No one's saying people need to be experts with computers. But we accept that cars are dangerous, so to use one you have to memorize a lot of rules and laws, obey them, master the operation of the vehicle, learn how to avoid hazardous situations, maintain the vehicle on a regular basis, keep up with tag fees and emissions tests and insurance, and get certified by a government agency which says that you know how to drive. There's a lot that goes into something as seemingly simple as "using a car".
Yet everyone accepts this, and that you have to learn it, usually in stages. Almost all of us have done it, yet almost none of us are "mechanics". It's not required to be a mechanic to drive a car, but it is required to have some understanding of how to use the thing responsibly.
If you don't think so, then next time you get a ticket for driving like a jackass, try explaining to the judge that you're a sysadmin and that's your area of expertise -- you're not a "car person" and you shouldn't have to know all this "stuff", because you just want to get from A to B.
Computers in this day and age are every bit as potentially dangerous as cars. While there is little risk of physical injury, the potential damage to finances and property and so forth is tremendous. It is not asking a great deal that people learn a few basics about competent usage of the machine, including safety precautions.
So, yes, I would argue that anyone who uses a computer on a regular basis, especially as part of their job, is either negligent or an idiot for failing to learn a few very basic and, frankly, extremely simple principles about computers.
I think you're right, and if so, then that's not something I'd want to brag about if I were Jobs or Apple. Nearly every Mac owner I know turns that magnification thing off because it's annoying as all get out. That's if they even keep the Dock around at all, which half of them don't.
Maybe so, but driver installs have been an annoying pain in the ass since as far back as Windows 95. Possibly earlier, but I wouldn't know since I jumped right from my DOS 8086 to a Win95 486 back in 96. Anyway, my point is that driver installs, and especially printer installs, are bloody obnoxious and, try as I might, I am honestly not able to recall one single instance where a printer install went off smoothly.
It never, ever autodetects the printer, even when it claims it can. I'm always forced to manually select the driver from a list of models. Half the time the model I want isn't even on the damn list, but several that are tantalizingly close are, so I use those. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. And all of that happens whether I try Windows' completely, utterly useless hardware-detection-driver-installation thing, or download the executable from the manufacturer.
If it's a network printer, god help you, since even with the IP address it won't connect a good percentage of the time. Then there's the plethora of crapware the manufacturer thinks you need in addition to a driver: A new Start menu folder, a quicklauncher, a systray piece of nonsense, a few icons on the desktop, some of which are just ads for more products from the printer maker.
In the end, it takes ten minutes longer than it should, barely works, and tends to randomly up and die for no reason, forcing you to reinstall the driver such that your printer list is now littered with seven of the exact same thing, with a tiny, tiny little checkbox next to one of them to show you it's the default one.
I'd say the blame is easily fifty-fifty for the annoyance of driver installs. Windows shouldn't be such a piece of junk that it allows any executable to shit all over your machine, and Microsoft has enough support from the vendors that this stuff should be truly plug-and-play. On the other side, the vendors need to make the process less bloody-minded, and stop shitting all over my machine just because I want a driver.
By the way, I hooked a Brother printer (forget what model) into my Ubuntu laptop yesterday at the office and had no problems whatsoever printing a PDF. I didn't have to go hunt down a driver off some website, run random executables, or click through any EULAs. Ubuntu didn't get up in my face about how it was detecting new hardware, couldn't find drivers, was checking online for drivers, couldn't find drivers, and would I like to send this error to Mr Torvalds? It just worked.
The link the guy posted acknowleges that fact. But it also points out that unless you're a professional in that industry, it really doesn't matter that much. I think the point is that too many people refuse to use GIMP because "it doesn't support CMYK like Photoshop does." They have no idea what that is, but they shy away and go back to Photoshop for that reason. For the majority of people who just want to edit images, CMYK really doesn't matter, and for the few professionals that do need it, well, GIMP clearly isn't the right tool.
I'm right there with you; I don't understand what the big deal is. I've never, ever been in a situation where I thought "Gee, if only I had a really small computer I could get something done!" I have an HP nx7400, which I believe is something like 15.4" across. It works fine on airplanes, even in coach. I've used it without problem in the back of taxis, in the passenger seat of cars, at the pub, at the coffee shop, or waiting in an airport. I generally do not take the train or bus, but I can't see it really being a problem if I did -- and frankly, I can go for a forty minute ride without using a computer. It's not that hard.
Even the "portability" argument doesn't make much sense to me. I walk around with this thing nearly everywhere, and it's fine. If I use a slightly larger bag than the one it came with, I can stuff all kinds of extra crap in there without hassle. It's not that heavy, and if you can't carry twelve pounds of gear with you for twenty blocks, maybe you should worry more about getting in shape than the size of your computer.
Like you, I am clearly wrong, since the silly things sell, but I can't shake the feeling that most people buy them as novelties or toys, since the people I know who have them already have a desktop and a laptop (or two, or three) before they get one of these things. I've yet to hear a decent reason for a netbook (or subnotebook, or ultraportable, or whatever the buzzword is this week), other than "it's small and light", which makes zero sense to me whatsoever.
The only thing I could maybe see is battery life, but that can be handled by higher-capacity batteries, or cranking down the brightness of the screen, etc. Even without such measures I get a good 1.5 hours or so from my laptop, and I can't think of many real-life situations where I'd be away from an outlet that long and "need" to use a computer.
Those screenshots weren't taken at the maximum settings, for one thing -- at least, they don't look like it. Why they would do this, I have no idea, but they look decidedly worse than Crysis does on my machine at the highest settings.
Also, the screens themselves don't do the game justice, says I. Did you play Crysis? Actually seeing this stuff in motion is pretty amazing, and makes a huge difference to the visual impact, which screenshots just can't convey.
Even the textures you're deriding were astonishingly well-done; I don't know the technical term for this type of bump-mapping, but what would be a flat and uninteresting ground texture on another engine, actually looked like it had depth in Crysis. Little pebbles and rocks on the ground, deformities in walls and mountains, that kind of thing.
The lighting alone was impressive as well, and worked extremely nicely with the ubiquitous foliage on the island. Unlike, say, Doom 3, I thought it was tastefully done and not flashy just for the sake of being flashy.
