you're missing that most computers come off the shelf with Windows and all the other crapware pre-installed. Reinstalling windows is something you and I can do in our sleep... but many users can't.
No, I'm not missing that. I'm just saying that most of us don't need to engage in the careful art of real "system tuning".
IMHO, if Best Buy were charging people $40 to reinstall the OS and drivers from scratch, install all of the applications the customer wanted (and none that they didn't want), and do some basic post-install configuration (set up user accounts, click "OK" on all the EULAs, install all updates, etc.), then I would think that wasn't a bad value. In fact, if that was a service that they would do for any computer you brought in, assuming they did a good job at it, then I might advise computer novices to take their computer in for that service every year or two.
I'm guessing that's not exactly what they're doing, though.
Yup, I've started using Microsoft Security Essentials. Honestly, all I want from AV software is that it's lightweight, unobtrusive, and does an acceptable job of detecting and removing viruses. Seems like all the antivirus software these days is trying to up-sell you to some more complicated suite, and if you install that suite you'll find that it's a bloated POS that's doing way more than it needs to. Amazingly, Security Essentials seems to be the best thing out there for my needs.
Being free helps. Along with everything else, being free means that if I install it on someone else's computer, they'll probably keep it up-to-date because there isn't a subscription that will expire. I hate installing a non-free virus scanner on someone's computer, coming back in a year and a half, and finding that they're infected with viruses because they didn't bother to pay for the subscription renewal. Almost as bad, I hate installing a free anti-virus, coming back in 3 months, and finding that the system has slowed to a crawl because they've upgraded to the full-security suite. Some people won't renew the subscription, but some people will just buy whatever damned thing their computer tells them to.
Can you remember when system tuning was part of the sysadmin's job?
Yeah, back when computers were so slow that they really needed tuning.
Now? Let's be honest, your computer will probably run best if you just don't screw around with it. You want your Windows system "tuned"? Reformat the drive, reinstall Windows, install the latest version of all appropriate drivers, run Windows update, and then install *only* the applications that you're going to use. That's about as "tuned" as most people need.
If you want to tune it further, try changing your performance settings to "Optimize for best performance" or whatever the equivalent is in Windows 7. It'll look a bit worse, but it may improve performance a little. Yes, you might also be able to disable some services and squeeze out a couple extra cycles, but how much does it matter these days? You're much more likely to break something than to effect significant performance improvements.
I've thought for a while that it could be pretty neat to have something like an iPhone/PDA with a stripped down portable interface, but when linked to a dock, it becomes a fully capable desktop machine.
I can type much faster than it can accurately recognize my handwriting
Yeah, the thing is that even though computers are probably getting better at recognizing handwriting, most of us are getting much worse at handwriting too. For me at least, trying to handwrite something neatly enough that another person could read it is a relatively slow and painful process when compared to typing. I suspect that a lot of the fascination with handwriting recognition and speech recognition originated in a time where people were much less comfortable typing than we are now.
I can imagine some real uses for a stylus/tablet setup, but I don't think they'll be an easier/quicker text input method than a keyboard.
I think as soon as it's too big to fit comfortably in your pocket, it's no longer competing with the iPhone or iPod. If the tablet cannibalizes any of Apple's sales, it will probably be the Macbook Air. The Macbook Air is sort of the closest Apple has right now to a netbook/ultraportable.
But many of the rumors suggest that this device will be intended to compete more with the Kindle or Nook than with netbooks. But with Apple, there's often LOTS of random speculation, so you don't really know until something is announced.
I think you're right that there aren't new stories, and sometimes people who ask for "originality" as missing the point somewhat. On the other hand, one of the big reasons we retell the same stories and reframe them as new stories is to keep the fresh and relevant. If the general consensus is that it feels too derivative of other stories, it might mean that the author failed somewhat in his reinvention.
I haven't seen Avatar yet, though, so I can't really comment on whether Cameron failed.
However, I'm thinking of writing a speculative fiction story where big publishing houses and media firms convince Congress to allow them to buy up public domain works, and then go after anyone who has an illegitimate copy of Henry V. What scares me is maybe it'll come true.
Actually that wouldn't surprise me. The way copyrights are working today, they don't necessarily protect or benefit the original creators anyway. If you listen carefully to the rhetoric behind copyright extensions and strict copyright enforcement, you'll find that a lot of the support is based on a vague economic theory that's very popular these days, based loosely on capitalism. The application of theory in this case goes something like this:
Having anything be "public" in a society is wasteful. Whether something is valuable can only be measured by how much profit it generates for private enterprise, and things which generate no profit are worthless. If you make something free or public, then it will necessarily be abused. All public things suffer from "the tragedy of the commons" unless they're so completely worthless that no one bothers to use them anyway.
