...not that there's any bright-line definition. But 1401's were considered "small computers" and the main use I knew for them was as satellite computers--auxiliary equipment used together with real "mainframes." For example, an IBM 7090 might perform input and output only to magnetic tape. The tapes were then mounted on the tape drive of a 1401, which read the tape and printed the contents on a line printer.
I read a fascinating book, "Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America," by Ira Rutkow, that answered some questions I'd always had about appendectomies.
If someone asked you to fill in the blank quickly in the sentence "The surgeon performed an _________" you would probably say "appendectomy." Yet it isn't such a terribly common operation today. Why is it the ur-operation, the one always used for purposes of hypothetical illustration? Why appendectomies?
According to Rutkow, It was a confluence of events. I hadn't realized that abdominal surgery had once been a medical taboo, with a nearly 100% mortality rate. Antisepsis ("Listerism") and anesthesia made it safe. It had once been extremely difficult to diagnose. I hadn't really thought of centrifuges, microscopes and blood counts as being a breakthrough in modern technology, but of course they were, part of the medical technology revolution that emerged from World War I. And they made it possible to diagnose appendicitis reliably. And there was one influential surgeon who promoted the idea that it was a surgeon's disease, that appendicitis "belonged to" the surgeon. Hospitals and surgeons found appendectomies to be lucrative, and they became almost a fad; Rutkow cites a hospital in which 1/5th of all operations performed were appendectomies.
In 2010, Nancy Gohring reported in Infoworld, Ballmer bets Microsoft's future on the cloud.. "'Seventy percent of the 40,000 people who work on software at Microsoft are in some way working in the cloud,' CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday at the University of Washington. 'A year from now, that will be 90 percent,' he said.... 'Our inspiration, our vision... builds from this cloud base,' he said. 'This is the bet, if you will, for our company.'"
I think there was similar rhetoric years earlier than that.
The Microsoft "Kin" phones lacked features normally implemented locally on phones, and Microsoft said that was going to be fine because modern-day young phone users were comfortable with relying on the cloud....
The next day he said tweeted "The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn't mean I think it can happen. It can't..." But maybe it can. Perhaps Putin's role in it is one of the "Details [that] are still being worked out, but officials say they expect a decision and announcement in the coming weeks."
Indeed. I used to like checking the Christian Science Monitor, hasn't been a major news source for a couple of decades but often has interesting items others miss or an interesting slant on something... and it's now using a desktop monitor to display less information than you could display on a cellphone screen.
I used to be able to scan headlines of about thirty or forty stories at a glance on my 1600x900 monitor. Now I can only see five. I'm interested in reading news, not complaining, and I've tried to figure out how to work around this, but I can't. The layout and sizing is such that if I use "reduced" magnification, by the time I get eight or nine stories onto the page the text is too small to read.
For heaven's sake! It's just a skin. With all the things they let you customize in Google News, why can't they give me a choice of information-dense and information-sparse presentations?
...without in any way minimizing the seriousness of the situation, let me observe that littering is deeply embedded in human nature, and it was ever thus. The very phrase "throw it away" tells us what we need to know. If we throw it far enough to be out of sight, we feel that it's gone. I'm leading up to a quotation from Owen Wister's 1902 novel, "The Virginian." Wister visited Medicine Bow, Wyoming in 1885 and I think we can take this as accurate observation:
"Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyomingâ(TM)s virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
The novel by John Wyndham begins with a spectacular spatial light show, a meteor shower unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. The protagonist is in a hospital with his eyes bandaged and feels sorry that he can't see the magnificent spectacle. It turns out that everybody who looks at the meteor shower goes blind, and the reader is given to understand or at least strongly suspect that it is some kind of orbiting weapons system that was activated accidentally.
Was the first version of ResEdit released in 1984 or 1985? In any case, for more than thirty years, there have been developer tools that allowed you to draw a UI screen, while simultaneously creating a WYSIWYG screen image, an object-oriented description of the elements in the image (e.g. "a checkbox at 50,100"), and code to generate the image.
As nearly as I can tell, the only novelty here is the ability to work off a static image file, rather than being able to work off the time-sequence of the series of drawing manipulations used to draw the file. This wouldn't be a big deal even if it worked, since it doesn't take very long for a human to look at a UI screen and draw a duplicate layout using a UI layout tool.
