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Want to read a horror story?
Number of computers
1900: 0
1950: 100
1980: 10000
1990: 1000000
2000: 1000000000
2010: 1000000000000000000
2020: 1
2030: 1
2040: 1
2050: 125 -
Larry Tesler, a computer scientist who created the terms "cut," "copy," and "paste," has passed away at the age of 74 (17 Feb 2020).
In 1973, Tesler took a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he worked until 1980. Xerox PARC is famously known for developing the mouse-driven graphical user interface and during his time at the lab Tesler worked with Tim Mott to create a word processor called Gypsy that is best known for coining the terms "cut," "copy," and "paste".
In addition to "cut," "copy," and "paste" terminologies, Tesler was also an advocate for an approach to UI design known as modeless computing. It ensures that user actions remain consistent throughout an operating system's various functions and apps. When they've opened a word processor, for instance, users now just automatically assume that hitting any of the alphanumeric keys on their keyboard will result in that character showing up on-screen at the cursor's insertion point. But there was a time when word processors could be switched between multiple modes where typing on the keyboard would either add characters to a document or alternately allow functional commands to be entered.10 -
I was told back in the 80's I wouldn't have a calculator every where I go... well, guess what mother fuckers, I don't just have a calculator everywhere I go, but it's a full computer, a supercomputer by 1980's standards, and I literally make a living writing fucking software for it...
dicks.19 -
My dad showed me one of his old notebooks from like 1980 or something and it was all handwritten FORTRAN stuff he used to do. Wow... We've come a long way.5
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Does linux suck? Imho, Yes.
A lot of the people bash windows regarding automatic restarts, updates, bsod etc.
I may be unusually lucky, but the last bsod I saw was in 2014 because of a faulty synaptics driver.
I've really tried to use linux to see what the hype is all about. Quite frankly, it sucked. The first time it wiped out all my data, I realized the value of backups. Hence I do not have a single pic of my school now, thanks to complicated ubuntu mounting.
Next is driver support. When I plug in a device, I expect it to work. I don't want to spend a day googling for drivers.
Why the fuck would I want to use a black terminal which gives me a headache. Am I in 1980? Which sadistic asshole designed vim ?
I have seen linux developers who claim to be linux experts and love linux. They take so long to do simple shit. For god's sake don't tell me there are GUI versions of linux available. I'd rather work in windows 95.
Why in the world would anyone want to use ls to see the contents of a directory! It is seriously so fucking unproductive.
I can't just download a software, click next a couple of times, and be done. No no no. I've to do sudo apt get update. Then try to find the fucking package. And if all goes well, there's always the dependency issue which is going to bite me in the ass. If google and stackoverflow go down, most linux devs will die a cruel death.
Fuck you linux.
I'm not saying windows 10 is the best, but at least I don't have to crawl through shit to use it. If you don't like automatic updates, disable it you moron. It is easier than renaming a damn file in linux.55 -
The moment when you start looking into Open Source, view contributors out of curiosity and pick one at random, view his work only to find out that the guy has been developing software since the 1980's before your parents were even married.
Holy shit.1 -
An original sticker from the exhibition "Hello Computer" at Tekniska Museet in Stockholm 1980 when I, 10-year old, first came in contact with a computer - an ABC80 with some chess game on it...and the rest is pretty much history :-)
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After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.
O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev
O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good
*An hour passes by*
O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*
TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.
Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer... -
Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?
** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **
PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?12 -
Sometime in the mid to late 1980's my brother and I cut our teeth on a Commodore 64 with Basic. We had the tape drive, 1541 Disk Drives, and the main unit and a lot of C64 centric magazines my dad subscribed to. Each one of the magazines had a snippet of code in a series so that once you had 6 volumes of the magazine, you had a full free game that you got to write by yourself. We decided to write a Hangman game. Since we were the programmers, we already knew all the possible words stored in the wordlist, so it got old quick. One thing that hasn't changed is that my brother had the tenacity and mettle for the intensive logic based parts of the code and I was in it for the colors and graphics. Although we went through some awkward years and many different styles and trends, both of us graduated with computer science degrees at Arkansas State University. Funny thing is, I kept making graphics, CSS, UI, front end, and pretty stuff, and he's still the guy behind the scenes on the heavy lifting and logical stuff. Not that either of us are slacks on the opposite ends of our skilsets, but it's fun to have someone that compliments your work with a deeper understanding. I guess for me it was 2009 when I turned on the full time DEV switch after we published our first website together. It's been through many iterations and is unfortunately a Wordpress site now, but we've been selling BBQ sauce online since 2009 at http://jimquessenberry.com. This wasn't my first website, but it's the first one that's seen moderate success that someone else didn't pay the bill for. I guess you could say that our Commodore 64 Hangman game, and our VBASIC game The Big Giant Head for 386 finally ended up as a polished website for selling our Dad's world class products.1
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My IT-teacher has a website. Aside from it looking like from 1980 (which is ok), he has a "security js Mail decryption":
In his page there is a <script> with a simple yet custom de/encrypt function. Then his E-Mail is an <a href="javascript:mailto:function('rubberish173848'>private email</a>. (Or something like that)
You can just run this link (open email app and read it) or use the same function and same href in the browser console and read it. It sounds so stupid.
