Still fascinating to me is that Haught, with all of his famous master debating skills and experience, could fail at the most basic premise of entering into a public debate, which is to let each position stand on its own merits.
It's only natural to suspect the motives of anyone who tries to bury the outcome of a public debate. In this case Haught could well be fanning the fires of controversy for his own purposes, which have now taken form as a far more theatrical degree of outrage than I would expect from someone of his vast experience.
I agree, there are many possible sides to a story. When someone tries to bury the story, however, something quite definite emerges, something called manipulation. By my accounting, he's now failed on three essentials: failure to debate in good faith, attempting to manipulate the record, and false outrage. Either that or he's quintessentially stupid, and there's no historical evidence of that apart from his religious convictions.
You're right, but remember, there is always a centralizing effect. If there isn't a central control point then there is still a centrally-defined platform architecture, a centrally-defined set of prototols and APIs, a centrally-defined security model. One tiny breach of any of these and you could suddenly have millions of compromised systems. My point is that it's not particularly a problem for Apple nor for this security model.
Given that there has to be some sort of security model anyway, I'd like to think the day will come when its parameters are not necessarily centrally controlled. For example, rather than have Apple centrally decide what is and is not fit for use, perhaps we'll arrive at a decentralized "web of trust" type of authorization scheme whereby you allow your peers to advise you regarding whether an app should be granted various permissions.
But already it's easy to see that there would be many technical and mercantile and social challenges to overcome before such a scheme can be effective. So I think that, by default, we'll be stuck with the central model for the foreseeable future.
Pardon me for saying it, but your comment is ignorant.
User support is, in fact, the least of the issues that IT faces. I'm stating a fact here. It's just not a big issue. It's easy to provide user support: easy to plan for it, easy to staff for it, easy to make it scale, easy to make it robust.
It's also not the case that users are necessarily part of the support equation at all. That doesn't make the IT function go away.
My observation was that whether or not everyone is supposed to be using the GUI, monkeying around with old and well understood standards doesn't make much sense.
No, because in a "good organization" the sales guy is running on a workstation that doesn't allow ordinary users to install software, among other things. And support staff were not busy yelling at the engineer for using a personal laptop because they don't have to. He finds that he can't get on the corporate network with it.
How do I know this? Because I've been advising organizations about secure system design for the past 20 years. Before that, I spent 15 years writing operating systems. So I've had a bit of experience watching other people's designs break while mine don't. What's your background?
No, it began with businesses buying and managing Unix workstations for their staff.
Where it started to fall apart was when businesses thought it would be cheaper to buy Microsoft systems instead. There was a little TCO problem there. Microsoft users were managing their own systems, and they were doing it badly. Not only was their actual job function was being diluted, it also created some truly monstrous infrastructure train wrecks. That problem still isn't solved. Businesses simply think it's normal.
User support is an important issue, but the least of the issues that IT faces.
Agreed, there is no middle ground between "100% supported" and "not on my network ever". That's because putting a foreign device on a corporate network is not putting it "a little bit" on the network. We have no control over the device, no idea what it might do.
Now, there are ways to safely support foreign devices, by sequestering them onto a dedicated network for example, which also necessitates effective practices for locking them out of the standard network. But that takes a degree of care in policy, design, and implementation for which many organizations are simply not resourced. So good organizations say "no". Mediocre organizations say "whatever". Guess which ones get hacked more often? Guess who's in trouble when that happens?
Many users use a GUI rather than a terminal. This means that the separation [between directories] is not needed
Could you explain your reasoning here, please? I see no relationship between directory conventions used by the system and the choice of interface made by the user.
In case you hadn't noticed, the organizational models for/usr/local and/opt are different in a manner similar to the difference between column-major and row-major arrays.
For example,/usr/local/bin contains executables for all local applications. This is convenient in terms of configuring such things as PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables but can easily lead to application name and version collisions. The/opt convention is for each application to reside in its own subdirectory, meaning that multiple application versions can safely coexist, that/opt can refer to a nonlocal filesystem, and so on.
It's also possible, and very successful, to build hybrids of these two models, but unfortunately there is no convention for doing so. Instead we seem to have regressed to a point where package management supports local software installation only and will not meaningfully install on networked filesystems.
