These people aren't stupid losers- they are fluent in another operating system, where they can achieve whatever it is they want... The problems on show here are ours, not theirs.
I have always had the greatest patience for someone starting off learning something, but I'd suggest that the users you're referring too are indeed stupid, and that your use of the term "fluent" is confusing the issue. The average Windows user is fluent only to the degree they have learned to recognise certain icons (on their desktop, in a file manager, or on a toolbar) and what generally happens if one clicks on them. That level of understanding can be generally associated with a pre-schooler. We are, after all, talking about adults most of whom have used a computer at work and/or at home for years and most likely make their living using it.
The fluency that you're referring to is better described as basic computer literacy. Granted the GUI of a desktop or program can be always be improved in the interests of helping out novice users, and is a goal worth extra effort and study, but it's no substitute for education. If a few hours of instruction is too much to ask, then screaming "You idiots! You don't click "Send and Receive" if you want to send an email! What's wrong with you?!?!" seems to me as perfectly appropriate.
The problems on show here are ours, not theirs.
Is it not just as possible that Microsoft, in dumbing down Windows for the novice user and obscuring What Really Happens(TM), has been a disservice to their customers? Put another way, do you think that folks who know what a command prompt have any problem understanding their computer is different than a toaster?
First Adobe gets hit with integrated PDF creation in the new version of Word, and now...
Actually, in the Real World(TM), the first thing a user learns when trying the Word->PDF "conversion" is that it's (to paraphrase) like a dog walking on it's hind legs. It's not done very often, and when it is, it's not done very well. The second thing they learn is that Word has trouble making up it's mind whether it wants to try and be be a word-processor or a desktop publishing program.
I doubt Symantec has anything major to fear. Historically, Windows has been full of applications that are typically replaced with third-party alternatives. Even licensed crippled versions of software (Diskkeeper, for example) that's included isn't worth using. This may not be true to the same degree with uniformed users, but it's easy to see how even a clueless newbie would be easily swayed by advice like "Use Symantec AntiVirus. It's the Real Thing(TM)."
Many people use things they can't explain. I can't explain the chemical reactions to cooking for example. All I know is when I boil an egg it goes white and hardens so I can eat it.
An egg white is about 10% protein and 90% water. It's the proteins that cause the egg white to solidify when you cook it. Egg white proteins are long chains of amino acids. In a raw egg, these proteins are curled and folded to form a compact ball. Weak bonds between amino acids hold the proteins in this shape--until you turn up the heat. When heated, the weak bonds break and the protein unfolds. Then its amino acids form weak bonds with the amino acids of other proteins, a process called coagulation. The resulting network of proteins captures water, making a soft, digestible gel.
The problem is for some things like, say, writing a 1 page letter or memo, it is easier to pull up a word processor (in the style of Word/OO etc) and get it done with quickly.
Oh, come on. If typing \begin{tabular}... is a bother, why not write a trivial bash script to prompt for the requisite To, From, Subject, etc. fields? Or use a dummy text template?
As for the original +5 Funny comment that wordprocessors are easier to learn than LaTeX, I would point out that no one really understands the wordprocessor they're using, least of the typical non-technical user, and that training programs for secretaries to learn or update their skills from one version of Word to another are expensive and time consuming as they are commonplace.
I've pointed this out before, but once upon a time no so long ago, secretaries in large organisations would regularly draft everything from the simplest letter to large complex documents in WordPerfect. The "markup" was no more complex than that of LaTeX, and the professional-looking memos, letters, etc. that went out the door were generated using simple pre-written macros that even little old ladies in accounting could use. Today, it seems, the approach is to have everyone spend their time endlessly "drawing" their documents (using toolbars and menus that even Microsoft has admitted are unwieldly), instead of writing them.
Obviously, LaTeX is hardly the ideal solution in many environments, but it's worth pointing out or at least reminding people that things can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make them, whether the subject is file formats, or the tools used.
Internal numbering... major number goes up for each suite release.
To add to that (while we're on the subject of new and shiny things from Microsoft), Vista is NT 6.0. For anyone who hasn't been keeping up, Win2K was (still is, I reckon) NT 5.0, and WinXP is NT 5.1.
