Plus the head office requires them to use a web app that requires IE with every security feature known to man turned off. It's terrifying. They've been told by the office and myself to never even use IE unless it's with the page in question. I'm not defending it; I'm saying it's that or no accounts-receivable.
See? This is how many, many people make a living--using software not available on Linux. Linux is a slow starter (if it's a starter at all) not because people are stupid or afraid of change or because they just haven't found the one manpage somewhere amid the sea of grammatically-and-orthographically-challenged manpages and forum postings that magically solves their driver problems; it's because the software they use to put food on the table doesn't run on it.
It makes me giggle about how Slashdot is probably the only community where one needs to point these things out. Seriously guys, we're in the tiny minority of computer users who even know what Linux is. There's some major echo chambering going on here.
See... Why is it that if I think Linux is little more than a hobbyist's toy on the desktop, I'm a troll? I'm still a nerd who likes news.
And just because there are apps available for Linux to do X, Y and Z doesn't address the parent's original point: They aren't the right apps. People need to use what other people are using. This is why we really only have 1.5 viable desktop platforms. I am migrating to Mac now because I've always liked MacOS better than Windows, and now that they are on Intel, it's trivial to just run both on the same machine well. That "0.5" is now looking more like a full 1.5.
This isn't the case with Linux. For the most part, the only apps available are ones no one has ever heard of, often with plenty of bugs to muddle through.
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of Linux. I use a whole grab-bag of FOSS utilities on both Windows and Mac. But I don't do my real work in them. In such cases, I use industry-standard tools. Until those run on Linux (and I hope that by then Linux can be coaxed into running right on everyone's hardware), Linux is a toy.
Yes. I don't like Linux not because it serves virtually none of my needs and is a hassle, but because I'm incompetent.
Read the parent for a list of things you can't run on Linux. That's what we are talking about. What is it with this idea that MS Office is the beginning and the end of people's software requirements?
I have no doubt I could have gotten my video issue worked out (this was in July). But after I did, what could I do with the computer? Type? I certainly couldn't use industry-standard tools to do my job. I'd have to make do with whatever some people hacked together in their spare time.
C'mon, seriously. Linux is just not an option for most people. I set up an Ubuntu system to give away a couple weeks ago. See how happy people are when you do that. The first time they come home from Wal-Mart with some $9 mahjongg game or something, only to find that it doesn't install, and will never install, they are grumpy and sad and want to know why.
Desktop Linux is for people who have above average computer skills, but below-average desktop computing needs. It's for people who use it all day at work for something it's good at (servers, etc.), and who just browse the web and/or watch vids at home. They are comfortable with it, and don't really need it to do much.
Slashdot is full of people who type plaintext for a living and seem to think that that is all anyone does with their computers. As long as there's a working keyboard driver, they're happy. The suggestion that I (or my friends who do design, or my parents who use enterprise software, or my colleagues who do stats) could make do with Linux is laughable. In my case, I have a very hard time even using a Mac, because of the statistical packages I use, only SPSS (which I use infrequently, but is essential) has a Mac version, and it doesn't even run on Intel (yet). I have all these packages running on XP in VMware Fusion on my Mac laptop (which I have been extremely impressed by).
Further, I'd like to point out that those "pointless Linux distro reviews" never explain how to get, say, your nVidia card to spit out more than 640x480 (the problem which stymied me last time I tried Linux), or how to get wifi to work, or any of the real problems you actually have after install.
Bah. My sig is sufficient to communicate my basic opinion.
I have been actively antagonistic toward consoles until a friend coerced and cajoled me into buying a 360.
I don't play PC games anymore. Granted, it doesn't look as good as the PC, but the overall game experience is... I dunno. Fun. I've been really pleasantly surprised.
'Course, it required getting an HDTV to be acceptable, but that has been nice, too. I scoffed at HDTVs as well, and was wrong about those, too, evidently.
I actually don't think Windows is that bad (well, Vista is pretty damned bad), but I recently bought a MacBook and have been mostly extremely impressed with what Apple's been doing while I wasn't looking. And Linux would be great on the desktop if it worked and if installing it wasn't merely a political statement and/or the act of a config-file-edit hobbyist (hence the sig).
You're right; I should be using Word, where the GUI is functional.
Styles are for things you're going to do many times. There are plenty of times when you just want to move the indent and move it back, for example. And OO.o sucks for that.
I use Word because of OO.o's failings with large documents. I'm not sure what problems you have with Word, but OO.o is a nightmare for serious writing (my master's thesis is where I stopped using OO.o and switched back to Word). Getting around in a 100+ page document in OO.o was a hassle, and as far as I could tell, it didn't support dynamic tables of contents, which was absolutely necessary for me.
