Look, I don't think I have some sort of right to coast through life without ever being inconvenienced, but airline travel is a very specific situation. It's something that ends up being pretty close to essential for various aspects of some people's lives, yet as individuals we don't have much control over the conditions in which we fly. And you're making the same stupid argument that I talked about before. Oh no! The Bill of Rights is no more! The country is doomed!
They can instruct us to do things, but sadly, not everyone listens. There are plenty of stories in the news of people becoming unruly and even violent while on planes, and once the plane is airborne it's a really difficult situation to deal with. You've got a bunch of people crammed into a small uncomfortable space for long periods of time. A portion of them are generally nervous about flying, if not outright afraid.
I think you underestimate the sense of entitlement that many people seem to have about their phones. Have you seen deli's and similar places with big signs that say basically "if you're talking on your phone while you're at the counter, we're going to skip over you."? And yet people don't listen, or they ignore it, or they'll respond with attitude when called on it. People have the right to be dicks if they want to, and that's fair. If you're not being nice on my property, then I have the right to make you leave. If it's not my property, then I have the right to leave and get further away from you. But on an airplane, 6 miles up in the air, there's nowhere for either of us to go. Since it's so much harder to deal with conflicts in the air, it makes a ton of sense to me to take some steps to avoid those conflicts. Some of those steps don't make much sense under normal conditions. But neither do 90% of the measures you already have to deal with even before you board the plane.
The FAA might only mention the interference as the reason, but I think that's just a small part of it. The annoyance factor is a really important reason. The FAA just doesn't want to come out and say it, because there's tons of jackasses out there who would cry about how their freedom of speech is being infringed, and how unfair it is, etc. It's easier to just shush those people by telling them that it's a safety issue. If it was really that much just a safety issue, I would think they'd have modified either the plane's systems or the phone system. Even if nobody in the aircraft is getting calls, a plane is most certainly in the path of numerous random cellphone signals pretty much all the time.
My example in my previous comment was about playing music over your computer's speakers. That certainly doesn't create any sort of interference with the aircraft's systems, but they'll still tell you to stop, because it's not fair to the other passengers to subject them to that noise. The same goes with people making phone calls, and from that perspective, the technology behind the call doesn't really matter. Either way the person gabbing on the phone is annoying all the other people packed in around them.
It's a shame that some people are either ignorant or indifferent to the point where society basically has to make up laws for fake reasons in order to force common courtesy. But that's how the world works I guess.
Then a stewardess walks over and tells you to stop, just the same as if you opened up your laptop and started playing music out of its speakers. Even if the FAA said that it was ok, I'd hope that most of the airlines would have the good sense to not allow it on their flights. The technology that you use to make that call isn't really relevant.
Well sure, it's not good business. It was most certainly a mistake, and it's in Apple's best interest not to make many mistakes. But still they'll happen, they happen to everyone and every company. A developer working with beta software should be extra aware of the good chance they'll stumble upon some of these mistakes. This particular incident is a bit more unusual than your standard programming bugs, but I see nothing that suggests disrespect from Apple towards developers.
Your original post seemed to imply some sort of evil intent to Apple, as if they did this on purpose, trying to screw over their consumers. If that's not what you were trying to say, then I apologize for not correctly interpreting your words.
As for your hardware vendor line of thought, again I think it's not an issue of malice or even disrespect towards their customers, but rather Apple just choosing different priorities for their platform than what others have done. If those priorities don't make sense to you, then you are free to purchase a different phone. Sure, you can't get one with Apple's OS on it, but that's Apple's choice to make as the designer of both the hardware and the software. There's trade-offs to be made in whichever direction you decide to go, but Apple has always been pretty "open" about their "closed" nature.
Yeah, because Apple can just download the blackberry software and just build off that. I'm sure no one would mind. Or maybe just take the old ipod OS and add a couple phone features to it, it's basically the same thing!
They must be really lazy. Maybe Google hired away all their engineers. I don't know why they couldn't just kick this whole thing out in a weekend.
Neither the battery replacement issue nor the copy/paste issue are examples of Apple suddenly deciding to remove functionality from your device. Your iPhone's battery is the same as it ever was, and it didn't ship to you with copy/paste. This isn't some sort of bait and switch like you make it out to be.
Generally speaking, Windows users both old and new will accept far more malware, inconsistent behavior, and horrible interface design than Apple users would tolerate.
Expiring beta versions of software are not unique to Apple, nor are they a new thing, nor are they even unusual. Worst case, either someone at Apple put the wrong expiry date in the software. Unfortunate, yes, but not a malicious act, and not some sort of cruel abuse directed towards their developers.
Wah wah wah! Apple released this fancy new phone but there's no SDK and nobody can develop apps for it, this sucks, Apple sucks, everyone sucks!
