For every 1000 iPads I see in the wild, I see maybe 2 or 3 Galaxy Tabs. (Phones are of course an entirely different story.)
So while I agree with
If you cannot compete, you litigate.
"Boohoo, someone else is making money..."
as being bad, that "someone" isn't Samsung, and Apple isn't a company that isn't competing. Hell, the only reason why there is a Galaxy Tab exists is due to the iPad's success.
ColdFusion was about the only language (in my experience - sure there's others) that you needed to pay for the runtime for your code (in a production environment; development version was free; The "Express" version went away around 2001 or so). Then along come Railo and Open BlueDragon, and there were open source alternatives. The "language" itself is pretty basic (most developers get by using just 5 tags), but the power of it comes when you use the various feature tags that are more akin to APIs (cfchart, cfpdf, cfsearch, etc). Railo and OpenBD of course implement all these tags. Whereas Oracle doesn't "sell" Java, Adobe sells ColdFusion - if Oracle wins, Adobe has 100% motivation to eliminate their competition. (Should also point out that OpenBD's lineage comes from New Atlanta, which sells commercial version of Blue Dragon - MySpace was built on this.)
Android has something like a 47% share in the smartphone space.. and there's a report of malware weekly.
I think it's fair to say that it's easier to find a hole (ugh, here comes the 12 year-old humor) than to imagine all the ways people might come up with. You simply need a large enough target to make it worth their while.
So you're saying that men who choose traditionally female dominated careers such as nursing or elementary education should behave like women, or go get a "male" job?
No professional workplace should condone any unprofessional activity.
If laughing at and making perverted jokes is what it takes to not be "feminized", then that's a pretty juvenile definition of manhood.
I don't disagree, as the same can be said for any other industry with a strong cultural leaning. I wasn't as much saying it's a problem to be fixed as much as saying that as long as it exists, we have to accept that we won't see diversity. If we do want diversity, then we need to make a welcoming environment.
I'm just pointing out that our subculture makes people outside that group feel uncomfortable, and shy away from it as a life choice. If you entered a field where most of your contemporaries were all "gangsta thug" types (not talking crime, just the culture) or were a bunch of cowboy boot, pickup truck driving folks who talked about deer hunting all the time, wouldn't you find yourself retreating to an area where you felt comfortable? I think that's just human nature. Why should a professional work environment have any cultural aspects, which honestly, having nothing to do with the work at hand? If we as an industry think that diversity is important, I think making others feel welcome is important.
I'm an independent consultant, so I'm not hiring anyone.:-) By "our" I'm referring to the culture romanticized on Slashdot, Reddit, etc. Programming is certainly an expressive art that feels natural to the group I referred to, but let's be honest: we're business people doing business things. We need to conduct ourself in a way that is welcome to all. We need to discourage those social practices which harm our industry in the long run. There's millions of developers overseas who are having great careers and have never read a single comic book.
Personally, I applaud all efforts to tear down the subculture and focus on the industry, not the nerds. One such effort to try to improve diversity is http://www.blackgirlscode.com/
I've never seen or installed such an app on my iOS devices. I'm sure if I spent some time searching the Slashdot archives, there'd be at least one article; I'm sure the apps do exist. (And are no longer on the app store today). However, these articles about Android malware are weekly, or more often. Google needs to shut it all down, and then relaunch Play where all apps are properly vetted.
Would that destroy the "freedom" concept? Maybe, but such an idea just doesn't work. Would you run any random Windows app on a Windows machine without an antivirus? Android has a massive smartphone share, and it's thusly going to be targeted. Imagine a 1997 where 40% or more all computers sold came with Mac OS or Redhat. Do you think that today we'd know those platform as untargeted by malware? Of course not. Either Google needs to lock things down, or we'll start seeing Norton or McAfee on the phones within the year.
