... and is happy that he's doing regular consulting again. Big decisions are made at all-hands meetings that are made 3x a year.... It actually sounds pretty unspectacular and really not that far from what I would do if I had a company.
... Embedded is a reason to learn C though. And embedded and IoT do have some intersection/overlap. But I IoT itself is mostly a fad involving the slapping together of unsafe preconfection microlinuxes with unsafe overkill websevers/port 80 stuff and adding that to toasters and stuff that really don't need it and won't be used more than ~3 times unless by some bored teenagers wgo wants to screw up your homes heating or AC by surfing on shodan for some lonb forgotten default access to said IoT trinkets.
Bottom line: You shouldn't do anything because of IoT unless it,s avoiding it like the plague (unless you're a hacker that is). OTOH If you want to learn embedded, C with assembler for the basics is the way to go.
The Society of German Engineers (VDI) regularly hyperinflates the numbers of required IT experts and engineers and open positions by orders of magnitude to get more people into University studying related fields to keep up the supply of fresh cheap graduates that can be bought cheaply and sold out expensively and score contractors some neat margins. It's the very same kind of ultimate bullsh*t, just with a slightly different goal.
A good programmer will be able to explain what he's doing. A good programmer will also be able to tell you that sending out that offer and requirements analysis before showing it to him or somebody else who will do the programming is a very very bad idea. And that you really should have him on board when planning the project. But you do have to listen.
If there is no social interaction (which may be formalised with Scrum or something), then you will never know what he is doing. And he won't care to do a good job because you don't care about what is required to do a good job.
Talk to each other. Every day. You learn very quickly how much worth a person is that way, no matter how far away you are from being an expert in the other persons field.
LAMP rules. Get over it. Yes, PHP is awkward (said it myself) and I don't particularly like it that much either. But show me another web PL that does what PHP / LAMP does. Hello World in PHP is "Hello World." There. Done. Upload a bunch of PHP files on to a LAMP setup, type in the URL in the browser and watch magic happen. No compiling, no appserver to babysit 24/7, no race conditions. Pure simple stupid procedural turing complete web template logic with some nifty utility functions bolted on left right and center, with no order or discipline what-so-ever. But they all work.
LAMP rules, it get's the job done and right now it's also putting money in my pocket. Yes, there are a lot of n00bs and non-programmers doing stuff in PHP and the projects using it have little to no idea how to organise web-dev, let alone a clean model or dev pipeline. And it's really ugly and bizar. But it get's the job done, one hack at a time.
PHP is the language that get's shit done on the web, plain and simple. It's the P in LAMP. That's why PHP has WordPress, Joomla, Typo3, EZ Publish, Drupal and such and Java has nothing of that magnitude. Go figure.
Since WordPress runs more than a fourth of the entire web (110+ Million Websites), 1.5 Million infected sites isn't all that much. Yes, WP is a mess and could use a redo, but then most legacy systems could, so what gives? WP is popular, is exposed via port 80 all over the planet and thus is a big fat jucy target. I'm glad Automattic (WordPress Corp.) is alive and well and doesn't try to be anything else than the herald of WordPress and it's (small) business arm and does it's dues by keeping up with patches and fixes.
First of all, I would tend to agree with Thiels general premise that there isn't enough sex/eros/sensuality in the tech-camp, even with so-called "high-functioning" nerds and successful techies. But I wouldn't see this as a tech problem rather than a problem of modern society in general, creeping up on all of us, not just the nerds. It's only us getting there quicker.
I see a lot of factors playing into this. The modern day phenomenon that Houellebecq describes as the "Extension of the Combat Zone" would be one key element. Long story short, the art of formalised courting in modern society has been lost. Especially in the US where men are generally always with one foot in jail for sexual harasment and general prudishness puts anything remotely erotic directly into a negative spotlight. But in other parts of the world too. Through a cultural degeneration of sorts and the sexual revolution of the 60ies we have lost a natural connection to our sexuality. Areas in which a formalised and thus safe encounter between men and women can happen have just about vanished.... I personally dance argentine Tango and in it have found one of those rare spaces where this formalised encounter still exists - something that changed my (sex)life as a nerd/geek and the perception and valuation of myself and women in most profound ways (I'm a straight male if you haven't guessed yet...).
Sex and intimacy is - in modern society more than at any other time - a form of art that needs to be practiced and refined. At the same time chances and times to do exactly this have just about disappeared in society. Nobody feels this more intensely than the superficially 'insecure' nerd (male and female).
What I find fascinating is that the problems that were wide and far between and limited to some awkward types (us outsiders) back in the 80ies have become personality traits observable in wide swaths of younger generations today. Herbivore (wo)men, Hikikomori, Escapism and Facebook/Instagram Depression/Disorder have become widespread phenomenon throughout society, making the problem more and more palpable for the general population today.
