Are you saying rape victims should be forced to endure PTSD symptoms for the rest of their lives - just because you think people should have traumatic experience to grow from?
I was already alarmed at this posting, but your question brought my concern into focus. Fine, let's say we do things your way. "Post-date-rape drugs", as they can be known, work like a morning-after pill so the rape victim suffers no emotional consequence whatsoever. They get accepted into our culture, become available over-the-counter. Some time passes. Pretty soon, some rapist in court gets off with the defense that they did nothing to their attacker that couldn't be fixed by popping a pill. Laws against rape begin to erode. Eventually, rape victims become younger and younger...it becomes a "normal" thing.
Is this a better world than the one we had before? That's what worries me.
You know, if I had one wish for computer literacy, it would be to have the entire population each get a 2/386 out of the recycle bin, and thrash the hell out of it. Since it's a garbage computer with no data of theirs on it, they have complete freedom to open every folder, click every option, move files at random, and even tear open the case and rip out the chips and shiff them and feel them. They can at last *explore*, because they have a sandbox!
I mean, would you have ever have learned to drive if your only chance was a shiny new expensive car, and what's more you were convinced that if you so much as changed the radio volume, the entire car would die instantly and have to be replaced? Fear is all there is between the dumbest newb and the saltiest geek.
Hey, I have an idea! Set up some computers as a business, and actually *invite* the public to trash them (The only rule is, no hardware damage.). Sort of like an arcade. Sell cappuccino on the side. Every night at closing, you zero out the drives and put Knoppix back on them...
There is no doubt in me that 1000's of years from now, civilizations of that time will look back on our present zeitgeist on computers with the same amazement with which we regard Dark Ages superstitions about fairies, elves, and witches. So I commend you on your solo voyage to Mars.
The most important thing you can do to make people understand computers is to drive it home that they're actually incredibly simple. They're as simple as a toaster - they're just a hell of a lot of toasters shrunk to microsize and wired together. Start with a light switch: one and zero; on and off. Wire three light switches together and there's a way to count to set them to eight different states. Wire them differently and they're different kinds of logic gates. Wire some more and you have NAND gates. Millions of switches later shrunken down to atoms make a chip. The rest is convenient tags we label groups of ones and zeros with to make it do anything useful. Build your way up the programming toolchain from there. [NOTE: see replies to this post for errors I made here, but only if they can compact the improved explanation into the same number of words.]
Take that paragraph (lovingly polished by the rest of the community), but DON'T LET IT GROW TO TWO! Take the wisdom of Abe Lincoln into account, who always insisted that reports from generals be entirely contained by a single piece of paper. Use that paragraph for the seed to your book, but keep it a Bonsai book. Be a revolutionary pioneer and give people a computer book they can LIFT for a change, and maybe they won't be scared to read it. I suggest 25 pages, large print, not counting illustrations. (NOT diagrams with labels and arrows everywhere. Illustrations. Like in a children's book.)
I'll of course do the Web 2.0 thing and satirize it all on my blog later. But speaking of funny discussions, isn't it time for another Sony story to break?
Thank you, honorable one. My faith in the next generation is restored. Be sure to stick around for the weekend round of "U don't think AOL/MySpace/MSN is the Wo0T??? You elite snob!!!" I'm counting on you for backup.
And for your next act, wrap your head in a turban, strap as many explosives and guns to your body as will allow movement, and streak headlong through a Secret Service convention screaming "My Life for Allah!!!"
You're looking at Knoppix and talking about the speed like it's surprising. Knoppix's specialty is that it includes everything but the kitchen sink. Other distros specialize in speed (or small size, which equates to most of the same thing). If I recall, Wolvix http://wolvix.org/node/25 is 128mb (or is it 256?) to fit on a USB. I've tried Wolvix and it's pretty quick. Also tried Dyne:Bolic http://www.dynebolic.org/ and it performs fairly quick considering it's size!
You know what all of the above distros have in common? They don't use KDE !!! Stay away from an 800 pound gorilla for a desktop on a live CD and you'll see load times halve right there!
