But there is an exception : adding manpower to a late software project being managed and created by incompetants who will never be able to finish it on their own can indeed be helpful. I mean, doing web front end stuff isn't exactly my specialty so if you gave me a big web project it would eventually be quite late, and adding web developers to it would get it done quicker than leaving me alone with it.
Not totally true. Stroke/path/fill rasterization work is not supported by current 3D rendering APIs (and thus not accelerated by 3d hardware). Right now the stroke/path/fill rasterization is done on the CPU and merely 2D blit-ed to the frame buffer by the GPU. The CPU could of course attempt convert the stroke/path into triangles and then use the GPU to rasterize those triangles (with some level of efficiency), but that's a far cry from "proper, full-featured 2D".
Fonts are special cased in that glyphs are cached, but small font rasterization isn't generally possible to do with triangle rasterization (because of the glyph hints).
Since SW doesn't even attempt to use HW for modern 2D operations, it will likely be a long time before HW will support this kind of stuff...
A - anything that you can't do by tesselating to triangles could be done with OpenCL or CUDA. You could, for example, assign OpenCL kernels where each instance rasterizes one stroke and composite the results or something similar, and exploit the paralellism of the GPU. But, it would be inconvenient to write. Especially since most PDF viewers don't even bother with effective parallelism in their software rasterizers.
B - you can do anything by tesselating to triangles.
Yeah, exactly like how Tivo buyers were all open source advocates, and Apple TV buyers are primarily interested in the fact that the kernel has posix API's. Though, there may be a small group of SteamBox buyers who buy it mainly because of playing games, and don't really care about what OS it runs.
How is the project named? Is it something reminiscent of the function (like PaintShop Pro, Photoshop, Internet Explorer) or something entirely random, forcing more cognitive load on an uninformed user (Gimp, Firefox, Juice)? Does it have a newish, edgy name to give it that extra sizzle (pantyshot, upskirt [zdnet.com]).
Thankfully, nobody ever game a dumb name to a piece of technology unless it was open. And nobody ever had to download the MSVCRT redistributable libraries, or install a Java runtime separately for a piece of closed source software, because they never depend on 3rd party packages.
Nobody would argue that there isn't a heaping spoonful of shittiness available to you in the open source world. You just have to accept that there are a million closed source apps out there that taste just as nice, despite the fact that they never released the source code. It's not really an issue of closed vs. open. It's an issue of limited resources and dumb ideas. I'm posting this from Windows 8 at the moment. As much as I can find to complain about KDE (and egad, so much...) I can find just as much here in proprietary land.
I'll grant documentation tends to be worse in open source as a general rule. But, if you ever wound up depending on some obscure closed source widget with a lone developer who doesn't fully share a spoken language with you, you will see documentation just as useless. Though, getting a thriving community of good technical writers interested in the open source movement would be a good things.
You ever try leaving a horse in a garage unattended for a few months, and then ride it when the time finally comes that you need it? Sure, a robot may need a little grease on the joints and a 10 point inspection after it has been in storage, but you don't need a bunch of land and people and resources to keep it healthy "just in case." Also, have you ever tried to field repair a horse with a detached leg? You can just screw it back together with basic tools, or send in another horse with a fresh leg, right?
You've picked an ironic day to spout that sort of nonsense. Today, October 1, 2013, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, started the major part of its implementation. That is a "gift" to the people of the United States from the Democratic party. There are plenty of difference between the two parties in terms of goals and policies. One thing they largely agree on is that allowing Americans to be killed in large numbers by terrorists is a bad thing. As a result President Obama has largely continued President Bush's counter-terrorism policies, but gone in very different directions with domestic policy. (Although it must be recognized that the differences in outlook have resulted in far fewer attempts to capture and interrogate terrorists due to the legal messiness that the Obama administration has helped create. As a result, they simply kill terrorists and lose the intelligence data.)
Surely, the Republicans are responsible for the current shutdown, and are werdly obcessed with killing Affordable Care Act. The Democrats have been trying to push through reforms that will benefit many Americans. I'm not saying tehre's no difference. But, you do know that Affordable Care Act is largely based on what was once a Republican legislative proposal, right? The republicans are mostly against Obamacare because the other team passed it. When the Republicans originally proposed it, the Democrats didn't like it very much mostly because it came from Republicans. The two parties really have relatively little difference in reality in terms of real policy goals in the long term. It's mostly about being opposed to whatever the other team is doing. That is a bigger driver for both of them than the real policy goal differences. (Which are indeed there. They just aren't really the dominant factor in determining what Congress does.)
