In the end all it does is take control away from the user
Most users don't want control. They want to get on with what they want to do without having to configure everything themselves.
regardless of the software being open or not. I can see it being used for a business so that employees can take their work home with them
Nope, that's what VPN is for.
Cloud services are good because somebody else is taking care of the boring parts for you - like being on-call 24/7 to make sure your services stay running so that you don't have to. I'm considering moving our email to external hosting so that I don't have to worry about redundancy and reliability issues myself, and also because you get constant feature upgrades without having to buy and install new versions of Exchange every couple of years (not that I do that anyway - I only upgrade when we actually need new features). I'd consider moving our internal web applications infrastructure to cloud hosting if its resource requirements grew massively, but I doubt that will happen.
but once you start trusting others with your data, you're going down a dangerous path.
It depends on the data, and whether it's encrypted for one thing. There are certain things that you want to keep in-house, but a lot of day to day business is pretty mundane stuff. Our email is already filtered via a third party, so all of our email is going through them unencrypted anyway. I wouldn't have a problem moving all of our email out of house. One benefit of that is that the email service I was looking at has a higher SLA than our ISP provides, so when our internet goes down (which annoyingly happens around once a year, last time was some kind of interface card burning out at our local exchange), people will be able to use their phones as modems and still get their email since it's hosted elsewhere.
You speak as if day to day life itself is any less of a game.
I can't imagine why people should care about what your view of "life" is, if they're enjoying themselves. No, I have never played Eve or WoW. I probably would have got into Eve if there weren't any stupid RPG skill building elements in there though. I do think that it is unhealthy to not get out and do a bit of exercise every so often, but besides that, who cares if these guys get their kicks from playing computer games vs going out to bars or any of the other boring, meaningless crap that most people do?
That's pretty bizarre. I hope the **AAs don't find a way to make a similar license (though their massive extension of copyright is about the same thing for most of those execs - they probably don't care what happens to things after they die).
Wow, that sounds like fun! Surely if we force people for long enough then they'll start to enjoy it? Well yes, it's called Stockholm Syndrome, but it's not the ideal.
Some people just don't enjoy that. Lots of humans are social, but some aren't. It doesn't mean they need to "learn to be human". If this kid enjoys the sports then great, but if he'd prefer to be doing his own thing, why torture him like that? There's no need to stop him having fun just because he doesn't conform to your idea of what a kid should be.
How can you possibly know if you enjoy something after only a week or two? You enjoy something when you start to become proficient at it, and that (generally speaking) takes practice.
I enjoy things that I enjoy. I am naturally proficient with a lot of stuff that I don't especially enjoy, and I enjoy some things that I'm not that great at. I then work to become better at those things. Actually, often once I've become proficient, I lose interest and move on to a new challenge.
Maybe some people don't enjoy anything unless they're good at it, but I don't think it's the case for the majority of people. Look at the number of people out there who enjoy computer games despite being quite frankly pathetic at them.
If you're primarily doing things to show off, then I suppose you would only enjoy things that you're good at.
Sorry, I don't quite get the "joke". Try kayaking, SCUBA diving, and windsurfing.
That's a pretty narrow minded view of what a human is. I hate team sports. I like some sports, but not team sports. I can't predict people well enough or something. If I'm playing football (soccer) I often end up just kicking people's legs out from under them, or if I'm playing basketball I'll end up slamming into people and maybe knocking them over. I don't think it's especially a lack of coordination, as I'm fine at martial arts, watersports, Parkour, etc.
Then again, some people just don't enjoy sports. I just think it's wrong to force him to do things for a certain amount of time, rather than give him options. Sure, get him to try something out for a week or two, as he might really enjoy some sports that he hasn't even considered doing - but don't force him into it if he doesn't want to do it.
I know I could have skipped a year of high school, and 2 or 3 of primary school without really missing out on anything. In fact I did skip a year one time when we moved house, but then we moved back to the original place and I went back to being in the same class. Even when we were back in the original place me and 4 other kids were put in the class above though, as there wasn't any space left in the class of kids our age. So I guess I both skipped a year and repeated one, hadn't really looked at it that way before.. anyway, like you I did great in school, got good exam results without trying so learned to stop actually studying.. in our preliminary exams one time I got 3 As and a B, so I focused on the class that I got a B in (Physics), ended up getting an A in the finals. Though for the other classes I got Bs.. go figure.