Further, and this applies to all documents, and is utterly baffling, OO.o's tab/indent sliders just... slide. Anywhere. They don't stop at sane increments like they do in Word. They don't stop at sane increments like the tab/indent sliders on the electric typewriters the UI is emulating. They are a complete failure. If you want to change the indent (for a block of quoted text, say) and go back again, good luck getting to the same indent as what you used before, and good luck getting back. I'm sure you can just put the numbers into a dialog somewhere, and you can, of course, set a style, but both of those are a hell of a lot more time consuming and unintuitive as just clicking on the appropriate triangle, dragging it a couple clicks, typing/pasting, and dragging back.
And tables. Tables are a nightmare in OO.o. I can bang out a very nice-looking table in Word in a few seconds. In OO.o, it takes minutes. Given the large number of statistical tables I have in my writing, this, too, was a deal-breaker.
Whenever I read platitudes about OO.o, I just kind of roll my eyes. No one who has serious word-processing to do could make do with it, and Excel is such a critical app for so many industries, playing with Calc is just nuts. OO.o is an amazing deal for the money, but sometimes you really do get what you pay for. MS Office may not be perfect, but it's damn good, and I'm not ashamed to say so. Maybe one day the DOJ or FTC will grow a pair and split MS into an OS company and an app company so we can see Windows whiter under the crushing weight of its crappiness and MS Office made available on Linux, which will finally give Linux some real legs (and get it the cash and users necessary to elevate it from its own crappiness!).
In related news, it looks like Lyx might really help with writing scholarly articles... Maybe you'll see me singing the praises of that next time!
The smart kids are reviled and bullied here in Japan just like in the US. The only difference from the US is that here, people here love the captain of the baseball team. It really is no different. I say this as someone who has taught in every level of the Japanese education system, from first grade to university.
There is a push to study for tests here that is mistaken as a push to be smart and/or learn, but this is due to viewing East Asian culture through a Western/American cultural lens. Being smart isn't important; racking up scores is important--scores on tests that are famous in the world of psychometrics for having things like Cronbach alphas of like 0.70 (That means that it's only 70% reliable--there's a 30% chance that if you took the test again, you'd get a different score, to put it simply. Tests like the SAT, GRE, TOEFL, etc. don't go live until they can hit at least 0.90--these are high-stakes tests; you can't afford to be wrong about these things!).
Much of this is based on the Chinese Confucian system of public examinations. From long, long ago, China (forgive the lack of dates; it's been a lot of years since my Asian Studies undergrad) had a system of examinations to determine who got into public office. This was considerably more fair than the system of nepotism that came before it. Of course, the tests had nothing to do with the position; they were tests on things like rote-memorized Chinese literature, etc. Ask any Chinese friend who went to a traditional Chinese school (even outside of China) for an account of this nonsense--older teachers still do it. Of course, since this required huge amounts of time to prepare for, the only people who could pass these things were usually the idle rich aristocracy, so nothing really changed, but if someone worked his ass off, even if he was from a poor family, he could get a sweet government job with all the concubines he could eat (I may be adding that detail, but it's a good detail, so in it stays). This has led to the development of a culture of poorly-constructed, almost impossibly hard, high-stakes exams that stretches across China, through Korea, and into Japan.
Everything is still decided by difficult, slapdash tests of general knowledge here in Japan. They decide what high school you go to; they decide what college you go to; they decide what company you're accepted to (you are "accepted" to companies here, like you are accepted to university--you are a member of a "class," and you start with no particular job--no "major"--and the company works that out later). So Japanese (and Chinese and Korean) kids cram like mad for these things. This is mistaken abroad as a culture of intelligentsia. It is not. It is a culture of passing multiple-choice tests, and we in the US are so blind and stupid that we have decided to emulate it. It was a stupid idea a thousand years ago; it's a stupid idea now.
So there you go; Asia really isn't that different. It just looks different. The jocks still get the chicks, no matter where you go. As animals we're programmed to favor strong men and young, fertile women. That's what leads to the species not dying out. Culture can skew this a little bit (the distrust of smart people doesn't seem to be as big a problem in adult society here as it is in the US), but at the heart of it, we're all just stupid monkeys looking to get laid.
I have no doubt that I could get Linux to do everything I want it to do (well, except run real, industry-standard software... oh, and support all my hardware... oh, and play games... wait a minute... What DOES Linux do? Check email? What DOESN'T check email these days? But I digress...) but it's all about the time required. TFA is massively understating the time one has to spend at the command line in Linux. True, once (if) you get everything working correctly, you won't have to go out to a shell anymore, but it's the DAYS of getting the system to that point that makes it a no-go for me. I have better things to do.
