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Search - "90's"
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My non techie girlfriend :) <3
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She: Hey I am getting a new phone!
Me: which one?
She: Apple I phone
Me: oh cool!
She: yea I am really excited. I can't wait to have more space on my phone. I can't have anything on my current phone.
Me: yup.
She: new phone will have a lot of storage space. Its going to be 64MB. Imagine all the things I can do with it now.
Me: Hey, the 90's called, they want their storage sizes back.
*hilarious laughter ensues*
Dat iPhone crowd doe. Android 4 life.13 -
TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN
I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳
We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;
JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).
HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).
There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.
No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.
You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.
Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!
Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!
Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.
...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!22 -
I have a lot of respect for anyone who can design a good looking website.
I can code like crazy. And I was a freelance classically trained illustrator for 10 years. But ask me to design a website and it's all spinning giffs, midi tracks, and Comic Sans. Some kind of early 90's geocities nightmare.7 -
Email. Fuck everything about it.
It's an obnoxious queue of messages I somehow must handle. And everyone in society expects you to have email. You can cancel your phone number, maybe even live without a house... but every hobo still must check their email.
It is an endless shitstream of things I don't want. Like a garden with some nice tomato plants, but then a really smelly weed starts invading and no matter what you do it keeps coming back.
I don't want to login to unsubscribe. I don't care about your "notifications center", or "managing the offers you receive from us".
And then your boss asks you to design an email campaign... I don't want to receive that shit, why would our customers? And even if I agreed with using email as a communication channel... YOU THOUGHT CSS IN INTERNET EXPLORER WAS A BITCH?
No really. Fuck email. Fuck everything about it.15 -
Resurrect happypenguin.org
This particular site appeared in the year 1998 with the goal to make gaming on Linux easier and more fun.
Unfortunately, 2013 the site went down due to lack of funding and time for the creator Bob Zimbinski. He released the database to the public but removed the code itself because it was created in the 90's and was a big security risk.
I want to resurrect happypenguin.org and I want some brave souls who want to participate with this. I am not a coder (I can only sysadmin) so It would be awesome if someone wanted to help out with this.
Would be awesome if you could make if look like the classic site, or make it very similar to it or https://distrowatch.com/ that also has a very retro style to it. It would also be great if the site was ad-free.
I will take care of the hosting part (servers, DNS, domain).50 -
Imagine, you get employed to restart a software project. They tell you, but first we should get this old software running. It's 'almost finished'.
A WPF application running on a soc ... with a 10" touchscreen on win10, a embedded solution, to control a machine, which has been already sold to customers. You think, 'ok, WTF, why is this happening'?
You open the old software - it crashes immediately.
You open it again but now you are so clever to copy an xml file manually to the root folder and see all of it's beauty for the first time (after waiting for the freezed GUI to become responsive):
* a static logo of the company, taking about 1/5 of the screen horizontally
* circle buttons
* and a navigation interface made in the early 90's from a child
So you click a button and - it crashes.
You restart the software.
You type something like 'abc' in a 'numberfield' - it crashes.
OK ... now you start the application again and try to navigate to another view - and? of course it crashes again.
You are excited to finally open the source code of this masterpiece.
Thank you jesus, the 'dev' who did this, didn't forget to write every business logic in the code behind of the views.
He even managed to put 6 views into one and put all their logig in the code behind!
He doesn't know what binding is or a pattern like MVVM.
But hey, there is also no validation of anything, not even checks for null.
He was so clever to use the GUI as his place to save data and there is a lot of parsing going on here, every time a value changes.
A thread must be something he never heard about - so thats why the GUI always freezes.
You tell them: It would be faster to rewrite the whole thing, because you wouldn't call it even an alpha. Nobody listenes.
Time passes by, new features must be implemented in this abomination, you try to make the cripple walk and everyone keeps asking: 'When we can start the new software?' and the guy who wrote this piece of shit in the first place, tries to give you good advice in coding and is telling you again: 'It was almost finished.' *facepalm*
And you? You would like to do him and humanity a big favour by hiting him hard in the face and breaking his hands, so he can never lay a hand on any keyboard again, to produce something no one serious would ever call code.4 -
The story of Netscape and Internet Explorer really proves the irony of fate! And how life will come back to bite you.
Back in the 90's you had to pay for browsers like Netscape (it was called a navigator but same thing) but after Microsoft released IE for free with your windows copy in 2002 it crushed Netscape and nobody used it anymore (the graph below).
But! Netscape wouldn't give up and before the company died after it made legal accusations against Microsoft and Bill Gates and made them pay for that they did, but Netscape was too far gone and already were falling apart they decided to make a self detonation (I guess that's what they thought being in that tight corner) and they released the code as open source which would later get taken by Mozilla and be the code base for Firefox.
Now look at how much better Firefox is and how nobody uses the shitty IE!
Kind of reminds me of the scene from watchmen where Rorshack was in prison and said the best sentence in the movie "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here WITH ME!"17 -
In the late 90's before I knew anything about web development at all I used to think HTML was an abbreviation for hotmail.5
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I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.
While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.
When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.
Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.
Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?11 -
Late 90's, I was about 12-13, Realized the source I was viewing was pretty much the whole website. Created a tribute page for rock music. It looked like a regular ol' shitty 90's website. Then one day my father showed me it's mentioned in quite a complementing way in a big national newspaper under the web section, didn't realize till much later that he was probably the one who informed them about its existence, but it was too late, as I've already tasted the fame&glory. Thanks dad! :)
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So my job doesnt use any version control. They just edit the files directly from the network drive. Wtf? Is this the 90's?4
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I wish all open source desktop applications had the same combination of expert features and polish as Blender.
The state of FOSS applications for creating diagrams, DB management & ERD, drawing SVGs, editing video, slideshow presentations, document processing, etc -- Yeah just all of it seems to be either stuck in some 90's UX paradigm, or it's a basic-as-fuck Electron app with 12 buttons for toddlers.
I know... I know... it's FOSS, can't be entitled.
But there's a part of me that really wants to be.
Fuck it, I'm just going to be entitled.
FUCK YOU LAZY FOSS DEVS, GET YOUR FUCKING SHIT TOGETHER AND MAKE SOME MODERN APPS. THROW YOUR GTK TOOLKIT BULLSHIT IN THE TRASH, GO CHOKE ON YOUR RETARDED WINDOWS-95 THEMED TOOLBARS, AND START MOTHERFUCKING COMPETING. YOU'RE BEING SURPASSED BY VENDOR LOCKED $50/MONTH CLOUD ABOMINATIONS MADE FOR COKE SNORTING DIMWITS. DON'T GIVE ME THAT "BUT PEOPLE WORK ON IT FOR FREE" CRAP, IF BLENDER CAN MAKE A GREAT COMPETING PRODUCT THEN SO CAN YOU.
Ah, completely unjustified and unfair.
But it still feels really, REALLY great to get it off my chest.
