P.S. for those wondering there is a Mac version. The main screenshot looks awfully "Windows" so I wasn't sure they supported the Mac.
Surprisingly, there is a version for OSX. There is a Linux version as well.
As for this post being particularly "educational" I beg to differ. The functional programming advise is sound, but overkill for just about anything you'll acutally use JS for. Recommending jQuery is a huge mistake. The only reason to learn jQuery is to understand other peoples brain-damaged code that uses jQuery.
Aptana? I've never used it nor do I know anything about it save that there is a version for OSX, which I discovered in seconds with a two-word google search.
What's funny about this meme is that you likely use goto all the time; it's just called 'break' or some other name or is in some other functional equivalent.
it still takes care of all of that annoying cross browser compatibility, OO, and other hard parts of JS.
Cross browser compatibility is ridiculously easy, you don't really need a tool to help you these days.
OOP should be avoided at all costs -- but that's in any language:) Javascript's prototype based object system is different enough from the "common way" (think: c++, Java, c#) that, if you've bought in to the OO hype, that trying to apply what you "know about OO" to JS is going to guarantee failure.
Besides, using one language and translating it to another is almost guaranteed to generate bad (or completely illegible) code in the target language. Just learn to use the target language effectively in the first place!
JS is ridiculously simple to use. I have no idea why so many people seem to struggle with it. My only guess is that they're trying to force it to act like Java or C# and (predictably) failing miserably.
Class inheritance is a terrible idea, and you should never need to use it.
Hear, hear! (Can you believe someone above was actually advocating multiple inheritance? Insanity!)
There are plenty of ways to write decent code in dynamically typed languages. They just aren't the same as how you write decent code in statically typed languages.
I'd accuse you of stating the obvious but, looking at the discussion here, it's apparently not obvious at all...
getting around Java's lack of multiple inheritance, or other shortcomings.
Lack of multiple inheritance is a good thing. I thought we all learned that lesson decades ago?
Java's type checking can be helpful at times,
Java's type system is a gigantic mess that causes more problems than it solves. It's ridiculous type checking is particularly irritating. (Why do you think people got so excited over generics? It was a solution to a problem that should have never existed!) As you say...
but after many years developing with dynamic languages, I will tell you that mismatched-typing issues are a tiny minority of bugs I've seen make it to production.
I couldn't agree with you more here. ("But, but, other people!" cry the uninformed! Well, they're uninformed.)
Back to JS, it would be nice if JS had a way to force a variable to always be a particular type, but it's easy to know ahead of time what type you'll have after an assignment. (It would also be nice if it had a freaking unsigned integer type, but that's a complaint that I have with other languages, Java included. Seriously, how did this get overlooked? It's the most frustrating thing ever.)
You also NEED to aquaint yourself with jquery. Javascript is almost untolerable without it.
Ugh. No you don't. Run as far away as you can from that and the zillion other steaming-piles like it (underscore.js comes to mind here).
If you've ever asked yourself "how can I make my code less readable?" or "how can I over-complicate this simple problem?" then jquery is your answer.
You'll probably want a good whiskey supply to drown your sorrows after knock off time too. Javascript is bloody awful.
Stop using jquery and you'll find that half of your headaches are gone automatically. Javascript can brain-dead simple if you know how to use it -- and it can be a gigantic headache when you use it incorrectly. If you think jquery makes your life easier, you're clearly using it wrong.
Using the correct labor costs of assembling an iPad 2 in the U.S., an iPad 2 made in the U.S would cost $445 ($325 for parts + $120 for labor), as opposed to a Chinese iPad’s cost of $335 ($325 for parts + $10 for labor). Assembling the iPad 2 in the U.S. and selling it for $729 would bring Apple’s gross margin down to 39%, not the 15.25% cited to by Mr. Thompson.
2 - Siri was supposed to be a distinctive feature of the iPhone 4S and iOS 5, so it would be pretty bad if it was half-assed;
I think you missed the point of my post. Still I couldn't resist replying to point 2. As you probably already know Siri is still in beta and can't do many of the things similar programs could do long before the iP5 hit the scene. I don't know what you call "half-assed", but they did release an incomplete product that's still in beta and promoted it as a key feature of their new product.
There's a major difference between "this works well enough we could charge a couple bucks for the app" and "this works well enough we're going to hype up the next version of our flagship hardware with it."
Too true! To charge a couple bucks means the app must work well consistently.
To hype the next version of a flagship product, it just needs to work most of the time.
To be a flagship product, it only needs to be minimally functional.
This is why I like to use the term scientism -- it describes the religious approach to science you see among the new atheists. Most religious people have a very shallow understanding of their own system of beliefs. In this case of scientism, adherents exhibit very shallow understanding of the processes of science.
