It does have relatively high costs, but that's because it only covers people over 65, who require considerably more care.
This needs to be understood. Not only so that people understand that medicare isn't a wasteful program, but so they understand this fact: our current setup is another way in which we privatize profits and socialize losses.
Think about the insurance pool. When are people generally assets (net contributors) to an insurance plan? When they're younger, healthier, and employed... and, generally, paying into a private plan. When do we have people on public insurance? Generally during their least productive and most expensive years.
Anyone who wants to imagine a purely private insurance business should think about what would likely happen to premiums if private risk pools suddenly had to cover the population medicare covers now.
Of course, what's more likely isn't that we'd have a private setup where the elderly actually participated in the risk pool. Probably we'd get a system where private insurers limited their downside systemically by finding one way or another to avoid covering that population.
Think of Apple's "iPad" as a big e-reader, with color and video, and it makes more sense.
And a touch screen. And an optional keyboard peripheral.
I see a lot of reductionist views of the iPad and my own take is that these miss the mark. Yeah, I do think it's designed to capture part of the eReader market (not all, since some people will insist on e-ink)... but I think it's also designed to capture part of the netbook market (though not all, because some people will insist on having another OS and more freedom), and part of the portable entertainment market (though not all, because some people don't care what size they're watching video at and/or prefer another gaming platform).
I see a bet by Apple that there's a spot for a convergence device between all these things. And a lot of commentators who assume they're wrong because it's not superior to each one of those devices in their niche. Particularly on slashdot. Not a surprise: geeks like the idea of clean transitivity. We'll see in a year or two who's right.
Is it really? I have yet to see year-to-year analysis of how government run healthcare is performing in various countries. It could be good now, but slowly sliding into corruption and inefficiency. You know, like most government programs.
I don't know about year-to-year analysis, but there's dozens of analyses out there that compare cost-per-person or cost-as-fraction-of-GDP with population health metrics. Just google "health care ranking by country." If you find one where the U.S. comes out on top, lemme know, but by nearly every systemic measure I've seen, we spend more AND get less.
It seems that even IE beat Firefox in Javascript performance now. Firefox sure has been slacking recently.
The chart you linked shows IE 9 and FF 3.7 more or less at a dead heat. So, even if this were an unfortunate turn of events, it's not as if IE 9 had a terrible lead.
But I'm not sure it's unfortunate. High performance javascript in what will likely be the world's most highly used browser for a while? Sounds pretty good to me.
Microsoft was sued by 20 State Attorneys General for violating antitrust laws.
I don't think there's much of a comparison between Apple and Microsoft.
No! You don't get it! That's how deep the conspiracy goes! Either Apple has brainwashed state governments so they don't see that Apple's also violating the same antitrust laws, or fanbois have infiltrated those governments! There's no other possible explanation!
Wake up sheeple and see the truth before it's too late and we have iGovernment!
It's funny, you know. I can't remember one single occasion where Microsoft actually used its control of Windows to specifically prevent a competitor's product from functioning on a PC.
You apparently weren't involved in the industry in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Lotus 1-2-3 and DR-DOS are among the (then) highly discussed cases. Proving intention is a difficult thing, but with all the fuss over time that Microsoft's come to make over backward compatibility, it's a pretty big stretch to claim that they didn't test against what was at the time fairly popular software.
I also can't remember this fabled golden age when ipods and itunes were "quite usable with non-Apple products".
I've never had a problem putting music I didn't buy from Apple on an iPod. I've never had a problem getting music I bought from Apple out of their ecosystem, as they included a "burn to CD option." That's before you consider some of the various hacks out there that will let you move whatever you like on and off an iPod w/o having to use iTMS (or even replace the iPod software entirely) and/or crack their DRM.
But again, that's beside the point. Apple's never used whatever market power they've had to ensure that you didn't have an alternative to their music player, or their music format, or their music store.
As for your underlying thesis, it is immensely naive. "ipod" and "mp3 player" are more or less synonymous for most non-tech people I know.
But not because they threatened anyone or made deals to eliminate competitors. Largely because they're good at marketing campaigns and producing products most non-tech people like to use.
Righteousness has nothing to do with my post, really. I'm not assigning any value judgments to Apple's behavior or Microsoft's in this discussion. I'm simply explaining the difference between the two to an audience that seems to have a chronic problem confusing them because they don't understand market power.
Maybe you missed the part where Apple convinced the entire record industry to allow Apple to resell their music encoded with a special kind of magic that only allowed that music to be played on Apple products. And then, for years, millions of people (sure, not everyone) bought that music without realizing that it would only play on Apple products.
Apple "convinced" the record industry? As in, persuasion? No threats to drop any label that wouldn't agree to some exclusive digital label? If so, we're not really talking about an abuse of their market power.
