I wondering the same thing. I can imagine there's still loads of perl 5 around that is actively maintained and extended, and in some ways I can even understand some people still like perl because they can get stuff done fast. But who in their right mind would invest time an effort learning and using perl 6 nowadays, now that there are a zillion alternatives that are much more mature and much less crippled by the perl heritage that 6 will probably have to carry around?
Disclaimer: I absolutely hate everything about perl anyway and have never understood why anyone would ever like it. So I'm probably not the most objective person to judge perl 6;-)
Very nice pulling these numbers out of your ass while making them look credible by pasting some shitty corporate names behind them.
If these numbers are even *remotely* accurate, I'm wondering what kind of demographic I'm in to have been able to navigate my ways around Flash for as long as I can remember. I have Flash blockers on all my PC's, my phone and my tablet do not support Flash video, and I only unblock Flash content when I really have to. Which, in 99 out of 100 cases is when I want to view a video on a site that didn't transition to HTML5 yet, which are becoming less and less very fast. The times I'm disappointed I really regret I'm missing out on Flash content are counted on 1 hand, for a year long of very intensive use of the internet.
>> 98% of Internet connected PCs have Flash Player Doubtful, but even then, who cares? And how many phones have Flash player? How many embedded devices? How many internet-connected PC's have HTML5 capable browsers?
>> 85% of the top 100 websites use Flash Player (Alexa) Absolute fucking bullshit. I'd guess not more than 20% to 30% may have Flash, and maybe about 5% of them actually require Flash for anything else but ads. Try uninstalling the Flash player and find out that all your site still work fine without it. AMAZING!
>> 75% of web video is viewed using Flash Player (Comscore) Of which probably half is already also available in HTML5. Most of the video's I watch on my PC come from Youtube or something like Vimeo, and they already work without Flash most of the time. Every now and then I stumble upon a site that doesn't use one of the bigger video portals that already support video without Flash, but I expect 90% of web video to be viewable without Flash within a year. I can hold out on the few video's that don't play yet until we get there.
>> 98% of enterprises rely on Flash Player (Forrester) This one is particularly hilarious. Seriously, I don't know a single company that 'relies on Flash'. Yes, many enterprises have websites with Flash content on it, but most of them simply fall back to a Flash-less site if you don't have Flash. I honestly cannot think of a single company that makes it impossible for me or for themselves to do business without Flash. 98% of Enterprises 'rely on Flash' my ass.
>> 70% of web games are delivered using Flash Player (Evans Data Corp.) This might be the only statistic that might actually make sense. For web games, Flash is fine by me. I don't play them anyway but I can imagine some people do, so that's one of the very few application areas where Flash is truly useful.
>> 3.5 million developers use the Flash Platform Yes, and probaly 350 million use Visual Basic, but that doesn't mean we need VB on the web. Also, I'd estimate that over 80% of the Flash 'developers' are too stupid to program in any other way than dragging and copy-pasting some ActionScript together.
>> 19 of the top 20 device manufacturers worldwide have committed to shipping Flash technology on their devices) Wait, what?? 19 of the top 20 device manufacturers *of what*?
Of the 10 things he listed four are only to make the hardware limitations of his device more bearable (1, 2, 3 and 5), one is to work around carriers/phone manufacterer limitations (8), three are also possible on iPhone (4, 6, 10), and one sounds like a really far fetched argument for rooting your phone, 'I can wipe my phone, which I'll hopefully never have to do, but if I do so, I can save myself 5 minutes not having to re-sync my apps'. Incredible!:-S
Which leaves: 'I have a full debian install on my phone OMGWTF!1!'...Yay!... I guess...
I have an ssh + X windows tunnel to my full Ubuntu server at homem so I have full access to 99.99% of command-line and x-windows apps. On my fag-phone... And I didn't even have to root it, so I'm still under warranty.
It's open in the sense that anyone can get the full specs, for free. There's nothing secret or magic about it that will make it hard for someone to write a complete codec for h264. So yes, it IS an open standard.
This analogy makes me think you're missing the point. If the iPhone were a car, you wouldn't be allowed to open the hood, change your own oil, pump your own gas, or change the tires. you wouldn't be allowed to drive to certain places and you could only use your car for pre-approved purposes. independent mechanics would be forbidden to touch the car, etc...
While I understand what you're getting at (people have said exactly this about Linux vs. Windows), I think you're actually proving the PP's point if you put it this way. In general, people who drive cars just take them to the garage if there's something wrong with it, they don't fix their own cars, they don't put a bigger engine on a turbo on it, they just _drive_ it, that's what they bought it for. The same thing holds for phones and now thinks are starting to look like computers are more or less going the same way. And you know what? I think that's a _good_ thing, and I'm saying this as someone who's been playing and working with computers his whole life and making a living writing software for it.
The problem with the whole 'technology is back to the 80's' or 'people will not be able to do this or that with their computer'-kind of arguments is that they're hyperboles, blowing things out of proportion. The fact that 99% of people will only be able to use technology as consumers, does not mean the 1% of people who like to tinker with it are automatically shut out. XCode and the iPhone SDK are still freely available so any one can write software for it, only if you get serious about it you will have to pay a small fee to test and distribute your stuff to actual devices. And if you want to experiment with stuff without any limitations, there's a million different ways to do that don't involve iPhones or iPods.
Warning people about the 'dangers' of closed or semi-closed platforms getting popular because it would stop the development of curious minds who want to learn about stuff and put them to their own use, it makes me think of the apocalyptic fear mongering I normally associate with religion. People really believe bad things will happen but reality and history don't offer any indication they will.
For larger code development jobs where multiple people are involved and the code is going to be maintained and supported for a long time, it's even harder to relate 'hours actively spend programming' to 'productivity'. A bad developer may be able to implement a new feature by working his ass off the whole week, but if it turns out that the code is so bad or buggy that it's hard to maintain, unreliable or even needs to be re-done completely, these 40 hours a week might actually cost the company hundreds of hours of extra work somewhere along the line. If you get the job done right, on time, it doesn't matter how you spend the hours doing it, even if it involves having to take your mind off the actual code and relax every now and then. I'm 100% convinced that you cannot force the human mind on a single, fixed and complex task for too long without losing your overview, and eventually ending up in dead-ends that you could have avoided by switching to completely unrelated tasks a few times each day. Some days your mind is on a train and you can go on for hours, but other days you get stuck on something, and forcing yourself to keep staring on that stream of codes on your screen will not help you.
