I didn't advocate giving billions of dollars to the failed companies in Detroit, either. Who should produce cars, of what types, and in what quantity is something the consumers in the market should decide, not the politicians who are sucking up to the unions for votes.
It does not follow that because government robs us and spends some of that money on politically-favored R&D, that R&D would cease to exist if government stopped doing so.
It's a pretty good way encourage technology development.
Bullshit. If you want to encourage technology development, then let people keep their money and invest it as they see fit, rather than having their money diverted to failed companies for political reasons. Tesla is not a viable business.
We need companies like Tesla to prove electric cars can be viable alternatives to prevalent gasoline vehicles...
They've already proved the opposite. If electric cars were a viable alternative to conventional, internal combustion engined vehicles, they wouldn't need hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money to keep them in business. Electric cars may be viable someday, but we're not there yet and a corporate welfare queen isn't going to produce it.
I wrote this about the Mac, but it applies to the iPhone and iPad as well:
1) Mac users are highly sensitive to the quality of your products' user experience. What this means is, go native or don't bother. Even though Google Earth and Photoshop are rife with UI atrocities, don't imagine that you can get away with ignoring the rules like they can. They're 500-pound Gorillas, and you're not. If you are Google or Adobe, get with the program and write a Cocoa UI, already. It's about time.
2) The native language for the Mac and the iPhone is Objective-C. Get used to it; it's not hard to learn. Any developer familiar with C should be able to learn Objective-C in a day, and be an Objective-C language lawyer within a week if he cares to. Yes, there are Ruby, Python, and other bridges you can use, and they work just fine, but limit this to integrating existing libraries with your apps. DO NOT try to use the bridges as a way to avoid learning the environment you're working with.
3) A cross-platform GUI is neither feasible nor desirable. You can't #ifdef the difference between Cocoa, xlib, and Win32. Don't believe me? Look at OpenOffice. (If OpenOffice looks OK to you, then please, forget about offering your products on the Mac. You'll only cause us pain.)
4) Don't bother with third-party cross-platform GUI libraries like Qt. Yeah, you can make it sort of work, but you'll get a lot of complaints from your Mac customers, and it will be more expensive than properly factoring your code and writing a native GUI for each platform. For every Mac customer who complains about a bad UI, there are many more who took one look at it and decided never to do business with the vendor in question.
I think that the biggest positive effect of the FairTax would be that businesses wouldn't have to spend so much time and effort on considering the tax consequences of business decisions. We waste a hell of a lot on the costs of tax compliance.
Seriously though, you're right. If I had one of these gadgets, I'd probably fly it around 500 to 1000 feet high most of the time, unless I was required to be higher for noise abatement.
I'm no fan of military spending myself, but the osprey was considerably cheaper than the F22, which is exactly what we need to fight the Soviets! Oh, wait.
Anyhow, I'd like to see the tilt-rotor concept applied to civilian uses. Speeding up city-center to city-center trips would be pretty handy.
Tail sitters like the Convair Pogo were a beast to land.
That's because the pilot was on his back, looking straight up when the Pogo was landing on its tail. The Puffin would have the pilot in a standing position during takeoff and landing.
4 crashes since its inception? That really isn't so bad. You should compare with other military planes.
Hell, just compare it to the early helicopters. The tilt-rotor concept is a major advancement. The accidents are regrettable, but not at all surprising.
Did I say anything at all to indicate that I believe what you accuse me of? Knuth is one place where the qsort algorithm can be found. I never said it was the only one.
I use is to ask esoteric questions until the prospective employee is forced to either start bullshitting or say the magic words "I don't know, I would have to look it up".
I ask them to describe some problem they solved that they're particularly proud of. Every coder I've ever wanted to hire has a few inventions they want their peers to know about.
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I couldn't let this partisan rhetoric slip by without commenting.
Nice try, but I didn't say that the Republicans were any better, did I?
-jcr
I didn't advocate giving billions of dollars to the failed companies in Detroit, either. Who should produce cars, of what types, and in what quantity is something the consumers in the market should decide, not the politicians who are sucking up to the unions for votes.
-jcr
It does not follow that because government robs us and spends some of that money on politically-favored R&D, that R&D would cease to exist if government stopped doing so.
-jcr
It's not corporate welfare.
Of course it is. They're getting hundreds of millions of dollars that they couldn't raise from private parties willing to risk their own money.
It's a pretty good way encourage technology development.
Bullshit. If you want to encourage technology development, then let people keep their money and invest it as they see fit, rather than having their money diverted to failed companies for political reasons. Tesla is not a viable business.
-jcr
We need companies like Tesla to prove electric cars can be viable alternatives to prevalent gasoline vehicles...