What's more, rich and successful people are wealthy because they are better than everyone else. The fact that they're rich is direct evidence that they are providing a good value that people are willing to pay for. Hence, the fact that these media companies are large and wealthy indicates that they should be rewarded and their business should be increased. Therefore giving them better copyright protection is only reasonable.
And finally, whenever a company profits, it's good for the economy. Those profits are all generated by the company, and none of that money would exist if those companies didn't create that profit. All that profit is ultimately distributed to us all through the free market, and so we all benefit from this profit generation. Therefore, the government should seek to secure as much profit as possible for large successful companies. If you don't create strong copyright protections, these companies will lose billions of dollars, which in turn means that our economy will lose those billions of dollars. Since no one will be able to directly profit from those works, there will be no economic benefit.
If that's how you think it works, then it would only make sense to sell off copyrights to all public domain works. According to the logic I just described (flawed as it is), every Shakespeare play that has no copyright is a huge economic waste.
I think you're right, but I'd put it this way: people of all walks of life, even in fairly menial positions, have some kinds of power. In doing their job, they must sometimes exercise this power in various ways. There's a broad spectrum between fully innocent and justified exercises of power and completely corrupt abuses of power, and there isn't a class of people who are immune to abusing their power.
I only know because I used to work on support there, and they tried this crap with trying to delete local admin rights for everyone so nobody could administer their own boxes.
I don't think that's unique to Target. You generally should remove admin rights from everyone's machine. It can be tricky with developers, but in general it's the right move. Microsoft may not have advised it back 10 years ago, but today it's common even on Windows. If you can't lock down common users, something is probably wrong.
These are the kind of people that read that pen drives are the source of all evil on their network and if you just delete the USB mass storage driver from the system, your problem is solved.
If you think USB devices are harmless, you might want to talk to this guy: link. It's not something that happens every day, but it might give you an idea of why IT people can be such controlling pricks. They're trying to prevent a million possible problems by controlling all the variables that they can. The poster's MBR problem might be pretty rare, but there are tons of ways that a person can screw up their own system or violate security policies using a simple USB key drive.
It's entirely possible for security to be too strict for the circumstances, but trying to dissuade use of USB drives isn't totally stupid.
DOMAIN ADMIN?! Jiminy Cricket, please tell me that's some kind of test domain or that you're such a small company that your IT staff and developers are the same people.
There was a study regarding inner city children where the children were provided vastly superior resources compared to their peers and their IQs were shown to be above average.
Yes, nurture clearly plays a role. If you give a bunch of kids much better education and resources, they'll score higher on tests. However, that doesn't mean that "nature" isn't playing an important role, too. I'm sure that within those kids who were given greater resources, some scored higher than others. What caused that? To some degree it's probably other "nurture" variables, but "nature" probably playing a role too.
The problem is that you can't really do a controlled experiment. What are you going to do, create a bunch of clones and subject them to different lives? Or even more difficult, put a bunch of genetically different kids through the same exact life? The closest they've been able to do is to study twins who were separated very early in life and raised in different circumstances. In those cases, they often found that both twins shared certain interests and aptitudes. The whole "tabula rasa" idea hasn't been well supported by modern science.
I think you've somewhat correctly identified the what while incorrectly attributing it the the why... I have confidence that I can fix things if/when they become broken.
Well that's even worse. A good support person might have all the confidence in the world that they can fix things if/when they become broken, but they won't fiddle with it too much anyway unless they have to. The question isn't whether you can fix it, but what happens in the time between when it breaks and when it gets fixed? How many people can't work? How many man-hours are wasted? How much money does the company lose due to the downtime?
Of course you can fix it. Anything can be fixed with enough time, money, and expertise, and yes, it's true that these days a lot of expertise can be found with a simple Google search. From my experience in working at various levels of support, being able to fix things isn't impressive to me at all. Having nothing ever break in the first place-- now that's a trick.
Well of course I don't literally believe in "computer gods", but on the other hand I think superstition sometimes gets a bum rap. Is it bad luck to spill salt or break a mirror? If you live in a society where mirrors and salt are expensive, then it sure is. Even more so with breaking mirrors, since it leaves little shards of glass to cut your feet on. It's also a pretty idea to walk under ladders, given that you might knock it over (hurting the guy on the ladder) or the guy on the ladder might drop something (hurting you).
My point, really, is that sometimes your knowledge isn't as important as your habits. If you know why you shouldn't walk under ladders and you do it anyway, you're more likely to get hurt than if you just don't walk under ladders because you think it's bad luck. Similarly, if your IT guy says that a certain computer "doesn't like it" when you do a soft reboot, then you might just want to go ahead and do a hard reboot. Maybe he's being superstitious by anthropomorphizing the computer, but that doesn't mean his advice is bad.
