How long did you spend staring at your screen in slackjawed disbelief after selecting the zoom tool and finding that instead of zooming out, right-clicking does nothing?
Modern smartphones aren't so good at it either. Think of the last time you just wanted to listen to the audio from a video file while you browsed the internet.
I am an irregular Linux user and am not deeply involved in the Ubuntu community, but over the past several months I have seen the general attitude of "random geeks" change dramatically with regards to Ubuntu. A year ago the standard response to a new user inquiring about Linux was "install Ubuntu, it's easy, there's lots of help available. Go get 'em tiger." Now, Ubuntu is usually spoken of with a kind of regretful contempt. I didn't much care for it myself, but Ubuntu used to be the public face of Linux, the thing 95% of the Windows/OSX users hit if they get interested in Linux. As far as I can tell, it's fallen out of the good graces of the power user community. It appears as if Ubuntu has decided to forsake the early adopters and power users in favor of the newbies and average Joes. That may be well and good on principle but I don't see it as a strategy capable of sustaining an OS ecosystem that doesn't come preinstalled on Dick and jane's new laptop.
> A year ago the standard response to a new user inquiring about Linux was "install Ubuntu, it's easy, there's lots of help available. Go get 'em tiger." Now, Ubuntu is usually spoken of with a kind of regretful contempt.
True. I used to suggest Ubuntu myself (actually, I was one of the people who started with Ubuntu, now I'm on Arch).
I've switched to either suggesting to install one of the forks of Ubuntu (mostly Kubuntu or Xubuntu), Linux Mint or even Crunchbang.
Good grief please don't suggest crunchbang for new users!!
Unless it's used as a transition for a clueful, but new to Linux, user who's going to learn a bit and then move to a different distribution. (Probably Arch or Tiny Core, if you're suggesting CrunchBang.)
Agreed. Unless it's supported by a legal framework, racism is a self-defeating phenomenon. Racist individuals deprive themselves of the benefits offered by the group toward which they are racist, therefore making themselves less likely to succeed. If anything, a person or group of people being racist should alert you, the observant seizer of the day, to an under-utilized resource and/or market niche.
So long as big brother isn't enforcing it; another person's stupidity can always be turned to your advantage.
I think the GP's point still stands. Smart companies will have an advantage recruiting these engineers, because they have less competition, and so they will win. (Corollary: the quality of the team is the strongest predictor of success).
I agree. Anyone who would hire a worse employee because they don't like the other's {race,color,nationality,gender,sexual preference,...} is an idiot, and I wouldn't bet on their success.
That said, we definitely need some short term solutions too. "Evolution" isn't particularly helpful to those being discriminated against right now.
The lack of women or black people in engineering isn't proof for their discrimination though. It could be that they simply choose to pursue different professions because their upbringing is different.
Companies doing discrimination arbitrage unfortunately don't do anything to help minorities who are discouraged from going into certain professions in the first place.
It is a very common flaw in reasoning that one party assumes that the opposition disagrees because they are scared or secretly agree. Atheists are all secretly christians, homophobes are all secretly gay, liberals are scared of "the truth."
People who mock Stallman for taking his shoe off and eating things he picked off his foot in the middle of a presentation are not terrified of him shattering their paradigm. They just think it's gross.
Stallman is a walking PR nightmare, and you're getting mad at human nature?? I don't believe this.
99.9% of humans won't take you seriously if you eat your toejam. That's normal. Stallman is nearly the worst thing to happen to the FSF. He should sit back & let Eben Moglen do the talking.
Well, that's a bit of a false dichotomy. Disliking prejudice doesn't mean I don't wish RMS was a better spokesperson.
But I wasn't really taking about the people who take him less seriously, but those who use that as an argument in a discussion. The former is a flaw (from which I suffer too), but the latter is much worse.
Except that kottke didn't say anything at all about Stallman's ethics, position on software, or the FSF. He just said it was ridiculous for him to put two paragraphs about parrots in his rider. Simple as that.
He didn't say it was 'ridiculous'. He said it was 'crazy and amazing'. Not quite the same thing; even 'crazy' can be a compliment in some contexts. ("Here's to the crazy ones...")
Having read only the stonehenge page and not the full slashdot article, I don't even have to be metaphorical when I ask what kind of pathetic, alarmist, lilly-livered school district would call the police over anything short of an actual threat against the school?
If it happened around here, whoever read the page would probably think some chunk of the student's blog where he was talking about his hunting or range trip got inserted into the page by accident. I am genuinely disgusted at the type of personality who would react to that text by calling authorities.
Touchscreens bring people closer to technology, but they also separate people from understanding technology. It's great that we have a whole generation of people with iphones, but we also have a whole generation of people who think that if it isn't in the app store, it can't be done, who crack the glass on their iphone and throw the whole thing into the garbage.
A touchscreen may give you a more organic connection to technology, but someone with a mouse is an order of magnitude faster at doing almost anything, and someone with a CLI is an order of magnitude faster still at complex tasks. Anyone who used PDAs for years before their first smartphone can tell you about the jarring sense of debilitation that comes when you go from using a stylus to using a finger.
As for voice recognition, its incompetence makes it too dangerous for me to use, and probably will for a long time. My phone calling/texting the wrong person at the wrong time is more than capable of ruining someone's life. I'm sure the same goes for many other people. It's like telling a five year old to retrieve a handgun. Behaving properly 98% of the time is not good enough by a long shot.
And programming computers is yet harder yet gives the user even more power. I think the dichotomy between power and usability is a false one. Technology should help people with their tasks. If this can be accomplished with a touch or speech UI I see nothing wrong with that.
