But how well it is coded, applies to all software. Companies always try to hire non-programmers to make their stuff. Thinking this guy can write code so he is good enough. They figure they are saving money. They are not they are just making crap that is hard to maintain, and the end users just hate.
People go to Google or Facebook or Amazon not because they are better in technology or service, but because they have the bulk of the data or products available. So you could Split up Google and have different Apps one for search a company for maps, a company for google suites. However their success is based on their integration. And Google Maps alone probably wouldn't be able to fund itself without google search dollars. Also people will Google with Google. There isn't anything stopping me from searching with Bing, I can even have Chrome search with Bing. I don't have to shop at amazon there are other stores. Unlike say Microsoft back in the late 1990's where if you weren't on their systems, you were at a disadvantage. You can live your life without Google, Facebook and Amazon. With Bing, living a good normal life, and going to a normal brick and mortar store (or is online section) .
I commonly use Javascript to Ajax Call and get a new session key a few times a minute. I do this so if someone did a screen/varable/back button capture of the page, they wouldn't be able to use that data without authentication. If it tries to renew an expired key, it brings you back to the login screen, and additional data will not be read or saved with an invalid key. Is it fool proof, no, is this all I am doing for security No. but it is putting an extra layer of security that wasn't there before. It is the equivalent of not hiding the key under the welcome map. So yes you can use Javascript to increase security.
You can only really trust Javascript as much as you trust the page creators.
Sure turn off Javascript for your random browsing, but if you are going to a site, where your personal info and needs to log into with... Then you might as well have it enabled. Because your data is already compromised, and you are just missing out on features which may make your browsing a bit easier.
Actually Google has been leading JavaScript adoption for over a decade. Even back in the early 2000's web/web app developers were slow to use Javascript on their pages (Or limited to input validation). Mostly because they were afraid of people using old browsers that didn't support it. If you did a lot of stuff, you probably didn't get the customer, because you cannot reference an other popular site that needs Javascript. Then with Googles Autocomplete feature and Google Maps, becoming a popular feature, it opened the door for the rest of us to apply Javascript,Ajax and DHTML to the pages. I know, Booo Javascript sucks! However Javascript is better then Sliverlight, Flash, Active X, Java Applets, in terms of keeping the web platform open, while offering the features most people wanted.
Now Javascript has its issues... However it is used on all major browsers, and if coded well, it makes your pages load and run faster. (if not then we have the suckyness we think of wanting to block Javascript for)
I have worked with people with Microsoft, Google, AOL (when it was a thing).... And for the most part they are not any better then those guys who worked at small companies, or even in Government. Actually people from small companies, are actually much better, because they know how to do more with less.
From my experience, when these projects get delayed and take a long time, is because most of the work going on is protecting your own butt. This is prevalent in work cultures which when there is a problem, the direction goes to who did the mistake and punish them. So people learn to have documentation, gigs of emails (copies of it if email is purged) to show off if there is a problem, that they have record of disagreeing with it, to showing they were told to do it that way, or someone else didn't do it the way you had said.
All this work doesn't make the product any better it just gives middle management the impression they are doing something about it. While the correct course of action is to 1. Fix the problem found. 2. Make sure that problem doesn't happen again. 3. Implement this plan to make sure that problem doesn't happen again. Most catastrophic mistakes made by a company are not done in a vacuum, sure there is that one guy who hit the Run button that started the mistake in action, but they are often built off of problems in the entire company. And often when big mistakes happen, everyone was doing their job as they were suppose to, it was just lack of big picture planning which causes the failure.
Why? Do you just like seeing people seriously hurt in general? Or do you just don't like the idea of motorized transportation that isn't a full sized car or motorcycle. Because there was someone who slightly inconvenienced you with some unsafe driving.
It is also not a good idea to base a business on a lowering trend as well.
However it is difficult to determine what is a fad and what is a trend.
A lot of people didn't get Color TV's because they though it was Fad, but it was a trend. A lot of people bought 3d TV's because they thought it was trend, but it was a Fad.
Mail Order was a fad which got killed by Box Stores, while Online Shopping (nearly the same thing) is a trend which is killing Box Stores.
