Can't blockchain technology work to validate electronic vote authenticity and integrity? It seems this would be a pretty good application for it here, to ensure electronic voting transactions couldn't be altered. Of course, authentication is the real problem, as we don't yet have an ID systems that allows for good public/private crypto yet. And of course, there are too many forces working against actually making sure voters are properly authenticated as citizens, on both sides, but for different reasons.
So yeah, in the meantime, paper ballots by mail, indelibly marked with ink (not pencil).
Actors are on the way out because of course as computers increase in capability so virtual acting bots become possible and they live forever
I was with you until you took a left turn into sheer fantasy. The most compelling stories are about humans (or analogies), after all, so I have a hard time believing we'll be discarding the human element entirely from story-driven entertainment. After all, even though we can play back musical recordings with perfect fidelity, music-lovers still flock to live entertainment.
The code is fine, have you used.NET since 1.1? It's arguably one of the best frameworks and language sets (C#/F#) available... certainly heads and tails beyond Java. It's only getting better since their move to open source the whole thing.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not complaining about the quality of Microsoft's code. I'm just stating the reality that Windows as an OS is just a slowly evolving piece of code. There's undoubtedly a lot of original NT code in there, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially in terms of security and stability. Whether MS periodically takes a snapshot of it and calls it Windows "whatever" or just keep upgrading it as Windows 10 service packs really makes no difference from a technical standpoint. It's really more of a marketing decision at that point.
BTW, I actually really like the C# language and the.NET framework (both are extremely well-designed), but I'm talking about the core OS code (which is mostly C/C++) being slowly upgraded. I'm not sure what.NET has to do with anything.
Microsoft's design of the Windows 10 upgrade dialog box was a great example of how to trick users into accidentally upgrading, even when they didn't want to.
Another one: charging a low price for a product on Amazon, then setting an exorbitant shipping and handling fee, which nearly doubles the price. I've seen this one fairly recently. The shipping fee is every bit as much of the price, but it's displayed only in tiny fonts compared to the main listing.
Is it any wonder that UX designers are getting a horrible reputation among some segments of the tech-savvy crowd? It's going to suck if consumers get pissed off enough about this that government regulators have to step in, and then anyone putting up an e-commerce website is going to have to wade through layers upon layers of government bureaucracy. Maybe that's inevitable, but it's annoying how it always devolves into that...
The notion of "last version of Windows" is just semantics. It's the same NT codebase, simply modified and upgraded a bit at a time... a new subsystem here, a new coat of paint there, etc, same as every previous Windows since 2000, or XP, if you're talking about just the consumer line. The same incremental upgrades will occur, but will stay under the Windows 10 brand, and will just be rolled out as periodic system updates, like we're seeing even now.
All this means is that that Windows is no longer a cash cow for them - operating systems are a commodity item now (see: Linux, ChromeOS, etc). There's no point in rebranding and renaming the same OS every few years, as that's not their future. Haven't you wondered why MS seems to be embracing Linux and open source? Because it's no longer a competitor for them. Desktop operating systems isn't part of a growth market - it's actually in *decline*. They're moving to cloud-based computing, and software as a service. The operating system is just there to provide a platform for software and services to sell.
As for the layoffs... they're dropping employees in their non-productive areas - of course they're going to be cutting their smartphone division, with 1% of the global market share, or something pitiful like that.
I'd say that "good programmers" can and do learn a variety of languages, and will use the most appropriate one for the task at hand. There's nothing wrong with getting down to the metal when requirements call for it, but doing so is foolish for many types of projects where top performance isn't a requirement. I'm a game developer, so I live and breathe C++ of course. But I write my tools in C#, and our game's scripting language is in Lua.
Why C# for tools? Because it has reflection, and a fantastic library for all sorts of serialization, networking, and UI support.
Why Lua for game scripts? Because then we can recompile and reload our game scripts on the fly, without even stopping the game.
Which programming language is "best"? It's a stupid question to start with, because the only reasonable answer is "it depends on what you're looking for in a language".
