A company called Jakks Pacific made a few of those, including a few console-like ones in their Flashback series. I'll bet you could still find them as they're not all that old.
IIRC, you could solder in a cartridge slot on the FlashBack 2 and play any of the old games. A real shame it didn't have that built-in from the start. Coupled with an AtariMax MyIDE-II Compact Flash Cartridge and you've have the ultimate modern 2600 setup.
Yeah, I wish the "hacks" forum on AtariAge had more of this kind of break-down. You sometimes find good discussions about problems and solutions though.
Work two days a week and... raise 2.5 children, own a home in the suburbs and a sensible late-model auto, enjoy an annual family vacation to a popular American tourist destination, and have not one single case of throat irritation (from smoking Camel cigarettes).
I'm not seeing it.
Maybe you mean something like... wages garnished for child support, a home in government subsidized low-income housing and a mini-van (technically, your moms mini-van), selling your food stamps (to take a different sort of trip), and a prescription that you need, but can't afford to fill.
That makes more sense. Well, more sense than Kurzweil has ever managed...
Well, that'll bring us right in to a discussion about causation. I don't know that I'm willing to tumble down that rabbit hole.
Just for fun. The Arab Spring was a later result of the social paradigm shift previously caused by the internet -- a fact hidden by the role that the internet played leading up to and during the actual events. The Arab Spring is just an indicator.
I'd like to go back to something I mentioned briefly earlier, the idea of a change being irreversible, as perhaps key to deciding whether or not it's a complete enough change to be called a paradigm shift.
That appeals to me as well.
Yet people can be removed from the Internet indefinitely and still maintain the same standard of interpersonal communication as long as geography isn't prohibitive... and if it is, then we must consider the impact of mountain ranges and other physical barriers equivalent to distance (as they impede travel), in which case I feel it's bizarre to suggest that the peculiarities of the Earth's surface should be allowed to have a role in defining something that is otherwise so general.
Until recently, distance and geography had a far more significant (even defining) impact on social structures of all types and sizes doesn't even scratch the surface. It was a dramatic influence on politics, language, economics, the list goes on. To some degree, the internet makes those barriers irrelevant.
That the internet has changed how people view the impact of distance on personal relationships, that's just one example. It's changed how we work, how we shop, how we communicate, how we make decisions, and that's all on the small scale. This is to say nothing of the power and influence it puts back in the hands of the individual -- the Arab Spring wouldn't have been possible in the old disconnected world.
Maybe it's too early to tell if the advent of the internet can be considered a social paradigm shift -- we've seen little more than a decade of real influence -- but there's little doubt that even now its removal would have a dramatic impact on the world, and not just economically. A look at the world 20 years from now would be helpful.
Not that I'm really arguing here. I don't think the internet represents a Kuhnian paradigm shift, just for different reasons.
It meant that humans were no longer the centre of the universe! How much more fundamental can you get?
Ontological doesn't mean fundamental, you know. The Copernican revolution marked the break from rationalism to empiricism, a decidedly epistemic shift. There were no metaphysical implications like we saw with Newton and Einstein.
That's why I didn't want to say it. This will go 'round for a while...
I don't want to write this. I really, really, don't... but we're not necessarily dealing with an ontological change, but necessarily with an epistemic change. See Kuhn's (and Kant's!) example of the Copernican revolution.
the Internet alone just isn't dramatic enough in its impact on value systems to qualify as a social paradigm shift. Certainly "it's normal to wish John a speedy recovery from the flu even when he's thousands of miles away" is some kind of change in values, but it pales in comparison to the depth and irreversibility of things we know for certain deserve the label, like the rejection of slavery or the writing of the Magna Carta.
How large a change is necessary for a change to be considered a "paradigm shift"? I don't know how to interpret this.
fizz = 0 buzz = 0 FOR i = 1 to 100
fizz = fizz + 1
buzz = buzz + 1
IF (fizz <> 3 AND buzz <> 5) THEN
PRINT i
ELSE
IF fizz = 3 THEN PRINT "fizz"; : fizz = 0
IF buzz = 5 THEN PRINT "buzz"; : buzz = 0
PRINT
END IF NEXT i
There is a separate description given for a notion of a social paradigm, but it's uncited and goes back particularly to the context of education in the 1970s by a researcher who left little in the way of a legacy (M. L. Handa), in a book so obscure I can't even find it in the library of the place where he or she worked.
