Well, think of it in terms of code, or proofs. The most elegant designs from any perspective are those that solve the essential problem without extraneous bits.
You could argue that Apple has perhaps gone too far in terms of simplicity or minimalism--that's a pretty subjective choice--but in most cases, it does actually solve the problem of interacting with the device effectively, and does so with the least clutter.
I'd rather see code that solves the problem at hand quickly and efficiently (and maintainably--that's one of my criteria for 'solving the problem' in a production environment) than code that goes all over the place and solves many problems, some of which possibly never needed to be solved.
I recommend the book 'The Design of Everyday Things'. One of the author's assignments to his students is to try and design an alarm clock that's easy to use that is well designed and easy to use. Hint: having a different button for absolutely every function is not the way to get a good mark.:)
I'm not sure sure. It did the RIGHT thing in that it didn't slavishly follow the book--most movies that do fail because books aren't the same as movies, so doing a 1-to-1 translation doesn't really work.
Heinlein also had certain political views that he trotted out in his books: citizenship through service, government control, propaganda, etc. The Starship Troopers movie actually does a really good job of a lot of that. Despite the big explosions and (sometimes) goofy dialogue and meaningless romance/sex scenes, the political undercurrent of the stories is still there. The movie has real political messages, if you're willing to look at them and not spend all the time watching the movie lamenting that it's not the same as the original.
I'm actually a huge fan of Jobs' work, and I think his contributions are hard to understate. But if I'm going to pick one thing about the iPhone that REALLY made a difference in this world, it's more about Jobs and his desire to call the shots in an industry that was used to dictating terms.
And while it's true that guys like Jony Ive can take the Lion's share of the credit for the ACTUAL design work, I consider Jobs such a fundamental part of the design that if you remove him, the phone isn't designed the way we know it. He was more than an executive that just signed off on things without looking at them, he carried it around and used it and demanded crazy things of his team that usually turned out to not be so crazy after all. (And frankly, this is probably why the Maps thing didn't go as well as Apple would have hoped. Jobs would have demanded the impossible and somehow, it would have manifested in the end. Now that there isn't someone there telling people that the impossible is actually possible, they're living within mortal constraints again.)
As for why I couched my argument the way I did, well, it's slashdot. I've been here a long time, and I know exactly the way NOT to get heard. This was a way to make sure I didn't get moderated -1: APPLE FANBOI SHEEPLE FUUUUUU
It's not the re-invention of the smartphone that was Jobs' greatest contribution to the market, it was creating a phone that was designed the way he wanted (and the way consumers wanted) and then forcing the telecom industry to use his phone, and not dictate terms back to him.
The reason why smartphones stagnated and were such a small niche before the iPhone wasn't purely on the basis of usability, it was also because telcos like calling the shots and bending you over.
If you don't like that Steve Jobs was, by all accounts, a bit off his nut, just remember that it was THAT personality that turned the tables on the music and telecom industries. You can hate Jobs, but you can't help but admire someone that forged the way in making the technology that we want available to us. Perhaps it was bound to happen, but I bet it happened faster because of him.
I loathe telecom companies, and the established music industry isn't far behind. Anyone that can wedge themselves in there and start breaking down their control is good in my books.
I honestly believe that my helmet has saved my life more than once while riding on the road. I've been hit by two cars and I ride my bike in the winter (I've never been hit in the winter), and I've bounced my head off the pavement a couple times. I've seen the foam compress, and I'm pretty sure I would've had pretty substantial injuries from those incidents. That said, I spend more time not crashing than crashing. I know people that have been hit by cars while walking. It's hard to eliminate risk from your life—that's just life.
And not exercising is a completely different risk you take on. I think people would do well to understand the risks of riding a bike and wear their helmets, but the barrier to entry needs to be as low as possible.
I live in Montreal, where the Bixi bike rental system is incredibly popular. We now have bike traffic jams in the bike lanes. I see women in business suits riding the bikes in their high heels. 90% of these people aren't wearing helmets or they're wearing them so wrong as to make them useless, but they're riding. Heart disease and obesity related diseases kill so many people every year, it's really just a cruel matter of the math: even if the number of people dying in bike related injuries goes up, we're almost certainly saving lives in the long run.
But central Montreal is dense and easy to traverse. The city is well set up for walking and is an utter nightmare to drive in—ideal conditions for a bike culture to come up.