PS: another tip: In a live CD, try to ascertain how much RAM it found on your system and whether it knows where your swap partitions are. Some live CDs miss out here, or need a little manual help.
Judging by your low ID number, I look backward with fondness at a time when that sig was current. Speaking as one who built every computer in his house...
Going by the responses, I'd say yes, we who don't want a camera lens shoved up our ass 24/7 and our every thought scrutinized are quickly slipping into a minority...in the US, anyway.
For the people absolutlely howling with outrage at the mere desire for privacy some of us have, I have one word for you: China.
Well, now, I wouldn't judge the remarks as all *THAT* hot. Most of the comments in here seem to be humorous. Keep in mind (a) some people actually *pay* for membership here (I don't), so would be a little more entitled to gripe when they didn't get their money's worth.
Let's face it, it does show gross neglect. How many of the group blogs that you know have a problem with duplicated effort? How many websites, period, with a group maintaining them do this? When's the last time you saw this on another news site? This would be so easy to fix: a simple shell script could scrape the RSS feed for at least the past month and grep for keywords.
Finally, there's some sore spots over story submission. Some folks take it quite personally when they've had 25 stories by them rejected in a row, but the same story shows up three times or the same member seems to get a disproportionately large number of submissions through all at once.
As for me, I'm mostly amused by the whole thing. I'm not a paying member, so to me Slashdot is just another web site in the whole wide internet, albeit one which strokes my geek side in a way that few other sites know.
See, I keep my tabs set to something close to 80 characters as well, because I'm a CSS freak and I'm writing to shoot down that narrow floating box in the center with sidebars all 'round.
I'll even blush and admit that I did a 2-year stint in the Conservation Corps (yes, I was a professional government-employed tree-hugger!) in my youth. I still wring my hands and fret a little bit over the occasional environmental impact. But even I laugh these instant doomsayers out of the lecture hall. No matter what we do or don't do about anything at all, insisting that we're all at the end of history isn't the way to do it.
As always, by the time it gets even one tenth as bad as the dark prophet preaches, bigger minds than I will be panicky enough to do something about it. I do enough for the environment today for one consciencious person, and gently urge others to do likewise, but that's all that needs doing.
Unless it's been heard before: "Americorp" wins as the new depreciative nickname for the US. I'm going to start calling it that in daily use and stare incredulously at anybody who corrects me. I'm even going to start filling that in as country of residence on tax forms, liscences, etc.
Targeting not You Linux users, but them Linux users that were windows users.
LOL. OK, I'll award each of us a half-point. You're right in what you say. But this leads to yet another of my favorite hobby-horses: probably one of the least popular opinions in all of computing that I'm about to utter, here, but true nevertheless: "People aren't nearly as stupid as we make them out to be."
Only six years ago, I was still one of "them Windows users". I was banging my skull in frustration at the built-in lameness of the platform. Then I got my hands on Linux. I dual-booted the family PC for awhile until the rest of the family caught up with me, and used Linux exclusively on my own box. And happy ending: we've all been running Windows-free for years, now.
Like any other ex-Windows user, I was a slow convert...we all were. We had to discover how to do things the Linux way. We had to adjust to the security constraints, which we first circumvented running as root, then grudgingly got user accounts, and now fully accept the sysadmin/group/user way as the sanest way to compute.
The number one thing I like most about Linux is: it lets me be as smart as I am! I was *always* computer-savvy, even when I was running a 286/DOS 6.22/Win_3.1 box and spending most of my time on it writing little gopher programs in QBasic (compiled to 'executables' with QB 4.5, of course!) from the DOS prompt. Linux was the first system that trusted me to have the brain I'd always had. The difference is, I can USE it now! Likewise, my family is discovering skills they didn't know they had as well. My spouse now is learning quite a bit of web design; she's discovered that there's more to it that a click 'n' build ISP-linked "home page". My kids are beginning to explore Python from the command line; we have to watch they don't use it to cheat on their math homework!
