The developer was one of these three guys, I can't remember which one said it: Barry Meade, co-founder Fireproof Studios Professor Anthony Steed, co-founder Chirp Max Whitby, co-founder & CEO Touch Press They are hardly incompetents! He was quite clear that there were about 50 handsets on which he needed to test Android apps to capture 90% of the market. The other 1450 is the long tail. He was also clear that irascible users with obscure handsets posting negative reviews because the app doesn't support their device well is something that has damaged the commercial success of quite a lot of apps. 50 handsets is a manageable number, but clearly is also a major PITA compared to 3 to 4 handsets for iOS.
I'm really not sure why you're arguing this point. It's well established that Android's flexibility has a downside of significantly more complexity for developers to manage. Tradeoffs are pretty fundamental to engineering, you really don't need to die in a ditch defending Android for making one.
I wasn't arguing the rights and wrongs of developers' decisions to go with either Android or iOS; I was asserting that many developers still do choose to go with iOS first. I think that's an observable and fairly inarguable fact. Perhaps it's changing, but for the moment it's certainly true. I can think of half a dozen "big" (ie significant, revenue-generating apps) that went iOS first -- Hailo, AddLee, many UK banking apps. I deliberately chose these as examples as they are free-to-download apps that still drive significant commercial value.
BTW, I think you made a very interesting assertion in your second section: "if you are trying to reach the maximum number of people with your app, I would suspect Android is already a clear winner". Developers of commercial software will be interested in reaching the maximum number for the minimum effort. That's the point about designing for 3 or 4 iOS devices vs 50+ Android models (out of 1500+ out there). I have heard developers say precisely this: they can build a nice Android app that breaks on someone's relatively obscure device and then they get bad reviews and sales fall off a cliff. It was on Evan Davis's excellent programme The Bottom Line (only available in the UK).
I'm going to quote from the Cochrane Review: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD005186.pub3/pdf "Description of the condition In England, 8.2%of patients admitted to hospital develop healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) (Hospital Infection Society 2007). HAIs cause 5,000 deaths and cost £930 million annually (National Audit Office 1998). In the United States (US), an estimated 5% of patients develop HAIs, at a cost of 4.5 billion USD per year. This translates to an estimated two million cases of HAIs per annum, accounting for nearly 100,000 deaths (Klevens 2007). In Canada, an estimated 220,000 HAIs occur each year, with 8,000 related deaths (Zoutman 2003). Infection control experts everywhere are working to identify and correct factors that contribute to these rates. Although hand hygiene has long been regarded as the most effective preventive measure (Teare 1999), numerous studies over the past few decades have demonstrated that compliance with hand hygiene recommendations is poor and interventions are not effective long term."
I suggest you spend some time learning what Cochrane is *before* responding, to ensure you don't make an even bigger public fool of yourself.
Gawande traces the history of checklists. He starts with surgery but expands the applications well beyond there. His work to push the takeup of checklists is amazing, and will save many lives.
Time pressure is a problem across the entire developed world, but it's not the major driver of failures in reliability. The major driver is the cognitive complexity of the task. Checklists tend to *save* time, not take time, because you don't have to try to remember what to do next, and because they drive towards a more standardised approach.
I beg your fucking pardon? The evidence that hand hygiene is a major transmission route for nosocomial infection is extensively documented and not just a marketing survey. I put that link up so that you could see some of the evidence for yourself. Are you going to bleat on about the survey, or are you going to look at the actual evidence about hand hygiene? You are sounding like a complete prat, arguing that there is no link between hand washing and lowered rates of HCAIs. It's on a par with arguing there's no link between smoking and lung cancer.
On the point about whether the use of video cameras to influence hand hygiene behaviours is the right or wrong approach, you're also being a complete tosser. You have assumed that this is seen as some kind of Orwellian view. But it's the implementation that counts. It turns out that actually, most hospitals using this technology are using it to help staff learn how they actually behave, compared to how they think they behave. Because most staff tend to believe they wash their hands consistently, and most staff don't, due to cognitive overload and other factors. So it is in fact a *learning* tool, not a coercive tool. As well as reading the Checklist Manifesto, you need to read Gawande's article on spreading innovation, which talks about the use of remote coaching in healthcare.
