It is not at all fair to condemn an entire generation as "having no idea how things work". At some point, you *have* to know the internal workings of the system you're fritzing with, or it'll fritz you. Thus delving deeper than the program you're good at using leads to a scripting language, and the scripting language leads to a hybrid language, and the hybrid language leads to a compiled language, and compiled language leads to assembly, and assembly leads to hexadecimal and binary, and binary leads to assembling your own hardware, and the hardware uses the same electronic concepts as the radios of half a century ago. If you're looking for blame, blame the disaster that is our education standards. Kids can't help not learning what nobody's bothered to teach them (or even actively prevented them from finding out about).
The thing to do is encourage young minds. Show them what they're missing. Of course, if we're talking some warez-cracking script-kiddie who knows nothing but half of one toy language and doesn't *care* to know any more, that's hardly above consideration. We call those "lusers".
If I knew a man who had killed a hundred people, I would think of him in a negative way, but if Fox Spews started condemning him I would begin to think that I had gotten him all wrong.
Most people - the overwhelming majority - are not competent to use a general purpose computer.
Suddenly, I heard angelic harps. This way lies heaven! Let the 90% use their computer like a webTV unit or thin client or whatnot, do whatever they need to do with webapps, the pressure will be off of the remaining 10% of us to dumb down the computer as we know it to drool-proof status...and everyone will be *happy*!
Hey, yeah, that's right! Red Hat 6.0 was my first Linux distro, and I got it up and running in four hours flat. At home. By myself. The GUI holds your hand the whole time, explains to you what the concept of disk partitions are...that's right! What a crock, two weeks!
Especially to those of us who've never used SAP and blissfully look forward to never using it. It sounds like it does a lot of boring business stuff. That's what God made Suits for is to deal with all that!
Retract the previous correction...I worded it right. I *hate* head colds, they screw up my concentration (the rest of the time, I have some other excuse)
...to find the only person on the planet who's switched to Windows from Linux.
And he isn't the least, tiniest bit a paid shill to spread patented MS-FUD!
No, sirree. But you never saw a better recipe for a flame-war on Slashdot. How should we do this one? Doom-style? NeverWinter-style? Quake3Arena-deathmatch?
What else can we learn from Slashdot moderation, I wonder?
Economics? I know every time I get mod points, it's like I'm racing the clock. "Oh, God, four left to spend in two hours! Uh, OK, this threads should need some modding. This post...fudge, it's maxed out! OK, this post...is this worth moderation? Isn't it? Is it? OK, *this* post...it's a troll, I'll...no, wait, somebody got it already...!" I end up blowing them away on frivilous mods or wasting them and letting them expire, I don't know which is worse. All I know is, I never have them when I see something really crying out for moderation.
Kind of like the value of dollars in an inflationary spiral.
Y'know, I had my car stolen a few years ago when we lived in Las vegas. It was ripped off from the parking lot of my apartment while we slept. The same evening, the exact same make and model of car (but it wasn't ours) was also found abandoned in the *other* end of the apartment complex's parking lot, in trashed condition. Clearly, the car thieves knew how to steal only one make of car, ditched it when it ran out of gas, took off walking, and - what luck! - found ours.
We called the police about it and their whole attitude was "So what? F#ck you!!!". They wouldn't even send a unit out, not even to look at the dumped car. It's things like this I think about (and I think most/.ers think about) when I see stories like this.
I am reminded of that video on the 'net somewhere (too lazy to look for it) of military personnel using military equipment to watch a couple make out in a car.
On the last season of Penn 'n' Teller's "Bullshit" (on Showtime), they had a stunt where they hired people to surveil a house where a "suspected terrorist" was supposed to be holed up. Then they hired two actors to make out next door. The "marks" were convinced that our safety as a nation was at stake, yet guess which way they swiveled the camera. In most cases, the "suspect" got away while the "agent" was busy ogling.