Man, did you even read the paper? A huge part of why women aren't encouraged to stay in science and stick it through is because of the awful treatment that they get when they're young and starting out. Only an utter masochist or someone committed beyond most human reasoning would stick it out in an area where they offer you $5000 less to start *before they even meet you*.
On every metric that they measured, women were getting the short shrift (even worse, people with feminine sounding names; 'Michelle' is also a man's name if you're French): money, mentoring and decisions of competence. For a lab management position that would probably just be a stepping stone through academia.
Women are the ones that bear children, it's true, but there are Scandinavian countries where the men also get a significant amount of parental leave, allowing the mother to get back to work if she so chooses and letting the father stay home with the kids. The problem isn't with WOMEN, the problem is with the way we TREAT women. Maybe if we thought of them as equal and competent workers, we'd find ways to manage the inconveniences of life that all of us have to deal with.
There are a great number of things that men are more likely to do that are deleterious to their health and ability to show up to work, but we don't seem to care about that. Blaming women for having kids doesn't make a single thing better. Societally, we just don't hold women in much esteem, and that's the real issue in the end. We can fix this, we just need to stop giving the same excuses and saying, "Well, we've tried nothing, and now we're all out of ideas!"
It's not as easy as that. My first name is Jan, which is a reasonable male first name if you're European, but it reads as a woman's name in North America. Actually, there are a lot of gender ambiguous names from an Anglophone standpoint here in Quebec. I know guys named Michelle or Jocelyn...really standard French names. You can't expect everyone in the world to conform to White, Anglosaxon, American naming conventions.
The real solution to this problem is to remove the name from the application all together. You don't get to know anyone's gender through their resume. Before you sit down for the interview, the base offer should already be decided on. If you get to the interview and it doesn't work out, no problem. If it does, so much the better.
If you take the long view, our current system shortchanges everyone. Women decide they don't want careers in science because they're treated poorly or are offered low wages that they can get doing easier jobs. We lose out on a work/research population that we desperately need and should be encouraging. We also lose out if we pre-judge people by their names regardless of their gender...you haven't even gotten to the cover of the book yet if you're judging a person by their name. It's like judging a book by the typeface of the title.
Even Google said that Samsung was probably making their products look a little too much like the iPhone.
And then you've got the Nokia Lumia series, which not only doesn't infringe (and is a design that Apple themselves used to show that you can build a non-infringing phone), it's far and away the most beautiful phone design on the market today, in my mind. I WISH Apple would make something that looks like that. (I like my iPhone 4, but that Lumia really does look amazing.)
Oh, and the Windows phone OS design is ALSO an indication that you can build something that isn't anything close to the iOS design.
In my mind, Apple's crazy patents are the BEST way to ensure that there's choice in the market, not just choice between two of effectively the same thing. It's the big departures from the well established norms that bring interesting things to us. Apple's original entry into the Smartphone space was hugely disruptive, and they were very successful. Samsung has piggybacked on that success, whether you agree that they infringed or not. It's going to take another company doing the same sort of wild thing to really bring us something new and innovative.
Like I said, I own an iPhone 4, but I don't expect Apple to do anything innovative with their phone for years, if ever. They've made the product they wanted (something high quality and easy to use), and they'll stick with that--and that's not a terrible thing. There are worse ways to run a business. But for me to get EXCITED about phones again, well, that'll take someone doing something really revolutionary that I can't miss. Right now, beyond expectations, that looks like Microsoft. If they can really strike out on their own and differentiate their phone from everyone else, they'll claw their way into contention.
But Apple vs. Samsung is really just a sort of nitpicky argument. The iPhone 5 is better in some ways, and the Galaxy is better in others, but they do the same basic things. It's like comparing fridges. Both of them keep your food cold, but one has an ice dispenser and the other has a digital temperature readout. You pick and choose based on your needs at the time, but the Smartphone market is basically a choice between dull appliances now.
Bull. Or at least, in the general sense, what you're saying is basically BS.
I readily accept that this thing that you say happened to your friend, but anecdotal evidence isn't terribly significant.
Do iPhones regularly fail in humid conditions for no other reason than it's hot and humid? I suspect not, or we'd hear about a lot of broken phones that Apple has to replace. It gets into the 90s here, with 90+% humidity on some days. It's not that common, but it happens. I've been out cycling with my phone on days like those, where I'm sweating and my phone is in my jersey pocket. Granted, it has a leather case on it, but it's hardly air or water tight.
