Posts by Adrian 4 2289 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2009
Not going to condemn him, and quite rightly, it appears his employers didn't either.
But wasn't that 6 months of petty jobs supposed to determine that he wasn't stupid, and that some things, like the Big Red Button, are not used lightly ? On your very first responsible operation ?
I would have expected him to at least ask, unless they'd drilled every last bit of initiative out of him. In which case they deserved it.
It's a chromebook, isn't it ?
If not, how is it better (or worse) ?
I'm not saying that it's bad that it's a chromebook, more interesting that someone other than google feel able to offer that partway point between local and remote processing. The 8-core processor, for example, implies that it runs a local browser rather than screen-sharing a remote one.
Who failed to communicate vital information that he was aware of ?
- not Harry. he didn't know., Upstream developers or company admin
Who did something unasked and without checking ?
- James. A learnihng experience, or should have been
Who failed to warn of the consequences of doing something other that what was documented ?
- Harry, probably
So all to blame, but mostly manglement. Because that's where the buck stops.
'IntelliSense suggestions speed up the typing process. When the suggestion matches what you were going to type accept it otherwise carry on typing.
But having suggestions flicker up near where I'm typing slows my typing, because it distracts my attention. I'm not much of a typist. I tend to read what I'm typing.
Yes, of course they're syntactically valid suggestions. But they're not likely functional suggestions, just valid autocompletes of the existing string. There are many possible such completions, only one is right, and it takes a good deal more 'intelligence' than VS has to predict what functionality I'm coding.
> It's like that 12 year old kid who keeps "making linux distros" - its so easy to make a Ubuntu derived distro, just edit a few files, and here's your ISO image.
Or the person who just has to use a different font for every paragraph. Do you remember Word Processing was all the rage and we had that awful font salad from excited new users ?
The application may have changed but the attitudes haven't.
> I assume you are referring to IntelliSense as that is the only thing,
Poorly named. There's no intelligence on show.
> for example does not have say a required semicolon at the end.
Also dumb. I don't want it correcting what isn't complete. How can it analyse something I haven';t typed yet ?
Badly, I think, is the answer.
My experience in C was that it would flicker up a distracting box while typing in a line, offering autocompletion to something that I didn't want. I know what I want to type. I don't need to be told, one bad guess at a time.
Why would I have started typing it if I didn't know what I wanted ? Maybe Microsoft's programmers work by hitting random keys until they get the code they want but I sure don't.
The time for offering suggestions is when I ask for them. I hate flickering crap showing up all over my screen.
Youtube's new bulging window homescreen can take a hike too. It's almost impossible to scroll through a page of it now without accidently expanding one window and obscuring the adjacent one. Do they think I stutter through each selection reading them individually ? I read a couple of relevant words from each heading and move onto the next line unless there's reason to inspect the detail.
If MCU prices are high because of shortages, doesn't that mean they don't have parts to sell at the higher price ? So the scalping is inherently limited.
It's only a benefit if customers turn to you because you have supply, and you can still command high prices because nobody else does. Which is possible, but not universal.
I think it long predates Covid, but it's not just electronics tech / computer tech. It's anywhere you have specialists.
Look at the behaviour of culinary chefs, for instance. It's even celebrated by the media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjAvmz3jKSU
There's a common cause for this behaviour. From the developer's perspective, the same mistake (and failing to look for existing solutions) is a common and repeated problem. So it causes irritation. From the newbie's point of view, it's the first time the problem ever happened and the first time they asked.
This doesn't excuse the behaviour, but understanding it is the first step to avoiding it.
Does anyone know what went wrong with the first, home-grown app ? I recall that the developers weren't allowed sufficiently low-level access to bluetooth but I don't know what it was like on Android.
I never installed the app (and I haven't yet caught covid, fyi on the correlation/causation thread above). I felt it was technically ludicrous : there was a mild link between covid and bluetooth in the fact that neither work at long distance, but once you get down to the detail, doing anything without either overwhelming false-positives or very poor useful warnings seemed a hopeless task. Perhaps the early developers found this. The article above certainly seems to support it.
Google and Apple, perhaps, had an interest in creating a public health positive for smartphones and avoided the negative side by leaving the statistical choice (time/strength of exposure) to appcode authors and the authorities.
> that's not true.
> i got compiled stuff from 10 years ago, still works.
> device drivers and such ok, but these are renewed anyway
Most things I find about the same as Windows : simple things just work, more complex things with dependencies mostly know how to fix themselves.
The one thing I always have trouble with (and I suspect this would be exactly the same on Windows) is anything that uses Python. Everything fails, and any attempt to satisfy its desires fails too, and breaks other things (eg python-based tools installed with the distribution).
The Python 2/3 thing seems to have been replaced by 3.onething vs. 3.anotherthing, and no python programmer can bear to base distributed software on dependable dependencies. The all have to use the latest thing and break old stuff. It's become a write-only language.
Oh, for the stability of C !
It's a fucking nightmare.
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