Funny thing, though... not only is there a lack of evidence things happened that -- with Apple strong-arming the industry -- the way I heard it was that it was the other way around: the music industry (the player with most of the market power in this context, mitigated somewhat by their cluelessness) asked for DRM. It wasn't until the industry figured out the lock-in situation that they started considering an open format, and Apple doesn't seem to have shown any resistance. In fact, most of the accounts on record suggest that Apple was willing to go with mp3s before the record industry was; Jobs certainly made some stump speeches about it before it happened.
You also have to do testing with several versions of Firefox.
Not really. You can almost safely ignore Firefox if you code to another standards-compliant browser. If an optimal cross-browser experience is a must, naturally you test. But it's funny how rarely you end up having to change things between versions of Firefox or, say, Chrome and Firefox. It happens, but it's not anywhere near as common as differences between IE 5,6,7, and 8 and... just about everyone else.
But more to the point is the reason why IE is the browser that dominates the landscape, and unlike the other browsers, it has very little to do with active choices on the part of the user and everything to do with market power. If you understand this concept -- if you understand things like how Microsoft bought up shelf-space in stores when software stores mattered, why OEMs increasingly chose to stop dealing with Netscape from 1996-1998, and in general Microsoft's history at distribution level with their associated business -- then you understand the issue.
Sure they have. Look what they did with the record companies... remember when Amazon was fighting to price music at less than $0.99, they were fighting against Apple and the record companies Apple had brainwashed into selling all tracks for at least $0.99.
"Brainwashed." Not strongarmed? No threats where they refused to sell music of any label that sold through Amazon for less? If not, then we're not talking about market power.
But let's back up a step... Windows (Windows Mobile if you like) ecosystem vs. iPhone ecosystem:
You're still talking about product features instead of market power.
But then again, apple fanboi's will always try to herd a stray iSheep back to the iFlock. There's even an app for that!
Or maybe they just get tired of anti-fanboi idiots making statements that seem to equate:
"Um, you're not forced to buy it. You're perfectly free to buy, enjoy, and develop for something else."
with
"Apple fanboi's will always try to herd a stray iSheep back to the iFlock."
For some reason, for a lot of geeks, it's never enough to just like something else that's not Apple. They have to LOUDLY TELL EVERYBODY ELSE THAT THEY SHOULD NOT LIKE APPLE TOO and this despite the fact that nobody's ever been forced to buy Apple.
No. No they don't. Perhaps you have some kind of blind spot or other cognitive impairment that keeps you from noticing the rather high number of comments on Slashdot that are not only generally critical of Apple, but specifically critical of Apple's lock-down policy w/regards to Cocoa Touch devices, but they're still there.
that Apple is doing exactly what the slashdot community rallied against Microsoft for doing, i.e. the digital wallet, multiple music stores, music players (at least they opened it up to other vendors besides themselves), etc, all crying out that this would be bad for the consumer.
Microsoft had a uniquely powerful monopoly, a hold over the computing desktop for about two decades, and abused that not just through their own product standards but through their market power over OEMs.
Apple's control issues can be a pain, but they've simply never done anything like that. The fact that music players and associated file formats are frequently cited as one of the most high profile issues shows how weak the comparison is: even at their absolute worst in terms of lock-down, iTMS and the iPod have been quite usable with non-Apple products and systems, and most of the time, Apple's competed on their product merits and marketing skills rather than market pressure.
If you decide Apple's practices aren't for you, more power to you. But that's part of the point, really. You've never faced any segment of any industry in which Apple's produced a device or piece of software you might be *forced* to work with, in which their mindshare and market power are so completely dominant you can't just choose something else if you want to. Cranky about their music store? There were other options. Didn't like the iPod? Buy another mp3 player. Don't want to bother to code for Safari as a web dev? Code the standards and chances are you can ignore it. Or use Chrome. Never want to use OS X? You're in luck. Never want any of your money to go to Apple for any reason? You're pretty safe as long as you don't buy their products.
Now, can you say the same thing about Microsoft? Unless you're new to Slashdot, chances are you're aware that for a good long period of time, it was pretty difficult to buy a prebuilt computer without paying the Microsoft tax. You can't be ignorant of the fact that it's pretty much impossible to do client-side web development and not test with (3 versions of) IE. And in many corporate environments, you're still essentially forced to use Windows. Thankfully, Microsoft as been pretty crappy about extending their monopoly outside of the desktop. But even in a world where Apple does brisk business, where Linux is starting to make inroads, where OpenOffice and other tools mean that for most common tasks you don't *always* have to have MS Office to exchange work-related documents.... Microsoft still actually has an incredibly strong near-monopoly grip on the desktop/applications experience.
And that's why statements like this:
Apple's DRM system is just as bad as Mircosoft's has been in the past.
