Never put down to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
It could also have something to do with the entirely snarky attitude of your post. Next time, try stating facts and asking for help instead of being sarcastic and finger-pointy about it. It's really amazing how tech support people DON'T react well to bullying.
Let's create a committee to discuss the standard, and send out several RFCs, then split off into an angry sub-contingent that insists tags be open-source and then Sun decides to embrace tags, but screws it up, and Microsoft buys its way into tags and engineers a perfect way to pwn your machine through the tag "1337."
Don't forget to make it structured, with methods and types and blah blah blah.
It's just words, fer chrissakes. When you can tell me the difference between "its" and "it's" then you can talk about standards for words. Until then, PLEASE let's not have another standards war over something trivial that is supposed to save the world but will only serve to confuse everyone, all over again.
Good points, but I take exception to the "there's no obligation." There is, in that it is polite and the right thing to do. It used to be SOP to do so. Now, people don't give a fuck about each other, and just want to reduce expenses.
Courtesy doesn't cost that much, really. Automation can chunk out responses, yah know? Even if it's cold and automated, it's a confirmation that they got your resume, and they didn't want you.
Better than not knowing if you should take this crappy job because you haven't heard from this good job. Pity is cheap.
Yes, and of course compilers don't care about syntax; there's all that flexibility and no arbitrary rule at all.
It's all about what you care about. Care about things? You get code syntax right. Care about people, and making yourself understood? You spend a half a freakin' hour figuring out the difference between "its" and "it's".
Now shut the fuck up about elitist this and "wah wah wah I can't learn the parts of speech." Go back to thumbing "ru hawt?" on your fucking cellphone.
"Have you ever tried installing Windows from scratch? That is like two days effort (by the time you get all your drivers and programs installed, and everything set up as you like)."
Maybe for someone who doesn't know what he's doing. More like three to four hours tops if you have the proper preparation. Less than that for the OEM restore disk with the drivers and apps on it.
Compare that with the bullshit you have to go through to make Firefox appear on your Gnome taskbar. Hah!
It's a game console. Can't you people leave anything to do what it's supposed to instead of putting bloody unix on it? My GOD I wish I had $600 to waste on something new to stuff linux into. I'd buy new tires instead.
1) Apply middling investments to compromised specifications with weak analysis, high turnover and poor deployment planning and pay a bucketload of money in the backend well in excess of any money you "saved" and STILL have a failure-in-place. 2) Do the job right, which will cost so much that everyone will realize that, gee, computing as we know it is actually quite expensive and you don't get that much of an ROI on large, complex, all-encompassing systems, especially after you count the fact it takes years to do a project right and the target moves.
How about
3a) Design a lightweight standard for software designed internally. Don't get caught up with the process becomming the deliverable. Do it in a month. 3b) Work on small, light, throw-awayable modules that do specific tactical functions and connect to each other through the lightweight framework in (3b). Never spend more than 6 months on a project. Don't be afraid to abandon projects that aren't working out because there's no point in feeding a dead horse. 3c) Engage engage engage the user population so they understand that IT is a craft, that it deserves respect, and that you're trying to help them.
The problem always comes down to how many orders of magnitude a given project is larger than human-scale. If you get beyond something that, say, 7 people can understand, you're screwed.
Computers are rational. People, largely, are not. Technologist creating products (whether it's a camera or a car or a program in a computer) MUST take into account their audience, just as a writer or a politician or a chef does. It's a craft. It requires actual work with actual people and a conscious effort not to despise them. If you can't do that, don't try, because...
1) People expect more than we can deliver 2) We don't manage that expectation well 3) We don't even bother to try because 4) We are rational people. That's why we're in computers.
Ordinary people aren't defective. They just don't think like you. Figure it out already. You'll be very, very surprised what happens when you show someone that you're a human being too and not some elitist.
