Either way there's profit involved, the question is whether the car dealership is an independent entity that gets a cut of the process or owned by the car manufacturer. I would rather deal with just one company than two that are constantly in conflict over who gets what share of the profits from sales and maintenance of vehicles.
I don't understand the dealership model anyway - when you're the only Toyota dealer in a fifty mile radius and Toyota is having a banner year, you're all set. But if Toyota dealerships open all around you, then what? Or say you're a Saturn dealership, and then General Motors closes the brand. Or you're a Lincoln dealership, and Lincoln demands that you pay for a multi-million dollar remodel of your showrooms at your own expense. Or you're a Nissan dealership, and they release a run of shoddy products nobody wants to buy (for the sake of argument - I have nothing against Nissan). I guess it makes sense if you're already wealthy - open franchises for six different brands at once, and unless the economy tanks any losses in one place might be offset by gains elsewhere. But for someone launching an individual franchise? You are at the mercy of the manufacturer, choose carefully.
I have several young kids, so I do most of my extra learning on the job and by listening to tech podcasts during my commute. There's http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly and http://se-radio.net/ and dozens of others. Instead of switching browser windows to Facebook while I'm waiting for a large file to move between servers, I switch to my RSS feed reader that subscribes to tech sites. And yes, maybe once or twice a year I'll buy a book on a new language and technology and force myself to read through it and toy with the examples. Figure I'm sacrificing maybe 10-20 hours of my free time for that every six months.
But more importantly, someone that's not keeping up with the latest trends in software development is screwing themselves. I can build the Javascript for a web page without using jQuery - but it would take me three times as long, so why would I want to? I can write the server-side of a REST application in Java and Struts 1 instead of dozens of newer options, but why would I do that? I can set up a test environment or two on individual physical servers instead of having six different test environments running in virtual machines, but that just means testing runs three times slower, so what have I gained?
In this industry, deciding you don't need to learn new things just means you're content to waste your time and the time of your colleagues.
I wouldn't argue with any of that. I believe IDEs are great, but you should understand what the processes that the IDE automates for you are first. i.e. Use Eclipse only after you understand how to compile and run Java code (or whichever language you're using Eclipse to help you develop with) from the command line. I also believe vi (vim) has to enter a software developer's toolbox eventually. I'm just not sure it's a great place to start.
Gmail has hundreds of millions of users, and provides ad revenue for Google. It's not going anywhere. I would also assume Google Plus, Google Search, Google Ad Sense, and Android are fundamental to the future of the company and safe to use. (That's not an endorsement, just a guess that those services will last as long as the company.)
And while Google App Engine is less essential to the company future, and is as vulnerable to the axe as Google Wave and Google Reader, there's an open source implementation of the APIs called "AppScale" which offers a migration path if Google shuts App Engine down.
I'll grant that. You can do everything you need in vi, very slowly, with 'i' for insert, arrow keys for navigation, and Esc then:x (or:wq) to save and exit. If someone can't learn that in ten minutes, even if they have to use a cheat sheet, then this is not the career for them.
But I still don't think it's the most useful way to introduce someone to writing software, and from the way tnk1 wrote "That weeds out 90% of them when their eyes glaze over after I try and teach them 'vi'." I take that to mean he was trying to get them to use hjkl, b,e,w, v and Ctrl-v, ^ and $, shell escapes, multiple copy buffers, and regexes on the first day and they had smoke coming out of their ears.
My introduction to computer programming was copying Basic programs off of sheets of paper into a text file. There was no accompanying text or lecture, just "Here, type exactly what is printed on this sheet onto the screen." I might as well have been transcribing Babylonian texts for all I learned. That was in high school. In college, my first computer science classes used Pascal, and then Ada under the principle that teaching newbies concepts trumps the importance of teaching them any specific programming language. Now that I've been out in the field over ten years, I think they were right. But most of my initial headaches with Pascal and Ada in the early classes were just syntax errors - if you spend all of your time trying to figure out where to put the semi-colon, you can't really focus on when you should be using a linked list and when you should be using an array.