My last Windows install, after format to all drivers being in and ready to go, took about an hour. I have tried installing Linux 3 times now, over the course of as many years (last time being a month or so ago), and I have NEVER gotten to that point. Even after days of reading forum postings and manpages--something that should never be considered part of a normal install process.
Actually, after my last Ubuntu debacle--and I mean like an hour after--I did make a switch--to the Mac. I still have my Windows box, but I note now that I'm typing this on my MacBook and I'm finding more and more that this is the computer I actually use more often than not. It (really) Just Works. It is solid and no-nonsense like Linux (e.g. it doesn't tell you in a popup every time it successfully connected to your wireless network, etc.), but there is software available for it that isn't hacked together by a bunch of hobbyists. Not that I actually have needed to buy much; it ships with actually useful accessories that actually do what they are advertised to do (iPhoto, iMovie). And when I set something up in the GUI, I'm very sure that it actually made the requested change to whatever config file it needed to without going digging for it to find out for sure (in the case of Linux, I'll save you some time wondering: No, it did not.).
Add to that that VMware Fusion works flawlessly booting my Boot Camp partition and letting me run my Windows-only apps right alongside my Mac apps, and only cost $40, and it's like I've gotten 2 computers for the price of one.
Windows IS free, as far as most people are concerned. And it still wins out over Linux. The Apple tax is high, and Mac users know it, but they'll still pay it because it's that much better than the two other free alternatives.
Good point. I've read a lot of accounts of a bunch of guys dressing up in police-style uniforms, reflective vests, and glowing red traffic batons jumping out of the dark and killing people who are foolhardy enough to stop. It's an epidemic. I recommend you gun it if that ever happens to you. Kill as many as possible. I'm sure the judge will understand when you explain that you did it because even though they LOOKED like police and IDENTIFIED THEMSELVES as police, you have a habit of running over pedestrians who startle you.
...You'd run five guys in police uniforms and reflective vests over for trying to breathalyze you? Um. Please don't come to Japan. They already think we foreigners are dangerous scofflaws without us killing unarmed police officers.
Thanks for beating the Chinese currency drum. People need to be more aware of that issue. It pisses me off to no end. China is cheating cheating cheating, and driving other economies down as well.
I live in Japan, which has been massively devaluing the yen recently, partly to compete with China, and also to keep interest rates low. As a result you might as well put your money under your mattress for all the good putting it in the bank does (I think I get something like 0.13%, and banks here charge you for every little thing--worse than Wells-Fargo in the US!) and my paycheck, which was pretty great when I took this job almost 3 years ago, is worth less every month when translated into more solid currencies like the USD or Euro.
Stupid corporate greed trumps sane fiscal policy every time. Corporations see the low price tag of manufacturing in China, and forget that everything's connected and that that they are going to pay in other ways.
Heheh, good point. I don't actually know how low they can detect, but they have stops where they just breathalyze everyone. You never see traps here (my license is currently suspended due to a speed trap) because they all hide out of sight. Then suddenly a bunch of police on foot come out of the bushes or an obscured side road and wave you over.
In the case of a sobriety check, they seem to do them in town a lot. You'll be driving up to a blind intersection on a Saturday night, and as you reach it, 5 guys come out of each side street and surround your car. One guy comes to your window, puts some weird microphone-looking thing in your face, asks you politely to breathe on it, and then tells you to have a nice evening.
I gotta say. The police here have a totally different strategy, and I suspect it works better than their US counterparts'. Here these guys absolutely kill you with kindness. Smother you with concern. The older guys act like concerned fathers; the younger guys like your mates who are just looking out for you. Granted, they're still cops trying to take away your money and your freedom for violating arbitrary rules, but at least they aren't dicks about it.
Yup. My brother spent 2 days in jail (with no record of it or the infraction--that's why he did it) for having ONE PINT which he drank over the course of 30 minutes and then drove home. He was pulled over for speeding, was breathalyzed, blew a.07, and was taken in for DWAI (DUI Jr.). When he went to his punitive alcohol class, he found that that was absolutely expected given his weight. If he'd waited like 15 minutes, he would have been fine.
But come ON. Who is impaired after ONE BEER? That's now my personal limit if I'm driving anywhere, though, and I wait an hour. Not because I'm too drunk to drive, but because the US is a police state.
I live in Japan now, where the limit is... anything over 0. This seems really draconian, until you see that there really is no reason to even worry about driving if you're going to be drinking. There are buses, there are trains, there are cabs, and there is even this really great service where if a night out for dinner "accidentally" becomes a night out drinking, 2 guys in a little tiny car come to where you've parked and one gets out and drives you home in your car while the other guy follows. It costs about the same as a cab ride (cabs here are expensive), but you AND your car get home safely! I have never really felt inconvenienced by the law here, even though it is much stricter than it is in the US, where I OFTEN feel inconvenienced, if not terrified.