The term isn't uncommon. You can thank Dennis Pirages and Paul Ehrlich for popularizing the concept of the "dominant social paradigm".
See: Pirages D.C., Ehrlich P.R. 1974. Ark II: Social Response to Environmental Imperatives. New York: Viking Press.
Pirages defines it best as the "constellation of common values, beliefs, and shared wisdom about the physical and social environments" Echoing Kuhn's "constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community."
Do what you want with that. I've never heard of M.L. Handa.
I'm starting to get the feeling that the real problem is that the article used the term "worldview" as a placeholder for ontology, which is what Kuhn was really discussing when he made the argument that the Aristotlean and Newtonian concepts of motion are incomparable. We shouldn't have been discussing worldview at all as a lemma to deciding whether or not the Internet is a paradigm shift.
If we're dropping the term "worldview", I don't think we disagree. I agree that the internet does not constitute a Kuhnian change in paradigm. A Kuhnian paradigm is first a social phenomenon. A shift then requires no other change beyond the necessary change to the general understanding or interpretation of a particular area of inquiry among those involved. The shift is a shift in thinking across the group. While the internet had a significant economic impact, it didn't change economics and thus didn't cause an economic paradigm shift. (Is Toffler dead? If so, he's rolling over in his grave!)
I should probably add that apart from Kuhn, there are other common uses for the term under which the internet would neatly qualify. Normally, I'd say "why bother", but I'll grant that those alternative definitions are probably not what the GP had in mind. It's not uncommon, however, to see the term applied to any major disruption or restructuring of economic or social systems. Seems almost completely opposite, doesn't it?
In case that's not terribly clear: For Kuhn, the paradigm shift happens when scientists collectively change their understanding of a field. For others, the paradigm shift happens when the fruits of that new science cause a dramatic social or economic change. (Think: the quantum revolution vs the technological revolution)
I could very well be forcing an artificial distinction. From the article: "One reviewer in 1966 criticized Kuhn for using the word 'paradigm' in twenty-one different senses in the book." It's been years since I read the book, though I didn't notice at the time. Who knows if he bothered with this kind of absurd precision?
Yeah, because everyone automatically understands why they can't just use Microsoft Word to type in that Javascript example.
Hell, most people don't even know what a web browser is (even though they use one every day) or that they can use it to run programs written in Javascript.
These are massive barriers to entry. Do you know how difficult it is to get people to understand why Microsoft Word is not well-suited for writing computer programs? It's not that they're too stupid to understand, it's that they lack the tons of background knowledge they need to have before they can even begin to comprehend your explanation.
A simple tool for writing simple programs is a damn good idea. Microsoft's SmallBasic is a good start, but it's not quite ready for prime-time.
Learning to program was MUCH easier back in the 80's when all you needed to do was turn on your micro. The interactive mode and simple commands not only made learning to program easy -- it made it fun.
There was a BBC program called "Electric Dreams" that followed a family who experienced life (from a technology perspective) one day per year from 1970. When they got a micro in the 80's, one of the kids brought a friend home from school so that they could write computer programs together! (The reason that the family picked the BBC over the ZX Spectrum was because the "salesman" showed the kids a few BASIC commands, which they found facinating. During the filming, the boy didn't even stay in the row for the "decision" scene, he left went right back to programming as soon as he put in his vote for the "boring" BBC Micro over the clearly more fun Speccy!)
I have no idea what it means to "improve" a worldview. Is there some ideal that people can work towards? We're way off, it seems. Let's try something different.
If I had to provide a single definition, I'd say that a worldview was the lens through which a person interprets the world around them. That's more than just what they consider to be the ground of all being, but how they understand, for example, how distance affects relationships.
