Given the overwhelming power of developing on Linux compared to Windows or Macs (Linux is so far ahead of both it's not even a contest) once developers move to the new platform, they'll never go back.
It took 20 years, but Linux won. Face it. It's just better technology.
People who start replies with "Nope" are usually towering assholes and go on to be wrong.
he only two requirements are "unsolicited" and "bulk". Commercial and topicality are totally irrelevant.
And wrong in a right now fucking hurry.
Spam is commercial and off-topic. All four or not spam.
I was helping build the Internet when your parents were in high school, son. Ask your dad what "newsgroups" were. In the meantime, don't lecture the professor. Class dismissed.
And yep, I was on the Internet when the term was invented.
It is impossible for anything posted to a Twitter feed to be spam, since seeing it requires you to follow that feed. That fails the first test, therefore it is not spam. Case closed, end of discussion.
Learn what the word means before you use it. Spam is not "anything I don't want to read."
There is a great deal of evidence to indicate we are no longer capable of advancing software.
It has been remarked that if we built buildings the same way we build software the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Take a look around. The government apparently spent $165 million on a web site that doesn't work.
There's no discipline in software development. It's slapped together to meet an artificial deadline. It's considered done if it compiles. It's shoved out into the marketplace so everyone can stuff their pockets and then all the developers are fired to make way for the new employees who will design the next piece of shit.
The only measure of how good software is depends on how shiny and "innovative" the user interface is. What the software actually does is utterly irrelevant.
There are now much fewer opportunities to create world-changing software and it's harder to develop modern software due to higher expectations from users.
We can't be satisfied with the "everything's been invented already" approach. That would be admitting we've invented technology we can't manage.
Now if that's true, then maybe everything has been invented because we're just not capable of advancing beyond a certain point. If you take a look around, there's a lot of evidence that might be the reality of it.
At the moment, it's definitely the reality for PCs and mobiles.
The biggest difference between then and now is that users now demand software that is much more featured and sophisticated.
That only emphasizes my other question. What was the last new (not a remake, not an iteration, not FOSS, not a game) piece of Visicalc-caliber commercial software developed from scratch on any platform?
I can't find one post-1997. In fact, ironically enough, Macromedia Flash was probably the crowning achievement of the 1990s software-wise.
So if the market is demanding "sophisticated" software, nobody is providing it, which only serves to emphasize my first question: where are the tools?
Do you see how the "post-PC world" is up its own ass?
There is a fundamental difference between the PC and mobile devices. They are not arranged on a linear timeline of innovation. Mobile devices cannot ever replace the PC, because the PC is the correct form factor for the human body.
My point is not just the rant of one generation to the other. It is a warning that the n+1 generation does not have access to the same quality of tools.
And if that situation is not rectified, there will be no n+2 generation, because there won't be any software available to them at all.
There is no contemporary mobile innovation in software comparable to Visicalc, or GCC, or Mosaic, or MySQL, or Photoshop. The reason is there are no tools to build them, and even when there are, they won't run on phones or tablets, they'll run on PCs.
It was written by two hard-working geniuses who busted ass for months and months to get it to work. Visicalc changed the world.
The reason they were able to write this software is because the Apple II had the tools to do so. If you had an Apple II, you had everything you needed to develop new software for it. Same goes for the PC.
Mobile phones and tablets have no such tools. They are locked, proprietary devices forbidden to developers. They use locked, proprietary programming languages, obscure, flabby and inconsistent APIs and cannot communicate with anything but the "cloud."
They also suck ass as computing platforms. Their operating systems are shit packed on top of shit, and their hardware is flimsy plastic shit to go with it.
Mobile phones and tablets are fiddly little distraction machines that function as brightly colored noisy little pets. They are nothing more than over-engineered tamogatchis. They are useless for real work, especially compared to open platforms like the PC. At best, they are a good place to store phone numbers. They also give teenage girls a way to drain their parents' wallets by sending nonsense to each other 24 hours a day for $1500 a megabyte.
