If a phone service provider won't shut down the spammers then that service provider should just be blocked by all the telcos in the west. I very much doubt that countries like India would continue to turn a blind eye on this when telco after telco was blocked from calling countries like the US.
At best, important people's executive assistants are on linkedin managing the important person's account. The rest are sales/marketing/middle management and others not really sure why they are there.
If the person is a "C" level executive then they are C level for a company of under 100 people with under 25 mil in sales.
One of the great feedback loops that usually drives a property or stock crash is leverage. If you get underwater on your speculative mortgage, or your margin gets eaten by a stock dip, then you are forced to sell which puts more people into this situation who are forced to sell...
But I have not seen anything suggesting that much of the crypto market is leveraged. This suggests two things. One that this plummet is actually more fundamental. But, that false recoveries are going to distinguish this crash more so than your typical bubble.
There is something wrong with people who are moderating 100+ subs. Often they have an agenda/axe to grind and moderate for the sake of power. Some subs are moderated very well but many have mods that are completely missing the point of their being there. Paid shills are rife in some subs where other people are banned for posting unambiguous facts that don't line up with the moderators tastes.
But unless there is a sub for people who spend 150 hours a week on redit moderators need to be cut way back in what they can do. Limit the number of subs any individual can moderate. Have a team who replace moderators who are clearly abusing their power.
And if that team has any spare resources, fight the shills, especially the chemical company shills.
I can see some company sticking with Oracle because they think that it would cost more to make the switch to something healthier. But it makes no sense for any company to do cloud with Oracle in that it would be new developing going on; why create neo-legacy crap when you don't have to.
Maybe their strong arm tactics turned a few current customers over to cloud but in my world I where it is endless AWS this and Azure that, I never have heard a single peep about going Oracle.
This is just like when nobody could see a way around Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC OS which then became a non-story when Android and iOS ate the entire mobile landscape. Microsoft tried so very hard stay relevant in this new world. Now we have the exact same story. Everyone wondered how to break the Oracle stranglehold on the enterprise DB and suddenly cloud made it a non-story. Except in the Microsoft case many people still do use PCs to access so much of the internet. With Oracle I see a future HP-UX. Purified Legacy.
I'm now waiting for someone to send me a resume showing their legacy creds with Cobol, DB2, HP-UX, and then Oracle listed as obscure dead technologies they know.
I do not disagree that art should inform things like engineering. But the culture surrounding the liberal arts should be kept in a separate institution. In NS there was a Tech school called TUNS. It kicked ass and took names. Many of its students went on to graduate work in places like MIT. It was primarily an engineering school with not much straying from that core.
But it had a problem. The tutiton was ~$3500 (at the time about average for any Uni in Canada). But $3500 didn't cover the cost of educating an engineer. Whereas there was a nearby school called Dal that had mostly art students who were also charged around $3000. The budgeted cost to educate an undergrad art student at the time was around $1500. This left lots of room to pay for things like medicine ($35k) or dentistry ($50k). It also left room for them to take over the financially struggling TUNS.
TUNS was crushed under the bureaucratic crush of Dal. Computer services were taken over by Dal and (literally not joking) renamed Borg. But worst of all the cultural policies of fairness and inclusion were dumped on the school. So mandates of having mostly locals attend (so as to foster the next generation of local engineers) was turfed and the school was overrun with foreigners who rarely stayed one day after graduating. This was also good economics as foreign students are charged far more.
But no longer was the school even focusing on the best and the brightest but wafting around on the whims of the politically correct far left wing people found in the liberal arts programs.
So I see having liberal arts and technical educations being a terrible mix. If you want the best and the brightest forming generation after generation of you local engineering and science community, then let practical efficient(ish) schools do their own thing. If you want an 8th rate joke of a tech school to emerge, then follow the lead that was set in Nova Scotia, Canada.
My main requests are three: Don't eat all my memory, don't eat my CPU, and block all videos. I regularly have 10+ tabs open and am missing many gigs of RAM. Rarely do I view a site where much more than a handful of megs would make any sense. Youtube is one of very few sites where I want videos.
One simple change to make is just don't let an auto loading video ever load again until I specifically allow it.
Another is to just stop all negative things. I will never ever ever ever allow any site to send me notifications. I will not be turning off adblock pretty much ever. And out side of google maps, I don't want any site to have my location.
Remember passwords. Get aggressive with password remembering.
Sound. Again I don't want sounds coming from a site unless I specifically allow.