True, it's definitely slowed down. Still, try comparing GPUs, or the performance of mobile computing hardware versus 6-8 years ago, and you'll see a fairly dramatic difference. In addition to the obvious technical challenges, I think perhaps desktop CPUs haven't advanced as dramatically in the last decade partially because there hasn't been a huge demand by most consumers for increased performance. My computer from 5 years ago works every bit as well for my day to day task as it did back then - the only exception being things like gaming.
How do you feel about men with hyphenated last names?
I just ponder the unsustainability of that particular family naming algorithm, if you take it to its logical conclusion. Pick a matriarchal or patriarchal naming scheme, but don't do both. It's like a programming language that has delimiting curly braces and enforced whitespace.
Sorry, I guess my sarcasm didn't show through. By "bugaboo" (a mythological monster, like "boogeyman"), I meant "completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory". I agree, it was complete nonsense, but I had forgotten the details and how that all got started, so thanks for that.
Wasn't this the big bugaboo of Windows Vista? I'm also curious how you think the media industries will re-introduce DRM in the billions of DRM-free songs that all the major online stores have already sold and are still selling.
No, I'm pretty sure this is just about space savings and a minimalistic design fetish. Not everything is a conspiracy, and we already won the DRM war for audio.
So far, my objection is that they don't work well. I got a BT hands-free headset, and had the idea of listening to audiobooks on my commute. Nope - after a while, my Android phone somehow borked the volume. It plays so soft I can't hear the thing. Until this tech gets much more reliable, it's too early to kill the analog jack.
Avast conned more than 1,200 people into connecting to fake wi-fi hotspots set up near the Republican convention and the Cleveland airport
...meaning they caught a lot of non-Republicans in their little "sting operation". All in all, a non-news story. I'm sure they were really hoping that they'd find 10% of the people looking at porn, or something more salacious. Why call out porn and dating apps in the first place?
All this proves is that we really need encryption everywhere, and that we need to make sure it's turned on by default, so that ordinary users don't have to think about it too much (because let's face it - that will never happen). Eventually, anything that's NOT encrypted should signal a warning to the user, although the transition will need to be gradual. Services like Let's Encrypt are slowly eroding any excuses not to make everything secure by default.
The single return rule makes sense in some circumstances. I like early outs, but then tend to the single return rule. If you're breaking apart your logic to that degree that you need a return in the middle of a long function, then you may want to consider breaking apart the function. Still, I think it's best to consider it a *guideline* rather than a rule. The moment you declare something a rule, someone will find a valid reason for breaking it.
As for other "optional" code, I tend to put parentheses around any C/C++ code that depends on operator precedent. The only one *everyone* knows is * or / before + and -, otherwise, it gets parentheses, just to be clear.
I see a lot of programmers try to cram as much as possible into one line, which I'm not a fan of. As one example, I'm not a fan of assigning a variable inside an if statement. It's harder to read than several short, clear lines, and it likely compiles to the same assembly in the end. So, I'll occasionally leave a formula as several steps and explicitly declare some of the intermediate variables, even if I could have stuffed it all into one line. It's easier to debug, since you can examine the intermediate values, and it helps others to understand what's going on, since the intermediate variables have an actual name as a hint. I'm sure it bugs some people who think it's too verbose or my variable names are too long and descriptive. I don't go crazy, but neither do I stick to single letters when a word or two works better.
Is it really that black and white? Spending money on toys means a bunch of people have a job creating, installing or servicing those products. I work in the videogame industry, and I have a good job because people spend money on themselves (or their kids) buying videogames. In turn, I spend my own money on lots of different things, which in turn help other people out. That's how economies function. Does it really matter what the products are?
Moreover, charity can be money down a black hole if you're not extremely careful. The *real* Bill Gates has learned that it's not always easy to ensure charity goes to worthwhile causes or produces any sort of measurable results, improving peoples' lives, even if you're giving away billions.
