Point in case: I get my computers refurbished. I'm a computer expert (duh). I get more out of a piece of junk computer than a regular guy out of a brand new 27" iMac pro. No surprise here. Hence, if I need to get a cheap high value car I'll ask somebody who's deep into cars. He'd probably be able to recommend something that costs a tenth of the regular price and lasts ages. My refurbished ThinkPad X220 costs 200$ + some cheap RAM and an SSD and does more than any regular computer user could ever ask for. I'd expect the same results from a car expert. Those Volvo station wagons from 2000 and before come to mind. They start warming up at 250 000 milage.
... anything other than confidential. Wether Googles "confidentiality mode" is sufficient or not is to a larger extent probably a very silly question to ask, IMHO.
They always have been through the effing roof. Same goes for fake "look, we're expanding" confidentials. Let's finally solve that problem before we here one more word from HR or recruiters. There's a nice plan right there.
... at my local Chaos Computer Club a while ago. She was wearing workers pants. She had taken the extra trip to another town to get them at a large hardware store for professionals and tradesmen. "I got these because they have a good measure of useful pockets." she said. She was playing "The binding of Isaac" on her Nintendo Switch.... Total wife material IMHO.
When I say fugetives I mean,... guess what?... fugitives. Families from Syria and the African savanna aren't exactly know for sending their kids to swim lessons. And why would they - they mostly live(d) in the desert anyway. I bet dollars to donuts that one of the most fascinating things for a family from North Nigeria is seeing a publicly accessible body of water and see others going for a dip and attempting the same. "How much water can you take in Germany?" Is a common question to tourist in rural Afrika. The answer "as much as you want" is a big source of amazement.... Our climate zones are vastly different and that also makes for the disproportionate amount of poverty in these countries. A cold hard technical fact very often overlooked in the fugetive discussion.
Hence the problem of a disproportionate amount of children of fugitive families drowning as they aren't familiar with the dangers associated with huge amounts of water.
I have absolutely no idea what your racist thing is here, as nothing of what I'm saying is racist. So chill.... Thanks.
Child drownings in Germany are linked to children not learning to swim anymore because baths are closing left, right and center and learning to swim isn't a collective basic skill anymore. Also fugitives from Afrika often don't know the concept of learning to swim.
Parents addicted to their smartphone comes in on a far back 3rd or 4th on the list of reasons.
The German press is full of this in the last year or so. Federal level is thinking about making swimming lessons mandatory again and public baths closing down due to lack of money is a problem discussed at federal level too.
... on my ARM Chromebook which default-boots to a spoof account. Confuses the heck out of even the vaguely tech-savvy security guy. Love the puzzled look on their faces.
I have a tablet running Android 5. Runs perfect. Why does the Airbnb app have to fail running correctly? What does the app have that it requires the Avantgarde of software to run on?
This is bullshit. I wish vendors would focus more on stability and long-term support than this nonsense. Same goes for operating systems.
An entrenched market ripe for disruption. I totally believe musk when he says that car business is hell. I'm wondering if he regrets not going for something different like electric scooters or total robot cars or some entirely new market.... Anyhow, I sure hope he succeeds!
I see problems with long-term feasiblity. Power consumption is through the roof, as is ineffciency in validation/resolution.
Digital currency is a very, very good idea, but a massive simple one-dimensional set of tokens managed by a single trusted service is way more likely to offer real-world advantage over bitcoin and Co. I believe digital currency will take off when we get one that doesn't require obscene amounts of processing power to handle and transfer via transactions. When you can have an app on your cheap-ass asian semi-feature-phone and transfer 50 cents with a push of a button and the guy selling you his fruit can see if on his phone in 3 seconds. This isn't going to happen at a global scale with any of the current cryptocurrencies. Hence their real-world usefulness is notably limited and thus they won't succeed as currency IMHO.
Unlike many others we, if we observe carefully, know exactly how and when we can be replaced. And when not. This gives us massive leverage and a few critical points. "I don't like your business model" is a very neat audible objection by someone who has a rare and demanded skill. Tech illuminates are in the sweet spot of being able to do a bit of a priests job in deciding who gets my skills and experience and who gets the finger.
I like that we have some confident and self aware engineers. Keep it up!
Downig CO from 20 Bazillion tons per year to 19 Bazillion tons per year is no big feat when other contients with similar population only do 10 bazillion tons. Yes, this is no time for finger-pointing and yes replacing nuclear with coal is nothing to brag about for Chief Mommy Angie of Germany, but there is no place for bragging either and definitely not for "following the US lead" in this camp. Seriously not.