It's very interesting, the ancient social institution of debate. Whereas the purpose of science, and even philosophy, is to gain a better understanding of truth, the purpose of debate is for one of the participants to win. In this sense, it's much like a spelling bee: impressive to watch from the perspective of studying technique, but otherwise pointless.
Very interesting debate you have going here. It illustrates the importance of working with clear definitions and not muddying them up together. Science as a methodology is a concept distinct from the scientific community composed of individual researchers each with their unique human characteristics.
Science progresses by means of its methodology. Without the methodology it is, by definition, not science. So, for example, you have a compelling hunch that goes against the prevailing theory. So what? I lucidly remember this being pointed out to me as an undergrad. We don't care where your hunch came from. Maybe you plodded along for years accumulating evidence until it began to show an intriguing pattern. Maybe it came to you in a dream. Maybe it's written in Runic script on a platinum bar that you found in your back yard. We don't care. What we care about is, can you prove your claim? If you can't prove it, no problem. Come back later when you can.
That's science. Now, the scientific community, that's something else, and here you would be making a valid point. People have built their entire careers by championing one paradigm or another. This is altogether human and there's no real way to get around it. They're resistant to change. Moreover, change merely for the sake of change would not be progress, just Brownian motion. Finally, as I noted above, science is inherently skeptical. We have to be open to new evidence and new lines of reasoning, but there is a huge corpus of existing evidence and existing reasoning that the new stuff has to be held up against.
So there are many reasons why interesting new ideas are not embraced uncritically. Richard Feynman said of QED that it was very mysterious. We don't know why it works this way. All we know is that the math predicts certain things, and time and again when we go out to measure these things in different ways, we find them to be in accordance with theory, to eight, nine, ten significant figures. That doesn't make them true, and the more you press a scientist on this point, the more he will assert this, but you'd have to come along and show that your alternative theory is more accurate in its predictions than the prevailing one.
We're basically in agreement here except on terminology. But terminology is important. If we don't use it precisely, then our thinking will be imprecise as well. That was the essence of my original comment.
I'd argue that you're using the word "belief" in a special sense here, in which it strictly means premise. It's rare in the context of science to see any reference to belief standing on its own without some kind of qualifier to make this distinction plain. Occasionally in the literature you'll encounter the phrase "we believe that..." used to mark an inference of some kind, typically one which the authors recognize may be pivotal or controversial.
But science itself does not operate on the basis of belief, not in any of the ordinary broad senses of the word (opinion, certainty, conviction, confidence, faith, trust) and most certainly not in the special sense accorded to religious belief in which various claims are held despite all evidence to the contrary.
There's an interesting sister thread to this discussion that explores the distinction between science and scientists. Check it out if you like intelligent debate, which evidently you do.
The problem is that the whole world is on the path to disagreeing with both American culture and American foreign policy. Carry on like this and you'll have completely isolated yourselves. And, it's not a pretty thing to say, but in case you haven't noticed, you're kind of circling that drain yourselves. In your place I'd be looking to make friends, not enemies. But that's just me.
Don't tell me that Velikovsky was right after all! All that blarney about biblical "manna from heaven" being edible hydrocarbons released into the atmosphere by an interplanetary event?
Saying that every human is unique and special is like saying you're immune to commercials.
What a fascinating syllogism you have there, equating the general with the specific.
But okay, let's go along with it and see where it leads. Let's suppose that I am immune to commercials (I know this to be true, based on a lifetime of evidence, but you can treat it as hypothetical if you like.) All we need to do, according to your reasoning, is find a single individual such as me, and then it follows that every human is unique and special.
This consequent can be independently observed as well. Thus, I agree with your syllogism. But your attempt to classify it as "wishful thinking" is then deeply misguided. It's logically sloppy and does not accord with the evidence. Words like "some" or "many" should not be conflated with "all". That's elementary.
No, most of the industry was outright eliminated by Microsoft's past practices. The competition today, to the extent that the industry has recovered, is a paltry fraction of what it used to be, and you'll notice that it only exists in segments where Microsoft didn't successfully get a lock-in through antitrust practices.
I feel your pain, man. I've encountered the same kind of indifference with respect to other areas of practice such as information security and computing infrastructure. If it's not actually on fire, right this minute, it's at the bottom of the agenda. Any consulting professional working in these areas is bound to feel profoundly frustrated at times. It's a tough way to make a living, and it's dissatisfying to know how far what you're engaged to do falls short of what you be doing.
