Actually the place where the LED flicker is the worst is in car tail lights. Most of them flicker in order to reduce the brightness for "normal" usage and not flicker when the brake lights come on. When you're looking right at them you can't see the flicker, but if your eye moves around suddenly it becomes a strobe light. Fortunately only a few manufacturers use them so far, but if they become commonplace I expect it to quickly become a safety hazard.
We'll see. The good developers probably won't be in the first wave of folks looking for jobs. I know our company is still in the "we have to figure out how to hire fast enough to do next year's work" mode.
Where having good engineering really helps, though, is in version 2.0 and 3.0 of the product, and when you try to leverage embedded devices with some of the same code, and when you try to scale it up a few orders of magnitude... basically, it buys you flexibility and nimbleness on the market that the "throw more hardware at the problem" folks can't match.
Despite Moore's Law being exponential over time (so far), adding additional hardware is still sub-linear for any snapshot in time. So it's not going to automatically solve most hard scalability problems.
Indeed, the u10 version of JDK6 is probably the biggest "point" release Java's ever had. For some strange reason Sun has decided not to use the last decimal point of their version numbers, but really this was JDK 1.6.1.
Any comparison of pre-u10 benchmarks with u10-or-later are pretty much completely invalid. This is especially true on Windows, which now uses hardware accelerated pipelines all over the place, so will probably be even more dramatically faster than Linux on the graphics tests.
We've hit a bit of a dead-end. No one is coming up with any UI that doesn't amount to spacial metaphors and "windows" being navigated by a keyboard and mouse. No one has come up with the "database driven file systems" we were all promised years ago, and no one has made the word processor obsolete.
I take it you don't own an iPhone?
That's the future. I think it'll grow up from the tiny devices rather than down from the big machines. Your next TV game console may just be [an iPhone connected to a television|http://www.macrumors.com/2008/12/05/outputting-iphone-apps-to-a-tv-moto-chaser-demo/].
As for the word processor, well, that part is mostly true. Alas, PowerPoint is the new Word for some segment of users these days...
Yes, but I'm sure Microsoft's "3.0" version of Windows-on-a-Ship will be the one that really takes off...
(Part of the reason this kind of software is so expensive is that you want it to work well with 1.0. If you don't mind towing a few failed ships around for awhile while you work out the glitches I could see software acquisition get cheaper...)
I see this argument a lot to justify various technology decisions in schools. Your advice makes a lot of sense for a secretarial or vo-tech program. But generally, the mission of a school is very different from the mission of a corporation, and getting a solid education is about a lot more than how to "prepare them for the real world". Use the tool appropriate for the job-- don't take what corporations do and assume it will be what's best for educational needs.
I'm sure they'll figure out some other way to hurt their own brands. Seriously, if they'd just embraced Scrabulous and asked for a percent of the profit, everyone would be way ahead right now. As it is, no one I know who played Scrabulous moved to the "official" client and few play the game Scrabulous turned into. Opportunity lost.
No, although that would be nice, too (my Dell doesn't support that either with the company's standard image). On a Mac, two fingers down anywhere on the trackpad lets you pan/scroll the active pane.
It works amazingly well, to the point I was trying to use the gestures on my Windows laptop after less than a day of using the MacBook.
I only have last year's MacBook Pro with the limited multi-touch pads, but using my work laptop's Dell's touch-pad is almost painful now. The two-finger scroll is insanely great, in particular. Hitting a scrollbar with a cursor seems like a cruel joke now.
You're right that technically the folks who were first vaccinated in the 70's aren't of age where most would get shingles yet (and the US didn't approve the vaccine for 20 years, but vaccination was common in some countries). However, the vaccine effectiveness has been tested to be anywhere from 6 years to 20+ years and counting, and hasn't been tied to any shingles cases. In addition, regular vaccination with the same vaccine has been shown to prevent shingles in people over 60, which lends additional validation to the theory.
Having said that, some vaccines are unneeded in my opinion; chicken pox, for example, is irritating but better to "experience" as a child.
Are you kidding? Shingles is a potentially disfiguring, often extremely painful event that happens at one time or another to many people who get chicken pox as a kid (shingles isn't acquired... it's a re-surfacing of the virus from within your body). I am glad that a couple of small shots my kids had as an infant will prevent him from ever getting shingles.