So with that in mind, I think I would start a newbie out with a programming language that has a relatively light syntax, a relatively simple build system, and a REPL for instant feedback. Python, Ruby, Perl, Scheme, and even LISP come to mind (provided you delay the introduction to macros, lambdas, and higher order functions in the languages that support them until the person has a good grasp of the basics).
I disagree. Teaching people to swim for the first time by tossing them off the side of a boat just drowns a large number of people that could have been great swimmers given time.
There are people that think an introduction to software development should have vi, makefiles, pointers, and red-black trees in the first week. I disagree, I think there's plenty of time to tackle each piece individually. Basic algebra is so easy to most educated people that it's laughable, but that doesn't mean we give our 10 year old kids the quadratic equation on the first day of their introduction to algebra class. This is no different. All a "trial by fire" does is prove you like being a member of the Spanish Inquisition.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to be good in this field. You need at least average intelligence, a willingness to learn, and tons of dedication.
He's trolling you, pay no attention. The problem with solely referring people to your open source work and refusing to demonstrate any skills at an interview is that you could copy/paste code from other projects into your Github repository (or whatever public place you use to store the code you supposedly write). Until you write code at the interview, the interviewer can't be certain that nice set of code he saw under your name at Github was really written by you.
If you're demanding that the code they write on a piece of paper compiles properly and runs flawlessly on the first try, that's a lot to ask unless maybe you're quizzing a Python guru on "Hello World!".
If you make it clear that mismatched parenthesis and a missed semi-colon or whitespace error is okay, and you just want to see a pseudo-code approach to the problem, I think it's legitimate. I don't have a lot of experience with this but at a previous job a guy that could sell manure to cows bluffed his way into a $100,000 salary position and after three months he hadn't written a single line of code. A simple code question like that would have stopped him cold, but they didn't ask it until the day they reviewed his lack of commits and demanded that he prove himself or get fired. Out he went.
Debian 7 has some stuff that's relatively old, especially compared to what people expect when they get the latest Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc... GNOME 3.4.2, when GNOME 3.6 is 7 months old. X.org 1.12, when X.org 1.13 is 7 months old. Perl 5.14, when Perl 5.16 is 11 months old. Linux Kernel 3.2, when 3.4 is 11 months old. Iceweasal 10, when Firefox extended support 17 is 5 months old.
I'm not knocking Debian, the Debian community, Debian's stability, or its security. But Debian stable's package selection is a little older than you would expect, and I believe it has been for the previous two releases too.
I think compatibility is more likely for Javascript than most other cross-platform methods. The browser vendors are in a race for performance and standards-compliance. I follow the Tom's Hardware "Browser Grand Prix" tests with interest. The most recent is: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/web-browser-chrome-25-firefox-19,3459.html
I like the idea of HTML5 games in concept because it makes the game more platform-independent. As a fan of open source software, I think that's good - one less bit of incentive for people to buy something running a proprietary operating system.
In order to do that you have to root your device, though. I'll do that for my tablet once I get one, but for now I'm just asked to advise friends and family on purchases. In the past I would steer them towards stock Android so they could buy from anyone they want (except, as far as I know, Apple). Now the Nook becomes an option.
I don't think you do get more tablet for the price. Look at all of the 1920x1080 or better display resolution stock Android tablets on the market right now. There's the Nexus 10, which is a great machine but starts at $400. What else? The Barnes & Noble Nook HD Plus gives you 1920x1280 for $270. The Kindle Fire is 1920x1200 at the same price, $15 more without "special offers" (embedded ads on some of the content). Those are good deals. Yes, you lose on processing power - but a lot of people would trade processing power for pretty graphics in this kind of application.
The point is, depending upon your priorities the value for your dollar is competitive. It isn't enough to sway me, I simply decided to postpone getting a tablet until something like the next generation Nexus 10 is under $300. If that takes a few years, it's no bother - I have the rest of my life to join the tablet stampede, I'm in no hurry.
