Android as a mass-market, Google-supported and actively sold and marketed product, accepted by mainstream industry is on borrowed time.
Don't think Linux. Think Open Solaris. How much of a dent is Open Solaris putting in the server room these days?
How about MeeGo? Hell, even WebOS is still being developed by a die-hard core after it was released to the world as open source abandonware. How many MeeGo or WebOS handsets you seen at the Verizon store? Android lives as long as Google and Samsung pour money and manpower into it. After that's gone, it's a hobby OS for die-hards and niche hardware companies.
And when ChromeOS matures, Android =will= be abandoned. Get used to the idea. It's a transitional system to get to the ChromeOS/Glass ecosystem Google has been saying VERY LOUDLY is their corporate direction.
Why is this notion a surprise?
(No, they don't expect everyone to wear the stupid headset. Does Google seem stupid to you? What did you =think= their goal for "ubiquitous computing" was? Everybody going gargoyle? No. Cheap phones have cameras and displays, all you need for augmented reality apps. Glass will be perfect for low-spec, low-buck locked-down featurephones currently ruled by various flavors of Java.)
Well, it =is= a spec bump. It's introducing some interesting stuff which is laying the groundwork for the future - most notably a 64bit processor - some stuff that's an interesting and well integrated minor selling point that will be aped by everyone else in the industry - the fingerprint reader and gold tone - and general refinement that makes it nicer to use than previous rev - the camera software. It's to keep the faithful in the fold. iPhone 6 should be the cart-upender you crave.
In general, tho, the dev tools for Android are fairly terrible and require more a lot more work to retool an app for a full size tablet, in a software market that subsists largely on ad-supported freeware. It's not as easy or profitable to support an Android tablet version of your software as it is in the Apple ecosystem, where users are more willing to pay money for software. This results in (comparative) lackluster demand for Android tablets, which results in lackluster tablets.
To be brutally blunt, despite, or rather because of, its enormous success, I think Android is on borrowed time. Touch-optimized ChromeOS is where the Google ecosystem is going to wind up. It will allow them to supplant Microsoft on the desktop, build demand in the tablet market, and cut Firefox OS off at the knees, all with the same code base and library of apps and complete visibility into user behavior (Google's in the business of selling ads and marketing data, remember).
Meh. MicroUSB and Lightning are both on borrowed time. I see no reason a charging pad that's also a wireless USB/wireless HDMI host won't replace both in the next year or two. Then we can whine that Apple's not on the Qi standard, and we have to buy two styles of charge/link pads at TJ Maxx or 5 Below for $5 each.
The issue isn't the quality of IT worker in India, but the age-old problem of hiring mercenaries. Some merc outfits are going to offer top notch fighters with lots of in-the-trenches experience and a good track record. They will not be a bargain. Other merc outfits slap any old loser into a uniform as cannon fodder, and pocket the difference. Both outfits will bail on you the instant it looks like things are going to go against you, and find some other sucker to pay the bills.
More, as India's domestic industries mature, and they are at speed, their best and brightest will be moving to local projects, where their co-workers speak the same language and work the same hours. There was a narrow window of time where outsourcing your IT operations wholesale to India seemed like a good idea. In addition to not being a good idea after all, the window has now closed - they have their own businesses to support and economy to grow. If you want to outsource just to save money, you're really only going to get the dregs, now.
I believe the intention is to make the high-end POWER chips more ubiquitous in the server room - heavy duty RISC/Unix(Linux) server platform. The intention is to squeeze x86 out of the datacenter with AMD systems at the low end, and POWER-based gear for the serious number crunchers.
IBM hopes that by bringing competitors into their platform, they can use economies of scale to make their systems more cost-competitive, and name recognition to separate themselves from the other POWER platform providers. Reduce the cost advantage of Intel-based gear and eliminate the single-source disadvantage of POWER, and they'll put some more daylight between themselves and HP and Dell, their closest rivals.
