You have to admit, they do tend to stick around no matter what newfangled graphics server comes around. Hold old X11 now? 30+ years or something?... Nice.
Yes, PLs need to be consistent, easy to learn and easy to use. All true. But PLs also need to offer easy solutions to tougher everyday problems. Cross-platform portability, the ability to easyly abstract away the hard stuff like networking, GUI, graphics and such and an easy integrated way to swtich from OOP to functional to sequential, from event-driven to imperative and back.
The PL squaring the circle the best right now is Python. And it show, as Python is the only PL used professionally in every field you can think of while at the same time being known for a very n00b friendly PL. If Apple want's Swift to compete/beat Python in that field they have to offer all that Python offers + a free cross-platform IDE + a binary cross-compiler for all major platforms including mobile. You know, like Python freezing, only better. That would be something new and get opinion leaders on board. Until then I'm not hodling my breath.
Between the Affinity Suite, Corel Draw, FOSS alternatives and roughly 10 bazillion 3D toolkits including Houdini, Lightwave, Cinema and Blender, there is absolutely nothing forcing anyone to use the big crappy two, Adobe and Autodesk.
Don't use Adobe or Autodesk. It's that simple.... Experts have known this for years.
I'm a web-developer. Which these days means I fiddle with this mess called WordPress for which there are a bazillion plugins for every problem you can think of. I do 20hr/week part-time, earn more than quite a few people do full-time and my biggest challange is diving deep into Gulp and Sass if only for the kicks of it because that will be obsolete in two years too. My life now is basically an extended vacation, because aside from my 20 hours of "work" I indulge in post-scarcity "minimalism", which means I live in a single room appartment, with not too much junk in it but still an abundance of goods, gadgets, food and entertainment. I've picked up Yoga and dumbell training as to stay fit and as a special means of preparing for old age - I want to stay fit as long and possible. In my spare time I go social dancing, have sex and plan surf and snowboard trips and study media CS on the side. Most of my job is being available for when stuff happends which I then fix in a few hours. Roughly 70%. At least.
This is the model of life as it will be in the future from here on out.
Keynes profecy has come true. 15 per week and person max. required for luxury lifetimes. UBI will come, and if it's the megacorps drilling it into the head of the stupid Trumps of this world. Even high profile CEOs say it's inevitable. There simply is no other way. As soon as robots drive our cars and sew our clothing at minimum 200 - 300 million people are going to lose their job around the world and a good pair of jeans will still cost less than 10 euros and *won't* need shipping around the globe, because on demand local production will be cheaper. Yea, robot maintainence is a few extra jobs, but nowhere near what is going overboard. Add to that the loss of the ICE drivetrain with at least 100 000 high qualification jobs in Germany and Europe and the AIs doing the stuff I still do because the code I work with is from 20 years ago by people who couldn't programm, bound to be replaced within the next two major releases of whatever tool I'm currently using.
Something neat and simple, like a raspberry SoC or something..... (Listen to me in 2018..."neat and simple, like a raspberry SoC"... Isn't progress awesome!?)
Back on track: we need this like now. When the 3d printers for electronics come about it should be trivial to print your type a FOSS smartphone model. IMHO.
I see people reading some agenda into what Cook is saying. But Cook is 100% honest and I totally agree with hin. Tech experts always have put technology into perspective, and rightfully so. Especially in education.... Look at how difficult a job we have at getting it to the Ords that voting machines are a bad idea.
Steve Jobs did the same, as do Clifford Stoll and many others.
My daughter knows her way around the Linux Netbook she got in her teens and we use Google Docs for me to help her write her english applications to universities. I have however also taught her to be paranoid about her online presence and gave her a set of ready-made spoof accounts along with it. Which she uses. She also creates her own when the need arises.
That her dad is *the* computer expert in her closer and wider vincinity has the consequence that she is not half as addicted to social media and whatscrap than her friends are. She left high school in the summer and now travelling in south america for half a year or so. We occasionaly do chat on hangouts every odd day, but at times wifi coverage is a tad flaky in the rainforrest... especially on your way to this place, apparently. She blogs to keep all her friends and family updated at once, but other than that has way better things to do than online-binge. She uses computers very efficiently, as a tool. But not obscessively. She is way more data safety/backup aware than her mom or any of her friends. And for computers/tablets/whatnot she looks at specs more like I would rather than an Ord (weight, ruggedness, battery time, data exchange & rescue possibilites, etc).
