And it's not just because it's what they are used to. People are also used to their old cars, but a lot of them want new ones
In my experience non computer literate people think of MS Office as the new car and other like OO.o etc as the weird, cheap car that came from some nutty eastern european nation:)
Also in my experince, people that think ppt look impressive and/or impressive are people that should be avoided. I suspect ppt has cost the business world untold billions in wasted time in lame meetings from some middle managment dude in a suit wasting everyones time. There are a vertain class of employee that should be paid not to come into the office. Douglas Adams had it right with the B ark.
Even with the appropriate googles you need to be careful. My left eye was slightly damaged when a 5mW HeNe laser accidentally reflected into it... I was wearing gogle but soem coherent radiation got thru.
Im not really sure what you mean by an uninstall option. Im assuming you arent talking about somethin like fink which does have a remove option. If you are talking about standard Mac Apps then 99% of them time they dont need an uninstal as OS X doesnt have anything like a registry and all apps are unbundled into their own little space. Simply deleting a app from the application window will uninstall(there are some expcetions to this but for most users its a non issue).
I double recommend that book also. Counting cards is not about being some kind of Dustin Hoffman savant type person. Its based on rough statistical analysis and often being something of a social hacker.
From personal experience I also found this dubious. I have work on projects that have been "declared" successful... sometimes despite the fact that I was still working on getting it fixed:) I was once working on a project that had to interconnect with a CRM project which was going badly. I was much surprised one friday to find a front page mention of the company email newsletter of how the CRM component had gone live. It was surprising because we 1. hadnt complete our testing and 2. they had no production servers yet up and running(and would not have for another four months).
My radio station of choice is triplej in Australia. They have an album of the week rather than a song... and it tend to be new music(either that or the new album of a known artist). DJs will play any track off the album and there will be interviews and discussion of the music, history of the band etc.
Nobody I've met has the money for a second PC to put on top of the TV.
I know two people off the top of my head that have what you describe. One is a contractor with far more money than sense and the other has no girlfriend. The cdontractor friend also owns and original Star Wars vector game console. And a Ferrari.
Id like to whole heartly back you up on your post on behalf of my father. Tho Ive never done any work on an ISO standard I know the amount of work that is involved. My dad worked on several ISO standards but particularly the X.500 standard. The amount of time(and in those days paper... no email) spent on getting a good spec is enormous and most people dont seem to realise it. Through on top of that intergovernmental and intercompany arguments and its often a wonder any ISO standards are approved at all.
The problem is that we are talking about a proposed international standard and you are using the phrase "it's goddamn assumed by anyone...". There should ideally be *no* assumptions in a stadard... it needs to be as clear and accurate as humanly possible. Remember that once a standard is published it is translated into many laguages and possibly implemented in different cultures as mentioned in TFA. What you assume to be obvious may or may not be obvious to others.
In a related way also consider the household cat, who cleans itself with its tongue. The barbs on the tongue are useful to smooth and untangle fur(and is also used in eating I understand) and the saliva is in fact a cleaning agent. It can look gross to us, who followed different paths down the tree of life. But it works for other species.
Interesting that this comes up when I just finished discusssing this with a friend not ten mins ago. I use the linux and os x real client fairly regularly. Id say the linux version is better... but the os x version is bad. It just seems to have the occasional visit to needing a visit from Mr SIGKILL every now and then. Thats said the real player is about a gazillion times better than the os x version of windows media player. I swear that microsoft write software for the mac just to irritate people.
So please tell me again how they can't stop people from not paying their license because they can already stop them now.
Its easy. You ignore the letter. They send the nasty letter over and over again. Eventually someone might knock on your door and ask if you have a TV... you tell them no. They are not allowed to come into your home without and invitation. The whole thing is based on scare mongering. I do have a license... but I have friends that really do not own a TV and they have the problem of trying to convince them to check their house and stop pestering them... they will not... the letters keep coming.
As well as pointing out the potential for level competition with open standards I'd also emphasis the potential for interoperability. I think it would be great if, say I liked MS office, but didnt like using the drawing program... then I could simply use another from someone else. If everyone play nice with each other and uses open formats then I should have no problems.
Another example of this type of silliness is regional protection of content. I live in Europe and like to watch a few American TV shows... some of these are available on iTunes the day after they air in the US. But I am not allowed to purchase them to protect local stations that may (or may not) want to air them in my country. I wouold happily pay the few bucks to iTunes to watch it but cant. However it is trivial from me to bit torrent them... HD quality TV that I can enjoy at my leisure on any device I desire.
Ive notice a few TV programs have been fooling around with broadcasting TV shows at the same time around the world... but unless you get agreements from hundreds of local TV channels around the world to take a gamble on a show(a new show I mean... once established and popular it could be done) I dont see this becoming the norm.
