My roommate (who can well afford it) is trying to avoid the SMS tax on his pay as you go phone, so I have to email him if I want a timely response, and hope he's near a computer.
Near a computer? Phones that can do SMS and email are free with many plans these days. If "push emails" are supported by the phone the emails arrive relatively immediately, not when the user happens to check email. It doesn't seem terribly different than SMS in such a case.
Please examine the California constitution (prior to last year) then come back and explain who really controls fiscal policy when Republicans have more than 1/3 of the representatives and won't vote to fund anything.
Sorry but history does not match your political party talking points. For example:
"During his time as Governor, Davis [Democrat] made education his top priority and California spent eight billion dollars more than was required under Proposition 98 during his first term."
"During the economic boom years of the Davis administration, the California budget expanded to cover Davis's new programs." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Davis
Objective-c only required for user interface code
on
Objective-C Comes of Age
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Its recent success has obviously been tied to one gigantic hit platform, for which it is the only natively supported PL.
To be clear, objective-c is only required for iOS user interface code. An iOS developer is free to use c/c++ elsewhere, free to use posix rather than iOS for many operating system services, etc.
You are leaving out the fact that untill about a year ago Calironia was actually run by Republicans. With the exception of the bay area and LA, California actually votes republican (not saying Democrats are any better, just pointing out the data).
No. The state senate has been democrat controlled for 42 years and the state assembly for 40 of 42 years. The legislature "runs" the state, particularly in the area of education, not the governor.
San Fran & it's surrounds are very liberal. The rest of the state, not quite as much. Not that I think that has *anything* to do with the test results.
The state is "liberal" overall. Geographically "liberal" regions may be very small but that is where the vast majority of the population resides. The "conservative" regions are relatively sparsely populated.
California has a bicameral state legislature, a senate and an assembly. For the last 42 years the California state senate has been exclusively controlled by the democrats, and the democrats have controlled the assembly for 40 of the last 42 years.
...perhaps it sends the message that what you are able to do, and what you continue to do effectively is more important than what on-paper tests you've passed. the board member did not effectively research the candidate...whether or not the CEO works out in the end is of no consequence.
If you, I, or the next poster lied about a degree then we would most likely be fired. Our ability to do the job would be irrelevant. If we were very lucky we would be allowed to re-apply for the job with an accurate resume/cv. I agree that degrees are not strictly necessary. Some *very rare* individuals can learn the same lessons on their own, although nearly all who believe that they can do so are mistaken, and for some things on the job experience can be roughly equivalent. The real intended lesson of automatic termination is never falsify your application. Employers rightfully want a very high price to be associated with such falsification.
Has Yahoo followed this very common policy of instantly terminating anyone who falsified their application? Why does the CEO get a pass compared to all other employees [/sarcasm]? That is the real question that this controversy raises.
He gives his honest opinion, saying what he believes to be true. There is no place for this sort of thing in the boardroom.
Actually this sort of thing is perfect for the boardroom, and it is something a person with the heart and soul of a salesman is likely to say at that level. The difference is that such a person would not say such a thing in public, only the privacy of the boardroom.
There are plenty of dysfunctional board members but not all are so. This is exactly the reason you have expert who are not competitors on your board.
In the long run Apple may also be in the middle, not just the high end. If they follow the same pattern that they demonstrated with the iPod and iPhone then when a 4th generation iPad shows up at the $500 price point, the 3rd generation iPad may be offered at $400 and the iPad 2 at $300.
Of course I am curious as to why the original iPad was simply retired. Perhaps there were cost or performance issues in the long term.
Curious to know how lacking was the perf., in your opinion?
It was just a subjective impression. The device was a recently unwrapped Christmas present still in a largely stock configuration. I only played with it for about fifteen minutes. My feeling at the time while navigating between the various built-in apps, giving each a quick try, and then navigating a couple of web pages was that it was not as snappy as an iPad 2, but I didn't really care. It was a $200 device not a $500 device and it was clearly "good enough". As an engineer I was impressed at what they managed with such an aggressive price point.
My cousin, the owner of the device, was quite familiar with the iPad 2, she often used her daughters, and had a similar impression. However she added that she loved the size, it looked far more convenient to carry around during the day to her.
They answered the right question, that being "why would you want to buy a tablet?".
