Just make my existing things better. Noise cancelling headphones that actually cancel all noise. Not just background hums but ringtones, talking, airport announcements, etc.
Or make me an awesome mouse, or an awesome monitor, or something for my car, or pretty much anything.
But make it awesome for me, not awesome for Sony. For instance I got the Xperia phone with the 6 inch screen. In so many ways that phone was potentially great. Pictures in good light were great, screen was great, OS was responsive. But 16G of ram with the OS and the crap apps that I couldn't delete taking up most of that wasn't. I couldn't put most apps on the SD card, the phone would not let me have the control I wanted, such as blocking all apps from notifying me. For instance I don't want to know "What's New" I don't give a crap about what sony wanted me to know. I don't use voice mail and couldn't block the nearly non stop reminders that I had voicemail.
With a modest amount of small apps and a few pictures I was pretty much always at 85% full; and with 16G that 15% went fast.
I had a sony book reader and it couldn't read most formats. Back to the phone. The mapping app was always jerking around. The Gyros were pretty much always having a spasm attack; bluetooth was no fun at all. The battery was a microbe. It was complete crap. But the worst part was that it was 100% clear that Sony wasn't in my corner. They were more interested in appeasing the app makers and their own marketing department. Good job Sony. That might be the last product I will buy from you. But if you make things that are aimed to please. Such as noise cancelling headphones that don't do things "for my own protection" but really make the sounds from the outside world go away, then I will be back in spades.
You can have an electronic ballot machine, and it will store and tabulate the votes.
The key part is that it also prints the ballot in large clear print showing what you picked. This paper ballot is the "source of truth". So the election will use the electronic ballots for a quick result. Any interested party can participate in scrutinizing the paper ballots and in the case of a discrepancy, the paper ballots will be used.
Making a slightly better Pi for a slightly higher price isn't going to turn heads. The pi just works. There is lots of code and it is a known quantity.
To beat the Pi there has to be some zing. Some problem that I am having needs to be solved.
I can think of a few things that would wow me(one or more would be great). Lots of RAM. Really small footprint. Really cheap. Very low energy usage. Really good GPU. The whole thing on a single chip. A zillion cores (even if they are slow). vxWorks Compatible. And what would be great would be a shipper in Canada who didn't charge way over MSRP and tag on a shittonne of shipping charges.
Basically, for a company to make what is effectively a next generation Pi is just dumb. The next generation Pi is probably around the corner anyway. Things like the Omega2 catch my interest. Super cheap, Low power and car run linux.
For instance. A ESP32 that could run linux would rock my world. That would basically end my pi buying days.
Nearly every SAS customer I have heard of has either sued them or engaged in some serious name calling. How on earth does SAS not only continue to stay in business, but in many cases SAS will screw up royally, engage in a public fight with a company, only to have that company expand their SAS deployment.
When I see a company deploying SAS, I usually am seeing a company that has recently been taken over by MBAs. Maybe a big family company that is moving on to the third generation. Maybe a company where the founding engineers have retired. But it take a seriously shitty bunch of management to choose SAS. The sort of management that would believe some bullshit about this 60/40 thing without a few googles of how shitty SAS is.
I read a great article where one guy compared Hadoop to tools such as grep. I many fundamental ways he was able to use UNIX command line tools to wildly outperform Hadoop on what I would consider to be on the larger end of a typical company's data set.
To me Hadoop was the classic solution desperately in quest of a problem. The worst problem with that being so many people who jumped onto Hadoop and thought they were ass kickers for doing so.
The simple reality is that for most corporate datasets the tool of choice is a boring relational database and usually something like MySQL. The common capacity roadblocks aren't found within the tool but in the tool users.
But if you use a tool like Hadoop, or go NoSQL with a tool like MongoDB, you get to say (until people realize you are actually quite stupid) "my datastore is better than your datastore".
Doesn't make as good an advertisement to the sucker investors. Zapped flash looks like unzapped flash. Unless it does something the sucker investors won't invest.
Think of the whole one-drop-of-blood exam. It played perfectly into the whole. "Why do you need to take so much?" question by non medical types.
Nearly every iPhone I have owned self destructed. The glass broke because it looked at it funny. The battery would become weak as a kitten because I abused it by actually charging and then using it. The touch sensor would start to ignore me. The sound regularly would go to crap. And with every OS upgrade on a slightly older model the phones would take another step toward the edge.
