I don’t get it

There used to be the old sentence: nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

In large companies, if you pick a large vendor, with admittedly a lot of bureaucracy, dubious tech and huge fees, your job is safe but also you will go through less problems.

Not all decisions are done to favor tech. At the management level you need to be able to answer to investors, have reputable vendors, etc because it softens problems. This is very important when it comes to funding: if your new cool tech has a problem, it’s much harder to defend than if the IBM solution is not working.

Programmers need to stop seeing a project as code only: it’s a product with finances, marketing, etc involved and sometimes to make one side work, you hurt the other side; it means that sometimes a slow, more expensive and cumbersome solution is the right one, even if the tech team does not like it. Took me over 15 years to really understand it...

There are two things at play here:

There are more coders today so the number of incompetent ones is larger, but also many older people got into this by true passion,.

To be be realistic, only geeks had a C64 or an Atari, etc while today everyone has a computer and can decide to get into coding.

So naturally, you have a lot more bad programmers and many happen to be younger since it’s more mainstream now, but there are also brilliant young programmers out there.

@irene you cannot have a true software rng because it is debatable is random really exists as a thing in the first place: What makes an event random is simply the lack of information about its cause; the moment you can explain it, it is not random anymore. A prng is not random, but measuring external events is not as well. One reply mentions the low bit of an ADC, but at a low level, there is nothing random about it. So you can call anything random if you don't look at the information related to it. Bus schedules can appear random to the person that doesn't know what time is (or anyone that lives in Malta); prng appear random for most purposes, but there is certainly no 'true' random possible in software since it is at a much higher level of understanding than some complex physics events we can already explain are not random.

Starting with it can be a bit of a pain, but once you are used to the commands, config files, etc you'll wonder how you've done without it all these years.

Despite the annoyances at the beginning, I really recommend you invest time in it.

@irene there is no hardware involved in the random generator. It is simply a mathematical function with well distributed output. If you put the same seed (starting point), you get the same output of 'random' numbers. So systems will usually use the system time and a few other variables to get the seed. You can find a lot of different polynomials source code online that will show you how it works.

It's called a pseudo random generator because it is not random at all, but for most intents and purposes, it looks random.

The first line already indicates a problem :)

There is currently a poll and a thread on slashdot about the ethics of automating your own job, it’s a good read.
The real question is: are you hired to provide a result or to be working x hours per day.

@olback that’s not true; the polynomial used needs a seed. Random generator are polynomials with a good distribution, they’re not random wat all but look random enough for most purposes.

The fall through can be very useful

@segfault: it was, Iran was modernized due to oil exports done by a gov that was very western friendly. Look for photos of Iran in the 60s. It was the only country in the Middle East with equality for women, etc.
At some point the rich got richer, the poor poorer and tensions started to rise. The gov also started to be less cooperative with the West.
Eventually this led to the ‘79 Islamic revolution and took the country back in time.
If you look at the 60s and early 70s photos, you will see Iran in a totally different light, it was a radically different country than it is today; but not playing to the West’s interests has been bad for all countries of that area.

Today Iran is struggling with economic sanctions, a lot of drug problems, a large organ black market, etc.

My personal opinion is that once we drop our need for oil, we’ll probably leave the Middle East alone because it won’t have anything of interest for us anymore.

At the same time, there is the opposite: I’m 46, started with assembler on the Atari when I was 12 and worked in the field since I was 17; the level of understanding from many young programmers is astoundingly bad.
You see many get in web programming, which is pretty much the McDonalds of tech, because they can’t do anything else. They don’t have a clue how the computers really work because everything they know is at a high level of abstraction and they come up with rules and mantras about how things should be depending on the fad of the moment.

Of course, you have some great talent, like there always was, but they’re now hidden in the mass.

Was it better before? Yes definitely because the barrier of entry was much higher since you needed a lot of passion to make anything work with the dev environments we had; as a result, the skill level in teams was a lot better.

Iran used to be the beacon of modernity for the East. It was ahead of all its neighbors until the Shah stopped obeying the West and the revolution took the country back to the Stone Age.
I am convinced that the Komeni revolution was orchestrated by the West since the US has spent the last 60 years screwing up that part of the world.