Beyond all that, I just enjoyed the game. But try not to judge the graphics on a couple of low-rez stills.
Isn't this common in journalism? If a known event is coming up, you write the article ahead of time -- one article for each probable outcome of the event. That way, when it occurs, you can publish immediately and not worry about being "scooped" by the competition. Most news agencies have obituaries already written for hundreds of celebrities. I'm sure most of them have stories already written for the victory of Obama or McCain, ready to roll out as soon as the official count comes in.
Looks to me like this is just another example of it, and it got posted accidently. This has happened before; I believe someone found CNN's repository of celebrity obits and it was a minor to-do for a while as everyone laughed, and then got over it.
People just want to do their job and move on with life, they don't care about memory registers or malware they just want to not be interrupted.
You make a fair point, but let me counter it a bit. If we're talking about computers in the workplace, it is not unreasonable for me, as an employer, to expect my employees to have some understanding of how to use computers efficiently. I'm not saying they need to be experts, but I wouldn't tolerate an employee who constantly breaks the fax machine or copier through negligence or "not caring". I wouldn't tolerate an employee who crashes the company van every other week. Why should I tolerate employees who constantly stuff up their computers by refusing to expand their knowledge just a little bit?
Not only are employees like that harming my property (the computers) with their negligence, but whenever one breaks, that employee now has to stop working, call IT, waste another employee's time to diagnose and fix the problem, and so forth.
The employee's disinterest in learning basic operations and, dare I say it, "best practices" of using a primary business tool also doesn't instill in me a lot of encouragement about their willingness to learn in other areas, either. No one's asking the general populace to become IT gods. I'm asking them to learn basics like "don't click Yes or OK to everything just to make it go away" or "organize your files in a sane manner, don't just chuck them all on the desktop" or "don't have fifty applications running at once if you don't need to". Basic operation.
So, you're right, the employee doesn't want to be interupted, and that excuse may fly the first time they break things by doing something dumb. Maybe the second time is a lapse. By the third time, this person should be able to figure out that having to drop everything and wait for some helpdesk doofus to come down and run antivirus scans for an hour wastes more time than spending three seconds deciding whether clicking on something is a good idea. If they can't, well.. maybe I should hire someone more intelligent.
This isn't a first amendment or free speech issue to me. I think allowing a school to punish a student for actions the student did while not at school, a school-sponsored event, or other school-related activity sets a dangerous precedent. Well, it's not really a precedent since it's been done before, but, y'know.
It doesn't matter that the target was the principal of the school. It still does not give the school the authority to met out its own punishment using its authority as a school, because the alleged violation had nothing to do with the school. If the principal felt victimized, he should push it through the normal civil court process, just like anyone else who feels they are the victim of defamation.
So, yeah, the kid got off with a wrist-slap, but it seems to me that allowing schools to regulate student behavior outside of the context of the school environment is a really stupid idea.
You make a decent argument but I doubt it's the one Hannity himself would use. I think that, if pressed (and he actually responded instead of attacking the questioner for being a "lib", or trying to turn it around somehow), he'd argue on grounds of the motivation of the perp.
I think you're right -- he probably does believe the government is "trustworthy" -- but were he to announce that on his show, it would raise eyebrows from even the most devout of his right-wing listeners. Conservatives may babble about how they love America and Jesus and apple pie, but a good number of them don't really trust the government.
This is all assuming Hannity is bright enough to construct the same defense you just did on his behalf, which I sincerely doubt. He's good at being loud and inciting venom, but he's not a particularly intelligent chap. Which may be why he trusts the government.:P
I was listening to Sean Hannity blathering on his radio show this afternoon about this topic and had the same thought, but somewhat inverted. He was filled with self-righteous indignation about the immorality of breaching someone's privacy like this, making all sorts of comparisions to listening in on people's phone conversations, checking their mail, etc. Of course, Hannity and his ilk lack the self-reflection to realise they're the same ones who just love warrantless wiretaps, pen registers, sneak-and-peek maneuvers, things like Carnivore and Echelon, and all the other invasions of privacy the government has been heaping on the American public in the past few years.
Apparently it's okay to do it to the masses because it might catch THE TERRORISTS OMG!, but when it happens to a candidate they like, suddenly it's the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone.
Personally I agree that privacy is important and Palin shouldn't have been put through this, but that's because I'm against that sort of invasion on principle, and I'm not willing to pick and choose who it's okay for and who it isn't.
One thing that comes to mind is NAT traversal, which is a huge problem in industries such as VoIP which is gathering more and more steam. Even with workarounds like STUN, ICE, having the devices register with a proxy every thirty seconds, etc, it doesn't always work. I'll agree this isn't usually a problem for large companies with competent network administrators but it is a huge problem for medium and small businesses who don't have IT staff, know jack about anything, plug their IP phones into "the internet" and run into all kinds of problems because their local router might be using one of several different and often conflicting NAT implementations.
There are tens of thousands of little companies like that, and to them, VoIP is a very attractive alternative to traditional PBX systems because of price, so they flock to it and then have to dance around the issues that NAT brings up. IPv6 would alleviate such issues.
Since I'm in the VoIP industry and see this all the time, it's the most obvious example I could come up with. But then there are random other things -- pretty much any service you want to run from behind NAT requires setting up port forwarding, and not all businesses have a) the IT staff who are bright enough to set that up (sadly), or b) the money to throw at routers that can handle more than ten or twelve such forwards.
Sure, most of us here snicker because these are trivial configurations, but to bewildered business types who don't have the staff to do this (and even those who do, because so many self-proclaimed network admins are just idiots), this kind of stuff is a big deal.
Just to be pedantic, there's nothing in the phrase "wi-fi", or "wireless fidelity", that really means anything at all. "Fidelity" is another word for "accuracy", so when we say something is low-fidelity or high-fidelity, we're referring to how accurately it reflects the original signal, and it has nothing to do with the means by which the signal is transmitted. "Wireless fidelity" is a phrase utterly devoid of meaning, so if you're going to bother bickering about it, you can start by doing what you can to eliminate that worthless phrase from the collective vocabulary.
