I work at Apple Park. It's the worst office environment I've ever had the misfortune to have inflicted upon me. Working in that gilded shithole has me looking elsewhere for work now, and I've been at Apple for many a year.
It's form over function, it's the fact that everyone has the noise-cancelling earphones (the good Bose ones, not the crappy Beats ones) and it's the complete lack of respect that is implied. My dog has a larger kennel (not that he uses it in CA weather very much) than I have desk-space.
It seems to me that US people (I only say the US because that's where I live, I don't know if it's as common elsewhere) seem to think Brits are nice people, and you can get away with shit around them. Brits are *not* especially nice. Brits are *polite*, there is a huge difference. The velvet glove conceals an iron fist, and it's generally easier to be polite back than to piss them off overmuch.
I imagine his questioning will be somewhat more... in depth... than it would have been previously. There is no time limit on select-committee investigations, like in the US congressional hearings. If it takes several hours, then it takes several hours...
I'm 48, have been working for Apple for the last 14 years or so, and live and work in the Bay Area. Sure, things are expensive, and once I stop being paid we'll bail to the Oregon coast or similar for retirement, but life is pretty good.
My wife is a full-time mum, my kid goes to a nice school (better than I ever had), the mortgage will be paid in 5 years or so, and we've just got a puppy (a Newfie:) I'm intending to stay until retirement. I'm hardly the oldest in my group (R&D) either, and I work alongside people who've been here for longer than I have (some of them go back 25 years) and who are older than I am. Age is not a barrier, at least at Apple, if you're good enough.
One is sufficiently exasperated by another's fucking idiocy and ignorance, that one goes to the nearest aircraft hanger, grabs the chocks that prevent planes from just rolling away, and forcibly places them into the fucking ignorant idiot's stomach, by way of the mouth.
One's blood pressure immediately drops, along with the fucking idiot; dead, that is.
Depends. Could be a blip (in geological time) of a few decades or hundreds of years, or the system could be bistable, and the new pattern becomes the norm for the next millennia or dozen.
And during the demo, which was running full-screen (windowed), they reduced the size of the window to 1/4 screen, and you could see 3 other ones running at the same time.
Don't get me wrong, I think the Acorn team did an amazing job with the first ARM chip, and when I saw the "Lander" demo running on an Archie, my jaw dropped. I spent the next term's student grant money on buying one, then worked 2 jobs to pay for it. Worth it.
I don't think Apple was involved in the first chip (that was an Acorn thing), but by the time ARM had morphed from the marketing "Acorn RISC Machine" slogan to an actual company, they were there, contributing quite a bit if you believe my colleague.
From the Wikipedia page: "The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology."
One of my colleagues was working with Acorn at the time (yes, I'm old, so is he) and he will talk your ear off about how the groups collaborated, and what IP Apple contributed, as well as the improvements made to the chip layout to help out the board-design people.
Apple are supposed to be "completely re-thinking" the Mac Pro. Maybe their solution is to have a "compute brick" plugin architecture, for which you can either have N fast cheap ARMs, or N fast expensive x86s. Similarly for GPUs...
Silicon Graphics did it with the Origin 350. With today's miniaturization, it could be possible to do it on a much smaller scale.
Apple was one of the founders of ARM. An ARM license doesn't cost them very much at all.
Manufacturing chips on the scale of Apple's iPhone means the cost per chip is relatively low. The NRE is done; at that point the more you can manufacture the cheaper it is per unit. Certainly paying Intel to manufacture chips and sell them (even at the margin that Apple can command) is going to be more expensive for Apple.
As for benefits... Apple has always wanted to own the whole shebang. They get to know ahead of time what the schedule's going to be, they get to dictate the chip's abilities, and they already have the design capability in-house. I *think* it'll be cheaper for Apple, with lower thermals and higher efficiencies with potentially a better designed chip. Whether the user sees benefits from that is up for debate.
There are certainly issues with compatibility and emulation, and I don't have a good answer for that. I suspect, if Apple go ahead and do it, they will have a good-enough answer for a transition. As for recompiling etc., they'll just require an ARM64 variant of any app in the app-store for a year or so ahead of any transition in order to be listed. That'll be sufficient IMHO to get almost everyone on-board.