*Apple releases beta SDK*
Wah wah wah! Apple released an inital version of an SDK for their fancy new phone and it isn't perfect and doesn't do everything we ever wanted, this sucks, Apple sucks!
All some people do is complain. Even when someone listens to what you're asking for, and tries to meet your needs. Even when they're just starting out and testing the waters in an area that is very complex. Apple released what they had because obnoxious people wouldn't shut up about how much Apple sucked for not releasing anything.
It'll get better. Half-finished software is the price the world pays for being whiny and impatient.
Yeah, that's all well and good, and so I'll happily buy a BluRay player to replace my DVD player. But probably not until my DVD player dies. That's assuming that my DVD player will last until BluRay players come down in price.
I don't think many people are particularly opposed to upgrading, they're just not in a hurry to do it.
If you do any sort of design for a living, be it industrial, graphic, architectural, whatever; the reality of your job is that silly things like management, focus groups, budget, laws of physics, etc. keep you from being as creative as you'd like sometimes. To balance that out, it's not uncommon for design professionals to find other outlets in which to release that creativity, to let it thrive, if only for a moment, so that it doesn't completely shrivel up and die inside of them.
Half of those people work on little side projects like this. They know it's not really realistic or practical. It might not even be a particularly good idea, but it's something that's fun to let their brain chew on, and something that's fun to discuss with others.
The other half of those people go become college professors, and they use their students' projects to satisfy their creative urges, with the minor side-effect of not preparing those students at all for their future jobs. Then when the students have their big crits, the reviewers inevitably skewer them for not having any connection to reality.
Yeah, but even Apple still writes some stuff in Carbon, and up to the point where they suddenly changed their mind, they had been telling everyone that 64-bit carbon was coming.
Nobody's really saying that Apple sucks for moving away from Carbon, the argument is that they should've communicated the timeline better to developers.
Not that I think giant developers neccessarily deserve special treatment, but you'd think it prudent to at least not waste a ton of time for a developer of one of the most significant programs available for your OS.
I think you're spot on. The average engineer off the street is much more likely to be useful in terms of practical know-how than they are as a manager.
While I know some engineers who won't be able to sleep unless they've triple-checked every part of whatever project they're working on, others that I've worked with couldn't plan their way out of a paper bag. Engineering, like every other profession, is a mix of productive, brilliant, mediocre, lazy, disorganized, and occasionally insane people.
1. I think taking down a bridge or a building is a pretty good way to show off the hard work you put into a bomb. I think it's probably a safe bet to say that many of the engineers working at Apple are proud of their projects, and they're almost as secretive as the NSA (who likely employs a ton of engineers).
2. That's retarded.
3. Engineers are not robots, they are many different types of people.
4. See #1.
I'm hoping your post was meant to be humorous, and someone who wasn't paying attention modded it insightful.
That's true, but that only helps if someone was planning on buying the whole album anyways (or the majority of it). If the fears of the music industry is that people will only cherry pick the best song or two and ignore the rest, $8 more is a lot of extra money for a bunch of songs that I don't really want, be it ten songs, or even fifteen songs. But make it just a few bucks more, and it starts reaching impulse territory.
For a few bucks, I'll take the risk of buying a bunch of crap because there's probably the occasional gem in there. But $5 is pretty much my limit for something like that. Right now, the iTMS is totally set up for that single song impulse buy. It just doesn't try very hard to upsell you the whole album. The music labels probably see selling an entire album for $5 as taking a loss compared to their usual price, but if I wasn't going to buy that album anyways, then they aren't losing anything. Especially with negligible distribution costs.
It makes even more sense with older albums. Serious music collectors and fans of particular bands are going to have CD's of the stuff they want already. They're not in the market for those albums. They should be more aggressive with pricing there.
The article summary says that the cellulose found in 250 million year old salt is the oldest known evidence for life on Earth. That's not true, there's ample of evidence of life for billions of years before that. The article states that the 250 million year old salt is the oldest biological substance known, which is pretty cool, but there are plenty of other types of evidence for life besides just finding dead tissue.
Through middle school and high school, I was as big a nerd as any of you. I loved video games, I played D&D, if my face wasn't right in front of a computer screen it was in a book, and I for all intents and purposes ran the fine arts department's "digital media lab". I was also about 100lbs. and didn't break 5' tall until 11th grade. And you know what, I didn't get my ass kicked once, I didn't get bullied, I didn't even really get harassed.
What was my secret? I didn't resent all of the "jocks" and the "cool kids". I wasn't particularly social, but I went to the occasional event, just to see if I'd like it. I tried participating in pick-up games after class. I wasn't always successful, sometimes I just embarrassed myself, but I laughed it off which let everyone else laugh and I just tried harder. And even teenagers respond to that.
