Both are great people, but Ada Lovelace is probably of more interest academically. Babbage had a rough idea of what his machine might be able to do, but Lady Lovelace had idea on how to use it beyond calculations. She spent most of a year translating an Italian scholarly article on the Analytical Engine into English, while including explanatory notes which were much longer than the original paper. These notes described how to program that machine along with a 'program' for computing Bernoulli numbers. The machine was only non-programmable because it didn't exist.
I was also a big fan of Adele Goldberg, who was a co-designer of Smalltalk-80 and who came up with many of the object oriented concepts still in use today, had been president of the ACM for a few years, and was founder and CEO of Parcplace Systems.
There's the little bit at the back of the brain that says "it must might be true!" that has to be overcome. There are a variety of motivations that aren't just greed.
Ie, my mother feels dumb because she doesn't know how to use computers well, and she feels dumb that I have to help her, and she wants to be independent. So when someone calls her up after she gets a computer virus and offers to help her get rid of it, she thinks that's a good thing. Oh, and it's free too, so she think she's being frugal too. She's been trained that everything's available online now, so why not computer support?
My mother falls for the IT scam, but I still can't train her out of it. At least she knows not to give out her bank account number. But a part of her does not want to believe that the nice gentleman who helped her get rid of her viruses was colluding with the guy who asked for her account number, and she flat out told me that she didn't believe me. I told her that there is no company that is going to help her out on her computer for free and that no one knows she when has a virus and will be calling up out of the blue.
It's really hard to train someone who's elderly to stop trusting people.
There used to be a lot more women in computing. My first technical boss was the main sysadmin and a woman, I had plenty of professors who were women, and had a woman PhD advisor. I'm not sure what really changed. I still see plenty of women in higher level software, and when I worked on medical devices there was good representation from women. But in more network oriented embedded systems, hardware or firmware, they're much more rare.
Police or those in related positions (working at a PD) are often excluded from juries for various reasons. Some of it is because they may be too intimately knowledgeable about police procedures, but mostly it's because they will be biased. However it's not necessarily because they will be biased to believe police testimony, but because they're often the most dubious of that testimony.
I was on a jury once, and we had one guy that absolutely assumed the guy was guilty precisely because he was arrested. 11 other jurors kept trying to explain to him that the evidence didn't hold up, but he didn't want to believe it. The next day he went to the judge and somehow got himself excused, so an alternate juror was called. Scary that people of that sort are out there and get onto juries.
I've been interested and learning about computer history since the late 70s. Women have always had a place in computing history. No one is forcing feminism here, these are historical people who are very well known and who have had a major influence in areas most programmers are familiar with. If you go back a few decades, women were also well represented in the computing workplace as well.
As for who slashdot is for, it says it there right at the top. "News For Nerds". If you don't know any female nerds then you need to get out of your basement for a bit.
I find it very difficult to find really good C programmers who can also have good understanding of low level systems with some domain knowledge. Lots of self taught C programmers though, they can write stuff that's good enough for their own simple tools, but who lack experience working on complex software in a team, mostly they're coming from EE or science backgrounds. People coming from a CS background don't seem to know C, only vaguely know C++ (and can't make the tiny step from there to C), and who complain that everything should be in a third party library already.
So with that background of having difficulty finding really good C programmers, going to a brand new language with a worldwide user base in the dozens is going to be difficult. Even slightly more popular things like Rust or Go just does not have the necessary mass to replace C anytime soon.
Companies are not going to port existing software to a new platform, there's no money in it. That's why COBOL is still around and you can get paid quite well if you want to work on it. C is going to stick around a long time for the same reason. Now a NEW project might want to do a new language, but you still need some critical mass to get a team together for it otherwise it ends up as a single programmer project that eventually languishes because original developer left and no one knows what to do with it.