And anyone who wants to, say, send an email should have to practice for four or five years to get it right? Even though we know there are people who, after 15 years, STILL DON'T? That kind of smarmy strawman is another reason why software sucks: so do geeks' attitudes about people.
Maybe, just maybe, the computer isn't something regular people should have.
If people are bad at figuring out what they want from a computer, and terrible at designing (which, yes, they are) then maybe the problem is that the computer sucks. General-purpose computing is best left in the hands of experts. That model worked for 20-mumble years, and it was a good one. It still is, if you need to get industrial-grade stuff done.
But "personal computers," to be distinguished from "desktop computers," are a bust. Ordinary people can't deal with the complexity, and attempts to make computers act like a friendly thingy with stuff on it all fail because the computer isn't a friendly thingy with stuff on it. It's a computer.
People need, say, the Pure-Digital video camera that lets you take digital video with one button, has no memory cards, and runs on aa batteries. They need the microwave oven with the popcorn button. They need the car with a computer in it so they don't have to know when to use the choke. Special, optimized uses of computers work great for ordinary people.
People aren't stupid, they just don't act like a computer. Maybe there's a lesson there.
THANK you. I realize that an entire two generations of programmers have been brainwashed into thinking that the process is the first deliverable in a programming job, but a lot of us older guys think that, gee, we should plan how the thing works and freakin' program it, not argue over how this method and that inheritance goes here.
You think people didn't know how to program in the past? Read about how programmers used to optimize the placement of their code on drum storage to take into account the latency of reads.
Too much about HOW to program, and not enough about actually getting something done, is what I've seen over and over and over. Style style style. Working code is only a byproduct, and who cares if it's error-checked or idiot-proofed? We've got Objects, dammit! Look! Look! We did it all tidy! ANd we used the latest silver bullet!
Maybe we should take some of the lessons of the past and look at our current tools and say "hmm, you know, we could probably rethink all of this and make it easier instead of harder."
Sorry. End of rant. I'm old. (gums his boiled chicken in the corner)
Normal. People. Don't. Know. What. A. Root. Kit. Is. Nor. Do. They. Want. To. Nor. Would. They. Understand. If. You. Told. Them.
Normal people are not interested in knowing how things work. They only care how they can use them to get more of what they want. They'll use a laptop to crack coconuts, if that's what they need. As for spiffy-looking stuff, Sony can still deliver.
Especially if you're looking to light your rootkit-infested laptop on fire spectacularly.
On my first 11, we had to key each adress and deposit data using the front panel rocker switches. We had the bootstrap loader on a very long avery label on the front panel.
Nice thing about magnetic core memory, though. If the power went out, you turned it back on, let things warm up a bit and sometimes just hit the CONTINUE toggle, and the thing would pick up where it left off.
This is yet another reason why computer people really oughtn't try to deal with the real world. This is so complicated as to be completely opaque and inscrutable. My god, is there a way to make it more complicated? Stick a watermelon in it? Require a certain color of socks? Redefine "free" to mean "whatever the hell we force you to do in an arbitrary and ineffable manner because otherwise you're just not 'leet enough and if you dare ask us a question we'll sneer at you and tell you to 'man gnu'?"
I'd rather spend money, get a real contract, and have someone to sue. Sheesh.
Nor do they understand that people with good intentions can do what will turn out to be very, very bad things simply because they believe We Have To Do It Before Our Enemies Do.
It's great research with some claimed good intentions. You should be scared.
"Camera's" is the posessive, as in "that belongs to the camera."
So when making logical points, try not to write like a mouth-breathing geek, 'k? People who might consider your ideas will listen to your well thought-out argument instead of thinking "what a doink."
And don't tell me I'm a grammer Nazi. If that's so, then every programming language is too, as well as every CLI. Heck, unix is an entire operating system that's case-sensitive. Who did that? A geek. So kindly get with it and stop discounting the complete and utter annoyance that the inability to pluralize simple nouns causes.
What's the consumer-grade weakness of Linux? Its inability to deal with consumer-grade brains and consumer-grade random collections of computer bits.