The world as a whole needs to turn and do it fast, we're halfway into FUBAR territory on a global scale as it is.... Are you still using a private car? Flying?... Stop it. There's a plan right there. Then you have my officlal permission to brag.
I'm not getting an ICE car, I'll keep using PT, carsharing (when I absolutely must) and my bike. Maybe an electric one some day. And I'll probalby use the bus to do my surfing vacation I had planned this year. Yes, it will be a 20 hour trip, but my eco balance will be lightyears above taking Ryanair to Southern Portugal. Everyone should start thinking stuff like this and acting accordingly. Like, now.
... the more plausible scenario. The reverse albedo effect is already taking effect and we're still adding to the carbon circle big time. Trumpistan and the wider world is still blissfully unaware of what's happening, as are the idiots here in my country dragging their heels with solar and driving ever larger luxury Audi's and Porsches and Daimlers, each and everybody on his own, at the same time. The current heatwave in Germany beats everything we've seen so far. It feels like I'm on the equator. Today they forecast 37ÂC, the highest temperature yet in my region and it's only going to get worse.
... of transitioning from a pure technology brand to a lifestyle and fashion brand with the advent of the iMac. They've been going further down that road ever since.
Today they are so far ahead that they can even drag their heels with us opinion leaders delivering meh hardware with last year's specs and still cap at 1 billion due to iPhones sold everywhere all the time.
That brand power of Apple these days is something it's would kill for.
... roughly 20 years ago. "Silicon Snake Oil" is the book iirc. Good opinionated read. I mostly agree with a solid amount of scepticism concerning media technology in the class room. The raspberry pi is the most of computing that I would let into a classroom. And only with CLI centric/coding lessons. And if we're honest, the raspberry pi is quite a lot.
I've been progging for 33 years, since my teens. Classic 80ies computer kid. I do that for a living since 18 years ago. I've finally enrolled in a BSc CS track that I'l pobably manage to complete, after having done my German GED High School diploma 3 years back. I'm in the second semester, only taking a few courses at a time, and pushing a wave of exams in front of me. I do part-time, because I'm working as a professional webdev too.
Here's my observation and it's 100% spot on with my expectations and one of the reasons I'm doing CS in my late 40ies:
The basics - Math, theoretic CS ("Theoretische Informatik"... dunno what that's in english exactly), graph theory, expanded theory of sets and so on are exactly what someone doing anything computer related at a professional programmers and software architects level should know and be able to wrap his/her head around. Being able to algebrahicly express and calculate the complexity of a relational graph in a database is a level or two above simply discussing which goes in what entity. It's tough - boolean algebra is a particularly neat alien monster to tackle if your not into algebra that much - but it's doable and it ups your understanding of what you're doing in your everyday work and it does away with the fog that covers many deeper areas that IT people encounter every day and should know more about. This is the reason you should do CS if you'e doing IT professionally. At least a bit of it on the side, in Kahn Academy or something.
Point in case: I'm in a CS project group right now reimplementing RSA to learn all the n00ks and crannies about it. Very nice. Slow as hell and crappy n00b code by my 19 year old comrades, but we all (me included) learned new stuff. For instance: Asmetric is hard and demands performance, thus is only used to do a preceeding exchange of a symetric key before the show starts. That's why https handshakes take up 1.5 of the 3.5 second rule for loading and displaying websites. Now who without some CS knowlege is aware of this?
However, there is the other side that the GP mentions, and this is a very simple cold hard fact that CS faculties need to get into their collective head: The avantgarde of software development is not in academia anymore. The regular skills you're teaching your students are most likely sub-par and will be nigh obsolete once your students leave for the real world. Yes, there is the occasional Scala that comes out of a university and then gets some hype in the industry, but that only works if the Prof who invented it is in the industry himself aswell.
Point in case here: We're doing this project in IntellyJ Idea already (bad idea imho). The introduction into the IDE was sub-par and the Prof talked bullshit and wrong details about Git. I could've given his introduction on the spot and he would've learned some new things.... That's because they probably only moved from SVN a few years back.
Kotlin is barely on their radar and it's already being used in the industry, in non-trivial projects.
Bottom line: As far as practical skills go, CS is too far behind the curve. I'm sure they are becoming aware of this and many a college is trying to catch up with close ties to the industry, but right now I learn more and better at local meetups than in class. Graph theory and math however I doubt I find some better place to learn that than at my faculty.
Perhaps people should worry far less about visual appearance and far more about functionality.
Wrong.