I've also been rained on while riding with my phone. No problem. Cold (Montreal winters)? Still no problems.
So my anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that the phone is relatively rugged in tough conditions, cancelling out your friend's evidence.
Like I said, if the iPhone were really as breakable and fragile as people seem to claim, we'd be looking at a much sadder Apple community, lower Apple stock price, and probably massive class-action lawsuits.
I cringed a bit and thought the piece was funny, but how many people did they have to interview for that clip? By the very nature of the show, you're only seeing the ones that are funny. If they'd done that to me, I'd've told them I knew they were lying. I bet most Android users would fall for the same sort of thing. By virtue of being the largest platform, they're going to capture a significant portion of people that just aren't that clever.
I read in a different article that the species was known to the native residents of the area. So western scientists have just named something, they didn't discover it. This article makes it sound like they're the first people that have ever seen such a thing.
Wait, what? Nearly all domain experts DO agree on that. Only a vanishingly small percentage of climate scientists think that human actions aren't affecting the climate, and more specifically, that CO2 levels aren't affecting the climate.
I haven't read the article or the paper yet; I can't conclude whether you're right and picked a bad example, or if you're exactly the sort of person it's supposedly talking about.:)
It's true, if I wrote nothing but simple array iterators all day, I would probably not need any comments at all.
Unfortunately, the code I write has a significant amount of complexity. Worse, I have to write code that integrates with code that is arcane and complex itself. Years and years of use have made the codebase I work with difficult to cope with without occasionally doing something more clever than trying to get the values in an array bigger than a minimum argument.
I didn't say they expressed the same thing, merely that code that is dynamic needs comments that are dynamic. Code that changes sufficiently to invalidate the comments means that you rewrite the comments. Code that does not change sufficiently to warrant such a change means you leave the comments alone. Again, there's no issue here.
If your comments add a 'significant' overhead to your coding, you're doing them wrong.
If your codes are 'static' while your code is 'dynamic', you're doing them wrong.
Code isn't finished until the system is clear. If the comment needs to change because the code changed, then change the comment. If the code change is SO convoluted as to change the entire comment, so much more the reason to change the comment. If the code has changed to be more optimal, but performs the same essential function, then the comment doesn't need to change.
Not at all. Extremely complex systems can be hard to trace the codepath through. Someone putting comments into a function to explain how it interacts in the greater scheme of things can be extremely helpful.
Comments aren't meant to explain code. You should be able to read a for loop. But if I'm in the middle of a function that's crashing and there's a comment telling me how this function interacts with the SYSTEM, then I can understand the CONTEXT of the code and more easily find the error. Otherwise, it's 20 minutes or an hour of reproducing the problem and then parsing the stack trace and then figuring out where this variable has been modified instead of where it SHOULD have been modified, etc., etc.
Comments aren't just there to explain the code. Of course you should write clear code. But I work in the games industry; there are times where clear code is thrown under the bus for the sake of efficiency. There are annoying convoluted constructs that are optimisations but they read like someone just showing off.
But this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what comments are for. You're not explaining the code, you're explaining the algorithm and the basic thing that your code is meant to accomplish. You don't write comments to let people know that you're looping over an array, you write comments to let people know WHY you're looping over an array and why they should care. I'm all for verbose variable names, but if you're going over 132 columns I'm already irritated. Go on for 80 more and it's tremendously annoying to read the 'clear' code.
There are a lot of different ways to solve problems. Ideally, your comments should lay out what your thought process was when you were solving this particular problem. If you leave, someone will understand the problem you were trying to solve, and that context makes reading the code easier.
And even if you don't leave, it's a good shortcut for yourself if you have to come back to that code several years later. I've saved myself a lot of time by commenting things well. Five years is long enough for my thought process and problem solving methods to change, so when I look at the code and wonder why in the hell I did something in such a dumb way, the comments tell me what was going through my inexperienced head.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, humans don't agree on the meanings of words. There is some research (that I've read in passing; no citations at the moment) that says that we all have our own meaning of words, and we all speak completely unique languages that just happen to overlap with other people's unique languages. To write code that is universally understandable, you need to write code that has a completely unambiguous context to all people at all times (well, more or less). As someone that works in a heavily bilingual office (in Montreal), you can't guarantee that the programmer before you had the same interpretation of things that you do.