You nailed it. I still have this Windows machine, but I recently bought a MacBook and I have to say: that is a nice OS. It's like Linux if Linux worked right, but with mainstream software support. The ability to have a bootable Windows partition (for games) or to be able to run that partition as a virtual machine (I use VMware Fusion) means that platforms basically don't apply to me anymore.
And yeah, my Xbox 360 is a damn nice product. It's more Mac-like in the way that it just works, and works well. It's part of the reason I bought a Mac. I enjoy games on the Xbox (with an HDTV) so much I didn't feel chained to Windows anymore and could start moving to the Mac. Kind of ironic. MS's great work on the Xbox lost them my OS business.
I just bought a MacBook a few weeks ago, and I was really worried about the keyboard, but I love it. It's hard as a rock. You can pound away at it and it has no flex at all.
And there you have why I haven't done much with it since moving to my new apartment in Tokyo. This building is crawling with kids, and, being Japanese kids, they do nothing but scream. Right outside my window. Right next to where I have to set my computer up.
But at least there's my office on campus. Only there there's a telephone and panicked coworkers asking for stats help with their unsalvageable research project 2 days before presenting at some conference. Not too bad during summer vacation, though.
You're confusing introvertedness and geekiness with Asperger's Syndrome. Yes, some people are introverted and geeky because they have difficulty dealing with noise, crowds, and people. However, other people -- like me -- simply like playing with cool toys.
I don't think I am, and "likes cool toys" is not a predictor of introversion as far as I've read. Asperger's Syndrome is characterized by more than just avoidance of input; it's characterized by "repetitive behavior patterns and impairment in social interaction" (Wikipedia). Introversion/extroversion is a psychological continuum, just like anything.
Granted, IANA psychologist, but I have done some research on the introversion/extroversion scale as it pertains to choice in language programs and therefore classroom environment and appropriate pedagogical expectations and best practices. Most of my understanding of the introversion/extroversion scale is based upon the lit review in the following:
Dewaele, J. M., Furnham, A. (1999). Extraversion: the unloved variable in applied linguistic research. Language Learning, 49, 3, 509-545.
and
Wakamoto, N. (2000). Language learning strategy and personality variables: focusing on extroversion and introversion. IRAL: International review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 38, 1, 71-82.
As such, I still hold that the Slashdot readership is probably leaning further toward the "introvert" end of the scale than what we'd expect to see among, say, mortgage salesmen.
I have used that site extensively for the design of my computer. It's the quietest PC I've ever encountered.
Noise is a huge problem these days, and I'd expect it to especially affect the Slashdot readership, since the majority of them are likely to be introverts. Introverts suffer from brain overstimulation all the time. Noise, crowds, situations that require constant attention to multiple variables, push us over the edge and drive us nuts. This is why we are drawn to jobs that require hours of uninterrupted attention, such as those in programming or academia. We find such things calming and are very good at them.
The effect of PC noise, however, is not one of which I was aware until I was working on my master's thesis and, just as an experiment, put on the noise-canceling headphones I use on planes while I was sitting at my desk writing. They killed the sound of my 3 80mm fans, the 60mm on my video card, and the smaller one on my southbridge. In one shot, I wrote for 6 hours straight, blissfully focused.
After that, I spent a lot of time and money upgrading my computer to be as silent as possible. I have a fanless PSU. A large, slow Zalman CPU cooler. I replaced the southbridge fan with a heatsink. I have a fanless video card. Air flow is achieved via 2 slow 120mm fans. Hard drives are mounted on rubber grommets.
All that being said, the computer is still noisier than I'd like, and 100% of the perceptible noise is that of the hard drives (well, CD/DVD drives don't really count, because you don't usually use them). I use only Seagate drives, which seem to be the quietest, but anything that could further reduce the whine (without mounting my drives on surgical tubing, something you can read about at SilentPCReview) would be absolutely welcome.
Just as the constant whine of an airplane's engines causes you to be exhausted at your destination, the constant whine of fans and other moving parts can exhaust you in front of your computer. I welcome any development to further reduce the noise footprint of today's PCs!
You were obviously older than most rock bands are when they start out. If you had a job, you are pretty much already in the "no future" camp, sad to say. I was very serious in my 20s, but as my 20s became my late 20s, I had to realize that nothing more than what I was doing was ever going to happen.
At least in those days, though, we could sell tapes and CDs and at least recoup some of the cost of making them...
Slashdot Mirror
Probably my favorite line in Burroughs' "A Thanksgiving Prayer" is:
Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind his
own business.
