Interesting point, as someone else posted it comes down to what is a sucessful flight,
the article quoted 1000 yard flight was far longer than the Wright brothers flight but it did indeed end in engine overheating.
If he had landed sucessfully after 500 yards and avoided the overheating problem then that would suddenly makes it a valid flight?
It seems that what you are saying is that a very short repeatable flight is more valid than a long flight which ended in some difficulty. I personally think a 1000 yard flight is more impressive achievement even if the ending was a little rough.
"but this doesn't seem to be the case for the first flight, can anyone shed any light on why nobody has made a fuss over this before?"
That was my get out clause.. Asking if anyone knew why this has not been widely publised - eg. because it isn't true.
I don't believe everything I read blindly, but its amazing that some people will never believe "facts" if it contradicts their current belief, I still see arguments that colosuss wasn't the first computer even now;)
I guess this is something that we will not every know the "truth" of. It's interesting that despite the quote attributed to Pearse the website linked from the article (assuming it is accurate) paints a very different picture:
Mch 31, 1902 - First powered flight. Estimated distance around 350 yards. Similar to the first Wright Brothers flight, ie, in a straight line, and barely controlled.
Mch ? 1903 - After spending a year working on the engine, and tending to his farm, Pearce made another flight, this time with a distance of only about 150 yards.
May 2, 1903 - Distance unknown, but as usual the aircraft ended up stuck in a gorse hedge 15' off the ground!
May 11, 1903 - This, my opinion, [ie. the opinion of Bill Sherwood] was man's first real flight. Pearse took off along the side of the Opihi River, turned left to fly over the 30' tall river bank, then turned right to fly parallel to the middle of the river. After flying nearly 1,000 yards, his engine began to overheat and lost power, thus forcing a landing way down the dry-ish riverbed. One of the locals, Arthur Tozer, was crossing the river at the time and was rather surprised to have Pearse fly right over his head!
Could it be simply that Pearse didn't feel his achievment counted as real flight at the time despite, from the article anyway, it seems that his orginial flight was similar to the Wright brothers flight, and made earlier.
I had never heard of the New Zealand flight until this story, seems like another case of the widely publisised achievement become the celebrated moment in history rather than the one that was actually first.
I know that colossus was because the project was a national secrect until reciently, but this doesn't seem to be the case for the first flight, can anyone shed any light on why nobody has made a fuss over this before? And are we going to see the history book re-written? Or will people just not accept that it and keep believeing the widely known truth? (most likely imo)
Lots of demos's but no shipped product, and a ship date that keeps getting pushed back.. sure everyone loves valve so this will be an un-popular point, but it's begining to look like vaporware...
I'll give you that anything written for linux *should* run on any distribution, but in the real world with commercial software you may really have no choice but to run on redhat.
There are lots of reasons for this, take an example of a piece of commercial software that states it runs on redhat linux.
Firstly it has been tested on redhat, this means all the packaging and install issues have been dealt with for redhat, no guarentees on any other distro.
It will have been tested with redhat's kernel version and all their assosiated patches, you might get different behaviour with different kernels / patches. This is especially the case in heavily multithreaded applications that could be affected by locking issues with different schedulers.
Support, if the company says it will run on redhat and they only support it on redhat - you have to run it on redhat! it's just that simple, you phone up support when something goes screwy, they ask you what OS you are running, you say debian they will just tell you to go away and run redhat.
It will be tested against the versions of libraries etc. that are shipped with redhat, others may well be compatible, but without testing you do not know the interactions. Yes you could install every single library that is in redhat and the same versions, but then why not just install redhat?
In short, for comercial software with support you are doomed to having to use specific OS versions because they are tested, and they are not likely to release the source code and let you configure the system for a different install.
I work testing software for a living and I find bugs in code that only manifest themselves on SuSE but not RedHat and the other way round. So distributions do make a difference.
As a tester I earn either the same, or in some cases slightly more, than people of similar experience / age who work for development within the same company.