Block the living hell out of facebook. Just stop them from ever getting any data from me. No like buttons, no sign-in with facebooks, etc.
A really cool feature that would be really nice would be the block the code that did this feature. If some news site has some "helpful" crap slide in I would love to have a way to select it and not only have it blocked but the code that ran it.
Also block sites from seeing my mouse cursor and block scrolling detection.
Make work jobs will be worse than the class BS jobs, they will end up being red tape jobs. Why not have a bicycle registry? Why not have a pet registry? Why not have a drone registry? Why not have a canoe registry?
I want to go for a nice kayak ride on the lake in front of my cottage. Why not have people there monitoring to make sure I have a PDF, am not drinking, smoking near my kids, swearing, going too fast, going too near the ducks, fishing without a license, paddling an un-inspected kayak, using an un-certified paddle, not wearing a fire retardant bathing suit, or not having had the latest in lake safety courses, eco courses, duck conservation courses, lake pollution courses, kayak safety course, and a sunscreen application course.
Many people argue factoids about programming such as MVC etc and completely miss the whole point is to deliver a working product.
If you follow every bad practice and generate tech debt as fast as you can you will probably start tripping over your own code and either not deliver or deliver a bad product.
At the same time, if you focus on pleasing your 3rd year academically oriented uni prof you will also probably end up not delivering or deliver a bad product.
So, the question is: what set of technologies will deliver the quality the client wants for the least amount of cost? The simple reality is that for the vast majority of web developments that aren't going to just be another wordpress heap of crap that LAMP or something else ending in P is probably best.
I personally do mission critical stuff that has management reporting through web. I do it in C++ so that it continues to appear "mission critical", the reality is that I would easily deliver equal or better quality with PHP in far less time.
To me PHP is like having an adjustable wrench. There is no arguing that proper high quality drop forged wrenches and sockets are better, but why then does my adjustable wrench get used so much? Because it is handy and in many cases the bolt/nut is off faster than if I had done the longer task of getting the correct wrench, only to find it wasn't an exact fit, so getting another wrench, trying it, then finding it is a metric nut, getting those wrenches, etc.
That said, there are many jobs where PHP is so wildly ill-suited that it is just abuse to use it.
PHP is an HTML template language. Full stop. It allows the mixing of some control logic with the front end. The further you push PHP away from this ideal the more wrong you are. But at this point any other combination of technologies just doesn't fill this niche anywhere near as well.
100% agree. But the template programming has become a huge problem. I am seeing people on stack overflow and others at conferences who are even initializing basic data types like they were some kind of complex beast. Templates have their place and it is only in the darkest corners of libraries.
Here is a perfect example of this academic nonsense:
int z={3} or int z(3). WTF. There are complete bozos suggesting this is the now "correct" way to init a variable. Yes that is a great idea. Let's make C++ less clear to someone coming from another language or basic human understanding. This is increasing job security or showing off their huge intellects, pure and simple. These nitwits completely miss the point that programming is to produce a quality product for the end user. Not an academic exercise. If the product takes longer, has more bugs, or is harder to maintain then your methodology is wrong.
I have met way too many C++ programmers who think that an elegant design is completely trumped by a sophisticated templated nightmare that requires a deep understanding of what C++ is going to compile into.
They will have fiendishly complicated templates, move, and copy operations built into objects that are instantiated once using the same data types every time. There is no copying, no moving, no variations and yet they defend that their completely unmaintainable code is the only way and that anything else would be amateur hour.
Worse is that these bozos are becoming the gatekeepers for programming interviews. They are pretty much lining up the candidates like a firing squad to blow them all away saying, "Ha he couldn't do a second degree variadic template with a half twist of lemon... loser" at the same time rejecting concepts such as code coverage measurements in unit tests.
Unless you are pushing the bleeding edge of performance, nice simple C++ code that smells more like python, has great unit test coverage (branch checking and all) and doesn't cause your customer or marketing team grief, is the only way to go. Anything else is just some selfish dick ensuring job security.
Nature or nurture. People often argue which dominates but in this case the parents gave him both the genes and the upbringing. I suspect the parents are not quite right to begin with and they didn't give him the life lessons to stand on his own two feet.
I would bet money that anyone who saw them raising this kid knew that screwed up was a probable outcome.
I see this as one of those videos where someone is pulling up a tree stump with a truck plus a rope and the tree-stump breaks free devastating the truck. Same outcome; here we are making fun of the carnage.