What does having your own hardware platform do? You know what damned video, CD and audio drivers to use, and you don't have to be a genius to set it up.
Put OSX on a PC and watch it fail WORSE than Windows because Microsoft has all that hardware vendor cooperation locked up.
It's as simple as this: People don't want to know how to run their computers. They just wanna push dah button. Vertical integration means you can control the entire user experience and make it consumer-grade.
Here's the thing: No one tells kids that someone they don't expect will be looking at their online personna, judging them, and denying them employment. This is done in secret.
Telling them that "duuh, nothing you do is private" isn't the same as "hey, there are people looking for reasons to exclude you, and there always will be. Conform externally, shut up, and take it like a man/woman/both." The consequences aren't real enough of they're
a) hidden b) not for n years
This is a reason why, for example, healthcare is a mess: The consequences of denying treatment may not show up for decades, long after insurance companies are gone. It's not a free market if the back end of the loop is in 2045.
The consequences for "bad" behavior are unfair if there is no way for the person to know that might happen. How can anyone know what some search firm is going to judge us on next when they won't tell us?
The internet makes all this available to everyone, and we're grousing over the quality and intent of the people READING it.
Will no one ask just what the hell an HR person has done in his or her life that he or she wasn't proud of?
This isn't a matter of privacy. It's a matter of dignity, and both posters and the invisible interrogaters in big business/gove'mnt/pervcirlces don't get that.
Act with dignity. Afford someone else the same if they screw up.
Slashdot Mirror
...ever heard of a Scotch Egg? Hardboiled, wrapped in sausage meat, breaded then fried?
Cancer-fighting, yup.
Never put down to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
It could also have something to do with the entirely snarky attitude of your post. Next time, try stating facts and asking for help instead of being sarcastic and finger-pointy about it. It's really amazing how tech support people DON'T react well to bullying.
I'm still going for incompetence, though.
Let's create a committee to discuss the standard, and send out several RFCs, then split off into an angry sub-contingent that insists tags be open-source and then Sun decides to embrace tags, but screws it up, and Microsoft buys its way into tags and engineers a perfect way to pwn your machine through the tag "1337."
Don't forget to make it structured, with methods and types and blah blah blah.
It's just words, fer chrissakes. When you can tell me the difference between "its" and "it's" then you can talk about standards for words. Until then, PLEASE let's not have another standards war over something trivial that is supposed to save the world but will only serve to confuse everyone, all over again.
I, for one, welcome our new, trolling, Soviet-Russia-welcomes-you, nothing-to-see overlords.
It's slashdot. It's nothing important. Lighten up, 'k?
Good points, but I take exception to the "there's no obligation." There is, in that it is polite and the right thing to do. It used to be SOP to do so. Now, people don't give a fuck about each other, and just want to reduce expenses.
Courtesy doesn't cost that much, really. Automation can chunk out responses, yah know? Even if it's cold and automated, it's a confirmation that they got your resume, and they didn't want you.
Better than not knowing if you should take this crappy job because you haven't heard from this good job. Pity is cheap.
Yes, and of course compilers don't care about syntax; there's all that flexibility and no arbitrary rule at all.
It's all about what you care about. Care about things? You get code syntax right. Care about people, and making yourself understood? You spend a half a freakin' hour figuring out the difference between "its" and "it's".
Now shut the fuck up about elitist this and "wah wah wah I can't learn the parts of speech." Go back to thumbing "ru hawt?" on your fucking cellphone.
"Have you ever tried installing Windows from scratch? That is like two days effort (by the time you get all your drivers and programs installed, and everything set up as you like)."
Maybe for someone who doesn't know what he's doing. More like three to four hours tops if you have the proper preparation. Less than that for the OEM restore disk with the drivers and apps on it.
Compare that with the bullshit you have to go through to make Firefox appear on your Gnome taskbar. Hah!
