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I think you're giving too much credit to ad execs...that was painful.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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By the same merit, though, I'm cr@p with radio tech, because computer tech was just growing up when I was "that age", and attracted me more.
I'll bet there were plenty of grumpy old buggers complaining about "kids nowadays not even knowing how to wire up a crystal", or some-such.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Between cloud & virtualization, a lot of today's developers don't realize they need actual hardware to run on.
How many of the younger generation even know how an OS works. How about Dynamic Link Libraries or OLE?
Does anyone know of any college that requires their CS degree students to learn Assembly Language? Colleges seem to have left Assembly to the engineers.
And yes, I am of the generation where if you needed something (compiler, OS, etc.) you wrote it yourself. Input via paper tape or punched cards.
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And that worries me - the people who employers want (young, just out of college, with the latest knowledge) are the people who know the least about how to actually do anything "outside the box". And these are the people who will be working on the most complex tasks - since complexity increases with time and the amount of lower-level support that has been developed and built on.
Then you look at what these people seem to have problems with and it's nearly enough to make you give up driving once you have closed all your accounts to move to a cash economy...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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There are some thing machines do better than humans. We built Assembler because we aren't at all good at coding machine language. We built compilers because humans aren't terrific at coding assembly, etc.
Thinking about it, that to me seems to be a good place for AI. Teach the AI S/W about the machine architecture & instruction set. Teach it about Assembler, C, C++ and C# (you would want the AI to leave a trail of bread crumbs behind, so we humans could if needed, decipher what the code is doing).
Teach the AI about how all the underlying infrastructure (magic) works. Teach the AI about coupling and cohesion. Teach it about the kinds of cyber attacks that EMET deals with. Let the AI take over the construction of the OS software and all the other "magic" stuff. No single human understands all the 100M+ lines of code that constitute the Windows OS these days.
Strikes me that done correctly, this could (over time) largely eliminate programing errors that cause security vulnerabilities. Also would yield leaner, faster code
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I refer you to series 1 of 'The IT Crowd'. (UK TV sitcom that went off the rails after the first few episodes but the first few were funny).
Surely it must be easy to teach an AI to say "Have you tried switching it off and back on again?"
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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Back when I was teaching I ran an evening class for "Computer Studies". One mother brought her son to attend the classes and proudly told me, "He's very good and knows all about computers. He always sets the high score on Space Invaders!" - which also gives you an idea of how long ago it was!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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You don't know how good you've got it. I was support supervisor for an accounting software company back in the early 80's, and some of the things we encountered back in those days have since become urban legend, but I assure you, they are totally true. Some examples:
These were the days of 5¼" floppy disks, and often we would get the client to send us in a copy of their files so we could inspect/repair them. One case sent us in a photocopy of their backup disk. Another folded the disk so it would fit into a standard envelope. Yet another kept the disks safe by storing them on the side of a filing cabinet with a magnet.
One of the funniest examples: one of our clients was the 7th Day Adventist Church. When doing telephone support, we always told them what to type letter by letter, and used a word as in "a for apple, b for balloon" etc. Anyway, our staff said "d for dingo", and didn't that stir things up! Poor girl was stuck on the phone for almost three hours getting a full explanation of how Lindy could not possibly have done it.
Cheers,
Mick
------------------------------------------------
It doesn't matter how often or hard you fall on your arse, eventually you'll roll over and land on your feet.
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Ah, yes, I've had the old 5 1/4"s with compliment slips staples through them.
My all time favourite one, though:
"I think the computer's broken."
"What makes you think that?"
"The screen's gone all blank except for a pound sign in the corner."
That was a conversation with someone who was meant to be a UNIX systems administrator. Sometimes it really is better to ask a programmer.
Slogans aren't solutions.
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But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
Cheers,
Mick
------------------------------------------------
It doesn't matter how often or hard you fall on your arse, eventually you'll roll over and land on your feet.
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PeejayAdams wrote: "The screen's gone all blank except for a pound sign in the corner."
