Bzzt. Back of the class. The "astronomers" are the subject of the sentence. "Infrared wavelengths" is the indirect object. In this example, it's clear that the adjectival phrase binds to the subject. There's no syntactic ambiguity about it whatsoever.
I'm amazed that humans are able to see extra-terrestrial events with such detail.
Ah, that's where you're mistaken. You have to read the article carefully. It says that the ESO astronomers are "comprised of silica and alumina dust." They're not human at all!
But animals don't have beliefs in the first place.
For this to be true, you must apply a very particular definition of "belief".
Last year, I had a problem with bears breaking in to my cabin on a Pacific coast island. The bears returned several times, eventually opening every tin can in the place. Only a few cans contained food. Most contained nails, saw chains, paint, machine oil, and so on. Plastic containers - none of which contained food - were largely but not completely untouched.
Under the common definition of "belief" we would have to say that the bears arrived at a belief that metal containers held food but plastic containers didn't. How the bears hold that belief is another question. For that matter, we don't know how humans hold beliefs. I just went to the fridge looking for something to eat. What went through my mind at that moment? I'm certainly not aware of formulating a proposition in quantifier logic that fridges contain food. Evidently, human beliefs, like those of the bears, need not be explicit or even conscious.
I support your distinction between reason and rhetoric. That distinction has existed since the terms and their corresponding methods were developed in classical times. The main evolution since then is that we now have greater clarity and precision within formal reasoning. It's also pretty evident that even in the classical period these methods served both to investigate meaning and to advance the reputation of the investigators. The two purposes were, and are, certainly not exclusive. So, if indeed there is any basis for "argumentative theory", it will have to be found earlier in social evolution.
As to the scientific method, here I think we disagree. One of the standard comments made in introductiory theory of computation is that it doesn't matter where you get your answer to any given question. It can come to you in a dream, in the bathtub, getting on the bus, whatever. The point is that eventually you have to verify that the answer is correct. It's the verification whose proof has to pass the test of correctness. Likewise with the scientific method.
Re:This is confusing, a little
on
Righthaven Loses
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Reminds me of the old tale about the woodcutter and the layabout. The woodcutter is just doing his job, out there splitting logs for the village, working along quietly. Along comes the layabout, who sits down, makes himself comfortable, drinks a couple of beer, all the time making grunting and puffing noises in time to the work.
At the end of the day, the woodcutter goes to collect his wages from the village clerk. The layabout tags along. Then, just as the bag of coins is brought out, he pipes up, "Hey, I'm entitled to half of that, because I did half the work. I made all the sounds."
The clerk says, "Right then, let's be fair. I'll count it out." And he carefully counts it into two piles.
The coins make a satisfying clinking sound as each pile grows. The layabout rubs his hands in anticipation. Then the clerk gathers the two piles together and gives the lot to the woodcutter, who cheerfully departs.
"Hey, what about my share?", says the layabout.
The clerk replies, "You've just been paid in full. You made only the sound of work, and so you have received only the sound of payment."
Case in point: Robert Dziekanski, a Polish traveller to Canada who was neglected for several hours in the airport immigration area, and who was then tasered to death by four RCMP officers within a few seconds of their arrival on the scene.
The RCMP confiscated this video and only released it after enormous public pressure. Imagine what would have happened without this evidence. As it was, the police failed to separately debrief those officers in order to plausibly minimize the appearance of collusion. The same four officers are now charged with perjury after telling a fabricated story in which Dziekanski "attacked them with a stapler." This is the story which the RCMP administration vigorously defended and then ultimately abandoned - all at public cost.
During the inquiry, the RCMP introduced massive procedural delays upon request to produce the internal documents recorded as a result of the incident. After documents were finally released, they were found to be incomplete. Significant among these, a police email suggested the officers made plans to taser Dziekanski even before they saw him. The RCMP lawyer eventually withdrew in tears after acknowledging the omission.
This is what the police did in the face of independent evidence. Imagine what would have happened without this video as evidence.
