So much of their life is hidden under a bushel because they don't discuss things, they don't divulge what they know, and the innovation that comes from that process doesn't happen, therefore, in the organization
Maybe the reason is that users say "we don't care about all that technobabble, just make the damned thing work the way I want to". And, of course, users don't discuss things, don't divulge what they know, and the innovation that could come from users sensibly discussing what their needs are doesn't happen either.
Marconi: Is-a too low, idiota. Too low. Bring up-a! Fleming: Fine weather we're having Mr Macaroni, wha? Marconi: Marconi! Macaroni is a pasta. Fleming: Yeah, whatever you say, Madoci. Marconi: Macaroni! Marconi: Batteria! Marconi: Connect the battery-a. Marconi: Santa Lucia! Marconi: Today, we make history-a! Marconi: Mamma mia!
Yeah right. Apple employs nobody in the US. The new campus [engadget.com] is actually a project to bring aliens onto Earth.
That campus is for 12000 people. Big f*cking deal, given Apple's size. The figure you need to look at is revenue per employee: Apple is making $1.7M per employee, mostly on the strength of their brand name and image. That makes Apple extremely inefficient in terms of job creation.
"That is in addition to Apple's monopolistic practices" Which market does Apple have a monopoly in?
I didn't accuse Apple of having a monopoly, I accused them of engaging in monopolistic practices; they are trying to get a monopoly. Let's hope they never succeed, because if they do, the computer industry will be truly screwed.
The scripting framework for Android is unstable and not very usable. The last release was in August. I don't think there has been a single application written in those languages. Jython and JRuby are extremely slow on Android. The Scheme interpreters I have seen are toys. So, I don't know of a usable, practical language other than Java for programming Android apps.
If you can point me to a usable Ruby, Perl, Lua, Python, or Scheme implementation for Android that is good enough to write real applications in, please do.
Every language has screws, but a good case can be made that Java has fewer of them than many other languages.
I have to disagree. The original Java language was simple and clean, but it was too limited to do anything with. The current version of the Java language is a bloody mess, with extensions and features tacked on haphazardly. And the Android APIs are extremely tedious, just like most Java APIs, in part because of the limitations of the language.
And evidently it isn't urgent to augment or replace Java, either with more expressive JVM languages like Scala, or supposedly simpler languages available for the JVM like the BASIC-like Jabaco, even though this could be done for Android since the translation to Dalvik bytecode is downstream of compiling into Java bytecode.
Languages that actually address Java's shortcomings need to perform dynamic code generation, which isn't supported on Android. They also tend to need large new libraries to fix the Java and Android library mess, leading to large executables. That's the reason why languages like Scala, Jython, JRuby, and Jabaco haven't caught on. If a language just compiles in a straightforward way to JVM bytecodes, it is going to have pretty much the same problems that Java itself has, because Java's limitations are part of the byte code.
The original BASIC is unsuitable to programming phones or doing anything of interest on modern machines, simply because it can't handle modern APIs and OOP. If you're talking about a modern BASIC like VisualBasic, that really is pretty much the same as programming in JavaScript and Python.
So, if you want to do easy development for you phone, use JavaScript. You can write cross-platform apps in it, and you get a choice of running it in the browser or making it a phone app.
If you work in the computer industry or study computer science, buying Apple products is not in your interest: the company creates almost no jobs in the US and it supports almost no CS research. That is in addition to Apple's monopolistic practices and their abuse of the patent system. All Apple ever does is "steal" (Steve Jobs's own words) the best ideas they can find, market the hell out of the products they build around them, and charge a premium for them.
I'm sure "traditional media" can get a story about a dead kid and his shoes right; there is, after all, little at stake and it isn't exactly complicated.
That doesn't mean reporters or "traditional media" are qualified, unbiased, or helpful when it comes to reporting on politics or economics.
This signifies so many of the core differences between Google and Apple
Google has a large team of researchers actually developing speech recognition systems, and the contribute to the science and technology of speech recognition. They have been at this for a decade, have vast amounts of data, and are doing extremely well.
Siri was spin-out from a tax-payer funded DARPA research project, cobbled together with some third party libraries. Apple snapped up the technology at bargain basement prices. Apple hasn't contributed shit to speech recognition, but now they are going to try to lock up applications of speech recognition with trivial patents.