Good list, except #3 is a bit specific, I think. There are a lot of other CS fields besides language parsing that teach these skills, and requiring that one in particular is a bit of over-specialization unless that's what you're hiring for.
I'd also still disagree that fearing Java-- or any particular technology- is a good thing. As you say, the language that the applicant spends their workday in doesn't matter all that much, so why not Java? It's easily the best intersection of pleasant to develop in vs. can build something substantial that I've ever used. It's also a harder language to make errors in. It's no ML where "it compiles so it probably runs correctly", but it's a far sight better than C, C++, or Objective-C. (Not sure about C#-- don't have much experience there.)
It's funny that after the Apple II, all the other computers looked like an Apple II. The Apple II was the first to use molded plastics instead of metal, and its technical design was ahead of its time. Don't get me wrong-- I owned the VIC-20, C-64, and even C-128; I didn't own an Apple under the Mac Plus. But considering most people my age got their first exposure to computers through their school's Apple II's, it's hard to underestimate its influence.
I second Java. It's very fast, very portable, well-supported, scales from embedded to enterprise, has great IDEs, is open source, and has a huge body of libraries, sample code, and support.
I'm not sure why you call your fear of Java "healthy". Fear of any particular technology is unhealthy-- it prevents you from making rational decisions about them.
Just to get your last "fact" out of the way first, Mike Markkula isn't spelled how you think it's spelled.
Secondly, while Apple's market share in the late 1970's was low compared to the PET and the TRS-80, it's influence was substantial. Which is why Apple rapidly gained market share and was ahead of them by 1981. The VIC-20 and C-64 borrowed a lot of ideas from it when they came out in the 80's, but when the IBM PC came out it rapidly took the market share lead and never relinquished it.
Isn't that like, the basic main goal of any modern corporation?
Not Apple. They've found ways to be extremely profitable without going to lowest-common-denominator products. Lots of people will point to a chart saying Apple products lack this or that detail that some cheaper alternative has. That's not really the point-- Apple thinks about how their products fit into their customers lifestyle and solves their problems.
There will always be room for Dell, Google, Symbian, whatever in an Apple-dominated market.
They do? So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products and not, say, the output of the sun?
No evidence is irrefutable-- That's the way science works. However, the evidence for fossil fuel combustion being a primary cause of global warming is extremely thorough. Much more so than that of coal-fired plants' Mercury emissions leading to any quantifiable health problems.
Certainly the sun's output varies over time, as does the amount of natural greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. But the amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere is currently way, way outside of the historical natural variations and correlates very well with climate change.
A University is one of the best places to get good work experience in your field. Look for work in a lab or with a research project. Even better if you can get course credit for it, but even if the pay sucks and it's tough to work and keep up with classes, it'll be worth it. Ideally you'll graduate with a degree AND experience and maybe even have a paper or patent or two with your name on it. And if you get a few years of university under your belt and find you have to drop one or the other, you'll have experience to fall back on in either case.
Right on page 2 this article says that they used beta software for Chrome but not for any of the other browsers. Yes, Chrome is only available as a beta-- there is no 1.0 yet-- but if you're going to allow the beta of one, allow them for all. FireFox and Safari both have widely available, easy to download and install betas that are dramatically faster than the last released version and likely to be released well before Chrome goes 1.0 (if it ever does, knowing Google).
So this entire speed comparison is completely bogus before it even starts. Either you're willing to use beta software or you're not, and if you are you probably don't have a problem with Firefox 3.1 and Safari nightly builds.
Are you asserting that every possible method and apparatus for separating wheat from chaff has already been invented, and there is no possible novelty in any new method of doing so? Otherwise, stop trolling.
Caveat: it doesn't filter out radioactive particulates
But it does filter out non-radioactive particulates? I assume there's simply a lower bound to the size of what it can filter and that suspended atoms are well below that size, but that "particulates" would be filtered out, whether they were dirt or little chunks of U-235.
And if you can't make that $100 back in short order, you're not really trying. Seriously, $100 is cheap. I know Google subsidizes their development program all the way down to $0 by diverting funds from their advertising business, but that's a business decision that doesn't really change the basic economics.