I am older, as the summary suggests - I'll be 49 this year, but these days I do:
verilog code on the FPGA, which talks to the
embedded micro (If there isn't one in the verilog or a hard macro on the FPGA), which is controlled by
the board-management micro, which talks to
the thunderbolt or lightning connector, which needs a
custom PCIe driver kernel extension on the host box (Mac or Linux), which wants a
user-interface library that applications will use to talk to the kext, and I provide a
GUI or shell app that exercises the hardware, and sometimes a
Full-blown application with complex threaded user-interaction which often needs
GPU accelerated display routines, which often use
OpenCL or Cuda routines for the heavy lifting
I don't think of myself as a "full-stack developer", I just think of myself as a developer. The goal is to solve problems, the more tools you have at your disposal the better.
From the same link: "Analyst Gene Munster said the Apple Watch represents just 3 percent of Apple's revenue, which would equal $1.6 billion during the quarter"
They have not undershot estimates - the watch has posted 50% increases in sales for 3 quarters running. I don't know of many products that do that.
And you're still ignoring the point I was making. Just on its own, the watch is the equivalent of a Fortune-500 company. Your original statement was "They (sic) is no money in that market". It is *you*, sir, who are wrong; in every respect.
The reason Qualcomm doesn't give a flying fuck about smart watches is because no one is buying them. If google etc wanted one so badly they could order custom designs, or make their own. They is no money in that market.
Apple made $1.6B in the last quarter on their watches. The segment "Apple wearables" is equivalent to a Fortune-500 company in its own right
There was a steady increase in the unit’s sales in the first year the Watch was on sale, rising from $1.7 billion at the start of the year to $4.35 billion by the end. Other products cooled off in 2015, but saw another strong holiday quarter. This time, the business unit generated $2.87 billion, a jump of about 30% over the same quarter last year, but still relatively small compared with even Apple’s other non-iPhone businesses. Even so, Cook said its wearables business, which he defined as the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Beats headphones, was comparable to the size of a Fortune 500 company.
Sure, it's no iPhone-X, but it's hardly buttons either. My ole gran used to have a saying "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves", and the same applies writ large here.
In the last 3 years I've bought over 500 books, most of them in the 600-1200 (thanks Brandon) page length. That's not taking into account the thousands of books I've read prior to realizing I could carry around a library instead of a book or two by going digital. I could stock a good-sized bookshop with the books in the attic...
4600 seems pitifully small to me - I'm only about halfway (hopefully) through life and I'm already well past that.
I "cashed out" a bitcoin last week, put down a 4x payment on my mortgage for this month.
You do realize that hundreds of millions of dollars are traded every day on the cryprocurrency exchanges, right ?
Go to coinbase.com (to pluck an example out of the air), log into your account. Do the 2FA thing with your cell phone. Type in how many btc or LTC or ETH you want to sell, wait a few days, and it appears in your bank account. It's easier than setting up a wire transfer...
Yes, but he's not agreeing with the summary, is he ? I knew reading comprehension on this site had declined, but I was hopeful it wasn't as bad as this...
Here's how it works.
1) A story is posted 2) Comments are made 3) Each comment can have a hierarchy of sub-comments. The text of any given comment is relative to its parent.
Just like this comment, calling your statement [the parent comment to this one] idiotic.
He was agreeing with his parent's comment, which is (rightly, IMHO) pointing out that Apple is actually going out of their way to make a fix they'd made (and QA'd with their hardware to work perfectly) *also* work with the non-Apple third-party hardware. This is Apple going above and beyond, and if you can't see that, well, that's more a problem with you than anything else.
And the douchebag that wrote the original clickbait, of course.
I'm almost in my 50's too. I've worked at Apple, currently in R&D, for the last 13 years. I sometimes poke fun at my boss for being a newcomer, because he's only been here for 12.5 years or so... There are people in my group who've worked there for 20+ years.
Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook (I think) amongst others are all in and around that area, and they pay very well. Sure, you'll be paying through the nose for a house/flat, but if you see yourself as having a career here, then that house/flat becomes an investment. Property values aren't likely to drop significantly in the next decade or so, in fact they're very likely to increase, so money put in now is likely a good return on investment.
Work, save, wait, quit, move.
That shitty $1M 1500-sq.ft ranch is now worth $1.5M and it'll still sell quickly, pay off your remaining $900k of mortgage and you're left with a pretty large nest egg to go live somewhere else. That's how it's worked out for me, anyway. I bought said shitty 1500 sq.ft house for $760k about 8 years ago, I get paid well, so I've been paying off the mortgage at 2x the monthly rate, and I now owe ~$300k. The house is worth ~$1.4M, Another 7-8 years and it's all mine.