On another note, despite the the restrictions, Ive never owned a DVD player that didnt ignore region codes.
I agree that racism has something to do with it, but created singers/groups became really popular with the labels after a few scandals in the early rock and roll scene. Particularly the incident of Jerry Lee Louis marrying his 13 year old second cousin. After that I think the powers that be preferred to have more direct control of their "stars"
Having just gotten thru reading those emails Im inclined to agree with you. However I think the microsoft people could have handled it a little better... he seemed quite willing to do the right thing until the MS guys started behaving like jerks(and the renewed invitation being withdrawn after one day kinda confirmed this for me... it seems he *does* deserve to be a MVP but they were openly lying to him about not contributing enough).
And also that Scott bloke... anyone one who uses the word "trending" is an idiot.
Not every single piece of software needs to be 100% unique and original.
Indeed no piece of software can be 100% original. Else we get into silly situations. Imagine if every new software development project couldnt use, say, drop down menus cause they didnt invent them.
I hate to post a me too post, but I also used to read the same stuff you did. Some of it was quite good(I particularly recall a series about a federation ship going on a mission in an advanced prototype into borg space to collect info that could well have been edited into a fairly reasonable novel). Then it all seemed to go to hell with slash stuff... which really isnt my scene.
Its damn shame... maybe Ill google around to see if any of the good stuff is still around.
Anyway, VB is perfectly cromulent for things like slapping together quick GUI frontends to an already existing application. Popular languages tend to be popular for a reason; it is shortsighted to dismiss any widely used technology.
I personally think one of the major problems with VB is that it is quite often used for a lot more than slapping together quick GUI frontends to already existing applications. Plus if I wanted to do this myself... unless I *had* to us VB I would do it with something like Delphi.
An example of this penicillin and Flemming and Florey(which is my favorite because I grew up near a suburb in Canberra that was named after Florey). If you ask a bunch of people who discovered penicillin youll get a bunch of people saying Flemming. Which is a bit true. But it took a great deal of slog work from Florey and a team of Oxford researchers to make penicillin a usable reality in the 40s. Note that I am not in anyway detracting from Flemming with this.
It interesting that you bring up Feynman because it brings up something about talent and/or genius that I think is being neglected in this conversation. And that is enjoyment of what you do. The wonderful thing I got out of Feynmans books and lectures was the wonderful sense that he truly loved and enjoyed what he did. He loved finding out about how stuff works, weather that be safe cracking or physics.
I think of myself as a good programmer. But I find it difficult to think of myself as naturally brilliant... rather I really enjoy learning about software development and programming. I enjoy learning a new language Ive and trying out new stuff... hence I do it for fun. I suspect a lot of programmers on slashdot are the same. So when people say that it take a lot of "work" to be good at something like programming I find it difficult to put myself in that category... I dont regard writing code as work(at least most of the time:) ) and if I wasnt a professional developer Id probably be a weekend hacker fooling around with some open source project for fun.
I was once speaking to some people that worked as developers and QA people at McAffee... this kind of thing is their worst nightmare. They test more than you would believe(the head QA guy told me that he used to work on medical equipment testing and that McAffee tested *way* more than that). These kind of produces have user bases that most software developers in the world rarely come close to in terms of numbers... something like 50 million licenses apparently... so if something goes horribly wrong you get a *lot* of angry customers.
The joke is dead but when I was in university an electronics lecturer told me a story about a guy in the UK who had bypassed his electricity meter to avoid paying the bill. The company soon found out what he was doing and told him to stop doing it or they would take him to court for damaging their property. He kept doing it and they took him to court over theft apparently. He tried to make the claim in court that he had stolen nothing because every electron the company had provided him with he quickly returned so there was of course no theft. He of course lost... but I always wanted to meet that guy:)
I hear you on Dreamweaver brother(or sister). Ive often wondered when staring at the monstrosity of HTML that get ejected from the bowls of such products, "Is it not possible to develop some kind of page generating tool that actually generates code that is *vaguely* human readable?". I mean it should be. Ive often thought it would be useful to use such a tool to create a basic prototype in a quick and easy fashion and then take that base to tweak into the real site. Im thinking along the lines of tools such as Delphi and some C++ code generators that are very common for GUI stuff. They can automatically generate a barebones framework for you to code to town with.
Melchett: Anything to say before we kick off, Captain Darling?
Darling: May it please the court, as this is clearly an open and shut case, I
beg leave to bring a privete prosecution against the defence council
for wasting the court's time.
Melchett: Granted. Council, he is fined fifty pounds for turning up. This is
fun! This is just like a real court! Alright! Let the trial begin!
The chagre before us is that the flanderous pigeon murderer did de-
liberately, callously, and with beastliness of forethought murder a
lovely, innocent pigeon. And disobeyed some orders as well.
Is this true?