Professionals should care about and be able to handle both. Aesthetics isn't that difficult and if someone doesn't care how a website looks they still have some work to before they can call themselves a professional webdev. Not caring about aesthetics is just as bad as not caring about wether your stuff is processed client- or serverside. That doesn't mean they have to do screens all day, but it does mean they should know how it's done, to a certain degree. Just as any screendesigner should know what state, focus and context is and the difference between a value and a variable.
If someone can build a lean website that just can't help looking like shite they're part of the problem. The way smaller part, but still a part. The others are people who build neat screendesigns but wouldn't know a client from a server and think because they are OK in print they're good in web. Then there is that massive blob inbetween who are bad at both and still claim to be professionals.
Bottom line: Learn some basics about design, it's really not that difficult and knowing some general stuff about modern bauhaus minimalism shouldn't be to much of work for any decent developer.
I'm so on board with this guy and I so totally get his frustration. This is my personal daily plight. The problem is, ever since "Web Design" we've had to deal with the vast majority of people in our field claiming to be "Web Designers" but not knowing squat about how the web works, what it does and what it can't do and how it is done correctly. This shows at every corner ever since. We need some serious steps into professionalising our field. It has come quite a way, but we are not there yet.
People think that because it's nice and shiny and they can click on it that they can understand it. The problem is they don't. With web design and typography it is so easy for people to mistake the picture of a house with a house. After all, it looks the same, doesn't it? It frustrates the hell out of me talking to professional awarded web designers that after 20 years still blabbel utter non-sense about the 72dpi myth. I could hardly believe what I was hearing as I had this discussion last winter. That's because even the people handing out the awards don't know how the web works.
I listened to a tech talk from a blind buy the other week who demonstrated with a screen reader and a braile terminal how he navigates the web. He also explained how to build a semantically correct web. It was such an eye-opener and a brilliant demonstration of where the wheat seperates from countless metric tons of chaff. Div soup, semantic hell and broken websites left, right and center. If I were Kind I'd pass a law that everyone who builds websites has to demonstrate the viablity of them by navigating them blind, with a screen reader. The quality of the web would instantly improve by orders of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Google can track you on the intarwebs!
Water is wet!
Pope catholic!
News brought to you by CORI - Captain Obvious Research Institute
Point in case: I get my computers refurbished. I'm a computer expert (duh). I get more out of a piece of junk computer than a regular guy out of a brand new 27" iMac pro. No surprise here. Hence, if I need to get a cheap high value car I'll ask somebody who's deep into cars. He'd probably be able to recommend something that costs a tenth of the regular price and lasts ages. My refurbished ThinkPad X220 costs 200$ + some cheap RAM and an SSD and does more than any regular computer user could ever ask for. I'd expect the same results from a car expert. Those Volvo station wagons from 2000 and before come to mind. They start warming up at 250 000 milage.
My 2 cents.
... anything other than confidential.
Wether Googles "confidentiality mode" is sufficient or not is to a larger extent probably a very silly question to ask, IMHO.
They always have been through the effing roof. Same goes for fake "look, we're expanding" confidentials.
Let's finally solve that problem before we here one more word from HR or recruiters. There's a nice plan right there.
... at my local Chaos Computer Club a while ago. She was wearing workers pants. She had taken the extra trip to another town to get them at a large hardware store for professionals and tradesmen. "I got these because they have a good measure of useful pockets." she said. She was playing "The binding of Isaac" on her Nintendo Switch. ... Total wife material IMHO.
When I say fugetives I mean, ... guess what? ... fugitives. Families from Syria and the African savanna aren't exactly know for sending their kids to swim lessons. And why would they - they mostly live(d) in the desert anyway. I bet dollars to donuts that one of the most fascinating things for a family from North Nigeria is seeing a publicly accessible body of water and see others going for a dip and attempting the same. "How much water can you take in Germany?" Is a common question to tourist in rural Afrika. The answer "as much as you want" is a big source of amazement. ... Our climate zones are vastly different and that also makes for the disproportionate amount of poverty in these countries. A cold hard technical fact very often overlooked in the fugetive discussion.
Hence the problem of a disproportionate amount of children of fugitive families drowning as they aren't familiar with the dangers associated with huge amounts of water.
I have absolutely no idea what your racist thing is here, as nothing of what I'm saying is racist. So chill. ... Thanks.
Child drownings in Germany are linked to children not learning to swim anymore because baths are closing left, right and center and learning to swim isn't a collective basic skill anymore.
Also fugitives from Afrika often don't know the concept of learning to swim.
Parents addicted to their smartphone comes in on a far back 3rd or 4th on the list of reasons.
The German press is full of this in the last year or so. Federal level is thinking about making swimming lessons mandatory again and public baths closing down due to lack of money is a problem discussed at federal level too.
