No, I wasn't suggesting that only multinationals could afford to advertise on TV. I was suggesting that people (ad agencies, companies) would have to be more creative.
Where I grew up there was a particular company that sold carpets. They always used the same spokesman, always dressed the same way, and while the sets may have changed through the years, it was always that guy, in the blue shirt and mustache, talking about carpets in his folksy way directly at the camera. If I were fast-forwarding through the commercials today and saw that ad, I'd immediately recognize it, and isn't that what most of advertising is? Brand recognition? I would immediately remember the particular carpet company because of that guy and, if I were in the market for carpets, sure I'd give them a call simply because they're the first name I think of when I think carpets.
The secret of effective advertising is "simple and direct"; don't confuse the person (both visually and audibly), and don't allow for interpretation (which some would argue is the failing of the Apple ads...they make "pc" seem sympathetic and the Apple guy smug).
Except when their DRM server or whatever thing the device phones home to is discontinued, or your device's memory gets corrupt, or you want to play those games on another device without paying for them all again, or you want to sell a game to someone else. A physical cartridge doesn't have any of the above problems, but like you said, you have to keep from losing them.
I have an iPhone and an iPod touch; one purchase allows me to use the app on both devices, simultaneously. Both my kids like a particular paint program, and they both use it on each of the devices and try to out-do the other.
There is no DRM server as far as I know in that the iPod touch doesn't have any way to phone home; it's connected to whatever wireless network I let it connect to. Apple has stated there is a "kill switch" in the iphone OS, but that is an explicit thing...we are going to delete this app because there's something so wrong with it ("wrong" being a very nebulous term, I realize) that we don't want you to have it. Amazon tried that with the Kindle and it didn't work out so well for them, to the point that they'd say they wouldn't do it again, essentially making the kill switch worthless. Apple would have the same problem...the public outcry would presumably be so great that they'd have to have a very very good reason to do so (it was a malicious app that was stealing your stuff, kicking your puppy, bricking your phone, etc.) and even *then* they'd still get flak for it.
A backup of your phone/touch is made when you sync it, so even if something did get totally hosed, you'd still be able to recover. I can personally vouch for this; I restored my ipod touch to a pristine state, with all the apps, after doing a weekend aborted jailbreak test that left it more or less catatonic.
Basically the challenge to the ad companies is that, in the age of DVRs, you need to adjust your ads to be 1. immediately recognizable and 2. worth watching in the first place. The Apple ads are brilliant in that it's basically just two people surrounded by white. This makes the ads immediately recognizable, even when the Tivo is in full fast-forward mode. Then the ads have to be worth watching; I'll skip the debate about whether the Apple ads are worth watching, but I personally find them very funny and will actually stop or rewind to watch them.
I can see, though, that this sinks the local ad for the car dealership, or any other company that can't (or won't) come up with ads that make people sit up and take notice and make you go "wait, what?" I'd bet it's these companies and ad agencies that are doing the bulk of the complaining.
Why is AI always referred to as an attempt to create HAL? AI won't succeed until HAL kills the crew and begs for its life. *That* is the end goal for AI, as the general public sees it?
I would argue that AI is anything where a machine makes a decision without requiring permission. This includes automatic transmissions, autopilot (something they had back in the 30s!), and air conditioning; a device reacted to inputs by itself and made a decision to something without asking. I'd think the reason why AI is impossible is that, if you apply AI concepts as lay-people think of it,you'd see that there is no way to build a system that could account for all the possibilities, while also accounting for the reactions of the people a decision would affect.
How would an AI conditioner handle an Aunt Tillie (who loves it ice cold at all times), and Uncle John (who can't have it hot enough) in the same room at the same time? People are looking to AI to somehow please both Tillie and John simultaneously, which simply can't be done, and thus somehow this is "AI"'s fault.
Meanwhile, as it's been pointed out many many times, a lot of modern airplanes simply couldn't fly without computers performing thousands of little adjustments here-and-there to keep the ungainly thing flying straight. Likewise, haven't computers in cars improved car reliability by also being able to make a million tiny changes to things like fuel mixture, braking, airbags, etc.?
