This question reminds me a lot of people who say "Music was so much better in the 1990s" or "Comic books are garbage now but they are so innovative in the 70s". Basically these people were more passionate about their hobbies (music, comics, computers, or whatever) when they were young than they are today. Therefore, anything going on "back in the day" was - almost by definition - so much more amazing than the pedestrian stuff we have today.
I would say the idea that there were more exciting developments 30 years ago is ludicrous. In the last few years we have virtually the whole of human knowledge at our fingertips, we've had a huge resurgence of neural nets, we have rockets that can land themselves (!), actually useful brain-machine interface (for example deep-brain stimulation for epilepsy), self-driving cars, actually cool VR, electronic communications becoming ubiquitous, cheap single board computers that even a child can use (e.g. Raspberry-Pi), electric vehicles becoming mainstream, a technology for currency that is actually threatening to upset the applecart, and on and on and on.
I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s and was deeply passionate about technology. I was excited about the Amiga, Unix, and C++. Those days have NOTHING on today.
I'm about 20 years older than that. Still, when I got into computing as a professional in my 20s I was excited by those things (Amiga, Unix, C++) and also some more academic things - AI and functional programming. I was also excited by "Client/Server" and networks. Now, all of the things which I was excited by as cutting edge have been through two transitions: one, to commercial acceptance and required knowledge for programmers; and, then two, ubiquity and invisibility. Meanwhile, some very smart people and aggressive startups have put all of these in the hands of everyone from teenagers to grandmas. Back in the 80's we may have dreamed of everyone having a computer and being connected, but we did not envisage how it would be. We probably thought of some giant international connection of PCs with people chatting through text consoles. We did not envisage the www, with all the world's news and knowledge being crowd sourced, we didn't envisage facebook/instragram/twitter with ordinary people compulsively getting their latest info from each other, and we didn't envisage smart phones. WRT smartphones, that was Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs only. Microsoft and Blackberry had 10+ years leap on them, but never understood the possibilities, nor did anyone else.
One common trend I've seen with programmers is that we dismiss the latest developments. In my time, we've dismissed the GUI ("I get more done throught the command line"). Then we dismissed the GUI with colors. Then we dismissed the web (yes - I heard that!). Then we dismissed smart phones. Then we dismissed facebook. etc. If it were up to us, we'd still be using mainframes with text consoles. Which was the state of technology when I arrived in 1980. Undoubtedly, that would have been rejected by the luddites from 30 years before then.
Good question! My answer is, as someone who was already a professional programmer 30 years ago, an emphatic NO!
Agree the dumbphone is the neatest solution if it really does the job. They are smaller and simpler - battery life is a big plus! However, I found that if I regularly need a smartphone/tablet as well, then it's just a matter of time before I lose one of them. The "must carry" list becomes: wallet, keys, phone, smartphone (maybe passport). One too many for me. A bit of a pity, however.:)
Thanks for the tips about the SIM USB reader and other spec details. (Although, I found during my dumbphone experiment that I was noticing things like this, which all just "worked" on a modern smartphone).
a) Beyond that though, invariably you'll have to explain to someone at some point why you can't just do some simple thing that everyone else can do because your device doesn't support the app needed for it.
Yup
A year ago I was asking myself almost the same question as the OP, and I came to the conclusion that what I needed was a good "dumb phone", augmented by a tablet when traveling. It took me hours of research on the internet to find the dumb phone. I eventually brought it, and found that it didn't do the basics of phone and SMS nearly as well as my Android smart phone. The two bug-bears were: firstly, contacts, where I had to manually enter and maintain my contact list which had been maintained in the Cloud by Android and synchronized with my desktop, and, secondly, typing SMSs. It was a bit of "fun" using the old keypad again, but basically a pain. I was slowly typing brief, misspelled responses to long messages.
Despite my limited stated requirements, I found that I needed/wanted more, practically. I did want to be able to access the internet when out, and to be able to take photos at short notice. Sure, my dumb phone did have some kind of worthless browser, and could take photos, but obviously there was no comparison with a modern, moderately specced smartphone, let alone a top end one. I also found that keeping track of a phone and a tablet during normal work and leisure was just too complicated.
The dumbphone experiment was a waste of my time in 2016/17, and will be increasingly so as time goes by
Yes. Previously the complaints against Microsoft were largely non-technical, and people were faced with a choice of paying a small amount for a Windows system which worked and they were familiar with, or having Linux for free but with no practical advantanges. Microsoft were always able to keep the prices down to the point where switching just wasn't worth while. But now we have a Windows which doesn't work and people aren't familiar with. Even if it were free customers don't want an operating system with a history of catastrophic failures, and which requires retraining. The cost of switching to Linux may well be lower than switching to Windows 10.
