A dev on my team wrote the following Excel 2000 credits (it was a flying carpet-like game). Afaik that was around the time BillG put his foot down and mandated no new credits. Enterprise customers felt these credits were both a sign of wasted engineering time ("you could have fixed x bugs instead!" and wasted disk space. It's logical, but only partly true. Shipping software on CD means a very long stabilization phase. You couldn't really "fix more bugs" because every bug fix had a risk of introducing another one. That means some Office teams would literally complete their work a year before shipping. They'd sit around half-heartedly helping other teams. That's when someone would take time to write credits. These credits were often tightly-optimized C and assembly, taking very little space. The facts couldn't overcome the optics, so that was the end of fun Microsoft credits.
As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.
It reminds me of an old story about Microsoft Windows. Back in the early 2000's, compiling and building Windows from source code took many hours on very specialized build hardware. Meanwhile there were thousands of developers who contributed to the full Windows stack. If any developer checked in a build failure, it would cause the build to be delayed. Well, at that scale (of thousands of developers), you can't compile Windows even if devs only commit 1 build break per year. Bad times...
Pretty interesting. Too bad the synths are generic and no beat. I'm pretty sure with more work this could substitute most electronica I listen to when I code.
I'm confused by what you mean. I'd argue that onboarding new customers should be your core competency, the focus of your main product. What am I missing?
I've worked at Microsoft, Amazon, and several other places. These clauses are pretty standard. I'd say it would be unusual to find a place that doesn't make you sign these (or similar) clauses. My experience has been that it mostly depends on your relationship with your boss. If you're a strong performer and your side interests don't interfere or compete with the company, you're "usually" fine. That's not a guarantee: it's just the odds.
Your location of employment also matters. I assume you're planning to work in Seattle, and unfortunately Washington is company-friendly when it comes to worker rights. California is usually more worker-friendly.
If you're planning on working on AWS, you're probably going to have little free time. Don't fret this legalese if you plan on dabbling in open source or write games on your free time. However if you're probably going to run into problems than other than just legal ones if you're planning on creating a business on the side: amazon usually demands too much to leave you with much free time.
I think that, over time, both paradigms are required. For the quick lookup/command, "ask" is best. For longer interactions, like driving directions, or cooking instructions, etc... a "conversation" makes more sense.
Given that we're at the early stages of conversational UIs, I think the 'ask' case is more helpful, but I'm more excited to see what will evolve through conversations.
Amazon lost the phone and tablet wars, so they shifted their focus to the voice assistant market, and are now ahead of competitors with their Alexa skills SDK.
It's great to see Google now step up too. I expect Microsoft and Apple follow suit.
It's pretty easy to imagine how one could port simple 'voice command' apps between platforms ('hey, order a pizza/uber/etc...). Over time, however, these platforms should emerge into substantial AI. To be useful they will need to remember and understand more subtle contexts. "Hey, what's the score of the game" will have to remember that I like the Seahawks and Sounders, but only the Sounders are playing live right now, etc...
I like Google's choice to include a "conversational" model to the application design. "Let me talk to <x>" is pretty natural and allows <x> to then have full control of the interaction. Alexa's "ask <x> to <command>" model makes it easier to fire off simple commands, but awkward for deeper ones.
I'm always amazed at how efficient AWS is at detecting private keys on the internet (checked into github, etc..), and then proactively locking down accounts. I wonder how long it will be until we see a similar service from consumer accounts, like github or twitter. Seems like "have I been pwned" might offer a commercial API for such benefit...
When this becomes real, the next question becomes "why own the car"? What's the benefit of having it sit in a parking lot for 8 hours until I'm ready to go home. Seems like the future will become more Uber-like, where I call up rides whenever I want, and don't worry about parking, maintenance, etc....
Good writing has similarities to good UI in that you have to relate to your audience. I'm a fan of this topic and appreciate your thoughts on it. However I found your article too long for my taste and attention span. Your complaints get lost in the enormity of it all.