Occasionally there'd be a guy who just wanted to be a dick, but I had made enough friendships within pretty much all of the different social groups at the school that there'd usually be someone around to make sure it didn't get out of hand. It always seemed to me that the "nerd" group had just as many issues as everyone else, and even though we shared more interests, they weren't necessarily better people or even better to hang out with.
I went to a public middle school and a private high school. It wasn't inner city or anything like that, so your milage may vary. But I always found that for me personally, if I approached people with a little confidence for myself, and a basic respect for them, then they'd usually be friendly, or at worst, decide to just let me be.
If this kid is a little dick head who struts around presenting himself as the smartest guy ever, then yeah he might have some problems. If he realizes that he's just another kid, with a few different opportunities for learning than some of his other classmates, then he'll probably be fine.
I agree. MS is going to be around for a loooong time. I do, however, believe that significant progress has been made in terms of standards, cross-platform compatibility, and Microsoft's ability to stomp on anything that annoys them. Plus the fact that Apple has made a solid resurgence, and there's a very viable alternative, even if it's still dwarfed in marketshare.
The delusional crowd constantly ranting about how MS is on the verge of collapse certainly makes a lot of noise, but I don't think they even constitute a majority of/. readers.
Like I said, MS has gotten their act together to a large degree in terms of security, and despite their problems they're still a huge company with a ton of resources, a ton of momentum, and the default OS for most computer manufacturers. MS is going to disappear anytime soon, Windows is not about to be relegated to history. The computer industry is still growing, (particularly overseas, there's lots of people who still need computers), and MS will benefit from that.
I'm not convinced that "durable" monpolies can only exist with government approval. In theory, a company that doesn't meet the needs of the market should go out of business, but when you're dealing with something like a utility, especially one that requires so much infrastructure, I'm not convinced that it'd ultimately pan out that way. And even if that is actually the case, what's the expected lifespan of a "non-durable" monopoly? The way that telecommunications technology is advancing these days, if it takes 20 years for a monopoly company to die out, that's still two decades that they can hold everything back, and consumers are getting screwed the whole time.
I also think that there are plenty of valid reasons why most utilities should not be an un-regulated market. We would not be well served by dozens of different companies fighting to dig trenches and run cables everywhere. The reality of regulating something as practical as that means that you're giving someone an unfair advantage, which ultimately means you're going to need to create more regulations in order to make that a fair deal.
The fact that government can very easily become inefficient and corrupt is true and unfortunate, but the same is just as true for corporations. Even if the market can manage to self-correct that (and I'm not completely convinced), it happens very slowly. Getting government organized and focused is certainly tough, but when it does happen, it can bring a lot of resources to bear and actually be very effective.
I disagree. I think that outside of certain circles of the tech industry, the majority of people out there don't really give a crap about the anti-trust stuff anymore, never gave a crap about shrink-wrap licenses, or ISO processes, etc.
I think it has more to do with the fact that MS consistently shipped mediocre software, and that fact caught up with them in two ways. First off the internet allowed people to become more educated on alternatives, allowing things like Linux and Apple to gain a small amount of mindshare (which is slowly turning into marketshare), and the internet also exposed Windows to a very "dangerous" environment, and Microsoft was not prepared for all the problems that it caused.
MS has seemed to get a halfway decent handle on the security issues, I haven't seen many news reports about huge global systems being suddenly taken down by worms anymore, and while my mom's computer still manages to get malware on it, it's not rendered unuseable every 6 weeks anymore. But people remember those problems, and those problems were enough of a headache that they got they started looking at some alternatives.
Prior to the internet becoming such a major part of the computing landscape, MS could put out whatever crap they wanted, and nobody really knew any better. The internet served both to expose a lot of those flaws, and at the same time it empowered people, or at least made it significantly easier for them to share their issues and look for solutions. Unfortunately for Microsoft, some of those solutions involve Linux/MacOS/other non-microsoft software.
Although there might be a small portion of people who think that way, I don't think it's really a big concern for Apple. I look at it this way. There's nothing that makes something uncool faster than your parents being into it. But as a long time mac fan, I would like nothing more for my mom to switch away from window to a mac. Partially for selfish reasons, because I'm certain I would spend less time on the phone doing long-distance tech support, but also because I think once she got over the shock of a different interface, she'd find her computer more useful.
Even back in Apple's troubled days, when the stereotype of the artsy snobbish mac fanboy really took form(and some people like that certainly did and still do exist), a lot of the mac proponents weren't trying to convince others that they were better than everyone else because they used a shinier computer. Overall, it was a genuine attempt to try and help people find a better computer. Linux has, in many of the same ways, gone through the same struggle. Just getting people to acknowledge that alternatives existed.