It wasn't long ago that "I'll stay in touch" meant "I'll call you in six-months, maybe write a letter or send out a card, then never again" to many people. Moving away from friends had a kind of finality that just doesn't exist for a lot of people in today's modern connected world. Thanks to the internet and social networking tools, their understanding of distance and relationships has changed dramatically. That is to say, their worldview has changed.
it didn't enable anything that had previously been impossible for a person to do
Well, sticking with the earlier example, I suppose you could have made dozens calls and written dozens of letters every time some minor event happened (my kid won a trophy for some sports thing, I got a cool new job, I read a book that I really like). I suppose you could also read dozens of letters from your friends (who also have an abundance of free time).
The truth, of course, is that it's too great a burden -- that's why distance had such a significant impact on relationships. Now, in a few minutes with a discount smartphone, you can keep up with friends and family. You can participate in the joy of Sally's new baby or wish John a speedy recovery from the flu. You can dispute this, but it's a way for you to truly participate in the lives of others that you really couldn't do before -- even with hundreds of letters and phone calls.
The point I really want to get at is that people were already capable of travelling.
We may be off here. I brought up travel as an example of how changes in culture can cause a change in worldview. I did that to say that the internet has caused cultural changes that, consequently, are likely to impact a persons worldview.
This has been tried so many times before. The simple fact is that most people can't program.
Only because they never learned how, not because they're incapable of writing computer programs!
Most people don't see any benefit to learning how to program, and so they don't bother to learn. The absurd, unnecessary, barriers that aspiring learning face today is enough to hold back all but the most dedicated. How many people's lives have been made more difficult because we've locked-out the home user with unnecessarily complex tools?
We're a long way from the old days, where all you needed to get started was the manual that came with your micro -- Just turn on the computer and start typing at the prompt. Those old computers practically begged you to write your own computer programs -- and provided an unparalleled sense of power and control as the computer sprung to life, dutifully carrying out your wishes when you typed that first "print" command!
You'd have to have some serious mental issues to delude yourself in to thinking that the ability to write computer programs somehow makes you special or important. Any idiot can learn to write computer programs -- and many idiots do.
Remember VB6? It was brilliant. It was so simple to use that people could not only teach themselves the basics of computer programming, but write programs that were meaningful or useful to some area of their own life. All without years of training or other long-term learning commitment. That's a good thing.
Sure, beginners will write bad code, but so does every beginner. Hell, most "professionals" produce absolute garbage. There's absolutely no harm (other than to the ego of the insecure developer) caused by home users writing software to meet their needs or just for fun.
Not everyone will be a professional programmer, or even write programs as a hobby. That's fine. No one is saying that everyone should learn to write computer programs. There should be, however, simple easy-to-access tools for laypersons who want to solve a problem and for beginners to learn the basics. Why lock all that power behind needlessly complex tools? Because a beginner might write some low-quality code? Get over yourself.
Nonsense. People do it all the time. At the office, it's more than just the development staff, everyone with a job that requires more than answering a phone, from the executives to the maintenance staff, employ "algorithmic thinking" to identify and correct problems as diverse as developing policies and procedures to why the furnace kicks out.
The backyard mechanic, the hobbyist baker, and the new homeowner tackling their first DIY projects all employ the same set of thinking skills that the computer program uses.
See, lots of people CAN do it, and do it every day.
Skills take practice. Writing, being a skill, also takes practice. Writing computer programs is no different.
The parent is right, any idiot can learn to program just as any idiot can learn to read and write. The the fact that it takes practice to do both well does not mean that those skills are forever beyond the potential of the average nobody.
It seems like the only people who claim that writing computer programs takes a "special mind" or some other nonsense are insecure developers who have no other skills or interests. They have a lot of their identity and self-worth wrapped up in their tiny little skill-set. I suspect that many of them realize that computer programming is not beyond the reach of the unwashed masses, and that's a thought that absolutely terrifies them.
Because adopting Android worked out so well for everyone but Samsung, right?
Oh, the exact opposite of that? I guess being a "me too" player isn't a smart strategy. Probably even worse for premium brands.
RIM made a smart move by buying QNX. It's (quite possibly) the most advanced mobile OS on the market. It instantly gave them a presence in new markets, which they're leveraging well, and an easy way to maintain their legendary security.