I loved my dslite, and played it a lot, and there are lots of games (lots and lots) of games that I had a lot of fun with (Mario Kart especially). I don't think I'll get another one only because the games I have on the iPhone, while not Mario Kart or Nintendo-quality, are good enough for what I want to do, which is kill some time on the bus or in a line. Plus, as it's my phone, I'm going to always have it with me.
Comparing the games I've played on the ds and the iphone, the only difference is that a majority of the games on the iphone seem to be trial balloons from established companies (EA, Sega), and home-brew games that are of varying degrees of quality. What I don't see is a major benefit of the ds hardware over the iphone. Yes I can pull out the game cart quickly get going with another game, but I've lost several carts and that's $40+ down the drain. With the phone, the app is actually installed and I don't see any excessive start lag that wouldn't be there in a cart game too (setting up the db, loading graphics, initializing the engine, etc.). From a graphics, sound, networking, etc., standpoint, I don't see anything the ds can do that the iphone can't (okay, yes, there are two screens, but that's not a "killer features" as far as I'm concerned; if anything, I've never been very good at keeping focus on the "right" screen at the right time).
I can appreciate we won't see Mario Kart on the iPhone soon, if ever, but I'd think that there are plenty of other companies developing for the ds who, if they wrote an iphone version, would be opening up a whole new market for themselves. I know there's been articles about iphone app piracy that you don't have as much with a cart, so I guess that's a legitimate concern. That said, I know lots of iphone users, none of them even know what jailbreaking is; are there really more iphone users "in the know" about how to pirate an app than users who just buy their apps and go about their business?
I appreciate this sounds very fanboy-ish, but as someone who had an ipod, a phone, and a dslite...I was carrying around a lot of stuff. The iphone, for me, consolidates everything into one package and there's no reason I'd want to go back.
So I've got a bunch of cable laying around, figure I'll run my own line from Japan to California. How does that work, exactly? I assume the cable is protected in some extremely strong waterproof and snag-proof sheath, but do they really just roll it off the ship, let it fall to the ocean floor, and there it sits? Do they have to occasionally throw a repeater overboard as well? I've always been curious how we're actually able to have these outrageously long cables under the sea and that it works, and works well enough that I believe cables are still the preferred method of data movement, with satellites being a distant second.
There are plenty of reasons that a route-based GPS is not all-encompassing (pun intended); a lot of places are not available by road, or the road ended long ago and now the GPS is saying you're essentially in a brown or green void.
I can see that this is not necessarily...mainstream..., but I've found that for hiking, geocaching, etc., I can use the TomTom to get me to the closest road or parking lot, and then I switch to (of all things) the iPhone 3gs for everything else, because of the compass and some excellent tracking software that's come out for it.
Don't Garmin and TomTom also provide the in-dash GPS for cars? I would think that would be a pretty good amount of $$$ too.
I kept wep on my router longer than I should have because I just liked playing Mario Kart just that much. I lost my dslite and thought to buy the new model, but it still doesn't support wpa, just wep. I decided I wasn't going to switch back just for one game, and opted instead to buy nothing. Maybe I'll get the new one if it can do wpa, but if not, no sale.
I have only Mac hardware at home, but I do have VMWare Fusion for the extremely rare occasion I need a Windows machine.
I bootcamp'ed my Intel-based Macs on the thought that I would perhaps need to use the machine as a pure Windows box once in awhile, but that hasn't happened; I've been surprised to find that between what I can do on a website, or what Java can provide, or what developers have been good to provide both a Mac as well as Windows version, there's nothing so exclusive to Windows that I've needed to run Boot Camp. If anything, there's just a couple of programs I use for development written in Delphi of all things that are exclusive to Windows.
I get what you're saying about having every move dictated by Steve in OSX, but I think the real situation isn't as cut-n-dry. The point of the OS is to run other applications, with all their related complexities; theoretically there's no reason why you need to spend any time dealing with the OS at all, short of moving files around. When it comes to this particular aspect, I don't see how OSX is any different from Windows or Gnome in terms of features, capabilities, etc. I honestly can't think of a particular aspect of file management that any OS has over another; they all use the same metaphors and offer the same capabilities (icons, lists, dragging, etc.)