Can you please explain to this nutjob how I can give my boardroom presentation in vi to maximize visual impact? I really need to get my message through.
Sure, but I'll explain it to you.
1. Draft your document in vi, add some preamble and the requisite \begin{slide} and \end{slide}, etc. where necessary.
2. Compile.
3. Display on screen during the board meeting.
You can make things as simple or as complex as you'd like.
I have fond memories of seeing a few thousand of secretaries using a similar approach. Granted, it was Wordperfect with template macros, and not vi, but they had little problem generating long documents with complex structures and tables after learning some basic markup.
Monitors, monitors - everybody says monitors... Want to get some serious hacking done... a four port KVM to one nice 20" LCD (or better.)
I strongly doubt there is a KVM in existence that doesn't noticeably degrade video quality. The degree to which it's noticeable may vary from person to person, of course, (in the same way that some people claim a 60Hz or 75Hz CRT flicker is "just fine"), but KVMs can't be part of any ideal setup unless the noise from running multiple systems becomes an issue. In that case, I would suggest building a server room and making use of KVMs (as opposed to VNC, etc. approaches), but only in a limited context.
Hot-key over and use the browser from another machine.
And when the awkward hotkey combinations, beeping, screen blanking and possible confusion as to what's connected where gets to you? LOL. The guy is looking for a dream setup to do programming, not systems administration.
Seriously, for the price of a good quality KVM, the requisite cabling and addressing any possible connection issues, purchasing an extra LCD monitor is almost always the better choice.
I am the biggest UI ludite and the search at the bottom is extremely user friendly. Sure, it is a new way of doing things but I hope other apps follow suit.
Actually, search on the bottom is exactly how search, filtering, external commands, etc. is implemented in many terminal-based (ncurses, etc.) programs, as is using the / to begin a search (rather than ^F). Mutt is an excellent example.
My guess is that the Firefox designers adopted the same approach for a GUI program because they were familiar with it, and knew how well it worked elsewhere. Not surprisingly, typical Windows users find it odd.
There's gotta be ads in there somewhere, lots of them.
If it makes you feel better, I'm sure there will be "Do You Yahoo?" advertising footer on every piece of outgoing piece of mail... the same kind of footer the rest of us need to go out of our way to strip out when receiving mail from folks insisting on using web-based email.
It would start with a programmer with a solid command of good grammar.
Funny, yes, but the real joke is on those programmers who believe there's an inherent contradiction.
Dennis Richie, Brian Kernighan, Larry Wall, to name a few, are hardly what you'd call grammatically challenged. In fact, they're well-read, well-spoken and highly literate. And I'd wager more than a dollar that CompSci books or O'Reilly publications aren't ghost written by English majors.
Bad spelling and broken grammar are the hallmarks of an illiterate, irrespective of one's professional training or what one does for a living. A reliance on tools to compensate for such shortcomings is a poor substitute for thinking and reading (commonly known as "proofing" in other circles). What such tools do, IMHO, is to obscure from view an inadequate education (we're talking grade-school, here), and removes any possible motivation for improvement.
Years ago I worked for a major law firm. What I remember most was how the old-timers (senior partners over the age of 60) were able to dictate their documents in full, and rely on their secretaries to transcribe and print the final output with little more than a final cursory check. The junior attorneys, by contrast, using their wordprocessors could fill a wastebasket with endless spell-checked revisions of a single letter.
The ability to write well may not be a requirement for being a good programmer, but all languages have a grammar and syntax, whether that language is C, or English, Finnish, or Hindi is irrelevant.
You can hear the incessant tapping of a vi user's escape key a mile away.
Beautiful, isn't it? Relaxed, rhythmic and almost elegant. Close your eyes, and it's like listening to a light rain falling. Compare that with the punctuated outbursts and clumsy too-many-notes style of that "other" camp, and it's like music.
Windows users, on the other hand, could easily be distinguished by an atonal and shizophrenic clatter interrupted by awkward and erratic periods of emptiness during which they take their hands of their keyboard to grope for an arrow key, and then stumble their way back home, mistyping along the way.
The Romans used to make ice in the deserts of Palestine and North Africa. It seems to me they were around before electricity and Frigidaire.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public health, and making ice without electricity, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Small, single-row enter, big backslash above enter, I thought that was the idea for making typing MS-DOS paths easier, and we have left that behind already, but seems they still live in early nineties...