Their new UI is stunning (thanks to great acquisitions like TaT and smart hires like former Apple designer Don Lindsay) and from what we've see so far, clearly not something you could achieve by slapping a skin on top of Android. Features like Balance would also be a clunky mess (like running a VM on your phone).
For developers, there's nothing attractive about Android -- from the tools to the ROI, it's painful. RIM, in contrast, has dramatically improved developer relations and the quality and variety of the tools available to developers. This includes true native development, not just a few "essential" parts. From Google's What is the NDK page: "In general, you should only use native code if it is essential to your application, not just because you prefer to program in C/C++".
In short: Adopting Android would have been the single worst move RIM could make. They'd be just another Android phone is a sea of unprofitable competitors, they'd lose every advantage that they currently have (their edge in security and MDM, for example), they'd be left out of other markets instead of expanding in to new ones, and they'd be unable to provide the same innovative new features for end users and developers (balance, peak, flow, etc.)
RIM made some mistakes, that's not in question, but skipping over Android was not one of them. Their transition was painful, sure. However, their new products are very impressive and, in many ways, well ahead of the game. Even BGR is singing their praises -- that takes some doing!
They could still fail in the market, I'll grant you that, but that won't be because they've produced an inferior product.
3D printing layer by layer will never be as fast or as cheap as an injection mold which does dozens of parts in one 5 or 10 second cycle.
That depends on the volume, doesn't it? The parent is talking about the production of a few hundred units. Sure, the cost per unit is higher than if you were making a few hundred thousand, but *much* lower than producing just a few hundred units the traditional way.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a French company, you right-wing loon.
So, I take it you have an answer to the symbol grounding problem? Or are you just reasserting computationalism in face of evidence to the contrary?
No, what he's saying is that "the meaning isn't in the message".
That's a nice slogan, but he misses an even bigger point. In slogan form: "syntax is insufficient for semantics".
A company called Jakks Pacific made a few of those, including a few console-like ones in their Flashback series. I'll bet you could still find them as they're not all that old.
IIRC, you could solder in a cartridge slot on the FlashBack 2 and play any of the old games. A real shame it didn't have that built-in from the start. Coupled with an AtariMax MyIDE-II Compact Flash Cartridge and you've have the ultimate modern 2600 setup.
Yeah, I wish the "hacks" forum on AtariAge had more of this kind of break-down. You sometimes find good discussions about problems and solutions though.
That would be cool, especially if they used the fixed version.
Well, cool except for the platform exclusivity... That's never cool.
I guess you missed:
a medium level of prosperity
Hmmm....
Work two days a week and ... raise 2.5 children, own a home in the suburbs and a sensible late-model auto, enjoy an annual family vacation to a popular American tourist destination, and have not one single case of throat irritation (from smoking Camel cigarettes).
I'm not seeing it.
Maybe you mean something like ... wages garnished for child support, a home in government subsidized low-income housing and a mini-van (technically, your moms mini-van), selling your food stamps (to take a different sort of trip), and a prescription that you need, but can't afford to fill.
That makes more sense. Well, more sense than Kurzweil has ever managed...
Thanks, it's been fun.
Well, that'll bring us right in to a discussion about causation. I don't know that I'm willing to tumble down that rabbit hole.
Just for fun. The Arab Spring was a later result of the social paradigm shift previously caused by the internet -- a fact hidden by the role that the internet played leading up to and during the actual events. The Arab Spring is just an indicator.
I'd like to go back to something I mentioned briefly earlier, the idea of a change being irreversible, as perhaps key to deciding whether or not it's a complete enough change to be called a paradigm shift.
That appeals to me as well.
Yet people can be removed from the Internet indefinitely and still maintain the same standard of interpersonal communication as long as geography isn't prohibitive... and if it is, then we must consider the impact of mountain ranges and other physical barriers equivalent to distance (as they impede travel), in which case I feel it's bizarre to suggest that the peculiarities of the Earth's surface should be allowed to have a role in defining something that is otherwise so general.
Until recently, distance and geography had a far more significant (even defining) impact on social structures of all types and sizes doesn't even scratch the surface. It was a dramatic influence on politics, language, economics, the list goes on. To some degree, the internet makes those barriers irrelevant.
