eBay was not the only online auction system on the Internet
While this is true, there's a much stronger argument that eBay has monopoly-like market power when it comes to online auctions than exists for the iPhone.
If you want a phone or PDA or convergence device, there's nothing about the *market* that would compel you to buy an iPhone. If you need to auction something online, there are definitely pretty powerful market reasons to go for eBay. It doesn't really matter much if Apple suddenly forbids all third-party apps of any kind and changes all their phones so you have to shake them in order to dial or something equally silly. There's enough competition that the market will route away from their products soon enough. eBay... not so much.
There's really only one place Apple's had anything close to monopoly power, and that's if you wanted to buy or sell music online, which is why you heard labels complaining a few years ago when they realized the DRM they'd insisted on was accidentally giving Apple tremendous power as a retailer. Given that the barrier to entry into the online music marketplace is actually pretty low (dealing with the labels over ownership issues is probably the most difficult part) that's not even a particularly strong complaint.
Apple's desire for control is sometimes a major pain, but it's not a monopoly.
It's this habit that the anti-fanbois -- a population much more rabid and present on Slashdot than actual strawman fanbois bandied about here -- have of insulting anybody who has decided the Apple products meet their needs best.
Apple Fan: I really like my iProduct! It fits
AntiFanbois: Pshaw. *MY* favorite product had the features I prefer two years earlier! I see no value in iProduct! People who buy it are stupid and easily distracted by shiny things!
Apple Fan: You're kindof a jerk.
AntiFanbois: See? Apple Fans can't take well-reasoned criticism of their beloved products! It's a cult!
Apple Fan: I'm not sure we can be friends.
AntiFanbois: See? They isolate you socially! Totally a cult!
1. Designer - Design tools such as Photoshop, illustrator etc (not my role!) 2. Front end developer - Photoshop (for slicing and dicing PSDs supplied by the designer), text editor (I'm using Geany at present) and lots of browsers.
This is pretty much the process I've used when I've been involved on the client side, and while it can have its problems (many designers who've never actually had to code a site have trouble groking liquid layouts and other web-centric design issues), it seems to be the best setup. People who are good coders and talented in both art and visual communications are rare, so it makes sense to divide the labor.
The one thing that surprises me about this process, though, is that almost everyone uses Photoshop to do the artwork. This seemed like a basic fact of life to me, until I ended up working at a shop that did everything in Illustrator, and I was surprised to find out how much better this setup was -- not only did the artists seem to be more productive, the vector artwork seemd a lot easier to take apart however I saw fit as a coder. After working there for three years, it's been kindof painful going back to working with PSDs, and I wonder how much of the industry has every tried both given the apparent advantage of Illustrator...
(And this is to say nothing of Fireworks. I mentioned it in the parent and don't want to sound like a broken record, but if Illustrator is better than Photoshop for this stuff, Fireworks is another 10 times better -- it's all the good stuff about both integrated into a program expressly designed for making websites, and it's so good at its job that I don't understand why its product cousin Dreamweaver gets all the fame.)
When was the last time Dreamweaver gave you standards compliant code (Actually, as a slashdot user, you probably never used Dreamweaver
You might be surprised. I definitely prefer Vim myself, but at my last full-time job, most of the other coders used Dreamweaver and periodically, I'd fire it up... either because I found myself doing something where it was kindof nice to be able to interact with the page visually, or just to understand what the other guys liked about it as a tool and how they used it.
To my surprise, at least with Dreamweaver 8, the code was pretty standards compliant. You could set which doctype you wanted for your (X)HTML, CSS support was decent, and could set it to warn you if you did something that violated the standard. Heck, I think you could actually even set it up to validate arbitrary XML documents.
There were some other nice features. It's sortof nice having an integrated FTP client to save you a trip to another app, the sitewide search and replace function was certainly a little friendlier/convenient than some of the unixy ways, "clean up word html"...
I don't miss it all that much myself, but honestly, I can see why some coders see it as a good tool to work in. Maybe that'll be enough to save it as a product.
Anyone doing design (artwork rather than page layout) isn't going to use Dreamweaver. It's great as a WYSIWYG html editor. From a design standpoint, it doesn't do much else. No raster or vector creation (unless you've decided to try the Celik CSS polygon method).
The only people I know who still use it are coders who find the extra features it provides in terms of editing and site management useful. In this sense, the article is quite correct -- Drupal and Wordpress and other software are eating away at the market that used to see Dreamweaver as the option for editing webpages without knowing HTML. Now CMSs do that.
Given that Dreamweaver really isn't a design tool either, usefulness as an IDE is pretty much the last thing Dreamweaver really has going for it.
Dreamweaver was never a good *design* tool, and I don't know how it ever got sold as one -- maybe the same way we got that horrible name "web designer" for client-side HTML coders.
It's potentially legitimate to call it a WYSIWYG page layout tool for HTML, but that's about the limit. You can't create arbitrary visual compositions with it, you're stuck with whatever metaphors Macrodobe lays on top of the limited tools HTML/CSS have to offer. You certainly can't create drawings of any kind.
If you want to do actual design, it's best to work in something with full vector and/or raster graphics capabilities like Illustrator or Photoshop (or better yet, Fireworks).
And herein lies the problem. Dreamweaver sortof sits in this odd intersection of niches that worked 10 years ago but doesn't work so well now. It isn't a great design tool. It is a decent WYSIWYG HTML layout tool, but it has increasing in-browser and in-CMS competition here. It's also a decent code editor, and I suspect this will be its last bastion of loyal users... but even there, I think it's going to have to fight to stay alive.
But I hope the idea that it's a *design* tool dies a swift death, and soon.