I love how some of the comments are of the vein, "No way! How can I code without an IDE and a debugger and my 3 massive monitors and 16-core processor? What a joke!" I've coded on the console, in vi or emacs. If people couldn't write software without modern amenities, we'd never have had the modern amenities.
The reason why we won't be coding on the iPad for quite a while to come is because that's not what Apple wants you to use it for. Light work, maybe, but it's mostly a consumption device, not a creation device. Besides, if you're that hot to code on your iPad, you're a lot better off coding remotely through SSH on a machine with that 16-core processor and 8GB of RAM. (Just because I've worked on those old machines doesn't mean it's the best way to do it.:)
Maybe one day, when this kind of device is effectively all anyone wants to use. But for now, Apple would rather that you bought more hardware, not less.
I'm convinced that they bought Tweetie and made it the official client because it was always the LEAST interesting client. It was functional, but bland; it was the plain porridge of twitter clients. Everyone else experimented with different views, different ways to manage this or that...but not Tweetie.
TweetBot is the best twitter client around. It's actually so good, I ended up using the Twitter List feature, which is effectively impossible to use well unless the client also does it well. Now I don't bother using my main feed at all, just the lists. So TweetBot took a feature that is nearly invisible on the actual Twitter site and made it useful. And they want to shut clients like that down.
I Twitter's at the 'run our one good idea into the ground and don't let anyone else play' phase of development.
It's been a performance and security blight since practically the first day, and certainly since Adobe took it over. I don't care if you hate Apple or love them, one of the single best things they've ever done for the internet is insist that Flash dies the ignominious death that it deserves. Once it's dead, we can find better ways to do the things that it was being used for.
I find my iPad perfectly suitable for mobile use--that is, I can put it in my satchel and use it at the cafe--and it's even better for home use, where it would be ridiculous for me to have a notebook when I have a perfectly good desktop machine. Except I can't sit in the armchair with my desktop machine.
It seems to me that tens of millions of people have found perfectly valid use cases for the iPad. Just because you can't find one doesn't mean it isn't there. I personally didn't have a good use case for it until a few months ago, when we decided to stop having two desktop machines and just switch to one desktop machine and a couple iPads. It works way better than the previous setup, AND we ended up with portable machines in the process.
My partner and I made the decision a long time ago to live anywhere but America. I have friends in the USA, and I visit fairly often, but I refuse to be in a country with the kind of politics that the US does. The fact that the abortion debate is alive and well is an absolute killer for us. Philosophically, we have trouble with a political system that thinks so little of its women and seems to be working hard to think even less of them. The split opinion on health care also baffles us; the fact that we don't have to consider our household budget or insurance plan when we need to see the doctor is pretty essential to us.
But, if you don't mind the politics and the guns (whether or not you get shot; you just need to not mind being around guns), there's a lot of nice folks there and a lot of opportunity.
So I can recommend Canada. Montreal, Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver are all amazing cities. They all have issues, but they're all wonderful in their own way. Vancouver will have the lowest taxes in that list, Montreal the highest. But the cost of living in Montreal isn't bad, so it kind of works out.
But ultimately, trying to predict the world economy and then trying to plan on where you want to live is a mug's game. Figure out where you want to live and see if you can make a living there.
It's not a price that's being passed on to you, actually. Apple charges effectively the same price for its phones that Samsung does, they just pay less to make them. Usually, that cost is soaked up by the carrier that buys huge numbers of the phones in advance to entice you to their service. If you go and buy the phone on its own, it costs about $500-$700, same as an unlocked Samsung phone.
It's telling that Apple makes huge profits at this price whereas nobody else does; they've made hugely smart supply line decisions that let them crush the market with good planning more than anything else.
It's also worth pointing out that if Apple dropped their price down to the margins that, say, Samsung (one of the only other profitable manufacturers) makes, two things would probably happen:
1) The smartphone industry would collapse and companies like HTC would either get out or post humongous losses quarter after quarter; and 2) Apple would be investigated for anti-trust violations (even though they no longer hold what could reasonably be called a monopoly)
Everyone should be glad Apple charges what it does. Nobody would make any money except Apple, otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, think of it in terms of code, or proofs. The most elegant designs from any perspective are those that solve the essential problem without extraneous bits.