Slashdot Mirror
And it's not just because it's what they are used to. People are also used to their old cars, but a lot of them want new ones
:)
In my experience non computer literate people think of MS Office as the new car and other like OO.o etc as the weird, cheap car that came from some nutty eastern european nation
Also in my experince, people that think ppt look impressive and/or impressive are people that should be avoided. I suspect ppt has cost the business world untold billions in wasted time in lame meetings from some middle managment dude in a suit wasting everyones time. There are a vertain class of employee that should be paid not to come into the office. Douglas Adams had it right with the B ark.
Even with the appropriate googles you need to be careful. My left eye was slightly damaged when a 5mW HeNe laser accidentally reflected into it... I was wearing gogle but soem coherent radiation got thru.
Im not really sure what you mean by an uninstall option. Im assuming you arent talking about somethin like fink which does have a remove option. If you are talking about standard Mac Apps then 99% of them time they dont need an uninstal as OS X doesnt have anything like a registry and all apps are unbundled into their own little space. Simply deleting a app from the application window will uninstall(there are some expcetions to this but for most users its a non issue).
I double recommend that book also. Counting cards is not about being some kind of Dustin Hoffman savant type person. Its based on rough statistical analysis and often being something of a social hacker.
From personal experience I also found this dubious. I have work on projects that have been "declared" successful... sometimes despite the fact that I was still working on getting it fixed :) I was once working on a project that had to interconnect with a CRM project which was going badly. I was much surprised one friday to find a front page mention of the company email newsletter of how the CRM component had gone live. It was surprising because we 1. hadnt complete our testing and 2. they had no production servers yet up and running(and would not have for another four months).
My radio station of choice is triplej in Australia. They have an album of the week rather than a song... and it tend to be new music(either that or the new album of a known artist). DJs will play any track off the album and there will be interviews and discussion of the music, history of the band etc.
Nobody I've met has the money for a second PC to put on top of the TV.
I know two people off the top of my head that have what you describe. One is a contractor with far more money than sense and the other has no girlfriend. The cdontractor friend also owns and original Star Wars vector game console. And a Ferrari.
Id like to whole heartly back you up on your post on behalf of my father. Tho Ive never done any work on an ISO standard I know the amount of work that is involved. My dad worked on several ISO standards but particularly the X.500 standard. The amount of time(and in those days paper... no email) spent on getting a good spec is enormous and most people dont seem to realise it. Through on top of that intergovernmental and intercompany arguments and its often a wonder any ISO standards are approved at all.
The problem is that we are talking about a proposed international standard and you are using the phrase "it's goddamn assumed by anyone...". There should ideally be *no* assumptions in a stadard... it needs to be as clear and accurate as humanly possible. Remember that once a standard is published it is translated into many laguages and possibly implemented in different cultures as mentioned in TFA. What you assume to be obvious may or may not be obvious to others.
In a related way also consider the household cat, who cleans itself with its tongue. The barbs on the tongue are useful to smooth and untangle fur(and is also used in eating I understand) and the saliva is in fact a cleaning agent. It can look gross to us, who followed different paths down the tree of life. But it works for other species.
I hear the Mac version's pretty decent too.
Interesting that this comes up when I just finished discusssing this with a friend not ten mins ago. I use the linux and os x real client fairly regularly. Id say the linux version is better... but the os x version is bad. It just seems to have the occasional visit to needing a visit from Mr SIGKILL every now and then. Thats said the real player is about a gazillion times better than the os x version of windows media player. I swear that microsoft write software for the mac just to irritate people.
So please tell me again how they can't stop people from not paying their license because they can already stop them now.
Its easy. You ignore the letter. They send the nasty letter over and over again. Eventually someone might knock on your door and ask if you have a TV... you tell them no. They are not allowed to come into your home without and invitation. The whole thing is based on scare mongering. I do have a license... but I have friends that really do not own a TV and they have the problem of trying to convince them to check their house and stop pestering them... they will not... the letters keep coming.
As well as pointing out the potential for level competition with open standards I'd also emphasis the potential for interoperability. I think it would be great if, say I liked MS office, but didnt like using the drawing program... then I could simply use another from someone else. If everyone play nice with each other and uses open formats then I should have no problems.
Another example of this type of silliness is regional protection of content. I live in Europe and like to watch a few American TV shows... some of these are available on iTunes the day after they air in the US. But I am not allowed to purchase them to protect local stations that may (or may not) want to air them in my country. I wouold happily pay the few bucks to iTunes to watch it but cant. However it is trivial from me to bit torrent them... HD quality TV that I can enjoy at my leisure on any device I desire.
Ive notice a few TV programs have been fooling around with broadcasting TV shows at the same time around the world... but unless you get agreements from hundreds of local TV channels around the world to take a gamble on a show(a new show I mean... once established and popular it could be done) I dont see this becoming the norm.