As a driver, you're obligated to pull over and make way for emergency vehicles, so it's naturally to look for the source of sirens as a driver. We're often required to divert our eyes and look behind us or to the side at times as well, even when driving in normal circumstances. Humans can't focus in all directions at once. Moreover, it's more or less impossible for a person to be 100% focused and ready to brake at an instant's notice.
Accusing him of not looking where he was going is more or less accusing him of not having eyes in the back of his head.
You'll find some folks in just about every religion that are wound waaay too tight and see the devil in everything. The rest enjoy their games and movies like everyone else.
Besides, who exactly lives anywhere near a "church steeple"? Maybe they're more prominent in other areas of the country? I've seen plenty of churches, but they rarely have steeples near where I live. Also, here in the US, we have "streetlights", not "lampposts". Curious choice of wording for potential perches.
Download and run Never10. It uses the official Microsoft registry key to disable Windows 10 updates (likely demanded by corporate customers, because obviously they sure as hell don't listen to *us*), and cleans up any downloads you might have incurred. Best of all, it's a use-it-and-discard it program, not something you have to install and keep around.
That's what QA is for, isn't it? Or if you don't have QA, you could just use VMs or other more constrained test environments. Why risk your development machine(s)? Well, everyone has different priorities, I guess.
You either earn a lot more than I do, or you buy really cheap PCs. But yeah, I'm not sure why someone would only have one. I have three machines I develop on. A Windows box, OS X, and Linux (with several partitions to test various flavors).
Preview versions of OSes are for enthusiasts. I'm a developer. I value stability, because my machines are how I earn my living. There's nothing an OS can deliver to me that's so exciting that I can't wait a few months for all the bugs to be shaken out... by the enthusiasts. I pretty much feel that way about most software that's critical to my workflow. I'll wait for the stable version, and even then, if it's an especially critical piece of software, I'll probably wait a while and keep an ear to the ground in case there are any widely reported issues.
I think it's going to take a little longer for directors to properly learn how to use the tools of their trade. Remember that ubiquitous CGI, or "the ability to create anything on screen that you want to" is a fairly new thing. And like any new tool, it tends to get overused at first, because everyone is excited about new and shiny things.
The same thing happened in the videogame industry. Unreal was one of the first shooters with colored lighting. End result: the environments looked like a radioactive clown puked all over them. The artists were so giddy to show off *colored lights* as a feature that they couldn't stop themselves from painting the environment in bright, vibrant, primary hues.
Fast-forward a decade. Programmable pixel shaders are a thing. Ooh, we can do *bloom effects*. Woohoo - crank up the bloom to 11! Let's live in a dream world! Or maybe motion blur, or film grain. Or depth of field. None of which really make for good gameplay, and in many cases, simply distract or annoy the player.
Rinse and repeat for each new technology that comes along.
These days, the best videogame artists have learned that a light touch on these effects are often better than slapping you in the face with them. I'm really hopeful Hollywood directors eventually learn the same thing.
This is the only point I'll flat out disagree with you on. Even today, there's at least one commercial product I know of sold that make use of FreeDOS to boot into a clean PC environment for some of its operations. It's still a real thing for some people, although an admittedly small group.
No, that's wrong. The personal computer revolution had begun before DOS and in the 1980s was in full swing with or without DOS. There was a wide range of types such as Sinclairs, Commodores, Amigas, Amstrads alongside the IBM/DOS PC in the 1980-95 period. It was standardised on the IBM PC clone only gradually.
When you start getting into subjective territory like this, there will inevitably be disagreement about how you define the "beginning" of the personal computer revolution, I suppose. My guess is many geeks like us will tend to define it as "when I got my first computer".;-)
I should probably have said *thoughout* the personal computer revolution, because you're correct that there were a lot of competitors in the early days. After all, my first computer was an Apple II, not a PC. Also, I think people are misunderstanding one of my statements. I said:
But it was really the PC, running MS-DOS for the most part, when the vast majority of people were introduced to computers for the first time.