Let me try to put the idea of a scientific theory in simple terms so that you can understand what everyone has been saying to you.
A theory is a predictive model. A hypothesis is a testable prediction. As theories make predictions, we want to say that theories generate hypotheses. Hypotheses are (by definition) testable, so a theory is only a theory in the scientific sense if it generates testable predictions. If a hypothesis is to be testable, it must necessarily be falsifiable. (Easy so far, right?)
As a consequence, a theory must necessarily be falsifiable, as it's only as good as the predictions that it makes. If a theory were NOT subject to falsifiability, it would not be a scientific theory!
Further, for a theory to be scientific does not necessitate that the predictions it makes match what is observed. That is, a theory can be wrong and still be a scientific theory -- it need only make testable predictions.
The term theory does not hold the special significance you see incorrectly parroted by the adherents of scientism. (Oh, and in case you haven't figured this bit out, a hypothesis doesn't graduate to a theory once it's been "proven correct" I blame Matt Dillahunty for spreading that particular bit of nonsense.)
You may want to look up the term "solipsism". It's pretty evident that you have absolutely no idea what it means!
You remind me of the girl in an old joke: A philosophy professor walks in to the lecture hall on the first day of class and announced "I'd just like to say, before we begin, that I'm a solipsist." A girl in the back stands up and cries "Thank goodness! I thought I was the only one!"
(If you don't get it, you've got some serious reading to do...)
They're not my "idiotic theories" neither are they "theories".
Reductionism is a metaphysical assumption. If that makes you uncomfortable, that's your problem. (I just realized that you may have absolutely no idea what the term "metaphysic" actually means. I can't explain your post any other way except as the product of pure, unadulterated, ignorance. Go, and educate yourself!)
The only barrier to is is the precision of our tools.
Lol! This is exactly what physicists thought up until the dawn of the 20th century. Max Planck was discouraged from taking up physics because it was "almost complete" with nothing left but more precise measurements -- good thing for us he didn't listen!
" we confront borders that an empirical (or scientific) method simply cannot transcend." There are no such borders.
Don't be ridiculous. First, science is not and has never been limited to empiricism exclusively (otherwise, we'd just call it empiricism!). Second, the limits of empiricism are well-understood and have been discussed for thousands of years (and for hundreds of years in the modern western conception).
Further, that the process of scientific inquiry has limitations (its scope is bounded; not infinite) should come as no surprise to anyone with even a basic understanding of the processes of science. Again, you'll find that this has *also* been discussed at great length for hundreds of years
It is only through some religious faith in science (that it can exceed it's own known limitations) or through pure ignorance that you could make such an absurd claim!
Trying to pick out things that are not well understood (speaking relatively here) as examples of science failing overall is stupid.
That is stupid. It's also stupid to think that the scope of science is unbounded or that the process gradually brings us closer to "the truth". I think that's the point of the (surprisingly poor) article.
Over all, it looks like the author just discovered philosophy of science, but didn't have the philosophical or scientific background to do much with it. (That is, this is what I'd assume had I not read the authors name. It's really not his best effort.)
Still, it's true that many of the metaphysical assumptions common in the "hard sciences" are starting to weaken. Materialism started falling apart under Newton, astonishingly enough. Reductionism (mentioned in the article) appeals to our intuition yet, like materialism, we're starting to see just how inadequate it really is.
If science is to continue to be productive, it seems obvious that we need a new metaphysic under which science can operate. I'll catch a lot of flack for using the word "metaphysic" near the word "science" without an intervening "not", but I won't apologize to the uninformed.
The problem with philosophy is that when it evolves into something concrete people stop calling it philosophy and give it a new name like "Mathematics", "Logic", and "Science".:)
I get the impression from your post that, even if you acknowledge the above, that you don't believe that philosophy (or metaphysics, heaven forbid!) can be useful or influential in these modern times.
While I could bombard you with examples of the major contributions philosophers have made in a diverse range of fields over the past 30 years, I'll leave that as a task for you. The best anyone could hope to do for someone capable of educating themselves is to let them know that they have a very large gap in their knowledge. After all, you can't know what you don't know.
Go, now, and read! I recommend you start with Carl Hempel's classic Philosophy of Natural Science. It's a tiny little book, but it should be more than adequate to get you started.
I want to be able to add something to my calendar, or ask where the closet X is.
What's so strange is that the things people bring up when they talk about Siri are the same things that other apps have been able to do for ages.