(Yet I figured out he probably doesn't want bots to spam his mail, so maybe I am stupid)1 -
Anyone else feels technology didn't have a major turning point in a while?
I mean, since the late 1980's we had an explosion of technologies:
Gaming consoles
Macintosh
Windows
GNU/Linux
World Wide Web
Smartphones
The rise of advanced web applications and JavaScript
But now? It seems like stagnation for the past 5-10 years or so.
Sure here and there there some nice stuff(like Cryptocurrency, Cloud services, IoT), but nothing that feels completely game-changing.
What do you think will be the next thing that will completely change our lives?18 -
Sometimes just I hate school.
While my gf had to take 2 "Leistungskurse" ("advanced courses"), I have to take 3.
Also, our little-country-side school doesn't offer IT-class as a Leistungskurs. So besides Math, I need 2 extra courses I am super-not interested in. I chose English since it's okay (but I'm not really good either) and ( ._.) chemistry. I had a good teacher in 10th grade but now I have this teacher who
- uses 1980 material
- explains not/bad most times
- is childish as fuck (we are 17-18 y/o)
- expects too much (we need to learn everything by heart)
- throws ugly, unorganized prints at us w/o context & explaination
and I could name more. My A-levels are going to be so fucking bad. Tuesday is my chemistry exam. Kill me, please......4 -
We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)
me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.
I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal... -
Coolest project I'll continually be working on.
http://jimquessenberry.com
Selling my Dad's famous BBQ sauces and rubs has been my hobby and passion for years. I'm lucky that my Dad was a computer enthusiast in the 1980's and also had a knack for marketing himself. All the while also being a somewhat famous character in the pioneering sport of competition BBQ cooking.
My brother and I shared the following machines growing up:
Commodore 64 w/ 2 Disk Drives, VicModem, & Tape Drive
Tandy 1000 Original Radio Shack IBM PC Clone
IBM 5150 w/ 20mb Hard Drive Expansion (Still Have This In Near Mint Condition)
Tandy 1000 RSX 386 with Win 3.11 For Networks
A Homebuilt Pentium 90 MHz Tower with Soundblaster and 16bit onboard video.
All that time on those machines learning various flavors of BASIC and crude graphic design got me where I am today.
That and learning how to BBQ... ;)8 -
WARNING - a lot of text.
I am open for questions and discussions :)
I am not an education program specialist and I can't decide what's best for everyone. It is hard process of managing the prigram which is going through a lot of instances.
Computer Science.
Speaking about schools: regular schools does not prepare computer scientists. I have a lot of thoughts abouth whether we need or do NOT need such amount of knowledge in some subjects, but that's completely different story. Back to cs.
The main problem is that IT sphere evolves exceedingly fast (compared to others) and education system adaptation is honestly too slow.
SC studies in schools needs to be reformed almost every year to accept updates and corrections, but education system in most countries does not support that, thats the main problem. In basic course, which is for everyone I'd suggest to tell about brief computer usage, like office, OS basics, etc. But not only MS stuff... Linux is no more that nerdy stuff from 90', it's evolved and ready to use OS for everyone. So basic OS tour, like wtf is MAC, Linux (you can show Ubuntu/Mint, etc - the easy stuff) would be great... Also, show students cloud technologies. Like, you have an option to do *that* in your browser! And, yeah, classy stuff like what's USB and what's MB/GB and other basic stuff.. not digging into it for 6 months, but just brief overview wuth some useful info... Everyone had seen a PC by the time they are studying cs anyway.. and somewhere at the end we can introduce programming, what you can do with it and maybe hello world in whatever language, but no more.. 'cause it's still class for everyone, no need to explain stars there.
For last years, where shit's getting serious, like where you can choose: study cs or not - there we can teach programming. In my country it's 2 years. It's possible to cover OOP principles of +/- modern language (Java or C++ is not bad too, maybe even GO, whatever, that's not me who will decide it. Point that it's not from 70') + VCS + sime real world app like simplified, but still functional bookstore managing app.
That's about schools.
Speaking about universities - logic isbthe same. It needs to be modern and accept corrections and updates every year. And now it depends on what you're studying there. Are you going to have software engineering diploma or business system analyst...
Generally speaking, for developers - we need more real world scenarios and I guess, some technologies and frameworks. Ofc, theory too, but not that stuff from 1980. Come-on, nowadays nobody specifies 1 functional requirement in several pages and, generally, nobody is writing that specification for 2 years. Product becomes obsolete and it's haven't even started yet.
Everything changes, whether it is how we write specification documents, or literally anything else in IT.
Once more, morale: update CS program yearly, goddammit
How to do it - it's the whole another topic.
Thank you for reading.3 -
I started writing basic in 1980 on my stepfather's Apple ][+. I was about ten. Then I got a Commodore 64 and got this awesome program called Gary's Game Kitchen. It had a Sprite editor and you programmed it by writing pseudo code. From there I learned C, then got jobs in Visual Basic and vb for Microsoft office (yuck!). Then I discovered Linux and became a web developer. *Hugs vim*
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