And they delivered at the right price. It seemed that most other tablets were in the price neighborhood of the iPad, so people naturally just got an iPad because of the iPad's perception of having more features and apps. With the Kindle Fire coming in at such a relatively lower price they overcame this perception of the iPad.
I am an iPad dev and when I played with a Kindle Fire at a family Christmas dinner I thought it was a pretty cool device well worth the price, any performance differences or missing apps were more than offset by the price.
I recall signs on the wall at the cafeteria on Apple's main campus that warned employees not to chat about their work
I worked there for three and a half years as an employee, and I've been back twice as a consultant, and I've never seen any such signs.
I definitely recall a sign/poster warning about chatting about unannounced projects/products where somewhere nearby can overhear you. It was 1998 or '99.
I doubt that "so our employees can talk shop without the competition overhearing us" is their #1 reason.
Your skepticism is appropriate. Apple doesn't only worry about chatter between employees and non-employees. They also worry about chatter between members of different teams within Apple. Employees working on Macs may not know anything more about that new iPhone being developed than the public.
Its been a while since my last visit to Apple but I recall signs on the wall at the cafeteria on Apple's main campus that warned employees not to chat about their work due to fears of being overheard. Again, this is the cafeteria on the main campus, in a secure building, available only to employees and invited visitors that have signed NDAs.
Google still learns about you, and when you're on other websites, the ads displayed there are relevant. Search ads are a source of revenue for Google, make no doubt, but website ads are a much bigger source of revenue.
Mobile ads are considered more valuable than computer ads and mobile is where many expect future growth to be based. Android exists because of this, its an attempt to make sure Google remains relevant as people shift to mobile devices. Things like Siri are a serious threat. It makes Android much more essential to Google's future, assuming of course that Android-based handset providers do not add their own Siri-like functionality that filters search and does its own presentation of results.
The difference between Siri and what this author is referencing as "Google" is query entry by voice or query entry by keyboard.
There is a far more important difference. Google is not getting the opportunity to display the search results, Apple is filtering and doing the presentation, so Google is not getting a chance to display ads.
This is *critical* because ads are Google's lifeblood. Search, email, social, etc... they are just vehicles to deliver targeted ads. Google is a targeted advertising company and filters like Siri threaten their core business.
Well sending robots is the first step. Even NASA did so in the 1960s. The Surveyor program tested technology, landing, and various other things before the Apollo program sent the humans. One of the Apollo missions landed within a couple of hundred meters of one of the Surveyor missions. The astronauts visited the robot and brought back one of its cameras.
Maybe, maybe not. Its not like instagram raised a billon from the market. The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision was largely made by one person.
Forget losing performance, think about your GPU running 100% when it only needs to be at 10% and what that will due to your powerbill. My GTX460 eats 150watts and newer cards will be even more.
And fan noise as the various fans in your system desperate try to cool things down.
Especially those things with a factory supplied backdoor. Regardless of the complexity of the password, regardless of how the marketing guys try to spin it as a "maintenance portal" or whatever they are calling it (assuming of course customers knew it was there), such a thing is essentially a backdoor.
Hopefully this was something that customers were aware of and something that customers could disable. Or more optimistically a debugging feature customers would have to enable for a session while in direct communication with the factory. Even so a hypothetically generate-able password is troubling.
In x86 land the code/data bloat is somewhat offset by the doubling of the number of general purpose registers and other architectural improvements of 64-bit mode. 64-bit mode is not strictly a wider incarnation of 32-bit mode.
That said your point is very valid. Write portable code, build for both modes and measure is the way to go IMHO.
Now I have to go, depressed and sad... your post reminded me of the Alpha we spent so much time studying in grad school in that mid 90s time frame.:-)
There is a lot more water on the asteroids than is on the moon. Is it feasible to exhaust the lunar supply, as we are doing with oil? Plus if the asteroid mining gets efficient enough then even the relatively small gravity well of the moon could be a disadvantage, prohibitive shipping costs to orbit.
It's not just about needing more memory. Lots of 32-bit apps made/make lots of assumptions about data type sizes, such as default int size, that can cause issues when moving to 64-bit. You've not worked with much legacy code if you think most apps will run just fine as is.