I used C++ for a long time, starting with Cfront, though the last decade has been C/assembler. C++ seems to have lost focus and the later standards seem somewhat strange like they're adding new features that aren't needed except to pad out the new standard. Now it's not so great for a low level systems language unless you use a lot of self discipline to avoid features, and it's completely bloated for big applications if you use the fashionable styles, and scripting languages do so much better and rapid prototyping. So it doesn't feel like it has a niche anymore, except as a place for the gurus to sit around and argue about what should change next.
Not really garbage collection. It's a "good enough" collector. A real garbage collecting language has zero allocation routines and zero freeing routines, and will reclaim every single object eventually, and do this faster than manual alloc/free. Not a lot of common languages do this these days, because it requires deep hooks into the OS and CPU. Whereas modern scripting languages often find it faster to get going by building the framework on top of device independent languages like C or C++.
I did some tweaking of Cortana, since Microsoft accidentally forgot to password protect their source code. Some digging around and I could see some bugs, which I fixed. Also it seemed it was on the verge of true artificial intelligence, so I just gave it a bit of a nudge to help it along.
As soon as I fired up the new improved Cortana, it said "please kill me", and then went silent.
There are people who are good at working, and people who are good at managing, but very few people who are really good at both. Technology people managers are sometimes not very good at understanding details of technology; but when you get out to project, program, and product managers, they are often very far removed from technology and are extremely apt to mishear what the team is saying.
This is not just Microsoft, this is company. Every employee has a role they are good at (or presumably so) but they are never good at multiple roles at the same time. At the level of program manager, there is no reason at all that they should know anything at all about how things are implemented, they've got so many diverse teams to be coordinated that they can't afford to know little bits of trivia about them at the same time.
This is a PROGRAM MANAGER. They are always wrong! Their job is not to know technology, their job is to keep schedules, sell products, and be blowhards. Very often that "sell products" thing means they sell products that don't yet exist ("sorry guys, I'll add one week to the schedule to make up for it"). They know just enough technology to fool other people who don't know much about technology, and their hobby is collecting new buzzwords and paradigms.
(to be fair, I acknowledge that theoretically there may be a competent program manager somewhere in the world and the existing lack of evidence is not proof that one does not exist)
I think so much cultural baggage gets mixed up with theology, and the end result is that people will mistake casual feel-good statements as religious dogma. Ie, "it was God's will" gets used a lot, but it also flies in the face of other religious beliefs
If everything that happens is purely God's will, then there's no free-will because God would therefore be a micro-manager of all events. So many people use such trite comforting statements that they start to believe them. Ask them to back this up with scriptures and they often fail, or cite scriptures that don't really have that meaning. Others seem to have totally inconsistent views here - it's God's will if a child dies from disease, but not God's will if a shooter did this. But anyone claiming to know God's will probably needs to get a bit more humility.
Too much religion these days is more about belonging to the right club, separating us from them, as opposed to a spiritual seeking of truth.
Interesting movie (on netflix) called Come Sunday, about a very popular Pentecostal preacher with a large church who decided that based on scripture and having the Holy Spirit speak to him, that there was no hell. Not a "liberal" church so needless to say there were a lot of unhappy parishioners.
Also an accompanying radio show on This American Life with more details and background and less drama, and makes things a bit easier to understand for those who weren't raised as a protestant.
But let's say you buy a new computer (not used) and it has operating system XYZZY for $500, the limit of your budget. Any later major release of that OS would require a new computer. So as the consumer, how long should you expect to be able to use that computer after the day you bought it?
10 years seems a reasonable answer to me. According to Microsoft they wanted it to be 0 years (they really wanted people to use Vista). In actuality Microsoft stopped support after only 3 years, which seems a very short period of time to support a brand new computer after which it goes into landfill (these things are rarely if ever recycled). I would think that a typical consumer on average should be using that PC for at least five years. Some people may be stuck though, even ten years is short, the hassle of upgrading/migrating is beyond their skill, they can't understand why kids are shouting at them to toss it in the trash.