My dad died the year after that, and I got seriously depressed throughout University - a lot of the reason for that is that I was studying computing, and that reminded me of my dad since he was the one that taught me about programming and computers in the first place.. I saw my transcript a few days ago. All 19s or 20s out of 20 for my computing classes in my first year, but then everything started sliding downhill as I got more depressed. I was on anti-depressants by 3rd year and I felt pretty cloudy all the time. I somehow got a 19 or 20 on formal languages and compilers in 3rd year though - I guess that class just really clicked with me - though I can't really remember anything I did back then. More because of the drugs than the time interval I think. Everything from 18-24 seems just like a cloudy dark mass.
Since University I've started making a few changes to my attitude and lifestyle to get healthy and try to focus on positive goals. I've recently started enjoying programming again and am looking to either do my own projects or help out with something I'm interested in. I feel like I've wasted 10 years in some ways, but I'm happy now that I'm on the right track again. I think it's best not to be too bothered about the past - just make the most of your future. I'm now both more physically and mentally fit than I've ever been in my life. We don't really start going downhill until our 40s, and even then if you keep using your body and your mind, you can keep both in good health for a long time, barring any degenerative disease.
Anyway for this specific kid, sure let him learn all he wants in his spare time, but I don't think they should try to push him or take him away from his school unless he wants to. They might kill his enjoyment of learning for one thing, or simply burn him out.
Okay, I'm not upset he's gone in the least, but he did spurn a massive change in mobile computing.
We had nice phone hardware for years before the iPhone came out, but the OSes sucked. The features were there, but they weren't anywhere near as nice to use as on current phones.
The first iPhone actually sucked on both hardware and software features (I don't think you could even send SMS messages?), but it used the first OS ever that actually had a good touch interface. All other interfaces before that you really needed a stylus to use effectively (well, I used the tip of my nail somewhat successfully on my Windows Mobile devices, but it wasn't anywhere near as nice as using a modern capacitive screen with large buttons).
I was very thankful that the iPhone came out, even though I never had a desire to own one. It forced the telephone industry to stop being so lazy.
That's a bit of an over-generalisation. I knew since I was 12 that I wanted to be a programmer. I also knew I didn't want to make a career out of working in McDonalds. If these kids want to be douchebags and make it cool to be dumb, then let them do it. Then they can teach their kids not to do the same, unless they're really that stuck up that they can't even admit by then that they made the wrong choice..
I don't see why you'd need to sort people into folders (apart from in the annoying chain mail forwarder's case).
I have folders for separate projects that I work on. Within those folders I have a "Documentation" folder, and a "completed folder".
If I get an email from someone asking me to add some feature to a specific application, I put it in the relevant folder (or if they ask me in person I'll often just send myself an email and file it in that folder). Once it's completed, I move it to the completed folder. Since I started filing things this way I've felt much more on top of things.
Tagging would work in a similar way, sure, but I don't really care. As some have already pointed out, searching within folders should reduce the search space too, rather than having to search by tags and then subconditions.
On a related note, when I've tried to maintain a separate to-do list on my computer it just gets neglected. Simply filing the emails means I don't have to type up to-dos, I can just drag and drop. I would forget to update my to-do list or even look at it really - and indeed sometimes some folders in my inbox still get forgotten about occasionally if I am busy on other projects, but I guess there's only so many things I can work on at once. It takes a while to shift your brain from one project's code base to another, so it's better to work on things in chunks, clear out the folder then move to another one.
My coworker started writing out his to-do list on a whiteboard in our office, and I tried it out too. I find it a lot more useful than a computer based list - I guess because when you get bored and absent-mindedly look around your office, you see the massive whiteboard list and it reminds you that you have stuff to do. Contrast with a tiny little system tray icon or a to-do list that you have to click your way through to in your email client, both of which are easy to filter out and forget about. I can put my most important tasks up on the whiteboard and work my way through them, then when I'm done it's a good time to look through all of my project folders and put the next set of stuff up on the board. Hopefully I won't end up needing something to further prioritise whiteboard tasks:p
I'm not a shill because I don't get paid to write half truths. Disliking Microsoft is just something that I've been doing for years before I'd heard of the internet. That makes me a kind of anti-fanboi or something, but not a shill.
Seems you're right, and that my "knowledge" of this area actually comes from sensationalist Slashdot headlines/comments at the time of the PlaysForSure debacle.
I really like the look of Pyjamas, another poster mentioned it. I was planning on trying out Python soon anyway, and Pyjamas seems to be a very, very nice way to create portable apps that can be run normally as Python apps under Linux and Windows, or compile to JavaScript for running in browsers (as long as you use no C libraries). Very cool.