If you just want to read books and magazines, a dedicated e-Reader is better. But if you want to play casual games, listen to music, and watch movies, then Amazon has the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble has the Nook Tablet, and as the Anonymous Coward said, for those purposes a regular Android tablet is better because you can access more browsers, buy content from more providers, and get something with a little more storage and computing power.
Well, with the Play Store on the Nook you can buy books, music, and films from Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and Google, so that's three choices instead of one. I'd consider that a small improvement.
Of course thanks to DRM that's just three walled gardens, or maybe more descriptively you could say three "content silos", instead of one. So it's not a huge improvement. However, the villains here are not Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google. If they didn't use DRM on content, the content owners (movie companies, music companies, book companies) would not allow them to sell their content. There are other reasons to dislike B&N, Amazon, and Google, but in this case we should be directing our ire at the MPAA and RIAA and spending our efforts and money on public domain and creative commons license content.
Steve Gibson did a podcast in which he tried to put homomorphic encryption in layman's terms ( here, about 25 minutes in is the meat of the discussion: http://twit.tv/show/security-now/376 ). What he said was possible, but didn't explain even in general terms, would be a distributed encrypted search engine in which you could send search request into it and get results, and the company hosting the service would not even know what you searched for.
I don't understand how you get from encrypted inputs and a mathematical operation that occurs without decrypting the inputs to a distributed search.
Good post. And in terms of consumers getting fleeced by companies, consumers tend to accept it until something better comes along.
In my house, we have two low-end Android tablets. Obviously the cheap game selection is not on par with the latest Starcraft 2 and Injustice: Gods Among Us, but there are some games with beautiful artwork, some with good mechanics and storytelling, the prices are great, and the selection is huge. And while even the best Android titles on mid-range Android hardware clearly lag the top of the line PC titles for visuals and other features, the gap is acceptable. No, I can't play the two big name games I listed. But I've got two tablets (10 inch and 7 inch) and over 30 games each that can be played without any active internet connection, all for under $450 total. Try that with a current generation console.
In terms of search and social networking, things are heading in the right direction it's just taking longer. I haven't given up hope. DuckDuckGo ( https://duckduckgo.com/about ) is a great search engine that works as well for me as Google but doesn't track. Still, it's a hosted service, and my long term hope would be for something like the distributed search engine Yacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy ) - but Yacy's search results weren't that great the last time I tried it. For social networking, a lot of people are working on making distributed alternatives to the big names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking just because they haven't gained a major share of the market yet, that does not mean it cannot happen.
If a company says "neither confirm nor deny" for a particular rumor, then at the very least it's under consideration. If they had no intention of requiring "always on" for gaming, they would have immediately responded to the rumors with a statement to that effect. (And I still wouldn't trust them.)
On first glance it's a reasonable idea, but I think it still hurts the partners. Selling the product that's perceived as the best in the segment, with a high price and high profits to match, is the market position every manufacturer wants to reach. So if Google grabs the juiciest 10% of the market, there will be 90% of the market available for everyone else but Google will own the segment everyone else wants for their own.
I think the best thing Google can do is what they seem to have done so far - treat Motorola like an independent subsidiary without any preferential treatment.
It depends on the phone, I have friends with great experience with Motorola products but my wife and a friend of mine had the Motorola Triumph, and after a few months the phone starts having hardware problems. And of course tech support is the typical nightmare.
But the problem with Google buying a mobile device manufacturer is that it puts Google into conflict with everyone else making Android products. Now Google has to work extra hard to convince all of the other Android device manufacturers that they won't give Motorola the best products, the first access to new Android features, more input on Android development priorities, and so forth.
Otherwise their Android partners will feel alienated, and are more likely to team up with Microsoft, HP, etc... or just write their own mobile operating system. (Lucky for the world, Microsoft's set Nokia on fire and has moved into conflict with is business partners even harder than Google by selling the Surface product line. That stops them from being a compelling alternative to Android for mobile device vendors.)
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Either way there's profit involved, the question is whether the car dealership is an independent entity that gets a cut of the process or owned by the car manufacturer. I would rather deal with just one company than two that are constantly in conflict over who gets what share of the profits from sales and maintenance of vehicles.