You could argue that Apple has perhaps gone too far in terms of simplicity or minimalism--that's a pretty subjective choice--but in most cases, it does actually solve the problem of interacting with the device effectively, and does so with the least clutter.
I'd rather see code that solves the problem at hand quickly and efficiently (and maintainably--that's one of my criteria for 'solving the problem' in a production environment) than code that goes all over the place and solves many problems, some of which possibly never needed to be solved.
I recommend the book 'The Design of Everyday Things'. One of the author's assignments to his students is to try and design an alarm clock that's easy to use that is well designed and easy to use. Hint: having a different button for absolutely every function is not the way to get a good mark. :)
Augh, this is like when I was a kid and I asked for Transformers and got 'Go-Bots' instead. That poor kid. :(
I'm not sure sure. It did the RIGHT thing in that it didn't slavishly follow the book--most movies that do fail because books aren't the same as movies, so doing a 1-to-1 translation doesn't really work.
Heinlein also had certain political views that he trotted out in his books: citizenship through service, government control, propaganda, etc. The Starship Troopers movie actually does a really good job of a lot of that. Despite the big explosions and (sometimes) goofy dialogue and meaningless romance/sex scenes, the political undercurrent of the stories is still there. The movie has real political messages, if you're willing to look at them and not spend all the time watching the movie lamenting that it's not the same as the original.
I think RAH would have liked it. :)
I'm actually a huge fan of Jobs' work, and I think his contributions are hard to understate. But if I'm going to pick one thing about the iPhone that REALLY made a difference in this world, it's more about Jobs and his desire to call the shots in an industry that was used to dictating terms.
And while it's true that guys like Jony Ive can take the Lion's share of the credit for the ACTUAL design work, I consider Jobs such a fundamental part of the design that if you remove him, the phone isn't designed the way we know it. He was more than an executive that just signed off on things without looking at them, he carried it around and used it and demanded crazy things of his team that usually turned out to not be so crazy after all. (And frankly, this is probably why the Maps thing didn't go as well as Apple would have hoped. Jobs would have demanded the impossible and somehow, it would have manifested in the end. Now that there isn't someone there telling people that the impossible is actually possible, they're living within mortal constraints again.)
As for why I couched my argument the way I did, well, it's slashdot. I've been here a long time, and I know exactly the way NOT to get heard. This was a way to make sure I didn't get moderated -1: APPLE FANBOI SHEEPLE FUUUUUU
It's not the re-invention of the smartphone that was Jobs' greatest contribution to the market, it was creating a phone that was designed the way he wanted (and the way consumers wanted) and then forcing the telecom industry to use his phone, and not dictate terms back to him.
The reason why smartphones stagnated and were such a small niche before the iPhone wasn't purely on the basis of usability, it was also because telcos like calling the shots and bending you over.
If you don't like that Steve Jobs was, by all accounts, a bit off his nut, just remember that it was THAT personality that turned the tables on the music and telecom industries. You can hate Jobs, but you can't help but admire someone that forged the way in making the technology that we want available to us. Perhaps it was bound to happen, but I bet it happened faster because of him.
I loathe telecom companies, and the established music industry isn't far behind. Anyone that can wedge themselves in there and start breaking down their control is good in my books.
I honestly believe that my helmet has saved my life more than once while riding on the road. I've been hit by two cars and I ride my bike in the winter (I've never been hit in the winter), and I've bounced my head off the pavement a couple times. I've seen the foam compress, and I'm pretty sure I would've had pretty substantial injuries from those incidents. That said, I spend more time not crashing than crashing. I know people that have been hit by cars while walking. It's hard to eliminate risk from your life—that's just life.
And not exercising is a completely different risk you take on. I think people would do well to understand the risks of riding a bike and wear their helmets, but the barrier to entry needs to be as low as possible.
I live in Montreal, where the Bixi bike rental system is incredibly popular. We now have bike traffic jams in the bike lanes. I see women in business suits riding the bikes in their high heels. 90% of these people aren't wearing helmets or they're wearing them so wrong as to make them useless, but they're riding. Heart disease and obesity related diseases kill so many people every year, it's really just a cruel matter of the math: even if the number of people dying in bike related injuries goes up, we're almost certainly saving lives in the long run.
But central Montreal is dense and easy to traverse. The city is well set up for walking and is an utter nightmare to drive in—ideal conditions for a bike culture to come up.
