Nah, there are hipsters and those who want a Mac because it has an image of cool that they want to emulate. The large majority of Apple users though are those that moved iPod->iPhone->iPad and have been tethered to that ecosystem for the past 15 years (or gathered into it at some point). Mind you, these are also people that have never used Mac's for work and are more or less forced to learn MS tools in high school, university or in the work force.
These factors aren't changing any time soon. Companies (except for hipsters in ghetto POS replacements, cash rich software companies, and graphics industries that are tied to proprietary Mac only products) generally don't invest in Apple for business, and I don't see that changing unless the value proposition changes significantly.
Where does this leave microsoft? I see their business pretty static for the long haul, and frankly, they should just adjust their business expectations. Not all software development companies can/should continually expand into new markets in the hope of increasing shareholder value. If I was MS, I'd secure shareholder value by locking into a holding pattern around product lines that make money while innovating incrementally sustaining their dominant positions in the markets they occupy. Constantly chasing the panacea of everything for everyone is and will continue to hurt their bottom line and errode their value.
Try again MS. You have plenty of cash reserves to burn through, so good luck with that.
On the flip side, I want to say they third party market of tablet add-on's (cases/keyboards) is just horrible. Walk into any consumer electronics store and see 60000 ipad items, maybe 1-2 Samsung specific items, a few MS ones, and literally nothing else for any of the countless Android devices. It just means I don't buy a keyboard or whatever and these companies continue to believe that there's no market for them.
He was convicted of a crime (assuming his guilt was established correctly) and the case was overturned on a 'venue' law, so, why the fck does anyone care about this exactly? That a douche tries to one-up his haters? If I wanted that, I'd read more Rob Ford. That's a guy with actual train-wreck entertainment value.
The field of programming is only getting larger, so making programming easier for the people you're working with oen way or another will not help by shoving them into the gutter. The better route is to support and foster better static an anlysis so at least when they shoot themselves in the foot, they (or you) can see why it happened.
Nah, I always see it the other way, every article released about bitcoin is like "xxxx is the year of the linux Desktop" and every single article pumps up reasons why bitcoin will suddenly take the world by storm, but nothing else changes. Bitcoin is a commodity that a few bit players will continue to play withg it and the general public won't know or give a fuck about until someone gets defrauded for their entire life savings for some reason (most likely due to their own ignorance). Then politicians will knee jerk and do something drastic (like banning online gambling in the US a few years back) and it'll continue to suck the life out of a concept that is frankly destined to fail.
Much of the value from startups comes from a group of bright people getting together and creating something (mostly an idea, but implementation is important). If you just have random people chiming in online, you lose a lot of the creativity and feel that comes from being in person. Can you have a startup purely online? Sure, but it just makes things that much harder. Oh, and a nice office with wizz bang decore attracts VC money.
And you'll have pretty much the same result. The Valley is successful because its a self-fulfilling prophesey.
1. Startups go to the valley to because there's a ton of successful ex-startups and they want to be the next one 2. Investors go to the valley because there are a ton of successful ex-startups and they hope to jump into the next one. 3. Startups become successful (in part) because they have a large amount of available investment capital
Rinse and repeat. Unless startups start getting amazingly big without deep pocket books, or the valley becomes just so unworkable that they can't sustain the costs (still a decade away assuming no dramatic bubble popping incidents I'd say) people will continue to gravitate there and be successful. There will always be startups in every non-trivially sized city, but unless they can garner big bankrolls for growth and talent aquisition, its hard to see penetrating into the market largely enough to be 'huge successes' like their valley counterparts seem to.
A few facts that aren't going away any time soon: 1. There are 1000 different e-wallet based solutions which are swiss cheese of compatibility with the few number of retailers that have even bothered to look into them (These have fees as well mind you, just possibly less than CC transactions) 2. There are many loyalty reward cards / apps that do what you want quite well but only for specific customer/retailer relationships 3. Easy solutions that are both ubiquitous/cheap/secure would basically require the entire industry to jump onto a single standard who's fee schedule is really low / non-profit and who's infrastructure services / equipment are interchangable
If its not easy, customers will just use Credit Cards or cash If its not ubiquitous, you may as well just use a rewards/points card program If its not cheap, retailers may was well use credit cards because at least its a system well understood and comfortable with If its not secure, retailers are on the hook for fraud and it will likely not be ubiquitous because which retailer would want to carry large purchase liability
All in all, its a 'solution' that on a green field may work. The articles frankly a utopian paradise where the slightly cheaper solution would require the entire infrastructure of our retail commerce system to be ripped out and replaced overnight in order to be feasible.