Well in general it's true been true for me that the hardest people to support have been the people who *mostly* understand what they're doing. Whether they're developers or hobbyists, it's a bad combination to have a decent amount of computer knowledge mixed with no support experience and little to no understanding of company policies. I've never really minded it, though, so long as the users are polite and respectful.
Also it really helps if you show some consideration for the fact that you don't necessarily know why the support personnel are doing what they're doing. For example, if they don't let you bring in external drives and boot alternative operating systems from them, it might be because they're using full-disk encryption and they don't want you to hose your MBR.
I'm joking, giving you a hard time, but I thought it was a good example. Not only did you not anticipate it, but your IT staff may not have exactly anticipated it either. But that's why a lot of corporate IT people are inclined to lock down systems, deny admin rights, and prevent people from bringing in outside equipment. It's not just about blocking a list of anticipated problems, but about preventing an infinite number of possible unanticipated problems.
What we did for some developers at one of my companies was to allow them separate development systems. They had computers that gave them access to email, web, all their normal work documents, and a standardized set of development tools, and those computers were supported by IT and locked down. If they needed more freedom than that, they had a budget for buying their own development machines which were run on their own network, and that network was firewalled off. We didn't officially provide support, but we'd provide advice and help them when time permitted.
However, what we found was that once they had to provide their own support, they didn't like dealing with the development machines very much because they crashed too often. They preferred our machines, which really had most of what they needed anyhow (we did have a specialized image for the developers), and were pretty rock-solid. That was years ago, though. I haven't dealt with developers much since, and I don't know what the current state of things is.
It is also important to note that, before copyright, there were far, far fewer books written then their are today.
It's also important to note that it wasn't all that long before copyright was invented that the printing press was invented. Before the printing press, copying books was done by hand and was extremely expensive. That meant distribution was low, and therefore there was often less of a reason to write. It also meant that there were fewer copies of any given book, and books with only a few copies were unlikely to survive for hundreds of years. So yes, we don't have many written works from Ancient Greece. Some of the reason for that is surely because many of them didn't survive.
So really, a person could draw a very different conclusion from that fact. Instead of crediting copyright, one could credit the snazzy new technology that allowed for cheap production and distribution of copies (the printing press).
Not really. I can understand why you'd interpret things that way, but I was trying to assert that most developers that I've known have a very different approach to problem-solving.
I'm not sure this is quite right as an analogy, but maybe it's like hiring an engineer to fix your pipes when you really need a plumber. Imagine hiring an engineer to fix your toilet, watching him sit down with a CAD program and design your entire house mathematically, and then having him insist that the plumbing in your house shouldn't work at all, in spite of the fact that your plumbing works fine. Then a plumber comes in, bends the rod that attaches to your float, and the toilet is all fixed.
In this example, maybe the plumber doesn't have a depth of knowledge about fluid dynamics as the engineer, but he also doesn't need to. And my point is not to say that one is better than the other. The plumber might not be very good at the engineer's job either, but this imaginary engineer might do well to call a plumber when he has a plumbing problem.
The example isn't too great, since fixing a toilet is easy and most engineers wouldn't be silly enough to drag out a CAD program like that. It's an exaggeration of course. In the developer/support roles, my assessment is something like this: developers spend their day thinking about how computers should solve a problem when they're working the way they're supposed to; support people spend their day dealing with how computers malfunction when they aren't working the way they're supposed to. Those are really two different disciplines which intersect to some degree but also diverge to some degree.
Well let me put it this way: What are the chances that the investments into infrastructure will be straightforward, i.e. the government paying for public infrastructure to be built? Very low. It's much more likely that the money will be passed out to the remaining baby bells (who aren't really babies anymore) for them to build infrastructure, and the infrastructure probably still won't be built.
Americans just don't seem to believe in public infrastructure. They don't see it as an investment for the long-term economic health of the country, but rather they see it was a potential business opportunity for businesses to ignore if it's not immediately profitable enough.
Now you might say that I'm describing a vocal minority, but even if that's true, that minority has a lot of influence over how things get done. We're not going to see decent Internet coverage in this country anytime soon. Our infrastructure has barely been maintained for decades now, and I just don't think we're willing to make the investment to get it fixed.
My comment on raising was meant to be more along the lines of: take two 100% identical clones, place them in two different families with different "styles" of raising children. Years later, would they show similar scores on an IQ test? If not, how much of the test is natural ability?
They've sort of done this sort of thing with identical twins who were raised by different families. Unfortunately, I believe that the twins were generally raised in the same culture, even if not in the same socioeconomic setting. That is, there have been twins where one was raised by a rich family and the other by a poor family, but not many where one was raised by upper-middle class americans and one by a poor illiterate family in a war-torn third-world country.