Curiously, this is the *only* place where I see some strange sort of an actual advantage in strange and bizar abrahamian revelation cults (i.e. Christianity, Islam and Judaism) today. While these cults are basically nothing than twisted remniscents of wacky ancient beliefs and traditions, their moderate 'modern' variants do actually still see to it that each and everyone has a real chance of finding a mate. Not a bad operating system for a society and one that give these cults somewhat of an unsettling evolutionary edge - they produce more children.
Generally I suspect this lack of sex, intimacy and sensuality thing will continue to spread throughout large areas of modern society until we come up with some revitalised form of courting and finally replace ugly sexual repurcussions, eccess escapism and ancient cults with something more modern and sophisticated and get around to real social interaction more. Todays "Cuddle-parties" and celebration of sexuality itself as something of religious quality in New Age "Tantra" and such hint in this direction. But I do also fear there will be a huge setback through VR and stuff like that before anything sustainably positive happens in this field though.
It's the internet. You go in anonymous and you come out unscared.
Glad I could help.
That aside, after well over 20 years online I think it's pretty safe to say that "abusiveness" in a given forum/channel/newroos/board/echo/whatever is directly proportional to the average education level represented in that forum/channel/... . This is even more so an affirmation to "dealing" with this problem as suggested above. Be polite, don't be annoying, don't be easyly insulted, don't easyly insult and don't feed or be bothered by the trolls. Those are just about the basics of online etiquette.
It's a FOSS Laptop Computer kit for ~250 USD. And for that if looks pretty neat.... So the bezel is a bit larger? Big fat hairy deal. I guess that is why the screen is so cheap - because it's a 10 year old model optimised for production.
I considered buying a new MB Pro - you know, the one with the touchbar. I thought long and hard and then settled for a current OS-less 11" netbook (300 Euros vis-vis 2300 Euros helped me make that decision aswell), with a quad-core pentium and 4 GB of RAM. I installed Lubuntu on it. Using it right now, typing this.
Yes, this machine, as this FOSS kit, isn't top of the line. But it is small and fast enough to be usable. And since it's slow enough to force me to use the CLI whenever I'm in doubt a task I need to do will perform well on the GUI, it is actually quite fast.
Long story short, I think this guy didn't quite get what the product he was reviewing is all about.
I was at the last two Google Polymer Summits and last years definitely saw a push towards PWAs. One of the reasons Google want's to push these is that it bridges the gap between complex web apps, mobile capable websites and mobile apps. Another quite simple reason is the app-bloat we're alle experiencing on our cellphones. Apps clocking in at 40+ MB and weighing down on Smartphones budgeted memory and storage are a big problem, as are mobile performance hogs that only run satisfyingly on the most modern 1st world smartphones. Many updates people can't make, because the vendors apps are simply growing to big. PWAs are supposed to tackle this problem aswell.
PWAs is Googles attempt to leverage the ubiquity of the open web and offer mechanisms to integrate it further into native plattforms. It's actually quite a stunt, because libs like Polymer try to square the circle in offering web toolkits that are easy to use, mobile ready, powerfull, cross-plattform and still somehow don't weigh down to much on end-user systems. You can imagine what bucketload of work that is and what stunts the developers come up with to tackle this problem, but the crews at Google have come up with some really impressive stuff. Such as storage worker components that stabilise mobile webapps with flaky online uplink. These are basically websites that mask as mobile apps and behave offline just as well as they do online, syncing your stuff only when they have a chance too. There is some quite cool stuff out there in PWA space.
It's all quite some magic, but probably is also an attempt to counterbalance the fragmentation happening in the android space. Build once, run everywhere (iOS, Android, Chrome, Desktop OS, etc....) is actually not that far away with PWAs.
I'm experimenting with PWAs, and while they do have a point, they also have the usual problems of squaring the circle. Tricky stuff and once again a scenario that proves building modern feasible non-trivial web-apps actually is quite a serious development task, requireing carefull planning and big, complex pipelines akin to those in regular x-plattform development.
After Apple started with lock-in and iOS golden cages with no access to file systems, they started losing Karma with the nerd crowd. Karma they had gained so much in moving to basically a FOSS unix as their new OS of the second coming of Steve Jobs.
As Apples Karma burned, Google was the closest thing to the new darling child of the nerd/geek crew. With moves like this and them also slowly turning their phones into nothing but hardware outlets for their brave new google services they are going the way of Apple in annoying the opinion-leaders (us). This is never a good move in the long-term and usually marks a decline of some sort. You know, like planlessly releasing 2 additional messaging apps and other strange things. Chrome is an awesome browser and V8 does a lot to strengthen the web - the worlds #1 free plattform these days. But screw this up, and people will start finding ways to move away from Chrome and Google. I hope there are enough smart techies in charge at Google to backpedal on this decision.