Voice recognition is driven by feedback, and Apple has a huge headstart with Siri because it's already out now in beta form, and so Apple has access to real-world usage data
Google has been doing speech recognition for nearly a decade, and some of the people there have decades more of experience. Google has vast amounts of voice data from their other speech-based products. Apple doesn't even come close: they don't have the skills, the people, or the data.
Like so many other technologies that they bought, Apple will milk this for its PR value for a few years and then declare victory and keep copying innovations from its competitors.
What Apple patented in '647 was standard functionality on other devices before. Right now, Apple can merrily rip off other companies and they can get away with it because there is no money in overturning their patents. We need to change the patent system so that if companies succeed in overturning a bad patent like '647, companies like Apple are on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in damages, plus an obligation to replay all related licensing fees.
Can we please stop this shit? Blaming doctors doesn't help you, and they are generally not overpaid. For the length and stress of their training, the debt they incur, and the difficult lifestyle many specialties must endure permanently, most doctors are actually underpaid - in overall salary, in compensation per hour, or both.
The "length and stress of their training" is a combination of hazing and deliberate barriers to entry. Doctors are themselves (through their professional associations) are responsible for creating these conditions, through placing tight limits on entry into the profession and tight limits on how medicine is practiced.
Yes, and "other opioids" are expensive because they are controlled. Opium used to be cheaper than alcohol until it was controlled.
Having said that, methadone is not intrinsically "more lethal" than other opioids, it is simply more likely to be used incorrectly. But the property that makes it more likely to be used incorrectly (long half life, less addictive) also makes it useful in many situations.
Freedom isn't picking who gets to enjoy that "freedom" based on some rules.
The GPL doesn't say "'freedom' is good therefore use the GPL", it says "these specific freedoms are worth protecting, and the GPL protects them". If you want to protect other freedoms, that's your choice. But starting an argument because your definition of freedom differs from the specific freedoms the GPL enumerates is stupid.
Because if you truly want to promote freedom and free code, you also have to let people to profit from it.
Nobody is preventing you from profiting from GPL'ed software. Nor does it impose any licenses on your own code. The GPL prevents you from using other people's work and effectively claiming it as your own.
Furthermore, your reasoning is faulty. Several companies, including Apple, Microsoft and Sun, have taken BSD and/or MIT-licensed software, made it proprietary, and attempted to hurt both users and the originators of the software.
I am not saying that GPL is always the answer. In fact, I distribute most of my software under BSD or MIT licenses. Nevertheless, your generic statement that more permissive licenses are always better for freedom are wrong. Sometimes, the GPL is the right license.
Any philosophy or religion can be misused for bad. In the grand scheme of things, however, Buddhism has been one of the most benign and tolerant religions. Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, has been one of the worst, being responsible for corruption, destruction of entire civilizations, and mass murder for two millennia across the entire world, along with Islam and Judaism.
And it is not surprising that monotheism has been associated with such massive crimes against humanity: the idea that morality is determined by an invisible omnipotent being is intrinsically morally wrong, even more so when that being is supposedly channeled through a large, corrupt organization like the Catholic church.
Really, the vast majority of fervent Christians start popping out of the woodwork here as morning rolls around in the Land of the Free.
True, the American people generally are more Christian and more religious than Europeans. Yet, churches have much more political power in European nations than in the US, much to the detriment of European democracies.
"Atheism" just means not believing in theism. Talking about all atheists as if they shared a single philosophy is like talking about all non-dog-owners.
Android may not be as open as you think. The recent webinos.org & visionmobile.com report gives Android a low Open Governance Index of 23%:
Governance doesn't matter for what I was talking about. What matters is that if Google screws up or gets in trouble, other people can take over the development of Android and adapt and port it.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you see Android apps running on Windows 8 tablets and Windows phones very soon, under some kind of emulator.
After being a user and developer in an Oracle environment, and seeing first hand how Oracle can do business; I am also concerned as to how the ongoing Oracle/Google Android legal dispute will work itself out... Perhaps Oracle think that they will make a great deal of money out of Android? Or perhaps they just want to throw difficulties in Google's way?
