I should know, I have the big blue E with the swooshy thingie right there on top of my backstreet boys desktop wallpaper. How could you have the internet on *your* hard drive????
Re:"in our society, actual work is done by a large amount of people; products are produced by a large amount of people, etc. Yet the small few at the top who do not actually produce any products; who do not know how or want to actually work for a living; who attempt to administrate despite their complete lack of knowledge about what is actually produced; those people retain the largest cut of the money and hand out the rest to everyone else who did something. Is there something wrong with this societal model?? "
I don't see much wrong with the model. If you're lucky enough to work for someone who pays you well, you may not feel so underpaid. On the other hand, the leader in a company takes risks, and can loose it all. The reward for that risk can and should be compensated to encourage more risk taking and foster economic growth. Being a business leader means you're the last one to get payed, and that's worth a lot. There are some other options.
1) Move to a socialist nation.
or
2) Start your own business.
Re:"You see "Plans to Peer at a Black Hole's Event Horizon", and the first thought you have is "who the hell is Blackhole.com or Eventhorizon.com, what do they have to do with P2P, and why haven't I heard of them before?!?!"
"And who is the holding company, "Black Hole", who owns Event Horizon.com?!?! I never heard of them. I better turn on CNBC Squakbox and check out if the kahuna has news on movement at Black Hole.
Re:"The ratio is out of whack. If the Big Scary Internet Business Dot Com has X Bandwidth, and the Home User has X / 2 Bandwidth (not X / 500) as it should be), there is a BIG problem."
Why sell 100M/sec for ~$20 a month into the home when you can sell it for ~$200 a month to a business.
You're leaving money on the table, and that's a bad business model. If you consider that Arpanet had ~56k truck lines (costing thousands) to connect computers in the late 70s and 80s, and today businesses are giving away 56k conectivity for "free", things move on.
Processor power and bandwidth make incrimental increaces in the marketplace, and have for 3 decades now, and I don't forsee a "leapfrogging" technology that makes it worth the investment.
Remember, it's not just the speed of the fibre, it's the router/load ballance/server that has to keep up as well. By definition, internetoworking means "we're all in this together" so what good does paying through the nose for 100x jump in bandwidth if nothing else it's connected too can keep up.
"Maybe it stems from a fear of "mucking up the works", or from fear of learning new skills, but there has to be a more psychological reason why people don't (or won't) master this very simple appliance. "
In my experience, it's bad business.
Don't pay someone a lot of money to do something they don't have the skill set to do. You don't send a script kiddie to do a gurus job in a network, and you don't send a veepee to fix a peecee. People (unlike computing) have limited skill sets and it's important for a business to get the most out them without expending a lot of money in wasted time.
If an employee teaches themselves (on their own time) to fix their computer when something goes wrong, they'll be a more productive person. On the other hand, I don't want a board member to cancel all his client meetings for the week because he can't figure out how to print out his presentation. You get an expert in to fix the issue and move on!
Put another way:
You've got 2 employees.
Alice and Bob.
Alice spent the weekend evaluating fixed wireless conectivity for the company network and Bob spent his weekend golfing with the clients son. On Monday the client calls to close the order and the network is down. Q:Do you put Alice on the phone with a client she doesn't know and Bob in the server room trying to find the "any" key?
A:No. People gravitate toward things they like doing and build their skill sets around that choice, and a good business will let them do that.
I recently visited a machine shop that does work for our company to talk to the employees there about possibly updating their CAM (Computer Aided Machining) software. Every time we send over data about parts and products to be made, there was a lot of needless questions being asked and answered by both parties thus leading to an eventual breakdown in that comunication and some bad parts being made. My goal was to eliminate all the fucking around and deliver a clear and easily understandable job requirement.
The shop consisted of a 3 tier management structure with the shop owner quoting us the job and handing it over to his designer who worked out the details to give to the guys on the floor to make. The owner ran "simple and easy to use acounting software" and wasn't willing to learn anything about what his designer was using. The disigner was using software with every fucking bell and whistle you could posibly imagine (and thus sisn't have time to mess with his PHBs doppy acounting stuff) and the guys on the floor were using a 15 year old 2D Gcode generator that was little more than a parsing script.