I think it's safe to say, though, that if you had a human baby raised by stone-age illiterate people, and, once full-grown, you handed him a written IQ test, than he wouldn't score very highly. It's clear that "nature" and "nurture" both play a role. It's not 100% one or the other.
Its kind of funny that that comment comes up in a discussion about...how to most effectively direct further public policy... to acheive universal broadband access.
Right, and lots of people have complained that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a communist/socialist action taken by a radical left-wing tyrant and his cronies. These people complain that private companies should be deciding when and where to build infrastructure, and if those companies only want to build where it's immediately most profitable for that company, then that's entirely appropriate.
You may think those people are nutjobs, but they're out there. I'm glad the current administration seems to understand that you have to spend money on infrastructure, and that the infrastructure should include the Internet. However, half the country is still complaining about how the government is spending too much money building infrastructure already.
Any developer who can't competently administer his own machine is incompetent
As an IT person who has supported developers, that makes me think that I've only met... like... 2 competent developers ever. Almost every developer thought he could administer his own machine, but very few did a good job at it.
As I see it (and maybe this is BS, but I'm saying it anyway), part of the problem is an issue of mentality. Developers seem to want to think about what *should* happen. Like "Oh, well installing this *shouldn't* make a difference. Changing this setting *shouldn't* make a difference." As though computers all make sense and work the way they're supposed to. In my years of doing support, I've come to the opinion that this is a very bad support mindset. Computers almost need to be treated as magical boxes possessed by evil spirits which might stop working if you anger the computer gods.
And I know, if you're a developer that probably sounds utterly silly and you think I'm a bad support guy. But you see, that's my whole point. Developers tend to have a different mindset. Computer stuff breaks all the time for no reason. Hard drives die, motherboards get fried, and monitors burn out. Sometimes enabling a setting will break your computer in some completely unrelated way. Yeah, yeah, there's a valid scientific reason. If I had access to the source code and I was a master programmer and I had all the time in the world, I could probably figure out exactly what was going on and fix it for real. But for my purposes, I just need the thing to work right now so my user can get back to work. For my purposes, for right now, it's good enough to assume that enabling the setting upsets evil spirits and angers the computer gods. It means "leave that setting alone."
It seems like every developer/administrator I've met wants to ague with that. They want to say, "But that setting *shouldn't* make a difference. Computers only do what they're programmed to do, so I just have to reprogram it right now." All that may be true, but as the support guy, you don't always have time like that. Sometimes you just have to blame the computer gods and move on.
Well honestly, I'm not sure what it is that we think IQ tests are supposed to measure. It seems to me that ought to be settled first. It's not measuring all cognitive skills that people have. For example, it doesn't measure your ability to read people or your ability to convince and influence people. It doesn't measure your moral judgements or aesthetic sensibility.
And of course it has to do with "raising". For example, if a test is being given in English, then it's going to be testing, in part, your English skills. In some cases, it may be measuring a person's ability to take a test. However smart you are, if you get nervous and choke whenever you take a test, you probably aren't going to do well on an IQ test. There's no real way around it. What's more, if you give me a particular IQ test, I bet I can prep someone for it and have them score much higher than they would without preparation.
None of this is to say that genetics or biological factors have no effect on cognitive skills, but of course IQ tests aren't simply testing "natural ability".
So yes, the answer is that real, usable IP is out of reach for many of us.
And this is why VoIP and TVoIP aren't going to make POTS and cable systems obsolete in the near future.
It's a real shame that the US doesn't believe in investing in infrastructure. We'll let our bridges collapse, our streets be filled with potholes, our electrical grid take out 1/4 of the country in one blackout, we'll live without a decent railway system, and we'll let our Internet access fall behind the rest of the world. We'll do it all because public infrastructure is "communist".
The truth is, POTS should be obsolete. You have problems with VoIP? Well that's just a sign that VoIP should be improved, made better, fixed. Name a problem with VoIP, and there are people who will find a solution, assuming we're willing to invest in infrastructure. You think POTS grew out of the ground on its own, fully formed and without problems?
The large cranial size causes problems in birth, reducing the number of individuals that survive the process and reduces the reproduction rate.
I've also read (though this may not be quite right) that our large complex brains use lots of energy, and therefore require greater amounts of food. That seemed interesting to me, since it might indicate that intelligence has an evolutionary downside that continues beyond child birth, and it might explain why animals generally don't select for intelligence. If the intelligence isn't going to serve you very well, then you may as well save the calories.
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you're missing that most computers come off the shelf with Windows and all the other crapware pre-installed. Reinstalling windows is something you and I can do in our sleep... but many users can't.