Open source also protects you from that to some degree. Even if Oracle or Apple were to go nuclear on Android and abuse the patent system to kill Android as a commercial product, the fact that Android source code is available under an open source license means that Android will continue to live on.
In contrast, if iOS gets into legal hot waters (and it likely will sooner or later), there is absolutely nothing you can do; Apple fully controls and owns iOS, and if Apple is forced to change it, there is nothing you can do.
Assuming you're Codepunk on the Apple Store, your games aren't exactly hot sellers there either. Furthermore, all your offerings seem to be aimed at kids or youth. Yup, for that demographic the iPhone is currently the hot thing to get. Believe it or not, that group does not represent the totality of phone users. So, between having fairly low volume applications and having them targeted at a youth demographic, it's not surprising that you don't do well on the Android store.
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Maybe the reason is that users say "we don't care about all that technobabble, just make the damned thing work the way I want to". And, of course, users don't discuss things, don't divulge what they know, and the innovation that could come from users sensibly discussing what their needs are doesn't happen either.
A moderator who doesn't get the reference and total non-sequitur. Gosh, you guys should have your geek cards revoked.
Ah, those were the days:
Marconi: Is-a too low, idiota. Too low. Bring up-a!
Fleming: Fine weather we're having Mr Macaroni, wha?
Marconi: Marconi! Macaroni is a pasta.
Fleming: Yeah, whatever you say, Madoci.
Marconi: Macaroni!
Marconi: Batteria!
Marconi: Connect the battery-a.
Marconi: Santa Lucia!
Marconi: Today, we make history-a!
Marconi: Mamma mia!
The scripting framework for Android is unstable and not very usable. The last release was in August. I don't think there has been a single application written in those languages. Jython and JRuby are extremely slow on Android. The Scheme interpreters I have seen are toys. So, I don't know of a usable, practical language other than Java for programming Android apps.
If you can point me to a usable Ruby, Perl, Lua, Python, or Scheme implementation for Android that is good enough to write real applications in, please do.
I have to disagree. The original Java language was simple and clean, but it was too limited to do anything with. The current version of the Java language is a bloody mess, with extensions and features tacked on haphazardly. And the Android APIs are extremely tedious, just like most Java APIs, in part because of the limitations of the language.
Languages that actually address Java's shortcomings need to perform dynamic code generation, which isn't supported on Android. They also tend to need large new libraries to fix the Java and Android library mess, leading to large executables. That's the reason why languages like Scala, Jython, JRuby, and Jabaco haven't caught on. If a language just compiles in a straightforward way to JVM bytecodes, it is going to have pretty much the same problems that Java itself has, because Java's limitations are part of the byte code.
The original BASIC is unsuitable to programming phones or doing anything of interest on modern machines, simply because it can't handle modern APIs and OOP. If you're talking about a modern BASIC like VisualBasic, that really is pretty much the same as programming in JavaScript and Python.
So, if you want to do easy development for you phone, use JavaScript. You can write cross-platform apps in it, and you get a choice of running it in the browser or making it a phone app.
If you work in the computer industry or study computer science, buying Apple products is not in your interest: the company creates almost no jobs in the US and it supports almost no CS research. That is in addition to Apple's monopolistic practices and their abuse of the patent system. All Apple ever does is "steal" (Steve Jobs's own words) the best ideas they can find, market the hell out of the products they build around them, and charge a premium for them.
I'm sure "traditional media" can get a story about a dead kid and his shoes right; there is, after all, little at stake and it isn't exactly complicated.
That doesn't mean reporters or "traditional media" are qualified, unbiased, or helpful when it comes to reporting on politics or economics.
Death by snoosnoo is overrated.
In the time it took you to post your rant, you could have found the prior art I was referring to.
Google has a large team of researchers actually developing speech recognition systems, and the contribute to the science and technology of speech recognition. They have been at this for a decade, have vast amounts of data, and are doing extremely well.
Siri was spin-out from a tax-payer funded DARPA research project, cobbled together with some third party libraries. Apple snapped up the technology at bargain basement prices. Apple hasn't contributed shit to speech recognition, but now they are going to try to lock up applications of speech recognition with trivial patents.
