I apologize. I misunderstood the article, but looking at the other comments I wasn't the only one who misinterpreted "open source python code" to mean a side sampling of open source code written in Python./me yanks foot out of mouth.
This is bullshit, but a great tactical conversion of non-informative data into marketable news by Coverity.
Coverity uses lexical pattern matching to find bugs based on "tricks" discovered by Dawson Engler and his colleagues in Stanford University in the early 2000s. The tricks (find "malloc" not coupled with "free", cli() not coupled with sti(), dereferences of uninitialized pointers etc.) were developed in the context of the C language used for Operating System code.
So they used tricks developed for one language and context, to another language in a different context, and found that they didn't find as many bugs in the latter as they did in the former. You would think that this suggests a failure - in that their techniques are not quite as effective on Python as they were on C. Instead, they have turned it around as a statement on the inherent high quality of Python code.
It's like saying that the fact that a good tennis player sucks at playing table tennis, it implies that table tennis is a harder game.
Big creative ideas are a privilege, not a prerogative. And they usually come about in startups, not in large corporations. If they occur in large corporations then the people who thought of them leave and do startups.
I follow kernel development only cursorily, looking at the kernel mailing list once in a while. But I get the distinct feeling that patch volumes have been higher over the past few months than they would be a few years ago. A version is simply something that group a set of tested patches. Generally, you don't want the sets to get too big, so it seems natural that the speed of version releases is keeping up.
It would be nice to see a plot of the number of commits and number of versions over time.
If by "I would argue" you mean "I am totally bullshitting" then yes, I agree.
Security threats come MORE from the web than native application installs. So people are leery of clicking on links.
Think about what you just said. Could it be they come MORE from the web because there are MORE websites and people are just MORE amenable to using them? Because there's this little detail that native apps get much less restricted access to the OS. For instance, Safari on iOS won't let you access the user's system logs (which other apps might occasionally write personal information to) but the containers that run native apps do.
If by "interesting" you mean "utter bullshit", then yes, that idea is "interesting". It means nothing until people run it. A native application downloaded is very likely to have been run at least once, so downloads actually mean something more meaningful than page hits in a web app.
On the flip side, when a page gets a hit, a user has probably looked at its content. Unless by "very likely" you mean "a degree of likeliness/meaning that I believe in, and I am a bigot".
It's really weird that there is no breakup of the causes of death. The study (linked in the article) says 32% of the deaths were from heart disease. In the study, the graph measuring the correlation between coffee drinking and incidence of heart disease cannot be accessed.
This makes it really hard to derive any meaning out of the study. Does drinking excessive coffee make it more likely that you'll walk into a manhole, or to have car accidents?
The question in the post "Web Apps: Future of the Internet or forever second class citizen" amounts to:
"In the future, are people going to predominantly build consumer software applications using web technologies such as HTML5 and Javascript, which are ubiquitously supported across all platforms, or are apps mainly going to be built in platform-specific environments."
not: "In the future, are apps going to sit locally on 'mobile devices and computers' (from the article) or are they going to be accessed via websites always."
This is probably the single biggest question every mobile developer faces early on. Do you build your app separately for every platform, so use XCode, Quartz etc. on iOS, do you use a cross-platform development environment such as Xamarin which targets the OS natively, OR do you just target the browser "as the OS" and as a result run across all platforms.
The comment was open-ended enough for the following interpretation: consumers are resistant to installing new stuff. They don't like to clutter their mobile device screens with icons, and they unconsciously fear security threats. If you have a web app, you bypass this installation step. Conversely, if you have a native app then just because it's installed doesn't mean people are going to use it. How many apps do you have on your mobile device, and how many do you actually use? The "install base" number is often abused by mobile developers, as they boast about "millions of downloads", to suggest that it corresponds to the number of users. But in practice, the latter is a small fraction. The idea that a "web app is installed on every computer in existence" is an interesting perspective on that practice.
Canvas works perfectly fine on Safari for iOS and Chrome for Android (we use it in a production app). So you are suggesting that instead of using DOM, you just draw widgets natively on the HTML5 Canvas. That's a pretty neat idea:-) It doesn't address the JS being the "Lingua Franca" issue though. Google's GWT compiler lets you write your code in Java and then targets Javascript as a back end. But that wires you to Java.