As for "77% accuracy," I have no idea what that means or how you calculate the percentage, but sounds like "it doesn't work," because the amount of work needed to correct something that is only 77% accurate is probably about the same--quite possibly more--than the amount of work needed to create it from scratch with a good layout tool.
Furthermore, it is very common for a UI layout to contain elements that are only conditionally visible. An obvious one would be a tabbed panel. A screenshot can show you the control that are in the frontmost tab page, but has no information at all that would allow pix2code to even begin to guess at the controls and other elements that are present in the other tab fields. Therefore, to get even a complete visual record of the interface, it is necessary to have some kind of procedure or script that results in every UI element being systematically revealed. That's not trivial. (Imagine some of the currently fashionable designs that save screen real estate by putting larger parts of the UI on invisible trays that only slide into view when needed).
If you're doing it right, you should never be doing anything twice. Anything you do should become a packaged and re-usable element that doesn't need to be coded again. I don't care whether you call it a subroutine, an object, or what have you.
Software development, done right, should grow exponentially--with a highly fluctuating exponent. No task should be predictable because no task should closely resemble anything you've done before. If it does, you shouldn't need to develop new code, you should just be able to re-use old code.
Well, OK, this is a gross oversimplification, but it does capture something fundamental about software development.
In the past I've found that managers almost prefer to do thing repetitively, over and over, the same stupid way. They love what is conceptually close to a duplication of the essentials of the last job, because although it's highly inefficient, it's also highly predictable. They would much rather have a near-linear curve of accomplishment versus time, then a much faster, but much less predictable exponential-with-fluctuating-exponent curve.
The typical manager would probably order you to recode the same thing ten times rather than "waste time" writing a subroutine.
(To be fair--it's hard to write a truly re-usable piece of code and easy to waste time in the name of re-usability and write code that isn't actually re-usable).
I remember this coming came up during the Y2K flap. COBOL programmers are dying out because companies have decided, for whatever reason, that they aren't willing to pay them much. A quick Google search--I don't know how reliable--shows me: COBOL Sr. Software Engineer / Developer / Programmer $88,049 Java Sr. Software Engineer / Developer / Programmer $103,239 But that understates the difference because the various job titles shown for COBOL positions are predominantly lower-sounding and lower-paid positions. As several have said, COBOL isn't hard to learn--I don't know it but I crammed it once for a test. Like all languages it takes a while to get good at it, but it's not specially difficult, nor is it specially bad.
The best strategy would be to render unto COBOL what is COBOL's--keep good legacy systems in COBOL--and pay enough to give people a reason to learn the language.
Sure. Anyone my age has seen the wheel reinvented several times because the minicomputer people were too arrogant to study what the mainframe people had done, and then the microcomputer people were too arrogant to study what the minicomputer people had done.
The other side of the coin is that I am very dilatory about installing any kind of update to anything because a) experience shows that the chance of an update breaking something in a serious way is something like 10-20%, b) the problem may not be obvious in the first five minutes or the first week of operation.
My wife's PC has now been rendered unbootable TWICE by Microsoft pushing through bad updates. I personally will not install a Mac OS update until I've taken the time to do a local backup to a hard drive, a remote backup to a cloud backup service, and waited two weeks to see if Apple retracts and re-releases the update, and read Macintouch for user reports to see what kinds of problems people are having.
I've already bought a new router once because the manufacturer's firmware update broke it and it was easier to buy another than to troubleshoot it.
I haven't got the time or energy to do that on a dozen household appliances.
The software industry has got to figure out a way to make sure that updates are one or two orders of magnitude safer and more reliable to install than they are today.
The old saw was that when corporation builds fancy new corporate headquarters, it is an indication of an "edifice complex" and a red flag.
The combination of a fancy new building _and_ a self-aggrandizing book seems dangerous to me.
An Wang's "Lessons" was published in 1986, about five years before Wang collapsed...
"The Ultimate Entrepreneur: The Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation" came out in 1988, the year DEC merged with Compaq... it's a little hard to date the "collapse of Digital."
My wife, who is sort of the idea non-techie user--follow directions, does virus scans, etc. is almost ready to abandon her Windows PC and see how well she can get by with an iPad. She is just totally ticked off at Microsoft. She bought a Windows PC with Windows 8 preinstalled, to avoid any possible upgrade hassles.
