Posts by This is my handle 109 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2011
The boss in question has moved on, so I may never know. He is Israeli, so I thought there might be some hyper-zionist backstory or something but no, as you say: just a painting about man's hubris based on Abrahamic mythology. I couldn't figure it out either.
I got an email saying my cloud data was deleted. That's it. No reason, no specificity around what the data might have been.
I thought it might be a phishing attack but there was no call to action, and the email header seemed legit.
Funny thing is other than a couple of Android phones I used years ago, I don't own a Samsung device that
would conceivably collect data and ship it to the internet, AFAIK.
I wonder if this was somehow in preparation for the acquisition.
Odd.
Thanks for the article. I was unfamiliar with the article or it's author so thanks for both. I read it and I think the author is on the verge of suffering an overdose of nostalgia. I remember BASIC. I had to write some in Uni and even got paid to write some on the side: Can't say I ever liked it. C (which is what I ended up re-writing my got-paid-for-this BASIC code in a year later when I couldn't make any sense of it) provides at least as low-level view into "how the machine thinks" as C-64 BASIC, without having to use BASIC as the "shell" to interface with your O/S (something it's even worse for than application programming IMHO). The author himself admits that are many variants of BASIC he could download then, (and even now) if he really thought BASIC was the cat's meow, but that they were all too high-level. Really? He admits that his son was learning C++ but doesn't really say why that didn't accomplish the same purpose. Finally, he mentions some of the languages designed specifically to teach kids to code (I think he used Logo as an example but there was also Turtle Graphics and I think Scratch was already a thing...) but that they were too high level for his purposes: that point I concede. I totally agree with the underlying premise: someone who thinks the way to sort data is to use COBOL's "SORT" verb, or SQL's "ORDER BY" is missing a lot, but I have to admit that it's been a pretty long time since I had to write my own sort routines from scratch (it was in Perl as I recall -- that's how long ago!), but don't his specific examples don't resonate with me (personally) at all.
Amusing, but as my 5 year old grand-niece responded when I suggested that the card game I was playing with her great-grandmother was only for people who could follow instructions responded: "Not helpful." I've been threatening (or at least insulting) Gemini since it first replaced "OK Google" or whatever the old thing was on my Android devices, to no avail. It's gotten so bad I've gone back to Siri.
It's one of those, "If you think this is bad, you should try the competition!" kinds of things. I admire their vision of CRM in the cloud; they were sort of the pioneers AFAIK, but it's been rough going. Once helped a friend move the customer base for his small firm from Act! to SalesForce. Within a year or so he paid me to move it back. Then there was the Lightning UI upgrade fiasco. Still: take a look at their competition and you'll get a new appreciation of SF.
While working on an "Associate's Degree" (2 year post High-School program unique to the US AFAIK) in Information Systems (then called "Data Processing" -- this was the early 80's) at an independent computer store (remember those?) one of my co-workers, George was a district manager of Information Systems as the local (Baltimore, MD) district of the IRS. He was moonlighting at this minimum wage job to learn more about these new-fangled things called micro-computers. Rather than spend his Saturdays & evenings out in the burbs he offered me a job. I was reticent to work for the federal government, having heard all the horror stories, but this guy impressed me. He said I could work with the COBOL / mainframe stuff I had learned at school, or with the Unix super-micros he had brought in. Naturally I chose the latter. It was the opposite of everything I'd feared, ... George was forward looking, a servant leader, and had found ways to get stuff done despite the bureaucracy. When I decided (for personal reasons) to move to the West Coast he got me a transfer to the LA district. It was the epitome of all the horror stories you've heard about government work. Maybe it was just the much larger city / district, or the difference between East Coast work ethic and West Coast laid-back.... I still wasn't in the dreaded mainframe division but it sure felt like it. I guess the moral of the story is YMMV. I am sure George has long-since retired or was managed out as an over-achiever (gosh I hope not), but I wouldn't be surprised if they still have those mainframes running COBOL.
I forgot about MultiMate! I ran it on my Eagle MS-DOS luggable. Lovely machine, for the time. Apple-level styling, but with a usable keyboard (no mouse; they had barely been invented yet) and a color screen as I recall. I have to admit that I abandoned it for WordPerfect after a bit, due to the latter's WYSIWYG accuracy: What you typed, what you saw, what got printed all pretty much matched, which seemed a miracle at the time.
Wordstar served as a text editor as well as a word processor on CP/M. It was a far sight better word processor than the PerfectWriter that came with my 1st computer (Kaypro II running CP/M) unless (as one of my consulting clients was) you were publishing an academic book.