1. Syntax is something subjective, and actually the way methods are invoked through messages is one of the key strengths of Obj-C that makes it so flexible without requiring all the complexity and pitfalls of of C++ 2. What do you not like about the way you have to define methods? You basically declare the method name and its signature and that's it. Which is like every other programming language 3. How is XCode 'primitive'. It's actually the only graphical IDE that I've ever used and found to be somewhat tolerable. In my day-to-day job I use strictly gvim and the CLI, because no IDE I know of has enough positives to counter the many negatives that any IDE will have compared to having a powerful editor like gvim. But XCode comes pretty close, closer than anything I've used before. Calling it primitive makes no sense to me whatsoever 4. There is no garbage collection in iPhone OS because it would be a bad choice for memory-constrained applications. You use the retain/release memory model, optionally with user-defined autorelease pools to mimic garbage collection while still having full control over object lifetime. Much like using smart pointers in C++. 5. What is 'weird' about the way properties are defined? Just like your 'the way methods are defined is weird'-argument, your statement is basically void. Declaring a property basically involves declaring its name, type, its attributes and optionally any accessor methods. How is this weird and how would you expect this to work without sacrificing features like atomicity and automatic retain/release semantics? 6. What di you mean 'the IDE is not integrated'? Integrated with what? The debugger is integrated, the editor is integrated, the build control is integrated, the interface builder is integrated, the instruments tools are integrated, I really don't get what you're talking about?
Do you even have the slightest clue what you are talking about? First of all, the fact that you dislike Obj-C does not make it god-awful, in fact, there's lots of people who really like it, like myself. It has a lot of the strong points from both C and C++, and if you know how to use these two, you know why Obj-C has some clear advantages over both. Second, you are not required to program in Objective-C if you don't like it. You can use C, C++ if you like that better, or even Python if that's your thing. The only requirement is that you use Cocoa for the GUI, which is actually a great API. Third: what on earth are you on about MVC? What makes you think you are forced to use MVC for anything on the iPhone? You are free to go without controllers or models, to merge views and controller, to merge controllers and models, whatever suits your application. 9 out of 10 times the MVC pattern is perfectly suited for a typical iPhone application, which is why it has such a prominent place in the iPhone developer guides.
It's sad to see that you actually got modded +3 insightful right now. I thought this was supposed to be a forum for technically-inclined people who know what the fuck they are talking about, instead of a flamebait trolling forum where you can dump your misinformed opinions just because you don't like the subject of the article or its products.
You keep telling yourself that and not buy anything Apple builds, but please stop polluting the internet with *YOUR VIEW* on why Apple is or isn't popular. Myself, I've been using Windows and Linux for years, I built my own PC's, my own Linux distro's using LFS, my own media-player running Linux, my workstation at work runs Linux etc. At home, I switched to Apple for many reasons. First, because I wanted to have a Unix-environment and a good graphical UI *at the same time*. Second, because Apple hardware has many desirable attributes. You and the GP or whoever here trashes Apple that thinks he/she knows it all might call it 'fashionable', but I find a dead-silent all-in-one with everyting intergrated and only a single cable for the power to be *desirable*. Just like I find a full aluminium unibody design that doesn't creak, tear, or fall apart, and has a multitouch trackpad that makes me forget I ever needed a mouse *desirable*, not fashionable. I couldn't give a flying fsck about how 'fashionable' my computers are, I don't go running around the street showing everyont how fashionable I am, with my fancy computer. Only genuine nerds can think something retarted like wanting to be fashionable with a freaking computer, and genuine nerds are not the prime target audience for Apple anyway. Last but not least, I see 'value' and 'price' as 2 different things, and I seperate 'specifications' from 'performance'. I've sold every Apple system I've replaced with another one for 30% to 50% of what I paid for them in the first place, after years of (fully satisfactory) use. Compare that to the $2000 PC I once built and sold for $200 only 3 years later. Price != value, something that doesn't seem to get through with so many people.
The whole 'Apple sells well only because they market them so well' is also bogus. Here in Europe, Apple literally has ZERO advertising. No posters, no TV ads, no official Apple store (only franchises), nothing. Still, more and more people I know of are switching to Apple and being extremely satisfied with it. Many do so because they got an iPhone and they love it so much they are tempted to buy more stuff from Apple. You can keep telling yourself it's all marketing, hype, fashion statement or whatever dumb excuse you can think of for not having to acknowledge that people actually like Apple products for what they are and how they work, but it doesn't make it true.
It's frankly a bit sad if you think about it, if so many people buy, use and love some product, that some people still feel they know it all and should decide for others whether their purchase was worth the money. Just stfu and buy something else already.
To risk a car analogy, most family saloons just "go" without needing much maintenance (perhaps changing the oil every now and then, I don't drive so I could be losing my credibility here). But you can still open the hood if you want to. So the enthusiasts can tinker, fixing problems themselves and souping their vehicle up if they choose. [..] But the way the computing market is going would be like sealing the hood of your car shut, so only registered dealers have access.
Car analogies to support statements about computers are evil, which is probably why you said 'to _risk_ a car analogy'. The car industry has actually been going the exact route of closedness and non-serviceability for which you brought it up as a counter-example. Modern cars nowadays all have electronics and computer systems that are only serviceable by brand dealers or acknowledged garages. Reading out the ECU or diagnosing why the engine runs rough isn't a matter of shorting some wires and watching how many times the warning light on the dashboard blinks anymore, like it is with old cars. It's a matter of plugging in a laptop using a proprietary connector, running certified and closed software you can't buy or download yourself. Also replacement parts are more and more only throwaway parts now, if something is broken you replace it in whole, and only dealer parts will fit. Last but not least many of the tools required or fixings are often non-standard or not meant to be undone and redone except if you have dealer-specific tools that are not available for resale.