So, WOW, Apple gave me a free feature that I did even appreciate.
Citation needed pretty much pisses me off. It makes sense that if someone writes an article about Clinton going to area 51 to meet the aliens we need at least a citation. But for so much more, not really.
But the one that sends me into a monitor punching rage is when I go to stack overflow and someone asks a solid and very useful "opinion" question and gets shut down with some crap about the question being not relevant to the forum or some crap. Asking for everyone's favourite cheese would not be appropriate. Asking for which is the best library for accessing bluetooth on a raspberry is. Or which is the best 3D modeling software for making models in Unity.
My simple litmus test of how badly stackoverflow is now failing us is that I would say that nearly 80% of the questions I am researching have some answers, but the discussion has been shutdown.
What is funny is that not one programmer that I know wants these shutdowns. Not a single one. And as for a "programming" question being more relevant. They go out of date as well. Ask how to convert a int to a string has probably changed in C++ two or more times in the last decade.
To be even more specific, I would say the general opinion questions are some of the most profound. For instance it is very nice to know if you have lost your Oracle database connection. But more importantly would be a question such as, "What is the best programming toolset for making portable iOS/Android games?"
I would read through the answers and maybe I would discover that Qt has brought up their game and is the best way, or someone might suggest different environments they tried and could suggest one for a first person, but another for the candy crush sorts. It is discussions like this that have profoundly changed what I do. It was right here on slashdot that I have discovered many interesting technologies such as who I use for hosting, who I use for domains, which IDE I use and even which languages I use. Needless to say these weren't asked in the format, "How do I print something to the screen in Visual Basic?"
I use google docs. I do this through my browser. When I am not using google docs. It is not running on my computer. 365 starts out on most machines as bloatware that comes with the OS. Actually installing this slow pile of crap makes the computer waste time and energy when I am not using the software.
How about this Microsoft? When I am not using your pile of shit, how about not running that pile of shit 100 different ways in the background? I maybe use 365 once a month. Thus it should run.... let's all say it together..... once a month. Not all bloody month.
In 365 I opened up the same document on two devices. The delay was just stupid. Maybe there was a setting I could have changed but why would the default for the setting be on stupid.
With GDocs two people editing the same document at the same time are almost at the same computer. I love seeing this on my phone; I make this kind of software but am still amazed every time it works.
I have almost entirely switched to Google docs. It does very little (which is all I need) and it does that very little very well. On occasion I have to open a word or excel doc and use 365 that was installed on my machine by IT. Every time it is a slog through stupid functions to get to the thing I need. Make a table, not right there. Formatting gone nuts again, oh well, CTRL-Z until I can try again. And so on
Or I can use Google docs and at no point does it get in my way. I don't lose things, I don't forget things, it just works.
When I was on Mac I used a document editor called Bean. Simply perfect. If it couldn't do it then I didn't want to do it, or I had a proper tool like Illustrator or InDesign.
I think the newest versions of Word are a classic example of a company listening to the "experts" who aren't the typical user. I am not suggesting that the experts be ignored, but that there be a basic simple editor for people like me who have a deep and unrelenting hatred of this ribbon crap, and an advanced editor for all those middle managers who love to generate TPS reports. There is probably even a cover-sheet versioning system.
I don't mean they have been catering to programmers for a long time. I left MS Windows over a decade ago because of your type of complaints. What I am seeing in the last couple of years is a massive turnaround. I think they realized that the future of the company is to to cater to programmers in a serious way and that actual customers would then follow.
I suspect they looked at what programmers really wanted to do as opposed to what they wanted to programmers to do and then realized they were only keeping the stupid ones.
You can now program for linux using Visual Studio. Or android, or iOS. It isn't perfect for the other platforms but it is getting better every month. Windows 10 will run on older hardware as well as many Linux installations. I would say that with the departure of Paul Allen, that the MBA attitude has left the building and that the technology one is back.
I think the concept of the "Home" computer has pretty much died. Students need something to do assignments, people working in offices need something for work. That is pretty much it. Then to make it worse, other than fashonistas and a much narrower group of professionals who need powerful computers there is only a tiny audience of gamers who need the latest and greatest.
Just about everyone else will direct their disposable technology budget to a kick ass new phone.