Taking advantage of the conversation audio was probably much better than trying to reshoot it while reading off a transcript. Good call there. That said, cutting from video of a person to a similarly framed still of a person is not a big improvement from a cinematic perspective. If you want to do more of these, and you want something to show when the video goes wonkey, you should get some other cutaway material. A great example in this case would have been some stills from her portfolio, Ken Burns style, with some simple annotations of what we are seeing. Another easy option would be occasional reaction shots of the interviewer. Obviously, you have4 complete control over that half of the connection so you can always capture decent quality video on your side. (It's a good excuse to clean up your bedroom, if nothing else.) You could also have images of the things that are being talked about. Pictures of cameras, screenshots of software, etc. At around 10:30, you say "I will have this cheapie as a spare" as you cut away from the video. Would have been perfect to cut away to a shot of the cheapie tos how what was being talked about. Or a shot from the cheapie. Etc.
And of course if you have more technical interviewees, you can ask them to record video of themselves on the call and send it to you after, while you have an audio Skype call for the interview. You can spend as long as you need downloading the already recorded video after the fact.
That said, good job providing the transcript below the video. Excellent model to follow.
There are certainly many ways that things can go wrong, but there are many technical people who do understand the costs of technical work. At the last place I worked, we could never get approval to buy some off the shelf software to do stuff that we had some very finnicky internal software. Everybody assumes that the development team would have wanted to make their own under all circumstances, but in that case the cost of maintaining the internal tool was enormous, and the cost in user time to deal with the unstable system was huge. But, bean counters could never see past the sticker price of what we had "for free" already, so we spent roughly the annual cost of the off the shelf tool every single month by not having it. Though, there was another department that had exactly the opposite problem. They had an internal file format that was supposedly very slightly better than the industry standard equivalent. (nobody had any numbers or tests to demonstrate this -- it was just 'known' because the developers were all assumed to be super geniuses.) A large team of people maintained plugins for commercial applications, libraries, tools, converters, etc., to support this internal file format. Bean counters might rightly question paying for the developer team on that project, but technology suffered from NIH syndrome so it persisted.
That made me wonder about something at work recently. All the machines at work are owned by the organization. It would be trivial for them to add their own trusted signing authority, so they could MITM every SSL web site. It wouldn't be terribly hard to auto-generate "valid" SSL certs, and have it tagged as whoever you want the signing authority to be. All they'd have to do is add their own cert, in this case named "GeoTrust Global CA", and they'd have perfect control. To do it perfectly, they'd just need to query the site you're going to, and match up the signer's CN and sign the new fake cert, and you wouldn't know the difference. Who tracks the fingerprint of every cert for every site they go to? Well, I'm sure in this crowd, a few do.
It's not merely possible. It's deployed, off the shelf technology. Not necessarily common, but many companies that do it see it as a cost reduction of more effective proxy usage, rather than anything nefarious.
That said, the way SSL is handled by the browsers is absurd. Not notifying on changes compared to a cached fingerprint, and giving huge warnings on self certification are blatantly obvious errors in judgement. Conflating encryption and identity in one awkward mess has probably done more harm than good. IMHO, it should work a bit like SSH, where the first time you go to a website, you see a little unobtrusive popup saying, "This connection is encrypted. The site claims to be "Foo corp." The identity is (not verified || vouched for by the following : CA Bar, CA Baz). " Adding certs for CA's should be really obvious, not obscure black magic. So, if you attend University of Foo, you can add their self signed cert and all the servers on campus that you access over https will show up as signed by U of Foo. Untrusting certs should also be obvious in the UI. Some web of trust model should be available. If you ever get something other than what was cached, you should see the details side by side.
As is, the system is mostly useless. It fails utterly at identification. And, it scares people away from using encryption on self signed certs. (As if that were somehow worse than operating entirely in plain text...)
True, but if the car had been stationary because it just broke down and wouldn't move, it still would have been idiotic to drive into the back of it. The driver in motion was going to fast for safety. Period.
But, get this: It was the 3rd time they tried to solve this problem with outsourcing, it was a replacement for a critical part of their infrastructure and it was still the same guy in charge that had messed it up two times before. And that is the real issue: Unsurpassed stupidity in local upper management.