Actually I am quite familiar with moving code between 32-bit and 64-bit environments (and gag, 16-bit in the distant past), between CPUs with different byte orderings etc. You are assuming the legacy code is being recompiled as a native 64-bit app. That is rarely the case. Running the old 32-bit binaries, or if maintenance is still being performed then continuing to generate 32-bit binaries, is far more likely. Unless you are hard up for more RAM there is rarely any benefit to porting the code to 64-bit. The performance gains are likely to be marginal. And the legacy app's run-time performance is likely to be just fine, running faster than every just because of the hardware improvements since it was originally developed. Modern 64-bit OS environments run their legacy 32-bit apps just fine.
Does anyone know what the (plausible) ROI for this is?
5 year, 25 year, 100 year?
The real return will not be from delivering things to earth, rather it will be delivering things to orbit and the moon to further orbital and lunar construction and habitation. Lifting metals and waters from the earth to orbit or the moon is very expensive. Getting those resources "locally" (local in terms of gravity well not absolute distance) is the way to go and someone will get very rich doing so. The problem is that a profitable mining enterprise is optimistically many decades in the future, more likely something for the next century at our current pace.
64-bit hardware doesn't require reworking old apps, most 32-bit apps will run just fine as is. Unless you need more memory than your 32-bit environment can provide I doubt many 32-bit apps are being revisited.
Games are an area where C/C++ has always been strong, one needs the performance, except possibly for casual games.
iOS is another thing that may contribute to increased C/C++ usage. When you target iOS you have to use Objective C, this is what the iOS API uses. However there is no problem using C/C++ code in the non-user interface portions of your code. For example in an iOS calculator app (rpn, scientific, statistics, business, hex) the user interface code is all Objective C but all the handlers for the button presses and all the math is in C/C++. This makes porting and testing easier. With respect to testing I can build regression and fuzzing test apps for the Linux console that include the button handlers and math code, these test apps then simulate button presses and check "displayed" results and various calculator registers (stack, memory, special purpose, etc).
And of course there is the combination of the two. iOS games. The core of the game itself should be written in C/C++ for performance and portability.
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My roommate (who can well afford it) is trying to avoid the SMS tax on his pay as you go phone, so I have to email him if I want a timely response, and hope he's near a computer.
Near a computer? Phones that can do SMS and email are free with many plans these days. If "push emails" are supported by the phone the emails arrive relatively immediately, not when the user happens to check email. It doesn't seem terribly different than SMS in such a case.
Please examine the California constitution (prior to last year) then come back and explain who really controls fiscal policy when Republicans have more than 1/3 of the representatives and won't vote to fund anything.
Sorry but history does not match your political party talking points. For example:
"During his time as Governor, Davis [Democrat] made education his top priority and California spent eight billion dollars more than was required under Proposition 98 during his first term."
"During the economic boom years of the Davis administration, the California budget expanded to cover Davis's new programs."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Davis
Its recent success has obviously been tied to one gigantic hit platform, for which it is the only natively supported PL.
To be clear, objective-c is only required for iOS user interface code. An iOS developer is free to use c/c++ elsewhere, free to use posix rather than iOS for many operating system services, etc.
You are leaving out the fact that untill about a year ago Calironia was actually run by Republicans. With the exception of the bay area and LA, California actually votes republican (not saying Democrats are any better, just pointing out the data).
No. The state senate has been democrat controlled for 42 years and the state assembly for 40 of 42 years. The legislature "runs" the state, particularly in the area of education, not the governor.
San Fran & it's surrounds are very liberal. The rest of the state, not quite as much. Not that I think that has *anything* to do with the test results.
The state is "liberal" overall. Geographically "liberal" regions may be very small but that is where the vast majority of the population resides. The "conservative" regions are relatively sparsely populated.
California has a bicameral state legislature, a senate and an assembly. For the last 42 years the California state senate has been exclusively controlled by the democrats, and the democrats have controlled the assembly for 40 of the last 42 years.
...perhaps it sends the message that what you are able to do, and what you continue to do effectively is more important than what on-paper tests you've passed. the board member did not effectively research the candidate...whether or not the CEO works out in the end is of no consequence.
