Look, a lot of people continue to rave about the astounding design ability and amazing ease-of-use of apple products. An example of a design screw-up works as a counter-argument, even if it's old and fixed in some way. In fact, you could argue that the fact that it was fixed is an acknowledgement that it really was a design screw-up.
And in general "we've heard that before, that's so *old*" is not actually a counter-argument.
The present Google operation is so engineer-centric that they're afraid to even decide what color blue they should use [stopdesign.com] without submitting it to the Cloud for arbitration. The point isn't that the Cloud would give you a bad result, but that their internal groupthink is so strong that they can't even tolerate individual decision-making.
Yes, pity the poor Designer. In the good old days they'd let you push your Brilliant Designs out on the world whenever you wanted. Now they make you prove it isn't going to screw things up with some A/B testing first. Oh, what a world.
Apple created one thing that didn't exist before that is what really saved the company. It wasn't the iPod, it was the thing that actually made the iPod useful for most people. Apple created iTunes. They actually got license agreements to sell songs online, legally, for a price that people would pay.
Before iTunes, there were places like eMusic (I used to work at one of the many incarnations of it before it started getting bought and traded around). eMusic had cut deals with every indie label in existence, and was selling subscription-based access to a collection of drm-free mp3s... they would've loved to carry the major labels products, but they couldn't talk 'em into playing.
The critical thing that Apple did with iTunes is they talked them into it. That's it. You can argue that the DRM plus pay-per-download model was the key feature, but I submit that the important thing was that Jobs could talk you into using shit for shinola, and he turned his reality warp field on the majors, and away he went from there.
Techies always want to believe that technical capability is key, the people who bought a product always want to believe they bought Quality... you're all ignoring the obvious though, which is Steve Jobs psychic powers.
True enough. There were "Internet search" sites, but they all totally sucked.
Well no, actually they didn't. You needed to know what you were doing, and have some skill at refining searches and so on, but altavista was a pretty fucking amazing innovation.
Also, much as I like google's search, it's worth remembering that what they do has some downsides: they make it very easy to find the same kind of stuff that everyone else wanted to see when they did a similar search. That circular definition of quality creates the same sort of problem you see everywhere else in the culture, where the popular is popular because it's popular, and the big stay big because they're big.
Since we're on the subject of innovation, how exactly does a new site get established in a post-google world where no one will see you down there on page 17 of the search results?
(Answer: you game wikipedia with self-promotional edits, so that there's lots of buzz about you in the top ranked link on google... )
pick one or a select few thought to be the top features and do them better than everyone else
Really what they do is convince everyone that they're doing it better. If you have any trouble with an apple product, obviously that's you're fault, everyone knows that they're so easy to use. Clearly you need to get in touch with the Tao of Apple.
Well, here we go with a standard slashdot response ("Ho hum, is this supposed to be news? I did this when I was in high school.").
Actually, when you've suddenly got a lot of data confirming a commonly held assumption, that actually is news. An article of faith has become scientific fact.
Wake me up when we get interesting news.
Nope. It isn't possible. You're going to go through life sleepwalking, copping a faux-jaded pose, deaf to all magic and poetry, oblivious to the music of reality.
> Something like Niobium would not be complicated at all, and I
> think chip-like circuits have been made with niobium before.
Niobium (and compounds of it) are superconducting only at very low temperatures, well bellow the liquid nitrogen temperature: 77K That's the magic number in this business.
> The difficulty is cooling here.
No kidding.
> (perovskites etc. would be a bear)
But those are indeed superconducting above the liquid nitrogen boiling point, so if you're going to play this game you need to learn to shoot those bears.
If you search on "San Francisco" it includes a lot of stuff that isn't, like Oakland and Daly City. If you punch the "San Francisco" tab, that restricts it further. As of today (Dec16) there have been 200 posts-- much older than that, and they're bound to be stale-- not "thousands". I grant that I was exaggerating when I said "none at any price"... there are some if you're willing to pay through the nose for a tiny place.
When I was looking (last October) conditions may well have been worse, but then, I personally have to screen out a lot of things like the Sunset and Richmond districts which are too far from the railway stations to be practical for the Silicon Valley commutes I always seem to end up doing.
People make errors in judgment about something as complex as countries, wars, and dictators. It happens.
Uh, no actually, that's no way near good enough. I think it's no exaggeration to say that our collective decision making capability is fundamentally broken, and the invasion of Iraq could be the poster child for that. Stupid, evil or crazy? Why not all three!