If you've been a programmer for over ten years, odds are that you don't work in an environment where you'd hear the phrase. There's some funny presentations mocking this group on YouTube. Basically, think the coder who got past his awkwardness and is basically now a douche. Works out, has some tats, wears Ed Hardy, has a feaux-hawk or a similarly trendy haircut, drinks 7 Red Bulls a day, listens to dubstep, and only codes in whatever's considered the new hotness (Node.js or Rails). In other words, a little start-up monkey (working at a company with a cool name like "douche.ly") who'll evaporate from the industry when the current startup bubble pops.
I'm the manager of a local programmer user group. In our monthly meeting, not five minutes goes by without some sort of perverted joke or comment. It doesn't really cease when we have any women show up our meeting (typically only one). Nice and inviting, yeah.
Though there always exceptions, programmers tend to be relatively socially awkward lot. It comes out in our jokes, in our dress, in our environment. (Ask your co-worker chuckling, "That's what she said...", wearing a video game t-shirt, with Star Wars figure strewn about his cube, as he hums the "Ocarina of Time" while coding....) There isn't a "No gurls alloud!" sign, but there doesn't have to be. There are plenty of brilliant women who would make great programmers, but who are totally turned off by the culture. It's all about feeling welcome. (Yes, I know there's the rare girl who embraces the subculture, but that's not the point.)
I understand this being on Yahoo Finance or the like, but this is just a blurb about a corporate acquisition. Just because they're IT companies just really make it geeky or nerdy.
Slashdot shouldn't get into trying to reporting on mergers and acquisitions, but should stick to what it does best: regurgitating the articles I read yesterday on Hacker News, which were then on Reddit 12 hours ago.
ColdFusion: There's a commercial version (Adobe's) and open source version that almost exactly the same (Railo). (There's also another open source version, Open BlueDragon, but it has diverged enough away from the original version that it's not a good comparison - but honestly I feel OpenBD docs are the best of the 3)
I won't say the Adobe documentation is great, but it is very complete, with every tag and function fully documented. Railo, however, has a loosely organized wiki, with semi-complete docs for 3.1 and 3.2, and a few articles related to 3.3 features - so unorganized and disjointed. Yeah, you can dig around on blogs and Stack Overflow, but saying it's "community supported" really doesn't cut it when you need to find a solid answer. Hell, most of the time when working on a Railo project I'll jump over to Adobe's documentation and hope that it's 100% compatible (most of the time it is).
That said, I think Railo is a great and in many ways superior product, especially in terms of performance and a few innovations, so I'm not bad mouthing as much as lamenting the fact that its documentation hasn't kept up with engineering.
So back to the original issue: I think great documentation is much more of a value add than adding new features, and this is an area where someone who may be good with ColdFusion but not Java (which is what all version of ColdFusion are written in) can help.
Hey, they could build an app that people could install on their computer or something! I think if they do that, they could give it a name like "distributed computing" or the like. Or even better, since most people use their computers at home, they could throw that in the name as well.
Apple Inc. (AAPL), burnished by the iPhone’s success and memorials to Steve Jobs, displaced Google Inc. (GOOG) as top company in Harris Interactive (HPOL)’s poll of corporate images. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) and Johnson & Johnson dropped.
Hilarious that this was marked as flamebait. I honestly think that what you're describing is as bad, if not worse, than "fanboyism". Of course, this is Slashdot, where hate is the word of the day. For years, it was Microsoft. Everyone cheered at the various court decisions: the monopoly ruling, the EU requirements. They were just salivating over the day when Microsoft would be disassembled by the courts and destroyed by Linux's inevitable victory in the desktop space. (LMAO even typing that) None of it ever happened: today Microsoft is daily losing relevance not by some great savior of the open source world, but by entropy: their business model is failing.
Yesterday it was Microsoft. Today it's Apple. Tomorrow it'll be? Someone. Probably Google. (When someone's profit is based on your information, a mantra of "Don't be Evil" directly conflicts with corporate goals.)