I don't understand the dealership model anyway - when you're the only Toyota dealer in a fifty mile radius and Toyota is having a banner year, you're all set. But if Toyota dealerships open all around you, then what? Or say you're a Saturn dealership, and then General Motors closes the brand. Or you're a Lincoln dealership, and Lincoln demands that you pay for a multi-million dollar remodel of your showrooms at your own expense. Or you're a Nissan dealership, and they release a run of shoddy products nobody wants to buy (for the sake of argument - I have nothing against Nissan). I guess it makes sense if you're already wealthy - open franchises for six different brands at once, and unless the economy tanks any losses in one place might be offset by gains elsewhere. But for someone launching an individual franchise? You are at the mercy of the manufacturer, choose carefully.
I have several young kids, so I do most of my extra learning on the job and by listening to tech podcasts during my commute. There's http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly and http://se-radio.net/ and dozens of others. Instead of switching browser windows to Facebook while I'm waiting for a large file to move between servers, I switch to my RSS feed reader that subscribes to tech sites. And yes, maybe once or twice a year I'll buy a book on a new language and technology and force myself to read through it and toy with the examples. Figure I'm sacrificing maybe 10-20 hours of my free time for that every six months.
But more importantly, someone that's not keeping up with the latest trends in software development is screwing themselves. I can build the Javascript for a web page without using jQuery - but it would take me three times as long, so why would I want to? I can write the server-side of a REST application in Java and Struts 1 instead of dozens of newer options, but why would I do that? I can set up a test environment or two on individual physical servers instead of having six different test environments running in virtual machines, but that just means testing runs three times slower, so what have I gained?
In this industry, deciding you don't need to learn new things just means you're content to waste your time and the time of your colleagues.
I wouldn't argue with any of that. I believe IDEs are great, but you should understand what the processes that the IDE automates for you are first. i.e. Use Eclipse only after you understand how to compile and run Java code (or whichever language you're using Eclipse to help you develop with) from the command line. I also believe vi (vim) has to enter a software developer's toolbox eventually. I'm just not sure it's a great place to start.
Gmail has hundreds of millions of users, and provides ad revenue for Google. It's not going anywhere. I would also assume Google Plus, Google Search, Google Ad Sense, and Android are fundamental to the future of the company and safe to use. (That's not an endorsement, just a guess that those services will last as long as the company.)
And while Google App Engine is less essential to the company future, and is as vulnerable to the axe as Google Wave and Google Reader, there's an open source implementation of the APIs called "AppScale" which offers a migration path if Google shuts App Engine down.
I'll grant that. You can do everything you need in vi, very slowly, with 'i' for insert, arrow keys for navigation, and Esc then :x (or :wq) to save and exit. If someone can't learn that in ten minutes, even if they have to use a cheat sheet, then this is not the career for them.
But I still don't think it's the most useful way to introduce someone to writing software, and from the way tnk1 wrote "That weeds out 90% of them when their eyes glaze over after I try and teach them 'vi'." I take that to mean he was trying to get them to use hjkl, b,e,w, v and Ctrl-v, ^ and $, shell escapes, multiple copy buffers, and regexes on the first day and they had smoke coming out of their ears.
My introduction to computer programming was copying Basic programs off of sheets of paper into a text file. There was no accompanying text or lecture, just "Here, type exactly what is printed on this sheet onto the screen." I might as well have been transcribing Babylonian texts for all I learned. That was in high school. In college, my first computer science classes used Pascal, and then Ada under the principle that teaching newbies concepts trumps the importance of teaching them any specific programming language. Now that I've been out in the field over ten years, I think they were right. But most of my initial headaches with Pascal and Ada in the early classes were just syntax errors - if you spend all of your time trying to figure out where to put the semi-colon, you can't really focus on when you should be using a linked list and when you should be using an array.
So with that in mind, I think I would start a newbie out with a programming language that has a relatively light syntax, a relatively simple build system, and a REPL for instant feedback. Python, Ruby, Perl, Scheme, and even LISP come to mind (provided you delay the introduction to macros, lambdas, and higher order functions in the languages that support them until the person has a good grasp of the basics).