Indeed, the problem with outsourcing isn't just the people who get the work. A big part of it is the people who send the work out. If an organisation has enough internal competence to understand the project and manage it, outsourcing some of the grunt work can be entirely successful. When somebody throws away the internal competence, throws money at a problem and hopes for the best, then it is nearly guaranteed to go badly.
A department at a company where I recently worked needed a developer. So, they hired a freelancer, gave them vague indications about wanting development done, didn't train the freelancer on the internal software stack that already existed, and were disappointed that the resulting tools mostly duplicated internal functionality and weren't very impressive. Nobody really liked the freelancer, so they fired the developer. I volunteered to help that department come up with requirements, etc. Instead, they immediately hired another developer. As far as I know, that department just thinks all developers are horrible people that are hard to work with, because they have refused to learn how to run a useful development project. It was just a steady cycle of hire/fire, never take a breath to understand what's wrong, because now we are even more behind our original schedule... They would have had the same results if they had outsourced to a foreign developer overseas, and they would have insisted that foreign developers are all bad. Sure, there are tons of shitty people calling themselves developers in the world, but if you refuse to have any internal expertise you will never be able to find the decent ones because you won't know them when you see them, and you will just annoy them into finding better work when you mismanage them.
However many lawyers you have, it's obviously better for them to understand the logic behind a decision, rather than just accepting the whole system as "just the way it is."
Washable? If printing eventually becomes sufficiently ubiquitous and refined, all you need care about is "recyclable." Toss the day's clothes in the bin. Pick what you want to wear tomorrow from a catalog, and let it print overnight. The fibers from today's garment will get recovered and added to the feedstock for the printer. The recycled fibers can be washed agressively without concern for the state of the garment they used to be. Eventually fibers wear out and you need some more feedstock.
And don't forget that your dealer would love to be able to download and print replacements and install them for you. No warehousing stock on hand. No shipping. No dealing with the manufacturer to source it. Just having the part for every model, for every year, "in stock" within a few minutes, guaranteed would be a huge win even if you didn't bother having a nice printer at home and installing the part yourself.
You can also make accounts using the names of real students for the friend requesting, or completely random ones. Some people won't friend the "Mascott" account, but may approve a request from somebody they think they know. A lot of people won't even notice being friends with two "Steve Smiths," but you could change the name on the account after getting friended pretty quietly to avoid being accidentally contacted as the actual person.
Figure out the human effort involved and work on that. "What the market will bear" means "How much can I rip a guy off without going to jail".
Except that charging more for semiconductors probably wouldn't land anybody in jail. So, your premise is very confusing. If somebody wanted to start a factory for NAND and charge more that what anybody else does, then they are perfectly entitled. It's not a very good business model, and they probably won't make any money because very few people would want to buy the product. But, they could do it if they wanted. You seem to have some very strange beliefs about how the economy works, which are pretty consistently contrary to how the economy actually works.
Just like your previous claim that "It's made by a machine, so it costs less." In the end, you are only ever paying for human labor or location. That's it. Whether naked people make a product bare handed, use simple stone tools, or high end fab equipment is all irrelevant. The chips cost a lot of money because somebody has to build the fab equipment, somebody has to operate it, and you need somewhere to put it all. They sell for a high price because there is a market of people who see that the product is more valuable to them than having that many dollars in their pocket.
You are absolutely right. The whole summary doesn't make any sense at all... first of all, the Macs run 32-bit applications just fine. Second, if you can emulate a 64-bit ARM, you can emulate a 32-bit ARM. Third, phone apps would suck on a laptop or desktop.
The logic of the article may still make some small amount of sense. Imagine a photo editor on iOS. Now imagine that there is an easy way to use your iOS apps on OS-XI. The only problem is that if your Mac Pro has 64 GB of RAM, and your iPhone is 32 bit, you may not get much benefit running that app on the bigger fancier system. OTOH, if the iPhone is 64 bit, then a future developer might make sure that the app has some extra bells and whistles in it that aren't very practical on a phone, but are really only useful when you run that app on a larger system.
It's not just a technical issue that the article seems to be trying to talk about. It's a broader ecosystem / psychology / platform possibility.
I was worried that Flash might stay expensive for a while, but now that an analyst is predicting it I know it won't actually happen. So, expect a massive crashing in prices pretty much immediately.