All that aside I have a question: Is there a Fork of Chromium in the wild that won't follow this lead? I use chromium regularly, but I've used alternatives too (Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.) and wouldn't mind using a fully FOSS Chrome clone alternative for a change. Any project doing this?
I did my Multimedia Design Diploma in 2001. One big part of the curriculum was building Multimedia Applications in Director. Our class learned programming in Lingo (the programming language of Director). With some teacher who had learned programming in Lingo and thus knew literally less than nothing about programming. After my training I had a gig for 9 months building SAP simulations with sliced up screenshots and buckets of cobbled-together Lingo code in Director. This was such an kafkaesk thing, you'd barely believe it.
Seriously, if you want to know why Director doesn't get any praise - aside from Adobe screwing things up... again - look at Lingo. This abysmal disaster of a PL has no equal on this planet. It's basically a programming language designed by people who couldn't really tell the difference between a value and a variable. I'm not joking.
If you think PHP is a mess, you have seen nothing my friend. Lingo takes the cake and wins the battle of bizar 'programming' languages hands down with flying flags, even with RunRevs "Transcript", Typo3s/Neos' "TypoScript" (Don't ask, you don't want to know, seriously now) and older versions of SQL joining the fight.
Director had some nice animation and prototyping/RAD concepts, no doubt. But at a certain point they should've brought some people in who knew what they were doing - you know, like with ActionScript 2 in Flash. They didn't and Director died a well deserved death.
I'm so glad JavaScript is slowly taking the place of the universal frontend/ui language and, trust me, if you'd've seen Lingo, you would be too.
This is type-a classic prankster penetration, now under the guise of "IOT" because SOCs have become so cheap you can stick them into anything, add a shoddy non-updateable web-thingie to it that is 5 version behind and has holes in it so big you can drive a mac truck through it. Or, more likely, default access codes that a 12-year old can look up on the intarweb in less than 15 seconds.
This is freakin' hilarious and really quite funny.
Did anyone of you guys see this coming? I certainly did. IOT is one big pile of trash and hype about it will disappear faster than the first dot-com boom. That's my humble opion anyway. My toaster doesn't need a webserver and certainly my freakin' doorlock doesn't either!
I hope this is over soon, if only for the sake of public safety. Meanwhile we will get some neat laughs and see some hilarious pranks by bored highschoolers.
The XBone launch was a disaster. They had to backpedal on just about any announcement made, having sold countless lock-ins as "features", type A Microsoft style. It's only for about a year now that people can trust the XBone to be reasonably fair to the consumer in most areas. And this is the stage of a console lifetime were those interested will go and ask around which console was better marketshare and is likely to have more people playing on- and offline. Hence even potential XBone buyers are craning their necks for the PS4s offerings.
I own the last iteration of the Xbox 360 and a stack of games, most of which would run on the XBone, and even I am reluctant of the XBone, due to the lock-in and lack of convenience in this generations consoles.
Consoles are too much of an online service extension and not really that convenient anymore these days. Pop in a disk, run a game used to be. Now it's download the update of Mafia 3 for 4 days flat until you can actually play. People who have no problem with that get a PC. XBones+Kinect "allways-on" non-sense and similar stuff was just the straw that broke the camels back, vis-a-vis the (slightly) less invasive and pretentious Sony and their PS4.
I'm pretty sure a good cardiologist with a table of all aggregated research on heart conditions and life expectancy can do pretty much the same. Health insurances have been doing this sort of thing for decades.
Does Swift want to become a modern feasible replacement for other cross-plattform technologies like Qt or is it focussed on Apple plattdorms?
Were/are there plans to build a full-blown cross-plattform application layer ecosystem for Swift, including IDE and a plattform agnostic standard lib or is this a thing left to anyone wanting to it themselves?
Thanks for answers. And good luck at and for Tesla!
US Universities have never been more than a bottom-line for-profit business that uses cult-like recruiting tactics and has absolutely no shame or loyalty to anything or anyone but themselves.
We IT experts are, compared to the rest of the ordinary crowd, in the extremely fortunate position that we can basically do whatever we like to do in our field and earn either decent or obscene amounts of cash while doing so. There is just about no other industry today where that is possible.
Do whatever you want. If you don't know what you want, try things out. Keep looking.... Steve Jobs was right on this one.
Think you have the great new app / service up your sleeve? Build that. Want to learn Oracle/SAP/Whatever wear a suit all day and earn big bucks quick? Go ahead. Want to be a digital nomad? Get going. Want to do web? Go right ahead. Want to do embedded? Do it. Want to do engineering IT? Get into a trainee programm already. Science? Same thing.