No, I'm not missing that. I'm just saying that most of us don't need to engage in the careful art of real "system tuning".
IMHO, if Best Buy were charging people $40 to reinstall the OS and drivers from scratch, install all of the applications the customer wanted (and none that they didn't want), and do some basic post-install configuration (set up user accounts, click "OK" on all the EULAs, install all updates, etc.), then I would think that wasn't a bad value. In fact, if that was a service that they would do for any computer you brought in, assuming they did a good job at it, then I might advise computer novices to take their computer in for that service every year or two.
I'm guessing that's not exactly what they're doing, though.
Yup, I've started using Microsoft Security Essentials. Honestly, all I want from AV software is that it's lightweight, unobtrusive, and does an acceptable job of detecting and removing viruses. Seems like all the antivirus software these days is trying to up-sell you to some more complicated suite, and if you install that suite you'll find that it's a bloated POS that's doing way more than it needs to. Amazingly, Security Essentials seems to be the best thing out there for my needs.
Being free helps. Along with everything else, being free means that if I install it on someone else's computer, they'll probably keep it up-to-date because there isn't a subscription that will expire. I hate installing a non-free virus scanner on someone's computer, coming back in a year and a half, and finding that they're infected with viruses because they didn't bother to pay for the subscription renewal. Almost as bad, I hate installing a free anti-virus, coming back in 3 months, and finding that the system has slowed to a crawl because they've upgraded to the full-security suite. Some people won't renew the subscription, but some people will just buy whatever damned thing their computer tells them to.
Can you remember when system tuning was part of the sysadmin's job?
Yeah, back when computers were so slow that they really needed tuning.
Now? Let's be honest, your computer will probably run best if you just don't screw around with it. You want your Windows system "tuned"? Reformat the drive, reinstall Windows, install the latest version of all appropriate drivers, run Windows update, and then install *only* the applications that you're going to use. That's about as "tuned" as most people need.
If you want to tune it further, try changing your performance settings to "Optimize for best performance" or whatever the equivalent is in Windows 7. It'll look a bit worse, but it may improve performance a little. Yes, you might also be able to disable some services and squeeze out a couple extra cycles, but how much does it matter these days? You're much more likely to break something than to effect significant performance improvements.
Maybe Apple will pull a coup this time around and offer a large tablet interface that's easily dockable.
Maybe making use of something like this patent?
I've thought for a while that it could be pretty neat to have something like an iPhone/PDA with a stripped down portable interface, but when linked to a dock, it becomes a fully capable desktop machine.
I can type much faster than it can accurately recognize my handwriting
Yeah, the thing is that even though computers are probably getting better at recognizing handwriting, most of us are getting much worse at handwriting too. For me at least, trying to handwrite something neatly enough that another person could read it is a relatively slow and painful process when compared to typing. I suspect that a lot of the fascination with handwriting recognition and speech recognition originated in a time where people were much less comfortable typing than we are now.
I can imagine some real uses for a stylus/tablet setup, but I don't think they'll be an easier/quicker text input method than a keyboard.
I think as soon as it's too big to fit comfortably in your pocket, it's no longer competing with the iPhone or iPod. If the tablet cannibalizes any of Apple's sales, it will probably be the Macbook Air. The Macbook Air is sort of the closest Apple has right now to a netbook/ultraportable.
But many of the rumors suggest that this device will be intended to compete more with the Kindle or Nook than with netbooks. But with Apple, there's often LOTS of random speculation, so you don't really know until something is announced.
Obligatory: http://www.misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle/
It explains everything you need to know about the Apple rumor mill.
I think you're right that there aren't new stories, and sometimes people who ask for "originality" as missing the point somewhat. On the other hand, one of the big reasons we retell the same stories and reframe them as new stories is to keep the fresh and relevant. If the general consensus is that it feels too derivative of other stories, it might mean that the author failed somewhat in his reinvention.
I haven't seen Avatar yet, though, so I can't really comment on whether Cameron failed.
However, I'm thinking of writing a speculative fiction story where big publishing houses and media firms convince Congress to allow them to buy up public domain works, and then go after anyone who has an illegitimate copy of Henry V. What scares me is maybe it'll come true.
Actually that wouldn't surprise me. The way copyrights are working today, they don't necessarily protect or benefit the original creators anyway. If you listen carefully to the rhetoric behind copyright extensions and strict copyright enforcement, you'll find that a lot of the support is based on a vague economic theory that's very popular these days, based loosely on capitalism. The application of theory in this case goes something like this:
Having anything be "public" in a society is wasteful. Whether something is valuable can only be measured by how much profit it generates for private enterprise, and things which generate no profit are worthless. If you make something free or public, then it will necessarily be abused. All public things suffer from "the tragedy of the commons" unless they're so completely worthless that no one bothers to use them anyway.