For most of the "Apple faithful", macs were never a secret exclusive club. We aren't upset at all the "normal people" moving in to our neighborhood. We just wonder (and argue about) why we couldn't get all these people to move in sooner.
I don't think there are that many people arguing that some hermit living in the middle of the woods in Montana should have telco's lining up to run a fiber line to his house, but there's a strong case to be made that even in dense urban areas and brand new high end suburbs, the state of the telecommunications infrastructure in the USA is generally behind the times. I've got family living in wealthy areas of the east coast, and their internet options are limited to the same dsl/cable choices that I get where I live. In the south in a city that was half destroyed by a hurricane a couple years ago.
What I think this means is that the government should force the telcos to get off their asses and actually upgrade some of this stuff, and do it without passing huge new bills onto consumers. Yes it's regulation, no it's not free market economics, and no it's not necessarily fair to the telcos and their shareholders. But the idea that those telco companies and their successes are the result of a free market is just a myth. They were handed their marketshare by the government decades ago. That wasn't a gift, it was a trade, and the telcos need to be held responsible for their side of the bargin.
Along similar lines, being an "art" student can be really frustrating when you're working hard and trying to make good grades. I majored in architecture, which isn't exactly fine arts, but certainly has an artistic aspect to it. Some of my engineering friends liked to dismiss some of my design work as artsy-fluff (sometimes they were right), but I worked hard on it, and at the end of the day/project/semester I created something through a lot of time and effort and thought. But frustratingly, because architecture has that aesthetic side to it, the grading would often seem very arbitrary. One professor on your review might love your idea and think you did a great job on it. The one sitting next to them thinks that the program guidelines(given to you by your professor) is flawed and can't get passed that and actually talk about your work. The one sitting next to them did a similar project fifteen years ago when they were in school and be pissed that you didn't approach it the same way they did.
At the end of the year, you get a B- while the dumbass that sits next to you with a half-assed project that they hastily threw together the last week of the semester gets an A because their design has a glass bridge and the professor has always dreamed of doing a project with a glass bridge.
I took some lower level CS classes because it was interesting to me, and one of the things that I really appreciated about it was that I pretty much always had a good idea what grade I was going to get. Either my program compiled or it didn't. Either it resulted in the correct output or it didn't. I may have had to work more or less to get that result than someone more/less talented, but if I put the time in, I could get a result that I knew was finished.
Some of them are undoubtedly just lazy, but I think another big part of it is that a kid in high school usually doesn't have a particularly accurate idea of what engineering school is really going to be like (or what an engineering career is going to be like), and it turns out to be something that just doesn't click for them. The laziness might then develop, but the laziness is more of a symptom than the actual disease. People in that position would probably be best served by looking for a new major, but if you're already a couple of years in, it might seem like a waste to not stick it out. Maybe switching majors would require you to spend an extra year in college, which would result in that much more student loans. Maybe you're just scared that whatever you choose next will be just as disappointing as engineering school was.
I'm not an engineer, I went to architecture school, but school for me was nothing like what I expected, and my job is very little like I expected either. There were plenty of things about school that I complained about (even though I worked hard (at least as hard as the engineering students) and did well), and there are plenty of things at my job that I complain about. But for both of them, despite the problems there were some very compelling things, things that I've enjoyed, things that I've loved being a part of, things that I'm proud of.
Not to make excuses for lazy people, but I think it's less of a problem that engineering is hard work, and more of an issue that it's just not for everyone, but a lot of times you don't really learn that until you try it. Just about any job/industry/field is hard work if you really want to be good at it, engineering isn't particularly special in that regard.
My other point is that it's important to differentiate between whining and criticizing. There's worlds of difference between whining because you want things to be easier because you don't care enough to work hard, and complaining because you want real change because you care about what you're involved in and you want it to be better.
Although in the case of the article that started this discussion, this guy is probably a whiner. Four out of his five points can be pretty easily applied to many fields of study. And the one about other disciplines having inflated grades could almost certainly be reversed if he spent some time at different schools.
I went to very nice private high school, and the head groundskeeper there had been working there for something like 30 years. Interestingly, for the first 15 years or so there he was a physics teacher. Somewhere along the line he realized that he could have a less stressful job, where he didn't have to dress up at all, didn't have to deal with stuck up rich kids and their parents, and got to spend a lot of time outside. And he made about the same amount of money.
He was a cool guy too, he still loved talking about physics, sometimes while students were hanging around outside he'd talk to us, explain to us the basic theories of how nuclear weapons worked, talk about impact forces in car crashes, some of the things that teenage guys certainly find fascinating.
