that has not changed at all in over 10 years, although we make it clear that we can't really support them if anything breaks. So far the only thing that has broken is 64-bit versions of Windows don't let you run 16-bit software. Just this week I had to tell a customer to go to a pawn shop or ebay or something and find an older computer he can install XP on rather than try to run the old program on his shiny new desktop system he got to make everything faster.
I did try suggesting he create a VM on the new computer rather than get a whole new computer, but he had no idea what I was talking about and I unfortunately didn't have the time it would take to teach him.
My PC was a Commodore. ;-)
This. When I started shopping for a PC in 1978, the choices were: Apple ][+, TRS-80, and Commodore PET. After playing with all three for several weeks ("Kid, if I see you come in my store again without buying anything I'm gonna call the police!") I picked the PET because it was so cool to be able to do "graphics" simply as printable extended ASCII characters, and animate them with PEEK and POKE directly into video RAM. I couldn't understand why people thought that stupid Apple was such hot stuff.
Of course years later when it was all IBM (and clones) I became a major Apple fanboy... or at least a Woz fanboy. Still can't stand the Mac, and I pedantically correct anyone who calls that piece of garbage an "Apple computer".
4 KB of RAM and a 20x40 ASCII display should be enough for anyone!