What's more, rich and successful people are wealthy because they are better than everyone else. The fact that they're rich is direct evidence that they are providing a good value that people are willing to pay for. Hence, the fact that these media companies are large and wealthy indicates that they should be rewarded and their business should be increased. Therefore giving them better copyright protection is only reasonable.
And finally, whenever a company profits, it's good for the economy. Those profits are all generated by the company, and none of that money would exist if those companies didn't create that profit. All that profit is ultimately distributed to us all through the free market, and so we all benefit from this profit generation. Therefore, the government should seek to secure as much profit as possible for large successful companies. If you don't create strong copyright protections, these companies will lose billions of dollars, which in turn means that our economy will lose those billions of dollars. Since no one will be able to directly profit from those works, there will be no economic benefit.
If that's how you think it works, then it would only make sense to sell off copyrights to all public domain works. According to the logic I just described (flawed as it is), every Shakespeare play that has no copyright is a huge economic waste.
I think you're right, but I'd put it this way: people of all walks of life, even in fairly menial positions, have some kinds of power. In doing their job, they must sometimes exercise this power in various ways. There's a broad spectrum between fully innocent and justified exercises of power and completely corrupt abuses of power, and there isn't a class of people who are immune to abusing their power.
I only know because I used to work on support there, and they tried this crap with trying to delete local admin rights for everyone so nobody could administer their own boxes.
I don't think that's unique to Target. You generally should remove admin rights from everyone's machine. It can be tricky with developers, but in general it's the right move. Microsoft may not have advised it back 10 years ago, but today it's common even on Windows. If you can't lock down common users, something is probably wrong.
These are the kind of people that read that pen drives are the source of all evil on their network and if you just delete the USB mass storage driver from the system, your problem is solved.
If you think USB devices are harmless, you might want to talk to this guy: link. It's not something that happens every day, but it might give you an idea of why IT people can be such controlling pricks. They're trying to prevent a million possible problems by controlling all the variables that they can. The poster's MBR problem might be pretty rare, but there are tons of ways that a person can screw up their own system or violate security policies using a simple USB key drive.
It's entirely possible for security to be too strict for the circumstances, but trying to dissuade use of USB drives isn't totally stupid.
DOMAIN ADMIN?! Jiminy Cricket, please tell me that's some kind of test domain or that you're such a small company that your IT staff and developers are the same people.
There was a study regarding inner city children where the children were provided vastly superior resources compared to their peers and their IQs were shown to be above average.
Yes, nurture clearly plays a role. If you give a bunch of kids much better education and resources, they'll score higher on tests. However, that doesn't mean that "nature" isn't playing an important role, too. I'm sure that within those kids who were given greater resources, some scored higher than others. What caused that? To some degree it's probably other "nurture" variables, but "nature" probably playing a role too.
The problem is that you can't really do a controlled experiment. What are you going to do, create a bunch of clones and subject them to different lives? Or even more difficult, put a bunch of genetically different kids through the same exact life? The closest they've been able to do is to study twins who were separated very early in life and raised in different circumstances. In those cases, they often found that both twins shared certain interests and aptitudes. The whole "tabula rasa" idea hasn't been well supported by modern science.
I think you've somewhat correctly identified the what while incorrectly attributing it the the why... I have confidence that I can fix things if/when they become broken.
Well that's even worse. A good support person might have all the confidence in the world that they can fix things if/when they become broken, but they won't fiddle with it too much anyway unless they have to. The question isn't whether you can fix it, but what happens in the time between when it breaks and when it gets fixed? How many people can't work? How many man-hours are wasted? How much money does the company lose due to the downtime?
Of course you can fix it. Anything can be fixed with enough time, money, and expertise, and yes, it's true that these days a lot of expertise can be found with a simple Google search. From my experience in working at various levels of support, being able to fix things isn't impressive to me at all. Having nothing ever break in the first place-- now that's a trick.
Well of course I don't literally believe in "computer gods", but on the other hand I think superstition sometimes gets a bum rap. Is it bad luck to spill salt or break a mirror? If you live in a society where mirrors and salt are expensive, then it sure is. Even more so with breaking mirrors, since it leaves little shards of glass to cut your feet on. It's also a pretty idea to walk under ladders, given that you might knock it over (hurting the guy on the ladder) or the guy on the ladder might drop something (hurting you).
My point, really, is that sometimes your knowledge isn't as important as your habits. If you know why you shouldn't walk under ladders and you do it anyway, you're more likely to get hurt than if you just don't walk under ladders because you think it's bad luck. Similarly, if your IT guy says that a certain computer "doesn't like it" when you do a soft reboot, then you might just want to go ahead and do a hard reboot. Maybe he's being superstitious by anthropomorphizing the computer, but that doesn't mean his advice is bad.