Sigh... Okay, here's a list from my parents' company (which I just got done installing and hence am all-too-familiar with):
Xactimate
Powerclaim
PenPro
Plus the head office requires them to use a web app that requires IE with every security feature known to man turned off. It's terrifying. They've been told by the office and myself to never even use IE unless it's with the page in question. I'm not defending it; I'm saying it's that or no accounts-receivable.
See? This is how many, many people make a living--using software not available on Linux. Linux is a slow starter (if it's a starter at all) not because people are stupid or afraid of change or because they just haven't found the one manpage somewhere amid the sea of grammatically-and-orthographically-challenged manpages and forum postings that magically solves their driver problems; it's because the software they use to put food on the table doesn't run on it.
It makes me giggle about how Slashdot is probably the only community where one needs to point these things out. Seriously guys, we're in the tiny minority of computer users who even know what Linux is. There's some major echo chambering going on here.
See... Why is it that if I think Linux is little more than a hobbyist's toy on the desktop, I'm a troll? I'm still a nerd who likes news.
And just because there are apps available for Linux to do X, Y and Z doesn't address the parent's original point: They aren't the right apps. People need to use what other people are using. This is why we really only have 1.5 viable desktop platforms. I am migrating to Mac now because I've always liked MacOS better than Windows, and now that they are on Intel, it's trivial to just run both on the same machine well. That "0.5" is now looking more like a full 1.5.
This isn't the case with Linux. For the most part, the only apps available are ones no one has ever heard of, often with plenty of bugs to muddle through.
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of Linux. I use a whole grab-bag of FOSS utilities on both Windows and Mac. But I don't do my real work in them. In such cases, I use industry-standard tools. Until those run on Linux (and I hope that by then Linux can be coaxed into running right on everyone's hardware), Linux is a toy.
Yes. I don't like Linux not because it serves virtually none of my needs and is a hassle, but because I'm incompetent.
Read the parent for a list of things you can't run on Linux. That's what we are talking about. What is it with this idea that MS Office is the beginning and the end of people's software requirements?
I have no doubt I could have gotten my video issue worked out (this was in July). But after I did, what could I do with the computer? Type? I certainly couldn't use industry-standard tools to do my job. I'd have to make do with whatever some people hacked together in their spare time.
C'mon, seriously. Linux is just not an option for most people. I set up an Ubuntu system to give away a couple weeks ago. See how happy people are when you do that. The first time they come home from Wal-Mart with some $9 mahjongg game or something, only to find that it doesn't install, and will never install, they are grumpy and sad and want to know why.
Desktop Linux is for people who have above average computer skills, but below-average desktop computing needs. It's for people who use it all day at work for something it's good at (servers, etc.), and who just browse the web and/or watch vids at home. They are comfortable with it, and don't really need it to do much.
That isn't me. That isn't anyone I know.
God bless you.
Slashdot is full of people who type plaintext for a living and seem to think that that is all anyone does with their computers. As long as there's a working keyboard driver, they're happy. The suggestion that I (or my friends who do design, or my parents who use enterprise software, or my colleagues who do stats) could make do with Linux is laughable. In my case, I have a very hard time even using a Mac, because of the statistical packages I use, only SPSS (which I use infrequently, but is essential) has a Mac version, and it doesn't even run on Intel (yet). I have all these packages running on XP in VMware Fusion on my Mac laptop (which I have been extremely impressed by).
Further, I'd like to point out that those "pointless Linux distro reviews" never explain how to get, say, your nVidia card to spit out more than 640x480 (the problem which stymied me last time I tried Linux), or how to get wifi to work, or any of the real problems you actually have after install.
Bah. My sig is sufficient to communicate my basic opinion.
I have been actively antagonistic toward consoles until a friend coerced and cajoled me into buying a 360.
I don't play PC games anymore. Granted, it doesn't look as good as the PC, but the overall game experience is... I dunno. Fun. I've been really pleasantly surprised.
'Course, it required getting an HDTV to be acceptable, but that has been nice, too. I scoffed at HDTVs as well, and was wrong about those, too, evidently.
I actually don't think Windows is that bad (well, Vista is pretty damned bad), but I recently bought a MacBook and have been mostly extremely impressed with what Apple's been doing while I wasn't looking. And Linux would be great on the desktop if it worked and if installing it wasn't merely a political statement and/or the act of a config-file-edit hobbyist (hence the sig).
Yeah, this has been an interesting thread.
You're right; I should be using Word, where the GUI is functional.
Styles are for things you're going to do many times. There are plenty of times when you just want to move the indent and move it back, for example. And OO.o sucks for that.
I use Word because of OO.o's failings with large documents. I'm not sure what problems you have with Word, but OO.o is a nightmare for serious writing (my master's thesis is where I stopped using OO.o and switched back to Word). Getting around in a 100+ page document in OO.o was a hassle, and as far as I could tell, it didn't support dynamic tables of contents, which was absolutely necessary for me.
