With all the problems that recent Windows updates are causing, and a blog post about how the Windows team are using Native React to deliver changes to the apps such as a part of Settings outside the usual updates I got to thinking how great it was back in the Windows 3.11, 95, and XP days when you got Windows and it mostly worked and it didn't get updated (aka more broken) every day. It was quick enough, it was yours, and it didn't tell you what to do.
You'd reinstall every year or two to clean out the disused DLLs etc, but it was mostly fine.
Of course it wasn't exposed to quite the same hostile environment it is today.
> Exactly, VSCode is done by well known people from the GoF book, Visual Age and Eclipse IDEs.
That doesn't mean it's any good - which I admit is subjective. I'm sure they've put good devs doing a ton of work into making an IDE they believe in but having used it for a couple of years I don't enjoy the experience.
Nothing feels obvious or simple, and trying to work in Python or embedded C++ compared to using Jetbrains tools feels like I'm missing so much. I've gone back to pycharm community edition because IMO it's light-years ahead of vscode in usability.
I guess people say the same about emacs.
I maintain VC++ was a better experience than vscode; whoever is working on it.
Weird, I don't recall having an alt-account and posting this. That's old age I guess.
I do the same, try to help the young'uns shooting themselves in the foot. I've always enjoyed that part of the job.
It really annoys me that while I feel having the decades of experience to see through hype and the willingness to help newcomers are possibly the most important aspect of being a senior IC, no-one in the current culture care about that or see it as valuable.
I'm guilty of this. I started with a C64 and love hardware and programming, but modern CPUs and MCUs are so complicated I can't be bothered learning about them.
The old 8-bit Arduinos were pretty understandable, but with an ESP-32 I just assume the compiler knows what it's doing and that the Espressif libs are 'good enough'.
I disagree. I generally don't get too upset by UI changes - having been programming since before Windows I've seen many of them - but LG is a loser.
I upgraded my mac to Tahoe and I don't like any change to the UI that I have noticed.
I upgraded my phone the other day, thinking it was just an update to whatever it already had, and ended up with LG on there and it is a disaster. I enabled the 'more opaque' feature and it did almost nothing.
LG is an awful experiment IMO. I'd put it at worse than Vista (which I skipped) and Gnome 3 which didn't bother me because I don't expect anything from linux desktops. I also skipped Windows 8 so not sure about the ranking there. But I'd say it's that level of disaster.
I was shocked when I first hit this. I'm also confused as to why the settings app constrains the window size but I think it did that in the previous version too - not a justification!
I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff.
Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.
Where is the upside here? An alu plant probably provided more jobs and produced something of actual utility. This is burning power for no benefit to society.
It's burning less power than before, but it's not producing anything of value.
The world cannot reasonbly run without alu, it got along better without crypto currencies.
Oh, I agree. I lived nearby (working for ERCOT; the Texas Power Grid operator) when Alcoa was still there and was planning the shutdown. It seems about half the people in Rockdale worked for either Alcoa, the nearby coal power plant, or the nearby coal mine that fed the power plant.
I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way.
Aluminum smelting is an incredibly energy intensive operation. A lot of places in the US that used to host aluminum smelters now host large datacenters, include the Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon on the Columbia river near a hydro dam. It's a shame that Rockdale didn't get something useful like these other places.
As far as Al smelting in the US; I don't know. I'd imagine it produces a lot of air pollution by itself and uses huge amounts of power that is usually generated by cheap methods like burning rocks (coal) or large hydro operations nearby to minimize transmission costs. Then you gotta get ore to the site. The only Al smelter I recall being left in the US is up near Puget Sound in Bellingham, WA and I think it's currently shutdown.
> I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way.
That's a disappointingly common crypto industry lie. Cryptocurrency mining involves very little labor beyond initial construction; it's certainly not a major source of permanent employment.
I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.
For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.
I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.
> I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.
Yes, in fact this is mainly what I meant with "quality badge". It's a badge mostly for instutitional bean-counting processes. Fellow scientists don't need it that much, typically we can separate the wheat from the chaff with a very quick skim.
You'd reinstall every year or two to clean out the disused DLLs etc, but it was mostly fine.
Of course it wasn't exposed to quite the same hostile environment it is today.
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