Google has been doing speech recognition for nearly a decade, and some of the people there have decades more of experience. Google has vast amounts of voice data from their other speech-based products. Apple doesn't even come close: they don't have the skills, the people, or the data.
Like so many other technologies that they bought, Apple will milk this for its PR value for a few years and then declare victory and keep copying innovations from its competitors.
You've heard of Google? Are you incapable of formulating a simple query?
Except, of course, that Apple didn't come up with this solution themselves either, they ripped it off from other companies.
What Apple patented in '647 was standard functionality on other devices before. Right now, Apple can merrily rip off other companies and they can get away with it because there is no money in overturning their patents. We need to change the patent system so that if companies succeed in overturning a bad patent like '647, companies like Apple are on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in damages, plus an obligation to replay all related licensing fees.
The "length and stress of their training" is a combination of hazing and deliberate barriers to entry. Doctors are themselves (through their professional associations) are responsible for creating these conditions, through placing tight limits on entry into the profession and tight limits on how medicine is practiced.
Yes, and "other opioids" are expensive because they are controlled. Opium used to be cheaper than alcohol until it was controlled.
Having said that, methadone is not intrinsically "more lethal" than other opioids, it is simply more likely to be used incorrectly. But the property that makes it more likely to be used incorrectly (long half life, less addictive) also makes it useful in many situations.
The GPL doesn't say "'freedom' is good therefore use the GPL", it says "these specific freedoms are worth protecting, and the GPL protects them". If you want to protect other freedoms, that's your choice. But starting an argument because your definition of freedom differs from the specific freedoms the GPL enumerates is stupid.
Nobody is preventing you from profiting from GPL'ed software. Nor does it impose any licenses on your own code. The GPL prevents you from using other people's work and effectively claiming it as your own.
Furthermore, your reasoning is faulty. Several companies, including Apple, Microsoft and Sun, have taken BSD and/or MIT-licensed software, made it proprietary, and attempted to hurt both users and the originators of the software.
I am not saying that GPL is always the answer. In fact, I distribute most of my software under BSD or MIT licenses. Nevertheless, your generic statement that more permissive licenses are always better for freedom are wrong. Sometimes, the GPL is the right license.
Yes you do: you imply that atheists don't believe in an afterlife, which is bullshit. Some atheists believe in an afterlife, others don't.
What is "disingenous" about it?
And why do you think they are under any obligation to continue free service?
Any philosophy or religion can be misused for bad. In the grand scheme of things, however, Buddhism has been one of the most benign and tolerant religions. Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, has been one of the worst, being responsible for corruption, destruction of entire civilizations, and mass murder for two millennia across the entire world, along with Islam and Judaism.
And it is not surprising that monotheism has been associated with such massive crimes against humanity: the idea that morality is determined by an invisible omnipotent being is intrinsically morally wrong, even more so when that being is supposedly channeled through a large, corrupt organization like the Catholic church.
True, the American people generally are more Christian and more religious than Europeans. Yet, churches have much more political power in European nations than in the US, much to the detriment of European democracies.
"Atheism" just means not believing in theism. Talking about all atheists as if they shared a single philosophy is like talking about all non-dog-owners.
Governance doesn't matter for what I was talking about. What matters is that if Google screws up or gets in trouble, other people can take over the development of Android and adapt and port it.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you see Android apps running on Windows 8 tablets and Windows phones very soon, under some kind of emulator.
Open source also protects you from that to some degree. Even if Oracle or Apple were to go nuclear on Android and abuse the patent system to kill Android as a commercial product, the fact that Android source code is available under an open source license means that Android will continue to live on.
In contrast, if iOS gets into legal hot waters (and it likely will sooner or later), there is absolutely nothing you can do; Apple fully controls and owns iOS, and if Apple is forced to change it, there is nothing you can do.
Assuming you're Codepunk on the Apple Store, your games aren't exactly hot sellers there either. Furthermore, all your offerings seem to be aimed at kids or youth. Yup, for that demographic the iPhone is currently the hot thing to get. Believe it or not, that group does not represent the totality of phone users. So, between having fairly low volume applications and having them targeted at a youth demographic, it's not surprising that you don't do well on the Android store.