Thanks for the realistic survey of alternative search engines. I've tried alternatives to google over the years, even as far back as 2000, which was when google became the default because they blew the competition out of the water.

I'm in Australia, so the localisation problem is crucial.

In 2017 I tried DuckDuckGo and found it just hopeless for Australia.

I've also tried Bing and it seemed good for localisation.

But I keep coming back to google because while others are catching up from behind google seem to keep pushing the state-of-the art, such as the excellent type-ahead, and the results it proposes by prefetching articles. Also, the integration with maps seems to work on mobile devices.

From what you've said, it looks like Bing and DuckDuckGo may be worth another try.

There's a map in the article. Antarctica was pretty much where it is now. The rainforests described in this article were, as the lead para says "close to the South Pole".

I thought your were about to say "recession", and agree, but then you said "AI".

When I was finishing my degree in '85 various people, including the professors, told me I'd probably be out of a job in ten years due to AI. I wasn't scared. Soon after that ('88) I met a guy who told me that people had predicted the same thing when he started out in the 60s.

I nearly survived 25 years, but got unlucky near the end, for just three months. It was a weird experience, and completely unlike anything I'd encountered before.

I describe it in my post just below yours. As I say in that post, apart from this one person all my other supervisors had been either very good, or good.

This was working as a lone contractor in a government department, so there's a couple of factors there which probably contributed to this person being able use his really ugly side with me.

In private enterprise you come across some nasty and hard-driven individuals, but if it upsets the team too much they undermine the enterprise and the bigger bosses don't want that, whereas in government everyone is quite cushioned from dangerous people, just so long as they don't effect them personally.

Diary yes (but keep it very secretively), but emails, no. A real bully objects to everything you do, and uses it against you. They also have to in control at all times, and see any loss of control (such as an unsolicited email) as an insult to their authority. The moment he gets one "unnecessary" (in his mind) email from you he'll attack you for it. "You should be getting on with the job!". He'll also nitpick the email for typos or minor errors, so that you have to spend an hour on what should take ten minutes. He'll also be alerted to you as a trouble maker, and the second time you do it he'll be all over you like a pit-bull. Only email him when he has specifically told you to, or it's unavoidable. In the second case, ie. unavoidable, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. He'll attack the necessary email, but also attack you for not sending it if you don't.

Yes - I'm talking from personally experience. I lasted three long months, but was going crazy after three weeks. I'd been in the workforce twenty years and didn't know such people existed.

In a 25 year career, from 1985 to 2010, I had (about) 6 jobs and (about) 15 bosses.

As one would expect, a few bosses were very good, most were good, and none were poor (you don't get to be a boss in a high tech company without being good at your stuff).

For the first 20 years of my career I'd heard of "bullying" and was dismissive of it. I thought that those alleging it was either imagining things, or not dealing with it professionally.

EXCEPT

I started a new job as a contractor with the DoD here (Australia), ie a private contractor in a government department. Within one week the supervisor had upset me with needless criticism and micro-management. I dealt with it "professionally", ie. keep my cool and address the substance of his complaints, not the manner. Within another week it was repeated - more complaints, more micro-management. I stayed "professional". Within another week he was contradicting his previous complaints. He had repeatedly told me to he wanted me to be more "communicative" with him, so I was I went to seek his guidance in a situation where it wasn't strictly necessary. Rather than answer my question he took the opportunity to tell me he expects contractors to be able to work these things out for themselves, and walked off with a snarl. I then realised I was dealing with a "bully". By the end of the first month work was a misery and I thought about him day and night. I quit after three months. This was the first and only time in my career I left a job just to get out of a place rather than to move on to something better.

I learned from other workers at the office that a previous contractor had also quit and the man's colleagues in the DoD couldn't work with him either. (How he stayed in a senior job is a mystery, but I think he was very good at sucking up to his own bosses, presumably blaming his subordinates).

So, I learned that bullies are rare, but when you get one you are in an impossible situation.

When I look back to the interview there wasn't much that gave him away, but there was a very "superior" attitude where he seemed to be putting me in my place, and apart from asserting himself he wasn't very interested in me.

Some time after this I saw him at a gym. I noticed him strutting around with his nose in the air, looking like he was full of himself. He was tall and muscular. He didn't see me. I don't think he saw anyone.

:)

Sent from the text-mode browser on your terminal attached to the PDP "Mini Computer" at work?

