I think the poster was referring to the parent post that commented that old people never keep up with new things and tend to screw them up while young people are on top of new technology, not to my reply of "many, but not most".
That makes me think of another concept relevant to experience. There is very seldom anything really and radically new in the field of software development. Eventually there are better, faster, and more efficient ways to do things, but almost no one ever does anything that is radically and fundamentally different than anything that had been done in recent years up to that point.
In other words, "Anything goes if it's my 'team', and everything is wrong if it's the other 'team'."
Yeah, I'm sure we're not the only ones who have noticed the naked hypocrisy that most politicians and most of their supporters exhibit. Most people don't even pretend to be consistent or principled.
Dear America: If you want to get rid of the filibuster, then vote it out, but don't start crying when your guy can't use it. You have been warned.
It depends. If they misentered the code for "Fox News" or "TV Land", probably Republican. If they misentered the code for "MSNBC" or a porn channel, probably Democrat.
If they actually meant to be watching C-Span, they are probably Rain Man, or maybe Ralph Nader.
You must work exclusively with stupid older developers then, because that kind of generalization is ludicrous.
Experience can't replace knowledge, but knowledge won't do you a whole lot of good until you have some experience.
In my experience there are good developers and not-good developers.
The good ones "get it", and can adapt to new languages and platforms quickly and still be effective and productive.
The "not-good" developers won't do well on the platforms they are used to no matter how long they work at it.
I was able to get hired to work in languages I'd never used before and adapted quickly. Good managers, which are increasingly hard to find, can recognize this kind of thing. Bad managers are how mediocre people can thrive in a career they are no good at.
Many, but not most, young kids fresh out of school "get it". They are worth hiring. Many, but not most, old timers with decades of experience don't "get it", and by that point they probably never will.
But I don't care how smart a person is, years of paying his dues in the trenches is absolutely imperative to become a true expert.
The problem here is not that the claim of a 30x performance increase was fallaciously generalized based on one particular piece of code as compared with Adobe's player, but that anyone familiar with Flash would find this claim to seem quite plausible.
If someone claimed that they made a compiler that, say, generated code that was 30x faster than what Microsoft's compiler or gcc could do, no one would believe it for a minute.
A big problem with this country is that you can find a Federal judge somewhere that will make and/or support any ruling or decision imaginable. The trick is finding the right one for your case.
It's pretty amazing just how much of the world is based on trust isn't it?
And it's equally tragic that it can't.
I don't think it's so much that people automatically trust each other, although that's certainly the case sometimes, it's more like it never occurs to too many people, unfortunately, that what they divulge could cause problems in the wrong hands.
For many years now, when someone asks me for information, my first thought is not to give the information, but to consider why I don't want to give it to that person. And I don't consider myself particularly paranoid with respect to what I share.
It gets tiring after awhile. Modern life in the 21st century requires a level of vigilance regarding information that probably never existed outside of the military, national security apparatus, law enforcement or some elements of business before a couple decades ago.
"Loose lips sink ships" was a common saying during World War II, but nowadays everyone must practice that level of vigilance over their own information all the time merely to be safe from criminals.
The moment DS9 and Voyager came on the air, Berman had veered away from Roddenberry's vision.
I disagree strongly. Regardless, of the quality of the shows (IMO, DS9 was very good and Voyager was (mostly) pretty lame), I think the shows maintained Roddenberry's visions but tried to put them different settings, which at the time was sorely needed.
The Federation is made up of people of many races that, as a whole, share that vision, and we see that that vision is not only possible, but is likely if not inevitable. In Roddenberry's future "history," the Earth went through periods much, much worse than anything we've seen in the 45 years of real history that have transpired since he created Trek, and yet humanity eventually comes out of it better than ever.
But that doesn't mean that everyone in his universe has reached that point, and the Star Trek setting would be pretty boring if everyone had. The original Klingons were anything but "peaceful" and "we-all-get-along" and in fact were very one-dimensional villains, basically a cardboard metaphor for Soviet/Chinese communists... at least until TNG, when they were fleshed out into a nuanced, believable, and more importantly, much more interesting race.