Bottom line: Tech like anything else is like medicine: Good fundamental knowlege and lean doseage is everything. Forget that and you raise dweeps adicted to the screen, not enabled grown-ups.
My two cents and two thumbs up on Cook on this one.
... left after Damore was fired due to the fact? I know this might be slightly off-topic, but maybe some Googler could anonymously give a comment on this whole Damore semi-witchhunt thing and how it goes down at Google itself? Like, in real life?
For best cost/performance ratio I recommend the Custom 1 Pro +.... Yeah, admitted, that name does suck. Then again they are genuises at headphones and a little low profile on marketing - who cares? And, yes, it's a regular headphone with a nice and neat 3.5mm jack, as it should be. Made in Germany, btw., not some chinese sweatshop. If that should mean something to you.
Reading this aviation stuf and the details in the comments reminds me of messing with AICC e-learning data back in 2002 and trying to convert it into XML or something other more useful. This was an amazing head-trip. You could smell the punchcards and hear the noise of the 60ies batch processors simply by looking at the raw data files. n-dimensional relations were (are) covered across files, data access based on column count, 126 character ASCII (and not a single one more!) more and some other awesome old-school sh*t. It's basically a data format from the steam age of computing. Very interesting, amazing and hilarious in a way but gawdawful annoying to work with in the microcomputer age.
Since Aviation was one of the first industries to have widespread adoption of mission critical electronic data processing this isn't all that surprising, but to be honest, they could really do with a complete redo of all their standards including this arcane runway naming scheme they apparently still have going.
That's just my impression anyway.... The offcial replacement for AICC data format btw. is SCROM, an XML based format from hell designed by the US DoD - so it's actually worse.... Errrm... maybe they *should* keep things as they are....
Todays pop music is written by algorithms. And it doesn't sound too bad. Because we listen to music so much repetetive and meditative ambient/trance like, 'boring' music has become the norm.
This is simply a classic evolution of artistic style. A song from 1920 sounds naive and childlike to us today, the sounds we listen to would sound like industrial noise to someone from that era. This is normal and music will continue to evolve to gain new subtleties and lose others.
Cost curves of fuel vs. electric just intersected roughly 10 weeks ago in late 2017. Note: That is cost for electric going down, like pretty steep. And that's with *todays* electric vehicles, with shitty batteries and no economics of scale. Experts expect ICEs to be basically gone in 10 years, simply by economics alone. Some say in roughly 5 years from now people will start paying for someone to take their ICEs, so bad will be their feasibility vs. EVs. The private owned ICE car industry is in for an equivalent of a long-running carpet bombing, late WW2 in Germany style. Prepare for incoming.
I remember all the stupid jokes from my fellow nerd buddies. They didn't get it. The MB Air was the first full powered portable work PC that you could carry around without breaking your back. 1.5 kg, 6 hours of battery time, sometimes more if you dimed the backlight and turned off wifi. I still have mine and it still is usable and useful. Although it does boot rather sluggish with macOS Sierra.
I hope they continue the line and make cheaper mac laptops again. 1500 Euros for a regular MB pro is just too much,
That could be part of the problem. They've probably reached a point where mass transport of passengers doesn't pay off anymore. At least not well and fast enough to justify further investment any time soon.
I would expect the market for the A380 to grown in time though. Just not as fast as Airbus might hope,
Then again, this could be just some marketing babble or call for more EU funds for Airbus. The latter being the most likely.
That's the plain and simple truth. Nuclear Fission only looks like it works if it is cross-funded by obscene truckloads of taxpayers money and nobody looks too hard at centralized power cartels (funded by said taxpayers money), reactor runtimes and maintenance costs (also paid by taxpayers mones). Factor in waste handling, storage and the risks of nuclear disasters and the balance sheet goes really deep-red.
The numbers don't add up and the whole concept simply doesn't work. Even the conservatives in Germany have noticed this. Replenishing Plant Wackersdorf - a multi-billion dollar project for the treatment and replenishing of nuclear waste - wasn't closed down by left-wing hippie protesters raising a stink of the better part of a decade, it was closed down by southern Germany state officials doing the math. Some backroom clerk adding up the numbers and seeing in awe and amazement that it wouldn't work, even with the best predictions. Same goes for the most advanced fast breeder at Kalkar - a building estimated more expensive than the Pyramids of Gizeh, inflation factored in.