All of these "users" were locked in to their easy to use interfaces and never took the time to look at the big picture of how my job flowed through their shop. This is a perfect example of users being blinded by their easy to use interfaces, and not looking at the big picture.
The moral of the story?
After 4 hours of meetings, I thanked them for their time and started sending work to another shop that has ProE deployed all the way from the owners desk, to the guys on the floor. They all have shared access to the same solid model data and they're all "on the same page".
Yes! This is a perfect example of how the interface matches the user and why the author of the article has a group of people that would be considered "general users".
Re:"Before the interface is "simplified", designers must ensure that it is still possible to do what was previously possible."
I agree that simplified design is a progression as apposed to a quantum leap. It's intuative to learn when you're faced with "old way =c:\winblows\desktop\mydocuments" and "new way=spiffy little button on the side".
You're also correct in your comments that this progression is a required step to move things forward. I think micros~1 has dropped the ball on this issue is they are moving forward, and forgeting the past. Relying exclusivly on the GUI and ignoring scripting, multi-user functionality, the CLI, and remote management, they have denyed users the "ease of use" they learned when they started learning computers.
In short, it's important to take steps forward in UI design, but don't throw out years of user training to achieve that goal.
No matter how easy you make it, some users still let their VCRs blink 12:00 [I never thought that I would actually have an application for using the blink tag, and now that I do,/. has it filtered:(].
Re:"
An example of his point I'd like to reference is the "smart menus" in Microsoft Office, which deliberately hide functions in order that the user doesn't have to see them. That actually makes it harder to use the software's functions, and it doesn't make it any easier to use the existing ones; it simply lets the user feel at-ease, never even seeing options he doessn't understand. "
I would agree that this is a good example "hiding the machine from the user", but this is just a natural progresion of computer science. Drum, Core, and Random Access Memory have all given spawn to their own file systems to help a user store and retrieve information from them. Extending this logic, one could say that a journaling file system "makes it to easy" and doesn't really teach the user about the computer they are using. Clearly, this is progress to welcomed with open arms.
Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis? All of these items would be educational to the user and give the user a better understanding of how and why his car works, but it would not help him get to work in the morning.
If the product has a target demographic that is very diverse and crosses many differant educational levels, the interface should match the market.
"(I should note here that I will be writing "students" all along when perhaps I should be saying "users" or something like that. The set of problems I will identify here is common to graduate students, instructors, staff, and undergraduates. However, I dislike the word users, and as a rhetoric and composition specialist my focus is teaching, so I'll be using "students" most of the time.)
Every student who takes a course in the NWE has a UNIX account with almost totally unrestricted Internet access. Students can make Web pages in one of the five NWE classrooms using one of several HTML editors available through our X-Windows interface. However, many students find the transition between the online environment and their home computer very unsettling."
The sample is flawed. Therefor, the conclusion is biased.
Yes, Newbies have trouble learning.
Yes, New network recourses require some learning.
Yes, New a interface requires going through a learning curve.
In short, this is little more than a helpdesk employee whinning about how stoooopid the CEO is for not remembering his subnet IP. Moreover, We've come a long way over the years to make computers easy and, if we would have never move toward "ease of use" we would all be writing our own drum memory drivers to push individual bits!
From the article: "Scientists aim to create a "radio quiet park", where nobody will be allowed to use mobile phones, TV, radio or walkie-talkies for fear their emissions could be mistaken for signs of alien life. The most likely site is in Australia."
I would hate to see the newsflash saying that first contact with an intelligent race of life from somehwere outside our own earth would sound like:
"Honey, don't forget to pickip johnny at practice."
"Hitachi Ltd. is slated to start selling Crusoe-powered notebook computers in November. Quanta, another leading maker of notebook computers, said it will ship Crusoe-powered products to IBM Corp. later this year.
Gateway Inc. and America Online Inc. have also said they plan to use Transmeta processors for their jointly developed "Internet appliance" products that will go on sale later this year."
All the heavy hitters lining up to deploy the chip and Sony has so much faith that they're deploying it in their flagship portable.
Now if only sony would install dual booting linux at the factory, I'de buy them by the 6 pack!
It's branches, not brances, but I'm not one to nitpick on spelling.