I disagree. Teaching people to swim for the first time by tossing them off the side of a boat just drowns a large number of people that could have been great swimmers given time.
There are people that think an introduction to software development should have vi, makefiles, pointers, and red-black trees in the first week. I disagree, I think there's plenty of time to tackle each piece individually. Basic algebra is so easy to most educated people that it's laughable, but that doesn't mean we give our 10 year old kids the quadratic equation on the first day of their introduction to algebra class. This is no different. All a "trial by fire" does is prove you like being a member of the Spanish Inquisition.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to be good in this field. You need at least average intelligence, a willingness to learn, and tons of dedication.
He's trolling you, pay no attention. The problem with solely referring people to your open source work and refusing to demonstrate any skills at an interview is that you could copy/paste code from other projects into your Github repository (or whatever public place you use to store the code you supposedly write). Until you write code at the interview, the interviewer can't be certain that nice set of code he saw under your name at Github was really written by you.
If you're demanding that the code they write on a piece of paper compiles properly and runs flawlessly on the first try, that's a lot to ask unless maybe you're quizzing a Python guru on "Hello World!".
If you make it clear that mismatched parenthesis and a missed semi-colon or whitespace error is okay, and you just want to see a pseudo-code approach to the problem, I think it's legitimate. I don't have a lot of experience with this but at a previous job a guy that could sell manure to cows bluffed his way into a $100,000 salary position and after three months he hadn't written a single line of code. A simple code question like that would have stopped him cold, but they didn't ask it until the day they reviewed his lack of commits and demanded that he prove himself or get fired. Out he went.
Hey, Unity doesn't have activation. That automatically makes it better than Windows.
So what's your occupation, then?
Debian 7 has some stuff that's relatively old, especially compared to what people expect when they get the latest Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc... GNOME 3.4.2, when GNOME 3.6 is 7 months old. X.org 1.12, when X.org 1.13 is 7 months old. Perl 5.14, when Perl 5.16 is 11 months old. Linux Kernel 3.2, when 3.4 is 11 months old. Iceweasal 10, when Firefox extended support 17 is 5 months old.
I'm not knocking Debian, the Debian community, Debian's stability, or its security. But Debian stable's package selection is a little older than you would expect, and I believe it has been for the previous two releases too.
I think compatibility is more likely for Javascript than most other cross-platform methods. The browser vendors are in a race for performance and standards-compliance. I follow the Tom's Hardware "Browser Grand Prix" tests with interest. The most recent is: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/web-browser-chrome-25-firefox-19,3459.html
I like the idea of HTML5 games in concept because it makes the game more platform-independent. As a fan of open source software, I think that's good - one less bit of incentive for people to buy something running a proprietary operating system.
The devil is in the details, of course.
In order to do that you have to root your device, though. I'll do that for my tablet once I get one, but for now I'm just asked to advise friends and family on purchases. In the past I would steer them towards stock Android so they could buy from anyone they want (except, as far as I know, Apple). Now the Nook becomes an option.
I don't think you do get more tablet for the price. Look at all of the 1920x1080 or better display resolution stock Android tablets on the market right now. There's the Nexus 10, which is a great machine but starts at $400. What else? The Barnes & Noble Nook HD Plus gives you 1920x1280 for $270. The Kindle Fire is 1920x1200 at the same price, $15 more without "special offers" (embedded ads on some of the content). Those are good deals. Yes, you lose on processing power - but a lot of people would trade processing power for pretty graphics in this kind of application.
The point is, depending upon your priorities the value for your dollar is competitive. It isn't enough to sway me, I simply decided to postpone getting a tablet until something like the next generation Nexus 10 is under $300. If that takes a few years, it's no bother - I have the rest of my life to join the tablet stampede, I'm in no hurry.
If you just want to read books and magazines, a dedicated e-Reader is better. But if you want to play casual games, listen to music, and watch movies, then Amazon has the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble has the Nook Tablet, and as the Anonymous Coward said, for those purposes a regular Android tablet is better because you can access more browsers, buy content from more providers, and get something with a little more storage and computing power.
