Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment My wife insisted she could not learn to touch type (Score 1) 186

She hunted and pecked through the beginnings of a reasonably successful career as a magazine copywriter back in the day. I tried to tell her it would be worth her while to spend a few hours with Mavis Beacon, but she insisted she had her way of doing things and that was that. Two index fingers, staring at the keyboard instead of the screen. Meanwhile, I was younger than her but did learn touch typing on a manual in high school. Anyway a year or so after I gave up trying to convince her to spend some time learning to type properly, I walked in on her as she was working and she was holding her hands in the home position, index fingers hovering above F and J, eyes on the screen, and doing a good 80 wpm as she pounded out copy. When I pointed this out she looked at her hands and said, "I don't know about any of that, I just adjusted what I was doing to get a little faster." Well, that's why they teach it that way, but some people gotta ice skate uphill, y'know.

Comment AI working as intended (Score 1) 113

This is the kind of thing that the US government would pay reporters to make up, using circular and non-existent citations. Late they revise or redact figures and reports to maintain a shred of credibility. The problem, is that someone's reputation was on the line, but now they can just defer blame to an AI hallucination. The damage is done, you've formed an opinion and a general sense of unease, but you forget what facts and sources you based that opinion or feeling on.

Comment Some did (Score 2) 65

Jobs and Wozniak got rich off Apple, Gates and Balmer off Microsoft. Sinclair was already rich. Tandy, Commodore, Atari, and IBM had hugely popular machines but no "rock stars" single-handedly responsible for their development, and bad business decisions ultimately killed them. Similarly Coleco, which had a great chance to undercut the PC with the Adam and its cheap letter quality printer, but they were too ambitious and by the time they worked out their manufacturing problems the PC had taken root. But the PC killed the rest of the industry by killing itself, making the first clones possible which could run object code generated for other manufacturers' machines, which was Microsoft's second stage to orbit after providing Level II Basic for the TRS-80. It wasn't MIcrosoft's intent, but imagine what today's computer ecosystem would look like if all software was still architecture-specific and there were a dozen or more popular models to choose from.
--
Apple and the rest had room to grow because the big names like DEC, Data General, and even IBM were focused on business and saw them as toys. They bought and ate anything that looked like it might compete with them, such as the CP/M office systems which might be a credible threat to minicomputers like the DEC PDP series. That was another gap IBM threaded by being IBM.

Comment They don't care about use cases (Score 1) 26

The whole point of the Browser company was not to take over the browser world. It didn't get funded by people who looked at its goals and said "Yup that will be a useful addition to most people's workflows" No, they thought they could get enough uptake to get someone else to buy them or figure out something else to make money. You can not convince me that any anyone thought their previous effort was useful by any slice of the general public. Now they're pivoting to AI because, obviously they need to raise more money and thats an easy way to do that. No one thinks their new product will be successful either.

Comment I am ditching my residential trash service (Score 1) 39

Waste Management used to have pretty good customer service, if they missed a pickup you just called, they'd send a truck out. Bin broken, call and they'd come fix it. Easy peasey. Now, all you can get is a call center in India that insists you got service even when you did not. They have missed three pickups in a row now. When my wife finally got a human being after 3+ hours on hold with multiple calls, the rep was completely unsurprised that it ended with a cancellation request and offered no pushback. There are three other companies doing trash pickup in our subdivision, one of them will now get our business, and apparently we're not alone.

Comment Re: Are they pissing in bottles? (Score 2) 206

This might seem like a good comparison, but there's a key difference in that salaried intellectual work doesn't have strictly quantifiable output metrics. You can find yourself in a position where a feature, once explored in depth is really a rats nest of features. Developers can poop or pee, but they may find themselves under immense pressure to deliver something where a project manager has underestimated the effort required to complete it. The developer then finds themselves virtually shackled to a chair for long hours to meet management's expectations. Meanwhile, warehouse workers go home at the end of shifts.

Comment Ah java! (Score 1) 100

I really wanted to love it. I wrote a great application for it, that almost worked perfectly. There was a single bug I couldn't get past and eventually had to debug the Java code itself before I found the issue, and it was an easy fix! Thats pretty amazing that a hack like me could fix a programming language bug. But my boss wasn't so keen on running a solution on a hacked up tomcat server... Se la vie

Comment Re:Sad (Score 1) 28

CenturyLink customers can say goodbye to stable, reliable, uncapped cheap fiber Internet

If "Lumen" is the same as "Quantum", then since I was forced to drop my slow-but-rock-solid DSL for the quantum "upgrade" a year ago, it's been neither "stable"
  nor "reliable." (And a double fuck-you for blocking *INCOMING* 25. WTF is that all about?)

And the hits just keep on comin'

Comment Re:China (Score 0, Troll) 84

You might not realize it, but we also have a one-party system in the US and a horrific history of human rights. For example, slave labor didn't end in the US, we just call it prison labor. This isn't what-about-ism, but pointing out that the US should worry about their own problems before pointing out China's problems. Much of your information is also just flat out propaganda and a distortion of reality.

Slashdot Top Deals

10 to the 6th power Bicycles = 2 megacycles

Working...