Second, the Linux desktop has always been about 10 years behind Windows. Today, though, this means that it's about on par with what WinXP was.
Quite a bit better than XP, and more attractive, IMO. The various "innovations" in Windows 8 and 10 may excite Microsoft, and even some power users, but everyone else just wants a system which let's them fire up email, the web and Office. They don't care if it looks and feels the same year-after-year. Games have largely shifted to consoles, and outside work people are spending more time on their phones than their PC's. People don't want a "better" OS which is unreliable or causes them to relearn how to use it.
About 5 years ago I had my mom staying as a guest and I had a Linux Mint system set up in the guest room for web browsing. She liked it very much and thought it more attractive and easy to use than Windows, and when I told her that it was free she commented "Why doesn't everyone use this?"
I heard the exact same thing in the 90s with Aspect Oriented Programming. Oh, we won't need programmers, you'd just pick your big building blocks and just put them together and voila!
Between 1985 and 1995 I heard of three revolutions which were going to put programmers out of a job "in ten years", they were: "computers programming themselves" (ie. AI), 4GL's, CASE tools.
I was never really worried by these, but after the third time, didn't pay any attention.
I was, however, always worried about being put out of work by new langueages (C++, Java, XML, etc..), and rightly so. But as long as I kept up with them, the work was there.
use edge for the one and only purpose that most people use it for, it doesn't stop there. You type "Firefox download" in the search bar, and the first thing you get is a prompt to stick with edge.
Close, but not quite, for me. I also use Edge to access Microsoft web sites, with the hope that it *might* work better, on their crappy site. So far, without success.
Expense isn't the issue. OIder employees with similar experience (and similar compensation) are also discriminated against.
It's really blatant in some of the ads.. "Looking for YOUNG, dynamic, candidate who works to deadline" has actually be used by someone who was stupid in placing their ad.
I remember a few years ago an Australian startup, which was then hitting the big time, putting out a similar ad. Except they were smart enough to leave out the word "young" and just hint at it with "dynamic", "eager to learn", etc, and mention that they would be joining a "young" team.
A couple of years later the company was in the news, complaining that they couldn't recruit skilled engineers
You've got a good point, but in fact the entire setup of the test is nonsensical. Here's how it should work:
1) Have a judge have two conversations, not necessarily at the same time, one with a human and one with a computer. (Obviously the judge does not know who is who.)
2) Give these conversations some time - more than five minutes, for sure.
3) At the end, have the judge declare who they think is the computer and who they think is the human.4) Do this repeatedly, and use statistical methods to determine, at certain confidence levels, whether the judges were doing better than random guessing.
When someone's devised a program that fooled, say, n=200 judges whose judgement was tantamount to random guessing at a confidence level of p=0.01, start the presses.
Thankyou. Got it.
Congratulations AC - that is a concise, scientific definition of the test.
All that these researchers have achieved is to redefine the Turing test downwards, and to redefine it so far downwards that it is a completely different test, sharing only the name. However, I see from Wikipedia that there is some history behind this redefinition. It's as if 30% success, from a blind audience, over 5 minutes may be be a first step towards passing the test - according to some. Yah... like jumping 5 feet in the air is a successful first step towards jumping into orbit, or proving Fermat for n=1..10 is a first step towards proving it for all numbers.
The OP is a technological achievement, but nothing more. It is not even relevant to the science of the Turing Test
its not just the start menu its the EVERYTHING that's changed all at once and requiring users to make a fundamental change in the way they use tools is going to meet resistance.
Changes like this should be introduced gradually, not because we're a bunch of whining sniveling children but because require a large adjustment all at once leads to user frustration and poor efficiency during the transition time.
That was my experience with Windows 8. I was very frustrated with losing the start menu, because, over time, I had customised mine to be able to do almost everything through it. All of a sudden I couldn't find anything, and couldn't understand what principles (if any) were behind how it was laid out. I had to google for how to shutdown the computer, how to close a Metro screen, how to run a DOS command, etc...etc...
I had expected it would take me about a week to master Win8, and be then I'd like it. After a month, I was still cursing it.
I considered gettting a Start menu replacement, but before I did I started to "get" the Metro interface, and realized that I actually like having two layers for mywork, ie. that I can leave some things on the top (Metro) and leave the desktop uncluttered. After a while I had also put all my regularly used programs into the taskbar.