The difference is that Windows puts all their options in a set of tabs in a dialog box, and then makes that dialog box available in every single Explorer window. Additionally, because Windows uses a menu bar for each window, instead of OSX's single menu bar, you end up with a lot of "visual complexity" in terms of what you're supposed to click on.
My complaints about OSX is that there is a ton of additional capability hidden in the keyboard shortcuts, but they don't go out of their way to ever tell you what they are. I actually spend a lot of time doing stuff in the terminal just because I perceive that as being faster to manipulate stuff and only because that's what I'm used to.
Apple has made a lot of the interface customizable, in terms of being able to see the full path to the current window, as one example, but they don't seem interested in mentioning how to do it. Likewise you can do a *lot* of stuff by manipulating plist files, but again they don't ever go out of their way to tell you how. In a lot of ways, I think they made a conscious decision to avoid having a Mac version of a "registry" where, yes everything is in one place, but make one wrong move and your machine becomes unbootable
Specifically, I have to (re)learn Perl every time I write something in it, which has been about 2 dozen times over the past 12+ years. Seriously though, there's something about my mind that resists keeping any Perl syntax or tricks-n-tips longer than it takes to do the actual project; once it's done it's as if someone else wrote it.
Why is it I can keep *shudder* Excel 4 macro tricks and have them at the ready at all times (=while(not(isblank(active.cell)))...why do I still remember this?) but I still struggle to assign values to a simple array in Perl?
The glory is making something that people *want* to use, or it really honestly makes their life better, and they know it. I've done mostly back-end stuff throughout my career but I have seen email comments from users who have praised the system for making such-and-such job easier, or figuring out this big thing, or saving a lot of time, etc., and I can feel good that I had a hand in that, or I implemented that, etc.
My kids like playing with the apps on the iPhone, especially music making and drawing pictures. I can't say how many times I've been handed the phone with a picture and my daughter beaming and going "I made that!!", with obvious joy on her face. That made me happy, and I'd think the author of the program would be happy to know how much joy s/he brought.
That's glory right there. If you can make someone happy with what you do, honestly and truly, then it makes the TPS reports, status meetings, weekends and late night worth it.
But it's still way way cool and I'd love to do something like this myself.
I was thinking of a short-lived TV show I immediately loved and can't think of its name (and sadly, google hasn't been my friend to find it) about a group of people who launch a spaceship to the moon using stuff from a junkyard. In a similar vein, I suppose, as a way of "upping the ante", what would be the chances of attaching a couple of rockets to the side so that, when the balloon has gotten as far as it's going to go, the rockets kick in and push it up that much further? Heck, what would it take to get it into some sort of orbit? I suppose, though, the pictures would look pretty much the same as taken from the balloon; you'd really have to work hard to get a good pic of the earth. Of course, INARS so I'm likely being incredibly naive in my ideas here.
I agree that this really smacks of straight-up advertising, but I will say that Bloom really is a pretty cool app; my kids love playing with it to the point that I can't ever use the phone for, you know, making phone calls.
Calling Brian Eno god may also rub people the wrong way, for a lot of reasons. I will say that he has quite a significant body of amazing work. Personally, my favorite is "Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks".
I worked at a company that had a Cobol-based program that went live back in 1969. A team of programmers had kept it going ever since. Shortly after I started (mid 1995), I was in a meeting when one of the Cobol programmers mentioned that so-and-so had died over the weekend. Everybody started talking about her, what a great person she was, etc. After the meeting, I asked who she was, and was told that she was the last surviving member of the original team that wrote and deployed the application. When the system was finally shut down back in 2003 or so (I had long since left, but still had some contacts there to tell me what was going on), I really felt weird about hearing it; here was this thing that had outlived its creators (and some of the later maintainers), and now it was gone too.
Isn't it strange how computer software is both unbelievably ephemeral, yet also incredibly long-lived. I've worked on both sides and I'm not sure which is more fulfilling; it apparently took several years to write the aforementioned Cobol program, but it outlived its creators. I wonder what a programmer on something like, say, Madden, would feel, knowing that this thing they're working so hard on will be totally supplanted by the next version, next year.
Strange business, this computing machinery. Strange indeed.
The Incompatible TimeShare system of MIT yore, as I understand it, is truly no more, unless somebody's been *extra* *careful* to keep their PDP-6 in working order all these years.