But most Mormons do. They are a fairly conservative bunch on the whole. The story is about a conservative, Republican, Mormon dominated legislature trying to get the internet to play by corporate rules. The "mormon" tag is just as appropriate as a "republican" or "conservative" or "corporations" tag on the story.
Meh. Speaking as a Mormon who's lived a good chunk of his life in Utah, I'd say that while you're correct, any of the tags you mention are problematic. The source of this kind of mistake isn't really any one of those influences, it's an intersection of all of them. The Utah Republican party, particularly on certain regional levels, has its own special brand of cultural crazy that's a product of religiosity applied to conservative "philosophy" mixed in with some provincialism and mercantilism.
And I think the combination deserves no small measure of criticism. The problem comes when in examinining the intersection, someone decides that each of the influences alone is worthy of the same level of blame of all of them. Or just picks their favorite influence to axe-grind against.
People can legitimately object to stereotypes and prejudices. But sometimes those stereotypes are things that are legitimately true and that need to be said, even if they do offend.
The problem tends to be that the stereotypes tend to be caricatures that offer no subtle or genuine understanding of what's going on.
For example:
Tell that to the people living in Utah, or Saudi Arabia, or Italy, who have to put up with prohibitions imposed on them in the name of the silent religious majority.
Yeah, the unavailability of tea and coffee is a real bitch in Utah.
No, it would increase the supply of skilled labor, thus reducing cost of labor across he board for those skilled positions. The immigrants would get paid less, and non-immigrant (native/already naturalized labor) would also get paid less.
Thus decreasing the economic advantage of pursuing science or engineering as a career, especially relative to law, management, or finance.
Thus leading to fewer US natives pursuing an education in these fields...
Which is fine, more or less, I suppose. Deciding to import your technical talent is one way to do things, as long as you have more money than everybody else.
The problem is what happens when these other places can afford to keep their talent at home... while, in the meanwhile, we've let the cultivation of domestic talent languish.
We (meaning America) needs to start churning out more home-grown techies.
Not necessarily. Maybe we can just make do with nothing more than a comparative advantage is in management, insurance, banking, and finance!;)
Seriously, I'm not sure that the problem is that we can't produce technically proficient and brilliant folks who can advance science. The problem very well may be that as our society doesn't reward these people very well, particularly in comparison to how well it rewards lawyers, medical specialists, and MBAs. Phil Greenspun's classic Women in Science explores this (and is actually far more about the problem of rewards for a scientific career than it is specifically about gender distribution in said careers).
I really don't hold out a lot of hope for this. Academia would be hard to change, but it's changeable, and it's probably easier to steer on a public policy level than the private sector. As for the private sector... our culture there is quite simply primed to value marketers and legal talent and management more than production workers. In fact, it's pretty much a solid tenet in the business world since the advent of industrialism that you want to make production labor as fungible as possible. We've liked to believe that creative/knowledge/information workers are immune from the reach of this, but they're not. The culture will drive management and owners to see science and engineering talent as a production resource and cost center. The other thing -- worse still -- is that it might well be true that legal, finance, and management talent can bring capital holders and business owners better returns than technical talent. At least over the last 30 years or so.
Combine that with the fact that technical fields of study involve some hard intellectual work. And then add to that the problem that even with recent geek chic, there are still plenty of other professions with higher social status (on top of monetary rewards). I really doubt we're going to see any change in whether the US produces more science and engineering talent. Maybe the following could happen, though, in rough order from most to least likely:
1) The economies of foreign countries become better places for their own talent to stay. They don't emigrate here, and local demand grows enough outsourcing isn't cheap either. Scientific / engineering talent becomes more expensive, and people who might have done something else decide it's worthwhile. 2) Education, cultural, and policy changes encourage scientists and engineers to become more entrepreneurial and reap more rewards from their disciplinary sweat equity, so the potential financial rewards rise. 3) Our downturn and narratives about our downturn become so severe towards bankers, finance folks, C-execs, and other suitlike entitites that capital holders and business are reluctant to shower them with rich financial rewards.
We still want to encourage immigration though.
It's true, immigration itself is a somewhat selective process, and being somewhat selective beyond that brings high-quality labor and potential social capital into the system.
However... I don't know about the H1-B model. Seems to me it mostly allows us to place our finger on the scales of balance between talent and compensation.
Obama is showing hypocrisy in record time, he's barely been in a month.
He has barely been in a month. And inside that month, I've heard more final-sounding verdicts on his presidency than in any new president's time in the last 16 years of following politics. He's just another politician. He doesn't care about privacy. Or the constitution. Or transparency. His talk of bipartisanship is empty. He doesn't understand economics. He's vindicated Bush by having any measure of continuity. He's responsible for the next terrorist attack. All in four weeks.
I think in another 2-4 years, it'll be time to come to conclusions about these things. Not that there's anything wrong with asking questions now, but anybody who's somehow arrived at a *conclusion* about Obama's presidency this early in the game is jumping to them, not thinking them through.
I also think it's worth pointing out that some of the things he's promised have tension between each other -- for example, bipartisanship and transparency regarding the previous administration (that might in fact be part of what's going on here, since the transparency policies regarding Obama's own administration seem promising so far). An unsubtle view would be that this tension between two principles always implies that a politician who has stated commitment to both is simply dissembling, but when you get down to the business of leadership, just like engineering, you're often (if not usually) working with tradeoffs between values that may each have their worthy points. Maybe I'm different from a lot of other voters, but I picked Obama precisely because I thought he seemed like he had the kind of mind that could navigate things this way, not because I thought he was a pure avatar of an ideology.