Juniper and Cisco auto-switches on their 10Gbase-T gear, too. You are arguing against an inevitability - a grand for a workgroup switch with that kind of bandwidth is a bargain, and will be a $500 switch next year, and a $250 switch the year after next. People are already deploying 100Gig-E top-of-rack uplinks.
There are Thunderbolt 10Gb-T adapters out there, but this is one of those things that should be standard on the box: gigabit is crusty and old.
You are aware that 10GE is not backward compatible with 10/100/1000 ethernet, correct?
Incorrect. 10GBase-T is backward compatible with Gigabit and 100Base-T, as it just so happens, I'm looking at the spec sheet of a Netgear switch at the moment. A USB dongle will suffice for those stuck on 10base-T networks.
Looking at the site - this thing is modular as all hell. Looks like a backplane at the bottom that everything plugs into... upgrade bits and pieces as required or tech progresses. It's kind of a bold thing to do.
They're also banking on PCIe3 being overkill for (current) workstation applications... TB2 being plenty for most use cases. Speaking of cases, expect lots and lots of cylindrical PCI expansion chassis and RAID arrays from third party soon. The old Unix workstation days are back, baby! Daisy-Chain 4 Lyfe! This actually makes sense, as few videographers will want to pop open the case on their editing workstation to add more storage, and special PCI card applications would probably be more at home in its own case with a robust power supply and cooling, anyhow. Sharing a small metal box with a pair of GPUs, high end CPU and some seriously serious RAM can be a little heated.
On the other hand, the gigabit ethernet is unforgivable. It really needs to be dual 10Gbase-T ports in this day and age.
What will the IT department look like in five years?
Well, there's going to be the guy with the beard and suspenders, and the guy with the "wacky" sense of humor, and they may be the same guy. Then you're going to have the angry guy who seems to know how to do only one thing, but it's something way important, and he does it incredibly well. Then there's the woman who stares at you blankly whenever you talk to her, but seems to have absorbed what you were trying to say anyhow. You will also have the really smart guy who can't seem to get any aspect of his life together, but seems to know everything about everything if you need to ask him anything. There's going to be the very stylish and personable guy who calls you "broham", and it's going to drive you nuts when it turns out he's pretty good at his job, because no fair, right? And the very nice person who can't figure out how to work the badge reader, nevermind anything he's supposed to be working on, but everyone likes him anyway. There's also going to be a kid fresh out of college who's sure she knows how everything works, and will break everything at least once trying to prove it, usually when your users are busiest. You will send her out to look for a wireless cable tester at least once, and then tell her it's an app she can download, she should search for it on google. Then there's the guy who never seems to be at his desk, never answers the phone and is never available in IM, but all his tickets get resolved with no follow up customer complaints. And there's also the woman who will do whatever a customer wants, no matter how stupid, and everyone hates her. Plus, everyone will fly jet-packs to work.
Replace IQ? I think it's a stake in the heart of IQ testing. Being a champ at "Where's Waldo" is not a good predictor of problem solving, imagination, communication and knowledge retention, which are the only real measures of intelligence. Spot-checking pattern recognition skills doesn't tell us much about an individual, apart from "Wow, he matched that pattern he was familiar with because he grew up in the same society as the test designers pretty darn quick. Yup."
I think what makes kosher salt preferred in many gourmet applications isn't the fact that a rabbinical authority has ensured it met the standards for kosher labeling, but that it's got a flaked consistency that allows it to "melt" into the surface of foods and provide a more uniform coating than granular salt or ground salt.
Actually, large granular salt is kosher salt. It's got two advantages - it's easier for the cook to measure "by eye" and sprinkle onto the dish (or into the ground coffee) in a controlled way, and it contains no additives that can affect flavor (like iodine). Table salt is much finer, hence easier to dissolve in liquids, and is available on the counter at every greasy spoon in the country, which is why I recommended it for brewed coffee. I don't think any iodine flavors will be all that noticeable against the strong backdrop of coffee.