Now that I have descended from my soapbox, I'll go drag my useless developer ass over to the nearest FOSS project and see how I can contribute to a slightly less depressing future.15 -
[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"
........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND4 -
Some of the dinosaurs maintaining legacy systems are rather well meaning, but somewhat frustratingly don't seem to have updated their knowledge of what counts as "a lot of storage space" beyond the early 90's. Just asked one of them if they could dump all the legacy logs to AWS each day so we could keep them for 6 months or so (they're rolled over weekly otherwise.)
"Well I mean we can, but are you sure? *All* the logs? You could end up storing close to 100MB of logs a month! Won't that be prohibitively expensive?!"
It's rather cute really.11 -
I've seen several rants about dumb/useless teachers, college and the CS degree studies; today is a good day to vent out some "old" memories.
Around two semesters ago I enrolled in a Database seminar with this guy, a tall geek from the 80's with a squeaky voice, so squeaky mice could had an aneurysm if they listened to him.
Either way this guy was a mess, he said he was an awesome coder, that we were still "peasants" when it came to coding, that relational databases had nothing on him since he was an awesome freelancer and did databases every day, that we had to redo the programming course with him and with his shitty, pulled out of the ass own C++ style guide with over 64 different redacted rules.
He gave us sample code of "how it should be done" in Java...it ain't my favorite language but fuck me a fucking donkey could have written better code with his ass!! He even rewrote Java's standard input function and made it highly inefficient. He still wrote in a structural paradigm in OOP languages! And he dared to make this code reviews were he would proyect someone's code and mock it in front of the class as he took off points, sometimes going to the negative realm (3,2,1,0,-1...)
But you know what's shittier? That he actually didn't even attend, 90% of the time, it was literally this:
> Good morning class
> Checks attendance. . .
> I'll be back, I'm going to check in...
> 1 hour 45 minutes later (class was 2 hrs long) - comes back
> do you have any doubts?
> O.o no...? I'm ok.
> We're done
Not only that, he scheduled from 4 to 17 homeworks throughout the week, I did the math, that was around 354 files from everyone; of course he didn't check them, other students from higher semesters did and they gained each point taken from students making students from lower semesters get the short end of the stick.
How did I pass? He didn't understood my code or database schema and he knew he couldn't fail me as he had no ground to stand on.
Thanks for listening, if you got to the end of this long ass post and had a similar experience I'd love to read it.13 -
Been playing a lot of old NES games lately.
Made me think how did they develop and program such amazing games with primitive 80'-90's technologies, assembly/c and no internet.
Now with all the tech we have most games are crap and based on webshit or mobile.3 -
Hi guys, this is my first rant so bear with me..
Stupid Indian fucking institutes doesn't give a shit about the things we learn in the institute. This curriculum is like from the 90's. I learnt NodeJS recently and I thought wow a new concept, not even my professor knows about it. I must be on top of the world or at least any way near it and then I see these video tutorials on the internet which are posted 2 years ago. OH MY GOD!! The thing is that my department's HOD doesn't know about that and the funny thing is that I'm doing a project under him "SECURITY OF WEB APPLICATIONS" and the only thing he knows is PHP. And FYI I'm not studying in an institute which is oblivious to the outside world. It's called an NIT, an institute of national fucking importance. At the end, I blame myself though. I should have been on myself not being completely dependent on the professors for knowledge.
I could fill the entire text area with the rant.
But then people will start ranting about the rant.
I will be posting more Indian-devRant soon so.. peace till then.
( I bet they don't know about Git/Github too)24 -
Rant about a german problem in english
I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.14 -
Yesterday, I tried to code without googling to see how far I can go. After 20 minutes of coding I run into a problem. I just couldn't make my angularjs app to work with ASP.Net MVC antiforgerytoken. I tried my best to solve it but no luck.
After 2 hours I finally gave up and connect my laptop to network and search for answer, within a few seconds. Google give my this link: http://ojdevelops.com/2016/01/....
After only few minutes I finally make my code to work. And I realized that there is no way I can figure this things out using only my head. I still need the help of community to get things done.
So my question is. During the 80's and 90's how did the old programmers get themselves unstuck when problem like this arrive?8 -
Fuck these stupid frustrating trends. It drives me fucking crazy. Scrolling a website and sections overlap each other, text flying in as you scroll, stuff fading in, images moving over text panels. FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!!! I want to read the content, I don't want to feel sick and confused. Clients - DO NOT SEND ME A LINK TO THIS KIND OF WORTHLESS SHIT, SAYING 'I WANT IT LIKE THIS'.
Used sparingly and intelligently, animation can add to the UX, but it rarely is.
Remember the 90's when lazy designers used the photoshop bevel and emboss filter on every fucking thing, the web was contaminated. Cunts.1 -
One of the things I really hate on Windows (and Microsoft software in general) is that the keyboard shortcuts are localized therefore are different from 90% of the apps that I use on a daily basis.
Two examples of this (EN-US vs PT-PT):
- "Save" is "Gravar" while "Underline" is "Sublinhar". This means that whenever I press Ctrl + S to save a doc in MS Word I underline a word instead of saving the bloody document.
- "All" is "Tudo" so when I want to select all the itens on a folder in the File Explorer I have to press Ctrl + T, the same shortcut I press in pretty much every single tabbed app to open a new tab.
This is terrible for the user experience because different languages provide different keyboard shortcuts to the user which goes against the concept of the usefulness of a keyboard shortcut: perform an action from anywhere without having to know its menu or menu description.11 -
University Final Viva for OOP with C++
(Yeah, that first line is a rant in itself for the likes of me and Mr. Torvalds)
Assistant Professor:
Tell me a few "functions" in C++ STL algorithm header
Me:
*starts off with the first one that came to my mind*
sort()
AP: Huh? a I'm asking the Algorithms in C++ STL
Me: Yes, this is one of them Ma'am.
She looked at me as if I told her that I'm dating her daughter. It became clear she doesn't know about it and she'll gladly deduct my marks for getting it wrong. So I explained how Sort() is a hybrid of quicksort, heap sort and insertion sort. (Read about it an hour ago while doing a competitive programming question)
AP: Tell me the ones we did in class.
I haven't attended those classes, so I just told her the ones I knew.
After a couple more infuriating questions, which themselves sounded right from a book published in the 90's, she gave me 10/15.
This is what's wrong with India's Education system, even the teachers know only the stuff mentioned in the course hand-outs. Forget brownie points, you get screwed over by the teachers for actually knowing stuff and using it.8 -
Hired a designer below me.. guy never wrote a full back nor frontend... Used npm shit for all his solutions and worked his way above me just by kissing ass and polluting the codebase in such a way 70% would be open source shitty plugins for shit he could not do by himself code wise...
At some point he assigned some of his tasks to me and I couldn't work with his patchy framework that was non existent within the codebase I worked on ...
At some point between npm installed tantrums I got pulled up to HR because my code quality dropped... And it was this fucktart that accused me of this saying I could not do modern development...