Further, and this applies to all documents, and is utterly baffling, OO.o's tab/indent sliders just... slide. Anywhere. They don't stop at sane increments like they do in Word. They don't stop at sane increments like the tab/indent sliders on the electric typewriters the UI is emulating. They are a complete failure. If you want to change the indent (for a block of quoted text, say) and go back again, good luck getting to the same indent as what you used before, and good luck getting back. I'm sure you can just put the numbers into a dialog somewhere, and you can, of course, set a style, but both of those are a hell of a lot more time consuming and unintuitive as just clicking on the appropriate triangle, dragging it a couple clicks, typing/pasting, and dragging back.
And tables. Tables are a nightmare in OO.o. I can bang out a very nice-looking table in Word in a few seconds. In OO.o, it takes minutes. Given the large number of statistical tables I have in my writing, this, too, was a deal-breaker.
Whenever I read platitudes about OO.o, I just kind of roll my eyes. No one who has serious word-processing to do could make do with it, and Excel is such a critical app for so many industries, playing with Calc is just nuts. OO.o is an amazing deal for the money, but sometimes you really do get what you pay for. MS Office may not be perfect, but it's damn good, and I'm not ashamed to say so. Maybe one day the DOJ or FTC will grow a pair and split MS into an OS company and an app company so we can see Windows whiter under the crushing weight of its crappiness and MS Office made available on Linux, which will finally give Linux some real legs (and get it the cash and users necessary to elevate it from its own crappiness!).
In related news, it looks like Lyx might really help with writing scholarly articles... Maybe you'll see me singing the praises of that next time!
Bravo! A cogent post on the subject!
The smart kids are reviled and bullied here in Japan just like in the US. The only difference from the US is that here, people here love the captain of the baseball team. It really is no different. I say this as someone who has taught in every level of the Japanese education system, from first grade to university.
There is a push to study for tests here that is mistaken as a push to be smart and/or learn, but this is due to viewing East Asian culture through a Western/American cultural lens. Being smart isn't important; racking up scores is important--scores on tests that are famous in the world of psychometrics for having things like Cronbach alphas of like 0.70 (That means that it's only 70% reliable--there's a 30% chance that if you took the test again, you'd get a different score, to put it simply. Tests like the SAT, GRE, TOEFL, etc. don't go live until they can hit at least 0.90--these are high-stakes tests; you can't afford to be wrong about these things!).
Much of this is based on the Chinese Confucian system of public examinations. From long, long ago, China (forgive the lack of dates; it's been a lot of years since my Asian Studies undergrad) had a system of examinations to determine who got into public office. This was considerably more fair than the system of nepotism that came before it. Of course, the tests had nothing to do with the position; they were tests on things like rote-memorized Chinese literature, etc. Ask any Chinese friend who went to a traditional Chinese school (even outside of China) for an account of this nonsense--older teachers still do it. Of course, since this required huge amounts of time to prepare for, the only people who could pass these things were usually the idle rich aristocracy, so nothing really changed, but if someone worked his ass off, even if he was from a poor family, he could get a sweet government job with all the concubines he could eat (I may be adding that detail, but it's a good detail, so in it stays). This has led to the development of a culture of poorly-constructed, almost impossibly hard, high-stakes exams that stretches across China, through Korea, and into Japan.
Everything is still decided by difficult, slapdash tests of general knowledge here in Japan. They decide what high school you go to; they decide what college you go to; they decide what company you're accepted to (you are "accepted" to companies here, like you are accepted to university--you are a member of a "class," and you start with no particular job--no "major"--and the company works that out later). So Japanese (and Chinese and Korean) kids cram like mad for these things. This is mistaken abroad as a culture of intelligentsia. It is not. It is a culture of passing multiple-choice tests, and we in the US are so blind and stupid that we have decided to emulate it. It was a stupid idea a thousand years ago; it's a stupid idea now.
So there you go; Asia really isn't that different. It just looks different. The jocks still get the chicks, no matter where you go. As animals we're programmed to favor strong men and young, fertile women. That's what leads to the species not dying out. Culture can skew this a little bit (the distrust of smart people doesn't seem to be as big a problem in adult society here as it is in the US), but at the heart of it, we're all just stupid monkeys looking to get laid.
Yes.
I have no doubt that I could get Linux to do everything I want it to do (well, except run real, industry-standard software... oh, and support all my hardware... oh, and play games... wait a minute... What DOES Linux do? Check email? What DOESN'T check email these days? But I digress...) but it's all about the time required. TFA is massively understating the time one has to spend at the command line in Linux. True, once (if) you get everything working correctly, you won't have to go out to a shell anymore, but it's the DAYS of getting the system to that point that makes it a no-go for me. I have better things to do.
