Giving public platforms to ordinary people? Blogs solved that.
This is actually an enormously important change that's taken place over the past 10-20 years. In the past, you'd need permission from "the powers that be" to get your voice (or creative works) out there into the public eye. Today, if you have the motivation, pretty much anyone can get public (and global) notice.
This is both good and bad (village idiots are now given attention to on a nation scale, whereas previously they've be ignored), but I think that overall its quite a positive shift.
Except everyone who casually reads tech news, only vaguely paying attention to headlines written by tech writers, has a completely mistaken impression of what it is and does.
Seriously, I've seen everyone from random friends to strangers on the street assume the car could basically drive itself. (Yes, even before they released the feature.)
The capabilities of the system, and the responsibilities of the driver, are quite clear... if you actually drive the car or read past the headlines. Unfortunately, most people who write knee-jerk article comments don't fall into either of these categories.
Don't forget that most software engineers seem to assume that coordinates only exist in the most naive latitude/longitude implementation, while remaining completely oblivious to everything you just mentioned above.
I've often felt that the licensing hissy-fit (which may have been a valid argument in the past, though not anymore) was actually a cover story or excuse for a bunch of C programmers who really just hated C++ and didn't want to allow the Linux desktop to use an environment written in it.
That being said, Gtk+ kinda feels like what you'd get if you insisted on implementing a C++ style object model in C, just because.
This is why I don't like the (media driven?) obsession with beating up a few select highly-visible tech companies over their hiring diversity statistics. The applicant pool is small enough, and the real energy needs to target the middle-school (or earlier) levels.
By pushing hard to improve these ratios, the highly-visible companies are just depriving the rest of the entire industry of any opportunity diversity whatsoever. Heck, the numbers feel so bad, that if they actually did drop the bar low enough and hire every single tech person meeting "diversity criteria," every other less-visible tech company would end up 100% non-diverse.
And also a much higher proportion of foreigners from Europe. But for the sake of diversity statistics, those people (who all speak difference languages and come from different cultures) tend to be considered the same as plane 'ole white Americans.
"niche market" is kind of an overstatement. In fact, your usage scenario -- according to statistics -- is the "niche market". Very very few people actually need the ability to get into an 8000lb truck and drive 600+ miles before needing to refuel.
But a very high percentage of people who bash Tesla in online forums seem to have this as a critically important use case:-P
You'd be amazed just how many Porsche SUVs that I regularly see driving around here in Silicon Valley. (No idea if they're diesel or gas, but I didn't even know such a vehicle even existed prior to moving here.)
I wish a bunch of people like this would come together, and see how much of their money it would take to free the rights to Star Trek once and for all. The simple fact that "fan films" are approaching such a level that the studios are now reacting negatively to them, is proof positive that those studios can no longer be trusted to carry on the franchise.
And if you're in the downtown San Jose area, you tend to notice the local impact of Woz a lot more. There's a street named after him, and he's made contributions to some community places for children.
It seemed like every little town blocking off areas for their own special little "Super Bowl Thing" caused *far* more disruption to daily life in the area than the actual Super Bowl itself. Overall traffic patterns barely budged. If anything, it was less busy than normal, because everyone stayed home to avoid the perceived Super Bowl traffic.
These companies are not going to singlehandedly change the makeup of tech (or even just high paid) workers in the United States, no matter how much they try (or are put under political pressure to do so). And I think that it is rather disingenuous / politically correct of them to simply market that they will do it because it's fashionable to say they will. Addressing this problem is deeper and requires more of the desired target segments to go into these fields to be available to apply to the positions to start with. Which is a much more difficult challenge that most of the advocates for such policies actually don't even want to put in the effort to do themselves.
I do often feel that if these companies actually did manage to change the makeup of tech workers among their own ranks, to reflect what everyone wants their stats to look like, we'll get into a different kind of bizzaro world. One where a handful of big-name tech companies have *all* of the desired diversity, and the rest of the industry is *entirely* 100% non-diverse. The supply-side problem really does feel that bad.
Does this problem need to be addressed? Yes. Is it right to point blame at companies so far down the pipeline for it? I'm not so sure.