My advice generally:
1.) You've got a degree but probably no or not that much practical experience. Know that that is what you are lacking and what you want and need to gain. So don't be afraid to burn yourself. Don't think because you have a degree you are better and are less prone to failure. Many big things start out with sticky-tape and chickenwire and grow from there - don't get all academic and shit if you join a startup and the crew is a battle-hardened pragmatic bunch and does things accordingly. Be useful with your academic background and your 'l33t skillz but also listen and try to see the big picturee. Academic and reality are to different pairs of shoes. Learn do discern.
2.) Be bold. My biggest problems looking back on my career was being to timid. I was careful and not reckless, which is good - especially if you have a kid to take care of - but I also was often too timid at certain points. When life pushed me over the edge and I had to take the plunge I always felt much much better a year late r.
The cool thing about being a CS grad is that however you fail you can always get back on your feet quickly, as IT experts are in demand right now.
Others have said it and I would second that: Plan and organise your exit.
Don't appease, don't confront but don't back down from a fight or discussion. Look for a new job and do your thing as long as you need to or can in the current company. Then quit professionally. If someone asks you why, state that element in the culture don't seem to fit. If someone gets specific in their questions, stay objective and calm while describing the situation that lead you to quit.
Unless they sincerely offer to address the problem head on and offer you to stay on your terms (different department, different supervisor, different tasks, no direct interaction with the a**hole, etc.) don't back down from your move.
I've come to think that gaslighting is a cruel way of social interaction, grown with human evolution. The people doing it are basically type-a sociapaths towards their victims. It's basically a mechanism of tribe-formation. The old testament and the abrahamic revelation cults much of our western culture is built on are full of this shit. An extended form of it being - of course - modern day fascism.
I read a lot about it lately. I had a strange experience this last half year with a supposed GF of mine and stayed in the 'relationship' just to observe the extreme mechanisms of semi-borderline reality distortion and manipulation she pulled off. I dumped her (the first time I seriously dumped anyone like this) and caught her off guard (she was shocked) but it's interesting that our "relationship" hasn't changed at all, the still behaves like an a**hole towards me, only less so because we don't interact that much anymore.
Social interaction phenomenon like this you should basically take as a more-or-less objective force of nature, and deal with it accordingly. No job in the world is worth putting up with something that challenges your basic inner self each and every step and has you prove your worth as a human every step of the way and has you doubt your self-worth.
You're better of being a bum or a digital nomand than putting up with a job like that.
C is still basically the most widely used assembler 2.0 and just about everything we use is built with C. Yes, there is C++ and entire stacks built on that, but I'm not talking about Windows. In the global context, Windows is somewhat of an exception. The C familly of languages is alive and well and the C-fans building our systems we work on still seem to think it's the best tool for the job.
Until someone replaces the entire toolchain with a new language like Go or Rust and people from the format like Linus Torvalds start building systems with it, C might fluctuate in general popularity, but it won't go away.
I'm pretty much on the side of the crowd here in this thread stating that you can emulate basically anything analog with digital photography with the right equipment, software and knowlege.
Knowlege being the problem here. As with anything, going digital requires a discrete intermediate step of understanding the basic principles of digital and neccessary abstractions involved. Precisely this is the deal-breaker.
Photographers generally don't care about color-depth data, sensor build, data throughput, the pitfalls of digital editing and all that.
Yes, you can do just about anything with digital tech, yet one of the best animation films of 2016 (Kubo) is made with super-old-school stop-motion. Force the crew to do the same enirely in a 3D pipeline and all the artists would rather kill themselves than do it.
I see this in my work everyday. I'm the sole IT expert in a crew of ~30 communicators and marketeers. We do our customer list in Excel because the marketing boss doesn't want to waste 5 minutes wrapping his head around the dead and abstact concept of a CRM system and an accompaning pipeline. It's basically the very same problem.
Film is real, digital is abstract and disconnected from this world. There may be a Hasselblad Digicam and a Mac Pro and Adobe PS luxury pack that does all this and more and better, but the sheer massive amount of digital pipeline and IT scaffolding such a technology needs makes a creatives brain hurt.
Thats the reason people use feature phones, moleskines and get all warm and fuzzy inside when they see vinyl rotating on the turntable. It's way less a pain in the but and far more real and sensual. I felt the same dancing Tango to a mechanical Gramophone a few months back. And it's the reason I'm cutting short on my computer time and just now bought what is basically a CLI-centric Linux Netbook rather than the new MB Pro.
More and more I come to the conclusion that I can't really blame them. Not everybody is an obsessive Nerd like we are and can wrap is head around digital as we can, because we do nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
... and is happy that he's doing regular consulting again. Big decisions are made at all-hands meetings that are made 3x a year. ... It actually sounds pretty unspectacular and really not that far from what I would do if I had a company.