You're an idiot if you think this was a acquisition meant to destroy Apple. It's quite the opposite: it's a defensive acquisition. It's a bunch of Cold War maneuvering: you fire, I fire. Any lawsuit big enough to destroy Apple (doing my best to type that without laughing) would surely come at the hands of Apple firing everything they have. Hopefully this will just keep everyone's lawyers at bay, and everyone can focus on making cool stuff.
I have CF. None of the meds I need I've ever done without, even when I had no insurance. Granted, they aren't quite as expensive as Kalydeco, but we're talking over $100K a year in meds. The pharmas tend to see to it that specialized drugs for small markets get to the patients: consider it a loss leader to benefit public perception and stock price.
I have cystic fibrosis. I'm 34 years old, and am in pretty good health: I can't see why I don't have at least 20 years left. That's the result of great new drugs coming out.
I'm sorta excited about this med, but it actually doesn't impact me. Why? I, like most CF patients, have the most common genetic variation in both alleles - delta F-508. This new medicine doesn't treat this variation (though the manufacturer actually has a variation of this drug that does treat delta F-508, and it's in the pipeline)
Cost? Yeah, it kinda freaks me out. However, CF is a small enough market that manufacturers typically subsidize treatment, for goodwill benefits. My current batch of meds - the ones I take when I'm healthy and doing good - probably costs over $100K retail. Even when I didn't have insurance, I never went without.
They're not going to stop this. A limited number of products that people comparison shop for can be made in store-specific versions (will there be a Target-only version of Madden?)
Why not embrace it, and partner with Amazon? They could even do a location-based search agreement.
They should push their advantages, which is not the product. They don't make Playstations or hair dryers, so to try to make your product your competitive advantage will always fail. They should push their sales focus to things that can't be comparison shopped easily (clothes, food, low cost items). Emphasize the time element (not a Target item, but I frequently buy computer and technology products at retail that I could easily save money at NewEgg on). Take the emotional approach: Make people feel guilty about not paying sales tax that benefits their state and municipality, and point out that buying local = jobs. Focus on ease of returns, and try to make that process easier. Emphasize services. Tell delivery horror stories. Etc, etc... I'm sure any or all of these can be argued down, but the bottom line is, a brick-and-mortar has competitive advantages, but they're not the product they're reselling, and it's not price.
Every time someone, credible or not, speaks out against global warming being caused by CO2, they're shouted down as speaking out in ignorance in order to advance an agenda.
Their argument? Look at temperatures!
Even if the temperature is warmer: that doesn't prove/disprove anything. The argument is causation. Anyone who's been through a high school freshman science course knows correlation != causation.
I'm not even going to pretend to say that I've thought out the science behind this, but I never hear anyone address: maybe things are warmer because there's more hot stuff? Add a bunch of people to a room, and don't change the amount of cooling coming in. I don't have population growth stats in front of me, but we've added like 1 billion people in the last century, in growth. Millions run around every day in vehicles that each warm up to hundreds of degrees in typical operation. There's probably at least a billion large appliances on the planet: the back of your fridge isn't somewhere you'll want to keep your hand for long. Manufacturing puts off heat. Computers put off heat - and we all have at least one.
I might be dumb here, and all those things combined would raise the global temp by nothing, significance wise. However, the CO2 arguments seem to imply that globe is unchanged, heat generation wise, and less heat is getting out due to atmospheric changes. That assumption seems wrong, and should be adjusted appropriately (say, our world should be 0.0001 degrees Celsius warmer than it was 100 years ago, all things being equal)
tl;dr More people and heat generating things increase global temps and CO2 discussions ignore this
Slashdot Mirror
For every 1000 iPads I see in the wild, I see maybe 2 or 3 Galaxy Tabs. (Phones are of course an entirely different story.)
So while I agree with
If you cannot compete, you litigate.
"Boohoo, someone else is making money..."
as being bad, that "someone" isn't Samsung, and Apple isn't a company that isn't competing. Hell, the only reason why there is a Galaxy Tab exists is due to the iPad's success.