So, it was a vicious learning curve which I would have abandoned if I weren't locked in, but now I'm happy with the Win8 UI, and would opt-out of the Start menu, if it were available.
If that's the experiece of a tech-savvy, Windows veteran, I can only guess at how less technical people have handled the transition. I expect that many of them still don't know how to close a Metro window (you "grab" the top with the mouse, and pull it down, btw)
I'm not really seeing it catch on either, but OCaml's sweet spot was writing fast code that dealt with very complex data structures. It enforced static typing, but used type inference to figure out what the types of variables were. It has powerful operators for assembling and splitting up data structures that let you write very concise code that was checked at compile time for correctness.
I use F# daily for the Model (and ViewModel) in WinRT and ASP.NET MVC. Your list of advantages (from OCaml) are exactly the ones which I enjoy.
In a nutshell: "... let you write very concise code that was checked at compile time".
What F# adds, mostly, is the.Net libraries, Visual Studio support, and redistribution to any.Net host. F# has added some cool features (particularly Type Providers).
I got into F# seven years ago, when it was just a research project and looked more like OCaml than a.Net language.
By 2010 it had become fully integrated into.Net, and was part of the Visual Studio standard install.
By 2014 it had evolved into a complete language with its own killer-features and it had spawned a large community, with blogs, tutorials, books and sample code. There are several significant third party add-ons, and numerous high profile adopters.
In five years time, rather than F# disappearing, it is more likely that it will be the preferred language of many developers and shops, and the early adopters will be thankful for our extra years of experience.
As for me, I'm thankful not just to have it on my CV, but because it helps me build better apps for WinRT, the web (with ASP.Net MVC) and Android. The root advantage of it being a functional language in the.Net world will always be its main attraction to developers, but its aggressive development by the F# team and widespread support increase its value. This latest strategic move (of opening it to open-source contribution) will accelerate its progress.
I expect that in five years time, or, hopefully, just two, I won't have to mix F# (for the model) with C# (for the UI) for WinRT and ASP.NET MVC.
I'll link back to this in five years with "I told you so". I'll still be Javaman59 then.
>> Not much chance of that. F# just hit #12 on the Tiobe Index, up from #69 this time last year:
Yep. The sooner you get into it, the better off you'll be in five years time.
Agreed, it may be difficult to change directions once employed, but it is possible (I once worked with someone who resigned a programming job because she'd just got a job with the police - something she'd always wanted to do. Someone else gave up a project management job to do a Radiography degree. And others I've known have resigned to travel the world for a year).
Agreed, it is possible to change career direction - particularly if you are strongly motivated for the new career, and have savings and/or other backup.
I think the trick is not to get "locked in". In this case I would possibly advise to take the job that is definitely there, but tread lightly until you get the job you want. Don't buy a house, don't get married, and don't have children, until it is certain that the games programming job isn't going to materialise.
I really liked this observation! Indeed, when you are young and independent is the best time to take a risk with your career. While it is never easy to change direction, it is certainly easier now than it is once you are financially locked in. After that, it'll be twenty years - if you are lucky!
In the end, an interim job is better than no job at all (or flipping burgers).
He's a friend. Do you have friends? Do you care about your friends? Do your friends care about you? If you saw a friend making what you think might be a mistake, wouldn't you perhaps talk to them. If your friends saw you making what to them might be a mistake, wouldn't you want them to talk to you?
Personally, I can understand where the Original Poster is coming from. He's a friend to his friend. It's what friends do.
When someone is taking their first job out of college I think that they should be given lots of advice from those with more real world experience. The first job often sets up the whole of your career. If you start in banking, you will probably stay in banking. Ditto for defence. Once you have two years experience in any industry it will be very hard to change to another industry. It's not impossible of course, but it may involve a period of unemployment and a pay cut. But, if you have dependants by then (which often happens in ones twenties) then you are locked in.
For the advice to be useful it should be based on fact, and the adviser should be careful of overemphasising their own emotions. It should also be open ended, eg. saying "The games industry often has some notorious sweatshops, but that is not universal", rather then "Don't work in the games industry!".
Perhaps the one bit of advice which must be emphasised to new graduates is that the first job is a very significant choice which they may not be able to easily change - so choose wisely.
Now, I am talking from personal experience here. When I was about to graduate someone gave me exactly this advice - the job I take now will probably be the one I have for the next twenty years. I rushed into it, and took an exciting looking job in the defence business. I quickly hated it, but I was already locked in, and had dependants. The defence business wasn't nearly as exciting as the it seemed, but it took me twenty years to get out of it, and a massive pay cut.
I live in South Australia, and it's winter here, too.