"GUI operations are essentially impossible to script. With large numbers
of servers, it is impractical to use the GUI to carry out installation
tasks or regular maintenance tasks."
-
David Brooks,
Microsoft
There's also a total neglect of the X Window System development at MIT, not to mention the various Lisp Machines and their graphical user interfaces which, drawing on the truly foundational work conducted at PARC and elsewhere, further explored the GUI paradigm and established some of its practical limitations.
The importance of building practical systems to test principles of human-computer interaction cannot be overemphasized. The early work by Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay and others was both innovative and empirical, but it dealt with various components of the GUI in isolation. Only by building a complete GUI system and putting it in front of a lot of people could we learn which elements were most successful and in what combinations.
For example, one of the ideas being particularly explored in the Lisp community at this time was how and to what extent the underlying objects should be manipulable through the GUI. Graphical copy-and-paste was a new but easily accepted idea. The obvious question, then, was whether such operations would do better to copy a representation of the object or the object itself. This parallelled a similar debate about the design of Lisp editors: whether these should be text editors in the spirit of Emacs or object editors which happened to offer a text representation. If I copy and paste a graphical representation of a file on the screen, under what conditions should that copy the file contents, the file itself, a link to the file, or the name of the file?
The answer, if you were to ask Microsoft or Apple at that time, would be equivalent to Henry Ford's "You can have any color you want as long as it's black." The Unix and Lisp world, meanwhile, were much more exploratory. No huge revelations come to mind, but in an incremental way it was these communities which established many of the GUI conventions we take for granted today. What has followed thereafter, for the most part, is merely eye candy.
Oh yes, the "Internet geek" community. Is there a "new anti-intellectualism" amongst them?
Considering that both of these terms are undefined and contentious, it should be no surprise to see a diverse, noisy spectrum of responses to the question. After all, who gets to say what sort of person qualifies as an "Internet geek"? At that rate, I suppose we might as well all have a crack at the definition. Is it anyone with a Facebook account? Or do you have to be a protocol designer? If the former, then we're really talking about a massive sampling of the whole human population, and there's no particular discussion to be had. If the latter, then I'd argue, as someone working in the profession, that it's the same highly-skilled elite as always, and that - of necessity - nothing has changed.
Something has changed. It's more crowded now. When I got started in this profession, computer science was a new term for the sorts of inquiries being made by mathematicians and electrical engineers. To be a computer scientist was much like being a rocket scientist. Everything was exotic. A lot of the work was, perforce, purely an exercise of intellect. Anyone who had free access to computer time lived in a rare state of privilege. Today networked computing is absolutely prosaic, and comparisons with the old profession are essentially meaningless under any but, as noted above, a fairly elite definition of "Internet geek".
That's what has changed. The once-exclusive hot tub has become infinitely more crowded. Well, but what does this tell us about a "new anti-intellectualism"? It tells us absolutely nothing that we didn't know before. In the limit, the average IQ of a population still converges, by definition, to 100. Such a population places no particular emphasis on intellect, since intellect is not its particular asset. That population of Internet practitioners is our reward for all the hard work of building the Internet. Most people don't appreciate what it means simply because they can't. It's not a question of hostility to intellectualism, it's just that it's no longer necessary for everyone to be an expert.
Does this threaten the intellectual elite which brought the Internet into being? I can't see how. Of course, it can be frustrating at times to deal with ignorance disguised as superiority, but that's nothing new. We can go back further, to Aristotle and beyond, and find the very same thing.
You've given a perfect example of the "duh" principle. By oversimplifying an already simplistic analysis, you've managed to pervert the original meaning beyond recognition.
This is why it's so important to RTFA. You say that "arthroscopic knee surgery, a very common procedure, doesn't actually help." That's not, however, what the article says.
The article cites two studies which report that certain specific arthroscopic procedures are not effective in treating osteoarthritis. The article then goes on to equate the specific procedures with arthroscopy in general, and osteoarthritis (a specific condition) with knee pain (a general symptom). The original research may be impeccable, but the article has summarized it falsely.