I would throw out a guess that I don't want to see over 95% of non youtube vidoes that try to play on web pages. Even youtube's going onto the next video would fall under this 95%.
Pretty much, unless your video is on youtube, I don't want to see it. That 3D animation your company paid $30k for that resulted in mathematically perfect workers kind of forward moon walking while carrying your product is at the bottom of my list. I came to your site for a price or contact info. The news article that won't shut up and has the video follow me down the page while I read the article is at the bottom of my list.
My ISP accidentally left cable TV coming to my house. I connected a TV to it to see and there it was, something like 80 channels. Then I disconnected it as I don't want that commercially ridden crap.
So, with "customers" like me, what the heck future does cable TV have, probably a terrible one as not only will the "me's" leave, but I suspect that TV will migrate more and more of its content to complete dumbasses which will drive more people away, not just not appeal to them, but people with half a brain won't want their kids or themselves exposed to endless breathless reporting on the Kardashians and the thoughts of Chairman Kanye West.
I have rarely met an MBA who had the time of day for an Engineering type. You tell MBAs that such and such needs to be encrypted moved, backed up, or whatever critical thing for $10,000 and you won't get the budget. Then an interior designer comes in and redoes the front lobby for the 3rd time in 5 years for a cost of $250k.
Then there are the pay scales. In any large not obviously IT company (many of which delude themselves into thinking they aren't nearly all IT like banks) you get an MBA with 5 years in getting $120k and the Engineers getting $70k. Then they wonder why they can't keep the talent.
The MBAs even treat the accountants like trash.
What I see are people of near zero talent who are genuinely scared of those with it. The more talent you have outside of their MBA world the more scared they are. You realize that you can save the company $10 million a year through something you found in the data and you get a pat on the back. Some MBA does a stupid deal worth $10 million (worth, not makes) and they get a rockin' bonus larger than the Engineer's salary.
Then, hidden among the corporate world are the companies that are pretty much just Engineering people some of whom are good at sales and business. Those companies attract the top talent and often run circles around the old guard. An old guard who realize that they need to up their IT game so they outsource to India and lay off half of their employees.
I have a simple formula. If a company has a large number of H1Bs in its staff then it will gain a short term advantage as it reduces costs and rides on its earlier momentum. In the long term it will start to find the ride bumpy, and then it will sink into oblivion. Think Yahoo, SUN, Compaq, etc. These companies were taken over by their MBAs who thought that Engineering was a commodity business.
So to answer the original question. Crappy companies that are not going to be competitive in the long term are not investing in IT. The companies that are kicking ass and taking names are.
I have been in two jurisdictions where there have been notable (luckily failed) attempts to regulate programmers. One attempt was that all software must be signed off by a professional engineer, and the other was just a professional "self-regulating" society of computer professionals where you couldn't deliver anything software related without being a member in good standing.
The people who were involved were all assholes. At a local conference someone jokingly suggested that they be blacklisted; which then turned into a circulated list of people who had tried to make it happen. From many of the key companies in town they and the companies they represented were not completely blacklisted so much as scorned. One of the main guys complained to me that his business lost the ability to be profitable for about 3 years after that. I laughed.
The gist of the article is that professional guilds exist to keep people out, but I see it as their also wanting control as well. The point of some of these societies is to even prevent competition among the "professionals" I suspect that if you are a dentist and you started inoculating people against cavities for free, (assuming there was such an inoculation) that you would be standing in front of a standards committee in a heartbeat. Or if you were a orthodontist who just went completely cut rate and offered services for cost plus a small living expense for yourself. Even overpaying your staff might find you up for a dental investigation.
I agree that the C64 was certainly a great place to start, but in those days computers were fairly useless and the games pretty crappy by our standards. Go a bit further back and all was more so.
Therefore you could make a little program that might actually do something cool. Plus computers were a novelty so making them do anything was cool.
If you started to get a bit serious you could reasonably make a game or a program that others might use. Not a blockbuster, but something interesting. Get 5 friends and spend a few months and you might actually make something worthwhile that made money.
Fast forward to today and there is no novelty, everyone has a computer in their pocket, and short of finding some bizarrely unfilled niche you aren't making anything useful alone and in short order; and if you do, you are probably just using some crass tool that simplistically pounds out an app or other "programming" like wordpress.
And as far as you and 5 friends making something in under a year, good luck with that. There are exceptions, but not that many.