I installed it on my Vista machine at home yesterday. Chrome managed to annoy me in nearly everything it did, from the very beginning, where it didn't ask me where I wanted to install it, and silently installed some Google update garbage I didn't want -- something a less knowledgable user would probably not even notice.
So I fire it up. First thing I notice is I can't set a homepage. Instead, it brings me to this rancid "Most Visited Pages" crapfest. Guys, I don't want that. I see no obvious way of turning it off. And I really don't want that every time I pop open a new tab. I'm quite capable of deciding for myself why I opened a new tab, thankyouverymuch -- I don't need the bloody suggestions.
As for that, I don't necessarily want anyone who uses my computer to see my Most Visited Pages every time they use the browser. I have nothing to hide, really, but that doesn't mean it's anyone else's business. This should not be default behavior.
The "Omnibar" is as miserable a failure as Firefox's Asswipe Bar or whatever they're calling it. Again, software that tries to suggest, correct, or assume anything about what I'm doing is just plain wrong. I understand that some people might want "features" like that, and that's fine -- let them turn it on. I shouldn't have to turn off little annoying bells and whistles. They should be off by default.
Specifically, what I find so horrible about the Omnicrap is how mind-bogglingly useless it is, while being extremely distracting. I typed the letter "S". The only site I'd visited up until that point was slashdot, so Chrome brought up Slashdot as a suggestion. It also brought up Southwest Airlines, and offered to run a Google search for "Sears". Yes, you idiots, those are clearly what I want to do since I typed the letter "S". It did something equally asinine when I typed "w", perhaps the most common letter in URL history -- brought up a bunch of meaningless suggestions for pages I'd never even heard of, much less visited, none of which had anything to do with anything. One was some resort hotel website in Arizona, and the others were also out of left field.
Software that tries to assume what I'm going to do before I've done it is, in my view, fundamentally broken.
I don't care that I can turn it off. I don't care if it "learns" over time. It breaks the conventional way browsers have behaved since antiquity, and while there's a time to break convention, there are also times when doing so makes things stupid and annoying. This is the latter.
Next I went to click a link. On hovering, Chrome animates this retarded, distracting little text box at the bottom of the app, showing the URL to the link. Whoever came up with that bit of idiocy needs to boil in an acid vat. Nothing should ever blink, pop up, or otherwise animate to distract me. The way every other browser behaves is to have a dedicated status bar at the bottom, and put information there, which is fine. Since it's always there it's easy to ignore, much like the sensation your shoes make against your feet, which you don't notice. But you'd start to notice if every time you took a step, your shoes emitted a loud beep. And you'd get annoyed very quickly.
Besides all that, it's hideously ugly, and looks more at home on Windows 95 than XP or Vista.
I don't really care about process-per-tab or faster Javascript. None of that matters when the browser as a whole is an irritating pile of dung. I will uninstall it when I get home tonight, and never use it again. Firefox works fine, and I see no reason to bother test-driving a rusted-out station wagon because some people say it might one day be sort of as good as the Lambourghini I'm currently driving.
Even the best sysadmin is going to come across problems he can't solve quickly from time to time. Now, suppose you're some manager or executive, and there's a serious problem with some "mission-critical" server or other. Do you want to wait while he gathers information, checks forums, examines logs, tries this, and tries that? Or do you want to spend a little cash up front to know that you have vendor support to someone who probably has access to the people who programmed the thing in the first place? Your sysadmin may be good but that doesn't mean he has the time or the knowledge to dig through layers of source code in who-knows-how-many kernel modules and whatever else and do the debugging. As a manager, you shouldn't want to waste the time it would take for him to do that even if he could.
Another thing to consider for many companies is the board and stockholders. People like that feel better believing there's a chain of accountability and an infrastructure of support that extends beyond the local staff. Even if it's all a grand theatre production, if it makes the investors feel better, it's probably worth it in many cases.
Careful. Are you sure it's also not the funding? When Kennedy announced his plans to get Americans to the moon, the entire nation was more or less behind him, and willing to throw money at the situation.
Have a look at this link for a comparision, year by year, of NASA's budget in adjusted 2007 dollars. When the Apollo missions and their related missions were ramping up, NASA was receiving quite a bit of money, close to 33 billion or so. For the past ten years they've been getting half of that, and they've got a number of other missions underway to fund -- plus there is more pressure today to do everything as cheaply as possible instead of making sure it's reliable or quick or both. Add that to lagging public support for the space program (we already beat the Commies, and what about the terrorists omg!) and you can see why it isn't a fair comparision.
However, for the most part, I agree that it shouldn't take this long. The groundwork of orbital mechanics and the launching infrastructure are already there -- this time all they need to do is develop a vehicle.
Only somewhat related, but what would really happen to the ISS if it were unmanned for a few years? Is it in danger of decaying? Are its systems in danger of breaking down? Would it cost less to just let it sit there and repair it when we get back, than it would to deploy stopgap measures in the form of broken Shuttle flights or Russian rockets? For that matter, since the Russians seem to have the ability to get there on their own, why not just let them manage it for a couple of years while we get our stuff in order, and give them some money for their trouble? If American hubris is what's getting in the way, it's time to shove that aside.
Maybe that's true if you restrict the definition of "profit" to mean the acquisition of material wealth. But even if you do nothing else with your computer but play video games, then I would argue that, assuming you really enjoy your games, you are profiting from your purchase.
Of course, for me, a faster computer with more memory also means better virtual machine handling, faster audio editing and post-processing, faster compile times, cooler games, and the ability to have those applications open which I need without trading off in performance due to memory constraints and so forth. All of which adds up to more work done in less time, or at least, more goofing off in less time, depending on what I'm doing. Either way, I'm benefitting.
Would you be reacting this way to a story that said something like "Two dudes in Minnesota developed a small electric motor which can blah blah blah"? There's nothing wrong with identifying the gender of the person in question. Hell, even on Slashdot the articles say "A guy in Arlington," or "Mr Smith said," or any number of other ways to declare the gender. And in this context, "chick" is just a casual way of saying "girl" or "woman", as "dude" would be a casual way of referring to a boy or man.
It just so happens that tomorrow will be my first day back in the office after about a month and a half of telecommuting. For me, it's been a pretty bad experience. I don't like driving in Atlanta traffic every day to get to work, but for someone like me it's better than the alternative.