So far, the only thing I'm solidly unhappy with is his FISA reversal (and that was a senate decision) and decision to federally fund international clinics that would use abortion as a family planning method. Everything else looks like he's considering tradeoffs.
In his latest blog entry, Douglas Crockford postulates that companies using IE6 are probably among the less efficient and competent ones, and therefore among the more likely to be weeded out by the invisible hand as times get tough.
is how far Apple's fallen here since the design of the Lombard/Pismo Powerbook. Those things would hold two batteries in different swappable bays. This meant that not only was it DEAD EASY to swap out a battery, you could actually keep a laptop running indefinitely on a series of charged batteries... without having to power down.
I suppose individual battery life has improved somewhat, but that's pretty much scant comfort.
No, it doesn't. Those who have more wealth will have a greater say about the existing wealth. It's not a democracy.
I'm glad you brought this up. Libertarians are fond of the saying "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner." They're curiously unable to examine the idea that libertarianism is rich wolves deciding what to have for dinner.
Everyone isn't equal, but the idea that those who have created wealth -- and especially those who have inherited wealth -- inherently have more wisdom in applying it is... well, not even on par with the rational choice hypothesis.
The wealth someone can 'extract' from a property is not set in stone; rather, the ways they can make money from a piece of land depend on what other people are willing to pay for.
You're assuming effects and information about effects passes along the transaction chain, when in fact, it's been demonstrated that information asymmetry is a common occurrence in even direct transactions. The introduction of customers doesn't mitigate the potential for distortions, it magnifies it.
The owner is, of course, entitled to decide if he values (as an example) $500 today more than the possibility of $1000 in a week. Just because he chooses the short term, that does not mean his choice was 'wrong'.
Well, it's certainly not efficient if choosing the $500 now destroys the possibility of $1000 in a week.
I'm saying all values can be expressed through action. If a man hands over five dollars in exchange for a good, then his actions indicate that he values that good more than the five dollars. If that was not the case, then he would have kept the five dollars in his pocket. How can his actions not reflect his 'real values'?
How familiar are you with the idea of information asymmetry and other problems with the efficient market hypothesis?
(Judging by your comments, I'd guess you're an Austrian, which means the answer is: chronically and willfully unfamiliar.)
What's the problem? If using land in a particular way brings in millions of dollars, and using it in an alternative way brings in very little money, then consumers are saying, with their money, that they would rather see the land used in the former way.
Again, this assumes an equitable distribution of wealth between those who value a given piece of land as a preserve and those who might choose to mine it for something else. And again, since in the short term it's possible for those who value it only for the wealth they can extract from it to make more money than those who may have preservation in mind, those people are quite likely to have more money.
If people really value a preserve, then they should be prepared to pay for it. The market does not care what you say -- it only cares what you do.
Which is another way of saying that all real value is monetary value -- a highly dubious proposition.
It can barely even be said that the efficient market hypothesis bears out over time. If you throw in the distortions which follow the inevitable concentration of wealth, and additional systemic problems relating to private local maxima, it's not hard to see how badly a market system may even value sheer practical utility. The idea that it could reach beyond that is a non-starter.
Milton Friedman argued that the legal framework is already in place to deal with companies polluting the environment. It all boils down to private property. Few people pollute their own land and few people care if someone pollutes his/her own land.
This *might* work more or less fine as long as wealth and land ownership are more or less distributed evenly amongst people who might have competing interests in property and markets correctly price in all forms of value.
As an example of what could happen if wealth is very unevenly distributed, you might have a small group of property holders in a given community both owning residences, which they rent, and industrial operations. What's to keep them from polluting the residences?
And if the legal system of recourse is distorted by wealth at all, the problem may not really go away even if you have a similar community where, say, 2/3rds of residences are privately owned, unless they've also got additional resources to handle the costs of coordinating a combined formidable response.
Consider also that conservation uses and environmental protection, while arguably important and even economically valuable over the long haul, may be considerably less profitable than uses that have side effects of spoiling the land. Open a preserve over hundreds or thousands of square miles and you may be able to keep it operating in keeping with its original purpose with access fees and guidelines. The same land, on the other hand, might bring millions of dollars of profits to owners willing to develop it for residence, industrial use, or mine its mineral rights. Given this equation, individuals willing to prioritize more profitable uses will naturally become more wealthy than owners who aren't... which leads to the other kind of problem I pointed out.
Markets are pretty fantastic tools, and there may yet indeed be places where we find trading of privately held assets yields benefits where we use a different model now. But it doesn't take too much thought to find real challenges to the idea that these systems always manage the depth and breadth of different interests effectively.
Your post has some truth if we're talking web development, but even that is quickly becoming irrelevant heading into IE8 whose quirks are not so much standards related as they are just different in the way that Gecko is different than Webkit.
I sure hope so, because the quirks historically have meant that even many of the MS ways of doing things are half-broken. I honestly wouldn't have half the contempt I do for Microsoft if IE6 had even provided MS-only way of doing things that worked where their standards were broken.
And while I've got a little bit of hope that IE8 will be a real improvement, I'm not holding my breath, nor am I really going to give them a lot of credit for basically remaining 5 years behind everybody else. We'll *maybe* have more or less trustworthy cross-browser support for CSS 2.1. I'll believe CSS 3 when I see it, and I'd be willing to bet HTML5 will wait a few years at a minimum. At any rate, I doubt the differences will be irrelevant.
However, Visual Studio and its debugging facilities are second to none. C# is a great language. SQL Server and it's tools are awesome.