Which I'd bet is probably accurate (although I admittedly have no numbers to back this up), as these were the machines they likely used at work. When it came time to purchase a machine of their own, it made sense to them to get another DOS or Windows-based PC, because that's what they knew. The DOS-PC's success at work made a bit impact on the home market, because as indicated, there were plenty of great competitors.
Well, anyhow, history is written by the winner. Or, rather, in this case, we look back and see the DOS-based PC as the most important of the line solely because of its place in history. We have to acknowledge that DOS is important not necessarily because of its qualities, but because of how widely used it became as the basis for Microsoft's reign over desktop computing, which continues even to this day.
Yeah, the problem is that the Internet is dominated by the voices of the PC generation, who somehow never learned that there actually was a long history of computing before the PC and MS-DOS.
CP/M and other precursor OSes are really only of interest to historians and nostalgic geeks, but DOS actually has some real relevance to many people and projects even today, thanks to FreeDOS and the fact that we're still running x86-compatible machines... which is sort of astounding, actually.
Sure, there was a long history of computing before the PC and MS-DOS, but it was constrained to very few people for the most part - specialists, hobbyists, professionals, academics, and so on. But it was really the PC, running MS-DOS for the most part, when the vast majority of people were introduced to computers for the first time. So, it's not all that surprising that DOS is seen - rightly, I think - as the OS most used at the beginning of the personal computer revolution.
Even so, I don't think that many people mistake that for the beginning of computing in general. If nothing else, they saw computers on TV, with walls of reel-to-reel tapes and flashing lights.
What happened? Is this the result of the new owners? Are people's opinions so easily swayed? Is this a case of not thinking it through originally?
Really? I've always liked Uber as a service and as a general concept. But I've long thought the execs were amoral scumbags. I'd imagine many people tend to change their minds about Uber after learning more about their executives. And from what I recall, Uber has been rather polarizing for quite a while here on/.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't blockchain technology work to validate electronic vote authenticity and integrity? It seems this would be a pretty good application for it here, to ensure electronic voting transactions couldn't be altered. Of course, authentication is the real problem, as we don't yet have an ID systems that allows for good public/private crypto yet. And of course, there are too many forces working against actually making sure voters are properly authenticated as citizens, on both sides, but for different reasons.
So yeah, in the meantime, paper ballots by mail, indelibly marked with ink (not pencil).
Actors are on the way out because of course as computers increase in capability so virtual acting bots become possible and they live forever
I was with you until you took a left turn into sheer fantasy. The most compelling stories are about humans (or analogies), after all, so I have a hard time believing we'll be discarding the human element entirely from story-driven entertainment. After all, even though we can play back musical recordings with perfect fidelity, music-lovers still flock to live entertainment.
Also, paragraphs > giantwallsofindecipherabletext.
The code is fine, have you used .NET since 1.1? It's arguably one of the best frameworks and language sets (C#/F#) available... certainly heads and tails beyond Java. It's only getting better since their move to open source the whole thing.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not complaining about the quality of Microsoft's code. I'm just stating the reality that Windows as an OS is just a slowly evolving piece of code. There's undoubtedly a lot of original NT code in there, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially in terms of security and stability. Whether MS periodically takes a snapshot of it and calls it Windows "whatever" or just keep upgrading it as Windows 10 service packs really makes no difference from a technical standpoint. It's really more of a marketing decision at that point.
BTW, I actually really like the C# language and the .NET framework (both are extremely well-designed), but I'm talking about the core OS code (which is mostly C/C++) being slowly upgraded. I'm not sure what .NET has to do with anything.
Microsoft's design of the Windows 10 upgrade dialog box was a great example of how to trick users into accidentally upgrading, even when they didn't want to.
Another one: charging a low price for a product on Amazon, then setting an exorbitant shipping and handling fee, which nearly doubles the price. I've seen this one fairly recently. The shipping fee is every bit as much of the price, but it's displayed only in tiny fonts compared to the main listing.