Still, you've managed to make matters even worse. Thanks to your claim, arthroscopic knee surgery has been generalized as useless. Taking this foolishness to the next level, no doubt someone now is going to read your comment, turn to his wife and say. "Honey, it says here that all doctors are quacks. See, I knew it all along."
The reason why arthroscopic surgery has become so commonplace is because it's an excellent refinement on traditional surgical procedure. If an open procedure was traditionally effective (take appendectomy for example) and it can be done arthroscopically, then it will still be as effective but will tend to be less invasive, have a lower risk of infection, and result in shorter hospitalization and faster recovery time. Knee surgery is absolutely not an exception.
At least you linked to the article you misrepresented, which in turn cited the research it misrepresented. Still, just don't do that. You could hurt somebody.
And often something interesting emerges when we move from sweeping observation to detailed study. Before Galileo and Newton, it was obvious that things fell down if you dropped them. They just did. It was already obvious centuries before when Aristotle looked at the matter, so obvious that he didn't look at the process very closely and therefore missed a very critical detail.
But even in his day, you couldn't draw a big crowd if all you did was proclaim that "PHILOSOPHER POINTS OUT THAT THINGS FALL WHEN DROPPED." You have to offer insight into how and why the process occurs, and then you can hope to attract, at least, those people within the population who are interested in questions of how and why. When Newton could predict the rate at which things fall, he also had a working equation for planetary motion.
Most protocols are dedicated to a specific function. It used to be that you wouldn't run a network application unless it was doing something that you specifically wanted it to do.
That expectation has changed significantly over the past decade, and not for the better. Now your choice of operating system or application is taken as an implicit invitation for it to use your network connection in ways that are not necessarily intended for your benefit at all. That's why it sometimes makes sense to configure a separate firewall device even for personal use. You can't, theoretically, prevent a proprietary protocol from tunnelling whatever data it likes, but you can at least perform a practical kind of triage over the traffic passing across your network.
As the Web becomes an increasingly general transport for applications, it becomes a network management exercise in its own right. And the concepts are similar to firewall management. Given that I'm paying for my system resources and my network bandwidth, I certainly don't want to waste them transporting and processing content that isn't valuable to me. Advertizing is not valuable to me. Therefore, I block it, just as I block any protocol that isn't valuable to me. As a consequence, I get very high signal-to-noise in my use of the network.
First, let me address something important and then set it aside. Training is for monkeys. Education is for humans.
Okay. This is a field in which rapid turnover of skill requirements is a given. Therefore, staff will not be able to deliver their best unless they are provided with the means to keep their skills fresh and relevant. I realize that even such a basic proposition as this will have its detractors, but frankly, they're idiots. There isn't much more to discuss on that front.
On the other hand, there's lots to discuss when it comes to finding effective means for staff to maintain relevant skills. I remember how shocked I was when I first got out of university and went on some of the technical courses required and paid by my industry employer. Hour for hour, the cost was at least 50 times higher than what I had paid for course time at university. And the content was laughably thin. And the instructors usually cut a few corners, because the students, for the most part, were disinterested. This was in 1980 when hardware vendors provided courses in their own operating systems. Yes, in principle it was a good idea to provide this important aspect of product support. In practice, the approach was exceedingly inefficient.
Good documentation was to become an even better idea. Take the original Unix documentation for example. It wasn't a course in system design, but if you had a reasonably general systems background you could rely on the documentation to fill in the specifics. And you could learn what you needed to know at your own pace. And it was free. All you needed was time. Most vendors became very committed to documentation. I'm not sure what was happening in the training industry at the time, because for decades I never ran into a situation which needed it.
As time passed, however, a different trend began to assert itself. Consumer products gradually began to ship with less and less documentation. Most of what remained seemed to consist of legal disclaimers. On the industrial side of the fence, a similar trend followed about a decade later. Vendor literature is fancier than ever, but also considerably more vacuous. There are lots of pretty screenshots explaining what form fields to fill out, but not what the fields mean or what processing is taking place behind the facade, much less to provide an analysis of the general case.