So that we can escape spaces, etc. in the newer not-quite-MS-DOS-but-sorta-the-same paths?
Seriously, for anyone who doesn't have limited needs or preferences, the backslash character (escape, in the real world) and the pipe character are far more important than an oversized ENTER key. Almost as important as the ESC key, and the CTRL key, both of which also got moved around by folks who thought they were making progress.
The author of this article has some valid points here...it's unfortunate that he chooses to embed those few valid points in a sticky matrix of hyperbole, hysteria, and inaccuracies.
Agreed, but I'd take issue with something more basic.
We wish to rotate an image, shrink it 50%, attach it to an e-mail and send it to a deaf musician... Utilizing a modern interface: The procedure would involve several clicks, mouse drags and keystrokes, and also require:...
I'd suggest that folks who such constructs as Utilizing an Interface have strayed too far from the Learn to Use Your Computer foundation.
mutt -s 'Can You See This?' -a `mogrify -geometry '50%' -rotate '90<' foo.jpg`
No distractions! Save for opening a dictionary to learn what the word mogrify means, was that really that hard? Or that different than writing a shopping list? Or do we need someone to design a button to suit our fancy that we can just click or point to because we're just too stupid or too lazy to do any work? Hell, if we could talk to our computers, the words we'd use would most likely be the same as the above.
Call me old fashioned, but while visuals, aesthetics, etc. no doubt play important or possibly underrated roles, Human Computer Interaction requires and will continue to
require critical thinking, reading (with, or without moving one's lips), and typing, all of which require an investment in time and effort beforehand to master. Seems to me the authors would prefer something more akin to miniature golf, or perhaps television.
for things like collapsing articles to header only and expanding them to full article? (And user options for the initial view)
So... you're looking for a usenet experience with proper threading, but with clicky links and pictures, and inside a browser, right?
I've got a better idea. Since the text thing is so 1980s, maybe we can do a Google Groups version, too. That way, those readers who want to use their browser can still do so and get better threading, and the rest of us can access it as a news feed through Gmane. Being able to read/. in mutt *and* get syntax hilighting for any HTML formatted posts -- now, that's something for the suggestion box!
No, but the construction dino's having feathers is a gerund, just like my having replied to this thread already is a gerund, or elbobo's confusion as to the what consitutes a gerund are all gerunds.
Again, gerunds demand the possessive.
b) Shortened words and acronyms can optionally have apostrophes before the 's', but many people frown on the use and thus it's not a universally accepted usage. So no, there's no "require", just an "optional, but not widely approved".
Agreed that the use of a trailing 's' in certain circumstances is open for discussion, but this isn't one of them, and misses the point entirely. The possessive form of dino is dino's; end of story. I'd be happy to quote Fowler, but this being/., and that being a gerund, I'd probably get a Wikipedia link.
imesonline reports the new "irrefutable" fossil evidence of dino's resembling "giant chicks" more then reptiles as formerly accepted... 2. "dino's"?. 4. I'd like to kill you for submitting this.
I like No. 4, but No. 2 is wrong -- dino's is most definitely correct. Gerunds require the possessive.
Windows Vista will be no different than the 98 to XP conversion. NTFS users will be able to easily convert their partitions. Again, they will be able to do it even if they don't know what it is exactly. As long as they know it's recommended, they will keep clicking the Next button..
Indeed. My bets are that things will be little different. More specifically, that some people will keep drinking the kool aid and enthusiastically repeat what they've been told.
Google for "ntfs+fat+convert" and see if you can come up with the magical 512-byte number that idiot users who opted for conversion were suddenly introduced to, along with the prospect of a reformat/reinstall.
If you don't see a problem with 512-byte clusters before Googling for related problems with which you also are most likely blissfully unaware, I'd suggest taking a break from criticising the critics and consider they may have something to say.
Windows users are largely novices, but you can't expect everyone to be an expert user able to keep up with the quirks of Linux et al.
Everyone has a soft spot for novices, but I'd suggest Windows users are novices and remain novices precisely because Linux et al provides manpages and documentation defining how things work. Microsoft's quirks, on the other hand, remain largely undocumented, like much of Windows in general. Your automatic transmission analogy seems valid, but for the wrong reasons.