The "post-PC world" is a marketing slogan designed to get you back on the upgrade treadmill and wanting the next version of the device you bought last month.
The difference is mobile devices cannot replace or even occasionally substitute for the PC, because there is no mobile device software that even remotely compares to the world-changing technology the PC made possible.
What was the last "visicalc-level" software title developed from scratch? I'm going to say the last of them debuted in the mid 1990s. With the exception of FOSS, there hasn't been shit developed for any platform since. It's like the fucking software industry was unplugged in the late 90s. (Gee, I wonder why?)
The worst part is, anyone in their teens or early 20s right now is so distracted by Unity and HTML5 and Haskell and all the other flavors of proprietary dumbfuckery that they will never learn why things work on a computer.
How the school district can somehow find $1 billion to spend on iPads, yet is shuttering programs in art, music, dance, athletics, journalism, horticulture, biology, driver's education, broadcasting, etc.
There is still no serious computer curriculum in California schools. There are also no field trips, school-funded clubs, librarians or after school activities.
But there's always an extra billion for the latest shiny object with a corporate logo on it, no doubt built by people about the same age as the students who don't get to go to school and don't get a free iPad either.
Slashdot Mirror
You assholes have just been too busy looking for people to call "teabaggers."
Twitter doesn't have a topic.
Case closed. You may now be quiet.
Given the overwhelming power of developing on Linux compared to Windows or Macs (Linux is so far ahead of both it's not even a contest) once developers move to the new platform, they'll never go back.
It took 20 years, but Linux won. Face it. It's just better technology.
Nope.
People who start replies with "Nope" are usually towering assholes and go on to be wrong.
he only two requirements are "unsolicited" and "bulk". Commercial and topicality are totally irrelevant.
And wrong in a right now fucking hurry.
Spam is commercial and off-topic. All four or not spam.
I was helping build the Internet when your parents were in high school, son. Ask your dad what "newsgroups" were. In the meantime, don't lecture the professor. Class dismissed.
By that logic, it is impossible for anything posted in a newsgroup to be spam, since seeing it requires you to read that newsgroup.
Newsgroups and Twitter feeds are two entirely different things. Can't apply the same logic to both.
Nice straw man though. Put a hat on him.
Spam is:
1. Unsolicited
2. Commercial
3. Bulk
4. Off-topic
It must be all four or it is not spam.
And yep, I was on the Internet when the term was invented.
It is impossible for anything posted to a Twitter feed to be spam, since seeing it requires you to follow that feed. That fails the first test, therefore it is not spam. Case closed, end of discussion.
Learn what the word means before you use it. Spam is not "anything I don't want to read."
Spoken like someone who's never designed a complicated website
For $165 million I could replace Yahoo.
And I've been doing web sites since the Earth cooled, so settle down, Timmy.
There is a great deal of evidence to indicate we are no longer capable of advancing software.
It has been remarked that if we built buildings the same way we build software the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Take a look around. The government apparently spent $165 million on a web site that doesn't work.
There's no discipline in software development. It's slapped together to meet an artificial deadline. It's considered done if it compiles. It's shoved out into the marketplace so everyone can stuff their pockets and then all the developers are fired to make way for the new employees who will design the next piece of shit.
The only measure of how good software is depends on how shiny and "innovative" the user interface is. What the software actually does is utterly irrelevant.
There are now much fewer opportunities to create world-changing software and it's harder to develop modern software due to higher expectations from users.
We can't be satisfied with the "everything's been invented already" approach. That would be admitting we've invented technology we can't manage.
Now if that's true, then maybe everything has been invented because we're just not capable of advancing beyond a certain point. If you take a look around, there's a lot of evidence that might be the reality of it.
At the moment, it's definitely the reality for PCs and mobiles.
If you think having a trillion dollars in market value disappear between the summer of 2000 and now, then you're just not very bright.
The biggest difference between then and now is that users now demand software that is much more featured and sophisticated.
That only emphasizes my other question. What was the last new (not a remake, not an iteration, not FOSS, not a game) piece of Visicalc-caliber commercial software developed from scratch on any platform?