The proposals I have seem for extreme term limits seem good at a glance, but none of them address the fact that it would in practice hand massive power to lobbyists. When everybody in the legislature is brand new, they can't be an expert on every issue that comes up. Thus when some nice guy who contributed to the campaign says, "Oh hey, I know all about water rights in the west," or flood insurance, or whatever it is, he's the one teaching the Congress however he wants about whatever he wants. You need some career bureaucrats to manage something as large as running the government, otherwise somebody will do it for you. We need really fundamental, far reaching reforms about how the US government does business to go along with term limits. It has to be done in concert with lobbying reform, campaign finance, and streamlining of federal responsibilities.
This is categorically false. Individual output of programmers vary by an order of magnitude (10x source [construx.com]). Literally one guy can be worth ten others. And this is why the "do you really need rockstars" is always a yes. Even if you are not trying to solve hard problems you can either hire 10x guys @ 50k a year or one guy at 150k a year. You make the choice.
"Do you really need rockstars?" is absolutely not always a yes. But, there are indeed cases where that's true. I recently left a day job, and I have some obscure specialities, so I have basically declared myself a rockstar. My old job was interested in knowing if I would be available to do freelance work. I said yes, but gave them a day rate that was probably much higher than they were expecting. So far, they haven't needed me, which is just fine. Eventually, they may well wind up needing me because they know I would be able to do in two weeks some things that it would take them months to get a generic "Okay" programmer up to speed enough to even start figuring out. The trick is to always take it on a case by case basis. Sometimes you have no need for a rockstar. Do your project with a great team of competent developers who are great to work with, and deliver a great product. Every once in a while, you want to do a project that you can't do alone because there is some obscure specialty that some insane jackass knows inside and out. 9 time out of ten, rockstar isn't as valuable to you as the day rate. But, every once in a while, yeah, something comes up where the cost of dealing with a lunatic is well worth it. Same as with any other developer, or any other job, you make a cost benefit analysis about the particular situation. There isn't a useful "always."
For one thing, on classic Mac OS, this sort of functionality was generally done with extensions which required rebooting the machine to take advantage of. You couldn't just drop an extension into the Macintosh HD:System:Extensions folder and start using the functionality without interruption. Support for IBP frame ("Long GOP") style codecs with out of order frame references was also extremely difficult to shoehorn into the design of the early QuickTime API. For a very long time, there wasn't anywhere you could put a file that would add robust support to it. And, if you can't conceive of any other way to do it, try to add a codec to VLC or FFMPEG. Yeah, "Put a codec in a directory" is really obvious when somebody says it out loud, but actually making it work really well was extremely rare when BeOS was doing it.
Or even try to add a codec to a Windows box today without an installer, for a Windows native application. Where do DirectShow filters go? Or was it a Video For Windows thing? Or... And then you have to make registry changes because just having a codec in a directory isn't enough to make it fully work. A codec like Cineform also wants to register a control panel applet to control decode behavior. They've had plenty of time to refine it and make it work easily as you describe being blazingly obvious...
More importantly. The source code of a library isn't necessarily any use for understanding best practices for using a library. Reading libavcodec would be gloriously unhelpful for adding video support to an application.
The amendment vote was 205-217. That's not losing by too much.
Well thank goodness it didn't pass. According to the NSA with their excellent monitoring of current events, they report that they have just discovered 205 terrorists that need to be watched closely and exposed! Who knew we were in such danger...
Well, I'm sure that'll be tomorrow's headline, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
But there is an exception : adding manpower to a late software project being managed and created by incompetants who will never be able to finish it on their own can indeed be helpful. I mean, doing web front end stuff isn't exactly my specialty so if you gave me a big web project it would eventually be quite late, and adding web developers to it would get it done quicker than leaving me alone with it.
Templates.
Not totally true. Stroke/path/fill rasterization work is not supported by current 3D rendering APIs (and thus not accelerated by 3d hardware). Right now the stroke/path/fill rasterization is done on the CPU and merely 2D blit-ed to the frame buffer by the GPU. The CPU could of course attempt convert the stroke/path into triangles and then use the GPU to rasterize those triangles (with some level of efficiency), but that's a far cry from "proper, full-featured 2D".
Fonts are special cased in that glyphs are cached, but small font rasterization isn't generally possible to do with triangle rasterization (because of the glyph hints).
Since SW doesn't even attempt to use HW for modern 2D operations, it will likely be a long time before HW will support this kind of stuff...