Another technology that makes for a multi-language environment is Google's NativeClient. But that has too much dependence on the underlying architecture for isolation, so it's probably going to be hard to keep it portable across all the platforms out there.
The pretext makes for good media fodder, so it's hard to judge the plausibility of the results without looking at the actual study. Couldn't find it in the Washington Post article or through a quick search. A few questions that come to mind..
- How many elections were studied? If it's a small number, then are the models overtrained? It's easy to come up with a model that connects two data sets if the data sets are known ! - Are "negative" tweets distinguished from positive ones in some way? If people dislike a candidate then they are probably as likely to post on them. e.g. try running this model on Donald Trump when he was talking about getting into the 2012 race. If you could distinguish "votes" and "antivotes" reasonably well then the idea should become more defensible.
I generally sympathize with predictions of gloom for Apple's long-term outlook. But they are based on changes in the market that Apple has been unsuccessful in adapting to. And to some extent, this difficulty started when Jobs was still around. Specifically:
- Android eating into their market share on Tablets and handhelds
- Changing business models. Less and less people are buying paid apps, making advertising the main source of revenue for app developers. Admob (Google) controls 90% of the market. What this boils down to is that Google gets a significant cut of revenue on the Apple App Store. This fraction is increasing and Apple's attempts at competing in the space (iAd) have failed dramatically.
Having admitted a negative outlook, it is impressive to see that the current leadership is trying to define their own vision, rather than trying to guess "what Steve would have done." Making iOS 7 non-skeumorphic, i.e., not using physical analogies in the user interface was a complete departure from Jobs' vision of a "beautiful, immersive user interface that you already know how to use." Apple's leadership is trying to redefine Apple as a company and trying to evolve its ideas to the world today.
I disagree with some of the comments that the iOS 7 UI sucks. The home screen is kind of ugly when you look at the 80's style icons, but I've been using it for a few months I significantly prefer it to the old interface. You have to use it for a while to feel the difference. When you look at a 3d beveled button with a shadow, you subject your brain to a lot more information than you do when you look at a simple rounded rectangle. Your brain has to exert itself just a tiny little bit more. It's hard to explain because it happens at the subconscious level. This bit of saving adds up over time, making the interface easier and more pleasant to use.
The decision to ditch arguably one of the iPhone's biggest assets - its skeumorphic interface - and start from scratch must have taken a humongous amount of courage, especially for a company Apple's size. With the way things are headed (Android, Ads, competition from Amazon, Google) it's clear that they cannot do without this kind of courage and determination. I wonder, though, if it would have been possible at all under Steve's reign....
A fairer way of rephrasing the last line might be "such a project WOULD make EVEN MORE sense IF it helped them in their lobby activities." The disadvantage being that it begs the question "How does selling software or any products to the government help in lobby activities?"
How about he create a new handle for his personal feed and tell all of his followers to subscribe to it and to unsubscribe from the old one. If the followers care about him, they'll switch over and unfollow the old handle. If they care mostly about his professional identity then they'll stick to the old account.
Unfortunately, none of the other providers have nearly as much variety or volume as Netflix, so a switch is out of the question. The question is Netflix or no movies on demand. I would love to terminate my subscription to make a point, but I also want to watch good movies at my convenience.
The fact that the market is established does not imply that there isn't room for massive improvements. When they entered Search it was an established industry but their technology was superior and hence got people to switch. Google+ makes massive changes to the Facebook model. If these are perceived as improvements, then they might just have a winner on their hands. The point about a premature release is hard to judge. Some of their products - most recently Google App Engine - have seen extraordinary success thanks to early 'preview' releases. They've had their failures too - but as I understand it Google has formal statistical methods to gauge if a product is going to make it by looking at early interest with the preview/beta product. On that scale, Google+ seems to be tending more towards Gmail than Google Buzz.
Slashdot Mirror
I apologize. I misunderstood the article, but looking at the other comments I wasn't the only one who misinterpreted "open source python code" to mean a side sampling of open source code written in Python. /me yanks foot out of mouth.
This is bullshit, but a great tactical conversion of non-informative data into marketable news by Coverity.