Lastly, by far the most important facet of any of these schemes is TRUST. If you don't have consumer trust in your transaction products, you won't have consumer buy-in. Loyalty cards have the maximum loss of whatever you've refilled them. CC/Bank cards generally have historically adequite means of limiting liability of holders (at the expense of retailers). What does this new system have to verify that my cash is safe with them?
If I wanted my fucking browser to look like Chrome, guess what? I woud've switched to Chrome a long time ago. Now I get an update today and it looks like crap.. sigh. Where's the 'don't touch my old fucking settings because i'm a hating curmudgeon' button, because I think its time for it.
1. Isn't actually true. You need to stay well within the lines or draw the ire and lawsuits from Oracle 2. Isn't true because you need to to be licensed by Oracle in order to be verified as 'compatible' and if they say no then guess what? 3. Yup, that's pretty much the only route you have
Tell that to Apache Harmony. Oracle refuses to make the certification 100% free / license un-encumbered, so here we are. You can't release a 'Java' runtime without certification, and you can't be certified unless you sign contracts with Oracle to bend over the barrel.
I have a solution, at least in part. Have a circle of trust so that: 1. You can only play if you know people in the service (or at least have a few very notable seed individuals which dev's trust) 2. If an individual is reported (and verified) as cheating, have a non-trivial penalty on the individual(s) who are in said friend group 3. If the upstream peer continues to be penalized for their peer's cheating, they can choose to drop their association essentially stopping the other guy from playing (unless they have other upstream peers willing to support them)
The system relies on a person knowing others, which is a hassle in the video gam troll world, but it means there's truely a penalty for not just players, but their peers as well. As a cheat provider, you'd be less likely to target said system, because the cheaters will be soon weeded out of the 'good players' pool
And every time I see a card for Ultraviolet or Apple digital copies, I throw the crap in the garbage. Until the day I can go to 'insert distributor here' and download a clean copy of the original movie, I'd rather just use DVD rippers or torrents to get a digital copy of the movies I 'own'.
The 10 people affected by this bus imrovement went out to celebrate but were hit by a car going twice the speed limit.. Oh the humanity!
Seriously though, I like to consider my needs a non-professional leading on the bleeding edge (2x 2560x1440's) But I don't even own a thunderbolt port, and unless some amazing peripherals come along to change my use case, I don't see that changing soon.
All I want is:
1. standard bus standard which can drive anything
2. said connector/cabling comes in 3 sizes from really really tiny cell phone variety to honking large clicking in connector that can't break
3. That is future expandible to whatever for the next 10 years minimum
4. No IP which prevents competition in said space except for standards bodies who's potfolios are both fair and unbiased in licensing terms
Addendum I. Monster cables is specifically banned from ever producing said cables for ever Nice to have's
5. Fibre option
6. Broadcast based networking support
7. Bus QOS control
8. Standard descriptive naming (NO BS marketing names like super-speed, hyper-active speed, high definition bandwidth, etc. )
9. Support host wake/power-on
10. Support at least bi-directional communications so I can plug in Bluetooth/IR/Wifi/etc.. message receivers and have if not chipset, at least OS support for pluggable and routable support for input methods without BS proprietary support all over the place
I was an after-the-fact consultant to fix a botched IBM project, and I guess the penalties were so high that IBM bankrolled the re-implementation with on-shore workers to get the project finished. Whenever you go into bed with an SI, make sure you have an iron clad contract and many penalty clauses.
PS: WiPro is almost entirely indian, so I don't know what H1B has to do with anything unless there's some contract requirement to have staff on-shore, which makes little sense when the purpose is to cut dev. costs
This is from Ars Technica, which used sampled statistics from every user's public profile page (it threw out non-public pages as a sample for obvious reasons). You can bet Valve does know with a lot more accuracy your play habbits. The points is SO WHAT? Where's the Evil part? I know they used countless kill / death spots in TF2 maps years ago in order to help balance the play on those maps and that helped to improve the balance and play. Riot games (League of Legends) has a lot of jobs for Big Data engineers, and you can bet they (and all other multiplayer vendors) are devoting serious effort inot making their games as appealing as possible to the masses.