Well in general it's true been true for me that the hardest people to support have been the people who *mostly* understand what they're doing. Whether they're developers or hobbyists, it's a bad combination to have a decent amount of computer knowledge mixed with no support experience and little to no understanding of company policies. I've never really minded it, though, so long as the users are polite and respectful.
Also it really helps if you show some consideration for the fact that you don't necessarily know why the support personnel are doing what they're doing. For example, if they don't let you bring in external drives and boot alternative operating systems from them, it might be because they're using full-disk encryption and they don't want you to hose your MBR.
I'm joking, giving you a hard time, but I thought it was a good example. Not only did you not anticipate it, but your IT staff may not have exactly anticipated it either. But that's why a lot of corporate IT people are inclined to lock down systems, deny admin rights, and prevent people from bringing in outside equipment. It's not just about blocking a list of anticipated problems, but about preventing an infinite number of possible unanticipated problems.
What we did for some developers at one of my companies was to allow them separate development systems. They had computers that gave them access to email, web, all their normal work documents, and a standardized set of development tools, and those computers were supported by IT and locked down. If they needed more freedom than that, they had a budget for buying their own development machines which were run on their own network, and that network was firewalled off. We didn't officially provide support, but we'd provide advice and help them when time permitted.
However, what we found was that once they had to provide their own support, they didn't like dealing with the development machines very much because they crashed too often. They preferred our machines, which really had most of what they needed anyhow (we did have a specialized image for the developers), and were pretty rock-solid. That was years ago, though. I haven't dealt with developers much since, and I don't know what the current state of things is.
It is also important to note that, before copyright, there were far, far fewer books written then their are today.
It's also important to note that it wasn't all that long before copyright was invented that the printing press was invented. Before the printing press, copying books was done by hand and was extremely expensive. That meant distribution was low, and therefore there was often less of a reason to write. It also meant that there were fewer copies of any given book, and books with only a few copies were unlikely to survive for hundreds of years. So yes, we don't have many written works from Ancient Greece. Some of the reason for that is surely because many of them didn't survive.
So really, a person could draw a very different conclusion from that fact. Instead of crediting copyright, one could credit the snazzy new technology that allowed for cheap production and distribution of copies (the printing press).
Not really. I can understand why you'd interpret things that way, but I was trying to assert that most developers that I've known have a very different approach to problem-solving.
I'm not sure this is quite right as an analogy, but maybe it's like hiring an engineer to fix your pipes when you really need a plumber. Imagine hiring an engineer to fix your toilet, watching him sit down with a CAD program and design your entire house mathematically, and then having him insist that the plumbing in your house shouldn't work at all, in spite of the fact that your plumbing works fine. Then a plumber comes in, bends the rod that attaches to your float, and the toilet is all fixed.
In this example, maybe the plumber doesn't have a depth of knowledge about fluid dynamics as the engineer, but he also doesn't need to. And my point is not to say that one is better than the other. The plumber might not be very good at the engineer's job either, but this imaginary engineer might do well to call a plumber when he has a plumbing problem.
The example isn't too great, since fixing a toilet is easy and most engineers wouldn't be silly enough to drag out a CAD program like that. It's an exaggeration of course. In the developer/support roles, my assessment is something like this: developers spend their day thinking about how computers should solve a problem when they're working the way they're supposed to; support people spend their day dealing with how computers malfunction when they aren't working the way they're supposed to. Those are really two different disciplines which intersect to some degree but also diverge to some degree.
Well let me put it this way: What are the chances that the investments into infrastructure will be straightforward, i.e. the government paying for public infrastructure to be built? Very low. It's much more likely that the money will be passed out to the remaining baby bells (who aren't really babies anymore) for them to build infrastructure, and the infrastructure probably still won't be built.
Americans just don't seem to believe in public infrastructure. They don't see it as an investment for the long-term economic health of the country, but rather they see it was a potential business opportunity for businesses to ignore if it's not immediately profitable enough.
Now you might say that I'm describing a vocal minority, but even if that's true, that minority has a lot of influence over how things get done. We're not going to see decent Internet coverage in this country anytime soon. Our infrastructure has barely been maintained for decades now, and I just don't think we're willing to make the investment to get it fixed.
My comment on raising was meant to be more along the lines of: take two 100% identical clones, place them in two different families with different "styles" of raising children. Years later, would they show similar scores on an IQ test? If not, how much of the test is natural ability?