In other words, the state of vendor documentation today is what vendor training was like thirty years ago. And this is good business, because if you want anything more, you're going to have to pay for it. Alas, the training is no better than the documentation. It's worse, perhaps, for anyone whose reading speed is faster than human speech.
Given this dismal state of affairs, I can see why employers don't find a lot of value in sending their staff off for training, especially if they have to travel to some distant city for several days. But don't let them throw the baby out with the bathwater! There are many other channels of education apart from the training industry. Some are enormously better value. You simply have to be willing to explore them. Conferences are a traditional example, as are university extension courses. I'm personally in favor of exchange programs, where organizations in the same sector allow their staff to trade places or engage in projects of common interest.
We should regard such undertakings as characteristic of our profession, and show some initiative around them. Otherwise we are reduced to following, to being monkeys. In that case, training may be the right word after all.
Your description is right on the mark for the particular pathology of the unskilled and unaware. I've had some additional correspondence with David Dunning about whether unawareness implies denial. His view is that while denial is certainly a possible adjunct, it's not strictly necessary for unawareness. Simple ineptness would also be sufficient. Your idea about lack of humility may be similar. That said, I think that anecdotally we can almost always find some aspects of denial and irresponsibility in any situation where a person actively promotes his competence in skilled areas where in fact he has no skill. These aspects are often well disguised, which leads me to believe that there is more than simple ineptness at play.
I have a colleague who fits this description perfectly. He's not a bad guy, but very slow to act and incompetent when he does act. (The situation prevails because management is loathe to intervene. Never mind why. It's a subject for another discussion.) It's been interesting to watch the progress of my own adaptation to working with this guy. I've seen myself go through several different phases, including constructive engagement, didacticism, praise and criticism, exclusion, and ultimately, congenial amusement.
Ethically, I feel that this progression was the right way to cope with the challenge of working with an incompetent colleague. I can recommend it. You have to give the person the benefit of the doubt, but not indefinitely. You have to be willing to encourage and educate, but not indefinitely. Work needs to be done. At a certain point, having exhausted all other alternatives, you have to give up. It's exceedingly important to proceed compassionately, and to keep management informed of these developments. To complete the story, I can report that ultimately, everyone is now bypassing this guy, and the awareness of the liability is slowly working its way up the chain of command. Most importantly, we didn't let our exasperation become toxic. We've tried our best, and nobody has been hurt. It's now up to management.
My observation is that, sometimes, that's the very best you can do. Ordinary professionals are moving along a gradient of skill throughout their career. Of course, as you say, therefore we will find ourselves somewhere along that gradient with greater and lesser people around us. It's incumbent upon us to learn from each other and teach each other. However, I disagree that professional success is invariably about professional effectiveness. There is a lot of parasitic behavior in our species. Some people do very well being "unskilled and unaware", even though we correctly regard such behavior as pathological. A very different incumbency is upon us for coping with such people.
Microsoft sells you software. You buy it, they're happy, and you don't lose your privacy.
Well, not really. First of all, you buy it and you do lose your privacy. Microsoft has been caught playing all kinds of tricks over the network. And it was among the first to try it. Others followed its example. A more accurate characterization is that if it can get away with it, it will.
But that's only one, rather generic, thing to worry about. What makes Microsoft special is its efforts to monetize DRM. This is something it has been building towards for over a decade now. It's naïve to think that software buyers are Microsoft's only customer. In fact you do see Microsoft hanging out with the likes of MPAA and Time-Warner. You're just not invited to the table.
Unless 100% of the applications that you need to integrate into your automation are driven by CLI or some kind of well-defined API, you'll be out of luck.
Windows isn't designed for automation. It's designed for moronic pointing and clicking.
Slashdot Mirror
Bzzt. Back of the class. The "astronomers" are the subject of the sentence. "Infrared wavelengths" is the indirect object. In this example, it's clear that the adjectival phrase binds to the subject. There's no syntactic ambiguity about it whatsoever.
I'm amazed that humans are able to see extra-terrestrial events with such detail.