So, as a thinking person, I've spent the past ten years or so wondering about the causes. I see that organizations are not acting in rational self-interest, and often aren't even interested in learning about what that might look like. As you say, it seems idiotic.
Then a few years ago I started dating a woman who's a professional organizer. Within her field, she's regarded as a model of success, though if you want to know the truth, there's not a lot of money in it. But there is insight into human nature.
Here's what I've learned, at least about professional organizing. Her organizational clients are pretty good in general. They might be small businesses which have grown too quickly to stay apace, for example. Their issues are usually straightforward and recognized. Her private clients, on the other hand, are people who are chronically not organized. They're hoarders, or they have no self-control, or they're indecisive. You get the idea. They may have fantastic life skills in other areas, one such skill being the ability to ask for help, but she meets these people usually only at the point of crisis. So my girlfriend, for a fee, gets to not only clean up the mess but provide a first-responder sort of psychological counselling. Fine. It's a business model.
The problem for people like you and me is that we can deliver very little value that late in the cycle. We may not be dealing with outright dysfunctional thinking, but I think that even ordinary human psychology can be problematic. Businesspeople, in general, tend to be aggressive and to hear what they want to hear. Understandably, they don't want to be distracted from the goal by a lot of nuance and complexity and tradeoffs. It does no good to call them idiots, but the fact is that it's hard to engage with them unless you have something that they actively want. Usually, that involves removing a pain point that exists now, not some hypothetical time in the future. It's too bad, really, such a waste. But that's the way it is.
everyone would be better served if "ancient alien" and "ghost-hunting" programs were shifted off channels like History and Discovery and onto something dedicated to "off-beat" theories
Onto religious channels, for example? Sounds like a perfect solution! I can think of people who would never need to change the channel.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, he was given the right to be heard. And then he tried to bury the record.
Still fascinating to me is that Haught, with all of his famous master debating skills and experience, could fail at the most basic premise of entering into a public debate, which is to let each position stand on its own merits.
It's only natural to suspect the motives of anyone who tries to bury the outcome of a public debate. In this case Haught could well be fanning the fires of controversy for his own purposes, which have now taken form as a far more theatrical degree of outrage than I would expect from someone of his vast experience.
I agree, there are many possible sides to a story. When someone tries to bury the story, however, something quite definite emerges, something called manipulation. By my accounting, he's now failed on three essentials: failure to debate in good faith, attempting to manipulate the record, and false outrage. Either that or he's quintessentially stupid, and there's no historical evidence of that apart from his religious convictions.
As I recall, /usr/local is a BSD-ism, whereas /opt arose out of System V. So they're culturally inflected as well.
Don't worry, not every computing infrastructure exists to support an office environment.
You're right, but remember, there is always a centralizing effect. If there isn't a central control point then there is still a centrally-defined platform architecture, a centrally-defined set of prototols and APIs, a centrally-defined security model. One tiny breach of any of these and you could suddenly have millions of compromised systems. My point is that it's not particularly a problem for Apple nor for this security model.
Given that there has to be some sort of security model anyway, I'd like to think the day will come when its parameters are not necessarily centrally controlled. For example, rather than have Apple centrally decide what is and is not fit for use, perhaps we'll arrive at a decentralized "web of trust" type of authorization scheme whereby you allow your peers to advise you regarding whether an app should be granted various permissions.
But already it's easy to see that there would be many technical and mercantile and social challenges to overcome before such a scheme can be effective. So I think that, by default, we'll be stuck with the central model for the foreseeable future.
Pardon me for saying it, but your comment is ignorant.
User support is, in fact, the least of the issues that IT faces. I'm stating a fact here. It's just not a big issue. It's easy to provide user support: easy to plan for it, easy to staff for it, easy to make it scale, easy to make it robust.
It's also not the case that users are necessarily part of the support equation at all. That doesn't make the IT function go away.
and not because I'm doing anything malicious
Spoken like a true narcissist.
My observation was that whether or not everyone is supposed to be using the GUI, monkeying around with old and well understood standards doesn't make much sense.
No, because in a "good organization" the sales guy is running on a workstation that doesn't allow ordinary users to install software, among other things. And support staff were not busy yelling at the engineer for using a personal laptop because they don't have to. He finds that he can't get on the corporate network with it.