Actually, yes - a sprinkling of kosher salt in the grounds before brewing, or table salt in the coffee itself, reduces bitterness and brings out flavor complexities... a great alternative for those avoiding dairy or sweeteners.
I have no problems with pure R&D projects like this in peacetime - it's where any sensible civilization should be spending the bulk of its military money when there's no major conflict afoot. My problem is with immensely inefficient and corrupt programs designed from the get-go to produce a less-than-adequate result (F-35), and with enormous standing armies and fleets we neither need nor can afford. (12 carrier groups. Really? We need all that? The Chinese have, umm... one. The one they bought second-hand from the Russians, that's not even operational yet.
It also shows a 60/70's naïvety toward how nasty our computing world has become toward attacking other users for personal and political gain.
Yeah, mitigating modern malware techniques, particularly trojans, is a non-trivial problem. Apple's solution, the walled garden, is probably the wrong one, but no-one has come up with another credible security model that works as transparently or effectively for the end user. This is really an area of OS research that needs a ton of attention and effort that it's not getting - anti-malware applications are not cutting it. The solution needs to be baked-in, not bolt-on, and pro-active rather than reactive.
This is exactly right. It's easier and more reliably profitable to work with domestic industries than to accept piecework from a country where there's a language and time zone barrier to collaboration. Companies in India were not capable of delivering a consistent result, because companies in the US were unable to offer consistent guidance and management. Pretty much as predicted by all the outsourcing skeptics. Once the domestic demand for IT services in India took off, outsourcing lost its luster for buyers and sellers both.
So, in essence, they don't want to pay IT staff what they're worth and can't find enough suckers willing to be underpaid, and believe the salesman when he says his company can do all of that messy IT work for you, dirt cheap. Heard that same song sung before - remember how everyone was going to lose their IT jobs to Indian outsourcing? How'd that turn out?
I'm thinking old fashioned extortion. Cough up some protection money, or bad things will happen to your network access... which is why the Egyptian authorities knew to look for them.
No, of course not. I draw the line at having an actual keyboard
A tablet has a keyboard, and also a mouse - the function of both is combined with the screen on tablets like the iPad and pocket computers like the iPod Touch or Nexus 4.
More to the point, "keyboard" is kind of arbitrary. "Can run software applications, and is not specialized to run one particular category of software" is probably a better definition - and both tablets and smartphones qualify. iOS and Android are both Unix variants, if you recall.
What serious database (sql speaking or not) or operating system is written in a "non-legacy" language?
A few of them were written in ADA, FORTRTAN and COBOL. These are clearly non-legacy languages, and the engine that powers the bold new ideas of industry and computer science.
No seriously, it's all old shit, and anything remotely interesting is happening at a higher level these days. Sorry. Even app programming is being abstracted with stuff like Cordova. There are a lot of job openings, as operating systems and RDBMS's dating from the 70's need updating on occasion, so they've got that going on at least.
Python can be either interpreted or compiled.
No-one uses it compiled anymore for new projects. Hence legacy.
You can't transform from "an interpreted language" to "a compilation target"
Of course you can. You're arguing a point of semantics no-one in industry accepts as valid.
Google would probably be surprised to learn that Python can't handle that use case
No they wouldn't. They invented Go and Dart because Python can't handle that use case.
So, also, Python (JVM and CLR via Jython and IronPython), Ruby (JVM, CLR, and JavaScript via JRuby, IronRuby, Opal/HotRuby/Ruby2js), etc.?
That's cute - but no. Legacy languages with bolt-ons few people use. Time marches on, and in another ten years you'll be mocking all the Clojure and Node.js guys wondering where their glory has gone.
I remember when the O'Reilly Python manual came out and everyone was excited - this was back in Clinton's first term of office. Python is old. Interpreted languages in general are old, and increasingly less useful. Javascript is transforming from an interpreted language into a compilation target due to its integration with web technologies - Python is just python. Jython was a thing for a while, but it's not functional-language enough to handle new virtual and cloud infrastructures, where an app has to run on thousands of machines, scaling up to thousands more in response to load, all without operator intervention.