Ah, playing the old "I have kids so I'm special" card.
Look it's simple, if you can't control your kids, they shouldn't be out in public.
Ah, playing the new "I don't have kids, so I'm better than you" card.
I guess in your world, everyone who has kids will be required to stay under house arrest until their kids are above some pre-determined age? Or should everyone be required to send their kids to a detention facility so they can go about their daily lives without giving you something to complain about?
Why is everybody's kneejerk reaction to blame the parent?
Because no one doing the blaming actually has children, or remembers what its like to have small children, or has ever actually had to chase a toddler around....though some of them will likely claim to have said experiences, and think that anyone who doesn't keep their child on a dog leash is a horrible parent...
You are missing the step where compact laptops became cost competitive and powerful enough that they weren't a burden to travel with. This made them an extra device for many people.
Definitely this. There was a time when everyone got these unwieldy and clunky laptops, that turned out to be as portable as a desktop under everyday circumstances. So when they needed something actually portable, they went out and got netbooks. Then later, as netbooks went out of style and the iPad was all the rage, they went out and got tablets.
But today, if you're lucky enough to have a laptop that's actually conveniently portable, a tablet doesn't seem to have much use anymore. A good smartphone has the advantage of being on your person all the time. And a good laptop can basically do anything. So what exactly do I need a tablet for? Its not going to be on my person as regularly as a smartphone, and its not going to be as capable as a laptop (that's now similar enough in size/weight).
That being said, there do seem to be a lot of older (non-computer) people who have somehow replaced nearly all of their "outside the office" computer use with iPads.
3) Looks like the driver didn't do anything beyond trust that the system wouldn't do something completely fucking stupid that the most primitive collision detection algorithm could have avoided.
Not so fast here... What appears to have happened, is this driver found a corner-case that a collision detection system actually may not have been designed to detect. Even the maker of the sensor package Tesla uses has come out to support this. (While mentioning that their next generation system will be capable.)
Of course I have seen a lot of tractor trailers out here that now have these side-fairing things installed to improve aerodynamics, which would likely have also improved detection in cases like this. But obviously, no such equipment was on the truck involved in this collision.
I keep wondering if some billionaire Star Trek fans should settle this argument once and for all, by paying CBS/Paramount enough money to release the rights.
After all, I think its been established that the official studios can no longer be trusted to produce Star Trek content, and many fans feel as though Star Trek is too important to be left to the official studios.
It's not fair to blame tech companies like Google for a problem that started well before it was even in existence.
If companies like Google actually did everything necessary to even their own numbers, to make everyone happy, then the rest of the entire tech industry would end up being 100% male.
That, IMHO, is the real problem with picking on a few choice large tech companies for this issue. Sure, they could do more than all the smaller shops to help the situation 15-20 years from now, but they can't really do anything to solve the problem in the short term.
Congratulations... You're ranting about a company's current and recent products based entirely on something they likely designed 5+ years ago, which is not representative. This is the problem they had at every step of the way during their attempts to roll out newer platforms. Of course the fact they they were "nice" and didn't make *any* attempts to push the marketing message of "Our new stuff isn't like our old stuff" certainly didn't help.
Seriously, to make a computer analogy, its like claiming "Apple Sucks!" in the era of MacOSX 10.11, because you had some bad experiences with the clumsiness of trying to use System 7 in 2004.
I want them to fix the bugs on my Q10. The thing likes to reboot after I set it down on its screen after phone calls.
This is an easily fixed mechanical issue. You just need to make a small shim out of piece of a business card, and wrap it around the far edge of the battery, to increase pressure on the electrical contacts on the other side.
When any other company does something you don't like, you boycott their products. By giving business to their competitors instead of them, they (theoretically) take notice and change their ways to win your business back.
But Apple seems to be a special case here... When Apple does something you don't like, you're allowed to: - Rant all over the Internet to gain public support - Sue Apple because of their practices - Push for regulations and/or legislation to limit their practices
But the one thing you're *never* allowed to do, for some reason, is: - Actually stop buying Apple products
Spoken like someone who has never taken their own advice. Community Colleges are tarpits with 25% transfer rates to a 4 year institution. The dropout rate is outrageous, and those who do transfer normally take 3-5 years to get there. When you look at the opportunity cost of delayed graduation by 1-3 years, the cost of community college far outweighs the tuition savings.