... Embedded is a reason to learn C though. And embedded and IoT do have some intersection/overlap. But I IoT itself is mostly a fad involving the slapping together of unsafe preconfection microlinuxes with unsafe overkill websevers/port 80 stuff and adding that to toasters and stuff that really don't need it and won't be used more than ~3 times unless by some bored teenagers wgo wants to screw up your homes heating or AC by surfing on shodan for some lonb forgotten default access to said IoT trinkets.
Bottom line:
You shouldn't do anything because of IoT unless it,s avoiding it like the plague (unless you're a hacker that is). OTOH If you want to learn embedded, C with assembler for the basics is the way to go.
Good luck.
The Society of German Engineers (VDI) regularly hyperinflates the numbers of required IT experts and engineers and open positions by orders of magnitude to get more people into University studying related fields to keep up the supply of fresh cheap graduates that can be bought cheaply and sold out expensively and score contractors some neat margins. It's the very same kind of ultimate bullsh*t, just with a slightly different goal.
... look just like other ancient manmade ditches in the ground on the other side of the planet!
Gee wizz!
It's called social interaction.
A good programmer will be able to explain what he's doing. A good programmer will also be able to tell you that sending out that offer and requirements analysis before showing it to him or somebody else who will do the programming is a very very bad idea. And that you really should have him on board when planning the project. But you do have to listen.
If there is no social interaction (which may be formalised with Scrum or something), then you will never know what he is doing. And he won't care to do a good job because you don't care about what is required to do a good job.
Talk to each other. Every day. You learn very quickly how much worth a person is that way, no matter how far away you are from being an expert in the other persons field.
It's that simple.
The reason I hate WordPress is PHP.
LAMP rules. Get over it. Yes, PHP is awkward (said it myself) and I don't particularly like it that much either. But show me another web PL that does what PHP / LAMP does.
Hello World in PHP is "Hello World." There. Done. Upload a bunch of PHP files on to a LAMP setup, type in the URL in the browser and watch magic happen. No compiling, no appserver to babysit 24/7, no race conditions. Pure simple stupid procedural turing complete web template logic with some nifty utility functions bolted on left right and center, with no order or discipline what-so-ever. But they all work.
LAMP rules, it get's the job done and right now it's also putting money in my pocket. Yes, there are a lot of n00bs and non-programmers doing stuff in PHP and the projects using it have little to no idea how to organise web-dev, let alone a clean model or dev pipeline. And it's really ugly and bizar. But it get's the job done, one hack at a time.
PHP is the language that get's shit done on the web, plain and simple. It's the P in LAMP.
That's why PHP has WordPress, Joomla, Typo3, EZ Publish, Drupal and such and Java has nothing of that magnitude. Go figure.
My 2 cents.
Since WordPress runs more than a fourth of the entire web (110+ Million Websites), 1.5 Million infected sites isn't all that much. Yes, WP is a mess and could use a redo, but then most legacy systems could, so what gives? WP is popular, is exposed via port 80 all over the planet and thus is a big fat jucy target. I'm glad Automattic (WordPress Corp.) is alive and well and doesn't try to be anything else than the herald of WordPress and it's (small) business arm and does it's dues by keeping up with patches and fixes.
... are probably the best way to start. Python is the only PL that is used professionally in all industries. It' s also modern and easyto learn.
Good luck.
Captain Obvious strikes again!
First of all, I would tend to agree with Thiels general premise that there isn't enough sex/eros/sensuality in the tech-camp, even with so-called "high-functioning" nerds and successful techies. But I wouldn't see this as a tech problem rather than a problem of modern society in general, creeping up on all of us, not just the nerds. It's only us getting there quicker.
I see a lot of factors playing into this. The modern day phenomenon that Houellebecq describes as the "Extension of the Combat Zone" would be one key element. Long story short, the art of formalised courting in modern society has been lost. Especially in the US where men are generally always with one foot in jail for sexual harasment and general prudishness puts anything remotely erotic directly into a negative spotlight. But in other parts of the world too. Through a cultural degeneration of sorts and the sexual revolution of the 60ies we have lost a natural connection to our sexuality. Areas in which a formalised and thus safe encounter between men and women can happen have just about vanished. ... I personally dance argentine Tango and in it have found one of those rare spaces where this formalised encounter still exists - something that changed my (sex)life as a nerd/geek and the perception and valuation of myself and women in most profound ways (I'm a straight male if you haven't guessed yet ...).
Sex and intimacy is - in modern society more than at any other time - a form of art that needs to be practiced and refined. At the same time chances and times to do exactly this have just about disappeared in society. Nobody feels this more intensely than the superficially 'insecure' nerd (male and female).
What I find fascinating is that the problems that were wide and far between and limited to some awkward types (us outsiders) back in the 80ies have become personality traits observable in wide swaths of younger generations today. Herbivore (wo)men, Hikikomori, Escapism and Facebook/Instagram Depression/Disorder have become widespread phenomenon throughout society, making the problem more and more palpable for the general population today.