Oh well, at least we got the Jargon file out of it.
I've come to really like GCD; I haven't played with it much in Cocoa (Obj-C) but I've been moving some of the stuff I wrote a long time ago in C to use it and I think I can say that what it does is *really* *really* awesome. It helps when writing code to be run in parallel; it does is not help you in determining *what* should be done in parallel. By putting your work into queues, by way of closures (yeah, blocks, whatever...I'm sticking with the closure name), it's up to the underlying OS to determine what thread gets what work, and on what processor. Having worked with multithreaded stuff on Windows, and calling GetThreadAffinityMask or whatever it was, and being told that it's just a *hint* to the OS, which is free to ignore you, which it always did, GCD really does spread out the work evenly among my 16-proc MacPro, and then turns around and does it just as well on the dual-core mini.
I've wanted something like this for years; a really decent OS thread scheduler that divides up the work on the other processors in a sensible fashion. I was even looking into how much effort it would take to write something like this from scratch for Linux, and now I don't even have to. Sweet!
Caveats: This is in OS X only, so no iPhone GCD (at least, not yet...not really necessary until we have multi-core iPhones), and while I've lived with additions to C++ through the years (templates mostly), the idea of adding, well, anything to C seems strange, let alone something as run-time dependent as closures.
In all the twists this long saga has taken, did anyone ever ask what Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson (the guys who actually *wrote* Unix) thought about all this brouhaha? I know, they were Bellcore/AT&T employees, and that AT&T owned it, etc., etc., but I'm sort of just curious what they have to say about all this fighting over something they wrote*.
* I also acknowledge that there were lots of other people who had a major, major hand in writing Unix; but the history books say they were really the first ones (Ken Thompson, specifically).
You dont get paid $1.2 million and sit under a flickering florescent light...
I wasn't paid that much; I was just a low-level sweatshop coder who fixed bugs, implemented stuff, and basically lived in C++ all day, every day. For all the hot-shot designers and managers, the people actually implementing the low-level code were working in pretty lousy conditions. Yes the machines were top-notch, but if your area wasn't on the tour circuit, you got all the crap furniture. Our proximity to a big storage room also meant that, when it filled up with retired equipment, machines, monitors, all kinds of stuff ended up being stacked up all over the place. I had a Sun mini-tower machines under my desk that I used as a foot rest.
Basically, you were paid a lot of money, so they expected you to suck it up and just deal; you aren't there for the atmosphere...you're here to make us even more freaking money.
Everyone, but it was not just some slang people throw around (like calling people "dude" or whatnot); everyone *hated* everyone else because everyone else represented obstacles to making even *more* money. I was hated because I couldn't implement some Black-Scholes variant fast enough, and that meant that the *one* guy who demanded it, thought he was losing millions. Admins were hated because things weren't clearing *instantly*. I remember one guy being *screamed* at because the printer had the audacity to run out of paper.
This was an environment where pure, unrefined greed was required. I remember a meeting being referred to as a waste of oxygen and money, and how much more they (the business guys in the meeting) could make if there weren't all these stupid a-hole IT guys. In the meeting. With the "stupid a-hole IT guys".
It's not worth it. It's just not worth it. I have never been more miserable than when working in such an establishment. I never, ever, ever thought I could get used to being called an a-hole to my face for, well, anything...that's just how you referred to. And while the executive offices were likely very nice, I sat in a cube with ripped fabric, working under a flickering florescent light.
In addition to what others have said, insanely long hours, unbelievable pressure (I was told that if I didn't have something working in production by Sunday night that I should just assume I'm fired), I can say that in 1996 I took 3 days off: New Years, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I worked every other day.
All updates within a particular version are free (10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.5.3, etc.), but jumping to a major version (10.4 -> 10.5) cost something. This particular upgrade is a little different insofar as they've tweaked the behind-the-scenes stuff more than anything else, which some folks might consider nothing more than a service pack, but because of that it's only $29 instead of the usual $129.
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No, I wasn't suggesting that only multinationals could afford to advertise on TV. I was suggesting that people (ad agencies, companies) would have to be more creative.
