"How many 3 year olds would you trust to lead a blind person around safely and successfully, day after day?"
That's just one skill out of many. I would not trust my boss to write assembly code, and I would not trust myself to fly a jet, but that says nothing about our generic intelligence.
Part of the reasons we usually don't use 3-year olds to lead our blind, is that children are more curious and more easily bored than dogs, so they are likely to run off and do other things. One could argue that this proves that the 3-year old is over-qualified for the job.
"in my experience, kids laugh when adults laugh; they are always looking for cues for social behaviour."
You did not meet me then. I remember thoughts I had when no adults were around from that time, and even earlier. No particularly bright thoughts of course - I was no Einstein; but I remember standing looking at myself in the mirror and saying to myself: "So, now I am three. What will it be like to be four?" At the age of two I for a moment thought there was a connection between my ability (or not) to whistle and running down a particular slope. It did not work when I wanted to show my parents of course, so I had to discard that theory.
"This is the case even with early teenagers. And, in fact, some adults."
Reading the other replies here, there are plenty of words of wisdom which surely helps as thought provokers.
The one thing I do not agree with, is all those people who say "it is like this". "You should do that." And so on. In not one single one of those entries I have seen any human insights that fit all - probably for the simple reason that a human insight that fits all is trivial, and there is no need to post trivial things.
Those entries are like so many of those bad American films and television series where you get a ridiculously simplified view of the world with one person at the end admitting "You were right all the time and I was wrong." Right and wrong. Black and white. Those things exist only in the imaginary of moral blockheads. However, there are "better" and "worse" answers to most questions, and one can get a decent discussion from that too.
By all means, use the blockhead entries and think about them, but have in mind that there is a very high likelihood that they do not apply 100% to your case.
OK, now over to my own opinions, which may fit your case more or less.
The painter Edvard Munch (of Scream fame), in his youth simply knew he had a talent. He played the violin well. He wrote decent poetry. And he painted. He knew he had a talent for something, but did not know which one to to develop. In the end he chose painting. I'm much like that, I feel I have a talent, but in contrast to Munch, I know it is not writing, it is not music, it is not painting, and that makes things quite difficult. There is a strong expression in there that lacks the means of getting out. My answer to the problem is simply to go on and live a happy life. It might in fact not have been any more fun being a person with a visible talent like, say, Bobby Fischer or Spike Milligan or Dudley Moore.
"Success" is not a mandatory condition for happiness, and it is definitely not a sufficient one.
My measured IQ puts me among the smarter people in Mensa, and I rarely meet people I could definitely say are brighter than me. But I keep meeting people I learn from, who succeed better than me at certain things, who behave completely irrationally and thereby end up in "better" positions. There are such a lot of things intelligence does not bring you. Being bright does not automatically mean you will be able to do anything you want to.
Life is beautiful, if you can feel it is beautiful, so enjoy it!
There are much more things to say on this subject, but I'd like to avoid repetitions, and I think most of the other important things have been expressed by other entries already.
Just as a reminder: The advice "think about it", is not necessarily a good advice. But it might be.
Why would there have to be anything keeping me off Windows, just because I don't use it? I have never even considered using Windows.
Why have you never been to Madagascar? Never had any reason to even consider it. It might be fun, but why would I?
Why have you never read anything about orthoceratites? Never had any reason to even consider it. It might be fun, but why would I?
Why aren't you using Windows? Why would I? I already have four fully functional computers. Never had any reason to consider buying a Windows machine as well.
Basically I know of nothing that Windows has that I would need. There may be things in Windows that I could need, but none that I currently know of.
lots of little tools (dd, sort, cat, cut, perl, awk, etc)
If that is all that keeps you on Unix, and you in fact envy the Windows users their... well, something, then you could easily switch to Windows and Cygwin. Most of the little tools are available there too.
... under the gazing sun, there will be a terrible struggle between the two protagonists. People lock themselves up at home and dare not go out. A few minutes to twelve, a resolute man starts walking down the street in one direction. His name is Ken Brown. From the other direction comes his eternal nemesis: the spell-checker.
Brown quotes Tanenbaum as writing in an e-mail: "MINIX was the base that Linus used to create Linux."
There is no reason to doubt that Tanenbaum wrote that. However, what he surely meant was mainly that the OS that Linus used to develop on was Minix. To infer that this means some automatic heritage, as Brown does, is about as bright as claiming that Harry Potter would be based on Windows, if Rowling uses a word processor under XP.