True, the AIM/AOL/MySpace crowd is almost entirely a loss. But to hypothesize what they'd do if they were to suddenly swoop on Linux would be the same as to ask what they would do if they suddenly got awarded physics degrees. But even if we discover (to our flabbergasted shock) that "Joe Sixpack" has a few tricks in him (hey, he learned Windows 15 years ago; even he was able to grok a copy of "Windows for Dummies" in order to do so.) and discovers Linux, even he's going to observe "I have xscreensaver and more plugins for it than I can possibly use that are risk-free, or I can download this spam-o-matic gizmo that takes over my machine..." Edge-cases, yes, some people will still use adware, no matter what. But adware will not thrive in the Linux world the same way it does in the Windows world, where there is no free xscreensaver option to start with.
from the response it's getting. No kidding, people make snap judgements about *everything* in about 50 milliseconds. That's about how long it takes for you to decide if a member of the preferred sex is attractive to you, whether an offered kind of food looks appealing, whether or not a suspect is guilty when you hear their arrest break on the news, whether or not you like the TV channel you just flipped to...nothing special about web pages.
Probably a way to take better advice from this is to design your pages so they load *FAST* without too many animations, images, and effects. For instance, the dreaded Flash animation page which presents you with a blank box and a progress meter in the middle ticking up from 1%...which makes me say:
"Hey, I just discovered your site: Tell me WHAT'S loading! Put the name of your site on the page. Direct me to a header page that asks me if I want to see your Flash animation. Put something to read on the page while your dingus loads. Put menus and widgets there, or a graphic, or anything to hold my interest while it loads."
Sites that violate all of the above lose me in *less* than 50 milliseconds.
all sorts of NEW software (screensavers, games, weather checkers, and download accelerators)
OK: read my lips. I will speak very slowly. We Linux users already have those things, without any ads at all. In the commercial software world, the motivation for running adware crap is that putting up with the advertizing garbage is the only way to get something for nothing. But there are some 300-odd complete Linux distributions out there, all of them loaded with more free software than you could ever run, and none of it has any sneaky adware in it. It's open-source: if you *did* include something intrusive in it, the next user could just remove it from the source and recompile it - and distribute it as their own! Oh, I'm sure you could *try* to do adware for Linux, it could work. But nobody's going to use it - they have nothing to gain by running a free program with adware that they don't gain by running a free program without.
everyone runs *nix, you'll see spyware applications be written for these OSes immediately.
No, as a matter of fact, that's a falsehood based on ignorance of what free software is all about. In Linux, *all* software is free, from the kernel out. You're trying to say the absence of spyware opportunites would overnight make Richard Stallman start dumping tons of malware into the next Emacs release?
Quite a bit of the garbage in the Windows environment is there because they know Windows users will tolerate it. This is the same reason you are charged for software, get rootkits installed with your music, get pressured to upgrade every two months, yada, yada.
Slashdot Mirror
I was already alarmed at this posting, but your question brought my concern into focus. Fine, let's say we do things your way. "Post-date-rape drugs", as they can be known, work like a morning-after pill so the rape victim suffers no emotional consequence whatsoever. They get accepted into our culture, become available over-the-counter. Some time passes. Pretty soon, some rapist in court gets off with the defense that they did nothing to their attacker that couldn't be fixed by popping a pill. Laws against rape begin to erode. Eventually, rape victims become younger and younger...it becomes a "normal" thing.
Is this a better world than the one we had before? That's what worries me.
um...I'm going to try to break this to you gently: It's been done before.
I mean, would you have ever have learned to drive if your only chance was a shiny new expensive car, and what's more you were convinced that if you so much as changed the radio volume, the entire car would die instantly and have to be replaced? Fear is all there is between the dumbest newb and the saltiest geek.
Hey, I have an idea! Set up some computers as a business, and actually *invite* the public to trash them (The only rule is, no hardware damage.). Sort of like an arcade. Sell cappuccino on the side. Every night at closing, you zero out the drives and put Knoppix back on them...