Where I grew up there was a particular company that sold carpets. They always used the same spokesman, always dressed the same way, and while the sets may have changed through the years, it was always that guy, in the blue shirt and mustache, talking about carpets in his folksy way directly at the camera. If I were fast-forwarding through the commercials today and saw that ad, I'd immediately recognize it, and isn't that what most of advertising is? Brand recognition? I would immediately remember the particular carpet company because of that guy and, if I were in the market for carpets, sure I'd give them a call simply because they're the first name I think of when I think carpets.
The secret of effective advertising is "simple and direct"; don't confuse the person (both visually and audibly), and don't allow for interpretation (which some would argue is the failing of the Apple ads...they make "pc" seem sympathetic and the Apple guy smug).
Except when their DRM server or whatever thing the device phones home to is discontinued, or your device's memory gets corrupt, or you want to play those games on another device without paying for them all again, or you want to sell a game to someone else. A physical cartridge doesn't have any of the above problems, but like you said, you have to keep from losing them.
I have an iPhone and an iPod touch; one purchase allows me to use the app on both devices, simultaneously. Both my kids like a particular paint program, and they both use it on each of the devices and try to out-do the other.
There is no DRM server as far as I know in that the iPod touch doesn't have any way to phone home; it's connected to whatever wireless network I let it connect to. Apple has stated there is a "kill switch" in the iphone OS, but that is an explicit thing...we are going to delete this app because there's something so wrong with it ("wrong" being a very nebulous term, I realize) that we don't want you to have it. Amazon tried that with the Kindle and it didn't work out so well for them, to the point that they'd say they wouldn't do it again, essentially making the kill switch worthless. Apple would have the same problem...the public outcry would presumably be so great that they'd have to have a very very good reason to do so (it was a malicious app that was stealing your stuff, kicking your puppy, bricking your phone, etc.) and even *then* they'd still get flak for it.
A backup of your phone/touch is made when you sync it, so even if something did get totally hosed, you'd still be able to recover. I can personally vouch for this; I restored my ipod touch to a pristine state, with all the apps, after doing a weekend aborted jailbreak test that left it more or less catatonic.
Basically the challenge to the ad companies is that, in the age of DVRs, you need to adjust your ads to be 1. immediately recognizable and 2. worth watching in the first place. The Apple ads are brilliant in that it's basically just two people surrounded by white. This makes the ads immediately recognizable, even when the Tivo is in full fast-forward mode. Then the ads have to be worth watching; I'll skip the debate about whether the Apple ads are worth watching, but I personally find them very funny and will actually stop or rewind to watch them.
I can see, though, that this sinks the local ad for the car dealership, or any other company that can't (or won't) come up with ads that make people sit up and take notice and make you go "wait, what?" I'd bet it's these companies and ad agencies that are doing the bulk of the complaining.
Why is AI always referred to as an attempt to create HAL? AI won't succeed until HAL kills the crew and begs for its life. *That* is the end goal for AI, as the general public sees it?
I would argue that AI is anything where a machine makes a decision without requiring permission. This includes automatic transmissions, autopilot (something they had back in the 30s!), and air conditioning; a device reacted to inputs by itself and made a decision to something without asking. I'd think the reason why AI is impossible is that, if you apply AI concepts as lay-people think of it,you'd see that there is no way to build a system that could account for all the possibilities, while also accounting for the reactions of the people a decision would affect.
How would an AI conditioner handle an Aunt Tillie (who loves it ice cold at all times), and Uncle John (who can't have it hot enough) in the same room at the same time? People are looking to AI to somehow please both Tillie and John simultaneously, which simply can't be done, and thus somehow this is "AI"'s fault.
Meanwhile, as it's been pointed out many many times, a lot of modern airplanes simply couldn't fly without computers performing thousands of little adjustments here-and-there to keep the ungainly thing flying straight. Likewise, haven't computers in cars improved car reliability by also being able to make a million tiny changes to things like fuel mixture, braking, airbags, etc.?
I loved my dslite, and played it a lot, and there are lots of games (lots and lots) of games that I had a lot of fun with (Mario Kart especially). I don't think I'll get another one only because the games I have on the iPhone, while not Mario Kart or Nintendo-quality, are good enough for what I want to do, which is kill some time on the bus or in a line. Plus, as it's my phone, I'm going to always have it with me.