The big Grocery Stores took over the Mom and Pop corner shop, but didn't do much against the convince stores.
Now Restaurants are pushing the idea of the experience, while Millennials just want the food. Especially for the low - mid range restaurants (Think many of the chain restaurants). Where the food quality is OK, but not worth the hassle of going to a restaurant, waiting for your turn, getting bugged by waiters. Having to sit and wait for your food, be sure you behave so you don't get kicked out... Now this could just be a fad, as Millennial get older and more mature, will want to go for more of the experience. Or it could just be a trend, of wanting the restaurant food, at the home experience. Where you can just be relaxed.
I am too lazy to go to the Grocery Store and return my bottles, So I toss them into my home recycling bin. Now the recycling center takes my bottles and processes them and gets paid for the stuff I just tossed out. With Open Source you don't pay for the software, but you pay for the Services around it. For Red Hat case, it is packaging it in a way that it works on a core install, paying for consultants and support folks to make sure it works, and people use it correctly. If there are problems they may have coders on staff to apply fixes to it.
That is the Open Source Business model. Unfortunately this model means no profitability in products that are really easy to use, and are not targeted towards businesses.
Coding isn't royalty based. Even for closed source applications. I would get paid for my time doing development, now if my code makes the company a Billion Dollars I don't expect to be paid any portion of that, because I had already agreed to be paid for my time.
If you are an Open Source Developer, either someone had paid you for your time, or you volunteered it. Now that someone had profited off your work, you are not going to expect to get paid extra for it.
Now if we change the business model to a royalty based work. Then I fear there will be a lot of shady things going on. Such as constantly rewriting a program, to stop long term royalty checks, a lot of work will be needed to calculate the value of such applications. R&D type of coding will be tossed out the window. I am not saying it can't work, but it will open the door for a lot of new issues.
However the Sun seems to shine every day in Arizona, vs. having to transport natural gas to the location.
I am not Anti-Fossil Fuel. It is a high energy density, and easy to transport, this is a good form of energy for energy poor locations, where they can be shipped energy to them to operate. Arizona is rich in solar energy, while not as dense, they have a lot of solar energy beaming down on them, and their dessert climate, and the states large and relatively untouched areas. Means there is a lot of room to collect the energy and counteract the difference in energy density.
For heat in my house I use wood pellets. They are cheaper then Oil for the winter. However I need more space in my garage to hold them then it would take to have an oil tank for the same amount of energy. However this is space in my Garage that I wouldn't be fully utalizing anyway. So the difference in Energy Density isn't a factor, but the cost of fuel, which offsets the opportunity cost of the used space in my Garage.
The up-time of such a device wouldn't meet modern service level objectives. The Sun Dial seems to have under 50% up time. It doesn't work at night, and often has problems on overcast days.
It is actually quite sad, how synchronized we are a society we are with Cell Phones and their clock all hooked up to a highly regulated atomic clocks. If I have meeting in 2 minutes I am like, I have plenty of time, to fill my coffee, check some emails, fix a line of code. Then dial in and still be early because I had 10 seconds to spare. Then everyone else is all connected in within 30 seconds after that.
Back 20 years ago, most people were 10 minutes early to a meeting, and the meeting didn't start until 5 minutes after the scheduled time. Because peoples clocks could be considered up to 5 minutes off.
So please tell me the best managed technology company out there? In general all of them suck, because we can't get our idea of what technology should be like, and there is always those features that seems to had slipped pass QC.
Now my beef with Apple is they have been leading the charge for decades to remove ports, plugs, and doors. Which allow us to fix our problems ourselves.
Gone are the days where I hosed my OS, so let me boot from the CD/DVD/Floppy Disk and rebuild the OS. If you are lucky you have a USB port where you can boot off of that. But for mobile devices, you are tied to the vendor doing its over the network upgrade, and hope you don't mess up the OS.
The problem is these Ads are just a touch away from a purchase. Back when I was a kid, where we had TV Shows that were 1/2 hour commercials for toys, and even seeing a full movie which was an advertisement for Nintendo. We could want this stuff as much as anyone, but we were limited by Mom and Dad. Who often had the final say of Yes you can have this or No you can't, even a non-helicopter parent at that time had that degree of control.