I know most people hate testing and see it has a dead end boring job, but if you take the right attitude it can be a good gateway to a future career in development (hey you might even find you like test).
With your skill list, in particular you use of scripting languages, I would say you are ideally placed to join a company as a software tester. While you have no experience as a tester machine maintenance and scripting is always needed, there is usually the opertunity to produce software testing frameworks and "real" code to test your product with.
Do this job for a couple of years, but make sure you build a really good relationship with development during that time, and whenever possible do as much product diagnostic as you can. Once you have proved yourself as a good tester and coder, with good product knowledge, the move into development is easy just talk to the people you know about moving.
This is exactly what I have done, moving from a sys admin role, into software test, and will be moving to developing the product I once tested in a few months time.
The problem with "petty crimes" is that while the real cost of the items stolen, or the damage done, is not usually significant, the effect on the people involved can sometimes be huge.
I know people who have had their cars broken into and little or nothing stolen because there was nothing to steal. This however has ended up costing the owner £200 in various repairs. Now as far as the police are concered this is a petty crime and are not even really interested in trying to pursue it further... But the person involved is now living with quite a lot of worry of future damage to the car, has spent £400 on a car alarm to try and deter futher breakins, and is moving house to leave the area.
Adding all this up amounts to a significant impact on this perons life, all for something that the police don't care about. Petty crime in quantity can ruin peoples lives just as much as one major crime.
Hmmmm, thats odd not that daewoo have had a perfect service history, but I've had things replaced - like a new clutch cable, which they had in stock, along with new break pads.
I've also had it broken into they got a new lock, with correct lock barrel for my key, in 1 week. They've sucked in other ways but no more than any other manufacturer that I have owned cars from;)
From my experience this is the case. Think of the ECDL as something that proves you can use microsoft office.
It is certainly not aimed at providing much understanding of how a computer works, and is definately NOT aimed at computer profesionals.
The aim of this is to provide a qualification, specifically for "entry level" office jobs, such as those given to 17/18 year olds, which proves you can use office / a computer / the web to a reasonable level. It can set you above anyone who only has something on their CV which says they can use a computer, but has not certificate to prove it. (Companys love certifactes and formal qualifications)
Chances are if you read and post to slashdot then the ECDL is of no use to you, unless you have no experience of MS office and want to learn about it:). If you are a 16 year old who is looking to get office temp work during summer holidays from school then this sort of qualification would probably be a big help.
I own a daewoo matiz, not sure if you can get them in america, but it is a small european style mini city car.
This thing is great, will happly cruise @ 70mph on a motorway, and around town / my usual short journeys I get 40mpg, on a long run it can go as high as 45mpg.
The key is that it only have an 800cc 3 cylinder engine, it's not the fastest car around but has all the toys such as A/C power steering etc. and is VERY easy to park.
Best thing is that second hand you can pick a 2 year old one up for £4000 easy, probably less.
In June, I attended the Grid Computing Planet conference in San Jose, California and I was suprised to learn that people even call cluster as grid. I believe that it is a marketing hype. Here is my definition of the Grid, which is based on my presentation as part of the "Understanding the Grid" panel:
Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of resources distributed across "multiple" administrative domains based on their (resources) availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements.
If distributed resources happen to be managed by a single, global centralised scheduling system, then it is a cluster. In cluster, all nodes work cooperatively with common goal and objective as the resource allocation is performed by a centralised, global resource manager. In Grid, each node has its own resource manager and allocation policy. Some of these points are being highlighted in my panel presentation at P2P 2002 conference.
Note: "multiple" administrative domains can exist within a single organisation. For example, two clusters managed by their own resource managers within an university can form a grid.
Not that I have written any major 3D software, or even work in the 3D industry. But at uni we learn't openGL as part of our computer graphics course.
Once you have mastered the coordinate system it is so mind booglingly easy to get graphics on screen it's insane:) Writing good fast graphics is another issue but it makes the creative process so much more fun seeing your work on screen quickly.