She found Windows 8 disturbingly close unusable, but gritted her teeth and started to learn it. Windows 8.1 managed to change enough things to be disorienting, without actually be an improvement. Then her PC was twice rendered unbootable by routine updates--in one case it seemed to be a case of dueling updates between Microsoft and HP, another time it was a faulty update that autoinstalled. (In both cases the "solution" was to boot in safe mode and roll back to the previous checkpoint).
Then came the forced Windows 10 upgrade, which again managed to change enough things to make the system harder for her to use without really improving anything.
Somewhere along the way the bloatware program she used to manage her photo library, which had come preinstalled and automatically associated to jpg files, so she was seduced into using it, stopped being compatible with Windows.
I think 10 to 10.1 has been painless, though.
The whole user experience of moving from Windows 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10 has been so badly mismanaged that it is easy to see why anyone who isn't forced to use Windows might abandon it for a tablet.
...to do a dozen things I don't understand why it needs to do. It's great that I can at least see what it's doing, but if I only downloaded apps whose permissions I really agreed to, I wouldn't download any.
The majority of them want my location, which I consider to be very sensitive information, for no obvious reason. Now as a matter of fact I have "location services" turned off--and quite a lot of them will lock up or crash if location services are turned off. So I end up deleting them.
The general quality of Android applications is just too low. I want an application to do X, I see ten competing applications to do X, I can't tell which is best--apart from astroturfing, user star ratings reward feature bloat rather than usability... and it's just too hard to download five of them and do personal SQA on them.
I've been wondering about this. We just got back from a nine-week camping road trip in which we visited fourteen states, and so far my record has been 100%: I NEVER was able to use my chipped card in a chip reader. Not once.
Let me be punctilious: at hotels and restaurants I couldn't always see what they did with the card, so I don't know for sure THEY weren't using a chip reader.
A very conspicuous absence was pay-at-the-pump gas stations, and that's a pity because that's said to be a common place to find skimmers. I did run into a pump--major brand at a service plaza on an Interstate--that declined my card when I swiped it. I went into the office, they had a chip reader on the POS terminal but they told me it wasn't working, and swiping didn't work their, either. I called the credit card company, who said there was no problem with my card... they had no record of the purchase and decline... and when I asked about security they said "Oh, you don't have to worry about that because your card has a chip in it."
Given that there was supposed to be a hard deadline of October 2015, yes, "disaster" sounds accurate.
The only sense I can make of it is that the banks don't actually care at all whether the system is implemented, they just want to cost-shift the costs of fraud to the merchants.
My primary card doctor is reasonably young and when I started seeing her, she keyed in notes about treatment plans and such right into the office computer. So I know she's comfortable with computers and that's she's a fast typist.
About two years ago, when she came into the exam room, she was followed by a young person with a laptop whom she introduced as "my scribe!" Her scribe was constantly tapping away at the laptop, taking notes and entering orders and so forth.
I don't honestly know whether this is good, bad, or indifferent, but it certainly is evidence that the burden of data has become so overwhelming that doctors need assistants specifically to help with that.
She works for a gigantic megapractice that is proud of being a Patient Centered Medical Home and an Accountable Care Organization and all that good stuff, so I think they are following current "best practices."
Geezer reminiscence on. When I was a kid, the doctor's office had a big lab, where they had microscopes and hemocytometers and did their own lab work, and a small business office. Now the labs are gone--they send all the lab work out. The business offices occupy a third of the floor space, because they need room for people waiting all day long on hold to talk to insurance companies. And they have to hire scribes to help the doctor with the data entry. Maybe it's progress.
...when they saw it. Under the name "RRS Sir David Attenborough" it will drop out of the public eye, do some good work, and be forgotten in thirty years. Under the name "RRS Boaty McBoatface" it would have been the subject of children's books, stuffed toys, animated cartoons, been remembered for a century, and inspired a generation of kids to become polar researchers.
While not intentionally funny, the HMS Beagle and the DSV Alvin don't have the most dignified names in the world, and the scientific work they did is none the worse for it.