My last Windows install, after format to all drivers being in and ready to go, took about an hour. I have tried installing Linux 3 times now, over the course of as many years (last time being a month or so ago), and I have NEVER gotten to that point. Even after days of reading forum postings and manpages--something that should never be considered part of a normal install process.
Actually, after my last Ubuntu debacle--and I mean like an hour after--I did make a switch--to the Mac. I still have my Windows box, but I note now that I'm typing this on my MacBook and I'm finding more and more that this is the computer I actually use more often than not. It (really) Just Works. It is solid and no-nonsense like Linux (e.g. it doesn't tell you in a popup every time it successfully connected to your wireless network, etc.), but there is software available for it that isn't hacked together by a bunch of hobbyists. Not that I actually have needed to buy much; it ships with actually useful accessories that actually do what they are advertised to do (iPhoto, iMovie). And when I set something up in the GUI, I'm very sure that it actually made the requested change to whatever config file it needed to without going digging for it to find out for sure (in the case of Linux, I'll save you some time wondering: No, it did not.).
Add to that that VMware Fusion works flawlessly booting my Boot Camp partition and letting me run my Windows-only apps right alongside my Mac apps, and only cost $40, and it's like I've gotten 2 computers for the price of one.
Windows IS free, as far as most people are concerned. And it still wins out over Linux. The Apple tax is high, and Mac users know it, but they'll still pay it because it's that much better than the two other free alternatives.
Good point. I've read a lot of accounts of a bunch of guys dressing up in police-style uniforms, reflective vests, and glowing red traffic batons jumping out of the dark and killing people who are foolhardy enough to stop. It's an epidemic. I recommend you gun it if that ever happens to you. Kill as many as possible. I'm sure the judge will understand when you explain that you did it because even though they LOOKED like police and IDENTIFIED THEMSELVES as police, you have a habit of running over pedestrians who startle you.
...You'd run five guys in police uniforms and reflective vests over for trying to breathalyze you? Um. Please don't come to Japan. They already think we foreigners are dangerous scofflaws without us killing unarmed police officers.
Thanks for beating the Chinese currency drum. People need to be more aware of that issue. It pisses me off to no end. China is cheating cheating cheating, and driving other economies down as well.
I live in Japan, which has been massively devaluing the yen recently, partly to compete with China, and also to keep interest rates low. As a result you might as well put your money under your mattress for all the good putting it in the bank does (I think I get something like 0.13%, and banks here charge you for every little thing--worse than Wells-Fargo in the US!) and my paycheck, which was pretty great when I took this job almost 3 years ago, is worth less every month when translated into more solid currencies like the USD or Euro.
Stupid corporate greed trumps sane fiscal policy every time. Corporations see the low price tag of manufacturing in China, and forget that everything's connected and that that they are going to pay in other ways.
Heheh, good point. I don't actually know how low they can detect, but they have stops where they just breathalyze everyone. You never see traps here (my license is currently suspended due to a speed trap) because they all hide out of sight. Then suddenly a bunch of police on foot come out of the bushes or an obscured side road and wave you over.
In the case of a sobriety check, they seem to do them in town a lot. You'll be driving up to a blind intersection on a Saturday night, and as you reach it, 5 guys come out of each side street and surround your car. One guy comes to your window, puts some weird microphone-looking thing in your face, asks you politely to breathe on it, and then tells you to have a nice evening.
I gotta say. The police here have a totally different strategy, and I suspect it works better than their US counterparts'. Here these guys absolutely kill you with kindness. Smother you with concern. The older guys act like concerned fathers; the younger guys like your mates who are just looking out for you. Granted, they're still cops trying to take away your money and your freedom for violating arbitrary rules, but at least they aren't dicks about it.
Yup. My brother spent 2 days in jail (with no record of it or the infraction--that's why he did it) for having ONE PINT which he drank over the course of 30 minutes and then drove home. He was pulled over for speeding, was breathalyzed, blew a .07, and was taken in for DWAI (DUI Jr.). When he went to his punitive alcohol class, he found that that was absolutely expected given his weight. If he'd waited like 15 minutes, he would have been fine.
But come ON. Who is impaired after ONE BEER? That's now my personal limit if I'm driving anywhere, though, and I wait an hour. Not because I'm too drunk to drive, but because the US is a police state.