I agree with this by and large. These are good tools, my shallow usage of which has been largely pleasant and free of horror. In particular, I think C#/.NET does a good job of being a better Java or C++ for a good chunk of development niches.
But I don't agree they're standout examples of products that provide some evidence of an internal drive to quality at MS. Even C# and.NET, which I think are an achievement, are hard to recognize as essentially MS products: they're more or less a Borland project that happened inside Microsoft because they had enough intelligence and market power to brain-drain and essentially buy Borland. And it's surprising, in fact, how many Microsoft products and tools started life outside of the company and essentially only found their way in because of the company's position in the market. Or, perhaps it's not so surprising if more or less, to a business deal with IBM based on a product they didn't develop but purchased.
When it comes down to it, I can't think of a single product that I'm pretty certain wouldn't have been produced by the industry -- and in fact, wasn't competetively produced by the industry, with someone else holding a real lead at some point -- if Microsoft had mostly kept to the operating systems niche. And there's enough examples of ways in which they've held everybody back for their own interests that I'm not sure their good points are a net win.
Not everything they do automatically sucks. Their net effect on the industry and on developers within it is another matter.
It's not ignorance - it's disagreement with your personal opinion.
If you have some kind of refutation regarding my "opinion" about IE6, then I'm interested. have my doubts that you've got any such thing, however, if you can casually dismiss it as "just an opinion."
It's certainly not just my personal opinion. It's not just groupthink opinion. It's a rather deserved judgment shared by just about every person I've ever encountered who's tried to do any serious client side development on the web, it's the opinion of tens of thousands of developers who've had to do systems or application-level development on anything Microsoft touched before Win2k, it's the opinion of tens of thousands whose projects and employment were touched by anti-competetive practices back in the day when Microsoft's market power wasn't just great it was genuinely frightening.
Just accept that Slashdot needs at least one masturbatory Microsoft bashing article every day
One Microsoft bashing article a day isn't what Microsoft deserves.
One for every 10 hours their product flaws and aggressive monopolistic practices have stolen from developer productivity (or general productivity) is probably about right.
The problem is that if you use that metric, even considering IE6 alone, you've probably got enough for 5 stories every day since Slashdot's inception.
Sometimes people act like the Microsoft bashing is simple knee-jerk or personal dislike. I'm jealous of the strain of ignorance that allows this belief to continue.
Their position in the markets they operate in is pretty much nothing like Microsoft's. Apple is not and never has been a monopoly.
It is *easy* -- not just possible, but *easy* -- and it's always been easy to buy any device apple offers (phone, a media player, a handheld, and, oh yeah, a personal computer) from another manufacturer. Even the *closest* thing Apple's ever had to a lock-in (online music) was easy to circumvent and inside of a few years had serious competition.
Apple generally doesn't use market power to force a consumer's hand. Legal power, marketing power, and even product-merit power... yeah. Market power, not so much.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is pretty much defined by their habit of using market power.
In the unlikely event that Apple somehow creates a piece of software or hardware that becomes a near essential part of almost every personal computer on the market, and then begins to abuse their status, then Apple will be the new Microsoft.
In the meanwhile, saying something like that is just another way of saying "Apple does stuff I don't like!"
If you do it properly will will get a nice set of multidimensional objects and fact/attribute tables which are orthogonal and lean. Easy to understand, search, join, build, compose, decompose, signal and track.
I'm led to believe it's not that easy, but I'd love to be shown wrong.
Also, SQL is a nightmare
I agree, and I think one of the interesting questions is why we don't have something better, or even just something else. There are probably millions of man-hours put into ORM or QBE layers, some with their own hacked-up query languages... that are eventually re-written as an SQL query. But as far as I know, despite the fact that we have open source databases, despite the fact that storage engines aren't married to queries... we don't have any other query languages directly supported by the database (unless, I don't know, is QUEL still supported by Postgres?).
Where's D? Why not have Prolog (or a tabled prolog if you're worried about unbounded queries)? Given the fecundity of the field with regards to all kinds of different programming languages, I don't understand why there seems to have to be One Query Language(TM).
I feel you, man, but every open technology that can be shimmed in to work under IE is a draw away from a Microsoft technology, rendering IE less and less relevant.
Don't get me started. IE8 is a sore point for me. You WON'T appreciate what you hear. (Or maybe you will. But it won't be the most pleasant conversation.)
Well, if it's something to the effect that though for years, you've absolutely hated Internet Explorer 6's limitations and the fact that Microsoft all but abandoned its development, and during those years, while you put up with all its idiosyncracies you accumulated a metric ton of contempt for the company whose half-life might -- if all the issues were addressed today -- only have you wishing painful chronic illnesses on the IE product development team in 5 years, and that despite all that, you allowed yourself a glimmer of hope when you heard the Microsoft folks talking about how IE 8 would support web standards, only to discover that they're basically still planning on being 4-5 years behind everybody else while dumping a lot of effort into silverlight, but you weren't really surprised because honestly, if they had either the skill or will to keep up, they could have done it without breaking a sweat back when IE6 was actually briefly in the lead, and so your contempt, rather than diminishing, is actually pretty much cemented on a monotonically increasing curve which will eventually cause the cretins involved in IE's product development team to suffer debilitating effects proportional their proximity to you.... then by all means, do go on.
Slashdot Mirror
eBay was not the only online auction system on the Internet
While this is true, there's a much stronger argument that eBay has monopoly-like market power when it comes to online auctions than exists for the iPhone.
If you want a phone or PDA or convergence device, there's nothing about the *market* that would compel you to buy an iPhone. If you need to auction something online, there are definitely pretty powerful market reasons to go for eBay. It doesn't really matter much if Apple suddenly forbids all third-party apps of any kind and changes all their phones so you have to shake them in order to dial or something equally silly. There's enough competition that the market will route away from their products soon enough. eBay... not so much.