...the update could have detected that it was running on a misconfigured motherboard. It could have issued a warning, containing directions on how to make the appropriate settings... with a PRINT option. It could have refused to install on a system that Microsoft knew it the update would damage.
Microsoft chose to do none of these things. Microsoft chose to hurt people who had paid money for their operating system.
Because it is beneficial to almost everyone in the industry to believe that "everybody" uses only the newest gear, there is a systematic distortion of the facts of what might be called "product demography." I've seen this everywhere I've worked, including several years at a (long-gone) Fortune 500 computer company.
It seems that almost everyone relies on 15 and 20-year old equipment. Everyone scratches their head in amazement at what's in the back of the server room and the unbelievable story of why it is still in service--but it is there.
I've had several conversations with people at the computer company that went about like this. "We don't need to support that model, it's too old, nobody is using it." "I think a lot of people are still using it." "Why do you think that?" "For one reason, because we still use it ourselves." "WHAAAAT?" "Sure. Check with Lewis on the 4th floor of building III. They have three of them." "What on earth for?" "Because of [reasons X, Y, and Z]. And they can't get rid of them because the new models [have problems Q, R, and S]. "Oh, well, that's a completely unique situation. Nobody else in the world is using them." "Trust me, if we're using them our customers are using them. Unless you believe that everyone else in the world is better managed and more up-to-date than we are."
I continue to be amazed at how high the "bandwidth" of a traditional, printed, paper highway map--such as those still provided by AAA, and frequently by the states themselves--compared to anything you can get electronically. Scrolling a six-inch screen is no substitute for a square meter of paper surface printed in high resolution... and with judicious human preselection of points of interest.
For your typical 150-miles-to-a-specific-destination trips I continue to try to make do by printing out relevant Google maps, a small-scale one for the major highway routes to get there and a big one of the neighborhood. It never really works. The GPS and our car's NAV system will get you from point A to point B and show you in very good detail the local roads immediately surrounding your present position, but don't work very well for planning.
Nor are electronic maps very good for sketching, highlighting, or carrying with you. And paper maps don't need to be recharged.
The movie suggested that the "Titanic" wasn't strong enough to support half its weight, levered and elevated, unsupported in the air. In the movie, the ship snapped in two (without the pieces fully separating).
This would have happened somewhere around 2:40 in the simulation video.
I guess this is just another illustration that Titanic buffs disagree with each other.
All kinds of AI have teething pains, during which the problems are obvious and comical (the Apple Newton's handwriting recognition being a case in point). At the same time, the achievements of modern AI are amazing--but also troubling.
When I compare AI as envisioned in the 1950s--Isaac Asimov's Multivac, or his robots, perhaps--the assumption was that AI would be closely similar to human intelligence. For example, it was implicit that robots would answer questions by actually understanding them. What we are seeing today evokes an analogy with technologies like the sewing machine. Early efforts attempted to sew the same way humans did, and failed. Singer's brilliant idea was a method of using thread to fasten two pieces of cloth that did not resemble human sewing or even use the same stitch.
A Google search is within shooting distance of Multivac. You type in a question and you get a useful answer. The interesting thing is that most modern AI is shoddy. It goes halfway. It gives you something that's inaccurate, yet useful. But the key thing is that you are expected to use your human intelligence to get the rest of the way and correct mistakes. In the case of Google, you do this by looking at a ten or a hundred search results, for example--and reformulating the question if you don't get the right answer.
Perhaps one of the things that early AI pioneers missed is that modern AI relies more on having huge databases of information than would have even been imaginable in the 1950s and 1960s, and less on AI actually mimicking human intelligence.
This is not a problem when it is all open, the AI is offering you something to look at and not making decisions for you, and it is all in the nature of help or suggestions rather than direct action.
It becomes far more serious when it is happening behind the scenes--when AI is deciding whether you get a loan, or pass an essay test on an exam, or get onto a terrorist watchlist.
"Wouldn't it be great if you could read a novel in an hour or two?"
You used to be able to. Reader's Digest used to publish Reader's Digest Condensed Books. In effect, they did the speed-reading for you. I have to say that they did a very skillful job of the editing, too. Very impressive. But not really that enjoyable to read.