All three branches have acted independatly to arrive at their own course of action regarding Napster. Having 3 branches of 'gubment means that a company or individual can survive the "shaving test". That is to say, if the president gets up in the morning, and cuts himself shaving, he can't fire everyone at Gillette. The pres. can have an opinion, but the other branches aren't obliged to act on it.
I read the same little blurb, and I almost spit out my coffee. I remember the day Frank went to washington and (intellectualy) ripped off Tippers head and shit down her neck. and to see that his wife is now giving so much to a elect a stuffed shirt like Algore is just too funny.
btw...there's an interesting interview with Gail Zappa here.
Re:"Will people PLEASE stop comparing Napster to gun use! Here's an Introduction to Analogies: the analogy should be something obviously true, that almost everyone agrees with.
..Then perhaps you should start to reconsider your point of view on this issue. Your false assumption that inatimate ojects cause harm is incorrect.
This company is trying to claim that they're not sending unsolicited email and then you find this in the article:
"Nearly half of the Harris Poll participants are registered when they sign up for Hotmail, for instance. They have to opt out in order to be removed from its e-mail lists.
The Mail Abuse Prevention System, known as MAPS, has done a good job keeping trollish garbage like this off of mail servers, and they should consinue without altering their practices. Harris has a home page that claims they are the leader in "internet market research". If it looks like Spam, and it walks like Spam, it's Spam.
On the other hand, Opensurvey.org has already gotten in bed with Harris.
The interesting thing with your question is, you're trying to attract a lot of people without attracting a lot of people. That is to say, you want to attract developers but not law enforcement. In this case, the "publish and subscribe" model of the web and mailing lists is clearly out.
I would suggest a private, secure newsgroup, hosted on your own machine, to allow only your developers to talk to each other. Think of it as your very own BBS for exchanging information and services. As a matter of fact, a BBS would be a pretty good way to a casual RIAA or MPAA port sniff. So ask your developers to dial into your box direct and keep it off the net.
As far as attracting new developers, this one is a little differant. They can't join a team they don't know exists, so look for trade mags and cheap "alternative newspapers" that have a lot of er umm "escort services" advertising in them. If they can advertise witout getting investigated, so can you. Getting their attention without tipping off "the man" won't be easy. It's a lot like winking in the dark. Sure, you know you're doing it, but does anybody else?
"American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act"
The name of this one sent up my bullshit alarm right away.
From the article:
"
One of the most pressing problems facing the Internet is the shortage of high-skilled workers. And since those workers can be found abroad, many high-tech companies are desperate to see Congress pass legislation that issues more special permits,or H-1B visas, so they can bring those workers to the United States. "
This a huuuuge load of BS. American companies want cheap labor to bring over indenured servants who spend 14 hours a day in their cubicle pounding it out for the man. Sacraficing their one and only youth in order not to be deported.
There is no IT labor shortage. There's a lack of cheap IT labor.
[mouth stops]"Oh my god it's farring apart at the seams" [mouth moves]
[mouth stops]
"Only mozzira can save us now" [mouth moves]
[Cue big green monster]
Slashdot Mirror
I should know, I have the big blue E with the swooshy thingie right there on top of my backstreet boys desktop wallpaper. How could you have the internet on *your* hard drive????
Hmmm The only mention of Algore in Hobbes internet timeline is the one in 1993 when whitehouse.gov went on-line.
Budist Munk bids: $0.03
Big Oil bids: $0.04
Chineese National bids: $0.05
Hmmm even with all of Algores biggest supporters, he's worthless.
I don't see much wrong with the model. If you're lucky enough to work for someone who pays you well, you may not feel so underpaid. On the other hand, the leader in a company takes risks, and can loose it all. The reward for that risk can and should be compensated to encourage more risk taking and foster economic growth. Being a business leader means you're the last one to get payed, and that's worth a lot. There are some other options.
1) Move to a socialist nation.
or
2) Start your own business.
"And who is the holding company, "Black Hole", who owns Event Horizon.com?!?! I never heard of them. I better turn on CNBC Squakbox and check out if the kahuna has news on movement at Black Hole.
Why sell 100M/sec for ~$20 a month into the home when you can sell it for ~$200 a month to a business.