The fact that the whole world drives cars without complaing much about these facts, and the fact that almost no-one likes to service their own cars (yes I know some people do, I actually like fixing overhauling my cars myself) should be a good indication why a company like Apple doesn't really have a lot to lose by opening up the platform completely.
Ontopic about the article: I kind of get where this guy is coming from, but I think he's exaggerating a little. First of all I don't see computers being replaced by tablets at all, and second of all the barrier to writing you're own iPad software isn't that high. There will always be computers like PC's, and there will always be software for creating new applications. Kids that really enjoy writing software with free software so much that they would want to write software that runs on a tablet like the iPad, could just work for the $99 it takes to register as an iPhone/iPad developer, in the same way they would have to save for buying an iPad or a PC.
Exactly. The fact that this tablet is intended to be used as an end-user consumer device that does not allow or require tinkering, or using it as if it were a PC, isn't necessarily a bad thin. Who cares if you're locked down to the apps in the app store, if the app store has exactly the apps you need, and if said apps are a whole lot better than some random you can download from the internet and install yourself.
Two things I don't get about all the whining about the iPad (I understand much of the other whining but not these two things)
1 - Why is it so hard to see that the iPad is NOT a computer in tablet format? Not everything with a CPU, RAM, some storage and a screen should have to be like a 'real' computer that uses a 'real' os that you can slap 'real' apps on, in fact, people don't even WANT a PC in tablet format, since it sucks using a PC in tablet format. There's a reason all the PC-like tablets failed: no-one wants to have one. 2 - Why don't the FSF people go as crazy over mobile phones, satnavs, media players, e-readers, handheld consoles, or whatever computerized device that runs proprietary stuff to accomplish some task that people find a need for, as they go crazy over this iPad. How is a device like the iPad a 'step back in computing' if you view it as a device that allows all these specialized devices to be merged into 1? The thing is simply applying existing technology to create a kind of device that people may or may not find useful, and not the next step in the evolution of computing.
The FSF need to have their heads checked if they really can't look beyond the fact that in theory you might be able to run all-free, all-open software on something like an iPad, and if they really believe the world would be better of if no-one would create devices like the iPad.
In the end people will buy and use products they like, and this is what drives development of new products. People don't buy what the FSF decides to be good or bad for the development of computing.
Plenty of doctor's and virologists acknowledged pretty quickly that the virus wasn't all that deadly, that vaccinating everyone wasn't really helpful or required and that the chances of the virus becoming something extremely lethal we're very small, and if it would have happened, we wouldn't have an answer to it anyway. Somehow these virologists weren't the ones dragged onto TV every night, writing apocalyptic newspaper articles and advising the government to buy all those vaccins. The virologists and doctors doubting the whole situation were mostly served-off as tinfoil conspiracy believers.
Also, most of your arguments are dogmatic and besides the point. The WTC attacks have nothing to do with a global pandemic, and they're incomparable. 3000 people on a scale of 6 billion in fact doesn't mean shit. Right now 100s of thousands of people are possibly dead in Haiti, and every year millions of people die from diseases nobody in the western world dies from anymore, such as cholera or dysentry. Neither of these facts are relevant to the H1N1 situation, just like your own arguments. Just picking and choosing random factos to support your position.
Last but not least what happened with the 1918 flu is most likely incomparable to what would happen when a really deadly flu virus came along right now, sanitation, health care and knowledge about viruses and how they spread haven't stood still the last 100 years.
If you really wanted to make your case, you should have mentioned the H1N1 flu virus is a combination of influenza strains that is very uncommon in humans, and for which most people have not been exposed before, hence the high risk of getting sick and passing the virus on. That, in combination with the possibilty of the virus mutating in something more lethal, might have become a real issue. The fact that H1N1 has spread worldwide is no surprise at all now that global travel is so common, but that alone really is not enough to warrant the total mass-hysteria that we've seen now.
Anyway, even taking into account the worst possible scenario (the H1N1 virus spreads like fire, mutates, and starts killing 10% of infected people) does not justify blindly buying millions of vaccins that were made based on the non-lethal initial H1N1 virus strain. Chances are high the current vaccin has no effect on a mutated H1N1 strain at all. So either way, something wrong is going on here.
Also, imagine how many people could have been saved using $0.50 cholera medicine, if we, the cocky, egotastic western world, wouldn't have overreacted on this disease that might even kill people in developed countries, and spent the hundreds of millions of dollars on cheap medicine for actual acute health risks around the world.
And then what, you put that $75 pentium-4 PC inside your A/V cabinet or what?
While I agree that you can build a decent HTPC for around the cost of a PS3, you have to admit that a desktop-PC is not the same as a small form-factor HTPC right?
Zotac IONITX-A: ~$120 M350 mini-itx case: ~$60 1GB RAM (plenty for a HTPC): ~$20 El cheapo small HD: ~$50 (use an external drive for your media, which most people have lying around somewhere)
Total: $250
If you want an IR receiver and a bluetooth dongle with that, add another ~$50
I don't get why you'd want to mod me troll, since I don't see we disagree? Of course knowledge of basic linear algebra is an important part of the skill set of anyone who writes computer programs. But that's not the same as being able to write a linear solver from the top of your head and it's also not the only or most important aspect of software engineering.
As an example: during the job interview for my current job I was asked to spell out a program that calculates the intersection of 2 lines, to integrate expressions and other math trivia, over the phone. I couldn't do it though I was able to formulate the steps to do it offline. Other questions we're purely questions about basic C and Unix trivia, which I was able to answer easily though most if it was in fact irrelevant or obsolete facts for todays software engineering. The interviewer found it really strange I wasn't able answer 'easy math questions' while I did seem to 'know a lot about software engineering', completely backwards to my impression about the interview. After that interview I've implemented simulation software containing non-linear regression, all kinds of matrix stuff, dft's, half of Matlabs basic linear algebra tools, image processing and more. Not because I can tell you how to do an SVD but because of good software engineering practices, by and making efficient use of existing solutions to common problems. That's the difference between writing software on a larger scale as opposed to using computer programs to solve mathematical problem. It's also why I view so many math and physics-related software as 'badly engineered' (though often well-written), mostly because it's confusing, the documentation is minimal, absent or dense and incomprehensible, sensitive to misuse, inflexible, in other words: difficult to use safely in production software. All the math stuff I use in our code is wrapped into sensible and safe interfaces that are well-documented and easy to use, which is what allows us to rapidly build complex but robust software from it.