It's a game console. Can't you people leave anything to do what it's supposed to instead of putting bloody unix on it? My GOD I wish I had $600 to waste on something new to stuff linux into. I'd buy new tires instead.
You can....
1) Apply middling investments to compromised specifications with weak analysis, high turnover and poor deployment planning and pay a bucketload of money in the backend well in excess of any money you "saved" and STILL have a failure-in-place.
2) Do the job right, which will cost so much that everyone will realize that, gee, computing as we know it is actually quite expensive and you don't get that much of an ROI on large, complex, all-encompassing systems, especially after you count the fact it takes years to do a project right and the target moves.
How about
3a) Design a lightweight standard for software designed internally. Don't get caught up with the process becomming the deliverable. Do it in a month.
3b) Work on small, light, throw-awayable modules that do specific tactical functions and connect to each other through the lightweight framework in (3b). Never spend more than 6 months on a project. Don't be afraid to abandon projects that aren't working out because there's no point in feeding a dead horse.
3c) Engage engage engage the user population so they understand that IT is a craft, that it deserves respect, and that you're trying to help them.
The problem always comes down to how many orders of magnitude a given project is larger than human-scale. If you get beyond something that, say, 7 people can understand, you're screwed.
Computers are rational. People, largely, are not. Technologist creating products (whether it's a camera or a car or a program in a computer) MUST take into account their audience, just as a writer or a politician or a chef does. It's a craft. It requires actual work with actual people and a conscious effort not to despise them. If you can't do that, don't try, because...
1) People expect more than we can deliver
2) We don't manage that expectation well
3) We don't even bother to try because
4) We are rational people. That's why we're in computers.
Ordinary people aren't defective. They just don't think like you. Figure it out already. You'll be very, very surprised what happens when you show someone that you're a human being too and not some elitist.
And anyone who wants to, say, send an email should have to practice for four or five years to get it right? Even though we know there are people who, after 15 years, STILL DON'T? That kind of smarmy strawman is another reason why software sucks: so do geeks' attitudes about people.
Maybe, just maybe, the computer isn't something regular people should have.
...a few thousand miles.
If people are bad at figuring out what they want from a computer, and terrible at designing (which, yes, they are) then maybe the problem is that the computer sucks. General-purpose computing is best left in the hands of experts. That model worked for 20-mumble years, and it was a good one. It still is, if you need to get industrial-grade stuff done.
But "personal computers," to be distinguished from "desktop computers," are a bust. Ordinary people can't deal with the complexity, and attempts to make computers act like a friendly thingy with stuff on it all fail because the computer isn't a friendly thingy with stuff on it. It's a computer.
People need, say, the Pure-Digital video camera that lets you take digital video with one button, has no memory cards, and runs on aa batteries. They need the microwave oven with the popcorn button. They need the car with a computer in it so they don't have to know when to use the choke. Special, optimized uses of computers work great for ordinary people.
People aren't stupid, they just don't act like a computer. Maybe there's a lesson there.
THANK you. I realize that an entire two generations of programmers have been brainwashed into thinking that the process is the first deliverable in a programming job, but a lot of us older guys think that, gee, we should plan how the thing works and freakin' program it, not argue over how this method and that inheritance goes here.
You think people didn't know how to program in the past? Read about how programmers used to optimize the placement of their code on drum storage to take into account the latency of reads.
Too much about HOW to program, and not enough about actually getting something done, is what I've seen over and over and over. Style style style. Working code is only a byproduct, and who cares if it's error-checked or idiot-proofed? We've got Objects, dammit! Look! Look! We did it all tidy! ANd we used the latest silver bullet!
Maybe we should take some of the lessons of the past and look at our current tools and say "hmm, you know, we could probably rethink all of this and make it easier instead of harder."
Sorry. End of rant. I'm old. (gums his boiled chicken in the corner)
Normal. People. Don't. Know. What. A. Root. Kit. Is. Nor. Do. They. Want. To. Nor. Would. They. Understand. If. You. Told. Them.