You're absolutely right. Since the lawsuit was filed in April 2011, Apple has come up with absolutely nothing innovative.
ColdFusion was about the only language (in my experience - sure there's others) that you needed to pay for the runtime for your code (in a production environment; development version was free; The "Express" version went away around 2001 or so). Then along come Railo and Open BlueDragon, and there were open source alternatives. The "language" itself is pretty basic (most developers get by using just 5 tags), but the power of it comes when you use the various feature tags that are more akin to APIs (cfchart, cfpdf, cfsearch, etc). Railo and OpenBD of course implement all these tags. Whereas Oracle doesn't "sell" Java, Adobe sells ColdFusion - if Oracle wins, Adobe has 100% motivation to eliminate their competition. (Should also point out that OpenBD's lineage comes from New Atlanta, which sells commercial version of Blue Dragon - MySpace was built on this.)
This is inevitable, and will continue. OSX have gone from 2% to an estimated 14% market share since 2003
Android has something like a 47% share in the smartphone space.. and there's a report of malware weekly.
I think it's fair to say that it's easier to find a hole (ugh, here comes the 12 year-old humor) than to imagine all the ways people might come up with. You simply need a large enough target to make it worth their while.
I try not to censor anyone. I like to let everyone be themselves, and allow their personal qualities (or lack thereof) to shine through.
So you're saying that men who choose traditionally female dominated careers such as nursing or elementary education should behave like women, or go get a "male" job?
No professional workplace should condone any unprofessional activity.
If laughing at and making perverted jokes is what it takes to not be "feminized", then that's a pretty juvenile definition of manhood.
I don't disagree, as the same can be said for any other industry with a strong cultural leaning. I wasn't as much saying it's a problem to be fixed as much as saying that as long as it exists, we have to accept that we won't see diversity. If we do want diversity, then we need to make a welcoming environment.
I'm just pointing out that our subculture makes people outside that group feel uncomfortable, and shy away from it as a life choice. If you entered a field where most of your contemporaries were all "gangsta thug" types (not talking crime, just the culture) or were a bunch of cowboy boot, pickup truck driving folks who talked about deer hunting all the time, wouldn't you find yourself retreating to an area where you felt comfortable? I think that's just human nature. Why should a professional work environment have any cultural aspects, which honestly, having nothing to do with the work at hand? If we as an industry think that diversity is important, I think making others feel welcome is important.
I'm an independent consultant, so I'm not hiring anyone. :-) By "our" I'm referring to the culture romanticized on Slashdot, Reddit, etc. Programming is certainly an expressive art that feels natural to the group I referred to, but let's be honest: we're business people doing business things. We need to conduct ourself in a way that is welcome to all. We need to discourage those social practices which harm our industry in the long run. There's millions of developers overseas who are having great careers and have never read a single comic book.
Personally, I applaud all efforts to tear down the subculture and focus on the industry, not the nerds. One such effort to try to improve diversity is http://www.blackgirlscode.com/
http://arstechnica.com/staff/forcequit/2012/04/sandwich-makers-finally-described-as-female-under-facebooks-leet-speak-option.ars
I've never seen or installed such an app on my iOS devices. I'm sure if I spent some time searching the Slashdot archives, there'd be at least one article; I'm sure the apps do exist. (And are no longer on the app store today). However, these articles about Android malware are weekly, or more often. Google needs to shut it all down, and then relaunch Play where all apps are properly vetted.
Would that destroy the "freedom" concept? Maybe, but such an idea just doesn't work. Would you run any random Windows app on a Windows machine without an antivirus? Android has a massive smartphone share, and it's thusly going to be targeted. Imagine a 1997 where 40% or more all computers sold came with Mac OS or Redhat. Do you think that today we'd know those platform as untargeted by malware? Of course not. Either Google needs to lock things down, or we'll start seeing Norton or McAfee on the phones within the year.