There's really only one place Apple's had anything close to monopoly power, and that's if you wanted to buy or sell music online, which is why you heard labels complaining a few years ago when they realized the DRM they'd insisted on was accidentally giving Apple tremendous power as a retailer. Given that the barrier to entry into the online music marketplace is actually pretty low (dealing with the labels over ownership issues is probably the most difficult part) that's not even a particularly strong complaint.
Apple's desire for control is sometimes a major pain, but it's not a monopoly.
I'm working on a GWT framework for the iphone that will allow you to write a web application
Perhaps something like SproutCore or Cappuccino or PhoneGap?
(Not that there's anything wrong with a new project. :) Just wanted to make sure you knew. )
A web app can get surprisingly close to being indistinguishable for native thanks to a few features in MobileSafari like:
This is true, and it's one of the reasons Apple tried to get people to swallow the "The Web is your Dev Kit" line.
It's also funny how people overlook this when they start griping about how venal and/or controlling Apple is.
... that bugs.
It's this habit that the anti-fanbois -- a population much more rabid and present on Slashdot than actual strawman fanbois bandied about here -- have of insulting anybody who has decided the Apple products meet their needs best.
Apple Fan: I really like my iProduct! It fits
AntiFanbois: Pshaw. *MY* favorite product had the features I prefer two years earlier! I see no value in iProduct! People who buy it are stupid and easily distracted by shiny things!
Apple Fan: You're kindof a jerk.
AntiFanbois: See? Apple Fans can't take well-reasoned criticism of their beloved products! It's a cult!
Apple Fan: I'm not sure we can be friends.
AntiFanbois: See? They isolate you socially! Totally a cult!
1. Designer - Design tools such as Photoshop, illustrator etc (not my role!)
2. Front end developer - Photoshop (for slicing and dicing PSDs supplied by the designer), text editor (I'm using Geany at present) and lots of browsers.
This is pretty much the process I've used when I've been involved on the client side, and while it can have its problems (many designers who've never actually had to code a site have trouble groking liquid layouts and other web-centric design issues), it seems to be the best setup. People who are good coders and talented in both art and visual communications are rare, so it makes sense to divide the labor.
The one thing that surprises me about this process, though, is that almost everyone uses Photoshop to do the artwork. This seemed like a basic fact of life to me, until I ended up working at a shop that did everything in Illustrator, and I was surprised to find out how much better this setup was -- not only did the artists seem to be more productive, the vector artwork seemd a lot easier to take apart however I saw fit as a coder. After working there for three years, it's been kindof painful going back to working with PSDs, and I wonder how much of the industry has every tried both given the apparent advantage of Illustrator...
(And this is to say nothing of Fireworks. I mentioned it in the parent and don't want to sound like a broken record, but if Illustrator is better than Photoshop for this stuff, Fireworks is another 10 times better -- it's all the good stuff about both integrated into a program expressly designed for making websites, and it's so good at its job that I don't understand why its product cousin Dreamweaver gets all the fame.)
When was the last time Dreamweaver gave you standards compliant code (Actually, as a slashdot user, you probably never used Dreamweaver
You might be surprised. I definitely prefer Vim myself, but at my last full-time job, most of the other coders used Dreamweaver and periodically, I'd fire it up... either because I found myself doing something where it was kindof nice to be able to interact with the page visually, or just to understand what the other guys liked about it as a tool and how they used it.
To my surprise, at least with Dreamweaver 8, the code was pretty standards compliant. You could set which doctype you wanted for your (X)HTML, CSS support was decent, and could set it to warn you if you did something that violated the standard. Heck, I think you could actually even set it up to validate arbitrary XML documents.
There were some other nice features. It's sortof nice having an integrated FTP client to save you a trip to another app, the sitewide search and replace function was certainly a little friendlier/convenient than some of the unixy ways, "clean up word html"...
I don't miss it all that much myself, but honestly, I can see why some coders see it as a good tool to work in. Maybe that'll be enough to save it as a product.
A designer might need Dreamweaver
Anyone doing design (artwork rather than page layout) isn't going to use Dreamweaver. It's great as a WYSIWYG html editor. From a design standpoint, it doesn't do much else. No raster or vector creation (unless you've decided to try the Celik CSS polygon method).
The only people I know who still use it are coders who find the extra features it provides in terms of editing and site management useful. In this sense, the article is quite correct -- Drupal and Wordpress and other software are eating away at the market that used to see Dreamweaver as the option for editing webpages without knowing HTML. Now CMSs do that.
Given that Dreamweaver really isn't a design tool either, usefulness as an IDE is pretty much the last thing Dreamweaver really has going for it.
Dreamweaver was never a good *design* tool, and I don't know how it ever got sold as one -- maybe the same way we got that horrible name "web designer" for client-side HTML coders.
It's potentially legitimate to call it a WYSIWYG page layout tool for HTML, but that's about the limit. You can't create arbitrary visual compositions with it, you're stuck with whatever metaphors Macrodobe lays on top of the limited tools HTML/CSS have to offer. You certainly can't create drawings of any kind.
If you want to do actual design, it's best to work in something with full vector and/or raster graphics capabilities like Illustrator or Photoshop (or better yet, Fireworks).
And herein lies the problem. Dreamweaver sortof sits in this odd intersection of niches that worked 10 years ago but doesn't work so well now. It isn't a great design tool. It is a decent WYSIWYG HTML layout tool, but it has increasing in-browser and in-CMS competition here. It's also a decent code editor, and I suspect this will be its last bastion of loyal users... but even there, I think it's going to have to fight to stay alive.
