Navigation is pretty handy, but the thing I really love about a smartphone is having a decent portable camera always with me. To quickly take a snap to share with family (mms, email or social media), when you otherwise would have missed that is pretty cool.
With a smartphone you have to turn it on, swipe your password and/or unlock it somehow, then tap the camera app and then tap/press something to take a picture. And you might get an error message, "Battery too low to use flash."
My dumbphone you press-hold camera button and that's it.
>With a smartphone you have to turn it on, swipe your password and/or unlock it somehow, then tap the camera app and then tap/press something to take a picture. And you might get an error message, "Battery too low to use flash."
With a generic "smartphone" you do, with an iPhone you just swipe up from the bottom right corner. It's nicely sandboxed outside the lock screen - you can see the photos you just took, but to review other photos you need to enter your PIN.
'Opportunistic technology' has applications in the classroom.
I have an old OS Blackberry Bold and I use the camera in class to photo student work and email it to a webmail account in-lesson then pop it on projector. I also use music player with 3.5mm lead to play podcasts &c. Fairly quick to use. Students encouraged to photo screens/whiteboards and email them in &c.
As a more mature (cough) person, I make limited personal use of social media and tend not to have very high traffic. The 'smartish' aspect is all data collection.
it's probably safer to just remember to use mv instead, because there's a very high chance that you'll do the wrong thing on a terminal that doesn't have that alias available.
Well, the classical engineering domains are all pretty different anyway (electrical, structural, civil, etc). I remember my grandfather saying he thought it was ludicrous that they were all covered by a single qualification.
Building software with an engineering approach is a real thing. Not everyone subscribes to it, but doesn't mean it isn't a real thing.
For the record, I do a lot of gardening too, and building software has fuck all to do with that.
I also don't get how everyone who argues against software-as-engineering talk like buildings and bridges never fall over. They do.
> When you're pissing your diapers in an old people's home, what good is your retirement money?
As I've understood, the point is to blow all your retirement money between the age of 65(standard retirement age), and as you so eloquently put it, the age when you are pissing yourself in an old folks home. With a little luck, you've got about 30 years there.
I know it was just a typo (of which you will find lots every day, some crucial to the meaning of the story) but I have saved a screen grab of a headline from a Christmas past where the Herald wrote "Elf diagnosis causing alarm" on a story about Internet self diagnosis.
> Building something interesting requires a surplus of time and money. Salaried jobs provide neither.
Standard negatory bullshit. You should be able to achieve building something interesting, using someone elses time and money. If you can't, maybe you've got an attitude problem, not a job problem.
Also perplexing was this assertion that salaried jobs don't provide a surplus of money, when the vast majority of entrepreneurs fund their projects and endeavors through a salaried position either held concurrently or in the past.
Original source FOR the "orders of magnitude" claim seem to usually point back to Fred Brooks Mythical Man Month (5-10x) or Robert Glass (Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering) 28x. I don't think either of these multipliers are accurately expressed as "orders of magnitude", regardless of them being supported by evidence.
There is some discussion of the topic in "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It."
Hmmm. I agree that 'orders' is not an appropriate choice of words.
But I usually don't interpret this kind of claims literally, so I took the GP remark as saying that in practice (IRL) there was no such 'wide gap in productivity', which is opposite to claims/data I saw before (as you mention, 5-20x) and to my own experience.