If you look at the needs of the average "home" user it would range from nothing to 10 year old laptop or $200 chromebook type thing.
So yes the bleed has stabilized and probably will remain this way for 5-10 years at least.
I suspect that this is why MS is catering to programmers. They are one of the bastions of professional users who also create products for other professional users. If they programmers all go to linux and mac then there is going to be a trend to more and more professional products on those platforms.
This is a huge breath of fresh air where Microsoft spent a huge amount of energy trying to turn programmers into.net enterprise sales people forcing the entire microsoft ecosystem down our throats. The useless programmers adopted.net and went to work for government and big companies. The real programmers went elsewhere.
Now the real programmers are sniffing around Visual Studio as it kicks some serious ass and is getting better every day.
Why would any company that give half a crap about customer satisfaction do any deal with Paypal. My rule for paypal has been (when advising clients) is that you use paypal because your bank hates you and other services don't yet trust you. But as soon as you establish a good revenue stream and can show that you are real, dump paypal like the turd it is.
A friend of mine worked with schitzos. The medical and government policy was to pile on the tobacco as they all knew it was mostly good for their condition. Even the schitzos knew this as they would do whatever the hell they could for more.
Is this the sort of science that wasn't done as it was so obvious that everyone assumed that it had already been done.
Quite simply there seems to be some kind of magical thinking that you can balance something unreasonable against basic rights. For instance anyone who thinks that it would be "Balanced" for a US court to order people in another country to do something is insane. The whole US revolution was about things like taxation without representation. So what makes the US seem to think that people in other countries should give two shits what their courts say when we have exactly zero input into the laws, the lawmakers, or any other body that would hold these bozos to account?
This is the sort of thinking that as the US economy runs down will cause the rest of the world to not even lift a single finger as they finally slip into unrelenting pain and misery.
I see a dire need for a subscription service that stays on top of blocking all the shit that MS seems to think that they can infest our computers with. I didn't buy my computer to be a MS advertizing machine. I bought it to work. I have cut all forms of media that I can that advertize at me out of my life. No radio, no TV, adblock, I even hate roadside signs.
I literally was thinking of moving to a city I recently visited because they banned all but the smallest of outdoor signs. Certainly nothing that was like the eyeball melting LED signs that are at every major intersection in any city where the government hates the people.
So I switched to MS for visual studio. But I am 100% leaving if I see more than one or two popups like this. Definitely a 3 strikes and windows is off my machine.
My daughter and I were in Costco where they were selling Boxed DVD sets for breaking bad with a very nice cover. We both picked it up thinking it might be some kind of cool Breaking Bad card game or something. We both put our boxes down in revulsion when we saw they were DVDs. Why don't they put out the Breaking Bad soundtrack on 8 Track? Or they might have been BlueRays? We didn't care. They could literally have been free either way and neither of us would have wanted it.
I think at this point DVDs are for sad lonely men who pine for the 90's to come back when having a huge collection of DVDs was something that would generate envy among your sad friends.
I have seen very few companies that were making a profit not hire someone because of their age. What I have seen is companies not hire someone because they just didn't add anything. What I have seen in all ages, but more in older people, is a rejection of things that have passed beyond "fad" and into best practices. Things like unit testing, modular code, modern OS usage, modern mixes of data stores that include things like nosql alongside relational.
Being able to program many languages is fine, quickly putting out a quality product that can hold its own against the competition is critical.
Although it sounds like you aren't guilty of the worst part of people who are in their 50s, One language for all solutions (usually Java or.net).
Looking back at my very early start as a coder I would say that it was solving real world problems for people and then being rewarded for doing so. Given the incentive to code, I learned, I did, and I kept getting better.
But just sitting me down with double linked lists would have bored the crap out of me and I would have probably resented coding and dumped it.
So what could help kids today? I would say a combination of making sure they have the resources, the ability to get mentorship when they need it, and someone to connect them to someone who needs some code.
Slashdot Mirror
Just make my existing things better. Noise cancelling headphones that actually cancel all noise. Not just background hums but ringtones, talking, airport announcements, etc.
Or make me an awesome mouse, or an awesome monitor, or something for my car, or pretty much anything.