If you, I, or the next poster lied about a degree then we would most likely be fired. Our ability to do the job would be irrelevant. If we were very lucky we would be allowed to re-apply for the job with an accurate resume/cv. I agree that degrees are not strictly necessary. Some *very rare* individuals can learn the same lessons on their own, although nearly all who believe that they can do so are mistaken, and for some things on the job experience can be roughly equivalent. The real intended lesson of automatic termination is never falsify your application. Employers rightfully want a very high price to be associated with such falsification.
Has Yahoo followed this very common policy of instantly terminating anyone who falsified their application? Why does the CEO get a pass compared to all other employees [/sarcasm]? That is the real question that this controversy raises.
... but it's ridiculous to hold politicians to absurdly high standards and react with cynicism when they fail them ...
Politicians? Isn't this really the case of holding a PhD candidate to a really high standard?
He gives his honest opinion, saying what he believes to be true. There is no place for this sort of thing in the boardroom.
Actually this sort of thing is perfect for the boardroom, and it is something a person with the heart and soul of a salesman is likely to say at that level. The difference is that such a person would not say such a thing in public, only the privacy of the boardroom.
There are plenty of dysfunctional board members but not all are so. This is exactly the reason you have expert who are not competitors on your board.
In the long run Apple may also be in the middle, not just the high end. If they follow the same pattern that they demonstrated with the iPod and iPhone then when a 4th generation iPad shows up at the $500 price point, the 3rd generation iPad may be offered at $400 and the iPad 2 at $300.
Of course I am curious as to why the original iPad was simply retired. Perhaps there were cost or performance issues in the long term.
Curious to know how lacking was the perf., in your opinion?
It was just a subjective impression. The device was a recently unwrapped Christmas present still in a largely stock configuration. I only played with it for about fifteen minutes. My feeling at the time while navigating between the various built-in apps, giving each a quick try, and then navigating a couple of web pages was that it was not as snappy as an iPad 2, but I didn't really care. It was a $200 device not a $500 device and it was clearly "good enough". As an engineer I was impressed at what they managed with such an aggressive price point.
My cousin, the owner of the device, was quite familiar with the iPad 2, she often used her daughters, and had a similar impression. However she added that she loved the size, it looked far more convenient to carry around during the day to her.
They answered the right question, that being "why would you want to buy a tablet?".
And they delivered at the right price. It seemed that most other tablets were in the price neighborhood of the iPad, so people naturally just got an iPad because of the iPad's perception of having more features and apps. With the Kindle Fire coming in at such a relatively lower price they overcame this perception of the iPad.
I am an iPad dev and when I played with a Kindle Fire at a family Christmas dinner I thought it was a pretty cool device well worth the price, any performance differences or missing apps were more than offset by the price.
... someone nearby ...
I recall signs on the wall at the cafeteria on Apple's main campus that warned employees not to chat about their work
I worked there for three and a half years as an employee, and I've been back twice as a consultant, and I've never seen any such signs.
I definitely recall a sign/poster warning about chatting about unannounced projects/products where somewhere nearby can overhear you. It was 1998 or '99.
I doubt that "so our employees can talk shop without the competition overhearing us" is their #1 reason.
Your skepticism is appropriate. Apple doesn't only worry about chatter between employees and non-employees. They also worry about chatter between members of different teams within Apple. Employees working on Macs may not know anything more about that new iPhone being developed than the public.
Its been a while since my last visit to Apple but I recall signs on the wall at the cafeteria on Apple's main campus that warned employees not to chat about their work due to fears of being overheard. Again, this is the cafeteria on the main campus, in a secure building, available only to employees and invited visitors that have signed NDAs.
Google still learns about you, and when you're on other websites, the ads displayed there are relevant. Search ads are a source of revenue for Google, make no doubt, but website ads are a much bigger source of revenue.
Mobile ads are considered more valuable than computer ads and mobile is where many expect future growth to be based. Android exists because of this, its an attempt to make sure Google remains relevant as people shift to mobile devices. Things like Siri are a serious threat. It makes Android much more essential to Google's future, assuming of course that Android-based handset providers do not add their own Siri-like functionality that filters search and does its own presentation of results.
The difference between Siri and what this author is referencing as "Google" is query entry by voice or query entry by keyboard.
There is a far more important difference. Google is not getting the opportunity to display the search results, Apple is filtering and doing the presentation, so Google is not getting a chance to display ads.