It's also for these reasons I think basic knowledge of applied mathematics and intricate knowledge of algorithms, data structures and development methodogies is more valuable than intricate knowledge of mathematics but only basic knowledge how to build and maintain quality software.
Dude, if there's three kinds of people on earth that make terrible software engineers, they're mathematicians, physicists and electrical engineers.
While they may write incredibly smart and efficient computer programs that solve incredibly difficult problems, that doesn't make them good software engineers. The libraries and API's I've used that have the worst documentation, the worst programmning interfaces and the most convoluted and non-extendable architecture are invariably libraries and API's written by (and often for) mathematicians, physicists and electrical engineers. Common 'good software engineering practices' don't appear to apply to people from these fields, which isn't bad if they'd stick with solving the problem and prototyping a solution, then hand over their work to skilled software engineers that are qualified to turn it into good software. Using stuff like LAPACK, BLAS, CSparse, Matlab-type code etc is pure masochism for software engineers like myself.
Ontopic for the submitter:
Both sound useful to me, but many of the topics from the 'selected math chapters' are probably only interesting to get a basic understanding of what is what, and improve abstract thinking. If you're ever going to have to write software that does differential calculations or linear algebra all depends on the kind of problems you will work on. There's lots of stuff you don't need to know anything about applied mathematics like that for. Graph theory, data structures and algorithms on the other hand, are almost a fundamental part of any CS or software engineering education. While you can write quality software without any knowledge of linear algebra, I really doubt you'll be able to write quality software without knowledge of algorithms, complexity theory, graph algorithms and advanced data structures. They're the cornerstone of software that doesn't suck.
Well for one, the machine can be passively cooled and will jump over 70 degrees Celsius if I tax the CPU for more then a few percent, during GPU accelerated playback it stays nicely around 60C. Also, the thing is in use as a home-server/personal web server, which means there's all kinds of stuff running in the background. 35% of a core i5 = around 300% of a single core Atom, you do the math.
Last but not least I like the idea that the most efficient part of my computer is used for the most appriopiate task. The Atom is barely able to do full-screen standard-def flash video, while the Nvidia GPU does silk-smooth 1080p content. How on eart would someone _not_ want that.
You're wrong. What you're seeing is that apparently the Casino Royale video is not fully accelerated by the GPU. The GPU load is never factored in the Windows performance monitor, you need CPU-z or something like that.
In addition, Intel beefed up their graphics core and it appears that the new Intel GMA HD integrated graphics engine offers solid HD video performance
Solid HD video performance? I see 35% CPU load in the Casion Royale 1080p trailer screenshot, on a fast Quad-core CPU. My puny single-core Atom 1.6Ghz with NVidia graphics does 6-10% max on any 1080p content I throw at it in XBMC.
It's better than what Intel offered before: nothing, but I still wouldn't recommend Intel graphics for any HD video player.
You must not be a developer, everything you're saying is based on ideal assumptions about how developers do their job that never occur in the real world. I've lost weeks if not months of productivity because admins or procedure-nazi's thought I didn't *need* this or that, and I should just conform to what all the Powerpoint and Excel heroes are working with, through procedures that take days or weeks before things are sorted properly.
As a developer I need _full_ control over _every_ aspect of the system I'm working on, you can always start out by assuming I only need A, B and C, but the moment some pesky bug, performance issue, problem with a certain 3rd-party, OS library, compiler or otherwise exceptional peripheral problem occurs, I need to be able to debug it with whatever tool is best for the job. Which often means adding or removing stuff from the system, rebooting it into different kernels, intentionally limiting or crippling OS or network resources to reproduce problems, etc.
Unless you like burning money by taxing IT support extra and frustrating developer work, your developers should (in general) be allowed to do whatever the hell they want to do to their systems. Fence them off using subnets and VM's, that's fine, but don't try to force a developer into the common user profile.
That's an interesting analogy but it also starts going in the direction of 'I don't believe in God because the moment I start asking religious people about things they end up reasoning in circles'. But just let me add I was just making up a few legitimate reasons for people to not believe in God, they're not even necessarily my own (though some are).
Philosophically speaking, you could reduce anything to anything and like this you could probably just as well reduce all of religion to the same thing, as finding an unlimited number of varieties of Christianity. That's the nice thing about philosophy, it's not really bound by any rules.
Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
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Religion in Video Games
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· Score: 2, Informative
There's three versions of atheism I'm aware of: I don't believe in God because no-one's (tried to) convince me of it; I don't believe in God because there's adequate non-theological explanations for why we're here and/or the explanations that rely in God introduce as many problems as they solve; I don't believe in God, but I don't disbelieve in him either (also classifiable as a subvariety of agnosticism).
So because you can't come up with more than 3 versions of atheism, atheism is less diverse than the variety in Christianity?
I know a few more variants: I don't believe in God because it doesn't make sense; I don't believe in God since I don't see why I should believe in God, and not in Allah, Brahma, extraterrestials or whatever; I don't believe in God because all the God-stories are inconsistent and ambiguous; I don't believe in God because the moment I start asking religious people about things they end up reasoning in circles; I don't believe in God because it so often appears to provide grounds for hate and intolerance; I don't believe in God because I disagree with his (or her, think about that!) views; I don't believe in God because if God would actually exists he's either not omnipotent at all, he doesn't really care about humanity and the earth that much, or he's just an evil sadist motherfucker; I don't believe in God because there seems to be no correlation whatsoever between what people believe and what people act on; I don't believe in God because I don't have the impression that people who do have better lives than people who don't; I don't believe in God because believing in God has proven to go against rationality and reason; I don't believe in God because I don't want to believe in hypocrisy.
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I wondering the same thing. I can imagine there's still loads of perl 5 around that is actively maintained and extended, and in some ways I can even understand some people still like perl because they can get stuff done fast. But who in their right mind would invest time an effort learning and using perl 6 nowadays, now that there are a zillion alternatives that are much more mature and much less crippled by the perl heritage that 6 will probably have to carry around?