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Look, I don't think I have some sort of right to coast through life without ever being inconvenienced, but airline travel is a very specific situation. It's something that ends up being pretty close to essential for various aspects of some people's lives, yet as individuals we don't have much control over the conditions in which we fly. And you're making the same stupid argument that I talked about before. Oh no! The Bill of Rights is no more! The country is doomed!
They can instruct us to do things, but sadly, not everyone listens. There are plenty of stories in the news of people becoming unruly and even violent while on planes, and once the plane is airborne it's a really difficult situation to deal with. You've got a bunch of people crammed into a small uncomfortable space for long periods of time. A portion of them are generally nervous about flying, if not outright afraid.
I think you underestimate the sense of entitlement that many people seem to have about their phones. Have you seen deli's and similar places with big signs that say basically "if you're talking on your phone while you're at the counter, we're going to skip over you."? And yet people don't listen, or they ignore it, or they'll respond with attitude when called on it. People have the right to be dicks if they want to, and that's fair. If you're not being nice on my property, then I have the right to make you leave. If it's not my property, then I have the right to leave and get further away from you. But on an airplane, 6 miles up in the air, there's nowhere for either of us to go. Since it's so much harder to deal with conflicts in the air, it makes a ton of sense to me to take some steps to avoid those conflicts. Some of those steps don't make much sense under normal conditions. But neither do 90% of the measures you already have to deal with even before you board the plane.
The FAA might only mention the interference as the reason, but I think that's just a small part of it. The annoyance factor is a really important reason. The FAA just doesn't want to come out and say it, because there's tons of jackasses out there who would cry about how their freedom of speech is being infringed, and how unfair it is, etc. It's easier to just shush those people by telling them that it's a safety issue. If it was really that much just a safety issue, I would think they'd have modified either the plane's systems or the phone system. Even if nobody in the aircraft is getting calls, a plane is most certainly in the path of numerous random cellphone signals pretty much all the time.
My example in my previous comment was about playing music over your computer's speakers. That certainly doesn't create any sort of interference with the aircraft's systems, but they'll still tell you to stop, because it's not fair to the other passengers to subject them to that noise. The same goes with people making phone calls, and from that perspective, the technology behind the call doesn't really matter. Either way the person gabbing on the phone is annoying all the other people packed in around them.
It's a shame that some people are either ignorant or indifferent to the point where society basically has to make up laws for fake reasons in order to force common courtesy. But that's how the world works I guess.
Then a stewardess walks over and tells you to stop, just the same as if you opened up your laptop and started playing music out of its speakers. Even if the FAA said that it was ok, I'd hope that most of the airlines would have the good sense to not allow it on their flights. The technology that you use to make that call isn't really relevant.
Yes, because you could just walk outside and experience everything that happens in the movies.
Computer animation reminds me of Tron. So 80's. This pixar thing sounds silly.
Well sure, it's not good business. It was most certainly a mistake, and it's in Apple's best interest not to make many mistakes. But still they'll happen, they happen to everyone and every company. A developer working with beta software should be extra aware of the good chance they'll stumble upon some of these mistakes. This particular incident is a bit more unusual than your standard programming bugs, but I see nothing that suggests disrespect from Apple towards developers.
Your original post seemed to imply some sort of evil intent to Apple, as if they did this on purpose, trying to screw over their consumers. If that's not what you were trying to say, then I apologize for not correctly interpreting your words.
As for your hardware vendor line of thought, again I think it's not an issue of malice or even disrespect towards their customers, but rather Apple just choosing different priorities for their platform than what others have done. If those priorities don't make sense to you, then you are free to purchase a different phone. Sure, you can't get one with Apple's OS on it, but that's Apple's choice to make as the designer of both the hardware and the software. There's trade-offs to be made in whichever direction you decide to go, but Apple has always been pretty "open" about their "closed" nature.
Yeah, because Apple can just download the blackberry software and just build off that. I'm sure no one would mind. Or maybe just take the old ipod OS and add a couple phone features to it, it's basically the same thing!
They must be really lazy. Maybe Google hired away all their engineers. I don't know why they couldn't just kick this whole thing out in a weekend.
Neither the battery replacement issue nor the copy/paste issue are examples of Apple suddenly deciding to remove functionality from your device. Your iPhone's battery is the same as it ever was, and it didn't ship to you with copy/paste. This isn't some sort of bait and switch like you make it out to be.
Generally speaking, Windows users both old and new will accept far more malware, inconsistent behavior, and horrible interface design than Apple users would tolerate.
Expiring beta versions of software are not unique to Apple, nor are they a new thing, nor are they even unusual. Worst case, either someone at Apple put the wrong expiry date in the software. Unfortunate, yes, but not a malicious act, and not some sort of cruel abuse directed towards their developers.