Now Germany is moving out of nuclear alltogether and for once we're actually ahead of schedule - even with all the fuss about the new powerlines crossing the republic. AFAI understand we've simply decided to front a few extra billion and move those underground, so nobody can complain of them blocking their view. We crossed the 80% renewables a few weeks ago. If Germany can do this - really not a country known for it's sunny days - the rest of the world can do it too.
People have to see the light: Nuclear Fission as we know it is a 60ies techno-romatic pipe-dream. And a dangerous one at that, with a 200 000 year waste problem attached.
IMHO the world should move to decommission classic nuclear fission ASAP. I'm glad the californians did this. I personally don't want to many chernobyls and fukushimas happening before the world finally catches on.
As it stands, we can easily replace Fission with non-coal renewables like Solar, Wind, etc. And the pace of that is picking up faster than anyone would've thought, because costs per KWH are already orders of magnitude cheaper. And regulations are trivial compared to anything nuclear.
The way LiMux was botched is a textbook example how to screw up a software rollout with shitty management. That some stupid n00bs can rollback a deployment worth 10ns of millions of Euros is a total desaster.
I hope the city of Barcelona has the minimum requirements of basic brain functions to pull this off without to many problems and some ords screwing up the process. After the LiMux desaster we need a success in this field.
People like to play with toys. And toys win in the end. Remember the toy computer called IBM PC with it's 8086 CPU? It was a toy for people to play with. And play they did. Now it rules the world (ok with bad CPU bugs these days, but you get my point).
Same with JavaScript. It's a toy. People like to play with it. Nobody asks bizar licencing fees for it. See the countless frameworks out there? Toys win. Believe it or not, JS is moving into Java territory as we speak You remember Java, do you? The language that was intended for IoT... I'm sorry... the "Network is the computer" thing? Upload a script and have the client run it? That Java only got hold on the server. Where it never was intended to go. And now JS is coming from the client and moving into it's territory. A silly toy. No chance in hell for professional applications. Just like the PC back in the day.
That JS has so many Frameworks constantly in the works is actually a good sign of health. Prepare for incoming. Toys win.
This whole diversity/gender debate thing is getting and more into an absurd territory of epic proportions. It's quite some time ago that I've been able to take larger parts of mainstream contributions to this debate seriously.
To me a very welcome addition of reason and level-headedness was the open letter of ~100 women of influence and fame in France speaking out against #MeToo, it's totalitarianism and a false pretense of feminism published two days ago in Le Monde (basically the French nyt) that went largely unnoticed/uncovered by mainstream media. These ladies deserve a medal or something and they deserve to be heard, despite mainstream media trying to ignore them.
This is technology that basically has been around since the steam age. In terms of "feasible and mature" it's way off the carts compared to anything else. I remember building battery-less radio receivers as an 8 year old. Adding radio receivers to modern smartphones is trivial and I personally wouldn't mind if lawmakers made it mandatory for vendors to do this. For people in distress and desaster zones we can only hope that vendors come to some sort of gentleman's agreement to build radios in by default. That would be cool.
Bricking is the equivalent of applying a killpoke. A software action that makes the hardware henceforth unusable.
This just screws up the kernel and requires you to set up a fresh one, perhaps reinstalling the core system. On Linux this is usually nothing more than a minor annoyance.
Again: it's not bricking. Bricking is when a software update or piece of code renders my smartphone not more useful than a brick and irreversibly so.
Stop using the word just because it's new and describes something significant. It doesn't make your news more interesting, it makes your news false.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to admit, they do tend to stick around no matter what newfangled graphics server comes around. Hold old X11 now? 30+ years or something? ... Nice.
Yes, PLs need to be consistent, easy to learn and easy to use. All true. But PLs also need to offer easy solutions to tougher everyday problems. Cross-platform portability, the ability to easyly abstract away the hard stuff like networking, GUI, graphics and such and an easy integrated way to swtich from OOP to functional to sequential, from event-driven to imperative and back.