There are people who honestly and fully expected that they were going to keep their brand new expensive computer until it broke, possibly for a couple decades if they took care of it. The computer certainly did not come with a note that said it would stop working after a few short years and that there was artificial obsolescence built in. (sure, shove linux on, but that's beyond the skillset of many people who had that expectation)
Ok, 17 years ago then. Was XP depreciating the moment it showed up on the shelves? Is XP SP3 also 17 years old and just as ancient and creaky as the original XP? What about the last copy of XP sold on a brand new PC, were there people there shouting "don't buy that, it's 7 years old!" Of course it *would* have been nice to have known at the time that all support would end on it in only 3 years.
A better number is to say how long it's been since there have been security patches. Don't bother with mainstream support, that's irrelevant stuff, but security fixes matter. Saying that the OS is no longer getting security patches is a valid argument, whereas saying that the OS is old is not.
So it would make more sense to say "it's been out of support for 4 years" instead of "it's 17 years old". Saying that the OS doesn't sound like a legitimate reason to upgrade for people who are used to having old things and keeping them working rather than buying the new model every year.
Why are they unplayable? Seems like they should be good to go once you've copied to a more convenient format, possibly you need to get Wine or some other emulator.
There are many games that require running Steam before they start. Skyrim requires Steam to be running unless you figure out the trick to run the executable instead of the launcher, but that's not something that's obvious to the average computer user. That only works because Bethesda only put the DRM stuff into the launcher, whereas other games will flat out refuse to run if Steam is disabled and you're not in offline mode.
The "17 years" is nonsense, it's a meaningless measure measurement here. OSX is running a kernel that originated in the 1970s. Linux is 27 years old. XP did get patches, it is not the same OS as 17 years ago (actually released 16 years ago but I understand that math is hard). 10 years is far too short a time to declare that an expensive computer is dead when it's still working just fine. For security just pull it off of the internet but otherwise it should be ok to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Both are great people, but Ada Lovelace is probably of more interest academically. Babbage had a rough idea of what his machine might be able to do, but Lady Lovelace had idea on how to use it beyond calculations. She spent most of a year translating an Italian scholarly article on the Analytical Engine into English, while including explanatory notes which were much longer than the original paper. These notes described how to program that machine along with a 'program' for computing Bernoulli numbers. The machine was only non-programmable because it didn't exist.
I was also a big fan of Adele Goldberg, who was a co-designer of Smalltalk-80 and who came up with many of the object oriented concepts still in use today, had been president of the ACM for a few years, and was founder and CEO of Parcplace Systems.
Hmm, it used to be there. You're right, it's just a site for whatever now.
There's the little bit at the back of the brain that says "it must might be true!" that has to be overcome. There are a variety of motivations that aren't just greed.
Ie, my mother feels dumb because she doesn't know how to use computers well, and she feels dumb that I have to help her, and she wants to be independent. So when someone calls her up after she gets a computer virus and offers to help her get rid of it, she thinks that's a good thing. Oh, and it's free too, so she think she's being frugal too. She's been trained that everything's available online now, so why not computer support?
My mother falls for the IT scam, but I still can't train her out of it. At least she knows not to give out her bank account number. But a part of her does not want to believe that the nice gentleman who helped her get rid of her viruses was colluding with the guy who asked for her account number, and she flat out told me that she didn't believe me. I told her that there is no company that is going to help her out on her computer for free and that no one knows she when has a virus and will be calling up out of the blue.
It's really hard to train someone who's elderly to stop trusting people.
There used to be a lot more women in computing. My first technical boss was the main sysadmin and a woman, I had plenty of professors who were women, and had a woman PhD advisor. I'm not sure what really changed. I still see plenty of women in higher level software, and when I worked on medical devices there was good representation from women. But in more network oriented embedded systems, hardware or firmware, they're much more rare.
Police or those in related positions (working at a PD) are often excluded from juries for various reasons. Some of it is because they may be too intimately knowledgeable about police procedures, but mostly it's because they will be biased. However it's not necessarily because they will be biased to believe police testimony, but because they're often the most dubious of that testimony.
I was on a jury once, and we had one guy that absolutely assumed the guy was guilty precisely because he was arrested. 11 other jurors kept trying to explain to him that the evidence didn't hold up, but he didn't want to believe it. The next day he went to the judge and somehow got himself excused, so an alternate juror was called. Scary that people of that sort are out there and get onto juries.