For windows development you can even start with openGL for free:) (yes even on windows). I would recommend getting the MinGW compiler which is free, and openGL - again a free download. Information can be found here a quick google search turned up this page and it is a good summary.
use google to find some simple openGL sample programs to work from- and away you go:) Have fun!
I have also used this service, we used it to setup and internet connection in the middle of a forest, lets see ya get anything other than a satelitte connection in the middle of a forest;)
The poster above is spot on with the description of the twin box unit etc. However there are a couple of points you need to consider. Firstly the software on your windows machine is used to download the correct keys to allow your connection to work. Once this has been setup they are stored in the satelite interface boxes, but you will need windows at least once for the setup / install.
Also, yeah the USB interface is not great, but there do exist satelite boxes for DirectWay that just provided an ethernet out - just expect to pay a LOT more for it. However ICS will work, as will other win32 Nat solutions. We used ICS with a separate linux webcache and caching DNS server. We ran a large number of PC's from this system with no real problems - however you will find the delay on dynamic pages - such as slashdot or web based mail client, is horrible. The speed is great, but the latency sucks:)
Ok, I meant public domain as in visible to the public rather than "public domain" as in copyright free.
Eg. News content is still copyright the author even if you distribute the content to thousands of people. And just because thousands of people see it, doesn't mean you can just do what you like with the material
Interesting question:) And goes to show I should check replys more often;). I guess that google get away with it because they are crawling the whole web and creating mirrors of web page text only, and probably not making money directly from the content that they mirror. More the listing of sites.
Slashdot being a news site would be making money directly out of reporting your site, and if they then copied then contents of your site without permision you could argue that they are taking your content without permision...
Having said that... I guess that provided you gave proper credit for your sources and didn't try to pass the information off as created by slashdot you might be ok..
Interesting thought, however in these days of huge law suits, has anyone considered the legal implications of just replicating a web site wholesale without your permision.
Even though the site is in the public domain, the author will still own the copywrite on the material. If you are making an income by duplicating his/her work then they should be entitied to a share of that income. In the case of slashdot, as the site is run as a buiness now, anybody who had their work duplicated by slashdot without permision might try to sue for adverstiving revenue gained on pages that displayed the content.
Yes you can replicate small sections for "fair use" and reporting purposes, but replicateing the whole site or any significant portion of it is probably dodgy
This isn't a comment on the rights and wrongs of copyright law and the law suit crazy world we live in - just an observation;)
Another advantage to using eprints is that it uses the OAI protocol to provide an external XML based interface to your site. This allows central "harvesters" to harvest the meta-data from your site and allow ease of centralised access and searching of multilpe e-print archives.
A virus scanning solution that provides the kind of functionality that you suggest is already out there... However rather than just stripping all attachments, it virus scans them, but also strips any attachments that attempt to hide the fact that they are really executables eg. britney.jpeg.exe
The system requires a virus scanner to be installed and I think they recommend sophos which is available for linux. Check it out here
Firstly I didn't yell at him, I very rarely yell at people because it doesn't usually help. You can tell people off for doing something like screwing around with equipment without having to yell
On your second point however... this is an interesting point that I have discussed at length with people in the past and with the guy I used to work with on the helpdesk.
First some background information. Our role on helpdesk was techinical support for machine failures / maintenance, and programming help for coursework assignments etc. Our role was a fine line that we trod on a daily basis between just giving people the answers and helping them to think for themselves.
While holding peoples hand and showing them step by step can be very helpful in certain circumstances it does not encourage them to think for themselves. With a simple piece of software like a PDF viewer I would expect that once somebody had been told it was capable of displaying the page in landscape, they would be able to find the software option themselves. This is not a "dumb" user we are talking about, but someone at the end of year of a Computer based degree course. They should be aware of things such as user interfaces and program options etc.
I always saw my role on helpdesk as teaching people to think. Very rarely did we give people final answers to questions but instead talked through concepts and tried to lead people to the answer rather than handing it to them on a plate. This helps them to see the paths to go down, and helps them to learn to evaluate options before picking a final solution. That, in my opinon, is better than just giving answers, because this was at a University and people were supposed to be there to learn.