Normal people are not interested in knowing how things work. They only care how they can use them to get more of what they want. They'll use a laptop to crack coconuts, if that's what they need. As for spiffy-looking stuff, Sony can still deliver.
Especially if you're looking to light your rootkit-infested laptop on fire spectacularly.
My favorite: "He proceeded at a high rate of speed."
Um. Speed IS a rate.
On my first 11, we had to key each adress and deposit data using the front panel rocker switches. We had the bootstrap loader on a very long avery label on the front panel.
Nice thing about magnetic core memory, though. If the power went out, you turned it back on, let things warm up a bit and sometimes just hit the CONTINUE toggle, and the thing would pick up where it left off.
This is yet another reason why computer people really oughtn't try to deal with the real world. This is so complicated as to be completely opaque and inscrutable. My god, is there a way to make it more complicated? Stick a watermelon in it? Require a certain color of socks? Redefine "free" to mean "whatever the hell we force you to do in an arbitrary and ineffable manner because otherwise you're just not 'leet enough and if you dare ask us a question we'll sneer at you and tell you to 'man gnu'?"
I'd rather spend money, get a real contract, and have someone to sue. Sheesh.
...the law of unintended consequences.
Nor do they understand that people with good intentions can do what will turn out to be very, very bad things simply because they believe We Have To Do It Before Our Enemies Do.
It's great research with some claimed good intentions. You should be scared.
And "possessive" has four esses. Doh. Vend one Nelsonian "HAA-hah."
The plural of "camera" is "cameras."
"Camera's" is the posessive, as in "that belongs to the camera."
So when making logical points, try not to write like a mouth-breathing geek, 'k? People who might consider your ideas will listen to your well thought-out argument instead of thinking "what a doink."
And don't tell me I'm a grammer Nazi. If that's so, then every programming language is too, as well as every CLI. Heck, unix is an entire operating system that's case-sensitive. Who did that? A geek. So kindly get with it and stop discounting the complete and utter annoyance that the inability to pluralize simple nouns causes.
Carry on. Nothing to see.
You don't wanna clean nothin' in Philly. That dirt, it's STRUCTURAL.
Arg. Once and for all.
What's the consumer-grade weakness of Linux? Its inability to deal with consumer-grade brains and consumer-grade random collections of computer bits.
What does having your own hardware platform do? You know what damned video, CD and audio drivers to use, and you don't have to be a genius to set it up.
Put OSX on a PC and watch it fail WORSE than Windows because Microsoft has all that hardware vendor cooperation locked up.
It's as simple as this: People don't want to know how to run their computers. They just wanna push dah button. Vertical integration means you can control the entire user experience and make it consumer-grade.
Here's the thing: No one tells kids that someone they don't expect will be looking at their online personna, judging them, and denying them employment. This is done in secret.
Telling them that "duuh, nothing you do is private" isn't the same as "hey, there are people looking for reasons to exclude you, and there always will be. Conform externally, shut up, and take it like a man/woman/both." The consequences aren't real enough of they're
a) hidden
b) not for n years
This is a reason why, for example, healthcare is a mess: The consequences of denying treatment may not show up for decades, long after insurance companies are gone. It's not a free market if the back end of the loop is in 2045.
The consequences for "bad" behavior are unfair if there is no way for the person to know that might happen. How can anyone know what some search firm is going to judge us on next when they won't tell us?
What's next? Phrenology?
It's not the data. It's the interpretation.
The internet makes all this available to everyone, and we're grousing over the quality and intent of the people READING it.
Will no one ask just what the hell an HR person has done in his or her life that he or she wasn't proud of?
This isn't a matter of privacy. It's a matter of dignity, and both posters and the invisible interrogaters in big business/gove'mnt/pervcirlces don't get that.
Act with dignity. Afford someone else the same if they screw up.
What? I'm sure that's Nasa's plan for all its video. When have THEY ever messed up?