This all boils down to reward for effort. With my Vic-20 I could put in little effort before it started to reward me. Thus I was hooked. Give the same zillion years later me visual studio 2017 and I don't know where I would begin. Maybe it would be rewarding enough. Maybe not. Printing my name over and over again would impress my friends decades ago. I don't know what I would have to create these days to impress them.
To me, finding a getty image is a failed search. Block them as I have exactly zero interest in their over posed images of business people in cheap ill-fitting suits and dead eyes.
I soon will need an upgraded videocard for ML. In fact, I would like two or three really good ones. The timing is about perfect as in the coming months cryptominers are going to be flooding the market with them as they try to pay their rent.
I consider Wine to be like putting wings on a car to make a flying car. You just end up with a crappy plane and a crappy car.
I develop software and actually do use the Raspberry(not as my primary platform), but I just make the software cross-compile on linux or windows so it isn't a problem. My personal experience with porting other people's software is that it is endless pain and suffering.
Let's say that I recommend to you a better search engine called blahblah.com. You check it out and it is much better in all the ways you might care about. You will recommend this to most of your acquaintances and maybe on your blog or whatever. How long before google has lost 90% of their regular search engine users? 6 months? A year at most.
I suspect that without that driving the company the rest is in immediate trouble. Gmail, docs, and those other products nobody cares about can fund google as it is now. So the cutbacks would be fast and furious. Once that happens you just have to look at previous shining stars like yahoo, Blackberry, or sun micro to see the future of google at that point.
I suspect that in the early days of facebook that myspace just laughed at them.
This has happened and will happen over and over. Some companies can pivot a little bit and start to regain lost ground but most just get to a point where suddenly revenues are tanking and they are simply doomed. This is often founded on decisions made long before the tanking began and it is then too late to change.
I have a standing bet with a few friends that 2 or fewer out of the 5 companies (Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, and Amazon) will be players in 2030. We all agree that Yahoo's present state would count as dead.
I assumed that people buying PC computers were content creating pros who trended to the expert side of things. But with HP taking the lead it clearly shows that I was wrong and that a vast portion of PC buyers took the short bus to the Staples store to get their fill of bloatware loaded flimsy piles of excrement. Once in a blue moon an HP will fool me into thinking "That one's not so bad." and then it tries to chew off one of my fingers with some shocking bit of low quality corner cutting marking BS nonsense.
If I had the choice between HPs best desktop model and a raspberry pi I would choose the pi without hesitation as I know that while not a star performer it won't let me down. The HP would be like a beautiful garden filled with poisonous snakes and skin inflaming plants.
Getting rid of cable TV is pretty much going to become a national pasttime. Things like sports have been shooting themselves in the face and they are one of the few reasons to even have cable for some people.
I was watching a show on someone's TV and nearly 1/3rd of the screen kept telling me that there was some concert now live on their web site. This was a Canadian TV channel. Over and over they kept putting this on the screen. It made the show shit to watch. Then there is the bug in the corner. These people simply do not respect my desire to not be continuously marketed at.
Netflix is free from this. Once in a blue moon netflix takes up the top half of my iPad app to blast some stupid series at me, and I resent that enough. I want to choose what I want, I don't want some MBA who has weaseled and backstabbed his way into getting his company to put his product in my face.
For instance, a number of people that I know are complaining about netflix continuously recommending Korean TV. None of us want it. If I find out that some exec did a Korean deal and is screwing with the recommendation system to push that crap, I will drop Netflix and go back to piracy in a heartbeat.
In nearly every technological household that I know there is Netflix. In those same households there is little piracy as compared to before. But there is piracy of any crappy streaming systems like CBS's. Not that Disney makes much other than crap, they too will see that their crap streaming service will not reduce piracy. Organizations like CBS don't seem to realize that the old is unacceptable. You can't put bugs on the screen, you can't relentlessly market at people through a service they are paying for. You can't abuse your customers to fit you needs. Sell them a great product and they will pay you. Sell a completely half assed MBA driven attempt at manipulation and pirates will cherry pick the few good bits and leave you empty handed.
It is those little things that Netflix does like skip intro that completely shows that they are tuned into their customers. With organizations like CBS they dole out the shows one a week and there is no skip intro because some MBA long ago identified that you could literally show 2 minutes of the exact same crap to people and it cost nothing more to make and filled 2 whole minutes of your 44 minutes.That is like 5% of your show for free. (frat boy MBA chest bump time).
So this should read, bad old school streaming does not reduce piracy, good healthy streaming does.