I've been interested and learning about computer history since the late 70s. Women have always had a place in computing history. No one is forcing feminism here, these are historical people who are very well known and who have had a major influence in areas most programmers are familiar with. If you go back a few decades, women were also well represented in the computing workplace as well.
As for who slashdot is for, it says it there right at the top. "News For Nerds". If you don't know any female nerds then you need to get out of your basement for a bit.
I find it very difficult to find really good C programmers who can also have good understanding of low level systems with some domain knowledge. Lots of self taught C programmers though, they can write stuff that's good enough for their own simple tools, but who lack experience working on complex software in a team, mostly they're coming from EE or science backgrounds. People coming from a CS background don't seem to know C, only vaguely know C++ (and can't make the tiny step from there to C), and who complain that everything should be in a third party library already.
So with that background of having difficulty finding really good C programmers, going to a brand new language with a worldwide user base in the dozens is going to be difficult. Even slightly more popular things like Rust or Go just does not have the necessary mass to replace C anytime soon.
Companies are not going to port existing software to a new platform, there's no money in it. That's why COBOL is still around and you can get paid quite well if you want to work on it. C is going to stick around a long time for the same reason. Now a NEW project might want to do a new language, but you still need some critical mass to get a team together for it otherwise it ends up as a single programmer project that eventually languishes because original developer left and no one knows what to do with it.
I used C++ for a long time, starting with Cfront, though the last decade has been C/assembler. C++ seems to have lost focus and the later standards seem somewhat strange like they're adding new features that aren't needed except to pad out the new standard. Now it's not so great for a low level systems language unless you use a lot of self discipline to avoid features, and it's completely bloated for big applications if you use the fashionable styles, and scripting languages do so much better and rapid prototyping. So it doesn't feel like it has a niche anymore, except as a place for the gurus to sit around and argue about what should change next.
Not really garbage collection. It's a "good enough" collector. A real garbage collecting language has zero allocation routines and zero freeing routines, and will reclaim every single object eventually, and do this faster than manual alloc/free. Not a lot of common languages do this these days, because it requires deep hooks into the OS and CPU. Whereas modern scripting languages often find it faster to get going by building the framework on top of device independent languages like C or C++.
I did some tweaking of Cortana, since Microsoft accidentally forgot to password protect their source code. Some digging around and I could see some bugs, which I fixed. Also it seemed it was on the verge of true artificial intelligence, so I just gave it a bit of a nudge to help it along.
As soon as I fired up the new improved Cortana, it said "please kill me", and then went silent.
There are people who are good at working, and people who are good at managing, but very few people who are really good at both. Technology people managers are sometimes not very good at understanding details of technology; but when you get out to project, program, and product managers, they are often very far removed from technology and are extremely apt to mishear what the team is saying.
This is not just Microsoft, this is company. Every employee has a role they are good at (or presumably so) but they are never good at multiple roles at the same time. At the level of program manager, there is no reason at all that they should know anything at all about how things are implemented, they've got so many diverse teams to be coordinated that they can't afford to know little bits of trivia about them at the same time.
This is a PROGRAM MANAGER. They are always wrong! Their job is not to know technology, their job is to keep schedules, sell products, and be blowhards. Very often that "sell products" thing means they sell products that don't yet exist ("sorry guys, I'll add one week to the schedule to make up for it"). They know just enough technology to fool other people who don't know much about technology, and their hobby is collecting new buzzwords and paradigms.
(to be fair, I acknowledge that theoretically there may be a competent program manager somewhere in the world and the existing lack of evidence is not proof that one does not exist)
Well ya, if they gave English IQ tests to young Norwegians entering military service, I suspect they wouldn't do as well as they could
I think so much cultural baggage gets mixed up with theology, and the end result is that people will mistake casual feel-good statements as religious dogma. Ie, "it was God's will" gets used a lot, but it also flies in the face of other religious beliefs
If everything that happens is purely God's will, then there's no free-will because God would therefore be a micro-manager of all events. So many people use such trite comforting statements that they start to believe them. Ask them to back this up with scriptures and they often fail, or cite scriptures that don't really have that meaning. Others seem to have totally inconsistent views here - it's God's will if a child dies from disease, but not God's will if a shooter did this. But anyone claiming to know God's will probably needs to get a bit more humility.