It is not at all a good sign that people here want to split hairs about Hitch's Folly. Maybe he wasn't being "careerist", maybe he was just drowning in patriotic anit-Islamic bloodlust, or hey, maybe he thought Saddam was a bad guy, eh? Yeah, dats it, he was shocked to learn that there was a dictator somewhere in the middle east! And worse, a dictator who wasn't kissing our butt any more!
The important thing is that we learn a lesson so that we "don't get fooled again".
True enough, but (1) it's not like this is the first time we were fooled, (2) we're not going to learn a damn thing if just we let people get away with stupid excuses for being fooled.
Except... They're not returning snippets, they're often returning as much as half or more of the book. And they're not doing it without the authors or right's holders permission.
Nope. Try again.
If they don't have the rights, they just show you a couple of lines (and typically not enough to even figure out what's being said).
But then, think about the next step: if I wanted to defeat this I'd hit google with a dictionary (preferably using a distributed attack), gather the images of little snippets of the text, and glue them together (probably after running them through OCR software).
Has anyone actually read this article? The guy is talking out his ass. As far as I can tell he's got nothing behind anything he's saying.
In the places I've worked, developers have certainly been valuable-- this is why, after all, we're paid a lot of money to do stuff a lot of us would do anyway-- but the critical assests of the companies have been things like the reputation of a domain name, or the side-agreements with various content providers, and so on.
As for a new bubble, yes, as far as I can tell there's a venture capital bubble of sorts in the SF area: VCs are tossing money at 20-somethings that'll work 80 hour weeks under the delusion that they're going to be the next facebook. This makes a degree of sense from the investor point of view, if you consider that there's nothing else going on in the economy remotely worth investing in.
This time around, there's this weird phenomena where there are no rental apartments available at any price in SF, but there's plenty of vacant office space: the kids are working on laptops in their living rooms and out in cafes, not in actual offices-- they're also completely trashing their backs and hands in the process. If you really want to invest in a growth industry, think about "physical therapy".
Here is one of my bi-annual posts reminding all about Thomas Gold's theory about the abiological origin of natural gas, oil and/or coal (which we call "fossil" fuels,
perhaps erroneously). He published a book about this: The Deep Hot Biosphere
One part of this theory has apparently become commonly accepted: "extremophiles" extend deep throughout the earth's crust. Cosmic hydrocarbons had already been observed in nebula, this new result appears to be another pointer in the same direction.
There's a certain kind of conservative that likes this theory-- see, we're not Running Out of Oil! The peakies are wrong!-- but there's no particular reason this would be good
news for environmentalists. There may be enough hydrocarbons in the crust to completely combine with all
the earth's oxygen...
"The goal is that the technology will help reduce congestion, fuel waste, and accidents"... and still allow people to sit in their own private metal cages without having to deal with anything icky like other human beings.
If you're interested in the subject, I recommend reading the Daniel Domsheit-Berg book: "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website". If D's account is any guide, erratic behavior from Assange shouldn't come as a surprise. And myself I would expect an Assange autobiography to be even less accurate than is the norm for such a thing, he's apparently into "self-mythologizing".
I remember Emacs was going to switch to Guile back in, oh....around 2000? hmmm, around the same time Perl 6 was conceived. Millennium mania?
Now that you mention it, I've had a theory that both projects should merge in order to solve each other's problems. If you implemented elisp on parrot, you should be able to create a mutant emacs using the new run time engine, which, if it works as promised, would let you customize your new lisp in a range of different languages, including guile. And this way, the perl6 community would have an environment to target for applications to answer the "but what is it good for" question.
I'm pretty sure the position of the "Conservatiods" is to not take your tax money in the first place.
The people-formerly-known-as-conservative are at this point well known for wanting to hand money to financial institutions that have gone broke ripping off the public with Ponzi schemes. This money comes from someplace.
The Bush regime got elected with money from Enron, which had been busy ripping off the Democratic state of California with energy market manipulation.
The war in Iraq, our continued support of Israel, etc does not appear to make any sense unless you regard it as channeling "defense" spending into supporting the interests of oil companies.
(On the other hand, it could be it simply doesn't make any sense.)
Conservatives do not, in fact, have much respect for property rights, outside of theory and rhetoric. At some point you need to look at what is actually happening.
The suggestion to "Follow Your Bliss" only works in an economy that's not run by sociopaths.
Ovid is trying to get perl programmers to move to the Netherlands right now. He says that the people who express interest all want to escape US politics.
No, you're not too old. When you realize what a POS pascal was you'll be overjoyed to working in another language.
What language should you learn? Go find some user group meetings for different languages, and ask yourself which kind of people you want to hang out with. Technical decisions are usually social decisions in disguise.