I can't find one post-1997. In fact, ironically enough, Macromedia Flash was probably the crowning achievement of the 1990s software-wise.
So if the market is demanding "sophisticated" software, nobody is providing it, which only serves to emphasize my first question: where are the tools?
Do you see how the "post-PC world" is up its own ass?
There is a fundamental difference between the PC and mobile devices. They are not arranged on a linear timeline of innovation. Mobile devices cannot ever replace the PC, because the PC is the correct form factor for the human body.
My point is not just the rant of one generation to the other. It is a warning that the n+1 generation does not have access to the same quality of tools.
And if that situation is not rectified, there will be no n+2 generation, because there won't be any software available to them at all.
There is no contemporary mobile innovation in software comparable to Visicalc, or GCC, or Mosaic, or MySQL, or Photoshop. The reason is there are no tools to build them, and even when there are, they won't run on phones or tablets, they'll run on PCs.
Visicalc was invented in 1979.
It was written by two hard-working geniuses who busted ass for months and months to get it to work. Visicalc changed the world.
The reason they were able to write this software is because the Apple II had the tools to do so. If you had an Apple II, you had everything you needed to develop new software for it. Same goes for the PC.
Mobile phones and tablets have no such tools. They are locked, proprietary devices forbidden to developers. They use locked, proprietary programming languages, obscure, flabby and inconsistent APIs and cannot communicate with anything but the "cloud."
They also suck ass as computing platforms. Their operating systems are shit packed on top of shit, and their hardware is flimsy plastic shit to go with it.
Mobile phones and tablets are fiddly little distraction machines that function as brightly colored noisy little pets. They are nothing more than over-engineered tamogatchis. They are useless for real work, especially compared to open platforms like the PC. At best, they are a good place to store phone numbers. They also give teenage girls a way to drain their parents' wallets by sending nonsense to each other 24 hours a day for $1500 a megabyte.
The "post-PC world" is a marketing slogan designed to get you back on the upgrade treadmill and wanting the next version of the device you bought last month.
The difference is mobile devices cannot replace or even occasionally substitute for the PC, because there is no mobile device software that even remotely compares to the world-changing technology the PC made possible.
What was the last "visicalc-level" software title developed from scratch? I'm going to say the last of them debuted in the mid 1990s. With the exception of FOSS, there hasn't been shit developed for any platform since. It's like the fucking software industry was unplugged in the late 90s. (Gee, I wonder why?)
The worst part is, anyone in their teens or early 20s right now is so distracted by Unity and HTML5 and Haskell and all the other flavors of proprietary dumbfuckery that they will never learn why things work on a computer.
And that's a fucking shame.
Something good happens in science and all the neckbeards come running to shout it down.
Sometimes I wonder why science is a religion for these people since they obviously have some kind of emotional need to destroy what it produces?
Enron
Please list five job skills. SKILLS, not knowledge or degrees.
Ready, go.
Eugenics.
Without software why would anyone get a steambox?
Did you just accuse Steam of not having any software?
brb My dumbfuck meter just broke.
They are not charging less. Amazon Prime is $79 a year and includes the free lending option.
Get it through your thick skulls: web browsers SUCK ASS.
Making a web site that does all the thinking for you is like trying to build a jet aircraft out of peanut butter.
What could go wrong?
People who start tech companies is 39 is because they get laid off and replaced with a know-nothing 23-year-old when they are 38.
Because IT experts sure as hell can't find a job anywhere else.
How the school district can somehow find $1 billion to spend on iPads, yet is shuttering programs in art, music, dance, athletics, journalism, horticulture, biology, driver's education, broadcasting, etc.
There is still no serious computer curriculum in California schools. There are also no field trips, school-funded clubs, librarians or after school activities.
But there's always an extra billion for the latest shiny object with a corporate logo on it, no doubt built by people about the same age as the students who don't get to go to school and don't get a free iPad either.
Regardless of your opinion, if you use the word "actually" either to begin a sentence or to modify an adjective, you are a towering walking dick.
Thank you.