The Maquis was the result of a brutal conflict between two non-Federation worlds, although some humans decided to get involved because it's natural that the writers would want to show humans involved to anchor the concept with the audience better. I don't think this veers away from Roddenberry's vision at all, but rather made for a great backdrop against which Roddenberry's vision is cast in sharp relief, showing a situation where the Roddenberry ideal had not _yet_ been achieved, but allowing us to see part of the evolution towards it, as well as making a great platform for exploring real world problems in a fantasy setting in the best traditions of Trek. This made for what was in many ways the most interesting Trek series.
Voyager had great potential by taking a small microcosm of the Roddenberry ideal and showing whether or not... and how... it could function in a truly alien situation cut off completely from everything that had allowed it develop. It's too bad that potential was totally squandered when we found out that the far side of the galaxy was as bland and unoriginal as the Alpha Quadrant had become, and that no matter what happened, the status quo ante would always be firmly reestablished, often in a very clumsy, heavy-handed way in the last 5 minutes of the episode.
I never watched more than an episode or two of "Enterprise" so I can't comment, but I think Berman, et al, did remain true overall to the Great Bird of the Galaxy, although there are plenty of other legitimate criticisms.
To be honest, I don't see it so much as "I couldn't think of a better name for this mysterious substance that exists solely as a plot device" but rather "Look, it's magic stuff. You don't care what it's called and neither do I. It doesn't make any difference. The SFX is red so we'll call it 'Red Matter' and not get our pocket protectors in a bunch worrying about pointless details."
To which I said, "Sounds good to me" Star Trek physics has gotten pretty silly in the past 15 years or so, and frankly I just don't care about it any more. As long as they don't use made-up physics to pull a "deus ex machina" more than 2 out of every 3 episodes or movie acts, I just don't care any more.
Red Matter? Whatever. Let's see some more cool spaceships.
Even in this case I'd post non-anonymously when I can. This kind of comment in particular sounds like it would be no problem to do so.
Clearly you've never dealt with upper management at a large company. I was once reprimanded at a former job (cough*AOL*cough) by upper management for praising, on an internal mailing list, the technology the company was using in its infrastructure, but which had fallen into disfavor by many in management.
When dealing with upper management, my policy has become, "Expressing any opinion is like poking a rabid wolverine with a sharp stick."
It doesn't stop me from doing it. I'm just not surprised when there is retaliation all out of proportion. Almost always, these are not people who want to hear from anyone not parroting exactly what they say.
How much mail do you have on your IMAP accounts. I have tens of thousands of messages and T'bird 3 took over a day to index the first time I ran it, and it generally runs like a dog. It's usable, not as bad as Outlook, but it's definitely not snappy, and it's a resource hog for the reasons mentioned.
So before you accuse someone of spreading FUD, perhaps you should get all the facts.
1997: I would start with Java, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1990: I would start with VB, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1985: I would start with Pascal, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1980: I would start with BASIC, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1975: I would start with Fortran, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1970: I would start with Fortran, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn PL/1, but those would be specialists.
1965: I would start with COBOL, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn ALGOL, but those would be specialists.
I think a simple proof of your thesis can be found at Microsoft Research, where a bunch of really sharp boffins are doing all kinds of really cool and ground-breaking stuff that never seem to make it into shipping products.
Microsoft is so non-innovative they are literally stagnating the state-of-the-art. As a personal anecdote, I had the dubious honor of taking over a non-trivial Excel application recently. Prior to this, I'd never done any app development using VBA, although I'd done some OLE Automation to drive Excel. This past several weeks has been an eye-opener to me, and more specifically, a strong reminder of how things used to be developing Windows software in the early 90s. It astounds me how crude, limited, archaic and poorly documented this stuff remains, even though Excel has been around for more than 20 years. As a spreadsheet, I always thought Excel was pretty good, but as a development environment, I haven't seen anything so backwards and limited in about 20 years.
The good news is that the people in charge are becoming open to moving towards a proper web app with a real database, which is the appropriate tool for this particular application.
But having a literal monopoly in Office software means there's no reason for Excel (or Word, etc) to ever get better. As long as there is an ever-expanding list of "features" most of which will never be used by more than 1% of users, Office will stay mired in its mid-90s rut.
I have a one word for the too bloated, too expensive, and not necessarily good games: GOG.com.