Store the music on the computer instead of with the player? Why? Admittedly you should ideally have a backup on your computer as well. But when you're walking in the desert and suddenly feel that urge to listen to Singing in the Rain, it does no good knowing that you have it on your harddisk at home. Better keep your full collection with you all the time.
"It's outrageous if you really think about it. Both that the US tech sector is not trying to fight back harder, and that we're still giving business to comapnies that are giving other customers better products for no other reason other than that they are Japaneese."
I wouldn't use the word "outrageous". It's simply the reality that the US cannot be best at everything. HiTech phones from Nokia and SonyEricsson usually appear in Finland and Sweden before they appear in the US. The US is mostly ahead the rest of the world when it comes to some things (arguably: Apple, IBM, Palm, Microsoft, burgers) but not everything (cars, phones, vacuum cleaners perhaps?).
In Europe we have for a long time travelled from one European country to another to find cheaper, better or simply more interesting products than we find at home. But if I buy a German car, that doesn't mean I want to taste their coffee, and if I buy Italian shoes, that does not mean I want to use their phone system.
"the fact that were all still here shows it was perfectly secure"
You forget the many universes theory. There may have been earths in 99 parallel universes that blew up. That fact that we are still here proves that we were the lucky ones in the 100th universe.
They claim the integration to be "a revolutionary new approach to office suite systems". To me it sounds just like good ol' OLE, Claris/AppleWorks, OpenDoc (sadly missed by at least a handful of individuals nowadays), and so on.
Still, good luck to them. One day someone will succeed in building a better Office packet than MS, and it won't be someone who doesn't bother to try.
"For many people their home directories store thousands of man-hours worth of work."
To me we do not say different things, we just stress different aspects. With the sentence above, you surely don't literally mean that there would be many users with thousands of man-hours without one single backup. (If I found such a user I would give him a type-writer.) What you mean is that many users do not make back-ups frequently enough to avoid annoying or even catastrophic losses, and that is certainly true.
I know of at least one person who still uses only disketts for back-ups, and even though the only important files in his case are text files, there are obvious limitations with that system.
The problem boils down to the quality and frequency of back-ups. My first entry was written with people in mind with decent back-ups, but I am fully aware that there are many other users out there. Not everyone has an 40G iPod dedicated to daily or hourly backups.
Nevertheless I persist in stressing the time factor. Reinstalling a system with all applications takes much, much longer time than restoring a proper backup of your home data, if a back-up is available.
"But was anyone actually hit by the exploit in a malicious manner. Granted, its something that should be patched, but what has the demand for it been like? Other than the example links floating around, I havn't really seen it anywhere else.
"
The demand was the same one as for you to have a working lock on your front door when you buy a new house, even if there may be no burglars around right then right there.
I'm sure no one has been hit for real. We would have heard about it at/.
"One place you can look to see what was installed on your computer...go to/Library/Receipts. This has a small.pkg file that is left behind every time something is installed through a package on the computer (which anything but a basic application will have). "
Never heard that theory before. I find no receipts in/Library/Receipts for MS Office X, MS Office 2004 Demo, Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, Lotus Notes or AppleWorks, just to name a few recent installations.
I do find SallingClicker however. If someone tries to install SallingClicker after having taken over a machine, we'll get him!
"It seems to be talked about a lot, but nobody's exploiting it!"
I hope you are right, but you have not convinced me.
This morning I suddenly realised that I accessed a lot of "unknown" web pages through Google. I made a search for images of "lanterns" (no, you do not want to know why), and to compare the images I quickly clicked on 10 different pages in 10 tabs, and got to 10 different servers that were new to me.
Out of the thousands and thousands of programmers who could use the exploit, I'm sure that there are at least one or two crackpots, who would actually like to. Let's assume that they put an innocent picture of a "lantern" or of "Jennifer Anniston" on a hacked page of another server together with the malicious code. I click on the "lantern"-picture, I am forwarded to the infected page, and bingo, they have access to my home folder.
Once I realised that, I logged in as a guest user in another session and started doing my random surfing from there instead. I'm going to continue with that inconvenience until Apple gives us a real patch.
Just because an accident has not happened yet does not mean that it won't happen.
"Reinstalling an OS X system is completely trivial. Making backups of all of your data every time you make a change to any document isn't. "
Logically reinstalling the system is trivial. However, it will take time with all the applications.