The PL squaring the circle the best right now is Python. And it show, as Python is the only PL used professionally in every field you can think of while at the same time being known for a very n00b friendly PL. If Apple want's Swift to compete/beat Python in that field they have to offer all that Python offers + a free cross-platform IDE + a binary cross-compiler for all major platforms including mobile. You know, like Python freezing, only better. That would be something new and get opinion leaders on board. Until then I'm not hodling my breath.
My 2 cents.
There is no "forced".
Between the Affinity Suite, Corel Draw, FOSS alternatives and roughly 10 bazillion 3D toolkits including Houdini, Lightwave, Cinema and Blender, there is absolutely nothing forcing anyone to use the big crappy two, Adobe and Autodesk.
Don't use Adobe or Autodesk. It's that simple. ... Experts have known this for years.
Glad I could help.
There is no two ways about that.
I'm a web-developer. Which these days means I fiddle with this mess called WordPress for which there are a bazillion plugins for every problem you can think of. I do 20hr/week part-time, earn more than quite a few people do full-time and my biggest challange is diving deep into Gulp and Sass if only for the kicks of it because that will be obsolete in two years too. My life now is basically an extended vacation, because aside from my 20 hours of "work" I indulge in post-scarcity "minimalism", which means I live in a single room appartment, with not too much junk in it but still an abundance of goods, gadgets, food and entertainment. I've picked up Yoga and dumbell training as to stay fit and as a special means of preparing for old age - I want to stay fit as long and possible. In my spare time I go social dancing, have sex and plan surf and snowboard trips and study media CS on the side. Most of my job is being available for when stuff happends which I then fix in a few hours. Roughly 70%. At least.
This is the model of life as it will be in the future from here on out.
Keynes profecy has come true. 15 per week and person max. required for luxury lifetimes. UBI will come, and if it's the megacorps drilling it into the head of the stupid Trumps of this world. Even high profile CEOs say it's inevitable. There simply is no other way. As soon as robots drive our cars and sew our clothing at minimum 200 - 300 million people are going to lose their job around the world and a good pair of jeans will still cost less than 10 euros and *won't* need shipping around the globe, because on demand local production will be cheaper . Yea, robot maintainence is a few extra jobs, but nowhere near what is going overboard. Add to that the loss of the ICE drivetrain with at least 100 000 high qualification jobs in Germany and Europe and the AIs doing the stuff I still do because the code I work with is from 20 years ago by people who couldn't programm, bound to be replaced within the next two major releases of whatever tool I'm currently using.
Bottom line:
Sit back, relax n chill and prepare for incoming.
... blue uniforms are real, cops are social fiction." - Robert Anton Wilson
Something neat and simple, like a raspberry SoC or something ... .. (Listen to me in 2018 ..."neat and simple, like a raspberry SoC" ... Isn't progress awesome!?)
Back on track:
we need this like now. When the 3d printers for electronics come about it should be trivial to print your type a FOSS smartphone model. IMHO.
"Apple" and "wallet friendly" in the same sentence simply does not compute. Really not. And I've got an MB Air myself.
I see people reading some agenda into what Cook is saying. But Cook is 100% honest and I totally agree with hin. Tech experts always have put technology into perspective, and rightfully so. Especially in education. ... Look at how difficult a job we have at getting it to the Ords that voting machines are a bad idea.
Steve Jobs did the same, as do Clifford Stoll and many others.
My daughter knows her way around the Linux Netbook she got in her teens and we use Google Docs for me to help her write her english applications to universities. I have however also taught her to be paranoid about her online presence and gave her a set of ready-made spoof accounts along with it. Which she uses. She also creates her own when the need arises.
That her dad is *the* computer expert in her closer and wider vincinity has the consequence that she is not half as addicted to social media and whatscrap than her friends are. She left high school in the summer and now travelling in south america for half a year or so. We occasionaly do chat on hangouts every odd day, but at times wifi coverage is a tad flaky in the rainforrest ... especially on your way to this place, apparently. She blogs to keep all her friends and family updated at once, but other than that has way better things to do than online-binge. She uses computers very efficiently, as a tool. But not obscessively. She is way more data safety/backup aware than her mom or any of her friends. And for computers/tablets/whatnot she looks at specs more like I would rather than an Ord (weight, ruggedness, battery time, data exchange & rescue possibilites, etc).