Comparing the games I've played on the ds and the iphone, the only difference is that a majority of the games on the iphone seem to be trial balloons from established companies (EA, Sega), and home-brew games that are of varying degrees of quality. What I don't see is a major benefit of the ds hardware over the iphone. Yes I can pull out the game cart quickly get going with another game, but I've lost several carts and that's $40+ down the drain. With the phone, the app is actually installed and I don't see any excessive start lag that wouldn't be there in a cart game too (setting up the db, loading graphics, initializing the engine, etc.). From a graphics, sound, networking, etc., standpoint, I don't see anything the ds can do that the iphone can't (okay, yes, there are two screens, but that's not a "killer features" as far as I'm concerned; if anything, I've never been very good at keeping focus on the "right" screen at the right time).
I can appreciate we won't see Mario Kart on the iPhone soon, if ever, but I'd think that there are plenty of other companies developing for the ds who, if they wrote an iphone version, would be opening up a whole new market for themselves. I know there's been articles about iphone app piracy that you don't have as much with a cart, so I guess that's a legitimate concern. That said, I know lots of iphone users, none of them even know what jailbreaking is; are there really more iphone users "in the know" about how to pirate an app than users who just buy their apps and go about their business?
I appreciate this sounds very fanboy-ish, but as someone who had an ipod, a phone, and a dslite...I was carrying around a lot of stuff. The iphone, for me, consolidates everything into one package and there's no reason I'd want to go back.
So I've got a bunch of cable laying around, figure I'll run my own line from Japan to California. How does that work, exactly? I assume the cable is protected in some extremely strong waterproof and snag-proof sheath, but do they really just roll it off the ship, let it fall to the ocean floor, and there it sits? Do they have to occasionally throw a repeater overboard as well? I've always been curious how we're actually able to have these outrageously long cables under the sea and that it works, and works well enough that I believe cables are still the preferred method of data movement, with satellites being a distant second.
There are plenty of reasons that a route-based GPS is not all-encompassing (pun intended); a lot of places are not available by road, or the road ended long ago and now the GPS is saying you're essentially in a brown or green void.
I can see that this is not necessarily ...mainstream..., but I've found that for hiking, geocaching, etc., I can use the TomTom to get me to the closest road or parking lot, and then I switch to (of all things) the iPhone 3gs for everything else, because of the compass and some excellent tracking software that's come out for it.
Don't Garmin and TomTom also provide the in-dash GPS for cars? I would think that would be a pretty good amount of $$$ too.
I kept wep on my router longer than I should have because I just liked playing Mario Kart just that much. I lost my dslite and thought to buy the new model, but it still doesn't support wpa, just wep. I decided I wasn't going to switch back just for one game, and opted instead to buy nothing. Maybe I'll get the new one if it can do wpa, but if not, no sale.
...I'm sure someone will find some other vulnerability.
Not that I like to feed trolls, but I thought I'd read this particular diatribe before:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20122733357&sid=1
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=25775362
http://kottke.org/98/11/ (wow! from 1998!)
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.634488.12
and a bunch more...Google has a lot:
http://www.google.com/search?q=From+a+productivity+standpoint%2C+I+don%27t+get+how+people+can+claim+that+the+Macintosh+is+a+superior+machine.&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
I have only Mac hardware at home, but I do have VMWare Fusion for the extremely rare occasion I need a Windows machine.
I bootcamp'ed my Intel-based Macs on the thought that I would perhaps need to use the machine as a pure Windows box once in awhile, but that hasn't happened; I've been surprised to find that between what I can do on a website, or what Java can provide, or what developers have been good to provide both a Mac as well as Windows version, there's nothing so exclusive to Windows that I've needed to run Boot Camp. If anything, there's just a couple of programs I use for development written in Delphi of all things that are exclusive to Windows.
I get what you're saying about having every move dictated by Steve in OSX, but I think the real situation isn't as cut-n-dry. The point of the OS is to run other applications, with all their related complexities; theoretically there's no reason why you need to spend any time dealing with the OS at all, short of moving files around. When it comes to this particular aspect, I don't see how OSX is any different from Windows or Gnome in terms of features, capabilities, etc. I honestly can't think of a particular aspect of file management that any OS has over another; they all use the same metaphors and offer the same capabilities (icons, lists, dragging, etc.)