The most important thing you can do to make people understand computers is to drive it home that they're actually incredibly simple. They're as simple as a toaster - they're just a hell of a lot of toasters shrunk to microsize and wired together. Start with a light switch: one and zero; on and off. Wire three light switches together and there's a way to count to set them to eight different states. Wire them differently and they're different kinds of logic gates. Wire some more and you have NAND gates. Millions of switches later shrunken down to atoms make a chip. The rest is convenient tags we label groups of ones and zeros with to make it do anything useful. Build your way up the programming toolchain from there. [NOTE: see replies to this post for errors I made here, but only if they can compact the improved explanation into the same number of words.]
Take that paragraph (lovingly polished by the rest of the community), but DON'T LET IT GROW TO TWO! Take the wisdom of Abe Lincoln into account, who always insisted that reports from generals be entirely contained by a single piece of paper. Use that paragraph for the seed to your book, but keep it a Bonsai book. Be a revolutionary pioneer and give people a computer book they can LIFT for a change, and maybe they won't be scared to read it. I suggest 25 pages, large print, not counting illustrations. (NOT diagrams with labels and arrows everywhere. Illustrations. Like in a children's book.)
I'll of course do the Web 2.0 thing and satirize it all on my blog later. But speaking of funny discussions, isn't it time for another Sony story to break?
Thank you, honorable one. My faith in the next generation is restored. Be sure to stick around for the weekend round of "U don't think AOL/MySpace/MSN is the Wo0T??? You elite snob!!!" I'm counting on you for backup.
And for your next act, wrap your head in a turban, strap as many explosives and guns to your body as will allow movement, and streak headlong through a Secret Service convention screaming "My Life for Allah!!!"
You're looking at Knoppix and talking about the speed like it's surprising. Knoppix's specialty is that it includes everything but the kitchen sink. Other distros specialize in speed (or small size, which equates to most of the same thing). If I recall, Wolvix http://wolvix.org/node/25 is 128mb (or is it 256?) to fit on a USB. I've tried Wolvix and it's pretty quick. Also tried Dyne:Bolic http://www.dynebolic.org/ and it performs fairly quick considering it's size!
You know what all of the above distros have in common? They don't use KDE !!! Stay away from an 800 pound gorilla for a desktop on a live CD and you'll see load times halve right there!
PS: another tip: In a live CD, try to ascertain how much RAM it found on your system and whether it knows where your swap partitions are. Some live CDs miss out here, or need a little manual help.
Holy God. I could see this actually being released and being a popular distro. I'll keep an eye on Distrowatch for this one.
Judging by your low ID number, I look backward with fondness at a time when that sig was current. Speaking as one who built every computer in his house...
For the people absolutlely howling with outrage at the mere desire for privacy some of us have, I have one word for you: China.
Let's face it, it does show gross neglect. How many of the group blogs that you know have a problem with duplicated effort? How many websites, period, with a group maintaining them do this? When's the last time you saw this on another news site? This would be so easy to fix: a simple shell script could scrape the RSS feed for at least the past month and grep for keywords.
Finally, there's some sore spots over story submission. Some folks take it quite personally when they've had 25 stories by them rejected in a row, but the same story shows up three times or the same member seems to get a disproportionately large number of submissions through all at once.
As for me, I'm mostly amused by the whole thing. I'm not a paying member, so to me Slashdot is just another web site in the whole wide internet, albeit one which strokes my geek side in a way that few other sites know.
See, I keep my tabs set to something close to 80 characters as well, because I'm a CSS freak and I'm writing to shoot down that narrow floating box in the center with sidebars all 'round.
As always, by the time it gets even one tenth as bad as the dark prophet preaches, bigger minds than I will be panicky enough to do something about it. I do enough for the environment today for one consciencious person, and gently urge others to do likewise, but that's all that needs doing.
Um, ah, OK, is there such a thing as a "centisecond"? A decisecond? Can I just hedge this out to "less than a second"?
And if we lose money, the terrorists win!!!
Unless it's been heard before: "Americorp" wins as the new depreciative nickname for the US. I'm going to start calling it that in daily use and stare incredulously at anybody who corrects me. I'm even going to start filling that in as country of residence on tax forms, liscences, etc.