... they are just vehicles to deliver targeted ads. Google is a targeted advertising company and filters like Siri threaten their core business.
This is *critical* because ads are Google's lifeblood. Search, email, social, etc
Well sending robots is the first step. Even NASA did so in the 1960s. The Surveyor program tested technology, landing, and various other things before the Apollo program sent the humans. One of the Apollo missions landed within a couple of hundred meters of one of the Surveyor missions. The astronauts visited the robot and brought back one of its cameras.
there's a new dot-com bubble
Maybe, maybe not. Its not like instagram raised a billon from the market. The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision was largely made by one person.
Forget losing performance, think about your GPU running 100% when it only needs to be at 10% and what that will due to your powerbill. My GTX460 eats 150watts and newer cards will be even more.
And fan noise as the various fans in your system desperate try to cool things down.
Nothing is 100% secure. Nothing. At. All.
Especially those things with a factory supplied backdoor. Regardless of the complexity of the password, regardless of how the marketing guys try to spin it as a "maintenance portal" or whatever they are calling it (assuming of course customers knew it was there), such a thing is essentially a backdoor.
Hopefully this was something that customers were aware of and something that customers could disable. Or more optimistically a debugging feature customers would have to enable for a session while in direct communication with the factory. Even so a hypothetically generate-able password is troubling.
In x86 land the code/data bloat is somewhat offset by the doubling of the number of general purpose registers and other architectural improvements of 64-bit mode. 64-bit mode is not strictly a wider incarnation of 32-bit mode.
... your post reminded me of the Alpha we spent so much time studying in grad school in that mid 90s time frame. :-)
That said your point is very valid. Write portable code, build for both modes and measure is the way to go IMHO.
Now I have to go, depressed and sad
There is a lot more water on the asteroids than is on the moon. Is it feasible to exhaust the lunar supply, as we are doing with oil? Plus if the asteroid mining gets efficient enough then even the relatively small gravity well of the moon could be a disadvantage, prohibitive shipping costs to orbit.
It's not just about needing more memory. Lots of 32-bit apps made/make lots of assumptions about data type sizes, such as default int size, that can cause issues when moving to 64-bit. You've not worked with much legacy code if you think most apps will run just fine as is.
Actually I am quite familiar with moving code between 32-bit and 64-bit environments (and gag, 16-bit in the distant past), between CPUs with different byte orderings etc. You are assuming the legacy code is being recompiled as a native 64-bit app. That is rarely the case. Running the old 32-bit binaries, or if maintenance is still being performed then continuing to generate 32-bit binaries, is far more likely. Unless you are hard up for more RAM there is rarely any benefit to porting the code to 64-bit. The performance gains are likely to be marginal. And the legacy app's run-time performance is likely to be just fine, running faster than every just because of the hardware improvements since it was originally developed. Modern 64-bit OS environments run their legacy 32-bit apps just fine.
Does anyone know what the (plausible) ROI for this is?
5 year, 25 year, 100 year?
The real return will not be from delivering things to earth, rather it will be delivering things to orbit and the moon to further orbital and lunar construction and habitation. Lifting metals and waters from the earth to orbit or the moon is very expensive. Getting those resources "locally" (local in terms of gravity well not absolute distance) is the way to go and someone will get very rich doing so. The problem is that a profitable mining enterprise is optimistically many decades in the future, more likely something for the next century at our current pace.
64-bit hardware doesn't require reworking old apps, most 32-bit apps will run just fine as is. Unless you need more memory than your 32-bit environment can provide I doubt many 32-bit apps are being revisited.
Games are an area where C/C++ has always been strong, one needs the performance, except possibly for casual games.
iOS is another thing that may contribute to increased C/C++ usage. When you target iOS you have to use Objective C, this is what the iOS API uses. However there is no problem using C/C++ code in the non-user interface portions of your code. For example in an iOS calculator app (rpn, scientific, statistics, business, hex) the user interface code is all Objective C but all the handlers for the button presses and all the math is in C/C++. This makes porting and testing easier. With respect to testing I can build regression and fuzzing test apps for the Linux console that include the button handlers and math code, these test apps then simulate button presses and check "displayed" results and various calculator registers (stack, memory, special purpose, etc).
And of course there is the combination of the two. iOS games. The core of the game itself should be written in C/C++ for performance and portability.