Measuring work metrics has never been an issue; in my industry, and especially at my company, customers are very, very quick to complain about the slightest problem. So if that server doesn't get fixed or if that database is acting up, they'll call in, the support queue will back up, the emails will pour in, and it will quickly reach my boss's attention. Combined with our ticketing system and small-office, close-knit atmosphere (e.g., communication), I've never been concerned about anyone thinking I'm not doing my job.
No, the problem is actually finding any motivation to do work. It's far too easy to roll out of bed at the last possible minute, stumble into the computer room, and sit there in your pajamas feeling like Hell because you haven't showered or dressed. You've got a host of video game at your fingertips. There's a case of beer in the fridge calling your name. Your cats are cute and want attention, or they're knocking things over to ruin your concentration. The jerk in the apartment upstairs is riding his pogo stick again. In short, there are a million little distractions at home, which aren't at the office, which will prevent you from really focusing on anything productive.
Beyond that, I don't like work. It's not my job, or the people, or the company -- those are all fine. I'm just one of those people for whom work is a necessary evil. I therefore require a distinction between work life and free time, and the blurring of the two is extremely uncomfortable. Particularly when a user gets obnoxious enough to the point where they get sent to me -- now I have to talk to them on the phone, and it's like they're invading my home! My home, where I live. Where I come to play with my toys.
Furthermore, the tools available to a home worker are, at least in my experience, never as good as what's available at the office. If I need information now I don't have to wait for a coworker to maybe respond to an IM when he gets around to it -- I can walk down the hall and ask. I have direct access to our servers and such, without the need for ssh over VPN which is about as snappy as the days of dialup BBS. When someone wants my help they generally come ask for it, and if they see I'm with someone else they wait, as opposed to my having to manage six ongoing IM sessions with various people at once. I don't need to wait for endless back-and-forth emails from the salespeople to try to get a straight answer -- I can just waltz down there and yell at them myself. Plus, just going to the office means I've already showered, dressed, and had some time (the commute) to wake up and become human. At a proper desk in a proper office environment I feel like I'm at work and I can focus enough to get into the groove of whatever I'm doing.
And finally, there's a social aspect of work. Working from home means spending the vast majority of your days completely isolated. It only takes a few days of your friends being busy so you can't go out at night, and suddenly you realise you've spent the past week without any human interaction whatsoever except the cashier at the grocery store. That wears thin very, very quickly.
I expect I'll get more done tomorrow at the office than I have for the past week at home, or at least, it'll feel that way. That having been said, I'm not looking forward to waking up an hour earlier.
I don't know. I'll often have a video going while I'm doing work, copying and pasting from various terminal windows and whatever else. Suppose that instead of a lame URL, this hijack put some shell command into my clipboard and I, suspecting nothing, accidently pasted it into the terminal? At the very least it could connect to a remote server owned by the attacker and give him information about my system (and from there, possible vulns), or it could do many far more insidious things.
I grant that such a hypothetical attack would only affect a very small portion of people, but then, so do many exploits.
But for a wider audience, I suppose even a web URL would work on many people -- it creates a URL in the clipboard which superficially resembles, say, myspace or facebook. Tons of people would then obligingly type in their credentials (people aren't that bright), or it could send information about the system to the attacker. The bogus URL could even try to download some executable or patch, and you just know there are plenty of people who would click "OK" to whatever it says because they don't know or don't care to learn not to do that.
Well, okay, it looks odd in that demo. First, the actress looks nothing like her digital counterpart -- their faces are different shapes, and mapping that one-to-one has to be a challenge in and of itself. Second, the digital actress looks too perfect -- her skin tone is unnaturally flawless, and her face doesn't wrinkle the same way a real human's would when she makes different expressions (watch the real actress' face at the same time, and see how her forehead crinkles and so forth in certain expressions.) The hair doesn't move either, and isn't well-rendered.
All that being said, though, I don't think the point of the demo was to try to convince you that the digital woman is real. It was more proof of concept -- now they can take basically any actor or actress, even if that person doesn't have the right "look" for the part, and remap their face to suit the needs of the role, without the need for special motion-capture cameras. This also means that you can have your actors in a real setting, interacting with each other and the environment, instead of sticking them in a dark room with markers all over their face and saying "Okay, now, in front of you there's a tall guy. Look up at him. No, he's taller than that! Look up some more! Now, you're shocked at his appearance. Put shock on your face!" It'll make for some much more convincing performances when we get actors out of the green rooms and back onto real sets again.
Three things about that. First, there's a reason he chose something like bdsm sex and not something innocuous like "Free USB mouse" -- it's because he's choosing his targets. There's no superiority you can feel over a guy who wants some free computer gear, but it's easy to feel superior to someone who enjoys something society considers extremely fringe, especially sexually fringe.
Second, the case would be extremely different merely by dint of what society considers normal (and this is an important consideration in any court of law). Most people will not feel that their privacy has been breached if you announce that they use a Dell laptop, because who cares? Most people will feel extremely violated if you disclose personal information about their sex life or sexual preferences. That is why one is a privacy issue and the other is not.
Finally, the "victim" here isn't claiming that he "didn't do anything wrong", though in truth, he didn't -- there was nothing illegal about his actions. I'm guessing he isn't positing the right or wrong of his actions because it's a complete non-issue. His complaint is fairly straightforward: "I sent personal information to you because you misrepresented yourself. You then made that information public." Whether or not you agree with him, it's at least a valid complaint -- misrepresenting your identity for the purposes of fraud or public humiliation isn't exactly kosher. But he's not the one dressing up his actions with high-falutin' nonsense about "community" and "greater good". He makes no bones about what he did.
The only one coming up with asinine excuses and "I don't have the money" sobbing is Jason.
The really sad part, to me, is this. There's a chance Jason will get off, likely on some very fine hair-splitting. If that were to happen, it will basically give the lulz-tards the idea that they can get away with anything and now have a free ticket to go completely balls-out and do whatever they want with no consequences. Not a pretty prospect, no matter how "legal" it may be.