Having read TFA (well, the README), it's as the summary says and the only really new thing here is the HTML5 storage driver. So my last comment would have been better made on the previous article about JS/Linux. This storage driver is very useful if you want to mess around in JS/Linux, so it was a brilliant idea. It would be pretty funny to see X on this, maybe even with WebGL 3D acceleration.. I certainly wouldn't want to wait around for it to compile natively though!
The special thing about it, is that it's available on almost any modern computing device, down to phones. It's become the Windows of programming languages in a way - not the best option, but it's just so damn common that you should at least learn to use it. I don't know why we don't have any alternative scripting languages for browsers yet. CoffeeScript looks nice, but it just compiles down to JavaScript anyway.. so not the most efficient way to do things if you need to ship your framework as libraries on your website rather than it being built into the browser.
I did suspect that Ruby was a bit of a fad, but it is a nice language all the same.
I think it's very cool. Technical, yes. Difficult? Probably not that difficult seeing as Linux is designed to be amazingly portable. It doesn't even need the C standard IO library to compile, so really you'd just need to emulate a few low level interfaces for things like memory access, keyboard input and a terminal display. There are a few different ways to implement it, but if he has it running quickly then that would be quite impressive:)
While saying that I'm better than my friends at Tetris and pointing out I got all golds on GT5 wasn't strictly necessary (I just mentioned them because I thought some readers would think "yeah but you suck at games, so making an AI play better than yo would be easy), I guess I'll point out one thing which some might assume to be arrogant if they've never looked into race AI or racing physics:
Making an AI that races around a track consistently better than a human is already known to be quite simple. Even the best of human drivers still occasionally make mistakes,. Getting AI to drive round a track well in bad/variable weather would be more of a challenge, but in the end it's still something that computers are well suited to.
Slashdot Mirror
In the end all it does is take control away from the user
Most users don't want control. They want to get on with what they want to do without having to configure everything themselves.
regardless of the software being open or not. I can see it being used for a business so that employees can take their work home with them
Nope, that's what VPN is for.
Cloud services are good because somebody else is taking care of the boring parts for you - like being on-call 24/7 to make sure your services stay running so that you don't have to. I'm considering moving our email to external hosting so that I don't have to worry about redundancy and reliability issues myself, and also because you get constant feature upgrades without having to buy and install new versions of Exchange every couple of years (not that I do that anyway - I only upgrade when we actually need new features). I'd consider moving our internal web applications infrastructure to cloud hosting if its resource requirements grew massively, but I doubt that will happen.
but once you start trusting others with your data, you're going down a dangerous path.
It depends on the data, and whether it's encrypted for one thing. There are certain things that you want to keep in-house, but a lot of day to day business is pretty mundane stuff. Our email is already filtered via a third party, so all of our email is going through them unencrypted anyway. I wouldn't have a problem moving all of our email out of house. One benefit of that is that the email service I was looking at has a higher SLA than our ISP provides, so when our internet goes down (which annoyingly happens around once a year, last time was some kind of interface card burning out at our local exchange), people will be able to use their phones as modems and still get their email since it's hosted elsewhere.
You speak as if day to day life itself is any less of a game.
I can't imagine why people should care about what your view of "life" is, if they're enjoying themselves. No, I have never played Eve or WoW. I probably would have got into Eve if there weren't any stupid RPG skill building elements in there though. I do think that it is unhealthy to not get out and do a bit of exercise every so often, but besides that, who cares if these guys get their kicks from playing computer games vs going out to bars or any of the other boring, meaningless crap that most people do?
That's pretty bizarre. I hope the **AAs don't find a way to make a similar license (though their massive extension of copyright is about the same thing for most of those execs - they probably don't care what happens to things after they die).
Wow, that sounds like fun! Surely if we force people for long enough then they'll start to enjoy it? Well yes, it's called Stockholm Syndrome, but it's not the ideal.
Some people just don't enjoy that. Lots of humans are social, but some aren't. It doesn't mean they need to "learn to be human". If this kid enjoys the sports then great, but if he'd prefer to be doing his own thing, why torture him like that? There's no need to stop him having fun just because he doesn't conform to your idea of what a kid should be.
How can you possibly know if you enjoy something after only a week or two? You enjoy something when you start to become proficient at it, and that (generally speaking) takes practice.