There are roughly 9.6 million millionares in the US presently (NOT INCLUDING HOUSES). That works out to roughly 3% of the population, so not a ton.
Given that I think most dev's probably fall into the top 1/3rd earners in society and that the 'millionaire' mark errodes yearly with inflation, its very likely that a large number of software developers will in fact be millionaires by the time they retire. The real question is in 30 years, what will a million bucks be in buying power, and will the next big number be 10 millionare, etc. instead.
I can't say for Flash, but most of the headline Java bugs related to the web start API's / DLL's which are actually outside of the core JVM sandbox (though there were a few in-sandbox flaws which were patched as well). You could say the same thing if there were gaping holes in Jlaunch, or Oracle's JVM API, etc.. The only difference is that web start for better or worse is included in the standard JRE release.
You don't hear about the countless exploits possible in java based server code, considering that basically everything entering a socket on the server is already in JVM, hence not likely to be exploited unless the site developer made some serious flaws themselves.
There are real physical historical reasons why telephone numbers were not portable until recently and why its a beaurocratic nightmare why its a hassle for everyone involved to this day. Think about BGP, but needing to track individual IP's of being nomadic (hell). Telcos do it because pretty much every exchange in the planet can commit point to point channel forwarding at this point, but in the IP world, that would be one a crazy, ineffective, and costly route.
It sucks currently, because most mom's, pop's, and joe plummer are all switching to touch devices for most of their needs because frankly looking at cat videos or updating my facebook status are about the pinnacle of computing purposes for most people.
For everyone who wants to 'do stuff' with their computers, there will still be a PC market, but don't expect to see the perfectly functional computer anymore, since we're now in the proverbial dog house. The same happened with consoles where around the PS2 era of gaming, a huge number og developers just stopped developing for PC's. Its improving now that the console market is getting a little frayed (and expensive), but for a long time PC gaming was the ugly stepchild that people just didn't talk about.
Oh, and Windows is now learning the hard fact their their market is generally not the new hotness touch crew, and probably never will be.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, there are hipsters and those who want a Mac because it has an image of cool that they want to emulate. The large majority of Apple users though are those that moved iPod->iPhone->iPad and have been tethered to that ecosystem for the past 15 years (or gathered into it at some point). Mind you, these are also people that have never used Mac's for work and are more or less forced to learn MS tools in high school, university or in the work force.
These factors aren't changing any time soon. Companies (except for hipsters in ghetto POS replacements, cash rich software companies, and graphics industries that are tied to proprietary Mac only products) generally don't invest in Apple for business, and I don't see that changing unless the value proposition changes significantly.
Where does this leave microsoft? I see their business pretty static for the long haul, and frankly, they should just adjust their business expectations. Not all software development companies can/should continually expand into new markets in the hope of increasing shareholder value. If I was MS, I'd secure shareholder value by locking into a holding pattern around product lines that make money while innovating incrementally sustaining their dominant positions in the markets they occupy. Constantly chasing the panacea of everything for everyone is and will continue to hurt their bottom line and errode their value.
Try again MS. You have plenty of cash reserves to burn through, so good luck with that.
On the flip side, I want to say they third party market of tablet add-on's (cases/keyboards) is just horrible. Walk into any consumer electronics store and see 60000 ipad items, maybe 1-2 Samsung specific items, a few MS ones, and literally nothing else for any of the countless Android devices. It just means I don't buy a keyboard or whatever and these companies continue to believe that there's no market for them.
He was convicted of a crime (assuming his guilt was established correctly) and the case was overturned on a 'venue' law, so, why the fck does anyone care about this exactly? That a douche tries to one-up his haters? If I wanted that, I'd read more Rob Ford. That's a guy with actual train-wreck entertainment value.
The field of programming is only getting larger, so making programming easier for the people you're working with oen way or another will not help by shoving them into the gutter. The better route is to support and foster better static an anlysis so at least when they shoot themselves in the foot, they (or you) can see why it happened.
Nah, I always see it the other way, every article released about bitcoin is like "xxxx is the year of the linux Desktop" and every single article pumps up reasons why bitcoin will suddenly take the world by storm, but nothing else changes. Bitcoin is a commodity that a few bit players will continue to play withg it and the general public won't know or give a fuck about until someone gets defrauded for their entire life savings for some reason (most likely due to their own ignorance). Then politicians will knee jerk and do something drastic (like banning online gambling in the US a few years back) and it'll continue to suck the life out of a concept that is frankly destined to fail.