LOL. OK, I'll award each of us a half-point. You're right in what you say. But this leads to yet another of my favorite hobby-horses: probably one of the least popular opinions in all of computing that I'm about to utter, here, but true nevertheless: "People aren't nearly as stupid as we make them out to be."
Only six years ago, I was still one of "them Windows users". I was banging my skull in frustration at the built-in lameness of the platform. Then I got my hands on Linux. I dual-booted the family PC for awhile until the rest of the family caught up with me, and used Linux exclusively on my own box. And happy ending: we've all been running Windows-free for years, now.
Like any other ex-Windows user, I was a slow convert...we all were. We had to discover how to do things the Linux way. We had to adjust to the security constraints, which we first circumvented running as root, then grudgingly got user accounts, and now fully accept the sysadmin/group/user way as the sanest way to compute.
The number one thing I like most about Linux is: it lets me be as smart as I am! I was *always* computer-savvy, even when I was running a 286/DOS 6.22/Win_3.1 box and spending most of my time on it writing little gopher programs in QBasic (compiled to 'executables' with QB 4.5, of course!) from the DOS prompt. Linux was the first system that trusted me to have the brain I'd always had. The difference is, I can USE it now! Likewise, my family is discovering skills they didn't know they had as well. My spouse now is learning quite a bit of web design; she's discovered that there's more to it that a click 'n' build ISP-linked "home page". My kids are beginning to explore Python from the command line; we have to watch they don't use it to cheat on their math homework!
True, the AIM/AOL/MySpace crowd is almost entirely a loss. But to hypothesize what they'd do if they were to suddenly swoop on Linux would be the same as to ask what they would do if they suddenly got awarded physics degrees. But even if we discover (to our flabbergasted shock) that "Joe Sixpack" has a few tricks in him (hey, he learned Windows 15 years ago; even he was able to grok a copy of "Windows for Dummies" in order to do so.) and discovers Linux, even he's going to observe "I have xscreensaver and more plugins for it than I can possibly use that are risk-free, or I can download this spam-o-matic gizmo that takes over my machine..." Edge-cases, yes, some people will still use adware, no matter what. But adware will not thrive in the Linux world the same way it does in the Windows world, where there is no free xscreensaver option to start with.
Can I still hum quietly to myself in a closed room!?!
Probably a way to take better advice from this is to design your pages so they load *FAST* without too many animations, images, and effects. For instance, the dreaded Flash animation page which presents you with a blank box and a progress meter in the middle ticking up from 1%...which makes me say:
"Hey, I just discovered your site: Tell me WHAT'S loading! Put the name of your site on the page. Direct me to a header page that asks me if I want to see your Flash animation. Put something to read on the page while your dingus loads. Put menus and widgets there, or a graphic, or anything to hold my interest while it loads."
Sites that violate all of the above lose me in *less* than 50 milliseconds.
OK: read my lips. I will speak very slowly. We Linux users already have those things, without any ads at all. In the commercial software world, the motivation for running adware crap is that putting up with the advertizing garbage is the only way to get something for nothing. But there are some 300-odd complete Linux distributions out there, all of them loaded with more free software than you could ever run, and none of it has any sneaky adware in it. It's open-source: if you *did* include something intrusive in it, the next user could just remove it from the source and recompile it - and distribute it as their own! Oh, I'm sure you could *try* to do adware for Linux, it could work. But nobody's going to use it - they have nothing to gain by running a free program with adware that they don't gain by running a free program without.
Keep sprinting and you'll get here.
No, as a matter of fact, that's a falsehood based on ignorance of what free software is all about. In Linux, *all* software is free, from the kernel out. You're trying to say the absence of spyware opportunites would overnight make Richard Stallman start dumping tons of malware into the next Emacs release?
Quite a bit of the garbage in the Windows environment is there because they know Windows users will tolerate it. This is the same reason you are charged for software, get rootkits installed with your music, get pressured to upgrade every two months, yada, yada.
you gotta wonder if Hitchcock knew it all along...(link provided for young'uns: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/)
So Word is an ill-designed piece of shit, like every other MS product, that's what "So". Wise-ass.
Your answer is in the mirror.