Bottom line: Tech like anything else is like medicine: Good fundamental knowlege and lean doseage is everything. Forget that and you raise dweeps adicted to the screen, not enabled grown-ups.
My two cents and two thumbs up on Cook on this one.
... left after Damore was fired due to the fact? I know this might be slightly off-topic, but maybe some Googler could anonymously give a comment on this whole Damore semi-witchhunt thing and how it goes down at Google itself? Like, in real life?
Curious to know.
The inventor of modern headphones still is quite conservative about their lineup and they still build some of the best in the industy. If you only look for expensive fidgety mainstream junk, you're in for trouble. Don't.
For best cost/performance ratio I recommend the Custom 1 Pro +. ... Yeah, admitted, that name does suck. Then again they are genuises at headphones and a little low profile on marketing - who cares? And, yes, it's a regular headphone with a nice and neat 3.5mm jack, as it should be. Made in Germany, btw., not some chinese sweatshop. If that should mean something to you.
You're welcome.
Reading this aviation stuf and the details in the comments reminds me of messing with AICC e-learning data back in 2002 and trying to convert it into XML or something other more useful. This was an amazing head-trip. You could smell the punchcards and hear the noise of the 60ies batch processors simply by looking at the raw data files. n-dimensional relations were (are) covered across files, data access based on column count, 126 character ASCII (and not a single one more!) more and some other awesome old-school sh*t. It's basically a data format from the steam age of computing. Very interesting, amazing and hilarious in a way but gawdawful annoying to work with in the microcomputer age.
Since Aviation was one of the first industries to have widespread adoption of mission critical electronic data processing this isn't all that surprising, but to be honest, they could really do with a complete redo of all their standards including this arcane runway naming scheme they apparently still have going.
That's just my impression anyway. ... ... Errrm ... maybe they *should* keep things as they are. ...
The offcial replacement for AICC data format btw. is SCROM, an XML based format from hell designed by the US DoD - so it's actually worse.
Todays pop music is written by algorithms. And it doesn't sound too bad. Because we listen to music so much repetetive and meditative ambient/trance like, 'boring' music has become the norm.
The progressive pioneers of Electronic music showed us what would be coming, now it's here and part of the mainstream.
This is simply a classic evolution of artistic style. A song from 1920 sounds naive and childlike to us today, the sounds we listen to would sound like industrial noise to someone from that era. This is normal and music will continue to evolve to gain new subtleties and lose others.
Cost curves of fuel vs. electric just intersected roughly 10 weeks ago in late 2017. Note: That is cost for electric going down, like pretty steep. And that's with *todays* electric vehicles, with shitty batteries and no economics of scale. Experts expect ICEs to be basically gone in 10 years, simply by economics alone. Some say in roughly 5 years from now people will start paying for someone to take their ICEs, so bad will be their feasibility vs. EVs. The private owned ICE car industry is in for an equivalent of a long-running carpet bombing, late WW2 in Germany style. Prepare for incoming.
I remember all the stupid jokes from my fellow nerd buddies. They didn't get it.
The MB Air was the first full powered portable work PC that you could carry around without breaking your back. 1.5 kg, 6 hours of battery time, sometimes more if you dimed the backlight and turned off wifi. I still have mine and it still is usable and useful. Although it does boot rather sluggish with macOS Sierra.
I hope they continue the line and make cheaper mac laptops again. 1500 Euros for a regular MB pro is just too much,
That could be part of the problem. They've probably reached a point where mass transport of passengers doesn't pay off anymore. At least not well and fast enough to justify further investment any time soon.
I would expect the market for the A380 to grown in time though. Just not as fast as Airbus might hope,
Then again, this could be just some marketing babble or call for more EU funds for Airbus. The latter being the most likely.
That's the plain and simple truth. Nuclear Fission only looks like it works if it is cross-funded by obscene truckloads of taxpayers money and nobody looks too hard at centralized power cartels (funded by said taxpayers money), reactor runtimes and maintenance costs (also paid by taxpayers mones). Factor in waste handling, storage and the risks of nuclear disasters and the balance sheet goes really deep-red.