Logically restoring a backup that does not exist is impossible. However, if it is there, it is a matter of a few minutes work.
Last time I lost my harddisk (last month or so) the by far most annoying bit was the system restore. That was admittedly just my personal experience, but I doubt I would be the only one, who makes frequent enough backups.
The bad thing is that all your precious docs can disappear or be sent away to a nasty exploiter.
The good thing is that you don't have to reinstall the system afterwards. It is enough to restore your properly made backup. That's some consolation at least.
The worst (?) potential consequence I can think of with the present situation is the malware grabbing a text file, where I have written down all the passwords to my Swiss bank accounts, and sending all my business secrets to my competitors and so on.
Not having that text file and not having any Swiss bank accounts and not having any competitors makes the risk limited for me, but other persons could have that kind of concerns.
(I opened my bank accounts in Sweden instead, where they have the highest taxes in the world. I could kick myself!)
What works best for me is any text-editor/word processor. I delete line by line or paragraph by paragraph as I have read them. Don't know why I feel that is comfortable, but it is.
(Keep a backup of the original in case you want to check again what the name of the butler's niece was.)
Now I'm confused who wrote what to whom, but it seems you, Steve, and I agree on all points that matter in this thread. Possibly apart from the "personal attack on [your] education", which, if you think I made it, I definitely did not intend, and which I have problems identifying. If it was my reference to potential ignorance in the "the original post", it should have read "my own original post" (bw5353's, not Steve's). Sorry about that. I much prefer talking about my own ignorance that the ignorance of others. I'm kind of egocentric in that way. I think. But I'm not sure.
Making un-informed statements about truths spoken or half-truths spoken is ignorance.
I cannot see the link between that statement and what I wrote. However, I nevertheless most definitely disagree. Making statements is never ignorance. It can be ill adviced. Clumsy. Silly. Challenging. Interesting. Boring. Superfluous. But it cannot be ignorance. It can show ignorance, but there is nothing in the original post that tries to hide any ignorance from my side.
You might want to check out what someone says before deriding the content.
That on the other hand is a very good advice. It still has nothing to do with the original posting of course, but I'm all for good advice, no matter how irrelevant to the context.
Well, if you choose to trust Michael Moore's agent, Disney decided this only (?) because of the potential problems with the present governor of Florida. So in that case it is very much a public influence that made them withdraw it.
From the New York Times:
Moore's agent Ari Emanuel says Disney chief executive Michael D Eisner asked him to pull out of deal with Miramax last spring, citing concern film could cost Disney tax breaks in Florida, where Bush's brother Jeb is governor; Disney executives deny tax breaks were issue;
Iff Ari Emanuel is right, then it's yet another slip away from American democracy.
Personally I have never read or seen anything that Moore has made, as most reviews seem to be either negative or positive in a way I do not like at all. I think Bush is a disaster for the US and the rest of the world, but I do not want to fight him with the half truths and insinuations that Moore seem to use according to many reviews - both positive and negative.
Guess I will have to start making an opinion of my own now, as he has turned impossible to avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
You remembered my birthday! Thanks a lot!
That's just one skill out of many. I would not trust my boss to write assembly code, and I would not trust myself to fly a jet, but that says nothing about our generic intelligence.
Part of the reasons we usually don't use 3-year olds to lead our blind, is that children are more curious and more easily bored than dogs, so they are likely to run off and do other things. One could argue that this proves that the 3-year old is over-qualified for the job.
You did not meet me then. I remember thoughts I had when no adults were around from that time, and even earlier. No particularly bright thoughts of course - I was no Einstein; but I remember standing looking at myself in the mirror and saying to myself: "So, now I am three. What will it be like to be four?" At the age of two I for a moment thought there was a connection between my ability (or not) to whistle and running down a particular slope. It did not work when I wanted to show my parents of course, so I had to discard that theory.
"This is the case even with early teenagers. And, in fact, some adults."
Agree to a frightening extent.
The one thing I do not agree with, is all those people who say "it is like this". "You should do that." And so on. In not one single one of those entries I have seen any human insights that fit all - probably for the simple reason that a human insight that fits all is trivial, and there is no need to post trivial things.
Those entries are like so many of those bad American films and television series where you get a ridiculously simplified view of the world with one person at the end admitting "You were right all the time and I was wrong." Right and wrong. Black and white. Those things exist only in the imaginary of moral blockheads. However, there are "better" and "worse" answers to most questions, and one can get a decent discussion from that too.