Depends. Are we talking more or less than money? Because this morning, truth lost 15 points on the Dow Jones, accompanied by plunges in honor, character, dignity, and responsibility. Greed's arrow still has the pointy part at the top, and is still green. Hey, if you love a Capitalist system, yah gotta love all of it!
That's just one of the things that could go wrong. The other thing is competence. Looking at the past five years worth of US Intelligence's batting record, I'm likely to want to check it myself. After all, terrorists might have hidden WMD in it, doncha know.;)
Call me paranoid. Actually, it's not even in the least paranoid. But I just don't want code written by the government on my computer. Not that I'm in the "Enterprise" market, anyway. *shiver* There's just too much that could go wrong...especially if it became a long-standing policy.
Good advice, but note, folks, that that means "a CD that boots on a Windows machine", not made or endorsed by MS in any way...
Yet another solution is just about any Linux live CD, which can be used to mount the hd and then you have some fantastic Linux tools to use to clean your Windows. Dual-booting is even better, with scriptable clean-up utilities you can craft out of Bash, sed, awk, and Python to auto-clean the Windows partition every time you start Linux. Feel free to edit Windows system files like.bat and.ini while you're at it in your handy dandy vi or emacs editor.
I swear, if Microsoft knew what was good for them, they'd *push* Linux. "The best of both worlds!"
Now, lemme get this straight. I'm expected to take a crap while up to my ankles in raw sewage in a flooded bathroom with the door smashed off the hinges. I complain about it for a year, nothing is done. I finally fix it myself, for free. For this, I am expelled. Then you go to the press. You spread word of mouth. You publicly shame the campus. You were a paying student, after all, not a refugee in a third-world slum. And then you take that whole record to another school.
Listen, I worked beauracracy in every possible flavor: the State Government, a power plant, and a multinational bank. In every case, we fixed our own tools, we made our own ways possible, if no-one did it for us. Yes, even at the Very Large Bank, when my equipment wasn't working and they wouldn't fund a new one and the field-circus engineer was drunk on the job and asleep out in the parking lot in his car (really happened!), I'd fix it myself on the sly. If I was caught, "Duh, I'm sorry, I didn't know I wasn't allowed to do that! Do you want me to break it back like it was again? I'll do that for you right after I use it to post this $800,000 before the deadline coming up in five minutes, which, if we miss, you'll get your ass chewed about it worse by *your* boss." Always, there were shrugs, turns, and I never heard about it again.
The Real World is a broken, stupid, bungled place. Fix it.
If you're anything like a REAL engineer, you apply that engineering to everything, including the most important kind: social engineering. Stupid people and stupid rules are just one more bug to fix. If there's a problem for an engineer to solve, nobody stands in their way, or they'll end up with an engineer-sized hole through them.
Hey, along with the pictures of the repairs and the before and after (be sure to get pictures of the *bathrooms* in both the stadium and the class, *bathrooms* will tell the most poignant story.): fake a UFO photo on the same roll of film (if I have to describe how to fake a UFO photo, give up and go home here.). Go to the press with straight faces, declaring that aliens from outer space came and fixed your school in the night.
It's the most important Zen I ever learned: If you face software problem, you are software engineer; if you face construction problem, you are construction engineer; if you face people problem, you are people engineer; but always, you are ENGINEER!
Probably an urban legend, but I remember reading something about "the first light bulb", or one of the first, that's still burning in a firehouse somewhere in the US. It was one of Thomas Edison's earliest. I think about that every time I change a light bulb that I just changed this month. I also think about cars I used to own like a Ford Fairlane and a Dodge Dart, that kept running well past the odometer rolling over, and compare that to today's cars that you're lucky to make it all the way off the lot before they break down.
It seems that computers "work too well" and are "too cheap" by everybody's standards, and they can't jump all over themselves fast enough to break them in every concievable way. One day, you'll hear people saying "Of course you lost your data! That's a USB drive, you only get five uses out of it and it wears out!" Doubtless, they'll only hold 10 Mbs at a time, as well.