That the internet has changed how people view the impact of distance on personal relationships, that's just one example. It's changed how we work, how we shop, how we communicate, how we make decisions, and that's all on the small scale. This is to say nothing of the power and influence it puts back in the hands of the individual -- the Arab Spring wouldn't have been possible in the old disconnected world.
Maybe it's too early to tell if the advent of the internet can be considered a social paradigm shift -- we've seen little more than a decade of real influence -- but there's little doubt that even now its removal would have a dramatic impact on the world, and not just economically. A look at the world 20 years from now would be helpful.
Not that I'm really arguing here. I don't think the internet represents a Kuhnian paradigm shift, just for different reasons.
It meant that humans were no longer the centre of the universe! How much more fundamental can you get?
Ontological doesn't mean fundamental, you know. The Copernican revolution marked the break from rationalism to empiricism, a decidedly epistemic shift. There were no metaphysical implications like we saw with Newton and Einstein.
That's why I didn't want to say it. This will go 'round for a while ...
I don't want to write this. I really, really, don't ... but we're not necessarily dealing with an ontological change, but necessarily with an epistemic change. See Kuhn's (and Kant's!) example of the Copernican revolution.
the Internet alone just isn't dramatic enough in its impact on value systems to qualify as a social paradigm shift. Certainly "it's normal to wish John a speedy recovery from the flu even when he's thousands of miles away" is some kind of change in values, but it pales in comparison to the depth and irreversibility of things we know for certain deserve the label, like the rejection of slavery or the writing of the Magna Carta.
How large a change is necessary for a change to be considered a "paradigm shift"? I don't know how to interpret this.
Mod is expensive. You don't need it.
In BASIC, because it irritates people.
fizz = 0
buzz = 0
FOR i = 1 to 100
fizz = fizz + 1
buzz = buzz + 1
IF (fizz <> 3 AND buzz <> 5) THEN
PRINT i
ELSE
IF fizz = 3 THEN PRINT "fizz"; : fizz = 0
IF buzz = 5 THEN PRINT "buzz"; : buzz = 0
PRINT
END IF
NEXT i
There is a separate description given for a notion of a social paradigm, but it's uncited and goes back particularly to the context of education in the 1970s by a researcher who left little in the way of a legacy (M. L. Handa), in a book so obscure I can't even find it in the library of the place where he or she worked.
The term isn't uncommon. You can thank Dennis Pirages and Paul Ehrlich for popularizing the concept of the "dominant social paradigm".
See: Pirages D.C., Ehrlich P.R. 1974. Ark II: Social Response to Environmental Imperatives. New York: Viking Press.
Pirages defines it best as the "constellation of common values, beliefs, and shared wisdom about the physical and social environments" Echoing Kuhn's "constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community."
Do what you want with that. I've never heard of M.L. Handa.
Why copy the array? Just reverse it in place:
var i = 0;
ar len = input.length-1;
while (ilen) { input[i] ^= input[len]; input[len] = input[len] ^ input[i]; input[i] ^= input[len]; i++; len--; } return input;
Illegible, but more efficient.
What a stupid test.
No, most older programmers suffer from "do it right" syndrome.
I wrote two different solutions and selected the most readable. It took 8 minutes, but I had to chase some damn kids off my lawn.
I'm starting to get the feeling that the real problem is that the article used the term "worldview" as a placeholder for ontology, which is what Kuhn was really discussing when he made the argument that the Aristotlean and Newtonian concepts of motion are incomparable. We shouldn't have been discussing worldview at all as a lemma to deciding whether or not the Internet is a paradigm shift.
If we're dropping the term "worldview", I don't think we disagree. I agree that the internet does not constitute a Kuhnian change in paradigm. A Kuhnian paradigm is first a social phenomenon. A shift then requires no other change beyond the necessary change to the general understanding or interpretation of a particular area of inquiry among those involved. The shift is a shift in thinking across the group. While the internet had a significant economic impact, it didn't change economics and thus didn't cause an economic paradigm shift. (Is Toffler dead? If so, he's rolling over in his grave!)