I enjoy things that I enjoy. I am naturally proficient with a lot of stuff that I don't especially enjoy, and I enjoy some things that I'm not that great at. I then work to become better at those things. Actually, often once I've become proficient, I lose interest and move on to a new challenge.
Maybe some people don't enjoy anything unless they're good at it, but I don't think it's the case for the majority of people. Look at the number of people out there who enjoy computer games despite being quite frankly pathetic at them.
If you're primarily doing things to show off, then I suppose you would only enjoy things that you're good at.
Sorry, I don't quite get the "joke". Try kayaking, SCUBA diving, and windsurfing.
That's a pretty narrow minded view of what a human is. I hate team sports. I like some sports, but not team sports. I can't predict people well enough or something. If I'm playing football (soccer) I often end up just kicking people's legs out from under them, or if I'm playing basketball I'll end up slamming into people and maybe knocking them over. I don't think it's especially a lack of coordination, as I'm fine at martial arts, watersports, Parkour, etc.
Then again, some people just don't enjoy sports. I just think it's wrong to force him to do things for a certain amount of time, rather than give him options. Sure, get him to try something out for a week or two, as he might really enjoy some sports that he hasn't even considered doing - but don't force him into it if he doesn't want to do it.
I know I could have skipped a year of high school, and 2 or 3 of primary school without really missing out on anything. In fact I did skip a year one time when we moved house, but then we moved back to the original place and I went back to being in the same class. Even when we were back in the original place me and 4 other kids were put in the class above though, as there wasn't any space left in the class of kids our age. So I guess I both skipped a year and repeated one, hadn't really looked at it that way before.. anyway, like you I did great in school, got good exam results without trying so learned to stop actually studying.. in our preliminary exams one time I got 3 As and a B, so I focused on the class that I got a B in (Physics), ended up getting an A in the finals. Though for the other classes I got Bs.. go figure.
My dad died the year after that, and I got seriously depressed throughout University - a lot of the reason for that is that I was studying computing, and that reminded me of my dad since he was the one that taught me about programming and computers in the first place.. I saw my transcript a few days ago. All 19s or 20s out of 20 for my computing classes in my first year, but then everything started sliding downhill as I got more depressed. I was on anti-depressants by 3rd year and I felt pretty cloudy all the time. I somehow got a 19 or 20 on formal languages and compilers in 3rd year though - I guess that class just really clicked with me - though I can't really remember anything I did back then. More because of the drugs than the time interval I think. Everything from 18-24 seems just like a cloudy dark mass.
Since University I've started making a few changes to my attitude and lifestyle to get healthy and try to focus on positive goals. I've recently started enjoying programming again and am looking to either do my own projects or help out with something I'm interested in. I feel like I've wasted 10 years in some ways, but I'm happy now that I'm on the right track again. I think it's best not to be too bothered about the past - just make the most of your future. I'm now both more physically and mentally fit than I've ever been in my life. We don't really start going downhill until our 40s, and even then if you keep using your body and your mind, you can keep both in good health for a long time, barring any degenerative disease.
Anyway for this specific kid, sure let him learn all he wants in his spare time, but I don't think they should try to push him or take him away from his school unless he wants to. They might kill his enjoyment of learning for one thing, or simply burn him out.
That is interesting. In 100 years surely some older versions of GPLed software will be in the public domain?
Okay, I'm not upset he's gone in the least, but he did spurn a massive change in mobile computing.
We had nice phone hardware for years before the iPhone came out, but the OSes sucked. The features were there, but they weren't anywhere near as nice to use as on current phones.
The first iPhone actually sucked on both hardware and software features (I don't think you could even send SMS messages?), but it used the first OS ever that actually had a good touch interface. All other interfaces before that you really needed a stylus to use effectively (well, I used the tip of my nail somewhat successfully on my Windows Mobile devices, but it wasn't anywhere near as nice as using a modern capacitive screen with large buttons).
I was very thankful that the iPhone came out, even though I never had a desire to own one. It forced the telephone industry to stop being so lazy.
Censorship, not compliance[duh]
That's a bit of an over-generalisation. I knew since I was 12 that I wanted to be a programmer. I also knew I didn't want to make a career out of working in McDonalds. If these kids want to be douchebags and make it cool to be dumb, then let them do it. Then they can teach their kids not to do the same, unless they're really that stuck up that they can't even admit by then that they made the wrong choice..
Good on them. If they can make working at McDonalds feel better than doing an interesting job, then so be it.
I don't see why you'd need to sort people into folders (apart from in the annoying chain mail forwarder's case).