The difference is that Windows puts all their options in a set of tabs in a dialog box, and then makes that dialog box available in every single Explorer window. Additionally, because Windows uses a menu bar for each window, instead of OSX's single menu bar, you end up with a lot of "visual complexity" in terms of what you're supposed to click on.
My complaints about OSX is that there is a ton of additional capability hidden in the keyboard shortcuts, but they don't go out of their way to ever tell you what they are. I actually spend a lot of time doing stuff in the terminal just because I perceive that as being faster to manipulate stuff and only because that's what I'm used to.
Apple has made a lot of the interface customizable, in terms of being able to see the full path to the current window, as one example, but they don't seem interested in mentioning how to do it. Likewise you can do a *lot* of stuff by manipulating plist files, but again they don't ever go out of their way to tell you how. In a lot of ways, I think they made a conscious decision to avoid having a Mac version of a "registry" where, yes everything is in one place, but make one wrong move and your machine becomes unbootable
Specifically, I have to (re)learn Perl every time I write something in it, which has been about 2 dozen times over the past 12+ years. Seriously though, there's something about my mind that resists keeping any Perl syntax or tricks-n-tips longer than it takes to do the actual project; once it's done it's as if someone else wrote it.
Why is it I can keep *shudder* Excel 4 macro tricks and have them at the ready at all times (=while(not(isblank(active.cell)))...why do I still remember this?) but I still struggle to assign values to a simple array in Perl?
The glory is making something that people *want* to use, or it really honestly makes their life better, and they know it. I've done mostly back-end stuff throughout my career but I have seen email comments from users who have praised the system for making such-and-such job easier, or figuring out this big thing, or saving a lot of time, etc., and I can feel good that I had a hand in that, or I implemented that, etc.
My kids like playing with the apps on the iPhone, especially music making and drawing pictures. I can't say how many times I've been handed the phone with a picture and my daughter beaming and going "I made that!!", with obvious joy on her face. That made me happy, and I'd think the author of the program would be happy to know how much joy s/he brought.
That's glory right there. If you can make someone happy with what you do, honestly and truly, then it makes the TPS reports, status meetings, weekends and late night worth it.
But it's still way way cool and I'd love to do something like this myself.
I was thinking of a short-lived TV show I immediately loved and can't think of its name (and sadly, google hasn't been my friend to find it) about a group of people who launch a spaceship to the moon using stuff from a junkyard. In a similar vein, I suppose, as a way of "upping the ante", what would be the chances of attaching a couple of rockets to the side so that, when the balloon has gotten as far as it's going to go, the rockets kick in and push it up that much further? Heck, what would it take to get it into some sort of orbit? I suppose, though, the pictures would look pretty much the same as taken from the balloon; you'd really have to work hard to get a good pic of the earth. Of course, INARS so I'm likely being incredibly naive in my ideas here.
Absolutely. This is my favorite movie about the space program of them all. The soundtrack is absolutely spot-on for it.
I agree that this really smacks of straight-up advertising, but I will say that Bloom really is a pretty cool app; my kids love playing with it to the point that I can't ever use the phone for, you know, making phone calls.
Calling Brian Eno god may also rub people the wrong way, for a lot of reasons. I will say that he has quite a significant body of amazing work. Personally, my favorite is "Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks".
I worked at a company that had a Cobol-based program that went live back in 1969. A team of programmers had kept it going ever since. Shortly after I started (mid 1995), I was in a meeting when one of the Cobol programmers mentioned that so-and-so had died over the weekend. Everybody started talking about her, what a great person she was, etc. After the meeting, I asked who she was, and was told that she was the last surviving member of the original team that wrote and deployed the application. When the system was finally shut down back in 2003 or so (I had long since left, but still had some contacts there to tell me what was going on), I really felt weird about hearing it; here was this thing that had outlived its creators (and some of the later maintainers), and now it was gone too.
Isn't it strange how computer software is both unbelievably ephemeral, yet also incredibly long-lived. I've worked on both sides and I'm not sure which is more fulfilling; it apparently took several years to write the aforementioned Cobol program, but it outlived its creators. I wonder what a programmer on something like, say, Madden, would feel, knowing that this thing they're working so hard on will be totally supplanted by the next version, next year.