Languages that are not legacy compile to JVM, CLR and/or Javascript - Clojure, CoffeeScript, Opa.
Heck for pretty much any creation, you want a real system. A tablet is fine for watching a video, it would suck for editing one.
Ummm. No. This is knee-jerk conservatism. There are already video editing apps for the iPad, one of them by Avid, 3d modeling apps from players like Autodesk, and absolutely no end of audio apps, some of them being used to crank out pro-quality product.
Sure, a full-blown workstation will provide more screen real-estate, storage and processing power - but those little phones have more oomph in them than professional workstations used to model Jurassic Park or compose and master the Fight Club soundtrack. Software options are catching up rapidly as developers and users learn how to work with the new user interface constraints.
Projects like Blender need to start figuring out how their application is going to work without a mouse and keyboard, as that's where the users are going. Once upon a time, it was inconceivable you'd need to develop a GUI for your application, too - non-touch interfaces are starting to look a lot like Word Perfect for DOS.
Adjust their initial expectations. Explain very clearly on your website and download page that this product is free to download and free to try, but paid contracts are required for professional support. Do not refer to your product, anywhere on your site, as a being available for free, or "free software" - the term is confusing. Open Source is a better term.
1) Around 10% of the population is African American. Even if there were the same proportion of "reverse racists", the numbers would be ineffectually small.
2) Segregation, sundown laws and lynchings were common up until the mid '60s, and not the 1860s.
3) This election featured a center-right candidate, a party moderate, famous for his business-friendly policy positions and support of the petroleum and natural gas producers - Barack Obama. White men voted against him in droves, against their own economic interest. Tell me again how white supremacism is no longer an issue in this country.
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Android as a mass-market, Google-supported and actively sold and marketed product, accepted by mainstream industry is on borrowed time.
Don't think Linux. Think Open Solaris. How much of a dent is Open Solaris putting in the server room these days?
How about MeeGo? Hell, even WebOS is still being developed by a die-hard core after it was released to the world as open source abandonware. How many MeeGo or WebOS handsets you seen at the Verizon store? Android lives as long as Google and Samsung pour money and manpower into it. After that's gone, it's a hobby OS for die-hards and niche hardware companies.
And when ChromeOS matures, Android =will= be abandoned. Get used to the idea. It's a transitional system to get to the ChromeOS/Glass ecosystem Google has been saying VERY LOUDLY is their corporate direction.
Why is this notion a surprise?
(No, they don't expect everyone to wear the stupid headset. Does Google seem stupid to you? What did you =think= their goal for "ubiquitous computing" was? Everybody going gargoyle? No. Cheap phones have cameras and displays, all you need for augmented reality apps. Glass will be perfect for low-spec, low-buck locked-down featurephones currently ruled by various flavors of Java.)
Well, it =is= a spec bump. It's introducing some interesting stuff which is laying the groundwork for the future - most notably a 64bit processor - some stuff that's an interesting and well integrated minor selling point that will be aped by everyone else in the industry - the fingerprint reader and gold tone - and general refinement that makes it nicer to use than previous rev - the camera software. It's to keep the faithful in the fold. iPhone 6 should be the cart-upender you crave.
In general, tho, the dev tools for Android are fairly terrible and require more a lot more work to retool an app for a full size tablet, in a software market that subsists largely on ad-supported freeware. It's not as easy or profitable to support an Android tablet version of your software as it is in the Apple ecosystem, where users are more willing to pay money for software. This results in (comparative) lackluster demand for Android tablets, which results in lackluster tablets.
To be brutally blunt, despite, or rather because of, its enormous success, I think Android is on borrowed time. Touch-optimized ChromeOS is where the Google ecosystem is going to wind up. It will allow them to supplant Microsoft on the desktop, build demand in the tablet market, and cut Firefox OS off at the knees, all with the same code base and library of apps and complete visibility into user behavior (Google's in the business of selling ads and marketing data, remember).