Much of the value from startups comes from a group of bright people getting together and creating something (mostly an idea, but implementation is important). If you just have random people chiming in online, you lose a lot of the creativity and feel that comes from being in person. Can you have a startup purely online? Sure, but it just makes things that much harder. Oh, and a nice office with wizz bang decore attracts VC money.
And you'll have pretty much the same result. The Valley is successful because its a self-fulfilling prophesey.
1. Startups go to the valley to because there's a ton of successful ex-startups and they want to be the next one
2. Investors go to the valley because there are a ton of successful ex-startups and they hope to jump into the next one.
3. Startups become successful (in part) because they have a large amount of available investment capital
Rinse and repeat. Unless startups start getting amazingly big without deep pocket books, or the valley becomes just so unworkable that they can't sustain the costs (still a decade away assuming no dramatic bubble popping incidents I'd say) people will continue to gravitate there and be successful. There will always be startups in every non-trivially sized city, but unless they can garner big bankrolls for growth and talent aquisition, its hard to see penetrating into the market largely enough to be 'huge successes' like their valley counterparts seem to.
A few facts that aren't going away any time soon:
1. There are 1000 different e-wallet based solutions which are swiss cheese of compatibility with the few number of retailers that have even bothered to look into them (These have fees as well mind you, just possibly less than CC transactions)
2. There are many loyalty reward cards / apps that do what you want quite well but only for specific customer/retailer relationships
3. Easy solutions that are both ubiquitous/cheap/secure would basically require the entire industry to jump onto a single standard who's fee schedule is really low / non-profit and who's infrastructure services / equipment are interchangable
If its not easy, customers will just use Credit Cards or cash
If its not ubiquitous, you may as well just use a rewards/points card program
If its not cheap, retailers may was well use credit cards because at least its a system well understood and comfortable with
If its not secure, retailers are on the hook for fraud and it will likely not be ubiquitous because which retailer would want to carry large purchase liability
All in all, its a 'solution' that on a green field may work. The articles frankly a utopian paradise where the slightly cheaper solution would require the entire infrastructure of our retail commerce system to be ripped out and replaced overnight in order to be feasible.
Lastly, by far the most important facet of any of these schemes is TRUST. If you don't have consumer trust in your transaction products, you won't have consumer buy-in. Loyalty cards have the maximum loss of whatever you've refilled them. CC/Bank cards generally have historically adequite means of limiting liability of holders (at the expense of retailers). What does this new system have to verify that my cash is safe with them?
If I wanted my fucking browser to look like Chrome, guess what? I woud've switched to Chrome a long time ago. Now I get an update today and it looks like crap.. sigh. Where's the 'don't touch my old fucking settings because i'm a hating curmudgeon' button, because I think its time for it.
1. Isn't actually true. You need to stay well within the lines or draw the ire and lawsuits from Oracle
2. Isn't true because you need to to be licensed by Oracle in order to be verified as 'compatible' and if they say no then guess what?
3. Yup, that's pretty much the only route you have
Tell that to Apache Harmony. Oracle refuses to make the certification 100% free / license un-encumbered, so here we are. You can't release a 'Java' runtime without certification, and you can't be certified unless you sign contracts with Oracle to bend over the barrel.
I have a solution, at least in part. Have a circle of trust so that:
1. You can only play if you know people in the service (or at least have a few very notable seed individuals which dev's trust)
2. If an individual is reported (and verified) as cheating, have a non-trivial penalty on the individual(s) who are in said friend group
3. If the upstream peer continues to be penalized for their peer's cheating, they can choose to drop their association essentially stopping the other guy from playing (unless they have other upstream peers willing to support them)
The system relies on a person knowing others, which is a hassle in the video gam troll world, but it means there's truely a penalty for not just players, but their peers as well. As a cheat provider, you'd be less likely to target said system, because the cheaters will be soon weeded out of the 'good players' pool
Just a first swipe on the idea, enjoy.
And what happens if the Arbiter sends both replies to the block chain? Who 'win's?
And every time I see a card for Ultraviolet or Apple digital copies, I throw the crap in the garbage. Until the day I can go to 'insert distributor here' and download a clean copy of the original movie, I'd rather just use DVD rippers or torrents to get a digital copy of the movies I 'own'.
Meh, Origin's crap and I haven't played an EA game in over a year because of it. If they release on Steam, I'd consider it.