Disclaimer: I absolutely hate everything about perl anyway and have never understood why anyone would ever like it. So I'm probably not the most objective person to judge perl 6 ;-)
Very nice pulling these numbers out of your ass while making them look credible by pasting some shitty corporate names behind them.
If these numbers are even *remotely* accurate, I'm wondering what kind of demographic I'm in to have been able to navigate my ways around Flash for as long as I can remember. I have Flash blockers on all my PC's, my phone and my tablet do not support Flash video, and I only unblock Flash content when I really have to. Which, in 99 out of 100 cases is when I want to view a video on a site that didn't transition to HTML5 yet, which are becoming less and less very fast. The times I'm disappointed I really regret I'm missing out on Flash content are counted on 1 hand, for a year long of very intensive use of the internet.
>> 98% of Internet connected PCs have Flash Player
Doubtful, but even then, who cares? And how many phones have Flash player? How many embedded devices? How many internet-connected PC's have HTML5 capable browsers?
>> 85% of the top 100 websites use Flash Player (Alexa)
Absolute fucking bullshit. I'd guess not more than 20% to 30% may have Flash, and maybe about 5% of them actually require Flash for anything else but ads. Try uninstalling the Flash player and find out that all your site still work fine without it. AMAZING!
>> 75% of web video is viewed using Flash Player (Comscore)
Of which probably half is already also available in HTML5. Most of the video's I watch on my PC come from Youtube or something like Vimeo, and they already work without Flash most of the time. Every now and then I stumble upon a site that doesn't use one of the bigger video portals that already support video without Flash, but I expect 90% of web video to be viewable without Flash within a year. I can hold out on the few video's that don't play yet until we get there.
>> 98% of enterprises rely on Flash Player (Forrester)
This one is particularly hilarious. Seriously, I don't know a single company that 'relies on Flash'. Yes, many enterprises have websites with Flash content on it, but most of them simply fall back to a Flash-less site if you don't have Flash. I honestly cannot think of a single company that makes it impossible for me or for themselves to do business without Flash. 98% of Enterprises 'rely on Flash' my ass.
>> 70% of web games are delivered using Flash Player (Evans Data Corp.)
This might be the only statistic that might actually make sense. For web games, Flash is fine by me. I don't play them anyway but I can imagine some people do, so that's one of the very few application areas where Flash is truly useful.
>> 3.5 million developers use the Flash Platform
Yes, and probaly 350 million use Visual Basic, but that doesn't mean we need VB on the web. Also, I'd estimate that over 80% of the Flash 'developers' are too stupid to program in any other way than dragging and copy-pasting some ActionScript together.
>> 19 of the top 20 device manufacturers worldwide have committed to shipping Flash technology on their devices)
Wait, what?? 19 of the top 20 device manufacturers *of what*?
cue iPhone fags foaming their mouths in denial!
Which would be surprising, because... ?
Of the 10 things he listed four are only to make the hardware limitations of his device more bearable (1, 2, 3 and 5), one is to work around carriers/phone manufacterer limitations (8), three are also possible on iPhone (4, 6, 10), and one sounds like a really far fetched argument for rooting your phone, 'I can wipe my phone, which I'll hopefully never have to do, but if I do so, I can save myself 5 minutes not having to re-sync my apps'. Incredible! :-S
Which leaves: 'I have a full debian install on my phone OMGWTF!1!'...Yay!... I guess...
I have an ssh + X windows tunnel to my full Ubuntu server at homem so I have full access to 99.99% of command-line and x-windows apps. On my fag-phone... And I didn't even have to root it, so I'm still under warranty.
It's open in the sense that anyone can get the full specs, for free. There's nothing secret or magic about it that will make it hard for someone to write a complete codec for h264. So yes, it IS an open standard.
This analogy makes me think you're missing the point. If the iPhone were a car, you wouldn't be allowed to open the hood, change your own oil, pump your own gas, or change the tires. you wouldn't be allowed to drive to certain places and you could only use your car for pre-approved purposes. independent mechanics would be forbidden to touch the car, etc...
While I understand what you're getting at (people have said exactly this about Linux vs. Windows), I think you're actually proving the PP's point if you put it this way. In general, people who drive cars just take them to the garage if there's something wrong with it, they don't fix their own cars, they don't put a bigger engine on a turbo on it, they just _drive_ it, that's what they bought it for. The same thing holds for phones and now thinks are starting to look like computers are more or less going the same way. And you know what? I think that's a _good_ thing, and I'm saying this as someone who's been playing and working with computers his whole life and making a living writing software for it.
The problem with the whole 'technology is back to the 80's' or 'people will not be able to do this or that with their computer'-kind of arguments is that they're hyperboles, blowing things out of proportion. The fact that 99% of people will only be able to use technology as consumers, does not mean the 1% of people who like to tinker with it are automatically shut out. XCode and the iPhone SDK are still freely available so any one can write software for it, only if you get serious about it you will have to pay a small fee to test and distribute your stuff to actual devices. And if you want to experiment with stuff without any limitations, there's a million different ways to do that don't involve iPhones or iPods.
Warning people about the 'dangers' of closed or semi-closed platforms getting popular because it would stop the development of curious minds who want to learn about stuff and put them to their own use, it makes me think of the apocalyptic fear mongering I normally associate with religion. People really believe bad things will happen but reality and history don't offer any indication they will.
^ this
For larger code development jobs where multiple people are involved and the code is going to be maintained and supported for a long time, it's even harder to relate 'hours actively spend programming' to 'productivity'. A bad developer may be able to implement a new feature by working his ass off the whole week, but if it turns out that the code is so bad or buggy that it's hard to maintain, unreliable or even needs to be re-done completely, these 40 hours a week might actually cost the company hundreds of hours of extra work somewhere along the line. If you get the job done right, on time, it doesn't matter how you spend the hours doing it, even if it involves having to take your mind off the actual code and relax every now and then. I'm 100% convinced that you cannot force the human mind on a single, fixed and complex task for too long without losing your overview, and eventually ending up in dead-ends that you could have avoided by switching to completely unrelated tasks a few times each day. Some days your mind is on a train and you can go on for hours, but other days you get stuck on something, and forcing yourself to keep staring on that stream of codes on your screen will not help you.