How do I know this? Because I've been advising organizations about secure system design for the past 20 years. Before that, I spent 15 years writing operating systems. So I've had a bit of experience watching other people's designs break while mine don't. What's your background?
No, it began with businesses buying and managing Unix workstations for their staff.
Where it started to fall apart was when businesses thought it would be cheaper to buy Microsoft systems instead. There was a little TCO problem there. Microsoft users were managing their own systems, and they were doing it badly. Not only was their actual job function was being diluted, it also created some truly monstrous infrastructure train wrecks. That problem still isn't solved. Businesses simply think it's normal.
User support is an important issue, but the least of the issues that IT faces.
Agreed, there is no middle ground between "100% supported" and "not on my network ever". That's because putting a foreign device on a corporate network is not putting it "a little bit" on the network. We have no control over the device, no idea what it might do.
Now, there are ways to safely support foreign devices, by sequestering them onto a dedicated network for example, which also necessitates effective practices for locking them out of the standard network. But that takes a degree of care in policy, design, and implementation for which many organizations are simply not resourced. So good organizations say "no". Mediocre organizations say "whatever". Guess which ones get hacked more often? Guess who's in trouble when that happens?
Many users use a GUI rather than a terminal. This means that the separation [between directories] is not needed
Could you explain your reasoning here, please? I see no relationship between directory conventions used by the system and the choice of interface made by the user.
In case you hadn't noticed, the organizational models for /usr/local and /opt are different in a manner similar to the difference between column-major and row-major arrays.
/usr/local/bin contains executables for all local applications. This is convenient in terms of configuring such things as PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables but can easily lead to application name and version collisions. The /opt convention is for each application to reside in its own subdirectory, meaning that multiple application versions can safely coexist, that /opt can refer to a nonlocal filesystem, and so on.
For example,
It's also possible, and very successful, to build hybrids of these two models, but unfortunately there is no convention for doing so. Instead we seem to have regressed to a point where package management supports local software installation only and will not meaningfully install on networked filesystems.
It's very interesting, the ancient social institution of debate. Whereas the purpose of science, and even philosophy, is to gain a better understanding of truth, the purpose of debate is for one of the participants to win. In this sense, it's much like a spelling bee: impressive to watch from the perspective of studying technique, but otherwise pointless.
Very interesting debate you have going here. It illustrates the importance of working with clear definitions and not muddying them up together. Science as a methodology is a concept distinct from the scientific community composed of individual researchers each with their unique human characteristics.
Science progresses by means of its methodology. Without the methodology it is, by definition, not science. So, for example, you have a compelling hunch that goes against the prevailing theory. So what? I lucidly remember this being pointed out to me as an undergrad. We don't care where your hunch came from. Maybe you plodded along for years accumulating evidence until it began to show an intriguing pattern. Maybe it came to you in a dream. Maybe it's written in Runic script on a platinum bar that you found in your back yard. We don't care. What we care about is, can you prove your claim? If you can't prove it, no problem. Come back later when you can.
That's science. Now, the scientific community, that's something else, and here you would be making a valid point. People have built their entire careers by championing one paradigm or another. This is altogether human and there's no real way to get around it. They're resistant to change. Moreover, change merely for the sake of change would not be progress, just Brownian motion. Finally, as I noted above, science is inherently skeptical. We have to be open to new evidence and new lines of reasoning, but there is a huge corpus of existing evidence and existing reasoning that the new stuff has to be held up against.
So there are many reasons why interesting new ideas are not embraced uncritically. Richard Feynman said of QED that it was very mysterious. We don't know why it works this way. All we know is that the math predicts certain things, and time and again when we go out to measure these things in different ways, we find them to be in accordance with theory, to eight, nine, ten significant figures. That doesn't make them true, and the more you press a scientist on this point, the more he will assert this, but you'd have to come along and show that your alternative theory is more accurate in its predictions than the prevailing one.
We're basically in agreement here except on terminology. But terminology is important. If we don't use it precisely, then our thinking will be imprecise as well. That was the essence of my original comment.
..." used to mark an inference of some kind, typically one which the authors recognize may be pivotal or controversial.