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No one's saying people need to be experts with computers. But we accept that cars are dangerous, so to use one you have to memorize a lot of rules and laws, obey them, master the operation of the vehicle, learn how to avoid hazardous situations, maintain the vehicle on a regular basis, keep up with tag fees and emissions tests and insurance, and get certified by a government agency which says that you know how to drive. There's a lot that goes into something as seemingly simple as "using a car".
Yet everyone accepts this, and that you have to learn it, usually in stages. Almost all of us have done it, yet almost none of us are "mechanics". It's not required to be a mechanic to drive a car, but it is required to have some understanding of how to use the thing responsibly.
If you don't think so, then next time you get a ticket for driving like a jackass, try explaining to the judge that you're a sysadmin and that's your area of expertise -- you're not a "car person" and you shouldn't have to know all this "stuff", because you just want to get from A to B.
Computers in this day and age are every bit as potentially dangerous as cars. While there is little risk of physical injury, the potential damage to finances and property and so forth is tremendous. It is not asking a great deal that people learn a few basics about competent usage of the machine, including safety precautions.
So, yes, I would argue that anyone who uses a computer on a regular basis, especially as part of their job, is either negligent or an idiot for failing to learn a few very basic and, frankly, extremely simple principles about computers.
I think you're right, and if so, then that's not something I'd want to brag about if I were Jobs or Apple. Nearly every Mac owner I know turns that magnification thing off because it's annoying as all get out. That's if they even keep the Dock around at all, which half of them don't.
Maybe so, but driver installs have been an annoying pain in the ass since as far back as Windows 95. Possibly earlier, but I wouldn't know since I jumped right from my DOS 8086 to a Win95 486 back in 96. Anyway, my point is that driver installs, and especially printer installs, are bloody obnoxious and, try as I might, I am honestly not able to recall one single instance where a printer install went off smoothly.
It never, ever autodetects the printer, even when it claims it can. I'm always forced to manually select the driver from a list of models. Half the time the model I want isn't even on the damn list, but several that are tantalizingly close are, so I use those. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. And all of that happens whether I try Windows' completely, utterly useless hardware-detection-driver-installation thing, or download the executable from the manufacturer.
If it's a network printer, god help you, since even with the IP address it won't connect a good percentage of the time. Then there's the plethora of crapware the manufacturer thinks you need in addition to a driver: A new Start menu folder, a quicklauncher, a systray piece of nonsense, a few icons on the desktop, some of which are just ads for more products from the printer maker.
In the end, it takes ten minutes longer than it should, barely works, and tends to randomly up and die for no reason, forcing you to reinstall the driver such that your printer list is now littered with seven of the exact same thing, with a tiny, tiny little checkbox next to one of them to show you it's the default one.
I'd say the blame is easily fifty-fifty for the annoyance of driver installs. Windows shouldn't be such a piece of junk that it allows any executable to shit all over your machine, and Microsoft has enough support from the vendors that this stuff should be truly plug-and-play. On the other side, the vendors need to make the process less bloody-minded, and stop shitting all over my machine just because I want a driver.
By the way, I hooked a Brother printer (forget what model) into my Ubuntu laptop yesterday at the office and had no problems whatsoever printing a PDF. I didn't have to go hunt down a driver off some website, run random executables, or click through any EULAs. Ubuntu didn't get up in my face about how it was detecting new hardware, couldn't find drivers, was checking online for drivers, couldn't find drivers, and would I like to send this error to Mr Torvalds? It just worked.
The link the guy posted acknowleges that fact. But it also points out that unless you're a professional in that industry, it really doesn't matter that much. I think the point is that too many people refuse to use GIMP because "it doesn't support CMYK like Photoshop does." They have no idea what that is, but they shy away and go back to Photoshop for that reason. For the majority of people who just want to edit images, CMYK really doesn't matter, and for the few professionals that do need it, well, GIMP clearly isn't the right tool.
I'm right there with you; I don't understand what the big deal is. I've never, ever been in a situation where I thought "Gee, if only I had a really small computer I could get something done!" I have an HP nx7400, which I believe is something like 15.4" across. It works fine on airplanes, even in coach. I've used it without problem in the back of taxis, in the passenger seat of cars, at the pub, at the coffee shop, or waiting in an airport. I generally do not take the train or bus, but I can't see it really being a problem if I did -- and frankly, I can go for a forty minute ride without using a computer. It's not that hard.
Even the "portability" argument doesn't make much sense to me. I walk around with this thing nearly everywhere, and it's fine. If I use a slightly larger bag than the one it came with, I can stuff all kinds of extra crap in there without hassle. It's not that heavy, and if you can't carry twelve pounds of gear with you for twenty blocks, maybe you should worry more about getting in shape than the size of your computer.
Like you, I am clearly wrong, since the silly things sell, but I can't shake the feeling that most people buy them as novelties or toys, since the people I know who have them already have a desktop and a laptop (or two, or three) before they get one of these things. I've yet to hear a decent reason for a netbook (or subnotebook, or ultraportable, or whatever the buzzword is this week), other than "it's small and light", which makes zero sense to me whatsoever.
The only thing I could maybe see is battery life, but that can be handled by higher-capacity batteries, or cranking down the brightness of the screen, etc. Even without such measures I get a good 1.5 hours or so from my laptop, and I can't think of many real-life situations where I'd be away from an outlet that long and "need" to use a computer.
Those screenshots weren't taken at the maximum settings, for one thing -- at least, they don't look like it. Why they would do this, I have no idea, but they look decidedly worse than Crysis does on my machine at the highest settings.
Also, the screens themselves don't do the game justice, says I. Did you play Crysis? Actually seeing this stuff in motion is pretty amazing, and makes a huge difference to the visual impact, which screenshots just can't convey.
Even the textures you're deriding were astonishingly well-done; I don't know the technical term for this type of bump-mapping, but what would be a flat and uninteresting ground texture on another engine, actually looked like it had depth in Crysis. Little pebbles and rocks on the ground, deformities in walls and mountains, that kind of thing.
The lighting alone was impressive as well, and worked extremely nicely with the ubiquitous foliage on the island. Unlike, say, Doom 3, I thought it was tastefully done and not flashy just for the sake of being flashy.
Beyond all that, I just enjoyed the game. But try not to judge the graphics on a couple of low-rez stills.
FDR was going to abide by the 2-term limit.
He was going to abide by an amendment that was ratified six years after he died?