But I hope the idea that it's a *design* tool dies a swift death, and soon.
But most Mormons do. They are a fairly conservative bunch on the whole. The story is about a conservative, Republican, Mormon dominated legislature trying to get the internet to play by corporate rules. The "mormon" tag is just as appropriate as a "republican" or "conservative" or "corporations" tag on the story.
Meh. Speaking as a Mormon who's lived a good chunk of his life in Utah, I'd say that while you're correct, any of the tags you mention are problematic. The source of this kind of mistake isn't really any one of those influences, it's an intersection of all of them. The Utah Republican party, particularly on certain regional levels, has its own special brand of cultural crazy that's a product of religiosity applied to conservative "philosophy" mixed in with some provincialism and mercantilism.
And I think the combination deserves no small measure of criticism. The problem comes when in examinining the intersection, someone decides that each of the influences alone is worthy of the same level of blame of all of them. Or just picks their favorite influence to axe-grind against.
People can legitimately object to stereotypes and prejudices. But sometimes those stereotypes are things that are legitimately true and that need to be said, even if they do offend.
The problem tends to be that the stereotypes tend to be caricatures that offer no subtle or genuine understanding of what's going on.
For example:
Tell that to the people living in Utah, or Saudi Arabia, or Italy, who have to put up with prohibitions imposed on them in the name of the silent religious majority.
Yeah, the unavailability of tea and coffee is a real bitch in Utah.
No, it would increase the supply of skilled labor, thus reducing cost of labor across he board for those skilled positions. The immigrants would get paid less, and non-immigrant (native/already naturalized labor) would also get paid less.
Thus decreasing the economic advantage of pursuing science or engineering as a career, especially relative to law, management, or finance.
Thus leading to fewer US natives pursuing an education in these fields...
Which is fine, more or less, I suppose. Deciding to import your technical talent is one way to do things, as long as you have more money than everybody else.
The problem is what happens when these other places can afford to keep their talent at home... while, in the meanwhile, we've let the cultivation of domestic talent languish.
We (meaning America) needs to start churning out more home-grown techies.
Not necessarily. Maybe we can just make do with nothing more than a comparative advantage is in management, insurance, banking, and finance! ;)
Seriously, I'm not sure that the problem is that we can't produce technically proficient and brilliant folks who can advance science. The problem very well may be that as our society doesn't reward these people very well, particularly in comparison to how well it rewards lawyers, medical specialists, and MBAs. Phil Greenspun's classic Women in Science explores this (and is actually far more about the problem of rewards for a scientific career than it is specifically about gender distribution in said careers).
I really don't hold out a lot of hope for this. Academia would be hard to change, but it's changeable, and it's probably easier to steer on a public policy level than the private sector. As for the private sector... our culture there is quite simply primed to value marketers and legal talent and management more than production workers. In fact, it's pretty much a solid tenet in the business world since the advent of industrialism that you want to make production labor as fungible as possible. We've liked to believe that creative/knowledge/information workers are immune from the reach of this, but they're not. The culture will drive management and owners to see science and engineering talent as a production resource and cost center. The other thing -- worse still -- is that it might well be true that legal, finance, and management talent can bring capital holders and business owners better returns than technical talent. At least over the last 30 years or so.
Combine that with the fact that technical fields of study involve some hard intellectual work. And then add to that the problem that even with recent geek chic, there are still plenty of other professions with higher social status (on top of monetary rewards). I really doubt we're going to see any change in whether the US produces more science and engineering talent. Maybe the following could happen, though, in rough order from most to least likely:
1) The economies of foreign countries become better places for their own talent to stay. They don't emigrate here, and local demand grows enough outsourcing isn't cheap either. Scientific / engineering talent becomes more expensive, and people who might have done something else decide it's worthwhile.
2) Education, cultural, and policy changes encourage scientists and engineers to become more entrepreneurial and reap more rewards from their disciplinary sweat equity, so the potential financial rewards rise.
3) Our downturn and narratives about our downturn become so severe towards bankers, finance folks, C-execs, and other suitlike entitites that capital holders and business are reluctant to shower them with rich financial rewards.
We still want to encourage immigration though.
It's true, immigration itself is a somewhat selective process, and being somewhat selective beyond that brings high-quality labor and potential social capital into the system.
However... I don't know about the H1-B model. Seems to me it mostly allows us to place our finger on the scales of balance between talent and compensation.
Linked elsewhere in the thread:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
Obama is showing hypocrisy in record time, he's barely been in a month.
He has barely been in a month. And inside that month, I've heard more final-sounding verdicts on his presidency than in any new president's time in the last 16 years of following politics. He's just another politician. He doesn't care about privacy. Or the constitution. Or transparency. His talk of bipartisanship is empty. He doesn't understand economics. He's vindicated Bush by having any measure of continuity. He's responsible for the next terrorist attack. All in four weeks.
I think in another 2-4 years, it'll be time to come to conclusions about these things. Not that there's anything wrong with asking questions now, but anybody who's somehow arrived at a *conclusion* about Obama's presidency this early in the game is jumping to them, not thinking them through.
I also think it's worth pointing out that some of the things he's promised have tension between each other -- for example, bipartisanship and transparency regarding the previous administration (that might in fact be part of what's going on here, since the transparency policies regarding Obama's own administration seem promising so far). An unsubtle view would be that this tension between two principles always implies that a politician who has stated commitment to both is simply dissembling, but when you get down to the business of leadership, just like engineering, you're often (if not usually) working with tradeoffs between values that may each have their worthy points. Maybe I'm different from a lot of other voters, but I picked Obama precisely because I thought he seemed like he had the kind of mind that could navigate things this way, not because I thought he was a pure avatar of an ideology.