Getting through job interviews is a completely different set of skills from programming. I think the "cult of the puzzle" is on the decline now, and instead we have the "cult of CS". Knowing a bunch of computer science trivia is advisable (even though you'll never need it, because it's all coded up in standard libraries at this point).
"'... And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense.'
5 * 100K * 2 = 1 million/year
Maybe I don't understand the biz, but that seems like a fair amount to spend on a public relations program.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, a lot of people continue to rave about the astounding design ability and amazing ease-of-use of apple products. An example of a design screw-up works as a counter-argument, even if it's old and fixed in some way. In fact, you could argue that the fact that it was fixed is an acknowledgement that it really was a design screw-up.
And in general "we've heard that before, that's so *old*" is not actually a counter-argument.
Consider yourself lucky. Many people who were privileged to meet Jobs wish they weren't.
Yes, pity the poor Designer. In the good old days they'd let you push your Brilliant Designs out on the world whenever you wanted. Now they make you prove it isn't going to screw things up with some A/B testing first. Oh, what a world.
Before iTunes, there were places like eMusic (I used to work at one of the many incarnations of it before it started getting bought and traded around). eMusic had cut deals with every indie label in existence, and was selling subscription-based access to a collection of drm-free mp3s... they would've loved to carry the major labels products, but they couldn't talk 'em into playing.
The critical thing that Apple did with iTunes is they talked them into it. That's it. You can argue that the DRM plus pay-per-download model was the key feature, but I submit that the important thing was that Jobs could talk you into using shit for shinola, and he turned his reality warp field on the majors, and away he went from there.
Techies always want to believe that technical capability is key, the people who bought a product always want to believe they bought Quality... you're all ignoring the obvious though, which is Steve Jobs psychic powers.
Well no, actually they didn't. You needed to know what you were doing, and have some skill at refining searches and so on, but altavista was a pretty fucking amazing innovation.
Also, much as I like google's search, it's worth remembering that what they do has some downsides: they make it very easy to find the same kind of stuff that everyone else wanted to see when they did a similar search. That circular definition of quality creates the same sort of problem you see everywhere else in the culture, where the popular is popular because it's popular, and the big stay big because they're big.
Since we're on the subject of innovation, how exactly does a new site get established in a post-google world where no one will see you down there on page 17 of the search results?
(Answer: you game wikipedia with self-promotional edits, so that there's lots of buzz about you in the top ranked link on google... )
Close:
Really what they do is convince everyone that they're doing it better. If you have any trouble with an apple product, obviously that's you're fault, everyone knows that they're so easy to use. Clearly you need to get in touch with the Tao of Apple.
Well, here we go with a standard slashdot response ("Ho hum, is this supposed to be news? I did this when I was in high school.").
Actually, when you've suddenly got a lot of data confirming a commonly held assumption, that actually is news. An article of faith has become scientific fact.
Nope. It isn't possible. You're going to go through life sleepwalking, copping a faux-jaded pose, deaf to all magic and poetry, oblivious to the music of reality.
> Something like Niobium would not be complicated at all, and I > think chip-like circuits have been made with niobium before. Niobium (and compounds of it) are superconducting only at very low temperatures, well bellow the liquid nitrogen temperature: 77K That's the magic number in this business. > The difficulty is cooling here. No kidding. > (perovskites etc. would be a bear) But those are indeed superconducting above the liquid nitrogen boiling point, so if you're going to play this game you need to learn to shoot those bears.
If you search on "San Francisco" it includes a lot of stuff that isn't, like Oakland and Daly City. If you punch the "San Francisco" tab, that restricts it further. As of today (Dec16) there have been 200 posts-- much older than that, and they're bound to be stale-- not "thousands". I grant that I was exaggerating when I said "none at any price"... there are some if you're willing to pay through the nose for a tiny place.
When I was looking (last October) conditions may well have been worse, but then, I personally have to screen out a lot of things like the Sunset and Richmond districts which are too far from the railway stations to be practical for the Silicon Valley commutes I always seem to end up doing.
Uh, no actually, that's no way near good enough. I think it's no exaggeration to say that our collective decision making capability is fundamentally broken, and the invasion of Iraq could be the poster child for that. Stupid, evil or crazy? Why not all three!
It is not at all a good sign that people here want to split hairs about Hitch's Folly. Maybe he wasn't being "careerist", maybe he was just drowning in patriotic anit-Islamic bloodlust, or hey, maybe he thought Saddam was a bad guy, eh? Yeah, dats it, he was shocked to learn that there was a dictator somewhere in the middle east! And worse, a dictator who wasn't kissing our butt any more!