There can be a plan, even in Silicon Valley. Just play the game and use the rules to your advantage.
I'm guessing that's more of an "asset management system". Ours was orientated around the video. As cameras roll, we digitised the footage by tapping into the tape deck monitor output, we had RFID tags on each tape, and we had LTC/VITC timecode from the deck. We therefore had a unique reference for every frame laid down, as it was laid down (ie: there was zero ingest time, which was - and still is to a large extent - an issue with asset management systems).
The system then sent each frame to a centralised database server that had a webserver on it, and I wrote a streaming (ok, this part was in C:) server and a streaming player for Linux, Mac, and Windows that understood our custom streaming format. There wasn't anything complicated about the format, it was basically motion-JPEG data served from an HTTP interface, so the player would send the URL "http://asset-server/tape-rdid/timecode-from/timecode-to" and get an application/octet-stream back which was each file (common headers stripped), where a file was an individual frame in JPEG form.
What this let people do was record out in the desert, and have their digital dailies sent back via a satellite upload to home base via rsync, and the team at home base could "see" (we only supported quarter-res images at the time, the internet wasn't as fast as it is now) the footage, reliably locate frames on tapes, and discuss/annotate/create EDL (edit display-list, basically a set of timecode-timecode ranges) sequences and play around with it as if they had the tapes right there, even if it was at a low resolution.
On a more prosaic all-in-house system, the act of using a Discreet Inferno or Flame system (which controlled the tape decks in a post-production suite) would automatically log footage into our system, so the non-artist types could use our "virtual VTR" system to review and create play-lists which could then be sent to the machine room with the certainty that what they'd composed in their web-browser would be what ended up on the tape that would later be delivered to clients. This freed up a lot of the tape-deck use which could then be put to more profitable use by the post-house.
There was at least one time when I got a angry phone call from a client who claimed our system was screwing things up. They'd created their EDL for the client using our system and then sent the job to the tape room to be generated, and of course creating that new tape would automatically log the new footage into the system (because it was writing to a tape in a monitored tape deck). They looked at the output footage of the generated tape in their browser, and it wasn't right. After a bit of tracking things down, it turned out the tape room had inserted the wrong master tape, so we saved them the indignity/embarrassment of sending footage from a *competing* client out the door. That alone, in the eyes of the director, was worth the cost of the system.
We had similar procedures for rendered footage from 3D systems (Shake etc. at the time). Again, everything was collated into shots/scenes etc. on the database server. We had rules that would be applied to directories full of frames that would parse out sequences from arbitrary filenames that were differentiated only by a frame number in the filename. That's actually harder than it looks - there is *no* standard naming convention across post-houses:) I separated out the code into a library, wrote a small commandline utility called 'seqls' which was *very* popular for parsing out a directory of 10,000 files into a string like 'shot-id.capture.1-10000.tiff'...
All of this is (I'm sure, I haven't kept up to date) commonplace today, but it was pretty revolutionary at the time. I'd say about 90% of the code was PHP, there were various system daemons in C, there were video players for the major platforms in C/C++ and there was a kernel driver for the linux box in C that handled the incoming video, digitised the audio, and digitised the LTC
15 years ago, Apple hired me on an H1B, and my starting salary was $140k, then they paid everything to convert my H1B to a green card. None of this includes joining and yearly bonus stock options (at the time, RSU's these days) or yearly cash bonuses. They also paid relocation and first few months of rent in a pre-arranged location.
I'm not special. There were several dozen of us in the (weekly) new-employee orientation meeting, most of whom were s/w engineers.
Oh, and I (or rather, my small company, that Apple bought) wrote ILM's digital asset management system for films like Star Wars (ep1), James Bond films, digital commercials etc. mostly in PHP. That sold for $40k/pop... Indeed, just like any language, it's possible to write crap code in PHP, but used properly it's a powerful tool.
When I started my PhD in image processing, I was given an 80-column, 24-line text terminal to the department microVax (approximately 1 MIP, shared between about 40 people). I was lucky, and got one of the good ones, it had an amber phospher:)
Seriously, the only place to see the results of the algorithm was on a shared display downstairs in the lab - which was in high demand. I ended up doing a lot of terminal-style graphs (mine wasn't a tektronix terminal, so I only had text-like characters) to prove an algorithm worked before actually seeing it.