The war started in 1939
No one said otherwise. He said the US wasn't attacked until 1941, which is true.
Isn't this common in journalism? If a known event is coming up, you write the article ahead of time -- one article for each probable outcome of the event. That way, when it occurs, you can publish immediately and not worry about being "scooped" by the competition. Most news agencies have obituaries already written for hundreds of celebrities. I'm sure most of them have stories already written for the victory of Obama or McCain, ready to roll out as soon as the official count comes in.
Looks to me like this is just another example of it, and it got posted accidently. This has happened before; I believe someone found CNN's repository of celebrity obits and it was a minor to-do for a while as everyone laughed, and then got over it.
People just want to do their job and move on with life, they don't care about memory registers or malware they just want to not be interrupted.
You make a fair point, but let me counter it a bit. If we're talking about computers in the workplace, it is not unreasonable for me, as an employer, to expect my employees to have some understanding of how to use computers efficiently. I'm not saying they need to be experts, but I wouldn't tolerate an employee who constantly breaks the fax machine or copier through negligence or "not caring". I wouldn't tolerate an employee who crashes the company van every other week. Why should I tolerate employees who constantly stuff up their computers by refusing to expand their knowledge just a little bit?
Not only are employees like that harming my property (the computers) with their negligence, but whenever one breaks, that employee now has to stop working, call IT, waste another employee's time to diagnose and fix the problem, and so forth.
The employee's disinterest in learning basic operations and, dare I say it, "best practices" of using a primary business tool also doesn't instill in me a lot of encouragement about their willingness to learn in other areas, either. No one's asking the general populace to become IT gods. I'm asking them to learn basics like "don't click Yes or OK to everything just to make it go away" or "organize your files in a sane manner, don't just chuck them all on the desktop" or "don't have fifty applications running at once if you don't need to". Basic operation.
So, you're right, the employee doesn't want to be interupted, and that excuse may fly the first time they break things by doing something dumb. Maybe the second time is a lapse. By the third time, this person should be able to figure out that having to drop everything and wait for some helpdesk doofus to come down and run antivirus scans for an hour wastes more time than spending three seconds deciding whether clicking on something is a good idea. If they can't, well.. maybe I should hire someone more intelligent.
This isn't a first amendment or free speech issue to me. I think allowing a school to punish a student for actions the student did while not at school, a school-sponsored event, or other school-related activity sets a dangerous precedent. Well, it's not really a precedent since it's been done before, but, y'know.
It doesn't matter that the target was the principal of the school. It still does not give the school the authority to met out its own punishment using its authority as a school, because the alleged violation had nothing to do with the school. If the principal felt victimized, he should push it through the normal civil court process, just like anyone else who feels they are the victim of defamation.
So, yeah, the kid got off with a wrist-slap, but it seems to me that allowing schools to regulate student behavior outside of the context of the school environment is a really stupid idea.
You make a decent argument but I doubt it's the one Hannity himself would use. I think that, if pressed (and he actually responded instead of attacking the questioner for being a "lib", or trying to turn it around somehow), he'd argue on grounds of the motivation of the perp.
:P
I think you're right -- he probably does believe the government is "trustworthy" -- but were he to announce that on his show, it would raise eyebrows from even the most devout of his right-wing listeners. Conservatives may babble about how they love America and Jesus and apple pie, but a good number of them don't really trust the government.
This is all assuming Hannity is bright enough to construct the same defense you just did on his behalf, which I sincerely doubt. He's good at being loud and inciting venom, but he's not a particularly intelligent chap. Which may be why he trusts the government.
Why do I listen to Hannity and his jingoistic buddies? "Know thy enemy."
I was listening to Sean Hannity blathering on his radio show this afternoon about this topic and had the same thought, but somewhat inverted. He was filled with self-righteous indignation about the immorality of breaching someone's privacy like this, making all sorts of comparisions to listening in on people's phone conversations, checking their mail, etc. Of course, Hannity and his ilk lack the self-reflection to realise they're the same ones who just love warrantless wiretaps, pen registers, sneak-and-peek maneuvers, things like Carnivore and Echelon, and all the other invasions of privacy the government has been heaping on the American public in the past few years.
Apparently it's okay to do it to the masses because it might catch THE TERRORISTS OMG!, but when it happens to a candidate they like, suddenly it's the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone.
Personally I agree that privacy is important and Palin shouldn't have been put through this, but that's because I'm against that sort of invasion on principle, and I'm not willing to pick and choose who it's okay for and who it isn't.
One thing that comes to mind is NAT traversal, which is a huge problem in industries such as VoIP which is gathering more and more steam. Even with workarounds like STUN, ICE, having the devices register with a proxy every thirty seconds, etc, it doesn't always work. I'll agree this isn't usually a problem for large companies with competent network administrators but it is a huge problem for medium and small businesses who don't have IT staff, know jack about anything, plug their IP phones into "the internet" and run into all kinds of problems because their local router might be using one of several different and often conflicting NAT implementations.
There are tens of thousands of little companies like that, and to them, VoIP is a very attractive alternative to traditional PBX systems because of price, so they flock to it and then have to dance around the issues that NAT brings up. IPv6 would alleviate such issues.
Since I'm in the VoIP industry and see this all the time, it's the most obvious example I could come up with. But then there are random other things -- pretty much any service you want to run from behind NAT requires setting up port forwarding, and not all businesses have a) the IT staff who are bright enough to set that up (sadly), or b) the money to throw at routers that can handle more than ten or twelve such forwards.
Sure, most of us here snicker because these are trivial configurations, but to bewildered business types who don't have the staff to do this (and even those who do, because so many self-proclaimed network admins are just idiots), this kind of stuff is a big deal.
Just to be pedantic, there's nothing in the phrase "wi-fi", or "wireless fidelity", that really means anything at all. "Fidelity" is another word for "accuracy", so when we say something is low-fidelity or high-fidelity, we're referring to how accurately it reflects the original signal, and it has nothing to do with the means by which the signal is transmitted. "Wireless fidelity" is a phrase utterly devoid of meaning, so if you're going to bother bickering about it, you can start by doing what you can to eliminate that worthless phrase from the collective vocabulary.