PW supported much larger documents (Virtual Memory was not a forte of CP/M and actual RAM maxed out at 64K) as well as endnotes / footnotes. Even indexing, as I recall. For most documents I'd write Wordstar was more than sufficient and quite snappy, thank you, once I upgraded to a Kaypro 10 with a hard drive, so the 5.25" diskette didn't spin constantly fetching something or other. Sure, WordPerfect was much more WYSIWYG and an all around a better word processor once MS/PC-DOS came around and we had 16 bits (well sort of; with 8-bit addressable RAM segments) and yes -- arguably better than Word is today, and certainly not any slower. It also had a mode which displayed the embedded formatting codes with the toggle of an F-key; something I still miss trying to figure out why Word wants to indent something, or won't let me do so, or whatever.
Yes, as a text editor it was no vi (which BTW I still use to this day when I don't need something language-aware like VS code or a Java IDE) but for CP/M it worked fine -- as long as you remembered to put it in plain text ("Document"?) mode [and yes, I too got irritated when I didn't...], but I don't think CP/M came with a full-screen editor so short of writing your own we used what we had.
When I did get to use vi BTW, finally getting to use "real computers" running Unix then later Linux, there was a more programmable alternative I was often encouraged to check out, in case I liked it better. I didn't. Anyway, it was a little thing called EMACS and funnily enough, the default key binding on the version I learnt was ... you guessed it: same as Wordstar. (Or maybe same as PW...; it's been awhile) ... Still I have always preferred vi. EMACS was open source though when very little else was so I've hacked on it a few times to allow users to edit text fields in a database, e.g. Ah, the good old days.
We're about the same age I gather but I started in Unix super-micros & minis rather than the big iron, so I learned whatever the original query language was for Informix, (which like many other RDBMSs also a QBE interface like the one that shipped with Paradox, mentioned elsewhere) then Quel, and only then SQL. I didn't think SQL was particularly better or worse than the others but was awfully glad one of them developed into a standard, so I didn't have to learn a dozen other query languages with more or less equivalent capabilities.
I don't know that I had much formal training on SQL either but ironically, have taught it a number of times. Thanks for the memories...
Following.... I no longer have a WordPerfect that will install on Windows (since the 1st 64 bit version... 7?) but I use a CMD.EXE or bash redirect, depending on what I want. Obviously, "ls" and "find" give you more flexibility in formatting but often DIR will do the trick.
I had written a password generator and wanted to run the output thru a script that would objectively check the results for strength. Maybe some python, node, whatever. (I figured inspecting the source would help me up my own game on the password generation side as well.) All I found were websites, which at no charge, would tell me if my passwords were strong enough. Lots of them. The ones I did a View Source on were pretty opaque. P.T. Barnum was an optimist, I'm afraid.
What's old is new again
We were looking at tools (no ML mentioned -- this was during the AI winter) to convert COBOL to Java back in the oughts. HP3000 & what would now be called a Z-class mainframe were the source systems, and clusters of blades running Linux as the target enviroment. A colleague and I even wrote some code to generate Swing User Interfaces from 3270 screen definitions as a POC. I wasn't there long enough to see it into production fruition but it was kind of fun.
The FinTech firm with which I had been happily engaged for a good 7 years was acquired by a bigger fish whose name (and it's founder) rhymes which Gnarles Schnob. Small fish had data centers in Dallas, Texas (long before TX discovered winter these last couple of years) & Jersey City, NJ (don't ask). Big fish had most of it's eggs in a basket in Phoenix, AZ and also Dallas. I could never figure out the Phoenix decision for exactly the reasons mentioned here.
Of course, we also grow rice (which basically grows in puddles, or "paddies") in drought stricken California, such are the distortions of an economy which totally devalues and disregards the natural environment.
I'd take it one step further: How many coders built their first webpages & services on apache *because* it has a cool name, that may or may not honor a great native people. It's certainly a sexier name than NGINX. Some will claim to ignore such shallow visceral impressions and rely strictly on features. Most of those folks would be in denial at best or lying at worst. Better a web server and a great supporting org that's grown to many other OSS projects than a helicopter warship, no? My $0.02. </rant>
I seem to recall having this problem with OS/2. Windows at the time got a pretty clean slate when you restarted (or as often as not in those days it restarted itself) but OS/2 seemed to come back in the same story state it was in when you rebooted it -- replete with cached keystrokes & mouse clicks you feverishly created trying to get it to respond.
... from "And Justice For All" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078718/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0) where a character throws himself on the mercy of the court (which has repeatedly held him in contempt) for his profane outbursts. "But your honor -- I'm a diabetic." "I fail to see what that has to do with it!" "That's because you're a douchebag!" "CONTEMPT!", as the gavel is pounded.
PS: I'm quoting from memory, which may have introduced some inaccuracies since 1979.
Honestly, other than more rows in an Excel spreadsheet, it would be really difficult for me to name an "improvement" to any of the Office Suite products since 1997. Not that I've been able to use them for a while (had to abandon those old 32-bit Windows apps after ... XP?) so maybe it's just nostalgia, but they pretty much lost me when they introduced "the ribbon" (2003?).
