As discussed previously, I have a bit of a… problem with gadgets. My latest toy? A PPC-6700 from Sprint. I was tired of having my cell phone reception (previously from Cricket) go out every time I got on the highway. Or, for that matter, when I entered my house. So, in typical style, I decided it was finally time for me to get the coolest. phone. ever.
Anyone who has worked with me or knows me well understands my frustration with OSS (Linux, et al).Â
The other day, I set a new record in frustration level. I only wanted to set up the CentOS (Red Hat derivative) distribution with Apache/mod_ssl, PHP4, and MySQL5. By the third reformat and reinstall of the operating system, I could hardly form a coherent sentence through my anger, let alone deal with any more undocumented configuration files.
Unfortunately, you can’t physically destroy Linux. So I took it out on Linux’s cohort–the physical machine.
Software “engineering” is very different from every other field of engineering–it’s done almost freehand. In the relatively early days of software development, the gears began turning to make software development a licensed trade. Imagine a world where programmers are required by law to pass a certification exam in order to write software. It makes a certain degree of sense, I suppose; millions of lives are at the mercy of software every year in hospitals, airplanes, and traffic lights. So how is it that such a system is not in place?
The property of software engineering that sets it so far apart from other areas of engineering is the low barrier to entry. Within 19 years of their invention, personal computers resided in over 50% of American homes. Today that figure is much higher. Excellent software development tools are often free. This is not the case with, say, mechanical or civil engineering. The software to support those professions is prohibitively expensive for a hobbyist, and the actual execution of the craft (construction) is laughably far from the reach of an enthusiast.
Because the barrier to entry in software development is so low, hobbyists are everywhere, in varying degrees of mediocrity. A very few develop incredible skills with no professional training. Most, however, are complete incompetents claiming that their self-taught abilities are somehow more… 1337 than any formal Computer Science education.
With about five years’ professional experience under my belt, I’ve come to the following conclusions about the role of education in programming prowess: (more…)
Microsoft’s gaming division has made much ado over the so-called “10-foot user experience.” People are starting to use their PCs for entertainment in a new way, Microsoft claims. Rather than sitting in front of a 19″ monitor with a keyboard and mouse, they are attaching their PCs to big-screen TVs to watch movies and play simple games.
Since my recent acquisition of a Dell Axim PDA, I’ve become much more interested in the opposite end of the spectrum: the “3-inch user experience.” As I’ve scoured the web for handheld entertainment on my PDA, I’ve been shocked by the poor quality of PocketPC games.