Are flat out, 100%, simply wrong. Apple's product decisions may make their platform less vital and products less appealing to some customers. But they don't ever really try to bend the whole industry that direction, and the only reason they have as much influence as they do is the same reason anybody who comes up with a good idea or a successful model does. Not because they're threatening OEMs with raised license prices if they don't do what they want.
I read the other day on Wikipedia that "older versions of the [Genera] are available as free software." Anyone know if there's a way to get a hold of such a distribution and run it under some kind of emulator?
In a perfect world, more production per unit of labor would mean that we would all have to work less to achieve the same level of prosperity. Unfortunately, that's not the case in the U.S. because our current intellectual property laws allow a relatively few people to take the lion's share of the benefit from the production being done.
Not just IP laws. The fact that a lot of industrial manufacturing is capital intensive combined with the relatively small segment of social networks that access to capital flows in. Or, as Marx might have said, most workers don't own the means of production under a capitalist system. Go back in time and reduce patent and copyright protections circa 1910 or even 1810 (where the benefits were more limited) and story of how the gains in the system play out for labor is pretty much going to be the same.
It's not that copyright and patent laws don't represent another barrier to entry: they sometimes do. But most of the time, they pretty much protect industrial competitors from other would-be industrial competitors.
We software geeks tend to see things a bit differently because for the last 20-30 years, we're one of the few groups lucky enough to be in an industry where we do more or less own the means of production (got a computer? And a compiler? Or interpreter for a capable language? Congratulations! You have production capacity!) because it's relatively affordable. So our barriers to entry are less about capital and more about other things like product awareness, network effects... and cost of compliance with the law, including copyright & patent law.
Maybe this will become more important in the future if it turns out that more industrial capacity becomes available for ownership down at the household level, and that's reason enough to make sure copyright and patent law are a balance bargain rather than a giveaway to lawyers and other people whose sense of entitlement is so great that they really, genuinely view ideas as genuine property, and so I think fighting against ACTA and its ilk are worthwhile... but let's not kid ourselves, copyrights and patents haven't really been the main tool of abuse in the relationship between capital and labor.
Want to innovate by using a functional language to bring your solution to market faster? No can do.
If you're familiar enough with functional language F (and JavaScript) to be justifiably snobby about JavaScript's status as a functional language and suggesting a VM as a solution, you shouldn't have much trouble writing an F-to-JavaScript compiler.
(If you do, then you likely fail the "justifiably" part of the snobby criteria, and you're also probably not likely to get a jump on that time-to-market measure, given how much more involved getting a standard common browser VM out into the world is going to be than developing a compiler.)
A VM's a cool idea, and maybe getting the idea into the heads of the people making standards would be worth doing. But if there's ever been anything like a "too late" point, we passed it a while ago, probably around the time Netscape split their ideas for client programming between Java and JavaScript. In the meanwhile, the JavaScript we have today is generally pretty capable, works across yesterday's, today's, and probably tomorrow's browsers, and implementations are getting faster. Maybe it's not your favorite language, but we could be doing a lot worse.
It has some real weaknesses for sure (dynamic scoping!).
Of all the things to pick on... dynamic scoping? Javascript'd be a harder language to work in without it... you'd essentially be getting rid of closures.
Dennis Chamberland: "I'd lose my patent if I told you."
Can that actually happen?
My understanding was that the whole point of patents is that you could tell everybody about your invention and still keep a claim to exclusive licensing power.
As far as I can see, it's a consume only device. You can read ebooks, and watch videos, browse web pages, but anything which requires any sort of textual interaction will be a pain in the arse.
Unless you plug in a keyboard.
And to go beyond that.... I realize here on Slashdot when we talk about iPhone apps, we mostly like to talk about fart apps and apps that have been banned from the app store, rather than any specific apps which do things, because that lets everybody argue about whether Apple is THE MOST EVIL COMPANY IN I/T TODAY EVEN MICROSOFT ZOMG or TOTALLY AWESOME YOU UNAPPRECIATIVE PHILISTINES. But the fact is that even among people who like to create things, the iPhone and iPod Touch have found a pretty great niche. Yeah, if you're writing code or text, touch is a terrible interface, but if you're creating visuals or audio, a touch screen is a fantastic interface, with arguable advantages over a mouse and PC keyboard, and the creative communities *I'm* familiar with are still pretty enthusiastic about the Cocoa Touch platform in general.
So, yeah. The iPad or something pretty much like it will find a place with musicians and visual artists, and given that the iPad will be in stores in a few weeks and have a notable brand and advertising attached, I suspect it will do well enough. Moreover, many people who have one will probably even be quite satisfied with it. Yes, even if it lacks some feature you find UTTERLY ESSENTIAL HOW CAN ANYONE LIVE WITHOUT THAT AND PUT UP WITH THE TYRANNY BLAH BLAH BLAH....
Don't know if it's for me, yet, though. I'll have to try a keyboard, see what the reading experience is like, and weigh my options regarding mobile connectivity.