1. For the PHBs and everyone in management who rightfully insist on a core level of competency for new hires and need some sort of metric when references, years of experience aren't satisfactory or need to be validated.
2. For the HR folks who are often ill-equipped to evaluate competency levels.
3. For prospective applicants to improve on or dress up their resume. This applies especially to Americans who traditionally have had no opportunity to see abbreviations after their names.
4. For anyone involved in teaching (or selling teach materials) to establish graduation status.
5. For anyone who needs to determine or otherwise establish they know their stuff.
The explosion in the use of certifications is admittedly fair game for fun, but when the tech field reinvents itself every few years, it should be understandable that everyone can be left wondering how well anyone knows anything.
If you've been involved in hiring, or worked in management, you know that references can't always be trusted, and experience is not always a measure of competency. How many secretaries who have been using Word for more than 10 years really know the program? Similarly, I think it's a legitimate question how many regular/. posters professing knowledge could pass a simple A+ or Network+ test, let alone that something more involved like Cisco's base CCNA, or the Microsoft MCSE set of tests. And for all the Linux geeks laughing at the MCSEs, I'd wager more than a few dollars that if they tried taking a RHCE exam, many faces would turn red from embarrassment.
Personally, I hate tests of any sort, and even tend to be suspicious of people that do well on them, but I'd be the last to dismiss their purpose or useful, irrespective of the test or who administered it. All the established professions have their legitimacy established using a test, and most have some form of continuing education that requires futher testing and certification. It would therefore seem fair, therefore, for anyone in the tech field be required (as needed) to do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Only on the weekends.
These people aren't stupid losers- they are fluent in another operating system, where they can achieve whatever it is they want ... The problems on show here are ours, not theirs.
I have always had the greatest patience for someone starting off learning something, but I'd suggest that the users you're referring too are indeed stupid, and that your use of the term "fluent" is confusing the issue. The average Windows user is fluent only to the degree they have learned to recognise certain icons (on their desktop, in a file manager, or on a toolbar) and what generally happens if one clicks on them. That level of understanding can be generally associated with a pre-schooler. We are, after all, talking about adults most of whom have used a computer at work and/or at home for years and most likely make their living using it.
The fluency that you're referring to is better described as basic computer literacy. Granted the GUI of a desktop or program can be always be improved in the interests of helping out novice users, and is a goal worth extra effort and study, but it's no substitute for education. If a few hours of instruction is too much to ask, then screaming "You idiots! You don't click "Send and Receive" if you want to send an email! What's wrong with you?!?!" seems to me as perfectly appropriate.
The problems on show here are ours, not theirs.
Is it not just as possible that Microsoft, in dumbing down Windows for the novice user and obscuring What Really Happens(TM), has been a disservice to their customers? Put another way, do you think that folks who know what a command prompt have any problem understanding their computer is different than a toaster?
First Adobe gets hit with integrated PDF creation in the new version of Word, and now ...
Actually, in the Real World(TM), the first thing a user learns when trying the Word->PDF "conversion" is that it's (to paraphrase) like a dog walking on it's hind legs. It's not done very often, and when it is, it's not done very well. The second thing they learn is that Word has trouble making up it's mind whether it wants to try and be be a word-processor or a desktop publishing program.
I doubt Symantec has anything major to fear. Historically, Windows has been full of applications that are typically replaced with third-party alternatives. Even licensed crippled versions of software (Diskkeeper, for example) that's included isn't worth using. This may not be true to the same degree with uniformed users, but it's easy to see how even a clueless newbie would be easily swayed by advice like "Use Symantec AntiVirus. It's the Real Thing(TM)."
...never looked sooo good.
Especially when top-posted and sent in quoted-printable, format-flowed, yada-yada format with an advertising footer.
It could be the folks at the Firemonger Project are also missing something.