Is it any wonder that UX designers are getting a horrible reputation among some segments of the tech-savvy crowd? It's going to suck if consumers get pissed off enough about this that government regulators have to step in, and then anyone putting up an e-commerce website is going to have to wade through layers upon layers of government bureaucracy. Maybe that's inevitable, but it's annoying how it always devolves into that...
The notion of "last version of Windows" is just semantics. It's the same NT codebase, simply modified and upgraded a bit at a time... a new subsystem here, a new coat of paint there, etc, same as every previous Windows since 2000, or XP, if you're talking about just the consumer line. The same incremental upgrades will occur, but will stay under the Windows 10 brand, and will just be rolled out as periodic system updates, like we're seeing even now.
All this means is that that Windows is no longer a cash cow for them - operating systems are a commodity item now (see: Linux, ChromeOS, etc). There's no point in rebranding and renaming the same OS every few years, as that's not their future. Haven't you wondered why MS seems to be embracing Linux and open source? Because it's no longer a competitor for them. Desktop operating systems isn't part of a growth market - it's actually in *decline*. They're moving to cloud-based computing, and software as a service. The operating system is just there to provide a platform for software and services to sell.
As for the layoffs... they're dropping employees in their non-productive areas - of course they're going to be cutting their smartphone division, with 1% of the global market share, or something pitiful like that.
I'd say that "good programmers" can and do learn a variety of languages, and will use the most appropriate one for the task at hand. There's nothing wrong with getting down to the metal when requirements call for it, but doing so is foolish for many types of projects where top performance isn't a requirement. I'm a game developer, so I live and breathe C++ of course. But I write my tools in C#, and our game's scripting language is in Lua.
Why C# for tools? Because it has reflection, and a fantastic library for all sorts of serialization, networking, and UI support.
Why Lua for game scripts? Because then we can recompile and reload our game scripts on the fly, without even stopping the game.
Which programming language is "best"? It's a stupid question to start with, because the only reasonable answer is "it depends on what you're looking for in a language".
True, it's definitely slowed down. Still, try comparing GPUs, or the performance of mobile computing hardware versus 6-8 years ago, and you'll see a fairly dramatic difference. In addition to the obvious technical challenges, I think perhaps desktop CPUs haven't advanced as dramatically in the last decade partially because there hasn't been a huge demand by most consumers for increased performance. My computer from 5 years ago works every bit as well for my day to day task as it did back then - the only exception being things like gaming.
How do you feel about men with hyphenated last names?
I just ponder the unsustainability of that particular family naming algorithm, if you take it to its logical conclusion. Pick a matriarchal or patriarchal naming scheme, but don't do both. It's like a programming language that has delimiting curly braces and enforced whitespace.
Sorry, I guess my sarcasm didn't show through. By "bugaboo" (a mythological monster, like "boogeyman"), I meant "completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory". I agree, it was complete nonsense, but I had forgotten the details and how that all got started, so thanks for that.
Wasn't this the big bugaboo of Windows Vista? I'm also curious how you think the media industries will re-introduce DRM in the billions of DRM-free songs that all the major online stores have already sold and are still selling.
No, I'm pretty sure this is just about space savings and a minimalistic design fetish. Not everything is a conspiracy, and we already won the DRM war for audio.
So far, my objection is that they don't work well. I got a BT hands-free headset, and had the idea of listening to audiobooks on my commute. Nope - after a while, my Android phone somehow borked the volume. It plays so soft I can't hear the thing. Until this tech gets much more reliable, it's too early to kill the analog jack.
Avast conned more than 1,200 people into connecting to fake wi-fi hotspots set up near the Republican convention and the Cleveland airport
...meaning they caught a lot of non-Republicans in their little "sting operation". All in all, a non-news story. I'm sure they were really hoping that they'd find 10% of the people looking at porn, or something more salacious. Why call out porn and dating apps in the first place?