In the end I either had to butkiss after his butts or just quit, so I did the latter... I told him and HR I owned alot more code quality than this asshat but just not his way of working and therefor it was more an issue of code equality I was never aware of ...
A month after that the company got overtaken by some silicon valley bullshit company buying up competition, and he is still working within that shithole dealing with 90's tech...
Was the best thing that happened to me, after that I grew alot in skillset and such by investments from other jobs and projects... If I would still work there today I would consider myself a caveman6 -
My best case "Deploy Bittersweet Pipeline":
Prep a bunch of carrots, cucumber and tomatoes for day snacks. Roll & cut some pasta noodles, cook stock with fresh veggies & mushrooms, add some droopy soft boiled egg(s) to the broth, drizzle in some black garlic hot sauce. Enjoy that breakfast with an unsweetened Australian flat white and a half-liter cup of chai spiced green tea. Watch some science/tech/woodworking/cooking YouTube videos while feeding my Bittersweet Jr girl.
(yeah my mood is determined for about 90% by food)
Fire up docker compose & IDEs, and start refactoring code and migrating/fixing old databases.
My worst case "Fatal Incident Bittersweet Repair & Recovery Process":
Stuck while refactoring the worst kind of trash code since 9am.
Pour a glass of Tawny Port at 9pm. Pour a glass of cognac at 11pm. Unwrap 3 chocolate bars and break them into chunks in a bowl. Look at IDE, get nauseated, not from the booze or chocolate, but from the code.
Can't fall asleep because code is too broken, that crap should simply not exist. Take some LSD and amphetamine, can't sleep anyway. Start splitting several 10k-line-long files into smaller classes, type until my fingers have blisters. Empty two bags of Doritos, order a large Falafel with extra garlic sauce at 4am.
Fall asleep at 5am with my face on my keyboard, wake up at 9am with keyboard pattern on my skin.
Cook some hangover noodles.
Call work that I'm taking 3 days off. Feed Bittersweet Jr while I watch some YouTube channels with her. Bittersweet has successfully rebooted.1 -
literally what the fuck is the point of C++
>takes 3 years to make anything half-functional
>language was made in like fucking 1902 so it's damn near fucking impossible to make anything that works without sifting through bumfuck retarded syntax/libraries
>error messages that tell you absolutely nothing of use and are indecipherable garbage 90% of the time
fuck C, fuck it's retarded downie little brother C++, and fuck the stupid fucking boomers who say you're not a real programmer unless you force yourself to become a masochist by using either one of these stupid fucking languages
"oh but it's fast!!11!1!!" yeah but working with it sure as fuck isn't
half the fucking time if I just stop including certain headers in another file then the compiler throws like literally 400 fucking errors at me even though the thing(s) I excluded had no bearing on whatever the compiler decides it wants to loudly bitch and whine about
"oh but games were made on it!!!!111!" yeah not without fucking horrific spaghetti code and 900000 different libraries and dependancies designed just to make a single fucking window39 -
I'm so fucking sick of the lack of great modern open source DB tooling.
MySQL Workbench can go suck a big fat herpes-ridden cock, it's horrible.
Dbeaver is a clunky 90's tool, which charges two Netflixes (yes, that is a valid $/month monetary unit) just to connect to a NoSQL DB.
Datagrip is nice, but has the same outrageously expensive pricing. I paid for it, and couldn't use it for my local docker DB during my holiday because it couldn't connect to the license server. Fuck you, Jetbrains. Your software is nice, but your DRM makes me hate you.
And then ERD software... It's either some hard-to-use afterthought piece of crap bundled with the DB IDE, some generic diagramming tool which makes DB-specific work needlessly unergonomic, or some vendor-locked online tool.
Fuck this shit, I'm making my own DB admin tool. With blackjack. And hookers. 😡12 -
In my quest to find a nice dark theme file manager, I stumbled upon this thing called Q-Dir. By default it looks like it comes straight out of the 90's, but after a bit of tweaking here and there it actually turned out really nice!
If you're like me and want the dark theme before Redstone 5 finally arrives but don't want to gobble up all your data in Insiders either, this is actually a pretty solid replacement. Hopefully that'll save some poor sods from having to go through the trouble of finding the holy grail of the dark theme in file managers :)
http://softwareok.com//...4 -
I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:
Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business
So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...
Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...
I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!
Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.
This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...
And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true
BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torturerant marshall_mathers worklife sugar-free_tateless_cake_decorant_figure_boss missolddays oldtimes_rants5 -
90's programmer used to code in turbo
C and ms-dos. Nowadays ide also make us frustrated sometimes.8 -
The challenge: a Dell Latitude XPi CD 133ST. It has a Pentium 133MHz, 32MB memory, and a 2GB HDD. I think I have some CD's with Mandrake from the late 90's. I hope. And mission impossible, an IBM Workpad z50 with a MIPS 4000 and 8MB split 50/50 between storage and program memory. Think that one will just be a large paper weight or door stop.17
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So someone here had the job to merge the current version of our software into another older repo.
(That older repo has some features for future versions, that should be only in there ... don´t ask ... not my decision)
Took him long enough. But he forgot to check one thing while merging: The encoding of the files.
And we´re german...
ALL umlauts, and all other special chars in the code were replaced with this: �
No global replace, because all chars were replaced with the same char.
(Why the fuck do we have special chars in the code in the first place???)
So to not need him to start all over again I compiled a list of common german words containing umlauts and did a global search and replace.
I think I got 90% of the errors like that.
Now he´s going to correct the rest of the errors.
Fuck the comments in the code though.
Just a waste of time...5 -
I'm not sure *why*, but I increasingly see the following pattern:
Challenge a primarily OO / imperative dev by saying OO or imperative styles aren't always a good fit, and that a stateless functional approach can offer advantages, and you often get something akin to:
"Yeah, it's new to me so I'm still working my way around it, but I get that. Makes a lot of sense."
Challenge a functional dev by saying the functional style isn't always best, and in some cases functional isn't a good fit, and you tend to get:
"YOU IMBECILE! YOU ARE SIMPLY CONSTRAINED BY YOUR YEARS OF MINDLESSLY FOLLOWING THE OO HERD! FUNCTIONAL IS ALWAYS SUPERIOR!! ALWAYS, I TELL YOU!!"
I mean geez guys, calm down and learn it's just another tool in the toolbox. I get that popular paradigms emerge and have their die-hard supporters, but I didn't even see this kind of thing when OO became the "new thing everyone needs to use for everything" in the 90's.3 -
Skrew all these "modern" css frameworks, I'm returning to the 90's bitches!!!
https://nostalgic-css.github.io/NES...3 -
Day 7 post turning 30:
I can feel the boomer mentality kicking in at full strength.
I find myself talking to people about how 90's music was so great and kids these days won't get to appreciate it.
I see so many people with jobs who are significantly younger than me.