On another note, despite the the restrictions, Ive never owned a DVD player that didnt ignore region codes.
I agree that racism has something to do with it, but created singers/groups became really popular with the labels after a few scandals in the early rock and roll scene. Particularly the incident of Jerry Lee Louis marrying his 13 year old second cousin. After that I think the powers that be preferred to have more direct control of their "stars"
Having just gotten thru reading those emails Im inclined to agree with you. However I think the microsoft people could have handled it a little better... he seemed quite willing to do the right thing until the MS guys started behaving like jerks(and the renewed invitation being withdrawn after one day kinda confirmed this for me... it seems he *does* deserve to be a MVP but they were openly lying to him about not contributing enough).
And also that Scott bloke... anyone one who uses the word "trending" is an idiot.
Not every single piece of software needs to be 100% unique and original.
Indeed no piece of software can be 100% original. Else we get into silly situations. Imagine if every new software development project couldnt use, say, drop down menus cause they didnt invent them.
I hate to post a me too post, but I also used to read the same stuff you did. Some of it was quite good(I particularly recall a series about a federation ship going on a mission in an advanced prototype into borg space to collect info that could well have been edited into a fairly reasonable novel). Then it all seemed to go to hell with slash stuff... which really isnt my scene.
Its damn shame... maybe Ill google around to see if any of the good stuff is still around.
Anyway, VB is perfectly cromulent for things like slapping together quick GUI frontends to an already existing application. Popular languages tend to be popular for a reason; it is shortsighted to dismiss any widely used technology.
I personally think one of the major problems with VB is that it is quite often used for a lot more than slapping together quick GUI frontends to already existing applications. Plus if I wanted to do this myself... unless I *had* to us VB I would do it with something like Delphi.
An example of this penicillin and Flemming and Florey(which is my favorite because I grew up near a suburb in Canberra that was named after Florey). If you ask a bunch of people who discovered penicillin youll get a bunch of people saying Flemming. Which is a bit true. But it took a great deal of slog work from Florey and a team of Oxford researchers to make penicillin a usable reality in the 40s. Note that I am not in anyway detracting from Flemming with this.
It interesting that you bring up Feynman because it brings up something about talent and/or genius that I think is being neglected in this conversation. And that is enjoyment of what you do. The wonderful thing I got out of Feynmans books and lectures was the wonderful sense that he truly loved and enjoyed what he did. He loved finding out about how stuff works, weather that be safe cracking or physics.
:) ) and if I wasnt a professional developer Id probably be a weekend hacker fooling around with some open source project for fun.
I think of myself as a good programmer. But I find it difficult to think of myself as naturally brilliant... rather I really enjoy learning about software development and programming. I enjoy learning a new language Ive and trying out new stuff... hence I do it for fun. I suspect a lot of programmers on slashdot are the same. So when people say that it take a lot of "work" to be good at something like programming I find it difficult to put myself in that category... I dont regard writing code as work(at least most of the time
I was once speaking to some people that worked as developers and QA people at McAffee... this kind of thing is their worst nightmare. They test more than you would believe(the head QA guy told me that he used to work on medical equipment testing and that McAffee tested *way* more than that). These kind of produces have user bases that most software developers in the world rarely come close to in terms of numbers... something like 50 million licenses apparently... so if something goes horribly wrong you get a *lot* of angry customers.
The joke is dead but when I was in university an electronics lecturer told me a story about a guy in the UK who had bypassed his electricity meter to avoid paying the bill. The company soon found out what he was doing and told him to stop doing it or they would take him to court for damaging their property. He kept doing it and they took him to court over theft apparently. He tried to make the claim in court that he had stolen nothing because every electron the company had provided him with he quickly returned so there was of course no theft. He of course lost... but I always wanted to meet that guy :)
I hear you on Dreamweaver brother(or sister). Ive often wondered when staring at the monstrosity of HTML that get ejected from the bowls of such products, "Is it not possible to develop some kind of page generating tool that actually generates code that is *vaguely* human readable?". I mean it should be. Ive often thought it would be useful to use such a tool to create a basic prototype in a quick and easy fashion and then take that base to tweak into the real site. Im thinking along the lines of tools such as Delphi and some C++ code generators that are very common for GUI stuff. They can automatically generate a barebones framework for you to code to town with.
From Blackadder...
Melchett: Anything to say before we kick off, Captain Darling?
Darling: May it please the court, as this is clearly an open and shut case, I beg leave to bring a privete prosecution against the defence council for wasting the court's time.
Melchett: Granted. Council, he is fined fifty pounds for turning up. This is fun! This is just like a real court! Alright! Let the trial begin! The chagre before us is that the flanderous pigeon murderer did de- liberately, callously, and with beastliness of forethought murder a lovely, innocent pigeon. And disobeyed some orders as well. Is this true?