What remains is a plutocratic corporate socialism sold to the masses as free market capitalism. No wonder they don't like it.
... on my ARM Chromebook which default-boots to a spoof account. Confuses the heck out of even the vaguely tech-savvy security guy. Love the puzzled look on their faces.
It's going on my nerves.
I have a tablet running Android 5. Runs perfect. Why does the Airbnb app have to fail running correctly? What does the app have that it requires the Avantgarde of software to run on?
This is bullshit. I wish vendors would focus more on stability and long-term support than this nonsense. Same goes for operating systems.
My 2 cents.
Given their track record that isn't exactly known for its eco- or consumer-friendlyness.
An entrenched market ripe for disruption. I totally believe musk when he says that car business is hell. I'm wondering if he regrets not going for something different like electric scooters or total robot cars or some entirely new market. ... Anyhow, I sure hope he succeeds!
https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Best Option. It's pre-order, so you'll have to wait a bit, but the wait is probably worth it.
You're welcome.
I see problems with long-term feasiblity. Power consumption is through the roof, as is ineffciency in validation/resolution.
Digital currency is a very, very good idea, but a massive simple one-dimensional set of tokens managed by a single trusted service is way more likely to offer real-world advantage over bitcoin and Co. I believe digital currency will take off when we get one that doesn't require obscene amounts of processing power to handle and transfer via transactions. When you can have an app on your cheap-ass asian semi-feature-phone and transfer 50 cents with a push of a button and the guy selling you his fruit can see if on his phone in 3 seconds. This isn't going to happen at a global scale with any of the current cryptocurrencies. Hence their real-world usefulness is notably limited and thus they won't succeed as currency IMHO.
If I am going to be dead before this becomes a problem, ...
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
Unlike many others we, if we observe carefully, know exactly how and when we can be replaced. And when not. This gives us massive leverage and a few critical points. "I don't like your business model" is a very neat audible objection by someone who has a rare and demanded skill. Tech illuminates are in the sweet spot of being able to do a bit of a priests job in deciding who gets my skills and experience and who gets the finger.
I like that we have some confident and self aware engineers. Keep it up!
... is going to save us from global warming. ...
Downig CO from 20 Bazillion tons per year to 19 Bazillion tons per year is no big feat when other contients with similar population only do 10 bazillion tons. Yes, this is no time for finger-pointing and yes replacing nuclear with coal is nothing to brag about for Chief Mommy Angie of Germany, but there is no place for bragging either and definitely not for "following the US lead" in this camp. Seriously not.
The world as a whole needs to turn and do it fast, we're halfway into FUBAR territory on a global scale as it is. ... ... Stop it. There's a plan right there. Then you have my officlal permission to brag.
Are you still using a private car? Flying?
I'm not getting an ICE car, I'll keep using PT, carsharing (when I absolutely must) and my bike. Maybe an electric one some day. And I'll probalby use the bus to do my surfing vacation I had planned this year. Yes, it will be a 20 hour trip, but my eco balance will be lightyears above taking Ryanair to Southern Portugal.
Everyone should start thinking stuff like this and acting accordingly. Like, now.
My 2 Eurocents.
... the more plausible scenario. The reverse albedo effect is already taking effect and we're still adding to the carbon circle big time. Trumpistan and the wider world is still blissfully unaware of what's happening, as are the idiots here in my country dragging their heels with solar and driving ever larger luxury Audi's and Porsches and Daimlers, each and everybody on his own, at the same time.
The current heatwave in Germany beats everything we've seen so far. It feels like I'm on the equator. Today they forecast 37ÂC, the highest temperature yet in my region and it's only going to get worse.
... of transitioning from a pure technology brand to a lifestyle and fashion brand with the advent of the iMac. They've been going further down that road ever since.
Today they are so far ahead that they can even drag their heels with us opinion leaders delivering meh hardware with last year's specs and still cap at 1 billion due to iPhones sold everywhere all the time.
That brand power of Apple these days is something it's would kill for.
... roughly 20 years ago. "Silicon Snake Oil" is the book iirc. Good opinionated read. I mostly agree with a solid amount of scepticism concerning media technology in the class room. The raspberry pi is the most of computing that I would let into a classroom. And only with CLI centric/coding lessons. And if we're honest, the raspberry pi is quite a lot.
I've been progging for 33 years, since my teens. Classic 80ies computer kid. I do that for a living since 18 years ago. I've finally enrolled in a BSc CS track that I'l pobably manage to complete, after having done my German GED High School diploma 3 years back. I'm in the second semester, only taking a few courses at a time, and pushing a wave of exams in front of me. I do part-time, because I'm working as a professional webdev too.