I sleep a couple hours more than I used to.
I live a routine life which is how I don't feel time passing by me.
I hear a voice inside my head telling me to quit gym because i am gonna grow weak anyway. Also, it would help with my productivity.12 -
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
It was the late 80's or early 90's, I was around 10 years old, and my jaw dropped when I typed this on the Atari 800XL my parents had just given to me.
Hooked ever since :)3 -
Back in the late 90's when I got started in my career - had a boss that didn't known the difference between Java and JavaScript. I made the mistake of trying to explain the difference. If you can keep the boss in the dark and get away with it - do it. Ignorance is bliss.1
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Fuck sake, so my bank has been migrating/rolling out new IT system and app/site have been broken for about a week (others noted evidence of devs debugging in production)
Assuming I don't lose my money as some mischievous assholes will inevitably exploit the fuck up, and rob the bank, I will be moving my funds to a different bank...
In mean time I'm trying to prepare for uni, and they're making a ton of semi-random changes in addition to rolling out a site with course details and info along those line, and good fucking god is it bad.
Is is slow as fuck? Check. Does it use never-seen-before naming for standard things? Check! Is the UI pulled from late 90's? YOOU BETCHA! Are the pages bloated with unnecessary content? Fuck yeah! Do I get SQL exceptions when I finally locate my course? Of course I do. Does clicking "back" take me back to the landing page instead of previous page, when I'm several steps deep? .....
I could keep going, but don't feel like ranting and feel more like punching someone in the throat.repeatedly. -
I really like Stack Overflow's new design. I specially like how they mix Times New Roman and Comic Sans, it's really seamless...
Such UX, much design, very nostalgia
Furthermore, I think we can all agree that
Purple 90's Theme > Dark Theme2 -
I didn't leave, I just got busy working 60 hour weeks in between studying.
I found a new method called matrix decomposition (not the known method of the same name).
Premise is that you break a semiprime down into its component numbers and magnitudes, lets say 697 for example. It becomes 600, 90, and 7.
Then you break each of those down into their prime factorizations (with exponents).
So you get something like
>>> decon(697)
offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]
offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]
offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]
And it turns out that in larger numbers there are distinct patterns that act as maps at each offset (or magnitude) of the product, mapping to the respective magnitudes and digits of the factors.
For example I can pretty reliably predict from a product, where the '8's are in its factors.
Apparently theres a whole host of rules like this.
So what I've done is gone an started writing an interpreter with some pseudo-assembly I defined. This has been ongoing for maybe a month, and I've had very little time to work on it in between at my job (which I'm about to be late for here if I don't start getting ready, lol).
Anyway, long and the short of it, the plan is to generate a large data set of primes and their products, and then write a rules engine to generate sets of my custom assembly language, and then fitness test and validate them, winnowing what doesn't work.
The end product should be a function that lets me map from the digits of a product to all the digits of its factors.
It technically already works, like I've printed out a ton of products and eyeballed patterns to derive custom rules, its just not the complete set yet. And instead of spending months or years doing that I'm just gonna finish the system to automatically derive them for me. The rules I found so far have tested out successfully every time, and whether or not the engine finds those will be the test case for if the broader system is viable, but everything looks legit.
I wouldn't have persued this except when I realized the production of semiprimes *must* be non-eularian (long story), it occured to me that there must be rich internal representations mapping products to factors, that we were simply missing.
I'll go into more details in a later post, maybe not today, because I'm working till close tonight (won't be back till 3 am), but after 4 1/2 years the work is bearing fruit.
Also, its good to see you all again. I fucking missed you guys.9 -
Oh boy, this is gonna be good:
TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck
So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:
The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.
So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!
This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.
I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.
Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!
Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...
The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.
But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.
So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)
So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"
So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones6 -
I get it, Java is an old language that's verbose as the day is long. But damn, please don't make it *even more verbose* than it needs to be. We've got the tools now to make it at least somewhat tolerable.
I mean, come on, we've got lombok, we've got streams, and we've had Comparator.comparing since Java 8. That's the best part of a decade you've had the luxury of writing single line comparator implementations out the box, but noooo, certain people have to pretend they're stuck in the 90's by thinking these multiple if / else statements are somehow still the best way of doing things.
Dahhh. Skill up people. This is not an industry where you can just do everything how you did it 20 years ago and call it good.5 -
Had a dream last night...
My grandmother gave me a flip phone as a present. My first thought was "really?"
But after flipping it open, I found that it had some gaming buttons (A, B, Start, etc). Also, it had a place to insert Gameboy games.
It was the most 90's/early 2000's phone ever.2 -
Sorry to keep whining about my stupid fucking job, but y'all, I think I'm nearing my limit.
There's some good...I am pretty much free to resolve issues any way I want to, as the only other person in the company who "codes" only knows one old ass language that doesn't apply to 90% of the rest of the tech stack at all, and some SQL - all of that to say, we may disagree, but ultimately, these matters are always deferred to me at the end of the day, insofar as the actual implementation goes (which is to say I am not micromanaged). At least as far as non-visuals are concerned, because those of course, are the most important things. Button colors and shit, woo hoo**. That's what we should focus on as we're bringing in potentially millions of dollars per month - the god damn button color and collapsible accordions based on data type over the shit ass DB performance bottleneck, the lack of redundancy or backups (aside from the one I made soon after I started -- literally saved everyone today because of that. My thanks? None, and more bullshit tasks) or the 300GB+ spaghetti code nightmare that is the literal circulatory system of the FUCKING COMPANY. Hundreds of people depend on it for their livelihoods, and those of their families, but fuck me in the face, right? I'm just a god damn nerd who has worked for the federal government, a handful of fortune 500's, a couple of fortune 100's, some startups, etc. But the fuck do I know about the lifecycle of companies?
I could continue ranting, but what's the point? I've got a nice little adage that I've started to live by, and y'all might appreciate it: "If everything is a priority/is important, nothing is". These folks just don't fucking get it. I'm torn because, on the one hand, they waste my time and kinda underpay me, in addition to forcing me to be onsite for 50 hours a week. They don't listen to me, couldn't give a flying shit about my experientially based opinions. I'm just a fucking chimp with a typewriter, there to take commands like a fucking waiter. But there's a lot of job security, assuming I don't fucking snap one day, and the job market for devs (I'm sure I don't need to tell you) is hostile atm. I'm also drinking far more than usual, and I really need to do something about that. It's only wednesday - I think...not 100% on that truth be told, and I logged my fourth trip to the liquor store this week already.
**Dear backenders - don't ever learn front end, or if you do, just lie about it to avoid being designated full stack. It's not worth it.5 -
Wellp, I just had a cowoker send me a screenshot. By that I mean a .pdf of the application we both work on that looks like she somehow manifested the program into the physical world and ran it through an early 90's copier, scanned the resulting piece of paper, and sent me that.
-
Time Travel.
Go and steal great ideas, computers, mobile devices, software etc from the future.