Curiously, this is the *only* place where I see some strange sort of an actual advantage in strange and bizar abrahamian revelation cults (i.e. Christianity, Islam and Judaism) today. While these cults are basically nothing than twisted remniscents of wacky ancient beliefs and traditions, their moderate 'modern' variants do actually still see to it that each and everyone has a real chance of finding a mate. Not a bad operating system for a society and one that give these cults somewhat of an unsettling evolutionary edge - they produce more children.
Generally I suspect this lack of sex, intimacy and sensuality thing will continue to spread throughout large areas of modern society until we come up with some revitalised form of courting and finally replace ugly sexual repurcussions, eccess escapism and ancient cults with something more modern and sophisticated and get around to real social interaction more. Todays "Cuddle-parties" and celebration of sexuality itself as something of religious quality in New Age "Tantra" and such hint in this direction. But I do also fear there will be a huge setback through VR and stuff like that before anything sustainably positive happens in this field though.
My 2 cents.
It's the internet. You go in anonymous and you come out unscared.
Glad I could help.
That aside, after well over 20 years online I think it's pretty safe to say that "abusiveness" in a given forum/channel/newroos/board/echo/whatever is directly proportional to the average education level represented in that forum/channel/... . This is even more so an affirmation to "dealing" with this problem as suggested above. Be polite, don't be annoying, don't be easyly insulted, don't easyly insult and don't feed or be bothered by the trolls. Those are just about the basics of online etiquette.
My 2 cents.
It's a FOSS Laptop Computer kit for ~250 USD. And for that if looks pretty neat. ... So the bezel is a bit larger? Big fat hairy deal. I guess that is why the screen is so cheap - because it's a 10 year old model optimised for production.
I considered buying a new MB Pro - you know, the one with the touchbar. I thought long and hard and then settled for a current OS-less 11" netbook (300 Euros vis-vis 2300 Euros helped me make that decision aswell), with a quad-core pentium and 4 GB of RAM. I installed Lubuntu on it. Using it right now, typing this.
Yes, this machine, as this FOSS kit, isn't top of the line. But it is small and fast enough to be usable. And since it's slow enough to force me to use the CLI whenever I'm in doubt a task I need to do will perform well on the GUI, it is actually quite fast.
Long story short, I think this guy didn't quite get what the product he was reviewing is all about.
I was at the last two Google Polymer Summits and last years definitely saw a push towards PWAs. One of the reasons Google want's to push these is that it bridges the gap between complex web apps, mobile capable websites and mobile apps. Another quite simple reason is the app-bloat we're alle experiencing on our cellphones. Apps clocking in at 40+ MB and weighing down on Smartphones budgeted memory and storage are a big problem, as are mobile performance hogs that only run satisfyingly on the most modern 1st world smartphones. Many updates people can't make, because the vendors apps are simply growing to big. PWAs are supposed to tackle this problem aswell.
PWAs is Googles attempt to leverage the ubiquity of the open web and offer mechanisms to integrate it further into native plattforms. It's actually quite a stunt, because libs like Polymer try to square the circle in offering web toolkits that are easy to use, mobile ready, powerfull, cross-plattform and still somehow don't weigh down to much on end-user systems. You can imagine what bucketload of work that is and what stunts the developers come up with to tackle this problem, but the crews at Google have come up with some really impressive stuff. Such as storage worker components that stabilise mobile webapps with flaky online uplink. These are basically websites that mask as mobile apps and behave offline just as well as they do online, syncing your stuff only when they have a chance too. There is some quite cool stuff out there in PWA space.
It's all quite some magic, but probably is also an attempt to counterbalance the fragmentation happening in the android space. Build once, run everywhere (iOS, Android, Chrome, Desktop OS, etc. ...) is actually not that far away with PWAs.
I'm experimenting with PWAs, and while they do have a point, they also have the usual problems of squaring the circle. Tricky stuff and once again a scenario that proves building modern feasible non-trivial web-apps actually is quite a serious development task, requireing carefull planning and big, complex pipelines akin to those in regular x-plattform development.
After Apple started with lock-in and iOS golden cages with no access to file systems, they started losing Karma with the nerd crowd. Karma they had gained so much in moving to basically a FOSS unix as their new OS of the second coming of Steve Jobs.
As Apples Karma burned, Google was the closest thing to the new darling child of the nerd/geek crew. With moves like this and them also slowly turning their phones into nothing but hardware outlets for their brave new google services they are going the way of Apple in annoying the opinion-leaders (us). This is never a good move in the long-term and usually marks a decline of some sort. You know, like planlessly releasing 2 additional messaging apps and other strange things. Chrome is an awesome browser and V8 does a lot to strengthen the web - the worlds #1 free plattform these days. But screw this up, and people will start finding ways to move away from Chrome and Google. I hope there are enough smart techies in charge at Google to backpedal on this decision.