Man, did you even read the paper? A huge part of why women aren't encouraged to stay in science and stick it through is because of the awful treatment that they get when they're young and starting out. Only an utter masochist or someone committed beyond most human reasoning would stick it out in an area where they offer you $5000 less to start *before they even meet you*.
On every metric that they measured, women were getting the short shrift (even worse, people with feminine sounding names; 'Michelle' is also a man's name if you're French): money, mentoring and decisions of competence. For a lab management position that would probably just be a stepping stone through academia.
Women are the ones that bear children, it's true, but there are Scandinavian countries where the men also get a significant amount of parental leave, allowing the mother to get back to work if she so chooses and letting the father stay home with the kids. The problem isn't with WOMEN, the problem is with the way we TREAT women. Maybe if we thought of them as equal and competent workers, we'd find ways to manage the inconveniences of life that all of us have to deal with.
There are a great number of things that men are more likely to do that are deleterious to their health and ability to show up to work, but we don't seem to care about that. Blaming women for having kids doesn't make a single thing better. Societally, we just don't hold women in much esteem, and that's the real issue in the end. We can fix this, we just need to stop giving the same excuses and saying, "Well, we've tried nothing, and now we're all out of ideas!"
It's not as easy as that. My first name is Jan, which is a reasonable male first name if you're European, but it reads as a woman's name in North America. Actually, there are a lot of gender ambiguous names from an Anglophone standpoint here in Quebec. I know guys named Michelle or Jocelyn...really standard French names. You can't expect everyone in the world to conform to White, Anglosaxon, American naming conventions.
The real solution to this problem is to remove the name from the application all together. You don't get to know anyone's gender through their resume. Before you sit down for the interview, the base offer should already be decided on. If you get to the interview and it doesn't work out, no problem. If it does, so much the better.
If you take the long view, our current system shortchanges everyone. Women decide they don't want careers in science because they're treated poorly or are offered low wages that they can get doing easier jobs. We lose out on a work/research population that we desperately need and should be encouraging. We also lose out if we pre-judge people by their names regardless of their gender...you haven't even gotten to the cover of the book yet if you're judging a person by their name. It's like judging a book by the typeface of the title.
What an utterly ridiculous statement.
Even Google said that Samsung was probably making their products look a little too much like the iPhone.
And then you've got the Nokia Lumia series, which not only doesn't infringe (and is a design that Apple themselves used to show that you can build a non-infringing phone), it's far and away the most beautiful phone design on the market today, in my mind. I WISH Apple would make something that looks like that. (I like my iPhone 4, but that Lumia really does look amazing.)
Oh, and the Windows phone OS design is ALSO an indication that you can build something that isn't anything close to the iOS design.
In my mind, Apple's crazy patents are the BEST way to ensure that there's choice in the market, not just choice between two of effectively the same thing. It's the big departures from the well established norms that bring interesting things to us. Apple's original entry into the Smartphone space was hugely disruptive, and they were very successful. Samsung has piggybacked on that success, whether you agree that they infringed or not. It's going to take another company doing the same sort of wild thing to really bring us something new and innovative.
Like I said, I own an iPhone 4, but I don't expect Apple to do anything innovative with their phone for years, if ever. They've made the product they wanted (something high quality and easy to use), and they'll stick with that--and that's not a terrible thing. There are worse ways to run a business. But for me to get EXCITED about phones again, well, that'll take someone doing something really revolutionary that I can't miss. Right now, beyond expectations, that looks like Microsoft. If they can really strike out on their own and differentiate their phone from everyone else, they'll claw their way into contention.
But Apple vs. Samsung is really just a sort of nitpicky argument. The iPhone 5 is better in some ways, and the Galaxy is better in others, but they do the same basic things. It's like comparing fridges. Both of them keep your food cold, but one has an ice dispenser and the other has a digital temperature readout. You pick and choose based on your needs at the time, but the Smartphone market is basically a choice between dull appliances now.
Bull. Or at least, in the general sense, what you're saying is basically BS.
I readily accept that this thing that you say happened to your friend, but anecdotal evidence isn't terribly significant.
Do iPhones regularly fail in humid conditions for no other reason than it's hot and humid? I suspect not, or we'd hear about a lot of broken phones that Apple has to replace. It gets into the 90s here, with 90+% humidity on some days. It's not that common, but it happens. I've been out cycling with my phone on days like those, where I'm sweating and my phone is in my jersey pocket. Granted, it has a leather case on it, but it's hardly air or water tight.