Ah, that's where you're mistaken. You have to read the article carefully. It says that the ESO astronomers are "comprised of silica and alumina dust." They're not human at all!
Must be nice to have your own portable fusion reactor.
No, that's merely your particular choice of reductionist explanation, in which you have again avoided addressing the meaning of the word "belief".
But animals don't have beliefs in the first place.
For this to be true, you must apply a very particular definition of "belief".
Last year, I had a problem with bears breaking in to my cabin on a Pacific coast island. The bears returned several times, eventually opening every tin can in the place. Only a few cans contained food. Most contained nails, saw chains, paint, machine oil, and so on. Plastic containers - none of which contained food - were largely but not completely untouched.
Under the common definition of "belief" we would have to say that the bears arrived at a belief that metal containers held food but plastic containers didn't. How the bears hold that belief is another question. For that matter, we don't know how humans hold beliefs. I just went to the fridge looking for something to eat. What went through my mind at that moment? I'm certainly not aware of formulating a proposition in quantifier logic that fridges contain food. Evidently, human beliefs, like those of the bears, need not be explicit or even conscious.
I support your distinction between reason and rhetoric. That distinction has existed since the terms and their corresponding methods were developed in classical times. The main evolution since then is that we now have greater clarity and precision within formal reasoning. It's also pretty evident that even in the classical period these methods served both to investigate meaning and to advance the reputation of the investigators. The two purposes were, and are, certainly not exclusive. So, if indeed there is any basis for "argumentative theory", it will have to be found earlier in social evolution.
As to the scientific method, here I think we disagree. One of the standard comments made in introductiory theory of computation is that it doesn't matter where you get your answer to any given question. It can come to you in a dream, in the bathtub, getting on the bus, whatever. The point is that eventually you have to verify that the answer is correct. It's the verification whose proof has to pass the test of correctness. Likewise with the scientific method.
Reminds me of the old tale about the woodcutter and the layabout. The woodcutter is just doing his job, out there splitting logs for the village, working along quietly. Along comes the layabout, who sits down, makes himself comfortable, drinks a couple of beer, all the time making grunting and puffing noises in time to the work.
At the end of the day, the woodcutter goes to collect his wages from the village clerk. The layabout tags along. Then, just as the bag of coins is brought out, he pipes up, "Hey, I'm entitled to half of that, because I did half the work. I made all the sounds."
The clerk says, "Right then, let's be fair. I'll count it out." And he carefully counts it into two piles.
The coins make a satisfying clinking sound as each pile grows. The layabout rubs his hands in anticipation. Then the clerk gathers the two piles together and gives the lot to the woodcutter, who cheerfully departs.
"Hey, what about my share?", says the layabout.
The clerk replies, "You've just been paid in full. You made only the sound of work, and so you have received only the sound of payment."
Case in point: Robert Dziekanski, a Polish traveller to Canada who was neglected for several hours in the airport immigration area, and who was then tasered to death by four RCMP officers within a few seconds of their arrival on the scene.
The RCMP confiscated this video and only released it after enormous public pressure. Imagine what would have happened without this evidence. As it was, the police failed to separately debrief those officers in order to plausibly minimize the appearance of collusion. The same four officers are now charged with perjury after telling a fabricated story in which Dziekanski "attacked them with a stapler." This is the story which the RCMP administration vigorously defended and then ultimately abandoned - all at public cost.
During the inquiry, the RCMP introduced massive procedural delays upon request to produce the internal documents recorded as a result of the incident. After documents were finally released, they were found to be incomplete. Significant among these, a police email suggested the officers made plans to taser Dziekanski even before they saw him. The RCMP lawyer eventually withdrew in tears after acknowledging the omission.
This is what the police did in the face of independent evidence. Imagine what would have happened without this video as evidence.
"GUI operations are essentially impossible to script. With large numbers of servers, it is impractical to use the GUI to carry out installation tasks or regular maintenance tasks."
- David Brooks, Microsoft
There's also a total neglect of the X Window System development at MIT, not to mention the various Lisp Machines and their graphical user interfaces which, drawing on the truly foundational work conducted at PARC and elsewhere, further explored the GUI paradigm and established some of its practical limitations.