I used to work on the undergraduate helpdesk for an electronics and computer science department. During my time working there I saw a number of things that I didn't believe were possible, things you would expect in a dilbert cartoon, not at a University!
Although you may not believe it, but this is a true story....
One day I was walking through the computer lab on my way to lunch, when I noticed someone sitting at a computer with the monitor turned on its side. Now all the computer in the lab have iiyama 19 inch monitors, so needless to say I was not impressed at a student screwing around with the hardware, so I wandered over to the person in question to ask what the hell he thought he was playing at!
When I got to the machine I asked him what the hell he was doing. He replied that he was viewing some PDF's of past exam papers, but the PDF's were all in landscape and so he had to turn the monitor on its side to view them properly!
Needless to say I was speachless at first, WTF!, I told him off for screwing around with our equipment, put the monitor back the right way up and told him that he was never to move lab equipment around like that again. At this point he got upset saying how was he supposed to view the exam papers? I told him to use the software to view landscape pages and went to lunch
1 hour later I was coming back from lunch (got to love working for a University) and discovered him, still there, head tilted 90 degrees reading the exam papers!
This is just one example of the lack of creative thought that I saw almost every day while working on the helpdesk. My attitude when working with anything, not just computers, is that what I want to do must be possible I just need to figure out how. I love solving problems and finding creative solutions. I always assumed that people who worked with computers were the same as me, with a passion for experimenting and "playing".
Sadly computing has been seen as a cash cow, anyone that want a high payed job tries to get a computer degree. These people do not make great programmers or computer workers because they have no passion for the work. They don't "get" the technology or the concepts and are only interested in one thing - they pay packet and the end of the month.:(
Slashdot Mirror
lol :P
Interesting point, as someone else posted it comes down to what is a sucessful flight, the article quoted 1000 yard flight was far longer than the Wright brothers flight but it did indeed end in engine overheating. If he had landed sucessfully after 500 yards and avoided the overheating problem then that would suddenly makes it a valid flight? It seems that what you are saying is that a very short repeatable flight is more valid than a long flight which ended in some difficulty. I personally think a 1000 yard flight is more impressive achievement even if the ending was a little rough.
/bow Good reply sir :)
"but this doesn't seem to be the case for the first flight, can anyone shed any light on why nobody has made a fuss over this before?"
;)
That was my get out clause.. Asking if anyone knew why this has not been widely publised - eg. because it isn't true.
I don't believe everything I read blindly, but its amazing that some people will never believe "facts" if it contradicts their current belief, I still see arguments that colosuss wasn't the first computer even now
I guess this is something that we will not every know the "truth" of. It's interesting that despite the quote attributed to Pearse the website linked from the article (assuming it is accurate) paints a very different picture:
Mch 31, 1902 - First powered flight. Estimated distance around 350 yards. Similar to the first Wright Brothers flight, ie, in a straight line, and barely controlled.
Mch ? 1903 - After spending a year working on the engine, and tending to his farm, Pearce made another flight, this time with a distance of only about 150 yards.
May 2, 1903 - Distance unknown, but as usual the aircraft ended up stuck in a gorse hedge 15' off the ground!
May 11, 1903 - This, my opinion, [ie. the opinion of Bill Sherwood] was man's first real flight. Pearse took off along the side of the Opihi River, turned left to fly over the 30' tall river bank, then turned right to fly parallel to the middle of the river. After flying nearly 1,000 yards, his engine began to overheat and lost power, thus forcing a landing way down the dry-ish riverbed. One of the locals, Arthur Tozer, was crossing the river at the time and was rather surprised to have Pearse fly right over his head!
Could it be simply that Pearse didn't feel his achievment counted as real flight at the time despite, from the article anyway, it seems that his orginial flight was similar to the Wright brothers flight, and made earlier.
I had never heard of the New Zealand flight until this story, seems like another case of the widely publisised achievement become the celebrated moment in history rather than the one that was actually first.