Ultimately, it is completing the task that matters. If I think about it, most tasks that require CLI interfaces are not necessary on an smartphone to begin with. And that might be a good thing.
We, the technocratic elite, will shape that world. We will be its masters, magicians amongst men. We will derive more power out of technology than regular users. But the price will be that in order to gain this deep knowledge we have to devote an awful lot of time to learn the arcane spells and invocations that are all but useless for most real world tasks.
We choose to master technology. Others choose to master science or stock markets or carpenting. To them, technology is a tool. In very much the same way we will be ignorant of the intricacies of their world.
The lower the understanding of the average user, the less variety there is in a given product category. Desktops came in all shapes and sizes, until everybody bought one and suddenly they were all beige boxes. If you've strolled through a brick n' mortar lately, you probably noticed that most laptops look virtually identical nowadays. Tablets came in all shapes and sizes, from the ten inch slate ala Stylistic, to the convertible laptop, to the hybrid in the form of the TC1000 series, to the five inch chunkers like the OQO and the Sony UX series. Now they're all minimalistic squares of shiny, fingerprint-ridden black plastic. PDAs had a whole ecosystem of designs, so many you could find one that exactly suited your needs. Folding, sliding, with keyboard and without, slates, anything. The smartphone revolution destroyed that. Now you can pick from a shiny square of black plastic with one button or a shiny square of black plastic with four almost-buttons.
Everyone being able to use it means designers try to please everyone by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Ease of use is why you have to remove a panel and the battery just to change SD cards, assuming you even have the option of a microsd card or removable battery.
You're still assuming that variety in a product category, or technology being all-powerful, is the end goal.
But to 95% of the world, or even 99%, this is not the case. Technology is there to make their lives easier and help them accomplish certain tasks.
I don't complain when my car cannot transform into a speedboat on cue - because that's not what I bought it to do. Likewise, I really don't care that my pen is unable to change brush shape or stroke size while I'm using it, where an artist might find that to be the bee's knees.
Technology is a means to an end - I for one am sick of the technocratic elite denying everyone the benefits of technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some kind of technological purity.
The end goal is for the user to have something that best suits their needs. For most people that might be an iphone. Many others are restricted to paying for things they don't want in order to have the things they absolutely require, while being denied the things they need. I hate to say it, but the things I could buy seven years ago suited my needs then much better than the things I can buy now suit my current needs. Computing began by requiring the user to know exactly how the computer worked. Later it merely encouraged and rewarded the user for knowing, like the person who can save a jpeg without pasting it into a Word file. Now it doesn't encourage the user at all and is making an effort at removing any difference between the person who knows and the person who doesn't. A computer can be easy to use without stifling the user; that's one reason Windows is so successful.
"I for one am sick of the technocratic elite denying everyone the benefits of technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some kind of technological purity."
In what way? No one is trying to stop a company from selling whatever they want. We're just saying we don't like the trend computing is taking toward a world where as far as everybody is concerned, the devices they entrust their lives and fortunes to might as well work by magic.
Lets compare this to airplanes. Air travel used to be limited to those who were able and crazy enough to actually fly planes themselves. Now everyone can use planes for transportation in a very mediated and controlled environment. A pilot flying in an airliner is very much like a programmer using an iPhone: Other engineers did all the hard work and the net result is something somewhat boring and limiting (a commercial airliner will only fly to certain destinations). On the other hand it is also very safe and comparatively cheap. Now flying an aircraft on your own is amazingly fun and an exhilarating experience. But it is also very expensive, quite complicated and somewhat dangerous.
Now the point is, I am both a programmer and a pilot myself. So I can definitely see the appeal of both. But, I happily use an iPhone and commercial air travel. Other people have put in a lot of work to made these very safe and reliable for common purposes and they really work well for crossing the atlantic while listening to a podcast.
The iPhone is not denying anyone access to laptops any more than an Airbus is denying you access to a Cessna. They are not dumbing the population down. They get the job done with as little disturbance as possible. For the crazy ones though, There are real computers and real airplanes!
You know how a car works? How a plane works? How a nuclear generator, water purification plant, and skyscraper construction works? I can't speak for anyone else, but I can only know so much. For the rest of mankind's knowledge, I rely on the rest of mankind. It's worked out pretty well so far.
I don't think it's a bad thing that people no longer need to understand technology to reap its benefits. If I would have to understand all things I interact with daily at the same level as I understand how computers work, I wouldn't have time to learn anything that actually interests me.
That's like saying people who don't understand how rsync works are losing out on the full experience of Dropbox. For the 99% of people who aren't programmers, first time ease of use is orders of magnitude more important than learning how to be a power user.
This seems to be a trend, at least in my perception: the more universal technology (the internet, mobile devices, ...) gets and the younger people become immersed in technology, the less they seem interested in how it works. The shortage in engineers and programmers seems grow while less and less people want to study these technical professions. At least where I live.
I'm not so sure that's true. You also need to account for the fact that as technology get's more universal, more people use it. So the same amount of "core geeks" could be using technology, but the ratio of "core geeks" to ordinary users is decreasing.
Sure, but I think that's accounted for when you see the absolute number of engineering/cs graduates drop.
Also, I would expect that being immersed in technology would at least stimulate curiosity in how it works, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
Admiring nature and animals doesn't lead to my becoming a biologist, nor drinking beer lead to my founding a brewery. You can appreciate something without having to really understand what is going on beneath the surface. We are just predisposed to an interest in technology, is all.
We can't peek under the hood or tinker with things like decades past.
You can't peek the lid of a PC like you could with an Apple ][. There's no pre-installed BASIC to play with. No schematics. Even most cars are now "no user servicable parts inside" when you lift the hood.