The extensions listed as Most Popular on the Firefox page aren't necessarily included. To wit:
FlashGot (yes)
CustomizeGoogle (NO)
NoScript (NO)
Tabbrowser Preferences (yes)
Adblock (yes)
Forecastfox (yes)
IE View (yes)
PDF Download (NO)
StumbleUpon (yes)
Gmail Notifier (NO)
From the Science of Cooking
An egg white is about 10% protein and 90% water. It's the proteins that cause the egg white to solidify when you cook it. Egg white proteins are long chains of amino acids. In a raw egg, these proteins are curled and folded to form a compact ball. Weak bonds between amino acids hold the proteins in this shape--until you turn up the heat. When heated, the weak bonds break and the protein unfolds. Then its amino acids form weak bonds with the amino acids of other proteins, a process called coagulation. The resulting network of proteins captures water, making a soft, digestible gel.
Not so hard, was it?
The problem is for some things like, say, writing a 1 page letter or memo, it is easier to pull up a word processor (in the style of Word/OO etc) and get it done with quickly.
... is a bother, why not write a trivial bash script to prompt for the requisite To, From, Subject, etc. fields? Or use a dummy text template?
Oh, come on. If typing \begin{tabular}
As for the original +5 Funny comment that wordprocessors are easier to learn than LaTeX, I would point out that no one really understands the wordprocessor they're using, least of the typical non-technical user, and that training programs for secretaries to learn or update their skills from one version of Word to another are expensive and time consuming as they are commonplace.
I've pointed this out before, but once upon a time no so long ago, secretaries in large organisations would regularly draft everything from the simplest letter to large complex documents in WordPerfect. The "markup" was no more complex than that of LaTeX, and the professional-looking memos, letters, etc. that went out the door were generated using simple pre-written macros that even little old ladies in accounting could use. Today, it seems, the approach is to have everyone spend their time endlessly "drawing" their documents (using toolbars and menus that even Microsoft has admitted are unwieldly), instead of writing them.
Obviously, LaTeX is hardly the ideal solution in many environments, but it's worth pointing out or at least reminding people that things can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make them, whether the subject is file formats, or the tools used.
Internal numbering... major number goes up for each suite release.
To add to that (while we're on the subject of new and shiny things from Microsoft), Vista is NT 6.0. For anyone who hasn't been keeping up, Win2K was (still is, I reckon) NT 5.0, and WinXP is NT 5.1.
Can you please explain to this nutjob how I can give my boardroom presentation in vi to maximize visual impact? I really need to get my message through.
Sure, but I'll explain it to you.
1. Draft your document in vi, add some preamble and the requisite \begin{slide} and \end{slide}, etc. where necessary.
2. Compile.
3. Display on screen during the board meeting.
You can make things as simple or as complex as you'd like.
I have fond memories of seeing a few thousand of secretaries using a similar approach. Granted, it was Wordperfect with template macros, and not vi, but they had little problem generating long documents with complex structures and tables after learning some basic markup.
I realize your capacitance for electrical puns may be low, but there's no need for such resistance! Admittedly, they are worse in series...
How to pay ohmage to someone with the potential to transform neutral words into a string of joules?
Monitors, monitors - everybody says monitors ... Want to get some serious hacking done ... a four port KVM to one nice 20" LCD (or better.)
I strongly doubt there is a KVM in existence that doesn't noticeably degrade video quality. The degree to which it's noticeable may vary from person to person, of course, (in the same way that some people claim a 60Hz or 75Hz CRT flicker is "just fine"), but KVMs can't be part of any ideal setup unless the noise from running multiple systems becomes an issue. In that case, I would suggest building a server room and making use of KVMs (as opposed to VNC, etc. approaches), but only in a limited context.
Hot-key over and use the browser from another machine.
And when the awkward hotkey combinations, beeping, screen blanking and possible confusion as to what's connected where gets to you? LOL. The guy is looking for a dream setup to do programming, not systems administration.
Seriously, for the price of a good quality KVM, the requisite cabling and addressing any possible connection issues, purchasing an extra LCD monitor is almost always the better choice.
I am the biggest UI ludite and the search at the bottom is extremely user friendly. Sure, it is a new way of doing things but I hope other apps follow suit.
Actually, search on the bottom is exactly how search, filtering, external commands, etc. is implemented in many terminal-based (ncurses, etc.) programs, as is using the / to begin a search (rather than ^F). Mutt is an excellent example.