A - anything that you can't do by tesselating to triangles could be done with OpenCL or CUDA. You could, for example, assign OpenCL kernels where each instance rasterizes one stroke and composite the results or something similar, and exploit the paralellism of the GPU. But, it would be inconvenient to write. Especially since most PDF viewers don't even bother with effective parallelism in their software rasterizers.
B - you can do anything by tesselating to triangles.
Yeah, exactly like how Tivo buyers were all open source advocates, and Apple TV buyers are primarily interested in the fact that the kernel has posix API's. Though, there may be a small group of SteamBox buyers who buy it mainly because of playing games, and don't really care about what OS it runs.
Thankfully, nobody ever game a dumb name to a piece of technology unless it was open. And nobody ever had to download the MSVCRT redistributable libraries, or install a Java runtime separately for a piece of closed source software, because they never depend on 3rd party packages.
Nobody would argue that there isn't a heaping spoonful of shittiness available to you in the open source world. You just have to accept that there are a million closed source apps out there that taste just as nice, despite the fact that they never released the source code. It's not really an issue of closed vs. open. It's an issue of limited resources and dumb ideas. I'm posting this from Windows 8 at the moment. As much as I can find to complain about KDE (and egad, so much...) I can find just as much here in proprietary land.
I'll grant documentation tends to be worse in open source as a general rule. But, if you ever wound up depending on some obscure closed source widget with a lone developer who doesn't fully share a spoken language with you, you will see documentation just as useless. Though, getting a thriving community of good technical writers interested in the open source movement would be a good things.
You ever try leaving a horse in a garage unattended for a few months, and then ride it when the time finally comes that you need it? Sure, a robot may need a little grease on the joints and a 10 point inspection after it has been in storage, but you don't need a bunch of land and people and resources to keep it healthy "just in case." Also, have you ever tried to field repair a horse with a detached leg? You can just screw it back together with basic tools, or send in another horse with a fresh leg, right?
Surely, the Republicans are responsible for the current shutdown, and are werdly obcessed with killing Affordable Care Act. The Democrats have been trying to push through reforms that will benefit many Americans. I'm not saying tehre's no difference. But, you do know that Affordable Care Act is largely based on what was once a Republican legislative proposal, right? The republicans are mostly against Obamacare because the other team passed it. When the Republicans originally proposed it, the Democrats didn't like it very much mostly because it came from Republicans. The two parties really have relatively little difference in reality in terms of real policy goals in the long term. It's mostly about being opposed to whatever the other team is doing. That is a bigger driver for both of them than the real policy goal differences. (Which are indeed there. They just aren't really the dominant factor in determining what Congress does.)
Taking advantage of the conversation audio was probably much better than trying to reshoot it while reading off a transcript. Good call there. That said, cutting from video of a person to a similarly framed still of a person is not a big improvement from a cinematic perspective. If you want to do more of these, and you want something to show when the video goes wonkey, you should get some other cutaway material. A great example in this case would have been some stills from her portfolio, Ken Burns style, with some simple annotations of what we are seeing. Another easy option would be occasional reaction shots of the interviewer. Obviously, you have4 complete control over that half of the connection so you can always capture decent quality video on your side. (It's a good excuse to clean up your bedroom, if nothing else.) You could also have images of the things that are being talked about. Pictures of cameras, screenshots of software, etc. At around 10:30, you say "I will have this cheapie as a spare" as you cut away from the video. Would have been perfect to cut away to a shot of the cheapie tos how what was being talked about. Or a shot from the cheapie. Etc.
And of course if you have more technical interviewees, you can ask them to record video of themselves on the call and send it to you after, while you have an audio Skype call for the interview. You can spend as long as you need downloading the already recorded video after the fact.
That said, good job providing the transcript below the video. Excellent model to follow.
There are certainly many ways that things can go wrong, but there are many technical people who do understand the costs of technical work. At the last place I worked, we could never get approval to buy some off the shelf software to do stuff that we had some very finnicky internal software. Everybody assumes that the development team would have wanted to make their own under all circumstances, but in that case the cost of maintaining the internal tool was enormous, and the cost in user time to deal with the unstable system was huge. But, bean counters could never see past the sticker price of what we had "for free" already, so we spent roughly the annual cost of the off the shelf tool every single month by not having it. Though, there was another department that had exactly the opposite problem. They had an internal file format that was supposedly very slightly better than the industry standard equivalent. (nobody had any numbers or tests to demonstrate this -- it was just 'known' because the developers were all assumed to be super geniuses.) A large team of people maintained plugins for commercial applications, libraries, tools, converters, etc., to support this internal file format. Bean counters might rightly question paying for the developer team on that project, but technology suffered from NIH syndrome so it persisted.
