People likely abhor Popeil because of the general disdain for telemarketing and infomercials,
Popeil was a whiz with injection plastic molding, he knew how to get it done fast and on the cheap. Certainly his marketing was way over the top, but his products are a good study in how to get products to market quickly at low cost.
There was no luck. Anyone with half a brain knew that OS9 was shit and tanking fast. They needed something better and fast, they had no time to start from scratch. They hired back Jobs because he basically forked Mac OS and re-wrote it correctly as Next OS. With just a little work Next OS became OSX and suddenly apple can sell real computers with real operating systems on them. no magic, no luck. just pure engineering skill.
So Jobs role was to judge that Apple had enough of a monopoly on design to make more money by screwing the customer and throwing away the downscale/rational part of the market.
Make products that deliberately wear out, make products that can not keep pace and must be replaced. That was his contribution.
Perhaps you can name a successful manufacturer of automobiles or furniture that DOES NOT operate by these same principles???
perhaps you would like to pick the moment in time where we stop innovating and making new things and start making the same thing every year
When vendors are still banging out tablets loaded with Jellybean and Kitkat, which is what 2011/2012 respectively, then three years is NOT a long time in tablet history at all!
yeah tablets go way back, elvis had one, john lennon wrote all his music on one
Living here, I can tell you it's truer than ever. I worked at the Toys R Us there at Florida Mall, and we would have "code red" exercises, which meant tour buses just pulled up and we're about to get slammed. It would usually be tourists from Brazil or Britain, and other south American and European countries. Literally 3 or 4 buses at a time, couple of times a day. Tourist LOVE to shop here, for whatever reason.
the entire state is about to be ankle-deep in salt water, gotta enjoy it while you can
A problem that I see *often* is in not knowing how to do math on a computer. People have a working model that numbers have infinite range and floating point numbers have infinite precision. Thus you see a lot of "(giantnumber * giantnumber) / tinynumber" and the get an overflow; or worse, it works for their test cases and their customers are the ones to get overflows and bizarre results.
I knew someone who stored floating point numbers as text (a waste of space), because otherwise the results seemed to be inaccurate when stored as binary. But so many common decimal numbers can not be represented in binary floating point with a fixed number of bits, like "0.1". Occasionally there would still be problems and the person would come to me and ask why two numbers did not compare as equal even though they looked the same when printed out.
You don't even need a floating point unit to confound most programmers.
Overflow of simple integer arithmetic is the #1 source of bugs.
CPU specific behavior, outside of the realm of the C specification, makes the bugs even bigger and badder.
people with a mind trained in logic and structural thinking (mathematicians, physicists), have a very clear advantage, and it will show in the the quality and maintainability of the code.
Actually the opposite is true. Skilled niche engineers tend to write frightfully cryptic code. It's totally brilliant stuff that runs fast and works like the dickens but it's just chicken scratch to all of the other engineers.
It's the younger, novice engineers that tend to over-comment and use the more correct programming idioms that they learned in school. The older more experienced developers picked up this stuff on their own, and they code by their own rules.
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People likely abhor Popeil because of the general disdain for telemarketing and infomercials,
Popeil was a whiz with injection plastic molding, he knew how to get it done fast and on the cheap. Certainly his marketing was way over the top, but his products are a good study in how to get products to market quickly at low cost.
Yet there was a lot of luck.
There was no luck. Anyone with half a brain knew that OS9 was shit and tanking fast. They needed something better and fast, they had no time to start from scratch. They hired back Jobs because he basically forked Mac OS and re-wrote it correctly as Next OS. With just a little work Next OS became OSX and suddenly apple can sell real computers with real operating systems on them. no magic, no luck. just pure engineering skill.
The vacuum of consumer demand for computers was created and Steve Jobs was in the right place at the right time.
He's no more special than any other lottery winner.
So Jobs role was to judge that Apple had enough of a monopoly on design to make more money by screwing the customer and throwing away the downscale/rational part of the market.
Make products that deliberately wear out, make products that can not keep pace and must be replaced. That was his contribution.