I'd argue that you're using the word "belief" in a special sense here, in which it strictly means premise. It's rare in the context of science to see any reference to belief standing on its own without some kind of qualifier to make this distinction plain. Occasionally in the literature you'll encounter the phrase "we believe that
But science itself does not operate on the basis of belief, not in any of the ordinary broad senses of the word (opinion, certainty, conviction, confidence, faith, trust) and most certainly not in the special sense accorded to religious belief in which various claims are held despite all evidence to the contrary.
There's an interesting sister thread to this discussion that explores the distinction between science and scientists. Check it out if you like intelligent debate, which evidently you do.
Um, this thing you call "belief"? Science doesn't use it.
The problem is that the whole world is on the path to disagreeing with both American culture and American foreign policy. Carry on like this and you'll have completely isolated yourselves. And, it's not a pretty thing to say, but in case you haven't noticed, you're kind of circling that drain yourselves. In your place I'd be looking to make friends, not enemies. But that's just me.
Don't tell me that Velikovsky was right after all! All that blarney about biblical "manna from heaven" being edible hydrocarbons released into the atmosphere by an interplanetary event?
Love your sig.
About ten years ago I was talking about this with Tim Bray, and he quite happily agreed.
How strict are your criteria? Would a classified ad qualify? In that case, you may wish to purchase the Very Well Built Electro Sea Plane with Paddle.
Also please note that "tremendously" means "tremendously".
Saying that every human is unique and special is like saying you're immune to commercials.
What a fascinating syllogism you have there, equating the general with the specific.
But okay, let's go along with it and see where it leads. Let's suppose that I am immune to commercials (I know this to be true, based on a lifetime of evidence, but you can treat it as hypothetical if you like.) All we need to do, according to your reasoning, is find a single individual such as me, and then it follows that every human is unique and special.
This consequent can be independently observed as well. Thus, I agree with your syllogism. But your attempt to classify it as "wishful thinking" is then deeply misguided. It's logically sloppy and does not accord with the evidence. Words like "some" or "many" should not be conflated with "all". That's elementary.
No, most of the industry was outright eliminated by Microsoft's past practices. The competition today, to the extent that the industry has recovered, is a paltry fraction of what it used to be, and you'll notice that it only exists in segments where Microsoft didn't successfully get a lock-in through antitrust practices.
I feel your pain, man. I've encountered the same kind of indifference with respect to other areas of practice such as information security and computing infrastructure. If it's not actually on fire, right this minute, it's at the bottom of the agenda. Any consulting professional working in these areas is bound to feel profoundly frustrated at times. It's a tough way to make a living, and it's dissatisfying to know how far what you're engaged to do falls short of what you be doing.
So, as a thinking person, I've spent the past ten years or so wondering about the causes. I see that organizations are not acting in rational self-interest, and often aren't even interested in learning about what that might look like. As you say, it seems idiotic.
Then a few years ago I started dating a woman who's a professional organizer. Within her field, she's regarded as a model of success, though if you want to know the truth, there's not a lot of money in it. But there is insight into human nature.
Here's what I've learned, at least about professional organizing. Her organizational clients are pretty good in general. They might be small businesses which have grown too quickly to stay apace, for example. Their issues are usually straightforward and recognized. Her private clients, on the other hand, are people who are chronically not organized. They're hoarders, or they have no self-control, or they're indecisive. You get the idea. They may have fantastic life skills in other areas, one such skill being the ability to ask for help, but she meets these people usually only at the point of crisis. So my girlfriend, for a fee, gets to not only clean up the mess but provide a first-responder sort of psychological counselling. Fine. It's a business model.
The problem for people like you and me is that we can deliver very little value that late in the cycle. We may not be dealing with outright dysfunctional thinking, but I think that even ordinary human psychology can be problematic. Businesspeople, in general, tend to be aggressive and to hear what they want to hear. Understandably, they don't want to be distracted from the goal by a lot of nuance and complexity and tradeoffs. It does no good to call them idiots, but the fact is that it's hard to engage with them unless you have something that they actively want. Usually, that involves removing a pain point that exists now, not some hypothetical time in the future. It's too bad, really, such a waste. But that's the way it is.
everyone would be better served if "ancient alien" and "ghost-hunting" programs were shifted off channels like History and Discovery and onto something dedicated to "off-beat" theories
Onto religious channels, for example? Sounds like a perfect solution! I can think of people who would never need to change the channel.