It's not merely possible. It's deployed, off the shelf technology. Not necessarily common, but many companies that do it see it as a cost reduction of more effective proxy usage, rather than anything nefarious.
That said, the way SSL is handled by the browsers is absurd. Not notifying on changes compared to a cached fingerprint, and giving huge warnings on self certification are blatantly obvious errors in judgement. Conflating encryption and identity in one awkward mess has probably done more harm than good. IMHO, it should work a bit like SSH, where the first time you go to a website, you see a little unobtrusive popup saying, "This connection is encrypted. The site claims to be "Foo corp." The identity is (not verified || vouched for by the following : CA Bar, CA Baz). " Adding certs for CA's should be really obvious, not obscure black magic. So, if you attend University of Foo, you can add their self signed cert and all the servers on campus that you access over https will show up as signed by U of Foo. Untrusting certs should also be obvious in the UI. Some web of trust model should be available. If you ever get something other than what was cached, you should see the details side by side.
As is, the system is mostly useless. It fails utterly at identification. And, it scares people away from using encryption on self signed certs. (As if that were somehow worse than operating entirely in plain text...)
The only people still using Perl are the people who know it well enough to no longer have to ask What TF is going on with it.
True, but if the car had been stationary because it just broke down and wouldn't move, it still would have been idiotic to drive into the back of it. The driver in motion was going to fast for safety. Period.
Indeed, the problem with outsourcing isn't just the people who get the work. A big part of it is the people who send the work out. If an organisation has enough internal competence to understand the project and manage it, outsourcing some of the grunt work can be entirely successful. When somebody throws away the internal competence, throws money at a problem and hopes for the best, then it is nearly guaranteed to go badly.
A department at a company where I recently worked needed a developer. So, they hired a freelancer, gave them vague indications about wanting development done, didn't train the freelancer on the internal software stack that already existed, and were disappointed that the resulting tools mostly duplicated internal functionality and weren't very impressive. Nobody really liked the freelancer, so they fired the developer. I volunteered to help that department come up with requirements, etc. Instead, they immediately hired another developer. As far as I know, that department just thinks all developers are horrible people that are hard to work with, because they have refused to learn how to run a useful development project. It was just a steady cycle of hire/fire, never take a breath to understand what's wrong, because now we are even more behind our original schedule... They would have had the same results if they had outsourced to a foreign developer overseas, and they would have insisted that foreign developers are all bad. Sure, there are tons of shitty people calling themselves developers in the world, but if you refuse to have any internal expertise you will never be able to find the decent ones because you won't know them when you see them, and you will just annoy them into finding better work when you mismanage them.
However many lawyers you have, it's obviously better for them to understand the logic behind a decision, rather than just accepting the whole system as "just the way it is."
Washable? If printing eventually becomes sufficiently ubiquitous and refined, all you need care about is "recyclable." Toss the day's clothes in the bin. Pick what you want to wear tomorrow from a catalog, and let it print overnight. The fibers from today's garment will get recovered and added to the feedstock for the printer. The recycled fibers can be washed agressively without concern for the state of the garment they used to be. Eventually fibers wear out and you need some more feedstock.
And don't forget that your dealer would love to be able to download and print replacements and install them for you. No warehousing stock on hand. No shipping. No dealing with the manufacturer to source it. Just having the part for every model, for every year, "in stock" within a few minutes, guaranteed would be a huge win even if you didn't bother having a nice printer at home and installing the part yourself.
You can also make accounts using the names of real students for the friend requesting, or completely random ones. Some people won't friend the "Mascott" account, but may approve a request from somebody they think they know. A lot of people won't even notice being friends with two "Steve Smiths," but you could change the name on the account after getting friended pretty quietly to avoid being accidentally contacted as the actual person.
Except that charging more for semiconductors probably wouldn't land anybody in jail. So, your premise is very confusing. If somebody wanted to start a factory for NAND and charge more that what anybody else does, then they are perfectly entitled. It's not a very good business model, and they probably won't make any money because very few people would want to buy the product. But, they could do it if they wanted. You seem to have some very strange beliefs about how the economy works, which are pretty consistently contrary to how the economy actually works.