Meh. MicroUSB and Lightning are both on borrowed time. I see no reason a charging pad that's also a wireless USB/wireless HDMI host won't replace both in the next year or two. Then we can whine that Apple's not on the Qi standard, and we have to buy two styles of charge/link pads at TJ Maxx or 5 Below for $5 each.
The issue isn't the quality of IT worker in India, but the age-old problem of hiring mercenaries. Some merc outfits are going to offer top notch fighters with lots of in-the-trenches experience and a good track record. They will not be a bargain. Other merc outfits slap any old loser into a uniform as cannon fodder, and pocket the difference. Both outfits will bail on you the instant it looks like things are going to go against you, and find some other sucker to pay the bills.
More, as India's domestic industries mature, and they are at speed, their best and brightest will be moving to local projects, where their co-workers speak the same language and work the same hours. There was a narrow window of time where outsourcing your IT operations wholesale to India seemed like a good idea. In addition to not being a good idea after all, the window has now closed - they have their own businesses to support and economy to grow. If you want to outsource just to save money, you're really only going to get the dregs, now.
I believe the intention is to make the high-end POWER chips more ubiquitous in the server room - heavy duty RISC/Unix(Linux) server platform. The intention is to squeeze x86 out of the datacenter with AMD systems at the low end, and POWER-based gear for the serious number crunchers.
IBM hopes that by bringing competitors into their platform, they can use economies of scale to make their systems more cost-competitive, and name recognition to separate themselves from the other POWER platform providers. Reduce the cost advantage of Intel-based gear and eliminate the single-source disadvantage of POWER, and they'll put some more daylight between themselves and HP and Dell, their closest rivals.
Juniper and Cisco auto-switches on their 10Gbase-T gear, too. You are arguing against an inevitability - a grand for a workgroup switch with that kind of bandwidth is a bargain, and will be a $500 switch next year, and a $250 switch the year after next. People are already deploying 100Gig-E top-of-rack uplinks.
There are Thunderbolt 10Gb-T adapters out there, but this is one of those things that should be standard on the box: gigabit is crusty and old.
Incorrect. 10GBase-T is backward compatible with Gigabit and 100Base-T, as it just so happens, I'm looking at the spec sheet of a Netgear switch at the moment. A USB dongle will suffice for those stuck on 10base-T networks.
Looking at the site - this thing is modular as all hell. Looks like a backplane at the bottom that everything plugs into... upgrade bits and pieces as required or tech progresses. It's kind of a bold thing to do.
They're also banking on PCIe3 being overkill for (current) workstation applications... TB2 being plenty for most use cases. Speaking of cases, expect lots and lots of cylindrical PCI expansion chassis and RAID arrays from third party soon. The old Unix workstation days are back, baby! Daisy-Chain 4 Lyfe! This actually makes sense, as few videographers will want to pop open the case on their editing workstation to add more storage, and special PCI card applications would probably be more at home in its own case with a robust power supply and cooling, anyhow. Sharing a small metal box with a pair of GPUs, high end CPU and some seriously serious RAM can be a little heated.
On the other hand, the gigabit ethernet is unforgivable. It really needs to be dual 10Gbase-T ports in this day and age.
What will the IT department look like in five years?