Well, with the Play Store on the Nook you can buy books, music, and films from Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and Google, so that's three choices instead of one. I'd consider that a small improvement.
Of course thanks to DRM that's just three walled gardens, or maybe more descriptively you could say three "content silos", instead of one. So it's not a huge improvement. However, the villains here are not Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google. If they didn't use DRM on content, the content owners (movie companies, music companies, book companies) would not allow them to sell their content. There are other reasons to dislike B&N, Amazon, and Google, but in this case we should be directing our ire at the MPAA and RIAA and spending our efforts and money on public domain and creative commons license content.
Great point, great point. I've been directing my ire in the wrong direction. Thanks for pointing that out to me.
That's a spectacular explanation, thanks. Obviously the actual details are still a mystery to me, but this is a great start.
Steve Gibson did a podcast in which he tried to put homomorphic encryption in layman's terms ( here, about 25 minutes in is the meat of the discussion: http://twit.tv/show/security-now/376 ). What he said was possible, but didn't explain even in general terms, would be a distributed encrypted search engine in which you could send search request into it and get results, and the company hosting the service would not even know what you searched for.
I don't understand how you get from encrypted inputs and a mathematical operation that occurs without decrypting the inputs to a distributed search.
Not always, but look at Apple - immensely profitable, and huge margins on expensive products.
Good post. And in terms of consumers getting fleeced by companies, consumers tend to accept it until something better comes along.
In my house, we have two low-end Android tablets. Obviously the cheap game selection is not on par with the latest Starcraft 2 and Injustice: Gods Among Us, but there are some games with beautiful artwork, some with good mechanics and storytelling, the prices are great, and the selection is huge. And while even the best Android titles on mid-range Android hardware clearly lag the top of the line PC titles for visuals and other features, the gap is acceptable. No, I can't play the two big name games I listed. But I've got two tablets (10 inch and 7 inch) and over 30 games each that can be played without any active internet connection, all for under $450 total. Try that with a current generation console.
In terms of search and social networking, things are heading in the right direction it's just taking longer. I haven't given up hope. DuckDuckGo ( https://duckduckgo.com/about ) is a great search engine that works as well for me as Google but doesn't track. Still, it's a hosted service, and my long term hope would be for something like the distributed search engine Yacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy ) - but Yacy's search results weren't that great the last time I tried it. For social networking, a lot of people are working on making distributed alternatives to the big names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking just because they haven't gained a major share of the market yet, that does not mean it cannot happen.
If a company says "neither confirm nor deny" for a particular rumor, then at the very least it's under consideration. If they had no intention of requiring "always on" for gaming, they would have immediately responded to the rumors with a statement to that effect. (And I still wouldn't trust them.)
On first glance it's a reasonable idea, but I think it still hurts the partners. Selling the product that's perceived as the best in the segment, with a high price and high profits to match, is the market position every manufacturer wants to reach. So if Google grabs the juiciest 10% of the market, there will be 90% of the market available for everyone else but Google will own the segment everyone else wants for their own.
I think the best thing Google can do is what they seem to have done so far - treat Motorola like an independent subsidiary without any preferential treatment.
It depends on the phone, I have friends with great experience with Motorola products but my wife and a friend of mine had the Motorola Triumph, and after a few months the phone starts having hardware problems. And of course tech support is the typical nightmare.
But the problem with Google buying a mobile device manufacturer is that it puts Google into conflict with everyone else making Android products. Now Google has to work extra hard to convince all of the other Android device manufacturers that they won't give Motorola the best products, the first access to new Android features, more input on Android development priorities, and so forth.
Otherwise their Android partners will feel alienated, and are more likely to team up with Microsoft, HP, etc... or just write their own mobile operating system. (Lucky for the world, Microsoft's set Nokia on fire and has moved into conflict with is business partners even harder than Google by selling the Surface product line. That stops them from being a compelling alternative to Android for mobile device vendors.)