I know that colossus was because the project was a national secrect until reciently, but this doesn't seem to be the case for the first flight, can anyone shed any light on why nobody has made a fuss over this before? And are we going to see the history book re-written? Or will people just not accept that it and keep believeing the widely known truth? (most likely imo)
Half Life 2 is the new DNF..
Lots of demos's but no shipped product, and a ship date that keeps getting pushed back.. sure everyone loves valve so this will be an un-popular point, but it's begining to look like vaporware...
I'll give you that anything written for linux *should* run on any distribution, but in the real world with commercial software you may really have no choice but to run on redhat.
There are lots of reasons for this, take an example of a piece of commercial software that states it runs on redhat linux.
Firstly it has been tested on redhat, this means all the packaging and install issues have been dealt with for redhat, no guarentees on any other distro.
It will have been tested with redhat's kernel version and all their assosiated patches, you might get different behaviour with different kernels / patches. This is especially the case in heavily multithreaded applications that could be affected by locking issues with different schedulers.
Support, if the company says it will run on redhat and they only support it on redhat - you have to run it on redhat! it's just that simple, you phone up support when something goes screwy, they ask you what OS you are running, you say debian they will just tell you to go away and run redhat.
It will be tested against the versions of libraries etc. that are shipped with redhat, others may well be compatible, but without testing you do not know the interactions. Yes you could install every single library that is in redhat and the same versions, but then why not just install redhat?
In short, for comercial software with support you are doomed to having to use specific OS versions because they are tested, and they are not likely to release the source code and let you configure the system for a different install.
I work testing software for a living and I find bugs in code that only manifest themselves on SuSE but not RedHat and the other way round. So distributions do make a difference.
As a tester I earn either the same, or in some cases slightly more, than people of similar experience / age who work for development within the same company.
I know most people hate testing and see it has a dead end boring job, but if you take the right attitude it can be a good gateway to a future career in development (hey you might even find you like test).
With your skill list, in particular you use of scripting languages, I would say you are ideally placed to join a company as a software tester. While you have no experience as a tester machine maintenance and scripting is always needed, there is usually the opertunity to produce software testing frameworks and "real" code to test your product with.
Do this job for a couple of years, but make sure you build a really good relationship with development during that time, and whenever possible do as much product diagnostic as you can. Once you have proved yourself as a good tester and coder, with good product knowledge, the move into development is easy just talk to the people you know about moving.
This is exactly what I have done, moving from a sys admin role, into software test, and will be moving to developing the product I once tested in a few months time.
Good luck and hope you enjoy it!
The problem with "petty crimes" is that while the real cost of the items stolen, or the damage done, is not usually significant, the effect on the people involved can sometimes be huge.
I know people who have had their cars broken into and little or nothing stolen because there was nothing to steal. This however has ended up costing the owner £200 in various repairs. Now as far as the police are concered this is a petty crime and are not even really interested in trying to pursue it further... But the person involved is now living with quite a lot of worry of future damage to the car, has spent £400 on a car alarm to try and deter futher breakins, and is moving house to leave the area.
Adding all this up amounts to a significant impact on this perons life, all for something that the police don't care about. Petty crime in quantity can ruin peoples lives just as much as one major crime.
Just something to think about.
Hmmmm, thats odd not that daewoo have had a perfect service history, but I've had things replaced - like a new clutch cable, which they had in stock, along with new break pads. I've also had it broken into they got a new lock, with correct lock barrel for my key, in 1 week. They've sucked in other ways but no more than any other manufacturer that I have owned cars from ;)
Aye,
:). If you are a 16 year old who is looking to get office temp work during summer holidays from school then this sort of qualification would probably be a big help.
From my experience this is the case. Think of the ECDL as something that proves you can use microsoft office.
It is certainly not aimed at providing much understanding of how a computer works, and is definately NOT aimed at computer profesionals.