I've also been rained on while riding with my phone. No problem. Cold (Montreal winters)? Still no problems.
So my anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that the phone is relatively rugged in tough conditions, cancelling out your friend's evidence.
Like I said, if the iPhone were really as breakable and fragile as people seem to claim, we'd be looking at a much sadder Apple community, lower Apple stock price, and probably massive class-action lawsuits.
I cringed a bit and thought the piece was funny, but how many people did they have to interview for that clip? By the very nature of the show, you're only seeing the ones that are funny. If they'd done that to me, I'd've told them I knew they were lying. I bet most Android users would fall for the same sort of thing. By virtue of being the largest platform, they're going to capture a significant portion of people that just aren't that clever.
Long story short: most consumers aren't like us.
I read in a different article that the species was known to the native residents of the area. So western scientists have just named something, they didn't discover it. This article makes it sound like they're the first people that have ever seen such a thing.
Wait, what? Nearly all domain experts DO agree on that. Only a vanishingly small percentage of climate scientists think that human actions aren't affecting the climate, and more specifically, that CO2 levels aren't affecting the climate.
I haven't read the article or the paper yet; I can't conclude whether you're right and picked a bad example, or if you're exactly the sort of person it's supposedly talking about. :)
It's true, if I wrote nothing but simple array iterators all day, I would probably not need any comments at all.
Unfortunately, the code I write has a significant amount of complexity. Worse, I have to write code that integrates with code that is arcane and complex itself. Years and years of use have made the codebase I work with difficult to cope with without occasionally doing something more clever than trying to get the values in an array bigger than a minimum argument.
I didn't say they expressed the same thing, merely that code that is dynamic needs comments that are dynamic. Code that changes sufficiently to invalidate the comments means that you rewrite the comments. Code that does not change sufficiently to warrant such a change means you leave the comments alone. Again, there's no issue here.
If your comments add a 'significant' overhead to your coding, you're doing them wrong.
If your codes are 'static' while your code is 'dynamic', you're doing them wrong.
Code isn't finished until the system is clear. If the comment needs to change because the code changed, then change the comment. If the code change is SO convoluted as to change the entire comment, so much more the reason to change the comment. If the code has changed to be more optimal, but performs the same essential function, then the comment doesn't need to change.
I really don't see the problem.
Not at all. Extremely complex systems can be hard to trace the codepath through. Someone putting comments into a function to explain how it interacts in the greater scheme of things can be extremely helpful.
Comments aren't meant to explain code. You should be able to read a for loop. But if I'm in the middle of a function that's crashing and there's a comment telling me how this function interacts with the SYSTEM, then I can understand the CONTEXT of the code and more easily find the error. Otherwise, it's 20 minutes or an hour of reproducing the problem and then parsing the stack trace and then figuring out where this variable has been modified instead of where it SHOULD have been modified, etc., etc.
Comments aren't just there to explain the code. Of course you should write clear code. But I work in the games industry; there are times where clear code is thrown under the bus for the sake of efficiency. There are annoying convoluted constructs that are optimisations but they read like someone just showing off.
But this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what comments are for. You're not explaining the code, you're explaining the algorithm and the basic thing that your code is meant to accomplish. You don't write comments to let people know that you're looping over an array, you write comments to let people know WHY you're looping over an array and why they should care. I'm all for verbose variable names, but if you're going over 132 columns I'm already irritated. Go on for 80 more and it's tremendously annoying to read the 'clear' code.
There are a lot of different ways to solve problems. Ideally, your comments should lay out what your thought process was when you were solving this particular problem. If you leave, someone will understand the problem you were trying to solve, and that context makes reading the code easier.
And even if you don't leave, it's a good shortcut for yourself if you have to come back to that code several years later. I've saved myself a lot of time by commenting things well. Five years is long enough for my thought process and problem solving methods to change, so when I look at the code and wonder why in the hell I did something in such a dumb way, the comments tell me what was going through my inexperienced head.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, humans don't agree on the meanings of words. There is some research (that I've read in passing; no citations at the moment) that says that we all have our own meaning of words, and we all speak completely unique languages that just happen to overlap with other people's unique languages. To write code that is universally understandable, you need to write code that has a completely unambiguous context to all people at all times (well, more or less). As someone that works in a heavily bilingual office (in Montreal), you can't guarantee that the programmer before you had the same interpretation of things that you do.