Slashdot Mirror
If a phone service provider won't shut down the spammers then that service provider should just be blocked by all the telcos in the west. I very much doubt that countries like India would continue to turn a blind eye on this when telco after telco was blocked from calling countries like the US.
At best, important people's executive assistants are on linkedin managing the important person's account. The rest are sales/marketing/middle management and others not really sure why they are there.
If the person is a "C" level executive then they are C level for a company of under 100 people with under 25 mil in sales.
One of the great feedback loops that usually drives a property or stock crash is leverage. If you get underwater on your speculative mortgage, or your margin gets eaten by a stock dip, then you are forced to sell which puts more people into this situation who are forced to sell...
But I have not seen anything suggesting that much of the crypto market is leveraged. This suggests two things. One that this plummet is actually more fundamental. But, that false recoveries are going to distinguish this crash more so than your typical bubble.
There is something wrong with people who are moderating 100+ subs. Often they have an agenda/axe to grind and moderate for the sake of power. Some subs are moderated very well but many have mods that are completely missing the point of their being there. Paid shills are rife in some subs where other people are banned for posting unambiguous facts that don't line up with the moderators tastes.
But unless there is a sub for people who spend 150 hours a week on redit moderators need to be cut way back in what they can do. Limit the number of subs any individual can moderate. Have a team who replace moderators who are clearly abusing their power.
And if that team has any spare resources, fight the shills, especially the chemical company shills.
I can see some company sticking with Oracle because they think that it would cost more to make the switch to something healthier. But it makes no sense for any company to do cloud with Oracle in that it would be new developing going on; why create neo-legacy crap when you don't have to.
Maybe their strong arm tactics turned a few current customers over to cloud but in my world I where it is endless AWS this and Azure that, I never have heard a single peep about going Oracle.
This is just like when nobody could see a way around Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC OS which then became a non-story when Android and iOS ate the entire mobile landscape. Microsoft tried so very hard stay relevant in this new world. Now we have the exact same story. Everyone wondered how to break the Oracle stranglehold on the enterprise DB and suddenly cloud made it a non-story. Except in the Microsoft case many people still do use PCs to access so much of the internet. With Oracle I see a future HP-UX. Purified Legacy.
I'm now waiting for someone to send me a resume showing their legacy creds with Cobol, DB2, HP-UX, and then Oracle listed as obscure dead technologies they know.
I do not disagree that art should inform things like engineering. But the culture surrounding the liberal arts should be kept in a separate institution. In NS there was a Tech school called TUNS. It kicked ass and took names. Many of its students went on to graduate work in places like MIT. It was primarily an engineering school with not much straying from that core.
But it had a problem. The tutiton was ~$3500 (at the time about average for any Uni in Canada). But $3500 didn't cover the cost of educating an engineer. Whereas there was a nearby school called Dal that had mostly art students who were also charged around $3000. The budgeted cost to educate an undergrad art student at the time was around $1500. This left lots of room to pay for things like medicine ($35k) or dentistry ($50k). It also left room for them to take over the financially struggling TUNS.
TUNS was crushed under the bureaucratic crush of Dal. Computer services were taken over by Dal and (literally not joking) renamed Borg. But worst of all the cultural policies of fairness and inclusion were dumped on the school. So mandates of having mostly locals attend (so as to foster the next generation of local engineers) was turfed and the school was overrun with foreigners who rarely stayed one day after graduating. This was also good economics as foreign students are charged far more.
But no longer was the school even focusing on the best and the brightest but wafting around on the whims of the politically correct far left wing people found in the liberal arts programs.
So I see having liberal arts and technical educations being a terrible mix. If you want the best and the brightest forming generation after generation of you local engineering and science community, then let practical efficient(ish) schools do their own thing. If you want an 8th rate joke of a tech school to emerge, then follow the lead that was set in Nova Scotia, Canada.
My main requests are three: Don't eat all my memory, don't eat my CPU, and block all videos. I regularly have 10+ tabs open and am missing many gigs of RAM. Rarely do I view a site where much more than a handful of megs would make any sense. Youtube is one of very few sites where I want videos.
One simple change to make is just don't let an auto loading video ever load again until I specifically allow it.
Another is to just stop all negative things. I will never ever ever ever allow any site to send me notifications. I will not be turning off adblock pretty much ever. And out side of google maps, I don't want any site to have my location.
Remember passwords. Get aggressive with password remembering.
Sound. Again I don't want sounds coming from a site unless I specifically allow.