Now with these Apps, you are just a click away from immediate gratification, and in-app purchase. Without the kids really realizing that getting $1.00 add ins that offer 10 minutes of mediocre enjoyment, could had been used somewhere else.
Sure some adults don't get this, but at least they will need to realize the consequences of such actions.
Kepler is way out of the shuttles range. Besides the shuttle ability to do such things was over exaggerated, and a normal rocket design could probably do such safer and cheaper then the shuttle.
Being that the Kepler is further away then our Moon is. And the moon is still currently the longest space flight we have manually manned. I would think so. Even if we were to have a robotic fuel craft. Creating such a craft and have it make a such detail connection to refuel it. Would still be more expensive then launching a new telescope.
We can also launch a new one with better technology that can dig even deeper then what the Kepler could.
Part of the problem with the American Space Shuttle program was the idea of a reusable space craft, because that is what we see in Science Fiction and our idea of a spacecraft. But we found out that for the most part reusable space crafts are not affordable and safe. Sure we as the little people get side tracked that equipment that cost more then all the homes in swanky high end neighborhood, to be disposable after a few years. But that is the nature of space economics. It is expensive, and even more so to go back, or to do maintenance. It just doesn't have the economy of scale.
You can get a dongle. If you go off brand you can probably get one for cheap. Me my old phone dies, so I got a $5.00 Bluetooth adapter for my headphones.
Now that nearly everyone has a Smart Phone to a point where we just call them normal phones. And by phone there is a tiny chip that is connected to a radio broadcaster and receiver, and the rest is a computer crammed into as small of a form factor as possible.
But Unlike the Black Berry days or the first iPhone to around I would say the iPhone 4 or 5 where having the newest smart phone meant you had a lot of extra power in your pocket where you could do so much more then your peer with the older version or without a smart phone at all. Today we all have these little rectangle glass front computers that we call a phone, while we may get emotional when someone uses a brand that we didn't choose, for the most part we really don't care anymore. Your Doctor may have an LG Smart Phone, while your garbage man may have an iPhone Xs Plus. It really doesn't matter that much anymore. Sure there is difference between the $150 smart phone and the $1500 smart phone, but it isn't 10x better. You will be lucky if it twice as good. But still for most stuff you can do the same things with them. So why upgrading until you have too.
The sad truth about business. Profitability isn't enough. If you have 2 products one makes $0.02 profit per unit while the other one makes $0.0199 profit per unit, and they take the same amount of resources to produce. The company will drop the $0.0199 product and move the money for the resources to make this to produce more of the $0.02 product.
Now some companies with longer term planning, may keep the $0.0199 product in case of a problem where the $0.02 product no longer sells, so they will still have feet in the game, but often there isn't that much a threat of that happening so they will just sell more of the higher profit item.
Just paying them money, doesn't guarantee their needs are met. I want x.org to support this touchscreen that I could purchase in bulk for $5.00 less then the competition per unit. The general project people, may not have objection to supporting such device, but just doesn't consider it a high enough priority. So you have your developers put in the patch and have them implement it. If they refuse it you can still have it as a fork in the product which is probably still good enough to release the product using these touchscreens.
The problem is most of the Open Source Teams are mostly all technical folks. Who really suck at explaining their value to their company, especially as they are sharing their hard work for free to their competitors. So they are considered a cost center vs a profit center.
What they need are some sales people to really boost their value to higher management. Explaining how they are leading the industry and forcing other to just follow, and by being strong in the Open Source community you push your standards downward, vs hoping for the best and having to reword some of your ideas because someone else had won the standard war.
That is the real problem with Apples Macintosh lineup. Where we use to have a yearly upgrade they seem to fall every 4 years. And their price doesn't seem to go down the next year. There really isn't a good time to buy one. The Air and the Mini, are already under-powered new (About a year old tech). Which isn't bad, but if you are going to keep it for 4 years or 8 years then these will be miserably out of date during your next upgrade. And you can't wait a year or two to get it on the cheap.
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But how well it is coded, applies to all software.