When Siri came out, there was a user here bragging that he could tell Siri that he was "hungry for Mexican food" and it would bring up a list of Mexican restaurants in his area. Well, I press the convenience key on my Blackberry and, surprise surprise, saying "I'm hungry for Mexican food" was all it took for Vlingo to pull up a list of Mexican restaraunts near me (grabbing my current location with the GPS) complete with a button to call them and a button to get directions.
I'm still not sure what Siri does that's particularly special, though I do hear a lot about the things that Siri won't do that other similar apps can do.
Well, in 2006 you'd have a hard time finding a blackberry with a camera. I don't know that one existed at the time. The 8100 was due in November of that year, but I don't know if it made the release date.
I don't know what mobile file manager you were comparing it to, but on BB phones with cameras, it's pretty painless. You can move a picture from any file dialog. Just select the SD card (it's listed with the phones internal memory at the root) and then the folder you want to move the file into. You could even multi-select and move whole groups of files at once. This was true as far back as BB's have had memory cards.
I did remove a webmail account from my phone recently. From the list of email accounts, I brought up the context menu and selected delete. Done.
Now, on much older phones (2006, 2007) if you setup the account through your BIS provider, you may have had to use their web portal or call them to remove it on the back-end. Removing the service book in that case won't help as it won't stop the email and the service book will just get pushed back out to your phone.
You should really look in to what they're offering now. I can't begin to tell you have much more advance their latest offerings are over their 2006-2007 products. (Like everyone else, they've come a very long way in the last 5 years.)
I disagree about the UI not being intuitive. Of course, I'm comparing it to other handsets on the market. I've found the various BB UI's over the years to be much easier to navigate and easier to find advanced options that on other platforms.
I have no idea what experiences lead you to form that opinion, and I personally can't think of anything that would lead to it.
Slashdot Mirror
P.S. for those wondering there is a Mac version. The main screenshot looks awfully "Windows" so I wasn't sure they supported the Mac.
Surprisingly, there is a version for OSX. There is a Linux version as well.
As for this post being particularly "educational" I beg to differ. The functional programming advise is sound, but overkill for just about anything you'll acutally use JS for. Recommending jQuery is a huge mistake. The only reason to learn jQuery is to understand other peoples brain-damaged code that uses jQuery.
Aptana? I've never used it nor do I know anything about it save that there is a version for OSX, which I discovered in seconds with a two-word google search.
REALLY *don't* use goto. I am serious.
Linus Torvalds would disagree with you.
What's funny about this meme is that you likely use goto all the time; it's just called 'break' or some other name or is in some other functional equivalent.
"Wow, this actually reads a lot like Java, it's very clean".
That doesn't make any sense. If it reads like Java, how could it possibly be considered clean?
it still takes care of all of that annoying cross browser compatibility, OO, and other hard parts of JS.
Cross browser compatibility is ridiculously easy, you don't really need a tool to help you these days.
OOP should be avoided at all costs -- but that's in any language :) Javascript's prototype based object system is different enough from the "common way" (think: c++, Java, c#) that, if you've bought in to the OO hype, that trying to apply what you "know about OO" to JS is going to guarantee failure.
Besides, using one language and translating it to another is almost guaranteed to generate bad (or completely illegible) code in the target language. Just learn to use the target language effectively in the first place!
JS is ridiculously simple to use. I have no idea why so many people seem to struggle with it. My only guess is that they're trying to force it to act like Java or C# and (predictably) failing miserably.
Class inheritance is a terrible idea, and you should never need to use it.
Hear, hear! (Can you believe someone above was actually advocating multiple inheritance? Insanity!)
There are plenty of ways to write decent code in dynamically typed languages. They just aren't the same as how you write decent code in statically typed languages.
I'd accuse you of stating the obvious but, looking at the discussion here, it's apparently not obvious at all...
getting around Java's lack of multiple inheritance, or other shortcomings.
Lack of multiple inheritance is a good thing. I thought we all learned that lesson decades ago?
Java's type checking can be helpful at times,
Java's type system is a gigantic mess that causes more problems than it solves. It's ridiculous type checking is particularly irritating. (Why do you think people got so excited over generics? It was a solution to a problem that should have never existed!) As you say...
but after many years developing with dynamic languages, I will tell you that mismatched-typing issues are a tiny minority of bugs I've seen make it to production.
I couldn't agree with you more here. ("But, but, other people!" cry the uninformed! Well, they're uninformed.)
Back to JS, it would be nice if JS had a way to force a variable to always be a particular type, but it's easy to know ahead of time what type you'll have after an assignment. (It would also be nice if it had a freaking unsigned integer type, but that's a complaint that I have with other languages, Java included. Seriously, how did this get overlooked? It's the most frustrating thing ever.)