Slashdot Mirror
...not that there's any bright-line definition. But 1401's were considered "small computers" and the main use I knew for them was as satellite computers--auxiliary equipment used together with real "mainframes." For example, an IBM 7090 might perform input and output only to magnetic tape. The tapes were then mounted on the tape drive of a 1401, which read the tape and printed the contents on a line printer.
I read a fascinating book, "Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America," by Ira Rutkow, that answered some questions I'd always had about appendectomies.
If someone asked you to fill in the blank quickly in the sentence "The surgeon performed an _________" you would probably say "appendectomy." Yet it isn't such a terribly common operation today. Why is it the ur-operation, the one always used for purposes of hypothetical illustration? Why appendectomies?
According to Rutkow, It was a confluence of events. I hadn't realized that abdominal surgery had once been a medical taboo, with a nearly 100% mortality rate. Antisepsis ("Listerism") and anesthesia made it safe. It had once been extremely difficult to diagnose. I hadn't really thought of centrifuges, microscopes and blood counts as being a breakthrough in modern technology, but of course they were, part of the medical technology revolution that emerged from World War I. And they made it possible to diagnose appendicitis reliably. And there was one influential surgeon who promoted the idea that it was a surgeon's disease, that appendicitis "belonged to" the surgeon. Hospitals and surgeons found appendectomies to be lucrative, and they became almost a fad; Rutkow cites a hospital in which 1/5th of all operations performed were appendectomies.
In 2010, Nancy Gohring reported in Infoworld, Ballmer bets Microsoft's future on the cloud.. "'Seventy percent of the 40,000 people who work on software at Microsoft are in some way working in the cloud,' CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday at the University of Washington. 'A year from now, that will be 90 percent,' he said.... 'Our inspiration, our vision ... builds from this cloud base,' he said. 'This is the bet, if you will, for our company.'"
I think there was similar rhetoric years earlier than that.
The Microsoft "Kin" phones lacked features normally implemented locally on phones, and Microsoft said that was going to be fine because modern-day young phone users were comfortable with relying on the cloud....
That sounds like what he discussed with Putin:
"Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded."
Donald Trump, July 9th, 2017
https://twitter.com/realDonald...
The next day he said tweeted "The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn't mean I think it can happen. It can't..." But maybe it can. Perhaps Putin's role in it is one of the "Details [that] are still being worked out, but officials say they expect a decision and announcement in the coming weeks."
Indeed. I used to like checking the Christian Science Monitor, hasn't been a major news source for a couple of decades but often has interesting items others miss or an interesting slant on something... and it's now using a desktop monitor to display less information than you could display on a cellphone screen.
I used to be able to scan headlines of about thirty or forty stories at a glance on my 1600x900 monitor. Now I can only see five. I'm interested in reading news, not complaining, and I've tried to figure out how to work around this, but I can't. The layout and sizing is such that if I use "reduced" magnification, by the time I get eight or nine stories onto the page the text is too small to read.
For heaven's sake! It's just a skin. With all the things they let you customize in Google News, why can't they give me a choice of information-dense and information-sparse presentations?
...without in any way minimizing the seriousness of the situation, let me observe that littering is deeply embedded in human nature, and it was ever thus. The very phrase "throw it away" tells us what we need to know. If we throw it far enough to be out of sight, we feel that it's gone. I'm leading up to a quotation from Owen Wister's 1902 novel, "The Virginian." Wister visited Medicine Bow, Wyoming in 1885 and I think we can take this as accurate observation:
"Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyomingâ(TM)s virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
The novel by John Wyndham begins with a spectacular spatial light show, a meteor shower unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. The protagonist is in a hospital with his eyes bandaged and feels sorry that he can't see the magnificent spectacle. It turns out that everybody who looks at the meteor shower goes blind, and the reader is given to understand or at least strongly suspect that it is some kind of orbiting weapons system that was activated accidentally.
Was the first version of ResEdit released in 1984 or 1985? In any case, for more than thirty years, there have been developer tools that allowed you to draw a UI screen, while simultaneously creating a WYSIWYG screen image, an object-oriented description of the elements in the image (e.g. "a checkbox at 50,100"), and code to generate the image.
As nearly as I can tell, the only novelty here is the ability to work off a static image file, rather than being able to work off the time-sequence of the series of drawing manipulations used to draw the file. This wouldn't be a big deal even if it worked, since it doesn't take very long for a human to look at a UI screen and draw a duplicate layout using a UI layout tool.