Companies always try to hire non-programmers to make their stuff. Thinking this guy can write code so he is good enough. They figure they are saving money. They are not they are just making crap that is hard to maintain, and the end users just hate.
People go to Google or Facebook or Amazon not because they are better in technology or service, but because they have the bulk of the data or products available.
So you could Split up Google and have different Apps one for search a company for maps, a company for google suites. However their success is based on their integration. And Google Maps alone probably wouldn't be able to fund itself without google search dollars.
Also people will Google with Google. There isn't anything stopping me from searching with Bing, I can even have Chrome search with Bing. I don't have to shop at amazon there are other stores. Unlike say Microsoft back in the late 1990's where if you weren't on their systems, you were at a disadvantage. You can live your life without Google, Facebook and Amazon. With Bing, living a good normal life, and going to a normal brick and mortar store (or is online section) .
I commonly use Javascript to Ajax Call and get a new session key a few times a minute. I do this so if someone did a screen/varable/back button capture of the page, they wouldn't be able to use that data without authentication. If it tries to renew an expired key, it brings you back to the login screen, and additional data will not be read or saved with an invalid key.
Is it fool proof, no, is this all I am doing for security No. but it is putting an extra layer of security that wasn't there before. It is the equivalent of not hiding the key under the welcome map.
So yes you can use Javascript to increase security.
You can only really trust Javascript as much as you trust the page creators.
Sure turn off Javascript for your random browsing, but if you are going to a site, where your personal info and needs to log into with... Then you might as well have it enabled. Because your data is already compromised, and you are just missing out on features which may make your browsing a bit easier.
Actually Google has been leading JavaScript adoption for over a decade.
Even back in the early 2000's web/web app developers were slow to use Javascript on their pages (Or limited to input validation). Mostly because they were afraid of people using old browsers that didn't support it. If you did a lot of stuff, you probably didn't get the customer, because you cannot reference an other popular site that needs Javascript.
Then with Googles Autocomplete feature and Google Maps, becoming a popular feature, it opened the door for the rest of us to apply Javascript,Ajax and DHTML to the pages.
I know, Booo Javascript sucks! However Javascript is better then Sliverlight, Flash, Active X, Java Applets, in terms of keeping the web platform open, while offering the features most people wanted.
Now Javascript has its issues... However it is used on all major browsers, and if coded well, it makes your pages load and run faster. (if not then we have the suckyness we think of wanting to block Javascript for)
I have worked with people with Microsoft, Google, AOL (when it was a thing).... And for the most part they are not any better then those guys who worked at small companies, or even in Government.
Actually people from small companies, are actually much better, because they know how to do more with less.
From my experience, when these projects get delayed and take a long time, is because most of the work going on is protecting your own butt. This is prevalent in work cultures which when there is a problem, the direction goes to who did the mistake and punish them. So people learn to have documentation, gigs of emails (copies of it if email is purged) to show off if there is a problem, that they have record of disagreeing with it, to showing they were told to do it that way, or someone else didn't do it the way you had said.
All this work doesn't make the product any better it just gives middle management the impression they are doing something about it. While the correct course of action is to 1. Fix the problem found. 2. Make sure that problem doesn't happen again. 3. Implement this plan to make sure that problem doesn't happen again.
Most catastrophic mistakes made by a company are not done in a vacuum, sure there is that one guy who hit the Run button that started the mistake in action, but they are often built off of problems in the entire company. And often when big mistakes happen, everyone was doing their job as they were suppose to, it was just lack of big picture planning which causes the failure.
Why?
Do you just like seeing people seriously hurt in general? Or do you just don't like the idea of motorized transportation that isn't a full sized car or motorcycle. Because there was someone who slightly inconvenienced you with some unsafe driving.
It is also not a good idea to base a business on a lowering trend as well.
However it is difficult to determine what is a fad and what is a trend.
A lot of people didn't get Color TV's because they though it was Fad, but it was a trend.
A lot of people bought 3d TV's because they thought it was trend, but it was a Fad.
Mail Order was a fad which got killed by Box Stores, while Online Shopping (nearly the same thing) is a trend which is killing Box Stores.