Perhaps you can name a successful manufacturer of automobiles or furniture that DOES NOT operate by these same principles???
perhaps you would like to pick the moment in time where we stop innovating and making new things and start making the same thing every year
due to google, all human jobs will be replaced by robots
You are blaming google because man has figured out how to use machinery? wow
I also want the apps I do use to be snappy.
netflix is an app
If you're paying $3 for a tablet, then you're buying an Etch A Sketch.
or maybe an excedrin
Cyanogenmod is an independent company
not independent if they need microsoft money to survive
supported by Cyanogenmod
supported by microsoft
When vendors are still banging out tablets loaded with Jellybean and Kitkat, which is what 2011/2012 respectively, then three years is NOT a long time in tablet history at all!
yeah tablets go way back, elvis had one, john lennon wrote all his music on one
This isn't great advice.
it could be MOST AWESOME and EXCELLENT advice if the primary use is watching movies
hang on.
2012 is a 'long time ago'? and a device built and sold 3 years ago is now 'long in the tooth'?
you guys who think that you should go thru electronics like you go thru sneakers, I think your priorities are ALL FUCKED UP.
2012 IS a long time ago in tablet history.
It's NOT a long time ago in desktop PC history.
What's ALL FUCKED UP is your inability to distinguish
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins
kind of like saying "hi, I make buggy whips and whale oil lamps"
For a start ban fast food drive throughs. Silly as it sounds card idling there are a large part of the smog problem.
it's easier to make cars smarter and it's impossible to make people smarter and expecting otherwise is a sure symptom of insanity
no doubt as an anonymous coward you will get many well thought out answers to your question
You still have to pay to have them applied.
if it's done at the factory on automated machinery the cost is probably pretty minimal
cats kill many thousands of times more birds than windmills ever will
Around here they put solar panels in the empty space in freeway interchanges, land that can't be used for anything else.
Living here, I can tell you it's truer than ever. I worked at the Toys R Us there at Florida Mall, and we would have "code red" exercises, which meant tour buses just pulled up and we're about to get slammed. It would usually be tourists from Brazil or Britain, and other south American and European countries. Literally 3 or 4 buses at a time, couple of times a day. Tourist LOVE to shop here, for whatever reason.
the entire state is about to be ankle-deep in salt water, gotta enjoy it while you can
Florida Mall was pretty upscale - Princess Di used to shop there.
Hernando De Soto went shopping there in 1539, he found that the native human lives were very cheap and he brought home a big bag of skulls.
there are a lot of tourists here.
hey honey, we're on vacation, instead of going to disney world or nasa, let's go to a mall and look at electronic gizmos, yeah that's the ticket
but I have an air freshener in my car and I don't want to get shot
A problem that I see *often* is in not knowing how to do math on a computer. People have a working model that numbers have infinite range and floating point numbers have infinite precision. Thus you see a lot of "(giantnumber * giantnumber) / tinynumber" and the get an overflow; or worse, it works for their test cases and their customers are the ones to get overflows and bizarre results.
I knew someone who stored floating point numbers as text (a waste of space), because otherwise the results seemed to be inaccurate when stored as binary. But so many common decimal numbers can not be represented in binary floating point with a fixed number of bits, like "0.1". Occasionally there would still be problems and the person would come to me and ask why two numbers did not compare as equal even though they looked the same when printed out.
You don't even need a floating point unit to confound most programmers.
Overflow of simple integer arithmetic is the #1 source of bugs.
CPU specific behavior, outside of the realm of the C specification, makes the bugs even bigger and badder.
people with a mind trained in logic and structural thinking (mathematicians, physicists), have a very clear advantage, and it will show in the the quality and maintainability of the code.
Actually the opposite is true. Skilled niche engineers tend to write frightfully cryptic code. It's totally brilliant stuff that runs fast and works like the dickens but it's just chicken scratch to all of the other engineers.
It's the younger, novice engineers that tend to over-comment and use the more correct programming idioms that they learned in school. The older more experienced developers picked up this stuff on their own, and they code by their own rules.
If builders built buildings the way that programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
The phrase "software engineer" is a horrible joke, they are bumbling fools akin to "Theodoric of York" in the SNL sketch. "more buffering!"