All the more reason why I've resolved to never buy anything that's electronic new if there's a used/discarded item available. I have simply gotten too good at fixing old hardware...I never see the time when I'll need to buy a new computer, just spare parts, and even those I usually get used. I'm glad I already did my USB flash drive shopping, while I still had choices.
OK, I get the picture. Cell phones rule, PCs suck; social butterflys have the say, geeks can shut the hell up. Imminent death of computers predicted, film at eleven. Check, roger wilco, duly noted. And I'm not taking one of these stories seriously until the day I'm reading it on something besides a PC.
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Oh, I used to think that as well. But with nothing left but ignorant people around you, which of them will know what you're good for?
The thing to do is encourage young minds. Show them what they're missing. Of course, if we're talking some warez-cracking script-kiddie who knows nothing but half of one toy language and doesn't *care* to know any more, that's hardly above consideration. We call those "lusers".
If I knew a man who had killed a hundred people, I would think of him in a negative way, but if Fox Spews started condemning him I would begin to think that I had gotten him all wrong.
Suddenly, I heard angelic harps. This way lies heaven! Let the 90% use their computer like a webTV unit or thin client or whatnot, do whatever they need to do with webapps, the pressure will be off of the remaining 10% of us to dumb down the computer as we know it to drool-proof status...and everyone will be *happy*!
No, wait, the codeine's wearing off...
Yeah, what does he do for an encore, run into a biker bar and scream "Harleys suck! They're built by fags!" and run out again?
Hey, yeah, that's right! Red Hat 6.0 was my first Linux distro, and I got it up and running in four hours flat. At home. By myself. The GUI holds your hand the whole time, explains to you what the concept of disk partitions are...that's right! What a crock, two weeks!
Especially to those of us who've never used SAP and blissfully look forward to never using it. It sounds like it does a lot of boring business stuff. That's what God made Suits for is to deal with all that!
Hey, *some*body had to say it!
Thank you, that's the first thing that leaped to my mind. Only it was less coherent in my mind (is this cold over *yet*???).
Retract the previous correction...I worded it right. I *hate* head colds, they screw up my concentration (the rest of the time, I have some other excuse)
I meant, of course "Linux to Windows". Guess I'm too used to typing it the other way round...
And he isn't the least, tiniest bit a paid shill to spread patented MS-FUD!
No, sirree. But you never saw a better recipe for a flame-war on Slashdot. How should we do this one? Doom-style? NeverWinter-style? Quake3Arena-deathmatch?
Economics? I know every time I get mod points, it's like I'm racing the clock. "Oh, God, four left to spend in two hours! Uh, OK, this threads should need some modding. This post...fudge, it's maxed out! OK, this post...is this worth moderation? Isn't it? Is it? OK, *this* post...it's a troll, I'll...no, wait, somebody got it already...!" I end up blowing them away on frivilous mods or wasting them and letting them expire, I don't know which is worse. All I know is, I never have them when I see something really crying out for moderation.
Kind of like the value of dollars in an inflationary spiral.
We called the police about it and their whole attitude was "So what? F#ck you!!!". They wouldn't even send a unit out, not even to look at the dumped car. It's things like this I think about (and I think most /.ers think about) when I see stories like this.
On the last season of Penn 'n' Teller's "Bullshit" (on Showtime), they had a stunt where they hired people to surveil a house where a "suspected terrorist" was supposed to be holed up. Then they hired two actors to make out next door. The "marks" were convinced that our safety as a nation was at stake, yet guess which way they swiveled the camera. In most cases, the "suspect" got away while the "agent" was busy ogling.
Depends. Are we talking more or less than money? Because this morning, truth lost 15 points on the Dow Jones, accompanied by plunges in honor, character, dignity, and responsibility. Greed's arrow still has the pointy part at the top, and is still green. Hey, if you love a Capitalist system, yah gotta love all of it!