1. Syntax is something subjective, and actually the way methods are invoked through messages is one of the key strengths of Obj-C that makes it so flexible without requiring all the complexity and pitfalls of of C++
2. What do you not like about the way you have to define methods? You basically declare the method name and its signature and that's it. Which is like every other programming language
3. How is XCode 'primitive'. It's actually the only graphical IDE that I've ever used and found to be somewhat tolerable. In my day-to-day job I use strictly gvim and the CLI, because no IDE I know of has enough positives to counter the many negatives that any IDE will have compared to having a powerful editor like gvim. But XCode comes pretty close, closer than anything I've used before. Calling it primitive makes no sense to me whatsoever
4. There is no garbage collection in iPhone OS because it would be a bad choice for memory-constrained applications. You use the retain/release memory model, optionally with user-defined autorelease pools to mimic garbage collection while still having full control over object lifetime. Much like using smart pointers in C++.
5. What is 'weird' about the way properties are defined? Just like your 'the way methods are defined is weird'-argument, your statement is basically void. Declaring a property basically involves declaring its name, type, its attributes and optionally any accessor methods. How is this weird and how would you expect this to work without sacrificing features like atomicity and automatic retain/release semantics?
6. What di you mean 'the IDE is not integrated'? Integrated with what? The debugger is integrated, the editor is integrated, the build control is integrated, the interface builder is integrated, the instruments tools are integrated, I really don't get what you're talking about?
Do you even have the slightest clue what you are talking about? First of all, the fact that you dislike Obj-C does not make it god-awful, in fact, there's lots of people who really like it, like myself. It has a lot of the strong points from both C and C++, and if you know how to use these two, you know why Obj-C has some clear advantages over both. Second, you are not required to program in Objective-C if you don't like it. You can use C, C++ if you like that better, or even Python if that's your thing. The only requirement is that you use Cocoa for the GUI, which is actually a great API. Third: what on earth are you on about MVC? What makes you think you are forced to use MVC for anything on the iPhone? You are free to go without controllers or models, to merge views and controller, to merge controllers and models, whatever suits your application. 9 out of 10 times the MVC pattern is perfectly suited for a typical iPhone application, which is why it has such a prominent place in the iPhone developer guides.
It's sad to see that you actually got modded +3 insightful right now. I thought this was supposed to be a forum for technically-inclined people who know what the fuck they are talking about, instead of a flamebait trolling forum where you can dump your misinformed opinions just because you don't like the subject of the article or its products.
You keep telling yourself that and not buy anything Apple builds, but please stop polluting the internet with *YOUR VIEW* on why Apple is or isn't popular. Myself, I've been using Windows and Linux for years, I built my own PC's, my own Linux distro's using LFS, my own media-player running Linux, my workstation at work runs Linux etc. At home, I switched to Apple for many reasons. First, because I wanted to have a Unix-environment and a good graphical UI *at the same time*. Second, because Apple hardware has many desirable attributes. You and the GP or whoever here trashes Apple that thinks he/she knows it all might call it 'fashionable', but I find a dead-silent all-in-one with everyting intergrated and only a single cable for the power to be *desirable*. Just like I find a full aluminium unibody design that doesn't creak, tear, or fall apart, and has a multitouch trackpad that makes me forget I ever needed a mouse *desirable*, not fashionable. I couldn't give a flying fsck about how 'fashionable' my computers are, I don't go running around the street showing everyont how fashionable I am, with my fancy computer. Only genuine nerds can think something retarted like wanting to be fashionable with a freaking computer, and genuine nerds are not the prime target audience for Apple anyway. Last but not least, I see 'value' and 'price' as 2 different things, and I seperate 'specifications' from 'performance'. I've sold every Apple system I've replaced with another one for 30% to 50% of what I paid for them in the first place, after years of (fully satisfactory) use. Compare that to the $2000 PC I once built and sold for $200 only 3 years later. Price != value, something that doesn't seem to get through with so many people.
The whole 'Apple sells well only because they market them so well' is also bogus. Here in Europe, Apple literally has ZERO advertising. No posters, no TV ads, no official Apple store (only franchises), nothing. Still, more and more people I know of are switching to Apple and being extremely satisfied with it. Many do so because they got an iPhone and they love it so much they are tempted to buy more stuff from Apple. You can keep telling yourself it's all marketing, hype, fashion statement or whatever dumb excuse you can think of for not having to acknowledge that people actually like Apple products for what they are and how they work, but it doesn't make it true.
It's frankly a bit sad if you think about it, if so many people buy, use and love some product, that some people still feel they know it all and should decide for others whether their purchase was worth the money. Just stfu and buy something else already.
[..] should be a good indication why a company like Apple doesn't really have a lot to lose by opening up the platform completely.
That should have read 'a lot to _win_ by opening the platform completely', or 'a lot to lose by _not_ opening the platform completely' of course ;-S
To risk a car analogy, most family saloons just "go" without needing much maintenance (perhaps changing the oil every now and then, I don't drive so I could be losing my credibility here). But you can still open the hood if you want to. So the enthusiasts can tinker, fixing problems themselves and souping their vehicle up if they choose. [..] But the way the computing market is going would be like sealing the hood of your car shut, so only registered dealers have access.
Car analogies to support statements about computers are evil, which is probably why you said 'to _risk_ a car analogy'. The car industry has actually been going the exact route of closedness and non-serviceability for which you brought it up as a counter-example. Modern cars nowadays all have electronics and computer systems that are only serviceable by brand dealers or acknowledged garages. Reading out the ECU or diagnosing why the engine runs rough isn't a matter of shorting some wires and watching how many times the warning light on the dashboard blinks anymore, like it is with old cars. It's a matter of plugging in a laptop using a proprietary connector, running certified and closed software you can't buy or download yourself. Also replacement parts are more and more only throwaway parts now, if something is broken you replace it in whole, and only dealer parts will fit. Last but not least many of the tools required or fixings are often non-standard or not meant to be undone and redone except if you have dealer-specific tools that are not available for resale.