I installed it on my Vista machine at home yesterday. Chrome managed to annoy me in nearly everything it did, from the very beginning, where it didn't ask me where I wanted to install it, and silently installed some Google update garbage I didn't want -- something a less knowledgable user would probably not even notice.
So I fire it up. First thing I notice is I can't set a homepage. Instead, it brings me to this rancid "Most Visited Pages" crapfest. Guys, I don't want that. I see no obvious way of turning it off. And I really don't want that every time I pop open a new tab. I'm quite capable of deciding for myself why I opened a new tab, thankyouverymuch -- I don't need the bloody suggestions.
As for that, I don't necessarily want anyone who uses my computer to see my Most Visited Pages every time they use the browser. I have nothing to hide, really, but that doesn't mean it's anyone else's business. This should not be default behavior.
The "Omnibar" is as miserable a failure as Firefox's Asswipe Bar or whatever they're calling it. Again, software that tries to suggest, correct, or assume anything about what I'm doing is just plain wrong. I understand that some people might want "features" like that, and that's fine -- let them turn it on. I shouldn't have to turn off little annoying bells and whistles. They should be off by default.
Specifically, what I find so horrible about the Omnicrap is how mind-bogglingly useless it is, while being extremely distracting. I typed the letter "S". The only site I'd visited up until that point was slashdot, so Chrome brought up Slashdot as a suggestion. It also brought up Southwest Airlines, and offered to run a Google search for "Sears". Yes, you idiots, those are clearly what I want to do since I typed the letter "S". It did something equally asinine when I typed "w", perhaps the most common letter in URL history -- brought up a bunch of meaningless suggestions for pages I'd never even heard of, much less visited, none of which had anything to do with anything. One was some resort hotel website in Arizona, and the others were also out of left field.
Software that tries to assume what I'm going to do before I've done it is, in my view, fundamentally broken.
I don't care that I can turn it off. I don't care if it "learns" over time. It breaks the conventional way browsers have behaved since antiquity, and while there's a time to break convention, there are also times when doing so makes things stupid and annoying. This is the latter.
Next I went to click a link. On hovering, Chrome animates this retarded, distracting little text box at the bottom of the app, showing the URL to the link. Whoever came up with that bit of idiocy needs to boil in an acid vat. Nothing should ever blink, pop up, or otherwise animate to distract me. The way every other browser behaves is to have a dedicated status bar at the bottom, and put information there, which is fine. Since it's always there it's easy to ignore, much like the sensation your shoes make against your feet, which you don't notice. But you'd start to notice if every time you took a step, your shoes emitted a loud beep. And you'd get annoyed very quickly.
Besides all that, it's hideously ugly, and looks more at home on Windows 95 than XP or Vista.
I don't really care about process-per-tab or faster Javascript. None of that matters when the browser as a whole is an irritating pile of dung. I will uninstall it when I get home tonight, and never use it again. Firefox works fine, and I see no reason to bother test-driving a rusted-out station wagon because some people say it might one day be sort of as good as the Lambourghini I'm currently driving.
Even the best sysadmin is going to come across problems he can't solve quickly from time to time. Now, suppose you're some manager or executive, and there's a serious problem with some "mission-critical" server or other. Do you want to wait while he gathers information, checks forums, examines logs, tries this, and tries that? Or do you want to spend a little cash up front to know that you have vendor support to someone who probably has access to the people who programmed the thing in the first place? Your sysadmin may be good but that doesn't mean he has the time or the knowledge to dig through layers of source code in who-knows-how-many kernel modules and whatever else and do the debugging. As a manager, you shouldn't want to waste the time it would take for him to do that even if he could.
Another thing to consider for many companies is the board and stockholders. People like that feel better believing there's a chain of accountability and an infrastructure of support that extends beyond the local staff. Even if it's all a grand theatre production, if it makes the investors feel better, it's probably worth it in many cases.
Careful. Are you sure it's also not the funding? When Kennedy announced his plans to get Americans to the moon, the entire nation was more or less behind him, and willing to throw money at the situation.
Have a look at this link for a comparision, year by year, of NASA's budget in adjusted 2007 dollars. When the Apollo missions and their related missions were ramping up, NASA was receiving quite a bit of money, close to 33 billion or so. For the past ten years they've been getting half of that, and they've got a number of other missions underway to fund -- plus there is more pressure today to do everything as cheaply as possible instead of making sure it's reliable or quick or both. Add that to lagging public support for the space program (we already beat the Commies, and what about the terrorists omg!) and you can see why it isn't a fair comparision.
However, for the most part, I agree that it shouldn't take this long. The groundwork of orbital mechanics and the launching infrastructure are already there -- this time all they need to do is develop a vehicle.
Only somewhat related, but what would really happen to the ISS if it were unmanned for a few years? Is it in danger of decaying? Are its systems in danger of breaking down? Would it cost less to just let it sit there and repair it when we get back, than it would to deploy stopgap measures in the form of broken Shuttle flights or Russian rockets? For that matter, since the Russians seem to have the ability to get there on their own, why not just let them manage it for a couple of years while we get our stuff in order, and give them some money for their trouble? If American hubris is what's getting in the way, it's time to shove that aside.
SQ372 has been perturbed by the gravity of Uranus
That's what she said!
Maybe that's true if you restrict the definition of "profit" to mean the acquisition of material wealth. But even if you do nothing else with your computer but play video games, then I would argue that, assuming you really enjoy your games, you are profiting from your purchase.
Of course, for me, a faster computer with more memory also means better virtual machine handling, faster audio editing and post-processing, faster compile times, cooler games, and the ability to have those applications open which I need without trading off in performance due to memory constraints and so forth. All of which adds up to more work done in less time, or at least, more goofing off in less time, depending on what I'm doing. Either way, I'm benefitting.
Would you be reacting this way to a story that said something like "Two dudes in Minnesota developed a small electric motor which can blah blah blah"? There's nothing wrong with identifying the gender of the person in question. Hell, even on Slashdot the articles say "A guy in Arlington," or "Mr Smith said," or any number of other ways to declare the gender. And in this context, "chick" is just a casual way of saying "girl" or "woman", as "dude" would be a casual way of referring to a boy or man.
In short, chill out, dude.