This isn't about bad micro management, it's about putting systems in place to help humans achieve 100% reliability, which is innately difficult for us.
I patronised you because you acted as though you had all the answers, when you clearly haven't remotely researched the topic. This isn't about malicious compliance. It's about you having a preset narrative that you wanted to impose on the story, even when the facts do not support your narrative.
Scale and network effects are clearly very important, and Android obviously poses a really serious challenge to Apple. However, I think you are wrong to assert that Android has become the standard software platform. It's clear that Android and iOS are the standard software platform*s*. Many app developers go with Android first, but plenty more go with iOS first, preferring to develop for a limited range of devices (3 to 4 variants vs testing on 50+ devices) and cognisant that app usage is much higher on iOS devices than on Android.
Could you please crawl back into your sanctimonious moralising box and take a copy of "The Checklist Manifesto" with you. When you've understood a bit of the theory of safety management, you could crawl back out and apologise to the families of the many thousands of patients who have died or been seriously hurt as a result of HCAIs.
You're wrong about "British subjects", which says a lot about you. You are overconfident with your facts. It takes all of a few seconds on the Web for you to check them before you hit post.
If you believe there are valid comparable crime statistics from today and 100 years ago, and that you can isolate all other changes in British society apart from gun ownership in your analysis, do go ahead and post it. I fancy a laugh.
The comment about the Queen is risible. A frequent trope of interviews with people who have had armed bodyguards is about the restrictions on their freedom that this entails. It might be necessary, because the alternative is worse, but it's hardly more free than not requiring armed bodyguards in the first place.
It is not theoretically impossible under British law for those men to have held guns, although I doubt they were held legally. Again, this is a simple fact that would have taken you seconds to discover if you'd have bother using the web.
As well as getting your facts wrong, your logic is pretty shoddy too. You're focused on people being defenceless. I'm focused on the fact that most criminals in Britain don't use guns in their crimes, and so there are far fewer gun deaths and gun woundings than there are in other countries where guns are more prevalent. Plus, obviously, the rate of accidental gun deaths and woundings is tiny, and the rate of deaths due to incompetent attempts to use guns to defend against attackers or perceived attackers is again tiny. You're looking the wrong way through the telescope. If you do that with a telescope, I hope you don't have a rifle with a sniper scope, or things are apt to end very messily.
Why do we get stories that make this comparison? Because there are other factors at play, which if you wiped the dribble off your chin and focused on reading the story could have been apparent to you, too. The apples-to-apples comparison here is how the same prosecutor dealt with two cases involving minors, which happened a week apart. That seems a perfectly reasonable basis for comparison, addressing the question: is she being consistent and proportionate in the eyes of a reasonable observer. To which the answer is "no, she is not, on the face of it".
I wanna know when they're going to create artificial mantis shrimp eyes. That I can put on and use. That would be cool, given that they are the most impressive eyes on the planet. I remember reading Fragment by Warren Fahy and being blown away by what they are capable of.
It's not *that* risky, though, is it? You can break a leg running. Happens to kids playing soccer all the time. Balls can smash through windows, shattering glass on screaming children and causing a cut. Also happens. Not sure it needs expulsion to manage it, however.
Risk = severity * frequency. And severity isn't that high, and the frequency isn't that high either.
Really? *Really*? Don't: - look at a patch of ground and examine the diversity of insect life - see how to hold a magnifying glass to set a piece of paper on fire - sit on the grass and conduct a thought experiment
Erm, there may be a whole host of differences, but there's no point ignoring the fact that: - the proportion of black kids locked up is much higher than the proportion of white kids - it's pretty easy to find lots of pairs of cases where the circumstances are very similar, but the punishments are different, and the black kid gets the more severe punishment
So it's hardly surprising that race is a starting point here, especially given that this is a columnist, not an academic.
Since when do you get to redefine the terms of the debate so that better means only "produces higher quality output"?
That is a useless definition because the skill of the operator is the primary determinant of quality, not the device. Shakespeare did fine without a keyboard, and Michelangelo coped without a Wacom.