The 10 people affected by this bus imrovement went out to celebrate but were hit by a car going twice the speed limit.. Oh the humanity!
Seriously though, I like to consider my needs a non-professional leading on the bleeding edge (2x 2560x1440's) But I don't even own a thunderbolt port, and unless some amazing peripherals come along to change my use case, I don't see that changing soon.
All I want is:
1. standard bus standard which can drive anything
2. said connector/cabling comes in 3 sizes from really really tiny cell phone variety to honking large clicking in connector that can't break
3. That is future expandible to whatever for the next 10 years minimum
4. No IP which prevents competition in said space except for standards bodies who's potfolios are both fair and unbiased in licensing terms
Addendum I. Monster cables is specifically banned from ever producing said cables for ever
Nice to have's
5. Fibre option
6. Broadcast based networking support
7. Bus QOS control
8. Standard descriptive naming (NO BS marketing names like super-speed, hyper-active speed, high definition bandwidth, etc. )
9. Support host wake/power-on
10. Support at least bi-directional communications so I can plug in Bluetooth/IR/Wifi/etc.. message receivers and have if not chipset, at least OS support for pluggable and routable support for input methods without BS proprietary support all over the place
I was an after-the-fact consultant to fix a botched IBM project, and I guess the penalties were so high that IBM bankrolled the re-implementation with on-shore workers to get the project finished. Whenever you go into bed with an SI, make sure you have an iron clad contract and many penalty clauses.
PS: WiPro is almost entirely indian, so I don't know what H1B has to do with anything unless there's some contract requirement to have staff on-shore, which makes little sense when the purpose is to cut dev. costs
Yup, pretty much that and nothing else really. Long live the new flesh!
This is from Ars Technica, which used sampled statistics from every user's public profile page (it threw out non-public pages as a sample for obvious reasons).
You can bet Valve does know with a lot more accuracy your play habbits. The points is SO WHAT? Where's the Evil part? I know they used countless kill / death spots in TF2 maps years ago in order to help balance the play on those maps and that helped to improve the balance and play. Riot games (League of Legends) has a lot of jobs for Big Data engineers, and you can bet they (and all other multiplayer vendors) are devoting serious effort inot making their games as appealing as possible to the masses.
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
There are roughly 9.6 million millionares in the US presently (NOT INCLUDING HOUSES). That works out to roughly 3% of the population, so not a ton.
Given that I think most dev's probably fall into the top 1/3rd earners in society and that the 'millionaire' mark errodes yearly with inflation, its very likely that a large number of software developers will in fact be millionaires by the time they retire. The real question is in 30 years, what will a million bucks be in buying power, and will the next big number be 10 millionare, etc. instead.
I can't say for Flash, but most of the headline Java bugs related to the web start API's / DLL's which are actually outside of the core JVM sandbox (though there were a few in-sandbox flaws which were patched as well). You could say the same thing if there were gaping holes in Jlaunch, or Oracle's JVM API, etc.. The only difference is that web start for better or worse is included in the standard JRE release.
You don't hear about the countless exploits possible in java based server code, considering that basically everything entering a socket on the server is already in JVM, hence not likely to be exploited unless the site developer made some serious flaws themselves.
There are real physical historical reasons why telephone numbers were not portable until recently and why its a beaurocratic nightmare why its a hassle for everyone involved to this day. Think about BGP, but needing to track individual IP's of being nomadic (hell). Telcos do it because pretty much every exchange in the planet can commit point to point channel forwarding at this point, but in the IP world, that would be one a crazy, ineffective, and costly route.
In case anyone wanted to know what responsive images are, I googles this imformative article on the subject:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/...
It sucks currently, because most mom's, pop's, and joe plummer are all switching to touch devices for most of their needs because frankly looking at cat videos or updating my facebook status are about the pinnacle of computing purposes for most people.
For everyone who wants to 'do stuff' with their computers, there will still be a PC market, but don't expect to see the perfectly functional computer anymore, since we're now in the proverbial dog house. The same happened with consoles where around the PS2 era of gaming, a huge number og developers just stopped developing for PC's. Its improving now that the console market is getting a little frayed (and expensive), but for a long time PC gaming was the ugly stepchild that people just didn't talk about.
Oh, and Windows is now learning the hard fact their their market is generally not the new hotness touch crew, and probably never will be.
Don't worry, post-post-post PC era, otherwise known as the fence computing will rock!