So far, the only thing I'm solidly unhappy with is his FISA reversal (and that was a senate decision) and decision to federally fund international clinics that would use abortion as a family planning method. Everything else looks like he's considering tradeoffs.
In his latest blog entry, Douglas Crockford postulates that companies using IE6 are probably among the less efficient and competent ones, and therefore among the more likely to be weeded out by the invisible hand as times get tough.
Hope he's right.
is how far Apple's fallen here since the design of the Lombard/Pismo Powerbook. Those things would hold two batteries in different swappable bays. This meant that not only was it DEAD EASY to swap out a battery, you could actually keep a laptop running indefinitely on a series of charged batteries ... without having to power down.
I suppose individual battery life has improved somewhat, but that's pretty much scant comfort.
No, it doesn't. Those who have more wealth will have a greater say about the existing wealth. It's not a democracy.
I'm glad you brought this up. Libertarians are fond of the saying "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner." They're curiously unable to examine the idea that libertarianism is rich wolves deciding what to have for dinner.
Everyone isn't equal, but the idea that those who have created wealth -- and especially those who have inherited wealth -- inherently have more wisdom in applying it is... well, not even on par with the rational choice hypothesis.
The wealth someone can 'extract' from a property is not set in stone; rather, the ways they can make money from a piece of land depend on what other people are willing to pay for.
You're assuming effects and information about effects passes along the transaction chain, when in fact, it's been demonstrated that information asymmetry is a common occurrence in even direct transactions. The introduction of customers doesn't mitigate the potential for distortions, it magnifies it.
The owner is, of course, entitled to decide if he values (as an example) $500 today more than the possibility of $1000 in a week. Just because he chooses the short term, that does not mean his choice was 'wrong'.
Well, it's certainly not efficient if choosing the $500 now destroys the possibility of $1000 in a week.
I'm saying all values can be expressed through action. If a man hands over five dollars in exchange for a good, then his actions indicate that he values that good more than the five dollars. If that was not the case, then he would have kept the five dollars in his pocket. How can his actions not reflect his 'real values'?
How familiar are you with the idea of information asymmetry and other problems with the efficient market hypothesis?
(Judging by your comments, I'd guess you're an Austrian, which means the answer is: chronically and willfully unfamiliar.)
What's the problem? If using land in a particular way brings in millions of dollars, and using it in an alternative way brings in very little money, then consumers are saying, with their money, that they would rather see the land used in the former way.
Again, this assumes an equitable distribution of wealth between those who value a given piece of land as a preserve and those who might choose to mine it for something else. And again, since in the short term it's possible for those who value it only for the wealth they can extract from it to make more money than those who may have preservation in mind, those people are quite likely to have more money.
If people really value a preserve, then they should be prepared to pay for it. The market does not care what you say -- it only cares what you do.
Which is another way of saying that all real value is monetary value -- a highly dubious proposition.
It can barely even be said that the efficient market hypothesis bears out over time. If you throw in the distortions which follow the inevitable concentration of wealth, and additional systemic problems relating to private local maxima, it's not hard to see how badly a market system may even value sheer practical utility. The idea that it could reach beyond that is a non-starter.
Milton Friedman argued that the legal framework is already in place to deal with companies polluting the environment. It all boils down to private property. Few people pollute their own land and few people care if someone pollutes his/her own land.
This *might* work more or less fine as long as wealth and land ownership are more or less distributed evenly amongst people who might have competing interests in property and markets correctly price in all forms of value.
As an example of what could happen if wealth is very unevenly distributed, you might have a small group of property holders in a given community both owning residences, which they rent, and industrial operations. What's to keep them from polluting the residences?
And if the legal system of recourse is distorted by wealth at all, the problem may not really go away even if you have a similar community where, say, 2/3rds of residences are privately owned, unless they've also got additional resources to handle the costs of coordinating a combined formidable response.
Consider also that conservation uses and environmental protection, while arguably important and even economically valuable over the long haul, may be considerably less profitable than uses that have side effects of spoiling the land. Open a preserve over hundreds or thousands of square miles and you may be able to keep it operating in keeping with its original purpose with access fees and guidelines. The same land, on the other hand, might bring millions of dollars of profits to owners willing to develop it for residence, industrial use, or mine its mineral rights. Given this equation, individuals willing to prioritize more profitable uses will naturally become more wealthy than owners who aren't... which leads to the other kind of problem I pointed out.
Markets are pretty fantastic tools, and there may yet indeed be places where we find trading of privately held assets yields benefits where we use a different model now. But it doesn't take too much thought to find real challenges to the idea that these systems always manage the depth and breadth of different interests effectively.
Your post has some truth if we're talking web development, but even that is quickly becoming irrelevant heading into IE8 whose quirks are not so much standards related as they are just different in the way that Gecko is different than Webkit.
I sure hope so, because the quirks historically have meant that even many of the MS ways of doing things are half-broken. I honestly wouldn't have half the contempt I do for Microsoft if IE6 had even provided MS-only way of doing things that worked where their standards were broken.
And while I've got a little bit of hope that IE8 will be a real improvement, I'm not holding my breath, nor am I really going to give them a lot of credit for basically remaining 5 years behind everybody else. We'll *maybe* have more or less trustworthy cross-browser support for CSS 2.1. I'll believe CSS 3 when I see it, and I'd be willing to bet HTML5 will wait a few years at a minimum. At any rate, I doubt the differences will be irrelevant.