But make it awesome for me, not awesome for Sony. For instance I got the Xperia phone with the 6 inch screen. In so many ways that phone was potentially great. Pictures in good light were great, screen was great, OS was responsive. But 16G of ram with the OS and the crap apps that I couldn't delete taking up most of that wasn't. I couldn't put most apps on the SD card, the phone would not let me have the control I wanted, such as blocking all apps from notifying me. For instance I don't want to know "What's New" I don't give a crap about what sony wanted me to know. I don't use voice mail and couldn't block the nearly non stop reminders that I had voicemail.
With a modest amount of small apps and a few pictures I was pretty much always at 85% full; and with 16G that 15% went fast.
I had a sony book reader and it couldn't read most formats. Back to the phone. The mapping app was always jerking around. The Gyros were pretty much always having a spasm attack; bluetooth was no fun at all. The battery was a microbe. It was complete crap. But the worst part was that it was 100% clear that Sony wasn't in my corner. They were more interested in appeasing the app makers and their own marketing department. Good job Sony. That might be the last product I will buy from you. But if you make things that are aimed to please. Such as noise cancelling headphones that don't do things "for my own protection" but really make the sounds from the outside world go away, then I will be back in spades.
There is only one way to do electronic elections.
You can have an electronic ballot machine, and it will store and tabulate the votes.
The key part is that it also prints the ballot in large clear print showing what you picked. This paper ballot is the "source of truth". So the election will use the electronic ballots for a quick result. Any interested party can participate in scrutinizing the paper ballots and in the case of a discrepancy, the paper ballots will be used.
As for online voting, HELL NO.
Making a slightly better Pi for a slightly higher price isn't going to turn heads. The pi just works. There is lots of code and it is a known quantity.
To beat the Pi there has to be some zing. Some problem that I am having needs to be solved.
I can think of a few things that would wow me(one or more would be great). Lots of RAM. Really small footprint. Really cheap. Very low energy usage. Really good GPU. The whole thing on a single chip. A zillion cores (even if they are slow). vxWorks Compatible. And what would be great would be a shipper in Canada who didn't charge way over MSRP and tag on a shittonne of shipping charges.
Basically, for a company to make what is effectively a next generation Pi is just dumb. The next generation Pi is probably around the corner anyway. Things like the Omega2 catch my interest. Super cheap, Low power and car run linux.
For instance. A ESP32 that could run linux would rock my world. That would basically end my pi buying days.
Nearly every SAS customer I have heard of has either sued them or engaged in some serious name calling. How on earth does SAS not only continue to stay in business, but in many cases SAS will screw up royally, engage in a public fight with a company, only to have that company expand their SAS deployment.
When I see a company deploying SAS, I usually am seeing a company that has recently been taken over by MBAs. Maybe a big family company that is moving on to the third generation. Maybe a company where the founding engineers have retired. But it take a seriously shitty bunch of management to choose SAS. The sort of management that would believe some bullshit about this 60/40 thing without a few googles of how shitty SAS is.
You should give MongoDB a try. It might impress you for a whole 6 minutes before you realize that the developers are a bunch of assholes.
I read a great article where one guy compared Hadoop to tools such as grep. I many fundamental ways he was able to use UNIX command line tools to wildly outperform Hadoop on what I would consider to be on the larger end of a typical company's data set.
To me Hadoop was the classic solution desperately in quest of a problem. The worst problem with that being so many people who jumped onto Hadoop and thought they were ass kickers for doing so.
The simple reality is that for most corporate datasets the tool of choice is a boring relational database and usually something like MySQL. The common capacity roadblocks aren't found within the tool but in the tool users.
But if you use a tool like Hadoop, or go NoSQL with a tool like MongoDB, you get to say (until people realize you are actually quite stupid) "my datastore is better than your datastore".
If prior art kept bad patents at bay then nearly every internet patent wouldn't have been granted. Something that endlessly confuses me.
Doesn't make as good an advertisement to the sucker investors. Zapped flash looks like unzapped flash. Unless it does something the sucker investors won't invest.
Think of the whole one-drop-of-blood exam. It played perfectly into the whole. "Why do you need to take so much?" question by non medical types.
Nearly every iPhone I have owned self destructed. The glass broke because it looked at it funny. The battery would become weak as a kitten because I abused it by actually charging and then using it. The touch sensor would start to ignore me. The sound regularly would go to crap. And with every OS upgrade on a slightly older model the phones would take another step toward the edge.