As for "77% accuracy," I have no idea what that means or how you calculate the percentage, but sounds like "it doesn't work," because the amount of work needed to correct something that is only 77% accurate is probably about the same--quite possibly more--than the amount of work needed to create it from scratch with a good layout tool.
Furthermore, it is very common for a UI layout to contain elements that are only conditionally visible. An obvious one would be a tabbed panel. A screenshot can show you the control that are in the frontmost tab page, but has no information at all that would allow pix2code to even begin to guess at the controls and other elements that are present in the other tab fields. Therefore, to get even a complete visual record of the interface, it is necessary to have some kind of procedure or script that results in every UI element being systematically revealed. That's not trivial. (Imagine some of the currently fashionable designs that save screen real estate by putting larger parts of the UI on invisible trays that only slide into view when needed).
If you're doing it right, you should never be doing anything twice. Anything you do should become a packaged and re-usable element that doesn't need to be coded again. I don't care whether you call it a subroutine, an object, or what have you.
Software development, done right, should grow exponentially--with a highly fluctuating exponent. No task should be predictable because no task should closely resemble anything you've done before. If it does, you shouldn't need to develop new code, you should just be able to re-use old code.
Well, OK, this is a gross oversimplification, but it does capture something fundamental about software development.
In the past I've found that managers almost prefer to do thing repetitively, over and over, the same stupid way. They love what is conceptually close to a duplication of the essentials of the last job, because although it's highly inefficient, it's also highly predictable. They would much rather have a near-linear curve of accomplishment versus time, then a much faster, but much less predictable exponential-with-fluctuating-exponent curve.
The typical manager would probably order you to recode the same thing ten times rather than "waste time" writing a subroutine.
(To be fair--it's hard to write a truly re-usable piece of code and easy to waste time in the name of re-usability and write code that isn't actually re-usable).
I remember this coming came up during the Y2K flap. COBOL programmers are dying out because companies have decided, for whatever reason, that they aren't willing to pay them much. A quick Google search--I don't know how reliable--shows me:
COBOL Sr. Software Engineer / Developer / Programmer $88,049
Java Sr. Software Engineer / Developer / Programmer $103,239
But that understates the difference because the various job titles shown for COBOL positions are predominantly lower-sounding and lower-paid positions.
As several have said, COBOL isn't hard to learn--I don't know it but I crammed it once for a test. Like all languages it takes a while to get good at it, but it's not specially difficult, nor is it specially bad.
The best strategy would be to render unto COBOL what is COBOL's--keep good legacy systems in COBOL--and pay enough to give people a reason to learn the language.
Sure. Anyone my age has seen the wheel reinvented several times because the minicomputer people were too arrogant to study what the mainframe people had done, and then the microcomputer people were too arrogant to study what the minicomputer people had done.
The other side of the coin is that I am very dilatory about installing any kind of update to anything because a) experience shows that the chance of an update breaking something in a serious way is something like 10-20%, b) the problem may not be obvious in the first five minutes or the first week of operation.
My wife's PC has now been rendered unbootable TWICE by Microsoft pushing through bad updates. I personally will not install a Mac OS update until I've taken the time to do a local backup to a hard drive, a remote backup to a cloud backup service, and waited two weeks to see if Apple retracts and re-releases the update, and read Macintouch for user reports to see what kinds of problems people are having.
I've already bought a new router once because the manufacturer's firmware update broke it and it was easier to buy another than to troubleshoot it.
I haven't got the time or energy to do that on a dozen household appliances.
The software industry has got to figure out a way to make sure that updates are one or two orders of magnitude safer and more reliable to install than they are today.
The old saw was that when corporation builds fancy new corporate headquarters, it is an indication of an "edifice complex" and a red flag.
The combination of a fancy new building _and_ a self-aggrandizing book seems dangerous to me.
An Wang's "Lessons" was published in 1986, about five years before Wang collapsed...
"The Ultimate Entrepreneur: The Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation" came out in 1988, the year DEC merged with Compaq... it's a little hard to date the "collapse of Digital."