I have folders for separate projects that I work on. Within those folders I have a "Documentation" folder, and a "completed folder".
If I get an email from someone asking me to add some feature to a specific application, I put it in the relevant folder (or if they ask me in person I'll often just send myself an email and file it in that folder). Once it's completed, I move it to the completed folder. Since I started filing things this way I've felt much more on top of things.
Tagging would work in a similar way, sure, but I don't really care. As some have already pointed out, searching within folders should reduce the search space too, rather than having to search by tags and then subconditions.
On a related note, when I've tried to maintain a separate to-do list on my computer it just gets neglected. Simply filing the emails means I don't have to type up to-dos, I can just drag and drop. I would forget to update my to-do list or even look at it really - and indeed sometimes some folders in my inbox still get forgotten about occasionally if I am busy on other projects, but I guess there's only so many things I can work on at once. It takes a while to shift your brain from one project's code base to another, so it's better to work on things in chunks, clear out the folder then move to another one.
My coworker started writing out his to-do list on a whiteboard in our office, and I tried it out too. I find it a lot more useful than a computer based list - I guess because when you get bored and absent-mindedly look around your office, you see the massive whiteboard list and it reminds you that you have stuff to do. Contrast with a tiny little system tray icon or a to-do list that you have to click your way through to in your email client, both of which are easy to filter out and forget about. I can put my most important tasks up on the whiteboard and work my way through them, then when I'm done it's a good time to look through all of my project folders and put the next set of stuff up on the board. Hopefully I won't end up needing something to further prioritise whiteboard tasks :p
I'm not a shill because I don't get paid to write half truths. Disliking Microsoft is just something that I've been doing for years before I'd heard of the internet. That makes me a kind of anti-fanboi or something, but not a shill.
Seems you're right, and that my "knowledge" of this area actually comes from sensationalist Slashdot headlines/comments at the time of the PlaysForSure debacle.
Wow.. dozens of people..? Crazy! I agree, there can't be enough other people left in the world to buy a small set of new iPhones..
(I guess when I wrote my original comment, I didn't know that though - but then I read TFA)
I know it is. It's still linux running on JavaScript in a browser, even if it's not as efficient as it could be.
I really like the look of Pyjamas, another poster mentioned it. I was planning on trying out Python soon anyway, and Pyjamas seems to be a very, very nice way to create portable apps that can be run normally as Python apps under Linux and Windows, or compile to JavaScript for running in browsers (as long as you use no C libraries). Very cool.
I wasn't meaning "you" as in the GP. I was making an analogy that like it or not, you're going to need it in future if you're in certain lnes of work
You have no clue what you're talking about.
Having read TFA (well, the README), it's as the summary says and the only really new thing here is the HTML5 storage driver. So my last comment would have been better made on the previous article about JS/Linux. This storage driver is very useful if you want to mess around in JS/Linux, so it was a brilliant idea. It would be pretty funny to see X on this, maybe even with WebGL 3D acceleration.. I certainly wouldn't want to wait around for it to compile natively though!
What is bad about it, if it's within the bounds of the browser's sandbox?
The special thing about it, is that it's available on almost any modern computing device, down to phones. It's become the Windows of programming languages in a way - not the best option, but it's just so damn common that you should at least learn to use it. I don't know why we don't have any alternative scripting languages for browsers yet. CoffeeScript looks nice, but it just compiles down to JavaScript anyway.. so not the most efficient way to do things if you need to ship your framework as libraries on your website rather than it being built into the browser.
I did suspect that Ruby was a bit of a fad, but it is a nice language all the same.
I think it's very cool. Technical, yes. Difficult? Probably not that difficult seeing as Linux is designed to be amazingly portable. It doesn't even need the C standard IO library to compile, so really you'd just need to emulate a few low level interfaces for things like memory access, keyboard input and a terminal display. There are a few different ways to implement it, but if he has it running quickly then that would be quite impressive :)
While saying that I'm better than my friends at Tetris and pointing out I got all golds on GT5 wasn't strictly necessary (I just mentioned them because I thought some readers would think "yeah but you suck at games, so making an AI play better than yo would be easy), I guess I'll point out one thing which some might assume to be arrogant if they've never looked into race AI or racing physics:
Making an AI that races around a track consistently better than a human is already known to be quite simple. Even the best of human drivers still occasionally make mistakes,. Getting AI to drive round a track well in bad/variable weather would be more of a challenge, but in the end it's still something that computers are well suited to.