They've already proved the opposite. If electric cars were a viable alternative to conventional, internal combustion engined vehicles, they wouldn't need hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money to keep them in business. Electric cars may be viable someday, but we're not there yet and a corporate welfare queen isn't going to produce it.
-jcr
Uh, no, it's not.
I've never had to use C#, but I find it hard to imagine that it's as bad as C++.
-jcr
I wrote this about the Mac, but it applies to the iPhone and iPad as well:
1) Mac users are highly sensitive to the quality of your products' user experience. What this means is, go native or don't bother. Even though Google Earth and Photoshop are rife with UI atrocities, don't imagine that you can get away with ignoring the rules like they can. They're 500-pound Gorillas, and you're not. If you are Google or Adobe, get with the program and write a Cocoa UI, already. It's about time.
2) The native language for the Mac and the iPhone is Objective-C. Get used to it; it's not hard to learn. Any developer familiar with C should be able to learn Objective-C in a day, and be an Objective-C language lawyer within a week if he cares to. Yes, there are Ruby, Python, and other bridges you can use, and they work just fine, but limit this to integrating existing libraries with your apps. DO NOT try to use the bridges as a way to avoid learning the environment you're working with.
3) A cross-platform GUI is neither feasible nor desirable. You can't #ifdef the difference between Cocoa, xlib, and Win32. Don't believe me? Look at OpenOffice. (If OpenOffice looks OK to you, then please, forget about offering your products on the Mac. You'll only cause us pain.)
4) Don't bother with third-party cross-platform GUI libraries like Qt. Yeah, you can make it sort of work, but you'll get a lot of complaints from your Mac customers, and it will be more expensive than properly factoring your code and writing a native GUI for each platform. For every Mac customer who complains about a bad UI, there are many more who took one look at it and decided never to do business with the vendor in question.
it's a sibling to C++
Oh, come on. Objective-C isn't perfect, but that is way too harsh.
-jcr
What none of the pundits have guessed, is that the Apple tablet will be based on Hypercard.
-jcr
I think that the biggest positive effect of the FairTax would be that businesses wouldn't have to spend so much time and effort on considering the tax consequences of business decisions. We waste a hell of a lot on the costs of tax compliance.
-jcr
Don't fly it that high?
Oh, you're no fun.
Seriously though, you're right. If I had one of these gadgets, I'd probably fly it around 500 to 1000 feet high most of the time, unless I was required to be higher for noise abatement.
-jcr
I'm no fan of military spending myself, but the osprey was considerably cheaper than the F22, which is exactly what we need to fight the Soviets! Oh, wait.
Anyhow, I'd like to see the tilt-rotor concept applied to civilian uses. Speeding up city-center to city-center trips would be pretty handy.
-jcr
I'm still not convinced this gives him the visibility and control he needs.
It puts his head in the same orientation as a pilot sitting in a conventional helicopter (or a fixed-wing aircraft, for that matter). QED.
-jcr
Tail sitters like the Convair Pogo were a beast to land.
That's because the pilot was on his back, looking straight up when the Pogo was landing on its tail. The Puffin would have the pilot in a standing position during takeoff and landing.
-jcr
I don't understand why so many flight related programs are named Icarus.
It's because most people don't know who you're talking about if you say Daedalus.
-jcr
how quickly will it hit the ground if it runs out of power.
You should be able to auto-rotate like you can with a helicopter. Also, there's always the parachute option.
4 crashes since its inception? That really isn't so bad. You should compare with other military planes.
Hell, just compare it to the early helicopters. The tilt-rotor concept is a major advancement. The accidents are regrettable, but not at all surprising.
-jcr
Did I say anything at all to indicate that I believe what you accuse me of? Knuth is one place where the qsort algorithm can be found. I never said it was the only one.
-jcr
When I joined Apple in '82
Oops. Make that '02.
-jcr
The Assembler Breakthrough that we all read about in Engines of Creation?
-jcr
I use is to ask esoteric questions until the prospective employee is forced to either start bullshitting or say the magic words "I don't know, I would have to look it up".
I ask them to describe some problem they solved that they're particularly proud of. Every coder I've ever wanted to hire has a few inventions they want their peers to know about.
-jcr
The rest of us, if we're lucky enough to even get an interview, can't just refer to Knuth and then tell our interviewer to bugger off!
As amusing as your sarcasm is, I have to ask why you'd want to work for someone that can't even conduct an interview competently.
-jcr
I don't want a programmer who knows linked lists so well that he's eager to re-invent them all over the company's source tree.
Bingo! We have stdlib already. It's a waste of time and money to write redundant code just to prove one's cleverness.
-jcr
Smeared across a couple square feet, not so good.
This is a couple of square feet of a phosphor-coated surface that's going to have a bias voltage, not a back-projection screen.
-jcr