Wah wah wah! Apple released this fancy new phone but there's no SDK and nobody can develop apps for it, this sucks, Apple sucks, everyone sucks!
*Apple releases beta SDK*
Wah wah wah! Apple released an inital version of an SDK for their fancy new phone and it isn't perfect and doesn't do everything we ever wanted, this sucks, Apple sucks!
All some people do is complain. Even when someone listens to what you're asking for, and tries to meet your needs. Even when they're just starting out and testing the waters in an area that is very complex. Apple released what they had because obnoxious people wouldn't shut up about how much Apple sucked for not releasing anything.
It'll get better. Half-finished software is the price the world pays for being whiny and impatient.
Yeah, that's all well and good, and so I'll happily buy a BluRay player to replace my DVD player. But probably not until my DVD player dies. That's assuming that my DVD player will last until BluRay players come down in price.
I don't think many people are particularly opposed to upgrading, they're just not in a hurry to do it.
If you do any sort of design for a living, be it industrial, graphic, architectural, whatever; the reality of your job is that silly things like management, focus groups, budget, laws of physics, etc. keep you from being as creative as you'd like sometimes. To balance that out, it's not uncommon for design professionals to find other outlets in which to release that creativity, to let it thrive, if only for a moment, so that it doesn't completely shrivel up and die inside of them.
Half of those people work on little side projects like this. They know it's not really realistic or practical. It might not even be a particularly good idea, but it's something that's fun to let their brain chew on, and something that's fun to discuss with others.
The other half of those people go become college professors, and they use their students' projects to satisfy their creative urges, with the minor side-effect of not preparing those students at all for their future jobs. Then when the students have their big crits, the reviewers inevitably skewer them for not having any connection to reality.
But I'm not bitter about it. Nope.
Yeah, but even Apple still writes some stuff in Carbon, and up to the point where they suddenly changed their mind, they had been telling everyone that 64-bit carbon was coming.
Nobody's really saying that Apple sucks for moving away from Carbon, the argument is that they should've communicated the timeline better to developers.
Not that I think giant developers neccessarily deserve special treatment, but you'd think it prudent to at least not waste a ton of time for a developer of one of the most significant programs available for your OS.
I think you're spot on. The average engineer off the street is much more likely to be useful in terms of practical know-how than they are as a manager.
While I know some engineers who won't be able to sleep unless they've triple-checked every part of whatever project they're working on, others that I've worked with couldn't plan their way out of a paper bag. Engineering, like every other profession, is a mix of productive, brilliant, mediocre, lazy, disorganized, and occasionally insane people.
1. I think taking down a bridge or a building is a pretty good way to show off the hard work you put into a bomb. I think it's probably a safe bet to say that many of the engineers working at Apple are proud of their projects, and they're almost as secretive as the NSA (who likely employs a ton of engineers).
2. That's retarded.
3. Engineers are not robots, they are many different types of people.
4. See #1.
I'm hoping your post was meant to be humorous, and someone who wasn't paying attention modded it insightful.
That's true, but that only helps if someone was planning on buying the whole album anyways (or the majority of it). If the fears of the music industry is that people will only cherry pick the best song or two and ignore the rest, $8 more is a lot of extra money for a bunch of songs that I don't really want, be it ten songs, or even fifteen songs. But make it just a few bucks more, and it starts reaching impulse territory.
For a few bucks, I'll take the risk of buying a bunch of crap because there's probably the occasional gem in there. But $5 is pretty much my limit for something like that. Right now, the iTMS is totally set up for that single song impulse buy. It just doesn't try very hard to upsell you the whole album. The music labels probably see selling an entire album for $5 as taking a loss compared to their usual price, but if I wasn't going to buy that album anyways, then they aren't losing anything. Especially with negligible distribution costs.
It makes even more sense with older albums. Serious music collectors and fans of particular bands are going to have CD's of the stuff they want already. They're not in the market for those albums. They should be more aggressive with pricing there.
The article summary says that the cellulose found in 250 million year old salt is the oldest known evidence for life on Earth. That's not true, there's ample of evidence of life for billions of years before that. The article states that the 250 million year old salt is the oldest biological substance known, which is pretty cool, but there are plenty of other types of evidence for life besides just finding dead tissue.
Through middle school and high school, I was as big a nerd as any of you. I loved video games, I played D&D, if my face wasn't right in front of a computer screen it was in a book, and I for all intents and purposes ran the fine arts department's "digital media lab". I was also about 100lbs. and didn't break 5' tall until 11th grade. And you know what, I didn't get my ass kicked once, I didn't get bullied, I didn't even really get harassed.