You also NEED to aquaint yourself with jquery. Javascript is almost untolerable without it.
Ugh. No you don't. Run as far away as you can from that and the zillion other steaming-piles like it (underscore.js comes to mind here).
If you've ever asked yourself "how can I make my code less readable?" or "how can I over-complicate this simple problem?" then jquery is your answer.
You'll probably want a good whiskey supply to drown your sorrows after knock off time too. Javascript is bloody awful.
Stop using jquery and you'll find that half of your headaches are gone automatically. Javascript can brain-dead simple if you know how to use it -- and it can be a gigantic headache when you use it incorrectly. If you think jquery makes your life easier, you're clearly using it wrong.
America isn't an option because of labor regulations and an expensive workforce. iPads would be up at $1499 and still losing money
Bullshit See thisForbes article.
Using the correct labor costs of assembling an iPad 2 in the U.S., an iPad 2 made in the U.S would cost $445 ($325 for parts + $120 for labor), as opposed to a Chinese iPad’s cost of $335 ($325 for parts + $10 for labor). Assembling the iPad 2 in the U.S. and selling it for $729 would bring Apple’s gross margin down to 39%, not the 15.25% cited to by Mr. Thompson.
That a 39% margin vs. the current 54% margin.
2 - Siri was supposed to be a distinctive feature of the iPhone 4S and iOS 5, so it would be pretty bad if it was half-assed;
I think you missed the point of my post. Still I couldn't resist replying to point 2. As you probably already know Siri is still in beta and can't do many of the things similar programs could do long before the iP5 hit the scene. I don't know what you call "half-assed", but they did release an incomplete product that's still in beta and promoted it as a key feature of their new product.
There's a major difference between "this works well enough we could charge a couple bucks for the app" and "this works well enough we're going to hype up the next version of our flagship hardware with it."
Too true! To charge a couple bucks means the app must work well consistently.
To hype the next version of a flagship product, it just needs to work most of the time.
To be a flagship product, it only needs to be minimally functional.
So if it is commercial software development then you have to consider sales potential.
That's the myth, of course. The reality is that less than 1% of iOS developers break $1000 in app sales.
This is in contrast with Blackberry developers, 13% of which pull in more than $100k in app sales.
Which platform would you rather develop for?
What about chuck norris? He's plenty hard!
He's tough all right, but he's only hard when he's around Ted Haggard.
This is why I like to use the term scientism -- it describes the religious approach to science you see among the new atheists. Most religious people have a very shallow understanding of their own system of beliefs. In this case of scientism, adherents exhibit very shallow understanding of the processes of science.
Let me try to put the idea of a scientific theory in simple terms so that you can understand what everyone has been saying to you.
A theory is a predictive model. A hypothesis is a testable prediction. As theories make predictions, we want to say that theories generate hypotheses. Hypotheses are (by definition) testable, so a theory is only a theory in the scientific sense if it generates testable predictions. If a hypothesis is to be testable, it must necessarily be falsifiable. (Easy so far, right?)
As a consequence, a theory must necessarily be falsifiable, as it's only as good as the predictions that it makes. If a theory were NOT subject to falsifiability, it would not be a scientific theory!
Further, for a theory to be scientific does not necessitate that the predictions it makes match what is observed. That is, a theory can be wrong and still be a scientific theory -- it need only make testable predictions.
The term theory does not hold the special significance you see incorrectly parroted by the adherents of scientism. (Oh, and in case you haven't figured this bit out, a hypothesis doesn't graduate to a theory once it's been "proven correct" I blame Matt Dillahunty for spreading that particular bit of nonsense.)
You may want to look up the term "solipsism". It's pretty evident that you have absolutely no idea what it means!
You remind me of the girl in an old joke: A philosophy professor walks in to the lecture hall on the first day of class and announced "I'd just like to say, before we begin, that I'm a solipsist." A girl in the back stands up and cries "Thank goodness! I thought I was the only one!"
(If you don't get it, you've got some serious reading to do...)
They're not my "idiotic theories" neither are they "theories".
Reductionism is a metaphysical assumption. If that makes you uncomfortable, that's your problem. (I just realized that you may have absolutely no idea what the term "metaphysic" actually means. I can't explain your post any other way except as the product of pure, unadulterated, ignorance. Go, and educate yourself!)
The only barrier to is is the precision of our tools.
Lol! This is exactly what physicists thought up until the dawn of the 20th century. Max Planck was discouraged from taking up physics because it was "almost complete" with nothing left but more precise measurements -- good thing for us he didn't listen!
" we confront borders that an empirical (or scientific) method simply cannot transcend."
There are no such borders.