This reminds me of something I used to observe all the time, when I was living around people doing CC and/or the local state university... They'd take 3+ years to finish that 2-year degree, then transfer, and it would still take them another 4 years to finish that university degree. What exactly did they save, over just doing the university degree from the start? Seemed like I'd almost never run into anyone who actually did the 2-year + 2 more at university, as such things are generally advertised.
The prevalence of the group you call the "Crazy GOP," and the pandering they demand from their entire party, is why I can never seriously consider voting for anyone in the GOP. Its also why I can never bring myself to honestly believe the "both parties are the same" tagline many seem to say, and why I can never consider voting for a 3rd party. I just find the "Crazy GOP" so intolerable that I'll vote against them (and hope they lose) whenever I have the chance. Pretty much everyone I know that's GOP-leaning and not a nutjob seems to simply disregard the "Crazy GOP" faction and act as if they're not relevant to the conversation.
That being said, if they ever to manage to shake off those crazies, one of two things may happen: 1) I'll actually listen to what they have to say, and seriously consider both parties in elections 2) I'll actually believe they're "equally bad" and start seriously considering 3rd parties in elections
Because they are doing a pretty crap job on both accounts. But hey, thanks for the tiger vs leopard emojis. That distinction is going to come in handy for sure. And let me tell you there's nothing like having to reprogram a backspace key so it knows how to delete a multi-unit vs a one unit UNICODE character. Fun times!
Having written code to do exactly this, on several platforms, I can definitely sympathize. You need to account for far more crap than most here likely realize. Modifiers, joiners, regional indicator symbols, surrogate pairs (older frameworks love UTF-16), and so on. Oh, and it gets even more fun when dealing with a UI framework that tries to be asynchronous.
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Giving public platforms to ordinary people? Blogs solved that.
This is actually an enormously important change that's taken place over the past 10-20 years. In the past, you'd need permission from "the powers that be" to get your voice (or creative works) out there into the public eye. Today, if you have the motivation, pretty much anyone can get public (and global) notice.
This is both good and bad (village idiots are now given attention to on a nation scale, whereas previously they've be ignored), but I think that overall its quite a positive shift.
Except everyone who casually reads tech news, only vaguely paying attention to headlines written by tech writers, has a completely mistaken impression of what it is and does.
Seriously, I've seen everyone from random friends to strangers on the street assume the car could basically drive itself. (Yes, even before they released the feature.)
The capabilities of the system, and the responsibilities of the driver, are quite clear... if you actually drive the car or read past the headlines. Unfortunately, most people who write knee-jerk article comments don't fall into either of these categories.
Don't forget that most software engineers seem to assume that coordinates only exist in the most naive latitude/longitude implementation, while remaining completely oblivious to everything you just mentioned above.
I've often felt that the licensing hissy-fit (which may have been a valid argument in the past, though not anymore) was actually a cover story or excuse for a bunch of C programmers who really just hated C++ and didn't want to allow the Linux desktop to use an environment written in it.
That being said, Gtk+ kinda feels like what you'd get if you insisted on implementing a C++ style object model in C, just because.
This is why I don't like the (media driven?) obsession with beating up a few select highly-visible tech companies over their hiring diversity statistics. The applicant pool is small enough, and the real energy needs to target the middle-school (or earlier) levels.
By pushing hard to improve these ratios, the highly-visible companies are just depriving the rest of the entire industry of any opportunity diversity whatsoever. Heck, the numbers feel so bad, that if they actually did drop the bar low enough and hire every single tech person meeting "diversity criteria," every other less-visible tech company would end up 100% non-diverse.
And also a much higher proportion of foreigners from Europe. But for the sake of diversity statistics, those people (who all speak difference languages and come from different cultures) tend to be considered the same as plane 'ole white Americans.
"niche market" is kind of an overstatement. In fact, your usage scenario -- according to statistics -- is the "niche market". Very very few people actually need the ability to get into an 8000lb truck and drive 600+ miles before needing to refuel.