The aim of this is to provide a qualification, specifically for "entry level" office jobs, such as those given to 17/18 year olds, which proves you can use office / a computer / the web to a reasonable level. It can set you above anyone who only has something on their CV which says they can use a computer, but has not certificate to prove it. (Companys love certifactes and formal qualifications)
Chances are if you read and post to slashdot then the ECDL is of no use to you, unless you have no experience of MS office and want to learn about it
I own a daewoo matiz, not sure if you can get them in america, but it is a small european style mini city car.
This thing is great, will happly cruise @ 70mph on a motorway, and around town / my usual short journeys I get 40mpg, on a long run it can go as high as 45mpg.
The key is that it only have an 800cc 3 cylinder engine, it's not the fastest car around but has all the toys such as A/C power steering etc. and is VERY easy to park.
Best thing is that second hand you can pick a 2 year old one up for £4000 easy, probably less.
Shamelessly stolen from www.gridcomputing.com...
What is a Grid?In June, I attended the Grid Computing Planet conference in San Jose, California and I was suprised to learn that people even call cluster as grid. I believe that it is a marketing hype. Here is my definition of the Grid, which is based on my presentation as part of the "Understanding the Grid" panel:
Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of resources distributed across "multiple" administrative domains based on their (resources) availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements.
If distributed resources happen to be managed by a single, global centralised scheduling system, then it is a cluster. In cluster, all nodes work cooperatively with common goal and objective as the resource allocation is performed by a centralised, global resource manager. In Grid, each node has its own resource manager and allocation policy. Some of these points are being highlighted in my panel presentation at P2P 2002 conference.
Note: "multiple" administrative domains can exist within a single organisation. For example, two clusters managed by their own resource managers within an university can form a grid.
Not that I have written any major 3D software, or even work in the 3D industry. But at uni we learn't openGL as part of our computer graphics course.
Once you have mastered the coordinate system it is so mind booglingly easy to get graphics on screen it's insane :) Writing good fast graphics is another issue but it makes the creative process so much more fun seeing your work on screen quickly.
For windows development you can even start with openGL for free :) (yes even on windows). I would recommend getting the MinGW compiler which is free, and openGL - again a free download. Information can be found here a quick google search turned up this page and it is a good summary.
use google to find some simple openGL sample programs to work from- and away you go :) Have fun!
I have also used this service, we used it to setup and internet connection in the middle of a forest, lets see ya get anything other than a satelitte connection in the middle of a forest ;)
The poster above is spot on with the description of the twin box unit etc. However there are a couple of points you need to consider. Firstly the software on your windows machine is used to download the correct keys to allow your connection to work. Once this has been setup they are stored in the satelite interface boxes, but you will need windows at least once for the setup / install.
Also, yeah the USB interface is not great, but there do exist satelite boxes for DirectWay that just provided an ethernet out - just expect to pay a LOT more for it. However ICS will work, as will other win32 Nat solutions. We used ICS with a separate linux webcache and caching DNS server. We ran a large number of PC's from this system with no real problems - however you will find the delay on dynamic pages - such as slashdot or web based mail client, is horrible. The speed is great, but the latency sucks :)
Ok, I meant public domain as in visible to the public rather than "public domain" as in copyright free.
Eg. News content is still copyright the author even if you distribute the content to thousands of people. And just because thousands of people see it, doesn't mean you can just do what you like with the material
Interesting question :) And goes to show I should check replys more often ;). I guess that google get away with it because they are crawling the whole web and creating mirrors of web page text only, and probably not making money directly from the content that they mirror. More the listing of sites.
Slashdot being a news site would be making money directly out of reporting your site, and if they then copied then contents of your site without permision you could argue that they are taking your content without permision...
Having said that... I guess that provided you gave proper credit for your sources and didn't try to pass the information off as created by slashdot you might be ok..
Either way, it's an interesting dilema ;)
Interesting thought, however in these days of huge law suits, has anyone considered the legal implications of just replicating a web site wholesale without your permision.