Coverity uses lexical pattern matching to find bugs based on "tricks" discovered by Dawson Engler and his colleagues in Stanford University in the early 2000s. The tricks (find "malloc" not coupled with "free", cli() not coupled with sti(), dereferences of uninitialized pointers etc.) were developed in the context of the C language used for Operating System code.
So they used tricks developed for one language and context, to another language in a different context, and found that they didn't find as many bugs in the latter as they did in the former. You would think that this suggests a failure - in that their techniques are not quite as effective on Python as they were on C. Instead, they have turned it around as a statement on the inherent high quality of Python code.
It's like saying that the fact that a good tennis player sucks at playing table tennis, it implies that table tennis is a harder game.
Big creative ideas are a privilege, not a prerogative. And they usually come about in startups, not in large corporations. If they occur in large corporations then the people who thought of them leave and do startups.
I follow kernel development only cursorily, looking at the kernel mailing list once in a while. But I get the distinct feeling that patch volumes have been higher over the past few months than they would be a few years ago. A version is simply something that group a set of tested patches. Generally, you don't want the sets to get too big, so it seems natural that the speed of version releases is keeping up.
It would be nice to see a plot of the number of commits and number of versions over time.
I would argue this is absolutely not the case.
If by "I would argue" you mean "I am totally bullshitting" then yes, I agree.
Security threats come MORE from the web than native application installs. So people are leery of clicking on links.
Think about what you just said. Could it be they come MORE from the web because there are MORE websites and people are just MORE amenable to using them? Because there's this little detail that native apps get much less restricted access to the OS. For instance, Safari on iOS won't let you access the user's system logs (which other apps might occasionally write personal information to) but the containers that run native apps do.
If by "interesting" you mean "utter bullshit", then yes, that idea is "interesting". It means nothing until people run it. A native application downloaded is very likely to have been run at least once, so downloads actually mean something more meaningful than page hits in a web app.
On the flip side, when a page gets a hit, a user has probably looked at its content. Unless by "very likely" you mean "a degree of likeliness/meaning that I believe in, and I am a bigot".
It's really weird that there is no breakup of the causes of death. The study (linked in the article) says 32% of the deaths were from heart disease. In the study, the graph measuring the correlation between coffee drinking and incidence of heart disease cannot be accessed.
This makes it really hard to derive any meaning out of the study. Does drinking excessive coffee make it more likely that you'll walk into a manhole, or to have car accidents?
The question in the post "Web Apps: Future of the Internet or forever second class citizen" amounts to:
"In the future, are people going to predominantly build consumer software applications using web technologies such as HTML5 and Javascript, which are ubiquitously supported across all platforms, or are apps mainly going to be built in platform-specific environments."
not:
"In the future, are apps going to sit locally on 'mobile devices and computers' (from the article) or are they going to be accessed via websites always."
This is probably the single biggest question every mobile developer faces early on. Do you build your app separately for every platform, so use XCode, Quartz etc. on iOS, do you use a cross-platform development environment such as Xamarin which targets the OS natively, OR do you just target the browser "as the OS" and as a result run across all platforms.
The comment was open-ended enough for the following interpretation: consumers are resistant to installing new stuff. They don't like to clutter their mobile device screens with icons, and they unconsciously fear security threats. If you have a web app, you bypass this installation step. Conversely, if you have a native app then just because it's installed doesn't mean people are going to use it. How many apps do you have on your mobile device, and how many do you actually use? The "install base" number is often abused by mobile developers, as they boast about "millions of downloads", to suggest that it corresponds to the number of users. But in practice, the latter is a small fraction. The idea that a "web app is installed on every computer in existence" is an interesting perspective on that practice.
Canvas works perfectly fine on Safari for iOS and Chrome for Android (we use it in a production app). So you are suggesting that instead of using DOM, you just draw widgets natively on the HTML5 Canvas. That's a pretty neat idea :-) It doesn't address the JS being the "Lingua Franca" issue though. Google's GWT compiler lets you write your code in Java and then targets Javascript as a back end. But that wires you to Java.
Another technology that makes for a multi-language environment is Google's NativeClient. But that has too much dependence on the underlying architecture for isolation, so it's probably going to be hard to keep it portable across all the platforms out there.
The pretext makes for good media fodder, so it's hard to judge the plausibility of the results without looking at the actual study. Couldn't find it in the Washington Post article or through a quick search. A few questions that come to mind..