But a very high percentage of people who bash Tesla in online forums seem to have this as a critically important use case :-P
You'd be amazed just how many Porsche SUVs that I regularly see driving around here in Silicon Valley.
(No idea if they're diesel or gas, but I didn't even know such a vehicle even existed prior to moving here.)
I wish a bunch of people like this would come together, and see how much of their money it would take to free the rights to Star Trek once and for all. The simple fact that "fan films" are approaching such a level that the studios are now reacting negatively to them, is proof positive that those studios can no longer be trusted to carry on the franchise.
And if you're in the downtown San Jose area, you tend to notice the local impact of Woz a lot more. There's a street named after him, and he's made contributions to some community places for children.
It seemed like every little town blocking off areas for their own special little "Super Bowl Thing" caused *far* more disruption to daily life in the area than the actual Super Bowl itself. Overall traffic patterns barely budged. If anything, it was less busy than normal, because everyone stayed home to avoid the perceived Super Bowl traffic.
Actually, there is feedback that it has been disabled. The car makes a chime noise, and there are dash indicators.
Of course a driver oblivious enough to let a car drive into a guardrail is also likely oblivious enough to ignore said feedback.
These companies are not going to singlehandedly change the makeup of tech (or even just high paid) workers in the United States, no matter how much they try (or are put under political pressure to do so). And I think that it is rather disingenuous / politically correct of them to simply market that they will do it because it's fashionable to say they will. Addressing this problem is deeper and requires more of the desired target segments to go into these fields to be available to apply to the positions to start with. Which is a much more difficult challenge that most of the advocates for such policies actually don't even want to put in the effort to do themselves.
I do often feel that if these companies actually did manage to change the makeup of tech workers among their own ranks, to reflect what everyone wants their stats to look like, we'll get into a different kind of bizzaro world. One where a handful of big-name tech companies have *all* of the desired diversity, and the rest of the industry is *entirely* 100% non-diverse. The supply-side problem really does feel that bad.
Does this problem need to be addressed? Yes. Is it right to point blame at companies so far down the pipeline for it? I'm not so sure.
Ah, playing the old "I have kids so I'm special" card.
Look it's simple, if you can't control your kids, they shouldn't be out in public.
Ah, playing the new "I don't have kids, so I'm better than you" card.
I guess in your world, everyone who has kids will be required to stay under house arrest until their kids are above some pre-determined age? Or should everyone be required to send their kids to a detention facility so they can go about their daily lives without giving you something to complain about?
Why is everybody's kneejerk reaction to blame the parent?
Because no one doing the blaming actually has children, or remembers what its like to have small children, or has ever actually had to chase a toddler around. ...though some of them will likely claim to have said experiences, and think that anyone who doesn't keep their child on a dog leash is a horrible parent...
You are missing the step where compact laptops became cost competitive and powerful enough that they weren't a burden to travel with. This made them an extra device for many people.
Definitely this.
There was a time when everyone got these unwieldy and clunky laptops, that turned out to be as portable as a desktop under everyday circumstances. So when they needed something actually portable, they went out and got netbooks. Then later, as netbooks went out of style and the iPad was all the rage, they went out and got tablets.
But today, if you're lucky enough to have a laptop that's actually conveniently portable, a tablet doesn't seem to have much use anymore. A good smartphone has the advantage of being on your person all the time. And a good laptop can basically do anything. So what exactly do I need a tablet for? Its not going to be on my person as regularly as a smartphone, and its not going to be as capable as a laptop (that's now similar enough in size/weight).
That being said, there do seem to be a lot of older (non-computer) people who have somehow replaced nearly all of their "outside the office" computer use with iPads.
3) Looks like the driver didn't do anything beyond trust that the system wouldn't do something completely fucking stupid that the most primitive collision detection algorithm could have avoided.
Not so fast here... What appears to have happened, is this driver found a corner-case that a collision detection system actually may not have been designed to detect. Even the maker of the sensor package Tesla uses has come out to support this. (While mentioning that their next generation system will be capable.)