The big Grocery Stores took over the Mom and Pop corner shop, but didn't do much against the convince stores.
Now Restaurants are pushing the idea of the experience, while Millennials just want the food. Especially for the low - mid range restaurants (Think many of the chain restaurants). Where the food quality is OK, but not worth the hassle of going to a restaurant, waiting for your turn, getting bugged by waiters. Having to sit and wait for your food, be sure you behave so you don't get kicked out...
Now this could just be a fad, as Millennial get older and more mature, will want to go for more of the experience. Or it could just be a trend, of wanting the restaurant food, at the home experience. Where you can just be relaxed.
I am too lazy to go to the Grocery Store and return my bottles, So I toss them into my home recycling bin. Now the recycling center takes my bottles and processes them and gets paid for the stuff I just tossed out.
With Open Source you don't pay for the software, but you pay for the Services around it. For Red Hat case, it is packaging it in a way that it works on a core install, paying for consultants and support folks to make sure it works, and people use it correctly. If there are problems they may have coders on staff to apply fixes to it.
That is the Open Source Business model.
Unfortunately this model means no profitability in products that are really easy to use, and are not targeted towards businesses.
Coding isn't royalty based. Even for closed source applications. I would get paid for my time doing development, now if my code makes the company a Billion Dollars I don't expect to be paid any portion of that, because I had already agreed to be paid for my time.
If you are an Open Source Developer, either someone had paid you for your time, or you volunteered it. Now that someone had profited off your work, you are not going to expect to get paid extra for it.
Now if we change the business model to a royalty based work. Then I fear there will be a lot of shady things going on. Such as constantly rewriting a program, to stop long term royalty checks, a lot of work will be needed to calculate the value of such applications. R&D type of coding will be tossed out the window. I am not saying it can't work, but it will open the door for a lot of new issues.
However the Sun seems to shine every day in Arizona, vs. having to transport natural gas to the location.
I am not Anti-Fossil Fuel. It is a high energy density, and easy to transport, this is a good form of energy for energy poor locations, where they can be shipped energy to them to operate. Arizona is rich in solar energy, while not as dense, they have a lot of solar energy beaming down on them, and their dessert climate, and the states large and relatively untouched areas. Means there is a lot of room to collect the energy and counteract the difference in energy density.
For heat in my house I use wood pellets. They are cheaper then Oil for the winter. However I need more space in my garage to hold them then it would take to have an oil tank for the same amount of energy. However this is space in my Garage that I wouldn't be fully utalizing anyway. So the difference in Energy Density isn't a factor, but the cost of fuel, which offsets the opportunity cost of the used space in my Garage.
The up-time of such a device wouldn't meet modern service level objectives. The Sun Dial seems to have under 50% up time. It doesn't work at night, and often has problems on overcast days.
It is actually quite sad, how synchronized we are a society we are with Cell Phones and their clock all hooked up to a highly regulated atomic clocks. If I have meeting in 2 minutes I am like, I have plenty of time, to fill my coffee, check some emails, fix a line of code. Then dial in and still be early because I had 10 seconds to spare. Then everyone else is all connected in within 30 seconds after that.
Back 20 years ago, most people were 10 minutes early to a meeting, and the meeting didn't start until 5 minutes after the scheduled time. Because peoples clocks could be considered up to 5 minutes off.
So please tell me the best managed technology company out there?
In general all of them suck, because we can't get our idea of what technology should be like, and there is always those features that seems to had slipped pass QC.
Now my beef with Apple is they have been leading the charge for decades to remove ports, plugs, and doors. Which allow us to fix our problems ourselves.
Gone are the days where I hosed my OS, so let me boot from the CD/DVD/Floppy Disk and rebuild the OS. If you are lucky you have a USB port where you can boot off of that. But for mobile devices, you are tied to the vendor doing its over the network upgrade, and hope you don't mess up the OS.
The problem is these Ads are just a touch away from a purchase. Back when I was a kid, where we had TV Shows that were 1/2 hour commercials for toys, and even seeing a full movie which was an advertisement for Nintendo. We could want this stuff as much as anyone, but we were limited by Mom and Dad. Who often had the final say of Yes you can have this or No you can't, even a non-helicopter parent at that time had that degree of control.