All this proves is that we really need encryption everywhere, and that we need to make sure it's turned on by default, so that ordinary users don't have to think about it too much (because let's face it - that will never happen). Eventually, anything that's NOT encrypted should signal a warning to the user, although the transition will need to be gradual. Services like Let's Encrypt are slowly eroding any excuses not to make everything secure by default.
The single return rule makes sense in some circumstances. I like early outs, but then tend to the single return rule. If you're breaking apart your logic to that degree that you need a return in the middle of a long function, then you may want to consider breaking apart the function. Still, I think it's best to consider it a *guideline* rather than a rule. The moment you declare something a rule, someone will find a valid reason for breaking it.
As for other "optional" code, I tend to put parentheses around any C/C++ code that depends on operator precedent. The only one *everyone* knows is * or / before + and -, otherwise, it gets parentheses, just to be clear.
I see a lot of programmers try to cram as much as possible into one line, which I'm not a fan of. As one example, I'm not a fan of assigning a variable inside an if statement. It's harder to read than several short, clear lines, and it likely compiles to the same assembly in the end. So, I'll occasionally leave a formula as several steps and explicitly declare some of the intermediate variables, even if I could have stuffed it all into one line. It's easier to debug, since you can examine the intermediate values, and it helps others to understand what's going on, since the intermediate variables have an actual name as a hint. I'm sure it bugs some people who think it's too verbose or my variable names are too long and descriptive. I don't go crazy, but neither do I stick to single letters when a word or two works better.
Is it really that black and white? Spending money on toys means a bunch of people have a job creating, installing or servicing those products. I work in the videogame industry, and I have a good job because people spend money on themselves (or their kids) buying videogames. In turn, I spend my own money on lots of different things, which in turn help other people out. That's how economies function. Does it really matter what the products are?
Moreover, charity can be money down a black hole if you're not extremely careful. The *real* Bill Gates has learned that it's not always easy to ensure charity goes to worthwhile causes or produces any sort of measurable results, improving peoples' lives, even if you're giving away billions.
As a driver, you're obligated to pull over and make way for emergency vehicles, so it's naturally to look for the source of sirens as a driver. We're often required to divert our eyes and look behind us or to the side at times as well, even when driving in normal circumstances. Humans can't focus in all directions at once. Moreover, it's more or less impossible for a person to be 100% focused and ready to brake at an instant's notice.
Accusing him of not looking where he was going is more or less accusing him of not having eyes in the back of his head.
You'll find some folks in just about every religion that are wound waaay too tight and see the devil in everything. The rest enjoy their games and movies like everyone else.
Besides, who exactly lives anywhere near a "church steeple"? Maybe they're more prominent in other areas of the country? I've seen plenty of churches, but they rarely have steeples near where I live. Also, here in the US, we have "streetlights", not "lampposts". Curious choice of wording for potential perches.
Download and run Never10. It uses the official Microsoft registry key to disable Windows 10 updates (likely demanded by corporate customers, because obviously they sure as hell don't listen to *us*), and cleans up any downloads you might have incurred. Best of all, it's a use-it-and-discard it program, not something you have to install and keep around.
That's what QA is for, isn't it? Or if you don't have QA, you could just use VMs or other more constrained test environments. Why risk your development machine(s)? Well, everyone has different priorities, I guess.
You either earn a lot more than I do, or you buy really cheap PCs. But yeah, I'm not sure why someone would only have one. I have three machines I develop on. A Windows box, OS X, and Linux (with several partitions to test various flavors).
Preview versions of OSes are for enthusiasts. I'm a developer. I value stability, because my machines are how I earn my living. There's nothing an OS can deliver to me that's so exciting that I can't wait a few months for all the bugs to be shaken out... by the enthusiasts. I pretty much feel that way about most software that's critical to my workflow. I'll wait for the stable version, and even then, if it's an especially critical piece of software, I'll probably wait a while and keep an ear to the ground in case there are any widely reported issues.
I think it's going to take a little longer for directors to properly learn how to use the tools of their trade. Remember that ubiquitous CGI, or "the ability to create anything on screen that you want to" is a fairly new thing. And like any new tool, it tends to get overused at first, because everyone is excited about new and shiny things.