Block the living hell out of facebook. Just stop them from ever getting any data from me. No like buttons, no sign-in with facebooks, etc.
A really cool feature that would be really nice would be the block the code that did this feature. If some news site has some "helpful" crap slide in I would love to have a way to select it and not only have it blocked but the code that ran it.
Also block sites from seeing my mouse cursor and block scrolling detection.
Basically let me take back control.
Make work jobs will be worse than the class BS jobs, they will end up being red tape jobs. Why not have a bicycle registry? Why not have a pet registry? Why not have a drone registry? Why not have a canoe registry?
I want to go for a nice kayak ride on the lake in front of my cottage. Why not have people there monitoring to make sure I have a PDF, am not drinking, smoking near my kids, swearing, going too fast, going too near the ducks, fishing without a license, paddling an un-inspected kayak, using an un-certified paddle, not wearing a fire retardant bathing suit, or not having had the latest in lake safety courses, eco courses, duck conservation courses, lake pollution courses, kayak safety course, and a sunscreen application course.
Many people argue factoids about programming such as MVC etc and completely miss the whole point is to deliver a working product.
If you follow every bad practice and generate tech debt as fast as you can you will probably start tripping over your own code and either not deliver or deliver a bad product.
At the same time, if you focus on pleasing your 3rd year academically oriented uni prof you will also probably end up not delivering or deliver a bad product.
So, the question is: what set of technologies will deliver the quality the client wants for the least amount of cost? The simple reality is that for the vast majority of web developments that aren't going to just be another wordpress heap of crap that LAMP or something else ending in P is probably best.
I personally do mission critical stuff that has management reporting through web. I do it in C++ so that it continues to appear "mission critical", the reality is that I would easily deliver equal or better quality with PHP in far less time.
To me PHP is like having an adjustable wrench. There is no arguing that proper high quality drop forged wrenches and sockets are better, but why then does my adjustable wrench get used so much? Because it is handy and in many cases the bolt/nut is off faster than if I had done the longer task of getting the correct wrench, only to find it wasn't an exact fit, so getting another wrench, trying it, then finding it is a metric nut, getting those wrenches, etc.
That said, there are many jobs where PHP is so wildly ill-suited that it is just abuse to use it.
PHP is an HTML template language. Full stop. It allows the mixing of some control logic with the front end. The further you push PHP away from this ideal the more wrong you are. But at this point any other combination of technologies just doesn't fill this niche anywhere near as well.
100% agree. But the template programming has become a huge problem. I am seeing people on stack overflow and others at conferences who are even initializing basic data types like they were some kind of complex beast. Templates have their place and it is only in the darkest corners of libraries.
Here is a perfect example of this academic nonsense:
int z={3} or int z(3). WTF. There are complete bozos suggesting this is the now "correct" way to init a variable. Yes that is a great idea. Let's make C++ less clear to someone coming from another language or basic human understanding. This is increasing job security or showing off their huge intellects, pure and simple. These nitwits completely miss the point that programming is to produce a quality product for the end user. Not an academic exercise. If the product takes longer, has more bugs, or is harder to maintain then your methodology is wrong.
I have met way too many C++ programmers who think that an elegant design is completely trumped by a sophisticated templated nightmare that requires a deep understanding of what C++ is going to compile into.
They will have fiendishly complicated templates, move, and copy operations built into objects that are instantiated once using the same data types every time. There is no copying, no moving, no variations and yet they defend that their completely unmaintainable code is the only way and that anything else would be amateur hour.
Worse is that these bozos are becoming the gatekeepers for programming interviews. They are pretty much lining up the candidates like a firing squad to blow them all away saying, "Ha he couldn't do a second degree variadic template with a half twist of lemon... loser" at the same time rejecting concepts such as code coverage measurements in unit tests.
Unless you are pushing the bleeding edge of performance, nice simple C++ code that smells more like python, has great unit test coverage (branch checking and all) and doesn't cause your customer or marketing team grief, is the only way to go. Anything else is just some selfish dick ensuring job security.
Nature or nurture. People often argue which dominates but in this case the parents gave him both the genes and the upbringing. I suspect the parents are not quite right to begin with and they didn't give him the life lessons to stand on his own two feet.
I would bet money that anyone who saw them raising this kid knew that screwed up was a probable outcome.
I see this as one of those videos where someone is pulling up a tree stump with a truck plus a rope and the tree-stump breaks free devastating the truck. Same outcome; here we are making fun of the carnage.