I've been buying several games from there recently, ones I played in the past and ones I missed the first time through, and when a game is as low as $6, I don't feel cheated if it's something I don't get a whole lot of use out of. I'm not associated with them, just a happy customer. Plus, no DRM and everything is tweaked to run on the latest Windows OSs. There are many classics from those days because the graphics really couldn't "wow" you, so good gameplay was needed for a title to succeed. There also wasn't a tremendous momentum of previously successful titles that could be slightly tweaked or skinned and re-released every year or two. How many games today, successful or not, good or not, are essentially Doom with better technology? There's nothing wrong with state-of-the-art graphics, but a good game should be able stand on its merits without them.
I remember this argument as far back as the Amiga: games focusing on eye candy and ignoring gameplay, and it's only gotten worse. There are still good games to be found, but it takes a lot of research and effort, and possibly a lot of money. Plus my hardware is fairly old and I just don't have a priority of upgrading perfectly good machines just to play games. Ironically, as gaming becomes more and more expensive, there appear more and more alternatives that are either free or low cost: open-source, casual Flash games online (many of which are rehashes of stuff you could buy 20 years ago), and companies like GOG.com and direct2drive.com that sell older games.
Slashdot Mirror
Aw. come on, RMS isn't _that_ bad, is he?
I think the poster was referring to the parent post that commented that old people never keep up with new things and tend to screw them up while young people are on top of new technology, not to my reply of "many, but not most".
That makes me think of another concept relevant to experience. There is very seldom anything really and radically new in the field of software development. Eventually there are better, faster, and more efficient ways to do things, but almost no one ever does anything that is radically and fundamentally different than anything that had been done in recent years up to that point.
I don't count, of course, the invention of Lisp.
In other words, "Anything goes if it's my 'team', and everything is wrong if it's the other 'team'."
Yeah, I'm sure we're not the only ones who have noticed the naked hypocrisy that most politicians and most of their supporters exhibit. Most people don't even pretend to be consistent or principled.
Dear America: If you want to get rid of the filibuster, then vote it out, but don't start crying when your guy can't use it. You have been warned.
It depends. If they misentered the code for "Fox News" or "TV Land", probably Republican. If they misentered the code for "MSNBC" or a porn channel, probably Democrat.
If they actually meant to be watching C-Span, they are probably Rain Man, or maybe Ralph Nader.
You must work exclusively with stupid older developers then, because that kind of generalization is ludicrous.
Experience can't replace knowledge, but knowledge won't do you a whole lot of good until you have some experience.
In my experience there are good developers and not-good developers.
The good ones "get it", and can adapt to new languages and platforms quickly and still be effective and productive.
The "not-good" developers won't do well on the platforms they are used to no matter how long they work at it.
I was able to get hired to work in languages I'd never used before and adapted quickly. Good managers, which are increasingly hard to find, can recognize this kind of thing. Bad managers are how mediocre people can thrive in a career they are no good at.
Many, but not most, young kids fresh out of school "get it". They are worth hiring. Many, but not most, old timers with decades of experience don't "get it", and by that point they probably never will.
But I don't care how smart a person is, years of paying his dues in the trenches is absolutely imperative to become a true expert.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a browser implementer, so possibly I don't know what I'm talking about.)
Why are you admitting this on /.?
You should simply act as if you are an expert and everyone who disagrees without is an ignorant dolt.
Oh, wait, you're trying to _improve_ the /. environment, not imitate it. Never mind.
Big ;-)
I was using Minefield for quite a while until so many things started breaking a couple weeks ago and I reverted back to 3.6.x.
I'm looking forward to going back, though. I've been a Firefox user since about Phoenix 0.4.
The problem here is not that the claim of a 30x performance increase was fallaciously generalized based on one particular piece of code as compared with Adobe's player, but that anyone familiar with Flash would find this claim to seem quite plausible.
If someone claimed that they made a compiler that, say, generated code that was 30x faster than what Microsoft's compiler or gcc could do, no one would believe it for a minute.
A big problem with this country is that you can find a Federal judge somewhere that will make and/or support any ruling or decision imaginable. The trick is finding the right one for your case.
I save stuff locally in case someone lunches the version control server and can't restore from backups. It's happened more than once in my career.