What was my secret? I didn't resent all of the "jocks" and the "cool kids". I wasn't particularly social, but I went to the occasional event, just to see if I'd like it. I tried participating in pick-up games after class. I wasn't always successful, sometimes I just embarrassed myself, but I laughed it off which let everyone else laugh and I just tried harder. And even teenagers respond to that.
Occasionally there'd be a guy who just wanted to be a dick, but I had made enough friendships within pretty much all of the different social groups at the school that there'd usually be someone around to make sure it didn't get out of hand. It always seemed to me that the "nerd" group had just as many issues as everyone else, and even though we shared more interests, they weren't necessarily better people or even better to hang out with.
I went to a public middle school and a private high school. It wasn't inner city or anything like that, so your milage may vary. But I always found that for me personally, if I approached people with a little confidence for myself, and a basic respect for them, then they'd usually be friendly, or at worst, decide to just let me be.
If this kid is a little dick head who struts around presenting himself as the smartest guy ever, then yeah he might have some problems. If he realizes that he's just another kid, with a few different opportunities for learning than some of his other classmates, then he'll probably be fine.
I agree. MS is going to be around for a loooong time. I do, however, believe that significant progress has been made in terms of standards, cross-platform compatibility, and Microsoft's ability to stomp on anything that annoys them. Plus the fact that Apple has made a solid resurgence, and there's a very viable alternative, even if it's still dwarfed in marketshare.
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The delusional crowd constantly ranting about how MS is on the verge of collapse certainly makes a lot of noise, but I don't think they even constitute a majority of
Like I said, MS has gotten their act together to a large degree in terms of security, and despite their problems they're still a huge company with a ton of resources, a ton of momentum, and the default OS for most computer manufacturers. MS is going to disappear anytime soon, Windows is not about to be relegated to history. The computer industry is still growing, (particularly overseas, there's lots of people who still need computers), and MS will benefit from that.
I'm not convinced that "durable" monpolies can only exist with government approval. In theory, a company that doesn't meet the needs of the market should go out of business, but when you're dealing with something like a utility, especially one that requires so much infrastructure, I'm not convinced that it'd ultimately pan out that way. And even if that is actually the case, what's the expected lifespan of a "non-durable" monopoly? The way that telecommunications technology is advancing these days, if it takes 20 years for a monopoly company to die out, that's still two decades that they can hold everything back, and consumers are getting screwed the whole time.
I also think that there are plenty of valid reasons why most utilities should not be an un-regulated market. We would not be well served by dozens of different companies fighting to dig trenches and run cables everywhere. The reality of regulating something as practical as that means that you're giving someone an unfair advantage, which ultimately means you're going to need to create more regulations in order to make that a fair deal.
The fact that government can very easily become inefficient and corrupt is true and unfortunate, but the same is just as true for corporations. Even if the market can manage to self-correct that (and I'm not completely convinced), it happens very slowly. Getting government organized and focused is certainly tough, but when it does happen, it can bring a lot of resources to bear and actually be very effective.
I disagree. I think that outside of certain circles of the tech industry, the majority of people out there don't really give a crap about the anti-trust stuff anymore, never gave a crap about shrink-wrap licenses, or ISO processes, etc.
I think it has more to do with the fact that MS consistently shipped mediocre software, and that fact caught up with them in two ways. First off the internet allowed people to become more educated on alternatives, allowing things like Linux and Apple to gain a small amount of mindshare (which is slowly turning into marketshare), and the internet also exposed Windows to a very "dangerous" environment, and Microsoft was not prepared for all the problems that it caused.
MS has seemed to get a halfway decent handle on the security issues, I haven't seen many news reports about huge global systems being suddenly taken down by worms anymore, and while my mom's computer still manages to get malware on it, it's not rendered unuseable every 6 weeks anymore. But people remember those problems, and those problems were enough of a headache that they got they started looking at some alternatives.
Prior to the internet becoming such a major part of the computing landscape, MS could put out whatever crap they wanted, and nobody really knew any better. The internet served both to expose a lot of those flaws, and at the same time it empowered people, or at least made it significantly easier for them to share their issues and look for solutions. Unfortunately for Microsoft, some of those solutions involve Linux/MacOS/other non-microsoft software.
Although there might be a small portion of people who think that way, I don't think it's really a big concern for Apple. I look at it this way. There's nothing that makes something uncool faster than your parents being into it. But as a long time mac fan, I would like nothing more for my mom to switch away from window to a mac. Partially for selfish reasons, because I'm certain I would spend less time on the phone doing long-distance tech support, but also because I think once she got over the shock of a different interface, she'd find her computer more useful.
Even back in Apple's troubled days, when the stereotype of the artsy snobbish mac fanboy really took form(and some people like that certainly did and still do exist), a lot of the mac proponents weren't trying to convince others that they were better than everyone else because they used a shinier computer. Overall, it was a genuine attempt to try and help people find a better computer. Linux has, in many of the same ways, gone through the same struggle. Just getting people to acknowledge that alternatives existed.