If you've been a programmer for over ten years, odds are that you don't work in an environment where you'd hear the phrase. There's some funny presentations mocking this group on YouTube. Basically, think the coder who got past his awkwardness and is basically now a douche. Works out, has some tats, wears Ed Hardy, has a feaux-hawk or a similarly trendy haircut, drinks 7 Red Bulls a day, listens to dubstep, and only codes in whatever's considered the new hotness (Node.js or Rails). In other words, a little start-up monkey (working at a company with a cool name like "douche.ly") who'll evaporate from the industry when the current startup bubble pops.
I'm the manager of a local programmer user group. In our monthly meeting, not five minutes goes by without some sort of perverted joke or comment. It doesn't really cease when we have any women show up our meeting (typically only one). Nice and inviting, yeah.
Though there always exceptions, programmers tend to be relatively socially awkward lot. It comes out in our jokes, in our dress, in our environment. (Ask your co-worker chuckling, "That's what she said...", wearing a video game t-shirt, with Star Wars figure strewn about his cube, as he hums the "Ocarina of Time" while coding ....) There isn't a "No gurls alloud!" sign, but there doesn't have to be. There are plenty of brilliant women who would make great programmers, but who are totally turned off by the culture. It's all about feeling welcome. (Yes, I know there's the rare girl who embraces the subculture, but that's not the point.)
I understand this being on Yahoo Finance or the like, but this is just a blurb about a corporate acquisition. Just because they're IT companies just really make it geeky or nerdy.
Slashdot shouldn't get into trying to reporting on mergers and acquisitions, but should stick to what it does best: regurgitating the articles I read yesterday on Hacker News, which were then on Reddit 12 hours ago.
ColdFusion: There's a commercial version (Adobe's) and open source version that almost exactly the same (Railo). (There's also another open source version, Open BlueDragon, but it has diverged enough away from the original version that it's not a good comparison - but honestly I feel OpenBD docs are the best of the 3)
I won't say the Adobe documentation is great, but it is very complete, with every tag and function fully documented. Railo, however, has a loosely organized wiki, with semi-complete docs for 3.1 and 3.2, and a few articles related to 3.3 features - so unorganized and disjointed. Yeah, you can dig around on blogs and Stack Overflow, but saying it's "community supported" really doesn't cut it when you need to find a solid answer. Hell, most of the time when working on a Railo project I'll jump over to Adobe's documentation and hope that it's 100% compatible (most of the time it is).
That said, I think Railo is a great and in many ways superior product, especially in terms of performance and a few innovations, so I'm not bad mouthing as much as lamenting the fact that its documentation hasn't kept up with engineering.
So back to the original issue: I think great documentation is much more of a value add than adding new features, and this is an area where someone who may be good with ColdFusion but not Java (which is what all version of ColdFusion are written in) can help.
Hey, they could build an app that people could install on their computer or something! I think if they do that, they could give it a name like "distributed computing" or the like. Or even better, since most people use their computers at home, they could throw that in the name as well.
You're also naive if you believe that a Samsung or Motorola device is assembled under different conditions.
Post this here since we know it'd never make it as an article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-13/apple-tops-google-for-no-1-image-as-buffett-s-berkshire-slips.html
Apple Inc. (AAPL), burnished by the iPhone’s success and memorials to Steve Jobs, displaced Google Inc. (GOOG) as top company in Harris Interactive (HPOL)’s poll of corporate images. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) and Johnson & Johnson dropped.
Hilarious that this was marked as flamebait. I honestly think that what you're describing is as bad, if not worse, than "fanboyism". Of course, this is Slashdot, where hate is the word of the day. For years, it was Microsoft. Everyone cheered at the various court decisions: the monopoly ruling, the EU requirements. They were just salivating over the day when Microsoft would be disassembled by the courts and destroyed by Linux's inevitable victory in the desktop space. (LMAO even typing that) None of it ever happened: today Microsoft is daily losing relevance not by some great savior of the open source world, but by entropy: their business model is failing.