The tablet form factor enables pictures to be made that could not be made using a laptop, because the artist could not, for example, stand in a field and draw from life. That is not simply a case of "easier" or "faster".
There are many other times when a tablet form factor is more useful than a laptop form factor (or a phone, for that matter). There are docks that hang on kitchen cabinets, for example. Doctors can take a tablet with them on ward rounds. Etc etc.
I get pissed off because people like you act in a such a self-centred way: you are like my toddler in your inability to acknowledge that other people have different perspectives on what is useful or not. But you couple it with a smartarse teenage pedantry ("better, not easier") that is all the more irritating for being wrong in the detail.
Plus you were rude about Hockney's art without taking the time to learn about it. Would have taken you all of 2 mins to scan his wiki entry.
WTAF are you on about? The question wasn't "can tablets do something that no other device was ever capable of doing?" It was "are tablets better at creating some types of content than laptops?" to which the answer is "well of course, you gibbering moron"
You're not being genuine at all. Otherwise, you wouldn't launch an irrelevant side attack on one of the world's pre-eminent artists.
Obviously, there are many millions (yes, millions) of folks who are producing less amazing art than Hockney on an iPad. You do know that sketch apps have made their creators millionaires because of their popularity? And that these apps don't just sit on tablets, plenty of people use them extensively? If not, you're dumber than I thought. And that makes you preeeeettty fuckin dumb, given your starting bar was suggesting he use a PC and Wacom as though that was feasible for an artist who frequently sketches outdoors and standing up.
That is a *really* stupid comment. Feminists are perfectly happy to talk about differences between men and women. Here's one difference: men have most of the power in the world. Here's another: men rape horrifically large numbers of women, men rape men in comparatively tiny numbers, and women don't rape men at all in measurable numbers. Women don't need to "make themselves feel victimized" [of sexist behaviour] -- because they are disproportionately the victims of sexist behaviour, so there's no "make" about it. You either are wilfully ignorant of these very basic facts about the world, or you are pretending that the facts are different to back up your own world view. Whatever the truth, it's undignified, and you should stop.
This is not insightful. It's the sodding cause of the crisis. Ideological fucktards like this vote in ideological fucktard Teapartiers. These Teapartiers then say "We need to force these agencies to cut paper-pushers and not the front line" and so they implement a rule requiring across-the-board cuts with no discretion to apply more of the cut to one project or department than another. And what is the result of that? Do the fucktards who voted in the Teaparty fucktards now say "hurray for the teapartiers? At last we get to cut paper-pushers and not just frontline staff". As Mr Fucktard here shows, no they do not. Because their view was nothing to do with facts in the first place, and was all to do with masturbation for what passes for their minds. Of course, the unintended consequence is that many programs are required to become sub-scale, ie their output per dollar input falls due to lumpy scale curves with significant semi-variable and fixed costs. And all to satisfy a bunch of fucktards who have to be reminded to only use one side of the paper to wipe and *still* walk out the bathroom with shit on their fingers.
Touchscreens are really fucking irritating on laptops that don't have the ability to disable them at the flick of a switch. You can't point something out on your screen to a colleague without jumping all over the fucking show. Gah.
- I think there are well-meaning people, who, with the egoism humanity has always assumed, look at the bad things that seem to happen without reason - hurricanes, etc. - and cast about for an answer, blaming it on humanity. It's no more well-reasoned than blaming the Ocean Gods of course, but it seems to be in human nature to assume that everything happens because, around, and for us (remember how Earth used to be the center of everything?).
There are plenty of other biases besides egoism, and many of those are likely to lead us to assume we are inherently unable to have any deleterious effect on the climate or environment. For example, we tend to believe that the world tomorrow will be much like the world today, and struggle to keep track of changes happening over decades (never mind centuries).
Slashdot Mirror
The developer was one of these three guys, I can't remember which one said it:
Barry Meade, co-founder Fireproof Studios
Professor Anthony Steed, co-founder Chirp
Max Whitby, co-founder & CEO Touch Press
They are hardly incompetents!