I love how some of the comments are of the vein, "No way! How can I code without an IDE and a debugger and my 3 massive monitors and 16-core processor? What a joke!" I've coded on the console, in vi or emacs. If people couldn't write software without modern amenities, we'd never have had the modern amenities.
The reason why we won't be coding on the iPad for quite a while to come is because that's not what Apple wants you to use it for. Light work, maybe, but it's mostly a consumption device, not a creation device. Besides, if you're that hot to code on your iPad, you're a lot better off coding remotely through SSH on a machine with that 16-core processor and 8GB of RAM. (Just because I've worked on those old machines doesn't mean it's the best way to do it. :)
Maybe one day, when this kind of device is effectively all anyone wants to use. But for now, Apple would rather that you bought more hardware, not less.
It's litres in Canada, I'm afraid. That's ~3800L. :)
I'm convinced that they bought Tweetie and made it the official client because it was always the LEAST interesting client. It was functional, but bland; it was the plain porridge of twitter clients. Everyone else experimented with different views, different ways to manage this or that...but not Tweetie.
TweetBot is the best twitter client around. It's actually so good, I ended up using the Twitter List feature, which is effectively impossible to use well unless the client also does it well. Now I don't bother using my main feed at all, just the lists. So TweetBot took a feature that is nearly invisible on the actual Twitter site and made it useful. And they want to shut clients like that down.
I Twitter's at the 'run our one good idea into the ground and don't let anyone else play' phase of development.
Flash has always sucked.
Period, full stop, end of story.
It's been a performance and security blight since practically the first day, and certainly since Adobe took it over. I don't care if you hate Apple or love them, one of the single best things they've ever done for the internet is insist that Flash dies the ignominious death that it deserves. Once it's dead, we can find better ways to do the things that it was being used for.
I find my iPad perfectly suitable for mobile use--that is, I can put it in my satchel and use it at the cafe--and it's even better for home use, where it would be ridiculous for me to have a notebook when I have a perfectly good desktop machine. Except I can't sit in the armchair with my desktop machine.
It seems to me that tens of millions of people have found perfectly valid use cases for the iPad. Just because you can't find one doesn't mean it isn't there. I personally didn't have a good use case for it until a few months ago, when we decided to stop having two desktop machines and just switch to one desktop machine and a couple iPads. It works way better than the previous setup, AND we ended up with portable machines in the process.
My partner and I made the decision a long time ago to live anywhere but America. I have friends in the USA, and I visit fairly often, but I refuse to be in a country with the kind of politics that the US does. The fact that the abortion debate is alive and well is an absolute killer for us. Philosophically, we have trouble with a political system that thinks so little of its women and seems to be working hard to think even less of them. The split opinion on health care also baffles us; the fact that we don't have to consider our household budget or insurance plan when we need to see the doctor is pretty essential to us.
But, if you don't mind the politics and the guns (whether or not you get shot; you just need to not mind being around guns), there's a lot of nice folks there and a lot of opportunity.
So I can recommend Canada. Montreal, Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver are all amazing cities. They all have issues, but they're all wonderful in their own way. Vancouver will have the lowest taxes in that list, Montreal the highest. But the cost of living in Montreal isn't bad, so it kind of works out.
But ultimately, trying to predict the world economy and then trying to plan on where you want to live is a mug's game. Figure out where you want to live and see if you can make a living there.
It's not a price that's being passed on to you, actually. Apple charges effectively the same price for its phones that Samsung does, they just pay less to make them. Usually, that cost is soaked up by the carrier that buys huge numbers of the phones in advance to entice you to their service. If you go and buy the phone on its own, it costs about $500-$700, same as an unlocked Samsung phone.
It's telling that Apple makes huge profits at this price whereas nobody else does; they've made hugely smart supply line decisions that let them crush the market with good planning more than anything else.
It's also worth pointing out that if Apple dropped their price down to the margins that, say, Samsung (one of the only other profitable manufacturers) makes, two things would probably happen:
1) The smartphone industry would collapse and companies like HTC would either get out or post humongous losses quarter after quarter; and
2) Apple would be investigated for anti-trust violations (even though they no longer hold what could reasonably be called a monopoly)
Everyone should be glad Apple charges what it does. Nobody would make any money except Apple, otherwise.