So, WOW, Apple gave me a free feature that I did even appreciate.
Citation needed pretty much pisses me off. It makes sense that if someone writes an article about Clinton going to area 51 to meet the aliens we need at least a citation. But for so much more, not really.
But the one that sends me into a monitor punching rage is when I go to stack overflow and someone asks a solid and very useful "opinion" question and gets shut down with some crap about the question being not relevant to the forum or some crap. Asking for everyone's favourite cheese would not be appropriate. Asking for which is the best library for accessing bluetooth on a raspberry is. Or which is the best 3D modeling software for making models in Unity.
My simple litmus test of how badly stackoverflow is now failing us is that I would say that nearly 80% of the questions I am researching have some answers, but the discussion has been shutdown.
What is funny is that not one programmer that I know wants these shutdowns. Not a single one. And as for a "programming" question being more relevant. They go out of date as well. Ask how to convert a int to a string has probably changed in C++ two or more times in the last decade.
To be even more specific, I would say the general opinion questions are some of the most profound. For instance it is very nice to know if you have lost your Oracle database connection. But more importantly would be a question such as, "What is the best programming toolset for making portable iOS/Android games?"
I would read through the answers and maybe I would discover that Qt has brought up their game and is the best way, or someone might suggest different environments they tried and could suggest one for a first person, but another for the candy crush sorts. It is discussions like this that have profoundly changed what I do. It was right here on slashdot that I have discovered many interesting technologies such as who I use for hosting, who I use for domains, which IDE I use and even which languages I use. Needless to say these weren't asked in the format, "How do I print something to the screen in Visual Basic?"
I use google docs. I do this through my browser. When I am not using google docs. It is not running on my computer. 365 starts out on most machines as bloatware that comes with the OS. Actually installing this slow pile of crap makes the computer waste time and energy when I am not using the software.
How about this Microsoft? When I am not using your pile of shit, how about not running that pile of shit 100 different ways in the background? I maybe use 365 once a month. Thus it should run.... let's all say it together..... once a month. Not all bloody month.
All the students in my life use Google Docs. All the students in my life generally get a free 365 from their universities.
In 365 I opened up the same document on two devices. The delay was just stupid. Maybe there was a setting I could have changed but why would the default for the setting be on stupid.
With GDocs two people editing the same document at the same time are almost at the same computer. I love seeing this on my phone; I make this kind of software but am still amazed every time it works.
I have almost entirely switched to Google docs. It does very little (which is all I need) and it does that very little very well. On occasion I have to open a word or excel doc and use 365 that was installed on my machine by IT. Every time it is a slog through stupid functions to get to the thing I need. Make a table, not right there. Formatting gone nuts again, oh well, CTRL-Z until I can try again. And so on
Or I can use Google docs and at no point does it get in my way. I don't lose things, I don't forget things, it just works.
When I was on Mac I used a document editor called Bean. Simply perfect. If it couldn't do it then I didn't want to do it, or I had a proper tool like Illustrator or InDesign.
I think the newest versions of Word are a classic example of a company listening to the "experts" who aren't the typical user. I am not suggesting that the experts be ignored, but that there be a basic simple editor for people like me who have a deep and unrelenting hatred of this ribbon crap, and an advanced editor for all those middle managers who love to generate TPS reports. There is probably even a cover-sheet versioning system.
I don't mean they have been catering to programmers for a long time. I left MS Windows over a decade ago because of your type of complaints. What I am seeing in the last couple of years is a massive turnaround. I think they realized that the future of the company is to to cater to programmers in a serious way and that actual customers would then follow.
I suspect they looked at what programmers really wanted to do as opposed to what they wanted to programmers to do and then realized they were only keeping the stupid ones.
You can now program for linux using Visual Studio. Or android, or iOS. It isn't perfect for the other platforms but it is getting better every month. Windows 10 will run on older hardware as well as many Linux installations. I would say that with the departure of Paul Allen, that the MBA attitude has left the building and that the technology one is back.
I think the concept of the "Home" computer has pretty much died. Students need something to do assignments, people working in offices need something for work. That is pretty much it. Then to make it worse, other than fashonistas and a much narrower group of professionals who need powerful computers there is only a tiny audience of gamers who need the latest and greatest.