The fact that the whole world drives cars without complaing much about these facts, and the fact that almost no-one likes to service their own cars (yes I know some people do, I actually like fixing overhauling my cars myself) should be a good indication why a company like Apple doesn't really have a lot to lose by opening up the platform completely.
Ontopic about the article:
I kind of get where this guy is coming from, but I think he's exaggerating a little. First of all I don't see computers being replaced by tablets at all, and second of all the barrier to writing you're own iPad software isn't that high. There will always be computers like PC's, and there will always be software for creating new applications. Kids that really enjoy writing software with free software so much that they would want to write software that runs on a tablet like the iPad, could just work for the $99 it takes to register as an iPhone/iPad developer, in the same way they would have to save for buying an iPad or a PC.
Exactly. The fact that this tablet is intended to be used as an end-user consumer device that does not allow or require tinkering, or using it as if it were a PC, isn't necessarily a bad thin. Who cares if you're locked down to the apps in the app store, if the app store has exactly the apps you need, and if said apps are a whole lot better than some random you can download from the internet and install yourself.
Two things I don't get about all the whining about the iPad (I understand much of the other whining but not these two things)
1 - Why is it so hard to see that the iPad is NOT a computer in tablet format? Not everything with a CPU, RAM, some storage and a screen should have to be like a 'real' computer that uses a 'real' os that you can slap 'real' apps on, in fact, people don't even WANT a PC in tablet format, since it sucks using a PC in tablet format. There's a reason all the PC-like tablets failed: no-one wants to have one.
2 - Why don't the FSF people go as crazy over mobile phones, satnavs, media players, e-readers, handheld consoles, or whatever computerized device that runs proprietary stuff to accomplish some task that people find a need for, as they go crazy over this iPad. How is a device like the iPad a 'step back in computing' if you view it as a device that allows all these specialized devices to be merged into 1? The thing is simply applying existing technology to create a kind of device that people may or may not find useful, and not the next step in the evolution of computing.
The FSF need to have their heads checked if they really can't look beyond the fact that in theory you might be able to run all-free, all-open software on something like an iPad, and if they really believe the world would be better of if no-one would create devices like the iPad.
In the end people will buy and use products they like, and this is what drives development of new products. People don't buy what the FSF decides to be good or bad for the development of computing.
Plenty of doctor's and virologists acknowledged pretty quickly that the virus wasn't all that deadly, that vaccinating everyone wasn't really helpful or required and that the chances of the virus becoming something extremely lethal we're very small, and if it would have happened, we wouldn't have an answer to it anyway. Somehow these virologists weren't the ones dragged onto TV every night, writing apocalyptic newspaper articles and advising the government to buy all those vaccins. The virologists and doctors doubting the whole situation were mostly served-off as tinfoil conspiracy believers.
Also, most of your arguments are dogmatic and besides the point. The WTC attacks have nothing to do with a global pandemic, and they're incomparable. 3000 people on a scale of 6 billion in fact doesn't mean shit. Right now 100s of thousands of people are possibly dead in Haiti, and every year millions of people die from diseases nobody in the western world dies from anymore, such as cholera or dysentry. Neither of these facts are relevant to the H1N1 situation, just like your own arguments. Just picking and choosing random factos to support your position.
Last but not least what happened with the 1918 flu is most likely incomparable to what would happen when a really deadly flu virus came along right now, sanitation, health care and knowledge about viruses and how they spread haven't stood still the last 100 years.
Common cold is also a pandemic.
If you really wanted to make your case, you should have mentioned the H1N1 flu virus is a combination of influenza strains that is very uncommon in humans, and for which most people have not been exposed before, hence the high risk of getting sick and passing the virus on. That, in combination with the possibilty of the virus mutating in something more lethal, might have become a real issue. The fact that H1N1 has spread worldwide is no surprise at all now that global travel is so common, but that alone really is not enough to warrant the total mass-hysteria that we've seen now.
Anyway, even taking into account the worst possible scenario (the H1N1 virus spreads like fire, mutates, and starts killing 10% of infected people) does not justify blindly buying millions of vaccins that were made based on the non-lethal initial H1N1 virus strain. Chances are high the current vaccin has no effect on a mutated H1N1 strain at all. So either way, something wrong is going on here.
Also, imagine how many people could have been saved using $0.50 cholera medicine, if we, the cocky, egotastic western world, wouldn't have overreacted on this disease that might even kill people in developed countries, and spent the hundreds of millions of dollars on cheap medicine for actual acute health risks around the world.
And then what, you put that $75 pentium-4 PC inside your A/V cabinet or what?
While I agree that you can build a decent HTPC for around the cost of a PS3, you have to admit that a desktop-PC is not the same as a small form-factor HTPC right?
Zotac IONITX-A: ~$120
M350 mini-itx case: ~$60
1GB RAM (plenty for a HTPC): ~$20
El cheapo small HD: ~$50 (use an external drive for your media, which most people have lying around somewhere)
Total: $250
If you want an IR receiver and a bluetooth dongle with that, add another ~$50
I don't get why you'd want to mod me troll, since I don't see we disagree? Of course knowledge of basic linear algebra is an important part of the skill set of anyone who writes computer programs. But that's not the same as being able to write a linear solver from the top of your head and it's also not the only or most important aspect of software engineering.
As an example: during the job interview for my current job I was asked to spell out a program that calculates the intersection of 2 lines, to integrate expressions and other math trivia, over the phone. I couldn't do it though I was able to formulate the steps to do it offline. Other questions we're purely questions about basic C and Unix trivia, which I was able to answer easily though most if it was in fact irrelevant or obsolete facts for todays software engineering. The interviewer found it really strange I wasn't able answer 'easy math questions' while I did seem to 'know a lot about software engineering', completely backwards to my impression about the interview. After that interview I've implemented simulation software containing non-linear regression, all kinds of matrix stuff, dft's, half of Matlabs basic linear algebra tools, image processing and more. Not because I can tell you how to do an SVD but because of good software engineering practices, by and making efficient use of existing solutions to common problems. That's the difference between writing software on a larger scale as opposed to using computer programs to solve mathematical problem. It's also why I view so many math and physics-related software as 'badly engineered' (though often well-written), mostly because it's confusing, the documentation is minimal, absent or dense and incomprehensible, sensitive to misuse, inflexible, in other words: difficult to use safely in production software. All the math stuff I use in our code is wrapped into sensible and safe interfaces that are well-documented and easy to use, which is what allows us to rapidly build complex but robust software from it.