Later "this summer" doesn't start until December.
I would say it does, because using seasons as a unit of time is a distinctly Northern hemisphere convention. In my observation, American's and Canadians are the main users of it (more than the British).
I often get confused talking to an American when they talk about doing something "in the summer", and it's not so much that they have a different summer, but that I'm not used to measuring time like this. (We only use it for things that are specifically related to the weather, such as sports).
In Australia we wouldn't say "later this winter", we'd just say "around August/September".
When I graduated from uni 25 years ago Dijkstra was my hero and, under his influence, I tried to solve problems on paper, and prove my programs, etc. It took me years to understand that real software engineering is about sitting in front of a computer, typing out code, testing and debugging it. I wasn't much use to myself or anyone else until I discarded the Dijkstra influence.
I still remember him as a great writer and humorist, and his ideas are useful, just so long as the young programmer doesn't try to put them into practice.
Is that the best you can do? There's nothing wrong with the first quotation or the third. The second prediction was made in in 1998, for God's sake. Good thing you posted as an AC: how many incorrect predictions have you made?
Fair enough.
Still, the second prediction is worth quoting in full. The premise "Most people have nothing to say to each other..." is so near, and yet so far, from web 2.0 that it's just delicious. To be able to say something so wrong (in hindsight) is an achievement beyond most of us. It must rank with the all time great failed predictions.
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
As a web developer I use VS predominately, but also Expression Web to prototype tricky HTML/CSS features, because it's WYSIWIG and HTML/CSS is so good. However, the process was always slowed by switching between the two tools, so I also see this progress, ie. incorporating ExpWeb into VS.
Taking Credit: As an old saying goes - the competent IT admin fixes problems before they happen. And then the PHB wonders why he is paying $X for new servers and infrastructure when the current system works fine. IT people should be more proactive about boasting about what they do. Sure, this is distasteful to lots of technical people. But guess what? Everyone else brags and lets their manager know (in a not so subtle way) of why they deserve more money: "I sold $YYY to MY clients". So the IT team needs to take credit for sales they help with. If an employee used a lot of resources to construct a portfolio for a client, it isn't all to the trader's credit. YOUR software and hardware helped him run simulations and generate the portfolio. So add THAT to your pitch. If one of the IT workers stayed up half the night so a client could get some figures/data - he should get credit instead of letting the suit tell the story. A knight wouldn't have killed the dragon unless he had a magic sword - but the armorer doesn't get any songs written about him.
...
If I could change one thing in my personal management, over 30 years in the business, it would be to advertise and promote myself, rather than to passively expect my achievements to be noticed. The passive approach usually worked when I was working with a team of other programmers, but it was spectacularly unsuccessful when I was the only programmer, or chief programmer, in a non-software business. The passive approach was also much more successful in my younger years, than in my fourties. People outside software expect programming to be easy, and, moreover, if the delivered product is good, and produced without visible project stress, they only see that as confirmation of the fact that it was easy. If there are visible problems, which happens on 99% of projects, then they see that as evidence of the incomptance of their programmers, and think that solution is to let the current team go (by no responding to wage requests) and get a better team, at the same price.
I think that "under promise, and over deliver" has to be part of the solution, in sharp contrast to the usual gung-ho, iron-man approach of programmers to estimating and promising.
An anecdote of how non-programmers view software is a discussion I had with my mother about web development. I mentioned to her that it is usually more difficult to build a complex site, than it is to build a pretty interface, and I mentioned google an example of a complex site. Her blank expression prompted me to suggest "You don't think that google is complex, do you?", and she just said, "Well, not really". Obviously, to her, a simple text box which searches the web is not complex!:)
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I also like that YAST is consistent with GUI or console. I haven't tried the webyast tet.
Good points! You reminded me of the console YaST. I use that often to do some admin on a server through ssh, without starting the GUI. It's a brilliant tool.
I didn't know about webyast. Thanks for the tip.
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Also, has the Yast GUI been fixed to make some kind of sense?
It always made sense to me. It's one of the top 3 reasons I stick with openSuse. The "pattern" concept in recent YaSTs is a little confusing at first (only because it complicates the GUI) - but once you've used it you don't want to go back.
YaST seems to combine the best of Windows style configuration GUI's, with a better view of the underlying mechanisms, and it put's everything in one place in a way that I've not encountered elsewhere in Windows or Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
And we were right every time.
:)
Sent from the text-mode browser on your terminal attached to the PDP "Mini Computer" at work?