My guess is that the Firefox designers adopted the same approach for a GUI program because they were familiar with it, and knew how well it worked elsewhere. Not surprisingly, typical Windows users find it odd.
There's gotta be ads in there somewhere, lots of them.
... the same kind of footer the rest of us need to go out of our way to strip out when receiving mail from folks insisting on using web-based email.
If it makes you feel better, I'm sure there will be "Do You Yahoo?" advertising footer on every piece of outgoing piece of mail
It would start with a programmer with a solid command of good grammar.
Funny, yes, but the real joke is on those programmers who believe there's an inherent contradiction.
Dennis Richie, Brian Kernighan, Larry Wall, to name a few, are hardly what you'd call grammatically challenged. In fact, they're well-read, well-spoken and highly literate. And I'd wager more than a dollar that CompSci books or O'Reilly publications aren't ghost written by English majors.
Bad spelling and broken grammar are the hallmarks of an illiterate, irrespective of one's professional training or what one does for a living. A reliance on tools to compensate for such shortcomings is a poor substitute for thinking and reading (commonly known as "proofing" in other circles). What such tools do, IMHO, is to obscure from view an inadequate education (we're talking grade-school, here), and removes any possible motivation for improvement.
Years ago I worked for a major law firm. What I remember most was how the old-timers (senior partners over the age of 60) were able to dictate their documents in full, and rely on their secretaries to transcribe and print the final output with little more than a final cursory check. The junior attorneys, by contrast, using their wordprocessors could fill a wastebasket with endless spell-checked revisions of a single letter.
The ability to write well may not be a requirement for being a good programmer, but all languages have a grammar and syntax, whether that language is C, or English, Finnish, or Hindi is irrelevant.
You mean like this?
You can hear the incessant tapping of a vi user's escape key a mile away.
Beautiful, isn't it? Relaxed, rhythmic and almost elegant. Close your eyes, and it's like listening to a light rain falling. Compare that with the punctuated outbursts and clumsy too-many-notes style of that "other" camp, and it's like music.
Windows users, on the other hand, could easily be distinguished by an atonal and shizophrenic clatter interrupted by awkward and erratic periods of emptiness during which they take their hands of their keyboard to grope for an arrow key, and then stumble their way back home, mistyping along the way.
The Romans used to make ice in the deserts of Palestine and North Africa. It seems to me they were around before electricity and Frigidaire.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public health, and making ice without electricity, what have the Romans ever done for us?
So much for the anti-Linux crowd saying there's far too many distro's...
I think the new slogan should drop the Your inspiration thing and go with something like
Microsoft - Let us customise everything for you.
You think there will be a choice of text editors, or will there be One Notepad To Rule Them All?
Small, single-row enter, big backslash above enter, I thought that was the idea for making typing MS-DOS paths easier, and we have left that behind already, but seems they still live in early nineties...
So that we can escape spaces, etc. in the newer not-quite-MS-DOS-but-sorta-the-same paths?
Seriously, for anyone who doesn't have limited needs or preferences, the backslash character (escape, in the real world) and the pipe character are far more important than an oversized ENTER key. Almost as important as the ESC key, and the CTRL key, both of which also got moved around by folks who thought they were making progress.
Agreed, but I'd take issue with something more basic.
We wish to rotate an image, shrink it 50%, attach it to an e-mail and send it to a deaf musician ... Utilizing a modern interface: The procedure would involve several clicks, mouse drags and keystrokes, and also require: ...
I'd suggest that folks who such constructs as Utilizing an Interface have strayed too far from the Learn to Use Your Computer foundation.
No distractions! Save for opening a dictionary to learn what the word mogrify means, was that really that hard? Or that different than writing a shopping list? Or do we need someone to design a button to suit our fancy that we can just click or point to because we're just too stupid or too lazy to do any work? Hell, if we could talk to our computers, the words we'd use would most likely be the same as the above.
Call me old fashioned, but while visuals, aesthetics, etc. no doubt play important or possibly underrated roles, Human Computer Interaction requires and will continue to require critical thinking, reading (with, or without moving one's lips), and typing, all of which require an investment in time and effort beforehand to master. Seems to me the authors would prefer something more akin to miniature golf, or perhaps television.
for things like collapsing articles to header only and expanding them to full article? (And user options for the initial view)
... you're looking for a usenet experience with proper threading, but with clicky links and pictures, and inside a browser, right?