.net enterprise sales people forcing the entire microsoft ecosystem down our throats. The useless programmers adopted .net and went to work for government and big companies. The real programmers went elsewhere.
Just about everyone else will direct their disposable technology budget to a kick ass new phone.
If you look at the needs of the average "home" user it would range from nothing to 10 year old laptop or $200 chromebook type thing.
So yes the bleed has stabilized and probably will remain this way for 5-10 years at least.
I suspect that this is why MS is catering to programmers. They are one of the bastions of professional users who also create products for other professional users. If they programmers all go to linux and mac then there is going to be a trend to more and more professional products on those platforms.
This is a huge breath of fresh air where Microsoft spent a huge amount of energy trying to turn programmers into
Now the real programmers are sniffing around Visual Studio as it kicks some serious ass and is getting better every day.
The only time you choose paypal is that people have some reason not to trust your company. I trust Amazon with my CC way the hell more than Paypal.
Discount tires by mail, maybe not so much.
Why would any company that give half a crap about customer satisfaction do any deal with Paypal. My rule for paypal has been (when advising clients) is that you use paypal because your bank hates you and other services don't yet trust you. But as soon as you establish a good revenue stream and can show that you are real, dump paypal like the turd it is.
A friend of mine worked with schitzos. The medical and government policy was to pile on the tobacco as they all knew it was mostly good for their condition. Even the schitzos knew this as they would do whatever the hell they could for more.
Is this the sort of science that wasn't done as it was so obvious that everyone assumed that it had already been done.
Quite simply there seems to be some kind of magical thinking that you can balance something unreasonable against basic rights. For instance anyone who thinks that it would be "Balanced" for a US court to order people in another country to do something is insane. The whole US revolution was about things like taxation without representation. So what makes the US seem to think that people in other countries should give two shits what their courts say when we have exactly zero input into the laws, the lawmakers, or any other body that would hold these bozos to account?
This is the sort of thinking that as the US economy runs down will cause the rest of the world to not even lift a single finger as they finally slip into unrelenting pain and misery.
Just block it, and show that you give a half crap about us. Please Google, show MS that there are forces that they can't control.
That is my only question. How do I block this?
I see a dire need for a subscription service that stays on top of blocking all the shit that MS seems to think that they can infest our computers with. I didn't buy my computer to be a MS advertizing machine. I bought it to work. I have cut all forms of media that I can that advertize at me out of my life. No radio, no TV, adblock, I even hate roadside signs.
I literally was thinking of moving to a city I recently visited because they banned all but the smallest of outdoor signs. Certainly nothing that was like the eyeball melting LED signs that are at every major intersection in any city where the government hates the people.
So I switched to MS for visual studio. But I am 100% leaving if I see more than one or two popups like this. Definitely a 3 strikes and windows is off my machine.
My daughter and I were in Costco where they were selling Boxed DVD sets for breaking bad with a very nice cover. We both picked it up thinking it might be some kind of cool Breaking Bad card game or something. We both put our boxes down in revulsion when we saw they were DVDs. Why don't they put out the Breaking Bad soundtrack on 8 Track? Or they might have been BlueRays? We didn't care. They could literally have been free either way and neither of us would have wanted it.
I think at this point DVDs are for sad lonely men who pine for the 90's to come back when having a huge collection of DVDs was something that would generate envy among your sad friends.
I have seen very few companies that were making a profit not hire someone because of their age. What I have seen is companies not hire someone because they just didn't add anything. What I have seen in all ages, but more in older people, is a rejection of things that have passed beyond "fad" and into best practices. Things like unit testing, modular code, modern OS usage, modern mixes of data stores that include things like nosql alongside relational.
.net).
Being able to program many languages is fine, quickly putting out a quality product that can hold its own against the competition is critical.
Although it sounds like you aren't guilty of the worst part of people who are in their 50s, One language for all solutions (usually Java or
Looking back at my very early start as a coder I would say that it was solving real world problems for people and then being rewarded for doing so. Given the incentive to code, I learned, I did, and I kept getting better.
But just sitting me down with double linked lists would have bored the crap out of me and I would have probably resented coding and dumped it.
So what could help kids today? I would say a combination of making sure they have the resources, the ability to get mentorship when they need it, and someone to connect them to someone who needs some code.