By all means, use the blockhead entries and think about them, but have in mind that there is a very high likelihood that they do not apply 100% to your case.
OK, now over to my own opinions, which may fit your case more or less.
The painter Edvard Munch (of Scream fame), in his youth simply knew he had a talent. He played the violin well. He wrote decent poetry. And he painted. He knew he had a talent for something, but did not know which one to to develop. In the end he chose painting. I'm much like that, I feel I have a talent, but in contrast to Munch, I know it is not writing, it is not music, it is not painting, and that makes things quite difficult. There is a strong expression in there that lacks the means of getting out. My answer to the problem is simply to go on and live a happy life. It might in fact not have been any more fun being a person with a visible talent like, say, Bobby Fischer or Spike Milligan or Dudley Moore.
"Success" is not a mandatory condition for happiness, and it is definitely not a sufficient one.
My measured IQ puts me among the smarter people in Mensa, and I rarely meet people I could definitely say are brighter than me. But I keep meeting people I learn from, who succeed better than me at certain things, who behave completely irrationally and thereby end up in "better" positions. There are such a lot of things intelligence does not bring you. Being bright does not automatically mean you will be able to do anything you want to.
Life is beautiful, if you can feel it is beautiful, so enjoy it!
There are much more things to say on this subject, but I'd like to avoid repetitions, and I think most of the other important things have been expressed by other entries already.
Just as a reminder: The advice "think about it", is not necessarily a good advice. But it might be.
So you are the guy who suddenly stopped me from ordering DVDs on Bill Gates' credit card! Damned you! Damned!
Why have you never been to Madagascar? Never had any reason to even consider it. It might be fun, but why would I?
Why have you never read anything about orthoceratites? Never had any reason to even consider it. It might be fun, but why would I?
Why aren't you using Windows? Why would I? I already have four fully functional computers. Never had any reason to consider buying a Windows machine as well.
Basically I know of nothing that Windows has that I would need. There may be things in Windows that I could need, but none that I currently know of.
If that is all that keeps you on Unix, and you in fact envy the Windows users their... well, something, then you could easily switch to Windows and Cygwin. Most of the little tools are available there too.
... under the gazing sun, there will be a terrible struggle between the two protagonists. People lock themselves up at home and dare not go out. A few minutes to twelve, a resolute man starts walking down the street in one direction. His name is Ken Brown. From the other direction comes his eternal nemesis: the spell-checker.
There is no reason to doubt that Tanenbaum wrote that. However, what he surely meant was mainly that the OS that Linus used to develop on was Minix. To infer that this means some automatic heritage, as Brown does, is about as bright as claiming that Harry Potter would be based on Windows, if Rowling uses a word processor under XP.
Store the music on the computer instead of with the player? Why? Admittedly you should ideally have a backup on your computer as well. But when you're walking in the desert and suddenly feel that urge to listen to Singing in the Rain, it does no good knowing that you have it on your harddisk at home. Better keep your full collection with you all the time.
I wouldn't use the word "outrageous". It's simply the reality that the US cannot be best at everything. HiTech phones from Nokia and SonyEricsson usually appear in Finland and Sweden before they appear in the US. The US is mostly ahead the rest of the world when it comes to some things (arguably: Apple, IBM, Palm, Microsoft, burgers) but not everything (cars, phones, vacuum cleaners perhaps?).
In Europe we have for a long time travelled from one European country to another to find cheaper, better or simply more interesting products than we find at home. But if I buy a German car, that doesn't mean I want to taste their coffee, and if I buy Italian shoes, that does not mean I want to use their phone system.
You forget the many universes theory. There may have been earths in 99 parallel universes that blew up. That fact that we are still here proves that we were the lucky ones in the 100th universe.
You don't think that one user is slightly limited as a statistical sample?
Still, good luck to them. One day someone will succeed in building a better Office packet than MS, and it won't be someone who doesn't bother to try.
1 billion Chinese?
Sure, they won't pay the full price tag, but with good deals with Chinese institutions, it can sure get a certain momentum.
To me we do not say different things, we just stress different aspects. With the sentence above, you surely don't literally mean that there would be many users with thousands of man-hours without one single backup. (If I found such a user I would give him a type-writer.) What you mean is that many users do not make back-ups frequently enough to avoid annoying or even catastrophic losses, and that is certainly true.
I know of at least one person who still uses only disketts for back-ups, and even though the only important files in his case are text files, there are obvious limitations with that system.