I should probably add that apart from Kuhn, there are other common uses for the term under which the internet would neatly qualify. Normally, I'd say "why bother", but I'll grant that those alternative definitions are probably not what the GP had in mind. It's not uncommon, however, to see the term applied to any major disruption or restructuring of economic or social systems. Seems almost completely opposite, doesn't it?
In case that's not terribly clear: For Kuhn, the paradigm shift happens when scientists collectively change their understanding of a field. For others, the paradigm shift happens when the fruits of that new science cause a dramatic social or economic change. (Think: the quantum revolution vs the technological revolution)
I could very well be forcing an artificial distinction. From the article: "One reviewer in 1966 criticized Kuhn for using the word 'paradigm' in twenty-one different senses in the book." It's been years since I read the book, though I didn't notice at the time. Who knows if he bothered with this kind of absurd precision?
Yeah, because everyone automatically understands why they can't just use Microsoft Word to type in that Javascript example.
Hell, most people don't even know what a web browser is (even though they use one every day) or that they can use it to run programs written in Javascript.
These are massive barriers to entry. Do you know how difficult it is to get people to understand why Microsoft Word is not well-suited for writing computer programs? It's not that they're too stupid to understand, it's that they lack the tons of background knowledge they need to have before they can even begin to comprehend your explanation.
A simple tool for writing simple programs is a damn good idea. Microsoft's SmallBasic is a good start, but it's not quite ready for prime-time.
Learning to program was MUCH easier back in the 80's when all you needed to do was turn on your micro. The interactive mode and simple commands not only made learning to program easy -- it made it fun.
There was a BBC program called "Electric Dreams" that followed a family who experienced life (from a technology perspective) one day per year from 1970. When they got a micro in the 80's, one of the kids brought a friend home from school so that they could write computer programs together! (The reason that the family picked the BBC over the ZX Spectrum was because the "salesman" showed the kids a few BASIC commands, which they found facinating. During the filming, the boy didn't even stay in the row for the "decision" scene, he left went right back to programming as soon as he put in his vote for the "boring" BBC Micro over the clearly more fun Speccy!)
Check it out here (about 20 minutes in): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEsiPMcxbdw
improve their individual worldviews,
I have no idea what it means to "improve" a worldview. Is there some ideal that people can work towards? We're way off, it seems. Let's try something different.
If I had to provide a single definition, I'd say that a worldview was the lens through which a person interprets the world around them. That's more than just what they consider to be the ground of all being, but how they understand, for example, how distance affects relationships.
It wasn't long ago that "I'll stay in touch" meant "I'll call you in six-months, maybe write a letter or send out a card, then never again" to many people. Moving away from friends had a kind of finality that just doesn't exist for a lot of people in today's modern connected world. Thanks to the internet and social networking tools, their understanding of distance and relationships has changed dramatically. That is to say, their worldview has changed.
it didn't enable anything that had previously been impossible for a person to do
Well, sticking with the earlier example, I suppose you could have made dozens calls and written dozens of letters every time some minor event happened (my kid won a trophy for some sports thing, I got a cool new job, I read a book that I really like). I suppose you could also read dozens of letters from your friends (who also have an abundance of free time).
The truth, of course, is that it's too great a burden -- that's why distance had such a significant impact on relationships. Now, in a few minutes with a discount smartphone, you can keep up with friends and family. You can participate in the joy of Sally's new baby or wish John a speedy recovery from the flu. You can dispute this, but it's a way for you to truly participate in the lives of others that you really couldn't do before -- even with hundreds of letters and phone calls.
The point I really want to get at is that people were already capable of travelling.
We may be off here. I brought up travel as an example of how changes in culture can cause a change in worldview. I did that to say that the internet has caused cultural changes that, consequently, are likely to impact a persons worldview.
This has been tried so many times before. The simple fact is that most people can't program.
Only because they never learned how, not because they're incapable of writing computer programs!
Most people don't see any benefit to learning how to program, and so they don't bother to learn. The absurd, unnecessary, barriers that aspiring learning face today is enough to hold back all but the most dedicated. How many people's lives have been made more difficult because we've locked-out the home user with unnecessarily complex tools?