True enough, but (1) it's not like this is the first time we were fooled, (2) we're not going to learn a damn thing if just we let people get away with stupid excuses for being fooled.
Nope. Try again.
If they don't have the rights, they just show you a couple of lines (and typically not enough to even figure out what's being said).
But then, think about the next step: if I wanted to defeat this I'd hit google with a dictionary (preferably using a distributed attack), gather the images of little snippets of the text, and glue them together (probably after running them through OCR software).
Has anyone actually read this article? The guy is talking out his ass. As far as I can tell he's got nothing behind anything he's saying. In the places I've worked, developers have certainly been valuable-- this is why, after all, we're paid a lot of money to do stuff a lot of us would do anyway-- but the critical assests of the companies have been things like the reputation of a domain name, or the side-agreements with various content providers, and so on. As for a new bubble, yes, as far as I can tell there's a venture capital bubble of sorts in the SF area: VCs are tossing money at 20-somethings that'll work 80 hour weeks under the delusion that they're going to be the next facebook. This makes a degree of sense from the investor point of view, if you consider that there's nothing else going on in the economy remotely worth investing in. This time around, there's this weird phenomena where there are no rental apartments available at any price in SF, but there's plenty of vacant office space: the kids are working on laptops in their living rooms and out in cafes, not in actual offices-- they're also completely trashing their backs and hands in the process. If you really want to invest in a growth industry, think about "physical therapy".
But stand back! Steve Yegge is on the way to show them how to get things to scale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8
Here is one of my bi-annual posts reminding all about Thomas Gold's theory about the abiological origin of natural gas, oil and/or coal (which we call "fossil" fuels, perhaps erroneously). He published a book about this: The Deep Hot Biosphere
One part of this theory has apparently become commonly accepted: "extremophiles" extend deep throughout the earth's crust. Cosmic hydrocarbons had already been observed in nebula, this new result appears to be another pointer in the same direction.
There's a certain kind of conservative that likes this theory-- see, we're not Running Out of Oil! The peakies are wrong!-- but there's no particular reason this would be good news for environmentalists. There may be enough hydrocarbons in the crust to completely combine with all the earth's oxygen...
"The goal is that the technology will help reduce congestion, fuel waste, and accidents" ... and still allow people to sit in their own private metal cages without having to deal with anything icky like other human beings.
That's hardly enough to qualify as a statesman.
And it's awfully sloppy, nailing some of the guilty.
Jobs was the master of the locked-down platform, and he repeatedly got away with crap that would've had people screaming if Bill Gates had tried it.
But you're not allowed to say nasty things at a funeral! No, you're not allowed to say nasty things about Jobs ever, under any circumstances.
If you're interested in the subject, I recommend reading the Daniel Domsheit-Berg book: "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website". If D's account is any guide, erratic behavior from Assange shouldn't come as a surprise. And myself I would expect an Assange autobiography to be even less accurate than is the norm for such a thing, he's apparently into "self-mythologizing".
I've also been looking at Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy by The "Guardian", which I'm afraid has a bit of trashy vibe to it, but has some interesting details here and there.
Now that you mention it, I've had a theory that both projects should merge in order to solve each other's problems. If you implemented elisp on parrot, you should be able to create a mutant emacs using the new run time engine, which, if it works as promised, would let you customize your new lisp in a range of different languages, including guile. And this way, the perl6 community would have an environment to target for applications to answer the "but what is it good for" question.
Standard estimate for employee overhead. Your company has to spend roughly $2 for every $1 they pay you.
Required reading to be minimally informed:
The people-formerly-known-as-conservative are at this point well known for wanting to hand money to financial institutions that have gone broke ripping off the public with Ponzi schemes. This money comes from someplace.
The Bush regime got elected with money from Enron, which had been busy ripping off the Democratic state of California with energy market manipulation.
The war in Iraq, our continued support of Israel, etc does not appear to make any sense unless you regard it as channeling "defense" spending into supporting the interests of oil companies. (On the other hand, it could be it simply doesn't make any sense.)
Conservatives do not, in fact, have much respect for property rights, outside of theory and rhetoric. At some point you need to look at what is actually happening.
The suggestion to "Follow Your Bliss" only works in an economy that's not run by sociopaths. Ovid is trying to get perl programmers to move to the Netherlands right now. He says that the people who express interest all want to escape US politics.
5 * 100K * 2 = 1 million/year
Maybe I don't understand the biz, but that seems like a fair amount to spend on a public relations program.