Now with these Apps, you are just a click away from immediate gratification, and in-app purchase. Without the kids really realizing that getting $1.00 add ins that offer 10 minutes of mediocre enjoyment, could had been used somewhere else.
Sure some adults don't get this, but at least they will need to realize the consequences of such actions.
Kepler is way out of the shuttles range.
Besides the shuttle ability to do such things was over exaggerated, and a normal rocket design could probably do such safer and cheaper then the shuttle.
You need the fuel to get there too.
Being that the Kepler is further away then our Moon is. And the moon is still currently the longest space flight we have manually manned. I would think so.
Even if we were to have a robotic fuel craft. Creating such a craft and have it make a such detail connection to refuel it. Would still be more expensive then launching a new telescope.
We can also launch a new one with better technology that can dig even deeper then what the Kepler could.
Part of the problem with the American Space Shuttle program was the idea of a reusable space craft, because that is what we see in Science Fiction and our idea of a spacecraft. But we found out that for the most part reusable space crafts are not affordable and safe.
Sure we as the little people get side tracked that equipment that cost more then all the homes in swanky high end neighborhood, to be disposable after a few years. But that is the nature of space economics. It is expensive, and even more so to go back, or to do maintenance. It just doesn't have the economy of scale.
You can get a dongle. If you go off brand you can probably get one for cheap. Me my old phone dies, so I got a $5.00 Bluetooth adapter for my headphones.
Now that nearly everyone has a Smart Phone to a point where we just call them normal phones.
And by phone there is a tiny chip that is connected to a radio broadcaster and receiver, and the rest is a computer crammed into as small of a form factor as possible.
But Unlike the Black Berry days or the first iPhone to around I would say the iPhone 4 or 5 where having the newest smart phone meant you had a lot of extra power in your pocket where you could do so much more then your peer with the older version or without a smart phone at all.
Today we all have these little rectangle glass front computers that we call a phone, while we may get emotional when someone uses a brand that we didn't choose, for the most part we really don't care anymore. Your Doctor may have an LG Smart Phone, while your garbage man may have an iPhone Xs Plus. It really doesn't matter that much anymore.
Sure there is difference between the $150 smart phone and the $1500 smart phone, but it isn't 10x better. You will be lucky if it twice as good. But still for most stuff you can do the same things with them. So why upgrading until you have too.
But they are not going to be on the Payroll.
The sad truth about business.
Profitability isn't enough.
If you have 2 products one makes $0.02 profit per unit while the other one makes $0.0199 profit per unit, and they take the same amount of resources to produce. The company will drop the $0.0199 product and move the money for the resources to make this to produce more of the $0.02 product.
Now some companies with longer term planning, may keep the $0.0199 product in case of a problem where the $0.02 product no longer sells, so they will still have feet in the game, but often there isn't that much a threat of that happening so they will just sell more of the higher profit item.
Just paying them money, doesn't guarantee their needs are met.
I want x.org to support this touchscreen that I could purchase in bulk for $5.00 less then the competition per unit. The general project people, may not have objection to supporting such device, but just doesn't consider it a high enough priority. So you have your developers put in the patch and have them implement it. If they refuse it you can still have it as a fork in the product which is probably still good enough to release the product using these touchscreens.
The problem is most of the Open Source Teams are mostly all technical folks. Who really suck at explaining their value to their company, especially as they are sharing their hard work for free to their competitors. So they are considered a cost center vs a profit center.
What they need are some sales people to really boost their value to higher management.
Explaining how they are leading the industry and forcing other to just follow, and by being strong in the Open Source community you push your standards downward, vs hoping for the best and having to reword some of your ideas because someone else had won the standard war.
That is the real problem with Apples Macintosh lineup. Where we use to have a yearly upgrade they seem to fall every 4 years. And their price doesn't seem to go down the next year. There really isn't a good time to buy one. The Air and the Mini, are already under-powered new (About a year old tech). Which isn't bad, but if you are going to keep it for 4 years or 8 years then these will be miserably out of date during your next upgrade. And you can't wait a year or two to get it on the cheap.