My wife, who is sort of the idea non-techie user--follow directions, does virus scans, etc. is almost ready to abandon her Windows PC and see how well she can get by with an iPad. She is just totally ticked off at Microsoft. She bought a Windows PC with Windows 8 preinstalled, to avoid any possible upgrade hassles.
She found Windows 8 disturbingly close unusable, but gritted her teeth and started to learn it. Windows 8.1 managed to change enough things to be disorienting, without actually be an improvement. Then her PC was twice rendered unbootable by routine updates--in one case it seemed to be a case of dueling updates between Microsoft and HP, another time it was a faulty update that autoinstalled. (In both cases the "solution" was to boot in safe mode and roll back to the previous checkpoint).
Then came the forced Windows 10 upgrade, which again managed to change enough things to make the system harder for her to use without really improving anything.
Somewhere along the way the bloatware program she used to manage her photo library, which had come preinstalled and automatically associated to jpg files, so she was seduced into using it, stopped being compatible with Windows.
I think 10 to 10.1 has been painless, though.
The whole user experience of moving from Windows 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10 has been so badly mismanaged that it is easy to see why anyone who isn't forced to use Windows might abandon it for a tablet.
...to do a dozen things I don't understand why it needs to do. It's great that I can at least see what it's doing, but if I only downloaded apps whose permissions I really agreed to, I wouldn't download any.
The majority of them want my location, which I consider to be very sensitive information, for no obvious reason. Now as a matter of fact I have "location services" turned off--and quite a lot of them will lock up or crash if location services are turned off. So I end up deleting them.
The general quality of Android applications is just too low. I want an application to do X, I see ten competing applications to do X, I can't tell which is best--apart from astroturfing, user star ratings reward feature bloat rather than usability... and it's just too hard to download five of them and do personal SQA on them.
I've been wondering about this. We just got back from a nine-week camping road trip in which we visited fourteen states, and so far my record has been 100%: I NEVER was able to use my chipped card in a chip reader. Not once.
Let me be punctilious: at hotels and restaurants I couldn't always see what they did with the card, so I don't know for sure THEY weren't using a chip reader.
A very conspicuous absence was pay-at-the-pump gas stations, and that's a pity because that's said to be a common place to find skimmers. I did run into a pump--major brand at a service plaza on an Interstate--that declined my card when I swiped it. I went into the office, they had a chip reader on the POS terminal but they told me it wasn't working, and swiping didn't work their, either. I called the credit card company, who said there was no problem with my card... they had no record of the purchase and decline... and when I asked about security they said "Oh, you don't have to worry about that because your card has a chip in it."
Given that there was supposed to be a hard deadline of October 2015, yes, "disaster" sounds accurate.
The only sense I can make of it is that the banks don't actually care at all whether the system is implemented, they just want to cost-shift the costs of fraud to the merchants.
My primary card doctor is reasonably young and when I started seeing her, she keyed in notes about treatment plans and such right into the office computer. So I know she's comfortable with computers and that's she's a fast typist.
About two years ago, when she came into the exam room, she was followed by a young person with a laptop whom she introduced as "my scribe!" Her scribe was constantly tapping away at the laptop, taking notes and entering orders and so forth.
I don't honestly know whether this is good, bad, or indifferent, but it certainly is evidence that the burden of data has become so overwhelming that doctors need assistants specifically to help with that.
She works for a gigantic megapractice that is proud of being a Patient Centered Medical Home and an Accountable Care Organization and all that good stuff, so I think they are following current "best practices."
Geezer reminiscence on. When I was a kid, the doctor's office had a big lab, where they had microscopes and hemocytometers and did their own lab work, and a small business office. Now the labs are gone--they send all the lab work out. The business offices occupy a third of the floor space, because they need room for people waiting all day long on hold to talk to insurance companies. And they have to hire scribes to help the doctor with the data entry. Maybe it's progress.
...when they saw it. Under the name "RRS Sir David Attenborough" it will drop out of the public eye, do some good work, and be forgotten in thirty years. Under the name "RRS Boaty McBoatface" it would have been the subject of children's books, stuffed toys, animated cartoons, been remembered for a century, and inspired a generation of kids to become polar researchers.
While not intentionally funny, the HMS Beagle and the DSV Alvin don't have the most dignified names in the world, and the scientific work they did is none the worse for it.