- How many elections were studied? If it's a small number, then are the models overtrained? It's easy to come up with a model that connects two data sets if the data sets are known !
- Are "negative" tweets distinguished from positive ones in some way? If people dislike a candidate then they are probably as likely to post on them. e.g. try running this model on Donald Trump when he was talking about getting into the 2012 race. If you could distinguish "votes" and "antivotes" reasonably well then the idea should become more defensible.
I generally sympathize with predictions of gloom for Apple's long-term outlook. But they are based on changes in the market that Apple has been unsuccessful in adapting to. And to some extent, this difficulty started when Jobs was still around. Specifically: - Android eating into their market share on Tablets and handhelds - Changing business models. Less and less people are buying paid apps, making advertising the main source of revenue for app developers. Admob (Google) controls 90% of the market. What this boils down to is that Google gets a significant cut of revenue on the Apple App Store. This fraction is increasing and Apple's attempts at competing in the space (iAd) have failed dramatically. Having admitted a negative outlook, it is impressive to see that the current leadership is trying to define their own vision, rather than trying to guess "what Steve would have done." Making iOS 7 non-skeumorphic, i.e., not using physical analogies in the user interface was a complete departure from Jobs' vision of a "beautiful, immersive user interface that you already know how to use." Apple's leadership is trying to redefine Apple as a company and trying to evolve its ideas to the world today. I disagree with some of the comments that the iOS 7 UI sucks. The home screen is kind of ugly when you look at the 80's style icons, but I've been using it for a few months I significantly prefer it to the old interface. You have to use it for a while to feel the difference. When you look at a 3d beveled button with a shadow, you subject your brain to a lot more information than you do when you look at a simple rounded rectangle. Your brain has to exert itself just a tiny little bit more. It's hard to explain because it happens at the subconscious level. This bit of saving adds up over time, making the interface easier and more pleasant to use. The decision to ditch arguably one of the iPhone's biggest assets - its skeumorphic interface - and start from scratch must have taken a humongous amount of courage, especially for a company Apple's size. With the way things are headed (Android, Ads, competition from Amazon, Google) it's clear that they cannot do without this kind of courage and determination. I wonder, though, if it would have been possible at all under Steve's reign....
Sarcasm. Just turn the negatives into positives and say everything with a smug expression.
It seems appropriate to celebrate the release of a Windows version with a pre-release edition of Linux.
crude
A fairer way of rephrasing the last line might be "such a project WOULD make EVEN MORE sense IF it helped them in their lobby activities." The disadvantage being that it begs the question "How does selling software or any products to the government help in lobby activities?"
How about he create a new handle for his personal feed and tell all of his followers to subscribe to it and to unsubscribe from the old one. If the followers care about him, they'll switch over and unfollow the old handle. If they care mostly about his professional identity then they'll stick to the old account.
Q: How much of James T. Kirk's mentality do you share in the real world? Did playing the character change you as a person?
I vote against it. -Software developer
Cheaper on a time basis, not on a work basis... This article makes me feel soo good about the imaginary candles on my hypothetical birthday cake.
> Apple spin-off's ultra-secure cloud-based provisioning service Wonder what ultra-secure means.. short of "we never turn it on ;)"
Unfortunately, none of the other providers have nearly as much variety or volume as Netflix, so a switch is out of the question. The question is Netflix or no movies on demand. I would love to terminate my subscription to make a point, but I also want to watch good movies at my convenience.
The fact that the market is established does not imply that there isn't room for massive improvements. When they entered Search it was an established industry but their technology was superior and hence got people to switch. Google+ makes massive changes to the Facebook model. If these are perceived as improvements, then they might just have a winner on their hands. The point about a premature release is hard to judge. Some of their products - most recently Google App Engine - have seen extraordinary success thanks to early 'preview' releases. They've had their failures too - but as I understand it Google has formal statistical methods to gauge if a product is going to make it by looking at early interest with the preview/beta product. On that scale, Google+ seems to be tending more towards Gmail than Google Buzz.
...in a right associative sense: (Man Claiming (Half of Facebook Suffers Setbacks))
not with the human proxies involved.
How do Gödel's incompleteness theorems apply to creating an organism immune to all viruses? (Thanks in advance for the answer).