Well, there's going to be the guy with the beard and suspenders, and the guy with the "wacky" sense of humor, and they may be the same guy. Then you're going to have the angry guy who seems to know how to do only one thing, but it's something way important, and he does it incredibly well. Then there's the woman who stares at you blankly whenever you talk to her, but seems to have absorbed what you were trying to say anyhow. You will also have the really smart guy who can't seem to get any aspect of his life together, but seems to know everything about everything if you need to ask him anything. There's going to be the very stylish and personable guy who calls you "broham", and it's going to drive you nuts when it turns out he's pretty good at his job, because no fair, right? And the very nice person who can't figure out how to work the badge reader, nevermind anything he's supposed to be working on, but everyone likes him anyway. There's also going to be a kid fresh out of college who's sure she knows how everything works, and will break everything at least once trying to prove it, usually when your users are busiest. You will send her out to look for a wireless cable tester at least once, and then tell her it's an app she can download, she should search for it on google. Then there's the guy who never seems to be at his desk, never answers the phone and is never available in IM, but all his tickets get resolved with no follow up customer complaints. And there's also the woman who will do whatever a customer wants, no matter how stupid, and everyone hates her. Plus, everyone will fly jet-packs to work.
Replace IQ? I think it's a stake in the heart of IQ testing. Being a champ at "Where's Waldo" is not a good predictor of problem solving, imagination, communication and knowledge retention, which are the only real measures of intelligence. Spot-checking pattern recognition skills doesn't tell us much about an individual, apart from "Wow, he matched that pattern he was familiar with because he grew up in the same society as the test designers pretty darn quick. Yup."
I think what makes kosher salt preferred in many gourmet applications isn't the fact that a rabbinical authority has ensured it met the standards for kosher labeling, but that it's got a flaked consistency that allows it to "melt" into the surface of foods and provide a more uniform coating than granular salt or ground salt.
Actually, large granular salt is kosher salt. It's got two advantages - it's easier for the cook to measure "by eye" and sprinkle onto the dish (or into the ground coffee) in a controlled way, and it contains no additives that can affect flavor (like iodine). Table salt is much finer, hence easier to dissolve in liquids, and is available on the counter at every greasy spoon in the country, which is why I recommended it for brewed coffee. I don't think any iodine flavors will be all that noticeable against the strong backdrop of coffee.
Salt and coffee?
Actually, yes - a sprinkling of kosher salt in the grounds before brewing, or table salt in the coffee itself, reduces bitterness and brings out flavor complexities... a great alternative for those avoiding dairy or sweeteners.
Say what you will about this study, the governments of the western world are living beyond their means.
Interesting assertion. Now, fire up Excel, and prove it.
I have no problems with pure R&D projects like this in peacetime - it's where any sensible civilization should be spending the bulk of its military money when there's no major conflict afoot. My problem is with immensely inefficient and corrupt programs designed from the get-go to produce a less-than-adequate result (F-35), and with enormous standing armies and fleets we neither need nor can afford. (12 carrier groups. Really? We need all that? The Chinese have, umm... one. The one they bought second-hand from the Russians, that's not even operational yet.
Until you get deployed to the SS Flounder...
Yeah, but then you're in the same attack group as the USS Otter, USS Blutowski and the USS D-Day, which is awesome.
It also shows a 60/70's naïvety toward how nasty our computing world has become toward attacking other users for personal and political gain.
Yeah, mitigating modern malware techniques, particularly trojans, is a non-trivial problem. Apple's solution, the walled garden, is probably the wrong one, but no-one has come up with another credible security model that works as transparently or effectively for the end user. This is really an area of OS research that needs a ton of attention and effort that it's not getting - anti-malware applications are not cutting it. The solution needs to be baked-in, not bolt-on, and pro-active rather than reactive.
This is exactly right. It's easier and more reliably profitable to work with domestic industries than to accept piecework from a country where there's a language and time zone barrier to collaboration. Companies in India were not capable of delivering a consistent result, because companies in the US were unable to offer consistent guidance and management. Pretty much as predicted by all the outsourcing skeptics. Once the domestic demand for IT services in India took off, outsourcing lost its luster for buyers and sellers both.
So, in essence, they don't want to pay IT staff what they're worth and can't find enough suckers willing to be underpaid, and believe the salesman when he says his company can do all of that messy IT work for you, dirt cheap. Heard that same song sung before - remember how everyone was going to lose their IT jobs to Indian outsourcing? How'd that turn out?