...the update could have detected that it was running on a misconfigured motherboard. It could have issued a warning, containing directions on how to make the appropriate settings... with a PRINT option. It could have refused to install on a system that Microsoft knew it the update would damage.
Microsoft chose to do none of these things. Microsoft chose to hurt people who had paid money for their operating system.
Because it is beneficial to almost everyone in the industry to believe that "everybody" uses only the newest gear, there is a systematic distortion of the facts of what might be called "product demography." I've seen this everywhere I've worked, including several years at a (long-gone) Fortune 500 computer company.
It seems that almost everyone relies on 15 and 20-year old equipment. Everyone scratches their head in amazement at what's in the back of the server room and the unbelievable story of why it is still in service--but it is there.
I've had several conversations with people at the computer company that went about like this.
"We don't need to support that model, it's too old, nobody is using it."
"I think a lot of people are still using it."
"Why do you think that?"
"For one reason, because we still use it ourselves."
"WHAAAAT?"
"Sure. Check with Lewis on the 4th floor of building III. They have three of them."
"What on earth for?"
"Because of [reasons X, Y, and Z]. And they can't get rid of them because the new models [have problems Q, R, and S].
"Oh, well, that's a completely unique situation. Nobody else in the world is using them."
"Trust me, if we're using them our customers are using them. Unless you believe that everyone else in the world is better managed and more up-to-date than we are."
I continue to be amazed at how high the "bandwidth" of a traditional, printed, paper highway map--such as those still provided by AAA, and frequently by the states themselves--compared to anything you can get electronically. Scrolling a six-inch screen is no substitute for a square meter of paper surface printed in high resolution... and with judicious human preselection of points of interest.
For your typical 150-miles-to-a-specific-destination trips I continue to try to make do by printing out relevant Google maps, a small-scale one for the major highway routes to get there and a big one of the neighborhood. It never really works. The GPS and our car's NAV system will get you from point A to point B and show you in very good detail the local roads immediately surrounding your present position, but don't work very well for planning.
Nor are electronic maps very good for sketching, highlighting, or carrying with you. And paper maps don't need to be recharged.
The movie suggested that the "Titanic" wasn't strong enough to support half its weight, levered and elevated, unsupported in the air. In the movie, the ship snapped in two (without the pieces fully separating).
This would have happened somewhere around 2:40 in the simulation video.
I guess this is just another illustration that Titanic buffs disagree with each other.
This professor's simulation indicates it did break--but not the way Cameron's movie showed!
All kinds of AI have teething pains, during which the problems are obvious and comical (the Apple Newton's handwriting recognition being a case in point). At the same time, the achievements of modern AI are amazing--but also troubling.
When I compare AI as envisioned in the 1950s--Isaac Asimov's Multivac, or his robots, perhaps--the assumption was that AI would be closely similar to human intelligence. For example, it was implicit that robots would answer questions by actually understanding them. What we are seeing today evokes an analogy with technologies like the sewing machine. Early efforts attempted to sew the same way humans did, and failed. Singer's brilliant idea was a method of using thread to fasten two pieces of cloth that did not resemble human sewing or even use the same stitch.
A Google search is within shooting distance of Multivac. You type in a question and you get a useful answer. The interesting thing is that most modern AI is shoddy. It goes halfway. It gives you something that's inaccurate, yet useful. But the key thing is that you are expected to use your human intelligence to get the rest of the way and correct mistakes. In the case of Google, you do this by looking at a ten or a hundred search results, for example--and reformulating the question if you don't get the right answer.
Perhaps one of the things that early AI pioneers missed is that modern AI relies more on having huge databases of information than would have even been imaginable in the 1950s and 1960s, and less on AI actually mimicking human intelligence.
This is not a problem when it is all open, the AI is offering you something to look at and not making decisions for you, and it is all in the nature of help or suggestions rather than direct action.
It becomes far more serious when it is happening behind the scenes--when AI is deciding whether you get a loan, or pass an essay test on an exam, or get onto a terrorist watchlist.
"Wouldn't it be great if you could read a novel in an hour or two?"
You used to be able to. Reader's Digest used to publish Reader's Digest Condensed Books. In effect, they did the speed-reading for you. I have to say that they did a very skillful job of the editing, too. Very impressive. But not really that enjoyable to read.
They don't seem to be around any more.