He was quite clear that there were about 50 handsets on which he needed to test Android apps to capture 90% of the market. The other 1450 is the long tail. He was also clear that irascible users with obscure handsets posting negative reviews because the app doesn't support their device well is something that has damaged the commercial success of quite a lot of apps. 50 handsets is a manageable number, but clearly is also a major PITA compared to 3 to 4 handsets for iOS.
I'm really not sure why you're arguing this point. It's well established that Android's flexibility has a downside of significantly more complexity for developers to manage. Tradeoffs are pretty fundamental to engineering, you really don't need to die in a ditch defending Android for making one.
I wasn't arguing the rights and wrongs of developers' decisions to go with either Android or iOS; I was asserting that many developers still do choose to go with iOS first. I think that's an observable and fairly inarguable fact. Perhaps it's changing, but for the moment it's certainly true. I can think of half a dozen "big" (ie significant, revenue-generating apps) that went iOS first -- Hailo, AddLee, many UK banking apps. I deliberately chose these as examples as they are free-to-download apps that still drive significant commercial value.
BTW, I think you made a very interesting assertion in your second section: "if you are trying to reach the maximum number of people with your app, I would suspect Android is already a clear winner". Developers of commercial software will be interested in reaching the maximum number for the minimum effort. That's the point about designing for 3 or 4 iOS devices vs 50+ Android models (out of 1500+ out there). I have heard developers say precisely this: they can build a nice Android app that breaks on someone's relatively obscure device and then they get bad reviews and sales fall off a cliff. It was on Evan Davis's excellent programme The Bottom Line (only available in the UK).
This irritated me enough to do a quick look for pubmed and Cochrane articles:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20088678
I'm going to quote from the Cochrane Review:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD005186.pub3/pdf
"Description of the condition In England, 8.2%of patients admitted to hospital develop healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) (Hospital Infection Society 2007). HAIs cause 5,000 deaths and cost £930 million annually (National Audit Office 1998). In the United States (US), an estimated 5% of patients develop HAIs, at a cost of 4.5 billion USD per year. This translates to an estimated two million cases of HAIs per annum, accounting for nearly 100,000 deaths (Klevens 2007). In Canada, an estimated 220,000 HAIs occur each year, with 8,000 related deaths (Zoutman 2003). Infection control experts everywhere are working to identify and correct factors that contribute to these rates. Although hand hygiene has long been regarded as the most effective preventive measure (Teare 1999), numerous studies over the past few decades have demonstrated that compliance with hand hygiene recommendations is poor and interventions are not effective long term."
I suggest you spend some time learning what Cochrane is *before* responding, to ensure you don't make an even bigger public fool of yourself.
Gawande traces the history of checklists. He starts with surgery but expands the applications well beyond there. His work to push the takeup of checklists is amazing, and will save many lives.
Time pressure is a problem across the entire developed world, but it's not the major driver of failures in reliability. The major driver is the cognitive complexity of the task. Checklists tend to *save* time, not take time, because you don't have to try to remember what to do next, and because they drive towards a more standardised approach.
I beg your fucking pardon? The evidence that hand hygiene is a major transmission route for nosocomial infection is extensively documented and not just a marketing survey. I put that link up so that you could see some of the evidence for yourself. Are you going to bleat on about the survey, or are you going to look at the actual evidence about hand hygiene? You are sounding like a complete prat, arguing that there is no link between hand washing and lowered rates of HCAIs. It's on a par with arguing there's no link between smoking and lung cancer.
On the point about whether the use of video cameras to influence hand hygiene behaviours is the right or wrong approach, you're also being a complete tosser. You have assumed that this is seen as some kind of Orwellian view. But it's the implementation that counts. It turns out that actually, most hospitals using this technology are using it to help staff learn how they actually behave, compared to how they think they behave. Because most staff tend to believe they wash their hands consistently, and most staff don't, due to cognitive overload and other factors. So it is in fact a *learning* tool, not a coercive tool. As well as reading the Checklist Manifesto, you need to read Gawande's article on spreading innovation, which talks about the use of remote coaching in healthcare.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/13/120813fa_fact_gawande
This isn't about bad micro management, it's about putting systems in place to help humans achieve 100% reliability, which is innately difficult for us.
I patronised you because you acted as though you had all the answers, when you clearly haven't remotely researched the topic. This isn't about malicious compliance. It's about you having a preset narrative that you wanted to impose on the story, even when the facts do not support your narrative.
