In the world of software development, enhancements in development tools and platforms tends to be incremental. Certainly, new tools, frameworks, and platforms that ease the job of software development or software project management come along with sometimes mind-spinning regularity, and we have discussed a good number of them in this space. But after that initial release, revolutionary enhancements of those tools in functionality, capability, and ease of use are pretty rare.
In enterprise computing, somewhere between the era of punched-card computers and the rise of the personal computer, there was the heyday of the mainframe and the “dumb terminal”—a keyboard and a monochrome monitor with no graphics capability, no mouse, no speakers, no webcam, no USB anything. One mainframe computer could support a large number of simultaneous users who logged in via these dumb terminals; they neither knew nor cared where the actual computer was located.
A friend recently shared an item on Facebook that described the top 10 developer excuses, including things like “it worked yesterday” and “you must have a virus.” The number one excuse: “It works fine on my machine!”
In his 2014 song “First World Problems,” “Weird Al” Yankovic sings about someone with issues—among them, “my house is so big, I can’t get Wi-Fi in the kitchen.” A first-world problem if there ever was one. We in developed countries take ubiquitous connectivity for granted, so it’s easy to forget that for over half of the world’s population, internet connectivity ranges from slow to nonexistent.
If you have only recently started hearing about Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto, you may be surprised to learn that the technologies have been available since 2014—almost ancient history when it comes to mobile tech. It seems that the technologies have at last become available in enough new car models to make their way into the public consciousness.
A common theme in science fiction is that of robots who are, or somehow become, intelligent enough to have opinions on the way humans are running things; invariably, the opinion is that they don’t much care for it, and they decide as a group to take action in the form of the violent overthrow of their human masters.