In fact, I was just looking for the link to a radio snippet about the hominid adaptation that allows us to metabolize (yes "Z" or "Zed" -- I'm a Yank) alcohol, allowing hunter gatherers to digest fruits & berries past their prime. Instead I found an equally interesting snippet that explains why many of my E. Asian friends get flushed when they try to keep up: https://www.livescience.com/61845-evolution-may-decrease-alcohol-tolerance.html.
This story reminded me of the Harley-Hampton twins (Devonte & Deante), talented young high-school (American-) football players. Word on the street was that they were offered a scholarship to play for the local Catholic school rival to our public (state-run) school, where my kids went. They wanted Devonte to cut his dreads. The public school, OTOH, told the boys they'd take them, "as-is". Sold! Those boys took us to two state championships in their varsity years. They gave it their all. They left nothing on the field. I understand they went on to (so far) success in the NCAA (university level league). The Catholic school has since dropped to a lower division.
... you'll find that in addition to an accentuated reliance on the likes of Amazon for goods you might normally just pop out to the local big box for, the CORONA virus has inexplicably ushered in a dramatic rise in the incidence of car-jacking, or "grand-burglary auto", the taking of a vehicle using the threat of those deadly weapons which are so ubiquitous in the US. I have to think that jacking an Amazon delivery would be a bonus for one of these thugs.
Apologies to Winston Churchill. I used to hate Salesforce, till I tried some of the alternatives... With #slack, it's rather the opposite. After years of complaining about chat systems (for 90% of all use-cases I still prefer email to getting a real-time interrupt that says "Joe is typing...." .... still typing ... ....; plus, I long ago drank David Allen's Getting-Things-Done "the fewer inboxes the better" kool-aid) I have come to hate #slack much less than the others.
Not that there's any age-ism in our field but ... a few years back I read a post (likely on LI, but I can't be sure; memory's the 2nd thing to go you know) about how to write a resume that doesn't divulge your age. Lose the double-spaces was number 1. Along with omitting a snail-mail address and of course the date of your University graduation.
Those of us who have been doing this for awhile will also leave off the side job we had in school overclocking Apple II's, and other ancient history. If done correctly they won't distinguish yours from someone whose career began when your reverse cron CV ends.
By the time you show up in that suit & tie you haven't worn since your niece's 2nd wedding they will hopefully be invested enough in your skills to look beyond your attire and the grey beard.
I thought that was strictly a MacBook thing?! I've owned or been assigned (by my employer) dozens of Windows lappies over the years (not to mention Linux ones, but they were generally loaded with Windows when I got them), and the only time I've had this issue was on one of the two MacBooks I've carted around during that same time period.
.... after high-level languages to run the same 3GL across hardware from multiple vendors, came the rise of the operating systems. Where once the PHB might have asked "But will it run on our Burroughs ( / Honywell / ....)" the question later became, "Do they make a compiler / runtime for ... CP/M .... MS-DOS .. Windows or Unix ... Linux... This article made me think of that though; I forgot who locked in we once were to specific hardware vendors. Now if only I could find a version of the audible.com client that runs on my Dad's old windows phone so I could share this book with him....
>> for most people the OS they use is pretty irrelevant.
This is probably truer than it once was, but still not quite.
Having made the switch from Windows 10 to High Sierra within the last year I have to say there was a definite learning curve, and this from a guy who has been using bash (, ksh, tcsh, csh, sh) for 30 years on. If I logged my wife or kids (3 Windows users and one Chromebook) into my MacBook Pro I doubt they could do much with it. YMMV.
Only been using Linux since the late 1990's; before that I used commercial Unices. That said, there are *still* things that are just easier in Windows: Streaming audio & video. Tax software (in the US most of us spend a weekend / year, or pay someone to, trying to keep as much of our hard-earned income as possible, since it's not like the Guv'ment actually provides any services in exchange for it; we're on our own here for health insurance, university education for the kids, transport, etc.). Building and using a toy database. (This one shocks me; even Oracle used to be easier to install and run on Linux than WIndows; but recent experience with 18 seem to have completely flipped).
So at home my Windows 10 desktop gets at least as much use as my Ubuntu box, and of late, my MacBook Pro even more, though since I'm new to it there's a certain Bright Shiny Object appeal there.
YMMV, but for me it's different tools for different jobs.
I almost upvoted you until I considered the disrespect our Mango Mussolini has shown *science*. And journalism. And democracy ....
I don't think respect is earned. I grant a modicum of respect to everyone I meet. I give them the benefit of the doubt. Disrespect is earned, and the Don has been earning it since the beginning of his public life, and continues to do so with every speech, every tweet.
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