So put a shilling in the meter.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Had a guy walk into my office, reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pull out a folded-in-half 5.25" floppy. Not surprising ... he couldn't read it.
Neither could I.
"But that has my last 6 months of XXX work on it! You have to read it!"
"You can't fold a disk like that and not ruin it."
"I've been doing this for 6 months and it has never been a problem."
"Why didn't you put your files on your hard drive or the network drive?"
"I don't trust them. My floppy is safer."
That conversation is etched in my memories.
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Nighthowler wrote: I need a drink.
Is the correct answer!
veni bibi saltavi
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I used to work near a guy on customer support in the 90s - he had a) the patience of a saint, b) a distinct German accent. It was magnificent to hear him (obviously, only one half of the conversation)
Do you have PIF Editor? It is ze icon viz ze yellow pencil...
No, zen ve must knife and fork it srough
... lots of to-ing & fro-ing, always polite, not getting angry ...
puts phone down, then in frustration - vhen she cannot speak her own language, she may as vell bark like a dog!
That was a particularly bad one though.
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I used to do phone support and one of the bizarre things that annoyed me was that for some reason people immediately forgot how to do anything when they were on the phone to you and this was a far from uncommon occurrence.
Them: "When I open this Word file the letters are really small."
Me: "Ok can you just open the file for me now."
Them: "How do I do that?"
Them: "When I start Outlook it won't download my mail."
Me: "Ok can you start Outlook for me now."
Them: "How do I do that?"
No matter what it was they were calling about, 50% of the time when you asked them to reproduce the issue they asked "How do I do that?" HOW DO YOU KNOW IT'S A £^*"$ING PROBLEM THEN???
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They hear your words, but ton't connect them with the normal activities, so they ask. Every time Mickeysoft sh*ts out a new OS, I use some new features and discover later what they actually are called. Sometimes even after asking some dumb question when I heard the name without yet knowing that this new feature I was using was behind that. If you do support all day, you may phrase things in a way that normal uses are not used to.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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A billion years ago when I was in IT and we were rolling out a PC network to replace an old mini system (Nixdorf) there was an elderly woman in accounts receivable that freaked out when she found out a mouse was called a "mouse". She absolutely refused to touch it.
I cut out a picture of a flower and taped it to her mouse and from that day forward always referred to it as a flower when we spoke. Damn picture was still there 3 years later when she retired.
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. ~ Ronald Reagan
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It was good to have fun with some of the clients like that. We had one client that lived very close to where she worked, and each lunch time would go home and watch "Days of our Lives". So whenever we had a new employee, and that client rang, we would get the new person to take the call and ask her how Days of our Lives was going, and enjoy the reaction when they got a (good natured) mouthful.
Cheers,
Mick
------------------------------------------------
It doesn't matter how often or hard you fall on your arse, eventually you'll roll over and land on your feet.
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Wow! That brings back memories! 
Isn't RD over the web a wonderful thing?
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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kmoorevs wrote: Isn't RD over the web a wonderful thing?
I would have given my left one for that when I did support.
Cheers,
Mick
------------------------------------------------
It doesn't matter how often or hard you fall on your arse, eventually you'll roll over and land on your feet.
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You have recounted fairly precisely what occurs when Mrs. Wife calls me at work/out on the bike/out of town and says "The computer isn't working" .
Software Zen: delete this;
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I wrote this litte utility program for a group of librarians - I think they all were 50+ years; they had definitely not learned any computer stuff during their education. I sent them the utility as an attachment to an email. One of the ladies called me up, not knowing what to do. I told her to simply pull the attachment from the mail message out on the desktop.
The lady halfway screamed "Desktop?? You must not use such technical terms to me - remember that I am a librarian, not a computer exepert!"
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Nighthowler wrote: The previous tech support request was to fix their laptop (because programmers know to fix everything. Go figure)
I definitely resemble that remark ... if somebody hears that I write code all-of-a-sudden they're calling me to fix their laptop or figure out their screw up in an Excel spreadsheet or something!
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Stay strong. We have been there bro.
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