Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Hug a probe! (Score 2) 36

Manned missions have always been a budgeting headache because they take a lot of money, a lot of time, and a consistent Congress, the last one rarer than the Holy Grail. US unmanned probes are more often on budget and have been quite successful overall.

("Manned" sounds misogynistic, but "humanned" and "peopled" sound awkward.)

Comment Wuck the Feb! (Score 1) 48

Hypercard influenced VB, one of the most most productive dev tools ever. We somehow de-evolved into bloated buggy learning-curve-heavy web stacks. Ooga Booga.

Most of the complaints about VB-like tools are fixable, but too few bothered to apply some R&D, instead throwing the baby out with the web water, giving us fucked up frameworks on top of the brain-damaged DOM and CSS. You humans are doing it wrong.

Git off my productive lawn, you wormy little buzzword fuckers!

Comment Re:There are many ways to touch type (Score 2) 182

I wouldn't be surprised if the multiplicity of keyboards does contribute. I learned in keypunch days, on cards, and they all had the same keyboards. Probably the first 10 or 20 years after were on desktop machines with builtin keyboards and they were all the same, or PCs where I could supply my own keyboards. Then came the world of laptops. It seems like every one has a different feel and different layouts for functions keys, numeric keypad, and CTRL/SHIFT etc. Right now, I have several laptops, all from the same manufacturer, and yet they have annoying little differences (half size arrow keys vs full size, ESC and ~/` subtly different) which always slow me down when switching. I could plug in my own keyboard, but then they wouldn't be laptops any more, and I'd probably have to buy a dozen keyboards before finding one I liked.

Comment There are many ways to touch type (Score 2) 182

I never took a class, I don't follow any particular pattern. Someone told me my fingers look like a spider crawling over the keyboard. But I don't watch my fingers, so far as I'm concerned, I do touch type.

And it does come with experience. The more you type, the more your fingers know where the keys are and you look less and less.

If you want to take a class to touch type, go ahead. But I would not call it necessary. Just type, and the more you do, the more you learn, like anything else.

Comment Lessons from feeding the amateurs (Score 1) 39

Whenever amateurs and tinkerers use "low code" or Rapid App tools* to create apps, almost 90% turn into maintenance headaches in my experience. They "mostly work" up front, but either the original author leaves, or the app grows into too big a mess for the original author to fix.

The user group calls in the formal IT team to fix it, and then get angry when the formal IT team says, "they didn't use standard practices, made poor documentation, and we are not familiar with their tool". I expect AI "solutions" to be similar.

Formal IT groups are becoming orphanages. Now a rash of AI latchkey orphans are on their way...

Always remember, making the baby is the easy and fun part.

* Such tools don't inherently have to be bad, but in the hand of amateurs they usually are.

Slashdot Top Deals

We all like praise, but a hike in our pay is the best kind of ways.

Working...