I would throw out a guess that I don't want to see over 95% of non youtube vidoes that try to play on web pages. Even youtube's going onto the next video would fall under this 95%. Pretty much, unless your video is on youtube, I don't want to see it. That 3D animation your company paid $30k for that resulted in mathematically perfect workers kind of forward moon walking while carrying your product is at the bottom of my list. I came to your site for a price or contact info. The news article that won't shut up and has the video follow me down the page while I read the article is at the bottom of my list.
My ISP accidentally left cable TV coming to my house. I connected a TV to it to see and there it was, something like 80 channels. Then I disconnected it as I don't want that commercially ridden crap.
So, with "customers" like me, what the heck future does cable TV have, probably a terrible one as not only will the "me's" leave, but I suspect that TV will migrate more and more of its content to complete dumbasses which will drive more people away, not just not appeal to them, but people with half a brain won't want their kids or themselves exposed to endless breathless reporting on the Kardashians and the thoughts of Chairman Kanye West.
"Ow My Balls"
I have rarely met an MBA who had the time of day for an Engineering type. You tell MBAs that such and such needs to be encrypted moved, backed up, or whatever critical thing for $10,000 and you won't get the budget. Then an interior designer comes in and redoes the front lobby for the 3rd time in 5 years for a cost of $250k.
Then there are the pay scales. In any large not obviously IT company (many of which delude themselves into thinking they aren't nearly all IT like banks) you get an MBA with 5 years in getting $120k and the Engineers getting $70k. Then they wonder why they can't keep the talent.
The MBAs even treat the accountants like trash.
What I see are people of near zero talent who are genuinely scared of those with it. The more talent you have outside of their MBA world the more scared they are. You realize that you can save the company $10 million a year through something you found in the data and you get a pat on the back. Some MBA does a stupid deal worth $10 million (worth, not makes) and they get a rockin' bonus larger than the Engineer's salary.
Then, hidden among the corporate world are the companies that are pretty much just Engineering people some of whom are good at sales and business. Those companies attract the top talent and often run circles around the old guard. An old guard who realize that they need to up their IT game so they outsource to India and lay off half of their employees.
I have a simple formula. If a company has a large number of H1Bs in its staff then it will gain a short term advantage as it reduces costs and rides on its earlier momentum. In the long term it will start to find the ride bumpy, and then it will sink into oblivion. Think Yahoo, SUN, Compaq, etc. These companies were taken over by their MBAs who thought that Engineering was a commodity business.
So to answer the original question. Crappy companies that are not going to be competitive in the long term are not investing in IT. The companies that are kicking ass and taking names are.
I have been in two jurisdictions where there have been notable (luckily failed) attempts to regulate programmers. One attempt was that all software must be signed off by a professional engineer, and the other was just a professional "self-regulating" society of computer professionals where you couldn't deliver anything software related without being a member in good standing.
The people who were involved were all assholes. At a local conference someone jokingly suggested that they be blacklisted; which then turned into a circulated list of people who had tried to make it happen. From many of the key companies in town they and the companies they represented were not completely blacklisted so much as scorned. One of the main guys complained to me that his business lost the ability to be profitable for about 3 years after that. I laughed.
The gist of the article is that professional guilds exist to keep people out, but I see it as their also wanting control as well. The point of some of these societies is to even prevent competition among the "professionals" I suspect that if you are a dentist and you started inoculating people against cavities for free, (assuming there was such an inoculation) that you would be standing in front of a standards committee in a heartbeat. Or if you were a orthodontist who just went completely cut rate and offered services for cost plus a small living expense for yourself. Even overpaying your staff might find you up for a dental investigation.
I agree that the C64 was certainly a great place to start, but in those days computers were fairly useless and the games pretty crappy by our standards. Go a bit further back and all was more so.
Therefore you could make a little program that might actually do something cool. Plus computers were a novelty so making them do anything was cool.
If you started to get a bit serious you could reasonably make a game or a program that others might use. Not a blockbuster, but something interesting. Get 5 friends and spend a few months and you might actually make something worthwhile that made money.
Fast forward to today and there is no novelty, everyone has a computer in their pocket, and short of finding some bizarrely unfilled niche you aren't making anything useful alone and in short order; and if you do, you are probably just using some crass tool that simplistically pounds out an app or other "programming" like wordpress.
And as far as you and 5 friends making something in under a year, good luck with that. There are exceptions, but not that many.