We're a long way from the old days, where all you needed to get started was the manual that came with your micro -- Just turn on the computer and start typing at the prompt. Those old computers practically begged you to write your own computer programs -- and provided an unparalleled sense of power and control as the computer sprung to life, dutifully carrying out your wishes when you typed that first "print" command!
You'd have to have some serious mental issues to delude yourself in to thinking that the ability to write computer programs somehow makes you special or important. Any idiot can learn to write computer programs -- and many idiots do.
Remember VB6? It was brilliant. It was so simple to use that people could not only teach themselves the basics of computer programming, but write programs that were meaningful or useful to some area of their own life. All without years of training or other long-term learning commitment. That's a good thing.
Sure, beginners will write bad code, but so does every beginner. Hell, most "professionals" produce absolute garbage. There's absolutely no harm (other than to the ego of the insecure developer) caused by home users writing software to meet their needs or just for fun.
Not everyone will be a professional programmer, or even write programs as a hobby. That's fine. No one is saying that everyone should learn to write computer programs. There should be, however, simple easy-to-access tools for laypersons who want to solve a problem and for beginners to learn the basics. Why lock all that power behind needlessly complex tools? Because a beginner might write some low-quality code? Get over yourself.
Nonsense. People do it all the time. At the office, it's more than just the development staff, everyone with a job that requires more than answering a phone, from the executives to the maintenance staff, employ "algorithmic thinking" to identify and correct problems as diverse as developing policies and procedures to why the furnace kicks out.
The backyard mechanic, the hobbyist baker, and the new homeowner tackling their first DIY projects all employ the same set of thinking skills that the computer program uses.
See, lots of people CAN do it, and do it every day.
Skills take practice. Writing, being a skill, also takes practice. Writing computer programs is no different.
The parent is right, any idiot can learn to program just as any idiot can learn to read and write. The the fact that it takes practice to do both well does not mean that those skills are forever beyond the potential of the average nobody.
It seems like the only people who claim that writing computer programs takes a "special mind" or some other nonsense are insecure developers who have no other skills or interests. They have a lot of their identity and self-worth wrapped up in their tiny little skill-set. I suspect that many of them realize that computer programming is not beyond the reach of the unwashed masses, and that's a thought that absolutely terrifies them.
Because adopting Android worked out so well for everyone but Samsung, right?
Oh, the exact opposite of that? I guess being a "me too" player isn't a smart strategy. Probably even worse for premium brands.
RIM made a smart move by buying QNX. It's (quite possibly) the most advanced mobile OS on the market. It instantly gave them a presence in new markets, which they're leveraging well, and an easy way to maintain their legendary security.
Their new UI is stunning (thanks to great acquisitions like TaT and smart hires like former Apple designer Don Lindsay) and from what we've see so far, clearly not something you could achieve by slapping a skin on top of Android. Features like Balance would also be a clunky mess (like running a VM on your phone).
For developers, there's nothing attractive about Android -- from the tools to the ROI, it's painful. RIM, in contrast, has dramatically improved developer relations and the quality and variety of the tools available to developers. This includes true native development, not just a few "essential" parts. From Google's What is the NDK page: "In general, you should only use native code if it is essential to your application, not just because you prefer to program in C/C++".
In short: Adopting Android would have been the single worst move RIM could make. They'd be just another Android phone is a sea of unprofitable competitors, they'd lose every advantage that they currently have (their edge in security and MDM, for example), they'd be left out of other markets instead of expanding in to new ones, and they'd be unable to provide the same innovative new features for end users and developers (balance, peak, flow, etc.)
RIM made some mistakes, that's not in question, but skipping over Android was not one of them. Their transition was painful, sure. However, their new products are very impressive and, in many ways, well ahead of the game. Even BGR is singing their praises -- that takes some doing!
They could still fail in the market, I'll grant you that, but that won't be because they've produced an inferior product.
3D printing layer by layer will never be as fast or as cheap as an injection mold which does dozens of parts in one 5 or 10 second cycle.
That depends on the volume, doesn't it? The parent is talking about the production of a few hundred units. Sure, the cost per unit is higher than if you were making a few hundred thousand, but *much* lower than producing just a few hundred units the traditional way.