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Actually the place where the LED flicker is the worst is in car tail lights. Most of them flicker in order to reduce the brightness for "normal" usage and not flicker when the brake lights come on. When you're looking right at them you can't see the flicker, but if your eye moves around suddenly it becomes a strobe light. Fortunately only a few manufacturers use them so far, but if they become commonplace I expect it to quickly become a safety hazard.
We'll see. The good developers probably won't be in the first wave of folks looking for jobs. I know our company is still in the "we have to figure out how to hire fast enough to do next year's work" mode.
Where having good engineering really helps, though, is in version 2.0 and 3.0 of the product, and when you try to leverage embedded devices with some of the same code, and when you try to scale it up a few orders of magnitude... basically, it buys you flexibility and nimbleness on the market that the "throw more hardware at the problem" folks can't match.
Despite Moore's Law being exponential over time (so far), adding additional hardware is still sub-linear for any snapshot in time. So it's not going to automatically solve most hard scalability problems.
Indeed, the u10 version of JDK6 is probably the biggest "point" release Java's ever had. For some strange reason Sun has decided not to use the last decimal point of their version numbers, but really this was JDK 1.6.1.
Any comparison of pre-u10 benchmarks with u10-or-later are pretty much completely invalid. This is especially true on Windows, which now uses hardware accelerated pipelines all over the place, so will probably be even more dramatically faster than Linux on the graphics tests.
Not surprisingly, the global climate is also in a cooling trend.
And piracy is up...
We've hit a bit of a dead-end. No one is coming up with any UI that doesn't amount to spacial metaphors and "windows" being navigated by a keyboard and mouse. No one has come up with the "database driven file systems" we were all promised years ago, and no one has made the word processor obsolete.
I take it you don't own an iPhone?
That's the future. I think it'll grow up from the tiny devices rather than down from the big machines. Your next TV game console may just be [an iPhone connected to a television|http://www.macrumors.com/2008/12/05/outputting-iphone-apps-to-a-tv-moto-chaser-demo/].
As for the word processor, well, that part is mostly true. Alas, PowerPoint is the new Word for some segment of users these days...
Yes, but I'm sure Microsoft's "3.0" version of Windows-on-a-Ship will be the one that really takes off...
(Part of the reason this kind of software is so expensive is that you want it to work well with 1.0. If you don't mind towing a few failed ships around for awhile while you work out the glitches I could see software acquisition get cheaper...)
I see this argument a lot to justify various technology decisions in schools. Your advice makes a lot of sense for a secretarial or vo-tech program. But generally, the mission of a school is very different from the mission of a corporation, and getting a solid education is about a lot more than how to "prepare them for the real world". Use the tool appropriate for the job-- don't take what corporations do and assume it will be what's best for educational needs.
I'm sure they'll figure out some other way to hurt their own brands. Seriously, if they'd just embraced Scrabulous and asked for a percent of the profit, everyone would be way ahead right now. As it is, no one I know who played Scrabulous moved to the "official" client and few play the game Scrabulous turned into. Opportunity lost.
No, although that would be nice, too (my Dell doesn't support that either with the company's standard image). On a Mac, two fingers down anywhere on the trackpad lets you pan/scroll the active pane.
It works amazingly well, to the point I was trying to use the gestures on my Windows laptop after less than a day of using the MacBook.
I only have last year's MacBook Pro with the limited multi-touch pads, but using my work laptop's Dell's touch-pad is almost painful now. The two-finger scroll is insanely great, in particular. Hitting a scrollbar with a cursor seems like a cruel joke now.
You're right that technically the folks who were first vaccinated in the 70's aren't of age where most would get shingles yet (and the US didn't approve the vaccine for 20 years, but vaccination was common in some countries). However, the vaccine effectiveness has been tested to be anywhere from 6 years to 20+ years and counting, and hasn't been tied to any shingles cases. In addition, regular vaccination with the same vaccine has been shown to prevent shingles in people over 60, which lends additional validation to the theory.
Having said that, some vaccines are unneeded in my opinion; chicken pox, for example, is irritating but better to "experience" as a child.
Are you kidding? Shingles is a potentially disfiguring, often extremely painful event that happens at one time or another to many people who get chicken pox as a kid (shingles isn't acquired... it's a re-surfacing of the virus from within your body). I am glad that a couple of small shots my kids had as an infant will prevent him from ever getting shingles.