Then sell it for a shitton of money in the 90's -
The process of making my paging MIDI player has ground to a halt IMMEDIATELY:
Format 1 MIDIs.
There are 3 MIDI types: Format 0, 1, and 2.
Format 0 is two chunks long. One track chunk and the header chunk. Can be played with literally one chunk_load() call in my player.
Format 2 is (n+1) chunks long, with n being defined in the header chunk (which makes up the +1.) Can be played with one chunk_load() call per chunk in my player.
Format 1... is (n+1) chunks long, same as Format 2, but instead of being played one chunk at a time in sequence, it requires you play all chunks
AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.
65534 maximum chunks (first track chunk is global tempo events and has no notes), maximum notes per chunk of ((FFFFFFFFh byte max chunk data area length)/3 = 1,431,655,763d)/2 (as Note On and Note Off have to be done for every note for it to be a valid note, and each eats 3 bytes) = 715,827,881 notes (truncated from 715,827,881.5), 715,827,881 * 65534 (max number of tracks with notes) = a grand total of 46,911,064,353,454 absolute maximum notes. At 6 bytes per (valid) note, disregarding track headers and footers, that's 281,466,386,120,724 bytes of memory at absolute minimum, or 255.992 TERABYTES of note data alone.
All potentially having to be played
ALL
AT
ONCE.
This wouldn't be so bad I thought at the start... I wasn't planning on supporting them.
Except...
>= 90% of MIDIs are Format 1.
Yup. The one format seemingly deliberately built not to be paged of the three is BY FAR the most common, even in cases where Format 0 would be a better fit.
Guess this is why no other player pages out MIDIs: the files are most commonly built specifically to disallow it.
Format 1 and 2 differ in the following way: Format 1's chunks all have to hit the piano keys, so to speak, all at once. Format 2's chunks hit one-by-one, even though it can have the same staggering number of notes as Format 1. One is built for short, detailed MIDIs, one for long, sparse ones.
No one seems to be making long ones.6 -
My last company had a code base originating in the 90's and they still write most parts of the GUI with a library that is a thin layer on top of Win32 API, with a self-rolled "ORM" for DB access (with LOTS of enums) and all that with >2million lines of C++ code. The code includes at least two implementations of std vector and std:list. One of which is even *named* std::vector. Feels good remembering that I have left that behind2
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TL;DR: What's cool about your company or what you'd like to have in your company?
I work at a small company (<50 employee) but it has some time around (I'd say almost 20 years or so).
The thing is, the boss here is cheap or inattentive or outdated or all previous options. This translates into a company stuck in the 90's management ways. Well, maybe late 90's.
So we don't have a lot of 'cool' or nice things here; and I've been thinking of coming up with a proposal of a progressive update of some things that gives us (the employees) some sort of identity.
For example, I think that small things like personalized notebooks or post-its or t-shirts give the employees some sort of sense of belonging. We don't have any of that. The only thing we have are business cards and I find them completely useless since I don't visit customers and all my communication with them is via email.
One thing I find very cool is when one employee starts in a company, in their first day they get a 'welcome kit' (example picture): notebook, pen, cup, t-shirt... It may look like stupid shit but it's way better and more motivating than the "Sit here and that's it" welcome I got when I started here.
So I wanna do a proposal of this sort of things that we can adopt, and I wanna know what do you find cool in your company or what would you like your company did so you'd feel more confortable or 'proud' (maybe that's not the word) of working there.6 -
To all of you:
Nobody enjoys loading screens. Just because the UI reacts on things, doesn't mean that the actual job gets fucking done.
So instead of using some shitty progressbar you copied from a dev who copied it from a 90's textbook, show some cat images.
The fucking internet is full of it and if your shitty Hello World app that is wasting 300MB of my RAM is dieing in the middle of some loading process, you could at least ease my pain.
Please. Show cat images instead of a progressbar. Thank you ❤️8 -
Linux or Windows - still a problem for inexperienced computer users.
I was an IT professional for 35 years but haven't looked at a line of code for 10 years. And it certainly looks different today -
I have trouble using my smart Phone. I have always disliked the intimidation tehniques practised by Microsoft over the years. When
I was running OS2 in the 90's I couldn't get any software for it because MS had persuaded the developers not to release any OS2 versions until Chicago (AKA WIN95) was released. I was forced to use Windows for years until I finally decided to try Linux. Linux
is a great answer but unfortunately unless you are a current programmer there seems to be some situations that force you to maintain a version of Windows (setting up devices, Printers and developed software). Now that UEFI has been introduced as the standard in new PCs it is very difficult just to install and run Linux. So as WIN10 (the most invasive and slow running Windows to date) is the only "Valid" OS - MS is still dictating what we can and can't do. I decided to sell my new PC and pick up an old BIOS PC so that I could run linux and Win 7 to accomplish
my needs. How long can this go on? When will Linux be a "valid" Operating System. And when will a non-programmer be easily able to setup his hardware and find necessary software to run on Linux.9 -
Another weekend, another relic. this one happens to be my wife's old standalone flatbed scanner, circa the late 90's3
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Have you become a replacement tool doing manual and menial IT work to bridge the lack of a proper IT process and streamlining?
I've worked for such companies and it's super annoying.. companies that zip projects to Google Drive instead of using a VCS.. not even having a drawing board or proper office chairs.. not even a cafeteria.. companies using Subversion instead of Git, no project management systems nor software, no JIRA, shit written down on printed paper,.. the list goes on.
A nightmare, really. Like developing in the 90's..3 -
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Brian Goetz. He's undoubtedly capable as an engineer, but he's also one of those 90's style neck beard jerks who is incapable of having a conversation with another human being and not being condescending AF.
That out of the way, this proposition and explanation is why I keep paying attention to him (well, maybe not entirely, he owns the direction of java, so yeah).
https://github.com/openjdk/...
It's reasonable, well thought out, and gives credit where it's due. While a bit non-committal, it speaks to what good has happened to java since it moved out from under the original manager (though the original owner was still far superior).
Here's hoping we see more proposals that parallel this direction.3 -
Why is it that so many developers have trash tier hardware? Sometimes I feel like 90% of developers are hardware retards. You work on a computer all day why the fuck are you running one from the early 2,000's that takes a year to boot and can barely run the applications you need? Hardware is a lot cheaper than time and better hardware will save a huge amount of time. And why the fuck do so many devs use laptops? Trashy little craptastic aluminium shit cans folding under the weight of the heat they produce. The more work you do the slower they go. Meanwhile I sit back on my heavily over clocked, water cooled, desktop and fly through workloads that laptop users wouldn't begin to be able to think about. So basically buy a desktop with high end hardware and you'll be amazed what you can get done and how much less painful stuff will be. And if you need to go mobile just grab a Chromebook and remote into your desktop. You'll be happy you did.20
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All I am asking for is a debugger in Xcode that works as well as Macintosh Programmer's Workshop ( MPW) circa 80's/90's. Maybe I am being unreasonable?