For most of the "Apple faithful", macs were never a secret exclusive club. We aren't upset at all the "normal people" moving in to our neighborhood. We just wonder (and argue about) why we couldn't get all these people to move in sooner.
I don't think there are that many people arguing that some hermit living in the middle of the woods in Montana should have telco's lining up to run a fiber line to his house, but there's a strong case to be made that even in dense urban areas and brand new high end suburbs, the state of the telecommunications infrastructure in the USA is generally behind the times. I've got family living in wealthy areas of the east coast, and their internet options are limited to the same dsl/cable choices that I get where I live. In the south in a city that was half destroyed by a hurricane a couple years ago.
What I think this means is that the government should force the telcos to get off their asses and actually upgrade some of this stuff, and do it without passing huge new bills onto consumers. Yes it's regulation, no it's not free market economics, and no it's not necessarily fair to the telcos and their shareholders. But the idea that those telco companies and their successes are the result of a free market is just a myth. They were handed their marketshare by the government decades ago. That wasn't a gift, it was a trade, and the telcos need to be held responsible for their side of the bargin.
Along similar lines, being an "art" student can be really frustrating when you're working hard and trying to make good grades. I majored in architecture, which isn't exactly fine arts, but certainly has an artistic aspect to it. Some of my engineering friends liked to dismiss some of my design work as artsy-fluff (sometimes they were right), but I worked hard on it, and at the end of the day/project/semester I created something through a lot of time and effort and thought. But frustratingly, because architecture has that aesthetic side to it, the grading would often seem very arbitrary. One professor on your review might love your idea and think you did a great job on it. The one sitting next to them thinks that the program guidelines(given to you by your professor) is flawed and can't get passed that and actually talk about your work. The one sitting next to them did a similar project fifteen years ago when they were in school and be pissed that you didn't approach it the same way they did.
At the end of the year, you get a B- while the dumbass that sits next to you with a half-assed project that they hastily threw together the last week of the semester gets an A because their design has a glass bridge and the professor has always dreamed of doing a project with a glass bridge.
I took some lower level CS classes because it was interesting to me, and one of the things that I really appreciated about it was that I pretty much always had a good idea what grade I was going to get. Either my program compiled or it didn't. Either it resulted in the correct output or it didn't. I may have had to work more or less to get that result than someone more/less talented, but if I put the time in, I could get a result that I knew was finished.
Some of them are undoubtedly just lazy, but I think another big part of it is that a kid in high school usually doesn't have a particularly accurate idea of what engineering school is really going to be like (or what an engineering career is going to be like), and it turns out to be something that just doesn't click for them. The laziness might then develop, but the laziness is more of a symptom than the actual disease. People in that position would probably be best served by looking for a new major, but if you're already a couple of years in, it might seem like a waste to not stick it out. Maybe switching majors would require you to spend an extra year in college, which would result in that much more student loans. Maybe you're just scared that whatever you choose next will be just as disappointing as engineering school was.
I'm not an engineer, I went to architecture school, but school for me was nothing like what I expected, and my job is very little like I expected either. There were plenty of things about school that I complained about (even though I worked hard (at least as hard as the engineering students) and did well), and there are plenty of things at my job that I complain about. But for both of them, despite the problems there were some very compelling things, things that I've enjoyed, things that I've loved being a part of, things that I'm proud of.
Not to make excuses for lazy people, but I think it's less of a problem that engineering is hard work, and more of an issue that it's just not for everyone, but a lot of times you don't really learn that until you try it. Just about any job/industry/field is hard work if you really want to be good at it, engineering isn't particularly special in that regard.
My other point is that it's important to differentiate between whining and criticizing. There's worlds of difference between whining because you want things to be easier because you don't care enough to work hard, and complaining because you want real change because you care about what you're involved in and you want it to be better.
Although in the case of the article that started this discussion, this guy is probably a whiner. Four out of his five points can be pretty easily applied to many fields of study. And the one about other disciplines having inflated grades could almost certainly be reversed if he spent some time at different schools.
I went to very nice private high school, and the head groundskeeper there had been working there for something like 30 years. Interestingly, for the first 15 years or so there he was a physics teacher. Somewhere along the line he realized that he could have a less stressful job, where he didn't have to dress up at all, didn't have to deal with stuck up rich kids and their parents, and got to spend a lot of time outside. And he made about the same amount of money.
He was a cool guy too, he still loved talking about physics, sometimes while students were hanging around outside he'd talk to us, explain to us the basic theories of how nuclear weapons worked, talk about impact forces in car crashes, some of the things that teenage guys certainly find fascinating.