/. in mutt *and* get syntax hilighting for any HTML formatted posts -- now, that's something for the suggestion box!
So
I've got a better idea. Since the text thing is so 1980s, maybe we can do a Google Groups version, too. That way, those readers who want to use their browser can still do so and get better threading, and the rest of us can access it as a news feed through Gmane. Being able to read
Ok, maybe not.
a) "dino's" isn't a gerund.
/., and that being a gerund, I'd probably get a Wikipedia link.
No, but the construction dino's having feathers is a gerund, just like my having replied to this thread already is a gerund, or elbobo's confusion as to the what consitutes a gerund are all gerunds.
Again, gerunds demand the possessive.
b) Shortened words and acronyms can optionally have apostrophes before the 's', but many people frown on the use and thus it's not a universally accepted usage. So no, there's no "require", just an "optional, but not widely approved".
Agreed that the use of a trailing 's' in certain circumstances is open for discussion, but this isn't one of them, and misses the point entirely. The possessive form of dino is dino's; end of story. I'd be happy to quote Fowler, but this being
Cheers.
imesonline reports the new "irrefutable" fossil evidence of dino's resembling ...
"giant chicks" more then reptiles as formerly accepted
2. "dino's"?.
4. I'd like to kill you for submitting this.
I like No. 4, but No. 2 is wrong -- dino's is most definitely correct. Gerunds require the possessive.
Windows Vista will be no different than the 98 to XP conversion. NTFS users will be able to easily convert their partitions. Again, they will be able to do it even if they don't know what it is exactly. As long as they know it's recommended, they will keep clicking the Next button..
Indeed. My bets are that things will be little different. More specifically, that some people will keep drinking the kool aid and enthusiastically repeat what they've been told.
Google for "ntfs+fat+convert" and see if you can come up with the magical 512-byte number that idiot users who opted for conversion were suddenly introduced to, along with the prospect of a reformat/reinstall.
If you don't see a problem with 512-byte clusters before Googling for related problems with which you also are most likely blissfully unaware, I'd suggest taking a break from criticising the critics and consider they may have something to say.
Windows users are largely novices, but you can't expect everyone to be an expert user able to keep up with the quirks of Linux et al.
Everyone has a soft spot for novices, but I'd suggest Windows users are novices and remain novices precisely because Linux et al provides manpages and documentation defining how things work. Microsoft's quirks, on the other hand, remain largely undocumented, like much of Windows in general. Your automatic transmission analogy seems valid, but for the wrong reasons.
1. For the PHBs and everyone in management who rightfully insist on a core level of competency for new hires and need some sort of metric when references, years of experience aren't satisfactory or need to be validated.
/. posters professing knowledge could pass a simple A+ or Network+ test, let alone that something more involved like Cisco's base CCNA, or the Microsoft MCSE set of tests. And for all the Linux geeks laughing at the MCSEs, I'd wager more than a few dollars that if they tried taking a RHCE exam, many faces would turn red from embarrassment.
2. For the HR folks who are often ill-equipped to evaluate competency levels.
3. For prospective applicants to improve on or dress up their resume. This applies especially to Americans who traditionally have had no opportunity to see abbreviations after their names.
4. For anyone involved in teaching (or selling teach materials) to establish graduation status.
5. For anyone who needs to determine or otherwise establish they know their stuff.
The explosion in the use of certifications is admittedly fair game for fun, but when the tech field reinvents itself every few years, it should be understandable that everyone can be left wondering how well anyone knows anything.
If you've been involved in hiring, or worked in management, you know that references can't always be trusted, and experience is not always a measure of competency. How many secretaries who have been using Word for more than 10 years really know the program? Similarly, I think it's a legitimate question how many regular
Personally, I hate tests of any sort, and even tend to be suspicious of people that do well on them, but I'd be the last to dismiss their purpose or useful, irrespective of the test or who administered it. All the established professions have their legitimacy established using a test, and most have some form of continuing education that requires futher testing and certification. It would therefore seem fair, therefore, for anyone in the tech field be required (as needed) to do the same.