I stepped a line in the debugger and all the variables disappear... and all I get is the spinny "fuck you" indicator and the variables all disappear.
But here is the worst part... Apple isn't holding any of those fucktards on the Xcode team accountable for producing a shit product.
I'm really glad I don't have to do this as a full time job anymore. Then why do I continue to pound nails with my forehead (use Xcode)?
Whip me, beat me, make me use Xcode...5 -
This fucking internal tool does not have any CLI capabilities, so to open each file i need to and get the data i have to manually hit 'File -> Open' select the file, then double click
Then high light the data i want and copy out what I need
If there was even just a cli to cycle over the fucking files to open each in their own instance it would be a good deal less fucking tedious and annoying
Like how the fuck do you not allow passing in a file name on cli to open like fuck i have to do this 40 fucking times FUCK i get this tool is originally from the fucking 90's but still you push updates every 3 months for the databases it accesses at least let me fucking pass in a fucking file to open it from cli3 -
ColdFusion and all ColdFusion devs should be executed. Its a god-awful software from the 90's and if you still use it you're either braindead or ignorant.
Shut up about legacy CF code too! No one cares whether or not your embeddable calendar would be hard to make in JS; fucking figure it out.
I realise that CF may make things easier in the short run, but in the long run you'll have introduced so much technical debt that you'll run crying back to JS anyways; CF is so hard to refactor and even to make flexible that you would spend less total time over an application lifecycle learning JS.11 -
Ok so I keep obsessing over RE2 because the game is just so fucking cool. But one thing that I want to make notice for us computer nerds:
In the police station, when you see the computers there that are on, you see a very 90's interface, and of course you will, the game takes place in 1998.
When you are at the Umbrella NEST facility, there are computers there, the interface looks TODAY modern. Meaning that(and I know we all fans of the games knew this already) Umbrella's tech is far beyond what common civilian entities have. I know this is done intentionally and I know people are aware of it, but I just think that it is a really really REALLY cool element to the story to have something like this.
On another note, I want to get excited about Kingdom Hearts 3. But fuck this it has been so long and I had already forgotten everything about 1 and 2 and I am not really a fan of the series anymore. A friend is coming over to play it, I just wish I was more hyped for it.5 -
I discovered a language I didn't know AND i like.
It's not under active development anymore, but I decide it has a nice syntax. It's made by the writer of craftinginterpreters. There are still people writing some extensions for it.
I decided to implement socket support in it.
That went very well and the result is just BEAUTIFUL. But now, i have a collection of socket functions that require a file descriptor (sock) for every function like write, read and close. We're not living in the 90's. I want to do sock.send(), sock.write() and sock.close(). So socket as an object.
I wrote a wrapper and it is freaking TWO times slower! Hows that even possible.
I've made wrapping to object optional now. Bit disappointing.
The language shows off with benchmarks on their page. Their fibers can even be faster than Elixr. Yeah, if you only use the fiber and nothing else from language. I benchmarked string concat for example against python: 1000 times slower or so.
The source code of wren is so freaking beautiful. Before Lua was my favorite language regarding source. The extensibility is so great that I prefer to work on this one instead of my own language. They kinda made exactly what I wanted. I can't beat that.
For if you're interested: https://wren.io/
The slot way of communicating between host language (C) and child language (wren) seems odd at beginning but i became fan of it.
Thanks for listening to my ted talk.
What's your opinion about wren (syntax)?25 -
So I promised a post after work last night, discussing the new factorization technique.
As before, I use a method called decon() that takes any number, like 697 for example, and first breaks it down into the respective digits and magnitudes.
697 becomes -> 600, 90, and 7.
It then factors *those* to give a decomposition matrix that looks something like the following when printed out:
offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]
offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]
offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]
Each entry is a pair of numbers representing a prime base and an exponent.
Now the idea was that, in theory, at each magnitude of a product, we could actually search through the *range* of the product of these exponents.
So for offset three (600) here, we're looking at
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
But actually we're searching
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 0
2^3 * 3 ^ 0 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
etc..
On the basis that whatever it generates may be the digits of another magnitude in one of our target product's factors.
And the first optimization or filter we can apply is to notice that assuming our factors pq=n,
and where p <= q, it will always be more efficient to search for the digits of p (because its under n^0.5 or the square root), than the larger factor q.
So by implication we can filter out any product of this exponent search that is greater than the square root of n.
Writing this code was a bit of a headache because I had to deal with potentially very large lists of bases and exponents, so I couldn't just use loops within loops.
Instead I resorted to writing a three state state machine that 'counted down' across these exponents, and it just works.
And now, in practice this doesn't immediately give us anything useful. And I had hoped this would at least give us *upperbounds* to start our search from, for any particular digit of a product's factors at a given magnitude. So the 12 digit (or pick a magnitude out of a hat) of an example product might give us an upperbound on the 2's exponent for that same digit in our lowest factor q of n.
It didn't work out that way. Sometimes there would be 'inversions', where the exponent of a factor on a magnitude of n, would be *lower* than the exponent of that factor on the same digit of q.
But when I started tearing into examples and generating test data I started to see certain patterns emerge, and immediately I found a way to not just pin down these inversions, but get *tight* bounds on the 2's exponents in the corresponding digit for our product's factor itself. It was like the complications I initially saw actually became a means to *tighten* the bounds.
For example, for one particular semiprime n=pq, this was some of the data:
n - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('5')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]
q - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('6')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]
It's almost like the base 3 exponent in [n:7] gives away the presence of 3^1 in [q:6], even
though theres no subsequent presence of 3^n in [n:6] itself.
And I found this rule held each time I tested it.
Other rules, not so much, and other rules still would fail in the presence of yet other rules, almost like a giant switchboard.
I immediately realized the implications: rules had precedence, acted predictable when in isolated instances, and changed in specific instances in combination with other rules.
This was ripe for a decision tree generated through random search.
Another product n=pq, with mroe data
q(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('4')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]
n(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]
Suggesting that a nontrivial base 3 exponent (**2 rather than **1) suggests the exponent on the 2 in the relevant
digit of [n], is one less than the same base 2 digital exponent at the same digit on [q]
And so it was clear from the get go that this approach held promise.
From there I discovered a bunch more rules and made some observations.
The bulk of the patterns, regardless of how large the product grows, should be present in the smaller bases (some bound of primes, say the first dozen), because the bulk of exponents for the factorization of any magnitude of a number, overwhelming lean heavily in the lower prime bases.