And now I look at the technological ability of my freaking phone, and I wonder at just how far things have come in 30 years or so...
Personally I wouldn't want one. Too many VMs, and I want 32GB in my next laptop, but that's some sales, so whodathunkit, I'm not your typical purchaser; and, probably, neither are those who were complaining...
As an aside, can you imagine the unholy shitstorm that would be making the rounds if any of this were happening to Apple ?
Exploding iPhones... The internet might not cope with that, and then Apple bribing people to keep quiet about the whole thing ? We might have a singularity event...
I've been coding for about 30 years now, a bit longer actually. Something that's become apparent over the years is that there ought to be a law of conservation of complexity. You can abstract and then re-abstract, you can use well-known design patterns, you can write defensively, and you can document until the cows come home. All of these help, they help by spreading out the complexity onto a larger surface - it becomes less opaque as it gets "thinner", the more it spreads out.
However, it remains the case that some things are just inherently complex, that understanding them, or their particular interfaces and parameters, requires the understanding of the system as a whole, not the parts in isolation. Sometimes divide does not conquer, at least in the real world. There's not *many* problems like this, and I've no idea if this is the sort of thing Linus is referring to - I don't keep up with the Linux kernel these days, but there may be a good reason why he's done what he's done. You "calling him out" without explicit reasons why, or (better) giving a superior approach than what is already there is just showing ignorance, IMHO.
Personally I think you've already made the assumption that naked infant pictures are in some way embarrassing. To my mind, they're not. To most Europeans, they're not.
It seems I'm really struggling to say this sufficiently clearly: The difference between a photo of a naked 4 year-old and a clothed 4-year old to me is the clothes, that's it. I really don't care whether the kid has clothes on or not, it makes absolutely no difference to the photo, and the first comment that would come to mind would be something like "wasn't that Summer of '73" or "Hey look at the size of that sand-castle you were building", or something equally irrelevant to the clothing situation.
If someone wants to get all upset over the photos, then fine. It's a bit weird to make an issue out of it, but whatever. Similarly, if the parents don't want to take the photos down, that's also a bit weird, it seems like basic courtesy ought to rule here. As I said, I don't really care; I think it's a matter for the family to handle, and apparently they think it's a matter for the courts to handle. Fair enough. I don't really see why it's news, either.
Slashdot Mirror
I work at Apple Park. It's the worst office environment I've ever had the misfortune to have inflicted upon me. Working in that gilded shithole has me looking elsewhere for work now, and I've been at Apple for many a year.
It's form over function, it's the fact that everyone has the noise-cancelling earphones (the good Bose ones, not the crappy Beats ones) and it's the complete lack of respect that is implied. My dog has a larger kennel (not that he uses it in CA weather very much) than I have desk-space.
Yes.
It seems to me that US people (I only say the US because that's where I live, I don't know if it's as common elsewhere) seem to think Brits are nice people, and you can get away with shit around them. Brits are *not* especially nice. Brits are *polite*, there is a huge difference. The velvet glove conceals an iron fist, and it's generally easier to be polite back than to piss them off overmuch.
I imagine his questioning will be somewhat more ... in depth ... than it would have been previously. There is no time limit on select-committee investigations, like in the US congressional hearings. If it takes several hours, then it takes several hours...
Um, no ?
I'm 48, have been working for Apple for the last 14 years or so, and live and work in the Bay Area. Sure, things are expensive, and once I stop being paid we'll bail to the Oregon coast or similar for retirement, but life is pretty good.
My wife is a full-time mum, my kid goes to a nice school (better than I ever had), the mortgage will be paid in 5 years or so, and we've just got a puppy (a Newfie :) I'm intending to stay until retirement. I'm hardly the oldest in my group (R&D) either, and I work alongside people who've been here for longer than I have (some of them go back 25 years) and who are older than I am. Age is not a barrier, at least at Apple, if you're good enough.
One is sufficiently exasperated by another's fucking idiocy and ignorance, that one goes to the nearest aircraft hanger, grabs the chocks that prevent planes from just rolling away, and forcibly places them into the fucking ignorant idiot's stomach, by way of the mouth.
One's blood pressure immediately drops, along with the fucking idiot; dead, that is.
Depends. Could be a blip (in geological time) of a few decades or hundreds of years, or the system could be bistable, and the new pattern becomes the norm for the next millennia or dozen.
Yeah. It was.