The same thing happened in the videogame industry. Unreal was one of the first shooters with colored lighting. End result: the environments looked like a radioactive clown puked all over them. The artists were so giddy to show off *colored lights* as a feature that they couldn't stop themselves from painting the environment in bright, vibrant, primary hues.
Fast-forward a decade. Programmable pixel shaders are a thing. Ooh, we can do *bloom effects*. Woohoo - crank up the bloom to 11! Let's live in a dream world! Or maybe motion blur, or film grain. Or depth of field. None of which really make for good gameplay, and in many cases, simply distract or annoy the player.
Rinse and repeat for each new technology that comes along.
These days, the best videogame artists have learned that a light touch on these effects are often better than slapping you in the face with them. I'm really hopeful Hollywood directors eventually learn the same thing.
grammar nazi's
You threw that in there on purpose just to draw them out, didn't you... Clever.
You can say that about DOS too.
This is the only point I'll flat out disagree with you on. Even today, there's at least one commercial product I know of sold that make use of FreeDOS to boot into a clean PC environment for some of its operations. It's still a real thing for some people, although an admittedly small group.
No, that's wrong. The personal computer revolution had begun before DOS and in the 1980s was in full swing with or without DOS. There was a wide range of types such as Sinclairs, Commodores, Amigas, Amstrads alongside the IBM/DOS PC in the 1980-95 period. It was standardised on the IBM PC clone only gradually.
When you start getting into subjective territory like this, there will inevitably be disagreement about how you define the "beginning" of the personal computer revolution, I suppose. My guess is many geeks like us will tend to define it as "when I got my first computer". ;-)
I should probably have said *thoughout* the personal computer revolution, because you're correct that there were a lot of competitors in the early days. After all, my first computer was an Apple II, not a PC. Also, I think people are misunderstanding one of my statements. I said:
But it was really the PC, running MS-DOS for the most part, when the vast majority of people were introduced to computers for the first time.
Which I'd bet is probably accurate (although I admittedly have no numbers to back this up), as these were the machines they likely used at work. When it came time to purchase a machine of their own, it made sense to them to get another DOS or Windows-based PC, because that's what they knew. The DOS-PC's success at work made a bit impact on the home market, because as indicated, there were plenty of great competitors.
Well, anyhow, history is written by the winner. Or, rather, in this case, we look back and see the DOS-based PC as the most important of the line solely because of its place in history. We have to acknowledge that DOS is important not necessarily because of its qualities, but because of how widely used it became as the basis for Microsoft's reign over desktop computing, which continues even to this day.
Yeah, the problem is that the Internet is dominated by the voices of the PC generation, who somehow never learned that there actually was a long history of computing before the PC and MS-DOS.
CP/M and other precursor OSes are really only of interest to historians and nostalgic geeks, but DOS actually has some real relevance to many people and projects even today, thanks to FreeDOS and the fact that we're still running x86-compatible machines... which is sort of astounding, actually.
Sure, there was a long history of computing before the PC and MS-DOS, but it was constrained to very few people for the most part - specialists, hobbyists, professionals, academics, and so on. But it was really the PC, running MS-DOS for the most part, when the vast majority of people were introduced to computers for the first time. So, it's not all that surprising that DOS is seen - rightly, I think - as the OS most used at the beginning of the personal computer revolution.
Even so, I don't think that many people mistake that for the beginning of computing in general. If nothing else, they saw computers on TV, with walls of reel-to-reel tapes and flashing lights.
Slashdot used to be very pro-uber.
What happened? Is this the result of the new owners? Are people's opinions so easily swayed? Is this a case of not thinking it through originally?
Really? I've always liked Uber as a service and as a general concept. But I've long thought the execs were amoral scumbags. I'd imagine many people tend to change their minds about Uber after learning more about their executives. And from what I recall, Uber has been rather polarizing for quite a while here on /.