It was if the entire vulnerability was hiding in plain sight for four+ years, and we'd been approaching factorization all wrong from the beginning, by trying to factor a number, and all its digits at all its magnitudes, all at once, when like addition or multiplication, factorization could be done piecemeal if we knew the patterns to look for.7 -
When I started, in the early 80's, there was no internet, and books related to programming were hard to come by, so everything had to be learned by going to the library, or reading the manual that came with the compiler. Finally, in the early 90's, I got to attend programmer training in the Air Force. My first successful program was a D&D character generator.5
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A client wanted his site to be finished earlier. The boss said ok if the client would pay more, and he did. However, a FE dev got sick (virus infection he said) and would have to rest for an extended period of time. The PM came in yesterday and said, "Alex (me), we are running out of time so you will have to take (FE dev's name)'s position because you said that you learned basic html/css when you were in high school." The PM left and close the door before I can turn my head away from the screen and say something (I was like WTF?). One of my BE colleague, who had been asked to do similar sh**t before when a FE guy got sick, pat on my shoulder and said, "Alex, you have won the lottery this time." Q.A.Q..I have just finished a navbar with 4 tabs using Uikit, it took me 90 min already.2
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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 -
In reply to:
https://devrant.com/rants/3957914/...
Okay, we must first establish common ground here. What do we understand about "showing"? I understand you probably mean displaying/rendering, more abstractly: "obtaining". Good, now we move on.
What's the point of a front-end? Well, in the 90's that used to be an easy answer: to share information (not even in a user-friendly way, per se). Web 2.0 comes, interaction with the website. Uh-oh, suddenly we have to start minding the user. Web 3.0 comes, ouch, now the front-end is a mini-backend. Even tougher, more leaks etc. The ARPAnet was a solution, a front-end that they had built in order to facilitate research document-sharing between universities. Later, it became the inter(national) net(work).
First there was SGML to structure the data (it's a way of making it 'pretty' in a lexicographical way) and turn it into information (which is what information is: data with added semantics) and later there was HTML to structure it even further, yet we all know that its function was not prettification, but rather structure. Later came CSS, to make it pretty. With its growing popularity, the web started to be used as a publishing device.
source:
https://w3.org/Style/CSS20/...
If we are to solely display JSON data in a pretty way, we may be limiting ourselves to the scenario of rendering pretty web pages using aesthetic languages such as CSS. We must also understand that if we are only focusing on making a website pretty with little to moderate functionality, we aren't really winning. A good website has to be a winner in all aspects, which is why frameworks came into existence, but.. lmao, let's leave that to another discussion.
Now let me recall back my college days.. front-end.. front-end.. heck, even a headset can be a front-end to a pick-order backend. We must think back to the essence, to the abstract. All other things are just implementations of it (yes, the horrendous thousands of Javascript libraries, lol).
So, my college notes say:
"Presentation layer: this is the UI.
In this layer you ask the middle tier for information, which gets that information from a database, which then goes back to middle tier, back to presentation. In the case of the headset, the operators can confirm an order is ready. This is essentially the presentation tier again: you're getting information from the middle tier and 'presenting it' as it were.
The presentation layer is in essence the question: how do I bring my application data to my end users in a platform-and solution-independent way?"
What's JSON? A way to transport data between the middle tier and the presentation tier. Is that what frontend development is? Displaying it in a pretty way? I don't think it is, because 'pretty' is an extra feature of obtaining and displaying data. Do we always have to display data in a pretty way? Not necessarily. We could write a front-end script (in NodeJS perhaps) that periodically fetches certain information from a middle-tier is serves a more functional role rather than a rendering one.
The prettification of data was a historical consequence of the popularity of the web (which is a front-end) (see second paragraph with link). Since the essence of a front-end is to obtain information from the back-end (with stress on obtaining), its presentation is not necessarily a defining characteristic of it, but rather an optional and solution-dependent aspect, a facet.4 -
Crowdstrike event caused a disaster at my company.
No, we didn't had a single crash, but something much worse has happened. My tech lead who lives in early 90's got his confirmation that we shall run with 0 internet, everything on premise, no source control, no external libraries only the absolute must that doesn't need ever any update. Finally we started to show him how powerful an azure pipeline would be, but after this, there's no hope.5 -
Gentle note to aspiring devs, that SO is not hacked. It just their new 90's theme design (More to come).
Search for history icon beside search bar to toggle to normal(Modern) view. Stop Panicking!2 -
Usually my home internet download speed is around 800-900 KB/s
Then I purchased Academind and codewithmosh courses then tried to download the courses but the download speed became 63-90 KB/s wow nice 👺
Maybe because of the holiday. Hopefully the download speed will be ok tonight.
(I like watching downloaded tutorial videos)3 -
Aesthetics are important
It had been a while since I had a look into the Yii framework. Went into their website today. I was surprised to see that they had changed the design of a lot of it. This is particularly good since I believe that one thing that really makes devs(particularly web since most of us are full stack) ignore a tool is the presentation of it on its respective website. That being said, it is really hard for any PHP framework to go ahead and compete with how really good looking and easy to navigate the Laravel website is.
I know this might seem as a shallow thing to look at. After all, a tool can be amazing and have a 90's looking website, and this happens a lot in certain communities. But all in all I am pleased that the Yii framework website is looking as good.
Then again Rails(the Ruby framework) has a "looks like a toy" website and the framework is really powerful and advanced. -
Today I had to work on a server running SunOS.
For those that don't know, SunOS was last released in the mid 90's. To top it off the only available editor was vi. -
TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.
Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.
Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.
My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.
Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.
I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.
Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.
I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers. -
I've had my share of both good and bad coworkers.
My best memories are definitely from the late 90's, early 2k's. The team I was a part of back then really had the best attitude. I particularly remember one of them, who ended up being a PM. He was always joking around, nothing was ever too serious to make fun of. He was an old school punk, and it did show. Although he was always professional in meetings with customers and when it mattered. If I'm not totally mistaken, he started a punk band in his fifties, where noone knew how to play or sing. Great guy!
In my current job, all the good and nice people are either quitting or bullied out of the company. I miss them. Sigh. -
Playing "de boerderij van Piet Precies" on an old windows 98 machine of my parents. It's a game for little children about this farmer, "piet precies", who is quite a perfectionist and has everyting on his farm go in orderly fashion, but one day his animals start to "revolt" or something, and make a big mess (a cow in his bedroom for example).
Yup, late 90's kid ☺ -
I always get great satisfaction by reworking and rebuilding ul li menus cos you know it's 2018 and fuk dat shit 90's implementation
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My favorite xkcd quotes (order is not significant )
1. _*It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.*_
2. ...too honest. Scale it back.
3. I'd like to bestow upon you the first annual AWARD of EXCELLENCE in BEING VERY SMART. May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom.
4. wait, what?
5. Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat ...
6. Okay, we _suck_ at this.
7. You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.
8. I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE
9. World's Greatest Daughter
10. People who open bananas for the other end
11. Just for the sake of the argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.
12. This explain a lot.
13. My bag is 90% backup batteries.
14. Well- will you be my "it's complicated" on facebook?
15. Oh God. Gotta get out. The window.
16. Sweet! I finally got my subduction license!
17. I'll tell you later - you wouldn't appreciate the punchline over this 12kbps cell phone codec.
18. RON PAUL evolves into TRON PAUL
19. Just talk to them like a f***ing human being
20. In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.
21. I eat my body weight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.
22. Nice try, Mike. Get out of the well.
23. Apollo retroreflectors
24. Can't see space vampires
25. My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.
26. WHAT.
27. Introducing The xkcd Phone 6, VIII, 10, X, 26, and 1876. We didn't start this nonconsecutive version number war, but we will not lose it.