The importance of building practical systems to test principles of human-computer interaction cannot be overemphasized. The early work by Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay and others was both innovative and empirical, but it dealt with various components of the GUI in isolation. Only by building a complete GUI system and putting it in front of a lot of people could we learn which elements were most successful and in what combinations.
For example, one of the ideas being particularly explored in the Lisp community at this time was how and to what extent the underlying objects should be manipulable through the GUI. Graphical copy-and-paste was a new but easily accepted idea. The obvious question, then, was whether such operations would do better to copy a representation of the object or the object itself. This parallelled a similar debate about the design of Lisp editors: whether these should be text editors in the spirit of Emacs or object editors which happened to offer a text representation. If I copy and paste a graphical representation of a file on the screen, under what conditions should that copy the file contents, the file itself, a link to the file, or the name of the file?
The answer, if you were to ask Microsoft or Apple at that time, would be equivalent to Henry Ford's "You can have any color you want as long as it's black." The Unix and Lisp world, meanwhile, were much more exploratory. No huge revelations come to mind, but in an incremental way it was these communities which established many of the GUI conventions we take for granted today. What has followed thereafter, for the most part, is merely eye candy.
Well, that's just sad.
Oh yes, the "Internet geek" community. Is there a "new anti-intellectualism" amongst them?
Considering that both of these terms are undefined and contentious, it should be no surprise to see a diverse, noisy spectrum of responses to the question. After all, who gets to say what sort of person qualifies as an "Internet geek"? At that rate, I suppose we might as well all have a crack at the definition. Is it anyone with a Facebook account? Or do you have to be a protocol designer? If the former, then we're really talking about a massive sampling of the whole human population, and there's no particular discussion to be had. If the latter, then I'd argue, as someone working in the profession, that it's the same highly-skilled elite as always, and that - of necessity - nothing has changed.
Something has changed. It's more crowded now. When I got started in this profession, computer science was a new term for the sorts of inquiries being made by mathematicians and electrical engineers. To be a computer scientist was much like being a rocket scientist. Everything was exotic. A lot of the work was, perforce, purely an exercise of intellect. Anyone who had free access to computer time lived in a rare state of privilege. Today networked computing is absolutely prosaic, and comparisons with the old profession are essentially meaningless under any but, as noted above, a fairly elite definition of "Internet geek".
That's what has changed. The once-exclusive hot tub has become infinitely more crowded. Well, but what does this tell us about a "new anti-intellectualism"? It tells us absolutely nothing that we didn't know before. In the limit, the average IQ of a population still converges, by definition, to 100. Such a population places no particular emphasis on intellect, since intellect is not its particular asset. That population of Internet practitioners is our reward for all the hard work of building the Internet. Most people don't appreciate what it means simply because they can't. It's not a question of hostility to intellectualism, it's just that it's no longer necessary for everyone to be an expert.
Does this threaten the intellectual elite which brought the Internet into being? I can't see how. Of course, it can be frustrating at times to deal with ignorance disguised as superiority, but that's nothing new. We can go back further, to Aristotle and beyond, and find the very same thing.
Like.
You've given a perfect example of the "duh" principle. By oversimplifying an already simplistic analysis, you've managed to pervert the original meaning beyond recognition.
This is why it's so important to RTFA. You say that "arthroscopic knee surgery, a very common procedure, doesn't actually help." That's not, however, what the article says.
The article cites two studies which report that certain specific arthroscopic procedures are not effective in treating osteoarthritis. The article then goes on to equate the specific procedures with arthroscopy in general, and osteoarthritis (a specific condition) with knee pain (a general symptom). The original research may be impeccable, but the article has summarized it falsely.
Still, you've managed to make matters even worse. Thanks to your claim, arthroscopic knee surgery has been generalized as useless. Taking this foolishness to the next level, no doubt someone now is going to read your comment, turn to his wife and say. "Honey, it says here that all doctors are quacks. See, I knew it all along."