This question reminds me a lot of people who say "Music was so much better in the 1990s" or "Comic books are garbage now but they are so innovative in the 70s". Basically these people were more passionate about their hobbies (music, comics, computers, or whatever) when they were young than they are today. Therefore, anything going on "back in the day" was - almost by definition - so much more amazing than the pedestrian stuff we have today.
I would say the idea that there were more exciting developments 30 years ago is ludicrous. In the last few years we have virtually the whole of human knowledge at our fingertips, we've had a huge resurgence of neural nets, we have rockets that can land themselves (!), actually useful brain-machine interface (for example deep-brain stimulation for epilepsy), self-driving cars, actually cool VR, electronic communications becoming ubiquitous, cheap single board computers that even a child can use (e.g. Raspberry-Pi), electric vehicles becoming mainstream, a technology for currency that is actually threatening to upset the applecart, and on and on and on.
I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s and was deeply passionate about technology. I was excited about the Amiga, Unix, and C++. Those days have NOTHING on today.
I'm about 20 years older than that. Still, when I got into computing as a professional in my 20s I was excited by those things (Amiga, Unix, C++) and also some more academic things - AI and functional programming. I was also excited by "Client/Server" and networks. Now, all of the things which I was excited by as cutting edge have been through two transitions: one, to commercial acceptance and required knowledge for programmers; and, then two, ubiquity and invisibility. Meanwhile, some very smart people and aggressive startups have put all of these in the hands of everyone from teenagers to grandmas. Back in the 80's we may have dreamed of everyone having a computer and being connected, but we did not envisage how it would be. We probably thought of some giant international connection of PCs with people chatting through text consoles. We did not envisage the www, with all the world's news and knowledge being crowd sourced, we didn't envisage facebook/instragram/twitter with ordinary people compulsively getting their latest info from each other, and we didn't envisage smart phones. WRT smartphones, that was Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs only. Microsoft and Blackberry had 10+ years leap on them, but never understood the possibilities, nor did anyone else.
One common trend I've seen with programmers is that we dismiss the latest developments. In my time, we've dismissed the GUI ("I get more done throught the command line"). Then we dismissed the GUI with colors. Then we dismissed the web (yes - I heard that!). Then we dismissed smart phones. Then we dismissed facebook. etc. If it were up to us, we'd still be using mainframes with text consoles. Which was the state of technology when I arrived in 1980. Undoubtedly, that would have been rejected by the luddites from 30 years before then.
Good question! My answer is, as someone who was already a professional programmer 30 years ago, an emphatic NO!
(I still love the Amiga, though!)
Agree the dumbphone is the neatest solution if it really does the job. They are smaller and simpler - battery life is a big plus! However, I found that if I regularly need a smartphone/tablet as well, then it's just a matter of time before I lose one of them. The "must carry" list becomes: wallet, keys, phone, smartphone (maybe passport). One too many for me. A bit of a pity, however. :)
Thanks for the tips about the SIM USB reader and other spec details. (Although, I found during my dumbphone experiment that I was noticing things like this, which all just "worked" on a modern smartphone).
a) Beyond that though, invariably you'll have to explain to someone at some point why you can't just do some simple thing that everyone else can do because your device doesn't support the app needed for it.
Yup
A year ago I was asking myself almost the same question as the OP, and I came to the conclusion that what I needed was a good "dumb phone", augmented by a tablet when traveling. It took me hours of research on the internet to find the dumb phone. I eventually brought it, and found that it didn't do the basics of phone and SMS nearly as well as my Android smart phone. The two bug-bears were: firstly, contacts, where I had to manually enter and maintain my contact list which had been maintained in the Cloud by Android and synchronized with my desktop, and, secondly, typing SMSs. It was a bit of "fun" using the old keypad again, but basically a pain. I was slowly typing brief, misspelled responses to long messages.
Despite my limited stated requirements, I found that I needed/wanted more, practically. I did want to be able to access the internet when out, and to be able to take photos at short notice. Sure, my dumb phone did have some kind of worthless browser, and could take photos, but obviously there was no comparison with a modern, moderately specced smartphone, let alone a top end one. I also found that keeping track of a phone and a tablet during normal work and leisure was just too complicated.
The dumbphone experiment was a waste of my time in 2016/17, and will be increasingly so as time goes by
This is different.
Yes. Previously the complaints against Microsoft were largely non-technical, and people were faced with a choice of paying a small amount for a Windows system which worked and they were familiar with, or having Linux for free but with no practical advantanges. Microsoft were always able to keep the prices down to the point where switching just wasn't worth while. But now we have a Windows which doesn't work and people aren't familiar with. Even if it were free customers don't want an operating system with a history of catastrophic failures, and which requires retraining. The cost of switching to Linux may well be lower than switching to Windows 10.