Even though the site is in the public domain, the author will still own the copywrite on the material. If you are making an income by duplicating his/her work then they should be entitied to a share of that income. In the case of slashdot, as the site is run as a buiness now, anybody who had their work duplicated by slashdot without permision might try to sue for adverstiving revenue gained on pages that displayed the content.
Yes you can replicate small sections for "fair use" and reporting purposes, but replicateing the whole site or any significant portion of it is probably dodgy
This isn't a comment on the rights and wrongs of copyright law and the law suit crazy world we live in - just an observation ;)
Darn, where did my moderation points go? :(
Another advantage to using eprints is that it uses the OAI protocol to provide an external XML based interface to your site. This allows central "harvesters" to harvest the meta-data from your site and allow ease of centralised access and searching of multilpe e-print archives.
For more information on OAI... see the FAQ
A virus scanning solution that provides the kind of functionality that you suggest is already out there... However rather than just stripping all attachments, it virus scans them, but also strips any attachments that attempt to hide the fact that they are really executables eg. britney.jpeg.exe
The system requires a virus scanner to be installed and I think they recommend sophos which is available for linux. Check it out here
LOL - If I could moderate this story you would definately get +1 Funny
:)
Firstly I didn't yell at him, I very rarely yell at people because it doesn't usually help. You can tell people off for doing something like screwing around with equipment without having to yell
On your second point however... this is an interesting point that I have discussed at length with people in the past and with the guy I used to work with on the helpdesk.
First some background information. Our role on helpdesk was techinical support for machine failures / maintenance, and programming help for coursework assignments etc. Our role was a fine line that we trod on a daily basis between just giving people the answers and helping them to think for themselves.
While holding peoples hand and showing them step by step can be very helpful in certain circumstances it does not encourage them to think for themselves. With a simple piece of software like a PDF viewer I would expect that once somebody had been told it was capable of displaying the page in landscape, they would be able to find the software option themselves. This is not a "dumb" user we are talking about, but someone at the end of year of a Computer based degree course. They should be aware of things such as user interfaces and program options etc.
I always saw my role on helpdesk as teaching people to think. Very rarely did we give people final answers to questions but instead talked through concepts and tried to lead people to the answer rather than handing it to them on a plate. This helps them to see the paths to go down, and helps them to learn to evaluate options before picking a final solution. That, in my opinon, is better than just giving answers, because this was at a University and people were supposed to be there to learn.
I used to work on the undergraduate helpdesk for an electronics and computer science department. During my time working there I saw a number of things that I didn't believe were possible, things you would expect in a dilbert cartoon, not at a University!
Although you may not believe it, but this is a true story....
One day I was walking through the computer lab on my way to lunch, when I noticed someone sitting at a computer with the monitor turned on its side. Now all the computer in the lab have iiyama 19 inch monitors, so needless to say I was not impressed at a student screwing around with the hardware, so I wandered over to the person in question to ask what the hell he thought he was playing at!
When I got to the machine I asked him what the hell he was doing. He replied that he was viewing some PDF's of past exam papers, but the PDF's were all in landscape and so he had to turn the monitor on its side to view them properly!
Needless to say I was speachless at first, WTF!, I told him off for screwing around with our equipment, put the monitor back the right way up and told him that he was never to move lab equipment around like that again. At this point he got upset saying how was he supposed to view the exam papers? I told him to use the software to view landscape pages and went to lunch
1 hour later I was coming back from lunch (got to love working for a University) and discovered him, still there, head tilted 90 degrees reading the exam papers!
This is just one example of the lack of creative thought that I saw almost every day while working on the helpdesk. My attitude when working with anything, not just computers, is that what I want to do must be possible I just need to figure out how. I love solving problems and finding creative solutions. I always assumed that people who worked with computers were the same as me, with a passion for experimenting and "playing".
Sadly computing has been seen as a cash cow, anyone that want a high payed job tries to get a computer degree. These people do not make great programmers or computer workers because they have no passion for the work. They don't "get" the technology or the concepts and are only interested in one thing - they pay packet and the end of the month. :(