Yesterday it was Microsoft. Today it's Apple. Tomorrow it'll be? Someone. Probably Google. (When someone's profit is based on your information, a mantra of "Don't be Evil" directly conflicts with corporate goals.)
You're an idiot if you think this was a acquisition meant to destroy Apple. It's quite the opposite: it's a defensive acquisition. It's a bunch of Cold War maneuvering: you fire, I fire. Any lawsuit big enough to destroy Apple (doing my best to type that without laughing) would surely come at the hands of Apple firing everything they have. Hopefully this will just keep everyone's lawyers at bay, and everyone can focus on making cool stuff.
I have CF. None of the meds I need I've ever done without, even when I had no insurance. Granted, they aren't quite as expensive as Kalydeco, but we're talking over $100K a year in meds. The pharmas tend to see to it that specialized drugs for small markets get to the patients: consider it a loss leader to benefit public perception and stock price.
I have cystic fibrosis. I'm 34 years old, and am in pretty good health: I can't see why I don't have at least 20 years left. That's the result of great new drugs coming out.
I'm sorta excited about this med, but it actually doesn't impact me. Why? I, like most CF patients, have the most common genetic variation in both alleles - delta F-508. This new medicine doesn't treat this variation (though the manufacturer actually has a variation of this drug that does treat delta F-508, and it's in the pipeline)
Cost? Yeah, it kinda freaks me out. However, CF is a small enough market that manufacturers typically subsidize treatment, for goodwill benefits. My current batch of meds - the ones I take when I'm healthy and doing good - probably costs over $100K retail. Even when I didn't have insurance, I never went without.
They're not going to stop this. A limited number of products that people comparison shop for can be made in store-specific versions (will there be a Target-only version of Madden?)
Why not embrace it, and partner with Amazon? They could even do a location-based search agreement.
They should push their advantages, which is not the product. They don't make Playstations or hair dryers, so to try to make your product your competitive advantage will always fail. They should push their sales focus to things that can't be comparison shopped easily (clothes, food, low cost items). Emphasize the time element (not a Target item, but I frequently buy computer and technology products at retail that I could easily save money at NewEgg on). Take the emotional approach: Make people feel guilty about not paying sales tax that benefits their state and municipality, and point out that buying local = jobs. Focus on ease of returns, and try to make that process easier. Emphasize services. Tell delivery horror stories. Etc, etc... I'm sure any or all of these can be argued down, but the bottom line is, a brick-and-mortar has competitive advantages, but they're not the product they're reselling, and it's not price.
Every time someone, credible or not, speaks out against global warming being caused by CO2, they're shouted down as speaking out in ignorance in order to advance an agenda.
Their argument? Look at temperatures!
Even if the temperature is warmer: that doesn't prove/disprove anything. The argument is causation. Anyone who's been through a high school freshman science course knows correlation != causation.
I'm not even going to pretend to say that I've thought out the science behind this, but I never hear anyone address: maybe things are warmer because there's more hot stuff? Add a bunch of people to a room, and don't change the amount of cooling coming in. I don't have population growth stats in front of me, but we've added like 1 billion people in the last century, in growth. Millions run around every day in vehicles that each warm up to hundreds of degrees in typical operation. There's probably at least a billion large appliances on the planet: the back of your fridge isn't somewhere you'll want to keep your hand for long. Manufacturing puts off heat. Computers put off heat - and we all have at least one.
I might be dumb here, and all those things combined would raise the global temp by nothing, significance wise. However, the CO2 arguments seem to imply that globe is unchanged, heat generation wise, and less heat is getting out due to atmospheric changes. That assumption seems wrong, and should be adjusted appropriately (say, our world should be 0.0001 degrees Celsius warmer than it was 100 years ago, all things being equal)
tl;dr More people and heat generating things increase global temps and CO2 discussions ignore this
Reading is a wonderful thing. The poster asked for resources to learn, which is how one acquires the knowledge you're referring to.