I'm thinking old fashioned extortion. Cough up some protection money, or bad things will happen to your network access... which is why the Egyptian authorities knew to look for them.
No, of course not. I draw the line at having an actual keyboard
A tablet has a keyboard, and also a mouse - the function of both is combined with the screen on tablets like the iPad and pocket computers like the iPod Touch or Nexus 4.
More to the point, "keyboard" is kind of arbitrary. "Can run software applications, and is not specialized to run one particular category of software" is probably a better definition - and both tablets and smartphones qualify. iOS and Android are both Unix variants, if you recall.
What serious database (sql speaking or not) or operating system is written in a "non-legacy" language?
A few of them were written in ADA, FORTRTAN and COBOL. These are clearly non-legacy languages, and the engine that powers the bold new ideas of industry and computer science.
No seriously, it's all old shit, and anything remotely interesting is happening at a higher level these days. Sorry. Even app programming is being abstracted with stuff like Cordova. There are a lot of job openings, as operating systems and RDBMS's dating from the 70's need updating on occasion, so they've got that going on at least.
Python can be either interpreted or compiled.
No-one uses it compiled anymore for new projects. Hence legacy.
You can't transform from "an interpreted language" to "a compilation target"
Of course you can. You're arguing a point of semantics no-one in industry accepts as valid.
Google would probably be surprised to learn that Python can't handle that use case
No they wouldn't. They invented Go and Dart because Python can't handle that use case.
So, also, Python (JVM and CLR via Jython and IronPython), Ruby (JVM, CLR, and JavaScript via JRuby, IronRuby, Opal/HotRuby/Ruby2js), etc.?
That's cute - but no. Legacy languages with bolt-ons few people use. Time marches on, and in another ten years you'll be mocking all the Clojure and Node.js guys wondering where their glory has gone.
I remember when the O'Reilly Python manual came out and everyone was excited - this was back in Clinton's first term of office. Python is old. Interpreted languages in general are old, and increasingly less useful. Javascript is transforming from an interpreted language into a compilation target due to its integration with web technologies - Python is just python. Jython was a thing for a while, but it's not functional-language enough to handle new virtual and cloud infrastructures, where an app has to run on thousands of machines, scaling up to thousands more in response to load, all without operator intervention.
Languages that are not legacy compile to JVM, CLR and/or Javascript - Clojure, CoffeeScript, Opa.
Heck for pretty much any creation, you want a real system. A tablet is fine for watching a video, it would suck for editing one.
Ummm. No. This is knee-jerk conservatism. There are already video editing apps for the iPad, one of them by Avid, 3d modeling apps from players like Autodesk, and absolutely no end of audio apps, some of them being used to crank out pro-quality product.
Sure, a full-blown workstation will provide more screen real-estate, storage and processing power - but those little phones have more oomph in them than professional workstations used to model Jurassic Park or compose and master the Fight Club soundtrack. Software options are catching up rapidly as developers and users learn how to work with the new user interface constraints.
Projects like Blender need to start figuring out how their application is going to work without a mouse and keyboard, as that's where the users are going. Once upon a time, it was inconceivable you'd need to develop a GUI for your application, too - non-touch interfaces are starting to look a lot like Word Perfect for DOS.
Adjust their initial expectations. Explain very clearly on your website and download page that this product is free to download and free to try, but paid contracts are required for professional support. Do not refer to your product, anywhere on your site, as a being available for free, or "free software" - the term is confusing. Open Source is a better term.
1) Around 10% of the population is African American. Even if there were the same proportion of "reverse racists", the numbers would be ineffectually small.
2) Segregation, sundown laws and lynchings were common up until the mid '60s, and not the 1860s.
3) This election featured a center-right candidate, a party moderate, famous for his business-friendly policy positions and support of the petroleum and natural gas producers - Barack Obama. White men voted against him in droves, against their own economic interest. Tell me again how white supremacism is no longer an issue in this country.