Second, the Linux desktop has always been about 10 years behind Windows. Today, though, this means that it's about on par with what WinXP was.
Quite a bit better than XP, and more attractive, IMO. The various "innovations" in Windows 8 and 10 may excite Microsoft, and even some power users, but everyone else just wants a system which let's them fire up email, the web and Office. They don't care if it looks and feels the same year-after-year. Games have largely shifted to consoles, and outside work people are spending more time on their phones than their PC's. People don't want a "better" OS which is unreliable or causes them to relearn how to use it.
About 5 years ago I had my mom staying as a guest and I had a Linux Mint system set up in the guest room for web browsing. She liked it very much and thought it more attractive and easy to use than Windows, and when I told her that it was free she commented "Why doesn't everyone use this?"
I heard the exact same thing in the 90s with Aspect Oriented Programming. Oh, we won't need programmers, you'd just pick your big building blocks and just put them together and voila!
Between 1985 and 1995 I heard of three revolutions which were going to put programmers out of a job "in ten years", they were: "computers programming themselves" (ie. AI), 4GL's, CASE tools.
I was never really worried by these, but after the third time, didn't pay any attention.
I was, however, always worried about being put out of work by new langueages (C++, Java, XML, etc..), and rightly so. But as long as I kept up with them, the work was there.
use edge for the one and only purpose that most people use it for, it doesn't stop there. You type "Firefox download" in the search bar, and the first thing you get is a prompt to stick with edge.
Close, but not quite, for me. I also use Edge to access Microsoft web sites, with the hope that it *might* work better, on their crappy site. So far, without success.
Whether it is true is not important.
Microsoft cannot undo three decades of mistrust that it has earned. At least not anytime soon.
Agreed.
Except that for me, "mistrust" has become "I'm sure you will screw me".
Expense isn't the issue. OIder employees with similar experience (and similar compensation) are also discriminated against.
It's really blatant in some of the ads.. "Looking for YOUNG, dynamic, candidate who works to deadline" has actually be used by someone who was stupid in placing their ad.
I remember a few years ago an Australian startup, which was then hitting the big time, putting out a similar ad. Except they were smart enough to leave out the word "young" and just hint at it with "dynamic", "eager to learn", etc, and mention that they would be joining a "young" team.
A couple of years later the company was in the news, complaining that they couldn't recruit skilled engineers
Thankyou! I watched the video zooming in and felt that the OP made sense, but didn't know exactly what they meant.
The only problem was that the OP was too vague, and omitted the numbers - rather than that the concept was stupid.
Computing... Verification complete.
You seem like a sensible person.
You've got a good point, but in fact the entire setup of the test is nonsensical. Here's how it should work:
1) Have a judge have two conversations, not necessarily at the same time, one with a human and one with a computer. (Obviously the judge does not know who is who.) 2) Give these conversations some time - more than five minutes, for sure. 3) At the end, have the judge declare who they think is the computer and who they think is the human. 4) Do this repeatedly, and use statistical methods to determine, at certain confidence levels, whether the judges were doing better than random guessing.
When someone's devised a program that fooled, say, n=200 judges whose judgement was tantamount to random guessing at a confidence level of p=0.01, start the presses.
Thankyou. Got it.
Congratulations AC - that is a concise, scientific definition of the test.
All that these researchers have achieved is to redefine the Turing test downwards, and to redefine it so far downwards that it is a completely different test, sharing only the name. However, I see from Wikipedia that there is some history behind this redefinition. It's as if 30% success, from a blind audience, over 5 minutes may be be a first step towards passing the test - according to some. Yah... like jumping 5 feet in the air is a successful first step towards jumping into orbit, or proving Fermat for n=1..10 is a first step towards proving it for all numbers.
The OP is a technological achievement, but nothing more. It is not even relevant to the science of the Turing Test
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its not just the start menu its the EVERYTHING that's changed all at once and requiring users to make a fundamental change in the way they use tools is going to meet resistance.
Changes like this should be introduced gradually, not because we're a bunch of whining sniveling children but because require a large adjustment all at once leads to user frustration and poor efficiency during the transition time.
That was my experience with Windows 8. I was very frustrated with losing the start menu, because, over time, I had customised mine to be able to do almost everything through it. All of a sudden I couldn't find anything, and couldn't understand what principles (if any) were behind how it was laid out. I had to google for how to shutdown the computer, how to close a Metro screen, how to run a DOS command, etc...etc...