While the smugness of the parent post could be interpreted at a stretch as flamebait or trolling, it's in no way offtopic. Comparing code density/expressiveness between frameworks is topical.
Pretty much Zend Framework in a Nutshell. Totally misnamed -- there is no Framework. It's a set of disparate libraries organized into a sort of class hierarchy that happens to have amongst it a Controller class.
No. It won't. There's probably always going to be new ideas about abstractions with the potential to save developers effort once they're implemented. I should hope so, anyway.
Won't the development efforts ever be directed to only a handful of frameworks?
The lion's share of attention is certainly directed towards a handful: Cake, Symfony, Zend (not actually a framework), and CodeIgniter probably topping the list, others like Akelos or Zoop or TinyMVC probably farther down but still striking the fancy of developers here or there.
But it pretty much comes down to developer itches, and the fact that thoroughly understanding a system is usually a task roughly equivalent to writing it.
And his explanation for what caused Sun to fall apart over the last two years makes a good deal of sense... it was doing more or less fine, even growing from its dot-com-bust nadir until the financial crisis hit, and then nobody was buying new Sun iron.
Maybe if you have some details of how you think he ran Sun into the ground, you could share them.
I think the author is mostly on. He's aware Dijkstra was exaggerating for effect, but also completely correct... if you started programming in the early home computing era, you probably started with a BASIC. I was lucky enough to get some varied exposure earlier to some other languages (LOGO and some shallow assembly), but until I was 15, it was pretty much Basic.
And none of my programming habits now resemble anything close to the BASIC I wrote in when I was that age. Except, occasionally, for the rare cases where global state seems to make sense, and even then, I try to namespace things in one way or another. But by and large, I picked up structured programming, I picked up object-oriented programming, I picked up logic programming, and I'm learning to enjoy functional programming.
I will say... there was a time when I was probably close to being "ruined." It was when I was learning C++, and I only really had Pascal, basic C, and Basic under my belt. And I had a pretty solidly structured-imperative mindset, and really hadn't seen any other way of doing things. C++ married data structures and methods in an interesting way, but it didn't seem like more than a stylistic practice to me. I was pretty sure most languages were alike, you just had syntax and typing differences.
But there was one thing: I'd had to learn Prolog for a very specific job. We were teaching it to high school students in a CS summercamp I worked at for a few years. The first year, I just thought "Man, this is weird," more or less got through all the exercises, and left it behind, and did what most people do: dismiss it as an odd research toy. The second year, I thought "this is weird, but interesting." The third year, I thought "Wow. There are all kinds of intriguing ideas here."
And there are, and I still think it could stand to see more usage in mainstream software, but more importantly, I think I'm pretty lucky I got repeated exposure to a language that forced me to think differently before I got very far into actually working in the software industry.
Because I now think there's either a critical period (or possibly, at a minimum, a critical attitude of some kind) after which a lot of programmers tend to lose either the humility or the curiosity that drives people to think about different programming constructs and habits. I think if a programmer has been minimally exposed before they reach it, they'll keep just enough of one or both of those attributes that they'll be interested in what they don't already know, rather than arriving at the point where "they've already learned the last programming language they'll ever need."
And if they don't get so exposed, they become Blub programmers, where generally $Blub is some industry-leading language that does enough you don't easily bump up against tasks that are near impossible in it.
To tie this back in with a point I think the author missed, I suspect that some of the difficulties with Basic are actually part of the reason why it didn't end up ruining more programmers. Almost everybody who really came to grips with it as a tool probably realized that it couldn't possibly be the last programming language you'd ever need (if it weren't enough that any effort to look into working as a programmer revealed that Basic was clearly not the strongest payroll ticket).
parts of the most important standards even came from Microsoft people. They are not all evil, you know.
Particularly their box model. That's right, I said it. The Microsoft box model is actually better than the w3c's css 2.1 model.
With either box model, you have the equation ContainerWidth = Padding + ContentWidth. But under the w3c model, you have to solve this equation, every time ContainerWidth or Padding changes. That's assuming you're using units where this is actually possible. If you want to use relative units, you're out of luck getting precise layout arithmetic and in some cases totally out of luck (unless you want to add scaffolding markup and style that too, but since half the point of CSS in the first place was to minimize that, it should be a red flag that something is wrong).
With Microsoft's model, the browser solves the equation for you whenever any kind of reflow is necessary.
Fortunately, with the advent of CSS 3, you have the option to tell the other browsers to do this the right way. Use box-sizing: border-box;.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, people used to understand things related to supply and demand
Well, since we're invoking the "duhr, people just don't understand economics" argument...
What's the "supply" of insurance?
Or, more explicitly: where does the money for the risk pool that backs insurance come from?
It does have relatively high costs, but that's because it only covers people over 65, who require considerably more care.