Good list, except #3 is a bit specific, I think. There are a lot of other CS fields besides language parsing that teach these skills, and requiring that one in particular is a bit of over-specialization unless that's what you're hiring for.
I'd also still disagree that fearing Java-- or any particular technology- is a good thing. As you say, the language that the applicant spends their workday in doesn't matter all that much, so why not Java? It's easily the best intersection of pleasant to develop in vs. can build something substantial that I've ever used. It's also a harder language to make errors in. It's no ML where "it compiles so it probably runs correctly", but it's a far sight better than C, C++, or Objective-C. (Not sure about C#-- don't have much experience there.)
It's funny that after the Apple II, all the other computers looked like an Apple II. The Apple II was the first to use molded plastics instead of metal, and its technical design was ahead of its time. Don't get me wrong-- I owned the VIC-20, C-64, and even C-128; I didn't own an Apple under the Mac Plus. But considering most people my age got their first exposure to computers through their school's Apple II's, it's hard to underestimate its influence.
I second Java. It's very fast, very portable, well-supported, scales from embedded to enterprise, has great IDEs, is open source, and has a huge body of libraries, sample code, and support.
I'm not sure why you call your fear of Java "healthy". Fear of any particular technology is unhealthy-- it prevents you from making rational decisions about them.
Just to get your last "fact" out of the way first, Mike Markkula isn't spelled how you think it's spelled.
Secondly, while Apple's market share in the late 1970's was low compared to the PET and the TRS-80, it's influence was substantial. Which is why Apple rapidly gained market share and was ahead of them by 1981. The VIC-20 and C-64 borrowed a lot of ideas from it when they came out in the 80's, but when the IBM PC came out it rapidly took the market share lead and never relinquished it.
Isn't that like, the basic main goal of any modern corporation?
Not Apple. They've found ways to be extremely profitable without going to lowest-common-denominator products. Lots of people will point to a chart saying Apple products lack this or that detail that some cheaper alternative has. That's not really the point-- Apple thinks about how their products fit into their customers lifestyle and solves their problems.
There will always be room for Dell, Google, Symbian, whatever in an Apple-dominated market.
They do? So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products and not, say, the output of the sun?
No evidence is irrefutable-- That's the way science works. However, the evidence for fossil fuel combustion being a primary cause of global warming is extremely thorough. Much more so than that of coal-fired plants' Mercury emissions leading to any quantifiable health problems.
Certainly the sun's output varies over time, as does the amount of natural greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. But the amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere is currently way, way outside of the historical natural variations and correlates very well with climate change.
A University is one of the best places to get good work experience in your field. Look for work in a lab or with a research project. Even better if you can get course credit for it, but even if the pay sucks and it's tough to work and keep up with classes, it'll be worth it. Ideally you'll graduate with a degree AND experience and maybe even have a paper or patent or two with your name on it. And if you get a few years of university under your belt and find you have to drop one or the other, you'll have experience to fall back on in either case.
Right on page 2 this article says that they used beta software for Chrome but not for any of the other browsers. Yes, Chrome is only available as a beta-- there is no 1.0 yet-- but if you're going to allow the beta of one, allow them for all. FireFox and Safari both have widely available, easy to download and install betas that are dramatically faster than the last released version and likely to be released well before Chrome goes 1.0 (if it ever does, knowing Google).
So this entire speed comparison is completely bogus before it even starts. Either you're willing to use beta software or you're not, and if you are you probably don't have a problem with Firefox 3.1 and Safari nightly builds.
Are you asserting that every possible method and apparatus for separating wheat from chaff has already been invented, and there is no possible novelty in any new method of doing so? Otherwise, stop trolling.
Caveat: it doesn't filter out radioactive particulates
But it does filter out non-radioactive particulates? I assume there's simply a lower bound to the size of what it can filter and that suspended atoms are well below that size, but that "particulates" would be filtered out, whether they were dirt or little chunks of U-235.
If the threats are just paranoia, why is Novell paying Microsoft for patent coverage for all their GPL distributions?
This is the same Rob Enderle that works for Microsoft now, right?
And if you can't make that $100 back in short order, you're not really trying. Seriously, $100 is cheap. I know Google subsidizes their development program all the way down to $0 by diverting funds from their advertising business, but that's a business decision that doesn't really change the basic economics.