I had expected it would take me about a week to master Win8, and be then I'd like it. After a month, I was still cursing it.
I considered gettting a Start menu replacement, but before I did I started to "get" the Metro interface, and realized that I actually like having two layers for mywork, ie. that I can leave some things on the top (Metro) and leave the desktop uncluttered. After a while I had also put all my regularly used programs into the taskbar.
So, it was a vicious learning curve which I would have abandoned if I weren't locked in, but now I'm happy with the Win8 UI, and would opt-out of the Start menu, if it were available.
If that's the experiece of a tech-savvy, Windows veteran, I can only guess at how less technical people have handled the transition. I expect that many of them still don't know how to close a Metro window (you "grab" the top with the mouse, and pull it down, btw)
I use F# daily for the Model (and ViewModel) in WinRT and ASP.NET MVC. Your list of advantages (from OCaml) are exactly the ones which I enjoy.
.Net libraries, Visual Studio support, and redistribution to any .Net host. F# has added some cool features (particularly Type Providers).
In a nutshell: "... let you write very concise code that was checked at compile time".
What F# adds, mostly, is the
I got into F# seven years ago, when it was just a research project and looked more like OCaml than a .Net language.
By 2010 it had become fully integrated into .Net, and was part of the Visual Studio standard install.
.Net world will always be its main attraction to developers, but its aggressive development by the F# team and widespread support increase its value. This latest strategic move (of opening it to open-source contribution) will accelerate its progress.
By 2014 it had evolved into a complete language with its own killer-features and it had spawned a large community, with blogs, tutorials, books and sample code. There are several significant third party add-ons, and numerous high profile adopters.
In five years time, rather than F# disappearing, it is more likely that it will be the preferred language of many developers and shops, and the early adopters will be thankful for our extra years of experience.
As for me, I'm thankful not just to have it on my CV, but because it helps me build better apps for WinRT, the web (with ASP.Net MVC) and Android. The root advantage of it being a functional language in the
I expect that in five years time, or, hopefully, just two, I won't have to mix F# (for the model) with C# (for the UI) for WinRT and ASP.NET MVC.
I'll link back to this in five years with "I told you so". I'll still be Javaman59 then.
>> Not much chance of that. F# just hit #12 on the Tiobe Index, up from #69 this time last year:
Yep. The sooner you get into it, the better off you'll be in five years time.
Agreed, it may be difficult to change directions once employed, but it is possible (I once worked with someone who resigned a programming job because she'd just got a job with the police - something she'd always wanted to do. Someone else gave up a project management job to do a Radiography degree. And others I've known have resigned to travel the world for a year).
Agreed, it is possible to change career direction - particularly if you are strongly motivated for the new career, and have savings and/or other backup.
I think the trick is not to get "locked in". In this case I would possibly advise to take the job that is definitely there, but tread lightly until you get the job you want. Don't buy a house, don't get married, and don't have children, until it is certain that the games programming job isn't going to materialise.
I really liked this observation! Indeed, when you are young and independent is the best time to take a risk with your career. While it is never easy to change direction, it is certainly easier now than it is once you are financially locked in. After that, it'll be twenty years - if you are lucky!
In the end, an interim job is better than no job at all (or flipping burgers).
That seems to be the unanimous advice here.
He's a friend. Do you have friends? Do you care about your friends? Do your friends care about you? If you saw a friend making what you think might be a mistake, wouldn't you perhaps talk to them. If your friends saw you making what to them might be a mistake, wouldn't you want them to talk to you? Personally, I can understand where the Original Poster is coming from. He's a friend to his friend. It's what friends do.
When someone is taking their first job out of college I think that they should be given lots of advice from those with more real world experience. The first job often sets up the whole of your career. If you start in banking, you will probably stay in banking. Ditto for defence. Once you have two years experience in any industry it will be very hard to change to another industry. It's not impossible of course, but it may involve a period of unemployment and a pay cut. But, if you have dependants by then (which often happens in ones twenties) then you are locked in.
For the advice to be useful it should be based on fact, and the adviser should be careful of overemphasising their own emotions. It should also be open ended, eg. saying "The games industry often has some notorious sweatshops, but that is not universal", rather then "Don't work in the games industry!".
Perhaps the one bit of advice which must be emphasised to new graduates is that the first job is a very significant choice which they may not be able to easily change - so choose wisely.
Now, I am talking from personal experience here. When I was about to graduate someone gave me exactly this advice - the job I take now will probably be the one I have for the next twenty years. I rushed into it, and took an exciting looking job in the defence business. I quickly hated it, but I was already locked in, and had dependants. The defence business wasn't nearly as exciting as the it seemed, but it took me twenty years to get out of it, and a massive pay cut.