All that aside I have a question:
Is there a Fork of Chromium in the wild that won't follow this lead? I use chromium regularly, but I've used alternatives too (Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.) and wouldn't mind using a fully FOSS Chrome clone alternative for a change. Any project doing this?
I did my Multimedia Design Diploma in 2001. One big part of the curriculum was building Multimedia Applications in Director. Our class learned programming in Lingo (the programming language of Director). With some teacher who had learned programming in Lingo and thus knew literally less than nothing about programming.
After my training I had a gig for 9 months building SAP simulations with sliced up screenshots and buckets of cobbled-together Lingo code in Director. This was such an kafkaesk thing, you'd barely believe it.
Seriously, if you want to know why Director doesn't get any praise - aside from Adobe screwing things up ... again - look at Lingo. This abysmal disaster of a PL has no equal on this planet. It's basically a programming language designed by people who couldn't really tell the difference between a value and a variable. I'm not joking.
If you think PHP is a mess, you have seen nothing my friend. Lingo takes the cake and wins the battle of bizar 'programming' languages hands down with flying flags, even with RunRevs "Transcript", Typo3s/Neos' "TypoScript" (Don't ask, you don't want to know, seriously now) and older versions of SQL joining the fight.
Director had some nice animation and prototyping/RAD concepts, no doubt. But at a certain point they should've brought some people in who knew what they were doing - you know, like with ActionScript 2 in Flash.
They didn't and Director died a well deserved death.
I'm so glad JavaScript is slowly taking the place of the universal frontend/ui language and, trust me, if you'd've seen Lingo, you would be too.
My 2 cents.
This is type-a classic prankster penetration, now under the guise of "IOT" because SOCs have become so cheap you can stick them into anything, add a shoddy non-updateable web-thingie to it that is 5 version behind and has holes in it so big you can drive a mac truck through it. Or, more likely, default access codes that a 12-year old can look up on the intarweb in less than 15 seconds.
This is freakin' hilarious and really quite funny.
Did anyone of you guys see this coming? I certainly did.
IOT is one big pile of trash and hype about it will disappear faster than the first dot-com boom.
That's my humble opion anyway. My toaster doesn't need a webserver and certainly my freakin' doorlock doesn't either!
I hope this is over soon, if only for the sake of public safety.
Meanwhile we will get some neat laughs and see some hilarious pranks by bored highschoolers.
The XBone launch was a disaster. They had to backpedal on just about any announcement made, having sold countless lock-ins as "features", type A Microsoft style. It's only for about a year now that people can trust the XBone to be reasonably fair to the consumer in most areas. And this is the stage of a console lifetime were those interested will go and ask around which console was better marketshare and is likely to have more people playing on- and offline. Hence even potential XBone buyers are craning their necks for the PS4s offerings.
I own the last iteration of the Xbox 360 and a stack of games, most of which would run on the XBone, and even I am reluctant of the XBone, due to the lock-in and lack of convenience in this generations consoles.
Consoles are too much of an online service extension and not really that convenient anymore these days. Pop in a disk, run a game used to be. Now it's download the update of Mafia 3 for 4 days flat until you can actually play. People who have no problem with that get a PC. XBones+Kinect "allways-on" non-sense and similar stuff was just the straw that broke the camels back, vis-a-vis the (slightly) less invasive and pretentious Sony and their PS4.
I'm pretty sure a good cardiologist with a table of all aggregated research on heart conditions and life expectancy can do pretty much the same.
Health insurances have been doing this sort of thing for decades.
No big deal really.
Were do you see Swift heading?
Does Swift want to become a modern feasible replacement for other cross-plattform technologies like Qt or is it focussed on Apple plattdorms?
Were/are there plans to build a full-blown cross-plattform application layer ecosystem for Swift, including IDE and a plattform agnostic standard lib or is this a thing left to anyone wanting to it themselves?
Thanks for answers. And good luck at and for Tesla!
Usefulness: Debatable.
Uniqueness and recognizability: 100%.
Someone is asking for trouble.
US Universities have never been more than a bottom-line for-profit business that uses cult-like recruiting tactics and has absolutely no shame or loyalty to anything or anyone but themselves.
FTFY.
We IT experts are, compared to the rest of the ordinary crowd, in the extremely fortunate position that we can basically do whatever we like to do in our field and earn either decent or obscene amounts of cash while doing so. There is just about no other industry today where that is possible.
Do whatever you want. If you don't know what you want, try things out. Keep looking. ... Steve Jobs was right on this one.
Think you have the great new app / service up your sleeve? Build that.
Want to learn Oracle/SAP/Whatever wear a suit all day and earn big bucks quick? Go ahead.
Want to be a digital nomad? Get going.
Want to do web? Go right ahead.