You're leaving money on the table, and that's a bad business model. If you consider that Arpanet had ~56k truck lines (costing thousands) to connect computers in the late 70s and 80s, and today businesses are giving away 56k conectivity for "free", things move on.
Processor power and bandwidth make incrimental increaces in the marketplace, and have for 3 decades now, and I don't forsee a "leapfrogging" technology that makes it worth the investment. Remember, it's not just the speed of the fibre, it's the router/load ballance/server that has to keep up as well. By definition, internetoworking means "we're all in this together" so what good does paying through the nose for 100x jump in bandwidth if nothing else it's connected too can keep up.
The past 30+ years of computing has shown that Bandwidth and proccessor power are incrimental, and any jump in either has a limited life, before it's obsolete.
In my experience, it's bad business.
Don't pay someone a lot of money to do something they don't have the skill set to do. You don't send a script kiddie to do a gurus job in a network, and you don't send a veepee to fix a peecee. People (unlike computing) have limited skill sets and it's important for a business to get the most out them without expending a lot of money in wasted time.
If an employee teaches themselves (on their own time) to fix their computer when something goes wrong, they'll be a more productive person. On the other hand, I don't want a board member to cancel all his client meetings for the week because he can't figure out how to print out his presentation. You get an expert in to fix the issue and move on!
Put another way:
You've got 2 employees.
Alice and Bob.
Alice spent the weekend evaluating fixed wireless conectivity for the company network and Bob spent his weekend golfing with the clients son. On Monday the client calls to close the order and the network is down. Q:Do you put Alice on the phone with a client she doesn't know and Bob in the server room trying to find the "any" key?
A:No. People gravitate toward things they like doing and build their skill sets around that choice, and a good business will let them do that.
The shop consisted of a 3 tier management structure with the shop owner quoting us the job and handing it over to his designer who worked out the details to give to the guys on the floor to make. The owner ran "simple and easy to use acounting software" and wasn't willing to learn anything about what his designer was using. The disigner was using software with every fucking bell and whistle you could posibly imagine (and thus sisn't have time to mess with his PHBs doppy acounting stuff) and the guys on the floor were using a 15 year old 2D Gcode generator that was little more than a parsing script.
All of these "users" were locked in to their easy to use interfaces and never took the time to look at the big picture of how my job flowed through their shop. This is a perfect example of users being blinded by their easy to use interfaces, and not looking at the big picture.
The moral of the story?
After 4 hours of meetings, I thanked them for their time and started sending work to another shop that has ProE deployed all the way from the owners desk, to the guys on the floor. They all have shared access to the same solid model data and they're all "on the same page".
Yes! This is a perfect example of how the interface matches the user and why the author of the article has a group of people that would be considered "general users".
I agree that simplified design is a progression as apposed to a quantum leap. It's intuative to learn when you're faced with "old way =c:\winblows\desktop\mydocuments" and "new way=spiffy little button on the side".
You're also correct in your comments that this progression is a required step to move things forward. I think micros~1 has dropped the ball on this issue is they are moving forward, and forgeting the past. Relying exclusivly on the GUI and ignoring scripting, multi-user functionality, the CLI, and remote management, they have denyed users the "ease of use" they learned when they started learning computers.
In short, it's important to take steps forward in UI design, but don't throw out years of user training to achieve that goal.
No matter how easy you make it, some users still let their VCRs blink 12:00 [I never thought that I would actually have an application for using the blink tag, and now that I do, /. has it filtered :(].
I would agree that this is a good example "hiding the machine from the user", but this is just a natural progresion of computer science. Drum, Core, and Random Access Memory have all given spawn to their own file systems to help a user store and retrieve information from them. Extending this logic, one could say that a journaling file system "makes it to easy" and doesn't really teach the user about the computer they are using. Clearly, this is progress to welcomed with open arms.
Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis? All of these items would be educational to the user and give the user a better understanding of how and why his car works, but it would not help him get to work in the morning.
If the product has a target demographic that is very diverse and crosses many differant educational levels, the interface should match the market.
"(I should note here that I will be writing "students" all along when perhaps I should be saying "users" or something like that. The set of problems I will identify here is common to graduate students, instructors, staff, and undergraduates. However, I dislike the word users, and as a rhetoric and composition specialist my focus is teaching, so I'll be using "students" most of the time.)