It's also for these reasons I think basic knowledge of applied mathematics and intricate knowledge of algorithms, data structures and development methodogies is more valuable than intricate knowledge of mathematics but only basic knowledge how to build and maintain quality software.
Dude, if there's three kinds of people on earth that make terrible software engineers, they're mathematicians, physicists and electrical engineers.
While they may write incredibly smart and efficient computer programs that solve incredibly difficult problems, that doesn't make them good software engineers. The libraries and API's I've used that have the worst documentation, the worst programmning interfaces and the most convoluted and non-extendable architecture are invariably libraries and API's written by (and often for) mathematicians, physicists and electrical engineers. Common 'good software engineering practices' don't appear to apply to people from these fields, which isn't bad if they'd stick with solving the problem and prototyping a solution, then hand over their work to skilled software engineers that are qualified to turn it into good software. Using stuff like LAPACK, BLAS, CSparse, Matlab-type code etc is pure masochism for software engineers like myself.
Ontopic for the submitter:
Both sound useful to me, but many of the topics from the 'selected math chapters' are probably only interesting to get a basic understanding of what is what, and improve abstract thinking. If you're ever going to have to write software that does differential calculations or linear algebra all depends on the kind of problems you will work on. There's lots of stuff you don't need to know anything about applied mathematics like that for. Graph theory, data structures and algorithms on the other hand, are almost a fundamental part of any CS or software engineering education. While you can write quality software without any knowledge of linear algebra, I really doubt you'll be able to write quality software without knowledge of algorithms, complexity theory, graph algorithms and advanced data structures. They're the cornerstone of software that doesn't suck.
Well for one, the machine can be passively cooled and will jump over 70 degrees Celsius if I tax the CPU for more then a few percent, during GPU accelerated playback it stays nicely around 60C. Also, the thing is in use as a home-server/personal web server, which means there's all kinds of stuff running in the background. 35% of a core i5 = around 300% of a single core Atom, you do the math.
Last but not least I like the idea that the most efficient part of my computer is used for the most appriopiate task. The Atom is barely able to do full-screen standard-def flash video, while the Nvidia GPU does silk-smooth 1080p content. How on eart would someone _not_ want that.
You're wrong. What you're seeing is that apparently the Casino Royale video is not fully accelerated by the GPU. The GPU load is never factored in the Windows performance monitor, you need CPU-z or something like that.
In addition, Intel beefed up their graphics core and it appears that the new Intel GMA HD integrated graphics engine offers solid HD video performance
Solid HD video performance? I see 35% CPU load in the Casion Royale 1080p trailer screenshot, on a fast Quad-core CPU. My puny single-core Atom 1.6Ghz with NVidia graphics does 6-10% max on any 1080p content I throw at it in XBMC.
It's better than what Intel offered before: nothing, but I still wouldn't recommend Intel graphics for any HD video player.
You must not be a developer, everything you're saying is based on ideal assumptions about how developers do their job that never occur in the real world. I've lost weeks if not months of productivity because admins or procedure-nazi's thought I didn't *need* this or that, and I should just conform to what all the Powerpoint and Excel heroes are working with, through procedures that take days or weeks before things are sorted properly.
As a developer I need _full_ control over _every_ aspect of the system I'm working on, you can always start out by assuming I only need A, B and C, but the moment some pesky bug, performance issue, problem with a certain 3rd-party, OS library, compiler or otherwise exceptional peripheral problem occurs, I need to be able to debug it with whatever tool is best for the job. Which often means adding or removing stuff from the system, rebooting it into different kernels, intentionally limiting or crippling OS or network resources to reproduce problems, etc.
Unless you like burning money by taxing IT support extra and frustrating developer work, your developers should (in general) be allowed to do whatever the hell they want to do to their systems. Fence them off using subnets and VM's, that's fine, but don't try to force a developer into the common user profile.
That's an interesting analogy but it also starts going in the direction of 'I don't believe in God because the moment I start asking religious people about things they end up reasoning in circles'. But just let me add I was just making up a few legitimate reasons for people to not believe in God, they're not even necessarily my own (though some are).
Philosophically speaking, you could reduce anything to anything and like this you could probably just as well reduce all of religion to the same thing, as finding an unlimited number of varieties of Christianity. That's the nice thing about philosophy, it's not really bound by any rules.
There's three versions of atheism I'm aware of: I don't believe in God because no-one's (tried to) convince me of it; I don't believe in God because there's adequate non-theological explanations for why we're here and/or the explanations that rely in God introduce as many problems as they solve; I don't believe in God, but I don't disbelieve in him either (also classifiable as a subvariety of agnosticism).
So because you can't come up with more than 3 versions of atheism, atheism is less diverse than the variety in Christianity?
I know a few more variants: I don't believe in God because it doesn't make sense; I don't believe in God since I don't see why I should believe in God, and not in Allah, Brahma, extraterrestials or whatever; I don't believe in God because all the God-stories are inconsistent and ambiguous; I don't believe in God because the moment I start asking religious people about things they end up reasoning in circles; I don't believe in God because it so often appears to provide grounds for hate and intolerance; I don't believe in God because I disagree with his (or her, think about that!) views; I don't believe in God because if God would actually exists he's either not omnipotent at all, he doesn't really care about humanity and the earth that much, or he's just an evil sadist motherfucker; I don't believe in God because there seems to be no correlation whatsoever between what people believe and what people act on; I don't believe in God because I don't have the impression that people who do have better lives than people who don't; I don't believe in God because believing in God has proven to go against rationality and reason; I don't believe in God because I don't want to believe in hypocrisy.
Should I go on? I can go on for hours...
Dictator != president
Soviet-Union != democracy