The numbers don't add up and the whole concept simply doesn't work. Even the conservatives in Germany have noticed this. Replenishing Plant Wackersdorf - a multi-billion dollar project for the treatment and replenishing of nuclear waste - wasn't closed down by left-wing hippie protesters raising a stink of the better part of a decade, it was closed down by southern Germany state officials doing the math. Some backroom clerk adding up the numbers and seeing in awe and amazement that it wouldn't work, even with the best predictions. Same goes for the most advanced fast breeder at Kalkar - a building estimated more expensive than the Pyramids of Gizeh, inflation factored in.
Now Germany is moving out of nuclear alltogether and for once we're actually ahead of schedule - even with all the fuss about the new powerlines crossing the republic. AFAI understand we've simply decided to front a few extra billion and move those underground, so nobody can complain of them blocking their view. We crossed the 80% renewables a few weeks ago. If Germany can do this - really not a country known for it's sunny days - the rest of the world can do it too.
People have to see the light: Nuclear Fission as we know it is a 60ies techno-romatic pipe-dream. And a dangerous one at that, with a 200 000 year waste problem attached.
IMHO the world should move to decommission classic nuclear fission ASAP. I'm glad the californians did this. I personally don't want to many chernobyls and fukushimas happening before the world finally catches on.
As it stands, we can easily replace Fission with non-coal renewables like Solar, Wind, etc. And the pace of that is picking up faster than anyone would've thought, because costs per KWH are already orders of magnitude cheaper. And regulations are trivial compared to anything nuclear.
The way LiMux was botched is a textbook example how to screw up a software rollout with shitty management. That some stupid n00bs can rollback a deployment worth 10ns of millions of Euros is a total desaster.
I hope the city of Barcelona has the minimum requirements of basic brain functions to pull this off without to many problems and some ords screwing up the process. After the LiMux desaster we need a success in this field.
My 2 eurocents.
People like to play with toys. And toys win in the end. Remember the toy computer called IBM PC with it's 8086 CPU? It was a toy for people to play with. And play they did. Now it rules the world (ok with bad CPU bugs these days, but you get my point).
Same with JavaScript. It's a toy. People like to play with it. Nobody asks bizar licencing fees for it. See the countless frameworks out there? Toys win. Believe it or not, JS is moving into Java territory as we speak You remember Java, do you? The language that was intended for IoT ... I'm sorry ... the "Network is the computer" thing? Upload a script and have the client run it? That Java only got hold on the server. Where it never was intended to go. And now JS is coming from the client and moving into it's territory. A silly toy. No chance in hell for professional applications. Just like the PC back in the day.
That JS has so many Frameworks constantly in the works is actually a good sign of health. Prepare for incoming. Toys win.
"Maintain your own dependencies!"
Bingo! Extra delicious cookie for you, sir! And a salute.
Keep them as far away from the election process as possible.
Captain Obvious was glad to help.
This whole diversity/gender debate thing is getting and more into an absurd territory of epic proportions. It's quite some time ago that I've been able to take larger parts of mainstream contributions to this debate seriously.
To me a very welcome addition of reason and level-headedness was the open letter of ~100 women of influence and fame in France speaking out against #MeToo, it's totalitarianism and a false pretense of feminism published two days ago in Le Monde (basically the French nyt) that went largely unnoticed/uncovered by mainstream media. These ladies deserve a medal or something and they deserve to be heard, despite mainstream media trying to ignore them.
Real life "Watchdogs". Nice. Gotta love this IoT nonsense everybody's into lately.
This is technology that basically has been around since the steam age. In terms of "feasible and mature" it's way off the carts compared to anything else. I remember building battery-less radio receivers as an 8 year old. Adding radio receivers to modern smartphones is trivial and I personally wouldn't mind if lawmakers made it mandatory for vendors to do this. For people in distress and desaster zones we can only hope that vendors come to some sort of gentleman's agreement to build radios in by default. That would be cool.
My 2 eurocents.
Bricking is the equivalent of applying a killpoke. A software action that makes the hardware henceforth unusable.
This just screws up the kernel and requires you to set up a fresh one, perhaps reinstalling the core system. On Linux this is usually nothing more than a minor annoyance.
Again: it's not bricking. Bricking is when a software update or piece of code renders my smartphone not more useful than a brick and irreversibly so.
Stop using the word just because it's new and describes something significant. It doesn't make your news more interesting, it makes your news false.
Thank you.
No news here.