It's pretty amazing just how much of the world is based on trust isn't it?
And it's equally tragic that it can't.
I don't think it's so much that people automatically trust each other, although that's certainly the case sometimes, it's more like it never occurs to too many people, unfortunately, that what they divulge could cause problems in the wrong hands.
For many years now, when someone asks me for information, my first thought is not to give the information, but to consider why I don't want to give it to that person. And I don't consider myself particularly paranoid with respect to what I share.
It gets tiring after awhile. Modern life in the 21st century requires a level of vigilance regarding information that probably never existed outside of the military, national security apparatus, law enforcement or some elements of business before a couple decades ago.
"Loose lips sink ships" was a common saying during World War II, but nowadays everyone must practice that level of vigilance over their own information all the time merely to be safe from criminals.
As it is, this was pushed in a Microsoft security Hotfix for Vista a couple years ago...
The moment DS9 and Voyager came on the air, Berman had veered away from Roddenberry's vision.
I disagree strongly. Regardless, of the quality of the shows (IMO, DS9 was very good and Voyager was (mostly) pretty lame), I think the shows maintained Roddenberry's visions but tried to put them different settings, which at the time was sorely needed.
The Federation is made up of people of many races that, as a whole, share that vision, and we see that that vision is not only possible, but is likely if not inevitable. In Roddenberry's future "history," the Earth went through periods much, much worse than anything we've seen in the 45 years of real history that have transpired since he created Trek, and yet humanity eventually comes out of it better than ever.
But that doesn't mean that everyone in his universe has reached that point, and the Star Trek setting would be pretty boring if everyone had. The original Klingons were anything but "peaceful" and "we-all-get-along" and in fact were very one-dimensional villains, basically a cardboard metaphor for Soviet/Chinese communists... at least until TNG, when they were fleshed out into a nuanced, believable, and more importantly, much more interesting race.
The Maquis was the result of a brutal conflict between two non-Federation worlds, although some humans decided to get involved because it's natural that the writers would want to show humans involved to anchor the concept with the audience better. I don't think this veers away from Roddenberry's vision at all, but rather made for a great backdrop against which Roddenberry's vision is cast in sharp relief, showing a situation where the Roddenberry ideal had not _yet_ been achieved, but allowing us to see part of the evolution towards it, as well as making a great platform for exploring real world problems in a fantasy setting in the best traditions of Trek. This made for what was in many ways the most interesting Trek series.
Voyager had great potential by taking a small microcosm of the Roddenberry ideal and showing whether or not... and how... it could function in a truly alien situation cut off completely from everything that had allowed it develop. It's too bad that potential was totally squandered when we found out that the far side of the galaxy was as bland and unoriginal as the Alpha Quadrant had become, and that no matter what happened, the status quo ante would always be firmly reestablished, often in a very clumsy, heavy-handed way in the last 5 minutes of the episode.
I never watched more than an episode or two of "Enterprise" so I can't comment, but I think Berman, et al, did remain true overall to the Great Bird of the Galaxy, although there are plenty of other legitimate criticisms.
To be honest, I don't see it so much as "I couldn't think of a better name for this mysterious substance that exists solely as a plot device" but rather "Look, it's magic stuff. You don't care what it's called and neither do I. It doesn't make any difference. The SFX is red so we'll call it 'Red Matter' and not get our pocket protectors in a bunch worrying about pointless details."
To which I said, "Sounds good to me" Star Trek physics has gotten pretty silly in the past 15 years or so, and frankly I just don't care about it any more. As long as they don't use made-up physics to pull a "deus ex machina" more than 2 out of every 3 episodes or movie acts, I just don't care any more.
Red Matter? Whatever. Let's see some more cool spaceships.
The idea of it being manufactured so NBC could give some unknown actress her own sitcom is a little too loopy for me to take seriously, though.
You haven't watched TV in a long time, have you?
Sure it is, but unlike CNN, Fox, the NYT, network news, etc, it also is a site for "Stuff that matters."
I did forget Prolog, am not familiar with ICON, and wanted to include APL, but couldn't figure out a good place to work it in. :-)
I also thought it would be a gas to go further back so that I could work in Jacquard loom punchcards...