I live in Japan now, where the limit is... anything over 0. This seems really draconian, until you see that there really is no reason to even worry about driving if you're going to be drinking. There are buses, there are trains, there are cabs, and there is even this really great service where if a night out for dinner "accidentally" becomes a night out drinking, 2 guys in a little tiny car come to where you've parked and one gets out and drives you home in your car while the other guy follows. It costs about the same as a cab ride (cabs here are expensive), but you AND your car get home safely! I have never really felt inconvenienced by the law here, even though it is much stricter than it is in the US, where I OFTEN feel inconvenienced, if not terrified.
You nailed it. I still have this Windows machine, but I recently bought a MacBook and I have to say: that is a nice OS. It's like Linux if Linux worked right, but with mainstream software support. The ability to have a bootable Windows partition (for games) or to be able to run that partition as a virtual machine (I use VMware Fusion) means that platforms basically don't apply to me anymore.
And yeah, my Xbox 360 is a damn nice product. It's more Mac-like in the way that it just works, and works well. It's part of the reason I bought a Mac. I enjoy games on the Xbox (with an HDTV) so much I didn't feel chained to Windows anymore and could start moving to the Mac. Kind of ironic. MS's great work on the Xbox lost them my OS business.
I just bought a MacBook a few weeks ago, and I was really worried about the keyboard, but I love it. It's hard as a rock. You can pound away at it and it has no flex at all.
And there you have why I haven't done much with it since moving to my new apartment in Tokyo. This building is crawling with kids, and, being Japanese kids, they do nothing but scream. Right outside my window. Right next to where I have to set my computer up.
But at least there's my office on campus. Only there there's a telephone and panicked coworkers asking for stats help with their unsalvageable research project 2 days before presenting at some conference. Not too bad during summer vacation, though.
I don't think I am, and "likes cool toys" is not a predictor of introversion as far as I've read. Asperger's Syndrome is characterized by more than just avoidance of input; it's characterized by "repetitive behavior patterns and impairment in social interaction" (Wikipedia). Introversion/extroversion is a psychological continuum, just like anything.
Granted, IANA psychologist, but I have done some research on the introversion/extroversion scale as it pertains to choice in language programs and therefore classroom environment and appropriate pedagogical expectations and best practices. Most of my understanding of the introversion/extroversion scale is based upon the lit review in the following:
Dewaele, J. M., Furnham, A. (1999). Extraversion: the unloved variable in applied linguistic research. Language Learning, 49, 3, 509-545.
and
Wakamoto, N. (2000). Language learning strategy and personality variables: focusing on extroversion and introversion. IRAL: International review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 38, 1, 71-82.
As such, I still hold that the Slashdot readership is probably leaning further toward the "introvert" end of the scale than what we'd expect to see among, say, mortgage salesmen.
I have used that site extensively for the design of my computer. It's the quietest PC I've ever encountered.
Noise is a huge problem these days, and I'd expect it to especially affect the Slashdot readership, since the majority of them are likely to be introverts. Introverts suffer from brain overstimulation all the time. Noise, crowds, situations that require constant attention to multiple variables, push us over the edge and drive us nuts. This is why we are drawn to jobs that require hours of uninterrupted attention, such as those in programming or academia. We find such things calming and are very good at them.
The effect of PC noise, however, is not one of which I was aware until I was working on my master's thesis and, just as an experiment, put on the noise-canceling headphones I use on planes while I was sitting at my desk writing. They killed the sound of my 3 80mm fans, the 60mm on my video card, and the smaller one on my southbridge. In one shot, I wrote for 6 hours straight, blissfully focused.
After that, I spent a lot of time and money upgrading my computer to be as silent as possible. I have a fanless PSU. A large, slow Zalman CPU cooler. I replaced the southbridge fan with a heatsink. I have a fanless video card. Air flow is achieved via 2 slow 120mm fans. Hard drives are mounted on rubber grommets.
All that being said, the computer is still noisier than I'd like, and 100% of the perceptible noise is that of the hard drives (well, CD/DVD drives don't really count, because you don't usually use them). I use only Seagate drives, which seem to be the quietest, but anything that could further reduce the whine (without mounting my drives on surgical tubing, something you can read about at SilentPCReview) would be absolutely welcome.
Just as the constant whine of an airplane's engines causes you to be exhausted at your destination, the constant whine of fans and other moving parts can exhaust you in front of your computer. I welcome any development to further reduce the noise footprint of today's PCs!
You spelled "ridiculous" correctly? 'Round here we definately spell that "rediculous." You know, because we're illiterate.
Thanks, Doc! A well-worded comment from someone who can probably spell "ridiculous" and "definitely!"
You were obviously older than most rock bands are when they start out. If you had a job, you are pretty much already in the "no future" camp, sad to say. I was very serious in my 20s, but as my 20s became my late 20s, I had to realize that nothing more than what I was doing was ever going to happen.
At least in those days, though, we could sell tapes and CDs and at least recoup some of the cost of making them...