Want to do embedded? Do it.
Want to do engineering IT? Get into a trainee programm already.
Science? Same thing.
My advice generally:
1.) You've got a degree but probably no or not that much practical experience. Know that that is what you are lacking and what you want and need to gain. So don't be afraid to burn yourself. Don't think because you have a degree you are better and are less prone to failure. Many big things start out with sticky-tape and chickenwire and grow from there - don't get all academic and shit if you join a startup and the crew is a battle-hardened pragmatic bunch and does things accordingly. Be useful with your academic background and your 'l33t skillz but also listen and try to see the big picturee. Academic and reality are to different pairs of shoes. Learn do discern.
2.) Be bold. My biggest problems looking back on my career was being to timid. I was careful and not reckless, which is good - especially if you have a kid to take care of - but I also was often too timid at certain points. When life pushed me over the edge and I had to take the plunge I always felt much much better a year late
r.
The cool thing about being a CS grad is that however you fail you can always get back on your feet quickly, as IT experts are in demand right now.
Good luck with your career. Enjoy it.
Others have said it and I would second that: Plan and organise your exit.
Don't appease, don't confront but don't back down from a fight or discussion. Look for a new job and do your thing as long as you need to or can in the current company. Then quit professionally. If someone asks you why, state that element in the culture don't seem to fit. If someone gets specific in their questions, stay objective and calm while describing the situation that lead you to quit.
Unless they sincerely offer to address the problem head on and offer you to stay on your terms (different department, different supervisor, different tasks, no direct interaction with the a**hole, etc.) don't back down from your move.
I've come to think that gaslighting is a cruel way of social interaction, grown with human evolution.
The people doing it are basically type-a sociapaths towards their victims. It's basically a mechanism of tribe-formation. The old testament and the abrahamic revelation cults much of our western culture is built on are full of this shit. An extended form of it being - of course - modern day fascism.
I read a lot about it lately. I had a strange experience this last half year with a supposed GF of mine and stayed in the 'relationship' just to observe the extreme mechanisms of semi-borderline reality distortion and manipulation she pulled off. I dumped her (the first time I seriously dumped anyone like this) and caught her off guard (she was shocked) but it's interesting that our "relationship" hasn't changed at all, the still behaves like an a**hole towards me, only less so because we don't interact that much anymore.
Social interaction phenomenon like this you should basically take as a more-or-less objective force of nature, and deal with it accordingly. No job in the world is worth putting up with something that challenges your basic inner self each and every step and has you prove your worth as a human every step of the way and has you doubt your self-worth.
You're better of being a bum or a digital nomand than putting up with a job like that.
C is still basically the most widely used assembler 2.0 and just about everything we use is built with C.
Yes, there is C++ and entire stacks built on that, but I'm not talking about Windows. In the global context, Windows is somewhat of an exception.
The C familly of languages is alive and well and the C-fans building our systems we work on still seem to think it's the best tool for the job.
Until someone replaces the entire toolchain with a new language like Go or Rust and people from the format like Linus Torvalds start building systems with it, C might fluctuate in general popularity, but it won't go away.
I'm pretty much on the side of the crowd here in this thread stating that you can emulate basically anything analog with digital photography with the right equipment, software and knowlege.
Knowlege being the problem here. As with anything, going digital requires a discrete intermediate step of understanding the basic principles of digital and neccessary abstractions involved. Precisely this is the deal-breaker.
Photographers generally don't care about color-depth data, sensor build, data throughput, the pitfalls of digital editing and all that.
Yes, you can do just about anything with digital tech, yet one of the best animation films of 2016 (Kubo) is made with super-old-school stop-motion. Force the crew to do the same enirely in a 3D pipeline and all the artists would rather kill themselves than do it.
I see this in my work everyday. I'm the sole IT expert in a crew of ~30 communicators and marketeers. We do our customer list in Excel because the marketing boss doesn't want to waste 5 minutes wrapping his head around the dead and abstact concept of a CRM system and an accompaning pipeline. It's basically the very same problem.
Film is real, digital is abstract and disconnected from this world. There may be a Hasselblad Digicam and a Mac Pro and Adobe PS luxury pack that does all this and more and better, but the sheer massive amount of digital pipeline and IT scaffolding such a technology needs makes a creatives brain hurt.
Thats the reason people use feature phones, moleskines and get all warm and fuzzy inside when they see vinyl rotating on the turntable. It's way less a pain in the but and far more real and sensual. I felt the same dancing Tango to a mechanical Gramophone a few months back. And it's the reason I'm cutting short on my computer time and just now bought what is basically a CLI-centric Linux Netbook rather than the new MB Pro.
More and more I come to the conclusion that I can't really blame them. Not everybody is an obsessive Nerd like we are and can wrap is head around digital as we can, because we do nothing else.
My 2 cents.