It just so happens that tomorrow will be my first day back in the office after about a month and a half of telecommuting. For me, it's been a pretty bad experience. I don't like driving in Atlanta traffic every day to get to work, but for someone like me it's better than the alternative.
Measuring work metrics has never been an issue; in my industry, and especially at my company, customers are very, very quick to complain about the slightest problem. So if that server doesn't get fixed or if that database is acting up, they'll call in, the support queue will back up, the emails will pour in, and it will quickly reach my boss's attention. Combined with our ticketing system and small-office, close-knit atmosphere (e.g., communication), I've never been concerned about anyone thinking I'm not doing my job.
No, the problem is actually finding any motivation to do work. It's far too easy to roll out of bed at the last possible minute, stumble into the computer room, and sit there in your pajamas feeling like Hell because you haven't showered or dressed. You've got a host of video game at your fingertips. There's a case of beer in the fridge calling your name. Your cats are cute and want attention, or they're knocking things over to ruin your concentration. The jerk in the apartment upstairs is riding his pogo stick again. In short, there are a million little distractions at home, which aren't at the office, which will prevent you from really focusing on anything productive.
Beyond that, I don't like work. It's not my job, or the people, or the company -- those are all fine. I'm just one of those people for whom work is a necessary evil. I therefore require a distinction between work life and free time, and the blurring of the two is extremely uncomfortable. Particularly when a user gets obnoxious enough to the point where they get sent to me -- now I have to talk to them on the phone, and it's like they're invading my home! My home, where I live. Where I come to play with my toys.
Furthermore, the tools available to a home worker are, at least in my experience, never as good as what's available at the office. If I need information now I don't have to wait for a coworker to maybe respond to an IM when he gets around to it -- I can walk down the hall and ask. I have direct access to our servers and such, without the need for ssh over VPN which is about as snappy as the days of dialup BBS. When someone wants my help they generally come ask for it, and if they see I'm with someone else they wait, as opposed to my having to manage six ongoing IM sessions with various people at once. I don't need to wait for endless back-and-forth emails from the salespeople to try to get a straight answer -- I can just waltz down there and yell at them myself. Plus, just going to the office means I've already showered, dressed, and had some time (the commute) to wake up and become human. At a proper desk in a proper office environment I feel like I'm at work and I can focus enough to get into the groove of whatever I'm doing.
And finally, there's a social aspect of work. Working from home means spending the vast majority of your days completely isolated. It only takes a few days of your friends being busy so you can't go out at night, and suddenly you realise you've spent the past week without any human interaction whatsoever except the cashier at the grocery store. That wears thin very, very quickly.
I expect I'll get more done tomorrow at the office than I have for the past week at home, or at least, it'll feel that way. That having been said, I'm not looking forward to waking up an hour earlier.
I don't know. I'll often have a video going while I'm doing work, copying and pasting from various terminal windows and whatever else. Suppose that instead of a lame URL, this hijack put some shell command into my clipboard and I, suspecting nothing, accidently pasted it into the terminal? At the very least it could connect to a remote server owned by the attacker and give him information about my system (and from there, possible vulns), or it could do many far more insidious things.
I grant that such a hypothetical attack would only affect a very small portion of people, but then, so do many exploits.
But for a wider audience, I suppose even a web URL would work on many people -- it creates a URL in the clipboard which superficially resembles, say, myspace or facebook. Tons of people would then obligingly type in their credentials (people aren't that bright), or it could send information about the system to the attacker. The bogus URL could even try to download some executable or patch, and you just know there are plenty of people who would click "OK" to whatever it says because they don't know or don't care to learn not to do that.
Well, okay, it looks odd in that demo. First, the actress looks nothing like her digital counterpart -- their faces are different shapes, and mapping that one-to-one has to be a challenge in and of itself. Second, the digital actress looks too perfect -- her skin tone is unnaturally flawless, and her face doesn't wrinkle the same way a real human's would when she makes different expressions (watch the real actress' face at the same time, and see how her forehead crinkles and so forth in certain expressions.) The hair doesn't move either, and isn't well-rendered.
All that being said, though, I don't think the point of the demo was to try to convince you that the digital woman is real. It was more proof of concept -- now they can take basically any actor or actress, even if that person doesn't have the right "look" for the part, and remap their face to suit the needs of the role, without the need for special motion-capture cameras. This also means that you can have your actors in a real setting, interacting with each other and the environment, instead of sticking them in a dark room with markers all over their face and saying "Okay, now, in front of you there's a tall guy. Look up at him. No, he's taller than that! Look up some more! Now, you're shocked at his appearance. Put shock on your face!" It'll make for some much more convincing performances when we get actors out of the green rooms and back onto real sets again.
Three things about that. First, there's a reason he chose something like bdsm sex and not something innocuous like "Free USB mouse" -- it's because he's choosing his targets. There's no superiority you can feel over a guy who wants some free computer gear, but it's easy to feel superior to someone who enjoys something society considers extremely fringe, especially sexually fringe.
Second, the case would be extremely different merely by dint of what society considers normal (and this is an important consideration in any court of law). Most people will not feel that their privacy has been breached if you announce that they use a Dell laptop, because who cares? Most people will feel extremely violated if you disclose personal information about their sex life or sexual preferences. That is why one is a privacy issue and the other is not.
Finally, the "victim" here isn't claiming that he "didn't do anything wrong", though in truth, he didn't -- there was nothing illegal about his actions. I'm guessing he isn't positing the right or wrong of his actions because it's a complete non-issue. His complaint is fairly straightforward: "I sent personal information to you because you misrepresented yourself. You then made that information public." Whether or not you agree with him, it's at least a valid complaint -- misrepresenting your identity for the purposes of fraud or public humiliation isn't exactly kosher. But he's not the one dressing up his actions with high-falutin' nonsense about "community" and "greater good". He makes no bones about what he did.
The only one coming up with asinine excuses and "I don't have the money" sobbing is Jason.
The really sad part, to me, is this. There's a chance Jason will get off, likely on some very fine hair-splitting. If that were to happen, it will basically give the lulz-tards the idea that they can get away with anything and now have a free ticket to go completely balls-out and do whatever they want with no consequences. Not a pretty prospect, no matter how "legal" it may be.