I'm about 20 years older than that. Still, when I got into computing as a professional in my 20s I was excited by those things (Amiga, Unix, C++) and also some more academic things - AI and functional programming. I was also excited by "Client/Server" and networks. Now, all of the things which I was excited by as cutting edge have been through two transitions: one, to commercial acceptance and required knowledge for programmers; and, then two, ubiquity and invisibility. Meanwhile, some very smart people and aggressive startups have put all of these in the hands of everyone from teenagers to grandmas. Back in the 80's we may have dreamed of everyone having a computer and being connected, but we did not envisage how it would be. We probably thought of some giant international connection of PCs with people chatting through text consoles. We did not envisage the www, with all the world's news and knowledge being crowd sourced, we didn't envisage facebook/instragram/twitter with ordinary people compulsively getting their latest info from each other, and we didn't envisage smart phones. WRT smartphones, that was Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs only. Microsoft and Blackberry had 10+ years leap on them, but never understood the possibilities, nor did anyone else.

One common trend I've seen with programmers is that we dismiss the latest developments. In my time, we've dismissed the GUI ("I get more done throught the command line"). Then we dismissed the GUI with colors. Then we dismissed the web (yes - I heard that!). Then we dismissed smart phones. Then we dismissed facebook. etc. If it were up to us, we'd still be using mainframes with text consoles. Which was the state of technology when I arrived in 1980. Undoubtedly, that would have been rejected by the luddites from 30 years before then.

Good question! My answer is, as someone who was already a professional programmer 30 years ago, an emphatic NO!

(I still love the Amiga, though!)

Agree the dumbphone is the neatest solution if it really does the job. They are smaller and simpler - battery life is a big plus! However, I found that if I regularly need a smartphone/tablet as well, then it's just a matter of time before I lose one of them. The "must carry" list becomes: wallet, keys, phone, smartphone (maybe passport). One too many for me. A bit of a pity, however. :)

Thanks for the tips about the SIM USB reader and other spec details. (Although, I found during my dumbphone experiment that I was noticing things like this, which all just "worked" on a modern smartphone).

Yup

A year ago I was asking myself almost the same question as the OP, and I came to the conclusion that what I needed was a good "dumb phone", augmented by a tablet when traveling. It took me hours of research on the internet to find the dumb phone. I eventually brought it, and found that it didn't do the basics of phone and SMS nearly as well as my Android smart phone. The two bug-bears were: firstly, contacts, where I had to manually enter and maintain my contact list which had been maintained in the Cloud by Android and synchronized with my desktop, and, secondly, typing SMSs. It was a bit of "fun" using the old keypad again, but basically a pain. I was slowly typing brief, misspelled responses to long messages.

Despite my limited stated requirements, I found that I needed/wanted more, practically. I did want to be able to access the internet when out, and to be able to take photos at short notice. Sure, my dumb phone did have some kind of worthless browser, and could take photos, but obviously there was no comparison with a modern, moderately specced smartphone, let alone a top end one. I also found that keeping track of a phone and a tablet during normal work and leisure was just too complicated.

The dumbphone experiment was a waste of my time in 2016/17, and will be increasingly so as time goes by

The English language is already doing this the way it usually does - through common usage.

People are increasingly saying "phone" to refer to their mobile, smartphone, cellphone, etc...

Yes. Previously the complaints against Microsoft were largely non-technical, and people were faced with a choice of paying a small amount for a Windows system which worked and they were familiar with, or having Linux for free but with no practical advantanges. Microsoft were always able to keep the prices down to the point where switching just wasn't worth while. But now we have a Windows which doesn't work and people aren't familiar with. Even if it were free customers don't want an operating system with a history of catastrophic failures, and which requires retraining. The cost of switching to Linux may well be lower than switching to Windows 10.

Quite a bit better than XP, and more attractive, IMO. The various "innovations" in Windows 8 and 10 may excite Microsoft, and even some power users, but everyone else just wants a system which let's them fire up email, the web and Office. They don't care if it looks and feels the same year-after-year. Games have largely shifted to consoles, and outside work people are spending more time on their phones than their PC's. People don't want a "better" OS which is unreliable or causes them to relearn how to use it.

About 5 years ago I had my mom staying as a guest and I had a Linux Mint system set up in the guest room for web browsing. She liked it very much and thought it more attractive and easy to use than Windows, and when I told her that it was free she commented "Why doesn't everyone use this?"

Between 1985 and 1995 I heard of three revolutions which were going to put programmers out of a job "in ten years", they were: "computers programming themselves" (ie. AI), 4GL's, CASE tools.

I was never really worried by these, but after the third time, didn't pay any attention.

I was, however, always worried about being put out of work by new langueages (C++, Java, XML, etc..), and rightly so. But as long as I kept up with them, the work was there.

Close, but not quite, for me. I also use Edge to access Microsoft web sites, with the hope that it *might* work better, on their crappy site. So far, without success.

Agreed.

Except that for me, "mistrust" has become "I'm sure you will screw me".