Here's my observation and it's 100% spot on with my expectations and one of the reasons I'm doing CS in my late 40ies:
The basics - Math, theoretic CS ("Theoretische Informatik" ... dunno what that's in english exactly), graph theory, expanded theory of sets and so on are exactly what someone doing anything computer related at a professional programmers and software architects level should know and be able to wrap his/her head around. Being able to algebrahicly express and calculate the complexity of a relational graph in a database is a level or two above simply discussing which goes in what entity. It's tough - boolean algebra is a particularly neat alien monster to tackle if your not into algebra that much - but it's doable and it ups your understanding of what you're doing in your everyday work and it does away with the fog that covers many deeper areas that IT people encounter every day and should know more about. This is the reason you should do CS if you'e doing IT professionally. At least a bit of it on the side, in Kahn Academy or something.
Point in case: I'm in a CS project group right now reimplementing RSA to learn all the n00ks and crannies about it. Very nice. Slow as hell and crappy n00b code by my 19 year old comrades, but we all (me included) learned new stuff. For instance: Asmetric is hard and demands performance, thus is only used to do a preceeding exchange of a symetric key before the show starts. That's why https handshakes take up 1.5 of the 3.5 second rule for loading and displaying websites. Now who without some CS knowlege is aware of this?
However, there is the other side that the GP mentions, and this is a very simple cold hard fact that CS faculties need to get into their collective head: The avantgarde of software development is not in academia anymore. The regular skills you're teaching your students are most likely sub-par and will be nigh obsolete once your students leave for the real world. Yes, there is the occasional Scala that comes out of a university and then gets some hype in the industry, but that only works if the Prof who invented it is in the industry himself aswell.
Point in case here: We're doing this project in IntellyJ Idea already (bad idea imho). The introduction into the IDE was sub-par and the Prof talked bullshit and wrong details about Git. I could've given his introduction on the spot and he would've learned some new things. ... That's because they probably only moved from SVN a few years back.
Kotlin is barely on their radar and it's already being used in the industry, in non-trivial projects.
Bottom line: As far as practical skills go, CS is too far behind the curve. I'm sure they are becoming aware of this and many a college is trying to catch up with close ties to the industry, but right now I learn more and better at local meetups than in class. Graph theory and math however I doubt I find some better place to learn that than at my faculty.
Perhaps people should worry far less about visual appearance and far more about functionality.
Wrong.
Professionals should care about and be able to handle both. Aesthetics isn't that difficult and if someone doesn't care how a website looks they still have some work to before they can call themselves a professional webdev. Not caring about aesthetics is just as bad as not caring about wether your stuff is processed client- or serverside. That doesn't mean they have to do screens all day, but it does mean they should know how it's done, to a certain degree. Just as any screendesigner should know what state, focus and context is and the difference between a value and a variable.
If someone can build a lean website that just can't help looking like shite they're part of the problem. The way smaller part, but still a part. The others are people who build neat screendesigns but wouldn't know a client from a server and think because they are OK in print they're good in web. Then there is that massive blob inbetween who are bad at both and still claim to be professionals.
Bottom line: Learn some basics about design, it's really not that difficult and knowing some general stuff about modern bauhaus minimalism shouldn't be to much of work for any decent developer.
Webdev here.
I'm so on board with this guy and I so totally get his frustration. This is my personal daily plight. The problem is, ever since "Web Design" we've had to deal with the vast majority of people in our field claiming to be "Web Designers" but not knowing squat about how the web works, what it does and what it can't do and how it is done correctly. This shows at every corner ever since. We need some serious steps into professionalising our field. It has come quite a way, but we are not there yet.
People think that because it's nice and shiny and they can click on it that they can understand it. The problem is they don't. With web design and typography it is so easy for people to mistake the picture of a house with a house. After all, it looks the same, doesn't it? It frustrates the hell out of me talking to professional awarded web designers that after 20 years still blabbel utter non-sense about the 72dpi myth. I could hardly believe what I was hearing as I had this discussion last winter. That's because even the people handing out the awards don't know how the web works.
I listened to a tech talk from a blind buy the other week who demonstrated with a screen reader and a braile terminal how he navigates the web. He also explained how to build a semantically correct web. It was such an eye-opener and a brilliant demonstration of where the wheat seperates from countless metric tons of chaff. Div soup, semantic hell and broken websites left, right and center. If I were Kind I'd pass a law that everyone who builds websites has to demonstrate the viablity of them by navigating them blind, with a screen reader. The quality of the web would instantly improve by orders of magnitude.
The allmighty and ever-knowing Captain Obvious has spoken!