However, Visual Studio and its debugging facilities are second to none. C# is a great language. SQL Server and it's tools are awesome.
I agree with this by and large. These are good tools, my shallow usage of which has been largely pleasant and free of horror. In particular, I think C#/.NET does a good job of being a better Java or C++ for a good chunk of development niches.
But I don't agree they're standout examples of products that provide some evidence of an internal drive to quality at MS. Even C# and .NET, which I think are an achievement, are hard to recognize as essentially MS products: they're more or less a Borland project that happened inside Microsoft because they had enough intelligence and market power to brain-drain and essentially buy Borland. And it's surprising, in fact, how many Microsoft products and tools started life outside of the company and essentially only found their way in because of the company's position in the market. Or, perhaps it's not so surprising if more or less, to a business deal with IBM based on a product they didn't develop but purchased.
When it comes down to it, I can't think of a single product that I'm pretty certain wouldn't have been produced by the industry -- and in fact, wasn't competetively produced by the industry, with someone else holding a real lead at some point -- if Microsoft had mostly kept to the operating systems niche. And there's enough examples of ways in which they've held everybody back for their own interests that I'm not sure their good points are a net win.
Not everything they do automatically sucks. Their net effect on the industry and on developers within it is another matter.
It's not ignorance - it's disagreement with your personal opinion.
If you have some kind of refutation regarding my "opinion" about IE6, then I'm interested. have my doubts that you've got any such thing, however, if you can casually dismiss it as "just an opinion."
It's certainly not just my personal opinion. It's not just groupthink opinion. It's a rather deserved judgment shared by just about every person I've ever encountered who's tried to do any serious client side development on the web, it's the opinion of tens of thousands of developers who've had to do systems or application-level development on anything Microsoft touched before Win2k, it's the opinion of tens of thousands whose projects and employment were touched by anti-competetive practices back in the day when Microsoft's market power wasn't just great it was genuinely frightening.
Just accept that Slashdot needs at least one masturbatory Microsoft bashing article every day
One Microsoft bashing article a day isn't what Microsoft deserves.
One for every 10 hours their product flaws and aggressive monopolistic practices have stolen from developer productivity (or general productivity) is probably about right.
The problem is that if you use that metric, even considering IE6 alone, you've probably got enough for 5 stories every day since Slashdot's inception.
Sometimes people act like the Microsoft bashing is simple knee-jerk or personal dislike. I'm jealous of the strain of ignorance that allows this belief to continue.
Their position in the markets they operate in is pretty much nothing like Microsoft's. Apple is not and never has been a monopoly.
It is *easy* -- not just possible, but *easy* -- and it's always been easy to buy any device apple offers (phone, a media player, a handheld, and, oh yeah, a personal computer) from another manufacturer. Even the *closest* thing Apple's ever had to a lock-in (online music) was easy to circumvent and inside of a few years had serious competition.
Apple generally doesn't use market power to force a consumer's hand. Legal power, marketing power, and even product-merit power... yeah. Market power, not so much.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is pretty much defined by their habit of using market power.
In the unlikely event that Apple somehow creates a piece of software or hardware that becomes a near essential part of almost every personal computer on the market, and then begins to abuse their status, then Apple will be the new Microsoft.
In the meanwhile, saying something like that is just another way of saying "Apple does stuff I don't like!"
If you do it properly will will get a nice set of multidimensional objects and fact/attribute tables which are orthogonal and lean. Easy to understand, search, join, build, compose, decompose, signal and track.
I'm led to believe it's not that easy, but I'd love to be shown wrong.
Also, SQL is a nightmare
I agree, and I think one of the interesting questions is why we don't have something better, or even just something else. There are probably millions of man-hours put into ORM or QBE layers, some with their own hacked-up query languages... that are eventually re-written as an SQL query. But as far as I know, despite the fact that we have open source databases, despite the fact that storage engines aren't married to queries... we don't have any other query languages directly supported by the database (unless, I don't know, is QUEL still supported by Postgres?).
Where's D? Why not have Prolog (or a tabled prolog if you're worried about unbounded queries)? Given the fecundity of the field with regards to all kinds of different programming languages, I don't understand why there seems to have to be One Query Language(TM).
I feel you, man, but every open technology that can be shimmed in to work under IE is a draw away from a Microsoft technology, rendering IE less and less relevant.
Don't get me started. IE8 is a sore point for me. You WON'T appreciate what you hear. (Or maybe you will. But it won't be the most pleasant conversation.)
Well, if it's something to the effect that though for years, you've absolutely hated Internet Explorer 6's limitations and the fact that Microsoft all but abandoned its development, and during those years, while you put up with all its idiosyncracies you accumulated a metric ton of contempt for the company whose half-life might -- if all the issues were addressed today -- only have you wishing painful chronic illnesses on the IE product development team in 5 years, and that despite all that, you allowed yourself a glimmer of hope when you heard the Microsoft folks talking about how IE 8 would support web standards, only to discover that they're basically still planning on being 4-5 years behind everybody else while dumping a lot of effort into silverlight, but you weren't really surprised because honestly, if they had either the skill or will to keep up, they could have done it without breaking a sweat back when IE6 was actually briefly in the lead, and so your contempt, rather than diminishing, is actually pretty much cemented on a monotonically increasing curve which will eventually cause the cretins involved in IE's product development team to suffer debilitating effects proportional their proximity to you.... then by all means, do go on.
Behold the power of HTML5. Coming to every web browser except Internet Explorer.
And IE, too, as soon as someone writes a something to render SVG + video in Silverlight. :)