Of course I have seen a lot of tractor trailers out here that now have these side-fairing things installed to improve aerodynamics, which would likely have also improved detection in cases like this. But obviously, no such equipment was on the truck involved in this collision.
I keep wondering if some billionaire Star Trek fans should settle this argument once and for all, by paying CBS/Paramount enough money to release the rights.
After all, I think its been established that the official studios can no longer be trusted to produce Star Trek content, and many fans feel as though Star Trek is too important to be left to the official studios.
It's not fair to blame tech companies like Google for a problem that started well before it was even in existence.
If companies like Google actually did everything necessary to even their own numbers, to make everyone happy, then the rest of the entire tech industry would end up being 100% male.
That, IMHO, is the real problem with picking on a few choice large tech companies for this issue.
Sure, they could do more than all the smaller shops to help the situation 15-20 years from now, but they can't really do anything to solve the problem in the short term.
Congratulations... You're ranting about a company's current and recent products based entirely on something they likely designed 5+ years ago, which is not representative. This is the problem they had at every step of the way during their attempts to roll out newer platforms. Of course the fact they they were "nice" and didn't make *any* attempts to push the marketing message of "Our new stuff isn't like our old stuff" certainly didn't help.
Seriously, to make a computer analogy, its like claiming "Apple Sucks!" in the era of MacOSX 10.11, because you had some bad experiences with the clumsiness of trying to use System 7 in 2004.
I want them to fix the bugs on my Q10. The thing likes to reboot after I set it down on its screen after phone calls.
This is an easily fixed mechanical issue. You just need to make a small shim out of piece of a business card, and wrap it around the far edge of the battery, to increase pressure on the electrical contacts on the other side.
When any other company does something you don't like, you boycott their products. By giving business to their competitors instead of them, they (theoretically) take notice and change their ways to win your business back.
But Apple seems to be a special case here... When Apple does something you don't like, you're allowed to:
- Rant all over the Internet to gain public support
- Sue Apple because of their practices
- Push for regulations and/or legislation to limit their practices
But the one thing you're *never* allowed to do, for some reason, is:
- Actually stop buying Apple products
Spoken like someone who has never taken their own advice. Community Colleges are tarpits with 25% transfer rates to a 4 year institution. The dropout rate is outrageous, and those who do transfer normally take 3-5 years to get there. When you look at the opportunity cost of delayed graduation by 1-3 years, the cost of community college far outweighs the tuition savings.
This reminds me of something I used to observe all the time, when I was living around people doing CC and/or the local state university...
They'd take 3+ years to finish that 2-year degree, then transfer, and it would still take them another 4 years to finish that university degree. What exactly did they save, over just doing the university degree from the start? Seemed like I'd almost never run into anyone who actually did the 2-year + 2 more at university, as such things are generally advertised.
The prevalence of the group you call the "Crazy GOP," and the pandering they demand from their entire party, is why I can never seriously consider voting for anyone in the GOP. Its also why I can never bring myself to honestly believe the "both parties are the same" tagline many seem to say, and why I can never consider voting for a 3rd party. I just find the "Crazy GOP" so intolerable that I'll vote against them (and hope they lose) whenever I have the chance. Pretty much everyone I know that's GOP-leaning and not a nutjob seems to simply disregard the "Crazy GOP" faction and act as if they're not relevant to the conversation.
That being said, if they ever to manage to shake off those crazies, one of two things may happen:
1) I'll actually listen to what they have to say, and seriously consider both parties in elections
2) I'll actually believe they're "equally bad" and start seriously considering 3rd parties in elections
Because they are doing a pretty crap job on both accounts. But hey, thanks for the tiger vs leopard emojis. That distinction is going to come in handy for sure. And let me tell you there's nothing like having to reprogram a backspace key so it knows how to delete a multi-unit vs a one unit UNICODE character. Fun times!
Having written code to do exactly this, on several platforms, I can definitely sympathize. You need to account for far more crap than most here likely realize. Modifiers, joiners, regional indicator symbols, surrogate pairs (older frameworks love UTF-16), and so on. Oh, and it gets even more fun when dealing with a UI framework that tries to be asynchronous.