Strange business, this computing machinery. Strange indeed.
The Incompatible TimeShare system of MIT yore, as I understand it, is truly no more, unless somebody's been *extra* *careful* to keep their PDP-6 in working order all these years.
Oh well, at least we got the Jargon file out of it.
I've come to really like GCD; I haven't played with it much in Cocoa (Obj-C) but I've been moving some of the stuff I wrote a long time ago in C to use it and I think I can say that what it does is *really* *really* awesome. It helps when writing code to be run in parallel; it does is not help you in determining *what* should be done in parallel. By putting your work into queues, by way of closures (yeah, blocks, whatever...I'm sticking with the closure name), it's up to the underlying OS to determine what thread gets what work, and on what processor. Having worked with multithreaded stuff on Windows, and calling GetThreadAffinityMask or whatever it was, and being told that it's just a *hint* to the OS, which is free to ignore you, which it always did, GCD really does spread out the work evenly among my 16-proc MacPro, and then turns around and does it just as well on the dual-core mini.
I've wanted something like this for years; a really decent OS thread scheduler that divides up the work on the other processors in a sensible fashion. I was even looking into how much effort it would take to write something like this from scratch for Linux, and now I don't even have to. Sweet!
Caveats: This is in OS X only, so no iPhone GCD (at least, not yet...not really necessary until we have multi-core iPhones), and while I've lived with additions to C++ through the years (templates mostly), the idea of adding, well, anything to C seems strange, let alone something as run-time dependent as closures.
In all the twists this long saga has taken, did anyone ever ask what Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson (the guys who actually *wrote* Unix) thought about all this brouhaha? I know, they were Bellcore/AT&T employees, and that AT&T owned it, etc., etc., but I'm sort of just curious what they have to say about all this fighting over something they wrote*.
* I also acknowledge that there were lots of other people who had a major, major hand in writing Unix; but the history books say they were really the first ones (Ken Thompson, specifically).
You dont get paid $1.2 million and sit under a flickering florescent light...
I wasn't paid that much; I was just a low-level sweatshop coder who fixed bugs, implemented stuff, and basically lived in C++ all day, every day. For all the hot-shot designers and managers, the people actually implementing the low-level code were working in pretty lousy conditions. Yes the machines were top-notch, but if your area wasn't on the tour circuit, you got all the crap furniture. Our proximity to a big storage room also meant that, when it filled up with retired equipment, machines, monitors, all kinds of stuff ended up being stacked up all over the place. I had a Sun mini-tower machines under my desk that I used as a foot rest.
Basically, you were paid a lot of money, so they expected you to suck it up and just deal; you aren't there for the atmosphere...you're here to make us even more freaking money.
Everyone, but it was not just some slang people throw around (like calling people "dude" or whatnot); everyone *hated* everyone else because everyone else represented obstacles to making even *more* money. I was hated because I couldn't implement some Black-Scholes variant fast enough, and that meant that the *one* guy who demanded it, thought he was losing millions. Admins were hated because things weren't clearing *instantly*. I remember one guy being *screamed* at because the printer had the audacity to run out of paper.
This was an environment where pure, unrefined greed was required. I remember a meeting being referred to as a waste of oxygen and money, and how much more they (the business guys in the meeting) could make if there weren't all these stupid a-hole IT guys. In the meeting. With the "stupid a-hole IT guys".
It's not worth it. It's just not worth it. I have never been more miserable than when working in such an establishment. I never, ever, ever thought I could get used to being called an a-hole to my face for, well, anything...that's just how you referred to. And while the executive offices were likely very nice, I sat in a cube with ripped fabric, working under a flickering florescent light.
In addition to what others have said, insanely long hours, unbelievable pressure (I was told that if I didn't have something working in production by Sunday night that I should just assume I'm fired), I can say that in 1996 I took 3 days off: New Years, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I worked every other day.
Not worth it. Absolutely not.
All updates within a particular version are free (10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.5.3, etc.), but jumping to a major version (10.4 -> 10.5) cost something. This particular upgrade is a little different insofar as they've tweaked the behind-the-scenes stuff more than anything else, which some folks might consider nothing more than a service pack, but because of that it's only $29 instead of the usual $129.
HTH