28. My morality has evaporated over the harsh UV light.
29. Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.
30. P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.
31. Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!
32. My normal approach is useless here
33. Wake up, sheeple!
34. Sir- strategic command has send us a lunch order.
35. Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience.
36. HOLY S***. Guys- people are complicated!
37. OH GOD- SPIDERS
38. Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.
39. How did the pole vaulters get up to our balcony?
40. Friggin' Python
41. I am the goddamn *Michael Jordan* of blurring the line between metaphor and reality. [tosses a basketball] -
I admire those people that are able to concentrate everywhere. I'm always looking for it and sometimes find it in the peace of my bedroom. Today found it in my car while listening to music from 70 to 90's
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i come from a very closely knit family and i kinda like it. i am in close proximity to my parents, they are growing old so i do a lot of home chores. meanwhile a lot relatives and dad's business friends live nearby , and the whole area around my home feels like a place of known people. my free time goes with 5-6 friends , who again live nearby, or with gym buddies. this is a nice life, which could further expand with a wife and my kids in future .
at the same time, i have seen the "work" life. my office is in a different state, 90% of people there are people like me who would be renting a home nearby and living alone/with strangers. their main "family"(well pseudo-family) will be their coworkers, and that's also not a bad thing.
in the workplace the reasons to be happy will be a lot (as parties or celebrations will occur on multiple birthdays/ company growths and other achievements) , and so will be the reasons to feel sad ( company failure, teammates leaving, missing family)
at the end of the day , when you are living an office life, you are a corporate rat running for the cheese you are never gonna (or , if you are a glass half full person, let's say that you are a "dedicated work professional giving your 100% to the company")
but here comes the dilemma : with AIs like chat gpt coming around and redefining nthe expectations from a software engineer, you will no longer be expected to be resourceful but rather how much of a corporate rat you can be. ( https://twitter.com/bajicdusko/...)
so 1) is it the only way forward for an upcoming engineer's lifestyle? to be like a soldier for their company , while their family and friends await for their long return? 2) if yes, what is the positi8 aspsct we can take away from this?
PS : what a stupid profession those AI/ML guys work in. they put out their minds together to make a sword which is gonna cut the heads of s/w engineers, their own breed. not lawyers, not doctors, not even the fucking peons, but their own freaking brothers4 -
rant == true
<rant>I want my stickers, but I'd rather rant about using email than actually use email. Cut me some slack, I'm a dev and I hate email. Email is horrible, it's barely changed since the 90's. I hate Slack and Skype as well, Discord is so much easier for my needs. I even set up some bots to tell me build statuses in their own channel.</rant>9 -
"90's kids are impatient developers and change job too often" is a phrase I hear often from other managers... The thing I always tell is, generations will clash and yea, we grew up wanting to work in awesome places developed by the marketers mind. How can we reach a better agreement? I have no idea!
Just want to wish you all a merry Xmas and keep on ranting!!8 -
I have my own sole proprietorship and hate it. I am in an area that a ton of businesses need new websites. Their existing ones look like they were made in the 90's. I go in, have a seemingly great meeting. We talk about goals and looks. It ends with "send me something and I will have my IT guy look at it". Your IT guy...in a business with 2 employees. Then a few months later, they have a new website. Looks like it was made in 2002.1
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Gotta love when you come across an interesting piece of software with a modern, sleek, and snazzy homepage. Then you press "Sign up" and are redirected to an ancient 90's web app whose first element after the body is a table.
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Every fucking time i see dual boot with a machine with WinCrap, the windows manager always end up messing with the boot at the bios forcing me to reinstall grub again to make a proper boot. Most of the time the Windows Boot Manager still is corrupt.
I feel rage about that, why does Windows is so badly design when it come to boot manager? I would think they would fucking figure it out after the 90'S!! But no, to fucking busy fucking with people's machine with broken update and feature nobody use... Fuck Microsoft!3 -
Back in the early 90's I never switched from vi to emacs, despite the peer pressure to do so
<ESC>
:wq -
In mid 90's, I played games in uncle's computer. I remember playing prehistoric, volfied and outlaws. It was first DOS, then Windows 95.
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Aladdin, The Lion King and The Jungle Book are available for latest PCs..the 90's games are back!!
https://goo.gl/4BKhtY -
How difficult is it to decide for your own future?
It's a month that I'm in total panic 'cause of a difficult choice I have to make about my job.
I really need some external opinions and points of view from other developers, maybe more experienced than me (I'm a medium-junior JS developer).
The situation is as follows:
1) I work as a Frontend Web Developer for a wonderful enterprise-like company with 100+ employees, where the individual rights are fully respected, there are no whatsoever pressures and there is a peaceful paradise-like atmosphere most of the days. I also love my teammates, which is something rare because I often dislike other humans.
2) I received a proposal from a Fintech startup, which required me a long time to complete a complex programming test they gave me. They look all very young, modern, fast and passioned about their job. But they are only living with bank's investments and are not producing any money at the moment. Also, I don't know if Fintech will be a successful field in the future.
3) I received another proposal, from a Healthtec startup this time, which has a lovely mission in the medical field, has received millions of investments, it's gaining some KK net each month but has a team of only 2 developers (3 with me if I accept). I know one of the developers and I remember he had issues of not getting paid months ago.
What's the problem with the first company? I totally dislike the product we are building, the development stack (fully Microsoft-based), the company's view (they still sell and think about software like in the 90's) and how the repository is managed. Everyday there are huge problems that end up blocking the frontend work and the final product is super ugly and works only if you know all the quirks behind it.
It's an old-fashioned desktop app with inside Chromium which should execute some components like graphs, tables, forms and shit like this. Every component is configurable through a property editor which is an utter giant mess of collapsed menus. I also suspect that the company's main business model is based on the difficulty to use this software (because they sell licenses and courses to use it).
There are no modern UX/UI concepts applied at all, nor they seem to care about it.
Each time I propose something there is a huge chain of approval-waiting that end up in a stale mate.
Also, it's useless to show my frustration about all these issues because I count very little in a so populated office.
------------------------------------------------
TLDR: I need to choice if staying in a Enterprise Microsoft-based and old-fashioned company, but in which the atmosphere is paradisiac or accept the risk to work for a Fintech or a Healthtec startup.
------------------------------------------------
What would you do if you were in my situation? What's for you the most stable field in the future?
Many thanks for the attention!6 -
Has anyone seen a good use case for robotic process automation (RPA)? Seems to me like a new buzzword for 90's screen scraping technologies?!