The problem boils down to the quality and frequency of back-ups. My first entry was written with people in mind with decent back-ups, but I am fully aware that there are many other users out there. Not everyone has an 40G iPod dedicated to daily or hourly backups.
Nevertheless I persist in stressing the time factor. Reinstalling a system with all applications takes much, much longer time than restoring a proper backup of your home data, if a back-up is available.
The demand was the same one as for you to have a working lock on your front door when you buy a new house, even if there may be no burglars around right then right there.
I'm sure no one has been hit for real. We would have heard about it at /.
Never heard that theory before. I find no receipts in /Library/Receipts for MS Office X, MS Office 2004 Demo, Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, Lotus Notes or AppleWorks, just to name a few recent installations.
I do find SallingClicker however. If someone tries to install SallingClicker after having taken over a machine, we'll get him!
I hope you are right, but you have not convinced me.
This morning I suddenly realised that I accessed a lot of "unknown" web pages through Google. I made a search for images of "lanterns" (no, you do not want to know why), and to compare the images I quickly clicked on 10 different pages in 10 tabs, and got to 10 different servers that were new to me.
Out of the thousands and thousands of programmers who could use the exploit, I'm sure that there are at least one or two crackpots, who would actually like to. Let's assume that they put an innocent picture of a "lantern" or of "Jennifer Anniston" on a hacked page of another server together with the malicious code. I click on the "lantern"-picture, I am forwarded to the infected page, and bingo, they have access to my home folder.
Once I realised that, I logged in as a guest user in another session and started doing my random surfing from there instead. I'm going to continue with that inconvenience until Apple gives us a real patch.
Just because an accident has not happened yet does not mean that it won't happen.
Logically reinstalling the system is trivial. However, it will take time with all the applications.
Logically restoring a backup that does not exist is impossible. However, if it is there, it is a matter of a few minutes work.
Last time I lost my harddisk (last month or so) the by far most annoying bit was the system restore. That was admittedly just my personal experience, but I doubt I would be the only one, who makes frequent enough backups.
Agree to some extent.
The bad thing is that all your precious docs can disappear or be sent away to a nasty exploiter.
The good thing is that you don't have to reinstall the system afterwards. It is enough to restore your properly made backup. That's some consolation at least.
The worst (?) potential consequence I can think of with the present situation is the malware grabbing a text file, where I have written down all the passwords to my Swiss bank accounts, and sending all my business secrets to my competitors and so on.
Not having that text file and not having any Swiss bank accounts and not having any competitors makes the risk limited for me, but other persons could have that kind of concerns.
(I opened my bank accounts in Sweden instead, where they have the highest taxes in the world. I could kick myself!)
(Keep a backup of the original in case you want to check again what the name of the butler's niece was.)
Now I'm confused who wrote what to whom, but it seems you, Steve, and I agree on all points that matter in this thread. Possibly apart from the "personal attack on [your] education", which, if you think I made it, I definitely did not intend, and which I have problems identifying. If it was my reference to potential ignorance in the "the original post", it should have read "my own original post" (bw5353's, not Steve's). Sorry about that. I much prefer talking about my own ignorance that the ignorance of others. I'm kind of egocentric in that way. I think. But I'm not sure.
I cannot see the link between that statement and what I wrote. However, I nevertheless most definitely disagree. Making statements is never ignorance. It can be ill adviced. Clumsy. Silly. Challenging. Interesting. Boring. Superfluous. But it cannot be ignorance. It can show ignorance, but there is nothing in the original post that tries to hide any ignorance from my side.
You might want to check out what someone says before deriding the content.
That on the other hand is a very good advice. It still has nothing to do with the original posting of course, but I'm all for good advice, no matter how irrelevant to the context.
From the New York Times:
Moore's agent Ari Emanuel says Disney chief executive Michael D Eisner asked him to pull out of deal with Miramax last spring, citing concern film could cost Disney tax breaks in Florida, where Bush's brother Jeb is governor; Disney executives deny tax breaks were issue;
Iff Ari Emanuel is right, then it's yet another slip away from American democracy.
Personally I have never read or seen anything that Moore has made, as most reviews seem to be either negative or positive in a way I do not like at all. I think Bush is a disaster for the US and the rest of the world, but I do not want to fight him with the half truths and insinuations that Moore seem to use according to many reviews - both positive and negative.
Guess I will have to start making an opinion of my own now, as he has turned impossible to avoid.