And during the demo, which was running full-screen (windowed), they reduced the size of the window to 1/4 screen, and you could see 3 other ones running at the same time.
The word I was looking for is "Gobsmacked" :)
Don't get me wrong, I think the Acorn team did an amazing job with the first ARM chip, and when I saw the "Lander" demo running on an Archie, my jaw dropped. I spent the next term's student grant money on buying one, then worked 2 jobs to pay for it. Worth it.
I don't think Apple was involved in the first chip (that was an Acorn thing), but by the time ARM had morphed from the marketing "Acorn RISC Machine" slogan to an actual company, they were there, contributing quite a bit if you believe my colleague.
From the Wikipedia page: "The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology."
One of my colleagues was working with Acorn at the time (yes, I'm old, so is he) and he will talk your ear off about how the groups collaborated, and what IP Apple contributed, as well as the improvements made to the chip layout to help out the board-design people.
Apple are supposed to be "completely re-thinking" the Mac Pro. Maybe their solution is to have a "compute brick" plugin architecture, for which you can either have N fast cheap ARMs, or N fast expensive x86s. Similarly for GPUs...
Silicon Graphics did it with the Origin 350. With today's miniaturization, it could be possible to do it on a much smaller scale.
Apple was one of the founders of ARM. An ARM license doesn't cost them very much at all.
Manufacturing chips on the scale of Apple's iPhone means the cost per chip is relatively low. The NRE is done; at that point the more you can manufacture the cheaper it is per unit. Certainly paying Intel to manufacture chips and sell them (even at the margin that Apple can command) is going to be more expensive for Apple.
As for benefits... Apple has always wanted to own the whole shebang. They get to know ahead of time what the schedule's going to be, they get to dictate the chip's abilities, and they already have the design capability in-house. I *think* it'll be cheaper for Apple, with lower thermals and higher efficiencies with potentially a better designed chip. Whether the user sees benefits from that is up for debate.
There are certainly issues with compatibility and emulation, and I don't have a good answer for that. I suspect, if Apple go ahead and do it, they will have a good-enough answer for a transition. As for recompiling etc., they'll just require an ARM64 variant of any app in the app-store for a year or so ahead of any transition in order to be listed. That'll be sufficient IMHO to get almost everyone on-board.
I am older, as the summary suggests - I'll be 49 this year, but these days I do:
I don't think of myself as a "full-stack developer", I just think of myself as a developer. The goal is to solve problems, the more tools you have at your disposal the better.
I like that. *I* need to read...
From the same link: "Analyst Gene Munster said the Apple Watch represents just 3 percent of Apple's revenue, which would equal $1.6 billion during the quarter"
They have not undershot estimates - the watch has posted 50% increases in sales for 3 quarters running. I don't know of many products that do that.
And you're still ignoring the point I was making. Just on its own, the watch is the equivalent of a Fortune-500 company. Your original statement was "They (sic) is no money in that market". It is *you*, sir, who are wrong; in every respect.
The reason Qualcomm doesn't give a flying fuck about smart watches is because no one is buying them.
If google etc wanted one so badly they could order custom designs, or make their own.
They is no money in that market.
Apple made $1.6B in the last quarter on their watches. The segment "Apple wearables" is equivalent to a Fortune-500 company in its own right
From: https://qz.com/973920/apple-aa...
There was a steady increase in the unit’s sales in the first year the Watch was on sale, rising from $1.7 billion at the start of the year to $4.35 billion by the end. Other products cooled off in 2015, but saw another strong holiday quarter. This time, the business unit generated $2.87 billion, a jump of about 30% over the same quarter last year, but still relatively small compared with even Apple’s other non-iPhone businesses. Even so, Cook said its wearables business, which he defined as the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Beats headphones, was comparable to the size of a Fortune 500 company.
Sure, it's no iPhone-X, but it's hardly buttons either. My ole gran used to have a saying "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves", and the same applies writ large here.
*Looks at iPad*
In the last 3 years I've bought over 500 books, most of them in the 600-1200 (thanks Brandon) page length. That's not taking into account the thousands of books I've read prior to realizing I could carry around a library instead of a book or two by going digital. I could stock a good-sized bookshop with the books in the attic...
4600 seems pitifully small to me - I'm only about halfway (hopefully) through life and I'm already well past that.
I "cashed out" a bitcoin last week, put down a 4x payment on my mortgage for this month.