That's just one of the things that could go wrong. The other thing is competence. Looking at the past five years worth of US Intelligence's batting record, I'm likely to want to check it myself. After all, terrorists might have hidden WMD in it, doncha know. ;)
Call me paranoid. Actually, it's not even in the least paranoid. But I just don't want code written by the government on my computer. Not that I'm in the "Enterprise" market, anyway. *shiver* There's just too much that could go wrong...especially if it became a long-standing policy.
Yep, that's the one I was thinking of. Nice catch! (-:
Good advice, but note, folks, that that means "a CD that boots on a Windows machine", not made or endorsed by MS in any way...
Yet another solution is just about any Linux live CD, which can be used to mount the hd and then you have some fantastic Linux tools to use to clean your Windows. Dual-booting is even better, with scriptable clean-up utilities you can craft out of Bash, sed, awk, and Python to auto-clean the Windows partition every time you start Linux. Feel free to edit Windows system files like .bat and .ini while you're at it in your handy dandy vi or emacs editor.
I swear, if Microsoft knew what was good for them, they'd *push* Linux. "The best of both worlds!"
Now, lemme get this straight. I'm expected to take a crap while up to my ankles in raw sewage in a flooded bathroom with the door smashed off the hinges. I complain about it for a year, nothing is done. I finally fix it myself, for free. For this, I am expelled. Then you go to the press. You spread word of mouth. You publicly shame the campus. You were a paying student, after all, not a refugee in a third-world slum. And then you take that whole record to another school.
Listen, I worked beauracracy in every possible flavor: the State Government, a power plant, and a multinational bank. In every case, we fixed our own tools, we made our own ways possible, if no-one did it for us. Yes, even at the Very Large Bank, when my equipment wasn't working and they wouldn't fund a new one and the field-circus engineer was drunk on the job and asleep out in the parking lot in his car (really happened!), I'd fix it myself on the sly. If I was caught, "Duh, I'm sorry, I didn't know I wasn't allowed to do that! Do you want me to break it back like it was again? I'll do that for you right after I use it to post this $800,000 before the deadline coming up in five minutes, which, if we miss, you'll get your ass chewed about it worse by *your* boss." Always, there were shrugs, turns, and I never heard about it again.
The Real World is a broken, stupid, bungled place. Fix it.
If you're anything like a REAL engineer, you apply that engineering to everything, including the most important kind: social engineering. Stupid people and stupid rules are just one more bug to fix. If there's a problem for an engineer to solve, nobody stands in their way, or they'll end up with an engineer-sized hole through them.
Hey, along with the pictures of the repairs and the before and after (be sure to get pictures of the *bathrooms* in both the stadium and the class, *bathrooms* will tell the most poignant story.): fake a UFO photo on the same roll of film (if I have to describe how to fake a UFO photo, give up and go home here.). Go to the press with straight faces, declaring that aliens from outer space came and fixed your school in the night.
It's the most important Zen I ever learned: If you face software problem, you are software engineer; if you face construction problem, you are construction engineer; if you face people problem, you are people engineer; but always, you are ENGINEER!
It seems that computers "work too well" and are "too cheap" by everybody's standards, and they can't jump all over themselves fast enough to break them in every concievable way. One day, you'll hear people saying "Of course you lost your data! That's a USB drive, you only get five uses out of it and it wears out!" Doubtless, they'll only hold 10 Mbs at a time, as well.
All the more reason why I've resolved to never buy anything that's electronic new if there's a used/discarded item available. I have simply gotten too good at fixing old hardware...I never see the time when I'll need to buy a new computer, just spare parts, and even those I usually get used. I'm glad I already did my USB flash drive shopping, while I still had choices.
OK, I get the picture. Cell phones rule, PCs suck; social butterflys have the say, geeks can shut the hell up. Imminent death of computers predicted, film at eleven. Check, roger wilco, duly noted. And I'm not taking one of these stories seriously until the day I'm reading it on something besides a PC.
College career counseling is dead, but ten million Slashdot readers have risen to take it's place.