Even in this case I'd post non-anonymously when I can. This kind of comment in particular sounds like it would be no problem to do so.
Clearly you've never dealt with upper management at a large company. I was once reprimanded at a former job (cough*AOL*cough) by upper management for praising, on an internal mailing list, the technology the company was using in its infrastructure, but which had fallen into disfavor by many in management.
When dealing with upper management, my policy has become, "Expressing any opinion is like poking a rabid wolverine with a sharp stick."
It doesn't stop me from doing it. I'm just not surprised when there is retaliation all out of proportion. Almost always, these are not people who want to hear from anyone not parroting exactly what they say.
How much mail do you have on your IMAP accounts. I have tens of thousands of messages and T'bird 3 took over a day to index the first time I ran it, and it generally runs like a dog. It's usable, not as bad as Outlook, but it's definitely not snappy, and it's a resource hog for the reasons mentioned.
So before you accuse someone of spreading FUD, perhaps you should get all the facts.
1997: I would start with Java, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1990: I would start with VB, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1985: I would start with Pascal, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1980: I would start with BASIC, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1975: I would start with Fortran, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn C, but those would be specialists.
1970: I would start with Fortran, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn PL/1, but those would be specialists.
1965: I would start with COBOL, then most people would never need to learn another language. A small minority would want to learn ALGOL, but those would be specialists.
1960: I would start with LISP.
I think a simple proof of your thesis can be found at Microsoft Research, where a bunch of really sharp boffins are doing all kinds of really cool and ground-breaking stuff that never seem to make it into shipping products.
Microsoft is so non-innovative they are literally stagnating the state-of-the-art. As a personal anecdote, I had the dubious honor of taking over a non-trivial Excel application recently. Prior to this, I'd never done any app development using VBA, although I'd done some OLE Automation to drive Excel. This past several weeks has been an eye-opener to me, and more specifically, a strong reminder of how things used to be developing Windows software in the early 90s. It astounds me how crude, limited, archaic and poorly documented this stuff remains, even though Excel has been around for more than 20 years. As a spreadsheet, I always thought Excel was pretty good, but as a development environment, I haven't seen anything so backwards and limited in about 20 years.
The good news is that the people in charge are becoming open to moving towards a proper web app with a real database, which is the appropriate tool for this particular application.
But having a literal monopoly in Office software means there's no reason for Excel (or Word, etc) to ever get better. As long as there is an ever-expanding list of "features" most of which will never be used by more than 1% of users, Office will stay mired in its mid-90s rut.
I have a one word for the too bloated, too expensive, and not necessarily good games: GOG.com.
I've been buying several games from there recently, ones I played in the past and ones I missed the first time through, and when a game is as low as $6, I don't feel cheated if it's something I don't get a whole lot of use out of. I'm not associated with them, just a happy customer. Plus, no DRM and everything is tweaked to run on the latest Windows OSs. There are many classics from those days because the graphics really couldn't "wow" you, so good gameplay was needed for a title to succeed. There also wasn't a tremendous momentum of previously successful titles that could be slightly tweaked or skinned and re-released every year or two. How many games today, successful or not, good or not, are essentially Doom with better technology? There's nothing wrong with state-of-the-art graphics, but a good game should be able stand on its merits without them.
I remember this argument as far back as the Amiga: games focusing on eye candy and ignoring gameplay, and it's only gotten worse. There are still good games to be found, but it takes a lot of research and effort, and possibly a lot of money. Plus my hardware is fairly old and I just don't have a priority of upgrading perfectly good machines just to play games. Ironically, as gaming becomes more and more expensive, there appear more and more alternatives that are either free or low cost: open-source, casual Flash games online (many of which are rehashes of stuff you could buy 20 years ago), and companies like GOG.com and direct2drive.com that sell older games.
Also, the 'Flash is buggy' stuff needs to stop. It makes you sound ignorant.
No, it makes you sound like a Linux user where Flash _is_ buggy and hideously slow.
I have no problems with Flash on Windows.
Yes, and that was almost 35 years ago. The game's changed a bit since then.
The problem is that these people not only get to comment about politics, but they vote.
Well at least New Zealand seems to be moving in the right direction on that topic.