I live in Western Australia and it's winter here.
I live in South Australia, and it's winter here, too.
Later "this summer" doesn't start until December.
I would say it does, because using seasons as a unit of time is a distinctly Northern hemisphere convention. In my observation, American's and Canadians are the main users of it (more than the British).
I often get confused talking to an American when they talk about doing something "in the summer", and it's not so much that they have a different summer, but that I'm not used to measuring time like this. (We only use it for things that are specifically related to the weather, such as sports).
In Australia we wouldn't say "later this winter", we'd just say "around August/September".
When I graduated from uni 25 years ago Dijkstra was my hero and, under his influence, I tried to solve problems on paper, and prove my programs, etc. It took me years to understand that real software engineering is about sitting in front of a computer, typing out code, testing and debugging it. I wasn't much use to myself or anyone else until I discarded the Dijkstra influence.
I still remember him as a great writer and humorist, and his ideas are useful, just so long as the young programmer doesn't try to put them into practice.
Is that the best you can do? There's nothing wrong with the first quotation or the third. The second prediction was made in in 1998, for God's sake. Good thing you posted as an AC: how many incorrect predictions have you made?
Fair enough.
Still, the second prediction is worth quoting in full. The premise "Most people have nothing to say to each other..." is so near, and yet so far, from web 2.0 that it's just delicious. To be able to say something so wrong (in hindsight) is an achievement beyond most of us. It must rank with the all time great failed predictions.
As a web developer I use VS predominately, but also Expression Web to prototype tricky HTML/CSS features, because it's WYSIWIG and HTML/CSS is so good. However, the process was always slowed by switching between the two tools, so I also see this progress, ie. incorporating ExpWeb into VS.
Your paying $50 for that, and also for the guarentee that it will work first time, on this laptop.
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Taking Credit: As an old saying goes - the competent IT admin fixes problems before they happen. And then the PHB wonders why he is paying $X for new servers and infrastructure when the current system works fine. IT people should be more proactive about boasting about what they do. Sure, this is distasteful to lots of technical people. But guess what? Everyone else brags and lets their manager know (in a not so subtle way) of why they deserve more money: "I sold $YYY to MY clients". So the IT team needs to take credit for sales they help with. If an employee used a lot of resources to construct a portfolio for a client, it isn't all to the trader's credit. YOUR software and hardware helped him run simulations and generate the portfolio. So add THAT to your pitch. If one of the IT workers stayed up half the night so a client could get some figures/data - he should get credit instead of letting the suit tell the story. A knight wouldn't have killed the dragon unless he had a magic sword - but the armorer doesn't get any songs written about him.
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If I could change one thing in my personal management, over 30 years in the business, it would be to advertise and promote myself, rather than to passively expect my achievements to be noticed. The passive approach usually worked when I was working with a team of other programmers, but it was spectacularly unsuccessful when I was the only programmer, or chief programmer, in a non-software business. The passive approach was also much more successful in my younger years, than in my fourties. People outside software expect programming to be easy, and, moreover, if the delivered product is good, and produced without visible project stress, they only see that as confirmation of the fact that it was easy. If there are visible problems, which happens on 99% of projects, then they see that as evidence of the incomptance of their programmers, and think that solution is to let the current team go (by no responding to wage requests) and get a better team, at the same price.
I think that "under promise, and over deliver" has to be part of the solution, in sharp contrast to the usual gung-ho, iron-man approach of programmers to estimating and promising.
An anecdote of how non-programmers view software is a discussion I had with my mother about web development. I mentioned to her that it is usually more difficult to build a complex site, than it is to build a pretty interface, and I mentioned google an example of a complex site. Her blank expression prompted me to suggest "You don't think that google is complex, do you?", and she just said, "Well, not really". Obviously, to her, a simple text box which searches the web is not complex! :)
I also like that YAST is consistent with GUI or console. I haven't tried the webyast tet.
Good points! You reminded me of the console YaST. I use that often to do some admin on a server through ssh, without starting the GUI. It's a brilliant tool.
I didn't know about webyast. Thanks for the tip.
It always made sense to me. It's one of the top 3 reasons I stick with openSuse. The "pattern" concept in recent YaSTs is a little confusing at first (only because it complicates the GUI) - but once you've used it you don't want to go back.
YaST seems to combine the best of Windows style configuration GUI's, with a better view of the underlying mechanisms, and it put's everything in one place in a way that I've not encountered elsewhere in Windows or Linux.