Just like your previous claim that "It's made by a machine, so it costs less." In the end, you are only ever paying for human labor or location. That's it. Whether naked people make a product bare handed, use simple stone tools, or high end fab equipment is all irrelevant. The chips cost a lot of money because somebody has to build the fab equipment, somebody has to operate it, and you need somewhere to put it all. They sell for a high price because there is a market of people who see that the product is more valuable to them than having that many dollars in their pocket.
You are absolutely right. The whole summary doesn't make any sense at all... first of all, the Macs run 32-bit applications just fine. Second, if you can emulate a 64-bit ARM, you can emulate a 32-bit ARM. Third, phone apps would suck on a laptop or desktop.
The logic of the article may still make some small amount of sense. Imagine a photo editor on iOS. Now imagine that there is an easy way to use your iOS apps on OS-XI. The only problem is that if your Mac Pro has 64 GB of RAM, and your iPhone is 32 bit, you may not get much benefit running that app on the bigger fancier system. OTOH, if the iPhone is 64 bit, then a future developer might make sure that the app has some extra bells and whistles in it that aren't very practical on a phone, but are really only useful when you run that app on a larger system.
It's not just a technical issue that the article seems to be trying to talk about. It's a broader ecosystem / psychology / platform possibility.
I was worried that Flash might stay expensive for a while, but now that an analyst is predicting it I know it won't actually happen. So, expect a massive crashing in prices pretty much immediately.
The proposals I have seem for extreme term limits seem good at a glance, but none of them address the fact that it would in practice hand massive power to lobbyists. When everybody in the legislature is brand new, they can't be an expert on every issue that comes up. Thus when some nice guy who contributed to the campaign says, "Oh hey, I know all about water rights in the west," or flood insurance, or whatever it is, he's the one teaching the Congress however he wants about whatever he wants. You need some career bureaucrats to manage something as large as running the government, otherwise somebody will do it for you. We need really fundamental, far reaching reforms about how the US government does business to go along with term limits. It has to be done in concert with lobbying reform, campaign finance, and streamlining of federal responsibilities.
"Do you really need rockstars?" is absolutely not always a yes. But, there are indeed cases where that's true. I recently left a day job, and I have some obscure specialities, so I have basically declared myself a rockstar. My old job was interested in knowing if I would be available to do freelance work. I said yes, but gave them a day rate that was probably much higher than they were expecting. So far, they haven't needed me, which is just fine. Eventually, they may well wind up needing me because they know I would be able to do in two weeks some things that it would take them months to get a generic "Okay" programmer up to speed enough to even start figuring out. The trick is to always take it on a case by case basis. Sometimes you have no need for a rockstar. Do your project with a great team of competent developers who are great to work with, and deliver a great product. Every once in a while, you want to do a project that you can't do alone because there is some obscure specialty that some insane jackass knows inside and out. 9 time out of ten, rockstar isn't as valuable to you as the day rate. But, every once in a while, yeah, something comes up where the cost of dealing with a lunatic is well worth it. Same as with any other developer, or any other job, you make a cost benefit analysis about the particular situation. There isn't a useful "always."
For one thing, on classic Mac OS, this sort of functionality was generally done with extensions which required rebooting the machine to take advantage of. You couldn't just drop an extension into the Macintosh HD:System:Extensions folder and start using the functionality without interruption. Support for IBP frame ("Long GOP") style codecs with out of order frame references was also extremely difficult to shoehorn into the design of the early QuickTime API. For a very long time, there wasn't anywhere you could put a file that would add robust support to it. And, if you can't conceive of any other way to do it, try to add a codec to VLC or FFMPEG. Yeah, "Put a codec in a directory" is really obvious when somebody says it out loud, but actually making it work really well was extremely rare when BeOS was doing it.
Or even try to add a codec to a Windows box today without an installer, for a Windows native application. Where do DirectShow filters go? Or was it a Video For Windows thing? Or... And then you have to make registry changes because just having a codec in a directory isn't enough to make it fully work. A codec like Cineform also wants to register a control panel applet to control decode behavior. They've had plenty of time to refine it and make it work easily as you describe being blazingly obvious...
More importantly. The source code of a library isn't necessarily any use for understanding best practices for using a library. Reading libavcodec would be gloriously unhelpful for adding video support to an application.
Well thank goodness it didn't pass. According to the NSA with their excellent monitoring of current events, they report that they have just discovered 205 terrorists that need to be watched closely and exposed! Who knew we were in such danger...
Well, I'm sure that'll be tomorrow's headline, anyway.