You do realize that hundreds of millions of dollars are traded every day on the cryprocurrency exchanges, right ?
Go to coinbase.com (to pluck an example out of the air), log into your account. Do the 2FA thing with your cell phone. Type in how many btc or LTC or ETH you want to sell, wait a few days, and it appears in your bank account. It's easier than setting up a wire transfer...
Yes, but he's not agreeing with the summary, is he ? I knew reading comprehension on this site had declined, but I was hopeful it wasn't as bad as this...
Here's how it works.
1) A story is posted
2) Comments are made
3) Each comment can have a hierarchy of sub-comments. The text of any given comment is relative to its parent.
Just like this comment, calling your statement [the parent comment to this one] idiotic.
He was agreeing with his parent's comment, which is (rightly, IMHO) pointing out that Apple is actually going out of their way to make a fix they'd made (and QA'd with their hardware to work perfectly) *also* work with the non-Apple third-party hardware. This is Apple going above and beyond, and if you can't see that, well, that's more a problem with you than anything else.
And the douchebag that wrote the original clickbait, of course.
I'm almost in my 50's too. I've worked at Apple, currently in R&D, for the last 13 years. I sometimes poke fun at my boss for being a newcomer, because he's only been here for 12.5 years or so... There are people in my group who've worked there for 20+ years.
Or, you know, a shit-load of cash.
Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook (I think) amongst others are all in and around that area, and they pay very well. Sure, you'll be paying through the nose for a house/flat, but if you see yourself as having a career here, then that house/flat becomes an investment. Property values aren't likely to drop significantly in the next decade or so, in fact they're very likely to increase, so money put in now is likely a good return on investment.
Work, save, wait, quit, move.
That shitty $1M 1500-sq.ft ranch is now worth $1.5M and it'll still sell quickly, pay off your remaining $900k of mortgage and you're left with a pretty large nest egg to go live somewhere else. That's how it's worked out for me, anyway. I bought said shitty 1500 sq.ft house for $760k about 8 years ago, I get paid well, so I've been paying off the mortgage at 2x the monthly rate, and I now owe ~$300k. The house is worth ~$1.4M, Another 7-8 years and it's all mine.
There can be a plan, even in Silicon Valley. Just play the game and use the rules to your advantage.
TL;DR: Not really.
I'm guessing that's more of an "asset management system". Ours was orientated around the video. As cameras roll, we digitised the footage by tapping into the tape deck monitor output, we had RFID tags on each tape, and we had LTC/VITC timecode from the deck. We therefore had a unique reference for every frame laid down, as it was laid down (ie: there was zero ingest time, which was - and still is to a large extent - an issue with asset management systems).
The system then sent each frame to a centralised database server that had a webserver on it, and I wrote a streaming (ok, this part was in C :) server and a streaming player for Linux, Mac, and Windows that understood our custom streaming format. There wasn't anything complicated about the format, it was basically motion-JPEG data served from an HTTP interface, so the player would send the URL "http://asset-server/tape-rdid/timecode-from/timecode-to" and get an application/octet-stream back which was each file (common headers stripped), where a file was an individual frame in JPEG form.
What this let people do was record out in the desert, and have their digital dailies sent back via a satellite upload to home base via rsync, and the team at home base could "see" (we only supported quarter-res images at the time, the internet wasn't as fast as it is now) the footage, reliably locate frames on tapes, and discuss/annotate/create EDL (edit display-list, basically a set of timecode-timecode ranges) sequences and play around with it as if they had the tapes right there, even if it was at a low resolution.
On a more prosaic all-in-house system, the act of using a Discreet Inferno or Flame system (which controlled the tape decks in a post-production suite) would automatically log footage into our system, so the non-artist types could use our "virtual VTR" system to review and create play-lists which could then be sent to the machine room with the certainty that what they'd composed in their web-browser would be what ended up on the tape that would later be delivered to clients. This freed up a lot of the tape-deck use which could then be put to more profitable use by the post-house.
There was at least one time when I got a angry phone call from a client who claimed our system was screwing things up. They'd created their EDL for the client using our system and then sent the job to the tape room to be generated, and of course creating that new tape would automatically log the new footage into the system (because it was writing to a tape in a monitored tape deck). They looked at the output footage of the generated tape in their browser, and it wasn't right. After a bit of tracking things down, it turned out the tape room had inserted the wrong master tape, so we saved them the indignity/embarrassment of sending footage from a *competing* client out the door. That alone, in the eyes of the director, was worth the cost of the system.