This needs to be understood. Not only so that people understand that medicare isn't a wasteful program, but so they understand this fact: our current setup is another way in which we privatize profits and socialize losses.
Think about the insurance pool. When are people generally assets (net contributors) to an insurance plan? When they're younger, healthier, and employed... and, generally, paying into a private plan. When do we have people on public insurance? Generally during their least productive and most expensive years.
Anyone who wants to imagine a purely private insurance business should think about what would likely happen to premiums if private risk pools suddenly had to cover the population medicare covers now.
Of course, what's more likely isn't that we'd have a private setup where the elderly actually participated in the risk pool. Probably we'd get a system where private insurers limited their downside systemically by finding one way or another to avoid covering that population.
Think of Apple's "iPad" as a big e-reader, with color and video, and it makes more sense.
And a touch screen. And an optional keyboard peripheral.
I see a lot of reductionist views of the iPad and my own take is that these miss the mark. Yeah, I do think it's designed to capture part of the eReader market (not all, since some people will insist on e-ink)... but I think it's also designed to capture part of the netbook market (though not all, because some people will insist on having another OS and more freedom), and part of the portable entertainment market (though not all, because some people don't care what size they're watching video at and/or prefer another gaming platform).
I see a bet by Apple that there's a spot for a convergence device between all these things. And a lot of commentators who assume they're wrong because it's not superior to each one of those devices in their niche. Particularly on slashdot. Not a surprise: geeks like the idea of clean transitivity. We'll see in a year or two who's right.
Is it really? I have yet to see year-to-year analysis of how government run healthcare is performing in various countries. It could be good now, but slowly sliding into corruption and inefficiency. You know, like most government programs.
I don't know about year-to-year analysis, but there's dozens of analyses out there that compare cost-per-person or cost-as-fraction-of-GDP with population health metrics. Just google "health care ranking by country." If you find one where the U.S. comes out on top, lemme know, but by nearly every systemic measure I've seen, we spend more AND get less.
It seems that even IE beat Firefox in Javascript performance now. Firefox sure has been slacking recently.
The chart you linked shows IE 9 and FF 3.7 more or less at a dead heat. So, even if this were an unfortunate turn of events, it's not as if IE 9 had a terrible lead.
But I'm not sure it's unfortunate. High performance javascript in what will likely be the world's most highly used browser for a while? Sounds pretty good to me.
Microsoft was sued by 20 State Attorneys General for violating antitrust laws.
I don't think there's much of a comparison between Apple and Microsoft.
No! You don't get it! That's how deep the conspiracy goes! Either Apple has brainwashed state governments so they don't see that Apple's also violating the same antitrust laws, or fanbois have infiltrated those governments! There's no other possible explanation!
Wake up sheeple and see the truth before it's too late and we have iGovernment!
It's funny, you know. I can't remember one single occasion where Microsoft actually used its control of Windows to specifically prevent a competitor's product from functioning on a PC.
You apparently weren't involved in the industry in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Lotus 1-2-3 and DR-DOS are among the (then) highly discussed cases. Proving intention is a difficult thing, but with all the fuss over time that Microsoft's come to make over backward compatibility, it's a pretty big stretch to claim that they didn't test against what was at the time fairly popular software.
I also can't remember this fabled golden age when ipods and itunes were "quite usable with non-Apple products".
I've never had a problem putting music I didn't buy from Apple on an iPod. I've never had a problem getting music I bought from Apple out of their ecosystem, as they included a "burn to CD option." That's before you consider some of the various hacks out there that will let you move whatever you like on and off an iPod w/o having to use iTMS (or even replace the iPod software entirely) and/or crack their DRM.
But again, that's beside the point. Apple's never used whatever market power they've had to ensure that you didn't have an alternative to their music player, or their music format, or their music store.
As for your underlying thesis, it is immensely naive. "ipod" and "mp3 player" are more or less synonymous for most non-tech people I know.
But not because they threatened anyone or made deals to eliminate competitors. Largely because they're good at marketing campaigns and producing products most non-tech people like to use.
Your righteousness is amusing
Righteousness has nothing to do with my post, really. I'm not assigning any value judgments to Apple's behavior or Microsoft's in this discussion. I'm simply explaining the difference between the two to an audience that seems to have a chronic problem confusing them because they don't understand market power.
Maybe you missed the part where Apple convinced the entire record industry to allow Apple to resell their music encoded with a special kind of magic that only allowed that music to be played on Apple products. And then, for years, millions of people (sure, not everyone) bought that music without realizing that it would only play on Apple products.
Apple "convinced" the record industry? As in, persuasion? No threats to drop any label that wouldn't agree to some exclusive digital label? If so, we're not really talking about an abuse of their market power.