They've sort of done this sort of thing with identical twins who were raised by different families. Unfortunately, I believe that the twins were generally raised in the same culture, even if not in the same socioeconomic setting. That is, there have been twins where one was raised by a rich family and the other by a poor family, but not many where one was raised by upper-middle class americans and one by a poor illiterate family in a war-torn third-world country.
I think it's safe to say, though, that if you had a human baby raised by stone-age illiterate people, and, once full-grown, you handed him a written IQ test, than he wouldn't score very highly. It's clear that "nature" and "nurture" both play a role. It's not 100% one or the other.
Its kind of funny that that comment comes up in a discussion about...how to most effectively direct further public policy... to acheive universal broadband access.
Right, and lots of people have complained that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a communist/socialist action taken by a radical left-wing tyrant and his cronies. These people complain that private companies should be deciding when and where to build infrastructure, and if those companies only want to build where it's immediately most profitable for that company, then that's entirely appropriate.
You may think those people are nutjobs, but they're out there. I'm glad the current administration seems to understand that you have to spend money on infrastructure, and that the infrastructure should include the Internet. However, half the country is still complaining about how the government is spending too much money building infrastructure already.
Any developer who can't competently administer his own machine is incompetent
As an IT person who has supported developers, that makes me think that I've only met... like... 2 competent developers ever. Almost every developer thought he could administer his own machine, but very few did a good job at it.
As I see it (and maybe this is BS, but I'm saying it anyway), part of the problem is an issue of mentality. Developers seem to want to think about what *should* happen. Like "Oh, well installing this *shouldn't* make a difference. Changing this setting *shouldn't* make a difference." As though computers all make sense and work the way they're supposed to. In my years of doing support, I've come to the opinion that this is a very bad support mindset. Computers almost need to be treated as magical boxes possessed by evil spirits which might stop working if you anger the computer gods.
And I know, if you're a developer that probably sounds utterly silly and you think I'm a bad support guy. But you see, that's my whole point. Developers tend to have a different mindset. Computer stuff breaks all the time for no reason. Hard drives die, motherboards get fried, and monitors burn out. Sometimes enabling a setting will break your computer in some completely unrelated way. Yeah, yeah, there's a valid scientific reason. If I had access to the source code and I was a master programmer and I had all the time in the world, I could probably figure out exactly what was going on and fix it for real. But for my purposes, I just need the thing to work right now so my user can get back to work. For my purposes, for right now, it's good enough to assume that enabling the setting upsets evil spirits and angers the computer gods. It means "leave that setting alone."
It seems like every developer/administrator I've met wants to ague with that. They want to say, "But that setting *shouldn't* make a difference. Computers only do what they're programmed to do, so I just have to reprogram it right now." All that may be true, but as the support guy, you don't always have time like that. Sometimes you just have to blame the computer gods and move on.
Well honestly, I'm not sure what it is that we think IQ tests are supposed to measure. It seems to me that ought to be settled first. It's not measuring all cognitive skills that people have. For example, it doesn't measure your ability to read people or your ability to convince and influence people. It doesn't measure your moral judgements or aesthetic sensibility.
And of course it has to do with "raising". For example, if a test is being given in English, then it's going to be testing, in part, your English skills. In some cases, it may be measuring a person's ability to take a test. However smart you are, if you get nervous and choke whenever you take a test, you probably aren't going to do well on an IQ test. There's no real way around it. What's more, if you give me a particular IQ test, I bet I can prep someone for it and have them score much higher than they would without preparation.
None of this is to say that genetics or biological factors have no effect on cognitive skills, but of course IQ tests aren't simply testing "natural ability".
So yes, the answer is that real, usable IP is out of reach for many of us.
And this is why VoIP and TVoIP aren't going to make POTS and cable systems obsolete in the near future.
It's a real shame that the US doesn't believe in investing in infrastructure. We'll let our bridges collapse, our streets be filled with potholes, our electrical grid take out 1/4 of the country in one blackout, we'll live without a decent railway system, and we'll let our Internet access fall behind the rest of the world. We'll do it all because public infrastructure is "communist".
The truth is, POTS should be obsolete. You have problems with VoIP? Well that's just a sign that VoIP should be improved, made better, fixed. Name a problem with VoIP, and there are people who will find a solution, assuming we're willing to invest in infrastructure. You think POTS grew out of the ground on its own, fully formed and without problems?
The large cranial size causes problems in birth, reducing the number of individuals that survive the process and reduces the reproduction rate.
I've also read (though this may not be quite right) that our large complex brains use lots of energy, and therefore require greater amounts of food. That seemed interesting to me, since it might indicate that intelligence has an evolutionary downside that continues beyond child birth, and it might explain why animals generally don't select for intelligence. If the intelligence isn't going to serve you very well, then you may as well save the calories.