Don't be ridiculous. First, science is not and has never been limited to empiricism exclusively (otherwise, we'd just call it empiricism!). Second, the limits of empiricism are well-understood and have been discussed for thousands of years (and for hundreds of years in the modern western conception).
Further, that the process of scientific inquiry has limitations (its scope is bounded; not infinite) should come as no surprise to anyone with even a basic understanding of the processes of science. Again, you'll find that this has *also* been discussed at great length for hundreds of years
It is only through some religious faith in science (that it can exceed it's own known limitations) or through pure ignorance that you could make such an absurd claim!
Science isn't failing the public, rather the public is failing science
Do you know how I know that you didn't read the article?
Trying to pick out things that are not well understood (speaking relatively here) as examples of science failing overall is stupid.
That is stupid. It's also stupid to think that the scope of science is unbounded or that the process gradually brings us closer to "the truth". I think that's the point of the (surprisingly poor) article.
Over all, it looks like the author just discovered philosophy of science, but didn't have the philosophical or scientific background to do much with it. (That is, this is what I'd assume had I not read the authors name. It's really not his best effort.)
Still, it's true that many of the metaphysical assumptions common in the "hard sciences" are starting to weaken. Materialism started falling apart under Newton, astonishingly enough. Reductionism (mentioned in the article) appeals to our intuition yet, like materialism, we're starting to see just how inadequate it really is.
If science is to continue to be productive, it seems obvious that we need a new metaphysic under which science can operate. I'll catch a lot of flack for using the word "metaphysic" near the word "science" without an intervening "not", but I won't apologize to the uninformed.
You've observed gravity? You should alert a physicist right away!
It's pretty clear that you're way out of your depth here. Typing the word "defined" in all-caps over and over isn't going to suddenly make you right.
Gravity is a force that we have DEFINED as the attraction between two massive objects with no charge.
You have the physics wrong as well.
The problem with philosophy is that when it evolves into something concrete people stop calling it philosophy and give it a new name like "Mathematics", "Logic", and "Science". :)
I get the impression from your post that, even if you acknowledge the above, that you don't believe that philosophy (or metaphysics, heaven forbid!) can be useful or influential in these modern times.
While I could bombard you with examples of the major contributions philosophers have made in a diverse range of fields over the past 30 years, I'll leave that as a task for you. The best anyone could hope to do for someone capable of educating themselves is to let them know that they have a very large gap in their knowledge. After all, you can't know what you don't know.
Go, now, and read! I recommend you start with Carl Hempel's classic Philosophy of Natural Science. It's a tiny little book, but it should be more than adequate to get you started.
I want to be able to add something to my calendar, or ask where the closet X is.
What's so strange is that the things people bring up when they talk about Siri are the same things that other apps have been able to do for ages.
When Siri came out, there was a user here bragging that he could tell Siri that he was "hungry for Mexican food" and it would bring up a list of Mexican restaurants in his area. Well, I press the convenience key on my Blackberry and, surprise surprise, saying "I'm hungry for Mexican food" was all it took for Vlingo to pull up a list of Mexican restaraunts near me (grabbing my current location with the GPS) complete with a button to call them and a button to get directions.
I'm still not sure what Siri does that's particularly special, though I do hear a lot about the things that Siri won't do that other similar apps can do.
What I'd much prefer is if you could allow or deny individually,
Blackberry has had that type of fine-grained control for years. I believe that newer versions of Android have something like this as well.
Well, in 2006 you'd have a hard time finding a blackberry with a camera. I don't know that one existed at the time. The 8100 was due in November of that year, but I don't know if it made the release date.
I don't know what mobile file manager you were comparing it to, but on BB phones with cameras, it's pretty painless. You can move a picture from any file dialog. Just select the SD card (it's listed with the phones internal memory at the root) and then the folder you want to move the file into. You could even multi-select and move whole groups of files at once. This was true as far back as BB's have had memory cards.
I did remove a webmail account from my phone recently. From the list of email accounts, I brought up the context menu and selected delete. Done.
Now, on much older phones (2006, 2007) if you setup the account through your BIS provider, you may have had to use their web portal or call them to remove it on the back-end. Removing the service book in that case won't help as it won't stop the email and the service book will just get pushed back out to your phone.
You should really look in to what they're offering now. I can't begin to tell you have much more advance their latest offerings are over their 2006-2007 products. (Like everyone else, they've come a very long way in the last 5 years.)
I disagree about the UI not being intuitive. Of course, I'm comparing it to other handsets on the market. I've found the various BB UI's over the years to be much easier to navigate and easier to find advanced options that on other platforms.
I have no idea what experiences lead you to form that opinion, and I personally can't think of anything that would lead to it.