Funny thing, though... not only is there a lack of evidence things happened that -- with Apple strong-arming the industry -- the way I heard it was that it was the other way around: the music industry (the player with most of the market power in this context, mitigated somewhat by their cluelessness) asked for DRM. It wasn't until the industry figured out the lock-in situation that they started considering an open format, and Apple doesn't seem to have shown any resistance. In fact, most of the accounts on record suggest that Apple was willing to go with mp3s before the record industry was; Jobs certainly made some stump speeches about it before it happened.
You also have to do testing with several versions of Firefox.
Not really. You can almost safely ignore Firefox if you code to another standards-compliant browser. If an optimal cross-browser experience is a must, naturally you test. But it's funny how rarely you end up having to change things between versions of Firefox or, say, Chrome and Firefox. It happens, but it's not anywhere near as common as differences between IE 5,6,7, and 8 and... just about everyone else.
But more to the point is the reason why IE is the browser that dominates the landscape, and unlike the other browsers, it has very little to do with active choices on the part of the user and everything to do with market power. If you understand this concept -- if you understand things like how Microsoft bought up shelf-space in stores when software stores mattered, why OEMs increasingly chose to stop dealing with Netscape from 1996-1998, and in general Microsoft's history at distribution level with their associated business -- then you understand the issue.
Sure they have. Look what they did with the record companies... remember when Amazon was fighting to price music at less than $0.99, they were fighting against Apple and the record companies Apple had brainwashed into selling all tracks for at least $0.99.
"Brainwashed." Not strongarmed? No threats where they refused to sell music of any label that sold through Amazon for less? If not, then we're not talking about market power.
But let's back up a step... Windows (Windows Mobile if you like) ecosystem vs. iPhone ecosystem:
You're still talking about product features instead of market power.
But then again, apple fanboi's will always try to herd a stray iSheep back to the iFlock. There's even an app for that!
Or maybe they just get tired of anti-fanboi idiots making statements that seem to equate:
"Um, you're not forced to buy it. You're perfectly free to buy, enjoy, and develop for something else."
with
"Apple fanboi's will always try to herd a stray iSheep back to the iFlock."
For some reason, for a lot of geeks, it's never enough to just like something else that's not Apple. They have to LOUDLY TELL EVERYBODY ELSE THAT THEY SHOULD NOT LIKE APPLE TOO and this despite the fact that nobody's ever been forced to buy Apple.
but everybody seems to forget
No. No they don't. Perhaps you have some kind of blind spot or other cognitive impairment that keeps you from noticing the rather high number of comments on Slashdot that are not only generally critical of Apple, but specifically critical of Apple's lock-down policy w/regards to Cocoa Touch devices, but they're still there.
that Apple is doing exactly what the slashdot community rallied against Microsoft for doing, i.e. the digital wallet, multiple music stores, music players (at least they opened it up to other vendors besides themselves), etc, all crying out that this would be bad for the consumer.
Microsoft had a uniquely powerful monopoly, a hold over the computing desktop for about two decades, and abused that not just through their own product standards but through their market power over OEMs.
Apple's control issues can be a pain, but they've simply never done anything like that. The fact that music players and associated file formats are frequently cited as one of the most high profile issues shows how weak the comparison is: even at their absolute worst in terms of lock-down, iTMS and the iPod have been quite usable with non-Apple products and systems, and most of the time, Apple's competed on their product merits and marketing skills rather than market pressure.
If you decide Apple's practices aren't for you, more power to you. But that's part of the point, really. You've never faced any segment of any industry in which Apple's produced a device or piece of software you might be *forced* to work with, in which their mindshare and market power are so completely dominant you can't just choose something else if you want to. Cranky about their music store? There were other options. Didn't like the iPod? Buy another mp3 player. Don't want to bother to code for Safari as a web dev? Code the standards and chances are you can ignore it. Or use Chrome. Never want to use OS X? You're in luck. Never want any of your money to go to Apple for any reason? You're pretty safe as long as you don't buy their products.
Now, can you say the same thing about Microsoft? Unless you're new to Slashdot, chances are you're aware that for a good long period of time, it was pretty difficult to buy a prebuilt computer without paying the Microsoft tax. You can't be ignorant of the fact that it's pretty much impossible to do client-side web development and not test with (3 versions of) IE. And in many corporate environments, you're still essentially forced to use Windows. Thankfully, Microsoft as been pretty crappy about extending their monopoly outside of the desktop. But even in a world where Apple does brisk business, where Linux is starting to make inroads, where OpenOffice and other tools mean that for most common tasks you don't *always* have to have MS Office to exchange work-related documents.... Microsoft still actually has an incredibly strong near-monopoly grip on the desktop/applications experience.
And that's why statements like this:
Apple's DRM system is just as bad as Mircosoft's has been in the past.
Are flat out, 100%, simply wrong . Apple's product decisions may make their platform less vital and products less appealing to some customers. But they don't ever really try to bend the whole industry that direction, and the only reason they have as much influence as they do is the same reason anybody who comes up with a good idea or a successful model does. Not because they're threatening OEMs with raised license prices if they don't do what they want.