The reason why arthroscopic surgery has become so commonplace is because it's an excellent refinement on traditional surgical procedure. If an open procedure was traditionally effective (take appendectomy for example) and it can be done arthroscopically, then it will still be as effective but will tend to be less invasive, have a lower risk of infection, and result in shorter hospitalization and faster recovery time. Knee surgery is absolutely not an exception.
At least you linked to the article you misrepresented, which in turn cited the research it misrepresented. Still, just don't do that. You could hurt somebody.
Well said!
And often something interesting emerges when we move from sweeping observation to detailed study. Before Galileo and Newton, it was obvious that things fell down if you dropped them. They just did. It was already obvious centuries before when Aristotle looked at the matter, so obvious that he didn't look at the process very closely and therefore missed a very critical detail.
But even in his day, you couldn't draw a big crowd if all you did was proclaim that "PHILOSOPHER POINTS OUT THAT THINGS FALL WHEN DROPPED." You have to offer insight into how and why the process occurs, and then you can hope to attract, at least, those people within the population who are interested in questions of how and why. When Newton could predict the rate at which things fall, he also had a working equation for planetary motion.
Is there something I wrote that you don't understand?
I don't have to block Slashdot, because it offers the option itself. That's nice. It would be nice if all sites were like that. My site is.
Yeah, though I tend to notice the "potential harms" bit. At least it's mentioned, which is a gesture approximating honesty.
Most protocols are dedicated to a specific function. It used to be that you wouldn't run a network application unless it was doing something that you specifically wanted it to do.
That expectation has changed significantly over the past decade, and not for the better. Now your choice of operating system or application is taken as an implicit invitation for it to use your network connection in ways that are not necessarily intended for your benefit at all. That's why it sometimes makes sense to configure a separate firewall device even for personal use. You can't, theoretically, prevent a proprietary protocol from tunnelling whatever data it likes, but you can at least perform a practical kind of triage over the traffic passing across your network.
As the Web becomes an increasingly general transport for applications, it becomes a network management exercise in its own right. And the concepts are similar to firewall management. Given that I'm paying for my system resources and my network bandwidth, I certainly don't want to waste them transporting and processing content that isn't valuable to me. Advertizing is not valuable to me. Therefore, I block it, just as I block any protocol that isn't valuable to me. As a consequence, I get very high signal-to-noise in my use of the network.
My ISP should be grateful.
But alas, high volume does not make up for a low signal-to-noise ratio.
First, let me address something important and then set it aside. Training is for monkeys. Education is for humans.
Okay. This is a field in which rapid turnover of skill requirements is a given. Therefore, staff will not be able to deliver their best unless they are provided with the means to keep their skills fresh and relevant. I realize that even such a basic proposition as this will have its detractors, but frankly, they're idiots. There isn't much more to discuss on that front.
On the other hand, there's lots to discuss when it comes to finding effective means for staff to maintain relevant skills. I remember how shocked I was when I first got out of university and went on some of the technical courses required and paid by my industry employer. Hour for hour, the cost was at least 50 times higher than what I had paid for course time at university. And the content was laughably thin. And the instructors usually cut a few corners, because the students, for the most part, were disinterested. This was in 1980 when hardware vendors provided courses in their own operating systems. Yes, in principle it was a good idea to provide this important aspect of product support. In practice, the approach was exceedingly inefficient.
Good documentation was to become an even better idea. Take the original Unix documentation for example. It wasn't a course in system design, but if you had a reasonably general systems background you could rely on the documentation to fill in the specifics. And you could learn what you needed to know at your own pace. And it was free. All you needed was time. Most vendors became very committed to documentation. I'm not sure what was happening in the training industry at the time, because for decades I never ran into a situation which needed it.
As time passed, however, a different trend began to assert itself. Consumer products gradually began to ship with less and less documentation. Most of what remained seemed to consist of legal disclaimers. On the industrial side of the fence, a similar trend followed about a decade later. Vendor literature is fancier than ever, but also considerably more vacuous. There are lots of pretty screenshots explaining what form fields to fill out, but not what the fields mean or what processing is taking place behind the facade, much less to provide an analysis of the general case.