Every student who takes a course in the NWE has a UNIX account with almost totally unrestricted Internet access. Students can make Web pages in one of the five NWE classrooms using one of several HTML editors available through our X-Windows interface. However, many students find the transition between the online environment and their home computer very unsettling."
The sample is flawed. Therefor, the conclusion is biased.
Yes, Newbies have trouble learning.
Yes, New network recourses require some learning.
Yes, New a interface requires going through a learning curve.
In short, this is little more than a helpdesk employee whinning about how stoooopid the CEO is for not remembering his subnet IP. Moreover, We've come a long way over the years to make computers easy and, if we would have never move toward "ease of use" we would all be writing our own drum memory drivers to push individual bits!
"Scientists aim to create a "radio quiet park", where nobody will be allowed to use mobile phones, TV, radio or walkie-talkies for fear their emissions could be mistaken for signs of alien life. The most likely site is in Australia."
I would hate to see the newsflash saying that first contact with an intelligent race of life from somehwere outside our own earth would sound like:
"Honey, don't forget to pickip johnny at practice."
"Hitachi Ltd. is slated to start selling Crusoe-powered notebook computers in November. Quanta, another leading maker of notebook computers, said it will ship Crusoe-powered products to IBM Corp. later this year.
Gateway Inc. and America Online Inc. have also said they plan to use Transmeta processors for their jointly developed "Internet appliance" products that will go on sale later this year."
All the heavy hitters lining up to deploy the chip and Sony has so much faith that they're deploying it in their flagship portable.
Now if only sony would install dual booting linux at the factory, I'de buy them by the 6 pack!
Black page!
All three branches have acted independatly to arrive at their own course of action regarding Napster. Having 3 branches of 'gubment means that a company or individual can survive the "shaving test". That is to say, if the president gets up in the morning, and cuts himself shaving, he can't fire everyone at Gillette. The pres. can have an opinion, but the other branches aren't obliged to act on it.
btw...there's an interesting interview with Gail Zappa here.
. .Then perhaps you should start to reconsider your point of view on this issue. Your false assumption that inatimate ojects cause harm is incorrect.
(wagging finger)
"I did not..have..sexual relations..with that drummer...Mr. Ulrich."
"Nearly half of the Harris Poll participants are registered when they sign up for Hotmail, for instance. They have to opt out in order to be removed from its e-mail lists.
The Mail Abuse Prevention System, known as MAPS, has done a good job keeping trollish garbage like this off of mail servers, and they should consinue without altering their practices. Harris has a home page that claims they are the leader in "internet market research". If it looks like Spam, and it walks like Spam, it's Spam.
On the other hand, Opensurvey.org has already gotten in bed with Harris.
I would suggest a private, secure newsgroup, hosted on your own machine, to allow only your developers to talk to each other. Think of it as your very own BBS for exchanging information and services. As a matter of fact, a BBS would be a pretty good way to a casual RIAA or MPAA port sniff. So ask your developers to dial into your box direct and keep it off the net.
As far as attracting new developers, this one is a little differant. They can't join a team they don't know exists, so look for trade mags and cheap "alternative newspapers" that have a lot of er umm "escort services" advertising in them. If they can advertise witout getting investigated, so can you. Getting their attention without tipping off "the man" won't be easy. It's a lot like winking in the dark. Sure, you know you're doing it, but does anybody else?
The name of this one sent up my bullshit alarm right away.
From the article:
" One of the most pressing problems facing the Internet is the shortage of high-skilled workers. And since those workers can be found abroad, many high-tech companies are desperate to see Congress pass legislation that issues more special permits,or H-1B visas, so they can bring those workers to the United States. "
This a huuuuge load of BS. American companies want cheap labor to bring over indenured servants who spend 14 hours a day in their cubicle pounding it out for the man. Sacraficing their one and only youth in order not to be deported.
There is no IT labor shortage. There's a lack of cheap IT labor.
Oompa Doompa Doompa de de.
I want Linux instead on NT.
[mouth stops]"Oh my god it's farring apart at the seams" [mouth moves]
[mouth stops] "Only mozzira can save us now" [mouth moves]
[Cue big green monster]