I read the other day on Wikipedia that "older versions of the [Genera] are available as free software." Anyone know if there's a way to get a hold of such a distribution and run it under some kind of emulator?
In a perfect world, more production per unit of labor would mean that we would all have to work less to achieve the same level of prosperity. Unfortunately, that's not the case in the U.S. because our current intellectual property laws allow a relatively few people to take the lion's share of the benefit from the production being done.
Not just IP laws. The fact that a lot of industrial manufacturing is capital intensive combined with the relatively small segment of social networks that access to capital flows in. Or, as Marx might have said, most workers don't own the means of production under a capitalist system. Go back in time and reduce patent and copyright protections circa 1910 or even 1810 (where the benefits were more limited) and story of how the gains in the system play out for labor is pretty much going to be the same.
It's not that copyright and patent laws don't represent another barrier to entry: they sometimes do. But most of the time, they pretty much protect industrial competitors from other would-be industrial competitors.
We software geeks tend to see things a bit differently because for the last 20-30 years, we're one of the few groups lucky enough to be in an industry where we do more or less own the means of production (got a computer? And a compiler? Or interpreter for a capable language? Congratulations! You have production capacity!) because it's relatively affordable. So our barriers to entry are less about capital and more about other things like product awareness, network effects... and cost of compliance with the law, including copyright & patent law.
Maybe this will become more important in the future if it turns out that more industrial capacity becomes available for ownership down at the household level, and that's reason enough to make sure copyright and patent law are a balance bargain rather than a giveaway to lawyers and other people whose sense of entitlement is so great that they really, genuinely view ideas as genuine property, and so I think fighting against ACTA and its ilk are worthwhile... but let's not kid ourselves, copyrights and patents haven't really been the main tool of abuse in the relationship between capital and labor.
... it's who's buying the policy.
Want to innovate by using a functional language to bring your solution to market faster? No can do.
If you're familiar enough with functional language F (and JavaScript) to be justifiably snobby about JavaScript's status as a functional language and suggesting a VM as a solution, you shouldn't have much trouble writing an F-to-JavaScript compiler.
(If you do, then you likely fail the "justifiably" part of the snobby criteria, and you're also probably not likely to get a jump on that time-to-market measure, given how much more involved getting a standard common browser VM out into the world is going to be than developing a compiler.)
A VM's a cool idea, and maybe getting the idea into the heads of the people making standards would be worth doing. But if there's ever been anything like a "too late" point, we passed it a while ago, probably around the time Netscape split their ideas for client programming between Java and JavaScript. In the meanwhile, the JavaScript we have today is generally pretty capable, works across yesterday's, today's, and probably tomorrow's browsers, and implementations are getting faster. Maybe it's not your favorite language, but we could be doing a lot worse.
It has some real weaknesses for sure (dynamic scoping!).
Of all the things to pick on... dynamic scoping? Javascript'd be a harder language to work in without it... you'd essentially be getting rid of closures.
Dennis Chamberland: "I'd lose my patent if I told you."
Can that actually happen?
My understanding was that the whole point of patents is that you could tell everybody about your invention and still keep a claim to exclusive licensing power.
As far as I can see, it's a consume only device. You can read ebooks, and watch videos, browse web pages, but anything which requires any sort of textual interaction will be a pain in the arse.
Unless you plug in a keyboard.
And to go beyond that.... I realize here on Slashdot when we talk about iPhone apps, we mostly like to talk about fart apps and apps that have been banned from the app store, rather than any specific apps which do things, because that lets everybody argue about whether Apple is THE MOST EVIL COMPANY IN I/T TODAY EVEN MICROSOFT ZOMG or TOTALLY AWESOME YOU UNAPPRECIATIVE PHILISTINES. But the fact is that even among people who like to create things, the iPhone and iPod Touch have found a pretty great niche. Yeah, if you're writing code or text, touch is a terrible interface, but if you're creating visuals or audio, a touch screen is a fantastic interface, with arguable advantages over a mouse and PC keyboard, and the creative communities *I'm* familiar with are still pretty enthusiastic about the Cocoa Touch platform in general.
So, yeah. The iPad or something pretty much like it will find a place with musicians and visual artists, and given that the iPad will be in stores in a few weeks and have a notable brand and advertising attached, I suspect it will do well enough. Moreover, many people who have one will probably even be quite satisfied with it. Yes, even if it lacks some feature you find UTTERLY ESSENTIAL HOW CAN ANYONE LIVE WITHOUT THAT AND PUT UP WITH THE TYRANNY BLAH BLAH BLAH....
Don't know if it's for me, yet, though. I'll have to try a keyboard, see what the reading experience is like, and weigh my options regarding mobile connectivity.