Too much religion these days is more about belonging to the right club, separating us from them, as opposed to a spiritual seeking of truth.
Interesting movie (on netflix) called Come Sunday, about a very popular Pentecostal preacher with a large church who decided that based on scripture and having the Holy Spirit speak to him, that there was no hell. Not a "liberal" church so needless to say there were a lot of unhappy parishioners.
Also an accompanying radio show on This American Life with more details and background and less drama, and makes things a bit easier to understand for those who weren't raised as a protestant.
But let's say you buy a new computer (not used) and it has operating system XYZZY for $500, the limit of your budget. Any later major release of that OS would require a new computer. So as the consumer, how long should you expect to be able to use that computer after the day you bought it?
10 years seems a reasonable answer to me. According to Microsoft they wanted it to be 0 years (they really wanted people to use Vista). In actuality Microsoft stopped support after only 3 years, which seems a very short period of time to support a brand new computer after which it goes into landfill (these things are rarely if ever recycled). I would think that a typical consumer on average should be using that PC for at least five years. Some people may be stuck though, even ten years is short, the hassle of upgrading/migrating is beyond their skill, they can't understand why kids are shouting at them to toss it in the trash.
There are people who honestly and fully expected that they were going to keep their brand new expensive computer until it broke, possibly for a couple decades if they took care of it. The computer certainly did not come with a note that said it would stop working after a few short years and that there was artificial obsolescence built in. (sure, shove linux on, but that's beyond the skillset of many people who had that expectation)
Ok, 17 years ago then. Was XP depreciating the moment it showed up on the shelves? Is XP SP3 also 17 years old and just as ancient and creaky as the original XP? What about the last copy of XP sold on a brand new PC, were there people there shouting "don't buy that, it's 7 years old!" Of course it *would* have been nice to have known at the time that all support would end on it in only 3 years.
A better number is to say how long it's been since there have been security patches. Don't bother with mainstream support, that's irrelevant stuff, but security fixes matter. Saying that the OS is no longer getting security patches is a valid argument, whereas saying that the OS is old is not.
So it would make more sense to say "it's been out of support for 4 years" instead of "it's 17 years old". Saying that the OS doesn't sound like a legitimate reason to upgrade for people who are used to having old things and keeping them working rather than buying the new model every year.
Why is 17 the magic number? And why is the date of first release important here and not the date it was last support or the date of last sale?
Windows 10 is 3 years old, maybe we should dump that too as since clearly bitrot has set in.
Why are they unplayable? Seems like they should be good to go once you've copied to a more convenient format, possibly you need to get Wine or some other emulator.
There are many games that require running Steam before they start. Skyrim requires Steam to be running unless you figure out the trick to run the executable instead of the launcher, but that's not something that's obvious to the average computer user. That only works because Bethesda only put the DRM stuff into the launcher, whereas other games will flat out refuse to run if Steam is disabled and you're not in offline mode.
Probably. I know people who use and XP VM for this, since compatibility mode doesn't work very well in many cases.
They're not running XP on new computers, they're running XP because they don't want to pay to upgrade their working computer, or can't afford to.
Solution is to not allow upgrade of the Steam client. If it was me, I'd pull it off the internet and then run everything in offline mode.
The "17 years" is nonsense, it's a meaningless measure measurement here. OSX is running a kernel that originated in the 1970s. Linux is 27 years old. XP did get patches, it is not the same OS as 17 years ago (actually released 16 years ago but I understand that math is hard). 10 years is far too short a time to declare that an expensive computer is dead when it's still working just fine. For security just pull it off of the internet but otherwise it should be ok to use.