This all boils down to reward for effort. With my Vic-20 I could put in little effort before it started to reward me. Thus I was hooked. Give the same zillion years later me visual studio 2017 and I don't know where I would begin. Maybe it would be rewarding enough. Maybe not. Printing my name over and over again would impress my friends decades ago. I don't know what I would have to create these days to impress them.
To me, finding a getty image is a failed search. Block them as I have exactly zero interest in their over posed images of business people in cheap ill-fitting suits and dead eyes.
I soon will need an upgraded videocard for ML. In fact, I would like two or three really good ones. The timing is about perfect as in the coming months cryptominers are going to be flooding the market with them as they try to pay their rent.
I consider Wine to be like putting wings on a car to make a flying car. You just end up with a crappy plane and a crappy car.
I develop software and actually do use the Raspberry(not as my primary platform), but I just make the software cross-compile on linux or windows so it isn't a problem. My personal experience with porting other people's software is that it is endless pain and suffering.
Let's say that I recommend to you a better search engine called blahblah.com. You check it out and it is much better in all the ways you might care about. You will recommend this to most of your acquaintances and maybe on your blog or whatever. How long before google has lost 90% of their regular search engine users? 6 months? A year at most.
I suspect that without that driving the company the rest is in immediate trouble. Gmail, docs, and those other products nobody cares about can fund google as it is now. So the cutbacks would be fast and furious. Once that happens you just have to look at previous shining stars like yahoo, Blackberry, or sun micro to see the future of google at that point.
I suspect that in the early days of facebook that myspace just laughed at them.
This has happened and will happen over and over. Some companies can pivot a little bit and start to regain lost ground but most just get to a point where suddenly revenues are tanking and they are simply doomed. This is often founded on decisions made long before the tanking began and it is then too late to change.
I have a standing bet with a few friends that 2 or fewer out of the 5 companies (Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, and Amazon) will be players in 2030. We all agree that Yahoo's present state would count as dead.
I assumed that people buying PC computers were content creating pros who trended to the expert side of things. But with HP taking the lead it clearly shows that I was wrong and that a vast portion of PC buyers took the short bus to the Staples store to get their fill of bloatware loaded flimsy piles of excrement. Once in a blue moon an HP will fool me into thinking "That one's not so bad." and then it tries to chew off one of my fingers with some shocking bit of low quality corner cutting marking BS nonsense.
If I had the choice between HPs best desktop model and a raspberry pi I would choose the pi without hesitation as I know that while not a star performer it won't let me down. The HP would be like a beautiful garden filled with poisonous snakes and skin inflaming plants.
Getting rid of cable TV is pretty much going to become a national pasttime. Things like sports have been shooting themselves in the face and they are one of the few reasons to even have cable for some people.
I was watching a show on someone's TV and nearly 1/3rd of the screen kept telling me that there was some concert now live on their web site. This was a Canadian TV channel. Over and over they kept putting this on the screen. It made the show shit to watch. Then there is the bug in the corner. These people simply do not respect my desire to not be continuously marketed at.
Netflix is free from this. Once in a blue moon netflix takes up the top half of my iPad app to blast some stupid series at me, and I resent that enough. I want to choose what I want, I don't want some MBA who has weaseled and backstabbed his way into getting his company to put his product in my face.
For instance, a number of people that I know are complaining about netflix continuously recommending Korean TV. None of us want it. If I find out that some exec did a Korean deal and is screwing with the recommendation system to push that crap, I will drop Netflix and go back to piracy in a heartbeat.
In nearly every technological household that I know there is Netflix. In those same households there is little piracy as compared to before. But there is piracy of any crappy streaming systems like CBS's. Not that Disney makes much other than crap, they too will see that their crap streaming service will not reduce piracy. Organizations like CBS don't seem to realize that the old is unacceptable. You can't put bugs on the screen, you can't relentlessly market at people through a service they are paying for. You can't abuse your customers to fit you needs. Sell them a great product and they will pay you. Sell a completely half assed MBA driven attempt at manipulation and pirates will cherry pick the few good bits and leave you empty handed.
It is those little things that Netflix does like skip intro that completely shows that they are tuned into their customers. With organizations like CBS they dole out the shows one a week and there is no skip intro because some MBA long ago identified that you could literally show 2 minutes of the exact same crap to people and it cost nothing more to make and filled 2 whole minutes of your 44 minutes.That is like 5% of your show for free. (frat boy MBA chest bump time).
So this should read, bad old school streaming does not reduce piracy, good healthy streaming does.