We had similar procedures for rendered footage from 3D systems (Shake etc. at the time). Again, everything was collated into shots/scenes etc. on the database server. We had rules that would be applied to directories full of frames that would parse out sequences from arbitrary filenames that were differentiated only by a frame number in the filename. That's actually harder than it looks - there is *no* standard naming convention across post-houses :) I separated out the code into a library, wrote a small commandline utility called 'seqls' which was *very* popular for parsing out a directory of 10,000 files into a string like 'shot-id.capture.1-10000.tiff' ...
All of this is (I'm sure, I haven't kept up to date) commonplace today, but it was pretty revolutionary at the time. I'd say about 90% of the code was PHP, there were various system daemons in C, there were video players for the major platforms in C/C++ and there was a kernel driver for the linux box in C that handled the incoming video, digitised the audio, and digitised the LTC
15 years ago, Apple hired me on an H1B, and my starting salary was $140k, then they paid everything to convert my H1B to a green card. None of this includes joining and yearly bonus stock options (at the time, RSU's these days) or yearly cash bonuses. They also paid relocation and first few months of rent in a pre-arranged location.
I'm not special. There were several dozen of us in the (weekly) new-employee orientation meeting, most of whom were s/w engineers.
Oh, and I (or rather, my small company, that Apple bought) wrote ILM's digital asset management system for films like Star Wars (ep1), James Bond films, digital commercials etc. mostly in PHP. That sold for $40k/pop... Indeed, just like any language, it's possible to write crap code in PHP, but used properly it's a powerful tool.
When I started my PhD in image processing, I was given an 80-column, 24-line text terminal to the department microVax (approximately 1 MIP, shared between about 40 people). I was lucky, and got one of the good ones, it had an amber phospher :)
Seriously, the only place to see the results of the algorithm was on a shared display downstairs in the lab - which was in high demand. I ended up doing a lot of terminal-style graphs (mine wasn't a tektronix terminal, so I only had text-like characters) to prove an algorithm worked before actually seeing it.
And now I look at the technological ability of my freaking phone, and I wonder at just how far things have come in 30 years or so...
Apple *do* know their target markets after all!
Personally I wouldn't want one. Too many VMs, and I want 32GB in my next laptop, but that's some sales, so whodathunkit, I'm not your typical purchaser; and, probably, neither are those who were complaining...
Why not both ?
As an aside, can you imagine the unholy shitstorm that would be making the rounds if any of this were happening to Apple ?
Exploding iPhones... The internet might not cope with that, and then Apple bribing people to keep quiet about the whole thing ? We might have a singularity event...
I've been coding for about 30 years now, a bit longer actually. Something that's become apparent over the years is that there ought to be a law of conservation of complexity. You can abstract and then re-abstract, you can use well-known design patterns, you can write defensively, and you can document until the cows come home. All of these help, they help by spreading out the complexity onto a larger surface - it becomes less opaque as it gets "thinner", the more it spreads out.
However, it remains the case that some things are just inherently complex, that understanding them, or their particular interfaces and parameters, requires the understanding of the system as a whole, not the parts in isolation. Sometimes divide does not conquer, at least in the real world. There's not *many* problems like this, and I've no idea if this is the sort of thing Linus is referring to - I don't keep up with the Linux kernel these days, but there may be a good reason why he's done what he's done. You "calling him out" without explicit reasons why, or (better) giving a superior approach than what is already there is just showing ignorance, IMHO.
Personally I think you've already made the assumption that naked infant pictures are in some way embarrassing. To my mind, they're not. To most Europeans, they're not.
It seems I'm really struggling to say this sufficiently clearly: The difference between a photo of a naked 4 year-old and a clothed 4-year old to me is the clothes, that's it. I really don't care whether the kid has clothes on or not, it makes absolutely no difference to the photo, and the first comment that would come to mind would be something like "wasn't that Summer of '73" or "Hey look at the size of that sand-castle you were building", or something equally irrelevant to the clothing situation.
If someone wants to get all upset over the photos, then fine. It's a bit weird to make an issue out of it, but whatever. Similarly, if the parents don't want to take the photos down, that's also a bit weird, it seems like basic courtesy ought to rule here. As I said, I don't really care; I think it's a matter for the family to handle, and apparently they think it's a matter for the courts to handle. Fair enough. I don't really see why it's news, either.