As a foreigner, you cannot compete in China against a Chinese competitor.
Sounds pretty straight up to me. Big market, sure, but foreign competitors will always be at a disadvantage.
(Score:0, Offtopic)
While the smugness of the parent post could be interpreted at a stretch as flamebait or trolling, it's in no way offtopic. Comparing code density/expressiveness between frameworks is topical.
Give us just a nice set of libraries. That's it.
Pretty much Zend Framework in a Nutshell. Totally misnamed -- there is no Framework. It's a set of disparate libraries organized into a sort of class hierarchy that happens to have amongst it a Controller class.
Yet another PHP framework. Won't this ever stop?
No. It won't. There's probably always going to be new ideas about abstractions with the potential to save developers effort once they're implemented. I should hope so, anyway.
Won't the development efforts ever be directed to only a handful of frameworks?
The lion's share of attention is certainly directed towards a handful: Cake, Symfony, Zend (not actually a framework), and CodeIgniter probably topping the list, others like Akelos or Zoop or TinyMVC probably farther down but still striking the fancy of developers here or there.
But it pretty much comes down to developer itches, and the fact that thoroughly understanding a system is usually a task roughly equivalent to writing it.
Schwartz seemed to do OK with Lighthouse Design.
And his explanation for what caused Sun to fall apart over the last two years makes a good deal of sense... it was doing more or less fine, even growing from its dot-com-bust nadir until the financial crisis hit, and then nobody was buying new Sun iron.
Maybe if you have some details of how you think he ran Sun into the ground, you could share them.
I think the author is mostly on. He's aware Dijkstra was exaggerating for effect, but also completely correct... if you started programming in the early home computing era, you probably started with a BASIC. I was lucky enough to get some varied exposure earlier to some other languages (LOGO and some shallow assembly), but until I was 15, it was pretty much Basic.
And none of my programming habits now resemble anything close to the BASIC I wrote in when I was that age. Except, occasionally, for the rare cases where global state seems to make sense, and even then, I try to namespace things in one way or another. But by and large, I picked up structured programming, I picked up object-oriented programming, I picked up logic programming, and I'm learning to enjoy functional programming.
I will say... there was a time when I was probably close to being "ruined." It was when I was learning C++, and I only really had Pascal, basic C, and Basic under my belt. And I had a pretty solidly structured-imperative mindset, and really hadn't seen any other way of doing things. C++ married data structures and methods in an interesting way, but it didn't seem like more than a stylistic practice to me. I was pretty sure most languages were alike, you just had syntax and typing differences.
But there was one thing: I'd had to learn Prolog for a very specific job. We were teaching it to high school students in a CS summercamp I worked at for a few years. The first year, I just thought "Man, this is weird," more or less got through all the exercises, and left it behind, and did what most people do: dismiss it as an odd research toy. The second year, I thought "this is weird, but interesting." The third year, I thought "Wow. There are all kinds of intriguing ideas here."
And there are, and I still think it could stand to see more usage in mainstream software, but more importantly, I think I'm pretty lucky I got repeated exposure to a language that forced me to think differently before I got very far into actually working in the software industry.
Because I now think there's either a critical period (or possibly, at a minimum, a critical attitude of some kind) after which a lot of programmers tend to lose either the humility or the curiosity that drives people to think about different programming constructs and habits. I think if a programmer has been minimally exposed before they reach it, they'll keep just enough of one or both of those attributes that they'll be interested in what they don't already know, rather than arriving at the point where "they've already learned the last programming language they'll ever need."
And if they don't get so exposed, they become Blub programmers, where generally $Blub is some industry-leading language that does enough you don't easily bump up against tasks that are near impossible in it.
To tie this back in with a point I think the author missed, I suspect that some of the difficulties with Basic are actually part of the reason why it didn't end up ruining more programmers. Almost everybody who really came to grips with it as a tool probably realized that it couldn't possibly be the last programming language you'd ever need (if it weren't enough that any effort to look into working as a programmer revealed that Basic was clearly not the strongest payroll ticket).
parts of the most important standards even came from Microsoft people. They are not all evil, you know.
Particularly their box model. That's right, I said it. The Microsoft box model is actually better than the w3c's css 2.1 model.
With either box model, you have the equation ContainerWidth = Padding + ContentWidth. But under the w3c model, you have to solve this equation, every time ContainerWidth or Padding changes. That's assuming you're using units where this is actually possible. If you want to use relative units, you're out of luck getting precise layout arithmetic and in some cases totally out of luck (unless you want to add scaffolding markup and style that too, but since half the point of CSS in the first place was to minimize that, it should be a red flag that something is wrong).
With Microsoft's model, the browser solves the equation for you whenever any kind of reflow is necessary.
Fortunately, with the advent of CSS 3, you have the option to tell the other browsers to do this the right way. Use box-sizing: border-box;.