Scale and network effects are clearly very important, and Android obviously poses a really serious challenge to Apple. However, I think you are wrong to assert that Android has become the standard software platform. It's clear that Android and iOS are the standard software platform*s*. Many app developers go with Android first, but plenty more go with iOS first, preferring to develop for a limited range of devices (3 to 4 variants vs testing on 50+ devices) and cognisant that app usage is much higher on iOS devices than on Android.
Could you please crawl back into your sanctimonious moralising box and take a copy of "The Checklist Manifesto" with you. When you've understood a bit of the theory of safety management, you could crawl back out and apologise to the families of the many thousands of patients who have died or been seriously hurt as a result of HCAIs.
http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/InfectiousDiseases/InfectionsAZ/HCAI/EpidemiologicalDataHCAI/hcaimandatorysurveillanceresults/
You're wrong about "British subjects", which says a lot about you. You are overconfident with your facts. It takes all of a few seconds on the Web for you to check them before you hit post.
If you believe there are valid comparable crime statistics from today and 100 years ago, and that you can isolate all other changes in British society apart from gun ownership in your analysis, do go ahead and post it. I fancy a laugh.
The comment about the Queen is risible. A frequent trope of interviews with people who have had armed bodyguards is about the restrictions on their freedom that this entails. It might be necessary, because the alternative is worse, but it's hardly more free than not requiring armed bodyguards in the first place.
It is not theoretically impossible under British law for those men to have held guns, although I doubt they were held legally. Again, this is a simple fact that would have taken you seconds to discover if you'd have bother using the web.
As well as getting your facts wrong, your logic is pretty shoddy too. You're focused on people being defenceless. I'm focused on the fact that most criminals in Britain don't use guns in their crimes, and so there are far fewer gun deaths and gun woundings than there are in other countries where guns are more prevalent. Plus, obviously, the rate of accidental gun deaths and woundings is tiny, and the rate of deaths due to incompetent attempts to use guns to defend against attackers or perceived attackers is again tiny. You're looking the wrong way through the telescope. If you do that with a telescope, I hope you don't have a rifle with a sniper scope, or things are apt to end very messily.
Why do we get stories that make this comparison? Because there are other factors at play, which if you wiped the dribble off your chin and focused on reading the story could have been apparent to you, too. The apples-to-apples comparison here is how the same prosecutor dealt with two cases involving minors, which happened a week apart. That seems a perfectly reasonable basis for comparison, addressing the question: is she being consistent and proportionate in the eyes of a reasonable observer. To which the answer is "no, she is not, on the face of it".
It's not exactly rocket science, is it?
I wanna know when they're going to create artificial mantis shrimp eyes. That I can put on and use. That would be cool, given that they are the most impressive eyes on the planet. I remember reading Fragment by Warren Fahy and being blown away by what they are capable of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes
It's not *that* risky, though, is it? You can break a leg running. Happens to kids playing soccer all the time. Balls can smash through windows, shattering glass on screaming children and causing a cut. Also happens. Not sure it needs expulsion to manage it, however.
Risk = severity * frequency. And severity isn't that high, and the frequency isn't that high either.
Really? *Really*? Don't:
- look at a patch of ground and examine the diversity of insect life
- see how to hold a magnifying glass to set a piece of paper on fire
- sit on the grass and conduct a thought experiment
That is an impoverished world
Erm, there may be a whole host of differences, but there's no point ignoring the fact that:
- the proportion of black kids locked up is much higher than the proportion of white kids
- it's pretty easy to find lots of pairs of cases where the circumstances are very similar, but the punishments are different, and the black kid gets the more severe punishment
So it's hardly surprising that race is a starting point here, especially given that this is a columnist, not an academic.
Since when do you get to redefine the terms of the debate so that better means only "produces higher quality output"?
That is a useless definition because the skill of the operator is the primary determinant of quality, not the device. Shakespeare did fine without a keyboard, and Michelangelo coped without a Wacom.
The tablet form factor enables pictures to be made that could not be made using a laptop, because the artist could not, for example, stand in a field and draw from life. That is not simply a case of "easier" or "faster".