In other words, the state of vendor documentation today is what vendor training was like thirty years ago. And this is good business, because if you want anything more, you're going to have to pay for it. Alas, the training is no better than the documentation. It's worse, perhaps, for anyone whose reading speed is faster than human speech.
Given this dismal state of affairs, I can see why employers don't find a lot of value in sending their staff off for training, especially if they have to travel to some distant city for several days. But don't let them throw the baby out with the bathwater! There are many other channels of education apart from the training industry. Some are enormously better value. You simply have to be willing to explore them. Conferences are a traditional example, as are university extension courses. I'm personally in favor of exchange programs, where organizations in the same sector allow their staff to trade places or engage in projects of common interest.
We should regard such undertakings as characteristic of our profession, and show some initiative around them. Otherwise we are reduced to following, to being monkeys. In that case, training may be the right word after all.
Your description is right on the mark for the particular pathology of the unskilled and unaware. I've had some additional correspondence with David Dunning about whether unawareness implies denial. His view is that while denial is certainly a possible adjunct, it's not strictly necessary for unawareness. Simple ineptness would also be sufficient. Your idea about lack of humility may be similar. That said, I think that anecdotally we can almost always find some aspects of denial and irresponsibility in any situation where a person actively promotes his competence in skilled areas where in fact he has no skill. These aspects are often well disguised, which leads me to believe that there is more than simple ineptness at play.
I have a colleague who fits this description perfectly. He's not a bad guy, but very slow to act and incompetent when he does act. (The situation prevails because management is loathe to intervene. Never mind why. It's a subject for another discussion.) It's been interesting to watch the progress of my own adaptation to working with this guy. I've seen myself go through several different phases, including constructive engagement, didacticism, praise and criticism, exclusion, and ultimately, congenial amusement.
Ethically, I feel that this progression was the right way to cope with the challenge of working with an incompetent colleague. I can recommend it. You have to give the person the benefit of the doubt, but not indefinitely. You have to be willing to encourage and educate, but not indefinitely. Work needs to be done. At a certain point, having exhausted all other alternatives, you have to give up. It's exceedingly important to proceed compassionately, and to keep management informed of these developments. To complete the story, I can report that ultimately, everyone is now bypassing this guy, and the awareness of the liability is slowly working its way up the chain of command. Most importantly, we didn't let our exasperation become toxic. We've tried our best, and nobody has been hurt. It's now up to management.
My observation is that, sometimes, that's the very best you can do. Ordinary professionals are moving along a gradient of skill throughout their career. Of course, as you say, therefore we will find ourselves somewhere along that gradient with greater and lesser people around us. It's incumbent upon us to learn from each other and teach each other. However, I disagree that professional success is invariably about professional effectiveness. There is a lot of parasitic behavior in our species. Some people do very well being "unskilled and unaware", even though we correctly regard such behavior as pathological. A very different incumbency is upon us for coping with such people.
Microsoft sells you software. You buy it, they're happy, and you don't lose your privacy.
Well, not really. First of all, you buy it and you do lose your privacy. Microsoft has been caught playing all kinds of tricks over the network. And it was among the first to try it. Others followed its example. A more accurate characterization is that if it can get away with it, it will.
But that's only one, rather generic, thing to worry about. What makes Microsoft special is its efforts to monetize DRM. This is something it has been building towards for over a decade now. It's naïve to think that software buyers are Microsoft's only customer. In fact you do see Microsoft hanging out with the likes of MPAA and Time-Warner. You're just not invited to the table.
Let me know when it's done. It's a very good idea, but I won't hold my breath.
None of the "enterprise class" applications I use have a hope of that unless the vendor undertakes to rewrite them from the bottom up.
Just not meaningfully.
Unless 100% of the applications that you need to integrate into your automation are driven by CLI or some kind of well-defined API, you'll be out of luck.
Windows isn't designed for automation. It's designed for moronic pointing and clicking.