There are many other times when a tablet form factor is more useful than a laptop form factor (or a phone, for that matter). There are docks that hang on kitchen cabinets, for example. Doctors can take a tablet with them on ward rounds. Etc etc.
I get pissed off because people like you act in a such a self-centred way: you are like my toddler in your inability to acknowledge that other people have different perspectives on what is useful or not. But you couple it with a smartarse teenage pedantry ("better, not easier") that is all the more irritating for being wrong in the detail.
Plus you were rude about Hockney's art without taking the time to learn about it. Would have taken you all of 2 mins to scan his wiki entry.
WTAF are you on about? The question wasn't "can tablets do something that no other device was ever capable of doing?" It was "are tablets better at creating some types of content than laptops?" to which the answer is "well of course, you gibbering moron"
You're not being genuine at all. Otherwise, you wouldn't launch an irrelevant side attack on one of the world's pre-eminent artists.
Obviously, there are many millions (yes, millions) of folks who are producing less amazing art than Hockney on an iPad. You do know that sketch apps have made their creators millionaires because of their popularity? And that these apps don't just sit on tablets, plenty of people use them extensively? If not, you're dumber than I thought. And that makes you preeeeettty fuckin dumb, given your starting bar was suggesting he use a PC and Wacom as though that was feasible for an artist who frequently sketches outdoors and standing up.
Jesus, people are dumb.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hockney+ipad&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB504GB504&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=_C6AUfCYNsil0QX-jICABw&ved=0CDQQsAQ&biw=1267&bih=645
David Hockney:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hockney+ipad&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB504GB504&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=_C6AUfCYNsil0QX-jICABw&ved=0CDQQsAQ&biw=1267&bih=645
That is a *really* stupid comment. Feminists are perfectly happy to talk about differences between men and women. Here's one difference: men have most of the power in the world. Here's another: men rape horrifically large numbers of women, men rape men in comparatively tiny numbers, and women don't rape men at all in measurable numbers. Women don't need to "make themselves feel victimized" [of sexist behaviour] -- because they are disproportionately the victims of sexist behaviour, so there's no "make" about it. You either are wilfully ignorant of these very basic facts about the world, or you are pretending that the facts are different to back up your own world view. Whatever the truth, it's undignified, and you should stop.
This is not insightful. It's the sodding cause of the crisis. Ideological fucktards like this vote in ideological fucktard Teapartiers. These Teapartiers then say "We need to force these agencies to cut paper-pushers and not the front line" and so they implement a rule requiring across-the-board cuts with no discretion to apply more of the cut to one project or department than another. And what is the result of that? Do the fucktards who voted in the Teaparty fucktards now say "hurray for the teapartiers? At last we get to cut paper-pushers and not just frontline staff". As Mr Fucktard here shows, no they do not. Because their view was nothing to do with facts in the first place, and was all to do with masturbation for what passes for their minds. Of course, the unintended consequence is that many programs are required to become sub-scale, ie their output per dollar input falls due to lumpy scale curves with significant semi-variable and fixed costs. And all to satisfy a bunch of fucktards who have to be reminded to only use one side of the paper to wipe and *still* walk out the bathroom with shit on their fingers.
Touchscreens are really fucking irritating on laptops that don't have the ability to disable them at the flick of a switch. You can't point something out on your screen to a colleague without jumping all over the fucking show. Gah.
- I think there are well-meaning people, who, with the egoism humanity has always assumed, look at the bad things that seem to happen without reason - hurricanes, etc. - and cast about for an answer, blaming it on humanity. It's no more well-reasoned than blaming the Ocean Gods of course, but it seems to be in human nature to assume that everything happens because, around, and for us (remember how Earth used to be the center of everything?).
There are plenty of other biases besides egoism, and many of those are likely to lead us to assume we are inherently unable to have any deleterious effect on the climate or environment. For example, we tend to believe that the world tomorrow will be much like the world today, and struggle to keep track of changes happening over decades (never mind centuries).
Why don't you do an end-run around the anti-fusion forces, then, and invent us a mass-converter. You'd make Heinlein happy.
I miss RAH.
This is an excellent response!